Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target - <AUTHOR> https://www.thisisinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-reworking-thousands-of-cars-2018-8 <comment><USER2> Why was this flagged?

This has been a big issue in auto manufacturing for decades. At one time, the Detroit automakers ran "dealer preparation centers" to finish what the production line hadn't done. Toyota's big innovation was figuring out how to get it right the first time, which got costs down and quality up. In a Toyota plant, if you have to stop the line for 10 seconds to get it right, a worker can do that. Videos of Toyota plants show a cycle time display and a vehicles per hour display over the line. It's expected that a car will take an extra few seconds every once in a while.

<comment><USER3> _At one time, the Detroit automakers ran "dealer preparation centers" to finish what the production line hadn't done._

Is that the "dealer prep" line that always seems to appear as a non-optional line item in the price of a new car?

<comment><USER4> No. The "dealer prep" you're referring to is literally taking just taking the plastic wrap off the car.

He's talking about fixing production errors, like panels being stuck on wrong[0], or window gaskets being misinstalled[3].

As a side note, this is the first time I've heard anyone defend the lemons coming out of Detroit in the 70s. It was so bad, that my dad would check the VINs, so that he would never buy a car that was built on a Monday or Friday, because it was too likely that the workers were either drunk or hungover.[1][2][4] And this is when he was in the UAW as mechanic and then a body man.

I thought these production issues might be overblown, so I checked the deck lids on three 3s in the parking lot at work. All three were misaligned. I didn't expect them to be perfect (it's not laser perfect on my 2010 Jetta either), but I didn't expect to fit my finger through the gaps. All three cars. All three in different places. That killed it for me. I will never buy a Tesla 3.

[0] [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/body-panel-gap- and-a...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/body-panel-gap-and- alignment-issues.12255/)

[1] [https://jalopnik.com/the-ten-worst-car-factories-in- history-...](https://jalopnik.com/the-ten-worst-car-factories-in- history-1595864932)

[2] [https://jalopnik.com/5645880/auto-workers-drinking- getting-h...](https://jalopnik.com/5645880/auto-workers-drinking-getting-high- during-lunch)

[3] [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/unfinished-metal- and...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/unfinished-metal-and-glue- seen-around-front-windshield-normal.107230/)

[4] [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/transcript](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/transcript)

<comment><USER5> How do you convert a VIN to the date of manufacture?

<comment><USER6> [https://electrek.co/2017/07/18/tesla-model-3-vin- decoder/](https://electrek.co/2017/07/18/tesla-model-3-vin-decoder/)

EDIT: whoops, missed the context. The above just tells you the model year. But you were replying to someone that implied it could be done down to the day. It can be done down to the month, but in my experience down to the day is rare, if non-existent (none of my vehicle VINs have that resolution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 So what? They talk about it like it is a bad thing.

Their cars work, they met their target, who cares about the details of the manufacturing process? Yes, there is room for improvement, there is always room for improvement, I let the guys at Tesla deal with their priorities.

It is a nice insight on how things are done at Tesla but that's about it.

<comment><USER7> Manufacturing rate is one measure of success. First Pass Yield (FPY - % of cars that don't require rework) is another. It seems like Tesla is sacrificing the latter in service of the former, or at least they were towards the end of Q2. I want to see Tesla succeed, but it seems like they really need to focus on increasing FPY in order to improve their long-term odds of success.

<comment><USER8> _First Pass Yield (FPY - % of cars that don 't require rework) is another_

I get that, but isn't it expected that if you create a new car factory, sort of from scratch, your FPY won't be exceptionally high? Unless you really know what you're doing due to previous experience in car manufacturing?

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't you learn how to properly manufacture a car before trying to release it at scale ?

<comment><USER10> To learn to build it is one thing; you could have a dozen highly trained engineers assemble it at their leisure and have a near perfect car every time. But to build the same car at scale on a production line is going to be an entirely different kettle of fish, with all new lessons to be learnt.

It seems to me that it would be an entertaining albeit high pressure job/problem sorting that out. You would of course try to engineer as much of the solution ahead of time, but in production scenarios, shit most definitely happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems that a lot of people think that car making begins and ends with the production line. The bit you see on TV - 'final assembly' \- is not the whole car making process, it is just the coming together of the many parts that have been assembled elsewhere into bigger parts that then get put together in this 'final assembly'.

Sounds as if Tesla's 'final assembly' is not that final with a little bit of work being picked up in quality control. The spin of the story is that Tesla are cheating their figures by just repairing a few extra cars to get them out the door, but there is probably a happier story than this - at least those defects were not shipped to customers.

It is okay for a new company to take time to re-learn what has gone on before. I jokingly imagine Tesla to be actually catching up to 1970's British Leyland quality control 'circles' with the next step being a relearning of the 'Toyota Way'. It takes time to build a culture of quality control, efficiency and all these good things. The only thing is that soon our friends in China are going to be offering plenty of very nice electric cars to customers who just want electric rather than dinosaur power. Will Tesla be able to compete once China have enough EVs for their own market?

<comment><USER12> >It is okay for a new company to take time to re-learn what has gone on before. I jokingly imagine Tesla to be actually catching up to 1970's British Leyland quality control 'circles' with the next step being a relearning of the 'Toyota Way'.

This would be okay if we actually were living in the 70s right now. The problem is of course that Tesla consumes money (like basically nobody else) and the real Toyota is still around and produces as many cars on a weekend as Tesla does in an entire year.

It's not like people are going to stop buying Toyota cars out of goodwill for Tesla.

> who just want electric rather than dinosaur power.

this too seems to be part of the reality distortion field around Tesla. All big manufacturers already produce hybrid and electric cars, and their research budgets dwarf Tesla, they will be ready in a few years as the market grows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That headline could also be read as "Tesla hit Model 3 target DESPITE reworking thousands of cars". Presumably they've got technicians both doing the rework, and also technicians and engineers working on solving the underlying issues causing the rework. Once the latter is done, they'll have freed up a lot of technicians for other tasks, and making 5000 cars a week will be almost trivial in comparison.

<comment><USER14> Which is good since other manufacturers are making 200,000 or so.

<comment><USER15> It's almost as if scaling an operation > 100% YOY poses different challenges than continuing to run a stable and mature enterprise.

<comment><USER4> Tesla is 15 years old, and operates out the NUMMI plant, that that was building 428,633 cars a year.[0]

Auto manufacturers changes models, every year. They either tweak them, completely redesign them, or launch new models. Ford even changed the entire frame and welding setup when they transitioned from steel to aluminum for the F150. None of them has these problems.

I'm sorry, but Tesla's growing pains should be over. And if they shouldn't be over, when should they? Does it take 20 years to figure out how to mass produce an item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now?

At some point, you've got a man that has no previous experience running a manufacturing plant, repeating the same mistakes the industry made 40 years ago. Including most damningly trying to automate final assembly[1], because he thinks he's being clever.

Let's be honest here. Building a car with zero defects is possible. It's done every day at scale, at every Toyota plant in the world.

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

[1] [https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in- the-...](https://qz.com/1261214/how-exactly-tesla-shot-itself-in-the-foot-by- trying-to-hyper-automate-its-factory/)

<comment><USER16> To be fair, a tesla car has little in common with an "item that has been mass produced by many different companies, from around the world, for about 100 years now". Almost all of the internals are as different as a computer is to a typewriter (please don't argue on the analogy, it's bad but gets the point)

<comment><USER4> If the problems were limited to the drive train, then I might concede the point, but we'd still be talking about 15 years of experience. From what I understand, the batteries aren't blowing up, and electric motors work, so I guess the drive train is fine.

The damning part is that these not the problems that people are talking about. People are reporting not being able to put a piece of metal on straight. We're talking about gluing a rubber gasket on to a piece of glass. _This_ is 100 years old, and this is what they're fucking up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tesla is almost at 6000 Model 3's a week.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla- tracker/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/)

And I believe that they're building almost 2,000 Model X,S cars a week.

At almost 400,000 cars a year, Tesla has got to be doing better than many expected.

Elon seems to be doing fine in this recent interview:

[https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08](https://youtu.be/mr9kK0_7x08)

<comment><USER2> That's not bad for one line. Most auto production final assembly lines make about one car a minute. Tesla Fremont is now running 7 days a week, 2 shifts, and talking about 3 shifts. That's usually considered overdoing it. Few auto plants run more than two shifts, and do maintenance on the third shift and Saturday. More than that, and quality suffers and the workers burn out. 5,000 cars a week per line is about right.

