Host Your Blog on DigitalOcean with Docker, Nginx and Let's Encrypt - <AUTHOR> https://www.archij.com/host-your-own-blog-on-digitalocean-with-docker-nginx-and-letsencrypt/ <comment><USER2> > volumes: - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro

Please for the love of all that is holy, do not ever do this! Giving access to the host's Docker socket is _equivalent_ to giving a container _unrestricted root access to your host_. Mounting the socket read-only doesn't protect you in any way either, because you can still connect to and write to the socket! Seriously, try it:

        % touch /tmp/docker.sock
        % mount --bind -o ro /var/run/docker.sock /tmp/docker.sock # this is -v /var/run/docker.sock:/foo:ro
        % docker -H unix:///tmp/docker.sock run --privileged -v /:/host -it ubuntu bash
        # # I couldn't write to it, but I can connect and write to the connection...
        # cat /host/etc/shadow # whoops!

(The full container escape is left as an exercise for the reader. It's pretty trivial though.)

To be fair, there are unix-like DAC controls that do restrict this somewhat but given that most people run containers as root or they don't use user namespaces this is still an issue.

Please stop doing this, please stop telling people to do this, and please stop making images that access docker.sock. I understand that this is something that a lot of people do, so it's obviously not exclusively the fault of the author for doing what the majority of people appear to be doing, but I think that this deserves to be said much stronger than it was in the past (people still expose Docker over the internet -- which is literally a free root-level RCE for anyone who figures out you're hosting it).

And yes, AuthZ plugins exist but nobody really uses them as far as I'm aware -- and personally (as someone who maintains container runtimes and other low- level container tools) I would not feel confident in depending on any AuthZ plugin's profile to protect against a container escape where you give unprivileged users access to /var/run/docker.sock. Even if I were to write one.

<comment><USER3> This is where it comes from and that's probably why it isn't explained in the post: [https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy- compa...](https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion)

It seems like if the author(s) of docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion had assumed something like docker compose or kubernetes that neatly handles sharing volumes between containers, they probably wouldn't have made the mistake of giving a docker container access to docker for such a trivial use.

I disagree that there's never a good reason to do this though. A docker control panel, or a CI or FaaS that spawns docker containers, can be a good reason to do this. [https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker- in-d...](https://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-docker- for-ci/)

BTW there's no escaping the container when you're doing this intentionally.

<comment><USER2> > I disagree that there's never a good reason to do this though.

The number of cases where it is an acceptable idea to do this (compared to the number of cases where people do this because they read it on a random blog post) is so small that it is statistically insignificant. In my view, it is much better to tell people to _never_ do something which is very rarely useful. People who know better would know when to ignore that warning (which I would hope would be the sort of people who would write a CI or FaaS), while those who don't know better likely wouldn't use it in a way that is "safe".

The blog post you link to is quite old (this was at a time when most users were well aware of what docker.sock did -- so much so that vulnerabilities I helped find in Docker from that time were not regarded vulnerabilities because they required docker.sock access!). I agree with Jerome's point which was to dissuade usage of Docker-in-Docker. His point _was not_ that bind-mounting the docker.sock is generally an okay thing to do -- and as I said I think that we should be far more vocal about how dangerous this is (because people don't listen otherwise -- as has been shown by the fact that there are still plenty of users that have Docker listening on a TCP socket without client certificates).

> BTW there's no escaping the container when you're doing this intentionally.

I don't know what you mean by this -- if you bind-mount the docker.sock inside a container that container can _trivially_ get root access on the host (AuthZ plugins can make it harder but as I said they are rarely used and cannot protect you from sufficiently clever attackers). My demo with 'mount --bind' was just to show how it worked, the same thing happens with '-v' (which is just a bind-mount under the hood).

Now, if you argue that the code in the container is always something you trust (which I think is a questionable assumption as it assumes that your code is not exploitable) then sure -- if all the code on your machine is safe you have no worries. But then the obvious question arises -- why do you need the isolation properties of containers in the first place? Why not just run in a chroot?

<comment><USER4> _why do you need the isolation properties of containers in the first place? Why not just run in a chroot?_

Docker containers are about more than isolation, they're also packaging. In my case, I already have a docker-compose.yaml with five services; adding another program as a chroot instead of a sixth service would significantly increase the installation complexity.

I do agree with you that mounting the Docker socket should never be recommended on a tutorial.

<comment><USER2> Right, there is a tooling argument. My point was that you can get most of the packaging with just chroot -- images are just tar archives at the end of the day.

But I might be biased given that while I've worked on both runtimes and image tools, runtimes have a lot more interesting problems so I tend to focus more on them when discussing the benefits of containers. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I I'm not going to tell people not to do this, but in my opinion this is massive overkill for a simple blog. Why use docker when you can just run nginx on the host with certbot for LetsEncrypt.

I guess docker gives you some flexibility for rollover and load balancing, but a single droplet will handle huge amounts of traffic for static sites.

<comment><USER6> In some sense everything is massive overkill for a "simple blog". You should just pay for medium/wordpress/ghost or use a static site hosted on github pages.

I personally fell for these posts a while back and regretted spending time on it. They don't tell you about the crazy amount of sysadmin skills that you need to get it up and running:

Do you need to worry about updates/security patches? How do you configure firewalls? How do you configure ssh settings? How would you even audit unauthorized logins? Where are logs stored? Are they rotated? Are they backed up? Are there backups? How do you restore from backups? How do you configure nginx? How do you configure certbot? How do you check if cron is running correctly? Do you ever look at access/error logs? How do you keep services running upon restart? How do you get notified of problems? How do you monitor uptime?

Each individual question will take minutes to hours to research and will open up new rabbit holes.

<comment><USER7> That's why I think these blogs/projects are useful. Or should people learn all this stuff first time they run a real app in production?

<comment><USER8> Most bloggers aren't ever going to "run a real app in production."

Most {net,dev,sec}ops engineers aren't writing blogs.

<comment><USER9> > Most {net,dev,sec}ops engineers aren't writing blogs.

Unfortunately, in my experience this is true. It's not for lack of motivation or desire, it's because my day job is stressful and tiring. The last thing I want to do when I come home in the evening is to spend my valuable personal time writing a blog about what I did at work. I would rather spend time with my family, or do something like that.

Of course, I could try to schedule time during work hours to write a blog on the company website by talking with my manager about it. Unless this advances any strategic or political agenda, it's unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER10> You could write about non work stuff that interests you, and only do it on occasional instances where you feel like writing, and pay someone like wordpress.com a pittance to handle the tech. This is what most web logs were like in the beginning.

I write a post on my blog about my interests once every month or two, and maybe crosspost it to Facebook, but I like that I get to write down my thoughts on a site I own.

If you don't get much enjoyment out of writing period though, not much reason to blog.

<comment><USER11> I personally blog about things I've found while working that have been a pain or a "oh hey, cool!" that I've not seen documented anywhere easily, so I write about them under the term "blogumentation" (blogging as a form of self- documenting) [https://www.jvt.me/posts/tags/blogumentation/](https://www.jvt.me/posts/tags/blogumentation/), reasoning found in [https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/](https://www.jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/)

I've found it useful for myself and colleagues, but also it's really awesome seeing hits from Google and other mediums where people are obviously finding it organically and sharing around through various means. Helping others find new / better ways to do things is really awesome

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having been down that path, don't do this to yourself. Just use a static site generator and Netlify, and save yourself countless hours of work and headache.

<comment><USER13> Yeah there really isn't any reason to do this other than wanting to specifically use these technologies.. Way easier with generators. Also you can save a lot of money by hosting it cheap instead of DigitalOcean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For blogs that are "small" and/or expect low traffic, if someone doesn't want to use free services, my recommendation would be a static site generator that pushes content to a site on Nearly Free Speech (nearlyfreespeech.net). It has a very simple way to create (and continuously renew) a letsencrypt TLS certificate. The cost would be USD 1.5 a month (or a bit higher than that) for what's classified as a "production site" there.

One drawback with NFSN is that it requires people to be somewhat tech savvy and know how to manage sites, probably use ssh, etc. If you're someone who can use S3 or this solution, then you'll find NFSN easier and cheaper for _this use case_.

<comment><USER15> I love NFSN. I wrote a detailed review a while back: [https://winningwp.com/nearlyfreespeech-web-hosting- review/](https://winningwp.com/nearlyfreespeech-web-hosting-review/)

(Not much has changed since then, and I'm still a happy customer.)

<comment><USER14> Nice writeup. Thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Absolutely do not do this.

host your blog on [https://pages.github.com](https://pages.github.com) or [https://www.netlify.com](https://www.netlify.com)

<comment><USER17> shout-out to gitlab pages, I use it and love it.

<comment><USER18> Awesome, thank you for your kind support. We really appreciate that.

<comment><USER19> I think gitlab pages is a great way to introduce people to the philosophy of gitlab.

