Russia Bans 1.8M Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/russia-bans-18-million-amazon-and-google-ips-in-attempt-to-block-telegram/ <comment><USER2> The founder of Telegram has just put this in his public Telegram channel - [https://t.me/durov](https://t.me/durov):

"For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason was our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.

Despite the ban, we haven't seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for the rest of our users.

Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.

Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram's organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is personally important for me to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.

To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally."

<comment><USER3> sadly Telegram seems down right now

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A few months ago I read an article about Telegram and their related companies and individuals. [1] The article read like a mix between a nerdy James Bond story, a bad Law and Order episode, a Mexican soap opera and a Russian episode of Cribs. It was written by an ex-employee so I took it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the article brings up a lot of red flags and shady behavior. Combined with their (alleged) connection with the Russian government, roll- your-own-crypto and the recent >billion dollar ICO it doesn't really make me all that willing to use Telegram any time soon.

[1] [https://email@example.com/pavel-durov-sued- senior-...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/pavel-durov-sued-senior-tech- lead-for-1-7-b24961dec503)

<comment><USER5> "roll-your-own-crypto" == DH-RSA-AES with GPL implementation? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(service)#Encryption_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_\(service\)#Encryption_scheme)

<comment><USER4> Sure.

[https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf](https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2017/project/19.pdf)

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why block Telegram and not .. all the others? Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, ... Are they objecting to the use of encryption? Because everyone uses encryption almost all the time for everything everywhere. The cat has been well and truly released from that bag. Are they just going to turn off the internet altogether?

<comment><USER7> Telegram is not the most popular messenger in Russia. It's not even in top-3 as far as I remember. But it is widely used by people who tend to be opposite to the current government (young professionals). Also, there are a lot of anonymous Telegram channels curated by the opposition.

<comment><USER8> It's going to take those people a hot 15 seconds to find another provider and switch.

<comment><USER9> Not only Telegram still working here, but it was a great experience yesterday.

Imagine the following: a manager in a supermarket explaining how to setup a proxy to a customer so that she (a woman in her 60s) could use their bot again.

Or a woman with a kid who is asking what the are going to do: "It's okay, we'll ask dad and he's going to do proxy-something".

Cyberpunk is now.

<comment><USER10> Similar things long going on in Crimea for the same reasons established by the other side (whatsapp and viber are blocked by whatsapp and viber owners correspondingly). When I was there, everyone seemed to have a vpn on their phones and getting it installed was none of a problem. Smarter people are better!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can watch how internet is dying here [https://2018.schors.spb.ru/](https://2018.schors.spb.ru/) Graph represents a number of blocked IPs.

<comment><USER12> That's quite a lot, It be funny to see how far this will go with Telegram still functional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And they also ordered Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores. I understand there are workarounds, but I'd really like them to respond with "f*ck yourself". It's a shame they won't do that, though.

<comment><USER14> And here is another yet problem with walled gardens. It creates a single failure point because Apple and Google are forced to comply with local law, regardless of how absurd it is, if they want to continue doing business there.

In an open environment, you would simply change the mirror urls and run apt- get update.

<comment><USER15> The Telegram client is available on F-Droid, so you can still use it even if you opt-out of the walled garden.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately Telegram-FOSS from F-Droid doens't have GCM support so won't be notified about DC updates via push messages.

I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google actually helps.

<comment><USER17> > I this particular case the centralization around the push service of google > actually helps.

No, it does not, and you even argued why. This centralization makes it harder to make the system more resilient.

We need an alternative to GCM.

<comment><USER16> I'd argue that in this case the centralization helps because blocking GCM would kill all notifications for all apps. As long as they (Russia) are not willing to do that Telegram can use this as a side-channel to update their IPs for all clients.

The other option would be for google to turn push notifications off selectively for Telegram and only in russia. Not sure if they can/will do that.

<comment><USER18> If Google will comply with an order to remove apps from the store in certain regions then they can certainly comply with orders to filter push messages destined for specific apps as well.

<comment><USER19> These are very different actions though, I doubt they would be seen as equivalent to any of the parties involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a pull request with 127.0.0.1 in it.

[https://github.com/zapret- info/z-i/pull/10/commits/8394b2026...](https://github.com/zapret- info/z-i/pull/10/commits/8394b2026cf9e81bb9392e6cef549848a161369f)

Wonder if they'll merge it.

<comment><USER21> It a repo of "leaked" blacklist. Roskomnadzor don't publish it to public and share it only with ISPs.

<comment><USER22> They do publish it, but here: [http://eais.rkn.gov.ru](http://eais.rkn.gov.ru)

<comment><USER21> Where? It's just a way to check single domain/ip/page if it's blacklisted or not. They don't give access to entire blacklist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe the goal of the Russian government was to block the Amazon and Google APIs in the first place, and they used Telegram as a convenient excuse. Just a thought.

<comment><USER24> Usually Russia don't play that smart. Wondering how would they replace those services.

<comment><USER25> It would actually seem like an ideal way to force the adoption of native cloud service replacements (regardless of quality or competitiveness of the offering). Russia has tended to go that way with most things, whether Mail.ru, VK or Yandex. Russia has a very long history of being insular like that and the powers that have dominated Russia the last century have a vested interest in keeping it that way.

<comment><USER26> The only reason why local hosters are making money is local personal data law which restricts that PD of russian citizen should be stored inside Russia, because their prices and level of service is non-competitive to i.e. DO or OVH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting to see which regions they're blocking, and how much they're blocking in each region. For IPv4 addresses only:

        Region          Desc                        IPs       Blocked   % Blocked
        ap-northeast-1  Asia Pacific (Tokyo)         1984800    786451     39.62%
        ap-northeast-2  Asia Pacific (Seoul)          459024    131073     28.55%
        ap-northeast-3  Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local)     65808         0      0.00%
        ap-south-1      Asia Pacific (Mumbai)         524560     65542     12.49%
        ap-southeast-1  Asia Pacific (Singapore)     1067552    425990     39.90%
        ap-southeast-2  Asia Pacific (Sydney)        1147168    163852     14.28%
        ca-central-1    Canada (Central)              196880         3      0.00%
        cn-north-1      China (Beijing)               231456         0      0.00%
        cn-northwest-1  China (Ningxia)               100368         0      0.00%
        eu-central-1    EU (Frankfurt)               1049888    787013     74.96%
        eu-north-1      EU (North tba)                 65808         0      0.00%
        eu-west-1       EU (Ireland)                 3757344   1966319     52.33%
        eu-west-2       EU (London)                   393488    131087     33.31%
        eu-west-3       EU (Paris)                    131344         1      0.00%
        sa-east-1       South America (Sao Paulo)     491808     65536     13.33%
        us-east-1       US East (N. Virginia)       10317600   4260203     41.29%
        us-east-2       US East (Ohio)               1179920    131079     11.11%
        us-gov-east-1   AWS GovCloud (US, East)        65552         0      0.00%
        us-gov-west-1   AWS GovCloud (US)             131088     32768     25.00%
        us-west-1       US West (N. California)      1311536    196642     14.99%
        us-west-2       US West (Oregon)             4917552   1769549     35.98%
                        Total                       29590544  10913108     36.88%

</comment><comment><USER28> Just in case previously when same thing happened with service called Zello and back then Amazon cease to provide them service (forbid to change IPs) before actual subnets were banned. Soon we'll see how Amazon / Google will react on Kremlin bullying this time.

