Digg banned from Google? - <AUTHOR> http://martinmacdonald.net/digg-banned-from-google/ <comment><USER2> This has nothing to do with Reader. We were tackling a spammer and inadvertently took action on the root page of digg.com.

Here's the official statement from Google: "We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy submitted link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly."

From talking to the relevant engineer, I think digg.com should be fully back in our results within 15 minutes or so. After that, we'll be looking into what protections or process improvements would make this less likely to happen in the future.

 _Added_ : I believe Digg is fully back now.

<comment><USER3> If this would happen to a less popular site, what chances does a site-owner have of getting attention to this problem, and getting it fixed?

<comment><USER2> Hey relix, it took an unfortunate chain of corner cases for this to happen, and for this situation it was actually more likely for the corner cases to hit a larger site rather than a less popular site.

In general, when a member of the webspam team directly applies a manual webspam action against a site, we also drop a note to the site owner at <http://google.com/webmasters/> . That helps the site owner tell whether something is going on with manual spam vs. just algorithmic ranking. Then any site can do a reconsideration request at the same place or post in our webmaster forum at <https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters> .

People like to scrutinize Google, so I've noticed that writing a "Google unfairly penalized me" blog post typically makes its way to us pretty often.

<comment><USER4> Hi Matt,

That doesn't match my experience. Could you explain the penalty against onlineslangdictionary.com?

Showing citations of slang use[1] caused what appears to be an algorithmic penalty. The correlation between showing citations and the presence of a penalty is apparent:

[http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overvie...](http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overview- charts.png)

Missing from those 3 charts is the one showing that citations were once again removed over 120 days ago, yet the penalty remains. It would appear that the algorithmic penalty was turned into a manual penalty.

I've followed all procedures including those listed in your comment, without resolution.

[1] By citations of slang use, I mean short (1-3 sentence) attributed excerpts of published works, shown within the appropriate definitions, as evidence of the correctness of those definitions. All citations were gathered and posted by hand.

<comment><USER2> Hi Walter, the only manual webspam action I see regarding onlineslangdictionary.com is from several years ago (are you familiar with a company called Web Build Pages or someone named Jim Boykin?), but that no longer applies here.

You're affected by a couple algorithms in our general web ranking. The first is our page layout algorithm. See [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page- layo...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout- algorithm-improvement.html) or [http://searchengineland.com/google-may- penalize-ad-heavy-pag...](http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad- heavy-pages-100601) for more context on that. In particular, comparing a page like <http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/compy> to a page like [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi&defid=6571433) , your site has much more prominent ads above the fold compared to Urban Dictionary.

Your site is also affected by our Panda algorithm. Here's a blog post we wrote to give guidance to sites that are affected by Panda: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more- guid...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on- building-high-quality.html)

<comment><USER2> P.S. One other quick thing. I saw you sending me tweets, but the tweets looked fairly repetitive, and you hadn't chosen a Twitter avatar. I get a lot of tweets from bots, and this looked fairly close to bot-like to me: [https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/phot...](https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/photo/1) That (plus the fact that the site had no current manual webspam actions, plus the fact that I wasn't sure what you meant by citations) meant that I didn't reply. Hope that helps.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense. All the tweets were by hand. I tried to tweet every weekday but missed some, then eventually gave up.

I just didn't know what to do upon getting no feedback from you guys after posting to the Google Webmaster forums, filing reconsideration requests, contacting friends at Google, posting to and commenting on Reddit about it, commenting on HN about it, posting to Facebook, blogging, and tweeting about it, and putting a yellow box at the top of all pages on the site mentioning the penalty and linking to a page with the details.

Thanks again for talking with me about this. (I'd still like to hear about Web Build Pages / Jim Boykin and the rest - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996> ...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doing a site:digg.com/news/ search on Bing shows a lot of pages like these:

<http://digg.com/news/gaming/ing_bank_i_ilanlar>

and even more duplicate tag and rss pages for "site:digg.com/tag/" and "site:digg.com rss".

These /news/ pages 302 redirect to many different sites (some are bound to contain spam or be of lower quality).

302 redirects for these links is bad practice. Some link shorteners (ab)use 302 Found (instead of 301 Moved Permanently) to hoard content that doesn't belong to them. The content for these links can't be found on digg.com, so they too use the wrong redirect and associate themselves with all pages they link to.

Besides that: Digg.com acts like a single page webapp for most of its content. There are no discussion pages or detail pages for the stories. The content that does appear is near duplicate to other content on the web, especially with popular stories, where many blogs just copy the title and the first intro paragraph.

<comment><USER6> I saw a similar pattern in the links that remain, it's sad to see the link authority of a site get plundered, and it seems like something inside Google's indexer realized that was going on and deleted it.

As a search engine its something you have to do if you want to consider site authority in your ranking model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is down, but here is the text from Google's cache:

        --snip--

_Something interesting has just come across one of my networks (hat tip to datadial), just a few days after Digg have announced that they are building a replacement for the much loved Google Reader, they have (coincidentally?) disappeared from the primary google index.

[image unavailable]

Is it an SEO penalty for links? That seems to be the number one reason that brands are getting booted from google's index these days… Some conspiracy theorists will no doubt be proclaiming its something to do with their announcement to build a replica of the now defunct Google reader, but personally I really cant see that having any effect. Could there?

Doing a site: search for Digg certainly demonstrates that they are no longer in the index:

[image unavailable]

Its likely (only if it is link based however) that it would be down to what individuals who submit content do after the fact – ie. sending spammy links at their posts to try and build the pagerank, and create "authority" which they then pass back to their own sites. Digg has long been listed in every "linkwheel" sellers handbook, and if that is the reason then what does it mean for every community site on the internet?

Will we have to manually aprove all new links soon at this rate? Come on Google – WTF – let the internet know what you're doing please._

        --end snip--

Without the images, maybe I am missing some context. But it seems hyperbolic, considering digg is not serving a robots.txt anymore [1]. It is probably just a blunder on Digg's part.

[1]: At the time of my comment, digg was serving an xhtml document with status 404 at /robots.txt. Now it appears to be a valid robots file.

PS: I am enjoying the irony of having a copy of the article, even though the site is down, because of Google's cache. Need to pontificate about how Google is potentially evil but can't keep your server running? Don't worry, people can read it via Google's cache.

<comment><USER8> I just tried the digg.com/robots.txt, and for it me it says:

User-agent: * Disallow:

Which explains everything without conspiracy theories

<comment><USER9> Yes, this seems to explain it.

<http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html>

<comment><USER10> No, it doesn't. Your linked example contains:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /

While the (new) digg.com/robots.txt contains:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow:

Those are very different. The former essentially disallows bots from crawling the entire site, while the latter disallows nothing - effectively allowing everything. The syntax is unusual, granted, for historical reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's possible (though not necessarily likely) that they finally got banned for their toolbar, which is basically designed to scam Google.

<comment><USER12> I'm not familiar with their toolbar. How does it scam Google?

<comment><USER11> It makes it look like you're still on Digg even when you click the a link to go to another site. So essentially it makes it look like people are spending a lot more time on Digg than they actually are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd wait for an official Digg statement, because Digg may have requested to be removed from google search results (the net result would be the same)

</comment><comment><USER10> From my experience, when Google de-indexes a site, they also suppress any PageRank the Google Toolbar would have shown for it; that doesn't appear to be the case here, digg.com is still PR8.

Having toolbar PageRank[1] and yet no cached page[2] is not something I've seen before.

[1] [http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?features=Rank&sourc...](http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?features=Rank&sourceid=navclient- ff&client=navclient-auto- ff&iqrn=UgnC&ch=8f25a5d62&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com)

[2] <https://www.google.com/search?q=cache:digg.com>

<comment><USER14> Your experience may be limited, because this is very common. PageRank and indexed status operate independently of each other; it's not uncommon to see a site that was deindexed still maintain PR for quite some time (and often, indefinitely). However, if your site is deindexed, PR means "nothing" because your links no longer provide juice.

