GitHub Major Service Outage - <AUTHOR> See https://status.github.com <comment><USER4> A bit weird. GitHub says they fixed it, but on the other hand CircleCI still considers it as an outage :

> Monitoring

> May 31, 2017 3:08 PM

> GitHub have declared the outage resolved and we are starting to see incoming > GitHub hooks. Builds are being triggered again. However we are still seeing > failures with the GitHub API. This continues to prevent our webapp > from > fetching data from GitHub. We are monitoring the situation and will ensure > sufficient capacity for when their service resumes normal operations.

<comment><USER5> Maybe fixing the problem is different than recovering? Like stopping blood loss vs slowly replacing the blood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good thinking on GitHub's part not using github.com/github/status to host the content of status.github.com. Amazon, take notice.

<comment><USER7> Were they doing this before amazon had that major outage?

<comment><USER8> Yes. They've been hosting it outside of their production infrastructure for several years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seeing an interesting thing where my github issue comments just posted are apparently posted a short time in the future. [http://imgur.com/a/eQSc9](http://imgur.com/a/eQSc9)

Doesn't seem to break anything, but it is a bit curious. May not be new though...I just happened to notice it today.

<comment><USER10> I've noticed this behavior with a lot of services.

I can only chalk it up to something like clock drift between the processing node and the database server.

Irritatingly I can't remember which site it was but I posted something somewhere a couple days ago and immediately after hitting enter the site marked what I'd said as submitted "a few seconds from now". I never fail to be amused that the fuzzy time library being used has code specifically designed to handle this edge case scenario. :D

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's really an edge case. Probably one of the main uses, actually.

Sure, if you use it to show comment age, you shouldn't ever see it, but I'm sure they fully support using it for countdowns, too.

EDIT: it's the 4th example under relative time for Moment.js ([https://momentjs.com/](https://momentjs.com/)).

<comment><USER10> I can totally agree about relative timestamping in both directions (past+future) - my argument is more about the UX of situations where you're canonically referring to a past event.

So as not to spam with my reply to a similar comment, I'll link it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452335)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As others have said, Github's postmortems are always great.

But frankly, I'd rather they have better uptime. Every couple months is too much. I pay them. My work pays them.

If their CEO is serious about zero downtime, how about he offers his paying customers a credit for time they cannot access the service?

<comment><USER13> My problem with a credit is that it never even comes close to what I'm losing in income. An ISP is an excellent example. I might get a $10 credit for 24 hours of downtime. I'm charging _slightly_ more per hour than that... /s

Maybe switch to bitbucket or other competition for a while?

<comment><USER14> If the price of the service working (or not working) is disproportionately large compared to the price of your lost business, that's a problem at _your_ end: you needed to calculate the risk vs return for _redundancy_.

Eg, if your Internet costs $100/mo, but you'd lose $100/hour when it's down during business hours, _buy a fallback connection from a competing ISP._ ;)

<comment><USER13> > a competing ISP

Wow! That actually exists in some places? ;-)

Infrastructure so often becomes a monopoly. I can't pay a competing bridge service to drive to work quicker, I can't pay a competing gas company to deliver gas via different pipelines to my house. And I can't pay a competing electric company that uses different wires.

I actually am lucky enough to live in a city where there are many competing high speed ISPs. But guess what? I've paid for fallback connections in the past and when one goes down, the other goes down, so I go out to lunch and see the guys working on the wires in the cabinet down the street. The wires that both my ISPs share. I suppose I could get a satellite ISP? That latency. True redundancy for infrastructure is actually very expensive in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "discussion": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14451924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14451924)

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny thing is Github sometimes makes more sales after an outage because clients want to upgrade to the enterprise edition to host on their own servers.

</comment><comment><USER17> A little funny like Silicon Valley episode , saw the news from GitHub CEO yesterday saying our goal is zero downtime and now it's down

<comment><USER18> Perhaps an issue with punctuation?

Goal: zero downtime.

vs

Goal zero: downtime.

<comment><USER19>
      Works on contingency?
      No, money down!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Business idea: github hosting failover. You'd probably need a modified git client, but if you can't push/pull/whatever from github, it transparently fails over to your service which will sync up with github once they've recovered.

Even better idea: github should stop failing.

<comment><USER21> When expanded to see the monthly trend it shows 99.6% availability.

Serious Question: is there enough people that would pay for that 0.4% to support a business?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As of right now...

On the one hand, I see "Everything operating normally." at the top in green, and no flags or alerts.

On the _other_ hand, the charts look good, but "App server availability" looks interesting, the right edge of the chart is pretty much at 0%.

</comment><comment><USER22> MEAN WEB RESPONSE TIME - <USER2>

98TH PERC. WEB RESPONSE TIME - <USER3>

4.3x?

<comment><USER23> And the 98th percentile is still faster than the 50th percentile of GitLab...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apparently it's resolved. I'd like to read their postmortem on it. They write those extremely well

</comment><comment><USER25> github daily availability history:

[https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/25f38b08/2/](https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/25f38b08/2/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like their cdn is having problems as well now, seeing timeouts when trying to download archives.

<comment><USER27> Was receiving random downtimes when I've tried opening a certain project and its wiki ~1 hour ago. Nothing big and a couple of refreshes fixed it, just minor annoyance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The outage seems to be resolved as of 8:58 EDT

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Now wonder what the issue was. Ghost in the shell?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> web looks fine but repository are not so responsive

</comment><comment><USER30> feel free to make a better one

<comment><USER31> It's called GitLab. Not 100% uptime but better (and constantly improving)

<comment><USER32> It will take a long time before GitLab can even begin to regain my trust from their missing-backups outage.

Problems are to be expected. But as great as it is that they had multiple levels of backup, _none of them worked_. They hadn't even been tested.

<comment><USER33> Do you have any evidence that Github does any better?

<comment><USER34> They haven't lost my data so far and they had to restore the production database at least once in their history. All circumstantial, but we'll have to wait and see.

<comment><USER35> They did not lose that much data, only a few hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Git access to repos seems to be working for me (pull, push).

</comment><comment><USER37> I guess they just rolled out their new DNS infrastructure ([https://githubengineering.com/dns-infrastructure-at- github/](https://githubengineering.com/dns-infrastructure-at-github/)) :-P</comment>


Ask HN: Why are you still using a crappy keyboard? - <AUTHOR> This question is addressed to people who type a lot, yet still use the (usually) crappy keyboard that came by default with their setup.<p>Are you satisfied with your keyboard? Have you ever considered investing in a better keyboard? Why haven't you? <comment><USER2> Two data points:

I continue using a 2009 MacBook Pro, because for me its keyboard has a better feel than the more recent notebooks. Except for high-end Lenovos, I find notebook keyboards (and trackpads) very poor quality compared to the old Apple keyboards.

On my main desktop system I use an old Lexmark (aka IBM) clicky clacky keyboard from the PC/AT era. I have yet to wear it out. I tried using it in an open office setting but my co-workers complained about the noise. I grudgingly used a Logitech until I moved into a private office -- I just close the door.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently switched away from a really old wireless Logitech keyboard to a mechanical keyboard, I would really recommend anyone who haven't tried typing on mechanical keyboard before, tries it because it just might change how they look at a keyboard

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm using something like this: [http://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-usb- keyboard-black/3489...](http://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-usb-keyboard- black/3489041.p?skuId=3489041)

I'm actually quite happy with it. I think it looks nice and the keys seem to press fairly well (not getting stuck, doesn't miss key presses). I haven't upgraded mostly because I don't see much of a need for a different keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only time I have been dissatisfied with a keyboard is when typing on other people's Macs and feeling an incredibly short travel distance.

Most cheap keyboard have enough travel that I have no real issue with them.

I have tried the many keyboards that keyboard aficionados around me have bought or built but have never really felt like they were actually better, rather than just pretentiously different.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use at least three separate computers regularly and probably eight on and off in the course of a year - not including the ones I work on helping others.

I think being flexible in able to adapt to a variety keyboards is kinda cool myself. Especially when some are 30-40 year old ones.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found a ~$20 Logitech I can just about stand. I don't use a mechanical keyboard in the office out of respect for my colleagues. If I had a private office I certainly would!</comment>


A Dictionary of the Near Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/opinion/13coupland.html?hp <comment><AUTHOR> I like this one, "INTERRUPTION-DRIVEN MEMORY We remember only red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow, the red ones interrupt and annoy us."</comment>


Accidental Scientist Hawks 'Online Marketplace for Brains' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/kaggle/

<comment><USER2> Kaggle is pretty awesome and I hope to use it myself one day.

The article makes a good point that a lot of the most interesting data sets just aren't that big. This is worth pointing out because I've noticed that there has been some conflating of "Big Data" and "Data Science." These two buzzwords are related but one does not imply the other. Big data is just that, working with really large data sets (I think with the implication that the data are unstructured).

