Investor revolt and legal dispute delay Filecoin plans - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/filecoin-blockchain-delay-3b5e6b9a-bcc8-41cf-81cf-563f6cebb2c4.html <comment><USER2> Filecoin is a great example of raising a lot of money slowing a project down. They did a $200m ICO in 2017 and they still haven't shipped a 1.0, while smaller, much less well funded projects (Sia, Arweave, ...) have made a lot more progress.

<comment><USER3> Are any of these projects ready for personal backup use, or still experimental?

<comment><USER4> The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future is astonishingly low. The "completion" rate on ICOs is close to zero.

> _" Obviously it could fail and become worthless. But if it works it could be > huge, like Google-scale huge, which is why this became so contentious," a > different investor explains._

That anybody put money into such a bleak concept is still beyond me.

<comment><USER5> I can generally agree about random ICOs, but for what it's worth the Filecoin team is world-class distributed systems talent. I wouldn't say this about any other ICO.

(I don't own Filecoin tokens and have nothing to gain by the project being successful, I'm just a fan of that team.)

<comment><USER6> If you're investing in a business venture, the distributed systems talent doesn't matter nearly as much as their ability to build and maintain a successful business without it falling over. If they've got millions USD worth of cash in the bank, they can hire talented engineers, but if they don't have any idea how to run a business no algorithm is going to fix that.

<comment><USER5> I'm responding to:

> The chance of "filecoin" or whatever else existing 12 months into the future > is astonishingly low.

I actually think the chance of Filecoin existing in a year is close to 1. It's not due to a prediction of a wildly successful corporate structure. It's mainly about the tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like there is a lot of hostility toward protocol labs (among others doing stuff with "blockchain"). However, everything they build is free and open source. They've gone to considerable length to make their libraries modular and support a multitude of languages.

Libp2p is the best peer-to-peer utility I'm aware of (please share if you know of comparable others). This in it self is a massive undertaking.

Multiformats is brilliant. A few simple tweaks to the way we form address open so many doors.

IPLD is supports json, cbor, protobuffers, git and more. All of which tie together really nicely in to the multiformat addressing and utilized by IPFS.

Literally everything they do is open source and free to use how ever you want. If you find a bug, fix it. If want support for something new, propose it.

Their projects are frustrating sometimes with regard to understanding the nuances of decisions that were made (such as /p2p vs the overloaded /ipfs) but they're not building pay per use service like AWS S3, they're building an open source community and they deserve at least a look at their source code before writing them off.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I don't understand about Filecoin is that they advertise it is for "Private data" too, but there are no access control mechanisms and no ability to delete data from the network. (You can "unpin" it, but there's no mechanism in the clients to compel nodes to actively remove content afaik) If I put private data on the Filecoin network, I would like to be able to largely prevent most people from even pulling down the encrypted files. What happens when the encryption guarding those files is found to contain a flaw and gets compromised? If someone has an old copy of the encrypted files, then that data can now be unencrypted. These issues seem to go largely ignored by Filecoin as best as I can tell.

<comment><USER9> > If I put private data on the Filecoin network, I would like to be able to > largely prevent most people from even pulling down the encrypted files.

Isn't that fundamentally impossible? There's nothing preventing someone from setting up an archive site dedicated to storing/serving deleted content.

<comment><USER8> I think you might not be understanding what I mean. I'd like to be able to use Filecoin as a backend storage that will only serve up data to people in a particular group.

Take the example of a traditional website or web application like Facebook. When I post content I can select who will be able to access that content and there is no way for anyone NOT in the groups I select to pull down that data even in an encrypted form.

If Filecoin operated this way, then there would be no way for anyone to archive the data, because they could not access it in the first place.

<comment><USER9> Right but filecoin isn't a centralized service, it's a decentralized network. Just like how ultimately your facebook post is stored on a server somewhere, stuff you stored using filecoin is stored on a random computer somewhere. At least with facebook there's some central entity that gets to decide where their servers are located and who gets access to them. You don't get that with a decentralized network.

<comment><USER8> Just because the storage network is decentralized (i.e. I don't get to choose where the files are hosted) doesn't mean that the nodes operating on that network can't be designed to honor a deletion request. For example, Tardigrade ([https://tardigrade.io](https://tardigrade.io)) is an decentralized network that provides an S3-compatible storage layer and also provides a removal command for the client. ([https://documentation.tardigrade.io/api- reference/uplink-cli...](https://documentation.tardigrade.io/api- reference/uplink-cli/rm-command))

<comment><USER10> It's not just a decentralized network, it's an _open membership_ decentralized network, i.e. anyone can be a node, and any compatible software can be used to run a node.

What the parent posters are saying is that there's no way to trust that your (encrypted) data won't end up landing on the hard drive of someone who chooses to capture everything that passes through said hard drive.

Whether the _node itself_ keeps the data is kind of immaterial, if there's no technical limitation preventing the _owner_ of the node from keeping your data.

But also, as an open-membership decentralized network, there's also no real way to _incentivize_ node implementations to _obey_ deletion requests.

It's helpful to think about peer-to-peer networks as if every node was programmed from scratch by the person or organization running it, to do exactly and only what that person/organization wants it to do. (Not true, obviously, but the incentives behind there being a free market of p2p node software work out similarly to if it was.)

In such an environment, why would a given node owner want to _add_ a "read a deletion-request log, and actually-delete everything mentioned in it" feature to _their_ node in particular? Especially if they weren't a party with their _own_ private data stored that they were interested in ever deleting, but instead were only on the network to make money hosting other people's stuff; or because they wanted to insert _public_ data sets onto the network?

<comment><USER8> In terms of an incentive, I would say that the node owner would honor the deletion request if the network pays them to do that. If I'm a node operator I don't so much care about the particular data I'm hosting, just what the network is paying for me to do.

The threat model I'm thinking about is a malicious actor requests an IPFS object that he/she knows holds data that is valuable, but that they can not decrypt. They then hold this object for a period of time till at some point they are able to break into it using improved computing power or exploiting some flaw in the implementation.

Now, you raise a good point about Filecoin being an _open membership_ network. In my particular example, the malicious actor could just decide to run an IPFS node and start holding any data that comes to it for future malicious purposes and maybe they start pulling down specific files that they want to target directly. I don't have a solution to this other than to think that having some reputation built into the IPFS node network could help mitigate that risk. You might imagine that nodes with high reputation are trusted and it is harder(requires a lot of time/money) as a node operator to become part of that group. People might decide to only trust the highly reputable nodes with their private data and utilize all nodes for public data.

<comment><USER11> What if they claim publicly to delete your data, accept decentralized payments to delete the data, actually delete that data on the node in the sense that nobody can retrieve the data on the public internet using any official protocols, but routinely take filesystem-snapshots of their servers and the owner browses them offline undetectably at their leisure?

Then 3 years later all the snapshots end up on a torrent site, after you paid that whole time to "delete data".

<comment><USER8> Yes, I think that is a risk in the absence of a true "Proof of Deletion". Perhaps though it would be so expensive to maintain a copy of all this data that no one is paying you for that nodes would be incentivized to just perform the actual deletion, since the rewards of keeping the data are unknown and the time horizon for maintaining that data at your own expense is unknown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the problem here isn't just Filecoin, it's Protocol Labs as a whole. I've been building applications using IPFS for about 3 years now, and the entire time Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the development of IPFS.

Basically any project I've seen started by Protocol Labs ends up a mess of a project so I'm not surprised Filecoin is where it is now. It's quite clear that Protocol Labs is extremely incapable of managing a project of scale.

<comment><USER13> > Protocol Labs has dropped the ball at every corner when it comes to the > development of IPFS.

How so? I don't have much experience with IPFS, but I've heard great things about it

<comment><USER12> Primarily due to poor management of the project. The best way to showcase this is through something called "testground".

Testground was an initiative started by Protocol Labs to create a solution that would be used for testing of IPFS at all levels of the protocols, while also giving developers an SDK that can be used to write new testground tests. The reason this was needed is because the before the Testground project was started, the last few releases of go-ipfs (the reference implementation of IPFS) introduced new bugs, and regressions. Why? Primarily because of the poor planning, poor test coverage, and overall poor project management.

So Testground development started and went on for about 5 months until the developer in charge of Testground development makes a post on a GitHub issue ([https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomm...](https://github.com/testground/testground/issues/42#issuecomment-569057553))

Tl;dr of that comment? Poor project management lead to a lot of wasted development time on Testground.

Irony of the whole situation aside, if this was an isolated incident it might not be so bad. But it's not an isolated incident, it happens all the time, and with every single project managed by Protocol Labs.

Interestingly enough this latest post from Axios caused me to come out of the woodworks with my own series of posts about how Protocol Labs has failed both IPFS and Filecoin. I briefly detail a few more of the problems here ([https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs- filecoin-p...](https://bonedaddy.io/blog/ipfs/posts/failure-ipfs-filecoin- protocol_labs/#the-problems))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cryptocurrency was invented to remove middlemen and counterparty risk. Yet every week I hear about middlemen and the tokens they control, and the actions they take or don't take that harm their investors... This is the opposite of crypto. By the way, all file storage coin projects are beyond inefficient, because backblaze is always going to win on price due to vertical integration.

