A static website generator in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus <comment><USER2> I did some due diligence on static site generators at the beginning of the year, first writing down my desired attributes:

* Actively maintained

* Supports Markdown

* Written in Python

* Flexible templating system

* Supports RSS/Atom feeds

* Supports syntax highlighting

* Track history (been around for at least a year)

The above list seemed like a good place to start, and after going through all the various candidates, the one that met all my criteria was Pelican. I liked the project and its author enough to eventually join the team as a committer. Check it out at: <http://getpelican.com/>

Cactus looks interesting, but I prefer having a wider range of deployment targets (instead of just S3). I also prefer the Jinja templates that Pelican uses instead of Cactus' Django templates. Just my two cents, of course. All of the various static site generators bring something interesting to the table — the more the merrier!

<comment><USER3> Have you tried Punch? <http://laktek.github.com/punch>. (and yes, I'm the creator).

It will fit into all your requirements and has been there for almost a year now.

<comment><USER4> > * Written in Python

Isn't punch a nodejs app?

<comment><USER5>
        * Download and Install Node.js.
        * Install Punch npm install -g punch

Seems so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a general plug for the Flask framework: <http://flask.pocoo.org/>

A lot of you are probably familiar with Flask and its awesome Jinja2 templating system.

There's a well supported, officially approved extension called Frozen-Flask that generates static sites from a Flask/Jinja2 deployment: <http://packages.python.org/Frozen-Flask/>

<comment><USER7> Assuming one were looking to create a simple static file from scratch (e.g. a personal blog), why would one select Frozen-Flask over a traditional static site engine?

If you are familiar with building sites with Flask, I can obviously see the appeal, but for someone unfamiliar with Flask, is there any advantage to going the Frozen-Flask route over simply using a static site generator and content stored as flat markdown? One of the selling points of static sites for me was not having to include a database layer for something as simple as a personal blog with a few dozen entries that I wish to serve.

<comment><USER8> It's probably worthwhile to point out the distinction between general frameworks for static page generation and those that are designed for blogs. Overall the supported features are similar with the only difference being the amount of code that needs to be written and how opinionated the framework is regarding the project structure. This latter point pretty much defines whether a particular framework will work for your project.

I have a static site, which is published in two languages, currently with over 5000 pages and about 50 page updates and new pages added per day. None of the static blog frameworks were flexible enough even though my requirements are pretty minimal. I ended up using <https://github.com/mtigas/django-medusa/> with a custom app, <https://github.com/StuartMacKay/django-sitepaths> to manage all the pages and allow pages to be easily regenerated. This works well, with little tinkering to keep it working however I'd certainly take a closer look at Frozen-Flask for my next project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also published my own static website generator. (Excuse my albeit-related shameless plug.)

<https://github.com/shazow/composer>

Composer is framework for building your own static site generator. It's not opinionated about what kind of website you want, or which templates you want to use, or what kind of pre/post processing you want to do, etc.

For example, shazow.net is composed by pulling metadata from a git repo and using author/timestamps those as variables in each Mako template container for Markdown+Pygments processed text.

Composer comes with a bunch of pre-built filters for convenience (Mako, Markdown, Jinja2, RST, Pygments—adding your own is bordering trivial), a site compiler and auto-reloading server, and some other reusable components.

If you're interested in doing something completely custom, this might be a good starting point. I haven't worked on it in several months but I like the core philosophy and design—I think others might too. Forks and pull requests welcome.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been very happily using Blogofile. It's what Mike Bayer uses for SQLAlchemy. There's a built in blog engine, and it uses Mako templates, which are significantly better than the django ones.

It also by default will recognize multiple formats (e.g. markdown, mako, plain html) for rendering and you can embed markdown inside of the mako templates.

And vaporfile works pretty well for uploading the finished site to S3: <https://github.com/enigmacurry/vaporfile>

</comment><comment><USER11> It would be great if someone (esp. the generator's authors or users) could comment on how this is different than the other Pythyon static site generators, such as Pelican. Based on the docs, it appears that it's built with easy deployment to S3 in mind.

<comment><USER12> Author here. I haven't looked too much at Pelican, but Cactus was built for designers (eg. be simple). The goal was to get them from nothing to a fully hosted site on s3 in under a minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a weird approach to this problem that someone might like. I use Brunch, which is a frontend assembler (like Yeoman but with more flexibility). I then use a Jinja2 watcher utility over the output directory. So one watcher does Stylus>CSS, Coffee>JS, minifying, concat etc., and the other one is for the template stuff. I wrote a simple utility for the templating part, which can output site translations too if you want. <https://github.com/jokull/jinjet>

Warning: Not good for blogging or anything you would like to update often.

I've also tried Flask-Freezer for static sites. All the benefits of regular frameworks.

Cactus has some nice things going for it, but some decisions are weird. May I suggest using Jinja2 for templating, Django is complete overkill and simply an inferior template engine. Oh and make it at least somewhat PEP8 compatible.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do any of these static site generators support A/B testing (probably via some JS)?

That's the real thing that I see missing in a lot of CMS's. If I could setup A/B tests right in markdown and easily post the results somewhere(A bit tricksy, yes), that would simplify operations hugely for a great many people.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. This would be a killer feature. Right now the options you have is to do everything server side (say django-lean) or use one of the commercial options (optimizely). Not ideal.

My money on the static site generator race is on docPad.

<comment><USER16> The most painful part is that you _used_ to be able to use Google Website Optimizer as a static-site-wide a/b tester. I was doing just that on my own (Hakyll-generated) site, gwern.net, and half-way through Google shut it down, and replaced it with some crippled thing in Google Analytics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work. I really like the simple deployment aspect.

I've been working on a static site generator as well, but with a twist. My issue has always been having to learn a brand new framework and set of commands to simply generate a static site. I already know Django very well, so I built a static site generator on top of it. I just use the Django test client ([https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/#module...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/testing/#module- django.test.client)) to dump the static content to a folder. I have some markdown helpers too, so all posts can be written in markdown and live in some folder at the root of the project. I have a few more things to finish with it, if anyone's interested I can throw it on Github.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here is my static site generator in Python: socrates. <http://honza.ca/socrates/>

Jinja2 templates; write in md, rst, textile; sphinx syntax highlighting; yaml config; compatible with s3 and github pages; atom feed.

<comment><USER19> I converted my WP hosted blog over to socrates last year. Very familiar and enjoyable environment being someone who does python, and served up using GitHub pages. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not to beat a dead horse with yet another recommendation, but here's what I'm using for my own site: <https://github.com/Ceasar/staticjinja>

Very simple, but perfect for my needs. Granted, I haven't added a blog yet, but it looks like it'll be pretty easy when I get around it it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I personally use Jekyll for my own blog - because I spent a lot of hours setting it up, and now it _just works_.

However, for my homepage[0], I use Asciiweb[1], a - As a fan of ASCII art, I'm really happy with it. It's great for a static homepage, though not that great for blogging.

It uses a custom markup language that supports a couple of great features: optional per-page configuration, executing scripts through a nifty <exec> tag, and the script's output is placed in the web page. I use this to run a BSD fortune script[2]!

[0]: <http://www.hardikr.com>

[1]: <http://tastytronic.net/asciiweb/aw.cgi>

[2]: <http://www.hardikr.com/aw.cgi?main=fortune.rfk>

</comment><comment><USER22> The major problem with all static generators is that, by design, they can't host comments. And using a 3rd party source for comments ain't exactly what I'd be looking for (self-contained)

The minor problem is that all the ones I used so far are a lot more complex to use that dynamic generators, for some reason. (Even thus I write templates, css, etc for the dynamic ones as well). It seems like a "it has to be complex" syndrome :p

<comment><USER23> > The major problem with all static generators is that, by design, they can't > host comments. And using a 3rd party source for comments ain't exactly what > I'd be looking for (self-contained)

I have initiated work on talkatv (<http://talka.tv>).

It's written in Python using Flask. You might find it useful and I hope you'll be able to help me expand it, since I havent found much time to do so myself.

<comment><USER24> That's interesting. I once (some time ago) tried juvia (<https://github.com/phusion/juvia>), as comments are a problem for me, 'cause I try to be as much self-contained, as I can be.

But on my host, it was not that easy to setup, and I am not that much of a rails guy. So a python-based alternative might fit me better.

I'll have a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to see a static site generator that still runs some kind of administrative backend somewhere. Then I could have clients or friends I do sites for log in to one of my personal machines and enter new stories/content, and it would generate the pages and push the updates. That would combine the best of a simple CMS with the best of static generation. Does something like this already exist?

<comment><USER26> Yes. It's called Movable Type.

<http://www.movabletype.org/download.html>

If you wait long enough, everything old becomes new again :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How's this compare to Ruby's Jekyll and Octopress?

I think static site generators are pretty great...especially if you have a decent grasp of JS frameworks. According to the recent HN front page submission, Obama's $250 million fundraising site was run off of Jekyll.

