Solving the river crossing puzzle with TLA+ - <AUTHOR> http://lorinhochstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/crossing-the-river-with-tla/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's easy to find TLA+ specifications which pass the model checker, but rare (and much more useful!) to see one which fails, in an informative way. In this case, the author adds the assertion right /= CREATURES to the spec, which evaluates to right != {Farmer, Fox, Chicken, Grain}. Basically, this asserts no state exists in which all entities have made it to the right side of the river (the goal state). If the TLC model checker makes it to the invalid (goal) state, it will appropriately register the failure and execution trace - the state path to the goal state. Very clever!</comment>


Computer Scientists Create Reprogrammable Molecular Computing System - <AUTHOR> https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/computer-scientists-create-reprogrammable-molecular-computing-system <comment><USER2> Am not surprised to see Damien Woods. Few years ago I got to see Nicolas Schabanel on a talk about dna tiles as computing block, a long time partner of Woods IIRC. Fascinating subject since they went up to Game of Life and had a form of compiler for it. The only issue was stability with large "programs" which impeded more abstract stuff (say lambda calculus). Ultra exciting stuff and ultra concerning too.

btw Schabanel university math group (Paris Diderot IREM) just made a peertube instance to host videos

[https://video.irem.univ-paris- diderot.fr/videos/watch/2082cc...](https://video.irem.univ-paris- diderot.fr/videos/watch/2082cc39-5c7f-4b72-b120-540567af05b2) <= Schabanel conference (french speaking)</comment>


Game Industry Veteran's Horrifying Article in Defense of Poor Working Conditions - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/game-industry-veteran-writes-horrifying-article-in-defe-1771434170 <comment><USER2> The same game industry veteran even bullies his employees into working while seriously ill. This behavior should be criminal. See: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgP- xKKUkAIxXph.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgP-xKKUkAIxXph.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Is this satire? I can't believe this is real.

I don't see how a mentally sound person could say this unironically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pushing a mouse is not a hardship. But doing it more than 40 hours a week is.

</comment><comment><USER5> the author, and the reviewer, are both wrong on all counts.</comment>


Things you can do with a browser in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luruke/browser-2020 <comment><USER2> Great list! Maybe time to add WebGPU ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020511)</comment>


Salesforce and Heroku: The Dork-Side of the Force? - <AUTHOR> http://joyeur.com/2010/12/14/salesforce-and-heroku-the-dork-side-of-the-force/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited by the new frameworks and platform services but I don't see how Joyent launching a Node based offering if Heroku/Salesforce also does adds that much valuation to Joyent.</comment>


YouTube "Let's Play"s are preserving video game history - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/06/how-youtube-lets-plays-are-preserving-video-game-history/ <comment><USER3> [https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/) is preserving it by letting you play them right in the browser via emulators compiled to Emscripten.

For example here is the Macintosh version of Dark Castle, which I spent some number of hours winning at the time (circa 1986, digitized sound was still a brand-new thing) [https://archive.org/details/mac_DarkCastle_1_2](https://archive.org/details/mac_DarkCastle_1_2)

If you hit "Options" you'll notice the familiar WASD keyboard control layout. Well, this is the earliest game I'm aware of that used that layout...

Here's The Dungeon Revealed, an early Mac dungeon-crawler I also spent a lot of time in: [https://archive.org/details/TheDungeonRevealedMacintosh](https://archive.org/details/TheDungeonRevealedMacintosh)

Here's Crystal Quest, the first color Mac game (although the emulation is in black&white which was also supported): [https://archive.org/details/CrystalQuest_2_2_5M](https://archive.org/details/CrystalQuest_2_2_5M)

Here's NetTrek, one of the first LAN multiplayer games I ever played (was fun!): [https://archive.org/details/NetTrekTheRealVersionMacintosh](https://archive.org/details/NetTrekTheRealVersionMacintosh)

And then there is Bolo, the one game I wish there was a modern-day version of that is remotely similar: [https://archive.org/details/BoloMacintosh](https://archive.org/details/BoloMacintosh) (Wish this was the color version, but anyway... It was a network tank battle game where you could capture points and build autotargeting defense turrets by harvesting trees via sending out your tank pilot (who was then vulnerable and could get killed, the respawn penalty was not trivial as I recall), it was INCREDIBLY fun at the time, literally hours in the computer lab with a group of other nerds)

It's amazing that I can even give other people a hands-on look at this stuff in their own browser. It's too bad that I can't show off the early network- gaming the same way (firing up Bolo or NetTrek in different browsers on the same LAN... It's probably possible to do, right?)

<comment><USER4> Emulators don't tell the whole story. Sometimes features depend on the physical game, as in the case of mario tennis and the n64 transfer pak [https://youtu.be/QbRkBTMRxZQ?t=653](https://youtu.be/QbRkBTMRxZQ?t=653)

<comment><USER3> I know. But I don't see how watching a "Let's Play" is going to get you much closer to those experiences

<comment><USER5> For games that have online components or are updated over time, a Let's Play video can at least be a window into how things worked at the time. Seeing a video of someone playing an online match in a game where the publisher has shut down the server is better than not having this information.

<comment><USER6> Here's a nice example of someone playing Demon's Souls on PS3 a few days before Atlus shut down the server - a neophyte playing together with an old hand who explains lots about the game and why it was loved.

Gaming Jay: Demon's Souls (PS3) (feat. Matt) - Let's Play 1001 Games - <USER2> 272 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x1mC1M0_Cs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x1mC1M0_Cs)

EDIT: Adding the title of the video to go with the link, because one thing that's especially annoys me about bare YouTube links is that if the video was removed, YouTube doesn't even give you the former title so that you know what you missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if they are. Emulating games is not really preserving them in a sense, because it can't reproduce the hardware or experience as it actually was very well. Like you can play Ridge Racer type 4 in emulation, but part of that game's history was the special controller it was bundled with, which let you twist the middle of it to enable analog steering wheel control.

Like you can't emulate Boktai without the solar sensor on it, and also you don't get the sense of how dark the game boy advance's screen is. Or another example is Trace Memory for the Nintendo DS, which made use of the fact that the DS can close like a book (to simulate stamping on an ink pad) or that the screen is reflective when closed at an angle (to cause two screens to reflect into each other to make a single word.)

It works to show a boosted version of the original game, but something like sprite flicker or having to use passwords to continue gets dropped out. Or something like the dreamcast's VMU, which displays info on it as you play or can be used for minigames to boost the character in the main game.

The games kind of get divorced from the hardware and media they were played on, which reduces them some.

<comment><USER8> I've been a gamer for 30 years and I don't remember a single game where the controller or hardware matter so much that a "Let's Play" wouldn't do it justice.

<comment><USER9> I can think of maybe 2 or 3 games total with a meaningful gimmick that needed specific hardware or control schemes to really "work". Losing it diminishes the game but doesn't completely invalidate it, so it's sad but it's not really the case for the thousands of other games I've played. Better to have the original game archived as an LP, perhaps even an LP that tries to capture the essence of the gimmick for people who can't experience it. I think we're entering a space now where this is a concern for more games though - an LP or emulated gameplay for experimental VR games or games with custom controllers may not live up to the experience at all, which is unfortunate, but not really avoidable.

The most easily understood example is 999, a game for the Nintendo DS that utilized the two-screens quirk of the system for narrative purposes. It was later ported to mobile and those versions had to drop the twist since there was no way to express it on other platforms. (To briefly summarize, the two screens represented separate timelines and the DS's constraint of only allowing touch input on one screen meant that whatever you saw on that screen was the only thing you could actively participate in)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does YouTube have any incentive to "preserve" anything once it costs them more money than it brings in? If not, maybe it's a little early to say they are actually preserving anything. (The article does kind of acknowledge this.) Maybe its real role is as a link in a chain that leads to /r/datahoarders

<comment><USER11> You overestimate the cost of storage at this scale.

It's totally worth them storing the data given the marginal cost.

A 10TiB HDD is only 150$ retail. These videos can likely be stored in less than 200MiB on average.

Storage has gotten cheaper YoY

<comment><USER12> Just a few days ago there was a discussion about how Google is now indexing less contented from a years ago[1].

If Google can't keep indexes which are relatively inexpensive why should they keep videos that are more expensive and possibly no one will watch? Especially as the length and number of videos is increasing faster than ever?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907)

<comment><USER13> You're not scanning through bulk storage like that all the time. Indexes have to be managed to be useful too which is another cost.

<comment><USER12> Videos still need to be indexed, why would Google keep the videos without indexing them?

<comment><USER14> Let's not confuse the videos with the index of the videos. Videos can be stored on the slowest and cheapest medium, indexes might be kept in memory or flash. Each video takes hundreds of mb compressed, an entry in the index could be constant per video

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Non-techies that are my age don't get the value of let's plays.

