0x10c (Notch's new game) - <AUTHOR> http://0x10c.com/story/ <comment><USER2> I wrote a simple DCPU assembler and simulator to teach myself CoffeeScript: <https://github.com/tjdetwiler/hcf>

Demo here: <http://tjdetwiler.github.com/hcf/>

</comment><comment><USER3> The new website now contains less content; noticeably the DCPU-16 spec is missing. Looks like he's in the middle of retooling. There is a video demo though.

<comment><USER4> I think Notch has been going through a divorce so understandably development has been a little slow.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/0x10c/comments/yb94y/the_reason_for_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/0x10c/comments/yb94y/the_reason_for_slow/)

<comment><USER5> Man, isn't that just how it goes...

<comment><USER6> Wow. I thought he got married less than a year ago? That's roughtimes :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called > for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing > a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 > 0000 0000 years.

Mh, looks like he is off by a factor of 256 :)

<comment><USER8> The DCPU isn't byte-addressable - all memory addresses refer to 16-bit words. Endianness mixups would result in swapping 16-bit words, not 8-bit bytes.

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that a byte is defined as the smallest unit of addressable memory; in the case of DCPU that would be a 16-bit byte.

<comment><USER10> That is an old meaning, which is slowly falling out of favor - it's very common to mean "8 bits" when you say byte.

Per Wikipedia - "The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. With ISO/IEC 80000-13, this common meaning was codified in a formal standard. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.[3]

The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the term byte."

<comment><USER11> If byte and octet become synonymous, what do we call the smallest addressable unit of memory?

<comment><USER10> Probably, the places that actually care about the difference will continue to use "byte", even though no one else will understand.

When I worked in embedded, whenever people were working on non-8-bit processors, they used the words "byte", "word", and "double word" in this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The video reminds me of System shock 2 somehow. I guess an eerie empty spaceship with what look now like quite dated graphics.

Looks like there is some sort of FPS aspect to this, hopefully you can catch ships in tractor beams and then board them, merging both ships together into some kind of CTF map. That could be fun.

The Singleplayer/Multiplayer/Hyperplayer looks interesting too, it could be a totally different game playing a few people on a LAN vs the MMO version.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's going to be interesting seeing how this plays out. Much of Minecraft's success can be attributed to serendipity, so it'll be interesting to see how this new game measures up, especially considering the scope of the project.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the website:

"Of course, I'm ending up reimplementing a lot of TCP, with packet resending and ordering for most things, so I'm not totally sure all this work is actually worth it, heh."

Then, maybe, don't, and just use it... :)

<comment><USER12> The problem will be latency, maybe there are some situations when you need to make sure you get all the packets in order but others where you don't.

For example , if you send an in-game message then this needs to be in the correct order. On the other hand if you have a spaceship turning quickly then as it's angle and velocity changes old information becomes useless so you will just introduce lag if you hang around waiting for old packets before doing anything with the new ones.

[http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/udp...](http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game- programmers/udp-vs-tcp/)

<comment><USER15> That's when you turn to using multiple data streams/connections/endpoints. Funnelling multiple data streams with different needs over a single mechanism (TCP, or UDP, or smoke signals) only yields misery, sadness, and death.

<comment><USER12> Using UDP and TCP at the same time can cause increased packet loss in UDP according to a paper linked from the article above.

<http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM>

I haven't read the whole thing, but the TL;DR appears to be:

If the connection is good then TCP will keep increasing it's Window size until packet loss occurs. This will cause the sender to keep sending more packets. The result of this is that the TCP connection will start to consume most of the available bandwidth effectively drowning out more of the UDP packets (e.g if a buffer in a router starts to become full). TCP is designed to play nice with other TCP connections.

This is probably precisely what you don't want in a game where the UDP packets contain the most important information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone think this name might be a bit of a problem? Being a programmer obviously I get it, but I can imagine it being a problem for average-joe: "Hey, I saw this really cool game the other day, it was called, erm... zero one, c, x? One zero? Uh, something like that. Anyway..." - will the person they were talking to be able to find it?

<comment><USER17> The game is about programming a spaceship in a fictional CPU's assembly language. I don't think they have to worry about what non-programmers think of the name.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK programming is only one aspect of the game, hopefully it will have a more mainstream audience too.

<comment><USER18> He's talked about systems for sharing code so that non-programmers can find code that does what they want without actually needing to dive in. Not sure how well this will work out.

<comment><USER19> There have been a few companies that have tried this with computers in the past:

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

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

I think it just may work out!

<comment><USER19> Reply to jiggy:

A great point. I can't wait for the first trojan that takes control of your ship and transfers control to a different player.

Will people be able to share binaries or just source?

<comment><USER12> IIRC the game emulates a CPU (either 8 or 16 bit can't remember), which means that at a basic level the binaries and source will be the same thing since the only language supplied with the game will be a form of assembler.

Of course we can expect people will create compilers (I believe some already have) to compile other languages down to the assembly used in the game.

The viruses/trojans will be an interesting thing, I believe notch said that it will be up to players to protect themselves from these.

There's a risk here though for essentially turing complete griefing, so hopefully there will be something to help protect newbies from accidentally running some horrible code.

<comment><USER19> Well, I'm sure Norton will put out something. Of course, when running it, your ship's hyperdrive will become 50% slower.

(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)

<comment><USER20> >(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)

I don't think it's about depth; you can't reply to very new comments (presumably to give people a chance to delete mistakes?) but if you refresh the page a minute or two later the reply link will be there as normal.

<comment><USER21> The reply link takes more time to appear as the thread becomes deeper. The purpose is to create a 'cool off' period to avoid very heated discussions.

<comment><USER19> Ah, good to know. Still, seems silly when you can just click link then type in a reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For those curious about the name:

0x10c = zero x ten c = zero extancy = no survival

<comment><USER23> Is that really where the name comes from? I thought Notch said it was "10 to the c", referring to the "0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years" from the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder why there aren't more science fiction stories about the past. For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future. I say it's about the new and exciting science, but some of this new and exciting science (physics breakthrough, artificial intelligence, etc.) just might have happened today or in the recent past, and we might not be able to notice it yet (or it have backfired back then and will only come to fruition later). Given that recent past is the time all of us have lived in, and some have nostalgic feelings for, it looks like such an oversight to me. In sci-fi games, I can only see 0x10 and Darwinia do this to a degree.

<comment><USER25> >For some reason, it's always assumed that science fiction is about the future.

Isn't steampunk essentially science fiction that's set in the past, near the industrial revolution?

<comment><USER24> I should have said "recent past". I am not familiar with steampunk. I read Wikipedia article, but that's it.

But what about the present day? The technology that we might think of today as thing of the future might just be developed in some obscure lab today, or 5-15 years ago. Wouldn't it be fun to speculate in that direction?

<comment><USER26> Cyberpunk would be an example of that.

<comment><USER27> Heh. Cyberpunk has always been about the future... It's just that we caught up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am so super excited about this game. Really interested to see what comes of the whole 'shared multiverse' ideas that he was talking about ... especially when joined with the programmable computers, I can't wait!

</comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone know if he's still using Java for this game?

<comment><USER30> Notch does everything in Java. Realistically, for developing a heavily simulated real-time 3D game like this or Minecraft, how many options does he have? Maybe C++, maybe C#, but that's about it.

Everything else is either too slow or doesn't have the up-to-date gamedev ecosystem.

<comment><USER31> Pure C is a fine choice, too. As is Objective-C. I'm pretty sure Objective-C will outperform Java and C# both. And there's no question that the best choice would be C, for its efficiency and its versatility.

<comment><USER32> If you use Objective-C just like C, then maybe. Otherwise, no.

And you'd have to be insane to write a game these days in C. It's just not a productive enough language for that. Whatever little speed you give up for Java pays off many times over in speed of development, debuggability, etc.

<comment><USER12> Even John Carmack writes C++ now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lets see if he actually manages to finish this one.

Also should he really be using TF2 models when he has his own team now?

</comment><comment><USER34> Pure genius!</comment>


What meaty projects should I do? - <AUTHOR> I am building my resume to get selected for a job at Google. I don't have much projects to list yet. I want to spend next few months developing projects to list on my resume. Considering my focus is MEAN stack what projects should I create? <comment><USER2> That's not a good strategy for getting into Google.

Getting the interview is not that hard, you don't need to show astonishing projects for that.

Passing the interview is the hard part. You should rather focus on getting really good at writing algorithmic code that is asked at interviews.</comment>


John F. Akers, 79, Dies; Led IBM as PCs Ascended - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/business/john-f-akers-79-dies-led-ibm-as-pcs-ascended.html <comment><USER2> Can we get a black header on HN for a day?</comment>


Ask HN: Best open source alternative to Medium? - <AUTHOR> So I'm thinking of launching my own blog, but instead of using Medium I'd rather get my own domain name and a small VPS. Content can be 100% static, the only problem is making it look good on desktop and mobile without too much hassle, just like Medium does. Something light would be preferred, generally would try to stay away from the likes of Wordpress, etc. Things like code highlighting would be nice to have too. <comment><USER2> Pick a static site generator, pick/write/buy a "responsive" theme for it.