<comment><USER18> Also, running that many shifts is a lot of overtime paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article hasn't described the root cause but Musk had hinted at it in one of the interviews. I think what happened was that when gigafactory started, they had this huge vision of complete end-to-end automated assembly. So there were robots designed for each portions of assembly, including some robots which were supposed to operate in inperfect situations through vision data, for example, locating a dangling hose, grasping it and connecting it within a car. The big learning was that robotic functions that operated in uncertain environment, relied on vision and tried to perform manipulation tasks failed big time to do the job consistently. Musk mentioned that human would pick up a gangling hose and connect to its expected position effortlessly in a second while a robot will fumble around and dig in to car even damaging it. In past few months, I think they have put a lot many more humans at work turning in to more traditional way of assembly, although more automated than other car manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER20> 37 minutes of rework per car doesn't sound like very much. It would be interesting to know what fraction of the total time that is.

<comment><USER7> 37 minutes * 4300 cars = 2,651 hours of work.

<comment><USER21> 2,651 hours/week * $30/hour = ~$80k/week. on a volume of cars that brings in $200m/week. so what? its a minor inefficiency.

<comment><USER22> not really. each rework is the equivalent of a branching prediction failure in a very very long cpu pipeline.

all tasks are massively parallelized in a production line. to reach 5000 car month tesla need to crank a car every seven minutes.

now imagine a production line that pump a car out every seven minutes and you need 37 minutes manual labor for each of them

the inefficence doesn't look so minor. it's also a logisticsl nightmare, just imagine parking all those cars while the rework stations free up.

<comment><USER23> In the time it takes one person to do the 37 minutes of rework you have taken 5 more cars off the line.

So 6 mechanics in 6 bays at the end of the line do the rework jobs and cars continue to flow out of the plant one every 7 minutes.

An extra $20 in COGS per car. Is this really so horrible? What am I missing?

Even if it's 10 mechanics and 10 drivers moving cars into and out of the bays, with some bays idle some of the time and let's call it an extra $60 in COGS.

Their gross margin is already way better than anyone expected to see on the Model 3, they used some very impressive electrical design to save in so many places.

Even just their rear view mirror is more than $50 cheaper than the competition's mirrors because of their smart electrical design. [1]

Right now they need _volume_ more than anything else. Speaking as a reservation holder.

[1] - [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-solidly- profitable-s...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-solidly-profitable- sandy-munro/)

<comment><USER22> > What am I missing?

just on top on my mind tooling, factory space, training, burnout, turns, above average defects that will have to be handled by the post sales network.

> they used some very impressive electrical design

oh yes they are brilliant car, no question about that. it's less impressive when you get an engineering marvel and the build quality is random depending on the hands that worked on it in post processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If this impacts the total time to make each car, wouldn't that impact your production volume? It seems weird that something that should make you slower is what allows you to hit your target? Unless they're saying the target doesn't take this into account -- which would just seem stupid.

<comment><USER25> Rework can happen in parallel with production, so it won't necessarily affect your rate.

<comment><USER26> It definitely affects labor productivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure why this would be flagged. Seems like an article of general interest.

<comment><USER28> I'd imagine the large contingent of hyper-pro-Tesla people who argue virulently against an any thing that makes Tesla/Elon look bad.

He's turned into an almost political topic in that way, unfortunately.

<comment><USER29> I sit in neither camp but I see almost as many anti-Tesla commenters, too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't stop myself thinking that this looks like short seller's propaganda. Producing a new car require adjustments in the process. This info tells me the feedback loop is in full swing to enhance production quality. I fully understand why Elon Musk wants to make Tesla a private company again.

Short seller's activity is toxic for the US industry. Allowing to make profit on other peoples failure is a good recipe to pull down an economy. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER31> I think you're being a bit too sensitive. I agree with you - building a whole new production line, and Tesla's share holders understand that too. This is just more information for those shareholders. It's important that there's accurate information about Tesla's manufacturing process for the market to correctly value the stock. It's no more objectionable for short sellers to emphasise bad news to drive the stock down than it is for Tesla to emphasise good news to drive it up.

<comment><USER30> Ideally, information should be objective. The efforts and pressures should go toward this goal.

What you say, if I understood correctly, is that it is normal to have disinformation news and that they will cancel themselves out. Unfortunately, information doesn't add up like numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >14% of the vehicles made didn't need rework [...]

>The most common reason Model 3 cars require rework is a "failed manual task," followed by cosmetic issues

Given how entirely ad-hoc their entire production line still is, and how the car doesn't seem to be designed for easy assembly at all, this is unsurprising. But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control.

<comment><USER33> > But at least they don't seem to skimp on quality control.

I don't think this is true (remember, reworking only addresses the problems you can see).

Last weekend I rented somebody's Model 3 on Turo to see what it was like, and while I enjoyed it, the QC problems are real. The touchscreen crashed twice, and the cupholder in the center spar doesn't close unless you push it very slowly. This is in a $60,000 car! Things like that don't inspire confidence in long-term reliability and I definitely won't be spending my own money on a Model 3 until I see some assurance that they are overhauling their QC in a big way.

<comment> semi-extrinsic > The touchscreen crashed twice

In this case, do you lose the speedometer etc while it resets? Does it reset automatically or do you have to press something? Genuinely curious.

Edit: this will become the go-to excuse for speeding in the future - "I'm sorry officer, I don't know how fast I was going, the speedometer had crashed and needed to reboot".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is Insider an especially important source? Why is the title editorialized to include it?

<comment><USER35> It wasn't; it was part of the HTML doc title. Most publications do this. We take those bits out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> With this company so shorted how are we supposed to tell the difference between actual news and a hit piece?

<comment><USER37> Read the article and then use your noggin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is great. Mr Musk is a perfectionist, like Japanese are. He is not selling bad finished cars(like other companies will do).

They are also using lots of automation. This means there are lots of problems at first. With automation, once you solve a problem, it is solved forever.

How you could compare Tesla rework with other companies rework, where the threshold that determines if a car needs reworking is decided by the executives of the same companies?

I could make rework zero just selling broken cars. I bought a European car with a problem in one valve of the engine when it was brand new. I told the dealers about the strange sound, they told me it was normal. It was not and gave me lots of headaches later.

<comment><USER39> Most other companies would fire a factory manager if even a fraction of the cars produced at the factory required rework of any kind, let alone the majority of the cars requiring 37 minutes of rework.

Take your Eurocar example, and then multiply that by multiple systems. And then apply that to almost every purchaser of the vehicle. And now you understand Tesla's problem. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Musk's "perfectionism" is interfering with the actual production and quality control of the vehicles and resulting in vehicles that are very far from perfect....when they easily could be, if he were to let the professionals run the company.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: heroku-like service for static websites? - <AUTHOR>

I'm constantly building new static sites, deployed using github pages (not enough control over my sites, goes down easily) and s3 (pain in the ass generally). I now need a better option because everything i find is FTP deploy which is lame. I want git or some other cross platform cli & gui way to deploy. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> We're building a backend using Docker that can do just that. It's called octohost and there's lots of information available here: [http://www.octohost.io/](http://www.octohost.io/)

We have a static template that you can see here: [https://github.com/octohost/html](https://github.com/octohost/html)

You can also use all sorts of other languages/frameworks - a full list is here: [http://www.octohost.io/languages](http://www.octohost.io/languages)

Deploys use git.

</comment><comment><USER3> We're building [http://www.divshot.io/](http://www.divshot.io/) to be exactly this. Currently in private beta and will be launching soon (in fact, anyone who sees this just shoot us an email and we'll let you in).

CDN-accelerated, automatic development and staging environments for every app, SSL support...take a look!

<comment><USER4> Wait, so just to be clear, divshot.com is the editor, and the divshot.io part is kind of a PaaS for static sites? Seems pretty exciting for front-end development :)

<comment><USER3> Yup, you got it. Sorry it took me a bit to see this post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can use heroku to host static website. Although it's a hack, but very simple and should not be a problem.

[http://www.lemiffe.com/how-to-deploy-a-static-page-to- heroku...](http://www.lemiffe.com/how-to-deploy-a-static-page-to-heroku-the- easy-way/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Use a single-dino Heroku to receive the latest push and have the dino deploy the appropriate folders to S3 for you?

I don't know of an existing way to do that but it would be a negligible amount of code + amazon sdk in most languages.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://harp.io](http://harp.io) (@HarpPlatform) powered by [http://harps.com](http://harps.com) (@HarpWebServer). A "Zero configuration publishing platform."

<comment><USER4> [http://HarpJS.com](http://HarpJS.com) is the URL, not harps.com :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is FTP lame? It works. Just select your folder, FTP it, go get some coffee, and wa-la, it's up!

</comment><comment><USER9> bitballoon.com is your best bet! Deploys are via Git and every commit is there, so you can revert to a previous state if u mess up. Plus if u dnt like git, deploy via uploading a zip of the site.

