Use LetsEncrypt and CloudFlare to secure any Heroku app for free - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/substrakt/letsencrypt-heroku <comment><USER2> Please do keep in mind that CloudFlare is essentially a consensual man-in-the- middle and for certain threat models is not compatible with the "secure" modifier.

If your threat model differs, this is cool.

<comment><USER3> Do also keep in mind that ssl on Heroku is terminated at their routing layer before your Dynos. Therefore it is as easy for Heroku (Salesforce) to man-in- the-middle your application as it is for CloudFlare, whether that be on instruction for the authorities or due to a bad actor on the staff.

Both of them you have to trust to do the right thing and that is an exercise left to the individual thinking of using either service. So lets not pretend that CloudFlare is a special case.

If you need to trust the none of your service providers can MITM your site then you can't use any PaaS or CDN, you need to terminate the SSL yourself, that includes for all static assets you use. No more jQuery from Google CDN, no more analytics/exception tracking/fonts from your favoured provider and no more advertising conversion tracking.

But then do also remember that it's possible for any web host to take over their customers site as long as they own the IP address. They just point the IP to another server, configure it to respond to the hostname and they can then even use any SSL certificate provider who validates the domain name with a file at a specific URL to grab a certificate.

Everyone has to make their own judgment on who they can trust. CloudFlare is no different.

<comment><USER4> >No more jQuery from Google CDN, no more analytics/exception tracking/fonts from your favoured provider and no more advertising conversion tracking

Those all sound like reasonable best practices for building a website.

<comment><USER5> Except for the part where anyone you'd like to partner with isn't going to trust your internal analytics to gauge your popularity. One of the points of third party analytics is that you have a disinterested third party who can provide the data to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or, if you want to just provision a letsencrypt certificate on Heroku without cloudflare:

[https://github.com/dmathieu/sabayon](https://github.com/dmathieu/sabayon)

<comment><USER7> Is it possible to do this on the fly with subdomains? I have a specific problem with my instance where I have multiple domains and multiple subdomains. Right now I use a wildcard SSL because the subdomains are generated on the fly whenever a new client signs up.

Is it possible to create a new certificate without restarting all the servers each time a new client signs up?

<comment><USER6> No, that is not possible with the sabayon architecture. It needs to store letsencrypt key/token for all domains, and stores them as config vars.

You'd have to store them in a database for example to avoid having to restart the app. But that wouldn't be a good solution either, as letsencrypt will not allow you to have more than 100 domains under the same certificate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm using Cloudflare + Heroku to host [https://www.gitignore.io](https://www.gitignore.io) [0], but I'm not using a LetsEncrypt certificate. I'm just using Cloudflare's Universal SSL[1] certificate. So far everything with Cloudflare has been amazing; they even prevented a 99 million+ request DDOS attack on my site a few years ago.

[0] - [https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io/wiki/System- Architec...](https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io/wiki/System-Architecture)

[1] - [https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal- ssl/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it possible to use this with multiple subdomains? I have multiple domains pointing to an heroku instance and each domain has multiple subdomains. Insofar as I understood LetsEncrypt does not support wildcard SSL but is it possible to use this tool (or another) to secure all subdomains as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Just pass in a comma delimited list to the subdomains parameters (subdomains=www,hello,another,test) and it'll add all of them to the certificate.

<comment><USER9> Is there a limit? Last I heard you could do up to 100 that way. That'd certainly be enough for my own needs ( _if_ I were using LetsEncrypt), but I don't know about other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just to clarify, is traffic unencrypted between CloudFlare and Heroku? Are those connections over the public internet?

<comment><USER3> CloudFlare is only providing DNS, no traffic goes though it in this instance.

It is trivial however to setup CloadFlare to have encrypted traffic to your Heroku app for free when using their cdn/webapp firewall service as your app is on [https://appname.herokuapp.com](https://appname.herokuapp.com) which CloudFlare proxy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We wrote a blog post about it too [https://substrakt.com/heroku-ssl-me-weve- come-a-long-way/](https://substrakt.com/heroku-ssl-me-weve-come-a-long-way/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Would this solution allow one to secure multiple TLDs on one Heroku endpoint/application?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently but it's on the roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cloudflare may not be as awesome as everyone makes it out to be. Discuss.

<comment><AUTHOR> For this use case it really is. The number of DNS providers that have support for SSL at the domain apex using ALIAS or ANAME records could be counted on one hand. You don't have to use any of the CloudFlare specific features, but their DNS management is really good.

<comment><USER13> Would you mind elaborating as to which few specific DNS providers those are?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! Heroku have a list here [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom- domains#configu...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom- domains#configuring-dns-for-root-domains)

<comment><USER13> Thanks, cheers</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The last lighthouse keeper of Capri - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181005-the-last-lighthouse-keeper-of-capri <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in the story of lighthouses and their keepers (focused on the Americas with a few scattered stories of elsewhere), I'd highly recommend Brilliant Beacons by Eric Jay Dolin ([https://www.amazon.com/Brilliant-Beacons-History-American- Li...](https://www.amazon.com/Brilliant-Beacons-History-American-Lighthouse- ebook/dp/B00ZAT8WIS)).

He writes history books that are full of anecdotes and interesting, well- researched primary sources. Hardly any of the information in the books are discoverable online, and realizing that is largely what inspired me to get into reading again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone bought / rented an old lighthouse, purely to live in? I'm fascinated by the idea - tons of time to read, draw, work on personal projects, etc.

<comment><USER4> In the US, lighthouses have been sold to private individuals. There's one I know on Cape Cod that's some sort of vacation rental. Apparently the Graves Lighthouse in Boston Harbor is also now privately owned. [1]

A couple points of information that you may know but others may not realize:

1.) Not all lighthouses are particularly isolated. Sure, some have only boat access and have difficult landings--see the Graves. But many are on roads on the mainland or on large islands.

2.) Again the Graves notwithstanding, the lighthouse keeper's house is often a cottage off to the side as opposed to the "lighthouse" itself.

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

<comment><USER3> Interesting, thanks. And I actually quite like the idea of living in a small cottage and using the lighthouse as a studio/workshop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With every sentence, my envy of the keeper's life grew.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. Great view, time for reading and thinking, steps for exercise, saving lives, few social events to attend...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _One stalwart sentinel remains in South Africa; three in France; a handful in India, Myanmar (also known as Burma) and Portugal; and fewer than 50 in Canada._

Anyone know why there are so many still in Canada?

People might be interested in the following project to turn Graves Light in Boston Harbor into a modern, livable space. It's tough as the space is tight and the conditions can be fierce ... last winter a storm ripped everything off the dock.

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

<comment><USER8> At a guess, Canada has a lot of coastline, especially compared to the others in the list. Much of it is quite rocky.

<comment><USER9> No idea if it's true but it's a solid guess. Canada has far and away the most coastline of any nation. Amounts vary depending on source but they have roughly four times as much as the number two on the list, Norway.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of_coastline)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They'll leave the lighthouse with this song:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOZqMC5SGGg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOZqMC5SGGg)</comment>


Brazzers porn account holders exposed by hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37285715 <comment><USER2> vBulletin :rolleyes:

"Social everything" has a cost when implementation of social features is outsourced.</comment>


Freelancer.com Pays $3.2M To Buy Digital Marketing Marketplace, Warrior Forum - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/freelancer-buys-warrior-forum/ <comment><USER3> I'm sure that Freelancer.com did their due diligence, but as a mere user of this and other marketing forums I don't see how this valuation makes sense. The site's primary source of revenue is the percentage it takes from WSO sales - "Warrior Special Offers". These are normally rehashed guides with such useful information as how to put Adsense on your site, with titles like "Make $300/day on Autopilot!". WSO's are the butt of jokes on other Internet marketing forums, as they are usually nonsense. Some other forums actually have sections dedicated to quickly throwing together useless WSO's with attractive titles, creating fake reviews, and getting them sold through Warrior Forum.

Definitely not an acquisition I would have made.

<comment><USER4> As someone who got wayyyyy too heavily involved into the whole "internet marketing" scene a few years back, I can confirm the sentiments above.

In my eyes, Freelancer just simultaneously paid millions of dollars for an obnoxious digital _wasteland_ while devaluing their own brand by associating themselves with these clowns.

I can honestly say I have never, and will never, use Freelancer. Especially now.

<comment><USER5> As if they weren't devalued enough by their habit of accepting completely illegal and immoral projects (i saw tons of requests for filipino camgirls and carding/cracking activities)..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I once joined Freelancer.com. Oh boy, what an experience it was. First off, there is a free plan for freelancers, but you should be paying ~$24 to get things going.

The second is charging money for tests, charging money for showing up as featured, and various other tactics to get money out of freelancers. I moved out as soon as I could.

<comment><USER7> Where did this $24 number come from? It's free to sign up and bid on projects and we charge a 10% commission for freelancers on a free plan only when you accept.

What's wrong with a fee to make a project featured? Ebay does this.

