How Genius annotations undermined web security - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11505454/news-genius-annotate-the-web-content-security-policy-vulnerability <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of how in the original vision of hypertext, links would be a layer over the content rather than baked into it.

So a product like web annotator would just be natural, rather than something requiring a whole new intermediary and hacks to work.</comment>


The northern-hemisphere winter of 2019-20 was the warmest ever on land - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/28/the-northern-hemisphere-winter-of-2019-20-was-the-warmest-ever-on-land <comment><USER3> In case somebody is wondering about the significance of a temperature record

[https://books.google.com/books?id=N0FLSOmeFPsC&pg=PT59](https://books.google.com/books?id=N0FLSOmeFPsC&pg=PT59)

Bottom line: records are extremely rare if events occur at random. If new records become far more common than the harmonic series predicts, then this is telling us that annual climatic events are no longer independent annual events but are beginning to form part of a systematic non-random trend.

<comment><USER4> So after a few data points, we're already declaring that a huge stochastic system has now suddenly turned deterministic? smh

<comment><USER5> We have more than "a few" datapoints at this time. Also, I don't think determinism is relevant to climate change. I.e. whether reality is deterministic is not what's at issue, it's whether the earth is heating up and whether human activity is a primary causal factor (yes, in both cases). There's also no conflict between determinism and systems too large to model precisely -- stochastic systems, in other words.

<comment><USER4> "We have more than "a few" datapoints at this time"

We do? Have we determined the duration where we can declare the climate process stationary (in a stochastic sense, of course)?

<comment><USER6> What on earth does that mean?

<comment><USER7> [http://wondermark.com/1k62/](http://wondermark.com/1k62/)

I'm a big fan of the Socratic approach but when people use it as a cudgel they're usually less interested in the answer than in positioning themselves as the questioning authority for the emotional impact upon an audience. Watch a B movie with the sound off or a foreign language film with no subtitles; you may not be able to follow the plot that well but you can easily tell who is supposed to be winning or losing each scene by observing the characters' demeanor. Same dynamic often obtains in internet arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This doesn't surprise me at all. In the Netherlands, we barely had any nights where the temperature was sub-zero (Celcius). We actually had several mosquitoes in our living room when we left the door open. It is just like the sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where fall directly skipped winter and directly went to spring.

Given we had very much trouble with the oak processionary[1] last year, causing itching and even being dangerous to one's eyes, I fear what will happen this year. Will it be dangerous to let our children play outside?

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

</comment><comment><USER9> What winter? We had a sproll, a combination of spring and fall and folks, at this pace our kids will not believe us we used to have feet of snow by Christmas.

<comment><USER10> I bought my kids sleds three years ago after a big snow storm. There hasn't been enough snow to use them again since. When I was a kid (same part of the country) we'd get weeks of sledding every winter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The monthly records continue, too. From NOAA:

> February 2020 marked the 44th consecutive February and the 422nd consecutive > month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.

[https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global- climate-202002](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202002)

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope we are not on an exponential curve with this too. Covid reminded us how exponential are surprising.

<comment><USER13> It's not a linear trend, but probably not exponential (polynomial?) Still all the large and scary effects are at the end when everyone alive today is dead. Our descendants will have plenty of reason to curse our lack of foresight and stealing from future generations.

However, stating an unpopular but still possibly true opinion: If our human caused global warming disrupts the repeated glaciation cycles known as ice ages, maybe tens of thousands of years from now people will have missed a terrible natural disaster. Not much consolation to the people who live through the next couple centuries.

<comment><USER14> This idea that we are doing ourselves a favor by skipping the next ice age is bizarre. It took less than 300 years to prevent it and the next one was thousands of years ago before it would happen. Also, the large and scary effects aren't coming when everyone is dead. They will be there by the time current college graduates retire.

<comment><USER13> I did a little searching to see if there's anything to my guess that global warming could postpone the next ice age, and there's a lot of people suggesting that is in fact the case. One example: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/13/fossil-f...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/13/fossil- fuel-burning-postponing-next-ice-age)

Ice ages are actually scarier to me than global warming, so I think that's a good thing on the whole. It's just we have to deal with the negative consequences now, whereas an ice age is a much further future concern. One reason ice ages are so scary, is it would cause much larger mass migrations of people than global warming, and it would devastate our ability to grow crops in the northern hemisphere, where we currently produce most of our food.

Global warming may actually enhance our ability to grow crops in the northern latitudes - with longer growing seasons, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mirror: [http://archive.is/dO21H](http://archive.is/dO21H)

<comment><USER16> Appreciate the link. I didn't expect HN to allow articles behind paywall like reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I enjoy WFH and agree with what everyone is saying that the current situation is far from ideal for WFH. However, many people who promote WFH forget something pretty important. If you have an home office then great. But many people live in small apartments with other family members and don't have ideal conditions for WFH. The solution is having many co-working spaces so that most people have one nearby. But people should be able to have their own desk and everything.

</comment><comment><USER18> Apart from anything else this could turn out to be extremely problematic in areas where the average temperature is around 0 degrees C. Lots of melting of snow (and then refreezing as ice)....

[1] [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JD028642)

</comment><comment><USER19> Only a couple of years ago, I spent winter in Moscow (Russia) and it was the coldest winter in over a century. At one point, it was -27 degrees celcius (-16.6 Fahrenheit) outside in the middle of the city. There was a meter of snow everywhere in the city. This winter I was in Germany and it was much warmer than last year but I wouldn't jump to conclusions on that basis.

<comment><USER20> -27°C happens there once in about 10 years, and the coldest winter in a century was in 1941-42 (because of General Moroz on duty!).

This year Moscow basically didn't have a winter, in my town near Urals it was pretty similar with 2002.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ever, like ever ever? Or ever since we measured?

<comment><USER22> Probably a combination of observation records, which aren't that old, and computed valued from analysis of sources such as ice cores. Obviously this is not the highest temperature winter in the northern hemisphere over the existence of the planet but may indeed be the warmest out of those periods from which we have records, observed or imputed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This was definitely the warmest winter I remember in my lifetime. There was hardly any snow.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, if one of humanity's failures (climate change) mitigates another (lack of pandemic preparedness)

</comment><comment> ur-whale [https://archive.is/dO21H](https://archive.is/dO21H)

</comment><comment><USER25> Worst season ever to be a skier in the northeast. Rain, rain, rain, then an early close due to COVID-19

<comment><USER26> Yeah, definitely a season to forget, but TBH the conditions in Jan/Feb were surprisingly good (when it wasn't raining!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The most commonly cited risks of climate change are natural disasters: > fiercer wildfires and hurricanes, bigger floods and longer droughts. But one > of the most striking recent effects of global warming has been unusually > mild weather in many parts of the world.

maybe if it was framed first as the massive and irreversible ecosystem disruption which it is, people would take more notice. the result of this could easily be loss of essential plankton at the bottom of it all, just like loss of insects and plant pollinators due to pesticides.

it's always sea level rise this and coastal floods that. i'm fucking sick of this idiotic reductionist rhetoric. there will be far bigger problems which cannot be solved by relocating 3 miles inland.

