Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/11/peter-sunde <comment><USER4> Many don't agree with the principles of TPB, but Sunde was willing to take risks for what he believed in. He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create. Most people go their whole lives without caring strongly about any issue at all, and almost all of those that do care are willing to sacrifice exactly nothing. I'd like to think that I would be willing to give up everything for what I believe is right. But everyone likes to _think_ that. And most of us will never find out, not how Sunde did.

That said, everyone also wants to be a martyr. TPB wasn't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without paying for it. It does sound like a noble crusade when he expands the context to include SOPA or PIPA or net neutrality, but TPB isn't really related to those things and served only as a rallying point for people who feel strongly about them. The ideal of freedom of information is only tangential to fighting the good fights that he listed in the opening of the piece.

The truth is that Sunde didn't have to go to jail. TPB's popularity gave him a platform and helped him to centralize an ideological movement. But there are other ways to do that, significantly more effective ways. Martin Luther King (as an example, not a comparison) went to jail too, but he also went to the right schools, wore a suit and influenced the right people. Creating a popular and morally dubious website is a quick way to put your ideas into the spotlight. But it doesn't last, and it doesn't really change anything. His effort and conviction are genuinely admirable but he's still a long way from winning the battles that matter.

<comment><USER5> > _TPB wasn 't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government > oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without > paying for it._ //

I think there is an issue of rights and freedoms.

With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. In other state structures those making the cultural artefacts that we use to express our selves, to link, to coalesce on common sentiment, those could be sufficiently supported to make all cultural artefacts free- gratis and free-libre.

The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience - means that many who would otherwise be [partially] excluded from participation in today's culture (for better or worse) can take part.

Moreover, copyright was initially set up with a view to ensuring that eventually the wealth locked up in shared experience, cultural introspection, confrontation with new ideas and different aspects of the culture would be freed in to the public domain.

The actions of media corporations, the use of DRM, these things (amongst others I'm sure) act to prevent entry to the public domain. DRM in particular breaks the copyright deal, if we the people aren't going to get our side of the copyright bargain why should we uphold the side that suits those financial interested in media production? Usually with a contract if one side breaks the terms then the contract is nullified - surely this morally should be true too of copyright.

In short, I think to assume that this is solely an issue of 'people who could pay to consume media choosing not to' is wrong, that there is a greater depth to this and that the likes of TPB have made a change to the access to the culture of the age making it [more] available to those of restricted means. I think this can make for more cohesion in society. Possibly too it makes for more homogeneity, that may not be a good thing however if the principle messages being passed (and shared) in society are those coming from Hollywood.

I feel there's much more to say on this. But I'll stop. /rant

Edit: cleaned up some verbosity.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I agree with much of anything you said.

>With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. [...] The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience

There is always going to be a culture. And there are always going to be things off-limits to the non-wealthy that would totally be part of the larger culture if made free. So? I don't think it's particularly important for music or film to be part of the larger, central cultural experience. If those things aren't available then something else will take their place. To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago.

I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people. I think people pirate because it's safe, easy, and free. I think most people's participation in piracy can be summed up as "selfish asshole". I think DRM is a blunt, ham fisted enforcement of the copyright deal and I'm curious as to why you think it breaks and should nullify the contract.

And on top of all this the maintainers of Pirate Bay are not benevolent Robin Hood's trying to give culture to the poor. They're making money. Megaupload network generated $175,000,000 in revenue. I don't think there's a damn thing honorable about any of these lot.

<comment><USER7> > To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even > 5000 years ago.

The current availability of books published last century is actually smaller than the current availability of books published before that. So there is actually a bit of a cultural hole from the 1900's because of materials are still in copyright and not published by their owners. Often it isn't even known who is the current owner of a material. There might come a time where people know more about culture 500 years ago than 100 years ago.

> I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by > other people.

I think we've lived with the concept of copyright and patents for so long that we've forgotten what an artificial construct that it is. We're basically giving exclusively ownership to ideas. There is a good argument for doing that, which is why copyright exists, but it's not a universal truth. Locking way and preventing the sharing, modification, and remixing of ideas has a deep cultural cost now and future generations.

<comment><USER6> Not having documentation on what culture was X years ago is different from there being no culture X years. I don't think your first example is relevant.

Copyright exists to serve the public. I think it largely achieves that goal. There are fair arguments to be made as to when copyright/patents stop serving the public interests. I don't think DRM as an enforcement of the copyright laws nullifies the protection already given. When it comes to copyright the following quote is long but largely sums of my thoughts.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator's total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright's owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." from An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html](http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html)

<comment><USER7> I'm not talking about "documentation". I'm talking about the actual culture: the books, the movies, the songs, and so on from that period. Look at Disney's Frozen, a huge movie based on the out of copyright story, The Snow Queen. Here's some culture from 1800's reproduced in 2014. The same cannot be done for most culture in the early to mid 1900's. Some things you literally cannot read, watch, or hear from that era. You certainly cannot adapt it in a new way. Not unless you want to break the law. That is the situation we are in.

I, however, agree that copyright serves the public and largely achieves that goal. But I think it did so better in it's original incarnation. Big money interests have shifted copyright in absurd directions. And I honestly don't care if Disney retains the rights to Mickey Mouse forever but in lobbying for that right they've dragged along everything else. So now it's impossible to reproduce other completely unrelated works.

A big one personally for me is old video games. I grew up in arcades and I love going through MAME and playing obscure titles that I often don't even remember until I start it up. Sure, if you want to play Pac-Man there are lots of legal options but outside of that a huge part of 80's culture is illegal to own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but downloading entertainment is not a human right. He didn't exactly feed starving people by breaking the law. He put up a torrent aggregator to, mostly, Hollywood movies and shoved aggressive and high-revenue porn and malware ads into every nook and cranny of that site.

HN and those passionate about internet freedoms deserve better heroes than guys like Sunde, Dotcom, and Ulbricht. These guys very much enriched themselves via what was essentially a web based business and any "freedom fighter" argument is pretty disingenuous at this point.

Personally, I see malware coming from ad networks and other dirty tricks TPB did as a bigger issue than being able to watch Spiderman 3 without paying. Honestly, now he's painting himself as a some anti-spying hero when his site was the #1 vector of aggressive spy and malware onto people's computers? I mean, it fucking took over the search box when you clicked on it and launched a download to suspicious-toolbar.exe immediately. What link actually took you to the torrent? Not the dozen of so "DOWNLOAD NOW" buttons Sunde happily populated his site with. We need less of that stuff, please.

<comment><USER9> > I'm sorry, but downloading entertain is not a human right.

Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right. Maybe certain entertainment business models aren't sustainable in the internet age. It's not like we'll run out of entertainment. Most cat-based YouTube videos are better than the Real Housewives of Schenectady anyway.

And to extort and imprison people for the sake of a business model is terrible.

<comment><USER10> >Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right.

No, but at least in the U.S., and most of the rest of the world, it is a _legal_ right. Does that count for nothing just because we're on the internet?

<comment><USER9> Human rights exist regardless of whether a particular legal framework honors them. _Everyone_ has the right to speech, including the right to the private transmission of data, the right to assemble to pursue common interests, etc. Those rights have limitations when it comes to harming people, but people aren't being harmed by any particular copy of Duck Dynasty S06E03.

The thing being harmed here is a business model. I vehemently disagree that someone should be fined or imprisoned in the name of a business model, especially an entertainment one. If the law says that's what happens, the law is unjust.

That being said, copying things that aren't yours without permission is a jerk thing to do. That shouldn't make you a criminal, however.

<comment><USER10> Do business models not pay people's salaries? Is this not an interest worth protecting? I think you're view is in trouble (or at least, extremely radical) if it depends on the premise that no law that protects only financial interests can result in imprisonment.

I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because shoplifting prevents a business owner from profiting off of the thing he had intended to sell, in addition to depriving him of his investment in the inventory (of course, no business owner cares much about his inventory for its own sake, he cares about it because it represents potential profit).

As many will be eager to point out, intellectual property is not finite. But this only means that you're depriving the IP owner of less profit than you would be if it were a tangible good, not that it deprives him of none. You might just as well say, oh well the thief would never have bought that DVD anyway, and the business owner has millions of them (and insurance!), so it's not really something the law should worry about... Also see mc32's sibling comment with some other excellent examples.

<comment><USER11> grandparent said that he disagreed with people being imprisoned or fined for copyright infringement.

Those are punishments.

Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.

Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.

That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.

