Boulder for startups? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently enrolled in the University of Miami for Computer Science, and on the side I'm also trying to get my own tech startup going. I'm considering transferring over the University of Colorado, Boulder for CS because it appears to have a better engineering school, and also that I've often heard the tagline "Boulder is for startups". Is this true? Can someone from Boulder chime in and give some opinions on how the startup environment is like in Boulder? It would also be helpful to know things like bar scene, nightlife, etc, basically anything I need to know about life in Boulder. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm a long time Boulder resident (10 years with a 3 year stint in NYC). I'm also co-founder and CTO at OpDemand. Our office is on the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder. AMA. ;)

Boulder is a fantastic place for startups, but keep in mind it's a city of 100k people. I happen to love that; others find it limiting. The community is very supportive, everyone knows everyone, etc. The bar/nightlife scene is better than your typical college town, plus Denver is close if you want bigger clubs/DJs/bands -- and don't forget Red Rocks. The most amazing thing to me, though, is the food scene. The quantity and quality of restaurants rivals big cities, and has to be seen (or tasted) to be believed.

Feel free to PM me if you have more questions re: pot, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh on a more serious topic: how hard is it to recruit developers and engineers in boulder? i'm a non-technical founder who is returning to school for CS, but i don't want to be limited to recruiting just fellow students who may not have what i need.

<comment><USER2> email me: gabriel _ opdemand _ com and i'm happy to continue the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah I live in Boulder now. Before that I lived in Silicon Valley. In terms of startups, Boulder feels a lot like Silicon Valley to me but much smaller. Denver (not too far away) has a good startup scene as well.

The nightlife in Boulder exists but it is pretty chill in my opinion. I think it is because most people here actually do stuff outside (i.e. hike, bike, ski, etc). The nightlife in Denver is a bit better and I would say it is typical of most larger U.S. cities. To be fair, I did not go to school in Boulder so I cannot comment on a university student's version of nightlife.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your input, i was worried this thread would be buried and no one would see it.

is boulder a college town? is it expensive to live there?

also, i'm just going to come out and say it: i'm a big pot smoker, and frankly one of the reasons i'm looking to colorado is that pot is legal there and i'd like to live in a place where i'm not technically breaking the law every night. do you know anything about the pot scene?

i do think the outside activity stuff sounds interesting, although i'm not really an outdoorsy guy. from your description, boulder sounds like coral gables which is where i am now - a college town that is 45 minutes drive from the notorious south beach party scene.

<comment><USER3> Yes it is a college town, but it is a bit more urban than your typical college town. It is also right next to the mountains (literally) which is something I enjoy. Rent is expensive but if you have roommates it should be fine. There are lot of hippies in Boulder so yes plenty of pot.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm actually thinking of getting my own place, because i work frequently from home and enjoy my privacy. can you give me an idea of how much a decent 1-br would cost per month in rent?

also, how's the weather there? is it always cold?

<comment><USER3> rent: [http://boulder.craigslist.org/apa/](http://boulder.craigslist.org/apa/)

It is sunny most of the time maybe even more than Florida. It is not humid either. When the sun is out in winter, it feels warm even if it is 30 degrees. It is very cold if there is a winter storm, but the snow melts almost immediately and it is back to feeling warm during the day. Summers are very pleasant.

And unlike the Midwest (where I grew up), it is warmer overall in the winter and there is stuff to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have debated moving to SV but Boulder sounds interesting. When you say "smaller" do you mean the ecosystem, " vibe" and talent is just as strong as SV just with fewer people, or do you mean it's on the right track but still not comparable to SV?</comment>


'A Partial Freedom': What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/05/a-partial-freedom-what-latvia-found-in-the-kgb-archives/ <comment><USER2> It was a very weird moment when 'the bags' were published. On one hand it had to be done as there were conspiracy theories abound regarding who's in them. Intially pretty much everyone would log in to check if there's someone they know. Journalists would scour the records and then try to get the ones mentioned tell their story.

At the end of the day though everyone understands that:

1\. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned.

2\. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing collaborators.

3\. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone.

So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the scum amongst us.

<comment><USER3> It was similar in Poland, but fortunately not all interesting records were gone, so in fact a lot of the scum got exposed.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how in a situation like that you can check the authenticity of archives. It must have been tempting for the KGB to plant incriminating material once they realised they were going to lose control of an archive - though they probably didn't have a huge amount of time to do that.

<comment><USER3> In Poland the transition happened quite quickly (the authorities barely had time to burn a lot of the documents) so I don't think there was time to do any widespread document planting. Plus, if you plant some documents they'd had to be consistent with all other records or it would be found out upon investigation (there's a special state-run institute in Poland which hires a bunch of historians who analyze those records, so it's a real possibility).

<comment><USER5> Sadly the institute (IPN) became a political weapon for fighting between all the factions that grew from Solidarity movement (You're in bed with the communists! No - you!). These factions later became PO and PIS - the 2 biggest parties that rule Poland interchangeably since 2006.

There's been some archives that were hidden for decades (for example Kazimierz Kujda or Lech Wałęsa), there's been manipulation of which exact offices require check with the archives, there were blackmails and misleading lists of "communist agents" published by politicians and journalists (lista Macierewicza, lista Wildsteina).

Fun fact - mother of Kaczyński (who currently rules Poland and is famous for McCarthy-like policies and calling everybody a communist) - is in IPN lists.

If they treated her like political enemies they should already declare her a public enemy/traitor/spy/etc. And just like they declare any political enemy with communists in family tree "regime's children" \- that should be enough to remove Kaczyński from politics by his own logic.

But they didn't (and probably correctly - lots of people were on these lists without actually being a spy, it could just mean you were considered or interesting to communist security for a variety of reasons - like being related to opposition activists, being a homosexual, a priest, having family abroad, whatever).

In the end I think we should just have had full transparency since day 1, because smart people realize being in the documents doesn't prove anything without interrelated evidence, and stupid people believe it's all a huge conspiracy anyway, no matter how many proofs you show them.

<comment><USER6> > _... and calling everybody a communist_

I have to admit, when I read that a pole (old enough to have firsthand experience with both) claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism, it made me reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland.

[https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/06/20/gay-ideology- is-...](https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/06/20/gay-ideology-is-worse- than-communism-says-polands-president)

PS. thinking of the Solidarity poster: Amy Kane, or Helen Ramirez?

<comment><USER5> > Amy Kane, or Helen Ramirez

No idea who these people are? The only famous Solidarity poster I remember was with High Noon: [https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/1d/96/5cefdcae73cef_p.jpg?155...](https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/1d/96/5cefdcae73cef_p.jpg?1559223972)

> claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism

They basically believe (or pretend to - it's hard to distinguish what is paranoia and what is political calculation at this point) that are the alt- right conspiracy theories are true.

Gender/feminism/lgbt is cultural marxism, Soros wants to replace Europeans with Muslims from Africa, Jews and Germans want to change history and make Poles responsible for Holocaust, LGBT is a conspiracy to destroy the church and turn our kids gay (so that these leftist pedophiles may get them), ecology is a conspiracy to destroy our economy by renewable energy equipment producers and leftists in Brussels. And besides global warming is bullshit of course. Recently government promised miners that we will mine coal till 2060 (despite having to store more than 2-years' worth of it already because our coal is much more expansive than imported coal and nobody buys it except for national powerplants that are forced to buy it :) ).

Even pedophilia in Catholic church is leftist's fault because most of it is male priest to male child so they are actually members of LGBT ideology. Hard to argue with such "logic"...

Sad thing is - it's not just politicians and tinfoilers, decent people start believing parts of that after years of propaganda in state media and church.

Basically there's 30% who believe all of it, 10% who believe parts o it, and about 20% who don't but vote them anyway because of social spending. And it's been that way since 2015...

> reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland

that's the fact not many people want to speak about :) 5% of population was in the communist party. In 70s few people were protesting - economy was ok and who cares about these crazy oppositionists.

Communism sucked for people who wanted to be free or cared about historic truth or wanted to have a career, or to achieve something in life without becoming a spy. But for your average person that only wanted to have a job, a flat, and a family it was OK for most of the period. So what if it killed 20 000 people that didn't wanted communism? As long as you're behaving like everybody else it's very unlikely you'll have any problems.

Solidarity was formed because the regulated prices for many kinds of food went up (because they weren't sustainable with the inefficient economy).

<comment><USER6> Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez are characters in _High Noon_. As the whole movie is less two-dimensional than most westerns, their characters go beyond the typical blonde vs brunette.

<comment><USER5> Doh :) Shows I'm not into westerns.

<comment><USER6> Is "Wybory" the same slavic root as the chorus singing "pick me" in:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSf1UcFRq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSf1UcFRq0) ?

(Russia is not subtle about encouraging deep rural population growth! The Subaru w/ spoiler and well-depreciated tractor are stereotypical village rides here, but we, being more densely populated, also have monoaxes. And you remind me I ought to explore "disco polo" sometime. Or do you have any recommendations for a more refined genre?)

