Carbon emissions on the moon put theory of moon birth in doubt - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-birth.html <comment><USER2> > "But now, it appears that there is ancient carbon embedded in the moon's > surface, suggesting some changes may have to be made to the theory of the > moon's birth."

frustrating they didn't go on to explain what those changes might be.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has Venus been definitely ruled out as the body that hit earth and created the moon? It certainly has some odd characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recently learned that the moon has its own molten iron core, like Earth. It makes me wonder if carbon emissions on the moon could be related to subsurface volcanism.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_structure_of_the_Mo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_structure_of_the_Moon)

</comment><comment><USER5> Actual carbon, or climate change carbon AKA co2?

Because if they mean actual carbon, I don't understand why they think it would not survive high heat - carbon is quite refractory.</comment>


IBM: 'Mac users are happier and more productive' - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html <comment><USER2> "compared to Windows users" (ftfa)

Did they survey Linux users, too? It would seem not, but I only skimmed the article.</comment>


U.S. assures Russia Snowden won't be executed or tortured - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/26/us-usa-security-letter-idUSBRE96P0NV20130726

<comment><USER2> Obama also assured us that he would protect whistleblowers:

"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."

So perhaps his assurances are of no value.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's sad that the U.S. has sunken to a point where this kind of guarantee is necessary.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't mean as much as it would have 15 years ago either. With many techniques redefined from torture to "enhanced interrogation", they could keep their word and he would still be in for quite a rough treatment.

<comment><USER5> On January 22, 2009 President Obama signed an executive order requiring the CIA to use only the 19 interrogation methods outlined in the United States Army Field Manual on interrogations. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/)</comment></comment></comment>


LESS - Leaner CSS - <AUTHOR> http://lesscss.org/ <comment><USER2> I see what they've done there... and it's very smart. In fact, when I was learning CSS I always assumed it could support variables.

However, I'm not convinced that putting yet another layer between your code and the browser is worth the complexity. But then I feel the same about HAML. Obviously, lots of other people disagree.

I'd prefer to see these features in CSS itself rather than a separate technology

<comment><USER3> There is so many frameworks trying to circumvent css, may be css is crap ? Better than nothing but crappy still.

Adding extra layers is ok when we get more benefits than we loose in view. I'd like to have a better css too or a more programmable browser. May be will be able to rebuild a virtual browser within the canvas ... ?</comment></comment>


Black Beauty: a shiny, scaly-skinned, 4.4B years old rock from Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6213/1044.full

<comment><USER2> Off-topic, but this page took almost 10 seconds to load - and from what I can tell, this website is largely focused on text content. How someone considers this acceptable (in 2014) is beyond me. Normally, I dismiss the angry sentiments about "text content sites with megabytes of Javascript that take ages to load" as baseless and strawman-centered; now, however, I'm more inclined to sympathize.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's a bandwidth problem. Here's a profile I captured in Firefox:

[https://i.imgur.com/RJkD3YC.png](https://i.imgur.com/RJkD3YC.png)

All of those image thumbnails were waiting on a single server response that took 9 seconds. This is repeatable: on each load, one or two requests take 10x longer than the rest. They're not large files, in fact most of them are already in the browser cache, and aren't resent (HTTP 304).

(Not an expert).

<comment><USER4> nerds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that it's sedimentary was surprising. I don't know if we've ever acquired sedimentary rock from another world before (but granted I'm not in the planetary-rock-business).

</comment><comment><USER6> From the article, "What's a meteorite?" Piatek asked him—and an obsession was born. Wait, he was a doctor and didn't know what a meteorite was until then?

<comment><USER7> A question and answer are not an immutable key value pair. Revisiting old questions can sometimes yield new results as other information has been added to one's schema.

Keep questioning?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly his last name apparently means "little piece" of something in Polish.</comment>


Google Is Giving Inbox Invites Out to Anyone Only for the Next Two Hours - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/03/google-is-giving-inbox-invites-out-to-anyone-who-asks-but-only-for-the-next-two-hours/

<comment><USER2> Just sent a random email to email@example.com as mentioned in on TechCrunch, immediately got a reply:

"Thanks for requesting an invite. We'll send you one as soon as possible."

Wondering when I'll actually receive the invite.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sadly Inbox doesn't work with GoogleApps emails</comment>


Air Quality Is Worse in Portland, OR Than in Beijing - <AUTHOR> http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2015/08/air-quality-is-worse-in-portland-oregon.html <comment><USER2> If I read link this correctly, the "is" here is more like "is currently" and not "is over the long term"; there's a large fire in the Columbia Gorge, with winds blowing the smoke to Portand.

I grew up in Miami. Every once in a while there would be a news blurb about how it was warmer in Anchorage than Miami. "Miami is colder than Anchorage" is both true and false, "depend[ing] on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."</comment>


Software Vulnerabilities in the Boeing 787 - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/software_vulner.html <comment><USER2> There is IMO exactly one valid way to get data from the flight systems to the entertainment network: use a literal one-way connection. Not "the only supported requests are data retrieval." Not "the software folks only transmit." A bona fide physical connection where one side has a transmitter, one side has a receiver, and there is no physical mechanism to send any information whatsoever the other way.

These devices are often called "data diodes". They are cheap. They cannot be hacked from the output side — at best a severely malfunctioning destination could send so much power the wrong way on the fiber or so much voltage the wrong way on the wire that the data diode fails. This would be surprising to say the least.

<comment><USER3> Aren't data diodes already a regulatory requirement for any connection between avionics and the IFE?

<comment><USER4> I guess they are a regulatory requirement because all of the modern aircraft have to request special conditions form FAA and EASA to justify why they do not comply with these requirements.

For example for the Airbus A350;:

> The applicable airworthiness regulations do not contain adequate or > appropriate safety standards for this design feature. These proposed special > conditions contain the additional safety standards that the Administrator > considers necessary to establish a level of safety equivalent to that > established by the existing airworthiness standards.

[1] [https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/12/17/2013-29...](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/12/17/2013-29985/special- conditions-airbus-model-a350-900-series-airplane-electronic-system-security- protection-from)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unlike the security researcher, I do have access to multiple 787s as I am one of many people responsible for maintaining them.

I'm obviously not going to attempt to exploit the firmware on an aircraft for obvious reasons, but the security researcher's notion that you can "pivot" from the in flight entertainment to anything to do with aircraft operation is pure fantasy.

These systems are entirely separate, including the electricity that controls the systems.

This guy is preying on individuals' lack of knowledge about aircraft mechanics in order to promote himself.

<comment><USER6> Would you say as someone who deals with these larger planes that at least the 787 current gen is closer to an older style chassis and body for cars? I have always imagined/assumed that 787's are not unique that they would be the same 'chassis' for a cargo plane or a passenger plane, and it really would have to do with how they fitted the plane for purpose?

This is part of the reason why I agree with you, because I don't see why the 787 would be unique by mixing avionics/mechatronics with the passenger systems but I don't know enough to say it with confidence. They would have designed the passenger systems to be independent and replaceable (especially with the knowledge gained from the legacies and upgrades of other planes like the 737).

Is there any public guides for 787 chassis and maintenance that you could point to as being reasonable things to read about this new style plane?

<comment><USER7> Not sure what you mean, but aircraft stopped being "chassis and body" some time in the 1930's. That was the switch to a monocoque design with stressed skin.

<comment><USER6> I couldn't find the right words to describe it, the other person who commented was a bit closer. At a certain point I would assume the Boeing 787 design would have interchangeable configurations that would not be dependent on the airframe and avionics. I wasn't sure if cabin, interior, model, or something else would best describe what I meant and chassis and body for a car was the best I could come up with that could describe these two changeable parts unlike the unibody chassis. It looks like configurations is the most appropriate word.

I was hoping that the person I commented to could point us at some fun manuals to describe how these configurations worked at a technical level.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about the 787, but in my day (757) every airplane that rolled off the assembly line was different. For one thing, there was a lot of customization for each airline, and the airplanes underwent constant technical improvement from field experience.

