DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-apple-mapkit-js/ <comment><USER3> Some paint it as if the main reason to switch was privacy ([https://www.imore.com/duckduckgo-switches-apple-maps- because...](https://www.imore.com/duckduckgo-switches-apple-maps-because- privacy) "DuckDuckGo switches to Apple Maps, because privacy"), but the previous map provider was mapbox (openstreetmap plus commercial sources) and I doubt mapbox collected more data than Apple is now.

<comment><USER4> DDG's main marketing model is talking about how they believe Google is privacy threat, so they'll highlight that angle in any change.

<comment><USER5> Google _is_ a privacy threat. Completely unrelated to DDG, marketing or believe.

One Google with thousand tentacles...

<comment><USER6> I'm a bit uncomfortable with how much DDG's marketing is focused on trashing their competition. They deliberately obfuscate privacy issues to strengthen their narrative. Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're small. I doubt they'll stay that way when they capture a significant market share.

<comment><USER7> > Sure duckduckgo is a good company right now, but that's only because they're > small.

 _Only_ because they are small? That seems to imply that if they ever get big, they'll no doubt become evil, privacy-wise. Apple proves that does not have to be the case.

<comment><USER8> Apple's main business is hardware, and software that helps sell the hardware. Any revenue from data is likely a seperate, minor stream; and for it to become a significant one, likely requires significant changes in Apple's operations. Like any other hardware company, they don't need google's kind of data collection to make money.

But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which are more valuable based on targetting quality, which is improved by... data. About the unique user, specifically. For DDG to grow while maintaining search as it's primary business, it's difficult to imagine them not eventually (or at least, being heavily incentivized to) approach/mimic google-style of data collection — because data collection is their money maker.

Apple is unique amongst FAANG in being non-data-reliant, _from the start_ ; they never had strong incentives to turn to it, and took the opportunity to stand against it, improving their primary business without any immediate loss (they're hit by opportunity cost for it, but otherwise).

<comment><USER9> Apple collects and uses data all the time. Their marketing kind of claims they don't, but their privacy policy is very clear that they do.

For example they continuously collect GPS position + list of WiFi APs from iPhone users to build their crowd-source'd wifi location database: "To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. Where available, location-based services may use GPS, Bluetooth, and your IP Address, along with crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations, and other technologies to determine your devices' approximate location."

They also state: "We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes."

It's quite eye opening to compare how Apple's marketing describes their privacy policy vs. how Apple's legal describes it.

<comment><USER10> Also, Apple sells the default search provider space on their OS to Google for ~9B/year.

So, does it really matter if Apple doesn't directly operate their advertising business and instead outsources it?

<comment><USER11> This says nothing about apple selling user data like google of facebook.

We should be more clear in distinguishing various levels of attacks to privacy.

<comment><USER9> Google doesn't sell user data either, though.

But Apple's privacy policy is very clear that they do share user data and they do use personal information for advertisement purposes: "Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."

Does Apple collect less data than Google? Almost certainly, Google is crazy good at it. But are they still collecting data and using it for targeted advertising? According to their own privacy policy _YES_ , yes they are. Including tracking people on their websites: "Apple's websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches."

Seriously, just read Apple's privacy policy: [https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en- ww/](https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/)

It really doesn't match their heavy privacy-first marketing push of late.

And for things like Siri it's hard to imagine that they aren't going to get increasingly creepy on the data collection aspect of things. It's sort of necessary to build out a "real" assistant. Asking things like "What time is my flight?", which is a useful feature, requires it to know when your flight is. Which you probably didn't manually tell it, because that's not very assistant-y, but instead it had to crawl your emails to find it. That ends up being creepy data collection. They could do it purely on-device, but then your homepod can't answer the same question, which breaks the magic. Unless they build some way for the homepod to ask all your other Apple devices. But if all your devices form a collective network that can share data about you between each other is it really "purely local" anymore? And what stops Apple from joining in on that mesh network whenever they want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!

<comment><USER13> >I wish they were explaining why they moved away from Mapbox and OSM in general!

Because it sucks. Isn't that obvious? There's no point in having a feature that nobody uses. I switched to DDG a few months ago and this has always been the one weakness. This is really good news IMO. Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.

You can argue all day that of course it's still a commercial company. But I'd rather compromise and hitch my wagon to the folks that are outwardly explicitly drawing out their commitment to privacy, whose incentives I understand and trust.

<comment><USER14> You're forgetting one detail that I think should be emphasized here: OSM is about free knowledge (as in freedom). You can use, modify and share OSM data however you want. Apple on the other hand is hoarding its information. You can only access it through their products in the ways they intended. They control everything (as always).

I do believe it when Apple says they're respecting their users' privacy, just like I believe it when DDG says that. But I am disappointed when I see how these companies neglect freedom and how so few of their users care about it.

<comment><USER15> It's disappointing that DDG isn't supporting an open infrastructure, but when you think about it their offering is in fact a closed infrastructure similar in principle to Apple's. It is a closed product, but which promises to protect your privacy. That has value when choosing to use a service in the short term, but it's not something to build on or to rely on in the long term, after all both companies could make any pivot they want if their incentives change in future. A better model would be contributing to a search engine which is open source, that cannot pivot without being forked.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, even though it's extremely unlikely companies like Apple or DuckDuckGo will pivot.

Another big argument for supporting free software solutions is to do it for the people who want/need freedom (like whistleblowers or activists).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When DuckDuckGo is set to a dark theme, the map is also in dark mode! To me, that is an incredible valuable feature.

Edit: which is a fallback to Mapbox, no Apple Maps feature.

<comment> master-litty We can send people to the moon but we can barely get dark mode right :)

<comment><USER17> We can't currently send people to the moon, unfortunately. SpaceX is working on creating that capability in the next decade or so though and with there track record it might even happen.

<comment><USER18> Yeah the last person we sent to the moon was in 1972, so long ago that Eugene Cernan has since died at 82 years old.

<comment><USER19> Is there an updated version of this xkcd somewhere? [https://xkcd.com/893/](https://xkcd.com/893/)

<comment><USER20> No, but there are four left, so we're tracking just above the 5th percentile line.

<comment><USER21> I think I remember hearing something about the Apollo astronauts having higher-than-average rates of cardiovascular disease as a result of the increased radiation in space.

<comment><USER22> The sample size is definitely not large enough to make such a broad generalization.

<comment><USER23> I would imagine that there are more medical details than this to the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to say I'm pretty upset about this.

Not over privacy stuff (I don't trust Apple that much either), but because Apple maps just sucks. Unless things changed within the last 4 months, Apple Maps couldn't accurately navigate me from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (which really isn't far).

<comment><USER25> Have you previously used OpenStreetMap? I'd be interested in hearing from those who have. I can say as a DDG user that presentation-wise I disliked what DDG was using before -- but from a direction-accuracy perspective I simply have no idea and would love to hear from others.

<comment><USER26> It's either great or useless, 100% dependent on your location.

Maybe 40% of my city is missing (top-20 in the US) including absolutely everything in my neighborhood other than a couple parks and churches. It gets my address to the correct block (between X and Y Aves) but that's it. Some small towns around me barely exist, others are absolutely complete.

You'll probably do ok in SF/NYC/LA/Chicago etc, but it gets really spotty beyond that.

<comment><USER27> Link the area, someone will add something if it comes to this thread :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If any of you are looking for a company (that is not Apple) that provides map tiles while respecting your customer's privacy, my company (link in profile) does not keep logs beyond debugging necessity and has plans to further improve our privacy profile. We also can make provision for proxy servers in the interest of privacy, if that is helpful for your use case.

(We currently use Analytics on our homepage, but have plans to replace that on our next iteration.)

<comment><USER29> Replace it with what if I may ask?

<comment><USER28> Hey spurgu, that's yet to be decided. :)

We're investigating some of the self-hosted options or our own log-based metrics (think ElasticSearch + Kibana). We're trying to avoid third-parties, if at all possible.

<comment><USER30> What would your analytics stack store if you plan to keep no logs other than those that are necessary for debugging?

<comment><USER28> The analytics I'm referring to would be for our marketing page (and only our marketing page). The logs are for our services themselves.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but I believe it's entirely reasonable to collect useful data on the marketing site vs collecting data via the services our customers pay for (and are used primarily by those who are not our direct customers).

There's also a difference between aggregated data (e.g., number of page hits / avg time spent on page) and PII (e.g., IP addresses, browser fingerprinting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So DDG will now use Apple's data to find places? Please don't. It should be the other way around.

