An open source Global Navigation Satellite Systems software-defined receiver - <AUTHOR> https://gnss-sdr.org/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this would be usable for applications like high-altitude balloon tracking, where commercial GPS receivers cut out above 18km due to ITAR regulations.

<comment><USER3> Looks like that limitation is removed.[0]

[0]: [https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2014/kim.pdf](https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2014/kim.pdf) (page 7)

<comment><USER4> Limitation is to commercial sales of receivers. Private individuals building/operating their own receivers have no limits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if any of these SDR solutions for hobbyists can get survey grade position solutions?

<comment><USER6> We've been trying to use it with a hackrf and bladerf and no dice at receiving actual GPS, even with an antenna exactly tuned to 1.57542GHz. Only when we transmit GPS signals ourselves so the signal is much stronger, are we able to obtain any satellites at all.

The software works, but you need a low noise amplifier or something else that you'd probably have to order from America or China (that would have taken too long for our school project).

<comment><USER7> I was under the impression that gps antennas were powered...and special.

The receiver has to pull the signal from below the noise floor so needs a little help but, admittedly, my understanding on how it all works is limited.

<comment><USER8> A sibling comment mentioned using a Bias-T, and that's pretty much always needed unless you're using a COTS Rx (which would generally have one built-in)

It doesn't even have to be a fancy one. In a pinch, once, I use a random- valued inductor and the smallest-valued capacitor I had on-hand, and soldered them to a little PCB I made by slicing up copper-clad board with an x-acto knife. (0603 parts, if I recall.) Worked like a charm!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What sat-constellation does this hear?

<comment><USER10> It appears that the eventual objective is to be able to use any GNSS. The page on telemetry decoder blocks[1] seems to indicate that GPS, GLONASS and Galileo signals are currently supported.

[1] [https://gnss-sdr.org/docs/sp-blocks/telemetry-decoder/](https://gnss- sdr.org/docs/sp-blocks/telemetry-decoder/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _At this time of writing, GNSS-SDR cannot be built natively on Microsoft Windows. As far as authors' knowledge, nothing prevents it but their own ignorance on Microsoft's building tools. Users have reported successful buildings of GNU Radio on Windows systems, so there should be not serious caveats building GNSS-SDR as well. However, GNSS-SDR is not blocked for Windows users. There are several virtualization tools that work well._

Great, let's blow off 95% of the desktop market and see how that goes for us.

Doesn't GNU Radio already support GNSS decoders? If I want a GPL-encumbered GNSS receiver solution, there are plenty of existing options.

<comment><USER12> The entitlement is strong in this one...

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's certainly an easy conclusion to draw, isn't it.</comment></comment></comment>


Dwarf Fortress and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/07/dwarf-fortress-how-to-stockpiles/ <comment><USER2> Dwarf Fortress is a developer game. Last I checked, you need mods to get any graphics beyond basic ascii characters. Practically everything is a keyboard shortcut that needs to be memorized. It makes the player feel like they're an operator from the Matrix trilogy.

It's interesting that by completely ignoring UI/UX the developers (2 brothers) have managed to create one of the most in depth worlds imaginable. This makes it completely unaccessible to the wider world, but beloved by the core audience and respected by any nerd that tried to read through a tutorial. It's found success in being the antithesis of a AAA game, which is usually beautiful but shallow.

I wonder if there could ever be another Dwarf fortress? Or if the target audience is too small to support another game.

<comment><USER3> I would not quite call it a developer game, just more like a very involved and deep simulation. The barrier to new players is steep, but there are lots of easy-to-use third party tools to make the game more friendly [1].

It's certainly an extremely daunting game, and the interface is ridiculous and makes no sense. Like anything worth doing, it takes practice.

If you're too intimidated by Dwarf Fortress, try RimWorld [2]. It's the same idea, but with a GUI. And if you really want to learn to play Dwarf Fortress, the Lazy Newbs pack linked to below is a great way to start. I'd recommend turning off invasions and aquifers in the opening menu. Other than that, there are plenty of how-to videos and wikis out there. I won't favor one with a link. Google can help with that.

There will never be another game quite like Dwarf Fortress. But there will be a lot of games that learn from it and expand on its ideals. Tarn and Zack are incredible people, and if you send them a donation, they will mail you a hand- drawn image of a dwarf doing whatever you ask.[3]

[1] [http://lazynewbpack.com/](http://lazynewbpack.com/) [2] [https://rimworldgame.com/](https://rimworldgame.com/) [3] [http://www.bay12games.com/support.html](http://www.bay12games.com/support.html)

<comment><USER4> DISCLAIMER: Do _not_ turn off aquifers. It will make your digging far less Fun.

<comment><USER5> Did you mean !FUN! ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can get a good feel for how ridiculously complex the simulation of Dwarf Fortress is just by reading the bugs: [http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195](http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195)

Cats were walking through spilled beer, licking it off their fur (as cats do), and dying of alcohol poisoning.

<comment><USER7> The best bug was an old one where carps would get stronger from swimming, which, living in water, they did constantly, thus making them invincible murder fish.

<comment><USER8> IIRC this was exacerbated by the fact that their bite was coded as (or similar to) a "punch" which actually would not have been so bad, except (1) a dwarf hit by it had a 50/50 chance of falling into water and (2) carp appeared in packs...

<comment><USER9> the bug was exacerbated by carp having teeth, thus giving them a bite. except they were able to bite across the water tile and onto the shore, thus engaging combat.

this resulted in death because dwarves, as a rule, dont know how to swim unless trained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dwarf Fortress is _definitely_ a developer game. I love how the game allows you to creatively stand-up industries of scale.

For instance, (shamelessly plugging), the game has minecarts, which transport goods point-to-point, following some track.

To avoid having to lay track for each route separately, I devised a system of logic components that will allow routes to share track, via automated routing:

[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Gnidan#Minecart_...](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Gnidan#Minecart_Routing)

The routing system uses synchronization primitives to ensure that each shared track segment is only occupied by at most one minecart at a time. Using this guarantee, I have my system switch track exits accordingly, so each minecart in transit gets sent to the right place.

GIF for anyone who might be interested: [https://i.imgur.com/nC3dfLK.gif](https://i.imgur.com/nC3dfLK.gif)

And the save file: [http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=11721](http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=11721)

</comment><comment><USER11> IMHO, the interface of dwarf fortress enhances the medieval fantasy experience. Each little detail has to be managed in it's own arcane way. It's the UI equivalent of the vice chancellor explaining to a cooper that buckets and barrels should be stored in separate locations. The cooper would of course go on a long tirade about how his father, and his father's father stored things this way, and that worked flawlessly for them.

Perhaps i just let my imagination run a little wild while i wait for those little 'g' s to come and try to kill my guys.

The UI is terrible. The UI is part of the charm. You get the experience Tarn wants, not the experience you want. Art is not required to be accessible. (it often is, and that's often good) but some experiences can't be handed to you in a gift wrapped package. There is no royal road.

<comment><USER12> Hmph. You're not _really_ having fun until you're having _!!XxXFunXxX!!_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you like Dwarf Fortress, but hate the interface, you may want to try out Rimworld. [http://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/)

It has a similar playstyle, but with graphics and a UI that isn't too bad. Not the best UI, but not bad at all.

<comment><USER6> Rimworld is great. The interface always kept me away from DF, but I had some good times with Rimworld even though it's significantly less complex (no Z-levels, for instance).

The first time I played it, I ended up with a Donner party-esque situation in which my medicine had run out, everyone was dying from infected wounds inflicted by raider attacks, and the few colonists still on their feet were fully occupied feeding the spoiled remains of the dead to the barely-living. Colonists were dying faster than the survivors could dig graves for them. It was brutal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> After you spend some time in DF, the interface isn't bad at all. Actions are separated into semi-logical sections, you get a feel for what keys navigate what menus ect. Tools like dwarf therapist and dfhack alleviate the worst of the UI problems. The real problem with DF is in its performance. Any fort more than a few hours old will grind to a halt as 100+ dwarfs pathing algorithms compete for a single thread. Fluids further impact performance, and if you get invaded? Have fun with 10-15 FPS until you give up. It's extremely disappointing as these late game interactions are usually the most fun.

<comment><USER15> I have played hundreds of hours of DF over many years and the interface is still awful. There are aspects of the UI I enjoy as a vim user. At best it can feel a lot like composing vim commands.

However at worst it's as this article outlines: obtuse, inscrutable, and lacking in consistency. Stockpiles are bad, but probably not even the worst interface. There are many aspects to job orders and militia management I still don't fully understand how to manage today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's one of the more egregious problems, but there's also things like the fact that placing a bed down and placing a workshop down has completely unrelated keys; manufacturing two different types of objects, ditto. I haven't played the recent versions, but organizing a military is something that's hideously difficult, and most of the guides for organizing your dwarves duties - the tasks they're allowed to perform, according to their skillsets - is best done with a third-party program that reads and edits memory directly. (You can do it in game, but you better have a notepad so you can record your dwarves' skills, and then use that data to actually assign them tasks.)

I used to play pretty regularly for a long while, and I still kept a notes.txt file with all of the various key combinations required to do the most basic of tasks.

If your profession is UX/UI design, you are probably going to take weeks off your life with the raised blood pressure this game will cause you.

<comment><USER17> The in-game job management interface effectively becomes unusable once your fortress reaches a certain size. It requires a third party program to manage jobs without wanting to tear your hair out.