We charge for tests so people don't game them by writing down all the answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> /non-related rant ahead

From a perspective of person who is (pro)actively looking for more work, freelancer.com is full of projects along the veins of "write me some software". It does not make sense to even bother applying to projects like that, as the time spent writing an application letter exceeds potential income.

~6 years ago I did a fair number of small projects on rentacoder.com - <USER2> quality of average project description was much higher (did they do any vetting on incoming projects?).

odesk.com on the other hand has a lot more projects whose authors understand a thing or two about how software development works (i.e. reasonable project description among other things).

<comment><USER7> Hi fest

I'n the Chief Executive of Freelancer.com.

The employers from RAC are all on Freelancer - and they are a lot more active than they were on the old site (which had a use interface from 1995 and was very difficult to use).

Regards Matt

<comment><USER9> You're going to need to name names if anyone's going to believe you. I've only seen ONE employer from RAC at your scamtablishment. Perhaps exaggeration is your strong point?

<comment><USER7> Ah, I know who you are now. We had a conversation when we acquired RAC because you wrote that book "Outsourcing Through RentACoder" and were upset we shut the site down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The last time I checked Warrior Forum was basically a marketplace for scammsters scamming newbies and selling scam paraphernalia. Long term value? Make 50.000 bucks in 10 days and get the Ultimate Master Traffic Money Maker for free!

<comment><USER11> I'm always amused by these Internet Marketers selling Internet Marketing Strategies to Internet Marketers. The whole site is basically an enclosed ecosystem of people selling and buying each others stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somebody needs to make an elance, odesk, freelance competitor that is private - contractors or companies need to apply and be pre-vetted to be on the site for design/dev and projects posted are above a minimum budget threshold.

<comment><USER13> A country specific version of freelancer was an idea after I couldn't get a gig against every other third world country bidding on what seemed to be the same project with multiple accounts. Since it seems there were few and far American accounts bidding compared to other countries, "American only" struck me as something that would be useful as a developer. Though, I'm pretty sure people go there to pay insanely cheap prices. If they want to pay $100+ hour for experience and high quality, they would find a local company and meet with them. It's not like Angie's list where you're going to pay more or less the same price and you can filter out who you want to chose.

<comment><USER14> _I couldn 't get a gig against every Indian and other third world country scamming the system with 10 accounts a piece_

I'm not Indian, but some HN readers may find offensive that you equate Indian with scammer.

<comment><USER13> Edited. I didn't intend to be offensive. I feel the system is flawed and can be manipulated by anyone. The vast majority of bidders seems to be outside of America.

<comment><USER14> _I feel the system is flawed and can be manipulated by anyone._

This is, unfortunately, true. You can however make some money on Freelancer if you offer quality and keep your prices at a medium level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Proof that Barrie doesn't know what the hell he's doing. He just bought a bunch of scammers! But then, seeing how Freelancer.com is a scam in itself, it all seems very clear now.

<comment><USER7> Only enough to have the largest user base and the fastest growing site in the industry.. and the only publicly listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://warriorforumsucks.com/](http://warriorforumsucks.com/) There is money to be made milking the vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not to diminish the work that goes into building a successful forum (most fail), but that's a nice out. With the right strategy it can even FU money.</comment>


Get Bing results side-by-side with Google with WebMynd (YC W08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmynd.com/html/bing.html

<comment><USER2> As I mentioned on an earlier thread, if you just want bing to look a little more like Google, I posted a Greasemonkey script here:

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649>

Interestingly, I can really, really tell that Google has iterated pixel-by- pixel on their interface to get the optimum look because there's an "uncanny valley" I sense when I see results UI that is close but-not-quite-like theirs.

It's really hard to get the search results to look exactly like Google (the script doesn't quite do it) and when it's not quite right it feels as if it is a fake/squatter/parked page rather than the nice clean Google search results. This script attempts to get partially there, but Bing, by default, reminds me a lot of the sort of "parked" search results you see out there.

I haven't quite put my finger on exactly what triggers that feeling, but it seems to be a mixture of line-height, coloring, font size, and the length of the excerpt.

<comment><USER3> Great analysis. I can't put my finger on it either, but there is something about the colors and spacing that makes me implicitly look away / be unable to read the bing results. I've been conditioned to ignore any text that has a certain format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me that hates the idea of this covering the google adverts? I don't think that's a good idea personally. I installed it, and then when it was covering google ads, I just thought "eugh no that's just wrong". It'd be far better to have it in a separate sidebar. Leave the browser window as it is.

If you're adblock, then sure - be like that. But if you're trying to be a legitimate company, covering someone elses adverts with your own content seems like a bad strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> We intentionally picked the right hand side of the page where the ads are since we think that is the part of the page that can be most improved. There are several companies experimenting with improving the Google results page: Surfcanyon, Foxmarks and Infoaxe spring to mind, the latter two also affecting the right side of the page.

Do you object to us pushing down the ads because you find them useful? Or you think it is wrong for us to potentially interfere with Google's revenue stream? Or another reason...?

<comment><USER4> Both - I find them useful, and I think it's the "wrong" thing to do morally. I'd much rather it was in a separate sidebar, leaving the google page as it was intended.

<comment><AUTHOR> WebMynd is definitely targeted at the people who don't find the ads on the right particularly useful.

We think it is right that users should be able to opt-in to have more control over how their online tools appear and function. Provided there is attribution i.e. we're not taking a tool or content and claiming we created it.

<comment><USER4> Sure, bear in mind though "people who don't find ads useful" is a very small niche market. Also by definition, they're not the type of people you can monetize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat. I've always kept using Google, while having a sneaking suspicion that in some areas the other search engines had surpassed them. However Google was good enough, and the only way to really tell is to do large amounts of side by side comparisons, and who has the time for that?

Now thanks to this plugin, I do.

</comment><comment><USER6> Putting search results side by side is old news:

<http://www.graball.com/r.php?s=cuckoo+bananas>

To get to Bing you have to use the "MSN" link, but you can get a side to side comparison of any two search engines. Plus, you don't have to install anything, since it just uses frames. (Most people implementing this today would use javascript, because as we all know frames are evil, and hence, we have to use other tools to re-implement frames.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to install anything, but you do have to keep remembering to go to a different site, outside your usual workflow, if you want to see the results side-by-side.

<comment><USER7> I doubt anyone wants to compare search results as part of their usual workflow: it's a distraction by definition.

You can always bookmark the site, although it should remember your preferences in the url or in cookies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice job getting this up quickly!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. A lot of the work we've done is building a platform which makes it really easy to add new sources, and improve search in general. So we like to show that off when appropriate :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't see where to add it. What section of links is it under? (And nice work getting it online so fast.)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you already have WebMynd installed at the latest level (0.8.1), restart your browser, do a search on Google then activate the Bing results by looking in the 'Knowledge' section in the Sites menu.

<comment><USER9> Restarting FF did it. By the way, this really shows how bing is often better than google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice work.

I was thinking about this earlier, but sadly Bingle.com was already taken.

</comment><comment><USER11> As a side note one with a big screen can use the command "split" of YubNub.</comment>


Improving Security and Privacy for Extensions Users - <AUTHOR> https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/improving-security-and-privacy-for.html <comment><USER2> There was so much backlash and fearmongering that the were killing ad blockers. But this seems reasonable and there is no discussion on HN regarding this.

One thing to note: if Google gets to decide what is an ad, will they whitelist Adsense ads?

<comment><USER3> If they just want to protect users, why not introduce these restrictions as a setting that's on by default, but still can be turned off (with a giant fullscreen warning about security and performance, if they wish)? I didn't ask to be protected by Google, so I see these changes only as an attempt to take away control of the browser (which I don't use btw).</comment></comment>


Show HN: New SEO tool for content and technical SEO analysis - <AUTHOR> https://seodity.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

For the last few months we've been working on a new tool for analyzing websites.

In the first iteration we've focused on the analysis of the content and technical aspects. While entering one address our crawler precisely analyzes each webpage. The most significant elements that we check are as follows:

\- the most frequent key words in the whole website and each webpage separately (whether they appear in the title, description, alt, url, h1-h6 attributes)

\- the amount of the content (key words in the whole website, webpages, in relation to html, etc.)

\- popularity of webpages in the social media (useful e.g. during research of the competition's articles)

\- SEO technical aspects (title, description, h1...h6 elements, alt)

\- SSL certificates when it is valid and when it expires

\- image optimization

\- on-site link correctness verification

On the basis of all elements we determine the original Seodity Rank, with the usage of which one can sort webpages.

Plan for the future (works have already been initiated):

\- backlinks

\- automatic competition verification on the basis of the Google search results (analysis of each competitive webpage separately and drawing conclusions + prompts)

\- white-label report adjusted to the Client's audit

From the beginning, in the substantive terms, our friends related to the affiliation market helped us a lot. They praise the tool very much.

We'll be very grateful for your suggestions and proposals concerning adding additional elements to the tool. Please let us know what else you would like to analyze.