Data science can include Big data as well as little data. It also seems to cover both structured and unstructured data.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Disclaimer: I'm the "accidental scientist" profiled in this article.)

Yes I've noticed this as well. People are often asking me for my opinion about Big Data, treating it as a synonym for Data Science. Since the journalist at Wired had recently written a couple of articles about Hadoop, I took this opportunity to explain to him how data size and data value are not necessarily directly related. I think he did a great job in the piece of getting this point across.

<comment><USER3> I think you'll find that Hadoop is often used in preparing the data into bite- size chunks for use in Kaggle contests.

Also, sometimes the contest winners do win by fetching more data related data than Kaggle provides. This happened in the Wikipedia participating-prediction contest, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aren't the prizes on offer extraordinarily low for the accomplishments desired?

For example to "Develop new models to accurately predict the market response to large trades." is valued at $10,000.

<comment><USER5> If a person were smart enough to "develop new models to accurately predict the market response to large trades", they would have to be very foolish to sell it for only $10K.

Assuming it was real and actually worked.</comment></comment>


Google Nexus One Sales Off to Slow Start - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/nexus-one-sales/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Well, I purchased an Android phone late last year. Most everyone else I know who wants a smartphone already has one. Bad timing, maybe?

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I misread the article but it doesn't say whether these figures are US only or world wide.</comment>


This spinning windmill on fire is beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/16/08/this-spinning-windmill-on-fire-is-beautiful <comment><USER2> Looks like the YouTube account was taken down.

</comment><comment><USER3> Video is dead; why did you submit this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Works for me.</comment></comment>


Hacked Feature Phone Can Block Other People's Calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518646/hacked-feature-phone-can-block-other-peoples-calls/ <comment><USER2> Baseband processors will probably be the top future exploit target, now that mobile is exploding. These processors are the central interconnect between microphones, the GPS and a bunch of other periphery on a smartphone (any phone, really). They run propietary binary blobs on mostly lower end ARM-SoCs, and due to their nature, most any exploit will be _remote_ , and you will have a high-bandwidth uplink to share the spoils.

The binary blobs are usually some variant of a homegrown RTOS system, written in _C_. Given the low end processors used, there is no isolation between processes (no MMU), and the complex 3G et al signalling has lots of nasty error paths and interrupt goodness.

<comment><USER3> I had started to fear this. As Android fanboy, my biggest phone is no phone is open. I try to explain what a baseband processor, and DSP, and most people are confused by why it matters.

Are there any fun phones (I assume in the US it would be illegal to sell one) with reprogrammable/more open baseband chips? Does anyone know anything about this topic? I would love to make this a hobby/obsession if there was a small place to enter this research outside of the industry.

<comment><USER4> A good place to look is the replicant[1] project which aims to offer a fully open-source version of android. Most supported phones sadly have closed sourced modems and other stuff.

There's one phone there[2] that only the wifi is non-free. So my guess i turning of wifi gives you a totally free pho ne.This is an openmoko phone- which is also open hardware phone.

Regarding fun: I think you can't run the play store there - so you lose the google apps. And the phone we're talking about is weak - cortex-a8, 512MB.

[1]replicant.us [2][http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GTA04](http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GTA04)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Unfortunately no one sells these anymore, correct? I was well aware of OpenMoko, but you point out a lot of the problems.

EDIT: I also forgot mention I was looking into this, but it means going back to the old phones. Still might be worth it.

[http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/MotorolaC123](http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/MotorolaC123)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a simple race condition exploiting the baroque way that GSM signalling works. When a call (or an SMS) comes in:

* the basestation will send an alert to the mobile phone ("contact me, I've got something for you")

* the mobile phone will request a channel ("hey, lets talk")

* the basestation will allocate a channel ("yo, talk here")

* the mobile phone will authenticate ("its me, TMSI:xxxxx")

* the basestation will lookup pending signalling ("oh, got something for ya")

That is the very rough outline of how GSM signalling works. My guess is that the basestation will clear the pending signalling for the mobile phone _even_ _if_ the authentication fails. So an attack can pre-allocate a bunch of channels and then send spoofed auth messages to the basestation. The attacker won't be able to actually authenticate because they don't have the Ki (the GSM keys stored on the SIM). This is just a race condition, and it seems like it would be noisy for the telcos' ops center which would receive a lot of alerts about failing authentication and call/sms delivery failures.

I haven't read the paper, but thats a guess as to how it works. There are loads of ways to DoS the basestation. This doesn't seem that exciting.

<comment><USER6> Well, the article says that it doesn't DoS the base station, but a group of stations called a location area. This location area in Berlin for example is 200 square kilometers. That's quite a bit more than a single base station. And all you need is a cheap GSM feature phone. You could probably turn it on and literally toss it on a bus to take a quarter of the city offline with a rolling DoS jammer. Hard to find in case someone tries.

<comment><USER5> For "basestation" read "the network". The partitioning of responsibility within a GSM network is relevant to this attack only in regards to which component maintains the "signals-pending table". There are a number of different locations this could be stored, depending on how the network is setup.

They are doubtless using osmocom-bb, which is an open source baseband implementation for a number of older phones using an old baseband board. The implementation of the attack is not relevant to the attack itself. You could implement it with an SDR, or with osmocom-bb compatible boards, or whatever. It is still a race condition that they've figured out how to win.

The solution is simple. The network needs to maintain to "signals-pending table" entry for a mobile until it successfully authenticates, or the entry times out. If they are flushing the entry after an unsuccessful authentication attempt then it enables a DoS, such as this one. I still have a hard time believing this is how it actually works because it seems like the network is behaving incorrectly.

<comment><USER7> I also don't believe that's how it works, for SMS at least. Authentication can also fail due to a broken device or to a poor connection. Does that mean SMS messages can get lost? Doesn't make sense.

Also, since this is a race condition, it means that the exploit can't block all incoming calls.

<comment><USER6> They figured out a race condition that they will always win. So yes, the exploit currently can block all incoming calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone more knowledgeable than me, please correct my presumptuous understanding, because this seems easily mitigated.

I would imagine that, like with your home network, cell phones have multiple addressing schemes in a network. So there's your phone number, but there's also some kind of network address that I have received from the carrier, and then probably some kind of address that refers to my connection with the tower.

I would assume that something similar to ARP goes on here. A message comes in for 415xxxxxxx, my phone. When AT&T gets it, they determine that phone number is network address 1234, and they have some system that says 1234 is currently in tower X. Tower X gets the message and broadcasts a request for the phone corresponding to device 1234. At this point, pirate device with tower address ABCD responds that it is, falsely, AT&T's 1234. The message is then sent to the the phone whose address in tower space is ABCD. My phone was actually DEFG but I couldn't reply fast enough.

So, if this pirate phone responds to multiple requests, for multiple AT&T subscriber addresses, claiming to have all those addresses, can't the tower just cap it at like 3 addresses? After that can't it be determined to be a pirate device and disconnected from the network? If one device claims messages intended for more than 3 addresses, isn't it safe to say it's faulty or spoofing?

Where am I wrong here? It seems like this level of ability should be built into a protocol that requires recipients to identify themselves? Like if I issue an ARP request on my Ethernet network, and the same MAC address always comes back, that would be a detectable attack (assuming it was not my gateway). Isn't this the same principle?

</comment><comment><USER9> This talks about screwing around with the network by acting like another phone to do denial of service. Can't you achieve the same result just by transmitting noise on the same frequencies? If you're blasting out paging responses, won't that be just as "easy" to track down as transmitting noise?

Modifying them to intercept calls/SMS is more threatening, especially as GSM and SMS look like attractive protocols for doing mobile apps and payments in "developing" areas.

<comment><USER10> Transmitting noise across the entire spectrum of frequencies that a cellular carrier uses would probably take a much larger and more expensive transmitter, a bigger antenna and more power. (You'd have to jam all the bands available to the carrier, since a tower can just tell a phone to switch to another frequency if there's a reception problem.) In contrast, all this exploit requires is a cheap cell phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised that the baseband paging firmware code is closed and has not already been reverse engineered. And if so, it is surprising for me as to why have we never come across any attack like this in real life.

<comment><USER12> The more cynical outlook would be that the baseband firmware has been reverse engineered and broken long ago, the fruits of this effort kept from being aired due to the high price they could command on the black market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sildes and video: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/let-me- an...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/let-me-answer-you- exploiting-broadcast-information-cellular-networks)

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know if CDMA is vulnerable to the same paging hijack?

I know that Verizon here in the US registers the ESN/MEID of the device itself for service provisioning (with a SIM only being used for GSM roaming and LTE).

I would guess that CDMA doesn't have to 'page' to find the right phone (though it might ping to see if it's still connected / in range) as the phone's ID is already associated with the number (no need to query a SIM).

</comment><comment><USER15> To expand on pudquick's question. Does anyone know if 3g, 4g, CDMA or any of the other standards are just as suspectible to this?

