Ordasity: Building Stateful Clustered Services on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://blog.boundary.com/2011/10/20/Ordasity-Building-Stateful-Clustered-Services-on-the-JVM.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not very familiar with building services on the JVM at the moment (though I'd love to be), so a quick, honest question:

What are the pros/cons of Ordasity[1] vs. something like Finagle[2]? Are they comparable and if so why would one be chosen over the other, what are the strengths of one vs the other, etc.

[1]: <https://github.com/boundary/ordasity>

[2]: <https://github.com/twitter/finagle>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Mitchell,

Thanks for asking -- in short, the use cases are a bit different. Finagle is a framework for building asynchronous RPC systems (e.g., services or APIs with transports over HTTP or Thrift), and Ordasity is a library for cluster membership, load balancing, and distribution.

Twitter's put together a nice toolkit atop Netty for building reliable services and describing communication between them. These services are generally stateless and might be balanced by something like HAProxy (when using an HTTP transport), or via a round-robin approach in the case of Thrift clients. A closer comparator for Finagle would be something like Scalang, our library for building hybrid Erlang / Scala distributed systems (though it's also excellent for pure-Scala systems as well): <https://github.com/boundary/scalang>

Ordasity is designed for describing stateful clusters in which individual nodes are responsible for claiming longer-lived work units -- think of it in terms of "a processing shard" of the system's total load. The library's primary goals are to help you:

\- Describe the cluster in simple terms such that when each node comes online, it joins the cluster and is aware of all other nodes (and vice versa)

\- Distribute work across the cluster by directing each node to claim an even "count" of work units or "even distribution" of the total load imposed by those work units.

\- Automatically rebalance work units across nodes in the cluster as the amount / intensity of work or cluster topology changes.

\- And gracefully manage maintenance or downtime scenarios by draining work units to another node.

In the end, Ordasity and Finagle are both tools for building distributed systems on the JVM. However, the types of systems they're designed to describe are a bit different. Hope that helps; let me know if you'd like me to clarify something.

<comment><USER3> Let me propose a use case, and I would appreciate if you indicated if I'm totally off base.

A virtual world, where actors(users) interact with each other, with the cluster providing validation and consistency between actors over a dynamic geography, where each node in the cluster would be handling the realtime requests of actors that are capable of interacting with each other, distant actors would be on different nodes.

(Would this work for a distributed server infrastructure to say an large online game?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare with akka (<http://akka.io>)?

<comment><USER5> Much like our engineers, our software is extremely opinionated. Ordasity, Scalang, and Overlock are all small, extremely focused libraries to solve a single problem in a single way. This is quite similar to the Unix philosophy and we have found it to be similarly successful. Projects like Akka take a more maximalist, all-encompassing approach that doesn't work well for the way we build and operate services.

One love,

Lil' B

<comment><USER6> The ordasity of your leftist signature, sir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the other types that can be applied to workUnit in the startWork?

It would be ideal to support Thrift protocol transports too

<comment><USER5> We have no plans to support Thrift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> can this be used with JRuby? e.g. for JRuby on Rails?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Roland,

Ordasity could certainly be used in building distributed JRuby applications. However, I'm not sure that pairing it with Rails would be the best use case.

Ordasity is designed for building stateful distributed services -- e.g., systems which can be described in terms of individual nodes serving a partition or shard of a cluster's total load. Rails applications tend to follow a stateless model in which any application server could serve any request.

Ordasity is more appropriate for building services in which a specific node will be serving all [requests / queries / events] for a work unit in the cluster. In our case, that's our netflow aggregation systems (which pull data together from a network of edge nodes into a single Kafka stream), and our event stream processing system (which we shard by client). In this example, we have two Ordasity clusters -- one comprised of Kafka nodes, and a second containing our event stream processing tier. Ordasity handles work distribution across both tiers, ensures that both clusters are aware of each other and able to communicate, and helps us guarantee that everything is wired up properly (i.e., each node on each tier is communicating with the proper node on another tier) when data is passed between them.

In short -- yes, you could build a distributed service in JRuby (or Clojure, Mirah, Scala, Java, etc.) with Ordasity. Just wanted to offer that note to clarify use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How "Load-based workload balancing" is done in JDK?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're curious about Ordasity's load balancing strategies, check out Section 4: "Distribution / Coordination Strategy" in the docs: <https://github.com/boundary/ordasity>

The code is also fairly straightforward to follow if you'd like to take a glance in the repo as well.

<comment><USER9> Thank you, I thought that you somehow found a way to measure CPU load of java processes, in fact you leave end user to measure the work load in end users units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this better than Hadoop?

<comment><USER11> I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

<comment><USER12> Hop on my spaceship, there is still room!

Good work Scott and team!</comment></comment></comment>


Disrupting Hypnotherapy: My Vision for Hypnotizr - <AUTHOR> http://www.hypnotizr.com/blog/disrupting-hypnotherapy

<comment><USER2> I'm a smoker and was actually thinking of trying it but a large part of me hates that I have to spend $50 on a service that I've never even tried before. The monryback guarantee helps but I still can't help but remain hesitant about purchasing despite my intrigue. Maybe I'm just cheap when it comes to products I have 0% knowledge on and have to pull out my credit card before I can even hear an audio sample.

I propose an unorthodox solution, offer a discount on the first purchase or offer a discount on any purchases after the first. Either way, I feel that more people would be inclined to try the product. Essentially, new customers need to be rewarded for taking a risk, most people have 0% knowledge of hypnosis and are doubtful of it, never having tried it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have audio samples (they're halfway down the sidebar on each product page) and we offered a discount way back in January when we launched.

If you're interested in trying it out but the price is holding you back, here's what I can do for a fellow HN user:

First, complete an order all the way to the PayPal page, but don't pay. Then e-mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com with the order ID that PayPal shows you. I will make your order and send it to you, and afterward, you can PayPal me any amount of money that you think is fair (I'll count it as market feedback).</comment></comment>


Leah Culver - The Setup - <AUTHOR> http://leah.culver.usesthis.com/

<comment><USER2> The Convore team is so BALLER. I had no idea Leah was behind <https://github.com/leah/PullToRefresh> Or OAuth. Or everything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> "An internet connection directly to my brain so I could quickly look things up on Wikipedia and always be right."

Reminds me of Eric Schmidt's comments regarding brain implants.

I had no idea Leah Culver had anything to do with OAuth. I hadn't given much thought to the list of independent contributing authors in the RFC.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure wikipedia is the proper place to look things up if you always want to be right!

I knew she'd written the OAuth python library, but never realized she'd been in on the spec itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In the more near future, I'd like to be able to develop iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. Why does this not exist yet??"

I can't imagine this. One of my least favorite things to do is type on touchscreen phones, and that's not even code. How would this work?

<comment><USER6> attach an external keyboard and mouse.

Or in the near future, virtual keyboards and mice that come with the device.

There are keyboards that are virtual, that shine a laser. <http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/8193/>

It's not too far of a stretch to imagine mice with something similar.

In addition, projectors are getting smaller and smaller, and it's not infeasible for them to be on future smartphones. That way, you won't need to squint at the screen, as long as you have a wall nearby.

<comment><USER7> . . . but then you aren't really developing on an iphone, in any meaningful sense anyway - all the "iphoneness" has been replaced, so it's effectively no different than any apple device with a cpu - ipad, mac mini, macbook etc.

I think she meant she wanted a touch-screen ui that lets you drag and drop elements into a new app. Doubtful you would get anything complex or terribly unique out of that kind of interface. Certainly no angry birds :)

<comment><USER8> That's pretty much how all development works in OS X proper.

Just today, I needed a simple interactive calculator to think through a problem. It took me about as long to write an app as it would've taken me to make a spreadsheet, but I got to have it be interactive and do what I needed: <http://skitch.com/dlsspy/rh8rp/throwaway-app>

<comment><USER7> cool, is that in cocoa?

for some reason I draw a distinction between "development" and writing little utilities for personal use, maybe because my little utilities aren't as pretty.

<comment><USER8> Yes. Tiny bit of objective C and enough time in IB to draw my inputs.

Much of the mobile development I did was for little things like that. I wrote a utility for palmos to clean up my SMSes in batch because the UI on my phone and the palm both sucked. The most complex I wrote was a call log app that would helped me with a particular problem I was having.

