Architecture Playbook - <AUTHOR> https://nocomplexity.com/documents/arplaybook/introduction.html <comment><USER2> Since it's relevant here, I will throw my hat into the ring for diagramming tools.

Terrastruct is a diagramming tool specifically made for software architecture. It allows you to express complexity by splitting the diagram up into layers and scenarios. Layers separate levels of abstraction, and scenarios describe what happens under certain conditions (e.g. server goes down). These are just things I wanted personally when designing architecture myself and couldn't find in existing tools.

[https://terrastruct.com](https://terrastruct.com)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing TerraStruct. It looks/feels like [https://www.ilograph.com](https://www.ilograph.com) but with extra features. :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! We're just tackling the problem from different angles, I'm a huge fan of what they're doing, and if you want to express your diagrams via code, ilograph, along with structurizr, I highly recommend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This appears to survey different architecture representation/drawing tools in different domains, and not any inherent architecture (a la Designing Data Intensive style patterns) itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's some useful templates in there. From many many years' experience as an architect it lacks a fair bit of context though.

How do you choose which tool or document template to use at a given time? Why in an architecture context do fine-grained things like creating an MVP even feature? Especially under business architecture?

Architecture (business, technology, process or any other typre of architecture) has these basic steps:

\- Assess current state

Understand the transformation (one or more processes) the client seeks to address, and find out what the technology landscape looks like. Start identifying stakeholders, and familiarise yourself with the client's worldview, environment, and the power and political landscape.

It helps to spend time understanding a situation before assuming you know how to improve it.

\- Set an objective

Identify who the client is, and define the client's objective. It's guided by the previous step.

\- Define scope

Bound the solution by outlining it's features and functions, by defining what's out of scope, and by discussing the criteria by which success is measured. The scope delineates what stakeholders expect the project to deliver.

\- Design and build

This is what most of us do. The Architecture Playbook seems to focus here most.

That leaves managing risk and stakeholders, and the post-project review.

A better guide might be had from the management consulting world - like Betty Vandenbosch's book Designing Solutions for Your Business Problems. My own architecture cheat sheet is [https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Consulting.aspx](https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Consulting.aspx)

For sure there are some templates in the architecture playbook that I'm going to read through to find gaps in my own knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like the intent behind this, but it needs a few more years to cook, and a lot more docs.

If you want to build a house, there's a whole lot of ways to do it. You can use a lot of different tools and materials and techniques, or a few. Doesn't really matter. What matters is what the purpose for the house was, where you build it, how much money you have, etc. There's no one set of tools that can tell you how to architect any house. Architecture should spring from the creating of the house, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER7> With Archi and Camunda, some of my favorite tools are listed here. Causal Loop Diagrams are great for systems thinking - not only in architecture. I often use CLDs to reason about business models.

Regarding enterprise architecture design, you might want to take a look at the TOGAF framework. The Architecture Development Method (ADM) gives you an excellent guideline on how to navigate through the topic.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great resource! Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Ask HN: Non-Techie trying to learn code. Please help with my course outline - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm a non-techie biz guy who wants to learn how to code. I signed up for membership at ThinkVitamin (run by Carsonified) and they have an awesome library of tutorials. But what they're lacking is a roadmap for learning these languages. Could any please give me some guidance? My ultimate goal is to start playing around with building my own web app, or at least have a better understanding of code.
The courses available are:
HTML & CSS (already watched), Javascript (already watched), HTML5, JQuery, JavaScript, UX, CSS3, Design, Ruby, PHP, Ruby on Rails, NoSQL, Accessibility,
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The courses you lined up are pretty good. You should stick with one scripting language for now. Once you are comfortable with one, you can pick up the other one later. You will always find people who will say php is better than ROR, ROR better than python. Don't listen to them. I will say pick one stick with one. Once you mastered its not a big deal to go on to other languages.

Before you start, understand the basic architecture of web based technology. Try to understand how http works in basic.

Just because you watched some videos and went through tutorials you won't be able to program. What you need to do is practice practice and practice. If you can't get in 100th time you should try 101st time. Another thing you need is passion. You should like what you are doing. If you are coding for the heck of it, you will not be able to code.

<comment><USER3> I would say this, some languages are easier than others when it comes to helping you follow good coding practices. You can create crap in any language but some make it easier than others to write good code.

As an example, Javascript. You can write beautiful code in Javascript and it isn't that hard but to do it, you need to to understand closures. Closures aren't the easy topic for a new programmer to grasp immediately so it might not be the best language. I would say that python and ruby are better for making it easy to learn good practices compared to php, perl or javascript and would suggest either of those as a first language to start learning with. It doesn't have to be the language you stick with but both are good for getting you going. You aren't out of the woods by picking either of them but I think you will find the experience easier. Of the two, I would lean towards python as it has a very 'one proper way to do it' approach which is easy on beginners. That said, you can't go wrong with either. If you want to venture slightly further afield, both scheme and smalltalk are excellent languages to do as a first language. If either of those tickle your fancy, I would look at racket for a scheme implementation and pharo for the smalltalk. Pharo has learning tools when you fire it up and racket has a ton of learning materials.

The first two languages I learned where a Forth variant and a straight up machine language. So any language can be your first one. I realized later on that while I had learned to program, I hadn't learned to do it well and went back and studied the hows and whys which I think any of the 4 above would be very good places to start with.

EDIT:

One last note, if you decide to go with Javascript, I strongly urge you to read 'Javascript: The Good Parts' very early on in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Learning programming fundamentals (flow control, common data structures, object-oriented programming, etc.) may be more useful than learning several different languages. I know Python isn't on your list of available courses, but I do like the Python tutorial (<http://docs.python.org/tutorial/>) as an introduction to programming fundamentals.

Having a project like a web app is a goal is a great idea; there's really no substitute for experience.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> You might wanna read/watch something about "typical SQL" databases (MySQL?) to compliment the NoSQL. Enjoy!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


What Organized Crime Pays - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/organized-crime-pays-0000477-v21n10?curator=MediaREDEF <comment><USER3> A most excellent film that depicts the realities of lives of various ranks of mafioso - in this case, the Camorra, a criminal organization based in the southern Italian region of Campania - is Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (2008)[1], based on the eponymous book by Roberto Saviano.

The Camorra bosses swiftly ordered his death and Saviano even contemplated fleeing Italy, thereafter.

Later he sued the very same crime bosses.[2]

[1]

Here's the Criterion trailer for the film

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwgKIpvLrCs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwgKIpvLrCs)

[2]

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/antimafia- cam...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/antimafia-campaigner- roberto-saviano-sues-gangsters-who-ordered-his-death-8406282.html)

<comment><USER4> This article was written by Roberto Saviano.

<comment><USER3> Oh. I missed that part.

But don't miss a chance to watch the film. Its on Hulu Plus.

Although its mostly pretty bleak, the film lays bare the impressive reach of the Camorra.

From waste management to high fashion !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also a couple of studies, books etc. that have looked into the earning potential of gang members (it is extremely low).

"Gang Leader for a Day" is a nice read in that regard.

<comment><USER6> "In Search of Respect" by Philippe Bourgouis is also good - technically an academic book, but very readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't seem like a low salary to me. Seems that it's about average for Italy ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage) 2610USD versus 2500 they mention in the article). So I'd guess above average for an entry level position.

I'd somehow guess it's also largely tax free!

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure about Italy, but in the United States, you would definitely want to pay taxes on that income, and, an important part of organized crime (an, as we saw in Breaking Bad, not so organized crime) is laundering the ill gotten gains, paying tax on them, such that you can then spend the money without worrying about the IRS. Because, if there is one thing that scares the Mafia, it's the IRS. They are ruthless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - it was the IRS that got Capone, right? (Or at least according to the movies)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The freakonomic piece on the economics of crack dealing is a good counterpoint to this, given they found that many people in that line of work were actually earning less than minimum wage. - [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_econom...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER10> agree title is misleading. organized crime does not mean italian mafia, which is what this post is about. the Bratva for instance is structured completely different, which I won't go into here today. even the Italians in NYC I've met who are in the family and connected are structured completely differently. many of these families have moved to completely legit businesses and just keep the fear factor in place to secure large city / gvt contracts. pay scale is on a much different scale than this.

not saying the post was inaccurate at all, but it is only describing about 5% of criminal enterprise.

<comment><USER11> > "many of these families have moved to completely legit businesses and just > keep the fear factor in place to secure large city / gvt contracts."

Protip: If your business model relies on "fear factor" you may have failed to satisfy the "completely legit business" specification.

<comment><USER12> I agree.

Note that this reasoning can also be applied to what we would think of as "normal" companies. What does this say about them?

<comment><USER13> The market is not rational?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like an investment firm, but with a bit more vertical mobility :).

