Panic's Next Code Editor (Coda Successor) - <AUTHOR> https://panic.com/next/ <comment><USER2> Why would you deliberately skew the text block like they did? The page reads like a printout from a busted printer.

Definitely not the worst weird hipster web-design I've seen, but it just invokes an uncomfortable feeling of something being broken or off. Not a good thing for a product announcement.

<comment><USER3> To make something new! Not everything has to be bootstrap garbage! I commend them for having the balls to do it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the only way I see this having any chance is if they make it able to load textmate / vscode / sublime text extensions</comment>


Websites can now fingerprint a device when multiple browser instances are used - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-multiple-browsers/ <comment><USER3> Resist! Use adblockers, disable cookies which live over the session by default, turn off JS if you can. When we get to critical mass, the advertising networks will come back with a new deal.

I wonder if we can come up with a widely adopt(able|ed) fingerprint that we can mask ourselves with, do any of these identifying bits actually make the web more usable for us?

<comment><USER4> I could be mistaken but doesn't the use of an adblocker make you even more obvious - e.g. Your fingerprint becomes more easily discernible from the rest of the Hurd, you become more obvious. Sure you could disable JavaScript but then you have basically disabled any website that depends on it which might equivalently disable the parts of the internet you wanted to access. Also it becomes obvious that your location has a broken experience. Perhaps there is a balance of blocking and blending in. My view on this is what kind of websites are you visiting that make you feel you need to disable parts of it?

<comment><USER5> > I could be mistaken but doesn't the use of an adblocker make you even more > obvious - e.g. Your fingerprint becomes more easily discernible from the > rest of the Hurd, you become more obvious.

In my generation (I'm 28), and even more in my cousins' (early twenties) it looks like the hurd is using an adblocker. And I'm talking about art students, acountants and chefs not IT engineers.

You just can't spend hours on YouTube videos without an adblocker on …

<comment><USER4> You could also pay ... $9.99 a month for ad-free youtube...

<comment><USER5> Not available in my country. And I'm not sure any of the aforementioned people would be willing to pay for something an adblocker provides for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been browsing the web without Javascript enabled since 2006. The worst is that once in a while you will click on a link to read some text, but arrive at a completely blank page. Many times this can be solved by disabling CSS for that page or using the Google cache, but it's still annoying.

I my view requiring Javascript just to display text or pictures is completely brain-dead, web "designers" that think this is a good idea should probably no be allowed to design anything. It also makes it hard for disabled people that rely on accessibility tools to use the web.

I don't expect "web apps" like a video player to work without Javascript, but basic things like reading text, viewing pictures or clicking on links should never depend on it.

<comment><USER7> I use ublock origin with chrome.

Do I understand correctly that the simple tool to block javascript (noscript) is not available on chrome ?

I'd like to disable javascript but the non-noscript recipes seem very complex ...

<comment><USER8> Chrome allows you to enable/disable javascript on a per domain basis. It's not an extension or very flexible but I've found it useful for most situations e.g whitelisting js for my bank website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Random idea: Couldn't browsers have two modes of browsing, one lightweight one where only the most basic of JS features are enabled by default (this is something that 99% of websites actually need) and the full version where everything is enabled. The lightweight one is the default state and the users can manually switch to full version. Or even better use logistic regression or a neural network to decide when a website genuinely needs advanced features and when it's just to track you. As a bonus the lightweight mode would also probably render much faster? How realistic is this? What would be the downside?

<comment><USER10> These are my thoughts (as a webdeveloper):

We have 5 big browsers and 3 OS's that we need to support (different rendering, different canvas rendering, not to mention 3d rendering quircks, different installed fonts), I think we don't need yet another way to make our lives difficult.

I understand that privacy is a big issue, but think about "normal" web developers who just want to show a cool working website to their users, but need to display this message to them: "Thank you for looking at our website, but unfortunately your browser is in lite JavaScript mode. Please set it to full functionality again and restart your browser en go to our site once more.".

I have already used dirty hacks to support the default setting of 3rd party cookies in Safari, while developing facebook apps or some apps inside an iframe that have different domains. It's there to make users feel more secure, but there are always ways around it.

It would be better to add the functionality you are suggesting as an option and not by default, so people, who understand the "risks" of not viewing some sites properly in favor of more privacy, will turn it on by themselves.

<comment><USER11> I understand the view and pains of the webdeveloper, but quite frankly I think privacy issues are way more important. Not even in the same order of magnitude.

Your comment feels like a restaurant saying 'Ok, I understand cleanliness is important, but as a cook washing dishes all the time is really annoying so I only wash them if customers ask for clean dishes'

<comment><USER10> Haha, good one, but joking aside, I would rather prefer that the dishes can never get dirty, no matter what.

I don't think it's in Google best interest to add anti tracking features into Chrome browser (and same with MS and Apple). So for now on we must bring our own cloth to clean out the dishes or go to another restaurant where the dishes are always clean.

The problem is that it's impossible to change the current behaviour of the browsers without breaking the whole internet. It would be much easier and better to create a new browser (look at Tor Browser for example), that has a lot of anti tracking features enabled by default.

People know that if they want privacy, they can use this browser. But it's still a "big" hassle to install it, not to mention my grandmother knows Chrome/Firefox, but not Tor Browser so she will never use it.

We do not need to change the browsers to let them defend us, but to teach folk what privacy is and what to do if you don't want to get tracked.

PS: keep in mind that browser is 1 item in the big picture of "tracking private data". IoT devices are really booming now, and everything is tracking us, our watches, refrigerators, thermostats, ... we can't just install a AdBlocker there.

<comment><USER12> _The problem is that it 's impossible to change the current behaviour of the browsers without breaking the whole internet._

That just doesn't track, sorry.

For one thing, plenty of sites would continue to work just fine if browsers (for example) wouldn't allow any JS to upload anything without the user's explicit consent. That would immediately solve a significant part of the problem, for a cost of one click the first time a user visits a site where they do want to allow it.

For another thing, web developers respond plenty quick enough to new opportunities to exploit browser functionality. If the major browser developers told them where to go, they'd fix their broken sites plenty quickly too.

 _IoT devices are really booming now, and everything is tracking us, our watches, refrigerators, thermostats, ... we can 't just install a AdBlocker there._

Maybe they're booming where you are. I've yet to see anyone, from my most gadget-obsessed geek friends to my least technical family members, actually use one, other than devices specifically made for some communications purpose or whose main/only function is to provide access to some remote service. Certainly I've yet to meet anyone who thought everyday household appliances like their fridge or thermostat needed to phone home to do their jobs.

As for installing a blocker, I've already seen multiple places interested in implementing something that is essentially a privacy firewall for home devices and/or building a database of which devices try to communicate with which remote hosts for which purposes. If IoT really does outgrow the marketing hype, tools to limit its capabilities for privacy and security reasons will surely follow, maybe even at ISP level in the same way that a lot of spam no longer even reaches our junk folders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you don't want to be tracked, the simplest solution is to disable WebGL and HTML5 stuff, and minimize use of Javascript. That's part of what Tor browser does. If you want that stuff, you can compartmentalize in multiple VMs.

However, even that can be vulnerable. Browsers in all Debian-based VMs have the same HTML5 canvas fingerprint on given hardware. Because the fingerprint is based on both the VM's graphics driver and the host's graphics hardware. To avoid that, you can use unrelated OS in your VMs. In my experience, Windows, OSX, Fedora, PC-BSD and Debian VMs have distinct HTML5 canvas fingerprints on given hardware.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, if we can't have privacy, at least lets make it clear that we DO want it and do what we can to have it.

Not being able to defend ourselves doesn't mean that we should give up.

A crowd can gather in front of a building and demand changes, unarmed and shouting. They may be heard or not, but still they fight. Sometimes the crowd is really huge and the other side has no option but to hear.

Use Firefox. Use uBlock Origin. Use uMatrix or NoScript if you can. Use HTTPS Everywhere. Use DecentralEyes and Privacy Settings (an addon to streamline setting the cryptic browser settings in favor of your security and privacy).

If you can, edit text fields through an external editor using things like Vimperator/Pentadactyl C-i command or extensions such as Its All Text or Wasavi.

Use a firewall. Use a firewall in your phone as well.

Search through DuckDuckGo or Startpage. Use F-Droid apps on your Android device, it even has a privacy conscious browser called Privacy Browser, a great and encryption friendly email client called K-9 and key wallet called OpenKeychain. Use Free Software.

Drop the use of Google Drive and Dropbox in favor of solutions such as Syncthing.

Use a password manager and strong passwords.

Fight the good fight. Using this tools you can still enable resources for websites where you need them, literally unblocking the web with each use case. It works if you need to work and learn through browsers. For anything else, use Tor Browser. Maintain an installed version. Open it and update it often.

Privacy is a right that we must fight for everyday and, sincerely, its an honor to be part of the resistance in this dark age.