<comment><USER5> I don't know Russian, the sound and ending changes are very predictable for a Pole that heard the language several times, but there's lots of false friends and they often use different root words than we do. But I'm pretty sure it is the same in this case.

In Polish "brać" = "to take" and prefix "wy-" adds aspect of movement out of some place so "wybierać" is literally sth like "to take out" and means "to choose".

"Wybór" is noun made from that verb, and "wybory" is the plural of that noun, so it literally means "choices", but is most often used to mean "elections".

"wybier mienia" from that song would be "wybierz mnie" in Polish.

As for disco polo it's basically Polish country - few people listen to it unironically and say so publicly (epecially outside countryside), but play it during any party and everybody will dance. There's no wedding in Poland without disco polo.

As for recommendation sorry for wall of text in advance :) I didn't know how to choose so I went chronologically.

60s and 70s were all about "big beat" which was basically Polish rock'n'roll. Some recommendations: Czerwone Gitary, Czesław Niemen, Skaldowie, Karin Stanek. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjLZwpmufw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjLZwpmufw) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CM68Z3z0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CM68Z3z0A) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WtBpMkxz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WtBpMkxz8) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_XYk- Xc94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_XYk-Xc94) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVFvIK7IRkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVFvIK7IRkw)

In 70s-80s there was this weird genre that I like called "poetic song" that turned into "student's song"/"touristic song".

It's started with Kaczmarski as something like Vladimir Vysocky or Bob Dylan - lyrics are more important than music, one guy and a guitar. I especially like Jacek Kaczmarski songs, there's also Łapiński, Gintrowski, Kleyff and others, and then the touristic songs took over and instead of politics and angst students started singing about how pretty the mountains are and how nice it is to camp in them, but the music style is still similar. The best examples are Wolna Grupa Bukowina and Stare Dobre Małżeństwo, but there's many more. It's very obscure genre, by the way, except for a few songs by Kaczmarski that turned into anthems because of politics in late 70s early 80s.

Kaczmarski story is very interesting. He wrote a song called "Mury" in late 70s (inpired by Lluis Llach protest song about Catalonia freedom) which was supposed to be about political movements taking over art from artists with good intentions and turning on artists and anybody who isn't with them eventually. That's the song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE) Solidarity took that song as its anthem and changed the last verses because it was "too pessimistic". Few people realize now what it was even about, mostly they think it was only about destroying communism. Basically it's a song that predicted what will happen with it :)

Other "poetic songs": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38k_Jom2eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38k_Jom2eg) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmfE9PkNpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmfE9PkNpA)

The touristic subgenre: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt03Q4EDHYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt03Q4EDHYQ) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxpdLbw3zM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxpdLbw3zM) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1q80-m-yo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1q80-m-yo) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfp- DRAUN8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfp-DRAUN8E)

80s and early 90s was all rock (because it's a protest genre and there were lots of things to be raging against). Perfekt, Maanam, Lady Punk, Budka Suflera, Kombi, Lombard, Kazik. Examples: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661sTP275nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661sTP275nE) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7OgVpWQs5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7OgVpWQs5s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3Yp4aUU7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3Yp4aUU7E) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nxamh3-t0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nxamh3-t0) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kicEsx7g0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kicEsx7g0) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqVcDyOAoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqVcDyOAoY) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esu5UYDFBew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esu5UYDFBew)

The first song refrain is "Chcemy być sobą" (we want to be ourselves) but people sung "Chcemy bić ZOMO" (we want to beat up ZOMO). ZOMO was communist political milita that beat up A LOT of people to pacify protests and shut down concerts.

90s-00s was mostly about pop and rock-lite by bands like Wilki, Varius Manx, De Mono, T.Love, Elektryczne Gitary. It's my youth so I'm nostalgic about these but they aren't that good in general: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby1imQDs3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby1imQDs3E) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYyu4wH4dQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYyu4wH4dQ) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SN_ZH75e68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SN_ZH75e68) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guJ25FxCwmY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guJ25FxCwmY) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghh0ttnRdiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghh0ttnRdiQ)

Best Polish female singer of all time also made career in 90s - Edyta Górniak. It's criminal that she didn't won Eurovision in 1994 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8)

Recently Polish hip-hop is pretty good (but it's 90% in the lyrics so you'd have to have translations and I don't know how well it translates). I recommend Paktofonika, Kaliber 44, Łona, Quebonafide, Taco Hemmingway, Mata. Paktofonika was the band that started serious hip-hop in Poland, they are till considered the best, especially "Jestem Bogiem" (I am god). Important culturally too. Here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc)

<comment><USER6> It's a shame that hip-hop really needs reasonable language skills. I'll give it a listen (while working down the rest of your wonderful suggestions!) but probably won't get any more out of it than the Gaeilge of:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk)

Does poland have any folk tradition similar to the russian chastushki?

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ppG_G2s9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ppG_G2s9g)

<comment><USER5> I've heard something similar at folk concert but I don't know from which region of Poland it was and it's generally not stuff that people know or sing (except for folk bands, recontruction groups etc.) Maybe it was translated from a russian song.

I think the most alive folk music is the one from górale (Tatra highlanders). It's very distinctive, after 2 chords you know it's from them. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8)

Besides górale there are a few folk songs that everybody knows and sings at campfires or on weddings or other gatherings (they are called "piosenka biesiadna" because you usually sing them when you're eating).

Examples: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg)

I'm not sure they are 100% authentic folk music though, because most versions nowadays are disco-polo :)

Example of true folk song I've heard a few times in my region (on weddings or concerts): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w)

It's in regional dialect that nobody really speaks anymore in daily life.

Another kind of folk music that's still alive is przyśpiewki (orchestra plays same tune and people switch and sing to diss everybody else on weddings :)). It's basically folk rap battles :)

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

BTW in one Kaczmarski song there's a Russian folk song included. I always wondered if it's true folk song or something he invented. Have you ever heard it?

The inner song starts here: [https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151](https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151)

<comment><USER6> The start of the included song is the same as a ukrainian folk song (with a very similar theme).

[https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379](https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379)

another version (gaily gown-greening):

[https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html](https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html)

And доню and собі́ would also be ukrainian. So it looks like I have to transliterate from polish to ukrainian, neither of which I have any experience with...

(Incidentally, _wesele_ seems to be one of the false friends you mentioned. Part of the chorus in

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4)

is Давай, давай веселей, but somehow I doubt the context has much to do with weddings.)

Edit: and speaking of weddings, YT just gave me [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q)

I guess [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth#/media/File:Rzeczpospolita2nar.png) probably had something to do with the distribution of the song?

Edit2: The instrumentation for Głęboka studzienka reminded me of my favourite bavarian cover band (for anyone that doesn't know they need to hear oom-pah metal): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI)

Edit3: TIL poland is a civilised country. You all also have carnaval! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg)

<comment><USER5> Yeah the song is a relict of PLC times.

"Wesele" means "wedding", "weselej" means "more happily" (wesoło, weselej, najweselej = happily, happili-er, happili-est - as adverbs not adjectives).

So "dawaj, dawaj, weselej" would mean something like "let's go, let's go, happier now", right?

<comment><USER6> Yes. I'd imagined something along the lines of "c'mon, c'mon, party!"

And I'd anglicise "Wiesiołyje Rebiata" as "Party Dudes"[1], but take that with a lot of salt[2], as my command of californian is much stronger than my sense of slavic...

(I'm pretty confident about it though, because pop music tends to gravitate to a certain vocabulary. Just as _corazon_ is one of the first words one learns when listening to mexican radio, and _сердце_ occurs often in russian, I assume I'll be hearing _serce_ frequently, along with appropriate first and second person possessives, in disco polo...)

[1] Here's that band rocking their 80's style: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk)

[2] i chlebem?

Edit: one of these days I still need to play with the Kogut programming language, [http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html](http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _From then on, most of them have been kept under lock and key, first in a > secure room in the Latvian parliament, and then in the Center for the > Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism._

In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?

<comment><USER8> I love the name.

For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated.

For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.

Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth.

Walking back from poor decisions is _super-hard_. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different."

Not sure what the answers are here, though.

<comment><USER9> The answer is democracy. If a policy doesn't work out, elect a new government with no political investment in the old failed policy, and in fact maybe even a platform to fix it, and have them fix it. Prohibition in the US is a classic case in point.

<comment><USER10> The answer certainly includes democracy, but having a constitutional republic like the US is not sufficient.

Figure 1 on pdf page 10 [1].

[1] [https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)

<comment><USER6> "Economic elites" here being approximated by the "affluent", namely 90th income (why not wealth?) percentile.

> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich > nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens' "affluent" respondents received > only about $146,000 in annual household income."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...not very much, it seems?

 _But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything._

</comment><comment><USER12> > But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what > these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.