<comment><USER29> If they don't cancel Telegram's service, their other customers who are also being affected by the ban will flee to other services. I don't think they can sit and watch that happen.

<comment><USER30> > will flee to other services

That's not something you can do very fast, especially not from google's compute engine or AWS.

Yes, eventually, they will, but that's a massive task for most companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, Telegram is blocked. But Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are still online. Hence, this is pushing users of a (relatively) country-neutral service, towards more American services.

Seems like a weird move for Russia.

<comment><USER32> This may also mean that Facebook is complying with the Russian government demands for at-will access to WhatsApp and Messenger content.

<comment><USER33> > _WhatsApp_ and Messenger content. (emphasis mine)

Isn't WhatsApp supposed to be end-to-end encrypted making it next to impossible even for developers (Facebook Inc. in this case) to access the transmitted messages' content?

<comment><USER34> Wasn't it WhatsApp that sent a key back to Facebook servers? Technically it's end-to-end encrypted, but Facebook could decrypt it if they really wanted to.

<comment><USER35> Do you have a source for this claim?

It does not sound correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The first round of the fight is clearly won by telegram - roscomnadzor is perceived as a lumbering and inept gorilla whose actions harm innocent bystanders while telegram continues to work almost perfectly.

Next we will see how effective the deletion of the telegram app from the Russian app stores will be. Because of the centralized nature of the stores telegram can't do much with it (they can try publishing clones of the client under unaffiliated entities, but apple and google can easily ban those too). Also it is rumored that the client uses push notifications to deliver proxy settings to devices and these also can be easily blocked by the store owners.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER16> Not much rumor there, it's right in the spec: [https://core.telegram.org/api/push-updates#service- notificat...](https://core.telegram.org/api/push-updates#service- notifications)

It's also actually pretty clever.

<comment><USER36> Thanks, good to know. And to open _that_ page I had to use a vpn!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Soon enough, every country will have their own internet. Until the new new internet appears

<comment><USER38> Are you referring to Richard's new internet or Jian Yang's new new internet? Jian Yang's internet is based in China...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here is the blocked IP counter [https://2018.schors.spb.ru](https://2018.schors.spb.ru) The page is in Russian, but the graph should be clear. It's now 16M IP's!!! It causes multiple problems in various services in Russia, but Telegram is still working as is :-0)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://2018.schors.spb.ru/](https://2018.schors.spb.ru/)

16M already.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does this mean that Google/Amazon customers on mentioned IP addresses are inaccessible? If so, I think Google/Amazon will choose to cease the contract with Telegram.

<comment><USER41> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Russia is taking a page out of the China internet playbook. Next it will build out it's own great firewall and slowly unblock services after it gain's control.

<comment><USER43> There the govt builds the controls. Here Twitter, YouTube and Facebook do. No big difference in my book. In terms of outcomes, only clowns get propped up either way.

<comment><USER44> Oh, there's a huge difference. You have alternatives.

<comment><USER45> There is no alternative to Google, Amazon, Youtube, etc. You have tiny, inferior competitors that don't even come close to 10% of the monopolist's market share. Google works very hard to trap you in their ecosystem. Once you're there, escape is almost impossible.

<comment><USER46> Yes, in large part because their service is good.

You're conflating legal restriction on individual behavior with market/individual-preference constraints.

"Life" in general is constrained. We are not trying to get rid of limited options (every choise is between limited options), we're trying to limit totalitarian control over individuals.

That is, behaviour which is artificially constrained by imprisonment, punishment and death for the sake of preserving tyrannical power structures.

<comment><USER45> And the end result are tyrannical power structures that de facto exert totalitarian control. There is very little difference between government- enforced restrictions and those created by global capitalism and its monopolies.

It doesn't matter to me if my rights are restricted by legal means or by corporate hegemonies, in fact the mechanisms in play are so complex nobody can really be sure anymore.

<comment><USER46> No no, people can be _very very very_ sure. The 20th C. tried both of those experiments and in the totalitarian system 10s of millions -- at least -- died.

Having your choices restricted by social cooperation and negotiation (in a market places) is _NOT_ the same as having them restricted by a bully with a military.

This false equivalence is a defense of genocide whether you are willing to own up to that or not.

<comment><USER45> This sums up this stance accurately:

[https://i.imgur.com/Rgvqkln.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Rgvqkln.jpg)

<comment><USER46> Oh no, I'm both British and leftwing.

My sympathy with state action ends however, when the leaders are murders, dictators and rutheless pilliagers of the public's wealth.

Russia's oligarchy stole Russia's wealth after the dissolution of the SU, and here you are equivocating objecting to regimes of murder and abuse with "muh food idle dont be having no choices fur me1112"£""11¬11223

The entitlement and ignorance is overwhelming. You arent owed _two_ major search engines. "Bing" not being bigger is not the same as having to use apps which in encrypt your commnunication because you fear the police will imprison or murder you.

You _are_ owed your political freedom. Which is de jure removed from you in Russia, and the suppression of telegram is _state action_ to supress it further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This used to be a big problem for colo and decidated service providers. You get 2-3 napster/bittorrent/kazaa/... or worse, some website some law enforcement agency finds objectionable ... with users renting/paying for servers and _poef_ entire countries and large isps block all your ranges. Happened all the time.

</comment><comment><USER48> Insane! Telegram is blocked in my country too but they didn't block millions of IPs I think to achieve that!

<comment><USER41> From TFA, Telegram moved to the Amazon and Google clouds to work around the ban, so they needed to block those addresses.

<comment><USER48> Thanks for the information

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> How long until all countries firewall off and whole reason for creating the internet is completely lost.

<comment><USER30> Not much. We need mesh networks across every device - routers, smartphones, long distance repeaters, etc - ASAP to avoid it.

<comment><USER50> Sorry, it will not work.

If your government can pass laws to allow themselves to block any Internet services, it may as well go ahead pass laws to prevent people from circumventing that block.

So, the only defense you have, is to prevent your government from issuing the first law.

<comment><USER51> Probably something like Fidonet model could be sustainable in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> quote from [https://github.com/aspnet/Docs/issues/5832](https://github.com/aspnet/Docs/issues/5832) : "That's not about the Azure's sites only. Almost each of Microsoft's sites is absolutely unusable in Russia now, like: Docs, MSDN, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, Xbox, all of them and many others are almost dead now."

</comment><comment><USER24> 15M IPs blocked. Are they going to block the whole internet??

</comment><comment><USER53> At Telegram their are pulling a troll move of epic proportions, much bigger than the troll move of the Russian government. Let's see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER54> Hm, does that mean other IMs gave their encryption keys to Russian government?

Also could someone from Russia confirm telegram/AWS are blocked?

<comment><USER55> Hello I'm from Russia. And yes, local authorities started blocking telegram IPs. It doesn't work without proxy/vpn.

<comment><USER56> Their DPI is so dumb that it can be easily bypassed just by editing `Host` to `HOst` in http header. BTW ipv6 adresses are not blocked.

<comment><USER57> Wait, assuming they're using TLS and certificate-pinning, the DPI shouldn't be able to read the HTTP headers at all. How does that work?

