The Demise of the Public Library - <AUTHOR> http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/the-demise-of-the-public-library/ <comment><USER2> And we're all missing the point again. Libraries are about books. I go to libraries to borrow books, to read books and generally get access to books other than Dan Brown and Harry Potter. That stuff is more than adequately supplied by the market: if I want mass-market paperbacks, I can get them used on Amazon for a penny plus shipping, much less than the cost of a bus ticket/train ticket/driving to the library. But more obscure stuff, out-of- print stuff, that's the value of libraries. And giving free (well, subsidised/low-cost) access to everyone who wants that is the value of libraries.

I've got a Kindle. I use it as a place for storing personal documents, pretty much exclusively. Almost everything I read is not an e-book in any format. Almost everything on my bookshelves is not available as an e-book in any format.

The long tail of books are not e-books and probably won't be for a long time. The point of libraries is exactly to ensure there isn't an information divide in society. Science, philosophy, literature, history, languages: these shouldn't be the preserve of people who can afford to buy the books or attend college or jump through the hoops needed to access research libraries.

And it's all very well telling people to go use the Internet. What are they gonna do, look it up on Wikipedia? Fine, and where are the people who write Wikipedia going to get access to the books to write the Wikipedia articles? And what happens when they get to the end of the Wikipedia article and want to read more? It's the same with adult education: the government tell us that we need to become "lifelong learners" to survive in the current economy. How exactly are we to do that when adult education courses are closing and libraries are closing?

A working programmer friend of mine wanted to do A-level in mathematics. He could only find one place in London that offers an adults course. To get into universities, students are more and more expected to have read outside their curriculum. Getting rid of libraries makes it so only the rich kids can get access to the books. And the only answer we can give them: go buy a Kindle.

If education is the road to a better life, we sure as hell need to make sure the road is kept in good repair.

<comment><USER3> In many towns libraries serve as a default community center. I get daily emails with all of the events happening in my small town and I would say at least half of those are at the local library.

What you're saying is true, of course. But that over looks a great deal of value that libraries provide -- it's more than just bound paper on shelves.

<comment><USER2> Sure, that's definitely what the government bureaucrats call "value-add". But the problem is that sometimes the value-add seems to be the only thing they focus on.

Decisions about library policy are done on the basis of the community stuff, how it'll affect parents with kids who use the library for story time, and the views of readers get neglected.

I went to my local library today, and they've removed yet more non-fiction shelving to move the registrar of births, marriages and deaths into the library. The library seems willing to accomodate just about anything... except books, which seem to be the primary function. The library in the next town over has a monthly "meet animals" day, where someone brings in a ferret or a snake or something and kids get to see and pet an animal. Which is fine, and I haven't got a problem with that. The fact that every time I go in there, they have less books makes me all the less likely to want to scream and shout when the barbarians in pinstripes come to tear the place down and "streamline operations" and so on.

Because of all the feel-good community stuff libraries have to do in order to remain "relevant", the actual point of the library gets slowly undermined and weakened. I don't blame the libraries: they are only doing what they need to do to survive. I blame the politicians and the public for undervaluing libraries.

<comment><USER4> > Because of all the feel-good community stuff libraries have to do in order > to remain "relevant", the actual point of the library gets slowly undermined > and weakened.

I want to point out that the actual point of a library is to do all of the things you mention. A community's library isn't just a repository of books, it's an integral public meeting space that facilitates access to information and helps with the needs of its community. Running programs for kids (in addition to ones for teens, adults, the poor, etc.) and providing access to civic information are all fair game for a public library. Libraries balance the needs of their communities, and in your community it sounds like there is a big demand for services other than books.

<comment><USER2> In my area, we have one of the largest spends on libraries in the country. But unlike a lot of other groups, those of us who just turn up and want to borrow books seem to not get much say in library policy. I don't think any of the community stuff is bad, and the local government needs to provide services for people, but that's not an excuse for reducing the books on the shelves, making inter-library loan services worse and so on. Libraries serve a lot of constituencies, but they sometimes forget that readers are one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Libraries create community and culture. I can't tell you how much value I get out of having a library across the street from me. I must go there at least weekly. I read books and see movies I wouldn't have otherwise. I meet neighbors there. Families bring children there. Libraries stock books and movies stores don't.

Having fewer libraries, even if bigger, doesn't match the value of a neighborhood library.

<comment><USER6> If you did not have a family, would you still find value in the library? Not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems it's biggest value is for parents with children.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, I find huge value in my local library, and I have no children. For myself, when unemployed the library provided a fantastic public space for me to get away from the home and do some serious programming work and job hunting. I know a few people who work on their side project ideas at the library (they bring their own laptops for this) and I know several people who use the library as their only source of internet access.

Keep in mind the value for a particular local library may not fall along your particular interests. Libraries serve the community as a whole, and there are many diverse needs for a typical community that a library has to serve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is truly sad. When I visit my local library all of the public user computers are continuously utilized and there is a waiting list -- I assume these folks either don't own their own computer or need to be able to use a public one. I appreciate the quiet place to work and free WiFi.

Not everyone has e-readers or can afford to purchase a large number of books-- our library definitely fills a need in the local community. Plus knowledgable staff can recommend good books and assist students with their research (the inter-library loan system which includes local Universities is especially helpful in this case).

While I can drive to the library, I do see a large number of folks arriving via foot and/or public transportation. I cannot imagine the impact to those communities which are losing their local libraries. Perhaps Brent is particularly affluent, but I suspect that the council is being misguided by their consultants or simply doesn't care about those members of the community who will be impacted most by these library closures.

</comment><comment><USER8> How many of you who support libraries actually give to them? After a friend challenged me to match his efforts I started giving books to our local library every year. My sister and I virtually came of age in that library and I'd forgotten how vital it is for a childs development.

But libraries do need to evolve. They need to have digital offerings. I'd like to see them set aside room for hacker spaces as well as user group meeting rooms.

The more community engagement for the libraries services the harder it will be for politicians to cut their budgets.

<comment><USER7> How many of your book donations show up in the stacks, available for check out? I've stopped donating books to my local library because they would just turn around and sell all of them at the next book fair. I was even buying new books which I'd appreciate being able to check out and donating them -- perhaps my tastes are out of sync from the rest of the patrons, but as a kid I appreciated that my local library had technical books that I was able to learn programming from.

<comment><USER9> Even if they sell off a lot of books they can still be helping out the library. Its a sad fact that books, especially paperbacks, wear out if you let them circulate. Whenever we get donations we always compare them to what we currently have on the shelves, and keep whichever is in the best condition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I consider the public library to be the secular society's equivalent of a church -- a place where the entire community can freely meet and exchange ideas, where mind and spirit can be enlightened through knowledge. I fear as libraries go, so goes secularism itself.

<comment><USER11> I thought it was called the coffee shop.

<comment><USER6> or the Internets?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> BTW, UCSD students recenetly "broke in" to an auxiliary library shuttered due to budget cuts: [http://www.publiclibraries.com/blog/college-students- force-u...](http://www.publiclibraries.com/blog/college-students-force-ucsd- library-to-open-for-finals/)

A quiet place to study and think is crucially important

</comment><comment><USER13> Libraries are one of those things that, even if you don't personally use them, your life will get a little bit worse if they disappear because of how their loss will effect your community. Probably enough so to justify supporting them with your taxes even if you never set foot in one.