Done.</comment>


Show HN: Spritz like bookmarklet - <AUTHOR>

After reading about Spritz I wanted to try out RSVP reading in real life so whipped up a basic bookmarklet version.
Supports: pause, rewind, jumping, WPM adjustment, Spritz like word centering, variable speed depending on word/punctuation.
http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-bookmarklet/ <comment><USER2> Cool Bookmarklet. I was just looking for something like that. But it shows the inline Javascript to me, too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link: [http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader- bo...](http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-bookmarklet/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome Bookmarklet! Thanks for the share</comment>


This is your brain on JS - <AUTHOR> https://codeandtalk.com/v/empirejs-2016/tara-lindhal-this-is-your-brain-on-js <comment><USER2> Isn't the whole left brain vs right brain a myth?</comment>


The Berkeley Revolution: A digital archive - <AUTHOR> http://revolution.berkeley.edu/about/ <comment><USER2> From the tip of the American cultural revolution to the greatest example of NIMBYism, regressive leftism, coddled college kids, drug abuse, homelessness, cultism and hypocrisy.

Keep Berkeley weird!

<comment><USER3> Basically the same objections people leveled at it in the first place.

<comment><USER2> Except the exact opposite?

The hippies all own expensive houses now and will do ANYTHING to keep the town from changing - specifically, to prevent the construction of affordable housing. As a partial result, there is a massive homelessness problem and the town is very expensive for young people.

Meanwhile, rather than campaigning for serious political and economic change, the current local protest movement is pretty singularly concerned with countering the "alt-right" (who are non-existent among the actual residents of the town) and rioting over "offensive" speech.

I was a fairly long time Berkeley resident but I had to get out. Berkeley rules but it has some pretty serious problems that it refuses to address.

<comment><USER3> I'm fully aware that yesterdays protesters are today's incumbents. And if you think people aren't campaigning for serious social and political change I don't know what to tell you. Surely you are aware that the historical protest movement was considered A Bad Thing in its day by many people, as opposed to being the subject of mass adulation.

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting way to think of it; that the anti-building folks are just yesterday's hippies, having grown older, more moderate and self- interested.

Another way of looking at it is that political movements are coalitions. Sure, people who are really concerned about the environment and people who are really concerned about poverty and the welfare of the poor are both on the left of the political spectrum in America, but they are not really natural allies; those in poverty use a lot less resources than they would if they had middle-class incomes, and things like organic food are massively less efficient, meaning that choosing organic food, to the extent that it crowds out inorganic production, is raising the price of food, something that is largely irrelevant if you primarily care about the environment, but central if you primarily care about the poor.

(Of course, there is some agreement, I mean, the price of farmland forces the issue, but 'sustainable farming' is important for all; you don't want another dust bowl, but that's a problem that, from my understanding, is largely solved, outside of, say, cattle grazing on public land. No farmer wants to destroy the production capability of his or her land. )

I mean, I'm certain that was a biased example, but my point is just that there are a lot of competing interests within a particular political coalition, so quite often, apparent hypocrisy is simply the fact that different people and different sub-groups within a broad political movement have different and sometimes conflicting priorities and values.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's difficult to discuss things like this in a fast moving discussion forum like HN, plus the fact that making a witty or ironic point that might work perfectly well at some times ends up being confusing or alienating at others.

I feel we're at a complex historical moment in terms of not just US politics but global trade relations, questions about the future of finance and economics, the pressing problem of climate change, and competing but radically different philosophies of national and global destiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm so glad I left that place. I've never lived in a place that was so obnoxiously proud of its past, all the while so completely hypocritical about its present situation. Great school, shit town.

<comment><USER6> > I'm so glad I left that place. I've never lived in a place that was so > obnoxiously proud of its past, all the while so completely hypocritical > about its present situation. Great school, shit town.

You found the _town_ was proud of its past and hypocritical about the present, and not the school?</comment></comment>


Hasura Adds Support to MySQL - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/08/hasura-raises-25-million-series-b-and-adds-mysql-support-to-its-graphql-service/ <comment><AUTHOR> I can't see anything in the codebase yet, however there's a stub documentation for MySQL integration:

[https://deploy-preview-5726--hasura- docs.netlify.app/graphql...](https://deploy-preview-5726--hasura- docs.netlify.app/graphql/core/getting-started/index.html#get-started-using-a- mysql-database)

Yes, everyone loves postgres more than mysql, but the truth is, a lot of software uses mysql, and mysql has one distinct advantage over postgresql: better clustering support with vitess and galera. Postgresql _is_ making progress but it's still behind at this time.

<comment><USER2> Ugh, had some CI issues!

Our docs page is just about live with the latest links so that you can try it out. I'll drop a note here when that happens.

<comment><USER3> Not tango12 but...for your convenience...

[https://hasura.io/docs/1.0/graphql/core/guides/mysql- preview...](https://hasura.io/docs/1.0/graphql/core/guides/mysql-preview.html)</comment></comment></comment>


PyCon 2012: Early Bird approaches; how much awesome can a conference contain? - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blogspot.com/2012/01/pycon-2012-early-bird-approaches-how.html

<comment><AUTHOR> And as always: I am around to answer questions around PyCon!

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it just me or is jnoller abusing hackernews to self promote PyCon and his own agenda.

#tryingtoohardmuch

It is kind of cute, but brings into question ANY story you submit on hackernews. What is your end game dude?</comment>


The Great Q&A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 (Aardvark, Hunch, StackOverflow, and Quora) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2010/02/the-great-qa-wars-of-2009-2014.html

<comment><USER2> I always laugh when people bring up Quora as if they already won. They haven't even launched yet.

The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is getting the answer after typing their question into Google.

The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.

Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users and billions of pages.

I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps that Yahoo left over.

And I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.

<comment><USER3> The Q&A wars haven't even started, and I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.

Yes, Yahoo has tons of traffic, but 1) they're already being overtaken by answers.com 2) SO identifies Software as being underserved by existing solutions. Software is a 400 Billion dollar industry. Who knows how many other industries aren't being served by Yahoo Answers.

The author is right, we're at the model T era in terms of technology. Relying on Google to find the appropriate question is a good short term tactic, but will be beaten in the long run by other approaches, and doesn't work _now_ outside of the consumer internet. Areas underserved now: B2B anything, corporate tech support (because they don't get much google juice), technical but non-web 2.0 areas like law, accounting, medicine.

Simple upvotes will eventually succumb to the slashdot/reddit phenomenon. Upvotes don't matter when popularity is not a good indicator for the answer you're trying to find. Think music preferences. "What music should I listen to?" is a terrible question for anything based on upvoting. A better system would take into account knowledge about the user, or knowledge about people with similar tastes to the user.

<comment><USER2> 1\. answers.com is another juggernaut from years ago. It was launched in 1999, but was rebranded in 2005. So giving them as an example doesn't work.

2\. StackOverflow works for programmers, but like Joel and Jeff say, 90% of their traffic also comes from Google.

3\. The reason Stack Overflow worked because they were able to bring in their communties from the start. Sure a stackoverflow for law would be nice...but good luck finding thousands of lawyers to give their advice away for free.

4\. Yes technology sucks....but Google and users care little about technology...for Q&A 90% of traffic is Google...if you haven't hit that statistic yet, you must have a very new site. Google IS Q&A, to dismiss them is suicide.

5\. Here is the thing...users just don't care. They don't care if the top answer was upvoted by 20 people, or if a magic unicorn decreed that it's the top answer. They just want the answer. Even if the site is nothing but pure text, as long as the answer is what the person was looking for, they are happy

<comment><USER3> There's more to Q&A than just the consumer internet. There's the things people find on Yahoo Answers today, and then there's everything people want answers for, whether Yahoo Answers has a category for it or not. The second is an order of magnitude larger than any site out there right now.

You're absolutely right to focus on whether the user gets the right answer or not. They don't care about technology. My point is that there is a _huge_ untapped market that can't be served by YA or SO, for technology reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with you about the Q&A wars shaping up, but I think you should include Fluther, which falls smack dab in the middle of this fray.

It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.

I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.

<comment><USER5> Unpack that "middle of this fray"--what differentiates Fluther?

<comment><USER4> \- We've been matching questions using an a sophisticated algorithm since before Aardvark launched.

\- We've been using real-time interaction also for years, and more recently added IM notification and chat (not saying I don't think parts of Quora's interface is slick, just we were doing it first).

\- We have similarly distinguished backers and advisors: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from- to...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/24/fluther-raises-600k-from-top-valley- investors-for-crowd-sourced-answers/)

\- We have a large, thriving community and a healthy amount of traffic (around 800k uniques).

\- And at the end of the day, we have a lot of smart people giving great answers. Try asking a good question good question.

\- Having talked at length with some of the other co-founders, ceos, and investors of these very companies (and others not on the list), I can say pretty confidently, that we are indeed, "in the fray"

Not trying to sound defensive. I love how our company how's grown, where we're going (we have some amazing stuff in store for this year). More I'm saying how it can be frustrating to not get included in discussions like this (which can shape opinion over time) that are written by people who don't actually have serious insight about the space.

Quite frankly, we're a lot more in the "in-crowd" than some of the other Q&A companies, but I don't think that makes them irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't trying to sound offensive. Wanted to soft pitch you something easy to hit because I hadn't heard of Fluther before and as long as you're disclaiming, it would be helpful to know what you're about.

I'm curious about your use of Google custom search, especially given your size. You don't think something more tailored would work better?

All in all, looks like a friendly community, which is no easy feat at scale.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, jimmybot.

