'Black Market Bank' Co-Founder Budovsky Sentenced to 20 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-06/-black-market-bank-co-founder-budovsky-sentenced-to-20-years <comment><USER2> >Prosecutors in New York said the company operated as "the financial hub for cyber criminals around the world."

Well fortunately for the cyber criminals, I have some great suggestions for alternative banking solutions. Plus! Your co-conspirators will almost definitely never face a day in jail. Think you will have to pay for expensive flights to Switzerland to open your account? Save some of that hard earned cash and just take a walk to your nearest high street.

HSBC 2012 - $1.9b fine for laundering Mexican drug money.

JPMorgan - $13b aggressive, irresponsible mortgage lending

Bank of America - $16b ditto

Libor rate fixing - $3b, multiple banks

Forex rigging - $2b, multiple banks

BNP Paribas - $9b, violating international sanctions

PPI - £23b, multiple banks

Around $240b worth of fines between 2009-2013. Some of which can be put down to incompetence. Most of which can be put down to outright criminal fraud.

Play it fair with sentencing please.

<comment><USER3> There's this trope about us choosing to not throw people in jail but its just a consequence of needing real evidence against a person.

Holder made some ckmment to the line of " if we had the evidence , people at the DOJ would be rushing to charge. Throwing a Wall St exec in jail is a career-making case" (edit: actual quote [https://mobile.twitter.com/lauraolin/status/7279880874149847...](https://mobile.twitter.com/lauraolin/status/727988087414984705) )

The interests are totally aligned for the DOJ to crush any execs found of willful wrongdoing

<comment><USER4> > The interests are totally aligned for the DOJ

Are they?

Eric Holder in 1999:

"Prosecutors may consider the collateral consequences of a corporate criminal conviction in determining whether to charge the corporation with a criminal offense. Virtually every conviction of a corporation, like virtually every conviction of an individual, will have an impact on innocent third parties." [0]

Eric Holder in 2013:

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them." [0]

> if we had the evidence

In reference to Goldman/SEC settlement over Abacus:

"Nor had they questioned top bankers in Goldman's mortgage businesses or any of the bank's senior executives. Even more surprising to Kidney, the agency had not taken testimony from John Paulson, the key figure at his eponymous hedge fund." [1]

An investigator that doesn't ask questions will have a hard time finding evidence.

[0]: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-25/wall- stree...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-25/wall-street-banks- and-their-critics-were-disappointed-in-eric-holder)

[1]: [http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-the-s-e-c- did...](http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-the-s-e-c-didnt-hit- goldman-sachs-harder)

<comment><USER5> > every conviction of a corporation [...] will have an impact on innocent > third parties"

Well there's your problem right there! Leave the corporations alone, along with most of the innocent shareholders and employees. Charge only the criminals as individuals, on up to the CEO. Jail, big fines, asset seizures.

That would clear things up very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is probably a much better source:

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve- plead...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-pleads- guilty-laundering-more-250-million-through-his-digital)

Thought Bloomberg is well known to quickly publish 2 sentence articles to get an entry in google for breaking news and then back fill the story as it gets more details.

If you haven't heard of the bank in question, Liberty Reserve was bank that was heavily used to launder black market money. You could open an account with an email address, and no other documentation, deposit bitcoins, and then pull out your holdings in the form of cash or gold.

I'm surprised it ran as long as it did, from 2006 to 2013. There was one of the bulge bracket banks, I think Goldman, who put out a note about the bank where they speculated that it was an CIA front for trying to track the flow of black market cash. I'll try and see if I still have the research note around.

<comment><USER7> It was active way before bitcoin existed and their primary currency was Liberty Reserve Dollars. You could deposit via western union or other cash deposit methods and transfer funds internationally with no questions. Bitcoin was added as another method fairly late on.

<comment><USER8> LR just provided the ledger, you bought in and cashed out through 3rd party exchangers who were supposed to do all the KYC checking. LR also would freeze any account that moved more than some arbitrary amount that I can't remember but you could open pretty much unlimited accounts with slightly different info to keep under the limits. They weren't as bad as the DoJ claims unless there was private side dealing they discovered.

When the exchangers started allowing Visa/MC ATM card loads is when all the org crime flocked to LR to cash out their stolen db sales and attention from DoJ started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like nonsense witchhunt based on three numbers:

"The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP[1]"

"...government charges, Liberty Reserve processed 55 million separate financial transactions and laundered $6 billion in criminal proceeds. [2]" (I assume they just summed up total amount of transactions here, just because they can...)

"Budovsky admitted in his plea agreement to laundering more than $250 million in criminal proceeds. [3]"

So, $250 mil. is 4% of $6 bn. Which is within normal range of money laundering rates.

He's getting it probably because he wasn't licensed and wasn't giving up data, or something like that.

[1] [https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money- laundering/globalizatio...](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money- laundering/globalization.html) [2] [http://abcnews.go.com/US/black-market- bank-accused-launderin...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/black-market-bank-accused- laundering-6b-criminal-proceeds/story?id=19275887) [3] [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve- plead...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-pleads- guilty-laundering-more-250-million-through-his-digital)

</comment><comment><USER10> Not only was this a nonsense witch hunt by prosecutors, but it was also a continuation of the war on cash. The government and the police do not like cash, they desperately want an all plastic transaction society, and have been using laws like civil procedure to attack the the cash-based system for many years. If you know nothing of civil forfeiture you owe it to yourself to read up on it. Simply put: If the police find a large amount of cash on you, they can take it, without a warrant, without conviction, and you will have to sue to get it back.

</comment><comment><USER11> The title should really be changed to "Liberty Reserve" rather than the shameless government propaganda from Bloombag.

Bitcoin, lacking untracability, will eventually just decay into the same non- fungible identity-dependent status quo. But the lack of direct persecution like LR/egold/etc really highlight its one technological achievement.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wondering how I can get my money back from this, lost a few grand (legal money) that I deposited just before they got shut down. Saw a vague allusion to contact SDNY about it (only found a mailing address) and haven't seen anything else since.

Was a decent bit of collateral damage since they were fairly popular for offshore forex and bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER13> That heavy jail sentence while HSBC got a "slap on the wrist", paying their way out of a criminal indictment [1].

 _> The settlement, announced December 11, 2012, included a $1.256 billion forfeiture and $665 million in civil fines._

 _> It resolved charges accusing HSBC of having degenerated into a "preferred financial institution" for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, money launderers and other wrongdoers through what the U.S. Department of Justice called "stunning failures of oversight."_

 _(...)_

 _> The deferred prosecution agreement, known as a DPA, lasts for five years, and prosecutors may indict the bank if it violates the terms._

 _> Gleeson said "much of what might have been accomplished by a criminal conviction has been agreed to in the DPA," whose administration he will supervise._

 _> He noted having received requests from the public to reject the agreement because it did not hold HSBC criminally liable. He also read numerous editorials and columns suggesting, as one put it, that HSBC was "too big to indict."_

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-settlement- laundering...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-settlement-laundering- idUSBRE9611B220130702)

<comment><USER14> I haven't read the indictment in this case, but HSBC didn't merit jail time for anyone in the U.S. The DOJ had no evidence that anyone in the U.S. at HSBC actually knew about specific money laundering transactions. The charge was based on inadequate controls. That's the classic case for a fine as opposed to jail time.