Most things were just using it as a fancy calculator or playing around with algorithms or something. I'm not very good at consumer devices, but I think everyone should at least have access to such toys (iLuaBox is a good start).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mnuchin Warns Virus Could Yield 20% Jobless Rate Without Action - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-17/mnuchin-warns-virus-could-yield-20-jobless-rate-without-action-k7wheob8 <comment><USER2> Don't worry, the current set of actions being undertaken will cause 100% jobless rate as hiding a job becomes illegal.</comment>


Ask HN: How to teach a friend about programming? - <AUTHOR> I have a friend that wants to learn iOS programming in Swift and he asked for my help. He doesn't have any basic knowledge event about the fundamentals of programming so I really don't know how to create a roadmap for him. He want's to do it just for the fun of it, not for pursuing a job as a programmer. Just as a hobby. He's not young, he has a job so he can't spend more than one hour each day for this new hobby therefore I must come up with a long term track.
Since he doesn't even know the basic stuff, how to I tackle this? If I'm jumping right into teaching him about variables, functions, classes, etc then I'm afraid that he'll get scared, overwhelmed and frustrated because he, like any other absolute beginner, lacks the "programming vision" (something that I like to call the "I know kung fu" Matrix moment).
So I suppose my plan must start with teaching him the why's and then the how's of programming, right? I must first give him some lecture about general programming knowledge?
I remember when I was a kid, even though I knew the syntax perfectly, I couldn't understand why do I need a function or why do I need to use a for-loop or when do I need to use X instead of Y, because the teacher didn't bothered to explain me these concepts. So that's what I'm afraid it'll happen to my buddy if I don't come up with a more down to earth way of teaching.
That being said, how do I do it? What books can I recommend him? How do I schedule his learning path? Any help is welcomed and appreciated. <comment><USER2> My advice would be to start with Norvig's essay: [http://norvig.com/21-days.html](http://norvig.com/21-days.html)

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will check into that, thanks!</comment></comment>


Microsofties out there – stop abusing your customer - <AUTHOR> I opened a MS account for some email testing, and it somehow auto-linked itself to a Skype account.
No permission was asked for, and none would have been granted. What did happen is I opened the email account on a pc running Skype (win32 and web app).
I only noticed because Skype since logs me out randomly, even during calls.
Searching for a fix indicated to unlink any MS account. I thought I didn't have a linked account, but when I checked - there was the Microsoft account that had gatecrashed the private Skype party :(
Oh, MS support told me they no longer lets you unlink the accounts.
WTF Microsoft, these are Dark Patterns - the same deceptive lying customer unfriendly things done in your name during the Windows 10 upgrade trick dialogues etc.
After 30 years as an expert on the MS platform, I want MS to succeed.
Can someone at MS fix this, perhaps for me to unlink the accounts (they were unlinked a week ago, they can still be despite the support script saying they can't). Then re-enable the working feature you had to unlink the account for anyone - a web search shows it's a common issue and customers want to do it. Give customers what they want.
Can people in MS who have some common sense and decency push back to stop the abusive nutjobs who have been creating customer unfriendly 'anti-features' into MS systems.
I know other companies treat their customers poorly, but copying abusive behaviour is the wrong lesson and you will eventually get Weinsteined. Instead focus on the big under-served market opportunity to treat customers well, the way you yourself would like to be treated.
As people's online literacy grows more and more people will realise the deception, bullying, and abuse of the power imbalance that these Dark Patterns are built on, and a history of abusive practices may be the reason today's big companies don't exist in tomorrow's future. <comment><USER2> How did you create this account?

If you do it through the web interface ([https://signup.live.com/](https://signup.live.com/)) you used to get a vanilla MS account.

However if you create one through Windows 10 I guess you will also automatically be signed up for all included services, which includes Skype.

Also, one time it was possible to "unlink" Skype from your Microsoft account (which basically consists out of removing your information from the Skype Global Address Book) by contacting someone from the Skype support team. However since a few months they made this removal process a self-service feature which unfortunately includes closing the entire Microsoft account linked to Skype.

So your best bet is contacting a support rep from the Skype support team and ask for your details to be removed from the address book. If they can't do this anymore you are probably SOL.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I created the MS account through the web interface, and didn't link it with the pc. I've just checked and the pc is still using it's local account with no sign of the MS account from the web (which is as it should be).

Thanks for your suggestion. Based on that I've checked the profile for the address book on skype and apparently the test account email is not shown.

I did talk with Skype support, and they wouldn't do anything. They've clearly been trained what to say about this issue, and to not even begin to attempt to do anything to resolve it.

I'm think I will create my own luck here, and migrate away from Skype fully, and MS as much as I can, because of these abusive Dark Patterns, the tricking users into things they don't want while hoovering up personal information are too prevalent in MS now.

For any readers who aren't familiar with the issues, there are a number of writeups and arstechnica is a good source - the big and clear events are the win 10 upgrade dialog, the tricks to make the local PC account harder to use when installing Windows, and this latest example of linking separate accounts without asking while breaking the usual boundaries of web pages isolation from other things on your PC and not allowing unlinking of the accounts forcibly and unexpectedly linked.

It's part of a pattern of abusive behaviour from Dark Patterns of UX, and I expect them to continue exploiting their customers in these ways. So I'm going to create my own luck by removing as much of their influence from my life as possible. Starting with skype :)

(Edited for a grammar fix.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What if we legalize cybercrime? - <AUTHOR> https://bqp.io/should-we-legalize-cybercrime.html <comment><USER2> What if we legalize murder?

People will be forced to be nicer to one another. People will learn self defense and become stronger and more capable. There will be more gun safety because everyone will be trained in gun use properly. Fewer spouses will cheat.

It will be a great world for everybody.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if that's quite a fair comparison. Physical self-defense is a cost we all would have to incur all the time. Software security, on the other hand, can be paid in a bit more of a centralized way by companies who are paying that cost anyway.

Obviously this is a thought experiment and probably shouldn't actually be done, but I think the murder comparison is slightly unfair to the idea.

<comment><USER4> The analogy is hyperbolic but apt. States exist to hold a monopoly on violence and protect property rights. One takes priority to the other, but they're both fundamental _raisons d 'être_.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you're arguing against there. Nobody is advocating or even talking about relinquishing the state's monopoly on violence.

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm not sure what you're arguing against _

The top commenter analogized, jestfully, legalizing homicide with legalizing cybercrime [1]. A second comment said this comparison was unfair [2]. My comment [3] responds to that second comment.

In essence, if a state's claim to a monopoly on violence is legitimate, then its claim to protecting property rights is (almost) as valid. Thus, advocating a dissolution of the latter, _e.g._ legalizing cybercrime, can be compared, as a legal _argumentum ad absurdum_ , with permitting murder.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266097](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266097)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266146)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266749)

<comment><USER3> But nobody is advocating that the state relinquish the right to protect property. They aren't making a philosophical argument about rights and laws of nature. They are making a practical case that, it may not make sense for the government to protect cyber property specifically. And that they make that determination on the basis of practical considerations.

They aren't relinquishing their theoretical right to control it. They are simply choosing not to for practical reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For people who won't read the article, it makes it clear that this is just a thought experiment, and offers a lot of reasons why we don't legalize cybercrime.

But one reason that's not mentioned is that it's horribly asymmetric:

> _Let me paint a utopian world for you, where all kinds of cybercrime – > hacking, ransomware, DDoS, etc. – are entirely legal._

It's much more expensive to defend against a DDoS attack than it is to launch one. Granted, if we did live in a world where cybercrime was legal, and things like IoT cameras were much harder to subvert into a free botnet, it might become more expensive, but in the end a lot more effort would be put into prevention than would be put into cause.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't it be possible to make the economics of DDoS symmetrical by enforcing repercussions at the ISP level?

If 10,000 IPs are syn flooding, all out of one ISP, their peers can stop routing that ISP's traffic until that ISP starts mitigating.

I imagine the biggest impracticality is that ISPs are monopolistic, so if you stop routing someone like Comcast, all of a sudden half of America is offline.

Perhaps we COULD let the internet be the Wild West, if we had a fair selection of providers, or if they effectively self-regulated.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Such things were in my recommendations. You could ensure stuff can always be traced to source (at transport level), filtered, and/or rate-limited. DDOS's get rate-limited automatically by ISP endpoint or middleboxes with costly penalties for this happening. Simultaneously, supply side starts offering all kinds of options to prevent that which are cheaper than being declared digital version of a public nuisance.

The Tier 1-3's mostly don't care since they're paid primarily to provide the line plus have regulators in their pockets. There's certainly work in these to reduce DDOS a bit for competitiveness but they avoid a simple solution like mine out of greed. ;)

<comment><USER5> > _DDOS 's get rate-limited automatically by ISP endpoint or middleboxes with > costly penalties for this happening._

Who would pay? My name is Serhei, and I'm in Ukraine, and I just unleashed a 100k-strong botnet of smartbulbs and babycams. It's spread somewhat evenly across American households, and mostly among their ISPs. I still pay nothing.

<comment><USER7> The people who connect products or configurations with shit security to the Internet. Bad security has to cost them something before the demand for good security is generated. Just headaches right now but loss of money or Internet is more severe. Then, with a demand, either the hardware/software market or the regulators will start doing something from there. They're already doing something where numerous products exist that were all created by relatively small companies or teams. They'll do a lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _While we can dream of a future where cybercrime is legal and we rely on our code and math to protect us, completely legalizing it today is not our best option. Nevertheless, we should consider moving in that direction._

I like that this article looks at the distributed, societal-level effects that derive from law. But I find the "should consider moving in that direction" part to be perplexing. One straw-man take against that: what about defense in depth? Can we strongly incentivize secure software and software-based appliances _and_ still have legal deterrents against cybercrime perpetrators?

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't the presence of those legal deterrents allow a company to transfer resources away from tech and into legal to mitigate the problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's no lack of cybercrime around to force people into hardening their own security.

