Special Purpose Linux Distributions - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/12/27/10-single-purpose-linux-distributions/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how they chose that list.

It's not a great article.

Other people have mentioned Geexbox and XBMC which are useful media centre distributions.

Slitaz is a cool minimal distribution, with excellent internationalisation. (It's amazing what they fit in to such a tiny package.)

Tinycore / microcore are great minimal distributions, but I don't know how much they're being developed at the moment.

Exherbo looks suitable for masochists. (<http://exherbo.org/>)

Arch / Gentoo / Linux From Scratch are great for people who want to learn Linux or who know exactly what they want.

<comment><USER3> Tiny Core Linuxis still going strong (<http://www.tinycorelinux.net/>). They're now up to three images, all built on the idea of running out of RAM with a 3.0-era kernel. The Core image is CLI-only and weighs in 8 MB; TinyCore adds a GUI/WM interface at 12 MB; and if you have RAM to burn you can opt for the 64 MB CorePlus image which is the only one that starts up with wifi set up.

It's a kick to play with. It's just amazing how fast a minimal distro can be running out of RAM. Even when you load it up with Firefox and a bunch of other apps you're still only looking at a few hundred MB.

No xmonad version yet though. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scientific Linux really isn't a special-purpose distribution. It's just another Red Hat clone like CentOS. (Some people claim that it's actually a superior alternative to CentOS.)

<comment><USER5> It's as special as Edubuntu. It may be based on RH (as Edubuntu is based on Ubuntu), but it's prepackaged with lot's of software for scientific usage (the same way Edubuntu is prepackaged with educational software).

It's obvious that some distros are more special-purpose and some of them can easily be configured/converted for everyday usage.

<comment><USER6> No, Scientific Linux is not prepackaged with lots of software for scientific usage. It's extremely close to RHEL. The additions are documented here: [http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/features/add...](http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/features/added)

<comment><USER7> Yes - exactly. It does not have 'special science sauce' added.

<comment><USER8> Springdale Linux (previously PUIAS Linux) is another RHEL 6 clone but they _do_ provide a repository that contains some computational maths software. That repository is not installed by default, and can be used with the other RHEL clones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Open Artist - <http://openartisthq.org/>

It tries to combine free software into a suite for creative people. Driven by the fact that there are so many cool applications out there, but most people do not know them, openArtist tries to be a complete package of creative software.

</comment><comment><USER7> 'Devian' Linux? Never heard of it.

Sci Linux:

"As the name suggest, the distribution is geared towards scientists doing scientific stuff (I wouldn't know)."

No it is no more (or less) scientific than CentOS.

Dreadful article.

</comment><comment><USER10> This list is bogus, silly and probably plagiarism [http://www.linuxhaxor.net/10-special-purpose-linux- distribut...](http://www.linuxhaxor.net/10-special-purpose-linux- distributions/) (2 years ago)

I would propose CNK or CNL Linux. These are stripped down version of Linux that run on the compute nodes of a super computer. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Node_Linux>

</comment><comment><USER11> Its cool to see the OS starting to be configured specifically around certain applications rather than the other way around.

How soon until apps live in their own specific OS environments on USB sticks and my "main OS" is just a hypervisor to run them? The return of the cartridge. Everything old is new again.

<comment><USER12> USB sticks? I'd rather just have everything pulled over the network and cached on my SSD :)

<comment><USER13> Sticks are still handy if you want to be able to boot Joe Random Device to a known standard distro. And/or for security / forensics / recovery work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> SystemRescueCd is a great one. I always carry a USB drive with it on my keychain.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another media center oriented Linux distro is GeeXboX [1]. I've never used it myself but I've herad that it's quite good.

[1] <http://www.geexbox.org/>

</comment><comment><USER16> parted magic looked interesting, but doesn't seem to add a coherent interface to everything. has anyone who has used it also used yast's partition manager (from opensuse)? if so, how does it compare? because i'd love a simple, standalone tool (one that i could use on other linuxes) that had all the functionality of yast's pm (eg. it can create encrypted llvm volumes over raid, for example - something that's available in the opensuse installer but seems to be beyond many other distros).

</comment><comment><USER17> Open Media Vault[1] a Debian based NAS OS. Although Synology's DSM[2] is also linux based it doesn't appear to be as free

[1] <http://www.openmediavault.org/> [2] <http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=us>

</comment><comment><USER8> I find Clonezilla pretty useful, it is a one use kind of tool though not really a full Linux.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sad to see no Qubes on, but I guess it doesn't sound as interesting as others.

<http://qubes-os.org/trac>

</comment><comment><USER19> XBMC is another one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone here have experience of Ubuntu Studio? How mature is it, as a distro / Ubuntu fork?

<comment><USER21> I've used it a lot and it works very well. However, at present I'm using stock Ubuntu 12.04 with the studio (mostly music production based) applications loaded through standard apt-get means. In the past Ubuntu Studio packaged a kernel built with Ingo Molnar's low-latency patches, but the stock kernel is good enough for real-time, low-latency production these days. Other than having most of the applications that you'd need packaged for you - a valuable service for new users - I'm not sure what Ubuntu Studio brings to the table for experienced users.</comment></comment>


LLVM 9.0 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-September/135304.html <comment><USER2> Note that this release (9.x) marks the first to be no longer available under the original permissive NCSA (BSD-like) LLVM license, going forward the LLVM project has moved to an "Apache 2.0 with LLVM Exceptions" for everything. And not just the compiler itself, but also sub-projects like the supporting libc++/libc++abi standard libraries. This change only happened due to corporate pressure, and was done without considering the larger impact towards the open source community.

This will undoubtedly effect many projects and companies alike going forward, but notably the OpenBSD project can no longer merge in new changes, which will ship with 8.0.1 later this year in 6.6. The Apache 2.0 license is not considered permissive enough to be included in the base system of OpenBSD, it muddies the line between Copyright law and US Contract law; adding additional restrictions related to patents that may terminate rights.

[https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300....](https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2017-April/112300.html)

[https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html](https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html)

It is very unfortunate that the LLVM project has ignored the concerns expressed by developers of an open source operating system project that have been eagerly adopting a clang based toolchain, across many platforms (arm64/armv7/i386/amd64/octeon/..) by default, and has been working on new innovative security mitigations (RETGUARD, ROPGadgetFixup framework, register allocator rearranging) along the way.

I will take this opportunity to ask, if you're a current LLVM developer/contributor, please consider making your changes also available under the terms of the original permissive license. For example, explicitly stating publically as such when mailing patchsets or pull requests. This would save having to privately ask permission to backport changes on case-by-case basis.

[https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/release/8.x/clang/...](https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/release/8.x/clang/LICENSE.TXT)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't the "LLVM Exceptions" part of the license take care of the patent issue you mention?

"[...] if a court of competent jurisdiction determines that the patent provision (Section 3), [...] conflicts with the conditions of the GPLv2, you may retroactively and prospectively choose to deem waived or otherwise exclude such Section(s) of the License [...]"

Source: [https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/master/llvm/LICENS...](https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/blob/master/llvm/LICENSE.TXT#L208)

<comment><USER4> It wouldn't cover anything from OpenBSD, if as excerpted by you, it only covers exceptions related to GPLv2 as I don't believe OpenBSD considers GPLv2 to be acceptable either.

<comment><USER2> > I don't believe OpenBSD considers GPLv2 to be acceptable either.

The GPLv3 is not acceptable in base at all, GPLv2 is unacceptable for new code, but we still have a few examples in base, very few.

<comment><USER4> Ah that'd probably be why I was thinking it was any code, small difference that's easy to forget about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Support for asm goto, enabling for example the mainline Linux kernel for > x86_64 to build with Clang"

This is big. Support for asm goto was merged into the mainline earlier this year, but now it's released [1]. Aside from the obvious implications of this - being able to build the kernel with LLVM - working with eBPF/XDP just got way easier [2].

[1] [https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/commit/784929d0454c4df6...](https://github.com/llvm/llvm- project/commit/784929d0454c4df6a98ef6fbbd1d30a6f71f9c16)

[2] [https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg544057.html](https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg544057.html)

<comment><USER6> Can anyone give a good concise explanation as to why GOTO was _not_ in LLVM from the beginning? It seems like something quite obvious to need. I can only guess that it had something to do with their compliation strategy not being able to deal with the ... nonlinearity* ... introduced by GOTO.

*Probably a better word for that

<comment><USER7> This is not about "goto", it's about "asm goto", which is a gcc extension which allows inline assembly (itself a gcc extension) to jump to a label outside the inline assembly.

<comment><USER8> Inline assembly is part of the C11 standard as Asm("assembly goes here")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Support for asm goto, enabling for example the mainline Linux kernel for x86_64 to build with Clang

This is great for Linux, no longer being dependent on a single compiler for one of the most popular ISAs can only be a good thing for the overall health of the project. To be clear, I have nothing against gcc.

<comment><USER10> 2 cents prediction :

Android will leave linux (fuschia), linux will leave gcc because companies developing the kernel will push for clang, clang will have media coverage, gcc will therefore loose a huge user base and the power of the FSF will go south.