<comment><USER56> That's right, but basically dpi sends tcp reset in case of https or 302 redirect in case of http before target server response, since it's located nearer. There's a tool to bypass this, so you can read more there. [https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI](https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is [http://zapret-info.gov.ru](http://zapret-info.gov.ru) being DDoS-ed?

</comment><comment><USER24> Can't wait for Durov comments on this. Really interested in the tech details. Any telegram developer here??

</comment><comment><USER58> Russian here. Good job Roskomnadzor. You just taught quite a few people to use VPN -- including me. And, as a side benefit, you created another image problem for Putin's regime (as if he needed any more of that).

I already had Bitlocker on all my PCs, 2FA everywhere, moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and VPN was one of the last privacy-related things I procrastinated on. Now I have VPN on all my desktops and on my phone, turned on by default. And I also switched to 126.96.36.199 for DNS.

Thank you government, I guess?

<comment><USER30> VPN doesn't give you privacy; it only allows you to bypass blocks (and introduce yourself to blocks in other countries or services though). VPN providers can still log your every move.

<comment><USER59> The difference is, VPN providers, unlike ISPs normally don't have your home address and passport info[1]. Some don't have your name at all, unless your traffic leaks your identity - e.g. when you're paying for VPN service with Bitcoin. Even more, they're generally out of your jurisdiction, which acts as some barrier against frivolous requests.

_____

[1] In Russia every ISP is legally required to perform this sort of KYC and keep those records for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Here's what the article should be: Russia bans lots of AWS and GCP IPs to see no riot.

<comment><USER59> It's rather "Russia bans lots of AWS and GCP IPs just because they can." There is no chance of riot happening.

A power play - sure. It's not the first (and surely not the last, unless something unthinkable happens) time our Tsar and his boyars introduce "countermeasures" against "foreign agents" that barely affect anyone abroad, but are essentially showing the world what kind of enforced restrictions Russian serfdom can tolerate for "national security" reasons - if any reasons at all.

When the Soviets had dissolved, Russia had its internal power struggles and was late to this game - but as we've entered this era of _stabilnost '_ (cf. Harmonious Society) we're catching up fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Video about this situation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVFdFoj83a8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVFdFoj83a8)

</comment><comment><USER62> "The internet needs to have a better way to block parts of it without taking down the rest of the internet."

\- Internal communication of the Russian Security agency

</comment><comment><USER63> And yet, Telegram is still working without a proxy or vpn.

<comment><USER7> not everywhere, unfortunately. In my location it's almost impossible to use it without VPN. It also became difficult to send files through it.

<comment><USER64> You can see here how russia has started to "burn": [http://downdetector.com/status/telegram/map/](http://downdetector.com/status/telegram/map/)

(However this might apply: [https://www.xkcd.com/1138/](https://www.xkcd.com/1138/) )

<comment><USER65> Big outages in Kyiv and Milan too?

[https://imgur.com/a/3biqq](https://imgur.com/a/3biqq)

(These look like outliers even considering xkcd population density.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> So what can telegram do if google and amazon bans them in Russia?

<comment><USER67> Use azure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> If this is indeed a blanket banning of AWS and GCP, then I assume that Amazon and Google will soon remove Telegram.

It might be immoral, but it's the fastest solution to the harm this causes to all other affected customers I can think of.

<comment><USER28> So do you think it's good idea for Amazon / Google reputation to cease their service to any SaaS if kremlin dont like it? Unlike many smaller players Telegram might actually afford to pay for even millions of new IPs in thousands of subnets.

<comment><USER68> > So do you think it's good idea for Amazon / Google reputation to cease their > service to any SaaS if kremlin dont like it?

No, but I don't think that's how it would be spun -- I would exect it to be framed as a ToS violation.

<comment><USER28> I not sure how it's can be against ToS because unlike other case Telegram is actually large enough to actually pay for tens of thousands end point IPs easily even on monthly basis.

And Kremlin minions certainly not going to stop ban subnets now even if will be 1:1000 ratio of Telegram's one and other services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> 18 millions now, things go crazy and out of control

</comment><comment><USER69> 18 millions now Things go crazy

</comment><comment><USER70> 16 millions already.

</comment><comment><USER9> 5M as of now.

</comment><comment><USER71> 4.5M already.

<comment><USER72> Correct, they updated it 40 minutes ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Sounds like a good reason to advocate for IPv6

<comment><USER74> If IPv6 was used Russia would ban address ranges instead.

<comment><USER75> I think he meant that only Telegram would be be blocked instead of possibly affecting half of the Internet on the way there. For Telegram it wouldn't be any better.

<comment><USER76> They would still be blocking the IPv6 netblocks assigned to Amazon and Google, only it would be easier because the blocks would be more contiguous.

<comment><USER75> I'm assuming it would be easier having one IPv6 address used only by a single application, that's why. Amazon/Google services would be less affected then. There's a whole different question if government would bother to be that precise, still.

<comment><USER76> The whole point of moving to the cloud was to make themselves harder to block. I don't think they would self-defeat by limiting themselves to a single /64 or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> 18M already

</comment><comment><USER78> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER56> nearly 6 million now

</comment><comment><USER79> ПОШЛИ НА ХУЙ ПИДАРАСЫ!</comment>


Show HN: Sales List – A curated list of tools and resources for salespeople - <AUTHOR> https://saleslist.co/ <comment><USER2> Saleslist without stuff made by Steli Efti is no saleslist :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

A little side project. I would love to get your feedback on this.

Thx!</comment>


Show HN: Get a phone call when a stock hits a certain price - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stock-alarm-market-alerts/id1465535138 <comment><USER2> nice! which technology do you use for Phone Calls (is it Twillio)?</comment>


Extending Emscripten to Support Objective-C  –  Running iOS Apps on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tombo.io/extending-emscripten-to-support-objective-c-running-ios-apps-on-the-web-10e54b854671 <comment><USER2> An exciting development. Perhaps a path to Swift on the web...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Swift support is definitely something we have on the roadmap for things we would like to develop in the future. :)</comment></comment>


Everything You Need to Know about Automating Visual Inspection with AI - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nanonets.com/ai-visual-inspection/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you've been conducting manual quality checks at your manufacturing company, you've probably been over-paying for low productivity and poor quality output. The link explains why AI-powered visual inspection is the future of manufacturing.</comment>


GitHub Load balancer: HAProxy zero-downtime, zero-delay reloads with multibinder - <AUTHOR> http://githubengineering.com/glb-part-2-haproxy-zero-downtime-zero-delay-reloads-with-multibinder/ <comment><USER2> Funny enough we're doing something pretty similar for our external lb tier but instead of a custom proxy we're just using nginx proxying back to HAProxy. Your solution is really nifty though because there aren't two accepts going on.

In the thing that we're trying nginx terminates TCP (and SSL if needed), proxies back to a unix socket where HAProxy is listening. This gives us the best of both worlds: we can reload HAProxy all day long and socket listeners are hitless, and we rarely need to reload the nginx config which comes out of the box with hitless TCP sockets. But it's not quite as cool as this solution because HAProxy and nginx both have to accept.

We haven't decided that we're going to do our internal load balancing this way yet because the listening ports change so often, but if we do I'll probably be working on [https://github.com/airbnb/synapse/pull/203](https://github.com/airbnb/synapse/pull/203) to do it. The PR makes it so that Synapse can manage both nginx and HAProxy simultaneously (to deal with the extra system complexity of an additional proxy). Or we'll try this cool thing out :-P

<comment><USER3> Can you remind me again why HA Proxy isn't hitless? Does it have to do with nproc?