Adding a "distributed" network in there is extra points of failure, not less. But in crypto, price tends to not care about actual efficiency or utility at all, and is really just a roulette wheel of ticker symbols. Disclaimer: founded a crypto.

</comment><comment><USER15> > But multiple sources say that a large percentage of those tokens had been > unilaterally distributed by CEO Juan Batiz-Benet to himself and early > employees for less than a penny each, and that he has continued to make such > distributions in the years since.

> Sources also say that no tokens were distributed to shareholders and that it > often was difficult to get questions answered.

I think this highlights where it's really difficult to be a young founder. Giving your investors news you know they won't want to hear isn't a fun conversation but it's necessary. And the longer you avoid those difficult conversations the harder it is to recover the relationship and the closer you get to running afoul of your duties.

<comment><USER16> And the more it looks less niave / akward as it does something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So how are the economics of decentralized storage solutions supposed to work? They don't have the economy of scale that big providers (eg. aws, google, backblaze) have, but yet they're somehow able to offer the service at a cheaper price?

<comment><USER17> The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all. I'm not sure that even that ends up working, but it's not meant to scale indefinitely.

<comment><USER9> >The idea is that it's a technology to unlock the free space on the hard drives you and I own, which we're currently not monetizing at all

Right now backblaze b2 charges $0.005 (half cent) per GB. This is probably an upper bound on what decentralized storage services can charge. I sampled some computers on bestbuy and found that most of them come with 1TB storage (this excludes computer with SSDs, which have less). This probably translates into 500GB of free space that the average person can rent out, which works out to... $2.5/month. If we factor in a modest electricity consumption of 30W for 24hrs/day, 30 days/month, that's 21.6kWh, or $2.16 in monthly electricity costs (assuming 10 cents per kWh). So best case, you're going to be making $2.84 per month per computer, which doesn't seem worth it. In reality it's probably worse because sia's currently paying $3.68/TB, which works out to a loss of $0.32/month.

<comment><USER18> This line of thought needs to noticed be much more. While I was initially also very excited about distributed/decentralized processing/filesharing systems, _this_ exact type of economic calculation seems to make the existence of many small, personal nodes in such networks unlikely. Even ignoring the electricity and network cost, if the setup and maintenance of such systems takes more than a few minutes per month, it just won't be worth it for the majority of potential providers. They would have to be zero-click installs, daemons in the background, unnoticeable, without requiring any attention from the user, despite issues like moderation.

Makes me wonder how the distribution on other filesharing/torrent networks looks like.

Another line of questioning I have is about the possible effects of this system should it become popular. Cryptocurrency mining caused huge spikes in graphics card prices - will the same apply to high-capacity harddisks, due to people trying to run mini-datacenters for profit?

How much storage will the Filecoin network be able to provide? How would a hypothetical large storage supply interact with pricing models of other providers? And on a more optimistic note, will it enable individuals to develop a new class of programs using lots of storage which aren't possible currently, technically or economically?

<comment><USER9> >Makes me wonder how the distribution on other filesharing/torrent networks looks like.

I think the key difference is in filesharing networks, there are tens/hundreds/thousands copies of data, and each peer can jettison the data at any time without penalty. In contrast, storage networks (I'm using sia as an example here) only have three copies (by default), require upfront commitment (6 months by default), and you stand to lose your collateral in the event you delete the data prematurely. The latter two properties exist to counteract the unreliability associated with only having 3 copies if peers can randomly drop out at will.

>will the same apply to high-capacity harddisks, due to people trying to run mini-datacemters for profit?

Theoretically no. Presumably because every gigabyte of storage that's being bought for the storage network, is every gigabyte that someone doesn't have to buy to store their data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The technology behind Filecoin is very impressive. I can't wait for the mainnet to be released so I can continue to use S3 as I always have. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> This project has always felt DOA to me - I can't think of any other possibility than the first adopters for this product being distributers of child porn over just about anything else.

<comment><USER21> None of the blockchain storage projects that I've seen have Freenet-style deniable storage. Given that they leave an audit trail on a public blockchain, they're arguably even less private than S3-style cloud storage. Basically Filecoin et al. look like they're not useful for child porn.

<comment><USER20> well it's not going to be used to store cat pics

point is there will be illicit content being shared, and why would I want to spin up a node and be roped into some FBI investigation because my computer has bits and pieces of the illicit content they are looking for?

whatever tiny reward they offer isn't worth it

<comment><USER22> > _point is there will be illicit content being shared_

You could have just said that, or 'pirated movies', but neither are as inflammatory are they? Instead you chose to make the most offensive assumption you could think up.

<comment><USER20> if you really think the earliest adopters of this project are going to be sharing pirated copies of The Avengers over child porn you don't understand anything about the internet and incentives

<comment><USER23> Have a look at what ipfs actually does. The nodes involved not only don't try to hide/obscure any metadata, they will share it with anyone running a DHT node and your queries will be pretty much public. Ipfs is probably the worst solution for distributing illegal content. The incentives there are actually to use just about anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heroines of the Haitian Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.publicbooks.org/heroines-of-the-haitian-revolution/ <comment><USER2> >> Vieux-Chauvet's novel instead provides portraits of diverse individuals—free people of African descent, enslaved people, white slave owners and white actors, parents and children.

>> The evocation of the ways in which women sought out space, autonomy, and futures for themselves and their families in the colonial order makes the book particularly powerful.

This article (and presumably the book it draws from) seems to want to paint revolutionary Haiti as a kind of multicultural, proto-feminist paradise.

Instead, the slave revolt led to the torture, rape, and ultimately complete genocide of the nation's remaining European-derived population, including women and children, and the slumping of one of the wealthiest colonies of North America into what it is today: one of the poorest places on the continent[1]:

"Dessalines later gave the order to all cities on Haiti that all white men should be put to death."

"Dessalines would proclaim an amnesty for all the whites who had survived in hiding during the massacre. When these people left their hiding place, however, they were killed as well."

"[T]he majority of the women were initially not killed. Dessalines's advisers, however, pointed out that the white Haitians would not disappear if the women were left to give birth to white men, and after this, Dessalines gave order that the women should be killed as well, with the exception of those who agreed to marry non-white men."

Far from paradisiacal...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre)

<comment><USER3> Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? That's not what this site is for.</comment></comment>


New TSA software to end naked scanner images - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/07/new-tsa-software-ends-naked-scanner-images.html <comment><USER2> Seems like such a simple solution to alleviate the privacy concerns that I'm surprised this wasn't discovered during the initial planning of installing the scanners.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a rather difficult problem, since now you need to do image recognition to figure out if there's "stuff" on the person. Without this feature, you can just pass the image directly through to the reviewer.

Good quality image recognition isn't trivial. I can see why it took a while to happen.</comment></comment>


Plan 9 ported to the Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/miller/9pi.img.gz <comment><USER2> I don't think it's a good choice to link directly to a file like that. Perhaps an article on the release would have been better.

<comment><USER3> Especially for us mobile users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion on getting it running: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855023)

And here's a video of it being demonstrated: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw)

<comment><USER5> Looking at the video, I think plan9 would have a potential consumer future if it had great typography and fonts.

<comment><USER5> This comment was made in the most positive way possible. Not sure why it was treated as it was non constructive or negative .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I read about Plan 9 I get a little sad. Unix is so good at what it does that the better enemy of the good doesn't stand a chance.

There are lots of better alternatives to Unix out there. But with the incumbents strengths being what they are I think we'll be stuck with Unix for a long time to come.

Possibly the only thing that will change this is if it is ever deemed that the Unix model is inherently broken from a security point of view and one of these other alternatives provides a fix. Performance and conceptual models are not enough to ditch decades of investment in technology that is good enough.

<comment><USER7> Linux is better. In comparison, Plan 9 is like primordial soup, whereas Linux is an advanced alien life from from the future.

There are so many parts of Linux that are far better than Plan 9, and polished for production work loads. Real life solutions are sometimes messy, and take many evolutions to get right.

Sure, elegant and simple maths is good. But if the maths is just wrong, and doesn't work, then the more complicated maths that actually works is better.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would lean towards the opposite. Plan 9 is a creature that was designed well from day one, but initially limited by restrictive licensing. Linux is probably one of the largest hack and slash jobs in programming history, but it was available under very free and liberal terms from the beginning and development was open to everyone, hence it garnered more community support and as a result was more successful.

<comment><USER8> Which is why MySQL. And now, MongoDB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time something to do with Plan 9 comes up I lament the fact that the most elegant elements of its design have failed to be realized in practical terms in other operating systems. When they are realized, they usually lose the elegance.

Mostly I think about union mounts (which are very different in plan9 than the version that's been integrated into Linux) and the privilege escalation system (which has always seemed, to me, to be so much better than the sieve that is setuid).

(Note: I'm aware there have been attempts to bring purer versions of these things to linux, but they never gain any traction)

<comment><USER10> Not to forget per-process fs namespace, and text-only replacement of ugly ioctls.

<comment><USER11> Linux does have per process fs namespaces now... ioctls on the other hand...

<comment><USER12> In Linux CLONE_NEWNS requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN which makes it almost completely useless; it can't be used to the extent and in the way it is used in Plan 9.

<comment><USER13> I believe once you create a user namespace ([https://lwn.net/Articles/528078/](https://lwn.net/Articles/528078/)) you can then create the other kinds of namespaces (mount, process, etc.) without requiring privileges outside of your user namespace.