<comment><USER12> > That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that > gets redistributed to producers.

Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.

No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.

You _have_ a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People _want_ that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.

The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to _produce_ that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.

Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - <USER2> than having some state institution doing it.

No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist _under_ copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have _faith_ it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady He went to jail for creating a website that enabled people to download music and movies without paying for them. Jail is a harsh punishment IMO for that. ACTA/SOPA etc. are all terrible things that we can't allow and we can't allow the internet to become more centralised/controlled by government. But that's not why he went to jail. Enabling illegal downloads of content has little to do with those causes.

<comment><USER13> And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spied on.

It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right".

I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.

<comment><USER14> >>> sharing of information

But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free.

Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine.

But video games are not information, so are TV shows, movies, etc. They are products which cost money to produce. It doesn't make economical sense to give it away for free hoping to get money from ads or whatever. Mobile games do that, and mostly they are unplayable without purchasing credits, etc. Even then, the quality is often very poor.

You can point to open source, but people producing open source software are minority of all engineers.

What you are saying might be morally 'right' but unfortunately being morally right doesn't pay the rent, bills and food.

<comment><USER13> Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK). A strong argument speaking against it is the fact that there are _many_ examples that say the contrary; Avatar is one of the most pirated movies and also one of the most successful ones, and earned a huge amount of money just on cinema tickets. You have e.g. Zynga, King and Rovio who have earned lots of money on free games.

I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.

<comment><USER15> _Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy /sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK)._

It's absolutely been demonstrated to be true, many many times. Do you think game studios, console makers, movie studios etc put money into DRM because none of them understand their own business?

There are lots of people who spoken either on or off the record who say the same things: the moment their copy protection fails, sales fall off a cliff and you can see it in the data. For video games it's even worse. The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.

Movie studio executives have graphs of sales and you can see the point at which high quality rips were uploaded to the internet.

Example:

[http://www.develop-online.net/news/lgc-2013-sports- interacti...](http://www.develop-online.net/news/lgc-2013-sports-interactive- reveals-shocking-impact-of-piracy-on-football-manager-2013/0185951)

<comment> 0x5f3759df-i [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves- Gabe...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe-Newell- Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the problem is that no one realizes the internet we grew up with and loved is changing fundamentally and we can't be passivist users of the medium anymore.

If you are you're basically saying you're okay with a future where governments regulate which services you can use and ISPs control how fast you can download bits based on whether you're using their sponsored services or not.

Its bullshit but its what's happening. At its core though, I think its a hardware problem. We REALLY need a decentralized networking solution to replace ISPs and DNS and if we don't get it, the road is going to be really hard going. This still doesn't solve the problem of intercontentinal networking, and I have no idea how we could solve that one without some monopoly/govt controlling everything.

<comment><USER17> It's not a hardware problem, it's a convenience problem. People _like_ that there's somebody else worrying about this. They are willing to do almost anything it takes so they don't have to worry about issues of basic infrastructure.

We already do this with water, electricity, and other infrastructure. Anything it takes as long as I can get water/power/trash-taken-out just by flipping a switch and paying a bill.

We, as a society, do _not_ want to think about this. As long as the internet is there when we open a laptop or a phone, we don't care how it got there.

<comment><USER18> I don't think we as a society don't want to think about this. I think that society at large just assumes that the internet IS regulated as a utility. Up until now, the major ISPs haven't taken an active role in speeding up, shaping or censoring content that non-geeks even really know about. When you explain things like the current FCC debacle, when they finally understand the context, they get enraged because its so obviously different and worse than how they thought the system worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel this is a very important article with a very important message, but I'm just not sure what I can do to help! They have money, guns, political support, media and very powerful, highly emotional rhetoric. The only thing I can do is hack on software, but most people don't care enough about "geeky stuff". I feel that the only way this issues will get resolved is if they get much, _much_ worse first (i.e. high-profile people jailed for what they say, internet controlled China-style, disappearance of middle class, ...).

<comment><USER19> Well you can always hack on decentralised, encrypted, hidden peer to peer chat, or other open software alternatives of high quality for all the services we use every day and so forth. If media is a problem, work on solutions for anonymous publishing etc.. if the software is good enough (including having a good ui and whatnot), it's less geeky. After all, people adopted BitTorrent, which is quite geeky!

<comment><USER11> Providing technical workarounds for broken policy can only do so much. It doesn't fix policy. It can only help avoiding enforcement.

Which might lead to court cases where they try to make an example of a poor sap they have caught. This has already happened to some extent with peer to peer file sharing.

a) only few individual users get caught and dragged through the courts, but they get slapped with damages in the hundred-thousands[1].

b) there is no big mafia boss responsible for everything they could hold accountable. So now they go after companies making software[2] or after sites such as TPB. Not on the premises that they did anything illegal themselves but that they enabled others to do so.

So who says that the net of what's illegal won't get cast even wider in the future if someone were to develop something that's even harder for them to prosecute? Or one could even argue that evasion through technology leads to policy becoming even more restrictive, even if that restrictive policy remains largely ineffective except for those few that actually get hit by it.

I'm not saying that the technology shouldn't be developed, I'm just saying that it doesn't automatically make society more free by itself. It just provides an underground in which one may move.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas- Rasset) [2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd).

<comment><USER20> Non technical users also don't care about encryption/security and what not.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't say that. I'd say they care about encryption/their personal security, but they don't care in the slightest what the implementation is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't agree with all (or most) of the principles of TPB, but I can appreciate his criticism of slacktivism. He had his beliefs, stood by them against the law, and served his time for it. It's unjustified to criticise a lack of action on his part.

My only concern with his methods would be if he hurt people in the process (indirectly through TPB). Also I fail to see how it was an effective protest against the things he mentioned in the article (SOPA, PIPA etc).

</comment><comment><USER23> Last paragraph was biting and very powerful - side note: Who sends a copy of 1984 to Peter Sunde in prison?

"My feeling of some life-altering insight might be nothing but rants on the spoiled, lazy and naive parts of our internet community. And maybe I'm using those terms just to piss people off a little bit more. But hey. I went to jail for my cause and your TV shows. What did you do? You want that copy of Orwell's 1984 returned? I'll take one of the 25 copies I got sent to me in jail and send it back to you. Maybe you'll read it instead of just sending it to someone else to take care of."

</comment><comment><USER24> When did stealing other peoples' life work segue from a guilty necessity to a noble cause? I missed that.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could say the same thing about Youtube in the beginning. Except for the fact that Youtube was even worse because people were uploading copyrighted material there and it was actually hosted by them and existed in the US. Whereas TPB was in Sweden and only linked to files.

<comment><USER25> Well, lots of people did say the same thing about YouTube. That's why they were sued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a complex issue.

While I believe copying without compensation is bad, and not something to feel proud of, I also understand the position of a Chinese or a person from Ghana that have to work 15 times more to be able to access the same item than an American.

The West has used countries like Ghana to dump technological trash that make children get malformations and cancer.

Think on this for a moment: what does 20 dollars means for you, now multiply it x15.

Now if you want to access an important resource for you or your family like a book, what do you do? You pirate it.

Most of the people in this world economic power is closer to the people of Ghana that to the people in California.

Copyright is out of control, it should be like patents 20 years, with the extensions it is becoming eternal and making impossible to reuse any work legally.

</comment><comment><USER27> > "What people reveal, what people fight for, are major causes. Freedom of > information. Liberty. Democracy. Governmental transparency and due process."

I have a really hard time trying to link this with my experience on TPB. It's all about downloading stuff without paying for it. Honestly, that's it. I'm not proud of that, I'm not saying it's a noble thing to do. I really don't get what trying to "determine" what should or shouldn't be free by sharing other people's stuff without their permission has to do with freedom.

<comment><USER28> Torrenting is an answer to bad service. I want to look up a movie I want to watch, choose between different quality/file size options depending on my bandwidth/hard drive space needs, download an MP4 with decent speeds, watch it, then store it to watch again if I feel like it.

I can do this legally for games via GOG or Steam, I can do this legally for (most) software I use, I can do this legally for music (limited artists) via Bandcamp, but there's NO option for movies, TV series, or most mainstream music. I literally cannot legally watch the latest episode of any of the shows I follow, because when they do have an online offering, it's restricted to the US.

So for me, downloading a movie on TPB is first about convenience, I want to get to the movie and TPB is the means to it. But implicitly it's also sending a message to the gatekeepers of content that I'm interested in their product. The other part of the message is making a habit of looking for and paying for convenient, DRM-free content when it's available.