Yeah, something tailored would definitely be better. Google custom search is pretty weak, but it gets the job done for our users until we find the time to improve. We'll probably switch to lucene or solr (with some secret sauce), but we've been too busy with other stuff. I set up a branch with Haystack (we use Django) a few weeks ago and was pretty impressed.

If you want to chat more specifically about search (or something else), you can drop me a line: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really really want to see someone do something like Aardvark JUST for shopping. Here's how it would work:

I put in product+brands I've purchased and feel comfortable answering basic "shopping" questions about: iPhone, macbook pro, apple, vizio, volkswagen, jaguar, french connection, ipod, linksys,etc.

Someone comes in and asks a question just like aardvark such as: "What iPhone should I buy? 16gb or 32gb?" "Did your linksys router give you problems?" It sends me or someone else that has purchased that brand/product the question and I give them some practical advice.

Attach affiliate links at the bottom (not sure how you'd do that yet but it's doable).

If you're making this, please let me beta test.

<comment><USER2> fairly sure you are describing <http://www.imshopping.com/>

granted they don't have the exact formula you described, but they seem to be heading in that direction

<comment><USER6> oh awesome. thanks vaksel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"Furthermore, it seems like "everyone on the SO team works remotely from home," and a recent job posting suggests that might continue. I hope not."_

I would love to have the author elaborate on why a small remote team is a bad thing.

Edit: also, FWIW, the product they are seeking funding for is StackExchange, which is built by 3 FogCreek employees who all work at the FogCreek offices in NYC.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not bad; it just doesn't scale. I don't have any direct experience but I would expect it to start breaking down around 10-20 people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most of the sites being discussed are mega sites, and while they get a lot of traffic they don't necessarily provide the best answers. The niche Q&A sites will ultimately become the best of Q&A. Not as high profile, but much better.

I'm biased because I'm the co-founder of YouSaidIt. We provide niche Q&A sites... but with a big difference. We focus on expert Q&A as well as the community. Our Q&A is more like a "town hall" or "expert roundtable". At one site, The Stranger (Seattle's biggest alt weekly) we have had the Mayor answering questions, Dan Savage giving advice, Paul Constant giving personal book recommendations, and candidates running for office.

We haven't even begun to see the places where Q&A will go.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, when Google buys a company, it creates a market?

</comment><comment><USER10> He forgot <http://shapado.com> my open source stackoverflow =)

<comment><USER11> Forgot or doesn't really know who the players are in this space other than who has shown up on TechCrunch? I felt like he left a lot of Q&A sites out.

<comment><USER12> Mailing lists are sort of a non-startup player too, at least for tech answers. If I'm googling for a programming question or a Linux configuration issue or something, I'd estimate I find my answer in mailing list archives at least as often as on normal websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> WTH are Aardvark, Hunch and Quora?

<comment><USER2> Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Hunch is basically a diagnostic type site. So you say you want a computer...and it gives you 20 questions with each question narrowing down your solution. Do you want a laptop or netbook? Do you want it in black or red or blue? etc.

Quora is basically a regular Q&A site mixed with twitter and Facebook. So you can follow a topic or a question etc. Personally I found it a bit confusing.

<comment><USER10> > Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends > with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Au contraire, Aardvark was built so you wouldn't have to spam your friends. Each user of Aardvark puts his field of expertise in his settings and only receive questions Aardvark AI thinks a user can answer and it gets better with time. It's really brilliant, and it doesn't ask your friends only, it asks anyone in the community that may be able to answer your question. It's a fast way (by IM, twitter, email etc ) to ask and get answers without bothering people who don't know anything about your question.

Disclaimer: I don't work neither for Vark nor for Google. But I think it's a great service.

<comment><AUTHOR> You nailed the concept but the execution was soft. They didn't have enough information on their users to do this well. They knew I was interested in 'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in expertise I had in each, for example.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Also, if you're a professional software developer, even your resume isn't a good description of what you are an expert on, so their one line description isn't adequate.

If I say I'm an expert on "linux", that could mean linux kernel code, the LAMP stack, or administration and then I get questions like "why do I not get sound out of my netbook on Ubuntu 9.10?"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Was the Death Star assault scene in the original Star Wars based on a true story - <AUTHOR> Perhaps you remember the final scene from the 1977 blockbuster "Star Wars: A New Hope", expertly crafted by director George Lucas and his film editor wife Marcia Lou Griffin.  Three aircraft break off from the main group for an improvised attack run on the huge enemy vessel.  A "one in a million shot" cause the enormous craft to self-destruct.
My claim is that the real-life inspiration for Luke Skywalker in this scene was a man named Lieutenant Richard Halsley Best who, with his two wingman, attacked and destroyed the huge Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi with a single well-placed bomb during the Battle of Midway.  Americans should temper their pride in this incredible feat by looking up the origin of the word "snafu".  One snafu was that all the other dive bombers in Best's group attacked the wrong carrier, another was that dozens of US torpedo attacks failed during the battle because of the infamous Mark 6 dud torpedoes.
As more evidence that the the Battle of Midway inspired Lucas, consider that the the whole plot of Star Wars revolves around the stolen plans for the Death Star, analogous to the intercepted Japanese battle plans in the case of Midway. <comment><USER2> The Death Star sequence (specifically the trench run) was based on, and sometimes lifted scene for scene from the 1955 movie "The Dam Busters." [0,1].

Substitute these experimental "bouncing bombs"[2] for Luke force-bending proton torpedoes and you have the end of Star Wars.

[0][https://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars- th...](https://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars-the-dam- busters)

[1][https://youtu.be/lNdb03Hw18M](https://youtu.be/lNdb03Hw18M)

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

<comment><AUTHOR> It's noteworthy that two people who worked on Dam Busters also worked on Star Wars 20 years later, as described in link [0] above.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So the original Star Wars, which has spawned so many copycat movies, is itself a copycat movie? Let's see. The formula seems to be: take two successful old movies, such as Battle of Midway and Hidden Fortress, and create a mashup set in a different genre to make it seem new. Has someone created a machine learning application that applies this mashup/genre switch on old movie scripts to make new ones?

<comment><USER2> To be fair, Akira Kurosawa was influenced by spaghetti westerns[0] and one of his films (Throne of Blood) is just Macbeth in feudal Japan, so the copying goes both ways.

[0][https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/film/kurosawa-and- the-w...](https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/film/kurosawa-and-the-wild- west/)

<comment><USER3> Star Wars is a little closer IMO.

The Tahei and Matashichi sequences towards the beginning when they split up are basically exactly the same and R2D2 and C3PO in the desert. Even the musical score is very close. Ditto on the space scenes and Midway.

Personally, I didn't have a problem with it -- many of the themes are universal and influence is fine... if anything adding the SFX and different storyline really honors the influencing films. I did get a little jaded when I saw a George Lucas interview on one of the DVD releases where he downplayed the similarities in what was in my opinion a disingenuous way.

<comment><USER4> Also, I've never read mention of this, but Yoda seems to me in many ways like Dersu Uzala from...Kurosawa's _Dersu Uzala_! (I think my favourite K movie) - e.g. forest-dwelling, short, benevolent, wise, and they speak similarly.

I believe Lucas helped with the financing of several of K's later films.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's possible that one or two of the torpedoes hit and was a dud at Midway, but the real problems were the slow speed of the torpedo planes, the need to drop the torpedoes at an even slower speed, the maneuverability of the Japanese carriers, and most of all the lack of fighter cover, which left the torpedo planes sitting ducks. The evidence seems to imply that none of the torpedoes hit at all.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And those Star Destroyers sure look like aircraft carriers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Star Wars is like a mashup of the Hidden Fortress and Midway. I found the fighter sequences similar to Midway as well.</comment>


40GB for $55 per month: Time Warner bandwidth caps arrive - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080603-40gb-for-55-per-month-time-warner-bandwidth-caps-arrive.html <comment><USER2> Those caps seem pretty draconian. Key points:

      * 768Kbps connection with a 5GB cap for $29.95 per month
      * 15MBps with a 40GB cap for $54.90 per month
      * Customers will be able to see how much bandwidth they have left by visiting the Time Warner Cable web site.
      * $1 for each additional gigabyte consumed beyond the cap.

I worry that this won't scale well as streaming services become more and more common. That's bad news for startups expecting their customers to have flat- rate access.

<comment><USER3> Its expensive but its _fair_. The connection I have now is _as much as you want, until its too much, in which case we'll just cut you off without warning._

I believe I might actually prefer the expensive and fair model.

<comment><USER4> 5GB for $29.95 is hardly fair. Web hosting companies have found ways to increase bandwidth and keep plan prices at same or lower levels. Why can telcos do the same? $5.99 per GB is a ripoff. I have already called Time Warner Cable and warned them that if they implement bandwidth caps in my area, I will discontinue their service. I have other options in my area like Speakeasy or wireless internet providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sadly, this is years from effecting the masses. Although depending on the popularity of AppleTV, the Netflix box and other streaming TV boxes that timeframe could narrow. TWC also has to consider how it's OnDemand content is going to be affected in the long-run. And how long is it before the internet starts streaming cable programing with unlimited channel selection and HD? The cable infrastructure is poor and I guess they are seeing what they can do to hold onto their market share until a radical shift happens. Although, since they already do have a large market share, you'd think they'd be more interested in figuring out how to leverage the internet to deliver more content instead of just stifling their users.