</comment><comment><USER14> Public libraries (in the traditional, physical-book-filled sense) are probably a doomed institution.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_library_usage>

Maybe they can hold on as free Internet cafes, since that seems to be how many people actually use them today. All that would be missing would be the availability of free or subsidized tea, drip coffee, and maybe some sort of nutritious but inexpensive to prepare hot soup.

<comment><USER15> That Wikipedia article blurs research libraries (like you'd find in a university) with public libraries. Almost all the hard numbers they quote are about research libraries, but the libraries that most of us care about (the ones that act as a democratic backstop for access to information) are public libraries.

The real thing to watch is the countercyclical nature of public libraries ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_library_usage#Econom...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_library_usage#Economic_effects_on_library_usage) in that article). As the economy worsens, public library use increases. Not just for reading material, but for the public services the libraries provide: free law clinics, resume-writing help, etc.

I'm not sure what your local public library is like, but in our small town library is busy all the time. People are borrowing paper books, using the Internet-connected computers, and getting help from librarians. Doomed? Only if we let them; only if we think it's okay to reinstate barriers around lifelong learning.

<comment><USER14> Also, public libraries aren't necessarily the best venues for Internet usage, free law clinics, resume-writing/job assistance, etc.

A community center that also has a library component, maybe.

<comment><USER4> Typically people who use the libraries for things like a free law clinic or assistance with writing a resume don't have an alternative resource. In my area our local library does a week of tax preparation for individuals at tax time with volunteers, and they are so busy that they have to turn people away each day. Many of those individuals simply cannot shell out the money to go to a tax prep service and don't have the resources or knowledge to do taxes themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm very comfortable with the end of libraries as we know them today, but I think the facilities should be repurposed into "study lounges" and meeting space for civics groups. With a few exceptns, you don't really need a library for books anymore. Why not have the young professionals studying for grad school entrance exams or high school kids studying in Starbucks to do that in a community-center type space. For folks without computers/Internet access, keep or expand the computers that are already in there.

I remember the Nook had a very weird feature where if you were inside the store you could free-read any book you wanted electronically, maybe a repurposed library could have the same licensing arrangement with content from the likes of Google books.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article argues that libraries serve their purpose as public e-cafes. Given that this is not the original intent of libraries, it would call for re- considering how they have been transformed by modern technology, i.e. the very thing the author mocks the council for having considered.

I would argue for a cloud model to libraries - as centralised a super-library as possible to house the electronic literature and then a series of "thin" libraries that have terminals to access that media.

This article offers personal anecdotes against a corpus of literature on falling library user bases, etc. A NYT author can do better than inducing the state of British libraries from a personal example.

<comment><USER17> Meanwhile, the person quoted in the article argues that everyone has computers and e-readers now.

Right, so close the libraries and _make sure e-books are free for everyone_ like library books used to be.

<comment><USER7> Our library system (Fairfax Co., VA) allows checking out e-books through a system called OverDrive: [http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/dbsremote/resource/eboo...](http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/dbsremote/resource/ebook.htm)

I've only tried it once to test it out and it appeared to work fine (I don't have a Kindle, I suspect I would use it more if I did).

<comment><USER2> OverDrive doesn't work on Kindle. Also, many libraries have only a very small number of OverDrive books: my local library has 30 ebooks on OverDrive.

<comment><USER18> You are incorrect regarding OverDrive and Kindle. The support was just recently added [1][2].

I will echo that most OverDrive collections are nowhere near large enough for most people to care just yet. But that has been rapidly changing with so many compatible eReaders on the market. Libraries are just now bulking up on digital licenses to meet the surging demand. I would not be surprised if there are already libraries with more digital copies of a popular novel than paper copies.

[1] [http://overdrive.com/news/OverDrive-and-Amazon-launch- Kindle...](http://overdrive.com/news/OverDrive-and-Amazon-launch-Kindle- compatibility-with-Library-eBooks)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200747550)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My local libraries function primarily as daycentres for the homeless and free internet cafes for students and immigrants. Arguably a valuable social service, but a library in name only. My nearest library loans more DVDs than books.

I'd be prepared to fight for the _idea_ of libraries, but the reality? Not so much. Cut the funding, close them all, spend the rest of the money on FE colleges (community colleges).

<comment><USER20> "I'd be prepared to fight for the idea of libraries, but the reality? Not so much. Cut the funding, close them all, spend the rest of the money on FE colleges (community colleges)."

Make sure that money is ring fenced carefully. See my post above in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article starts out with a potentially sound assertion on considering whether patrons of libraries walk or travel to them (though I cringe at anecdotal evidence being used to assault a study).

It then argues that libraries serve their purpose as public e-cafes

</comment><comment><USER21> or The Demise of Physical Media

<comment><USER22> With VHS tapes, and DVDs, we watched programs and movies on television screens. Take away the physical media and replace it with files on a computer, and we're still watching programs and movies on television screens.

With vinyl records, and cassettes, and compact discs, we listened to music on speaker systems and on headphones. Take away the physical media and replace it with files on a computer, and we're still listening to music on speaker systems and on headphones.

But books? We never consumed books through something analogous to television sets or speakers. We held the actual book in our hands, and read the printed pages with our eyes. Replacing physical books with digital books is, in my opinion, a significantly bigger switch than moving from compact discs to MP3s or from DVDs to MP4s. The entire experience has changed, not just how the content is stored.

<comment><USER23> Along with that we've gone from needing gigantic buildings to house them to being able to carry them around with you in your pocket. That's also a gigantic change in the experience. It's turned a personal library/study into something for the rich into something that is affordable by at least half the population in the western world if not more.

<comment><USER24> There's a 3.5 GB ebook torrent at Pirate Bay. Between Project Gutenberg and places like TPB it's within reach for anyone with an internet connection.

<comment><USER25> A while back I, ahem, saw a torrent for over 10G of Math books/textbooks on TPB along with numerous other collections that one would never find outside of exclusive university libraries. The internet has changed everything regarding access to certain classes of information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm posting this from a library. I use my local library for my office. Most have free Internet and more recently, free DVD rental.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well that is to be expected. Ebooks are so much cheaper to distribute that it makes no sense to have all these physical books around.</comment>


NRO records related to the creation of the NROL-76 logo - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/records-concerning-the-nrol-76-logo-37622/#file-154942 <comment><AUTHOR> Favorite quotes:

I asked XXXXX,the NRO PSO, if fairing logos require White House approval. XXXXX said after the octopus logo (NROL-39), the White House threatened to require presidential approval if the NRO approved any more menacing logos.

This Latin approach has worked before and allowed one of my previous organizations to have the slogan "Doing God's work with other people's money" fly right through the approval process. [1] [1][https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/youre-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/youre- mad-about-wrong-part-doing-gods-work-other-peoples-money/332049/)</comment>


So, why Plan 9? - <AUTHOR> http://email@example.com/msg17067.html <comment><USER2> Why I agree that the everything-is-a-file approach that Plan 9 takes is pretty great, and it would be great if that would find a greater use in Linux or the BSDs (beyond /proc etc.), one has to take those comments about the size and quality of the code with a grain of salt.

Once again, the last 20 percent of performance take 80 percent of the effort, and quite often about as much lines of code. And Linux/BSD had to be that highly optimized, or it would have failed in the server sector, probably wouldn't support as many architectures and weird hardware parts.

Having said that, I guess that a lot of people would be happy with the level of support and speed Plan 9 supports, as hardware tends to merge (RIP MIPS, Sparc, 68k, PA-RISC, S3, Tseng, Token Ring…), and Moore's Law takes care of the rest.

