Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustainable-decadence.html <comment><USER2> The missing component in all of these green initiatives aimed at changing human behavior is a simple feedback loop. Put a fucking indicator somewhere in the shower that tells people how much water they used, or better yet, energy, or better yet, carbon. Show them their week over week, month over month, etc information and positively reward them (via tone—and other UI hints—of the message, e.g., "you reduced your shower carbon by X this month! Great work!"). If you do that even my backwoods relatives who still burn their garbage will start using less and less water, even all the while talking about how climate change is all a hoax.

<comment><USER3> I might be in a minority overall, but I really dislike gamification creeping into everyday life. I don't want some kind of cutesy "points" for showering ecologically, possibly linked to a virtual currency on an app (which conventiently also collects vital telemetry information).

<comment> a-p-o It doesn't need to be digital feedback. Imagine you could physically see the water from a shower filling into a column of water. Let's say 70 liters might reach 6 ft. If someone could see this and wanted to use less water, then they just need to keep their showers short enough that the water fills to the 60 liter mark, then the 40 liter mark, until they're happy with their efforts. No crypto currency. No telemetry.

<comment><USER3> That I could get behind. The parent post though said "positively reward them (via tone—and other UI hints—of the message, e.g., "you reduced your shower carbon by X this month! Great work!")" and that crosses my personal line for creepiness.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for mentioning Kohn's work.

It boggles my mind how super smart people just don't get that human beings cannot be incentivized the same way rats and birds can.

Reward/punishments (same thing) kill intrinsic motivation. It has been proven countless times.

Providing feedback as in making something visible is another story altogether and can be empowering.

Speaking to people like an adult trying to manipulate 3-year olds is condescending, inappropriate and repulsive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The daily shower would be hard to sustain in a world without fossil fuels.

If this is really true, then I see no hope for us. Humans will not make sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily, and will politically punish anyone who makes them do so. When this comes before the voters, "I am the person taking away your hot showers" is going to be a losing stance.

We can't "conserve" our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in clean energy tech. We need a world where the energy for hot showers is plentiful and clean.

<comment><USER6> > Humans will not make sacrifices to their way of life voluntarily

I don't think that's true at all.

Currently (speaking from the UK at least) people have been making huge sacrifices in their lives for months. Although ostensibly this has been enforced, in reality it is impossible to police and has almost entirely been done voluntarily, through persuasion, and with much popular support. These sacrifices have been far greater than using less water in showers.

> We can't "conserve" our way out of this. We will need a breakthrough in > clean energy tech.

It's no use being defeatist about this when the problem is much greater than the solution.

It's as if at the start of WWII politicians started saying, well, people won't tolerate being conscripted and having rationing, we might as well do nothing.

Incidentally, I've heard wishes for breakthroughs in clean energy tech for decades, and we've since had major advances in things like solar, wind and batteries. We can hope for more advances in the coming years but we shouldn't bank on it - we have the technology already to tackle the problem.

<comment><USER5> The examples you are giving are examples of short term sacrifices.

However, take a look at the UK post WWII. Winston Churchill got voted out of office. The big thing people wanted was a return to normalcy and the way things had been before.

<comment><USER7> On the contrary, Atlee won the 1945 election on a platform of radical social reform: national healthcare, social security, and state-funded education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangent: I appreciate what they are doing with their solar-powered server, but they could make the site so much easier to read by removing the whole-page overlay to be something less obnoxious and irritating to read when half the page is yellow and half is not.

Perhaps a thing to let you "minimise" it so it only takes up a 1cm bar on the side, or a thing to just let you dismiss/hide it entirely?

Also for the image dithering, it kinda feels like they've gone too far with that - I guess it is a stylistic thing to have huge huge huge dithered images that at best don't fit on a single screen at once or at worst require you to scroll past 2 or 3 screen heights worth (e.g. "A 6-nozzle mist shower" one), yet with a resolution so low you can't actually read the text (NASA image)?

In my opinion it would be better to have higher resolution dithered images, that are just physically smaller and fit on one screen (I am using a 1920x1080 1x1-DPI so not exactly huge by modern standards but not tiny) so that the file-size balances out.

I found the article really hard to read due to the 50/50 yellow-not yellow and the absurdly large low-res pictures that I needed to scroll to see the entire thing but actually cant see because the resolution is so poor. Sorry. :(

<comment><USER9> I actually enjoyed the overlay and the image format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's one aspect about the energy use of warm water that this article glosses over: warm water is particularly easy to store. Heat is also a byproduct of many industrial processes- reusing and storing that heat or warming up your boiler at peak energy production time is an efficient way to make use of "waste" energy. This significantly reduces the effective energy usage of any warm water usage.

There's also ways to efficiently turn electricity into heat - heat pumps for example. These "produce" around 3-4 joule of usable heat per joule of electric energy. Just using a heat pump instead of an electric heater cuts the mentioned energy costs to a quarter.

<comment><USER11> Solar hot water panels are also pretty effective. You get water hot enough for showering even on cloudy days here in the UK.

<comment><USER12> In countries with a lot of suntime, it can be as simple as a black tank/radiator outside. 3-6 months of free hot water with absolutely minimal investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One problem that article does not address is that mist showers with warm water seem like a perfect recipe for breeding _Legionnaire Disease_ , a very dangerous and deadly form of pneumonia. This is especially true if you store the water in a warm state for longer times rather than heating it on the fly. Unless this problem is addressed, mist showers are not a good idea.

<comment><USER14> The article mentions this and has a link at the end to very detailed precautions to avoid legionella bacteria in water systems.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I overlooked that passage. The link is in the last paragraph, after the main article. Should have read it more carefully. Anyway, it's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can get a sufficient amount of hot water for all your family's daily shower out of 3m² of thermal solar panels. no fossil energy necessary.

Water isn't scarce in many parts of the world, and domestic use is most often negligible anyways.

Cool tech though, will have to investigate the local wife-acceptance-factor

<comment><USER16> The last line resonates with me. It helps if you have a second bathroom with which to test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The Carbon Footprint of the Daily Shower

Nuclear power plants have zero carbon footprint. Let's build them instead of reducing quality of life.

<comment><USER18> This site only seems to be interested in solutions that seem to utterly degrade humans, like eliminating showers and travel, or eating worms.

<comment><USER19> I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of people here just realize that nuclear plants are expensive. It's 1 to 5 billion optimistically for the new designs provided you don't have any taxes or regulations at all. It's multiple times more for designs that we actually have experience with. If the government wanted to build some, at government expense, I'd be all for it. That said, I'm not at all surprised that no private energy investment groups have put their money on the table for nuclear. (Especially after the financial disaster that is Vogtie).

Nuclear really is just too expensive right now, and therefore too risky, for many of the energy players in the private sector. Again, if the government was to shoulder the majority of that risk, I think you might have some takers maybe? But as it stands? No way.

I'll even go so far as to say that if the nuclear supporters on HN were the energy billionaires, I'd give good odds that they wouldn't put their money on nuclear either. Even if you spotted them a no tax and no regulation environment. The nuclear supporters on HN would still wait for government help in the same manner as the big energy players today.

<comment><USER20> Those are fixed per-plant overhead costs, though.

If you need twice as much power, then rather than building twice as many nuclear plants, you can just build one plant _far less than_ twice as big, to output twice as much energy. (I believe it scales logarithmically, actually.)

 _Spreading_ nuclear energy is costly (insofar as you eventually need to build more plants, because no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances); but _scaling_ nuclear power in response to densification of urban areas is cheap (as long as you do it in advance.)

The problem is that, in places where it'd make a lot of sense to just plop down a nuclear plant, there's either heavy existing investment into e.g. coal; or the nearby area is _as yet_ too small to "pay back" the costs of nuclear investment.

Really, what nuclear power fits hand-in-glove with, is centralized urban regional planning (i.e. planning a large global city 50 years in advance.) But hardly anyone does that. Even the USSR didn't do that.

There's one region that _is_ doing top-down regional planning right now: Dubai. But, ah, they don't need the energy.

(Though that raises an interesting point: a large uranium deposit could be exploited on the global market in a very similar way to a large oil deposit, if a country so desired. Harvest the electricity locally with nuclear plants; create some fuel out of it [hydrogen? ethanol?]; and sell+ship the resulting fuel globally. There could totally be a "nuclear Dubai" built on the resulting resource-extraction economy.)

<comment><USER17> > no power grid is 100% lossless over long distances

Power loss is actually just around 5% per 1000km. So if electricity is made twice as cheap it can be transferred virtually anywhere in the US from a single point in today's price (of course we won't build a single power plant, that's just an illustration of the fact that transmission cost is not prohibitively high).