We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was going on.

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

<comment><USER6> > "By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had > been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages > of 18 and 60."

For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.

<comment> orbital-decay I don't know why you're being downvoted, the comparison seems completely appropriate. Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of. An non-targeted informant network of that scale would be simply redundant and hard to maintain for their lookalikes these days.

<comment><USER13> It is a quantitative comparison of alternatives with a very different quality. Apples and oranges, if you will. The fact that both spy on private information does not mean that the information is roughly equivalent, nor the level of betrayal.

Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.

<comment><USER6> I did say 'contrast', not 'compare'. I agree the information is not roughly equivalent (the smartphone gathers much more data) and agree the level of betrayal is not there (as with the line about the advantages of making the landlord and the tenant the same person, there are also advantages to making the informer and the informee the same person).

For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2]

Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all?

As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones.

[1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage)

[2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on [https://eos.com](https://eos.com) due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets.

Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824)

[3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..."

[https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA- DOC-19-PUB-...](https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA- DOC-19-PUB-002-Public-Docs-Vol-II-2019-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and- Munitions-List-Dec-19.pdf)

[4] "What you mean _we_ , kemo sabe?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's different about these files and those of tech platforms is that the information itself didn't matter. It was the system of government itself to maintain the impression that there were secret informants everywhere and there was no way of knowing who was or wasn't. The point was to instill terror for its own sake, and to politically paralyze individuals, or "atomize," people into inaction. The randomness and absurdity of the system was by design, as the arbitrary nature of it had the effect of creating uncertainty and paranoia in every individual relationship. This secured the power of the party and the regime.

The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror.

Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," ([http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...](http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readings/Hannah%20Arendt%20-%20Ideology%20and%20Terror.pdf))

Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.

</comment><comment><USER15> May be employees of FAANG should read these archives. This will give them insight into how to design humane tech and avoid surveillance.

<comment><USER9> There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure if there's any truth to it.

<comment><USER6> Seems unlikely to me, but Trotsky does provide useful background for Goldstein's analysis of IngSoc.

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.htm#ch06-4)

Fun fact: only about 13% of the world of 1984 lives under constant observation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900)

Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Facebook and Google literally has over 300 GB of data on me

<comment><USER17> Not doubting that they have a comprehensive dossier, but that seems like an exaggeration to me. How did you come up with that figure?

<comment><USER18> Yeah I get a full Google data dump every 3 months and it's about 350GB at the moment. Most of it is photos, but still.

<comment><USER19> With advances in AI and digital image analysis, I'd guess that long term these photos could provide lots of information too. Especially if google attempted to extract information from aggregated media of all users.

Very offtopic, there's a sci-fi novella, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague) , where one of the plot elements is a search for information through old photos and movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> (2019)

Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder whether the files stored in nsa and dhs databases on all of us will come out someday? We do get leaks and hints from time to time:

[https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/12903846737896734...](https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1290384673789673472?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER22> Now Latvija gain freedom from Russia and become one of best counterey in the Europe Union and the World!</comment>


React State vs. Redux State: When and Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Redux state is useful for when other parts of the app need to be aware of or react to that state.

Sometimes there are little bits and pieces that may look like they are "private state of a component" but over time you'll find instances where it's useful to know that state.

For example I have a LoginForm component and a SignupForm component.

If you have half-way filled email and password on the LoginForm, but click on "Create an account" it would be nice if SignupForm picked up that state from the login form.

So my LoginForm state is stored in the redux store under the key "loginForm".

And SignupForm will pick up that state if available and vice-versa for going from sign up to log in.

<comment><USER3> For this specific occasion you could also use the Lift state up pattern -> [https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/lifting-state- up.html](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/lifting-state-up.html) and it would work just as fine.

I've been doing some React projects for the past 6-7 months and I still haven't had the need to use Redux. I believe you want Redux when your application is really large / complex.

<comment><USER2> Yes but it can get pretty noisy when a component that is deep down needs access to some information.

Redux decouples component structure from information access.

This is useful when you have some little button for example that should look different depending on whether the user is logged in or not.

Without redux you will burden each and every component in the hierarchy to manage that state up and down.

With redux that button can hook itself into the state and be dropped anywhere without burdening its parents for any state management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I like to do is not use Redux at all until I find I need it. So basically it comes a point in my app when I have too much information in my state and I need to share it with multiple components. At this point, I add the most global stuff to the redux store and keep meaningless things as react state.

</comment><comment><USER5> Use Redux state if you want the data to be available across multiple components.

Use React Component State if no other component cares about the data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Use both, React for internal component state, Redux for global state that could be serialized.</comment>


Ask HN: Limitations to Scaling a Hardware Device to Reduce Disease Transmission - <AUTHOR> Inspired by the COVID-19 outbreak, I recently had a eureka moment and think I have an idea for a simple hardware device that could reduce the transmission of diseases.  I'm in the early stages of prototyping it, but the availability of components on Digikey and the factory lead times listed are not anywhere close to the scale and speed needed.  I know there are more options than Digikey, but I can't help bu think at some point the supply chain will not meet demand.   I If that's true, then the ship has already sailed for massively scaling the device and making a dent in the spread of the current outbreak.  If that's the case, I'll still build it in the hopes that its effectiveness can be proven, and that it will be useful for the next outbreak.  Obviously, to even sniff the required scale, the design would have to be made available to anyone who can make it.<p>So the questions are: If the goal is to produce millions per month, how quickly could a company like Microchip ramp up production to the point where they are producing that many ATTiny85's?  How many alternative sources for similar products are there available? What about batteries (coin cell or otherwise) and SMD component manufacturers of resistors, LEDs, accelerometers, etc.?  I'm assuming that if the device is small enough, then a nationwide network of PCB manufacturers would be able to keep up.  Is that wrong?  What else am I missing? <comment><USER2> Your Microchip sales rep can give good answers to that. Typically, for a small, mature chip like the ATTiny85 they can deliver a million immediately and quickly ramp up to any volume you need in a few months. But there are many similar chips and one may be much more available than the next.

Definitely build several prototypes first to see if people want it before investing a lot of time in building a supply chain.</comment>


Monk's Enlightenment Begins with a Marathon Walk (2010) - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125223168 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm surely going to butcher this story, but I heard from a Zen priest who visited Mount Hiei this year that there is a position there of a monk who maintains a (the?) main shrine. That monk attends to the cleanliness and order of the shrine exclusively, and resides there without leaving throughout the entire duration of the position, which is 12 years.</comment>


Log In or Create Account - <AUTHOR> https://the-magazine.org/login More info on Marco's site: http://www.marco.org/2013/02/24/the-magazine-sharing<p>I believe this and the way subscriptions are confirmed through the app are elegant solutions. <comment><USER2> I applaud the attempt to move away from passwords, but this seems like a pretty annoying solution. I don't want access to my email to be tied to my access to "The Magazine". If I'm going to need to access some other service to log in, I'd prefer a Google Authenticator style solution where my access code is always a single click away from my phone's home screen. Maybe Marco/The Magazine could use Google Authenticator and just accept any password as long as the auth code is right, it seems like that would provide the same level of security as this solution.

As a side note, wouldn't someone trying to gain access to my account result in a deluge of password-link spam to my inbox? Or do they have some elegant solution for that.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a big factor, and why I think this is a really bad UX. I've actually considered this method of authentication in the past, but the only thing this fixes is this site having to remember a password for you (and the accompanying side effect of the vulnerability of your password being compromised).

Now, the user not only has to hold onto the login email (or request a new one), but they have to access that email _every_ time you use the site -- or, bookmark the URL (yuck). Not to mention the issue if they're on another device that doesn't have access to the email address.

This _may_ work as a secondary, optional method of authentication. But having it as the _only_ method isn't a good UX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I did not make an account to try it out, so the following suggestions are for this kind of scheme in general.

1\. The mailed login link should be only good for a single use.

2\. This should be handled as a service by a third party site (similar to the way OpenID works). The mailed login link would link to the third party site, which then redirects to the destination if the login is valid.

The idea behind #1 is that if someone gets into your email, they should not be able to simply follow any old login links you've failed to delete. Best practice would be to delete the mails as soon as you click the link, but people will forget so the system should be designed with that in mind.

The idea behind #2 is that someone who gets into your email should not be able to tell from your old login links where you have accounts. If he could, he could simply go to those sites and make then initiate sending a new login link.

3\. When you tell a site to send you a login link, the site should assign a random PIN to that login link and tell you (on the website) that PIN. The login link validator site should require you to enter that PIN before redirecting to the final destination site.

This is to prevent an intruder in your email from getting to an unused login link before you do and using it.

</comment><comment><USER5> What if the email account has been compromised? Right now, having unique passwords for each account allows me to compartmentalize access to my accounts. In this case, the attackers would have one less thing to worry about.