Valid PR while being deindexed is one of the (many) tricks that Google has added in the last couple years to try to reduce the usefulness of getting PR for blackhat purposes

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe they nuked themselves:

<http://digg.com/robots.txt>

<comment><USER16> It's cloaked so only google can see it - try changing your user agent to match googlebot's.

<comment><USER17> Using the googlebot User-Agent string gives me:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow:

This robots.txt should allow all bots to search the entire website. However, I think Google also penalizes websites that serve different content to googlebot than to non-bot user agents.

<comment><USER18> This is the same as what I see, using a standard-issue Firefox UA string.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google admitted the mistake: "We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly."

[http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/20/google-seems-to- have...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/20/google-seems-to-have-de- indexed-digg/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Google has rules concerning SEO. A warning for the rest of us not to try to cheat our way to a better ranking.

</comment><comment><USER21> Their robots.txt file clearly asks to not be crawled at all.

      User-agent: *
      Disallow:

<http://digg.com/robots.txt>

<comment><USER5> Incorrect. To configure your robots.txt to not be crawled at all use:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /

Allow indexing of everything with:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow:

It seems they are at this very moment struggling to change things.

<comment><USER21> You are totally right. Disregard everything I said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER23> <http://digg.com/robots.txt> <\-- 404 Not Found

I know a robots.txt 404 shouldn't de-list you, but I would have expected digg to have one?

Maybe they requested de-listing and removed their robots.txt? Who knows!

<comment><USER24> There is one there now:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow:

<comment><USER23> Yup - It's back now.. But it 100% didn't exist when I posted earlier :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What I love most about this situation is the multiple theories, when in essence Google puts it very simply: WE F __*ED UP. Sorry!

</comment><comment><USER26> If you assume conspiracy then you're most likely ignoring the simple fact of life in the technology world. Someone made a screw up.

</comment><comment><USER27> It doesn't matter if they were banned - they didn't care about SEO in the first place.

All those old URLs they had for years? All disappeared as they wanted to start fresh.

</comment><comment><USER28> And nothing of value was lost.</comment>


Sorry ARIMA, but I'm Going Bayesian - <AUTHOR> http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/04/21/forget-arima/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this. If you wanted to get started doing this kind of analysis in python check out the examples for the maturing pyMC3

[https://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc3/stochastic_volatility/](https://pymc- devs.github.io/pymc3/stochastic_volatility/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I second for PyMC3 - a great library. And just recently I went through [https://github.com/markdregan/Bayesian-Modelling-in- Python](https://github.com/markdregan/Bayesian-Modelling-in-Python).

</comment></comment><comment> liviu- I found it quite interesting to compare HN and /r/statistics in terms of the tone difference in the comments when discussing this article: [https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/4fw1bn/sorry_ar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/4fw1bn/sorry_arima_but_im_going_bayesian/)

<comment><USER3> Because "data science".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really interesting post. I have to say the data science team at Stitchfix are clearly doing really good, __applied __work that is central to their business. It 's so cool to see.

Here's a tip for any R users who read through the code and (like me) is pained by repetition. Instead of using

        library(lubricate)
        library(bts)
        library(...)

Just use apply!

        packages <- c("lubricate", "bts", "...")
        lapply(packages, library, character.only = TRUE)

<comment><USER5> it's clever but is it more readable?

these sorts of discussions, people who write blog posts about 'library' vs. 'require', kind of feel like 'R smell'.

wouldn't it be better for a language to just take a list of libraries for import, maybe with a readable syntax?

so... have we got to where Julia can re-use R packages yet?

<comment><USER4> I understand where you're coming from, but these two lines are exactly 'taking a list of libraries for import'.

packages is a character vector of package names, lapply is by definition 'list apply'. We're taking a list of packages and applying the library function on them.

This seems complicated if you're not used to it but _R is a functional language_. Approaching R from this perspective makes it a powerful, flexible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like others, I enjoyed this.

I work with time series data every day in the domain of commercial real estate. One of my constant struggles is to extract an underlying long-term trend from the real estate cycle. I would love to try this here.

Can anyone suggest some Bayesian learning resources for a non-statistician?

<comment><USER7> [http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic- Programming-...](http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/)

<comment><USER4> Another open source Bayesian book/course all in python: [http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkbayes/t](http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkbayes/t)

<comment><USER8> If you can program, this is the best probability book. I think you messed up the URL, though:

[http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/think- bayes/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks a ton you all posters of these book names and links. Helped a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Really nice story. All the Bayesian stuff now gets swamped by big data method. There must be a time machine learning people will come back to the Bayesian womb. :-)

I'm currently using it to define priors on measure spaces. I think it's awesome to have so few abstractions in a discipline and be able to do inference anyway. I'd definitely recommend to look into Dirichlet Processes if you haven't before. It's a nice entry point.

<comment><USER11> Wharton's Pete Fader would agree with you somewhat that big data-style methods are overblown: [http://www.datanami.com/2012/05/03/wharton_professor_pokes_h...](http://www.datanami.com/2012/05/03/wharton_professor_pokes_hole_in_big_data_balloon/)

he also has some very cool uses of dirichlet processes (modelling entire competitive industries)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was very surprised when I went to the root domain to see what stitchfix is. Completely not what I was expecting! I guess my model didn't predict a clothes delivery website to be writing about cool stuff like this. But now a bayesian update to this belief is in order :)

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the content.

Does anyone else have a _really_ hard time reading the light gray-on-white font?

<comment><USER14> It is ironic that your off-topic comment lead to down-votes, reducing the contrast of your comment. I can't imagine the nightmare you must be living right now.

<comment><USER13> Mostly, I'm unconcerned about karma. But at present, the contrast is fine. I suppose the vote count has increased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Excellent walkthrough I'll be sure to give this a try on my next project.

Any good references for an intro to the traditional arima models?

<comment><AUTHOR> Short: [http://a-little-book-of-r-for-time- series.readthedocs.org/en...](http://a-little-book-of-r-for-time- series.readthedocs.org/en/latest/src/timeseries.html) or [http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/411arim.htm](http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/411arim.htm)

And for a longer, a book by the author of R forecast library: [https://www.otexts.org/fpp/](https://www.otexts.org/fpp/)

<comment><USER4> This book is extremely practical - I would definitely recommend it for doing actual time series analysis. That said, it's not a _learn time series book_. It's a _do basic time series in R_ book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was very interesting to read, especially as I'm currently taking a course in time series analysis. The course doesn't touch on any Bayesian treatment of the topic at all, and barely goes beyond non-stationary models (e.g. ARIMA.)</comment>


Electric scooters aren't as green as you may think - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-08-02/are-e-scooters-good-for-the-environment <comment><USER2> There's always someone who's going to tell you how something is not as green as you may think.

Maybe we should just forget about global warming for a little bit and try to remember how dirty the air is from gas vehicles.

[https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/21/las-dirty-air- vio...](https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/21/las-dirty-air-violated- federal-smog-standards-for-almost-3-months/)

<comment><AUTHOR> ownership is one way to bypass half the emissions issue (of cars having to pick up and drop off rental scooters) as well as the associated shortened-life issue.

i own one of the xiaomi scooters initially deployed by bird and mentioned in the article, and for little round-trip errands, it's hard to beat the convenience. you can ride literally door-to-door, without even looking for parking, since you can bring it right into most businesses (even bikes don't have that convenience in most cases).

<comment><USER3> Curiously, that's the opposite of what they say about cars

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > biking (8 g) or walking (0 g) [per mile]

This is simply wrong. It doesn't take into account the CO2 footprint of the person doing the biking or walking. Biking is more efficient than walking per km. Since anyone biking, running, walking would be eating more to cover the exercise this can have a significant footprint based on what their diet looks like. A running beef eater vs a running vegan looks very different.