</comment><comment><USER16> This will be responsible for a few deaths if it ever becomes widespread. The obvious way is by preventing people from calling 911, but the other way, potentially just as deadly, is preventing people who are on-call from being called into hospitals where their services are required.

Someone who's on-call isn't always at the hospital. They might well be across town, within a certain range as dictated by maximum response time; that is, they can be anywhere within fifteen minutes' travel to the hospital once they've been called. Of course, if they don't get the call, or get the call late, that could mean someone's life.

There's an actual, articulable reason shit like this is illegal, and it isn't just arbitrary FCC bullshit. Being annoyed at cell phone calls isn't worth someone's life.

<comment><USER17> Not to detract from your point, but it wouldn't affect home lines, so they'd still be able to contact 911. As for cell phones, if someone, say, collapses in public, I've witnessed 5+ people try to contact 911. The likelihood of everyone having the same network and thus being knocked out is relatively low.

And finally, many doctors use pagers/beepers, which wouldn't necessarily be knocked out in the same way a GSM network would.

But that's just me talking on a few details; I agree with you, it should obviously be illegal and could be deadly.

<comment><USER16> > it wouldn't affect home lines, so they'd still be able to contact 911.

First: Land lines, not home lines. My home line is a cell phone. Many others can say the same.

And this only helps when a land line is available, and when someone thinks to use it. Being out in the boonies is an obvious failure mode, but the other one, which can also be deadly, is people getting panicky and forgetting that the phone what hooks to the wall can be used to make calls.

> As for cell phones, if someone, say, collapses in public, I've witnessed 5+ > people try to contact 911. The likelihood of everyone having the same > network and thus being knocked out is relatively low.

Maybe I'm too used to living in the boonies, but I doubt most of the towns I've been to have any more than one network for the entire community. Simply not cost-effective to build-out in the flyover states.

> And finally, many doctors use pagers/beepers, which wouldn't necessarily be > knocked out in the same way a GSM network would.

I know for a fact there are towns which are cell phone only as far as hospital personnel are concerned. You're right that pagers would likely be immune to this, but that only helps if they're actually being used.

<comment><USER17> Good catch, I meant land lines.

When I said the same network, I probably should have said _network provider_ \- I meant that if a GSM network is knocked out, odds are there's a CDMA Verizon user in the bunch trying to call 911.

Good points all around.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should Cameras Replace Car Mirrors? U.S. Regulators Want to Know - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/should-cameras-replace-car-mirrors-u-s-regulators-want-to-know <comment><USER2> That's easy. Video recording of accident.</comment>


China Should Launch a Libra Competitor – Huawei CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/07/28/huawei-ceo-libra-china-facebook-cryptocurrency-digital/ <comment><USER2> China should start by making WeChat available for non-Chinese - for example tourists traveling in China.

Whether it runs on a blockchain is less important. Adoption and good user interface is what is important and that WeChat already has in a major way.

<comment><USER3> Is there such a thing as a Chinese debit (pre-paid) card, and would that be accepted by either WeChat or Alipay? Or a Hong Kong debit card?

Alternatively, they could have a 2nd class foreigner version of WeChat and Alipay with whatever restrictions on it they want. The status quo is more of an imposition on Chinese vendors than on tourists.

<comment> fbi-director You can connect it to a regular (debit) bank card. Or a credit card. But not a prepaid credit card if they even have those anymore in the mainland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> China should decentralize weixin (wechat pay) which is already in massive use all across China. That would disrupt Libra.

<comment><USER5> You (should) mean _centralize_ , not _decentralize_.

The innovation of Libra is that having "100 major corporations mostly large enough to not be bossed around by governments" do consensus to run a USD stablecoin, is about as close as you can get in trustworthiness to having the American government itself run a USD stablecoin.

 _But_ , despite being the next best thing, it's still strictly inferior. If the American government itself issued (minted?) a USD stablecoin, it would have an extra tool in its toolbelt that these corporations wouldn't: monetary policy. The American government would be free to inflate/deflate USD itself to control the tether of their stablecoin. (The probably wouldn't _do_ that, but the fact that they _can_ would keep the coin much more stable.) As well, they wouldn't have to hold any liquidity at all—they would just have the mint issue digital fiat US dollars (i.e. the cryptocurrency) in place of regular physical fiat US dollars it was planning to issue.

All of which is to say, given that China doesn't have 100 major corporations large enough to not be beholden to the Chinese government, _de_ centralizing an existing corporate digital currency would just be silly. But _centralizing_ one into a Chinese-government-issued RMB stablecoin, would make complete sense.

<comment><USER6> > having the American government itself run a USD stablecoin.

They could call it "The American Dollar". It is hard to forsee a practical difference between a government sponsored crypto and a regular currency.

If the crypto couldn't inflate that would be pretty major, but governments can already do that with their own currencies and choose not to. If they had a crypto that technically was unable to increase supply, sooner or later (that is to say, sooner) they would replace it with a crypto that they _could_ inflate

Ditto near-instant, secure exchange with anyone in the world. It isn't like sub-minute network communication is a secret technology; the delays that exist are probably more to do with currency controls and regulatory compliance.

It is meaningless to have a trustless distributed currency that is pegged to a large, untrustworthy centrally controlled currency. Its only purpose is to skirt around the edges of financial law. Governments do not support that.

<comment><USER5> > They could call it "The American Dollar".

Yes, that is what I was suggesting—that the US Mint just mint USD as tokens into a blockchain's Central Bank account, instead of as greenbacks into a Central Bank's physical vaults. They're dollars either way.

> It is hard to forsee a practical difference between a government sponsored > crypto and a regular currency.

I mean, yes, that's the point of stablecoins.

> It is meaningless to have a trustless distributed currency that is pegged to > a large, untrustworthy centrally controlled currency.

No, it's not.

A stablecoin is "a regular currency"—i.e. fiat money—and _also_ a cryptocurrency—i.e. something that you can move around on a blockchain in fancy ways using smart contracts, with everything staying provable and deterministic such that mutually-distrusting parties (i.e. private citizens of countries that are at war with one-another) are forced to agree on what happened.

> Its only purpose is to skirt around the edges of financial law. Governments > do not support that.

Have you been paying attention to what has been happening in the cryptocurrency space for the last two years? A whole infrastructure is being established to allow governments to regulate and control crypto instruments, like security tokens. Crypto companies (or, at least, the ones everyone's investing in now) are no longer attempting to work _despite_ governments; instead, they're now attempting to take advantage of the properties blockchains give you (e.g. "money you can't sweep under the rug"; "contracts that execute automatically and can be proven to have executed"; etc.) while still allowing governments to butt into transactions.

Essentially, the modern business-investor's interpretation of a blockchain is that it's just the same kind of thing as a securities exchange: a government- regulated platform making novel types of trades liquid by decreasing the costs of those trades. A blockchain is just a securities exchange with lower barriers-to-entry for developers of new types of tradable securities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought they were already running Bitcoin?</comment>


Google's Matt Cutts Talks Down Keyword Domain Names - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/googles-matt-cutts-talks-down-keyword-domain-names <comment><USER2> Google has become almost immune to keyword domain names.

Other search engines, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've thought it made some sense to weight domain keywords considering the number of people I observe using the google search box as an address bar.</comment>


Terrible interview question: Swap variables without a temporary - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/mortoray/terrible-interview-question-swap-variables-without-a-temporary-22jp <comment><USER2> Actually it's a great question, because it clearly tells you that you don't want to work there and especially with/for the questioner.

I remember years ago, being asked by some doofus in an interview about efficient 8086 code to divide by some constant (I don't remember). He wanted some magic trick which only worked for that value.

I was trying to escape from a really horrible employer at that time but am still thankful I didn't end up working at that place instead.</comment>


Ask HN: Static site generator with web UI? - <AUTHOR> Wordpress has long been an easy way to set up a brochure-ware site which can be maintained by a non-technical user.  Someone just needs to install it, customise a (free or paid) theme, and occasionally install updates.  The business owner can add/edit pages whenever they want, without assistance.<p>Are there tools for maintaining static sites which are as easy to use (after initial set up), or is Wordpress still the way to go? <comment><USER2> I know that you're probably looking for an alternative to WordPress, but here's what I do at my company.

We have an internal WordPress installation where (non-technical) staff can make posts & pages, use their favorite themes & plugins, etc. Everyone can view the internal site to critique it, make changes, and basically screw around without touching the live site.

Once they have the site ready to release, we use a simple plugin (ignore the "outdated" warning): [https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output- plugin/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/) which basically exports the site to a static copy as a zip file containing all of the HTML and other static assets.

We made a little deploy script which loads the zip file on our Nginx webserver, moves the old "build" of the site to an archive directory (so we can still retrieve it in case the new site is broken), regex'es the files to change some things (such as wp-content/ URL's) to point to our CDN, etc. Once everyone has QA'ed the site on the internal server, we just run the deploy script and now the new version is live.