<comment><USER20> The US (and/or China, Russia, and Canada) are bad examples, because most countries are not nearly as large, and most countries want some measure of "ensured by our own hand" electrical-grid independence/fault-tolerance (even though they share a power-grid with their neighbours), just like most countries want a standing border-defence force (even if they participate in a defence alliance.)

So what you'd get in practice, in a nuclear-first world, is O(K log N) power plants: i.e., log(N) plants _per country_ , for each of K≥195 countries.

<comment><USER17> The world already operates more than 195 nuclear power plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My semi off-grid cabin has no well so I haul water. Showering is by far the biggest consumer, though I use a composting toilet so there's no flushing to compete with.

Having to literally carry every gallon used has completely restructured my relationship with water.

It feels very wrong to use a flush toilet now. What an obscene thing to do with potable water, especially in a drought-stricken place like California.

</comment><comment><USER22> Mist showers aren't very comfortable. I personally enjoy high flow showers. I'd rather see water usage cut at golf courses and other industrial uses. We as humans shouldn't deprive ourself first, only as a last resort.

<comment><USER23> > I personally enjoy high flow showers.

Me, too, I feel kind of addicted actually. One change that I have noticed is that it must be about two decades since I last owned a washcloth. I wonder if they had been part of the customary hotel bathroom set back then or were they considered part of what the first would bring?

As a high-flow addict what I'd really love to have is a closed loop shower, because what I certainly don't need is drinking water quality the entire time. Use fresh water only at the beginning until the loop is filled (perhaps manually or automatically omitting recapture of the first few tens of seconds of the initial flow, for when you come in really dirty), then cycle for as long as you want, then again fresh water for a final rinse. Bonus points for a button to purge/refill mid-shower if you want it a bit cleaner.

I consider this concept one of those good things that is threatened by the perfect (expecting people to shower less or downgrade to mist-showers or washcloths)

<comment><USER24> In a lot of places in the world fresh water is not an issue and a higher rate of usage actually helps with sewer systems and prevents them from clogging.

However recovering the waste heat from a shower, e.g. by running the drain water trough a heat exchanger with the freshwater would already help saving a lot of energy.

<comment><USER23> Indeed, my main issue with my shower is "why tf doesn't this thing have some heat recovery". But that wouldn't be considered an alternative to more radical solutions like a mist shower in the same way a water cycle would.

<comment><USER22> In warmer climates you can capture waste heat from your a/c and heat water at the cost of running a small recirculating pump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm intrigued, but I honestly don't understand how they rinse effectively.

On the one hand, the article explains how a Navy shower uses a 30-second rinse, which feels like how long I need to rinse for to get all the soap and shampoo off.

But then the article says "a mist shower of 8.9 minutes offers plenty of time to get rid of soap and shampoo".

Huh? If it takes me two minutes to lather up, am I spending 7 minutes just waiting for enough mist to gradually collect to rinse? That sounds... horribly inefficient and just bad design generally.

(It also admits it won't work for people who need to rinse long hair, so statistically this seems very male-centric.)

I'd much rather just get it done with in 30 seconds. In fact, I can't see _any_ benefits over a Navy shower at all here, only drawbacks. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER26> I think the benefit over a navy shower is that you still have some warm water while you're lathering so you don't get cold. I can imagine a hybrid approach where you switch to full flow just for rinsing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the is one of the easiest personal ways to reduce consumption. I challenged myself and have recently completed 2 years of no "continuous" showers.

Instead, I sit in my empty bathtub and use the spray only for getting wet enough to soap up and rinsing off. In between, all my lathering and scrubbing is done with the spray off.

As a person who loves long hot showers, this initially took some getting used to, but now it is my daily routine.

<comment><USER28> What if you also drop the soap, that way you need even less water.

I'm not trolling by the way, I believe soap mostly isn't necessary. I'm interested in why everyone uses it when they take a shower.

<comment><USER29> People who don't use soap generally smell worse to those that do.

<comment><USER30> I don't smell after showering either with or without soap. This state only lasts a very short while in either case unless I apply deodorant. So soap really does nothing for me smell wise.

<comment><USER31> Most people who smell bad don't realize they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Within this context: "drain water heat recovery unit" for a Google search. Upcoming building codes within Europe might make this common I believe.

</comment><comment><USER33> Our water systems are just boneheaded, the _indoor outhouse_ was only invented yesterday!

Here in San Francisco, our water comes from Hetch Hetchy[1][2] two hundred miles away. You turn on the tap, it flows into the drain and away again, to a processing plant and then, I think, the Pacific Ocean. That is objectively insane.

A less insane system would capture and store water on the way in and the way out, keep some of it in a large (house-sized) tank at ~120°F (storing low- grade thermal energy, typically waste heat from other systems plus solar) and feed the showers through a small continuous-flow heater (JIT heating). Waste water from the shower can go right into the garden if you use the right soap.

(Lavender flowers work great as soap. "Its late Latin name was _lavandārius_ , from _lavanda_ (things to be washed), from the verb _lavāre_ (to wash)."[3] The English word "lave" is of the same root.)

I lived off-grid in the woods for a time and we had long-as-you-like hot showers. That's half the benefit of civilization right there in the bathroom! Just _think things through_ and yu can have a high standard of living without the ridiculous waste.

It's fun, cheap, and easy.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Shaughnessy_Dam_(California)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Shaughnessy_Dam_\(California\))

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Were the energy calculations in the article done under the assumption of "all humans" living in single-family homes with their own water boilers? Because hot water has economies of scale (oddly enough, in pretty much the same ways that cloud-compute does.) If most of the world lives in apartments (or even just townhouses served by large shared central boilers with well-insulated underground hot-water plumbing), I suspect the energy calculation works out a lot differently.

</comment><comment><USER34> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535380)

</comment><comment><USER35> I have this showerhead that has a mist setting: [https://cirrus- shower.com/](https://cirrus-shower.com/) (I didn't buy the "aromatherapy" add- on stuff). It's good, but water flow is indeed a problem, and my heater switches off mid-shower when the showerhead is on the finest setting and uses the least amount of water.

</comment><comment><USER36> As is, this seems utterly useless for rinsing hair (particularly long hair), and it's difficult to see how it can achieve broad adoption with this flaw. If there was a pushbutton that would turn on a "high flow" nozzle for 30 seconds at a time for hair-rinsing purposes, it would be much more functional.

</comment><comment><USER12> My first thought was "that needs a high pressure pump" haha, which would kind of defeat the purpose. Probably still way less water usage though.

</comment><comment><USER37> If we can't even make a regular shower sustainable, then our civilisation is fucked.

Next month: how to enjoy your weekly sponge bath!

</comment><comment><USER38> "This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline"

\--

yeah, welcome to the future.</comment>


Wipeout: When Your Company Kills Your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2010/11/22/131511381/wipeout-when-your-company-kills-your-iphone

<comment><USER2> What the article doesn't mention is that, if you back up all of your data to your desktop, you can retrieve it by restoring the phone. You will still lose the corporate data, but you will get back your apps and personal data.

If you are using Exchange at work, I would definitely recommend keeping your personal data (email, contacts, calendar) in a separate account, which the iPhone will seamlessly combine for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it.

Where I've worked, if an IT guy started accidentally nuking people's Blackberrys that IT guy wouldn't just be fired, he would be destroyed.

On the other hand, if your device is _actually_ lost then you would want the entire device to be nuked.

I suppose it boils down to how much the employer is willing to invest in its employees. If the employer is not willing to pay for the devices the employee uses for work, then the employer is probably not going to manage those devices responsibly. For that reason, I would never connect my personal device to work unless my employer was willing to pay for it.

If your employer acts like they're doing _you_ a favor by allowing _your_ device on their network, then that's probably a good indication that you shouldn't do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do any enterprise solutions allow more granular wiping?

I'd be completely fine with my workplace being able to nuke their own information, so long as they couldn't touch my personal data.

Well, I wouldn't be _perfectly fine_ with it, but it seems like a reasonable minimum level of separation.

<comment><USER5> Touchdown (for Android) <http://www.nitrodesk.com/dk_touchdownFeatures.aspx> keeps all of the Exchange Activesync'd data separate from the main email on the phone, so when you get wiped only corporate email/calendar get wiped. I don't think anything similar exists for iPhone.

<comment><USER6> I can't speak for iPhone (though I imagine it's similar), but pretty much all your data can be recovered to your phone just by logging into your Google Account, from what I understand. If you use AppBrain, the apps you have installed will be saved too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember a similar story from a couple of months ago, and for that reason haven't connected my work email on my phone. I'll only consider doing it if the company starts paying for the phone and the plan. Until then, it's not worth the risk for me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Its nice to see this issue get some additional coverage.