Thanks in advance!</comment>


Homebrewed CPU Is a Beautiful Mess of Wires - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/homebrewed-cpu/ <comment><USER3> Idea: "Nerd Knitting"

Get a bunch of the crew together and sit around the table wire wrapping while exchanging stores from the cube.

Bob: "Steve, can you pass me a blue 16AWG strand..."

Steve: "Sure thing, your 4-bit CPU is turning out quite nice.."

Bob: "Thanks Steve, that's a pretty nice thing to say coming from someone who just finished a 8-bit dual core"

[Rest of the Crew]: "Ahhhh...."

</comment><comment><USER4> You know we have these things called FPGAs. That's where you can have fun with hardware hacking nowdays.

You can design whatever piece of hardware you want and still have it execute at a decent speed (say 50 MHz, vs. 2 GHz for a Pentium). But I can put millions of gates of logic.

An 8-bit CPU is maybe 5,000 gates at most. A decent 32-bit RISC processor is below 100,000 gates.

My previous employer builds machines filled with such FPGAs (<http://eve- usa.com>). On those, you can map really crazy stuff like real, modern processors. It's the ultimate sandbox for the hardware designer.

The only problem is that they tend to be a little bit pricey for amateurs (but I hear you can get boxes real cheap through university programs - <USER2> students).

<comment><USER5> I don't think he was focusing on performance. Bill Buzbee, of homebrewcpu.com, built his the same way, with wire-wrapped TTLs. He did it because he wanted "touch the magic" of those early machines.

I imagine there is something very satisfying of individually wire-wrapping thousands of connections and dealing with the minutiae of a complicated electronic device that prototyping a FPGA just can't give you, especially for a pet hobby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My friend just submitted his proposal for PhD research on a new dielectric, Hafnium-oxide.

He and I were talking yesterday about the massive knowledge-base at Intel where they have a very tight grip on semiconductor technology. He was musing that if Intel suddenly went up in flames, our culture would take a step back about 40-50 years.

His point being that these new transistors (32nm and subsequently 28nm gate width) are so incredibly complex that few people understand exactly how they work and all the issues underlying.

Not sure where the industry is headed, but the limit is fast approaching.

<comment><USER7> > Not sure where the industry is headed, but the limit is fast approaching.

Those types of statements have a short half life in the semiconductor industry.

<comment><USER8> Past performance is not a good indicator of the future, especially when you're bumping into basic limit of atoms.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I remember when 50nm was a big deal. Now its 28nm? That's absurd. How they make those interconnects is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I did this in undergrad, though not a 6502 and using solders and sockets. Wire wrapping makes this far, far more difficult.

"Why did I do all this?" he says. "I don't know. But it has been a lot of fun."

Same thing everyone asked me, and I gave the same answer. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

<comment><USER10> wire-wrapping is crochet for engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome. As the complexity of the underlying technology increases, I've often wondered if this style of hacking won't move solely into software, and then into virtual worlds -- think a World of Warcraft-like environment, or a metaverse, Neal Stephenson style.

Not a very well-formed thought, but something I think about from time to time.

<comment><USER12> It seems that the complexity of the technology is already out of immediate reach for hardware hackers of this sort. This is an _8-bit_ cpu!

<comment><USER13> Well just build two and you got a 16-bit'er and so on. Bit size it really not much more than linear scaling. Other things like pipe-lining are behind the complexity of modern cpus.

<comment><USER14> Two 8-bit cores != a 16-bit CPU.

By your math, every dual-core 64-bit Intel CPU would actually be a 128-bit processor, a quad-core would equate to a 256-bit system, and the Cell would be a very studly 1088-bit chip (64-bit PPE + 8x128-bit SPEs).

You appear to be confusing "linear" scaling with "exponential", which makes a serious difference.

<comment><USER13> It's in principle pretty simple to interconnect two n-bit CPUs and obtain one 2n-bit CPU. The only element that scales above linear is the multiplier, and it's not even quadratic.

<comment><USER15> True, depending on what you mean by "bit". I'm not sure it is entirely trivial to interconnect the instruction-parsing parts, and memory operations might also be interesting. The ALU would be pretty simple, but you'd lose a lot of speed there (assuming something else didn't kill you first), as even if you have two CLA's (seems unlikely, given the additional complexity), you'd double the time it would take to stabilize the outputs.

<comment><USER13> My point is, that just characterizing a CPU by saying it's an n-bit architecture, doesn't say very much about the complexity of the real thing.

You should not fall prey to the (in other contexts appropriate) assumption that an increase of one bit inherently doubles complexity (confusing linear with exponential).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People in the Bay Area should visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

<http://www.computerhistory.org/>

They have an example of a computer used on board the Apollo missions that was entirely wirewrapped. The docent said that when they were done debugging they would then pot the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Quite cool.

Actually surface mount is not all that bad. I have some friends who use it on boards at home for fun.

And I would be surprised if there weren't vendors or other activity using surface mount at the Faire.

<comment><USER18> i'm working with surface mount components for a project. def. not as bad as the article makes it out to be. just takes a steady hand, a decent soldering station (i've got a weller WES51, around $80), small tips, lots of flux, and a magnifying glass. getting the first component down took a while, but improvement (fast and clean connections) came quickly. now it's kind of fun.

<comment><USER19> If I had a hand that steady I would be a brain surgeon...

Better:

If I had a hand that steady I would still be a brain surgeon...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is so cool to see! I'm looking forward to spending time in his blog to follow from start to finish.

I don't have the skill or knowledge to attempt a project like this, so I guess that means I have project envy at this point and will have to be voyeur. :)

This brings back lots of late 70's and early 80's memories.

</comment><comment><USER21> kind of makes me want to sit down and take a swing at building one myself

<comment><USER22> Even better idea : write a CPU simulator! Just a while loop that reads assembler from a file and interprets it on a virtual CPU. I did this in Java a while ago, I reproduced a few Intel x86 ASM instructions. MOV, CMP and JMP are all you need for Turing completeness, if I recall correctly.

You could make up your own assembly language.

Next easy step : add a memory-mapped bitmap display to your virtual machine. Bochs watch out!

After that, write a compiler for your favourite language towards your assembler and watch it run on your CPU. Then a debugger. Then you would be more awesome than Zed Shaw.

<comment><USER4> What I'd love to see is someone invent an assembly language that is reversible. Meaning that if you execute the code backward, you undo whatever the code was doing.

This way, the undo function of office becomes trivial to implement! (minus some IO issues)

<comment><USER23> I've written a simulator for one (not of my own design): <http://www.accesscom.com/~darius/hacks/pisa.tar.gz>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We also build one at engineering school (national university of Mexico), although 12 years ago it was a 4-bit CPU (from gates, a couple of ALU, some sequencer,...), I think now they build 8-bit CPUs. Did you guys build similar things?

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, the Tyranny of Numbers in action in modern times: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_numbers>

</comment><comment><USER26> Is this using transistors? Vacuum tubes? Or discrete IC's?

<comment><USER27> I'm waiting for the first one built with relays :-)

<comment><USER28> <http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/index.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why not a breadboard? Wire wrapping seems pretty tedious.

<comment><USER30> I wire-wrapped my first computer. It's not that tedious, it beats the hell out of soldering when you're doing your first design, and if you make a mistake it's easy to fix.

When I then made modifications I used red wire instead of blue. If it didn't work I knew which wires to replace. If it did I could either leave it and use yellow as the next red, or I could replace the wires. At a glance I could see the state of the build.

A good wire-wrapping tool, good flow with the circuit, I could put three wires every minute for an hour.

I may still have it somewhere ...

<comment><USER29> You could do the same things with a breadboard, without the tedious wrapping.

At UIUC, one of the assignments for a required course in the Computer Engineering department is to build a (simple) 4-bit processor. We only got a week to do it, so you can be damn sure we used a breadboard and had a system in place to debug the thousands of wires.

<comment><USER9> UIUC is the truth. If they require you to do a project like that in order to graduate, they have a good grasp on what a CE needs to understand. Wish I would have went there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow... that's quite an achievement, I don't think I would even know where to start with building a CPU from scratch!

<comment><USER32> While I don't have the skill/time to take on a project like this I really loved the book 'Code' by Charles Petzold. It walks you through the design of a CPU starting from nothing.

There is also 'From NAND to Tetris in 12 steps', I haven't looked closely at that but from what I've heard it gives a similar level of detail.</comment></comment>


China Accuses U.S. of Cyberwarfare - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/china-accuses-us/ <comment><USER2> Don't they realize how dumb they look?

Their standard response to any criticism is to dig through things which have happened in the past as a result of US action, make huge leaps of logic, and then justify whatever it is they did in terms of that.

Never mind the right or the wrong of the issue...

I guess that's the sin/shame culture difference. For them it doesn't matter what they did, it matters that they got caught. And justifying it in terms of what someone else did means they regain "honor" or whatever the fuck it is they're trying to do...