<comment><USER18> Odd, I never really felt that way, I just put certain jobs on repeat and kept huge stockpiles of food, booze, etc. The quantum stockpiles of stone help, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> (Second comment, because it's a different topic.)

I've found that Kerbal Space Program seems to occupy that same gaming niche for me, of a game that's more of a simulator without defined goals, that rewards both planning and the realization that all of your finely laid plans can go to hell in one second - sometimes because of a wrong microdecision you made, and sometimes because that's just how that universe operates.

But with much better controls, and you can fly cool jet planes if you want to.

<comment><USER19> For me, Factorio fills the planning game niche really well. If you don't plan right, you'll find your factory grinding to a halt as your resources are trickling in instead of flowing efficiently. "Refactoring" doesn't feel like the worst chore in the world, rather you can quickly tear things down and redesign much quicker than a lot of strategy games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sad to see so many apologists for bad interface, but I didn't expect any better. "It's an amazing game" and "It's for developers" are not excuses for poor UI.

Complexity is not any more of an excuse than the inconsistent order of arguments or use of underscores in PHP is defensible.

Reminds me of an argument I once had with my brother-in-law, a psychologist, over academic writing. He argued that the obtuse, frequently unreadable style was simply "how they're done." Good writing is simple and logical — every academic would benefit from a semester of journalism, where deliberately bad writing isn't tolerated.

</comment><comment><USER21> To be honest, most people play dwarf fortress with considerably plugin assistance, including the much needed Dwarf therapist. However I feel like the complaining over the interface is really unnecessary, any interface would struggle with the level of depth that the game exposes. I feel like most would struggle to come up with a sensible interface for such a game...

<comment><USER16> > _any interface would struggle with the level of depth that the game exposes_

But there are plugins that make doing certain tasks much, _much_ easier. So a reasonable interface _can_ be made.

DF's interface doesn't struggle, it lays down and moans.

<comment> crooked-v For an example, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game that took the complexity of content-filled roguelikes (commands for every key on the keyboard, multiple mode-switches for many commands, layered tileset mapping, etc) and added a beautiful and easy-to-understand and accessible mouse-driven UI and graphical tileset to it, _without_ harming pure-keyboard accessibility.

It's completely possible, it just takes some effort.

<comment><USER22> As someone who has played far too much Stone Soup (going back to when it was called Linley's Dungeon Crawl), and bounced, hard, off of Dwarf Fortress a number of times, I think that you're understating how much simpler, conceptually, Crawl is.

DF is many, many orders of magnitude more complex than Crawl. Many.

<comment> crooked-v DF's _gameplay_ is more complex, but the interface is (or easily could be) functionally identical to Crawl's. Status area that shows the currently selected thing, menu with commands and submenus, viewport with layered graphical tiles, overlay dialogs for large menus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The best part about this article is that the author left all the quality levels disabled. After all that work, the stockpile still won't accept any goods.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm just curious: am I the only one thinking that Dwarf Fortress actually has acceptable(if not good) UI? In most cases the screen will hint you what keys you can press to perform action. Yes I admin the UI is not so good whatsoever and in certain cases it's confusing, but it really is a question which you are comparing it to.

For example in roguelikes such as Nethack, there's no hint on the screen at all and you will have to go to a specific long help page to read about it. The result is: you will have to first memorize a lot of commands to be able to play the game.

If I'm programming using vim, I certainly agree that memorizing all those commands will boost my productivity and I'm willing to do so. But for fun time, I'm not sure if I want to memorize those many commands first to have some leisure time.

<comment><USER25> I would say it has good UX, but not good UI. There is a difference.

<comment><USER24> Yeah of course, I agree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As I do whenever Dwarf Fortress comes up, let me retell the tragic story of Môsom.

Remember that nothing in this story is embellished. It all happened within the simulation. Dwarf Fortress is at the very least the best story generator game of all time.

I needed to tap a source of water to create a nice waterfall in my dining room. Everything was prepared: the waterfall would fall through the dining room, and then a channel under the dining room led off the side of the map through a fortification. All I needed to do was open the wall of the tunnel which was touching my water source.

Feeling too lazy to channel in from above (and slightly evil), I decided to go ahead and sacrifice a dwarf for the effort. I had the dwarf wall itself in and then open the wall. Two seconds later multiple bad things were revealed about this decision:

\- The dwarf was actually a mother carrying her child under her arm

\- The water was under high pressure.

\- I had forgotten to make a floodgate to stop the water if needed.

The water shot out of the wall, instantly killing the baby and smashing the mom against the wall of the tunnel. She was dragged along by the water, fell down the waterfall and was pushed up against the fortification on the edge of the level with two broken legs and a bruised spleen. The baby's corpse was caught under the waterfall right underneath the dining room and wasn't going anywhere. The mother kept trying to run upstream but was unable to.

I felt pretty bad at this point. But thinking there was not much I would be able to do since the mother would certainly die soon anyways, I just tried to quiet my bad conscience and focus on other things, awaiting the inevitable message the mother had died.

A day later the baby's corpse started to fill my dining room up with miasma, making me have to wall out the waterfall to keep my dwarves from vomiting. Quite poetic justice, really: the stench of death was on my waterfall.

I was still waiting for the message that the mom had died.

It didn't come.

After a week of game time or so I looked to see what she was doing and my jaw hit the floor. She was FISHING. The mom was fishing to stay alive while drinking the water. She was in an obviously really bad mood having witnessed death and the decomposition of her child. But she was barely staying sane because she was being "comforted by a lovely waterfall".

That did it for me. I finally decided to launch a rescue mission to save her. Not 2 seconds after I had given the command to dig a tunnel to where she was, she went insane and died of thirst shortly after. I was too late. _sniff_

Her name was Môsom.

<comment><USER27> I love these stories. DF is truly my favorite game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I gave up on DF, and get my crazy colony simulator needs met by Rimworld now....but I did get addicted to LCS for awhile, which is another horrible interface attached to a gem of a game, made by the DF devs.

<comment><USER27> I have not heard of this game. can you link me to it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've always wondered how Dwarf Fortress stores its three-dimensional world... anybody have any information on that? considering the size of the worlds involved, I'd imagine some interesting methods are in play to keep the worlds at a suitable size.

Dwarf Fortress is kind of this interesting standard of complexity over interface design. prioritizing depth over a pretty UI seems to really do wonders in development..

</comment><comment><USER30> I've made 3 separate attempts to get into DF: read tutorials, watched Youtube videos, the whole shebang. The incomprehensible UI drove me away every time.

Having said that, I love that something like DF exists, even if I can never enjoy it. I think the world is better off for it, in some small way.

</comment><comment><USER31> That was a refreshing article in that far too many historical articles were along the lines of "If only it had pretty art and maybe some celebrity voices then it would be awesome". Those articles are very annoying.

Note that not all of DF is as obscure as the example in the article. I've never tried doing what the author tried and I salute the author for bravery in trying it. Most activities in DF are fairly straightforward.

This article did remind me that I haven't sent the brothers some $$ in awhile, if you send them $$ they send you hand drawn art vaguely inspired by DF.

[http://www.bay12games.com/support.html](http://www.bay12games.com/support.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the UI is the least of the game's problems. It seems like each release Toady introduces more bugs and game design problems than solutions.

It is still worth playing for the weird level of detail and depth but I have a hard time having as much fun as I once had.

I recommend rimworld if you just want to have fun, though it doesn't quite have the level of emergent shenanigans happening in it yet.

<comment><USER16> I haven't played in awhile; what sorts of new bugs and design problems have cropped up?

I used to read the blog posts regularly, but I don't really care about the art-and-history simulator, or the single-player mode, so I stopped keeping up with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dwarf fortress has a UI that is on par with learning regex. If you can master dwarf fortresses interface, then you can learn linux, regex, sed and awk.

That having been said, the game is amazing, and has a valuable lesson involved: "loosing is fun".

<comment><USER34> That's total and absolute nonsense.

Speaking as a linux user with a good bit of experience with sed, awk, and regex, DF is _way_ worse.

<comment> norea-armozel Yeah, I'm going to confirm that it was easier for me to install and run my first Linux distro (Slackware) back in '99 than it was to play Dwarf Fortress. Seriously, anyone who can get a fortress to last a year in-game amazes me.

<comment><USER35> As someone who also first installed Debian in 98 from a single floppy disk netboot image, a memorized FTP site domain, a cable modem connection and a whole night of hoping, I wholeheartedly agree, Dwarf Fortress is way, way harder.

Every year I pick it up and play it for a bit just show myself that I can do it.

These days, I watch streams of people playing the game on Youtube or I play Rimworld if I'm in the mood for actually playing something myself.

I've never been able to have the patience to get to one of the really interesting kinds of fortresses that have steam-powered defenses that tunnel hordes of enemies strategically through your base only have them burned to death.

Also, the game is single threaded so there's a very linear limit of how many dwarves and interesting emergent things can happen in your fortress.

God, I miss playing that game. When it's good, it's the best there.

I've wanted to learn Rust for the express purpose of making a faster, multi- threaded DF-like game.

<comment><USER34> Yeah.