<comment><USER27> I fully understand what you mean. I saw you're from Brazil too, so you know how awful Netflix is around here and how much we pay for games, for example. I download mostly due to the reasons you mentioned. As much as possible I avoid downloading books and I try to pay for music when I can (some stuff is just too expensive to import and many times really hard to find). I also rely on Steam and digital copies to avoid stealing (I have no problem calling it that) games.

But by the end of the day, despite being hard to find or expensive or unavailable, it's not mine to take. I understand I have no right to just rip The Flash S01E09 and make it available for free, IMO. Even though I downloaded and watched it yesterday.

<comment><USER29> Why? It's not like the most downloaded TV series are also the ones making the most money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I see many people in this thread debating (1) whether Sunde is some sort of freedom fighter, and (2) the ethics of intellectual property law. In my interpretation Sunde is mainly arguing that people who are criticizing him for not defending TPB should instead get their hands dirty and make something that sidesteps the established internet control structures, for better or worse. I don't think that's such a controversial idea.

</comment><comment><USER31> The man choosed to do what he did, but when they were heavily fined I already felt an obligation to pay a part of it, as I was a regular user before that. About the future of the web and other larger social questions, I find it hard to believe.. when it's mostly movies and tv shows (even though there was some hard to find vintage content on it sometimes). Lastly, as for anything, when technology N is unavailable, we go back to N-1. We won't stream the latest show from the other side of the planet right from peers in real time but well.

<comment><USER29> >We won't stream the latest show from the other side of the planet right from peers in real time but well.

Ain't that what Popcorn Time is doing?

<comment><USER31> But Popcorn relies on public trackers to do, or is it fully distributed ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> He mentions Snowden and Manning, but he left Dread Pirate Ulbricht off the list of comparative figures. A real shame because that may actually be a more accurate comparison.

</comment><comment><USER33> What I did was finance a feature film and get it released on DVD. Shame some people think that they can just take all my investment and piss it on to the internet.

</comment><comment><USER34> "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." - <USER3> Stekel

I think we need Peter Sundes in this world to keep the rest of us vigilant ... I'm not sure going to jail for a cause really helps much either. While I admire him for sticking to his principles, I'd rather he was out in the world doing his work.

</comment><comment><USER35> I like the way he selflessly teamed up with a Neo-Nazi. How noble.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Subtitle: _" Even bad guys are Heroes in their own Story."_

</comment><comment><USER37> Do you think he's being ironic about the cell phones? Seems like a strange stance on them if he's all in favor of skipping Facebook, for similar reasons and with similar consequences.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow all I see here is top-paid man-hours being used to produce a wall of text.

I'm not against discussion, but look at what are we doing, arguing to each others instead of just producing something valuable.

</comment><comment><USER39> Some similar thoughts:

[http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> _I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?_

A bit _tu quoque_ , not the best way to engage people, IMO

</comment><comment><USER41> This sucks, I didn't get to download a car.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think what most people here are missing is that TPB didn't actually host any illegal content and yet it still got shut down and its members sent to jail. Sunde went to jail for free speech and distributing completely legal files. I think that's implicit and am rather surprised that it's a point missed by so many people. In that sense, it's a lot more egregious than Manning or Snowden because, AFAIK, he did not commit any crimes. Perhaps he wants it to be a warning to people like many of the commenters here who are deriding or belittling his actions yet still claim to support free speech.

If the files he distributed contained freely available chemistry information, would he have been sent to jail for assisting others in making bombs or poison? That seems rather ridiculous, but that's essentially what equating his actions with piracy is actually doing.</comment>


Joon Yun's $1M Palo Alto Longevity Prize - <AUTHOR> http://paloaltoprize.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> In recent years a growing network of supporters of longevity science has emerged in the Bay Area entrepreneurial and venture community. It is a highly networked environment, and visible signs such as the Health Extension meetings are really just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. It is no accident that the SENS Research Foundation and its coordination of rejuvenation biotechnology research is based in the Bay Area: venture capitalist turned philanthropist Peter Thiel was one of the early high net worth donors to SENS research, and folk in the software engineering community have always made up a sizable fraction of the donors and supporters of first the Methuselah Foundation and then the SENS Research Foundation after it was spun off as an independent organization. Medicine is engineering, and aging is an engineering problem asking for a solution: this is something that is perhaps more clearly visible to people who have written code for a living at some point in their careers.

Which is not to skip over the fact that there is a thriving medical biotech venture community in that part of the world as well. It just doesn't get as much press, and the people involved have historically tended to be just as conservative and quiet about the prospects for treating aging as the rest of the life science research community. Sometimes change must come from the outside, which is exactly what happened in this case.

Before funding SENS research the Methuselah Foundation initially focused on the Mprize: a research prize aiming to spur the research community into doing more work and speaking more publicly about efforts to extend healthy life span and produce rejuvenation in the old. At the time the prize launched, the silence of the research community and their unwillingness to push the boundaries, educate the public, and get on with treating aging was a real issue and a cultural roadblock to progress. That this state of affairs has changed dramatically is due in no small part to the efforts of the Methuselah Foundation and the networking that took place as a direct consequence of the existence of a research prize.

In a different world the Mprize might still be generating press and progress even today, but it was hampered by an unfortunate happenstance of research, in that one of the first methods discovered to extend life span in mice was so effective that it has yet to be surpassed or even matched, more than ten years later. It is hard to have a contest when there are no new winners emerging on a short enough time frame to interest the public. For my money, I'd wager that producing mice that live longer than growth hormone receptor knockout mutants won't happen without the implementation of SENS rejuvenation treatments, ways to extend life by repairing damage (and thus reversing aging) rather than slowing the progression of damage (and thus slowing aging).

Nonetheless, the Mprize was a successful vehicle to produce change in the aging research community: this is the interesting thing about research prizes, that they don't have to achieve their stated competitive goals or even look like they worked as a contest in order to produce the desired outcome, a revival of effort in a specific field of research and development. Success is all about networking and attention, which in turn leads to fundraising and greater activity where before there was little. The Methuselah Foundation still runs the Mprize, but is presently focused on speeding up organ tissue engineering through the New Organ Prize: working to ensure that patient- specific organs built from stem cells exist soon rather than twenty years to thirty years from now.

So perhaps this leaves a space for a next generation of research prizes in longevity science, and it turns out that folk in the Bay Area venture community think that is the case - and if there is one thing that these people are good at, it is networking, the lifeblood of a research prize initiative. So take a little time to peruse the Palo Alto Longevity Prize and note the panoply of advisors and research teams signed up to compete. The actual details of the prize are of technical interest, especially since they lean in the direction of supporting repair over slowing aging, but they are far less important than what is taking place behind the scenes as a result of this initiative.</comment>


Show HN: Serverless Stripe Analytics Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://cubejs-stripe-dashboard-example.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ <comment><USER2> I see it uses some framework Cube.js to run calculations and retrieve data, how can I change how MRR or other metrics are calculated?</comment>


U.S. programmer outsources own job to China, surfs cat videos - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china/ <comment><USER2> Old repost from January 2013</comment>


Show HN: Snapdex – A discovery tool for Snapchat - <AUTHOR> https://www.snapdex.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Laurent, the creator of Snapdex. Snapdex is a fully editable directory of Snapchat users. It just got featured on Product Hunt ([https://www.producthunt.com/tech/snapdex](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/snapdex)), a bit earlier than I expected honestly, as I wanted to show it here first!

Snapchat is full of interesting people who produce unique content exclusively to Snapchat (Justin Kan, Mark Suster to name a few). I wanted to find more people like them, but there's nothing really good out there to help you discover new Snapchat accounts, so I made this!

The site is made with React.js in the frontend and Laravel in the backend. A few months back, when I started working on the site, I didn't have any experience building javascript apps (me being almost exclusively a backend developer), so I'm pretty proud of what I've achieved and learned in those few months.

Would love to have your feedback on the site. And let me know if you have any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: what do you use for a home NAS? - <AUTHOR>

I'd write a poll, but I don't know enough of the brands. Joe Armstrong apparently uses a Synology. FreeNAS obviously supports iXsystems. Personally, I use hand-me-down Dell towers with SuSE because the upfront cost is $0 and YaST over SSH is good enough for NFS.
I recently got bit by my set-up though when I finally figured out that a disk that chronically drops out had a bad cable, not a bad disk.
So, between that and Armstrong's usesthis post, I wanted to ask HNers: what do you use? And why? <comment><USER2> I've got a NetGear ReadyNas Pro with 6 drive bays each containing a 2Tb seagate low power drive for 12Tb of usable space. It allows me to rip dvds in pretty much raw form to the nas and then transcode them (using <http://handbrake.fr>) to whatever format I want. My wife wants to watch some RomCom on her phone/android tablet during a long plane ride? No problem! Get it at RedBox for $1.20, rip it, and transcode it to the proper size and format. The resulting file is only 300-450Mb, so her phone and tablet can hold gobs of them. Also, netgear has some pretty decent forums.