<comment><USER3> >Don't they realize how dumb they look?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. More like, "Do they care at all how they are perceived in the West?"

And the answer to that question has to be a resounding "NO"-- and for good reason.

Attempts at 'real diplomacy' (define as you will) are for nations which have reason to fear the repercussions of their actions. For the CCP, no such fear exists, nor should it. What's the worst any nation will do in retaliation to anything China has done throughout this whole affair, including, but not limited to, lying about what happened?

What is the United States or anyone else going to do? Embargo CHINA? Risk war (cyber or real-world) WITH CHINA? Obviously not. We need them too much; if we couldn't trade with China, the standard of living in the US would plummet, tons and tons of American corporations would go under, and countless Americans would be out of work because of it. Dislike the CCP for their ideological differences though we may, we'd never do anything more than slap them on the wrist (in 2010, anyway...2030 is a different story).

The CCP knows they're untouchable. That's why they act the way they do.

edit: Sorry about the caps lock. I'm a noob here and don't know how to italicize or bold yet. :( Halp, anyone?

edit #2: In the paragraph which begins, "Attempts at...": When I say, "For the CCP, no such fear exists, nor should it," I do NOT mean to say that it is a good thing for any nation to have license to act in this way. Rather, it was my intent to say that the CCP is correct to believe they can get away with such actions without risking serious repercussion.

<comment><USER4> You can italicize with stars. Don't think you can bold.

<comment><USER3> Thanks _sparky_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, China. Ensuring Twitter does not go down during times of civil unrest is definitely cyberwarfare. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER6> It's interesting to see how US people doesn't count Internet (and cyberwarfare) as a Political instrument. EDIT: Not only US people, EUs too.

You really think [USA, NATO, EU, ... ], doesn't make use of [massive] cyberwarfare? And that cases like Google's or Iran's doesn't make profit to Big Members of NATO?

<comment><USER7> I don't know why you were modded down, you are just stating your opinion.

But your response has a basic logical misunderstanding. Both the US and China engage in cyber warfare, but making sure that Twitter is stable during a period of heavy use by protesters is clearly NOT "warfare", it is ensuring the free flow of information.

More and more I am seeing the logic of those that say Chinese censorship is a violation of their WTO Free Trade obligations, as it allows them to sell their information services internationally without also allowing foreign firms to sell their information in China. This is restraint of trade, a protectionist attitude that will harm their development in the long run.

<comment><USER6> If we want to stack only at Twitter, it was only 1 of the several tools (news media too) USA (and whoever made profit) to make propaganda, yes actions like this are still called propaganda. This is the same method it used to invade Iraq, though used different tools. (Be aware that this is my opinion as I don't have sources.)

definition: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda>

Look, I'm Albanian, I'm not attacking anyone, nor I'm interested in doing it.

EDIT: _For those of you thinking we live in a free world. Try writing down anything that undermines your country leaders, or what they won't you to say: in fact we don't know what to say, because if we did we couldn't (we will be the second one to know about it). We will be taken down as a National Security threat._

See the Joseph Goebbels quote by _chrisb_ down.

<comment><USER7> OK, here: The elected and un-elected leadership of the United States practice terrorism and illegal manipulation of other countries in the world, and the US' own citizens, for the purpose of maintaining and increasing control over markets and natural resources. They have no real interest in the freedom of their citizens or of other peoples. Further, the government works primarily for the benefit of moneyed interests and has been thus since the founding of the republic.

These are statements that I think you would agree "undermine the [US'] leaders." But we have the right to say them, and it is something we are very proud of. Almost all countries claim to offer this right to their citizens, but the US actually does grant it and protect it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels

True in the 1940s and still true today.

</comment><comment><USER9> "... said the article, according to Guardian"

Why couldn't Wired quote the original article instead of getting it second hand from Guardian?

</comment><comment><USER10> This sounds like a preemptive attempt at a "tu quoque" (aka "no u") defense. China has been caught out in a fairly blatant cyberwarfare attack and is now trying to defuse blame. Not to mention attempting to justify their vast, ridiculous censorship efforts.

<comment><USER11> I hope you realize the US also has extensive cyber espionage efforts.

<comment><USER12> References please. I suspect you're right, but I'd never claim it as fact without some evidence.

<comment><USER13> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm>

"... US firm Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF.

"[...]

"But former CIA director James Woolsey, in an article in March for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that the US did conduct economic espionage against its European allies, though he did not specify if Echelon was involved."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've noticed that trolls tend to accuse others of the same dishonest arguing methods they use. For people just skimming the discussion, it looks like two people calling each others the same names...</comment>


Ask HN: Can We Predict the Future? - <AUTHOR> Is predicting the future different from "knowing" the future? <comment><USER2> Prediction literally means "spoken and/or written beforehand" so one of differences between the two is the former is in a shareable format, and the latter is thought that could, but doesn't have to be shared. Of course once it is shared and then subsequently occurs, it becomes a prediction and not just personal knowledge.

Another difference is that a successful prediction can manifest through a fluke, coincidence, probability of less than 1, or hindsight editing of claim, whereas "knowing" is a probability of 1.</comment>


A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

<comment><USER2> Not that I disagree, but it's a bit rich coming out saying those things, right after he has OKed a portion of the open HTML specification created specifically to render the open specification worthless.

Recall the EME^W DRM, then you can come back (again) and talk about the importance of having an open web.

<comment><USER3> The title sorely misses a [2010] tag; this is almost three years old.

<comment><USER4> Yeap, November 22, 2010

Good catch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tim Berners Lee: "A Call for Continued Open Standards, Neutrality...and DRM"

One of those 3 things doesn't belong in there and isn't compatible with the overarching philosophy. Guess which.</comment>


Show HN: Banter – Talk to your friends and family through video messages - <AUTHOR> https://getbanter.io/ <comment><USER2> Great idea, and I think it will actually gain traction. Just work on marketing and promotion - so you need a social media presence. Right now I don't see even a Twitter account.

I also noticed that your logo and that of Algorithm Conference [1] share the same icon. How did that happen?

[1] [https://algorithmconference.com](https://algorithmconference.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! A social media presence is definitely planned.

The logo that we're using was created using Namecheap's Logo Maker [1], and was intended to be a temporary placeholder. We'll be changing it soon.

[1] [https://www.namecheap.com/logo-maker/](https://www.namecheap.com/logo- maker/)</comment></comment>


New LibreOffice comes with alternative for users of Microsoft ribbon-interface - <AUTHOR> http://cor4office.blogspot.com/2016/12/new-libreoffice-comes-with-alternative.html <comment><USER2> Did they work around the patent, or just decided that it wouldn't hold up in court?

<comment><USER3> I doubt there's a utility patent, I take it you think MS may have taken out a design patent?</comment></comment>


How Effective is Internet Advertising? - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/how-effective-is-internet-advertising.html

<comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: "for non-brand keywords we fi nd that new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads but that more frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative."</comment>


Halfbakery: Distributed Rendering - <AUTHOR> http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Distributed_20rendering

<comment><USER2> Back in the Netscape 3 or 4 days there was a bug that allowed Java applets to remain resident after the user had left the page.

An ILM engineer (possibly joking) told me that a clever sod used that bug plus an early porn site to set up a distributed renderfarm.</comment>


China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/24/how-china-used-more-cement-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-did-in-the-entire-20th-century/ <comment><USER2> Pedant: Cement != Concrete. Cement is one component of concrete. Concrete is composed of water, aggregate, and cement.

The video linked to by Gates' blog says[0] "The most important material in terms of sheer mass in our civilization is cement _made into concrete_ " "The chinese poured into their buildings and roads [...] as much _concrete_ in just 3 years as United States in 1 century".

"In modern times, researchers have experimented with the addition of other materials to create concrete with improved properties, such as higher strength, electrical conductivity, or resistance to damages through spillage."[1]

There's more available[2] to concrete these days than what the US infrastructure used up to 2000[3]. Not that 3 years consumption > 100 years consumption isn't impressive, but:

1) not only are we not comparing the same period

2) it's not clear we're comparing the same material

I often hear cement and concrete used interchangeably, but had the difference drilled into me when I worked (doing computer work) in the industry briefly. For that reason (cement != concrete) and potential advancements in concrete (maybe there are new composites that let us use a fraction of what used to be necessary?) it's not entirely clear what the numbers mean, outside of "China is growing fast".

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7O9pmM_A0&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7O9pmM_A0&feature=youtu.be&t=54s)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Modern_additives](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Modern_additives)

[2] [http://www.columbiatribune.com/editorial_archive/pollution-e...](http://www.columbiatribune.com/editorial_archive/pollution- eating-concrete/article_c82246f6-5cfa-11e3-9f03-10604b9f6eda.html)

[3] [https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/making- the-modern-world-cement-A_800_v2-11.png)

<comment><USER3> Anybody that does not understand the difference between cement and concrete is going to be in for a surprise when they mix up a batch of dark gray goop and try to use it for something in construction.