User rights actvists know how hard it can be to teach people the importance of this things. Its hard and not always effective and often backfires.

If you are a developer, don't put your tail between your legs and accept that you must for monetary reasons circumvent user rights, talk with your team, be the guy with weird thoughts and be proud. You know the importance and they don't. Isn't it like this when a math teacher struggles with his younglings? They just don't know. Be patient.

We can BE the change we want.

Edit: Use Signal. Support Riot. SUPPORT THE EFF! There are so many beautiful people fighting the fight with us. Thanks to everyone involved in the development of this products and services, often left in the shadows and unpaid. You are love.

<comment><USER15> Do all of this and you'll be fingerprinted as being in the fringe minority of privacy-craving web users, so for this effort to succeed, it might help for there to be some form of orchestration/automation and education to achieve all of these together with a wide population of people.

That'd be a startup or nonprofit project, not necessarily anything any of us can individually do and not stick out like a sore thumb unless somebody capitalizes on anti-privacy revelations which can galvanize the population in favor of self-education on privacy hygiene.

Paraphrasing (probably inaccurately) Bruce Schneier's answer to a question of mine on this topic at DEF CON: the best privacy solutions are the ones embraced by many people.

<comment><USER14> This isn't about being invisible. 99.9% of the people can't, including most of the HN crowd. It has become literally almost impossible. This is about making a statement for what you believe and fighting for digital world we want.

You can always use techniques such as blending in if you really must, tools such as Tails or QubesOS.

If they want to put a red pin on me with the words activist and "conscious of us", let them while and if they can.

Edit: changed the word "secure" to "invisible" because they are different things entangled in this scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can see why the industry didn't adopt the Do Not Track header, as it would basically kill all targeting revenue goodness that's been built up over the years. Why not try and push for a unified IDFA instead, which has its benefits for targeting but also more control from a user perspective?

I don't really see an industry adoption of these fingerprinting techniques. The linked page took 20 seconds and 100% CPU before getting a fingerprint ID, so running that at scale seems pretty useless?

<comment><USER17> Yes. Device/OS level "advertising ID" that can be reset at anytime by the client is sorely needed and would be used by every ad network, greatly improving privacy and performance of ads on the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I note without surprise that most of this tracking leverages JavaScript. When do we say that enough is enough? When do we finally agree that the web was better without JavaScript tracking us everywhere we go, and when do we finally admit that not all ideas (JavaScript) were good ideas?

My browser works against me these days. Sad times.

<comment><USER19> Throwing web-interactivity (via Javascript) away today is like throwing your computer away. Computers help you be more productive, but it also helps the people who want to profile you. What's the alternative?

If it's not Javascript, any functionality that offers access to the hardware (via however many layers) to "apps" from the "cloud" can be exploited this way. Maybe we should disallow hardware access, how will YouTube play videos? Should we all install youtubeplayer.exe ?

<comment><USER20> JS is different---your browser automatically downloads and executes untrusted, unsigned, arbitrary, ephemeral code that can do whatever it feels like. Almost worse: is does so silently without the user's knowledge, and has the illusion of remote execution, misleading the user into thinking no software is actually running on their own computer.

<comment><USER12> _JS is different---your browser automatically downloads and executes untrusted, unsigned, arbitrary, ephemeral code that can do whatever it feels like._

It really doesn't. There are severe limits on what JS downloaded from some random site can do via a browser on your local device. A few tricks to detect some environment-based signals and invade privacy might be undesirable, but that intrusion is nothing compared to the kind of stunts native software has pulled over the years, and the major desktop and mobile operating systems are pathetically ineffective at sandboxing that software compared to what browsers do with JS, even taking into account the unwanted side effects of recently expanded capabilities that we're discussing here.

<comment><USER21> >It really doesn't. There are severe limits on what JS downloaded from some random site can do via a browser on your local device.

That's missing the point.

With respect to tracking a user, most of those restrictions don't matter. Your browser _does_ download/execute untrusted, unsigned, arbitrary, ephemeral code that can do any kind of tracking it wants.

<comment><USER12> And compared to the kinds of technologies used for copy protection and telemetry in native applications, what JS can do within a browser is still very limited.

Yes, the browser executes JS code from untrusted sources, but only if you visit a page that loads scripts from those sources, and always (barring security bugs) within a sandbox that limits their capabilities.

I fail to see how this can possibly be any worse than installing software in other ways such as running a native executable you downloaded from somewhere, or following a "curl | sh" installation process as advocated by plenty of popular OSS tools, or allowing native software that you already installed to install arbitrary automatic updates that it fetches from remote sources.

The argument netsharc made was essentially that turning off JS would disable a lot of useful functionality for a lot of people, and that providing that functionality would still involve similar risks if it were done some other way. The reply from mikegerwitz argued that JS is different, but I still don't see how. The relevant comparison isn't against just turning JS off, it's against turning JS off and implementing the same functionality some other way, and compared to the sandboxed environment of JS, the most likely alternatives with today's technology would be even worse in terms of security and privacy.

<comment><USER20> > compared to the kinds of technologies used for copy protection and telemetry > in native applications

Compared to the damage a logging truck can do to my car, a snow plow is very limited. I still don't want to be hit by a snow plow.

The threats to privacy posed by JS are severe and constantly evolving. Being able to profile based on hardware is effectively breaking the sandbox.

> (barring security bugs)

Which are far from uncommon. But you can't predicate a security discussion with the phrase "barring security bugs".

> I fail to see how this can possibly be any worse than installing software in > other ways such as running a native executable you downloaded from > somewhere, or following a "curl | sh" installation process as advocated by > plenty of popular OSS tools, or allowing native software that you already > installed to install arbitrary automatic updates that it fetches from remote > sources.

Each of these requires explicit user authorization at some point (barring malicious operating systems). In the case of automatic updates, the initial install required user consent.

That isn't the case on the Web when you click on some random link I send you and automatically download and execute a program.

<comment><USER12> _The threats to privacy posed by JS are severe and constantly evolving._

What exactly are the big threats you see here?

Yes, JS can be used to track whether the same computer is being used to visit different web sites. But there are other tracking techniques based on other web technologies that are also very accurate and require no cooperation from JS in the browser. The ultimate risk is the same in both cases: being tracked from one web site to another, and therefore potentially identified in real life if the other data held by those web sites in combination is sufficient to remove anonymity.

As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, I'd be the first to agree that this is undesirable, and that we should try to do something about it by limiting the access that is available by default and now being exploited for unintended purposes. I just don't see that the general risk is unique to JS or that JS is qualitatively worse in the danger than other web or general software technologies.

 _Each of these requires explicit user authorization at some point (barring malicious operating systems). In the case of automatic updates, the initial install required user consent._

Again, how is this any different to giving a user a link to a web site, which they then choose to follow? If you want to use some interactive functionality, how does it make the slightest bit of difference whether you're trusting JS code that runs directly or indirectly from a web site you voluntarily visit, scripts that run directly or indirectly via a script you curl|sh, or whatever is in some executable that you download and run? There is an inherent element of trust in all of these cases, and unscrupulous actors have betrayed that trust with nasty results in all of these cases. Again, I'm not saying the situation with JS is good, I'm just saying it's not significantly different to the situation with other current technologies that might be used to provide similar functionality in alternative ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> JS increases the finerprintability a huge amount. It's worth looking at ClientJS to see how many bits of identifying information can be hoovered up with JS.

[1] [https://clientjs.org](https://clientjs.org)

</comment><comment><USER23> Time to start patching your browser or proxying requests to munge http headers and strip out all identifiable data, and to throw random garbage in there. Obviously you can detect this pattern as well, but it makes it harder. Browser vendors are not on our side. Spend a couple minutes with tcpdump and a fresh install of any modern browser, and you'll see what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER24> Tried their sandbox site from firefox and chrome on my Mac. They were able to calculate same 'Computer fingerprint'. Looks impressive from tech perspective.. though bad for privacy

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there a point to third party cookie policies, given this?

What is the extent of the ability to track a user between sites these days even if they blocked third party cookies? Meaning, given an advertiser with 1,000,000 users what are the chances it knows that you just visited sites A, B, C if it has ads installed on each one?

</comment><comment><USER26> Although I can't discuss much, I've seen similar techniques used years ago. Or, in other words, it's fairly easy to come up with new signiture producing schemes. That's why some people disable Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER17> Identity (as in a stable handle for your browser/device/profile) is an important part of the web. It's tied into all kinds of functionality and security.

What we really need is a device/OS level "ID" that can be read by any app or website so that it is stable. Since it's controlled by the OS, resetting your identity is as simple as generating a new ID. This single change would improve security and performance across the web and remove the vast majority of fingerprinting being used today.