Also, is this behavior carried over to the mobile apps?

edit: Nevermind. I was not thinking right. Password resets, as pointed out by many, are always possible with email access.

<comment><USER6> Most existing accounts allow password resets via email, so email compromise would also result in account compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Instapaper (also by Marco Arment) used to do a similar thing. Then this happened: <http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738>

Interesting to see he is giving it another shot. It looks like the new implementation solves some of the problems brought up in that blog post.

<comment><USER8> I have a feeling this is an initial marketing feature for him.

You pull in users who value the convenience and ease of signup and once you reach critical mass the feature no longer yields the percentage of conversion that makes/breaks your venture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is neither a new pattern, nor does it seem to be executed in a particularly interesting way. Am I blasé or am I missing something?

<comment><USER10> I haven't seen this before; what other apps/sites have used it?

<comment><USER11> craigslist? any time you want to post, you get a link that lets you confirm/publish the post, or edit/delete the post.

<comment><USER10> That's an excellent comparison, but from my understanding there's not a concept of ongoing users beyond the author of any individual post. Great point, though, that seems like the highest-profile similar example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At first this seems to be no different from the password auth: both the password method and the login URL method essentially implement the shared secret scheme, and the rest are technical details.

Except the devil is in the details, as usual: passwords are (or should be) kept and transferred in encrypted form, whereas with the login URL the shared secret is exposed even if transferred over HTTPS.

Other than that, of course, it would be such a relief to dump passwords altogether!

<comment><USER13> The URL isn't any more exposed than any password would be over HTTPS, that is to say not at all unless you are being MITM'ed by someone who controls a CA in your browser.

<comment><USER14> True but there's still a way. Unless you've got HSTS enabled most users, _if_ they manually type in the URL, will leave out the protocol altogether which means the server needs to redirect you to https. That's no problem but there's always the chance that someone can perform an https stripping attack and catch the connection before the redirect occurs. Even with HSTS enabled the first time a user does this they're still vulnerable as HSTS cannot be activated until you have an initial https connection.

Chrome's HSTS list solves this but you have to make sure you send the Chromium team an email to add you to the list and even then not everyone uses Chrome. I had them add my app to the list recently which makes me feel warm and fuzzy but its not bullet proof.

In the end, yeah it's a real narrow edge case but as we all have been warned and seen so many times here on HN, those edge cases, no matter how narrow, often end up becoming real at some point. That's not to say I think it'll happen, just saying there is a way.

<comment><USER13> The same attack you're describing could easily be used to steal a password- based login, too.

<comment><USER14> Right, but that's not the point. I'm not trying to say this passwordless login is flawed or worse than password based login. I just saw a flaw that stuck out and pointed it out. Nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do something similar for a small message board used by about 10 friends that has a shared password. All you do is look in your email for the link or bookmark and use the bookmark to log in.

It might seem strange, but some people probably prefer it this way. If your app has a reset password link that grants a session, some percentage of users are going to use reset links pretty much exclusively to get into the app.

</comment><comment><USER16> This kinda this is what inspired to me to use google authenticators time based OTP's and try to make a service out of it (shameless plug: <http://www.gauthify.com>), I think theres a solid benefit to be gained from OTPs in a login setting since they're rotated, not memorized, and random.

<comment><USER17> I built this one night as a sort of example for GAuthify. Real simple, just checks a user's email against a database, retrieves their unique GAuthify ID, and checks that against the GAuthify API.

<http://zackboehm.com/dev/gauthify-phplogin/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This would work if your email address was somehow tied to your browser for "remote logins" (via native implementation? add-on?), and a little popup just showed up.

Or, I think a mobile version where you got a text would work (since typing on a little screen is harder than opening a notification).

Otherwise, it seems worse than passwords.

<comment><USER19> Your mobile device has email, right? Mine does. You'd just type your email into the site on mobile, then get the link for your device's browser. You'd have to type email, app switch, the click link. I don't think that is too bad actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Brilliant!

In fact - it's probably more secure than a normal password scheme! No password hash database to be stolen, no brute force attacks to dodge, no chance of your account being compromised without noticing because you'll get an email if someone tries anything (assuming the cookie is safe and SSL'ed)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is so obviously useful (it simply skips a few steps in my almost weekly "forgot my password" routine) that there must be a reason why it is not more widespread...

<comment><USER21> It's not widespread because it adds extra steps for those who do remember their password (switch tab, wait for email, open email, click link), or for those who don't have their email client open (go to gmail.com, log in, open email, click link).

Marco's audience likely reads the magazine from within the appe (where the practice is keep the user logged in indefinitely) or they always have their email client open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems to be punting a lot of the security responsibilities regarding the Magazine to the user and email provider. Clever, but perhaps too clever by the half.

<comment><USER23> I don't see how this is any different to every site with a 'reset my password' link

<comment><USER22> And I have the same opinion of those sites whose only security is sending reset links to a user's email. But at least with those you don't have to hop back and forth between your email and the site anytime you use a different device or browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does it work?

<comment><USER25> When you enter your e-mail, you receive a message such as...

\---

Log into The Magazine by opening this link:

[https://the-magazine.org/login/8LvjumLKwNXeBX2zDkxZGuDixUzds...](https://the- magazine.org/login/8LvjumLKwNXeBX2zDkxZGuDixUzds01SAwlUPksK)

This link will expire after an hour and can only be used once. To log into multiple browsers, send a login request from each one.

\---

It works well, they click the e-mail link, and it saves a cookie to log them in. I think it's a decent solution. It comes down to preference, would you rather type in a password, or click a link e-mailed to you. At times, I have complex passwords, so they take a while to type, and other times, I'd rather type in a password, than access my e-mail on a computer or network of questionable security.

In the end, passwords need to change, and I think in the future they'll disappear. We need smart cards or something along those lines. Click the login button, pass the card over your phone or computer, and you're instantly logged in. The card remains in your wallet like any other.

<comment><USER26> I'm missing something. What happens when you come back?

<comment><USER19> I would assume the cookie is still valid and you're authenticated, or you type the email address and you get a fresh token.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of the old Instapaper login model. Of course, that too was Marco Arment. I guess he hates traditional logins.</comment>


A Solution in Search of a Problem - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/lang/letter-c.html <comment><AUTHOR> > what if I were to start writing the English letter 'C' in two forms, to > distinguish its two pronunçiations? Speçifically, when 'C' gets the soft /s/ > sound, we'll write it with a çedilla, and when it gets the hard /k/ sound > we'll write it as usual.

catalog

catalogue

pronunçiations

speçifically

çedilla

çircular

clearançe

maçe

preçious

oçean

These are all examples from the article. Do you notice the pattern?

If you ever learned a romance language it will be obvious because you probably learned it as rule, and while the rule is not as pronounced in English it still works a lot of times.No cedilla needed in my opinion.</comment>


Microsoft shares flirting with $30 for first time in nearly 2 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/243227/microsoft-shares-flirting-30

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much Android royalties have to do with this. Which is especially perverse given Google's below-forecast earnings. Heh.</comment>


Single Serving Site of the day: Big Ass Message - <AUTHOR> http://bigassmessage.com/9d03501f4

<comment><USER2> <http://bigassmessage.com/741540b37>

</comment><comment><USER3> Is that a big-ass message, or a big ass-message?

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do I think "stealth pepsi ad"?

<comment><USER5> Yes! Confirmation that they're bring back Crystal Pepsi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.bigassmessage.com/48755cf5b>

</comment><comment><USER7> See people, this is why flash isn't going anywhere. HTML5 could never do this ...

</comment><comment><USER8> I played around with the different options. My eyes hurt now. Really.</comment>


Who Should I Thank? (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

<comment><USER2> Good god! Even if he wasn't serious you'd have to question his mental stability. It would be very foolish to be the student of someone who jokes about killing his students. Stay far away. I hope they take his guns away.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely wrong. Don't speculate about things you know nothing about.

Shivers is beloved by his students. For example, Matt Might -- who I name because his blog is one of the most frequently frontpage'd on HN, and also because you have taken his website format as your own -- personally remarked to me many times about the quality of Shivers as PhD advisor. This occurred over the course of the two or so _years_ that I was advised by Matt, and I have personally heard the same from many of his students since.

<comment><USER2> Well that is interesting to know! You have to ask though, why someone would continue, even in 2013 to joke about mass murdering students? I'm separating that fact from his long and distinguished career. I dont know the man. Why does he find that funny, if that is his intent? If it's not, what is his intent?

For the record, Prof Might has been hugely influential in my decision to go to graduate school. You're lucky to have him as an advisor.

<comment><USER4> > You have to ask though, why someone would continue, even in 2013 to joke > about mass murdering students?

But, as indicated in the title, it's from 1994 ….</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FMYLIFE.com: Why Didn't I Think of This? FMYLIFE (Insane Growth) - <AUTHOR> http://siteanalytics.compete.com/fmylife.com/?metric=uv

<comment><USER2> 3-5 years ago I registered "pissesmeoff.com" with the same idea. Write about things that piss you off, vote up/down. I was in school so I never got around to it. Domain expired. Now (expectedly) is squatted.