I could imagine a pipeline setup in the future (with the help of web IDE) that will allow authors to write and commit new articles, for editors to edit them and sign them off to the publisher, and the publisher to publish articles to a static site without leaving the browser. Thoughts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To everyone saying "use a static site", this deploys Ghost which is a blogging application that provides an admin interface to create and edit posts.

Yes, you can use something like Netlify CMS or Contentful with a static site to get an admin interface, but those would require additional setup or payment beyond github pages or a netlify account.

</comment><comment><USER21> It'd be nice to see a follow-up post on how to keep this setup up-to-date with the latest security fixes without service disruption.

<comment><USER22>
      ~$ docker-compose pull
      ~$ docker-compose up -d --build

The compose files are already using latest, so this pulls the latest images, rebuilds images with any new code, and restarts the services.

<comment><USER23> assuming jwilder publishes updated images..

<comment><USER22> Oh, for upstream/base? If a Docker Hub image was set up with automated builds, it would automatically rebuild the image once its base was rebuilt. It looks like _nginx_ was set up this way, but _nginx-proxy_ was not. So you have to rebuild _nginx-proxy_ manually.

      ~$ git clone https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy
      ~$ cd nginx-proxy
      ~$ docker build -f Dockerfile.alpine -t my-own-tag-name/nginx-proxy:alpine .
      ~$ cd ..
      ~$ sed -i -e 's/image: jwilder\/nginx-proxy.*/image: my-own-tag-name\/nginx-proxy:alpine/' docker-compose.yaml

Alternately, you could fork the _nginx-proxy_ repo, build it, push it to your own Docker Hub account, and add the Repository Links[1] back to _nginx_. Then you could use TravisCI to automatically pull in and rebuild changes from the parent _nginx-proxy_. This way you get automated builds when base is updated, and when _nginx-proxy_ is updated.

[1] [https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/builds/#repository- links](https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/builds/#repository-links)

<comment><USER23> Yes, it is entirely possible to do the right thing.

The trouble is 9 times out of 10, the only place you find it documented is in some random forum post where cargo-cult silliness gets critiqued, rather than by the folks publishing these how-tos.

<comment><USER22> These aren't even how-tos, they're clickblogs. If you'd like to contribute to actual HOWTOs for this kind of stuff, I'm building a wiki...

<comment><USER24> link to the wiki for a noob?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this the proper way to share file sockets?

Also, why Docker and not just an Ansible script?

update:

Found this...

[https://github.com/jkap/ansible-ghost- letsencrypt](https://github.com/jkap/ansible-ghost-letsencrypt)

<comment><USER22> Why not Terraform? Why not Puppet? Why not X? Pick your poison. But it does seem simpler to not have to learn Ansible if you're already using Docker.

The example you give has 6 config files.... the linked article uses 1 config file. _shrug_

<comment><USER25> So if you know Docker, you shouldn't know how to do things without a container?

<comment><USER26> Nobody said that.

But yea, when using Docker already, why not? It's quick and easy compared to all the alternatives.

<comment><USER25> Why add an additional layer of abstraction?

Really, you don't even need Ansible.

Just ssh into the box, apt install nginx, run the Let's Encrypt script and install Ghost.

<comment><USER22> The docker-machine command creates the droplet for you, and then docker- compose runs everything for you. It's two commands and one config. It's repeatable, automated, fast, simple, and complete.

But, sure, you could do it in a more complicated way, or a more manual and time consuming way that isn't documented or automated. I think that's called the "job security" method.

<comment><USER25> How many static blogs are you deploying?

Shouldn't we also be using k8s to orchestrate all the blogs?

<comment><USER27> Yes, k8s would make it even easier, if you had access to a hosted k8s cluster. But that isn't what DigitalOcean provides.

<comment><USER4> It does now: [https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is NOT meant to be incendiary. I'm trying to learn. Why not use Netlify instead? It seems to have everything you need from a static site host and has a comprehensive, well-documented toolchain. Seriously, what am I missing? Would DO be better under peak loads or something?

<comment><USER27> No, it's just that Netlify is proprietary and only works for static sites. The method in this article is more general.

For this use-case Netlify is the better option.

<comment><USER28> Thanks much. I really was trying to learn, downvotes to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While this is pretty cool, it's also not all that much of an effort to setup https using certbot and have it automatically configure nginx: [https://smalldata.tech/blog/2015/12/29/nginx-nodejs-and- http...](https://smalldata.tech/blog/2015/12/29/nginx-nodejs-and-https-via- letsencrypt)

Setting up the renew job is also a very simple cron job.

Moreover, something that one forgets is that once you have your posts, comments and any sort of data, you need to have backups and other sysadminy stuff.

Personally, I enjoyed learning about this while setting up my blog :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if you run a lighter blog and specifically want to do it on a machine you control the I can recommend using the nginx:alpine docker image to host your site. All you need to build it is a COPY command:

       COPY ./my_static_files /usr/share/nginx/html

This alone wont get you HTTPS, but I wouldn't be surprised if you can get that working with little effort using docker volumes and certbot

</comment><comment><USER31> Once, I worked on a Rails app that was setup in a docker compose environment. I won't talk about prod, but was very surprised to see how much more complex it made developing locally, having to deal with docker instances and such, compared to just run `rails s` if we weren't using Docker.

Was the app setup improperly, or is that expected that using Docker will make local development more complex?

<comment><USER32> It's a mixed bag. Some of it was probably improper setup. With mounts and docker exec and such it's easy to go into the container and rails s or rails console and do what you need to do. But you have to deal with user permissions if your app creates files and some other things but you can just use a docker container as a very lightweight VM.

On the other side you have to track down and figure out how to install or build whatever obscure old Ruby version they're using and dirty your machine installing and running services to support the app. All of which is also painful.

I do client work and I'd rather not dirty my machine installing old or random software to work on a project. So having portable local environments works well for me. But they do take some thought to set up and people often don't take enough care in either case to document the procedure for getting things set up to work on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Like, why?

Am I being too cheeky if I point out that setting up a droplet with a WordPress blog on DigitalOcean takes three minutes? :)

(They have a premade image for it)

</comment><comment><USER33> The most efficient host-your-own-blog I've ever seen is just static blog generation & S3. I don't do it myself (ironically, I run tiny kubernetes cluster and in the past had a systemd-managed docker+ngin+LE setup before that) but it doesn't get much simpler than uploading a folder to S3 that's being served by amazon as a website.

</comment><comment><USER34> More people should know about Caddy. A webserver with built-in HTTPS. We've been using it in production and the experience has been great so far: [https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

<comment><USER35> Using caddy for anything that might be commercial,by compiling, seems like a huge pain:

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- host...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-host-a- website-with-caddy-on-ubuntu-16-04)

<comment><USER34> The Caddy license page states that:

 _" If your company uses official Caddy binaries internally, in production, or distributes Caddy, a commercial license is required."_

So if you are not using the official binaries (for example a community- provided Caddy Docker image) a commercial license is not required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I really miss the days when plain text files were used on a simple apache server linked with simple html pages. We've gone from concentrating on content to concentrating on the visuals, first.

</comment><comment><USER37> or you can just use [https://github.com/SteveLTN/https- portal](https://github.com/SteveLTN/https-portal) for ssl termination

</comment><comment><USER38> How about not using any of that and instead using one of the hundred static site generators on GitHub and github.io hosting?

<comment><USER39> it's twice as expensive? $120 a year vs $60? (unless you make your content open source in which case github is free)

<comment><USER29> Gitlab also provides hosting and free private repos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I want FTP back!

<comment><USER41> SFTP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've been using Netlify for a while with Hugo as site generator. It's free with HTTPS and CDN support.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why do you guys love complexing so much? Why not use one click wp instance from DO images?

<comment><USER44> Because it's fun

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Hugo + Netlify is simpler and faster. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER46> GitHub pages with HTTPS support is easier :P

</comment><comment><USER47> Would this work OK in 512mb at, say, Vultr?

<comment><USER48> As long as you have some swap configured you'll probably be fine.

<comment><USER22> Alternately, generate static HTML, run a bare web server and use about 16MB of RAM.

<comment><USER49> Why even bother running a web server? Just use S3 with cloudfront.

<comment><USER22> It looks like this would work, but you would have to use www.myblog.com instead of myblog.com since you have to use a CNAME to use cloudfront. Maybe using cloudflare's CNAME flattening?

<comment><USER50> Unless you host your domain servers on Route53, in which case you can configure an alias record at the apex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Premature optimization something something...and honestly this isn't even optimization, just some extra complexity.

Dockers cool for doing dev stuff on your laptop, or for scaling out with something like kubernetes. This is just silly!

</comment><comment><USER52> use medium

<comment><USER53> This was already proposed and shot down for various reasons: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17983366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17983366)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm just curious - why? Forgive me if I am missing the obvious advantage over a blogging platform like medium.