I used to bike 65km/d round trip to work. Wonderful for my mind and body, but I had to eat at least one extra meal every day for the periods I was active, around 200-300g total.

Normally I would replenish with fried eggs and potatoes at a guesstimated 4x (CO2 equivalent mass ratio), which is (meh) reasonable? Giving around 13g/km footprint for biking (just from my food).

Assuming I would be eating lamb or beef at somewhere around 30x impact, that extra meal would give a biking footprint around 92g/km just from my food!

Correct my numbers or methods if you disagree.

[edit]: Comparison to my (tiny) car at the time burning 4.5l/100km, (2.3kg CO2 / litre petrol), the car would be around 103g/km, which is not much higher than me on a bicycle if I kept a shitty diet !!

<comment><USER5> > _It doesn 't take into account the CO2 footprint of the person doing the > biking or walking._

This is carbon neutral because all the CO2 we exhale comes from atmospheric CO2 captured by plants (and then through the food chain up to us).

Now, of course food production has a carbon footprint because of harvesting, transport, processing, etc. but it quickly gets hugely complex to measure.

In any case, for the purpose of comparison they obviously restricted to the impact of the mean of transport. Your food or your carbon footprint in general does not change anything about that.

<comment><USER6> That is an absurd argument. The modern food chain is not carbon neutral [0].

If I start running to work, I have to consume more food. If I have a vegan diet I am eating the direct result of photosynthesis. That is, we could imagine the embodied carbon of my apple resulted directly from my previous exhalation of CO2. I do not dispute that some part of the 'life cycle of food' is a closed loop in this regard.

Yet I can't just 'eat an apple'. I also require someone to grow the apple (with fertilizer and its GHG emitting production chain), protect it (likely with pesticides), clean and package, transport, store and sell the apple. By the time I chew into the apple I have already contributed to the demand of GHG emitting processes.

So if you want to rigorously compare scooters with walking, running or riding a horse (all which affect quantity of food consumed), you need to take into account the carbon footprint of food. Just as when you look at GHG emissions of fuel, you don't just look at its combustion - you look at the supply chain.

If you only look at where carbon is added (e.g. fossil fuel combustion) or removed (e.g. carbon forest sinks) from the cycle, you miss out on learning about how individual actions or choices affect the rate at which addition or subtraction occurs.

[0] - [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henk_Westhoek/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henk_Westhoek/publication/257160858_The_price_of_protein_Review_of_land_use_and_carbon_footprints_from_life_cycle_assessments_of_animal_food_products_and_their_substitutes/links/59e329bc458515393d5b49dc/The- price-of-protein-Review-of-land-use-and-carbon-footprints-from-life-cycle- assessments-of-animal-food-products-and-their-substitutes.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > I have to consume more food.

Most people probably don't, and many people could afford to both run to work and eat less.

<comment><USER8> My environmental studies prof did an experiment cycling and getting the bus to university on both the amounnt of money spent and energy consumed. He found that he would spend more if cycling than the bus fare on food to keep the same energy input equal.

People also generally cannot sustain eating less continually but obviously there's a health benefit from some changes.

The ecosystem approach to food energy and carbon brings some surprising convulsions too. For example wrapping and selling fruit in plastic bags is better than buying them loose. This doesn't make sense unless you think about the whole picture.

I suspect that the recent HN craze for indiscriminate feel good tree planting is also ecologically and sustainably suspect if looked at holistically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Eh. We're currently at a stage in which we sort of have the tools to go carbon-neutral but aren't fully there yet.

For example, producing an EV currently involves releasing a bunch of CO2.

I can't name all of the reasons why but I imagine it'll be stuff like mining equipment being fossil powered, the trucks that transport the cars, the power that goes into refining stuff, etc.

Eventually all of that can be made carbon neutral; the only processes I can see potentially being an issue would be if like, actually digging the soil released CO2.

It would be literally impossible for the first EV to be made using only renewable energy by definition because it's the first.

Location matters too.

Sweden's electrical grid averages ~10-20g of CO2 per kWh because it's mostly nuclear/hydro.

The UK is at about 300g.

Trucks, vans, trains, etc should all be electrified as soon as possible. A last final burst of CO2 in order to create all of that, then we stop, perhaps sequester some, and off we go.

One can hope.

<comment><USER10> One can hope that we can free ourselves from the individual car driver paradigm. We have the tools to go car-free, but aren't fully there yt.

<comment><USER11> Do you have children? The idea of going car free when you need to take 50kg of stuff with you everywhere is terrifying.

<comment><USER12> What are you taking everywhere?

<comment><USER11> The car seat and isofix base together must be the best part of 20kg. Then there's prams, nappy changing bag. If we're staying overnight, travel cot and chair etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't mean this in a rude way, but the fact that you just tried to justify cars primarily by the _need to transport car seats_ may be a hint that your thinking might be a little too set in the car paradigm. A lot of the problems solved by cars, are also caused by cars.

<comment><USER11> My partners parents live, according to Google, 38 miles or 53 minutes away by car

Alternatively, 3 hours, 2 trains and a bus away.

It's completely impractical with a small child.

<comment><USER13> Okay, that's a reasonable complaint, but travel time is a distinct and separate issue from the point we were discussing, which was the need to transport paraphernalia of which nearly half was car-related in the first place.

Nevertheless, it's another example of cars creating the problems that they solve - this kind of disparity can only be caused by a terrible public transport infrastructure, which in turn is caused by inadequate funding, which is caused by lack of demand due to cars (and lobbying of course). In most places in Europe, bus+train is much faster than driving for long journeys, especially intercity. Trains can go at speeds than would be unsafe on roads, and don't have to worry about traffic jams, while buses are frequent and often get dedicated lanes in cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bunch of brand new junk whether it's teslas, electric scooters/bikes, or anything else that's new and green is obviously bad for the environment. What's bad for the environment is excess consumption of anything. All these new green products only offer marginal improvements over their "non" green counterparts and never address making the manufactuering process green, which counts for the vast majority of the emissions of almost all goods.

If you care about the environment cut back your consumption of new shit. Go fix that bike in your garage and ride that to work.

<comment><USER15> > All these new green products only offer marginal improvements over their > "non" green counterparts and never address making the manufactuering process > green, which counts for the vast majority of the emissions of almost all > goods.

Not for cars, not by a long shot. The vast majority of carbon emissions of a car are after it rolls off the assembly line.

<comment><USER14> Factually incorrect.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/20...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car)

<comment><USER16> This is very much an estimate... and I can't just take things like this:

> If we do this, and then divide by the total emissions of the auto industry > by the total amount of money spent on new cars, we reach a footprint of > 720kg CO2e per £1000 spent.

as true by default. They don't show why would that relation be true either. For example, you can find options that cost you many thousands more and amount to a few extra chips and different software.

<comment><USER14> It is an estimate but a close enough estimate to counter the claim that the vast majority of emissions are after production of the car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most of the concerns are potentially lessened as they mature.

The vandalism they refer to will certainly be reduced as people come to accept them. There can be charging stations around the city where riders can plug them into to get a discount or credits, reducing the need to collect them with a truck and drive them around. I imagine there are ways to mitigate people abusing them, such as making them easier to replace damaged parts or making them better able to detect when users are throwing them around and such.

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there really people out there who believe that these things are "green"? It was well known before that the life expectancy those scooters is measured in months. It is also well known that electric vehicles with lithium batteries are "green" only if you use them for a very long time. IIRC for electric cars that would be something like four years of daily use -- mostly due to the pollution caused by the fabrication of the batteries. But of course, it isn't your city that gets polluted but some distant area where these things a built.

If you want to be green, use a bike or some non-motorized scooter.