As a Linux guy, massive bonus points that the ReadyNas boxes are just modified Debian and they will let you get root on them. <http://www.readynas.com/forum>

I'm a HUGE fan. You can get a diskless 6 drive bay one for: [http://www.amazon.com/Readynas-Pro-6-Unified- Nas/dp/B004S9JX...](http://www.amazon.com/Readynas-Pro-6-Unified- Nas/dp/B004S9JX52)

It is also a great time machine backup for my wife's crackbook pro lappy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know the NetGear was that hackable. Cool.

Have you ever had to do a network install of, say, OS X? Yardie reports he was able to do that with Synology (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4340947>)

Also, any experience with AeroFS?

<comment><USER2> A network install is just a PXE for any operating system. It would be pretty trivial to setup tftp on the readynas. If it isn't builtin already, Id be surprised if there wasn't a community extension to do it on the forums already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just bought a Mac Mini and attached some external drives. I run PS3 Media Server for Mac to stream content to my PS3 and app enabled TV.

It's not super slick or cool but I don't care. I spend at least 8 hours a day at a Linux or Solaris terminal. When I'm ready to relax, I want everything to just work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you remotely access your mini at all? Like with AeroFS?

<comment><USER3> Just SSH and the built in screen sharing app since it's headless and just sits on a shelf.

Admittedly my needs are easily met. I really just wanted the following

* stream downloaded content to PS3

* host virtual machines for testing (I use Parallels)

* run Jenkins for building projects and running tests to keep it off my laptop

* download torrents

* host local backup

I'm sure there are better solutions but I don't feel like it's worth investigating for myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could never afford a real NAS, and I've used many DIY setups (linux boxes, mac boxes, with software raid) but I've settled on a WD MyBook for its pure simplicity. If you just need a file server and don't need tons of space (2TB is plenty for me) I'd definitely recommend it.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell A HP Proliant Microserver. Has room for four disks, but I've only got two in there atm. It runs Debian with Samba for network file access. I intend to configure up NFS but haven't got around to it yet.

<comment><USER5> ^ this

Plus besides using the Proliant as a NAS, it doubles as a great mediacenter & is super quite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Got an Acer Homeserver on eBay for $100. Installed Ubuntu server 12.10 on a USB drive, picked up 4 2TB Seagate drive on black friday for $80 each. Have 3 in Raidz and one as a hotspare. This acts as my Time machine server, torrent box and media server. Running Plex on it, but Plex insists on transcoding everything, which the Atom isn't really powerful enough for.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is your RAiD set up? Mine is just RAID 0, because that's what philg said to use. Hadn't thought of Acer

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for posterity, let me note I meant that to read RAID 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use a netgear readynas nv+. It's their consumer model, but it does the job for me. It's not the fastest, but has good features and support from the community. You can even easily upgrade the memory ( voids the warranty I believe).

Only issue is if you only put 1 disk in (of 4 potential slots) the fan goes nuts. Runs full speed off and on.</comment>


Using CircleCI 2.0 with Elixir and Phoenix - <AUTHOR> http://joeellis.la/using-circle-2-0-with-elixir/ <comment><USER2> Just read CircleCi: CircleCi (specially 2.0) is an over engineered beast, designed for vendor lock in and selling add-on features. That is my experience working with it for over a year.</comment>


Ethical Autonomous Vehicles – ethical reasoning for driveless systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativeapplications.net/unity-3d/ethical-autonomous-vehicles-complexities-of-moral-and-ethical-reasoning-for-driveless-systems/ <comment><USER2> Can't you use the same argument for robot soldiers? They will stick to rules of engagement and less people will die.

The question with cars and robot soldiers is how comfortable will society be with machines causing human death. Even if overall human death is reduced.

Also,what about accountability? Who would I press charges against if a self driving car chose to save a stranger but kill a loved one? For a human driver,neglect and responsible driving can be measured. But for a machine,the only blame I can place is with a megacorp and their lawyer army for training the ML algorithm that caused loss of a loved one (or loss of a limb)</comment>


Ask HN : Does pricing difference makes a better reason to face the competitors? - <AUTHOR>

Hi ,
I am working on a startup idea, Its " Google Voice for customer support " .
Recently someone launched a similar service and they are charging for incoming calls and even the outgoing calls are very expensive.
I am well connected in VoIP sector and can offer better prices and give free incoming calls option for this service .
Do you guys think only with better pricing I can fight with the competitors as most of the features are similar ? <comment><USER2> Unless your market is highly price sensitive, if you're only way to compete is with lower prices, you might compete yourself right out of business. People tend to associate price with quality - if you're much lower priced, they may think you're lower quality.

Now, if you can be lower priced and SIMPLER (both to explain and in the design of your site/product)...that could be a winner.</comment>


Autoscaling Pub/Sub Consumers - <AUTHOR> https://labs.spotify.com/2017/11/20/autoscaling-pub-sub-consumers/ <comment><USER2> At Netflix, we have considerable use of the autoscaler with our custom scheduler. Is there any reason you can't autoscale based on queue depth, or time of items in queue?

As far as your Docker problems go, have you tried to upgrade to 4.9.34+? We found the issue as well, and upgraded kernels, and haven't looked back.

<comment><AUTHOR> We did thought to use queue depth, but CPU metric was easier to start with. One problem with using queue depth though is that we can't (didn't figure out how to) throttle down autoscaler to not give us more machines in case downstream service is down.

We did upgrade Docker, but we didn't upgrade kernel. Switching kernel is a bigger task that we'll probably do at some later point.

<comment><USER2> I'd argue that switching kernels is pretty easy. At least for us, there's a lot less QA to switch kernels than Docker versions. The more often you upgrade, the easier it is to upgrade, as with almost all things.

We also have a team that does work processing that's built a PID controller to autoscale ASGs based on queue depth, and time in queue. Although, their code is not open source, the concept is a self-tuning autoscaler based on a number of variables allowing you to prioritize cost, timeliness, or even throughput.

We've been doing this for a while. If you'd like to collaborate at all, let me know.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Waitinglist Time to wait - <AUTHOR> My question is basically how long does it usually take to get access to a Mobile App's Startups Waiting List to the app :) it seems like a very interesting app and would benefit me a lot I came upon this startup just now -- AppAll Mobile (www.appallmobile.com) and twitter (https://twitter.com/AppAllHQ)<p>(they just launched from what it seems) and I signed up. Seems like a really cool and useful product for many.<p>From what I saw on their website and tweets today it's like a "Dropbox" but for Mobile Apps. So you can have as many apps as you want and your device uses up no storage. <comment><AUTHOR> Just because I've signed up for Mobile apps like Mailbox and Robinhood before and it took quite a while so I was wondering how long would AppAll take do you think on average</comment>


#slack integration with hackersays.com - <AUTHOR>

It's finally possible to integrate #slack with http://hackersays.com by using https://github.com/jarmo/lita-hackersays <comment><USER2> And, as customary in this part of town, the two links now as.. links! Finally!

\- [http://hackersays.com](http://hackersays.com)

\- [https://github.com/jarmo/lita-hackersays](https://github.com/jarmo/lita- hackersays)

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally got some help. Thanks m8!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: In Houston TX for the week - startup related meetups? - <AUTHOR>

I am in Houston for this week at a conference (cnx.org - on open education publishing).  Anyway, I may get some free time and would want to make good use of that - so any suggestions, from popping in to offices or demos would be welcome.<p>Oddly I arranged a meetups on other forums, just never crossed my mind to ask here. <comment><AUTHOR> Just so I can find the thread again ...</comment>


New Zealand earthquake: Tsunami follows powerful tremor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37967178 <comment><USER2> Currently in Wellington. Was fucking shaky, seriously thought the building was about to collapse. This was ~500 km from the epicenter.

We were evacuated and let back in. All the planning in the world doesn't prepare you for the real thing, the first thing you're meant to do is keep calm, and I sure as hell didn't. I sprinted right the fuck out of my apartment building, I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table wasn't going to do shit to save me.

