Most internet service providers are gone – Sonic has survived and thrived - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Most-internet-service-providers-are-gone-Sonic-14188418.php <comment><USER2> I tried to get Sonic at 100 Grand Avenue in Oakland after they put fliers on homes and businesses all around saying "We are coming to Oakland with our own fiber and offering gigabit!" (they have been in Oakland for a long time with their AT&T DSL product). Turns out, they decided to not install to my building (254 unit high-rise), most likely due to a, what I believe to be, illegal exclusive line ownership agreement that my commercial landlords signed with AT&T.

Thankfully, a recent entrant to the inner Bay Area market, Wave G (which has roots in Astound, a name those of you with connection to Walnut Creek might recognize, and RCN) is now providing me symmetric gigabit point to point internet for $80/month with no caps. Just very glad to finally be rid of Comcast.

I will say though that I've previously gotten Sonic at business addresses, both DSL and Fiber, and they have been super great. Glad to see the small guy winning in such a competitive market as the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> _illegal exclusive line ownership agreement that my commercial landlords signed with AT &T._

Exclusive, yes. Illegal? Not really. Every apartment building I've lived in has had an agreement with one provider. They don't want to rip open the walls for every company that wants to put in a line. And these days with the way internet providers come and go, I don't blame them.

If you rent, you don't own the building, so you have no say in the matter. If you own a condo, then you can at least influence the board. If you want more control over your home's internet service, buy a house.

The only way around it is to go wireless. Back when WiMax was a thing, the building I lived in had an exclusive deal with AT&T, which could only supply 768k DSL. I got around that by going with ClearWire's WiMax.

<comment><USER4> It is, in one sense, illegal. "The NOI provides a history of FCC regulations in this area, noting that in 2007 and 2008 the commission "prohibited providers from entering into or enforcing exclusive agreements to provide services to customers in commercial and residential MTEs."" \- [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/exclusive- broadb...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/exclusive-broadband- deals-between-isps-and-landlords-face-scrutiny-at-fcc/)

What's not illegal is landlords accepting free services from the ISPs in exchange for their tacit agreement to not allow any other ISPs in. While, of course, saying to tenants that "you can choose any provider you want".

"Go buy a condo or a house" is not an option for the vast majority of people living in apartments. Otherwise, they wouldn't be living in an apartment.

<comment><USER5> I worked at Comcast from 2014-2016

Comcast never explicitly signed contracts barring landlords from allowing competing services in, mainly to reduce the scope of legal culpability if it somehow came to such a thing

They would offer very generous (read: free) services to the landlords of buildings however. Especially in large complexes like the one I lived in northern Seattle

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm being too picky? Or a maybe I'm just in the minority, bit I don't really like using Sonic. I mean, their internet works, and customer support is fine (but I've had as good a service from Comcast too).

What I find annoying from Sonic is their billing process. I dislike that they foist a random router onto you and charge you $10 a month (and charge you if you want to return it). I also dislike that they force a landline on you and charge you another $10 on you. Who in 2019 needs a landline? What I find somewhat dishonest, is how the sell it. I get that most advertising is not supposed to reflect reality, but it's sort of strange that you get excited about ads that say and "1GBPS internet at $40 a month" and only a year later realize that you're paying $75 a month instead. And that's something that's public, who knows what else about their business is as deceptive.

I suppose that's why Sonic has survived. I suppose that's the kind of business you need to run if you want to have a successful ISP.

<comment><USER3> _Who in 2019 needs a landline?_

People with house alarms. People with fax machines. People with medical equipment that sends information to their doctors a couple of times a day. People who don't trust VOIP providers. People who want to be properly geolocated when they dial 911. People who want to use a phone when the power goes out for longer than a cell phone can hold a charge (think hurricane-prone states).

Here's a good one: People who want to talk on the phone.

I stayed on a remote ranch in New Mexico back in April. The owner was at the next ranch over, about five miles away. I needed to call her, so I picked up the phone. A real land line phone. Good Lord, I'd forgotten what a quality phone call sounds like. It was as if she was right there in the room with me. No awkward cellular delay. Talking over each other was OK and natural and you could still understand the other person. It was an absolute delight. I already have my current place wired with VOIP, but in my next home I'm going to get a landline.

Landlines may not fit into your lifestyle or mindset, but that doesn't mean they don't have value.

<comment><USER7> No landline has sounded anywhere near as good as FaceTime Audio to me.

<comment><USER8> Personally this has been my experience, too

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I miss the days of competing ISPs. I remember having Speakeasy for my DSL back in the early 2000s and being impressed at the range of services they offered and relatively high speeds they offered for less than what Verizon wanted to charge for a DSL line. Usenet, a shell server, personal webhosting, a POTS phone bank you could use as a backup when you were on the road.

But the limitations of DSL meant they couldn't compete with FiOS. And since FiOS didn't have to deal with grandfathered common carrier laws Verizon wasn't forced to share and they have not. Amazingly, even though the customer service headaches are incredible, you can get a reasonably fast line for not too much money (100Mbit for $35/month) on FiOS. Probably because we have some competition from cable modems. Of course you can't get IPv6 on there, because Verizon's most advanced network ever doesn't support it.

<comment><USER10> FIOS wasn't actually why that market segment died; it was due to the FCC decision to re-classify DSL [0]. This was in response to a lawsuit resolved a few months earlier that did the same for cable internet connections. [1]

By re-classifying both cable and DSL as Title 1, rather than Title 2, that meant that they were no longer common carriers, and could kick all the competing ISPs off their network. This is why it seemed that most of the third-party providers went away nearly overnight.

[0]: [https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-changes-dsl- classification/](https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-changes-dsl-classification/)

[1]" [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/technology/cable-wins- int...](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/technology/cable-wins- internetaccess-ruling.html)

<comment><USER11> > The phone companies say that the ruling will free up more of their resources > to improve their broadband services, although at least one FCC commissioner > says he will be watching to see if that's really the case.

> ISPs such as EarthLink, which already have a hard time competing on price, > may still negotiate access contracts with the phone companies but are > looking for alternative ways to deliver their services.

EarthLink sold the next year to Windstream for $673 million in an all-stock transaction. [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/dial-...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/dial-up-pioneer-earthlink-still-exists-and-its-merging- with-windstream/)

Three years later... Windstream unloads legacy EarthLink internet assets for $330M [https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/windstream-unloads- leg...](https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/windstream-unloads-legacy- earthlink-internet-assets-for-330-million)

<comment><USER12> And Speakeasy to Covad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very happy Sonic customer here. I just moved from San Francisco to the East Bay and the process was mostly painless, and when a little glitch did occur, instead of trying to force me to deal with the existence of their internal processes, policies, and silos, something I call Conway's Law For Customers, they just Took Care Of It For Me.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sonic customer here, but will try to be neutral. The value proposition was probably the best selling point, and they rarely raise prices. There is a certain satisfaction when the odd piece of Comcast advertisement comes by mail offering 2-3x the price for 1/8 the bandwidth from Sonic. Fiber customers can return the residential gateway and use their own router, which saves you $10/month. You have to agree you understand the implications of loosing remote troubleshooting, but I'm sure HN users are savvy in this department.

Prior to getting symmetrical fiber, I didn't have a clue what all that bandwidth could be used for, but again the value proposition was icing on the cake. Years later I still haven't a clue what all of this bandwidth was for. Imagine a kid on a fieldtrip to a famous chocolate factory imagining swimming in a chocolate fountain. The fountain is real, but you dip maybe one strawberry when you get there.

The only customer support call was easily enough to self fix. I just wanted to know if I had permission to touch the equipment in the outside service panel.

Hopefully, more cities push for municipal broadband. That would be if Comcast would stop suing to stop it.

<comment><USER15> _Fiber customers can return the residential gateway and use their own router, which saves you $10 /month. _

You can return the gigantic Pace multifunction dongle but it'll cost you $10/mo to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just wanted to chime in about how happy with their residential service in SF. I have their 1Gbps package. With Comcast, this would most often translate to a real-life asymetric 250mbps download, 50mbps upload speed. With Sonic: I'm consistently getting SYMMETRIC 900mbps+! It's insane and comes in real-handy when you're pushing a few gigs of file from your home server to AWS...

Edit: I have cat6 ethernet wired throughout my place.

<comment><USER17> Former Sonic customer here. I caved and moved to the South Bay after doing the commute for too long and Sonic is honestly what I miss most about the city.

<comment><USER18> Same here. I can't imagine complaining about Sonic. If I had issues, I could call a freaking human in Mountain View (or whatever), and he'd fix it rather than asking me to cycle the power on my computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I worked at an ISP back in the late 90s. We were in the same building as our backbone provider and they simply drilled a hole in the floor and dropped an Ethernet cable down it for us to get our connection. We replaced our custom built dialup racks with something fancier and supported ISDN for the handful of customers who wanted it. The coming of DSL and cable internet was the writing on the wall to get out. The owners sold it to a larger ISP during a frothy period of mergers and acquisitions while the marketplace tidied itself up.

There used to be dozens of ISPs you could choose from in a big market. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER20> Visits site > Clicks Check Availability > Enters Address Info > Clicks Check Availability > Google Captcha > Selects Audio (because I've been caught in a loop too many times) > Clicks Play > Enters Text > Receives "Try Again Later..." > Closes Tab

There has got to be a better way. I mean Sonic just lost a potential customer because I won't "Try Again Later".

Ubuntu + Firefox FWIW

<comment><USER21> so you are complaining that sonic uses google captcha, and google captcha did not work for you today? lol.