I've been going back and forth about having my phone linked to Google this way. I don't like the concept of handing them an invitation to remote wipe my phone. On the other hand, there does not seem to be a better way to do over the air contact syncing etc (without signing up for MobileMe). My current position is to also sync to my desktop as a "if Google dies somehow" data store and think of my phone as somewhat more disposable repository.

<comment><USER9> This is not Google per se, it is a Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync plugin feature. When you install the Exchange ActiveSync plugin[1], it _requests_ that you authorize the software to have the authority to wipe your phone. You must accept that or not use ActiveSync.

The advantage of ActiveSync is "push" email notifications and integration of your Exchange calendar and address book with the base Android calendar and address book.

If you use IMAP to access the Exchange server, the Exchange server cannot wipe your phone.

If you connect to Google's servers (IMAP), Google cannot wipe your phone via their servers.

[1] On my Nexus One, the ActiveSync email plugin was pre-installed and I don't remember seeing the request for wipe permissions when I first configured it. When Google (or whoever) pushed an update for the ActiveSync plugin, it _did_ ask me for wipe permission. That was my first clue that I sold my soul.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it isn't a Google-specific issue in general; the link to Google is me- specific in that I linked my phone to Google in this way. I did it for specific reasons (contacts mostly) and initially without knowledge of the possibility or remote wipe.

It is interesting that the Android plugin has some UI words about the authority to wipe the phone. In my recollection iOS did not display anything like that.

It is also interesting that Google's set-up tutorial for iOS promotes the ActiveSync method but doesn't mention remote wipe:

[http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=13...](http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How many people are using Exchange to sync their Google accounts to their iPhone/iPad? How many of them realize that is an invitation for Google to wipe your device?

<comment><USER11> It's not clear Google has that kind of control. They don't control the Exchange server. They're just feeding data to it.

<comment><USER12> Google in fact does run the Exchange server that you connect to; setting up Google Sync gives them just as much power as setting up any other Exchange account would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone"

And that _is_ the problem. Your phone is controlled by someone else. It's not really _your_ phone.

<comment><USER14> No, the problem is that she changed her phone's settings without realizing the ramifications. Despite the fact that Amanda thinks AT&T controls her iPhone, the fact of the matter is that they could only block it from the network, not remove all of the information from it.

<comment><USER13> She gave her company control over her phone because she didn't think of it, because it felt completely natural for her that AT&T would be in control of her phone, not her.

People's misconceptions about the technologies they build their lives around sometimes give space to a lot of pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I believe that is also possible with Android phones when you use the default Exchange connectivity app. I've ended up using a different program to connect to Exchange.

</comment><comment><USER16> And that is why I don't connect to Exchange.

<comment><USER17> That's certainly why I don't connect any personal devices to the company Exchange infrastructure - they pay for an iPhone so I use it for work.

I have a dumb phone, iPod and an iPad for personal use - which I find a better combination than one _do everything_ device.

<comment><USER16> Do you have very large pockets?

<comment><USER17> I use a backpack, usually with my iPod in my jacket pocket when walking to/from work.

I have a pretty terrible attitude towards phone usage - I rarely answer it (I usually let it ring out and return the call if it is from someone important). Most people I deal with regularly know to text or email me rather than phoning.

<comment><USER16> That would also work, but I would find it too annoying to have to carry a backpack everywhere. But hey if it works for you, that's great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure what is worse:

\- the fact that this is technically possible,

\- the fact that the software and service providers think it is appropriate to offer the feature,

\- the fact that some employers (such as the one in the article) actually think it is even slightly reasonable behaviour to use the feature on someone's personal phone,

\- the fact that the wiping behaviour isn't already clearly illegal with horrific penalties, or

\- the idea that the kind of employee waiver mentioned in the article might actually be considered a fair and enforceable part of any employment contract.

This is just so completely wrong, it's hard to know where to start!

<comment><USER19> There's nothing wrong about it at all; it's a completely reasonable due- diligence security mechanism.

First and most importantly, employers cannot remote-wipe your phone if you haven't paired it with their Exchange infrastructure. Remote-wipe is part of the technical contract you enter into when you link your phone to your company's internal infrastructure. Therefore, while it's _totally reasonable_ to be outraged at the prospect of your employer wiping your phone, the answer is simply "don't let them".

Why do IT departments need this capability? That's easy: when you synced your phone up to their email system, you collected an unspecified number of company secrets. Some of those secrets come with a legal obligation to safeguard them. In a surprisingly large number of companies, some of those obligations have theoretical criminal penalties attached to them.

Turning off your Exchange access doesn't get rid of secrets Exchange disclosed to you already. Companies turn over tens or even hundreds of employees a week. It's absurd to suggest that they'd leave this matter up to chance, with or without a "scrub your device regularly" policy.

More to the point: when companies lose PI, PII, or financials, they end up in the newspaper. Usually, when there's even a _reasonable likelihood_ that data has been exposed, companies are required to notify impacted business partners, incurring contractual and legal expenses. Even if you just left the phone in a bar, and the thief is almost certainly just going to wipe the phone anyways. It's naive to suggest that companies accept the risk of landing in the paper or in court _every time someone loses a phone._

It's also perfectly reasonable to point out (bad) IT departments that require you to tie your personal phone to their email systems. By all means, bring up "remote-wipe" when they refuse to buy you a crappy Blackberry instead of letting you B.Y.O.

<comment><USER18> > There's nothing wrong about it at all; it's a completely reasonable due- > diligence security mechanism.

Nonsense. There is absolutely nothing diligent about having an ability to wipe someone's personal data that has no connection to your business, under any circumstances.

> Remote-wipe is part of the technical contract you enter into when you link > your phone to your company's internal infrastructure. Therefore, while it's > totally reasonable to be outraged at the prospect of your employer wiping > your phone, the answer is simply "don't let them".

So, here's Flawed Cliché #1 in the opposition argument: "If you don't like it, don't sign up for it."

Unfortunately, if this sort of behaviour is tolerated, it becomes an assumption by management that it is acceptable. Refusing to accept it yourself then gets you a black mark in some manager's mental file, at best.

Moreover, the risk to the personal phone here is completely disproportionate. This sort of link could be established by an employee without any awareness of the potential consequences, in response to a casual request by a manager before the employee goes off to a conference the following week.

> Why do IT departments need this capability? That's easy: when you synced > your phone up to their email system, you collected an unspecified number of > company secrets. Some of those secrets come with a legal obligation to > safeguard them.

Flawed Cliché #2: "You have to protect company secrets."

Firstly, this is a complete straw man: protecting _company_ secrets from the company mail server does not in any way require deletion of _personal_ data on a _personal_ phone.

Secondly, if the company has legal or regulatory constraints in how it handles some data, it should not be providing access to that data on a system that is not supplied, properly configured and fully secured by the company's experts anyway.

> Companies turn over tens or even hundreds of employees a week. It's absurd > to suggest that they'd leave this matter up to chance, with or without a > "scrub your device regularly" policy.

Flawed Cliché #3: "We need to secure our data when people leave to protect us against inside jobs."

Firstly, anyone who is pulling off an inside job is probably not going to leave the only copy of valuable/sensitive data on their personal phone.

Secondly, maybe you should be more careful with who you hire if this is a serious problem. Someone who is determined to pull off an inside job isn't going to be stopped by such a simplistic approach.

Basically, your entire counter-argument is a non-argument. Nothing you have said in any way justifies a company having the power to interfere with your personal data, and if they need that kind of power over company data because of its sensitivity then they should not be relying on employees' own devices anyway.

<comment><USER19> I think you read about 100 words into my comment, got angry, and started typing. If you hadn't, you'd have seen that I wasn't talking about insiders pulling heists.

<comment><USER18> > I think you read about 100 words into my comment, got angry, and started > typing.

Physician, heal thyself. You wrote:

> Companies turn over tens or even hundreds of employees a week.

Unless this is some difference I have never previously encountered between British and American English usage, that seem a pretty clear reference to employees coming and going. In the context, what else could you possibly be referring to apart from the danger of leaking data because employees who used to have legitimate access still had the data after they left?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My employer solved the issue of people not knowing about this very easily. Before you can connect to exchange with a personal device, you had to sign a document saying that that they could remote wipe your device if it gets lost _as well as_ when you terminate employment.

</comment><comment><USER21> The whole article is based on this:

 _Stanton wouldn't have been surprised to see this kind of remote control on a company phone.

But this iPhone was hers.