People still don't care. And it is still asymmetric in that the people with loose security aren't being hurt by their own loosiness. And it is still impossible to ensure your system is completely secure. And it is still asymmetric in that attackers only need one flaw to win, defense must fix every flaw.

</comment><comment><USER11> >With no law to hide behind, companies will put a much more serious effort into making products that are secure from day one. The "Nobody will do this because it's illegal!" excuse is gone.

It's not like the "Nobody will do this" stuff makes much sense at the moment given there are hacking stories in the press all the time.

<comment><USER12> Even the most deranged psychopath follows the lines on the road when driving. The lines serve a purpose, which may fail for specific individuals, but does provide a guideline so that most do (even if some of those following some lines will cross others). Laws do not govern by consequence alone, but by exploited instincts in humans. Humans do not cleanly separate social agreements from safety constructs from linear optimizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do kinda fancy the idea of giving letters of marque for "cybercrime", though it's obviously not realistic for a whole bunch of reasons.

</comment><comment><USER14> An interesting thing to consider would be the retaliation that might develop. The best defense is a good offense, so all these companies might start actively attacking their attackers.

<comment><USER15> It's a reasonable tactic when you have comparable resources to your opponent, and you know how to attack them. Both cases are probably untrue, the latter in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a good thought experiment. I'd like to expand on it.

The author points to these items:

        - The value they expect to gain for themselves by attempting the attack.
        - The probability of getting caught.
        - The punishment they expect to receive if they do get caught.

They then make the argument that it's disadvantageous to try to maximize the probability of getting caught or increasing the punishment (items 2 and 3).

Legalizing cybercrime would have some positive effects, for sure, but also many negatives, as discussed.

What if we tried to minimize "value they expect to gain for themselves by attempting the attack"?

Here's a twist, I'd like to consider minimizing that by breaking it down further. There are two important components here:

        1. the value
        2. the who (the boundary of what's included as part of "themselves")

I don't think it's easy or viable to reduce the value gained, but what if it were possible to change the definition of "the who"?

I look at myself as an example here. I personally have very little interest in harming others. Even if I were in a hypothetical situation where I knew I could do something with low chance of being caught and/or low punishment, I still wouldn't take advantage of that situation. In fact, I would really enjoy being nice/white hat in such a situation. But it's not because the value is low, it's because I consider "myself" as the overall humanity and not just myself the person who's typing this comment. My goal is to maximize the benefit for everyone by creating net positive value. I know that if I could to DDoS or steal money from someone, even if it's risk-free or legal, I still wouldn't do it just because it doesn't benefit all of humanity (even if it benefits myself)... the value as I see it is overall negative (I gain less than someone else loses).

So I wonder if it's possible for more people to look at things that way, where they try to maximize value for everyone rather than themselves. Can we increase people's empathy? But most importantly, if everyone behaved this way, would that actually be better for us, or would absence of selfish behavior and competition be harmful?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Can we increase people's empathy?

Psychopaths exist. What do we do about them?

<comment><USER17> More specifically, there are several mental disorders that are defined, in part, by a lack of empathy (ex: Narcissistic Personality Disorder). Attempts to "increase people's empathy" will likely fail on those individuals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah right, I forgot about the others. :(

Yeah, it's a real problem that needs to be addressed when discussing empathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why doesn't the government protect people from cybercrime? You can openly threaten, harass, and slander people with no penalty. You can steal things from people - even from the institutions that are fundamental to democracy - with very little risk of punishment.

It's the wild west; government has abandoned it's responsibility to protect its citizens and institutions, and for some reason very few people object; they accept it as the norm.

</comment><comment><USER19> The article is a good thought experiment, but I think doesn't touch on the one current legal form of cybercrime: bug bounties.

While they have their issues, properly administered they are a win for security researchers, consumers and companies.

A great recent example is Shopify: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200455)

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me indeed on the idea on some Libertarians, who believe we all steal from each other. So making every legal would result in that you get an equilibrium in which everybody gives up something voluntary and nobody steals anything. This is probably badly summarised but I never believed that would a good idea or even realistic.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Making the punishments more severe is a poor idea too. We've see again and > again people being prosecuted under cybercrime law for "crimes" that > shouldn't have been crimes.

This is bad logic, increasing punishments does not necessarily mean more innocent people get caught.

<comment><USER22> I think you're misinterpreting.

It's not necessarily that _more_ innocent people get prosecuted, but that when they do the stakes will be higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think in many places or situations, depending on the targets and the overseers, it sort of is.

Intelligence or military cybercrime is definitely legal to the ones doing it. Some places or countries are too small to enforce or don't care about it. Some people are probably helped by funders who have bribed their way into legality.

</comment><comment><USER24> In the same vein as the title question: what if we (ie, one of the botnet operators) made all the shitty IoT devices into TOR exit nodes? My guess is that would either (a) incentivize people into securing or discarding them or (b) normalize exit nodes for the benefit of tor and online anonymity.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting concept, but seriously what is up with the comments on this blog post?? I could not have been more surprised or confused by that.

<comment><USER26> The comments appear to be written by Terry A. Davis, a schizophrenic computer programmer famous for creating TempleOS as well as his belief that one can communicate with God through random numbers. He was shadowbanned a number of years ago on HN for making similar off-topic and offensive comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Odd that google.com now redirects me to bing.com when I use Microsoft Edge... Ah, another Facebook blackmail notice, need to remember to send them their monthly $20, so they don't tell my significant other about my affair... Somebody left a phone on the ground, oh damn it, it just scanned my fingerprint and is breaking into my bank account, serves me right, I should have known better than to go outside today.

Yeah, I'm not digging this dystopian future. On the plus side, it would bring typewriters back into common use.

<comment><USER28> > Somebody left a phone on the ground, oh damn it, it just scanned my > fingerprint and is breaking into my bank account

Never, ever, use biometrics as a valid login option for identity-sensitive data/applications. They're way too easy to find out for an attacker.

<comment><USER29> The real problem is when it becomes a mandatory authentication system. We've all seen the ridiculous password requirements some sites have, that in reality offer no additional protection -- and their implementations are often questionable; Chase Bank still is case insensitive for example. All it will take is for someone to think it's a good idea, and make a push for that as a standard.</comment></comment></comment>


What the Repeal of Net Neutrality Means for Digital Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.interactually.com/repeal-net-neutrality-means-digital-marketing/ <comment><USER2> wouldn't you just host your site on shopify or something since they'll probably pay the extortion fees. Hosting your own server is probably out, but the cloud sites and/or CDNs will consolidate.

<comment><USER2> I not advocating against Net Neutrality, but commercial interest will adapt. It's fringe innovation that will have the most issues. create new protocol, but it doesn't have a lot of users so it gets blocked or charged more.</comment></comment>


How Ancient Humans Reached Remote South Pacific Islands - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/science/south-pacific-islands-migration.html <comment><USER2> This article is thin on details. But there's a lot of good stuff written about Polynesian navigation technology. I particularly liked the book Vaka Moana, which has an approachable and intelligent description of boats, cultures, navigation techniques, etc. [https://www.amazon.com/Vaka-Moana-Voyages- Ancestors-Settleme...](https://www.amazon.com/Vaka-Moana-Voyages-Ancestors- Settlement/dp/0824832132/)

One thing I took away from the book was that Polynesian colonization follows a pattern that looks deliberate. Specifically that they would depart on a voyage against the winds and currents, the hard way, so that they could make a swift return if they couldn't find the destination. Or at least that's what some computer modelling of the spread of Polynesian culture says. That finding is a bit at odds with this NYT article, not sure what that means.

Some other links for this NYT article:

The PNAS page (abstract only, paywall) [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/10/18/1612426113](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/10/18/1612426113)

Another summary with more details [https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study- finds-climate-helpe...](https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-finds- climate-helped-guide-early-pacific-seafarers)

<comment><USER3> Also, testicular navigation was a thing. More sensitive current detection...

<comment><USER4> I had no clue...

[http://www.hawaii-nation.org/gis/8-conclusion.html](http://www.hawaii- nation.org/gis/8-conclusion.html)

Thx!

<comment><USER5> This explains in more detail how it works: [https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/friends/Technology_of_Oceania.pdf](https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/friends/Technology_of_Oceania.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is old news. We've known since 1830 that a man named Nephi built a boat, and his father Lehi was given a golden compass ball called the Liahona that directed them from the Arabian Peninsula to South America where they built a massive civilization. After 400-500 years a curious man named Hagoth built another boat and settled Polynesia. It's all documented in the historical tome called the Book of Mormon. [Source: Former Mormon :)]

<comment><USER7> Your comment absolutely made my day! I just thought I'd point out that the specific geographic locations you mentioned are _technically_ not official doctrine but are personal beliefs held by definitely many members. [Source: Current Mormon who prescribes to alternative theories]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always wondered what the process was like for the people who made it to someplace like Rapa Nui (Easter Island), which is a tiny speck in the middle of a vast ocean. Was it some kind of shotgun approach where a lot of expeditions were launched, and a very few hit a target and the others either perished or turned around?