<comment><USER22> It's a valid critism. They decided to use Google Captcha and it often blocks 'advanced' users. ReCAPTCHA often has problems with Linux, non-chrome, VPN users, and users that use ad or javascript blockers.

That's the kind of advanced user that appreciates and uses an internet provider like Sonic.net.

It would be like a mobile phone service provider requiring people to pass a turing test if they call into the sales line from a mobile phone.

<comment><USER23> Why isn't email verification enough for these services? I don't think they really need to worry about automated services signing up for accounts, so I wonder why they put anything there at all...

<comment><USER24> Availability tends to be a closely-guarded secret; they don't want a competitor typing in every address in the city and then getting an easy list of customers.

ISPs are way too paranoid about this, though. Simple rate limiting is more than enough. If someone builds a botnet to check what buildings you're available in, maps the addresses to the person in charge of IT at every company in the building, signs the necessary access agreements, digs up the streets to install fiber, then calls your happy customers and asks them to switch, ... good luck to them. Meanwhile, an easy-to-use map or availability checker for potential customers probably has a high probability of getting you a sale.

<comment><USER25> Back in the early 90's, Metricom used a feature of Xerox PARC's Map Viewer to overlay the locations of their pole top boxes on an interactive map, so you could see the coverage of their Ricochet spread spectrum radio network.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_\(Internet_service\))

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hopefully of interest to HN readers, Sonic has frequent flyer miles with the EFF as being one of the best privacy-oriented ISPs around, fighting gag orders for customer information, offering VPNs, etc. - this article briefly skims over that, easy to find more info in searches. ( [https://www.eff.org/who-has- your-back-2017](https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2017) ) Probably one of the first all-Linux ISPs to boot. (disclaimer: I've had a Sonic account for just a bit over 24 years, I'm biased)

</comment><comment><USER27> I had Comcast out recently due to intermittent connection issues. The _very_ first thing he said when he saw my SB6141 was that it was not on the approved list and that it was likely the issue. Of course, he tested the line and found the real issue ( _their_ line and connector outside). After he left, I looked it up and my modem _is_ in fact still on their approved list for the 60Mbps that I pay for.

I seriously dislike the state we are in with all the consolidation of communication companies. It's just mind blowing that this has been allowed to happen.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have Sonic at home, despite that it is basically AT&T dual bonded DSL and slower then my old Comcast connection. Its fast enough and I really like Sonic. Comcast, not so much.

<comment><USER29> What's the reason to not like Comcast? For me it was Sonic at $90/mo for 3 maybe 4mbps (not a lie), or Comcast at $80 for 300mbps. It's a no-brainer there.

I'm not doing anything illegal so I don't care about Comcast cracking down on torrents. The data caps are high enough that I can't hit them in my max-2 simultaneous Netflix streams. Comcast let me buy my own modem instead of using theirs. The only time I lost Comcast service was when all of San Francisco lost power.

Comcast is pretty bad/predatory as a cable TV operator. But we're talking about Internet service, and they're pretty straightforward there.

If you're in SF, can't get Sonic fiber, and really hate Comcast, then you should look into Monkeybrains.

<comment><USER30> When I lived in SF I had monkeybrains, I was happy with them, and very happy not to give comcast my money.

<comment><USER31> How fast were upload speeds with Monkeybrains?

<comment><USER29> It depends on your building's setup. We have a gig radio on the roof with G.Fast inside the building to each unit. I get 200mbps up and down. $35/mo tough to beat unless you can get Sonic fiber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used to be a big support of Sonic for years, but have changed my mind as of late.

They skipped my block for fiber, and I thought there could be some issue (like the fact that a Muni electric line runs down it) that might make it impossible for them to install it. So I asked their tech support if it was going to someday come, or never come.

Sonic would not give me any information. They wouldn't confirm or deny that they'd ever be able to install fiber. They said it would probably happen eventually, but refused to provide even a ballpark figure like "next month, next year, 2 years, 5 years or 10 years".

I finally got a response saying that there were overloaded utility poles on my block and the next block, and that was what was preventing them from stringing fiber. They even sent a map showing which poles were at fault.

So I went to the PUC and worked with them to get the poles replaced, all while sticking with Sonic's slow and expensive ADSL.

Once the poles were replaced, I went back to Sonic and they still refused to say if or when they'd be able to install fiber. Finally (several years have gone by now) someone from the responsible department said that there would never be fiber on my block because of the Muni electric line. What? That's what I asked in the 1st place!?!

After that someone else replied and said that they could actually do it on Muni electric blocks now, but they again refused to give me any semblance of a timeframe. Finally, someone else at Sonic admitted that it could be a very long time, perhaps more than 7 years, because "it's as time consuming to do permitting for a block as it is for a neighborhood" and my block wasn't a priority.

That's all fine, but if so why didn't they say so in the first place rather than giving me a run-around for 3 or 4 years? Wait, I think I know the answer: if they admit that fiber isn't coming any time soon (if at all) people might go to a competitor for faster service!

Pretty cynical, and not what I'd hope for in an ISP committed to transparency. But there you have it: as far as I'm concerned, Sonic just isn't as cool as they seemed.

TL/DR: If Sonic skips your block, they ain't coming back any time soon, if at all, even if the issue that made them skip is corrected.

<comment><USER33> > _Wait, I think I know the answer: if they admit that fiber isn 't coming any > time soon (if at all) people might go to a competitor for faster service!_

It's the opposite: if they say they'll string fiber in 2 years, they get drowned by anrgy requests for status updates if they slip. It's lose-lose for them: commiting to a delivery date gets people angry at them if they slip does to regulatory/admin delays, not commiting to a date gets people fed up and impatient.

<comment><USER32> What you're saying is the reverse of the situation I'm complaining about.

I'm not saying that they should specify how soon fiber is coming. Yes, then they'd have a support issue as you describe.

I'm saying that they should admit it when they know that fiber definitely isn't going to come any time soon at all, so that people can make an informed decision not to waste their time waiting for it to come.

<comment><USER33> > _I 'm saying that they should admit it when they know that fiber definitely > isn't going to come any time soon at all_

I can't speack for Sonic but I feel like they might not know if something is impossible to deliver in the short term, and the amount of work to give you an accurate timeframe is non-trivial, so they don't do it. To them, there's probably no difference between the "we want to do it but we don't know by when" and "we want to do it but we don't know what's stopping us", since I guess all their delays are unknown unknowns.

Sounds like you'll be waiting for microtrenching anyway, good luck

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's because Sonic is AT&T....

"Sonic will offer the AT&T service under its own brand and with its own customer service."

[https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/3900026-181/sonic- partner...](https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/3900026-181/sonic-partners- with-att-works)

<comment><USER35> There's a world of difference between _being_ and _partnering with_ AT&T.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> sonic customer here (past through sonic, currently through LMI.net as a reseller).

they're the best ISP i've ever dealt with, and the fact that they've won a court case against AT&T to run fiber through oakland and berkeley is just amazing. their teams are working in my neighborhood now to get this all installed.

i can't wait for my $50/month gigabit internet, complete w/the best customer service ever!

<comment><USER37> Completely agree. Sonic is a customer service provider that happens to be an ISP.

I've had their gigabit fiber service in SF for the past two years. The few times I've had to call and inquire about a service issue, I was able to speak to someone within a minute of calling. And if you check their forums, you'll find their CEO responding to questions.

<comment><USER36> omg omg omg! the sonic cherry picker truck was finishing up the fiber work right outside my house this morning... talked to the amazingly nice cablemen and i should have fiber in ~month!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Its really really to hard differentiate yourself as an ISP as most people look to you as utility and ultimately just look at your price. There are in my experience (see below) two ways to measure/review an ISP: 1) Their customer service. 2) Their actual internet product (be it fibre, lte or copper)

Most people get upset,mad and angry when 1(customer service) goes wrong and thus grade the ISP solely on that. They then move to a "better" (read better call centre agent) and usually for a less superior product.

Face-it the "Unicorn-ISP" doesn't exist with excellent customer service and excellent connectivity product.

Fun side-story/plug. I run www.FibreTiger.co.za. South Africa's largest "Internet Comparison Service". In South Africa we have over 15 fibre networks (only 3 or 4 really matters) and a little over a 100 registered ISP (only about 5-7 really matters and we only list about 20. Keep in mind only about 10%-15% of our population have fibre-coverage.

Our biggest problem is most people still don't know how fibre works in our country. I.e you can only get a package from an ISP with a network you have coverage for.

I've once be called "unethical" because I told a lady she can ONLY get fibre from this very specific fibre network in her area. (There was no other fibre coverage for her). Yet no matter how I explained she thought I was restricting her choices.

Oh well :)

</comment><comment><USER39> My initial experience with Sonic was kinda abysmal (real annoying to have to take 4 hours off work only for the tech to never show up), but it's since proven to be pretty solid (at least for DSL), and even with the tech no-show it was pretty great to just be able to text them back and get what seemed to be a response from a real person almost immediately.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you are in the Boulder area, Indra's Net is an isp that is still around. They've diversified, but last I checked still offered some dial up service to more remote parts of the area.

[https://indras.net/](https://indras.net/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm really looking forward to their fibre rolling out in my neighborhood (for an entire year now). Last week I saw one of their trucks installing cable on the street right perpendicular to me.

So close.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sonic Fibre is great. I have the gigabit service and I've never worried about the cost because I'd pay $100 for it and it's less than that. Comcast was $89 for 200 megabit.