<comment><USER2> When HAProxy reloads, it has to re-bind the sockets that it was listening on. Due to a bug in how Linux implements listen port sharing (SO_REUSEPORT), new incoming connections can get dropped for a very brief (~1ms) period while HAProxy reloads. The Github article and the linked Yelp article both go into detail on this.

The tldr is that in Linux right now there is no way to gracefully drain connections from a listening socket. Many programs work around this by passing the socket file descriptor from the old process to the new process, which is, for example, how nginx works.

<comment><USER3> Right, the 3 way handshake can go sideways during that interim. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why were the Balkans underdeveloped? A geographical hypothesis - <AUTHOR> https://glineq.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-wereare-balkans-underdeveloped.html <comment><USER2> A simpler explanation: Those countries didn't get aid through the Marshall Plan after WW2:

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

Additionally, some of them entered the EU much later compared to other countries, so they haven't received EU's "free" aid for as long as the others, either.

Look how much this type of aid/investment has helped South Korea.</comment>


Ask HN: How to learn design as a hacker? - <AUTHOR> I'm a full stack web dev and hacker by heart. However, all my front-end designs just can't compete with anything delivered by a (semi-)professional designer. Are there any CodeAcademy-like resources that provide actionable advice on how to do better UI design? I'm getting tired of hiring freelancers.<p>I tried hackdesign.org, but figured it was way too high-level and since it's only a blob of links to blog-posts it didn't create any continious learning experience for me. I'm looking for resources that help me with practical problems like whitespace/margins, color schemes, font-sizes etc... <comment><USER2> A little late, but I will add a couple thoughts:

\- Good programming uses sensible patterns to make code maintainable and flexible. Good design does this too.

\- Insanely great programming is a little insane - it breaks the rules. Insanely great design does too. But you can't shortcut to this step - you have to put in the time.

\- For me, I learn the most programming by looking at what other people have written, and modifying it in some way, or applying something to a project of mine. Learning design works the exact same way.

\- I would argue against learning anything like color theory, typography or information hierarchy. This is like take 5 CS 101 classes before beginning programming. You might have a better "foundation", but you will probably get burned out before you even start. That stuff can wait. And it will make a lot more sense when you have some corpus of work to set the context for what you are learning (same with programming).

\- Don't worry about making anything look like "cool" websites. Honestly most trendy designs are simply terrible to use. Design should make the products more enjoyable to use and easier to use. Anything else is intellectual arrogance.

As with programming, I find doing things like katas is really useful. So grab a pen and paper and start drawing. Sketch like this - [http://strongdesignstudios.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/is...](http://strongdesignstudios.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/isospin-website-sketches.png), boxes for stuff and lines for stuff. don't try to add the detail. keep things light and easy to change. use a pencil. then start sketching stuff.

\- make a landing page for a construction company

\- make a page to market an event

\- make an app "page" to find good barbers nearby

You will naturally start asking yourself the right questions. "What information is most important?" "How should information or pages be broken up?" "Who will be looking at this page?"

if you have more questions feel free to email me jeffchuber @ theBIGsearchgiant.com

<comment><USER3> As someone in the same position as the OP, first thanks for the ideas, it is a useful post. But I am a little surprised about advising against colour theory (the only of those suggestions that I actually know anything about).

Sure no need to go into depth, but there are plenty of short easily manageable resources for getting the basics. Before I read a blog post about colour theory I had no idea the concepts even existed. Now I'll use an online tool to help me select colours that will work better together. The effort required is basically a bit of google, and less than an hours reading.

<comment><USER4> I don't think he meant "don't learn color theory". I think he meant don't wait till you know color theory to start designing. Just as you don't need to know Object Oriented theory to start banging out some code, you don't need color theory and typography to start sketching out designs. Its all important in its time, but don't jump in the deep end too soon. You risk intimidation and burn out. Pick it up as you go.

<comment><USER2> exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a grahic / fine artist that has moved into webDev (JS, java, grails) there is no short cut or easy answer to be an all in one coder / designer. You need the basics of graphic design first: COLOR, DOMINANCE, LAYOUT

COLOR: a good color palette will take any project up a notch [http://www.colourlovers.com/](http://www.colourlovers.com/) [http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color- the...](http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory)

DESIGN STRUCTURE: much the same way you create Classes that can be extended, you can do some in design. There are Dominate objects in your code that you use to create other object. \----dominant, subdominant, subordinate Design [http://www.vanseodesign.com/web- design/dominance/](http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/dominance/)

Also, if you create a dominate visual design feature, repeat that element(color / pattern / shape) else where on the site, to build consistency

Also for Page Layout, rules in Photography can be a great help. Looks that the Rules of 3rds [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds)

The most important part of creating anything is inspiration. Pinterest is great for looking at designs, picking what works for you and what doesn't.

You have to understand that all of your early stuff will look like crap. Much the same way we've all said "Wow, that code I wrote 6 months ago is a pile of junk. I'm surprised it's still working."

Alos, buy a sketch book and put it next to your bed. Draw before you go to sleep. Even if you just doodle.

Advanced Typography is not something I recommend right off the bat, as it can lean towards fine art at times [http://www.fromupnorth.com/typography- inspiration-753/](http://www.fromupnorth.com/typography-inspiration-753/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's what I did to start solving this problem: I hired a good designer friend to have weekly design sessions with me.

They've been incredibly helpful, and a lot of fun. Books and blog posts help, but nothing beats having a passionate teacher sit next to you and coach you along.

Here are some recommendations and details on how these go down, if you're interested:

1) Read 1-2 books on design beforehand (I recommend these [1]), perhaps introductory in nature. There are several principles and beginner concepts that you can become familiar with on your own that'll provide a better foundation once you've hired a design tutor or coach.

2) Have a tangible goal to facilitate your learning. Like any art, everything design related takes time, and having something interesting to retain your focus over days, if not weeks, if not months, will keep it fun and meaningful. My tangible goal has been redesigning one of my company's products.

3) Before each session I send my designer a page or two I want to focus on (e.g. client list and client edit pages), goals and sample content, and examples of designs I like for inspiration. We both work on designing those pages independently. We don't share or view each other's work until we're in session.

4) Once we're in session we review our designs and discuss each of our decisions on spacing, content choice, emphasizing this or that via different font styling, coloring, etc. As expected, my designer's work is always superior, but the real eye openers are when he walks me through why that is, especially when he points out how much easier, faster, but more relaxed my eye gets to what it wants on a given page w/his designs vs. mine.

We've had 6 sessions so far and I'm convinced this is the best method of learning design (just as having a private tutor is superior for many other things). If you have someone you can hire for a similar arrangement, at least consider doing so, I highly recommend it.

[1][a] Designing Web Applications (Nathan Barry)

[1][b] The Non-Designer's Design Book (Robin Williams)

[1][c] Don't Make Me Thing (Steve Krug)

<comment><USER7> I haven't read [1][a] but I highly recommend b & c.

The Non-Designer's Design Book is what got me really understanding design after a decade as a developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are quite a few good resources for developers to learn design.

Disclaimer: I wrote a book on this topic, but because of that, I know resources made by other people too.