Doing things, however, that increased the weight or changed aerodynamics of the airplane were a very big deal, causing a ripple effect that would be very expensive.

Freighter versions were commonplace, with the obvious omission of windows (weight savings) and interior fluff.

Doing a stretch, or a re-wing or re-engine is an enormous thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me as someone with no experience of designing aircraft control software, avionics or anything to do with planes, that the entertainment system should be on a physically separate network to anything safety critical. Like, different everything: power supplies, switches, cables, control panels, the works. There should be no entryway into the flight control network except from the cockpit.

<comment><USER9> There are three separate networks, with data diodes used for cases where information flows between them.

HW separation was enforced by FAA back when 787 was in prototype stage.

<comment><USER10> Where can one read about the 787 data diodes?

<comment><USER4> You can read about the fact that there are NO data diodes on the FAA website

> The proposed architecture of the 787 allows connection to and access from > external sources (the public Internet) and airline operator networks to the > previously isolated Aircraft Control Domain and Airline Information Services > Domain.

> Capability is proposed for providing electronic transmission of field- > loadable software applications and databases to the aircraft. These would > subsequently be loaded into systems within the Aircraft Control Domain and > Airline Information Services Domain.

[1] [http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library%5CrgSC.ns...](http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library%5CrgSC.nsf/0/2FF392BE50BE5821862572C0004AEB68?OpenDocument)

<comment><USER9> That's a request for comments from before 787 got its type certificate - I'd like to see the result, as I do recall there being a request to redesign the networks due to "not enough separation". Even HN talked about it.

I can't find the "work-in-progress" reports for type certification regarding the network, but the special conditions involve:

> The applicant shall ensure system security protection for > the Aircraft > Control Domain and Airline Information > Domain from access by unauthorized > sources external to > the airplane, including those possibly caused by > > maintenance activity. The applicant shall ensure that > security threats are > identified and assessed, and that > risk mitigation strategies are > implemented to protect the > airplane from all adverse impacts on safety, > > functionality, and continued airworthiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their "rebuttal" almost seems like a taunt to other security researchers to prove them wrong. Calling the researchers irresponsible and their tools rudimentary was a dick move.

</comment><comment><USER12> > That second barrier, the company argues, allows only data to pass from one > part of the network to the other, rather than the executable commands that > would be necessary to affect the plane's critical systems.

Assuming planes don't use something like CAN-bus but regular TCP protocol, this can't really be true right? Perhaps they talk about which services are allowed to connect (listen for incoming connections).

<comment><USER9> AFDX protocol stack is unidirectional with no ACKs or anything like that, which makes use of physical data diodes trivial.

<comment><USER4> That is false. Apart from the hard-coded and restrictive network configuration, AFDX is basically UDP/IP. There are many uses of bidirectional application protocols (like TFTP).

<comment><USER9> unidirectional nature of the communication protocols means that AFDX- compatible application can be easily firewalled for cases such as reporting data to maintenance network, as I understood from Boeing's response.

Electronic Flight Bag being part of maintenance network is not something good, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was flying about a year ago and was messing with the in flight entertainment in a 787. It was pretty easy to figure out how to get to a boot menu in the in flight entertainment. I was thinking "huh, this seems like maybe a way in". Seeing how the in-flight displays navigational data it must be on the network as the flight systems. I'm sure there is some kind of segregation but its probably not ultimately secure.

</comment><comment><USER14> How exactly do you get a hold of firmware and set up a lab to test everything with stuff like this?

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC- JCvFyjlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC-JCvFyjlo)

The 787 Dreamliner is a nightmare. Bad code produced by offshore teams. International teams totally violating safety procedures.</comment>


Ask HN: What online course platforms have you used to *take* courses? - <AUTHOR> Another thread is asking about platform recommendations for creating a course, but I firmly believe in going to where customers are already gathering.
So, what online course platforms have you used to enroll in (and ideally complete) a free, freemium, or paid course?
And particularly for paid courses, what induced to to make the purchase? <comment><USER2> Generally I get courses from 3 different places:

1) Udemy - I get a lot of courses here on random subjects that I find interesting, or don't even know I find interesting until I go through the course catalog. Udemy tends to have a lot of sales (courses for $10-15 each) and the content is generally well put together and informative. I've mostly taken photography courses from here, but they have a wide range of stuff.

2) Linux Academy - I like LA because they tend to have a lot of updated content on some of the newest in cloud and systems management technologies. They also have well put together packages for certifications and things, such as AWS.

3) A Cloud Guru - Always get my AWS courses from here. I always wondered if they would be successful since they were specializing in such a niche area, but with AWS' rapid development and release of new products, I am sure they are having no trouble. The content here is well researched and put together, and the course creators are very engaged with their community.

The main things that are important, I think, for an online course platform are: 1) Quality content - put some effort into knowing what you're talking about. Don't just seem like you're reading out of a textbook, or putting together slides based off of some other source. Provide anecdotal information during the course that goes along with the subject you're talking about, show you know your stuff. 2) Engage with your learners - as someone taking an online course, it's always nice to be able to ask questions about something either that I need more clarification on or want more details about. Provide a platform to ask those questions, and allow the community to chime in and answer. Also be engaged as the course creator.</comment>


Marking the Coastline of Britain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-47538031 <comment><USER2> I had hoped this was finally going to tell us how long the coastline of Britain is.

<comment><USER3> It's infinitely long! :)</comment></comment>


An app that lets you pretend to receive a call when a co-worker distracts you - <AUTHOR> http://nopebutton.com/ <comment><USER2> Just be honest and say "please don't think I'm being rude, but I really need to get on with this work." You can be assertive without lying or being nasty.

<comment><USER3> That's ideal and needs to be the first approach. In practice, people that communicate all day don't always understand than other jobs require uninterrupted focus. That's why engineers try things like no-meeting- wednesdays and schedule blocks for coding.

I wouldn't use the tool in question, but I relate to the motivation.

<comment><USER4> if you need to use this tool, the uninterrupted focus is most likely already gone, damage done. it's even likely that the person will return once your call is done to interrupt you again.

<comment><USER5> or.... they'll learn that you prioritize answering calls over f2f, and they'll start calling you all the time. easier to 'avoid' to some degree, but you're just shifting the interruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a clever social engineering scheme to collect phone numbers.

</comment><comment><USER7> I never understood why a telephone gets precedence over somebody who made the effort to come to you in person.

<comment><USER8> Because after 6 or 7 rings the person calling you will go away, while the person who has come to you will, usually, stand and wait.

I agree with the sentiment though, that it does often give the impression of being bad mannered.

<comment><USER9> Just let them go to voice mail. If it's important they'll leave a message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the "Boss Key" you had in earlier games (or as a TSR in DOS), that showed some fake spreadsheet instead of your game screen. This is basically its cubicle cousin.

</comment><comment><USER11> Resume your focus! ...until our partners call you on a hourly bases for the rest of your life. ;)

<comment><USER12> lol so true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was going to jump on this before I realised that (1) I have my phone on DND when I am 'running silent, running deep', and (2) I found out from the comments here that it doesn't work outside the US.

Perhaps to address both issues, there could be a version of this that doesn't actually make a physical call? Perhaps a pairing of an iOS/Android app to a button on the browser which send a standard in app message (free) to the phone associated with the button. The app could then simulate a ring tone, which would be enough to complete the illusion of an incoming call?

<comment><USER14> You can also use something like Google Voice or True Caller and block all other calls to your phone except for that one

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why not just honestly say you're busy? Works for me.

There's quite a few versions of this. I think a cheaper option is an app on your phone that imitates a phone call.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just yell "I'm wired in!" and get back to it!