<comment> Paul-ish This wouldn't give us any more privacy. It would just become another signal in the tracker's model, they wouldn't solely rely on it. Cookies were the same idea limited to a single website. We were told to clear our cookies and we could prevent tracking. We have seen what cookies have become, with zombie cookies[1][2] raising from the dead after we think they are gone. At the end of the day, advertisers and trackers didn't really want us to have the capability to reset our identity with them.

If you try to change the ID, trackers will use other things to try to keep tracking your browser session.

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

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

<comment><USER17> The functionality (and corresponding machine implementation) matrix of a user will always give enough entropy to construct an identity, but much of this was created because of the lack of any other reliable and stable option. A stable ID would definitely be used since services now spend a considerable amount of time and effort in constantly figuring it out through other means.

A single website is too narrow since things like ad networks (which are the economic backbone of the web) work across many sites. A single root domain is an outdated isolation model on the modern web.

Outside of that, the only other answer is regulation. Something that is missing in many areas although some countries seem to be making good progress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Are ad companies ahead of the research and have been doing things like this all along?

2\. In theory you can look at JavaScript served from ad sites and reverse engineer to see what they are tracking. Has anybody tried to make a database of which ad vendors run which things in browsers? (Similar to how malware is reverse engineered?)

<comment><USER28> Yes and yes.

Take a look at the work of Steven Englehardt around cookie syncing and gpu fingerprinting [0] [1]

[0]: [https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2014/08/07/the-hidden- perils-o...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2014/08/07/the-hidden-perils-of- cookie-syncing/)

[1]: [https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/01/12/retrospective- look-...](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/01/12/retrospective-look-at- canvas-fingerprinting/)

<comment><USER27> Checking what sites use specific techniques is not the same as reversing JS to find new techniques.

<comment><USER28> There's no new techniques, this stuff all uses the same javascript APIs and that's what the crawlers that look for this stuff look for.

People have been doing GPU fingerprinting since the canvas APIs were available, with accuracy rates of over 90%, this further refines it by exploiting subtle differences in 3D rendering via webgl but the API surface is pretty small

And you really don't need to reverse JS, you can just run it in a controlled environment and hook into certain calls etc. not too different to how you'd do analysis of vm / packed binaries though some of the scripts that do this stuff will try to detect these sandboxed environments and deactivate themselves (google does that, for example, cause they run their fingerprinting inside a custom VM in javascript)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For some reason, this didn't fully work for me. I tried Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on MacOS. The results for the Audio feature were the same for Chrome and Firefox, but different for Safari.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd imagine for most home users the combination of the following is enough to track them across multiple browsers:

{ip, device pixel ratio, screen resolution, time zone}

You can then identify more unique browser features to track them across multiple locations. Even if it's not completely unique, you can build up a network graph that's probably good enough for most things - people living in the same house probably have similar interests.

<comment><USER31> I imagine you could have a browser plugin that randomized the values that javascript sees for those, except for sites where they matter? (Very few, I'd guess).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How is this news? The adult and casino industries have been using this technology for years now to avoid fraud.

<comment><USER3> What fraud attack do those industries share which is prevented by fingerprinting?

To address your question, the technique is novel and more accurate.

<comment><USER32> Charge backs. For a long time those industries were dominated by affiliate programs, and so affiliates would hire firms in other countries to use stolen credit cards to inflate memberships, then charge back after the affiliate got their payout. By using shared networks of the finger prints we were able to identify computers already used for fraud on other sites or our own sites and refuse them the chance to even sign up.

EDIT: Sorry, to be clear, the people using the stolen credit cards didn't charge back, the actual owners of the cards would. But this affected the industries two-fold, first in constantly having to battle with credit card and billing companies that didn't want to provide services for an industry with such a high charge back rate, but it also hurt us in paying out to affiliates who cost us money instead of bringing it in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder what "machine" means here in practice. It gives the same result for Firefox, Chrome and Safari on macOS, but if I booted into Windows, perhaps I'd get a different result. Or perhaps if I switched to the internal monitor.

</comment><comment><USER34> This script crashed here on FF:

Skript: [http://www.uniquemachine.org/fingerprint/js/fontdetect.js:61](http://www.uniquemachine.org/fingerprint/js/fontdetect.js:61)

</comment><comment><USER35> Using WebGL while browsing with Tor? What could go wrong!

<comment><USER36> Nothing much. What do you think could go wrong?

<comment><USER35> I don't know, maybe massive pwnage?

I'm sure you know that and are just being difficult. Its because OpenGL/DirectX drivers run a large compiler in the kernel and then send the compiled code to the GPU. None of that code is inspectable. Drivers routinely have special hacks to tweak the performance of particular games or matching patterns of use that tweak special paths, making thorough testing particularly hard.

[https://medium.com/@afd_icl/hey-a-web-page-just-restarted- my...](https://medium.com/@afd_icl/hey-a-web-page-just-restarted-my- phone-c06d3db76542) [https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/829124727289544704](https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/829124727289544704)

<comment><USER36> > _I don 't know, maybe massive pwnage?_

Any real examples besides proofs of concept and academic concerns? As in, examples that affect the average user, not some specifically targeted person?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone actually bother to do this? I mean to ctach the 99% of normal users for advertising you don't have to go through any trouble.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is one of the reasons I disable JavaScript.

The web is an interlinked _web_ of documents called pages. It's not a distributed application platform: although it can be twisted into that, it turns out that no-one actually carefully considered all the potential security, privacy & performance implications of doing that — and it's no surprise that the security, privacy & performance of the single-page app web is abominably atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER39> Would something like this even be legal under some of the more stringent cookie and tracking laws?

</comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone know about any research for fingerprinting the host inside a virtual machine?

</comment><comment><USER41> Just use iphone & default safari, its retardingly difficult to discern 2 iphones, they are literally the same hardware only IOS version can be a bit different. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER42> tldr: "The new technique relies on code that instructs browsers to perform a variety of tasks. Those tasks, in turn, draw on operating-system and hardware resources—including graphics cards, multiple CPU cores, audio cards, and installed fonts—that are slightly different for each computer. For instance, the cross-browser fingerprinting carries out 20 carefully selected tasks that use the WebGL standard for rendering 3D graphics in browsers. In all, 36 new features work independent of a specific browser."

<comment><USER43> The browsers should have an incognito mode that lies about that stuff - <USER2> just says it's a generic new macbook of something like that. 99% of sites would still work even with the wrong info on your OS, screen size etc.</comment></comment>


Samuel Little Is Most Prolific Serial Killer in U.S. History, FBI Says - ajay-d https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/us/serial-killer-samuel-little.html <comment><AUTHOR> While I fully support the freedom of the press to report this, I really wish they would show responsibility and not. I can't really find any societal value in giving people like this notoriety. I would far rather their name be buried and no one ever speak it.</comment>


Hacker News network of users (based on commenting behavior) - <AUTHOR>

There has been a lot of discussion lately on trust measures, reputation and groups on Hacker News. So, I decided to run some experiments on the crawled dataset of stories released by Xirium (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374).
Of course, the real database of voting history of users would have been much better, but this is all I could get...
Calculation
The trust values were calculated as follows: 1. For each story the submitter gets +1 from all commentors. I know this is naive, but bec. of lack of voting history (on the story), I had to go with this assumption. 2. Each commentor gets ( votes_on_that_comment / total_votes_on_all_comment ) for each comment on that story, from all other commentors. (Again I know this is naive). 3. Trust values are added up for (object, subject) pairs across all stories. 4. The votes on the story were recorded as votes from a virtual user 'HNCROWD' for the submitter. After adding up, the trust value from HNCROWD for a user reflects the 'Karma' of the user on the website.
The resulting file is downloadable in CSV format here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/mw59f7
So with these values I tried running some experiments:
1. Clustering: An interesting experiment would be see if there are clusters of users among commentors. I used the Markov Clustering Algorithm (http://micans.org/mcl/) for clustering graphs as it does not need the number of clusters as initial input.
Unsurprisingly enough, most of the Hacker News community belongs to a single cluster. This makes sense as Hacker News is quite a focussed community interested in practical hacking related to the web, entrepreneurship and startups.
Other explainations are that users who comment are themselves quite interested in the stories and the community and are hence closely connected and similar. The users who are dissappointed with the website, might not be commenting at all... Again, using voting statistics would have been better.
2. Trust-Rank: Second, I tried applying a variation of the TrustRank algorithm ( http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF ) to the trust values data.
The result here was also unsurprising. The ordering of users was very similar to what is generated using Karma on Hacker News website.
Further work: 1. The method of calculating trust values (based on comments) is very basic and needs to improved (like taking into account threads and opposing opinions). 2. I want to see if this information is actually useful in tasks like News Recommendation.
Conclusions:
Without the availability of voting data, it is hard to say if users on a focussed site like Hacker News have diverging interests. I am sure, as the community grows people of different interests are bound to join. But, the whole idea of a democratic voting site only allows stories that are interesting to the most active users to be selected. And so, other users will find the website boring, and not contribute and maybe leave. This might be an example of a community maintaining itself...
Giving highly trusted users down-modding power will strengthen this emergent behaviour, and the community will become more focussed (towards these users) than it is now. This might be both good and bad depending on if you are in this majority...
Comments are welcome... Leave your feedback here: http://arnavk.blogspot.com/2008/07/hacker-news-network-of-users-based-on.html
P.S. Thanks to Xirium for sharing the dataset. <comment><USER2> You could ask pg if he would run your algorithms on the voting data he has.</comment>


What ever happened to storing pics with electron cannons? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/27/tob_ibm_1360/

<comment><AUTHOR> _The operator had limited control over the system through an operator's panel composed of a power-on button, power-off button, and an emergency pull. Powering on the machine would start a program load routine that took about 30 to 40 minutes to complete (Windows Vista: eat your heart out)._

I'll try to remember this when someone mentions the Good Old Days(tm). And also when designing the control panel for my media player system, they had the right idea about the number of controls.</comment>


Alt-right attitudes present large statistical differences from control groups - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right <comment><USER2> Oddly enough anonymously polled edgelords from 4chan aren't centrists.