This has worked out great for us - no one had to learn a new CMS; we can easily change WordPress versions (or, switch to an entirely new WordPress install), add new plugins, and mess around with stuff without breaking the live site. Plus, the site is served entirely as static files from a lightweight machine which runs only Nginx - no PHP, database, or anything else.

Note that obviously any "dynamic" features of the site (like comments) won't work, but that doesn't impact us.

Our site is in the Alexa top 5000 and we've been using this setup for over a year without any site downtime, broken theme issues due to version updates, scrambling to update due to WP security issues, or any other annoyances that come with using WordPress.

<comment><USER3> But you're almost entirely relying on this black-box plugin constituting a systemic risk (critical path) in your process.

For me, I'm afraid that this is not 100% reliable solution for me.

<comment><USER2> The plugin is open source: [https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/static- html-outpu...](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/static-html-output- plugin/)

And all that it does is simply "spider" the site and save the pages to HTML.

You could get the exact same effect using curl or wget, we just use the plugin so that my non-technical employees can effectively click a button, get the zip file, and send it to someone who's got access to do the deployment.

<comment><USER3> I see now.

Since it's an open source and its basic functionality can be replaced with simple Unix modules, I see no problem with this setup anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend you check out roots ([http://roots.cx/](http://roots.cx/)), a static site generator that lets you use a CMS like Wordpress to manage content and then pulls data from its API to build a static site.

We've set up a full featured publishing workflow by coupling this with outgoing webhooks on Wordpress using hookpress and a great static hosting platform called Netlify that accepts incoming webhooks to trigger new static builds with roots when content is updated on Wordpress.

So far it's been fantastic for us. We enjoy all the benefits of a static site: low hosting costs, simple infrastructure, highly scalable, and virtually zero downtime, while still giving our users a familiar CMS interface.

We're are using a similar workflow to power our site ([http://carrot.is/](http://carrot.is/)) but instead of Wordpress we're using Contentful, an API-based CMS with webhook support. Luckily, roots has a very flexible extensions API, so whatever CMS you want to use, as long as it has an API it can be turned into a static site.

Here's an example of how to set this up with Wordpress: [https://github.com/carrot/roots-wordpress- example](https://github.com/carrot/roots-wordpress-example)

As well as the two CMS extensions we've built so far: [https://github.com/carrot/roots-wordpress](https://github.com/carrot/roots- wordpress) [https://github.com/carrot/roots- contentful](https://github.com/carrot/roots-contentful)

We really love it, and are happy to answer any questions from people considering a similar setup or who are interested in learning more about roots.

</comment><comment><USER5> Full Disclosure: I'm the founder of Makemake.io.

You could use an online website creation tool. There are several robust solutions available including Weebly, Squarespace, and Wix. There are many integrations and add-ons available that target small businesses. It does cost a bit more than running a cheap hosting plan on Wordpress, but you do get support and it requires no technical expertise at all to get started.

If you have _only_ static content and want to create an _animated_ brochure- ware site, I would ask you to consider looking at Makemake.io. It features a simple drag-and-drop editor with no coding required.

If you need to integrate database driven features (contact forms, a shopping cart, etc), I would definitely investigate one of the former options. It just depends on your requirements.

<comment><USER6> I just tried Makemake.io, it's pretty neat. One thing I'd really like with it, is to be able to save on my hard drive the page I just made, so I could use integrate it with my own website not hosted as your subdomain.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

<comment><USER5> Hi! Thanks for the feedback. :-)

I'll have to take a look at adding that feature! In the meantime, you could consider iframing the site. I know this isn't ideal, but it might work depending on your use case.

<comment><USER6> Well, I still can save the webpage under my_webpage.makemake.io and then save the source, but it's not so convenient.

What you could also do is integrate makemake.io with a subversion, so as a user I could change my website, and then compare it with a previous version.

Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Webflow - [https://www.webflow.com](https://www.webflow.com) \- Let's you build responsive sites in a web UI without code. I'm a non-technical founder and I use it for our marketing site (works across browsers, has CSS animations). Our devs have never even touched it. I've been very, very happy with it.

<comment><USER8> I took a look at this, and it seems to be aimed at designers? While I'm sure that it's a fantastic tool (also judging from the other positive comments), what if the target audience (the non-technical end-users editing the content) also can't design their way out of a wet paper box?

(Frankly, I would prefer to not even let them touch the content ...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey Guys, Head of Engineering at SendHub here. We recently switched over to using webflow for our marketing pages (everything under www) and have not looked back! It's really nice to be able to knock out custom responsive pages quickly all while enabling non-technical people to make minor edits. One thing we like in particular is the ability to easily push changes to different subdomains. Finally, if we ever do decide that we need something different (doubtful in the foreseeable future) the code that webflow generates is beautiful and maintainable. Webflow has huge fans at SendHub.

</comment><comment><USER10> Webflow.com -- hands down. Having used Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and WordPress, Webflow just provides you with so much more control and pixel perfect accuracy.

Although the learning curve is a little higher than SquareSpace/Wix, it's actually worth it. As a non-dev designer, it has allowed us to deploy all our sites effortlessly with the same fluidity and crisp animations as you'd expect from a grassroots buildup. It also allows you to export your (clean) code.

I honestly would never go back to anything. Webflow is how a GUI for website builders should be.

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://prose.io/](http://prose.io/) is a CMS for statically generated sites (i.e. Jekyll)

<comment><USER12> Sounds awesome, but I really dislike not being able to see a screenshot before having to connect my github account...

<comment><USER13> Agreed. I don't really have a problem with connecting my GitHub account, but a landing page should at least explain what the site does and provide some basic screenshots/feature overview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is sort of my bread and butter. I almost predominantly use siteleaf.com and prismic.io as my cloud based CMS solutions. They both have great APIs that can be easy to consume depending on your setup.

I do all of my site building in Middleman, and during the Middleman build process consume the requisite API to load into Middleman's local data method. Upon complete, I sync everything up to S3. I use Heroku just for its Scheduler and run the compile every 10 minutes.

It's kind of neat, because I can have the Middleman scaffolding sitting in a repo, and the content sitting in Siteleaf/Prismic for the client to play with. And the hosting on S3 costs ~$3/month. It makes for a pretty dynamic static site.

<comment><USER3> Your tech stack looks interesting but why "Middleman" and not for example "Jekyll" ?

<comment><USER14> Primarily because of Middleman's local data[1]. Basically any .json or .yaml files located in your Middleman project's /data dir are exposed via the data method as a big iterative array.

This makes it perfect for polling an API during build for whatever data you need, then tossing the whole .json ball into the /data dir for exposure.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some Jekyll, but I find Middleman covers pretty much all my bases these days.

[1][https://middlemanapp.com/advanced/data_files/](https://middlemanapp.com/advanced/data_files/)

<comment><USER3> So, your setup is composed of as follows:

Middleman: The template files.

Siteleaf: The CMS for the end users to play with

Prismic: The database.

Heroku: The deployment esp. the scheduler part.

Amazon S3: The hosting.

Did I get it right?

<comment><USER14> Close. Siteleaf/Prismic is an either or deal. Siteleaf is much simpler architecturally, and works for like 80% of my clients. You basically get page collections and optional meta data. Prismic is much more blown out - I bring it in as the big guns if I need to support a more complex hierarchy or need specific document masks/permission levels/etc. The deploy via Heroku is neat because it does a git clone of the repo on github before running the Middleman build (therefore consuming the API), so all I have to do is push my changes up to Github and they'll get picked up on the next pass (sometime in the next 10 minutes). It's just real fun to work with, with very few failure points. After all, the worst thing that happens is the build fails and they get served a 10 minute old static site.

<comment><USER3> Neat. Very neat indeed!

How about your clients?

Did they miss the old WP text editor or are happy with the new CMS?

My only take on this setup is the perceived or apparent fragmentation since the resources are scattered over many places and not on a single point like in a typical WP installation, what do you think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Side note, does this exist for mobile apps?

I see plenty of prototyping tools and have no idea why they do not generate nice native iOS and Android code as starting point to building the remaining parts of an app.

<comment><USER16> Ionic Creator does exactly that! (Though not "native" as it generates HTML/JS for compilation with Cordova.)

[http://ionicframework.com/creator/](http://ionicframework.com/creator/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Hugo team has been thinking about how to set up a web frontend.

[http://discuss.gohugo.io/t/web-based- editor/155](http://discuss.gohugo.io/t/web-based-editor/155)

Hugo -- [http://gohugo.io/](http://gohugo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER18> There are some ways for content delivery as far as I know. [https://docpad.org/docs/plugins#custom- interfaces](https://docpad.org/docs/plugins#custom-interfaces) [https://github.com/yortz/octopress-admin](https://github.com/yortz/octopress- admin) [https://github.com/zkarpinski/Jekyll- Admin](https://github.com/zkarpinski/Jekyll-Admin)

I will go as a selling point for them the performance & simplicity. It's also easier to maintain for a person with some technical knowledge than Wordpress regarding updating the core & the plugins.