It's not illegal for your bank to be used for money laundering. Every bank is used by money launderers. And every U.S. bank knows, in the abstract, its branches are used to launder money. Read the money laundering statue: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956). It requires transferring money with either: a) intent to promote illegal activity; or 2) knowing that the transaction is designed to conceal unlawful activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of the cases where HN urgently needs the "dislike" button (karma neutral, of course).

</comment><comment><USER16> AML/KYC is inevitable in a collectivist system. Centralization requires the state to attempt to know everything about everyone, which is impossible, and leads to collapse.

</comment><comment><USER17> Perfect Money is the name of the service that took LR's place.

<comment><USER18> e-gold, Pecunix and the ones that just shutdown and ran off with the user's money like ECU-Money and GDP.

There were a bunch of them.</comment></comment>


Setting Gopath in GitHub Actions - <AUTHOR> https://laszlo.cloud/setting-gopath-in-github-actions <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'm very much looking forward for feedback as I'm lacking best practices for Github Actions.

The presented approach is just the best solution I could find.. possibly there are better ones.</comment>


Putting the Tesla HEPA Filter and Bioweapon Defense Mode to the Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/putting-tesla-hepa-filter-and-bioweapon-defense-mode-to-the-test <comment><USER2> I think they are not testing with small enough particles. In the article, they test with PM 2.5 particles which would be around 2.5 micro meters. However, if you look at the table on page 11 of

[http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory- prote...](http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory-protection- against-biohazards.pdf)

Potential bio weapons such as smallpox, anthrax, influenza and the hemorrhagic viruses are far smaller than 2.5 microns.

Also, there are probably issues with the sensitivity of the detection equipment. If you look at the table on page 8 of

[https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no1/12...](https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no1/12_1detectbioagents.pdf)

And at the table at

[http://www.siumed.edu/medicine/id/current_issues/bioTable2.p...](http://www.siumed.edu/medicine/id/current_issues/bioTable2.pdf)

You will see that some of the biological agents can cause infection with as few as 10 particles. I doubt that the Tesla equipment could detect a concentration of 10 particles of these sizes.

This article is basically the biological equivalent of the I can't break my own crypto article.

>Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real.

is false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence of Bioweapons Defense Mode working is entirely lacking.

<comment><USER3> I also haven't thought of a case in which it matters to protect the interior of the car. I can't live in that car for more than a couple days without resupply (assuming I'm driving around with several cases of water which would be more than a little paranoid), so at some point I have to expose myself to the pathogens present on the outside of the vehicle.

<comment><USER4> In a couple of days, you could drive 3000 km away from the bioweapon attack, if you don't run out of battery. Even on a single charge, the Tesla's range is 370 km. Typically 1 km is more than enough to escape a bioweapon plume.

<comment><USER5> In the event of a large scale bioweapon attack, every HazMat team within the range of a Tesla's battery will be busy dealing with the original incident. How do you plan to exit a contaminated car?

<comment><USER4> Before the hazmat teams arrive! What, are you going to wait around in the danger zone and keep breathing spores? I'll adopt your kids if they're good at scrubbing floors and cooking.

<comment><USER6> You're the guy in the epidemic movies that breaks quarantine and kills another million people by sneaking the pathogen out of the hot zone.

Man I hate that guy.

If you breathed spores you're already infected. Your car can't help. And the spores on the outside get spread, plus the ones in your filter kill your automechanic and that starts the second wave.

<comment><USER4> Epidemic-causing pathogens like plague are nearly useless as bioweapons: they're more likely to kill the attacker (or their friends, family, or entire country) than the people they're trying to attack. Actual bioweapons are almost invariably things like anthrax, brucellosis, and botulinum, where person-to-person spread is rare or impossible, and which you're very likely to survive if you can keep your dose down and get treatment.

You shouldn't be getting your information about the world from movies — that can get you killed — and you especially shouldn't be criticizing people who know more than you on the basis of movie plots.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and your car which has been in an anthrax spore cloud is safe to leave a quarantine area?

My movie analogy doesn't change the fact that you're inciting other people to break quarantine based upon a laughably incorrect assertion that somehow an air filter makes you and your vehicle safe for other people. Talk about a criminally dangerous sense of entitlement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real._

Their filter does a good job cleaning particles out of the cabin air. Good on them.

Nevertheless, calling it "Bioweapon Defense Mode" is clearly a prize bit of marketing. A system designed to protect against an external bioagent wouldn't run huge amounts of outside air through the filter. That would just load the filter more quickly, impacting its performance (for chemical agents) and/or its energy requirement (for particles). Instead, you would cut the outside air intake as much as you could get away with, in order to buy the occupants time to drive clear of the plume.

Since they claim that the car is responsible for the decrease in the particle concentration in the test chamber, they must be running a pretty high flow of ambient air through the system. Of course, the ambient concentration would decrease even without the car's filter, due to particle deposition, and possibly due to losses in the sampling instrument. But then you only report those other loss rates if you're interested in science, rather than in marketing.

<comment><USER8> That would depend on your definition of a "bioweapon". How many people have to be killed by a toxic substance injected into the air to consider it a weapon? 1.2 million people died in China alone in 2010 from air pollution.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air- pollution-l...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution- linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html)

<comment><USER9> Weapons are defined by intent, not body count.

<comment><USER8> Criminal negligence doesn't require intent. If you fire your gun into the air because you are a jackass, and the bullet comes down somewhere and kills someone, the gun is still a weapon, even though you had no intent to kill.

<comment><USER10> I think he meant the intent of the creator of the compound/item.

A gun is created to kill. A taser to incapacitate. A knife is created to cut/stab things - and since human flesh is highly cuttable substance even kitchen knives are considered weapons. A car is created to transport people but can be used to kill. Cars are not weapons because in their conception there is no intent to harm someone.

<comment><USER8> What about a rock? The same analogy holds true. Anything can be a weapon, its simply absurd to contend that intent matters.

<comment><USER9> There has to be intent in there someone. A gun is a weapon. A rock can be a weapon. A dangerous polluting factory may be criminally negligent and morally despicable, but it's not a weapon unless it was deliberately deployed to maximize exposure to a target group. (Which isn't out of the question, given human nature, but I haven't heard of any evidence for it happening yet.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why couldn't they have just left it as "it's a really good air filter"?

If you're in the vicinity of bioweapon aerosol, the particles will possibly still be present in air once you get out or will have coated your car. Also, for some of these organisms, you only need to inhale < 10 cells for it to cause disease [1], so the filter needs to be (literally?) 100%.

So, unless Tesla plans on packing powered air purifying respirators [2] in their cars, this is a gimmick.

[1] [http://www.asm.org/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/0000000660/nw1103...](http://www.asm.org/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/0000000660/nw11030138p.pdf) [2] [http://www.legionsafety.com/msa-optimair-tl-papr-kit-for- hoo...](http://www.legionsafety.com/msa-optimair-tl-papr-kit-for-hoods.html)

<comment><USER12> I think people read it too literally right now. If you say some road bollard is so strong it could survive a bomb explosion you usually don't expect bomb explosions. It's just that it survives large forces.

This system stops particles as small as ones that could be used in bio weapons. It's a theoretic comparison, not a warfare ad.

