Cross-signing and end-to-end encryption by default - <AUTHOR> https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/06/cross-signing-and-end-to-end-encryption-by-default-is-here <comment><USER2> Both are asynchronous messengers.

Signal: + protects metadata + protects the content (e2e encryption) - is not anonymous - is not resilient against regulations

Matrix: - does not protect metadata + protects the content (e2e encryption) + is anonymous + is maybe, potentially resilient against regulations (federated, not centralized architecture)

<comment><USER3> You could argue that Matrix does protect metadata if you run your own server - and in extremis, one way of running your own server and protect metadata is to go P2P and embed it into your client (which is one thing we're currently working on).

That said, there are some other pretty big differences between Matrix & Signal; the biggest one is probably that Matrix is an open standard and open network, encouraging 3rd party clients, servers, bridges, bots etc - optimising both for freedom/liberty as well as encryption. Signal optimises for privacy at all costs and doesn't allow 3rd party clients or services. See [https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus- freedom](https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom) for more.

<comment><USER4> That's not really a reasonable argument. Signal makes a profound UX tradeoff to protect metadata by not requiring servers to store it in the first place: it drafts off people's phone contact lists, and thus everyone who uses it needs to be identified by a phone number.

Matrix doesn't have any special way of avoiding that tradeoff. It just takes the other end of the trade: Matrix servers are exposed to valuable metadata, so that people can use whatever identifier they want.

And, of course, the flip side of Matrix's "freedom and liberty" federalized design is that it is May 7, 2020, and the project is just now announcing E2E by default for private conversations. This is exactly why, years ago, Moxie Marlinspike wrote his post arguing about the downsides of federalization. It sure looks like his predictions were borne out!

I think both of these projects are valid and important, and that they have different goals and audiences, and we do people a disservice when we pretend like they're in any kind of serious competition. Matrix is what you'd replace an IRC server with. Signal is what you'd tell an immigration lawyer to use for messaging.

<comment><USER5> > And, of course, the flip side of Matrix's "freedom and liberty" federalized > design is that it is May 7, 2020, and the project is just now announcing E2E > by default for private conversations. This is exactly why, years ago, Moxie > Marlinspike wrote his post arguing about the downsides of federalization. It > sure looks like his predictions were borne out!

I'm skeptical that much of _this particular_ delay has to do with federation, as opposed to things like differing priorities and general project velocity.

Why? Because Matrix is not yet as successful or as diverse as XMPP, the example Moxie gave in his blog post. My impression is that Matrix has one main server implementation (Synapse) that everyone uses, and one main client implementation (Riot) that E2E encryption was added to. And the company developing Synapse and Riot is also developing the spec, so it's completely coordinated. Alternate clients and servers exist, but they're very much "alternate"; I don't think anyone was waiting for them to implement anything before making this announcement.

I could be wrong. I'm not involved in Matrix development, or even a Matrix user. But that's my impression from some quick Googling.

If I'm right, the only real cost of decentralization at this point was having to (a) design the protocol itself to support federation and (b) document the protocol as part of the Matrix spec. That's not nothing, but it's small potatoes compared to the kind of massive ecosystem fragmentation Moxie was talking about.

<comment><USER3> My take on this is:

Yes, Matrix's development would go way faster (6-10x is my estimate) if it wasn't decentralised. Huge amounts of effort goes into designing a system where you have multiple servers (or peers in p2p) which can't be trusted, and where the behaviour needs to be formally specified in a neutral public spec that can be independently implemented. You have to layer the spec into abstractions which ensure the lower layers are stable and relatively frozen such that folks can build on them confidently, but the higher layers can evolve and experiment as rapidly as possible.

However, we think this is an acceptable cost in exchange for building an open network / protocol / ecosystem like Matrix. Freedom is important.

As comex points out, we've tried to mitigate slowness by developing the core of Matrix (protocol and reference server and reference clients) by the same logical team rather than by vying factions - which has certainly helped, but only as an incremental factor.

The fact it took us 3 years to exit beta for E2EE and turn it on by default reflects more that we chose a large scope (interactive verif, cross-signing, encrypted key backups, etc all break new ground, afaik), had to make it decentralised, and also reflects prioritisation (encryption is not our only focus).

So yes, it takes longer to build Matrix than a centralised e2ee messenger. Or longer to build bitcoin than paypal. Or the Web than AOL. But we think it's worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Folks who have tried Matrix/Riot and Slack – how does the product quality compare?

Slack has many issues (little bugs, latency, notification issues, the shitshow markdown editor) but overall delivers a smooth product experience IME. When you self-host Matrix, do you typically get great perf without much effort? Is the product experience of the Riot client smooth and complete?

<comment><USER7> In my experience, Matrix and Riot are great. I love the protocol and concepts around it, and Riot was much higher quality than I expected it would be. Since trying it out for a while a few months ago, I have since abandoned it, however, because operating my own Synapse server was just too much work.

Specific pain points were:

\- setting up SSL - getting Let's Encrypt certs onto a server without a web server was a pain, and keeping them up to date was even worse. I would love to see ACMEv2 support integrated into Synapse for painless SSL setup.

\- TURN server - if you want to use voice chat, you need to set up a separate TURN server, which has its own set of challenges. Again, I would love to see a solution integrated into Synapse.

\- Video chat - Even with a TURN server in place, video chat requires a separate plugin to work. Jitsi is recommended, I believe. Yet again, I want this integrated into Synapse and Riot.

\- Federation - Federation is part of what makes the Matrix protocol so great, but it was a huge pain to configure in Synapse. I spent hours to get it working, and it still had quirks about matrix.mydomain.tld vs mydomain.tld. I would like to see this simplified.

Probably the thing I was happiest about is that a ton of administrative settings are easy to work with in the Riot web client.

Keep it up, guys! I hope Matrix takes over the world, and I hope to come back some day.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to hear that :( There are two things we've tried to do to fix it:

1) Running Synapse really isn't that hard if you follow best practices... but I think we've done a bad job of communicating those best practices; instead Synapse's INSTALL.md lays out tonnes of different options and expects folks to pick their poison. I tried to fix this a few weeks ago by sitting down and recorded a dorky video to try to steer folks through best practices for setting up Synapse + certbot + Jitsi: [https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own- secure-c...](https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure- communication-service-with-matrix-and-jitsi). (I need to extend it to coturn, but again, coturn should be straightforward. I don't think we should be baking TURN into Synapse though!). You could also shove everything in Docker and forget about it.

2) Peer-to-peer Matrix will let you get up and running without even needing a server. This is progressing alarmingly rapidly at the moment - [https://p2p.riot.im](https://p2p.riot.im) is a version of Riot/Web which installs a homeserver (Dendrite) in your browser as a WASM service worker. It's alpha, but it mostly works pretty well, and is hopefully the shape of things to come - to let people have autonomy over their comms without ever needing to understand SSL, TURN, etc.

<comment><USER7> I'm getting the following error when using the P2P instructions. Is this likely an from an outage?

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/myGNh77ukXWgqaVX9](https://photos.app.goo.gl/myGNh77ukXWgqaVX9)

<comment><USER3> [https://p2p.riot.im](https://p2p.riot.im) is a webapp and runs in browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On HN I'm always seeing a fight between Signal and Matrix. Can someone explain this to me? As far as I see it: Signal replaces SMS; Matrix replaces Slack/IRC. These seem like different products that work in different spaces.

<comment><USER4> Among technologists, the two most divisive aspects of Signal are that it requires phone numbers, and that it isn't (and likely won't ever be) federated --- that is, you can't run your own Signal server and be accessible to people using ordinary Signal clients.

Matrix doesn't use phone numbers, and is federated (that's what makes Matrix interesting), so it's naturally the "antidote" suggestion on threads when people bring up these aspects of Signal.

The fact is that they're not really comparable projects; they have different audiences and different goals. People have an innate narrative bias that constant hunts for horse races to spectate, and so you'll see a lot of "Signal vs. Matrix" arguments, but it's an artifact, not anything substantive.

<comment><USER9> I know you're just citing the arguments, but I can't help but respond.

I always see Signal as being "really good" crypto. Bulletproof? No, surely not. That doesn't exist. If I were a dissident or something I would be using gpg religiously and all that jazz.