</comment><comment><USER15> It's an interesting piece written by an authority on the subject, but the title is so misleading that its negation would be closer to accurate. Accordingly we replaced it with a representative sentence from the article. Suggestions for a better title, as always, are welcome.

<comment><USER16> Umm, what?

> If you worked your way up to become one of the boss's right-hand men, you > could get a monthly stipend of $32,000 to $38,000. If you were a vicecapo, > second-in-command to the boss, you'd receive about $130,000 a month. And > bosses—well, it's impossible to even guess how much they can take in.

Sure sounds like 'Organized Crime Pays' is an extremely accurate title.

<comment><USER17> $i for a Few Important People:wq

<comment><USER18> You might know this already but ZZ is faster and a bit more reliable method than :wq

ZZ has the side benefit of never saving out copies into randomly named files.

<comment><USER17> Also, find . -name "*.swp" -exec rm {} \; is also slowly getting abstracted away in my mind as a single, atomic and very useful command.

<comment><USER19> You can configure Vim to put the swap files in your ~/.vim instead of the directory of the file you're editing, which in my experience is much less annoying - <USER2> [https://github.com/GregorStocks/configs/blob/35ab5c3c45e5cfa...](https://github.com/GregorStocks/configs/blob/35ab5c3c45e5cfa9a380c56431d539ca47ea7e00/.vimrc#L65)

<comment><USER20> I have a directory in /tmp set up for swap files. And indeed, it is much less annoying than having them in the working directory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Built a Side Project - <AUTHOR> https://stayintech.com/info/sideproject <comment><USER3> Aside from the free nature of the app, I think what's missing was a consistent growth strategy. In your opinion 1/ how much would be a fair price for such a service 2/ which/who sales/marketing saas/specialists would have helped it attract customers 3/ what would be the next features appealing enought to convice users to try it, use it more frequently, and invite other, should this app continued to live

</comment><comment><USER4> It sucks that you had to kill your project because of costs but honestly I don't blame you for going the Heroku route. It does it all for you with some "mininmal" configuration. I like linux and have done enough maintenance on various sites so I generally don't feel lost but I'd kill to have someone walk me through the process of setting up a production ready web app just once.

</comment><comment><USER5> _" To learn more about my users, I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients."_

brilliant read, one thing I'd modify is ask some/all these questions on signup or login. Tweak enough questions and techniques to ask [0] so as not to discourage. This way you can gain more info as as people use/try/login.

[0] Must be numerous ways to gain info building it into actions of tool.

</comment><comment><USER6> For all the people saying Heroku is too expensive: a basic single server, 10M row database and SSL is around $50 a month on Heroku: [https://www.heroku.com/pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing)

Personally, for the reduction in admin tasks (which I think people greatly underestimate), improved deploys and rollbacks, and improved uptime about $50 a month is completely worth it compared to a standard server.

I don't know why the monthly bill in the article is $250 though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.

<comment><USER8> How do you keep your costs so low?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like this kind of posts, a side project helps creating side projects. it was a matter of time until I figured out that to make money you can simply teach people how to make money. who wouldn't want to learn that :)

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I like reading these. Kinda disappointed to see the project abandoned though. Seemed like you were really on to something and like others are saying, you probably could have found cheaper hosting to keep it going. Also would +1 seeing the project open sourced if it's not continued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's another checklist style app, only built on PHP AppEngine. So far there hasn't been enough traffic though to make a reasonable estimate of cost.

[http://www.fallinloveapp.com](http://www.fallinloveapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> Iteration 3: Die

</comment><comment><USER13> This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday, [https://www.goodui.org/](https://www.goodui.org/). If your site was still up, I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.

<comment><USER14> It's mildly frustrating that that site mentions "Press J for next K for previous" at the bottom of the page after I've scrolled through them all..

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients._

Great!

 _The open rate of the email was 45,8%_

That's excellent.

 _...and 27 people replied._

Oh. Oh dear.

 _~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - <USER2> the tool for a friend or colleague._

96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is _by far_ the more important number. If the people who'd tried the app were a random sample of the population then 2.2% might be enough to suggest there's a valid premium business model there, but the people who tried the service weren't randomly selected - they were a self-selected group of people who are interested enough in user testing to sign up for the service. If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (alledgedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a _big_ messaging problem.

<comment> nezza-_- > The open rate of the email was 45,8%

How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

<comment><USER16> From MailChimp's website

[http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click- rates](http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates)

<comment> nezza-_- And: [https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching- affects-...](https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open- tracking/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Author here, happy to get feedback!

<comment><USER18> "monthly costs of running the service" was your killing argument. Why didn't you migrate to a cheap hosting ? My single host at scaleway (3.59€ per month) can handle many toy projects and gives me all freedom.

<comment><USER19> I find Scaleway tricky when deploying apps since it is ARM - the price is kick ass, but I wasnt able to go around limitations with my Python apps. Do you ever run in to issues like that? How is uptime?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!

<comment><USER21> That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

<comment><USER20> $225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

<comment><USER22> My experience as a one man operation is that you always have to make trade offs between building something yourself (especially if you actually need to learn a new skill-set to do it) and using someone else's solution. Honestly, in general this is essentially always the debate even at my regular job.

For me, Heroku has always been the choice over AWS or Digital Ocean. I haven't had it block me from doing anything I've wanted to do and my monthly bill is around $10 (for multiple sites). For my projects, I could never make a solid argument that moving away from Heroku would actually change the product for the end user in any meaningful way. And with the greater amount of time and energy I would need to focus on a non-Heroku server-side, it would likely slow progress.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, I don't really care what you use if it fits your needs. The main point here is that the author shut down his project, because they were spending $250 a month, to operate a very basic setup. Pick your favorite host, but a car payment to do so, is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

<comment><USER24> And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance?

I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your $10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin- level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for every subsystem. There's just too much.

The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.

<comment><USER23> How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users?

I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have hundreds of paying customers.

The moral of the story is that you should choose the right tool for the job. A $250/mo. Heroku app for a developer who wants to fiddle around with it for a tiny side project is not a good value as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER25> Agree with brandon272.

$250/mo is not a viable business plan.

As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper.

For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server costs can take you.

<comment><USER8> What sort of infrastructure?

<comment><USER25> Bare Metal. I typically use something like OVH's offerings.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


More Than Half the World's Population Is Middle Class - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/20/does-make-you-middle-class-or-wealthy-planet-earth/ <comment><USER2> Many would beg to differ - in what that actually suggests and implies (as if people are doing well enough). How do you define these things?

First you need to figure out what things like poverty mean in the big picture; things like debt stress and how much everyone should have.

[https://medium.com/@abraxian/thinking-is-everything-a- bright...](https://medium.com/@abraxian/thinking-is-everything-a-bright- future-means-clear-thinking-2d16a0433954)

[https://www.statista.com/chart/11857/the-global-pyramid- of-w...](https://www.statista.com/chart/11857/the-global-pyramid-of-wealth/)

"The level of financial inequality around the world is staggering. According to a new Credit Suisse report, 45.9 percent of global household wealth is in the hands of just 0.7 percent of the world's population. Those 36 million individuals control a mind-boggling $128.7 trillion, as can be seen from the following the pyramid.

"Below that, 391m people own $111.4 trillion, 39.7 percent of global wealth, despite accounting for just 7.9 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant and it shows how 3.47 billion people (70 percent of the population) share a combined wealth of $7.6 trillion which is just 2.6 percent of total wealth."

What all of this means is that in reality, when it comes to practicing rights at work rather than ideological theory and liberal sentiment, you don't have any stopping power or negotiating power whatsoever to resist the flow of money and wealth in the world, and how these dictate your life. They, the rich, and their processes, determine all of the overarching actual degrees of freedom in society. Conservatives like to say you can shop somewhere else — where? Who has all the land, resources and natural resources? These must belong to the people together as part of the national commonwealth. There is no other way.

"More than a third of Britain's land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years.

"In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue- blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates.

"A group of 36,000 individuals — only 0.6 per cent of the population — own 50 per cent of rural land."

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain- ST...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain-STILL- belongs-aristocracy.html)</comment>


Geoff Hinton - Recent Developments in Deep Learning - bra-ket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vShMxxqtDDs

<comment> bra-ket related article: ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/imagenet.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/imagenet.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> An excellent read.</comment></comment>


You wouldn't have a maximum account balance, would you? - <AUTHOR> https://inventropy.us/blog/you-wouldnt-have-a-maximum-account-balance/

<comment><USER2> Yes, of course, you have maximum balances on most bank accounts!