When I was a kid, it was NES and then Sega. You'd go over to your friend's house and would take turns playing Mario, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, etc.

When you weren't playing, you were watching your friend play. Sure, some games were multi-player, but not all of them.

Let's plays capture that same feeling of watching your friend play the game.

<comment><USER16> Should I point out the obvious that you aren't friends with the youtuber doing the Let's Play? You can't form a real two-way bond with one another, and that is the foundation of friendship. Real friendship could bloom in many other ways and you guys could go get a pizza, go climb Everest, help them work on their car, etc.

In a nutshell, that describes my fears and reservations about the way the current age is going. It's all watching and commenting and not enough back and forth interaction and doing.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if async forum communication / semi-interactive celebrities can adequately replace the 'piece' of human interaction that makes prisoners go insane in solitary confinement. I'm sure we'll find out soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Call me old-fashioned, but I often prefer screenshot-based LPs. LParchive is a great resource for those.

I did enjoy Void Burger's video LP of Silent Hill but I liked that she used subtitles for commentary instead of her voice (I think the only time she spoke was to grumble after a particularly frustrating game over).

<comment><USER19> This makes me think, YouTube could really use multiple audio tracks that can be selected by the end user for commentary in general, not just LPs.

<comment> frosted-flakes This is something I've always wished for. That way, I could turn off the annoying background music that makes it hard to hear what's being said, or if there's a copyright strike against some music, only the music track gets deleted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unfortunately disk space is still expensive and rather limited, its unfeasible to really preserve YouTube in any meaningful sense. Maybe someday, like Google Video, YouTube videos will disappear forever.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps we may have a data revolution before the point of having to delete this old content arrives. I remember watching something on the possibility of storing data within DNA ( the long-term storage possibilities looked very promising not that long ago ).

Is there any other exciting tech which may be on the horizon / advancements in this field?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Owing to that I simply no longer have space or money to repair my older consoles, I've often turned to these let's plays to relive some of my favorite video games.

With every new console generation, backwards compatibility is discussed as one of the main points of contention, yet continually it is shelved. Because of this, I am skeptical of the rumors of the supposed universal compatibility that the Playstation 5 may have.

I will note, as someone who hasn't played since the 360, that Xbox appears to be taking steps in the right direction. I hope that continues to put pressure on Sony to allow their own games to be compatible with the new consoles, and maybe Nintendo as well to offer better virtual console offerings (a long shot, I'm sure).

<comment> jon-wood The XBox One's emulation is fantastic in the odd occasion I've used it to play a 360 game - other than the shape of the controller you'd be hard pressed to tell that you're not in fact using an XBox 360.

<comment><USER23> Actually in a lot of cases, the games run better on Xbox One[1], and an increasing number are enhanced for the Xbox One X, which means that by default they run at a 9x higher resolution (so 720p -> 4K; 3x vertical, 3x horizontal).

You can see here[2] some comparisons for Forza Horizon and the difference is quite striking.

[1] [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-vs- xb...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-vs-xbox-one- backward-compatibility)

[2] [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-forza...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-forza- horizon-back-compat-looks-stunning-at-4k)

<comment><USER22> This is especially striking and a huge step in the right direction, in my opinion. Oftentimes these days I've turned to emulation to older games due to the resolution on, say, PSX games being very low, but often easily scalable through an emulator.

I do hope the industry trends towards this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love Let's Plays, I basically grew up watching them. As a kid a little interested in video games, they gave me a lot of context of how games changed overtime (how the transition to 3D affect Mario, Sonic, and Zelda), which gradually lead me into Computer Science.

I only had a few friends as interested in video games as I was, so it was huge to see these people who knew _everything_ about their favorite games. And most importantly, Let's Plays are really casual, the people who commentate are funny, and it feels like hanging out on someone's couch. I remember when I accompanied my mom to her spin class, I was reminded a lot of Let's Plays - the instructor would give some commentary to a shared enjoyed activity.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's worth noting that video game LPs as a format in general have been on a downtown lately, likely because streaming (a la Twitch) has been on the rise, is more profitable, and requires substantially less post-production work. The implosion of the Something Awful forums which incentivized the creation of high production-value LPs didn't help.

<comment><USER26> True. And one extremely sad thing for conservation, is that Twitch does NOT save all streams forever, it only keeps vods around that have been marked (I think by the creator?) as interesting. In one of those speedrun history videos, there was actually a case of a world record in a game, that was streamed, had many people witness it, but was not saved, and deleted by Twitch, and now we are not exactly sure how the run was actually performed, we just have the time for it. Luckily I think the record I mention was broken, but I can imagine that there are similar important moments out there that will be lost before anyone notices their value.

Imagine if we only had Twitch Vods of PT, and nobody actually saved them cause at the time there was no point to it, and they were all lost now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > If you rip out all the pages of existential angst and whining from Hamlet > and jump straight to him stabbing motherfuckers, you lose the understanding > of the full experience.

Thought this use of "motherfuckers" was unnecessary, but then I remembered the plot of Hamlet.

<comment><USER28> I see what you did there, Oedipus.

<comment><USER29> Eye see what you did

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can only talk about preservation if you actually can pull the content out. It's not like Google doesn't shut down a handful of projects early - at some point they might decide to wipe unprofitable videos as well and we might end up with no preservation whatsoever.

<comment><USER31> But there are people who are constantly downloading the let's plays of those youtubers, so there will nearly alway be a copy of a video if it isn't on youtube and it might end up on archive.org later on

<comment><USER20> Are there really? I do watch a lot of let's plays and sometimes download them in bulk, but I don't keep them around for long. 1080p60 takes a lot of space and recently a lot are even in 4k.

<comment><USER32> You just need to visit r/datahoarders to verify this claim. No, I don't understand it either, but it is definitely something people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What you need to preserve it are games sold on GOG and other DRM-free stores.

<comment><USER34> Nah, you need pirates. You need something like what what.cd was, an archive built by enthusiasts driven by quality and the desire to have untampered original copies. (Plus patches & cracks when needed). You need abandonware sites.

GOG and other DRM-free stores are subject to the whims of publishers & developers and random rightsholders. They are not in the business of archiving games. They will host censored versions, patched versions that differ from original releases, you don't get original ISOs and you don't get to choose your patch level, you don't get to reject tweaks that break compatibility with the systems the said games were originally supported on, etcetra. And then games get pulled from stores, for any number of reasons.

If you want an archive, don't leave it to a commercial entity who aren't and couldn't be in the archival business even if they wanted to. GOG doesn't want it, what they want is a curated storefront and it's notoriously hard to get your game on GOG, because they don't want it. You know all this, I know you do.

<comment><USER33> GOG is surely quite curated, but for older games they usually don't have many objections. There is also itch.io where there is almost no curation at all.

As for preserving in other ways - I agree, you can't expect any specific store to be around in the future.

Internet Archive also work on preserving old games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What Archive.org does to preserve actual games (ROMs) should be talked about. YouTube does not have the right motives in place to thought as reliable in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER36> Could the story be renamed to 'How YouTube's "Let's Play"s are Preserving Video Game History'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, and done.

(I originally submitted it with the headline as formatted in the article, _How YouTube let 's plays are preserving video game history_)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In addition to video let's play, I've also read a lot of image Let's play on forums. On one hand, you have the issue of link rot, with LPs which relied on Dropbox and Imageshack becoming lost. On the other hand, it's way better for interaction between the player and the reader, with the writer able to offer the reader to choose on different in-game choices. Of course such things are possible with video, but I don't think it's as easier on a forum than on YT.

Image Let's play are also superior for text-heavy games, it's way easier to skim a text on a series of pictures (or typed if the author has taken the time to do so) than in a video.

</comment><comment><USER38> I find myself hearing about weird titles & demos in a lot of places (IRC's, Comments on Gaming Forums and Other places) and search for their videos all the time. And I do go back from time to time to appreciate how far gaming has come and for the memorabilia of childhood games by watching the gameplay/trailers of the same. Someone needs to step in and do a Gameplay/Letsplay database of sorts for future reference maybe?

</comment><comment><USER39> The article is written as if YouTube started the trend of "Let's Plays", and that it's the only place you'll find them. As far as I know it really started with the "Let's Play!" subforum on forums.somethingawful.com, many of which are now archived outside of the forums at lparchive.org.

</comment><comment><USER40> Until something happens to Google, and youtube.com goes down (^_^;). Can we consider any website to be permanent?

<comment><USER41> Can we consider electricity to be permanent?

<comment><USER42> Seeing as electricity is a commodity, made by many different suppliers, we can consider it much closer to "permanent" than a website existing at the whim of a single company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> On this topic: I'm sure there are a few "epic" let's plays that have left a mark in history, for most games. You need to be a gamer to know, though.