But is signal _____significantly_ __ __better than basically every mainstream sms-like thing? Absolutely! imessage, sms, mms, whatapp, facebook messenger, whatever google 's current chat app is, etc. All of them don't even try to be a secure/privacy-respecting chat tool and reall y make no secret that they're usually totally the opposite (facebook messenger....).

So when it comes to getting my parents onto something that sends videos of the kids real good and also will make dragnet state surveillance efforts a bit harder, I pick Signal.

<comment><USER4> The cryptography in Signal is substantially better than that of GPG. You would have a very hard time finding a cryptography engineer that disagreed with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perfect timing: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430) Congratulations!

<comment><USER11> Pretty sure the person posting the Matrix page knew this

<comment><USER12> Actually this was all released a couple of days ago, just took a bit of time for them to write the blog post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tox is:

* Still alive.

* Still open source libraries and most clients.

* Still mandatory e2e encrypted. (unlike matrix)

* Still always-on full forward secrecy. (unlike matrix)

* Still full p2p. (unlike matrix)

* Still works fine.

Just saying.

Why isn't Tox more popular? The difference has to be the amount of money/effort spent in marketing.

<comment><USER14> How it work through NATs?

<comment><USER13> It implements hole punching.

<comment><USER14> Hole punching works for firewalls, but is unreliable for NATs. Note that most home routers are Linux based, and Linux uses symmetric NAT, where hole punching does not generally work reliably.

<comment><USER13> It also implements relays, if both sides can't be reached.

And it works with TCP, if it can't be made to work with UDP.

And it supports ipv6.

You're pretty much covered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092269) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23088852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23088852) (these should be merged perhaps)?

</comment><comment><USER15> For those looking to selfhost synapse and riot, we (cloudron.io) recently made both these packages stable. If you need help in setting them up, happy to help here (even if not on cloudron)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a Python SDK that supports encryption well yet? I have a simple command line script to send a message to a Matrix room. About three months ago I tried to add encryption, but apparently the old matrix-python-sdk is deprecated in favor of matrix-nio, but encryption support in the latter was very marginal still.

<comment><USER3> matrix-nio's encryption is very robust now, but by far the easiest way to hook up a simple commandline script is to pipe it through pantalaimon ([https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon](https://github.com/matrix- org/pantalaimon)) - which acts as a daemon to offload E2EE from your script, using matrix-nio under the hood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have you guys tried Olvid [https://olvid.io/en/](https://olvid.io/en/), they removed the servers principle entirely. Worth trying

</comment><comment><USER18> Yay! This is the right move for their users.

There's still a ton of work left to do, but I'm thankful for all the hard work that went into making this possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> w00t! my computer club hosts a homeserver and it's been running so smoothly since we upgraded.

<comment><USER20> How is memory consumption going? I'm waiting for improvement in this area or a stable release of Dendrite [0] (hoping it has a reasonable memory usage).

0: [https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite](https://github.com/matrix- org/dendrite)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I heard there's a telegram-like client for Matrix? Is it still around?

<comment><USER3> nheko is pretty similar to TG and is reborn and evolving well after a hiatus a few years back: [https://github.com/Nheko- Reborn/nheko](https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this use ephemeral secrets/is it forward secret?

Can see this info in the blog.

<comment><USER3> It depends on the layer. Matrix used Olm for device-to-fecice encryption, which is a clone of Signal's double ratchet, and is PFS. For message history however we use Megolm, which is a simpler hash ratchet which is synchronised across the members of a group by sharing its state over Olm. You typically replace the Megolm ratchet every 100 msgs or 1 week, but depending on how fast you do that and how long you store the keys for, you can get PFS. The problem is that most users want to be able to access their chat history from the server, which is by definition incompatible with PFS as you have to keep the message keys around to decrypt the msgs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How they made scalable webrtc end-to-end encrypted? I guess it is not scalable (~5 members max).

<comment><USER3> Multi-way video conferencing in Matrix isn't e2ee yet; the e2ee-by-default here refers to private group chats, DMs, and 1:1 video/voip calls.

Once Jitsi lands their E2EE support (hopefully using Matrix's E2EE for key management, c.f. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855407)) then we'll get E2EE video conferencing too.

Until then, Matrix (but not Riot) also supports E2EE video conferencing via full mesh webrtc, but as you say, it scales to relatively few users.

<comment><USER23> Insertable streams are not going to help much since if it encrypts every frame this would mean that every frame will be encrypted and therefore couldn't be compressed. It doesn't make sense actually since you could just encrypt RTP payloads instead keeping service messages in plain text.

<comment><USER3> Insertable streams let you encrypt the compressed media.

WebRTC doesn't give you hooks to re-encrypt the SRTP payloads.

<comment><USER23> How does this visualisations are done? How it could "decode" incorrect image and display as a demo in various articles?

I do not believe that video codecs are able to decode over "encrypted" data and produce some video stream.

<comment><USER3> the point of insertable streams is that you can hook into the compressed payloads and encrypt them after compression, and then decrypt them before decompression. The codec never sees encrypted data.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shazam is always listening – even when it's been switched 'off' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/15/shazam_listening/ <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953368)</comment>


Free shipping from China - <AUTHOR> http://romain.goyet.com/articles/free_shipping_from_china/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_zone)

China uses free trade zones extensively. This means that some items a moved in bulk to domestic staging areas, so not everything is leaving from China, I believe that there are requirements that they be postmarked from China due to import export rules.

Second, China's postal system is a social system of a communist state, it is heavily subsidized and therefore much of the costs are hidden in the system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your help sorting this out! I quite don't understand your point though:

\- The Free Trade Zone seems to be related to customs (which, by the way, I was never asked to pay…).

\- Even if China's postal system is heavily subsidized, there's a part of the shipping that is handled by non-chinese people (once the package is in the customer's country). So who would be paying for that part?

<comment><USER2> Customarily the seller pays customs which is a percent of the price IIRC, the free trade zones allow China and other countries to ship stuff in bulk to another country and stage it as well as offset the cost of customs until the time of purchase. So it allows them to pre-ship bulk items to domestic staging areas. This may account for how the item gets to your country, but yes is does not account for domestic shipping. China may have agreements in place for domestic rates in other countries but that I do not know. I do know the Special Economic Zones account for the ability to get items from China to consumers at extremely low cost per item.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazon isn't losing any money on prime shipping. If you look at "other purchase options you can see that many other vendors offer the same products for about $3.99 less, but charge for shipping. Amazon's merely hiding the shipping cost with an elevated retail price.

<comment><USER4> I often hear people talk about how you're not really getting 'free' shipping since you are paying $99. Well, yes, but, that $99 doesn't just get you free shipping. Also free music streaming, quite a few free movies/tv shows, free photo storage, free music storage.

Honestly, I think $99 is a steal for all you get considering the music streaming alone costs you more than $99 a year on Google Play or Apple Music.

<comment><USER3> That's true, and it's great if you can use it. I don't care for their content delivery.</comment></comment></comment>


Unix in this module - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rubykube/module-cunix <comment><USER2> Strange organization here. If we look at ex08 for instance, there is a test.c file and an accompanying "binary_tree.h" header. This header declares some functions like "visit_tree", but they are not found in that subdirectory. Why would the declaration of the binary tree library be located together with the test module, but the implementation be elsewhere.

Much of this stuff is not related to Unix, too.</comment>


Ask HN: Ideas are cheap link? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I'm trying to help some business students and am looking for a specific article I saw surface a few times. I'm in a time pinch, and searchyc and Google are failing me.
The article in question is around ideas are cheap, or ideas are commodities. There was a long list of existing ideas that single person came up with, and the point being the value is in the execution. It's not the Inc article not PG's /ideas.html article, but a list of ideas.
If you vaguely know what I'm talking about, I'd be happy to help clarify it. If you can share that link, I'd be very grateful.
Thanks, and sorry for the uninteresting post.
Edit 1: Thank you! I thought this would go past /newest and die with the spam. I appreciate the links, but the post/article I'm looking for was essentially "see how invaluable an idea is? I'll give you a list of x number of things that I think would be an interesting business." The article then goes on to provide a list of ideas. <comment><USER2> I believe this is the one that had started it all:

[http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/08/ideas_are_just...](http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/08/ideas_are_just_a_multiplier_of.html)

And here are some others (more links on the same subject within each article):

<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100604/0954389689.shtml>

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/01/cultivate-teams- not...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/01/cultivate-teams-not- ideas.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404298> This one? I'll post other relevant finds. You might want to search YC again using keyword "ideas" and sort by points.