The shrinking alone will cause some interesting effects.

There are a lot of lay-man misconceptions about concrete, one of the more persistent ones is that concrete needs to 'dry'. It doesn't, it needs to _cure_ , it's a chemical reaction that gives concrete its strength, not something going into solution to allow pouring that then dries and solidifies.

Concrete is very interesting material, its history is fascinating and the materials science behind it as well.

Such a simple thing in principle, so incredibly complex. Just like glass another one of those materials with vast depth.

<comment><USER4> > Concrete is very interesting material, its history is fascinating and the > materials science behind it as well.

It's one of those deceptively 'unsexy' materials too from an outsider's perspective: think of steel and someone may think of, what, swords? watches? but think of concrete and someone thinks of brutalist architecture and urban decay. But there's no reason why concrete is any less fascinating and complex than steel.

What I suppose I'm saying is that it has a PR problem, and I'm glad people like yourself are leaving comments like that to help solve it :)

<comment><USER5> Isn't the Parthenon cast in concrete? Some very beautiful buildings have been made that way.

<comment><USER4> I believe the _Pantheon_ dome was, not sure about the Parthenon though. But it's definitely very old. A lot older than some people realise I think. But yes, not disagreeing that it can be beautiful. I've seen many beautiful concrete sculptures, but I don't think it's the first thing that springs to mind for many.

<comment><USER5> Ha ha, yeah, that's the one. What was I thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bit about buildings lasting 20-30 years really surprised me. The Pantheon stands for a millennium, but 30-year-old concrete crumbling? The article cites a Goldman Sachs quote from a tumblr [1] notes at the bottom of the list:

        An estimated 25-30% of China's cement capacity is low-grade cement
        not used in other countries (P.C. 32.5 grade).

I'm not a cement/concrete expert, but PC 32.5 does seem to be a low grade. Higher than PKC 32.5 (composite cement) but lower than PC 42.5. So I found this other source that puts it in stark terms [2]:

        According to the China Cement Association, low-grade cement products
        (all 32.5 grade) accounted for 72% of the total cement output in China
        in 2013, with the P.C. 32.5 grade cement accounting for 54%.

So 72% of cement was 32.5 grade, and most of that (54/72%) is PC 32.5. I was a bit skeptical at first, but now I really wonder if/when these structures start to crack &/ crumble.

[1] [http://ftalphaville.tumblr.com/post/100653486301/contextuali...](http://ftalphaville.tumblr.com/post/100653486301/contextualising- chinas-cement-splurge)

[2] [http://pg.jrj.com.cn/acc/Res/CN_RES/INDUS/2014/2/19/c6835c29...](http://pg.jrj.com.cn/acc/Res/CN_RES/INDUS/2014/2/19/c6835c29-bc15-490c-ac73-83b64cdecd86.pdf)

<comment><USER7> I think China is going to suffer an epidemic of infrastructure failure in the near future, perhaps as early as the mid-2020s if the 20-30 years estimate is correct.

For comparison, South Korea's extraordinary growth was followed by a series of infrastructure failures in the mid-90s. A relatively new bridge suddenly fell into a river during the morning rush. A department store imploded, killing over 500 people. Gas explosions all over the place. IIRC none of the major accidents in Korea were caused by low-grade concrete specifically, but there seems to be a general parallel between what the Chinese have been doing lately and the "build now, worry about quality later" mentality that Koreans adopted during their period of rapid growth. Both result in crumbling buildings 20-30 years later.

<comment><USER8> It's already happening. There are high-profile stories of bridges collapsing and so on. I live in Shenzhen right now and was looking for a new apartment during the summer last year. My roommate noted that a lot of the landlords all know that the apartment buildings will be replaced and rebuilt in 20-30 years.

If that's true, the expectation is already there. However, my impression is that this belief stems from this idea that construction will always be happening because that's how the economy rolls.

The question is what percentage of the population believes that this cycle really is the end game and what percentage of the population thinks they're investing into infrastructure what will last their entire life.

<comment><USER7> Most ordinary people either don't understand the cycle, or even if they do, they're powerless to do anything about it.

If what happened in Korea is any indication, the first generation of apartment buildings will be demolished after 20-30 years, homeowners will be "asked to leave" with as little compensation as the construction company can get away with, and a new block of condos will go up that the previous homeowners just can't afford. In Korea, at least we let the previous homeowners file complaints and protest for a while before we send in the bulldozers. In China, the bulldozers will probably go in first, and the GFW won't let anyone else know what happened next.

<comment><USER9> This is an accurate picture of what happens right now in China, but limited protests are permitted by homeowners to haggle the price. An extra complication is Chinese can only own their properties for a maximum of 70 years anyway, with many having only 30 or 40 years left on the state-granted lease, so even without the demolition cycle Chinese aren't really looking ahead more than a few decades anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> according to these stats the US did the same in the last 5 years

[http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of- cem...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cement-in- the-us/)

<comment><USER11> That was the first thing I thought when I saw this stat posted a little while ago. "Fine, the stat sounds impressive, but there's a lot of other stats that other countries do more of in the last few years than in the 20th Century".

For example, anyone could write a dramatic headline declaring that we've created more computer chips in the last X months than in the 20th century. That doesn't mean much.

In short, this feel like some sort of crappy statistic handpicked to make China look bad, when in fact it's the whole world that's using a lot more concrete, not just China!

<comment><USER12> Wait why is this bad? I thought it was crappy statistics handpicked to make China look good!?

Why is progress in countries outside the western civilizations a bad thing?

Don't we want the people who make our iphones and oculus rift headsets and shiny usb-c devices to have apartment buildings to live in?

<comment><USER13> _Don 't we want the people who make our iphones and oculus rift headsets and shiny usb-c devices to have apartment buildings to live in?_

I'd rather they had nice houses instead.

<comment><USER14> Why? So that China experience the 'luxury' of endless suburban sprawl and the myriad of problems it brings. Hopefully China can learn from out mistakes, not repeat them

<comment><USER13> No. Because a house is simply a nicer place to live than a flat.

It's very possible to have nice houses without endless suburban sprawl. They can indeed learn from our mistakes; have nice houses, but without endless suburban sprawl.

<comment><USER14> First of all I absolutely reject your claim that houses offer a priori simply a nicer place to live than flats. Sure there exists certain combinations of price point, geographic location and life situation where it holds, but it certainly isn't a given.

Secondly how are you going to build nice affordable houses for 1.4 billion people without sprawl. Are you suggesting completely giving up on urbanization and going back to having countless tiny villages?

<comment><USER13> There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages. I'm not going to sit here and fill in the gaps in your imagination; I suspect you've already made your mind up.

<comment><USER14> _There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages_

Absolutely, but they either suffer from rapidly rising houses prices or no appreciable population growth. If you stick to a population ceiling of say 50k or so then many problems are easy

But we are talking about about places that are seeing up to a million new people show up in just a few years. Building everybody a nice house is neither realistic nor, in my opinion, desirable. We've either got to re-think the whole "everybody gets a nice house" or try to reverse urbanization in favour of lots and lots of small town capped at around 50k population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In China every building is built with cement. In US most homes are built with wood.

<comment><USER16> From the article:

> And where many houses in the U.S. are made of wood, China suffers from a > relative lack of lumber. Unlike in the U.S., many people in China live in > high- or low-rise buildings made out of cement.

A critical argument, but unfortunately mentioned towards the end of the article. But overall its a interesting article and this gif [0] comparing Shanghai '87 vs '13, from it gives a good perspective of the modernization (akin to images of Dubai).

[0] [https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/Shanghai.gif)

<comment><USER17> Why does such a large geographical region lack wood? Really? Maybe they just don't care and are happy with cement buildings.

<comment><USER18> I am non-American, and I do not understand why (most/some) Americans think think the default/superior housing material is wood. If someone can explain, I'd be happy to learn.

I'm perfectly fine with brick-and-mortar houses (and concrete sky-scrapers). Brick houses have less fuel for fires, better load-bearing properties (pros), although they take longer to construct.

<comment><USER19> > I'm perfectly fine with brick-and-mortar houses

Brick is just siding. What's the frame made out of?

You can use wood, you can use steel, you can use concrete with rebar. Those are your only real options.

In the US, you will frequently see 2-3 story houses framed with wood and with a brick siding. I'm in one right now. Anything higher than 3 stories will be done with steel or concrete.

Wood is cheaper than steel and lasts for hundreds of years if properly cared for, which is why it's preferred for smaller residential structures.

<comment><USER20> >>Brick is just siding. What's the frame made out of?

Man, that is going to be a shock to my house that has all of the outside walls, and parts of the foundation, made from brick. Just because your house has a brick veneer doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.