To the gamers on HN: can you post your favorite "let's play", specify which game and year it is, and maybe why you like it so much?

<comment><USER44> I watch them mostly for self-indulgent reasons, so I don't think a non-gamer would enjoy many. The main reasons are to preview a new game before buying, to relive a childhood game, see the end of games I remember not completing, or to watch someone go through a game I've finished and see how they react to various situations. Depending on the game and streamer this can be entertaining for different reasons, such as their personality or skill level.

On the last point a recent one I enjoyed was Joseph Anderson's Undertale blind playthrough. The game is notorious for throwing unexpected meta-narrative about games, gamers, and even stream viewers, and seeing a critic encounter that where he didn't expect it was entertaining. It also has a very difficult boss as "punishment" for certain choices you make on a typical third playthrough, and he definitely proved himself as a competent gamer when it only took him a few hours to beat that encounter. I could hear the change in tone as he got quiet and entered the zone and knew it wouldn't be long.

Like all Let's Plays though it is long and probably best viewed while you are doing something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> XBoxAhoy aka Ahoy is the best retro-documentary channel I've ever seen: [https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy](https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy) Highly recommended!

</comment><comment><USER46> I wish we had a "let's play" for mundane stuff like logging into WinCIM and AOL back in the day. Nobody would've thought to commit those things to VHS.

</comment><comment><USER47> Couldn't agree more. But how will YouTube itself will be preserved beyond Google's economic interests?

</comment><comment><USER48> > It's a long-observed fact that the phenomenon of the YouTube let's play has > benefits beyond just entertaining viewers and gradually introducing > teenagers to neo-Nazism via YouTube's algorithm.

This is really poor wording. Maybe s/benefits/affects? Because I don't think anyone (well maybe neo-Nazis) think "introducing teenagers to neo-Nazism via YouTube's algorithm" is a benefit.

<comment><USER49> That's why it's funny -- because no one would say that seriously, so there's a contrast between the serious tone and the content. Rock Paper Shotgun is a funny site, and manages to gently editorialize like this without seeming strident.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> At this point, saving video games seems like saving examples of drinking glasses from you local discount store.

Humanity simply can't save a copy of everything from all time. We should let more go. By preserving everything, we're decreasing signal to noise, IMO.

<comment><USER23> Incidentally, a point raised in Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001):

> But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating > every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always > accessible.[...]All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing > at an alarming rate.

> an overabundance of digital information -- the world will drown in the > coming flood of information

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> YouTube is not a good place to preserve anything, though...

</comment><comment><USER52> Depends on the "Let's Play" quality. Most I've seen are just garbage. Only a handful of channels are actually playing these games without curse words or social commentary</comment>


Show HN: Tool for Scrum Masters - <AUTHOR> https://www.scrumbs.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Description: Agile management tool designed for scrum masters

Open source: yes

Free to use: yes

Looking forward to hear your first impressions and suggestions. If there are any scrum masters lurking around here, I would be pleased if you could offer a few minutes of your time to chat.

Thanks! Andrei</comment>


'I'm Not Your Wife' A New Study Points to a Hidden Form of Sexism - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/im-not-your-wife-a-new-study-points-to-a-hidden-form-of-sexism/258057/ <comment><USER2> I've finally reached the point I can't tell the difference between a serious academic article and something from The Onion.

Trying to take this seriously, I believe the authors of the study have discovered, quite shockingly it seems, that men tend to extrapolate experiences they have in one social context into another. Women are not mentioned at all in this regard. One assumes they are either immune or did not deserve equal attention from the researchers.

That's about all I got. Plus there was some dragging in of current politics -- it can't be that these types of things have political overtones, can it? Heaven forfend!

My sarcasm font is broken, so I'll just come out and say it: this is link and argument bait and accomplishes nothing whatsoever except to make people argue with each other about "hidden biases". One supposes that if these biases were truly hidden that arguing about them would be impossible, yet somehow it still occurs.

Definitely not worth an upvote.

ADD: I'll continue the rant a bit more. We have lot of a lot of good articles sliding off the new page -- hell, for what it's worth somebody submitted my latest blog article just a couple of hours ago on cool CSS tricks -- and the top stories on here now are along the lines of "I'm not your wife", "Mean things border agents did to me" and "Dear Horuku"? I love meta talk and pushing boundaries when it comes to thinking through problems in a unique way, and I even love a good thought-provoking slice-of-life or political story, but this stuff is just empty-headed garbage designed to waste time. </rant>

I feel better now. :)

<comment><USER3> You're totally ranting about the wrong thing. What you should be ranting about is people who keep confusing HN with reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think we subconsciously evaluate most of our relationships through the lens of previous relationships. We compare our first boss to our fathers and mothers and teachers, previous authority figures. We compare our co-workers to our friends, our roommates or classmates or the childhood friends we kept in touch with. And clearly, these men in "traditional" marriages are evaluating their women co-workers in terms of their primary female relationship, which doesn't work out well for equality. As the article points out, much of this is unconscious, even opposite of what they think they're doing.

That really makes me wonder about my professional and personal relationships. While I'm fortunate to have been exposed to a wide variety of people of both genders in professional and social circles, I wonder what unconscious biases are still affecting my professional relationships.

<comment><USER5> I'm gay and I don't evaluate other men or their capabilities against those that I have with my partner. (In fact, it could be scary or hilarious depending on which way I might try to do that).

I understand this explanation and at first I was inclined to go along with it, but I'm almost more disturbed by the conclusion. [These] men have such limited exposure to "real" or other women that they can only shoe-horn other women as they perceive them? Based off a microscopic sample?

Or am I just way out in left field? I don't mean to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The causal relation that this article is supporting seems backwards. They aren't biased against women in the workplace because they're in a traditional marriage; they're in a traditional marriage because they're biased against women in the workplace and so would be less likely to marry a woman that wants a "modern" marriage.

<comment><USER7> I think the direction is pretty plausible. I often treat people according to whoever I was last talking to. And I catch myself interpreting women's behavior according to whichever woman I last had a long conversation with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just as a thought experiment, do you think Mary Zuckerberg, the 28 year old founder of Facebook whose casual jeans and hoodie so outrages the investment community would be an ideal role model for entrepreneurs in Hacker News?

<comment><USER9> (1) _Mary_ Zuckerberg?

(2) In what way is this related to the article. His wife is a recent medical school graduate and it's not known yet what her future work plans are.

(3) Zuckerberg has not been cited for being either uncommonly progressive or uncommonly sexist in his views on women in the workplace. What does he have to do with the questions raised in the _Atlantic_ article?

<comment><USER8> No, if the _person_ who founded Facebook had been a female graduate from the Ivy League, do you think that Facebooks history to date would have been the same.

The temptation (mine anyway) is to say yes, and prove what a well balanced fellow I am. But I ask further down if you say yes, why yes? I noticed that the real Mark got married and I did not even know he had a relationship. But I swear if Mary Zuckerberg, billionairess, famous Internet entrprenuer had been engaged the whole world would know his face, shoe size and that famous Oprah interview ...

So the media would have been different for sure. Would that have mattered?

Just questions to get at our own filters

<comment><USER10> Celebrities of both sexes have choices to make regarding how much to downplay their private life. Some celebrities are very good at keeping their families mostly out of it. Others are not. I am not so sure that's a gender thing. My marriage was a very private matter and we both protected it from prying outsiders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People see management as a way of fulfilling their own life goals rather than an opportunity to genuinely help develop members of their team. The status of the managers personal life is going to have a huge impact on what particular goals they have. In my completely anecdotal experience; married men with kids have much higher expectation of deference than other groups.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Someone I know, gender unimportant, that only reads the ads and the comics. I'm just asking if you're doing similar."

This is not a sexist line of thinking. I would, however, consider it somewhat rude. No, it's my paper and I bought it and you have no right to expect any share of it ... unless I'm kind enough to drop it when I'm done or take only the sections I want.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad that we keep the focus tight here at sexist news.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, reddit.</comment>


Sneak Preview of Django Zoom (Heroku-like service for Django apps) - <AUTHOR> http://noderabbit.com/2010/09/18/sneak-preview-djangozoom/

<comment><USER2> Looks great, but It's more of an 'EngineYard-like service for Django apps'. Heroku does this marketing / technical trick where you don't have machines, just ruby running in the cloud. No servers to reboot or configure, just X$/mo add-ons to click.

I use and think both services are great, but Engine Yard has all of it's thunder stolen by Heroku. Steeper learning curve, but far more dynamic than Heroku.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing Heroku (and Engine Yard) had/have going for them is you can't run Rails on Google App Engine. Any opinions on how Zoom is going to stack up to Django on GAE?

<comment><USER4> * You _only_ get the GAE database, no RDBMS, not even alternate nosql things like Mongo.

