Github and Engineyard part ways - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-and-github-transition/ <comment><USER2> Hey all. Wanted to chime in the discussion.

My blog post is direct and to the point. There's honestly no mystery about this, I laid out all the details, possibly excepting one.

We designed our infrastructure offering 3 years ago. We _knew_ that the vast majority of websites would produce nearly read-only file I/O. GFS's less than stellar write performance isn't a problem in that typical case.

Along comes Github, and they have an entirely different disk I/O profile to the rest of our customers. Github was built on a shared-something architecture because GFS made it quick and easy to get up and running, developing features, and attracting users. This is a good thing!

Github has been very vocal about their dislike of the GFS filesystem we use for shared filesystem access. GFS doesn't scale forever, and we've never suggested it does. It could scale far larger than it has at Github, but fizx hit the nail on the head: we weren't willing to do it for free, and Github was unwilling to pay our price.

We warned Github many, many moons ago that given their growth rate, in order to scale their application smoothly and inexpensively, a shared-nothing architecture was eventually going to be needed. We offered to help them with that architecture, as we saw Github running wonderfully atop a cloud service such as EC2.

Rather than do the re-architecture now, they've chosen instead to move to a vendor who can provide them a high performance, high availability, non- commodity, proprietary network file server infrastructure. I suspect it will work well for them, and we'll all enjoy a faster Github. :-)

From my perspective, I really want everyone to understand that there's no bad blood on the EY side, and hopefully none on the Github side. Business is business, decisions need to be made each and every day.

<comment><USER3> I much prefer being talked to this way instead of hearing about "non-Ruby repositories."

<comment><USER4> Personally, I like hearing about both the technical and the commercial reasons driving a business decision. The fact that GitHub did not serve Ruby projects exclusively (or primarily) was an important factor to EY - why should they neglect to mention that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think they could have worded this better: "GitHub offers the largest free storage quota among the big SCM hosters, and we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to subsidize that quota for non-Ruby developers."

It sounds odd Engine Yard hosts an entire for-profit company for free just in exchange for some complimentary accounts.

My imagination tells me GitHub is tired of being slow and Engine Yard couldn't do anything more to help them. Instead of the news being "GitHub Leaves Engine Yard Because It's Too Slow" the news is "Engine Yard Kicks GitHub To The Curb Because GitHub has Non-Ruby Repos."

I don't see either headline being positive towards Engine Yard.

<comment><USER5> Ok, as far as I can tell, the real story is that Engine Yard relies on a GFS/SAN setup that doesn't scale in the unique way that Github needs.

If you think about it, Github is one of the few sites that actually directly uses the filesystem heavily. Everyone else hits scaling issues on the DB first.

      The sad thing of all of this is it's not really a matter
      of scaling, and it never has been. Our bottleneck has
      always been the file system. GFS just... sucks. I'm sorry,
      but I have to say it. Case in point, your graph. The first
      rebuild I ran timed out because of GFS. The second one ran
      fine, took maybe a minute to process, if that. GFS impacts
      everything... gem build failures due to cloning... GFS.
      Network graphs taking long time to build... GFS. Caching
      jobs not completing... GFS. I think you see where I'm
      going here. There's no plans to deploy the new code to the
      live servers, and I think the reason is that we're afraid
      it'll make GFS performance worse, not better. But on the
      new servers where we don't have to fight GFS, it's
      amazing.

<comment><USER6> Funny thing is that we told github that gfs would not scale for them over a year ago, we also outlined how to move to a shared nothing chunk server architecture. They didn't take our advice so it's mostly their own architecture decisions that were holding them back with regards to gfs.

Anyway there seems to be plenty of airchair quarterback on this one. The real story is that we can't afford to host them for free anymore.

<comment><USER7> FWIW - thanks for hosting them for so long. GH is a wonderful service, and I'm sure EY contributed greatly to it's success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When evaluating hosting providers, the quote Engineyard gave us was tremendously expensive.

They offered a great deal of value-added services, but we found that it would be cheaper to go with the second-most expensive option (Amazon EC2) while also hiring a qualified full-time sysadmin.

Whether this was a wise choice or not given our experience with EC2 is up for debate. But even if we had gone with Engineyard and had no problems at all it would be hard to justify a couple developer's salaries for it.

<comment><USER9> Just out of curiosity, what were your options that were cheaper than EC2, and why'd you reject them?

<comment><USER8> There were several hosting services that were a good deal cheaper. It costs $576/mo to run an extra large EC2 instance fulltime, while purchasing a server with similar specs only costs $2k or so. The data center across town could give us an equal number of server power for much cheaper. We're in our own data center right now, in another city, and we simply have a contractor we pay to go in and occasionally replace broken equipment. It really is quite cheap to do it this way.

Various hosts offered greater degrees of managed services at various prices. None really offered the flexibility that EC2 offered, or offered that much over simply colocating our own servers. With less traffic or fewer servers I can see many of these hosts being a great deal.

There also were several places that gave us completely screwy quotes that I can imagine were only meant to trick CEOs who don't know any better. One example is a place that offered us the use of an HTTP load balancer for the "low, low price" of $1000 a month. A lot of places offered expensive managed services, but when talking to the people who would serve us it was clear they didn't know what they were talking about. We did not seriously consider these places.

To Engineyard's credit, they were only managed host who sounded like they had knowledge that would be really valuable to us. They also made clear that they would devote significant resources to getting our site working smoothly. We would have paid a premium for this service, but not the premium they asked.

EC2 offers an amazing amount of flexibility that we found highly valuable. A sysadmin and developer spent most of a day diagnosing an issue with a DB server that ended up being a flaky drive. In EC2, we would have simply killed the server, fired up a new instance, waited an hour for its replication to catch up, and returned it to the rotation.

To return to EC2 we would have to drastically reduce the load on our MySQL instances, since we found that EBS volumes had somewhat unpredictable and not that great performance. Reducing our reliance on MySQL is something we're doing anyways, since on its current course it would have been difficult and expensive to continue scaling up in any data center.

<comment><USER9> Not to second-guess you, but extra-large reserved instances going full-time for 3 years go for $250/mo via [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower- pricing-for-amazon-...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/lower-pricing-for- amazon-ec2-reserved-instances.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jesus Christ, there's a lot of drama-mongering in this thread. Grow the fuck up, it's a business decision that both sides had an interest in seeing happen.

</comment><comment><USER11> > We identified the bottlenecks and supported GitHub and the community by > making patches to ssh to allow key lookup in MySQL rather than a text file. > That remains, to this day, one of the finest examples of Engine Yard support > and it makes me extremely proud just thinking of it.

This seems... odd to me. It doesn't feel like the right boundary between businesses. From a hosting provider, I expect good, steady service, reboots, a root console, and that they'll fix anything that's on their end (hardware, for instance).

Patching ssh is development work, and is something I would expect to pay for to meet specific goals, but not something that comes as part of my hosting package. I mean, what if you are just cruising along, and _don't_ need any deep hacking over a couple of months. Is your money being wasted? With actual developers, I could redeploy them to do other things. Can I do that with EY?

They seem like really good, sharp guys, but I don't quite get the business, I guess.

<comment><USER2> From our perspective, it was a matter of helping our partner and the Ruby community succeed.

We're working really hard to make Ruby on Rails succeed. This is just one of the many ways that we've pitched in to help it do so.