(as a free software zealot ( :-) ), I'm worried)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > LLVM will now remove stores to constant memory (since this is a > contradiction) under the assumption the code in question must be dead. This > has proven to be problematic for some C/C++ code bases which expect to be > able to cast away 'const'. This is (and has always been) undefined behavior, > but up until now had not been actively utilized for optimization purposes in > this exact way. For more information, please see: bug 42763 and post commit > discussion.

This will break all sorts of code. Often we have things that are const for callers of an API but not necessarily for the implementation of an API. Other cases are where an API should have used const but didn't and then got partly constified, and there are places where you still need to cast away const-ness.

<comment><USER12> Optimizing away even more calls of memset, memcpy or memmove is the completely wrong way. gcc went down this bug and called it "optimization", now llvm did the same. Can we at least keep at least one sane working compiler? At least emit a prominent warning when "optimizing" away lib calls. This helps only artificial benchmarks and will hurt everybody.

If an assignment to const memory is illegal, treat it as error, and don't silently remove it.

Fear we'll have to blacklist clang-9 also, not just gcc-9.

<comment><USER13> How about you fix your code to not rely on undefined behavior specific to a compiler version? Poor coding standards is not an excuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Repo of the Linux kernel built with clang:

[https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux](https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux)

<comment><USER15> "This branch is even with torvalds:master." Does that mean there are no patches necessary for any GCC builtins? Or does the actual clang-buildable part live on another branch?

<comment><USER16> With LLVM 9, it is now possible to build the Linux kernel with no patches (for x86_64).

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clang- li...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clang- linux-53&num=1)

<comment><USER17> Note: we also build+boot under CI:

* arm (v5, v6, v7)

* arm64 (v8)

* ppc32

* ppc64

* x86_64

* mips

[https://travis-ci.com/ClangBuiltLinux/continuous- integration...](https://travis-ci.com/ClangBuiltLinux/continuous- integration/builds/128315291)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meanwhile, Mesa developers merged ACO compiler for AMDGPU, as the future replacement for llvm.

<comment><USER17> Fun fact; AMDGPU driver can't run when built with LLVM right now because they:

1\. build their driver with a stack alignment of 16B (standard for x86_64 userspace).

2\. use floating point in the kernel, which the kernel has limited support for.

3\. The rest of the x86_64 kernel uses 8B stack alignment.

Code from 3 calls into 1. And then they have sse2 instructions in their driver (double precision arithmetic). Guess what happens?

<comment><USER19> This has been patched and will be fixed in 5.4 if I recall correctly, right?

<comment><USER17> Heh, no, sorry, my fault. I wrote the patch you're referring to; I got it to link. When AMD went to test it on hardware (which I don't have), they hit alignment related general protection faults that I traced back to a movaps instruction. I'm still working with CrOS and AMD folks to figure out what to do, but there's a few questionable things that are going on in their driver that have a few kernel devs confused. For now, people are just happy to see AMD participate more in upstream kernel dev, but definitely some parts of their driver will need to be rewritten I fear at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The optimizer will now convert calls to memcmp into a calls to bcmp in some > circumstances.

What is the improvement from that change? I thought they were essentially the same.

<comment><USER21> _memcmp_ has to find the first offset where the buffers differ, and check which of them is larger.

 _bcmp_ only has to figure out whether the buffers differ. It doesn't have to figure out where they differ.

For example, for _s=1024_ , _bcmp_ can do (at most) 128 64-bit compares (using vector registers, it could even use larger steps)

 _memcmp_ could do the same, with an additional "figure out where in the last 8-byte parts compared the difference lies".

That's an amount of work that's independent of the buffer sizes, so it wouldn't add much, relatively, _if_ the buffers compared are large and the difference (if any) most of the time is near the end of the buffers. I doubt those ifs often hold, though.

<comment><USER22> This would be true, except bcmp has been removed from posix some years ago. There's no particular requirement that a function called bcmp does what you expect.

<comment><USER21> [http://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#notewo...](http://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#noteworthy- optimizations):

 _"The optimizer will now convert calls to memcmp into a calls to bcmp in some circumstances. Users who are building freestanding code (not depending on the platform's libc) without specifying -ffreestanding may need to either pass -fno-builtin-bcmp, or provide a_ bcmp* function."*

So, he's, you may have to provide it yourself. I expect you can fairly easily copy-paste it from various BSD-licensed libraries, though (example: [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/libkern/b...](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/libkern/bcmp.c), but be warned about that _"I don 't believe this is a problem since AFAIK, objects are not protected at smaller than longword boundaries"_. That likely is, but may not be true on your platform)

<comment><USER22> So the problem here is I may already have a function in my program called bcmp, which takes no arguments and prints "better consider more possibilities" to standard output. This is all fine and legal. My program also uses memcmp, because of course it does. But now calls to memcmp are going to be replaced to with calls to bcmp, which does not have the same effect at all.

<comment><USER23> That's nothing new, though. If you have a memcmp that isn't memcmp (and don't explicitly call a lib-provided memcmp anywhere) and build without libc, your memcmp will incorrectly be used, too.

MSVC is even more notorious for this kind of issue, silently adding a number of function calls it assumes the standard library will provide even when your code doesn't use the standard library at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hey Andy, will this mean I can try (experimental) zig on risc-v in the near future? :))

<comment><AUTHOR> llvm9 branch will be merged into master today (as soon as the CI infrastructure is updated with LLVM 9) and it has basic risc-v support in the std lib, as well as cross compilation targeting risc-v using glibc and musl.

edit: [me updating the CI infrastructure]([https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1174769700343074818](https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1174769700343074818))

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Support for asm goto, enabling for example the mainline Linux kernel for > x86_64 to build with Clang

This is an awesome step!

</comment><comment><USER26> That was fast, has the release cycle changed?

<comment><USER27> LLVM changed their versioning scheme a few releases back (maybe around 3.9 -> 4.0 IIRC?), so major version increases will be more common now. I think it used to be roughly tied to bitcode compatibility?

Someone who works on LLVM can give a more specific answer, but the gist of it is we'll see more major version increments now.

<comment><USER28> [http://blog.llvm.org/2016/12/llvms-new-versioning- scheme.htm...](http://blog.llvm.org/2016/12/llvms-new-versioning-scheme.html) explains the exact change.

<comment><USER26> Ahh thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good to see LLVM IR becoming the ultimate bridge between Software and Hardware</comment>


Ask HN: Did you ever do anything unethical to get your startup off the ground? - <AUTHOR> A lot of mixergy interviewers say that in the early days they've done things that would be considered unethical in order to get their sites off the ground.
A good example of this would be Facebook, which has done a ton of things early on.
So have you yourself(or the company you worked for) done anything that would be considered unethical to get the business off the ground?(if you are worried about your reputation just use a throwaway account)
This may involve:
- spamming comments to get links/users
- creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic
- scraping other's websites to fill your DB
- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready
- putting up 235 users online when you only had one
- pretending to be bigger than you were
- voting up your own submission on HN/Digg/Reddit
- creating a fake back story to make your startup interesting(we just want to save the world, we don't care about money)
- astroturfing your site with fake accounts
- sending fake numbers to get coverage(i.e. traffic, revenue, profit)
- buying an email list to spam people
- promising unrealistic delivery dates
- using the user's email address to spam their address book
- pretending the site has users when it doesn't(this hottie is 5 miles away from you, register to contact her)
- etc. <comment><USER2> I was part of a startup years ago that did many of those things and much more. I still won't go into the details of what it was that my cofounder did, but it made a _big_ difference.

It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed (circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best.

Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day. Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month.

None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found. At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then the entire situation changes.

Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.

<comment><USER3> That sounds interesting, but without _the_ interesting part it's much less so.

<comment><USER2> Fine. In broad terms, he leveraged the file sharing networks of the time. He put the name of our site on files that were shared very often and we had our college friends seed them on various services. It seemed crazy at first, but there is a big difference between no one seeing your name and thousands of people seeing your name. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move.

My point was that critical mass and viral growth are powerful concepts, and some times all it takes is one little push to get things moving.

<comment><USER4> This isn't unethical. This is a brilliant marketing tactic. (Putting the name in there, not the actual sharing, which I guess is unethical depending on what you're sharing.)

<comment><USER5> i would consider soliciting someone else go share files (probably illegally) with the explicit purpose of advertising your website to be marginal at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We had a buy/sell site aimed at university students. At the same time, 2 other sites cropped up. So we posted links to items from one site on the other. Those two sites got in a pretty nasty fight ("We didn't do it" "Yeah right you ^ _& ^_&") Meanwhile we just continued growing as usual.

<comment><USER7> like so many of these posts, I am left wondering... why is that unethical?

<comment><USER8> Tricking your competitors into fighting and mistrusting one another? You don't think that's unethical?

<comment><USER7> no? I'm not abusing someone's trust or breaking my word. Every other consideration is subordinate to my aim.

<comment><USER8> That's a pretty measly definition of ethics. Under your definition, murder is ethical so long as you don't lie about it.

<comment><USER7> herp derp I obviously meant it to the most extreme case possible.

I could counterargue that I gave my word not to do any wanton killing and therefore it's prohibited and then I can wedge whatever I want into that system.

