Building a vacuum tube computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/vtc/ <comment><USER2> >but electron speed in cupper is about 15-20cm per nanosecond so it is usually not a big factor.

I'm going to be _extremely_ pedantic for a moment, but this is a case where there's a bit of a difference between electricity and electrons. The speed of electricity, aka electrical energy, aka electric field propagation through copper is 15-20cm per nanosecond. The speed of electrons, aka drift velocity, is far slower and governed by the current and conductor cross-section. Vd=I/neA. For a 91w TDP desktop CPU at maximum current draw, the drift velocity through the power connector would be about 245cm per hour. Yes, per hour. For AC circuits the drift velocity is effectively zero because the electrons vibrate back and forth around their starting position.

<comment><USER3> This blew my high-school-physics mind; is there a quick primer / ELI5 on this somewhere? Are you saying that if I connect a battery to a lightbulb, "electricity" moves at speeds we're accustomed to, but "electrons" will only move from one side terminal of battery, through a bulb, to the other side, way way slower than laypeople think? Or did I misread and oversimplify your message? :|

<comment><USER2> Basically correct. If you could attach a magical GoPro to a single electron in a conductor and applied voltage to it, you would see that it zips around at very high speeds in various directions across very small distances and only averages out as moving in the right direction. This average velocity is the drift speed. If you magically labeled all the electrons in the lamp's wiring, you would find it contains (almost) all the same electrons it started with. The company just bills you for the energy it took to move those electrons back and forth like the teeth on a sawblade.

You can also think of it like water in a filled tube. If you pump more water into one end the person on the other end will get your signal long before the physical water you put in to create the signal reaches him. You could put a water wheel or propeller in the tube to convert the energy of the moving water into work, and just like the lamp you don't have to wait until the physical molecules of water you pumped in reaches the wheel to start using energy from the moving water.

<comment><USER4> > You can also think of it like water in a filled tube. If you pump more water > into one end the person on the other end will get your signal long before > the physical water you put in to create the signal reaches him.

This made it click for me, thanks!

<comment><USER5> This is appropriate: [https://www.askamathematician.com/2012/04/q-can-you- poke-som...](https://www.askamathematician.com/2012/04/q-can-you-poke- something-thats-far-away-with-a-stick-faster-than-it-would-take-like-to-get- there/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would not target RISC-V- they need to review much simpler machines, like Princeton IAS or Manchester Baby, and they should try a bit serial design.

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

"By June 1948 the Baby had been built and was working.[23] It was 17 feet (5.2 m) in length, 7 feet 4 inches (2.24 m) tall, and weighed almost 1 long ton (1.0 t). The machine contained 550 valves (vacuum tubes)—300 diodes and 250 pentodes—and had a power consumption of 3500 watts."

Also look at super tiny tubes:

[https://tubes-store.com/index.php?cPath=30_101](https://tubes- store.com/index.php?cPath=30_101)

<comment><USER7> The super tiny tubes are cute. They look like they have to be soldered in though. Could be annoying to replace when they break down? The bigger tubes are socketed.

<comment><USER8> There are special types of high-reliability tubes used for computers. If I recall correctly, one of the tradeoffs is that they use a different alloy for the wire, which makes the wire more expensive to manufacture because the process wears out the tooling more quickly. I can't find the article where I found this information, though.

<comment><USER9> The key to long life for valve (tube) computers was never turning it off.

<comment><USER8> That's not really the key. When ENIAC was first run, several tubes would fail each day—and yes, it was turned on all the time. They addressed these problems by adjusting heater currents. In general, there's a tradeoff here because you don't want to strip the cathode (which _can_ wear out a tube quickly) and you want good performance from the tube. The on-off cycle effect on filaments is also largely due to surge currents with a cold tube, at least for typical designs, and there are various techniques to limit the surge currents which will extend tube life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some of the early tube computers had some really interesting circuits. One that comes to mind is the use of "kirchoff adders," which are more-or-less analog adders with easy one-bit DACs and ADCs on the inputs/outputs. I can't remember if this ended up in the "final" IAS machine, but I'm pretty sure it was used in the MANIAC and is described in the "Second Interim Progress Report on the Physical Realization of an Electronic Computing Instrument": [https://library.ias.edu/files/pdfs/ecp/secondinterimpro02ins...](https://library.ias.edu/files/pdfs/ecp/secondinterimpro02inst.pdf).

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a PDP-8 would be a smarter start. Only 8 instructions, IIRC, and a few 12-bit registers. And it can emulate a PDP-11, so (the emulator) could run UNIX.

<comment><USER12> Definitely.

BTW, PDP-11 (and PDP-8?) uses 74 logic chips, not discrete transistors, so I would say it's already complex enough for tubes.

<comment><USER13> The original -8 (no slash anything) used discrete transistors and DTL logic.

Going the opposite direction I always wanted to reimplement the flipchip modules using SMD technology just for fun. A discrete transistor SMD PDP8 that fits on a desk would superficially seem realistic, at least for a large enough desk. Honestly I just don't want to pay for the connectors and wire the backplane connectors. The SMD components could turn 60s era "handheld" flipchip modules into postage stamps, but no technological progress has happened for wire wrapped backplanes so my SMD design's backplane would remain exactly the same size and complication as the original -8, unfortunately. I'd have a giant tangle of wire wrap wires and a couple hundred postage stamp size "nano-flipchips". Probably 50 pounds of interconnect copper and 1 pound of circuit boards, LOL.

This is whats likely to get Op. Its easy to make an adder or a latch, but takes an entire spool of wire to connect one up to the overall circuit. Lots of work.

Sure, if you use 1950s germanium transistors, RTL and DTL logic is no fun anymore. I always wanted to try RTL and DTL using something more fun, like 2010s era microwave low power amplifier FETs. I would not like to pay for it, but it would be a lot of fun to build a 50 GHz ALU or similar. I have no idea what I'd do with it other than say "wow" a lot, which makes it an ideal hobby experiment.

<comment><USER14> As far as backplanes go, you could go with FPC cables instead of wire- wrapping. That would fit the new components theme, but would require actual circuit boards for the backplanes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe they only recently decided to target RISC-V but the ALU design does not cover all the functions needed. It is missing implementation of the shift instructions, for that they need a 32 bit 5-level barrel shifter. Plus they also need a comparison block which is quite complex on its own. Given the number of years it has taken to get to this point, if could be 2050 before it is working.

<comment><USER16> You don't need a barrel shifter. You can shift one bit at a time. It's slower, but takes far fewer components.

Capacitor memory addressed with tubes seems a strange choice. DRAM is capacitor memory, of course. Atanasoff, who had a a sort of computer in 1939, had capacitor memory, but he had to use a drum rotary switch to address it.

Memory was _the_ big problem in the early days. IBM had an electronic multiplier before WWII, and plugboard-programmed machines, but no good memory elements. (Just registers with motor driven wheels and clutches and contacts.) Pilot ACE had a delay line (slow, serial access), the Manchester Baby had a Williams tube (too expensive per bit, but random access), and the EDVAC had mercury tank delay lines (slow, serial access, and toxic). Whirlwind (1951) had the first core memory (expensive per bit, but got cheaper over time.)

Core would be a reasonable choice for a tube system. Addressing is XY, so you need O(sqrt(N)) tubes.

Memory was a million dollars a megabyte as late as 1970.

<comment><USER12> > _You don 't need a barrel shifter. You can shift one bit at a time. It's > slower, but takes far fewer components._

I think I've finally found someone to ask this question.

How many transistors and space did it take to implement a 8-bit barrel shifter in the 1980s? I found the computing capabilities of 8-bit CPUs in retrocomputers, like the Z80 or 6809, were actually not too bad. With shift- and-add, a lot of computation can be done effectively, but their biggest limitation is the lack of a barrel shifter. Without one, no constant-time bitshift is possible with variable step, you have to shift 1-bit at a time. Performance could be boosted dramatically if a single 8-bit barrel shifter is included, and would open the avenue of a lot of optimization techniques for graphics as well.

Why didn't they include one? Especially when you consider that the Z80 was an "ultimate upgrade" of the Intel 8080, and the 6809 was the "ultimate upgrade" of the 6800.