<comment><USER3> What you're saying makes sense to me, but do you have a citation for Plan9 being notably slower than Linux on equivalent hardware? Seems like it'd be trivially true unless there is a fantastic architectural advantage to plan9 somewhere, but I'd love to see some numbers.

<comment><USER2> It's been a while since I lurked on 9fans (after all the late adopting minimalist tiling window manager fanboys started coming in in droves), so I can't give you any links to recent comparisons.

First of all, the comparison would be pretty unscientific if you include all the different variables. So let's say you want to test common server performance, then you'd probably do something like an apache bench for a web server. Now comes the problem: Apart from the kernel issues (memory management, ethernet driver, scheduling), you'll have different web servers, compiled with different C compilers.

The GCC port for Plan 9 is ancient, and I'm not aware that e.g. Apache is running on it.

Yes, you can simply test page loads/second with any technology available to any platform, and if you buy into the fact that _everything_ you're doing is wrong (so not just Plan 9 vs Linux, but also gcc vs. 8c, apache vs pegasus etc.), well…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Plan 9 is actually a great little OS, it is where linux _could_ be if it wanted to badly enough.

Instead we're stuck with early 70's technology. Which is good enough, but it could be so much better if not for a bunch of NIH and ego.

No disrespect to the kernel devs, they're doing a great job. But longer term I wish there was some more real innovation instead of just a slightly better (and free) mousetrap.

For another interesting take on OSes look at QnX.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps a group could make a Linux distro with the goal of forking, and Plan9ifying, the source of every package they ship. No one would have to use the resulting distro (other than to demo the neat way that the Plan9ified packages integrate so easily with one another) but the original authors/maintainers of the upstream packages could adopt the Plan9ification patches a la carte, gradually increasing Plan9ification across the board. The patches of one package would always be guaranteed to work with the patches from any other, as the resulting combination has to hang together in the demo distro—and, since this would only be an _eventual_ goal of the group, they would also have to make sure that all their patches didn't _expect_ any Plan9ification on any other package's part.

<comment><USER4> That's not a trivial exercise. The philosophy behind plan 9 is radically different from some of the ways things are done in Linux, and it would take a great effort to get this even close to production grade.

Plan 9 is structurally very different from Unix under the hood, it is in many ways a better unix but backwards compatibility was not what they had in mind when they designed it.

Unix is said to have 'everything is a file' as its mantra, plan 9 shows what 'everything is a file' really means.

<comment><USER6> > The philosophy behind plan 9 is radically different from some of the ways > things are done in Linux, and it would take a great effort to get this even > close to production grade.

So it's not just "NIH and ego", it's the fact that people are loath to abandon working software for benefits that probably seem somewhat abstract?

The "crossing the chasm" approach is to find a niche where your product _can_ win and then go from there. Taking on Linux head-on is just not going to be a winning proposition.

<comment><USER4> It was NIH and ego that stopped adoption from some of the more advanced knowledge available at the time when the relevant portions of linux were developed.

There was no 'working software' to abandon at the time, there is now.

<comment><USER6> Plan 9 came much later than Linux, if I'm not mistaken. Things like microkernels were around then, sure, but is Plan 9 interesting because its a microkernel or because of how you interact with it and how it's architected (everything is really a file)? Edit: it appears that Plan 9 existed internally at Bell labs at about the same time Linux was being developed, but was only released to the public, under a commercial license, in 1995. It was finally open sourced only a few years back.

Also, there certainly was plenty of existing Unix software out there when Linux (and BSD) came out. Not nearly as much as now, but nothing to laugh at either.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget minix and the Tanenbaum / Linus exchanges.

That's a pretty well documented era, and guess what, Tanenbaum was right.

But Linus was riding high on the momentum that he'd generated and Tanenbaum lost the popularity contest. But that didn't make him wrong, and over time those few disadvantages that have been trotted out as the reasons why he was wrong have all been put to rest.

That's part hindsight, but Tanenbaum had a huge amount of experience and was already ahead of 'conventional' unix. Some people think he wasn't ahead enough, but it was certainly a step forward from where linux is, even today.

<comment><USER7> > Tanenbaum was right

Citation needed. Where do you get that? Performance-wise the biggest problem of OS X is still that part that is based on the "many servers are the OS" idea.

That's the reason why this exists:

<http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/darbat/>

Also, NT wanted to try moving in that direction but the critical parts are not "many servers."

Also, there's a reason why L4 was developed (note: post Tanenbaum): the "real" microkernels were very problematic performance-wise and it's actually harder to produce them (example: Gnu Hurd)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd>

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, you can view the current fad of virtualized everything and hypervisors as a kind of exokernel.

<comment><USER7> > you can view the current fad of virtualized everything and hypervisors as a > kind of exokernel.

No I can't, as long as the underlying OS is still a monolithic one, thus selected because it's the fastest and the most convenient to be maintained.

<comment><USER8> Not all hypervisors have an underlying OS. I should expressed myself more clearly.

I was talking about bare metal hypervisors, not hosted hypervisors. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor#Classification>)

We have some experiments with very stripped down domains (i.e. virtual machines) that make full use of paravirtualization. They are quite close to being processes in an exokernel OS. And boot up really fast---like processes should do.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, my wording was indeed clumsy, but it doesn't change the fact: the hypervisor is simply not doing the stuff that the classical OS kernel does, it's not replacing anything, it's just a layer with some specific new functionality, so _when you're changing the meaning of the terms being discussed_ of course it can appear that you're winning the argument, whereas you're just performing tricks. No matter from which direction you observe the systems, the overall functionality possible with monolithic kernels is still not really substituted with something better.

<comment><USER8> > the hypervisor is simply not doing the stuff that the classical OS kernel > does

And that makes the comparison with exokernels apt. Exokernels are not supposed to do what normal kernels do.

(Though if you run a normal kernel on top of a hypervisor or exokernel, in a sense you haven't reached the true potential of the system and your critique is more than valid.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On topic of running old OSs in virtualisation, I purchased and installed "VirtualAcorn" and took delivery yesterday. It's RiscOS-in-a-box. I'm running on top of OSX.

My motivation is I have a friend who composes, and is still using a twenty- year-old acorn running the original release of Sibelius on floppy disks. He bought it directly from the Finn's apartment door back in the day. We thought it might be a good idea to get his life's work off this collection of ancient hardware and floppies :)

It has a command-line, but I haven't worked it out yet.

<comment><USER10> I remember programming on Acorn A3000 or similar, nearly 20 years back. I used to program on display models in computer shops, as my family couldn't afford to buy one. I seem to recall hitting a function key to get a command prompt at the bottom of the screen, and further dialog with the command line caused the rest of the GUI to scroll off screen with each new line printed.

I programmed in its dialect of BASIC, which was - I recall - like a Commodore 64 on steroids. I was impressed, in a way which I wasn't by QBasic on PCs, because I had yet to learn the benefits of structured programming, and missed the line numbers on the PC.

Thinking back, I think it auto-numbered lines as you hit return, like this:

        10 PRINT "Hello"<press Return here>
        20 |

I remember that in particular being major improvement over the C64; I had seen so little, and had very few resources to learn from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some of the ideas in Plan 9 are utterly fantastic.

/proc comes from Plan 9, and I remember being awed by the Plan 9 filesystem, which used memory and hard disks to cache a giant WORM jukebox (in the Bell Labs version, anyhow). I forget what the path was but you could just transparently go and have a look at the whole file system on any given day and wander around a read-only version of the fs for that day.