Not even a month ago I made a search for a famous place in Lisbon (you know, big metropolitan area, capital of Portugal, 11th-most populous urban area in the European Union) and Apple Maps didn't even know it existed. Made the search in DDG and it found it, from where I had to copy the address and manually search for it in Maps.

Or I could've used Google Maps in one try, but I genuinely want DDG and Apple Maps to succeed so I keep trying. But please do use the best data of both, don't replace one with the other.

<comment><USER31> >best data of both

Isn't that basically just Google Maps? I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'.

What does Apple Maps do better? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER7> Yes, Google Maps is superior in my region, but as I mentioned, I'd rather support Apple and DDG. I do so for their stances on privacy, but also because usability-wise I do prefer Apple Maps.

> I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'

They must be different datasets; I doubt Google would want to give Apple any data, or data Apple would take it. I will mention that once I have found one place in Apple Maps that was not in Google Maps. It was a small hostel in Europe.

<comment><USER32> > I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps

That hasn't ever been true with Apple Maps (to my knowledge, but absolutely not true now.)

Here's a bit on Apple Maps's current situation:

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding- maps-f...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from- the-ground-up/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a shame to see that DuckDuckGo and many other such companies (yes, also Apple) jump on every "privacy" marketing opportunity they get but largely ignore related user rights such as freedom of information and free software.

Actions like this, the fact that DDGs core components are still proprietary and the freezing of DuckDuckHack just kinda make me think DDG sometimes cares more about the PR than its users.

Don't get me wrong I do think DDG does a good job at providing a good search engine service that respects its users' privacy. It just bothers me that (almost) no one around here seems to care about freedom.

It's a similar thing with Apple, with the exception that Apple actively goes against even the most basic freedoms by forbidding sideloading (if that's still happening), forbidding the GPL on the App Store and being in control of the whole stack - from hardware to software - on almost every platform they have, amongst others.

I'm not saying you _need_ to love freedom but it's a good thing to have, so why not propagate it alongside with privacy? And if you don't do it for yourself, do it for those who care about their freedom.

<comment><USER32> How is free software a right? I'm not dismissing the value of free software, but considering it a right? If free software is a right, that diminishes the what "right" actually means. Freedom of speech is a right. The ability to defend oneself is a right. Privacy is a right. But free software? How does the map provider of DDG have any effect on a person's ability to use, create, or distribute free software?

<comment><USER14> I believe it is a user's right to know and verify what a specific piece of software does to his data and machine and adjust that behaviour if needed. For that, they need access to the source code.

I believe it is a user's right to share the software and configuration they use to help out their neighbour and for that they need to be able to share copies of the software.

Lastly, I obviously believe it is a user's right to run the software wherever they want.

So yeah, free software is a right in my opinion, like freedom of information and free speech. Unfortunately, not many companies care about it (yet).

You're also right in the point that DDG not setting OSM as the default map provider won't actually hurt OSM, really. But it does piss me off a bit when a company always talks about how "privacy friendly" and "open source" they are yet they completely dismiss the (related) freedom aspect. Because "privacy" and "open source" are just the buzzwords the media is talking about.

Does DDG not know about freedom? Does DDG not care about freedom? Why? I know they probably have a good reason for that and good intent in what they're doing but without having an answer to these questions, it just looks like they're grabbing the low hanging fruit sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm a bit concerned about how much data Google has on me and I do think Apple is genuinely more concerned about user privacy. But what's the difference in practical terms really?

Google uses my data to target ads at me but doesn't actually give any of my data to its ad-buying customers. Apple doesn't do this but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.

Since this is really the scenario we should be most concerned about and since all tech companies are required to comply with the law it seems to me that the only way to have any meaningful online privacy is to not use cloud services from any vendor.

<comment><USER34> > Apple ... is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a > subpoena.

Apple must of course comply with a subpoena, but it can only hand over data it holds the keys to. The iOS Security whitepaper[1] goes into some details. Any encryption keys that are stored in iCloud Keychain "share[] the security characteristics of iCloud Keychain—the keys are available only on the user's trusted devices, and not to Apple or any third party." This is used for some, but not all, categories of iCloud data today—iMessage transcripts, for instance, are safe only if you do not use iCloud Backup.

1: [https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....](https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

Your post makes it sound like Google targeting ads to you and Apple complying with legal data requests happen with the same frequency, which is obviously false, and definitely is a difference in practical terms for the everyday user.

According to Apple's transparency report[2], they gave data up in 2,088 account requests in the United States in the first half of 2018.

2: [https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information- request...](https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/)

<comment><USER33> I agree there are some important differences but for my own privacy I'm much less concerned about being targeted by ads then I am about some future administration deciding I'm a person of interest for some reason and subpoenaing my entire online life. In that respect there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between the two.

I deleted my Facebook account because Facebook actually has sold user data to third parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not in the US - so realize that not everyone experiences this - but I've never had a mapping software be so terrible as Apple maps, led me completely out of the way and over a toll bridge that I didn't need to go over. Trip was over an hour longer than it needed to be. I'll definitely still be using !maps to get google maps on duckduckgo.

<comment><USER36> It's regional.

For a long time (in internet time), Apple Maps were clearly inferior to Google Maps.

These days, it's more nuanced. In some geographies they have parity. In a select few, Apple is ahead. For most, though, Google is better.

For speed and privacy reasons, I check Apple Maps first. If I don't find what I'm looking for, then I go to Google Maps and follow up by force-quitting Google Maps when I'm done.

<comment><USER37> where do you think apple maps is better than google?

google maps is the only google service i still use on a regular basis because it's clearly better than apple maps for me (california mostly). apple maps is ok for simple use cases like finding a known business, but an ambiguous search on google maps is almost always better, as is their routing.

i'd love to find a better mapping service for these more complicated use cases so i can avoid google altogether.

<comment><USER38> In the SF Bay area, they are generally on par depending on what features or points of interest you want to find. Some locales are shockingly different. Shenzhen China is much much better on Apple (Google and Bing show roads in the river - completely misaligned) but Shanghai is almost useless on Apple, but very detailed on Google (assuming you can even get to Google in China).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I could see a future where DDG gets acquired by Apple.

<comment><USER3> Separate discussion from last week, most argue against it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816748)

<comment><USER40> I'd argue for it. Apple is missing a search engine, has deep-enough pockets and resources to build its own engine if DDG API contracts were stopped, and is favored by people who value their privacy.

<comment><USER41> Apple is missing a search engine. That doesn't imply that Apple needs a search engine, nor does it imply that acquiring one would be the most profitable thing they could be doing with their available resources.

Arguably, a key part of Apple's success is that they _don 't_ behave like Microsoft.

<comment><USER42> DDG doesn't even -really- have a search engine, they are using Bing's API. So the acquisition wouldn't even make sense.

<comment><USER43> DDG uses Bing as well as a bunch of other sources, including their own crawlers. Portraying it as a sort of "Bing in disguise" is incorrect.

<comment><USER44> Their own crawler is not used for organic search results. See sibling comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> "pizza in berlin" lacks several options, and I just checked my neighbourhood. This is why I'm still using google maps on my iphone, their search results are far better and more accurate

<comment><USER46> "pizza in frankfurt am main" is terrible.

Scrolling with shift (!?) doesn't work at all in my FF.

I can't change the search term on the map page...

The satellite view doesn't have street names (????!)

Edit: the link I click is a yelp.com link. Why are we even talking about Apples privacy here and not yelps?

What a horrible step back...

<comment><USER21> > The satellite view doesn't have street name

Are you sure you're not in hybrid view?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> To zoom in using my mouse wheel, I have to hold down shift, and then it zooms in the opposite direction to how it works in Google Maps (Firefox 64.0 on Ubuntu).

The behaviour works fine for the MapBox maps.

<comment><USER48> Same experience with the zooming. Thanks for the tip on holding shift, but it's realllly slow too.

I also can't drag the map around or click on any items on the map. Really inferior experience so far.

Did you find a way to switch back to the Mapbox maps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can't imagine many people use the maps features in DDG. Switching over to Apple maps isn't going to help, considering that everyone I know in New England stops using Apple maps after about the fifth attempt. Absolutely everyone has an iPhone yet I have no idea how Apple Maps looks like at this point.

</comment><comment><USER50> Scroll wheel isn't zooming the map for me.

<comment><USER51> Hold down shift while scrolling to zoom, just like Maps.app.

<comment><USER52> > just like Maps.app.

What is a maps.app?

