Schneier on TSA Backscatter X-ray Backlash - brown9-2 http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/tsa_backscatter.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting point is made in one of the links by an Israeli security expert who helped design security in Tel Aviv:

And here's ([http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=2941610&...](http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=2941610&sponsor=)) Rafi Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority:

A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install "useless" imaging machines at airports across the country.

"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747," Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.

" _That's why we haven't put them in our airport,_ " Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.

(emphasis mine)

</comment><comment><USER2> Bruce is one of the plaintiffs in EPIC's lawsuit trying to block deployment of the scanners</comment>


Words and phrases you need to stop using - <AUTHOR> http://www.daccreative.co.uk/goodcopybadcopy/2009/07/24/thirty-words-you-need-to-stop-using-today/

<comment><USER2> Another crusty old twit getting all self-righteous because the language has moved on and left him behind. These are all perfectly fine, useful and well understood terms. Some are quite specific to certain fields, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with jargon given the right audience. Bandwidth, for example, is a beautifully succinct and expressive word to use when talking with a technically savvy audience. The English language is always evolving. Learn to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm interested in hearing what we use after the term "social media" burns out. A while back, people used to throw around "multimedia" to no end...

<comment><USER4> Cloud interfacing

:-P</comment></comment>


GitHub adds Organizations - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/674-introducing-organizations

<comment><USER2> These guys are great. They keep innovating even while they are in the drivers seat in their field. Thats the way to do it.

Kinda reminds me of how WoW evolved over time to have better guild features. Perhaps the engineering resources weren't available to implement them, but more likely they learned what their audience wanted from watching their audience actually use the system.

<comment><USER3> FYI, WoW has a grand total of around 30 engineers working on the game doing development. The majority of headcount is support and ops (~4000).

<comment><USER4> I would gather that there are a huge number of Testers as well?

<comment><USER5> A lot of testing is put on the actual users; WoW has "public test realms" that they use for betas.

<comment><USER4> Interesting! I guess the motivation to test comes from seeing what advantages you can wring out of upcoming changes, and/or ensuring opponents don't receive advantages over you.

<comment><USER5> Some really competitive users do want to get used to new raid encounters, but a lot of users just do it because they are anxious to try out new content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have been testing this feature for a few months now at Shopify and it seriously takes GitHub to the next level. Really amazing and kudos to the team.

</comment><comment><USER7> Out of interest, can anyone remember what the prices were for the Large, Mega and Giga plans ?

I can think of a situation where a small start-up is on Medium, and switching up to the next level at $100 per month is looking quite dear. Would be good to have a comparison with the old prices.

Edit: Found it via Google Cache:

Large $50/mo Large 50 Private Repositories 25 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Mega $100/mo 125 Private Repositories 60 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Giga $200/mo 300 Private Repositories 100 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

<comment><USER8> Looks like they still have the large plan in the system, just not listed. <https://github.com/signup/large>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> biggest question is whether there's a price point missing - $100 for lowest- priced organization support is pretty high.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, I'd love to use organizations but paying for 50 repos is just outright crazy. We have a 12 person dev team, and 10 repos. Can't justify 100mo just for that. Will need to stick with unfuddle for now.

Chris/Tom: please provide a lower priced entry for organizations.

<comment><USER10> I don't want to be rude and I am making some assumptions here (also no knowledge or experience of running a company). But if you have 12 people dev, assuming they are being paid for their work and not working pro-bono. Assuming its a company. You are probably spending somewhere around 600k - 750k per year on these developers. Surely 100/month is not too much?

Like I said, I am making some assumptions. Maybe I am missing something.

<comment><USER11> It's a question of opportunity cost. Are the new features worth $100/month as opposed to the old way of paying $10-20/month?

Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.

It's a little silly to say "Well, you're spending 600k-750k a year, you can afford it." They can also afford a bouncy castle.

The _right_ question is--does this provide enough value to justify the cost? For the parent, no, it doesn't.

<comment><USER10> I don't follow the logic here or the bouncy castle analogy. A private repo adds more direct value to a company that has 12 devs than a bouncy castle (ok maybe indirectly it might make them happy and more productive, but its stretching a bit).

I understand the question of whether it provides value, and it would be sufficient argument if you are company with lets say ~50k/yr on expenses. But when you are spending (assumptions of course) 600k-750k JUST employing your dev team, I just don't see how this $1100/year is too much; esp when the cost is associated with a core aspect of your business.

We are not talking about renting a water cooler here.

<comment><USER11> > A private repo adds more direct value

They already have private repos. The new features are permissions and a dashboard. Those particular features might be nice to haves, but for many small or midsized dev teams are not "a core aspect of [their] business."

It's not unreasonable to look at the new offerings ad say "I'm not going to pay 5x for a dashboard and better permissions."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see a lot of mentions about collaborator limits, so I though I'd mention something. GitHub does not limit private collaborators. The posted limits are soft limits, and they're there to protect themselves from users that simply seek to abuse the service to use it as a shared file host, for illegal activity, etc.

<comment><USER13> The collab limits aren't soft, they're just not strictly enforced right now. We may start enforcing them at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yep, github price are pretty high. Even the most basic plan, which I use for my own purpose, kind of cost a lot. I think it's something like 12/month for a couple of meg and 3 repositories with 1 collaborator.

I think it's a way to encourage open source.. while thinking that if you're a business, you can easily afford the 100$.

<comment><USER15> The Micro (smallest) plan is actually $7/month for 5 repos and 1 collaborator. It's not cheap given that you could host an infinite number of git repos with an infinite number of collaborators on any shared host, but that's not the point.

GitHub is pretty. GitHub doesn't require you to ask for SSH keys to add someone as a collaborator. GitHub lets you comment on lines of commits. GitHub lets you host blogs/websites with GitHub pages. Etc.

Everyone's always comparing GitHub's prices to inferior products. GitHub saves you time and effort, and since most developers are highly-paid, it doesn't need to save very much time to be well worth it.

And if you do see it as too expensive, maybe you're not their target customer. If your time is only worth $10/hour, and GitHub only saves you 15 minutes per month, it's not worth it to you pay them $7/month. The solution isn't to complain about their prices though--it's to accept that it's not worth it and switch to one of those cheaper substitutes.

<comment><USER14> Well, maybe you are right about the fact that I don't use github for the good reasons. Mainly, I don't blog, host website and I don't comments on my own line of code. I mean, I'm a bit weird to use github to host my git repository. Now that I think of it, I might try to email posterious my git repository and blog on github.

I've used github before for school and yes, I was paid 0$/hour to work on those projects. Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three students because only one collaborator was allowed. It's relative.. but 7$/month (~30$ for the semestry) for ~15 meg seems over priced for me.

All I'm saying is that the micro package isn't "that" micro and that you should pay for what you use. And thinking I'm not their "target" is wrong because there is more chance for me to use github later for real projects if I have used it during my university time.

But maybe you are right and I should switch to cheaper substitutes. I know lot of my colleague are doing it and more and more people on internet blog about them switching from github to other "cheaper" alternatives. In my opinion, it's way better for github to reduce their prices then to see users leave for alternatives.

<comment><USER16> How is github expensive if github is FREE!?

All you would have to do is open source your projects, and pay a big fat $0 per month. Just .gitignore your sensitive data files like database credentials, api keys, etc. If you are using something like capistrano to deploy, all you would have to do is upload these files to your server, then hook a function onto the deploy action that symlinks the sensitive files back into place.

You can't possibly complain about FREE now can you?

P.S. I love github (and pay 7 big ones a month even though I don't really have a job and am running out of money like its nobody's business)

<comment><USER14> only public repository are free. School project can hardly be public since that would be called cheating.

<comment><USER16> Here you go: [http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student-a...](http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student- account)

FWIW - isn't it kind of backwards that public code encourages cheating? Shouldn't we all be working together anyway? I have learned nearly everything I know from studying, and copy/pasting code from people better than me. What a shame =(

<comment><USER17> I think the problem is that assignments are usually don't have much variation in the end code, meaning someone stands to gain just by being able to copy public code. If the assignments were more open ended it could allow that type of class collaboration and in the end everyone could learn more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see Github being proactive

[http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/717-i-need-a-...](http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/717-i-need- a-plan-between-22month-and-100month)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you spend learning/education budgets at work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As a product guy, it has been nice to get the certs: agile and pragmatic. I also did an ML bootcamp, which was awesome.</comment>


Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API - <AUTHOR> https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api <comment><USER2> The important part:

 _Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.