<comment><USER9> Call me an elitist asshole, but I find your tone infuriating.

Clean it up. Learn some respect.

<comment><USER7> it should have been totally obvious that my original statement was related to business strategy, not homicide.

I'm well aware that I have a looser sense of ethics than average, but ethics is a cultural construct that can be debated on its own merits.

Not abusing trust, not breaking promises and not being violent are the core tenets of my ethical/moral beliefs - the violence one is just not relevant to business discussions. I've often discussed this with people who have stricter codes that are adhered to less stringently.

your comment verges on ad hominem. If somebody wants to twist my words to make their point, yeah they'll get a little sarcasm in return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Greg posted a nice compilation of shady tactics used during the startup period of major internet companies at [http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless- enough-for-star...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-enough-for- startup.html)

A quick summary:

 _Facebook_ : Spammed Harvard Students

 _BitTorrent_ : Free Porn as Initial Bait

 _MySpace_ : Spammed >100M on Launch Date

It appears as if (slightly) shady techniques can give you the advantage you need to succeed.

<comment><USER11> BitTorrent's wasn't unethical or shady (unless you think all adult content is shady). They'd licensed the content - which was, IIRC, an kind of free teaser ad for 'LightSpeed' porn - which I remember as being an odd name for a porn site. Caused a huge fuss on Slashdot.

<comment><USER12> The version I heard was that they got it off Usenet, where it had been posted by the supplier.

Sounded like a sensible way to seed the service, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't get caught up in a scam mentality. Instead think of ethical pivots on things that would otherwise be shady. For example, Google 'scrapes' the entire web, but no one would consider that unethical, its a search engine. On the other hand, if they just spammed/exposed all your personal email contacts (google buzz) that is highly likely to be perceived as unethical. At the end of the day, be clever rather than be scammer.

<comment><USER14> Fun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?

<comment><USER15> I'm tempted to say that your hypothetical is either impossible, or it's already happened.

On the "impossible" side -- search engines, or search directories, pre-date the web. A lot of people downloaded their first web client from a Gopher link or by looking it up on Archie. HTML itself was kind of about providing an index for other files -- "index.html", get it?

However, on the "already happened" front, in 1997 Ticketmaster sued Microsoft just for linking to content on its website. And ever since automated search engines have been around, people have been suing them -- for replicating portions of their content without explicit permission, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't call anything he did unethical, but check out this interview with Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo guy) about his previous startup: <http://mixergy.com/gabriel-weinberg-duck-duck-go-interview/>

With all of the respect I already had for him, his candor in this interview gave me even more respect for him.

</comment><comment><USER17> Spamming comes up a ton in my interviews. Most recently, the founder of Match.com said that's how he got his site's first users.

</comment><comment><USER18> _\- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready_ _\- promising unrealistic delivery dates_

Wait, these are unethical? I thought they were standard and common sales tactics. Seems like many companies are doing that.

(disclaimer: I don't sell anything).

<comment><USER19> Similar to promising potential customers that your product is doing things it doesn't actually do and hoping you can add the extra features before anyone finds out.

I view those as distasteful, but I've yet to see any company/salesperson who doesn't do it. I'm sure this looks different once you are in sales and everyone is doing it, but from my seat over at operations it sure looks dishonest. I hate it when vendors use these tactics on me - so how can I do this to anyone else?

<comment><USER20>
      and hoping you can add the extra features

Well, there's a difference between 'hoping' and _I'm sure we can get this done_. As an example: our product is evolving with the needs of our customers and as such we often promise things that don't exist yet. That doesn't mean we don't have every intention of delivering on our promise.

<comment><USER19> I guess the question is - does the customer know they don't exist yet but you have every intention of delivering?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Scott Kliger, the founder of free411.com defrauded a company I used to work with and our investors of $50K by agreeing to develop some technology for us and then trying to pass off open source code as the deliverable. Meanwhile, he used the funds to build free411.

<comment><USER22> Libel suit in .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..

<comment><USER21> I don't think he'd dispute it. He gave the money back eventually, but after he'd developed his product and obtained investor funding for it. Unfortunately our project lost a fair bit of traction and our investors lost confidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I contacted a company to buy Sex Offender data. I called twice and then sent 3 emails. After a month of no replies I wrote a program that screen scraped their site.

<comment><USER24> Is screen scraping really unethical? I mean, you've sent me a bunch of text... whatever I do with it is my business.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is to some people...a) you are breaking the ToS b) you are stealing their content to resell/republish it as your own

<comment><USER25> What if I never read or even open the ToS and proceed directly to screen scraping your site?

Afaik there is no law that mandates you must read/agree to the ToS before loading a website. In fact, what if the ToS states 'If you visit this site, you must pay us 1000 dollars', are you now liable? Despite the fact that just to _read_ the ToS you had to visit said site.

My point is that only a court will decide what happens, and just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it gives you carte blanch to do whatever you please.

<comment><USER11> Sure, ToS are crap - they're not contracts and any 'extra rights' the site gets are indeed not worth the electrons they're printed on. But copywritten content is protected by good-old actual law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For ThatHigh.com, I searched textsfromlastnight for stories containing the phrase "marijuana" etc. Worked like a charm.

<comment><USER27> Then what? Posted comments pointing to ThatHigh.com I'm guessing. Did you just put the link or did you say something like "Sounds like something from thathigh.com"? Did they eventually get removed as spam?

<comment><USER26> nah, nothing like that. i just used it as a seed for content. there were very few, honestly. but it was a good start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is probably a weighted thread since many people are connected to their startups through their usernames and wouldn't want to post.

For me, the answer is no except for "promising unrealistic delivery dates". For me this wasn't about lying but partly about just being unrealistic with myself and also about setting certain goals publicly to hold myself accountable. I don't think this is in the same boat as the other unethical items mentioned, but of course I may just think that because that's the only one I did...

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that's why I said that they should use a throwaway account if they are worried.

<comment><USER29> What exactly do you gain from this "poll"? If you want blackhat, go to PPC and adware peddling forums. Otherwise this thread does nothing but validate creepy behavior on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> the point is to show that most companies have done shady shit in the early days and that's one of the main reasons why they managed to survive long enough to turn legit

<comment><USER29> Most companies? the secret to every great fortune is _not_ a 'forgotten crime', de Balzac's opinion notwithstanding.

If we're looking for a justification for a company's under-performance, the solution is not to look for excuses, the solution is to reflect honestly and question our existing ideas and approaches. Otherwise we're no different than couch-potatoes dismissing all athletes as "dopers", while drawn ourselves in a self-righteous bag of Doritos and a liter of coke.

And lest you think I am being a hypocrite and taking the moral high-ground in an appeal to cheap applause and upvotes; let me say that I am all in favor of any ruthless business tactic that furthers your market dominance. Undercut the competition, corner them, etc. But get there, first, through quality and great service. Not by shutting down their mail servers. Go through their garbage, but don't phish their accounts. Point out their shortcomings to the public, but don't lawyer up and sue them out of existence or appeal to xenophobia or use a government crutch to ban them from the market. etc.

There is a difference between war and genocide; neither is excusable, but one of them appeals to my own warped sense of chivalry and machismo, while the other fills me with disgust.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion, and is entitled neither to a response nor agreement.

<comment><AUTHOR> it doesn't have to be a great fortune.

the reason most successful companies resorted to unethical things early on, is because they had no resources to play "fair". Once you are actually making money you can afford to take the high road.

yes hacking mail servers is going too far, but scraping and spamming ends up being a necessity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> PG: "A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days..."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

</comment><comment><USER31> I saw a lot of sites spam the bejeezus out of delicious when they got their starts; folks who claim to be reputable now.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's hard to stay more ethical than your competition - tactics that would never occur to you become pretty tempting when you see them successfully used against your own company.

That said, for every startup that did something a little shady to succeed, there's got to be another that went off the rails because it spent too much time focused on and fighting with its competition. Ninety-nine percent of my own 'competitor-focused' activity could've been much better spent on my own business.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wouldn't consider most of the actions listed "unethical" per-se, some actions like; _"creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic"_ are legitimate, while _"buying an email list to spam people"_ can be downright illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> people have different levels of what they consider unethical.

as far as keyword stuffing...google considers that blackhat so you can get banned when they find you

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We sent unsolicited emails to as many addresses as we could (manually) find online over a week or two. We're in a B2B niche so it wasn't hard to find directories online. Never used any bulk email tool, just copied and pasted.

This was 6ish years ago. I wasn't aware of spam laws at the time. I wouldn't recommend it but it worked.

</comment><comment><USER35> A startup I worked for did all of this and more - I left because some of their tactics were getting far too shady for me. Scraping business listings to populate your DB to make your ad network look like it was being used wasn't so unethical as some of their spamming adventures.

</comment><comment><USER36> most of top ones without the bottom 5.

The nub of the matter is this, IMO it's OK to do what you have to do to gain momentum even if that would be classified as technically spam or what have you, as long as you do it with style. This means sending relevant content to people who want it but just don't know it yet, NOT sending people stuff they may never want and what you do send has to be 100% pure quality.