\---

Sacha Grief's ebook is good for an in-depth example:

[http://sachagreif.com/ebook/](http://sachagreif.com/ebook/)

\---

Design for Hackers by David Kadavy is also well written. He explores the more traditional way to learn design, with the history of fonts, color theory, etc.

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

\---

A different approach might be reading about creativity. My friend Paul Jarvis has some great books about creativity, especially his new one, The Good Creative, if you're looking to get inspired:

[http://pjrvs.com/books/](http://pjrvs.com/books/)

\---

Nathan Barry's design books are great. He also has a course on Photoshop if you're looking to learn.

[http://nathanbarry.com/books/](http://nathanbarry.com/books/)

[http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/](http://nathanbarry.com/app- design-handbook/)

[http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/](http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/)

\---

One of the best books about UI/UX/usability is Don't Make Me Think:

[http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited- Usability/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited- Usability/dp/0321965515/)

\---

Great place for topic-specific books. Some of these are more advanced and intended for designers. I'd suggest these for after you read up on the basics.

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

\---

My book focuses on design fundamentals instead of advanced theory. It's intended as a starting point for things you can do right now. Actionable, focused on building skill instead of knowledge.

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

\---

Email me anytime if you need help. My email address is on the site above.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER9> [http://TeamTreehouse.com](http://TeamTreehouse.com) also has a design course. Covers logos and other things like that. CodeSchool also has a course, but I haven't tried it [https://www.codeschool.com/paths/html- css](https://www.codeschool.com/paths/html-css)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Design lies somewhere between art and science, and that makes it harder to teach and harder to learn. There are universal design rule about what looks good and works well, and even if you can manage to distill what they are and vigilantly apply the rules - it doesn't guarantee the result is good, only that the result isn't bad.

Likewise a person with no knowledge of best practices and the science behind colour and layout can intuitively design something great, and it's greatest where it naturally aligns with design truths and weaker where it strays from them - but it's hard to teach that 'eye' for design that feels what is right when it can't be measured as easily.

My advice is to learn design from a clean-room approach. You can use HTML and CSS to learn design as easily as Photoshop or Illustrator. Use a tool that's comfortable for you to manipulate, and start with empty files. Only bring in the elements you want to use, and experiment with them. Change their size, colour, font, placement, rotation, and style. Try different shades of grey on different backgrounds and get a sense of what is legible and illegible. Try finding a pair of colours thst match and feel good together and recreate that harmony using two different shades you have picked.

There's a lot about design thst you can learn by experiencing it, but the true knowledge happens when you research and play around with things.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've compiled a mini-course[1] that's exactly this -- design for developers. It more or less follows the 80/20 rule of getting you through what you _should_ know without bogging down too much in the narrowly focused stuff that you don't need. It's geared towards beginners too.

[1]: [http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/web-design- basics](http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/web-design-basics)

</comment><comment><USER12> As a former graphic designer and current programmer, i eould say forget about design for hackers and learn design as such.

The most important aspects of design are communication, composition, visual structure and the skill of mixing colours.

Learn to simplify the message to a few elements, make the most important things to really synd out. Also learn about desining with grids to make the result clear, pleasant and harmonious.

Learn about golden section, and how it relates to catching and guiding the viewers eye - look at the works of master photographers and renaissance painters.

To learn about colour theory, go to library, find a classic book(!) about the subject and grab some colour pencils and mix some colours! In short time you will develop an intuitive understanding of using the colour sliders in graphic programs to design harmonious or disharmonious colour scales. Also learn about complementary colours.

If you want to learn to draw, also learn about perspective and valeur (shadows amd lights) and try to imitate different textures.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've often had a similar desire. I see the suggestions here for books and courses, which I don't dispute as good sources. However, I've come across good designers who have not gone through such extensive training. They haven't taken a 3 week course on typography and font selection. Yet their designs look and feel amazing. Do some people just have a natural knack for design while us hackers are forced to go through extensive courses to just get the basics?

I'm personally interested in just a simple list or article on the basics of modern and aesthetically pleasing design. Something like, "rounded corners are easy on the eyes, use them here, but not here." "Button shadows work in a case like this, but not this." "Your background and foreground colors need to complement each other, here's some pairs to try." I have however never ran across such a list/article.

</comment><comment><USER14> Master iOS Design is a free resource that covers the theories and principles of design and then how they are actually applied in design. First couple of sections should be valuable to anybody interested in design:

[https://www.drawar.com/ios/course/design](https://www.drawar.com/ios/course/design)

</comment><comment><USER15> Learning to design well is like learning to code well: You do it a lot until you improve. Examine "good" designs, thoroughly. Keep notes of sites or apps you find attractive, and try to find out why. Emulate those things.

Also, read some actual design theory books. Theory is to design what algorithms are to code.

<comment><USER16> I did this and it worked for me. I taught myself design after finishing a code-heavy computer science degree. I learned how to use Photoshop quite quickly along with some design theory but it took time to get really good.

I used to look at those sites that were popular a few years ago that list well designed websites, and take inspiration from one or several of them at a time by combining the elements to create a new design.

It helped that I was working for a company that wanted a new design created to a brief each week as it helped me to get better quite fast.

Reading a lot of design, UI and UX blogs to understand why things worked was crucial to my development too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> IMHO css grids are a simple and fundamental method for accomplishing good design. I am very fond of Zurb's Foundation [1] as it seems to be the most logical means to my end design. Trying to stay objective in this matter, I would focus on fundamental concepts of design that have already proven the test of time. I think a good example of this would the book; The Elements of Typographic Style [2]

[1] [http://foundation.zurb.com/](http://foundation.zurb.com/) [2] [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Brin...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Bringhurst/dp/0881791326)

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel the same way -- I also tried hackdesign.org and it felt lacking. I think the key to learning design is building a volume of practice, and reading a couple articles on whitespace and color themes won't cut it -- much the same way as taking a CodeSchool Ruby course won't make you a pro Rails developer overnight.

I'm trying to learn more about design and write about my learning process at [http://designwithdave.com](http://designwithdave.com) \-- there's only one post so far, but my goal is to post practice exercises and step-by-step redesigns of existing stuff in order to get better.

</comment><comment><USER19> How did you get good at development? At some level, you practiced by copying patterns and implementing them, learning along the way. The same principle is true for design.

I have a friend who I've seen progress from nothing to becoming a great web designer simply by putting in the hours. My best advice for anybody for whom design doesn't come easy is to take in inspiration (try behance or dribbble) and copy it. Keep copying until you make something worthy of being copied.

</comment><comment><USER20> hackdesign.org is pretty good provided you actually take their advice and look into the materials provided.

For example: there are 5 typography related 'modules' in the top level list.

In module 1. 'Dive into Typography', there are 6 different resources within.

From the one of those 6 resources, here are a list of materials mentioned:

* book - Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals [0]

* book - The Elements of Typographic Style [1]

* book - Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works [2]

* post - Unicode Beginners Introduction for Dummies Made Simple [3]

I've found this to be the norm for most posts, they may not cover absolutely everything about a single topic, but they will most definitely point you to somewhere that will.