<comment><USER2> This is pretty awesome. Never heard of them until today - looks interesting.</comment></comment>


Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can Be Dangerously Useful - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-proves-that-piracy-can-be-dangerously-useful-180804/ <comment><USER2> I wish I had Sci-Hub as a teenager. Many times I was interested in some algorithm, but got presented with Elsevier's "you shall not pass" page. Very frustrating to know the knowledge exists but being unable to access it with no recourse.

For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field.

But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.

<comment><USER3> When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely?

I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.

<comment><USER4> I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power.

If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.

<comment><USER5> I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation take a lot of time.

We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research, or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits pocketed by side actors?

> If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in > the first place.

I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety nets?

<comment><USER6> In my mind, it boils down to an extremely simple question - if money didn't exist, and you didn't have to work to stay alive, would people do job x or job y?

The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and fridges, etc.

In a society like this, things might move a little more slowly (probably we wouldn't have the airline or public Transit systems we have now), but things would absolutely still get done.

<comment><USER5> > The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, > personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and > fridges, etc.

Volunteers and especially personal projects really strike me as activities one undertakes when they have secondary means of survival and/or safety nets. The latter is commonly mentioned as problematic in terms of requiring GitHubs from job applicants.

The existence of these people is not sufficient, we also have to prove that these people are not distributed in some highly biased way, which I suspect, they are. There could be a lot of consequence to such biases. For instance, software developers creating software that blind people can't use.

<comment><USER7> I've done personal projects precisely because I don't have another safety net.

Posting my projects here on Hacker News gets attention, which might possibly lead to a job offer. (In practice this doesn't work all the time, but it's been more successful in the past than trying to cold-email HR departments). I think personal projects show my interests and skills better than interviews.

On that note, I am looking for work, and I'll do your (2 month) project for free just to get a reference letter. The 2 month limit is because I'll be out of cash by then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists > that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published > papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by > Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.

Damn, I am _impressed_!

<comment><USER9> And a screenshot of some of the search results on science direct, beautiful. Plus I'm imagining the blog writers grinning with glee when they were provided/discovered this.

<comment><USER10> The sad part is that the linked sci-hub domain name has been shut down, so those are now dead links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> God bless scihub!

Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it _uses open standards_ (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:

        wget --recursive --span-hosts --no-directories --accept '*.pdf' --quiet \
            --execute robots=off https://sci-hub.tw/$DOI

And instantly get a local copy of the .pdf. It's a hacker's dream!

<comment><USER6> What's the $doi bit?

<comment><USER12> A variable representing the DOI of the resource in question, fill it in with whatever you're searching for (the DOI of a paper, for instance).

<comment><USER13> beat me to it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects.

This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?

<comment><USER16> > Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this > out?

The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it.

And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.

<comment><USER17> CS may be the faster growing field in the arXiv over the last decade but it was relatively late to the party. [https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index](https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have so much that I want to say about this - but beyond all the politics and moneyed/tenured interests holding back change, I can see that Jupyter notebooks are the disruptive innovation that will force publishing to modernize. People I work with are producing notebooks that fuse text, formatted equations, code, and interactive figures in a way that looks and feels like a top-quality paper. Except with this paper, you can reveal the code that produced each figure, probe and alter the analysis methods directly, and download the raw data behind the figures (it's an attribute of the plot object! Imagine that!). This format will win. It's too useful and solves too many problems not to win. The only question is whether academicians have the foresight to build in a decentralized DARE I SAY blockchain/smart-contract- based peer review system to circumvent the rent seeking publishers.

<comment><USER19> Err do you mind explaining what the blockchain has to do with this?

<comment><USER20> This is the perfect application for Blochcian

* Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian.

* Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code.

* The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the reply!

I'm not sure I fully understand (or buy into) Blockchain, so forgive me for probing further on this, but: I'm still not sure how blockchain is helping here? Can't you get the same results by just publicly publishing the articles with an open license? That's kind of how things work right now in open-access journals (or with something like StackOverflow, for that matter) and it works fine, what is blockchain adding here? There are tons of copies of StackOverflow's data running around in mirrors, they are (or it's easy to do) hashed for a crypto signature, so you can't just change their text on people. No one can ask money for the answers because they are licenses CC.

So what is Blockchain adding to this? As I understand it, what blockchain provides is most importantly an incentive mechanism, to make people actually donate the PC time to store things (iiuc), but it seems to work fine in popular cases without having the incentive mechanism (e.g. StackOverflow), and I'm guessing if it isn't popular, then just cause it's on a blockchain doesn't change anything and no one will bother storing it?

But again, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about, so I'd be more than happy to be corrected.

<comment><USER20> In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for maximum rewards. The more reputed a platform becomes the more power does it have. So it's totally upto the people who runs the journal to change the rules one day if they decided to make more money. They can easily change the license of the new papers that are waiting for review and the authors would still have to publish in the journal because of it's reputation. They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors that they don't like. On the other hand this can't be done for an application for example running in Ethereum. Once a smart contracts is deployed there is no way to modify it.

The other argument is modifying the text. I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has been modified or not.

StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the incentive mechanism. Also none of the users gets a portion of the money that they helped them to make. I am not sure whether this is the greatest example. One can easily write a smart contract that will facilitate the transfer of money from writers to reviewers without the need of any central server. The amount of money the reviewer gets would be a function of their reputation. So it would be in the best interest of the reviewer to produce high quality work and high quality reviews. A far as the storage is concerned one can make use of Ethereum or a general purpose blockchain for building this. You would have to pay for the storage(reviews, ratings etc) only once and the nodes in the network would make sure that its their for ever. The research papers can be stored in IPFS due to their large size. The files can be seeded by anyone. If the research paper is popular it would be always available. If it is not popular the author or the university can still seed it as its in their best interest. I don't think it matters much where the PDF file is stored. It can be in a central server run by University as well. So this is not a big issue.

Does that makes any sense? Feel free to correct me as well :)

<comment><USER19> Ok, your last paragraph is the most interesting, because it makes me think that I'm not sure how exactly you imagine this working, and maybe I'm missing important details. I'd love you to explain a bit further how this will work - who is paying whom exactly, etc, to make sure we're on the same page.

That said, let me address some of your points: > In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for maximum rewards [...] They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors that they don't like [...]

I agree with all of this, and would love for the system to change. But this is basically orthogonal to the blockchain - it only requires everyone to decide to give more prestige to whatever new entity replaces it, whether it runs on the blockchain or not. Furthermore, the blockchain does _not_ fix any of the incentive problems by itself (again, unless you imagine something I'm missing here). Specifically, even if everything moves to the blockchain, if it ever loses prestige, then people won't want to publish there anymore, and we're back to square one. And the existence of new, open-access journals (and things like Arxiv) prove that you don't need the blockchain to solve this problem - it's completely an incentives/economic/etc problem, and the tech here is incidental.

> I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow > doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments > or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going > to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has > been modified or not.

Well, yes, but the average user isn't going to be downloading the entire blockchain, or running algs to make sure nothing was modified, either. But in fact you _can_ find dumps of the Stack Overflow data, and they're probably hashed, so _someone_ could always prove what was the original content, even if the "central entity" here (Stack Overflow itself) decides to one day try to censor something.

> StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the > incentive mechanism.

Not, really? I mean, sure, they store things, but in terms of money, they make money by selling advertising, job listings, etc.

As I said before, the other stuff you wrote is a lot more interesting, but I'm not sure I'm getting it - who is paying money here, or another way to say it, how is money getting into the system? Right now, publishers make money, and afaik, the reviewers and the contributors mostly don't. I'd love to fix that too, but, how does the blockchain help to do that? And specifically, what does it do that I can't replace by building the equivalent of a Stack Overflow for publishing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)

<comment><USER22> how does citeseerx compare to arxiv? Are they just different networks (PSU/Cornell) that function independently or do they index the same content?

<comment><USER23> They are very different beasts. Arxiv (and most pre-print repos) accept submissions (with filters, like requiring academic affiliation or vouching, and requiring reasonably-formatted metadata), have a moderator do a skim-level review of the work, and then post it. CiteseerX is an automated crawler, like Google Scholar, which finds PDFs on author homepages and extracts metadata from the PDF. There is no human review or cleanup process, and there can be a long delay before content gets discovered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a non-academic who is interested in reading academic articles (and doing personal research), sci-hub is a blessing for those of us without university affiliation and access.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sci-Hub is so much more convenient than attempting to find things in my university's library system. There are browser plugins that let you click on DOI links, taking you directly to a pdf of the relevant paper.

For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.