This is a terrible way to conduct research.

</comment><comment> andrew-lucker Since when has Mechanical Turk become an acceptable polling instrument?</comment>


Open-Source News CMS being Developed by The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen - <AUTHOR> http://www.knightfoundation.org/news/press_room/knight_press_releases/detail.dot?id=378887 <comment><USER2> Here are some Texas Tribune Github projects that appear to be pieces of Armstrong:

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.base> (base functionality)

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.esi> (edge side includes)

<https://github.com/texastribune/armstrong.apps.couchdb> (couchdb views)

<comment><USER3> Oh thank God it's in Python! The last thing the world needs is another plate of PHP spaghetti.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, because, you know, Python (being a magical language) prevents spaghetti implementations.

Spoken like someone who's tinkered with Wordpress for 20 minutes and decided that was grounds to make sweeping assumptions. Drupal's internals are tight. You ever hear a developer complaining about coding against it, guaranteed it's because they don't know what they're doing.

<comment><USER3> No, Python's not a magical language.

It's just that, for various reasons, when good programmers are given their choice of language for a project they tend to choose Python and not PHP, or Java, or BASIC. And that's just my experience, but I don't think I'm the only one who's observed that.

Speaking of sweeping assumptions though: I've been a PHP developer since version 3 and have deployed many WordPress sites, themes and extensions, going back to version 2.1. I'm quite familiar with its internals, and while not to the same extent, I am also experienced with Drupal.

I can say with certainty that if you are the kind of web developer who likes a cleanly enforced separation of logic from presentation, or who enjoys being able to predict with high accuracy the flow of control, you will be frustrated with WordPress and Drupal -- and PHP apps in general. On the other hand, if you like writing hook functions and embedding business logic in your templates, you're in luck because the APIs of both do a very good job of making this the default mode for development.

If we continue down this thread, we're going to have a language war; my main intent was to disabuse you of the notion that people who criticize PHP speak from ignorance, as I have been paid very well for a long time to perform all sorts of PHP-related mental gymnastics. I absolutely refuse to use it for personal projects and have scaled back the extent to which I use it at work, by finding a job where I have more freedom with my projects.

I could go on about the nastiness of PHP, but if you don't believe that this is the state of PHP CMS development -- perhaps you think that it's not bad to write code this way, or perhaps you think all the hoops that one has to jump through to do things The Right Way are not actually burdensome -- then we simply disagree on what it means to have a good programming environment.

If you feel that way, I'd recommend a couple of PG's essays to you:

<http://paulgraham.com/avg.html> <http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html>

EDIT: Another thing occurs to me: there are a ton of environments and frameworks where a 5 minute screencast is plenty convincing to someone looking to try it out. You can show off some great concepts and capabilities in 5 minutes. So yeah, 20 minutes of trying to do something trivial in WordPress is enough to get the gist of things -- if you can't find at least one great, if minor, experience in 20 minutes of using a tool, it's probably a good indication of things to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet more comical blundering courtesy of an industry I do not miss working for. For the cheap seats over at the Tribune:

1\. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS.

2\. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS.

3\. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects.

Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity drop what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow. If that isn't sufficiently "geared towards the newsroom" hire a couple of freelance developers to cook up a few custom modules and you're done for 1/100th the cost. Have a nice day.

<comment><USER5> You make very important points. Upvoted.

> _1\. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS._

> _2\. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS._

Us at The Texas Tribune or potential Armstrong users? We're doing pretty fine with our CMS. Armstrong users won't have to pay to maintain an entire CMS since community maintenance should take care of most of their needs. They'll have to pay to maintain their templates and additions to the CMS, _but they're already paying for those with their current CMS_. I think Armstrong will end up saving many news organizations money over going with a proprietary solution.

> _3\. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects._

Is this in regard to the Armstrong project itself or implementations of it? There's little editorial interaction with Armstrong. We know what the two newsrooms involved need, and we've already built a CMS that satisfies those needs. Now we're abstracting out our unique needs and trying to anticipate the places where other implementors will need to make customizations. I think it'll work out fine.

 _Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity drop what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow._

No thanks. I and many other developers are more productive in Python than in PHP. If there's a barrier between your CMS and the news applications you want to integrate with it, you will be even less productive, and many possible projects will be written off from the get go. (We could do everything in PHP/Drupal, but no.) For more on that, see Matt Waite's recent article: [http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a- digit...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digital- future-for-news-developers-have-to-be-able-to-hack-at-the-core-of-the-old- ways/)

No developer in a news organization wants to be faced with an "All these worlds are yours, except the CMS. Attempt no landings there" type of situation. A news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news applications with is a huge win.

<comment><USER4> After four years working in the industry I can say with confidence that in 100% of the news organizations I've interacted with humoring the developers resulted in a disaster. Newspapers are not software shops.

From a business perspective there's no money in humoring the guys in the development department on this one. Money's too scarce. It's cheaper and more effective to can any dissidents, swap in competent PHP developers and go with an implementation that minimizes wheel reinvention and the amount of code the organization is responsible for maintaining.

<comment><USER5> Cheaper? Yes. More effective? Debatable. If a news organization is just trying to put articles online, then sure, that approach works. If they want to push the boundaries of what's possible in online journalism, you're not going to be able to accomplish that by sticking the cheapest cogs in the machine.

Armstrong users will only have to maintain their templates and customizations. This is a requirement no matter which CMS you pick.

<comment><USER4> I once cooked up an implementation targeted at the "Local Events" vertical. It implemented 100% of Zvents feature set and took 15 hours to put together. That tells me everything I need to know about effectiveness.

Basically my point boils down to this: there are freely available, insanely flexible, totally customizable CMS's that have been under active development for a decade or more. Given how long it takes to create truly polished software of any kind, starting a CMS project from thin air doesn't make sense, you're hundreds of thousands of developer hours behind existing projects on day one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't this how Django was born? A news agency needed a CMS and django was built.

<comment><USER7> The Texas Tribune uses Django right now. I wonder if they will be building a CMS on top of it.

<comment><USER5> We've built a CMS using Django, and we'll be taking it from a custom hack to something that's widely usable, while fixing the gripes we've built up over the past year and a half.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It will be interesting to see how much better this will be than a custom installation of Wordpress with the proper plugins to achieve the same functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wordpress is an amazing blogging system and it's coming into its own right as a CMS, but it's not geared toward the newsroom. Armstrong (the name of the project) is being built for the newsroom. Because of that, it probably won't gain a ton of traction in the standard Drupal/Wordpress deployment area, but that's fine by us. We're out to make the best news CMS, but the best generic one.

That focus is what's sets us apart from many of the other open-source offerings out there, in my opinion.

<comment><USER9> I am interested in CMSs and am curious to know how a cms for newsrooms actually looks like? I am working on a Drupal implementation and believe Drupal to be so generic that it can accommodate to any cluster of workflows - but maybe you believe the overhead of generality is too much?

Maybe it would be more fruitful to invest that $975,000 in improving Drupal and/or creating a installation profile for newsrooms?

<comment><USER10> Indeed, the OpenPublish Drupal distribution would seem to meet the requirements stated.

Not to mention a 2-1/2 year head start on understanding and actually delivering on user needs.

And a vastly larger developer base than this project will ever dream of having.

It drives me friggin nuts when people declare the need to build new customized WAFs and CMSs to meet their highly unique needs.

If OpenPublish doesn't meet your your needs, you can customize it for a lot less than $1M.