The only problem is that it disconnected during two CS:GO games leaving my teammates annoyed (mildly) with me.

Also I think it was them who told me about the .org TLD being uncapped and all that and I appreciate that.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have Sonic's gigabit fiber service and I absolutely love it. I also appreciate that you can get support via SMS.

</comment><comment><USER44> There is a good interview with Dane Jasper at about 1:11:15, where he talks about this history of Sonic.net.

[https://youtu.be/hoxhj4zq0DE](https://youtu.be/hoxhj4zq0DE)

</comment><comment><USER45> Sonic Fiber is available in my neighborhood two blocks away in every direction. Just not my block. :-( Still switched because I was so sick of Comcast.

</comment><comment><USER46> Do any ISPs still offer shell accounts?

<comment><USER47> Here's one that does ;-)

[https://www.sonic.com/shell-access](https://www.sonic.com/shell-access)

<comment><USER48> Does anyone have experience with the usenet access it says it provides? I can't find any information on google.

<comment><USER49> When I last tried a few years ago, I could just point a news reader at news.sonic.net and it worked. I can't test it now because I'm no longer a Sonic customer. (I love many things about them, but where I live in Santa Clara, they could never offer any service faster than DSL, and I finally gave in and switched to Comcast.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I use Monkeybrains in SF. Decent service.

</comment><comment><USER51> Please Sonic, come to Ingleside Terraces!!!</comment>


Wellcome Global Monitor shows European crisis of confidence in science - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/19/survey-shows-crisis-of-confidence-in-vaccines-in-parts-of-europe <comment><AUTHOR> Link to the study main page:

[https://wellcome.ac.uk/reports/wellcome-global- monitor/2018](https://wellcome.ac.uk/reports/wellcome-global-monitor/2018)

Link to full study report pdf:

[https://wellcome.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wellcome- global-m...](https://wellcome.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wellcome-global- monitor-2018.pdf)</comment>


GPU Patent battle in the works, while Apple gradually cuts ties with Imagination - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/3/15158982/apple-iphone-gpu-imagination-powervr/? <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone who has been following this, it has been _a long time_ in the making: [http://www.realworldtech.com/apple-custom- gpu/](http://www.realworldtech.com/apple-custom-gpu/)

And Apple has been recruiting GPU designers for at least 5 years.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you interested in article "Objective-C: the sight of Rubyist"? - <AUTHOR>

20 days ago I submitted article "Objective-C: the sight of Rubyist" to Russian collective IT blog called "Habrahabr". So guys, do you want to see that article in English? That article covers what's the diff between Objective-C and Ruby ideology and syntax, and what is common between these langs. <comment><USER2> Sure. I've programmed in both quite a bit and it would be interesting to read another take on things.

I'm also confident we will get mac ruby fully baked into OS X at some point in the next year or two as well and I strongly believe there will be a large demand for people with knowledge of the obj-c based foundation stuff as well as ruby on the mac.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just published an article: [http://goshakkk.name/blog/2011/08/19/objective-c- rubyists-in...](http://goshakkk.name/blog/2011/08/19/objective-c-rubyists- insight/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would.</comment>


From rags to Richer: A business success story built on treating people well - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/03/from-rags-to-richer <comment><USER3> [https://outline.com/WBeYRT](https://outline.com/WBeYRT)

<comment><USER4> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "we have more than enough already".

I wish more people would adopt that attitude.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't read that behind the pay wall.

Meanwhile: [https://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/result...](https://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results_at_a_glance.html)

<comment><USER7> > Couldn't read that behind the pay wall.

Works fine here in Dillo (no JS support) and Firefox with NoScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a proponent of this mentality of investing in your people. I'm a huge Louis Rossmann fan because I feel he builds his business in a way that puts his people first. Recently this was clear when one of his board repair specialists got hurt in a hit-and-run accident (was literally ran over by a truck).

The way that Louis is taking care of his employee is nothing short of inspiring to me. As I understand from the videos, he's covering his salary during recovery, has supported him in the legal case, is accommodating his injuries by sourcing very expensive special equipment (microscope), and has visited him multiple times in the hospital.

He'll sit on camera saying "I'm a tough boss, I'm hard to work for" etc. While I'm certain that's true I just see it as high expectations + wanting to retain top performers. Nothing wrong with that when you put your money where your mouth is and treat your team like family IMO. I'd kill to have a boss like that because that's a person I'd be happy to get behind and support!

<comment><USER9> Yes, Louis is the real deal. Authenticity counts. I'm always astonished at the excuses people make for bad behavior as being "normal". Just look at what he went through with real estate brokers looking for a new storefront. It's no accident he ended up taking a space that was brought to him from a broker (Alan) that had a similar philosophy as to him. That so many people went and hunted Alan down shouldn't have surprised him - people crave authenticity, even if they don't know what it is.

Like him or not, a huge factor in Trump's success is he's Trump. What you see is what you get, warts and all. It may be ugly by most people's standards, but it's authentic. A candidate keeping campaign promises? What?!?

One would think it would be easier to be authentic but apparently for politician/authenticity is the same as vampire/holy water.

Always doing the right thing often isn't the easiest path in the short term. However in the long term it's invaluable. One of the favorite phrases Jude Judy tossed around is "if you always tell the truth you don't have to remember!" \- there's a lot of depth and truth there (and I'm sure she got it from somewhere else, I just heard her say it multiple times).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another company renowned for treating its employees well is Patagonia. The founder, Yvon Chouinard, wrote a book about it ("Let My People Go Surfing") and speaks about it here:

[https://youtu.be/EHS2X-KoN_w](https://youtu.be/EHS2X-KoN_w) (edited version)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHS2X-KoN_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHS2X-KoN_w) (full version)

I can't think of any other companies off the top of my head, but I'm hope there are plenty that I'm just ignorant about.

</comment><comment><USER10> I often see the word "company" and "corporation" used interchangeably. But a corporation is just a machine invented by humans; a "company" is a group of people.

A company, of run properly, is a great way to get people together to accomplish a complex objective. A corporation is merely one of the tools they use.

If you think of people / companions (same roots) as, you know, actual humans, your business will typically be more effective.

<comment><USER11> Your point is well taken, but in the US, at least, a limited liability company is also an entity that you can form like a corporation, or a partnership, so the words don't necessarily conform to their dictionary definitions and are, perhaps, more interchangeable than you suggest.

I also think there's a broad divide in the world between those who think that corporations are dehumanizing and those who think of them as simply a group of people, like the dictionary definition of a company.

<comment><USER12> A company is a partnership of individuals, on many dimensions, legal and otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course. The most successful businesses are ones that give people what they want. The same goes for how you treat your employees.

It's why slavery is hopelessly unable to compete with free markets.

<comment><USER14> > It's why slavery is hopelessly unable to compete with free markets.

This sounds incredibly wrong, but obviously as someone who finds slavery morally reprehensible I would love for it to be true. There are so many industries that, as far as I can tell, could never have begun without slave labor - tobacco being the obvious one that created a boon for the burgeoning United States. Sugar cane in Brazil is a modern example. Chocolate from the Ivory Coast is also interesting, because there is fair trade chocolate you can buy - the fair trade chocolate is a rounding error compared to the industry as a whole.

If you're trying to produce a product in bulk that doesn't require highly trained employees, how would slavery not help your bottom line?

<comment><USER13> > This sounds incredibly wrong

I know it's not the conventional wisdom, but read up on the economies of the US free Northern states and the slave Southern states. The failing southern economy juxtaposed with the prosperous north was a major factor leading to war.

> how would slavery not help your bottom line?

1\. slaves hate you, and would like to kill you

2\. slaves will do as little as possible

3\. slaves will not make any constructive suggestions

4\. slaves will run away

5\. slaves will require armed guards

6\. slaves will sabotage your operation at every opportunity

7\. slaves will spit in your food (and much, much worse)

8\. slave economies tend to make it illegal to educate slaves, even illegal to teach them to read, making them very unproductive

9\. you wouldn't want to be in a room with a few of them without armed guards

<comment><USER14> Without more evidence, I think we just have to agree to disagree. I believe everything you've listed is a second-order effect, and depending on the situation (such as sugar cane in Brazil) many of them do not even apply at all. The sugar cane example is so unique I'm not sure _any_ of them apply, the only one I think might is #8. If you have Netflix and are interested, watch season 2 episode 3 of Rotten. There are other episodes on other industries as well involving what is essentially slave labor that I believe do not apply to many of your rules as well.

I am not saying slavery is always the best way to get an edge in a competitive market, but sometimes it is. Otherwise, why would people still be using it today? There are literally billions of dollars to be made every year in multiple industries if what you're saying is true.

<comment><USER13> > Otherwise, why would people still be using it today?

Generally because there is something else going on that interferes with the free market operating.

There's a good reason that slave economies used to be commonplace, and when free markets appeared they disappeared, one by one.

Do you think the US became a superpower because of slave labor? (Recall that the wealth produced by the slaves was demolished in the Civil War.) In example after example, countries that ditched slavery and turned to free markets became much, much wealthier.

<comment><USER14> > Do you think the US became a superpower because of slave labor? (Recall that > the wealth produced by the slaves was demolished in the Civil War.) In > example after example, countries that ditched slavery and turned to free > markets became much, much wealthier.

I feel like China, while an extremely complicated example, is a good counterpoint to this.

<comment><USER13> China switched to free markets.