<comment><USER13> > _I think people read it too literally right now._

Did you even read the article? It _literally_ says this:

"Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real. You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your car."

<comment><USER12> Yes, I did read it. That's how people talk about products these days (unfortunately). But we didn't talk about it that much in case of tank-proof audi:

[http://blog.caranddriver.com/now-you-can-spec-your- audi-a8-t...](http://blog.caranddriver.com/now-you-can-spec-your-audi-a8-to- literally-withstand-a-shelling-from-a-tank/)

Or cases that can literally survive a bowling ball:

[http://www.yourtechreport.com/2011/04/16/protect-your- ipad-f...](http://www.yourtechreport.com/2011/04/16/protect-your-ipad-from- an-8lb-bowling-ball/)

You're not expected to test either one of those claims. They're just there for comparison of what the product is theoretically capable of. (or going the other way, one could complain that anything below 200mph is not ludicrous)

<comment> squeaky-clean That doesn't seem like just marketing for the Audi. It seems like the car is seriously intended for individuals who may be attacked, politicians, very rich/powerful people in unsafe areas. It's not for your grandparents to drive to church on Sundays. It looks like most people buying it are politicians and diplomats. The security features are also an upgrade that costs like $600k.

It has a built in "patented emergency exit system, a fire extinguishing system and an emergency fresh air system" [0] and the windows on the standard model can't even be opened/closed. And get this, that emergency exit system will blow the freaking doors off the car so you can exit.

"If the doors can no longer be opened normally, an Audi-patented pyrotechnic system simply blows apart the joins between the doors and the vehicle body and you walk out without even grabbing the door latch." [1]

This Tesla is being pushed as helping people deal with air pollution, but "it can withstand a bioweapon attack! For real!". That Audi is literally for people who might drive over an IED, or get pulled over by a jeep full of people with machine guns.

[0] [https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press- releases/audi-a8-l...](https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press- releases/audi-a8-l-security-most-secure-audi-ever-4737)

[1] [http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/05/a-685k-audi-a8-that- will-...](http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/05/a-685k-audi-a8-that-will-blow- its-own-doors-off/)

<comment><USER12> It's class BR7 protection. That means it protects from lead bullets. That's all. Here's a list of examples of what it doesn't protect from: AK47 with hardened or armor-piercing bullets, incendiary bullets, tank fired shells.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be surprised if the author confused gas tank and tank.

> Oh, and for even more money on top of all that, special battery and tank > protection can be fitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your > car.

Unless you're being attacked with smog, this seems rather hyperbolic.

I can't imagine that two minutes breathing, say, aerosolized tweaked Spanish influenza, would be 'safe'. Maybe if you were in the car with the system running before the attack, though?

<comment><USER16> Seriously. Advertising this without testing against pathogens is a joke.

(And I'm as big a Tesla fan as there is, but that's an objective fact from a QA perspective.)

But then again, testing against smog is something a group of engineers can do on their own. Testing against lethal and highly contagious airborn pathogens is hardly something you can just up and do in your ordinary automotive lab. Doubt they're prepared to handle that. Even getting your hands on the pathogens in the first place is difficult, let alone handling them in a safe manner for testing.

But if they're going to advertise this, that's what they need to do.

<comment><USER17> If you have a sensor that can detect things the size of bioweapon pathogens at concentrations where airborne pathogens would be dangerous, then yes, you absolutely can test for them. And, what do you know, some common bioweapon bacteria are around .5 um, and HEPA filters have to be able to filter out 99+% of objects .3 um to be rated as HEPA bu the US DOE. Add on that many bioweapons are actually not natively airborne and are distributed as aerosols with even larger droplet sizes, 1.5 um to 5 um, and a certified HEPA filter is absolutely capable of defending you from biological weapons. The technology to measure things that small and defend against them is readily available.

<comment><USER16> God, I hope they don't apply the same rationale to TSA.

"Well, there's clearly no real way to get anything dangerous through here without the metal detectors picking it up, so no need to test our systems with any realistic threats."

<comment><USER17> The TSA would be _completely, perfectly effective_ if it simply didn't let anybody get on planes. That defeats the purpose of the TSA, of course; they have to let people on planes. Our filter, by comparison, is allowed to stop _everything_ , which makes its job much easier.

* Aerosols are really the only effective way to deliver biological weapons. This holds even with person-to-person transmission; "airborne" transmission almost always means "infected person coughs, spreading aerosolized fluids that contain infectious bodies".

* Aerosol droplets smaller than .5 um don't land on parts of the lungs that can absorb them and are re-exhaled relatively harmlessly. Aerosol droplets smaller than .5 um also lose stability (evaporate, chemical changes, solar irradiation) too quickly to be useful.

"Realistic Threats" are, in this case, particles between .5 um and 5 um. There is zero difference between a droplet with and without an infectious payload. If you really wanted to you could do this test with some completely harmless organism like a household micrococcus strain, but it wouldn't demonstrate anything new. If there are no particles of that size coming through the filter, you are safe, in the same way that the plane would be safe if it took off with no people in it.

<comment><USER16> "Our filter"? Are you a Tesla Motors employee? If so, question, how about changing the filter after a biological attack? How is that done?

<comment><USER17> Sorry, started thinking like I was writing a paper. Not a Tesla Motors employee. Used "our filter" to separate it from "the TSA's filter".

For the actual question: you probably leave the filter in place until it's clogged, at which point you replace it as normal except you're wearing a hazard suit. Those filters basically don't let anything go. However, note that the filter will be exactly as contaminated as anything else on the outside of the car is; a persistent weapon will have covered _every_ surface in the attacked area with hazardous numbers of spores or similar, not just the filters. If it's not a persistent weapon - that is, it's designed to kill or incap everybody and then dissipate so your soldiers can walk in two days later and take over - then you just wait those two days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Biological weapon attack = Hide in Telsa for air filtration

Electrical Grid attack = Telsa doesn't charge

Likeliness deaths from either < Deaths from negligence of bureaucracy, lack of personal responsibility

/me chamber-checks Kalashnikov, takes drag of hand-rolled cigarette, checks internet conspiracy messageboard, and mentally catalogues MRE supply.

</comment><comment><USER19> Brilliant marketing:

1\. get people worried about something they previously didn't care about;

2\. as a solution, add a new part to the car that will need frequent replacement and maintenance, thereby increasing the CLV.

<comment><USER20> I can't wait for the model 3. it will have a bear attack prevention rock as standard equipment!

<comment><USER21> Indeed. I see people complaint that this is marketing. It exactly is. Just like Steve Jobs and his jewel-style boxes. Some people enjoy paying for a good show. The biodefense is straight out from a Tarantino style: When you exaggerate enough that you can't possibly be taken seriously, but the audience starts discussing whether that's credible or not.

There is a strange expectation that you can't have a good laugh about your products if they are not otherwise perfect. I'm not a sociologist, but something tell me that when the discussion shifts on non-essential elements like the HEPA filter, people assume the rest of the car just works.

I'm asthmatic and I've been told people in a car are more exposed to polluants than cyclists. Should I consider a Tesla ;)?

