Barr's Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/barrs-encryption-push-is-decades-in-the-making-but-troubles-some-at-fbi-11579257002 <comment><USER2> Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime.

All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were like this in the west.

Law enforcement officers (and politicians) must confront the simple fact that they must accept the restraints that the law places on them, even if it means letting the bad guy get away with it. Getting the bad guy at any cost ("Tango and Cash" style) makes a fun movie but it undermines the freedoms that our ancestors (by both blood and principal) fought and died for.

<comment><USER3> > All individual rights are carved out from the default government

Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US.

Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them.

This is a massive difference with other systems that lots of people, both inside and outside the US are not aware of.

Take the right to bare arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government.

Here's the key difference between "grant" and "recognize": The government can't take away that which it does not own, did not and cannot grant.

An example of a right (well, a privilege) government can take away is your driver's license. They grant it and they can take it away.

In the case of firearms, the US government does not have the ability to confiscate weapons because that is not a right the government granted and, therefore, they don't have unilateral power to cancel that right with a simple bill. In fact, it takes a tremendously complex agreement across all States and the federal government to make any changes to the US Constitution (2/3 majority in the Senate, House and all 50 State Legislatures). Even that does not guarantee government to have the right to eliminate rights.

This is good. This means, among other things, that the government can't take your freedom of speech away because they do not own it, they did not grant it. It is recognized as a fundamental right. All rights in the Bill of Rights are equal in this sense (as far as I know). If we weaken one of them (as many want to do with firearms) you run the risk of opening Pandora's box and exposing the people to government control of rights.

It's an interesting problem.

Coming from this perspective it is hard to understand why people in any nation would want to live in an environment where the government owns and grants rights --and can take them away at will. If the idea is that government works for us --they are our representatives-- why in the world would it make sense that they would be able to take away our rights? Imperfect analogy: It's like a project manager hiring a worker and then having that worker fire the project manager.

PS.: A lot of anti-gun activists keep pointing at places like New Zealand and their gun confiscation and buy-back programs. The typical cry is "We should do the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that right. And it can't take it away. In many ways this kind of activism is nothing less than futile and even nonsensical. It's almost like demanding that we change the gravitational constant in that it is about as likely.

<comment><USER4> I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.

<comment><USER5> They are more intertwined than you think.

What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your privacy to the putative end of arms control?

People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear up and down the street it's only -X and not -Z. It is -Z and it is -X. Period.

It's why I've begun to fear the legislator that is seemingly able to break the law by making laws they are not empowered to make, and a politicalized judiciary that doesn't spend their time enforcing a strict obeyance of legislation to common language, and administrative lawmakers in the executive that are never double checked.

The world passed on to the generations after us will be a grim place indeed if we keep leaving them more and more shackled by the overwhelming detritus of the legislative hooliganry of our age.

<comment><USER6> You and I have a natural right to self-defense, I don't know that you or I have a natural right to firearms.

I'm a firearms owner and I love to hunt but I am not sure that people have a natural right to firearms, and from observation many people should not possess them due to personal negligence surrounding the awesome responsibilities attendant with firearms usage/mis-usage.

<comment><USER7> Although responsibility is important, firearms aren't an "awesome" responsibility. Millions of kids use firearms safely; some quite young. It's in the same ballpark as other ordinary responsibilities like driving, maintaining a swimming pool, using power tools, etc. As far as recreational activities, those involving guns aren't particularly dangerous (statistically).

There are something like 400M civilian-owned guns in the U.S. If it were an awesome responsibility, then we'd all be dead by now. But murder rates are low and either steady or declining.

It's easy to say that other people seem irresponsible, but we need to look at the data. Firearm accidents resulting in death are very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards the latter, and I think this is the reason:

My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history.

So why is it that there is so much support for tough-on-crime policies that decrease popular freedom in obvious ways? Why does it seem like the less people are affected by crime, the more they abhor it and feel the need to root it out to the last, no matter the cost? There are diminishing returns here. The price we pay to track down the last criminal on Earth will be _everything_.

<comment><USER9> But encryption doesn't have "mostly safe". It has safe and not safe.

There isn't a meaningful in between.

<comment><USER10> Unclear why this was heavily downvoted.

Modern encryption is, eventually, either effectively unbreakable, or effectively worthless.

Or is there widespread knowledge of exploits that can recover, say, 25% of a plaintext reliably, but no more?

<comment><USER11> I'd argue that there are levels of security and encryption, mostly around what data is secret.

If I make an encrypted phone call to you, there are a few "levels" of information. There's the exact information exchanged on the call, the _amount_ of information exchanged but not it's value, the identities of those in the call, the date and time and duration of the call, perhaps the hardware used to make the call, etc...

Encryption isn't an all or nothing thing, it often involves tradeoffs and giving up some security for convenience or the other way around. And in some areas there are laws about what must be kept secret and what must be visible to the government (like in anti-money laundering laws).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a terrible article. There are ZERO mentions of the risks and tradeoffs inherent to mandating or requiring backdoor access. Here is a good summary of such risks: [https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690)

<comment><USER13> There's an HTTPS version too: [https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690)

<comment><USER12> Thanks. Updated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The differences in opinion on this topic are almost entirely defined by whether or not the person has the _most basic_ understanding of what cryptography actually is.

Comment #1:

> This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of > mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep > people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the > government mandates.

Comment #2:

> Encryption is an issue that Congress needs to resolve. However, there has > not been any leadership on this issue for several decades. Apparently, there > is no lobby and fundraising money to be made by either party and it does not > win any votes, so Congress is not interested. Until the leadership vacuum in > Congress is resolved this problem and many others will not go away.

It's obvious where Barr falls:

> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the > meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first > served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had > they not been solved?

Maybe we should be teaching this stuff in high school. The pseudocode for RSA is like twelve lines. Outlawing it is not practical.

<comment><USER4> I sympathize with your position but I think we need to imagine the counter argument the state would make. That argument would be "you don't understand the determination of the state. If you are correct and the threat exists in basic arithmatic and if we determine the threat is too great, we outlaw basic arithmatic. That is the level the state will go to." See O'Brien's speech in concerning "if we determine that 1+1 equals 3, we will make 1+1 equal 3", etc.

IE, yes, it's impossible but that still doesn't mean they keep trying harder and harder and more and more destructively.

<comment><USER14> You're right of course, but theory and practice look very different.

The "I don't care how cryptography works, why can't we just have a backdoor?" crowd is imagining that a magical piece of "common sense" legislation is capable of solving this problem. Yes, they can pass _something_ , but it isn't going to _work_.

Because two days after it passes, they'll have courts full of obstinate people who refuse to provide keys for their homebrew encrypted messaging systems. Sure, you can jail them indefinitely, but that just highlights how obviously unsolved the problem remains.

<comment><USER15> Why does jailing someone for breaking the law show how unsolved a problem is?

Marijuana use is something thousands (millions?) of people have had jail time or other significant repercussions that have negatively impacted their life.

If encryption is outlawed, I see no reason why jails wouldn't fill up if people started wrapping their own backdoor-less crypto around whatever else is used.

<comment><USER14> Jailing someone for refusing to reveal a secret doesn't cause that secret to be revealed.

What is the problem they're trying to solve? They claim to want a "reveal secrets" button, but for any determined person or for any secret of consequence, the button won't work.

Yes, jails _will_ fill up, war-on-drugs style, but my argument is that filling up jails isn't a good goal given what they claim they wait. So my only conclusion is that they're either lying about what they want, or they're idiots. Both seem plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is nothing in the making. Some government moron came up with this nonsense 30 years ago and now they just can't move past this stupid, self- defeating idea.

<comment><USER17> See: war on drugs.

<comment><USER18> Damn war on drugs is almost 50

<comment><USER19> 48 years and 7 months, according to Wikipedia!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quote: "He views the current conflict as similar to one that was emerging when he led the Justice Department in the early 1990s, they said, when law enforcement's wiretapping efforts were disrupted by newly emerging digital technology."

Translation (also this can be viewed as a resume for entire article): The powers in charge are pissed off because they lost a tiny percent of their control and want it back.

</comment><comment><USER21> The entire "going dark" narrative presupposes that the era of the wiretap is the one true background from which to judge the present. But long before there was a wiretap a warrant was mostly useless for listening in on private conversations because there was nothing to wiretap and nothing to wiretap with.

Was the pre-telephone and pre-microphone era some kind of lawless hell on earth where law enforcement was completely helpless to do anything?

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://archive.is/Zz6zx](http://archive.is/Zz6zx)

<comment><USER23> > You're going to find a way to do this or we're going to do this for you

How? By decreeing that use of encryption is evidence of guilt?

</comment></comment><comment> mewse-hn I still remember Comey saying that only criminals need encryption

<comment><USER24> That's pretty fascinating. Do you have a reference?