<comment><USER9> Islands leave distinctive cloud formations in their wake, sometimes stretching many hundreds of miles. Here's an example from satellite photography: [http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?i...](http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=86978)

A popular theory is that Polynesian navigators would hone in on these cloud patterns in the sky, treating them as the big arrows in the sky pointing to land that they essentially are.

<comment><USER10> "Islands leave distinctive cloud formations in their wake"

Only islands with high peaks, which means most likely, volcanic islands. Which happens to be true for large islands in the pacific. As opposed to purely coral islands which rise just above the sea level.

<comment><USER11> Very true. However, flat, forested islands can reflect a greenish color onto whatever clouds might be above them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have always found the history of the population of Madagascar amazing [1]. Who would have guessed that people from Borneo would be the first people to arrive.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar)

</comment><comment><USER13> The answer was suggested back in 1947 by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-tiki expedition which demonstrated how it was possible to sail the 4,000 miles or more across the Pacific from South America to the Polynesian Islands in a simple raft.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that the Polynesians appear to have sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific going the other direction. In Heyerdahl's day this was hard to explain because the Polynesians would have had to sail against the prevailing winds and currents. The problem for Heyerdahl's theory is that archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence indicates that Polynesia was pretty much settled west to east.

One thing we know now is that it is possible to sail Polynesian voyaging canoes pretty much any direction you want to go, at least over long distances. The Polynesian Voyaging Society has sailed Hōkūleʻa [1][2] all over Polynesia at this point and in fact they've sailed her all the way to the North Atlantic since then.

Back in Kon Tiki's day, the performance of Polynesian voyaging canoes wasn't well understood. They can't tack near as well as a modern sailboat, but they can tack to 45 degrees off the wind. And although it's true that prevailing winds in the South Pacific blow east to west, they still vary quite a lot in their exact direction. This means it's possible to sail to an island east of your starting point in a voyaging canoe even though the prevailing winds and currents are against you. Also it turns out the the prevailing winds can completely change directions during El Niño years, which happen with some frequency, making west to east sailing a lot easier. [3]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea)

[2] [http://www.hokulea.com/](http://www.hokulea.com/)

[3] I don't have a good citation for this last paragraph, but it might be from Ben Finney's paper "Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia", [https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

</comment></comment><comment> saiya-jin I thought these settlements were gradual and caused by lack of ocean/much shorter distances to cross due to polar caps capturing much more water in the past.

ie Russia and Alaska were supposedly connected, same for Britain vs Europe mainland, and also South pacific to some extent.

It doesn't explain all cases (ie mentioned easter island, no clue there), but this might have many reasons

<comment><USER15> The colonization of the Pacific happened very recently in the terms of people spreading around the world: well after the last ice age. According to wikipedia, the first human settlement in Fiji was perhaps 3500 BCE. Hawaii wasn't settled until sometime around 1000 CE. The sea level would have been nearly the same as today and distance between islands would be, for practical purposes, identical.

I have heard/read that changing weather patterns had an effect on the movement of people around the Pacific, making some journeys easier or harder during different periods. Long distance voyaging had essentially ceased again by the time Europeans were exploring the Pacific. Unfortunately, I can't provide a reference.

<comment><USER16> _Long distance voyaging had essentially ceased again by the time Europeans were exploring the Pacific. Unfortunately, I can 't provide a reference._

In Polynesia that's mostly true (although Samoa to Tonga is rather far, so depends on what you mean by 'long'). In Hawaii, the home and voyage of the ancestors was a place in legendary history.

In Micronesia though, there are still a few people who can do long-distance voyages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So what was the technology?

<comment><USER18> The ability to sail a boat up wind. The boats they used, catamarans, have a hard time sailing less than 90 degrees to the wind even today.

<comment><USER19> Your comment is a little ambiguous--- we've built modern-day catamarans that can definitely sail upwind. I think you're saying that the catamarans that Polynesians have built were never able to go up wind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Article should be called:

"How _we think_ ancient humans reached remote ..."

We will never know without having been there, just like the bering straight migration "fact" has now been debunked, to name an example.

It is very disappointing how sbjective and arrogant researchers have become, from astronomers to psychologists, and political scientists at the top.

We don't know many things, we _think_ that is how they work based on what we see, but they never say that and it becomes the master narrative.

<comment><USER21> Usually, to be generally accepted, hypotheses like in the OP require multiple independent lines of evidence. (E.g., for human migrations, DNA, linguistic traces, and technical artifacts could serve as independent lines.)

Publishing this article in a wide forum like PNAS is the way of asking the community at large for reactions, for or against. If it had been a more narrowly discipline-specific article, it would appear elsewhere, like _Oikos_ or _Oecologia_.</comment></comment>


Cleveland Police Investigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/12/4/7335777/justice-department-cleveland-police

<comment><AUTHOR> the doj report can be found here:

[http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press- release...](http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press- releases/attachments/2014/12/04/cleveland_division_of_police_findings_letter.pdf)</comment>


Poof! You're Unpublished. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/business/media/07link.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> One of the things so many people forget is that large parts of the internet are archived. It's not as easy as you think to remove something from the net.

Just removed some content? So what? I can find it on Google cache. Removed content a year ago? I'll find you on the Wayback Machine!

And that's before you get into syndication with other sites, bots, etc...

<comment><USER3> Both Google and the Internet Archive will remove cached content if asked (which I think is terrible but I guess this is their only way to avoid copyright infringement problems).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The controversy on boingboing existed because they refused to say why they removed the link. I don't think the secret is that evil -- I strongly suspect it was done to placate advertisers in general. Advertisers don't like links to porn. Boingboing makes an enormous amount of money so they want to keep advertiseres happy. They should have just said so instead of keeping it a secret.

At least I'm hoping it was that reason and not because of a personal feud Xeni had. I've thought about installing a no-Xeni greasemonkey script but she does post some good things...

</comment><comment><USER5> Heh, I knew from the title that this was going to be about Boing Boing. I'm not sure how that reflects on the article, but I think it's something like "this is not a widespread problem, only some fanbois complaining about a semi- obscure blog."

<comment><USER6> Last time I checked, bOING bOING was one of the 5 most popular blogs on the Internet.

<comment><USER5> Blogs are obscure compared to the NYT, though.

<comment><USER6> And the sky is often blue. What's your point? You said "semi-obscure blog". bOING bOING is not an obscure blog.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man throws away hard drive containing £4m worth of BTC - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1175103/bitcoin-blunder-man-throws-away-4m-laptop

<comment><USER2> His hard drive may be worth even more when it is dug up by archaeologists 1024 years in the future.</comment>


My Coffee Setup - <AUTHOR> http://holograham.com/2013/11/29/my-coffee-setup/ <comment><USER3> Does anyone know of any double-blind taste-tests for enthusiast setups like this? Not limited to coffee but I'd also be very curious about tea, wine and much of the accepted wisdom of both classic and modern cooking.

I don't mean this to be snide. I'm totally open to this kind of setup producing a far superior cup of coffee. But if we accept the premise that at least a portion of the experience, however slight, is psychological, I'd be very interested to know how big that portion is.

Somewhere on my depressingly long list of project ideas is a kickstarter for a video series that does exactly this - very rigorous double-blind tests for coffee, tea, wine, beer, food preparation techniques etc.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that the premise is flawed, in that sense that it's the wrong setting for enjoying things like for example wine.

A big part of enjoying things like wine, coffee, tea, beer, whiskey, chocolate etc is in the setup, experience and anticipation of it. Good company and a nice mood makes wine taste better.

By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce a more "pure" or "objective" result, because the metric is wrong - the setup is artificial to begin with.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with just enjoying a cup of coffee and that being it. Coffee snobs and the likes who insists on their metric being the only right ones are annoying (not implying that the author is of that variety).

<comment><USER3> > By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce any more > "pure" result, because the setup is artificial to begin with.

I agree that the results of a properly controlled blind tasting are not more "valid" than the results of enjoying a coffee in a casual setting. However, they are helpful in indicating how much of that casual experience of a coffee is due to the contextual and psychological elements of the experience and how much is a result of the intrinsic qualities of the cup of coffee itself. I think this is interesting in its own terms.

I don't think the premise is flawed, because the premise is not "a double- blind taste test will establish whether subjective taste is true or false", but rather "a double-blind taste test will indicate to what degree subjective taste is determined strictly by the substance being tasted".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Baratza Vario Coffee Grinder – Simply the best home grinder on the market. 440 distinct grind settings. Ceramic burrs for low heat transfer and long life_

I can't help wondering if the grinder uses solid core or braided wire internally. If it's braided, he'd better ensure that there's some opposing winding in there to prevent any heat transfer from stray EM fields.

</comment><comment><USER6> I read that as "My Coffee Startup". I need to go to bed, and possibly read HN less.

<comment><USER7> Both are equally acceptable (Startup/Setup, not going to bed or reading HN less).

<comment> r-s I thought it was going to be about coffeescript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I can agree with the pourover method (the resulting cup of coffee is by far my favorite), I've found that it simply takes more time than I'm willing to invest during the week. For a weekend morning, absolutely, but I find myself getting impatient during the week.