Bank accounts with high balances are not of the same kind as bank accounts for poor people; they're not managed the same way, and they're not managed by the same bank people.</comment>


Make Medium Readable Again - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readable-agai/kljjfejkagofbgklifblndjelgabcmig <comment><USER2> I've been using a bookmarklet that simply removes all fixed-position elements from the page; it makes Medium and plenty of other sites tolerable.

This is it:

      javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

<comment><USER3> Yup. Source/author: [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky- headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

<comment><USER4> Hum, any ways to make it work with Safari IOS?

<comment><USER5> You don't need it in Mobile Safari. Tap the paragraph icon to the left of the address bar and it'll go into Reader View, which eliminates all that rubbish.

<comment><USER6> Or long-press on it and select Automatically use reader mode on this site.

<comment><USER4> Hum the main issues are e-commerce websites that are recognized by the reader feature.

<comment><USER6> You can long-press to have it always off for a site too.

If you have a Mac, you can configure Safari there to default to a setting, say using reader mode automatically or autoplay videos.

It seems these settings are shared with mobile Safari.

And then you can override these settings per site in Mac Safari, and only the reader mode setting in mobile Safari.

A bit weird that you can't do it all in mobile Safari, it doesn't feel finished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a serial selecter, I wish it would get rid of the popup when you select text. [https://imgur.com/G5x0U9P](https://imgur.com/G5x0U9P)

<comment><USER8> Fellow serial selector here. Is there a formal name for what we do?

<comment><USER9> OMG I have found my people.

<comment><USER10> Me too! I thought it was just me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey, creator here. This is also available for Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make- medium-r...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-medium- readable-again/)

And feel free to suggest any improvements, or submit a pull request on GitHub! [https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for making this, in particular thank you for the "disable lazy loading" option, which I have always found annoying when I'm on a slow connection (which is very often since I'm in Australia).

<comment><USER13> I _hate_ scroll-based lazy loading of images. It's bad enough when latency is merely high, as is commonly the case for such things for us in Australia, but it's actively hostile to unreliable internet connections. When I know I'm not going to have an internet connection, I used to be able to just load pages, and know that they'd be there when I got to them. But with lazily loaded images? Nope.

(Non-scroll-based deferred loading of images is not necessarily bad, though I don't see much purpose in it.)

<comment><USER14> As a developer that recently implemented lazy loading of inages, the goal is simple: getting the site interactive and usable as fast as possible.

Most users stop reading without ever scrolling down, having already made a decision yes or no.

So loading the content after scrolling down uses more of that users data plan, and makes the site load slower.

That said, I simply replace the thumbnail with the actual image as soon as it scrolls into the view, and let the browser do its own thing.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried lazy loading as it is implemented specifically in Medium, while on a slow connection? (Just head out to Medium, find a post that has several pictures, and then you can simulate being a slow connection using developer tools). Basically the previews are completely useless (just an unintelligible, extremely blurry splash of colour without shape or form) and they are not progressive (not many intermediate steps between the initial splash of colour and the final picture, so you have to wait a long time anyway to even figure out if you are interested into that particular picture or not), in addition it seems to be computationally expensive (whild guess: perhaps because of the overdone gaussian blur effect), which you notice when you try to scroll and the scroll motion becomes choppy (even though I'm on a gaming PC with decent specs). I much prefer the "blocky" look that many other lazy loading solutions have, rather than the blurry look in Medium, because with the blocky look you are more likely to guess what's depicted in the photo.

<comment><USER14> Using non-progressive images with a blur is standard practice though, with little alternative.

Because you often want to use png or webp for the final image, instead of jpg (and these formats are non-progressive), and loading of progressive content can't be controlled by scrolling.

As for that blur, medium definitely overdoes it with that, doing it on the canvas and all.

This is what my site looks like before lazy loading: [https://i.imgur.com/O9YjU7o.png](https://i.imgur.com/O9YjU7o.png) and I'm usually testing it on 3G and 2G to test performance – every image is available with srcset in countless versions so your browser can additionally choose which version it wants to show.

I'm always interested in improving this.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the insights (I have never implemented lazy loading myself so it's interesting to read about it).

> As for that blur, medium definitely overdoes it with that, doing it on the > canvas and all.

Yeah I find it really hostile from a UX point of view.

P.S. I just looked at your imgur and the ones that are more intelligible to me are the smaller pictures in the bottom raw, while I wouldn't be able to say what's in the first two larger pictures (interestingly, it seems that with blurry pictures the larger the picture, the harder it is to guess the contents).

<comment><USER14> You can try yourself on quasseldroid.info if it loads better for you than medium — usually it should.

That said, none of it is easy to optimize.

The ideal goal is to only load images if they're actually needed, only in the size that is needed, to always show at least a placeholder, and to ensure the loading never causes the page to reflow.

That's why all this complicated loading is used, to give the illusion of a faster site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hope someone from Medium is reading this thread -- there's a problem with your product if people who want to go to your site to take time and read consider your site unreadable.

<comment><USER16> I appreciate the creators efforts here, but honestly medium just needs to get their shit together. I use Reddit enhancement suite because it adds features. This just makes a basic blogging platform useable for reading. Personally I've just opted to not use medium any more.

<comment><USER17> Medium is dead. This is not a problem since yesterday... Medium has fallen in the same trap it wanted to solve at the beginning. I advice everybody to stop using Medium for their practices...

<comment><USER18> What would you say is the best alternative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> On Safari and Firefox we have a built-in way to remove distractions like these, such as Reader mode. A cynical viewpoint on why Chrome doesn't offer this is that doing this would prevent you from seeing Google's ads.

<comment><USER20> Don't think any cynicism at all is required to arrive at this conclusion.

<comment><USER21> I marvel at the creative genius that can come up with a, with any plausible alternative explanation, to be honest.

<comment><USER22> "At Google, we love the internet and creators who dedicate their life to crafting webpages that are beautiful to look at and delightful to read. In order to honor the hard work of these creatives, we have decided to not implement the "reader mode" many other browsers have. You can rest assured that Google will always do everything it can to support the visions of all who make the internet as we love it possible."

(Could also insert a sentence or two about how Google has AMP instead, leaving "creators" in control unlike "reader modes")

<comment><USER23> It's sad how plausible this is. Particularly in light of how Google explained removing the "view image" button from Google images the other day:

"Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites."[1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964226180776845312](https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964226180776845312)

<comment><USER24> Two tweets down they mention they did it because of a lawsuit settlement.

<comment><USER23> They added that more truthful explanation a few hours later, due to the barrage of hate and confusion their original tweet was getting.

<comment><USER25> Ya lying to people smart enough to see through bullshit does that

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The pictured hackernoon banners are especially visually intrusive. Hackernoon also inserts text and image ads (inline) to some of the posts that contributors make. The contributor is not notified of these edits, and chrome extensions like this won't catch them (and they are also neon green).

It might be good for their branding if my primary takeaway were positive, not annoyed.

<comment><USER27> I always find it weird if a link shows up on twitter or HN and then a few days later it appears again, now suddenly under this generic "hackernoon" branding. Medium is bad enough at hiding author identity, mixing the good with the crap, but hackernoon adds another layer and I just don't get it.

<comment><USER28> The value-proposition for the author by submitting to an Medium publisher like HackerNoon is increased exposure, although I wonder if it's worth the cost of having the personal brand obfuscated. (page views for a personal blog are a vanity metric, after all)

Incidentally, whenever I see a HackerNoon or FreeCodeCamp domain on Hacker News, it serves as an _anti-signal_ of quality, which is an interesting side effect.

<comment><USER27> Same with the anti-signaling for me. Having the same issue with Medium too, but at least there the author is in the URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't for the life of me understand the people who write about programming on Medium when the CMS doesn't even have native syntax highlighting.

I wish I could tell people it's straightforward to migrate from Medium, but it involved a lot of annoying copy-pasting when I did it.

Sooner is better than later, though. Call it markup debt if you well.

<comment><USER30> [https://dev.to](https://dev.to) is such a great alternative to Medium for programming posts. I really wish it catches up and becomes more popular

<comment><USER31> So is any blog engine with syntax highlighting, or even a simple HTML document with something like prism-js[^1].

[^1]: [http://prismjs.com/](http://prismjs.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Medium was specifically created because of bloated blogs. It has become the very thing it ought to destroy.

<comment><USER33> It's the cycle of people who want to "do things better".

Step 1: Find a type of website experience that sucks for users. Example: Blogging, image sharing.

Step 2: It's so simple! Just do the same, improve on the UX, don't plaster ads, have a clean site and give it a cool name. Example: Medium, Imgur.

Step 3: As people flock to your site because it's cleaner than the alternatives, have the lightbulb moment: "Oh wow, I could monetize all these users!". So you plaster the site with ads, marketing gimmicks and what not and you don't suffer for it. It's not that it works. It's just that you have a userbase that trusts you and is already used to you. They don't know anyone else.