<comment><USER28> I used Jekyll up until 7 months ago before switching to Pelican and blogged about it here:

[http://blog.williamting.com/posts/2012/05/30/migrating- from-...](http://blog.williamting.com/posts/2012/05/30/migrating-from-jekyll- to-pelican/)

tldr: Wanted to mess around with internals, but rather than learn Ruby I switched to a Python-based platform instead. I've learned Ruby since then, but only at a surface level of comprehension.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is a simple example project for a blog: <https://github.com/koenbok/CactusBlog>

</comment><comment><USER29> Do we really need another one? What's the point of creating these static website generators in Python?

</comment><comment><USER30> what is the application he uses to copy amazon key in the screencast : <http://vimeo.com/46999791>

<comment><USER31> LaunchBar at <http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks good i might have to check it out</comment>


Swiss law reforms make crypto respectable - <AUTHOR> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/swiss-law-reforms-make-crypto-respectable/46024124 <comment><USER2> This is actually a very huge deal. Crypto is now on its way to being a world currency similar to the dollar, franc and the other world currencies. Bitcoin is the de facto standard so a bitcoin earned anywhere in the world has a guarantied place where it can be spent and by default it will be the only one that will keep its value since there will always be a set number that can't be increased. Look for it to be a store of value even more important than gold.</comment>


History of CSS Layouts, from Geocities on - <AUTHOR> http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/weblog/2012/css-layout-evolution/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting read. The best information I got out of this was the: columns: 30em 4; property.

Explanation from the post:

The width you specify isn't an absolute, it's a goal. If 2½ columns will fit, you'll get two columns 45em wide each. If only half a column will fit, you'll get one column 15em wide. So the width might not always be what was specified, but for the reader, the design always fits the screen perfectly. And since the column heights are auto-balanced, the layout always fits the content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, and that's cross browser and available today, in contrast to some of the other CSS mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I couldn't tell if this site was a demonstration of the GeoCities example, then I saw it was in fact not.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really wish the browsers would start implementing support for CSS3 grids</comment>


Open source is super amazing (except for when it isn't) - <AUTHOR> http://soledadpenades.com/2016/01/12/open-source-is-super-amazing-except-for-when-it-isnt/ <comment><USER2> Well...Github specifically has tools that allow people to fork stuff and then request feature merges - I have submitted fixes and features to various pieces of software this way, and I find it quite convenient for both parties: the original author only needs to review the code (which, I admit, is nontrivial quite in itself) and approve the merge. Although this is, technologically, akin to a project fork, it doesn't have the emotional baggage attached to "well I think that I'll do better than the original", it's merely a branch not pretending to replace the main thing.

As for people passing off things as their own - yes, "that's why we can't have nice things," as the internet saying goes; and I know how infuriating that is. I don't know what could be done about this, alas.

</comment><comment><USER3> A problem that is easy to solve: Clearly define the scope of the project and when it's done, it's done. Period. Unfortunately (maybe with the exception of Knuth and DJB) nobody does it that way.</comment>


Show HN: Featuretracker.com – A simple way to track features - <AUTHOR> Hey, HN! Cody and Jake here, the founders of FeatureTracker (https://www.featuretracker.com). We have one simple goal, to allow creators to make data-backed decisions when building interfaces. Maybe you have a really fancy date picker and are looking for ways to scale it back. With FeatureTracker you can track the granular usage of each component of that date picker, then decide what to keep and what to cut based on actual numbers.
We track specific clicks and provide a few simple data points to make you feel a little more comfortable making decisions and less like you're driving into the dense fog that can be product development.
We built this to help us answer questions and hope it can help a few others too. We're aiming to keep things simple as possible. We'd love to hear from you, so let us know if you have any questions or have feedback.
Thanks,
Cody and Jake <comment><USER2> You Getting Started/Start Tracking Features links don't work if I try to open them in a new tab. At first I thought they were just broken links and almost left before discovering that they work if you happen to guess how to use them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just pushed a fix for that. Good catch, thanks for letting us know about it.

<comment><USER3> It's still broken

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> hmm... the main button on the homepage takes me to the error page [https://www.featuretracker.com/a](https://www.featuretracker.com/a)

<comment><USER5> I'm experiencing the same problem. The link at the top of the page works, but not the main button below.

<comment><AUTHOR> That should be fixed now, dropped the ball on that one, thanks for letting us know.</comment></comment></comment>


Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html <comment><USER2> The analogy has a couple of problems with it. There is the fact that programs can be run in parallel, with one program feeding the other output in real time. This one the article covers although I don't completely buy their explanation.

For another example, 'cmd | cat' is often not the same thing as 'cmd', because a command can inspect whether stdout is a tty or not and alter its behavior. This is why 'ls' normally outputs all in one line, but changes to one-per-line when used with a pipe (e.g. grep).

The other issue that comes to mind is that bash provides multiple concepts of "monadic" sequencing; not just with pipes but with the && and || operators, if logic, for/while loops, etc, which form a more traditional "imperative programming" monad. Perhaps bash could be considered then to be a nested monad (monad transformer?) but I'm not sure how precisely you could model its semantics while keeping things elegant.

But yes, in general you can view the shell as a monad, and there are libraries in Haskell which do exactly this (Shelly and Turtle come to mind). In general, the divergences from a purely monadic model come from the fiddly bits of real- world programming which can cause edge cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fun read (fair warning: you should have _some_ understanding of monoids and monads before reading) and further validates my hypothesis that understanding category theory would make me a more effective engineer.

If you've had the joy of constructing useful shell pipelines, and part of it is in the ease of knowing how it will behave. this is a nice formal statement that the underlying reasons WHY it just "feels right" are because of category theory--which means if I can just learn category theory, I'll have a new tool for approaching and factoring problems that will be, technically speaking, hella useful.

I suppose I should start (re)working my way through [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8LbkfSSR58&list=PLbgaMIhjbm...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8LbkfSSR58&list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7FMa2HsnawM_)

<comment><USER4> I had a look (at the original 2001 article) - seems you have to know Haskell to understand anything.

<comment><USER5> Edit: The OP expanded that the post was about the linked article... now my comment doesn't make too much sense.

If you say that about Milewki's talks then I don't agree. He does use Haskell notation a lot, but gives C examples as well and most of his arguments are based in category theory/general programming.

Anyway, I think that the series of talks linked in the GP are a must watch. Even for people that don't fully agree with the viewpoint of Category Theory being a "holly grail" the videos do provide a different point of understanding.

<comment><USER4> "Milewki's talks"? Don't know what he or that is. Nope, I was just trying to say, the linked article "Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming" was about Haskell (and Unix pipelines), and maybe I should have known that from the title, but didn't. And I had to stop reading after 2 lines because it assumed Haskell familiarity.

edit: Didn't see edited comment you mentioned until after I wrote that. Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Bartosz Milewski: [https://bartoszmilewski.com](https://bartoszmilewski.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Operator | (a pipe), "forces" a command, which is a promise of output, on > its left producing a stream, an argument for a command on the right-hand > side of the pipe. A shell pipe thus is an equivalent of a monadic >>= > operator.

Why is this monadic and not just function composition? Why not just identify `a|b` with `b.a` and `a;b` with `seq a b`?

</comment><comment><USER8> What?

> From shell's point of view, the filters -- echo and cat -- are pure, > referentially-transparent functions of their arguments

Yes, in this somewhat bizarre, contrived, tautological use of `cat`, maybe. But `cat` is more commonly used not as an identity function (the explicit identification of which would seem to strengthen the author's case, but isn't made), but as a way of pulling in data external to the command-line input, making it neither pure nor referentially transparent.

> Operator | (a pipe), "forces" a command, which is a promise of output, on > its left producing a stream, an argument for a command on the right-hand > side of the pipe

That seems to be more simply a description of function composition, rather `>>=`, which concatenates functions that have multiple output modes.

Indeed:

> UNIX filter is expected to sequentially consume its input and produce a > single output stream

is suggestive that filters on the command line have no side-effects, which is not a typical usage of the term.</comment>


Angry Birds earns a Million at Chrome Web Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromeosapps.org/angry-birds-breaks-all-records/

<comment><USER2> Misleading title. When you say "earns a Million", I'm pretty sure most people will think _dollars_ , not, as it turns out, _users_. Cool stuff otherwise.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is the point that Angry Bird developers haven't earned a million dollars? And that's important?

<comment><USER3> A million dollars in the Chrome web store in 11 days would be _very_ interesting. Cool stuff none the less.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am sensitive to deceptive 'journalism'.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's talk content. AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ <comment><USER2> From the comments:

Q: In Ellen Pao's op-ed in the Washington Post today, she said "But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly."

How much of the push toward removing "ugly" elements of Reddit comes from the motivation to monetize Reddit?

A: Zero.

_____________________

His reply currently has -1022 points. The censorship of Reddit for advertisement purposes has been a topic of discussion in a select few subreddits for quite awhile. It looks like the rest of reddit is finally realizing what is going on.

I don't have anything against it, people have to make money and with free services like reddit, the users are the product that is sold to advertisers.

What I don't understand is, why not just admit it? From my ~20 years of internet usage, I have learned the one constant is you never lie to the internet.