They are doing this knowing that high bandwidth customers are likely to leave and they either a) don't care or b) are doing this specifically to lose the high bandwidth users. Cable is already pushed to its limits and providers are spending a lot of money to keep up with satellite's HD offerings.

Unfortunately for TWC, there are plenty of options and eventually this model will cannibalize their entire broadband business.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is happening at a time when 100Gbps is becoming standard in Swedish homes.

</comment><comment><USER3> 40 gigabytes in a 30 day month looks like a continuous transfer rate of about 128 kbits/s. A little more than twice dialup.

Heh, watch out for bittorrent clients on your network!

<comment><USER7> No no. Dialup was 56KB/s not 56kb/s.

<comment><USER8> 56 kbps = 7 kilobytes / second

<comment><USER7> 40GB/month = 15KB/s. Put that all together and you'll see his error.

<comment><USER3> Ok, Ok, 128 was just a hipshot. Lets do it right

40 GB = 42,949,672,960 bytes

1 month = 2,629,743.83 seconds

40GB/1month = 16,331 bytes/second

8 bits per byte -> 16,331 * 8 = 130,648 bits/sec

So round about 131 kilobits / second.

Dialup was 50 kilobits/second practically _so_ almost but not quite 3 times the speed of dialup.

<comment><USER7> Dialup isn't 56KB? Ah, my lying network monitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 40GB number made me think, hmmm, you could ship a person a hard drive full of stuff every month cheaper than that. It could be like a netflix meets bittorrent business model ;-)

<comment><USER10> You mean Netflix meets Bittorrent meets the US Government.

<comment><USER9> Well, yeah. The smiley was a stand-in for the feds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This kind of thinking is the _major_ reason why America is behind in the mobile access market and true broadband access.

Ridiculous.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand, DSL and cable connections in Central Europe have had these kinds of limits for ages, and the flat fee and "fair-use" style contracts have only been offered on a broad scale for the last 2-3 years or so. (my parents & sister were on a 2.5GB/month contract until about 1½ years ago)

I suppose it's not held up the massive expansion of broadband as much here because the alternative, dialup, is even more expensive, at generally between €0.01 to €0.015 (~$0.015-$0.02) per minute. We've always been used to paying a premium for internet access, so when something comes along that's better value for money, more people jump on board.

The capped or pay-per-megabyte contracts are still the norm on mobile (EDGE, 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA) internet access though. But mobile communications contracts in general already have pretty draconian terms in my experience. (minimum runtime 24 months, small print overload, etc., at least you aren't charged for _receiving_ calls/texts these days anymore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They will probably offer exception to websites owned/affiliated with Time Warner. This will encourage/force people to download streaming media using Time affiliated sites.

<comment><USER14> This is illegal to do. Content comapnies aren't allowed to merge or enter agreements with "delivery providers", unless there is a loophole.

<comment><USER15> Reference to the law making this illegal?

ESPN360 (from a 'content company') has been only available to users of ISPs ('delivery providers') who've paid licensing fees to ESPN. [1] This arrangement has existed for a couple years, at least. That would seem to undercut the claim such agreements are illegal.

[1] [http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-espn-opens-broadband- ac...](http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-espn-opens-broadband-access- beyond-certain-cable-isp-subs-to-mil-edu/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The one positive thing I can think to say about this is that it will sting people whose Wintendos have been zombified by spammers.

But mostly it reminds me of why I cut all ties to the local cable monopoly last time I moved.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't mind tiered pricing based on consumption, but their pricing scheme is the ridiculous part. So long as the whole internet and all protocols are treated evenly, fine. So long as the limits are there clearly fine. Right now I have Optimum Online "unlimited" and I have been cut off twice for going over bandwidth limit. I was seeding 1 torrent for about 48 hours straight (Debian Etch) and they cut me off for "setting up a server". I don't know exactly how much I use in a month, but probably 50-100GB? 5 wouldn't last me 3 days.

<comment><USER18> Read your user agreement. Any kind of server is typically forbidden for non- business lines, regardless of the bandwidth.

For what it's worth, I haven't had a moment's trouble with verizon, despite being firmly among the top 1 percent of users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This will never work, and thank god. There is a reason they are releasing in the boonies where there is no competition.

Why would I pay $29.95 with a 5GB cap, when I can get 1.5mb/s DSL for $19.95 with no cap

Why would I pay $54.90 for 15MBps with a 40gb cap, if I can get 20MPps FIOS for $39.99.

<comment><USER20> I live on Cape Cod, not exactly the boonies, less than 2 hours from Boston and have ONE choice for broadband. No FIOS, no DSL, just Comcrap cable (with rising rates every year). They have me by the balls and if they capped my Internet there's nothing I could do.

<comment><USER10> There are a couple of things. Satellite and EVDO. Both are downgrades, but better than a 5gb bandwidth cap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I wrong, but didnt Time Warner pay 40 million for access to bittorrent last year with plans on distributing high quality movies online? This goes against what their goals are with regard to populating the web with high quality video. Maximum Suck!

</comment><comment><USER22> I say its fair, but only if you charge fully by the GB or not at all; having a standard then add-on is trying to get the best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER23> Welcome to the suck :(</comment>


Google and the death of beta testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/118347-google-and-the-death-of-beta-testing <comment><USER2> Kind of ignores the work Google did in releasing Plus, which shows a lot of lessons from Buzz and Wave have been learnt. In particular, being very clear it's a "Field Test" (as they called it), inviting feedback on the site, and erring on the side of caution when it comes to privacy. (e.g. I think users were initially preventing from making something public that was shared to a limited audience...possibly overkill, but a good way to start things off). Whereas Wave was more or less designed as "Email is Now Dead, Get Over It" and introduced that way, Google have been very cautious and humble in their messaging around Plus.

<comment><USER3> Of course, that was backed up by a release schedule that launched new features/improvements on a near-daily basis for 3+ months afterword. If somebody launches a product to "beta" and can't quickly improve on it, I don't really consider it a beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Buzz was rolled out to all Gmail users without sufficient testing or input > from regular people.

Excepting use of the word "sufficient", this strikes me as pure conjecture. Was Buzz a failure? Undoubtedly. But I would be literally shocked to find out that Google released it without extensive user research. It's not an exact science (or a science at all, really). When people try to make new things, they fail more than they succeed.</comment>


Show HN: Managing SSH Access to AWS EC2 Instances Using SSM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elpy1/ssh-over-ssm <comment><USER2> Seem likes an awfully laboured equivalent of GCP's OSLogin [1]. To SSH into an instance:

      gcloud compute ssh <instance_name>

GCP takes care of generating a key pair. The GCP linux images configure OpenSSH and PAM to check you have relevant IAM permissions. IAP [2] is used in place of a bastion if the instance doesn't have an external IP address.

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/managing- ins...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/managing-instance- access)

[2]: [https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/using-tcp- forwarding](https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/using-tcp-forwarding)

<comment><USER3> Session manager doesn't require inbound access iirc. An agent on the machine handles the request via a connection to the SSM service. Your request for a session goes to the SSM service and a websocket connection is established from the machine you need to remote into. A cool solution.

<comment><USER4> I assume it also logs the access in the SSM audit logs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can also use ec2-instance-connect[0] to enable users to generate ephemeral keys that are valid for a few minutes, authenticated with IAM. The benefit is that it's all native after you've pushed your keys using either aws-cli or mssh.

It has more or less the same benefits that SSM has, and you can use the same method with ProxyCommand to establish authentication before connecting. You can also chain it using ProxyJump to use a bastion host. Wrapped in a tool like aws-vault you can quite easily work with 2FA and such.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2019/06/introduci...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2019/06/introducing-amazon-ec2-instance-connect/)

<comment><USER6> Does ec2-instance-connect use the generic system account or does each AIM user/role get it's own instance account? Asking from an auditing and logging perspective, as in is there a way to tie back a command which was run back to an individual human directly?

<comment><USER5> It has to use an existing system account, yes. You do lose a lot of auditing abilities this way, since you cannot capture the content. For me this is more about establishing a secure way to grant people access to instances, without something like LDAP or SSH CA.

LDAP sends passwords in cleartext over an encrypted channel, I don't like the idea of someone else on the host I'm connecting to being able to read my password. Naturally you can use key based authentication with it.

I know that some people are required by law or regulation to log all these things, but personally I don't see much benefit of such audit logs. All bets are off when someone has local access to a machine. And there's this whole debate about using MitM-proxies for logging and security and the potential security implications they pose.

All that said, step-ca[0] and vault[1] looks really promising to provide some kind of provider independent way to authenticate in a secure manner. You also have teleport[2] but I haven't looked much into it.

[0] [https://smallstep.com/docs/cli/ssh/](https://smallstep.com/docs/cli/ssh/) [1] [https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/signed-ssh- cert...](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/signed-ssh- certificates/) [2] [https://gravitational.com/teleport/](https://gravitational.com/teleport/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the links, Teleport seems especially interesting.

Yeah, we are required by contractual obligations to log these things or at least sudo commands. Don't disagree that it's less than useful but only so many things you can argue about. The logging we can do with auditd but we need unique instance users for that to be useful.

<comment><USER7> (disclaimer, I was a founder of ScaleFT - acquired by Okta)

This is exactly why many customers use Okta's Advanced Server Access: [https://www.okta.com/products/advanced-server- access/](https://www.okta.com/products/advanced-server-access/)

It does certificates as a credentialing mechanism, but also full separate accounts, lifecycle management of accounts and sudo files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've been using SSH over SSM at work, and it's been great for tying access to IAM credentials.

