Ask HN: Is Diaspora Overrated? Overhyped? - <AUTHOR>

just a little imho...
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there are already open source 'facebook killa'z' out there. What makes Diaspora different? (besides an article in the NY Times)
Best of luck to the Diaspora Team "TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT" <comment><USER2> Here are a few problems I see with Diaspora (although I may be wrong, feel free to correct me).

1) They propose a mesh network, but haven't addressed scalability. If I have 1000 friends, presumably I'll have to open connections to all 1000 nodes to get updates

2) I don't think they have addressed how you will discover your friends nodes. Facebook makes it easy to find friends. Just import your address book or type a name into search. Either they will have to come up with something similar to an email address (username@domain name of where your node is hosted) or they are going to have to search the mesh network, or someone will have to be in charge of a central directory. All except the central directory are less user friendly than Facebook and the central directory has problems of its own like who do we trust to run it?

3) When privacy is their main motivator, they don't seem to understand the encryption that well. They talk about encrypting your data using AES. So how is a friend going to access your data? You would obviously have to decrypt it when a friend requests it (and probably re-encrypt it with a shared secret key specific to that friend). But then if your node is running on a hosting service (because only uber nerds are going to run their own) you're now just trusting that host with your privacy which isn't any different than how people trusted Facebook.

<comment><USER3> 1) They've mentioned maybe using XMPP, which is federated and seems to work ok.

2) It's worse than that, search for John Smith on facebook and the top result will be the one in your social circle. So a central directory would have to know the social graph. However, sending search queries to your existing friends, by whatever method you use for updates, and forwarding them a couple hops might work nicely. No idea what they're thinking on this.

3) I thought I saw something about them using public-key crypto, and assumed they would be encrypting their posts with each friend's public key. Performance might be an issue, since they would have to re-encrypt for each friend, so maybe they are thinking to share a secret key with all friends.

It's true that you're trusting the host with your privacy that way, but instead of one big host that everybody has to trust, there are lots of hosts that compete with each other for people's trust. And there's no one place for marketers or other goons to find all the information on everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me just vaporware for now. Have they stated that they have working code?

<comment><USER2> I believe they said they have a mockup

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the exciting thing is the fundraising and the momentum (against facebook?). I wouldn't bet on the project succeeding, but I would (did) give $50 just to support the experiment.

</comment><comment><USER6> $100k in non-venture backed capital, other than that, maybe a glimmer of hope.

All we can do is wait and watch. They've talked good game, now it is time for them to walk it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it's the idea behind it that's overrated, overhyped etc, stemming from a fundamental lack of appreciation between theory and practice. If you post it on the internet, it's public. It might not be supposed to be public, and it may not be public for quite a while, or indeed ever, but it's a naive expectation, IMHO.</comment>


Apple: Thoughts on bias, value, excess cash and dividends - <AUTHOR> http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2012/03/apple-thoughts-on-bias-value-excess.html?m=1

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great piece on Apple and its current cash balance situation. Though most companies never face such an issue it is interesting to understand what Apple must be considering.</comment>


NYC law enforcement has been able to crack iPhones in-house since Jan 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/08/crack-iphones-in-house/ <comment><USER2> My inner skeptic says if you have enough money and demand for phone decryption that is using a low-entropy key; your best bet is to take a dump of the phone NVRAM and feed it to inhouse iphone emulator, brute-forcing the key in parallel, without any lockouts. Their product may be an ios emulator.

<comment><USER3> The Secure Enclave should protect against that type of attack. And why would you assume it is a low entropy key? Also, my iPhone is autocorrecting Secure Enclave to capitalize it for some reason.

You should probably read this before believing your "inner skeptic" [https://www.apple.com/business/docs/site/iOS_Security_Guide....](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/site/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A quick web search yields no information about _how_ Cellebrite might be able to achieve this. Does anybody have any inside knowledge? Has anybody played with one of these devices?

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that any inside knowledge leaked to the public is also knowledge available to Apple, which can use it to either find and patch the bugs Cellebrite is exploiting, or at least build defense mechanisms that mitigate the effect of exploits. Even short of detailed technical information, simple things like "how long does it take?" or "how many times does the device reboot?" or "what does the USB cable look like?" can still help narrow down which software components (or even hardware components) to look at. So Cellebrite is well-motivated to avoid any leaks.

That said, it is most likely "just" a computer that talks to the phone over USB and uses a chain of software exploits. It has to take over first the application processor, then the Secure Enclave, in order to bypass the passcode entry rate limit. The rate limit is key. iOS encrypts user data based on the passcode, so without guessing the passcode there's no way to get at the data short of breaking AES. But you _can_ guess. Passcodes default to 6 digits, creating only 1 million possibilities, low enough to bruteforce. Even if the bruteforcing has to be done on-device (because the passcode is tangled with device-specific keys managed in hardware), and even if repetitive crypto operations are added to make the key derivation take longer (not sure), key derivation can't take too long or it would negatively impact the user experience, and 1 million is just really low. The only way to make a 6-digit passcode secure is to make the nth access attempt take (exponentially) longer than the first, a restriction that can't be done with pure crypto but requires some trusted software to enforce. Which can be hacked.

That said, if you're planning to do something sketchy, you can set a long non- numeric passcode and you'll probably be immune to whatever Cellebrite is doing. (Unless they're recovering the passcode itself from… somewhere. It's not supposed to be stored, but bugs are possible.)

Source: iOS Security Guide

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> if you are ridin' dirty just stay off the phones.

</comment><comment><USER7> A $5 wrench? [https://www.xkcd.com/538/](https://www.xkcd.com/538/)

<comment><USER5> US police are not going to use a literal wrench. They _have_ tried to jail people until they reveal the passcode, but even that has been subject to constitutional challenges. Much simpler to be able to get access without permission. Also, in some cases the owner of the device has not been apprehended; perhaps they don't even know the police have their phone, and the police would like to keep it that way. Or the owner could be dead, as in the San Bernardino case.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Chicago police have been known to have black sites, so I wouldn't put a metaphorical wrench past the realm of possibility.</comment></comment></comment>


IPhone Apps for the Lawbreaker in You - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,535200,00.html <comment><USER2> This article is about exactly as sensationalist as I've come to expect from Fox News.

Out of all of the (3) applications mentioned in the article, one's functionality has been duplicated for some time on another device (TomTom speed trap reporting), the other is completely and totally legal and useful in the state it works in (MMJ dispensary finders), and the third is just as "illegal" as using a pen and paper (or in fact, any other device with text editing capabilities) to count cards.

While the applications are interesting, the way that they've chosen to frame the story strikes me as inappropriate.</comment>


How much did Tumblr's VCs really make? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/22/how-much-did-tumblrs-vcs-really-make/

<comment><USER2> Kind of weird when both one of the top VCs (and someone involved in the transaction) comments on Hacker News, _and_ CNN picks it up. I thought all of this was kind of inside baseball at best.

<comment><USER3> But it's not like it's some "real" CNN writeup. It's Dan, and it's Fortune. Dan is currently my favorite inside baseballer in VC-land. He actually knows his beat really well. Apparently Fortune (TW owned) eschewed its own domain (much like ESPN did in favor of espn.go.com).

For instance... this piece about the Midas List was a really well balanced look at the issues with Forbes' list.

[http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/09/fools-gold-in- vc-l...](http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/09/fools-gold-in-vc-land/)

Dan knows his stuff.

<comment><USER4> _> In short, the Privco report is a load of Yahoo._

I can't comment on him knowing his stuff since I'm not familiar with his work, but I definitely like his style ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, Primack debunks this bullshit PrivCo report.