</comment><comment><USER4> reminds me of a Mark Cuban interview I saw recently

</comment><comment><USER5> There are some good sources for the 'attitude' that ideas are cheap, easy, and plentiful and execution is difficult, hard, and everything.

Google search:

"Ideas are easy execution is hard"

gives about 4,700 hits.

Google search:

"Ideas are easy" Kawasaki

yields as its first result:

[http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/04/cx_gk_1104artofthestart.htm...](http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/04/cx_gk_1104artofthestart.html)

with

Art Of The Start

Ideas Are Easy, Implementation Is Hard

Guy Kawasaki, 11.04.04, 9:55 AM ET

So this attitude goes back at least to 2004.

At

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvuirDPHKA&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvuirDPHKA&feature=player_embedded#at=67)

is an interview by John Heilemann (New York Magazine) of columnist- correspondent venture partners John Doerr (KPCB) and Fred Wilson (Union Square) at the OreillyMedia, Web 2.0 Summit 2010: "Point of Control: Finance", November 15-17, San Francisco, CA.

There one of Doerr's remarks was:

"Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."

The YouTUBE video is from a link at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com at

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/web2-interview-with-john- and...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/web2-interview-with-john-and- john.html)

which is Fred's thread on the interview.

On that thread at

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/web2-interview-with-john- and...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/web2-interview-with-john-and- john.html#comment-98615968)

is a rebuttal to Doerr's claim. The core of the rebuttal is:

Bad ideas are easy, and plentiful, and then, sure, execution is difficult and everything. Good ideas are difficult and rare, and then execution can be routine, and the US is awash in the ability to do routine execution well.

There is a fundamental problem with any empirical, summary observation such as:

"Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."

In many areas, for a variety of reasons, some quite solid, 'averages' are important. So, in venture capital, we should note two points:

First, just looking at what entrepreneurs send Doerr, likely the empirical average would be

"Ideas are easy".

Second, since likely such a large fraction of what entrepreneurs try is from "easy" ideas, even if their expected return on investment (ROI) is much less than for good ideas, if look at successful startups, then maybe, still, will see that most of them started with easy ideas and then were successful mostly just from execution.

So, the fundamental problem is that in venture capital, such empirical averages are next to irrelevant: Doerr, etc. are looking for successes, and only a tiny fraction of what they see in their e-mail or even in successes in market are good guides to planning for success.

More generally, empirical data can be terrific stuff. Maybe fundamentally it could be enough for all of 'information', but from just a little consideration that would take some unreasonably large amount of data.

So, instead of just empirical data, we have other methods. E.g., from some fundamentals, we can engineer solutions that are new and quite solid.

In the history of applied science and engineering, there are many projects where initial ideas were presented just on paper, were carefully reviewed and seen to be quite solid, and then execution was both routine and successful.

Parts of our civilization are quite good at such reviewing. Maybe biomedical technology venture capital does such reviews, but it does appear that information technology venture capital essentially never does. So, a really good idea will get evaluated essentially only in the head of an entrepreneur, and everyone else will see at most just the execution.</comment>


Insiders Ride Social Networking to a Big Payday - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/business/20bonanza.html?hp=&pagewanted=all <comment> brown9-2 Odd that this article doesn't mention that LNKD is down 35% from it's first- day highs: [http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...](http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1308600000000&chddm=8211&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:LNKD&ntsp=0)</comment>


Why do Covid fatalities remain low when infection numbers are rising? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/23/why-do-covid-fatalities-remain-low-when-infection-numbers-are-rising <comment><USER2> Haven't testing rates increased significantly? A natural outcome would be that we see more mild cases which previously would have flown under the radar.

I don't buy the article's hypothesis of social distancing being a factor. Social distancing has been ongoing for a long time, and if anything it's happening less now as people fear the virus less with dropping fatalities. So why would social distancing suddenly now begin to have a greater effect?

Mask usage could play a role. If you're infected while wearing a mask your initial viral load is likely significantly reduced. And at least here in England masks were not mandatory until recently.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've gotten better at treating it, and/or we're testing more people.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a short article...

When they mention the large drop in ventilator usage - isn't that because after a month or two, medical experts said it probably does nothing or even could harm the patient if you put them on ventilators?

</comment><comment><USER5> Could it be better treatment protocols?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if I'm missing something because I'm on mobile or have ads blocked but this article seems devoid of content.

We keep going through this. COVID rates spike, people see death rates don't immediately spike and make all sorts of claims about policy (we should open schools! In person dining!) then death rates do spike because they always lag tests by a month for a variety of reasons. In the U.S. there's also the impact of the states (Texas, Florida, Georgia) that have chosen to stop reporting accurate data at all. Out of sight out of mind.

And don't forget many of the (even young) people who aren't dying are going through weeks or months of hell and may have debilitating symptoms for an indeterminate length of time.

The only sane policy is to shut everything nonessential down until every case can be thoroughly traced and testing capacity is such that anyone can get a test at any time for any reason. If the U.S. had done that in March this would be over already and going out in public wouldn't be paying Russian roulette with your future.

<comment><USER7> > then death rates do spike because they always lag tests by a month

I don't think that is entirely accurate either. If you look at France for example[1] rates have steadily been climbing for six weeks again and yet there's not even a blip in deaths, and the corresponding rise in deaths in the first wave also did not trail infections by much, same in Spain where there doesn't even appear to be a lag[2]. Pretty much all countries I checked didn't lag deaths much at all. It may very well also be the case that we missed a ton of covid infections during the first wave.

[1][https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/fr](https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/fr)

[2][https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/es](https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/es)

<comment><USER8> Supply of tests was constrained at the start of the epidemic so you might be reading too much into that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The elderly are better protected now. Only they need to be protected, everybody under 50 has a higher risk to die from a car accident.

Belgium and Spain had the most prominent policy errors in their care homes, which led to it's exorbitant high percentages. In Belgium they didn't have enough N95 face masks, so caretakers started sharing them. In Spain it was a similar care home fuckup (Fascist government cuts, they only kept the hospitals in excellent shape). My guess is that the UK with its privatized care homes had similar issues. No idea yet about the high rates in France. They didn't had fascist government lately I thought (Forgot about Sarcozy apparently). Italy had its high flu IFR's of over 1% for decades. (Privatized homes plus high air pollution plus Berlusconi, leading to be the world flu leader). The US has its sugar crisis and healthcare crisis known for decades, besides it's political inefficiency.

Treatment protocol improvements are another theory, but as far as I see it they still use oxygen ventilators, which is known to be of not much help. So unlikely. They also refused to use known therapeutical prevention methods which did work (politics were apparently more important than saving life's of elders), instead promoted fringe methods like 5% face masks and school closings.

<comment><USER3> How is Spain fascist? Its legislature is headed by members of the socialist- aligned PSOE in both the upper and the lower house. Very confused by these comments.

<comment><USER10> Fascist and Nazis were also socialists. Hitler's political party had "Socialist" in it's name. It's funny that nowadays we call Nazis "far right" where in fact they should be called "far left".

<comment><USER11> Now do the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flutter ECommerce Ready to Use App - <AUTHOR> https://www.ionicfirebaseapp.com/products/flutter-e-commerce-clothing-app <comment><USER2> Contact email@example.com</comment>


Don't forget to download your Posterous blog - <AUTHOR>

posterous.com will shut down in 2 days, don't forget to download your blog backup! http://blog.posterous.com/thanks-from-posterous <comment><USER2> I wish I could - see <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5621245>

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a similar problem, but it was fixed a couple of hours ago.

<comment><USER2> Now I'm getting:

        The specified key does not exist

Really, really fed up with this crap. Wishing I'd never started with Posterous, and taking lessons for how I treat my users in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know why this is listed under <https://news.ycombinator.com/ask>?

<comment><USER4> The /ask page lists text posts, i.e. those which include a text body rather than a link (what reddit calls "self-posts"). It's named "ask" because "Ask HN" posts are one of the more common kinds of text posts, but it treats all text posts the same.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Is Hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2012/08/16/yahoo-is-hiring/ <comment><USER2> I'm a front-end engineer on the YUI Team at Yahoo. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try my best to answer it here.

<comment><USER3> I'm perpetually mystified Yahoo isn't a bigger presence on my phone. The Yahoo! games division ignored the mobile market. The Yahoo portal app is a literally an embedded browser onto which yahoo overlays 4 buttons. Home, _Post to Facebook_ , Share, and More.