LWN ran a great series on namespaces recently: part 5 ([https://lwn.net/Articles/532593/](https://lwn.net/Articles/532593/)) covers user namespaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those who might have been curious, one of the folders present when he opened acme was named ピテャゴラスイッチ, it's a japanese children's show:

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

I'm not sure why it was there... But just in case you wondered.

<comment><USER15> My eye went straight to it as well but more because I had passively (embarrassingly) assumed that Plan9 didn't have non-western fonts by default. 'twas a silly thought.

[http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/utf](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/utf)

<comment><USER16> At least Plan9 did something wrong. UTF8 is so superior to this silly 16bits encoding.

<comment><USER17> Yes, and that's why they (Rob Pike & ken) created UTF-8 and converted Plan9 to use it.

see [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This has been out for awhile now. For a complete list of bootable OS images for the RaspberryPi see:

[http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions](http://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions)

</comment><comment><USER19> I really need to run Plan 9 again. I haven't done so since the late 90's. (I also thought that Oberon was pretty interesting too.)

EDIT: With so many former Bell employees there, my personal fantasy is that Google would takes over Plan 9 and starts releasing images of it for Chromebooks. I know its not going to happen but I think that would be sweet.

</comment><comment><USER20> I installed it a few months back, and prepared the SD card in linux. Instructions: [http://trogrd.tumblr.com/post/38874675677/plan-9-on- rasberry...](http://trogrd.tumblr.com/post/38874675677/plan-9-on-rasberry-pi)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see a link to Rob Pike's other contribution, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant"

[http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf](http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf)

It's really a very good piece, which I'd summarize as a catch-22. To be important you must be different. To be successful you must be the same. Linux solves that by being the same. (And indeed Apple, acquiring NeXT did as well.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Now this could become handy: [http://code.google.com/p/go- plan9/](http://code.google.com/p/go-plan9/)

<comment><USER23> i would love to see just the opposite.. plan9-go a plan9 kernel and tools all coded in go.

but go is a first class citizen when you think of something like raspberry..

you can think golang wherever you can think of python

<comment><USER24> You can't write a kernel in Go because it has a mandatory runtime system and garbage collection. However, Mozilla's Rust language is similar in some ways, can work runtime-less, and a small demo kernel has been written in it: [https://github.com/charliesome/rustboot](https://github.com/charliesome/rustboot)

<comment><USER12> Of course that you can; kernels are not magic. Many kernels have been written in languages with far more heavyweight runtime systems than Go. A few examples have been provided in the comments. Here is a toy example in Go: [http://gofy.cat-v.org/](http://gofy.cat-v.org/)

You need some bits of assembly, but that's true for C, C++, Rust and whatever else as well.

<comment><USER23> he´s not saying that its not possible to use go for that.. its just that the compiler puts the go runtime wich is specific for the userland and that in the end of the line will create a bunch of kernel syscalls for whatever systems you are..

to make this happen, it should be possible to, at least change the runtime , or not use a runtime at all.. so the little boot part in assembly could call a go function in kernel mode

<comment><USER12> Of course you'll need a specific runtime just like for C you can't use the user space libc. There's no difference between C and Go here.

You can create your own runtime as you see fit. In fact, the Go distribution used to ship with such a bare metal runtime. Search the repository history for the tiny runtime. Reviving it again should be easier then porting Go to a new architecture, which is quite easy. Making a stub runtime (equivalent to booting a C kernel with no libc) is not more than half an hour of work.

Go can call assembly and C, and assembly and C can call Go. This is used a lot in the runtime, nothing special about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone please change the link to a press-release, blog post or news item? We killed their poor server.

</comment><comment><USER26> So.. Plan9 looks cool. Everything is distributed, kind of cool. I get that. I've also read this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658247) and other documents about Plan9.

So, what is its killer feature that makes ME want to try it out?

<comment><USER27> > So, what is its killer feature that makes ME want to try it out?

Transparent distributed multi-user environments and clean unification of files and objects are some of the main goals [0], but, at its core, it is a research OS, and has never evolved to fill a specific niche. Many people, including Alan Kay (I mention it because I recently re-watched a few of his presentations), have spoken out about the need for more open-sky/exploratory research. It might gain popularity if it specialized into a good distributed control-plane, performance-constrained systems, or as a container OS, but it is not any of those things. Try it out for the fun and experience of trying it out.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Design_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Design_concepts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What performance may we expect? Is there Linux emulation lib? Or at least package database based on Debian sources?

<comment><USER28> > _What performance may we expect?_

It'll feel very snappy until you try to actually do a lot of computation, especially I/O. This is the curse of Plan 9.

> _Is there Linux emulation lib?_

Not for ARM.

> _Or at least package database based on Debian sources?_

This doesn't even make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What performance may we expect?

<comment><USER29> Watch the video to get an impression. He compiles the kernel in ~1 minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is anyone else unable to resolve bell-labs.com? I've tried with my local connection, then SSH'd into my home machine, and tried via 3G on my phone and no luck.

Any links to a mirror or what not?

</comment><comment><USER31> lol, PAAAH the image !

</comment><comment><USER32> That just looks like a tarfile. Anyone could host a tarfile and call it plan9.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hosted at Bell Labs

<comment><USER32> I stand corrected. Anyone at Bell labs, could host a tarfile and call it plan9.</comment></comment></comment>


From who would Microsoft have bought Yahoo? - <AUTHOR>

If Yahoo would have agreed to the Microsoft offer, where would the money have went to?
Since MS did not try to buy shares from the shareholders - I guess that the shareholders would have kept their shares, right?
So how would MS afterwards have "owned" Yahoo, without owning shares? <comment><USER2> Yahoo is a publicly traded company, so Microsoft would have bought it from ALL of the shareholders.

YHOO is currently around $28-$29/share. Microsoft was willing to pay a premium of almost $10/share on top of that.

There is a lot involved, but the process generally goes like this:

Buying company (MS in this case) meets with Buyee (Yahoo) and negotiates some price.

Buyee board accepts buyers price.

Press releases and such go out. Much rejoicing.

EVERY shareholder gets a chance to vote, but things are rarely voted down. Common shareholders generally end up voted the recommended way (in favor of the buyout), and large shareholders generally control enough of the stock that this isn't a big issue.

Sale is approved, and Buyee stock shares are exchanged for Buyer stock shares, at the ratio of their current prices. If you held 100 shares of YAHOO, you'd end up with about 125 shares of MSFT in this case. (Yahoo being supposedly worth about $35/share, MSFT being worth about $28/share).

In some cases, these buyouts can be "hostile" where the Buyee can attempt to buy enough of the shares on the market to effectively control the voting.

These points are over-simplified, but it gives you the general idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't Yahoo as a company own part of its own shares? My guess would be that MS would've bought those shares.

Also, I would've thought an infallible deity such as yourself would know correct syntax: "where would the money have _gone_ to" ;)</comment>


Beyond the iPhone 5: The future of Apple's mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/07/10/beyond-the-iphone-5-the-future-of-apples-mobile-devices/ <comment><USER2> Okay, this just started to blow my mind.

Regarding the iPod Touch:

 _a data enabled device, with no subscription, that is capable of cross-device messaging, voice and video calls via FaceTime and gives the user the ability to walk away at any time and switch to another carrier.

Now think about it this way: What if such a device was just called an iPhone?_

I think Apple, ever since getting rebuffed on the SIM-free iPhone, has been plotting an end run around the carriers, but first had to get them hooked on subscription-free income from iPad users. Brilliant.</comment>


AI Junkie - <AUTHOR> http://www.ai-junkie.com/

<comment><USER2> "you need flash player"

Any description of what this is?</comment>


Ask HN: Need your opinion–what would you use this for? - <AUTHOR> Hey there!
Over the past month I built a service that allows you to see your users browse your website / web app in real time. It's kinda like "session recording" offered by various services, but live, mainly to offer support.
To make it easier to market I built a Chrome extension that integrates it with Intercom and other live chat services, so that when someone chats you up you can see their screen live and troubleshoot problems a lot quicker. Some early users utilize it this way.
However, I personally like a lot more the idea of having a "monitor" with say 6 screens and being able to send a message to people you see struggling, to offer "proactive" support. This comes from seeing way too many of my users on other apps make dumb mistakes and seeing myself losing money after they leave frustrated. I would really have paid to send them a message on screen saying "hey, let me know if you need help with this :)".
I'm not sure whether: 1. this "proactive support" is creepy; 2. it is scalable; 3. it only works in my mind; 4. companies would pay for it; 5. the ease of marketing something "for intercom/livechat/..." outweighs the coolness of the monitoring station.
What do you guys think? Would love your opinion!
Website is https://peekin.io/ <comment><USER2> 1\. If users are NOT aware of being tracked, it is HELL creepy 2\. Scalability is now not an issue :) I think your concern should be to find the first customer. 3\. not sure 4\. I think they would, but you need to make sure users are not creeped out by it. 5\. Unsure. You might want to try both ways. Start marketing a specific use-case and see what happens (if it works, etc..).