If, during that downtime, when the "Twitter's problems are Ruby on Rails" FUD was running high, would anyone believe that a Github scale failure wasn't a Ruby on Rails problem? We weren't willing to test it, so we solved the problem, i.e. we put our money where our mouth is -- That Ruby on Rails scales just fine, the bottlenecks are generally elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> > From our perspective, it was a matter of helping our partner and the Ruby > community succeed.

I suppose what seems confusing to me is that there are a lot of things you _could_ do to help your customers succeed, but many of them are fairly expensive - such as cutting your rates, or doing high end development work.

With more basic hosting, say EC2, I know that Amazon isn't going to do beans for me, so I'm on my own. I know exactly what the price does and doesn't include, and what I have to provide myself. EY seems fuzzier... it's almost like having an extra developer on staff in terms of talent, but it is and it isn't: you can't tell that person to go off and do something else.

Say I move one of my sites to EY; is your "whatever it takes" attitude going to include fixing up my ugly design/graphics work?:-)

<comment><USER12> It seems to me that the patch wasn't for "GitHub, the EngineYard client", but instead, "GitHub, the Ruby community resource", just as they support JRuby, Rubinius, and Rails development.

If you operated a site that EngineYard saw as a valuable resource for the Ruby community, I'm sure they'd help you out in whatever way possible as well.

<comment><USER11> What you describe is that paying customers subsidize 'community resources', which is great for me as a mooching Rails (and github) user, but perhaps not so great for paying customers. I don't think they'd put it that way; and indeed I believe they must provide a lot of 'extras' for their customers for the cost of that service. Still though, it seems that it's a service that will be best with clients who make a lot of help requests, getting their money's worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Engine Yard and Github's business relationship aside, is anyone else sick of everything these days being about the tool or language people are using? For some reason we hear more from the Ruby side than any other about how great their language is, but frankly the only thing that matters are the products made from it. I don't know, I'm just kind of sick of Ruby fan boys.

<comment><USER14> _"we hear more from the Ruby side than any other about how great their language is"_

Um, that crown _unquestionably_ goes to a big chunk of the python community right now. Reddit alone provides a steady stream of both extreme fawning over python and vitriol targeted at ruby, and your comment and its upvotes demonstrate that it's present here, as well.

It's also quite a colossal double standard to complain about Ruby-specific hosts considering the existence of GAE, all the django-targeting hosting companies <http://www.google.com/search?q=django+hosting> and all the companies providing language-specific services for PHP, Java and every other mainstream language.

<comment><USER13> I'm not complaining about the hosts, I'm complaining about the extreme focus we put on the language being used rather than the products being made.

<comment><USER14> _"I'm complaining about the extreme focus we put on the language being used rather than the products being made."_

What "extreme focus on the language"?

Simply mentioning "Ruby" in the context of a Ruby-only hosting company's decisions does not constitute "extreme focus" any more than mentioning "Python" or, more recently, "Java" when discussing the Google App Engine. It's completely uncontroversial to anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind.

Also, the services provided by the companies (or as you put it, "the products being made") are Ruby and Git hosting, with EY also maintaining several Ruby implementations. I'm not sure how you could say anything about EY's "products being made" without mentioning Ruby.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps in the context of what services EY are providing it isn't controversial, since they clearly just provide Ruby hosting. In general though I feel like lately everyone is so dead set on the langs/tools they are using that we tend to focus on the languages rather than the general CS topics behind all of them. This was just a good time to bring up my annoyance I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bottomline, it's a business decision, I'm sure if staying with EngineYard was an option they would have gone that route. Moving to EC2 is probably a lot cheaper than other pricey, like RackSpace solutions. It's part of growing up, you sometimes have new friends, but never forget those you grew up with. I wonder how many new EY customer use their github accounts ?

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have any idea what host github is moving to?

<comment><USER17> We're moving to Rackspace.

<comment><USER18> Cloud or dedicated/managed?

<comment><USER17> Real hardware and lots of it. Once we get moved over and everything's humming along nicely, we'll do a writeup or two about the new infrastructure.

<comment><USER19> Nice, I'm really looking forward that to that. I'd love to hear about the transition too - big moves aren't easy, as I'm sure you guys know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Silly question: the GFS referred to here is Global File System (<http://www.redhat.com/gfs/>) not Google File System, right?

<comment><USER2> You are correct, sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it's rather funny that this would never be news if not for the keywords. I mean, a customer changes a hosting provider for business reasons. Yawn. Who cares.

But, drop in "Ruby" and "Git" and see it as front page news on HN with a discussion going off on tangents.

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't offer a free storage quota or limit how many projects you can host. There, problem solved. The people who leave will no longer be a drain on your servers and the people who stay will be paying for the maintenance of those servers.

<comment><USER23> That would kill the majority of open source projects hosted on github, free hosting for public repos is one of the reasons it's so great. I'm willing to pay for private repos, but if I had to pay for my public ones too, I'd just not host them on github.

<comment><USER22> Maybe those open source projects should charge a fee as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does this mean I'll no longer get a free GitHub account as an EngineYard customer?

EDIT: N/M, found the answer.

Does this mean I can have a free GitHub account because I'm also a Rackspace customer :)</comment>


Struggles Developing a Commercial WordPress Plugin - <AUTHOR> https://deliciousbrains.com/struggles-developing-commercial-wordpress-plugin/?utm_source=Email+marketing+software&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-article&utm_content=struggles-developing-commercial-wordpress-plugin <comment><USER2> I've authored commercial membership plugin memberwing a while ago. Total revenues including consulting fees and subsequent sale of it as a business (with more of subsequent consulting) are in 6 figures. It's a good strategy of free version for promotion of commercial version although Wordress is strict in terms of how much you allowed to pimp your commercial stuff through their free plugins repository.

If your plugin helps people to make money - price tag could be higher vs. utility plugins.

To protect my commercial plugin from disassembling I've developed my own PHP encoding system (zencrypt) that worked in 100% of all hosting accounts.

Paypal is a popular payment processor to sell through although nothing prevents buyer from buying and then requesting refund next minute and Paypal will not always be on your side for digital products. I've created my own commercial license tracking system wrapped in encoded PHP that also warns about expiring license and asked for renewal. If buyer pulls "refund" trick on me - I've deactivated license remotely and that disabled plugin for offending customer.

Consulting was a big source of revenues as some customers wanted to add this and that feature and some ended up paying $10,000-20,000 per lifetime for extras. This is pretty impressive considering that PHP is not exactly big money making skill.

<comment><USER3> And all it takes is one college kid a weekend to break your system. And you'll lose more than half of your revenue stream.

<comment><USER4> Yeah - [http://www.almahdi.cc/programming/zencrypt-php- encoder](http://www.almahdi.cc/programming/zencrypt-php-encoder)

<comment><USER2> He suggests using ionCube and alike.

The biggest problem with ionCube is that it requires support from hosting company providers. Some do not support it and then your customers cannot use your ionCube-encoded software.

Zencoder offers 100%-hosting supported solution. It's ability to be decoded by geeks is not a problem. It's 80/20 solution and it good enough for wordpress- plugin protection type of purposes. Definitely worth effort from my side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >It is generally accepted these days that commercial plugins are sold with an annual license giving the customer 1 year of access to support and software updates.