<comment><USER55> Medium's reading experience is pretty bad with all the annoying popups showing up all over the place. Also with Ghost you can easily export your data and move it across different ghost installations, you can customize the look and feel of the blog, you can use your own custom domain without paying medium extra for that, etc.

<comment><USER56> For anyone that wants to move from Medium to Ghost easily, I made this thing to do that: [https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost](https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost)

<comment><USER57> Ghost uses markdown, right? So does this tool export my medium blogs as markdown files, with links to the image files already embedded?

If so, I will be forever indebted xD

<comment><USER56> Ghost 2.0 uses Mobiledoc format now. But you could get Markdown + Images out of this with a little hacking and passing the output to [https://github.com/yuloh/mobiledoc-markdown- renderer](https://github.com/yuloh/mobiledoc-markdown-renderer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This does not belong on HN at all. 1) It is not novel or interesting and 2) it is made worse through being self-promotion. Do not make posts like this.

Edited to add: But to scratch the stupid itch I tried hard not to scratch and respond to the other people here, I do this with my own personal blog and it's totally fine. All of my self-hosted software is containerized behind an HTTP reverse proxy. I can do it any number of ways but "Rely on <external third- party service>" seems like a terrible idea to me. And there is _no reason whatsoever_ for all the posts in this thread naysaying this particular way of doing it, any more than there's any particular reason to naysay the suggested alternatives. Do whatever you want. Learn something. Improve your skillset.

<comment><USER3> Read the HN rules. People are allowed to submit their own content. By the way, your username appears to promote a disgusting slang term. How is that any better?

<comment><USER58> There were two whole qualifiers in my statement, half of which you ignored. Self-promotion is obviously okay. However self-promotion of bland, boring posts that regurgitate nearly useless information which has been posted hundreds of times... Edit: Oh, I see that you have a long history of twisting the words of others and personally attacking those you disagree with, so we're done here. You have a nice evening.</comment></comment></comment>


Maps of the US made entirely of roads - <AUTHOR> http://benfry.com/allstreets/

<comment><USER2> _< wants ultra-zoomed-in version>_

<comment><USER3> <http://maps.google.com/>

<comment><USER4> [http://www.planit3d.com/source/texture_files/roads/road12.jp...](http://www.planit3d.com/source/texture_files/roads/road12.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Cloudant Labs On Foundational MapReduce Literature - <AUTHOR> https://cloudant.com/blog/cloudant-labs-on-foundational-mapreduce-literature/

<comment><USER2> Disappointed to see no pre-google references since the technique was well known to parallel practitioners two decades before it was popularized by google.

<comment><AUTHOR> @hatetobethatguy, you're spot on. In an effort to keep the reading list concise I skimped on the historical literature. Do you have a good "first" reference on map reduce? Lisp?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would also love feedback from anybody that's done a good scan of the Impala code or actually put it through its paces.</comment>


Interview with the Guy Who Tried to Frame Me for Heroin Possession - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/09/interview-with-the-guy-who-tried-to-frame-me-for-heroin-possession/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting that the "hacker" himself was caught via hackery. When I worked on anti-cheating stuff for a game company, I was able to stop the seller of the cheat because their cheat had been stolen and resold so they had to put anti cheating tech in their cheating tech and it opened a hole I was able to exploit to detect them.

<comment><USER3> sounds more like they had to put anti-piracy tech in their cheating tech

<comment><USER4> Imagine you're selling a tool that lets players win every game.

Then imagine someone else starts selling another tool. Anyone who buys that other tool is now able to beat the players you promised a win to, AND they're not giving you any money for it. This damages your reputation, which in an underground market is probably your most valuable resource. So not only are they not paying you, but they're robbing you of future sales by damaging your rep.

Wouldn't you put in something to prevent users of your newest cheat from being cheated themselves?

<comment><USER5> No different from Google blocking "spam" while simultaneously targeting and delivering ads...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much of his personal information was gleaned from "respectable" American companies like Lexis-Nexis, Equifax, and Transperian? I'm sure they gave everything and medical history for the price of a few coins. I have no respect for companies that don't respect my privacy. And I make it a habit of giving them as much useless, inaccurate information as possible.

<comment><USER7> Who do you mean by "his"?

Also, Krebs is a hell of a guy.

<comment><USER6> > Vovnenko first came onto my radar after his alter ego Fly published a blog > entry that led with an image of my bloodied, severed head and included my > credit report, copies of identification documents, pictures of our front > door, information about family members, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Damn. It does seem that stupid mistakes took him down. Revealing too much about himself on his forum. I mean, if he'd been careful, compromise of that forum would have revealed nothing about him. And for Dog's sake, using the same password on low- and high-security accounts!

Of course, the real story could be hidden through parallel construction. But on it's face, this does support the argument that it's stupid mistakes that take people down. Krebs' blog is full of them.

Edit: And just to be clear, I'm not even suggesting support for that Ukrainian dickhead. It's just that criminal takedowns are well reported, and so provide cautionary lessons for the rest of us.

<comment><USER9> > _Damn. It does seem that stupid mistakes took him down._

One possibility on the "cautionary lessons for the rest of us" front is a classic bit of wisdom about asymmetric adversarial situations: the other party only needs to get lucky _once_. There is a fundamental challenge of scale and time for any entity or individual that tries to run something dealing with persistent antagonists over long time periods, it just plain becomes hard to keep track of it all without further infrastructure systems in place. And its also hard for any single human to stay in the zone persistently, we're not really wired that way, hence the need for non-human support structures.

And that in turn is the same challenge for any business dealing with significant organic growth, criminal or not, it's the classic "that TOTALLY TEMPORARY one-off excel spreadsheet someone made 15 years ago now runs hundreds of millions of dollars" issue. It's hard to know ahead what will be important and sticky or not, even if experience helps. And it's hard to decide how to allocate limited resources too. Infrastructure you build helps you scale properly in the future, but it doesn't do anything for you right now, you might not even know you could need it. And overbuilding upfront might mean there is no tomorrow to worry about anyway.

It's a tough nut, though fortunately it's one area that is probably worse on the black side of things since there is less room for recovery from mistakes. Maybe it's one of the structural forces that can help encourage law abiding behavior, legit companies can mess up badly but still potentially recover if there is enough meat to them, whereas a total opsec break for criminals can mean the end of the enterprise.

<comment><USER8> Yes. And I was thinking more of activists in repressive places. Who, notwithstanding what we might think of them, _are_ criminals in the eyes of their governments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure it's possible to "give" inaccurate information to Equifax.

<comment><USER11> I work at one of the big 3 credit bureaus so thought I'd chime in -

It is entirely possible to report inaccurate information to the bureaus. Although more often than not it's on accident, not malicious. Additionally bureaus collect a lot of information from other sources. Some public some private. It's possible for these datasets to be error prone themselves.

There are however official procedures for disputing/correcting errors in reporting and in my experience they do a pretty good job of validating everything (as that's literally the business they're in)

<comment><USER6> Our son (10 yo) had a delinquent medical bill for reasons we don't understand. The creditor can't tell us who sent the bill because we aren't the named party and I'll be damned if I put him on the phone with them, because he is a minor. So, we're at an impasse and no one can tell us anything.

Someone managed to get his name and address and did not realize he was a minor. Brilliant system you have!

<comment><USER12> yardie says> So, we're at an impasse and no one can tell us anything.*

This is not true. And the system works fine. But you'll have to do some work (write a few letters and maybe a bit more). Here's how:

0\. Open a chronological paper file. Copies of all correspondence with dates clearly marked/stamped will go into this file. Put the file into a file cabinet: put a copy of every letter, note or form, including the creditors' initial complaint, into it in time order. Also put notes about any phone conversations into it. Put dates on everything.

1\. Talk to your local police department and, with your son, file a report with them if possible. They'll view it as a waste of time but it helps by putting you on "the right side of the law." Do it just to have a police report on file locally.

2\. Have your son write a letter to the _creditor_ (not the credit bureau) explaining that your son is a minor, the debt is not his, he did not purchase the item and asking them to remove the invalid entry from his credit report. Add a page with your adult names and signatures explaining that he is your legal son. Send those two letters along with a copy of the chronological file to the the creditor, all via registered mail if you're paranoid.

3\. Wait. They _will_ respond. Usually they'll cave at this point. Sometimes they'll call and ask that a police report be filed in _their_ jurisdiction (usually by phone) or some such. Do what they ask within reason. Make sure they (creditor, police) send you copies of everything. Follow up if they don't.

4\. Wait. _They_ (the _creditors_ , NOT you) should, after brief investigation, notify the credit bureau to remove the item from your son's credit report. If they don't do so within a few months, send follow-up second and third letters if necessary, reminding them.

5\. If you get no response from the creditor after two months, copy the chronological file and send it via registered mail to the _credit bureau_ adding a cover letter explaining that you have exhausted the legal means of redress with the creditors and they have refused to respond appropriately. Ask the credit bureau to investigate the creditor's item on your son's credit report.