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, what I meant with scalability is that if you have up to say 10-15 users at a time you can keep track of them easily, if it's more you either need more people or the whole monitoring station becomes worthless

<comment><USER2> Agree but you could still easily gather events and metrics, which once aggregated would provide BI insights. Managers do love this kind of things

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Proactive" desktop support is very common in larger organizations where the time needed to personally dispatch a technician to each user in meatspace would be prohibitive. Usually such remote proactive support is initiated with the user's direct approval.

In my opinion the "consenting adults" principle applies here: it doesn't hurt to ask for a user's permission, and if they agree, it's not creepy. If they don't agree, no harm is done.

One last thing: you're right to worry about scalability. High-touch support is fundamentally not scalable (someone please prove me wrong!), which is why you see companies like Google providing automated "support" that makes customers feel alienated and not valued.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get what you're saying—I guess what I'm trying to understand is whether a regular user has an unspoken expectation that browsing or using a web app is "private"\--in which case that expectation is already broken most of the times by usage of analytics and, less often by session recording tech--or whether it is like walking in a store: no one is bothering you but you know that there's someone that might be seeing what you are doing, and if you stand in front of an item long enough someone is gonna come over asking if you need any help.

Apps like intercom already allow you to specify "triggers" so that when the user does something you can send them a message. I'm not sure how many people actually realize that it is an automated message.

<comment><USER3> Considering how much brouhaha there has been recently in the media (legitimately or not) regarding privacy issues, I doubt anyone expects true privacy when using SaaS products or any old websites these days. There are obviously those people who _really_ care about privacy, however those are a minority and probably aren't worth worrying about in your case.

I think making this work well (assuming underlying tech is solid) is a matter of UX technique. Iterate on a solution that makes the user aware of your support capabilities, then make it easy to summon help. Perhaps it'll be more natural if the user must initiate each support session, i.e. by highlighting a section of their screen and twiddling a control which makes it clear that human help is on the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Woah! Take my money!

Though I really wish you would consider selling the software and allowing it to be self hosted for security reasons - I think this is great!

My users really aren't the brightest (that's not to put them down; computer savvy users just aren't my target demographic) - so it would be awesome to see what their struggling with.

That - and for months I've been having an incredibly hard time hunting down 1 specific bug - I've setup all kinds of traps, triggers - still nothing.

Maybe if I can actually see it happen, it'll shed some light on it.

1 problem - in an AngularJS 1.x app - this is throwing a lot of JS errors. The site is working fine with it in place - but the console has a lot of red in it pointing to your script with no specific error message.

Message me if you wanna see for yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! Thank your for your feedback!

Are you seeing errors on your website or peekin.io? There are a lot of console error on peekin.io that are due to the html being sandboxed and there is no way around that.

Otherwise I can take a look :)

\--

As for the product itself: I'm not sure—are you saying you'd use it to watch your user "proactively" or when they ask for support?

Thank you!

<comment><USER4> The errors are occurring on my site, after including the script.

I intend to use the app to watch the user proactively. I have various triggers in place that let me know when a user is on the site / what their looking at / etc... (the usual metrics) but 1 bug continues to elude me. Letting me see what the user is actually doing might help me find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If a "Stuggling with X?" window came up on bottom right hand corner I might not be as creeped out if I thought it was just help

</comment><comment><USER6> Its creepy. Creepy enough to never come back. I did that once and i am pretty sure the user never came back.

</comment><comment><USER7> In most cases creepy, creepy enough to probably leave a site and never come back, especially if it is things like payment details or a service where I store data (so basically, nearly everything that is complex enough to make this service "useful")</comment>


AppJet: Another cloud application framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/12/02/appjet-another-cloud-application-framework/

<comment><USER2> I'm still not impressed. There are many things wrong with it:

1\. I don't know anyone who actually likes javascript. Lots of people use it, but I've never met anyone who loves it. People love ruby, python, C++, VB6, Delphi, Lisp, Clojure, but there are some languages that people just use but don't love, and Javascript is one of them

2\. Why ever would I put my eggs in their basket? Learn a new framework, and have all this run on their servers? They may pull this anytime, and what am I left with - a .jar file that I now have to purchase some expensive server to run with?

3\. I don't see that they will scale. Google, I KNOW they scale because they are at the top of the heap, but I don't know who AppJet are.

Frameworks and languages are a big investment for a programmer, and AppJet offers a lot of uncertainty, but no clear benefit.

Sorry about this, but this one gets my thumb down (again).

<comment><USER3> I actually really enjoy JavaScript. I secretly enjoy closurefu and first-class functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it seems that it isn't a secret anymore.

<comment><USER4> Kinda like Victoria's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this maybe targeted more at novice programmers? A web IDE doesn't make that much sense if you already have local source control, there's an "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming" (<http://appjet.com/learn-to- program/lessons/intro>) linked right on the front page, and the whole experience seems to encourage experimentation with instant feedback. If I'm right, all the comments about Google App Engine miss the point.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks interesting, but I don't know if their architecture can scale as much as appengine.

<comment><USER7> I think that's the big flaw with this, and that's simply that it's a small company. The one thing I can't risk in my cloud app framework is that the company will suddenly go under or that it won't truly scale.

Otherwise, it's cool.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an equivalent of no-code for chemistry or biology? - <AUTHOR> No-code is a way for non programmers to create apps.<p>Is there something analogous that will give me a head start in chemistry or biology? <comment><USER2> Not really. There is biobricks ([https://parts.igem.org/Help:An_Introduction_to_BioBricks](https://parts.igem.org/Help:An_Introduction_to_BioBricks)), but you would need to have some background in biology and lab techniques to know how to use them.

I'm skeptical this would ever be a thing since doing anything non-trivial really does require understand how things work, since there are so many confounding interactions at the molecular level.

If you really want a head start you just need to start learning the fundamentals of those fields.

<comment><USER3> > I'm skeptical this would ever be a thing since doing anything non-trivial > really does require understand how things work, since there are so many > confounding interactions at the molecular level.

What are some examples of these confounding interactions?</comment></comment>


This is your government - <AUTHOR> http://foseti.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/this-is-your-government/

<comment><USER2> " _I do not rule Russia; 10,000 clerks do._ "

Attributed to one or more Russian Czars.</comment>


Docopt: The biggest advancement in argument parsing in the last 40 years - astro- http://broken.build/2015/01/19/docopt/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very untrue. I've already seen exactly the same approach in CPAN several years ago, so it can't be the biggest thing in recent 40 years. It's not that brilliant, either.</comment>


50 Percent Will Abandon Facebook for Google+, Poll Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389102,00.asp

<comment><USER2> This poll is inaccurate for many reasons:

\- Poll audience is skewed (PCMag readership, people who showed up on the site that day)

\- Just because people want to move to G+, doesn't mean they will, unless the rest of their social group does (again, back to point#1)

Not saying that Google + wont do well, or anything just that this poll is pretty much useless as reliable source to base any predictions on.

I would look at things like user engagement, activity etc - this is extremely anecdotal, but so far a lot of my circles (except for my close friends one) have been spammy with poor content filtering (facebook is good about surfacing posts from people i care about, but then again they have a lot more data about who i 'care' about)

My close friends circle has been pretty inactive and I check it maybe once a week, but that might be because there's only 30 people there. Most of my G+ activity over the last week has consisted largely of adding people into circles, and not much else, sadly.

I would also add that my social circles probably have a larger proportion of early adopters than the average user, since I studied programming & work in the software industry (and my social circles tend to reflect that).

I must admit I am also really nervous about merging my social & online identities into one account owned by one company, though the average person would not care about this.

<comment><USER3> You are right: Grannie is already on facebook and isn't gonna learn another social network interface.

<comment><USER4> The grannie in my family will sign up for whichever social network has the pictures of her grandson. So I think that even (especially?) non-technical users will choose whether to sign up based primarily on who else they know is using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In a related poll, 100% of flies trapped in spiderwebs want to break free.

I hope to god Google+ kills Facebook but I'd bet every single cent I have that 400 million Facebook users will not be leaving for G+ anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its a scary thought to have one company control almost all the data for a user. Just think what kind of data Google is collecting using their search engine, adsense, gmail, chrome etc. And now if they have users also move their social circles to Google+, it will give them almost complete information about a person. This is for them THE missing piece of the puzzle to tie everything together. Just for this single reason, I am never going to join Google+ however fancy and cool those circles look like.

<comment><USER7> I'be been wondering about this. Is better for one company to have all your info or multiple companies having all your info? At least by concentrating you can minimize the leaks no?

<comment><USER8> Which other company has all your info? Facebook doesn't have your searches, nor your emails.

<comment><USER7> They pretty much do albeit indirectly, they do have my (incomplete) web history from a bunch of site with like buttons and other such means. I'm not arguing Google has more then most but they all have enough to build a fairly complete profile of me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 50% said "yes" to Google+. 7% said Facebook is irreplaceable. The rest are undecided, unable to join Google+, or responded with "screw social networks".

On the other hand, it's a poll on PCMag. It's not a serious poll, so it's inherently worthless; and the readership is probably biased.

I feel I'd switch my use to Google+ if about 30% of my friends were there, if I liked the interface and privacy stuff more (I haven't seen it yet).

Plus, there's more than a snowball's hope in hell that Google+ will turn out to be a better development platform.

<comment><USER10> I agree that it's heavily biased. For instance, 12% said they haven't even tried G+ yet. Clearly that percentage is higher in the "real world".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And how many of those 50% have actually tried Google+?