"It was my account, in my name [and] I'd paid all the bills," Stanton says. "It didn't make any sense to me that somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone, and could completely disable the phone and the account."_

The whole news item is "person doesn't understand how a system they use works, as a result gets confused shocked and indignant".

There's no _news_ here. Exchange ActiveSync has been working that way for, what, 4-7 years or so.

If you haven't learned what something can do, then you have every right to be confused, but pretty much no right to be annoyed.

This kind of nuanced technology with personal phone and phonebill connected over a third party network to a company email and calendar does not have "a nontechnical explanation" for how it works. There is no nontechnical explanation for what kind of security problems you might end up with if someone steals a mobile phone with a live email account - from revealed information in emails and calendars and address books and live address book searches, to social engineering to forged messages. The phone might have a VPN connection.

Someone else got trampled by the march of technologic complexity, that's perhaps the news.

<comment><USER18> > If you haven't learned what something can do, then you have every right to > be confused, but pretty much no right to be annoyed.

Pretty much every legal system in the world exists because such a position is more idealistic rather than realistic. No human being has the capacity to fully understand every interaction and agreement they participate in as a routine part of daily life. If people actually stopped to read and understand all the small print, taking expert advice where they needed it to fully appreciate the implications, then society would literally collapse in days. Likewise, if everyone refused to use any device where they had not received full technical training in every aspect of the functionality, society would fall apart.

We counter this problem using legal techniques, such as requiring that any term in a contract must be reasonable and understood by both parties for it to be enforceable. The law in most jurisdictions also explicitly recognises that not all contractual agreements are made between parties of equal bargaining power and resources, and therefore tends to give the benefit of the doubt to the little guy. In this case, if it isn't illegal for a company to exert this kind of control over an employee's personal property without the involvement of flashing neon signs and professional legal advice, perhaps it should be.

<comment><USER22> Do you feel that _"We actually have a one-page waiver that says, you know, if you're going to connect your personal phone to the corporate e-mail system, that we do have the capabilities if the phone is lost to remote wipe it — and we will — and then have the employee agree [to] and sign that form," Davis says._ is a flashing neon sign?

What I find odd is that a company allows people to keep confidential company information on a personal device at all.

There are many reasons to require this, including insider information, or other legally-required barriers, as well as company-protected information.

<comment><USER18> > Do you feel that [...] is a flashing neon sign?

Yes it is, but it doesn't say anything about the company wiping the phone negligently because someone in IT screwed up.

Also, it's rather like holding up a flashing neon sign saying "I'm about to beat you up" before you beat someone up. You might have made them aware of the problem, but that doesn't mean your actions are either justified or legal.

> What I find odd is that a company allows people to keep confidential company > information on a personal device at all.

Exactly. If the data is sensitive, it should be controlled properly by the company using company equipment. That has been my argument all along.

> There are many reasons to require this, including insider information, or > other legally-required barriers, as well as company-protected information.

To require what? If you mean an arbitrary wipe of a personal device that is not limited to company information, which is what this whole discussion is about, then I'm starting a new club for posters telling me about how there may be legal requirements that necessitate such a facility without actually saying what those requirements are, what laws impose them, or in what jurisdiction. Please take a membership form and join the queue. :-)

<comment><USER21> There is not going to be a law requiring a company wipe an employee's personal phone.

To the extent that this is covered by law, and I am not a lawyer, it will be under something like "a company covered by this regulation will use industry standard practices to protect customer data on mobile devices".

One of the industry standard practises is remote wipe of the whole device in the event of theft. Personal or not, the distinction is idealistic and not realistic.

<comment><USER18> It is not in any way an industry standard to allow employees to use personal devices to access sensitive corporate data. In fact, doing so would automatically fail a security audit in a lot of large businesses.

<comment><USER19> And it would be perfectly fine at any number of other large businesses, including some of the country's largest law firms, some of the largest financial services companies in the world, and several health information providers.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, and I've never claimed otherwise. (Obviously I personally disagree with such a policy, but that is immaterial to this debate.)

Please remember that the question here is whether some sort of generic laws or regulations might implicitly require an employer to have the power to compromise their employees' personal phones and wipe their personal data, given that none of the people arguing on legal/regulatory grounds has ever come up with any citation that makes this requirement explicit.

In his post, jodrellblank mentioned "industry standard practices" as an example of such generic legal wording. The fact that many large businesses accept the policy of using employees' personal devices does not make it an industry standard. The fact that many more do not _does_ mean that it is not an industry standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Zimbra 6 supports remote wipe too.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to become a front-end developer. Any tips on how? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in becoming a front-end developer as a career. I currently work in IT so am able to read and understand code, write my own HTML and CSS as well as some PHP but I'm not really sure what's required in the real world. I understand that jQuery is a good starting point but I'm not entirely sure where to even start on that topic. There are so many options and languages I could learn but the speed at which I can learn them all is obviously limited as I have a full time job, so I'm likely going to focus on one or two things at a time and build my own projects with them.<p>What should I learn to woo employers and how would be the  best way to learn them? Going to classes? Online? From friends? <comment><USER2> [http://dylanized.com/getting-started-with-frontend-web- devel...](http://dylanized.com/getting-started-with-frontend-web-development/)

Also: [http://teamtreehouse.com](http://teamtreehouse.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's kind of hard to know what your goals are based on this note. Perhaps you might want to look at a javascript framework, such as Angular or Ember. A lot of front end work is being done primarily in javascript these days.</comment>


The Presidential Text Alert Has a Long, Strange History - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-emergency-history/ <comment><USER2> If the system had been called a "National Alert", since most other alerts are typically "Regional Alerts", then I suspect a lot of the sour taste and politics in this would neatly go away. Calling it a "Presidential Alert" suggests it's a direct line of communication with the President, when the system is clearly managed by an agency with the authority to issue these alerts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some additional information about PERKI: [http://web.archive.org/web/20060401172542/http://www.geociti...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060401172542/http://www.geocities.com/radiojunkie3/WGU20.html)

(also, "HFR till end of the world confirmed" is amazing. Must add that sort of thing to a software project sometime)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know why everyone got so angry about this. I don't like Trump in the slightest, but it seems like we should test, at least _once_ , any emergency broadcasting system that we think could be important/useful in the event of a national disaster.

And it's not like this is classified or secret, either. Go into the settings on any smartphone, and you can see that this is implemented.

:shrug: I don't know, just doesn't seem like a big deal

<comment><USER5> > _Go into the settings on any smartphone, and you can see that this is > implemented._

Not on iOS. Out of curiosity I'd turned off both "AMBER Alerts" and "Emergency Alerts", and still received the "Presidential Alert" alert. It's a different class of alert.

<comment><USER6> Whereas I disabled Amber alerts but not emergency alerts, and I also did not get the alert from the Orange Volcano of Hate.

Dunno.

<comment><USER7> This could have been where you were located.

My parents have a nano cell (live in the country out of tower range). And while they were on network, they were not connected to a proper cell tower. The alert wasn't conveyed to nano cells and the like that were wifi connected.

I am not sure how that would affect amber and emergency alerts and if they get them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the bet that Trump will start using this in-place of his Twitter account..

<comment><USER9> The "Presidential Alert" is not actually managed by the president. And I don't mean that he delegates it or something--the whitehouse doesn't run it.

<comment><USER10> All of the agencies involved in running the various alerts are part of the executive branch and ultimately report to the WH.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask NickB:  How do you do it, dude? - <AUTHOR> You're all over the place.  Your current karma is over 8000.  How much time do you spend submitting links, etc...?  Any tips or tricks?<p>By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better. <comment><USER2> Can you downmod a submission? I don't see how. If not, then submitting is a good strategy to get karma. You can't lose any.

Engaging in a debate, OTOH, is another issue. Doesn't matter who's right, what you've done, or what you know. If someone else disagrees with you and doesn't feel like saying why, they just click the down arrow. "Anonymous Coward Downmodders".

I could earn 50 points by posting the cure for cancer in one post and lose it all by saying I hate <Ruby, Facebook, Lisp, whatever> everywhere else.

So, to be safe, keep submitting, don't insult anyone, and never say anything controversial. But what fun would that be?

(Geez, I hope nobody disagrees with this.)

<comment><USER3> What the heck? What happens if you lose some karma? If you want to insult somebody (and it's related to the context), do it!