<comment><USER22> It is kind of silly all the arguing here. I'm half expecting a study to hit the front page tomorrow that tries to see if the "ludicrous mode" is actually "ludicrous"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe it's just all the Prince nostalgia speaking, but ever since watching the classic 1989 version of Batman, I've wondered how long you'd really be safe inside of a car during a terrorist chemical weapon attack.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hn- CTSKmeo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hn-CTSKmeo)

Thankyou Tesla for delivering a car that the 1989 version of me would have been pretty keen on acquiring!

<comment><USER24> Speaking of that scene. I've always been skeptical that a jet could drag big balloons away like that. Seems like a lot of weight/drag to load on on the front tip of the plane.

<comment><USER9> Also, I suspect that a stylized batwing shape may not, in fact, be optimally aerodynamic.

<comment><USER25> Bats fly pretty good !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is so cool. My bosch vacuum cleaner has a hepa filter, I'm going to duct tape my RC car to it, turn it on and call it a "Bio-weapon defense drone"

<comment><USER27> But apparently that HEPA filter is nothing like the Tesla filter. I believe I saw a comparison where the Tesla filter blocked something like 100x smaller particles than your typical vacuum cleaner HEPA.

<comment><USER28> If that's the case it probably would have been listed as ULPA...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope this is an option on Model 3, too. I'd probably pay $2-5k premium for "really good air filter" if I lived in or frequently travelled through cities with bad air (I'd pay $10k for it in Beijing).

</comment><comment><USER30> This is impressive but worries me that one day this will be used as excuse to allow excessive pollution.

The average person in China right now need this. Let's hope that the USA doesn't get to the point where this level of pollution is in the air because people who are well-off and control industry all have these cars to drive and be driven around in that filter the air so heavily for them, so it doesn't matter to them.

<comment><USER31> we see this happen in countries with poor security records. Rich people get high quality private security and then they care less about supporting the police. Similarly with water quality in many countries where rich/middle class people get water delivered. It is in the public interest to not allow the wealthy to internalize these externalities only for themselves so that they focus the government resources towards solving them for everyone.

<comment><USER13> > _Rich people get high quality private security and then they care less about > supporting the police._

Do you really think that "rich people" will disregard air pollution because their car provides filtered, clean air?

<comment><USER32> People will always assign priority to problems depending on how much of it they are personally experiencing.

(With the notable exception of Hollywood celebrities desperately searching for a purpose in life)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sorry, but that article has something fishy.

Looking at the graph, there is something wrong. According to the graph (measurement) there is a reduction of the pollution from about 1.000 µg/m3 (minute -3) to 800 µg/m3 (minute 0) before the doors have been closed and before the system has been activated. That is a 20% reduction by nothing has changed.

<comment><USER34> Possibly, when the opened the doors, cleaner air from the inside of the car mixed with the air from outside and lowered the pollution, but I'm just guessing here.

<comment><USER35> I think this whole 'research' needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We can keep guessing at what they meant but answers would have to come from them (or other researchers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I understand that the article is mostly PR, but to demonstrate effectiveness of the filter, why not also present null hypothesis, where no A/C is activated in the car and/or a common car A/C filter.

</comment><comment><USER37> With both exterior and interior filters, it really goes a long way towards keeping the interior of the HVAC system clean. I'm curious how good a job they do with moisture management though (i.e. keeping the heater core and rest of the HVAC system dry). Considering it's Tesla, I'd wager they're on point.

With some other manufacturers, especially legacy models, you'll usually have little to no intake filtering, and probably minimal cabin filtering. Combined with moisture retention inside the heater core due to design flaws such as insufficient fin spacing or an absent/inactive afterblow module, it can be very bad. For example: toxigenic fungii thriving on the excess moisture, contaminating the passenger compartment every time the blower fan is turned on.

</comment><comment><USER38> > to major cities in China.

Aaah. Now I getcha.

</comment><comment><USER39> everyone - this is the button you press when someone farts in the car, nothing more...

</comment><comment><USER40> > Moreover, it will also clean the air outside your car, making things better > for those around you.

I'm very sceptical that this is the case outside of an enclosed bubble.

</comment><comment><USER41> What TFA doesn't mention is where the actual pollution happens - at the factories producing batteries with dangerous chemical such as lithium, and where the electricity is produced - coal power stations, or if renewables are used, where the renewables are manufactured - for example rare earth minerals such as gallium needed for solar panels being mined in conflict zones with no environment regulation. Yes sometimes the pollution is many levels removed, but in the end Earth is a closed system and as far as I can tell, at least for now, an electric car supply chain produces more pollution over its lifespan than a regular car. It's just that the pollution doesn't happen inside the owners bubble, which the bioweapon experiment so ironically exemplifies.

<comment><USER42> The difference is that electricity can be produced any number of ways, not just by burning coal, and if some amazing eco-friendly battery alternative appears at some point in the future, existing EVs can easily be retrofitted with them. On the other hand, a fossil fuel vehicle bought today will still be a fossil fuel vehicle 100 years from now, regardless of technological advancements.

No, EVs aren't perfect and may not be for years to come, but they offer flexibility to make up for that. Sitting and waiting for the perfect replacement for ICEs is fruitless; alternatives must first be embraced if they're to ever develop sufficiently.

<comment><USER43> Yes, I always shrug reading convoluted arguments like that. In Norway all of the grid power comes from hydro, so the (sizeable by now) fleet of EVs does have zero carbon footprint without any fine print.

<comment><USER44> I agree with your sentiment. However, wouldn't a person pitching that argument then counter that Norway built their hydro grid in part using oil exports, ie that Norway is responsible for enabling a lot of global pollution per capita in order to pay for that grid (and the on-going vast per capita oil exports necessary to continue supporting it)? What's the counter to that premise?

<comment><USER45> Norway also exports and imports energy to Europe to exploit the potential for energy price arbitrage. In effect, _any_ country that is connected to an international energy grid has partial responsibility for bringing down global CO2 emissions.

I don't see how this is an argument _against_ electrical vehicles. In fact electric vehicles should increase the incentive to reduce the carbon emissions of electricity production since now at least improvements there will have a material effect on the carbon efficiency of transportation.

(Norway built out most of its energy grid before the oil industry got started, by the way -- but we do maintain out grid partly using tax money from the oil sector, just like all parts of our public sector).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Man my car's rear hatch seal leaks exhaust fumes into the body, start to have trips if you sit around too long. Maybe its the straight pipes....

</comment><comment><USER47> Curious on when they plan to transition to tesla.com

</comment><comment><USER48> Running an ICE car in a garage will harm you (and kill you pretty quickly), running an electric car will heal you.

It sounds cheesy but it true.

</comment><comment><USER49> The real question is whether or not it'll pull a fart out of the air before the other passengers smell it...

</comment><comment><USER50> Has any other manufacturer tried selling cars with this angle? Not really, although claims for car ventilation and air conditioning have been made before. It seems that because Tesla are 'part of the solution' they can take this marketing angle wholeheartedly. I also believe Elon Musk really wants the air quality, he has pushed for this feature.

"You are what you breathe..."

...is my marketing statement for Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER51> Was air moving around the vehicle to simulate typical driving speeds?

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder if the real objective of this is to protect passengers from the hazardous fumes of damaged lithium-ion batteries? I'm not sure though if this could protect against those.

</comment><comment><USER53> By BioWeapon, I thought they were adding some sort of "pepper-spray" theft deterrent or "defense" feature.

</comment><comment><USER54> Now make one for my house. :-)

</comment><comment><USER55> Tesla - not just another cool car. Bioweapon Defense Mode. Ftw!