At date I believe Google+ has around 30 million users and Facebook has 800 million+

How is this study possibly even close to relevant? I joined Google+ about 2 weeks ago and haven't even gotten used to their interface!

I am so damn tired of nonsense surveys without any form of significant or scientific basis.

Also; I believe that 70% of all Google+ users and Facebook users are likely to join iFriends.com (surveyed from Apple users)

<comment><USER12> > Also; I believe that 70% of all Google+ users and Facebook users are likely > to join iFriends.com (surveyed from Apple users)

For a moment I thought "What? When did I miss Apple coming out with their own social network?" and so I checked iFriends.com; all I have to say is I wasn't really surprised at what I saw.

<comment><USER11> Well that will surely teach me to check the ramdom URL's I type. Was merely making a lighthearted comment on the irony of choosing a user type and asking them aimed questions.

Disclaimer; Not an ifriends.com user and never will be. Seems like a cheap adultfriendfinder affiliate. And a crappy one at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's incredibly difficult to poll populations of 750 million people and get an accurate cross-section. Especially when that population is spread out across multiple continents. To give a sense of scope, the number of people polled represents only 0.0008316% of Facebook users. With a sample that small, you'd have to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure diversity in polling cross- section.

In other words, this poll is useless.

</comment><comment><USER14> ... TBH if only 50% of users in the current primary demographic (PC Mag) are interested... that might not be a good result for Google+ at all...

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also some users from Twitter, and also other users that have never liked Facebook and aren't using it. So Facebook may end up keeping 700 mil users, while Google+ could have 600 mil, or more.

<comment><USER14> I'm not as optomistic as yourself. Outside of my IT friends Google+ is currently a joke. Even inside my group theres a strong division, theres a strong feeling that Google is going to far, alot of people are already upset with Googles privacy issues adn this is a whole new level of issues.

The next thing is 20mil may seem like a great figure, but thats only ~7% of gmail users. That figure is actually pretty average in terms of its user base and a hot new product a month in. I would be slightly concerned if I was the product manager... especially with reports of decline already...

And don't pretend the invite thing why its low, I don't know a person who hasn't got an invite including both my elderly parents.

I don't think Google will fail because of the army of fan boys and wannabes, but I don't think in its current iteration it offers anything that can grow a community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Holy sampling bias, Batman!

This sort of non-story is the kind of thing that makes me want to revoke a "journalist"'s posting privileges.

</comment><comment><USER16> 50% ? Awesome. But in my city, 99% of people doesn't even know what is g+. That 1% are geeks and my family members I told about g+.

</comment><comment><USER17> That only sets Facebook back like, what, a year?

</comment><comment><USER18> If the poll is somehow perfectly accurate then 50% of ~800 Million is still a pretty decent userbase.

But if Google give Facebook a chance to fearmonger about how Google+ users risk losing all Google services (including gmail history) without warning while simultaneously not allowing anyone with a Google Apps account to access the service without really cumbersome workarounds then Google+ will be remembered just like Google Wave is.

<comment><USER19> Don't forget that's 50% of around 6000 techies. In reality I would've thought at least 90% of those 800 million users are non-techies. Maybe they are doing lots of advertising in the states, however here in the UK I'm pretty sure I could ask most non-techies and they wouldn't have even heard of Google+.

It's the one thing that's going to make it tough to beat facebook now is that it's become a household name - most people have heard of it even if they haven't been on the site.

<comment><USER20> And that's mainly because of their so-called development platform picked up by marketing researchers. I am still astonished to see grown-up companies with functional websites driving traffic to "their" out-of-control Facebook pages even with full page ads.

If Google+ would appeal for marketing purposes, I bet it'll gain at least as much popularity in a blink of an eye.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess in their defense, they never said it was a scientific poll.

</comment><comment><USER21> Poll taken from Google+ fans</comment>


Intel won't release Spectre patches for some older chips after all - <AUTHOR> https://liliputing.com/2018/04/intel-wont-release-spectre-patches-for-some-older-chips-after-all.html <comment><USER2> The support list [1] is weird. Gulftown (Core i7) and Westmere-EP (Xeon) are essentially the same chips yet only the latter is patched. The distinction between Gulftown and Westmere-EP actually was barely ever made until now. And Intel's confusing product line has lasted until today - the Xeon W3690 is apparently Gulftown (the only Xeon) and is not patched [2], yet the Xeon W3670 and W3680 are Westmere-EP and will receive their microcode updates [3].

According to this document, make sure to read your CPU's model numbers carefully. It doesn't reflect well on Intel that the line does _not_ appear to be drawn based on technical capability, but apparently on contractual obligations.

Many CPUs in the unsupported list still make very serviceable hardware in 2018. It's a shame a security issue will only add to their obsoletion, or make people using this hardware more vulnerable. Spectre variant 2 is difficult to exploit in practice, but that sounds like some famous last words.

[1]: [https://newsroom.intel.com/wp- content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...](https://newsroom.intel.com/wp- content/uploads/sites/11/2018/04/microcode-update-guidance.pdf)

[2]: On page 8

[3]: On page 16

<comment> chao- That the W3690 is not the same uarch as the W3670 and W3680 is weird as all hell. Even weirder that it differs from the X5690, to which it is almost identical. Did they start selling the W3690 before the other Xeon W-series SKUs?

Saw the headline and my heart sank, but I got a lucky dodge on this. Bought a W3680 because at the time, I couldn't find a W3690 at a reasonable price (from what I could tell they were a top choice for people refreshing their Mac Pros?). Maybe I'll squeeze another 7 years from this X58 machine yet!

<comment><USER3> Sigh, I put a W3690 in an old Mac Pro a couple of years ago, and it's been working nicely. Now time for plan B...

<comment><USER4> Just make sure to get a processor that's not Intel. No need to reward them for bad behaviour.

<comment><USER5> That's going to be hard without changing the mainboard, which will most likely not make it easy to (continue? to) run MacOS.

<comment><USER4> Good point. For me it's not an issue as I barely use OSX any more.

But for people wedded to that platform... not much room to move. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This list includes the base model CPU in the 2009, 2010, and 2012 Mac Pros, as well as some of the BTO upgrades. I'm disappointed, but not surprised.

The 2012 Mac Pros, in particular, were still being sold less than 5 years ago, so this means it's still officially supported by Apple. I wonder if there's some awkward conversations happening between the two companies about that.

Fortunately, it's possible to upgrade the CPU in a Mac Pro to a newer part which is still supported by Intel.

<comment><USER7> I think the "awkward conversations" are already over:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16737072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16737072)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this means we've only seen the beginning of the full effects of Spectre. I'm expecting consequences for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER9> This list includes the Penryns used in most Mac laptops and the Mac Minis up to ~2010 vintage. I still use mine to host various Internet-facing utility services, which it does handily.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, all the Libreboot laptops are done. Frog boiled.

Freedom's last holdout now are Coreboot ARM machines like the latest ARM Chromebooks.

<comment><USER7> RISC-V: A new hope

<comment><USER11> Until you can run x86_64 at native speeds, replacing it will take a long time.

<comment><USER10> [https://youtu.be/Ii_pEXKKYUg?t=5m16s](https://youtu.be/Ii_pEXKKYUg?t=5m16s)

RISC-V is already faster. It just needs better fabs.

<comment><USER11> I already knew RISC-V was/is faster in benchmarks. But does that translate to transparently emulating x86_64 for the majority of use cases?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh fucking great... my CPU's on the list, they didn't ask me but apparently I don't mind someone stealing all of my credentials from my main computer... what kind of BS non user said that.

I will never buy another Intel CPU, fuck you very much Intel.

If you have an old macbook you might want to check that list, the various flavours of C2Duos on that list were pretty common.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Bloomfield i7s are still perfectly serviceable processors. People will almost certainly continue using them unpatched.

</comment><comment><USER14> My Q6600 based desktop (g0 stepping) died right before all this news came out after a decade of dedicated use. Guess it would have had to be retired anyways.

</comment><comment><USER15> Has AMD released Spectre patches for all of their old chips? I'm guessing they haven't so it looks likes Intel has company.

<comment><USER16> If I'm not mistaken, the weaknesses of AMD processors with regards to Spectre were less pronounced than Intel's, so maybe they could get by.

<comment><USER15> According to Wikipedia, AMD CPU's are just as vulnerable to Spectre variant 1 and 2 as is Intel. The confusion that AMD was not vulnerable to variant 2 was due to a mistake made by AMD and later corrected by them 9 days later after verifying they were also vulnerable to variant 2.

 _AMD originally acknowledged vulnerability to one of the Spectre variants (GPZ variant 1), but stated that vulnerability to another (GPZ variant 2) had not been demonstrated on AMD processors, claiming it posed a "near zero risk of exploitation" due to differences in AMD architecture. In an update nine days later, AMD said that "GPZ Variant 2…is applicable to AMD processors" and defined upcoming steps to mitigate the threat. Several sources took AMD's news of the vulnerability to GPZ variant 2 as a change from AMD's prior claim, though AMD maintained that their position had not changed._

<comment><USER17> Their position didn't change. AMD architecture simply doesn't prefetch data that requires elevated permissions to execute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunate, but not unexpected.

A shame about Bloomfield and Gulftown, but the rest of the products seem to be firmly in the legacy/obsolete category.