<comment><USER4> Maybe you won't get to 250 points and will be stuck with orange as your top color forever!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow.. a thread about me? I guess I should feel honored :)

A word about myself so you can see where I'm coming from... I'm currently part of a startup. We're working feverishly on a product that I feel might get some heavy competition in 6-12 months. I've seen one or two products that sort of come close to the area we're approaching but they haven't really hit the bulls-eye. The pace at which we're working is not for the faint of heart and I work about 12-13 hrs every day. The team has about 4 people so far (+2 part time) and I'm the lead. This is my third startup (1st time as a lead) so I've seen things from many different angles. I've experienced a startup that skyrocketed and one that failed and also one that's doing moderately well. So yes, I've seen what works and what doesn't. We're completely self funded at this point (myself and my co-founder put some cash into the company) but we might go out and raise some money 6 months from now or so. We have never applied for YC... we're probably too late and too big for YC.

Now, after reading that description, you will understand what my interests are and why I like this site so much. I'm primarily concerned with methods, ways, advice of how to work using agile methods and how to develop webapps fast. We use RoR, some Java, some Python, some Flash and a lot of JavaScript. Personally, I'm a huge fan of functional languages (Lisp & Erlang) so you will see a lot of submissions from me on those topics as well. I am also _extremely_ interested in various distribution methods (viral, word of mouth, SEO/SEM) so you will see me submit a lot of links like that.

Now, how exactly do I track news. Well, I use an RSS reader (NetNewsWire, grab it, it's free now) to gather my news and the only news website that I actually open inside a browser is Hacker News. I check RSS feeds about 3-4 times a day (usually during breaks and when I need to clear my head) and I use a YCN bookmarklet to submit (<http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html>). It literally takes a second to submit using that handy little piece of JS code. I track about 150 feeds. Majority of them are about programming and technology. But I also track a lot of marketing, business and startup-related legal blogs. I dislike heavy volume blogs since they post a lot of fluff and a lot of it is boring to me at this point. So, whenever I find something that's interesting to me, I post it here. Over the past six months, I found a lot of interesting blogs linked here so I doubt you're missing much if you just track HN's "new" section.

Submissions that are not strictly news are usually best links on the topic that I was researching. For example, after I did some research on recommendation systems, I posted a few links that were helpful to myself. I also use HN as a crude delicious.

I also enjoy commenting on HN because people who frequent this site tend to be smarter than people on other sites and they tend to be in the same situation as myself: fighting time and working on something and looking for ways to make their product successful and better. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) on HN is also quite high. I was afraid that it would fall after pg rebranded and expanded the focus of the site but that has not happened yet (lucky for us!)

I like to read a lot and I read very quickly so you'd be surprised how little time I actually spend reading stuff on the web. I try to read a book a week as well.

Quick tip... check out the "new" section and give a mod point to articles you like. Most of the articles get "hot" after they reach the front page but a lot of quality articles never reach it. When you've identified people who have similar interests as yourself, keep track of their submissions. I keep track of submissions of 3 people here and I upmod their stories quite often since they interest me. For example, this is my submission queue: <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb>

And finally, reward people who post to your threads by moding them up :). Has this made any difference to my rep? Probably not but I like spreading karma.

PS: My HN specific email's in my profile. Feel free to ask personal questions offline.

<comment><USER6> Nice one nickb. Have you also tried tumblr as a 'crude delicious'? It has a sweet bookmarklet thats easy to use the same time as news.yc's.

Two tips I'd like to chip in myself:

1) Rewrite the headline to make it clearer

2) Don't post a submission or comment unless you believe it creates value for others. Consider the signal/noise ratio.

And a third for those who only want karma:

3) Mention a keyword such as PG, YC or Lisp in the headline. "Justin.tv Video interview with Paul Graham on writing openID support for news.yc in lisp" would be a high karma headline

<comment><USER7> ...I was going to say something against that last point, and it not being done for the right purposes. I then hit reply and found you changed it. Well played.

But, this still applies to some more of the posts here. I notice that, for the most part, people are harking against news.yc being flooded with crappy submissions and turning into digg/reddit. Then you have threads like this where a portion of the focus of these comments are geared towards giving tips on how to have high karma retrieving posts.

In my opinion, karma is nice and all, but the main purpose of news.yc is to submit quality articles, articles that interest you and may interest others, without karma valuation playing a role in submitting something. That is part of the reason why digg has devolved into what it is now. People began to put a great deal of emphasis and importance on accumulating diggs, or karma here, which in turn decreased value of posts, and so on, blah blah.

In any case, vote me up!

<comment><USER6> Sorry about it changing. I have a very iterative approach to writing.

Are there any non-karma approaches to news sites that work well?

The two that I know of are:

      1) Charge for membership
      2) Keep the community small

<comment><USER7> I'm not suggesting we eradicate karma. Karma is a fine way to credit quality submissions and comments. Karma is not the problem, but rather a person's desire to accumulate lots of karma is.

I'm putting the burden on the users to evaluate their motives and to make sure that what they are submitting will really contribute to the community, not for the sole purpose of fueling their karma fetish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought of posting a similar question before because you seemed to be responsible for 1 in 6 of everything that happens on the site. I'm surprised to hear you actually get other stuff done. For a while I was starting to suspect you might be a professional Hacker News researcher!

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah seriously!

I recently got into the leader board which gave me a good feeling, although I know I shouldn't be feeling that. But even with my low score, I feel like I am Karma Slutting sometimes (I prefer that to the term Karma Whoring).

</comment><comment><USER10> NickB is not real, he is my bot

(just kidding)

</comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, in the past 5 days, nickb has gained 150 points of karma from submissions, and 25 points of karma from comments; so clearly it's primarily the submissions which are putting him so far "ahead of the pack".

Interestingly, in the same 5 days, nickb has submitted 37 stories -- an average of score of just over 5 points each -- which places ranks him highly not only in volume of submissions but also in quality.

<comment><USER12> Nickb clearly has some clever software working for him :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> it's all those xkcd submissions :X

</comment><comment><USER14> I guess the links must be the money-maker, they tend to get more points then the comments.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ever heard of custom burned RSS feeds and an alarm clock?

</comment><comment><USER16> Step 1: Attribute value to Karma

etc.

<comment><USER17> When you come back as a walrus, you'll be sorry.

<comment><USER16> I'm going straight to hell.</comment></comment></comment>


UK film censors forced to watch a 2-day long movie of paint drying - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2016/01/25/uk-film-censors-forced-to-watc.html <comment><USER2> Although it sounds like fun way to torture oppressive freedom-of-speech- violating censorship evildoer, it'll be torture only when one person sitting in front of monitor watching it for 2 days.

In reality, BBFC can hire 10 poor minimum wage workers for watching 4.8 hours of entire films each. UK minimum wage for 60 minutes equals 1 minutes of submission fee.

Yep, It's criminally expensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> They can analyse the frames in a timeline and skip ahead for changes, also analysing the audio file for transients. In fact, what's to stop them just watching on 4x speed?</comment>


Democracy Voucher - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_voucher <comment><USER2> Democracy Vouchers have been a game changer in Seattle. Lots of small campaigns that would've petered out earlier have persevered and been well funded due to community support enabled by this program.

Politicians are interacting with people they would've previously ignored, as now every voter in Seattle has $100 per year that they can invest in a candidate or candidates: [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/politics/candidate...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/politics/candidates-for-seattle-city-council-have-collected-1-6-million- in-democracy-vouchers-so-far/)</comment>


Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories - <AUTHOR> http://reddit.com/info/5zwu5/comments/ <comment><USER2> I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx...

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751>

</comment><comment><USER3> Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.

<comment><USER4> That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?

<comment><USER5> He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.

I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)

<comment><USER6> "He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system."

So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.

<comment><USER8> Just adding tagging plus tag filtering would do a lot.

John.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its too late for him. There is no good left in him. Darth Vader betrayed and killed, your reddit.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, Ron Paul is a symptom, not the root cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the Ron Paul stories on Reddit. I agree with others, this is grass roots democracy.</comment>


The Coming Linux Admin Shortage - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctoedge.com/content/coming-linux-admin-shortage

<comment><USER2> It's not clear to me that this argument holds a lot of water: more Linux servers do not necessarily mean more administrators. One of premises that underly the cloud movement is the benefit that comes with centrally administrating machines. See for example Google's OS X terminal app that let's you type into multiple (>= 20) ssh connections simultaneously. Enterprising enterprise admins will find a way to manage large collections of machines without an army of helper monkeys.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with a problematic worker? - <AUTHOR> Quite some time ago I was in a conversation on to handle an ex-alcoholic employee, who I guess has since been terminated because of a disappointing job performance.
However, I would guess that even with a proper, good-enough job performance, the chances of that employee being terminated would be much higher compared to a "normal" person.
I feel it might be really, really hard for someone with past problems to have a professional life.
Do you have any experiences or anecdotes to share on the subject? <comment><USER2> My wife has ADHD and to get through her university degree she had to learn time and attention management. The thing is though, these strategies would actually be immensely valuable to anyone, but because most us don't need them, we don't learn them. As a result of all that hard work she turned out to be a much better student than the majority of her peers.