Also, from the list of prohibited content:

>Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This sounds like a rule that some teenager made up for guild forums. How in the world does Huffman think using something so vague as an actual punishable rule will turn out well?

Anyway, good luck to Huffman he is going to need it. I feel like voat.co is going to see a very huge increase in numbers during the next few months.

<comment><USER3> > _What I don 't understand is, why not just admit it [users are the product > that is sold to advertisers]._

Because reddit's popularity is built on the illusion of being the complete opposite! One of the first large influxes of users came from Digg, who had their own revolt over censoring a 16 byte number.

Centralized sites have been given a pass for way too long. Let us hope the pendulum swings back the other way hard. Restricting communication, no matter how repulsive one finds the content, does _not_ make the "world ... a better place".

<comment><USER4> That's a worldview that does not accept any circumstance in which speech is also an action. But posting non-consensual pornography is more than speech; it's also a deliberate and disastrous violation of someone else's privacy.

<comment><USER5> Is publishing any private fact a person wishes to hide "more than speech", or is it only publishing information about their genitals? I.e., what principle (if any) distinguishes between publishing a picture of Donald Trump's penis and publishing a (hypothetical) private racist conversation of his?

<comment><USER6> Honestly seems like people trump the word "privacy" and "free speech" when it fits their agenda/world-views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't solve the problem. Banning "[a]nything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people" is so open-ended that it could include minor criticism or it could exclude flagrant bigotry, depending on the interpreter. They've replaced the de facto policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like with an official policy of arbitrarily banning things they don't like.

<comment><USER8> When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

<comment><USER9> Reddit still lacks an objective definition for "harassment". (So does the world, I think.)

> When was reddit arbitrarily banning things they don't like?

When they banned five subreddits (actually quite a few more than that, but five were announced), without a clear policy that could be fairly enforced on all subs.

<comment><USER10> That banning was consistant with existing reddit rules at the time and was not out of the blue. FPH especially had been warned several times about vote brigading; many of the FPH users got shadow bans for vote brigading.

<comment><USER11> And yet ShitRedditSays is allowed to vote brigade as much as it wants.

<comment><USER10> No, they're not.

Point out vote brigades to the admins and they shadow ban users and the sub risks being banned.

Reddit should just release some charts of brigades from FPH and SRS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Prohibited: _Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)_

About time.

<comment><USER13> I consider your comment harassment. I think it should be removed.

Slippery slope don't you think?

<comment><USER14> One my favorite things about the anti-SJW movement is how they fundamentally _don 't understand_ what they're opposing. They see people using words like "harassment" and achieving results, so they go full cargo cult and start spewing those same words in the belief that they'll be able to achieve something as well. It reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement, a belief that there's some set of magic words that gets results, rather than actually interacting with society.

<comment><USER15> I don't know, in an Internet context "harassment" can be very ambiguous. In real life situations it's usually pretty clear, but some people may consider certain Internet activities harassment while others may strongly disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people

This is incredibly ambiguous. I think it is important to specify what exactly harassment _isn 't_, and explicitly permit that.

Most people claiming 'harassment' are simply using it as a tool to silence and persecute people who dare to hold opinions that differ from their own. For example, the Twitter harassment trial that just finished yesterday in Toronto. [1] Merely saying that one 'feels harassed' should not count for anything.

Furthermore there is a problem with labelling certain communities as being problematic, or whatever word they are searching for. This makes uncommon or novel viewpoints vulnerable to further marginalization if their opponents succeed in giving them that label.

[1] [http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie- blatchfor...](http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford- ruling-in-twitter-harassment-trial-could-have-enormous-fallout-for-free- speech)

<comment><USER17> Spez quoted the existing harassment policy. It is not as simple as "feeling harassed:"

 _Systematic and /or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them._

The key phrases to me are "systemic and/or continued" and "a reasonable person."

<comment><USER16> I'm sure what they have in mind is pretty well-considered, however, the pitfalls I outlined above still remain. For instance, different people have different ideas of what a `reasonable person' is. Generally, one which is pretty close to themselves! Also, ``systemic and/or continued'' also means different things to different people. For instance, the opponents of Gamer- Gate claimed (and perhaps genuinely believed) themselves to be targets of a `harassment campaign', when in fact, they were receiving disagreement and mockery from many different sources, each only communicating once or a handful of times. [1]

So, that wording of the policy still leaves plenty of leeway for the sort of abuse I described above.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out- group_homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity)

<comment><USER17> That's the way laws work: They can't be applied by algorithm, you need judgment. If you don't trust the judges, you can't work around that by writing laws so explicit that they can't be misapplied. Doesn't work.

If the issue here is that you don't trust Reddit, we should debate that. I'd say that's a much bigger problem than not trusting the way that policy is worded.

<comment><USER11> The problem with censorship rules is that it's very hard to trust anyone with them because the act of enforcing the rule removes all evidence of rule violation from public scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Anything that harasses, bullies, or abuses an individual or group of people > (these behaviors intimidate others into silence)

> /r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, > but does not violate our current rules for banning.

Seriously? /r/coontown isn't harassing, bulling, or abusing a group of people? This AMA didn't clarify anything at all, these were always the vague, sometimes enforced, rules.

<comment><USER19> Having hateful beliefs is not in itself harassing, bullying, or abusing individuals.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't it abuse "groups of people" then?

<comment><USER9> By that vague definition, doesn't /r/politics "abuse" Republicans?

<comment><USER12> I just took a look at the /r/politics front page. I don't think there is anything there a reasonable person would think was harassment, bullying or abuse. The closest is a claim that "right wing extremists have no qualms destroying people's lives", but I don't think that would pass the reasonable person test.

<comment><USER9> I agree. /r/politics shouldn't be banned for harassment, bullying, or abuse, but it could qualify under some definitions.

For example, check out the comments on [https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson...](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/3di5ty/ben_carson_will_attend_iowa_religious_liberties/)

<comment><USER12> Can you point to a specific comment?

There is one where he is called a religious nut, but that seems as bad as it gets. I don't see any problem.

It isn't useful presenting hypothetical situations. If there is a problem on /r/politics then point to it.

<comment><USER9> Well, we have the usual insults about Republicans: racist, crazy, bigots, stupid.

> The GOP can't run a black guy. The rift between voting Republican and > maintaining baseless hatred for minorities would cause too many voters' > heads to explode.

> You're talking as though the republican electorate has a memory.

> Can you all just admit that the entire republican party represents the > ideals that this guy embraces (hating gay people) and what Donald Trump > continues to spew (hating immigrants and hispanics).

The specific baseless suggestion for this post: Ben Carson wants to kill gays (because he accepted an invitation).

> Ben "Compassionate Execution" Carson

> i.e. gays are like insects? Wait, best not to give Carson any ideas...

A random suggestion that Ben Carson is a drug abuser:

> I can't comprehend how a Doctor that graduated from John Hopkins and Yale > turned out the way he did.

> ...

> unfettered access to the best drugs?

Some random insults:

> Bobby "Stupid Party" Jindal, Tom "Tehran" Cotton, James "Senator Snowball" > Inhofe, Bobby "the exorcist" Jindal

> Alas, it is true...Ben Carson does not have a neocortex.

All fairly typical for a political discussion, I know. Still disgusting. (Speaking as a liberal-leaning independent.)

<comment><USER12> None of these are anything like what harassment laws target. Additionally, a much higher bar is set when talking about a public figure. It's fine to call a politician stupid, and no reasonable person would consider that harassment.

<comment><USER9> Were we talking about harassment laws?

I thought we were talking about a much wider definition of harassment, wider even than reddit policies - one which might include /r/coontown (and perhaps also /r/politics).

<comment><USER20> You were, until the debate was lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR - We will still allow almost all the same hateful stuff we have previously allowed, but we will do our best to hide it so people will stop complaining.

</comment><comment><USER4> They're going to require a login to see the "indecent" subreddits. I wonder, are they going to take any other measures to make them difficult to reach from, e.g., search engines?

Will they run advertisements on "indecent" subreddits?

<comment><USER22> Turning racist subreddits into cost centers feels like a good alignment of incentives, but it's weird to give toxic users an ad-free experience because they're toxic.

<comment><USER23> That's an interesting point, but my read on Huffman's original comment is that it's more for market reasons.

I work in the ad tech industry, and my read is that this is Huffman trying to assure brands that Reddit is a reputable venue for advertising. For example, most major brands are VERY skittish about going anywhere near family unfriendly content because they don't want to be associated with a questionable site.

From this perspective, accidentally giving toxic users an ad-free experience (a small thing) is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means you can attract the big advertisers (a huge thing).

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately, it will remain a true statement that "Reddit hosts the largest white-nationalist forum on the Internet" (just /r/coontown alone already has nearly the pageviews of Stormfront). It is literally true that every advertising dollar will be supporting Nazis. That's not going to be an easy sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It strikes me that nearly every problem Reddit faces is a result of centralization and scale. The right answer is for users to go back to a self- hosted model, which will never happen because people follow crowds instinctively.