Was it technical limitations, i.e. even a 8-bit barrel shifter is still too expensive for a 8-bit chip? Or was it that the cost of additional shift instructions decoding/processing is much higher than the barrel shifter itself? Or was it the lack of demand, i.e. it could be done reasonably well with acceptable cost, but simply no commercial reason in the 8-bit era to add one?

<comment><USER17> I examined the ARM-1's barrel shifter on the die [1]. It takes roughly 10% of the chip so it's a fairly hefty investment.

8-bit chips probably didn't have a barrel shifter because they were very limited in functionality. (I didn't realize how limited until I looked at mainframes of the time.) Functions like multiply and divide are more useful than barrel shifting, and those were missing too. Barrel shifting is sort of a frill. As for the Z80, it was very, very tight on space so it's not surprising the barrel shifter was lacking. It didn't even have an 8-bit ALU; it had a 4-bit ALU that was used twice per operation.

[1] [http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ances...](http://www.righto.com/2015/12/reverse-engineering- arm1-ancestor-of.html)

<comment><USER12> > _I examined the ARM-1 's barrel shifter on the die. It takes roughly 10% of > the chip so it's a fairly hefty investment._

> _Functions like multiply and divide are more useful than barrel shifting, > and those were missing too._

My thought was that the lack of multiplier/divider can be somewhat compensated by adding a cheaper 8-bit barrel shifter instead. So according to your analysis, apparently even that didn't make economic sense for a 8-bit chip.

Thanks a lot for giving an authoritative assessment, Ken!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> RISC-V has pretty big registers and a lot of them, so you will need more tubes than you otherwise might...

<comment><USER19> there's an embedded subset with half the number of registers

<comment><USER19> (and people have talked about doing 16-bit subsets)</comment></comment></comment>


Intel Risks It All (Again) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/140/intel-risks-it-all-again.html

<comment><USER2> What interests me most was the comment about the pivot away from compliance to Moore's Law. Could it be that we might be nearing the /commercial/ limits of Moore's Law, where the consumer-level demand for more speed and power has tapered off? Or is this merely a reflection of the increasingly green-friendly market?

<comment><USER3> "Green Friendly" also equals laptop friendly.

As cool as something like the IBM Power7 chips look - I'm not sure I want one of them sitting on my lap..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How ironic, an inter-page-ad of 'fast company' blocked me for a few seconds.</comment>


How Zynga Uses Ghetto Testing, A/B Testing, Minimum Viable Products - <AUTHOR> http://grattisfaction.com/2010/01/how-zynga-does-customer-development-minimum-viable-product <comment><USER2> This is such a powerful, simple concept.

We've discussed this before on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=539900>

And there's a whole forum dedicated to this style of product creation / testing on Tim Ferris' site:

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/vBulletin/forumdisplay.php?s...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/vBulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=9ae24b28914ac9d68687698104da781e&f=5)

Lots of goodies buried in there.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about 'interest testing' instead.

And, BTW people have been doing this for years. Write up some google ads for nonexistent products and then watch and wait to see what value props and features matter to your test market.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ghetto testing? That's a terrible name for this...

<comment><USER5> I really wish "ghetto" -- as a stand-in for ill-conceived, poorly executed, low quality, substandard etc. -- would die.

IMO when people use it, they are introducing the suggestion that these "ghetto" things are what poor blacks or Latinos would do/use. We also have in America (and elsewhere?) the concept of "white trash" which I view as the poor white American analog of "ghetto". It also needs to go.

(Bracing for downvotes)

<comment><USER6> I take ghetto to mean substandard, unpolished, incomplete, etc... No racial undertone. An overly sensitive, dare I say politically correct and self righteous person, can read offense into anything.

To suggest that Pincus's comment had anything to do with race is your own self-oriented projection.

<comment><USER7> >> I take ghetto to mean substandard, unpolished, incomplete, etc...

Except that's not what it means. If we're making up definitions then that's a whole different ballgame.

Wikipedia: A ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressure. A ghetto is now described as an overcrowded urban area often associated with a specific ethnic or racial population.

Definitions: 1. A part of a city, esp. a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups. 2\. The Jewish quarter in a city: "the Warsaw Ghetto".

I know that in current day society the word isn't always intended on meaning that. It doesn't change the fact that this is what it actually means. And I definitely don't believe Pincus was using it with any sort of racial undertones.

That being said, I still agree with the parents statement and I too wish it would die.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying that anyone here used it with racial intent. I'm saying that I believe the word originates from an intent to disparage people who live in ghettos, i.e. certain minorities.

I'm talking about what it what the connotations of something being ghetto are -- especially when I someone is being accused of ghetto behavior.

In some parts of the country, "Aunt Jemima" (and "Canadian", I've heard) are used as slurs against black Americans. The dictionary definition standard would permit this, since Aunt Jemima is only the name of a brand of maple syrup.

The notion that the dictionary defines what is an isn't racist is wrong. Dictionary definitions trail modern usage, they don't lead it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Test and iterate is obvious. What's not obvious here is just how early and where: test the idea before you have a project, test on a high-traffic site instead of picking a group of test users to play in a private setting.

</comment><comment><USER9> I frankly doubt there is a way to know which product will make a viable business or not. If you think about it Google has more data then anyone on what users actually want, and they still create products which fail.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps if they based their new features on users testing like Zynga, instead of the 20% projects of their employees they might have features that have more market success (keep in mind Google's and Zynga's market are not directly comparable).

Implementation wise, I could see Google doing a "labs ghetto" where some set of white-listed MVPs would go out to small percentage of their user-base.

It's a powerful concept.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Camduck – Video chat, games, friend list - <AUTHOR> http://camduck.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Random video chat with WebRTC, give it a try!

Any feedback would be great! Thanks</comment>


All My Homies Hate C: A Zoomer's Perspective on the Ancient Language - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kurtisknodel/all-my-homies-hate-c-9690192a0aa3 <comment><USER2> It seems that the complaint is "I don't understand this thing, so I hate it."

That's a very immature way of thinking.

<comment><USER3> Especially for a thing that you're new to. I find that "hello, world" is always the hardest program to write, because the kinds of mistakes you make result in nothing happening. You get very little to go on for debugging. Often, there may be nothing to Google. "I type run and nothing happened."

You can't really properly hate a language until you're an expert on it. Young developers love to hate languages, because it's the thing right in front of them, without realizing any of the actual challenges that go into software development. Which include living with the fact that writing "hello, world" is frequently incredibly frustrating.

<comment><USER2> "You can't really properly hate a language until you're an expert on it."

So true. So very, very true.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Platform for building enterprise Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_mJtSPTcbk This is a platform for building enterprise apps with no programming required.  Our flagship product is Chatty Studio, and environment where users can use rules-based formulas and flow diagrams to create apps.  Our focus is enterprise, i.e. mobile-front end for current SAAS or standalone apps for processes such as PO forms. www.chattysolutions.com <comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback, questions, criticisms are welcome.</comment>


When retargeting campaigns go wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.hasoffers.com/blog/saving-face-retargeting-campaigns/

<comment><USER2> Why would someone search for splenda daddy?

<comment><USER3> We never did find out why they were looking for splenda daddy and we're a little afraid to ask... ;)</comment></comment>


Infobitt – A movement to do for the news what Wikipedia did for encyclopedias - <AUTHOR> http://www.infobitt.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I started Wikipedia back in 2001 and after a long string of nonprofits have started Infobitt.com, which is, sort of, Wikipedia for news. We scour the web for facts about a given story, aggregate hand-written summaries of the facts, rank-order them, and rank-order whole stories (collections of facts = bitts) as well. At scale, we will make news less noisy and more efficient to catch up on. My claim is that only a giant online community could do this--traditional news orgs aren't big enough, and algorithms aren't sophisticated enough (any more than they're sophisticated enough to write Wikipedia).

<comment><USER2> Interesting. How do you plan to keep coverage unbiased? A lot of bias manages to sneak into Wikipedia articles on current events in spite of their community guidelines and moderation.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that bitt and fact order, as well as which fact is displayed to the reader, is (or will soon be) subject to vote will provide a moderating influence, I hope.

The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is that there will be more of a moderating effect.