Carlin was spot on: "The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

<comment><USER28> > _it 's always sea level rise this and coastal floods that. i'm fucking sick > of this idiotic rhetoric._

The true picture is closer to "sea level rise, coastal floods, changes of average temperature -> a chunk of the planet suddenly becoming uninhabitable -> mass migration -> lots of suffering, starvation, death, possibly war". But maybe this chain of reasoning has too many steps for a regular person to follow. Maybe the communication needs to focus on "no more food X in stores once average temperature in place Y goes above Z degrees"?

<comment><USER29> > _possibly_ war

I like your optimism!

<comment><USER28> I'm usually not that optimistic, but trying to cope with the COVID-19 situation made me significantly less cynical. It's as if my mind avoids certain patterns of thought that could disrupt my fragile emotional stability at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years) says the warm winter in Virginia had to do with the "north atlantic oscillation" [NAO]:

> So why is it that we seem to be in a snow hole?

> Part of it has to do with something called the North Atlantic Oscillation. > This combines the effect of two features in the atmosphere; the Icelandic > Low and the Azores High. - [https://www.wsls.com/weather/2020/02/12/baghdad- > sees-rare-sn...](https://www.wsls.com/weather/2020/02/12/baghdad-sees-rare- > snow-our-winter-remains-wimpy/)

Having just used the "disable javascript to read the article" trick, I noticed this Economist article correctly points out the NAO's influence in keeping cold air locked up in the Arctic, but doesn't mention the snow in Baghdad nor the blizzards in Turkey [0] nor the record colds elsewhere (certain places in Canada, eastern Russia, etc)

Wikipedia has this page on the North Atlantic Oscillation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation)

[0] [https://www.ntvhouston.com/2020/02/blizzard-buries- turkish-v...](https://www.ntvhouston.com/2020/02/blizzard-buries-turkish- village-under-20-feet-of-snow/)

I read reports of potato farmers in Idaho having to deal with an early frost last fall, and racing to harvest the potatoes before they were ruined by an early cold snap. I don't know how much of their crops were lost. I've also noticed reports of a sugar shortage.

Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

"A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which a statement falsely claims an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically valid option." \-- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma)

The false dilemma presented in this article is that of "global warming" vs. "the old climate status quo". The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle. I read a great article about one of the solar telescopes having measured slight changes in the sun's output over the last 20+ years... The data is out there, scientists just have to consider the full spectrum of climate possibilities.

[Edit] I thought the article was about the SOHO satellite, but maybe it was about instruments on the International Space Station. These pages mention European solar observatories on the space station:

> The Sun does not always shine with unchanging power: its output varies > minutely over the period of about 11 years known as the 'solar cycle'. In > principle, these fluctuations can affect us on Earth.

\- [http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...](http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Research/SOLAR_three_years_observing_and_ready_for_solar_maximum)

> This is where the Solspec instrument comes in. Part of the Solar package on > the International Space Station, it was launched with the European Columbus > space laboratory in 2008 and tracked the Sun until it was shut down this > year [2017]. It measured the energy of each wavelength in absolute terms and > its variability – a feat that requires a higher order of precision than > relative measurements. As an analogy, it is easy to feel a change in > temperature, but nobody on Earth can sense the exact temperature without a > thermometer.

\- [http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exp...](http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Columbus/State- of-the-art_solar_reference_spectrum)

<comment><USER31> >Most of the cold air was locked up over the Artic this past winter, whereas normally it is carried south by the jet streams. Some areas of the planet did have record cold in February. An article about February's snow in Baghdad, Iraq (the second snowfall in the last 100 years)

The "second" snowfall would mean it wasn't a record. The data showing this winter was the warmest on record _as a global average_ (not just Virginia) takes these outliers into account. Nothing about those events calls the general warming trend into question.

>Humans need to work on being climate-flexible, not being "all in" on global warming.

No, humans need to accept reality. Carbon dioxide emitted by human activity is warming the planet and that could destabilize parts of the environment that humans rely on.

>The third logically valid option is that climate is now cooling due to the solar cycle.

This is a joke, right? You said it yourself: the period of the solar cycle is 11 years. It cannot explain a phenomenon that has been observed over more than a century.

<comment><USER30> The bit in my comment about the period of the solar cycle being 11 years was a quote. The sun also oscillates in intensity over hundreds and thousands of years. The sun was (allegedly) slightly less active the Europe's colonial age, which motivated a lot of people to leave Europe. The sun was slightly more active during most of the 20th century, leading to the observations behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Some scientists, who aren't wedded to the anthropogenic theory, have looked at all the solar numbers and concluded we're due for a couple decades of weak solar cycles (global cooling) before the warming resumes.

I don't know who to believe, I just wanted to point out that there might be a reason behind this alleged "warmest winter ever" other than "it's the CO2". I'm not particularly interested in debating with someone with convictions of hot-earth environmental catastrophe being more reasonable than cold-earth environmental catastrophe, so feel free to have the last word.

<comment><USER31> >I don't know who to believe.

You should believe the IPCC.

>Some scientists

How many physicists do you know? For me it's about 30. You know how many of them accept the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change and it's a problem? All of them.

>I'm not particularly interested in debating someone with convictions

I don't have "convictions". What I have is a degree in physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I hope the Covid self quarantining demonstrates that WFH works. We can do more WFH and cut down on traffic, time lost in traffic and our carbon footprint. We also might spread less of the flu around too.

<comment><USER33> All I'm hearing from friends is that WFH is way worse than it was hyped up to be and that it's so much worse not being able to work with your coworkers in person and to have separation of your home and work for mental health. Everyone is different and WFH is not a panacea.

<comment><USER34> I'm surprised it needs to be said, but WFH during a pandemic is not equivalent to WFH during normal life.

<comment><USER35> Well, in my case WFH during the pandemic has been far better than otherwise because now everyone is on an equal footing. Everyone is WFH so I'm not missing random side conversations or getting ignored altogether.

And it's still pretty terrible.

There are advantages, but at least for me my productivity is miles higher in an office environment.

<comment><USER28> Pandemic WFH is a total disaster. As much as it becomes equal footing, the floor has fallen off. WFH works when you can actually _work_ from home - <USER2> when every possible place where you could stash your kids is closed. WFH also doesn't work if forced suddenly on people who, before the pandemic, haven't given it even a single thought.