This sounds like a lot of trouble but it really isn't and it would be a great lesson for you son, since it shows how most of the world works.

Correction involves loosely-coupled organizations and persons. Nothing in this happens at Internet speed. Each contact must have the situation explained from the beginning. It teaches a person how to order events in time, how to narrate a story consistently and how to be patient.

<comment><USER13> It's obscene that this burden falls on these folks because someone else falsely used this kid's name. The police report should be filed against the collection agency and the credit bureau, for fraud.[0] We may not have debtor's prisons anymore, but we certainly have guilty-by-default for finance.

> it shows how most of the world works.

It certainly does, but not in the way you meant. :/

[0]I'm aware this is not legally possible; I mean "should" in a moral sense.

<comment><USER12> They didn't mention a collection agency, nor is one likely involved with this case yet. Collection agencies enter the picture usually long after an incident and much neglect by various parties.

Collection agencies are not evil. If you've ever been a landlord or had someone fail to pay a debt, a collection agency may be a godsend b/c they buy your debt (you get _something_ at least; they get the paper debt, valid or not). Is that not a valid capitalistic risk-taking venture?

The credit bureau can't be charged with fraud: their data is from legitimate businesses (creditors); any fraud would apply to the creditor.

This system has and still works well. Most everyone reading this has made good use of our current credit system. We all understand how it works but are impatient with the slowness of the system. But it is a mistake to confuse slowness with malintent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ouch, Poggioreale is not a nice place to be in.

<comment><USER15> Why?

<comment><USER14> Beside living side by side with people from the camorra ("camorristi"). This is a letter to an italian newspaper about living in Poggioreale (in italian) [https://www.corriere.it/cronache/13_luglio_28/detenuto- poggi...](https://www.corriere.it/cronache/13_luglio_28/detenuto-poggioreale- lettera-sulle-carceri_735836e4-f760-11e2-a852-8fa32bcbd2fe.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is a link to the original interview, since neither Krebs nor the people that made the translation seem to believe in citing their sources:

[https://krober.biz/?p=3200#more-3200](https://krober.biz/?p=3200#more-3200)

<comment><USER17> [https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/Inter...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/Interview-with-Mukha-aka-Fly-1.pdf)

Here's the translated PDF. Either the original Russian was hacked up already, or this translation is very iffy.

<comment><USER18> The original is full of barely comprehensible jargon, obscure code-speak, intentional spelling mistakes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So this guy picked OP completely at random? I wonder why he was initially targeted

<comment><USER20> The most important and missing information at the start of the article is _why_ the OP had their information posted on the forum, why they were getting sent this package.

<comment><USER21> OP is a very well known security researcher. Here is his self-bio:

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/about/](https://krebsonsecurity.com/about/)</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing – Create Guten Block Toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://ahmadawais.com/create-guten-block-toolkit/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, folks!

Super excited to launch — `create-guten-block` — Easily one of my best open source software.

       A zero-config #0CJS dev-toolkit for building #WordPress #Gutenberg block plugins.

     Blogpost → https://AhmdA.ws/CreateGutenBlock_
     GitHub → https://AhmdA.ws/CreateGutenBlock

ONE sane defaults dependency!

 Develop Blocks Build Production code Eject whenever — NO LOCK IN!

Star the GitHub Repo → [https://AhmdA.ws/CreateGutenBlock](https://AhmdA.ws/CreateGutenBlock)</comment>


Stephen Covey, "7 Habits" author, dies at 79 - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/stephen-covey-7-habits-author-dies-79-163742994--finance.html <comment><USER2> Stephen Covey wrote a profoundly influential book which made a big impact on my life. At a time when most self-help authors were focused on improving your personality, Covey was concerned about your character.

A quick summary of the habits:

1) Be Proactive - accept that while you can't control what happens to you, you can always control how you respond

2) Begin with the End in Mind - imagine what you'd like people to say about you at your funeral, live each day with that vision of your best self in mind

3) First things First - don't let the urgent take precedence over the important - make sure you devot time/energy to your highest priorities

4) Understand before Seeking to Be Understood - make sure you really listen to others, reflect what you hear, before trying to tell them anything

5) Think Win-Win - life works better when you don't see things as a battle, but as an opportunity to allow both/all parties to succeed

6) Synergy - ok, this was a little vague, but basically by working together you can achieve more

7) Sharpen the Saw - make sure to take time to renew yourself - exercise, sleep, recharge, learn new things, and keep yourself operating at the highest levels.

RIP Stephen. Tremendous respect for what you've embodied.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for writing this. I must admit that I always dismissed 7 Habits as yet another business self-help book full of platitudes. (Without reading it, of course.)

Based on the reaction to his death here on HN however I'll give it a shot.

<comment><USER4> >Based on the reaction to his death here on HN however I'll give it a shot.

This thread is affected by the Michael Jackson effect. I would get my reading advice from a less biased one.

<comment><USER5> Did you get your name confused with your password or something? (Just wondering about the name :))

<comment><USER4> I use a random alias whenever I am not using my real name. The habit comes from a combination of laziness, paranoia, and dissatisfaction with various aliases I have past used. The downside is difficulty to login from other machines, though I could use something like lastpass.

I use an Alfred plugin (<http://trepmal.com/alfredapp/random-password/>) to generate logins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of years ago I've read and listened to lots of motivational and self improvement books and audio-books. 7 habit was one of the most insightful I've read. This book has nothing to do with the "get rich quick" category we usually find it in when we go to the library or bookstore.

</comment><comment><USER7> Copyright note: if this counts as a work of corporate authorship (surely the publisher owns the copyright not the author...but maybe I'm misunderstanding this definition) this book will enter the public domain in 2107. If it counts as a work of the author then public domain will hit in 2082. This assumes they don't extend it any more.

In either case, it's likely that "highly effective people" will have acquired a number of different habits...but maybe our grandchildren will find interest in the comparison.

<comment><USER8> Or you could spend $21 at Amazon and save yourself 71-95 years. I've bought the book, and the advice is actually worth more than $21.

The best tools and information don't always cost money, but sometimes they do.

<comment><USER9> or $2.69 + shipping, used :)[1]

 _OR_ , for free, at your local public library [2]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Habits-Highly-Effective- People/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Habits-Highly-Effective- People/dp/0743269519/ref=tmm_pap_title_0)

[2] [http://sccl.bibliocommons.com/item/show_circulation/11771480...](http://sccl.bibliocommons.com/item/show_circulation/1177148016?search_scope=CAL- SCCL)

<comment><USER10> _OR, for free, at your local public library_

It's not free.

It's a copy that you and others in your area had purchased for you, by your local library, with money collected through the tax mechanism.

<comment><USER11> Relative to the purchasing options, it's free insofar as the marginal cost is zero.

Yes, technically _someone_ \- whether a donor or taxpayers - had to buy the book, construct the building, fund ongoing operations, and so on. But any of your tax money that you might have paid for this is a sunk cost - there's no additional user fee you pay in order to take out _Seven Habits_ (or any other book).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Color me underwhelmed by Covey's writing. I always found it a bit too obvious, and found it disingenuous that while he spoke at length about the importance of religion and his large family, he never came out and stated that he was Mormon (not that there's anything intrinsically good or bad about that, but ... it's like appearing multiple times on the news as a small businessman without revealing that you're also an officer for a decidedly partisan political organization ([http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jul/13/introducing- joe-olivo/...](http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/jul/13/introducing-joe- olivo/?utm_source=local&utm_media=treatment&utm_campaign=daMost&utm_content=damostviewed) \-- no, not Covey).

His association with Darl McBride (of SCO vs. IBM lawsuit fame) doesn't particularly impress me either, in the "judge 'em by the company they keep" sense. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darl_McBride>

Covey took an obscure term from psychology and rather utterly changed its meaning. "Responsive" or "anticipatory" work fine. <http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/proactive>

Covey's book is decent. It's by no means the best. The truths it speaks are pretty obvious.

And I suppose this is my own take to his principle #2.

<comment><USER13> _The truths it speaks are pretty obvious._

I think most great truths are like that. The Golden Rule is a good example.

<comment><USER12> Covey self-aggrandizes. He doesn't pose this as some well-accepted ancient wisdom occasionally misplaced. Or at least that was my impression of the book. Read it some 20 years ago, reviewed bits of it since. I find it difficult to stomach, believe I finally just tossed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Beginning as far back as high school his "7 Habits" book had a profound impact on the way I think and feel about relationships and work/life balance. I return to it every few years to look at it with fresh eyes.

I am saddened by this news and will surely take some time today to reflect on the lessons I have taken from his work.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a laconic geek, Covey's habit #5 "Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood" resonated with me. Actively listening to people to understand them, verifying my understanding, then seeking to help them understand me has served me very well socially and professionally.