</comment><comment><USER56> What is the point of wasting precious resources and taxpapyer money on this ?

<comment><USER57> If you've ever wanted to travel in Indonesia/Singapore/China locations during the multi-month Haze/particulate issues, you would understand how this is a pretty invaluable technology.

I don't really have any lung issues (that I know of) - but if I forget to bring a mask, and walk for any distance, I start coughing and gagging after a while to clear my lungs.

It gets so bad, that at times people are not only told to stay indoors (where they hopefully have filtered air), but are in extreme cases, evacuated.

Can you imagine how wonderful having this mode of air-cleaning would be during those months if you had asthma (or young children?)

<comment><USER56> Is Tesla making cars for Indonesia, Singapore or China currently? Surely there are problem all over the planet but I don't see why American government must subsidize solving those problems.

<comment><USER58> GM, Ford, and Chrysler receive billions in subsidies. During the 2008 Auto crisis the US gave those three $70 billion to keep them afloat. The US subsidizes its car companies. It also spends tens of billions subsidizing Boeing, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, IBM, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and various airlines. Telsa, like many other companies, also receives subsidies. So what? There's nothing special going on here.

<comment><USER13> > _During the 2008 Auto crisis the US gave those three $70 billion to keep > them afloat._

Sold equity for it.

<comment><USER59> Why didn't they sell that equity to private buyers if it was so valuable? Oh wait, the companies were on the verge of bankruptcy so that equity was worthless. Gave is the right word here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Do You Regulate 3D-Printed Guns? - <AUTHOR> http://techonomy.com/2013/05/how-do-you-regulate-3d-printed-guns/

<comment><USER2> Stop focusing on inanimate objects, and start paying attention to behavioral consequences. Unenforceable prohibition does not proceed well.</comment>


Announcing Dresssed.com: Premium Rails Themes - <AUTHOR> http://macournoyer.com/blog/2011/01/04/dresssed/

<comment><USER2> Related to this but somewhat off-topic: I just worked through Michael Hartl's RoR tutorial[1] and early on he mentions that it's depressing to work on something with absolutely zero style. (He uses Blueprint to jumpstart the process and then gives chunks of CSS along the way, so that what you're looking at as you work is never awful/empty/unstyled.) Along those lines but even more fully-baked, I just found Pilu's[2] web-app themes[3] in a recent blog post[4]. Maybe everyone who does Rails knows about these, but they were new to me.

[1] <http://railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book>

[2] <https://github.com/pilu>

[3] <http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme/>

[4] [http://blog.bryanbibat.net/2011/01/03/starting-a- professiona...](http://blog.bryanbibat.net/2011/01/03/starting-a-professional- rails-app-with-haml-rspec-devise-and-web-app-theme/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the pointers. It is indeed much more fun to work on an app that looks hot!

I've seen pilu's theme, but I'm aiming at having themes designed by professionals (no offense to pilu), with quality similar to <http://www.woothemes.com/>

<comment><USER2> Yup, and I agree that the two issues are distinct. Having more fully designed templates that you would buy for a final project is (to my mind) different from wanting something immediate (and free) that you can use while building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is my blog post. Not much to see atm. I'm only validating if there's enough interest at the moment. Didn't expects it to get posted to HN.

That being said, any feedback on the idea are greatly welcome :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I know there's not much yet, but I thought it interesting enough, and, perhaps more importantly, I thought it might generate some interesting discussion here.

That the idea is from you means it's likely to actually be executed and executed well, which further encouraged me to post it here.

<comment><USER3> Sorry Miles didn't mean it was a bad idea. I appreciate you posting it here.

I just hope nobody gets offended that there's not much to see atm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who don't know Marc-Andre he is an accomplished developer who created <http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/> (used by big sites like Heroku.com) and he also wrote <http://createyourproglang.com/> which has sold over 500 copies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing much to see at the moment. any invites available?

<comment><USER3> Sign-up to the newsletter, that's how I'll let ppl know what's up.</comment></comment>


The Saudi Arabia of Lithium - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1124/034_print.html <comment><USER2> So if we take a range of estimates for total amount of lithium in the world (4.4M - 165M tons) and "a rule of thumb" of 124 pounds for one vehicle, there is enough lithium in the world for _concurrently_ active 78M - 2.9B vehicles.

By some quick googling there is around 600M-700M cars in the world today.

<comment><USER3> If we do the math, it appears that Chile stands to make a substantial amount of money. I only hope that the country learned its lesson from the copper boom and bust.</comment></comment>


Winds 2.0: It's Time to Revive RSS - <AUTHOR> https://getstream.io/blog/winds-2-0-its-now-time-to-revive-rss/ <comment><USER2> Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat [https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/) to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way.

I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid.

Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.

<comment><USER3> How does Newsboat support non-Latin scripts? Seems like a pretty basic requirement.

E.g., this blog is in Hebrew, you can see the expected text layout on its website: [https://workaround.blog/](https://workaround.blog/)

I wonder if Newsboat can replicate that layout. Here is the RSS feed:

[https://workaround.blog/feed/](https://workaround.blog/feed/)

<comment><USER4> As you can see here: [https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX](https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX) Newsboat handles Hebrew as it's supposed to. That is fetching the article and sending the output to the terminal. It is after all a terminal program and therefore only displays text trough the terminal. You can set the text width though. So I suspect newsboat supports the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other non latin scripts which are of a decent size. The rest is all dependant on how you configure your terminal/ the font you use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> N.B. this isn't fully open source because it relies on the Stream API: [https://getstream.io/](https://getstream.io/)

They have a free quota of 3 million feed updates (not sure if total, I'm guessing per month?). Important to keep in mind because the app may be open source, but they can pull the plug on it by shutting down the web service. And so you can't self host it independently.

It might be nice, not saying otherwise, but for example something like Newsblur.com is open source and hosted, so you can pay a yearly fee for the service, while having the peace of mind that you can fork it and self host it yourself should the product die, which is what many of us want after Google pulled the plug on Reader ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> NewsBlur is a great project. Winds relies on Stream, Algolia and Mercury API. NewsBlur supports Mercury. You can run both Winds or Newsblur on your own server.

I wonder if we could do a project together with Newsblur where we list if sites properly support RSS. Similar to how the Python 3 ready sites popped up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. > Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline > over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well._

After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way, I'm using Inoreader every day.

<comment><USER7> For reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a kindle book.

Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all posts the author would like to make public, regardless of how many are new to the reader. This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts. (The single RSS file on my blog takes up the majority of my bandwidth costs.)

RSS needs to be replaced, not revived.

<comment><USER8> For your RSS issue, you can safely truncate your RSS feed to the latest N articles, where N is a random reasonable number you choose (10 is good, because it's so decimal). RSS reader software will know how to deal with it.

WRT scraping, it is getting harder because funny websites w/ no static content where everything is generated via Angular or Perpendicular or sth. are really hard to deal with. Recently my uni switched from an army of Wordpress websites to an homegrown AJAX-MVC-Reactive abomination where the links are reimplemented via some funny black magic where the actual link items (which are not anchors btw) don't have encoded in them the link targets, but only an onclick event that knows somehow where to go. And because they just killed all the RSS feeds, I wrote up sth. to revive them for me via phantomjs, but could not figure how to find the link targets, I cannot link the RSS items to anywhere but the main announcements page, and I can't add any description from the link target.