90% wouldn't agree with this but IMO it depends on where you're coming from and what the odds are against you. Just do it well and make sure that the end result is a positive for your potential clients.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great list, and couldn't come at a better time for my startup.

<comment><USER38> Taking the "Liar's Poker" approach eh? Cautionary tale >> guidebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This sounds like a todo list for a non-technical co-founder.

</comment><comment><USER40> No, but I lied about it just now. (This is a convoluted bit of self- referential logic and a joke.)

Seriously -- a demo where I was logged into a server and monkeypatching the DB locks because they were broken for the piece of the site the marketing/sales guys wanted to show.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would be very surprised if any of these things will help you at all. None of them provide things that people really want. More importantly, attempting them distracts you from figuring out how to find out and make what your customers really want.

For example, you can try to spam to your heart's content, but people have this thing called a back button. Even if you can get a few people to bite, they'll most likely ignore you once they figure out that there's nothing there.

You can try to say "235 users online" when there aren't any, but that won't actually give users the experience they want. It might fool them for a little while, but that won't matter anyway if there's no reason for them to stay.

<comment><USER26> I disagree. These methods help exposure, and a fraction of those users will actually want what you have.

That's why spamming works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is it just me, or does anyone else want to be able to answer "no" to this question without having to even think about it?

</comment><comment><USER43> I can't think of anything, so either I haven't done anything unethical, or I did a damn good job of convinving myself it was ethical.

<comment><USER44> That's the best thing about ethics, if you convinced yourself it was ethical then it _was_ ethical for you. For someone else maybe, maybe not. Everyone gets their own, entirely personally prioritized set :)

<comment><USER45> I think that's defined as egoism; ethics tend to be concerned with the theoretical value of morality.

<comment><USER44> I see what you're saying and I don't pretend to be an expert (or even very knowledgeable in general) on the subject.

All I meant was that ethics are a very personal thing and what's 'right' to one person may not (and, if you ask me, _should not_ necessarily) be right to another.

Ethical egoism says that you should do what is in your self interest, and that doing so makes you ethical... Rather than that I'm trying to ask: What _is_ 'good' or 'bad'? Different cultures, races, sexes and individuals have (at least) slightly varying opinions on what is right and wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I rather called 'unethical' in loosely startup term as 'creative exploratory of abundance wealth of opportunity'

</comment><comment><USER47> Richard Branson admitted to doing something unethical and illegal in his early days - he was caught by the authorities and he has said that it was a real big lesson for him. I think sometimes the path to 'easy money' can be tempting

</comment><comment><USER48> "promising unrealistic delivery dates" seems like something few of us could plausibly claim _not_ to have done. Perhaps the question should be "promise dates you know for sure you cannot deliver on".

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder what the ethics of 'flattering spam' are a la the comments on this blog post [http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing- Microso...](http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing- MicrosoftWebApplicationtargets.aspx)

On one hand its spam, but on the other the author can pretend it was a nice comment from an online handbag store owner.

</comment><comment><USER50> I won't talk about me, but I've seen some friends doing shady things. Let's just say I had to convince a friend of mine (for his startup) that DDoSing his competitor at peak times wasn't a wise idea... Another guy I knew (not really a friend) was using xrumer (a tool to spam forums for SEO purposes) directly on his website...

</comment><comment><USER51> A super early startup I worked for years ago got a really amazing deal on our first two servers. We paid like some minimal price for some PC hardware that was essentially out of the back of a van.

</comment><comment><USER52> I work at a company that did some "email campaigns" and many worse things in the beginning. And it helped a lot - getting as many sales from a smallish 10M country in Europe as from half of the US

</comment><comment><USER53> One, and I didn't know it was wrong at the time. So no!

I really hate how Facebook works the spam/address book angle. It is very unethical. I don't trust facebook in the slightest.

</comment><comment><USER54> You sound like you might have done all these things, half of these wouldn't even occur to me?

<comment><USER55> these are all really common amongst the affiliate marketers. and it is just the tip of the iceberg. affiliate marketing is filled with some seriously sleazy people who do far worse.

<comment><USER56> I believe the tactics used by affiliate marketers to gain money in the short term, is having a negative effect on consumer confidence in web transactions in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> someone I know paid Philippine girls to reply to messages on his fledgeling dating site.

</comment><comment><USER58> I used to crash our main competitor's email & login server at 6.01pm when free dial-up calls started at 6pm. They ran on NT and if you opened tcp/ip port 0, the kernel crashed. Happy times.

<comment><USER29> Didn't any part of you refuse to do this at a more visceral level? How could you sleep at night knowing you're cheating to get ahead? Does it even matter if you 'win'?

I can understand gaming Google and public opinion, but directly vandalizing someone's property and hindering their business is unconscionable.

I really want to understand the justification for this. And I say this as someone whose moral system is flexible enough to accept bank robbery (but not purse-snatching.)

<comment><USER59> I don't see how crashing a Windows box is any worse than robbing Goldman Sachs. (In both cases innocent people suffer, but the target is pretty reviled.)

I say this as someone who likes to claim he's chaotic good, but really is pretty much lawful good.

<comment><USER60> So because the competitor used Windows, konad's actions were justified?

If that is the case, that's a very weak justification.

<comment><USER61> If a person's morality is flexible enough to permit bank robbery, then a very weak justification is probably adequate.

<comment><USER62> Robin Hood ethics don't necessarily justify this type of vandalism and unless you're living under a tyranical monarch (or some equivalent), Robin Hood ethics are questionable to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> looks like someone has a bit of an Affiliate Marketing background :)

<comment><AUTHOR> only a little, make about 1-3K/mo from it.

<comment><USER63> well, then as a user of this site as well as presumably affiliate forums, you know that this site isn't too keen on the methods you listed compared to other sites where it's considered essential TO DO those things in order to succeed, no questions asked.

It really all depends on how far you're willing to push the boundaries

<comment><AUTHOR> with affiliate marketing I stuck to white hat methods, which is why I wasn't making a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Viking school is switching its program from rails to Fullstack JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/learn-full-stack-javascript-in-12-weeks-with-viking-immersive <comment><USER2> Um, I tried on both Chrome and Opera, and in both cases the email-signup box cannot be entered into.</comment>


The Pace of Innovation is not Slowing Down - <AUTHOR> http://blog.contentdj.com/2013/05/21/innovation-is-not-slowing-down/

<comment><USER2> I'd have to side with Thiel, with one caveat. Innovation of important technology is slowing down. How many animated GIF/photo-filter apps does the world really need?

I'd like to see more companies focusing on the big problems that have the potential to impact the way we work, live, and survive.</comment>


New software would play any videogame ever created  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16590-new-software-would-play-any-videogame-ever-created.html <comment><USER2> _But existing emulators are usually specialised and themselves prone to becoming outdated. KEEP is intended to be the "first general purpose emulator", designed to be migrated easily to new computing platforms._

Makes no sense to me. Why not just optimize your emulator for x86 and emulate _that_ , should it ever go away?

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing we'll likely have no record of in the future are the emergent properties of complex multiplayer games. Servers can sometimes be configured to do full recordings of each match, but players cannot, because servers only send updates for players that you can see.</comment>


Nightmare Machine by MIT Media Lab - <AUTHOR> http://nightmare.mit.edu/#.WB7JfwRXkFc.hackernews <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a new Blackmirror episode called "Playtest" where an AI tries to find a way to scare a game tester. I think this could help to dynamically create the required assets and support game developers, although I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where this has any priority whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER3> On behalf of Saito Game Team, I most humbly apologize.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12765022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12765022)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it a Windows machine?

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if other animals find gore and distorted faces horrifying.

</comment><comment><USER6> AI, "The Boogeyman" man of our time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah right. Just teach skynet how to scare humans...

<comment><USER8> I see your point there. We shouldn't be investing ANY time at all in developing AI that is meant to hurt people or have a negative impact on the way people feel.

<comment><USER9> If we don't invent a nightmare machine then the Soviets surely will, and then where will we be?! A nightmare gap, that's where!

My opinion is we need to invest _more_ funding in nightmare-generation research before it's too late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who asked for this? This really seems antithetical to AI/human goal alignment.

<comment><USER11> Humans make art like this, would you say those people are working against "human goals"?</comment></comment>


Bono's ONE foundation under fire for giving 1% of funds to charity - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314543/Bonos-ONE-foundation-giving-tiny-percentage-funds-charity.html <comment><USER2> And the ONE foundation has said 1) It's not a charity, 2) they don't take public contributions, 3) the private funders, who are on the board and include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, do not have a problem with the spending.</comment>


Samsung's Bizarre Emojis - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/samsungs-bizarre-emojis-6be568a3b7d9 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised the article doesn't mention my favorite, the simple Cookie:

[https://emojipedia.org/cookie/](https://emojipedia.org/cookie/)

Everyone decided cookies are probably chocolate chip cookies, except Samsung, who apparently got confused during the process...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a Korean cultural bias in the choice? The iOS emojis (I'm an iOS user so I"m speaking generally, and not from this article) remind me very closely to the DoCoMo emoji I had in Japan in the 1990s.

<comment><USER4> Entirely possible. Emojipedia has previously noted that the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was missing the emoji for "Map of Japan", "Crossed Flags" (which is typically depicted as a pair of Japanese flags), and "Chart Increasing With Yen".