<comment><USER21> The macOS Maps app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I guess DDG are angling for Apple to purchase them. Personally I would have preferred for them to stick with OSM. Also, after a quick test, the Apple maps load slowly and driving directions are offloaded to another provider (Bing, Here, Google. or OSM)

</comment><comment><USER54> I really wish DDG would build a Google Apps competitor ... as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant because people will spend hours per day logged in and locked in to the Google ecosystem

<comment><USER52> I don't use Gmail. FastMail works nicely for me, with no google-login required.

Don't see why DDG (a search engine) should run an email-service, nor vica- verse really.

<comment><USER29> If you want to control all the world's data...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Personally - I find Apple maps (now, not at all in the early days) much better than Google maps - except for one thing: On several occasions where I enter a street address and if it's in a heavily populated area particularly if it's on an intersection the pointer will be in the wrong place on the street - I've reported these when I've encountered them and Apple has fixed each one within 24-48 hours but it's still a bit annoying when it does happen. My guessing is that because Google farms a tremendous amount of public and private data from Android devices and Google searches / services they are able to use their privately held wealth of peoples information to improve street numbering especially when new roads are added or intersections have been changed - <USER2> combined with Google maps being 14 years old and Apple maps only being 7. Still, a sensible move for a privacy focused system I believe.

<comment><USER56> One thing Google Maps does have that I don't think Apple Maps has is crowd sourced edits. You can actually propose edits to Google Maps as a user. It's especially prominent with business information, but it is even possible to adjust road geometry.

<comment><USER57> You can do that with Apple Maps as well, I can't say "always" but for a long time at least, though I can't speak for how fast they'll necessarily deal with it. But if you set a marker then there will be a "Report an Issue" button down below at the bottom of its info panel/pane. Amongst the options there is "Add a Place" which can also be a street, and there is a free form "Other Issue" (which you can attach a photo to as well) catch-all. I don't think Apple has any more advanced stuff like user proposed road geometry editing, which is too bad because it's painfully obvious where some simple algorithm has worked off a satellite image vs it having some human attention.

But there is definitely some edit crowd sourcing, it may just suffer from a smaller or less motivated user base. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen Apple really try to _incentivize_ it either, whereas at least at one point Google had a fairly fleshed out actual gamification for Google Maps where people could sign up to be "Local Guides", earn points for constructive actions, and get badges that could be publicly displayed. Essentially free for Google (dunno if they ever gave anything else to top editors for PR, but they didn't promise it) but even simple public recognition of an icon can be surprisingly motivating for a lot of people. I don't know how active that still is and also vaguely remember stories about editing tools getting shut down a few years back, but at any rate Apple has never really tried anything like that at all AFAIK. Not that as a corporate culture they've ever really gotten gaming, period.

<comment><USER56> Good to know. Has this really been around for that long? I swear I was reading about this as an issue for Apple Maps just recently.

<comment><USER57> We should probably quantify "long", I know it's been a few years at least because I added a couple of businesses myself. But I guess it's already been well over 6 years since Apple Maps' initial launch (how time flies!), and there have been plenty of changes since then, so you could well argue even a few years isn't that long in the scale of the thing. And the 1.0 launch sure was rough a heck, not many such things where there has to be a public apology given let alone from Apple. Some of their initial ideas for how it would develop (with heavy 3rd party dev involvement for example) never really seemed to work out, and they've become more, "traditional" I guess over time in terms of data sources and doing the grunt work themselves (IIRC they started doing their own sensor vans for example like in 2015/2016?). At any rate though it's there now and has been for a bit, it's in the Mac version as well and I can see it even in older ones.

Having said all that, I just checked some of the entries I made way back when, which I did with full write ups, my source, photos, and in one case I was in fact the business head of IT and provided that from my work email and a device on our business Apple ID even. And I'm positive those were accepted and on the map for at least 6 months while I was still there. Yet now I look and nothing, and they definitely are still in business at the same location. That's kind of a crappy. If Apple accepts user submissions but then blows them away from time to time during map source fusion say it could explain some of their paucity of data and would discourage more submissions from those few who bothered in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm looking forward to the day that privacy and convenience are mainstream again(if there were ever). This feature is a right step on that direction.

<comment><USER59> They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

      I'm looking forward to the day when people know what they are talking about.

<comment><USER28> > They were using an open source map company, not google maps. By that > standard, I feel this is probably a privacy regression.

I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Open source is not the same as privacy-friendly.

Apple makes privacy a core-tenet of their product. I do not see the same stance from Mapbox.

<comment><USER60> I work at Mapbox. Not speaking officially for the company here (for that see [https://www.mapbox.com/privacy/](https://www.mapbox.com/privacy/)), but I can say it's definitely an internalized norm that in order to earn trust as a platform we need to be very careful with any user data we get. While user- generated location data does flow into updating our map, we are aggressive about anonymizing and aggregating that data as quickly as possible (including stripping out data on the client side).

But I agree Apple has consistently advertised their focus on privacy and backed it up with their actions.

<comment><USER28> Hey Chris, glad to hear that is an internal focus!

I hope for the sake of the Internet that one day discussions about privacy aren't needed because it's the default everywhere. Then everyone wins. :)

<comment><USER61> Except advertisers and industries propped up by that model

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Apple Maps has seen impressive improvements in the past couple years. With Mapbox/OSM in the mix as well, I look forward to seeing where the competition in the maps space leads us.

Mapkit JS took me by surprise when it came out. But so far, it seems to have been a solid decision, especially at a time when many were looking for new solutions after Google Maps changes finally rolled out. And for the most part it looks pretty good.

(Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Maps, opinions mine and not my employer, etc etc. I wish I didn't have to write this so often.)

</comment><comment><USER62> Eh ... What?! This thing isn't functioning at all! How did they think what they have now with Apply maps could ever replace what they had before in terms of functionality?! What were they thinking? Just to mention a few issues I hit on the first attempt of using it:

\- I cannot search?! I can only search on DuckDuckGo, THEN click on the map tab and see a SINGLE location, no similar locations or whatever. And then I cannot in the map tab search? How ridiculous is that? Now I need to do a completely new DuckDuckGo search, hope that it will magically find the street or whatever I search, even if there are multiple ones in the same city. \- I cannot look for directions from A to B?! When I click the "Directions" button I get redirected to bing.com, which is currently blocked to a 100%. I don't want to go to bing, I want to get DIRECTIONS, on the DuckDuckGo map tab and not on another website. \- I cannot even ZOOM, wtf? I keep using the mouse wheel and nothing happens! This thing is so broken.

And this is only the first visit of the map tab. How they f'ed that up, omg.

</comment><comment><USER63> The calls to MapKit seem to be going through a proxy on DDG's servers, which are currently (1/15/19 18:00 UTC) 403ing.

<comment><USER64> Sorry about that, we had a brief issue with our proxy, it should be working properly now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> One thing I notice is that there is no way to restrict search to the map area, or to refine by "Search this Area."

</comment><comment><USER66> I've been waiting on a better alternative to google for many years. I've use DDG when I can but the quality indexes are just not there. Google was at the pinnacle of balance just before they got rid of uncle-sam and reg exp search options. Now every search is tailored to your previous metadata.

</comment><comment><USER67> This map doesn't work for me. Completely blank.

<comment><USER68> Same. Does image search work for you at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interestingly, it seems like the Maps data that Apple is providing here is inconsistent. In southern California, through the native apps I'm getting high-quality maps, while DuckDuckGo is still showing me the older low-quality ones.

</comment><comment><USER68> Somewhat related but DuckDuckGo Image and Map search results have been broken for months for me. I just get blank, broken images. Anyone else have this problem?

Kind of defeats the purpose if I have to use google for half of my searches.

<comment> dan-robertson Some kind of extension blocking the images/js from loading?

<comment><USER69> Or faking/randomizing your UA? Some sites (e.g. YT) serves other image formats based on the UA string.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why are people such fans of Ddg and not searx.me? searx is entirely open source and you can run your own instance.

Ddg reportedly does collect some information (?), and their core is closed source.

<comment><USER71> I think it's probably that DDG does a better job at marketing themselves. Whenever there is any sort of privacy scandal there always seems to be some comment from their PR dept.

Personally, I am highly skeptical regarding DDG and find much of their marketing to be hyperbolic (see the duck.com foolishness [0]). For me, I feel that if I'm just going to get Bing search results and Bing ads, I might as well just use Bing.

[0]: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google- antitrust...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu- duckduckgo-chrome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I wasn't even aware DDG had maps at all since they never once showed up for me. Probably because I am entering Japanese addresses, and their address parser isn't recognizing them as such. As much as I wish to use it, much of DDG has been and continues to be really abysmal if you're living in non- English-speaking Asia. I really worry if they're aware and/or are bothering to improve this.