(teehee: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942sTOBISQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942sTOBISQs))

</comment><comment><USER17> The problem of being distracted when coding was greatly reduced for me when we moved to Git from more ancient version control tools. With faster/easier committing and history browsing, I can now make smaller and more logically divided commits, and thus need to keep less context in my head at every single moment.

</comment><comment><USER18> What an outrageously annoying website. I love it!

</comment><comment><USER19> I created a version of this in 2006 (I think), called Getmooh.com - Get Me Out Of Here. The idea was to get people out of bad dates with an automated call.

I used the Skype API with VB6 and some natural voice libraries from AT&T. We mostly got used for prank calls with pre-recorded messages we had. Worked OK. But cost us money and I got bored once it was built. We got maybe 60,000 sign ups I think.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure this was a feature of an old dumbphone, you could set it up so that holding down the number 5 (say) on the key pad would trigger a 'call'. Might have been a Samsung?

<comment><USER21> I hand an old Nokia (That had a sliding keyboard !!) with this feature (press down volume 4 times), it also had a scheduling feature with personalized ring- tone, number and display name!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Amusing idea. Absolutely no good reason for this to require a Chrome-specific extension, though; this would work in any browser.

<comment><USER23> Any browser with extensions support, you mean.

<comment><USER24> Why not a simple bookmark? No extensions required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This seems great for those situation where telling the person that you are busy, or cannot attend them anymore wont cut it.

Usually a phone call is the only detractor for them to interrupt me. at the end it ended up being just to let me know something like i got this to compile!! which could have been done on slack or lync.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this works only for US and Canadian numbers. Which isn't mentioned anywhere on the website.

<comment><USER26> I think that's because other cultures don't mind telling others that they are busy /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I made a similar app to this for Pebble at a hackathon in 2015: [https://github.com/phoneyscape](https://github.com/phoneyscape)

We got an offer from Madrona Ventures for it that I never ended up following up on.

</comment><comment><USER28> Related but with a different focus, Chelsea Handler made an app called "Gotta Go": [https://gottago.io/](https://gottago.io/) The process was detailed in one of her Netflix episodes IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER29> False premise - a phone call should never be allowed to interrupt a real conversation.

<comment><USER30> Surely you don't mean never.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a blatant advertisement

<comment><USER32> It's a quick side project that might be useful to some, presented in quirky and humorous way. Why does it bother you?

<comment><USER31> It is a way to collect phone numbers disguised as an outlet for passive aggression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> pretty standard feature on Japanese phones for unemployed people or people who wanna look more busy or important, I guess people in West don't care do much about losing face our impression

</comment><comment><USER34> Note the fine print in gray (or is it grey) text at the bottom the page

 _(Any discount code associated with this experience will expire on December 31, 2017.)_

</comment><comment><USER35> "i'm sorry, i'm on a deadline"

</comment><comment><USER36> I just say: i'm going to get me a coffee (water, restroom) and when i return they're gone.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you don't have your phone on airplane mode then you do want to be distracted.

</comment><comment><USER38> Simple but powerful.

Great job.</comment>


CVEs on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/search?q=CVE-2018- <comment><USER2> this appears to be a collection of CVEs from many users and often exploits accompanying them with citations to those.

wonder what is collecting this and if it is automated.

side note: another quote from Dr Who I see, thanks for sharing. I wish there were not so many seasons but I feel I am too far behind to start. I need a clean 10 page summary for all seasons so I can get into the next one :-)

<comment><USER3> Looks its just the results of a GitHub search query

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A charged vacuum emboitment? Intriguing ... [http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Charged_Vacuum_Emboitment](http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Charged_Vacuum_Emboitment)</comment>


Weekend project: What Every Programmer Should Know About FP Arithmetic - <AUTHOR> http://floating-point-gui.de <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thought "What the hell is 'Functional Programming Arithmetic' " after reading this headline? :)

I once had a more detailled look at floating-point numbers, and yes, it's quite a big topic. I like the site, because it's kept quite short, and it describes a few important aspects in regard to the usage of floating-point numbers in your programs (e.g. Comparison).

Maybe you want to mention that there's also an IEEE Standard for Floating- Point Arithmetic: <http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/>

<comment><USER3> Coincidentally, I was in the process of doing the same thing. Then I came across <http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/184403224> which said what I wanted to say, exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Partly off topic:

Is it normal that I have only two real fears, Mosquitos and Floating Point Arithmetic?

(And I know most of FPA stuff and few most useful numerically stable algorithms)

BONUS POINTS: Which part of question is off-topic? :)

</comment><comment><USER5> You seem to be missing the use of an absolute value function on your 'comparison' page.

<comment><USER6> Also, on the Binary Fractions page, in the last cell of the first table, the last term is "1x0," which should be "1x1."

Nice, informative site though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - will fix that tonight.</comment></comment></comment>


Paleolithic concert halls?  Cave drawings in France correspond with places of natural resonant sound - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html

<comment><USER2> Why is it surprising that they'd pick chambers that amplify the human voice?

If I was going to initiate someone in a cave that was dark, smokey and full of animal paintings on the wall, I'd really like my voice to be booming too.</comment>


80% of the Web Powered by PHP (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://haydenjames.io/80-percent-web-powered-by-php/ <comment><USER2> PHP is not that bad. I used Laravel to build out a PHP based web-app , it was a breeze to build - great developer experience - Eg: Netbeans/Eclipse Syntax editors are easy to use, composer was as easy as rails was. Most of my work was on the JS part though (React/WebVR). Tests, Code Coverage, Deployment to AWS, everything was smooth . This coming from a polyglot dev who built apps with Scala,Python, Java and Ruby

<comment><USER3> I've used PHP (pre 7) at $JOB. It's not bad for hacking a project together. In fact, it's kind of ideal. (Though I would personally pick Python.)

It is bad when working on a business-grade product with more than a dozen engineers. Bizarre language choices and an intrinsic tendency towards non- encapsulation seems to make even more spaghetti code than you'd find in Ruby, Python, Java, etc.

<comment><USER4> > even more spaghetti code than you'd find in Ruby, Python, Java, etc.

From working on numerous large Java projects, I can say with real-world experience that the logical equivalent to spaghetti code is very common with Java. The difference is where the spaghetti is -- in Java, it tends to be spaghetti inheritance and encapsulation.

<comment><USER5> Nice to see more of those "real world" words that confirms that everybody can do clusterfucks (aka spaghetti code) in any language, given the proper time and lazyness ;P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think link should be changed to [https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl- php/all/all](https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all), because it points to more actual results. On that page, we can see a diagram that shows many websites has not been updated to work with latest PHP 7+, which I'd say is quite shameful and/or method used by authors of this report to check PHP version is not adequate (I guess it is now a common standard to hide version of the used interpreter in a HTTP header, while it wasn't obvious todo task when only 5.x was available). Additionally, I found it is quite wrong to putting equal mark between PHP and Hack (HHVM) in section of "Popular sites using PHP".

Edit: Fixed some language errors and typos.

<comment><USER7> > that shows many websites has not been updated to work with latest PHP 7+, > which I'd say is quite shameful

Speaking as an ex-hoster here who had to look after a fleet of shared servers running PHP (000's of sites) for 15 years, sadly life is not that simple in the trenches. The major problem with PHP is breaking changes. Even within the 5.x releases there were enough breaking changes such that upgrading from say 5.3 to 5.6 could break a site. The jump from 5.6 to 7.x has enough breaking changes to make you cry. I think there should have been a commitment to maintain 5.6 for the next ten years, if only for security fixes.

Now I'm not suggesting that developers shouldn't go back and fix stuff that breaks because the PHP folks removed/altered that functionality (with the good intentions of encouraging more secure programming, for example), but there's a labour cost and someone needs to pay for that time.

There's also functionality in PHP that shouldn't have been removed (register_globals) but should have been defaulted to disabled. Sure register_globals is insecure but what we saw were folks adding the same functionality back, just google for "php emulate register_globals".