Those skills transferred almost seamlessly into project and task management.

There are a lot of stories like that, where that problematic past you talk about, give people some really valuable skills. Of course a lot of people don't succeed in their struggle, and I think most people who do, would still rather be "normal", but you shouldn't disqualify people because they've had to struggle.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do not, actually. But I totally sympathize with your concern and also totally agree with moksly, 8 hours ago. I personally never gone through anything like that, one side or another, but I strongly believe in people's capacity, no matter how hard they insist on the contrary.</comment>


Giving up on Ruby packaging - <AUTHOR> http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=617 <comment><USER2> Can I be the jerk on this thread to raise my hand and say, "from what I can see, every single thing Debian has done with Ruby, from the way they split Ruby up into separate packages to the mindboggling damage they inflicted on RubyGems, has worked to the detriment of Ruby and provided no discernable benefit to end-users"?

For at least a year now, I've simply accepted that Debian's Ruby lives in a parallel bizarro-universe, rm'd any trace of it that intrudes on my own (real) universe, and installed everything from source.

I write this not to feel better about myself but to attract the passionate, angry disagreements that will help me better understand the problems this guy was trying to solve, so I can understand how he looks at the world and what his decision means instead of silently hoping that this post means nobody is going to try to integrate Debian and Ruby anymore.

<comment><USER3> You've done the right thing, but attributed blame in the wrong place, it's Ruby that's in the parallel bizarro-universe.

Ruby, RVM, ruby-gems etc were all designed and built for developers. APT was designed and built for system administrators.

In the world of system administrators, API differences between versions 2.3.5 and 2.3.8 would be considered bugs. In the world of Ruby/Rails, that's just standard practice. APT would not let you install both 2.3.5 and 2.3.8 simultaneously because that would be silly. It is silly, but it's useful for developers. The detriments are obvious to everybody but the Ruby community -- DLL hell is one of the major factors in the decline of the Windows platform.

So yes, keep Ruby off in it's own parallel universe, partitioned off using RVM or bundler. As a developer, this brings you many real benefits. But recognize the real detriments to normal users and system administrators, and place the blame squarely where it belongs -- on the Ruby community.

<comment><USER2> Ruby is overwhelmingly used by developers. I understand that there are a few projects that are so popular and useful that end-users and admins might want to install them without actively developing for them. But the decision to optimize Ruby for that use case, instead of for its overwhelmingly more common use case as "developer tool", just - seems - wrong.

I don't "blame" anyone. I think Debian is wrong about Ruby.

<comment><USER3> But is that a coincidence? Python is widely used by end users -- a large portion of the Ubuntu apps are written in Python. Ruby is widely used by end users via the web (zillions of twitter users, for example), but it is not widely used for desktop apps, even though it would be a good language for them.

<comment><USER2> It wasn't Debian's place to decide that maybe Ruby should work more like Python. Packaging, by the way, is a longstanding sore point with Python developers; RubyGems is one of the few clear wins Ruby had over Python.

<comment><USER4> Really? I haven't used RubyGems, but one of my favourite things about Python packaging is that I can take a proper Python distutils-based package, and in about thirty seconds create a usable RedHat package that my sysadmin colleagues can safely and easily deploy to our production systems, alongside all the other updates they manage.

I believe various Debian packaging "helper" scripts (like Joey Hess' "debhelper") have built-in support for Python distutils packages too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hate to see Lucas burn out and I think the Ruby & Debian communities will both be negatively affected. I'm a Debian Ruby user whose contributed a tiny bit (first Redmine package) and I have watched Lucas and the rest of the team repeatedly bang their heads into a wall when trying to get agreement on something from either side.

My personal view is that the Ruby/GEM packages should be laid out like the Perl/CPAN, which seems to be doing just fine.

If you want to help, go to the Debian Ruby Team page (<http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby>) and join us (<http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/RubyExtras/JoiningTheTeam>).

<comment><USER6> I love Perl, and I'm a Perl god. But CPAN is a plague unto it. If any piece of software should be called a ghetto, CPAN is it.

<comment><USER7> I like cpanm[1] quite a lot. Have you tried it as an alternative installer for modules? (I'm no Perl god, but I still maintain a healthy chunk of Perl code I wrote for sysadmin things a few years ago. I find that cpanm does exactly what I need it to, without the overhead of CPAN.)

[1] <https://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many other free software projects are significantly hindered by the language used by the main developers? I found that the most fascinating aspect of this post. Software tends to be so very English-centric that the fact that Ruby is Japanese really stands out.

<comment><USER9> I believe that early on most of the OCaml community was French-speaking.

Personally, I found that aspect of the article borderline offensive. Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit! Oh, and don't release software on Dec 25th. (News flash: the majority of the world population does not celebrate Christmas.)

<comment><USER10> _Oh, people shouldn't speak their native language because... speak English dammit!_

Nothing offensive about that, as long as it's expressed in a polite manner. To me it sounds like a constructive proposal from someone who has witnessed the problems first-hand, he's not just "ranting from the sidelines".

This is not about imperialism. It's about improving the communications in a project that has long turned international. English _is_ the lowest common denominator. Refusing to acknowledge that simple fact does not help anything.

<comment><USER11> Also given Lucas' native language isn't English either it's hard to claim imperialism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started using RVM a little while ago, and... I am not that excited about it (although it is well done and mostly works as advertised). It seems like the direction Ruby is going is to have things like Rails applications that require their own version of Ruby and a whole slew of gems, which also means that if you have a number of applications, you start getting a large amount of duplication? I'm not entirely sure as I'm new to the system, but it adds an extra level of installed stuff that I'm not 100% comfortable with.

Edit: as an aside, Zed Shaw's wild attacks and untruthful accusations against Debian were some ugliness that the world could have done without. I hope Lucas finds other places to more productively (and happily) employ his talents in the free software world.

<comment><USER13> You don't have to have any duplication (with RVM and bundler) if you use the same ruby version on your projects.

Requiring an exact version of Ruby for a project is a practice that avoids rare issues of version inconsistency.

<comment><USER12> > Requiring an exact version of Ruby for a project is a practice that avoids > rare issues of version inconsistency.

If they're rare, you ought to identify them, and, rather than require an exact version, say "this version or greater", and spell out exactly why in the comments, so that future users of your code will know precisely what code is affected and be able to reason about it themselves.

<comment><USER14> _say "this version or greater"_

That only works if all future versions are guaranteed to be backwards- compatible with the current version. A guarantee that does not exist.

See here:

[http://yehudakatz.com/2010/08/21/using-considered-harmful- or...](http://yehudakatz.com/2010/08/21/using-considered-harmful-or-whats- wrong-with/)

A version requirement is a statement that "I have tested this code with these versions of the dependencies and verified that it works." Yes, given sufficient time and energy one can also test the code against many older versions of the dependencies, find any bugs, and include explanatory comments, as you suggest. But one can't test against the dependencies _as they will exist in the future_.

<comment><USER12> > That only works if all future versions are guaranteed to be backwards- > compatible with the current version. A guarantee that does not exist.

It's not the sort of thing that's easy to prove empirically one way or the other, but I get the feeling (despite being a heavy user and fan of Ruby) that other languages take that guarantee more seriously. It's a tradeoff: by not spending much effort on backwards compatibility, they can spend more time developing "cool new stuff". Users get more new stuff faster, at the expense of having to worry more about upgrades breaking things.

<comment><USER14> _other languages take that guarantee more seriously_

It's more than just a feeling. They certainly do.

But: Those languages are there. They live! Perl 5, for example, is there. It has not gone anywhere. Its community would _love_ for you to use it. The fact that some people sometimes decide to use other things tells us something about the value of backwards compatibility in uncertain times.

My impression is that Ruby does change uncomfortably quickly, but not so quickly as its problem domains are changing. The rate of change of our software ecosystems is a symptom, not a cause. My god, the things that have happened in the last decade. Cheap virtual machines in the cloud. Widespread use of distributed version control. Client-side web apps. Mobile applications. NeXT cubes in your pocket for $250.

<comment><USER12> > The fact that some people sometimes decide to use other things tells us > something about the value of backwards compatibility in uncertain times.

Java, which seems to take it fairly seriously, is way more popular than Ruby is.

I agree that the world changes quickly, but disagree that you need to radically change stuff all the time.

For instance, in Rails, they went from <%= to <% back to <%= for forms. To me as an end user, that is completely useless churn.