<comment><USER16> Ditto here. Of all the habits, #5 is the one that stood out and intensely/profoundly changed my outlook on relationships.

It's funny how it seems obvious when you read it, but sometimes we need someone else to summarize and restate the obvious to look at it clearly and objectively.

Covey's anecdotes seal the deal: instead of vague platitudes he gives specific (if idealized) examples. Definitely unscientific, but certainly helps understand.

<comment><USER17> > It's funny how it seems obvious when you read it, but sometimes we need > someone else to summarize and restate the obvious to look at it clearly and > objectively.

This brings to mind one of my favorite Covey quotes:

      "What is common sense is not always common practice."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My mentor who was instrumental in nearly all the best things I achieved as an adolescent highly recommended I read 7 Habits, but I never did. It was one of those things I just put off.

One thing I'll say though is that this is how I want to die-- Biking steep roads in the foothills, living to the fullest regardless of age, and then be comforted in the end by my children and their families.

This man died well.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow! I just started reading his book ([http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Habits- Highly-Effective-People/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Habits-Highly- Effective-People/dp/1416502491/)) this weekend and was reading it at lunch less than an hour ago!

Sorry to hear, it's a great book.

</comment><comment><USER20> Although "7 habits" is good, Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people" is still #1 for practical, real-world business and relationship advice, in my mind.

<comment><USER21> The problem with that is that far too few geeks are interested in winning friends or influencing people.

Still, the Carnegie book is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's all about the 2nd quadrant.

<comment><USER23> Stephen spent more time there than most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In addition to his books and organizers he also had 52 grand-children! That's one birthday per week, on average.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am sad as if someone from my own family had died.

Since I first read it 10 years ago, I kept calling the 7 habits my "bible" (I am not religious). Every sentence of the book teaches you something new. Each time you read the book, you learn something you.

This book had such a big impact on my personality that I can't recommend it enough.

I even developed a Time Management tool based on his habit 3 First Things First: <http://weekplan.net>

Stephen, I wish I had attended one of your seminars. I regret I haven't.

</comment><comment><USER26> $0.75 used from half.com if you still down own a copy. Books are such amazing value. It's like an everyday Steam Summer Sale in the book world.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a book that I read at least once per year. It's a valuable resource and highly relevant to entrepreneurs and generally to everyone.

</comment><comment><USER28> Been trying to convince my girlfriend to read this for a while.

She finally started to read it under advice from a mentor, and it is really having an impact on her effectiveness.

It was just yesterday we were discussing some of the points of 7 habits over wine.

RIP Stephen. I will remember to "Sharpen the saw".

</comment><comment><USER29> I read this book a while ago and it has definitely influenced me in positive ways. I know I'm not the only one who has benefited. I'm sad to hear this news.

Good reading for just about anyone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sad news about a distinguished man. His "7 Habits" book was one of the very first books that I read on personal development.

One of the best things about his work is that it focused on deep change and fundamental principles and values, not quick-fixes. He never promised that self-improvement or improving your relationships with others was easy, but he did show many people a way that worked well.

</comment><comment><USER30> I read his book in college. Had a profound impact on me. The "Sharpen the Saw" habit convinced me to exercise regularly.

</comment><comment><USER31> RIP Stephen. I was 17 when I read "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", a book that has absolutely enlarged my vision about values and guiding principles of various areas of my life. That has changed my life.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sorry to hear this news. My sympathy to his love ones. Unfortunately, I've never read "7 Habits" but after reading all of the positive comments I will definitely get a copy this week and give it a read.

</comment><comment><USER33> PSA: Wear a bike helmet when biking. It doesn't say if he was wearing one, but it doesn't sound like it. I'd probably be dead or in a coma today if I hadn't been wearing one when I crashed.

<comment><USER34> > "He was wearing a helmet, which is good news."

Though the importance of your PSA still stands.

<comment><USER35> Considering the bicycle culture of Amsterdam, it's amazing that I've yet to see a single person wear a helmet.

<comment><USER36> Maybe they were all wearing invisible helmets?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828134>

<comment><USER35> Not to my knowledge! The only helmet they have is their cranium!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From his 2003 photo, when he was 70 years old - he looks very young for his age back then - more like 55 or 60.

<comment><USER12> Being old doesn't have to mean looking it. Taking a different guy as an example: <http://cbass.com/PICTORAL.HTM>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> First time I have seen a Yahoo article linked on HN in a while.

</comment><comment><USER39> I remember first reading about "7 Habits" from Linus's management style:

 _First off, I'd suggest buying "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People", and NOT read it. Burn it, it's a great symbolic gesture._ [1]

After that I read the book and it's actually not that bad. It helps.

[1] <http://lwn.net/Articles/105375/>

<comment><USER21> That says more about Linus that anything else I've read.

<comment><USER40> I suspect it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self-reference to the Linux C coding style (<http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle>) where he suggests burning the GNU coding standards, using exactly the same phrasing.

Incidentally if you read the GNU coding standards I think you'll find they really ARE that bad ([http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Formatting.html#...](http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Formatting.html#Formatting))

<comment><USER41> I was curious about how bad the GNU standards could be [they make so much great software!].

Holy crap. Function calls with a space? foo (x,y);

Braces indented halfway into the "else" keyword? Ugh. I'm no C guru but even has a freshman cs major I'd recognize that as ugly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Find the cheapest Amazon for your books - <AUTHOR> http://piranhas.co/

<comment><USER2> This could be quite useful to students or those that order a bulk number of books regularly.

I would include the word 'country' in the title.

You should have a bottom line conversion into a currency that is understandable to the user so they can see the overall price difference. I know you highlight the cheapest - but it should be shown to the user so they know what the saving is.

Some improvements do need to be made as some prices were blank / not pulled through but when I checked directly they were significantly cheaper than the one that was highlighted.

<comment><USER3> Cool idea and agreed with needing the word "country" in the title. I didn't know what the site was for when I first came in. I had to click on a book in your "Try these" list to understand. Maybe include a sub-title that says "Not all books are priced the same on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, etc. Search to find which Amazon country-specific website has the cheapest price to buy your books."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, I paraphrased your suggestion almost directly to the site. The change will be online soonish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      "We can't search for anything if this is empty :-("

It's not empty though... it says "chad fowler". I understand this is just a placeholder, but for those who aren't developers and may not appreciate the difference, clicking search when the input field is empty should perform a search for the placeholder text.

<comment><USER5> Huh, never considered this before. If I had a placeholder username/password on my login box, should just clicking "login" take the user to a demo/guest account, or should it bounce them and tell them to fill it in? What would be more expected there?

<comment><USER4> The general principle here is that if your field has a placeholder which is descriptive such as "Enter search here" (or just "Search") then it's a bad user experience if submitting the form does a search for the literal text "Enter search here". However, if the placeholder is a valid example such as "Isaac Asimov", then it's a good user experience if submitting the form does a search for that actual text, especially where trying out the search is a primary means of demonstrating the product as is the case here.

Another example might be a flight search service where the placeholders for "Departing" and "Arriving" contain "Los Angeles" and "New York" plus valid leave/return dates. If you're trying to show people (who may not be actively looking for a flight at the time) how awesome your service is, clicking on the "Show Flights" button should use those values because the whole point is to demonstrate your service's unique selling proposition.

For a login/demo where your goal is to get people to try the demo and convert into a signup, I suspect you will find it more effective to offer trying a demo account via an obvious, in-your-face call to action rather than dual- purposing your customer login form.

<comment><USER6> Dual-purposing your customer login form _in addition_ to the blatant CTA might not be a terrible idea, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may be a technical problem, but it's hard to really know the best price of a book when you exclude used books from third-party sellers. For example I found a $70 book that was in the $60 range on a foreign site, but then if you clicked through on the US site you could find one for $45 that was slightly used. Without that kind of contextual information the site is less useful.

<comment><USER8> It may be less useful for your particular case but I found it an amazing tool. I want new books and I didn't know that the German site had the book I was looking for in half the price although three weeks delivery at most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I´ve been doing this manually for years, great job. Just include amazon.es please ;). It would be interesting to have the possibility to change the shipping option. Shipping from amazon.com with the cheapest option takes a month or more to reach Spain, so sometimes is better to pay a bit more to avoid that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice! working on something similar but not limited to Amazon stores only <http://www.librarist.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Well done.

I'm building something slightly similar : <http://www.shoptimate.com> But it's browser extension, not a website and it's not limited to books or Amazon.

Note that shipping from a foreign country can lead to custom taxes.

</comment><comment><USER12> I tried it with the first several suggested books, and they all showed .com as the cheapest. You might want to consider hand-picking a few that will show up for [country] users as cheaper from [other country] store, to better demonstrate the utility of the service.

</comment><comment><USER13> I typically use <http://bigwords.com> for multi-book price comparison; it gives you the cheapest total price with shipping, and allows you to tweak parameters (new/used, internation, etc).