Thank god.</comment>


Ask HN: looking for fresh ideas, my startup is not working  - <AUTHOR>

I have been bootstrapping a startup for about a year. The startup has pivoted twice but it is not monetizable as I see it.
My original idea: My concept is to help people solve their emergencies (not life or death but something that defines a motivated buyer) in finding products or services. I go on Twitter and search for tweets like "back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor" or "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed."
I would call or email the businesses in their area that could solve their problem. In this email I would say that I have a lead and ask them to reply. All the replies would go on a page where the buyer would be able to easily send messages to the vendors which I had hoped would turn into a chat.
The problems: Maybe I am finding products for people that are priced too low because people are not willing to pay for our searching and businesses are not willing to pay for the lead. If I could validate the lead it could help but thats hard to do with people off Twitter.
Looking to the future: I would love if I could somehow transition from people off Twitter to the corporate market where I could hopefully charge more and when the products/services searched for would be more repeatable. Do you think a corporation has any needs/emergencies that could be filled regularly?
The value I provide: I save time and frustration in searching, calling, and emailing. I also provide multiple vendor options during an emergency. At one point I had hoped that I could even get the people to negotiate on prices with the vendors or maybe that the vendors would compete a bit for the lead and offer discounts.
Any help is appreciated. If the answer is drop it and move on to something fresh, it is welcome if you could provide a new possible startup idea. Thank you. <comment><USER2> Your examples explain it. "back hurts, anyone know a good chiropractor", and "my phone cracked anyone know where to get it fixed." People trend to trust other people, so why would they trust you? What curation and validation are you doing on the businesses? If you are rating them, what are you basing your ratings on? These are questions that I think about when I hear your business. Also, it sounds complicated, and non-scalable.

What you can do: if the people are already on twitter, go to them. Create a twitter-bot that people can follow, and it automatically follows you back. When someone says "my back hurts", you use natural language processing on their tweets, and recommend a solution to them, gluing together Yelp, Angie's List, or anything else that might be relevant. Offer three months free, if they like it, they pay a monthly subscription. If not, take them off a list. When successful enough with consumers, you MAY be able to turn around and start charging businesses, but then, you have the responsibilities of curation, and I think it's easier to let companies who specialize in that ( like Yelp or Angie's List) do that, and you piggy back off them. Check if you're allowed to use their data, and if they charge for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is absolutely fantastic feedback and advice and it gives me a new possible road to take. Thank you. I might be misunderstanding something, but the main thing I wanted to do which a tweet-bot wouldn't is start conversations with the "bad back" person and the chiropractors. Even one or two messages back and forth could answer a question where a bot would come short, for instance "I hurt a muscle around my left shoulder blade lifting weights. Is this a normal athletic case for you to work on? If so would I need an initial x-ray? Do you take insurance and when is the earliest you can fit me in?" If the hurting back person was able to get a few chiropractors to answer these question then they could make a much better buying decision.

<comment><USER2> It seems like you're trying to apply a Business to Business (B2B) mentality to a business to consumer relationship. Is there a reason for that? Is that your background? The problem is, business to consumer is low margin, high volume. You need to find a way to make that work.

It sounds like you want to do a LawPivot, for general consumer application. You want to build a MARKET, which is the hardest thing imo to do in the startup world. Too many variables, and even with millions of dollars and a great founding team, you can fail (Airtime didn't fail, but for what they were hyped up as, I think it did). If you want to really do this, start with a small sector.

Btw, LawPivot would not work over tweets - it would ruin their professional presence (at least currently). Maybe you want to make a 411 tweet-bot of sorts? Where you tweet a question, and you answer it?

I feel as though you're hitting several different things at once, try to hit one thing, HARD.

Also, automate business to consumer, IN THE LONG TERM. Short term, anything goes. Mechanical Turk, you and a friend doing google searches after reading tweets, anything. Get paid, then automate. This is covered in "The Lean Startup", required reading.

That was just my stream of consciousness, thanks for reading!

<comment><AUTHOR> I really want to thank you Manglav. You have helped me immensely. Your last reply is spot on. It is like LawPivot and most importantly I think I am failing because I am trying to build a MARKET. This really brings things into perspective for me. Building a MARKET is just not something I can do. Do you think there is way to find a specific niche in the market that I could start with? Also, I am curious as to your thoughts on Pinterest. It has no natural pre-existing market or at least I dont see how one reaches girls who like to create scrapbooks. Yet it succeeded. I am not saying I could do what they did. I am just curious as to how you would define their market.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, the market is already a niche (Taskrabbit, AirBnB, LawPivot, etc). I was advising you to find a smaller segment of the market to start from. This should be something you're familiar with, and should have a decent concentration of said niche. For example, I don't advise trying match Eskimos with Popsicles that they want (not enough volume). Finding "your niche" is sort of easy, try graphing your time weekly and see what activities you do. Then rank your activities based on the strength you have in them. The top one is your best niche to attack in your local market.

Pinterest pulled a Steve Jobs - it was their job to know what consumer's wanted a year in the future. They were able to see that the coming smartphone explosion would combine with people wanting to be social, and what evokes a lot of emotion? Looking at old photos with friends. Add some filters on top to hide any bad picture taking skills/catering to the masses, and you have a billion dollar idea. They also provided a billion dollar execution, by exiting within two years. Pinterest was a case when all the stars align in the startup universe, and they also worked really really hard to build the telescope to see them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a great idea but as manglav said, people trust the opinions of their network so it will be hard to get users to use it when they can ask their friends/colleagues.

Also the solution manglav provides, perfect, if you can do it that would make the process much simpler but it would take a lot of work. Check out <http://chirpify.com>, they do something interesting with NLP on Twitter.

If you want to work on something else, I would be happy to talk to you more about what I am working on. Email is on my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> The one thing we have proven is that while people do trust their own network, they have been open to hearing from us. Off the top of my head, we convert maybe 40% of the time. By convert I mean getting someone to click on a link to our site from twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If a human has to search, call and email, the business model won't scale quickly enough to ever fit the Silicon Valley idea of a startup.

Likewise if the business model is addressing unique customer needs one at a time.

There's not much value in leads for chiropractors, either. Their business grows largely by word of mouth or broadcast marketing.

If you're going to leads one at a time, the sales have to be big. The problems have to be non-trivial, and the actual research more valuable than the localized results from Bing.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the point that is will not scale quickly. I wrote a bot that searches through various directories and pulls off email addresses, so its an automated process that does my work and emailing. I don't trust my bot yet so I still check over everything it does. The only reason I mention calling is if they want something done really fast and they are willing to pay for it. I understand completely that using a human to call is not scaleable. Its still a way to gauge my market and get customer feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggest doing something completely new. Twitter was a good way to get someone's attention in the early days. Now, people are wary of spam and will probably ignore your message. This alone should be enough to make you dump this idea. Even if they listen to your message, they still have to buy what you recommend. Too many if's.

Find a problem a core group of people have. Develop a solution to solve that problem, and find a way to distribute that solution.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop thinking of your ideas. Just pick a niche industry, and see what problems THEY are having. Only start building the solution when you see a convergence of the same problems.

</comment><comment><USER7> Make some app that track the intake of diet by Kids to learn what kid loves or not and at what time. It might need a bit of mining, Machine learning stuff but worth making.

</comment><comment><USER8> can I see the URL? I would love to check it out :) And perhaps we can brainstorm an idea or two?</comment>


The Management-free Organization - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_managementfree_organization/

<comment><USER2> The issue with eliminating management is equivalent to the issue of eliminating feudal aristocracy: this is the way things have been done since as long as we can remember.

Much like we don't need Kings to rule us, we don't need managers. We can complete tasks in small, focused teams and interface as necessary to create large organizations. However, as with aristocracy, the management wishes to maintain its authority at all costs because it is extremely self-serving. Neither aristocracy nor management add any value, but by historical and institutional momentum they have come to rule the corporate world.

Finally, as with aristocracy, to change this ancient paradigm of management the people need to fight back. That means refusing to work for old management controlled companies and instead contributing to their destruction by becoming entrepreneurs.