Using the SSM tool as a ProxyCommand for OpenSSH is brilliant. I can SSH to an instance (turning on agent forwarding, etc.) or SCP files back and forth, all the same way that I'd do it with a regular host. But that host doesn't need to be exposed to inbound SSH traffic!

I was also able to get the ProxyCommand working in a Docker container, so I don't have to install the AWS CLI or the SSM plugin on my (Linux) host system, with an .ssh/config entry like this:

      Host i-*
        ProxyCommand docker run -i --rm -v $PWD:$PWD -w $PWD -u 1000:1000 -v ~/.aws:/tmp/.aws -e HOME=/tmp -e AWS_PROFILE <docker image ref> ssm start-session --target %h --document-name AWS-StartSSHSession --parameters 'portNumber=%p'

A few problems in practice:

* We often use our bastions to do port forwarding, e.g. to connect to an RDS instance inside VPC. As far as I know, we can't accomplish this with just SSH over SSM, so we still keep our bastions.

* User management: SSH over SSM doesn't do any user or key management for you (which makes sense). It establishes the SSH connection and you're on your own from there. We use Keymaker [1] to dynamically create user accounts on the EC2 instances, and populate SSH keys according to the user's IAM profile. This works fine, but maybe there's room for simplification.

* Connecting based on instance ids (`ssh i-...`) can be awkward. It would be amazing if we could alias these somehow, like set up a CNAME that points to `i-...`. I wasn't able to get OpenSSH to follow a CNAME and then use the ProxyCommand. Maybe it's possible, though.

[1] [https://github.com/kislyuk/keymaker](https://github.com/kislyuk/keymaker)

<comment><USER9> I haven't used it or looked into what it supports, but I did remember this announcement which may interest you: "New – Port Forwarding Using AWS System Manager Session Manager": [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-port- forwarding-using-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-port-forwarding- using-aws-system-manager-sessions-manager/)

To make the ProxyCommand setup a little easier, perhaps you could use `aws ec2 describe-instances` with the appropriate filter? For example, the article I linked uses:

        INSTANCE_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-instances \
                       --filter "Name=tag:Name,Values=$INSTANCE_NAME" \
                       --query "Reservations[].Instances[?State.Name == 'running'].InstanceId[]" \
                       --output text)

to grab the instance ID from the Name tag. You could set up a shell script as a ProxyCommand to do this automatically, although beware that ProxyCommand's %h will always lowercase the input...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard to overstate how much of a difference this makes for managing people's access to servers without having to manage access keys. Especially if someone leaves the team/company you don't need to roll out new AMIs or run your puppet/ansible, it's just a `terraform apply` to update the IAM policy and you're done. Absolutely love it.

One thing that I found annoying through the web interface was the lousy support of special characters. Every now and then either some character combination or a big wall of text would make the browser-based terminal almost useless. I have yet to make time to configure the cli access which I don't think will have these issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very funny, we received a ticket from a security audit a week ago asking us to get rid of our bastion and use SSM instead. Having never heard of SSM, being in a rush to a deadline and lacking skills with ops, we kinda panicked. 10min later, we had found the SSM interface in the AWS console, found it extremely easy to use and had deleted our bastion :)

Note: the README says "I found myself in a situation where I couldn't easily copy a file from my machine to the server". Note that you can use S3 for that (`aws s3 cp ...`), though you should be careful with permissions on your S3 bucket

<comment><USER5> You can always just pipe things over ssh. And now that ssm supports local port forwarding you can easily use netcat to send files back and forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Solving the SSH over SSM is sadly useless right now. The whole point of why we began using SSM was logging.

1) We soon discovered that using bash (and not sh that SSM signs you into) doesn't format the logs correctly and makes them unreadable 2) Using SSH over SSM doesn't log at all

Both of these problems are on AWS github but as always, they don't respond.

<comment><USER6> Does SSM generate unique users for each login or does it use a generic user? The later would make any logging outside of SSM difficult since there's no way to tie it to a specific IAM user except time windows.

<comment><USER12> You can specify the behavior. There is no unique user for each login, by default you are dropped to generic ssm-user. It's possible to set up a log-in into specific user based on the IAM username.

> The later would make any logging outside of SSM difficult There is a way to > tie IAM user to SSM. You have to request SSM permissions and AWS logs that. > AWS logs pretty much every single API call so it's just matter of storing > and auditing correctly.

<comment><USER6> >There is a way to tie IAM user to SSM. You have to request SSM permissions and AWS logs that. AWS logs pretty much every single API call so it's just matter of storing and auditing correctly.

If you're using a generic ssm-user (and going to ssh so there's no ssm logs of the commands) then wouldn't you not be able to distinguish the commands (say in auditd) of two people logging in at the same time?

I'm reminded of RDS which does not store enough logs anywhere to reconstruct which IAM user/role was running specific commands when using IAM Authentication unless you create individual users in the DB.

<comment><USER12> > If you're using a generic ssm-user (and going to ssh so there's no ssm logs > of the commands) then wouldn't you not be able to distinguish the commands > (say in auditd) of two people logging in at the same time?

But that requires auditing directly on EC2, right? (You can indeed sync the logs somewhere, but that diminished the beauty of out of box logging)

> I'm reminded of RDS which does not store enough logs

AFAIK, it's not possible with their current implementation to accomplish this. We just swallowed that it won't work and for the sake of security created seperate users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an example we've been working that creates an Okta-managed user who can get in to a tagged EC2 instance using Session Manager. No bastion/sshd/security group ingress rules required. [https://github.com/symopsio/terraform-okta-ssm- demo](https://github.com/symopsio/terraform-okta-ssm-demo)

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been using this script for a while and it works great [https://gist.githubusercontent.com/qoomon/fcf2c85194c55aee34...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/qoomon/fcf2c85194c55aee34b78ddcaa9e83a1/raw/59286cadad054018012fe22ed23379729cb893a9/aws- ssm-ec2-proxy-command.sh)

</comment><comment><USER15> Still need to figure out how to do this with an ephemeral fargate task. I'm guessing that I can build an image that adds SSM.

Otherwise my developers can't get a Django shell in production for emergencies.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hasn't this been solved by using SSH certificates instead of keys?

<comment><USER6> SSM doesn't require you to manage keys or have a bastion/vpn/public access. It'll also log access attempts, in some cases log commands, and ties into IAM permissions (ie: these people can't access prod but can access test, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great. We usually overload the bastion server with NAT duties but SSM + hosted NAT makes bastion servers a thing of the past?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been rolling SSM out at work; 10/10 would do again.

</comment><comment><USER19> that's pretty great. been using ssm for a while but wasn't aware of AWS- StartSSHSession, which solves all the quirks I had with ssm in the first place (like loosing the abilities of scp, tunneling and such).

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone give any experience using this method vs. AWS Secrets Manager?

</comment><comment><USER21> thanks!</comment>


How to Survive the Series A Crunch—From Someone Who Didn't - <AUTHOR> http://www.seanpercival.com/blog/2013/06/03/how-to-survive-the-series-a-crunch-from-someone-who-didnt/

<comment><USER2> This quote really grated on me: "At my company we managed to have 100 percent retention until the very end. I was extremely proud of that and of my staff for pushing forward in a world of uncertainty".

Pushing forward...further into the abyss, further into a negatively-sloped opportunity cost curve, further into a start-up that'll scar their CVs and render future employment more difficult? You may call that loyalty, but I call it irrationality unless their equity compensation was adjusted for the risk you imposed on them. These people weren't "your" staff; they were employees tied to your company only by a contractual obligation. You didn't own them. They weren't your property. And despite your ego and delusions of grandeur, you weren't doing them favors by continuing their employment. Their tenure shouldn't be celebrated, it should be emphasized as a cautionary tale.

<comment><USER3> "...further into a start-up that'll scar their CVs and render future employment more difficult". Let's not be so cynical. If you're a quality engineer or designer I have a hard time believing being part of an ecommerce startup that didn't make it as a scar that will render further employment difficult. Loyalty and seeing things through during dark times can be admirable in some employers' minds.

Sure, people might take a pay cut to work at a startup, but if they believe in the vision that's perfectly fine. Are we going to criticize poets, musicians, comedians, teachers, or other people who don't make high six-figure VP of Engineering salaries because "they could have made more" in a cubicle somewhere else?</comment></comment>


A book on the persistence of elites is an unexpected guide to getting a good job - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651207-book-persistence-elites-unexpected-guide-getting-good-job-how-join <comment><USER2> This is spot on. There isn't anything inherently difficult about what entry- level professionals (as defined in the article) get up to. You'll be doing powerpoint slides or reading documents until you fall asleep, but it's a skill that many, many more people have than are needed. Basically anyone can bone up on a few accounting ratios (what is xyz technical term?), read a book about brainteasers (100 people on an island...ugh), and read the general news (tell me something interesting?).

So who do you pick? You have all these well-educated, similar people. So of course you go for the ones you like. You ask them stupid brainteasers and stock questions (what's your greatest weakness? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?) and just see who will say something you like. They are just as capable as the ones you don't like. This is also the reason you need to have gone to a top uni: why bother looking for a skill that everyone has? Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.