We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission._

So Tweetbot et al will work until they have twice as many users as today. And then what? Surely Twitter won't give them permission to continue after that, given that the entire point of this update was to get rid of 3rd-party clients.

To be fair, they've made the restrictions pretty liberal for the long tail of applications. But this still rubs me the wrong way.

I actually use and love the official Twitter iPhone app. But I don't want to live in a world where 3rd-party apps, which often introduce and popularize new features, cease to exist.

<comment><USER3> And then what?

Best case scenario is: those client apps get in touch with Twitter and negotiate a per-user rate to be paid to Twitter.

This could be a great way for Twitter to allow third-party clients, but get a cut of the revenues from the non-free ones.

And it allows Twitter to decide this on a case-by-case basis.

(Or, maybe it's just a way to force very popular commercial clients into complying with whatever Twitter's revenue-generation plans end up being).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most "creepy" part of this is the limitation in user tokens for an application. If you have more than 100.000 users that use your Twitter client, you have to talk with Twitter. For what? I don't know, but I imagine that it would be some kind of paying per use or maybe adding mandatory in-stream ads.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like they're saying this: "If you plan on using the API like many people already use it, don't bother."

Also, what category would LinkedIn and Instagram's usage of the API fall under?

<comment><USER6> I would put Instagram on the consumer line between engagement and analytics and LinkedIn on the engagement line between between business and consumer. They four quadrants are fairly specific though and are not a good match for everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, at least they're giving us a long lead time until 1.1.

<comment><USER8> Really? 6 month from turning it on to disabling 1.0 is really not that long a time at all. In that time, every client needs to migrate to 1.1 and QA that, and then all the distribution channels (distros, app stores, etc.) all need to get updated versions, and then users all need to upgrade. 6 months is _extremely_ optimistic for that to all happen.

<comment><USER4> But there's not much change. For most developers it will require no more changes than replacing "api.twitter.com/1" with "api.twitter.com/11" (or whatever it is) and testing a little bit for the new rate limits (which, as Twitter says, will be enough for apps that are currently within those limits).

The bigger problem is for apps than don't authenticate: Search apps, analytics... anything that does not write to Twitter is probably not authenticated. They'll have to migrate to OAuth and requiring user authorization.

But, as I said, this will not be the case for most of apps. Anyways, it wouldn't be bad that Twitter gave more margin to developers.</comment></comment></comment>


2016 in 8760 hours - <AUTHOR> https://blog.smartertime.com/2016-in-8760-hours-6e7f6bc78bf <comment><USER2> You won't believe it, until you see it i guess!</comment>


Ask HN: Does HN censor 'Who is Hiring' for companies they don't agree with? - <AUTHOR> Just came across this ad for a job in the Ask HN Who is Hiring for March for a job openings at PornHub:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282520
but the same can't be found when looking at the thread under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281834 ... so I wonder has this posting been unlinked from the main thread so that people won't find it?
What am I missing? Is it offensive to people when they hear or read the word "porn"? Or is this simply a mistake or bug?
What offends me personally is job postings that point to facebook, Palantir and FAANG. These businesses are a pest to society (IMVHO). Yet I wouldn't get outraged over it and demand that they be shadow-banned. <comment><USER2> It's on page 4: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281834&p=4](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281834&p=4)

Click "More" at the bottom of the page to navigate between pages.</comment>


Tesla Shifts to Intel from Nvidia for Infotainment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-26/tesla-is-said-to-shift-to-intel-from-nvidia-for-infotainment <comment><USER2> I think the bigger news is that Tesla will be using AMD's chips for Autopilot:

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/20/tesla-said-to-be- working-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/20/tesla-said-to-be-working-on- its-own-self-driving-ai-chip-with-amd/)

Not sure why it even had to go with Intel for the infotainment system over an ARM chip maker, considering how much more expensive and how much more power Intel's chips use, but I suppose the primarily reasons would be 1) updates, and 2) better support for the Linux-based infotainment system. ARM chip makers probably couldn't promise more than 2 years of updates or strong support of Linux.

It's obvious why they didn't go with AMD for both: two suppliers is better than one.</comment>


No need to wait for ServiceWorker – speed up your site today - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/WPZsWr4QGqR

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, HTTP caches have opaque, browser-provided semantics that work sometimes and mysteriously don't work in other cases.

They can't be used to ensure that you have a complete atomic set of application assets, are often purged in ad-hoc ways by browsers, and in general aren't a good hint to browsers about exactly what the semantics of the caches are.

ServiceWorker gives applications control over many of these considerations in a programmable way. If you've ever tried to work with AppCache or control time-to-boot in the context of possibly-warm HTTP caches, you know that this is a godsend.

Which isn't to say that people shouldn't make the best use of HTTP caches, nor that HTTP caches aren't currently underutilized. It's just to say that the control offered by ServiceWorker will make it far easier to control the nitty- gritty of caching behavior, which matters a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, my squabble is not an argument against SW in any way. SW affords a lot more control to the developer and makes this pattern significantly simpler to implement and deploy.

I'm simply pointing out that you can get most (if not all) of the claimed perf benefits using existing API's. Yes, it won't look as pretty, but if you want to deliver a better experience to existing + older browsers.. this is something to consider.

<comment><USER2> As a person who has spent weeks of my life trying to persuade AppCache + HTTP caches to do what I want (and who subsequently became a champion for the low- level primitives that became SW), I just don't agree with this.

It seems true in principle, until you try to actually get precisely the semantics you want, and then things go downhill fast. People should definitely try to find ways to use the HTTP cache more aggressively, but in practice, it's a giant slog with very little cross-browser consistency and total failures on mobile devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Once again, I'm not arguing against SW.

We should be thinking about how to deliver the best of both worlds: a great experience for older (non-SW) browsers, and an even better experience for those that do. The underlying patterns are effectively the same, SW just makes many things much simpler, and there is no reason to block on SW to start on this path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've made a longer comment on G+, but in short: if you max-age your page for a decent length of time, you lock users into that version of the page. Shipping any kind of update means waiting for that max-age to expire.

<comment><AUTHOR> And I replied on G+, but also in short: do a background version ping, force a revalidation if version has changed. Gnarly, yes, but works. :-)

<comment><USER4> Also, you can append a last modified query parameter to automagically clear the cache for static assets.</comment></comment></comment>


Misusing DOM text methods - <AUTHOR> http://benv.ca/2012/10/4/you-are-probably-misusing-DOM-text-methods/

<comment><USER2> Text is a sequence of characters. HTML is a sequence of tags and HTML-encoded text. Some text can be interpreted as HTML. Some of that HTML can be malicious. The bottom line is if you take text, and you give it to something which expects HTML, you will encounter bugs with non-alphanumerics, XSS holes, or both.

Let's look at the methods discussed in the article. textContent gives you the text inside of an element, ignoring any tags. This text can certainly look like HTML, and that HTML can be malicious.

createTextNode takes text and creates a node with that text as its content. innerHTML of that gives you HTML that, when rendered, is the sequence of characters that matches the text you passed it. If you want a sequence of HTML which cannot contain tags, creating a text node and immediately grabbing the HTML within it certainly is a safe way to do it.

In general, "escaping" is the wrong way to think about it. You have functions which can convert text to the equivalent HTML, and you have functions which extract the text within a DOM node. While sometimes the HTML which renders as a given text string is the same as the string, this is definitely not always the case.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on the escaping. Alternatively, if you have content you want to remove HTML from before displaying, don't generate rich DOM nodes for that content, immediately stick it into a TextNode and insert _that_ into the DOM. Per the example in the OP, div.textContent will remove the "first level" of HTML, and leave what looks like tags, as the characters are unescaped. So just display this as an actual TextNode. It will show the <script> string in-line (I say string here, because it's not actually a tag, since it's in a TextNode), but that's actually the content the author intended by having it escaped in the input.

<comment><USER4> That's a good point. I'll edit the article to mention this.</comment></comment></comment>


Such Evil 3D Particles - <AUTHOR> https://c1.goote.ch/30e6e44dfc0e4c3eabd4fc07383ec327.scene/ <comment><USER2> Instantly crashed WebGL on Windows 10 Chrome 47.0.2526.73.

Runs nicely on Microsoft Edge.