If you find yourself in a similar dilemma, I'd recommend* an AeroPress. They take < 1 minute and essentially leave you with a double espresso, to which you can add water and have an Americano. A year ago I would have said French Press, but I grew tired of the 'silt' at the bottom of the cup.

*I'm a bit of a coffee aficionado myself (Seattle) and have more than 5 coffee-making-devices at home.

<comment><USER9> Aeropress rocks. Really.

My morning cup goes like this:

* Lightly roasted beans

* Hario mini for grinding, with click number five

* Grind 14 grams of coffee and mix it with 230 grams of water

* Let it brew for 3.5-4 minutes

All of this with the inverse method. Easy, quite fast and a really cheap way of getting an excellent cup of coffee. All my equipment was around 50 euros and the most expensive part is to get proper and fresh beans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> $18/lb??? What a rip off. If anyone is wanting to get into great coffee without spending an arm and a leg, please look into roasting your own coffee beans. There is a place called Sweet Maria's in Oakland that can ship it to you; however, I often find shipping kills the deal. I found a really cool local roaster that is willing to sell me any of their green beans for $7/lb. After roasting, you lose some weight so that it comes out closer to $8/lb. And, it's really fresh. The freshest anyone can get.

<comment><USER11> Fresh isn't always what you want. Many African varietals need two days rest before they really get good, though Latin American beans typically need just one day.

One of the best shots of espresso I've ever had was a Rwandan roast pulled at fourteen days. Incredible.

<comment><USER12> Just curious, do you know of a good reason for this effect? Do roasted beans ferment after time?

<comment><USER13> Roasted beans give off CO2, which is displaced by oxygen during the off- gassing process. Fresh roasted beans are full of CO2, which mask the aromatics/lipids. The first day or two, most of the off-gassing is all CO2. After the first day or two, the aromatics themselves start to off-gas, taking flavor with them.

It's basically oxidation and enzymatic breakdown after that. So they don't ferment, they just oxidize (a lot of the flavor in coffee comes from aromatics and oils/lipids, so it's similar to butter getting bland if it oxidizes for a while).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use a similar setup. I swap the V60 for a Chemex (better for larger quantities), a Bonavita instead of a Buono and I don't bother with Intelligentsia's overpriced roasts.

Frankly, I think Intelli's golden days are behind them and they're partly riding on their reputation at this point. Better roasts at lower prices are available from other roasters.

<comment><USER14> I live in Chicago where Intelligentsia was started and has several locations. Intelligentsia is good coffee but it's not the best in town by any means. Other strong (Chicago based) competitors:

[http://www.halfwitcoffee.com/](http://www.halfwitcoffee.com/)

[http://www.bigshoulderscoffee.com/](http://www.bigshoulderscoffee.com/)

[http://gaslightcoffeeroasters.com/](http://gaslightcoffeeroasters.com/)

[http://www.lacolombe.com/](http://www.lacolombe.com/)

[http://www.darkmattercoffee.com/](http://www.darkmattercoffee.com/)

<comment><USER11> I haven't been to any of their Chicago locations, just Venice and Silver Lake in LA. I was also at a cafe in Tokyo a few weeks ago that imports Intelligentsia, which personally seems like overkill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For what its worth. I just upgraded from an old Delonghi and an Aeropress to a Crossland CC1 w/ a Vario grinder (a refurb from Baratza), love this setup so far. Having a good grinder definitely helps a lot at least as far as consistency goes.

</comment><comment><USER16> Intelligentsia coffee is great, there is also an artisan bean subscription service, out of SF I think: [https://tonx.org](https://tonx.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've tried Tonx -- wasnt a huge fan. Perhaps I should give it another go.

<comment><USER17> You should! :)

Send me a note if you want me to kick out another sample your way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for this post. Was never really into coffee until I moved into a workspace that valued good coffee over Starbucks and K-cups (we drank MADCAP: [http://madcapcoffee.com/](http://madcapcoffee.com/)).

I've been toying with the idea of getting my own setup but wasn't sure where to start. This definitely clarified that it's pretty expensive to get started so I may just stick with the artisan coffee shops in town.

<comment><USER19> Consider an aeropress or french press. I like a french press @ home and an aeropress @ work (the aeropress is a bit cleaner to use).

Then, if you're willing to throw in some manual labor, you can get a nice burr grinder like the Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill.

All told, $50-75

90% of the benefit to your coffee is switching away from a regular drip machine and to some kind of press, and away from preground beans and to freshly burr-ground beans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you enjoy a dark roast like I do, make sure the beans are a little oily when you buy them, they should have a shiny surface. That means they are fresh.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been experimenting with a portable coffee setup. It's currently an Aeropress, a Porlex Mini Stainless Steel grinder, a thermometer, and a small scale. I'm experimenting to decide on the ideal type of filter - <USER2> comparing paper vs. a couple different metal filters.

<comment><USER22> If portability is valued, why bother with a scale?

I love this Able stainless steel filter for Aeropress: [http://ablebrewing.com/products/disk-coffee- filter](http://ablebrewing.com/products/disk-coffee-filter)

The difference in flavor from a paper filter is very noticeable and hugely appreciated.

<comment><USER21> One of the fundamentals of good coffee is a proper ratio. I think it's worth the extra space.

I just received that filter - I liked it, but I had to drastically change my grind size, and the resulting coffee didn't have the body that I associate with Aeropresses.

I talked to the Able Brewing folks, and now I have one of the Disk Fine filters inbound that supposedly behaves more like a paper filter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In italy you'll find a mocha pot in every house. Any expert in coffee could tell me the difference in taste if you'd use the mocha (using hot water under pressure) or the drip method?

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't drink coffee, it's poison!

<comment><USER25> Why do you say that? Care to explain?</comment></comment>


We need constrainable lightweight markup languages - <AUTHOR> http://everypageispageone.com/2016/06/05/why-we-need-constrainable-lightweight-markup-languages/ <comment><USER2> I'll keep saying it: _The_ most cost-effective way to advance math and hard science research in the United States would be for some person or organization to put down $1 million to hire some developers to produce an enterprise- quality replacement of LaTeX, with an editor. It ought to be somewhere between LaTeX and Markdown in complexity. The amount of grad student, post-doc, and professor time that is wasted dealing with LaTeX is staggering. There's just no reason any should need to spend, e.g., an hour to figure out how to get columns working.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that rewriting LaTeX is the right route, but rather compiling something else into LaTeX or making a good LaTeX editor(one where you wouldn't actually be writing straight LaTeX). I think a sort of SASS or Coffeescript type language for Latex would be excellent.

<comment><USER2> A language that compiles into TeX would be fine. However, there is a huge danger that the abstraction isn't robust, and everyone would just need to keep "opening up the hood" to fix things in the original TeX, and then things are worse than they started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree that we need extensible lightweight markup languages, but I'm not sure how the OP distinguishes between a grammar and a constraint. And if by "language" he didn't mean "grammar," then what did he mean? An example would have gone a long way.

My experience---and I've seen others comment to this effect---is that James Clark's nXml mode for emacs is as good as it gets for authoring in XML. If you already know the commands for structured editing, you have a great headstart. Also from James Clark is compact Relax NG. It's basically like regex for the DOM, and I find it pleasant to use. Until you hit something that it can't specify. But if you really must have a schema, and you have control over it, it can be worth making your schemas RelaxNG-able.

And anyway, even if you're using markdown or anything else, using it without a "really sophistocated editor" is (IMHO) "next to impossible" (edit: I mean, just as painful as anything else).

But yes, I've been ruminating over what I would use to replace Org Mode for literate programming, where I don't want all of its features (or an Emacs dependency), yet I do want to create ad-hoc constructs with arbitrary transforms during export. I haven't tried it, but it looks like Quaint might be of interest in that area. ([http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/](http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/))

<comment><USER5> Good question. In my head I simplified it to "he wants XML schemes without having to write XML." That's probably a bad assumption or too simplified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I totally agree with the article. I have been working (as a university project) on a semantic markup language which has a well defined, user specified semantics (comparable to a DTD, yet much easier to write) with user definable syntax and a TeX-esque markup language, which deduces as much structure as possible from the DTD, allowing users to write very little while still being able to transform the document into a semantic graph structure which can (theoretically) be transformed to any output format.

While the software we've developed is fully usable and quite mature (including clang-like error messages), there is virtually no documentation. However, a poster and a presentation of the project, along with all source code (including the source code of the website) can be found at

[https://ousia-framework.org/](https://ousia-framework.org/)

I'm looking forward to continue the project as soon as I find some time.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is in the nature of such languages to grow. We've seen this happen to MIT Runoff, which begat nroff, which begat troff, which begat ditroff, which resulted in TeX. We've seen it happen to HTML, which started as a lightweight markup language. It's happening to markdown right now.

One of the few approaches that hasn't become bloated is Rich Text Format, and that's because nobody uses it.

<comment><USER8> Hey! I use it for many of my personal notes. When I'm not using txt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We _have_ a lightweight extensible markup language. It's called XML.

When HTML web components are fully supported in all browsers, it'll be possible to create custom markup elements to extend HTML to include custom DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

I already have a library (ng2-markdown) that provides a template tag that can parse markdown (incl syntax highlighting) in the same manner that the script tag can parse javascript.