<comment><USER19> Bloomfield's a decade old, Gulftown only moderately less. I'm pretty sure I'd put them in the legacy category today (and I have a 975 around here, so I'm a little bummed, but I get it).</comment></comment>


The Trouble with Free Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/trouble-free-software-sean-mcbeth/ <comment><USER2> "Stop publishing source / programmers should be paid" ... I can't disagree; but we tried that once, remember? That's what the software world _was_ until after it became possible to build free software using free software.

The free sharing of creativity in software has advanced the world and made the life of most everybody on the planet measurably better. The several thousand burnt out, used up, F/OSS developers who didn't cash in (and I count myself among that number in my arrogance) are not too large a price to pay for having the world we have now vs the world we had then.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I wrote this with the Software Freedoms in mind, which the GPL is an expression of, I'm only using it as a model for discussion. I'm not explicitly saying "license under the GPL".

So with that said, the GPL does not say "put your code up on Github". It says "give your code to your users". It also doesn't say "don't charge for your software." I'm talking about taking these ideas literally. The only people who get your software from you are people who have paid, and they get the source code along with it.

People have always surmised that, because of Software Freedom #2 (redistribution), they could turn around and release your code for free, so the majority of people have defaulted to just releasing their code, in the open, for free. I question whether or not that would actually be the case, or how big of an impact it would have.

I'm also not really sure I like Freedom #2 in its most explicit sense. I am starting to think that I'd prefer to operate under a model where anyone may modify My Code as they want (Freedom #1), and release the modifications as they see fit (Freedom #3), but the original base of it all, My Code, they need to get from me. In the context of "getting paid", I think that model might work better. But that's more of a minor detail.

I'm not saying "hide your code". I'm just saying, "stop leaving it laying around."

Yes, the world has benefited greatly. But Google and Facebook seem to have benefited more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article seems laden with strawman arguments. A lot of FOSS software is exceptional, and it isn't made by Google, et. all. For examples: Ubuntu, Blender 3D, etc.

(I realize that Ubuntu includes binary blobs, and Blender gets money from Google sometimes via Summer of Code. I don't think those facts invalidate my point.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Canonical is a $110 million company. They are stewards of Linux, but they profit from the free work that others are doing. I'm calling into question whether or not that's enough. In the case of Canonical, it's a tough call, though getting a little less tough the more ad-tech they push more ad-tech into it.

On the extreme end, the massive profitability of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., is a signal that they are taking more than they are giving.

And there is a long, long tail of other, popular projects that have had huge impact on the world, for which the developers have not received anything remotely approaching fair compensation. Look at the impact jQuery had on the world in the mid 2000's. Looking at Wikipedia just now, it says that it's in use on 73% of the 10 million most popular websites. Surely, somewhere, somebody could have coughed up a few dollars.</comment></comment>


What font is this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/262720332

<comment><USER2> Almost completely certain it's Bodoni.

[http://www.identifont.com/show?GL](http://www.identifont.com/show?GL)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could it be Bembo Book, ITC Legacy Serif Pro, or Garamond ?</comment>


Why Life on Other Planets Will Resemble Ours - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/alien-nations-why-life-on-other-planets-will-resemble-ours-15fb4ede6fe7?source=rss----444d13b52878---4&gi=d80bf9c17a3d <comment><USER2> Requires some kind of sign-in to read the article. Not going to happen.</comment>


Show HN: UI Movement – The best UI design animations, every day - <AUTHOR> http://uimovement.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I initially launched UI Movement just over a year ago and it started out as a simple newsletter to showcase UI designs.

Today I'm launching version 2.0, which is completely redesigned to make browsing and filtering easier. New UI animations are tagged so that if you're working on a specific design element, you can easily find the popular animations for that element (like map browsing animations, for example).

I'm a developer professionally myself, and many of the 10,000 subscribers are developers, so I hope some of you find the site & newsletter useful too.

If you have any questions about the stack, the costs and revenue, or anything else, please ask away.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is cool. It's one of my favourite emails I receive each week, so simple. Really liking the addition of tags here.</comment>


Apple confirms it now uses Google Cloud for iCloud services - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google-cloud-platform-icloud-confirmation <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465315)</comment>


How the U.S. Won Cuban Soil - <AUTHOR> http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/funfacts/guantan.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> This tells the story of how the USA started a base in Guantanamo Bay (site of the famed prison), and how it maintains a large military presence in one of its supposed biggest political adversaries.</comment>


In defense of NIH syndrome (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ <comment><AUTHOR> Shared this here because I think the NIH syndrome is far too rarely discussed in a positive light. The article brings some fresh air to the topic.</comment>


How India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/how-the-worlds-largest-democracy-shuts-down-the-internet <comment><USER2> Context is super important while reporting such news.

"India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet " \- False.

"India, the World's Largest Democracy, Shuts Down the Internet in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan " (they had it blocked for entire state of Jammu and Kashmir) where terror attacks are (were?) a norm, specially in Kashmir

<comment><USER3> Internet access was cut off recently also in the states of UP and Karnataka, where terror attacks are totally not the norm. It was done in response to protests against the CAA.

Edit: I mention this to call out the tendency of this government to use internet access cuts to suppress dissent regularly as a powerful tool.

[https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/internet- shutdown-...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/internet-shutdown- continues-in-several-parts-including-mangaluru-ghaziabad-following-anti- citizenship-protests/story-hnPSSj9oGh2AtZw8TQoxaM.html)

<comment><USER4> Is burning buses just dissent for you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We need to realise that the internet/social media shutdowns will now become normal to "control" populations and ensure people cannot mobilise or protest. Governments are putting in place the methods to avoid protest. The problem with this if you have a maniac in charge it's going to be a helluva thing to get theM out. The only way around this is to develop tools and solutions. Otherwise democracy as we know it is dead.

<comment><USER6> >The only way around this is to develop tools and solutions.

It's an interesting thought experiment what those tools would be like.

Maybe something like freenet mixed with ipfs over a wifi mesh network? Not sure how that would work with that much latency.

You could have throwaway wifi dropboxes to propagate between people.

One project I read about was a raspberry pi wifi "grenade". It boots off a usb with the encryption key then it runs off a ramdisk. Then you "pull the pin" and leave it. If it's discovered then nobody can analyze it to find out what it was doing or who it was communicating with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I understand why this is flagged, but I wish it wasn't.

Regardless of the proposed merits of the shutdowns (I don't consider them valid), the concept of this is horrifying.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article starts with:

"Update 27 January 2020: News reports state that India's government has restored Internet access to the Kashmir region"

RESTORED (albeit partially)

<comment><USER9> "though residents there can currently only browse 301 websites approved by the government and still cannot use social media"

It's also worth noting that this started in August 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Realistically, what are the options to access Internet in a region where government blocks it on an ISP level? Or is it back to carrier pigeons?

<comment><USER11> People smuggle usb sticks into North Korea...

I've also read about still using the usb sticks or something similar for the transport but using ipfs or dat so you can propagate updates to files, eg an archive of news or resistance communications.

You could actually do this with carrier pigeons.

<comment><USER10> What is 'dat'? I couldn't find anything that would make sense in this context.

<comment><USER12> These should help:

[https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat- works/](https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat-works/)

[https://www.datprotocol.com/](https://www.datprotocol.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> can anyone with any insight into indian governance comment on why this wouldn't somehow be a massive legal liability?

I realize states typically have full autonomy w/r/t 'fighting terror', but the economic implications for just about everything seem like this could result in all kinds of lawsuits and also wouldn't be tenable from the perspective of 'political capital'

<comment><USER14> India is massively under policed, which makes maintaining law and order a daunting task in volatile situations[1]. For Kashmir, the situation is far more complicated due to the presence of external terror.

1\. [https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-police-force- amo...](https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-police-force-among-the- world-s-weakest-1560925355383.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> India is developing due to $160 billion/year FDI + NRI remittance; And Modi regime destroyed the economy/credibility of India [https://mobile.twitter.com/TimDraper/status/1207674025616519...](https://mobile.twitter.com/TimDraper/status/1207674025616519173)

</comment><comment><USER16> Uhm, maybe it's time we work harder to put communication infrastructure in the hands of corporations and other non-state non-nation transnational entities that are powerful enough so governments don't have much power over them? Maybe monopolies and tech giants could be a good thing you know... Under a few big "Unbrella Co."-s you could have a nice pseudo-anarchic libertarian global system.

 _Whatever happened with the idea of a future where corporations would be truly transnational and would have private armies and police forces and such and really dwarf governments in power? ...it sounded like a dystopia back then, but nowadays I 'd really wish we'd be in that variant of the future instead of the current one!_

<comment><USER17> I mean. In case the downvotes arent clear, you are aware of the history of e.g. the British East India Company?

<comment><USER16> ...wasn't that familiar with the gritty details this part of history, but from a simple skimming, I see that things sort of worked-out fine until BEIC shifted its focus from _trade and profit_ to _territory grabbing, waring around, and administration_. And it started behaving as a nation, probably because it was... all its owners where British nobility, right? That seems to be also when things turned bad for them - they practically went bankrupt but were still artificially kept a float by the then British Empire?