<comment><USER19> the xiaomi scooters that most companies started out with have a 280Wh battery. Teslas have an 60-80kWh battery.

if you are saying it takes 4 years of daily use the make the manufacture of a 60kWh battery greener than driving, then it only takes ~80 days of use for a scooter battery.

<comment><USER12> And the average scooter survives less than 80 days.

Meanwhile most of the journeys on scooters where I live are replacing walking or cycling...

<comment><USER19> Source? For either of those two claims

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd say one important point is that, in many places, public transportation is inadequate, completely overfilled, or both. If people are expected to move from cars to public transportation, many places just don't have the infrastructure to accomodate that transition. I live in Cologne. While we do have public transportation that allows you to reach most places, it's already at a point where the city wouldn't be able to cope with eliminating cars. Car- sharing, escooters, etc., these could be considered necessary extensions to public transport and enable car-users to transition, even if these options aren't entirely as green as using trains or buses would be.

</comment><comment><USER21> Feels like Moving goal posts.

Of course lithium batteries aren't CO neutral.

Escooters are a great transitional device.

</comment><comment><USER22> _That actual trip somebody's taking on the scooter — that's pretty green," said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies who was not involved with the study. "What's not green is everything you don't see."_

This title is misleading and a perfect example of the backlash any new tech that challenges the status quo faces.

A more accurate headline would be "Dockless e-scooters..." but instead the author has lumped together owner driven e-scooters, which have very little carbon impact, with rentable scooters, which by themselves don't have a large carbon impact but the ecosystem around them does.

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel like the number of diesel powered ambulances I've seen dispatched to scooter induced accidents alone offsets their carbon footprint

</comment><comment><USER24> Walk.

</comment><comment><USER25> Exactly - I love how people think these scooters are "clean" when piles of them are ferried around in gas guzzling cars every night (farther distances than the scooter should themselves cover "under electric propulsion").

I have an electric unicycle I absolutely love and recommend the use of personal electric transport to everyone. But scooter sharing is dumb and makes cities look trashy.

<comment><USER26> If they're only rounded up once a night by a petrol car, but in the daytime they did four trips each, then they are still saving most of the energy cost of the short trips even before you account for the collection trip by the car being one trip for many vehicles.

Also, they're not always collected by cars. I was in Vienna recently, and saw someone collecting electric scooters by piling them onto another electric scooter.

<comment><USER14> The scooters are not replacing what a car would have been used for in the majority of cases. They're replacing walking or cycling.

So no they are not saving energy.

<comment><USER26> All the people I've asked who have used them or considered using them were replacing taxis. If they have a bike, or if the destination is close enough to walk, there's no need to use something "that expensive".

<comment><USER14> Cool anecdote.

<comment><USER27> Right but the article also says that ⅓ of people who used then would have otherwise used a car. And I'd expect the actual number to be a bit higher because people like to appear healthy and green.

So they _are_ displacing cars.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple to remove, replace non-inclusive language in code base - <AUTHOR> https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/17/apple-to-remove-replace-non-inclusive-language-in-code-base <comment><USER2> How about actually doing something about slavery or saying something about the human rights abuses of your manufacturing HQs country?

This changes nothing other than give some developers a warm fuzzy feeling like they did something. Like changing your avatar as a protest...

<comment><USER3> Obviously Apple's efforts go beyond renaming functions. See my other reply at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880163)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They are also deprecating the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". In my mind I never associated them to skin colour, but I'm not a native English speaker. Does anybody know the origin of these terms? Is there any semantic link to race?

<comment><USER5> It's a very very old cultural association, dating back to primitive times where people were literally 'afraid of the dark'. So Day = Light = Good and Night = Dark = Bad. Night-time is associated with mystery, fear, ignorance, demons, devils, 'creatures of the dark' etc and Day-time is associated with rebirth, new life, positivity, understanding etc.

Of course none of that resonates with the self-flagellating virtue signallers, whose cultural awareness extends about as far back as last week and who assume every reference to 'Black' must be due to 'whitey' being incorrigibly racist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are places in the world where slavery is still a thing, unfortunately, and they clean their conscience by replacing a few words in their codebase.

Slacktivism at its finest!

<comment><USER3> Here is Apple's 2019 report on "Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking and Slavery in Our Business and Supply Chains."

[https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple- Comb...](https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Combat-Human- Trafficking-and-Slavery-in-Supply-Chain-2019.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I am not necessarily speaking about human trafficking in theie supply chain.

I am talking about redirecting your efforts towards issues that have a real impact. Does Apple want to do something about slavery, some philanthropic gesture? There are thousands of things that are more effective than replacing a few words in the codebase. But maybe they wouldn't grant as much publicity as this PR stunt does.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Apple does those things, which are detailed in the link.

A short blurb titled "Updates to Coding Terminology" on a site aimed at developers is not a PR stunt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This topic has been beaten to death, and most people already know where they stand on this topic, but I'd just like to add one thing:

I think it's becoming clear that the people pushing for these kinds of changes are likely racist. Weird, but hear me out...

Trauma can taint anything to be seen as dangerous or bad (an example would be people who are triggered by clowns), but victims of trauma usually also understand that their phobic reactions aren't necessarily representative of the real world. They don't expect others to reconfigure reality to keep them from being triggered, except maybe on an individual level, with the understanding that one party willingly deceives or hides things from the other to help them cope.

This is not that, because the people implementing the changes don't harbor the related trauma (by their own admission), nor do they acknowledge the deceit. They are instead motivated by prejudice.

There may be an innocuous question like "how do we become more inclusive?" and they see a term like "blacklist", knowing its basic negative connotation, then mistakenly correlate that to _black people_. This is a racist mental connection, and it's similar to how someone might see the word "dyke" and think lesbian, even when it's being used in the context of its true meaning: a sea embankment. This is fine though, most people can simply remind themselves of this fact and move on. Furthermore, most people also understand the general origin of their misconception, and can tell when it's something they personally believe, or something that has been drilled into their heads through repetitive exposure.

These people, however, are unable to separate the reality from their own prejudices, and so believe that their interpretation is real. "The term 'blacklist' must be problematic for black people, because we all know that deep down it's saying we want to ban black people, right?"

A non-racist without exposure to the supposed problem with saying 'blacklist' _won 't make the racist connection_.

A racist without exposure to the supposed problem with saying 'blacklist' _will assume it has racial subtext_.

A non-racist who has been exposed to the supposed problem with saying 'blacklist' _will correctly separate their misconception with the truth, and reject the supposed racial subtext_.

<comment><USER8> No. The term 'blacklist' deprecated because it contains the color 'black', it's deprecated because it uses 'black' to mean 'not allowed'. This really shouldn't be so controversial, just use words that accurately describe what you mean.

<comment><USER7> That's a very disingenuous claim, since this is obviously political, not about clarity. Or, do you mean it's being changed because of the use of "black" specifically? In which case that's not being questioned here, we're talking about why they see "black" as a specifically racial color.

<comment><USER8> > In which case that's not being questioned here, we're talking about why they > see "black" as a specifically racial color.

You can't think of why that might be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is beyond embarrassing, do something real instead.

<comment><USER10> Doing something real actually takes effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't like the slippery slope fallacy in general, but with this topic I am really asking myself how things will develop eventually. Will colors be outlawed, to be replaced by wavelength numbers? Will hierarchies of all sorts be forbidden? How will we be able to make movies or write books or computer games about historic events?

<comment><USER5> As I said in another comment on another thread, which naturally got downvoted into oblivion, we are rapidly heading into an Orwellian word where the language becomes so loaded and politicised that it will soon be impossible to use certain formerly innocuous words, because they'll be seen as too offensive.

As I said then. Maybe we should just replace the word 'Black' throughout the English language with 'Double-Plus-Un-White' and have done with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's nothing wrong with the word black.

Something seems wrong with using the terminology "master/slave" in the 21st century when we mean "primary/secondary" or "default/dev" when using version control software.