You know, I wonder if we could use dfhack and LD_PRELOAD to force df to do some multithreading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does the author play console games? This is about average for a PS4 menu.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can't decide if this guy is being serious or just deadpan. It's very well- executed if it's just a deadpan delivery of a typical gamer -- who is used to mashing no more than six different buttons -- trying DF for the first time. Well, maybe the fortieth or fiftieth time, if he's a really quick learner.</comment>


A Baby Quantum Internet Was Born Today - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/tech/quantum-internet-120412.html

<comment><USER2> The cool thing about quantum mechanics is that a man-in-the-middle attach won't work!

The reason for this is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that there are certain attributes of a particle where we can't know both of them perfectly. The classic example of this is position and energy.

The relevant attributes here, though, are angular momentum (spin) in the "left/right" and "up/down" directions. Think of a particle as two arrows, one pointed either left or right, and the other pointed either up or down. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that if I know with 100% accuracy that a particle is pointed left (or right), I can't know anything about if it's pointed up or down, and vice versa. In fact, if I measure the left/rightness of a particle, the up/downness gets set randomly to be either of them.

So quantum communication works more or less like this: We agree that left and up correspond to a 1, and right and down correspond to a zero. So if I want to send a 1, I randomly choose a either a left or an up, and send it to you. Then, on your end, you randomly choose an axis to measure on, and after I've measured, we tell each other (through a public channel) which axis we measured on. If we agree, we use the bit, otherwise, we throw it away.

Ok, so now, what if Eve comes in the middle and steals our electron, reads it, and sends it again. Well, she doesn't know what axis to measure on! So if I send it on the up/down axis, Eve measures it on the right/left axis, and you measure it on the up/down axis, you have a 50% chance of getting a wrong answer. So if we take a few bits at random and publish them, we can get a pretty good idea if someone's snooping.

Also, Eve can't copy our particle, because if she could, she could read one axis from one particle and the second from the other, which would violate the Uncertainty Principle (this result is known as the No-Cloning theorem).

<comment><USER3> That only works if the public channel is trustworthy. If Eve can man-in-the- middle it too, she can just conduct separate instances of the protocol with Alice and Bob, forwarding on the classical data.

<comment><USER4> this is true of any form of communication.

if you go far enough into crypto theory, you become so skeptical that even hume looks naive. how do you know you aren't a brain in a jar, subject to a cruel experiment to explore how people respond to boring philosophical rebuttals to their posts on social networks?

<comment><USER5> Pretty harsh considering comex is right and pranjalv123 is wrong. Authentication is still necessary in quantum communication channels. MIM is no less possible on a quantum channel than a classical one. Eavesdropping is harder but the no-cloning theorem doesn't prevent attackers from learning information about what you and your buddies are saying to each other. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- cloning_theorem#Imperfect_cl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- cloning_theorem#Imperfect_cloning)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand.

If the two atoms are linked via entanglement, why are they also connected by optical fiber?

if aiming a laser at the first atom will change its state, then shouldn't the state of the second atom change too at the same time?

" That photon zooms along the optical fiber to other optical cavity containing the other atom."

photon zooms? that means on the other side of the optical fiber, the second atom absorbs more than just one photon?

<comment> jean- The atoms are not initially entangled. They become entangled once a photon from one atom travels along the fiber and interacts with the second atom.

I believe that "zoom" means "to travel very quickly" in the sentence you quote.

<comment><USER6> Thank you. I'm not native English speaker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > That photon zooms along the optical fiber to other optical cavity containing > the other atom.

Wouldn't this break the entanglement?

That photon is going to be absorbed/re-emitted countless amounts of times as it "travels" though the optical fiber.

Every time this happens, the wave function is collapsed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't the man-in-the-middle attack still work in this scheme?

</comment><comment><USER9> Previous discussion on the topic here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830746>

</comment><comment><USER10> I like to think that we'll uncover a new phenomena for communication, but be troubled the the incredible amount of noise in the medium, only to discover it's the channel for intergalactic WiFi.

Browsing the UWW will be crazy.

</comment><comment><USER11> >never be hacked

May I be the first to say, challenge accepted.

<comment><USER2> Actually, a bunch of commercial quantum crypto systems were hacked a few years ago, in spite of being "theoretically unhackable". The details are at [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/quantum-hacking- cr...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/quantum-hacking-cracks- quantum-crypto/4371), but basically you can convince avalanche diodes that they're only receiving one photon by blinding them, and this lets you bypass the security inherent to the No-Cloning theorem and the Uncertainty Principle that quantum crypto relies on .

<comment><USER12> Untappable is not the same as unhackable. Using the term "unhackable = untappable" is really bad way to talk about computer security since it ignores every other security bad other than the ability to capture photons traveling down a fiber.</comment></comment></comment>


Google, general patent for using ANS (both tANS and rANS) in video compression - <AUTHOR> https://encode.ru/threads/2648-Published-rANS-patent-by-Storeleap/page3 <comment><USER2> This is beyond spineless.</comment>


Viper.io is a simple netty toolkit for http projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/briangu/viper.io I wanted to make a netty based toolkit for easily building s3-enabled, static, embedded, or simple REST sites. <comment><USER2> let's get more contributors on this simple netty!</comment>


Ask HN: Sales people who can sell our SaaS application prototype? - <AUTHOR> Me and my partner have build a prototype of a SaaS application. What is the best way to talk to potential customers, we are not good sales people. Any advice? <comment><USER2> Sales people are driven by money. Give them something to sell, such as minimum viable product.</comment>


Tor and HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https <comment><USER2> I think this is misleading. I now believe that the NSA has the private keys for substantially all SSL certs in use, and I expect that a non-trivial percentage of Tor nodes are run by the government.

SSL certs require cooperation of a trusted registrar even for the biggest companies -- Google's is signed by Equifax, for example. Given what we've seen in the last few days, requesting keys from the root CAs is a no-brainer.

For Tor, a bunch of attacks are possible by owning only a small percentage of all nodes. Recently, Tor was issuing a "call for relays" due to a dwindling number of participants that was endangering the network. Considering that Tor came out of Navy research, if you don't think they have a statistically interesting number of nodes, you're crazy. If they don't, it's only because they don't think that Tor is an interesting source right now.

TL;DR: Security depends on your threat model, and while I think that Tor and HTTPS provide strong protection from run-of-the-mill attackers, I don't think that either provides meaningful security if you're worried about the NSA.

<comment><USER3> > SSL certs require cooperation of a trusted registrar even for the biggest > companies -- Google's is signed by Equifax, for example. Given what we've > seen in the last few days, requesting keys from the root CAs is a no- > brainer.

Getting a root's key does not enable them to decrypt the traffic. Getting the server's SSL private key USUALLY means you can retroactively decrypt, but it is possible (though uncommon) for servers to be configured to use ephemeral keys (EDH modes) which provide perfect forward secrecy (that is, the property that the session key can't be recovered even with later compromise of the server's long-term key).

Interesting sidenote: AFAIK there are no widely-supported (TLS 1.1 or below) methods of mitigating the BEAST attack while enabling PFS - those modes are TLS 1.2+ which isn't widely spoken yet.

 _This is all irrelevant though._ The issue is with the tech companies giving them the plaintext data themselves. No amount of transport-layer encryption helps with that.

You have to stop using US services.

<comment><USER2> I can't update my original post now, but I stand corrected. I "remembered" uploading the private key with the CSR last time I went through the process, but must have misremembered. Well, that's _some_ good news I guess. The NSA could still easily request the private key from the company, of course.

<comment><USER3> You don't share your private key with the CA.

A certificate is an attestation (signature) by a CA's private key that a given PUBLIC key is yours, that anyone with the CA's public key can verify.

The CSR does not contain your private key.

NONE OF THIS MATTERS. This is not about bulk-decrypting SSL, though I'm sure NSA does that when and where they can, too. This is about coordinated, automated, integrated methods of transmitting the plaintext.

Why should they bother getting a key and scraping gmail's payloads when they could just have Google give them an API? Furthermore, this method would continue working perfectly even ifwhen services switched to ephemeral key modes that provide PFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The important part of the diagram for Tor is the first NSA character, as you can see it still shows "Location" before you are routed through the Tor relay.

With the location information it is possible to correlate the exit information via pattern matching, though it would take considerable analysis, this can be done by logging volume and timing information on the two sides. I am sure there are even better techniques to analyze exit/entry correlations, especially if you're not using a secure browser.

So having a private VPS doesn't really matter, in fact it can make matters worse because you are adding layers that can be "watched" before you hit an entry node, the more data that can be logged the easier it is to track.

You're best option is to choose random nodes, connect at random times and also look into using Tor bridges. If possible using several different IPS's or even better random wi-fi hotspots, though this is hardly convenient for most users.

Tor bridges: [https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en)

Whitepaper on Tor passive logging attacks (pdf): [http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mwright/papers/wright- passive.pd...](http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mwright/papers/wright-passive.pdf)

<comment><USER5> > With the location information it is possible to correlate the exit > information via pattern matching, though it would take considerable > analysis, this can be done by logging volume and timing information on the > two sides. I am sure there are even better techniques to analyze exit/entry > correlations, especially if you're not using a secure browser.

I've thought the same. But I've also thought that if this is indeed possible, why does Silk Road still exist? Or does this analysis only apply Tor clients connecting to websites, and not Tor hidden services?

<comment><USER6> Hidden service routing works quite differently that regular exiting traffic. Twice the number of relays are involved, and the traffic is end-to-end encrypted instead of being visible to any relay (such as an exit node). Correlation attacks are always possible to a global passive adversary (which NSA may or may not be), but as far as I can tell, they seem much harder to pull off against hidden services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An excellent illustration for those already familiar with the concepts.