</comment><comment><USER3> How did they become so popular, though? Word of mouth? IRC? what?</comment>


Dumb Ways To Die (Melbourne Metro) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMykLW4AXs

<comment><USER2> Memorable and amusing and therefore more effective than either a dry message or possibly even a shock advert

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the Aussies are very good at this kind of thing. If you look up their anti-drunk driving commercials you see how they really care about the effectiveness if these things.</comment>


What Would It Take to Shut Down the Entire Internet? - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/what-would-it-take-to-shut-down-the-entire-internet-1837984019 <comment><USER2> It seems to me that it wouldn't be that difficult. There are only a few major backbones that would need to be eliminated, and the rest of the internet would crush the remaining portion with sheer volume of unhandled traffic. We've seen rather minor line cuts that have hobbled large portions of the internet, which causes me to believe the internet in its current form is still pretty fragile.</comment>


Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang? - <AUTHOR> A recent Erlang article in Communications of the ACM portrays Erlang as a specialized language for messaging/chat (Facebook chat, XMPP, etc.)and distributed storage (CouchDB, Riak, etc.)<p>I think this is probably right, but I'm wondering what else you've built in Erlang. Was it a good fit? Why or why not? <comment><USER2> I built a fault-tolerant system for binding lots of disparate and network- unaware services via a monitored event-driven communication protocol to a network-fronted cloud architecture. It's called Katamari, and it's the version of Fuzed (this same concept just for Rails instances) that I modified to run as the majordomo of Powerset's realtime query analysis layer. It let us take un-threaded and network-unaware software that talks over local file descriptors and turn them into a cloud service.

Katamari also has some fairly good fault tolerance characteristics. It aggressively tries to maintain a cloud and it has no real single points of failure. It recognizes hung or crashed instances of individual workers and restarts them. It also supports arbitrary versioned resources existing in parallel, which is great when you want to do A/B testing.

It was also designed so that it was usable in both a development and production environment. While currently little slow for most production uses (~2ms overhead for most queries, with a special case of ~12ms), it's plenty fast and runs in less than 10mb of memory on most linux systems, and can transparently go from a 1-box to a N-box solution.

Microsoft open-sourced it for me (after 2 years of bureaucratic nonsense), so I am just pulling out the useless and crufty parts before I put it up on GitHub. I've given 2 talks about the technology, one for Fuzed at Railsconf and one on Katamari at the last Erlang Factory. I hope to have a modernized version maintained this year, and start moving the tech forward.

Katamari is about 10k lines of code; with about 2/3 of that being Erlang and the remaining 1/3 being Ruby code for the glue (Ruby was Powerset's primary glue and binding language, so it is the only supported binding). Katamari aggressively leverages the characteristics of Erlang to accomplish this feature set; its safe to say all the fault tolerance wouldn't have been doable without Erlang's implementation providing the basics for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> ErlyDTL, a Django Template Language compiler: <http://github.com/evanmiller/erlydtl>

Chicago Boss, an MVC web framework in progress: <http://github.com/evanmiller/ChicagoBoss>

This doesn't get mentioned enough, but Erlang has excellent compiler tools, so if you're willing to roll up your sleeves, you can usually hack the language to fit your problem. For instance, Chicago Boss ships with a nice but completely non-standard database querying syntax, described here:

<http://www.chicagoboss.org/api-db.html>

You will weep for joy when you rewrite a gnarly SQL query with a few well- chosen Unicode set operators.

The compiler tools also make it easy to generate Erlang AST and compile it to BEAM (Erlang bytecode). That's how ErlyDTL works. I haven't done performance benchmarks myself, but the folks at Zotonic report that their Django templates and controller code come out 10X faster than comparable PHP code.

I think a couple of things prevent Erlang from being a do-all language:

1\. Lack of libraries. The situation has been steadily improving, but Erlang's VM and processing model makes it difficult to draw upon the "C tradition" in the same way that Perl, Ruby, and the others can take a popular C library and write a thin wrapper around it.

2\. Inferior OS integration, at least with UNIX. For instance, custom signal- handling facilities are non-existent, and you have to jump through strange hoops to do simple stuff like close only the write end of a read-write pipe, or get the exit code of an exec'd process. Weak sauce for anyone who has spent a lot of time with Perl, Ruby, or C.

</comment><comment><USER4> ErlyWeb, an open source web framework: <http://github.com/yariv/erlyweb/>.

Twoorl, an open source Twitter clone: <http://github.com/yariv/twoorl/>.

Vimagi, a graffiti-like facebook app: <http://apps.facebook.com/vimagi-paint>.

Also, parts of Facebook chat (I work at Facebook).

<comment><USER5> Also, thanks for your work on mysql driver, which I happen to use for PavoMe.

<comment><USER6> HN is such a nice community :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I built a very specialized mail server (MTA).

It was a tedious, frustrating experience, even though you'd think it would be the perfect language.

It ended up being too slow (probably because of all the string processing)

In my entire programming career, I've never before had to join a mailing list and ask questions to get things done, that should tell you something.

<comment><USER8> I'd be interested in hearing more about the frustrations.

<comment><USER9> yes indeed I'm increasingly using couchdb, planning on picking up erlang and it would be useful to avoid the mailing list if you can pass info along...

<comment><USER7> This was a few years ago, so my memory is foggy and things might have changed, but I remember how uncomfortable erlang felt in a unix environment. I might have felt the same way about java, since its also sandboxy.

I think the first time I hit the mailing list was because I couldn't figure out how erlang can boot up and change its effective user id. (setuid). The reason being it needs to grab a privleged port as root. Well forget that, it has no idea what that means. The recommended way is to use iptables port forwarding. I think thats how couchdb does it (or one of those nosql things)

Logging also didn't seem to fit well with linux. You can manage to write some stuff to syslog, but erlang really prefers its confusing way of logging. See things like this <http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/sasl_app.html>.

Oh and if you decide to just write data to the error log in the simpliest way possible, like this error_logger:error_msg("An error occurred in ~p~n", [a_module]). Guess what, it doesn't open that log file in append mode, so it wipes it out every time you restart the erlang process. You have to write and install your own error log handler to open the file in append mode.

Want to do some dns lookups? Sounds simple. It starts up a gen_server thread... and starts caching the results! Talk about principle of most surprise. And it doesn't handle mx records. But if you get on the mailing list the guys will tell you there's an undocumented library deep in the distro that will handle this, and probably won't change. So you give up in frustration and just write a port to run dig.

It just went on and on.

You can really tell that erlang evolved to run self sufficient on special hardware and not in a supportive unix environment.

And of course there are the basic language frustrations. What bothered me the most was simply the lack of a 'return'. This meant you couldn't 'short circuit' a function, like "if something then return", and it often resulted in another level of nesting, even for the simpliest stuff. Yes I know that sometimes you could use function pattern matching to factor this out, but not as much as you hope. Having a 'return' statement in erlang is part of a religious war, which I'm not going to fight, but I'm strongly on the having side.

I found some erlang things worked great for my project, like the server and finite state machine 'behaviors', but when I realized the string processing was so slow I just switched to stackless python, wrote it in a fraction of the time, never used it, and ended up keeping the existing perl version :)

You can write a MTA in any language, so its probably not the best fit for erlang. The best fit for erlang would be something that only erlang could do, and just suffer through it ;-)

<comment><USER10> _You can really tell that erlang evolved to run self sufficient on special hardware and not in a supportive unix environment._

Well yeah, it was written to run telephony equipment. It's not a general purpose language, though it has been moving that way.

<comment><USER11> AFAIK it was written as the research, not to run at any specialized hardware, then "sold" as being able to run the phone switch, but it needed a "big iron" computer attached to it just to drive that switch (!) -- it was _that_ slow. And AFAIK it's still very slow. Up to quite recently it wasn't even able to use more cores.

<comment><USER12> Where did you get all that from? Erlang was never intended for research but as a tool for writing real switch applications. Yes, the original Prolog interpreter was slow, but that has not been used for almost 20 yrs. We never had "big iron" computers to play with, and never really needed them either as the system has been efficient enough to run on computers that were cost effective for the actual applications. The implementations have always been optimised for applications that are highly concurrent and extremely fault- tolerant, like telephone switches. Yes, it was a bit slow in being able to use more cores but that was because Ericsson, who still maintains the BEAM implementation, did not have need of it. Now, it will take as many cores as you can throw at it, and be able to use them if you have written a truly concurrent application (Amdahl's law). Transparently too.