Why does the most noticeable feature in a Yahoo app post links to a competitor's website? Is management paying attention? Do they have an actual mission?

Yahoo's mobile websites can be useless (e.g. sports.yahoo.com shows an alphabetical listing of teams in NCAA football conferences, but you cannot see their standings). Do the people handing the sports website actually watch sports? Does the project manager not realize I'll never use their sports site again?

Does yahoo not see phones as a priority? Why hasn't someone taken charge and attempted to bring Yahoo to the mobile market in a meaningful way? As an end user it seems the company is coasting. Is the new CEO going to be able to get something going or is the company too stuck in the mud to get some focus on development?

I know the post is not really the questions you were looking for but from the outside all I see is disorganization, lack of focus and fear of change. Why would someone want to go into that environment?

<comment><USER4> While I don't have much to say about your product questions (I'm an engineer an open-source platform team at Yahoo, other end of the spectrum), one that I can answer though is...

> "Why would someone want to go into that environment?"

Good question. Like all companies, you should choose the one that most fits your ideals and career objectives, so I can only answer your question from my perspective. For me, that is working for a large Web company, who values open- source and front-end engineering, and provides unique challenges and problems to solve at a massive scale. All other issues or perks are secondary to me as long as I get to spend my workday doing what I'm passionate about, and my company supports my interests. There are few, if any other companies I can work with that match what Yahoo can in that regard. In fact, in 2008 there were only two companies on my list when I was looking to make the move from the startup-world, I interviewed at both, one was warm and welcoming (Y!), the other not as much. Really happy with the way things worked out.

It's tough (impossible?) to get _everything_ you want in a work environment. Remember, happiness is entirely relative [1]. You can find dozens of blog posts about people being unhappy at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, startups, etc. just as you can find people who are extremely happy. Everyone values different things, but I think the interest most people share is that their company values them. Oddly enough, last year I referenced a Marissa Mayer quote in a short blog post [2] about finding happiness in your career, and why I like Yahoo. Glad to see she also realized Yahoo is an awesome place to be.

You just have to prioritize which aspects are important to you, and ensure those are important to your employer as well. If someone is choosing their employer based off reasons other than how they spend 95% of their workday, they should reevaluate their situation. That's at least my philosophy.

Sorry that probably doesn't answer your product questions, but I felt your underlying question was "Why Yahoo?", so I tried to best answer that.

[1] Interesting study which you can find references to it all over the Web. "Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?" [http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1980-01001-001) Related TED talk, [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html)

[2] "The Best Career Advice You'll Ever Get" [http://derek.io/blog/2011/the- best-career-advice-youll-ever-...](http://derek.io/blog/2011/the-best-career- advice-youll-ever-get/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for taking the time to write a response. I know my original post was a bit scattershot. You gave a very good reply for what I gave you to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.businessinsider.com/forget-iphones-and-free- food-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/forget-iphones-and-free-food-heres- the-real-big-change-marissa-mayer-is-bringing-to-yahoo-2012-8)

This isn't the team slated for the deathmarch is it?

<comment><USER2> Theres nothing on that article that says a team is on a deathmarch, unless you posted the URL wrong. Just because a project got re-allocated (I don't even know what project this is, btw) doesn't mean the engineers were fired or something. :-/</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's stopping you from starting up? - <AUTHOR> Dear Hacker, As an active user of HN, there is a high probability that you are excited about starting up. So, what is it that is preventing you from starting up?
Maybe you already started up. So, what is it that's stopping you from making it as successful as you want to be?
Do share your pain point and we will try our best to help you solve it. <comment><USER2> Eh, it is you again. Are you trying to drum up business for your company? If so, this is not the right place to do it. I see you have changed your website.[http://ideatostartup.org](http://ideatostartup.org)

In case anyone is wondering, this was OP's initial thread -[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200913)

<comment><USER3> My problem with Mr. Daga's offering is that he claims to be an expert in all things startup but does not seem to grasp the concept of how to communicate his intent or show his value. His site is a very basic Meteor setup. He has grammatical mistakes galore. He's value proposition is that if you add your email to his list he will make you go from being unsuccessful to being successful; we're not sure how. The whole thing is a poor attempt all the way around to create, I imagine, an email list to eventually sell a book or maybe some sort of consulting services.

Mr. Daga, please, tell me why I should hand you my email address? How will you turn me from one of the failures of the startup world to a success? What are you offering me? Why should I listen to you? Anything.

<comment><USER2> Mr Daga's initial site was $9,000 and they will convert the idea or something like that. It will be harsh of me to say it is a "scam". That has being scratched to this new site. My problem with his approach and questions on HN is what exactly is he hoping to achieve? Does he want to across as an expert? I don't understand it really. I am looking at his responses to the people who responded and don't even know what to make of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am literally laughing out loud reading your comment. What happened to you Pavornyoh? You very much sensible last time.

<comment><USER2> @Nikhildaga, I am glad I can make you laugh. These are genuine questions. Looking at your site now and this thread you started, what are you looking to accomplish? These questions have to be asked you know..

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to help entrepreneurs succeed. That is all I am trying to accomplish. But, with the rigid mind which you have got, anybody doing any good and anybody doing anything new will look a scam to you. Elon Musk must be a scam to you few years ago. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs must be scam to you too. If you don't believe in something, it does not mean anything.

Someone is always doing something somebody else said was impossible. Try trying.

I wish good look to you. You have got a good brain and if you utilize it in constructive way instead of fantasizing criticisms, you will do far good to the society and to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just launched a bitcoin & litecoin mining pool at [https://crypto.space](https://crypto.space). I believe aside from other pools with zero pool fees, I have the lowest pool fee I can possibly afford, at 0.56%.

I'm having an awful time getting the first users to sign up to contribute their hashing power to the pool, as there's no incentive for someone to join when there's no one else using the pool & no hashing power to share at the beginning.

I'd gladly pay ~$30/month for users with a good amount of hash power to sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey cdvonstinkpot,

It looks like your main concern is about getting Traction. Here are the 19 channels for getting traction : [https://medium.com/swlh/the-19-channels-you- can-use-to-get-t...](https://medium.com/swlh/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to- get-traction-93c762d19339)

How many have you tried? Trying some other channels will certainly help you get the users you want. Thanks

<comment><USER3> So, I hate to beat this dead horse. But, evidently I don't hate beating it enough to stop. Here goes:

The poster came to you with a very specific problem with his particular startup which is in a funny space. He has a mining pool which needs hashing power, he has incentives, but he needs traction which is hard because those incentives don't start to kick in until he has a certain level of traction. He has given a very specific amount of money he'd be willing to pay to find that traction.

You, a self proclaimed expert in accelerating startups, then give him a rather bland and generalized "internet marketing" blog post. How does this solve his problem? "Trying some other channels will certainly help you get the users you want." Really? How? Will targeted blog posts incentivize users with large hash rates to come to his service? Are you suggesting his real problem is that he is not well known in an overly saturated market? Maybe speaking engagements might be a better choice? Why?

Maybe you're right he should try these. But the important part is the why.

<comment><USER2> I agree with @Trcollinson here. If you want to be considered expert in "start- ups", you have to be able to give detailed answers and not blog posts. Why did you select that blog post anyway? Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have problems finding non-tech co-founders.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am aware of many looking for tech co-founders. Maybe one of them got same idea as yours. Would you like connect you with them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I haven't started up yet because I don't have enough knowledge about startup or business' legislation in my country (México), and actually that's the reason why I'm looking for a good business cofounder. As you may guess, I haven't found him yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey razeonex, Its generally recommended to have a co-founder from those whom you know already. Are you sure there is no one of your friend who can be the business cofounder? You can also try [http://founderdating.com/](http://founderdating.com/)

One more thing, contrary to popular belief, there are many successful solo entrepreneurs out there. If you think you can learn about business legislation in Mexico, starting up as a single founder is also an option. You can bring in others later.

Thanks

<comment><USER6> Hey nikhildaga thanks! I just signed up! I'll tell you that you're right, I maybe just need a little push or someone who trusts, and I think I can build it with a little bit of knowledge. Your words were really helpful actually :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks razeonex. Glad it helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ideas and skill.

I'm here for the articles and discussion not to start my own business.