<comment><USER11> > _There 's nothing wrong with the word black._

It's negatively connoted in many places. In German for example, fare jumpers are "black riders", people who don't pay TV fees are "black viewers", illicit money is "black money", pessimistic views are "seeing black" etc. etc. ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this will do wonders for the black community.

</comment><comment><USER13> I want to see that regex.</comment>


Gödel, Escher, Bach - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach <comment><USER2> I tried to read GEB once, but I had a hard time getting past the feeling that it was more about appearing clever than actually being clever.

<comment><USER3> I think the Tao Te Ching is more clever than Gödel, Escher, Bach. But, GEB is still fun-- I just don't think it completely deserves the "Holy Grail" status it has.

<comment><USER4> Tao Te Ching talks about good and evil and says that the Tao is older then god. Chinese mysticism doesn't mix with western science or logic. For example western logic exposes the mysteries of the universe in a concrete way by telling us about atoms, fusion, relativity and more, while Tao te Ching talks about some vague mumbo jumbo while claiming only greater people understand the Tao while absolutely providing no concrete definition and no evidence.

Tao te ching is more comparable to works of fiction like lord of the rings or the Bible. I wouldn't compare it to GEB which builds its foundations starting from axiomatic logic. One is concrete, the other is mythical. Do note that the Tao te Ching was written way back during a time when people were unclear about the reality of things and probability and the scientific method were not known. If anything Tao te Ching is a "fun" fictional work while GEB is genuinely trying to express something about the nature of consciousness.

Don't be fooled by Chinese mysticism. It's a bullshit industry where they sell false religions, bullshit herbal medicines, martial arts and bullshit philosophies in a genuine attempt to scam you. Some of it is practiced under a genuine belief but most are scams.

I would know I'm Chinese myself.

<comment><USER3> Don't be fooled by the concrete either, my friend. The Tao Te Ching is no different, in ways, to the Bible, the Quran, Lord of the Rings, Dune, Cat's Cradle, The Feynman Lectures... It's all what you take from it.

<comment><USER4> The lord of the rings and dune are works of fiction. Is that what you're saying Tao Te Ching is? I can assure you GEB is not a work of fiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MIT had a course on the book with recordings on YouTube. They're great to watch as you work through the book:

[https://youtu.be/lWZ2Bz0tS-s](https://youtu.be/lWZ2Bz0tS-s)

</comment><comment><USER6> Ask HN: Has anyone actually read the whole thing? What did you think?

<comment><USER7> I read it cover to cover in high school (85-86, maybe) and another time through in college. I loved it. I don't get the modern backlash against it.

<comment><USER8> Same here. Found it in high school and was blown away by the cleverness of the dialogues. Didn't understand everything else, but the chapter on TNT opened my eyes to how simple rewriting rules could be used to perform computation, and that insight was an important reason for my studying theoretical computer science later. It's a book that helped me dream.

I reread it years later. The dialogues didn't age well, but the rest of the book is still great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an introduction to formal systems[1], it's great. For a musician, it totally falls apart in the "Bach" section. The idea that the circle of fifths[2] (or any progression that ends where it started) is a "strange loop" is just silly. There's nothing strange about it. Traverse a sequence of (usually 12) integers that slice up the octave by using any integer for step size and bang! You eventually land back at the beginning of the sequence.

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

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

<comment><USER10> There's at least one strange thing about it: there's no perfect tuning for evenly-spaced chromatic-tone pitch systems. Whether you pick 12 or any other number of tones, the resulting circle of fifths (combined with analogous octaves) will witness the fact that it's not possible to tune the system perfectly.

As a musician, I found a lot of interesting things in GEB, even if it did not advance my music career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I liked this book, but skipped the Bach, and most of Escher parts. They seemed like a stretch.

I found "I am a strange loop" to be fantastic. It is about Godel.

<comment><USER12> I think the Bach and Escher parts really drove it home for me. To see how actually completely different people from different disciplines came to understand and communicate the essence of the spurious loop and eventually the paradox.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. Reading it as "what does this book able to do." Instead of "what is this book doing for me"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I read that book, and I think that it is good. (I do think BlooP and FlooP can be reduced though; IF and comparisons and multiplications are not needed, since they can be implemented out of the other stuff.)</comment>


Rocket Engine Pulled from the Ocean Definitely Belonged to Apollo 11 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2013/07/bezos-apollo-11/ <comment><USER2> F-1 is still the biggest chamber, by thrust. We decided to go with smaller, even though much more advanced engines; even Starship is going to use Raptors of smaller thrust per chamber. Were the questions of how to develop first stage engine answered differently in 1960-s than now? Starship is decidedly not Sea Dragon regarding first stage engine solution; will we come to bigger thrust chambers again or we see why we won't need them?

<comment><USER3> These are just my personal thoughts, but my guess would be that we don't go back to having big chambers. Having more chambers and engines theoretically provides more fault tolerance. I think one of the things that has really improved since the 1960s is how much smaller and faster a control system can be since we've got much more powerful computing.

<comment><USER2> There are good arguments for big chambers as well, so we need to consider both sides. Cooling of bigger chamber is easier, as we have the law of cubes- squares (volume growth against area growth with growth of the size). We have less parts, so less things to fail. Also potentially better mass efficiency (thrust to mass), as some elements can't be scaled proportionally to smaller sizes.

For big rockets, where such chambers would be appropriate, we don't need particularly fast control system. Saturn-V could even be flown with manual control, and astronauts were trained to do that.

Of course there are advantages with smaller chambers and smaller engines too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that this is from 2013.</comment>


U.S. fourth-quarter GDP cut to 2.4% from 3.2% - <AUTHOR>

How does this happen? <comment><USER2> It's not the GDP which was cut down but the estimate of the GDP growth.

<comment><AUTHOR> of course...but it's not the first estimate...and this isn't a small correction</comment></comment>


The Math Behind Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/math-behind-bitcoin/ <comment><USER3> Original article: [http://blog.chain.com/post/95218566791/the-math-behind- bitco...](http://blog.chain.com/post/95218566791/the-math-behind-bitcoin)

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for this. As someone new to bitcoin, this helped explained things a bit for me, but also leaves me with many more questions.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone explain the part explaining b?

        y2 = x3 + ax + b
        For a = 0 and b = 7 (the version used by bitcoin)

Can someone please explain why b is set to 7? Is there some other articles that explain this in a little more depth?

I'm finding references to Secp256k1 (SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters), but am struggling to understand it.

<comment><USER5> You have a list of requirements when generating an curve. Some of the requirements are needed so the equations you use have solutions, while some are there to prevent known attacks that take advantage of the structure of the curve.

The numbers should be choosen using a nothing-up-my-sleeves strategy, to prove that you haven't chosen them to enable an attack that isn't public knowledge yet. So you typically choose the first number that match all requirements, either counting sequentially, or using a preagreed pseudorandom sequence, like the Brainpool curves.

See for example the requirements used by the Brainpool curves - <USER2> requirement has a rationale.

Security requirements: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5639#section-2.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5639#section-2.1)

Technical Requirements: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5639#section-2.2](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5639#section-2.2)

<comment><USER4> That was... an awesome explanation :)

Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another explanation which may be of interest:

[http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin- protocol-a...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol- actually-works/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Lol that image is so "kids, math is cool, like the Matrix": [http://media.coindesk.com/2014/10/math-behind- bitcoin.jpg](http://media.coindesk.com/2014/10/math-behind-bitcoin.jpg)</comment>


What are the missing features in App Engine? - <AUTHOR>

i think fulltext search is very fundamental and essential thing for a web application . i put a lot of effort to bring fulltext search to my site.<p>what are things which are essential for a web application is not present in App Engine? <comment><USER2> Ability to backup and restore the datastore via the dashboard. This is long overdue. I know the bulkloader exists but it's hardly ideal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, datastore backup and restore using bulkloader is not comfortable. For getting backup in local machine i am using bulkloader. However, i am doing online backup using backup(dummy) appengine project. I am coping data back and forth between production and backup projects for backup and restore purpose. Its comparatively easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SSL access on non-appspot.com domains, i.e. HTTPS on custom domains (on their roadmap, BTW)

</comment><comment><USER4> Oauth or Authsub for appengine operations.