<comment><USER26> Can you share the browser plugin that you use? I've noticed Google has been removing many of the Sci-Hub related plugins from the Chrome store.

<comment><USER25> Mozilla too apparently. I just checked and the one I'm using —"Sci-Hub Links"—is no longer listed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Government grants should come with open access strings (un)attached.

<comment><USER28> Why should taxpayers be funding the massive profits of Elsevier and others?

<comment><USER29> Yes, that's the point, right?

<comment><USER27> That is the point. Currently lots of research is taxpayer funded, and then published in closed journals where the people who paid to create it have to pay to read it. Elsevier are the only winner.

Taxpayer funded research should be open access, and this could be stipulated in the grant itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For anyone interested in getting to the relevant paper in Sci-Hub in one click, there is the Sci-Hubify bookmarklet:

[https://bookmarkify.it/9864](https://bookmarkify.it/9864)

</comment><comment><USER31> Worked at a university dealing with this some years ago, the publishing companies blocked our IPs on regular basis because they had detected "hacked student accounts" Then we had to block them and swear they changed password before they unblocked us. They said that it was Chinese phising emails that tricked students to give up their password. If you dont know, a couple of years ago almost everyone accessed the publishers sites thought revese proxies at the school, so sci hub collected accounts and proxied you thought them, dont know if its still the case. We used this software called ezproxy, Think it was pretty common.

Also pretty sure many students gave away their passwords freely, based on that nobody seemed that surprised/worried when we said their accounts was compromised.

</comment><comment><USER32> FYI, this post is kept up to date with the latest scihub links: [https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers- scienti...](https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific- articles-free-scihub/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I work at a University and frequently need to read papers. I can only access the manuscripts on campus or through a VNP. That is way too much hassle, which is why I love Sci-hub. Sci-hub makes it easier to access the manuscripts than the providers themselves.

</comment><comment><USER34> it's barely piracy when you are pirating publicly-funded material that should be free in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why are the authors of the papers giving rights to Elsevier? If the papers are being peer reviewed for free, why doesn't SciHub corral the reviewers and allow authors publish directly to SciHub.

Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those published by any named journal.

<comment><USER36> It's unfortunately detrimental to one's academic career to not publish in the most "prestigious" journal one can. This results in researchers publishing in closed journals either to try and maintain their own careers or due to pressure from their department as a way of looking more attractive in grant applications.

Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing career/department suicide by allowing this to happen.

Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from the trenches until this situation changes.

<comment><USER37> I really don't want to insult anyone with this comment, but after hearing about how shitty academics are treated during their entire career (phd, postdoc, faculty, publishing), including the low pay, politics, and giving away the rights to their work, they seem like one of the most manipulated and least self-confident demographics in the global workforce.

<comment><USER38> >but after hearing about how shitty academics are treated during their entire career (phd, postdoc, faculty, publishing), including the low pay, politics, and giving away the rights to their work, they seem like one of the most manipulated and least self-confident demographics in the global workforce.

I'll both agree and disagree. Starting with disagree:

A lot of these problems arose mostly in the last 20 years, and is somewhat dependent on the discipline. To give you an idea, someone getting an engineering PhD with, say, 3-5 papers published in peer reviewed (but average) journals had a good chance of getting a tenure track job as late as, say, 2005 - without doing any postdocs - no concerns about impact factors, etc. Most advisors were not slave drivers. Now if you switch to something like biology or physics, then it was much less likely and you needed a post doc. Still, if you went back another 20 years, you'd likely get a tenure track job straight out of a physics PhD.

For publishing, most academics never cared until the last 10 years or so. The cost of journals to universities did not explode until some point in the 2000's - so even less prestigious universities would subscribe to most journals an academic needed.

Once you got through tenure, it's hard to describe how you're treated as "shitty". You choose your hours. You choose if you want to get paid for summer or not. You choose what you want to work on. The pay is low, but it somewhat tracks that of industry (i.e. engineering professors still get paid more than humanities, etc). Having all that freedom _should_ cost you in terms of pay. And just like in the real world, you can always get paid more if you do pretty good work in things that _others_ care about (i.e. sacrifice your freedom somewhat).

Where I agree with you: In my experience, _any_ group that insulates itself from the outside and uses only in-group metrics will eventually reach the stage they are in. If only they get to decide what makes one academic better than another, then you will get pettiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What is the best way for me to access Sci-hub? Does it cycle through domains? If so, what is the best way for me to access the most up to date URL. Is there a UNIX command line method for doing this?

<comment><USER40> Bookmark [https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go](https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What would be the best way to help sci-hub anonymously if one wishes to do so?

</comment><comment><USER42> How can I mirror all their pdf?

<comment><USER43> Look at the libgen torrents - I'm not sure it's a complete copy, but it's massive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> R.IP. Aaron Schwartz

</comment><comment><USER45> > dangerously useful

Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I would say the real danger is third party using other people's research to pocket billions and denying legitimate access of the research to millions and billions of people. That's extremely dangerous.

<comment><USER46> > Ah yes danger to the profit motive.

I see no problem in a profit motive. I see the problem that countries enforce censorship via violence (I am talking about copyright laws).

<comment><USER47> All countries do that, even ones that do not observe copyright (NK does not observe domestically but enforces foreign copyrights, Micronesia has an IP regime stricter than copyright).</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Visa USA - <AUTHOR> I'm in a rather odd situation myself when it comes to attaining Visa's. I have qualifications in my work field but I do not have a Bachelors degree. I recently moved to Canada around 5 months ago to work with my co-founder (A Canadian Citizen) on a business startup and we're planning to move to San Francisco or the Silicon Valley area in California. I'm currently on A TRV (Temporary Residence Visa) in Canada while we work through the planning an seeking investments phase but I found out that to get a visa to work in the US I must have a Bachelors degree. Is it possible for my co-found who has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science to found the company in the USA and sponsor me to attain a H-1B Visa? He is aiming to work on the startup along side his job. We are both 50% equity holders for our startup.<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> I do not recommend advertising his side-project when working at Google. Unless he's allowed by his contract this may be a bit problematic for your' business future.

</comment><comment><USER3> H1B visas are really a lottery now. You can give it a shot, but be prepared to try for a few years.</comment>


Lookup Before You Hookup - <AUTHOR> http://www.intelius.com/mobile

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://xkcd.com/796/>

<comment><USER2> Eh... seeing as how the service predates the comic, I'm thinking it's really "xkcd imitates life".

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops. I edited the title. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Plan to ban printed guns makes no sense - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/13/the-latest-plan-to-ban-3d-printed-guns-makes-about-as-much-sense-as-the-last-one/

<comment><USER2> The thing that the community needs to know is that Yee has absolutely zero knowledge of the gun industry or the tech industry, so could never make legislation....

He is currently best known for creating legislation that provokes gridlock on San Francisco streets and puts bicyclists in harms way. He's also voted for other such gems as the banning of cellphone towers in his district, requiring warning labels on cellphones (they cause cancer and kill kittens). Lee is that guy who's both for and against every issue, whichever one is going to get him more media coverage. I thankfully don't live in his district, but I can't wait till he leaves office and people with some sense can actually start trying to fix the messes he's created.</comment>


Anonymous Person Posts $500,000 Bond To Free Texas Teen - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/11/201202207/anonymous-person-posts-500-000-bond-to-free-texas-teen <comment><USER2> It's bizarre to see the number of comments on places with normally great discussion (Ars Technica being a prime example) who talk about how this kid should "only" get community service or a small fine.

He made a joke. An obvious joke, seemingly devoid of any real malice. The idea that he should invoke _any_ punishment for this is insane. His speech is protected by the First Amendment, and morally he did absolutely nothing wrong.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "An obvious joke"

Not that obvious. The only thing that makes it clear this was a joke was the addition of 'jk'. A lot of people won't know when that means and even though I know what it means I'd still be worried after reading the post and probably have it looked into. There are some things normal people don't even joke about - this is one of them.

Edit: I might be wrong on the last point. There will be some people who joke about these types of things. But his post wasn't funny. It was just a sick statement.

<comment><USER3> For the record, here's exactly what the teen said:

 _" Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still-beating hearts. Lol jk"_

That's an obvious joke. The "lol jk" wasn't even necessary to flag it as such.

<comment><USER4> Seriously, _eating peoples still beating hearts_? I don't care about Poe's Law or how much sarcasm doesn't translate to ascii... if that is not _plainly_ a joke to you then you have some serious issues with the english language that you need to resolve.

<comment><USER5> I make worse jokes than this on a weekly basis. That something like this could lead to any kind of punishment beyond "stop making tasteless jokes" is insane.