Oh, one exception: the children of the powerful. A buddy of mine worked in investment banking and there were a number of kids whose parents were CEOs of known firms, or other important people. Those kids are going to be able to do the job at hand as well as the future job of getting business. It does tighten the pyramid for the other capable kids, but they know the game.

Contrast that with a job where the skill is roughly as available as the demand. Where it is possible that the random guy off the street cannot do it (eg iOS developer). What do you do then? Well, now you can't just show up to the interview unprepared. You need to spend time asking real, discriminating questions (How do optionals work in Swift?). You also might need to balance your opinion about the person's character with your need to have that skill in house.

<comment><USER3> For entry-level positions, you're absolutely right.

But the authors fail to mention that these firms have turnover approaching 50% per year for new employees. As a new employee fresh out of college, they work you like a dog and wait for those who can't hack it to quit. The first two years are screening for work ethic (though by "work ethic", they mean how much of your life you're willing to sacrifice to the job).

And likability is the core criteria because not only are these professional jobs, they are professional _service_ jobs. As in you work directly with clients. So it's a huge asset to the firm if you're a likable person because you'll have better client relationships that lead to you selling more work.

I've worked in management consulting for a while and that's just the game. Executives at large companies almost invariably have consulting backgrounds themselves, so they know how it works.

<comment><USER4> I know what a consultant is, and I know what a manager is... But I'm not sure I know what a "management consultant" is.. You sound like a contractor who shows up and tells managers better ways to do their jobs? If that is true, why don't they ask you why they should trust your opinion over their own?

<comment><USER5> You don't tell them better ways to do their jobs, you tell them what they want to hear and provide political cover for them to do what they wanted to do anyway. If you're a CEO and you want to make a change, consultants will sell you data and benchmarks and best practices to back you up when you need to sell it to the rest of the execs and the board.

<comment><USER4> wow.. thats.... genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Consider these paragraphs:

"One candidate in Ms Rivera's sample passed the interview by adopting the persona of a successful consultant that he knew at that firm. Even if you do not go that far, you must at all costs avoid appearing nerdy or eccentric: there are plenty of jobs with tech companies for those types. The old- fashioned belief still prevails that playing team sports, especially posh ones like rowing, makes for a rounded character....

This overwhelming emphasis on style rather than substance may seem an odd way to select members of the 1%. But those at the top of the consulting, investment-banking and legal professions know that the most prized possession in uncertain times is not brainpower, but self-confidence. For all the talk of the world becoming dominated by a 'cognitive elite', in reality it appears it is nothing more than a 'confidence elite'."

It would seem that someone with a past in one of these firms who actually had a good 'fit' there would make a poor fit for most tech startups. [1]

So then I back look at this sentence, "The top ranks of governments and central banks are sprinkled with Goldman Sachs veterans. Technology firms, though they are catching up fast, have nothing like the same grip on the global elite."

Our tide is rising, and they can wait in their confident complacence. They'll never see it coming.

1\. [http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

<comment><USER2> Is it a uniquely American thing, this weird school with a caste system based on football?

I went to international school, and I noticed the kids who were playing the popularity game tended to be Americans. The ones who liked to say who was in and who was out. The ones who wanted to be cool, the ones who watched all the right shows and wore all the right clothes. It was a really strong influence on the other kids, and it was particularly Americans who'd recently arrived.

Since it was an international school, not everyone bought in.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if it's uniquely American. I think the secondary school social system is based in the individualistic culture of American society at large, and may appear in other countries with a similar individual emphasis.

In many cases, American children (at least in my region of the country, growing up in the late 1990's & 2000's) are told that they are exceptional at a young age by their parents/mentor figures. This article sums up the environment nicely.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y- unha...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y- unhappy_b_3930620.html)

I think a desire to fulfill this expectation of individualized achievement can lead adolescents to pursue peer approval as an activity unto itself, the so called "trying to be cool," you may have observed.

<comment><USER8> American culture is not individualistic. It's conformist to the extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _MANAGEMENT consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world's best universities._

I believe the ratio is far higher in English speaking, white countries as they can freely join Wall Street and the supporting infrastructure.

The ratio is lower in non-English speaking countries like Asia.

Thus we have the strange shift of R&D and manufacturing (especially manufacturing) to Asia where brightest graduates end up in industries other than management consultancy, investment banking, and law firms.

Soon the new manufacturing centers will wonder why they have to hire Wall Street when that can be done elsewhere? Especially like in China.

I know I will get flak for this but the 3 career paths are not good for the nation, while it may be good for the few who are in the top 1%.

While SpaceX and Tesla and Apple are great, it's not enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been hired as an investment banker, and hired as an investment banker, and I can tell you this is nonsense.

The IB interview process does a very good job of screening candidates for mastery of basic skills -- if you don't have a very strong grasp of accounting, valuation, free cashflow, and so on, you will not get an offer.

After passing those competence hurdles, yes, personality and fit questions do matter.

<comment><USER11> I'm guessing this problem is similar to the one I vaguely recall reading about regarding Google: Almost everyone who applies has the intellect required to perform well at Google. That's why intelligence isn't a good criteria for recruiters at Google to use as a differentiator.

I would guess the same thing applies here (please correct me if I'm wrong, given your experience) -- almost all the folks who apply will have a fairly solid grasp on accounting, valuation, etc. (the technical/knowledge parts), especially if they're coming from Harvard/Stanford/et al.

Therefore, since "knowledge" isn't a very good differentiator (everyone who gets a resumé on your desk is competent), folks in these prestigious positions have to filter for something else -- and it seems they've chosen "fit".

<comment><USER10> Most applicants can't get past the competence checks.

Candidates who could get past the competence checks could get dinged for fit questions, but there weren't so many of them that we could be terribly choosy. Maybe Goldman can be. There just aren't that many people who are that smart, that skilled, and that willing to work that hard.

Now that's entry-level. Who is promoted and succeeds, that's a different question. Fit questions matter a lot more there. But even then I think the key skill was the ability to see problems from a client's perspective, and from a senior banker's. The folks who can execute with those perspectives in mind, those are the ones who do very well.

Investment banks, at least at the entry levels, are meritocracies. If you can understand what it means to deliver, and deliver, you'll do well. But that understanding is trickier than it looks.

Now there is a networking effect to this process. But it's more about getting information about what skills the banks will be looking for, and where to get that information, and the standards that they're looking for. This stuff isn't written down in manuals, you have to extract it from other people. If you don't know that stuff, you don't know what targets you have to hit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alternative title: How to get a professional job.

> The most important quality recruiters are looking for is "fit"

> looking the part is essential.

> Recruiters repeatedly told Ms Rivera that they looked for people who could > be their friends as well as their colleagues

> Emphasise any similarities that you can find between the two of you.

Really? That seems like standard stuff required for any professional job, not the ones that might earn you enough cash to be in the "1%".

<comment><USER9> > looking the part is essential.

Are they looking for workers for actors/models?

<comment><USER13> The full quote is: "Staff in professional-services firms spend most of their time dealing with clients; so looking the part is essential."

Which makes perfect sense in any industry where you'll be dealing with customers and clients.

Ever watch a successful politician on the campaign trail? They dress to match the particular audience they'll be talking to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 'Hang on their every word. And flatter their self-image as "the best of the best" and the most jet-lagged of the jet-lagged.'

No thanks.

<comment><USER15> Actually, no don't do it. I am interviewing for vacationers lately and many people seem to be doing that. It may work with some interviewers, but for me it looks very acted, kind of creepy and in any case irrelevant. If you want a tip for management consulting interviews, act like if you are ready to work, discuss your thought process, ask questions where you don't know something, say something that demonstrates imagination, knowledge or creativity and maybe even act a little by getting on the whiteboard as you would in a meeting. If you got the interview you are halfway there, I am assuming HR has already filtered for the best. The interviewer past me will assume even more.

<comment><USER16> This is more or less what happened when I was hired for my current (tech job): I was asked about a real life problem by the interviewer (my soon-to-be colleague/manager) and I explained how I would have dealt with it (my thought process etc..). I asked question when I didn't know something, and I also wrote an email few hours/one day later confirming my interest for the company and adding a couple of things that could have not been clear during the interview about my skills. And when I went there for the second interview, as I had studied a bit more on their real problem, I had the opportunity to add few more thoughts on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Whether in consulting, investment banking or the law, firms use revenue- > generating staff rather than human-resources people to decide who has the > right stuff.

This is one of the positive aspects of professional services recruiting that I think other companies should emulate. It's crazy that engineers have to get through non-engineer filters to get hired.

<comment><USER18> The takeaway is not that HR is involved, but that engineers are not seen as "revenue generating."

To rather too much corporate management, engineering is a blue collar job. It happens to require computers instead of metal and power tools, but it's still not "revenue generating" in the strategic, legal, or financial-industries sense.

Obviously not all management is like this. But there's still a whiff of working-with-your-hands contempt for engineers from many people who work primarily with money and power. And the cultural differences, and differences in motivation, shouldn't be underestimated.

<comment><USER19> Well, whatever managers think of engineering, they surely don't think HR is revenue-generating; HR is practically the definition of "overhead".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > For all the talk of the world becoming dominated by a "cognitive elite", in > reality it appears it is nothing more than a "confidence elite".