<comment><USER11> I remember reading "Erlang - A survey of the language and its industrial applications" (Joe Armstrong - in INAP'96)

Now I've checked again, so let me summarize:

It started to spread "outside the lab" in 1987. In 1995 there were three commercial applications: network simulator, mobility server and distributed resource controller. First is a simulator, not running on the specialized hardware, the third was running on "a network of Windows NT machines." The second: "acts as a call control system _when linked to the PBX_ "

OK, the second was running on the additional SPARC-based machine, not big iron, but AFAIK certainly more powerful than the PC's of that time.

So I don't see anything that was targeting really "specialized hardware" particularly not what we'd think as embedded (less power consumption, slower processors than the PC CPU's). It was a research project, and it had traditionally performance problems.

Even today, after so many years, when you compare Erlang HiPe (Hi Perf, you can imagine others then!) with something higher than C, let's then say Lua JIT it's easy to see which one is faster:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=luajit)

Edit: Or for multi core 64 bits with Mono:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=csharp)

<comment><USER13> Do you realize that rvirding is Robert Virding, one of the creators of Erlang?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked on a spreadsheet compiler at hypernumbers.com and some backend stuff for vidiowiki.com (video transcoding, file uploading/streaming and some other smaller stuff).

Erlang excels at distribution. People tend to forget its raison d'être is fault-tolerance (not concurrency), so when you set off working on an Erlang application you presume that it will run on 2+ machines. That's why it's great for things like Facebook Chat and Riak. In addition to those, it's also good for writing control and supervision layers, where workers are written in Python, Java, C etc.

While I'm at it, I'd like to plug <http://veldstra.org/whyerlang/> It's in a real need of an update, and I'd love to hear any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER15> Banking systems, both retail and commercial. Logistics. Embedded. Clusterware. Telecoms. Robotics, AI. When it comes to messaging, don't forget RabbitMQ and all the SMS systems.

Francesco

<comment><USER16> For those of you who don't now, Francesco Cesarini is the founder and CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting, and has been a major proponent of Erlang for years, also having co-written the book "Erlang Programming" (<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596518189> \- it's a great book, I highly recommend it myself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Simple stuff, but:

\- An IRC bot -- great fit for the language

\- A URL shortener service (three times) -- first on Yaws, then on Nitrogen, then on ChicagoBoss (Hi EvanMiller!)

Erlang is the most fun I've ever had writing code. While a lot of that is the functional language aspect, I find it an extremely intuitive language at least at a low level (once you get past the 'there are 4 ways to end a line?!?!' stage). I'm still getting used to thinking through bigger problems in an Erlang way, but thats more a function of my brain than the language.

I think Erlang gets a lot of unfair knocks given it's pigeonholed reputation for 'concurrency and fault tolerance'. Certainly it has it's limitations (libraries), but generally, I think its a pretty well-rounded general purpose language.

</comment><comment><USER18> A Facebook application that had nearly 2 million users.

A game data aggregation platform and feed system for EA.

A lot of open source Erlang stuff (<http://github.com/ngerakines>)

</comment><comment><USER19> I have built the backend (game logic and comet) for <http://www.iluminatus.ro>, a trivia-like multiplayer game for the Romanian market. We're going to release an english version soon.

It was a great fit. It lacks Unicode processing capabilities by default, but there are a few open source libraries for that. The only thing I dislike about Erlang is the poor string manipulation and lack of clean structures (Erlang's records are an ugly hack IMO).

</comment><comment><USER20> <http://hypernumbers.com> \- an online spreadsheet which is a native web app - lurching towards a proper launch after a lot of development.

Erlang is a great fit - works well, allows you to build a native stack without any cross-language impedance. Your application is cluster ready from the get- go and allows you to focus on the functionality rather than any of the utilities required to make the damn thing stay up.

</comment><comment><USER5> I built a Twitter client, with j2me on handsets and Erlang server at the back to handle all communications with twitter and few other services for image hosting, etc. It was my second project in Erlang and was very rewarding experience. Part I especially liked, is that I could deploy updates to the server while it was running, with no desruption to clients at all. <http://pavo.me/>

</comment><comment><USER21> Phonebooth, a hosted telephone system <http://www.phonebooth.com>

Great fit. OTP process restart characteristics. Per-tenant process separation. Process abstraction, in general, rather than threads. Finite state machine behaviors. Live code upgrades. Mnesia database.

Only real downside was it took the rest of the team a bit of time to become effective in Erlang... about 4 to 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not me but deserves attention: <http://www.wings3d.com/>

"Wings 3D is a subdivision modeller with an user interface that is easy to use for both beginners and advanced users"

</comment><comment><USER23> I wrote a distributed sat-solver in Erlang (good old fashioned search problem). It was my intro project to get to know the language. Has been great fun and now Erlang is in charge of computers talking to each other while Java takes care of the heavy lifting. Also a similar problem solved with Erlang (nothing to do with me), and featured here on hacker news...

[http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/08/tour-of-preach-distributed- er...](http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/08/tour-of-preach-distributed-erlang/)

Great stuff. Erlang may make you smile (again).

</comment><comment><USER24> We built a system to connect teams via texting and conferencing. <http://www.connectteams.com>. Erlang provides the web front end, the backend telecommuncations, and the reporting interfaces. All perfect fits.

</comment><comment><USER25> Super late (a misjudged apache-bench got me banned for a day or something), but: <http://darcsden.com/alex/aliter>

It's a reverse engineering of a popular MMORPG called Ragnarok Online (or RO). Last time I was working on it, you could log in with the official client, walk around, teleport, chat, etc. (The walking had to be done in C, though; one pathfind per walk request is not something I'd want to leave to Erlang.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Erlang is perfect for any messaging systems. And on other hand Erlang works well for GIS:

Vector Map Server - a BSc thesis project. Vector geospatial data streaming server, very similar thing to server's streaming vector data to Google Earth or Map24. Also works as WFS server. Has to handle a lot of data, but since data is mostly immutable it works well.

Backend service for not yet released liveblogging site. Done in collaboration with few other developers. Massive pubsub system. Done tests with 1M concurrent users on 200 small-node EC2 cluster with end-to-end latency mostly < 1.5s.

Texspace - spatial search server based on Microsoft Research paper. Fuzzy spatial search capable of working with completely unstructured queries. Had pretty big issues with processing, indexing and analyzing big amounts of data due to slowness of all DB solutions available at that time. Writing geometry algorithms in Erlang is not trivial due to immutability, since all of them are described in imperative languages.

IM subsystem for microblogging site (which is pretty big in Asia) - implemented 5 proprietary protocols. Erlang is perfect for such tasks! The only issue was lack of documentation for proprietary protocols ;)

Map routing server - implemented optimized A* search with route graph generalization. Writing fast A* is tricky in immutable world. Books like Okasaki's "Pure Functional Data Structures" FTW!

WMS Tiling / TMS service with caching. Simple and easy task for Erlang. Mnesia + file-level cache.

Overseer - Nitrogen + CouchDB app for tracking employees time by doing screenshots via VNC and marking them as "work" / "not work". A breeze :)

Erlang FTW!

</comment><comment><USER27> SMS/MMS gateway (aggregator) with SMPP, CIMD and MM7 support and AMQP interface (RabbitMQ as a broker). Also building a simple SMSC right now.

It's a perfect fit.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm currently building a web-based IRC client with bouncer-like functionality - ie, stays online when you close the browser, remembers backlog etc.

Built github.com/RJ/playdar-core in erlang, after initially writing it in C++/boost

</comment><comment><USER10> Not mine, but there is a CMS built in Erlang: <http://zotonic.com>

</comment><comment><USER29> \- we wrote the backend of <http://bidit.eu> in Erlang (front end in Rails) \- we're writing the backend for a TV co-viewing chat application for the iPad in Erlang right now \- we're rolling out a new Nitrogen-powered website for Inaka Networks this weekend

</comment><comment><USER30> I built one of the fist comprehensive call detail record collection systems for a SIP voip network. I also built a least cost routing system for same.

A options feed aggregation and charting backend.

A package management system.

many many other small apps.

Cheers, Martin Logan erlangcamp.com

</comment><comment><USER31> Not mine, and though I can't find a page on their site that states it, Vendetta Online[1] uses Erlang heavily for their server code. I went to a conference they spoke at a while back, they've said it works wonderfully for them and lets them handle large amounts of players easily.

They are also working to release a game engine (NAOS[2]) built from their server code, which also uses Erlang pretty heavily

[1]: <http://www.vendetta-online.com/> [2]: <http://www.guildsoftware.com/products.html>

</comment><comment><USER32> I did several small Erlang projects and now working on two relatively large.

Erlang is a good fit for:

* Irregular concurrency: Task-level, Fine-grained parallelism

* Network servers

* Distributed systems

* Middleware: Parallel databases, Message Queue servers

* Soft Realtime / Embedded applications

* Monitoring, control and testing tools

Not so good fit for:

* Concurrency more appropriate to synchronized parallel execution: Data Parallelism

* Floating-point intensive code (HPC)

* Text Processing / Unicode (Unicode support now much better)

* Traditional GUI (some improvement with wx now)

* Hard Realtime applications

* Extensive interop with other languages/VMs (some improvement here with NIFs and Erjang - Erlang on JVM)

* No Windows 64-bit VM

I using Erlang for the things listed under "not so fit", because it's advantages out-weight some incomvinience.