What are your users gonna do, build their own site that doesn't suck?

It really is a depressing, wasteful cycle.

<comment><USER34> > It really is a depressing, wasteful cycle.

I do agree with this, but I believe we can make it at least not-as-bad.

I recently started a new blog & evaluated a load of options, Medium was one. I quickly decided it had become a cesspool of attention engineering and social widgets, and ultimately settled on self-hosting, with no banner adds or social rubbish.

Can the average public do this? I'd argue it's not trivial nor inexpensive currently, but maybe that's worth fixing? Encourage people to move off centralized platforms for sharing content, and maintain control.

<comment><USER33> Since we're talking about blogging platforms I might as well plug Ghost: [https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

I recently moved my company's blog to it. This is an open source, self- hostable markdown blog engine with an excellent featureset and some great default themes, and a paid hosted plan.

Official Ghost blog: [https://blog.ghost.org](https://blog.ghost.org)

My company's blog: [https://articles.hsreplay.net](https://articles.hsreplay.net)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Note: this plugin can read and change all the data on the websites you visit.

<comment><USER36> Extensions that do this terrify me. Imagine a popular Chrome extension, say, Fireshot, with 2 million active installs, selling out. The next update of the app gets shipped with a screen scraper that looks at coinbase.com. Some time after you've last visited your dashboard, it opens a connection on some entirely unrelated site and posts to the 'send' page to send all of your BTC to a third party address.

Or if you have 2FA enabled for sends, just intercept the send POST with an address of your choice, but display the user's originally input address on the confirmation screen. To make it even more confusing, keep a list of transactions:intended accounts so any time the user looks on _any_ bitcoin site it shows the transaction was going to the right account.

<comment><USER37> The bitcoin people will tell you that if you're using the same computer to browse the web as to hold a bitcoin wallet, you're doing it wrong.

(there are other conclusions one could reach from this, such as the disadvantages of being your own uninsured bank)

<comment><USER38> Isn't that how silk road guy got caught by the feds.

<comment><USER39> i thought he signed up for a forum with an email tied to his real life identity but used his previously anon handle

<comment><USER40> It was a StackOverflow question he posted while creating Silk Road, in which he used his real name (before switching to the "frosty" alias in under a minute).

And his SSH key had both the username and hostname set to that alias ("frosty@frosty"), which is how they connected him to Silk Road.

Specifically, it was this question: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i- conne...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a- tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing- unobstruct-230e4e95cf5...](https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing- unobstruct-230e4e95cf5e)

Unobstruct is a good anti-dickbar tool for iOS.

</comment><comment><USER35> Better idea: make the internet readable again.

Perhaps using a combination of AI/ML and collaborative raw-text extraction.

<comment><USER42> You mean Safari's (and presumably any other browser) Reader Mode?

[https://imgur.com/a/qsYrf](https://imgur.com/a/qsYrf)

<comment><USER43> That's what I use on firefox. Works great most of the time.

<comment><USER35> Thanks, just tried it, but it seems to remove all images, also the relevant ones :(

<comment><USER44> It depends how they're added to the site. In-line images on Ars Technica appear fine.

<comment><USER35> Yes, and that's exactly why it probably needs some AI/ML or some collaborative user input ;)

<comment><USER44> Medium inserts the images as you scroll; they don't show up if you extract the text before scrolling down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've gotten so used to right clicking and removing the offensive parts of websites in ublock origin that I always find it shocking just how bad the web is on a new machine. So many banners, so many subscription lists, so many useless social bars.

It's also kind of silly that I have four different extensions just to shield myself from how bad the web has gotten. I feel like I'm going under red alert every time I want to check my email.

<comment><USER31> > every time I want to check my email.

Ever considered using a non-web email client? K9, Tunderbird, Evolution, Kmail, Geary, mutt, alpine, etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15123638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15123638)

</comment><comment><USER47> Sheesh, why do we need tools for user-hostile layouts?

I hate reading between slats on Medium, don't they realize that?

What's their incentive for it?

<comment><USER42> Increases usage?

<comment><USER48> Does it? Does anyone just go to medium.com and see what's going on rather than being linked to some specific article? Is there anything about the medium reading experience that means someone would rather go to them specifically rather than where the content they want happens to be? Are they trying to lure writers that way? I don't get it.

I mean, I'm sure they know their business and everything. Again: I don't get it.

<comment><USER42> Well, that's the _incentive_ for Medium to do it. Only they would know whether it works or not. It sticking around suggests it does. However, success hides all problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Every time I visit medium, it shows a popup reminding me how much times I visited it before. Do they want to make me feel guilty for visiting too often?

</comment><comment><USER50> I have made a stylish stylesheet with a similar purpose:

[https://userstyles.org/styles/150108/medium- custom](https://userstyles.org/styles/150108/medium-custom)

But it is more focused on the writing experience.

I really love medium's editor, but I wanted a dark theme (more comfortable for the eyes), and to remove all the clutter so I could focus on no-distractions writing.

I hope you'll find it useful =)

</comment><comment><USER51> Recently I've released an extension that hides the sticky elements. It works on all sites including Medium. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sticky- ducky/gklhn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sticky- ducky/gklhneccajklhledmencldobkjjpnhkd)

</comment><comment><USER52> I have found a Chrome extension over a month ago called "Sticky Header Hider aka Fixed Header Fixer" by Emojistuff which works very well. Yesterday I found the other one "Make Medium Readable again" by A Bunch Tell when I changed my search term from "Sticky Headers etc" to dickbars and found I am not the only one being tormented by those things. I also see another extension for Apple called Unobstruct.

I like the option "Disable lazy image loading". I have noticed that. I thought it was for constantly loading of adverts.

Pleased to see something done about this annoying practice.

They think I am so stupid that I can't locate the navigation bar so they have to ram in my face/fixed line of site constantly.

So nice to have the freedom back without any work in hiding things with Adblock or clicking that bookmark for most sites.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why does this extension need permission to "read and change all your data on websites you visit"?

<comment><USER11> So it works on custom domains like hackernoon.com [0]

[0]: [https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/blob/master/content.js#L66](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/blob/master/content.js#L66)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a lot of this, and works on most sites, not just Medium: [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky- headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Or if you are using uBlock Origin add this to custom filters

      ##.u-fixed

</comment><comment><USER56> Technology is progressing fast, but I think UX is going down more and more.

To be able to read basic text, we need to fix things by ourselves, make scripts, addons, etc.

Soon we will need fix for this, fix for that, fix for everything.

</comment><comment><USER57> Now we need something which will silently remove React hype articles :-D

</comment><comment><USER58> I like this plugin. Thanks. I do not like the recent "pivot" if oh will of medium allowing branding etc. It's not executed perfectly; though I do not have a better solution in mind.

</comment><comment><USER59> This looks great, now how to get rid of these annoyances on Android Chrome? Especially the uncloseable "get app" button.

<comment><USER60> Not to sound edgy, but you don't (and probably never will). Use Firefox instead and be happy with your extensions :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why not make all the web readable again? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just- read/dgmanlpm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just- read/dgmanlpmmkibanfdgjocnabmcaclkmod/)

</comment><comment><USER62> Does this mainly fix things that are annoying to non-members?

I've considered making an extension to retool the "clap" nonsense myself, but for readability Medium is second only to mobile-friendly view on Android most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Hii its a great topic to discuss <a href="[https://www.fortechinfo.com">free](https://www.fortechinfo.com">free) paytm cash</a>

</comment><comment><USER63> Hii its a great topic to discuss [https://www.fortechinfo.com](https://www.fortechinfo.com)

</comment><comment><USER64> Not sure if my comment here is relevant, but the past 5 - 8 days or something Medium (logged in) changed for me significantly. I can now only see the main header stories and some top lists to the right:

[https://imgur.com/a/bfdHb](https://imgur.com/a/bfdHb)

The mobile just says "You've made it through your stories for now". Has anyone else experienced this the past days ? Have they expanded their subscription model to include even articles that are not "paywalled" ?

</comment><comment><USER65> You could just use ublock and get rid of those parts manually on articles pages

</comment><comment><USER66> Outline.com is a great tool to quickly do this with any webpage.

<comment><USER67> Strongly seconded.

[https://outline.com](https://outline.com)

Works where Reader Mode isn't an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Medium looks fine in a text-only browser such as links. Better than most websites in fact.

</comment><comment><USER69> I thought this was going to make Medium more readable; but it literally makes Medium more readable.

<comment><USER70> What?

<comment><USER71> He means the articles themselves didn't change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Enough of the "Make X Y Again" please, it does nothing but refer to negative connotations.