<comment><USER3> However it would depend on who is doing the voting. If you, for example, used Twitter to gauge political sentiment, you'd be representing x% of the majority position, which would introduce a selection bias that would imply that x% represent the views of everyone. The problems with Wikipedia for controversial topics Ali's that typically both sides are highly motivated to "win" whereas those that aren't so motivated probably have the correct answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not only feasible, we are already doing it! [1] I have also written extensively on why Wikipedia is not a newspaper [2] and the many flaws of Wikipedia for news-based content [2]

Larry's attempt to break down the news into bits is an interesting experiment (and I wish him the best of luck as he goes forward). I'm not sure he will be able to attract the user base he needs to make it work though. We pay our writers, and are moving to implementing a revenue-share model to reward our writers. I'm not sure if the "work-for-free-while-the-owners-get-rich model works any more.

[1][http://newslines.org](http://newslines.org) [2][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a- newspaper/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedia-is-not-a-newspaper/) [3][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly- sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback and the connection! Clearly, the content creation models are quite different; our focus is pretty exclusively on hard news (for now); we summarize (and can rearrange) individual facts from many sources instead of making one narrative per story written by one person; and you don't rank the news in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how).

We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...

<comment><USER4> Thanks Larry. I think breaking down the info into bits is interesting, it's something we have been looking into for other parts of our site (not news). BTW, weren't you paid to create the first 1000 or so Wikipedia articles?

<comment><USER5> Are you at 1000 articles? How's your burn rate?

<comment><USER4> Our writers have added almost 25,000 posts on thousands of topics (a sample here [http://newslines.org](http://newslines.org)). So far, at $1 a post, that has cost $25,000. Some of our writers have made thousands of dollars. We just closed more investment are are building a revenue-share model that will give our writers even more money. People who get in early, and do consistent work will be able to make a lot of money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, may the best model win!

<comment><USER4> There's plenty of room for everyone. Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't that the purpose of [http://en.wikinews.org/](http://en.wikinews.org/)? What will this site do right that Wikinews doesn't?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Wikipedia for news" might be a brief statement of the purpose of Wikinews, but it isn't an attempt to solve the problem I'm concerned to solve. Wikipedia made encyclopedias better by making a giant encyclopedia. Wikinews didn't make news better...in any way. What we want to do is actually organize the news, including the "long tail" of citizen journalism, into "small pieces, loosely joined" in the form of one-sentence fact summaries. The result will enable a scalable community to co-author a truly useful, complete, and giant selection of the news, without the noise and confusion that besets the news today. So that's the difference.

<comment><USER3> This I could get behind. If you were to strip the adjectives out of the stories (both literally and figuratively, it would not only remove some of the inherent bias, but also a lot of the noise. For example: "A police officer shot a man during an altercation over Lucky Charms in Sometown, California. The shooting is currently under investigation.

And that's it. You report the facts of the investigation and then the public has an unbiased view of the facts, without the subtle nuances that introduce bias. Such as, "A black police officer shot a Vietnamese man. Until the facts of the case reveal that race was a motive, then those details presumptively introduce race as a motive. That's the kind of journalism that is successful financially because it generates strong emotions, and thus viewers however it's subtly dishonest not because those facts aren't true, but because of the motivation behind why those facts where included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like the idea of summarizing various source in infobitt. But I think it still suffers from some points outlined in "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" [0].

E.G. not living in the states, half of the "top news" section is pretty irrelevant to me and the relevancy of the others seems to be based on the personal interests of the tech sawy contributors. I'm sure this gets better once more people are using it. But i guess having some noise is unavoidable.

The nice thing about this crowd approach might or might not be, that only provable facts are quoted and fewer false accusations are made. Thats mostly the reason why I stopped following news after the Utøya massacre in 2011 and later quitted my job at a news site.

Is there already an API one can fiddle around with? I think there is a huge potential in being able to use that data and hopefully feed stuff back. In my opinion, the problem with journalism today is not journalism itself but the distribution of content and the lack of choice how to consume it.

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad- rol...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli)

<comment><AUTHOR> The news on the front page looks a little weird because a bunch of new people from Hacker News just arrived and ranked the news very quickly and sloppily. So it's OK. In a few days when things have settled down (??), you'll see it's much more plausible. As for being U.S.-heavy, we will of course have a U.K. version, other national versions, other languages...but that'll be post-launch and post-second funding round.

In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different.

I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-)

Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard- launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Less and less do I trust the wisdom of the crowds, and Wikipedia. I want expertise, not the consensus of amateurs and the ignorant. Look how well the consensus of experts, or at least professionals, works at HN: useful, better than alternatives, but I wouldn't bank on it.

A story, possibly apocryphal, about Richard Feynman: He gave a strong negative review to a textbook that the other reviewers endorsed. When confronted he said he might not be the smartest person in the world, but was he more intelligent than the average of a hundred people? Certainly!

Or from a Car Talk brain teaser: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one persion who doesn't know what they're talking about?

What about 100 or 1,000 people? I'm pretty sure they know less, as they create in their echo chamber greater certainty and additional untruths.

(I am overstating the case for effect; there is value in the aggregate factual knowledge of crowds, and they are not always ignorant.)

<comment><AUTHOR> As I have said several times before, Wikipedia doesn't follow Surowiecki's rules for "wisdom of crowds" effects.

The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise independently of each other and comments.

Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of facts, and the best can rise to the top.

Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary. So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for taking the time to answer my, and everyone's questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a race to the bottom. How will original, reliable reporters of facts have time to gather them if they aren't paid?

<comment><USER10> Lots of people do things for free if they feel like they are getting something out of it. Pay is an incentive, but it is not black and white.

<comment><USER11> What they would be getting out of this still seems to be a bit of a mystery.

<comment><USER5> Not for everyone. Look at Yelp and Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A much higher proportion of news content than Wikipedia content is politicized, and Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues.

How will you prevent users from politicizing your content? For example, will you exclude more politicized sources such as Fox and the Huffington Post? Separate editorial sources from straight journalism? What about government- controlled media such as Russia Today (RT)?

It seems like the content of politicized stories could be mostly politicized 'bitts' (where often both sides are deceptive and none of the information is valid), and it could merely represent the beliefs of whichever side has more dedicated contributors.

<comment><USER11> >Wikipedia functions worst, IMHO, for politicized issues.

It still functions better than most major news outlets do. Usually the only time I see an article that is _very_ heavily slanted is when it the pet issue of some particular group or cause (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_States) )

Its rules on sources aren't bad at all, it's just implementation which is a bit dodgy sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Feels very much like news.google.com.

With the voting on GN being time and search traffic? I am not sure how the determination on GN ordering works, but the idea of human curated news seems an even more sensation driven principle than the current network news industry.

Even HN falls victim to sensationalism on a regular basis, and I presume most of HN's users are somewhat invested in the quality.

I am not meaning to detract from the effort, but the outcome for such a scenario seems pretty repeatable. Especially with the history of non-niche vote driven news outlets/sites, and their predilection to not be viewed as quality, definitive, or substantive.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://news.genius.com](http://news.genius.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ever since I heard of this site, I've thought that (annotating the web, or parts of the web) is a great idea for a website, and they're executing it pretty well. It's not what we're doing, but it's still cool and my guess is they'll keep growing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Only a giant, international, online community could make this happen." Oh, yeah? It's already being done by an AI. That's what Google News does.

 _Machines should think. People should work._

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's not. I use Google News when trying to figure out how to organize and summarize the news. Google News isn't very good at ranking news, and it doesn't even try to summarize the facts in the news.

<comment><USER8> > Google News isn't very good at ranking news

Is this something Infobitt evaluated or do you mean they don't rank it well for your personal needs? Also, they do provide 1-2 sentence summaries, but nothing as detailed as Infobitt.

I happen to think Google ranks news surprisingly well, though not well enough to be my primary source (I doubt any machine or group of people will beat my personally selected and organized RSS feeds), but that's only for my needs. FWIW I don't logon to Google and block most tracking so I'm not sure they customize it for me.