</comment><comment><USER8> One Idea!!!</comment>


Boots.com is currently throttling access to shoppers - <AUTHOR> http://www.boots.com/throttle/index.html <comment><USER2> I've seen that happen on websites here in Denmark during big sales. Not sure what the point is...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They must be losing a lot of sales. I would love to see a post mortem of this when they're back up and running, along with some figures on what this is costing and how something like this happens.

</comment><comment><USER3> Timer went down to zero, then reset to 40 minutes... what the damn hell?</comment>


Amazon and the extinct dinosaurs - <AUTHOR> http://my-inner-voice.blogspot.com/2010/11/amazon-and-extinct-dinosaurs.html

<comment><USER2> How $8M per year HPC cloud is way cheaper that a soon-to-be-dead Jurassic Supercomputer ($50M to $85M per year)</comment>


Ubuntu Removes the Amazon Web App - <AUTHOR> https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/ubuntu-removes-the-amazon-web-app <comment><USER2> The whole reason people use Ubuntu and other free OS's is _because_ they don't come with a bunch of commercial crap & telemetry and whatever other vendors foist on their captive audience. Going down that route is completely against what FOSS should stand for.

<comment><USER3> > & telemetry

Telemetry and crash reports can be done right so you should not hate the concept but the bad implementation.

First step is that it should all be optional and it should be disabled by default or have it as an option you are forced to decider if yes or no. You should also be informed when data is sent and what is sent and have the option to deny. Like if app X crashes I send the crash report but if app Y crashes I won't send it.

Also about telemetry if all power users turn it off then you can have situations where developers will drop a feature because they don't use it and there is no data to show that more then 12 people are using it.

<comment><USER4> You're saying that as if the point of the software is to support the software, or report good numbers. It's not. The user should be the focus.

Opt-out and hard-coded systems immediately put you no the back foot. You make people question _why?_ and _is it worth it?_ If all you've got it reporting numbers of users, you can go do one. The risk of genuine private data leaking out is not worth your marketing numbers _to me_.

The Amazon link was much more egregious though. You were sending all Dash searches through to Amazon. This was unacceptable and poorly explained. I'm sure some people liked it, and they honestly could have made the integration a better trade for the user (play videos off Prime Video, etc), but only as an opt-in feature where you can see the ramifications.

<comment><USER5> People need to understand that large scale software not having telemetry borders on malpractice if it interacts with the internet. If your software is crashing on a large scale - or worse, causing problems for other people's servers or taking out users' computers - you need to know, and you need to fix it fast. You can't just wait days or weeks to get enough complaints about it from people savvy enough to file bug reports.

Look no further than how a recent Chrome update almost completely broke the software for Citrix users. Their telemetry (somehow) was not tracking this so it took days to get a fix because IT/ops people had to figure out that a Chrome update caused the bug and then escalate through chromium bug reports. Now imagine that happening _any time_ a crash or major bug makes it into connected software...

For stuff that just runs offline, like Excel or whatever, it's super justified to not want telemetry in it if that's the tradeoff users want.

Incidentally this is basically the reason why all the major browsers are on rapid forced (unless you're in the enterprise) updates - the risk of having users stay on older versions with security holes is just too high because it ends up leading to massive botnets. I hate it, but hundreds of millions of people use those apps.

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with the little popup that asks you if you want to report a problem every time a crash happens? Is there really any problem with letting the user choose on a case-by-case basis?

If it's happening so frequently that the popup becomes annoying, you've got bigger problems.

<comment> blaser-waffle Because people rarely click Yes, even if it's rare.

Plus it means little to the end user, and outside of HN, Slashdot, or other tech forums, most folks don't even know what telemetry means in an OS context. They click No, and move on.

<comment><USER7> Are you saying all of those users whose browsers are crashing on a large scale are going to say no?

Also, are you implying software should send telemetry to the mothership regardless of users' will?

There used to be a time software was tested and released finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had assumed Amazon was paying for the Amazon "app" in Ubuntu (based on gut feel) but it looks like it might have been part of a Canonical's web-y vision for the Linux desktop future [1]. Does anyone know why the Amazon app existed in the first place?

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/05/what-happened-ubuntu- uni...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/05/what-happened-ubuntu-unity-web- app-integration)

<comment><USER9> Well hey, I just happened to work on that stuff back when Canonical still had its own desktop product.

The idea was to make a user's experience as great as possible. The desktop design department all lived through their iPhones, and felt that most non- techie computer users wanted the same experience. The whole desktop-phone convergence thing was the prime directive, and having search be the prime experience on desktop for a fully-integrated web experience was the way there. There were many "scopes" plugged in that searched all kinds of things, and among them was one that searched Amazon.

It didn't hurt that Canonical made a bit of income from affiliate referrals. At least until Amazon found out. Then, it just became another web search scope.

<comment><USER10> Was this around the same time Canonical had phone ambitions?

> non-techie computer users

MS made the same bet, but is this really your userbase?

<comment><USER11> Ubuntu has always tried to be (with mixed success) "Linux for everyone else". At some points that just meant it was relatively easy to install and had a pleasing UI. At other points they've really tried to push their way outside of the primary userbase of Linux. Successful or not, I'm glad someone out there is at least giving it a try. Imagine a world where desktop Linux isn't just for nerds. Where more than one consumer-facing laptop comes with Linux pre- installed, vetted, and actively supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I get my torch lit, what's going on exactly?

<comment><USER13> Clarification to all: "drops" in this context means "gets rid of" rather than "releases".

Ubuntu is _getting rid of_ affiliate links which it originally introduced to generate revenue, but have proved controversial and by the sounds of it unfruitful.

Ubuntu has also previously included Amazon search results in its start menu search (known as 'lenses' or the 'HUD') which were also controversial, but these were removed when Ubuntu switched to shipping the Gnome desktop by default.

<comment><USER14> Which then raises the question, how does - if at all - Ubuntu make money for Canonical?

<comment><USER15> Business support and private cloud offerings (as in: pay Canonical to come set up a private cloud for you on machines you own).

Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses.

<comment> blaser-waffle > Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would > likely be the default choice for businesses.

I mean, with regards to Linux Enterprise stuff... it is. SuSE is the boss when it comes to SAP, but otherwise everything lives on some flavor of Red Hat or derivative; CentOS is everywhere.

In the Enterprise we only roll with stuff that is officially supported. Hiring freezes, layoffs, and general work ebb-and-flow means we will need to rope in help at some point, and while I may be a wiz at some CLI functions I'm not up on what each patch is doing to the environment. Having a support contract to lean on is a huge advantage.

Canonical was (is?) effectively trying to do this on the .deb side of the house (as opposed to the .rpm side), though I don't know how successful they were/are. I looked at interviewing w/ Canonical, but the Glassdoor reviews painted a picture of an org that was having deep growing pains and internal struggles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the rage. It's a shortcut that opens amazon.com in a browser. It queries location, for opening the local amazon site, but that could be avoided by disabling geoclue.

<comment><USER17> The default was to submit all Unity launcher searches to Amazon to populate the desktop search with items sold in Amazon.

<comment><USER18> This was the shortcut to Amazon website, not the search lens that already died in the transition from Unity to Gnome.

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/ubuntu-removes-the- amazo...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/ubuntu-removes-the-amazon-web- app)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the correction. Probably others have also confused these two features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great. Getting rid of that app was one of the first things I would do on a fresh Ubuntu installation.

</comment><comment><USER20> The ambiguous "drop" in this context really annoys me.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, i automatically assumed they meant released.

<comment><USER22> I totally forgot that "drop" could mean "release". The usage of the word here seemed entirely unambiguous to me.

<comment><USER20> It was unambiguous to me too, until I started reading HN where it seemed to consistently used to mean 'released' or 'shipped'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The first thing I did after install was to remove all the launcher shortcuts except for Firefox. This'll make it easier on new installs for me (and perhaps most of us).

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder whether they are making room for an Amazon competitor.

</comment><comment><USER25> Eventually they drop the crapware foisted on us that we complained about when they put it in.

Why won't they listen to us?

<comment><USER26> It'$ a my$tery, no one know$

<comment><USER27> It'$ a my$tery we might never $olve

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Have they ever released how much money they earned off those affiliate searchers/clicks?

</comment><comment><USER29> and nothing of value was lost.

next up: remove the malware from MOTD.

</comment><comment><USER30> Good riddance

</comment><comment><USER31> Hear, hear!