<comment> mewse-hn [https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/comey-say-apple- encryption-b...](https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/comey-say-apple-encryption- bad-bad/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> These are must-read and very relevant: [https://cr.yp.to/export.html](https://cr.yp.to/export.html), [https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept- justice](https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice), [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case- estab...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established- code-speech)

Cryptographic software is protected under the 1st amendment.

</comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the time some politicians thought it would be a good idea to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)

<comment><USER27> In the US, tomato sauce counts as a vegetable when assessing school lunch health. Thanks GOP:

[https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato- sauce-p...](https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-sauce-pizza- vegetable-congress-gop-healthier-school-lunches-expensive-article-1.978339)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> encryption regulations by people who don't understand encryption.

this is encryption export ban 2.0

</comment><comment><USER29> PCR (paywall couldn't read). Barr should hook up with these academics instead:

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are- failed-t...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-failed- technology-harming-children-dissidents-and-journalists)

Then he can get the pols to push the ever popular "for the children" narrative and have legislation slipped through the child protection act bill to mandate backdoors to encryption.

</comment><comment><USER30> > WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William Barr returned to the Justice > Department last year, law-enforcement officials briefed him on how > encryption and other digital-security measures were hindering investigations > into everything from child sex abuse to terrorism.

> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the > meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first > served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had > they not been solved?

So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"?

It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of digits.

Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct _public key infrastructures_. The math and corresponding source code became readily available.

So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital information that only intended persons can decrypt and read.

This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),

Bruce Schneier, _Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C_ , ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.

etc.

In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.

So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996.

LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well!

So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996?

I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating?

Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are _cinema noir_ of _crime dramas_. In general it's interesting to use those old movies to get insight into what US _pop_ culture was like, and how different it was from the present, those several decades ago.

In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier!

So, if Apple wants to use _unbreakable_ encryption to sell smartphones, around the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those old movies!

</comment><comment><USER31> Anybody have a non-paywall link? Every one I try just links to WSJ.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a republican and I totally disagree with Barr's push. I honestly believe that once enough people explain to Trump the implications of unlocking one phone he's pragmatic enough not to unbottle that genie. He's been much more reserved than many would have expected given the loudness of his bark.

<comment><USER33> I guess that may be part of the issue. For better or worse, I check president's twitter feed from time to time and one of his recent shares includes a talking point about Apple not helping with the phone.

One would think he would want to not let goverment have this power, but, well, perception of things depend on where you sit. Right now he sits in the WH.

<comment><USER32> If you recall, this situation happen before with Barack Obama as president. Eventually he dropped it because something new and more important will come up a sure as sunrise. It seems to be bipartisan if you ask me. It boils down to do the ends justify the means and that doesn't split among party lines.</comment></comment></comment>


Patterns of Failure - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Patterns-of-Failure.aspx <comment><USER2> So.. After reading this, I began wondering if the company I work for does or doesn't fit under the umbrella in the article.

I work for a company that creates online digital "newsrooms". Basically, CMS on steroids. We handle everything for a company that needs to publish their PR content in a way that doesn't make journalists cringe and run screaming. I'm talking about Press Kits, Releases, Photos, Videos, "Baskets" or "bundles" of the above, being able to e-mail the bundles out to other press people, very complex embargoes on content (so releases expire or do not even show up before a certain time), very complex permissions and very complex subscription management systems, etc...

All of the above is... well... complex. The company found they were re-writing the system over and over with each new client, or worse, copying code from the old client.

So they created a system of plug-in-able modules of sorts. When a new newsroom wanted video stuff, we plugin VideoManagement, and all the requisite features get shoved into the new client's app. When a client application that uses video management finds a bug, it is fixed, and pushed out to every other client site that is actively maintained, and they get the fix too.

On top of this, though, the client applications are able to be customized with new layouts and such. Always a bit of a pain, but it's still capable of being customized fairly easily.

So is the company I work for wrong for doing that? We don't have any real clients other than these types. We've found a niche, and have found plenty of business within that niche. Does it not make sense in _this_ case?

I ask here because I'm unsure of whether or not I feel like the company I work for is the exception simply because I work for it.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> I think that's real application evolution at work: You have new projects and new requirements all the time, but they're _similar_ projects. It is natural to gradually build out a framework of reuse. That's different from the "the entire business should have uniform software" misconception described in the article. There, the owners are grabbing for an efficiency that simply isn't present in that situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "we often forget that the consequence of unnecessary duplication is far less than the consequence of unnecessary consolidation."

I don't know that I agree with this. Unnecessary consolidation _is_ bad, but I find that it's more of an effect of that consolidation being poorly thought out.

<comment><USER5> Then maybe just a set of common libraries is a better way out... There's just a problem of a difference between a common "authentication library", "unified storage library", "messaging library", ... and a global clusterfuck with more inter-dependencies than your brain neurons have.

If you can keep them separate, they don't become a required framework for everything - but changing anything in one of them still requires retesting a lot of applications that could've been affected. Keeping the libraries as simple as possible (maybe even as separate language-independent rpc services if it's only for internal usage) could be a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who currently works for Corporate IT, I totally share that pain, especially about the inner-platform.

Our current UberMegaProgram is very customizable. When you want to add a new product, you add the fields the product will have (so far so good), and then, there is something called "operations"... which is basically Assembler re- invented. You move data to some registers, do some basic operations... and you're expected to do all the math and validation in that (which is, of course, un-debug-able). I HATE it but since we paid 800000 dollars for it, it's not going away soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am not entirely sure. Is the difference between: (1) a number of reusable modules/components (I am thinking of, say, maven artifacts in a private repository, something along a private CPAN) and (2) the evil Uber-Application that:

in (1) you take several modules out of the sea of modules you have and integrate them into the software you create for the customers needs (potentially adapting or refining the modules)

while in (2) you rather try to bend a single application and the customers will in a way such that they eventually meet somewhere, forming some sort of application which sort of meets the customers requirements?

If this is the case, then I think I agree.

</comment><comment><USER8> Eerily familiar.

As well as making the developer's life a misery, the ÜberApplication can mean a slow death for your company as you can't sell components separately - it's all or nothing.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you an API to handle request variability by US state? - <AUTHOR> I have been struggling with determining a sane approach to building a REST API for servicing each state within the United States.  Effectively, it would be creating the same semantic resource/operation for each state, but the input/attributes of that resource slightly vary by state.  Some states are nearly identical and others are drastically different.
One option I have tried in the past is having a super operation with a large interface for supporting all states, then the application handles the state variability within the application code.  However, this makes the interface confusing for consumers as it quickly becomes unclear which attributes apply to which state.
Another option, which I have been rather hesitant of pursuing, could involve separate operations for each state with concrete contracts (i.e. an API path /my-service/ca/my-operation).  This seems like it would introduce a maintainability issue within the code to support 50 operations and lead to code redundancy.
Curious if others have encountered a similar problem. <comment><USER2> Short advice: avoid inheritance, favour composition.

Some other things I would do:

\- Simplify API: (/service/${STATE})

\- Create a dictionary of ${STATE} to RequestHandler's for all cases, and a default case.

\- Divide as much functionality into reusable stateless functions.

\- Compose RequestHandler's with reusable functions.

Now when the server receives a request with ${STATE} it can look up the appropriate handler in the dictionary and process the request.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! This seems like a reasonable approach I might give a test drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You need to think about if you can generalize the app logic. How would you build a "configuration" for each state? If you can figure that out, you can build either a config file (or database) to drive the logic. Maybe that gets you 80% there, and the other 20% is "custom" code based.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was going to implement for a similar problem, but for state & local gov (apparently some 450 different systems to potentially deal with, if we ever cover the whole thing) -- my thinking is that I expect most systems to be fairly different, but some to be shared (used the same backend or whatever partnerships occurred).

I'm also concerned that they'll randomly go and swap out their systems, probably poorly (eg fbo.gov just switched to beta.sam.gov, half-cocked with missing features everywhere, and an underspecified and randomly updated API)

So I figure 50% of this thing is going to be workarounds, but some of it shared, so the plan was to just map m:1 localities to functions, and slowly grow a little library of shared logic.

When they do their nonsense and randomly change their API behavior, just fiddle with the dict and give them their own function.

The key though being that I don't expect any of these guys to stay stable, or even sane, so there's not much hope for anything elegant -- the best you can hope for is to reduce the boilerplate.

Worst case you have 450 unique functions, but as long as each one is simple enough it's not a big deal for maintainence. The main question then is to actively watch for things changing under your feet, and to fail-fast -- if it's not exactly what you expect, fail, report it and get it fixed, because I'm definitely not watching 450 changelogs, which probably don't exist anyways

However, in my case we found a much nicer 90% solution -- our main interest was filtering notices, and everyone supports email... So instead we just made a big inbox, setup some rules for initial filtering and pulled the emails to regex filter and slapped Gmail labels onto them.