As a person developing WP based sites for a small business, this is a huge sticking issue. I absolutely agree support should be charged for on a case/time based basis, but limiting updates essentially means the site will be broken after the license term. WP moves fast enough that keeping up with core/plugin/etc revisions on at least a quarterly basis is necessary if you don't want your site to be broken or hacked.

I think the minimum for at least security/compatibility/bug fixes should be 2-3 years. The products we sell have a 3-year warranty for all defects, yet your proposed software business model wont do that.

Last point: you want $90-1000/year to upload databases to S3? Isnt this a trivial amount of developer effort to automate? I am not a developer by any means, and I could do this fairly quickly. Numerous high quality plugins will do backups for free and writing a cron job to upload these to S3 would take a few minutes. If I'm just misunderstanding, your page is doing a poor job on selling me the real advantages.

<comment><USER6> I think the majority of wordpress website owners have a very basic understanding of technology. This means it's possible to build and monetise plugins that do things you and I might consider trivial - and that's a good thing if it's done well and customers derive real value in exchange for their $/£'s.

It's extra overhead for developers to update an application to fix security/compatibility/bug fixes without including new features too. There would need to be two versions of the app, one with just bug/security fixes and one with bug/security fixes + new features. That's two code bases, two sets of testing required, two sets of releases and release notes/change logs. As a result, asking customers to pay for a year of upgrades/support seems fair. If customers continue to derive value over that year, they can purchase again for another year. If not, they can abandon it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're dealing with many of the same issues at Eager ([https://eager.io](https://eager.io)). We're considerably younger as app stores go, going us a shot to iterate. The insights in write ups like this are therefore very helpful.

<comment><USER6> Hey, I looked at your site and I don't understand why I would use Eager over the Wordpress official plugin directory. I'm a moron, help!?

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing their tool isn't just wordpress specific. I guess kind of a grander scale project than [http://sumome.com/](http://sumome.com/) but in the same vein.</comment></comment></comment>


How We Built Our 60-Node (Almost) Distributed Web Crawler - <AUTHOR> http://blog.semantics3.com/how-we-built-our-almost-distributed-web-crawler/

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. This post is an expansion of my comment <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4369590> on the excellent post 'How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours' ( <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4367933>)

Don't hesitate to ask me any questions.</comment>


The Case for Getting Rid of Borders – Completely (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/get-rid-borders-completely/409501/ <comment><USER2> That seemed... pretty unconvincing. It seemed to boil down to "Restricting people by national borders is immoral, therefore there's no moral defense for it, therefore it's immoral".

Yes, it tried to do a bit better than tat. It tried to make a case that restricting people is immoral. But if you didn't already assume that it was, the argument was... rather unconvincing.

It also assumes that no moral case can be made for borders, instead of actually taking such an argument seriously and addressing it.</comment>


Show HN: TGmeetup – A collection set of technical groups' information (meetup) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TGmeetup/TGmeetup <comment><AUTHOR> This is a collection set of technical groups' meetup. Collect the technical meetup information and get the activity from meetup platform, such as Meetup, KKTIX ... etc. The user can use this tool to find technical meetup and attend it. This project provide CLI, Web, Google Calendar, RSS, GitHub Issues to show the events.</comment>


How to Put Natural Gas Meter Online with SimpleCV and Scikit - <AUTHOR> http://gas.paralelnipolis.cz/ <comment><USER2> Cool, this is something I had on my project backlog. Actually, they had to monitor the same type of gas meter I have in my basement (and they are produced in my neighborhood).

Currently, it seems I just have to lurk around on HN long enough until someone posts a solution for a thing I was thinking about.</comment>


An Editor for Composed Programs (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/an_editor_for_composed_programs.html <comment><USER2> " _What I 've discovered is that SDE is a wonderful way of guessing someone's age: those under 40 or so have rarely heard of SDE; and those above 45 [2] tend to either convulse in fits of laughter when it's mentioned, become very afraid, or assume I'm an idiot. In other words, those who know of SDE have a strong reaction to it (which, almost invariably, is against SDE)._"

Very, very true.

The run-the-compiler-in-the-background approach is much more successful.

<comment><USER3> Would Emacs' paredit be considered SDE? If so, that would be a huge counterpoint. Everyone I've talked to that's gotten up to speed with it has loved it.

<comment><USER2> As far as I know, it doesn't require that the file always be syntactically valid. It just helps you to do that.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How many miles do you think you've scrolled today? - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrolltrotter/mppejknbhapogefdpekbpalahphlhgdm <comment><USER2> Can "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"

Chrome extensions that require such extensive permissions make me extremely nervous and I don't think I'm alone. Is there a way to build this in a way that didn't require such elevated privileges?

<comment><USER3> It's been a while since I dabbled in Chrome extensions, but if nothing has changed, then not as a Chrome extension, unfortunately. If you mean theoretically, then of course; Chrome could let extensions subscribe to particular event hooks and whatnot and get very fine-grained about it. I expect that would actually be too fine-grained for most users, but what they have at the moment is a system where installing almost any extension feels quite risky. I'm not sure that Google really want Chrome extensions to exist, though. It feels like a very neglected part of Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the last part, I agree with you from a developer's point of view as well. The review process is a shambles at the moment. Sometimes the review process can take weeks and one can still get rejected with no explanation. I understand the need for a manual review when an extension asks for powerful permissions like this one does but an approval time of more than a week is a bit much. And every subsequent update to the extension (even a small description change) also goes through the same review process. Imagine a critical bug fix taking more than a week for approval! It feels like they want to shut down their doors for individual developers. In comparison, firefox took only 2 hours to approve the same extension.

<comment><USER4> Firefox only does manual reviews on "Recommended Extensions"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was once in a seminar led by one of the world's pre-eminent primate researchers who explained that, without any irony or humor, he refused to scroll when reading emails--Anything important should be immediately visible.

<comment><USER6> This is also standard journalism practice, and I use it all the time as a somewhat heuristic for news article credibility.

Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article, and the least important at the end. This is tradition from print newspapers, where your article would be cut if the editor didn't have enough space. Sometimes only the first paragraph would make it into print, so you'd better make sure all the important details are in there.

If I'm reading an article and it doesn't have all the important information before the fold, there's a high probability (in my experience) that other issues exist (eg shoddy sources or plain factual errors).

<comment><USER7> > Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an > article

In online journalism practice many do the exact opposite. They make you read paragraph after paragraph of speculations and bullshit before elaborating/explaining their click bait headline. Anything to make you stay and scroll so their ads get more screen time.

<comment><USER8> Relating to another HN submission today about site optimization: my brain interprets this as "a slow loading site" and I just abandon the page after the first paragraph or two (exception: some private blog pages).

Then again I started reading print newspapers about 40 years ago and this was also the approach for reading the paper so I learned a long time ago to be parsimonious with my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A long time ago when I used to spend almost all my day in front of a computer, I wrote a program that would measure the physical distance my mouse cursor had moved thinking surely it must be several hundred meters a day. In fact it was only about 30 metres per day. I imagine to scroll a mile would take several months for the average web user.

<comment><USER10> It seems like cursor acceleration (breaking the linearity between pixel and physical distance) would make this non-trivial; curious how you implemented it.

<comment><USER9> Well I wanted to specifically measure cursor distance rather than mouse distance so acceleration doesn't come into it. As long as you can sample the mouse position frequently enough, you can get an idea of how far it has travelled. All I had to do to convert pixels to physical distance was use a tape measure to get the width and height of the visible part of the screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This would be interesting to see on my phone at the end of the day. Even having decreased my social media and news consumption considerably over the last few years, I still catch myself mindlessly scrolling from time to time.