<comment><USER73> But this is actually a solution...

<comment><USER72> I don't doubt that it is. Why someone would want to associate their app/tool/product with a controversial political slogan is beyond me.

<comment><USER74> Why would would someone want to censor themselves just because people they don't like want a monopoly on language? Is acting in a milquetoast manner attempting the broadest appeal more important than having common sense and integrity?

<comment><USER75> > _Why would would someone want to censor themselves just because people they > don 't like want a monopoly on language?_

All effective communication is "censoring yourself". When I say that I'm a software engineer, I'm refusing to say that I'm a kazoo player, because I intend to convey the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a software engineer" and not the idea that people get when they hear "I'm a kazoo player." No matter how much I dislike (or like) kazoo players, I'm not going to attempt to reclaim the term from them.

And the English language is descriptive, not prescriptive. When a phrase has a well-established meaning - whether that meaning was first by commoners 400 years ago, or commoners today, or (for some languages) a bunch of academics in an ivory tower today - people are going to think I mean that meaning when I use the phrase. If I want my communication to be effective, it's on me to pick words that I expect people will understand, not on my audience to figure out what I really meant.

When I communicate, I intend to communicate the most accurate thing I can to, yes, the broadest audience I can.

<comment><USER74> I'm not saying self-censorship is bad, I'm saying that if you do it because someone else misappropriated some language, then you're on a clear path to only saying what other people permit. And this is especially wrong when those 'other people' are actively trying to undermine your ability to communicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Hey, one of the founders of Hackernoon here.

Love what this does, could you make it removing fixed positioning instead? Basically this kills all of our branding. we try to maintain a quality threshold for our community, and as such hope that yall notice our colors and at least consider that it might be worth it to read.

Personally, Id love something that minimized the nav to the bottom while moving but thats just me.

This is amazing work! Thanks for helping the community!

<comment><AUTHOR> > could you make it removing fixed positioning instead?

This is actually what it does. Hackernoon is a resourceful site but I hate reading it. I usually open Chrome Developer Tool and kill the header + bottom engagement bar manually. If I'm too lazy, I just close the tab. I'm so glad I found this extension.

<comment><USER76> Yeah, we don't have control of our layout like that :( I derped really hard and didn't notice it was just making it fixed from the photos (I was mobile when commenting)</comment></comment></comment>


The Indoor Rainforest Iowa Almost Built - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/5328-an-oral-history-of-the-indoor-rainforest-iowa-almost-built

<comment><USER2> San Francisco has an indoor rain forest.[1] If you're in SF, visit.

[1] [http://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/osher- rainforest](http://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/osher-rainforest)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds similar to the Eden Project: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Project)

</comment><comment><USER4> Also similar to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2) which local folks referred to by its initials.

</comment><comment><USER5> "bonobos... shanghaied from the jungles of Central and South America"

I assume they were planning on stealing them from a Brazilian zoo?

<comment><USER6> One of these things is not like the others...</comment></comment>


Show HN: I created this to keep me focused and productive (surprisingly it works) - <AUTHOR> https://fiddlewax.com/daytoday.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For reference, my daily schedule that seems to work nicely is:

1\. Turn on one of the background environments (usually the café audio).

2\. Play some jazz (trying to pick a playlist of songs that don't have lyrics so it doesn't distract).

3\. Warm up with some quick brain/physical exercises.

4\. Finally, dive into whatever needs to get done. :)

All the code sits inside a single page of HTML, so feel free to download the source and tweak it for your own links/interests!

Cheers, Adam</comment>


Ask HN: Which database do you use in in your stack in 2018? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This is from enterprise perspective where I recommend Exasol for analytics (its extremely fast) and Snowflake for ETL (virtual data warehouses on AWS).

</comment><comment><USER3> MySql and Postgres

</comment><comment><USER4> the old, boring mysql

</comment><comment><USER5> mysql</comment>


Free ERP for Small Business Onwers - <AUTHOR> http://semilimes.com <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical because the site says this is free but does not explain how you support the product. Is my data your product? Such a tool asks for a lot of sensitive data. Why should I trust you?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And we invite you all to join [http://semilimes.com](http://semilimes.com) to find out more details on how you can get your free erp.</comment>


Questioning the Law of Conservation of Energy - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/is-the-law-of-conservation-of-energy-cancelled <comment><USER2> Me: "Questioning the media's elite-driven narrative" is such a clickbait headline.

Also me: "Questioning the law of conservation of energy"—aaah, a headline clearly intended for sophisticates like myself.

(The article itself is good; I'm just amused at my own reaction.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Putting aside the quantum aspects of this article for a moment, (not that they aren't fascinating, but, ...well, one can only think so hard at the end of the day!) I think this is a good place to link to Sean Carroll's post about the gravitational aspects of the general issue (for anyone who might not have seen it): [https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy- is-not-conserved/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I read recently that through the Casimir interaction, heat can be dissipated in a 'vacuum' as it is transferred to virtual particles. When this happens and the virtual particles pop back out of existence, do they carry the energy they absorbed along with them into nonexistence? Or by absorbing energy do they become real? Would that then mean energy is being created?

<comment><USER5> some references please

<comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770464) was posted 20 hours ago on the topic, pointing to [https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum- weirdness...](https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum- weirdness.html) .

<comment><USER7> I'm no physicist, but the article says "phonons can indeed be transferred across a vacuum by invisible quantum fluctuations."

Which is not the same as "heat can be dissipated in a 'vacuum' as it is transferred to virtual particles."

spot the difference: "transferred across a vacuum" (to some other object) vs. "dissipated in a vacuum" (to nowhere).

<comment><USER6> Perhaps physics has a specialized version of "dissipated"? A look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipation) suggests that's the case.

And perhaps corporate_shi11 is using "dissipated in a vacuum" to mean "transfer of internal energy from a hotter body to a colder one across a vacuum"?

 _shrug_ \- I dunno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Energy is a slippery concept. To Wikipedia it's a 'quantitive property' that 'must be transferred to an object.' A _property_. Good luck weighing that, or nailing it to a tree.

Consider the 'transformation of energy' ... from mechanical to electrical to acoustical to chemical to potential to kinetic to thermal (end of the line). What is the 'it' that's being transformed?

In one sense all things are 'energetic' so long as they have a velocity (relative to something else). We need to keep an eye on boulders up on hillsides. They're not _moving right now_ ... but their _potential energy_ might be transferred to us, thanks to the equally mysterious 'gravity'.

Yes, the math all seems to work. But we're not quite 'there' yet. Our position is uncertain.

<comment><USER9> Is heat really the end of the line? Heat engine to mechanical, etc.

<comment><USER10> That's an interesting question. AFAIU, heat engines don't take energy from heat, but from heat _difference_. In this sense, heat is like potential energy - an absolute value is arbitrary and meaningless in isolation, but moving mass between two points of different potential lets you store or extract energy.

OTOH, from what little I remember from reaction kinetics in chemistry, temperature there is used as absolute value that determines the chance of collision between their molecules and the "activation energy", both of which influence the rate of a chemical reaction. In this space, thermal energy seems like something absolute.

What gives?

<comment><USER11> > In this sense, heat is like potential energy - an absolute value is > arbitrary and meaningless in isolation

Not quite. Potential is defined with an arbitrary basis as you've pointed out, but with temperature the basis is not arbitrary: it's chosen for us, and this value is absolute zero. Taking a temperature difference is not enough to figure out how well a heat engine will work on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At least this one has a direct title. The other "but what if we ignore thermodynamics for a moment" articles that pass by HN sometimes bury the lede a bit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Considered abandoning reading when I saw the ridiculous "if we believe in dark matter, why not aliens?" headline on the side. Did stop reading when they started talking about quantum mechanical observations. Is Nautilus just a Markov generator trained on terrible Quora answers?

<comment><USER14> This is not really fair. The "why not aliens" article is an interview with a scientist who argues that we should not outright dismiss the possibility that something (particularly omuamua comet) is alien technology, until we have proof one way or the other, which is not a ridiculous thing to say.

I also can't see what is particularly wrong with the description of quantum mechanical observations in this article. It looks to me like a good enough description of the idea of research done by the author himself.</comment></comment>


Fml: An optimizing array programming language - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jckarter/2839239 <comment><USER2> This looks rather nice and in some ways resembles Nial ([https://github.com/danlm/QNial7](https://github.com/danlm/QNial7)) in that its a array language that is more accessible to programmers not familiar with APL/K/Q etc

However the gist is over 8 years old and there doesnt seem to be a public repository for the language available.

Edit: add NIal repo link

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit annoyed that I can't find anywhere to download the language, I would like to try it out.