RSS should be kept, those who don't know the job they are doing should be replaced.

<comment><USER9> > ... where N is an arbitrary number you choose (12 is good, because > [https://dozenal.org](https://dozenal.org)).

FTFY ;)

<comment><USER10> > because [http://dozenal.org](http://dozenal.org)

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite.

TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use [https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/) to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] [https://freshrss.org](https://freshrss.org)

<comment><USER12> 100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome.

Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional.

[1] [https://miniflux.net/](https://miniflux.net/)

<comment><USER13> Since I'm considering to switch from TTRSS to something else, may I drill a bit? (the website is a tad short)

I heavily rely on nested categories in TTRSS (Youtube -> News for news channels for example), while the website says it has categories, can they be nested?

And most importantly, does miniflux handle about 700 feeds well? It would help a lot if I could lower the update rate of some feeds that only update once a month...

<comment><USER12> No nested categories. They're all flat. Miniflux is ultra minimalist and "opinionated," which I ended up preferring to all the others. YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

It's also wicked fast, resource-light, and the code is really easy to grok if you want to hack in anything. But, the update rate is a single global setting[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it could handle far more than 700 feeds... you'll hit bottlenecks from bandwidth or the DB before anything with the app.

[1]: [http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html](http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html)

<comment><USER13> >YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

I don't need much customization, I simply rely on a lot of features for daily convenience. Either way, it seems good enough and I might be able to work around it (or submit a patch if I'm not lazy).

Update rate is merely a concern because I don't want to spam some hosts with repetitive updates for no reason, might be worth another patch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Two words: News. Blur. I have been using [https://newsblur.com](https://newsblur.com) for years now (ever since Google Reader died) and am not switching to anything else soon.

RSS is not dead.

<comment><USER15> Yea, I'm thrilled with NewsBlur. Significantly happier than I even was with Google Reader, plus it's open source, plus the dev is fairly steadily introducing well-thought-out features (like highlighting articles from infrequent posters).

Glad to pay for it to keep it running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default. Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so:

[http://example.com/?feed=rss2](http://example.com/?feed=rss2)

<comment><USER17> Related: Firefox still offers an RSS button that you can place in a toolbar. Lights up when a site has a feed available.

<comment><USER18> Chrome also has an official extension (by Google) to do the same:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss- subscription-e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription- extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en)

It can be configured to send the selected feed URL to your (online) aggregator of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I've been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

For iOS I use Reeder ([https://reederapp.com](https://reederapp.com)) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit ([https://readkitapp.com/](https://readkitapp.com/)).

Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one now and again that doesn't, but that's their loss as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER20> > For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I've been using feedly.com > (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the > web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

Interesting, I also migrated to feedly but I do use the web application on the desktop, though the feedly app on my phone. On desktop, the webapp works really well for my purposes — which is mostly going through all updates (all sorted by oldest, "j" for next), and once in a while opening one in a full browser window ("v") or sending the page to instapaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds. Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their information from more centralized sources (like HN).

<comment><USER22> I don't think many sites _removed_ RSS, but many new sites and services in the last ~5 years, never implemented or served it in the first place. The typical share icons now are FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Email is less common (although usually there's an email newsletter signup). For a while, there wouldn't be link to RSS on the page, but you could still find the .rss or .atom link in the HTML header. But a lot of times that's not there anymore either.

It makes me sad to have to settle for Liking a company's FB page, since it's up to FB whether or not I ever see it.

<comment><USER23> Youtube is like this. They don't advertise rss feeds but include them in the page source of youtube channels. In the one or two times I couldn't find the link in the source, I'd just copy the channel id of the channel and use the feed url from another channel. Works like a charm!

<comment><USER12> A surprising amount of services have this. You can even turn your Gmail inbox into an (authenticated) RSS feed[1]. Small warning: it uses an outdated XML feed namespace, but most readers should handle it fine.

[1]: [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/feed/atom/](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/feed/atom/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it from whatever computer I might be using.

<comment><USER25> This is a great point; however, we wanted to bring the user experience to the desktop. You are more than welcome to submit a PR to make this application web compatible.

<comment><USER26> Why do you require users to make an account? I personally would rather have all my settings stored locally, and export them if I needed to. An option for this would be great.

<comment><USER27> Yeah I installed it, saw you need an account, and uninstalled it.

I quite like desktop programs still, but I expect everything to be stored locally and not to need an account. I had hoped for a KeePass style db file that I could sync on Dropbox or something, but the last thing I need is more accounts and my data on some randoms server that could be taken down when they get bored, or run out of money/motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> (deleted useful feedback but ultimately neggy comment -- sorry, these guys are launching an app, I don't want to shit on that in a top comment where it's the reader's first experience).

<comment><USER29> I'd like to know why I should download and install this when I can use Feedly. Maybe it's uncool to like Feedly nowadays, but it does everything I want it to do. Before that I used Google Reader until it was retired.

<comment><USER28> I hate Feedly's UI. Sorry

<comment><USER30> I had the same opinion. So few months back I made an iOS app to read all my favourite sites in one place [https://7web.co](https://7web.co)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like #ReviveRSS but:

> Powered By: Stream, Algolia, MongoDB, SendGrid, AWS

My feed reader is an old PHP script running on a NUC.

<comment><USER32> Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be _great_, but not necessary

<comment><USER33> Tiny tiny rss, all the way, you have great web based desktop ui and good mobile apps

<comment><USER34> Yes, agree, this is my choice of reader too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm not sure what this non-native application is offering me over plenty of Mac (and presumably Linux & Windows) native versions using way less memory and having platform-native UI controls.

RSS's challenge has never been apps, it's support from publishers to keep using open formats.

<comment><USER36> I'd also say a large part of its issue is lack of internal consistency of the format itself. Firstly there are the various official RSS versions, then there are all those Atom things and probably others as well, and then there's the thing about how you're supposed to render the things correctly. XML as the content format is also pretty much antiquated.

A modern format would no doubt have to be JSON- or YAML-based and have its human-readable content in plain text or markdown, so it'd have to be pretty much readable with a plain text http client, like curl.

So, just let RSS die the slow death it's been going through for good reasons and bring something consistent and straight-forward into its place. Something that you could easily generate and parse from any modern language without specific libraries.

Bringing RSS back is like trying to bring SOAP as a RPC system back; it just won't fly anymore no matter how much hot air you try to pump into it. We know better now and have better ways to do the things.

<comment><USER31> [https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To "revive" RSS, wider support from content providers is needed, not from software to consume feeds.

Can't display a feed that doesn't exist!

<comment><USER38> We did our part. As of a couple weeks ago, you can now syndicate your published email conversations as an RSS feed:

[https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex391...](https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex3917)

<comment><USER37> Don't forget an important part of the picture — feed autodiscovery tags. See [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub- autodiscovery...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub- autodiscovery-01)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm still angry (ish) at google for killing google reader, it met my RSS needs really nicely.

I use feedly now. Which is pretty good. For me having it has a web site is most useful, rather than a device oriented thing that manages feeds.

<comment><USER40> The thing that bugs me about the Feedly website is that it doesn't really feel like a RSS reader, at least on the free service. Maybe the paid version is (much) more customizable but I doubt it. It reminds me more of Flipboard.