Looks nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you try again? It has been updated to a new version that should work better.

<comment><USER2> Still crashes (well, actually "WebGL snag") with Chrome. GTX 560 Ti, nvidia driver version 10.18.13.5354.</comment></comment></comment>


11 Facts about Data Science that you must know - <AUTHOR> http://www.edupristine.com/blog/11-facts-about-data-science

<comment><USER2> Surprisingly accurate list. Especially:

7\. No one cares how you did it

9\. Presentation is key

If you think academia has problem with unreproducible research, you should work in private sector consulting for some time.

If you can use data science to make your customers to do random walk in the space of doing their business and they reverse the negative changes after some time, it shows in the bottom line after a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> 12\. Statisticians who have been working successfully in this area for decades will now need to re-brand themselves as "data scientists", because "statistics" isn't a sexy enough word.

</comment><comment><USER4> As much as I normally hate these sort of lists, this one was very spot on.

</comment><comment><USER5> On a side note, 9 of those statements apply equally to any technical field. The only two that don't (deep learning and big data) can be substituted with the appropriate term du jour in the field.

For example, I'd argue they apply very well seismic interpretation in a business setting. The connotations change a bit, but the overall sentiment is identical.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As one journeys through his/her career in analytics, some truths start becoming evident over time. And while none of them are ground-shattering, they often surprise novices in the field. So, it's worthwhile to know 11 absolute facts of data science.

</comment><comment><USER6> While I found this list to be quite good is it a common thing to write an article based on "facts" pulled from reddit? (see note at the bottom of the article)

<comment><USER7> "7\. No one cares how you did it"</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Adsense started altering the pages it is on - <AUTHOR> Some days ago, my pages where I have Google Adsense on were suddenly completely broken.
After some investigation, it turned out that the Google Adsense code started to change the styles of the page it is on.
It seems it figures out which parent element or grand-parent or grand-grand-parent... element is limiting its height. And then adds "height: auto !important" to that element.
If it is limited by max-height, it adds "max-height: auto !important" to the limiting element.
I had Googles dynamic ad sizes in a div with a size that fits my layout. Since they adapt to the space they get, everything was fine. But now they explode their parent element to a size that breaks my site.
I find this behavior pretty shocking. <comment><USER2> Are you by any chance placing these ads in-feed? They do call this out. It's definitely odd that they're doing this.

[https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189959?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9189959?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not using the in-feed ads, but the responsive ads.

No matter which ads - I think it is not acceptable that they alter the surrounding page. They also don't state that on the page you linked. What they talk about there is about the size of the ad. But what the ad code does now is to analyze the rest of the page and alter it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can you put the ad into a iframe?

<comment><USER4> Nope. Adsense scripts enforce height=auto!important on the parent elements of wherever it is placed, and often render an iframe with dimensions exceeding the widths of the container. Their responsive ads are also huuuge now, like 970x600</comment></comment>


Sites with Google maps starting to fail - <AUTHOR> With the massive price spike in Google maps, some sites have started having map failures.  Any interesting ones you've seen?  What changes have you made due to it?
A coworker this morning reported that he couldn't order pizza last night on his mobile because the Google map was "in developer mode", and he couldn't get past it to order.  Via his desktop he could.  Also a health provider had broken maps.
We ended up setting up our own OSM-based tile servers, and are going to be deploying them possibly today.  My vacation and a service credit from Google delayed the deployment until now.  Can't wait to get over to the OSM-based tiles, and in the grand scheme of things it was fairly easy (maybe 2-3 weeks of effort, all in).
What are your Google mapocalypse  stories? <comment><USER2> I have a "friends only" facility that renders a map perhaps once a week. That's now failing, so I'm looking at using a GeoCoding service instead. The pricing model that Google has is a reasonable price in terms of actual money, but the hassles I'd need to go through for such a small thing are just too much.

So I'm going elsewhere. It's not a big deal, it's not a mapocalypse, but it's anecdata.</comment>


Genius.com now lets you annotate any website - <AUTHOR> http://genius.com/4680916/www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20141217a.htm

<comment><USER2> What happens if the target website does not want to be embedded?

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure you can make this decision on your website with software.

Result 1: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3279357/how-to-prevent- em...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3279357/how-to-prevent-embedding-my- web-page-inside-an-iframe)

<comment><USER2> Maybe there should be an annotation equivalent of robots.txt, that can be honored by RapGenius or any other site that wishes to embed the target site.

As annotations become standard ([http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/)), sites should be able to declaratively express their policy on being annotated, rather than being forced to embed a blacklist/whitelist in Javascript.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Blue light glasses vs. flux? - <AUTHOR> I am using flux with daytime settings. I am wondering if glasses provide something better dinxet the alternative is free? Or flux does not really cut blue light? <comment><USER2> I have tried both religiously over the years.

One advantage of the glasses is that they work for screens that you don't have software control over - how often you might look at such screens depends on your particular circumstance.

How often do you do image editing? Another advantage of glasses is that it only affects what you see and you won't get questions from others about why your screen looks all red.

One advantage of software like flux, redshift, twilight, etc is that you can customize its schedule and get really granular.

They both work - which one is better just depends what for. If money is tight the software is more than sufficient and a great example of why FOSS is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that many modern Samsung devices have a blue-light filter available right in the main icon tray (the 11th out of 21 on my Galaxy SO+, for example).</comment>


LEDs Are Set to Revolutionize Greenhouse Farming (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/528356/how-leds-are-set-to-revolutionize-hi-tech-greenhouse-farming/ <comment><USER2> One question I have had on my mind is about solar powered LED lighting.

Solar cells capture a wider spectrum than plants (plants are green ergo not green eaters).

At what levels of efficiency do solar cells and LEDs have to be before you receive a net gain by having the solar cells in the sun instead of the plants. How far away from that are we now?

Underground farming in arid regions seems like the best scope for something like this.

<comment><USER3> I don't have a definitive answer for you, but you can kind of back into a rough approximation (someone please correct my math if I went astray).

High-efficiency solar cells are about 20% efficient across the daylight spectrum.

For some reason, no one gives hard stats on how much energy LEDs waste as heat, but the claims are that incandescents waste about 90% of energy input as heat, and LEDs are about 80% more efficient than that. So let's say LEDs convert about 80% of input power into light at their operating wavelengths as a guess.

So if we put these together, we'll get about 16% of the input daylight back out as light at the wavelengths we want.

According to wikipedia [1], about 47% of light that falls on chlorophyll is wasted because it falls outside the ideal range for plants (400-700nm). Another 3% or so is lost due to wavelength conversion. The rest we can't really do anything about because it has to do with biological limitations. Put another way, our total system has to be about 50% efficient to be better than just putting the plants in the sun. As you can see, we're not even close. In fact, it's not even possible since the theoretical maximum efficiency of solar panels is only about 34% [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit)

<comment><USER4> The Shockley-Queisser limit only applies to single-layer cells under unconcentrated light. Different cell designs have surpassed it by significant amounts in practice already.

<comment><USER3> Do you have a link where I can read more? I'm aware of light concentrators being more efficient, but that defeats the whole point since the surface area required is far more than size of the panel itself.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit#Tandem_cells)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Economist had some related content in this week's Technology Quarterly ([http://www.economist.com/technology- quarterly/2016-06-09/fac...](http://www.economist.com/technology- quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh#section-2)) - I made note of the 2 LED producers they mentioned: [http://www.valoya.com/](http://www.valoya.com/) and [https://www.heliospectra.com/](https://www.heliospectra.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The next step is optimizing the plants to grow better in these greenhouse conditions - currently the plants waste lots of energy. For example my company, TAXA Biotechnologies[1], has identified a gene that doubles the rate of growth of lettuce per unit light energy. It wouldn't work in the wild as the cost is reduced pest-resistance but growing indoors there are other ways to control that. [1]www.taxa.com

<comment><USER8> Optimize for taste, not for fast growth, please. I don't want to pay for lettuce with taste of straw.

<comment><USER9> Last time I checked (it's been a while since I had a salad), lettuce already doesn't have too much of a taste. I'd be surprised if they managed to mess that up.

<comment><USER10> It really depends on the lettuce.

Iceburg seems to be intentionally useless. Romaine starts to have a little flavor. Leaf lettuces have a wide range of flavors.

<comment><USER11> Iceberg is a texture, not a taste per se. Used in combination with other greens and veggies it has a place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Link to the paper [http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3016](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3016).