</comment><comment><USER73> Excited to see DDG's local search improving. I once ordered take out from a restaurant in another state based on a careless DDG search...

</comment><comment><USER74> She's not loading any tiles for me....

</comment><comment><USER75> Caution: DuckDuckGo's Apple Maps might kill your macOS's default map (show completely blank map) if your app has non-English language setting. If so, open your active monitor and search "geod", kill it and run map app again. It can return your apple map app back to normal state.

<comment><USER21> How so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Well looks like I wont be using DDG for directions then, their directions are going to be trash.

</comment><comment><USER77> Cool I don't have to bang Google for directions anymore!

I started using DDG (slowly trying to remove Google as much out of my daily life as possible) after reading about how Google ATAP tried to patent a MIT researchers life's work without her knowledge or consent.

</comment><comment><USER15> This decision to move away from open infrastructure actually clarifies something I've been thinking about DDG recently. When you think about it, DDG is actually very similar to Apple in terms of its offer to users. It is a closed service which offers privacy as part of its marketing. That's not to dismiss it outright or say the offer is not useful or not sincere, both are valuable alternatives to Google, but in the long run their promise has no legal backing. Both could switch to a different model overnight if their incentives shifted.

We could spend a decade evangelising for DDG, it becomes a significant mainstream player, and then gets sold to someone with totally different priorities. I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, is there a legal barrier to this scenario playing out?

<comment><USER78> Business models are probably stickier than tech stacks.

<comment><USER15> It's not really a choice of one or the other, most companies that contribute to open infrastructure also have a business model that relies on that. For instance Red Hat, it can be bought but both the business model and the legal backing for the tech licensing are sticky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> A+ DDG! I have been using DDG (duck duck go) since Gabriel created it in 2008. It's been my default search on all my devices. When I need to route searches through Google, I do, as Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want, whereas DDG, gives you great results, with a different algorithm on the type results plus the added security of what DDG is about. They don't track you. They don't save your searches. I don't use apple maps as i use android, but I like that DDG continues to go against the grain and choose privacy over comfort.

Lastly, I know the bulk of my searches go through DDG so I don't have to think about what I searched, on what devices, was it on a public net, was VPN enabled?? etc etc.. What are you thoughts? Do you use DDG?

<comment><USER43> > Google is still king at knowing and giving you the exact results you want

Not for me, it's not. The quality of Google search results for me has been falling for years now. These days, DDG and Google are about equally good on that score.

I suspect that it's because Google tries to tailor my search results to what it thinks I'm looking for rather than just giving me the results I actually asked for, and it's really, really terrible at it.

<comment><USER80> Totally. I find that most of my Google searches are not relevant. It started to go down hill once they started pushing ML on search. Google is a marketing platform and no longer a search engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I wish they would have done a bit more testing: With Firefox I can't change my position by dragging (looks like an image) and with chrome, I can't zoom with the mouse wheel...

</comment><comment><USER82> Is this the first consumer web interface for Apple Maps? I guess the JS toolkit has been around for about half a year now, but is anyone else significant publishing web maps with it?

</comment><comment><USER83> duck duck go is pretty horrible compared to google, for search results... i wish it wasn't. Tried it, both myself and my less tech savvy wife, thought wtf is this?

</comment><comment><USER84> Apple should launch an alternative to Google Maps on Android. I can slowly see the transition coming.

I love Here Maps too, it's good to have alternatives to Google products.

</comment><comment><USER85> StartPage and Searx are two interesting alternatives to DDG.

</comment><comment><USER86> Is there any point in talking about DDG "privacy" as long as they use yandex (which is basically an fsb (kgb) outlet) as a search backend?

<comment><USER87> As much as Google is an FBI outlet or what do you mean? Is there a point if DDG doesn't send personal data to yandex?

I'd expect DDG to not send my IP address or browser info to yandex. Is that not the case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> What's DDG's business model?

<comment><USER53> To get acquired by a bigger company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> The experience is already better. Thank you. Now please delete Yelp (or at least let me turn it off).

</comment><comment><USER90> [http://wikimapia.org](http://wikimapia.org) can be a win-win to DDG

</comment><comment><USER91> Their core is proprietary, therefore there is virtually no difference between Google and DDG in terms of privacy

</comment><comment><USER92> DDG and Apple? seems fishy

</comment><comment><USER93> Who uses Apple Maps?

</comment><comment><USER94> Idiots

</comment><comment><USER95> Why hasn't Apple bought DuckDuckGo?

I also think the name DuckDuckGo is too long and too cumbersome, they should consider rebranding to something simpler. Branding matters.

<comment><USER96> They own duck.com now, figure it won't be long until they're rebranded as "Duck"

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Apple is probably going to buy DuckDuckGo this year

<comment><USER98> Apple can buy the same search index access DDG has (and probably would have to re-negotiate DDGs existing contracts when taking them over) if it wants to get into search. Although DDG has some additions on top of that, if it'd be cheap enough those could be a reasonable deal for Apple.

I'm not sure Apple wants to get into the mess that offering a major search engine is.

Google is paying them quite well for the opportunity to be the search engine on Apple devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Re: _DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps_

When you use Apple Maps to _go_ anywhere, you do have to _duck_ :-)</comment>


Ask HN: What does being successful mean to you? - <AUTHOR> What's your definition of "success"? <comment><USER2> Being able to spend the maximum time possible with the ones I love.

This means optimizing my work time so that I make as much as possible, in as little time as possible, and then get back to spending time with my loved ones.

The time horizon is a little tricky: if you optimize for the next 30 days, then you could just quit your job, and spend those 30 days with your loved ones. You might be in a world of hurt after those 30 days, though.

If you optimize for your entire life, you might be tempted to work your tail off for a dozen years, hoping that you can squirrel away enough capital quickly to let you retire altogether with financial security. However, things happen over time - both to you and to your loved ones - and you need to enjoy the time with them while you're all still able to do the things you enjoy. (I've had members of my family become suddenly unable to travel or even leave the house.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Being generally happy with my life -- whether it be over the course of the day, week, year, etc. Is the work I do meaningful / helpful? Can I spend time with the people I want to spend time with? Can I do the things I want to do?

As long as the answers to those things are positive, or are trending positive, things are good.</comment>


The mechanism behind Internet Explorer CVE-2014-1776 - <AUTHOR> http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Security-Research-Blog/The-mechanism-behind-Internet-Explorer-CVE-2014-1776-exploits/ba-p/6476220#.U3UiPuP254Y.hackernews <comment><USER2> Still no good public PoC? I still can't get the UAF bug to trigger for some reason.</comment>


Show HN: PullPreview – Deploy previews for any application, on your servers - <AUTHOR> https://pullpreview.com <comment><USER2> Wow this is cool. I actually spent a lot of time developing a solution for this for the last company I worked for. I copied the Angular repos way of doing it. [https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/aio/aio- build...](https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/aio/aio-builds- setup/docs/_TOC.md)

It's really well documented and made the whole process a lot less work. It works great for angular apps.

There doesn't seem to be a ton of services in this space and for larger teams working on the same product I see this solving an actual problem.

Congrats on launching, excited to see where this goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, thanks for your comment!

I had a look at the angular way of doing it: very nice to see other approaches! From a quick look it does seem to require quite a bit more steps and to be more limited in scope, but the documentation looks very good indeed! Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, this is our submission for PullPreview, a way to spin preview environments for any application directly from GitHub to cheap AWS Lightsail servers. No intermediary service involved.

## Context

PullPreview's main use case is for making it easier to review code in branches or pull requests, because reviews with live code are always better than code- only reviews. This means better and faster feedback from reviewers (be it clients or teammates), so that everyone can iterate faster on the feature being developed.

However in most organizations, there is only a handful of staging servers available to the developers, which are hard to keep in sync, maintain, and with complicated processes to make sure you don't step on someone else's code.

PullPreview solves this with ephemeral environments for any pull request or branches, just by adding a label from the GitHub UI. URLs for the deployed environments are displayed right into the GitHub UI, thanks to the integration with the Deployments API.

## How it works (spoiler: no kubernetes)

Contrary to many other solutions, PullPreview _never sees your code_, because it runs as a GitHub Action and does all the work within the GitHub Action runner. The Action automatically provisions a server in _your_ AWS account (a cheap Lightsail instance), and then boots your application using the Docker Compose file(s) that you specify. The server is automatically destroyed when the PR is merged, closed, or the label removed.