<comment><USER26> Almost reminds me of the Silk Road, and the move towards decentralized markets. Someone needs to make a decentralized reddit where anyone can go wherever they wish easily, and no one is tasked with serious governance issues -- let each subreddit govern themselves.

<comment><USER27> A network where the users are in control of what they see and hear. A ... user net of some sort. You could probably call it usenet. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.

<comment><USER25> You could call it usenet, but someone would have to give it a better interface than the thing we call usenet now. People in general are not going to give up the modern comforts of the web for freedom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values."

No. We don't. Those people are a detriment with no redeeming qualities.

You can clash against values without being stupid.

But in any case clashing against the hivemind on reddit is quite hard, and boy oh boy the hivemind can be stupid.

If reddit actually want to make things better they can get rid of the downvote option.

<comment><USER29> Removing down-votes doesn't help unless you've got a fairly sparse sub to begin with. Facebook doesn't have down-votes, and I consider that one of its poorer features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not exactly the change people were anticipating.

In fact, I'm not sure there is a change.

<comment><USER31> The biggest change is making subs that violate "common decency" opt-in.

I predict they'll find a new phrase for that criteria as "common decency" pretty obviously would re-classify subs that are not what they're really after.

<comment><USER32> "Unpalatable to advertisers"

<comment><USER33> What's wrong with that honestly? I'm totally fine with them removing subs/content that exists only because assholes on the internet are anonymous. This whole nerd rage is from nothing in my opinion, they are telling the idiots to take it somewhere else, and the majority of the rest of us can read content on our subs and the staff doesn't have to waste time with the back and forth or lawyers that comes with questionable content.

<comment><USER32> I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I totally agree that they should ban racist/sexist/bigoted garbage.

I do think it's kind of pathetic how transparently Reddit's owners only ever respond when they get bad press from the mainstream media, instead of showing some spine and real moral leadership.

It's sad that Coke's ad buying team is what passes for a conscience today.

<comment><USER33> Spez is hosting an AMA right now with 15k comments, and 2k new ones since I last refreshed, I'd hardly call that only responding in mainstream media.

<comment><USER32> I'm sorry, my phrasing was ambiguous (now edited). I mean that the only time Reddit's leaders show any concern over the horrible content on their site is when that horrible content shows up on the frontpage of CNN.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reddit is in dire need of a UI/UX improvement. The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension.

Honestly it feels like developers have not made a significant change to Reddit in years. Screw advertising revenue, Reddit needs to begin making improvements gradually to its user interface or else it risks becoming a dinosaur.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _The site is unuseable without the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) browser extension._

Not much of a Redditor, but could you elaborate as to why the vanilla Reddit UI is "unuseable"?

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I hear this often, but I've never used RES and the site seems fine. Maybe I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome..

<comment><USER28> The most useful thing in it is the ability to load an image or video inline in the page. A single click and the image is there, and resizeable by dragging the mouse.

It does other things too, but the images is the most important IMO.

Without it you have to keep clicking back and forth from page to image.

<comment><USER35> I've used RES for years, just turned it off yesterday. The only thing I noticed was the inline things and 'ctrl + b' not working when bolding something. Autoload on scroll as well but that was even annoying at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > The reason we're careful to restrict speech is because people have more open > and authentic discussions when they aren't worried about the speech police > knocking down their door.

Am I reading this right? As in, we restrict speech because people speak more freely when they're not free to speak?

<comment><USER37> You may be reading it wrong. It sounds like they don't want an environment in which people aren't sure what is allowed or not allowed. "Careful to restrict speech" in the sense that you don't want to go overboard with rules and moderation because you end up trading one problem (bad behavior from bad citizens) for another (an overly sanitized and controlled environment).

OTOH, even your interpretation makes some degree of sense to me. When a community turns toxic, the bad behavior from the bad citizens drives away all of the good citizens who are positive contributors. It's just like mailing lists or discussion sites like HN. Personal attacks beget more personal attacks, and eventually so much of the comments are malicious or stupid that people who actually have something to contribute go elsewhere.

An extreme example would be YouTube comments. If you see a bunch of terrible comments that barely parse as human language, you are that much more unlikely to leave a well-written comment because why bother? It'd be pearls before swine (if all the comments are terrible, then the people who bother reading the comments are likely also terrible).

It sounds like Reddit is just trying to avoid the downward spiral that almost every electronic community goes through eventually, but are aware that taking this too far could have a chilling effect on the larger, more constructive community that they want to retain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This Reddit comment (from the thread being linked to but not easy to see, at the time I write this) catalogs the various public statements that staff have made over time about Reddit being a place for free speech on the web:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5r0ch)

It's interesting to see what was said in the past and how it compares to the narrative today.

</comment><comment><USER39> For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal.

To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.

The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.

It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.

One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.

But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.

For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.

\----

The main thing is (the perception that):

Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.

\----

To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.

Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao (and what would have been the reaction to Steve Huffman here, had he unilaterally taken a more extreme stance than he has here). Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intend to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".

\----

\----

Also important to understanding this:

To the users I'm talking about, the "cognitive value" of Reddit is not entirely about directly being fed opinions to take up as one's own.

Many of these users find great value to being exposed to, they deliberately seek out for their own enrichment: idiocy, malice, counterfactuals, cognitive dissonance, debate (honest and otherwise), the whole range of perceptions and opinions. To them, being exposed to these things is just as much of the value of Reddit as the "good stuff". And that seems to be the aspect of Reddit most strongly and immediately under threat.

Anyone who does not value this kind of experience (which seems to be a very large proportion of the people participating in this conversation at the most visible levels) is going to see any attempt to frame this type of content as valuable in any way as totally incomprehensible, evil, and malicious itself. So this part of things is pretty close to an impossible conversation to have in public.

\----

\----

(reposting a comment that I've made before, in a thread that was apparently soft-killed on HN)

<comment><USER39> Here is a similarly-aligned sentiment from the OP thread here, beautifully- stated by somebody with potentially more credibility on the subject (let's be honest here) than me (though do note that she rightly does not claim to be speaking for anybody but herself):

\----

> I have been a redditor for a very long time, and I've been part of a range > of kinds of communities that vary fairly significantly.

> I am also a female who was raped, and this is something I have been opened > about talking fairly frequently on reddit.

> I disagree with the ban of the aforementioned sub, because I feel that it > sets a precedent depending on what the society deems appropriate to think > about, and what it does not.

> Please note, that I can not and do not pretend to speak for any woman who > was raped besides myself.

> What I am concerned with is this distinct drawing of a line between the > people who own the site, and the people who create the content on the site. > Reddit appealed to me because it was the closest thing to a speaking > democracy I could find in my entire existence, utilizing technology in a way > that is almost impossible to recreate across large populations of people > otherwise.

> This sequence of events marks this as a departure from that construct. From > today onwards, I know that I am not seeing clusters of people with every > aspect of their humanity shown, as ugly as it may be sometimes. I feel that > it is not the subreddit that causes subs like /r/rapingwomen to exist, but > this stems from a larger cultural problem. Hiding it or sweeping it under a > rug from the masses is not what solves the problem; I have already lived > under those rules and I have seen them to be ineffective at best and > traumatizing / mentally warping at worst.

> People's minds should not be ruled over by the minds of other people, and > that is what I feel this has become. Internet content is thought content, > idea content. It is not the act of violence - these are two very separate > things. You can construct a society that appears to value and cherish > women's rights in the highest regard, and yet the truth can be the furthest > thing from it.

> I really would hope that you would reconsider your position. To take away > the right of being able to know with certainty that one can speak freely > without fear, I don't have many words to offer that fully express my sadness > at that.

> The problem is not the banning of specifics. The problem is how it affects > how people reason afterwards about their expectations of the site and their > interactions with others. It sets up new social constructs and new social > rules, and will alter things significantly, even fractions of things you > would not expect. It is like a butterfly effect across the mind, to believe > you can speak freely, and to have that taken away.

\-- /u/abcabcdeabc, responding directly to Steve Huffman

[https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_t...](https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3djjxw/lets_talk_content_ama/ct5si6q?context=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who didn't see anything of value in this AMA from /u/spez?

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems completely reasonable, maybe just a bit vague...

The only surprising thing to me about this announcement is that they didn't already have such a policy in place.

</comment><comment><USER41> Pao has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is.

</comment><comment><USER42> > Anything illegal

Illegal where?

<comment> y-satellite The US, since that is where reddit is based.

<comment><USER42> CA laws specifically then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "Anything illegal"

That's a pretty broad catch-all.

</comment><comment><USER44> Hilarious. Spam is strictly prohibited, while hate-speech is tolerated, unless inciting. spam must be lethal. Anywho, I've never liked Reddit and like it even less seeing what's going in there.

>> These types of content are prohibited [1]: >> Spam

<comment><USER45> Spam is easy to recognize. Hate-speech isn't, there's a tremendous range of speech that may-or-may not be hate speech.