I would love the shameful alert that told me "you've scrolled twice as many miles as you've walked today" since I know the second set of metrics definitely exists. It may be what I need to quit the habit completely.

<comment><USER12> I think that would actually fit very well alongside eg Apple's "You've had 30 minutes of screen time today" messages

<comment><USER13> The Apple Lisa had a "mouse odometer" in software that tracked the number of pixels moved since startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to see a leaderboard there

<comment><USER15> Cow Clicker 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how well the "pixel distance scrolled" translates into the actual distance your finger moved the wheel.

<comment><USER17> This is a bit hard to calculate because of scroll acceleration and inertial scrolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Within the last six months I've developed arthritis in both my hands (and ankles). Each morning when I wake up both of my hands are stiff like they've been in ice water.

My right index finger which I use for scrolling using my mouse scroll wheel (and typing). when I bend in in the morning my index finger it will make a snapping noise. None of my other fingers make the snapping noise.

The odd thing is it isn't the joint. If I bend my fingers in the morning and my index finger snaps you'd think it was the joint. I experimented and cracked my index knuckle after it made the snap and the knuckle snapped.

Anyway that's a tale of my bizarre life somewhat related to this topic.

<comment><USER19> I find scroll wheels dangerous on the index finger, as it gets quite a workout. I prefer touchpads/ mousepads for scrolling, but I'm curious if foot pedals would be better.

<comment><USER20> Interesting—I scroll with my middle finger, always have. I thought everyone did. Makes sense in retrospect that different people would find different "intuitive" ways of using a mouse, though!

<comment><USER18> I do now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Source: [https://github.com/prashantbaid/scrolltrotter](https://github.com/prashantbaid/scrolltrotter)

</comment><comment><USER22> I will log this as the first appearance (to me) of the "light mode also available" pendulum swing! See you all in a year!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This was a very intentional decision to keep light mode as "also available".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://whatpulse.org/](https://whatpulse.org/) has been doing this sort of metrics gathering for years. Keyboard and network stuff too.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you're tired of scrolling on your phone's browser: [https://www.jumpbrowser.com/](https://www.jumpbrowser.com/)

<comment><USER25> Shame that's only iOS - is there something similar for Android?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How long until web sites start offering Frequent Scroller Miles?

</comment><comment><USER27> I scroll for light-years because of my logitech mx master 2s which has a ball bearing on the wheel so it can go flying.

With a high refresh monitor it's just fun to scroll around!

</comment><comment><USER28> How did you go about developing this? Am curious to see what 'level' of chrome its implemented on

</comment><comment><USER29> They should make it so the distance you run today becomes your allowance for how much you get to scroll

</comment><comment><USER30> I've always joked that some people run a marathon and some people scroll a marathon.

</comment><comment><USER31> I want a system-wide app measuring scrolling distance for smartphones

</comment><comment><USER32> Any firefox equivalent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrolltrotter...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrolltrotter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "You will need Google Chrome to install most apps, extensions and themes.

Download Google Chrome"

Yeah buddy, just wait for me to install that. Any Firefox equivalent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you go - [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrolltrotter...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/scrolltrotter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nice one PB

</comment><comment><USER35> 1/64th of a mile

</comment><comment><USER36> 3 parsecs</comment>


New mobile ecommerce startup ShopZero is selling free products - <AUTHOR> http://shopzero.net <comment><USER2> What's the catch?</comment>


Matt Cutts's Idea for an Android/iPhone app: Call Me a Cab - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/cab-finder-application/

<comment><USER2> This is built in to the Maps functionality on the iPhone. Typing in "taxi" will show me the details of the nearest cab companies and touching the phone number that appears will let me call them.

Getting the nearest free cab to drive to me would take a little bit more than an iPhone app - you'd need a whole new business model built around it.</comment>


Returning to Second Life - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/returning-to-second-life/ <comment><USER2> Many years ago when Second Life was a small community of incredibly cool and gifted people (around near the end of beta/beginning of live), I've written some games there. I've long abandoned SL, but the games still exist in world (because I have a lifetime account, so my virtual land ownership never expires).

I've set the games to email me when someone achieves a respectable score in one. I still occasionally get one of those emails. That's LSL (Linden Scripting Language) code that was compiled into bitcode years ago and the source hasn't been touched in any way since, and neither has the bitcode (or the script would've been reset and lost its memory - all the highscores are stored only in script memory) - and it still continues to run. This amazes me. That's the kind of stability many webhosts can only dream of.

Oh, the SLURL is on the bottom of these emails if you want to check out some really old games: [http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stillman/65/81/24](http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stillman/65/81/24)

<comment><USER3> I used to be on the teengrid, and even some of those guys were insane. I used to know someone who had built a javascript version of the viewer. There was no viewing but you could access everything else (inventory, chat, map).

Teen grid also lacked the ability to get items from the main grid so the average build quality of anything was pretty bad. I wonder how many of those builders went on to work in 3d animation or something similar. Pretty much everyone I know who used to play it either ended up in coding or some artistic career.

<comment><USER4> That was Katherine Berry's AjaxLife: [https://my.secondlife.com/katharine.berry](https://my.secondlife.com/katharine.berry)

She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to lose interest in developing within SecondLife: [http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl- ui](http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui)

I was on the teen-grid, too. In my time there, I met many really gifted teen programmers. They partly inspired me to pursue computer science, and, years later, I've even had the unexpected pleasure of meeting some of them in person!

<comment><USER5> > She recently wrote about an experience with LindenLabs that caused her to > lose interest in developing within SecondLife: > [http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl- > ui](http://kathar.in/post/149846332570/lsl-ui)

Augh. As someone who, back in the day, put significant effort into building up a semi-sane framework for UI construction in my own LSL scripts... that looks so much nicer than what I had to work with it's painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good memories. I built the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Second Life [0] in 2007. I met Philip Rosedale in August 2007, he saw it and said it was the most beautiful building ever made in SL.

Then, I found my job at AWS through Second Life. [1]

Years later, the project became secondary to me. Unfortunately, there was no way to backup my creation, and I didn't want to give 300$/month to Linden Labs. (unfair artificial constraint, to be honest). I shut it down. They might still have a backup somewhere, who knows?

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXPVJww9H5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXPVJww9H5c)

[1]: [http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by- amazon.com...](http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazon.com/)

<comment><USER7> opensimulator (opensimulator.org) is free and you can run it on your PC if you can find a way to extract your creations from SL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What amazes me about Second Life is that, despite 15 years of technology improvements, it's still an awful user experience to explore. Low framerates, janky loading, high latency movement.

<comment><USER9> I'm tempted to look at it the other way - it's amazing that it has been a success for the last 15 years despite low frame rates and janky loading. Suggests the user base don't care much.

<comment><USER10> > _Suggests the user base don 't care much._

And that's absolutely the case: users don't care _that_ much, despite the teraflops inside our GPUs.

While things have changed in the almost 30 years since " _Lessons from Habitat_ " [1] was written, one of the conclusions is still valid nowadays: the implementation is relatively unimportant.

The entire paper is a gem; worth checking it out. It has aged wonderfully well, and I never get tired of re-reading it over the years.