They don't call it a "confidence game" for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm half convinced that telling everyone you only hire the _elite_ is actually to convince everyone working for you that they are _elite_ and in turn will perform better. IMHO it's the same reason that Google has those crazy interviews and claim they only hire the best. It's motivational bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER22> Although, I have my suspicions that this article is designed as click-bait, I will add my 5c:

"Those at the top of the consulting, investment-banking and legal professions know that the most prized possession in uncertain times is not brainpower, but self-confidence."

"The most important quality recruiters are looking for is "fit": they would sooner choose an easy-going person with a second-class mind than a Mark Zuckerberg-type genius who rubs people up the wrong way."

This is exactly why these industries are ripe for disruption. Unfortunately, medicine/healthcare operates like this also to a large degree. The world will be in infinitely better place when this changes and second rate poseurs are replaced by legitimately competent and valuable alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER23> These consulting companies aren't the only "good" jobs around. What a strange article.

<comment><USER24> It was referencing a strange book, which profiled a strange world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> either that or get into politics. between the power that writing laws and regulations, to enforcing them, you can gain a lot of support. then to top it off with a generous retirement that many public servants get you could have just a great time.

I do tire of the idea of that only people who excel in business comprise the one percent, far too often those who write the laws do nearly as well economically

</comment><comment><USER26> I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER27> Clickbait for engineers?

<comment><USER28> 10 job hunting tricks that the elites don't want you to know! You won't believe number 3!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What about having the necessary knowledge and skills, having good grades and good recommendation letters?</comment>


Tiny, fast library to increase speed of coding - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/volta.js <comment><USER2> This is horrible. It's almost as bad as inlining CSS. Your markup should be semantic. _class= "font-size-24"_ is not the way to do it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/liamka/volta.js](https://github.com/liamka/volta.js)</comment>


TA.Gui – A tool for non-developers and business users to automate web apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tebelorg/TA.Gui <comment><USER2> Looks cool, well done. I toyed with the idea of building something similar as a product a few months ago. I think there's an opportunity for a service that allow users to create their own integrations for services that are too niche for Alexa/Siri etc to bother with, but would still benefit from automation. Example might be booking local tennis courts, seeing what specials are on at local restaurant, etc.

Some other ideas-

\- Save macros retroactively. i.e, Extension records all the time, user selects previous n steps from 'action history' view.

\- Paid service for running macros in cloud on schedule, receive reports, notifications, etc.

\- Invoke macros from Alexa, FB bot, etc

\- With above, can interactively ask for instruction if it encounters an error (button not found, etc).

<comment><USER3> Thank you grw_ :) And especially for sharing your well thought out points.

I have noted down all your ideas for further exploration. I'm chewing on an idea of crowdsourcing + marketplace, where people can make use of the flows made by others (without sensitive credentials), and where users with complex automation requests can have someone do it for a small goodwill fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's for non-developers and business users, but your demo uses vi and a command line. I would not expect most non-developers and business users to be comfortable with those tools.

<comment><USER3> Thanks wffurr for your feedback, using notepad will do as well, but yes, I believe there is still a large potential gap to be closed in removing user friction, and that is the priority in pipeline. The other being porting over to Windows after the ground issues from incoming feedback are resolved.

For the beta, a primary aim is to minimize writing code to zero or minimal if a user knows JavaScript. I started working on this general tool 2-3 months ago because I hate writing code to drive automation.

I was spending much time copying and pasting and editing that I can't believe its 2016. I want to retain all the capability of handling complex scenarios, without writing large chucks of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like AppleScript for the web. Neat!

In theory could it also be used to script actual desktop applications with JS UIs?

<comment><USER3> (hit the comment limit yesterday, trying again)

Thanks nerdponx!

Do you mean cross-platform desktop apps base on Electron for example? Currently the terminate points are PhantomJS or Firefox and I haven't tested that use case.

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tebelorg/TA.Gui/master/src...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tebelorg/TA.Gui/master/src/media/flowchart.png)

For raw desktop apps, might be able to work some integration out with projects such as RobotJS or pywinauto. Regardless, feel free to reach me at email@example.com or the repo issues page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you tanky_frank for sharing here :) Overnight the stars jumped from 2 to 500+, and became trending repo #2 on GitHub.

Hope to say hi to you at email@example.com. Next in pipeline is making the Chrome extension more expressive, and porting to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice tool and well done. But the overall idea very much looks like the popular iMacros for Chrome or iMacros for Firefox browser addons - Chrome version here: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imacros-for- chrome...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imacros-for- chrome/cplklnmnlbnpmjogncfgfijoopmnlemp)

And for _non-developers_ the screenshot-driven Kantu Web Automation Browser (Chromium-based, [https://kantu.io](https://kantu.io) ) is much easier to use than any tool that relies on Xpath and CSS Selectors.

<comment><USER3> (hit the comment limit yesterday)

Hi 23432, thank you for your kind feedback :)

I have not used iMacros before but did a quick check. I guess one of the difference would be it costs between $500-$3000 for different types of licenses (common for RPA software like Automation Anywhere or UiPath), while TA.Gui is under MIT license free to use/modify/share.

iMacros supports scripting by writing code, while one of the primary aims of TA.Gui is to minimize writing code while still supporting datatables, object repositories, incoming and outgoing API calls etc. I can't add more since I have not used iMacro but have noted this tool for reference.

For Kantu, it reminds me of SikuliX project, except that SikuliX is for entire desktop while Kantu is for browser. Have noted this down as well for reference :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recently i have started working with NightmareJs to scrape few sites. There also you have to mention the flow as in click here , grab this data n all. Wondering how is it different from that . Also can we use it to scrape data from a site and save to database?

<comment><USER3> Hi uberneo, thanks for your feedback. TA.Gui is based on CasperJS (with PhantomJS as underlying browser in invisible mode or SlimerJS+Firefox in visible mode).

One of the main aims of TA.Gui is converting almost natural language into working JavaScript code to run automation. Of course, it supports JavaScript directly within the automation flow for developers to still retain their full expressive ability.

I haven't used NightmareJS before to comment on the difference between it and CasperJS. But yes, TA.Gui can be used to scrape data from a site and outputs to text files or screen. Current beta version (v0.6.0) does not support writing directly to database, however a script (shell, PHP, etc) should be able to directly read the output text files into a database.

If you are already familiar with NightmareJS, using TA.Gui would probably be a breeze for you. You might have a try to see and I appreciate feedback on gaps to firstname.lastname@example.com or through the GitHub repo issues page :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Windows defenders reports a malware when trying to download the master branch. Now I will be forced to format my company laptop. Great! P.S: The reported virus is Trojan:Win32/Sprinsky.

<comment><USER9> Probably a false-positive: [https://virustotal.com/en/file/504f86c07384b93800120b182a81e...](https://virustotal.com/en/file/504f86c07384b93800120b182a81ebf2af9200ed4a77ce807f0c21e51bf86284/analysis/1487431934/)

Webroot Heuristic goes riot on the Resurrectio_LICENSE.GPL file in the chrome plugin. Only file that is "infected". (See File Details on Virustotal)

Without it: [https://virustotal.com/en/file/44f9ffa063cf3f2e23dfedef81150...](https://virustotal.com/en/file/44f9ffa063cf3f2e23dfedef81150fa1f433d8bf3c3f49d74592771768d15488/analysis/1487432121/)

But of course: no warranty.

EDIT: It's also probably Win32/Sprisky instead of SpriNsky. [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=win32+sprisky&t=hb&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=win32+sprisky&t=hb&ia=web)

Looks more and more like a false positive, happened also with the/a GnuPG Installer for Windows: [http://gnupg.10057.n7.nabble.com/Trojan-detected-in- Windows-...](http://gnupg.10057.n7.nabble.com/Trojan-detected-in- Windows-10-Simple-Installer-for-GnuPG-Modern-td50896.html)

<comment><USER10> Is the snake oil srsly attacking a GPL-License File?

That has so much potential for jokes... ^^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Other options :

Dejaclick

Selenium IDE

<comment><USER3> Thanks supremesaboteur for your feedback, I have not used Dejaclick before. For Selenium IDE, I got the impression that I cannot have access to conditions, loops, datatables, object repositories, invoking by API/scheduling, make outgoing API calls, etc. Without writing code.

I thought it was a rather limited tool (the Selenium IDE part), so usually test automation teams write their own frameworks in their preferred programming language to drive Selenium WebDriver (which of course is mainstream), then write code to do the test automation.

I'm basically attempting to bring that sort of framework out of the picture, to let users being able to do the same kind of complex stuff without writing code. They can still use JavaScript code in their automation flow if they want.

<comment><USER11> You should mention that in the README. 'Why TAGui over currently available tooling ?' is the first question many people will ask

<comment><USER3> Sure supremesaboteur, thanks for your suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It reminds me of QuicKeys. I'm going to have to look into this.

<comment><USER3> Thanks LordKano, feel free to feedback any bugs or suggestions to email@example.com or through the GitHub repo issues page. I welcome suggestions to make it better!

</comment></comment><comment> m-a-r-c-e-l awesome tool, go on!