In my particular the case the floors and roof are made from wood. The floor joists rest on the brick walls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Similar stories have been written about other parts of the world. They didn't have the same impressive aggregate total of concrete (or the ingredient in concrete called cement) used, but there were impressive housing and road construction figures from Ireland and Spain and many parts of the United States before the housing markets collapsed in those countries. China is still at risk for a housing collapse,[1] particularly because workers' incomes are not rising as fast as the cost of newly constructed apartments, and overall national population growth has slowed. Housing construction in China is propelled by many of the same speculative lending practices that propelled the last boom in the United States, and may not result in all those new housing units being occupied by anyone able to pay enough rent to produce a positive return on investment.

[1] [http://www.dw.de/chinas-real-estate-market-weighed-down- by-o...](http://www.dw.de/chinas-real-estate-market-weighed-down-by- oversupply/a-18207416)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/pimco- warn...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/pimco-warns-on- china-s-steel-demand-outlook-as-housing-cools)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/business/international/in-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/business/international/in- china-housing-market-pressure-to-sell-hesitation-to-buy.html)

[http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/02/commentary/wo...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/02/commentary/world- commentary/chinas-real-property-problem-is-in-the-supply/#.VRG-9vnF-So)

<comment><USER22> The fundamental difference between China housing price drop and US is majority of Chinese buy properties with cash or get mortgage with very large deposit like 40%. So the risk of subprime crisis is very low.

<comment><USER23> That was true 10 to 15 years ago. It's no longer accurate. China has become a massive accumulator of debt at the consumer level. While it's not as bad as the US subprime situation was, it is bad and getting worse.

Since year 2000, China's household debt has gone from 8% of GDP, to now 40% of GDP as a ratio (the US is 75% by comparison). Mortgage debt has become a common problem in China. At the rate household debt is expanding in China, they'll be up to 60% in four years or so.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/china- hous...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/china-housing- slaves-helping-property-rebound-mortgages)

<comment><USER22> You still have to put down a 30% deposit for first home and 60% for a second, which is stark contract to 0% down payment or even borrowed down payment in US.

A main reason people buy properties is the lack of other type of investment. The public in general have no confidence in stock market. Housing is the only thing almost guaranteed to make money. As financial reforms such as allowing investing overseas kicks in, we should see money moving away to housing market.

<comment><USER23> 0% down is very rare in the US among total housing ownership. The average person is required to put down 15%-20%. Even during the bubble it represented a very small portion of all housing and lasted for only a few years.

Home equity is about 55-56% in the US for the entire housing market (owner occupied) and has continued to climb since the lows of the post bubble bust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> China went through their industrial revolution far later than the US, this is to be expected, especially with a population ~3x as large.

<comment><USER25> Based on population one might expect 33 years. Would the additional factor of eleven really be expected from the fact that various developments occurred later? ISTM that the Chinese just really prefer concrete as a building material. It isn't as though all new construction in USA is concrete.

<comment><USER26> For houses, America is somewhat an outlier. Most of the world builds concrete houses and America uses lumber.

<comment><USER25> There is a trade-off between permanence and sustainability. Mostly, though, lumber construction is only feasible in areas with lower population densities.

<comment><USER27> Take note that about 20% of the country lives in Earthquake Country, where just about all residential dwellings tend to be built of wood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A rough analogue for changes to the environment in regard to the US might be the logging of old growth forests to fuel construction and urbanization.

</comment><comment><USER29> Typical of exponential population growth. The past few years of any resource usage will be more than all of the resource usage of human history combined.

<comment><USER30> Population growth is not exponential but actually slowing. This is one of many misconceptions about demographics - an absolutely fascinating and important subject which gets little attention in the media or schools.

Here's a nice intro from Joel Cohen, a longtime leader in the field:

[http://www.floatinguniversity.com/lectures- cohen](http://www.floatinguniversity.com/lectures-cohen)

<comment><USER29> The rate may be slowing (as expected), but the overall rate has been exponential until now. Like it took us forever to get to 1 billion, but getting to 7 billion took no time at all from that point.

<comment><USER30> If the growth rate is slowing it is not exponential - a constant growth rate is the definition of exponential[1].

After increasing dramatically during the first half of the 20th century the growth rate has declined for the last 40 years. Looking more deeply into the demographics (by country and age group) it is pretty clear that this decline will continue for many decades to come. The video I linked above goes into some of this.

Most experts currently predict that the world's population will peak (i.e. below zero population growth) middle of this century around 9 billion - although a few say as high as 11 billion or as low as 7 billion. These predictions are way down from just a decade ago.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how much was used to build their ghost cities: [http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities- in-2014-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities- in-2014-2014-6)

<comment><USER22> They are being filled up.

[https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest- post-5-c...](https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/koos-jansen/guest- post-5-chinese-ghost-cities-came-alive/)

<comment><USER32> people ridicule it because it's so different than the american way, which is to severely restrict housing construction to cause enormous increases in price so that nobody can afford to live anywhere without taking out massive loans, while poor people get kicked out of their homes.

<comment><USER33> That is not the "American way". That is the way certain areas behave as they try to fight urbanization, but is not the way most areas behave.

<comment><USER34> Can you give some examples of cities that don't do this? Every single city I'm familiar with does this, though Houston does it less than most places.

<comment><USER35> It's hard to point to examples of cities that don't do it because it doesn't make the news when a new building is put up in Nashville. It doesn't make the news when a law to limit building height is never even proposed in Kalamazoo. It doesn't make the news when Akron's population increases 3% year over year.

It _does_ make the news when San Francisco's residents start getting driven out of the city. It _does_ make the news when Madison limits the height of buildings downtown. Can you give me an example of people who didn't get a flat tire today? Of course not, because that's just called normal functioning.

<comment><USER32> so what you're saying is, the media distorts and amplifies the exceptions in order to create a perception of widespread dysfunction, thereby generating revenues through public outrage?

but this only happens in the US, right? not anywhere else, like... china?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How much concrete did the US use from 2011-2013?

<comment><USER37> cement and concrete are different materials

<comment><USER38> But you need cement to make concrete.

<comment><USER39> Yes, but if you're comparing usage across countries you probably want to compare the same thing; either concrete or cement.

<comment><USER38> Indeed but if you want a pretty good estimate you can just whatever mixing factor is most common in China or the US and convert :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Measuring progress in tons of concrete is like judging programs based on lines of code.

<comment><USER3> Not really. It's more like observing the number of shipping containers going in and out of a country and deriving some rough figures on the economy from there (or trends).

Lines of code have to be examined in detail to figure out their impact, concrete is the universal component of construction, if more concrete is used there _will_ be more construction going on.

<comment><USER40> Loads of code means someone put lots of money into it, same as when loads of concrete is poured. It says nothing of the benefit of the program/structure that has been built.

I don't want to dub any specific piece of software the Three Gorges Dam of code. But it surely is out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I must see this story come up on the internet at least once a month. Why is this so fascinating to people?

<comment><USER42> Pound-for-pound, cement is the largest producer of carbon emissions in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Something like Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns [1] helps explain this ostensibly unbelievable fact. It reminds of a similar statistic about the number of years that passed before a country's GDP doubled. UK did it in 154 years (early 17th century to mid 18th century) and China doubled its GDP in just 12 years [2].

For further reading check out an answer on Quora [3] where I found the McKinsey Global Institute report.

[1] [http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating- returns](http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns)

[2] [http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights%20a...](http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights%20and%20pubs/MGI/Research/Urbanization/Urban%20world%20-%20Rise%20of%20the%20consuming%20class/MGI_Urban_world_Rise_of_the_consuming_class_Full_report.ashx)

[3] [http://www.quora.com/What-dont-we-know-about-the-Chinese- eco...](http://www.quora.com/What-dont-we-know-about-the-Chinese-economy)

</comment><comment><USER44> "The growth in any doubling time is grater than the total of all the preceding growth" So maybe any developed country including the U.S. did the same.

</comment><comment><USER45> How about comparing lumber usage? The U.S. may not have used as much cement, but we probably had more wood available.

P.S. I imagine using cement is more eco-friendly.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Your imagination is wrong, sadly. The cement industry accounts for nearly 5% of global CO2 emissions, about half of which comes from the chemical decomposition of calcium carbonate (which is how you make cement).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> so what,as a Chinese I still can't afford a house

</comment><comment><USER47> I think what is not being discussed is debt. Debt is used to finance this type of growth.</comment>


Religion Is Disappearing. That's Great for Politics - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/pew-survey-religion-118834.html#.VXmWkhNVhBd

<comment><USER2> If I have to choose between some pretty acceptable dogmas and the wild materialism, I will choose the first without thinking twice. I will add that I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian if it matters.

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a false dichotomy. Edit: removed unneeded snark, my apologizes

<comment><USER2> Well, on theory, yes, but in practice, it's a dichotomy. I strongly believe that materialism counters progress. For example, if we all believed in a greater mission for our civilization, all our efforts would be focused on building space ships and space colonization, not wasting efforts in buying a bigger home, a newer car model, buying new fancy clothes, getting a crazy haircut, and so on. Yes, there are people who are not on the either extreme today, but these are not the majority. I am happy that geeks start to embrace minimalism, simplify life, and focus our limited seconds on this planet in something productive, but, again, we're a minority. The majority needs guidance and religion has been effective for the masses so far.