I'm sure there's a lot out there that looks like this now, but this was in 1992/1993.

The compiler was also cool as hell but lacked any of the aggressive optimizations that even gcc has now. It was very much oriented towards incredibly fast compile times rather than squeezing out the last x% of performance through optimization. I believe that the go compiler is a descendant of this one.

On the negative side, it was a very insular culture with an attitude that 'things we don't need to do aren't worth doing'. Avoiding shared libraries is fine, I guess, as is having a minimalist GUI approach. But telling people that shared libraries suck and shouldn't be used and using the fact that _you've_ got a tiny static library that does all the GUI stuff _you_ need as proof seems a bit rich, when the GUI that you produced doesn't have any of the conventional features of a GUI library. When so many things are being changed at once it's pretty easy to conflate two unrelated things into a 'win' (e.g. 'haha, we don't have a lame shared library system on our machine, and by the way, Motif sucks anyhow').

It's fine up to a point but it was starting to ring very hollow when you had go to another machine to run a web browser that looks even faintly like an actual web browser.

This may all have changed; it's been a long time since I had anything to do with P9. But I think the 90s are the point where Plan 9 decisively 'missed the boat' and the insularity and general attitude was part of the problem. If 'ape' (ANSI Posix environment) had been better maintained and taken seriously Plan 9 might have been considerably more popular and its alternate (frequently superior) ways of doing things might have taken off.

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that even pros must use some tricks to run something of it on the modern hardware, so it appears as it's still mostly an experimental research platform?

<http://email@example.com/msg17086.html>

"I am typing this in acme in 9vx running on FreeBSD, using the rio port in P9P for my window manager. Because I'm away from my home network, I'm running 9vx with the the root on my local machine. When I'm at home, I use 9vx booting with its root taken from a real Plan 9 file server. I also run it on qemu fairly often."

</comment><comment><USER12> From one of the replies in the thread:

You could have pointed out that the entire source tree is smaller than the gcc manual.

</comment><comment><USER13> Don't forget to try Plan9 for user space, the Plan9 utilities ported to POSIX systems.

</comment><comment><USER14> _getting things right the first time around is much more of a practical matter than you may at first realize._

</comment><comment><USER15> Because OpenBSD community isn't arrogant enough for you.</comment>


FrootVPN – Surf anonymously on the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.frootvpn.com/

<comment><USER2> Free product, free support, no logs. They're either lying or trying to turn this into a freemium product at some point in the future. Everything else just seems unlikely.

Furthermore, their domain is protected by WhoisGuard (Panama). If they (the people involved, not the servers) were sitting in Sweden this would be unnecessary (compare IPredator). The IP address behind the website points to the same Swedish datacenter(s) that the services surrounding The Pirate Bay use as well (Portlane). IPredator itself seems to have moved to Cyprus though.

Uppercase and underlined "anonymous" next to plain text passwords via email is just unprofessional.

<comment><USER3> I can't tell you how happy I am to see this as the top comment.

Free is a con.

If you want a cheap VPN that you control (and that's faster than Tor), set up an endpoint on something that takes Bitcoin payment and pay with Bitcoins obtained via an anonymous route. This list might be helpful.

[https://www.exoticvps.com](https://www.exoticvps.com)

<comment><USER4> Depending on your needs, you can just roll your own with Amazon EC2. I use it for an SSH tunnel, mostly to use while at work. Not that I'm doing any weird browsing, I just don't like the thought of my employer keeping a log of what I am doing on my free time ([https://xkcd.com/303/](https://xkcd.com/303/)).

I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I only pay for what I use.

<comment><USER5> That's a VPN but not anonymous. Amazon knows who you are.

<comment><USER2> There is always a server that knows who you are. Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2 instance or a TOR entry node.

Hosting you own VPN server seems overkill for this kind of use case. There are many trustworthy VPN providers that I'd recommend for use cases unrelated tor BitTorrent. A couple of years ago people recommended SwissVPN over and over to me, though I've never used it. I was a happy IPredator customer for quite some time.

If you want to host your own VPN server (let's face it, servers are useful anyway), I'd recommend cloud providers other than Amazon. Iceland, Sweden and Germany are very friendly countries.

<comment><USER6>
        There is always a server that knows who you are.
        Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2
        instance or a TOR entry node.

Correction: the TOR entry node only knows the data came from you, but there's no way for it to know whether the data _originated_ from you or not. For all it knows, you could be a relay and the data came from someone else.

<comment><USER2> My bad, this is actually an important distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not quite sure what the appeal of free VPN services are, or why anyone would trust them.

Setting up a VPN server takes very little time. From a default Ubuntu installation you only need to install the OpenVPN Access Server package, visit a web page and add a user.

You can do this from a cloud service provider in a location with favorable privacy laws, like Iceland. I do this with GreenQloud, and just spin up my VPN instance when I'm on an untrustworthy wifi network, behind a corporate firewall, traveling to a country that censors, or whatever. Powered on instances cost little, and powered off nearly nothing. The attack surface is low, as it's usually powered off.

People who wish to be nearly untraceable can use a prepaid credit card for anonymity.

<comment><USER8> >People who wish to be nearly untraceable can use a prepaid credit card for anonymity.

Does anyone have experience with this? I tried it once, and found that most places blocked the use of these cards and needed a "real" one.

<comment><USER9> I used a prepaid card to sign up for an AWS account because I'm not comfortable giving them my real one for a "free trial", they accepted it at the time, approx 1 year ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1\. We offer a free service. 2\. With free support. 3\. And we somehow have enough ips to go around for everyone? 4\. Btw, we are not MITMing you or logging anything.

What?

<comment><USER11> You don't need enough IPs to go around; you can always assign a private IP address and do NAT (this is how most VPNs work anyway).

But yeah, I don't understand how they're paying for it. My best guess would be they found a loophole to exploit peering agreements, similar to how small rural telephone companies will set up free conference bridges because the big telcos have to pay them connection fees.

Or they're just capturing info and selling it (unlikely; personal information just isn't worth that much and it's easy enough to buy already from data brokers).

Or they're MITMing the big ad networks and showing their own ads instead. I consider this the most likely scenario.

<comment><USER10> Oh sure, sorry I meant to imply that effectively those external ips they will be exposing to outside services will be banned fairly soon by a lot of things and marked as a vpn/proxy service.

On second reading I realize that I basically in no way say that.

Agreed with everything you said though, it's not legit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always chuckle when I see a VPN service claim no logging. While it's probably true, they can't ever prove to you that that's actually the case, which makes the claim moot for anyone who actually cares about their privacy.

<comment><USER13> Until somebody gets sued and posts about it on twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> received email with password in plaintext after registration

<comment><USER15> I was just going to say the same thing. What the hell kind of group offers security and VPN services and then sends passwords plaintext!

<comment><USER16> They will need to store them in plain text or encrypted plain text (which is just plain text with sugar on top) just due to the way some of the VPN protocols they support work.

They should avoid emailing them however, if they can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Within less than an hour of being connected to FrootVPN through OpenVPN, incoming connection to sshd from sketchy IP followed by multiple attemped incoming connections to screensharing from another sketchy IP... bots, or not, I dont know...

But if every single comment thus far isn't enough of an indication.. as I have never experienced these security issues in the past, I think it's fair to say.. stay away, stay far away...

</comment><comment><USER18> Dosen´t seem very legit. According to reddit it´s sluggish not really working and presumingly stealing information. Can anyone back this information? or counter it? I don´t feel like using this software it´s way too fishy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wait... so...