Edit: Here's a good white paper from MediaCurrent

[http://www.mediacurrent.com/guide-large-scale-publishing- dru...](http://www.mediacurrent.com/guide-large-scale-publishing-drupal)

And the distribution site:

<http://openpublishapp.com/>

<comment><USER5> I addressed this issue in this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314146>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If working on this or the various news applications we put out at The Texas Tribune appeals to you, note that we're hiring: <http://trib.it/ttdevjob>. Bonus points if you're in town for SXSW and want to talk. Email me (firstname.lastname@example.com) and/or show up to the Knight Foundation's Media Innovation party on Saturday (<http://www.mediainnovationparty.com/>).

</comment><comment><USER11> I just read this article yesterday about news org CMSs: <http://bit.ly/gcrZgN>

Should be interesting to see what they come up with. Are there plans to do new/innovative things, such as automating inclusion of crime data, as the author in that article talks about?

Is there any further information about costs? $975,000 seems like a lot to develop a CMS, but perhaps that's not all going to pay for development...?

Edit: I see now that although the linked article from the OP says "will develop", the Armstrong site says the first release will be this June and that the 'base of Armstrong' has been powering the contributing organizations' websites since 2009.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's "open-source" but the source isn't available and there's no way to contribute? Their website (armstrongcms.org) mentions they have a GitHub page, but it's not linked, and I'm not finding anything from searching repositories for "Armstrong."

EDIT: Ah, I see my GitHub search-fu is not strong, but jashkenas' is ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313737> ).

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still in the process of getting everything setup. This is literally _just_ today public. We'll be getting code setup with the ability to contribute and proper links on the website over the next few days to week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Again? The last time worked so well: <http://www.populousproject.com>

</comment><comment><USER14> There's another Open Source News CMS with a ton of traction already Open Publish - <http://openpublishapp.com/>

"The Nation", "The New Republic", "Japan Week" and a bunch of others use it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any ideas yet on what technologies the developers will use?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the devs on the project. It's Django/Python-based. That provides an amazing platform for newsrooms and their diverse needs, so we're just building on top of it.

<comment><USER15> Excellent! I'm a big fan of Python for web development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More information, including a few technical details, is here: <http://armstrongcms.org/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I work for The Bay Citizen and we're hiring developers. Email me (firstname.lastname@example.com) or check out the post on our site... [http://www.baycitizen.org/about/careers/senior-software- engi...](http://www.baycitizen.org/about/careers/senior-software-engineer/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds pretty awesome Travis - good luck with the project!

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats Travis! Can't wait to see what comes out of it.</comment>


The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn't a scandal: this is how Facebook works - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/camridge-analytica-scandal-how-facebook-works-harvesting-data-politics-trump-brexit-a8264051.html <comment><USER3> This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here.

Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end.

From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended:

> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information > from people after they chose to download his app. His app, > "thisisyourdigitallife," offered a personality prediction, and billed itself > on Facebook as "a research app used by psychologists." [0]

Cambridge Analytica's CEO also espouses complete deceit as a strategy core strategy for using data to manipulate outcomes and advocates for using "behaviorally targeted language" to create an outcome. Like say you have a "private beach." If you really want to keep people out, why not say "sharks sighted" instead?

His example, not mine: [https://imgur.com/a/q1zYP](https://imgur.com/a/q1zYP), [https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc](https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc), [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo)

The scandals for me are two fold. First, we have a data repository (Facebook) that's powerful enough to assist in this type of weaponized manipulation that's entirely unprotected. Even if you think Facebook is some type of benevolent overlord that you trust with your data, it's a scandal that nothing has stopped any number of third-parties from doing what Cambridge Analytica did.

Second, we have a sitting president who actively made use of these "targeted information strategies" during his election in a blatantly unethical fashion. (For the record, so did Ted Cruz.) I for a long time laughed off the Antifa crowd as being an overreaction to Trump, but it's now blatantly clear to me that he deliberately used authoritarian tactics to win the election.

<comment><USER4> CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.

The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it? I'm sure there are numerous groups doing this now both privately and funded directly by states. That doesn't make it right, but it changes the question to; What's special about CA?

I've been reading a biography of Allen Dulles called the Devil's Chessboard. Dulles founded the CIA and setup the agency as a prime purveyor of disinformation campaigns. These kinds of Machiavellian tactics likely go back further than The Prince himself. The only thing new here is the level of amplification modern data technology provides, but this is not limited to CA.

<comment><USER5> > The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it?

I mentioned this in another thread and got immediately downvoted, which I predicted would happen. I will add more context here to perhaps avoid that. What I said was:

"What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo."

To be clear, I am not a Trump supporter, and identify as a far-left progressive, so I'm only stating what I see to be happening, and not attacking the Democrats. Secondly, I used to work at a gaming company that was the largest 3rd party integration with Facebook, and saw that this type of data leakage has been the norm and not the exception for at least 8 years.

Trump has been under a (mostly deserved) multi-pronged attack by various left- wing media, political, corporate, and voter organizations since he got into office. What is happening is that many, if not most, upwellings of public sentiment against his presidency are actually engineered through the very same sorts of PR firms as Cambridge Analytical, even though most people think the that it's organic. There is obviously organic disgust for Trump, but it's being fed and amplified and warped and guided using the same social media techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses, which is ironic.

<comment><USER6> There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.

So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato/Koch) and foundations (Bradley, DeVos) and right- wing news outlets to spread propaganda. Because they have more money to spend.

So I think rightfully, people feel that the bigger threat is from the right. It's not a coincidence that CA was heavily funded by a GOP billionaire who wants to damage gov't services to cut his own taxes (Mercer is in an $8B dispute with the IRS).

I think the real problem is what Zeynep Tufeksi has been writing about: _informed_ consent. Even if some tiny print says it's ok in a click-contract where they have a majority of the negotiating power, Facebook is releasing data on its uses without their informed consent. That's what we as a society need to re-evaluate.

<comment><USER7> > There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP > billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives.

Clinton heavily outspent Trump in the last election.

"Clinton's unsuccessful campaign ($768 million in spending) outspent Trump's successful one ($398 million) by nearly 2 to 1. The Democratic National Committee and left-leaning outside groups also outspent their Republican counterparts by considerable margins."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/someb...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/somebody- just-put-a-price-tag-on-the-2016-election-its-a-doozy)

<comment><USER8> Comparing the campaign spending does not capture the (vast) amounts of money spent by PACs. Indeed, one would expect Democrats to have more small-money, campaign donors, as opposed to large-dollar PAC donors.

I'm not satisfied with the off-hand dismissal of outside spending from the linked article. Since 2010, this has (arguably) been the more interesting area to scrutinize, and deserves more than a sentence.

<comment><USER7> I also recall the heavy domination of social media like Reddit by Clinton supporters. CNN was solidly in the Clinton advocacy camp, too. Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the nomination. Trump was nominated despite the rather intense opposition from the GOP establishment.

The polls all predicted an easy coast to victory for Clinton. Even Trump on election night appeared shocked that he won, and seemed to have made no plans in case he won.

How do you reconcile that with the claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters? Do you have any figures?

<comment><USER8> I tried not to discuss my political views in my comment - I'm sorry if you feel that I lent support to one candidate or the other.

> Despite all that, she still had to manipulate the DNC party rules to get the > nomination

I don't think this is true. Irrespective of whether there was impropriety at any particular election, there was no way Clinton would have lost the nomination by the time that Sanders was in his stride. The superdelegates all but assured this.

Incidentally, the Sanders campaign went from decrying the presence of superdelegates to courting them - they may be an unreasonable mechanism for elections, but both groups tried to use them to their advantage.

> claim that the Trump supporters vastly outspent the Clinton supporters

I made no such claim. I suspect that it's true, but my point is that looking at campaign donations (and Reddit activity) highlights the activity of low- dollar donors.

Finally, to put into perspective the numbers from the article you cited, it seems that PACs spent 4 billion USD (across all races) in 2016[1] - <USER2> four times the spending of the two presidential campaigns.

It seems complicated to total super-PAC spending. Many websites state that there was more money supporting Clinton/Democrats, but this may ignore Republican PACs that do not declare a party preference[2].

[1] [https://www.fec.gov/updates/statistical-summary-24-month- cam...](https://www.fec.gov/updates/statistical-summary-24-month-campaign- activity-2015-2016-election-cycle/)

[2] [https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2...](https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2016&disp=O&type=S&chrt=D)

<comment><USER7> > I don't think this is true.

Donna Brazile (Chairman of the DNC) wrote a book about it.

[https://www.amazon.com/Hacks-Inside-Break-ins-Breakdowns- Don...](https://www.amazon.com/Hacks-Inside-Break-ins-Breakdowns- Donald/dp/0316478512/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it really that different from the 2012 campaign?

"But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign.... That's because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists....in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button."