Probably a good lesson to be learned from BEIC for future transnational megacorps: _(1) keep your focus on making profit and growing (growing in the do-lots-of-R &D to increase your technological supremacy sense - you probably can't grow marketshare after you're already a monopoly), (2) let governments do the "drawing borders" and maintaining local civil order part, and (3) diversity, diversity, diversity - if all your owners are from one nation and one social-class / race / whatever, you'll be phagocytized or subverted by that nation and/or sub-group._</comment></comment></comment>


The Men Who Are Convinced We're All Living in a Simulation - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/the-men-who-are-convinced-were-all-living-in-a-simulation-d2c76772df2f <comment><USER2> Slightly More technical discussion: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living- in-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a- computer-simulation/)

This idea isn't new. Robert Heinlein wrote about this decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stopped reading after: "That all changed last November, though, when the Chicago Cubs, the most futile franchise in the history of professional sports, won the World Series, and Donald Trump, the most unqualified candidate in the history of the U.S. presidency, won the Electoral College"

</comment><comment><USER4> Tom Campbell is also famous for his virtual reality theory. According to him the acceptance among scientists grew from few people to several thousands and continues to grow

</comment><comment><USER5> :wonders what the women believe:

</comment><comment><USER6> It kind of feels like someone made a fairly well-intentioned simulation, and then some other people came along and hacked it for their own benefit, taking away a large part of the value proposition, and leaving a mildly shitty simulation for the remaining people. I guess that sort of thing would be inevitable.

<comment><USER6> Here is a more interesting question imho: Assuming we are in a simulation, how does a person make sure that their thoughts are 'really their own' and not sort of programmed in. E.g. How does a person make sure that they are not a robot, that they are not being manipulated to e.g. vote for someone, have whatever political view, do this or that thing.

<comment><USER7> The whole topic is pointless because it does not detract or add to the realism of our existence; this is just another exercise in pure determinism.

You already are bootstrapped by your biology and life experience you do not make decisions in vacuum and there is a good chance that your biology has as much of an impact on your base political views as your nurture.

<comment><USER6> Hypothetical scenario 1: Let's suppose Person A exists for a while and has belief set A. Now person B comes along a while later and /claims/ to be a life-extension clone or something of Person A who is maybe entitled to some of the resources that Person A had available. (Maybe just a different avatar, in video game terms) Should Person B. exhibit some or all of the same beliefs that Person A had in order to claim this? (I would say obviously yes..?)

Hypothetical scenario 2: Suppose that Person A has whatever beliefs in ordinary times, but is put in a stress or otherwise abnormal situation and forced to make whatever decision. Should their decision be their ordinary time logical choice, or their choice under a high amount of stress?

I'm sure I could come up with more scenarios, but the point is, what should be intellectually considered a given person, in circumstances like a simulation where an adversary could heavily muddle the waters.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand the scenario you proposed or it's relation to the simulation hypothesis.

However as for the latter part of your post anything which is external is irrelevant.

Basically it doesn't matter if the universe is a simulation a hologram or a marble it has no actual impact on our reality since it's ohtside of its scope.

If we are being tinkered with it does not detract from our reality in any way it doesn't change anything since if we are in a simulation then an administrator who modified your code is on the same level as natural law, they are a part of the universe not our peers.

<comment><USER6> (I guess that's sort of off the thread)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Widely cited blind audition study spurious - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition-study-11571599303?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Paywalled. Article text also here:

[https://wokeamerican.net/blind-spots-in-the-blind- audition-s...](https://wokeamerican.net/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition- study/)</comment>


We scraped the World Bank's website - <AUTHOR> http://www.cgdev.org/publication/we-just-ran-twenty-three-million-queries-world-banks-website-working-paper-362

<comment><USER2> An interesting and somewhat related (but only tangentially) article I read a couple of days ago found that nearly 1/3rd of World Bank reports are never read, not even by a single person: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/08/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/08/the- solutions-to-all-our-problems-may-be-buried-in-pdfs-that-nobody-reads/)

It was submitted to HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7715881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7715881)) by another user, but probably never got traction because the title of the article is very vague.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like a marketing problem. Although, I suspect the PDFs aren't the only dissemination method (as stated in the article). After someone spends so much time writing a report, it probably sits in their consciousness and spreads via the person's other interactions (eg shaping their perspective, thinking, and pursuits). With so many people producing so much content on a daily basis, it's hard to imagine people actually reading it all. So hopefully the good ideas get kept in the person's thoughts and come out repeatedly until it's heard. Otherwise, I am not sure there really is a good filtering mechanism on a system scale.

<comment><USER4> Or maybe they are spreading bad ideas, we won't know unless somebody reviews them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or...you could simply use the World Bank's website and free API that already offers much public data to download in various formats: [http://data.worldbank.org/](http://data.worldbank.org/)

A similar data repository is available from the European Central Bank: [http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/](http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "public domain... but can [only] be accessed in small pieces"

Sounds like the wonderful world of "APIs" on the www.

This sort of data should be on an FTP server.

I can build my own "apps". Give me the option of raw data.

Just my opinion, nothing more.

<comment> aaron-lebo That's not quite what is going on. I had to do a paper for class recently that was looking at economic indicators. If I needed data on "Agriculture & Rural Development":

[http://data.worldbank.org/topic/agriculture-and-rural- develo...](http://data.worldbank.org/topic/agriculture-and-rural-development)

Down at the bottom is a link that will give you a csv file:

[http://api.worldbank.org/v2/en/topic/1?downloadformat=csv](http://api.worldbank.org/v2/en/topic/1?downloadformat=csv)

I thought it was really easy. I ended up having to visit multiple download links, but stitching the data together was simple using Python.

Without looking at the paper, I'm not sure what exactly they have. Have they just done the stitching already and are providing the complete data set? Or is there additional data not covered in the csv downloads?

Edit: Having looked a the paper it looks like the data they scraped was not in the CSVs. But I really cannot tell. If that is the case, I don't know why only some data is available as a bulk download and other data is not. So...back to your original point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the source right now. Noticed comments in the code along the lines of "selenium is really slow traversing the dom" etc.. Also noticed the script implements the non-headless Firefox WebDriver. Wouldn't it have been _much_ faster to have used GhostDriver or some similar headless solution?

<comment><USER8> Unless you need to evaluate JavaScript or take screenshots of the rendered page is there any point at all in using a webdriver like that instead of building a plain old scraper?

<comment><USER9> I agree, using Selenium seems like an unnecessary waste of time and cpu resources when replicating the GET/POST requests and parsing the html response using a simple Perl or Python script would have sufficed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the data could be useful.

On the other hand, the data was probably already useful through the world bank's tool. Furthermore, it's reasonable to assume that the data was only released because the people who had to make the final decision were convinced that the effort required to reassemble the data would be prohibitive. The fact that it's now all been released might have a chilling effect on future releases.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Not sure I follow. Do you think the World Bank will now hesitate to release their data because someone scraped it?

They have an open data policy, using CC-BY [1], so unless this scraping effort took data that wasn't covered by that it should be ok I think.

[1] [http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:...](http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23164491~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The code is _very_ well commented and I'd highly recommend if anyones interested in scraping to read through it. As a bonus, the Appendix details all the steps to run the script making it very easy for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why would such important public data be only available to internal researchers? Cost? Politics? Fear?

<comment><USER13> If 70% of their reports are downloaded only a couple of times, ever, I would guess that the answer is that nobody is interested in them. Have you ever read one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is an appendix to the paper describing how to install and run the author's script. I'd like to take a look at the source, but can't find an actual link to the code. Am I overlooking something?

<comment><USER14> 1\. go here [http://www.cgdev.org/section/publications?f[0]=field_documen...](http://www.cgdev.org/section/publications?f\[0\]=field_document_type%3A2057)

2\. click on the link to "We Just Ran Twenty-Three Million Queries of the World Bank's Web Site"

3\. click on the "Data & Analysis" tab

4\. scroll to the bottom and there are download links to harvester_parameters.py, harvester.py and unloader.py

BUT i can't seem to actually download them, as there is some redirect that fails :( i tried creating an account on that site as well. anyone else have any luck?

<comment><USER7> Perfect, thanks.

I got the redirect error too when I tried to download _all_ files. However when I deselected all and just checked the readme, csv data, and python scripts, it worked just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i thought the point of this way, gee, the world bank makes it hard for you to get data out, so we scraped them, and here is the data for you guys to play around with. I looked for a bit, but couldnt find the data -- am I missing something?

<comment><USER16> The last sentence on that page reads: "The full data can be downloaded at www.cgdev.org/povcalnet."

<comment><USER17> And the page linked has large number of files that appear to be relevant to _other_ papers but not this one.

However, this link

[http://www.cgdev.org/section/publications?f[0]=field_documen...](http://www.cgdev.org/section/publications?f\[0\]=field_document_type%3A2057)

leads to page that has two papers listed by title. Click the second of the papers. Click Data and Analysis tab, and you can download the CSV files they obtained. You don't need a log in but you do need to agree to sensible looking conditions.

I can't seem to link directly to the agree terms/download page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess they could have just gone to [http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home/](http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home/) and downloaded via CSV

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if they would have released this if Weev had not been freed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looking at some random datasets, this looks like it's pretty small datasets (less than a mb?) -- so it'd be nice to just have them zip-ed and available as a torrent (say plain-text description in one file, and csv in a folder per set)?