* Doing geo stuff on GAE is pretty infeasible.

* You can't run other commands, e.g., shell out to git. * You can't connect to any services except HTTP (on port 80/443).

* While you can use the database instead of a filesystem most of the time, it's often harder. Even simple things like using a library that does file-based caching adds challenges to code reuse on GAE.

* There are no C-based libraries on GAE, including things like lxml, image processing libraries, etc. GAE slowly adds new GAE-specific libraries for some of those operations, but slowly and inconsistently.

Often an app won't need these things, but maybe at some point in the future it will -- with GAE you are kind of stuck at that point, or you have to setup external services to augment your core GAE app (removing a lot of the operational simplicity of GAE). And because Django Zoom uses individual virtual servers there's no point at which you can't _somehow_ accomplish what you want to accomplish, even if it's not something directly baked into the service.

In practice it's extremely uncommon to develop an application then move to GAE -- people always develop _for_ GAE from the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks...kind of unpolished ;) I understand that getting it to work is the hard part, but adding a little style can't hurt.

Requested access to the beta, I have a couple of django projects that would be nice to run on such a service.

<comment><USER6> @kilian - we fully intend to polish the UI and make it look nicer, but you're right - we've been focusing on getting the backend working well, as that seems to be the biggest challenge. It could like all nice and pretty but people won't use it if it breaks. Looking forward to getting your feedback when you deploy your Django projects!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty awesome, it really kind of sooths a pain point I have been dealing with. The company I work at is a Django Shop and every time I type "fab Prod deploy" I consider starting work on a gui interface to provision servers(with the linode api), run test suites and deploy code from Github.

</comment><comment><USER8> DjangoZoom (<http://djangozoom.com/>) is mentioned several times in your article, but none of them are clickable.

General request for business blogs: make it easy to navigate to the site you are talking about!

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea with much potential.

Have you solved the problem how to sandbox/protect against apps that have gone wild?

Are you allowing or planning to clone using git protocol instead of http?

Do you support or have planned custom domains?

</comment><comment><USER10> already exists: djangy.com ;-)

<comment><USER11> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616704>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've also requested an invite.

I'm less concerned with the lack of polish (as kilian brought up) -- but I would definitely start copying and pasting some of the information that you have on the noderabbit site to the DjangoZoom page, or at least, before you come anywhere close to live.

I would tell you to look at the Heroku site for what kind of information sells to users, but I've always had a hard time reading their color scheme, so I much preferred yours.

Any plans on support for Tornado, or is it JUST Django on the roadmap?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your suggestions! What kind of info would you like to see that would help you understand the service better?

We have no plans to support Tornado, but if there's enough demand we'll consider adding support for it.</comment></comment>


Google asks Supreme Court to overrule disastrous ruling on API copyrights - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/google-asks-supreme-court-to-overrule-disastrous-ruling-on-api-copyrights/ <comment><USER2> "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." \- John Carmack [1]

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20010624154450/http://www.voodooe...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010624154450/http://www.voodooextreme.com/games/interviews/carmack/)

<comment><USER3> He's talking about software patents. I wouldn't equate that with API copyright. For many things discovering an algorithm to do something is just that - a process more about 'discovery' than 'invention.' As an obvious example in graphics, think about something like height mapped terrain. Anybody of reasonable cleverness who thinks on the problem of how to represent terrain in a 3D world is going to, at some point, "invent" height mapped terrain. Whole system APIs, by contrast, are more of a creative expression in that there are an infinite number of possible APIs. And for anything not completely trivial, wholesale copying there is only going to happen by overt and intended effort.

I'm not saying that APIs should or should not be protected by IP law -- only that it's a different issue since the odds of unintended replication approach zero very rapidly as the complexity of a system increase. So the question becomes whether _intentional_ , and not strictly necessary, replication should or should not be allowed.

<comment><USER4> If I take a copyrighted text book on linear algebra,

then I copy its table of content.

then create my own text book (with unique material), where the table of content is from the above book.

Did I just violate the copyright of the first text book ?

<comment><USER5> If the table of contents was dozens of pages long and you did it just so your clients could stop using the copyrighted book, I think they would have a case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Feel more education on software development for the Court is needed.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is so one-sided it hurts.</comment>


Where are my tax dollars going? - <AUTHOR> https://fiscalfs.blogspot.com/p/about-if-youre-us-citizen-you-just-paid.html <comment><USER2> What is the kickstarter for? You seem to have the data, and the tool?

Is it a hostage situation? ie, If I dont get the funding, Im gonna delete all this.

<comment><USER3> Occasionally, it's nice to compensate people for producing something that others value. This has a couple of benefits, one of which is that same person might continue to produce interesting things.

<comment><USER4> I have no problem with paying people for their work, I just don't believe kickstarter is the appropriate platform for selling already completed software. (And neither does kickstarter, unless they've changed their goals recently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool, and using windirstat to visualize it is a great idea. Props.

<comment><USER6> Indeed it made me chuckle.Like hey that's a good use for that tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the UK, if you want to see the government's financial position, not just expenditure but income, assets and liabilities, and consolidated accross all of central and local government to international accounting standards, then you can read the Whole of Government Accounts [1]. They are pretty accessible and well written, and there is a (more complicated) interactive version [2].

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/whole-of- governme...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/whole-of-government- accounts-2016-to-2017)

[2] [https://www.nao.org.uk/highlights/whole-of-government- accoun...](https://www.nao.org.uk/highlights/whole-of-government- accounts-2016-2017/)

<comment><USER8> There are also a lot of dashboards to measure the performance of many government services: [https://www.gov.uk/performance/services](https://www.gov.uk/performance/services)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI, if the author or someone else would like to port it to Mac, GrandPerspective is a great tool that I use all the time and displays WinDirStat-like trees.

<comment><USER10> Hate to pile on but D3.js is the goto for treemaps these days methinks.</comment></comment>


America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It's No. 28 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-22/america-is-not-the-greatest-country-on-earth-it-s-no-28 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a Michael Parenti speech on "Superpatriotism" from 1988. There's no existing transcript I can find so I may be the first to do this:

"The superpatriots love of country seems predicated on the country being 'up there', stronger and superior to other countries.

What happens if it's gonna slip? What about people from ... lesser lands? What about somebody from...Luxembourg. I mean now, Luxembourg is #122, just barely ahead of San Marino in its military might.

So what does someone from Luxembourg do? Do they go around shame-faced? Do people tease them, "Are you from Luxembourg?", "No no, I'm uh...French". And you say, "Do you love your country" and they say "well wha..what is there to love ... I mean a few border police, no army, no navy ..."

Here's the mp3: [http://9ol.es/luxembourg.mp3](http://9ol.es/luxembourg.mp3)

The entire speech: [http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/23514](http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/23514)

<comment><USER3> Why people only rip on Americans for being patriotic? Nobody rips on the French when they say they have the best {food, fashion, history, literature, country, *}. Everybody seems fine with European snobbery in all its variants: French, Italian, and even English snobbery is accepted, but not quite as much as the others it seems.

<comment><USER4> "Nobody rips on the French when they say they have the best."

Everybody does, it is called "chauvinism". There is nothing wrong believing your country is the best, provided that you have actually traveled to other countries and know it is a fact. You will find your country being the best "at something", but could learn and improve a lot from other countries as well.

The problem with chauvinism is not understanding other countries(not knowing other cultures or countries) making yourself prejudices that are not real, and the mass of people being easily manipulated by the power establishment.

Given that the US has the biggest army in the world, with nuclear subs, nuclear missiles, drones and stuff, American prejudices are extremely important for the rest of the world.

For people living in Libya or Syria, Afghanistan , Iran or Saudi Arabia, American prejudices and actions could be the difference between being alive or dead, for you and your family, abandoning your country as a refugee with nothing or having everything you have destroyed.

When people in charge want the gross of the people to support an invasion of a foreign county and make a big business with the natural resources, they use patriotism as the main tool(e.g Americans were "being Attacked" in Iraq because 20 people from Saudi Arabia hijacked Americans planes).

<comment><USER5> > There is nothing wrong believing your country is the best, provided that you > have actually traveled to other countries and know it is a fact.

Yes, there is. No single country can be "the best" or "the greatest", because this term is ridiculously underdefined. (The same fallacy applies to the submission, btw.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When traveling in the US, I'm always amused at the reactions of disbelief, horror, aggression, and utter incredulity when I propose that their country isn't the greatest in the world.

After all, they likely hear or are told every day that they are not only "free" (unlike everywhere else?) but the "greatest".

<comment><USER7> Really? What kind of people are you talking to? Note that Bloomberg, the source of the above news, is American. Note that the reaction you get might not only stem from the message itself, but also from the way you deliver it. How do you react when a foreigner critizes your country out of the blue? Imagine someone saying to you: "Your people regularily mistreat immigrants, did you know that?" How do you react?