<comment><USER14> That's a very controversial statement without a lot more context. You can even google "is china a free market?" and see people arguing about it today (multiple articles from 2019). Many sources disagree with you, including Wikipedia. I realize this ignores almost all of the nuance and it is not binary, but I still would not consider the Chinese economy a free market.

I appreciate the discussion, but I think we just disagree.

<comment><USER13> > That's a very controversial statement without a lot more context.

Here's an overview of the switch to a market economy:

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

<comment><USER14> Let's try something I saw on the front page of HN today about how to disagree better :)

If the United States is an 8 out of 10 on the free market scale, what would you consider China?

<comment><USER13> It's less free than the US, but it's a lot more free than what it was before 1978. China's prosperity improved in direct correlation with adopting free market policies.

For another example, look at North vs South Korea. Same country, an arbitrary line drawn, one prospers the other doesn't. East and West Germany, same thing. North and South US before the Civil War, same thing.

<comment><USER14> I agree with all of your examples and historically the transition has worked as you described. I think that after China opened its borders for trade the transition is so murky you can barely even draw a line like you can for the others. One obvious difference between China and the others is their widely agreed upon currency manipulation. There is also the fact that companies are essentially owned by the state, and you can really only operate with the grace of the government. I believe censorship is severe enough there to be a factor as well.

I understand (or at least I think I understand) your point about how by becoming freer they have prospered more, but I think it is so much more complicated than that when it comes to China. I realize it's always dangerous thinking to say something is an exception; but China is an exception. Yes, China reaped many rewards by opening up trade, but they clamped down on many things simultaneously - essentially trying to have the benefits of free trade with the convenience of a draconian state.

This is going in a slightly different direction than I intended. My original point was about slave labor for specific industries (as opposed to countries), and I feel my point stands that some industries benefit from it. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, they have both fair trade and slave labor chocolate - <USER2> slave labor chocolate absolutely dominates the market. My next point was that China didn't become a super power simply by becoming a free market (and I contend is still is not a free market, although it is freer than it was 50 years ago), but by hoarding natural resources, manipulating their currency, exploiting workers (their own and from Africa), disallowing international competitors internally unless specifically sanctioned by the Chinese government (so essentially China decides who is allowed to participate), and other bullying tactics.

While I think China has a much more prosperous future than the Soviet Union did and they've managed their internal affairs much better (although I do think shit is going to hit the fan there soon in a very bad way), they became a superpower first and foremost by strong-arm tactics. Opening the market with the US and the rest of the world just provided them the money to do so, and we have bent to their will more times than not.

This has been fun, but we really need to agree to disagree at this point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Setting aside the morality -- which is its own reason to treat people well -- it's damnably effective.

Something I got from a book on negotiating:

It doesn't matter how good of a negotiator you are, if you develop a reputation for being a jerk, you're going to fail.

Why?

Because for every room you're in being the best negotiator, your reputation is in ten, negotiating the other way and talking you out of deals you didn't even know about.

Conversely, if you develop a reputation for being a reliable partner and a fair dealer, then your reputation will do the hard work for you. People will talk you into deals without your input, because they _want_ to work with people like that.

<comment><USER16> This. Winning is not how can I rip em off. Winning is a feeling of fairness in all parties and repeat business.</comment></comment>


Cost to store 1PB over 3 years (chart) - <AUTHOR> http://www.quantum.com/pr/CostToStore.jpg <comment><USER2> Without supporting calculations, I don't believe the numbers very much. Of course Quantum, as a manufacturer of tapes and tape drives, will have chosen assumptions that support using their product lines.

At $0.022/GB, the cheapest 3GB spinning media disks [source: pcpartpicker.com right this second] will only set you back $22,000 for the 333 of them it takes you to get to 1PB. Now, that leaves out a LOT of the cost to operate them over 3 years, but the difference between $22,000 for 1PB of raw HDDs and $1,666,000 for the estimated 3-year TCO means I've missed over 98.6% of the total cost according to Quantum.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assumes:

\- 3 year support

\- $1000 monthly hosting fees

\- admin costs for non-cloud items

\- 10% data accessed each month (for S3 and Glacier)

It would have been much better to have made a simple calculator to adjust how much if any of these items to include. The 10% accessed for S3 and Glacier is excessive and without it I think Glacier could be very competitive with tape.

And also missing from this chart is optical as Glacier is thought to be implemented.

[https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret- bd...](https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdxl/)</comment>


Best UK SEO conference wrap up, rap ever.   - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG3T-ZaNFjI ASCON, Search, Social Media and Analytics. Short Wrap up presentation about SEO, Analytics, Search and Mobile presented at Presented by Neil Walkerat #sascon @theukseo www.seomad.com / www.sascon.co.uk.<p>Here is the full version with presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1BoDuyaDtQ <comment><AUTHOR> ASCON, Search, Social Media and Analytics. Short Wrap up presentation about SEO, Analytics, Search and Mobile presented at Presented by Neil Walkerat #sascon @theukseo www.seomad.com / www.sascon.co.uk.

Here is the full version with presentation: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1BoDuyaDtQ></comment>


An update on "greyballing" - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.uber.com/an-update-on-greyballing/ <comment><USER2> So

1\. They only addressed using it against regulators.

2\. Still using it against regulators, but will surely stop whenever it figures out when...

3\. Other concerns? Nope.

Uber is really living up to their hype of being socially and morally bankrupt.</comment>


Google's Sundar Pichai receives $199m stock award - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c7b9b5d4-ce89-11e5-92a1-c5e23ef99c77.html <comment><USER2> paywall

<comment><USER3> Everyone already knows that. That's why the 'web' link is under the title.

<comment><USER2> False and false.

      "Everyone already knows that."

I had to click the link to find out. Also, why are you confident the submitter knew that? If the submitter knew it was a paywall, why did he submit it and not another non-paywall link with the same info?

      "That's why the 'web' link is under the title."

Unless the status quo has changed since this post[1], the "web" link's purpose is to "[find] better sources and catching spam," not to encourage paywall sites with a handicap allowance.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

<comment><USER3> Getting the link through Google is supposed to make it readable.

You can also read this: [https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/hacker-news- faq-1-ho...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/hacker-news-faq-1-how-do- i-read-an-article-behind-a-paywall/)

<comment><USER2> I click on all (3) of the FT.com links via google for the article, and they're ALL paywalled for me.

The HN FAQ says its OK to post paywall links with the necessary condition that the paywalls have workarounds, which I assume excludes paying ;-).

<comment><USER3> You can register for free. That entitles you to several stories a month.

<comment><USER2> No. I'm getting a popup with 4 options -- the cheapest of which is $1/4-week- trial.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis - <AUTHOR> https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus/index.html <comment><USER2> Coauthor here. I lead the research team at Princeton working to uncover online tracking. Happy to answer questions.

The tool we built to do this research is open-source [https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/](https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/) We'd love to work with outside developers to improve it and do new things with it. We've also released the raw data from our study.

<comment><USER3> I am going to ask about a really basic question: what is fingerprinting?

I had to dig around, from the paper is sounds like a stateless form of tracking.

The audio example made sense:

1\. the mic comes on, and it identifies a particular background noise.

2\. I browse to another site, or a different page without a cookie.

3\. The mic comes on again, matches the ambient noise and realizes I am the same person.

Is that what you mean? If this is the case, how can the "canvas fingerprinting" work since I had to browse to a new page and all the old pixels from the previous page are no longer there.

Anyway, if it is what I understand it to be, then it sounds very interesting. I bet some science fiction author wishes they had though to use it.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to answer the basic question: fingerprinting is about trying to identify your device as uniquely as possible using available APIs, in order to track you cross-site, without cookies.

To do that, you first try to identify API that have different results depending on the browser or the device, and then track their result. For example, the User agent have some identifying information. It's not unique for each person, but you can start having a bit of identifying information. Do that with multiple APIs (available fonts, installed plugins ...), and you start having enough identifying informations to uniquely identify some browsers, without having an actual ID provided by the browser.

To test your browser, you can visit [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

<comment><USER5> Which API reveals my system fonts to a website?

Edit: The fingerprint test at [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/) shows my System Fonts

<comment><USER6> I don't think you can enumerate them these days, but you can test for them by trying to use them in CSS (which font is used would affect the width of a span of text, use a wildly different fallback font and you can guess which is installed) or <canvas> (where you can inspect the actual pixels rendered).

<comment><USER7> Or use @font-face and detect calls to a remote URL — which happens when the named local font is missing:

        @font-face {
          font-family: "Roboto";
          src: local("Roboto"), url("https://example.com/user-does-not-have-roboto") format("woff2");
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As soon as I saw these APIs being added I immediately dropped into about:config and disabled them. How the hell do these people think this is a good idea to do without asking any permissions?

Put these in your user prefs.js file on Firefox:

user_pref("dom.battery.enabled", false);

user_pref("device.sensors.enabled", false);

user_pref("dom.vibrator.enabled", false);

user_pref("dom.enable_performance", false);

user_pref("dom.network.enabled", false);

user_pref("toolkit.metrics.ping.enabled", false);

user_pref("dom.gamepad.enabled", false);

Here's my full firefox config currently:

[https://up1.ca/#nUSA1WtY13ECfmYC5c825w](https://up1.ca/#nUSA1WtY13ECfmYC5c825w)

Privacy on the web keeps getting harder and harder. Of course this should only be used in conjunction with maxed out ad blockers, anti-anti-adblockers, privacy badger and disconnect.