However, I not sure its that easy to understand for those who don't know what "location" means, and the text is slightly small and hard to read. It would be a great improvement if they showed a small help text if one hovered over a label inside one of the yellow boxes.

Still, a very excellent job of EFF.

<comment> eugene-d I guess "location" means "IP Address". It's not your location in the URL bar, as HTTPS encrypts the connection, not just HTTP request body.

<comment><USER8> HTTPS doesn't encrypt the domain. That said, Tor does.

<comment><USER9> https encrypts the host header (indeed all the http headers), so yes it does encrypt the domain in that respect. What it can't encrypt is the destination IP address, which would be reverse looked up to the domain if everything was configured right in the DNS.

<comment><USER10> This is no longer true.

Seeing as HTTPS sites could not previously share an IP address, making it obvious which site communications with any given IP address was directed towards, an extension was developed that now sends the desired host unencrypted before the encrypted package.

This doesn't yield any more information that could previously be derived, but does allow you to serve as many HTTPS sites from a single host as you wish.

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

<comment><USER9> I stand corrected and I've learnt something :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can help contribute - [https://cloud.torproject.org/](https://cloud.torproject.org/)

Note that you can reduce your costs by using spot instances.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any sense how many nodes (or I guess how much bandwidth or even something else I'm not thinking of) it would take to make a material difference on the speed of the network?

<comment><USER11> I don't know, but you can monitor the status of the network here - [http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/](http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe I'm misinformed, but I thought the big problem has less to do with data in transit than it does with the destinations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) working hand-in-hand with the NSA? What am I missing?

<comment><USER14> Yep. It doesn't matter how you securely you get your data to Company X if Company X is handing the data over to the NSA.

<comment><USER15> Tor hidden services could help, though.

<comment><USER16> As long as you aren't using a service with your actual data. If I use Tor to connect to facebook and input my personal information, Tor is only protecting my data in transit. The NSA can still request the data from my account from facebook.

<comment><USER15> With a Tor hidden service, the NSA cannot necessarily _find_ the service provider. Of course, neither can I, so there is a whole different set of threats (and it could be the NSA providing the service in the first place) but it does help a little with this specific problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting how everyone in the diagram except the user, the sysadmin, and the relay nodes have "evil eyes".

<comment><USER18> Yes. Undoubtedly sysadmins are responsible for some, if not most of the most egregious handoffs of data to outsiders (legal or illegal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What happens if NSA starts operating a number of Tor exit nodes and eavesdropping on the outgoing traffic? What prevents them from doing so?

<comment><USER20> Nothing, but they would still not know where the traffic is coming from. The "Onion" defined in the Tor protocol is unwrapped layer by layer by each node. So the NSA has a choice where no option would help them too much: 1\. Be the first node you access and be able to see your IP but not your traffic 2\. Be the last node and be able to see your traffic but not your IP 3\. Be a middle node and see neither

<comment><USER21> Can't they do both 1 and 2 and correlate the information?

<comment><USER15> Yes. Which is why we need to keep a lot of nodes running, and part of why Tor hidden services are a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How legal is operating a Tor node? I'm thinking of putting up a machine (and a VPS) to just run a node. I just don't want to get into legal trouble for running a(n exit) node.

<comment><USER23> Running a regular node is fine as you're routing encrypted information for the Tor network - your unlikely to get any hassle although check your countries laws on crypto first.

Running an exit node may be a different story. You could get false DMCA takedown notices or get charged with someone else's crime. Think of it this way; you're running an open proxy. Uses of Tor can send any traffic through your connection. That being said, some ISPs are ok with it, others won't tolerate it.

I suggest you checkout [https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit- node](https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node) if your really serious about running an exit node.

<comment><USER24> Then, maybe, use Bitcoins for payment and Tor+HTTPS while signing up for the hosting provider?

<comment><USER25> Bitcoin transactions are chained, that may compromise you.

But you could use an anon currency-exchange or currency-bridge like paysafecard.com to obtain some value and obtain bitcoin with that value and never use that bitcoin key again to avoid that.

<comment><USER26> Is there no system to swap ownership of coins?

If not there should be. You send X amount of bitcoins to a middle man who then gives you X amount back. Technically they will be different coins and they'll go to a different account #, so you can't trace anything.

<comment><USER27> Take a look at mixing services[1], which seek to do exactly that.

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem of HTTPS is that you will need certification from some CAs which may be working with government agents.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, and even if you get a certificate from a CA which isn't, it doesn't matter, since _any other CA_ can still issue a cert for your domain.

<comment><USER29> Cert pinning and [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6962](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6962) would help for those cases.

<comment><USER25> Yay for a trust automaton, another level of complexity that won't solve anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why does the graphic portray police as mean angry people. Police are good people who provide a valuable service. They do a good thing. They are not the enemy.

<comment><USER31> No, they don't, they do a bad thing. In actual fact, all cops are bastards. Their primary function in society is to defend the property rights of the capitalist class against the working class, thus preserving inequality.

<comment><USER32> Ignoring for a moment the validity of this statement, can I ask why you visit a site that is primarily about business news/Silicon Valley Hacker errata if you're not a fan of the 'bourgeois'?

<comment><USER31> Because it's Hacker News, not Bourgeois News. And I know this site is tied to an ideology that reimagines the "DIY" (for want of a better term) aspect of the hacker tradition as a kind of pro-capitalist (or at least "DIY capitalist") thing, but I don't think most hackers are capitalists, even on this site. For me, anti-authoritarianism has always been a central tenet of the hacker tradition, which for me goes hand-in-hand with anti-capitalism. I acknowledge that most hackers are not explicitly/consciously anti-capitalist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Assuming the NSA is tapping ISP cables, and siphoning all unencrypted data of the web, and that they need to ask the big companies in the slides for the encrypted data, would EFF's "HTTPS Everywhere" help with all the websites that are not encrypted, like say Reddit?

<comment><USER34> As another commenter mentiioned, that tool just automatically switches to HTTPS sites if available (on the same domain name)

FYI: there's [https://pay.reddit.com/](https://pay.reddit.com/) but it doesn't work with HTTP Everywhere because its on a different domain.

<comment><USER35> And sometimes users post links to reddit itself, and it won't be https.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> With most ISP already using DPI it's anyone's guess how much the spies can see.

[http://www.bivio.net/products/dpi/](http://www.bivio.net/products/dpi/)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/06/deep-packet- inspe...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/06/deep-packet-inspection- soon-to-be-15-billion-business/)

[http://www.george-orwell.org/1984](http://www.george-orwell.org/1984)

</comment><comment><USER37> Love the evil faces in the infographic with the twisted eyes. Notice how the sysadmin is not evil.

<comment><USER38> That's hilarious. I guess the EFF knows that most of it's supporters are sysadmins, ironically the one class of people with the most direct and unfettered ability to violate privacy--and a track record of having done so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have problems even logging in on ycombinator with tor. Not to mention any site with anti-spam protection.

<comment><USER25> Since nearly every Tor-exit has working reverse-lookup or by using [https://check.torproject.org/](https://check.torproject.org/) it is easy to deny access to Tor-users while authenticating.

It makes imho no sense to authenticate using Tor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Where does running traffic via a VPN [0] come into this?

Does that count as HTTPS, or are they referring to 'SITE.COM' having an HTTPS certificate?

Is it possible to use Tor and a VPN together?

[0] e.g. I use [https://ipredator.se](https://ipredator.se)

<comment><USER25> If you use a VPN to connect to Tor, you can hide the fact (from your local isp) that you use tor.

If you use Tor to connect to your VPN-provider, you can hide your location from your VPN-provider.

Since your VPN-provider may have payment information from your creditcard it makes no sense to use a VPN and Tor together, its just a cascade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How secure is ssl? Can't NSA fake a certificate?

<comment><USER42> Do they really need to fake it? It surely might be a part of the famous indirectly accessed data.

<comment><USER43> This has been my question in this whole mess, if we assume NSA can and does subpoena the keys and certs as opposed to the direct data (and the NSA were copying data en masse, which now seems likely) would that not make HTTPS essentially useless?

<comment><AUTHOR> The NSA is not the average guy listening in on your wifi and then using your CC to buy stuff online. HTTPS protects against those, and it does so relatively efficiently.

<comment><USER43> Sorry, I should have clarified that it negates HTTPS in the context of the NSA (and presumably other government actors around the world), still great protection from getting your facebook session hijacked over wifi.

What about protection from the average NSA sysadmin or analyst with slightly less moral fiber than Edward Snowden? (or gambling debt, or a mental disease, or an obsession with your significant other etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> When using Tor+HTTPS, the first NSA eavesdropper can see location. How serious is that?

<comment><USER8> By location they mean your IP (from which they can get your address, by asking the ISP). As long as they can't links the two captured packets, they just know that you're using Tor.

<comment><USER45> Well your IP determines your location. That other evasdropper is from your ISP, since you first connect to your ISP and then Tor. Your ISP potentially knows your location which is what the NSA evasdropper gets.

And since its shared with amongst both the evasdropper, potentially NSA knows your location even if you use Tor. They should have indicated that too I guess.

<comment><USER8> Sharing the data is not enough, they have to link it to be useful. They probably can, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> How about using Tor > VPN (Note: Not VPN > Tor) ?