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be good to convert all prices to a single currency, I understand these change daily but I'm sure you could find a real time quote to track/use.

I like the design a lot, very clean. Hats off!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great! As someone who moved from London to Sydney it is just what I need, I never know whether to order from the .com store or the .co.uk store.

<comment><USER16> You might find <http://booko.com.au/> useful

<comment><USER17> Hey that's my site - thanks for mentioning it! There's also a UK, NZ and US site( <http://booko.us/> ) now.

<comment><USER18> Wow. Thanks for saving me umpteen bucks over the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Clever idea, nice design and great service! What are the chances that you add Amazon.it as well?

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems not to take ASIN numbers.

</comment><comment><USER21> booko.com.au is a similar Australian site, although it doesn't limit itself to only Amazon.</comment>


San Francisco convention canceled over dirty streets, homeless - <AUTHOR> https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/report-san-francisco-convention-canceled-over-dirty-streets-homeless/1280189992 <comment><USER2> Discussed 1 day ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17443550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17443550)

</comment><comment><USER3> _The convention told SF travel "that they loved the city, but post-convention surveys revealed their members were afraid to walk the streets amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets."_

 _..._

 _" We all know there is a problem, and now, we need to work toward a solution," Carroll said._

</comment><comment><USER4> Easily the dirtiest city of the US that I have visited due to conferences. On par with the NYC MTA.

</comment><comment><USER5> IIRC, Seattle's starting to get this too. High levels of income inequality sure are fun!

<comment><USER6> If everyone had at least 1 million dollars but a few people had 1 billion dollars, that's massive income inequality. By your logic, or imprecise language, we should avoid this. Perhaps we could make everyone equally poor instead?

<comment><USER7> If everyone had a million dollars .. you mean like Zimbabwe in the 90s? Do you not understand how inflation works?</comment></comment></comment>


What Facebook looked like in 2006 - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20051201013112/http://facebook.com/

<comment><USER2> It's too bad that there's no way to archive of the "inside" of the site. What was it like to actually _use_ Facebook at this time? I actually did use Facebook back then, and even I'm not even sure exactly how I used it before the news feed feature was added -- I'm pretty sure people would click "friends" and then look for a little "profile updated recently" message.

It would be cool if people could go back and try old versions of things in the cloud. With non-cloud software (like Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 1.0), it's possible to do this, but with websites, once they've been taken down, no one will ever be able to use their old versions again. I wonder if there's some way that Facebook could "donate" old versions of their code for posterity.

<comment><USER3> I don't remember 2006 specifically, but I was on facebook in 2004. Back then, it was only open to .edu addresses. They had a list of all of the dorms at the school and the rooms in them. You would select using a pull down menu which was your room. They also had drop-down menus for all of the classes that the school offered, and there was a 'group' that was created for each class that you could use to construct study groups (or whatever). There was no news feed. Instead of the 'wall' as it is now, it was instead an editable text box that acted like the white board that is common outside dorm rooms.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I remember the "white board" wall. Back when the Facebook API came out in 2007-ish, I implemented a functioning lookalike using the API -- at one point, it had around 17,000 users who had logged in, including Mark Zuckerberg himself(!!)

...then Facebook basically killed the API (changing it over to a more of an authentication system than an add-content-to-your-profile system) so that was it for my app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you find the Internet Archive useful, please consider donating: [http://archive.org/donate/](http://archive.org/donate/)

<comment><USER5> I used to find the Internet Archive incredibly useful, sadly the new design has completely ruined this. Before the site was nice and organized, now it's a big mess that seems to be designed for smartphones. Infinite scrolling really helps making the site completely chaotic and confusing.

However, even though the site is ruined for me now, I really want to thank Internet Archive for all the years of enjoyment it has given me.

<comment><USER4> Did you click the beta button and leave feedback?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What Facebook looked like in 2004... [http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.theface...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.thefacebook.com/)

(Don't forget it started as 'thefacebook.com')

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to notice that the iconic 'Like' button has appeared on FB only in 2009, with acquisition of FriendFeed (recently closed), a social network site which pioneered it.

FriendFeed was created by a team led by Paul Buchheit, the original creator of GMail, and Bret Taylor, one of creators of Google Maps.

Just a funny fact that shows how much the tech industry is interconnected.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love the al pacino banner

</comment><comment><USER9> Something interesting is the Facebook still stores all (or most of) these assets, served straight from facebook.com instead of a CDN: [https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif](https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif)

</comment><comment><USER10> Or how about way back when it was still called theefacebook

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040902031403/http://thefacebook...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040902031403/http://thefacebook.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> That's actually 2005.</comment>


Ask HN: How does someone in India access the internet when taken down? - <AUTHOR> Title is the question. I'm currently living in India, and want to understand what I can do to retain internet access when the government attempts to take it down. Currently, the government run ISP appears to be shutting down, while private ISPs have not yet. I understand systems, networks not so much. - What are terms I should google to get good information? - What technology is useful in this situation? Is there some way to access the internet still? - How do I most easily setup a mesh network for communication? - What books/manuals should I keep at hand? <comment><USER2> DNS queries are not banned!

So you can tunnel network traffic over DNS.

More info [https://davidhamann.de/2019/05/12/tunnel-traffic-over-dns- ss...](https://davidhamann.de/2019/05/12/tunnel-traffic-over-dns-ssh/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Use BSLN landline broadband internet. In the recent internet ban by indian govt in assam the bsnl landline internet was active and working (torrent/porn/darkweb are blocked). \--: imindian live in india/assam/barpeta

</comment><comment><USER4> If they keep phones up, you want to get a dial up ISP with a modem. Preferably on a land line. If they're pulling down phonelines too, you may be able to do satellite internet, if that's available. Tends to be spendy though.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/](https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Firechat, Signal Offline, Vojer, Bridgefy, Briar [https://www.thequint.com/tech-and-auto/tech-news/apps- androi...](https://www.thequint.com/tech-and-auto/tech-news/apps-android-ios- use-offline-when-internet-shut-down)

<comment> m-p-3 But that's only for messaging, not accessing the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi fellow brother, this comment is unrelated. But we need WOKE Indians like you. I run a website named India Channel.

[http://indiachannel.heliohost.org](http://indiachannel.heliohost.org)

It is an anonymous website like 4chan but without images and made for Indians.

We have an IRC too (check page). If you say, I'll add a programming /prog/ board too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Elon san's satellites will save us. Only if they don't ban possession of those transceivers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Get a Jio account and hot spot it ?</comment>


Ask HN: How to build COVID-19 test kit? - <AUTHOR> I am curious if there are any biotech experts here who can answer this.
Can we open source methods to build COVID-19 test kits?
What raw material, tools are needed to pull it off. Given the current testing disaster going on in the US. Would it be possible to go decentralized? <comment><USER2> I imagine it would be challenging to get the necessary samples to accurately calibrate the test/ensure efficacy?

</comment><comment><USER3> How would you test it?

</comment><comment><USER4> Your bottleneck would not be the building of the test ([https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/brands/thermo- scient...](https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/brands/thermo- scientific/molecular-biology/molecular-biology-learning-center/molecular- biology-resource-library/spotlight-articles/basic-principles-rt-qpcr.html)), but the FDA approval. The CDC was able to get emergency use authorization from the FDA in 1 day for its test, but you are not the CDC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would I need FDA approval if I want to use test for myself or friends? Bio hackers do all kinds of experiments with CRISPR technology.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I thought you were trying to solve the broader bottleneck of testing which would require approval. But as a hobby just for fun, I suppose you could do anything you want...not sure how useful it would be (would you trust your result? Would health agencies take your result as evidence?)</comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates' views shaped by father - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-08-27-billgates_N.htm

<comment><USER2> Who's views aren't shaped, in part, by their father?

<comment><USER3> I think the point here is that the father holds some interesting views, and these had a specific influence.

I mean, how many multi-millionaires would write a book that is a defense of the estate tax?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can find out more in Warren Buffett's bio:

<http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/snowball/>

Warren is also a good friend/father figure of Bill Gates. Gates was a major influence on Buffet in the philanthropy area and hence the reason Buffett is donated all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

They have some interesting views on society. Warren's Ovarian Lottery idea is interesting. If he were born in Bangladesh could he still be the world's richest man? Probably not, so those that make it in America owe something to America for the framework that allowed them to be wealthy. This is the first time "giving back" actually made sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> In other news, dog bites man.</comment>


Vietnam critic's end was the start of family's pain - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/vietnam-critics-end-was-the-start-of-familys-pain/2015/11/01/b50e1d54-7cdf-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html <comment><USER3> Nobody here is showing the other perspective: that of the millions of Vietnamese whose hearts were touched by his actions. He was a martyr for the Vietnamese people. Vietnamese schoolchildren learned a poem by heart - <USER2> Vietnam's poet laureate - about Morrison's brave sacrifice. He is a national hero ther, and is still remembered there for what he did.