We need browsers to start asking permission. When you install an app on Android or iOS it says "here's what it's going to use, do you want this?". The mere presence of the popup would annoy people and prevent them from using these APIs.

<comment><USER9> Thank you, user, for making your fingerprint hash more unique by disabling certain default features, given your user-agent string, thus opting into cat- facts.

<comment><USER10> Disabling them probably makes you significantly more unique than those that don't just because the vast majority of people never will disable them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google has a vested interest in information leakage. I have a suspicion that the Chromium project expresses a strategic desire to shape the direction of browser development away from stopping those leaks. The idea of signing into the browser with an identity is a core feature and in Google's branded version, Chrome, the big idea is that the user is signed into Google's services.

Google only pitches the idea of multiple identities in the context of sharing devices among several people: [https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en) and even then doesn't do much to surface the idea. [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=multiple+identities...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=multiple+identities+in+chrome&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=google.com&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&as_rights=)

<comment><USER12> This is why Firefox is gaining momentum; they seem to be the only browser interested in user privacy. Users are definitely interested.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. i even use FF despite its terrible terrible "pinch to zoom" functionality - which works perfectly in other browsers (Safari, Chromium, Chrome).

Zooming is such a basic thing... i don't understand why they implement it in such a crappy way. Certainly doesn't attract users.

<comment><USER14> Can you elaborate what's so bad about Firefox's pinch to zoom?

<comment><USER13> Take a look at this movement: [https://up1.ca/#q07x8mFjrGtXR6ju1r3EQw](https://up1.ca/#q07x8mFjrGtXR6ju1r3EQw)

In Safari, this is what it does: [https://up1.ca/#Lu0r_cI_v0vXvzpa9nUmEg](https://up1.ca/#Lu0r_cI_v0vXvzpa9nUmEg) So in Safari it lets me zoom all the way in and/or out with 1 smooth movement.

This is what the same movement does in Firefox: [https://up1.ca/#SEKWNOm1BSQnkntxj_v53w](https://up1.ca/#SEKWNOm1BSQnkntxj_v53w) In Firefox, if i want to zoom all the way in, i have to pinch in like 10 times (very annoying) and then to zoom out pinch out another 10 times...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the kind of nonconsensual sureptitious user tracking that the EU privacy directive 2002/58/EC concerns itself with, not those redundant, stupid cookie consent overlays.

<comment><USER16> So a regular site using, say, mixpanel doesn't need to show a warning?

<comment><USER17> If the cookies are purely technical (say, login cookies), no.

If the cookies are used for tracking, like Google Analytics, then yes, it needs to ask the user for consent.

And that's not a warning, but actual "yes/no", and in the no case, it may not set a tracking cookie, or have set a tracking cookie already.

Most sites (except for a few dozen German and Dutch ones) just redirect you somewhere else, though, if you refuse to be tracked.

<comment><USER18> Something that is best left to the browser to handle... by allowing the user to enable/disable 3rd party cookies. Which we already have. But no, the EU has stupid notifications on basically every single website as a result since everyone uses third party analytics. Why? If you want your analytics to be believed by anyone who wants to advertise with you, invest in you, partner with you, or buy you, they'd damn well better be third party analytics.

<comment><USER15> The EU Commission and the regulatory agencies actually agree with you. The stupidity is 100% with the web devs and customers.

<comment><USER19> What do you mean with "The stupidity is 100% with the web devs and customers"?

The law requires user consent, in form of a click on a banner or scrolling the page, before setting any cookie.

<comment><USER15> Which law? The 2002/58/EC doesn't.

<comment><USER19> Not that one.

[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:320...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32009L0136)

Complete law: [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...](http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32009L0136&from=EN)

Paragraph 66 talks about cookies.

A later exception was made by the EU for session cookies.

Guidelines for webmasters:

[http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...](http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#section_4)

It has a sample banner which is similar to those which most users display.

Spanish official directives (with further protection because of a local law called LSSI): [https://www.agpd.es/portalwebAGPD/canaldocumentacion/publica...](https://www.agpd.es/portalwebAGPD/canaldocumentacion/publicaciones/common/Guias/Guia_Cookies.pdf), page 17. Also comes with a sample banner

Did you really think that everyone else was wrong or didn't read the law and is programming these banners as some sort of fad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> f- Although the emphasis on the actual abuse of newly-introduced APIs is much needed, it is probably important to note that they are _not_ uniquely suited for fingerprinting, and that the existence of these properties is not necessarily a product of the ignorance of browser developers or standards bodies. For most part, these design decisions were made simply because the underlying features were badly needed to provide an attractive development platform - and introducing them did not make the existing browser fingerprinting potential substantially worse.

Conversely, going after that small set of APIs and ripping them out or slapping permission prompts in front of them is unlikely to meaningfully improve your privacy when visiting adversarial websites.

Few years back, we put together a less publicized paper that explored the fingerprintable "attack surface" of modern browsers:

[https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/client- ident...](https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/client- identification-mechanisms)

Overall, the picture is incredibly nuanced, and purely technical solutions to fingerprinting probably require breaking quite a few core properties of the web.

</comment><comment><USER20> So... what we need is a browser, which says it supports these things but blocks or provides false data on request and looks as ordinary as possible for "regular" browser fingerprinting.

Is anyone aware of the existence of one?

<comment><USER21> The problem here is Canvas fingerprinting - that's what I found the most surprising and interesting.

How do you prevent that, apart from working on 'fixing' browsers to create pixel-perfect renders across different browsers/platforms/configurations. Would that even be possible?

Edit:

> Tor Browser notifies the user for canvas read attempts and provides the > option to return blank image data to prevent fingerprinting.

Huh. I guess that's one attempt, but being able to read pixel data out of a canvas is completely reasonable.

<comment><USER7> > […] but being able to read pixel data out of a canvas is completely > reasonable.

Not for every website. Most websites don't need canvas at all. One option would be to ask users to activate canvas support for a website that does need it, so users can judge for themselves if the request is legitimate. This is how the geo-location API works after all.

I am not convinced that this will work very well though.

<comment><USER21> Seems like just another vector to fingerprint that browser by :)

<comment><USER7> It is! But a disabled setting has a much lower entropy in terms of identifying bits than the hash generated with an active canvas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Colour me unsurprised. Disappointed though.

I'm glad I disabled WebRTC when I first discovered it could be used to expose local IP on a VPN.

These "extension" technologies should all be optional plugins. Preferably install on demand, but a simple, obvious way to disable would be acceptable. (ie more obvious than about:config)

Not a great deal can be done about font metrics other than my belief that websites shouldn't be able to ferret around my fonts to see what I have. Not like it's a critical need for any site.

<comment><USER23> What would anyone do with your internal network IP?

Having these features as optional plugins means they are basically impossible to count on having in the basic web platform, meaning you're going to fight a losing battle to gain adoption for any applications that need them.

And the open web platform is the only platform right now that is enabling developers to create cross-platform applications outside of the restrictions of walled-garden app stores.

<comment><USER22> Not just internal network IP, but also public IP. There were quite a few test sites popped up when the issue came to light.

> Having these features as optional plugins means they are basically > impossible to count on having

Funny. Didn't seem to prevent flash, acrobat or others becoming extensively adopted. If I want browser video chat I can install WebRTC etc.

If the cost of having that universal platform is compromising everyone's privacy, on any site that wants to check, it's not a fair or acceptable trade.

Seems to me we have this ass backwards.

<comment><USER23> You know every site you ever go to sees your public IP, right?

Seems to me you're just being paranoid.

<comment><USER22> Not when connected to a VPN, they should see the vpn public IP. The issue was that WebRTC enabled snooping on ISP-provided IP whilst on a VPN.

See [https://github.com/diafygi/webrtc-ips](https://github.com/diafygi/webrtc- ips) or [https://www.purevpn.com/blog/disable-webrtc-in-chrome-and- fi...](https://www.purevpn.com/blog/disable-webrtc-in-chrome-and-firefox-to- protect-anonymity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> NoScript is an all-or-nothing approach. Are there any JS-blockers that allow API-level blocks?

<comment><USER25> If you use Firefox or Iceweasel, you can disable most of those apis in about:config or user.js. For example, media.peerconnection.enabled = false, to disable WebRTC. dom.battery.enabled = false for battery, etc.

<comment><USER26> Or you could use the privacy settings addon, which adds a toolbar button to enable/disable most of those settings.

<comment><USER27> While that works, it's reset whenever you clear your history and data completely. Isn't there a way to whitelist this in user.js permanently?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> All of this makes me wonder how some of these interfaces should be more closely guarded by the user agent.

Perhaps instead of a site probing for capabilities, they should instead publish a list of what the site/page can leverage and what it absolutely needs to work. Maybe meta tags in the head or something like the robots.txt. Browsers can then pull the list and present it to the end user for white- listing.

You could have a series of tags similar to noscript to decorate broken portions of sites if you wanted to advertise missing features to users and, based on what features they chose to enable/disable for the site, the browser would selectively render them.

<comment><USER29> Users don't want to do this though.

I mean, how many people are dealing with the hassle of noscript? That's probably most of the users that are going to do anything other than tell the browser to stop asking questions.

<comment><USER28> Users are familiar with managing permissions, they do it all of the time. Users have to manage location services and the camera in browser. iOS and Android also prompt for access to resources.

Why is it unrealistic to expect the same for other interfaces like audio, video, WebRTC, and other potentially exploitable functionality?

<comment><USER30> Most permission management most users do is click the "accept" button when installing an app without reading anything on the list. I don't see how that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So given this information, how can we poison the results that the trackers get?