Refuse to work for managers, and rob the corporate behemoths of their talent.</comment>


Employee-Driven Learning - <AUTHOR> https://datagrail.io/blog/employee-driven-learning <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting curuinor. Hey HN, I wrote this. Hope you enjoy.</comment>


Twitter says it's sharing more of your data, and users are not happy - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/24991/twitter-says-its-sharing-more-of-your-data-bitcoiners-are-not-happy <comment><USER2> It reminds me of a famous quote "If something is free, you are the product"

<comment><USER3> I hope people would get this someday.. good to live in hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What % of infosec/privacy-focused and crypto users will move to the alternative/s due to this?

Surely it's a minuscule amount if any, they are addicted to it like a drug and won't leave at all, complaining and feeling persecuted is all they have.

Twitter played their hand well and could easily go further down the line without any consequences.

</comment><comment><USER3> Twitter.. please go away. MI5 officials spying users ?... Oh no thanks

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool, cool.</comment>


Google Closes Offices in in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/changes-to-engineering.html <comment><USER2> I always wonder as an engineer myself what kind of project these guys in overseas Google offices do; how do Google keep them happy? Is it just the fact that it is Google? That won't be enough for me.

In my 12 years career so far I have always worked in startup or small companies where I have actual work to do. I have been to interview with big companies, they could not tell me what would the job bring me in terms of real work; I had always turned down offers from Google like folks.

<comment><USER3> Well there is certainly "actual work" done in overseas Google offices... ;-)

Sometimes many groups from different places work together on a larger project. E.g. there are teams working on "search engine algorithms" in many different countries. Or sometimes you have a smaller project that is just handled in one office. Like the javascript engine for Chrome was done out of Denmark I believe.

I'm not sure about other big companies but Google at least doesn't interview on a group-by-group basis. So during the interview itself, they wouldn't know yet what group you would be working in. That discussion comes later.

<comment><USER4> I've always thought that that was pretty cool--helps keep organization standards high overall and prevents poor managers from building their own little kingdoms.

Even if a group ends up with a new hire who lacks some domain knowledge, I'd bet that as long as they're generally smart, which the hiring process should guarantee to some extent, they'll adapt quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions."

Uh, wow. If they're _cutting_ by 100, how many did they have to start with?

<comment><USER6> I think you replied to the wrong link.

I was confused because I was reading about the office closing and couldn't figure out where the 100 positions came from.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right. Not sure how that happened.</comment></comment></comment>


The world according to Android - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2010/06/02/the-world-according-to-android/ <comment><USER2> Maybe Google was hoping some other "market app" would take over and get adopted by handset makers or carriers. It's not googles core business to sell apps worldwide. There are a lot of other market apps out there.</comment>


Public-Key Cryptography That Even Quantum Computers Cannot Break - <AUTHOR>

NTRUEncrypt is a public key encryption algorithm that is considered unbreakable even with quantum computers. Commonly used cryptosystems like RSA or ECC, on the other hand, will be broken if and when quantum computers become available.
In addition, NTRUEncrypt is significantly faster than other public-key cryptosystems.
NTRUEncrypt was proprietary for a long time but has recently been implemented as an open source library. It can be downloaded at http://ntru.sf.net/ . <comment><USER2> _NTRUEncrypt is a public key encryption algorithm that is considered unbreakable even with quantum computers._

Citation needed. Who considers it unbreakable even with quantum computers?

<comment><USER3> Not sure how good X9 committee is:

([http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110411005309/en/Secu...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110411005309/en/Security- Innovation%E2%80%99s-NTRUEncrypt-Adopted-X9-Standard-Data))

> _Recognizing the need for stronger crypto that will hold up under > increasingly powerful attacks, such as those that will be enabled by quantum > computing, and understanding how NTRU is unique in its ability to do this, > the X9 standards body created the X9.98 standard and certified NTRU._

> _NTRU has gained widespread acceptance and credibility since it was first > presented in 1996. Many organizations, including the National Institute of > Standards and Technology (NIST), acknowledge the need for a public-key > crypto system that is optimized for constrained mobile devices and resistant > to quantum computing. NTRU's adoption as an X9 standard is another step in > that direction._

etc etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Implementation is in Java :( Sidechannel possible through timing attacks based on time used for decrypting, that way information about the private key can also be obtained. More information here: [http://www.cdc.informatik.tu- darmstadt.de/reports/reports/Ni...](http://www.cdc.informatik.tu- darmstadt.de/reports/reports/Nikolay_Vizev.bachelor.pdf)

Who uses Cryptography without research on what it is anyway? :)

You say or cite it's unbreakable, even with QC's. I doubt that, but don't have the anti-thesis. I can just tell that it sounds too far fetched a bit. Thanks for sharing this though I always find it's enlightening when people share crypto findings.

Also read: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTRUSign>

These are accepted papers for ASIACRYPT 2011, I've not found pdf's yet. [http://cist.korea.ac.kr/~asiacrypt2011/index.php?cont=accept...](http://cist.korea.ac.kr/~asiacrypt2011/index.php?cont=accepted)</comment>


2015 in review – 1 year after I quit blogging - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/2015-review/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. I've always appreciated the HN community. Happy to answer any questions!

(Also, that's a weird title. Any mods want to change it?)

<comment><USER3> Hey Nathan, just tremendous props to you for being so honest about the ups and downs of Convertkit. It's been inspiring and fascinating as you've switched around the messaging and marketing. Awesome work.</comment></comment>


Storefront Gets $1.6M To Grow Its 'Pop-Up Shop' Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/26/storefront-seed-funding/

<comment><USER2> It'd be interesting if they can do spaces that convert empty large retail stores into minature malls consisting solely of a couple of popup shops. I think the trick to this is that you would need to find some equivalent of an anchor that can have a consistent presence and can expand/shrink their share of the space so that consumers never show up at a half deserted "mini mall."

Maybe someone like bonobos could do that. All they really need is to stock a couple sizes of each item & then could place the orders online for delivery. This means they could easily scale what is on display & rent out the space whenever a pop-up wants it.

Another idea I've had, and this predates airbnb, is basically an airbnb for kitchens/restaurants so chefs can easily rotate cities. Not really passionate about this idea or feel it would be an amazing business. Would be interested in going to the popup restaurants as a customer though.</comment>


Netflix - Why We Choose HTML5 for User Experiences on Devices - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-user.html <comment><USER2> Except that Netflix's iPad app is so slow and clunky it's almost unusable.

<comment><USER3> That's the only iPad app my 2-year-old needs help navigating. He likes to watch Thomas and Friends on it, but by the time he's asking for help he's added about 50 things to my DVD queue. This happens almost every day, so whenever I drop a DVD to return in the mail I can't be sure what comes next.

<comment><USER4> Netflix's app is the opposite of how Gruber describes a great app: "...it should seem, when you're using it, that the entire device was meant for it. E.g., a good chess game for the iPhone should make the iPhone itself feel like a chess playing device." [1]

The Netflix app feels painfully like using a computer, not a movie-finding- and-watching device. IMO, that's why HTML is the _wrong_ choice, at least for iOS.

[1] <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/12/03/tablets>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, so why can't I run Netflix on Ubuntu, then? If they're using HTML5, then shouldn't they have solved the problems with DRM preventing support for Linux?

<comment><USER6> But streaming video to a console allows them to not really have to worry abuot the DRM issues. They probably stick with a Silverlight solution on PCs until they can do DRM on HTML5.

<comment><USER7> BTW: there are many people waiting for W3C to add DRM to HTML5 video, but:

• <video> _supports DRM already_ in shipping browsers — Safari on Mac plays FairPlay-restricted files.

• DRM by definition is in opposition of being open and interoperable, so it's impossible for HTML spec to do anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It makes it easier to embrace HTML5 when you have complete control over the browser used.