\- free

\- no logs

\- support

\- unlimited bandwidth

Is this some kind of badly executed sting operation?

</comment><comment><USER20> "Do you keep logs?"

"We dont keep any logs of any kind. all we ask from you is your email address and username. and thats it. no other information is keept in our system."

One must immediately question a company whose customer facing copy appears in such a way.

<comment><USER16> The whole site/concept/product only appears to be a week old. Even Googling the name turns up stuff from the last few days only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Hide your identity online and surf anonymous. When using our service you will be protected behind a encrypted tunnel and no traces can lead back too you"

Shouldn't that be "back to you"? Not back too you.

</comment><comment><USER22> They are no longer sending the password with the sign-up email. Not going to try it out though given it still is likely some type of scam.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't really use these VPN services, but I did see they use PPTP (for android at least). Isn't that flawed/insecure?

</comment><comment><USER24> Could be another Anon OS. I'd be weary of anything marketing itself as a "free" VPN.

</comment><comment><USER25> Has to be either a scam or it will require a payment after they get few users.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sent my password in plain text back in an email. Game over.

</comment><comment><USER27> hmm could abuse the plaintext password for <script> and <iframe> tags... Something smells fishy with everything free!

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting...doesn't work in China.</comment>


Creepygirl - <AUTHOR> http://www.cubo.cc/creepygirl/

<comment><USER2> At about the 0:30 mark she should look dead center and scream.

</comment><comment><USER3> Her eyes look bloodshot. I wonder what she's been up to.

</comment><comment><USER4> The company behind the tech... <http://www.motionportrait.com/e/>

</comment><comment><USER5> The smile is all wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> :) cool eyes..</comment>


How Our Relationship Survived When My Partner Got Sick - <AUTHOR> https://www.menshealth.com/health/a25225033/male-caregivers/ <comment><USER2> I lost my best friend last year to Crohn's disease. He was only 33 years old and left behind a 5 year old son.

The utter helplessness in the face of such horrific suffering and interminable decline is a pain I wish nobody had to endure.

As my friend worsened, I would rage at friends and family who peddled false hope with their quack "cures", internet remedies, and religious nonsense. But he was the picture of grace throughout his final decline, warmly welcoming visits.

The last time I saw him, he wanted to just chat for a few hours. But I couldn't sit still. I massaged his feet and refilled his water bottle and shifted his body to provide a little relief from the constant discomfort of bedridden life.

At the time, I thought I was helping him. But I realized after he was gone that he was helping me, giving me something to do so that I didn't feel so damn powerless.

I don't know why I'm writing this. I haven't really talked about it with anyone. I think about him every day, and my heart goes out to anybody suffering from a debilitating disease -- both the sufferers and their caregivers. Every day becomes a fight for dignity and humanity.

If I took any lessons away from the horror of that year, it's the power of listening. Just listen. Don't try to judge or fix or explain anything.

I think I helped most when I just sat and listened. I wish I had done it more.

<comment><USER3> You are a good person. The fact that you reflected on this says so.

Don't get stuck on wishing you listened more.

Call his wife, see if she needs anything like fixing a fence, water faucets etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great story of love. Mine is kind of the opposite...

My ex-wife got early onset rheumatoid arthritis. It took a long time to diagnose, but once we did, it was a relief to know what we needed to treat. We spent years going doctors, trying various medications and generally taking care of her health with no expense spared. Eventually, despite all of our efforts, our relationship grew further and further apart and I finally asked to separate (after about 10 years together). It was the most difficult thing I've ever done, partly because it was traumatic to let go of someone who was sick.

As crazy as it sounds, after we separated, she found a shaman in the jungles of Peru and moved there from San Francisco to be healed. Today, she shows no signs of RA (has even come back to the US a few times for 'real' testing) and she is healthy and happy. I now live in Vietnam and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life.

Despite all the difficulties, separation was the best for both of us. We are still friends and keep in touch online.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious to hear more about shaman experience as I have some anxiety-like issues that no type of medicine/ therapy seems to be helping with.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I don't know exactly which program she went with, but she's been down there for a couple years and I think pretty well connected into it.

keywords in google are "peru jungle shaman"

involves taking ayahuasca and other jungle made substances

do your research, i think there is some definitely sketchy outfits, but there are good ones too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To echo others in this thread, sadly, my relationship did not survive my partner's mental illness.

My girlfriend had a quite extreme form of borderline personality disorder, possibly with schizophrenia - but it's hard to know exactly because she would often be uncooperative with professionals and was often using drugs. She also didn't talk to her family, but never told me why.

Eventually, after struggling for more than five years, I threw in the towel and broke up with her. I still supported her financially, because she was incapable of work, and was trying to encourage her to seek professional help.

Within a few months, she had committed suicide and left a note blaming me for leaving her.

I found out later, after contacting her family, that she had two children by different fathers that she had left with her parents then ran away from - among a ton of other things she did to ruin the lives of anyone who ever knew her.

I spread her ashes last month with her sister who hadn't spoken to her in over 10 years.

It has hit me quite badly, and often I regret breaking up with her considering what happened, but deep down I knew I couldn't continue. It was affecting my own mental health so badly that I was struggling keeping myself afloat. The best thing for her would probably have been to call it off much sooner, before she became too dependent on me - but the guilt of breaking up with someone who is severely ill meant I couldn't bring myself to it until I could no longer cope.

As nice a story as the article is, my advice would be that you do have to consider your own life as well. If you can't look after yourself, you can't look after someone else.

<comment><USER7> _my advice would be that you do have to consider your own life as well._

I think this is an excellent thought.

I am told by someone who is a professional counselor that therapists who have patients with borderline personality disorder have to reduce their other caseload significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I mod r/CrohnsDisease and try to make sure every text post gets at least one thoughtful reply. We're here for anyone with IBD/Crohn's/Colitis as well as friends & family of those who have it (since it can be just as difficult for them.)

[https://reddit.com/r/CrohnsDisease](https://reddit.com/r/CrohnsDisease)

<comment><USER9> Hello from /r/Celiac. I'll link you on the sidebar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wife has Scheuermann's and Levoscoliosis (spinal deformities) and spends a large (often majority) percentage of her time in agony. American doctors refuse to give her opioids because their idea of resolving the 'opioid crisis' is to not help anyone (because the DEA is up their asses for every script they write), and since most of them haven't heard of her issues, they shrug their shoulders and recommend physical therapy, for someone who can't get out of bed. Yes, her pain has driven us to the brink of divorce on a few occasions, but we are united in our revulsion at the American healthcare system and the politicians whose meddling has shaped it.

I truly envy everyone who gets help for their mysterious or chronic illness in the United States. We're leaving next year.

<comment><USER11> Can you get meds by mail or even go buy meds every x months ?

<comment><USER12> Controlled substances usually aren't available by mail (at least not legally).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That was a beautiful and sad article. Bittersweet but the sweetness was more subtle and powerful than the bitterness. Love, I guess, is the light side of the force, and the dark side is all that is in opposition to that.

My first wife was frustrated with my progressing back problems, and when I had a breakdown after being fired she became more and more angry. One day, after I got back from therapy and told her what was discussed, she said "you're not supposed to be fixing yourself, you're supposed to be fixing our marriage!!". Other things happened, and we divorced soon after.