This event is going to taint WFH for years to come.

<comment><USER36> My experience has been more that it's shown itself to be highly polarising. There are also a lot of people who knew they wanted to work from home and just didn't have the option, I think this will be a lively debate in the years ahead.

From a pollution perspective though, the preferable choice is fairly obvious.

<comment><USER28> I agree, and for what it's worth, I've been working from home for almost three years now. But my productivity has tanked recently because of yet another factor: the COVID-19 situation is cognitively taxing. Initially I had to micromanage my parents, grandparents and in-laws, to ensure they're safe and have enough emergency supplies; then it took me three weeks to stop spending half of the day following COVID-19 news. From what I hear, this is a very common situation with everyone now, so whatever productivity drop happened in companies attempting WFH now, I'm betting most of it doesn't have anything to do with WFH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If we don't figure out a way to get past the anti-science types it will be the death of us all one or the other. We need to develop anti-memetic technology. Bad memes are killing us.

<comment><USER38> Speaking as someone who did physics in college:

Science, whatever that means, has become sclerotic and harmful to the public. It's held up as a paradigm of reason and hope but if anything it's full of politics and lies and has been for a long while. Let's talk evidence:

* It's looking like the last 40 years of string theory has been a boondoggle.

* Pretty clear that most of medicine is based on fraud and regulatory capture - we know that most chronic treatments and even public health advice is just plain wrong. If this is new to you, any book by Gary Taubes is a reasonable introduction.

* Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the public. If however we do believe the models (which is reasonable to do!) then things are going to be so dire that we can't tell the public or they'll freak out. Buying an electric car or not flying isn't going to do anything - we need to be massively carbon negative to have any impact at all. You should assume the absolute worst climate predictions are a reasonable picture of the future.

* The reproducability crisis. We _know_ most science journals are now full of BS.

My proposed solution is that we have the death penalty for anyone who conducts experiments that aren't triple-blind. It's the only way to get any real evidence.

So, you know, science is wonderful. But science-as-done-by-humans is a morass of sewage and it's not entirely surprising the public don't believe in it any more, there are plenty of "hard" scientists that don't either.

<comment><USER37> In places, you're conflating the very bad meme problem, to which science itself is susceptible, with science itself.

For example, the whole "fat is bad, carbs are good" meme was never backed up by solid science, it itself was a bad meme.

> Pretty clear that most of medicine is based on fraud and regulatory capture

I can't speak for you, but if I have a heart attack or cancer, I'll still go to the hospital, so it isn't as bad as you're stating.

> Even within climate science, the models aren't as clear cut as we tell the > public.

Ok, death penalty for non-triple blind is crazy. But if we're thinking of tough ideas:

* Imprisonment for corporate lobbying.

* Corporate dissolution for political donations or influence

* Corporate dissolution for attempts to "influence science"

* Corporate dissolution for PR campaigns that lied

* No corporate-funded "scientific" studies should be published

* The reproducibility crisis is a bad incentives problem in science and publishing. We need to change the incentives. The system needs to change to reward something like "points" where points come from publishing failure to reproduce as opposed to just the notoriety of "first to find some interesting result"

<comment><USER38> > For example, the whole "fat is bad, carbs are good" meme was never backed up > by solid science, it itself was a bad meme.

And yet, here we are. How were the public supposed to figure that out? Public health advice was, and is, pretty clear: eat carbs.

> I can't speak for you, but if I have a heart attack or cancer, I'll still go > to the hospital, so it isn't as bad as you're stating.

You just haven't done your research. :-)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/placebo-e...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/placebo- effect-of-the-heart/545012/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Cancer-Metabolic-Disease- Management-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Cancer-Metabolic-Disease-Management- Prevention/dp/0470584920)

<comment><USER20> I'd like to invite all the proposers for carbonate-dominant diet to live above 55°N for a few days in January while eating minimum amount of fats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's becoming apparent that the 21st century will be marked by a series of natural disasters of various severities and speeds that regularly erode global supply capacity and quality of life.

<comment><USER40> How is warm winter natural disaster? I like it like that.

<comment><USER41> Fires. Warm winters mean little snowpack. Little snowpack means that everything is dry and dead come August. All of the plant life being dry and dead in August means that any fires which occur will be much worse.

<comment><USER42> if you live in the western US. we don't really have "snowpack" to begin with in the east, though I shudder to think of what an anomalously warm east coast summer will be like.

<comment><USER43> Typically they result in vast amounts of deaths from heat waves in larger cities.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Chicago_heat_wave](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Chicago_heat_wave)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I can't read this because of the paywall. The headline is wrong, which doesn't give me a feeling that it is worth reading anyway.

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

<comment><USER45> Okay, add the phrase "in recent time" which is the relevant assumption

<comment><USER44> I'm not the one making an article with a lie as a headline. Why is everyone okay with prefacing data with deception?</comment></comment></comment>


News Researchers found Bacteria send electrical signals to communicate - <AUTHOR> http://mykotori.com/researchers-found-bacteria-send-electrical-signals-communicate/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5nw48b/researchers...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5nw48b/researchers_found_bacteria_send_electrical/)</comment>


The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc <comment><USER2> The Living Computer museum provides logins to several old pieces of hardware. I wonder how many people are going to request logins to the PDP-11 to try to build the C compiler?

<comment><USER3> You may have your very own PDP-8, PDP-11, or PDP-10 simply by running SIMH.

<comment><USER2> Emulation's useful, but it's something that I've been doing in various forms for over half of my life. There'd be a novelty to actually running something on a 40 or 50 year old piece of refurbished hardware, adapted to run as a host on the Internet.

<comment><USER3> No doubt. I had a few raised eyebrows back when my company ditched a VAX 11/730 and I took it, but it was a VAX that ran on 110 and it was my very own. Made a damn fine usenet node for the limited feed that went to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's type inference everywhere!

<comment><USER5> Or rather, undeclared types are assumed to be int. Is that what you are talking about?

<comment><USER4> The keyword "auto" means int?

<comment><USER6> It means automatic storage duration (i.e., on the stack). [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2192547/where-is-the- c-a...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2192547/where-is-the-c-auto- keyword-used)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Holy heck. 1972. The year I was born.

And that PDP-11 emulator is a blast.

        RESTRICTED RIGHTS

        Use, duplication or disclosure is subject to
        restrictions stated in Contract with Western
        Electric Company, Inc.

</comment><comment><USER8> How was this compiler bootstrapped?

<comment><USER9> By extending Ken Thompson's B compiler. The B compiler was initially written in TMG before Thompson rewrote it in B. Then Richie added types like 'char' and 'int' and called it NB ("new B"), then he added structs and C was born.