For example I want to deploy an app on appengine for a user without asking him his userid and a password.

Use case: User comes to a site. Search for available applications to install. Click install; give permission, application installed to his appengine account.

</comment><comment><USER5> An API for accessing dynamic instances would be so useful for me. I'm developing a library with layered model storage (local cache,memcache, datastore) and cached query functionality on App Engine and using the power of local cache forces me to do some heavy cache invalidation.

If only there was a way to loop through all instances and refresh/invalidate values.

Here's the project if you're interested: <https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine>

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. At first for me it was a centralized database, If two apps want to access the same data, what are you going to do? We got around it by making an API.

2\. A module for google checkout, I'm still trying to find a Python one for PayPal.

3\. +1 For the HTTPS on custom domains

4\. +1 To import and export databases

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure I'd call them essential but my 3 biggest pet peeves:

1) No threading. I feel they could find a way to sandbox these without hurting performance.

2) No support for the WebSocket API.

3) No support for Go. This one is a bigger mystery to me; seems like a win-win for the community and for Google.

<comment><USER4> Is channel api not close to Websocket?

<comment><USER7> Channel API is just comet.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stability & speed. My apps randomly kick out various HTTP 500 errors. Sometimes database speed isn't so slick.

<comment><USER2> Are you using the new HR datastore? Since I switched reliability has been great.

<comment><USER8> No, but I will give it a try with a test build, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What about version controlling system in appengine?</comment>


Texas, here we come: Migration to the lone star state - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/06/migration

<comment><USER2> My concern with regard to the large amount of people moving to Texas is that they'll then advocate the same policies they just fled from.

<comment><USER3> These policies may eventually find their way to Austin. I don't think the people who fled them will advocate them, but keep in mind what "fleeing" means - somebody is pursuing you. These folks may eventually catch up.

One big difference between San Francisco and Austin is that SF has been a wealthy city for a while now, whereas Austin is still on the way up. The more money there already _is_ , the more incentive people have to focus on getting that money than creating new wealth.

As Austin gets bigger, wealthier, and more established, it's hard to believe that some people won't see jobs, benefits, apartments, and vacations as things people "get" rather than "create."

SF, while unimpressive in this regard, really isn't that different from any other old city (Boston, NY come to mind). The advantage these old cities have is they are, well, much more interesting places to live than most of the new cities.

It sounds like Austin is in that magical spot where it is both new and interesting, a rising star that doesn't have the baggage yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At my last corporate job (in Austin), we interviewed an engineer currently at Apple. We asked him why he was moving. He answered "I can work at Apple for $120k/year, and pay $1m for a house, or I can work in Austin for $100k/year, and pay $200k for a house".

This was pre-bubble and I didn't fact check his numbers, but are the cost of living in SV numbers correct?

<comment><USER5> Not exactly... and it's most definitely not an apples-to-apples comparison.

That $200k house in Austin is in a suburb. All of those nice walks to the grocery store? Gone. All of those nice close local eateries? Gone.

You can find that in Austin, but the price jumps up pretty significantly.

<comment><USER6> Isn't a $1M silicon valley house also in suburbia?

<comment><USER7> Depends on what you mean by suburbia. Most of Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc are what I'd think of as "dense suburban". It's generally walkable to restaurants & shopping.

<comment><USER8> It'll cost you more than $200k, but dense suburban housing is still more affordable in Austin than it is in the Bay Area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think they read the totally wrong thing from this data. People move to Portland, Austin, or Seattle due to the much higher perceived quality of life. Low taxes are nice, but that's really just a side benefit.

</comment><comment><USER10> This could be an example of Simpson's paradox[1]. You can't determine where people are moving based on which map has the most black lines.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox>

</comment><comment><USER11> > High earning New Yorkers and Californians can take home between 9% and 11% > more of their income by moving to Texas

Wages in Austin are __significantly __less than San Francisco or Seattle and I suspect NY too. Don't kid yourselves you will be bringing home less money. Sales and property taxes are high too. But considering costs esp housing it's probably a net gain.

I wish I could recommend you not come to Austin (because influx of peoples will change what Austin is) But I can't cause Austin flippin rocks. [qualifications for judgment include; 3yrs Austin, 14yrs SF, 3yrs Seattle, many months in SoCal, Phoenix, Baltimore, Toronto, Melborne, all over Germany, Prague, Bangkok]

<comment><USER12> so since you reject the articles financial argument, what is it you find "flippin rocks" about austin?

<comment><USER11> > But considering costs esp housing it's probably a net gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At this rate it's going to be tough keeping Austin weird.

<comment><USER14> No kidding.... we keep getting an influx of people seduced by the charm of Austin who then turn around and force the charm to go away (see the recent destruction of the Cathedral of Junk for an example). I know, I'm making sweeping generalizations.

The infrastructure is definitely not set up for all of these new people.

Anyway, that's my doom-and-gloom for the day. Welcome to Austin?

<comment><USER8> Most of the things people blame newcomers for in Austin are actually caused by people who've been in Austin for a while. The noise complaints don't come from the people in the shiny new condos, but people succumb to their base instinct for class warfare and blame problems on people who aren't like them.

I don't think the city did anything wrong by trying to make sure the Cathedral of Junk didn't hurt anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Forbes had an interesting article

[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0607/opinions-houston- immi...](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0607/opinions-houston-immigration- job-growth-on-my-mind.html)

recently that had a narrower focus (Houston) but touches on many of the same topics ... innovation, job growth and immigration ... and how they have helped Texas stay ahead of the curve during the recession.

</comment><comment><USER16> Note the astute comment 2nd from the top pointing out that a lot of the Californians are headed to Oregon, which is _not_ a "low tax" state. Oregon's taxes are actually fairly progressive: no sales tax (which tends to hit lower income people more), and a higher income tax, IIRC. Basically, they're moving there because it's indubitably cheaper, and the quality of life is higher (not such a rat race).

</comment><comment><USER7> There's definitely some cherry-picking going on here. The migration patterns for Manhattan don't support the low-tax theory at all.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ok, now I have to ask: do you guys actually think high taxes are good? Please respond with comments, rather than just up/down voting this.

</comment><comment><USER17> Guys, taxes are good. The government knows how to spend your money better than you.</comment>


Volvo Sets a Top Speed for All Its Cars - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/safety/volvo-sets-a-top-speed-for-all-its-cars <comment><USER2> I admire Volvo's drive for safety, the three point seat belt was a major advancement, and although a goal of zero deaths seems nearly impossible, that doesn't make it any less of a worthy cause to seek.

If I could afford their vehicles I would most certainly consider them. I hope they stick around for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> 180 is okay when you're on awake, in a hurry, and all your senses are on red alert. Everything above is just madness. Still can't understand why Germany allows anything above.

</comment><comment><USER4> The backlash against this amongst so-called "petrolheads" has been as vitriolic as it is predictable.</comment>


Jay Z set to reveal new music streaming service to take on Spotify - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/03/29/jay-z-tidal-music-streaming-service/70628226/

<comment><USER2> I ran through a few trial periods of Tidal and found it a great high-quality alternative to Spotify. Glad to see it gaining ground/support.