Rather than re-creating the problem of data being hard to find by splitting the download links over two-pages, and apparently requiring a click-through for every dataset to get at the data?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not even sure what kind of data this would be but it sounds fascinating.</comment>


Show HN: A crowd-sourced MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/crowdcourse

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, OP here. This is one of my first major projects, and it's basically a crowd-sourced version of Khan Academy, Coursera, etc. Please give it a look and consider making a contribution. I'm always happy to hear any feedback.

You can check out the site directly at <http://www.crowdcourse.com/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I built something very similar two years ago:

<http://www.newschool.co/>

I essentially abandoned the project, but I'd like to get back in it. If you're interested in working together somehow, shoot me an email at Miserlou57 at aol dotcom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your interest. It's funny that we both started with Calculus as our first course. I'd be interested in a conversation. Expect an email from me soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> how did you get that domain name?

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the idea and I'd love to contribute, but English is not my first language and my pronounciation is terrible.

I would consider creating no-sound video lectures with annotations on the side, if someone else with a clean pronounciation would then do the voiceovers and mix their recorded voice into the videos.

Have you considered such a scenario?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I'd love to branch out and support non-native English speakers (as well as other languages) in the future.</comment></comment>


A developers framework for (beginner) UX design - <AUTHOR> http://jessepollak.me/2012/07/17/a-developers-framework-for-ux-design/

<comment><USER2> There's so much wrong with this approach I don't even know where to start. Follow if you want mediocre ux.</comment>


Amazon applies a restocking fee of 25% of the item price - <AUTHOR> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dxxvi/amazon-restocking-fee/master/Amazon-restocking-fee.png<p>It's a surprise that nobody outside of Amazon knows about Amazon restocking fee. <comment><USER2> One of the problems is Amazon decided to become a bazaar instead of a store. So it might be sold by Amazon, or fulfilled by Amazon, or sold by somebody else. You have to pay attention to who you're buying from and what the policies are. It's like walking into Target and there's the regular store but there's been a flea market setup inside as well.

Personally I wish they'd segregate the experience. Have one experience be the Amazon store as it used to be with consistent expectations. If you can't find the product you want it could then direct you to the bazaar.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=901926) ?

<comment><USER4> Came here to post this. Some items are marked Free Returns, others are not. This is not news, and plenty of people know about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've not had any issues with this, though I am somewhat hesitant to return items because of the articles I've read about Amazon sometimes closing accounts - including access to AWS and previously-purchased digital goods - for "too many returns".

In the past month I've returned a cellphone case (not as described) and a marine-grade amplifier (despite being explicitly "waterproof", it failed the first time it got rained on). I probably won't buy anything expensive from them for a while because I don't to have to return something else if it's faulty.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Items in original condition past the return window*"

<comment><USER7> "If your item was fulfilled by a third-party seller, you may be charged up to 20% restocking fee even if you return the item in original condition within the return window."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That must be an American thing. Here in EU an online seller must give a full refund for any item returned within a few weeks.

<comment><USER8> Is there a reason for that? Here (US) a lot of people buy stuff on a whim and when they decide they don't like it, they just return it, as Amazon usually doesn't charge anything.

I always though that as a huge cost that ends up being passed on to people who don't buy+return stuff on impulse.

<comment><USER9> This is a risk Amazon assumes, by offering products that customers cannot see in-person before purchasing. There is no substitute for actually handling the product, and Amazon can't exist if people are reluctant to purchase items for this reason. While returns may cost Amazon, they are essential to convincing customers it's ok to by unseen merchandise. Think Zappos (also an Amazon company).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > To set expectations, we have a restocking fee if Amazon is not in error.

> To set expectations, we have a 30-day free return window. This is why I > could wave the fee.

...What? Is this not conflicting policy? It creates an artificial price increase only for the ignorant customer. If there is a free return window, why are they charging anything? The expectations they set are very confusing.

<comment><USER11> Amazon is strange in that way.

On my first Kindle Paperwhite (second Kindle overall) I paid for removal of ads.

For my second Paperwhite I just called the hotline and asked them to cancel the ads. Done. For free.

<comment><USER10> I bought a Paperwhite last month and I was planning to do this. Heard it worked for a lot of people. How long did you wait before asking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you return an item, Amazon probably cannot reasonably literally 're-stock' it as they can't be sure what you have done to it, even if it appears sealed. I would imagine the item now has to be sold at a massive discount, recycled, or simply thrown away, so to them it's probably 100% loss when you include things like shipping.

You're at fault for that - you simply decided you didn't want it after previously agreeing to purchase it - so it seems very reasonable to me to charge you for that. I think in the US they don't have to accept returns at all when you don't really have any reason (in some countries they do) so they're already doing you a favour!

<comment><USER13> > I would imagine the item now has to be sold at a massive discount, recycled, > or simply thrown away, so to them it's probably 100% loss when you include > things like shipping.

I've received numerous "new" items that were previously opened and returned merchandise; things like a vacuum with hairs in one of the cleaning attachments. Same with a pair of headphones. I'd be happy if there were a discount for accepting a minimally used item. As it is Amazon just hopes you don't notice.

<comment><USER14> "amazon warehouse deals" is where all the returns go. And yes you can get good deals.</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Cuban: Success & Motivation - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogmaverick.com/2007/12/24/success-and-motivation/

<comment><USER2> This seems like it would do well in the next editions of founders at work or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm. So he agreed to take part in deceiving the employment agency in order to get his first computer-industry job?

Frankly, I don't have much respect for this.

<comment><USER4> "Michael wasn't as convinced, but he then asked me the question I was dying to hear: "Would you not go back to the employment agency at all, so when we hire you we don't have to pay the fee?" I was in."

Seems to me like he didn't state what his response was. He could have said "No, that would be wrong."</comment></comment>


This week, I employed 1052 people.. - <AUTHOR> http://martijnpannevis.nl/blog/2010/01/13/this-week-i-employed-1052-people/

<comment><USER2> Was your motivation to go through another intermediate on top of mturk because Amazon does not deliver its mturk service to European companies or for another reason ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's mostly because Crowfdlower does some additional filtering: they have an algorithm that rates workers, and bases it's trust in the worker on how well he does compared to others. It also does some magic on resubmitting a unit as long as the results aren't clear yet.

Also you can set some "gold" units: assignments you have done yourself, so you know the right answer. This can be used to test if the workers are actually trying, instead of just clicking random stuff.

While I could have built all that myself, Crowdflower already does this, and has a bit simpler API to boot, than Mturk itself.

<comment><USER2> Neat! I tried signing up for mturk a few weeks ago as a customer but they wouldn't accept me because of the location of the company.

Pretty disappointing. I hope they open that up sooner or later (rather sooner), it seems to be a little roundabout to have to register another company just to be able to use mturk.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually also tried signing up for mTurk. And while I guess it's not how it's supposed to work, I could sign up after looking up a random NY zipcode. Not 100% sure about the billing tho, but I do know non-americans who have used Mturk before, and supposedly also paid for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did you find out if the CrowdFlower workers are more/less expensive compared to mturk (excluding CrowdFlower charges of course)? What I mean is there might be people wanting to work only under CrowdFlower's umbrella and asking more for their (proven) quality work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crowdflower uses mturk as its main source of workers (they have some other interfaces as well), but I'm not sure that it being a crowdflower job is even shown at mturk (I'm sure some mturk workers will recognize the layout etc). I haven't compared the prices, since I haven't run the jobs directly on Mturk, but we are quite happy with our current pricepoint.

<comment><USER4> Have you ever looked at the 1secondfilm project? <http://www.the1secondfilm.com/>

Seems like something that might interest you - you should get in touch with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The video is actually really impressive.

<comment><USER6> <http://oneframeoffame.com>. It's a pretty catchy song as well!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: As a Technical Lead what metrics do you collect? - <AUTHOR> Metrics in following areas:
1.  Code in general/Code quality
2.  Application performance (rails web app in my case)
3.  Agile metrics (Scrum based)
4.  Team metrics
5.  Anything I might have missed
How useful are this metrics?  How do you use them? <comment><USER2> I am measuring things that are displayed in ollertapp.com It's free and open source addition to Trello.

I think that focusing on metrics that are synthetic can be misleading and do some bad things for a morale.

Focus on providing valuable outcome to end-users.</comment>


HeyDuel: Anonymously vote on your Facebook friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.heyduel.com/

<comment><USER2> While I'm just speculating since this doesn't seem like the type of thing I really want to give my Facebook credentials to, it seems that it wouldn't be especially anonymous if the people who are 'dueling' don't have a lot of mutual friends with each other.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whoa. This is allowed by the facebook TOS? Including the bit at the bottom where anyone can see who has been duelled against whom, and who won?</comment>


Ask HN: What is better than Evernote? - X-combinator

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding your question, you can take a look at Google Keep but I think that Google is not making a good competitor to Evernote byt itself. The advantage over Evernote is the Google ecosystem integration.

</comment><comment><USER2> Where can I download "Paper + Pen" and is it available on Android?

</comment><comment><USER3> Paper + Pen

<comment><AUTHOR> How exactly you take bookmarks with paper and pen? How can a bookmark taken with paper and pen be useful? How do you read simplified versions of articles while taking notes with paper and pen? How do you capture pictures with notes with paper and pen (unless you draw really really good). And so on...</comment></comment>