Read [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/16/norman-m...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/16/norman- morrison-vietnam-war-protest) for a better description than I can do.

</comment><comment><USER4> One lesson? The moment ideology enters a scene, we pretend that's what it's all about. Even his surviving family can only talk about his unhappiness in a purely political context. The writer doesn't note that the man's behavior leading up to the suicide is strongly reminiscent of other suicides and family annihilators. Many people reading this article will only think of the war and pacifism and not this guy's humanity.

It's similar to how many people imagine suicide bombers are just random fervent Muslims given an explosive vest. In actuality, their recruiters target depressed and traumatized people and try to sell them a way out of their pain.

<comment><USER5> On the contrary, it's meaningless to view this only through psychology. Was the monk who self-immolated in Vietnam depressed? Psychology doesn't have the vocabulary in place to understand political emotions, and the only people who insist that political emotions don't exist are people who would prefer you didn't have them.

This action is inseparable from the politics that created it -- that's why people talk about politics in its context. Was it a cold action that hurt his wife and the people closest to him? Yes. But was it also a bold humanitarian move that made him a hero in Vietnam? Yes. It's possible for something to be both political and personal, and this article didn't try to oversimplify that.

How about a different lesson? That unnecessary war causes untold suffering.

<comment><USER4> "On the contrary, it's meaningless to view this only through psychology"

Nice excluded middle. But realistically, this man wasn't a humanitarian hero. He accomplished nothing--nothing changed due to his immolation. Except that he died, which looks like it was his actual and ultimate goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If he had had the foresight to somehow get a reporter with camera onsite, guaranteeing a photo, I think the impact of this would have been far greater.

A 1% chance of ending the Vietnam War in 1965 was probably objectively worth one man's sacrifice. (Suicide is horrible, but on utilitarian grounds of greatest good for greatest number.) I'm not sure what the actual odds were. Pentagon Papers clearly had a bigger impact and no one died. There were probably other effective anti-war protests which could have been used, too. (I personally would listen to military officers breaking ranks and explaining why the war is unwinnable as it was being prosecuted much more closely than I'd listen to arbitrary hippie anti-war protestors; particularly someone who had actually served in Vietnam in a capacity to see that firsthand, and who was advocating a reasonable course. Similarly I listen to Binney/Drake/Wiebe, Snowden, etc. far more seriously than random anti-NSA-on-moral-grounds people.)

<comment><USER7> "The future will repeat the recent past until some catastrophe changes our current way of implementing republican government, and Americans may not like what that change will bring." \- Major General (Rtd) Mike Symanski

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There was also presumably some pain for the families of 2 million or so Vietnamese killed. Maybe the moral is to avoid wars even if the alternatives are less glamorous. The US could have allied with the Vietnamese and basically bribed them to adopt liberal values rather than going the puppet government and military intervention route.</comment>


Zuckerberg in Holocaust denial row - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44883743 <comment><USER2> We were told all we needed to know back when The Facebook was a Harvard only site, and his reaction towards the trust others were granting him was "those suckers!". He may be rich beyond all our dreams, but he's a dumb smuck for never realizing the opportunity he blew.</comment>


Show HN: GigPlug – Recommend your contacts for jobs and earn a bounty - <AUTHOR> http://gigplug.com

<comment><USER2> Is this UK only?

Love to see any effort to solving the labor/skills mismatch in a more efficient manner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently we only have roles based in the UK. We will be adding US roles shortly.

If you have any contacts who are based in the UK they will be matched with roles in our system.

Also, you can connect your contacts and have a play regardless of where you live. Any feedback on onboarding, UX, concept etc would be much appreciated. Hit the LinkedIn button to get started.</comment></comment>


Twitter's Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/01/twitters-busine.html

<comment><USER2> "And I also noted that some of the best web companies of our time; Google, YouTube, Skype, and Facebook all launched without a business model and too their sweet time getting to one."

Wait, aren't 3 of those still unprofitable, with no sign of change? I mean, technically they have business models, but Twitter can just sell ads and then they'll have as good a one as any but Google on that list.

<comment><USER3> True. And what about eBay, Amazon, and the other huge internet sites that actually do make a ton of money and actually did have a business plan relatively soon in the game? Chopped liver?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just can't believe that there isn't a forward thinking Angle/VC out there that wouldn't be willing to keep the servers hot for such a classic viral internet 'phenom' until, over time, a natural monetary use appears. Twitter (like youtube) maintains it's cool factor by not telegraphing how it hopes it'll make it's founders billions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think of YouTube and Skype as loss leaders.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to be the founder of a company that exits as big as those two 'loss leaders' did. And there's nothing saying they won't make it up (and more) in a few years.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Math grads of HN, what is your current role and how do you like it? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to figure out what to do after my MSc in Applied Math so I thought why not ask the members of the community with similar qualifications. <comment><USER2> I'm working on my startup and I absolutely love it. Much better then a postdoc in literally an way. I am my own boss, get 2-5 times the salary compared to academia and I do similar science but on a much broader sense. I would encourage every helpless finished PhD to look into academia spin-offs.

Edit: of course this also applies on finished Master studies in STEM.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a long essay because I was in your shoes once and it took me a while to find myself.

Well, I'm currently in between roles but I'll give you a basic summary of my resume. It's a lot of weird director roles mostly in eCommerce and design. I explain this a lot as well, math is the same everywhere. Jumping has its risk but overtime it's stabilized decent growth in my salary and I'm constantly picking up new skills.

I have a BS in Math. I think my minor was in applied? Not sure. I was lucky enough to take grad classes for all the requirements for quantitative finance MS under my scholarship but wasn't eligible to graduate because my scholarship didn't cover that school technically. I could've figured it out but honestly nobody even asks if I have a degree or not. Basic lesson I learned is that the easiest opportunities out of applied math all involve learning some Python. I find R in the wild less unless its for research, but I still use it.

Out of school I did two things, I worked at a number of teaching opportunities which paid okay sometimes and I slowly began the process of building out a data science startup.

I definitely entered tutoring and teaching with a sense of humility, I was not going to be making much money anytime soon. These kids needed my help, not my attitude. Traditional roles for math are far and few. But there's a lot of really nice tutoring and substitute teacher roles if you know the right people. I suggest starting out at an agency which contracts you out to build out a client network. At least in the Bay, this is a good way to meet a lot of smart rich people. I don't know if I'd recommend this role now with COVID. I prefer at least pen/paper/chalkboard one-on-one sessions for teaching and find it cumbersome to do online. Programming is better online since you have to deal with different environments and hardware anyways, good practice.

For the data science startup, I knew immediately that my biggest flaws out of school was that I did not network enough, did not pursue research more seriously and overall sucked at socializing. It was an incredibly awkward and humiliating period of my life. Being smart means absolutely nothing if you're not a stable, professional and confident person that people are comfortable working with you. Especially if you are handling sensitive, complex information. So I spent the next 5 years working on that.

I did some questionable practices, such as cold starting my professional network by setting up an AngelList browser script which applied to like 22,000+ jobs and left a little personalized message for them to contact me directly. Not a very cool thing to do, but I was desperate and scrappy. Being somewhat familiar with Python, I found a lot of lowhanging fruit from modernizing Python 2 repos for data science and machine learning into Python 3 which involved adding parentheses here and there basically. That encouraged me to be more confident that I can actually contribute to research and develop my own projects. Last, I purposely seek out more directorial and managerial roles that involve more face-time and meetings than actual programming. Socializing does not come naturally to me and I have to practice it every day or I fall out of my rhythm. I'd have to say, I do not spend as much time doing or studying math as I'd like to in any role, but the benefit of what I know comes handy almost all the time because I'm at least aware of a solution or technique that applies to almost any given situation. Anyways the moral of this story is that, as a student of mathematics, you cannot reasonably apply the rules of normality or societal expectations to naturally shape your career. By and large, most of us do very poorly in making a decent living, and it behooves you to be pragmatic about your thinking and work towards decisive changes.

Takeaways: In order to succeed in math, I had to drop my attitude that anything about math mattered at all. I don't even bring it up these days. It's kind of a liability, because it reeks of "esotericism". It bears unfaithfulness unfortunately, but there's nothing you can do to change people's stereotypes. Most of my success these days comes from learning how to function as a human being and not a coffee algorithm machine. Take on whatever work you can find, it will invariably lead to a better recommendation even if you're just cleaning up Excel spreadsheets or teaching kids. People in math are generally very good at being lost for a long time and it helps to keep up with where they're going, sometimes they introduce you to things that are once-in-a-lifetime.

From a more practical standpoint. Here are some things you can do to build out a professional presence, that in my opinion are a good idea even if you're not focusing on getting a PhD.