If a parser is already available in javascript, it's not exceedingly difficult to create new HTML elements.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did you consider troff/nroff programs?

They were/are the programs used to write unix/linux manpages. Such documents are usually rendered in our terminal via the man utility, but they can export to html and pdf too (man man).

I used to read a bit about the format and it does not look bad at all.

If you didn't know, Ken Thomposon's "The Go Programming Language" was typesed using troff (and it looks okay to me).

</comment><comment><USER11> i have an entry: zen markup language (z.m.l.)

> [https://medium.com/the-bower/beyond-markdown- > part-1-23006656...](https://medium.com/the-bower/beyond-markdown- > part-1-2300665659f7#.c95tsf72z)

built specifically to handle the features of books, as identified by using the project gutenberg corpus, but can easily be extended to handle whatever other structures might be required by any long-form docs.

still don't see enough interest in overthrowing markdown to work at raising the z.m.l. profile at the present time, but i am continuously monitoring the scene for that sign.

also see my 2013 review piece: "markdown considered harmful"

> [https://medium.com/the-bower/markdown-considered- > harmful-495...](https://medium.com/the-bower/markdown-considered- > harmful-495ccfe24a52#.7z6qhs6up)

</comment><comment> Const-me The article says "and before too long everyone is complaining and saying they should be going back to WYSIWYG tools"

I wonder what's wrong with WYSIWYG tools?

Personally, I use MS Word all the time.

It works very well for me and for various people I interact with (clients, colleagues, bosses, subordinates, friends, family, etc.), for decades already.

</comment><comment><USER12> Since it's 2016, the answer is JSX. Define a core set of react components that are at feature parity with markdown. Extend it willy nilly.

<comment><USER13> Are you implying that the answer will be different in 2017? ;)

<comment><USER14> If parent hadn't combined JSX and React, you'd have a fair point. However, JSX can stand alone, and that would also be my technology of choice.

<comment><USER4> Forgive me, but what does any of this have to do with authoring documents? Aren't JSX and React about coding models and views?

<comment><USER15> It doesn't. They are either joking, being snarky, or over estimating the coding aptitude of people like scientists.

<comment><USER16> Sure, most scientists are not going to have time to learn all the ins and outs of JavaScript. But you may be underestimating the potential convenience of composable components. It seems plausible that _well-built_ components, using JSX and whatever rendering engine you prefer, could be much easier to work with than a language like LaTex.

Of course building these components would not be a simple task.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Full Text Search API Launch For Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/05/looking-for-search-find-it-on-google.html

<comment><USER2> Announcement on google+ and in the appengine group: [https://plus.google.com/111042085517496880918/posts/6Vq8soef...](https://plus.google.com/111042085517496880918/posts/6Vq8soefrgy) [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google- appengine/d11NgSTeK...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google- appengine/d11NgSTeKl8)</comment>


Harvey Weinstein's Army of Spies - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies <comment><USER2> An amazing expose of the tools available to the rich and powerful to suppress the truth and get away with morally monstrous behavior. Remember that an individual like Harvey Weinstein represents the tiny tip of an iceberg of reprehensible abuse of power. If a Hollywood producer makes use of these kind of techniques, imagine what is possible for the heads of large corporations and the leaders of corrupt nation states.

</comment><comment><USER3> > He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the > women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations ... One of the > investigators pretended to be a women's-rights advocate and secretly > recorded at least four meetings with McGowan

This goes way beyond simple work place harassment. This is a predator taking advantage of his position of power to prey on others. Its reprehensible and deserve jail time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thankfully, this strategy didn't work. I wonder how often it does though.

<comment><USER5> Such tactics apparently worked for decades.

<comment><USER4> I've read more than a few times lawyers claiming that "fixers" like the fictional "Ray Donovan" and "Michael Clayton" don't exist. This story seems to say they do.

<comment><USER6> They're called "Public relation firms"

<comment><USER4> In this case it was apparently a law firm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > As recently as Friday, the firm had a bare-bones Web site, with stock photos > and generic text passages about asset management and an initiative called > Women in Focus

Too bad there's no Oscar for Best Inadvertent Lampshading of a Covert Smear Campaign.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Techniques like the ones used by the agencies on Weinstein's behalf are > almost always kept secret, and, because such relationships are often run > through law firms, the investigations are theoretically protected by > attorney-client privilege, which could prevent them from being disclosed in > court. The documents and sources reveal the tools and tactics available to > powerful individuals to suppress negative stories and, in some cases, > forestall criminal investigations.

Reading this makes me think that we need new ethics rules for lawyers and ways to force disclosure of this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> The story is rife with examples of egregious acts, from Weinstein's investigators interviewing and secretly recording victims under false identities to lawyer David Boies directing a PI firm to help stop a report on Weinstein that was being produced by NYT, a client of his own firm (Boies Schiller Flexner)!

And the story apparently isn't over as journalist said in a TV interview that there's more reporting to come.

</comment><comment><USER7> Flagged into oblivion by the self-appointed thread police.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like a miserable way to enjoy your good fortunes in life. I'm sure many successful people can't get out of their own way, and this is just another case of never being satisfied.

</comment><comment><USER11> Happens a lot to human rights orgs and NGOs also

</comment><comment><USER12> Disgusting. If he doesn't go to jail, vigilante action would be justified.

<comment><USER13> Vigilante justice is an affront to the rule of law and is never justified. Even in heinous crime such as those committed by Weinstein.

<comment><USER4> Bracing for downvotes, but surely somebody has some unflattering nude shots of Harvey somewhere. Wouldn't be terrible (well, in some ways) if those surfaced.

<comment><USER14> I'm always amazed how quickly most people's principles go right out the window the moment they're angry. Publishing unauthorized nude photos is wrong, period. Doesn't matter what a piece of shit he's accused of being. He deserves prison if he's guilty of these criminal acts. With the number of instances he would reasonably spend the rest of his natural life in prison, after being duly convicted. That's what's right, and that's justice.

<comment><USER5> Simple explanation is that most people don't have principles.

<comment><USER15> Simpler and probably better explanation: We don't all have principles neatly aligned.

Your _principle going out the window_ may be me _expressing a deeply held opinion_.

<comment><USER5> Well, I would agree that many people treat self interest as a principle. I don't think many people have principles beyond that though.

Maybe mild preferences.

<comment><USER15> Most people I know have fairly decent work ethics, standards how to treat other people, honesty up to a point.

Not that I don't share a large part of your cynicism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What does this have to do with hacker news?

<comment><AUTHOR> How the rich and powerful use spies and private investigators to track people seems to overlap with topics of interest to HN IMO. Just because it happens to also involve someone in mainstream news headlines doesn't make it less noteworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seriously, not relevant here on HN, guys.

</comment><comment><USER18> Of course Weinstein had Al Gore's lawyer.

He also took sheets straight from the Clinton handbook.

It's time to de-politicize sexism. I await the day when Hollywood celebrities rush to loudly criticize every Republican slimebag on the planet. And _also_ every Democrat slimebag.

Only then will progress be made.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you "design then code"? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
So I want to build my own web app, and after reading Getting Real by 37signals, I'm inspired to build mockups before actually adding the functionality. I have two questions though:
1. They (37signals) say that you can make the design with HTML and CSS. What are the good tools to facilitate this process? I guess I could write stuff from scratch, and I've found some tools that help you make mockups, but what are the best ones?
2. How exactly do you add the functionality with the design? For example, let's say I want to make a  web app using Ruby on Rails, and I make the design for it. I can then create a rails project and build the functionality, but how can I tie the actual functionality with the front-end? I'm sure this is a long answer as well, so if you could recommend a place where I can read about it, that would be wonderful.
Thanks in advance for all your help. <comment><USER2> Our approach was: 1\. Sketch mockups on paper, iterate until happy. 2\. Sketch mockups in Photoshop, iterate until happy with every little detail. 3\. Send photoshop mockups for slicing - get back HTML/CSS/JS 4\. Convert static HTML files to static templates. In our case, it was Django templates. At this stage, we used dummy data so now the site would be served through django, exactly match the Photoshop images and the sliced HTML, data populated through views. That is, the static data is now hardcoded in the code rather than in the HTML. 5\. Incrementally replace each view to serve data from DB instead of hardcoded. Data can be added to DB in Django using an interactive shell or using the admin interface. At this stage, we had our models flushed out and relationships between objects cleared up. 6\. Add additional functionality such as forms and whatnot to actually accept input through the app. 7\. Ajaxify everything to turn the website into a web app.

We didn't use any fancy tools beyond what's mentioned above.</comment>


Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/nearly-half-of-you-reading-this-have-bullshit-jobs <comment><AUTHOR> It has a very clickbait-y title but the article itself is interesting. Especially the idea that jobs with meaning are culturally/economically devalued. Not sure that idea squares with the idea of the vocational developer...?

<comment><USER2> Interesting, and agreed.