[http://blog.emojipedia.org/samsung-puts-japan-back-on-the- ma...](http://blog.emojipedia.org/samsung-puts-japan-back-on-the-map/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is there an annoying "open in app" button covering the content? it's just text and pictures, my web browser handles that just fine. If I want to open it in an app, I can open it in pocket.

<comment><USER6> It's hosted on Medium and that's the app it's talking about. I still don't know why anyone would do that though.

I was confused by this a while back on the Slack engineering blog - "why would I want to open this in Slack??"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those are terrible. The grimace one wasn't terrible; so I thought, "hmm, this is likely the worst of what is a totally trivial problem". The problem is trivial but it went _down hill_ quality wise. I would say honestly, a new user or user of any platform other than Samsung is going to have some awkward and confusing exchanges.</comment>


The Google manifesto isn't sexist or anti-diversity, it's science - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com///opinion/no-the-google-manifesto-isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/ <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, trying to drown the conversation with pointless rhetoric and flagging submissions will lead to nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> inb4 flagged and gone :)

<comment><USER4> Echo chamber is alive and well!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Parse Address – Simple Address Parsing API - <AUTHOR> http://parseaddress.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all. I built this as a simple to use solution for parsing free-form street addresses around the world. It's currently integrated into my other side project, postcardbot.co. I've had many people reach out to me about the address accuracy, so I've decided to separate it out into it's own project.

I'll keep it free for now, unless people start abusing it.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm curious as to why you chose an array of components as a response instead of an object of component keys?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. Left behind from some cleaning/testing. It's back to normal now.

<comment><USER2> Nice turnaround! I'm building an API myself to get public feedback.

Are you exposing this to get an idea for demand? How are you tracking this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope :). It's just a problem I've come across a bunch before. I'm exposing it so people will have a quick resource to use for a side project. As long as things stay relatively modest, I'll keep it open for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This does a pretty good job for a simple, naive parser.

Some possible edge cases to consider:

 _123 Summit Blvd West Palm Beach FL 33406_ This returns the city as "West Palm Beach", when it is actually in "Palm Beach" and the street would be "Summit Blvd W". (How do you know? lots of ways, but ZIP is the obvious contender)

 _W324S7840 Paul Ln, Mukwonago, WI 53149_ In some places in Wisconsin, they have something called the WISCRS ("whiskers"), which is a coordinate-based address system. The "W324S7840" is actually the "number" component, while "Paul Ln" is the street name.

 _Carmel, CA_ There is actually a portion of Carmel that doesn't have any mailboxes. Kind of a strange place. Probably not relevant to this, but worth mentioning.

Like I said, this is pretty good for naive parsing. It's not _terribly_ useful for businesses, though, because for most business cases, you need more than simple breaking down into components.

For example:

\- "SF" and "San Francisco" are equivalent but not == to each other, so if someone were using this to de-duplicate addresses, they would hit a failure point here.

\- "Street" and "St" are equivalent but not == to each other, so not de- duplicatable.

\- Minor misspellings, like "Warrington" vs "Warington". You can't detect these, necessarily, without a more comprehensive database, but misspellings would contribute to billing/shipping errors and duplication issues.

\- ZIP codes can tell you a lot about an address. For example, all ZIPs beginning with "941" are in San Francisco, "946" are in Oakland, "945" are in Alameda, and so on. Getting a list of all the states and city ZIP codes can help you determine whether to keep or reject an address's ZIP code. For example, I put in "123 Main St, Boston, MA 90210", and it just spat out "90210". If you remember the 90s at all, you'll know that 90210 in California, not in Massachusetts. This would cause a failure in either billing or shipping for any business. The ZIP Code is actually super powerful. For example, in 94102, there are only 44 possible streets. If you were to create this ZIP- city-street mapping, you could very quickly verify the authenticity of the street, city, state, and ZIP components. (Numbers are harder, units even harder than that.)

\- 401 Rodeo Way, Austin, TX is an apartment complex, but 403 Rodeo Way, Austin, TX is a parking lot (and is not a real address). For most business cases, you don't want to allow people to put in bad addresses. This is hard, though, because sometimes databases don't get updated with new construction or renovated buildings. Tricky, but something to consider.

To be clear, I think you've done a fantastic job. I built a full-featured address parser for a large real estate company a few years ago. In fact, this is my go-to coding challenge when I interview engineers. I say "Here's 123 Main St, Boston, MA 00235. Break it apart into its components." Typically, they try and split on commas or use a regex, in which case I would remove the commas and everything breaks. There are a ton of ways to write an address, all of which may be valid, but are hard to predict. Another good example would be something like "123 St Francis Ave, Boston, MA 00235". The "St" in "St Francis" trips people up often, but your app catches that. Fantastic job with that.

Keep up the good work. Super impressed. It'd be great if you could tackle some of the edge cases I mentioned above, especially with regards to correcting ZIP codes.</comment>


What 4chan thinks of HN - <AUTHOR> http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S38087806 <comment><USER2> Sadly, most of the things on there are true. We can try to deny it all we want, but most of the stuff that's there is true. The power of anonymity is that you get to voice honest opinions without tying it up with your identity and/or feeling responsible for it. Of course, this can be argued otherwise too, by citing some (bad) comments as example from that thread, but for the most part, what you see there are honest comments.

Some of my favorites:

>Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]

>Why I have decided to stop using [ Tried and true web dev environment] and start using Meteor

>Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry standard framework].

>Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?

>[Actually interesting topic] - 0 comments

>Can the NSA blow up your PC remotely?

>Why you shouldn't store your files locally, but in the cloud

>Why it's impossible to use PHP even though millions of people are doing great things with it

>Some blog post about scalability... blog crashes after posting link to HN and /r/programming

>Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product and added Bootstrap to it

>Pay me $50 to teach you decades old vim features in screencast form

>Reasons Why A Basic Income Guarantee Might Just Be A Bad Idea

And this is the best:

>38090087

so the password is password?

<comment><USER3> As someone who lives outside of sv, it seems like they're not describing a site but a place. So while visits to HN can do worlds of good to my intellectual curiosity, this post is a nice reminder that I don't actually have to endure this disgusting mindset on a daily basis. Thankfully.

tldr; you people are awesomely sickening.

Oh yeah, and they forgot to add "How I quit my job and traveled the third world on just a 'few dollars a day'"

<comment><USER4> cheeky bastards got some variants of it, though:

"How I quit my job and went into consulting" "How I quit consulting and went into freelancing" "How I quit consulting and went into your mom's vagina" "How I quit my consulting job for a month and learned to program and am now making 80k a year writing Ruby apps" "How I quit my contractor Ruby dev gig and joined the Node.js behemoth (and why you should too)"

brilliant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How could they have left out the patronizing irrelevant [0] links [1] to Wikipedia [2] in all the wannabe-academic [3] comments with references[4]?

(and yes, references must be 0-based [5])

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation)

[5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- based_numbering](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering)

<comment><USER6> Parodies are usually funny because they're true. The citations in HN comments are some of the most valuable contributions to the site.

This whole post is depressing. Far from lighthearted fun, these comments all have an undercurrent of hostility ("wannabe-academic"). The mosaic formed by these comments imply pg has harmed the world by creating HN. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Imagine where you'd be forced to go if HN didn't exist, for example.

<comment><USER7> Coming unprepared to 4chan and reading its take on _anything_ (including 4chan itself) leads to the conclusion that it harms the world and its creators should be ashamed of the fact they haven't committed suicide yet.

<comment><USER8> What a vile thing to say. Then again, this _is_ 4chan, so I shouldn't be supri... _oh nope_. I switched back to the HN tab. This is praptak, pretending to be high and mighty on HN, proving himself wrong in the same breath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord

      [231 points] Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product
      and added Bootstrap to it.

      "[some program/service] in Javascript" - 6075 comments

      Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry
      standard framework].

      Hacker, entrepreneur, genius, lifestyle blogger, CEO of
      Whoof! Pastebin for dog owners and pixel.io image-resizing
      service made entirely in Go.

Startup culture in a nutshell.

<comment><USER9> Haha, at risk of completely fitting the stereotype 4chan is setting out for us:

*Silicon Valley startup culture.

It is very different in other places, really!

<comment><USER10> *HN culture

<comment><USER11> As an Australian, my viewpoint into Silicon Valley culture is through HackerNews. What are the main differences then?

<comment><USER10> Well, not everyone here is ripping off existing products and adding Bootstrap to them. :) A few startups working on other things are...

[https://angel.co/boosted-boards](https://angel.co/boosted-boards)

[https://angel.co/counsyl](https://angel.co/counsyl)

[https://angel.co/crowdmed](https://angel.co/crowdmed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      203 votes - How I learned my 6 year old daughter how to
      do high algorithm trading in Haskell

      1 hour later, 421 votes, Your children should be outside
      playing, not coding

That brought me to tears

</comment><comment><USER13> I was on 4chan /g/ basically every moment where I had more than an hour's worth of computer time from around 2010 to mid 2013. In those days as a PC hardware enthusiast and someone who was just beginning to use GNU/Linux, I felt I fit in with the culture fairly well. Of course, there was always "shitposting," but I found the amount of garbage to be tolerable.