They do not seem to have accounted for the fact that the "waste" heat from current solutions reduces the overall heating bill. Of course, electrical heating is not usually as cost effective as other methods.

<comment><USER13> Greenhouses in NL use natural gas to heat and they are getting a serious discount compared to homes and offices, compared to what they are paying for gas heat any conversion from electricity to heat is a loss to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Greenhouse farming really could be a good way to help tackle the waste/runoff problem. I think Greenhouse farms could easily be closed systems with no need to push polluted water back into the world. The dead zone in the gulf of Mexico (all ocean dead zones actually) HAS to be dealt with pretty damn soon as I understand it...

</comment><comment><USER15> Ceramic Metal Halide bulbs, at much lower wattage than HPS, but with more power than LED seems to be the immediate compromise. A 315w Phillips Ceramic MH will deliver a huge spectrum to the plants with less than half of the heat of a comparable 600w HPS/MH. The cost is getting very close to traditional HPS lights. LEDs do work, but they still use plenty of power, and are largely unproven. Try to find a greenhouse/grow store that stocks ANY led fixures. They have been cheap China crap for so long, that the better ones cost quite a bit of $.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's already revolutionizing in India [http://www.ujala.gov.in/](http://www.ujala.gov.in/)</comment>


Ruby has entered the Enterprise thanks to the Enterprise gem - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/tenderlove/enterprise/tree/master

<comment><USER2> The same thing happened to VisualWorks Smalltalk years ago. We reimplemented the "change log" to use XML, so we'd be buzzword compliant. Functionality gain: none. Result: embarrassing bugs in Smalltalk training class when I was demoing how you don't lose code even if your image crashes.

(We broke a very cool feature that had been working for decades, which is core to developers, just to be buzzword compliant!)

<comment><USER3> Now the title of Robert Martin's talk: "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby Too" makes sense.. <http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2089545/>

<comment><USER2> Yes, and it _pains_ me to see you guys making the same mistakes. (Though, you have done some things really right!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's also acts_as_enterprisey, which has been around for a while now <http://github.com/airblade/acts_as_enterprisey/tree/master>

From the site:

Rails make life easy for us but -- and it's a big but -- we don't want it to look easy. acts_as_enterprisey is your friend.

How does acts_as_enterprisey make webapp development look hard? Well, the only way your client can judge your app is by playing around with it. What better gives the feeling of heavy weights being lifted behind the scenes than slow response times? Exactly. That's what acts_as_enterprisey does.

So while your client clicks, ...waits..., and then gets the page, you can blather on heroically about wrestling with clustered indexes, cache expiration strategies, n log n seek times, etc ad nauseam.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think I enjoyed this the most:

"I'm sure you're asking yourself, 'how much does this enterprise solution cost me?'. Well, like any good enterprise system, it is insanely expensive. This gem will cost you eleventy billion dollars payable to me, now."

<comment><USER6> According to my calculations a good enterprise solution costing eleventy billion dollars would require a fourty billion dollars annual support contract.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget a 90 billion dollar custom code fee!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As we all know, XML is just another word for Productivity! One less thing to compile and throw those pesky errors before we put it straight into production.

I can't wait to show this to the IT guys... if they ever get back from their 4 hour lunch break.

Awesome mullet BTW!

</comment><comment><USER9> What I'd really like, is a way to express xml in xml, so I can be super- productive all day long recursively writing a single xml document.

<comment><USER10> You want XSLT. ;-)

<comment><USER11> XPath is far too concise. It needs an XML encoding. Something like PMML, where math looks like

      <DefineFunction name="frob" optype="continuous">
        <ParameterField name="x" optype="continuous"/>
        <Apply function="+">
          <FieldRef field="x"/>
          <Constant>42</Constant>
        </Apply>
      </DefineFunction>

I wish I were joking.

<comment><USER10> Content MathML to the rescue: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Content_MathML>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sorry... it's not ready for the enterprise until there's a code generator that will automatically create the XML based on some existing COBOL code.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't trust this software much. Most enterprise software I've dealt with requires at least two paid consultants to install and configure. "gem install enterprise" ? Are you kidding? This is kids stuff. A few other concerns:

* No rea (Ruby Enterprise Application) objects? How do I package my software in to one file that I can upload through the enterprise application manager?

* Speaking of which, where is the enterprise application manager? I expect a buggy web app that only works on ie6 and requires 10+ activeX components.

This is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

</comment><comment><USER14> A little late, though, as most of the "Enterprise" frameworks have started to shun XML configuration.

<comment><USER15> er i'm pretty sure this rubygem is poking fun at the "enterprise" and not a _really_ for the enterprise

<comment><USER14> What I'm saying is that this would have been funny 3 years ago.

<comment><USER16> MY PROJECT IS NOT A JOKE. ;-)

<comment><USER17> Har har.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's kind of funny, I actually just finished building a tool that lets you perform queries against the ruby AST. You can pattern match and process S-Expressions. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's pretty neat.

Check it out, SexpPath: <https://github.com/adamsanderson/sexp_path/tree>

<comment><USER19> HOLY SHIT! YAY!

I knew if I just waited long enough someone would finish this off for me! Wonderful!

What do you think about folding this into sexp_processor?

I should prolly actually ask this on github. I only read ycombinator for the enterprise post. :)

<comment><USER18> Send me an email or drop me a line on github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cannot wait for the same thing for JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER21> finally!

</comment><comment><USER22> Good joke, guy!

</comment><comment><USER23> It looks like a joke.

Why bother HN readers?</comment>


Show HN: Please rate - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.igbow.ambidexter <comment><USER2> you might get more traction with more description. as it is, i'm not going to click on the link to see what it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok thank you for the hint!</comment></comment>


File indexing and searching for Plan 9 [pdf] - vezzy-fnord http://lsub.org/ls/export/tags.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> lsub has done so many interesting Plan 9 projects which are so little known (and used). I have tried to read most of nemo's papers, but I admit I haven't actually used much of his software. Nowadays it seems that his projects are all self-contained rather than being userspace software for traditional Plan 9. There is still a lot of exploration to be done in the best semantics for implementing 9p servers for various purposes.

<comment><USER2> I'm just glad that there are still people (prmiarily nemo/francisco ballesteros/9front team/cat-v) hacking away at Plan9/Inferno/[nix/octopus/planb]/etc. In a world where corporate OS research is all but dead, it's definitely nice to see.

<comment><USER3> Is corporate OS research really dead? We have L4, seL4, Xen, Mirage OS, Singularity nowadays.

It's more like the focus has shifted from traditional OS kernels into virtualization, distributed systems and verification.

<comment><USER4> Other than formal verification of your Ring 0 and Ring 1 kernel components, (L4 not withstanding- there seems like genuinely interesting innovation coming out of that project), it seems like the rest of those are re-implementations of concepts that have been around for decades. We've gone full circle back into virtualization that IBM System 360 -> z-Series and VAX/VMScluster had. The difference is now you have all this tech that used to cost millions of dollars, available for a few hundred thousand dollars, making it way more accessible to the "non-SAP/Oracle/IBM" demographic.

RE: seL4 borrows a lot of TrustedBSD (and to some extent Trusted Solaris). I don't know what the technical implementation details of Xen/XenServer are but once you add all the doo-dads, you've basically got VMware ESX with VMotion/HA/VSan in terms of functionality. I'll give VMware credit because VSan appliances are an easy-to-configure-and-deploy HA fairly-high-IOPS component of the VMware suite that's going to be a EMC SAN killer. The innovation there is how well it's integrated into the rest of the VMware virtual networking/vMotion/HA/disaster recovery suite, though, and not anything you could present at a conference.

I haven't looked at Mirage recently but I don't think they're doing anything really groundbreaking (i.e. academically; you won't see papers being presented on it)- a clever unikernel and useful tool but certainly not research. Read the old IBM Redbooks for z/OS and there's are numerous common components between the 1980s implementation of a System/390 running a hypervisor and and the Xen/ESX internals. I can only comment on IBM's stuff with confidence as a former IBMer, but VAX/VMS' clustering probably shares a lot of of what ESX is doing.