Some of the features include unlimited parallel environments, support for SSH access, source IP filtering, port filtering, seed data support, data persistence across deploys, all managed from the GitHub UI.

All of this is packaged as an Open-Source GitHub Action that can be tried right now. You can run it for free for 30 days, and after that we have two license tiers at 120€/year and 300€/year. We believe it is pretty cheap compared to rolling and maintaining your own solution in-house. It is also free for non-profits.

## Next steps

We're looking for feedback on the idea, what could be missing, and the pricing. We are also discovering many more use cases while dogfooding our own idea. For instance, we are currently running a few services in production, continuously deployed thanks to PullPreview (e.g. pullpreview.com itself).

<comment><USER3> First off, congrats on launching! I've personally been working on something very similar for the last bit, and actually plan on launching very soon.

As other commenters have mentioned, this is a system which seems all-to-common to have built in house, and I think you've highlighted issues with that: it may be simple to get something basic working, but without a larger investment, it ends up being unstable and unmaintained.

It's been great seeing all of the similar solutions being launched over the past month, and the slight different ways that different players (you, Okteto, LayerCI, Release, FeaturePeek, etc) are approaching this issue. I see that what you have done is specifically focused on Docker, and purposely avoided Kubernetes. I think that gives you a niche space, along with Dockup ([https://getdockup.com/](https://getdockup.com/)), who I believe are taking the same approach.

I appreciate your focus on security and privacy, specifically around "can never seen your code", but I'm curious about this choice. Did you find that this was actually a concern that customers had? CI/CD platforms, which are kind of a neighbor of Continous Product Review tools (this is how I've been referring to this class of product internally), and have an implicit trust. I have not received much push-back about automated code access, and when that has been a concern, I've found that those individuals preferred to how everything in-house anyways (Gitlab, or Github Enterprise).

Do you have any sort of cost-control structure in place? Being a Github Action, I see this more as a library than a managed service, which also means you have less control/ability to monitor your users ephemeral environments, and I would hate to see the shutdown behaviour break, and suddenly ephemeral environments never go away and your user is left with an obnoxiously large AWS bill.

Overall, I love what you're doing to approach this space in a new way. If you'd like to chat about the space, my email is in my profile (I literally just added it, so hopefully it's visible :fingers-crossed:)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, thanks for your comment and the great points you've made.

Regarding security, we do believe that it is a selling point for many companies. You might be ok granting access to Circle CI or others, but for a new kid on the block that's more difficult. And being run as a self contained action means you are not dependent on the availability or continuity of the service you depend on.

As for misbehaving instances, this is indeed something that we thought about, and we'll make sure this doesn't happen in two ways: \- allowing to set a max duration for an instance, and a max number of concurrent instances \- having an additional trigger in the workflow file to launch a cleanup phase like every day, since GitHub actions already support cron-like tasks

I'll send you an email a bit later as I'm currently on the go, thanks again and talk to you soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, I've never heard of the [1] _" The Prosperity Public License 3.0.0"_, free for non-commercial use, or 30 days free for commercial use, which seems like a great compromise.

This idea is very similar to a few other solutions, [2] Release (YC W20), [3] Netlify Deploy Previews. However, this looks a little different, as it encapsulates everything into the repo's Github Action (except for the cloud provider setup). It also deletes the deploy once it's merged in, which Netlify's Deploy Preview's do not.

How does the domain name for the deployed website get provisioned? something like "pr222.myapp.com"

[1] [https://licensezero.com/licenses/prosperity](https://licensezero.com/licenses/prosperity)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22486031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22486031)

[3] [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing- deploy-p...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy- previews-in-netlify/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, and thanks for your comment!

There are indeed a few other solutions to this problem. But we haven't found any with all of the following characteristics:

a) doesn't require access to your private code

b) works for any type of app

c) doesn't require buying into kubernetes if you don't want to

d) cheap to run

A little digression here but the main trigger for creating this was seeing a post [1] on the Basecamp blog about their implementation of preview envs for their upcoming service: It seemed so convoluted and expensive that surely there was a way to do it with less moving parts (I totally understand that Basecamp may require a complex setup like that, but I'm pretty sure it should remain an outlier).

Your comment about Netlify forgetting to remove the deployment link from the GitHub UI once it's merged is also true, and from my testing Heroku also forgets to remove it. The GitHub deployment API documentation really needs some love, but still surprising since the removal is supported.

Regarding domain name provisioning, you can see a few examples in the demos linked from the features page. Currently the pattern is IP-gh- REPO_ID-[pr|branch]-[PR_NUMBER|BRANCH_NAME].my.pullpreview.com. Something I forgot to mention on the features page is that custom domain names are also supported. Custom patterns could also be supported without any issue.

[1] [https://m.signalvnoise.com/seamless-branch-deploys-with- kube...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/seamless-branch-deploys-with-kubernetes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty neat.

Since a new server is launched for every preview, it would be cool if the packaging used cloud-init vs docker-compose.

If containers are a focus perhaps you could support k8s deployment/svc manifests and compose via something like [https://github.com/kubernetes/kompose](https://github.com/kubernetes/kompose)

For k8s you could quickly launch a single node cluster with kind

<comment><AUTHOR> > Since a new server is launched for every preview, it would be cool if the > packaging used cloud-init vs docker-compose.

Actually the way it works now is that you keep the same server for the duration of a PR / branch. This means faster redeploys since the docker cache is there, and you don't lose your demo data on every redeploy.

Cloud-init is used for the initial setup of docker and compose, but then the code sync happens through sending the app tarball from GitHub to the server and refreshing the compose.

We thought about mono-node k8s, but found that removing one abstraction layer would be better for now.

Thanks for your comment!

<comment><USER5> Interesting and nice design on the hot deploy, lots of potential there. Congrats on shipping!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's also not limited to GitHub in any way and could be used straight from your dev machine or from other CI tools such as GitLab CI, Circle, Jenkins, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks good guys, it's definitely a tricky problem to solve well. I've written a similar open source version of this which you can find here:

[https://gitlab.com/Rodeoclash/StageHand](https://gitlab.com/Rodeoclash/StageHand)

I went with a similar idea of using Docker Compose to configure the app although with an extra layer on top of that to be able to expose multiple services. I wanted both the application itself and the ability to say, view the database using PGWeb while I interacted with it. You can see this in the screenshots in the link and I think this is quite a powerful feature as it allows you (in our case) to catch outgoing emails for example.

I never really got around to writing good documentation for standing up the service as it's quite complicated, but if anyone is interested I could help you through it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, review apps are a hot topic it seems ;)

Many companies have come with their own version of the concept, which in our experience doesn't stand well the test of time (because the person that wrote the glue code left the company or docs are lacking or setup is very complex, etc). Hence PullPreview, so that companies can delegate the burden of maintaining that workflow to us, while retaining full control over their code and servers.

Our version is also Open Source (but not free except for non profits) and it doesn't limit in any way the number of ports you can expose . By default and for ease of use ports 22, 80 and 1000-10000 are allowed in the firewall, but you can reduce that to the bare minimum with just a single config option. See [https://github.com/pullpreview/action/wiki/Inputs](https://github.com/pullpreview/action/wiki/Inputs) For more details.

<comment><USER6> Awesome!

It's always interesting to see how others solve the curly edge cases too. I struggled with figuring out when to shut down a preview (hence why it deploys in an iFrame, I track presence using websockets and shut the preview down after the user is done)

Deploying on Lightsail is good too. I went with K8s and always had the intention of using some kind of VM level isolation, but (kind of) physically separate servers like Lightsail works well too.

Why thing I couldn't really figure out, how do you go with large docker images? The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around to figuring out how to do a good cache for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The bulk of my spin up time is spent pulling the image. I never got around > to figuring out how to do a good cache for it.

With our approach you keep the same instance for the duration of a PR or branch, so you mostly incur the docker tax On the first deploy. Afterwards it will reuse the local cache.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER6> Yep, I suppose at $5 per month or whatever the cost of the instances, that's not actually a bad price. My assumption was to spread the cost of running the previews across a fleet, but like you said, you pay the docker tax :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I developed something like this for my frontend team at a previous company as well. Much needed and I'm surprised not already mainstream. Love the focus on privacy/security.

What's the difference from [https://featurepeek.com/](https://featurepeek.com/)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about FeaturePeek, thanks for mentioning. It looks very similar indeed. From a quick look I would say the main differences are that it doesn't run on servers you control, and is limited to frontend code only?