[http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the- obama-...](http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama- campaign-connected-with-young-voters/)

<comment><USER3> This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users:

> Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information > from people after they chose to download his app. His app, > "thisisyourdigitallife," offered a personality prediction, and billed itself > on Facebook as "a research app used by psychologists." [0]

Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: [https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc](https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc)

The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.[1]

He also continued to revel in his company's ability to manipulate after the election.[2]

[0]: [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge- an...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/)

[1]: [https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc?t=1m45s](https://youtu.be/n8Dd5aVXLCc?t=1m45s)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo)

<comment><USER9> The application is different, but not 'completely different". The use of friend lists harvested from an application to target ads was not known by users. Much of political campaigning, and advertising in general, is exactly as you describe, "using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince".

I would agree with you that the purpose of the application was deceptive, but don't most applications that use Facebook logins attempt to monetize this data?

<comment><USER3> This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software.

It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.

This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.

<comment><USER10> The problem here, as is the root of almost all the problems we face in society isn't Cambridge Analytica. The problem is people lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make good decisions.

> It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions.

Nobody with any knowledge of history or good sense trusts any government institution.

>It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.

This would require having a civil society filled with civil discourse to start out with, which we didn't (and don't) have.

The simple, irrefutable truth is that governments and those in other centers of power have been using propaganda to control feeble minds and society at large since Woodrow Wilson founded the first official state-run propaganda machine (the CPI) over a hundred years ago.

Everyone is trying to find a "reason" that people rejected "traditional American institutions" and the establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in favor of a classless, boorish carnival barker in Donald Trump. They point to the evil Russians, or the dastardly villains at Cambridge Analytics, because they don't want to accept that "traditional American institutions" have been utter garbage for decades. They don't want to accept that many, many Americans are simply rejecting the status quo. Americans may not be smart or informed enough to know exactly what is wrong with "the system", but they know its horribly broken, it doesn't work in their interests, and many of them are reflexively rejecting that system. They aren't rejecting it because of the Russians, or because of some Twitter trolls, or some facebook ads - they are rejecting it because they have seen their standards of living plummet over the last few decades while those at the upper echelon of society have gotten fabulously wealthy. They are rejecting it because so many people are one illness or accident or lost job away from being homeless. They are rejecting it because they have seen (and continue to see) a race to the bottom for working people while the "elites" push for open borders and a massive influx of cheap labor that will make their lives even more difficult.

So keep on crying about the evil Trump and the dastardly Russians, and whatever other phantoms you invent to explain away the growing national discontent while keeping your head in the sand about the real problems we have.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with you about at all about the ground truth of American polity. (I have a lot of family that voted for Trump.) From my perspective, the election sent the right message but through a profoundly dangerous messenger.

For me, Russia and Cambridge Analytica are not scapegoats: they are other problems that need to be addressed which are not orthogonal to addressing the economic inequalities aggravated by the current system.

<comment><USER11> It worth remembering though, that this messenger was deliberately picked from the crowd of 16 (!) people during primaries. Voters spoke when they abandoned Kasich, Jeb and the rest. It's not like they had no choice. They had.

<comment><USER12> There was an interval of about 3 months where if Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich had agreed to draw straws and support the winner, Trump could have been stopped relatively easily. But instead they all assumed Trump could never win, and thus spent a lot of resources attacking each other and splitting the traditional Republican vote.

<comment><USER13> And _that_ was due to two insane factors: first, that we use primaries rather than caucuses; second, that many of them define the winner as the one with the most votes.

On the first point, a representative democratic republic really shouldn't be choosing its candidates by popular vote. A caucus system empowers parties to moderate & modulate the voices of their voters. As horrifically corrupt as Clinton, Inc. were in the 2016 election, in general it's a _good_ thing for party insiders to seek a more electable candidate.

On the second point, it simply makes no sense at all for a 40-30-30 split to go to the fellow with 40% of the vote. Instant runoff voting or a similar method would be far preferable to the current way we count votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Watch the mini documentary of the undercover op by channel 4

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

This isn't just data mining, it's straight up misinformation, entrapment, and god knows what else.

<comment><USER15> Some additional context via NY Times coverage on the entrapment aspects of Cambridge Analytica's operating procedures.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica- al...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica-alexander- nix.html)

Note: I tried to post this here, because it seemed worthy of its own thread, but it was marked as a dupe for some reason - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16622761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16622761)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, same. Not sure if it's the mods or what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Summary below article title:

 _Three key parts of Facebook's model come into play: gathering data from people in order to profile them, designing systems that allow that data to be used to target people, then allowing third parties to use the data and those targeting systems for their own purposes_

Back in Nov 2017, when the senate was questioning Facebook, Google, and Twitter about the Russian ads during the election...

 _Burr issued a warning to the sites, saying they are on the front lines of defense for the security of the country 's future, urging the representatives: "Don't let nation states disrupt our future."_

I sleep better knowing The Zuck is on the frontline keeping us safe. /s

<comment><USER18> Facebook treats people's volunteered information as goods-for trade. And business is booming!!

Politics aside, I wonder how this will affect the "Russian intervention in US and UK politics" search for "truth".

I am also expecting that UK authorities will be paying a visit to "Cambridge Analytica" and I hope we will find out the truth on what exactly they did for the UK Referendum, US Elections, and wherever else they "helped people decide".

Something tells me though that we won't ever be told the truth. E.g. let's say that there was no Russian interventios to US election and it was all Cambridge Analytica's doing. With Theresa May driving the attention away from the actual problems and into a "UK-Russia" debate about the death of a spy, it would NOT serve her political agenda of smoke-and-mirrors to clear Russia's name (just theorising - I don't take sides).

Ps: I remember a saying "live by the sword - die by the sword". How do people expect a spy (who has been uncovered) to die? In his bed on his 90s?

<comment><USER19> > let's say that there was no Russian interventios to US election

I know you're posing a hypothetical, but your scenario is impossible. Over a dozen Russians have already been indicted. Russia was involved. Period.

<comment><USER20> Personally, I'm waiting on the indictments of the US citizens, including high- level federal employees/politicians that have done the much same thing for decades in other countries.

<comment><USER21> You're in luck. The company this article is talking about was part owned by an American, and had an American high-level federal employeee as Vice President and their CEO has just been captured on tape talking about having done much the same thing in several other countries. Maybe you'll get your wish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Listening to Facebook is starting to feel like listening to an arms dealer who wants to sound remorseful.

Well what did you _think_ the very targeted things that you're selling to anyone would be used for?

<comment><USER23> I find it so hard to believe that everyone at Facebook is just shocked now to learn the realities of what they do. Their naivety and ignorance would have to be off the charts for it to be genuine.

<comment><USER24> Maybe it's a lot of young people fresh from college and they hear about the big five or whatever, and choose Facebook because they think of it as a social networking company and big, famous, and cool. Just an old guy's opinion - would not want to work there.

<comment><USER25> That explains the actions of (some of) Facebook's "rockstar" developers. That does not explain the actions of Facebook's data scientists, psychologists, product managers, and execs.

Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.

<comment><USER26> You cannot really expect people who have to work for a living and do work for a vertically structured corporation to be ethical and to go against their bosses. The problem is inherent to capitalism and it can make people do far worse things than this, like killing people or promoting and making wars.

<comment><USER25> Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.

<comment><USER26> The conscious and deliberate decision to put a system in place that manipulates and exploits people who have to work for a living and makes them do things with no questions asked is not created by employees themselves. But it is a decision nevertheless and it is unfair to expect employees, who are victims of such system, to do the right thing as they usually fear the consequences of the dissent. Which can literally mean not just losing a job, but life and death kind of choices, never being able to afford a medical care, lack of place to live, prison and so on.

<comment><USER25> It's disingenuous to claim that employees of Facebook are being exploited as such. Factory workers maybe, but not a lucrative position at Menlo Park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Haha they must be referring to yesterday's version of the scandal. The appetizer.

[https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica- revealed-t...](https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed- trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to- entrap-politicians-investigation)

<comment><USER24> The audacity is jaw dropping. Their spokesman immediately walked back all the claims made on tape of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Some regulation I'd like to see for social network ads, at least for political ads:

\- Make all ads publicly viewable along with the targeting demographics. So everybody can see, for example, that a politician is pushing xenophobia to older people.

\- Some kind of ad "fake news" score associated with a campaign. This one is difficult, but I could imagine a score based on a mixture of "fake news scoring providers" from across the ideological divide and news orgs.

The point is to give voters some transparency into what a politician is actually campaigning on.

<comment><USER29> How about simply banning targeted advertisement? It's clearly toxic to society.

<comment><USER30> Facebook would cease to exist.

I love it! Where do I sign the petition?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Facebook isn't unhappy because CA used user data to manipulate people. Facebook is unhappy because CA got the date through a third party, instead of paying for it directly.

The real test will be whether Facebook sues CA for a billion dollars over what it did, or just gives it a slap on the wrist.

</comment><comment><USER32> The only thing surprising about this is that people are surprised about this.