Other than IBM and MSR, a heavy funder of SPJ at Haskell and F# support as a primary language, definitely paid for itself many times over w/r/t language research the Python 3.5 async await syntax-sugar and, to some extent semantics, which was influenced by C# clearly, derived from F#2. Apple has a few people working on Clang (though not LLVM IIRC, so eh). Facebook has a really interesting language agnostic suite of analysis (primarily static) which I'm tracking carefully because it looks like it has a boatload of interesting capabilities.

There's a lot of interesting research going on, but not much of it is done by corporations, Microsoft Research notwithstanding.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Mirage seems like the continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor instead of a raw microarchitecture. I suppose being OCaml is a nice perk, though ultimately their scope is very limited (deploying applications).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love reading these little blurbs about Plan9. I haven't played around with it too much but it feels very "modern" (I know it's old).

What are some of the ways a beginner can get into Plan9? Can I use it as a Desktop Operating System on my old Thinkpad? What can I do with it? Does it run a modern browser? Could it run QEMU?

<comment><USER3> I tried to run an original Plan 9 image, it is quite outdated (Ethernet configuration in QEMU silently fails, for example; half of its internet resources are either vanished or temporarily unavailable). Maybe, it's just not for beginners.

I've had much more luck with 9front distribution, it seems maintained at least.

A desktop OS is a vague term, but you have to be super undemanding to use Plan 9 in the modern environment. If you plan to develop on it, be aware: it's quite possible, but it is not POSIX-compatible, it has its own, often quite opinionated tools (Acme editor with its obsessive three-button mouse usage is something I could not get used to), it is often a world-in-itself. It has C, Go, Mercurial, Python though. Don't expect many opensource projects we take for granted to be available (databases, servers, etc). However, 9front has its own "repository" [0] that has ssh, vim, ghc and other basic Unix tools.

No, neither Plan 9 nor 9front run a modern internet browser. A modern browser is a complex, non-portable, monolithic, demanding beast. It just does not fit the Plan 9 vision, so the common piece of advice is to run a VNC session to a mainstream OS to browse the internet. `elinks` is "a graphical browser" according to Plan 9 people (and I rather agree).

This is impression of a beginner, so feel free to correct me.

[0] [http://www.plan9.bell- labs.com/wiki/plan9/Contrib_Index](http://www.plan9.bell- labs.com/wiki/plan9/Contrib_Index) (oops, it is offline at the moment).

<comment><USER4> "Opinionated" yes, but entirely consistent with the UNIX mentality. One tool, to do one thing, done well, chained together.

I love emacs so, so much (I'm the nerd who has foot pedals, and I've spent at least 1k hours perfecting my .emacs.d over the last 10 years). It's ability to meta-modify itself is incredible.

Editor rant for nerds who have spent at least 100 hours on .vimrc or emacs.d:

But ACME takes it to the next level. It feels like Smalltalk. It exposes all buffers via a FUSE block device you can mount, and all of a sudden you can feed buffers or sub-selections of buffers to standard UNIX utils. Literally everything that takes input from STDIN you can pipe to, and optionally return to the same buffer via STDOUT. You're no tied to languages. Hating Vimscript or Elisp becomes irrelevant because as long as you can run the binary and pipe to/from it, you can manipulate your data.

It's fantastic for exploratory scripting, literate programming and my only qualm with it is I'm a home-rower. (That is, all of my interfacing revolves around keeping my wrists and about 1/4" of my lower palm. My wrists are planted in that specific position 98% of the time, with movement primarily centered around pivoting my wrists about those two radial points).

My idea is to use Caps as a meta-key, then have s,d,f act as 1,2,3 on the mouse. Even with chording, it doesn't impose a stretch.

If you are passionate about editors, watch Russ Cox's talk on ACME. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Brainsurgeon, a text editor inspired by brainfuck - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanfox/brainsurgeon <comment><USER2> Was hoping it would be _written_ in brainfuck.

That would make for some fun comments.</comment>


The Recording Industry Likes to Make Me Look Like an Asshole - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/the-recording-industry-likes-to-make-me-look-like-an-asshole/

<comment><USER2> I hope one day you come to think about what you are really saying.

The music industry isn't a thousand part as important as a usefull internet. Frankly copyright has become far too difficult to enforce without killing the internet so we should drop the enforcement, accept the decline in output from the movie/music industry (and I am ok with it going all the way to zero) and move on.

Unlike a lot of others here I don't have anything against mainstream music, but I do no that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that the price of copyright, compared to the additional value created by it, is too high.

Remember there is no natural right to copyright, it was allowed by the founders as a way to promote useful art and science - and there is no requirement that we keep it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope one day _you_ come to think about what you are really saying. It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

<comment><USER3> >It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

It's too hard to protect the interests of buggy-whip makers. Let's outlaw automobiles. It's too hard to protect the interests of barges. Let's outlaw trains. It's too hard to protect the interests of ocean liners. Lets outlaw air travel.

No one is _entitled_ to a living. No one should have to rely on the government to protect their business model. If your business model doesn't work in an Internet-enabled world, too fucking bad. We didn't bail out the buggy whip makers for having a business model that couldn't survive in an automobile enabled world. We didn't bail out the barge and steamboat industry when trains came along. Why should we bail out the recording industry because they can't hack it in an Internet-enabled world?

Because that's what this is. A bailout. This a bailout that dwarfs the bank bailout in terms of the harm it can do to our economy and our liberty. And it's not even a bailout for artists. It's a bailout for a parasitic monster that, as far as I can tell only serves to funnel money from consumers to lobbyists.

EDIT: By your logic, even the recording industry _itself_ shouldn't exist. The recording industry killed off the "home-performance" industry and drastically cut sheet music sales by making and distributing recordings of performances. So who's looking out for their interests?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the thing, no one is _entitled_ to free music, either.

Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. It's not a buggy whip. It's music. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, then you just don't need to have a copy. Is that really such a hard concept for you to grasp?

<comment><USER3> >Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants.

Is it a product that everybody wants? Or is it a product that everybody _says_ they want? If music were truly as appreciated as you say it is, then more people would be paying for it, no?

And guess what? More people _are_ paying for music. iTunes is selling _millions_ of tracks each year. Amazon is doing the same. Do you really think that artists would go out of business if they got the _whole_ share of their iTunes proceeds, rather than having to split it with the recording industry?

As another comment below me says so eloquently, "Louis CK gets it. Trent Reznor gets it. Radiohead gets it. The recording industry doesn't get it and neither do you."

<comment><USER4> Your ignorance and oversimplified reasoning is woeful. If banks left their vaults on locked and didnt enforce theft, you would bet your ass that people would filling their fat pockets with wads of $100s. If someone makes something and wants to charge a dollar amount you cannot say no and just take it.

Your argument of people doing it right is irrelevant. They choose to sell it one way, and other artists choose another. You as a consumer can have an opinion as to which way is most effective, but you cannot decide how they distribute.

<comment><USER5> Think of a bank that CANNOT have an effective vault because there is technology available that allows people to walk through solid matter.

You could outlaw (or make difficult to use, restrict its features) the walk- through-walls technology. Or you could just stop clinging to your old idea of what a bank or a vault is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves._

Well consider me fucked.

What the author doesn't realize is that he's fighting against an organic phenomenon. Even if SOPA passes, piracy will continue to thrive. There are thousands of eager engineers begging for the chance to prove that they can produce an elegant hack around this poorly considered attempt to control the internet. There is also a culture that has now adjusted its formula for content value, and those people will _demand_ piracy, just as they demand jailbroken phones and modded xboxes, and someone will rise to meet their demands. A new file sharing solution will emerge, and the media companies will have to spend another decade trying to lobby for a way to whack the next mole.

In the meantime, those of us who understand that you can't prevent a bit from being copied have learned how to create content that people _feel good_ paying for. Of course, people don't have the right to download content without paying for it, but you can't stop the spread of 1s and 0s without giving the media companies an authority that goes beyond what is reasonable.

<comment><USER7> This. A million times this. Thank you.

The customer's desire to give you money _is_ the product. This is inherent in the nature of near zero cost replication.

Loius CK gets it, Reznor gets it, Yorke gets it, kickstarter gets it. OP doesn't, the RIAA doesn't.

<comment><USER8> So you're saying that we only REALLY want the products to which we would chritably throw cash? so when I buy coke at the grocery store, it's because I want to charitably contribute to the coca-cola company's artful soda recipe? And when I don't feel like appreciating it, I should just take them?