And don't get me started about the annoyance that was removing mysql_* support. Those exact same insecure string concatenated queries are still being executed via mysqli_* and the PDO libraries. In my experience, binning mysql_* didn't make a damn bit of difference when it came to sql injection attacks.

Don't get me wrong, I admire the efforts of the PHP core team, but they made a rod for our already sore support backs whenever a new release of PHP shipped because of some fairly unnecessary BC's.

<comment><USER8> > The jump from 5.6 to 7.x has enough breaking changes to make you cry.

It's not just PHP. But Python 2x / 3x as well.

Just to point something out: this is one reason why Java is so well liked for large enterprise code bases. They have been religious about backward compatibility in new versions.

A 2nd principle I would advocate is that if there must be a breaking change, it should be caught at compile time, not at run time. The project should fail to build, and the errors point you to exactly where the source code problems are.

Other language systems would do well to embrace backward compatibility and build time errors over run time errors. IMO.

<comment><USER9> > ... But Python 2x / 3x as well.

That was one of the lowest effort upgrades I ever did for my company (backend services, no front end websites).

One of the other reasons Java is popular in big companies is the low effort it requires to find people who can work with it.

<comment><USER10> > That was one of the lowest effort upgrades I ever did for my company > (backend services, no front end websites).

If your application does a lot of ASCII/unicode/raw string and byte manipulation, the transition from Python 2 to 3 can be very cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is slightly off topic. But PHP has a great devloper experience, in general, now with vscode, and autocomplate, find all references, etc. But the best framework out there is Laravel. It's great, but the maintainer doesn't seem reliable. Every single release has some type of backwards incompaitible change to it of which they don't document all the changes. So it's basically a blackbox if you are to upgrade your laravel/framework version.

<comment><USER12> The PHP experience was one of the worst experiences I have ever experienced.

<comment><USER11> PHP is very fast. The tooling is great, and it's very easy to get started. VSCode with the right extensions makes PHP development fun.

<comment><USER13> D:

Which are the "right extensions" because what I saw was not "fun" at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this speaks more to people running lts versions of servers that have php5 in repos.

<comment><USER15> Looking at you CENTOS

<comment><USER16> But that's the value proposition of a distro like that. Write your app against whatever is in the repos in the .0 release and get a stable ABI until the next major release in a little over a decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> PHP is a great because it lets you get stuff done. Easy to understand, deploy and extend. Also, with the new reactive frameworks such as swoole, it can even support situations where you need to service a very high number of connections. We use it extensively at my firm and are proud to do so. A lot of PHP criticism comes from developer snootiness and a fairly hefty survivorship bias. PHP is good for a bunch of things - let's just be okay with that!

<comment><USER18> Other programming languages "let you get stuff done" without all of the ugly warts and rough edges of PHP. And the only survivorship bias involved is that only developers with a high tolerance for terrible programming languages stick with PHP so the community disappears into its own navel in an endless cycle of awfulness. Calling this developer snootiness is like building houses with stone hand tools and scoffing at the workers who won't join your construction company until you buy some hammers.

<comment><USER17> Not really. PHP is not awful. It powers much of the web because it's actually good at its job. What's your programming language of choice? I bet you will find ample, justified criticism of it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That is mostly because of Wordpress

<comment><USER20> According to WordPress, it's about 25%. [1] So it would mostly be not- WordPress.

[1] [https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/08/wordpress-now- powers-25-o...](https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/08/wordpress-now-powers-25-of- the-web/)

<comment><USER21> that is out of date- wordpress is up to over 33% of the web

[https://wordpress.org/news/2019/03/one-third-of-the- web/](https://wordpress.org/news/2019/03/one-third-of-the-web/)

That's the _entire web_. It is staggering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Recent (funny) Observation, I hear more non-programmers trash PHP than actual programmers

<comment><USER23> Young programmers too.

I guess it's like how people trashed COBOL and Fortran when I was getting into development. Then later in life, I come to find out that Fortran is ubiquitous in engineering and is actually amazing for what it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I prefer PHP but as glue. Like my first-grade teacher taught us, a drop of glue goes a long way. Too much glue makes a mess.

Unlike many programmers, I don't pick one of the Turing-complete programming languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, whatever) and try to write as much of my app as possible in it. Because they are Turing complete, you really can write everything in it. Because you can learn only so much, you are tempted to write more than you should in that language.

But like I said, PHP is just a part of my stack, and I try my best to make it one of the thinnest layers. The other parts are Postgres, Apache, and the user's browser. I try to use each of those as much as possible. The server operating system also plays a part, and I suppose my stack includes Bash.

Basically I try to do as much business logic as possible in Postgres. This leaves PHP to do little more than glue the output of Postgres to HTML templates.

<comment><USER25> I prefer PHP as a whore.

Because we all abuse it, and is damn easy to make it work.

But at the end, we all feel dirty for using php.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> this site has tons of trends and is probably more up to date: [https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/programming- language](https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/programming-language)

they have tons of other metrics. To summarize PHP and Wordpress absolutely dominate the web.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well, the question is why so many admins stick with PHP 5. My guess is that due to the breaking changes that came with PHP 7: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_7)

<comment><USER27> it is also shocking that they use php 5.5, which basically is unsupported for two years.

Well PHP 5.6 is unsupported aswell, but it was supported till december 2018..

<comment><USER28> Ubuntu 14.04 shipped with PHP 5.5 by default, and it's supported until next month. I don't know how well the maintainers backport security fixes from newer versions, but at least technically it's still supported. The last security update to php5-common on trusty came out only a few days ago.

End of upstream support is meaningless in a world where most servers run LTS distros of one flavor or another. I've been telling my clients that they should be able to rely on PHP 7.2 for a long, long time because it's the default version in Ubuntu 18.04 and RHEL/CentOS 8, both of which come with 10 years of support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use PHP everyday and it rocks for what it does when you use it with best practices. The real problem is with small companies who won't or don't upgrade their infrastructure on a regular basis.

Heck, even with Wordpress these days you could use it as an API source and build a modern SPA website. It's just getting over the inertia of intransigent stakeholders.

</comment><comment><USER30> Would like to see "sites" vs "webapps"

<comment><USER31> That's quite a blurry line, though. How much functionality does a site need to become a web app?

<comment><USER32> I would describe a web-app as "any website that can't be replaced by a Static Site Generator outputting to a public_html directory of a stock-standard Apache 1.3 installation on a locked-down server that has no CGI-bin." (So, the SSG could output .htaccess files, and even files that contain Server Side Includes, but can't do CGI, FCGI/WSGI, PHP, or in-server Lua like OpenResty.)

Or, a simpler definition: a webapp is any website that you can't effectively host on your ca. 1995 ISP's web hosting.

Many webapps where the "app" is purely in a CMS backend (e.g. most Wordpress sites) are websites. Unless they include comments, in which case they're not. Unless those comments are JavaScript-embedded third-party (e.g. Disqus) comments, in which case they are. :)

<comment><USER33> That's an incredibly narrow definition. Why does the backend's capabilities matter? If a site has comments set up through its own backend vs through Disqus, the UX will/could be pretty much the same.

<comment><USER32> Because we're talking about the backend-deployment+ops-jargon terms "website" and "webapp", not their general usage. Words can have precise jargon meanings _which are different_ in different disciplines. This is where ops people tend to draw the line: a web _site_ is something you can deploy to e.g. an S3 bucket and it'll be fully functional, with no other dependencies that you have to maintain for it. A _webapp_ is something that _does_ have such dependencies that you need to set up and maintain—e.g. a database layer.

But even ignoring that, I also define the terms this way because of the prefix "web." A webapp isn't "an app on the web", but rather "an app powered by the web." An entirely-offline JavaScript SPA that is just _served over_ the web, _isn 't_ a web-app. It's just a program that runs in a browser, just like a Flash or ActiveX or Java applet is a program that runs in a browser. (Is a Flash game a "web game"? It's usually considered a _browser game_ , but that's not the same thing.)