As I finished high school and started diving more deeply into GNU/Linux, reading /g/ slowly became less and less enjoyable. At one point, I became so jaded that I felt I understood rms's famous quote regarding /g/: "I tried to look at that page but saw online inane comments." I guess I wasn't as much of a fan of the battlestations, rms memes, desktops, and riced-out GNU/Linux desktops as I previously was.

However, /g/'s influence on me will never be lost. Even after reading more and more hacker news, I still prefer the anonymous style of posting. I say GNU/Linux instead of Linux. (It may be a bit ironic that I learned about rms through a forum where he is a meme that is usually portrayed negatively.) And, to be be honest, I still kind of like battlestation threads (though I may read more usesthis.com instead of /g/). I will also probably never buy any apple products.

Thank you to whomever posted this on /g/, as it really opened my eyes as to how large the intersection of these two communities really is. Perhaps I'll drop by again sometime.

<comment><USER14> RMS isn't really portrayed negatively on /g/. Sure he is made fun of but there is still large minority who agree with his philosophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This one is my favourite

-"Things I've learned from coding for a month"

-"Ten ways to become a better programmer" \- by the guy who's been coding for a month

<comment><USER16> This. These kinds of posts always make me roll my eyes. Frequently they get hundreds of upvotes.

Makes me wonder about the quality of submissions from the fields I understand much less (sciences, humanities, politics, etc.).

<comment><USER17> Don't be silly - computer programmers are experts in every field due to Google and Wikipedia, so certainly the science and humanities posts must be of top quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The jokes are so accurate I'd conjecture there's a huge intersection between the two communities.

Huumm... Except the fact that, arguably, I don't normally conjecture outside HN [1].

[1] I actually want to see what pg has got to essay about this. Just wait until the Arcstar is ready...

 _Please hold your downvotes_ I kid, I kid. Most of this (rather funny) criticism is geared towards SV culture in general, I guess, as HN is just a reflection of that plus common nerd/hacker/engineer/smart-kid-outcast behavior. Apart from the idiosyncrasies of large communities that HN is not invulnerable to, I actually have found great content here. And yes, I'm a white college kid in his early twenties with big ambitions, pg is my hero and I don't feel like getting a job at IBM -- that doesn't mean I'm going to chase a $1B exit with Instagram for Squirrels+social+toilets alongside my other rich friends, replacing cancer research with tweets and fucking up the economy while at it. I'm broke and from another country like many people here, and despite the stupid media frenzy, snarky HN comments, bubble or not and so on, I still want to be part of all this. Why? Because I'm young, stupid and want to see what it's like.

I guess this is what the world's greatest engine of innovation looks like: a bunch of young and stupid nerds from another country.

</comment><comment><USER19> 4chan's commenting system is simultaneously more annoying, and more enjoyable to use. The backtrack style lets you follow conversations, but it doesn't become a nested nightmare. Backtracks also highlight comments of importance or significance.

the Reddit/HN system is hunting the most valuable comments through democracy, but it throws that work out because of its visible tree structure. People can ride the top post.

Also the auto updates are nice to stay current on an active conversation.

Gotta give it to 4chan, nice system. Shame about the captcha.

<comment><USER20> I loathe nested comments and vastly prefer inline quote previews and backlinks.

Then again, I'm biased.

<comment><USER21> >Then again, I'm biased.

That's an understatement.

But seriously, I agree with everything you stand for in regards to how internet discussion should work. Flat discussion is vastly superior, even when weighing the negatives

<comment><USER22> The only time i've ever seen threading really work well is when it only includes the headers, like with email or newsreader clients, and there's a separate frame altogether for the text (which makes it in essence follow a flat style.)

But threading the text as well just makes long discussions difficult to follow and unreadable as the margin starts to get cramped.

Which on HN is apparently part of the reason they do it the way they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love how anonymity engenders such honest commentary. When people aren't tied down to their reputation/ego, they are free to say what they really think.

<comment><USER24> Is it really honest? Anonymous discussion tends to bring out the bigots - there's even some of it in the linked thread - but is it their genuine opinion, or could it be that it's just bored teenagers trying to rile someone up for a laugh?

<comment><USER25> You bring up an interesting point to discuss.

I see this kind of "shock" throughout the techy mainstreamy politcally correct communities. It seems to me that the people that take issue with bigotry are themselves somehow weak through some kind of insecurity manifesting itself as a desire to fix this perceived "injustice". Because, you know, muh feels.

4chan just doesn't care about your feels. It's funny to say this (see how I am distancing myself from 4chan to add validity to my argument?); but I do think more communities could learn something from 4chan in this aspect.

On a related note; I saw that outrage thread linking in the 4chan post about this black chick getting some dude fired and what not about a non-PC joke at a conference. Then, in the HN thread [1], to my pleasure, at least the top comments were mostly absent of the typical reddity/facebook etc. white knighting "This is why women arent in tech!" nonsense.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667)

<comment><USER24> > It seems to me that the people that take issue with bigotry are themselves > somehow weak through some kind of insecurity manifesting itself as a desire > to fix this perceived "injustice". Because, you know, muh feels.

Being empathetic is a weakness?

<comment><USER19> Being susceptible and unwilling to accept it makes you manipulatable. If one person cracking watermelon jokes gets under your skin, think what a psychopath with an end game pounding the drum of affirmative action can do.

Outrage is definitely a weakness.

<comment><USER24> > Being susceptible and unwilling to accept it makes you manipulatable. If one > person cracking watermelon jokes gets under your skin, think what a > psychopath with an end game pounding the drum of affirmative action can do.

I'm afraid I'm not following your logic. Care to explain further?

<comment><USER19> if you react to a negative social appeal emotionally, you will react to a positive social appeal in the same manner.

Basically, if I can get you to react with misogyny, I have a level of control over you.

<comment><USER8> I think you strike the nail on the head here, and in the process touch on something that I have noticed:

"Trolling" is about power. People do it because being able to push somebodies emotions one direction or another lets them play with that person like a marionette. Making people upset is a power trip for trolls.

It would not suprise me if many (not most by any means, but many) trolls are in fact psychopaths who are 'practicing' in a way. Running low-risk experiments on how to control people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >Needlessly negative opinion with the purpose of making me seem more intelligent that I really am.

edit:

lololol toasting in an epic thread.

edit2:

The actual thread is [https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38087806](https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38087806)

</comment><comment><USER27> I love it. The biting sarcasm reminds me of the radio talk shows from GTA 5. Rockstar devs take the shit out of everybody. Here's my contribution:

        [542 points] Why you should work for a startup:
        Low pay, long hours, no equity, uninteresting dipshit problems and
        privileged tools for bosses [224 comments]

        [Posted by a VC, founder, or current employee/inmate]

</comment><comment><USER28> Relevant XKCD: [http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/](http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/)

<comment> vezzy-fnord That's not just an HN issue. It's a problem in any community where there is a significant ratio of self-professed geeks or the like.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if there is a relevant xkcd about this very issue.

<comment><USER30> This one covers it pretty well: [http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/](http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/)

<comment><USER31> this one's better: [http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/](http://dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/)

<comment><USER32> Meh, I opened all three of those in new tabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Similar parody twitter: [https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion](https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion)

<comment><USER34> Also:

[https://twitter.com/StuffHNSays](https://twitter.com/StuffHNSays)

[https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says) (No longer updating)

[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ShitHNSays](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ShitHNSays)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Stallman interruptions to promote the term GNU/Linux are perfect.

<comment><USER36> Oh I was in tears by the third Stallman posting. It looks like he was posting the same things in other threads as well. Stallman spamming

<comment><USER37> There are actually rampaging Stallman bots that will post those. It's pretty great, actually.

New startup idea: Stallman-as-a-service.

<comment><USER38> Well, here's Stallman as a shell 1-liner

        curl -s "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman" |grep "<li>" | grep -v -E "(Chapter|href|Source:)" | perl -MList::Util -e 'print List::Util::shuffle <>' | head -n1 | sed -E -e "s#</?(li|i|b)>##g"

<comment><USER39> First try:

"I'm the last survivor of a dead culture, and I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead."

<comment><USER40> This one opens really well, then the inevitable kicks in:

The War on Drugs has continued for some 20 years, and we see little prospect of peace, despite the fact that it has totally failed and given the US an imprisonment rate almost equal to Russia. I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners. Today, one of the benefits the public wants is the use of computers to share copies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There are a lot people on this forum who seem to think they're absolutely right about some convention or way of life and that they're entitled to attention (ie they believe their take is actually insightful). This describes the "I did or think X, and you should also think or do X" threads.

<comment><USER42> I think the business of being an entrepreneur selects for such traits.

The whole notion of "disruption" that is central to so many of the ideas floating on HN, is rooted in the arrogance necessary to make them work.

<comment><USER43> I have found that if a person calls themself an Entrepreneur; they usually have delusions of grandeur--and hide behind that title. They go through life wondering why no one wants them around. Kinda pathetic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Missing this one:

        [foobar] in Pure CSS

Honestly, the one I hated most is

         Why you should never use [foobar]

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm actually really surprised they seem to think that the HN community is anti-sexist. Compared to 4chan, maybe, but from my experience it isn't at all.