Finally toss some humans to read the much shorter filtered list of email to determine relevancy and extract any details and push it forward.

Not fully automated... But a couple days work to implement, and good enough, and we'll see if we ever actually need something more legitimate down the road

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah interesting! Thanks for the reply, seems like you're having to deal with a lot more variability than me. Definitely sounds like an interesting problem and interesting solution to match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> PATH/service/{variable}/my-operation

have a big switch statement to control business logic in service

</comment><comment><USER6> They have, you will need 50 versions.

Do you want to manage them as a single application and code base or 50?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would most likely want to manage them as a single code base as the business logic among the various states would be largely common (upwards of 80% or higher).</comment></comment>


Silk Road evolved as 'grass-routes' movement - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-03-silk-road-evolved-grass-routes-movement.html <comment><USER2> For those who may be wondering, the image they display in the article is the location of modern Kyrgyzstan. The large basin in the left image is the Fergana Valley; that of the lower left, the Tarim Basin in modern Xinjiang, China; and the north is the Kazakh steppe.

Historically, the Silk Road (in this region) ran from Kashgar in the Tarim Basin to Osh in the Fergana Valley, although I'm not exactly sure which passes were taken. It always struck me as odd that the Silk Road didn't pass through the Kyzyl-Suu river valley, which is the only road link you can see today on Google Maps. On the other hand, this visualization does seem to reinforce the idea that natural trading paths did not cross the mountain ranges in ways that would reinforce that link but rather focused on a more circuitous route via the bulk of Kyrgyzstan.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose it makes more sense, given the scope of most people's lives at the time, than the notion of a planned route from start to finish. As I understand it, the "Road" was less a journey for a single merchant, as it was the game of telephone played with products by dozens of merchants.

Basically, a human telegraph for tangible goods, with a mark-up at each step. With that in mind, the price of cloves in Medieval Europe starts to make a lot of sense, as do the crazy stories behind some of the spices. See: The alleged source of cinnamon!

<comment><USER4> Yes and communities and networks of merchants (e.g. Sogdians) ensured trust and fidelity in delivery of goods and money. A remnant of the Silk Road is the continuing practice of 'hawala': [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their map is difficult to understand. I can't read the labels (weird font, too small) and I can't figure out what part of the world I'm looking at.

The following map gives me some context:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Silk_rou...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Silk_route.jpg)

Red are land routes and blue are the sea/water routes. The OP's map appears to be the area above China and India where you see two parallel red lines.

<comment><USER2> Close, but not quite. I first interpreted the large oval in the upper right of the image as the Tarim Basin (the large oval desert in China). However, given the city names, it became clear that the distances didn't work. The large oval in the image is in fact the oval lake in Kyrgyzstan (slightly above the northernmost red line).

The lines on Wikipedia's map are so thick that they obscure most of the relevant features in the image.

The bounds of the image on Google Maps is roughly this: [https://goo.gl/maps/akaV2mcgUXv](https://goo.gl/maps/akaV2mcgUXv) (I don't know how well the exact extent matches up). Bishkek and Almaty are at the northern edge of the image, Kashgar at the southern edge, Karakol at the eastern edge, and Kokand at the western edge. In simpler terms, just make sure you can see all of Kyrgyzstan and not really much more than all Kyrgyzstan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ooooh, _that_ Silk Road.

I was thinking of a different Silk Road that was less grass-routes movement and more movement of grass and 'roots'.

<comment><USER7> I came into this thread expecting an article about how Silk Road was originally used by pot dealers... not what I expected but still interesting :P

<comment> ju-st I thought the title was some kind of pun on "grassroots movement".

<comment><USER8> It is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: One URL Per Day - <AUTHOR>

I think an interesting experiment would be to only allow users to submit one URL per day.  Find two really interesting URLs in one day?  Submit it the next day.  How many people think that they are actually going to find more than 365 worthwhile stories in one year?
This also serves the dual purpose of focusing attention on discussion, which I believe is the most important part of this site.  It'd be an interesting system to try, if only to see how it turns out. <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb> submits more than 365 worthwhile stories in a year.

The number of new submissions correlates with the number of users. Number of users correlates with number of people looking at and voting on the "new" page.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's another experiment :-(. I've been here 400 days, and made 60 submissions. None of which have been "Ask HN," "Tell HN," or polls. A tip for building karma here -- spend less time here and go do something notable.

<comment><USER4> A tip for those who want to build karma...rethink your priorities.

<comment><USER5> Spend some time building Xbox Live Achievements instead :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few results I think we might see if pg were to try this experiment. 1. Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission. 2. Flatten the karma curve. Not sure what good this would do, though. 3. Help some folks get more work done as I wonder how some folks here get anything done with all the reading of, and posting of articles/content. I'd be interested to see how many, if any, "good" submissions were missed. Sure this is pretty hard to globally quantify, but if you want to post something, and can't as you're still in your 24 hour post post no post window, how long will it take for someone else to scoop you? I wonder if it will actually hurt the community (ie: missed content). I bet little of value would slip through the cracks, but some posts wouldn't attain the point heights that we see now as they'd be posted by regular folks, not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters.

<comment><USER7> _Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission._

While the quality of discussion here is almost unrivaled (Business Spectator's conversation section is the HN of APAC business), not everyone is here for the discussion. This site _is_ unrivaled as a news aggregator.

Why is a discussion worth more than a submission? Typically a great submission leads to an even greater discussion, but this is not always the case. And sure, we occasionally see low value articles accumulate a lot of points, but the same can be said for the odd low value comment.

 _not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters_

With the exception of PG, who has long since removed himself from the leader board, we don't really see this too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Or modulate the URLs/day based on average pts per URL submitted.

</comment><comment><USER9> Agreed. It will reduce spam as well - startupnz.</comment>


Ask HN: How to take a screenshot of a complex website in 2017? - <AUTHOR> Hey,
(I fail at this every two years, here we go again, now with your help).
I want to take screenshots of a few news websites for a little fake news project of mine, and most approaches return something completely different than what I'm seeing when I open Chrome.
Limited height would be better/ok (something like the first 3000 pixels). Those news websites many times have infinite scrolling.
I've tried:
- phantomJS (rendering sucked, tried every technique I could find to wait for JS to load)
- wkhtmltopdf (almost ok, generates a huge 30M image with all the height, no antialiasing it seems)
- https://github.com/gen2brain/url2img (this was the best so far, uses Qt bindings but not the latest version)
- actually run a headless browser in DigitalOcean with xvfb-run and take a screenshot: I failed at this
What I didn't tried was Selenium, because it seemed even harder.
How would you do it? <comment><AUTHOR> Here are the major news websites I'm testing on:

[http://www.estadao.com.br](http://www.estadao.com.br)

[http://www.folha.com.br](http://www.folha.com.br)

[http://g1.globo.com](http://g1.globo.com)

[http://www.bol.com.br](http://www.bol.com.br)

[http://edition.cnn.com](http://edition.cnn.com)</comment>


Ask HN: What should be included in a computer reverse engineering course? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Maybe just work through this book

[https://beginners.re/RE4B-EN.pdf](https://beginners.re/RE4B-EN.pdf)</comment>


Cassidy Curtis's Marvelous Surface Drawings (1996) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.brown.edu/~banchoff/BHE.pdf <comment><USER2> This is what an alumni magazine is for: celebrating students' achievements. Just think of how it felt to see that homework! This is what professors live for. I'm not surprised that Banchoff talked about this whilst receiving a teaching award, since any true teacher knows that the real award is occasionally seeing students like Curtis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I took this class in the early 1990s; Banchoff was quite an interesting fellow, and excellent at motivating undergraduates. One of the things he offered his honors class was a chance at getting hired to do research as a freshman/sophomore.

He was one of the best lecturers I've seen; he'd collect questions about the previous reading at the beginning of class, and realtime construct a lecture about the material by winding his way through answering all the questions.

The combination was pretty motivating; I spent many hours shading 3d graphs by hand. Mine weren't this nice, but I still wish I had them.

<comment><USER4> I also took Banchoff's class in the early '90's. It was fantastic, and he had a knack for filling multivariable calculus with excitement. I'll never forget his "monkey saddle" graphs.

That class kicked my ass, but it was one of the most memorable classes that I took at Brown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you have seen Shrek or How to Train Your Dragon, you have seen some of the work the student produced after graduation.

See [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0996697/](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0996697/)

<comment><USER6> His website states that after Dreamworks he works for Google now. But I guess this is one of his best works:

[http://otherthings.com/howtobaby/](http://otherthings.com/howtobaby/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> He's still doing awesome stuff. See his blog, for example: [http://otherthings.com/blog/](http://otherthings.com/blog/) (I never knew Cassidy but I studied under Tom Banchoff a few years later, so I certainly knew his homeworks!)