The building has some cracks in the plaster and food has fallen off all the shelves, but nothing serious. The water seems to be running a bit brown though, so maybe some damage to the water pipes.

Props to the crew at Bizdojo ([http://www.bizdojo.com/](http://www.bizdojo.com/)) for opening an invitation for us to come and chill there if we couldn't get back into our homes. Doing the right thing there!

<comment><USER3>
        > I have 4 levels above me, hiding under a table
        > wasn't going to do shit to save me [...]  food
        > has fallen off all the shelves,

The advice to hide under tables isn't meant to save you from the entire building collapsing, but from injuries sustained from stuff falling off shelves & the non-structural parts of your roof collapsing.

<comment><USER4> Also, some tables, particularly heavy wooden and metal tables, can withstand lots and lots of weight. Hiding under them can help you avoid getting your skull bashed in by a falling slab of concrete.

<comment><USER5> The one biggish one I went through was in Seattle, where I was in a startup. We had cheap IKEA desks, which barely held the computers. I bolted for the door, which was the wrong thing to do in a brick clad building. Thankfully, we were on solid ground on Capitol Hill, not the fill in Pioneer Square, so I didn't get hit by falling cornice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Description on Twitter: "The shaking went on for ages, longest quake I've felt. It was like waiting for a Verge article to finish loading."

[https://twitter.com/thefoehesought/status/797814348672421888](https://twitter.com/thefoehesought/status/797814348672421888)

<comment><USER7> Brilliant, too bad he didn't say Forbes. That would be more accurate.

<comment><USER8> Meh, forbes is more a problem with those pesky pre-load screens. The Verge site is a massive heap of dung even after loading. I swear every image is loaded as RAWs and then converted via JS into something edible by the browser, or some other "hipster artistry".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Magnitude 7.5 earthquake. For reference, I felt this in Hamilton, a bit under 1,000 KM away. First earthquake I have ever felt. Hamilton never, ever gets earthquakes.

Nevertheless, NZ infrastructure is built to withstand this sort of stuff. Only $100m-1b economic damage is expected, no casualties expected.

<comment><USER10> The problem with earthquakes is that damage accumulates. So while a building might stay intact or with minor damages during the main one, the aftershocks could wreck havoc. And with an 7.8 aftershocks could last for months and be quite severe.

Nevertheless I hope everyone is OK and wish you the best. I've experienced quite a few earthquakes in my life, although nothing over 7, and the shock stays for long. It's one of those times in your life when you feel completely helpless.

<comment><USER11> Yes but all multi Tennant buildings and large buildings will be inspected. We're pretty used to this and have some of thebest earthquake engineers in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Better resolution map: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxJjRotUUAAJK-w.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxJjRotUUAAJK-w.jpg:large) (from [https://twitter.com/NZcivildefence/status/797809307597213696](https://twitter.com/NZcivildefence/status/797809307597213696))

Some tweets with photos:

[https://twitter.com/ThomasMeadia/status/797806928520880128](https://twitter.com/ThomasMeadia/status/797806928520880128)

[https://twitter.com/ThomasMeadia/status/797809032635420672](https://twitter.com/ThomasMeadia/status/797809032635420672)

[https://twitter.com/HenryMcMullan/status/797813785461334017](https://twitter.com/HenryMcMullan/status/797813785461334017)

<comment><USER12> Map updated: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxKErQkUQAArm_4.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxKErQkUQAArm_4.jpg:large) (from [https://twitter.com/NZcivildefence/status/797846187197902848](https://twitter.com/NZcivildefence/status/797846187197902848))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm from Christchurch, contacted family there. There's been mass evacuations from the coastline. Tsunami's have started but they can last for hours. Kaikoura has already had a a surge measured 2.5m, if this is the case the waves will get worse before they get better. But NZ is pretty prepared for these things, so hopefully everyone scampers to the safe distance from the coastline. I worry about the Chatham Islands, they're directly east of the epicentre, and Tsunami's travel very fast. I hope they've all gotten to high ground.

<comment><USER14> No, that 2.5m high one was the worst of the waves. [http://images.geonet.org.nz/tsunami/plots/latest/detide.png](http://images.geonet.org.nz/tsunami/plots/latest/detide.png)

It was most likely caused by a movement of sediment into the Hikurangi Trough.

<comment><USER15> Then why is it still reported that waves 3-5 meters are expected?

<comment><USER13> Civil Defence are doing their job, getting people away from the coastline. There maybe Tsunami's there may not be, better not to take any risks. Must be protocol when any of the Tsunami alarms are triggered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know what the lights were about? [http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/strange-lights-during- earthq...](http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/strange-lights-during-earthquake- confuse-onlookers-2016111404) or is it a hoax.

I'm in Palmerston North a long way away, but that was the biggest quake I've felt.

<comment><USER17> link to video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hIQaJg3lVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hIQaJg3lVM)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that looks like transformers popping (falling off poles, etc).

<comment><USER19> Some of the videos are showing these lights out over the ocean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was just reading this today on Wikipedia: "No evidence has been found of any correlation between supermoons with major earthquakes."

<comment><USER21> Well yes, because a supermoon is just when the moon being close to the earth happens to line up with the moon being full. The moon comes this close to the earth once a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm from Christchurch which is about 100km away. Felt like a long rocking boat ride. Luckily it wasn't violent, unlike our 6.3 quake in 2011 which accelerated the city vertical by a foot, dumped it down and smashed everything.

</comment><comment><USER23> Had to laugh, consoled my daughter on the phone from here in the South Island last night and said "See, trumps been in 3 days now and the world hasnt ended yet" and at midnight it sure felt like it had!

<comment><USER24> At the risk of sounding pedantic, he doesn't take office until Inauguration Day on January 20.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here a link to the list of recent earthquakes: [http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt/severe](http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt/severe)

<comment><USER26> Another link: [http://www.emsc-csem.org/](http://www.emsc-csem.org/). Initially showing a map of Europe, it provides however, a global list with location and intensity in tabular form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am in Hanmer Spring on holiday with the kids. Was 15km from the Epicenter when it hit. Big shake for a long time. One of the kids didn't wake up... worst thing that happened in our house was the shampoo falling into the bath, so pretty blessed there. All roads closed so guess we have an extended holiday. Lots of very big after shocks.

</comment><comment><USER28> Could there be any connection to the moon's current proximity to Earth? Does anyone know to what extent the moon's gravity can influence earthquakes? Tides are one thing, but it seems plausible that the moon being closer to earth than it has been in 68 years could be moving the plates a bit more than usual.

<comment><USER29> In general, there is a connection. The earth tides have an amplitude in the tens of centimeters [1] (yes, the earth moves under our feet!) and a connection to earthquakes is a given, since the stress changes on faults can trigger them. Here is one example: [2] Their research also indicates that a higher stress can trigger earthquakes not triggered by lower stress since the local fault strength must be exceeded.

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

[2] [http://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8601.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8601.abstract)

<comment><USER11> GNS scientists are saying there's no connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone please edit the title?

And wow, this looks heavy. I hope everyone is well.

<comment><USER31> There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?

<comment><USER32> It's surfer slang, elements of which have made their way into a lot of the English spoken in NZ, Oz and SA.

<comment><USER33> He is quoting the movie "Back to the Future"

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/quotes?item=qt0416301](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/quotes?item=qt0416301)

<comment><USER11> It doesn't matter, it's not appropriate when people are trapped under collapsed buildings and are dead.

<comment><USER34> You seem to know something that others don't. What's your source on that?

<comment><USER11> I was part of the first response for the Christchurch earthquake providing technical support and co-workers in my old job are trained USAR engineers that were deployed overnight. But most of this information is from the NZ media. We aren't talking high fatalities, but USAR are looking for a couple of missing people and there are buildings that have collapsed, people were also stuck under a vat in a winery and had to be cut out. There are two people dead but not much information is coming out of the most effected area because most communications are down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Tremor"? I mean, IMO anything 7+ is more than a tremor.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can I just say — stoked to see all the kiwis on HN!

</comment><comment><USER37> Unfortunately the "Latest Felt Quakes Map" at [http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/geonet](http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/geonet) doesn't work because the website has exceeded 25,000 map loads in a day.

<comment><USER38> This one works: [http://earthquaketrack.com/quakes/2016-11-13-11-02-56-utc-7-...](http://earthquaketrack.com/quakes/2016-11-13-11-02-56-utc-7-8-23)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Do we expect to see this wave on the other side of the Tasman? And if so, will it be big?