[0] - [http://insideparagraphs.com/](http://insideparagraphs.com/)

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Brin...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Bringhurst/dp/0881791326?/)

[2] - [http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Stealing-Sheep-Works- Edition/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Stealing-Sheep-Works- Edition/dp/0201703394/)

[3] - [http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/un...](http://pythonconquerstheuniverse.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/unicode- beginners-introduction-for-dummies-made-simple/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Typography is one element of UI design - I agree with you that the material they provide / you linked to is probably high quality, but there must be a faster and more actionable way to learn to design than to read 3 books on every one of these elements! Imagine someone trying to learn to program: You would (probably) not recommend 3 books on Syntax, Compiler Design and Data Structures to even get started...

<comment><USER21> I'm a design manager, but I also code too. I buy books all the time for my staff.

If you want a single book that covers all major topics with theories and plenty of examples, give this one a go.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592532616/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592532616/)

This is NOT a book on web design. This is book on graphic design and, a good one at that. It covers types, images, graphics, layouts, form.

Simply copying designs in this book will put you ahead of many 'professional' web designers. It's because many web designers do not fully understand what makes a design good (or bad).

Even though my work is all digital, personally I find most of the talented designers are still found in traditional print design world.

You can pick up a used copy for less than $15 shipped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've found Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: Design Sins and Virtues: A Designer's Almanac of Dos and Don'ts to be very useful - each page is dedicated to one design rule, and the justification, tips on use, etc.

[http://www.amazon.com/Thou-Shall-Not-Comic- Sans/dp/032181281...](http://www.amazon.com/Thou-Shall-Not-Comic- Sans/dp/0321812816/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1408117065&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a book, Design for Hackers: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers- Reverse-Engineering-B...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse- Engineering-Beauty/dp/1119998956)

The author also produced a free 12 week email course: [http://designforhackers.com/](http://designforhackers.com/)

<comment><USER24> First of all, thanks for the mention! (I wrote Design for Hackers).

I'll just elaborate so OP and everyone else can get an idea of how I approach things when teaching design.

My goal with the book was to "reverse engineer" everything that comes together to make a good design. In my eyes, the factors of design are always the same (purpose, technology, culture), it's just a matter of understanding how they work together.

OP mentions whitespace/margins. I'm such a white space fiend, I did a whole hour-long talk at SXSW entirely about white space. So, definitely my book talks about that. You can get much better at design very quickly if you forget about everything else (fonts, colors, ornamentation) and just concentrate on white space first.

I also do cover color schemes, and how to build them. If you want an understanding of how I approach color check out the article I wrote "Why Monet Never Used Black"[1].

I also write about font sizes & geometry in design. If you want a sampling of those particular thoughts, Lifehacker picked up one of my tips on the font sizes I always use on projects[2].

Of course, there's also my free email course that creature mentioned.

Hope this helps!

1\. [http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color- theory/](http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color-theory/)

2\. [http://lifehacker.com/stick-to-these-font-sizes-to- simplify-...](http://lifehacker.com/stick-to-these-font-sizes-to-simplify- designs-and-more-1531615325)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm surprised no one has mentioned Cadence & Slang by Nick Disabato: [http://cadence.cc/](http://cadence.cc/)

I found it a gentle but thorough introduction with great references for further reading. I wish I had read this before trying to design apps for the first time - it would have saved a lot of headache.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also, a little late, but a bit over a year ago I created:

[https://github.com/cjbarber/learn-design](https://github.com/cjbarber/learn- design)

And it ended up getting a few stars on Github so I think some people may have found it useful.

> What is this?

> Resources and tools for hacking design together and (alternatively) learning > design.

</comment><comment><USER27> The best book about User Interface Design / User Experience I've read so far is Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis: [http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Use- Create-Interfaces-Applica...](http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Use-Create- Interfaces-Applications/dp/1934356751)

</comment><comment><USER28> I am still far far from being anything someone would consider a designer, but I got a lot out of [http://bootstrappingdesign.com/](http://bootstrappingdesign.com/) \- it focused enough on actionable things that it was pretty much read + implement to get going.

<comment><USER29> This book is awesome! Really glad to see someone mentioned it. It has just enough about design so you can make something that doesn't look terrible. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I feel the same, almost all resources I know are stating the basics but don't iterate on how to use them. Maybe you should also post this question on Designer News [https://news.layervault.com/](https://news.layervault.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER31> Check out Before and After Magazine. I think designers literally see differently than non-designers. He covers general design principles that helped me see things in new ways.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> "Rules of thumb for novice designers"

[http://shazow.net/everything/rules-of-thumb-for-novice- desig...](http://shazow.net/everything/rules-of-thumb-for-novice-designers/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel I should mention 'The Bible' of usability: The Design of Everyday Things [1], which is highly recommended.

[1] [http://amzn.com/0465050654](http://amzn.com/0465050654)

</comment><comment><USER34> Ask a designer friend to send you a big PSD file and use it as a textbook. You can learn a ton just from examining the set up of spacing guides, layer groups, folders, font sizes, shadow effects, etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> I took a course on DesignLab, a platform for learning how to design as a hacker, and it was really good. Learned all the basics of how to MVP my own sites with some polish. www.trydesignlab.com

<comment><USER36> Just signed up for one of these too. Looks like exactly what the OP is looking for. I haven't taken the course yet, so I can't speak to how good it will be, but I like that their approach seems to be learn/build/critique cycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Good design is what I miss most as a skill. As as developer I can ship much faster if I can train myself to design well.

</comment><comment><USER38> just wanted to drop this resource my friend made: [http://www.30images30days.com](http://www.30images30days.com) to try to learn design, he also came from a very technical background so just went that route.

</comment><comment><USER39> funny you ask it like that, there is a book which is literally named "design for hackers" and it is pretty good

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://hackdesign.org/](https://hackdesign.org/) is a really nice collections of design articles, videos and tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER41> designcode.io

FWIW, I think this is the way forward. If you're a front-end programmer and you want to be relevant in five years time you better be a good designer too.

<comment><USER42> isn't think an iOS specific design course?

<comment><USER41> This is where most hackers fall over. Yes, this particular course cares about iOS and associated technologies for it's particular teachings, but crucially it's one of many good ways to learn _design_. Which is of course transferable.

There's no such thing as "design for Windows" and "design for Java" and "design for Linux" or whatever; there's just design. Pick your tools of choice to learn. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nice links.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any one providing Network File System as a service - <AUTHOR> I have an application which uses file system as a storage and stores lots of media files and growing fast. it has very few users that rewriting would not be a best approach. I am looking for a hosted nfs provider<p>* Looks like AWS EFS is only accessible from EC2 and appears very costly (0.30 per GB). * Using s3 mounted with s3fs would be a alternative but its a kind of hack<p>if you have used any providers, could you please share your experience? <comment><USER2> It is unlikely you'll find something like this, since general wisdom is that you really should not run NFS over WAN links (it doesn't deal with latency very well). (and if, then only through VPNs for security reasons)</comment>


Ask HN: Which Project Management/Issue Tracking for distributed teams? - <AUTHOR>

Our team is distributed over several timezones, but this should apply to any people that work remotely.
As an experiment we tried to rely on GitHub issues as a project/task management/time tracking tool as well as issue tracking per se and so far its been a fairly dissatisfying experience. Mostly due to the fact that our needs eclipsed what GH issues supported fairly quickly.
Access Control: Generally speaking we have a 'Client' and 'Management' and 'Staff'. I want to only allow Client to assign issues to Management, which then decides if this Issue is a bug or a feature and reassigns it to the right Staff. I dont want Clients to be able to bother Staff directly. Neither Pivotal nor GitHub do this well. Redmine may be able to help.
Time Tracking: I want to be able to track how much time particular task is taking so that we are able to estimate further tasks better. Pivotal Tracker does this well, alas I dont think they provide a good reporting tool.
Bugs/Issues: Github doesnt allow assignment of an issue/bug to multiple people or the concept of watchers. Sometimes multiple people need to be notified of existence of a bug. Both Lighthouse and Redmine support this better
It looks like one choice is Pivotal in combination with Lighthouse but access control I think is lacking. Another one is Redmine which is not as nice as Pivotal, but allows for finer access control.
What do you guys use and recommend? <comment><USER2> Redmine is what we're using now. It's had a very positive effect on our team's productivity and I wish we'd switched sooner. We've had problems with a few third-party plug-ins but Redmine itself has been very stable.