We already have a term for the thing that {Flash, ActiveX, Java} applets are: apps. Offline JavaScript SPAs are just apps too. We don't need to add the prefix "web"; it's meaningless here. In any of those cases, if you took the exact same program, and slammed it into an Electron wrapper instead of into a domain-fronted S3 bucket, it would clearly not be a "web app" in any sense. Your SPA would just be "a JavaScript _app_ that uses a browser DOM as its graphics toolkit." Well, that's just as true before you put it in the Electron wrapper.

So "web app", then, has a specific meaning, above and beyond "app." You need something extra. That something extra is a backend, which your browser—driven by the app's logic—interacts with _over the web_. That's what makes an app "a web app." (This definition intentionally encompasses both server-rendered dynamic HTML, and client-rendered JavaScript SPA apps. You don't need a frontend _app_ ; you just need a _web backend_ that something is interacting with. That something can be the browser directly, by clicking links and submitting forms; or it can be a JavaScript frontend, using AJAX.)

A "web site", then, is a "web app" without the "app" part. If it's clear in the above definition what an "app" is, and what a "web app" is, then you can subtract one from the other to derive a definition of a "web not-app." That's a website: something powered by a web backend, which does not do any app things. If we decide that "app things" are basically "storing state", then a "site" is an "app" with no persistent state.

And since the definition of "web" here is about a backend, then the difference between a "web app" and a "web site" (a web not-app) is probably defined by the properties of the backend. So the difference about the ability of the web backend to store state. So a "web site" is a "web app" where the backend does no app things—i.e., stores no state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What about PHP RoadRunner, PHP Swoole, ReactPHP, ... ?

<comment><USER35> I recently benchmarked Swoole. It's insanely fast compared to regular PHP.

It's currently taking #4 place in the famous framework benchmark:

[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> People have asked us why we use PHP in 2019, sometimes scoffed at us.

This is why.

<comment><USER37> "This" being "everyone else is doing it"? Doesn't seem a great reason.

<comment><USER38> PHP has it's flaws but it has it's strengths too. For low traffic sites or more content heavy sites that are going to be heavily statically cached anyway...it's REALLY hard to find cheaper hosting.

PHP scales down better than just about any other language out there since most of the rest of them have to boot up.

<comment><USER18> It seems like for that kind of site what you're really looking for is completely static content behind a CDN. Your average blog or corporate homepage doesn't need to be dynamic at page-load time. You can generate the pages with a template engine when you update them, and then serve up the static content.

If you want to power some little dynamic things like blog comments you can run a custom microservice in a less awful programming language, or go with some hosted cloud option like AWS AppSync or Aurora Serverless.

<comment><USER39> So one should increase their reliance on third party services, potentially having their small site requiring two or three external services (potentially at different providers) instead of just having it all in one package (in PHP or anything else)?

<comment><USER18> So one should dynamically generate the page's markup for every single page view? With the attack surface that comes with exposing your PHP site to the public internet? Are you going to conscientiously check for security updates on your server? Are you going to trust whatever CMS you're using to win the whack-a-mole game of patching vulns (and god help you if it's Wordpress)? Are you going to stand up and maintain your own database server? Can you scale up capacity if you need it? Have you thought about backups?

The "all in one package" solution is a lot more complex than you make it sound. I would argue that much of the 80% of the web powered by PHP would be well-advised to utilize cloud services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> PHP 7: didn't use it too much yet but things definitely have been improving on the syntax side! But doing PHP is 80% awful jobs and 20% cool companies so it's not something I would put too high up on my resumé.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd like to see websites excluding WordPress.

<comment><USER42> It's not just wordpress. There are magento, joomla, drupal...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Right time to learn Node.js :)

</comment><comment><USER44> 6 months coding php. Never again.

<comment><USER45> Care to go into some details?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is wrong.

What they're measuring isn't the number of websites that use a particular technology, but the number of websites that _report_ they're using a technology. In the case of PHP that means expose_php is set to true in the ini file, and Apache is configured so use "ServerSignature On". Those are the defaults, and they're arguably _bad_ defaults because gathering information about a target is Hacking 101. You definitely shouldn't be giving away version numbers unless you're _really_ good at patching stuff on day 1.

What this survey means is that PHP gives away data about your web apps internal structure. Most other web technologies don't do this. The defaults are more sane. They're not adding x-headers to every request about what versions of which technologies the server is running.

If you dig a bit you'll see this line in the source data: "PHP is used by 79% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know." ([https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_langua...](https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all) under "How to read this diagram")

tl;dr PHP server admin need to get better at security.

<comment><USER47> Assuming most are running WordPress, Drupal, etc, hiding the fact that you're running PHP is a bit fruitless. Those platforms are dead simple to identify by the URL paths of components, like /wp-content/whatever and other similar clues.

I do agree that exposing the version isn't a great idea.

<comment><USER48> [https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/blob/master/src/apps.j...](https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/blob/master/src/apps.json)

Handy reference from the Wappalyzer browser extension for you.</comment></comment></comment>


Teaching in the Age of Minecraft - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/teaching-in-the-age-of-minecraft/385231/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> The most significant limitation on bringing games into the formal learning environment is the time investment to make it work effectively. The article notes that teachers want to create their own teaching tools (and subsequently 98% of their content is teacher created) but the take away should not be that teachers _want_ to create this content - but that the commercial creators were not creating useful content on the behalf of these teachers. It's classic design 'empathy' breakdown.

The time constraints on teachers operate on several different levels: very limited time for planning, unpaid overtime to prep these materials, and most importantly the limited amount of time teachers can devote To specific learning targets (fast and good is often better than slow and very good).

I am actually bullish on the utility of 'games' for education - but I rarely hear a realistic discussion of the constraints on teachers as part of the discussion. For this reason, I see these efforts as far more likely to succeed in non-traditional/informal learning environments.</comment>


A world-famous urbanist says New York is becoming a "gated suburb" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/808749/a-world-famous-urbanist-says-new-york-is-becoming-a-gated-suburb/ <comment><USER2> I work as a software developer in Silicon Alley. I don't know anyone that owns an apartment in Manhattan that paid for it with money they earned. A few paid for apartments with family money, but the rest of us rent. My family has lived in the city for a long, long time, and I understand this isn't a wholly new phenomenon, but it's gotten much worse in the last 3 years.

How is this sustainable in the long term?

To make things worse, where I live in Astoria the local community board is so obsessed with parking (we have 2 fucking subway lines, more than the Upper East Side) that all large new buildings have underground parking, making them dramatically more expensive. This is to "keep things affordable."

It feels so kafkaesque. I've thought about moving to Kansas City, where they've been building like crazy and the new streetcar is very useful.

<comment><USER3> It's a disaster. No single factor affects people's decisions as much as the rent in this city; lives here revolve around it, especially if you're only making so-so money. I think about how different life here would be if everyone's rent was only, let's say, 10% of their income (jobs, hobbies, social lives, etc.)

The rental increase treadmill keeps turning faster and faster, and the need to keep moving neighborhoods every few years is not a picnic.

I was born in Brooklyn and have lived in NYC my whole life, and the rental situation just gets worse every year. Unless and until we start dealing with the issue seriously, it's just going to keep eating more and more of people's incomes. I wrote a post on this a while ago summarizing the issue:

[https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent- crisi...](https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisis-or- the-rent-is-still-too-damn-high-edb13ca853cc#.mzgoimq52)

My rental history looks like this:

1995: 300/month sublet (Kensington)

1997: 625/month 1BR walkup (Brighton Beach)

1999: 675/month

2000: 1450/month 1BR walkup (Upper East Side)

2001: Above raised to 1650, moved

2002: 1125/month studio (Yorksvillle)

2009: 1175/month studio (Yorksville) - landlord wanted the apartment for a relative, had to move

2010: 1750 1BR walkup (Lower East Side)

2011: 1800

2012: 1850

2013: 1900

2014: 1950

2015: 2000

2016: 2180

All the old apartments I lived in are now at least 400-500+ more. It's out of control. I'm probably heading back to south BK when my lease is up; at least studios under 1400 still exist there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This problem is ingrained not just in New York, but a stack of "superstar" > Western cities like London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Florida argued

I can attest that it is certainly happening in Austin, TX.