<comment><USER40> Unlikely because the earthquakes were on the East coast of New Zealand, away from Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Cross-posting from my FB feed:

Here's some of the interesting stuff I've found on the internet about today's earthquake (that they're now calling a 7.8):

1) real-time Buoy data, for helping to determine the likelihood of a Tsunami: [http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/](http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) Interestingly, the quake only caused a tiny change in the sea level (in the region of 5 cm's) but the expected swells on land are in the region of 3-5 meters. I believe this is because as the wave gets closer to land, it get's funneled into a smaller area, meaning the 5cm change in sea level gets amplified. Which is why it's hard for the civil service to accurately predict whether a tsunami is likely when these events occur (That, and the nearest working buoy is in Tonga), which would by why they almost always say yes, and then retract the warning later.

2) the USGS science-y explanation for what actually happened. The take-away seems to be that this may have increased the stress on the primary fault in NZ. Interestingly, their's a a suggestion that the rupture was across the hope fault, rather than along it, which helps to explain why the after shocks have been so varied (by location): [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#executive)

3) also from USGS, a map indicating affected regions, with town populations, and the likely economic impact of the quake: [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000778i#pager)

4) The Canterbury Police shared a link earlier that indicated 3-5 meter swells is around the maximum we should expect from a locally generated earthquake (due to the nature of fault lines in NZ), that's not to say we can't experience a larger tsunami, but that said tsunami would have to be generated externally (like say, south america), which should in theory give us more time to prepare. But like all things, this isn't a hard and fast rule.

5) there's a pretty cool video of what purports to be lights in the sky over wellington during the earthquake (probably has something to do with magnetic interference from the energy released by the quake): [https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%...](https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fzachary.bell.315%2Fvideos%2F1854573738108559%2F&show_text=0&width=560)

6) stuff have had pretty good live coverage here: [http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/86416304/live-north- canterbu...](http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/86416304/live-north-canterbury- quake)

7) The USGS website indicated that the quake lasted around 2 minutes, with the highest intensity coming around 50 seconds into the quake.

<comment><USER15> 1) I think it was because the 5cm height is backed by a huge width, when crawling towards the land slope creates a very strong (not necessary high) wave that just keeps pushing forward.

<comment><USER42> Tsunami waves have an extremely long period. A good surfing wave forms when a swell 2-5 m amplitude with period 13-24s when it starts to feel the bottom of the ocean.

The amplitude of the tsunami wave in the open ocean is much smaller than wind- generated swells but they can have periods of 60-70 minutes so they are more of a surge that just keeps coming when they hit land, and as you say when they start to feel the bottom they stand up and the large volume of water in the wave makes it stand up larger and more powerful than you would expect for a smaller amplitude swell.

Every wave has a peak and a trough and the trough of the tsunami wave is what causes the water levels to recede so drastically before the wave hits.

Geographic features like valleys that get narrower and narrower will cause the same volume of water hitting the coast to make a much more drastic change in water level

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Not 100% applicable to New Zealand but here's the Tokyo disaster prepardness book --

[http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/GUIDE/BOSAI/](http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/GUIDE/BOSAI/)

It has a lot of good practical information -- especially chapters 1 & 4\. We all got one sent to our homes, and I thought it was quite useful!

</comment><comment><USER44> Good on this guy for getting the warning out early, 7.2 or greater and potential for a tidal wave, spot on old chap! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isl1Gtg74e4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isl1Gtg74e4)

</comment><comment><USER45> When I was a kid, the 1992 Big Bear Landers earthquake hit in Southern California. That was a 7.6 if I recall. So I can relate to what those in NZ are feeling. Our rock chimney collapsed and fell off the house, nearly crushing my mom who was outside at the time.

</comment><comment><USER46> Parts of the South Island have moved 2 metres closer to the north. That's a big shunt.

</comment><comment><USER47> Does anybody know the status of RocketLab's facilities [1]?

[1] [https://rocketlabusa.com/rocket-lab-launch- complex-1-ready-f...](https://rocketlabusa.com/rocket-lab-launch- complex-1-ready-for-launches/)

<comment><USER48> Oh those are well up the North Island, they probably didn't even feel it there. Or if they did, it would have been very mild.

<comment><USER49> They do have employees in the South Island too (mainly Christchurch), and were looking at Birdling's Flat as a launch site. However, I imagine anyone involved in the South will also be fine -- Christchurch rolled around but didn't suffer much damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone know if there is any special effort to construct buildings that can withstand reasonable earthquakes in New Zealand?

Christchurch seems particularly prone to quakes in New Zealand. I hope the people of New Zealand are safe.

<comment><USER51> Yes, there are earthquake standards for new buildings, and mandatory retrofitting for older buildings (as they are updated).

From what I've seen, this is pretty similar to San Francisco. It would be interesting to see data comparing the standards across earthquake-prone countries/regions.

<comment><USER11> I used to work for a structural engineering company that had offices in both NZ and California, from what I understand the standards of earthquake engineering in NZ are higher than in California.

To be honest I think you're probably safer in a large earthquake in a post Christchurch NZ than in a small earthquake in a country that doesn't usually get them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Damn that is really scary. I used to work in Miramar (Wellington suburbs), which is built on reclaimed sea, if I recall, and everyone was freaked out that a major earthquake would liquify the entire area.

<comment><USER53> Huh? Miramar is a steep hilly peninsular. Are you talking about Rongotai?

<comment><USER54> The flat bit in the middle that is most of the Miramar suburb is seabed (and later swamp) that has been uplifted by large earthquakes over time.

<comment><USER53> TIL. Born and raised in Wellington city and never knew that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Really wish the best to all the people impacted here, stay safe!

</comment><comment><USER56> Hoping all are safe and stay safe in New Zealand!

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone know of a group or website which is tracking the incidence and intensity of earthquakes over time?

<comment><USER58> [http://www.globalcmt.org/](http://www.globalcmt.org/)

Scroll to the bottom and look at the chart of cumulative energy (moment) release over time. This is probably the easiest visualization what you're looking for without going to scientific papers. It only goes back to the 1970s though. The big steps are the Sumatran earthquakes and Tohoku (Japan). There were some equally big steps in the 1950s.

As far as I know (and I do this professionally) there is no evidence for any real variation in the global, time-averaged rate of earthquake occurrence or energy release. However the time window to average over has to be several decades to centuries depending on how comfortable one is with noise. Any individual segment of a fault will have an earthquake repeat time (for a significant earthquake) of hundreds (San Andreas fault) to tens of thousands of years, and is lots of evidence for clusters of earthquakes on individual faults or sets of faults, but this is mostly a local effect--the stress changes in the crust caused by an earthquake can basically load nearby faults and affect when they will have the next earthquake. But again, this is for the most part local (<100 km). Globally, earthquakes are essentially unrelated. That a big one may hit Chile and then Japan in short order is happenstance as far as the seismological community is concerned (though it's not dogma, and long-distance 'teleseismic' triggering is investigated--it just doesn't seem to be a big deal).

However, earthquakes in the news aren't a good reflection of global seismic statistics. Earthquakes like the Italian events (M6-6.6) over the past few months (and years) occur every day, but mostly in the ocean basins and don't affect people other than shaking some palm thatch roofs in Vanuatu. The most deadly event (minus tsunami) in my lifetime was the Haiti earthquake in 2010, killing ~200,000 people, and it was a pretty routine, moderate-magnitude event. It just hit an incredibly vulnerable population.

<comment><USER57> You're the real MVP. Thanks for your understanding of my question and the info. I get what you're saying about cumulative energy release over time and it's interesting to note the effect that earthquakes' periodicity has on how we need to sample the data. Very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So the tsunami was 1 foot Hawaian style. Doesn't seem too big...

<comment><USER11> The tsunami risk was low because it was an inland quake, however they enacted a tsunami evacuation as a precaution. Would you rather they take a risk?

<comment><USER59> Oh, for sure, of course I would! That is _exactly_ what I meant by my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Videos of the earthquake:

[https://youtu.be/WcljQHCUm_o?t=20](https://youtu.be/WcljQHCUm_o?t=20)

[https://youtu.be/EsnS28ulJUw](https://youtu.be/EsnS28ulJUw)

News say it's 7.4 - 7.8 magnitude.

<comment><USER61> This is not footage from this earthquake. This earthquake hit at 12am in the morning so these videos are obviously of another time.