EDIT: Clarified first paragraph

<comment><USER15> Google news is likely based on algorithms and big data based on user searches and the # of times articles with keywords are getting selected. Nothing wrong with that, but far short of what an informed and active community can do. The two are complementary but quite different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have been contributing to infobitt for awhile now. The potential is for it to be a place where you get a rounded view of a story by multiple editors providing different facts. One option I hope will emerge is filters so I could see for example how the world news appears from an Australian perspective and then instantly flip and see it from a is perspective. That would be something that nobody has done as yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been contributing to infobitt now for about a year. I think the idea of breaking a story down into individual facts linked to sources is interesting. The game changer will come when we start adding value beyond that. There are some ideas percolating on that front. So I would encourage anyone interested to get on board and see where this takes us.

<comment><USER4> Are you being paid, or is there a revenue share? If not, I wonder what your motivation is.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, crazy right?

Folks already contributing hundreds of hours for free for some time.

I can't imagine someone doing free work and writing, ranking restaurant reviews, editing, citing, writing pieces of encyclopedia entrees or electing Presidents like in 2008.

Grassroots wha?

<comment><USER4> Getting free contributions works for Wikipedia because it is not a business, has no ads and it's supported by donations. And because people get ego value from getting their contributions on a large, popular site. However, if the intention is to use free content to make the owners (and VCs) rich, then I am not sure that is a sustainable business model in the long term.

<comment><USER5> Quora and Yelp are for profit.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and their models are unsustainable. I wouldn't be an investor in any company that uses free labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, it's possible. I haven't seen a crowd-sourced news website with a focus on the community so much as Infobitt. The site's style is really good: the news is given to me in small pieces with easily digestible key facts. I can see a lot of people going to this site every day to know what's going on around the world.

<comment><USER5> Yes. The design is far from perfect.

This is just a beta version.

For me, it's already a pretty good way to catch up on the main news fast.

I can pick one bitt and learn some key facts and move on.

Fast, easy, good enough.

Much faster than any alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quick googling of news ontologies reveale plenty of established knowledge models. Why does the world need one more?

<comment><USER5> None of which are being used to deliver quality news much note concisely at low cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like a nice idea but isn't Google News already doing a decent job on this? It's going to be hard to beat the speed of Twitter or Google News in my opinion but I'll be curious to see where this goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. Google doesn't summarize facts. It aggregates articles into clusters, which is useful, but it doesn't save us much time. Google also does a rather poor job of ranking the importance of stories, and often has old news for a long time and breaking news relatively late (or later than a motivated community, like Twitter, can have it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would love to see this work. Really love to.

This has as big of a chance to improve humanity as wikipedia, I believe. The elimination of news curators will reduce other people thinking for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a happy user of InfoBitt. I went from skimming different news sources, such as Yahoo headlines, to strictly looking at InfoBitt for the top news of the day.

<comment><USER21> Is there a link to actually read some stories on the site?

<comment><USER10> You can sign up here at infobitt.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Is a "Wikipedia for news" feasible?

I'm pretty sure it isn't. People who claim the opposite seem to miss something important. Well, of course it depends on how to define "wikipedia for news", but there are several reasons why it is empty talking.

First off, wikipedia is all about data. It's really cool that it provides easy to use service as well, and that's the reason why it is somewhat more successful than OSM, but nevertheless, Wikipedia _is the data_. Newspapers, TV, now all these news portals are _services_. There is important difference between data and service.

Data is gathered and shared amongst us as people working for some great good, which is useful for us personally as well. I might event not like you, disagree with all your opinions, but as long as you can provide to that great work of ours some knowledge that I cannot provide (even if I'm not particularly interested in it) I welcome you. All that matters to me is that you are not lying here. And, as you can see, even in such (presumably) politically-neutral environment there is much disagreement and silly behavior, people tend to get personal, there're edit wars, forked projects like encyclopedia dramatica, because there obviously appears to be some content which isn't interesting for one community, but interesting for another. I don't know much about content of sites like knowyourmeme and such, but russian clone of lurkmore is actually a funny example, as many of articles there are about some real, important topic, about which article on Wikipedia also exists, but are composed in a much more harsh manner, without worrying about political neutrality, and often delivering some curious facts, so if you are interested in the subject you would probably read article both there and on wikipedia.

Service is something to be _delivered_. It must be on time, as "cold news" aren't even news anymore. It's about you providing me information I'm interested in even before I know I'm interested in it, so you should guess it (no matter if it's having good intuition or using machine learning). It's about it being provided in right amount, so I wouldn't stop reading before I get to the most interesting part (and never buy a newspaper from you anymore). It should be reasonably entertaining, so I would want to come back for more. That being said, service is kinda hard. And sadly I assume you don't want to work your sweat off just to please me, for free it is. So our little community-driven platform should be as useful for me, as it is for you. There are several easily deductible reasons why it is a problem, so I'll skip discussing them and get to the first conclusion: something that is about opinions and is equally useful and interesting for all participants isn't news service, it is social network. So if you think you are building news service I guess you don't understand what you are building, because actually you are trying to build one more social network. Lack of understanding what you are making is a problem by itself.

Second is empirical confirmation of the first, and is pointed out in other comments: we have plenty of services like that and services which are social networks in the first place (reddit, HN, even twitter for that matter) are more successful news platforms that specialized news platforms. And I don't even see any claims of how different form them it would be.

Third problem is as much as I don't like journalists, there are reasons for them to exist. They go to dangerous places and make photos, they use all kinds of shady tricks to find ugly and quite interesting story under plain-looking surface, they know who to ask, they know how to ask. They know what to tell to their consumers, they know how to tell. If you are building your own virtual newsroom without journalists you either need to use resources provided by real ones working for other agencies, which makes your own platform some aggregator like facebook or google adds, or, yeah, reddit, HN, Twitter, everything else. Or you just won't have anything (interesting) to tell, really.

<comment><USER5> Did you even read this?

[http://infobitt.com/category/about- infobitt/b/5762](http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762)

<comment><USER22> Ah, my bad. I didn't sign up because I never sign up to i-don't-know-what and I didn't expect that I will find some "about page" _after_ signing up, which seems to me like very natural thing to [do not] expect. Unfortunately I can't follow your link without signing up either, and service that behaves like that actually makes me inclined to go away and never turn back not matter what. So, no, I didn't read it, and I admit it very much might be the reason I don't understand what it is about.

But, still, what I said in the previous post are pretty general statements which I believe must be true to some degree for every single form of "wikipedia for news".

<comment><USER23> I suspect that after the site undergoes some further improvements, its content will be made visible to those without accounts (so that you would need an account to contribute but not to read).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, agreed. There are some issues (mostly having to do with scalability) we have to sort out before we launch to public view without login.

<comment><USER22> But why you need people to log in to see about page? Just 1 static html page so I (not really me, because I spent a lot of time on that conversation anyway, but _somebody_ , whatever) could decide if it's worth my time to sign up using real email account. It's, well, _the point_ of about pages, to explain people what is that stuff they are looking at, and if they really want to go further. Scalability issues? That 1 static html page could be hosted anywhere, and, besides, if your servers aren't dying to host login page it wouldn't make very much difference anyway.

<comment><USER5> That's a good idea. Hope Larry considers it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's certainly something we can consider now that we've soft-launched. We've thought about it in the past, and now I guess it is a good idea to consider it again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like Reddit

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you haven't read the quick summary on Infobitt just yet.

[http://infobitt.com/category/about- infobitt/b/5762](http://infobitt.com/category/about-infobitt/b/5762)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> hacker news is essentially a wikipedia for tech news.

<comment><USER5> Yes. Also, techmeme.</comment></comment>


Beware of the Silicon Valley Cult - <AUTHOR> http://thinkfaster.co/2015/12/beware-of-the-silicon-valley-cult/ <comment><USER2> In general I agree with the sentiment, but calling it a "cult" might be a little too extreme.</comment>


What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/print-this/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877?page=all <comment><USER2> Already on front page of Hacker News:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327202>

Apparently the duplicate submission detector didn't match the noncanonical form of the URL you submitted with the previous submission.</comment>


Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/business/media/anti-surveillance-activist-is-at-center-of-new-leak.html

<comment><USER2> I think Glenn Greenwald is a damn good writer, I used to read his articles a lot when he was writing for _Salon_ , he really read a lot, has an extensive knowledge of this area and knows how to use all these excerpts and quote extensively to prove his point. Think of a kind of _The Daily Show_ segments but for written articles. As I'm actually busy myself in my work I must say I'm not able to read all his writings since he started working for The Guardian, but I am both happy and worry that this is him that brought this proof to the public knowledge. I hope the US Gov will have the decency to admit it was fair game and not try to retaliate, but I must say based on past outcomes I'm not optimist about that. And this article insisting in calling him a _blogger_ , I don't know their motivations maybe to separate him from _real journalists_ but it makes me sick, typical from NYT though.