</comment><comment><USER32> wont be missed</comment>


Elsevier – My part in its downfall (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ <comment><USER2> I experienced the other side of this, as someone working for a library technology company. Getting licenses to index just the metadata of non-open access journals can be extremely costly, even when the journal publishers derive a net benefit from the arrangement (if discovery software surfaces a result from your journal, and the academic clicks through, the library link resolver records it and the figures are used to justify a continued subscription).

It's a massive racket, the source material (academic papers) are free, the editorial staff are not paid, e-journals have obviated the need for printing and distributing paper copies ... Elsevier and their ilk are a parasite, feeding on the spoils of academic research that is often publicly funded.

But then, in a "publish or die" mentality that researchers are forced into, publishing in journals with higher impact ratings help them keep their job; unless every single researcher agrees to stop publishing in the paid-for journals and move en-masse to open access this sorry situation will continue unabated.

<comment><USER3> (edits for structure. disclaimer: these views are my own, not my employers' or the communities' or publishers')

Publishers do provide a necessary service: financial support for meetings. One significant problem with "Open Access Everywhere!" is that many conferences are a huge financial net loss even after the registration fees, so they need the publisher's financial support to actually hold a meeting. In this way, most of the smaller conferences that publishers support are subsidized by the heavy hitters. It would be a shame for those smaller meetings to disappear.

It's easier for top tier conferences to choose how to publish. For example, in computer vision, CVPR and ICCV (two top-tier conferences in the field) are currently co-sponsored by IEEE (the publisher) _and_ the Computer Vision Foundation, which is run by well-respected members of the computer vision community. As part of this arrangement, papers from these conferences appear in IEEE Xplore as well as the CVF's open access website, free for everyone: [http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/menu.py](http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/menu.py) Of course, only a very small number of heavy-hitting conferences can afford the kind of leverage that CVPR and ICCV needed to pull this arrangement off. In their unique situation, everyone (publishers and academics) benefit from the arrangement. That's not usually the case.

In an open-access-only "Ditch the Publishers!" world, it's unclear how we can continue to support smaller conferences. Not every field has big industry players that can sponsor the meeting, and not many students or advisors have enough grant money to afford increased registration fees.

<comment><USER4> But the academics pay the publishers, who then oh so generously put on these conferences. If they didn't pay the publishers in the first place there would be more money for attending conferences. That's eerily similar to a protection racket or something.

<comment><USER3> Should conferences raise registration fees in such a system?

Most students already can't attend conferences on their own because registration is so expensive. Making it even more so would prevent the students that could benefit the most form attending.

<comment><USER4> (I should know, I'm a student) One would like to think that there would then be more scholarship funds available to students interested in attending. Many conferences I'm aware of also offer reduced registration fees to students. In my experience the travel expenses tend to be the greater portion for students attending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A better bottom-up strategy is one based on assurance contracts. Some scientists might not be willing to immediately part with Elsevier because of other constraints. But they can publicly declare a promise: if scientists X,Y,Z (perhaps their direct competitors, or the editorial board of a journal) promise to not work with Elsevier, neither will I. Scientists X,Y,Z might then have their own promises. If these promises are recorded publicly, that can start a growing movement where today no one has to do anything, but in a few months or years a lot of people have no disincentive not to work with Elsevier.

<comment><USER6> Great idea. But then Elsevier might refuse to work with people who have such contracts.

<comment><USER7> I don't think Elsevier has editorial control over the journals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tim Gowers is an amazing mathematician and a person of great integrity, but this is not exactly news given that the boycott has gone on for so long now (see the date on the article). More recently, in March 2016 he founded a new ultra-low-cost journal (Discrete Analysis) which publishes all articles on arXiv. [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis- la...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-launched/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Note - this from 2012. An update is published here - [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/interesting-times- in...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/interesting-times-in-academic- publishing/)

</comment><comment><USER10> He mentions that the editorial board of _Topology_ resigned to found _Journal of Topology_. This is counted as a success story, but when I try to read a paper there I get this message:

"You may access this article for 1 day for US$40.00."

Great deal.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's tough because academic disciplines are so provincial; each has its own short list of (typically closed) journals that garner respect.

To get people to switch to an upstart open access journal takes momentum out of the gate. You need to convince qualified volunteers to do peer review for a journal they've never heard of and that might vanish tomorrow. You need to convince influential insiders to submit quality papers. And you need to repeat this process for each insular sub-discipline.

<comment><USER11> i like the idea of papers getting stored and cataloged in arxiv. the new- journals can reference the paper on arxiv. I don't have the links handy but there was a recent Overlay Journal that did just that.

one could make their own journal from a git repo or subreddit. they are just lists

<comment><USER10> I like that idea too, but my point's that this isn't a technical problem. It's a social problem. It's the problem of convincing a critical mass of influential people to simultaneously put their reputation on the line for a new e-journal that nobody's ever heard of.

<comment><USER11> I understand, and agree with you. Almost no problems in the world are technical. We have everything we need, right here, right now.

The academics that already have tenure need to be the ones leading the charge. The niche and "low quality" journals all need to go overlay+openaccess. While Elsevier and Springer are pointed as these rent seeking machines, even the ACM and IEEE have a pretty tight noose on the flow of information.

Maybe it is as easy as a federal law that states, if federal money ever comes within 3 meters of your research, the researcher cannot assign copyright to another entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its amazing that our phones say it's 2016, we have a database about literally every episode of every popular TV series, yet we _can not_ have a database of scientific findings, measurements and methods that everyone can search, download, analyze, use it to train models, even though taxpayers paid for it. We have in part sacrificed the disemmination of knowledge to the egos of scientists. I think it's shameful.

<comment><USER13> > the structure of the job market for academic scientists

Fixed that for you. Few scientists are anti-open access, especially for reasons of ego. In physics and mathematics, for example, virtually all papers are published on arxiv unless a particular journal forces them not to. It instead has to do with publishing in high impact journals as well being required for (a) people to read your paper, as their peer review processes are a first filter to separate the wheat from the chaff and (b) because they generally keep their jobs by virtue of such publications.

Unless you're a rockstar in your field, nobody is going to read your paper if all you did was put it on arxiv, and as a result it won't be taken as evidence you should keep your job. This isn't the scientists fault, it's just a relic of a time when the publishers of journals _did_ provide a worthwhile service.

There are some fields where people tend to be greedy about hiding their research before its done lest anybody steal it, but this seems to me to be an acceptable level of "ego". Would you object to an open source developer wanting his authorship to remain clear in any derivative works of his code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is from 2012, and his then idea of a website listing academics who publicly boycott Elsevier was long ago implemented here: [http://thecostofknowledge.com/](http://thecostofknowledge.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The US Government is trying to address access to publicly funded research by requiring that most government agencies have open access plans.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=public+access+plan&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=public+access+plan&ia=web)

This was started government-wide from a memo by John Holdren.

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf)

Each agency comes up with their own plan, but they have to make access to the research possible without charge.

Many agencies provide access to submitted manuscripts.

Another good avenue to address access would be to get states to adopt similar policies based on research by state employees.

It is often easier to get states to pass laws than it is to deal at the federal level.

Is anyone interested in writing up some legislation?

<comment><USER16> From Holdren's memo:

> Specifically, each agency: i) shall use a twelve-month post-publication > embargo period as a guideline for making research papers publicly available

Twelve month? Seems Europe is heading in a better direction:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement- eu...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-european- leaders-call-immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> From 2012

<comment><USER18> And Elsevier is still going strong, and annoying people. It seems that piracy[1] is the only way to bring them down.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177957)

<comment><USER19> piracy is an act of breaking copyright by copying one's work. who is copyright holder of scientific papers? definitely, not Elsevier.

<comment><USER20> Yes, Elsevier definitely _is_ the copyright holder to most of the non-open- access papers it controls.

Elsevier, like most other no-OA journals, requires a copyright transfer. Quoting [https://www.elsevier.com/about/company- information/policies/...](https://www.elsevier.com/about/company- information/policies/copyright) :

> In order for Elsevier to publish and disseminate research articles, we need > publishing rights. This is determined by a publishing agreement between the > author and Elsevier. ...

> For subscription articles: _Authors transfer copyright to the publisher_ as > part of a journal publishing agreement, but have the right to: ...

(There are some exceptions. Obviously Elsevier does not control the copyright to materials which are not covered under copyright, like papers produced by employees of the US government as part of their job.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I won't eat at McDonald's.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's funny, the whole complaint about the tactic of bundling.