<comment><USER25> It could circumvent VPN censorship/supression or DPI since VPN is not a secure end to end communication.

That way you would obfuscate your endpoint against your vpn endpoint/provider.

It would add no further benefit to location obfuscation with Tor, since your VPN-provider will always snitch on you when opposed with lethal force.

<comment><USER46> They can know your location, but at least no one will know what you're doing.

<comment><USER25> Your VPN will become your new endpoint, it is a tor-vpn cascade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What would be the highest level of anonymity one could achieve on the modern internet? How could you accomplish it?

<comment><USER25> There is no level on anonymity, either you are, or you are not.

Addendum for achievement: Connect to Tor from a public accessible network/wifi that is free from surveillance using a pristine installation and never use that network-device again.

Addendum 2: If you use the network device twice, you may achieve only pseudonymity.

<comment><USER48> Valid point that anonymity is a binary property, but, if you wanted to talk about levels you could perhaps measure the level of difficulty of finding your identity, or the likelihood of accurately doing so.

<comment><USER25> The tradeoff is the same as keysize in crypto. It is time.

If you choose to communicate a second time from the same endpoint with the same equipment you may achieve only pseudonymity.

Since Tor doesn't limit the encapsulated protocols, it depends on the implementation and awareness of the user and you can't put a number or percentage on that.

Imho the Tor-role has changed, it provides access against censorship, DPI, region-partioning and hidden services. Simply try to access youtube or any other global service via different tor exits, that may be intresting, not from an anonymity point of view.

<comment><USER49> Out of curiosity, why does the equipment matter?

<comment><USER25> There may be information leaking (as in fingerprinting) from your device (that you are not aware of) that would allow very easy correlation, like in a mac address or existing session cookie, similar address in a public open network or whatever you can imagine to compromise your anonymity, that gives an adversary any advance to successfully correlate your current session with one of your previous sessions.

At this event your anonymity becomes a pseudonym.

The next step would be to try to reproduce or predict behavior and setup a trigger for that information.

If the loss (compromise) of anonymity or pseudonymity may lead to imprisonment, torture, assassination or death this maybe an issue to consider.

If you try to obfuscate your access to porn, it is a completly different story.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Biggest Comeback of 2012: Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.besttechie.com/2012/12/17/biggest-comeback-of-2012-yahoo/

<comment><USER2> I have to say I've been impressed with Marissa Mayer: I think it's way too early to know how this will turn out, but it reminds me a bit of Jobs coming back to Apple...</comment>


Being a Developer After 40 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@akosma/being-a-developer-after-40-3c5dd112210c#.x0fp7fyg4 <comment><USER2> Larger discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11569726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11569726)</comment>


WageCan|Bitcoin Debit Card and Bitcoin Wallet with Daily Interest - <AUTHOR> https://www.wagecan.com

<comment><AUTHOR> "For other purchases like gasoline and miscelaneous expenses, the family is excited to try WageCan, a brand new bitcoin wallet and DebitCard that allows you to make purchases with the card at any establishment that accepts MasterCard." [https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/introducing-the- uncoin...](https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/introducing-the- uncoinventional-bitcoin-bus-tour)</comment>


Facebook issue warnings/censor to author retroactively for speech made years ago - <AUTHOR> https://thestandnews.com/politics/%E6%88%91%E5%B0%8D-%E8%87%89%E6%9B%B8-%E6%B8%85%E5%A0%B4%E7%9A%84%E5%9E%82%E6%AD%BB%E5%9B%9E%E6%87%89/ <comment><AUTHOR> Translation: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=zh- CN&tl=en&u=h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=zh- CN&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fthestandnews.com%2Fpolitics%2F%E6%88%91%E5%B0%8D-%E8%87%89%E6%9B%B8-%E6%B8%85%E5%A0%B4%E7%9A%84%E5%9E%82%E6%AD%BB%E5%9B%9E%E6%87%89%2F&sandbox=1)</comment>


Review our site: www.morethanagift.com - <AUTHOR>

My sister and I built a site to help people give more meaningful gifts.
We'd like to know how you see the site and in what ways it may be lacking (or great).
We are a bit at a loss how to get some wider exposure - we don't know if it's just our lack of experience in online marketing or if the site seriously lacks appeal.
Thank you in advance for your help! <comment><USER2> I would work on cleaning up a few very minor design issues, such as the words "male" and "female" being lowercase on the menu. Mostly, the design is excellent though.

Next, I would try to minimize repetition in suggestions. I can't find a single category for which adopting an animal isn't listed as a possible gift, yet I can't think of a single circumstance in which I'd give that as a gift. More variety in suggestions would definitely be appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your point about repetition in suggestions is excellent. I will fix the sort order so that more unique suggestions move up and more run-of-the-mill ones are bumped down.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.morethanagift.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Good luck to you. I dropped by and one thing I noticed was that your gift suggestions were often below the fold. Example: <http://www.morethanagift.com/occasion/retirement>

I would think that someone who clicked a link for "Retirement Gift Ideas" does not need to be sold on the idea of buying a retirement gift; they likely want a few sentences of intro and then to see the gift ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a good point. We should perhaps even switch the section order or, as you said, at least shorten the intros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would just use a search box and checkboxes instead of categories. Also I would allow users to add suggestions - crowdsource this thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! Search will definitely become necessary as the content base grows, it's tricky though, because it's hard to define by what criteria people should search.

We definitely have some crowdsourcing-ish features in the pipeline that should help with growing the content base and increasing user engagement.</comment></comment>


Europe's 'Database Right' Could Throttle Open Data Moves There - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130211/08050521945/europes-database-right-could-throttle-open-data-moves-there.shtml

<comment><USER2> It all depends on the context. Many small websites were threatened with legal action if they displayed more than a couple of weeks' worth of football (soccer) fixtures on their site. The claim was that the data was part of a copyrighted database.

Luckily (and advsior at) the ECJ saw it differently. I don't think it has been officially challenged in court yet...

[http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2011/december/football- fi...](http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2011/december/football-fixtures-not- protected-by-database-copyright-says-ecj-advisor/#content)

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's a taxpayer-funded database it ought to be free. However, privately created databases shouldn't necessarily be free.. It costs money to assemble data, even public records, so for someone to do the work of compilation and have that work be unprotected will provide a disincentive for people to create the databases in the first place.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the sentiment that tax funded data should be free. But in practice it is more complicated. American Government data seems to either be free and open access or completely restricted for security reasons. In the EU publicly funded projects tend to require payment but have better data availability. This is particularly obvious with remote sensing satellites where the NASA/USGS budget for public-good projects is severely restricted. Payment at the right price is not always a bad thing if it makes projects viable. Especially when they wouldn't be viable without asking for payment from end users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Europeans seemly have some Schizophrenic policies sometimes.

I mean, there are fields (like IP) where they make the best, and worst laws, at the same time.

They don't decide if they want freedom or not it seems.

<comment><USER6> Coming from Germany, my opinion is, that the question is, which lobby is the strongest at the moment, these laws are conceived.

The EU is (imho) not really much more, than an undemocratic playing field for industrial lobbies. Nearly nobody cares for the EU parliament (the only elected body in the EU).

If some countries have a strong law in some cases - and can convince (or blackmail) others, to go the same route - good for everybody, when it comes EU-"law". But if the EU goes the pro industry, contra people-way... bad for everybody.

Just my two cents, after watching for more then ten years and seeing this stuff happen again and again...

<comment><USER7> > the only elected body in the EU

You mean the only elected body with EU wide reach. There are many more elected bodies within the EU but their reach is limited to smaller chunks of geography.

And even the EU parliament does not actually have reach across the EU because not all countries have ratified the same set of rules. So it's possible for countries to have seats in the EU parliament which passes laws which then do not affect some of those countries in the same way. It's quite messy.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that was what I menat. Not the only body, but the only directly elected body as an EU-institution.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK contractors, see which companies are outside ir35 friendly - <AUTHOR> https://www.offpayroll.org.uk/ <comment><USER2> This whole IR35 thing is bollocks. And HMRC does not care. Companies big and small are against it, I'd be surprised if any contractor is for it, most contractor organisations are against it. But HMRC does not care. Absolute bollocks.</comment>


IBM gets a patent on "out-of-office" e-mail messages–in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/effs-stupid-patent-of-the-month-ibm-claims-ownership-of-out-of-office-e-mail/ <comment><USER2> Fortunatelly IBM decided to do the right thing:

Update 3:53 pm: Asked about EFF's criticisms of the patent, an IBM spokesperson said that "IBM has decided to dedicate the patent to the public." The company notified USPTO today that it will forego its rights to the patent.</comment>


Rocket mystery: What weapon was Russia testing in Arctic? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49319160 <comment><USER2> I grew up in one of the USSR satellite states. Still remember Chernobyl like it was yesterday.

One thing's for sure - whatever Russians tell the world about this incident, it'll be a lie.</comment>


The Conversational VC Pitch - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2017/10/the-conversational-pitch/ <comment><AUTHOR> I agree with Fred on this, and am glad this is a trend. A "presentation" it static and unengaging for both sides: VC's can tune out and avoid eye contact. Entrepreneurs can act without thinking, helping to avoid stress. The results benefit no one.

It's been my experience in VC that few pitches which don't evolve into true conversations are effective. So one should plan to build conversion, to build a connection with your audience.

That said, I do like having slides to fall back on, or refer to, when needed. But I try to minimize the time that anyone looks at them, vs. at other people.