Edit: It's tailored to marketing people so I think that's why.

<comment><USER41> You might want to try NewsBlur.com - it's quite similar to how Google Reader used to be. It has a free version (64 RSS feeds) and a paid version (unlimited feeds).

(I remember trying Feedly when Google Reader died, but ended up going with NewsBlur instead.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought. (I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on small and skewed sampling biases.)

<comment><USER43> the tide of sentiment rises and falls. the glow of opinion waxes and wanes. the wave of reaction ebbs and flows.

<comment><USER42> and the question persists; how can this insight earn me profit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Of course it's an Electron app. :|

That said, pleasantly speedy! Nice work. There are a fair number of minor UI glitches (suggestions list frequently flickers when going to/from it, follow/unfollow can sometimes escape bounds of window and cause scrollbars, etc) but overall it feels pretty nice. I'll give it a try for a while.

If you're taking recommendations though:

\- It'd be really awesome if I could paste a URL into the search field and have one of the options be "add a new feed" rather than clicking the +.

\- And the "featured" section is probably a decent intro to new users (keep it!), but I'm unlikely to ever use it, and it's taking up a LOT of real- estate. Maybe an option to hide it / make it able to scroll away, to give more room for the stuff you already follow below.

</comment><comment><USER44> For a company who wants to "#ReviveRSS", the Stream site seems to avoid the word "RSS" like the plague except in this new blog post.

Do they support RSS in their service, and if so does this product use their service for RSS feed polling, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stream is an API for building activity feeds. You use it when you want to follow things in your application. Another use case is notification feeds. RSS readers are a tiny fraction of our customer base, but it's something we care about. API tour is here: [https://getstream.io/get_started/](https://getstream.io/get_started/) Currently Stream powers the feeds for over 300 million end users, Stackshare did a nice post about our tech: [https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go- news-feeds-for-ov...](https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds- for-over-300-million-end-users)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?

<comment><USER46> It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0].

[0]: [http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared](http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn't make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.

<comment><USER48> Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.

<comment><USER49> So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.

<comment><USER48> The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for _publishers_ to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had some kind of standard way to _increase_ the probability of ads being seen, publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true).

My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades [or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals. That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for several years now at least.

> And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from > actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.

We're probably writing past each other. I _think_ you're imagining a _much_ more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every _n_ feed items for some suitable value of _n_. And my imagined world wouldn't require any changes to RSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I've been using rss again for a few months, and it's been really nice. It's like twitter without the noise.

The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only" where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking about the same thing, and "all articles".

I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm amazed RSS has lasted this long.

In terms of technology, it's a dog. Beyond the problems associated with malformed XML, and crazy namespaces (I once went through several hundred thousand feeds and found over 100 different tags), the process of polling for new content is inefficient and wasteful. I recently moved my personal blog from one server to another and was _amazed_ at the amount of bot traffic I get - over 5 years after I stopped blogging regularly.

In terms of business sense - why would a publisher ever want to create an RSS feed in the first place? I'm still surprised they bother. RSS feeds don't drive sufficient traffic to justify their existence, and allows easy copying/republishing. There's zero financial incentive.

I'm a news junkie and loved blogs in their heyday, but those days are over and they aren't coming back.

</comment><comment><USER52> I recently unfollowed most "media" on my Twitter, and transitioned those sources to RSS / Feedly app on iOS. Feedly works good enough, and my Twitter feed is now much quieter, and I feel good about spending less time on Twitter (for various reasons).

I have found that finding an RSS feed for a website/brand can sometimes be difficult. Feedly does a good job making this easy, but sometimes I need to resort to Google, to find the proper feed.

I also find it rewarding to follow (on Twitter) journalists, instead of the paper/website/org they work for. You get more personal tweets, story follow ups, and can engage them in conversation, unlike most media feeds which are managed by staff uninterested in engaging.

</comment><comment><USER53> I use Liferea. It used to work well 6 years ago and still works good. I don't need to share my feeds with the "cloud" and I don't need to run yet another instance of Chrome and have yet another copy node_modules. Pricing: 0$/month.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app.

I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds and a few subreddits and email new items to me.

Having all my updates in one place I can consume in one place when I want is just great.

I'm not sure what I'd get out of Winds looking at it.

<comment><USER55> The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't read.

Nope, most of it's _news_ (whether tech or some other kind), and the social media stream kind of access (where you care about what's current, but if you missed it so what) seems a lot more appropriate.

<comment><USER54> I mean, if you want to support that kind of view, you could certainly just purge anything more than 10 articles old or whatever from the RSS feed from your inbox.

We probably just use these things differently though. Like, if a product I'm interested in gets reviewed I want to see that -- I don't want to have to go search the website later because maybe it was reviewed but I wasn't hovering over my RSS feed the hour or two it was the top story.

Basically, it completely replaces the website's front page for me, and if I have to go there I've failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> That looks like a nice desktop app, and that's certainly a start.

If other users are anything like me, then to really revive RSS you have to think more multi-device.

Assume the user will want to get to their feed of stuff to read from their phone, tablet, or laptop.

Assume the user will want to listen from their phone most of the time (iphone or android), but maybe their watch while exercising, their car stereo while driving, and through speakers like Echo or Sonos at home.

Get these things to sync up nicely and I bet people wouldn't mind a bit that RSS is underneath somewhere, making it go.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does this app support RSS syncing services like Feedbin? I don't see any mention of that in the description, which suggests that it doesn't. If so, that's a pretty big missing feature.

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there an app/service that does the following?:

* Has a feed a la RSS readers

* Allows items on that feed (from all the sources) to be earmarked

* At the end of reviewing the unread items of the feed, summarise a 'checkout' of earmarked items

* Sends a payment to each of the publications for the content earmarked

* Compiles the content into a consumable format such as kindle, PDF or download for mobile

I can only think of instapaper/pocket type services that don't allow for payment, or for browsers like Brave that use blockchainy things that seem new and scary. Or are just RSS readers.

<comment><USER59> Pretty much my thoughts: if you want RSS to live, turn it into the platform for content micropayment. If you just want it to be a better adblocker, don't act surprised if nobody wants to play along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Why can't I upload OPML file? App does nothing when I upload it.

<comment><USER61> Same problem here

<comment><AUTHOR> It's bugged, the team is pushing a release, but it will take 24h before it's in the app store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y RSS never died. Many sites (at least those of interest to me) still release feeds. It's just that they are not advertised as much and the RSS logo kind of disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER62> Is that another Electron app? If so, no thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Web and React Native are coming soon

<comment><USER62> Sorry, but I'm very skeptical it can compete with a truly native Cocoa app such as NetNewsWire on UX.

It's such an unfornutate trand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of "google news."

<comment><USER64> Shameless plug: This is exactly what we built [https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com) for. It is entirely driven by feeds (both RSS/Atom as well as Twitter home timeline). You can filter by content (Lucene query), by feed, by domain (suffix) and a few other parameters.

<comment><USER63> I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I didn't find any more cool features in Winds than in other Google Reader clone products. I have been using inoreader([https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)) since Google Reader was shutdown, and it works very well for me.

</comment><comment><USER66> Thunderbird Feeds feature is enough for me and i don't see if i want another rss reader client

email + feeds?