</comment><comment><USER8> Notable that Cassidy Curtis is a synesthete:

[http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/](http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/)

I wonder if that plays a role.

Fantastic article, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh, nice! If you enjoy "mathematical drawing" give a look at "A topological picturebook" by George K. Francis.</comment>


U.S. Job Growth Is Great, but Boosting Wages Will Be Much Harder - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/u-s-job-growth-is-great-but-boosting-wages-will-be-much-harder <comment><USER2> Wages are growing, mainly at the low end. We are seeing efforts to stop this via many different types of immigration.</comment>


Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://effbot.org/zone/simple-top-down-parsing.htm <comment><USER2> Classic paper from 2008. Still informative.</comment>


Canadians, fight Internet Usage Based Billing (UBB) - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/04/14/canadians-fight-internet-usage-based-billing-ubb/

<comment><USER2> The simple basis here is that Bell Canada owns huge swathes of the Canadian network infrastructure. If you live in a city then you're lucky, because Bell might have at least one competitor operating, usually a Cable company.

If you live in even the least-remote rural area you're likely stuck with the choice of Bell or one of the ISP's that piggy backs off of Bell's network. The example here is TekSavvy, their speed on the Bell network is capped at 5mbps despite (in certain areas) Bell can provide 16mpbs to its own customers, however TekSavvy provides unlimited bandwidth for a very reasonable price. $30 for 200gb, $40 unlimited with TekSavvy, but Bell offers 100gb for $80 and thats the best you'll ever get. What Bell is trying to do is make sure all the smaller providers, like TekSavvy, will have to charge their customers more per GB than Bell does.

Bell wants you to have to pay $1/GB or _more_ for any other ISP on their network, or you can choose $0.80/GB with them. When currently you can pay $0.15/GB or _less_ with their competitors.

Back in the UK BT, who owns almost 100% of the lines, tried to do a similar thing, but regulators stepped in and now you can get internet access from dozens of different providers. You can buy it from your grocery store for god's sake!

</comment><comment><USER3> Why?

I used to pay for $30 per month for 20 hours of dial-up access, with an extra $1 per hour charged after that. Market forces reduced that cost significantly as new entrants with new technologies emerged to tap into a growing customer base, and that will happen again if bandwidth caps are imposed by existing service providers.

The last thing I want is for legislators to decide how much my service providers can charge and for what services they'll do so. As with any give- and-take, existing providers will ask for some protectionist advantage in exchange, and that will block new entrants and slow the adoption of new communication technologies.

Ten years from now, this argument is going to sound as stupid as if I had demanded my MP legislate a whopping 100 hours of dial-up access for my $30.

<comment><USER4> >The last thing I want is for legislators to decide how much my service providers can charge and for what services they'll do so.

You can't suddenly impose laissez-faire capitalism on an industry so closely tied to government regulation. Continued regulation is needed so that corporations can't take advantage of the infrastructure privileges granted to them. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around.

No one had a monopoly over dial-up, the difference with broadband is that there is a legislated monopoly.

<comment><USER3> It's not laissez-faire and it's not 'suddenly imposed'

If there's plenty of bandwidth to go around and existing providers impose caps, then new entrants will lease that bandwidth and provide residential customers with unlimited bandwidth plans.

Telecom regulations should prevent new entrants from being blocked from doing just that. If they are blocked (and the Canadian system isn't laissez-faire, so they shouldn't be), then you'll have an issue to gripe about.

<comment><USER2> They aren't blocked, what Bell is doing is trying to block the system! All small ISP's are forced to go through Bell's network, and Bell is trying to charge them higher per gigabyte than they do their own customers, so you have no choice but to go with Bell if you're stranded on their network.

<comment><USER4> Locally to me, Verizon wholesales DSL at retail prices. So it is $30/month to get it from Verizon and $60/month to get it from anyone else.

<comment><USER5> The problem being Bell is wanting to cap all the other providers.

Currently here it is the opposite - it is cheaper from other providers than from Bell directly. Now, it wants to be able to also cap those other providers to prevent them from offering unlimited services.

Bell wants to do what it does in the mobile space and nail everyone with massive overage fees after the tiny limits are exceeded. Until mid 2008, the largest cell phone data plan you could get from Bell or Rogers was 5 MEGS. They charged by the kilobyte after that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WooCommerce Hosting Stack First Time with Varnish - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudways.com/blog/varnish-compatible-woocommerce/

<comment><USER2> ok so what's next with the Varnish-Cache compatibility with all Woo Cart Extensions? I have seen some people facing the Ajax cart issues. But, looks like those on comments are solved. I'm happy with the test site and planning to migrate soon. Can you guys do it for me?

<comment><AUTHOR> What I see is that they are providing migration for free for your 1st website that you want to move there. Configuring varnish is itself a great hassle. So, its great that its configured by the service provider. I like the console UI as well. Easy to use for the people who have less server knowledge like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Avoid at all costs caching the cachable parts of the app will save you nothing in the REAL WORLD</comment>


Show HN: Masonry – JavaScript grid layout library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/desandro/masonry <comment><USER2> can't way to move into something more data oriented than css as cascading is powerful but confusing. this shows promise, still doesn't play very nice with outer transitions, i.e. [http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/4-21-2016/oXAN7e.gif](http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/4-21-2016/oXAN7e.gif)</comment>


Show HN: Sportageous – A sports media platform for smart sports content - <AUTHOR> https://www.sportageous.co <comment><AUTHOR> I've started this sports media platform along with my 2 co-founders after getting tired of rumours, memes and fake news in sports. Would really appreciate some thoughts/feedback on the content and the UI/UX as virtually everything has been in-house as we've continued to grow.

<comment><USER2> ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Writing a recursive descent parser for arithmetic expressions - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to write a top-down recursive-descent parser for basic arithmetic expressions, but 'm running into some hangups.
For simplicity's sake, let's restrict operators to `( ) * / + -` in that order of precedence. And of course we have arbitrary numbers as operands.
So, my first intuition is to view the parser as sort of the inverse of the production rules of the BNF grammar; any grammar rule that produces a symbol should have a corresponding parse rule that consumes that symbol. That all seems to make sense to me.
I'm working on the expression ` 1 + 2 * 3 - (4 + 5)` first. There's not much nesting so that part isn't bad.
My first naive approach greedily grabs the left-hand-side operand after performing a lookahead. So in this case it sees the `1 +` and makes an AddExpression where lhs = 1 and rhs = a recursive call to the parse function with the rest of the tokens as input. Then it attaches to the rhs of the add expression a MultiplyExpression where the lhs = 2 and the rhs is the recursive call...etc etc
Following this approach ends up giving me a parse tree that corresponds to the expression `1 + 2 * (3 + (4 + 5))` instead of `1 + 2 * 3 - (4 + 5)`.
So, I can intuitively see that precedence needs to be considered, and it requires either scanning ahead too many tokens (I'm trying to write an LL(1) parser) or I guess doing something like the shunting yard algorithm with an operator stack and a value stack. So I guess my question is - is there some elegant, recursive way to solve this problem without having to use a stack or look ahead an arbitrary number of tokens? Basically I want to find n elegant recursive solution, but a stack-based one is fine if it's the best way of solving the problem.
This was all pretty stream of consciousness so sorry if anything isn't clear. The goal is eventually to write a LL(1) parser generator so that's why I'm trying to make sure my understanding is as solid as possible. <comment><USER2> Maybe this example will help? [https://github.com/SAP/chevrotain/blob/master/examples/gramm...](https://github.com/SAP/chevrotain/blob/master/examples/grammars/calculator/calculator_pure_grammar.js)

It is implemented using a parsing library so the lookaheads are automatically performed by the library, but the general pattern is still relevant.

Basically each binary precedence level gets a rule (weakest first) and each of these rules will consume as many operators of the current precedence level as it can.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for learning iOS development in 2013 - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm a primarily ruby developer, however a friend has asked if I can help with an iOS app for his site (integrating features so it's not just a wrapper for the site)
I've looked at, and done Hello, World style iOS test apps in the past, but this was in iOS4 days, looking at XCode now it's all Storyboards which doesn't seem to tie in with the eBook I bought way-back-when (PragProgs iPhone SDK Development from 2009) and things have moved a long way since then.
So, what are the resources you'd recommend (paid eBooks included) for a developer who's basically new to Obj-C and iOS development?
Cheers!
Kevin <comment><USER2> First off, I have some small side iOS projects coming down the pipeline so if you're interested in helping a bit, get in touch.

Also, storyboards are really powerful and can save you a lot of time once you learn them.