<comment><USER5> > Imagine someone saying to you: "Your people regularily mistreat immigrants, > did you know that?" How do you react?

"I know, right?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The U.S. is No. 64 in the rate of mothers dying for every 100,000 births, and No. 40 when it comes to the rate children under age five die."

That is shameful for the tenth richest country in the world (per capita).

<comment><USER3> The real shame in that number is that other countries literally let premature babies die without intervention so they can keep their health costs down and infant mortality numbers down too while the US aggressively intervenes and reports all births massively inflating our infant mortality numbers.

Basically, if you are going to be a premature baby, you would much rather be born in the US than any other country in the world.

<comment><USER9> Doctors stand by as babies perish because they're concerned about their nation's WHO rankings? Citation needed.

<comment><USER3> I'd say its is more of an institutional bias again costs and perception that drive policies that prevent intervention when babies are born too young or too underweight. That's how the you get the horror stories of "my baby was born X days too early/Y pounds too underweight and they refused to do anything."

<comment><USER10> I've literally never heard any such story. Online or in my circles.

Again, [citation needed].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I never accepted America as "greatest country in the world" as a literal truth, anymore than I would say my Dad is "the greatest in the world" and expect anyone to believe it. It's a statement of love, or belonging, or some other sentiment, but some set up its literal interpretation as a strawman and begin wailing on it.

<comment><USER12> Bingo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hands up - who'd rather be in Iceland than the US?

<comment><USER14> Me. Iceland is awesome.

<comment><USER15> Not only that, your vote actually counts with only 331,778 people!

<comment><USER5> You mean like in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_O3BA5e28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_O3BA5e28) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought it was interesting that according to their numbers the U.S. has fewer homicides than Germany (which is worse than Syria?!). That's quite surprising.

<comment><USER17> The graphs are a bit confusing. higher = better, actually (there is a small bit saying "safe levels/ unsafe levels" above the 1st graph). I was also confused why Saudia Arabia would have such high issues with alcohol, whereas in fact it is Russia that does...

<comment><USER18> I'd say they're more than a little confusing. Why would anybody from a western cultural background choose yellowish orange for "better" and a range of blues for "worse"?

<comment><USER19> Heatmaps are pretty common in western culture.

<comment><USER18> Heatmaps are used with continuous data. This map has 4 discrete values, so it's really misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did the UN report actually set out to rank countries by order of "greatness" or was that the mass media's contribution? The compilers of the report probably stated something like "based on criteria x,y and z which are based on data we obtained from organizations 1,2 and 3, or their equivalents, in countries around the world we ranked these countries from 1 to 100 (or whatever) according to their scores".

So...being #28 in the list doesn't mean that country is the 28th "greatest" country in the world. Obviously there exists no objective definition of "greatest" or "best" country/city/region in the world but every time I see that written somewhere I cringe a little. It could be my inner pedant but it's also because I know somebody will take this as meaning the researchers meant x country is THE greatest in the world and argue why this is, or is not, the case. Probably not so much on HN but preventative measures have been taken just in case.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fun fact: America is not a country

<comment><USER22> Agreed. However this is something that most of the world (aside from Mexico, Central, and South America) collude in. I try to say "the US" in conversations with my European friends, but they will always just say "America" in response. And of course, there is no English equivalent to Estadounidense.

<comment><USER23> The French language has "États-Unien" [0] but it is almost never used.

[0] [https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%89tats- Unien](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%89tats-Unien)

<comment><USER22> Of course, even that _could_ be ambiguous given that my homeland's southern neighbor is officially "Estados Unidos Mexicanos" (Mexican United States). That usage is so rare as to be pretty much irrelevant, though.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Although there is a lot of local variation, after all America is the third most highly populated country in the world, I would broadly agree with this picture.

</comment><comment> d--b So? Is it about time someone makes it great again?

<comment> fake-name Again implies it was great at some point, (or greater then it is now).

At what point, exactly, was the US "Great"? Was it when Women couldn't vote? Was it when black people couldn't sit in the "white people" part of the bus? Was it when you could get committed to a mental institution just for being gay?

While there are many things wrong now, the rosy past that such rhetoric seems to _assume_ exists was never a thing. America was never great.

<comment><USER25> Great relative to others, not perfect.

<comment><USER10> For one of the youngest countries on Earth, the US is (maybe because of that) all too opposed to change.

The US constitution was written over 200 years ago. Other countries were founded many hundreds or thousands of years before that, and have thus realized that the core principles they were founded on were maybe not all applicable today, and continually update their laws and government.

The problem with "the greatest country on Earth" is that it's unwilling to adapt and learn and grow. Which is what every other country and human on Earth tries to daily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It should be metioned that the process of statistical data collection can vary between countries.

</comment><comment><USER27> But it is #1 in military might. So, its the greatest

<comment><USER19> Mightiest is not necessarily greatest.

<comment><USER27> History would suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER19> Really? The Mongols were fearsomely mighty, yet their empire lasted less than a hundred years and their culture spread nowhere. The USSR was a military superpower, yet it only lasted one human's lifetime, and it absolutely sucked to live there. Alexander the Great was stupendously powerful in a military sense, 'conquering the known world', yet his realms collapsed upon his death at only 33.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm so sick of these articles:

1- poverty is defined differently in each country

2- so is infant mortality

3- so is life expectancy (who gets included isn't the same)

4- social justice issues have no clear definition

5- some of these stats aren't even quantifyable, such as hygiene.

...

How much is a percentage of obesity worth? As much as percent of GDP? Or why isn't the number of top 100 universities accounted for?

can keep going and going...

These are political rankings given the veneer of rigor because they have numbers attached to them. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are just busy work for the Social Justice Warriors with nothing else to do but make up yet another meaningless utopian index.

[https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs](https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs)

<comment><USER28> Some indicators could be subjective but how can infant mortality and life expectancy be defined differently in different countries?

<comment><USER3> Who is "born" is defined different depending on which country. E.g., most European countries will not count premature babies if they don't make certain weight or other metrics and no attempt to intervene, so this sets up some really perverse incentives. These can make up more than 3 out of every 4 premature births so it can significantly tilt the stats:

[http://www.nationalreview.com/article/276952/infant- mortalit...](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/276952/infant-mortality- deceptive-statistic-scott-w-atlas)

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

<comment><USER14> > ... most European countries will not count premature babies if they don't > make certain weight

Factually incorrect, as shown by your own link which lists 6 countries that have weight/gestation thresholds. Or maybe there are less than 12 countries in Europe, who the hell cares, right?

<comment><USER3> You trimmed the rest of the sentence that said "or other metrics" that would include things like weeks premature. That clearly changes the meaning the sentence. But that's a minor thing when you are playing a game of Gotha, isn't it.

<comment><USER14> > ...That clearly changes the meaning the sentence

If you look at my reply I talk about gestation period.

Only 6 European countries have thresholds for either gestation or weight.

You can accuse me of playing "gotcha" if you like, but you're misrepresenting data and it's fair for me to correct you.

[Edited for typo]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon.com is clever in its use of tracking and follow-up e-mails - <AUTHOR> http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/amazon-com-is-clever-in-its-use-of-tracking-and-follow-up-e-mails/ <comment><USER2> "This e-mail and post are also useful reminders: virtually everything you do online can be tracked, if someone wants to track you. Amazon does, for reasons that presently seem benign. Nonetheless, next time I move I might delete this account (if that's possible) and start another one, which won't have a purchase history going back to 2002."

I'm sorry, but who cares? And did the OP really not know that? I don't browse Amazon while logged in and not expect them to be using every bit of my history for marketing. This just seems like a really ridiculous criticism.

Seriously, there's a middle-ground here. If you're doing something remotely private, take a few steps to make sure you can't be tracked as easily. Don't want your viewing history tracked? Clear your cookies or enter private browsing mode. Afraid that your IP address will give something away? Use a VPN.

This isn't new. People have been tracking you for decades using as many techniques at their disposal as possible. Sure, it's easier now, but let's be honest, the quality of information you're giving away here isn't that sensitive. Unless you're particularly embarrassed about buying high-end cameras, I don't see where the worry is.

<comment><USER3> I think this is an important point and don't think you deserve downvotes.

This stuff can actually be really useful. What's wrong with Amazon being helpful if you have chosen to receive their marketing emails? You know they know what you looked at. Telling you about what they know you might be interested in doesn't have to be sinister. There was a time when the salesperson in your small local town might have done the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Some of them are misses—Leica's cameras look completely silly to me—but the hits are there."

Perhaps their A/B tests have shown that presenting you with what you call 'obvious misses' increases the odds of you making a purchase decision...