It's been a long road getting to where we are now. In the past we've used hosted tools on a per-project basis (Assembla, Unfuddle, Basecamp, etc.) and even built our own. Coming to Redmine, hosting it on our own server (which is necessary due to the kind of data we're working with) and customizing it for our projects has been delightful.

Not everything has been dandy, though. For one, getting it installed on Debian was rather difficult. It was actually easier to update Lenny to Squeeze and then install Redmine than it was to get Redmine running on Lenny.

More importantly, the quality of some third-party plug-ins we're using are highly varied when it comes to code quality, usability and / or documentation. The developer community is very active around Redmine, but unfortunately the plug-ins directory and forums are not equally as active.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in the process of building a PM tool for my self and many on the pain points you mentioned are covered. The tool will be simple - any simpler and it would be excel + email.

If you are interested we can talk some more and maybe we can help each other.

<comment><USER4> I am also headed down this same road, we should chat.

<comment><USER3> Drop me a line, I have my contact info on my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> CodeBase - <http://www.codebasehq.com/>

Git repository, issue with watchers, time tracking and more.

I've been using it for about 2 years. It's very feature rich and has a great workflow.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am quite happy with Projecturf, and I like it because it is simple, but it might be too simple for your needs. You might as well give it a try!

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you describe if and how ProjectTurf solves the issues I outlined in my post?

<comment><USER4> Do you think it is better to have a simple/flexible project management tool? Or are certain processes (like web development) too unique and demanding to fit under this umbrella?</comment></comment></comment>


General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy - Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2012/08/15/general-motors-is-headed-for-bankruptcy-again/

<comment><USER2> This is a great article - especially near the end where it compares the VW leadership's focus on product excellence and details:

Martin Winterkorn has a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering, and he has spent his entire career in the automotive industry. At the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, Winterkorn was caught on amateur video sitting in, and studying Hyundai's newly introduced i30, a competitor to VW's best-selling family car, the Golf. Here is an excerpt from a story about this incident published along with the video by The Truth About Cars, an auto industry blog:

        "(Martin Winterkorn) pulled on the adjuster of the steering column, and heard – nothing. At Volkswagen, there is an audible ("klonk!) feedback whenever the steering column is adjusted.

        Immediately, Klaus Bischoff, head of Volkswagen Brand Design was summoned. He pulled on the adjuster: No sound. "Da scheppert nix," exclaimed Winterkorn in his heavy Bavarian accent. "There is no rattle!"

Winterkorn was livid: "How did he pull that off?" He, the blasted Korean. "BMW doesn't know how. We don't know how." He, the blasted Korean, must have found out how to battle the dreaded Scheppern.

Tension is high. This could affect careers. Someone quickly explains that there had been a solution, "but it was too expensive." That gets Winterkorn even more enraged. "Then, why does he know how?" For less money. He, the Korean. There is no answer. Hyundai has beaten Volkswagen at the Scheppern front.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Dear Mr. Woodhill, I am embarrassed for you writing such an article when GM currently has about $40 billion in cash and liquid assets in the bank and is projected to earn about $4.00 per share next year which comes to another $8 billion profit to add to it. GM currently has enough cash in the bank and liquid assets on hand to buy back ALL of it's shares at the current market price if it chose to do so. GM's liabilities per the balance sheet are maybe $15 billion which is very manageable for a company of GM's size. The shortfall in the pension and benefits is estimated depending on who you check it out with between $15 and $25 billion. GM has well over $100 billion on hand in its pension trust fund and the shortfall is payable over many years into the future. There has just been a law enacted which increases the future interest rate expected on the future returns for pension plans that will significantly decrease the present value of the future obligations and GM has billions in tax deferrals to use up. It doesn't matter if GM loses some market share as they are downsizing. What matters is how much profit they are making whether they are first in sales or not. A big problem GM had before was that they strove to be #1 regardless of their profit status or the reputation they were sacrificing to remain first in sales. I will be very happy to send you a contribution to enable you to sign up for Security Analysis 101 as it appears you have never taken that course or need a refresher." -- First Comment. This pretty much sums up the article. Bullshit.</comment>


Modern Perl Released as Free ePub - <AUTHOR> http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2011/02/share-the-modern-perl-epub.html

<comment><USER2> To clarify, in case anyone thinks this is a repeat without clicking through: It's been available as a PDF, but now is available in ePub format, as well.

Thanks, chromatic! I guess now I really do have to buy a hard copy, as well -- show my support.</comment>


A $13B Complaint - <AUTHOR> https://www.novackmedialaw.com/blog/2017/1/19/the-13-billion-dollar-complaint <comment><USER2> This reads like a law firm trying to trigger the Streisand effect, not sure why I should care

</comment><comment><USER3> > 1) We didn't say we are suing JPMorgan. [Huh?]

Why the huh? The author's own point 1 implied the suit was against JP Morgan.

> 1) JPMorgan already has the document, so there is no element of surprise on > the government's side.

<comment><USER4> Yes the author is asking for the document and believes it should be a non- issue because:

> 1) JPMorgan already has the document, so there is no element of surprise on > the government's side.

To which the DOJ responds:

> 1) We didn't say we are suing JPMorgan.

Which is a bit of a confusing response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Headline doesn't need the dollar sign and the word "dollar".</comment>


Show HN: Pushlist – Easily push notifications to your phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.pushlist.me/

<comment> 97-109-107 There's also [https://belt.io/belt](https://belt.io/belt) which I had good experience with for the past two months.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wonder how this app differs from Pushbullet.</comment>


Amy is every developer's wet dream. - <AUTHOR> http://amy.codegeckos.com

<comment><USER2> Feels kinda like an evernote designed around code. I kinda like it..but you should offer some explanation somewhere. I hate having to look around and not know what this does. Also..a way to sign out would be nice. (Unless I missed that. I only perused for about 15 seconds)

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. 'wet dream' reference in title.

2\. Anatomically implausible female assistant.

3\. In yoga pants.

4\. Who calls you 'Honey.'

Yup, sounds about right.

<comment><USER4> i don't understand the anatomically implausible part

i don't think it's yoga pants

lot of people can call you honey. some even use it just to reference other people. like darling is used UK (most annoyingly, gordan ramsay)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just created an account and am not sure what it is for. There's no about page anywhere.