I'm a q programmer who loves it, but would love to see a language that is: 1\. free and open source 2\. less symbol heavy than k/q 3\. fast enough/safe enough to be used in production

So I'm always on the look out for something new like this that could replace it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Joe says it was purely a design doc:

[https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/1221232990233038848?s=20](https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/1221232990233038848?s=20)</comment>


Show HN: Professional broadcasting engine written in c++, opencl, opengl and qt - <AUTHOR> https://www.motioncaster.com/ <comment><USER2> I love the fact that the UI has professional switcher buttons but how is this different from OBS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your interest, our launch is very recent so this our minimum viable product. We have a lot of features coming up including a built-in macro function to automate complex or repetitive tasks.

At this point we are confident MotionCaster has the smallest resource footprint even if 4K videos are recorded simultaneously with live streaming.

Secondly, it has a built-in title maker that can make vector-based images, videos, subtitles, virtual studio, You can make high-quality broadcast content fast and easy.

This is possible because it's been programmed to take full advantage of system resources through our own video processing engine and optimal resource distribution.

So when you have the same computer specs, you can do more than other software and process higher resolution vid</comment></comment>


Proposition HN: - <AUTHOR>

There's an opportunity in robotics that I don't currently see as being followed through widely enough.
Last year the predator algorithm for real-time object tracking was invented (there are youtube videos and a google tech talk on it.). The code is open source and on the inventor website I think.
The hacker news community is full of highly skilled people. For each of the following tasks there is very likely someone who can do it in few hours.
- port the predator algorithm from matlab to numpy (or c etc.)
- creating a mechanical turk website/api for allowing turk workers to do initial labels (watch the videos and you'll get how it works). This might not be necessary as not much labeling needs to be done, but it would be a nice to have anyway.
- creating website/api for experts to do labeling when that is necessary
- somebody probably already has robot arms lying around at their work or in the lab. If not, some people can chip in to buy it and house it someone's work/home (1000 people - 5 dollars each - 5000 used industrial robot)
- creating a website that allows authorized people to submit data to the robot, or even allow people to rent robot time
- creating a website to spread the word about predator algorithm applications
A first application I have come up with is to create hamburger making robot. A couple industrial robot arms (or even less accurate lightweight arms would do, such as in animatronics) and a few cameras placed around.
There is no reason why all this couldn't be done in few days collaborating over the net.
Other ideas
- automated laboratory mouse handling/dissection - cooking - cleaning - checking on 3d printing machines (plastic and biological)
This would make a big impact so it's a great project for ambitious hackers.
There are business opportunities in this, but an open source project might move quicker. <comment><USER2> Addng the video and inventor site urls here will make it easier to find, but of course a search on youtube could solve the issue also, if you however have the urls, I'll suggest to add them here. Best.</comment>


18.939 Kilometers (about 11.77 Miles) - <AUTHOR> http://worlds-highest-website.com/

<comment><USER2> The 'Elevator' links should definitely have used animated scrolling

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it.. what is the purpose?

Also according to the style sheet it isn't 18.939km.

"height: 2219em; /* temporary (due to Firefox 3), usually 18939em */"

Its really 2.219km.. apparently

<comment><USER4> em != km

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)#CSS>

<comment><USER3> Hmm, have you read the sites CSS? By setting the font-size to 100cm wouldn't you also be setting the em to 1 metre? em == m</comment></comment></comment>


Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/ <comment><USER2> This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication.

* Push vs. Pull. Does the recipient have to ask to get incoming messages.

* Off the cuff vs. Official. How quickly is the communication written, how much thought goes into formal language & proofreading.

* Personal vs. Notification (this is a big problem for communication). Regular mail has fallen to this, 99% of mail is automated messages, both wanted and unwanted. Email is going the same direction. Phone never has moved very far that direction.

* Filtered vs. Raw. Computer filtered, or human filtered. Spam, autocategorization, etc.

And then it adds document problems to it:

* Collaborative vs. Sign off. Am I co-writing the document with somebody or is it a write-revise-signoff cycle?

* Controlled vs. AdHoc. How formal does the collaboration need to be. Does it make sense for us to both be editing things, or is internal consistency too important to allow concurrent edits?

Basically, just saying "screw email, it's a chat! With Widgets!" totally ignores what people use communication services for, and the varying levels of formality, proofreading, speed, style, and automation.

A quick rundown of communication protocols that exist:

Email: Delayed, Push for the most part, Filtered, lots of notifications

IM: Instant, Push, Raw, few notifications

Blog: Delayed, Pull, Filtered (RSS reader, you decide what to read), few notifications.

Waves: Instant, Push (?), Raw, notifications... maybe?

Basically, it fits in the IM category for the most part. Why would this replace my email to the boss containing a page of pros vs. cons on a new technology that we were going to adopt? Would this replace the automated quarterly emails from HR showing me my 401k balance (and does it do the job any better?).

Summary:

Very technologically cool, but I have no idea how it fits well into the framework of communication types, and adds anything that's not covered adequately with current communication methods.

A thought I have had was that twitter flourished because it was a different set of attributes from anything else that existed (along with other things of course).

<comment><USER3> Tough to say without trying it, but I think this has the potential to be a very _flexible_ format and therefore potentially cover more use cases than you are giving it credit for.

As an example, I wouldn't want to turn writing the page of pros vs. cons to my boss into a big collaborative discussion. But once I write the big long list in draft mode and then send it off, it would probably be great if the boss and the whole team could have a conversation about the document in real-time and at various places in the document. It would sure be more manageable than the big email chains in outlook that I've got now.

<comment><USER4> What is "flexibility" from a technical point of view is "ambiguity" from a social point of view. Is the conversation real-time or only _potentially_ real-time? IM is a real-time conversation, like two people speaking. E-mail is not. A single protocol and interface for both means people will be constantly confused about each other's intentions. I like the idea of combining and persisting all communications about a single topic, but in the screenshots it looks like all Wave messages look the same. "Draft" mode vs. keystroke mode provides a clue, but what if I don't see the message arrive? What if I have a real-time conversation with somebody, and then five minutes after it ends, one of us posts another message? We have to add some kind of comment indicating whether it is intended as a continuation of the previous conversation, the beginning of a new real-time conversation, or a one-off message (with the sender perhaps not available to chat at the moment.)

Everything that is currently implicit in the mode of communication (email, IM, etc.) and in mode-specific indicators (IM status, etc.) will now have to be communicated explicitly. That seems like a big step backwards. Google Wave will do well if it usefully _aggregates_ many different modes of communication, but if it attempts to _unify_ them then it will be socially unworkable, a total flop.

<comment><USER5> I don't follow your logic at all. I frequently have essentially real-time conversations via email. If someone steps away the conversation doesn't 'end' it just reverts to a slower pace. Gmail with its conversation-oriented view is already closer to an IM flow than most traditional email clients.

I don't have email interactions or IM interactions, I have _conversations_. I frequently switch off an email chain to an IM or telephone or even in person. If wave lets me coordinate that all in one interface and let me access the same history and context from multiple locations it will be phenomenally useful for me.

<comment><USER4> I have real-time conversations via email, too. The difference is in the expectations of the participants. It's subtle and social. I wouldn't just walk away from a fast-running IM conversation to go to lunch without saying something to let the other person know I was going to be gone for a while. That would be rude. Doubly so on the phone. You don't just hang up on somebody in the middle of a conversation unless you're pissed at them. Email is different. Nobody thinks it's weird or rude if you disappear from an email conversation for ten minutes. After sending an email, you can even walk away from your computer and not check your email again for hours, unless the content of your message indicated otherwise.

In contrast, an IM that isn't a one-off message says, "If you're there and available, I would like to have a real-time chat with you." Each mode of communication sets different expectations. It's quite handy. If you unify everything into a single mode of communication, then you have to set expectations explicitly.

"Hi, Joe. Can you tell me XYZ? Please reply when you are available to have an interactive real-time conversation with me."

"Hi, Joe. Can you tell me XYZ? Please reply at your leisure. I may not be available immediately to discuss your reply but will respond at some point if I have further questions."

See the difference? Of course, the different modes of communication don't mean the same things to everybody. I expect every company and every group of friends has a slightly different IM culture, for instance.

<comment><USER5> Your conversational partners are substantially more polite than mine :)

It's not even remotely uncommon for people in my circle to leave an IM or even a group chat in the middle. We all have dozens of things going on at any given time and it's expected that, unless the conversation is Really Important it will take second fiddle to the emergency of the moment.

So for us all conversations implicitly fit into your second category unless pretty explicitly stated already.

I concede, however, that if your typical behavior doesn't fit this model already wave is likely to be somewhere between useless and actively frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. For this to take off, other providers would have to implement the Wave API/protocol. Other providers like Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Just as today everybody is running SMTP servers.