<comment><USER8> I agree, although I'm contemplating providing 2 UIs, an HTML5 version and an IE-friendly version for my own projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The balance between native and web-browser controls is interesting. The author indicates a preference for native, but chose web so they can change things more quickly:

 _This capacity for testing is so critical to how we innovate, we're willing to forego having a native UI experience to accommodate it._

</comment><comment><USER10> They ported WebKit to the PS3? Goodness gracious. That's a hack and a half right there.

<comment><USER11> Not really, considering they had millions of dollars behind them, while quake 3 was ported to android in people's spare time.

<comment><USER10> I'm thinking more the inherent programmer hostility of the underlying platform.</comment></comment></comment>


The Nom Profit-Maximizing Operating System [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~dan/papers/nom-vee-2016.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> More details can be found in Muli Ben-Yehuda's thesis:

[http://www.mulix.org/pubs/theses/nom- msc-2015-15.pdf](http://www.mulix.org/pubs/theses/nom-msc-2015-15.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> From the abstract:

> In the near future, cloud providers will sell their users virtual machines > with CPU, memory, network, and storage resources whose prices constantly > change according to market-driven supply and demand conditions. Running > traditional operating systems in these virtual machines is a poor fit: > traditional operating systems are not aware of changing resource prices and > their sole aim is to maximize performance with no consideration of costs. > Consequently, they yield low profits.

> We present nom, a profit-maximizing operating system designed for cloud > computing platforms with dynamic resource prices.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of some earlier papers about using linear optimization techniques to rebalance servers across cloud hosts based on changing spot prices, like "Cost minimization for provisioning virtual servers in amazon elastic compute cloud"</comment>


Write Fast Apps Using Async Python 3.6 and Redis - <AUTHOR> https://eng.paxos.com/write-fast-apps-using-async-python-3.6-and-redis <comment><USER2> > we make heavy use of asyncio because it's more performant

more performant than....what exactly? If I need to load 1000 rows from a database and splash them on a webpage, will my response time go from the 300ms it takes without asyncio to something "more performant", like 50ms? Answer: no. async only gives you throughput, it has nothing to do with "faster" as far as the Python interpreter / GIL / anything like that. If you aren't actually spanning among dozens/hundreds/thousands of network connections, non-blocking IO isn't buying you much at all over using blocking IO with threads, and of course async / greenlets / threads are not a prerequisite for non-blocking IO in any case (only select() is).

it's nice that uvloop seems to be working on removing the terrible performance latency that out-of-the-box asyncio adds, so that's a reason that asyncio can really be viable as a means of gaining throughput without adding lots of latency you wouldn't get with gevent. But I can do without the enforced async boilerplate. Thanks javascript!

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you said this. There's an async cargo cult going on, where every service must be written in "performant" async code, without knowing the actual resource and load requirements of an application.

From the last benchmark I ran [1] async IO was insignificantly faster than thread-per-connection blocking IO in terms of latency, and marginally faster only after we hit a large number of clients.

Async IO doesn't necessarily make your code faster, it just makes it difficult to read.

[1] [http://byteworm.com/evidence-based- research/2017/03/04/compa...](http://byteworm.com/evidence-based- research/2017/03/04/comparing-the-performance-of-synchronous-versus- asynchronous-network-io/)

<comment><USER4> const users = await getUsers();

const tweets = await getTweets(users);

console.log(tweets);

Is async code really harder to read?

<comment><USER5> In your example the async code doesn't really help anything though - the next statement has to wait for the response from the previous one before continuing.

In your example you'd probably want to be using Promise.all to run two IO operations simultaneously.

<comment><USER6> The next statement has to wait, but the runtime can yield to another waiting async task so you aren't blocking the total throughput of your program (assuming it's async-all-the-way-down).

The benefits are generally larger-scale than a single method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've just recently started using Sanic[0] paired with Redis to great effect for a very high throughput web service. It also uses Python 3 asyncio/uvloop at its core. So far very happy with it.

[0] [https://github.com/channelcat/sanic](https://github.com/channelcat/sanic)

<comment><USER8> I have never found a good example of a Python web server that provides some mechanism for statefulness. Is it just fundamentally not possible to have shared state among requests handled by the threads of a process? Sanic's examples seem to be the same as Flask's: self-contained function calls attached to endpoints.

I keep hitting a wall with Python when I want to do something like:

1\. subscribe to a websocket connection and keep the last received message in state 2\. expose an http endpoint to let a client GET that last message.

<comment><USER9> You normally use something like redis to store the state.

If you were going to share state in memory between threads, how would you handle the case where the second request goes to a different server or that the process has restarted? You'd need redis anyway, so you might as well just use it in all cases.

<comment><USER8> I get that everyone's responses are thinking some big public thing. I'm thinking small toy implementation for my home network.

The toy experiment is how to do what's trivial in Node with Python. Mainly because I like working with python. I think the answer might be: Python is the wrong tool for the job.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that accessing shared state concurrently in a multi-process context is a non-trivial problem, so specific software emerged that handles these problems for you.

The simplest solution is to use a small DB system like sqlite. It is built into Python (import sqlite3) performs reasonably well and you do not have to run an additional service.

Now if a small DB like sqlite already feels overblown to you (and it really _is_ simple and small) you might not need concurrent access either, so the simplest solution is to just use a file where you store your state.

<comment><USER11> I'd say the simplest solution is a global (or just shared) variable using a thread-safe container like queue.Queue. There's also multiprocessing.Queue, which supports sharing the queue across multiple workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone recommend a good book to get started on concurrency, with discussions of models, and a few implementations such as golang and python 3.5+?

While I can write this kind of code, I don't feel like I completely understand some of the concepts.

<comment><USER13> I'm not far, but Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks is pretty good and might fit what you're looking for.

[https://pragprog.com/book/pb7con/seven-concurrency-models- in...](https://pragprog.com/book/pb7con/seven-concurrency-models-in-seven- weeks)

<comment><USER14> I recommend the book very much. However it doesn't have a chapter the single- threaded concurrency handling (with eventloops, and futures/promises and sometimes even plain callbacks), which is currently en-vogue in lots of languages (JS, python asyncio, boost asio, etc). So this is something one should look up elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> Do you have any reading material that you would recommend for single-threaded concurrency?

<comment><USER16> [http://krondo.com/in-which-we-begin-at-the-beginning/](http://krondo.com/in- which-we-begin-at-the-beginning/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ouch: [https://github.com/paxos- bankchain/pastey/blob/master/app.py...](https://github.com/paxos- bankchain/pastey/blob/master/app.py#L99)

<comment><USER18> That's actually a call to a rickroll.

<comment><USER19> It still flushes the db first?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Write Fast Apps Using Async Python

When working with Python and Ruby I find 80ms responses acceptable. In very optimized situations (no framework) this can do down to 20ms.

Now I've used some Haskell, OCaml and Go and I have learned that they can typically respond in <5ms. And that having a framework in place barely increases the response times.

In both cases this includes querying the db several times (db queries usually take less then a millisecond, Redis shall be quite similar to the extend that it does not change outcome).

<5ms makes it possible to not worry about caching (and thus cache invalidation) for a much longer time.

I've come to the conclusion that --considering other languages-- speed is not to be found in Python and Ruby.

Apart from the speed story there's also resource consumption, and in that game it is only compiled languages that truly compete.

Last point: give the point I make above and that nowadays "the web is the UI", I believe that languages for hi-perf application development should: compile to native and compile to JS. Candidates: OCaml/Reason (BuckleScript), Haskell (GHCJS), PureScript (ps-native), [please add if I forgot any]

<comment><USER21> You can get 2-3 ms response time (sans network) with any of Django, Flask and Pyramid. Database queries tend to eat a lot, esp. if the queries are bad (long wait in the DBMS or post-filtering in Python/whichever); sometimes ORMs can eat a fair bit as well. But it's fairly rare to get that low, most pages for me (that I cared about) will take 10-30 ms. Using the correct tools and the right approach is fruitful as always.