I'm mostly a Rails/Ruby dev as well but am doing more iOS. My recommended resources are:

1\. BIG Nerd Ranch book (best book IMO) [http://www.amazon.com/iOS- Programming-Ranch-Guide-Guides/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming- Ranch-Guide- Guides/dp/0321821521/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366754358&sr=1-1&keywords=big+nerd+ranch)

2\. Programming iOS (5|6) by Neuburg (either version is fine) [http://www.amazon.com/Programming-iOS-6-Matt- Neuburg/dp/1449...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-iOS-6-Matt- Neuburg/dp/1449365760/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366754378&sr=1-3&keywords=ios+programming)

3\. Ray Wenderlich blog and tutorials bundle (worth the money) [http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-5-and-ios-6-by- tutori...](http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-5-and-ios-6-by-tutorials- bundle) His storyboard tutorials are great

4\. NSScreencast (think RailsCasts for iOS. Not as thorough yet, but worth the money) <http://nsscreencast.com/>

5\. Do a week-long, in person class such as <http://pragmaticstudio.com/ios> if you can afford it

\---

Other than that, I really haven't run into issues I couldn't figure out via Stackoverflow or Apple's docs/samples.

The real issue for me was wrapping my head around the frameworks and understanding how it differs from Rails/web world. You might find it helpful to just take a week off and bury yourself in it. Try and pick a very simple (but useful/functional) app you can build and ship in a couple weeks. Give yourself a deadline and do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, I know its probably odd, but I tend to favor video resources when picking up a new language. My process tends to be to go through a great overview series that hits the high concepts, and then use books + internet as a reference for improvement.

For IOS and Obj-C there is one absolute winner for me:

Simon Allardice's Obj-C and iOS courses <http://www.lynda.com/Simon- Allardice/21-1.html>

He is by far the most thorough and entertaining bald, british, programming teacher ever. Granted, he focuses on the core essentials, but that's generally what you need anyway.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER4> Haha, yea I love his voice. The distortion is hilarious when you speed up the videos and just as entertaining.

Definitely a great resource worth getting a Lynda account for if you University doesn't offer one for you already

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple's own tutorials and videos are quite good. They are available once you become a paid ADC member.

Hillegass's book is what most people use, but it's slightly dated at the moment. I actually prefer Ray Wenderlich's material these days. Once you get advanced, Mike Ash's Friday Q&A is a great resource.

Video wise, the Stanford iOS course on iTunes U is great, but I'm not sure how up to date it is.

<comment><USER6> I second the Stanford iOS class - a new one just finished in March, so it's very up to date: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/coding-together- developin...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/coding-together- developing/id593208016)

<comment><USER4> Third, I just took the class as well and the forums on piazza are also a great resource. They went live when the class started and the community was very helpful for a beginner. There are still some active people there so check it out.

<https://piazza.com/stanford/fall2012/cs193p/home>

EDIT: that was the old link <https://piazza.com/stanford/winter2013/cs193p/home>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to make this one app and then go back to Ruby (or what you normally do) afterwards, you could probably wing it with a variety of specific online tutorials, GitHub, StackOverflow, and of course 'Google'.

If you want to become a talented iOS Developer, callmeed posted everything you'll need to start your journey.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all your answers, I'm looking to do more "proper" iOS development as time goes on rather than just winging it for one app and never returning :) As suggested by callmeed, I'm going to try and book a week off from my day job as trying to learn something like this in the few hours I have free in evenings isn't going to happen (at least not productively) and I've got a target of what I hope to get done by the end of the week - thanks for your suggestions everyone, and I'll be in touch shortly callmeed :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out <http://www.getappninja.com/> which currently features an iOS for Absolute Beginners video screencast series that takes you from zero knowledge to building a Zombie Pet game from scratch.

Also Ray Wenderlich resources are great IMO.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of App Ninja :)</comment>


Return to the rainforest: A son's search for his Amazonian mother - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23758087

<comment><USER2> Just went to submit this myself. Interesting read, it deserved to hit the front page imho.</comment>


The rush to exploit an increasingly ice-free Arctic - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/the-rush-to-exploit-an-increasingly-ice-free-arctic/ <comment><USER2> Just another point - do we have any vague ideas the effect this opening of the ice will have on the gulf stream.

As a mortgage holding Brit, who recently holidayed on our west coast which has dolphins, surfers and palm trees (really), I would like to know if I will pay my mortgage off only to find the housing Market in UK a little bit depressed with winters like Toronto

</comment><comment><USER2> I feel like there is a train humanity is on, gathering speed ever faster, but the railroad in front of us is being manufactured in the rear car and passed overhead and laid down just in time for the wheels to hit.

We have been getting better over the years in new railroad manufacturing techniques, and there is no particular reason why we _will_ fail, just ... well.</comment>


Skiff Reader: The Largest Yet Thinnest eBook Reader to Date - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5439734/skiff-reader-the-largest-yet-thinnest-ebook-reader-to-date

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the plastic logic reader will have competition after all.

I could use something like this. I'm annoyed, though, that all of them insist on being a networked device. I really just want a miniature flash drive that displays files.</comment>


Distributed Systems (3rd Edition – 2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/distributed-systems-3rd-edition-2017/ <comment><USER2> Note that you need to provide an e-mail address to download the book (but my address from a disposable e-mail service worked OK).</comment>


A source for this picture? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562095677975441408/photo/1 <comment><USER2> Just to head off a lot of confusion stirring on the net about this: The person who posted the picture is claiming this woman is doing app _ratings_ , not some outsourced App Store submitted app approval process.

<comment><USER3> Ah interesting, as in: she's the person who rates your app if you "buy" some ratings?

<comment><USER4> Yes. It's funny because everyone knows this has been going on forever, but I guess once they put a picture to it, everyone gets up in arms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised the crowd here is surprised... you can also hire Chinese to solve catchpas, etc. and it's on the cheap side of things.

<comment><USER6> I definitely wasn't surprised, as I've known this principle has been going on for some time. But I, for some reason, thought this could be done somehow with a single device, or something. I never really knew _how_ it happened, just knew _that_ it happened.

So this picture answered that question for me (though I'm sure this isn't the only way it can or is being executed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> She could possibly make more money touring with a sound mixer and synthesizer apps on all those. I'd go see some live complex drone music, I'd help her set it up.

<comment><USER8> It's quite probable if someone is manually entering ratings on hundreds of phones, that the owner of the phones is not the same person doing the labor.

Is there a reason that you think she, in particular, would make money using a synth app on those phones, versus anyone else?

<comment><USER7> If she doesn't own them she should consider asking her boss if she can open for Melt Banana sometime.

What would happen if you used each phone to call another phone on the rack and then put them all on speaker phone? The feedback would be fascinating.

What if you created a FaceTime array in which each phone connected to an audience member's phone? You could then place tone emitters throughout the venue and the physical placement of each participant would shape a chord assembled on stage.

So much room for creativity beyond the creative grey market businessman's greed. That was the point of my post.

<comment><USER8> There's room for how many app store ratings companies/employees? With a reasonably stable income, too. There's room for how many iPhone feedback musicians?

In fact, what you're suggesting may have already happened. Boss took a set of iPhones, then ran a band. And then bought more iPhones to grow his ratings business. So the image you see would be the same, regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks something quite easy to detect and ignore if apple was serious about ratings

<comment><USER10> How would you detect it? Any detection algorithm that springs to mind seems easily defeatable. These devices are most likely all on individual pay-as-you- go cellular cards, each with their own iTunes account. Each review is probably either only a star rating, or for text-based reviews a randomly generated unique paragraph.

You could detect similar texts but that's just an arms race against new corpora being added to their generator.

Maybe detect the same app getting a lot of similar ratings in a period of time? But then the farm could just randomize the input list of apps among the farmers and stretch out the time period to make it look like more natural traffic.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER11> Reviews are tied to app store accounts, which are tied to credit cards. Reviews also reset with each version of the app. You could detect the same accounts being used to review each version of the app, discount ratings from newly created accounts, discount ratings from accounts with reused credit cards, etc. It seems like an easier way to game the system would be to pay anyone with an iPhone $5 to download and rate your app.

<comment><USER12> You can have an app store account without a credit card. I don't think it was always possible, but it is now. Also, the accounts don't have to be newly created. This operation could be quite long-lived.

You could have some automated system which loads many different apps to be rated, so that the person in the picture isn't rating the same app over and over again in a short period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing illustration of a Sybil attack

<comment><USER14> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack) \- didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm impressed the first reply came from someone from WSJ looking to make an article I presume.

</comment><comment><USER16> It doesn't look like there is any EXIF data in the image, perhaps because it's been opened and saved so many times. If we had the original image, that might shed some light as to where/when it was taken.

<comment><USER17> Twitter strips EXIF. Most big sites do.

<comment><USER18> why do they strip the EXIF?

<comment><USER19> i imagine it is to protect the identify and location of people who post images and have no idea about exif/how to strip it.

Also saves us who do know from the hassle of stripping it out on our phones before posting ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fiverr's headquarters exposed.