OBVIOUSLY NOT. If you don't appreciate the music, or even the artists work, then don't download it. If you don't want it, dont steal and insist that your "just getting it for the right price." I can't even begin to explain how entitled it sounds o hear people saying that they wil pay for the things that they "really should be paying for because they want to be." This is a justification for piracy and is in no way a solution to the curent issues. You buy a product, you donate to charities which you like. Charities ask you to contribute, firms tell you what you need to to pay for their product. Louis CK is in no way an indication that people will pay for things they 'really appreciate,' lots of people really wanted the experiment to work. But what of Kanye's album? I see hundreds saying "Oh this guy is a jerk, I'm just gonna take his album." Is that how natural markets work?

Don't like it? Good, that's your NATURAL INCLINATION to go for lowest price possible which will in no way just 'go away' when you really appreciate your products, nor should it.

And this is not zero cost replication. There are people that put a ton of time and effort into piracy to make it work. We'll know when we've reached a solution that works when the enormous online filesharing infrastructure necessary for the current levels of piracy dissolves, and people simply start to pay for the products like they would any other.

<comment><USER7> > This is inherent in the nature of near zero cost replication

If coca-cola sold their recipe rather than selling cans of soda, then I would agree with your paragraph one.

Remember that coca-cola does not pay royalties to many of the inventors of the ideas the bottler uses to bottle soda. Newton's heirs do not own the world.

As for paragraph two, all I can say is that yes: human markets do work that way. My advice to you is to remember that a rational man adjusts to the world, rather than becoming angry that it isn't the way he wants it to be.

As for paragraph three, you're wrong -- we all donate to charities we like, we all give gifts, we all help each other; we read books by great thinkers and are thankful for their gift. When you really like an artist, learning that they need money to recoup their cost of production is much the same as learning what a friend wants for their birthday: you give it as a token of your affection.

edit: you just added paragraph four. Please reread what you wrote. You're not even pretending to understand the subjects you're commenting on any more :(

<comment><USER8> That is not for you to choose. If the artist wants you to give as a token of your affection, they can, but for now, you have no right to decide that you need not pay for their work until they've earned your affection. This is in no way a solution. And I have every right to be angry at justifications for theft with claims that theft is the baseline, and benevolence is a product of further appreciation. Theft cannot be the baseline.

People need to adjust to idea that services need to be paid for. Plain and simple, if they aren't paid for, in full, they stop being provided. And if say this magical benevolent system is implemented, are you to guarantee that good will can ensure that the money is actually paid? I can't, and based on the justifications for theft I've seen on this forum, I seriously doubt anyone here will actually pay for the all music they take, especially under the anonymity and "I'm special so it doesn't matter when I do this immoral thing" of the internet.

<comment><USER9> The service of creative content production, or intellectual property in general, is an artificial one, not a natural one. We've endowed ourselves with this institution, presumably to promote cultural progress. So established, we _can_ argue against the idea that it is "theft" because we have artificially stimulated that definition in the first place; it is not "theft" naturally, it is theft due to centuries of a model that used to work, but cannot work anymore.

To refuse to reconsider whether it is theft or not is therefore asinine.

That said, I'd like to ask what more than a cynical and baseless speculation you use to support the argument against a patronage model for creative content? You're looking at charity in the wrong way -- a number of individuals who enjoy the benefits of some action are free to provide as much of their own incentive to support those institutions.

Your argument against a patronage (donation based, or public subsidy) model is akin to complaining that a homeless shelter should expect all of the homeless they take care of to pay their share in the service they provide. _That is not the point_ and is clearly not the effective strategy. Enough people who have the cultural motivation and desire can donate to those shelters, or a number of other non-profit institutions who provide different solutions.

There simply is no evidence for you to base the allegation that it is "in no way a solution" because we already see patronage as an effective model for a number of systems that capitalism has failed to address. Once we stop pretending creative content can be owned, we can actually begin progressing as a culture.

The days for copyright are numbered, and the selfish and entitled are not the pirates but the artists who demand that their content be worth something to everybody.

<comment><USER8> Refer to response above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I don't see people in the technology community making real and productive > proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

That's because there is no technical solution, this is a people problem, not a tech problem. I've thought about it a lot myself. Software gets pirated too, after all, so if there was some technical way to block it, it would've happened already. Microsoft controls a significant fraction of the world's OSes and they can't even manage it, and not for lack of trying or lack of funding.

But that does _not_ mean that artists are screwed, only that they'll have to adapt. Computers won't replace authors any time soon[1]. And adapting _is_ possible, though it relies less on copyright and more on business acumen. Look at the webcomic authors: they give away their work for free, but the smart ones can still make good money. If you want lessons on how, start watching how Howard Taylor does business. He gets his fans to ship his books for him and they like it.

You can give the pirates the middle finger all you want. But, laws or no laws, I don't see how people are going to stay in business unless they adapt. I can understand it being painful: I see factory workers getting replaced by machines, after all. But the lesson is the same: evolve or die.

[1] Uncreative fill-in-the-blanks style writing, like that program that does sports reporting, excepted.

<comment><USER11> * That's because there is no technical solution, this is a people problem, not a tech problem. *

That's just not correct. The technical "solution" of Napster and later torrenting enabled this on a mass scale, did it not? Surely that's a "technical" matter and not only a people matter? If you make it technology easy enough that a 14yo with little tech skills can download the latest pop album _for free_ and _with virtually no risk of any consequences_ , then you've technically provided a way for someone to take the easy way out. People are like water - they'll almost always take the easiest route to get what they want. If it's easier to torrent/download and there are no repercussions (of whatever type), then they'll choose that more often than not.

Take away the tech that made it easy (or technically add in repercussions like a virus/trojan) and they'll stop.

<comment><USER12> I hate to get 2nd-amendment-peanut-butter into your piracy-chocolate, but as I was reading your comment, the phrase "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" flashed through my mind. Guns are a mix of a technology/people problem, must as much as copyright infringement is, and we haven't even solved that problem yet. (At least, we don't seem to have solved it in the USA.)

<comment><USER10> There is one really good point in there. If you want to be a successful artist, make it so that people _want to support you_. That's what Louis CK was doing the other day. That's how Howard Taylor operates. It's just good business. You have happy customers. That makes you happy. Good times all around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-R It isn't the job of government to ensure that a business model is profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. The concept that creating music or film (or any other kind of intellectual property) would be predictably profitable enough to merit investing so much in its production is a rather recent phenomenon.

Consider, when musicians and performance artists play on the street, they determine based on the donations they get whether or not their efforts are worth their time, and adjust their future investments accordingly - they don't use law enforcement to force every viewer/listener to pay, claiming entitlement to compensation. On the internet, the sound reaches further, and the street is larger - as are opportunities for donations, and the cost of using law enforcement to extort payment.

Perhaps a better solution hasn't been offered because, for things that travel and are reproduced more like sound waves than physical objects, this model of business/enforcement just isn't scalable, at least without infringing on people's rights.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not that the recording industry is, just coincidentally, a bunch of jerks.

Copyright is not about money, not directly. Copyright is about power. In the case of the content industries, honking great amounts of government backed power to grant or withhold access to what is basically the shared culture of the planet. Enough to, eg: strong arm a company that would prefer not to be evil into accepting at-whim takedown - that's what power does. And that's what by-design amoral money-grubbing organizations do when you hand them that much power, they turn into thugs, because their only way to make money is to hold things hostage. Even those around them who would be moral are pulled into the amoral system, because of that power.

Regardless of whether you agree that artists and labels should be paid, copyright is a bad way to implement it.

Thus, defending copyright but saying "you make me look bad" - no, this is inevitable. If you shook the dice again and re-implemented copyright with different starting people, personalities and companies, this would happen again. it's what copyright _does_.

</comment><comment><USER14> Culture: No one ones it. Not even creators.

Copyright: An incentive to produce culture.

The Internet: A bit distribution platform.

Technology: Gave you the ability to sell physical records, then took it away. That was a quick century.

</comment><comment><USER8> To put no blame on either side, as the only attempts I've seen on this ground involve louis CK and some small-time dubsteppers, what of the music industry's effective monopoly and set-without-alternative pricing? Not many artists have the resources to bypass this system when they really have the opportunity to opt out of the label system, so the argument of "pay for it or find another way to get music" isn't exactly reasonable. And as a better indication, there's been a clear decrease in consumer valuation of individual songs, as evidence of the total effort exerted to bypass current prices, and yet the prices for music have remained steady.