<comment><USER20> > You can get 2-3 ms response time (sans network) with any of Django, Flask > and Pyramid.

Wow, never managed to do that. Maybe I have to try it again (last time checked on Django was some years ago).

<comment><USER22> Truth. The best I can get in Django is 30 ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Paxos.com

I'm confused by the relationship between Paxos, the company, and Paxos, the algorithm. Do the authors of Paxos work for Paxos?

Edit:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_\(computer_science\))

Ah; both are named for a fictional financial systen

<comment><USER24> By the way, the author of the original Paxos paper is Leslie Lamport, who currently works at Microsoft Research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The title is misleading. The blog post doesn't cover how fast using async python is, it's a tutorial on how to use their ORM redis library.

<comment><USER12> There's a link on the page which digs in a bit more:

[https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python- networking/](https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python-networking/)

<comment><USER26> And that topic was discussed in HN previously with 130 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11625585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11625585)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >>> The performance of uvloop-based asyncio is close to that of Go programs.

I would prefer standard benchmarks for this. I hope they submit their framework to TechEnpower benchmarks.

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

<comment><USER28> Those benchmarks aren't any more standard than anything else.

<comment><USER27> Yes but you can see the most number of frameworks there running on the same hardware and same settings doing the same job. Also you can see the configuration how to achieve that.

<comment><USER29> except that various frameworks highly depend on their configuration/version/coding style/linux configuration/memory used/cpu's used/use case. it's also important that some frameworks behave better when they are warm. also some code behave's differently when you connect with a single client to make requests via wrk, vs a aggregate of multiple clients. they still use wrk and not wrk2, their error rate is pretty high and their framework is well not always well behaving.

besides all that, it's just simple cases that they are testing. I would never ever trust this site or any result they got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > You get the benefits of a database, with the performance of RAM!

One of the benefits of modern RDBMS is that they make extremely sophisticated use of RAM, and all levels of fast to slow storage below that SSD / RAIDs / slow single spindle.

</comment><comment><USER31> Quite related, but if you want to use Redis as a SQL database I wrote an extension to do just that: [https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL](https://github.com/RedBeardLab/rediSQL)

It is a relative thin layer of rust code between the Redis module interface and SQLite.

At the moment you can simply execute statements but any suggestion and feature request is very welcome.

Yes, it is possible to do join, to use the LIKE operator and pretty much everything that SQLite gives you.

It is a multi-thread module, which means that it does NOT block the main redis thread and perform quite well. On my machine I achieved 50.000 inserts per seconds for the in memory database.

If you have any question feel free to ask here or to open issues and pull request in the main repo.

:)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is pretty neat. I've been using a plain Redis wrapper (aioredis) with uvloop and Sanic ([https://github.com/rcarmo/newsfeed- corpus](https://github.com/rcarmo/newsfeed-corpus)), but I'm going to have a peek at subconscious.

</comment><comment><USER33> >One of the common complaints people have about python and other popular interpreted languages (Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc) is that they're slow.

Proceeds to show an animation of posting a blog post that performs no faster than if it was built using Django.

</comment><comment><USER34> > 10k pageviews took ~41s

Might be that the server is insanely slow, but I would have no problems reaching 10k page views per second with some basic PHP and even MariaDB on a low end E3-1230 server. Pretty sure more would be quite easy to...

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems strange that they would claim that Python's libuv based event loop is twice as fast as Node.js's libuv based event loop. There's some context missing to that statement or it's flat out false.

<comment><USER36> What does it even mean. The event loop is only used when there is nothing going on. Is it faster at doing nothing ?

<comment><USER37> > The event loop is only used when there is nothing going on.

In async applications event loop is what actually executes your code and performs IO. In essence, event loops are under load all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you want performance don't use Python.

<comment><USER39> Sadly true. Python is great for scripting, but "high performance Python" is frequently a challenge better suited to other tools.

<comment><USER40> "High performance Python" is usually done by "offloading literally everything to native extensions" :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is to get a high performance ready app out. You could probably get an app out faster in PHP or Meteor or other prototyping framework.</comment>


Google's Satellite Images Reveal Chinese 'Ghost Cities' - <AUTHOR> http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2010/12/googles-satellite-images-reveal-chinese-ghost-cities/

<comment><USER2> Clearly a popular submission - we've seen it three times before this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014746>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006910>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015447> <\- This third submission got the upvotes and the comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really get a kick out of Google satellite images of China. There are a lot of oddities, such as that 1/3rd scale replica of a mountain region (assumed to be Tibetan?) with a facility nearby full of tanks/cars/etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Nobody's ever really lost money on real estate in China" - how can you short this market? Do they have entities analogous to REITs there?</comment>


An Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc. - <AUTHOR> http://thomashawk.com/2010/12/an-open-letter-to-carol-bartz-ceo-yahoo-inc.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty common sense stuff, but as they say common sense is not so common, especially among CEOs.

As for underperforming CEOs getting high pay, from personal experience I can provide anotehr data point: Ed Zander who at one point was the highest paid in the US with ~$30M. He totally f __ked up Motorola (among other people). In fact, sadly, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception among CEOs.

<comment><USER3> It costs a lot of money to convince a CEO to come to a failing/faltering company.

EDIT: I'd just like to add that I think the letter itself is very well written and surprisingly heartfelt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What we need now is fuckedcompany.com 2010-style !!

</comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I read a letter like the one Bartz wrote, I'm curious who the intended audience was, a board, or the employees.

"Margins have expanded. Revenue growth has stabilized after a long period of decelerating trends. "

That was definitely not written for any of Yahoo's employees.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stock market is the most efficient grader of all? Really? Algorithmic trading accounts for over 70% of US equity trading volume. If there ever was a time when you could grade a CEO based on the stock market performance, that time is long gone. Check your assumptions.

<comment><USER7> Informationless trading adds volume but is not thought to move prices. Check your assumptions.

<comment><USER6> Huh? _Informationless trading_ is pretty much the exact opposite of _algorithmic trading_. It has nothing to with volume, it simply means that you are buying/selling not because you have information that leads you to believe the stock in question is about to go up/down but rather because you need cash, or it's an IPO, etc.

Algorithmic trading is nothing _but_ informational - the whole purpose is to analyze information, detect a trend, and ride it. Add to that quote stuffing and other _price manipulation_ techniques (emphasis mine). It think it's rather hard to make a case that the robots that make up the majority of trading volume have no effect on prices.

I don't know where you get your nebulous _is thought not to move prices_. Thought by whom? HFT firms and technology providers? Well, duh. They are making a killing in essentially passive income and they are about to get shut down by various regulatory bodies in US and Europe. What do you expect them to say? Of course their party line is, we have a zero net effect on prices, and a positive effect on liquidity.</comment></comment></comment>


Happy IPv6 Day - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/happy-ipv6-day/ <comment><USER2> If you use comcast they have enabled IPv6 support (I believe they give you an ip of some sort)

<comment><USER3> not yet, only in a few cities for a few customers that are in their test program.

<http://comcast6.net/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google and all Google properties were down in central North Carolina for about 15 minutes just now: confirmed by others in this area on totally different ISPs. I wonder if it's related...

<comment><USER5> They were down in suburban Philadelphia, too.

<comment><USER6> Seemed to be down in NYC. Actually, I think it might have been a browser issue.

Chrome worked. Firefox did not. I think chrome was falling back to IPv4. Tried a few wgets ... some versions correctly falled back to ipv4 (cygwin). A friend's wgets (not sure which distro) kept trying v6 addresses.

<comment><USER6> When I used dig to get the AAAA record, I only saw 1 address for google. What gives? Surely there are more than 1 addresses ... I thought dig would show them all. It does that for AA records. I'm very confused.

<comment><USER7> This is because there was one IPv6 address in the DNS reply. Search for "happy eyeballs" for the overall description of why. In short - If your IPv6 went dead and you'd have more than one IPv6 addr in the reply, you'd get bored until you reach the IPv4 addresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't it great that it's IPv6 day already and most consumer ISPs haven't even tried to offer IPv6 support.