Like I've said, I like Ruby and am mostly happy with it, but there's a tendency to rush off after the 'latest new thing!' that at times I view as counterproductive.

<comment><USER15> You're kidding me, Java? We're talking about compatibility in the context of avoiding code duplication. Java itself is very good at compatibility but compatibility of third party libraries are wildly different, plus Java apps tend to vendor all third party libraries regardless of compatibility guarantees.

As for the Rails <%= thing, where did you get the idea from that they went from <%= to <% and back to <%=? Did all of this happen within the same release minor release cycle? Rails has a strong compatibility policy for minor releases and only tend to break things between different minor releases.

<comment><USER12> I meant Java the language; I don't know much about the ecosystem.

The tag thing in Rails has happened over time, not in the same release cycle, but still it's annoying.

<comment><USER15> Are you seriously complaining about a compatibility breakage that conforms to their compatibility policy? You knew exactly what kind of guarantees you signed up for. You can't expect developers to never break anything unless you don't want any form of innovation. And as far as I know the old <% form_for %> _still works_! You don't have to use <%=.

<comment><USER12> > Are you seriously complaining about a compatibility breakage that conforms > to their compatibility policy?

Yes, I am. Just because they have a policy in place doesn't mean that I lose my right to air my opinions.

The point with the <% thing is that it feels a bit too much like gratuitous code churn to me. <%= is what you use to output something, and you do want to output a form, so <%= is what they should have stuck with from the beginning.

<comment><USER15> The inability to use <%= for form_for was a _limitation_ in ERB. Using <%= for form_for to make things consistent is a _new feature_ since Rails 3. This has got nothing to do with compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> RVM has been a boon. 1\. Easy to test my library/app against multiple ruby versions.

2\. Easy to run an app which requires an older version of ruby (I typically use 1.9.2).

Advanced features like gemsets allow finer grained control but only if needed.

<comment><USER5> RVM is great for some things and a bane for others. Like you, I use it all day, every day to build & test multiple Ruby projects on my MacBook. It has really increased my output and reduced my hair-pulling.

On the other hand, automating and managing a server install using RVM is a nightmare. I don't want/need compilers on my servers, I just want to push a package out and have it work (i.e. APT).

<comment><USER17> out of curiosity, what other issues does RVM pose to "others", other than having to apt-get install compilers? also, wouldn't you need compilers anyway, for a whole lot of gems that use native extensions?

<comment><USER18> No, that is the beauty of using system packages, you just apt-get install them (if they are packaged, that is). That is why it is so important for projects to make it easy for distributions to (re)package extensions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At RubyKaigi, we talked about closing the Japanese list. It's a bad idea because closing the list will not stop conversations from happening in Japanese, it will just move the conversations to IRC. At least, if we have the conversations recorded, there is an opportunity to translate them.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just know that whenever I wanted to use the official ubuntu repository, I ended up not being able to install a gem because rubygems was too old. Since gem update --system doesn't seem to work on debian-based systems, I just had to install it from source again

<comment><USER21> This wasn't a problem for a long time, but then a major release of release of rubygems came out, and then the switch to gemcutter happened, etc. I've gotten around this by installing everything but rubygems from the regular Ruby packages from the Debian (or ubuntu) repos. I install the rubygems.org version of rubygems and everything works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I understand Lucas' decision, however it leaves some worrying questions about the state of ruby on Debian systems.

Despite the rumours, the ruby1.8, ruby1.9 and rubygems packages are are excellent shape thanks to the hard work by Lucas, Diago and Akira.

There were consistent fundamental workflow clashes between upstream and the Debian packagers that have made their job exceedingly difficult. These clashes aren't malicious or antagonistic, they're just the meeting of two very different communities with very different priorities.

To name a few of the clashes: API changes in minor releases, effective forking of rubygems by copying it into the 1.9 tree, opaque decision making (mostly due to the language barrier), allowing installed programs (ie rubygems) to update themselves and expectations on what is allowed in /usr/bin.

I'm not saying either community is necessarily correct on these issues, just that they add up to some pretty big differences for debian-ruby to navigate.

I use the Debian packages for ruby1.8, 1.9.2, jruby and rubygems in both my development and production environments. I've found them stable, rapidly updated in response to security issues and predictable. Lucas - thanks for your efforts, they will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER23> A similar situation exists in Lisp. Most everyone I know downloads the lisp of their choice (SBCL, CCL, Clojure) from the project site and goes forward from there.

This seems particularly true of efforts that are cross-platform. In particular, developing for Linux and Mac pretty much makes this the way to go for these two languages.

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone considered that crap like RubyGems, RVM, and Bundler is a symptom of us as rapid (read: careless) developers not being able to manage our code and our releases in an organized and well-ordered manner, not a symptom of poor package management by distributions?

</comment><comment><USER25> The same thing happened to Gentoo. I talked to the people behind Ruby packages in Gentoo and they wanted to manually create packages for each gem. It is one of the main reasons why I gave up on Gentoo and went back to Arch Linux.

I see gems as just snippets of code instead of "real" OS packages. They change a lot, they are application specific, and (most of the time) they are simple.

<comment><USER12> > I see gems as just snippets of code instead of "real" OS packages. They > change a lot, they are application specific, and (most of the time) they are > simple.

And, like me, if you're using Rails, they are code that is visible to the outside world. That is code that you want to make sure is secure, and is not just some minor detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> People - you forget that the Debian community is not just random packagers but also developers. Debian packagers try VERY hard indeed to produce a stable system that works out of the box for all of their users - and that includes developers of all sorts with all types of development environment for several common programming languages.

As part of that, it's useful to know what's stable and what isn't. Debian tends to track version numbers and look for stable versions for a reason - once released, Debian commits to supporting a release for the lifetime of that release plus one year - roughly three years now. Anything that isn't actually released as stable and thereby fixed will go into testing/unstable - there's nothing to stop you running the latest and greatest at any time, but possibly not on Debian stable.

In another life, I have to deal with developers who say to me: just mirror Ruby and Rails for us on the inside of the corporate firewall. There isn't an easy place to start - if you want to build a Ruby infrastructure inside a large company, with software management systems, management suspicion of FLOSS but committed developers - where do you begin to convince people that this is a usable infrastructure?

Red Hat support a subset of very common packages and will support these now for up to 10 years. That's your banks, stock exchanges, infrastructure companies: if you want Ruby developers and programmers to make inroads into that sort of environment, then you need sane packaging sense or at least a sense of what's usable.

Debian produces a far larger subset for use of the programs out there - and on 13 hardware architectures.

As regards the English/Japanese language flaming: Debian has 1000 or so developers and maintainers, spread worldwide - Lucas is a French speaker, originally, but Debian developers speak and use most common human languages - English is a convenience to a truly distributed, international community.

</comment><comment><USER27> What would be nice is if RVM allowed a package option for an installed Ruby + gemset. RVM doesn't work for me on my servers because it break idemopotence but I'd love to install RVM on a testbed, type 'rvm package' and get a tarball that I can dump in /opt/ on my production systems.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've never had very good luck using the Ubuntu Ruby packages. The binaries are never linked, and I can't update Rubygems, which means I can't install a lot of gems that I need. Is it tough to use RVM on a production server? Is it easy to get Thin setup and all that?

</comment><comment><USER29> So what is it that RubyGems does differently than other languages that makes it so hard to support? Having a binary debian package for each ruby distro makes sense (as an alternative to rvm), but I'm not really sure why gem is a hindrance.

<comment><USER7> The Rubygems package can be updated itself (normally) via `gem update --system`. On Debian (and Debian-derived distros), this feature is disabled.

I believe their reasoning is that they don't want a package installed and tracked via APT to be updateable outside of APT control and tracking.

<comment><USER9> CPAN can also self-update. So, why is Rubygems bad and CPAN presumably okay?

<comment><USER7> I wondered about this myself as I wrote, but I wasn't 100% sure that CPAN could self-update. I don't honestly know _why_ they're treated differently. (I also wonder about cabal and pip and luarocks, etc. I just don't know.)

Corrado mentions here that he would like to see Ruby/gems handled more like Perl/CPAN in Debian, but I'm not sure exactly what that means or what it would look like.

<comment><USER30> I read through all the comments to make sure no one else has responded. I'm more of a Perl developer then a Ruby developer, but these are my observations of the differences between the two.

1\. Perl Versioning is more thought out. It tends to have more consistent versioning semantics. Experimental branches are done in odd minor versions. e.g. 5.11.x was the development version; where 5.12.x is the stable release. All further development occurs on 5.13.x, etc. Patch level changes on the stable version are for minor updates (that don't break compatibility) or security fixes. Major changes to the language that break things are enabled by explicate pragams. E.G. use 5.10; Major version numbers represent core changes to the language, and really represent a new language, that may or may not be compatible with the previous language. E.G. Perl 5.X.x V.S. Perl 6.X.x. This adherence to the value of having development and release versions trickles down to the modules themselves.