My partner and I are caregivers for each other. She walks the dogs when I am unable because of back issues, I do grocery shopping when she hasn't had any sleep due to being up all night because of her IBS. We sign "I Love You" to each other when we're on the phone or conference calls. We listen to podcasts together and she rewinds parts because she was intensely focused on a game, and I smile at her because I know that this is how her mind works, and it's wonderful. She understands just what being introverted is, we both avoid the grocery store and its crowds, rather than either of us being frustrated with the other for wanting to stay at home in bed.

Neither of us is perfect, and I know we both cause each other worry and stress. Just like in the article, sitting on the curb waiting for the other to make it through a snowstorm, both literally and figuratively.

I hope you all find people in your lives who accept you for who you really are, and who will be your mutual caregiver, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

</comment><comment><USER14> What a beautifully written (yet sad) story. I have a good friend who suffers from Crohn's disease, but she keeps it so well hidden because I didn't realise how bad the disease was until I read this article.

<comment><USER15> It affects people differently so she may be better off than the person in this story, but no doubt it's a real burden to most sufferers. My good friend has it and I've watched him struggle for fifteen years now. There are alright years, terrible ones, and some in between. It's a terrible disease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My relationship didn't survive my ex-wife's sickness. She had bouts with clinical depression and was at times not motivated to do anything. I did everything at home and because of her illness she was easily irritated at me and impulsive, I dreaded coming hone sometimes. We decided to split after she recovered, we couldn't heal the relationship.

I often think about it as my weakest moment and biggest failure.

<comment><USER17> Don't beat yourself up. You pushed through this, waited for her becoming better. There's nothing weak about realizing that it can't go forward at some point in time, especially after she recovered (and not before).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In November 2012 I had just turned 30 years old and my wife and I had been married for a bit over 2 years, but were together for over 6 by then. On the newer side we had a 1 year old baby girl and I had just started my new job at Google 6 months earlier.

At first I thought I had a bad stomach virus, but after 2 weeks of some very worrying trips to the bathroom I finally saw a GP and told him my problems. He gave me a few tests and told me that I had a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile (aka C. Diff.). Which was odd, because it's usually the kind of infection that you get while in hospital, but I had been completely healthy for my whole life. He started me on a cycle of some very potent antibiotics: Flagyl and Vancomycin. After another week of worsening symptoms is when things got really bad... and really scary. I couldn't go to work that week, I still remember describing the pain like someone stabbing me in the gut with a knife and twisting.

I had to stop eating. Drinking water was excruciating. I couldn't leave the bed anymore, and the only movement I could make was to curl more tightly into the fetal position. By now my fevers were regularly spiking over 102 F, and I spent most of the night sweating myself into an exhausted few hours of sleep. After a few days of this I finally called my GP who told me to go the ER immediately. On my first trip to the ER I sat hunched over in a waiting room chair for a few hours, probably as pale as a ghost. When they finally brought me in and heard my C. Diff. diagnosis everyone put on their quarantine outfits and stayed the fuck away from me. Oddly, they only gave me 2 bags of saline IV and sent me back home.

After another few days at home, writhing in agony in bed, still unable to eat anything and barely drink anything I had to go back to the ER. This time I called my GP (who showed extreme care, and was adamant I go back to the hospital) when I got to the ER. Luckily he had done his residency there and knew a few of the doctors. This time my C. Diff diagnosis got me a first class ticket to a private room and quarantine sign. I felt mildly bad about this, because after Hurricane Sandy 1/2 of the hospitals on the east side of Manhattan had been shut down and the wait time for a hospital bed from the Beth Israel ER was over 24 hours for some people. (I got over feeling bad for others pretty soon after).

I was wheeled up to my new room and asked to poop in a bucket for another C. Diff test. Almost as fast I was hooked up to IV Flagyl and Vanco for the "big guns". That night my fever hit 105. The next morning a doctor finally came to see me for more than 30 seconds. This was the first time they told me the C. Diff tests came back negative, but "it must have been a fluke" so they asked me to poop in a bucket again. This was pretty problematic, given that I hadn't eaten anything in almost 2 weeks at this point. This continued for a few days, each night the fevers making wish I would just die, followed by doctors coming in the next day and wondering what was wrong with the damn test results. No C. Diff.

At this point the confusion of what could be wrong became an obsession. Every nurse or doctor who came in, I asked what is it. Their answer.... "we think it's C. Diff., it's just not showing up in our tests... you need more antibiotics".

On the fifth day the pain became excruciating, I was lying in bed, dead still, just trying to hold onto the edges hard enough so the pain in my finger tips made me feel anything other than that fucking relentless twisting knife in my gut. Finally someone in the hospital seemed to notice that I wasn't doing so well, and they sent me to get a CT scan. A few hours later a doctor whom I had never seen before walked into my room, he may have introduced himself, but I was so deliriously preoccupied with my pain that I have no idea. In a monotone voice with now questions he said "I have the results of your CT scan, we see some micro perforations along your large bowel and believe you have fulminant ulcerative colitis. We're moving you to the surgical ICU and may need to perform emergency surgery to completely remove your large intestine. You'll need an ostomy bag if that happens". The end. Please hold your questions until after the ostomy bag.

WTF? What did that guy just say? What is "ulcerative colitis"? Did he say "micro perforations"? Is that better than regular perforations? Just make the pain stop please. Why did it take a week to get a CAT scan when I'm already in the hospital? Why does my stomach still have this knife in it? These were most of the thoughts that quickly entered my brain.

None of those questions mattered. I spent the next 4 days laying in a cube in the surgical ICU. A very nice nurse (I sadly don't remember her name) wiped the blood from my back side each day. At 7am and 7pm the lead surgeon followed by his gaggle of surgical residents came to stare at me like a specimen. Talking about me, but never to me. Never actually making eye contact, and only glancing at me from behind their clipboards. I hated those surgeons. Never fucking once did they speak to me. Only stared, and talked about ripping out my intestine. I liked my intestine, but probably would have been OK with the idea of losing it if just any one of those doctors had explained what it would be like without it. Or why it needed to go. Or what the fuck was happening to me.

Luckily at this point, the IV prednisone that they hooked me up to seemed to be taking the pain away and I was able to hold a short conversation now. I was even drinking small sips of water like a human being again.

After my time in the surgical ICU I was sent to post-OP recovery for almost 2 weeks. By this time I loved prednisone. It was my new best friend. I could eat Jello!

When I was discharged from Beth Israel Hellhole, I mean hospital, I had been in for over 20 days. I lost 45 lbs, I entered at nearly 180lbs and left at almost 130lbs. I was still only on prednisone, because my major medical insurance for Remicade hadn't cleared yet. That would still take another 3 weeks before I could start treatment on an actual drug.

Eventually I started this new wonder drug and things got better for a little while. Unfortunately after 6 months I developed "drug induced lupus", which is less fun than it sounds.

But in those 6 months my diagnosis changed 4 times. From Ulcerative Colitis -> Crohns Disease -> "almost certainly" Ulcerative Colitis -> Indeterminate Colitis (that is an actual diagnosis [https://jcp.bmj.com/content/57/12/1233](https://jcp.bmj.com/content/57/12/1233)).

6 years later, 6 surgeries, I've lost count of the number of hospital stays totaling almost 9 months. Failed off of 4 biologics. I eventually did lose my large intestine. I'm on my 2nd ileostomy (they put me back together once.... that turned out to be a very bad idea, and another story for another time).

In the end, it has gotten better. I'm skinny, but I'm healthy now.... mostly. My marriage didn't survive, partly for stress of illness but mostly for very different reasons.