<comment><USER33> At least now I won't be laughed out of the room when I tell friends and family that Facebook is horrible and they shouldn't use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not much of a social network user. A few forums and a barely-used Google account are as close as I've been willing to go. But it seems to me that they're just crying out to be regulated as a utility, if they're going to be allowed as a for-profit company at all.

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess it's time to remind people that you are not a customer of Facebook, you are the product being sold

</comment><comment><USER36> What's changed? I've been telling people this for f___ing ages...

</comment><comment><USER37> This whole thing is just a convenient excuse for people to explain how Trump got into office.

People uploaded their whole shitty lifes onto Facebook while everyone out there warns you to not do that. Yet people argued that they need a place to connect to their friends and all the other crap that FB-users come up with to explain this shitty move (much like cigarette-addicts). Also it is pretty clear how that data is sold. And how intelligence uses it. Snowden? Anyone?

Now that the masses need it they come up with this bullshit story. There have been companies like this before, Democratic and Republican (e.g. Targeted Victory helped Romney, Obama had his Team). The lemmings out there just used the past 4 years to fill Facebook with all the data they could eventually sell to Cambridge Analytica and their friends.

Grow the fuck up people.

<comment><USER38> You are perhaps over-reacting. It's not a bullshit story, it's real. Yes, it is just more of the same but that doesn't make it any less real. We shouldn't allow one instance of evil to slide just because other instances have gotten away with it.

Anyway from a tech standpoint this might be exciting times. It could very well be the end of $FB. I doubt on its own it would be enough, but if someone has been working on a social network for the past few years now would be a good time to do a big publicity push? G+ are you listening!!

<comment><USER37> I am not overreacting. I don't care for Facebook or CA. But people knew this could happen.

> We shouldn't allow one instance of evil to slide just because other > instances have gotten away with it.

What evil exactly? People gave their data to FB and decided not to listen to everyone warning them. It's in FB's ToS that they will sell your data and they did. What evil did happen here? People may didn't like what was done here but seriously they could have avoided it.

> G+ are you listening!!

So the next big headline will be G+ sold data to CA?</comment></comment></comment>


DHTML Lemmings primer - <AUTHOR> http://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer.html <comment><USER2> Direct link to the Lemmings game (written 7 years ago!): <http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember the thread on this game from the forum where the author is a moderator. It's quite a feat even nowadays. And the game is still addictive.

Once a year, on April Fools these lemmings take over this forum (<http://gathering.tweakers.net>) and you see them parachuting and digging across the screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> There isn't even any need to wait for April Fool's, you can see them in action any time you want :) [http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_topics/23?templates...](http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_topics/23?templateset=tweakers&lemmings=50)</comment></comment>


Collecting HN Visitor Analytics for Distribution to HN Community - <AUTHOR> http://dd0t.com/static/hnstats.html

<comment><AUTHOR> In response to this item on the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397619>

I'm going to leave this page up for a week and then I'll publish the results under a CC license next week.

</comment><comment><USER2> > "Legal stuff: By visiting this page, you are agreeing to have details of > your browsing environment recorded and published under an open source > license. This information is tracked and will be released completely free of > personal details. Please be assured your anonymity will be preserved."

WTF??? After I already visited the page you tell me that by visiting the page I consent to release of information? What if I tell you that I don't consent? Can I send you a copy of my browser's UA and extension signature and ask you to remove from your listing? ;-)</comment>


2 years of digital transformation in 2 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2-months/ <comment><AUTHOR> From Satya Nadella:

We delivered double-digit top line and bottom line growth once again this quarter, driven by the strength of our commercial cloud. As COVID-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security, we are working alongside customers every day to help them stay open for business in a world of remote everything. There is both immediate surge demand, and systemic, structural changes across all of our solution areas that will define the way we live and work going forward. Our diverse portfolio, durable business models, and differentiated technology stack across the cloud and the edge position us well for what's ahead.</comment>


Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music - <AUTHOR> http://www.mixest.com <comment><AUTHOR> Mixest was a project I built this summer because Pandora is too mainstream and Spotify isn't random enough. I wrote a scraper and crawler in node.js that constantly searches for new blogs and adds new music to the radio. Instead of an account system, I used HTML5 local storage to keep track of favorite songs and recently played songs.

You may have seen Mixest on HN 3 years ago, back when it was written in PHP. Its data was destroyed last year by a PHP virus, so I rebuilt it from scratch.

I've been using it as my hacking playlist, and I hope you guys will enjoy it too!

<comment><USER2> Didn't you do this about 2 years ago? I remember people had to submit content to it though, I even offered to help develop but you said you were fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The old developers never rebuilt the site after it was hacked, but I offered to take over the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Woah, blew my ears off. I did not expect it to start playing instantly.

Awesomeness past that. Simple. Quick. No bullshit. I usually don't use services like this but I find myself still listening.

You should offer a link to where you got the track, the artist title and song name are great starts.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the warning

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great execution, no barrier to playing. If I understand what you are doing correctly (scraping mp3 blogs), most of the music is provided to the blogs by artist (or PR) for purposes of promotion, so legally it's relatively solid.

I'm curious to know what blogs you are scraping, and how the crawler is moving on to new blogs? I chase a lot of music blogs and host one myself, and know how inconsistent they can be design and format-wise!

Also suggest linking to the original blog the song was found from, somewhat of a courtesy to the blogger, but even more as a means to find more information about the artist (without you having to input that data yourself)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great stuff! I've really been enjoying this--the interface is clean and it's a great experience. If you write up more about how you find the songs or the tech under the hood, I'd enjoy reading more.

Also, I'd love to see buy/download/more info links. It would be a lot of work to canonicalize band/song names, but might provide some good ways to monetize if you wanted to make this a bigger project.

Way to go!

</comment><comment><USER7> The site is incredible. I love the design and the extraordinary simplicity in functionality.

To make a side comment, this seems like an ideal MVP. It gets all the core functionality well-implemented, with enough polish to make it captivating.

Some users mentioned that user accounts, despite the use of HTML5 to store user-specific info, is something that would still be useful. I agree, and it makes it an ideal part of your next revision.

Keep up the good work! This is definitely bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER8> Love this, already found a great new artist I love. Well done. Another vote for a little more info on where the track was found so information on the artist can be chased down.

<comment><USER9> +1 for this. More background info in general (site where you found it, artist(s), album(s) and song) would go a long way. Nice alternative to my hype machine addiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a play button, and when you press it it actually just starts playing cool music? I didn't know that sort of straightforwardness and intuitiveness was even possible. Why can't the whole Internet be like this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Very good execution and a good choice for the domain name. The design (green/white/red/hearts) reminds me of <http://hypem.com/> \- you should check it out if you haven't. It's got a similar theme (crawl indie blogs for music) and has a pretty big following.

<comment><USER12> This looks really great.

The big problem with hypem I've found is that the popular tracks is completely under crowd control and wheres I used to use the service to find music that aligned well with my tastes (I discovered Phoenix and some incredible dance remixes of music I love through the service for example), now that the site's got more popular the music has following the American trend of Skrillex like 'dubstep' that not even the 'no remixes' setting can remove for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love it. I really wish there was a link to more information about the artist or at least to where the crawler found the audio. I'm sure the artists would appreciate it also. On that topic, how legal is this? Is all the music public domain?

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome site. Im curious as to how you defined your heuristics? Finding good obscure music seems like a hard thing to do programmatically.

It seems like you would want to find "good" music (which maybe could be determined by how many unique references link it) but thats the opposite of obscurity.. So how did you determine the quality of the "obscure" music you crawled? By hand?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm loving every single song it's selecting for me. Is there a way I can login and save my loved songs (apart from scrobbling) ?

So I liked a song, then I clicked scrobble , it redirected to last.fm - fine, but when it returned to mixest, it started playing another song, and also lost all my previously loved songs :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that's because www.mixest.com and mixest.com are technically different domains :(. I'll get that fixed up, but your loved songs should appear on one of the two domains.

<comment><USER15> You were right. They were on www

A small bug : sometimes when I click Next, nothing happens, so I clicked Next many times. That ended up in the song history becoming like this : <http://i.imgur.com/yUcj5.png>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Guys/gals in need of ideas to hack together: this is a perfect example of what to aim for. A minimal, easy to use app that draws a passionate niche.

Easier said then done, I know. But this is really outstanding execution of a light app for music lovers. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love this. There's a particular song that I absolutely can't get enough of, but it isn't labeled correctly (says "Track 4 by New Artist"). I've "loved" it but do you have any suggestions for finding out what it is?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is awesome, I've been using it for the last couple of hours now really nicely done. Would love a blog post explaining the development process and the choices you made.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you give any details on how you determine the music found is Indie? Are you looking for just Indie keywords or cross referencing a database?