<comment><USER3> Tidal's great, but I really wish they'd update the player.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which perks do you negotiate for beyond base salary? - <AUTHOR> I'm about to enter into a compensation package negotiation where I have the upper hand. I have skills that this company needs and they know I have them (my previous boss works there).
I'm thinking of negotiating the following in order of priority for me and I wanted to know if there was something I was overlooking:
* Base salary (depending on the initial offer, of course)
* 10% annual base salary as a Signing Bonus (because I was already told it's too late in the year to participate in the annual profit sharing plan) payable after 90 days of employment
* 5% annual base salary for Moving/Relocation Expenses (to break my lease, etc.)
* 4 weeks paid vacation/sick time (employees start at a generous 3 weeks here)
* Work laptop of my choosing (they can pick the brand if they're married to one; they can set an upper limit for the budget)
* Remote work 2 days per week (of my choosing) starting 30 days after successful employment
* Work cell phone of my choosing
* Internet stipend to facilitate my work from home days
* Slight modification to my Title such this the "lateral move" becomes a move up
What am I forgetting? Hiring managers, what about this is out of the question? What is the hardest to accommodate?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Severance package. Try to negotiate for a few months of severance. Make sure the wording includes language for no longer employed by. So that if you decide to quit, or they let you go they will pay you a wage before any unemployment for a given term. But also includes it being open if you do start another job right away that they still owe you. Also try to get health insurance during the term as well.

Then at review time try to get more added time added to it. So that over time you can get more weeks of pay. This can be a bargaining chip if they can't afford a giving a raise, that you would accept more time for the severance package instead of a raise. While it might also seem silly if a raise is offered but no increase in severance counter with a proposal with a smaller raise and severance.

Do this until you have 6 months to a year of severance. Start low with say 2-4 weeks but try for 12 weeks.

This will buy you protection in the future if work becomes hostile, or a super visor start pulling crap trying to make up bs on performance reviews to try to justify letting you go.

Make it expensive for you to leave the company and that they need to be honest, fair and ethical with you at all times, or you can play the fuck it card and sit at home and still get paid while you look for work. If they let you go same deal, but you then get any unemployment after the severance terms are up.

</comment><comment><USER3> During the first internet bubble companies offered cars, not leased or company car, but the signing bonus was a new car. (I assume it was also PR go get their name out).

I negotiated 5 more (paid) vacation days once and would do again.

My very first contract had a clause of automatic promotion after 1 year unless there are objections.

> What is the hardest to accommodate?

Mostly companies try to be perceived fair. So paying somebody home internet but not offering it also to others in a policy (e.g. everybody is entitled after 1 year employment) comes off as unfair. Giving out more salary is usually easier.</comment>


Fedora 25 to Run Wayland by Default - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-25-Wayland-Default <comment><USER2> Does this mean remoting is available? I can't find anything recent and definitive, but the FAQ still says no. I've never understood how Wayland can even be considered usable without it. "The user owns exactly one computer" hasn't been true for a decade or more.

<comment><USER3> I used to think the same way regarding Wayland. But then I realized the abysmal state of X11 remoting: most applications I would like to use remotely are basically sending images over the network, instead of just API calls. Try using Firefox over X11 forwarding. I think some battles have been lost in this regard.

The creators of Wayland decided that it is not their task to handle remoting. You could argue that this demphasizes the issue, leaving it to insufficient VNC, dead projects like NX, or not yet production ready projects like X2Go (once they support Wayland that is).

<comment><USER2> > The creators of Wayland decided that it is not their task to handle > remoting.

That seems to be their decision but I can't imagine what's motivating them. How is the non-remote use case even relevant at this point? Is Wayland intended for console gaming?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just got a 4k laptop, but my monitor is 1080p, so I'm excited about Wayland getting better faster (it's the only good way I know of to have different scaling across displays). I'm still finding all sorts of weird quirks in Linux with 4k...but, I'm also still finding quirks in lots of Windows software, too (games and music software, in particular, are prone to using their own UI toolkits and end up looking ridiculous because of it). So, I can't blame Linux for all of those problems; it's just a tricky problem, I guess.

<comment><USER5> This is one thing that Mac seems to have gotten perfect nowadays, I connect my retina laptop to non-retina monitors, and every seems to work fine, all the time.

Apple made one massive simplification -- apps only run at 1x size, or 2x size, and nothing else. This isn't theoretically "nice", but (for me) covers most use cases, and seems to have made the implementation much easier, as you can still design your interface pixel-wise, and just let the OS double scale everything.

<comment><USER6> OSX's scaling system is actually more flexible than just 1x and 2x. I often run my 4K monitor at the effective 1440p resolution. Applications such as Retina Display Manager let you choose between many more scaling sizes than the standard system settings.

<comment><USER7> OS X can only scale by powers of 2. If your monitor runs at native 4K (3840x2160), scaling ~1.28x renders to 6016x3384 and scales down by 2x to 3008x1692. Your example is at 1.5x (2560x1440), which renders to 5120x2880 and scales down by 2x to 2650x1440. The most efficient scale is 2x (1920x1080) because that can be rendered natively. So while you can have arbitrary effective resolutions, it's rather wasteful to render and can have serious performance implications when you're not using native or powers of 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great, this is an important milestone we've been waiting years for. No doubt there will be lots of problems, but that's the first step in getting them fixed.

</comment><comment><USER9> What about Redshift on Wayland :(?

<comment><USER10> Needs to be implemented in each compositor, like most other missing details on Wayland.

<comment> vertex-four Actually... Wayland fully supports transparent windows assuming you have a buffer with alpha transparency, and windows have no decoration by default. It would take a very small protocol extension to allow overlay windows which don't accept input of their own, allowing for Redshift (and other tinting tools, such as those for dyslexia) to implement such an extension without embedding it into a compositor.

Wayland has a process for standardising extensions - write the XML file defining it and send an email to the mailing list, then respond to questions - if developers cared about Wayland, they could do it.

<comment><USER11> Redshift (or flux) doesn't work that way. It adjusts the monitor's color temperature using XRandR.

<comment> vertex-four Alright, though my latter point stands - standardising an extension for setting colour temperature would not be terribly difficult. You could look to libcoopgamma for ideas on managing multiple clients trying to change things at once, or write a simpler protocol that only allows one client to change things. At the very least, an unstable protocol definition and a patch for Weston would be a lot more than what we have now, and doesn't require Redshift to be cloned for each Wayland server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FreeBSD is making progress on this, too: [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2016-Aug...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2016-August/063017.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Misleading title. The decision here is to leave Wayland on but it can still get pulled later if it is deemed to not work well enough.

<comment><USER14> This is correct and the comment should not have been downvoted. (The article is wrong.) This is essentially just about allowing Wayland to remain the default during alpha, but it can very well be removed as default later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i'll believe it when i see it</comment>


Twitter CEO on the future of twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/02/tech/main5358982.shtml

<comment><USER2> As much as I love to read about Twitter, there's no real news here. We already know about lists & geolocation.</comment>


Vault 8 – Source code and analysis for CIA software projects - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/vault8/ <comment><USER2> If pretty basic software can place misleading markers on internet traffic and file metadata, why is the presence of Russian metadata in a hack or leak considered evidence?

<comment><USER3> Because "Russian metadata" was not the totality of evidence used to draw the conclusion that it was Russia. It's never just one thing, it's all the things, together.

If you want an example of the kind of analytical techniques that people use for attribution in the US government and sophisticated industry groups, then refer to the Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis: [http://www.activeresponse.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/dia...](http://www.activeresponse.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/diamond.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Isn't the CIA here specifically attacking this model of attribution?

<comment><USER5> Kaspersky has a response to the attacks on attribution that's quite relevant to this story which you can read here:

[https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2017/10/Guerrero-Saade- Raiu...](https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2017/10/Guerrero-Saade-Raiu- VB2017.pdf)

It was on HN before, but it vanished quickly -

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15483529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15483529)

<comment><USER6> Looks like we invited nkurz to repost that one but it didn't happen to get traction either time. Hard to say why, but it wasn't flags.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, didn't mean to imply otherwise. It's pretty interesting, IMHO, but just didn't get upvotes/visibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that WL goes after the one nation state that is not going to completely fubar them, and has much better human rights than the other big nation states it could go after. I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights, the US is not the highest target on the list. On the other hand, if they want easy publicity with minimal risk to self, the US is probably their best target.