<comment><USER9> Set up a tunnel and get some yourself. ISP don't have to -- y et. Maybe soon the situation will change. It's important to get the word out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the life of me, I have no idea what this is about. It was a BBC headline here in the UK but there is absolutely no interest from anyone in the UK at all. No ISP focus, nothing.

I would rather like IPv6 but I don't know why.

(I do understand OSI model, IPv6 thoroughly, played with 6to4 and my Windows 7 boxes talk to each other with v6 etc but I just don't get IPv6 day).

<comment><USER11> Today, big Internet portals are supposed to resolve to AAAA (IPv6) DNS queries in their main site. Thus, if your computer is enabled, it should try to access it using IPv6. It's also a good chance to see if AAAA responses to any machine (IPv6 or not) would cause any trouble in their OS or applications.

It's also some type of marketing to make the crowd aware about it. Many companies may have started on IPv6 because there was a day dedicated to test it.

<comment><USER10> Thank you - I am now enlightened.</comment></comment></comment>


Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - <AUTHOR> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ <comment><USER2> It's great to see resources like this popping up. When I was in school we used the Tanenbaum book, even if it was heavily skewed to his belief that microkernels were better (Torvalds and Tanenbaum fought in an epic flame war).

At the University of Arizona, we implemented in our class projects various stages of an operating system kernel, such as a process/thread scheduler, user/kernel mode functions, message passing (IPC/mailboxes), locking/semaphores/mutexes, signals, paged memory, and a file system in this upper division course. It wasn't as hard as a class like Automata, but it was tedious.

However, now that I am doing so much low level work, I can appreciate what we learned in class. In fact, it gives you a strong understanding how critical sections and locking work (and how this all ties in with the operating system). It makes you appreciate simple user mode delegate syscalls like fopen, fork, and malloc and realize that a bunch of things are happening in kernel mode. It makes you avoid naive design choices like while(true) loops and look for blocking/event-based equivalents.

So you might groan about taking an operating systems class. Don't! You might never ever work on operating systems, but you will be able to appreciate how to make the operating system work for you. Some self taught programmers I have met don't know the difference between blocking and non-blocking. If anything, operating systems will drill these concepts into your head to help you leverage operating systems for your benefit.

<comment><USER3> Malloc is not a syscall.

<comment><USER2> You're right--if it can't find memory within the heap, it will invoke a call to brk and it will allocate it from the OS and thereby invoking a syscall. Apologies for my lumping of malloc as a syscall :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apropos of nothing, if you want a VAX/VMS system to play with (they profile one in the book) let me know :-)

This is a great book btw and you can't beat the e-price of free. I also recommend "Operating System Concepts" which is sort of the canonical book on the topic, or if you can find it a used copy of the Springer-Verlag book "Operating Systems Design".

<comment><USER5> VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.

<comment><USER4> I happen to have one each of all but one of every QBUS based VAX DEC made (maybe too, the MicroVax I's location is in question). Also a half dozen VTxx terminals, although the fun ones are the VT340's that do REGiS color graphics. People started sending them to the dump in 1998 because they weren't "Y2K compliant" and DEC wouldn't sign off on non-current hardware ...

<comment><USER5> I was given a bunch of DG gear around Y2K. Kept a couple of Aviion boards to hang on the office wall after having to purge the system collection before moving.

As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.

<comment><USER4> Aren't those cool? (the STM discovery boards) I got one of the original butterfly boards ($15 from Digikey) and then one of the DISCO boards (the one with the LCD) at ARM TechCon. I then started a Google+ "community" (Cortex M Developers) and started using (and trying to improve in small ways) libopencm3 (see it on Github [http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3](http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3)). Lots of folks are using these boards, they are pretty awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> UW Madison represent! I took the course with this book, not with Remzi though. He is an amazing professor and this book gives a very good introduction to OS, especially Linux OS internals.

<comment><USER7> Remzi was one of my favorite professors at UW. I took the class with him. He really made the subject fun and interesting and really liked to challenge his students. One of my most memorable teachers from UW!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I saw ___" Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces"_ __I thought... the shell, the file system and the kernel. And if you know what I mean by that, then you, too, are old.

</comment><comment><USER9> First thing I clicked on was the "Dialogue on Virtualization," not being familiar with why virtualization would necessarily be the first thing taught in an OS, but then, that's why I'm looking at this, because I know nothing about building OSes.

Anyways, the dialog was pretty campy, or excessively goofy. Also, I'm probably hellbanned.

<comment><USER10> _Also, I 'm probably hellbanned._

No, you are not. If you think you should be, but for some reason that automatic system has missed you, you can send an email to PG asking him to ban your account manually.

<comment><USER9> Er, ... What was the point of this post? I was hellbanned before because I got angry a long time ago.

I mentioned it because I realized I hadn't properly articulated my thoughts. Then I realized it didn't matter in the end. Of course, I guess that realization was wrong.

<comment><USER10> If you read with show-dead, you frequently see people making similar statements, wondering if the reason no one responds to them is that no one sees their messages. By responding to your post, I was informing you that no, you are not currently banned, and your posts are visible.

The second half was a not-to-funny joke inverting the usual advice about "you should write to PG and ask him to un-ban you". Since you weren't banned, but seemed to think you should be, I was suggesting you write him and request that he punish you for whatever transgression you thought you had made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <3 Remzi. Best Professor ever.

</comment><comment><USER12> I just had an OS course with this textbook this last semester. Really good book. I'm surprised to see this on HN.

</comment><comment><USER13> xv6 is one awesome OS understanding resource. [http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> OSs is one of those topics I could never get a handle on. I always felt I needed a better visualization of the whole thing. Maybe this book will help.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic! Thanks for posting this!

</comment><comment><USER16> thanks for sharing it for free :D</comment>


Facebook working on approach to classifying satirical news pieces - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/03/05/facebook-working-on-approach-to-classifying-satirical-news-pieces/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting followup to the discussion on "Facebook Threatens Satire Site Over CNN Story That Snopes Rated 'False'"[0], with a statement from Snopes.com CEO David Mikkelson.

The most interesting thing to come out of all of this: given that "satire" isn't a binary thing, how can you police it? What's to keep anyone from saying whatever and calling it satire, without hurting silly sites like the Babylon Bee or The Onion who are pretty clear about their silliness? Can such a thing be policed manually or algorithmically?

Tangentially, does Hustler Magazine v. Falwell ("the parody could not have been reasonably considered believable")[1] deserve re-evaluation in light of Poe's Law ("it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some...as a sincere expression of the parodied views")[2]? I ask this light-heartedly, more for discussion than out of any kind of strong conviction on the matter.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16503829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16503829)

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)</comment>


IOS Product Strategies - an honest discussion - <AUTHOR> http://smalldozes.posterous.com/ios-product-strategies-an-honest-discussion Settling Fat vs. Settling Thin and what that means for your apps on the appStore <comment><USER2> I've seen some startups release painfully early versions of apps with no promotion etc. to see if their app settles fat or thin to collect baseline metrics...then iterate & do a bigger branding/PR push etc.</comment>


Protests Put Hong Kong on Collision Course with China's Communist Party - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-communist-party.htmL <comment><USER2> > "How do you think Beijing will think now?" he added. "Do you think they will > want to give democracy to people when people are insulting their rule?"

What do you think Beijing thought before? What a good boy you were being?

Beijing doesn't want to give you democracy regardless of what you are doing. Now they just have to be way more overt about it.

<comment><USER3> Beijing will slaughter these protesters eventually either in public or secretly. We have an absolute moral imperative to give everyone in Hong Kong the option to evacuate to a free country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So… a few thoughts. I live in HK (having semi-recently moved here from the Bay Area, right before this all flared up).