<comment><USER3> Seriously, that's an insult to Glenn Greenwald. The Daily Show is good as far as entertainment goes but Greenwald writes about serious stuff in a very concise and substantive way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It wouldn't be unprecedented for him to be held in contempt for refusing to reveal a source, but the article doesn't make clear that it is not illegal for a journalist to leak classified information as long as they're not the one who holds the clearance. It is very illegal for someone who holds a clearance to provide that information to a reporter, but if you happen to stumble across it without breaking the law, you can publish it.

Mark Klein, the AT&T engineer who found the NSA wiretaps in the AT&T colo was never prosecuted for this reason. He was just doing his job, sans clearance, and stumbled into the blueprints.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is a game of chess going on and the NY Times just played an interesting move. It wrote a story that appears to flatter Greenwald but in fact gives the reader the lexicon to dismiss/ignore him.

Clearly if the NYT wanted to be doing investigative journalism to challenge government overreach, it would be.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Why did the put all those smear (slander) quotes at the end of the article?

<comment><USER5> Also the bizarre photo in which he looks stressed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He is a lawyer that practiced with one of the most prestigous firms in the country and has written several best selling books, including a NY Times bestseller or two. Calling him a blogger is the NYTimes attempt to discredit him to a certain extent in the eyes of their readers.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm really glad he did this, took a lot of bravery I'm sure. I almost get the feeling that he's happy to be in the crosshairs of the US government.

</comment><comment><USER9> They are not even hiding they are going after journalists who expose their crimes now, are they?

<comment><USER10> Ask an Al-Jazeera reporter what its like getting into the US. I don't read Al- Jazeera stuff very often, but I've never found anything that didn't seem to be good quality reporting. Yet their reporters are held for hours at the US border and questioned at greater length than actual terror suspects who've gone on to bomb stuff. It's bad.

<comment><USER11> I've found Al-Jazeera to be the best news network out there. It seems to be only one that's not ridiculously biased and ratings driven.

<comment><USER12> AJ is in an interesting position:

* most news networks in the middle east are state-run (and very obviously oppressive with heavy censorship), however AJ operates distinctly independently

* as such people in the middle east are exposed to news they wouldn't normally be exposed to, for example controversial news stories or other news stories that require strict objectivity

* western news networks are increasingly rebroadcasting AJ footage, most interestingly because AJ acquires exclusive interviews that other news networks aren't privy to

* AJ provides live feeds of their news channel _for free_ online

* they are growing, and have plans to offer[1] Turkish (Turkey), Spanish (Latin American), and Urdu (Pakistani) channels

It's exciting to say the least.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Plans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera#Plans)

<comment><USER13> Not being state run does not mean it is not under the influences of the state and the position its leaders take.

 _" First, it is home to al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network that has transformed how Arabs get their news. Many give the television channel more credit for spurring on the Arab Spring than Facebook or Twitter. By bringing the revolutions into the homes of every Arab, al-Jazeera drew regional attention to early events in Tunisia and helped boost the number of Egyptians on the streets from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Al-Jazeera gives Qatar "soft power" well beyond its size."_[0]

Kinda like the history between the CIA and many news organizations that "operate distinctly independently".[1]

[0]: [http://www.cfr.org/qatar/tiny-qatars-big-plans-may-change- mi...](http://www.cfr.org/qatar/tiny-qatars-big-plans-may-change- mideast/p26143)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_the_media#Use_of_mass_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_the_media#Use_of_mass_media)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bradley Manning leaks classified information after learning that he was going to get kicked out of the military for being gay. Greenwald publishes this article after basically getting kicked out of the country for being gay. Anyone starting to see a pattern here?

<comment><USER12> Glenn mentions this and specifically points out that there is a pattern:

> When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to > evaluate: 'Is it me, or is the system bad?'

One has to wonder whether the government considers gays and lesbians high-risk dangerous individuals, and furthermore whether they should establish inclusive policies for gays and lesbians to deter any anti-establishment tendencies (or to establish exclusive policies discouraging or preventing gays and lesbians from holding sensitive government jobs).

<comment><USER6> > One has to wonder whether the government considers gays and lesbians high- > risk dangerous individuals,

It used to be a security clearance risk. The idea that you might be blackmailed with the threat of being outed.

<comment><USER15> I could see that be an issue with that today too (as would extra marital affairs, gambling debts, etc) but I doubt they would care one way or the other if you weren't in the closet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the U.S. prosecutes Greenwald, then it's time to prepare for a revolution.

<comment><USER17> Considering NSA and other three letter agencies apparently have quite plenty of surveillance equipment installed, I think your revolution will be met at the door step by two gentlemen in black suits.

<comment><USER16> 1\. I never claimed to be a part of any revolution. I'm not.

2\. This is a burner account and I'm logged in via tor.

<comment><USER18> You're not taking into account the invisible, microscopic swarm of nanocameras that have been hovering around you since fifteen years ago, when, aged 12, you posted a comment that now strongly correlates with later activities that are not condoned by the government, especially since the new laws passed 2 years ago.

<comment><USER19> This thread is ripe for a Slashdot-esque comment:

"I think revolution is the only way for@#�%((((#*;;;";!@

NO CARRIER"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers."_

</comment><comment><USER20> It's doubtful that he will be prosecuted. What's much more likely is that his source will be the target of a hunt and subsequently prosecuted as have other leakers recently

</comment><comment><USER21> Hahaha! Greenwald would love that...

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a nice hit piece the NYT whipped up. Do they normally publish biographies of journalists who write leak pieces? No? Only when it's time to smear someone. Here's what the NYT was asking:

[http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.hk/2013/06/nytsullivan-email- exch...](http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.hk/2013/06/nytsullivan-email- exchange.html)

Is he a weirdo loner biased advocate gay blogger? Just say yes!

Really sad to see the NYT fighting against transparency in government.

</comment><comment><USER23> Will the US prosecute Greenwald for the leak? No way. If they do that, it will be harder to say anything about free speech or freedom of the press in this country, and that is not the American way.

What is, unfortunately, the American way, is to try to find something else to charge him with (see Assange for example), not only to silence him but also to discredit him. Do not be surprised if allegations of pedophilia or other crimes are made.

Many decades ago my mother's uncle ([http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_inter...](http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_interview.shtml)) began to build his private legal practice on defending people from Smith Act prosecutions due to involvement with the Communist Party USA (ironically he never really considered profit much of a motivator for him, and he left a high powered law firm to defend the Community Party), distributing Marxist literature, and the like. Did the government come after him? Yes. With the Smith Act? No. They didn't want to come right out and say "we don't want these people to have good legal representation." Instead they came with a variety of unrelated, and eventually sent him to prison for a year. Unusually he was reinstated to the bar on his release (which is somewhat unusual). (Listening to the interviews with him, I hadn't known he was kicked out of the ACLU for defending civil liberties of Communists.)

The goal wasn't to throw him in prison but to take away his voice. It didn't work with John. He went on to fight, fight, and fight some more, eventually winning significant victories for political freedom in this country. With someone like Greenwald, though I don't know. It does seem to have been fairly effective at discrediting Assange.

I harp a lot on "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" and certainly we are not at the same level the Stalinist USSR was, but I can tell you that it is something that has roots in the US as well.

<comment><USER24> Assange hasn't been charged with anything by the US.

<comment><USER25> But, but, he's a rapist! So we should all denounce him.

This is the view now held by most about Assange, sadly.

On the note of Greenwald, it looks like it's already started:

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is often on the opposite ends of issues from Mr. Greenwald, called him, "a highly professional apologist for any kind of anti-Americanism no matter how extreme."

They'll be calling him a terrorist within the week.

<comment><USER23> I still stand by it, they will pay someone to make accusations of pedophilia or something. Calling him a terrorist is too close to the controversy. The approach taken to Assange is far more effective.