<comment><USER5> It would be intriguing to see Amazon's stats about how often people buy after receiving these emails. They must work, I've just got no idea how successful they are. Would anyone care to guess what % of these kind of messages trigger a sale?

Similarly, It'd be interesting to see stats on other forms of 'reminder' advertising. Like the type that keep showing you recently viewed products as you browse other websites. I'd have thought this would just be irritating to people, but again, it probably works because companies keep doing it. Are there any public stats about how effective it is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Amazon finance card doesn't interest me and I'm not going to buy a camera today—or one from Amazon, because of they charge sales tax and most online retailers don't. But I'm simultaneously impressed and creeped out by the company's nudge e-mails."

I'm guessing this is part of the reason why Amazon is pushing on an online sales tax at the federal level.

<comment><USER7> Pretty much; I helped lobby against it in Sacramento with Amazon and the PMA. The amazing thing was how uncaring politicians were for the plight of small affiliates - especially those who would be ruined overnight.

Most online retailers have come to understand that solving it at the federal level is really the best solution for all involved.</comment></comment>


Ariane RISC-V CPU – An open source CPU capable of booting Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openhwgroup/cva6 <comment><USER2> So I've had the itch to get a 64-bit RISC-V board of some sort. For reasons I won't get into, I'm not so interested in the 32-bit version.

The prices for the Genesys 2 Kintex-7 are $1000 USD at Digikey, which is way too much to spend on a hobby. I suppose I could try to port the FPGA code to a cheaper platform, but I'm no expert on that sort of development.

Arguably, I'm not an expert on operating systems development either...

On the other end of the spectrum, There is this Canaan Kendryte K210 chip, which is a dual-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC, but only has 8MiBytes of on-chip SRAM, with no provision for SDRAM. An RTOS is of course the straight-forward choice for that, though people are apparently able to run a very slim Linux kernel on it as well. You can get various boards from Seeed Studio for $30 USD or less.

Is there something else that is a reasonable price? Less than $100 USD? Yes, I know, qemu is free.

<comment><USER3> There are pre-built images for cheaper FPGA boards. There is one for the Parallella system.

A limiting factor on most FPGA dev boards is the amount of RAM if you want to do any software development on the resulting RISC-V SoC.

</comment></comment><comment> j-pb I love that the controller symbol is a toilet, because on a miss-predict it does a "flush".

</comment><comment> DC-3 Could someone break down the significance of this for those of us who are less hardware-acquainted? Does this represent the cutting edge of RISC-V CPU design? And how difficult would it to implement this design properly instead of simply emulating it with an FPGA?

<comment><USER4> Emulation to me implies simulation, which isn't what an FPGA does.

A configured FPGA and an ASIC are both real electric circuits. In an FPGA the building blocks are larger groups of transistors (typically forming "Look Up Tables") that are connected together by a network of a bajillion electronic switches (read: other transistors). In an ASIC the building block is generally a transistor (although technically any structure you can "tape-out" with lithography) and everything is wired up directly.

Porting this to an ASIC is more gated by access to proprietary tooling than anything else. There's a number of open source efforts to replicate this tooling on older process nodes (search for SkyWater PDK and OpenROAD).

As for how significant this particular RISC-V chip is, there are a bunch of open source RISC-V chips cropping up. This one does seem to have more extensions implemented than the typical RISC-V chip, which is notable. Personally I'm more interested in RISC-V CPUs written in newer tooling (i.e. nMigen or Chisel) rather than Verilog as I find Verilog a trusty but a bit archaic (similar to how C is seen these days).

<comment><USER5> Emulation just means running it on hardware it wasn't intended. That runs the spectrum between ISA emulators like Dolphin, software RTL simulators like verilator, and FPGAs can certainly be used for emulation if the design wasn't really intended for them as the real end goal.

There's also an interesting point in that spectrum of the cadence/synopsys hardware emulators. They run in a rack sized device composed of a bunch of FPGAs and arrays of custom ascetic processor cores that can only do logic and branch ops to run HDL for SoC sized designs at ~1-10MHz.

<comment><USER6> I know ZeBu very well and... "a bunch of FPGAs" is an understatement. It can go all the way to 1500 FPGAs !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> RISC-V could be a pretty good ISA, if only it came with a popcount instruction. Given popcount, it is easy to compose a whole range of other essential operations with just one or two more instructions. Without, you are stuck running two dozen instructions just to get to the first step.

Is the RISC-V evolutionary process capable of processing small-sized, incremental improvements? Or are only big "extension" instruction families even possible?

<comment><USER8> The B extension is going to add that.

[https://github.com/riscv/riscv-bitmanip](https://github.com/riscv/riscv- bitmanip)

Also conditional move which you really need for a lot of reasons but especially to avoid timing attacks in cryptography.

<comment><USER7> The B extension spec seems to be stagnating. It will anyway be optional and probably rarely implemented even if ever finished. If we have to wait on B, it probably means not getting popcount.

Conditional move would be there implicitly if they had defined boolean "true" to be ~0 in the ABI: just AND. Instead they made it 1, so you have to negate it before you can use it for anything. This has been well understood in SIMD circles for decades; it is a mystery how they could have missed it.

I am ready for a RISC-VI, RISC-W, or RISD-V "fixed version".

<comment><USER9> B extension was making good progress after it had slowed down for a while. Seems like standardization has slowed because of COVID.

The argument that it will never be implemented seems kind of wrong, why not? Multiple vendors and open source extensions already implemented the essential functionality in non standard ways. In the next standard profile for Linux, the V and B extensions will very likely be included.

ISA standardization never happens as fast as you hope it does.

<comment><USER7> Popcount is important even in minimal implementations, including "embedded". Waiting for B is not a way to get popcount where it is needed. We need another track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool. No register renaming but scoreboared issue means it's still weakly out of order. It seems to be grabbing the instruction stream in 32 bit chunks but I wonder if it can decode two compressed instructions in a single clock cycle?

<comment><USER10> I doubt it because they can cross page-borders which is a seriously annoying "feature" in the compressed extension. Also 32-bit instructions can cross the page border too!

<comment><USER8> The 32-bit instruction sets I'm familiar with all tend to enforce alignment which means page boundaries aren't a problem. Also, you get 2 extra bits of jump distance for free by not having to specify the exact byte you're jumping too but only the 32 bit word.

<comment><USER10> If you disable the compressed extension then you do get enforced alignment. So, for example RV32I, RV64I both 32-bit alignment. I just ran a small linux program I had for RV32GC and I found 2 places where an instruction crossed a page border. I don't understand why they thought that was a good idea, and for such a modern architecture too, but I guess on hardware it's fine?

<comment><USER5> Well, there's a few places were it makes sense and doesn't. And it being an optional extension means that it pretty much exists where it's benefits outweigh it's costs.

The really tiny cores with RV-C don't even have page tables, so there's no straddling to worry about. There it's very cheap, and has a lot of benefit, so you see it in the same target (and same reasons) as CortexM cores being Thumb2 based.

One level of complexity up, a simple embedded core with a full MMU (taking the place of what'd be a classic 5 stage RISC like in a home router or something) is the least likely to want it, but in those cases you're normally doing buildroot like software anyway, so it's not a big deal that you have to compile everything with rv32g instead of rv32gc.

Larger more powerful cores have the gate count necessary to paper over the complexity of straddling page boundaries. And that's why you see the binary distros pretty much requiring RV-C. The increased gate count there is worth the better utilization of the I$.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's so attractive in RISC-V compared to, say, ARM or MIPS? Is it just the license?

<comment><USER5> It's cleaner than ARM or MIPS. AArch32 has something like 1200 instructions these days and a ton of cruft in there. AArch64 has good but not great instruction density, having nothing like ARM Thumb or RV-C.

MIPS (or at least what most people mean when they say MIPS) has all sorts of gross stuff like branch delay slots that are a pain in any non 5 stage in order design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like it just shares a name with the spacecraft but isn't related?

<comment><USER13> I can't help but think of Ariane V and its famous launch failure due to a programming error. I hope Ariane RISC-V fares better. ;) (Ok, the rocket platform has been reliable since 2003, but that ruins the joke.)

<comment><USER14> Was going to say the same. I learnt of the Ariane 5 explosion in a class on critical-systems software development. The out-of-range error that cost $0.5bn.

A summary of the failure: [https://www- users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html](https://www- users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html)

<comment><USER7> It wasn't even the out-of-range value that caused the failure--that would have been fine. The failure was caused by trapping the error, and dumping debug data onto the realtime control bus.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The number of allocatable IPv4s just dropped to zero - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/IPv4Countdown/status/33174459619737600

<comment><USER2> This is only true in a very technical sense. The last free /8 was allocated to a regional authority.