<comment><USER46> There have been a few incidents where discussions about gender issues have been _very quickly_ flagged off the front page.

Example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495950)

<comment><USER47> I don't understand why the post you linked would have been flagged. I see nothing at all wrong with it.

<comment><USER46> That's the problem. It was at #3, then _immediately_ dropped off. (see the comments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why does everybody think HN users and 4chan users are two separate groups of people? In order to write those things, someone has to spend some time on HN.

</comment><comment><USER49> I love how hackernews is responding to this with confidence and humor.

It's like an avuncular old gentleman responding to a lampooning by saying "haha, jolly good joke chaps, some of that was right on the money"

I particularly appreciate the maturity and humor demonstrated by hacker news's response in stark opposition to how a lot of Internet communities (4chan, reddit) get angry when 4chan mocks them.

I like a community that is self aware of its own ridiculousness.

<comment><USER50> I was hoping to start another thread titled: Message board as evidence intelligence is emergent

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is one of the most accurate parodies of this site. I still love reading HN, but I'm doing more work now, so I don't have as much time to comment, but I'm sure that I've seen every one of those 4chan titles in some form or another over my 2 year tenure.

Edit: I didn't see any framework battle posts...

      ▲ 200 points Why Angular is better than Ember
      ▲ 200 points Why Ember is better than Angular

</comment><comment><USER52> These are hilarious, some pretty good (and accurate) ones in there. I'll bet at least a few of the posters there are lurking here, as well.

Don't even want to know what the thread would have turned out like on /b/.

</comment><comment><USER53> Thank you. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

<comment><USER54> Yeah! Very awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> They missed my favorite,

A Startup Anecdote To Advertise My Unrelated Company

</comment><comment><USER56> [Actually interesting topic] - 0 comments -- this thread is proof!

</comment><comment><USER57> "Why Go Is Better Than You And Everything You Own And Why It Always Will Be" \- Seems to sum up a lot of HN posts recently.

</comment><comment><USER58> Haha, I love this one :

I went to the Apple Store and this guy was really nice to me

</comment><comment><USER59> > Today I must accuse a further 3 commenters of "ad hominem" to fill my quota.

</comment><comment><USER60> Very similar to the Linked List news parody [1] which was on HN a few months ago.

[1]: [http://www.linkedlistnyc.org/archive/issue_081.html](http://www.linkedlistnyc.org/archive/issue_081.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> No mention of the TSA, Snowden, or how the United States made them sad today?

<comment> daniel-cussen "Can the NSA blow up your PC remotely?"

<comment><USER61> The TSA... Careful, there might be another 4chan joke about confusing the NSA with the TSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I used to participate actively on /g/ in 2007 to 2011 roughly, I go back for a few months at a time. Funny I used to be on so much I could tell who was posting by seeing the frequency of their favorite images to post and what fonts they were using. Their ircs are good too. It's nice to see some of the communities I frequent meet each other.

</comment><comment><USER63> Surely this isn't what 4chan things of HN. But rather what HN thinks of itself. To come up with such a good parody you have to be really knowledgeable about the thing you are making fun off.

</comment><comment><USER64> I find this HILARIOUS!! Some of those guys visit hacker news WAYYYY TOOOO MUCHHH.

</comment><comment><USER65> what would be awesome is if the mods here changed the title to "ITT: we hacker news now"

<comment><USER26> Go big or go home. Make it the default <title> text for the whole domain.

<comment><USER65> it was actually a meta joke... they complain about the mods updating the title to the original one even if less informative... and that was the original title by OP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> The fact that this is front page on HN is a deliciously ironic recursive joke...

<comment><USER67> It keeps going. Somewhere in that thread, someone mentioned that they might post the thread on HN. Later in the thread someone says that would be a bad idea and links to the previous time someone linked a 4chan HN-satire thread on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is hilarious, liked it. Here's another one:

        [315 points] You should work from Starbucks.
        [262 points] Why working from home or Starbucks is a bad idea.

<comment><USER69> I actually have a screenshot of something like this - [http://i.imgur.com/dtFupzL.png](http://i.imgur.com/dtFupzL.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is absolute gold. Glad there's some humor on HN from time to time, as well as showing 4chan isn't just /b/

</comment><comment><USER71> Wow, it's actually super funny, and accurate. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER72> Whenever I have a question whose answer is more subjective than objective, I ask it on HN.

I find the community here gives the most comprehensive and unbiased answer, while still being passionate about their opinions.

</comment><comment><USER73> My favorite part of the thread:

[https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38087806#p38097739](https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38087806#p38097739)

</comment><comment> master-ruse-man /g/ (or 4chan in general) also love to be ``racist'' [http://hackerjews.com](http://hackerjews.com)

</comment><comment><USER74> Why again are we concerned about what 4chan thinks?

<comment><USER75> See the other top 20 posts on HN about how lack of anonymity will ruin youtube and G+ because of the not so hidden assumption that anonymous commentators result in a higher level of commentary. Talking about 4chan is a political statement.

I like 4chan because its the standup comedy of the internet. Most of what you hear you wouldn't say to your mom, both are funnier if you're a bit drunk or whatever, some level of edginess and offensiveness is not just tolerated but expected... So I like 4chan and I like HN and unsurprisingly I like the intersection quite a bit. And I'm hardly alone. I subjectively think the overlap in the Venn diagram is huge, perhaps approaching majority.

Finally, in isolation from the obvious social and political issues, its a hilarious parody.

<comment><USER74> You are claiming that most HNers use 4chan? Interesting, but likely impossible to prove. I hope for the sake of our field that's not true, or maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Title was a bit linkbait-y, but the content was good. And true.

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

It's not just 4chan talking here, it's all of us. We can't reply because everything is true. The only difference is the guys posting on 4chan are free to post under anonymity. Here? Not so much, I don't want my 714 karma to stray too far from my 720 days here.

I still like you HN <3

</comment><comment><USER77> Right on the mark!

</comment><comment><USER78> I needed a good laugh tonight.

</comment><comment><USER79> 2nd best: reddit for pseudopseudo-intellectuals

I disagree of course, but it did make me lol.

</comment><comment><USER80> I feel like this is similar to when the Native Americans and Columbus met.

</comment><comment><USER81> AHAHAHahaha

>I am going to [country people think is still in the stone age even though it as Western as can be, Vietnam for example] for a year and will only bring my iPad Mini and a pair of trousers

</comment><comment><USER82> Relevant: [http://threepanelsoul.com/2013/09/30/on-local- color/](http://threepanelsoul.com/2013/09/30/on-local-color/)

</comment><comment><USER83> Let 4chan know what we think of them!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748619)

</comment><comment><USER84> Latest trend in HN comments: Why this topic reminds me of a particular entry from "that" submission on 4chan!

</comment><comment><USER85> I have to say a lot of this stereo-typing is entirely accurate, and definitely made me have a chuckle or two.

Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER86> Oh man this one killed me, I'm crying haha

I went to the Apple Store and this guy was really nice to me -101 comments

</comment><comment><USER87> > implying 4chan is one person

</comment><comment><USER88> This is like approaching a tribe and tearing apart its social fabric. Anthropologically speaking it's never the right approach. There are times when you just have to accept certain behavior. Let the system adjust from within.

</comment><comment><USER89> Fantastically correct.

</comment><comment><USER90> This is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER82> "Ten reasons to be really scared"

</comment><comment><USER91> mostly accurate

</comment><comment><USER92> It's funny because it's true.

</comment><comment><USER93> This is just hilarious. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER94> But this link isn't 4chan...

</comment><comment><USER95> Spot on! And very funny, too. :)

</comment><comment><USER96> Why so serious?!

</comment><comment><USER97> Can pg please add HN Gold so I can give this guy some?

</comment><comment><USER98> Serious comment about internet bullying. -148 points

</comment><comment><USER99> That is what you call :pawned:

</comment><comment><USER100> this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER101> /thread

</comment><comment><USER102> Hahaha, I literally just wrote "beautiful" and got downvoted here, I'll write it again "beautiful" !

<comment><USER103> Only reason you probably got downvoted is that it doesn't really add to the discussion. An upvote is way better than "beautiful" imho. But, hey, I do agree, that was hilarious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> This is exactly the level of humor and intellect you'd expect from 4chan. See how I didn't say anything there?

</comment><comment><USER105> "Why I stop coding and focus more on my blog" 39123 comments

Gold :)

</comment><comment><USER106> Bonzi buddy favicon

</comment><comment><USER102> beautiful

</comment><comment><USER107> I hate corporations, but I hate startups even more</comment>


Ask HN: Am I wrong to feel betrayed by whois for publishing my address? - <AUTHOR>

I've been building websites for less than a year now and have registered 4 or 5 domains for side projects. I used a credit card and my (parents) address was published for the whole world to see.<p>No other web service could get away with grabbing information from your credit card and posting it publicly. Why is whois given such an exemption? <comment><USER2> Your address is part of the public record for your domain registrations.