<comment><USER32> There have been a couple plugins which try to address this question: Chameleon ([https://github.com/ghostwords/chameleon](https://github.com/ghostwords/chameleon)), which is still in early stages, and FireGloves ([https://fingerprint.pet- portal.eu/?menu=6](https://fingerprint.pet-portal.eu/?menu=6)), which was built by a research group (not sure it's still supported).

Also a great paper on this topic: [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/209989/tr1.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/209989/tr1.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Some methods of fingerprinting are probably used to distinct between real users and bots. Bots can use patched headless browsers that are masquaraded as desktop browsers (for example as latest Firefox or Chrome running on Windows). Subtle differences in font rendering or missing audio support can be useful to detect underlying libraries and platform. Hashing is used to hide exact matching algorithm from scammers.

There is a lot of people trying to earn on clicking ads with bots.

Edit: and by the way disabling JS is an effective method against most of the fingerprinting techniques.

<comment><USER34> As someone who has written code to detect bots, exactly this. We don't care about fingerprinting the user, we care about fingerprinting to verify the user agent you claim to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What annoys me the most is how many useless cycles these trackers use to track me.

</comment><comment><USER36> WebRTC guys get around this by stating fingerprinting is game over, so don't even bother. They ignore that they are going against the explicitly defined networking (proxy) settings. Browsers are complicit in this. If the application asks "should I use a proxy", then ignores it, silently, wherever it wants, that's deceptive and broken.

There's still zero (0) use cases to have WebRTC data channels enabled in the background with no indicator.

If all these APIs are added, the web will turn into a bigger mess than it is. They can't prompt for permissions too much. So they'll skip that, like WebRTC does.

</comment><comment><USER37> Seems like browsers should ask the user's permission to use these html5 features. Then whitelist. For example, a site that does nothing with audio should be denied access to the audio stack.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think it's time for HTML--, which would contain no active content at all and simply be a reflowable document display format.

<comment><USER39> SO basically AMP minus the Google-sourced JS...

<comment><USER40> ...which is just HTML then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There is an acceptable tradeoff between pseudo anonymous access through browsers vs non-anonymous access through native apps.

To interpret this research as reason for crippling web or browsers would be a giant mistake. Crippling browsers will only work against users, who will be then forced into installing apps by companies.

Two popular shopping companies in India exactly did this, they completely abandoned their websites and went native app only. This combined with large set of permission requested by apps lead to worse experience in terms of privacy for consumers. As the announcement for Instant Apps at Google I/O demonstrate, web as an open platform is in peril and its demise will be only hastened by blindly adopting these types of recommendations.

Essentially web as open platform will be destroyed in the name of perfect privacy. Only to be replaced by inescapable walled gardens. Rather consider that web allows a motivated user to employ evasion tactics, while still offering usability to those who are not interested in privacy. While with native apps where Apple needs a credit card on file to install, offer no such opportunity.

I am happy that Arvind (author of the paper) in another comment recommends a similar approach:

""" Personally I think there are so many of these APIs that for the browser to try to prevent the ability to fingerprint is putting the genie back in the bottle. But there is one powerful step browsers can take: put stronger privacy protections into private browsing mode, even at the expense of some functionality. Firefox has taken steps in this direction [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/11/03/firefox-now- offers-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/11/03/firefox-now-offers-..). Traditionally all browsers viewed private browsing mode as protecting against local adversaries and not trackers / network adversaries, and in my opinion this was a mistake. """

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730373)

<comment><USER42> > Two popular shopping companies in India exactly did this, they completely > abandoned their websites and went native app only. This combined with large > set of permission requested by apps lead to worse experience in terms of > privacy for consumers.

I'm surprised nobody has commented on your comment yet. I was in a meeting just this morning where my interlocutor assured me that over 70% of advertising in 10 years will be native apps since everything else is getting blocked or abandoned (and presenting it as an opportunity to do all the stuff you "can't do anymore" on browser).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Over 3,000 top sites using the font technique, and from the description this sounds really wasteful (choosing and drawing in a variety of fonts for no reason other than to sniff out the user).

Each font is probably associated with a non-trivial caching scheme and other OS resources, not to mention the use of anti-aliasing in rendering, etc. So a web page, doing something you don't even want, is able to cause the OS to devote maybe 100x more resources to fonts than it otherwise would?

A simple solution would be to set a hard limit, such as "4 fonts maximum", for any web site; and, to completely disallow linked domains from using more.

</comment><comment><USER44> After reading this it makes me want to disable JavaScript entirely, along with cookies, and go back to text browsing. I've been using Ghostery on my phone, it's been pretty good.

<comment><USER45> I'd say that's pretty needless. I run ghostery and ABP simultaneously and they do a great job catching these trackers.

The downside of having no JS compared to accidentally a getting fingerprinted is a no brainer for me. Modern web is pretty useless without JS for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Whoa, what's the use case for exposing battery information?

<comment><USER47> Some application want access to the battery info as they might want to disable some functionality in case your battery runs low. It would be smarter if instead of giving exact battery level it will get a callback once the battery runs low.

<comment><USER48> The Great Suspender is an example of this. Auto-sleeps browser tabs when on battery.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

<comment><USER49> Sharing the battery information with a browser extension seems reasonable, but are there any websites that actually use the battery information for legitimate user benefit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Of course this is something you do. Throw it together with all of the other information you can clean from a browser (referrer, ip) and you can get a match with a very high confidence level.

Shops can do the same with baskets, you find that people are either identified by one very rare feature which reoccurs often or their little graph of 4-5 items which correlate 99% to them.

</comment><comment><USER51> All these things make the websites the new apps. Most probably we won't need to use many desktop applications a few years later.

<comment><USER28> That's the line Apple took with iOS shortly before it introduced the App store. Mozilla, Palm/HP, and even Microsoft with it's Win 8 Metro Apps tried to make websites the new apps. It has some short comings.

Web apps are definitely getting better, I haven't used an actual email client in 10 years, but they have a long way to go before they can replace dedicated clients entirely.

<comment><USER52> > Web apps are definitely getting better, ... but they have a long way to go > before they can replace dedicated clients entirely.

And yet, just yesterday there was a great discussion on Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, where entire operating systems are accessed and operated virtually through just the browser [0].

The current top comment indicates that while there are some setup hoops to jump through to use a specific OS, the performance itself "works very well" [1]. Does this not qualify as a web app replacing a client entirely?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11721466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11721466) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722141)

<comment><USER53> That doesn't sound too far from Desktop Computing as a Service. It will be a sad day when I have to pay $9/month to be able to log into my desktop.

<comment><USER52> I mostly agree.

Ideally I'd like to have a minimal OS and file set on my local machine (for offline and poor connectivity scenarios), that automatically syncs with my own, encrypted cloud system, such that I can (at my own discretion) update the OS from controlled sources (e.g. git). But I don't think there is enough interest from others for such a system, and I'm occupied with enough other projects that I won't be able to set up such a system.

<comment><USER51> I think that it depends on your use-case. I use Google Photos to store my media files, Github to store application configuration & source code of my applications, Chrome to store bookmarks, passwords, Spotify to save & listen music etc. Even if I lost my computer now, I would easily setup my desktop environment again.

<comment><USER52> For me, I don't use Google Photos or Spotify, I have my own local copies and maintain my own backups.

I do use Github for some projects, but I also maintain local copies and maintain my own backups for all my projects.

If pinboard.in ever disappeared, it'd be like loosing an appendage! It might not be as bad as loosing an entire arm or leg, but its loss would be equivalent to at least a finger or two!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If you want to see a live demo of all the ways your browser can fingerprint you, this is a great website: [https://www.browserleaks.com/](https://www.browserleaks.com/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Since the original web based ad campaigns were launched we have been tracked. Serious web analytics companies know these tactics already.

So what exactly is the research contribution being made here? What's new and interesting?

</comment><comment><USER56> I think its similar to how Absolute Computrace rootkit identifies Android and Lenovo devices. Each hardware compoment has a unique ID, like your ethernet, bluetooth, even microphones and batteries.

</comment><comment><USER57> Would it be more secure to use tor than traditional browser. The only drawback is the longer RTT.

</comment><comment><USER58> Malware filtering is needed.

<comment><USER59> that's why we have things like ublock and ghostery; it's essentially the same

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Ahhh. Remember when this was just a Flash problem, and getting rid of Flash was going to rid the world of evil?

Spoiler: that didn't happen.

<comment><USER61> Things like this happened with flash but you had no control over them since flash was all or nothing and closed source.

<comment><USER60> I agree with that (technical person's) perspective, but that was not the mainline argument. Steve Jobs got on stage and said it was a hunk of battery wasting crap that invaded your privacy. I'm saying you can make that case regardless of your platform de jour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Well, who would have guessed. Surprise surprise.

The web is such a shit technology.

<comment><USER63> And how would Silverlight or Java applets or Flash or any other client side technology be better in this regard?

You have to expose capabilities and those capabilities can be used to create an unique fingerprint based on your device.

How would you design the stack so that this kind of thing is impossible? Feel free to use your favorite tech stack as a base.

<comment><USER62> How about not developing applications in the browser? Its about linked documents. Not angular-17 MVVM async session persistence in indexdb with websql and asm.js rendering webgl for a spinning teapot.

<comment><USER64> OK. So you get your 'document only' internet. Where do we put all the other stuff? I have a bunch of 'non-document' websites that are essential to me now.

What happens under your new regime? Someone reimplements them all as native apps?