</comment><comment><USER19> For side jobs I always use [http://statamic.com](http://statamic.com) since it is all flat files that I can edit in a text editor, but my clients can use the GUI admin. I can use Git with it and you can turn it on for the admin to so any edits made by the GUI are committed as well.

I am good friends with the creator as well, but I would still use it otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER20> You might want to give a try to Prismic.io (for backend UI) + backed.js (for static generation, consumes Prismic API):

[https://prismic.io/](https://prismic.io/) [https://github.com/prismicio/baked.js](https://github.com/prismicio/baked.js)

disclaimer: I work at the company backing the project, although not on this product.

<comment><USER21> BTW Prismic.io can also be used with Metalsmith: [https://github.com/mbanting/metalsmith- prismic](https://github.com/mbanting/metalsmith-prismic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use Nikola with the "webapp" plugin [1]. It's still too much for non- technical users, but with some polish you could probably get it to be usable by anyone.

1) [http://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/preview-of-nikola- webapp.html](http://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/preview-of-nikola-webapp.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> The Grid (thegrid.io) looks very promising in this area but won't be available right away ("end of Spring"). You will get a web UI as well as iPhone and Android apps to manage your content, and static pages get generated automatically. Check it out if you're not in a hurry.

</comment><comment><USER24> There was a CMS based on Dropbox which I think produced static pages, although I don't recall the name of it.

Obviously, a Dropbox-based interface is really easy to use, provided the user can get the hang of very basic Markdown (which seems not to be a problem for non-technical users judging from Reddit).

</comment><comment><USER25> PicoCMS might fit the bill. PHP with files as markdown, semi static as markdown is parsed on each page hit but that could easily be cached.

It has an editor plugin that allows live editing of the content.

[http://picocms.org/plugins.html](http://picocms.org/plugins.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> I use [http://www.siteleaf.com](http://www.siteleaf.com) its got a nice web UI and it uses liquid templates and Jekyll behind the scenes I think so it's pretty easy to write template logic and you can host on github pages for free.

</comment><comment><USER27> Squarespace is actually pretty good for this. You can get discount codes from basically any podcast.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ghost ([https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)) has many themes that can be considered brochure-ware. The editing is in Markdown.

<comment><USER29> I don't think Ghost is static, though. TMK everything is stored in a sqlite db.

<comment><USER28> You can ask it to generate static posts, IIRC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As many others have said, Webflow ([http://www.webflow.com](http://www.webflow.com)) is definitely your best option.

</comment><comment><USER31> Well let's define what you mean by "maintaining a static site." Because if you can change it and update it, a la WordPress, then it's not really a static site.

What you seem to mean is are there CMSes that output static pages instead of rendering pages live when they are viewed. And you're just really talking about caching.

And the answer is, you can accomplish this pretty easily with just about any CMS (including WordPress) by using Varnish or other caching systems.

<comment><USER32> When using a static site generator, you still change and edit content. It's just that the output is generated statically and users access the static content. Anyway, I'm guessing your interpretation of the OP's intent is correct.

However, you can't do all the same with WordPress + Varnish. One of the nice things about statically generated sites is that you can deploy anywhere (such as S3) without minimal operational complexity.

<comment><USER31> > One of the nice things about statically generated sites is that you can > deploy anywhere (such as S3) without minimal operational complexity.

Fair point. I was not entering any hosting concerns into the equation, only the behavior of the system as a whole.

<comment><USER33> Caching is not the same, since if the page isn't in the cache - and it's often easy to find one that isn't -, the request will get passed on to the generator, which (vastly) increases the attack surface of the whole system.

<comment><USER31> Come on, that's like saying brakes don't work because if you don't press them then your car doesn't stop.

Of course if you're concerned about this you'd make sure every page is current int he cache.

<comment><USER33> Then the attacker does a POST instead, which the caching layer passes on, and your work was for naught.

I'm sure it's possible in theory to prevent all kinds of attacks, but it's not like not pressing the breaks, more like trying to plug every hole in a sieve. The tool just isn't built to help you do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [http://getkirby.com/](http://getkirby.com/)

You can build pretty advanced pages with it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Take a look at [https://www.lightcms.com/](https://www.lightcms.com/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Check out [http://www.webhook.com](http://www.webhook.com).

</comment><comment><USER37> You might like Kirby CMS: [http://getkirby.com](http://getkirby.com)

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://www.simplybuilt.com](https://www.simplybuilt.com)

</comment><comment><USER39> Bricolage, although it didn't really look maintained last time I checked.

<comment><USER32> Do you mean this?[0] I don't see mention of static site generation anywhere.

[0] [http://bricolagecms.org/](http://bricolagecms.org/)

<comment><USER39> Yes, and they do.

Funny that they don't prominently say so. Most secondary material about Bricolage touts static generation with a web UI as the main selling point. That's how I got interested in it.

Another one, much better known: Movable Type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> CityDesk by Fog Creek. In 2003.

</comment><comment><USER41> ikiwiki but the editor sucks</comment>


Autoruns for Windows v13.94 - <AUTHOR> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and when you start various built-in Windows applications like Internet Explorer, Explorer and media players. These programs and drivers include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. Autoruns reports Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond other autostart utilities.

[..]

You'll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically!"</comment>


Trump Dumps Climate Science and Innovation in 2018 Budget Blueprint - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/policy/trump-budget-blueprint-dumps-on-climate-science-and-innovation <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

 _... it fits a pattern: Throughout the document programs aimed at comprehending or addressing climate change take deep cuts, even where there is no obvious fiscal justification._

 _"The budget targets almost anything that is related to climate," observes David M. Hart, who directs the Center for Science and Technology Policy at George Mason University, near Washington, D.C._</comment>


How Many Users Does it Take to Reach Critical Mass? - <AUTHOR> http://duo.chaoscollective.org/?betatest

<comment><AUTHOR> Duo is intended to be a new kind of discussion format. It's somewhere between chat, IRC, and threaded forums.

We've had a couple hundred people check it out, but over the last day or two (not that many people at once). How many people are needed for a social site to feel interesting? My guess is that it only takes a good handful (maybe 25 or so) to kick things off and encourage growth.

Or is it a crazy idea to do something social without jumping on the back of the other social mega services?</comment>


Soylent nutritional label - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/soylent-gets-tested-scores-a-surprisingly-wholesome-nutritional-label/

<comment><USER2> This is people isn't it?</comment>


Things Product Managers Should do in Their First 30 Days - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/07/24/12-things-product-managers-first-30-days-new-company/

<comment><USER2> \--Good one</comment>


Stack Overflow Culture - Jon Skeet - <AUTHOR> https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-culture/ <comment><USER2> I think that one of the main issue that Stack Overflow is facing right now is directly related to their karma / points system. Those points can (and are) be used as a social proof of your programming abilities, which can be leveraged in a CV. With that in mind, the goal can be to maximize the number of points by spending the minimum time possible, thus looking for quick and easy questions.

I am both an "asker" and an "answerer" on SO.

When I have time, as an "answerer" it's really difficult to look past trivial questions and to provide insights on more complex questions where :

\- The time needed to provide an insightful answer is higher

\- The question is so precise and focused that few users will benefit from it, so the potential upvotes are low as well

As such, the potential karma per second I can get from those value-adding question is quite low. It's much easier to correct a comparatively simple null-pointer-reference in a simple piece of code.

As an asker, I have the opposite trouble : my question are usually pretty focused on a specific and complex area. I do not post on SO unless I _really_ have tried a lot of different options.

I spend a lot of time articulating the question, posting as much detail as possible, and documenting what was tried and what did / did not work. I usually get 0 answer since the question needs the answerer to spend quite a bit of time to sully understand the issue I am facing, and needs expertise to provide an answer.

As an answerer, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time providing actual value. As an asker, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time getting value out of it.

I do not have a solution for this issue, but one solution would be to skew the karma system to encourage user to answer complex, focused, and difficult questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stackoverflow.. such a horrible place.

If they want the site to be what the mods say they want then the answer is simple: have a test before you get membership. The policies say basically we don't want anyone who is not already good on this area and also we will punish and very publicly humiliate you to "help" you learn.

Hate to say it as one, but this is just aspie ignorance.

1\. People learn with support, that makes a community. Otherwise they are your enemies and this is an arms race

2\. People don't know how to ask questions about things they don't know about, don't be idiots.

3\. If people aren't asking questions how will you get points?

There are many more issues etc but those are some blondes IMHO. They should definitely drop anything about being for hobbyists as it is totally not.

There are many easy solutions but it's not what the mods want so it's prolly gonna die.

E.g. only let low score / new user to answer questions at first . Especially for new or low score users

That way everyone has a chance to learn from some one closer to their skill level.

Then after it's answered open it wider.. that way the question should already be cleaned up before skeet sees it.