</comment><comment><USER20> I have fond memories of discovering nice indie music with something called Indy, which was released in 2005 by Ian Clarke (of Freenet fame) <[http://blog.locut.us/2005/04/17/indy/>](http://blog.locut.us/2005/04/17/indy/>); and featured a nice recommendation engine. Sadly, it seems to be dead now...

</comment><comment><USER21> I definitely prefer it to Grooveshark radio. Nice and simple. The interface is a bit confusing, I pressed the music button thinking it was broken. Maybe add tooltips? Also, using the URL for playing certain songs is interesting. If a user bookmarks the page though, doesn't that mean they'll get the same song every time?

</comment><comment><USER22> A link to download/buy the music or even Artist's profile would be helpful. Love the colors, and the minimalistic UI.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome. Good work. It'd be cool if you added some keybindings. space = start/stop, right arrow = next

</comment><comment><USER24> For the lazy ones, here's a copy-paste to add a download-link:

      $('#extras').append("Download");

(Only for the currently playing song, there's probably an event to hook it up to the playlist switching songs.)

</comment><comment><USER25> Bookmarked it and shared with a few friends. Just don't put too many ads on there, and I'll probably be coming back a few times.

Maybe you can make the ads themselves entertaining by scraping the web for the most unusual of those as well...

Anyway, nice work!

</comment><comment><USER26> In both Firefox(ESR) and Chrome(v22) I am getting a message that I don't have the latest Flash installed. When I click on the message, adobe says I already have it. (no flash blockers enabled)

<comment><USER26> Okay, fought this for 10-15 minutes and discovered that it was my security settings in Firefox and my c-t-p settings in Chrome that were breaking things. Please switch to HTML5 or make the flash element visible.

And now that I have it up . . . how do I say this politely? This is the music of my nightmares. What genre is this? I know I've been stuck in a hole listening to classic jazz and hip-hop recordings for 10+ years, but this just sounds like dissonance and apathy. Most of the tracks I've found are less than 3 minutes long, about as tonal as Shostakovich and a bit croony?

Though, now that I typed all that, a single, solitary hip-hop track popped up after 20+ songs, and it's rather nice. So confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What do you mean by "indie"? Creative Commons and other free music? Did you include the big free sites' catalogs?

It would be great if it work without Flash but I understand that this would be a major change.

</comment><comment><USER28> Works on iphone (without autoplay of course). Oddly the skip and play icons are reversed, but the functionality is not? Almost made me give up thinking iOS might not be supported.

</comment><comment><USER29> awesome, i love the simplicity!

i'm curious, how are you seeding your crawler and determining attributes for the next song recommendation? from my understanding, pandora has a team of musical experts and it takes them 30 minutes to gather data for each song (attributes/input to their recommendation algorithm).

i'm building <http://cloudplay.fm> a multi-source music player, and would love to have an API to Mixest. the world does need more niche'd Pandoras :)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is truly outstanding. Please allow me to create an account so I can come back to my favorites (or make the UI clearer as to what is saved for me and what's not).

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice job, like hypem-lite. My only minor gripe is that the "more obscure" needs to be "more more obscure" for my taste...but, that's probably just me.

</comment><comment><USER32> Kept hitting the next button until I realized it was not, in fact, the play button. Nice concept and work though! Would eat again.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love this. Thanks for putting it together! I'm not sure it will replace my beloved 3WK, but it is always great to pick-up new artists.

Well done.

</comment><comment><USER34> Love the music so far, but it seems biased toward indie rock. Is that by design? I prefer electronic music, am I out of luck?

</comment><comment><USER35> Love it. The last.fm scrobble is a nice touch. Makes this site all the more awesome to use.

Simple, effective design too.. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER36> I absolutely love mixest, I've used it when it was launched here on hn 3 years ago... <3<3<3

</comment><comment><USER37> great execution for all the reasons already mentioned.

since it's layout is already simple and modular, a couple of meta tags and @media styles in your CSS would be good to make it collapse down on phones for easier access to the controls

</comment><comment><USER38> Where is the music coming from? Blogs? or Mixest is hosting the mp3?

</comment><comment><USER39> Awesome stuff ! Would be nice to have volume control though..

</comment><comment><USER40> Awesome. I hate indie rock, but I still love Mixest. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER41> Super love to it. Beautiful interface and beautiful songs.

</comment><comment><USER42> The UI/UX is great. The music is great. Triple thumbs up!

</comment><comment><USER43> Awesome!!! i have left it in bg.. man,, nicely done!!!

</comment><comment><USER44> This is absolutely amazing - I'll be sure to share!

</comment><comment><USER45> this is awesome! simple and excellent idea, clean (and fast!) interface, and just well done overall. what are your plans for it?

</comment><comment><USER46> How would you monetize something like this?

<comment><USER47> I'd say with the quality of music I've seen, people would be willing to pay (month/year) for the service provided he develops it a bit further. Another possibility would be to have referrals to purchase the music like turntable.fm does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is there any way to change the volume?

</comment><comment><USER49> Do you plan on releasing the code?

</comment><comment><USER50> How do I select "less obscure"?

</comment><comment><USER51> Music selection is good.

Simple to use.

Good stuff man

</comment><comment><USER52> it's good :-) music is good too

</comment><comment><USER53> Love it.

</comment><comment><USER54> mobile version is needed!

</comment><comment><USER55> amazing!

</comment><comment><USER56> love it!

</comment><comment><USER57> sounds too much like mixincest</comment>


Ask HN: How to Handle Impossible Situation - le-mark I'm currently at a Big Dumb Corp. We have a legacy application that actually does pretty well as an add on to the main line of business.
The situation is this; we host the applications on our infrastructure. The company has an infrastructure group that manages the servers, network, databases, etc. We basically throw a .war over a wall and they just take care of it (this is a java shop btw). Due to PII/PHI reasons, development doesn't have access to the prod or UAT environments.
The issue comes when there are problem with a release. We had one release recently that's been very unstable on our largest customers. Everythings fine for smaller customers but when it comes the customers with the really big DB's we have servers going unresponsive, require restarts etc. Needless to say, we don't do load testing, so this was not caught before release. The infrastructure team just rolls back to previous versions if customers complain too much.
It's a real disaster. The problem is the infrastructure team takes no responsibility in trouble shooting or diagnosing the JVM issues, and Dev has no access to do it.  If it was me, I'd connect visualvm to a server/jvm and watch it constantly. But I can't, I don't have access and can't get access.
Does anyone have input on this type of situation? What course of action can the development take in this situation? I feel like I'm just whining and pointing fingers, I'd really like to have a solution for this! <comment><AUTHOR> The best solution in an env like this would be to have a good APM like AppDynamics. If you don't have that and can't get it installed, next best would be good logs and a good log aggregator/search tool like splunk. Another option (sorry in advance, this sucks, but "works" to find these issues for some definition of "works"): Branch off the last good version, apply changes one by one (or bisect) and push them out to one of the complaining customers - hopefully with their collaboration. When it breaks again, you know where to start looking. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER2> This isn't a technical problem, it's a business problem. Who are the relevant decision-makers, and what are their constraints when it comes to allocating resources?</comment>


Code For India - <AUTHOR> http://codeforindia.org/

<comment><USER2> Looking at the team it seems that except the founder , all the contributors are from the same company. I believe this is because this is a new site. It will be very difficult to maintain a truly democratic model for teamwork in Indian conditions , because many folks would try to hijack the good work done by others (not mere speculation). A benevolent dictator that vetoes what is done , accepted initially would be for best.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why I do have to get in contact with them to start a project? Centralized monitoring often leads to self-promotion. It happens in India a lot. Pass. Until they are really open.

<comment><USER4> That was shot down quite fast. I would give them a few months before making such a judgement.

<comment><USER3> What. why? So where is the open source code for this website?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem in India is not about creation, but adoption, and it is mainly cultural.

Selling to companies is highly driven by relationship, and then cost. The company who was named as the topmost technology innovative company ([http://www.nasscom.in/innovation- awards2013](http://www.nasscom.in/innovation-awards2013)) is yet to find some solid traction.

And helping government? There will be no takers, since they want you to make solution as costly as possible (and thus more money can be allocated and spent, you know why).

So that leaves consumer-centric approach: "Help people help each other." Particularly because today everyone can afford a smart phone. But how much change people-only focus will bring about, we need to explore and debate.

We should very much welcome the efforts such as this one; but I hope we all appreciate and understand the underlying constraints.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is more write code and get marketed here than anything else. I thought the site is more about open source contributions from India serving local needs. Its more a marketing tool and probably idea recruiting for future funding.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks to be a nice initiative, something is always better than nothing. I hope like many others, they just don't set the site and forget after 8 months.

Though I couldn't found it, I am sure it is non profit (it has to be), also are they giving some "no strings attached" money to the people ? and as @linvin said below, in India the problem is not creation but adoption. You just can't create apps/sites and expect people to start using it. It takes lot of time, marketing, effort, resources, people and money to make it happen.</comment>