Also it's pretty expensive with their per-seat pricing ;)

<comment><USER8> FeaturePeek cofounder here! Glad to see others in this space :-) Yes, our use case is mostly geared towards frontends devs getting design and product feedback from their team.

Right now we only spin up frontends (both pure static and Docker-based architectures, which you can of course point to backend services you host), and run in the public cloud (so not tied to your existing infra). By default, environments are private, so only the people you whitelist can access them.

On top of that, we overlay tools that let you comment w/ screenshots and screen recordings, and file tickets on third-party integrations.

We also have other neat usability wins, like each repo getting its own subdomain (rather than each pull request) so that you don't have to re-login to your app for each environment that spins up.

<comment><USER9> I do find this quite expensive, and per-seat pricing is a turn off - but the overlay tools are pretty slick!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hacker News is a funny thing. I see you made the same submission way earlier, and almost no reception. Now, it is exploding! Congratulations on that!

I am not going to hide that I am totally jealous, being a competitor to you (just in the managed and hosted space, instead of the on prem solution you offer), and launching my version of the same service as yours, Pull Dog ([https://dogger.io](https://dogger.io)) just a few days prior to this, with almost no reaction like your first submission.

That being said, I still can't help but think your project is exciting and share your excitement for this. I'll definitely be following the development as you evolve!

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting tool. Github actions is definitely a thing and will probably play a major role in CI / CD in the future.

It took me a bit of time to understand it from the homepage though. That would be awesome to have just a simple directory to clone to test it.

Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, thanks for the kind words, and yes I think GitHub Actions have the potential to replace a large part of the current GitHub SaaS ecosystem.

There are a few demos listed in the Features section. The simplest one being a wordpress repo which shows the absolute minimal configuration required in terms of files (1 docker-compose, and 1 workflow file): [https://github.com/pullpreview/demo- wordpress](https://github.com/pullpreview/demo-wordpress)

You can clone that repo and fill in your AWS credentials in the Secrets section of the GitHub repository settings, and then you'll get a live environment running (like in [https://github.com/pullpreview/demo- wordpress/deployments](https://github.com/pullpreview/demo- wordpress/deployments))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see a version of this for GCP an other cloud platforms (DO, Heroku, especially), would you be open to a collaboration there assuming I can code in your lingua franca?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, we thought about other providers as well, can you send me an email to discuss (should be in my profile)? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh it's nice to see how well you've pivoted from PullReview! It's a great idea and I'll be trying it out shortly.. As a side note, @crohr was one of our first beta tester and paying customer of jidoteki.com (now on-premises.com), sadly their PullReview service didn't do as well as planned, but PullPreview seems to be a home run. I'm happy to see them building this service and look forward to watching the development.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Alex,

I think you're confusing me with the original creators of PullReview. My other venture is packager.io, which you might remember as well. Congrats to you for the continued development of your on premise packaging solution!

<comment><USER13> Ohhh Cyril haha you're right! Yes of course I remember packager.io. Sorry about that!! In any case, I still find this very interesting and will definitely check it out. Thanks for the heads-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not familiar enough with the gaps between Github Actions and Docker compose to understand fully what this is doing.

I recall when I deployed my first docker-compose app it took less than 5 minutes (create droplet, login, git clone, copy in my secrets, docker-compose up)

I left that droplet running ($20/month) but if I wanted to tear it down regularly then it's a short script to do so.

Now - I'm pretty green on all this stuff and it was brain-dead simple even for me. What's the gap I'm missing that you're trying to fill?

<comment><AUTHOR> It may be simple for you to do, but you just described having to provision a server, manually checkout your code using SSH agent forwarding or HTTPS auth, setup your environment variables, and then launch the app. And manually repeat the last steps as many times as you push to your branch.

At this point you're the only one to know about your preview server, and you need to not forget to destroy it when you're done.

PullPreview handles all of the synchronisation mechanism, as well as providing pretty URLs, automated SSH access to any GutHub users, source IP filtering, port firewalling, HTTPS support etc.

Plus the whole integration into GitHub so that you don't need to retrieve the preview URL by yourself, and you get notified if anything goes wrong during the deploy, with full logs available.

That's the gap we're trying to fill :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there anything like that, but for Kubernetes instead of docker-compose?

</comment><comment><USER16> Any plan to integrate with Gitlab Ci? Can't wait.</comment>


Squash to monetise players' physiological data to attract more eyeballs - <AUTHOR> https://indianexpress.com/article/sports/sport-others/squash-monetise-players-physiological-data-to-attract-more-eyeballs-6585778/ <comment><USER2> I used to wear a fitbit when playing squash but after a while heart rate data says the same boring stuff and doesnt help much.

Unsure if the tech is there but id be more interested if they tracked the players movements in detail using some form of motion capture. Squash is confined in a small room so its probably easier to do this than other sports. Have a fully digitised replay available for each game.

Then we could start analysing the data to show to amateurs how they should have moved and reacted within their own games compared to how the top players have reacted in similar situations.

<comment><USER3> This is a neat idea. PSA currently shows a movement heat map over the course of each game but it isn't interesting either - they are all just very similar looking blobs.

I would love to see slow-motion breakdowns, but that might only be interesting to fans who play seriously. Then again, maybe that's most fans since it is a more obscure sport?

I'm just glad they finally figured out that dark blue courts and a white ball is the only combination that gives people a hope of seeing the ball on TV. High def viewing helps too, of course, but the old color schemes used before 8-10 years ago made it impossible to see the ball.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the blue/white combo has indeed revolutionized the TV viewing experience. We need more characters in the commentary box too though. Joey Barrington is good at what he does, but others are "Meh" so far.

A spot in the summer olympics would go a long way to improve everything, of course.

<comment><USER3> What is the deal with the commentators emphasizing when the players "fist pump" and pronouncing it strangely? Such a silly gimmick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an avid fan, I would be more interested in a)- how modern squash players train b)- if they can give me feedback on my game via video.

I once trained with a former World 80, he was a nephew of a former world- champion. His coaching and feedback on the game was 100 times better/different than the club's coach. Training with him for 15 days, I think, had 10x times more ROI than training with club coach.

These professional players / coaches are miles ahead. His feedback on my game, racket skill, movement, and even on warm-up was so different. I had never warmed-up like that before and his prescribed exercises was so different and effective.

<comment><USER6> Imagine the marketable aspect of this "openess". You watch a football (aka soccer) game, the score is 1-1, the game is in its first 20mins (70 left to play) and you see that team A has an average heartrate of 100, and team B has an average heartrate of 130. You can then place your (live) bet accordingly having this stress/fatigue/stamina factor (or whatever other metrics may be available).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean this with the utmost respect, but why is squash so damn popular with wealthy middle aged tech dudes?

<comment><USER8> The other replies make some good points about why people like squash, but here's more:

1) You only need one other person to get a high-intensity workout. This is much easier than reliably mustering 22 men for a soccer game, or 10 for basketball.

2) It's a medium-impact, mostly-non-contact sport that doesn't involve jumping, but does involve a lot of lunging motions. This means it causes waaaaay fewer injuries than e.g. basketball (esp. serious knee injuries), and also promotes flexibility in the hips and knees. That flexibility turns out to be important for general well-being and mobility as you get older.

3) You don't need a lot of gear, just the gym shoes and gym clothes you already have, plus a racquet and a 2 dollar ball. You can get a 20 dollar racquet or a 800 dollar racquet, depending on if you're a cheapskate or a gear nerd, or anything in between.

4) You can play it indoors, with or without the cooperation of the weather.

<comment><USER5> I have played squash and my wife is an orthopaedic surgeon. Per her, and from my experience, I can say that any serious squash is not easy on the joints (knees, ankles, thighs, hamstring, etc). I have done swimming, field-hockey, cricket and table-tennis (though not as a pro) and I can say this with a lot of confidence that Squash was the most intense even its in amateur/basic form.

But if you're in it for fun e.g. play it 3 times a week for like 20 mins then maybe yes, but definitely check this with your doctor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With the Tour de France on at the moment, you have to wonder if live tracking and publishing cyclists physiological data could help with detection of doping, which has been endemic in the sport throughout the years.

<comment><USER10> But how? Investigating riders putting up higher watts than usual?

The already implemented biological passport makes more sense to me.</comment></comment>


A brief history of flat design - <AUTHOR> http://techsamurais.com/?p=1232

<comment><USER2> Didn't really know flat UI was also Swiss design. I also like the colors used for flat UI. They are soft and not harsh on the eyes. For the aesthetically challenged like me, here is a link to a flat UI color pallet [http://flatuicolors.com](http://flatuicolors.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Flat design is the digital adaptation of Swiss style design.</comment></comment>


Juju (black magic) in the age of social media - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2016/10/07/juju-in-the-age-of-social-media/ <comment><USER2> The average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is 80.