The point I'm making is just because your internet is document-only please don't assume mine or other people's are.

<comment><USER62> Because it is so, it must be so.

Every web app is written in perl/php, therefore we will keep using perl/php. - What will you do, rewrite the apps? </..

internet != web.

This cludge of in-browser tech everyone is pursuing already comes with so much suffering for the developer. But the enthusiasm to embrace garbage like religion is just unbelievable. (yeah js everything, spotify lol)

I think the current webapp tech stack is not doing our generation justice. Yes google has very strong interests in maintaining status quo since it dominates it and so do many other giants. But good, user friendly and maintainable software looks different.

Why not break the completely misused model of documents for apps ? there is no document semantics in 1000x <div> elements riddled with js callbacks.

But dont let my cynicism annoy you, its the resignation talking. Imagine what cool tech we would have if something was started in the 90s (no, not java applets) and was all grown up now.

But every big company is now a walled garden provider. Just think about UI toolkits, would spotify be in Chromeframe otherwise?.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission.html <comment><AUTHOR> Amazing to see the CDC and NYT apparently waking up to the reality of asymptomatic transmission at this late hour.</comment>


Is there an opposite to absolute zero? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/hot.html

<comment><USER2> I don't quite understand. Heat is a measure of the vibrational kinetic energy any individual molecule possesses as it travels along, right? So, shouldn't the maximum temperature just be whatever the unit conversion is for one C-per- oscillation? That is, at no time should a particle be able to be pushed by its vibration into a velocity greater than light, correct?

<comment><USER3> The kinetic energy goes to infinity as the speed of a particle approaches the speed of light, so there's no upper bound on the kinetic energy a particle can have in special relativity. The formula you possibly had in mind, mv^2/2, is valid only for v much less than c; for relativistic velocities the energy of a particle is equal to mc^2/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2).

BTW, it's any kinetic energy that contributes to the temperature, not necessarily vibrational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolute one!

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, Chuck Norris.</comment>


Ask HN: What's broken in healthcare and how would you fix it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I almost hate to say it, but Trump's idea makes more sense. I can buy my car, homeowners, life, etc insurance from a company across state lines, why were health insurance companies prohibited? Obamacare was a huge disaster. A lot of the provisions could have been taken care of in other ways.

The Affordable Care Act was mostly written by the former CEO of WellPoint, a health insurance company.

Why can't we buy drugs from Canada? Why are our high drug prices here subsidizing the rest of the world? Removing most of the health insurance companies might be a good start. bureaucrats answering to shareholders should not be involved in healthcare decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can go to any bank ATM in the U.S. and securely access my funds. The infrastructure in transparent, secure, and seamless. I can go two separate hospitals in different states and the same is not true for my healthcare information. I know efforts are in place to correct this, but if we can send a probe to Pluto, we can put a system in place to share healthcare records.

</comment><comment><USER4> Health payer system. 100% screwed. Start from ground up and build ONE simple single payer system and remove ~7-10% of the cost of healthcare immediatly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Profit motive.

Burn it down and rebuild with a single payer system.</comment>


DO Installer – An installer for getting apps running quickly on DigitalOcean - <AUTHOR> http://installer.71m.us/ <comment><USER2> Well, hello! This is my project -- I didn't expect to see it posted here!

It is as jgh said: "it's basically just a script that provisions a new digitalocean instance via the DO api, installs dependencies, and builds/installs/runs the program."

I built it specifically so people could easily install my open source church software OneBody by clicking a button on the website here: [https://church.io/onebody/](https://church.io/onebody/)

If I would have known guests were coming, I would have cleaned up a bit! The CSS looks horrible on mobile I just realized.

Anyway, thanks for posting!

<comment><USER3> Tip: To fix your CSS, you're using Bootstrap but you're missing any '
' or '
'. One of those around your outer 'class="row"' (basically level below body) fixes your main issue.

(Then remove the negative margin on your Go button and/or use one of the better options bootstrap has for that kind of thing [1]).

[1] [https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/components/#input- groups-b...](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/components/#input-groups- buttons)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

<comment><USER3> np!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like a cloud-init wrapper to me. Shell script provisioning, the kind that I would avoid.

</comment><comment><USER5> A little bit of css could help. The text hugs the edge of the screen and I can't click on the button.(on mobile)

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks pretty cool. Is the app.yml format documented somewhere?

<comment><USER2> No, it's not documented. I feel bad.

It's basically four keys: name, image, min_size (optional), and config.

The config key contains the cloud-config, tutorial here: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an- introduc...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction- to-cloud-config-scripting)

Example app.yml with more stuff: [https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/master/app.yml](https://github.com/churchio/onebody/blob/master/app.yml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So is this like Docker?

<comment><USER8> I just took a quick look at it and I don't think so. I think it's basically just a script that provisions a new digitalocean instance via the DO api, installs dependencies, and builds/installs/runs the program.

<comment><USER9> It might seem simple, but this person obviously put a lot of work into it. Looks good @jgh really cool!

<comment><USER8> I didnt mean to imply they didnt put work in! Sorry if I did.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My life as a wolf - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1243709/My-life-wolf-British-naturalist-dared-infiltrate-pack-wilderness.html

<comment><USER2> Excerpt:

 _As I set off for the stream, the young male suddenly knocked me down. I lay there, winded, as he stood over me snarling, eyes blazing and teeth bared. Looking as if he might rip my throat out, he then backed me into the hollow of a tree. Every time I tried to move he snapped the air with his jaws. I had never seen him like this and feared for my life.

As dusk fell, his mood changed. He started to walk towards the valley. After a few steps he stopped and looked back, which meant he wanted me to follow. On the way he stopped and sniffed scratches on the ground. There were bear droppings, and deep gouges in the bark of the trees where a huge grizzly had scraped his claws: the signs of a bear intent on killing.

Suddenly it became clear. This wolf hadn't wanted to hurt me but to save me from the rampaging grizzly. I owed him my life._

Fascinating piece. And if you own a dog (or want to) there is a column of behavioral tips.</comment>


Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism-cultivates-home-grown-allergies/ <comment><USER2> The only reason why we don't plant tons of edible fruit trees in city parks is because they would make a huge mess and attract rodents. But now that we're going to have self-driving robots that can clean up after the trees by the time they're old enough to produce fruit, there really isn't any reason why our park trees shouldn't be producing food for us.

<comment><USER3> > ...there really isn't any reason why our park trees shouldn't be producing > food for us.

The article does address that notion -- trees are really good at capturing pollution, and a good amount of that pollution ends up in their fruit. Which sucks. I grew up foraging urban food, and I'll still pick and eat berries and stonefruits because they're too delicious to pass up, but it seems irresponsible for governments to promote such a thing.

<comment><USER2> > The article does address that notion -- trees are really good at capturing > pollution, and a good amount of that pollution ends up in their fruit.

Right, you wouldn't be able to do this with street trees for that reason, but park trees are fine. The soil just needs to be tested on a regular basis for heavy metals, but that isn't especially difficult; e.g. this has already been done for a lot of community gardens in NYC. While fruit definitely contains whatever pollution is in the environment, unlike many mushrooms it generally doesn't hyper concentrate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is such an interesting insight into how urban planning decisions can affect health.

What are the chances that airborne allergens increase rates of food allergies?

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, very small.

Most allergens are denatured by acid and enzymes in the stomach. Many food allergies, which typically are not the same kind of immunological reaction as seasonal allergies/allergic rhinitis, are caused more by the failure of epidermal barriers or acid attack than by mere exposure. don't become sensitized because you ate something so much as because your body allowed bits to get somewhere they are not allowed to be under any circumstances, which is why the outsized anaphylactic reaction food allergies often cause.

(... _typically_. In some cases it is cross reaction, where an antigen in food is too similar to some other antigen the body has previously identified as an invader. See for example the temporary meat allergy that can be caused by some Lone Star tick bites. And there are yet other causes of course...)

Seasonal allergies are usually mild because they are generally localized, peripheral, and provoked in tissues that are designed to give this response as a normal protective action.

(That is, your nose is correct to run or stuff in response to histamine release caused by pollen. Frankly, I feel some foreboding about what sequelae we will eventually discover to be caused by chronic H2 antagonist administration over decades, drugs like Claritin/Zyrtec that people are taking every day of their lives.)

So! While it is possible and some rare cross reactions have been observed (particularly in fruiting trees/eating fruits), as a general rule your seasonal allergies do not increase your food allergy risk.

Now, some people are at higher risk for both due to environmental or genetic circumstances. But there it is a prior immune dysfunction that caused both rather than one causing the other-- though it's an understandable intuition to connect them as your question does. Having one or the other makes it more likely you have both, but it one doesn't cause the other.

<comment><USER6> >So! While it is possible and some rare cross reactions have been observed (particularly in fruiting trees/eating fruits), as a general rule your seasonal allergies do not increase your food allergy risk.

If you're talking about oral allergy syndrome, it isn't really what I'd call rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If by "batonical sexism" we mean the choice to use male trees instead of female trees because it'd be a burden to clean up parts of the female tree that drop to the ground seasonally. It's a straightforward tradeoff: use male trees that produce pollen (and make it worse for allergies) or use female trees that have to get cleaned up (or plant both, and deal with both problems).

<comment><USER5> As the article notes, planting both actually reduces one of the problems: pollen. Female plants attract and capture pollen. So you will slightly increase litter while moderately reducing pollen.