<comment><USER62> > at 12am in the morning

Argh, had to look that one up. 'Just after midnight local time'.</comment></comment></comment>


HN Business users: What are your daily pain points from a technology standpoint? - <AUTHOR>

What type of recurring issues do you face at work that limit your ability to be productive or even get the job done? <comment><USER2> Trying to explain business process to a software developer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lack of reliable free (or inexpensive) VOIP/Video conference even though I have 22Mbps/22Mbps. It is totally unacceptable to be dropped or clipped during a business conference call.

Also, lack of a inexpensive, easy to use conference bridging with global landline dial-in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Relying on offshore developers to fix bugs during critical moments.

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking of a platform to build a reliable offshore dev teams. Are those offshore developers freelancers or it's a team that work only on your (or maybe one or two more clients') projects?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Too much email, its like playing Whack-A-Mole all day.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think would be a good solution to that?

<comment><USER6> Not sure, if I knew I wouldn't have such a problem with it :)

However, I do find that when I let the emails build up over a few hours, rather than answering them as they come in it takes a lot less time to answer them all at once and I can get other work done and be less distracted in between. But sometimes you need to keep checking because something could be important, and the compulsion to just respond is very strong and kills time. Maybe if I knew the deadline on responses (what was urgent) it would be easier. Priority inbox is good, but doesn't really help with this...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Developer cost.</comment>


Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3004848/cloud-computing/ex-vmware-microsoft-and-citrix-workers-set-up-application-container-company.html <comment><USER2> > Container hype is running high. Developers have flocked to the technology > for more easily packaging applications and running them across various > disparate environments.

It's a hype that should die in a fire bigger than the one reserved for Adobe Flash.

Many people will think they can just deploy a shitload of containers and be done... well, each and every single one of them has to be maintained, updated for security fixes...

Not to mention the likely possibility of breaking API changes in the container version. vagrant/puppet I'm looking at you, nothing is worse than having to figure out which ancient version of vagrant and puppet was used at creation in order to get the system running again. Or, well, look five years in the future, and hope today's hyped container solution will still be present then.

Fuck containers, get a properly managed ordinary Debian server and save yourself a lot of headaches.

<comment><USER3> I've tried so hard as an infrastructure person to explain this to people. It's better just to ignore the hype or move to sane orgs that aren't on the container hype train (so you're not wasting valuable time on tech that's going to get gutted eventually).

There is no magic tech that makes problems go away. Just abstractions (sometimes they work, sometimes they don't).

<comment><USER4> It's hard to take your criticism seriously when Google, Netflix, Heroku, Shopify, Paypal, Uber, Ebay, Yelp, Spotify don't qualify as "sane" orgs according to your criteria.

<comment><USER2> All the companies you name have significant engineering manpower to dedicate whole teams to maintain all the tooling so that the devteams don't need to worry about maintaining their containers, VMs and whatnot.

I dare say that all that microservice stuff only works with 300+ employees if you keep everything containerized.

<comment><USER5> Where are these magically difficult to maintain containers? I regularly deploy stuff via containers and moving my github repo to a container to being deployed is very simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Pricing has not yet been set, but it will be a subscription, freemium model; > A beta version of the software will be available soon.

Buzzwords abound. How do they know a freemium model will be possible without losing money? Why will they put out a beta rather than starting with a "gold" version of the software?

Articles like these do not bode well for their subjects. They read like symptoms rather than anything that actually increases hype in my view.

<comment><USER7> _How do they know a freemium model will be possible without losing money?_

They don't, just like they also don't know if a non-freemium pricing model will be possible. They presumably wrote a business model that it'll be implemented and then reevaluated.

 _Why will they put out a beta rather than starting with a "gold" version of the software?_

Probably because they want the benefits of having early feedback before investing too much work into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still not sold on Docker. The shift towards microservices makes it redundant.

Docker is a tool which was built for platform-as-a-service/DevOps people who had to manage complex systems made up of many different technologies which those DevOps people didn't want to think about. It provides a relatively clean encapsulation of complex logic.

With microservices, the idea is to break up your complex system into independent services which each perform a specific task. I think an implied goal of microservices is that each individual service should be made up of relatively few technologies - If each microservice is made up of few technologies, it's really easy and fast to just git pull the relevant changes (or update from your package manager) and relaunch your service.

I would like it if someone could explain it to me why I need to pull something from DockerHub instead of GitHub (assuming that you have a simple microservice made up of a single, cohesive technology stack which you actually understand and builds relatively quickly)?

</comment><comment><USER9> > _One of the novel things about the platform is that it is hardware agnostic, > meaning that it can control physical bare metal machines, virtualized > environments, or even public cloud infrastructure_

Cloud Foundry already has this capability (runs on AWS, vSphere, OpenStack, Vagrant(!) and now Azure); Otto is not far behind.

Anything you can supply a Garden backend for, Cloud Foundry can use.

</comment><comment><USER10> what i'd like to see is containers used for Steam games with slow loading times (or having to launch another launcher), i'd like to be able to hibernate a game and resume at a later time.

<comment><USER7> Containers are not usually suspendable like VMs. What you need is a process checkpointing tool like CRIU[1], which can suspend regular processes to the disk.

[1] [http://criu.org/](http://criu.org/)</comment></comment>


Wikipedia moving to HHVM - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-10-08/Technology_report

<comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ8JtNsJnqY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ8JtNsJnqY)

</comment><comment><USER3> This move should make a lot of financial sense. I am not sure, if there is any information on the no of servers deployed but the move should reduce the infrastructure bill significantly for Wiki Foundation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes indeed, it should.</comment></comment>


Show HN: JSON.equals in Java to compare two JSON's - <AUTHOR> https://tech.blobcity.com/2018/09/02/json-equals-in-java-to-compare-two-jsons/ <comment><USER2> Thought I'd share something I discovered about Json comparison. This simple line also works:

      return jsonObject1.toMap().equals(jsonObject2.equals);

because JsonObject uses HashMap internally which supports equals(). The downside is it would be slower because toMap() creates a copy.

Btw, downloaded java-commons as Maven dependency from JitPack: [https://jitpack.io/#blobcity/java-commons](https://jitpack.io/#blobcity/java- commons)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this also works. We were using this for a while until we landed up with very large JSON's. .toMap() is very expensive and takes significantly longer to execute on large JSON's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can't one just simply check if the strings are equal?

<comment><AUTHOR> No string compare does not work, as the order of elements may not be the same so the strings may not be the same. The utility will report both JSON's as equal even if order of elements is different.

<comment><USER3> Ok cool, thanks for the explanation!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you prefer to learn programming from books or video courses? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Books.

I'm okay with videos: they definitely add something to the discussion, particularly when _deciding_ if I want to learn something.

But for me, when trying to go deep, I prefer being able to flip pages (e-books are great for reference, not as great for deep reading, for me) and the information percolates better.

But you should also control for the age of the respondents--I'm relatively old at 48.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is age dependent. I prefer books to videos for learning programming stuff and I'm in my late 20s. The book/ebook gives me time to review/parse/think about what the code is doing. I can also proceed at my own pace, skimming over stuff thats irrelevant and spending more time on parts I need to think about. Doing any of that is difficult with a video.

<comment><USER2> I suspect there's a correlation between age and preference, but this is (a) just a hunch, and (b) just a generality--there are always outliers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Books (or papers), but language and methodology reference materials NOT tutorials. I do not find video useful. Video is, for me, too information poor.

I like to learn programming and coding by reading other people's code. Real code is usually more instructive that code fragments created to illustrate a point.

I am a fan of leaning on my own, but direct personal contact with a knowledgeable human does aid the learning process.

</comment><comment><USER5> Both -- there is so much to learn and forget -- practice and note taking is essential.

If a book has 30 pages in a chapter, I'll always have about 2 pages of notes at the end of it. So at the end of a book I usually have a 24 page mini- book/doc that I can refresh my memory quickly. In fact, I read these mini- books all the time when I'm stuck in traffic or waiting on anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I want to "master" something I prefer books. But a lot of times I just want to know "enough" of something to start working with it. For such things I prefer videos.

One thing I have noticed that before using any AWS service for the first time, I look for tutorial videos for it. This way I can see somebody clicking through screens to set up the service in AWS console. This helps immensely to start using the service as quickly as possible. After watching the videos I skim through the AWS docs to look for gotchas and then start using the service. Slightly off topic, one thing I have found very helpful in learning AWS is their FAQs. I make sure I read all of them if I am planning to use a service.

For programming, I didn't find the video tutorials very useful. For programming, I prefer tutorials, books, and documentation.