Studies critical of the 80 IQ findings have found the average my be closer to 70, maybe as low as the mid sixties.

[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2009.09.009](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2009.09.009)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find a job? - <AUTHOR>

Thought you lot may have an answer for this
In short I've been living in the SF bay area for 3 years with a 7 years total of software development experience (last 4 years mobile stuff mainly Android) and just struggling to get a job.
Yes I'm a bit fussy, I'm looking for a senior role with a decent commute from where I live, which still leaves me with heaps of opportunities.
So you can come up with the assumption that I'm useless (don't know you may be on the ball with this one), but my last interview experience kind of proved to me that that's not the case. In essence the company changed the description after making the decision not hire me (The message to the recruiter was we didn't employ him for a given reason here is the new job description)
Any tips, or personal experience will be appreciated! <comment><USER2> I have noticed a disconnect between the reality of getting hired and the articles in the "career" section of the newspaper about how hard it is to hire programmers. It's tougher to get a job than they make it sound.

Are you focusing very heavily on android development? If so, you might be more successful if you expanded to web development, which of course has more competition but also has a lot more potential employers as well.

I'm also not sure how your interviews are going - one thing I've learned is that you should _always_ pull out the data structures book and review the crap out of it before you interview. I've lost out on jobs almost certainly because I was rusty on this.

Not sure what else to say without more info about your specific situation... good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Conversely, why is it so hard to find good developers, people who really know something? For example, here's what we are looking for at Maxeler (<http://www.maxeler.com>):

       Software Engineers: HPC Application Acceleration, Palo Alto, California

       Application acceleration engineers work with client applications
       to deliver order of magnitude speedups. You'll be involved
       in every stage of accelerating applications, from analyzing
        multi-million line code bases through developing new algorithms,
        to implementing complete solutions running on FPGA, GPU, or
        other technologies. We are in the early stages of growing and
        building up the Palo Alto office, so you'll be part of a very
       small team working in a start-up-like environment.

       You will need a degree or equivalent professional qualification
       in Computer Science or a related discipline as well
       as experience in some of the following:

        * » High performance software development in C/C++ or FORTRAN.
        * » Program analysis and transformation
        * » Compiler design and implementation
        * » Computer architecture / digital circuit design.
        * » Working with scientific software code in HPC application
            domains such as computational finance, seismic processing,
            life sciences or fluid dynamics.

We've looked at a many resumes (sadly, resume writing is frequently creative writing) and interviewed many candidates without finding many people who even come close to our standards.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, that is a VERY specific skill-set. I'm sure you know that, but I'd bet that most of the people with that skill-set are already employed somewhere (someplace like Intel would be my best guess) using it and not as amenable to moving on as, say, Johnny Rails-Developer would be.

It sounds like a very interesting and challenging gig, though. Out of curiosity, what's the salary for something like this?

<comment><USER3> Did you notice that the skills/experience bullet list said "some". We are interested in abilities, insight, and basic knowledge. As part of the candidate evaluation process we test candidates on their performance with a substantial design and implementation project, one that we believe should be fairly simple for someone with good programming skills and a good knowledge of algorithms and design. Most fail, and most of the rest perform badly. Even at the coder level, we see people who are unable to translate written descriptions into code. It is really depressing.

Maxeler is an interesting and challenging gig. Maxeler takes clients "known to work" code running on a cluster of machines (typically several thousand) and accelerates it by as much as a factor of 250X using a combination of hardware and software. Salaries depend upon skills and performance and are competitive with those elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm quite surprised by this. I live in the Seattle area, and there are more dev jobs than developers... everyone company/team I know that looks for a developer has a problem doing so... positions sit unfilled for months.

I should emphasize, there are definitely a lot of developers here, but the amount of _good_ developers is less than the amount of jobs looking for them. I have three times in the past two years been the primary resource (interviewer/researcher) for finding new developers, and each time I find 90-100% of the devs I interviewed were just trash. I lucked out one of those three times and found an outstanding one, but the other two times I had to settle on a less than ideal one.

I'd also say that networking plays a huge part... join groups with similar programming interests (such as .Net user group or Alt.Net), post on Facebook that you're seeking a gig, etc... that will you help you get through the pile of devs that are simply developing for the money, not for the love of development.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by trash? Could you give an example?

<comment><USER5> Trash like, they could recite some programming knowledge from books/classes, but once you asked them to start thinking on their own, they fell apart. For example, asking them to model a simple, scenario, such as orders, line items, customers, etc.... (but one in the domain I was hiring for). They had no clue how model it in a way that would work. Or, asking them to work through a problem, logically trying to solve something, or going through the steps they would use to solve a problem.

Sometimes if they made it far enough, I'd sit with them at a computer and ask them to do something fairly simple, but something they most likely hadn't done before, so they need to figure out how to... then watch how the interact with the IDE, how they figure out how to do something (they can use the internet, any tools, ask me, etc). And most of the time, they just fall flat on their face.

<comment><USER7> I've been a programmer for 15+ years and I'm very very good in the capabilities you say you're looking for.

I am also very business-minded having run my own outsource programming service overseas for the better part of a decade until I moved back to the USA 20 months ago.

Unfortunately I have learned that most companies in the USA these days are not willing to allow me to use the language in which I have developed and practiced my expertise for the past 15 years, regardless of how much faster I can produce for them in this language.

Instead most companies seen to hold out for programmers who know today's "popular" languages. So they lose out on my extensive background and experience, and I lose out on an opportunity to bring one of these companies the kind of service and performance they complain about not being able to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't live in SF so this may be a bit ignorant, but it's possible the market is simply saturated out there. You may see heaps of opportunities, but you may not be seeing a horde of people who are actually looking at the same heaps of opportunities and are better positioned for them or simply luckier than you are. 4 years of mobile development seems to plant you pretty strongly in the mobile realm, as you would have gotten on board back when OpenMoko was still relevant. Are you looking to switch away from that? That might be rough in a saturated job market.

Are you currently unemployed? That can also send a pretty rough message and make it harder to get a job than it would be otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.

I'm currently contracting, I'm not sure that saturation is the problem, it was like this a few months ago but now things look different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The company that I'm working for (a great, quickly expanding startup) is looking for mobile devs, if you're interested shoot me an email and I can provide further details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure I'll be more than happy to hear about new opportunities, unfortunately you haven't posted an email in your profile.</comment></comment>


Closed-loop body weight control - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ifac-control.org/2016/12/05/closed-loop-weight-control-the-power-of-feedback/ <comment><USER2> I find this interesting as for long decades I gained weight (~1kg/year), topping at a BMI of 34.

Then I had some health problems and decided to weight myself everyday in exactly the same conditions, which is not easy to achieve over a long period of time. At the same time I refused any of the small social transactions like shared cookies, etc. I also wrote my daily weight in an Excel file.

Since 1.5 years I lost 1.5kg each month, then weight stabilized at a BMI of 31 (still obese).

Loosing so much weight (25kg) is frightening, is it a cancer? My wife and myself joked about the power of the Excel file. When I read this article I made a correlation between the proposed approach and mine.

However in the article the duration was only one month, often people gain more weight afterward than they lost (I learnt it the hard way several times), and in only one month the social cost is bearable, try to do that for years, your friends and family will slowly learn to hate you, even if doing that means your health is improving.

(edited for typos and clarity)

<comment><USER3> > decided to weight myself everyday in exactly the same conditions

Water weight fluctuates too much day-to-day anyway. It's probably better to consider a moving average of the last n readings than to bother to control for conditions.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that what people usually says, but the article says exactly the contrary.

Anyway I don't see why it makes more sense to make readings everyday and make an average on the last n, then use this average to make a continuous set of decisions. What you are probably thinking, is about making _one_ decision, like "do I have to diet or not?". It is also the case if someone is only slightly interested in her/his weight, for me I weight in exactly the same conditions everyday. I told it in the previous post, it's a bit hugly on the social side, it has to be an obsession to make it work.

My main question everyday is: How my weight relate to last day meals, and there is a very close correlation, that why it is so useful to weight often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can somebody explain this to me like you'd explain it to your grandmother?