[1] [http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html](http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really liked SecondLife, and ran an early 3d Printing service for Avatars out of it called "Fabjectory" \- long since shut down.

Here's how it worked:

1\. I'd have avatars come meet me in my "studio" \- a floating cube with very basic geometry that was way up in the sky away from other objects.

2\. I'd use an app called OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) that was developed at Eyebeam to extract the avatar's geometry and textures.

3\. I'd then load up the 3D capture (which would be a mess) and clean it up and make a bunch of manual modifications to make the 3D design print worthy.

4\. I'd export the resulting image as VRML and then send it to my printing partner who would print them on "Sandstone" \- plaster infused with color inkjet and something like superglue.

Here's a picture I found on Google of them: [https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1102/1236026167_49aae2fc0b_b....](https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1102/1236026167_49aae2fc0b_b.jpg)

<comment><USER12> People still do such a thing in SL, but it's actually mostly called copybotting, and is used to steal items sold on the market. Really common as well. I don't really deal with SL anymore, but a friend of mine was sucked back into it. There's a large amount of people that are very unique, and exploitable. People exploit them for humor and profit as well.

</comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Technical challenges aside, I don't think VR will turn Second Life into a _Snow Crash_ Metaverse anytime soon.

Speaking of 2007, remember how hyped motion controls were? Remember how excited we got when we saw people "bowling" and "boxing" on Wii Sports? Remember the thrill of booting up LoZ Twilight Princess for the first time? Remember that first sword swing that was blocked on screen even as your real- life arm kept swinging, undaunted but by a pithy vibration?

Even with VR that didn't cost an arm and a leg and ran Second Life at 90fps without trouble, the simple fact is that without realistic force feedback, every user will be constantly reminded that they are not _actually_ flying a spaceship in zero G, they are not _actually_ being double-teamed in a mass orgy, and they are not _actually_ relaxing in mud bath at a sprawling spa.

True immersion is decades away. Until we have Star Trek holodecks or Metal Gear nanomachines, we are only fooling ourselves into believing that virtual reality is completely immersive.

We really ought to have a kind of Turing Test for VR to restrain the hype.

<comment><USER13> _Speaking of 2007, remember how hyped motion controls were? Remember how excited we got when we saw people "bowling" and "boxing" on Wii Sports? Remember the thrill of booting up LoZ Twilight Princess for the first time? Remember that first sword swing that was blocked on screen even as your real- life arm kept swinging, undaunted but by a pithy vibration?_

I remember other people feeling that way yes, but for myself and some others it felt like a big set a gimmicks. Motion control on the Wii wasn't really motion control, it was wiggle control; I remember complaining years ago motion control would only be really interesting what it was 1:1.

I don't feel that way about VR this time. Virtual reality is rough and it's it's in its early stages in terms of hardware, software, and the user experience, but it has so much potential. If anything VR right now reminds me of games back of the time of Wolfenstein and Doom, and I'm pretty excited. Having said that I'm not buying first generation VR gear, I put in my time with early computers. My generation two or three though I expected things are gonna be pretty damn interesting. I'm not a particularly optimistic person, but I am genuinely optimistic about this. I don't think full immersion is required for VR and especially AR to change the game.

<comment><USER14> Things got a lot more accurate on the Wii with the MotionPlus: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_MotionPlus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_MotionPlus)

<comment><USER13> Very true, and now really excellent motion control is standard VR fare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "According to Peter Grey, Second Life developer Linden Lab's senior director of global communications, Second Life's monthly active user count today totals "between 800,000 and 900,000.""

I find this pretty surprising. I wonder who they are. I never got the appeal of Second Life but if this is accurate then it clearly appeals to a group of people.

<comment><USER16> Bots play a pretty pivotal role in the game. There are benefits to "faking" traffic, in order to boost your search result. Likewise bots are the only way to interact with quite a few APIs, so even when it's silly to use a bot you're still forced to (bot referring to a modified client to do things like searching land, getting zone data, and similar).

As for who they are. There is baby boomer after baby boomer when it comes to real users (at least 8 years ago when I played. The youngest of the boomers). It's also worth noting that when it comes to the typical MMO, they are really really bad at providing a social experience. So Second Life as a game that doesn't have the grind or ways to kill other players, does a really good job of drawing in lots of the people who will play a game just to talk (since once you provide ways for The stereotypical Achiever/Grinder or Player killer to control gameplay they tend to dominate the game). Also very few games offer the level of expression and modification.

<comment><USER3> I played back when the teen grid was still a thing. You forget about the large collection of people in the midwest who are relatively isolated from other people. I've always described SL as a chat room with a 3d modeler and a scripting engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised the article didn't even mention "High Fidelity", a VR platform created by the original founder of Second Life.

<comment><USER18> How's that working out? I installed the client once, wandered around a bit, found it boring, and quit. Here's their promotional video.[1] The graphics are lame. It's like a video game from about 15 years ago. It looks worse than Second Life. Why isn't this thing up to AAA title graphics quality? What's the advantage over Second Life?

High Fidelity starts their world out as a boring flat plane. They should have started it out as good-looking natural terrain, with trees, shrubs, and grass. Use SpeedTree to generate a realistic looking world. That would set the standard for how good things should look. If people buy land and build things, the good-looking natural features will push them to do better work.

As people move around, they should wear the grass down a bit, and when there's enough wear, an NPC road-building crew moves in and builds a path. There should be an automated Department of Public Works which gradually installs public services.

And if an area is abandoned, grass should grow through cracks in the roads.

Amazon is coming out with a "Snow Crash" show. Somebody should have the Snow Crash metaverse running before it comes out.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=-ivL1DDwUK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=-ivL1DDwUK4)

<comment><USER19> I don't know how well user generated content of AAA graphics would work. An open world makes it even worse because the players have to be exposed to all of the things that keep performance in check. Those same things break any illusions of what they are looking at being more than a paper thin movie set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems to me that the types of immersive experiences described by sci-fi authors years ago and branded as the metaverse is currently alive and well in the form of popular PC games like GTA, ARK and PUBG. Its just not branded/consumed as VR, i.e. with headsets, and it lacks the open-world customization and connectivity that was assumed in many of the stories. I believe that is mainly down to limitations with realistic graphics needing to be prebaked and networking issues as well as lack of adoption of peer-to-peer systems like content distribution and payment.

I think that eventually we will move back towards the open-world, user-created and maximally immersive metaverse in a huge way. A few things will make that happen. One is peer to peer distributed services, which I believe will eventually replace most centralized services. It will just become the way we do distribute code, content, and money. Sure, people have been talking about this for many years, but while the adoption and applications haven't reached wide popularity, they continue to grow steadily. This is just as much about social change as it is about technology. And groups of people change and adapt slowly.

Another enabling technology will be real-time path tracing or ray tracing etc. This will probably be enabled by better hardware and/or custom chips designed for global illumination. If we can combine this effectively with procedural generation, that can really reduce the bandwidth requirements and make custom, on-the-fly networked loading of diverse complex realistic environments much more practical.

Another thing that will move us back towards those old-school metaverse visions is better VR hardware. When we have widely available inexpensive high resolution, lightweight, untethered displays and convenient, high-fidelity input devices, VR will become the default computing mode for large numbers of people. Within a few years those things will come together.