<comment><USER4> Same. I am stunned that this apparently warrants _any_ sort of official response, and I am doubly stunned that so many people seem to support a response of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There needs to be a way of controlling activist judges. Why the court is even able to decide what amount the bail is, is beyond me.

Of course, I'm not even mentioning the part about being thrown in jail for what is tantamount to thought crime. That's a whole 'nother issue.

\</comment><comment>----

EDIT: I'm not sure why my comment has been downvoted? Incase you were confused, I was referring to this here:

"In April, a grand jury in Comal County, Texas, indicted Carter on a charge of making a terroristic threat, and a judge set bail at $500,000."

See, even though the Jury found him guilty, the Judge set the bail enormously high. This kid did NOTHING. He exercised his first ammendment rights, and got a 500k bail for it. The real problem here was the Judge, who gets to set the bail after the fact. I wonder what the jury would have concluded if they had been allowed to decide the bail?

<comment><USER7> In reference to your edit - the phrase "activist judge" is a bit of a dogwhistle for conservatism; it's easy to click to downvote before really digesting what you said.

That said, an independent judiciary is an important part of the separation of powers on which American government is based. While I personally find this entire thing reprehensible from soup to nuts, the judge's power to set arbitrary bail really is the way the system is supposed to work (the kid getting beat up in prison is _not_ the way the system is supposed to work - except that plenty of Americans need a lot more civics education and actually do like to think of people getting raped in prison as extrajudiciary punishment for the suspicious).

Also, an indictment is not a ruling of guilt. A grand jury is convened to decide whether there's a case at all. I personally think this grand jury should have their citizenship revoked until they've passed a battery of examinations in what America stands for, but sadly, that's again not the way the system works.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that half the population is below average in terms of mental ability and education.

A bigger problem: the state's attorneys and judges should know about the Bill of Rights, and they are the ones with the actual power here. With such a high bail it appears this particular judgeship was granted erroneously.

<comment><USER9> > The problem is that half the population is below average in terms of mental > ability and education.

Isn't this a problem everywhere, though? Why do we only hear this issue WRT the U.S.? (I freely admit it could just be because I live in the states)

<comment><USER6> It's the poverty!

People in other countries get healthcare when they need it. They get assistance when they need it. Therefore, they have extra mental cycles to use to consider the reality of politics.

In the US, we make sure our poor people have to work two jobs so they can't stop to do a damn thing about how screwed they are by participating in our democracy.

<comment><USER10> Rwanda has a basic universal healthcare system. Everyone pays an amount according to their economic status, and everyone gets basic healthcare.

<comment><USER11> Achieving a lot when you have little would leave one to believe that having lots lets you achieve a lot. I'm some respects the US hasn't managed to achieve much at all. Is this what you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As if we needed another fight to defend yet another constitutional amendment in peril... Now we've got to make some noise about the 8th.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Excessive_bail)

(Excessive bail: Yep, founding fathers thought of that too.)

<comment><USER13> > Yep, founding fathers thought of that too.

No, they stole the idea from British Law.

<comment><USER14> Are you referring to the cases in the UK where people made jokes and ended up in court for it?

Because, we don't even have free speech guaranteed. Quite a few people are going to jail for their words. On top of that, we refuse entry to people and boot others out because of what they say. Merely their words and opinions.

See, now we have this scary notion of "hate speech". No one knows what it means, but people get arrested and charged, and end up in jail. Its on a whim. It's designed mission creep gone mad.

Any pretense of free speech in the UK is long gone.

<comment><USER15> > On top of that, we refuse entry to people and boot others out because of > what they say.

Is there a country in the world that _doesn 't_ do this? If you're not a citizen of a country, you generally can be kicked out or denied entry for the smallest of reasons. Which is bad, but not unusual.

> No one knows what it means, but people get arrested and charged, and end up > in jail. Its on a whim.

I'm not sure I completely agree with the hate speech laws of the UK, but there a lot of case law and precedent behind it, and it's not nearly as broad as you make it sound.

In general, hate speech laws target abusive speech intended to stir up racial hatred, and abusive speech intended to harass an individual. The laws also targets _threatening_ speech against sexual orientation, or _threatening_ speech intended to incite religion hatred. So it's okay to, for instance, ridicule or insult Islam or Christianity, but it's not okay to incite violence against Muslims or Christians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given recent events, what this kid said was foolish - but did it really merit imprisonment? The government would have a field day with users on services such as Xbox Live and just about any online community that reaches a wide demographic.

The mainstream media basically left this kid to rot, save for a few blurbs on the 'fourth page' news. Had it not been for user-generated coverage on the net and the generous person who bailed him out, he would have probably rotted in jail for who knows how long. No, instead we're more interested in hearing about celebrity babies being born or some has-been mobster in his twilight years.

The system is broken - well, at least it's broken for anyone who respects human rights and civil liberties. To put my hand over my heart and pledge my loyalty to the 'land of the free, and the home of the brave'. What a joke! Thinking that we have any say in the supposed 'democratic process' is laughable. What does voting even do now other than make the slicksters in Washington play musical chairs? What is it going to take to actually create reform and install a government that cares about its people - a government that _is_ the common people?

Apathy is imprisonment.

<comment><USER17> I think the recent Australian equivilent was much better handled:

[http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/teenager- arrested...](http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/teenager-arrested- for-8216bomb8217-tweet-during-pink8217s-concert-at-rod-laver-arena- melbourne/story-fni0fee2-1226675857291)

"[The Police] spoke to him, they fed him and someone was there making jokes with him. They just thought he needed a kick in the bum and that's all he really needed,"

He's facing charges because the management of the venue wanted to place charges, but I expect he'll end up with something like community service and nothing that will ruin his future job prospects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know money does not buy happiness, but sometimes I wish I had "unlimited money" to be able to do thing like that.

<comment><USER6> Acquiring unlimited money is definitely more likely than an informed citizenry ever developing in the US, so I wish you the best in that pursuit!

<comment><USER19> Informed citizenry... that's

oh, now I'm sad...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Link to article that explains what he posted [http://www.inquisitr.com/843742/justin-carter-teen-jailed- fo...](http://www.inquisitr.com/843742/justin-carter-teen-jailed-for- terroristic-facebook-comments-out-on-bail-after-anonymous-person- posts-500000-bail/)

<comment><USER21> Thanks, had to click 3 links before the OP story gave some insight into what had happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This case disgusts me. It makes me sick to the stomach. What the fuck happened to this world.

<comment><USER23> What the fuck happened to America.

FTFY. Americans believe his country= the world, not true.

<comment><USER24> Anyway, he has a point.

Police abuse, federal spying and over abuse of the law system by the governments are, unfortunately, becoming a common point in many of the so called "democratic" countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How come the US still has a bail system? It so obviously favours those who can pay their way through. Either you are under arrest or you are not. If you are, you should only be able to regain your freedom by being found not guilty.

<comment><USER26> Posting bail has nothing to do with being under arrest, and everything to do with remaining detained. For many (particularly non-violent) arrests there is no reason to detain a person until the time of their trial, which is at least a month but can commonly be a year or longer after the original arrest date due to a backlogged court system as well as delays necessary to prepare for a trial. Bail system does favor people that can afford it, but so does the trial system (afford a better lawyer), the healthcare system (afford a better doctor), the housing system (afford a better house in a better area), etc. That's called capitalism.

<comment><USER25> I agree with you that it does not make sense to detain someone for a non- violent crime unless they are likely to commit more crimes. But then they should be released unconditionally while awaiting their trial, not dependent upon whether they can pay a ransom fee or not. On the other hand a psychopathic murderer is dangerous to society so he should never have the option to pay bail.

<comment><USER27> I could be mistaken, but I don't think the idea is to force poor people to be detained. I think the purpose is to provide an incentive for the accused to show up to their court date. If the person posts the bail themselves, then they get the money back when they show up. If they use a bail bondsman, then a bounty hunter will track them down if they don't show up.

<comment><USER25> Then why didn't this kid, and anyone else stuck in arrest that can't pay the bail, use a bail bondsman to get out of it? It seems like a reasonable idea but broken in practice. If I wanted to become a fugitive I wouldn't care of I was chased by both bounty hunters and the police.

<comment><USER27> You still need to pay the bail bondsman 10% of your bail (and you don't get it back). He probably didn't have a spare $50k. The question I have is why was the bail $500k? That seems excessive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's crazy to think about the precedent this sets. I mean, what about public works, books, music & articles? Could this be considered a terrorist threat these days?

            The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
            Any fucking time. Any fucking day. Learn to swim,
            I'll see you down in Arizona bay. Some say a comet
            will fall from the sky. Followed by meteor showers
            and tidal waves. Followed by faultlines that cannot
            sit still. Followed by millions of dumbfounded
            dipshits. Some say the end is near. Some say we'll
            see armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will cuz I
            sure could use a vacation from this Silly shit,
            stupid shit...