The TMG interpreter used by Thompson to create B was implemented for the PDP-7 by Doug McIlroy in PDP-7 assembly language: [http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2014-September/005149....](http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2014-September/005149.html)

This is what TMG looked like: [http://multicians.org/tmg.html](http://multicians.org/tmg.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For some reason, I was a bit suprised for the extensive use of gotos. Thanks for sharing this pearl!

<comment><USER11> This is cute:

      	switch (o=symbol()) {
        ....
      /* short constant */
      	case 21:
      	case21:
    		*cp++ = block(1,21,ctyp,0,cval);
    		goto tand;

       .... elsewhere in the switch ....

            		cval = -cval;
    				goto case21;</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tabba, a better way to manage your tabs in chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabba/chlaldlfbnejpjdeddpmmffedjedjjll <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here, if you have any questions please let me know :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Why Chrome first? This makes me sad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly because it's what I use everyday. I would imagine it would be fairly easy to port over to a FF or safari extension, though i haven't actually looked into it.</comment></comment>


The Moldbug Variations - <AUTHOR> https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein <comment><AUTHOR> Key quote:

```

Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been "coaching Thiel."

"Peter needs guidance on politics for sure," Yiannopoulos responded.

"Less than you might think!" Yarvin wrote back. "I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He's fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully."

```

It seems Thiel is very much in the pocket of the Valley's Neo-Fascist movement.

<comment><USER2> It's sad that the person who co-wrote Zero to One would fall into this orbit. It remains one of my favorite business books in spite of the fact that its co- author has gone off and hopped on the crazy train politically.

Of course many of the original Italian Futurists became Fascists too. There seems to be some tendency for unbridled futurist thinkers to fall for fascism and similar ideologies.

Some futurists also go for left-leaning forms of totalitarianism too. I know several really smart authoritarian Marxists.

I see it as a pathology of futurists who have gotten themselves too far from the coal face; of futurists who are not actually Doing The Work (or aren't anymore). There's a temptation to think that politics is the thing holding us back from progress and that progress can be accelerated politically. If we could just get rid of all that slow painful democratic consensus and replace it with some kind of dictatorship of know-it-all smart people all that magic futurist technology would just materialize out of thin air.

There's also this tendency to think regulation is holding us back. That _can_ happen, but it typically happens _after_ things are invented. Regulation is not preventing us from achieving immortality or true AI or free energy because we have no idea how to do those things regardless of whether or not there are laws against them.

Edit: Thiel's case is honestly more mysterious though. Here's a guy who's spent years ranting against the fact that our culture is controlled by know- nothing windbags who don't actually do anything and are hostile to progress and what does he do? He gets behind Donald Trump, a total know-nothing windbag who has absolutely no skills, abilities, or understanding beyond the ability to promote himself and manipulate people. Trump is the emptiest of empty suits. There is literally nothing there except primate dominance gestures. I have no idea what Thiel thought was going to happen, but it's not happening whatever it was.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not even so sure that it's Futurism with Thiel so much as just unbridled avarice.

If it looks like a greedy scumbag, and quacks like a greedy scumbag, well...

<comment><USER2> Read Zero to One. Assuming that is in any way representative of what he thinks, he's a Futurist.

Then again it's also possible that he's massively inconsistent and full of contradictions. Humans are not perfectly philosophically consistent robots. Contradiction is more normal than not. Peoples' beliefs often come more from emotional affinities and cultural bias than reason.

<comment><USER3> Or, you know, a utility-maximizing actor found it utility-increasing to place certain words into certain sequences in certain contexts due to the expected effect said arrangement would have upon the expected audience?

It's not terribly complicated.

<comment><USER4> I get your point and I in fact agree. I just wanted to say that that is a sentence structure that only a programmer could find beautiful :)

<comment><USER5> The sentence flows perfectly well. Not sure anyone would find it beautiful but it is certainly succinct and expressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I have a friend who's just spooky in his ability to predict the movement of culture and politics, often many years in advance. He's a genius about other matters too. He clearly possesses an off-the-charts IQ as well as a lot of varied worldly experience and background.

He also thinks the Apollo Moon landings were fake.

We've debated the subject. His reasons for thinking this are complex but they boil down not only to evidence (as he sees it) but the cultural narrative. Why did we step so far back from progress in the early 70s? Maybe it's because our greatest achievement was a ruse and everyone kind of realized it on some subconscious level. Maybe the psychological effect of that ruse was to derail us from the future. Oh, and the films of Stanley Kubrick are full of covert signals where he spills the beans about the whole thing. Just watch. It's all right there. Kubrick did the Moon landing fakes and later used the same technology to film 2001, which is in part a very "meta" allegory about the Moon hoax.

I think this is all completely and utterly nuts.

I've met Yarvin a.k.a. Moldbug. He's really brilliant. I'm sure he has an off- the-charts IQ and like many scary smart people his mind has habits of its own and often moves in mysterious and deeply creative directions. His software work transcends the realm of conventional development and into the realm of high conceptual art.

He thinks feudalism and autocracy are superior political systems, a notion about as nutty as the Moon Hoax theory. There is literally not a shred of evidence for it either contemporary or historical and it makes no rational sense. In all our many thousands of years of social experimentation there are no examples that can be cited to support the case and many that can be cited against it. If you want an easy one search for a picture of North and South Korea from space. There's your answer. Case closed.

We went to the Moon too. I've seen the pictures and heard the astronauts talk about what it was like to... uhh... walk on the Moon.

There are low superstitions only an idiot would believe. For those of greater intellect there are higher superstitions far too absurd for an idiot to grasp. It takes a genius to contort their mind like that. It takes a really profound intellect to convince themselves that the Moon landings were fake, that the Earth is flat, or that feudal autocracy is a superior system of government.

Look into the flat Earth. It's got some Mensa-grade IQ proponents. Only a genius could grasp the mathematics of the ether vortex that allows satellites to "orbit" above the plane. An idiot would conclude that they're just falling in circles around a big ball, which yields simple math an idiot could grasp but does not explain the subtile occult symbolism of US polar expeditions or why the UN won't allow us in Antarctica. It takes a really perceptive mind to notice those things and tie it all together. Here let me "red pill" you...

The right and conspiracy theorists have no monopoly here. I'd also count the postmodernist dialectical hermeneutics word salad spewed by critical studies professors in humanities departments. As near as I can tell it means nothing but maybe I'm too dense. Maybe the most profound insights into history and culture are buried in all those syllables.