I don't mind having a chat with someone to explain how to all their specific question, or narrow down a wide open one to something more specific. I realise that I may be turning someone of programming for decade if I act like those it comes naturally to.. you need time to toughen up before you can take the full force of an geek who cannot see your face but had to deal with your ignorance.

Also don't close or deleted questions, just have a tag and filter then out of normal searches.

People love the opinion questions and to me they are more valuable that something I can brute force if I have to.

Anyways I could go on all day.. but there is no point as it's a community and it's their choice, but we need something similar for non expert humans too.

<comment><USER3> Goddam touch screen typing. Sorry, hope it make sense :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stackoverflow was a major improvement over forums and mailing lists when it first came out: centralized, clean and easy to use, and the content was up to date. Additionally, the early users generally already pretty savvy, or at least motivated to learn and make quality contributions. Now a decade on, much of the content is stale, accumulating reputation has become a goal in and of itself, and the culture has become weirdly cult-like. There no longer seems to be the same shared purpose or sense of community and respect.

In many ways, the site still is designed for the early days. Take stale answers and questions for example. I can't even count the number of times I've clicked on a stack overflow link in the search results only to find that the accept answer is some horrendously unnecessary jquery snippet. This problem needs to be addressed if the site is to continue being a valuable resource

As Jon identifies though, the bigger problem is culture. I quite like his proposed covenant and wish more users would take it to heart. It's also interesting to think how design could promote the covenant. Some quick ideas:

\- Provide a question template: "this is what I am trying to do and why", "this is what I have tried", "this is what is not working".

\- Better way to ask for clarification on a question or answer. Comments are too overloaded in their current implementation.

\- Require users explain why they are voting to close an issue (more than the general categories already provided)

\- Provide a section for "I have a problem but don't even know what question to ask"

\- Provide more UI reminders that users are human.

\- Tag questions by new users with "new asker".

\- Automatically remind new users of good etiquette, such as: 'Don't forget to accept the correct answer'

\- Add explanations to downvotes (again, something besides comments)

\- Show new users examples of good/bad questions and answers and explain why before throwing them in the deep end

The obstacle is that solving these problems will require changing the site in a way that would break the existing reputation system and piss off many prolific users.

The bigger question I have: so Stackoverflow is bad, but what is the better alternative?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm also both an answerer and asker on SO, and I've been using the site off and on almost since the beginning. The larger issue for me (and what is just touched on in this article) is the change in character of SO as its grown over time.

In the beginning I found a number of open and interesting questions (occasionally some of these were closed as being too opinion-based or broad, which bugged me a bit as they were some of the most interesting and illuminating (granted, you could argue that that is not the intention of SO. Still, having an interesting conversation closed seemed, at the very least, excessively pedantic).

The larger issue, I think, is that most open questions now are either of the "How do I do obscure thing X in framework Y under rare condition Z" variety, or beginner "Please do my homework" or "I have a bunch of things in my array it's not printing" sorts of questions.

Not sure what the right answer is for this. And, even so, I often get good responses when I post.

<comment><USER6> > The larger issue, I think, is that most open questions now are either of the > "How do I do obscure thing X in framework Y under rare condition Z" variety, > or beginner "Please do my homework" or "I have a bunch of things in my array > it's not printing" sorts of questions.

I think it's due to the fact that the questions "in the middle" are already answered and people find them through searching. No need to and again. Only beginners (that can't search effectively) post on SO or people having rare edge cases (for which asking in SO is a last resort).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still baffled by SO, I've been on there for like 10 years now and still can't seem to upvote anything and have no clue why. It's also remarkable how often you'll find "answers" on there that are flat out wrong or horribly out of date, at least once you get past the "how do I manipulate a date" level in a given area.

If you can't upvote you can't seem to downvote or fix the answer, and if you try to comment on an answer it seems to get autodeleted most of the time.

<comment><USER8> I found the site quite offputting at first. To newcomers it appears to be a typical forum, but it operates quite differently and the process of finding out is unpleasant.

I eventually started using SO daily circa 2010-2011. Now my account is idle, but 2-3 answers continuously garner reputation. Since I was last active in 2011, my rep has gone from 12k to 20. Some of my older answers are out of date ("is there an ORM for PHP like the entity framework?" from 2010 for example), and on some, people have left comments complaining about that. It's not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site. As a casual user I have no time to keep up with or understand the way the site works and the constant changes.

<comment><USER9> > It's not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave > them, according to the philosophy of the site.

Ideally SO would like you to keep the context of an answer up-to-date, such that they aren't actively misleading, for example by giving dates or version numbers and pointing out if things have changed. If you want to recommend an entirely different approach, I believe there's a mild preference to writing a new answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> good perspective and I gotta say, Jon Skeet sets a great example of being down to earth & considerate! I mean, memes of his legend put Chuck Norris to shame...</comment>


Interviewing candidates - <AUTHOR> http://ericlippert.com/2015/06/08/interviewing-candidates/ <comment><USER2> I feel like this is how everyone thinks they interview candidates, and that it doesn't really work. I wrote about this at length, specifically so I wouldn't write the same long HN comment every time this comes up. :)

[http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring- post/](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

<comment><USER3> I appreciate that you're tired of writing the same comment over and over, but I'd really appreciate your going into some depth about what "this" is that you're referring to and how it contrasts with your approach. It seems like the original article describes a very scripted, standardized interview that tries hard to put the candidate at ease. If you were to condense your article into a sort-of "Joel test" for interviews, I imagine that this process would score reasonably well.

<comment><USER2> It's based on the assumption that it's reasonably possible to put a candidate so at ease that they can solve interesting programming problems in front of an interviewer. But in-person interviews are inherently hostile, if for no other reason that they're timed and adversarial. It's better that we jettison the entire notion that they can be a venue for demonstrating programming ability.

I'm not opposed to interviews. I just think you need to factor out the programming from them.

<comment><USER4> Huge fan of that hiring post, by the way.

I'm currently working with a roomful of cognitive scientists on ways to unpick some of the bias from recruitment. Be good to have a chat at some point if you're interested.

<comment><USER2> I'm easy to get ahold of. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "How are things going?" is actually a terrible question to ask someone in an interview, if that's literally how you ask it. It is saying to them, in so many words, "tell me how you think you are doing, performance-wise, so far?"

Horrible, and about the direct opposite of a question that will put someone at ease. Questions that will put someone at ease are ones that have nothing that can be construed as something you are _assessing_ their answers to, like asking them about their visit to the area or if they enjoyed lunch or something like that. Break the ice, tell them about what you work on, see if they need a break, and then start digging into stuff. I also like to tell the person up-front what we'll be covering in the interview so there are no surprises. Walking in the door and asking them a question they could interpret to mean to reflect on their interactions with the previous interviewers makes me cringe.

<comment><USER6> Well as I said in the article, the intention of the question is emphatically not a "gotcha" about how they are actually doing. It's intended to find out if there are any problems that need addressing.

<comment><USER5> Yeah it's a tough one I think to ask well -- maybe you've got the tone and wording down in a way that candidates won't misinterpret, but I've avoided that type of question because I'm not able to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is almost exactly the template that I apply to my own interviewing. However, I switched away from asking about a project on the candidate's resume because I found that that question - specifically meant to put people at ease - did not in fact put them at ease.

Instead, I found that people became surprisingly flustered - including one who said that "like a lot of things on there, it sounds cooler than it is" and went on to question his own commitment to the field. I asked about the project because it sounded awesome, and, when I pressed him to please tell me about his role, it was awesome.

I think that many people are not prepared to discuss every item on their resume. I don't think that's great, but I don't want to base a large amount of my decision on that fact. This question threw them off for the rest of the interview, so I've stopped asking it.

<comment><USER7> Some people -- i.e. introverts -- are uncomfortable talking about themselves and their strengths and accomplishments. Unfortunately that's kinda the point of the interview. Not sure there's much you can do about that besides (as you suggest) pressing them to answer questions and cutting them some slack for not being super forthcoming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Red flags often surface at this point. I've had candidates with PhDs in computer science, for instance, who did not know that on a 64 bit architecture, pointers are 64 bits wide."

Because learning 64-bit architecture is impossible for somebody that have proven that they can learn a field, perform research, and successfully write and defend a dissertation? '32 < 64' is beyond them?

<comment><USER6> No, because we are _actually building telescopes here_ , and astronomy PhDs apply, and when they are not actually clear on the difference between a reflector and refractor telescope you realize, hey, this person is going to need to learn so much about the very basics of the field that they're applying for that it's not going to be a good fit.

I've had candidates with PhDs in computer science who thought that pointers on 64 bit operating systems were two bytes wide. Do they believe that there are only 16000 possible allocations before the allocator fails? Not likely, because that's ridiculous. So how could they have that belief? because they understand so little about pointers that they don't understand the _implications_ of their false beliefs.

I need someone who is going to command the salary that a PhD-level candidate will demand to be able to hit the ground running.