<comment><USER6> I'm never going to sign into something that doesn't tell me what it is first. Never.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> you are going to get lot of criticism for the title, and first page. just a heads up.</comment>


Bill Gates is going to Antarctica - will send notes from there - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/BillGates/statuses/9400453607 <comment><USER2> ...Needs context. Why is Bill Gates going to Antarctica?</comment>


A Markov text generator that learns from the Twitter streaming API - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/TweetOvermind <comment><USER2> Here is a layman's introduction to Markov text generation:

<http://www.in-vacua.com/markov_text.html>

With some code:

[http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/06/pseudo-random-text- markov...](http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/06/pseudo-random-text-markov- chains-python/)

<comment><USER3> Thank god for this... I had no idea what Markov was!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, I built a Markov text generator years ago, and made a PHP bot to crawl web pages to gather text for it, but that was before Twitter even existed. One suggestion might be to add a dictionary of english words and acronyms so that you can weed out nonsense words and other languages. It would probably have a big effect on the accuracy.

I wonder if the code is available anywhere? I'd love to experiment with it myself and see if I can improve on it some.

Edit: I found the code: <http://github.com/OEP/markov>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a rather fun idea, I like it a lot :) So far I'm using a mix of PHP, C, and more PHP and have just set the bugger live here: <https://twitter.com/markov_chains>

<comment><USER6> Wow, yours looks like the quality is much better (especially so considering it just started learning a few hours ago). The OP's is a bunch of meaningless gibberish.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! To be honest, I'm really quite scared by how often its tweets kinda- sorta make sense ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is delightful. What I'd really like to see now is one that could learn from people's reactions to it: pay attention to which of its tweets were retweeted or favorited and try to generate more like those.

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a similar thread on reddit 2 days ago: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c6o1t/i_created...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c6o1t/i_created_a_markov_text_generator_that_learns/)

I pointed out a bot that I run there: <http://twitter.com/twatterhose>

Here's the code: <http://github.com/avar/bot-twatterhose>

And the Markov engine powering it: <http://hailo.github.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> A friend of mine runs a similar bot on Twitter, seeded with Twitter messages it sees:

<http://twitter.com/x11r5>

...on Identica, seeded with Identica messages it sees:

<http://identi.ca/x11r5>

...and on the web, seeded by content from an IRC channel:

<http://www.x11r5.com/>

As the about page says, "X11R5 is an insane geek on Identica, X11R5 is an insane 12-year-old on Twitter."

<http://www.x11r5.com/wtf>?

</comment><comment><USER10> I built something like this for Sunlight Labs' Apps For America contest last summer. It feeds US patent application abstracts to a Markov processor to generate random invention descriptions. <http://eurekaapp.com/>

It's pretty slow (tail call optimization in Ruby would be nice), but what it spits out tends to be pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a reference to a classic hack, Mark V. Shaney, where a Markov-chain generator was used to post to Usenet. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney>)

Bonus tie-ins to HN topics:

Rob Pike was one of the perpetrators (an author of the Go language)

It was featured in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American

(yeah, I wrote one too, after reading the article. I think it's catnip to hackers, like the Game of Life)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry, but I really don't see the benefit for having made this thing-- the tweets it puts out are useless!

Are we just playing around in how to program Markov text generation? Because who cares; they figured that out ages ago.

<comment><USER13> hmm. I can't tell the difference between that and any other twitter feed. Mindless gibberish brain-hand-grenades that take 45 minutes to decipher and turn out to be about a television series I've never seen.</comment></comment>


"Show us a code sample" - <AUTHOR> I see this when applying to many jobs and freelancer sites (most recently Gun.io). They always want a sample of your "best code", but they never explain what criteria they use to measure "best".
Are they looking for incredibly tight code (i.e. Code Golf)? Or something clean and readable that solves a common CS question? What if my "best" code is something that doesn't make much sense outside the context of the project, or if it's proprietary work that I did for hire?
This question just seems like an arbitrary way to get rejected, so how do you respond to it? <comment><USER2> It's a test that you are an actual programmer, a way to probe your tastes and maturity, a measure of your skill (if the code sample is bad) and a starting point for an interview.

For example, I wouldn't hire someone who sends me proprietary code from their previous job, and someone who "solves a common CS question" instead of submitting something advanced and/or useful shows that they are very junior (which is not the same as being careless and incompetent).

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. I have quite a few code samples from libraries I've developed which I can provide. I just wanted to get some insight into the ambiguous criteria for "best".</comment></comment>


Re: our patent application for an evil advertising scheme [Fake Steve Jobs] - <AUTHOR> http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/re-our-patent-application-for-an-evil-advertising-scheme.html

<comment><USER2> Earlier today, I was loading a free, online Flash game in my browser. I also loaded another web page in another tab, which I put upfront...

The ads that were shown before the start of the game were frozen, for as long as that tab wasn't in front.

Yes, people, it has already begun.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait until schools license this patent to force their students to actually learn! It could revolutionise education.

</comment><comment><USER4> This passage by FSJ may highlight the essential difference between Google and Apple in coming years, even as they offer superficially similar services:

 _Google might make a play for this [replacing cable TV] as well. But they'll try to do it without charging money, which will never work. Google's whole world revolves around generating revenue through advertising. And they still think that asking people to pay for something is just a total non-starter because nobody wants to pay for anything anymore.

Truth is, money is the easiest thing to get people to give up. Much easier than asking them to give up their time. Nobody wants to watch ads or futz around with some science project where you have to integrate a bunch of different things and it never works right. _

That is: Google wants people to pay with their attention and time, which Google then resells to businesses for cash. Apple wants people to pay in cash, to save attention and time.

And somewhat relatedly: is there a higher proportion of Apple customers among people who click Google ads (spending their attention freely), or among people who buy Google ads (buying the attention of others, or paying to preserve their own)? I don't have figures but strongly suspect the latter.

<comment><USER5> _I don't have figures but strongly suspect the latter._

You are underestimated the technical ability and drive of apple users, you must understand that most computer users are normal people (including apple). Those ads you see on TV for apple are meant for those same people that the Windows 7 ads are meant for.

On another idea from the quote you took if say apple came out with a TV option under a monthly fee and at the same time google came out with an alternative that was free but had an ad every 15 minutes or something along the lines google, the company who can spend and spend and has the market support, would come out on top even if they had the lesser service. No one should ever underestimate the power of free.

<comment><USER6> Just to throw some alternate perspective in here, I could mention how Spotify offers it's service as a free, ad-supported service and as a paid for service without advertisement.

I thought the advertisements were annoying enough to pay for premium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me very much of a short-story by Stephen Baxter called "Glass Earth, Inc.", which was set in a society where everyone has to watch a daily ad-quota, and is monitored to ensure that they do.</comment>


Torrentz Gone, KAT Down, Are Torrent Giants Doomed to Fall? - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/torrentz-gone-kat-down-are-torrent-giants-doomed-to-fall-160806/ <comment><USER2> Why isn't anyone launching a torrent search site on zeronet? If zeronet needs a killer app to take off, this might just be it?

<comment><USER3> There are a few already. Play is the best one I know, but it has limitations. Its database is limited to recent movie releases and it's sourced from rarbg, so it requires that to stay up for now. The interesting problem is writing a torrent site that can run on a distributed network such as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> is it too risky to host it on TOR?</comment>


Starbucks to Offer Free Wi-Fi at All US Stores - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/06/14/starbucks-free-wifi/

<comment><USER2> At all stores in the USA. Not worldwide.

<comment><AUTHOR> Title updated. Thanks.</comment></comment>