First, there's a ton of misinformation out there. Few sources have entirely accurate information, but the best English-language resource I've found on the subject is the local paper South China Morning Post (scmp.com). They have pretty accurate and unbiased live reporting of the protests as it flares up. Twitter and private groups have unfiltered live information.

The movement is still described as "anti extradition bill," but has long stopped being about the extradition bill that triggered it all. At this point, it's simply a revolution against an increasingly worrying shift towards Beijing-controlled authoritarianism.

The mood has intensified and darkened since the beginning of the movement in June. There is a lot more disagreement now about whether the protester's tactics are justified. The protests are losing a lot of general support, but still attract overwhelmingly large crowds. Police has stepped up the aggression, the gov't isn't budging, and dissidents are increasingly angry and willing to resort to violence and guerrilla tactics. There's also the added element of the white shirt counter-protesters (allegedly triads, allegedly China-backed) inciting indiscriminate violence to attempt to scare the public into distancing themselves from the movement.

Nobody has died yet, but the violence is getting worse and some people are getting seriously hurt. Yesterday's flare-up at the airport was in response to anger about a female medic protester being shot point-blank in the face by police and losing an eye. There were some pretty horrific scenes of police shooting tear gas rounds at close range in Kwai Fong MTR station (which is against the rules for how to use tear gas and which endangers both protesters and bystanders and MTR employees alike).

My life here hasn't been affected much, but I do make an effort to avoid the protests area which aren't exactly safe. There have been quite a few of regular transit disruption. I've definitely have had several days of cancelled plans due to transportation issues. I've had friends crash with me because their neighborhood was in the middle of a protest fight. I've had a friend get tear gassed walking home a bit too close to a group of protesters.

Hope this all gets resolved peacefully soon, but let's be real… it won't. I expect this will continue to escalate. I'm watching China's response carefully, because there's a risk they make some pretty unprecedented moves.

For perspective, here's a comment I wrote the day of the first violent protest on June 12th (which I attended): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167292)

Happy to answer any questions from the perspective of an expat on the ground.

<comment><USER5> What do you think are the chances that the tanks roll in, all protestors are shot or arrested, marshal law is declared for a few months, and eventually Hong Kong becomes just another city in China without its own special governance or laws?

<comment><USER6> There's a third way; getting "Singapore-d".

In the 1960s Singapore annoyed Malaysia so much they were essentially ejected from the federation against their will.

It was a major shock at the time, but decades later the two countries are still mostly amicable. I sincerely hope China would consider this route.

<comment><USER7> Why would China even consider "ejecting" a part of its territory that they fought over for a long time to finally get back?

Recovery of lost territories and reunification of the country is a core policy of the Chinese government(s) since 1912...

And as noted in the replies, striving for national unity is an ancient theme of Chinese national psyche.

<comment><USER6> Which I find to be irrational.

Stamford Raffles "took" Singapore from the Malay sultanate in the 1820s. In 1963, we finally got it back, but let them go barely two years later due to ingrained cultural differences that manifested during the meantime.

With the rise of so many capable cities on the mainland, perhaps pursuit of unification is just not worth the trouble anymore.

<comment><USER8> > With the rise of so many capable cities on the mainland, perhaps pursuit of > unification is just not worth the trouble anymore.

Maybe to you? It's clear from China's actions that they think otherwise and they're willing to do whatever it takes to ensure control and unification.

<comment><USER2> You can't really have a bastion of free speech and democracy on your doorstep as an authoritarian state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are the chances of the unrest spreading into China?

One hears of sporadic unrest through China, I take the economy hasn't yet faltered so people aren't too disgruntled.

I take it this qualifies as "Interesting Times"

<comment><USER10> 0 to minimal chance. the brainwashing happening in mainland china makes those protesters into terrorists supported by foreign governments. that's the level where china is at right now.

<comment><USER11> I think in the mind of the Chinese mainlanders, HK was always supposed to be a part of China proper, just like Taiwan. These riots are seen as childish at best, and at worst, a threat to the LEGITIMATE rule of the central Chinese government. Again, this is their view on things. If that's what you think, then of course you'd be for a harsher response, they're attacking what you think is right and true.

Of course, in the West, we don't admit the CCP as truly rightful rulers of China for many reasons, but mainly because they're not democratically elected. There is no refusing, there is no dissent. The Chinese aren't dumb, they see that too, but they see it as the price you pay for orderliness. And maybe it is? This, coincidentally, is also used to justify censorship: it is the price you pay for running a large society effectively. And maybe it is. We see censorship on our side of the world too, in the name of combatting fake news, child pornography and terrorism.... Exactly how you justify it in China.

The CCP's largest issues all stem from not truly being of the people and thus lacking that pressure valve: unchecked corruption, and an inability to uphold ethical standards. We've seen this with authoritarian regimes time and time again, with the Nazis, with the Soviet, and now with the CCP.

This was a rant about nothing, thanks for reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Carrie Lam, leader of Hong Kong, can't answer whether she has the power to withdraw the extradition bill: [https://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/status/11611029359228108...](https://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/status/1161102935922810880)

</comment><comment><USER13> Everybody, this is a dangerous time. APCs are massing in Shenzhen (see other thread).

Now is the time to email your local Chinese embassy. Carrie Lam, the top HK politician. Michael Tien and Ronnie Wong, leading pro-establishment politicians. Let them know dialogue & political solutions are needed, violence is not acceptable, and that PEOPLE ARE WATCHING AND CARE.

Mention any connections to China you have. Your voice can make a difference to the political calculus. But time is very short. Act now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mainland China will implode by 2025. Debt + aging population.

<comment><USER15> You just described the USA also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I highly recommend following and supporting the Hong Kong Free Press, an independently funded online paper:

[https://www.hongkongfp.com/](https://www.hongkongfp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> > China's top leader, Xi Jinping, wants to make Hong Kong more like a mainland > city, using economic incentives to buy happiness and propaganda to win > loyalty. The protesters, who represent a wide swath of Hong Kong, want a > government that looks out for their interests, not just Beijing's, to help > resolve problems like astronomical housing prices and low wages.

> The two sides no longer seem to recognize each other's concerns.

This kind of language is why the NYT is the subject of so many centrism memes. There are no "two sides" that can "recognize each other's concerns" and get along. There are democracy and authoritarianism. I'm kind of flabbergasted that they can't find the courage to take a stand on even such a black-and- white issue. It's always "two sides."

<comment><USER18> > This kind of language is why the NYT is the subject of so many centrism > memes. There are no "two sides" that can "recognize each other's concerns" > and get along. There are democracy and authoritarianism.

They're a newspaper, not a political blog. This isn't an op-ed. They're not meant to be "taking a side."

<comment><USER19> In some situations there is an underlying truth, and opposing sides (who have both public and private agendas) will gladly lie and spin in order to get their way.

For example, perhaps Ukraine says they've been invaded by Russian troops without insignias; and Russia says it isn't them.

Some would say the ideal in journalism would be not only to report the conflicting statements, but also to _determine and report what the underlying truth is_.

<comment><USER18> What underlying truth have they missed here? The only thing I see here is that people are shitting on the NYT for not picking a side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another Tiananmen Square massacre on the horizon...</comment>


How "Legal" Are Seed Libraries? - <AUTHOR> http://www.postcarbon.org/article/2339769-just-how-legal-are-seed-libraries <comment><USER2> WTF?! Didn't realize this was even a thing.

Honestly reeks of agribusiness lobbying.

Seeds are a fundamental requirment for human existence and should be free to sell, save, use, give away.

Next thing you know water will cost $15.00 a gallon and only be sold through authorized sources like Monsanto and Coca-cola for "QUALITY CONTROL" purposes.

<comment><USER3> To me it didn't sound like lobbying, but laws that didn't take into account that people might give away seeds for free. It's a good law for knowing that the seeds you buy are good quality, but poor for centralized community seed exchanges, which are a pretty new thing. In the past you would just go to your neighbor and get some seeds (which is still legal).