I suspect this is strongly correlated with the drop in crime in cities as well. The very concept of "gated suburb" cities is pretty cyberpunk, imo.

</comment><comment><USER5> > If you look at what people are living in on the Upper East Side, in these > new towers, [it's] 3,500 square feet for a family of two, a parking spot in > the garage or next to your unit

What the heck is he talking about? At least here in Toronto, high-rise units tend to be small, often very small compared to suburban houses. And it's hard to find condos with three or four bedrooms. They tend to have two at most.

3500 square feet? That's the penthouse, man. It's for the guy in the silk ascot and velvet robe who invites his friends (who are of an age with his daughter or granddaughter) over for a pool party.

<comment><USER6> Getting development permission in New York City is extremely difficult and expensive, much more so than in Toronto. Also the level of demand is much higher. This tends to drive developers to serve the upper end of the market moreso than the middle. As a result, new Manhattan residential towers really do have a remarkable amount of big luxury units. (Richard Florida would probably know, he owns a house in Rosedale. He travels in these circles.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Always wanted to live in NY, but knew owning a place would be impossible (also a developer). Chicago is probably as close as NY as I'll get, and that's fine. Can easily afford a large SFH or two-flat (with tenant paying most of my mortgage) with a yard. This is with a short walk to train station (less than 30 minute commute), to work in a big city with a wealth of culture and entertainment options.

I can't find that particular combination anywhere else in the US.

<comment><USER8> Washington, DC? I think though that in the surrounding metro area, a SFH costs more on average than in Chicago.

<comment><USER7> DC would also be an excellent choice, but anecdotes seem to imply housing is very expensive--I'll have to look more in depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe they should allow the construction of more housing. Seems like if you have supply problems, you should permit supply to grow.

<comment><USER9> It's NYC, not Houston. :-) Some considerations:

* The city's already very densely populated, increasing the density comes at the price of having to ensure the infrastructure can handle it. The most obvious is the creaking subway system, which has gotten hella overcrowded in the last few years, but you also have other infra that needs to go along with it (the type where you tear up the street and fix layers of piping, cabling, and all the rest)

* The 'not Houston' comment is partly snarky, partly to make the point that what makes New York City what it is, or Paris or London what they are, is their character and that's partially zoning and building code. I suppose you could raze all the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and build mega apartments, but do we really want to do that?

* Politically, changing zoning is hard. Density is pushed back on by the local neighborhood. Next you have affordable housing advocates that push back against zoning, in fact in places like Bushwick, even if you include 25-30% affordable housing in a new development, you still have picketing, protests and loudspeakers. In Williamsburg, under Bloomberg there was massive rezoning that lead to the neighborhood essentially turning into an extension of Manhattan. Partly this involved rezoning light manufacturing, and allowing building by the riverfront. That said, affordable housing advocates and people in that camp decry Williamsburg as a great tragedy because the rents went up for the poorer people that were there before.

* Finally, after all I said they ARE building more housing. But they can't build housing faster than the people are moving here and also the people are making babies. People have a tendency to multiply, and the economy here has been pretty stable. 8M residents in 2000 compared to 8.5M today. The demand fills faster than the supply can keep up.

<comment><USER6> Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn are very densely populated, but there's a lot more to the city than that. Huge swaths of the New York metropolitan area are two-storey houses, and what I suggest is upgrading these to five or six storey brownstone-style housing. Yes, infrastructure does need to be built, but by putting more people in less space, you increase the ability of the city to pay for infrastructure. After all, cities that are losing population (de- densifying) generally do not find it any easier to pay for their existing infrastructure. And if people want New York to stay just the way it is physically, then they're going to have to stop complaining about the prices. Increased supply or increased prices, that's the trade-off.

Yes, changing zoning is difficult, and the way Bloomberg went about it only made it worse. Because the up-zoning (permitting more development) was limited to a very few neighbourhoods, it meant that the new development was concentrated there, with noticeable effects. If he'd up-zoned a wider area, that development could have been more spread-out and less disruptive. As it is, though, he actually down-zoned large areas of the city, often those low- rise neighbourhoods which could have handled more density. Just as in San Francisco, increased housing supply will in large part need to happen in the inner and outer suburbs.

New York is building housing, but not that much: [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc- hou...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nyc- housing.png?w=600&h=371) . Just because there's a few big noticeable towers going up does not mean that there's a large amount of housing being built. Also, just because supply isn't keeping up, doesn't mean it does nothing at all. By building more housing, the increase in price is _less than it otherwise would be._</comment></comment></comment>


Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Tragedy of Google Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/#?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I have been going down the rabbit hole of copyright, fair use, and the Google Books Settlement recently. This article is a great summary including a lot of the peripheral issues, but the "2003 law review article" linked in TFA is nigh unreadable to me, compared to the actual legal opinions and briefs[0].

They are a couple of fascinating documents. The Authors Guild seems gobsmacked by the final ruling, and so am I. Perhaps the SCOTUS was correct to turn down hearing the case, if only to let the issue settle a little more, but it really feels like it's likely to be overturned in the near future.

There are some interesting tidbits in the opinions: 1) In the definitive ruling, the judge decides that the harm done to the market for the books is negligible, or overcome by the transformative "purpose" of the the usage ("purpose" is significant because most examples of fair use include some type of new creative "expression"). This is surprising to me. 2) Google Books is ruled fair use in part because the book descriptions (and snippets?) are metadata _describing_ the books, information that should not be controlled by the authors.

[0] [http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/authors-guild- v-g...](http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/authors-guild-v-google- inc/)

<comment><USER3> The final ruling in _Authors Guild v. Google_ was really just a footnote to the whole saga, though. The article barely mentions it.

The article focuses on the failure of the class action settlement, due to the "perfect being the enemy of the good" (librarians and individual authors objected to the settlement because they hoped Congress would pass a law to free orphan works, but what actually happened is that no progress has been made).

<comment><USER4> The battle lines around orphan works are interesting because they don't really follow the same contours as do a lot of the other disagreements about copyright law. From what I've seen, the main opponents of freeing orphan works are individual content creators and the organizations that purport to represent them like ASMP.

The fear I gather is that large content users won't make much of an effort to contact rights holders and will use orphan works legislation to just take it for free.

<comment><USER5> And this is one reason why i believe that copyright should require a minimal- fee registration every ten years. If you keep your registration current, there is no effort required to contact you. If you can't be bothered to do that, your copyright clearly isn't worth much to you and expires. Either way, the status of the work is unambiguous.

<comment><USER4> In the case of something like a photograph, that means a minimal-fee registration on _each_ photograph every 10 years. This is also exactly the sort of effort that opponents of orphan works legislation feel that large content corporations will take advantage of when all the little guys forget to renew.

I'm actually mostly for orphan works legislation but I understand the perspective of the opponents.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't it be easy to have a provision for bulk registration?

Like, "renew the photographs with SHA's .....", and then providing a simple tool to list all the SHA's of all files with a given extension in a directory?

One request with 50.000 photographs?

<comment><USER7> How about if I draw 7000 sketches or drawings in a year? How would that be "bulk registered"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the interesting tidbits in the article is the discussion about the length of copyright terms. The common wisdom is that the current (too long IMO) terms are the result of lobbying by Disney and other media companies.

The article goes into how, in fact, this really came out of Europe and a fundamentally different perspective on the purpose of copyright than the US Constitution. Wikipedia also has what seems to be a pretty good discussion.[1]

So when people say that current copyright law goes way beyond "promote the progress of science and useful arts" they're absolutely right. But copyright law in continental Europe was much more focused on protecting the rights of authors.