</comment><comment><USER3> After 5 years and 100s of Investment Decks I think investment decks are actually terrible for founders. All they do is give investors infinite reasons to say no. All of our best investors came on board without seeing a deck - <USER2> it was a long coffee or dinner that was the conversation.

I've never met an investor that said "You know slide 12 really sold me" but plenty that said "Slide 12 really showed me that this isn't right for us right now."

Also none of the big 5, or whatsapp etc... had investor decks. Media kits, sure, but no investor decks.</comment>


What coding language should I start with? - <AUTHOR> I know this will sound like a real vague question but I'd like to learn a coding language.  I know a little html and CSS but really, not much.  What would be a good place to start?  I was considering LAMP or Ruby.  I know someone will ask what do I want to do with it.  Well, right now it's just to learn but I want something flexible that won't handcuff me.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> You can try my free book I'm working on:

<http://learnpythonthehardway.org>

Go through each less, spending a week or more on each one if you need to. Contact me any time if you run into problems (@zedshaw on twitter is best). I'm not totally done with the book, but you shouldn't run out of exercises for a while.

<comment><USER3> That looks like a great book. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are going to try to use it to earn money and you are looking for the shortest return on investment, JavaScript hands down.

If you just want to learn programming and logic for the pure interest of the subject, then personally I would go with C or assembly, and tinker with embedded stuff.

OO Java or Python.

So as you can see, it really comes down to what you want to learn it for. I am making an assumption that by mentioning LAMP and Ruby that you are looking for web languages? If that is the case then Ruby, Scala or PHP will suffice.

But, take note, with the way web apps are moving JavaScript is your best bet, as more and more people are dumping the server side web templating languages and implementing their view logic in HTML / CSS / JavaScript.

Personally if I where starting out, I would learn how to build the front end with HTML / CSS / JavaScript and then learn how to implement REST services to supply data to that front end, in one of the aforementioned languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I'm not really expecting to earn money working with it as a job but more to tinker with on personal projects. Do you have a recommendation for a good JavaScript book?

<comment><USER5> JavaScript: The Good Parts <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm learning how to code right now too and it's been frustrating to find resources that truly start at the beginning without assuming you know things from other languages. Right now I'm looking into using Google App Engine and python and these are the best resources I have found:

-MIT open courseware offers a FANTASTIC introductory course using python with video lectures which are nice since I get tired of reading 600+ page books. [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/)

-Another resource that I found very helpful is a book called Head First Java, I'm not really into Java but the first few chapters give a great overview of Object Oriented programming. I wasn't sure what the difference between a class and object were, and I was unsure about other very basic questions. This book answered all of those questions, and it's written in a very entertaining style.

-I'm also reading a book called "using Google app engine" also starts from the beginning, and introduces all the technologies that go into Google App Engine. I found that book on gigapedia.org btw.

-I tried zed shaw's learn python the hard way book. I've only done the first few examples so I don't have an opinion on it yet. But so far I think it's a good resource for short little exercises to learn your way around python syntax, but I definitely needed more of a programming background which is where all the other resources I mentioned above fill in the gap.

by the way i would definitely recommend python over other languages I've looked into because at least as a beginner, python syntax isn't complicated to learn. But if you are interested in learning say Java, there is a Stanford online course that might be good, so just look at their online course offerings.

A final python resource which I found was Guido Van Robot where you basically control a robot in a maze using python. I haven't looked at it too closely yet but it seems entertaining and helpful for the beginner. If you're familiar with Karel the Robot, Guido Van Robot is the exact same thing, except using python. <http://gvr.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> For some reason it didn't occur to me to look at some of the resources avail. through Universities. I will be sure to check out your suggestions.

For those interested in Ruby I did find a free book on Ruby and after glancing through a few pages it seems to be written in an interesting way with funny references.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_%28poignant%29_Guide_to...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_%28poignant%29_Guide_to_Ruby)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your insights, I've basically learned that their in no right or wrong answer. A big part come from just stepping up to the plate and giving one a go and see where it leads. It sounds like it will lead to learning different languages when I want to do different things. If I heard correctly over time they all become easier to learn because you have the fundamentals under your belt.

Yesterday I talked with a friend at Jaspin Interactive and he added some insight into the open source vs commercial coding, pluses and minuses and front end vs back end. Which helped a lot, because knowing what you plan to do down the road most definitely will help your decision.

So here is my plan I'm going to learn the front stuff a bit more HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then move to the back end. I will most likely go with something opensource and see what sticks.

Thank you all for the help.

Scott

</comment><comment><USER7> Since you are already working with HTML/CSS I would definitely start with Javascript, like others have said.

From there, I would start by looking at what your goals are first. Why do you want to learn? Do you want to build something for yourself, or others? Is it just for fun or do you eventually want to get a programming job.

For example if you want a good job in my hometown, you end up working in Government. So if someone were to ask me what the best language is for them to get a job, I'd say look at the .NET framework (which is what the majority of our Government uses).

Personally if I just had to throw out a language, I'd say Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you are teaching yourself a language, I think it's most important to gain an understanding of the general concepts of software development.

So pick a language (I learned with PHP years ago) and stick with it knowing that you can expand later.

Once you have a foundation of the concepts of software development, you can move around and use different languages and you'll pick them up pretty easily because you will then be working mostly with different sytax.

I wouldn't worry too much about being locked into the language you learn with but I think PHP or Ruby would be good choices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you that sounds like good advice

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know I am going to get down voted probably here. But seriously, if you are starting out, Java might be a very good thing to start with too. As a language, it's very mature. The documentation is pretty good. I know setup might be a a little tricky for a noob, but it's not that bad. Although, I agree, if you are focusing on ROI, Ruby or python, or even PHP are more inviting. And you can probably do a lot more faster that way.

But for learning things inside out, Java might be a very good choice. Good books, great amounts of algorithms, in fact great algorithm books too. One really good one is Effective Java, sEcond edition. Another algorithm related (short but solid) book is Data structures and algorithm analysis in Java.

Now, don't take me wrong. I might be a little biased, because I find it easier to do a lot more in Java on Eclipse IDE, than anything else.

Started a startup right after MS, didn't go so well. Still stuck in Dallas, TX. Would love to move to CA, but immigration issues plus financial burdens.

I started out as a C++ job in my current company that hired me, with some more AMPL (Mixed integer programming). Read Ruby on Rails book, Agile programmingusing ROR or something by DHH (David heinemeir hanson). Loved it, but found ROR a little limiting for what I am doing. But my day job ended up being in Java. I do prolog hacking, although haven;t really done that in while. And still for fun, and continuing my startup on side, and completing a dream of solving a bunch of NP complete problems in seconds, still using a mix of C#, Excel, PHP, Prolog. Very soon jumping onto Javascript or Jquery probably, since I wanna move into making a real Web GUI, instead of a C# GUI.

So, yeah after all this, I found easiet and very helpful where C# on Visual studio and Java on Eclipse IDE. Loved ROR, found it quite easy too, esp the book is great. For PHP, I still am doing structural coding, although sometime in future I am def reading PHP Objects, Patterns and Practices .

I wish that would help you pick one. Because you sound a lot like me, I was so confused in college, no idea where the world is going. Personally, my research and doing my startup later opened my eyes to the real world. Of course, Paul Graham essays and HN were so much more helpful too.

Of that reminds me, go read PG's(Paul graham) essays first. I think you need to understand programming in general first, the startups and then pick up a language to learn.

Oh, Oh, MUST READ for you....I wish this came out when I was in high school or early college.

This will give you a little more perspective.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Great link, Mr. Graham always puts things into perspective. My takeaway just step up to the plate pick one and see where it leads and if change in necessary, change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ruby seems like a good choice, given its presence and popularity both in webapp and desktop app niches, and reputation for being fairly easy to learn.</comment>


Show HN: Chaos – Pastejacking Tool to Replace Semicolon with Greek Question Mark - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aydwi/chaos <comment><USER2> Why?

<comment><USER3> The important part might be "it does not require root privileges" & still takes over control over your clipboard

<comment><USER4> It doesn't require root control for a falsely trusted program to delete most of ~/ but still, why?</comment></comment></comment>


Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web <comment><USER2> A company I worked for used to host Minitel services. In particular, it was a system to handle driving test allotments, reservations and cancellations between the government ("Préfecture") and the driving schools.

The service was provided for free to the government, the company organised free training sessions for government clerks, and it was the driving schools who paid for the service when dialling into our minitel servers.

It technically wasn't a monopoly, because the driving schools could still go down to the préfecture, and do everything using the forms/pen/paper.

The company tried on a number of occasions to get the driving schools to move from the Minitel service to the new web version. Every single time, there was a huge push-back from the driving school unions, about how expensive the new service was, and how "unusable" the website was, compared to the Minitel.

We even had people calling in, saying that we were extortionists. "We've been using this for over 20 years, and never paid a cent; now you want us to pay xx€ a month?" I guess some of them really didn't look at their phone bill.

I heard about 4 or 5 "planned terminations" of the Minitel service during my stint from 2010 to 2015. France Telecom/Orange even provides a "Minitel over IP" service these days, where a website can be enrolled into their payment service, and users pay per minute on the website. It's a superb scam tool (just have a hidden iframe open a pay-as-you-go page), and Orange is constantly fighting the fraudsters.