Start a math blog. Wordpress, GitHub pages, doesn't matter. As long as it supports basic LaTeX and Markdown, you should be good. Find something you're interested in to write about. Learn how to market your ideas. If you need help setting one up, I'm more than happy to help you find something you like.

Treat research as a lifestyle, not a career. Find preprints you like. Experiment with repo's that are cool. Build projects for yourself. Share your ideas on Twitter, talk about papers, meetup with interesting people in your field or industry. You're already on Hacker News, that's great! Contribute to open source, publish tutorials. Golden rule, if you are generous with your time and space, the universe will kindly return the favor to you.

If you're deadset on FAANG or prestige startups, that's actually a fairly attainable goal. Learn the ins and outs of an interview process. If you've taken basic algorithms courses, understand data structures, and are generally good at problem solving theory or metaheuristic approaches, you're in good shape. Generally I have found that the higher bidders tend to appreciate people who understand numbers a lot more since they have a generally higher incentive to focus on endeavors that actively make money. Polya has been incredibly helpful to me in this regard.

My most successful roles have been almost always completely made up. Standing at frontier of research or science opens up a tremendous number of opportunities, simply because you can see them. The best jobs don't exist yet. If you want a place in this world, there's a lot less competition when nobody does what you do, and you get more credit for doing it because you're the first to do it. Treat the world like you would treat yourself.

To conclude, be open. You are a mathematician. What you do is incredibly noble, demands creativity and its essence is freedom. The vast, vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to study what we have, and that gives us a tremendous advantage even in tech and computer science. I have been hired for roles for reasons that had nothing to do with being smart or writing good code but mostly because I was interested in ethics and taking on hard choices and problems. Your career will invariably be nonlinear, like almost all money is. Focus on maintaining a discipline in yourself outside of school. Learn to specialize, learn to generalize, learn to do balance both while practicing moderation in moderation. Keep doing math for yourself and only for yourself.</comment>


Court: Uber drivers are company employees not self-employed contractors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/uber-drivers-employees-uk-court-ruling/ <comment><USER2> why is that we have these good ideas, make it an app and it's cool and all, and boom it's the government wanting to take away the idea by legislating it, the idea's originators become greedy and milk the idea like there's no tomorrow, normal folks kill the coolness of the idea by demanding this idea dance on it's nose for them, and then the idea withers away ... I wonder if cool ideas can survive human nature

<comment><USER3> In principle, I agree with you.

However, we must remember that coolness isn't just coolness. There are labour laws and such that need to be in place to prevent people skirting them.

Sadly, laws don't catch up as fast as technology. I mean the only reason Uber is even decent is because of the existing shitty taxi laws across the world that allowed terrible monopolies to overcharge and not bother innovating.

The libertarian in me, wants these things to just happen. That being said, you have to respect local laws in which they operate.</comment></comment>


Tule (YC S14) Is a Crop-Hydration Sensor for the Tech-Savvy Farmer - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/21/tule-is-a-crop-hydration-sensor-for-the-tech-savvy-farmer/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a cofounder of Tule and happy to answer any questions.

A few corrections for the technical crowd:

This technology hasn't existed since the 1800's. It is derived from a technology called Surface Renewal that measures the turbulent transport of mass and energy from the planetary surface to the atmosphere. The concepts behind Surface Renewal were first developed in the 1930s by chemical engineers. These chemical engineers developed a model to describe the movement of gases into liquid media by fluid volumes interacting with the air-liquid interface. In the 1990s, UC Davis researchers adapted the Surface Renewal concept to the planetary surface-to-atmosphere interface. Recent improvements in the technology enable Tule to measure the amount of water vapor carried away from crop field by wind eddies.

Our technology was validated for accuracy against the gold standard research tools used in academia, lysimetry and eddy covariance.

What truly makes our technology exciting is that we can tell farmers the optimal amount of water to apply to maximize plant growth (yield) and plant stress (quality). Studies have shown that getting irrigation right can radically change yield and quality. Before our technology, farmers have never had the feedback to optimize irrigation. This is analogous to NewRelic locating the bottlenecks in your server performance. You can't optimize until you can measure.

edit:

As requested, here are links to the technology:

An easy to read summary is here:

[http://edu-tuletechnologies-com.s3.amazonaws.com/Tule_Surfac...](http://edu- tuletechnologies-com.s3.amazonaws.com/Tule_Surface_Renewal_Background.pdf)

The original academic paper is here:

[http://myweb.ecu.edu/suh/PawU1995.pdf](http://myweb.ecu.edu/suh/PawU1995.pdf)

<comment><USER2> That wasn't at all the sort of technique I was expecting. Without knowing otherwise, I'd presumed that you were doing something that directly measured evaporation rate, and that the claim that it was covering a large area instead of a single point was just puffery based on the the hope that air conditions were constant over the whole area. This is much better.

I only glanced at the original paper, but I was lost by the end of the first sentence: "Numerous methods exist for estimating the flux density of scalars." Mathematically, that doesn't make much sense. Does scalar have a different definition in meteorology? Or is this an odd translation from another language?

<comment><USER3> Obviously I am unaccustomed to the waters of Hacker News. I meant to post this in response to nkurz's question rather than the main thread. See below.

Hi, I'm Tom, the other cofounder at Tule. I developed the recent improvements in Surface Renewal during my PhD work at UC Davis.

Examples of scalars, as the term is used in atmospheric science, are air temperature, water vapor concentration, carbon dioxide concentration, or any other constituent of the atmosphere.

Here is a more formal definition from [http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Scalar](http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Scalar):

Any physical quantity with a field that can be described by a single numerical value at each point in space. A scalar quantity is distinguished from a vector quantity by the fact that a scalar quantity possesses only magnitude, whereas a vector quantity possesses both magnitude and direction. Thus, pressure is a scalar quantity and velocity is a vector quantity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Neat stuff. It's a sensor that measures actual evapotranspiration in the field, which is essentially how fast the leaves are losing water. This can be very useful in deciding how much irrigation is needed so that the plants are not unduly water stressed. The link to their website in the article turns out to be broken, but it leads to [https://www.tuletechnologies.com/](https://www.tuletechnologies.com/).

There were a number of interesting things in their FAQ that weren't mentioned in the article. The main one that jumped out is that contrary to the article, the cost is not $1500 per sensor, but is a $1500 per season subscription, with the use of the sensor being included. That's an interesting model. And I greatly admire that they are being so clear about pricing on their site.

Also from the FAQ:

      How do we know it works?

      We use a recent innovation in atmospheric science from the
      University of California at Davis to measure Actual ET.
      This innovation was validated against lysimetry and eddy
      covariance. From a technical perspective, Tule uses the
      Surface Renewal method to measure how much water vapor the
      wind is carrying away from the field. If you'd like a more
      in depth look at the technology, please let us know.

Yes, I'd like to know. Perhaps some details or links could be posted here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! Links posted above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi, I'm Tom, the other cofounder at Tule. I developed the recent improvements in Surface Renewal during my PhD work at UC Davis.

Examples of scalars, as the term is used in atmospheric science, are air temperature, water vapor concentration, carbon dioxide concentration, or any other constituent of the atmosphere.

Here is a more formal definition from [http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Scalar](http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Scalar):

Any physical quantity with a field that can be described by a single numerical value at each point in space.

A scalar quantity is distinguished from a vector quantity by the fact that a scalar quantity possesses only magnitude, whereas a vector quantity possesses both magnitude and direction. Thus, pressure is a scalar quantity and velocity is a vector quantity.

</comment><comment><USER4> The soil moisture probe comment in the article is wrong. Several years ago I worked for an agricultural telemetry company, and we resold soil moisture probes that were several meters in length - measuring far more than 'a few cubic inches'. The soil moisture probes were excellent for determining when the plants were finished 'drinking', and you could also use them to determine how far down the roots reached.

It's interesting to see the chickenwire around the probe, too. We had a problem with native parrots who ate everything; our weather stations had rubberised doppler probes... eaten; plastic cable ties... eaten; anything not metal... eaten. Probably not digested, it's just that the birds get bored and try anything...

</comment><comment><USER5> In the sign up form you list a few crops (Almonds, Grapes, Carrots, Tomatoes, Walnuts). I'm surprised to not see the big dollar US crops on the list (corn, soybean, wheat, cotton). Do the same principals apply to those crops as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> The technology definitely applies to the big dollar crops (corn, soybean, etc), and we plan to serve those markets someday. We are starting in specialty crops (almonds, grapes, tomatoes, etc) because these customers have a "hair on fire" problem with intensive irrigation management and the California draught.</comment></comment>


Autonomous Nissan Leaf in London Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRqNAhAe6c <comment><USER2> I've never seen an autonomous vehicle drive with traffic before, let alone keep pace. Perhaps I simply haven't been keeping up with the latest advances in the technology, but this looks very cool.

It's mentioned in the video of course, but it's worth noting that there's still no way for the car to appropriately deal with heavy rain (or snow) obscuring the cameras.</comment>