<comment><USER5> We want to control our body weight (system output) by altering how much we eat (system input), based on measurements of our weight, so that it follows a particular trajectory. We could simply try to calculate how much we should eat ahead of time based on this trajectory and our initial weight, and then follow this schedule without updating it based on any subsequent measurements ("open loop control"). However, this would require a very good mathematical model that can accurately predict future weight based on current weight and food intake. If we instead choose how much to eat based on continuous measurements of our weight (using feedback to achieve "closed loop control"), we can get away with using a much worse model; this is one of the key advantages of feedback.

The proposed control algorithm is simple: when eating a meal, eat a total weight of food and drink (F(t)) that is the weight you would like to be at the end of the meal (r(t+T)), minus your weight at the start of the meal (w(t)). This rule ignores metabolism, so you will fall below your target weight by the next meal, but you will eat accordingly more then.

Obviously, as the article notes, this requires that "the reference r(⋅) has to be chosen larger than w(⋅) at all times". You can see this in Figure 1: the measured mass starts below the reference, then increases up to the reference, then falls below it, then increases up to it at the end of each meal.

<comment><USER6> You are awesome for taking the time to explain. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can anyone explain what this js program does? - <AUTHOR> I received this spam e-mail today which had a .js file attached.
What exactly does it target?
source https://gist.github.com/dazhbog/7bb55d709e007f206271 <comment><USER2> Seems to download and install unidentified software (presumably malware) from a couple of sites. Looks like it targets MS-Windows specifically. I strongly suggest not executing it.</comment>


USPTO: Inventorship limited to natural persons & does not include AIs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/16524350_22apr2020.pdf <comment><USER2> News article [1] from today about this, contains quotes from the person concerned. For instance, humans are "stuck in an age-old paradigm rut in which only wet computers – ie: brains – count. What happens when a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization visits Earth?".

[1] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/29/ai_patent_denied/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/29/ai_patent_denied/)</comment>


Shortwave trading - <AUTHOR> https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-trading-part-ii-faq-and-other-chicago-area-sites/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for noticing this post. It covers many of the questions that arose in the comments on my Part I post. It also details two more shortwave trading sites around Chicago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part I discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028892)</comment>


Staying focused: it's not just your environment - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/03/stay-focused/ <comment><USER2> "Judge each part of your work based on your motivations." Nicely said. Puts into words a phenomenon I've experienced in the past: the more motivated I am, the more pragmatic my decision making becomes ("pragmatic" being measured against the goals I'm motivated toward achieving).</comment>


90% of software developers work outside Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/729293/90-of-software-developers-work-outside-silicon-valley/?imm_mid=0e5d09&cmp=em-prog-na-na-newsltr_20160716 <comment><USER2> >90% of the world lives outside the United States

<comment><USER3> I agree the submission could use a title change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gotta be true. I imagine quite a few of them work in China, not to mention India.</comment>


Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB <comment><USER2> "The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else..."

It's striking how dumb this fine sounding claim becomes when you actually get specific. What "systemic damage" is being done by Larry & Sergey having become so much richer than they used to be, or more recently, Mark Zuckerberg doing the same? None at all that I can see.

<comment><USER3> PG,

The cases you cite -- tech entrepreneurs whose startups generate vast wealth -- aren't really that relevant to Rich's argument.

While I guess they do make up a portion of this class of superrich (without any research, my hunch is a small portion), the larger problem Rich describes is that society just isn't rewarding people the way it used to, and that there's been a deliberate rigging of the system for the past 30 years that is allocating capital in the hands of a very select few. Pretending like those few are all Zucks and Sergeys is a deliberate misreading and has nothing to do with this problem.

I think your reaction to this, judging from your writing, comes from the fact that you are very much surrounded in a culture of startups and tech innovation, where money is made by creating new things and expanding the pie, not reallocating its slices. That's great, but isn't a reason to deny some obvious -- and depressing -- realities about what's happening to America's social and economic fabric.

The tech startup scene may be a bright light in this pretty dark trend, but is not a reason to deny the trend exists.

Lastly, this is bad for startups. The allocation of capital based on merit is the linchpin of an innovative and growing economy, and the lifeblood of what you do day in, day out. You really should be on the other side of this argument.

<comment><USER2> _(without any research, my hunch is a small portion)_

It wouldn't have taken long to test that hunch.

<http://www.forbes.com/wealth/forbes-400/list>

The superrich basically consist of company founders, their kids, and hedge fund managers. So unless your dark conspiracy = hedge funds (in which case why not just say so?), there's no evidence of it.

<comment><USER3> Come on. I think you very well know that the superrich class being discussed is more than just the Forbes 400. It's about the top 1% or 5%. There's a whole lot of room beneath these 400 people that take up space in this class of superrich that has grown in the past 30 years at the expense of everyone else. The Forbes list just validates that the way to make the absolute most money is to start a company. And that's great. But again, irrelevant.

Here's some quick research you could've done to test YOUR hunch:

"These numbers actually understate the wealth of America's top 1 percenters. Each Fed Survey of Consumer Finances, as Kennickell notes, specifically excludes from the survey sample any of the people wealthy enough to make the most recent Forbes 400 list of America's richest. In 2007, the Forbes 400 held a collective net worth of $1.5 trillion.

But in 2007, even without the fortunes of the Forbes 400, the top 1 percent still held a whopping 33.8 percent of America's total family wealth. Families in the bottom 90, all together, only held 28.5 percent."

[http://www.alternet.org/story/137540/solving_the_mystery_of_...](http://www.alternet.org/story/137540/solving_the_mystery_of_the_richest_americans%27_missing_wealth/?page=entire)

As for any dark conspiracy, I'll say it again -- just because it isn't a part of your reality doesn't mean it isn't real.

<comment><USER2> The Forbes 400 list isn't just company founders. It's founders, inheritors, and speculators. Do you have any reason for believing the mix of wealth sources changes as you go further down the list? In fact, do you have any specific rich person or type of rich person in mind that would be an example of the conspiracy?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I do. I think it's pretty logical to assume that you would begin to see many more money managers and executives as you go down the list. But I don't really see what that's getting at.

The point is that the same people doing the same things are getting much more than they used, and it's a direct result of actual policy changes. I'm not sure why identifying these people as individuals and professions is all that relevant. But do I think that tech entrepreneurs are a minority in those few million people? Yes. Call me crazy.

I think the real question is: Do you have reason to believe that the pretty well-documented overhaul of tax, monetary, and regulatory policy that has taken place in this country over the last few decades didn't actually happen?

If so, that's a conspiracy I'd love to hear about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making $500K per year at Bank of America and earning $20K a year with your side s-corp does not make you a small business owner that can help unemployment with a Bush tax cut.

<comment><USER5> The existence of an employee depends on the existence of an employer and a customer. Both are needed. When you tax customers, you hurt jobs just as effectively as when you tax employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why should income inequality matter if the life standards of everyone rises?. As a guy who grew up in socialized India and saw the effects of this kinda of rhetoric i am worried about the future of America!

<comment><USER7> Excellent point. In my opinion this sort of rhetoric is a substitute for addressing the real issue which is the value actually being provided by government services.

If you tell a poor person "We spent your social security on the war and now we're going to lower the amount you receive" that's asking to be voted out of office. If you tell them "The greedy rich person got a tax cut and that's why your social security is gone. Let us fight them" that gets a lot of people upset and helps politicians win elections.

<comment><USER8> "If you tell a poor person "We spent your social security on the war and now we're going to lower the amount you receive" that's asking to be voted out of office. If you tell them "The greedy rich person got a tax cut and that's why your social security is gone. Let us fight them" that gets a lot of people upset and helps politicians win elections."

It's funny how, in both scenarios, it would seem the poor person would likely vote democratic, yet Republicans still win 6 out of 10 times. Perhaps, it's because the republican in scenario #1 just issues IOUs to the SS trust while still waging the wars, but spins it by saying "war is manly and we're awesome so debts (and deficits) don't apply to us", then when the house of cards fall, and the democrats scratch out a victory in the next election cycle due to voter frustration, the republicans whip up the frustration and then pivot it by saying "see? we told you the liberals would destroy us. debts are TERRIBLE! give us another chance!"

It's the virtuous circle of modern politics, which is why I don't even bother with it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So presumably the Republicans would vote down an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98%. We don't know because they won't put it to a vote.

Could the Democrats then put to a vote an extension for the bottom 99%? Then 99.5%, 99.9% and so on? Eventually they would have to reach some threshold where the Republicans would have to compromise right?

Is it a practical matter of time, a matter of the lost tax revenue or just the risk of alienating rich donors that prevents this?

</comment><comment><USER10> Is anyone else unable to get over the writers name?</comment>