</comment><comment><USER33> I built a real-time news widget that streams (hyper)local news and public records (marriage licenses, liquor permits, etc). Media companies partner with us <http://nozzlmedia.com> we've doubled the time visitors spend on their Web pages.

Erlang was a good fit for us, mostly because of the tools available around it, such as Nitrogen <http://nitrogenproject.com> a powerful JavaScript/Erlang framework. Erlang apps seem robust and lean.

</comment><comment><USER34> Started etap: <http://github.com/ngerakines/etap> which ngerakines took over.

Iterate: <http://github.com/zaphar/iterate> an agile user story tracking app. Which is mostly useable but still in development. Used nitrogen which I found to be a really good web framework for dynamic applications.

</comment><comment><USER35> Mostly toy projects, many of them still in development.

A little homemade web framework. A blog compiler to generate a static site. A one-on-one chat client to be integrated with other already existing websites, a browser-based version of the Apples to Apples game, a brainfuck interpreter, maze solver, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> We have an erlang cluster that runs all our services @ <http://thecadmus.com>

High number of processes distributed across multiple nodes with supervisor trees taking care of them all has worked well for us.

</comment><comment><USER37> \- a key-value stored modeled caching system that can run functions during set/get, have expiry, counters, counters that wait for N as a buffer before running transactions, and machine learning - all as primitives. the tail- recursive processes acting as mini-servers holding state and the best thing is that you have a mini-automatic scaling if you combine this well with expiring of processes. increase load when there's a need. they die when there's no more need/lesser traffic.

\- a distributer crawler that works with python. from a typical rdbms approach that brought down creating inverted index's from more than an hour to few seconds. the euroka moment was when we stopped porting/writing for another language, sequentially, for-loop style approach to a more - processes and message passing. big 'why didnt i do this moment' a few years ago!

\- a website , dashboard for the ad/content network using yaws on the LYME stack

\- and btw - all that rumour about unicode is just bs. actually it was a blessing for us that content aka strings are just integers which when converted to binaries not only takes less space, pattern matches like a dream but all of a sudden your sytem can handle any language because to it - it's all just integers, english or swahili. that was a huge bonus even when getting investors, new untapped market opp's.

\- an ad network, ( content network i guess without saying)

\- a fire-and-froget thumbnail/screenshot system with queues & talking to imagemagick . i love writing and fire-and-forget tools, and with erlang, its so darn easy to write proceses's that have a life of their own. sure at some point you need to compromise on erlang's unique ability to handle RAM vs giving that up to research on how to handle large mnesia tables ( mnesia = inbuild db that has a limit on size of tables) . but it's worth the tradeoff.

case in point - our idea of scaling was...'reducing nodes' ie increasing efficiency

-2008 a million hovers in the year, 4 nodes

-2009 a million hovers every month, 3 nodes

-2010 a million hovers every week, 2 nodes i could bring it down to 1 node for doing the tasks as well, on just one 1 8gb RAM node.

the idea of reducing your costs, means that much lesser to profitability. ( we're now profitable, pretty much on auto-pilot on the backend, the 3-4 member team concentrating on increasing toplines,sales now )

in addition... \- a wrapper to iui for nitrogen framework for building iphone webapps easily \- wrappers to tokyocabinet ive contributed to called medici \- remember writing wrappers to other things like rrd, aws utils, etc

all of the above have been used at hover.in, more at <http://slideshare.net/bosky101>

there's nothing i can think of that i wont/cant do in erlang anymore.

~B @hoverin

<comment><USER38> Let me guess, all this over engineering nonsense set your startup back 3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> OpenPoker</comment>


Show HN: Convert HTML to markdown with python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gaojiuli/tomd/ <comment><USER2> You should use HTML.parser and focus on the conversion to markdown. The way you parse HTML in the convert function is very inefficient and can easily produce incorrect results with valid HTML (e.g.
stuff">some text
 )

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this is "Show HN", what is the motivation _you_ have for doing this? There's no motivation or background in the linked README.

<comment><AUTHOR> When crawling online articles such as news, blogs, etc. I want to save them in markdown files but not databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't it make sense to escape markdown syntax in the HTML? In HTML which you're converting from. __* has not special meaning.

 __foo __

<comment><AUTHOR> Tomd has the ability of converting the HTML that converted from markdown. If a HTML can't be described by markdown, tomd can't convert it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is it better than [https://alir3z4.github.io/html2text/](https://alir3z4.github.io/html2text/) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe the number of lines of code is less. And the logic of tomd is easier to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see projects that convert HTML to markdown. Projects to convert in the other direction (md to html) are far more common. Parsing HTML is tough

<comment><USER7> I completely agree. I had made something similar in lua and it was very fun and I found many md to html converters, but not the other way around. HTML parsing is what made me 'pause' development on that tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pandoc may be of interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tomd is a python tool. Pandoc is a haskell tool.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Though pandoc handles more formats and doesn't parse HTML using regex. And it supports more features.

In general the language something is written in isn't necessarily a benefit by itself. Is there a reason why you prefer Python when there already exists another tool written in another language?

<comment><AUTHOR> When crawling online articles such as news, blogs, etc. I want to save them in markdown files but not databases. For instance, I can download my wordpress blogs as markdown files with requests and tomd in a single python script without configering another language environment.

<comment><USER8> You don't need a Haskell interpreter, it's shipped as a compiled CLI by most good package managers. There are also Python wrappers. Regardless, I'm very glad your tool is working, it looks cool.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube is down - <AUTHOR> 500 Internal Server Error Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten them):

    APkpgMVpqEhgHzV8DLHFQ-qFbj7D1TQOS7DuFs8CPpzx5BlGuyfVF37s

    [....]

    8xxa9sXGmxRVFO-auwK3tGfRsDepspi1N0HNNrMtf0k_8VI3S0YXQlRp
 <comment><USER2> not something you see very often.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's back up now. It's still weird to see a 500 error on a Google Property.

<comment><USER4> Think this is the second time in +10 years I've seen youtube be like this

<comment><USER3> I've seen a few 500 errors with Google properties were recent. They were both in the past 2 weeks. YouTube, today. Gmail about a week ago while setting up a new account, I got a 500 error while trying to sign into the account.

Many years ago I ran into a couple errors involved with Google Search. I think one of them was an Unprocessable Entity and the rest were 500 errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> yeah, pretty down [https://i.imgur.com/CfhzHU0.png](https://i.imgur.com/CfhzHU0.png)

EDIT: and it is back up

</comment><comment><USER5> Now it's back online!</comment>


Literacy is Obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/07/15/coding-modern-literacy/ <comment><USER2> In non-English-speaking countries, the English language is the new "literacy" (the knowledge that is essential to success in life). Even for IT jobs, the biggest barrier for new entrants is not the actual coding skills, but the English language requirement. Coding skills are easier and quicker to obtain than fluency in English.</comment>


There Are over 4M Public Jupyter Notebooks on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://kyso.io/KyleOS/nbestimate <comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering how the number of R Notebooks would compare, now and for the forecasted numbers. Thinking I'll do that next.</comment>


Ask HN: How does this man have access to every DNS query worldwide? - <AUTHOR> In the article linked below, a man named "Max" is reputed to be able to view worldwide DNS requests in realtime. How is this possible?
 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign <comment><AUTHOR> And while I'm at it, how can he tell when an email is sent from the domain he's watching? That wouldn't be possible just from being able to see DNS traffic, would it?</comment>


Performance and Opportunities of HTTP 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.heavybit.com/library/developer-technical/video/2013-08-27-ilya-grigorik

<comment><USER2> So Google _says_ that pipelining is bad, but they never compared to it in any of their published results. One of their results for mobile didn't even include TCP connection setup for SPDY but did for HTTP (I suppose their SPDY implementation kept the connection open to their test server). Google says bad proxies and routers break pipelining, except if you can use SSL to bypass these things for SPDY then this is a solution for pipelining as well.

Meanwhile Microsoft published data showing pipelining to be basically the same speed as SPDY, and one of Google's pages (maps IIRC) loaded much slower with SPDY then plain HTTP because of a priority inversion, so priority codes had to be embedded in the site content.

So there's this much more complicated single connection, with priorities and "TCP-over-TCP" and dubious performance benefits. Why? I wonder how long Google will allow each request to come from a different connection. That seems to be where they are headed with this.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. I'm still not sold either.

To add to your examples, _Google claims_ resource sharding is bad and complex and "hacky", and criticize this for possibly breaking client-side caching and invalidating HTTP proxy support.

Then they move on to show how "wonderful" server-push is with the example of a request for index.html also _pushing_ index.js and index.css, two files almost guaranteed to be cached more than 99% of the time. As if that doesn't break caching.