One last element of the metaverse stories is AI, which is also advancing quickly. So I think we will see that sci-fi vision fully bloomed within the next decade at the most.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder. How does SL compare to Minecraft? I went through a phase of playing quite a bit of Minecraft with strangers on a random server I picked. I was about double the age of most people there, the youngest one them being around 10 years old. It was a really great experience: from finding someone's creepy abandoned and boobytrapped temple, to saving Colin the chicken from running away, to cliff diving, to exchanging holiday gifts.

But how does it compare to something like SL where it seems you can create much more interesting scenarios?

<comment><USER22> I haven't touched SL in a long time, but it's quite different. Money plays a very real role in SL. It also lends itself very well to role playing, since you can make your character look however you want. There used to be lots of adult stuff as well. From Playboy mansion, over brothels to kinky, furry stuff. The modeling tools in general are so much stronger as well. I've randomly discovered a strange, Japanese inspirited palace where people dress up as horses and pull others around in wagons. I've watched Hollywood movies in in-game cinemas. It's very different from Minecraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I saw VR/AR coming back for whatever strange reasons as I am a VR pessimist, the first thing I wondered is why Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple don't buy LindenLabs...

<comment><USER24> As the article noted, VR and SL aren't compatible so from that perspective, there's nothing of value to buy.

The real value in buying Linden Lab used to be, in my opinion, the in-world currency called the Linden (or L$). For a long time, I thought that Linden Lab should've made the L$ available as an Internet-wide currency but now cryptocurrencies appear to be a better alternative.

<comment><USER23> I disagree - it's not compatible now, but it could be made so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Check out decentraland, its going to be revolutionary

</comment><comment><USER26> Organic community building is everything</comment>


The White Hat's Dilemma - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU-iRcUeA6p6fyEE4qUbSuFMqmSuWjRsL_4/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000 <comment><USER2> I used to work for Blizzard. The Chinese government requested that we modify the WoW client so that they could intercept all chat. As far as I know, no-one said anything, including me - and Blizzard, of course, was more than happy to comply, given the size of the market and the risk of being forbidden to do business there. There were plenty of other MMOGs happy to play ball and eat that cake.

I didn't say anything. It was happening to "them", Chinese nationals. Not only that, but "they" should know better than to say sensitive things online, because even if we didn't install the back door, I reasoned, it wouldn't be too hard to get that data through various other means.

I really regret not only my participation, but not making a big stink about it. No-one did. I strongly suspect that that same system is being being used domestically, now. Clearly it was the wrong thing to do. I've regretted my role in that implementation for several years. I shouldn't have participated, and I should have protested. Even if it didn't stop it, at least the company leadership might have felt the heat. But I was a coward and I didn't want to lose my job, didn't want to fight a legal battle, and, like I said, it was just China spying on it's people, which everyone knew they do anyway.

And who knows? The news probably would have been ignored, or, if it wasn't, I might have been branded as a coward and a disloyal employee, betraying the people who put food on my table. And I being under 30, overpaid, over- priviledged, etc. I can hear the Fox News commentators even now. That, to me, has been the most difficult thing about Snowden, is that here's someone who did the right thing, who revealed wrong-doing on the part of our government, and there are a lot of people who say he's the wrongdoer, who attack him as disloyal and worse. A back door in a game used by China? Who would even care about that? And if they did, I'd just be torn to shreds, unemployable and with heaven-knows-what kind of future.

The reaction to Manning and Snowden, particularly the lack of strong public support, sends a strong signal that people don't want to know. They don't want to upset the apple cart. They don't want to challenge the government, they don't want to question it, not even when it's clearly violating it's own most important rules - the rules that, presumably, we've been fighting to promote these last 200 years. It seems hopeless.

<comment><USER3> Fuck it, I'll go ahead and say it:

First, thanks for coming clean. You're a human being who's made a really bad decision.

You should feel terrible for this. "They" are not merely your possible friends, or your relative's relatives, or your neighbors' cousins... "They" are other human beings who might someday decide to stand up for their human rights. "They" are millions of people you sold out for easy "dinner" & "rent".

And now the tool you helped build to invade their privacy is likely being turned on all your real friends, and your real relatives, and your real neighbors. And you're not even getting paid anymore.

You should feel terrible for selling out for so little. You weren't as afraid of being unemployed as you were of having to do something. You were mentally lazy and your moral compass was clearly defunct.

Too bad your behavior is not undoable and you'll have to live with it for the rest of your life. Maybe you can do something to recover for it in the future.

Hopefully your ethical failure can serve as an example of what not to do.

<comment><USER4> What did you hope to accomplish with this post? "Here's someone who did something bad, who can't undo it, and who feels bad enough to come clean - let's rub it in so as to discourage others from doing so"?

<comment><USER5> I'd say that a clear goal of that post is to emphasize that it was a _choice_. To me Spothawk is rubbing in the fact that it was a decision.

<comment><USER6> And it's a lot of people's _' decision'_ to bury their heads in the sand about the implications of Snowden's leaks. In that light, why isn't it also directed at everyone who doesn't care, rather than one guy who does?

Edit: What about the employer's choices to go ahead with it? No anger directed that way? This guy should have fallen on his sword but his company gets a pass?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, every person in the chain needs to wake the f* up.

Please don't mistake my lack of attention to Blizzard's complicity as a 'pass'.

I actively campaign against folks who would bury their heads in the sand. In the past decade I have spent huge effort (preaching?) to convince my peers not to accept work in these Military Industrial jobs and to leave them if they're already there. I've had quite a bit of success in that regard, and I would encourage (as I tried in my response) that others would help educate their peers as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's an alternative vantage point, my vantage point, one I think makes these kinds of ethical quandaries easier to navigate:

* I'm not a "white hat" or a "black hat"

* I'm not deliberately involved in any kind of "cyber" conflict

* I don't do what I do because I'm battling the forces of evil, or organized crime, or anything else

Instead: I do engineering. The same way a contract driver developer does, or a Rails dev. I happen to work in a particularly challenging problem domain. My work happens to have some interesting implications. But those implications are not the reason I work in the field; I work here because it allows me to grapple with compilers, number theory, low-level networking, hardware, OS kernels, and every imaginable development platform. It's about the craft.

I find this vantage point, which appears amoral, makes the ethical dilemmas easier to resolve. If a company like Narus asks me to help them make a network monitoring system harder to evade, I don't have to put that request into some ethical framework that considers the good that application might do. I just turn the work down. Same goes for the US Government; no, sorry, not interested.

Total respect for Alex (the "white hat consulting company" he founded is iSec Partners, our sister company and former archrival). I get the sense that Alex engages intentionally with these dilemmas, that he wants to be a part of something larger than himself and, I think, larger than the craft. As a result, sure, he has to live a carefully examined life, and make sure the projects he's working on aren't skewing his compass. I admire him for picking his way through those problems. But I'm every bit as engaged with the field as Alex is, and I'm here to tell you that you _don 't_ have to get tangled up in these kinds of ethical problems if you don't want to.

<comment><USER8> Reading what you just wrote reminded me of the famous Edmund Burke quote: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing".

If it had not been for the acquiescence of engineers who took part in the creation of PRISM, XKeyscore, etc. we... well, we would not _have_ PRISM, XKeyscore, etc. Increasingly there is no such thing as an "amoral" position when it comes to a lot of these things -- you're either an entity who willingly chooses profit over principles, or you do something to defeat the evil as you see it (or, at least refuse to take part in it). In this day and age the conscientiousness of man is one of the last remaining defenses to fight the many evils, new or old, mercurial or familiar. It falls on all of us to think of the moral ramifications of our actions, in the workplace and off, and choose carefully and to the extent we comfortably can to see humanity continue prosperously.