The regional authorities (RIRs) still have many, many smaller blocks to allocate to individual organizations. The first RIR isn't expected to run out of ipv4 space until October.

That's when the shit really hits the fan.</comment>


The $60k Telegram That Helped Lincoln End Slavery - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-telegram-that-helped-lincoln-end-slavery/ <comment><USER2> I wish titles like this would add "..in the US." Lincoln didn't end slavery globally.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery/chronology-who- ba...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery/chronology-who-banned- slavery-when-idUSL1561464920070322)</comment>


TUI for lobste.rs, Written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.wezm.net/technical/2019/04/lobsters-tui/ <comment><USER2> Can somebody explain why we need another acronym that appears to mean the same thing as CLI?

Edit: Gotta love these downvotes. Punishing people for trying to patch holes in their knowledge is a great teaching strategy. Stay curious, folks

<comment><USER3> A TUI is not a CLI, but a GUI that 'happens' to render in a terminal environment, restricted to the features available there. (mostly ANSI escape codes)

It's a common acronym.

<comment><USER2> > It's a common acronym...

Thanks! Learned something new today.

<comment><USER3> Wikpedia has you covered: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text- based_user_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface) ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article leaves me with more questions than answers after reading it. Has the author written a TUI for lobste.rs in another language before? How was the experience different by using Rust? Where there any "Aha!" moments during this exercise which makes the author think that Rust could replace other languages in their daily work?

<comment> vertex-four I mean, the author probably just picked Rust as a language because they like Rust, the same way that most people pick languages for small projects.

<comment><USER4> Yes... but this hit the front page of Hacker News: why? Just because it has "Rust" in the title? I was hoping for a little insight or, you know, _news_...

<comment><USER5> Every other year there is a trendy language, and if you write a Tetris clone with it you can write a blog post about it. Nowadays it's Rust, tomorrow it will be something else.

Project idea: a visualization of trendy languages on HN, written in Kotlin</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We're heading Straight for AOL 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/aol-20 <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008769) (and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160133) with no comments)

<comment><USER3> It seems the recentness of that discussion was enough for many people to warrant flagging this one--it's been sent to page 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure what you're ranting about here. What closed protocols / technologies are vendors creating that pose a risk?

On the contrary over the last few years we've seen vendors start to converge on web standards (HTML, CSS, JS) [2].

We've seen the development of crucial technologies for rich multimedia / interactivity on web apps like websockets (RFC 6455 [3]) and WebRTC [4]. Things like an open browser automation protocol is helping devs build cross- browser apps [5].

Also, 1) we're up to RFC 7639 in the official list [1], so that's about 2000 RFCs since the one you mentioned in your article. 2) RSS is not a protocol 3) vendors _are_ building completely open source tools (e.g. Facebook & Google with React & Angular.js) 4) "companies now deliver one half of their application and some custom protocol over HTTP and never mind inter- operability with other services or playing nice", really confused about this, do you have any examples? 5) Are you suggesting that HTTP is transport layer? Because it's not [6]

       [1] http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt
       [2] http://caniuse.com/
       [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455
       [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-webrtc-20150210/
       [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/
       [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

<comment><USER5> You're missing the point if you're holding up HTML/CSS/JS as a counter- example.

In the past, we had a more robust network software ecosystem in which high- level protocol semantics were standardized across vendors, ensuring that:

\- Multiple server implementations existed, and

\- Multiple client implementations existed, and

\- Data (the bits owned by users) were portable across those implementations.

This creates a healthy, more resilient ecosystem, within which there does not exist a single point of failure, and competition for clients, servers, and _services providing the same_ is robust.

HTML/CSS/JS do standardize semantics, but they're _application platform_ semantics -- we get interoperability and choice across browsers and web servers, but we're losing network interoperability between the applications being built on top of them.

This isn't limited to the web, either: closed protocols and DRM on mobile (e.g. Apple's iMessage, Facetime) have produced a similar result. Apple controls the messaging clients, the OS, the network protocol, and the servers. If you want to leave, you lose access to everyone else using the protocol. Resiliency is also lost -- a single party controls the entire infrastructure, including the client software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The difference here is that while AOL was a completely walled garden, many of the various players here have APIs that you can connect to. Then you have intermediary companies like IFTTT and Zapier that are glue between those various services.

Not that I don't agree with the main point - moving from completely open to little fiefdoms, but I think it's an imperfect analogy given the push towards everything having APIs for connectivity between them.

<comment><USER7> Your mention of "little fiefdoms" reminded me of a piece that Bruce Schneier wrote called "Feudal Security": [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008769)

Somewhat related Sandstorm.io is also a pretty cool concept that might help avoid an AOL 2.0.

[https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love a good rant (and I respect Jacques a lot!), but this one falls apart between the 3rd and 4th paragraphs:

 _>...instead of delivering software to the end users which then implemented this protocol using executables for the various platforms[,] HTTP allowed to deliver both the visual part of the application (the user interface) and (eventually) the rest of the client portion of the application in one go._ (comma added)

 _> The end result of all that is that we're rapidly moving from an internet where computers are 'peers' (equals) to one where there are consumers and 'data owners', silos of end user data that work as hard as they can to stop you from communicating with other, similar silos._

Both of these may be true, but one doesn't follow from the other. There are a complex blend of forces that conspire to silo data and separate it from users - not the least of which is the desire to a) keep it safe, and b) make it accessible on all devices. If disposable web software follows from anything it's from the vulnerability of client devices - we give you both the reader and the data every time because we know you're going to drop your phone and need a reinstall anyway.

The web is _still maturing_ and I think WebRTC and WebSockets are particularly interesting, because they are analogs to lower level things that came before, but they work in that disposable web environment.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yep. I think a big point that has not been addressed is how we got into this situation. Most internet users are locked behind home or corporate networks, without a real addressable IP and every port but 80 and 443 blocked. A lot of this was done in the name of security (exactly how does blocking a port or ignoring a ping response make you secure? I've never heard a valid technical reason for this being more secure, beyond tradition-says-so answers.), but is really due to cargo-cult sysadmin behavior and bad default settings on hardware.

Now we've basically ruined IPv4, peer to peer communication doesn't work for enough users to make it useless, forcing the centralized server-client model. It's not just hardware with bad defaults - try accessing a (non-localhost) website hosted on a port 6666 in Chrome. You can't, Chrome has a blacklist of "insecure" ports. I am baffled such a concept even exists, ports aren't secure or insecure, they are a channel for data. Then I look at websockets and laugh, We rebuilt udp over http over tcp, just so web developers can send arbitrary data again...

I get very upset when I see the same sort of ideas taking hold in IPv6, we have another chance not to ruin this, and yet we seem to want to force the broken IPv4 model, with firewalled NATs, blocked ports, and more broken default settings.

<comment><USER11> Ping of death has happened before. You do not serve any purpose by opening ports that you do not intend to use. Closing all unneeded port is called minimizing attack surface.

Ports may not be inherently secure or insecure, but the history of their usage give them bias towards likely being secure or insecure. Chrome does the right thing by blocking these ports as an overwhelmingly large percentage of their users will probably hit this port under "insecure" situations. Those who need to use these ports can and will find alternate ways to do it.

<comment><USER10> What "attack surface"? Almost all your ports, no applications listen to. Closing them serves no useful purpose.

If an application has problems accepting input on a port it is listening to, that is an application bug. Closing your ports doesn't solve this, it just hides the problem under the rug, and breaks the Internet in the process.

<comment><USER11> The firewalls you mentioned were NAT/Enterprise level. They do not generally have absolute control of what programs are running on one of their internal computers. May be that port left open is used by a C&C client installed on one of the user's computer inside LAN, hereby possibly compromising the whole internal network. There is a reason why DMZs exist.

<comment><USER12> Corporate security is a different sort of beast from almost every other security environment. What's acceptable in that arena is almost _always_ an unacceptable management practice for someone who is designing and operating what is supposed to be a network of peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Open protocol, HTTP, email:

[http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/)

It's not peer-to-peer, but at least it is open. We see the same issue, which is why we're doing it.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _Please open up your protocols, commit to keeping them open and publish a > specification. And please never do what twitter did (start open, then close > as soon as you gain traction)._

If you want to make money, I'm not sure how sound this advice is. Anyone know an example of a company that has kept protocols open and made any significant money?

<comment><USER15> The question is: is it a case of "because", or "despite"? Is there any proof that using open protocols and making money are mutually exclusive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the people that have been making proprietary protocols just moved from making them directly on top of TCP to HTTP. Saying that if HTTP didn't exist Facebook would have proposed an interopable status protocol seems incredibly naive to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I actually expected to see a rant about Facebook. That said, I don't think that the general issue is so bad regarding protocol development. For the most part, people are building on the back of HTTP.