2\. CPAN is both a tool and the Archive.

       a. As a tool it is great for both developers and package maintainers.

           i. For developers:

              * it allow them to install bleeding edge modules.

              * easily upgrade those modules

          ii. For maintainers it allows them to:

              * query the Archive for various meta information (dependences {build, release}, author, license, etc)

              * download the modules and extract them

              * allow the creation of build tools (e.g. dh-make-perl,pbuilder) that automate the packaging of the module

       b. As an Archive, it provides a common place with an agreed upon standard.

           i. Modules on CPAN can be marked as a Developer release.

          ii. Modules on CPAN can also be marked as released version.

         iii. All information in the Archive can be Queried by the CPAN module, that is part of Perl CORE

          iv. Perl Core, the interpreter and build tools are well defined.

           v. Core modules are also well defined, and do not change at patch levels.

So, package maintainers can easily package perl modules into their os specific packaging system. To make a Debian package on Lenny from CPAN it's as simple as: dh-make-perl --requiredeps --cpan Module::In::CPAN --build

If all your dependences are already in the system this will generate a deb for you, if not it will tell you the modules it could not find; so you can build them.

Perl modules allow you change where things are installed by respecting the various PREFIX config options. From what I have read here, it seems this is not true of RubyGems.

I don't know enough about RubyGems to know if it does the additional things the CPAN tools does. But the main thing is Perl/CPAN works with Debian by following their rules, and making it easy for them to build deb packages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Evolution is key: Survival of the fittest, and RVM is the fittest in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER32> Whoa... Even though the developers of Ruby are Japanese, he's demanding that they start speaking fluent English instead? And he thinks others are being assholes?

Granted, he only said 'English' in his rant, but if it's typical Japanese English then he won't understand it half the time anyhow, so it'd have to be fluent English.

Here's a novel idea: FORK IT. If you don't like how a project is being run, that's your option. Telling others how to do their work doesn't work with open source. They don't have to listen to you, and calling them assholes certainly doesn't help.

<comment><USER33> Telling someone to FORK IT is only useful if the maintainers are so incredibly incompetent or toxic that even accepting the massive penalties of a fork (especially massive for huge commercially popular projects) one is better off with the fork.

Nowhere else. I don't want to live in a world where this is considered an acceptable response to every small and big criticism or suggestion for improvement:

"Hey, maybe we should remove that dead code."

"IF YOU DON'T LIKE DEAD CODE, FORK IT!"

"Have we considered moving to Git from our crufty old CVS?"

"IF YOU DON'T LIKE CVS UP, FORK IT!"

"Docbook really isn't very easy to contribute doc fixes to; I was thinking about rewriting our manual in Markdown since it's really not that complex a document - "

"FORK IT!"

<comment><USER34> It's very true. And if you decide to fork it than that's what you hear:

"OMG, YOU CAN'T FORK RUBY. ARE YOU CRAZY? THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE."

<comment><USER35>
        It's very true. And if you decide to fork it
        than that's what you hear:   "OMG, YOU CAN'T
        FORK RUBY. ARE YOU CRAZY? THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE."

Or not:

[http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/12/forking-...](http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/12/forking- rubymy-rubyconf-keynote-is-now-up.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Denuvo Accused of Using Unlicensed Software to Protect Its Anti-Piracy Tool - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-accused-of-using-unlicensed-software-to-protect-it-anti-piracy-tool-170605/ <comment><USER2> It's a hoax

[http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo- gmbh/](http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/)</comment>


Media.ccc.de in Roku Channel Store - <AUTHOR> https://channelstore.roku.com/details/567876/media.ccc.de <comment><USER2> Just some personal recommendations:

23C3: Body Hacking, Hacker Spaces, Mining AOL Search Queries

24C3: Design Noir, Dining Cryptographers, A Spotter's Guide to AACS Keys

25C3: Blinkenlights Stereoscope, Running Your Own GSM Network, Messing Around with Garage Doors

26C3: Weaponizing Cultural Viruses, Playing with the Built City, Cybernetic Cannibalism, Homewreckery

27C3: Data Analysis in Terabit Ethernet Traffic, Console Hacking 2010, A Short Political History of Acoustics, OMG WTF PDF

...my archive has a hole in it here...

33C3: Edible Soft Robotics, Saving the World with (Vegan) Science

34C3: Free Electron Lasers [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16028723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16028723)

</comment><comment><USER3> For us Americans that don't know anything about this: it seems that this is done by the Chaos Computer Club[0], which runs the Chaos Communication Congress[1] which is a sort of German DEFCON.

0 - [https://www.ccc.de/en](https://www.ccc.de/en) 1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress)

<comment><USER4> I'd assume most people that know about HN know about the Chaos Computer Club.

<comment><USER3> Except I had literally never heard of them. And the only comments on this topic (when I posted) were other people asking who they were and why this was on HN.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if you noticed any of these recent frontpage submissions and just didn't associate them with the CCC: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=true&query=media.ccc.de%2Fv&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

<comment><USER3> I recognize those headlines. I don't believe I clicked a single one of them though (if I did I likely closed it as soon as I saw it was a video). Not that it matters. I opened this HN article wondering what it was all about.. saw several others had already commented they had no idea what it was about.. so I looked it up. And here we are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This content has been on [https://media.ccc.de/](https://media.ccc.de/) for weeks, so there is no need to watch on the Roku store.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the developer of this channel and am not directly associated with CCC; I asked for permission to use their API to provide these videos for Roku users and have been developing it off-and-on for a few months. I'm planning on adding more conferences from their collection, but in order to meet the Roku Direct Publisher requirements, I have to make some additional assets for each event beyond what's provided on their site.

Code for my API parser and feed generator is at [https://github.com/unwiredben/media.ccc.de-on- roku](https://github.com/unwiredben/media.ccc.de-on-roku)

</comment><comment><USER7> Roku is frequently derided for being spyware here, and CCC is full of privacy aware hackers. I would have thought the crossover of people interested in CCC and Roku TV subscribers would be fairly low.

<comment><USER8> > Roku is frequently derided for being spyware here, and CCC is full of > privacy aware hackers. I would have thought the crossover of people > interested in CCC and Roku TV subscribers would be fairly low.

fwiw, I had trouble watching one of the presentations linked here last week so I went to YouTube and watched it there.

Evangelizing/educating is sort of like bank robbery I guess. There's like an old joke where someone asked a famous bank robber why they robbed banks and they said "because that's where the money is"... so maybe there maybe people who don't know they are interested in CCC who they might be able to reach.

Looks like CCC has serious problems in its administration (they beat up Vincent Canfield) [https://twitter.com/gexcolo/status/1214261610338037761](https://twitter.com/gexcolo/status/1214261610338037761) but imo that does not take away anything from the presenters/presentations.

<comment> jess-sch > they beat up Vincent Canfield

They dragged him out because he refused to leave. He was being quite aggressive and kept resisting.

Would it have been more appropriate to call the police? Sure. But I can definitely see how they would feel threatened by him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the content is German or English? I assume the former, but want to check before I (non-German speaker) install.

<comment><USER10> The talks from the big Congress (yearly) are either in German or English. I'd say the split is 50%. But most talks are translated ton English or German and some are to other languages (French, Spanish, Russian). The translations are done by volunteers during the talk so they might not be perfect.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't guarantee this Roku channel will have those translations.

<comment><USER10> Usually it's represented in different Videos. If they offer all videos, the different language versions should be available.

<comment><USER2> This year at least, they're distributing them as a single video file with multiple audio tracks. No idea how Roku handles that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> how is this "top of HN" worthy? bot campaign?

<comment><USER12> It gained 42 upvotes in an hour? The software puts low point value posts on the front page if they're garnered fast enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Basic question: Why is this relevant? I've never heard of media.ccc.de, so what's so interesting about it that, as soon as they have a Roku channel, it's the top link at Hacker News?

I'm assuming that this organization is somehow controversial? Are they streaming pirated content or something that's politically controversial?

<comment><USER14> I was thinking the opposite: I have no idea what Roku is, but CCC talks are often posted on HN. I guess two worlds collided somehow :)

For what it's worth, CCC organizes the "Chaos Communication Congress", which is a fairly large tech/hacker conference, with over 15,000 participants ([https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Main_Page](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2019/wiki/index.php/Main_Page))</comment></comment>