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

<comment><USER8> With conservative Supreme Court justices loudly and proudly rejecting non- American sources of legal standards, I wonder how European perspectives came to dominate the US legal system on copyright issues but are ignored on human rights, labor law, and the environment?

<comment><USER4> This wasn't about legal precedent though, so very little if anything to do with SCOTUS. This was about aligning worldwide copyright under the Berne Convention.

I'm not familiar with the detailed history but it's pretty easy to imagine that aligning on a longer term would be much easier than on a shorter one. After all, even in the US, on the one side you have plenty of interests in favor of longer terms even if there are somewhat abstract constitutional principles that favor a shorter term.

<comment><USER9> It's just a play: one side says they need to align to the other, so they pass law to match the other's limits... and raise them a bit. The other side notices and lobbies for alignment, which again will go a little bit further. Rinse and repeat.

Deflecting criticism by claiming another party forced your hand is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it still works extremely well. See also: EU directives, which are requested and agreed upon by all EU governments, just to be immediately turned into "tyrannical rules from Bruxelles" the minute they have to be applied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most important benefit from the project: the ability to search these books. I've been researching a history of science subject recently and it's amazing the amount of information I could get from Google Books and nowhere else online. And where the snippets are not enough, I have the book title and author name, so I know where to look for the information in print.

<comment><USER11> The public benefit of searching the books isn't fully realized, alas, until more than just Google can see all of the text. Here's an example of a book discovery tool built using the Internet Archive's scanned book collections:

[https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore- book...](https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in- the-21st-century/)

[https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/?q=Gregorian+Calendar&y...](https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/?q=Gregorian+Calendar&y=1582)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Imagine an intellectually curious but poor high schooler: They can't afford to buy journal articles and books; they have almost no option to access serious, quality information. How much potential is lost to this travesty?

We've fallen far, far short of the potential and dream of the Internet and the democratization of knowledge, and the state of things has become a norm; few even notice it or realize what they are missing.

The truly valuable knowledge, to a great extent, still is inaccessible to the vast majority of the world. It is in books and academic journals. As a simple example beyond Google Books, I was thinking the other day that Safari Books by itself contains much more valuable knowledge (and far less misinformation) on many technical issues than the rest of the Internet; I learn more about some topics in a few hours on Safari Books than in a year on the Internet.

Technically, books and journals easily could be made universally accessible, creating an explosion of knowledge and all the things knowledge enables and motivates - the Enlightenment, science, technology, democracy, liberty, prosperity, most of modern civilization, etc. Instead of being well-informed, most of humanity is left with the dregs, and instead of the Internet providing an explosion of knowledge it has created a plague of misinformation and propaganda. IMHO the lack of high quality knowledge also robs the public of the ability to discriminate between good and bad information: Most lack a model of what quality knowledge is, of even the questions to ask (something encountered frequently in serious scholarship). Few even realize the vast gulf between the quality of generally available information and what is in the books and journals. (I'll add that the demise of bookstores means few even see or are aware that the books exist.) And even if they know, it's inaccessible.

Instead of embracing a technological revolution in the distribution of information - a turning point in the history of humanity - we have brought forward the model used for the old technology, with distribution as controlled and limited as the old medium of paper. For the most part, it seems like the same few people have the quality information, the professional scholars. Let's not forget and give up; it's too important.

<comment><USER13> > I'll add that the demise of bookstores means few even see or are aware that > the books exist.

According to this data[0] (take it with a grain of salt), there are as of 2017 at least >20,000 book stores in the U.S.

Pretty much every job gives you a book (policy manual) when you get hired.

Schools, even the most technologically advanced, still have plenty of physical books.

So although I agree with most of your comment, I'd gander to say most of humanity knows physical books exist.

[0]:[https://www.statista.com/statistics/249027/number-of- booksto...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249027/number-of-bookstores- in-the-us/)

<comment><USER12> I didn't mean that that people aren't aware that such things as books exist, which of course would be absurd.

I meant that people aren't aware of the serious and scholarly books that exist because they don't experience the serendipity[0] of seeing them in particular, or en masse, in the bookstore.

[0] IIRC, serendipity is actually part of the design of library arrangement systems (Library of Congress, Dewey, etc.): Books are arranged so that you will happen across related information when you look for the book you came for.

<comment><USER14> This point cannot be overstated right now. Recommendation systems like Amazon's are terrible for book discovery compared to looking at the rest of the shelf when you are getting a book at a library. There is a popular sentiment that the Internet has made knowledge discovery easier than going to the library, which in my experience is absolutely misleading, and is causing people to wrongly believe they have done research on a subject when in fact they have completely overlooked a giant corpus of published material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _In August 2010, Google put out a blog post announcing that there were 129,864,880 books in the world._

That number actually sounds surprisingly low. In contrast, I wonder how many the underground "bookz" scene have scanned so far. It's hard to find exact numbers, but from what I could find, LibGen contains approximately 3M books, so if Google is accurate, that's ~2.3% of all books ever published. No doubt there are other sites I'm unaware of, probably in other languages, which have also accumulated massive collections of ebooks; but the fact that there exist people who have, for free and on their own time and at risk of being sued for copyright infringement, voluntarily scanned and shared over 2.3% of all the world's books is somewhat amazing.

<comment><USER16> The number of "books" being published is growing exponentially. So, a significant fraction of all books ever would have been published in the recent past (which also means that they would probably be "electronic natives" that don't need scanning and digitization). I imagine that the uptick in self- publication opportunity is already (or will become) and important factor in that growth. For these reasons, I don't find it shocking that some online repository has a few percent of all books ever written.

PS: I couldn't find numbers regarding my statements. It would be great if someone can provide sources buttressing or refuting my claims.

<comment><USER17> The problem with self-publication is that your book might as well not exist[0] unless you already have a significant following (in which case you could easily secure a publisher). This isn't an issue unique to the digital age, there's a term specifically for publishers who will just publish anything: vanity presses (though the catch is that _you_ have to pay _them_ usually, hence the "vanity" part). Publishers provide their name, marketing, and get your books into stores which is pretty important. (I write Wikipedia articles on manga and you can easily tell the North American publishers apart by how hard they get the manga scene to write about and review—via advance copies—their books, especially with regards to press releases and staff interviews. If a manga didn't have this, it became really hard to justify a Wikipedia article for it on the basis of Notability) Also I bet for statistics purposes, only books registered with the Library of Congress are counted (how else would you find all those self-published works?).

There are services like Lulu for free self-publication,[1] but they don't carry the same "legitimacy" or reach of publishers. I think the best analogue to online self-publishing would be the zine: they were easy to reproduce (via photocopying) and distribute (at events or via post). However, none of them really had a long-lasting legacy[2] and anything successful eventually legitimizes itself as a periodical or magazine and becomes established. Thus, I think self-publishing doesn't really change much for the individual, but makes it much easier for groups[3] to gain traction. Overall, being self- published on the internet just increases your accessibility, but we should be careful confusing it with traditional publishing or counting it in statistics because a lot of it is just noise. (bringing up Wikipedia again, there are tons of "books" on Google Books that are actually just random compilations of Wikipedia articles)

Anyway just some of my random thoughts, hope I didn't digress too much.

[0]: Overused thought experiment: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

[1]: [https://www.lulu.com/](https://www.lulu.com/)

[2]: An exception like the _Phrack_ ezine might be of interest to the HN crowd. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrack))

[3]: Here's where the print-web distinction breaks down. A _ton_ of blogs and amateur news websites have evolved and became taken seriously. Just because they're not published in a book format, doesn't mean they're distinct in my opinion.

<comment><USER18> Some people are all "Self-publishing is great! I get half of the price of every book I sell."