<comment><USER3> ok, I will just chalk it up to semantic differences then. :)

To Terry (dead comment below): God should implement a "show dead" feature on the universe. Huge fan of your work, btw.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Goldman Sachs hacking my website? - <AUTHOR> http://videality.blogspot.com/2013/09/is-goldman-sachs-hacking-my-website.html

<comment><USER2> If the directive of Goldman Sachs wants to hack your website, the break attemps will come from the NSA offices (and probably you won't notice them in your logs after they got in). But individual persons (that could have an IP in that range, or get an unsecured access point) and individual computers (parts of botnets, running trojans, something that works as a proxy, etc) are everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> C: It's obviously just a piece of malware on one or two of their computers doing automated scans.</comment>


What is TF-IDF? - <AUTHOR> http://michaelerasm.us/tf-idf-in-10-minutes/ <comment><USER2> Lucene is moving away from TF-IDF to BM25 as the default. Pretty similar idea, but tends to performs a better with short content.

[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-6789](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-6789)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25)

In the very limited test cases where I've compared them it hasn't mattered much, but other's results are pretty compelling.

[https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-bm-vs-lucene-default- simil...](https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-bm-vs-lucene-default-similarity)

<comment><USER3> Vector Space replacing or being combined with TF-IDF approaches is new way of summarizing and searching for meaning in documents...

[http://18.104.22.168/TuataraSum/example_context_control- ml2.html](http://126.96.36.199/TuataraSum/example_context_control-ml2.html)

<comment><USER2> Interesting. This basically uses the background word2vec data for the entire Web to provide more information and help with things like disambiguation, synonyms, etc? Am I understanding that correctly?

Maybe nit-picky thought, but its not clear to me that the TF-IDF part is what's doing a lot of extra lifting there.

Do you know of any good evaluations between using vector space data and other methods for summarization?

<comment><USER3> Word2Vec was a fork or based on a more exhuastive vector space approach here [https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/1234...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp- tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence- berkeley-national-lab)

I've compared the summarization to others like OTS [http://libots.sourceforge.net/](http://libots.sourceforge.net/) which I believe strictly relies on TF-IDF and it seems better and allows for context to control the summarization.

Other similar approaches might be based on Latent Semantic Analysis, Latent Semantic Indexing or LDA.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Translate IDF to "how uncommon is this word in the corpus?"

TF-IDF is acronym soup, but mathematically simple: IDF is a scalar applied to a term's frequency. And in the comparison, the numerator is the document overlap score and the denominator is the square root of the two documents. For more, Stanford's natural language processing course is the bee's knees: [https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture/preview](https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture/preview)

</comment><comment><USER5> TF-IDF solves an important problem and it's good to know about.

However, in some applications, such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and its generalizations, there are practical alternatives such as log-entropy [1] that I've found to work better in practice.

[1]: [http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03203370#page-1](http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03203370#page-1)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's an interesting demo I made where you can type or paste in words to get a sense of their IDF ( [http://tpoem.com/test/dict/test_dictionary.html](http://tpoem.com/test/dict/test_dictionary.html) ).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's also used in AI-based document summarization systems that are worth millions e.g.

Yahoo Paid $30 Million in Cash for 18 Months of Young Summly [http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in- cash...](http://allthingsd.com/20130325/yahoo-paid-30-million-in-cash- for-18-months-of-young-summly-entrepreneurs-time/)

Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/google-buys-wavii-for- north...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/google-buys-wavii-for-north- of-30-million/)

<comment><USER7> Also used extensively in Lucene based search engines such as Solr and Elastic. Most companies running search use a Lucene-based search engine.

[https://lucene.apache.org/](https://lucene.apache.org/)

[http://lucene.apache.org/solr/](http://lucene.apache.org/solr/)

[https://www.elastic.co/](https://www.elastic.co/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this similar to the concept used by Amazon's "statistically improbable phrases" (word-based instead of n-gram based)?

EDIT: according to SO, yes: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/2009546/489590](http://stackoverflow.com/a/2009546/489590)

<comment><USER9> Yes! Although ...

"Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you."

TF-IDF is old, and very cool. n-gram based extensions of it are a bit newer, but are likely implemented in almost exactly the same way. N-grams just require a lot more compute power because your corpus grows faster than a plain ol' bag of words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice job explaining a fundamental IR algorithm.</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle pathological customers? - <AUTHOR>

We have problem in our bootstrapping business. Occasionally, or better to say more often than we would like, we run into 'pathological customers'.
We wonder what is the best way to deflect and handle these kind of customers. Basically, in our case, 'pathological customers' which do the following:
- they complain that "something is not working" or "have problem understanding" in order to extent free trial
- they complain about performances (everything is slow)
- if they pay, they pay the lowest plan ($4/month in our case) and only monthly plan but they require constant attention
- very often they want to use the service in different way that it is meant to be used
- in general they are not our target market (i.e., mainly geeks)
We looked our Streak history (btw, excellent CRM plugin for Gmail) and found that majority of emails/complains come from that kind of customers.
We want to have good customer support but we think we spent too much time on 'pathological customers' and too little working with our target customer segment.
In short, how to 'fire customer' but still be nice. <comment><USER2> offer a refund and an apology, and close the account. If you can't come up with a genuine apology, just do the refund. Just make it clear that you are closing the account with the refund. (I mean, don't just close the account, say something like "If you don't think the service is suited to your needs, we can give you a full refund and close the account"

If they do find genuine problems (and being slow is a genuine problem, even if the slowness is in some other part of the network, it's your problem.) apologise in a genuine manner. If you can explain why you made that choice (for example, hosting your servers far away from the customer) that helps, too.

The cheaper the customer is, the more pleasing the refund will be to them. And even non-cheap customers seem to respect you for the refund, if you take the attitude "I don't need to charge people that aren't getting value out of my service" of course, if the user isn't getting value out of the service, the user doesn't need to keep using the service.

On top of that, it's very important to clearly define what you will and won't do for the customer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've spent most of my career in e-commerce and I've dealt with these people for years. Your best recourse is to get rid of them, quickly. Seriously. Why allow them to drain your resources when they could be draining your competitor's instead?

Back in the day, I worked for a large e-commerce company. We started a project to track customer value. Simplified, customer value = total_purchases - (total_returns * return_processing_cost_factor) . We had customers who had made dozens of purchases but had negative value to us because they returned almost everything they ordered. We wanted to keep free, no-hassle returns but these people were abusing us. The only solution? Get rid of them as quickly as possible. We discussed--half seriously--giving them gift certificates to competitors and even closing their accounts. There are plenty of less-harsh methods, too. We talked about identifying their Caller ID when they called customer service to make a return and intentionally putting them on hold for a little bit longer.

Since you aren't really an e-commerce company, your solution will be different. Figure out a metric for customer value and act on that metric. Whether it's discontinuing service, or moving them to slower servers, or de- prioritizing their customer service inquiries, look for ways to gently encourage them to go elsewhere.

You can't feel too badly about this. There are some real leeches out there, happy to bleed you dry and maximize their benefits while minimizing your profits. These people ruin good things for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Try setting up a forum, and create a support section that is only available to paid users above a threshold. When your pathological customers try to email you can nicely point towards your forum and say sorry, you are not the support team but they are welcome to ask questions on the proper forum. If they want to upgrade to access support, then you'll at least be making some money for your time. Use a private support email or token system if you can for your paid users. I've seen a company use Twilio and OpenVBX with a custom module, where paid customers get a number to access phone support, otherwise they get a voicemail saying 'buy support to call us'.

</comment><comment><USER5> Raise your prices until they leave. Give them a 30 day notice before raising the prices. Enjoy your new found peace.

Don't explain anything to them. No tutorials. Nothing. These people can't be taught.

</comment><comment><USER6> You could use this as an opportunity to develop some good tutorials or similar. Also, people like that tend to be emotionally needy more than anything else. Emotionally needy people tend to want attention. If you can email back a link to a tutorial instead of doing personal handholding, they will start going elsewhere for their addictive little emotional crap. The trick is to be genuinely helpful with the technical issue (so they don't have a new excuse to be wrapped around the axle about you) while not feeding their sick need for attention.

(This was me at one time: Desperate housewife with chronic health problems -- and often heavily medicated to boot!, so lots of trouble focusing on the task at hand. Customer support hated me and often lacked the savvy to discourage my long tangents they did not want to hear.)