Moral of the story... find a great doctor; don't go to the closest hospital, go to the best hospital you can find; become an expert on yourself and your disease; speak with doctors like advisors, not oracles; don't let other people tell you "what you should do", but listen to their stories and advice; reduce stress; stay active.

I still don't know what I have. My diagnosis is now "maybe" Crohn's (?). But I'm aware of it. Only my closest friends even know I have "a bag", everyone else just tells me I'm too skinny. I can deal with that comment when I eat 3 dinner plates in front of them. I don't have similar symptoms to other Crohnies. I can eat anything seemingly without consequence, my triggers are almost certainly stress related. They're also (so far) completely localized to the large intestine and lower (although I have had horrible canker sores since childhood). Luckily none of my small intestine or upper digestive tract has ever been noticeably affected (other than the canker sores). Overall I feel lucky to have great doctors now, and a (usually) positive outlook, but damn...

The psychological toll is not to be discounted either. I should have sought a group to speak with, or someone who knew first hand what this was like. I became very angry for a long time. This didn't help keep my stress levels down. I also find it hard to find the line of "am I lazy?" or "am I sick?", this question is annoyingly common. I try my best not to be a "1-uper" when someone tells me they don't feel well, but mostly I try to get them to stay away from me since the immunosuppressants make a common cold feel like malaria (I really don't like my coworkers who think coming into the office sick is what a good soldier does). Overall, it is a very lonely place.

IBD sucks

edit:

+1 for r/crohnsdisease and r/ostomy (like another poster mentioned above) both are great communities

<comment><USER19> What a terrible story, though I'm surprised they ordered more than one test for the bacterial infection.

I had a kidney infection last year around this time. I caught it early, as I had been through it before and had once left it so late that I developed sepsis (infection of the blood).

I went to the ER and told them I had a kidney infection. The intake nurse was very kind and asked me relevant questions. She seemed to be inclined to confirm my self-diagnosis: "yeah, it sounds like a kidney infection."

They got me to a bed and ordered a urine test. The urine test came back an hour later, "100% clean, perfect urine". The doctor poked at my back for a bit and assured me my ailment was mechanical! I assured her it was not mechanical. "Well, your urine test is perfect, so I don't know what to tell you. If you're still experiencing symptoms in the next couple days, just come in, but for now try to rest and not put too much strain on your back :) "

So I went home. In the next two days I developed a fever of 102 and was in excruciating pain, both in my head and my general abdominal area. I couldn't walk, I couldn't even think. My family forced me to go to the ER because I was incapable of making the decision. I genuinely thought I would die-- I thought I had already developed sepsis and would suffer brain damage and I would die. We went to the ER and they did another urine test. lol SURPRISE, I had a kidney infection! They gave me the tiniest, littlest dose of morphine that almost did nothing to help the pain, and gave me a prescription for antibiotic pills. I insisted they send me to an outpatient facility for IV treatment. "That's a great idea!" They said. Jesus.

Anyways, kidney infection was cured, but MY GOD, I would think the first thing they would do is order another urine test! Apparently the tech failed the first time and sampled it too late, which is why my urine was "pristine" (their words). No one's urine is fucking pristine!

<comment><USER20> Have anecdotally heard of many false negatives on a c diff test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Be right back. Getting out of bed to give my sweet heart a hug.

</comment><comment><USER22> When you get something without asking is the best way to survive relationship, Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER23> removed

<comment><USER24> That's not politically incorrect, but simplistic evolutionary thinking.</comment></comment>


Using an LCD's poor viewing angle to your advantage - <AUTHOR> http://chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/ObliqueLCD

<comment><USER3> I used to work at a place where our work product was kept in safes. They had these funky electronic locks, and instead of having notches on the dial there was a little LCD window on the top (facing the ceiling). Whereas most LCD manufactures try to get a wider viewing angle, the manufacturer had gone the other way, so you had to hold your head in exactly the right place or you couldn't see the numbers as you dialed the combination.

There was no way you could shoulder surf the combination. Even if you planted a camera the head of the person opening the safe would be in the way of the camera's sight line.

<comment><USER4> You can do that with any display. They are called privacy filters, you just stick them in front of the display and work exactly as you say.

<comment><USER5> More technically polarization filters. Laptop/Desktop manufacturers usually sell these at an obscene price, but there has to be a place to get them for a more reasonable price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this may have come a bit late to be useful - I can't see that colour inversion effect on my laptop monitor even at fairly extreme angles, so I'm not really confident that it's going to work on here. The advance in LCD technology may prevent this seeing any serious adoption, although I do think the "unread emails" one is pretty nifty. I'm not so sure about the banking one since I'm very unlikely to do any banking with someone sitting nearby, even if I knew a technology like that was in place.

<comment><USER7> There are still plenty of cheap LCDs in the world, they just don't show up in high quality products. I bought a cheap Android tablet (a Viewsonic gTablet) a while back to try out, and it had terrible viewing angles.

The banking example on the site actually implies designing an ATM specifically to take advantage of this feature. There are often people around you when you use an ATM.

Other products where security is an issue (special more-secure laptops?) could be designed this way as well. You wouldn't do banking with people watching, but if you needed the ability to do company work while, for example, spending a lot of time flying, it might be a net benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great example of the old engineering adage that you can turn every fault into a feature.

<comment><USER9> I thought that was an old jazz musician's adage ;-)

<comment><USER10> If you make a mistake, repeat it and call it your own arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing I find amazing is not so much that they were able to use colour refracting to overlay invisible messages on bad LCDs... it's looking at the problem in "creative-reversedness" (yes I just made that up).

We all would look at the limited viewing angle as a problem. Not enough people can see the TV, colour is bad, blah blah. But if we were to look at the problem in reverse - Too many people can see the screen from all angles, colour acuracy is not that important for all applications, and so on... we actually define a product that we can fit in the banking, HR, etc roles.

The next feat of genius was looking at what was causing the original problem and then leveraging it to create the new fuctional solution. Many just use the polar lenses, now you can just create a app that overlays invisible ink.

Great job.

</comment><comment><USER12> Could this be used to correct my posture? I can just imagine my screen telling me to "sit up straight!" every time I slumped just like my father used to.

<comment><USER13> No, for that you just need PostureMinder:

<http://pcbackpain.com/how-postureminder-works/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems pretty cool. But is the viewing angle of an LCD an inherent property of the particular materials used or is it a side effect of uncertain manufacturing processes? I.e. could an LCD screen's viewing angle be changed if it was manufactured more precisely or calibrated better or something?

<comment><USER15> It's definitely dependent on the LCD monitor. I have a TN monitor, which works with the demo page, but on my IPS monitor, the text never really disappears from any angle.

<comment><USER14> Sorry what i meant was, even with the same brand and manufacturer, might there still be slight differences in viewing angle depending on how well each individual monitor was made/calibrated? My point being that, as cool as the idea is, mightn't it be impractical if you have to test/calibrate every monitor that's used, versus a manufacturing process that takes the usage into account from the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The works on even mac laptops

go to the demo page here: <http://chrisharrison.net/projects/obliqueLCD/>

look at your laptop screen from above and below (i.e., tilt or rock it) - <USER2> side to side.

More details here: <http://chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/ObliqueLCD>

<comment><USER17> I could easily read all the text on that demo page, even when looking at my monitor head-on.