After doing it for a while I would gladly take a much lower percentage of each sale in return for much huger sales, and having people to deal with printing, distribution, publicity, advertising, and all the other parts of the process that aren't "me drawing the next page of comics". And I'm lucky to be working in comics, rather than words, where there's a significant tradition of "underground" publishing that's become legitimatized into "small-press" and "independent" publishing, rather than an epithet like "vanity press".'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to > get to the same outcome

I really feel like Google is a victim of their own engineering brilliance sometimes: the objectors really thought that because Google made this look easy, that it _was_ easy. They figured if one company could just casually decide to do this, that they could reliably expect that someone else or maybe government or another legal avenue will come along. The reality of course, is that Google is special; nobody will do it now and even Google is losing its "specialness".

And further, because Google appeared to be doing it so easily, they all thought that Google profiting from it in some way was unfair. They didn't see it as reasonable that Google should be rewarded for the genuine investment of labor and intellectual property involved in pulling this off, precisely because Google didn't give the appearance that it was hard. If Google had given more of an appearance of struggling to achieve it - I'd bet the authors would have suddenly appreciated what Google was doing more and probably accepted the idea that it was fair for Google to profit from it in some way.

<comment><USER20> As someone who has looked into this quite a bit it's not difficult to do what Google Books had been doing in 2017. The reason is that various groups have ripped and converted to PDF thousands of books. It's trivial to facilitate search on these and other cool stuff at this point. Someone could do it if they really wanted too without too much effort. They haven't most likely because there isn't much profit in it as it stands and legal hurdles since Google failed.

<comment><USER21> The article does mention that one of the big issues Google encountered was logistics.

It's one thing to scan a few dozens/hundreds of books. It's a completely different thing to do it for _all_ books. Assuming you'd want to digitize 100 million books in three years, you'd need to process 91324 books per day, or roughly one book per second, assuming no breaks and 24x7x365 operation.

As the article said, Google poured hundreds of millions of dollars on this, so I'd wager it's not as trivial as it sounds.

<comment><USER22> Thank you. This is not "re-create /r/place in a weekend" territory. This is physical hardware development and a substantial logistical challenge.

<comment><USER23> Found a video of one of their prototype scanners. IIRC they looked at like every scanning solution available and also got a bunch of universities and libraries to help them purchase and operate scanning equipment. Pretty cool stuff.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhL7qJYzcd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhL7qJYzcd4)

edit: Next vid looks good too. In depth on different scanners.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JuoOaL11bw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JuoOaL11bw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"...here we've done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it's 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they're the ones responsible for locking it up._

 _" I asked someone who used to have that job, what would it take to make the books viewable in full to everybody? I wanted to know how hard it would have been to unlock them. What's standing between us and a digital public library of 25 million volumes?_

 _" You'd get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you'd have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You'd flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate."_

Now this would be an interesting leak to Wikileaks.

<comment><USER15> That just makes them viewable, and being still hosted on Google's servers, it would probably be closed in a few minutes too as people start downloading everything they can find. Something similar might've happened to Springer a while ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10810271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10810271)

Leaking 25M books' worth of files, however, is going to be far more difficult. It would have to be a very carefully coordinated effort both on the "inside" and "outside"; one person doing a Snowden won't have any effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't they have proposed a neutral party that would store and manage all the books? Just like the Books Rights Registry was going to handle most of the money. I suppose that Google didn't expect all that backlash. And, now that I think about, that was out of the scope of the lawsuit as well... In the words of an American president: "Sad!"

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe Google could get around some of the issues by spinning the thing off as a non profit? It could always owe Google a few million for what they'd spent so far.

<comment><USER26> A few hundred million.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So it's between 50 and 60 petabytes of data?

I've been wondering how it would be possible for a disparate group of tech- oriented people to make a collection like that. It would only take a 1000 people with 6 terabytes of storage, which doesn't sound impossible to me.

The main issues I see are:

a) How to share access to the data without exposing yourself?

b) How to make the data discoverable and searchable?

c) How do you ascertain survival of the data?

and optionally: d) How to deal with the freeloader problem?

<comment><USER27> If we use the private torrent site scene as a model all of those things are pretty much solved.

These regulatory agencies go around and play whack a mole on them but they tend to live for a long time and have vast archives when they become mature.

see the history of the late what.cd for a rundown of what once existed for music. I think that cheap streaming services have kind of killed the peak potential of the music version of these sites though. It's kind of sad though because what.cd had every single release of every single song catalogued. Streaming sites will only give you 1 or a few.

<comment><USER6> Well... I'd say it isn't solved. What.CD went down. Fuck, that still hurts.

People now speak of Google Books as a library of Alexandria, but What.CD was the real thing. Google Books was barely available to anyone, ever.

That shouldn't be possible the next time. How though? Distributed metadata curation is a problem we haven't worked out well. I know I haven't.

Especially if the metadata is stored on and for data stored on a diverse set of platforms, like "not only BT", but also Freenet, HTTP, FTP, IPFS... It just doesn't exist.

<comment><USER27> I guess separating the meta data from the content in such a way the index can't be targeted for copyright violation.

<comment><USER6> The thing is, you have to index the pieces of metadata or otherwise make them discoverable, and then decide which parts you trust.

This would need some kind of signing/trust-distribution scheme, something like namespaces ("YIFY can only approve movie and show releases because they only do movie and show releases").

It would also need way to blacklist malicious metadata (automatic scanners that publish lists of files with viri?).

It's very much non-trivial as far as I can see.

That's ignoring the copyright issue, which can mostly be ignored if you somehow make it impractical to prosecute the distributors of the metadata. But I think (part of) the metadata will still be subject to copyright lawsuits, in the context of "the right to be forgotten" and fair-use safe harbors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Somehow all 25 million books need to be freed. It seems like it would be a great thing for society if this somehow just ended up online.

It's the orphan works that need to be freed the most. Many good books have been orphaned and will never be reprinted or digitized because the initial publisher is gone, author is hard to track down, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, google have an amazing resource on their hands. Data mining, machine learning, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Did Google offer to scan and release as creative commons at any point? Seems like the least evil option to me.

<comment><USER17> That's only possible to do if you're the copyright holder. What Google would have been doing would have been specifically for orphan works, meaning no known copyright holder was able to be found. (as for public domain works, in America[0] you can't claim copyright on them again unless you significantly transform them into a derivative work. It doesn't stop museums from claiming copyright on public domain paintings regardless though...) Besides, I'm not sure Creative Commons would have helped—since I'm assuming you're referring to non-commercial—because the settlement depended on Google being able to pay anyone claiming the books, pay the publishers, and sell the books to recoup/profit. Just merely making the books free online would enrage the publishers class who would feel that they are losing possible profits.

[0]: For countries that follow [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow) doctrine they might actually be able to but that defeats the purpose of wanting to make public domain works freely available

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's a heck of a lot of training data :O

</comment><comment><USER32> Copyright is broken.

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4)</comment>


Interview of Stephen Wolfram and more details about his personal analytics - <AUTHOR> http://quantifiedself.com/2012/03/the-computational-quantified-self-a-qa-with-stephen-wolfram/

<comment><USER2> The detail I find really remarkable is that all the data collection systems are almost entirely passive! What would it take to be able to put that sort of logging/ tracking system together for the normal technical user?

<comment><USER3> Technically, Google has a lot of this data for each of us. It would be nice if they let us see it.</comment></comment>


The rules of brainstorming, according to top design firm IDEO - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2017/07/03/the-rules-of-brainstorming-ac.html <comment><USER2> This is just the basic set of rules devised by Osborne (and later Adams) in the 1950s-'70s. There's a rich set of literature on facilitating co-creation workshops that builds on both practical experience and formal research, and much of which goes against the original brainstorming thesis (e.g., let people generate and score concepts individually, to avoid the "tyranny of the decibel"). Current workshops tend to have a much more structured flow than the classic model, and are designed to address the specific needs of the expected output.</comment>