I don't mean this to be a thoughtless, idealistic anti-NSA tirade, I'm frankly very okay with folks working on hip new technology that catches the bad guys, I just think your decision framework which is devoid of any ethical considerations is highly, highly dangerous and I wish for the good of us all that it doesn't catch on.

<comment><USER7> Did you read every other sentence of what I wrote? None of this has anything to do with my comment.

<comment><USER8> One, I don't think it's the HN law that all threads should follow in some precise linearity: there's such a thing as free-form debate. Two, my comment did have something to do with your comment. Three, you very often reply like this -- "did you read what I said?" \-- not that it matters much to me personally, but can you please start making an effort of at least trying to communicate such things in a little more civilized manner? The tone of such comments is often toxic and inflammatory.

<comment><USER9> His authoritarian tone squares nicely with his approach to ethics as expressed in threads like these.

<comment><USER7> I think you think this is a stinging comment, but it really says more about you than it does about me.

<comment><USER9> My comment being sincere, I don't expect it to sting you in the least. What a petulant reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great presentation and something that programmers in general (not just infosec) need to have a personal decision model for. Everyone should be able to make their own decision to these questions as they see fit, but the more we talk about issues like this the more we see where other people like us (who maybe were put into this position in the context of "work") have decided on a stance (and the repercussions of said stance) the better off we all are. We who work on machines and not man don't have an oath that we are taught to follow and/or live by, and I don't necessarily think we should. That being said, the Jr. programmer working for a small firm can encounter decisions of ethical importance as much as a black/white/grey/green/mauve hat infosec can. To me, this is the core value of what a site like HN provides and probably the main reason I read the comments on HN more than I do the articles.

</comment><comment><USER11> My favored moral framework for most situations is the noblesse oblige: If, by chance or by choice, you have the privilege of affecting a lot of people, you now have the responsibility of supporting the most marginalized members of that group, regardless of whatever prejudice against them you may have had.

This is, in a lot of cases, a nearly impossible obligation to completely fulfill, but in application, it leads to both a closer examination of privilege and to moral decisions and outcomes that are progressive.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd say correct answer almost always is to leave quietly. Let's leave doing immoral things to immoral people and let's hope their employers starve due to elevated fees.

Also if you live in US you should always put your own safety in the first place. US justice system becomes most significant threat to capable citizens.

</comment><comment><USER13> Slide 28. What does "IR" mean?

<comment><USER14> Incident Response

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thank you ALex for bring up these issues. I just would like to point out that ethics and morality are both normative propositions (in the sense that they are different cross culture and society). Basically what is consider desirable vs. undesirable behavior. As we all must have found out by now, what is consider desirable and undesirable that very different from place to place.

It would perhaps to be more constructive to consider a positive model of integrity (Positive as in positive theory in economics). In many ways we have confused morality and ethics with integrity. Integrity when distinguished in the positive model it can be apply consistently across culture, societies, groups or organization (kind like the law of gravity).

For those who are interested, you download the short paper by Dr. Mike Jensen on social science research network related to positive model of integrity:

[http://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274](http://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274)

</comment><comment><USER16> What letter was asked to be signed at the end?

<comment><AUTHOR> The EFF's CFAA reform letter. They had folks in the room to gather paper signatures from attendees, and remote folks will eventually get a chance to sign electronically.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/letter?utm_source=twit...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/letter?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it is worth thinking about the idea that whatever your particular moral framework is it should not be about 'making a difference' but making the most effective difference you can. Actually if you hold something to be important you should want to do the most that you can. Exceedingly often what this means is doing something different to the majority of people. Often this goes against conventional wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER18> I question the slide regarding trade secrets:

* the names are misspelled: first person is Sergey Aleynikov (not alinikov) and second person is Samarth Agarwal (not agrawal)

* in each circumstance, there was actual trade secret theft. That part is clear. The slide itself seems to suggest something beyond that, but they essentially took code that they wrote for their employer (and they signed contracts clearly saying that it belongs to the employers)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for catching the spelling mistakes.

The point of that slide is that trade secret theft is a very old problem, and that there is a long history of criminal and civil case law to look to when punishing that kind of action. Those individuals were all charged under the Economic Espionage Act and face extreme penalties. I see this as another version of overcharging under the CFAA; the Federal Government has one standard for doing something on paper and a much harsher one for the same activities while using an SVN repo.

I am not defending the actions of those men, I just feel that the civil remedies that have been used for decades are more appropriate than having the soul-destroying power of the US DOJ turned against them on behalf of their employers.

The ethical dilemma exists for the technologist who performs the investigation and testifies against her former co-worker. What responsibility does she have to see justice done? I don't have an answer, but that was the question posed by the slides on justice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have a link to a plain-text version of this that doesn't require access to the Google spyware site?

<comment><USER20> Are you asking for this? [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU- iRcUeA6p6...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU- iRcUeA6p6fyEE4qUbSuFMqmSuWjRsL_4/export/pdf)

<comment><USER21> I think you missed the whole "...doesn't require access to Google..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who is the finnish guy?

<comment><USER23> Mikko Hypponen, from F-Secure.

[http://mikko.hypponen.com/](http://mikko.hypponen.com/) [http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/](http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love the Ultima 4 reference

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Still my favorite game ever.

<comment><USER24> What class did you get?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't remember what I got the first couple of times I answered honestly. I do remember manipulating the system to become a Paladin, which perhaps negates the entire point of the morality system and makes me a rogue in real life.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, I did the same thing. I wanted to be a Ranger, because Aragorn in Lord of the Rings is one, so I manipulated my answers. Plus it's in the center of the graph, so I thought that had to be better.

But, I do recall I would get Mage (Honesty) if I did it, er... honestly. Today I get Bard (Compassion). I guess people really do change over the course of their life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why do people even sign NDA's ?

<comment><USER26> Have you ever worked for a company that didn't ask you to sign one?

That's not rhetorical, I'm curious--it seems that virtually every company has some amount of proprietary information, isn't that what drives competitive advantage in software?

<comment><USER27> I signed them when I was younger, but have been able to avoid them since a couple of years. In my opinion, the law should be enough in most cases.

Recently I was offered a good and well-paying job. Late in the recruitment phase there was this far-reaching NDA I would have to sign. I asked to be given two days to read and evaluate it, which apparently labeled me as someone very strange, I should just flip through it in 10 seconds and sign like everybody else.

Two days later when I questioned their HR/Legal about some of the clauses they got very uncomfortable, and tried to avoid making a big deal out of them, saying it was "standard" and "at this site, they had never taken anyone to court based on it".

I didn't sign, and hence they could no longer offer me the job. Oh well, their loss, they would have to do without the value I could provide to their business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Was this talk recorded?</comment>


Rumors of a 7-inch 'iPad mini' are becoming increasingly hard to dismiss - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/07/04/rumors-of-a-7-inch-ipad-mini-are-becoming-increasingly-hard-to-dismiss/

<comment><USER2> A 7-in iPad mini means that Apple would be competing with itself more than Android. If you have an iPad 1, you might "downgrade" to a iPad mini. Likewise, if you have an iPod Touch, you might upgrade to a mini. In neither case are they gaining new customers.</comment>


Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-what-facebook-knows-about-you <comment><USER2> This concerns me because predicting people's tastes and spoon feeding them the content they crave typically reinforces their views; especially topics related to politics or personal values. Confirmation bias is running amok on sites like Facebook where, sadly, a lot of folks get their "news". Based on personal observation, I don't think the majority of users are even aware of the optimization algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" Facebook also buys data about its users' mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers."_

Wow. Makes sense, but I hadn't really considered them doing this in addition to what they get from just observing user behavior and content analysis.