Vocational Developer is a bit too meta here :P</comment></comment>


Jim Buck, Who Made Walking Dogs a Job, Dies at 81 - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/nyregion/jim-buck-made-walking-dogs-a-job-dies-at-81.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting contrast to the recent Salon article about how TaskRabbit, etc., and their effects on the economy.</comment>


PubNub vs Realtime.co Benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://ec2-54-247-13-197.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/default.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Please help me finish my benchmark, run the test at your preferred browser. [http://ec2-54-247-13-197.eu- west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/def...](http://ec2-54-247-13-197.eu- west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/default.htm) Thanks.</comment>


Ex-Minuteman missile officer: I could have faked a global missile launch order - <AUTHOR> http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/3066/biscuits-cookies-and-nuclear-bombs#comment-10086

<comment><USER2> _"For the Minuteman ICBM force, the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command worried that in times of need the codes would not be available, so they quietly decided to set them to 00000000; checking this combination was even present on the launch checklists. This was not changed until 1977."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Developm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Development_and_Dissemination)

<comment><USER3> Security is always a comprise between protection and accessibility. The USAF, rightly or wrongly, thought that the requirement the codes prevented them from doing their job (responding to a nuke attack).

<comment><USER4> Protection? What does 'protection' even mean (in this context)? Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the most basic tenets of security. In the parent's case accessibility is held above integrity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah and many hackers types that have worked around WMDs knew how they could do such and such, but that's why there's the PRP (Personnel Reliability Program) program, psychological interviews, polygraphs (yeah yeah, not scientific), and security clearances and background checks.

Not to be dismissive, it's a hole certainly.

<comment><USER6> Speaking of potential psychological issues, what about General Powers, head of SAC at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, who was fond of statements like:

 _Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!_

He's seems to be one of the few people who was actually enthusiastic about the prospects of starting a (very one sided) nuclear war.

<comment><USER7> Being crazy gets you leverage on the negotiation table. Seeming measured and rational and restrained oftentimes gets you into trouble. See Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, for instance. There's no way that'd happen under a more aggressive President, like FDR or Nixon or GW.

As the Romans said - "Si vis pacem, para bellum." - "If you wish peace, prepare for war." Pacifistic, restrained military and civilian leadership paradoxically can invite violence against you.

<comment> b-man _Being crazy gets you leverage on the negotiation table. Seeming measured and rational and restrained oftentimes gets you into trouble. See Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, for instance. There's no way that'd happen under a more aggressive President, like FDR or Nixon or GW._ [citation needed]

<comment><USER8> See: Kim Jong-Il

<comment> b-man I was thinking more in these terms:

 _... the entire "madman theory" of coercion was flawed in its essence, depending as it did on twisted logic that assumed an adversary would respond to a calculated show of irrationality with something other than irrationality of its own._ [1]

[1] <http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0614-20.htm>

In that article you can see what kind of danger unchecked assumptions and arrogance can lead people into, specially when these traits are carried by people with access to WMD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, I don't think my eyes have ever bugged out so much over an HN submission title!

⁂

> _The Presidential identification (ID) codes … could delay implementation > long enough to prevent a rapid response_

To me, a naïve human who doesn't want to see a nuclear winter, it seems that we should be optimizing for _human life_ instead of _immediate revenge._ I would even dare to hope the response to a nuclear launch would be to _roll over and surrender_ for the greater good. And while I'm no expert in game theory, I suppose the official line is that guaranteeing _mutually assured destruction_ was the only way to prevent _all_ nuclear attacks.

<comment><USER10> Thats the error nobody ever see in the MAD scenario - until the missiles are launched, it is absolutely in the interest of both sides to threaten to launch in the event the other side does so.

The moment the missiles are launched however, the side that didn't launch no longer has any advantage to launching a counter strike (assuming an all out strike was launched, not just one with a few missiles) and the leaders have every advantage to broker a deal for refuge in the other country, as theirs will soon be uninhabitable.

<comment><USER6> There have been hints that a number of politicians who might have had to issue a retaliation order might have refused to do so from purely _moral_ reasons.

In Richard Rhodes _Arsenals of Folly_ a close adviser to Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying:

"I think deep down he doubted that he could bring himself to strike another country with [nuclear weapons]"

Somewhat to my surprise, I'm from the UK and was in my teens in the 1980s where Reagan wasn't exactly portrayed in a positive light, I've found myself believing that Reagan probably would have had the moral courage to do such a thing.

<comment><USER11> About issuing orders to fire, some might find this clip from "Yes, Prime Minister" funny: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUzRJfAc-HU>

edit: actually this one is even more appropriate: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjaAqY_KFdw>

<comment><USER6> There are also the handwritten "letter of last resort" - which add a frightfully British aspect to the command and control of nuclear weapons:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After reading this I start to _really_ feel why we don't like 'security by obscurity'...

<comment><USER13> I think that this is actually pretty good use of security by obscurity. You cannot prevent well motivated and capable attacker from launching unauthorized nuclear strike by purely technical means.

Well probably anything related to "tamper proof" security (defending against attacker who has full uncontrolled access to "secure" device) of anything is security by obscurity at best (security of such commercial products is often based on that each device uses unique configuration of countermeasures) and pure snake oil more often.

In this case whole security of this system really relies on people (and their belief that there are some technical security measures that they cannot trivially circumvent) and focusing on technical means too much would actually divert resources to something that is actually not possible to do perfectly. USAF probably correctly assumed that relying on people is better approach. I remember that some (probably DoD-sponsored, in relation to WMD security) study asserted that only meaningful way to protect system from well funded and motivated attackers is to not let such attackers near the system (presumably by means of guarding it).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This blog -- Arms Control Wonk -- is absolutely fantastic. The parent post itself is definitely worth reading, as is almost every post in the blog.</comment>


Why Android Fragmentation Is Still a Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406991,00.asp

<comment><USER2> "Buy an Android phone that's not an unlocked Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and you'll be stuck with 10 or more apps that try and force you to sign up for additional monthly fees, or force you into carrier-approved app stores and services that are usually worse than alternative third-party offerings. You can't remove these programs to free up space, either, or even delete their icons, unlike with a PC."

You can't delete them, but you can disable them (since at least ICS) so that they only show up in the Settings -> Apps -> All listing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because OEMs won't do anything until consumers get smarter and vote with their wallets or Google strong-arms them.

A "Google stamp of approval" for devices outside of the Nexus line with similar software and hardware standards would do wonders.

</comment><comment><USER4> When I think of this problem, I wonder, was Android developed for the end user, or the device manufacturers?</comment>


COBOL's Not Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/01/cobols-not-dead-in-the-enterprise.php

<comment><USER2> I started at a company 2.5 years ago as a COBOL programmer and am now a Software Architect for the company. I would say that COBOL still runs a very large percentage of business systems (especially banking). Our system does even implement GUI and we are starting to use a form of MVC for new development.

While I think most companies that have COBOL systems want to get rid of them and move to a newer language, doing so is going to take a very long time. My company has wanted to move from COBOL to a higher language for over 5 years now and never been able to prove the business case. The language will be around, at least in maintenance if not development for at least another 20 years imho.

The big problem that companies are having is that the majority of COBOL programmers will retire in the next 5 years and new college grads don't have experience with it and don't want to learn it because it is considered "dead" by mainstream CS. That means those that actually know the language stand to make a very large amount of money in the coming years helping big banks convert their systems, when they have nowhere else to turn.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's even a little bit of activity on the /r/cobol subreddit:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/cobol>

</comment><comment><USER4> COBOL is dead. This is just another press release from Micro Focus, a legacy/COBOL vendor. If you're fooled by this, you're not thinking critically.

<comment><USER2> I think you need to define dead. If you are saying it is dead in the sense that there is no new development being done on it and/or it is not in high use, then you are completely mistaken. I would say the best "dead" definition for it is: any company looking to implement a new system would not choose COBOL as their language. In that sense, it is technically dying, but definitely not dead.</comment></comment>


How a Hacker Performs a SQL Injection Attack and How to Protect Your Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.webhostingsearch.com/articles/sql-injection-attack-protect-your-data.php

<comment><USER2> okay the Scrubbing Input Data is what am looking for</comment>


European regulators reject latest proposal by ICANN over its Whois data service - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/06/europe_no_to_icann_whois/ <comment><USER2> The article speaks about "the critical Whois service". Can anyone tell me what it's critical for? I can think of two reasons:

        - abuse contact info
        - registration date

(The latter is used in spam score calculations, I've heard.)

Neither of those are the registrant's private information. I don't understand why we're pushing to have private data in a public directory in the first place. (I never understood this, but being young, I first registered a domain around 2008, long after it was common to ring Joe from USAF up because their FTP was down.) The registrar has to store it for billing anyway, so if a domain is used for something illegal, the police can get at the info anyway...

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely critical for network engineers.

Think figuring out who a given prefix belongs to, what routes are advertised by an AS, what BGP communities does an AS honor, how to contact an organization's NOC ...

(yes, whois is for more than just domain names)

<comment><USER2> I didn't know that this was part of WHOIS, I thought separate services such as BGP looking glasses provided this. And other organizations (IANA and RIRs iirc) hand out AS numbers and prefixes. But even if it were part of WHOIS, then this is non-personal information which should be fine to list in a public directory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work in a registry which has whois obligations over number resources and I find this very troubling. I'm not going to say there is no right to privacy here, but I suspect states inside the EU will be seeking high privileged rights to information not in whois, come what may. So, this disempowers people seeking redress from harm as outsiders but doesnt stop state actors or lawyers or police.