I believe that there is a market equilibrium, and that as songs are made cheeper to reflect their new value to consumers, more will buy rather than steal, but it seems like labels are insisting that they should dictate market price without alternative rather than adjust price to demand. I don't mean that they should just lower prices until we get what we want, but I think the direction the music industry is headed is more enforcement of monopoly than prevention of theft.

If there were a way for artists to effectively bypass the system, or for value to consumers to have sway in the market price, this may not be an issue, but it is. In reality, the system means more theft, so artists see less revenue, and I'd imagine that artists would go for an alternative as readily as many consumers. And further, if there were some way to do away with it, there'd likely be far less of a culture of theft, or say, less communally supported resources for it, so artists might conceivably be able make money if they attempted to go sans-label.

Obviously these are just more reasons why the system is broken, but the difference is the availability of a market solution. And if there isn't in fact, a treatment for the disease rather than the symptom, I really only see SOPA as reasonable if it were immediately followed by anti-trust legislation against some big name labels.

</comment><comment><USER15> While I agree that the protection of copyright is a noble pursuit (yes I believe people should be paid for things they create if they request to be paid), the recording industry is going about it in totally the wrong way.

Time and again, people have proven that if there is a SIMPLE EASY alternative, then we will use it. Take a look at Steam, Spotify, Amazon etc. All of these people provide a service that is easy to use, and despite there being a simple way to pirate the content provided on most of those services (and btw, this here is the big secret), MOST PEOPLE DON'T.

Most of the time, if there is a valuable product out there, then consumers have no problem paying for it. Yes, there will still be piracy for a variety of reasons just as there will always be physical theft, e.g. too high a cost, people are too poor etc..., most people support artists and content creators and are willing to pay for their use of those products.

Game manufacturers are starting to catch on, so are software producers with the emergence of app stores (the restrictions on those platforms are another matter entirely and I won't judge them here), but despite the fact that the music industry is older than either of those industries, it is aiming to shut down the only platform in modern society that can push their profits incredibly high if they do it right.

Yes, to do this right (and I am not saying Spotify or ITunes have this down), they would have to invest, A lot, but given how much they are investing in lobbying for SOPA, it is a joke to think they couldn't devote a tiny bit of their über profits to developing a platform that actually works.

P.S. earbitscom - Here is an alternative. One that your site goes some way towards providing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to view copyright as a short-circuit path to fast promise-exchanges of the following form:

"I have a really interesting piece of information. In fact, I create this information, and it takes a lot of work. For whatever reason, you want the information. I'm happy to share it with you, for a price far lower than the cost of creation, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else." Copyright is a short-circuit process whereby anyone who has ever received the information in whatever way (including hearing/seeing it in public) is legally treated as though they agreed to the above terms.

I think that _some kind_ of "I'll give you info X if you promise not to redistribute it" structure is not a priori a bad idea. Obviously, it is unclear that those promises would be upheld in practice ... but at that point I believe it becomes a market question of whether people are willing to live up to their promises and not a question of bad policy.

Copyright, as an approximation to such a structure, is fundamentally problematic because it attempts to make the above exchange work without:

a) having to trust people (the law is used to scare them into behaving)

b) the receivers of the information having felt like they made a valuable promise in return for the valuable information (the receivers are told they are getting something that is "owned" as opposed to merely "not public knowledge")

</comment><comment><USER17> >> But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don't see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

It's not that simple to "solve" piracy with technology. Technology inherently makes it easy to copy and share things. The changes will have to come from the businesses that accept that they have a failed business model. They must accept that have no realistic way to continue.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is an interesting point.

I have no idea, but is it reasonable to make the claim that the DMCA is flawed? By that I mean, is it excessively annoying / ineffective to actually _use_ the DMCA for its intended purpose?

(I'm not referring to DMCA abuses... just whether it's fundamentally broken or not.)

I haven't really given it much thought. I always assumed that the DMCA was a reasonable middle ground. But is it?

<comment><USER19> If you believe that the purpose of the DMCA is to make it so you can sit back and do nothing and all piracy magically stops by Sheer Force of Law, it doesn't work.

If you believe the purpose of the DMCA is to give rights holders a certain amount of power to self-enforce and are willing to concede that it won't all be stopped, it works pretty well.

If your opinion is somewhere in between, adjust as needed.

I think if earbits wanted to clean up his essay a bit he should come out and state clearly and explicitly what his goal for his desired legal regime is. I suspect he's sneaking in an implicit requirement that it be perfect on us, and if you accept that you'll _never_ be satisfied. There is no set of tools that the government can hand the industry to eliminate piracy. Even SOPA isn't draconian enough. On the other hand, once you accept that a certain amount of lossage is inevitable and that we expect rightsholders to only really have to chase down violations on the largest sites and have the tools to catch the vast bulk, the argument that the DMCA is some sort of grossly flawed bill becomes much, much harder to just float by without justification. There's a huge gap in the logic there, which I think is what some people are choking on without quite consciously realizing it.

I suspect that actually filling in that gap will inevitably erode the perceived power of the argument, though. He complains technical people aren't working out how to solve a problem that he can't actually give his true requirements for without losing his audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you. What's been conspicuously missing from the entire SOPA debate is how there does exist rampant and willful violation of copyright currently hidden under the safe blanket of the DMCA and that this is a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed.

SOPA is not the right way to do it but denying the reality makes the anti-SOPA side's message not being heard by those across the aisle.

<comment><USER21> Would you mind giving examples so we can understand what scale of problem you're alleging?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I > don't see people in the technology community making real and productive > proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

If this is the crux of your argument (and I fully believe it is), then your entire premise is flawed. There are big players making major inroads into this problem already. You might have heard of some of them, like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Market, Steam, and Origin.

You should read what Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, the owner of Steam (which is often credited with singlehandedly saving PC gaming as an industry) has to say about piracy: <http://www.gamefront.com/gabe-newell- piracy-is-a-non-issue/>

The solution isn't DRM, or dispatching special ops to assassinate teenagers who pirate Ke$ha music, or giving corporations an internet killswitch. The solution isn't even to eliminate piracy. You can't, and you'll never be able to. Beyond that, you don't even _need_ to eliminate piracy. What you want to eliminate is lost sales. There's a lot of conflating piracy and lost sales, especially by the content producers, and it's utter bull.

If Newell is correct (and I have every reason to believe that he is), then the way you capture sales lost to piracy is you establish distribution that is easier and more accessible than piracy, and people will use it. The "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is old and tired, but there's a nugget of truth in it - there are two general classes of content pirates; those who would buy the item, but for whom piracy is more convenient, and those who wouldn't buy the item, and take it because they feel entitled to it. There's a third, smaller class, who would buy items, but lack the finances to do it, but it's arguable that that's not a lost sale, and in all three cases, you're still achieving greater distribution, which does make at least some contribution to your product's success, however nebulous. That's not to make an excuse for piracy, but I firmly believe it to be a reality of any form of content distribution.

The consumers have proven over and over again that we'll legitimately buy things if there are easy, convenient ways to get them legitimately. You generally lose sales to piracy when it becomes _easier_ to pirate content, not when it becomes cheaper. I would argue that the majority of piracy is about convenience moreso than it is about money. The solution isn't to make it less convenient to be legitimate (hi, DRM), but more convenient, and all of a sudden, you find yourself recapturing those lost sales.

</comment><comment><USER23> The author claims "And I support record labels, because many of the albums I love would not exist without label financing, and I might not know about them if not for label marketing and promotion."

While this statement may be true about "the particular albums this particular author likes" it is untrue in general. A good song will get popular through various means. An artist does not need his life to be controlled by a middle man so that the audience can be advertised to. There are many ways in which the word spreads in the 21st century. The hard thing for an artist is to acquire the minimum artistic ability which probably means years of toil to reach a level when some one cares to listen to you. Making a song is a relatively inexpensive task. And once u have a reputation, you have mechanisms like kickstarter to fund your project. More alternatives will evolve as the recording industry dies.

</comment><comment><USER24> The SOPA outcry reminds me of global warming - specifically the generation that doesn't believe in it, that scoffs at the notion that man could even affect mother nature.

That generation seems so backwards and hubrisitic: the crazy idea that one could just take and take and take without giving something back, without respect for the balance of the system. "My actions don't count because mother nature will always figure a way to make it all work out okay." Could there be a more juvenile train of thought?