I'm sure there are better examples, more scholarly ones, but that was the first off the top of my head.

<comment><USER29> They already started "fixing" books: [http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/01/06/huck-finn- censorship...](http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/01/06/huck-finn-censorship- and-the-n-word-controversy/) ... (it will be so much easier/faster once everything is digital and remotely controlled)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In jail he's been beaten to the point of black eyes and concussions, stripped naked and held in solitary. While we're all debating like armchair constitutional scholars, I'd say the $500,000 donor was motivated at least as much by this.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129617/teen- jailed-for-facebook-comment-reportedly-beat-up-behind-bars)

<comment> wes-exp Solitary confinement is believed by many critics to be a form of psychological torture which can cause long-lasting damage to the brain.

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/solitary- confineme...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/solitary- confinement-2/)

The fact that this kid's harmless comments have triggered a rabbit hole whereby he is on the receiving end of physical and psychological abuse while under the "care" of the state is disgusting and appalling.

I do imagine such concerns played into the donor's decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This whole event feels like an enormous waste of time and money by and for everyone.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, it's begging for an "adult" to step in, smack everybody involved upside the head, and tell them to stop being ridiculous and get on with things that matter.

It's really baffling that this is actually happening and a real kid is having his life ruined over that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Slightly off topic:

How does the bail system fit to "Equal justice under law" ?

How a justice system can call itself just when rich get a clear advantage?

<comment><USER34> generally speaking, bail is set based on the persons means and the crime. The amount is supposed to be an amount that will make a person show up for trial, so a wealthy person will get a higher bail than a poor person for the same crime. Also, the worse the crime (and punishment expected) the higher the bail

all of that is why this is so absurd. the bail is extraordinarily high for the "crime" and for the person's level of wealth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Anyone wonder who might have paid this high an amount to bail this kid out? half a million is not a chump change for many millionaires or multi millionaires...but could be for someone who is a multi billionaire... And which multi billionaire would have 'soft' side to a facebook comment by a young kid..19 yr kid...maybe someone who probably would have said brash things himself when at that age...(not implying that he would have in same context) ...so could that be Zuckerberg? 1/2 million is a chump change for him and has obviously affiliation to see people not stop commenting on FB. Just wondering

<comment><USER36> Whoever bailed the kid out did not pay $500,000 -- they paid either 10% or 15% (i.e., $50,000 or $75,000) to a bail bondsman as a non-refundable bond, and the bail bondsman then paid the $500,000 to the state.

It's still a nice gesture.

My guess is it was Johnny Depp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has anybody heard from the woman who set this whole thing in motion?

It would be a big boost to the case, I imagine, if she comes forward and says "I never wanted this". And sticks up for the poor kid.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how this anon person/group gathered that money.

<comment><USER39> I am hoping this anonymous person is a Facebook employee who decided to put their exercised stock options to good use.

<comment><USER38> So are you a facebook employee who decided to put their ...

Whoever did this, heroes act in the shadows...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Who the hell were the geniuses that actually indicted him? And to sit there for 5 months? Where's his speedy trial?

</comment><comment><USER41> So, anybody else think that maybe the anonymous donor was somebody associated with Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER42> This is great news, but I really have to rain on the parade: what took so long?

<comment><USER43> We were all waiting for you to step up.

<comment><USER42> No you weren't, but are you saying that nobody who sympathized with him had the money until now?</comment></comment></comment>


The Merge Fairy (Open Source): automated merging of revisions between Subversion branches - <AUTHOR> http://thebogles.com/blog/svn-merge-fairy/

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because it's awesome, and I'm going to use it at RescueTime. But also because I want someone to change the config format to YAML. :)</comment>


The Mystery of Tom Pritchard's Bike - <AUTHOR> https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a33995147/tom-pritchard-bike-mystery/ <comment><USER2> What a great man and what great storytelling. Thank you for sharing.

I happen to have an Eisentraut 'Limited' of similar vintage. I bought it off of a retired aerospace engineer a decade ago. It's equipped with the same classic Campagnola and while the frame is a little tall for me I still get great pleasure in riding it around town. It is beautifully made, very light, and a piece of art.

Not mentioned in the story but Albert Eisentraut was building his bicycles in Oakland.

<comment><USER2> A couple old photos I dug up off my social media accounts:

[https://scontent- lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/67766_15300271...](https://scontent- lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/67766_1530027103606_6053859_n.jpg?_nc_cat=101&_nc_sid=2c4854&_nc_ohc=InYLMbVK968AX-97w-W&_nc_ht=scontent- lax3-1.xx&oh=3f537ccc2473b482250e07ef0874f772&oe=5F8DDA51)

[https://scontent- lax3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e15/1...](https://scontent- lax3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e15/11236024_875678062491454_1010697952_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent- lax3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=110&_nc_ohc=Aec0_ndGqUMAX_Ak3lo&_nc_tp=18&oh=df653c0f0f03d2805f2129b4c9f8ab66&oe=5F8FD470)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a great story and an amazing person. It's always nice to read about someone who was genuinely a good person. I especially liked the quote: "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived that distinguish one man from another."

<comment><USER4> Fully agree. What an amazing read :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As to the significance of "5826 D.B.T. 1976", it appears that it stands for Denver Bicycle Tax. This is probably why the author tried phoning the Denver police and then the oldest bike shop in Denver.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems that you can me make a movie on this guys life. I got to know a few characters like him and the truth is that they are awesome people but never stay around for long, as they are always seeking the next adventure.

For those who want more, here's the piece he wrote on Tom: [https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the- my...](https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the-myth/)

<comment><USER7> Try this link if you don't want to subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times to read one story:

[https://archive.vn/QyMnG](https://archive.vn/QyMnG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've lived in St. Pete since 2000. If Tom was who I think he was, he was certainly a character. He'd drive around with that d __* jeep blasting flight of the Valkyries.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Eisentraut trained Bruce Gordon, Joe Breeze, Skip Hujsak, and Mark > Nobilette, among others.

That's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Breeze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Breeze) who built some of the first mountain bikes.

<comment><USER10> I spent half a day with Bruce Gordon and bought one of his bikes a decade or so ago. He's gone now, but he was an interesting character in his own right - seems the bike world is full of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the piece he wrote on Tom [https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the- my...](https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/01/11/moose-and-the-myth/)

</comment><comment><USER11> > "He said he was trying to get the attention of a beautiful young woman who > was a serious cyclist, and he couldn't just ride up on a Schwinn Varsity."

So, I had an orange Schwinn Varsity when I was in jr. high school. (40 pounds of _steel_ baby). Then one year, one of my friends got a 20-something pound Nishiki. What a revelation that was; the feeling of efficiency was just incredible.

<comment><USER12> When I was in college, I listed after the Bridgestone MB-0....until they got in a Nishiki Alien.

That thing was mind bogglingly different...I looked it up earlier in the year and...it's not so mind boggling different anymore.[http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/download/file.php?id=230276](http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/download/file.php?id=230276)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I need to know more about Tom Pritchard apparently, but I've been embarking on my best attempts to upgrade my bikes on my own. When I saw that 6-speed with down-tube shifters and the camo road bars! God, it's so fun. I need to redo the paint on my SE Draft Lite so I can take some pictures and at least try and feel like I have a cool classic bike.

<comment><USER14> > I need to redo the paint on my SE Draft Lite so I can take some pictures and > at least try and feel like I have a cool classic bike.

Or not! To learn from Tom, he had the adventures but wasn't outspoken about them - the stories were told by others. With a bike, the point is to enjoy it! I have an 80s steel frame, not as unique, but it gets me around, fast, and I've had tons of fun with it over the past 15 years. Camping in the woods with it chained to a tree, riding through 6" of slush on slick tires, wiping out and learning multiple times... I've touched up scrapes and dings with not- quite-matching shades of nail polish, my handlebar tape is falling apart, my bottom bracket sticks out a bit because I did a shit job of replacing it 5 years ago. But I love it anyway. Or as the article said,

> "Bicycles are not built to be used as status symbols," Eisentraut himself > wrote in a chapter on framebuilding for a book called Bike Tripping, > published in 1972. "The cyclist should ride his chosen bike, instead of > bullshitting about its angles or its chain stay length."

<comment><USER13> OK, my green nail polish running out will probably be when I do something about the brake levers and the damage done to the original paint by said brake levers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a really wonderful story. For anyone like me who's reading the comments but doesn't care at all about bikes: read the story, Tom Pritchard sounds like a great man.

</comment><comment><USER16> Many, if not all, lives are as rich as this and would benefit from as romantic a retelling.