</comment><comment><USER18> From the article:

> And please never do what twitter did (start open, then close as soon as you > gain traction).

Charging for access is hardly "closing itself". Is the author faulting them for moving to a more sustainable model?

</comment><comment><USER19> Somewhat, but not completely, along the same lines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10188667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10188667)</comment>


6 Y Combinator Startups I Would Have Invested In Back Then - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/6119/6-Y-Combinator-Startups-I-Would-Have-Invested-In-Back-Then.aspx

<comment><USER2> Kind of a 20/20 hindsight thing too. I wish people would write these type of posts right after the startup launches.

It's very easy to bash startups and think you're an expert because you picked who would fail (the vast majority of them do). It's much harder to pick winners.

<comment><USER3> I've written them right after the startup launches. My track record:

1.) Reddit. The day after it launched: "Well, this is interesting, but I can't ever see myself using it." 3 months later, after I started using it: "Well, I use it, but I can't ever see it getting popular." Early 2006, in response to PG's comment about "This sucker's profitable": "But are they profitable enough to cover the opportunity cost's of the founder's salaries?" Mid 2006: "Okay, they're profitable through bizdev deals, but I can't imagine them ever getting bought." I believe they were acquired on Halloween 2006.

2.) Infogami: I thought they were the most likely of the SFP05 startups to be successful, right until they launched.

3.) Wufoo, when it came out: "I don't get what the point is." About 9 months later: "Incidentally, I'd put Wufoo, VirtualMin, and DropBox at the bottom of the deadpool, i.e. most likely to succeed."

4.) Xobni: "Personally, I'd put Xobni at the top of the YC deadpool." <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51982>

5.) VirtualMin: Already mentioned that this is one I'd invest in if I actually had money. I'd used Webmin for previous websites; there's a lot of money in easy-to-use server admin tools for folks who don't really know what they're doing.

6.) RescueTime: Loved it from the moment I heard about it. Immediately recommended it to friends; if I had money, I'd invest.

7.) Thinkature: I thought this was really cool when it came out, and that it'd be one of the survivors of its batch.

8.) Flagr: Thought this was succeeding for sure when one of my RL friends linked me to a Flagr map.

9.) Justin.TV. "This is pointless, I can't believe YC gave these guys $50K, I'll probably never visit it again."

Somebody remind me never to become a VC.

<comment><USER4> That's not bad.

And for the record, most VCs should never have become VCs.

<comment><USER5> neither of you guys mentioned loopt, but it is supposed to be one of the startups that PG has the most expectation. do you guys think it won't succeed, or what is it?

personally, I don't get it either.

<comment><USER3> I'm on record as saying that it won't - I could very well be wrong (just look at my track record ;-), but that's my prediction.

<comment><USER5> we'll see. =) i'd say it won't too, or it morphs into something totally different and succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shoulda/woulda/coulda... Is that worth anything?

<comment><USER4> Well, I'm biased (being the author of the article), but it was worth something to me for two reasons:

1\. Writing it helped me think about the topic.

2\. I got a chance to compliment some folks that I think deserved it without seeming overly silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dupe. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=264139>

Well... that's one more bug in the duplication detection routine. Apparently adding a "/" to a url causes it to count as a different one.

<comment><USER4> Well, technically, adding a "/" at the end of something _is_ a different URL.

<comment><USER8> The point is that we don't want duplicate content, even if it's at slightly different URLs.

<comment><USER9> I think the counter-point was that it may actually be different content. How often that is the case, I don't know, but assuming it will never happen doesn't necessarily seem like a great idea.

<comment><USER8> Maybe the system should actually check what's at each page.

And you should read more carefully. I did not suggest the thing you say is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Boring</comment>


Ask HN: What's the hardest part of doing biz dev to generate direct sales? - <AUTHOR>

Would love to hear thoughts from HNers who hack AND sell.
For those who had to jump in on the sales/biz dev efforts at your startup, what are the biggest challenges you face?
Is it lead generation? Is it identifying the decision maker and figuring out how to get in front of them? Is it closing deals? <comment><USER2> I find it the first two. Identifying prospects and finding who to contact. Especially when we don't yet have a mentor. I think if we had a mentor who knew the right people, how the industry works and what works, it would be invaluable. Building something was the easy part for us (well, not easy) but making a profit is the hard part.

<comment><AUTHOR> so in the case of ONP (I assume this is the business you're referring to), is the challenge for you is finding folks who'll buy ad space in your magazine?

where are you currently getting leads from right now?

<comment><USER2> ONB, yeah, the challenge is finding advertisers. The smaller companies often have no contact information, and the larger companies mostly use ad agencies. So then you have to find who is representing whom, and then additionally find a way to reach the media buyers within that agency. We haven't fully launched our effort, but we're planning on getting leads through our contacts in the advertising agency market, through our app itself (which will invite people to advertise) and through cold calling smaller companies (or cold emailing in this day and age). We're also putting together a press kit to encourage media buyers at agencies to try us out. To a car company or a major advertiser, the prices we'll be charging will be tiny compared to a tv media buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Timing.

You need to know when you're selling yourself, and you need to know when you're selling your product. You can't sell your product until you sell yourself; if you try to, especially in B2B and smaller markets, you might lose your sale.</comment>


Ask HN: What did google do with my search results? - <AUTHOR>

When I google docley my web application site's description comes up, but it points to a different domain with different content (qdb.taranen.co.uk).
I am hosted with slicehost and asked them about this. Their reply:
22.214.171.124 is a Slicehost IP, but I see nothing in their account or records that I can find that would indicate they are pointing any DNS at your IP (which is how I suspect Google would have indexed that way). You may want to contact Google to see how they've come upon this index record for your site as I'm unsure of the specifics, but again, based on what I'm able to see I see no reason why this would be happening. They're not pointing any DNS records at your Slice IP so they're not (as far as I know) sending any traffic to your site via a URL you're unaware of.
I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this. <comment><USER2> If you look at Google's cached page, it looks like they fetched <http://qdb.taranen.co.uk/> at 2009-11-06 07:47:43 and your page came back.

When did you acquire your current IP address? If it was some time around that point, my guess is that they had your IP address before you did, and thir DNS (or google's cache of it) was out of date.

 _I am not sure what to do or how to resolve this._

I don't think there's anything you can do aside from waiting for Google to re- crawl. For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header.

<comment><USER3> _For future reference, though, this is a good reason to only serve up your site in response to HTTP queries which come with the right Host: header._

Or add a <link rel="canonical"> tag, see:

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify- your-canonical.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to Search Results:

[http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&b...](http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=docley&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=docley&fp=20257e61c65c0f5)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you signed up for Google's Webmaster Tools? It gives you access to see crawl stats and errors.

They have to crawl your site to establish domain ownership, doing so may or may not speed up the re-indexing process.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just did that today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a semi-related note that mail from slicehost is excellent customer service. A lot of companies could learn from that - right now they're getting valuable free marketing on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that this was great support.

This was the entire email:

Hey David,

When I do a dig on the URL in question, it comes back with the following information:

dig qdb.taranen.co.uk

; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> qdb.taranen.co.uk

;; global options: +cmd

;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER<<\- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21877

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;qdb.taranen.co.uk. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

qdb.taranen.co.uk. 257 IN A 184.108.40.206

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns.123-reg.co.uk.

taranen.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns2.123-reg.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

ns.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 184.108.40.206

ns2.123-reg.co.uk. 2320 IN A 22.214.171.124

;; Query time: 218 msec

;; SERVER: 10.6.24.4#53(10.6.24.4)

;; WHEN: Wed Nov 18 13:10:06 2009

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 126

18.104.22.168 is a Slicehost IP, but I see nothing in their account or records that I can find that would indicate they are pointing any DNS at your IP (which is how I suspect Google would have indexed that way). You may want to contact Google to see how they've come upon this index record for your site as I'm unsure of the specifics, but again, based on what I'm able to see I see no reason why this would be happening. They're not pointing any DNS records at your Slice IP so they're not (as far as I know) sending any traffic to your site via a URL you're unaware of.

If it turns out that they are pointing DNS at your slice IP you would want to send them (or their DNS provider, which is not Slicehost) a notice asking that they stop pointing the name at your IP. According to the whois records, their name servers are set with:

Name servers:

ns.123-reg.co.uk

ns2.123-reg.co.uk

Let me know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Cheers.

\-- Ben H - Slicehost Join the Slicehost community! Notices and Alerts Follow us on twitter: @slicehoststatus @slicehost

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hunt down Matt Cutts or another Googleite and ask them to check it out. Such appeals have worked in the past.</comment>


Super Star Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://forums.topcoder.com/?module=Thread&threadID=698770&start=0 I asked this question on topcoder , would like know your view about this. <comment><AUTHOR> Want to add this superb link I found. <http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html></comment>