That's the fundamental problem when it comes to content; that's the fundamental problem when it comes to 'business models' - not the RIAA or MPAA or even TPB - but the hordes of people who have too little respect for the people who create the content that is voraciously consumed. Hordes that take advantage of a system and predictably cry out when anything threatens their spot at the teet.

The earth, of course, doesn't ask for money - just for respect - respect shown when each individual asks "Am I hurting you?" and when each individual wonders "Is there a better way I could be doing this?"

A lot of folks fancy themselves the smartest person in the room, but there is a lesson in respect for others that needs to be learned before true success can be realized. Put away the false dichotomy of how things used to be and how you want them to be; there is a real way they can be, and a balanced way they should be.

I remain optimistic. But then, it's sometimes tempered; Upton Sinclair said it well:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's is the thing: earbitscom _is_ an asshole. I think he might make a decent point toward the end of his piece, but he is an asshole and it shows in his comments and it shows in this article.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Don't fight the Internet." - Eric Schmidt

</comment><comment><USER26> "But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don't see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy."

As far as artists being compensated for their work, I really have enjoyed some of Jaron Lanier's talks where he argues that if the net had retained a design intended to keep "provenance" then every person would get paid for the bit's (no pun intended) they've input, and ideally this is the direction that would have been more equitable. As to the feasibility or how "realistic" his views can extend beyond "talks" , I have no idea. I do think within the current framework piracy is simply the norm and all the politics around are just a barrage of job opportunities to try and "solve" unsolvable problems. The point of the piracy "war" isn't to end it, it's to extend it out as long as possible. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Joey,

I am in the same business as you and I will say this old quote. "Do not cut your nose to spite your face".

So to fix lets say $50 billion worth of losses, you support destroying the Internet?

Do you realize that the way the DCMA is abused this moment, SOPA can and will be abused?

Based on your accusation of Grooveshark, let us take the reverse. do you realize with SOPA anyone can take down earbits every single day for any song and you have to prove you have the legal right to stream those songs?

Be careful what you wish for.

</comment><comment><USER28> > _far bigger dogs than me are on both sides of this fight and my opinion > isn't going to have an impact._

And that is where I stopped reading, unfortunately. Have a little faith in yourself, why don't ya?

</comment><comment><USER11> Well said. I think it would be interesting to see the reactions/votes/comments to this broken down by age group. I suspect those > 30, by and large, agree strongly with you, those between 25 and 30 would be a mixed group, and those younger than 25 would think you are a crazy person. I have no "data" to back this up but it's my guess.

Well written - thanks for sharing. (And I'm 40 if that matters)

<comment><USER29> _I suspect those > 30, by and large, agree strongly with you_

I wish to register myself as a counterexample in the strongest possible terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> HE'S A WITCH! BURN HIM!

</comment><comment><USER31> Our founding fathers believed that you should be very careful what powers you give to any authority because, even though they may be nice now, you have no idea who will be in charge in the future.

This is why any student of history is against SOPA. We believe that it does _not_ protect the rights espoused in the Constitution. We believe that it may be abused in the future.

Some people, such as yourself, seem to believe that this would never happen. You seem to think that because there is a need (in your view) for copyright holders to remove "owned" content, that we need a law like this. And further you seem to believe that its ok to have such a broad law, even though it may be open to such abuse.

UMG is just _demonstrating why the founding fathers were right_ and why you are naive and short-sighted.

Here's the thing: if UMG wasn't actively doing it, you'd still be naive and short-sighted. You'd still be an "asshole", in your words, and the founding fathers would still be right.

<comment><USER32> Why would you put "owned" in quotes there?

There's one thing that the OP is indisputably correct about: Content creators (should) own the content they create. When Isee someone do something like putting "owned" in quotes, it just immediately strikes me as someone who justifies piracy to themselves by saying that no one owns content.

<comment><USER33> Or at the very least, if nobody owns it (as some people seem to believe), then content creators shouldn't be deceived into thinking that they own it and that society won't just pass it around. Whether or not IP exists, society at large needs to mostly agree one way or another, or a lot of people will put a lot of effort into something they wouldn't otherwise, and they won't be reimbursed in the way that convinced them to put in the effort in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> He forgets that in most countries Copyright, IP, etc are public commons 'licensed' to private companies by the laws passed. It is not an automatic privilege and does change over time as the public adjusts its laws to match reality.

In other words MPAA and RIAA do not have an automatic right to their business models because as technology changes so than to how much we the public grant in rights to companies in form of copyrights, etc.

Remember this dumb fuck MPAA and RIAA when DCMA was passed it got redefined by negotiation and court cases. When SOPA gets redefined we do not have to be nice about it..fair warning..

<comment><USER35> I was very close to giving you an upvote, and then you resorted to calling the author a "dumb fuck" after he posted one of the most thoughtful, poignant essays I've recently read on the subject.

Because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't necessarily invalidate their opinions. If anything, in perhaps a better time, it would open the invitation for frank, but ideally _civil_ discussion.

<comment><USER36> _"Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves."_

 _"the most thoughtful, poignant essays I've recently read on the subject."_

You might want to read more...

<comment><USER35> In context, he's saying that to anyone justifying theft from the artists who are producing work.

I _did_ read more.

<comment><USER37> Copyright infringement, not theft. Artist's property before infringement == Artist's property after infringement.

<comment><USER35> If you say so. I'm not willing to get into that argument at the moment, but let's just say that yes, I fall into the camp that believes it does deprive the artists of revenue.

I play guitar, and I know and play with a lot of small / amateur musicians who literally pay their rent with their artistry.

I find it amazing that in the dawn of all the technology we have at our hands, people would honestly advocate that all of an artist's digitally distributed goods should be 'free', whether they intend it that way or not, relegating the artists to only being able to make money by performing in public shows, and I guess hoping against hope that the pirating public doesn't decide that that is too proprietary a way for them to distribute their music.

Hell, the way it's going, I can see people making an argument for holding artists down while we surgically remove their talent from them so that we can stick it up on the Pirate Bay. :-\

<comment><USER37> _I fall into the camp that believes it does deprive the artists of revenue._

No more than simply not buying _and_ not listening does, and I doubt you consider that "stealing".

 _I find it amazing that in the dawn of all the technology we have at our hands, people would honestly advocate that all of an artist's digitally distributed goods should be 'free', whether they intend it that way or not, relegating the artists to only being able to make money by performing in public shows, and I guess hoping against hope that the pirating public doesn't decide that that is too proprietary a way for them to distribute their music._

I find it amazing that some people can't comprehend that one can find the notion of copyright wrong, regardless of its benefits.

I also note that buyer have shown multiple times that they're willing to pay way more than they need, even if they can get it legally for $0.01, so that assumption that it would relegate the artists to just public shows remains to be proven.

<comment><USER35> Not buying and listening doesn't derive benefit from it.

If you don't believe in copyright as a natural right, and as a result, simply do not purchase music that you find objectionable on whatever grounds, then I support you 100%.

Regardless of whether or not copying the material deprives them of a tangible good, it didn't cost them nothing to produce the work. Instruments are expensive, recording time is expensive, distribution is expensive, etc.

More to the point, I believe that even if you don't consider the artist the owner of the work, then I believe you should respect that they are the owners of its distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > _Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves._

I really don't think it's the recording industry that's making you look like an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER31> "There is a plan to murder 6 million jews. Some of you have written in to ask me to condemn this plan. Unfortunately, I cannot condemn this plan, because none of you have come up with a reasonable alternative."

I don't think you can use the excuse that we don't have a way to support your business model, to turn around and support fascism.

<comment><USER39> Godwin'd

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm not going to argue, but this one thing always bugs me, and it happens all the time:

"You get people like Universal, who yanks down a Youtube video that they have no copyright claim to, simply because they don't like it and they can. This is suppression of free speech and a violation of the most important right in our country."

Only the government can suppress free speech. If you're talking to someone and I come in and shout over you so nobody can hear you, I'm not limiting your freedom of speech, I'm just being an obnoxious asshole.

<comment><USER40> If there's a law that says you can call in the police to drag people away if they don't shut up when you tell them to, it certainly is an issue of freedom of speech.

<comment><USER39> Maybe the law itself is unconstitutional (I won't argue that either), but there is nothing that I, a private party, can do to you, another private party, that will violate your right to free speech.</comment></comment></comment>