Additionally, as the article also notes, all allergens are not created equal. Pollen is mostly notable insofar as it is allergenic; planting trees with low or nor allergenic pollen uncouples "pollen" and "pollen that causes allergies" levels.

<comment><USER7> > So you will slightly increase litter while moderately reducing pollen.

I don't see any indication that the increase in litter would at all be of greater proportion than the decrease in pollen. Only that bit of pollen that gets blown to a neighboring female tree would get absorbed. Not even all of that, since presumably the majority would get blown off the tree. I can't see how any more than a single digit percent of the pollen would be captured, so people with allergies would still be affected.

The increase in litter would be significant if half the trees were female. On my college campus there were parts of the year where certain types of trees would drop seed pods and it littered the streets for the better part of a week. It'd take a significant amount of manpower to clean it up - probably a garbage-bag per tree - so we just left it outside and dealt with vegetation litter for a couple weeks.

Unless the article backs up the claim that the pollen reduction would be substantial and the increase in litter trivial it could still very well be that a mix of female and male plants does not prevent allergic reactions to such a degree that it's worth using a mix of plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr

Male trees were planted disproportionate to female trees in urban settings because they didn't shed messy seeds. The preponderance of male trees increases the amount of pollen exposure. Author asserts this leads to an epidemic of allergies/asthma. Author asserts this indirectly leads to cancer.

Author fails to apparently take into account that although we are exposed to more male trees than female trees, our total tree (and therefore, pollen) exposure is far lower than historic norms. If adverse consequences are due to pollen over-exposure, we would still be net underexposed to pollen, so any increase in adverse health consequences couldn't be explained by that.

Author also presents themselves as a "horticultural epidemiologist." Worth noting that a google scholar search suggests this person is not an academic and holds no academic credentials, but he does make his income flogging a pair of books on this topic. I guess "Epidemiologist" isn't a protected title, but I usually don't see it applied to someone that doesn't actually work in epidemiology, or hold a degree in epidemiology.

<comment><USER4> One thing that isn't clear is how effective female trees are at removing pollen from the air. Is it possible that even with a much higher population but a more balanced sex ratio, there would still be a lower airborne pollen count?

<comment><USER9> Yes, that's the core premise made by the author: If we're going to plant male plants, either we plant female plants (which have evolved to take up the maximum amount of pollen possible) or our lungs take up the pollen (which results in biological issues).

There's an inflection point where the amount of pollen left in the air by a sparse male forest equals the amount of pollen left in the air by a dense balanced-ratio forest. The article doesn't say where that inflection point is, though — when you state that inflection point as "a balanced-ratio forest can be XYZ as dense as a male-only forest with same or lower pollen counts", XYZ could be 1.1x, 20x, 5000x. Extrapolating that to urban trees, with pollen measured at human face heights, would be the holy grail of prove-or-disprove the value of this approach.

It is very likely that trees evolved to pollinate no more than is necessary to deliver the correct amount of pollen to the trees near them. I cannot find any estimates of this percentage at all, so as with XYZ above, it could be 1%, 10%, or 99%. More science is definitely required in both forest-shaped configurations and urban-shaped pockets.

<comment><USER10> I wonder how good trees really are at attracting pollen. Intuitively it sounds like the forces should be small and the effect should be pretty marginal.

<comment><USER9> Trees are 0.3 _billion_ years old, so presumably they are not just good at it, but _best_ at it.

<comment><USER11> And birds are about 160 million years old, but they can't fly as high or as fast as airplanes. Evolution doesn't plan ahead, so it easily gets stuck in local maxima.

<comment><USER9> Birds seem to fall out of the sky a lot less often. Could be the same is true for pollen. I don't know if I agree with the guy, but I think he's right to encourage more science time and money spent on it.

<comment><USER12> What? How could you think this is remotely true. It's international news when a commercial aircraft crashes. Birds, not so much.

<comment><USER9> Observer fallacy, though I'm kind of confused why I've never personally seen it happen. I've seem one window strike but never a ground strike.

<comment><USER13> If you want to observe birds there are some great nest cams all over the world.

The first days/weeks/months of flying is not perfect. A large predatory bird needs a lot of training and exercise. Wildlife rehabilitation is an other good source to hear about the work involved in getting wild birds to fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would it be feasible to genetically engineer trees to neither drop seeds nor release airborne pollen?

<comment><USER15> You don't have to genetically engineer it. Just clone (known for millennia) a barren plant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great article, horrible title

</comment><comment><USER17> You ever see one of those titles where individually you know all the words, but don't know what they mean together?

</comment><comment><USER18> The 10 people who died from the pollen storm in Melbourne was interesting.

[https://www.google.com.au/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9907120](https://www.google.com.au/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9907120)

It also interesting because it possibly only showed up because it hit the media, but it should have been see-able before if proper stats were kept over the long term.

</comment><comment><USER19> To use male trees in parks (when possible) is a technical choice, totally unrelated with sexism. To link all things with female opression is unhealthy and a mess leading to absurd dead ends.

Cities are full of "male symbols" in form of phallic shaped towers and square high buildings. Should we remove all of them and start building round hemispheric houses instead? Should we remove only the 50% of skyscrapers?

The term botanical sexism is unfair for garden designers (not always men) and creates a non-existent problem

<comment><USER20> I think you missed the point of the article.

<comment><USER19> Maybe the writer should have used a better title then. Less clickbaity and annoying. That some pollens can trigger allergies when combined with diesel particles is not exactly breaking news.</comment></comment></comment>


Things We Got Wrong in Fintech - <AUTHOR> https://www.regalii.com/blog/5-things-we-got-wrong-in-fintech <comment><USER2> Always good to have an opportunity to point to [https://medium.com/bull- market/a-cynic-s-guide-to-fintech-3c...](https://medium.com/bull- market/a-cynic-s-guide-to-fintech-3cd0995e0da3)

 _" Fintech business model #1. Reinventing past mistakes of the banking industry because you don't know about adverse selection"_

</comment><comment><USER3> I read each of the five "lessons learnt" in this article and thought to myself: "No shit, Sherlock!"

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, I ended up working in FinTech. It was an eye-opening experience and, ever since, I have been constantly amazed by the irrational optimism/arrogance/hubris of people who have zero experience in the sector but believe that they know better than people who have been working here for decades.

It's actually embarrassing at this point. To quote Lucky Green, God forbid "there might be something to be learned from several millenniums of financial services best practices."

<comment><USER4> What's worse is that investors are actually funding companies run by people who don't recognize that fraud is really bad, compliance is a pain, customer acquisition costs are high, trust is a challenge and remittances are primarily used by the unbanked.

It goes to show how much the investors know these days.

<comment><USER5> I know of a fintech startup that hired a guy who had been convicted of embezzlement at a previous company.

If I could short that company...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry if this is OT, but didn't regalii go thru YC? IT doesn't have the flag.

At any rate, Regalii was one of the best companies in my round of Startup Chile. I saw their pitch and I really wanted to invest.

Of course they have these challenges, and with the current regulatory climate in the USA this is only going to get worse and worse over time-- imagine what will happen when they have to verify and report the identity of every recipient of their funds? I think thats not too far off.

IT will be hard to report he identity of Chileans or Argentinians or Uruguayans to the IRS because it will be hard to collect it in a way the IRS understands.

And then how many argentinians are going to want to give a US company enough info that the remittances (in US Dollars equivalents) can be reported to the argentinian government at some point down the line?

Moving money across borders is the number one business governments seem to want to destroy (Because of course all this money could be "Terrorism" or "drug" related.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Related: what do people think of Yodlee?</comment>


Kernel Tracing Qmax on Solaris – Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.m0noc.com/2016/08/kernel-tracing-qmax-on-solaris-part-2.html <comment><USER2> I've DTrace'd qmax before -- pretty useful, back in the day of Solaris.

Linux is finally getting these superpowers too with BPF: [https://github.com/iovisor/bcc#tools](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc#tools) , which is great news for all of us running Linux.

<comment><USER3> 'brendangregg - Do you believe that DTrace will maintain status as the penultimate bees knees in dynamic tracing for the foreseeable future, or will Linux's BPF and other tracing tools quickly overtake DTrace?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> S10u9 in 2016? That seems pretty odd, I'm guessing you are avoiding Oracle releases of S10, but also Illumos. Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say I'm avoiding Oracle/newer releases; I do use them along with e.g. Solaris 2.6, Linux 2.x, 4.x, etc.

For many pen-testers and sys-admins we still need to understand, abuse, and support legacy tech in addition to the latest tech. Only a few days ago it was reported that the UK's Met police still have 27,000 PCs running Windows XP.

It isn't just about using the tools, but understanding and fixing problems encountered when running them; in this case using Illumos source as a guide with a number of other techniques to get the tool to work on the closed source version of Solaris.

In any case, I think there is a "hacker"/technical curiosity in playing with this stuff and understanding how it works, so it's fair game.</comment></comment>


This Is Exactly How Fast the Windows Monopoly Is Being Destroyed - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/21/microsoft_windows_monopoly_three_charts_that_show_its_demise.html

<comment><USER2> It worries me that the flight to tablets and other not-PCs will cause a return to the $4000 PCs of the 90s (at least, I can remember my father paying about that for a 486DX)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't worry too much about this. Shrinking markets usually mean price wars. As PC growth stalls, today's equivalent of your father's $4000 PC now sells for under $400.

<comment><USER3> Really? Wouldn't less players mean each individually has more influence on the market, therefore price hikes?

Things seem to get more expensive in shrinking markets (magazines, for example)</comment></comment></comment>