</comment><comment><USER21> Gaming the system will always be apart of the game.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems like this could be about app store ratings, but it seems more likely that this is about manual testing. Wake me up when there's some more (credible) information.

<comment><USER23> That seems like an awful lot of iPads for one person if she's just doing manual testing.

<comment><USER24> Well, they might be testing many apps at once. A lot of bugs are the "well it was running a long time and it crashed" type that you'd outsource.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The technical term is "growth hacking"

<comment><USER26> lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In that pic there are roughly 18*6=108 devices per panel. On the other side of the girl it seem there's another panel which could have another ~108 devices. That's 216 good reviews/votes coming from a single asian lady... notbad.jpg

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the whole iTunes connection and review process, and send fake reviews automatically from a server, or even from a botnet.

</comment><comment><USER29> That's why I feel lucky that my very first attempt to make a food rating app for China market failed at product building stage almost 3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> As replied the OP, it's an anonymous friend of him.

<comment><USER31> He says in his very next tweet that he doesn't know if it's real:

[https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824](https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824)

 _There's lot of pay-to-review service on the net but most ppl never seen how they work. Dunno if it's real but still give us some insight._

<comment><USER32> There's a pretty big "if" in that sentence.

<comment><USER31> Yup! So important I repeated it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can't you do this more efficiently opening several instances of an emulator on a powerful computer?

<comment><USER34> Not for iOS

<comment><USER35> You wouldn't need iOS, you could do it perfectly fine in iTunes on Windows or OS X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wouldn't it be easier to just use Mechanical Turk for this?

<comment><USER37> wouldn't they need iphones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> And everybody shits on google for trying to tie personalization to everything.

Do you want to sort your apps by the the rank and reviews of chinese laborors? Or do you want it to prioritize ratings by people you actually know?

Personalization is really the only way to nuke the arms race that is fraud/spam detection and crowd-sourced data.

There is no perfect answer. Just more abstract games to play.

<comment><USER39> Na they would just create 1000's of personalities. Maybe by IP Address and time with personalities would work or even better stop ranking by it at all.

I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

<comment><USER40> > I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to > handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.

The point they are making is that with Google, your friends app reviews matter more than random peoples.

<comment><USER39> But I also follow my non-friends as well, I also might trust one friend more then another for their opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How she operates that many phones?

<comment><USER42> I assume every phone is a different user, and she just goes around rating apps. I am not sure if you could automate that process, but then why would the phones be arrenged in such a way that one person can quickly click on every one of them, instead of a dark room.

<comment><USER43> Probably could automate it, maybe even by using a Mac and multiple instances of the iOS simulator, but that would require a lot of expensive development, so it's likelt much cheaper to buy a bunch of devices and hire super cheap labor.

<comment><USER23> You could build a hardware rig that's programmed to hit the 5-star rating area, and then "submit" \- but you'd also need to find a way to launch the app store to the correct app every time, and then debug the thing, and then still pay someone to stand around and watch in case it gets into trouble anyway.

<comment><USER44> Open CV could easily help in that area. Servo controlled stylus for input, OpenCV based watchdog against pre-programmed motions. Maybe mechanical turk or something to generate the reviews.

Perhaps you could fight it by doing statistical analysis on review patterns. If the device is only ever giving great and/or crappy ratings and the same group of devices rates the same group of apps the same way, you could detect this.

Edit: Of course, they could fight detection by having a queue of apps to review and an array of devices. Randomize the matrix and periodically retire a device to prevent it from gaining too much history. Since it's running in a machine it would likely be in pristine condition and capable of being resold as new. Heck, they could buy one, use it for a period of time then return it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Problems with ORMs - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/09/problems-with-orms.html

<comment><USER2> Entity Framework for .NET allows for 1 more form of ORM, which is Code First.

Using reflection, you write your entity Objects, and it generates a DB model for you. It sufficiently covers about 80% of common ORM use cases.</comment>


Finite of sense and infinite of thought [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_nPnURW6BU <comment><USER2> Thank you to OP for posting. Is there a place, besides HN, where I can find more like this? I am interested particularly in that it is about theory of computation and in the fact that it is detailed and substantive, as contrasted with introductory class lectures for sophomores.

(I am aware of the ToC blog feed [http://cstheory-feed.org/](http://cstheory- feed.org/), which is also a good source to keep an eye on.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ron Pressler (the presenter) is an active contributor to HN [1], and he blogs at blogs at [https://pron.github.io](https://pron.github.io) [2]. There he has a multi-part blog post under the same name as the presentation, and if he chimes in here, he may be able to provide ptrs to additional resources (else ping him on Twitter [3]).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pron](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pron)

[2] [https://pron.github.io](https://pron.github.io), [http://www.paralleluniverse.co](http://www.paralleluniverse.co)

[3] [https://twitter.com/pressron](https://twitter.com/pressron), [https://twitter.com/puniverseco](https://twitter.com/puniverseco)</comment></comment>


AIRO bracelet tracks your nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress levels - <AUTHOR> https://www.getairo.com/ <comment><USER2> How does the food measurement work? a spectrometer? ... seems fishy to me

<comment><USER3> > How are you able to track nutrition?

> We've built proprietary technology that uses different wavelengths of light > to look into the blood stream and detect metabolites as they are released > during and after your meals. This allows AIRO to measure caloric intake and > even the quality of meals consumed.

They'd make a fortune if they had bloodless glucose testing. The diabetic market is enormous.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, this is either amazing, or crap. The suspicious part of me assumes crap. But I'd like to be wrong. This could do utterly amazing things for our understanding of nutrition if there was an easy way to monitor everything that someone ate. The quality of studies would skyrocket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to Abhi and the rest of the Airo team! Nice work guys.</comment>


Wine Staging - <AUTHOR> https://wine-staging.com/ <comment><USER3> Wine is hell of a project. Having all those windows programs running on linux/os x is really a huge achievement. I know that there is still a way to go, but I really admire this herculean effort put into this project.

<comment><USER4> I'm always really impressed when things just work in Wine. I started using YNAB this year and sure enough, it worked in Wine _with Dropbox integration_. Pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting project, it's almost like they searched through the WineHQ bug tracker for unmerged fixes and made a huge branch with all of them. There are certainly a lot of fixes that never make it to mainline Wine. The handful I've been watching have gone nearly 5 years without any meaningful progress past the initial patch. Occasionally someone will comment that the issue still affects them. I'm not sure what the solution is, it's an unpaid project.

<comment><USER6> > "There are certainly a lot of fixes that never make it to mainline Wine."

Out of interest, why is that?

<comment><USER7> Lack of manpower. Improving, merging and testing a fix isn't zero-effort.

<comment><USER8> Alexandre Juliarde keeps a very high quality threshold for patches, which makes sense as it's such a complicated project.

This can make the conversations quite interesting from the outside if you're into this sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tracking fixes as .patch files in a git repository is.... an interesting way to go about things.

<comment><USER10> Not the first or only project to do this. Spigot, a fork of the CraftBukkit minecraft server, uses a similar approach [0]. It allows to easily collaborate with the upstream project (Just apply the feature's patch on current master).

[0] : [https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT/repos/spigot/...](https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT/repos/spigot/browse)

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't it be better to just keep the changes in a branch in a fork off of the upstream master branch? I would think that git would do a better job at re-applying to newer releases (i.e. merging from upstream master) than what patch(1) can do?

<comment><USER11> This makes me think that automatic rebasing and test running as a service would be an interesting product. Continuous integration of upstream changes into your possibly proprietary downstream fork (for features or ports), with Travis running each time.... You could avoid the problem of divergent forks!

<comment><USER12> This is possibly the hardest version control problem I ever ran into. Especially in projects which have a large number of changes upstream (100+ commits daily), I've only seen bad and worse solutions.

The bad one is trying to follow upstream on each commit, notifying you every time some patch either doesn't work or doesn't merge anymore so you have to fix it manually. This still doesn't stop the cases where the patch in itself works, but doesn't make sense in the project anymore (some code moved around, tests still pass, but the functionality is not reachable). You also need a fair bit of architecture to test each of your patches with on each upstream change.

The worse solution is taking a few days off every time a bigger release is out and porting all patches. It saves on the continuous testing infrastructure, but takes unknown amount of time and you may discover some functionality simply cannot be migrated anymore. You're also likely to introduce many more bugs with rushed development.

I've been through planning something like this on a number of projects before. It's a lot of effort and it should be avoided as much as possible.

I think the product you describe could be actually a really good idea, but a lot of it would have to deal with as clever annotations as possible - <USER2> broke, when did it work the last time, who's responsible for porting, what functionality does it provide, is it critical/optional, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what it would take to create/put-together a minimal window manager and stripped down version of Linux wired to run Windows software as its default mode or purpose. Would it rival ReactOS or is Wine simply too unstable to truly serve as a "whole" OS?

<comment><USER14> Google "Lindows". A company tried to do exactly this circa 2001.