This is something that punk and hard core music has done, pretty much since the beginning. Most punk rock discographies are filled with repetitive overlaps of the same songs, and re-recorded versions, or versions of songs performed at live shows.

For a while, I had just assumed it was part of the whole small budget, DIY, low fidelity aspect of the genre. Bands might have tracks on EP's and 7 inches, that go out of print and become rarites, or the band might just be disorganized, or have extra space on a disc, and pile in a few more tracks, because what the hell?

But after a while, collections become bloated with all kinds of pointless cruft, and you look through some catalogs, and it's pretty obvious that some bands would just get desperate to make sure they have something in the new releases section every six months, to stay visible, and they'd obviously record one new track, bundle it with four or five other tracks, and dump it into their catalog to indicate signs of life.

It's not unlike like baseball cards, where doubles are a known factor, and concentrations of rare desirable items are controlled and designed, to fuel collector's habits.

I guess the difference with scientific journals is that the fanbase doesn't have the same sort of emotional investment in their collectables.

<comment><USER5> A particular band's music [1] is not a public good paid for largely out of taxpayer money. Private enterprise can do whatever it wants to do, as long as it is not actively hurting anyone else.

[1] Music as a whole is a public good, but any one band forced out of business does little to diminish this public good.

<comment><USER23> > A particular band's music [1] is not a public good paid for largely out of > taxpayer money.

Actually, many countries _do_ actually partially compensate bands through taxes, which makes the whole thing even more messed up. See the various blank media taxes, or even government-run record labels (such as BD Pop).</comment></comment></comment>


What happens to retired airliners? See a tear-down of a 747-400 - <AUTHOR> http://aviationweek.com/blog/photos-what-happens-all-those-airliners-when-they-retire-see-tear-down-747-400 <comment><USER2> Kevin McCloud recently did a TV programme for channel 4 (UK), where they took a retired Airbus A320 and recycled as much of it as possible into non-aircraft related goods. I believe this was with the engines already removed.

[http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevins-supersized- salvage](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kevins-supersized-salvage)

[http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/kevins-supersized- salvage...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/kevins-supersized-salvage- kevin-mccloud-3450695)

Even if the engines are too old to re-use, the high temperature nickel alloys they contain are valuable for making new high temperature engine parts. There is a real scarcity of that type of material.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing that those winglets alone are worth GBP 400,000. It's just a few layers of metal, no?

<comment><USER4> The link below says the fuel cost per hour for a 747-300 is ~$21,000.

[http://www.what2fly.com/operating_cost/boeing/747-300.php](http://www.what2fly.com/operating_cost/boeing/747-300.php)

The winglets save about 3 - 3.5+% fuel consumption. (from Boeing's website and Wikipedia)

So it only takes roughly 2000 hours of flight time to recover the costs from a used set of winglets ($650k each according to the article).

2000 flight hours is generally less than 2 years worth of flights for a normal 747-300. (Couldn't find a great source, didn't look too hard: [http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/general_aviation/re...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation- forums/general_aviation/read.main/492074/) )

According to this they weight between 375 - 518 pounds and are ~6 feet tall, which is significantly more than they look. [http://www.b737.org.uk/winglets.htm](http://www.b737.org.uk/winglets.htm)

Edit: doubled the hours, thanks bhousel

<comment><USER5> What I don't understand is, why would you order an aircraft without them in the first place,if the saving is so big?

<comment><USER6> Generally they would be older airframes where winglets weren't an option at the time of manufacture.

Also, if you are running a lot of short flights, fuel costs may not be your primary concern. For example, the 747-400D is a model meant for short domestic routes like between Japanese islands, and doesn't have winglets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess that isn't too surprising but other than the avionics and engines which seem relatively standard, I'm surprised that there is such a market for the other stuff. Presumably its people keeping jets flying that need replacement seats or that video screen from a specific version of in cabin entertainment systems.

People buy high tech stuff and part it out as well, so company A will sell their servers to the scrapman who will then resell hard drives, memory, CPUs, and HBAs and then scrap the chassis. I cobbled together several VAXen that way (buying 'disposed' ones and pulling enough parts to make a whole one).</comment>


XPS 15: how I set up dual boot, GPU switching and multitouch gestures on Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/60a907/xps_15_9560_from_the_box_to_productivity_how_i/ <comment><USER2> Few things I would do differently, granted I've never struggled to the level the author has latest Linux Mint and a new XPS 15.

1\. Always wipe the disk/trash all partitions and install Windows 10 fresh after you rip out the keys. OEMs ship crapware city with some nasty nasty things sometimes. You will also get back a decent amount of extra GBs from recovery partitons.

2\. Linux distros all come with Gparted, use it for resizing.

3\. The nVidia drivers are ready to go in additional drivers, don't know why he was installing ppas ( picked wrong release? )

As a golden rule if you have brand spanking new hardware and things are not working, upgrading your kernel to bleeding latest will usually solve things. ( 60% of the time it works evertime! But no seriously, you may need to roll up your sleeves and compile RCs with custom patches )

4\. OSX like gestures work out of the box very nicely on Cinnamon. It's a shame he couldn't get it going, might be worth spending a little more effort on getting it running. Forcing it or xorg to reconfigure might work if something screwed up with the driver switching?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great timing for this as I just removed my XPS 15 from the box not 30 minutes or so ago. I still haven't decided if I'll dual-boot Linux or use VMWare.</comment>


What Books Are Product Hunt's Top 500 Makers Reading? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parrotread.com/what-books-are-product-hunts-top-500-makers-reading-160cdfa229d9#.vh53ckq2u <comment><USER2> Any list for top hacker news posters?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Messages.app gets cross-device notifications just right - <AUTHOR> http://ericdfields.com/2012/02/16/messages.app-gets-notification-behvaior-just-right/ TL;DR:
When typing in Messages.app, iCloud knows your in Messages.app. When typing on the iPad, iCloud knows your on the iPad. When you're engaged in a conversation on one device, the other devices do not get notified of new messages. This avoids cross-device notification flares currently experienced by calendar alerts, which makes for an especially noisey 9:55 AM for me.
Now say you're working, working, working and Messages.app is out of focus. At this point, iCloud doesn't know what you're up to. A new message comes in. Since iCloud doesn't know what you've done since the conversation stopped it notifies all your devices.
You're still in OS X so you reply to the message via Messages.app. Now you've got notifications to dismiss on your iOS devices, right? Total first-world bummer, right? Nope: iCloud dismisses the notifications across devices once the conversation picks up again.
No extra X-ing out of things. No burnt seconds of your life. Just gets rid of them because it knows you've started talking again. <comment><USER2> That's nice and all, except that I can't add my phone number to my Messages account, so anyone with a mobile devise can only send messages to my phone. Unless they sent a "text" to my email address, which I'm sure people do all the time.</comment>


Psychotic Websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/31102

<comment><USER2> Ironic to me at least, the style/format of the linked page look psychotic. Sterile black and white with lots of underlining and very little space between the lines. (Shudder) I was too afraid to read it unfortunately. The style scared the crap out of me.

But, I read it anyway. The article isn't much use to me. But, maybe Google could provide an indicator by each link indicating a "psychosis" score for the page based on frequency of phrases in the text like "microwave", "conspiracy", and "paranormal". Then they could change out the indicator each day with something new, like an "Apprentice" score for the number of times "fired", "Trump", or "Ivanka" were mentioned in a page.</comment>


Why you should move your startup from San Francisco to Vegas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.walls360.com/yes-vegas-infographic-1-from-yiying-lu-move-your-startup-to-las-vegas/

<comment><USER2> A: "What happened?" B: "He took the seed round and bet it on black!"</comment>


We Are Building Educative to Advance Interactive Learning in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.educative.io/collection/page/6630002/190001/200001 <comment><USER2> Good initiative

</comment><comment><USER3> Great going. All the best guys!</comment>


Phonegap Build for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://build.phonegap.com/docs/ios-builds

<comment><USER2> Very cool, I wasn't aware that of the PhoneGap Build project.

I was looking at PhoneGap pretty heavily last year but abandoned it once I had started with Appcelerator Titanium, but I have recently been revisiting it as Titanium has lagged in their support for blackberry.