<comment><USER7> This. Documentation will become your best friend. Treat every new inquiry as an opportunity to create a mini-tutorial. With some doctoring up, you can usually use the guts of emails you've sent to clients in the past. These don't have to be lengthy or detailed, just a quick, basic step-by-step on how to handle the most common tasks and issues that may come up. As your documentation builds up over time, dealing with these people will become easier. Instead of writing out the same responses over and over, you thank the customer for writing and give them a link to the appropriate article. Eventually you can train most them to try looking at your documentation _first_ and limit the inquiries coming in to more serious issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What percentage of your customers is this? If it is 1% then you probably want to refund them and close the account. If it is 20% then your company is the problem. Or you are missing an opportunity to address a different need.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are these people who are just causing problems or just want things other than what you are providing? Those are two different problems with two different answers.</comment>


Three Mile Island Lessons for Covid-19: FEMA and Me - <AUTHOR> https://www.cringely.com/2020/04/15/three-mile-island-lessons-for-covid-19-fema-and-me/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is part one of a two part essay.

Part two: [https://www.cringely.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lessons-from- th...](https://www.cringely.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lessons-from-three-mile- island-2-the-nrc/)</comment>


Tech Giants Vow to Tackle Online Hate Speech Within 24 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-31/tech-giants-vow-to-tackle-online-hate-speech-within-24-hours <comment><USER2> Why are people so easily offended these days? why can't they just filter out the comments based on their content (like I do for example) instead of forcing their "safe spaces" on rest of us.</comment>


China to lift ban on Facebook, Twitter, NYT within Shanghai free-trade zone - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1316598/exclusive-china-lift-ban-facebook-only-within-shanghai-free-trade-zone <comment><USER2> The Shanghai Free-Trade Zone comprises about 2% of Shanghai's Pudong district or less than 0.5% of the greater Shanghai area. Other reports[1] from the SCMP indicate the government may want to make the entire Pudong district a free trade zone if things develop smoothly.

Pudong is home to most of Shanghai's finance industry. The FTZ however is centered on the Yangshan Deep Water Port. (Map of the FTZ [2], yellow neighborhoods) The loosening of Internet restrictions around a _port_ gives credibility to the idea that Pudong in general will see more developments like this to come. This is significant because those initiating the plans to expand the FTZ in Shanghai have faced the strongest _resistance_ from China's finance and banking regulators[3]. Most banks in China can not engage in international commerce directly so outside investments usually entail setting up a complex JV with a China based company with terms that strongly favor the embedded players.

What's interesting to see here is the government is using the opening up of Internet restrictions as a carrot in part of a larger play to promote economic growth while the opposition is coming from the entrenched players in an industry which otherwise stands to make huge gains by introducing more competition. Framed like that, the situation is very analogous to American cell phone carriers with regards to spectrum control.

[1] [http://www.scmp.com/business/banking- finance/article/1303462...](http://www.scmp.com/business/banking- finance/article/1303462/shanghai-free-trade-zone-may-be-extended-cover-pudong)

[2] [http://www.waigaoqiao.gov.cn/SysAdmin/upfiles/2006-4-27/6328...](http://www.waigaoqiao.gov.cn/SysAdmin/upfiles/2006-4-27/632817353665707532.jpg)

[3] [http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1282793/li-fought- str...](http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1282793/li-fought-strong- opposition-shanghai-free-trade-zone-plan)

<comment><USER3> Interesting - but I have to ask, what's with the italics?

<comment><USER4> I almost missed them, but now that you've pointed it out I can't _not_ notice it.

Maybe the _port_ isn't really a port, but the nerve center of China's secret Internet resistance? Which is why it's _resistance_ and not resistance.

Sorry, couldn't resist it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does it come with an arrest if your post gets liked 500 times, too?

[http://www.dailydot.com/news/china-teen-arrested- rumors-500-...](http://www.dailydot.com/news/china-teen-arrested- rumors-500-retweets/)

<comment><USER6> Because other countries would never detain you based on what you said on a social network...

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/think-before-you-tweet- why-...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/think-before-you-tweet-why-two- teenagers-were-refused-entry-to-the-u-s/2802)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby- de...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby- death-11-people-UK-arrested-making-racist-anti-religious-comments-online- British-soldiers-death.html)

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/12/kent-man- arrested-...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/12/kent-man-arrested- burning-poppy)

<comment><USER7> Two wrongs don't make a right?

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, but every post like this is followed by a nay-saying comments.

This is a step in the right direction for China, why tarnish a positive with a tangentially related negative, sarcastic and dismissive comment?

Furthermore the 500 likes/shares rule, is at least a rule (even if it is ridiculous), in the rest of the world it tends to just be done at random, cherry picking laws to get a prosecution.

China is no saint, we all know that, but surely relaxing restrictions should be seen in a positive light and as a sign of overall progression?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps they are planning to trial a new foreign commercial intelligence gathering platform with high value trade targets who would congregate in that zone?

Fun fact: when the new Shanghai port opened ~2004ish, I did the voiceover for the promo video. (I was double sure to include the phrase: _My voice is my password. Verify._ )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some context: I don't actually know how useful this will be. Most foreign companies already use VPNs to Hong Kong or the US. Almost all the expatriates I know have personal VPNs set up as well. Astrill ([https://www.astrill.com/](https://www.astrill.com/)) is the name I've been hearing nowadays.

I also discovered recently that more tech-savvy locals can also buy ways to jump the "Great Firewall" ridiculously easily - even right off of Taobao, which is the Chinese version ebay. (If you're interested, just search for "IP代理." I think it's about 8-15 RMB a month?)

This free-trade zone is tiny, and in the middle of nowhere. [Edit: things may be different if it's by Shanghai's port; I wasn't aware of that.] The most potentially exciting part about this news is that the government is _thinking_ about extending this relaxation to all of Pudong, which is home to Shanghai's new financial and business district. Pudong effectively the CBD of Shanghai, but otherwise essentially is like the south side of London's Thames: most people live on the other side of the river, where the culture, excitement and history is. In other words, the vast majority of Shanghai's 20 million residents _still_ won't be able to access Facebook... which is why this isn't half as big of a deal as it appears. Then again, I suppose it is exciting that there will now be a portion of mainland China where the government is actively letting people access Facebook.

<comment><USER10> The GFW isn't as big a problem as the shitty broadband in China. $50,000 USD/month buys the equivalent of a $99/month Time Warner business connection. The GFW is a problem because every router in the country is doing filtering and dropping connections, causing high latency and making broadband very expensive.

I agree that this means little for Facebook or Twitter, but it likely means that in a few years multi-nationals will actually have usable video- conferencing and internet connectivity that works and doesn't cost a significant fraction of each employee's salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time to set up a VPN endpoint in Shanghai :)

<comment><USER11> You didn't already have one to get past the wall in the first place? :P

<comment><USER6> Several ;) But they all require hops out-with the country

<comment><USER11> I see what you're thinking there. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Symbolically it could mean a lot. Imagine a tiny part of the US where gun ownership is completely banned. How would the Republicans react to that? I still doubt if the leftists in China would really let this happen.

<comment><USER13> You mean like Washington DC? Plebeians are unarmed, and every political stooge is surrounded by armed guards with automatic weapons.

<comment><USER14> Gun ownership is not completely banned in DC. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_District_of_Col...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_District_of_Columbia)

<comment><USER15> Concealed carry is prohibited, which is clearly what he's referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So if someone ran a proxy within the FTZ, everyone could proxy through that out to the free world?

</comment><comment><USER17> It might be a good place for companies like Amazon to set up a data center there.

<comment><USER18> Azure is already in Shanghai and inside of the firewall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great! Finally China can be as shallow and self-centered as the west. Can't wait to see chinese people posing with their friends "having fun" or pretending to eat sushi for that extra cultural and intellectual status.

<comment><USER20> "eating sushi"? - wrong country...

<comment><USER19> Eating sushi because it's not local, ie. exotic. Since facebook was introduced it's one of the ways to promote yourself and your supposed extraordinary lifestyle online.

<comment><USER21> The GP may have been pointing out that many people in China still have hard feelings over WWII atrocities. I have a Japanese friend who pretended to be Korean when she was living in Beijing because of the hostility she experienced. I think the most blatant hostility she experienced was when her cover was blown because her mother (who can only understand Japanese) called while she was in a cab. The cabbie heard my friend speaking Japanese, and because of that pulled over and made my friend get out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> anyone know roughly how many users this will be?

<comment><USER23> not very many as the free trade is mostly unpopulated and mostly filled with construction sites and no residential buildings. Maybe after more companies move their offices there you will see more users. But they will all only be able to access facebook only from their office so it is not like there will be that much new traffic to these sites

<comment><USER24> And when the companies move there, they'll just end up blocking facebook anyways to increase employee productivity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> These countries, Iran and China probably knew that Facebook is a huge spying machine and kept their citizens safe.

<comment><USER26> <snark>

More like, they didn't want any competition with the government. </snark>

<comment><USER27> Ma Huateng (Tencent's CEO, aka the boss of QQ) isn't the government. He's just married to the daughter of a _very_ prominent party member. But ... I can't remember who. (It's either Wen, or Hu - one of the former big two). And it's not on the front page of Google (black hat SEO?).

<comment><USER28> I think by competition he/she meant spying and not social media?</comment></comment></comment></comment>