<comment><USER3> Talking about migrations, I worked at two places (tax office, and large store) that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every time it was a disaster. I was much enamored by the old system that was hyper efficient, both at the low level (zero bandwidth, fixed layout) and at higher level too, all that wasn't spent on visuals and gimmicks was used for "smart" features, semantic suggestions, math auto correct on the fly. Also almost no learning phase. Sad.

<comment><USER4> > that were transitioning from AX400 minitel like interface to the web. Every > time it was a disaster.

Usually the first service is build in an Agile manner. It starts small, and more and more features are added as years pass by. Then some one decides to create a complete new system from scratch, and they never realize all the hidden complexity that exists in the original solution. So this second waterfall project fails and needs years to become usable.

Happened something like that in this case? :)

<comment><USER3> Can't say, I wasn't working on this, I just witnessed it.

My best guess is that nobody wanted to maintain the old so IT decided to surrender to the latest enterprise fad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple historical anecdotes:

There was the equivalent of the hug of death multiple times every year when students were checking their results, overloading the servers as (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people tried to furiously dial in simultaneously to get results from various nationwide exams such as the infamous Baccalauréat.

In 1981 for the presidential elections, the result was broadcasted live on the Minitel and showed up live on the news:

(On TV) [https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao](https://youtu.be/rJHUZNlO9ao)

(Remastered Minitel output) [https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I](https://youtu.be/JIZ_D34J3-I)

The Minitel was such a national pride that the Internet had a hard time piercing through the habits and the collective mind, setting back France by a couple of years on that front. Said misplaced pride is also very visible on some other bad decision making such as forcefully applying national preference to technology such as Bull computers in the enterprise or Thomson TO7&MO5 in schools which were ripped apart by the competition nonetheless. This behavior is still visible today as the government tried to push for "the French Cloud" by heavily subsidizing software such as a poor alternative to Dropbox which became Orange Cloud or looking the other way when Deezer was clearly violating IP rights by padding its music catalogue as it was missing deals from the majors. Same goes with banks shunning Apple/Android Pay in favor of being hell-bent on that sad sad Paylib thing, and various other similar heavy cases of NIH. I'm tentatively hopeful but very cautions about that "French SV" thing. Wait&see.

<comment><USER6> As a non-French, I wouldn't say that being proud of the Minitel was misplaced at the beginning, as it was a great accomplishment for its time. The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - reminds me of the "not invented here" problem.

Regarding "national preference", no EU country is big enough to make that work for these kinds of technology; maybe the EU as a whole, if there wasn't the big problem of language...

<comment><USER7> > The problem was sticking to it when a clearly superior alternative emerged - > reminds me of the "not invented here" problem.

One of the issues here is that the internet was not "a clearly superior alternative" as it had some aspects which were (and still are) significant downgrades.

Monetisation is a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on ("kiosk" services with a 4:2 split between the service and the network operator, with multiple price points) and in the early 90s added secure standardised CC payment (new models had a CC reader/terminal built in).

<comment><USER6> Well, if you prefer, let's say "an alternative that was obviously going to win on the market".

PS As a consumer I find it very hard to say that use-time payment is better than flat access cost + many different ways to pay depending on what you use.

<comment><USER8> You seem to assume that the internet is flat fee, that is historically not the case.

The internet was pay by the hour or pay by the kB for a very long time. The flat free subscriptions only emerged around the 00's.

<comment><USER6> My first internet connection was through a 28.8k modem, I know very well that it wasn't flat at the time, and that's exactly why I said that "pay per minute of use" is terrible for consumers compared to today's situation, while the OP said: "...as it had some aspects which were ( _and still are_ ) significant downgrades. Monetisation _is_ a big one, Minitel had use-time payment very early on"

<comment> vertex-four I'd say the Internet still doesn't have a very good monetisation system. Card payment is several times too much effort to use, takes a good couple of minutes, and isn't reasonable for a one-off service. PayPal and similar services are a mess, and not much better. The point wasn't that use-time is good, it's that there was monetisation integrated into the design of the system, and it was easy for the customer to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network's privacy and anonymity. In late 1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved the last page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an interrupted session—as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry was swift and brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw Minitel as a competitor, warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some 3,000 terminals were returned in protest. The PTT soon dropped this feature." Pretty sad to see where we've come since then

<comment><USER10> I think the basic problem is that while back then we had a low water mark of privacy, the Soviet Union, that the west wanted to stay above as a point of pride, these days we have none.

<comment><USER11> Well we have China, but western leaders seem to be more prone to using the Chinese Great Firewall as a leading example than a bad example.

<comment><USER10> Funnily China seems to be treated more like a capitalist oligarchy these days (and may well be operating like one as well).

The last remaining communist nations to be "feared" seems to be Cuba and North Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It was great for "piracy". You had message board where people would swap floppies. You basically copied a game (Atari ST games of course) and would send the floppies hoping your counterpart would do the same.

It was a great time and I learnt a lot about the geek community, the sharing and got access to many games which at age 15 I could not afford.

<comment><USER10> Elsewhere one made do with classified ads in computer magazines.

I wish i could find the story i read once from a guy in GB that did so for the Amiga, and found himself so inundated with replies that he bought himself a second drive for his A500 and spend whole weekends swapping floppies.

<comment><USER13> That's what I wanted to point out, classified had much more traction than minitel to swap disks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fond memories of programming my Amiga to scrap pages from the Minitel to fill up up database instead of doing data entry by hand, as ha been expected of me during my first intership…

</comment><comment><USER15> Was Minitel something only the middle and upper classes had, or was it a universal thing?

I'm from the UK, I didn't get onto the web until 1999, before that we used Teletext. I think the advantage to it was most televisions supported Teletext by the 1980s and it was a free service - albeit you had to pay your annual TV license.

<comment> d--b Everybody had one. You didn't have to buy the terminal, most people rented it from the phone company for a few francs a month. And the most useful services were free.

<comment><USER13> try that again. At first it was given at no cost to people who accepted to stop receiving the paper phonebook, then you could rent or buy depending on the specific model. During the golden age about 20% homes were equipped at peak it reached 25% (far from everybody had one).

There were no services available for free, at first there were two kinds: the service provider pays the operator or the user pays the operator (about 3€ an hour). no money for the service provider. Then came the kiosk offer which started the golden age: the user now pays 9€ an hour with 6€ for the service and 3 for the operator.

<comment><USER16> 9 million terminals for a total population of 55 million, it is pretty good coverage. I used to live in Cesson-Sévigné, where it was born. One day, my dad came back home early 80's with one for free.

After few years everybody I know had one per household, except for my grandparents. Pretty much every household who wanted one could get one.

Later they built more fancy terminals (faster modem, combined with phone, better screen/graphics, etc.) and rented them. The free one was still a good deal.

The White Pages where totally free. And if I recall the Yellow Pages had a the first minute or so free. I remember navigating the pages as fast as possible to not pay the fee.

As mentioned before some school results and even applications were made using the terminal, for residual fee on the phone bill.

My mom was buying online (3Suisses, Redoute and CAMIF) through the terminal from early 80's until early 2000. She had a hard time to move to internet website when it comes to buy online. She heard so much of CC fraud online that she felt safer using the Minitel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An effort to bring Minitel-based computing to the masses happened in Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1990's. The service was named CommunityLink. It was a joint venture between U.S. West ( then, a Regional Bell Operating Company ) and France Telecom.

You can see the overview beginning at minute 16:00 in this episode of the old TV show The Computer Chronicles:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNc1zQ0Fpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNc1zQ0Fpg)

The above episode begins with the Minitel story from France.

CommunityLink didn't really seem to catch on, locally. We did have a thriving BBS community at this time and most techies that I knew had CompuServe accounts.

</comment><comment><USER18> "and dudes (mecs in French) browsed the personal ads at 3615 MEC." <\- Something was lost in the translation there.

<comment><USER19> What was lost exactly? The reference to MEC is explained

<comment><USER20> Your sibling comment links the current website. Apparently it's a gay dating service. Wasn't clear to me from the article.

<comment><USER19> Ah that wasn't clear to me either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quick question for those who remember the time. What was BBSing like back in the Minitel days?

In the States and other places without an equivalent system, BBSs were pretty much the only way to connect in any kind of "on-line", but as soon as the Web became widespread BBSs died a very quick death. I would suppose that Minitel would have prevented an equivalent BBS scene from developing in France, but I have no idea. I know there were reasonably big scenes in other parts of Europe though.

<comment><USER22> There were plenty of BBSs in France at the time but mostly used by people who were "into computers". Oh, and Compuserve!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this just me or are we getting more and more articles about the Minitel on HN these days?

<comment><USER3> Not only HN, I think it's been on reddit too. It's odd since the service has been removed entirely a few years ago and already got coverage at that time.

Maybe the issues with net neutrality push people into history. Similarly there were Ethernet stories last week.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I tend to think that we're all looking for an alternative to the looming destruction of the Internet that is inevitably going to happen when Net- neutrality dies.

As an older user, I'd love it if we could figure out a way to resurrect Minitel/Teletext and use it as a way of routing around the damage that is coming from the political classes.

<comment><USER23> > for an alternative to the looming destruction of the Internet that is > inevitably going to happen when Net-neutrality dies.

The Minitel was the archetype of service centralization with a single hardware provider. Hardly a good case for Net neutrality.