<comment><USER46> Yeah but... racism is well established as a harmful thing by now. If you host subs dedicated to it you are making the world a worse place. It might be a tough call with other things but this one is as clear-cut as it gets.</comment></comment></comment>


SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/neo-nazi-swatters-target-dozens-of-journalists/ <comment><USER2> The heart of the problem is that SWAT-ing is possible.

You shouldn't be able to make an anonymous phone call and have the police bust down someone else's door guns drawn.

An unverified phone call _alone_ should not amount to probable cause. That's not civilization.

<comment><USER3> To play devils advocate a little - If I'm a 911 operator and the person calling says "They have gun next door - there's shouting, I'm really scared WHAT DO I DO?!" What do we do? Turn them down? Ask for proof? From the police perspective - they're entering a potentially dangerous environment, which means gun drawn until the environment is cleared.

To your point though - the fact that the swatting has resulted in innocent deaths is evidence that law enforcement is too aggressive.

<comment><USER4> I know in my country, the police would probably knock on the door and verify that something's wrong, especially if the caller can't spin a convincing scenario that fits the location. Maybe pistols drawn, but pointed down. If someone answers and says "huh? I didn't call anyone? what's going on?" in a somewhat convincing way, ask them to step outside, hands up, and if he complies the situation is probably solved, right there. You can still have a look inside, confirm.

There's like so many steps along the way where you can make an assessment of the situation before going FULL SWAT-raid. Mother in a night gown opening the door, yawning? Probably not a threat.

I'm not saying I want the job handling these situations or that it's easy, but "well, someone called, let's send in the Wet Ops team!" can't be the only answer, either! There's even videos of cops handling this _super_ calm and professionally, basically how I described it above. So it's not impossible.

<comment><USER5> > I know in my country, the police would probably knock on the door and verify > that something's wrong, especially if the caller can't spin a convincing > scenario that fits the location.

This is because in your country it is exceedingly unlikely the cops will receive a barrage of high powered assault rifle fire after knocking. The militarization of police in the US is a complicated problem that ultimately stems from our proliferation of guns which turn every interaction cops have into a potentially deadly one.

<comment><USER6> But that is ... wrong.

The US cops have _talked_ about escalating risks for years but US cops haven't faced actual escalating dangers. One can track the actual danger faced by police and it has been declining.

The problem is the average citizen gets their information from TV dramas where cops indeed constantly face dangers.

headline: "Once again: police work is NOT getting more dangerous"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2014/10/02/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2014/10/02/once-again-police-work-is-not-getting-more- dangerous/?utm_term=.7855e1b0389b)

<comment><USER7> It's disingenuous to ask us to accept this data alone as a reason to disregard the risks that American police face in the course of their work. Whether their job is safer today than at the height of the so-called 'crack epidemic' is irrelevant to the reality of the day to day risks that they face. For starters, this data doesn't include the numbers of police non-fatally harmed in the course of their work. Even still, their risk of being fatally shot is 5x higher on average than the general citizen.

<comment><USER6> Police work is less dangerous than many common occupations in the US but it is indeed still dangerous.

The question is whether this level of danger is a sufficient to justify police tactics that severely endanger civilians such as no-knock raids - factors that make "SWATing" so dangerous for the average person.

The further factor here is that the false belief that there's an armed camp ready to attack cops instantly with automatic rifles can give one the distorted impression that no-knock and related tactics will save lives.

However, the reality is there are few people ready to knowingly engage the cops (since even if you win, you lose against the authorities) but there citizens who have guns ready for _persons known_ who might be breaking into their home and so SWAT tactics can be as likely to draw fire and casualties as to avoid them in the real world. And kill innocent of course.

<comment><USER7> Here's some data here that seems to differ somewhat from what was originally posted: [https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police- officers-2014.htm](https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police- officers-2014.htm)

I would never be an advocate for the kind of no-knock raids the article is describing. I'm not addressing that by contesting the use of those statistics. My point is more that _any_ risk of getting shot in the line of duty changes the entire playing field. Just because it's declining doesn't mean that it's insignificant. That being said, as said before I'm not advocating for the kind of overwhelmingly violent responses that SWATting describes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I might be wrong, but a whole bunch of heavily armed guys busting down doors in response to an anonymous phone call is not in the spirit of prioritizing de-escalation over violent resolutions. I want cops de-escalating situations, not shooting up the neighborhood, or going on high-speed chases on neighborhood streets.

Now, I imagine swat teams don't like doxxing either. Sounds like a business opportunity.

<comment><USER8> May SWAT team guns shouldn't have independent triggers, but require some kind of consensus algorithm across SWAT team members for a pulled trigger to have an effect.

<comment><USER9> Interesting idea, but the following two scenarios look identical to the consensus algorithm:

* One officer sees a suspect drawing a weapon, and reacts more quickly than the others or the suspect is not visible to the other officers, and thus fires a justified shot and saves a fellow officer's life.

* One officer misinterprets an innocent gesture, fires an unjustified shot and takes the life of a suspect/innocent person.

Furthermore, I'd worry that the diffusion of responsibility means that the officers fire more often, under the belief that their fellow officers agreed with their course of action, or are indicating that they are in danger (by trying to fire), or that they don't believe they alone have taken the decision to kill, so can justify shooting at a lower perceived level of threat.

See for instance firing squads:

> This is believed to reinforce the sense of diffusion of responsibility among > the firing squad members. This diffusion of responsibility makes the > execution process more reliable because the members are more likely to aim > to kill if they are not entirely blamed for it, or if there is a chance they > did not fire the lethal shot. It also allows each member of the firing squad > to believe afterwards that he did not personally fire a fatal shot—for this > reason, it is sometimes referred to as the "conscience round".

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

<comment><USER8> Regarding your first two points, a proper evaluation would involve some estimate the relative utilities of those two outcomes, and an estimate of their frequencies. Taking a cue from signal detection theory, one would want to design the algorithm such that the true positive rate maximizes expected utility, and takes into account how the probabilities shift in a situation. A tough task, on all accounts; however, the situation as it stands now is no different, except that, perhaps, we have less control over how we adjust the decision threshold (one thing that is apparent here is that there is a potential conflict between the individual utility of the police officer and the sort of social welfare function that the role of the police is supposed to fulfill).

With respect to the diffusion of responsibility effect, I think you are probably right that there are lots of possible unintended consequences. In as much as an officer decision to pull the trigger explicitly or implicitly takes in to account the reduced feelings of guilt and increased feelings of peer support in case the weapon is in fact fired, and if it takes into account the smaller likelihood that pulling a trigger will actually discharge the weapon, it may well increase the frequency which the trigger is pulled. More darkly, one could imagine a squad of officers making it into a distributed game of Russian Roulette.

On the other hand, I think this highlights the limits of our imagination. For example, one could imagine the following alternative. Each officer has a body cam, and a pair at base, who is actively monitoring the camera. A decision to fire the weapon must involve both the person on the ground, and the buddy. Or one could have a supervisor of some sort, who can override individual decisions, and so forth.

I don't have the answer, but I think it warrants thinking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This could have just been an unfortunate escalation of the political tension which seems to be omnipresent, but once you drag the police into the game it becomes deadly. I suspect the idea of "counter-doxing" made sense at one time, when CNN was threatening to dox people over memes, or when someone is doxed, fired, and humiliated, because a twitter-ista thinks you've manspread too far (/s?), but none of that even remotely compares to swatting. Sending a (generally speaking) overzealous police force to a persons home after convincing the police a violent crime is underway, is on the scale between assault, and attempted murder in my opinion (and that's assuming no one actually gets hurt).

Edit: There seems to be some confusion below. I'm not excusing the police of their responsibility by any means. Its important to remember the vast majority of swatting incidents end without violence, thanks almost entirely to the professionalism of the men who have just kicked down a door (or chose not to kick down the door, but knock instead) and found out that the phone call they got about a guy in his living room butchering small children is actually just a dude playing video games or whatever.

Edit2: I'm a pretty libertarian fellow but if you are incapable of thinking of a scenario where you would _want_ the police to kick in your door and storm your house with guns, then you either have no imagination, or you live in a magical fairy tale land and I'm super jealous.

<comment><USER11> I think I prefer to live in a society in which these sorts of fake calls are intentionally and randomly made - without notice or authorization of any sort - in order to continually test and verify that emergency services are functioning properly (in this case, not killing anyone based on an anonymous tip).

Making a 911 call is an anonymous venture; there's no deposition or oath or penalty of perjury here. A civilized society is one in which calls made to such an endpoint (whether by a human or bot or whomever) are treated accordingly.

Police need to stop killing people. Stop violating people's rights. SWAT teams have not made society better and are easily deprecated. That's the real message here.

<comment><USER12> There was absolutely no need for that cop to shoot that person who got SWAT'd either. The guy was completely surrounded by police with rifles, at a far distance, and he was obviously confused at being told multiple different commands. They are way, way too quick to pull the trigger.

All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though. Even when you misdial 911 they will sometimes even send a car out to make sure, unless you explain yourself well over the phone.

So these scammer guys will always be able to get a police response, especially as long as phone calls can be spoofed to look like it's coming from "inside" the house. The only variable is how the police handle it and, of course, how many sociopaths there are who can pull it off properly without getting caught.