I've seen enough of this to start thinking that bizarre transcendentally- irrational nonsense is one of the things holding back the evolution of human intelligence. I've wondered if our 100 average IQ might be an evolutionary local maximum surrounded by valleys on all sides. Lower IQs don't equip us with enough brains to survive, while high IQs too frequently lead to cognitive towers of babel that derail and confuse. Basically we get smarter until +/\- one standard deviation of 100 and then start getting dumb again, but in a different way. We get complex-dumb not simple-dumb. Maybe there's another local maximum up there somewhere... like if you had an IQ of 300 you'd see through the nonsense easily... but we've never reached it. Super-smart humans seem smart enough to assemble elaborate state graphs but not smart enough to prune them, and they seem prone to letting the impressiveness of these structures overwhelm the simple evidence of the senses and straightforward reason.

It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of nutty stuff in Silicon Valley. With so many high-IQ people assembled in one place they're sure to drive each other to complete and utter insanity through competitive intellectual edifice building and hyper-meta-over-analysis. I'm not sure if legal marijuana will help or make this a lot worse.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT0zjorR68A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT0zjorR68A)

Edit: my Moon hoaxer friend predicted the rise of the alt-right as far back as 2008, calling Obama-era America "Weimar America" and even going to far as to cite geek culture as ground zero for its emergence. He predicted a new, hip fascist movement that would ascend with a mixture of futurism, conservatism, and quasi-occultism (Kek! Kek! Kek!) and that it would come from the Internet. He predicted all this eight years ago. Today he predicts a two-term Trump and a world war. Let's hope he's wrong.

Edit #2: You can also see the tower of babel effect in the design of software, where us geniuses can add complexity forever but can never prune it.

<comment><USER6> Consider that the issue here may not what you're trying to measure (intelligence), but the metric you're using to measure it (IQ).

Frirst, IQ does not measure gross intelligence the way most people think it does. It measures the ability to succeed on an IQ test, which seems to correspond to several abilities possessed by generally intelligent people. Being high or low-IQ does not guarantee intellectual performance on a given task or in a given setting.

Second, intellect is an amplifier of but not a replacement for skills and hard work. You can't understand the physics of or rocket science required to perform a moon landing unless you've got the knowledge and skill to apply those principals. General knowledge doesn't imply specific knowledge almost ever. Even learning to reason logically is a skill you have to pick up before you can apply it. If Mozart had never seen a piano or any other instrument, he would never have become a musical prodigy on those instruments.

"Complex-dumb," in my opinion, is just a result of people with some degree of general intellect (or who believe they have that intellect and can convince others of it) assuming that their smarts give them the ability to understand things without putting in the work required to actually understand them. (If we accept this concept, there are also some interesting implications when we start asking 'what leads a person to make that assumption?', but that's another discussion.)</comment></comment>


NTFS bug lets anyone crash Windows 7 and 8.1 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/in-a-throwback-to-the-90s-ntfs-bug-lets-anyone-hang-or-crash-windows-7-8-1/ <comment><USER2> Do you suppose VMS is also vulnerable to this sort of problem? I believe ODS-2 has an analog of $MFT.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on Braintrust.io's new homepage - <AUTHOR>

I've been working very hard on a better landing page for my startup Braintrust.io.<p>Please give me your feedback. <comment><USER2> Taweed, your service looks fantastic, it must have taken a lot of development and refinement. It certainly looks polished from the youtube video.

I don't know your numbers but based on the fact that you are continually overhauling your pitch I am going to assume that you are struggling to gain traction, so with that in mind I'll do my best to give my opinion on why that is. Again no offense intended, service looks great!

I think you are struggling to develop a direct, refined super simple, super clear _focused_ message to a specific niche customer.

For some reason I have you on my google buzz thing (we exchanged some emails a while ago) so I feel like I'm pretty up to date with your iterations. Your message has never been ridiculously simple and focused. You should pick a specific niche and go after it like a starving dog. Is it for micro startups? for freelancers? for families? for college group projects? for enterprise? for red-haired left-handed moms born in Idaho? Get specific, answer EVERY SINGLE ONE of that niche's questions and concerns, and then hit it out of the park.

I watched all 7 mins of your video, I've read all your copy (I agree that the grayed mockup is very non-user-friendly and thus a turn off) and I can't get excited about it because it's too vague of a proposition. I get that its private and its a communication platform, but customers less savvy than myself understand that there is an ocean's worth of online collaboration products. It's not a question of how great your product is (it does look pretty nice) its more a question of whether your target audience _understands the benefits of your specific product_ and how you solve _their specific_ problems. This is why it hurts to be vague, you end up trying to be all things to all people (whether you intend that or not) and you get brownie points with zero of them (because you don't specifically address any niche pain points other than privacy).

Get tiny - get narrow - get focused.

Seems like your competition is 37signals. They started by focusing on freelance web designers (because that's what they were). They focus on the tech-savy freelancer who needed to collaborate with his client - nothing more.

Oh yeah lastly, the whole philosophy page is extremely self-serving. No one cares about your company, they care about what your company can do _for them_. It's fine to talk about yourself just so long as it's in the context of how your helping ME. I think you meant well with what you wrote, but for us HN'ers it's blatantly obvious that you are talking about internet startup related things - your customers dont care! No one cares about your business model, they don't care about the legitimacy of freemium, they've never heard of 37signals, they-don't-care!

It's 4:30 am, I'm going crazy, best of luck to you my friend!

HTH!

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's my stream-of-consciousness:

\---

I saw a huge "scroll down to learn more" arrow and thought "why don't you just put what I'm supposed to learn right here?". Why do I have to scroll for it? And what's this stuff underneath?

Reluctantly, I scrolled. Write a response? No... Curtis? Who is Curtis? Some acme inc files? No, that's not it either... Braintrust Features? Oh, finally, I'm here. So I see a list of features, and I see some benefits....but what is Braintrust? So I scroll all the way back up and look to my right, I see....Social Collaboration for your company. So now that I finally have some context, let me re-read everything....

\---

I think the whole "fake mockup of a real interface" concept is flawed. Nothing I see on first glance (a) works or (b) means anything to me. I totally missed the big yellow box the first time through, so I had zero context.

This is unrelated, but your logo looks like Ubuntu+Joomla to me.

Finally, I'd rethink the "pimping" analogy on your philosophy page.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi Tawheed - looks like you've got a slick product there! Problem is a visitor to your site has to be _really_ motivated to trawl through all the stuff to work out what it _is_. A few points (most echo apsurd's comments):

* The large/desaturated product-shots are too confusing - a significant proportion of your visitors will be confused by these - I was. I thought _they_ were the sales site.

* I was desperate to be told what it is. Front-and-centre, first thing I read. I get the yellow box is trying to do that, but, I read it as: 'Buzzword Buzzword for your company. The fastest & simplest way to buzzwords.' I got nothing from it.