<comment><USER16> Yes, very centralized, but in early 80's with telco companies having pretty much a monopoly on their own respective market, and practically no standard hardware, the Minitel was the best that could be done to get a large chunk of the population to go online, make safely online transactions, exchange messages, before the Web.

Today, 35 years after with what we know, with a deregulated telco environment, with internet protocols and corresponding hardware, sure, the Minitel is not ideal for net neutrality. I think it was still a good step, and looking back, not a too shabby execution either. Now 35 years later, the market brought Android smartphone, which are the new commodity for people to go online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I remember having used minitel 1B (80 colomns) in 1992 to connect to my school from home (600km away) to send my updated (using vi) report (in latex) to my teacher. The main drawback of course was that the phone line was always busy. It was using a quite cheap (the equivalent of 0.02€ per minutes) connection (36 21).

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone with Minitels or compatible modems could run their own service, just like a BBS.

There were quite a lot of these services, that anyone could connect to, for just the cost of a local communication.

They had interesting features such as file transfers, real-time multiparty chatrooms, the ability to define macros (custom sequences of control code to display fancy images and animations in discussion boards and chatrooms), and more.

At that time, local phone calls were not free, but they were cheap compared to longer-distance (but still in France) calls.

So, these services were federating very local communities. Members frequently met in person. Think about Facebook just for your city, where most people in your friend list are people you actually know in person and often hang out with.

That was pretty awesome. Internet being global is amazing, but these very local communities were also amazing in a different way.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article isn't kidding when it said that the old phone system was terrible, phones typically had a second earpiece so you could hear through both ears in the hope of making out what the other party said.

And them in a huge jump foreward, the PTT switched to digital and by 1980 anybody could get digital service (isdn) cheaply at their house.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577881)

</comment><comment><USER29> What was the significance of the '3615' in all the service codes? Was this just a common prefix like 'www' in web addresses?

<comment><USER30> It's the short phone number to dial to get access to the portal where you enter the name of the service you want. There were different ones with different pricing. 3614 was cheaper (no revenue for the service I think), 3615 was regular and 3617 was expensive (you could buy stuff, like games by staying online).

While most services were accessible through this portal (operated by the French telco), you could also dial a "regular number" to access some services à la BBS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For what it's worth, I still have one around here. It makes for a great retro- terminal that can be plugged on a 1200 bauds serial connection. I agree that it isn't the most lightweight solution, but it at least works pretty well, and without hassle.

</comment><comment><USER10> As an aside, i recall running into something similar to a Minitel, only it was web based and used ISDN for connectivity.

Basically it was a desk phone with a slide out keyboard and embedded web browser.

<comment><USER11> There were a bunch of devices kind of like that around the dot-com boom [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_Audrey)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Also, shoutout to BelTel in South Africa, my first foray into online world, including national chat, way back in 1985.

</comment><comment><USER33> Credit where credit is due: the french invented fembots

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't forget about Infovía in Spain, too, even though that was much later.

<comment><USER35> And Prestel in the UK, but it was never as ubiquitous as le Minitel.

<comment><USER36> And Bildschirmtext (BTX) in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Minitel really illustrates my view on the tech business: Go global or go home. Scale is King.

<comment><USER38> Well Minitel tried to go global there was a Californian trial (and a country wide scale was unheard or for online services).

<comment><USER39> It was called USVideotel, and it was moderately successful. I worked for them in the late 80s. It was very popular amongst its users, but eventually lost to Prodigy and AOL.</comment></comment></comment>


Elixir and Ruby can talk to each other using Erlix - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fazibear.me/elixir-ruby-dont-fight-talk-with-erlix-24b0f5ed8d12 <comment><USER2> I don't see any practical use for this. You're just sending text around. This breaks most OTP conventions, you lose insight from the Observer, etc..

If all you want is message passing you should just use something like zeromq which would allow for a lot more than just Elixir to Ruby.

<comment><USER3> or [http://bert-rpc.org/](http://bert-rpc.org/) perhaps.

<comment><USER4> Alas, most of the libraries are pretty old and not currently active. But still seems to be a decently simple/useful spec. However, messagepack protocol seems much more broadly supported and some new rock libs are popping up, but no common rpc spec.

Based on those facts, I decided to build a Bert-rpc but using message pack and geared for embedded devices. Just released (as in tonight!) the initial code for an Arduino RPC library. It uses the msg pack for Arduino ([https://github.com/HEADS-project/arduino_msgpack](https://github.com/HEADS- project/arduino_msgpack)), a great little library. Enjoying it much more than most JSON libraries.

It's intended purpose is to make interacting with sub-1ghz radios and be easy to interface with elixir. Only have basic Call and Cast semantics at the moment, but it's only two days old. :-) If anyone's interested in helping, I think C++11 lambda might be a feasible way to create rpc callbacks that non- devs could use (maybe...).

<comment><USER3> You might also look into google protobufs ('gpb') and grpc, which are newer solutions that make some interesting tradeoffs but focus on performance and small size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be curious to see if this becomes viable as an interface wrapper for teams that writing new services in Elixir while supporting important pieces of legacy Ruby code. This seems to be the situation in a lot of Ruby shops, and it would be fantastic to see someone getting this working at a big scale and seeing some industry best practices emerge.

<comment><USER6> I am not sure why we need to replace Ruby with Elixir. Nor do I understand why it is necessary to write every new code in Elixir. I mean when Crystal gets production ready are you guys going to rewrite everything from Elixir to Crystal ? :-| Elixir is not a substitute for Ruby. It's completely different paradigm and language. Same for Crystal. They just happen to feel like Ruby but are missing a lot from Ruby/Rails ecosystem.

I really like lispness of Ruby and the rails ecosystem. For a lot of things it's still numero uno technology.

<comment><USER7> The first things that come to mind:

\- true parallelism (this is why we need guilds in Ruby 3)

\- the BEAM

\- functional yet OO at a higher level [0]

\- all the Erlang/OTP goodies for free

\- Phoenix/Ecto are quite nice frameworks and solid alternatives to the server-side JS world

\- "looks" like Ruby though is an entirely different beast

Crystal on the other hand looks more like a Rust alternative to implement almost-as-C-fast Ruby gems. I'm sure it can evolve into an ecosystem but since it's quite far from being stable it will take some time, time in which the Elixir ecosystem will grow because its Erlang foundation already fixed the big issues.

[0] - [https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong- oop](https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting - makes me think of ErRuby:

[https://github.com/johnlinvc/erruby](https://github.com/johnlinvc/erruby)

Like JRuby, but s/Java/Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what the benefits of this approach is to say, a json driven microservice between elixir and ruby?

<comment><USER10> Running your applications in Erlang is its own microservices architecture. Each process is essentially microservice that can interact with others on any node in your cluster by sending messages. Everything is handled for your by the runtime. Processes on a different node? No problem, they're easy to discover and if a message does go to another node the serialization is handled for you. Erlang is so powerful I'd actually invert your question.

<comment><USER11> I hesitate using Erlang/elixir for this than aws lambda + event distribution. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER12> If you don't need low latency and are ok with the extra architectural overhead... there's nothing wrong with that.

Different use cases

<comment><USER11> Many are preaching erlang/elixir on the OTP/microservice alternative paradigm – that doesn't seem as attractive as the low latency resiliency.

At least to me, as a story.

<comment><USER12> Well... it's a win for both. It means it's easy to write performant and highly concurrent microservices.

Latency is part of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would like to see a DRB <-> Erlang C Node (but in Ruby) system.

Start Ruby process, get Erlang node.

</comment><comment><USER7> >the Erlang node, __witch __is connected to Erlang VM over the network.

Witches are connected to the BEAM? :) funny typo.

<comment><USER14> Well, BEAM _is_ somewhat magical, so... Freudian slip?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. Any real world application this has been used for?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this more or less useful than C bindings in either language?

</comment><comment><USER11> With aws lambda elixir is less attractive to me. I wonder if anyone has similar thoughts?

<comment><USER17> At Appcues, we use a combination of both approaches.

We have our Elixir backend where we need some combination of:

\- Low latency -- Lambda + API Gateway requests typically incur a ~200ms invocation latency

\- Persistent connections, e.g. WebSockets

\- High performance

\- Continuous usage, let's say at least ten calls per second all day every day forever

For everything else, Lambda and API Gateway have been fantastic, even without a framework like Serverless. It's so cheap! It's so convenient! It's so reliable-enough!

But we couldn't get along on a 100% Lambda backend, far from it.

<comment><USER11> I agree with this a lot. Especially on the web socket front. I've been thinking of an ideal structure for this. I haven't decided between elixir or bet in with Google and Firebase.

<comment><USER17> For what it's worth: we use Firebase in our stack too, but at this point it's confined to our customer-facing dashboard (as opposed to our end-user-facing service). I don't like it when my critical systems depend on services out of my control, especially when those services go down for hours or days at a time -- as Firebase DB has done twice in the last year, for us.

<comment><USER11> How are you delivering sockets to end-user facing service? Through phoenix?

<comment><USER17> Yes, we have a pool of Elixir + Phoenix servers behind a classic Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (set to TCP/SSL mode, not HTTP/HTTPS, or else WebSockets don't work).

<comment><USER11> Hmmm cool. How are you deploying Phoenix?

<comment><USER17> Right now we're using Edeliver and Distillery. We're planning to containerize things soon, so I'm not sure what the toolchain will look like then, but if you have long-lived servers then Edeliver is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool, should be very useful...thanks for posting!</comment>