<comment><USER9> Different perspective: I believe for most CS persons this would be a 5-minute- difference... i.e. it would take 5 mins for them to understand/research 64 bit OS pointers size. So basically you're penalizing potential good candidates for just 5 minutes of their life.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it may be only 5 min.

But it tells _a lot_ about the amount of "just 5 min" things they don't know.

I was asked once what load average knows (and I didn't know it). Because my background wasn't in sysadmin.

The fact that you know one fact or doesn't is immaterial, but it's a good proxy.

Your hiring decision should not be based on only that, of course, but let's say it's a pixel in a picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It had never occurred to me until I read this, but I have a sudden urge to ask my interviewers simple coding questions like "reverse a linked list".

In most cases it would be a silly waste of time, but it would also have saved me from one or two truly horrific jobs with skill-free managers.

</comment><comment><USER12> This was my thoughts on the matter: [http://seshbot.com/blog/2014/01/24/the- best-way-for-programm...](http://seshbot.com/blog/2014/01/24/the-best-way-for- programmers-to-interview-programmers/)

summary: ask the open ended question 'what was the most recent interesting project in which you were heavily involved?' and then focus most of your technical questions on the system the then describe. If a programmer can't talk throughly about a topic which they chose themselves and are purportedly very interested, they probably aren't right for the job (at whatever company I'm working for anyway!)

The benefits are that you wont be randomly hitting a gap in their knowledge, you get a better idea of what they feel are their greatest strengths, and because you can raise your expectations about the quality of their answer you can probe very deeply and find out how good they are at communicating, and whether they are actually blagging.

The problems you can encounter are: they might end up running the interview if you aren't careful; you must be very engaged and perhaps talk about things you aren't that knowledgable yourself, and it is harder to compare one candidate with another (which is VERY important at large companies where you must justify your decisions to HR)

</comment><comment><USER13> I also wrote a thing about coding interviews, from the employee side:

[http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/05/why-i-dont-do- codi...](http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/05/why-i-dont-do-coding- tests.html)

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands _" Second, what actually did they do on this project?"_

A lot of developers I know when in interviews say, "Well, the "team" did this and "we" did that. You always want to use singular personal pronouns such as, " _I_ did this", or "The team expected _me_ to do such and such."

This is something a lot of potential hiring managers like to hear. If they have to ask what _you_ did, many believe you're role or your work may not have been that important.

<comment><USER14> Yes, parsing "I/we" is a great way to filter out collaborative team players and hire antisocial narcissists.

Is that what you want, though?

<comment><USER15> I don't care as much about what the rest of the team did, because I'm not interviewing them. I'm more interested in what you, the interviewee, personally did to help the team achieve success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with what was said in the article. I'd say one half of programming in general is objective in the sense that either the program works or doesn't. The other half is completely opinion based - be it a design philosophy, choosing algorithms, future proofing APIs, hardening code against malicious actors, etc. This half is very fuzzy because there are no right/wrong answers as it goes more towards taste. IMHO you should try to evaluate the following - "What has the candidate done that makes their opinion worth something". If you can't come up with a very strong reason to give any kind of weight to their opinion, then I'd say do not hire them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I feel like I follow this template as well. Except, I like to add a small self assessment at the beginning of the interview. Like:

          Q: On a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being low) how do you rate yourself on "Programming Language Du Jour"?

Then I can see if their self assessment is inline with mine. Which can help in reviewing the resume.

I also like to ask for them to choose a project in the past to talk about, because then it's easy to see what they are passionate about. Or easily tell if they are choosing to talk about something because they think, you think, it's cool.

<comment><USER18> I was asked by a hip, happening, popular web-app related startup to rate myself in C++.

I pointed out that Bjarne Stroustrup rated himself 7 out of 10 once. I wasn't as good as him, and I wasn't nearly as good as him, which left me the field of 5 and below.

I can guarantee that some ham-fisted chancer who'd flicked through the "Teach Yourself C++" chapter summaries put himself down as an 8, though.

<comment><USER19> Agreed - the answer to this question is really the result of how much one _thinks_ one knows. Because a little knowledge can result in false confidence, those that rate highly will fall into two categories: Those that actually know, and those that don't.

If the interviewer can distinguish between these two categories, then what value does the question add? If the interviewer cannot and is relying on the answer to this question (even partially), then it's an example of relying on a false signal.

Whenever I'm asked this question, I always respond with the following questions:

1) What does a "10" mean?

2) What does a "1" mean?

3) What's the difference between 5, 6 and 7?

4) (Optional, this could easily come across as being snarky) What's the range of levels in your team/org/dept for this metric?

<comment><USER14> You are absolutely right, but your behavior would offend the kind of person who thought it was a good question in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Leave the candidate with a positive impression of the company

I feel like I haven't experienced this enough in interviews. Mostly I assumed that if I'm applying then interviewer already thinks that I have a good view of the company (or otherwise I wouldn't want to work there right?), but it would be nice to get a better outlook of the company. Maybe I'm just asking the wrong questions.

</comment><comment><USER21> > if we make a bad hire, that can drag down the productivity of a team for > years

This is the essential cowardice of employers. Interviews are insufficient contexts to judge if someone can help move your business forward. Screen the incompetent, but just hire people and don't be afraid to let them move on if they don't work out after 2/=4/6 months.

</comment><comment><USER22> Love this, very useful for me, especially the gradually elevated technical interview steps/details, though it's less meaningful for junior engineers, who normally can't think that deep yet be it at interview or on the job.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not do 2 phone screens to filter out completely incompetent people and then let them choose:

\- paid work for a week

\- writing patch for a project or making simple tool(proxy of the job) and invite them to talk about it.

<comment><USER24> Because candidates have lives outside of code. They probably already have a job, so taking a week off for "vacation" which will actually be a "paid interview" sounds like a crummy deal. Writing a patch-- similarly, it's eating into their own time. You're going to lower your hire rate from that.

<comment><USER25> If they can take half a day or a day out of their life to show up for an interview then certainly they can take the same time out of their life to write some code instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't really get it.

This is sounds like a very pretty typical software engineer interview process. The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death.

Unless you're Google (or Facebook), you are not getting thousands of applications a day. You don't need to emulate their hiring process. They do it for a reason (practicality) whereas it seems others do it out of pure snobbery. Whiteboard coding is worthless (barring simple fizzbuzz tests which can be done over the phone anyway). I mean how pompous does this shit sound:

"All candidates eventually figure out that they will need to add an auxiliary data structure that maintains a map from a 32 bit integer to a 64 bit pointer, because of the aforementioned ten pound sack. Do they know that there are off- the-shelf map classes? If not, do they have confidence that they could write one?"

Eric Lippert is originally from Microsoft though, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me. After all, they're the ones that started asking "Why is a manhole cover round?" in software engineering interviews.

Much respect goes to tptacek that outlines a much better and enlightened alternative.

<comment><USER6> Well, my intention was not to sound pompous, but writing is hard, you know? Thanks for your cogent critique of my tone.

<comment><USER27> Regardless of whether you or tptacek has the better method for hiring coders, I have much more problem with dvt's tone in his post than yours in the article. Hope this kind of response won't discourage you from posting more, as I've had a lot of value from your writing in the past and found this article interesting as well.

<comment><USER28> I second this. I've read a lot of your writings and have even watched your episode of 'Checking in with Erik Meijer', both of are very informative. Thanks for writing this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's how you hire a candidate, in two steps:

1) If they provide a github/bitbucket/sourceforge link, look at what's there. Skip step 2.

2) Literally anything else. It won't work anyway.

<comment><USER25> Assuming you just need a candidate to do grunt level coding.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you monitor your email inbox placement? - <AUTHOR> There's a lot of tools and services to monitor the technical side of email deliverability (e.g. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, IP blacklists).
But what solutions are there to monitor actual inbox placement? (e.g. if your email actually reaches the recipient's inbox and not marked as spam along the way).
Do you use anything? <comment><USER2> Your best option would be to use the [Return receipt] or [Delivery status notification] options. The latter will be an automated notification from the mail server stating it accepted or deferred the e-mail.</comment>


Why This Crisis Isn't Like 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904140604576496241939456906.html

<comment><USER2> I think this article looking at the two major financial drops as independent events is mis-guided.

The article states that the 2008 financial collapse was caused from the bottom-up, starting with mortgage lending.

It then goes on to state that the current drop is a result of 'Governments around the world, unable to stimulate their economies and get their houses in order, have gradually lost the trust of the business and financial communities.'