<comment><USER26> This time around, I wonder if some "rogue" politician will suggest that a drone should airstrike him.

<comment><USER23> Still too close. Far better to find something to tarnish his character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Apparently, he doesn't live in US but in Brazil(where I'm located, also), the irony is that since he's not in US it's they can probably run PRISM all over his stuff... I mean, he's american so maybe there's some little safeguards, but at this point he's probably already considered an enemy of US or aiding it so this can be bypassed, and even if not, since invading ALL PRIVACY of foreigners, me included, seems to be cool, they can run it through everyone near him and 'accidentally' get what they want, lawls...

</comment><comment><USER25> Absolutely they will, as they have in other similar cases. They may or may not succeed, but they already have a track record of going after journalists, so I don't see why this should be any different. If they don't push for prosecution, he'll probably have an "accident" at some point in the not too distant future, like has happened to plenty of other whistleblowers, or at the very, very least, they'll turn his name to mud through aspersions and insinuations of sex crimes and so-forth.

</comment><comment><USER28> Where is Sam Lowry ?</comment>


Serious Flaw Discovered in VxWorks - <AUTHOR> http://www.gadgtecs.com/index.php/2015/09/12/serious-flaw-discovered-in-the-os-used-by-over-a-billion-devices/ <comment><USER2> I am curious what has Vxworks on the 787. Anything D and Up sure ( DO178B(c) ) but anything else would need to be certified at a level that I thought only two other RTOS's on the market where certified for critical systems. Integrity and LynxOS-178. I also believe critical systems are air gapped from non critical as well.</comment>


Microsoft to provide automatic updates to handle Japan era name change to Reiwa - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/04/03/business/microsoft-provide-automatic-updates-handle-japan-era-name-change-reiwa/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was able to find items in RHELs issue tracker with references to ones in glibc. Curious what will happen with macOS and other platforms. How does this stuff get done?</comment>


Senate amendment would deny bloggers legal protections as MSM journalists - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Democrats-trying-to-criminalize-citizen-journalism-78461812.html

<comment><USER2> The linked bill that this is supposedly amending only has 8 sections, so it's not clear to me what the amendment is striking or where it's inserting things. Anyone have a better link to what's being amended?

EDIT: As best I can tell, this fits in section 8(2)(A) of S. 448 as currently printed at the linked site (<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/z?c111:S.448:>), so I'm guessing that the Durbin-Feingold amendment is presuming some other amendment that we're not seeing yet. Again: anyone have a better link?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the biggest traffic spike you got? - <AUTHOR> Tell us your story. Please do share even if your site was still small at the time. It's always relative to your usual traffic figures.<p>Where did the crowd come from? How many requests per second did it reach at peak? How did your site handle the load? How long did the surge last? How many unique visitors came to your site during the surge? How did this affect your business? <comment><USER2> When it was announced here, [https://artpacks.org](https://artpacks.org) peaked at about 100 requests per second. It's a site that _really_ triggers nostalgia and encourages a lot of browsing.

The site held up very well on a $5 DigitalOcean box, due to the fact that it mostly served small, static files (only routing and archive-unzipping happen server-side). All templates are created on the front-end.

Edit: Just checked and I was wrong—it's a $10/mo DO VPS.

Edit 2: Oops, I forgot to mention that an app launched the same day, which used the same API endpoints as the main site.</comment>


OkCupid Deletes Post "Your Looks and Your Inbox" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/browserdotsys/status/992106695332687872 <comment><USER3> In case anyone didn't catch it... the 4 photos of "random" dudes that follow the line:

> "here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are > totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as > significantly less attractive than so-called "medium""

are the 4 cofounders of OkCupid... ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's wrong with the article and how is it related to incels?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is destroying unpleasant data the new version of book burning?

<comment><USER6> It is a little more 1984 than Fahrenheit 451.

That post never existed. We have never been at war Eastasia. [Your] Ignorance is [our] strength.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it has more to do with Zuckergate than Incelgate.

In case you didn't know OkCupid and Facebook's data research teams are in strong competition regarding which team is most borderline unethical, as evidenced for example here: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/okcupid-e...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/29/okcupid- experiment-human-beings-dating).

</comment><comment><USER8> >Incelgate

can someone explain what this is?

<comment><USER9> Seemly after the canadian guy killed people with a van, a witchunt for Involuntary Celibates started...

For example: [https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496](https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496)

<comment> J-dawg Agh, that's scary. What is she expecting them to do about it?

Is she asking them to fire people for being sexually unattractive?

<comment><USER10> I think there's a distinction to be made between "people who are unable to find sexual partners" and "people who self-identify with and participate in communities that spew hatred and encourage violence over the fact that they can't find sexual partners".

Sort of like the difference between "white people" and "white supremacists". Except that currently we don't have separate (reasonably brief) terms for the above categories.

There's nothing wrong with having employees who are unattractive / can't find sexual partners, and I agree that that would be just as ridiculous a criterion to fire someone over as being caucasian. However, if you have people in your company who are filled with vitriol or considering violence (be it because they hate women who won't sleep with them or because they hate people with a different skin color), that's a problem waiting to happen.

<comment> J-dawg I think this "intolerance of intolerance" is becoming terrifying.

I personally find "people who hate people with a different skin colour" and "people who hate women" to be repulsive. I'd _prefer_ not to work with those people, if possible. But I accept that in a free society, I might have to. I have no special right to be protected from opinions I don't like, and nor should I.

Nobody should be excluded from employment because of an opinion. And in a free society, it should never be illegal to state an opinion.

We are crossing the line into thought crime here, and it's frightening to see powerful people like Ellen Pao being ok with that.

<comment><USER10> It is the rare person who can prevent their hate from leaking out into their day to day interactions and making their coworkers uncomfortable - <USER2> interfering with morale and the company's viability.

<comment><USER11> If we remove the ideological aspect of this argument entirely, what we're left with is the notion that employment is supposed to be 100% comfortable. But...

In any given employment environment: chairs may be less than form-fitting; different people will have different tolerances for the thermostat setting; some employees may heat fish and durian fruit in the microwave; one may be asked to load or unload 40 foot shipping containers; being under pressure to meet a deadline is fairly normal; a boss or coworker may have an unpleasant personality, possibly even a personality disorder.

In general, we expect that in many ways, employment _will be uncomfortable_. In general, we accept this as a nominal cost of earning a living.

But once various ideologies are introduced, there is a sudden expectation that a small and specific subset of workplace interactions ought to be 100% pleasant and comfortable. Why is this?

<comment><USER10> If I have the choice between working somewhere where my colleague thinks he has the right to rape me if I don't sleep with him vs a place where my colleagues are respectful and have my back, where do you think I'll choose to work? And if I don't have a choice of where to work, do you think I'll be able to do my best work with that sort of threat present?

It's not just about comfort (though personally I do think people have a right to a workplace where there coworkers would defend them against bodily harm rather than claim a right to inflict it). It's also about what's best for the business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think this has anything to do with the incel movement. It was a risky post to begin with. This tweet is making a lot of assumptions. Flagging as no good discussion can come from this post on HN.

<comment> J-dawg > _Flagging as no good discussion can come from this_

..in your opinion. Why do you feel the need to silence that discussion?

I get that HN is a forum with its own rules and as such there is no automatic "right" to free speech, but is this really what flagging is for?

Flagging should be used for spam and other content which simply doesn't belong on a tech-related forum. Not for just removing stuff that you personally don't want to discuss.

Why don't you just ignore it and upvote the stuff you do want to participate in?

EDIT: this comment now appears as 'folded' when I refresh the page. Does this mean that it too has been flagged? That's pretty funny.

<comment><USER13> On HN flagging is used not just for spam, but often for content you don't agree with; especially if you strongly don't agree with it. In this case you think this content shouldn't be on HN and click "flag". If enough people do that, the post disappears. There's nothing you can do about it.

<comment> J-dawg > _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is > spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag > them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you > did._

Flagging is supposed to be used for spam or off-topic content. People who flag stuff they don't agree with are not following the guidelines of this community.

'whalesalad' is apparently breaking the guidelines twice, first by flagging something simply because they don't agree with the discussion that might ensue, and secondly by commenting to say that they flagged.

Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER13> This is theory. What I describe is how this works in practice: commenters on HN use flag as a tool to silence opposing views. It happens every day, hard to overlook it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> J-dawg Why do posts like this get flagged so often?

This relates directly to a tech company, and is about the intersection of tech & societal trends which many people here are interested in. It seems like perfectly valid HN content.

Do flagged posts get reviewed by moderators, or does HN allow a minority of users to flag whatever they want out of existence?

<comment><USER14> I don't know the details, but the [flagged] mark is added automatically when enough users flag the post, probably it consider the fags to upvotes ratio, but I'm guessing here. With even more flags the story may be killed.

The mods usually take a look at the stream of post, specialy the flagged ones, but there are too many posts and in case you find something classified too badly you can email them email@example.com , they usually reply soon, but it's manual process so use it wisely.

My guess here is that some users flagged it because the incel angle. It looks like a exaggeration, but I'm still not sure. So I'm not hitting any buttons here [no upvote, no flag, no email to the mods].

[My interpretation is that a log time ago OkCupid posted some silly story with some data and dubious analysis as a marketing strategy. Now they have been acquired and they must pose as a serious business, so they delete the old posts that are too polemic or politically incorrect, so ... I'm not sure that there is a connection or not.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The stat that they don't show are how many simultaneous sexual partners people have on the site. They could have made it an interactive data exploration site to compare this to attractiveness!

Just get off of these awful sites and programs. They profit off the worst traits of humanity and it seems their blog as well. There is nothing scientific or useful that can come from their data or supposed insights. The first step in the right direction was to delete the post.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would anyone with integrity and self-respect subject themselves to flawed, unnatural and zero investment world that are dating apps? Can you imagine how lazy, distracted and confused are the users of these apps are in real life? Just stick to the real-world, screen the square root of as many people as you could ever meet in your remaining life-expectancy and pick the best one that comes along next. No Paradox of Choice. No "The One." No waiting for Godot. Just action.

<comment><USER17> > and pick the best one that comes along next

The point is that for a set of people there's no-one coming along next. Hence they turn to dating sites to try to make connections.

I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. There were no dating apps, just classified 'want to meets' in the newspaper and they were expensive and fruitless. I didn't have a first date until I was 30, it took that long to find someone who was interested.

I wouldn't lecture anyone today about anything they can ethically & legally do to avoid that long sentence of loneliness. Even if they don't find a life partner, just getting one or two dates can be a huge boost to esteem.</comment></comment>


In Africa, Money not necessary for mobile banking - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/in-africa-money-not-necessary-for-mobile-banking/ <comment><USER2> Make a somewhat effusive statement, that's really ingenious; a hard currency for the new millenium, portable, divisible, and universally accepted.

Of course you've traded the brutal master of the despot's printing press for the harsh mistress of Moore's law, but the second at least is somewhat predictable.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't quite understand: how do they trade the airtime? I don't think in Europe there is a way for a phone user to transfer his airtime to someone else? I can see how they could trade the prepaid cards, but how does the mobile banking work?</comment>


Happy Hacking Easter – Story of privacy violation into an eggshell - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hacktivesecurity.com/index.php?controller=post&action=view&id_post=12 <comment><USER2> I once found and disclosed similar issues in an app.

The app didn't use HTTPS so it was trivial to intercept Bearer tokens.

For some reason, most API endpoints returned way more data than necessary (e.g., when receiving a message you also get the user's last location, their name, their latest known profile icon), so simply observing network traffic on an Insecure WiFi network would be enough to get all the information you could ever want (no need to actually use that Bearer token).

And of course the app collected the precise GPS location and would return a GPS location with full precision in virtually every API response (messaging a stranger, fetching their public profile, etc).

In my private, responsible disclosure sent to the creator I demonstrated how I could use their private API to track the creator everywhere he goes. I think that drove the message home ;)

I am always skeptical when an app wants my GPS location.

Since I am friends with the creator's wife, I never wrote a post about this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the author of the post, but here are some notes on this app:

500,000-1,000,000 installs: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ferrero.ma...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ferrero.magickinder.tablet&hl=en)

Written by Ferrero SpA (Yes, the producers of Nutella... $8.4 billion in annual revenue): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrero_SpA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrero_SpA)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Last but not least, all communications are transmitted in clear text; no encryption is involved across the whole app."

It's pretty common to send and receive API requests in clear text, since the encryption for this part should be handled by HTTPS. But you're right, this app only uses HTTP

<comment><USER4> Correct, but https is often called encryption too, in these contexts

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another similar privacy leak affecting children on the VTech website a few months ago:

[http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/11/when-children-are- breached-i...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/11/when-children-are-breached- inside.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish the author would have listed the types of issues at work here.

Privacy violation is the result of a few types of issues including JSON injection and horizontal privilege (maybe vertical) escalation.

Also, providing fixes could help lend a hand to developers, both the creators and readers of this post.

Please don't take this post as negative, it's a very nice finding which I'm glad is public to the point of helping our user information become safer, and for that I thank you author.

<comment><USER7> The app authors could have simply read OWASP and been fine, this appears to be direct object access issues, in other words, they had no check to verify that the user sending the request actually had permission to any of the things they requested.

Everything else is just manually issuing commands to a "RESTful" interface which does not care which account issues the command.

[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project)</comment></comment>


Amazon Announces Free Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/

<comment><USER2> I've been a Rackspace Cloud customer for years, and happily so, but it's this constant drumbeat of innovation and forward momentum at Amazon that makes me seriously reconsider my choice.

I really want to see Rackspace step up its game over the next year, if for no other reason than to keep Amazon on its toes.

<comment><USER3> Let us know when/if Rackspace decides to step up to the plate (those publicly traded bastards).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What will be the impact of this on third party monitoring apps like CloudKick.?May be they have to provide more value addition on other areas of cloud computing like custom building of servers , automating sys-admin etc.

<comment><USER5> CloudKick is nicer, but then free is free. I use CloudKick for my stuff and I don't think I'll stop. Some customers however need to cut their costs for many-Ec2 instance deployments, so the free monitoring is good.

I just checked most of the large instances my customer runs, and noticed some are very underutilized; wonder if free monitoring might reduce Amazon's revenue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Better info in the email they sent out:

 _Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We're excited to let you know that as of today, all Amazon EC2 instances come with free Basic Monitoring metrics from our Monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch. You don't need to do anything to make this happen. It's there for you to use. Simply sign in to the AWS Management Console and select one of your active instances. You will immediately be able to view graphs and track performance on metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic.

Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 provides metric data on instance performance at five-minute frequency. Customers can optionally choose to enable Detailed Monitoring, which provides metric data at one-minute frequency for an additional $0.015 per instance-hour.

In addition, starting today you can now set alarms for any metric that Amazon CloudWatch monitors. You can configure these alarms via API call to send notifications or initiate Auto Scaling actions when metrics cross certain thresholds. Alarm pricing starts at $0.10 per alarm per month.

All the features mentioned above are available immediately in all regions (US-N. Virginia, US-N. California, EU-Ireland, APAC-Singapore), and we invite you to try them today! Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch at: aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Web Services Team

P.S. Amazon CloudWatch monitoring remains free of charge for Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances._

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow! Amazon just keeps getting better and better (and cheaper and cheaper). Hmmm...what are they up to?

<comment><USER3> It is a race to the bottom. Amazon is attempting to commoditize all aspects of their Cloud offerings.

If something becomes a standard feature, a competitor or service cannot pick up the slack and use it as a differentiating feature.

<comment><USER8> I agree. This is not the first time that Amazon have targeted the companies that can/could be used to add value to their offerings.

There was a company (cannot remember the same sorry) that provided MySQL in amazons cloud before they launched their RDS service. And an much better service it was too. The startup did not ask you to give them a 4 hour window where they can bring down your DB. But still it was an Amazon service so the brand awareness was there.

This seems like a direct attack on the likes of cloudkick. I do not understand the motivation to be honest. They were making some money from their own monitoring and not they are making none, but they are pushing companies like cloudkick away from survival and innovating more.

While the free micro instances offer was obviously a push to put the boot into Rackspace and attempt to take the remaining % of the IaaS market this I understand less.