<comment><USER8> > I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights, the US is not the > highest target on the list.

well, I say that constant hopes for transparency and the strides we take towards those goals will keep the United States high on the list of nations with decents human rights.

WL is one of those strides, and I think it's invaluable.

It's 'interesting' that given the muck that WL has raked up about the U.S. that anyone could be upset about their ( the US ) having been a target..

<comment><USER9> The question is not whether the US should be subject to oversight, the question is "does WikiLeaks intend to push a deliberate agenda with their disproportionate targeting of the US?"

You would be naive to take for granted that WikiLeaks is acting exclusively out of principle.

<comment><USER10> You are reframing the discussion.

<comment><USER11> I would disagree. This particular discussion was started by yters' post; aalleavich's point seems to me to be extremely in sync with yters'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the source code (and several binary compiles) of the CIA C2 infrastructure + client implants for Solaris, Linux and various routers. I suspect that now this is in the open, past and current CIA malware will now be detectable by commercial Anti Virus.

<comment><USER13> I'm not so sure about that. WL released the documentation back in April, which contained more than enough information to create a few behavioral detection signatures for the implants. I would assume that any AV company who cared has already created and deployed signatures.

<comment><USER12> Hi chronic,

We now know that all comms implant to C2 are TLS with a unique (fake) certificate tree. They use unique, single use domains for operations. I don't believe there was enough information in vault 7 to identify IOC's that could be used for behavioural analysis. We also now know that the C2 fronting servers negotiate 'Client Cert optional', which is a fairly unique configuration item.

The git repo contains 3 binary builds of the client/server malware. I think this is more important for detection than their docs.

Regardless, its all public domain now.

<comment><USER13> AV is now far beyond just using hash-based detection, but you are correct that having the three binary builds will allow that to also be added to their (hopefully existing) detections. No argument there.

What you're saying comes from the documentation included in the source, yes. But if you dig into the Confluence dump from back in March, you'll see that the User's Guide and Developer's Guide PDFs for Hive were attached to one of the wiki pages already, explaining how this all worked. It did not get any press attention as it was quite mundane compared to the more interesting leaked wiki pages, but I would really hope AV companies and others in infosec noticed this already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The following line from /honeycomb/crypto.c look very interesting...

       /*
        * Computing a "safe" DH-1024 prime can take a very
        * long time, so a precomputed value is provided below.
        * You may run dh_genprime to generate a new value.
        */
       char *my_dhm_P =
           "E4004C1F94182000103D883A448B3F80" \
           "2CE4B44A83301270002C20D0321CFD00" \
           "11CCEF784C26A400F43DFB901BCA7538" \
           "F2C6B176001CF5A0FD16D2C48B1D0C1C" \
           "F6AC8E1DA6BCC3B4E1F96B0564965300" \
           "FFA1D0B601EB2800F489AA512C4B248C" \
           "01F76949A60BB7F00A40B1EAB64BDD48" \
           "E8A700D60B7F1200FA8E77B0A979DABF";

<comment><USER15> Those lines aren't very interesting. The comment explains exactly what and why they are.

You'll be able to find this same C̶I̶A̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶d̶o̶o̶r̶ DH-1024 prime in tons of other projects:

[https://github.com/mstorsjo/rtmpdump/blob/master/librtmp/rtm...](https://github.com/mstorsjo/rtmpdump/blob/master/librtmp/rtmp.c#L42)

[https://github.com/travelping/nattcp/blob/master/polarssl.c#...](https://github.com/travelping/nattcp/blob/master/polarssl.c#L24)

<comment><USER14> You're right, I got over-enthusiastic. And it looks like the C code has been migrated to Python anyway. Also, owners of MikroTik hardware look to be thoroughly owned:

            elif str(beacon_hdr.os) == '40':
    	    beacon_data['os'] = "MikroTik-MIPSBE"
    	elif str(beacon_hdr.os) == '41':
    	    beacon_data['os'] = "MikroTik-MIPSLE"
    	elif str(beacon_hdr.os) == '42':
    	    beacon_data['os'] = "MikroTik-x86"
    	elif str(beacon_hdr.os) == '43':
    	    beacon_data['os'] = "MikroTik-PPC"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The bad news is that soon CIA will not have to build their own infrastructure due to the rise of all kinds of public P2P technologies. The best type of covert operation is the one that is hidden in plain sight.

</comment><comment><USER17> I see Wikileaks is still publishing "leaks" about US agencies in the week following major news on the Russian investigation, as they have more-or-less consistently since February.

I'm sure this time is just coincidence, too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Again?

Can someone tell me if there's actual malfeasance this time or just more edgy moaning about the spy agency doing its job?

I'm happy to call out the security apparatus when it actually oversteps its bounds (Eg the Snowden leaks). But so far as I can tell wikileaks vault 7/8 isn't a leak in the public interest. Its just anti-American wankery.

<comment><USER4> The amount of work that they put into throwing off attribution, while expected, is important to make it's way into public knowledge rather than just the realm of conspiracy, IMO.

<comment><USER10> It is vital to the intel community that their methods of attribution can't be publicly audited and that their authority is trusted on word alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting drop.

I have many questions but two are very high on my list:

1\. one of the commit messages mentions merge from a git remote hosted at devlan.net. Who owns that host and is it a hidden CIA server or repurposed captured host?

[https://wikileaks.org/vault8/document/hive- log/page-41/#pagi...](https://wikileaks.org/vault8/document/hive- log/page-41/#pagination) Merge branch 'master' of ssh://stash.devlan.net:7999/hive/hive

[https://www.whois.com/whois/devlan.net](https://www.whois.com/whois/devlan.net)

It kinda looks like a captured host registered originally by a French admin.

2\. Why Solaris? Microtik and the other router targets make sense in combination with generic Linux machines, but Solaris sticks out and there must be an interesting explanation for targeting that. What kind of internet facing Solaris hosts are out there or which orgs use it in such a capacity to become a target for the CIA?

<comment><USER20> 1\. Stash seems to be an atlassian instance hosted on their intranet.

2\. <conjecture> Kaspersky ? </conjecture> \+ ISPs, universities, etc.

<comment><USER19> 1\. it's very bad practice, even if only internal, to use an already registered public domain. It crossed my mind that this might just be an internal domain (devlan -> developer LAN), though it seemed unbelievable an agency would have people in IT with that much disrespect for proper network config.

It must be an interesting life for the French admin of the "real" devlan.net since the leaks.

2\. I don't get the Kaspersky reference. Can you explain?

ISP and University: I suppose you mean those would be running public Solaris hosts, right? And that therefore the CIA has been hiding on those servers. I sure would hate the CIA to spy on scientists, though it's not unheard of that one of the agencies knocks on a door of a scientist who just happened to be on the verge of publishing something they deem a risk. Happened in the past and sure still does. The imbalance and abuse of power is the problem and here it's legalized/constitutionalised. An agency can spy on my private life and professional work without being questioned, but we aren't allowed to demand a transparent administration or any of the many ranches of government.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix's the Great Hack Brings Our Data Nightmare to Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-great-hack-documentary/ <comment><USER2> Just a funny observation of mine:

When the lobbists have seen how effective this technology is at creating public opinion (brexit, USA elections) they immediately rushed to lobby laws against it, treating it as a weapon (GDPR).

They felt treatened for a second, making their wealth obsolete in comparison to few milions of $ spend on internet commercials.

Sword that they used to gain that wealth and position could be now very well used to abolish them.

First time I've seen world elite to be afraid.</comment>