But the reason the governments were trying to stimulate their economies was as a result of the 2008 recession. Wasn't most of the spending and debt which accumulated a result of the stimulation packages aimed at resolving the 2008 drops?</comment>


Response from OH Senator Sherrod Brown regarding SOPA/PIPA - <AUTHOR> http://gregloesch.com/736/reply-from-oh-senator-sherrod-brown-regarding-sopapipa/

<comment><USER2> Typical politician response: Speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He simultaneously voices support for the bill, while criticizing it. He then closes his letter with a vague "I'll keep your concerns in mind" and fails to indicate whether he supports it or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, those were my thoughts as well. Nothing he really said seemed that insightful. I could be mistaken, but I believe he was listed as one being in support of SOPA/PIPA.</comment></comment>


Breaking the rules of video game design with a collection of free strategy games - <AUTHOR> Design principles for the eSports for engineers game collection are:
1. target audience is people who enjoy reading dense technical material
2. designed to accompany your daily exercise bike workout, for 30 min to one hour  a day total.  The collection includes a different game for each day, providing for a varied mind/body workout.  Scoring formulas are provided to track your daily and weekly performance.
3. Sample different game domains, from deep learning chess and Go to realistic sims.  Spar with a world-champion level AI first to train, then play online vs other humans if desired.
4. realistic physics, re-creation of historical events and strategy, not fantasy, are the themes that draw you in.
5. free on linux, no advertising.
6. you'll need to read a book and a game manual for each game to get the most out it
7. differentiate with breadth, depth, and richness of content, reflecting a wide range of volunteer contributors from all over the world, and over a long period of time.
8. unpack one tar file on linux to play all the games.  No payment infrastructure or internet is needed to play.
more information here:
https://alternativeto.net/software/esports-for-engineers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Free, world champion Chess, Go and Bridge were a big find, and were added for version 3. All functionality of Mig Alley's well-known unscripted campaign has been restored. The daily and weekly score mechanism has been added. And last but not least, QA has been done to improve the user experience.

</comment><comment><USER2> What's new in the 3.0 release of esports for engineers?

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this game package run on Manjaro linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> The recommended linux distro for eSports for engineers is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and wine 5.0 or higher. That way you just follow the instructions in the documentation and everything runs with no hassle.

Most of the games will probably run out-of-the-box on any linux distro, but the sims and GPU-accelerated deep learning engine might require some additional work loading needed libraries, etc.</comment></comment>


FreeBSD Full Disk Encryption, with an External Boot Drive, GELI, and UFS (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://vesterman.com/FreeBSD/FullDiskEncryption <comment><USER3> I've switched back from such a setup to having an unencrypted UFS boot partition. The external boot medium works nicely, but then you think about a USB stick being your SPOF too much, then you create backup sticks. Which means you have to secure them at least as good as the one "you are always carrying". But you can not simply carry the backup as well, as that would subject it to the same wear and tear. Which spawns the second backup. It is a rabbit hole.

That said, I am really looking forward to Allan Jude's last patches hitting CURRENT, at which point I will rebuild that Laptop with UEFI booted, full disk encrypted root on ZFS without any unencrypted bootpartition.

There will still be the issue of the unencrypted bootloader that does the initial decryption to load the kernel, but that will likely end up an irrelevant attack vector compared to the Laptop's BIOS anyway...

<comment><USER4> Which laptop do you use? I love FreeBSD but have always failed at installing it properly on a laptop (Macbook dual boot, or Dell XPS 13).

<comment><USER3> It's a Dell Latitude E6430 aka whatever my workplace gave out at the time I got a new one. Which means I can not claim that any sort of research went into choosing this one or that that it runs FreeBSD dis-proportionally well - <USER2> it does not. It just runs it, with the occasional hickup here and there.

For example on boot, it always prints that the boot device is invalid, since it gets confused by finding GPT partitioning without UEFI. Then you press enter and it happily continues to boot...

I never fully configured the UMTS modem in it I think, that entire class of hardware is just soul crushingly awful.

And as I am running CURRENT, every once in a while there is commit that throws i915kms into a suspend/resume tantrum (refusing to shut down, not coming back up). But since I do actually power down the laptop instead of suspending it, so that the disk encryption actually has a chance to help me out, I am not too bothered by it.

My use case for the laptop is mainly being a glorified ssh terminal multiplexer. It just needs to provide a comfortable, familiar runtime that I can navigate blindly at 3am, still partially asleep and without any coffee. All the tools need to be there, in the correct drawer, with the correct label and all the right marker labels on the man pages.

I tried running a Linux laptop/workstation combination at work since that is what our boxes predominantly run, but it just feels like running around in somebody else's slippers all day.

Sorry for oversharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Optionally, at this point you might want to overwrite any preexisting data on your hard drives with zeroes or, preferably, random values."_

Am I being silly, or could a hard drive full of _random_ data be confused with a hard drive full of encrypted data by some member of the security services in the future? Would zeros not be a better bet?

The Debian installer attempts to write random data to the whole drive when you elect to encrypt the hard drive (except for the small /boot partition as mentioned in OA). I always quit out of that. My security needs are of the 'laptop left on bus' variety, not enterprise level.

<comment><USER6> At that point, you are trying to remove the ability to read the old files on the disk you are about to use for new encrypted data. Wiping with all zeros will make it extremely difficult to recover files and random will be even more so. But by writing down zeros, you leak metadata about the encrypted parts of your drive. Zeros almost certainly don't contain data, but the noise will. If I can see you have 30gb of noise on a drive, rest zeros then I know something I probably shouldn't, namely that you have written at least 30gb to that drive. But that same 30gb of noise wouldn't be discernible in a drive full of random data.

What you might be thinking of is when decommissioning the drive after having encrypted it. At this point, I don't think it matters. I'm not sure drives come with all zeroed status from the manufacturer anyways.

<comment><USER7> Buy a used platter of off eBay or from your favorite reseller of refurbished equipment (and keep the receipt). Replace the disk's controller with one of your own (the one it came with was broken). Ummm, I dunno what the previous owner of this drive has done with it!

<comment><USER8> In this era of strict liability crimes that won't help you. In fact, it may actually be more risky.

<comment><USER7> How so? By future laws that outlaw resales? Make do-it-yourself repairs illegal?

Yeah, that would suck.

<comment><USER9> I think ey probably meant "finding illegal content on the parts of the platter you haven't touched yet".

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's what I meant. It's possible that merely having some forms of data in your possession would be considered prima facie evidence of crime -- there is no need for the state to demonstrate that you put it there or that you had any idea it was there to be convicted. That you might take content from somewhere and not look at what it is before carrying it is reckless -- and much like carrying, through airport security, luggage packed by someone unfamiliar to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds very cool, as an almost life-long Linux user.

Important question, that makes me suffer in other *nix platforms: does anyone run a rig like this AND it work properly with sleep/hibernation and resume?

<comment><USER11> Works fine with suspend-to-RAM. FreeBSD doesn't have software suspend-to-disk support (and it's almost never implemented by the BIOS).

<comment><USER10> > FreeBSD doesn't have software suspend-to-disk support (and it's almost never > implemented by the BIOS).

Linux has spoied me so bad I never noticed the former, and I am shocked by the latter.

Nice to get a response from a completely ignorant BSD and security notice, by the way. :-) I guess I could ego trip and say "how can I trust this user" but I suspect others will chuckle like me.

<comment><USER11> I'm having trouble understanding this comment. Possibly due to typos?

<comment><USER12> I think this person is impressed that the founder of Tarsnap would respond to the question of a novice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And here's how you do the same thing, only with ZFS:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120606231347/https://web.irtno...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120606231347/https://web.irtnog.org/Members/xenophon/blog/revised- freebsd-root-zfs-geli)

(Sorry---I'd posted this to my now-defunct blog back in 2012.)

<comment><USER13> Here's how you do something similar, only in a dual-boot setup with Mac OS X (FileVault2) and Ubuntu (OpenZFS/LUKS):

[https://gist.github.com/xenophonf/2e2d1a1550b0fb8dae98](https://gist.github.com/xenophonf/2e2d1a1550b0fb8dae98)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I kinda like how Dragonfly does implement dm-crypt such as on Linux (compatible) instead :).

</comment><comment><USER15> Question: when installing FreeBSD 11, I can automatically encrypt the disk in the install if I use ZFS, using UFS doesn't work, I would have to do that manually. Why didn't they implement this already?

<comment><USER3> I think the encrypted ZFS installer bits were upstreamed by PCBSD which is ZFS-only; so it would make sense for them not to implement the UFS version.

Apart from that, probably nobody needed it bad enough to sit down and write it so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great write up!</comment>


Review: Eye-Fi Mobile X2 provides real camera quality, smartphone convenience - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/reviews/2011/04/eyefi-mobile-x2/

<comment><AUTHOR> I always forget to transfer photos from my SD card to my computer, so this seems like a cool and convenient solution for getting those high quality digital camera photos onto your smartphone/tablet/notebook for sharing online.</comment>


"San Francisco" trashes Yelp -- and its own ethics - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/349769/san-francisco-trashes-yelp-++-and-its-own-ethics <comment><USER2> No mention of the hundreds of restaurants in NYC proudly displaying Yelp stickers in their windows. Saw one last week with an award from Yelp for extraordinarily high ratings.

Very active community here. I just started telling everyone I know about it. Give them a couple of years and they'll be everywhere.</comment>