</comment><comment><USER7> I prefer just getting code, editing and figuring out what it's doing. So learn by doing! If i'm super stuck I use google. This is how I learnt programming at a young age(12), back in 2002 - at the time I didn't have money for books, and there wasn't really any programming videos about. No stackoverflow then either - you'd have to experiment a lot more with code to work out what was going on.

Learn by practice!

Just realised this seems to not be the case as much anymore, as emphasis is on speed of learning, not really depth.

Occasionally i'll watch videos though too - but unless i'm practicing i tend to forget it quite quickly.

I did try using books from the library when I was younger - but I don't think I got past the first 2 chapters of a c++ book without getting bored. Being able to take small video games and edit them kept my interest and passion much more.

</comment><comment><USER8> Both first I watch the videos the I read the book. For me it's better to see someone explaining how to do things and then if I need to go deeper I read the book. Something like going to college first I listen the instructor then I go home and read my book.

</comment><comment><USER9> I prefer reading books, so I can jump to where I'm interested in.

For videos, I have to concentrate the whole time, which is tiring.

</comment><comment><USER10> Video courses. That's how I taught myself Java at 12, and why I never touched my Objective-C book until college.

</comment><comment><USER11> Text for well-defined subject matter. I only like videos that discuss high- level concepts.

I don't like the screencast kind. In fact, one advice I'd give to my younger self is to try not to read and watch tutorial-style content (and this includes many books too!).

</comment><comment><USER12> I prefer to use both. They provide different approaches to learning, that complement each other.

</comment><comment><USER13> Books. However, I have taken one free Udacity class and it was pretty badass.

<comment><USER14> Can you tell me which Udacity class you took? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Books and StackOverflow and videos more or less in that order.</comment>


Kevin Ham - "the man who owns the internet" (long) - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm?postversion=2007052205 <comment><USER2> I don't really agree with the vitriolic hatred of domainers. They're bottom feeders, but I don't think fair to say it is inherently evil. I've chosen not to do it myself for the same reason I'm not an SEO guy. It's unpredictable, a time sink, and it'd be hard for me to be proud of the result of my effort. I think it's easier to just create something of value. If you do that your domain name is mostly unimportant.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a great example of Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil". Since the domain market is unregulated why not take advantage of that for your own personal gain, regardless of who it harms? After all everyone else is too right? Buy up all the names you can and fill them with worthless advertising instead of useful content. How disgusting!

<comment><USER4> How disgusting, indeed?

It's for sale, nobody owns it, and it's eventually going to be controlled by whoever can use it best. I suspect that you aren't hurting for content, given that there's already more than anyone could possibly absorb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that bothers me about the article is that CNN makes the practice seem like something that is not even morally questionable at all. I understand remaining neutral or whatever, but they could have at least mentioned new businesses that are trying to get a presence on the web, businesses that have to pay far more than they should just to get a name from someone who is providing no content at all.

The real problem is the idiots out there who actually click on the links on these sites. If not for them, this practice would not be possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy is providing everybody with a useful service! Bare with me!...

All non-registered domain names are currently sold for the same price, regardless of much value they have to potential buyers. By thinking of and buying say "weddings-central.com" for $10 and then reselling it for $10,000 he's creating valuable domain names that won't be wasted by being sold for less than they are worth.

He's basically a speculator. If he bets wrong he loses money, and he bets right he makes money and provides a useful service.

<comment><USER5> This makes no sense to me. He's only doing a service for himself and those that advertise through him.

If I want to start my own online radio station (I know, it's been done), onlineradio.com seems like a good place to start. Except of course that it's being squatted on, so I can't pay the "public domain" price that I should be able to, but instead I have to pay one of these bosos whatever they think it's worth. The fact that he bought it didn't help me come up with the name... it's an obvious name, and that's why he bought it in the first place.

So where's the service again?

<comment><USER6> The service is that he's making onlineradio.com available to you, for a price you both agree on. If he didn't, and someone else took it who wasn't a squatter then you would have no chance of getting it.

He's selling you a second chance to get the domain name, and a service of preserving the good domain names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hm... but do you really "own" a domain name? My understanding that legally all domain names are public property and you can only "lease it" for a period of time.

However, if you can prove that a certain domain name is the name of your business (and you have a legit, valid business running) and a scumbag like this fucker "owns" but does not use your name, you can claim that domain in court. I heard google did this with google.ru in russia: the asshole-domainer who "owned" it got nothing.

</comment><comment><USER8> My long-standing opinion of domain speculators notwithstanding, I feel bad for the future web developers of Cameroon, and all those other African countries whose domains this guy is going to squat on.

I could draw a bunch of other fun implications from this article, but they mostly fall in the "What you Can't Say" category.

</comment><comment><USER9> This smells wrong... like "how to get rich playing poker"</comment>


Tools and operating frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://eicolab.com.au/2015/07/tools-and-operating-frameworks/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never been a heavy MS Excel or MS Access user but those kinds of tools still are - after many years - clearly democratising computing. The notion of pushing this a bit further by thinking "frameworks" is very much worthwhile and maybe the "correction" to an ever more "consumerist" internet.

I always admired IFTT - you could probably think of it as more of a framework.

Does anyone know of more projects like it or ones with an even less intuitive angle towards solving this problem?

The question is this: how can we essentially put ourselves "out of our jobs" by providing a generalised "framework" in a not-traditional sense (so that we can work on even more interesting stuff;) ?

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points." \-- Alan Kay</comment>


Outernet – a curated subset of the web broadcast from space - <AUTHOR> https://www.outernet.is/en/

<comment><AUTHOR> Posting to see what HN make of this. A friend backed the Lantern Indiegogo campaign yesterday [[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device- free-d...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-data- from-space-forever)] which sounded exciting and useful. I love the idea here - core knowledge, news, crisis response stuff broadcast globally.

While I'm excited about this and will probably back the Lantern myself, the current Outernet could really use help with content. I downloaded the whole of the Outernet [328 MB compressed] and most of the stuff is of pretty dubious interest: "Two Randomized Trials Provide No Consistent Evidence for Nonmusical Cognitive Benefits of Brief Preschool Music Enrichment", or advances a pretty niche non-mainstream media outlook (the Corbett report podcast).

<comment><AUTHOR> The broadcast currently contains 758 articles, of which 676 are Wikipedia pages.

The remainder are: \- 15 gutenberg texts (e.g. Moby Dick, Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm, ...)

      - 10 open access Harvard papers

      - 54 dw.de news articles

      and...

"Making (Up) an Archive: What Could Writing History Look Like in a Digital Age?" - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11297828

There Can Be No Turing-Test--Passing Memorizing Machines - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11684156

Corbett Report Episode 293 - The Ebola Effect - uternet://www.corbettreport.com/episode-293-the-ebola-effect/

The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims about Jesus's Marital Status - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11041837

The Activity of Reason - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3415961

Corbett Report Episode 293 - The Ebola Effect - outernet://www.corbettreport.com/episode-293-the-ebola-effect/

Civilization Starter Kit v0.01 - outernet://opensourceecology.org/outernet://opensourceecology.org/outernet://opensourceecology.org/Civilization_Starter_Kit_v0.01.pdf

Two Randomized Trials Provide No Consistent Evidence for Nonmusical Cognitive Benefits of Brief Preschool Music Enrichment - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/11276120

The Collage of Humanity - [https://collage.outernet.is/](https://collage.outernet.is/) Civilization Starter Kit v0.01 - outernet://opensourceecology.org/outernet://opensourceecology.org/Civilization_Starter_Kit_v0.01.pdf

Civilization Starter Kit v0.01 - outernet://opensourceecology.org/Civilization_Starter_Kit_v0.01.pdf

The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/12016836 "Learning from utopia: contemporary architecture and the quest for political and social relevance." \- outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/10579145

Middle-Period Discourse on the Zhong Guo: The Central Country - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3629313

Be Careful What You Ask For: Reconciling a Global Internet and Local Law - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9696322

Thinking about prestige, quality, and open access - outernet://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4322577

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8612238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8612238)</comment>


Modern Microprocessors – A 90-Minute Guide(2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/ <comment><USER2> Ah excellent, I see Spectre and Meltdown have motivated my fellow software folks to take a peek at the internals of CPU architecture :)

Here's a great intro for beginners: [https://www.elsevier.com/books/computer- architecture/henness...](https://www.elsevier.com/books/computer- architecture/hennessy/978-0-12-383872-8)</comment>