I don't suppose anyone would want to send me a beta key.</comment>


New Twitter exploit about goats – how it works. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wait-till-i.com/2010/09/26/new-twitter-exploit-how-it-works/ <comment><USER2> Nothing fixes an exploit faster than the threat of embarrassing sexual messages.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Twitter allowing updates through the API via IFRAMES and GET

Total amateurs. I hope those guys didn't have the guts to say anything about diaspora. Because disallowing GET updates is, like, third page on network security book.

<comment><USER4> It is also an error to assume that disallowing GET for updates adds any security. I recommend reading about cross site request forgery. CSRF is the type of attack used on Twitter today.

<comment><USER3> Never said it did.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you did. You said that not allowing GET requests to change data on a site is commonly covered in network _security_ books. It's not a security issue, it's a behavior issue. GET requests are supposed to "safe" in that they don't result in changing any data on the site[1]. Breaking that expectation can result in all sorts of unintended consequences, such as unintended changes caused by link prefetching.

The article is also subtly wrong. GET requests can be protected from CSRF attacks. There just isn't ever a reason to do that if you're doing things right.

[1] <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html>

<comment><USER3> 1\. "Never said it did _prevent CSRF_ " -- probably should have clarified.

2\. You're arguing about semantics. CSRF is a security issue. Being able to send updates without user's knowledge is a security hole too. Backed up by a wrong behaviour if you wish. I should never forget that HN is a Serious Business.

None of the above mentioned makes twitter guys any less lame.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sex Doll Sales Surge in Quarantine, but It's Not Just About Loneliness - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankicookney/2020/05/21/sex-doll-sales-surge-in-quarantine-but-its-not-just-about-loneliness/#203dbf48170f <comment><USER2> Who is the stinking, log-of-shit editor at Forbes that thought this would be a good idea for an article?

Rot in hell, corporate media outlets.</comment>


US Government says it's unconstitutional to ban sleeping outside - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/13/its-unconstitutional-to-ban-the-homeless-from-sleeping-outside-the-federal-government-says/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone have an extra/outdated tablet that I can give my homeless friend Augie?</comment>


The G Project: Yes, this company actually exists. - <AUTHOR> http://marketpowerforall.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Complete with four "founding consultants"! <http://marketpowerforall.com/team.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Warning: plays loud music and whistling immediately upon loading.</comment>


Robert Louis Stevenson and His Friends - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth <comment><USER2> Apropos nothing really at all, I always found it interesting that Robert Louis Stevenson's father ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stevenson)) was a famous engineer that is mostly lost to modern history because his inventions don't really matter to us today.

Which I learned from this obscure quote (not even anywhere on Google) I dug up in the Brown University archives one summer:

The need of our country is not to lift marble to the fortieth story of some new office building, but to lift the level of character; not to whiten the seas with the sails of commerce, but to develop those simple fidelities and homely virtues which are the cheap defense of nations. When Tennyson wrote ``The Crossing of the Bar,'' he did more for civilization than if he built any ocean-liner or man-of-war. Thomas Stevenson did much for England when he built the lighthouses which send their radiance each night over the tossing waters of the Channel. But we owe far more to his son, Robert Louis Stevenson, because he taught us how to kindle a light within, how to keep the soul serene and steadfast in the face of pain and death. When Millet seized his brush and painted the `Angelus' on the bit of canvas that cost him three francs, he did more for labor and the laboring man than if he had seized a spade and worked for fifty years in the fields in France. Not the men who add to out quantity of materials, but the men who deepen the quality of our living, are the real benefactors and educators of the world. In such endeavor our antagonisms vanish, because we become workers together with god. -William H.P. Faunce, President of Brown University

<comment><USER3> Thank you for that, it's uplifting.

It does appear to be available on the net, although in remarkably few places:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The%20need%20of%20our%20c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The%20need%20of%20our%20country%20is%20not%20to%20lift%20marble%20to%20the%20fortieth%20story%22)

<comment><USER2> I checked earlier but you're obviously correct. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Turnkey employment backup / subsidiarisation in Vancouver - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetruenorth.me/ <comment><USER2> "It requires a valid H1B, _the employer to incorporate a subsidiary in Vancouver_ , and a quick visit. "</comment>


Verifying a Sorting Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://4z2.de/2016/02/07/verifying-sorting-algorithms <comment><USER2> What about using a counting or layered Bloom filter? They also gives a probabilistic confirmation that the sorted list contains the same elements as the unsorted one.

Another solution, if the goal is to verify the sort algorithm, is to augment the sort data with position information (which isn't used in the sort), then use that to confirm that each of the original elements is used.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be another option but you would have to evaluate several hash functions per element, which is a lot more expensive than a few multiplications _and_ would use a lot more space.

What do you want to gain by augmenting the data with position information? Wouldn't you just have to check whether the positions array is a permutation of (1, ..., n)?

<comment><USER2> > a lot more expensive than a few multiplications

It's "t" times the few multiplications, because each one gives a 75% success factor. This is equivalent to doing multiple hash functions.

> and would use a lot more space

Well, yes and no. A Bloom filter is space-efficient, so it depends on what you compare it to.

If you have both lists in memory then each verification test can be run in constant memory.

But suppose you sort in-place? This cuts your overall memory use in half. You can use some of that saved space to construct the Bloom filter, then sort, then construct and compare the result.

It's also possible to compute all "t" values first, then sort in-place, then compare. This is another sort of signature. I don't know enough to tell if this will require more or less space than an equivalently powerful Bloom filter.

> "What do you want to gain by augmenting the data with position information?"

It's a linear time check, rather than O(n log n). But at a cost of n * log(n) bits (or n*32 bits if we assume 32 bit indices.)

<comment><AUTHOR> A hypothetical optimal bloom filter-like data structures needs -log₂ ε bits per key as noted in [1]. For the absolutely arbitrary value ε=0.25 that's 2 bits per key (so 2n bits), and you need that t times. Or if you do it directly with a higher success probability, say, 10^-6 then it's 20 bits per element. That's more than half of the input size, assuming 32 bit keys. The approach I wrote about uses O(log₂ p) = O(log₂ (n/ε)) bits, or put differently: a constant number of integers. Bloom filters are awesome (and I know HN loves them) but this isn't a good application for them.

Sorting in-place would be a neat trick, you'd have to store the t integers, but as I showed t=30 is more than enough. That's 30 ints, again way less than a Bloom filter.

Re: position information, I'd consider that linear space too (measured in machine words). It's a good idea but keep in mind that if the input was in a random order, these are n accesses to completely random memory locations. Due to the way virtual memory is implemented (TLB misses are commonly resolved using a B-Tree data structure to prevent timing attacks), they actually take closer to log n time. There's an older paper that shows that this takes roughly the same time as sorting the input. I believe it was in [2] somewhere. Huge pages might mitigate this nowadays.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter#Alternatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter#Alternatives) \- citation goes to Pagh, Anna; Pagh, Rasmus; Rao, S. Srinivasa (2005), "An optimal Bloom filter replacement", SODA'05, pp. 823–829

[2] [http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/rraman/rahman- thesis.pdf](http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/rraman/rahman-thesis.pdf) PhD thesis of Naila Yasmeen Rahman. The PDF resists my attempts to do full-text search. It might have been "Analysing cache effects in distribution sorting" from WAE'99\. I'm sorry that I can't be more specific right now.

<comment><USER2> It makes sense (to me now, in retrospect) that a Bloom filter would require more memory than a characteristic fingerprint because the Bloom filter supports element tests in addition to equivalency. Thanks for working through the details!

Regarding "Due to the way virtual memory is implemented", the essay does not use that memory model. It says a binary search take O(n log n) time, but it's actually O(n log n) essentially random lookups. If we assume log n lookup time then the binary search is better described as O(n (log n) (log n)), yes?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the RAM model, a single binary search takes O(log n) accesses. If nothing is specified, this is the model that's commonly used to analyse algorithms, and one of its assumptions is that access to any memory location takes constant time. That this might not be true on actual machines is one of the shortcomings of that model, so you might say that it takes O(log² n) _cycles_ on a certain machine. But the accesses also converge to the position where the element is, so the last couple of accesses will be in pages the TLB knows and that will even be in cache, so they'll take only a couple of cycles. Analysing this gets very complicated very quickly.

In the end, the RAM model is just that: a model. No model will ever cover all the peculiarities of the hardware that things are actually implemented on, as that would be nearly impossible and in any case too complex to work with during analysis. You just have to be aware of its limitations and do lots of benchmarks if you want to maximize performance :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>