<comment><USER17> I think that's a bit unfair. Most Americans for example haven't even left the country(and many, their state), much less try and smuggle hash into Spain.

<comment><USER18> While my story isn't done being written, I doubt mine would hold up a candle against what Tom had experienced by my age so far. Some people just live unusual lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A fine story, and a sweet bike. The engineer in me says "perfection".

</comment><comment><USER20> I also appreciate that the author doesn't wear stupid gaudy bicycle jerseys and shorts.

<comment><USER21> Having lived in Florida, I would wager that the author is suffering for fashion in jeans and a black shirt moreso than he would be in "gaudy" bicycling attire. Or maybe that's your point -- that we should all prefer looking hip over dorky-yet-functional?</comment></comment>


SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimHealth <comment><USER2> An informative [and entertaining] video review: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-H0GwsZPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-H0GwsZPk)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the companies that is doing something similar but with real data.

[http://www.rwjf.org/en/how-we- work/grants/grantees/ARCHeS.ht...](http://www.rwjf.org/en/how-we- work/grants/grantees/ARCHeS.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would love to get a copy of this -- GOG.com comes up empty, as does eBay and Amazon. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER5> I found this: [http://www.myabandonware.com/game/simhealth-2am](http://www.myabandonware.com/game/simhealth-2am)

<comment><USER4> Thanks very much!</comment></comment></comment>


The World's Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995 - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain <comment><USER2> It is a hash of a block, but not a chain.

For this to be a chain, it would have to be published multiple times, each time containing references to previous blocks under the published hash.

Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. Hashing and publishing the hash is pretty popular way to prove timestamp of a secret without revealing the secret, yet. I did it myself a couple of times when I wanted to be able to prove later that I had a particular information before some specific time.

<comment><USER3> _Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples._

This statement could be made much more interesting and convincing if you provided some actual examples.

<comment><USER4> It's fairly common (at least among the security community) to post a hash of a claim to Twitter, that they can reference in the future to prove that they had X information on Y date without disclosing the actual information until later.

For example, I could post the hash "9712f2488fa00fc5b11b657995ac10c9" to Twitter and then after the prediction comes to pass, I can reveal that the hash was for the phrase "Pittsburgh Steelers will Defeat New Orleans Saints 30-21 in Super Bowl LIII", proving that I had some knowledge or prediction that I didn't want to reveal at the time of the prediction.

<comment><USER5> Wait but this is not fail proof right. For example I can post that Kolkata Knight riders will defeat Mumbai Indians along with a post that Mumbai Indians will defeat Kolkata Knight riders and delete the wrong twitter post once the competetion is over?

<comment><USER6> Presumably, one can assume that once it is published publicly, someone else could make a note of it, and tattle on the author whenever they delete a hash without revealing the source of it.

In practice, nobody is attending to anyone that closely, aside from a handful of public figures, and shenanigans like those you described might actually work to get someone more attention, only to fail once they have enough. That's why a publication mechanism that disallows deletions is desirable for such hashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a hash chain, pretty sure one can find much older ones. some old checksums might do that too. When someone says blockchain, in my book (and this might differ from others) - its about the consensus algorithm used to prevent tampering, like POW as introduced by Bitcoin.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you that your definition is what we _should_ define a blockchain as, as Natamoto defined it. However, I'm afraid to say probably the majority of companies that claim they use blockchain probably use something very close to Git instead, or even just a digital signature or a hash function. Seriously, it's ridiculous.

Imagine if Google called certificate transparency blockchain? Journalists would lose their shit. Such an easy article to write. In fact, Google explicitly say on their website that they're kinda against the hype: [http://www.certificate-transparency.org/general- transparency](http://www.certificate-transparency.org/general-transparency) "These technologies are strongly related to the much-hyped blockchain. The reality, of course, is that there isn't a "the" blockchain, and that decentralisation is not always the answer. We are not making "the" blockchain, and we do not claim to support decentralisation."

I'll never forget my first job the business people wanted to investigate "the blockchain" and the yes men came up with a bunch of PoCs. I just asked "how is this different to Git?" Such an awkward moment.

<comment><USER9> > I agree with you that your definition is what we should define a blockchain > as, as Natamoto defined it.

Funny enough, "blockchain" as a term wasn't defined in the Bitcoin white paper at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't exactly new, and not only for the reason in the article - Check out NetNotary from back around that time, too: They published their checksums daily in the WSJ, IIRC. Could be wrong, but I seem to recall NetNotary was a Marshall Rose/Carl Malamud project...

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there actually any chaining going on, or is this a standard "trusted timestamp"? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping)

<comment><USER12> The article doesn't make it totally explicit, but it sure sounds like each new hash incorporated the previous one.

(It's also possible that each published hash is just a brand new hash of the aggregate, but this seems somewhat less likely based on the wording.)

ETA: Looks like it's a chain, or rather a Merkle tree. From the horse's mouth: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168)

<comment><USER13> A Merkle root including previous Merkle roots may have been innovative when Surety started, but while its required in bitcoin its not a key feature of what defines a Blockchain.

<comment><USER12> Given that "blockchain" is a generalization of Bitcoin, not formally defined theoretically beforehand, I suspect we would not agree on what a blockchain even is, and would go 'round and 'round in circles.

But I think we can agree that a Merkle chain like this would be sufficient for most of the things people are trying to use blockchains _for_ recently, which certainly says something.

<comment><USER11> Yea, I think most would lean towards requiring one or both of:

        - it's a distributed consensus system (often around "blocks", but e.g. iota is not)
        - it's a chain of hashes to prevent mutation (around "chains")

And I doubt we'll ever get everyone to agree on what subset (including null) of those are "a blockchain".

Very ( _very_ ) few things benefit from distributed consensus IMO. And not all altcoins use blocks at all. So I tend to lean towards hash-chains. Publicly- verifiable immutability is useful in quite a lot of real-world scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i don't see evidence that it's really a block-chain since the data are not dependent on the previous block, i.e. it's not a linked list ("chain") data structure.

<comment><USER15> Hi, ex-CEO of Surety here. The article is not very technical so I can see where you might assume this is not a true blockchain. However, the hash value published in the Times was, in fact, dependent upon every single hash value for every digital "document" ever submitted to the Digital Notary Service.

A Digital Notary client application would submit a hash value (which in the early days was a combination of MD5 and SHA-1 but the system was very flexible in that it could upgrade the hash algos when more collision resistant versions became available) that would become part of a Merkle tree along with any other client submissions received in a short timeframe. The parent "top hash" node of the Merkle tree was then hashed with the the last value in a linked list referred to internally as the "super hash" chain to create a new end value in the chain.

The client application would receive a notary "certificate" containing all the values in the Merkle tree required to re-calculate the hash woven into the super hash chain along with the timestamp for the moment it became part of the chain. The client application could use this certificate at any time to electronically verify the veracity of any "document" (i.e., guarantee that the document existed in its exact form at a specific point in time.)

On a side note, the algorithms and implementation were successfully tested in court cases. (Some of Surety's customers used the system to timestamp millions of documents turned over in electronic legal discovery to ensure they were not tampered with by opposing counsel.)

The New York Times value was only significant in that if could be used to "manually" calculate the veracity of the notary certificate by hashing the super hash value it contained with all subsequent values in the super hash chain until it resulted in the hash value published in the Times. This "widely witnessed" approach made it impossible for an insider to collude with someone to generate a correct notary certificate retroactively by replacing the document with a forgery.

The blockchain technology used by crypto currencies is similar except for the tremendous amount of computation required to generate a "correct" hash value to close out a block and weave it into the chain.

Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta deserve a lot of credit for creating this when were working for Bellcore. Two brilliant guys.

<comment><USER16> The "block" in blockchain is due to it being a byzantine fault tolerant replicated state machine. If it were centralised there would be no need for a block. That may be the main distinguishing characteristic. Git is another example of an application running on a hash chain, but it doesn't have blocks because it doesn't require a slow / costly consensus process.

<comment><USER17> Feels a bit like that's a post-facto argument to me.

It sounds like the Surity thing had "blocks" consisting of a week's worth of documents which got chained together and had their hash published irrevocably every week.

Without the subsequent invention and popularity of the specific implementation of the bitcoin blockchain - I don't think the slow/costly consensus "feature" could be considered a requirement to distinguish between "hash chains" and "block chains" like that.

(But I'm regularly on the losing side of nomenclature arguments - I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones"...)

<comment><USER18> > I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non- > autonomous quadcopters "drones"

Apparently we should call them quadpters because it's based on helicopter for which the ethymology is not heli + copter, but helico + pter, like in helicoidal and pterodactyl.