Think about it the other way around. Suppose you need to serve a legal document to the owners of a web site you are having problems with - you need the address. Not being able to contact a web site owner would be a bad thing - right?

Your credit card security is hardly being undermined by a public record of your address is it?

</comment><comment><USER3> This was all disclosed by whichever registrar you used. It's your fault for not noticing before you agreed to their Terms and Conditions. FWIW, there are some registrars (GoDaddy, for instance) that give you the option of a private registration, where they mask your public data with their own.

</comment><comment><USER4> GoDaddy also owns DomainsByProxy. They put the WhoIs address as their corporate address. That should address your concern.

<https://www.domainsbyproxy.com/Default.aspx></comment>


ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/02/esa_starlink/ <comment><USER3> Two things from this article that surprised me:

> _The ESA operations team confirmed that this morning 's manoeuvre took place > approximately half an orbit before the potential pileup._

Half an orbit is _mightily late_. It's a last minute emergency correction in space terms. Given that both Aeolus and Starlink satellites are active missions, how come they didn't realize and correct this sooner?

And related:

> _If plans to orbit thousands more satellites (to bring broadband to remote > areas, or inflict it on air-travellers, for example) come to fruition, the > ESA team reckons that things will need to be a lot more automated._

Maybe it's because I didn't get far enough in the space industry handbook I'm reading, but I was _sure_ orbital tracking and detecting potential collisions was automated already. There should be continuously running simulations that are constantly fed fresh TLEs from tracking stations, that check whether or not anything is going to collide with anything else in the nearby future.

<comment><USER4> According to the other article I read about it ([https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/02/s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/02/spacex- refused-to-move-a-starlink-satellite-at-risk-of-collision-with-a-european- satellite/)) they knew about it earlier but Starlink refused to move their satelite.

<comment><USER5> So, they were playing chicken? And Starlink won?

<comment><USER6> No.

Jonathan O'Callaghan published his extremely biased and inflammatory clickbait before waiting for SpaceX to present their side of the story (time from ESA tweet to Jonathan's story was about three hours).

What actually happened is that SpaceX communicated their intention to take no action based on a much earlier estimate of extremely low collision risk. A later update from the US Air Force got lost in the mail filter, so SpaceX never read it otherwise they would have contacted ESA immediately.

Here is Loren Grush with a more mature and less inflammatory take on the topic: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847243/spacex- starlink-s...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847243/spacex-starlink- satellite-european-space-agency-aeolus-conjunction-space-debris)

In time we will get a more thorough understanding of what happened, but the ESA's fundamental point is emphasised by SpaceX's experience: having to coordinate satellite operations through email that is handled by humans is fundamentally unworkable, and something needs to be done about automating everything before the megaconstellations take to the sky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the author of a Forbes article on the same subject:

[https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1168859502067834881](https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1168859502067834881)

"Just to quickly clarify again @FastCompany et al, ESA did NOT ask SpaceX to move. SpaceX simply said they would not move their #Starlink satellite, necessitating an evasive manoeuvre from #Aeolus."

[https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1168833920118480898](https://twitter.com/Astro_Jonny/status/1168833920118480898)

"I'm not sure on the exact timeline but yes, ESA was alerted to the event five days before. Three days prior, they noted a raised collision risk. One day before, they decided to move. SpaceX sent one email saying they had no plans to manoeuvre."

<comment><USER6> That was published before the author had any response from SpaceX (it looks like he gave them an hour or two to respond before publishing).

Here's Loren Grush with more info: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847243/spacex- starlink-s...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847243/spacex-starlink- satellite-european-space-agency-aeolus-conjunction-space-debris)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is hardly a 'first'. ESA felt their satellite was being obstructed by SpaceX who moved into the space much later and didn't act responsibly as they should have. So ESA decided to send out a press release.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you can feel the bad blood behind the press release.

Basically ESA nicely asked SpaceX to maneuver their sat and shorten its lifetime - they don't have a legal basis or enforcement mechanism anyway. SpaceX pretended not to hear until it was too late and ESA went ahead with their contingency plan of burning their own sat's fuel and lifetime instead.

<comment><USER7> If it was really about burning fuel, ESA would not have waited until half an orbit before. The longer you wait, the more you have to burn.

<comment><USER10> Not really.

a. They did an altitude increase. There's no real gains from an earlier burn that one might get when doing something like a hohmann transfer.

b. Half an orbit before out means more/better telemetry to work with.

c. They are from a quick google, well within the range where atmospheric drag plays a role, and you need to do station keeping. leaving it this late means you don't "waste" fuel from drag.

Admittedly, my only credentials for this are a few thousand hours in KSP and reading around the subject. Anyone with a proper degree on this is welcome to correct me.

<comment><USER7> In that case they were simply adjusting their station keeping schedule and minimum (if any) fuel would be wasted.

If that wasn't the case, they could raise or lower the altitude slightly several orbits before the "event" causing them to arrive at the intersection point earlier or later. For a desired time delta, the sooner your perform your altitude change the smaller the changed required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This all happened at 320km, which is way below the Starlink constellation operating elevation. So the satellite in question is either one that is undergoing de-orbit testing, or is not functioning correctly which likely means SpaceX couldn't move it if they wanted to.

Very, very misleading to say the ESA had to dodge the "mega constellation".

<comment><USER12> The register does seem to have a penchant for hyperbole.

<comment><USER13> Penchant? It's why they get out of bed in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Hmmm. We move our satellites on average once a week and don't put out a > press release to say who we maneuvered around...

\- [https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168582141128650753](https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168582141128650753)

> Normal part of flying satellites (or should be). Does BA announce every time > one of its airplanes steers around a Ryanair aircraft?

\- [https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168607146646364160](https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/status/1168607146646364160)

CEO of Iridium, an existing not-mega constellation that Starlink is arguably going to make obsolete. When a competitor is coming in and calling this unnecessary drama, you have to wonder if the ESA has a leg to stand on or is doing this for political pandering.

They have lots of political reasons to do this too. Attempting to acquire more regulatory authority. Attempting to acquire funding for projects like AI collision avoidance ([https://twitter.com/esaoperations/status/1168540912282165248](https://twitter.com/esaoperations/status/1168540912282165248)). Maybe even attempting to slow down a competitor to their Ariane rocket family...

PS. the other recent tweets by the CEO of iridium are also interesting and relevant: [https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/with_replies](https://twitter.com/IridiumBoss/with_replies)

</comment><comment><USER15> This article has some questionable word choices.

"We contacted SpaceX to get its take on ESA's _antics_ , but nothing has yet emerged from Musk's media _orifice_ "

"In 2018, the _boffins_ keeping track of things"

Is this considered professional journalism nowadays?

<comment><USER16> Many British publications use the term.

boffin: Noun (British informal) A person engaged in scientific or technical research. [1]

It appears regularly in the Economist, too [2].

[1] [https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/boffin](https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/boffin)

[2] [https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and- africa/2019/08/08/...](https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and- africa/2019/08/08/how-africa-can-encourage-home-grown-maths-boffins)

<comment><USER17> You don't often hear Orifice though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Our starlink team last exchanged an email with the Aeolus operations team on > August 28, when the probability of a collision was only in the 2.2e-5 range > (or 1 in 50k), well below the 1e-4 (or 1 in 10k) industry standard threshold > and 75 time slower than the final estimate. At that point, both SpaceX and > ESA determined a maneuver was not necessary. Then, the U.S. Air Force's > updates showed the probability increased to 1.69e-3 (or more than 1 in 10k) > but a bug in our on-call paging system prevented the Starlink operator from > seeing the follow on correspondence on this probability increase - SpaceX is > still investigating the issue and will implement corrective actions. > However, had the Starlink operator seen the correspondence, we would have > coordinated with ESA to determine best approach with their continuing with > their maneuver or our performing a maneuver."

Reportedly an official SpaceX Statement (typos are probably mine)

[https://twitter.com/lorengrush/status/1168917747109191681?s=...](https://twitter.com/lorengrush/status/1168917747109191681?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER18> "[...]but nothing has yet emerged from Musk's media orifice."

Typo or colorful word choice?

<comment><USER19> You don't know _The Register_? Take a look at the rest of the site: wordplay like that is their chosen style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> While space may be infinite, the parking spots closest to the door ain't - <USER2> are we even talking about letting commercial entities taking up so much LEO space without some kind of ride share clause? This is ESA we are talking about, a pan-national agency working solely for the common good of humanity. Should they move for a prototype of the next AT&T global monopoly?</comment>


Regrets of the Dying - <AUTHOR> http://inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html

<comment><USER2> In case you don't get many comments, it might be because this has been submitted a few times before. I've listed some of them here - there are more. It's clearly a popular item, and if people really do read it, then it certainly serves as a reminder to check our own priorities.

But how many people read it and try to be constructive?

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570865](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570865)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239) <\- This has the most coments

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603369](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603369)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604180](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604180)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615886)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617705](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617705)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2624341](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2624341)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743768](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743768)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290059](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290059)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306688](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306688)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331535)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3398988](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3398988)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542280](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542280)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3629787](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3629787)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646379)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3816422](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3816422)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872345](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872345)

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4174746](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4174746)</comment>