It seems Amazon have ignored the old rules where in a new market there is less direct competition as there is plenty to go around and have gone straight for total market domination.

Disclosure: My project has(had) as a highlight feature IaaS monitoring, metrics and alerting. So if the above sounds a little unreasoned please forgive me while I contemplate a pivot. :-(

<comment><USER9> It was FathomDB (I worked there). FathomDB is still going actually, but I'd basically warn anyone away from building a convenience service on top of Amazon's stack - they're using the Microsoft playbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> a direct link to the post being referenced: [http://aws.amazon.com/about- aws/whats-new/2010/12/03/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2010/12/03/announcing-free-monitoring-for-amazon-ec2-instances/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This definitely sweetens the deal. AMZN's monitoring facilities have been expensive and not really all that good.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you, it very expensive for small startups not taken off yet. For example Cloudkicks charges $99/month for their entry level offering. May be their target customers are startups/companies which are taken off (profitable, VC funded). Also as suggested by other commenter (troels) , monitoring may be not essential for all startups at the early stage.

<comment><USER11> I've often been unhappy with off-the-shelf monitoring systems, because every major site I've worked on has had some unique kind of problem.

For instance, there was one site where user abuse was the real problem... Bad enough that I built something that detected possible abusive behavior and would beep my pager.

For another project we had about 20 geographically distributed mirror sites, and we had to monitor network connections to all of them and make sure they were all alive and staying synchronized.

Right now I've got a site where the caching system screws up periodically and then I start getting 500 errors. Sooner or later I'm going to really fix the problem, in the short term what I really need is something that gets in my face whenever the 500 error rate spikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cop up, who's startup just died ?

I hope it was more like a "startup idea" though.

<comment><USER13> Amazon has had monitoring for their instances for a year now. The only change is in the way that they price it.

It used to be expensive enough that you wouldn't leave it on at all times, but would turn it on to diagnose something or check up on one of your boxes, then turn it back off when you were done. Now you get a baseline low-fi version for free.

I think they just realized that nobody was paying for this service, and that it really didn't cost them anything to provide it. So they just made it free.

As far as Startup Killing goes, I doubt this will hurt any "Cloud Monitoring" startups significantly. If you look at the 5 basic charts they give you, you can see it's in line with their stand on reporting across all their services: They give you the basics, but leave plenty of room for somebody else to step in and deliver something better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> After the introduction of micro instances, cloudwatch costs were simply unjustified. Way to go Amazon – best news I've heard this week!

</comment><comment><USER15> Kudos! But this should have been done long ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> Free monitoring... right, yes, I suppose you get monitoring by the NSA for free :)

<comment><USER17> If you are not a US citizen, of course.

<comment><USER16> If you are a US citizen, there's also an agency for that...

<comment><USER18> NSA, CIA and FBI "free monitoring" is not free - the billing is via another 3-letter agency: IRS ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Free Monitoring, it's like when they kicked out Wikileaks from their cloud? Nice feature.</comment>


Interactive Visualisation of "Piano Phase" by Steve Reich - <AUTHOR> http://www.pianophase.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Phase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Phase)

</comment><comment><USER2> A friend of mine played this piece on two pianos for his senior recital and it was amazing. The only standing ovation for a senior recital at Vanderbilt University for years, maybe ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this it? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnQdP03iYIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnQdP03iYIo)

edit: nevermind, decided (for once) to read the youtube comments. This is Kulas Hall at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory in Berea, OH

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mildly interesting (at least in chrome on os x) if you open a new tab on top of it the web audio api stops playing but doesn't seem to stop the timer in the animation leading to a jump and some interesting audio for a beat when you open the tab back up.

</comment><comment><USER4> Switching away from the tab in FF Dev while it's playing makes for some interesting audio and visual effects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just watched this version ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0345c6zNfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0345c6zNfM)), as a drummer~ it was pretty satisfying :)

ps: I just saw the 'solo' version, even more satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER6> This website is blocked by Fortinet: "Category: Meaningless Content".

Edit: I've never seen the website, nor have I ever visited any url with 'piano' in the domain name, from work, afaik. ...

</comment><comment><USER7> I want to see it for Phrygian Gates</comment>


Quickselect Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.techiedelight.com/quickselect-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> Input: arr = [7, 4, 6, 3, 9, 1] k = 2

Output: k'th smallest element in the array is 4

Am I missing something... shouldn't the k'th smallest element in this array be 3, given that k=2?

<comment><USER3> Sort the array:

      L = [7, 4, 6, 3, 9, 1]

      -> L = [1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9]

Now L[k] = L[2] = 4.

The notation is potentially misleading, but consistent with this interpretation.

EDIT:

Ah, I was completely wrong.

      List : [7, 4, 6, 3, 9, 1]
      Index:  1  2  3  4  5  6

The smallest element is 1, the second smallest element is 3, the index of the second smallest element _counting from 1_ is 4.

This is deeply, deeply confusing. Badly expressed, and a very poor example.

<comment><USER2> Context can be clarified by writing: "Quickselect is a selection algorithm to find the INDEX OF THE kth smallest element in an unordered list. It is closely related to the quicksort sorting algorithm."

<comment><USER4> it doesn't return the index, rather the element itself..

<comment><USER2> True. This is what I meant by confusing, without properly defining the variables at play, in this context, k is the index of the element of the ordered list, and not the kth smallest element.

Semantics, I agree, but confusing nonetheless.

Or in other words, how do we define k?

<comment><USER4> I have emailed them. post should be updated soon.

<comment><USER2> Post has been updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A JS implementation for fun [tests-not-yet-implemented]: [https://github.com/cristiancavalli/quick- select](https://github.com/cristiancavalli/quick-select)

</comment><comment><USER6> No mention of median-of-medians for pivot selection? Someone needs to re-read CLRS...

<comment><USER4> They have mentioned Introselect which is a hybrid of quickselect and median of medians.

<comment><USER6> Ah, missed that paragraph. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Why We Love Email from Amazon and Hate Email from Barnes & Noble - <AUTHOR> http://www.jondale.com/blog/2008/05/why-we-love-ema.html <comment><USER2> This guy's reading choices aside, this is further proof that Amazon takes their recommendations very, very seriously and understands that good recs = revenue. B&N - I'm not sure what they understand. B&N just doesn't seem to get it. Their Book Clubs could be great communities - if they were about community, not selling books (the sales will come folks!). And frankly, think outside the box folks. A recycled forum is just so lacking. The good thing about B&N is that they can often get the book there faster than (non-prime) Amazon. But when it comes down to it, I still do most of my nerd purchasing at bookpool. They don't try to recommend or sell me anything, but what I buy from them, they get right, and get it to me fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember really wanting to like B&N e-mails. The thing that annoyed me was that they would always pretend to have great deals just for me. Then I realized that all of their 20% off deals would still cost me more than buying the book from Amazon at their normal price. Plus as alluded to in the article, I never saw any books/movies/CDs that jumped at me. I finally gave up and unsubscribed.

I love Border's e-mails on the other hand. They send me coupons varying from 10%-40%. I think that they do data mining to figure out which e-mails I respond to. I'm trying to teach their learning algorithm that I only use 40% off coupons;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't want to get junk e-mail from _anyone_. I always uncheck any preference boxes and it drives me wild when companies ignore that. Amazon seems to be a good citizen, but Expansys, AoC, Waitrose and a few others are persistant offenders.

</comment><comment><USER5> Agreed. Amazon rocks. But I'd recommend that guy to change his habits though: classical music is better for you than junk common sense literature. I haven't read all of those books, but some. Maybe others are better, but I doubt it. When Peter Norvig joked at startup school about lack of substance in these "economics for masses" books, the audience audibly agreed.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if you should judge another's reading selection.

<comment><USER7> sure you should, watch this.

Adults who list "Harry Potter" among their top books are morons.

<comment><USER8> What if they list Tolkien books or have a forum nick from Lord of the Rings? By the way, 'Nazgul' and 'Narsil' aren't two words that would normally go together.

<comment><USER9> (LoTR > Harry Potter) x infinity

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, this is surprising from B&N. If Qdoba can track all the burrito purchases I make, B&N can surely keep track of what books I have. Once you have the data, making recommendations isn't rocket science.</comment>