<comment><USER15> It came with the added fun of having Microsoft sue them, just to have the court say that "Windows" in the OS context is not a defensible trademark!

<comment><USER16> At which point MS settled out of court and kept Lindows in business for many years to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's quite useful. I mostly use Wine staging instead of regular Wine. For instance support for PulseAudio is nice to have. Stock Wine still doesn't have it for some reason. And some other such things.

<comment><USER18> Pulseaudio support is definitely nice. I use stock wine and it's the main reason I use alsa. The alsa sink of pulse and wine don't run well together for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Curious, why does the link show as green on HN?

<comment><USER12> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645) (first link submitted from that domain)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those who are wondering what exactly "a special wine version" is, it isn't some new version of the drink, it is "a free and open source compatibility layer software application that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems". "Wine" stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29#Pipelight....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29#Pipelight.2Fwine- compholio)

</comment><comment><USER21> Gentoo users: there's an USE flag for that ;) [[https://github.com/wine- compholio/wine-staging/wiki/Installa...](https://github.com/wine- compholio/wine-staging/wiki/Installation#-gentoo-portage)]

</comment><comment><USER22> The url of the link seems incorrect : [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wine- staging.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wine-staging.com)

<comment><USER12> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645) (click the name, not the domain name)

<comment><USER22> ok thank you for the answer and explanation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is awesome! building wine in pkgsrc is broken for me at the moment (clang problems), so having a working/up to date wine build on OS X is great!

<comment><USER24> brew install wine --devel

or

brew install wine --HEAD

<comment><USER23> a good point. I used to use homebrew but I've dedicated my time pkgsrc proselytization, so I don't have homebrew installed anymore. I have a fontforge patch that I need to submit upstream, and I think I just need to install a newer gcc to get the builds to pass with pkgsrc. In the mean time I haven't tried an i686 build, which in theory should work..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is the origin of "compholio"? I chuckled when I saw that for some reason.

<comment><USER26> It's a person's internet handle ([http://www.compholio.com/](http://www.compholio.com/)) who wrote custom patches for Wine that were popular before they were incorporated into the mainline project... and not a thinly veiled Beavis and Butthead reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does Wine, Mono, and Microsoft open source .Net play out?

<comment><USER12> [http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono](http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono)

"For Wine releases 1.5.3 and later, the Wine Mono package is recommended. For earlier versions, an official Windows release of Mono 2.10 is recommended.

Wine 1.5.6 will install Wine Mono automatically as needed."

"If you need to use Microsoft's implementation of the .NET framework, the Microsoft runtimes can partly run on Wine."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In the 90 ages, as linux user, I tried many times to use it, with not great result. But now with the virtualization I think that it lost its traction.

</comment><comment><USER29> > _Please note that our Wine Staging repository does not contain the full Wine > source, which would be very intransparent for our users and developers. > Instead we 're providing Wine Staging as a patchset which has to be applied > on top of the corresponding upstream Wine version. _

Translation: we can't figure out how to use git, to _actually_ make a transparent development stream that users can just pull: and check out to an arbitrary commit, etc. "Let's try this without the last three commits ... git checkout HEAD^^^ ... done".</comment>


Why Chivalry Needs to Die - <AUTHOR> https://fourthwave.quora.com/Why-Chivalry-Needs-to-Die

<comment><USER2> I open/hold doors for other people, regardless of gender. It's just good manners. Anyone who comments on the door-holding habits of others without being directly involved, is not being chivalrous, just a busybody.</comment>


Ask HN: If HN didn't exist, which other community would you default to? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Reddit, lobsters, some of the HN clones also get a bit of traffic so I might aggregate them somehow.

I like reddit because you join the ones that gel with your tolerance of sillyness. I like a bit of humour but not a chain of 100 replies to a fart joke.

</comment><comment><USER3> Old Reddit, with limited/selected subReddits, no thumbnails.

<comment><USER4> What subs? I find that reddit is increasingly just bullshit

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One that I'm working on myself and too afraid to post publicly. The people on this site are not my target audience either.

ps. There's no one on it but me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably one of my own communities. Hell, maybe I'd set up that universe's equivalent of Hacker News or something, rather than it being a Ycombinator project.

</comment><comment><USER7> subreddits with strong moderation are indistinguishable from hn

also indiehackers.com

<comment><USER8> I rarely visit anymore since the partial redesign. For one thing the page loads are very long, with an annoying splash page.

Two, the endless scroll, but they have your profile button on the footer and other essential links? How has that not been brought up?

The site overall has annoying and bad ux.

Makes me wonder if the site has essentially been abandoned by the owner. At the least it is neglected.

<comment><USER7> For a minute i thought you were talking about reddit's undesign. Yeah Indiehacker has almost comically bad UI but you're more likely to find people that are hustling there. HN is more about corporate office politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> /. for old trolls reddit to ctach up new ones

<comment><USER10> The soylentnews.org community seems to be growing well as another take on the /. formula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> lobste.rs

<comment><USER12> shhh. you'll turn it into HN.</comment></comment>


Pitch decks we used to raise $1.1M - <AUTHOR> https://www.twine.fm/blog/pitch-deck-used-to-raise-a-million/ <comment><USER2> "We use SEO to concentrate niche product conversions on our website." Seems briefer, more honest, and it's more obvious why that would make money.

The people who ended up buying a creative stuff were going to do it anyway, and the people who were going to sell it do so slightly more often. Now they do it on your website, because a search led them there!

The "Route to Market" slide changes are pretty funny. You're microoptimizing for how concrete you should state, "We're sending spam to Craigslist, Dribbble, and Behance users to find stuff to sell, and we're cramming Google to find buyers." It's smart from a business point of view, though utterly indefensible.

Never mind that your post is a submarine advertisement. There's something about your deck and how you write that's very off-putting, like a synthesis of different startup personality tropes.

It's ironic, because people who are actually really creative—who will deliver the best value for presumably your customers—would have an allergic reaction to this article. Maybe the mediocre sellers and desperate buyers won't.

Does Twine concentrate mediocrity? That's my takeaway from the deck. It's probably unfair.

<comment><USER3> ;)

<comment><USER4> [deleted]

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. It was meant to be a joke but I removed due to the downvotes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All this tells me is that a slide deck matters little, if at all. There's hardly anything on these slides except some marketing bs. None of the graphs even show important metrics.

I'm sure what was said when the deck was presented was far more influential

<comment><USER6> You shouldn't dismiss it so quickly. The deck does exactly what it needs to do if your objective is getting face time with VCs as an early stage start-up:

1\. Kept it under 15 slides

2\. Used tight copy to succinctly get across what they do, why they're doing it, what their "angle" is and how big the space is

3\. Illustrated some traction and hustle

4\. Showed the team wasn't completely wet behind the years (and that they could successfully recruit and execute)

5\. Outlined a plausible initial growth strategy

6\. Signalled some social proof: from early investors and happy users

7\. Wrapped it up in a clean design and sensible slide sequence

It's harder than it looks.

Edit: and that's just the deck. Chances are they will have had to plough hundreds of hours in to: networking, google+linkedin+crunchbase+angel list deep dives building a VC pipeline, reading countless money raising blogs/books/podcasts and practising their in-person pitch for when they do get a meeting (not to mention making sure their existing cap table wasn't fucked up from earlier FFF investments, if they had any). After all that comes a probable 75% to 95% rejection rate from the final list of VCs they drew up and managed to get a meeting with [and you have to keep the company moving, growing and developing while you do all of this].

Basically, if you're early stage and a founder who doesn't already have one or two notable previous wins under your belt, there's a lot of background shit you need to do before you even have a chance of getting in a room with a credible VC and winning them over with a slick sales pitch. An effective deck is one of those things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This suffers from both the fundamental attribution error and the labor-theory- of-value error.

They seem to be implying: 1) We got funded. 2) We worked hard on our pitch deck. 3) The effort on our pitch deck is why we got funded.

I don't see any reason that their first pitch deck is better than their 12th or their 23rd. Just because the 23rd investor liked their business plan doesn't make that pitch deck, or their strategies to improve it, correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your pitch deck will get you meetings, not investment. No one invests from only seeing a pitch deck.

From speaking with investors, we learned about better ways to get across what we are doing. What the key ares that interested investors, etc. Most of that we learned was from the actual conversation rather than specific feedback on the deck.

On a side note, the first version of this deck makes me slightly embarrassed. Even the "final" version does because the company has evolved since we closed our investment round.

<comment><USER8> "Even the "final" version does because the company has evolved since we closed our investment round."

Do your investors find that concerning at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they would be more concerned if we didn't evolve. For example, Twitter isn't just an SMS service anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just as an antecedent, for comparison's sake. We raised more (seed round) with no deck at all. What really mattered was the demo, story, traction, and market plan. We used to use a deck, but as time went on it became a distraction from having a fluid conversation.