<comment><USER11> > All 911 calls are and should be taken seriously though.

It depends what "taken seriously" means here. If it means followed-up upon in a rapid way to see if there is any corroborating information to indicate that there's a real emergency, then sure.

If it means instead to suppose that any of the provided information is true tout court, then no, this is a recipe for ongoing disaster.

It's important to have a rapid, anonymous reporting system. It's also important to have auxiliary systems in place to verify information that comes in through this system.

<comment><USER12> Plus a calm rational authoritative person on the ground who isn't in Captain America hero mode but instead expects verifiable and multi-sourced evidence that the situation requires escalation to extreme force. Rather than relying on his lackeys to observe for very lax rules of engagement based on some hyper-pessimistic risk models.

<comment><USER11> > Captain America hero mode

I don't really follow the Marvel universe very closely outside of X-men, but isn't Captain America a figure who stands in contrast to government overreach, Nazism, police brutality, etc? I think of him as being a sort of left libertarian.

I think we might actually need _more_ Captain Americas in these situations, not less.

<comment><USER13> > left libertarian

What's a left libertarian? A liberal socialist? Those words are opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Absolutely creepy website...Went on to see what they've got there.. Randomly clicked on one of the names on the list..Some kid's photo,with all his contact details,his parents names,photos,phone numbers,etc..FFS

<comment><USER12> Sheesh, imagine if they had access to Facebook's data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know some people who are on a similar list run by the far right in the UK.

edited for grammar all happy now.

<comment><USER16> Also, a list in the US created to target the right/extremists: [https://www.elon.edu/E-Net/Article/166381](https://www.elon.edu/E-Net/Article/166381)

<comment><USER17> Where's the targeting part? Megan Squire is not int eh habit of SWATting people, nor has anyone promoted using her research as such.

<comment><USER16> She's creating a database of people labeled in that category. She's playing the "well I didn't say to go harass these people.. but here's a database of them"

<comment><USER17> I'm familiar with her database. She's not doxing them but pointing out the facts of their public relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm very sorry for the Journalists affected, but I have to say I'm glad it happened to them. We need high profile issues like these.

It's the only way it will change.

Untold thousands of regular joe's get hit with this every year. No one cares since it only happens to 'the bad guys'.

When you have authoritarianism, it doesn't always go your way. That's why we should be against authoritarian tactics, such as sending armed men to break down doors and terrorize people over an anonymous phone call (I personally think we should draw the line in the sand much more on the side of freedom, but this basic level should be agreed by all)

I grew up long enough ago when there was a feeling that the Western world was superior to the Iron and Bamboo curtains because these things didn't happen in America.</comment>


C++: Uniquely addressed - <AUTHOR> http://pfultz2.com/blog/2015/05/31/unique-address/

<comment> hun-nemethpeter In the first example sum_f() was declared with two parameter but used with zero param.

<comment><USER2> No, sum_f is a _functor_ , only its operator() is overloaded to receive 2 parameters, the constructor of the struct is a default constructor that takes no argument.

[http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/functors-function- objec...](http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/functors-function-objects- in-c++.html)

<comment> hun-nemethpeter Oops.. Yes, you are right.</comment></comment></comment>


Android on x86 - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/live-android/

<comment><USER2> Boots perfectly on VirtualBox: <http://skitch.com/joelf/bshj1/android-on- virtualbox>

<comment><USER3> Getting meta: <http://imgur.com/pxOff>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI, contrary to the site, you don't need any special tools to concatenate files other than, er, cat.

Eg:

      cat *00? > android.iso

Works fine. Note since Android is designed for touch phones, you might notice that mouse acceleration is lacking.

<comment><USER5> why are the files split in the first place?

<comment><USER6> So you won't be as frustrated when you get disconnected at 99% ? (I am not sure if you can resume downloading, like with FTP servers that support resuming)

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the client has to support resuming as well. This is why (along with the fact that they enjoy using ridiculously outdated technology) the scene still uses split RARs—a lot of the autotrading scripts (as well as FTPd's) they utilize don't support resuming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since this is for those who "want to give Google Android a try, but don't feel like buying a T-Mobile G1," and not meant to be actually useful as an OS, I don't understand what this has to offer over the SDK. (The SDK runs Android in a virtualized environment on Windows, OS X, and Linux.)

I read the project summary and skimmed the "readmefirst.txt" and I still don't get it. Is it faster? Easier to install?

</comment><comment><USER9> I _love_ the pun/jab at MS, even if it is unintended: they included the word "live" in the name. Because the "live" brand isn't confused enough.

Good thing MS sorted out this brand mess by moving to "bing".

<comment><USER10> There's no need to downmod someone into oblivion just because they're not aware of a not-very-significant fact.

<comment><USER11> I think it has more to do with the attitude and sarcasm of the comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Serverless has stamped a big DEPRECATED on containers - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/serverless-is-eating-the-stack-and-people-are-freaking-out-and-they-should-be-431a9e0db482 <comment><USER2> It's not "serverless," you are just paying someone else to run more of your stack for you.

In the late 90s to early 2000s we called this "Application Service Providers" or "Managed Hosting."

</comment><comment><USER3> Really? Serverless platforms seem mostly proprietary. If you use AWS Lambda then you are mostly locked into AWS.

<comment><USER4> Every technology has some degree of lock-in. Serverless has tradeoffs like anything else. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the costs? I recently did a writeup on this that helped me work through my own thoughts on the issue: [https://www.trek10.com/blog/think-faas-podcast-talkin- lock-i...](https://www.trek10.com/blog/think-faas-podcast-talkin-lock-in/)

<comment><USER5> How does Kubernetes have lock-in? You can run it on any cloud or baremetal.

<comment><USER6> Those are different levels of lock-in. Vendor lock-in is, in my opinion, worst than software lock-in. Kubernetes is also, open source. Edit: grammar

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Errr... serverless IS containers at least in the case of AWS.

Kinda weird to be saying "container technology will wipe out ....... container technology!"</comment>


Be a Grim Reaper - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jarederondu.com/grim-reaper

<comment><USER2> Another bathroom confessional which really doesn't say much at all IMO. Minus the quotes, there's a grand total of 125 words in the post.

"_____ is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" applies to basically anything that can be designed, whether it's UI's, API's or whatever.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good design is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - So true</comment>


Apple's Great Big Fail: iBooks Author Is Amazing - But Locks You In - <AUTHOR> http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2012/01/apples-great-big-fail-ibooks-author-is-amazing-but-locks-you-in-to-ibookstore.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is a misunderstanding. I think what they mean with "Works" in that section is the generated iBooks file by iBooks Author. Not the Work that represents the "unformatted" contents (text) of the book. Tricky difference.

To me it seems that they are simply trying to avoid a situation where you use iBooks Author and then setup PayPal on your own web site and start selling that nicely formatted iBook yourself without going through the iBooks Store and paying Apple 30%.

I don't think this is about exclusive sales of a book through the iBookstore. If that were the case then it would have been spelled out very clearly I think. They are just trying to control distribution of generated iBooks files, not of your actual work.

I am not a lawyer, but I think the above makes sense. Apple is not that evil I think.</comment>


NetJSON: data interchange format for networks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/interop-dev/netjson

<comment><USER2> Interesting project, a modern approach to network data collecting and sharing, seems ideal for geographic distributed networks monitoring.

I hope this will success where SNMP failed.

</comment><comment><USER3> We're doing lasts test in order to start using it in biggest wireless community network in the world: guifi.net ;)

<comment><USER4> What methods are being considered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> thanks for sharing! The homepage is [http://netjson.org](http://netjson.org)</comment>


Malcolm Gladwell Explains Himself (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/article/5033/malcolm-gladwell-interview-profile-2013/ <comment><USER2> wow.. that article reads exactly the way you'd expect Gladwell to write. Guess we have a heir now!</comment>


Indie games bundle for Android  - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegala.com/?mobile

<comment><USER2> Legends of yore looks really good. Similar graphics to Realm of the Mad God as well and I really enjoyed that.

I thought they might be the same developer at first as Realm of the Mad God because the art style is so similar.

<comment><USER3> Same artist! Both are made by Oryx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find this a good approach for marketing interesting new (indie) games for Android. However to be honest, the indie thing is not so much of an differentiator in mobile space than it is in PC gaming? Big studio games are still rather rare on mobile platforms.

But, why oh why the site does not work on the platform the games are intended for? The flash introduction videos do not run properly, the default browser lags because of the Javascript and my Transformer Prime2 (with ICS 4.0.3) rebooted itself because of the page.

I will probably purchase the bundle despite these grievances, though.. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm one of the developers for the android/ios/windows/mac/linux game Cardinal Quest that's on this android-focused bundle.

Feel free to ask me anything!

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this done by the <http://www.humblebundle.com/> people? Or is the design just heavily influenced by them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's the same people, but it does look very influenced by it. More indie game promotion is good though. Plus, they're probably using the same donation system because it's been proven to work.</comment></comment>


2019 Js13kGames Winners - <AUTHOR> https://js13kgames.com/#winners <comment><USER3> I'm hugely impressed by this and applaud the effort, I've played the top game a bit and it's very nice, especially if you've not played a game with rewind/replay mechanics before.