Turns out, the 'secret' text is coloured to blend in with a white background, but the page doesn't actually _enforce_ a white background; my light-grey background doesn't provide enough contrast to read a novel, but it brings out the 'secret' text nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is definitely cool, but I still hate shitty LCDs. I bought 2 separate Samsungs that said they could pivot, but both (being made years apart) still had such horrid viewing angles that even looking straight on while vertical would make that distortion effect and make me feel sick.

I fought Samsung for false advertising using every method I could find and eventually they just gave me 2 24" IPS's and a 22" that can do 3D. The IPSs are really nice, but you can fry an egg on them they run so hot.

Using one of those shitty monitors if I get to the sweet spot where the text is invisible, if I move a hair up or down I can see the text :S

</comment><comment><USER19> In one example they have blurred the financial details on the screen from anyone viewing from the side.

I wonder if that could be iterated further such that all of the screen is blurred from the sides (presumably by dynamically altering the "overlay" to cancel out each color of each pixel).

This would then make a great alternative to a privacy screen for use on planes, etc.

<comment><USER18> Don't ATMs do something like this, or are they just built to have the shittiest viewing angles ever (which is obviously advantageous for this scenario)?

<comment><USER20> They have privacy filters, a separate covering that reduces the viewing angle of any screen to almost zero. You can buy one yourself, if you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this could be used for a game somehow...

</comment><comment><USER22> That banking example would be better if the text viewed from an angle obscured the bank balances as well.

<comment><USER23> One of the later examples does that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Currently, you can buy a private filter for any monitor and you can see what is in the monitor only if you are in front of it. I think they should develop their own devices with the applications to sale them.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow - I saw one of the monitors I currently use in their "Photos" section.

</comment><comment><USER26> Isn't this old news? [http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/08/2010-range-rover- gets-12-...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/08/2010-range-rover-gets-12-inch- dual-view-touchscreen/)</comment>


An open letter to Elon Musk - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/07/30/elon-musk-open-letter/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr Possibly tongue in cheek please for general sanity in the world. This time projected at the genius de jour. Your favorite and mine.

I feel like I've read this kind of thing before... Rich white guy saves the world. Oh yea, Dances with wolves. No, wait, Avatar. No, wait, lots of other stuff.

Yes, these things need fixing. No, I don't think one person can fix them. Yes, Elon Musk is hella cool. No, these problems won't be solved in our lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER3> Elon Musk has enough to worry about, leave him alone!

<comment><USER2> I don't think his areas of specialization, personality, or interests align to the plea either.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What exciting Ruby projects do you know of? - <AUTHOR>

...including non-web applications, too. <comment><USER2> JRuby.</comment>


Israel passes law to cap bankers' salaries - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/29/israel-passes-law-to-cap-bankers-salaries-pay-gap <comment><USER2> Say what you will about banker pay, the one thing I really respect about investment banking (having a family member who is an ibanker) is the transparency around pay in the industry.

To some degree there might be collusion to set wages (although at their pay scale I'm not sure they care), but all ibankers know what to expect pay-wise at X years of experience, perhaps with some slight variance based on other factors. So there is a distinct lack of the information asymmetry that is so prominent in compensation discussions in other industries that is so heavily weighted in favor of the employer.

I wish this existed in more industries as Glass Door simply doesn't cut it unless you are in a field with very well-defined roles/titles in markets with enough data.</comment>


Show HN: Find and analyse realisations of quantum systems from transfer function - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joebentley/simba <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is my most recent project as part of my PhD. It is a python module for computing the realisation of a quantum system directly from its input- output frequency-domain transfer function. It should be useful to anyone interested in quantum computing or quantum optics.

Until recently, it has not been possible to systematically produce a quantum system corresponding to a given input-output transfer function. Instead, physicists guess based on intuition at what quantum systems produce what kind of frequency-domain behaviour. This instead introduces a totally systematic way of realising quantum systems of arbitrary complexity from its behaviour in the frequency domain, the reverse process of what is previously possible, and totally changes our process for designing quantum systems

Thanks!</comment>


Is this service worth building? - <AUTHOR> Would you like to have a mobile app which shows how dangerous is the place you live in (and/or places you and your close ones visited)?<p>It would be great to hear your thoughts about it. <comment><USER3> What are your data sources? What level of detail will you drill down to? How will you keep it updated? What do you mean by dangerous? How will you handle inevitable complaints about prejudice etc when labelling some areas as dangerous: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28712227](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28712227) ?

Overall I suspect your main challenge will be producing an output dataset that is granular enough to be useful whilst remaining accurate over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I can use something like crimereports.com and similar resources.

2\. I wasn't thinking about details (i mean low-level). Just want to understand is this product worth to be built))

3\. I can use crime data to compare one place to another. In this case, I can find safe and dangerous regions.

4\. "How will you handle inevitable complaints about prejudice etc". I'll think about it

<comment><USER3> OK so dangerous means crime in your app then - but there are also many other types of hazard you could include - natural hazards, disease, terrorism etc. For something like tornados I bet there's some great datasets available. You could also look at scraping news feeds - I've seen apps that extract place names from news data and geolocate based on the place.

To an extent I think whether the app is worth building is is dependent on the data you have access to and any process you apply to enrich the data - <USER2> will govern the character and quality of your app. If you can give people something they cannot easily get elsewhere you might get more users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have seen crime data available like this on a neighborhood level on Trulia and Zillow.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen it too. Heatmap + crime list. What about crime stats for some period, dynamic, predictions, etc.?</comment></comment>


Firefox Accounts is coming - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-accounts-manage-your-marketplace-apps

<comment><USER2> I'm rather annoyed with mozilla/firefox pushing for ubiquitous usage of their authentication platforms. I prefer my decentralized, modular, and personally controllable account information. The reason I don't "Sign in with Google" or "Login with Facebok" is the same reason I don't want a Firefox Persona or Account. Also, let me sign up without a damn e-mail.</comment>


Show HN: Peer-to-peer database over IPFS (toy) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/johnny-morrice/godless <comment><AUTHOR> OP here:

TLDR; CRDT, peer to peer, PEG query language, in early development, possibly just a toy.

Crypto/user concepts are planned for the near future. I am not exactly sure the shape this will take, but to keep it simple, I'll probably sign every Entry with a key. Perhaps an IPFS key - I haven't looked into how IPFS does cryptography.

Motivations are: noticing how there have been a few CRDT projects posted online lately, and wanting to abstract out a layer so I don't have to do lots of maths for every program :)</comment>


Adding bash auto-completion to scripts - <AUTHOR> https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial <comment><USER2> I found this an interesting and useful tutorial, but I observe - so many submissions, so little discussion. Why no love from the HN crowd? It's a mystery ...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17127410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17127410)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103976)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073966)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052732)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17040160)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16930893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16930893)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876216)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16802800)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727972)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727227)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16715032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16715032)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16656841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16656841)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16535189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16535189)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508524)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16499361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16499361)</comment>


Buncefield Bomb Garden: How Landscaping Magnified an Explosion - <AUTHOR> http://bldgblog.blogspot.ca/2012/06/buncefield-bomb-garden.html

<comment><USER2> I've never complained about turning more of our lawn into gardens on the theory it left me with less grass to cut ... Little did I know I was turning our home into a death-trap.

</comment><comment><USER3> oh man -- upvoted for the blog alone. that site is fascinating!</comment>


Can You Charge a Tesla by Towing It? (With Ford Raptor) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaGVoB4Zn-Y <comment><USER2> TLDR: The short answer is "yes". (They claim a fuel economy of 13L/100km too, apparently, which is...mildly terrible, but I guess better than being completely stuck).</comment>