2\. What does open-sourcing mean? Is Google open-sourcing their server-side code? Probably not, since it's tied to the Google architecture anyways. Implementing these APIs/protocols would be a significant expence for the other providers. Also, open-source or not, this would still be a Google-technology (controled by Google), and large corporations don't like to invest in other's technology.

3\. Presumably Google would allow Gmail users to upgrade with a click, so they'd have a good amount of seed users. But still, most of my contacts are not @gmail.com, so the experience would be limited.

4\. This probably includes email as a special case, eg. your Wave provider is still running SMTP servers and receiving email messages coming to your address (Wave address = email address) and placing them in your Wave inbox, and sending out emails per SMTP if the other side is not Wave enabled. This means painless upgrades in terms of "compatibility" for the user.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I've only skimmed the docs!

<comment><USER7> _Is Google open-sourcing their server-side code?_

From <http://www.waveprotocol.org/>: _our plan is to release an open source, production-quality, reference implementation of the Google Wave client and server_

So it looks like they will release an example of server code, thought it probably won't be exactly what Google uses. Still, this should allow other people to copy that implementation and make their own servers relatively easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The web is getting _really exciting_ again! I mean, it always has been, but these open protocols, open platforms, and general openness has really got me smiling :)

So many possibilities!

<comment><USER9> I'm glad somebody is excited. Not to be a downer, but I'm personnaly seeing copy-cat evolution, not revolution. The new toys just aren't going to change the way I work and play.

<comment><USER10> But for many it will and that will basically create the possibility for google to do ever more finely targeted advertising

Which is where they make there money and why they are doing all these products.

It makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER11> It's in Google's interests, as the king of Internet companies, to be at the forefront of whatever "the future of the Internet" is. I think to imply they crafted Wave specifically with advertising potential in mind is unnecessarily cynical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is an open protocol: <http://www.waveprotocol.org/>

<comment><USER13> it's xml based <http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec>

looks like XMPP to me

I really hate XML

<comment><USER14> XML is not suitable for Mobile Platform.

<comment><USER15> Why not? It's simple enough, and there exist small, fast XML parsers with low memory footprints.

<comment><USER14> I'll enumerate the implications and conclusions:

       1. XMPP is verbose.
       2. XMPP is inefficient for mobile networking.
       3. A proprietary binary protocol would be more efficient for mobile devices.
       4. The former Android xmppService API will diverge away from XMPP.

<http://www.deepdarc.com/2008/02/14/mobile-xmpp/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google Code Page: <http://code.google.com/apis/wave>

</comment><comment><USER17> This could be revolutionary, however email is the way it is because that's just how we've communicated as a species for eons, all the way from letters to tablets to cave paintings. You think carefully about your message, create something representing it, and share it. It seems like Wave is essentially condensing that process into one step, more like a conversation. I'm not sure everyone will welcome that.

<comment><USER18> It seems to be acting like a lot of communication tools at once. If there's some way to partition the usage up somehow then it's like a combination of several quality tools in the one place with the option to let the borders blur.

It'd be nice to be able to set the communication mode for instance - "this is asynchronous, like an email", and then you don't have to worry about the person you're writing to coming online while you're drafting something you want to word carefully. It sounds like they have something like that but I don't know what the granularity is like.

If it can do that you can have your cake and eat it to, and I'd be pretty keen to give it a go.

Hell, I'd be happy with email/chat/feed reader/blog interface as separate apps in the same page, just so I could get status info from everything in the same place that I do stuff. Being able to drag and drop things between them all has a fair bit of appeal as well.

It's probably a fine line between good integration and a huge shiny mess though.

</comment></comment><comment> andrewl-hn So, the new thing they did is that they combined Chat and Wiki and then threw some API for mashing up. Made it pretty and Ajaxy. Well, mmm, Ok. I guess many people will like it.

I still prefer plain-text emails, though.

<comment><USER19> Back in my day, we didn't have any of these fancy real-time-mashups. If you wanted to mash up, you'd show up at the person's front door, pull out a map, and point at things.

<comment><USER20> Back in my day, we used ICQ for collaborative document editing and chat. It worked.

<comment><USER15> Sounds kind of clunky, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That is the direction AOL always wanted to go with their browser/client.

The key difference being the openness of wave.

<comment><USER22> And that it has Google behind it, not AOL. AOL wasn't able to keep up with the innovation and so they fell behind, especially as the walls to the full Internet crashed down and AOL's walled-garden approach became outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was never a big user of IM or any real time communications (not even phone) so I don't think I would use it much for that.

But I do like that they experiment with new forms of collaborative document editing. This has always been a big pain. I have thought about it quite a lot myself.

The really difficult thing about collaborative document editing is versioning. The more I think about it the more open questions accumulate.

I have my doubts that a tool that wants to be so many things at the same time can be a good enough collaborative document editing tool. For instance, how do I separate the content that is edited from the communcation _about_ that content? Maybe that becomes obvious when we can actually try it.

<comment><USER24> > For instance, how do I separate the content that is edited from the > communcation _about_ that content?

In Wave there is a distinction between editing text and attaching a reply or comment to the text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350262>

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://wavesandbox.com/> is where people are getting developer accounts from the Google I/O Conference. You may directly navigate to it and add yourself to a waitlist too, if you're not registered at the Google I/O Conference.

Direct link: <https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/>

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess I'm not hip or social enough to get it. It's like a glorified e-mail/IM client with avatars and social networking stuff, and a bunch of other things super glued to it? Seems like it might be too ambitious. Maybe there's a good idea in there somewhere but, looking at the tools/sites I use now, I can't imagine why I would want to use this instead. I certainly don't want to waste my time duplicating my efforts on more than one site/service/whatever. Looks like there might be a decent barrier of entry too just figuring out how all these parts work with each other and how you can modify them to work the way you want them to.

</comment><comment><USER27> Silicon Valley Google Wave Discussion lunch tomorrow (5/31)

Come, Bring a Friend and let's discuss Google Wave over lunch.

Please use the following link: <http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347> to RSVP.

Feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.

</comment><comment><USER18> How would this effect mailing lists?

<comment><USER18> Gah - too late to edit.

I was wondering specifically about how would it effect development mailing lists - with wave plugins to look at patches / browse repositories / review code things could get pretty interesting.

Although with non-development mailing lists it could be interesting as long as you could optionally select the group of people to discuss the contents of the list.

I'm assuming sometimes it would be better to discuss the contents of the mailing list (or RSS feed) with a select few of your contacts. Discussing the content with all subscribers can be done already (although perhaps not as fluidly) with blog post comments etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> this is what facebook should've gone for. specially them, due to the social network that they have.

the other contender would be linkedin due to the professional atitude they have towards social networking.

</comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one wondering how Google Wave is going to combat spam?

<comment><USER30> I think I heard someone say whitelisting, but I lost the reference.

<comment><USER18> Well, if you're going to try to reinvent email you've got a better chance at making whitelists useful.

Even if your inbox (or whatever the wave equivalent is) could divide incoming waves based on whether they were from whitelisted contacts or from unknown contacts, it gets a lot more useful if people whitelist each other by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A solution in search of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER32> There are almost nothing new about this project - the big idea is "lets put all out services together" under new buzzword with the same proven strategy - "we will host and monetize your data" and "we published an APIs, you wll code it out".

The same principle is about technology - put it all together XMPP + XML documents (for easy data extraction and indexing) (google docs) + version control (git) + wiki-style editing (wikipedia) + maps, of course + profiles (facebook) + feeds (twitter).

And it will probably work, because it is targeted for mobile devices (android) as clients which means instant and short messaging by definition.

</comment><comment><USER33> Woah, that could be some pretty disruptive technology.

</comment><comment><USER34> So something ambitious is going to be built ontop of complete junk and by forcing the HTTP protocol to handle shit it wasn't meant for. Wonderful. Fucking wonderful.

Can we get a time machine and go back to the 80s and start all over again and build up a proper platform _before_ the WWW becomes popular??

<comment><USER35> No, it's an extension to XMPP: <http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol- spec>

<comment><USER34> Erm, I was talking about the web-end. I didn't realize there was a separate protocol for it but in any case, XMPP is heavy because it uses XML (which is also somewhat junk).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> We agree with Google. This is the same idea behind our newly launched startup, <http://www.browseology.com>

If you don't want to wait for Google Wave to see updates from everyone in real time, check it out.

<comment><USER37> Google Wave actually looks nothing like your product whatsoever.

We already have real-time updates. What we don't have is a system where every sort of update is treated in a single place. That's what Wave is.