I was wondering exactly what had to be under 13K, so I looked in the repo (a staggering 2.4M zipped), where even just the /src/ directory is a bloated 108K. The answer is, when you build it, it creates a single index.html which is a rotund 35003 bytes, but which zips down to a svelte 11764 bytes.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want to see what a 1kb game looks like, here is the full writeup of the original 2010 JS1K winning entry: [http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/js1k/](http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/js1k/) (use arrow keys to move and space to jump)

The smoothness in the graphics of the winning Js13k game blow me away. I love the way it "rolls back" after the timer ends, and would love to see a dev blog writeup from the authors.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that 1k game is insane. Not only you got a lot of details in the visuals (cloud, rainbow, trees), you also have multiple mechanics such as coins, falling terrain and flower obstacles. Amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Replying top level to say thank you all for the lovely comments on our game, 'xx142-b2.exe'. It was a huge surprise for us to win this!

We are slowly working on a dev blog/post-mortem for the game. Coming soon!

<comment><USER7> Congrats, this was so impressive! Game graphics is an area I know nothing about. Everything just seemed magical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In case js13kgames is still down, see this GitHub Blog post [0] for the winners.

[0] [https://github.blog/2019-10-08-js13k-2019-highlights/](https://github.blog/2019-10-08-js13k-2019-highlights/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The mark of a great entry is a fully playable game. And "xx142-b2.exe" certainly succeeds on all fronts. The graphics details are amazing: infinite fog drop off, spotlight reflection, ambient floor animation, etc. I feel like they could have saved bytes with procedurally generated levels. But it wouldn't have been nearly as fun progressing ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great to see this! I was recently going down a rabbit-hole of demoscene & 64k intros, and this stuff is very fascinating to me.

Played the first few games & had a blast! I really like the second one with the boomerang throwing mechanic. The FPS Swagshot was cool too.

Also, 'Racer' (#15) gave me flashbacks of the old Rad Racer days!

</comment><comment><USER11> Hug of death, anyone? :)

</comment><comment><USER12> does anyone have any good guides for making games like this? I want to start but have no idea where..

<comment><USER13> [https://medium.com/web-maker/making-asteroids-with-kontra- js...](https://medium.com/web-maker/making-asteroids-with-kontra-js-and-web- maker-95559d39b45f)

and other tutorials at [https://js13kgames.github.io/resources/#tuts](https://js13kgames.github.io/resources/#tuts)

<comment><USER12> ty!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What was the theme this year?

<comment><USER15> 'Back' according to [https://medium.com/js13kgames/js13kgames-2019-has- started-3a...](https://medium.com/js13kgames/js13kgames-2019-has- started-3a438ff4b078)

<comment><USER16> Are there any examples of competitions that have themes that are more (for lack of a better term) constraining? I find the theme for most game jams is so vague you can shoehorn any entry you want in to it. Demake competitions are interesting.

<comment><USER17> A couple of examples spring to mind... and the URLs should be adequate in hinting at what the constraints are :)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/cga-jam](https://itch.io/jam/cga-jam)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/fantasy-console-game- jam-3](https://itch.io/jam/fantasy-console-game-jam-3)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/2-buttons-jam-2018](https://itch.io/jam/2-buttons- jam-2018)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/procjam](https://itch.io/jam/procjam)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/1-bit-clicker-jam](https://itch.io/jam/1-bit-clicker- jam)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/gbjam-7](https://itch.io/jam/gbjam-7)

\- [https://itch.io/jam/musicgamejam](https://itch.io/jam/musicgamejam)

If you can think of a constraint, there's a good chance a jam already exists for it. If not, hosting one is easy, and very fun / fulfilling. See [https://itch.io/docs/creators/game-jams](https://itch.io/docs/creators/game- jams).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pretty nice. Too bad a number of these don't work in safari.

<comment><USER19> From my experience doing web development, that's not surprising. Safari is sorta the king of broken, half-implemented Javascript APIs that will advertise support but don't really work correctly.

<comment><USER18> I find that javascript apps often work in two of the three browsers.

If someone develops entirely in Firefox, there's chance it'll work in Safari or Chrome, but not both.

Same for if someone develops in Safari.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool games! I like stuff like this, but I have never understood really the meaning of making it under a specific size?

<comment><USER21> It originates in the constraints of hardware, particularly 8 and 16-bit computers with typically 4K or 64K addressable memory. Starting with the modification of existing games, it became a challenge to push how impressive a program could be made (typically an audiovisual demonstration "demo"). Such hardware becoming obsolete added to the impressiveness.

Demo and game competitions without constraints exist, but naturally become a competition of art and design, where use of existing engines is rewarded, discouraging programmers. The constrained competitions can be more appealing to programmers, where programming creativity is better rewarded.

<comment><USER22> Just a bit of historical update - most 8-bit machines topped out at 64k of memory (8 bit data, 16 bit address space), but some could do more with extra hardware or "tricks" (paging a special 8k block using a custom MMU or similar); even then, memory tended to be limited just due to cost if nothing else.

16-bit machines usually had a larger address space; the Motorola 68000 had a 24-bit address bus, for instance. While that allowed for quite a bit of memory, again (at least for most consumer hardware) most people were limited to at first 512k to 1Mb, then as the early-90s wore on, up to about 8Mb - <USER2> which point 32-bit cpus became affordable.

So the only place you really saw larger amounts of memory (and this is more my understanding than experience, as I was just a kid then) with 16-bit machines was usually businesses and other "larger scale" computing that had the need and finances to afford it. As always, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Page is down for me.

<comment><USER24> Same here.

<comment><USER13> fixed!

<comment><USER25> Still down.

<comment><USER13> back up again, and trying to keep it alive

<comment><USER26> Sorry, no, all pages report "Whoops, looks like something went wrong."

<comment><USER13> aaaaand it's back again (at least right now)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Time on Unix - <AUTHOR> https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/05/02/time-on-unix.html <comment><USER2> Btw nixers is a nice little forum. Check it out if you are into minimalism, suckless software, macos/linux/bsds and such. Very cool community

<comment><USER3> I tried to join but the 'are you a human' riddles flummoxed me.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I did get one eventually, but only after some extensive Googling.

Although I did successfully register the whole experience completely put me off from participating. I don't really want to be in a community with such extreme gatekeeping.

<comment><USER5> sounds like sour grapes .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author states:

>"The mean time recorded there was used as the one to derive your local civil time as an offset from, called Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT for short. However, it was not as precise as it could be and thus got replaced in 1967 by another standard called Universal Coordinated Time, UTC.

UTC is a version of the Universal Time standard. In this standard we also find UT1, that keeps track of Earth rotation angle using GPS satellites ..."

I was confused by this as my understanding is that the first GPS blocks were the NAVSTAR system which were launched in 1978[1]. Or am I reading this incorrectly and UT1 is a later version of the UTC standard?

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/po...](https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/policy/GPS_History.html)

<comment><USER7> Indeed it's a later standard part of the wider "Universal Time Standard". It specifically tracks earth phase expressed as Universal Time UT1.

NB: UTC is part of the Universal Time Standard, it is not _the_ time standard. I think from your comment you are mixing the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Impressive breadth and depth. I didn't expect something that started out at such a beginner level to end up that deep in the weeds.

<comment><USER7> Thank you very much, that was my goal to make it gradual so that anyone with just a bit of understanding could get through and have an overview of the topic.

I've read a lot on this topic and couldn't find a page that explained things properly so I created one.

I hope if I've made typos, technical mistakes, or that my writing isn't clear enough in some places that the online community can help with fixes so that this can become a better resource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This font is gigantic. And the text is a bit too wide. It feels as if I had to do a marathon from left to right on each line.

I wish the web didn't have the possibility of styling its content and would only use standard options which would be customizable by users. E.g. as a webdev, you wouldn't be able to set the font face beyond "serif", "sans- serif", "monospace" and then everybody could just set those to what they like. Similarly, there would be no "font-size". You'd have to use semantically correct HTML tags and the user would choose the font size for these tags. I'm tired of 99% pages being unreadable. Reader mode is a hack.

EDIT: To clarify, the text on this page renders on my 4k screen with 170% scaling as ~31cm wide and each character is ~1cm tall.

And sure enough, the CSS responsible for this part contains "font-size: 22.4px;". That's beyond reasonable for normal body text.

<comment><USER7> I'm the blog's author. Can you advice on some CSS fixes, I'm not experiencing what you're describing on my phone (Chrome and Firefox) nor my desktop (also Chrome and Firefox). Could you also share a screenshot please.

<comment><USER9> Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/MfEAvRp.png](https://i.imgur.com/MfEAvRp.png)

I see you used "width: 60%" to specify the width of the article text. That's probably good for narrower screens, but on its own can have unpleasant effects on wider ones. Consider adding "max-width: 39em" to mitigate it. You may fiddle a bit with the exact value there to see what works for your website.