Apart from my dayjob I have whois objects in DNS registries so i know there is the other side of the coin. I see the bad stuff from choosing not to hide my ID.

<comment><USER2> I'm fine with governments being the only ones who can view domain registration details. Heck, I'd be fine with nobody having access, forget the whole whois system: if the government needs to find who runs freemovies.example.net, they can ask (or subpoena) whoever was paid to register it (i.e. the registrar).

As far as I understand, the WHOIS system was made in the 80s when it was useful to be able to look and ring someone up. Literally everything was in beta on the arpanet, and direct communication makes debugging a lot easier. But it's 2018, and I do not want 4chan to be able to look up my home address in that system. That creates more mayhem than it's worth by far.

Thinking about what use I ever had from the whois system, I guess it's only abuse email addresses for IP addresses. And I hear that people make use of the registration date of domains to calculate spam scores. Neither of those require the registrant's private information to be in there.

<comment><USER4> Problem is, some domain and number holders have no incorperated body: they hold the resource as a private individual. Hard to formulate consistent data law around WHOIS when its both people, and corporate entities.

I was in the WHOIS as was from SRI-NIC. I kept GM85 in my current nic-hdl for resources as a memory of the days gone by: they even published a paper copy of the listing.. the phone book of the internet, how .. quaint.

Yes, the protocol is designed for days gone by. but the GDPR laws apply to RDAP, even though it has HTTPS and could in principle use Oauth or similar to constrain whats shown to open access.

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the problem. You say the problem is that both individuals and companies register domains, but why should the info of either be visible in a public database?

<comment><USER4> So that people who are seeking redress can find who holds the resource. That's what whois is mostly about: redress. I'm not trying to defend that against peoples rights to privacy I'm observing there's a significant community of interest in "who did that" if you don't believe that's necessary then you win with GDPR. If you do, then the masking means you cannot know, but lawyers and judges and police and governments can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a German this rather doesn't make any sense to me. ICANN is not allowed to offer the whois service, but I have to publish my full address on my website according to German law.

How can this be?

<comment><USER6> > but I have to publish my full address on my website according to German law.

The E-mail address does not need to be your personal address, Lufthansa uses email@example.com and I don't see a reason why this would not be acceptable.

The postal address does not need to be your personal address, a business address is fine. Well, if you are a 1 person business run from home I am not sure. Go to court and have it tested up to the constitutional court, why Carsten Spohr (CEO of Lufthansa) gets better data protection than you do.

Yes, your real name has to be on a business web site. That's obviously the price to pay to run a business. As a potential customer wasting my money on fake service or otherwise suffering from a breach of contract, I think this is a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the fact that "whois privacy protection" has become a free service now thanks to GDPR.

<comment><USER8> Nothing is truly free. You're paying for it in one way or another.

<comment><USER9> In this case the cost of the service is close to zero, so it's virtually free. It was similar to phone operator charging for caller ID, an easy way to make a quick buck by flipping a bit somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > It should have been obvious that the legislation would also impact the Whois > service, which requires anyone buying a domain name to provide their names, > address and personal contact details – and then publishes it all on the > internet for anyone to see.

Even using "whois privacy protection", I've always anonymized my contact information. I've used a working email address, of course, so I can manage the domain. But there's no reason to provide a physical address or telephone number. I tend to use hostels and business hotels.

Also, while this will protect those registering or obtaining domains going forward, historical data is widely available.

<comment><USER11> > _But there 's no reason to provide a physical address or telephone number. I > tend to use hostels and business hotels._

Except for that ICANN rule that if your information is incorrect, your domain name can go bye-bye at any time.

<comment><USER10> True. But I've never had that happen. And that's why I've used valid addresses and numbers. You mainly need to pass validity checks.

And for critical domains, you can just hire trusted third parties to manage them. There are law firms that specialize in stuff like that.

<comment><USER12> > But I've never had that happen.

Well, I guess that means it will never happen in the future either then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My inner self is kind of in the 'watch the world burn' mode.

Given ICANN is a US based company, I believe they can terminate the contract with all European registries for unable to fullfill the terms in contract.

</comment><comment><USER14> Rightly so.

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems to me that ICANN came up with a plausible interpretation and the pushback from the regulator should be a wake-up call to those who naively claimed GDPR was reasonable and no big deal.

I think it makes a lot of sense for a domain registrar to keep basic information in the long-term, about who registered what. I find it odd that this has become a point of contention.

<comment><USER16> Did you read the letter [1] that was linked in the article? It is much less hyperbolic than the article makes out.

Paraphrased:

Yes, of course you can keep registration data for your own legitimate usage. Contact information for the lifetime of the domain is fine.

Storing it for 2 years after expiry is not necessarily problematic, but you need to document why you legitimately need it.

You can't make private contact information public without consent.

However, you can disclose it to 3rd parties who make a legitimate request, but you should record the request.

[1] [https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/07/05/edpb-icann- whois.pdf](https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/07/05/edpb-icann-whois.pdf)

<comment><USER15> It also sets up peculiar legal fictions, i.e., it is ok to keep contact info for 'legal' persons, but not 'natural' persons and if the 'legal' contact info hints indirectly about a 'natural' person, that's a violation, unless, I'm sure a series of other conditions and legal fictions are satisfied. The 8 pages are dense with impenetrable legalese, and the message essentially is that ICANN is not allowed under GDPR to fulfill its mission of publishing the identities of website owners to the public. That is not a reasonable position, from a US perspective. Why is only a government inquirer allowed to know such things automatically, why must my request as a member of the public be logged for ICANN to fulfill it? Is that actually beneficial to 'privacy' or a derivative GDPR minefield?

GDPR is a negative development for openness, tranparancy and interconnectivity.

<comment><USER16> I can explain it simply to you. Only the personal data of flesh and blood human beings is protected. So contact info is protected if it is the direct email of a human being. If its a huge faceless corporation and the email is just "legal@.." it is not protected. Saavy?

Well its certainly beneficial for privacy. There are very few social media sites in the world where publishing other people's contact details without their permissions is allowed. Its banned here. Its banned on Reddit. And a ton of other sites. There is really very little difference.

How would you feel if all HN submitters had to list a personal phone number? Why is running a website any different?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What future predictions of yours about tech turned out to be wrong? - <AUTHOR> A few nights ago a friend of mine wanting to get into software development, asked me about where I thought the industry was heading. It got me thinking about the times myself or others have made wrong predictions about the industry. When were you wrong or what didn't you expect HN? <comment><USER2> My previous answer was more about tech in the broad sense.

Here are software tech trends that I thought were going to be HUGE but kind of fizzled. Some I strongly believe are ripe for a comeback:

1\. (As before) I thought Java and Java Applets would be the GUI and OS for everything.

2\. Object-oriented Programming. It has become fashionable to ridicule OOP but I still think OOP (minus nearly useless inheritance) plus Design Patterns is powerful, just not the grand solution to all problems.

3\. Knowledge Management Systems. There were supposed to be rules engines for every domain of human knowledge that experts would fill with rules-of-thumb and facts and voila! You'd have all-knowing oracles that could diagnose any medical problem, etc. They still exist but proved expensive to build and limited. IBM's Watson revived the idea for a while, though.

4\. Associative Operating Systems and Object Stores. File and folder OS'es were supposed to be dead and gone by now, replaced with content-oriented OS'es that retrieved information by their contents and by tags without regard for location. Everything was supposed to be a series of linked and nested objects so that if you updated a spreadsheet here, your related contract and presentation would update automagically.

5\. Syndicated content and automatic agents. There was a time when RSS was king and existed as a parallel API, if you will, to human-readable content. Everything from your coffee pot to your favorite news site would have a feed and your self-programmed agents would hunt and sift and deliver information to your dashboard, handle routine transactions for you and, of course, broadcast your status and thoughts to the world. Much of this, too, exists in scattered patches but isn't the universal nerd nirvana we expected. Instead, people relinquished rich, decentralized RSS feeds for controlled, predigested Facebook, Twitter and Reddit feeds. Sad. APIs and automation are big as ever but somehow never became tools of the people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for you insights. Number 5 I'm actually really sad about. I would love the web to work this way today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> In 1994, I believed Java and Java Applets would replace Flash, desktop apps and even operating systems. I knew we'd all have fiber to the home by 2005, at the latest. I was sure that we'd all be using 360 panorama cameras and stereo cameras. All pictures would be VR experiences. My worst prediction: I fervently believed that all cars, electric or otherwise would be obsolete by 1995, replaced by on-demand pods on rails.

On the other hand, I knew CGI would revolutionize movies, 10 years before Pixar. I showed my traditional animator friend early graphics and he laughed at the idea. I adopted digital photography years before film cameras were dead. I also bet my career on graphic user interfaces when text-mode MS-DOS was the only serious operating system and later turned down a higher paying client-server job to work on this crazy WWW thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> facebook...dumbest idea ever...besides...uber...</comment>