* Scrolling down (a long way) - the first information dense part of the page appears, listing features, in a seemingly random order.. Ok, my data will be private, but, WHAT IS THE PRODUCT?

* Benefits before features - people want to know how it will help them, not what bells-and-whistles it's got.

* The demo video is good, but long. People will need to be pre-sold enough on the product already to sit through it all.

The page/site isn't customer focussed enough. It's 'conversation' needs to go like this:

* Our product is THIS. * Do you have problem X? (and Y, and Z?) * Yes? * Well, our product solves everything. * Here's how it does it, and here's how your future will look and feel when you use it. * Sounds great huh? * Give it a try by doing this - no risk, you can do it for free!

'THIS' in the list above should be phrased using the words that your customers use. Not clever, not fancy - the exact words they use. The only way you can find this out is by getting out of the building and going talk with them (Customer Development style).

If you don't know how to explain the problems it solves, again, go and ask your prospective market what problems they have, and make note of the words they use to describe them (this is where I think apsurd's suggestion to narrow your niche makes sense).

Currently your site's conversation is more like:

* Buzzwords * Confusion * Our product's nice and got stuff in it * Give it a go

Perhaps the following might be a bit too 'salesy' for your liking, but you should be able to pick up some good tips: SEOMoz landing page overhaul case study <http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/> \- I can also recommend signing up to get the annotated PDF, it's full of interesting points.

Best of luck with it! Your product looks very good - niche it down/focus on a narrower market, then get out there and talk to your prospective customers to find out how they want to be sold to!

</comment><comment><USER5> I had a hard time noticing the fainter scroll down arrow at first and was mildly upset about being denied access to click on things. It feels like a popover ad that won't click away. That was enough for me to leave, even as a reviewer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link: <http://braintrust.io>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @apsurd @cheesemuffler thanks so much for your honest feedback. i'm going to give it another iteration tonight (and then schedule some more customer development calls)!!!

</comment><comment><USER6> I feel like I'm being pushed to do something I don't want even though I just arrived and have no preconceived notion.

(the overlay is not my cup of tea)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah... i see what you're saying. would you like it more if you click on the links in the image and get a little pop-up of what its about?</comment></comment>


Horrible color banding on certain low-end Lenovo laptops. Fix? Tilt the screen - <AUTHOR> https://support.lenovo.com/documents/SF15-I0012 <comment><AUTHOR> Example Lenovo Z50-75 with HD display:

[https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z- series/Z50-75-...](https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z- series/Z50-75-Gradient-colors-color-banding-dark-dim-display- Faulty/m-p/1839225)

Completely unusable for anything beyond Excel. I don't see how it is different from selling laptop with B&W display. By their own description it's an "multimedia" notebook. They also have fake product images with proper color gradients :)</comment>


Say No to Ireland's SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://stopsopaireland.com/ SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.
Instead, <b>the law is being enacted by ministerial order</b>. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material. <comment><USER2> So an honest question for the sites operators, who appear to be an injury solicitors. What's the deal with your Privacy Policy [1]? Is it a copy/paste from another site or did you mean it to be that bad? It's the reason I'm telling people not to supply the site with any personal details. It clearly says details will be used for "market analysis" (whatever that means) and the site operators can contact (spam) people by any means of communication the user gives them. I can't see a way to opt-out. I don't want to come across as offensive but I care about my privacy.

[1] <http://stopsopaireland.com/privacy/>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it looks like it's been dragged over from the solicitors' other sites, which have entirely different purposes.

(I just had a word in person - I'm the one keeping the server up but that's the beginning and ending of my involvement.)

Response: "Yes. Sorry. That needs fixing and will be fixed asafp. We're not going to mail people, and 'market analysis' means 'analytics' in this case but is moot because we have none enabled anyway. It'll get removed/replaced as soon as the phones stop melting and we can put 10 mins into it."

<comment><USER2> That's great. To be honest I'm guilty of copy/paste Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions myself. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like a new course of action for MPAA.

1st they failed to push SOPA in USA.

But, they may force Ireland and other smaller countries to pass SOPA like laws.

Then, they can push again in USA claiming that it is good since everyone else is using it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you provide a link to the S.I. itself on the page? I'd like to read the damn thing before calling my TD's.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mr Sherlock said he would "tweet complete clarification shortly".

Irish Times article with more information: [http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0124/break...](http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0124/breaking32.html)

BTW, I just posted the link to HN, I've no affiliation with the site. Fully support what they're trying to do though.

<comment><USER6> he'll also be on rte radio show drivetime after 1800. [https://twitter.com/#!/drivetimerte/status/16183954268344320...](https://twitter.com/#!/drivetimerte/status/161839542683443202)

you can find links for listening online here. <http://www.rte.ie/radio/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since its been established that the Irish data protection commission has authority over Facebook (since their EMEA HQ is based in Ireland) what implications would this legislation have for FB I wonder? I know Facebook passed the recent privacy audit that the commission carried out but would the ability of record/movie companies etc. to have offending sites blocked through the courts here would obviously affect FB right?

<comment><USER8> I don't believe the final text has been released yet but my understanding is that it wouldn't effect Facebook anymore than it would effect a website which doesn't have a base in Ireland. The law is 'SOPA-like' because it gives Irish courts the right to tell an ISP or hosting service or other third party to block the site.

It is unclear at this time if infringing websites will be given notice that they are about to be blocked. Again, the final draft hasn't been released.

The scary thing is that they are trying to get this passed without a vote in parliament.

<comment><USER5> Does this really surprise anyone? Having seen Irish government in action over the years, this is exactly how they like to do things.

That being said, I'm in Sean's constituency and I voted for him, so I'd better call him quick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just a minor suggestion.

When I signed the petition, the link that says "Find out what else you can do" at the bottom does not work for me. (Windows 7, Chrome 16)

<comment><USER3> Sabrina (who put the site up, and who I'm married to) reports that we think that's fixed, and thanks you for telling her.

I'll say this: Linode rocks. It's getting _battered_ here and seems to be barely breaking sweat.