As to the text size, you used "font-size: 1.4em". I think that in this regard it's best to rely on the defaults and set "font-size: 100%" in "html, body" and then "font-size: 1rem" for the tag where the main text is contained.

<comment><USER10> On a wide, 1440p monitor, with the browser window full-screen width, it looks fine to me.

Smaller text would be harder to read. And it's not like the text is edge-to- edge wide.

BUT [https://contrastrebellion.com/](https://contrastrebellion.com/)

<comment><USER9> I just retried viewing this page after rebooting into Windows and it looks completely different. The text is a lot smaller than on Linux. So Windows handles HiDPI a lot differently, it seems. But my own website looks exactly the same on Linux and Windows. I'm using a "reset.css" \--- maybe that's what's at play here.

In any case, our impressions being different only prove my point about standardized styling of webpages.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux 3.8 Released - <AUTHOR> http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges <comment><USER8> If I understand correctly, user namespace support was the major thing missing for the secure use of Linux Containers (LXC). This should bring widespread, extremely rapid container-based virtualization under Linux closer to a reality. Redhat is nominally backing this via libvirt, but mainly offers paravirt-based solutions. IBM who authored a lot of the kernel code seems to be interested the same stuff for large-scale servers. We live in interesting times.

<comment><USER9> Does this solve the problem of constraining root to the container?

<comment><USER10> Yes.

<comment><USER9> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know open-source is old-hat by now - but damn - look at the man-years of contributions. Linux is a miracle.

<comment><USER12> I've had the same sentiment for many years... Linux is indeed a miracle.

But after spending a lot of time with it recently (e.g. getting LXC running last night), I've concluded that it would be very hard to design a system with a security API that is worse than Linux.

The issue is that Linus doesn't design ANYTHING. He doesn't believe in design; he only believes in evolution.

Unix was designed, whereas Linux is mostly a bunch of code bolted on top of Unix. It's not sustainable in the long term. Someone needs to actually design something eventually, so there is a stable base for more evolution.

Spend some time looking through these:

        - traditional Unix ACL-based security
        - traditional resource limits
        - chroot (not secure, but used as a "part" of many  security solutions)
        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - LSM-based
          - <USER4>
          - <USER5>
          - ...
        - <USER6>
          - <USER7>
          - namespaces (apparently completed with this kernel release)
          - LXC user space tools
        - ptrace sandboxing
          - (at least a dozen projects use this)
        - user mode linux

And you'll realize it's just a huge mess. I'm sure the complexity makes Linux measurably more insecure in practice. Or it just provides employment for a lot of people -- who knows.

There's never going to be a way to clean this all up, since people are relying on all of it.

I don't have that much experience with the alternatives; I'm sure they're messy in their own right. (I've used many OSes, but not security-wise.) But this definitely has me looking towards FreeBSD and such. Too bad it is more expensive on EC2.

I mentioned Minix 3 here before -- it's probably a pipe dream, but being a microkernel, it seems like a good basis for a future secure Unix. It actually was designed in some sense.

From what I gather people take the existence of root escalation exploits on Linux for granted. If that weren't so (and it shouldn't be with a microkernel), then traditional Unix security might actually cover a lot of cases that all these hacks on top are patching up.

EDIT: Also, Linux should look to DJB for guidance. Out of all the hairiniess, how do you even do this on Linux (or any Unix)? <http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html> It just seems crazy.

<comment><USER13> With the disclaimer that I very much have a dog in the fight, you might want to look at illumos[1] and its distributions like SmartOS[2] and OmniOS[3]. It has a secure, robust container model (with a hat tip to FreeBSD jails for providing inspiration over a decade ago) and a mature least-privilege model that minimizes attack surface -- not to mention ZFS, DTrace, KVM and other goodies. At the very least, you can take solace in knowing that others share your desire for cleaner alternatives...

[1] [http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and- develop...](http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development- of-illumos-2/)

[2] <http://smartos.org/>

[3] <http://omnios.omniti.com/>

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the links; I had heard of SmartOS but not known much about the technology.

What sort of disappointed me about LXC is that you end up with an init process and 7 or 8 children of it in each container. I am more interested in sandboxing at the level of a single process. In a lot of cases you just want to run somebody else's Python code and look at its stdout; you don't need to spin up init and family do that.

There are a hundred and one projects like this but most of them seem half- baked.

Capsicum [1] looks like what I'm interested in; there seemed to be effort around a Linux port a couple years ago but I don't think it happened. Does Illumos/SmartOS provide anything like this?

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/>

<comment><USER14> You don't need init in each container, and the encouraged model of having a whole distro in a container is bonkers. Play around with clone(2)/unshare(2) directly, and it is fairly simple. All you need to know about pid 1 is if it terminates your namespace goes, and orphan processes will reparent to it (and some signals are blocked). If you have a single process then this doesn't matter really. You can do all this from Python I expect, I have done it all from Lua with no issues.

<comment><USER12> OK from what I understand "LXC" is basically the user space tools that give you the distro in the container... it's more of a VM model.

But yeah I think I just need the underlying cgroups, and possibly some of the namespaces. Although I don't car aell that much if untrusted code can see what processes are running; just as long as it can't affect them.

Just curious what you were using containers for from Lua? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER14> I started using them largely for testing netlink code, as it is much easier to create some isolated network devices than risk messing about with the real ones. This is part of a fairly comprehensive Linux binding for Lua <https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have high hopes for the automatic NUMA balancing work. We are getting a lot of cores per socket capable of generating a lot of traffic per core and the disparity which was already pretty large continues to grow.

That said the scheduler does pretty well, it beats manually binding without a lot of experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone else love reading these, even though they are mostly way over your head? There is something about kernel release notes that makes them fascinating...

</comment><comment><USER17> 3.7.x has been borderline breaking on my laptop for a month now and I'm fairly sure that the issues I've experienced affect a large number of users (excessive heat, low battery life on Sandy/Ivy-Bridge based notebooks). Compiling 3.8 as I'm typing this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty excited about seeing F2FS in mobile devices eventually, as mobile devices still need all the I/O performance they can get, considering most manufacturers are using cheap flash storage, and even the high-end ones aren't that fast.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. Really looking forward to trying this on my Raspberry Pi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will the ext4 inline data be enabled by default? Any idea how older kernels will deal with files inlined by 3.8?

<comment><USER21> Older kernels refuse to mount a filesystem with feature flags they doesn't understand; see INCOMPAT_INLINE_DATA in <https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Disk_Layout>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does F2FS requires special hardware? Can I format my SSD with F2FS in near future?

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'd like to know more about this. Should I be using it instead of EXT4 on my old, boring desktop SSD?

<comment><USER24> At the moment it's had some reports of syncing issues (e.g. not syncing when it should), and a few performance odditites. All that being said, I'm not sure i've seen reports of any corruption outright but it is fairly new compared to the ext family. I'd say stick with EXT4/3 if you're using the desktop ssd for anything serious, if not, go for it; it doesn't look like it'll kill your cat and/or wife.

<comment><USER23> Oh, I don't care if it eats my root install. I've got a "reinstall everything and reconfigure everything" script that gets me back to 99% after a new install. Plus, I keep my home partition on a "totally stable TM" RAID10 BTRFS array, so I don't mind a bit of risk.

<comment><USER25> Isn't "totally stable" and "btrfs" somewhat contradictory?

<comment><USER26> _So far_ my experience has been btrfs is stable, meaning I haven't had any data corruption and TRIM works great. That being said I have multiple backups and images of the system :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Storing files data inside inodes is really great feature - it should make usages of file-system-as-DB approaches usable in a lot of cases where it didn't make sense before.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's human nature to tool worship. I am no exception. But please, let's worship tools that enable radical innovation. The Linux kernel was that tool-- in 1999. It's still improving, but it's not worthy of this much attention. It merely allows existing innovation to work better. It's like celebrating the latest Xeon processor--cool, yes, but not worth this much collective distraction.

</comment><comment><USER29> Support for 386 being removed. My children compile kernels on their 386 to keep warm in the winter. Linux 3.8 MURDERS CHILDREN (<http://xkcd.com/1172/>)

<comment><USER30> I guess it's time to upgrade to a 486. I hear they've come down in price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sad. This had Thunderbolt hotplug working on my Mac at one RC and then it got removed and didn't get added back in. Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter does work, but it was kernel panicing yesterday on rc7. I'll have to see tonight if it's fixed.

To others, where would I report such an issue if it's still broken?

<comment><USER31> The linux-pci mailing list: <http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-pci></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Replace HTML,CSS,JS for mobile web? - <AUTHOR>

I see many browsers being developed for mobile. All of them still use HTML,CSS,JS for rendering web page. Why not replace it with a different presentation format that is suitable and efficient for mobile ? <comment><USER2> You mean native?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, like browser 2.0 with different presentation format.

<comment><USER2> Mmmm I do not see the point, you can do (almost) everything with web apps that you do with native apps. A browser that introduces a third set of tools will just make things worse. Maybe your idea should be to build a browser that exposes all device functionality to web apps.</comment></comment></comment>