If you want to advertise Browseology, do it with a post to the front page, and only advertise in other threads if it's relevant to the story. You're borderline spamming right now.</comment></comment>


5 Ways to Stop Trolls From Killing the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.cracked.com/article_16765_5-ways-stop-trolls-from-killing-internet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> More known for their wise-ass lists, Cracked tries to offer some solutions to the Internet's Troll problem.</comment>


A simple (but highly controversial) solution to eliminating terrorism on planes. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/TgPjwEJCJup/A-simple-solution-to-eliminating-terrorism-on

<comment><USER2> So stupid it hardly warrants comment. So if there is no one famous on your flight, it doesnt fly? OTOH if your first passenger is a world famous terrorist, the problem solves itself. You have a plane full of terrorists; just shoot it down. (Crikey, I feel like I am on /.)

</comment><comment><USER3> 1: There's no way it'd work.

2: It'd be bigotry-o-rama.

3: Even simpler, and in the same practical category: End commercial air traffic. No more terrorism on planes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't Silicon Valley operate in a similar way via social networking?

<comment><USER3> I don't know the internals of Sillicon Valley, but I guess, yeah it does. And I also guess that the ratio of people you shouldn't have employed/co-founded with/funded there is significantly higher than the ratio of terrorists on planes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL</comment>


Ask HN: How would you host this? - <AUTHOR> I need to host an application and I'm looking for the cheapest option that considers the following...<p>* The front-end is written with React * The back-end is written in Node + Express * The database is MongoDB * We don't need much storage. 512 MB should be fine for a while * We need daily database backups * The site will have around 30 users and will be less than 1 concurrent request per second * We will require SSL (HTTPS) * We can't use the free limits for our AWS account * I'm the only one who supports this app and I want something reliable and easy to set up and maintain<p>How would you host this app? <comment><USER2> Slap everything on a 5$/10$ DigitalOcean instance running Ubuntu and use Let's Encrypt for free ssl certificate. Quick, easy and cheap.</comment>


Ask HN: What Would It Take to Make an Open Source Google? - <AUTHOR> Having little experience with search engines, I wonder whether it would be possible to create an open source alternative to Google? I applaud, for example, DuckDuckGo for serving as a privacy-focused alternative to Google. But at the end of the day, to paraphrase Vitalik Buterin, I believe "can't do evil" beats "don't do evil".
Could the execution and runtime of said search engine be powered by blockchain/cryptocurrency tech? There are several existing technologies like Sia that decentralize file storage. Or are other technologies better suited?
What are other challenges of operating a search engine? Regulatory compliance? Ethical scrubbing of results?
Would this solution be tenable or does search lend itself too much to a centralized entity like Google? <comment><USER2> I posted this a few years back, problem has since become only more difficult: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626999)

Writing an open, and distributed web crawler / indexer is a nice programming exercise. Writing an "objective" ranking function (for any values of "objective") in an open, and distributed manner is structurally not favoured by humanity's current incentive structure. As in:

* a dev team have to agree on signals, and weights: "SERP quality" has dedicated teams of people assigned for specific verticals @ Google; replicating this in a distributed manner will be played politically

* Assuming any significant usage, the second you submit ranking code to public github repo, the algo will be played by thousand SEO scammers to their advantage

* Executing custom ranking function on other people's computer not only introduces security risks, but will have scammers setting up honeypots for collecting other people's ranking signals, and playing accordingly.

<comment><USER3> What about having a variety of different possible ranking functions? With people being able to select one they prefer or defaulting to a random selection/aggregation of them? Just an idea.

<comment><USER4> People would still game the most popular (default probabbly) system and it wouldn't take long for folks to give up on the search aspect as it would be dorked up pretty regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scrapping seems to be a fairly solved problem, there are open source scrapers that are competitive with google, and just download an entire site into an archive, ssl headers could be included to prove the authenticity of the archive in a distributed environment.

Indexing I have no idea how this could be done in a distributed way, as far as I know it basically cant. Distributed p2p apps use a central server or will send the search query to everyone on the entire network until some one gives them a result. Which isn't efficient enough to work on googles scale and the privacy issues.

My best guess is to break a query into tokens and then have a dht of indexes for each token and then have the peer request all the needed indexes compile them together or something? Anyway even if there is a way to distribute an index efficiently, I cant think of a way to generate the indexes in a secure way, at least without some sort of human oversight, which might be acceptable.

Distributed ranking runs into all the problems sdrinf pointed out. A better solution is to have lost of ranking factors enough that its easier to just make a good website than figure out the system and how to game it. Then let the end user weight the ranking factors to suite them, this should give better results than google and make SEO harder to fake.

</comment><comment><USER6> Which part(s) of Google? Search? Docs? Drive? Analytics? There are at least a fee open-source alternatives already under development, such as Nextcloud (Docs/Drive) and Piwik (Analytics).

In order for open-source projects to be successful we need to contribute resources (time and money) and encourage coordination (I.e. contribute to existing efforts rather than bikeshedding or starting from scratch.)

<comment><AUTHOR> While the other pieces would be nice, I am primarily concerned about search. That product seems like the toughest nut to crack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Common Crawl" and Elastic Search? Elastic Search for ipfs. Adding a few petabytes with a lot of bandwidth to ipfs, maybe modifying the warc/wat headers to support ipfs address pinning? Some extra web browser code to sanitize, token harvest, pipe webpages that users visit back into the indexing/pinning locally with metadata for times visited and other counts, with a ui that allows user to pick and choose what gets indexed. Some extras around front page click through thrashing because of poor results, incentivizing quality with upvotes/downvotes/flags, charging for search, and paying for it with resource (bandwidth/storage) commitments.

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea is intriguing. Perhaps it'd be possible to structure web crawling and indexing as a decentralized operation - drawing inspiration for crypto based storage networks.

People would get paid to run crawlers / store indexes of the data.

Gonna ponder this

</comment><comment><USER9> How is blockchain technology relevant at making a search engine. It sounds like you're looking for a way to use the tech instead of purely trying to fix the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm definitely just throwing that out there, as a solution for decentralized monetization and incentivizing resource sharing. So far, blockchain/crypto tech is the only sustainable solution I've seen to distributed computing where no one entity owns the execution of computation or storage of data. Definitely open to alternative ideas though, this is just a thought experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is [https://github.com/commonsearch](https://github.com/commonsearch)

Also, it is a lot of money only for handling the storage costs.</comment>


Cross-referencing fitness trackers to identify CIA "Black" sites in Djibouti - <AUTHOR> https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2018/01/21/that-was-too-easy/ <comment><USER2> I saw nothing in there about fitness trackers.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-map-showing-the- users...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-map-showing-the-users-of- fitness-devices-lets-the-world-see-where-us-soldiers-are-and-what-they-are- doing/2018/01/28/86915662-0441-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.dee798749a7d) is the recent WaPo article titled "U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging".

> The Global Heat Map was posted online in November 2017, but the information > it contains was publicized Saturday only after a 20-year-old Australian > student stumbled across it. Nathan Ruser, who is studying international > security and the Middle East, found out about the map from a mapping blog > and was inspired to look more closely, he said, after a throwaway comment by > his father, who observed that the map offered a snapshot of "where rich > white people are" in the world.

This seems to have nothing really to do with Marcus Ranum's blog post that the OP linked to.

<comment><USER2> Here's a followup from that blog author which does discuss the topic: [https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2018/01/29/big-data- awkw...](https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2018/01/29/big-data-awkward/) .</comment></comment>


FlumeJava Port to Hadoop - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cloudera/crunch

<comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting thing is the way DoFn serialization serialization works, allowing you to escape MapReduceBase hell for every single tranformation in a MapReduce job chain.</comment>


Hotmail Password Reset Fail in Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://www.novainfosecportal.com/2012/06/13/hotmail-password-reset-fail-in-pictures/ <comment><USER2> Dunno about others, but this is what I see: <http://i.snag.gy/LPiss.jpg>. I assume the author was using a "trusted PC," which he had previously verified _.

What's really annoying about Hotmail passwords is the 16 character limit.

_Edit: This is what Hotmail says about verifying a "trusted PC."

"To use this feature, you must access your account using Internet Explorer and have Windows Live Essentials installed."</comment>


Ask HN:If you could access every file with a specific keyword, what would it be? - <AUTHOR>

If you could have access to every document (email, word document, government cable, pdf, jpg, txt, etc.) in the world containing a specific keyword, what would that keyword be, and why?<p>I've had this discussion a few times with different circles of friends, and each group has come up with completely different suggestions.  The only rule is that the keyword needs to be a reasonable suggestion, and not something intentionally-broad like "the", "a", "and" designed to just capture every possible document. <comment><USER2> "secret"

<comment><USER3> Share a file with the word "secret" in the filename on Limewire and you will soon find it's downloaded by a company out of Pennsylvania called Tiversa.</comment></comment>