Thunderbird!

</comment><comment><USER67> RSS came back to light after privacy concerns and Winds requires registration to work?

</comment><comment><USER68> For websites I want to follow that don't provide an RSS feed I wrote a 30 line python script which runs in daily cronjob and creates me an an XML feed that I can import locally in my reader (newsboat). Easy and it works great.

<comment><USER69> do you have this python script in some kind of github/bitbucket repo? would you mind to share it? Newsboat is awesome!

<comment><USER68> Yes I have. Here you go [https://github.com/h43z/rssify](https://github.com/h43z/rssify)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I like these two open source readers:

1\. [https://www.feedbunch.com](https://www.feedbunch.com) 2\. [https://www.commafeed.com/](https://www.commafeed.com/)

:-)

</comment><comment><USER71> How about everyone gives the creators of Winds some credit instead of bitching about RSS, the interface, the desktop experience, etc. I would imagine they put months of effort into building out such a complex application.

</comment><comment><USER72> I don't the problem is a lack of clients or interest from consumers; it's that publishers want more control of the content and how it is consumed (for example by forcing you to use their own platform).

</comment><comment><USER73> Winds 2.0 was easy to setup but it immediately asks to register an account upon the first app launch. Why? I prefer to store my settings locally or in Dropbox. I uninstalled the app without moving any further.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the feedback, this is awesome. Sounds like a lot of people would like a web and mobile version.

What other problems do you currently have with your RSS readers and Podcast apps?

Anything in particular that you're missing?

<comment><USER74> I have far too many feed items to read. I'd like to review ~1,000 items in 20 minutes, as a start. (Review means: Read the headline, possibly read the summary, decide whether to read the full story, do whatever is needed to open full story, move to next item; I'll read the full stories after I've gone through all the feed items.)

* Deduplication: Which might remove ~5% of my feed items

* Grouping: This would be by far the most important feature. I need something to group articles covering the same story (e.g., all the news publications' stories on the big game or big speech or big calamity last night). Then I can quickly choose one and ignore the rest.

* Speed: UI that responds at the speed of thought and maximizes throughput when reviewing feed items. A keyboard interface is essential.

* Complex filters: So I can automatically process items as desired.

* EDIT: Automate handling of broken feeds: On one hand, I want to spend as little time on broken feeds as possible; perhaps the reader can retry for x hours, then try obvious alternative addresses (perhaps Stream can maintain a db of the new addresses, saving each user from redundantly solving the problem themselves), then notify me with an efficient interface for resolving the problem.

* Micropayments: Maybe over-ambitious, but it would be a great way to support the authors. A possibly world-changing feature.

</comment></comment><comment> vladimir-y It's built on Electron.js, so for Desktop only, how is it useful then?

[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/) is still working well by the way.

</comment><comment><USER75> I pay a couple bucks every month for Feedbin and couldn't be happier: [http://www.feedbin.com](http://www.feedbin.com)

<comment><USER76> Only a couple? How? I pay 5 / month :/

<comment><USER75> Judging by my billing history, it looks like I signed up the same day it was announced back in 2013. I must be grandfathered in. I'd happily pay $5/mo for Feedbin if the grandfathered plans were removed. In terms of cost per hour of use, it's probably the service I pay the least for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Revive? How do you think I got here in the first place?

RSS isn't all that dead since some of us olds never stopped using it.

</comment><comment><USER78> Since we're on the topic, are there any new-ish open source alternatives to pump & stream-framework?

</comment><comment><USER79> Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for packaging their Linux app.

<comment><USER80> Why it is sad?

<comment><USER23> Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the developer controls the update process, not the user.

Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise.

See: [https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh- for...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for-snap- from-store/707)

<comment><USER79> I'd add to that a general dislike of the "splitter" attitude taken by Ubuntu. Unity vs Gnome, Mir vs Waylaid, now Snap vs Flatpak. The latter works well, the former doesn't improve in any meaningful way. Why fragment?

<comment><USER81> Gnome 3 was quite widely disliked by a big part of the community. I'm not sure Unity was necessarily a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> When I read the headline, I immediately knew this was some RSS reader built on Electron.

</comment><comment><USER83> plug: [http://flatreader.com/](http://flatreader.com/)

Idea is to be super simple. Unlimited feeds in beta.

Will post the github if anyone is interested in helping out. Sinatra / Ruby, Postgres.

<comment><USER11> > Unlimited feeds in beta.

That isn't a great selling point to me. That means I might become locked into a service with bad terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> How about Feedpresso? Would anyone be willing to give it a go?

</comment><comment><USER85> It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to share content. Just the opposite in fact.

<comment><USER86> I've never used an RSS reader so correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS can basically allow you to read the content without advertising? Sharing is fine, but I think they would prefer sharing in a way that can make money.

<comment><USER87> I use RSS/Atom to keep up-to-date on the 100+ webcomics I read, and the content in those feeds can vary wildly. Some include the full comic page, some only a thumbnail, some contain an accompanying blog post, others are empty and you need to follow the link to see the post.

If you want to read everything in your feed reader, those "incomplete" feeds are disappointing, but I just use it as a kind of newsletter to get notified of updates. I even use Thunderbird's built-in feed support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> RSS in JSON format? Or may be yaml

<comment><USER11> Please, no. RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care about the data format. [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> if someone comes up with RSS in a pure JSON format, I'd think we may see a revival.

<comment> yoz-y [https://jsonfeed.org](https://jsonfeed.org)

Already supported in Feedly and Feedbin, probably more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I'll disagree. It's been however many years since Google Reader shut down and I haven't replaced it with anything.

Don't really feel the need to add RSS back into my life.

<comment><USER52> How do you consume / aggregate the content you previously consumed via Google Reader?

<comment><USER90> Found out I could live without most of it. Now I visit Reddit and HN more.

<comment><USER52> Same here - I use Feedly less often than I used Twitter when my media feeds were housed there. I also find this same behavior after we recently ditched cable TV. Those TV shows and networks that were "important" to me before are not nearly as much now that I've broken free.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever lost your confidence? - <AUTHOR> Have you ever lost your confidence to to point you could no longer perform your professional duties?<p>If so how did you deal with it/overcome it? <comment><USER2> Yes.

At different occasions in my life I have found out my world was a lie. If you've ever been born into a cult you'll get it. Getting out of a religion is not even close to what happens when you leave a cult that contains nearly all your friends and family. It is like visiting an alien planet with your fellow spaceship occupants and then when time comes to leave for the mothership you tell them you'll actually be staying.

Still the best decision I ever made.

My advice: when you become unhappy you should leave. If I paid closer attention to the possibility of exiting I'd have generally went to a better place. It is better than burnout or becoming enslaved to a meme.

There are many cults in the world, meme complexes that trap people in them, they're not all advertised as them though because they're usually not uniformly bad or good. I've seen university education institutionalize a friend. He cannot function outside of the quad without falling apart. I've seen friends work themselves to a nub for next to no reward beyond the symbolic. In most cases the solution was to leave. The problem with leaving is that having an unknown future feels scary.

You should have the ideas, and not let the ideas have you. The ability to change your shape is the greatest gift humans have. The only caveat I would add is to make sure your exit timing is appropriate for your financial situation. You'll need to plot your way out of the conspiracy.</comment>