<comment><USER4> It's not legal to get seeds from your neighbor if your neighbor is using seeds with any patented genes (a la Monsanto Soy beans). In fact, if seeds from your neighbor's field _are blown over by the wind_ to your field, and you harvest those, you can be sued for patent infringement. Monsanto has done this and won. They even (in)famously hired Academi (nee Xe nee Blackwater) to find 'patent violators'.

<comment><USER3> >Monsanto has done this and won.

Well that's just not true.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top- fi...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths- of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted)

<comment><USER5> According to your link, seeds from Schmeiser's neighbor's field were blown into his field by the wind, he harvested them, and was successfully sued for patent infringement. So everything your parent comment stated was correct.

There is an element omitted, which was that he harvested those seeds (in accordance with his established business practice of keeping seeds from his field) in the knowledge that they were Roundup resistant, since he had sprayed his field with Roundup to see what would happen, and what happened was some of his wheat lived.

Roundup isn't patented or controlled in any way. So what would happen if I took up the hobby of growing a few patches of wheat every year and spraying them with Roundup? Over time, the magic of selection should produce Roundup- resistant wheat, which would be free of any Monsanto influence. Would I be violating Monsanto's IP?

If you think I wouldn't be violating Monsanto's IP by growing, and selecting, my own Roundup-resistant wheat, take note that Schmeiser didn't do _anything_ I didn't describe myself doing in the thought experiment.

<comment><USER3> He wasn't sued because the seeds blew into his yard. He was sued because he collected the seeds and grew nothing but those seeds, even knowing what they were.

>Schmeiser didn't do anything I didn't describe

Yes he did. He didn't develop his own Roundup resistant seeds, he grabbed them from Mansanto plants.

>the magic of selection

It doesn't work like that. What you would end up with is years of nothing but dead plants until you get bored and forget about it.

I don't want to defend Mansanto, but you're being ridiculous. This argument is repeated over and over and it's just not true.

<comment><USER5> Sorry? That is precisely how selection works. Ever heard of herbicide- resistant weeds? Desirable crops can develop resistance the same way weeds do (that is, by coincidence).

The additional "action" you ascribe to Schmeiser is purely metaphysical. In the thought experiment where I grow wheat as a hobby, I do the following:

        1. Purchase, and grow, wheat seeds, not from Monsanto.
        2. Spray my wheat with freely-available Roundup.
        3. Harvest and replant whatever happens to survive.

There's also an expected step

        4. Purchase additional non-Monsanto wheat in the case where I don't get any seeds in step (3).

Step (4) is just a repeat of step (1).

There are two things we can say about Schmeiser:

1\. Schmeiser took steps 1-3 above.

2\. Schmeiser didn't do anything other than steps 1-3 above.

There was reason to believe that they'd work for him faster than they would work for me. But all of his actions were unquestionably above-board. What produced the ruling against him wasn't anything he did -- it was something his neighbor did.

Consider a different scenario. Schmeiser, the eccentric farmer, decides to devote a patch of his land to independently developing Roundup-resistant wheat. He does exactly what I described, seeing little success. Three years later, his neighbor starts purchasing and planting Roundup-ready wheat. Schmeiser continues to do the same thing he's been doing for three years. Is it now illegal?

<comment><USER3> >That is precisely how selection works. Ever heard of herbicide-resistant weeds?

And if you want to bet your farm on you being the one to magically find Roundup resistant wheat, you go right ahead. But no farmer is going to do that. and Schmeiser certainly didn't.

You want to argue, go argue with the judge who heard all of the facts. But please, don't spread false information like "Monsanto sues farmers for accidents". It's not true.

<comment><USER5> You seem to have reworded "Monsanto will sue you for your neighbor's pollen blowing into your field" into "Monsanto will sue you for accidents". We know they didn't sue him for using Roundup, because Roundup isn't controlled (rather, it's controlled in the normal way, by charging money for it). We know they didn't sue him for harvesting and replanting his own wheat, because, again, that's legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is crazy that people are prohibited from giving away things that belong to them - and to avoid opening a can of worms, we're not even talking about drugs or something like that - because of bunch of government busybodies worrying about imaginary dangers that never happened like terrorists putting I don't even know what in the seeds.

I wonder what if they would one day discover that there are millions of people on internet giving away code which is then being used in most critical infrastructure projects. By their logic, they should ban all open-source projects until they undergo rigorous (and hugely expensive) compliance testing. And cyber-terrorism is a real threat too! So I hope they don't read HN, would not want to give them any ideas...

<comment><USER7> _So I hope they don 't read HN, would not want to give them any ideas..._

Seriously, don't give the nanny-state, collectivist, big-gov, we-need-more- regulations crowd any more ammunition or ideas! That crowd of kooks do enough harm on their own, no need to help them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is the same problem in Europe, I think it has even already been posted in HN. I guess it's the same lobby that got success on both sides of the Atlantic.

[http://www.saveourseeds.org/en/dossiers/eu-seed- regulation.h...](http://www.saveourseeds.org/en/dossiers/eu-seed- regulation.html) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Kokopelli](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Kokopelli)

</comment><comment><USER9> > Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario

No it's not, especially in this scenario. Anyone who espouses this BS should be removed from their position.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone commenting actually read the article? Giving away seeds isn't actually illegal. This is overzealous law enforcement and hopefully won't stand up in court.

The regulations for selling seeds may be unreasonable, but they are at least understandable.

</comment><comment><USER11> So what's the BitTorrent equivalent of a seed library? (no pun intended, but amusingly apropos)

<comment><USER12> r/seedswap on reddit.

<comment><USER13> Risky click of the day...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's Ohio's laws I don't have access to me email to login at work:

[http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/907](http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/907)

</comment><comment><USER15> Dumb question.. How long are seeds able to be preserved without a (reup?)

<comment><USER16> In theory thousands of years. [http://www.non-hybrid- seeds.com/VAULTlongtermseedstoragesyst...](http://www.non-hybrid- seeds.com/VAULTlongtermseedstoragesystem.html)

In practice you lose more over time so it greatly depends on how many you start with. However, you could encode the DNA in another format which effectively means unlimited shelf life assuming you a reasonably close species to work with.

[http://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news129](http://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news129)

<comment><USER6> Another format would actually be a problem - finding a format that would be readable in 10K years is a huge challenge, since all current languages, semantic systems, etc. may be completely forgotten by then. Check out this one:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force)

about trying to solve how to say "dangerous radiation" so people in distant future would understand. Not trivial task at all.

<comment><USER16> Persionaly, I suspect a scale model of a DNA strand + it's encoding would be a strong enough hint for any society capable of using that data to build a life form. As up you only need 4 symbols for the encoding. Then just repeat that at ever smaller scales.

The real issue is you need to encode a lot of data in a stable form for a long time for cheap enough someone would pay for it. Pluss, the cost of actually sequencing 10K+ plants * a few examples so you have some genetic diversity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is regulated standards for foods pushed to the logical position from a bureaucratic standpoint, but mindbogglingly insane position from a biological one, that all inputs to the system must be on the official list of defined things, otherwise the entire process of insisting that we know what is going on falls down.

</comment><comment><USER18> "After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law"

Sadly, the answer to this question these days is nearly always yes, no matter what you are doing. You are pretty much one overzealous act of selective enforcement away from federal crime. 3 felonies a day and all that yap. Do remember that sensationalist stories aside, its exceedingly unlikely to happen to you. Not that we shouldn't try to fix it, but its not worth worrying about to the point that it alters your daily life with paranoia.

</comment><comment><USER19> The fact that this is at all illegal is a testament to the shitty situation in the United States with regards to both intellectual property and food production. I'm ashamed of my country, and my state, because of this.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain to me how you commit agri-terrorism with unregulated seeds? What is the government's argument for this?</comment>