</comment><comment><USER10> My take is that it will become like upwork for creatives. Meaning, some amount of people will try it to land their first gig, and then immediately drop it when they get lowballed repeatedly or after they have a couple referrals. But there are a lot of eager freelancers to churn through.

They will be hated by everyone in the business and probably make boatloads of money.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have mechanisms to stop Twine being a race to the bottom which I won't go into detail here.

I wanted to keep this is about the deck rather than our positioning and hope its helpful to someone.

<comment><USER11> What are your mechanisms for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> This article explains it: [http://tech.co/twines-ceo-creative-marketplace- brings-qualit...](http://tech.co/twines-ceo-creative-marketplace-brings- quality-gig-economy-2017-04)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When did the transition occur from success and profit mattering to $$ raised being the most important metric? So many startups today brag about $ raised before they even mention what they do. Is this really the new norm?

<comment><USER13> Interesting, my sense was we just completed the opposite transition over the last 24 months. A couple years ago it was all about being a unicorn (ie. fundraising) and now it's all about revenue. I guess these things are cyclical though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, when someone writes "Look our pitch deck that raised us $x million" is clickbait.

It was never the pitch deck, it was the traction that got them funded. If you have good traction and your pitch deck is not abysmal, then you can always raise money.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this a bit misleading since you had VC's unlike most startups who are trying to raise money without them

<comment><AUTHOR> Half our money has been from angels

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm overwhelmed by the noisy design of the blog. The pitch decks, what visitors want to see, are a tiny, 430px wide embed under the fold. There is a huge header image, left floating side bar, a large right sidebar, then a floating ad, then a slide-in form in the bottom right partway through the page. This all makes for a distracted reading experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can view it directly here: slideshare.net/stuartlogan2002/the-pitch-deck- we-used-to-raise-over-1-million

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm also trying to get quotes for a logo design for one of my open source projects, but I can't find logo design in the dropdown. What category do I choose?

Edit: URLS not allowed so I can't do my brief properly... [https://cl.ly/0C0K3z2n372c](https://cl.ly/0C0K3z2n372c)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you choose "Graphic Designer" as the role you're looking for, that should help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who feels like a search focused business like this that presents itself well and is taking 20% (!) commission might be more an incentive to invest than the pitch deck?

</comment><comment><USER19> this needs flash to play? nothing happens when clicking the "arrow right" symbol below the logo...

<comment> keir-rex Not on my iPad... Which browser are you on? I used the arrows on the side of the slide not underneath.

<comment> ju-st Doesn't work either on my FF. I works when you click on "show only this frame"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [deleted - supposed to be funny, ended up being mean]

<comment><USER21> If it seems that way to you, you're in the right place and know the right people.

Not everybody has the connections you do.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can programmers help with the coronavirus crisis? - <AUTHOR> I feel fortunate enough to be able to stay at home while all the essential service personnel and medical staff is fighting this pandemic.
However I feel somewhat useless and trying to figure out a good way to contribute  especially seeing friends and family putting themselves out there.
Does anyone have any ideas, any active efforts going on? <comment><USER2> A bunch of people have asked this question and variants of it, so there's some good threads you can read:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+help+coronavirus](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+help+coronavirus)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+help+covid](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+help+covid)</comment>


New in iOS 14: Simple Everyday Privacy with DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-privacy-browser-ios14/ <comment><USER2> Aren't iOS browsers just a reskin of safari anyways?</comment>


Ask HN: open source e-learning platform? - <AUTHOR>

I need to choose open-source e-learning platform like Coursera/Udacity/Edx. I looked at Edx source code but it looks like very complicated system with lots of subprojects. I need something simpler and flexible. Same with Khanacademy. Source code of Coursera and Udacity not available.<p>Or it is simpler to write it from scratch? <comment><USER2> These are complicated software packages, wrapped around web-2.0 services (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

You should write down what you need for starters and see what can be implemented in some CMS, although a RoR app might be the easier way to go.</comment>


GRANTLAND AND THE (SURPRISING) FUTURE OF PUBLISHING - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-future-of-publishing/?curator=MediaREDEF <comment><USER2> please less SCREAMING in the submission title...</comment>


Ticketmaster redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.ticketmaster.com/sneakpeek2008

<comment><USER2> You can redress evil fees all you want; they'll still be evil fees.

<comment><USER3> Ya, I was hoping the redesign was done by Pearl Jam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site still feels somewhat busy and corporate, but I'll give them credit for losing the "Tour News" and "Entertainment Guides" sidebars. The sidebars they have are busy and space-sapping but not quite so bad. I think someone there's been looking at upcoming.org.

Another site redesign made easier by having a low bar. So it goes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is the OP a troll posting this here? There is no one on earth except TM employees and investors that like TM.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a redesign of one of the major e-commerce sites. Is anything related to an organization that is 'disliked' a troll?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ticketmaster won't be bearable until they stop charging 14.00 service fees, per ticket

</comment><comment><USER7> at least they got rid of the double search engines,</comment>


Example node http server powered by a golang webassembly module - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trashhalo/go_wasm_node_http <comment><AUTHOR> If you are curious about the benchmarks [https://gist.github.com/trashhalo/b2f120fb9d20bd4003bf125c02...](https://gist.github.com/trashhalo/b2f120fb9d20bd4003bf125c0200b601)

There seems to be a 3x overhead for using go webassembly for this use case. I filed an issue for performance hit. It seems high [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26277](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26277)</comment>


Ask HN: Jingle/Sound purchasing - <AUTHOR>

I want to add some sound to my app. Does anyone have suggestions for purchasing audio tracks? <comment><USER2> Hello, I could do something, if you want contact me. What kind of app it is and what kind of music/soundss you'r looking for?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually doing a little market research. Through my friends that work on music I realized there isn't a solid marketplace for this type of sale. I am entering pre-release stage with my 99 designs like platform.

Thanks for the off though, it is appreciated.</comment></comment>


How can we avoid eating hacked (genetically modified) food? - <AUTHOR>

Californians will soon be voting on Prop 37 [1] and may become the first state in the US to require labelling of food which contains genetically modified ingredients. Over 50 countries already require this. Personally I think the jury is still out on the long term effects of GM food on humans [2][3] so labelling will be helpful to anyone who would like to avoid GM food but found it difficult.
It's easy for some things. I love Kettle Chips and they already label themselves as being made from "non-GMO ingredients".  However, when it comes to buying groceries, it seems the "organic" label isn't enough, and you have to look for "100% organic" [4], so just grabbing stuff at Whole Foods is no good.
Eating out is obviously much harder. For example, Burgermeister use Niman Ranch beef where the cattle themselves dine out on hacked food. "Unfortunately, use of GMOs is now prevalent in the U.S., and cross-contamination of non-GMO fields due to wind drift from genetically modified crops does sometimes occur." [5].  I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant menu declare a dish to be GM free.
If you try to avoid GM food, how do you make it easier on yourself?  Do you eat at home more?  Do you use any apps or websites with lists of products confirmed to be GM free?
[1] http://www.carighttoknow.org/
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2205509/Cancer-row-GM-foods-French-study-claims-did-THIS-rats--cause-organ-damage-early-death-humans.html
[3] http://www.nature.com/news/rat-study-sparks-gm-furore-1.11471
[4] http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/what-is-organic.html
[5] http://www.nimanranch.com/faq.aspx <comment><USER2> Why worry about this? There is no scientific evidence that "genetic modification" (the new kind, rather than the kind of genetic modification that has always been done by breeding) poses any health risks whatsoever.

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/antivaccine- ve...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/antivaccine-versus-anti- gmo-different-goals-same-methods/)

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity- why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

since 1960, so new foodstuffs introduced since then based on GMO science so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then.

<comment><USER3> _Why worry about this? There is no scientific evidence that "genetic modification" (the new kind, rather than the kind of genetic modification that has always been done by breeding) poses any health risks whatsoever._

Search for "french study GMO" on google. Most scientific testings on GMOs aren't done on period long enough to be significant.

 _A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING_

This isn't evidence that GMOs are healthy, only that other factors are overriding GMOs effects.

 _since 1960, so new foodstuffs introduced since then based on GMO science so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then._

It doesn't mean that we should let people eat GMOs. Hard drugs (like heroin, cocain, etc) represent a minor cause of death too.

<comment><USER4> _Most scientific testings on GMOs aren't done on period long enough to be significant._

Over a long enough time period, it has been shown all foods lead to death.

<comment><USER3> There are different kinds of death, and the ones mentioned in that study are not really the kind I would like to go through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Avoid fast food and chains. Shop carefully. Vote for labeling laws.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll do what I do now, cook/prepare as much of what I eat as possible, bought from markets where possible. I don't care about organic or not, I care about needless additives and lost nutrients because it was prepared a week ago in a factory.</comment>