<comment><USER19> Or tetrapter, to stick with Greek roots (though I'm personally fine with heteroradicalism!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Widespread use of this technology would be a problem for government, since it would be difficult to insert fake records to create "legends" for undercover detectives, spies, and people in witness protection, etc.

<comment><USER21> Widespread use of Facebook might have a much more significant effect, because people don't usually memorialize all of their life events in a public digital notary service but often do so with social media.

I bet counterintelligence agencies are scraping social media and the web in order to see whether some travelers' identities are lacking in (or contradicted by) historical online documentation.

</comment></comment><comment> bits-and-bolts No the oldest block chain was invented by Acient Greeks, take Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. They are similar to blockchain as follows:

\- Memorization of whole piece == Proof of work \- You need lots of people to agree upon the story == 51 % of nodes \- You can only append to the piece, because many others know and have memorized the piece so they will not agree to your version.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. Now how do we turn this into virtual currency?

<comment><USER17> I've got an idea - classified advertising!

We'll start selling space in the coinbase field to real estate advertisers and escort services!

'The Times 03/Jan/2009: room to rent in 3br share house in The Mission, $2600/month+utilities'

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Initially I thought this was commissioned advertising, and it did read as such.

However, the ex-CEO has mentioned that it only operates for existing customers ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865294)), which conflicts with that view somewhat, so maybe this isn't an ad.

In any case; where can I view 1995 copies of NYT for free? :)

<comment><USER24> > In any case; where can I view 1995 copies of NYT for free? :)

Every public library in the United States, if I'm not mistaken, and a large number of major libraries worldwide.

<comment><USER23> Hmm. I was hoping there was a way I could do so online.

 _Mumbles something about equal opportunity open access and the bourgeois_

<comment><USER24> New York Public Library, with a library card: [https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/08/22/how-to-search- nytimes](https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/08/22/how-to-search-nytimes)

Los Angeles Public Library, with a library card: [https://www.lapl.org/new- york-times-digital](https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital) (and you can apply for an e-card online for free: [http://www.lapl.org/about-lapl/contact- us/e-card/e-card-regi...](http://www.lapl.org/about-lapl/contact- us/e-card/e-card-registration))

Kansas City Public Library, with a library card: [https://www.kclibrary.org/blog/kc-unbound/how-read-back- issu...](https://www.kclibrary.org/blog/kc-unbound/how-read-back-issues-new- york-times-free-online)

Etc.

Summary: get a public library card, support the oh-so-terribly bourgeois public library system ;)

<comment><USER23> This is fair, but I don't know how much the National Library of Australia has, or whether access is free. Sorry I forgot to mention my location in my previous comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Article has autoplaying audio

<comment><USER26> You can turn this off in many browsers nowadays (media.autoplay.enabled in Firefox). Still good to call it out though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So essentially a checksum. Using that logic, blockchains have been hiding within the internet forever because tcp/ip protocol employs them.

</comment><comment><USER28> there are no blocks and therefore calling it an blockchain is pure clickbait. what we have here is a chain of hashes

</comment><comment><USER29> Bitcoin's innovation was trust and conflict resolution through proof of work, not linked lists of hashes.

<comment><USER30> There is difference between bitcoin and blockchain. A blockchain is, by definition, a linked list of hashes.

<comment><USER7> That's just called a hash chain, Bitcoin I believe just calls it a chain of hashes. The block data structure incl. salt and POW is what is so unique about Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This describes something from Surety, LLC. Too bad their web page doesn't have https. Hard to take them as seriously. [http://surety.com/](http://surety.com/)

<comment><USER32> The login page has ssl. [https://enterprise.surety.com/MyAbsoluteProof/ChangeMyAccoun...](https://enterprise.surety.com/MyAbsoluteProof/ChangeMyAccountSettings.aspx)

<comment><USER24> If the page that links to the login page hasn't proven it's secure, I shouldn't trust the links, and therefore shouldn't trust the destination. Hence why static landing pages need HTTPS just as much as login pages.

<comment><USER26> Fair enough, although you could check that the domain names are the same in this case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump confirms he will look into Pentagon's Jedi cloud contract after complaints - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/18/trump-says-seriously-looking-into-amazons-pentagon-contract.html <comment><AUTHOR> The title from tech meme: Trump says he's looking into a Pentagon cloud contract for Amazon or Microsoft because 'we're getting tremendous complaints'</comment>


A Valid domain name without TLD on internet - <AUTHOR> http://good <comment><USER2> This is not "without TLD", this is literally just the TLD.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell there is no .good gTLD.

<comment><USER2> I'm not talking about gTLDs. TLD is a term with multiple meanings.

<comment><USER3> Ah, misunderstood your point. If there were a .good TLD, then that could be an explanation for why it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does any body know how is this a valid Domain name?

<comment><USER4> That's not a valid domain name:

$ dig good

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> good ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<\- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 65133 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;good. IN A

;; Query time: 3 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.11.1#53(192.168.11.1) ;; WHEN: Mon Feb 19 12:13:28 2018 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 22

I works because most browsers try to add ".com" to an invalid domain name. And good.com is valid

$ dig good.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> good.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<\- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 57755 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;good.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: good.com. 19030 IN A 184.108.40.206

;; Query time: 4 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.11.1#53(192.168.11.1) ;; WHEN: Mon Feb 19 12:14:05 2018 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 42

And [http://good.com](http://good.com) redirects after some jumps to [http://us.blackberry.com/](http://us.blackberry.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Try opening the URL in your browser it's working. Or use $host good to find the Ip address of the server

<comment><USER3> > _Try opening the URL in your browser it 's working._

As the parent said, browsers try to fix bad domains by themselves.

> _$host good to find the Ip address of the server_

NXDOMAIN. if you get something else, your DNS provider is injecting something.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Embedded Chat in Website? - <AUTHOR>

Recently someone proposed the idea of embedding a chat room on our website for users to chat between themselves (it's a community-type site). I was wondering why don't we see more sites having chat between users? Isn't it something that can make users stay on your site loner, and engage more? Do es that idea have any chance of success? <comment><USER2> Are you looking for a SAAS solution to spin out quick? You'd need to roll it out to see if it did keep people around and then need to keep watching your numbers as the community grew. Eventually as you get a large user base you get issues with how many people are in one "chat", moderation of offensive content, how the experience itself scales, etc. which is why larger sites may not do it (or they never found value in it)

If you're doing the startup thing though, just roll it out and see if it helps you get to a better place and keep evaluating if it's core and worth it to maintain. GoInstant has turned into Platform as a service which could maybe handle the real time component.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to check out: [https://togetherjs.com/](https://togetherjs.com/)

For a community site, it sounds like a decent idea in general. Why don't we see more? I think it is only recently that some easier ways to do it came about.</comment>


Show HN: KickSearcher -- advanced search for Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://kicksearcher.meteor.com/ <comment><USER2> I would add a way to save a query and get updates over time via email. Maybe add other project sites, also.</comment>


Stripe for Gift Cards - <AUTHOR> I would like the community thoughts on this as we are in the secondary gift card space.We are "ATTEMPTING" to build a payment processing system similar to stripe but for gift cards where payment processors can augment their payment processing capabilities through the use of gift cards or merchants directly can integrate our service to accept gift cards as a form of payment. IE an end user can pay for an item or service say with a walmart or best buy gift cards. We already have the ability to do instant balance verification for gift cards.  What do you guys think about this? <comment><USER2> 1\. Why would I want my store to accept payment with someone else's gift card?

2\. What consumers want this?

3\. How do you make money?

4\. Balance verification seems a bit easier than balance transfer. The stores issuing gift cards make a fair amount of money in interest on those card balances. Cooperating with you and other stores might result in a loss of net interest income.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Why would I want my store to accept payment with someone else's gift card?

Maybe you are a high risk merchant that has trouble with CC processor such as gambling sites or adult related sites. Or you customer base is concerned about privacy and fraud. Accepting gift cards is also a great way to avoid chargebacks.

2\. What consumers want this? Consumers who are concerned about their privacy.

3\. How do you make money? We already make money by selling discounted gift cards to shoppers looking to save money on purchases from their favorite brands.

4\. Balance verification seems a bit easier than balance transfer. The stores issuing gift cards make a fair amount of money in interest on those card balances. Cooperating with you and other stores might result in a loss of net interest income.

Some brands love the secondary markets and other don't. But i would argue it may help increase brand sales since customers may buy gift cards solely for the purpose of privacy or other reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Beware of the use of the gift cards for credit card fraud. For example see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7501821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7501821) (51 points | Mar 31, 2014 | 54 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks we are aware of the huge fraud problem in the space. We have a way to fight against this currently so am not too worried about this.</comment></comment>