<comment><USER3> Thank you m-a-r-c-e-l!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool

<comment><USER3> Thanks dema_guru!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Launching Wordpress Plugin to Replace Powerpoint & Slideshare - <AUTHOR> We've spent 9 months and close to $200,000 building a new plugin for wordpress.  It's in beta, but it has:
- a canvas editor for slides
- a pdf importing service (with API)
- a presentation viewer that is embeddable anywhere (with links to you not someone else)
- slide notes (something none of the presentation sharing sites really accommodate)
- publish on your own site and an aggregation site automatically (with API)
We're launching now because we need to get it in your hands and have you provide us feedback for the next few phases.  The power of owning your presentations and content is not to underestimated from a marketing perspective.  The ideas for the phase 2 canvas editor are pretty spectacular.
Please give us your feedback on:
- http://wordpress.org/plugins/seoslides/ <- plugin
- https://seoslides.com <- homepage
- https://seoslides.com/upgrade <- upgrade page
- http://seoslid.es <- aggregation site
- http://sparkcatalyst.com/slides/youftw/ <- sample imported presentation
- https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/526056443ce0 <- medium article
It's a presentation building system built on top of the most popular CMS.  And the base model includes almost everything for free on the repository.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Wow. I just started publishing wordpress plugins... i'm going to study this pretty hard.

<comment><USER3> Excellent, krapp! Looking forward to your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> very interesting initiative

I see from my own experience that there is an increasing demand for more sophisticated content creation inside wordpress

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ishener. We would love to have you try it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This kicks ass! Buh bye Slideshare.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, marlos1965! We will really be digging in on creation next, so cannot wait to hear your thoughts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome plugin! This is big!!!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, jmorrow, cannot wait to show you what is next!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool plug -in . have added it to three website

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome let us know if you have any feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Innovative. A+

<comment><USER3> Thank you, nickchmura, appreciate the support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can't wait to give this a full test run! Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Thanks, grantlandram, cannot wait to hear your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a win for us all, for sure!

Not sure why the sites did not populate... trying below:

[http://wordpress.org/plugins/seoslides/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/seoslides/) <\- plugin

[https://seoslides.com](https://seoslides.com) <\- homepage

[https://seoslides.com/upgrade](https://seoslides.com/upgrade) <\- upgrade page

[http://seoslid.es](http://seoslid.es) <\- aggregation site

[http://sparkcatalyst.com/slides/youftw/](http://sparkcatalyst.com/slides/youftw/) <\- sample imported presentation

[https://medium.com/what-i-learned- building/526056443ce0](https://medium.com/what-i-learned- building/526056443ce0) <\- medium article</comment>


An $800 13.3" E-ink Monitor - <AUTHOR> http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/06/e-ink-demos-13-3-second-screen-e-ink-monitor-ces-2015-video/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's something interesting from CES 2015 a couple weeks back.

Hidden in the back of the E-ink booth at CES 2015 was a USB monitor which added a 13.3" E-ink screen to almost any device. And as you can see in the video, it's pretty fast.</comment>


Chinese SSD offers mission impossible style self destruction - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/runcore_self_destructing_ssd/ <comment><USER2> I just wasted 5 minutes trying to find a link to post here. It was an article where two hackers decided to actually try out all the various hard disk destruction methods people postulate, with a view to making a remote self- destruct mechanism. They posted lots of photos of different things they tried, and an amusing write up of their escapades: they burned them with fire, attacked them with acid, masonry drills, other chemicals, almost maiming themselves and annihilating their garage a couple of times. If anyone could dregde up the URL for me I'd be most appreciative.

<comment><USER3> The article is likely about the talk "And That's How I Lost My Eye: Exploring Emergency Data Destruction" at DEFCON 19 [1]. A blog post [2] gives a quick overview, and the 50 minute talk [3] is very entertaining. There's no whitepaper, and I couldn't quickly find a more detailed article.

[1] [https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc- archives/dc-19-archive....](https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc- archives/dc-19-archive.html#Lawson)

[2] <http://www.sportsfirings.com/?p=4959>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXbq0BFzQQg>

<comment><USER2> Thanks muchly. I think it was probably the video that I saw.

EDIT: yep, it was. You should all watch it, it is most diverting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am wondering what the use case for this is.

I mean you want to destroy your computing equipment for 2 reasons.

1) Its end of life cycle. In this situation you have plenty of time to do what you want.

2) The enemy is upon you. In this situation you are very short on time.

For situation 2 I would have thought burning or blowing up the computers would be a better solution than trying to quickly unscrew the case. Find the cable. Find the hole to plug the cable in. Press the button. Move onto next hard drive / system.

For situation 1 I would have thought that destroying them another way would be just as effective. You would also have the advantage of not having self destructing hard drives in key systems which could malfunction / be exploited / triggered because someone pressed the red button to erase by mistake.

The only use case I can think of is hackers / pirates / terrorists. I could see them running a computer which has the red button ready to go and taped to the outside of the case to destroy evidence as soon as police try to kick down your front door.

<comment><USER5> "a better solution than trying to quickly unscrew the case. Find the cable."

A dedicated panel switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really surprised that they implement "destroy all data" by physically overwriting the flash cells. This is commonly (e.g. iPhone) done by storing all data encrypted with a randomly-chosen key and just throwing away the key to "delete" it, which is a _much_ faster way to destroy a drive. And it's not like Flash drives can function without a somewhat complicated controller anyway...

EDIT: clarified in response to DanBlake (and hackermom, who has just been hellbanned.)

<comment><USER7> Can you explain why adding a encryption routine is faster than just blind overwriting the data with 0's?

Genuinely curious as it seems that would not make sense, if you overwrote it with zeros in a comparable, logical manner.

<comment><USER6> What JonnieCache and DanBC say: keep the data encrypted at all times, then you can just overwrite the few bytes of the encryption key to render the data unreadable. This has the additional advantage that you only need to really securely erase a very small amount of storage (plus the controller's memory.)

(Editing my original post to make this more clear. Sorry.)

<comment><USER7> Oh, I thought you mean "as you push it" encryption.

When I was in the military, Encrypting data was not acceptable for disposal though. They make you physically destroy it, which is why I imagine they do things in this manner.

<comment><USER6> Yes, physically destroying drives prevents problems ("oh that wasn't encrypted?", "turns out it still had parts of unencrypted data on it from the previous server it was installed in", "what do you mean 'encrypted according to 1995 standards' (DES) is no longer secure?"). It's a good policy; but if you offer both "destroy" and "erase", "my" crypto implementation of "erase" has a lot to recommend it. (And there's no reason you can't follow it with a good zero-everything.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmmm, so you're using your hard drives in production and suddenly you add another point on the list of "possible bad things that can happen".

What if this gets triggered when you don't want it to? You're just adding another list of possible bad shit that can happen.

I rather wished it was not built into the device itself, but you connect it to something else.

Just add another layer of stuff that can go wrong, and this one fries the disk completely.

</comment><comment><USER9> Being a Chinese solution I sort of wished they just attached some fireworks. :(

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess these buttons have to be installed in some way that they are easily and quickly pressed in case of emergency before the enemy gets the equipment (so w/o opening your notebook i.e.). But then every colleague running past my desk can quickly trash my SSD. Probably a remote triggering the buttons via software makes more sense.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's the point of the green button (overwriting data with random garbage), if you can have an encrypted drive, which means you have random garbage on it all the time, lest you have the key. Well, maybe that's how it works (erasing the encryption key), though in this case there is no point of doing it remotely.

In this case the red button is not that important either. The only thing they could be used is when you are tortured to give away the decryption key (or passphrase) for the drive. By pressing the red button, you could convince the bad guys, that they won't be able to read the data anyway. The green button would not save your arse, since they may just think that you gave them the wrong key.

<comment><USER12> The green button provides security even if your encryption key has been compromised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think triggering an overwrite of all memory with random data by pressing a short sequence of on-unit buttons would be more practical when you're smuggling data through Jinnah international airport and the authorities seize you.

</comment><comment><USER14> This movie clip feels like it could be featured in a dystopian sci-fi movie in which a big corporation has all the power. Just waiting for Deckard to walk by a billboard and see this playing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do I need the red button if the green button erases data sufficiently?

The red button is impressive but whats the benefit of trashing the SSD? Or does the green button not erase data with 100% reliability?

<comment><USER15> It's for organizations that have different standards.

For example, the DoD has a pretty strict standard w.r.t. erasing traditional magnetic hard drives, even though `dd of=/dev/zero` should be good enough. Attacks at that point are theoretical, but they want defenses against theoretical attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this have an internal battery to ensure that the destruction is complete even if the power source is removed? Otherwise there's an obvious weakness: before raiding the house, cut the power: this will prevent the SSD user from being able to destroy their data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I imagine if someone is serious enough to be using this, they'd be running a UPS too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "We have a batch of spontaneously self-destructing drives, now what?" "It's A Feature!" ;)

No, seriously, this may be pretty useful, especially since the self-destruct mechanism can be hooked up to something else.

</comment><comment><USER18> Smoke and close up damage seem fake.

<comment><USER19> Were you expecting more or less of a dramatic moment? I've fried robotic parts before, and you really do get a small puff of acrid smoke. Things usually melt and turn black in my experience instead of cracking, but then, I've never zapped a big array of flash memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow! I'd have to buy a stack of these so I can demo it to my friends every now and then.</comment>


What's important when starting up - <AUTHOR> http://rememberthisguy.com/2009/09/16/how-to-start-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> Summary: Be smart, work hard, take customer service seriously, and measure everything you can.

This is way better: <http://paulgraham.com/start.html>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if I should take this is as a compliment to me, or an insult to Paul Graham.

<comment><USER3> How did you know that first comment was spam ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good read. Thanks for this Auston.

I especially liked the segment on Clarity/Transparency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>