Action count just hit 14,000 since last night at 10pm local time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This will pass. There are no big sites or organisations backing the opposition so there will be no world effecting black out or protest. Boot licking allies of the US gov will implement SOPA like legislation for them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for posting this! I was completely unaware of this being pushed through.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is absolutely no information on that page as to what the possible ministerial order contains.</comment>


Nim partners with Status.im - <AUTHOR> https://nim-lang.org/blog/2018/08/07/nim-partners-with-status.html <comment><USER2> Those are awesome news! I'm glad to see "improvement of nimsuggest and LSP development" in the suggestions :D</comment>


Ask HN: Please review our site | version 1 - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN: The site I am asking for you to review is:
www.votetocracy.com
Votetocracy is a site where citizens vote on bills in congress and send votes to their reps. Citizen's votes are tallied against the votes of Congress and displayed as agreements or disagreements.
We are looking for feedback on usability: Can you find bills that you would be interested in?
Feedback on: The concept. Are you interested in politics enough to vote on these bills? If your not interested in politics - but are interested in decisions congress makes that effect your life - would you vote on bills?
The business model will not be revealed until version 2 so we are not really looking for feedback on that aspect.
Looking forward to hearing from you. <comment><USER3> Great idea. Couple of notes (I am running Chrome on Mac)

\- You have a drop shadow on the main content. However, it does not show up on the bottom, only the top and side.

-on <http://www.votetocracy.com/outcomes.html>, the checkmark icons are overlapping the font

\- You button text is being cut off

\- Is there a reason why you need my entire personal information (address, zip code)

Other than some css fixes, looks good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I'll look into the css stuff. Yes - we need the personal info to look up your representatives. I guess we could make that more clear. Actually - <USER2> used to ask more info. Things like profession, ethnicity etc. It helps us when reporting aggregate data. No one really complained - we just took it out for the moment until we redo some other things.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why this did not show up on the ask part of the site? It was submitted without a url.</comment>


Show HN: Yggdrasil Network – compact mesh routing experiment for mesh networks - <AUTHOR> https://yggdrasil-network.github.io <comment><AUTHOR> Although we've had a couple of mentions on HN in the past, Yggdrasil has not really had a formal introduction here - we were keen to introduce Yggdrasil as a project rather than as a couple of version point releases. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce our project - the Yggdrasil Network ([https://yggdrasil-network.github.io](https://yggdrasil-network.github.io)) - a proof-of-concept network to explore how we can build a decentralised IP network without the traditional scaling problems that other protocols tend to face.

There are plenty of mesh routing schemes out in the wild that have come before us - as an example B.A.T.M.A.N was merged into the Linux kernel back in 2011 - and many of them with different design goals, but one thing that many mesh routing schemes have in common is that they often have an upper size limit on the size of the network that they can practically support. In a protocol dependent upon external subnetting, especially where subnets may not practically map to physical locations (limiting the effectiveness of route aggregation), routing tables will become unmanageably large, cumbersome to replicate and difficult to keep up-to-date across the network.

CJDNS experimented with the idea of using a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to look up the location of nodes on the network, which had two primary effects. First of all, nodes could be identified by their public keys rather than relying on external subnetting, which meant that it was possible to "flatten" the network down into a single address space (or key space) and IP addresses could be derived using a function of the node's public key. Secondly, nodes would not need to store entire copies of the routing table - instead they would just store small pieces of information that they care about, and the collective knowledge of the network enables two given hosts to find a path to one another. However, CJDNS is source-routed and often suffered from problems in that the network was not always capable of determining the most optimal paths - nodes on the path were not able to use a better route or take shortcuts if available. This eventually lead to the introduction of "supernodes". These supernodes would keep a full view of the network and allow other nodes to delegate path lookups but would require you to trust the supernodes and decreasing decentralisation in the process.

Inspired by CJDNS, Yggdrasil was born - a compact routing scheme implementation which would keep some of the useful features of CJDNS but attempt to solve the scalability issue without depending on supernodes. Nodes would still be identified by their public keys (and IPv6 addresses would be generated from them), a DHT would still be used to assist in locating nodes on the network but nodes on the network would be arranged onto a globally-agreed spanning tree. The "root" of the spanning tree is elected by a function of the node's signing keys (although apart from being designated as the "root", there are no other benefits) and all other nodes are given locators relative to the root of the node. This allows Yggdrasil to route greedily - the sending node only needs to know the locator coordinates of the remote node, and then each other node on the path can simply pass the packets on in the correct direction without being source-routed. This allows us to take shortcuts as a node on the path may know of a better route, or may know to avoid certain links as a result of congestion control. It also means that each node does not need to know much about the state of the network - they need to know their own locator and a path to the root, and other information is supplementary.

Around the middle of 2015, we had a barebones network simulator and eventually a prototype codebase written in Golang was released at the end of 2017. Just over a year later, we've released a number of alpha releases, added support for many platforms (including Linux, Windows, macOS and BSDs) and fixed a number of bugs. There are also on-going efforts to port Yggdrasil to iOS (lead by myself) and with plans to eventually support Android also. The Yggdrasil network currently sits today at around 130 nodes with a few members of our community running public services for consumption by network users. Our goal is to bring Yggdrasil to as many devices and places as possible, as ultimately what we need is to be able to test at scale, identifying and fixing problems if and when they arise.

Anyone is able to download Yggdrasil and join the network, and we welcome anyone who would like to join us in our channels or who would like to test or contribute.

\- Our channels: #yggdrasil:matrix.org on Matrix or #yggdrasil on Freenode

\- Our blog with some more interesting posts: [https://yggdrasil- network.github.io/blog.html](https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/blog.html)

\- Our latest builds from CircleCI: [https://yggdrasil- network.github.io/builds.html](https://yggdrasil- network.github.io/builds.html)

<comment><USER2> I really like the look of this. I have often wondered how one might approach implementing self organising networks for use within isolated communities or the 3rd world.

There are still many places where there is either no internet access at all, or internet access is only provided by a single vendor that is next to useless. The hardware exists that would allow communities with limited technical knowledge to build their own networks, but I have yet to find the software.

Obviously in the civilised world we defer to our ISPs and their technical knowledge to maintain our connectivity, but why must it be like this? Why can't we just throw a bunch of old computers together along with some NICs, switches and cabling to make a self organising, self healing wide area network (an internet) that could be used by anyone.

There is plenty of old but perfectly functional hardware out there and already communities trying their best to make use of it. Maybe it could be made easy for them with a zero-conf USB bootable Linux distro that could run the nodes on one of these networks?

Add to the mix other new technologies like IPFS, and the whole of human knowledge could be made available to even the poorest communities, and there would be little to no congestion.

Am I dreaming here? Is there anything about the above that is unrealistic? Would love to hear opinions on this!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm personally rather hopeful that Yggdrasil, or something similar to it, could be used to provide connectivity in harder-to-reach places. I don't think it's a bad dream to want to localise networking more.

One project that comes to mind is the the OLPC project - they had a go at meshing their devices with 802.11s but, like most other routing protocols, it wouldn't scale up as far as it needs to.