So you have a possibly hacky thing you _may_ do which _may_ break something, which is bad. And then you have a new protocol feature causing the exact same problem. And that is good. Hey Google: Make up your mind, already!

Yeah. Not sold at all. HTTP 2.0 is a terrible protocol, and not because it doesn't do enough, but because it does too much. It attempts to solve problems not belonging to the application layer.

HTTP 1.x was a nice, simple, stateless text-mode protocol. This thing is a terrible, state-full, impossible-to-debug Rube Goldberg machine and has nothing in common with that simple and nice protocol whose name it attempts to piggyback on.

<comment><USER4> Google seems to dislike sharding because its an end run around CWND and congestion control. In an uncongested network sharding works great. Once it starts to become congested sharding works against you. The priority system and single persistent TCP connection is there to make it suck the least for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a very well done presentation/website. More venues should think about this.

<comment><USER6> Shame about the huge banner at the top of the page that stays there as you scroll. Website designers that purposefully waste my screen space, please get a different job!

<comment><USER7> Hey there. Tim from Heavybit. I wanna make sure you're having the best experience possible. Can get me some more info on the banner? It might be the video of Ilya's talk.

<comment><USER8> When the video can't be played (I don't have Flash on my machine) it'd be better to remove the banner altogether:

[http://i.imgur.com/A27FPZN.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/A27FPZN.jpg)

<comment><USER7> Gotcha. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just posted the slideshare for this here: [http://www.slideshare.net/heavybit/heavybit-presents-ilya- gr...](http://www.slideshare.net/heavybit/heavybit-presents-ilya-grigorik-on)

</comment><comment><USER10> Security was not even mentioned. Really? Was it that long ago?</comment>


Modern Doctors' House Calls: Skype Chat and Fast Diagnosis - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/health/modern-doctors-house-calls-skype-chat-and-fast-diagnosis.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

<comment><USER2> I'm curious: the folks reading HN are obviously pretty comfortable with technology, but I get the impression from the comments that almost everyone has heard about telemedicine, but virtually no-one actually uses it.

For those who have not used telemedicine services, why is that? Couldn't find one? Preference for an in-person visit? Concern about the accuracy of the diagnosis? If you have used a telemedicine service, how did you find the experience and would you do it again?

[Full Disclojure :) I'm a physician currently working on umedoc.com, one of thousands of telemedicine startups...]

<comment><USER3> I've used a telemedicine service: FaceTime with my grandmother who is a nurse.

But to more seriously answer your question, I really just haven't known about actual services that I could use. Also, how does it work with health insurance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meta-comment: it is gratifying that this article legitimately covers the relevant pros and cons (including the unexpected one that it may raise medical costs).

These days (and maybe perhaps for a long time) article either cover only one side or have pseudo-balance (e.g. quoting anti-vaxxers as legitimate)

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely seems like the future. Meadow (YC W15) is doing Skype evaluations for renewing medical marijuana prescriptions: [https://getmeadow.com/md- renewal](https://getmeadow.com/md-renewal)

Not sure whether they're only doing renewals because of legal regulations or to limit actual fraud.

</comment><comment><USER6> As much as I'd like to see something like this be the future, sadly Skype is not HIPAA compliant.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a founder of a tele-health technology company, and I can say from my vantage point that this type of service is the future. We are just waiting for the payers, both private and government, to catch up, as well as appropriate legislation to be changed/enacted.

<comment><USER8> Honestly-not-being-snarky question: how long do you give it until insurance companies start erecting barriers (e.g. preauthorization) to in-person visits?

<comment><USER9> Or hire providers themselves and own the vertical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't do your medical consultations over insecure channels.

<comment><USER11> Of course, I'd like to see secure communications be the norm. So I'm not saying you're wrong. I am just saying that I'm not worried too much about this.

Let's look at the secure channels when I visit the clinic.

Like the secure channel at the office where I physically go in and the doctor discusses medical stuff with me and the door wide open? Or where even when the door is closed I can hear his consultation with the people in the next room? That's gotta be some violation.

Or the secure channel where the receptionist uses a 25 year old computer system to enter my SSN and scan my insurance card? A credit card number is worth next to nothing. A medical ID number is worth a lot more. And considering all the break-ins recently...

Or the secure channel where I hear all sorts of things as a visitor at a hospital? They'd openly discuss my mom's cancer treatments in the hallway where everyone could hear.

Or the secure channel where I have to provide a doctor's note to my supervisor because otherwise it's unexcused. And now HR knows I was at the doctor. And if I have lots of excuses, I might lose my job. Not the kind of security you're talking about, but it's a different kind of security. :)

Secure channel or not, if someone wants to get information on me, they're gonna.

Actually, I'm now quite depressed and I think I want to have a quick nap. :(</comment></comment>


Programming Poems - <AUTHOR> http://johesp30.freehostia.com/poems.html <comment><USER2> They are good, but not as good IMHO, as these programming haikus [0]

      A file that big?
      It might be very useful.
      But now it is gone.

      You step in the stream,
      but the water has moved on.
      This page is not here.

And several others

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/error- haiku.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/error-haiku.html)

<comment><USER3> This seems to apply to the site right now[1]:

        Stay the patient course
          Of little worth is your ire
          The server is down

Wayback machine snapshot[2]. They seem to mostly (completely? I didn't check them all) be drawn from the NetPositive error haikus[3]

[1] [http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/gnu.org.html](http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/gnu.org.html)

[2] [http://web.archive.org/web/20180108182544/https://www.gnu.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180108182544/https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/error- haiku.html)

[3] [http://8325.org/haiku/](http://8325.org/haiku/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A Programmers Lament

King of sorrow, Prince of bits

do make this a server hits

WHILE TRUE AND FALSE OR ELSE IF NOT

loops will break and . comms .

Much fading of the Blinken lit

</comment><comment><USER5> See the golemn, walk and talk, for to the perchment, spark and life was given, see the slave, stumble and fall, who once was bright and driven.</comment>


Tesla Powerwalls and Solar Panels Sent to Puerto Rico - <AUTHOR> https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/01/tesla-powerwalls-solar-panels-sent-puerto-rico/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Bloomberg reports that Tesla is sending hundreds of its Powerwall battery systems to be paired with solar panels. The joint systems will help the battered island territory restore electric power."

At least people won't have to wait for the PR electric grid, both the transmission and distribution systems, to be rebuilt. This should have a definite positive impact and hopefully save some lives.

</comment><comment><USER2> I know this is pretty much a silly thing to be saying & just wishful thinking on my part, but...

Many places like large swaths of Africa and Asia skipped building much of the traditional landlines and went straight to cell phones.

With so much of the electric grid literally wiped out, wouldn't it be cool to see them rebuild in a more future-looking fashion with many of the ideas around solar & community batteries, rather than a traditional grid?

As I said, I know that's not terribly realistic...unless Elon wanted to have a laboratory and made some big donations to prove a point. It is the kind of thing he is known for, for reasons different than most people realize (unless you read that fascinating article about him from last year).

Interesting to discuss, anyway, so go for it.

<comment><USER3> A big problem is that the island is already under a large debt load and doesn't have a lot of financial tools that municipalities would normally use to get out from under debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The lack of mosquito nets is getting bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> I presume they will be working with some officials to put these in to some key infrastructure, not handing them out to people who literally have nothing. So who gets them first and is there a key quantity needed to restore power to some sector of society?

I think the trick is for people in areas hit by climate change to put these things in before rather than after the catastrophe, hopefully Peurto Rico can be better prepared for the next one. Powerwalls might become a key part of disaster recovery, if not the most important part.

<comment><USER6> > I presume they will be working with some officials to put these in to some > key infrastructure, not handing them out to people who literally have > nothing

You don't need to presume, it's stated in the article:

The company has employees on the ground to install them and is working with local organizations to identify locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wonderful. Very supportive.

Would love an answer on timeline when I placed my $ down months ago for my new roof... before you say I am an asshole...

I really am happy that they are doing this. I am big fan of Mr. Musk. and all of his vision and forward thinking. The idea that the human race has someone that has read The Culture and had the brains, money and ambition to try to sort for that helps give me faith that my children might have a good future. However would love to hear a bit more status updates from them for those that sign up and write checks. More communications would be rock star. The fact they did this came from HN and not feom Tesla saying hey guys... heck I would write a check for more if they setup a charity to help here.

<comment><USER8> Keep in mind that the energy storage products are built in Reno, NV and the solar tiles are produced in their Buffalo, NY solar gigafactory.

Tesla still sells regular ol' solar panels, which is likely the product being deployed to Puerto Rico (not the tiles).</comment></comment>


Firefox OS Typeface — mozilla.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/products/firefox-os/typeface/ <comment><USER2> The character selection is still lacking a bit (Ubuntu Regular has about twice the amount of characters), but otherwise it's looking good.</comment>