Wireless meshing is something we are definitely interested in though. I am hopeful that with the iOS port that we may be able to experiment with true meshing over Multipeer Connectivity/AWDL (if Apple allow us to...) and there have also been efforts by the Toronto Mesh community to adopt and test Yggdrasil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to have built on top of a lot of accepted ideas that were floating around in the academic peer to peer space in the early 2000s. Glad to see some of them getting traction in the wild aside from, you know, old school music pirating networks.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're hoping that our implementation may spark some interest in these very ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally got around to looking at this and had a couple questions if you're still checking this thread.

Your 0.3 announcement mentioned switching from Kademlia to Chord for the DHT but doesn't go into much details. The lookups are consistently fast, and maybe consume less storage? But Kademlia seems from a topology point of view to more closely match your network and seems to have significant advantages for networks that have ephemeral nodes.

A bit less technical but is there an overall goal for the project? Was this trying to solve a specific issue (such as consistent mobility addresses?) or is this more of a project to test out a combination of findings from research papers?

</comment><comment><USER5> It occurred to me reading the headline that you could simulate all of the nodes in a virtual environment.

So kind of a general question, but: could you or do you have a way to like, run a VM on your computer where you could ssh in have a big open area to turn on nodes and play around with various network topologies, or the software running in each node? Other people could ssh in and pretend to be a node too.

That way we could try running it on our computers and debug the stack in each node, and then if it works, we could download the stack into our own routers and devices and run it in the real world.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a special simulator build which can run several nodes in a single process, and this has been used in the past to test different topologies and network graphs.

But yes, there's absolutely no reason that you couldn't stand up a whole load of VMs or containers and run Yggdrasil in each of them to play about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks really interesting, I'm currently at work but will check out in more depth later!

From a quick scan I can't understand, how does the tree work for routing with a fixed node address when the node is moved?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your address stays with you, as it is derived from your public key, but your coordinates/locator on the tree changes. Another node wanting to speak to you would send out a DHT request asking "where are you now?" and, knowing your new locator, can send the traffic to you.

We have a kind of switch/router separation in the codebase where the spanning tree and locator switching is handled in the virtual switch. In our case, instead of MAC addresses, the switch deals in spanning tree locators/coordinates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would it be possible to embed or import the yggdrasil codebase into my own golang project, so that I could opporate my software project in its own namespace or keyspace?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's something we're working on - right now it's possible to link against Yggdrasil but there isn't much to separate IP traffic from your own custom traffic. Soon we will have the ability to separate the two and we will publish a better-defined API with which to do it.

<comment><USER7> that sounds exciting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will check this out later but for now, _what_ a good name. Although I'm not sure how good the connectivity is in Helheim.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Yggdrasil](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Yggdrasil)</comment>


LastPass gives others access to your password vault in emergencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/lastpass-revamps-password-management-software/#ftag=RSSbaffb68 <comment><USER2> Note that it only allows access to people designated by the user. The user can configure a waiting period between the emergency contact's request and access.

I can think of two ways this is implemented:

1) LastPass has a backdoor to users' data, and they use it in certain conditions.

2) Ahead of time, emergency users are given credentials different than the primary users' credentials. The emergency credentials are disabled except in the emergency conditions.

#2 is much more secure but knowing typical end-users ability to retain credentials, especially ones they aren't using, it seems like it would have a high failure rate. Maybe they could use biometrics? But how would LastPass physically collect biometric data? Not all phones have fingerprint readers, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some technical details are discussed at [https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/emergency- access/](https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/emergency-access/)

<comment><USER2> Hmm ... this doesn't look good:

 _With the Emergency Access feature, you can give trusted family and friends access to your LastPass account in the event of an emergency or crisis. Your designated Emergcy Access contact(s) can request access to your account and securely receive the passwords and notes without knowing your Master Password. You decide how much time should pass before they're given access once they request it, and you can decline access if it's requested unnecessarily.

Emergency Access can also be used as an alternative account recovery feature, if you worry about ever forgetting your master password and want to ensure you have a backup way of recovering your vault.

...

Your Emergency Access contact must have a LastPass account. If they do not, we will help you send them an invitation for them to join LastPass so that you can add them as a contact._

<comment><USER3> Not to be snarky but you missed the most relevant part:

 _LastPass uses public-private key cryptography with RSA-2048 to allow users to share the key to their vault with trusted parties, without ever passing that information in an unencrypted format to LastPass. When Emergency Access is activated, each user has a pair of cryptographic keys – a public key to allow others to encrypt data for the user, and a private key that allows the user to decrypt the data that others have encrypted for them._

 _The key used to encrypt and decrypt your vault data is encrypted with the Emergency Access contact's public key, and can be decrypted only with their corresponding private key. When setting up Emergency Access, you are using the recipient's public key, encrypting your vault key with that public key, and then LastPass stores that RSA-2048 encrypted data until it's released after the waiting period you specify. Only the recipient can decrypt the data, so no one else can decrypt it without access to the private key of the recipient you're sharing it with, which is encrypted with their master password key. This process is completely automated, with no action required by the end user, and ensures that the data is inaccessible by LastPass or outside parties._

Basically, it sounds like LastPass has each client generate a keypair, store the private key in the vault, and give the public key to LastPass for distribution. I'm no security expert but it seems secure to me, at least as far as LastPass is considered secure.

<comment><USER2> I agree. That part didn't show up with JavaScript disabled, so my mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also, a new UI that doesn't suck.

[https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/01/introducing- lastpass-4-0.h...](https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/01/introducing- lastpass-4-0.html/)

<comment><USER3> On mobile it still appears broken enough to essentially require the use of their mobile app (and the corresponding paid premium membership) for anything beyond extremely occasional access.</comment></comment>


The Tech Behind the New Twitter.com - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-twittercom.html

<comment><USER2> This is sweet: "Twitter.com is now a client of our own API. It fetches data from the same endpoints that the mobile site, our apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and every third-party application use."</comment>


Sources: Sony Is Working on 4K 'PlayStation 4.5' - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/sources-sony-is-working-on-a-ps4-5-1765723053 <comment><USER2> They better not launch it without 16GB HBM2 GPUs. It would also be great if it supported Vulkan, especially now that they seem to agree that cross-platform gaming is in fact not so bad for consoles. Adopting Vulkan could only help Sony in its war against Microsoft and its DirectX platforms.</comment>


Building Scalable Databases: Denormalization, the NoSQL Movement and Digg - <AUTHOR> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/09/10/BuildingScalableDatabasesDenormalizationTheNoSQLMovementAndDigg.aspx

<comment><USER2> I don't know that this article actually says anything useful. It gives a very short high level overview of 3 non-relational databases and regurgitates quotes from another couple of blogs about databases from digg and friendfeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really? You left a {TODO} in your article?</comment>