Propublica is also providing a Chrome extension (link on the article) that allows you to see (some of?) the data Facebook has.</comment>


Show HN: Lettuce – Tinder(design) + Pandora(personalization) for food - <AUTHOR> http://www.heylettuce.com/

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's me... but based on the description in the submitted title, I was thinking that this was going to be personalized suggestions for recipes, cooking or dishes, and not for restaurants. The 'Pandora' notion of recommending things based on genre/mood/flavor/style definitely cuts both ways between food and restaurants which makes this seem cool, but I have to say I wished this was for recipes/home cooking instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Right now we're focused on solving the "What's for lunch?" problem and layering in suggesting great places to eat for groups of friends. I can definitely see a time in the future where we support all types of solutions for what to eat, including preparing meals at home. Which incidentally is also my preference. Though that may be the bootstrapping talking :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I understand the comparison to Tinder (swipe left / swipe right) but I was kind of confused at first because it's not like the restaurant is also rating you to find a two-way match. Good job on the execution none-the-less!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In the future we want to have the ability to add a pool of a dozen or so friends so we can suggest plans for groups on the weekend based on each user's swipes. So there will be matching in a sense.</comment></comment>


In Seattle, a Sinking Feeling About a Troubled Tunnel - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/us/in-seattle-a-sinking-feeling-about-a-troubled-tunnel.html

<comment><USER2> " _That was when the machine's bearings became clogged with grit after digging only about 10 percent of a two-mile highway tunnel beneath downtown._ "

Perhaps. Perhaps more significant is that (all this from memory when I did some research after learning about this Charlie Foxtrot) the machine failed 3 days after it chewed through the steel casing of well _sunk and then left there by the same state government org that 's running the whole project_.

Almost needless to say, they didn't tell anyone about this minor detail for a month. And while no one was talking when I checked, it's obviously very questionable this will be covered under Hitachi's warranty coverage.

Another minor detail is that that state org, their transportation department or whatever, has a wonderful financial setup for this project. Well, for them, anyway. They're paying a fixed amount, and the city will have to cover any overages. Which at this point look to be substantial, I think they'll have blown through the project's ~$48 million reserve by now.

Oh, and that earthquake damaged viaduct? Estimates are that if the tunneling or other activities like this rescue cause it to drop by 2 inches (1 more than the hopefully local drop reported in this article), they'll have to close it.

<comment><USER3> A downright prescient 2010 article from Seattle's local alternative newspaper [http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go- wr...](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go- wrong/Content?oid=4399657)

<comment><USER4> That's not especially meaningful -- if there's a hipster-reactionary position to be taken on construction projects, the Stranger will take it.

The Stranger has a long history of fighting losing fights to keep things more- or-less the same -- unless the alternative is trendy and/or guaranteed not to impact Capitol Hill. For example, they'd prefer that the viaduct be replaced with a "surface boulevard" that has a fraction of the throughput, thus all but guaranteeing decades of gridlock in downtown Seattle (which they like because it "discourages driving", because they heard that San Francisco did it...and most importantly, because it doesn't affect their lives either way).

Meanwhile, they complain _constantly_ about light rail on the hill, but they campaigned heavily for the monorail-to-nowhere. Why? Because it was a monorail (cool!), and the construction wouldn't affect their favorite neighborhood (even better!)

Point being, it's not difficult to pull an article from the Stranger predicting doom for a major urban planning initiative. That's practically their stock in trade.

<comment><USER3> You apparently really don't like the Stranger, but that article is incredibly well researched and reasoned. Lots of valid points that are vindicated in retrospect. The only other notable papers in Seattle (Times + Weekly) do a piss poor job of covering government accountability.

<comment><USER4> I like the Stranger fine as an alt-weekly, but I give them basically no credence on matters like this.

It isn't especially challenging to come up with ways that big projects might fail. The point is, they'll whistle past the graveyard (Monorail!) or dwell on every conceivable negative outcome (Tunnel!) depending on which approach serves their purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tunnel Boring machines (TBMs) fascinate me. A machine that is part excavator, part factory, part structural support. And generally custom made for every job, wicked expensive, and by all accounts very high maintenance. Seemingly only "slightly" better than just digging the hole the old fashioned way with sand hogs and trucks.

Given their nature, I have always wondered whether or not it would be possible to use the excavating end as a 'portal' to manually excavate in the case of breakdown, such that you could get to the "outside" of a damaged TBM but clearly that isn't a design feature (the Swiss needed to get to theirs as well as I recall on their tunnel project through the Alps. That we got a pair under the English channel seems amazing.

<comment><USER6> I looked into buying a used 24" TBM, turns out it's quite affordable to buy one, use it for a project, and sell it. It can be much cheaper than trenching.

Project didn't move forward. Pity.

<comment><USER7> How much was it?

<comment><USER6> I don't remember the price of the TBM itself, but it was going to be about $300,000 to put in the tunnel. That includes purchase and resale of the TBM. Prices for used TBMs seem to be mostly measured in meters drilled, so if you're only putting a kilometer onto a drill with five, you're not going to hurt the value much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is 4 years old, written before the tunnel project started, but it clearly lays out the risks. Not only in building the actual tunnel, but also that the city of Seattle (of which I'm a happy resident) is on the hook for any cost overruns. [http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go- wr...](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go- wrong/Content?oid=4399657)

Search for the section that starts with "The tunnel-boring machine gets stuck" to read Dominic's assessment of TBM risks.

<comment><USER9> ah gawdbless TheStranger (particularly prior to Dominic's curious departure) but the city is-not/will-not be on the hook for costs associated with the tunnel, overrun or otherwise. It's a state route (as a parallel part of state route 99), it's a state project, it was approved on the state level with only the most superficial approval of the city.

<comment><USER2> Every source I've read about the project says the city is responsible for overruns. The author goes into the exact details of how this is so, even quoting language from the law and how it might be interpreted.

<comment><USER9> Nevertheless everything written down and filed with the city attorney respectfully belies Dominic and his faithful echo chamber on this particular issue.

<comment><USER2> Rather obviously this is going to be subject to litigation, and you didn't have to tell me the above for me to know what the city's position will be ^_^!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of several reasons I voted against this stupid tunnel!

<comment><USER11> It could hardly have been more obvious that the cut and cover option (trench with a lid "tunnel") was the best choice for the public.

<comment><USER12> I was never convinced that the city needed anything more than a surface street. It's a little dicey putting any tunnel there against the waterfront in landfill in an earthquake-prone area. Moreover, it was never clear that the traffic patterns would have been improved by any sort of tunnel option. The whole thing always had the feel of a land grab for real estate developers, too. On top of that, a tunnel was really the worst for Seattle since it wouldn't help anyone get into or out of downtown, just _through_ downtown.

<comment><USER11> I didn't support a surface street because it would have stop lights, in which case it wouldn't begin to replace the viaduct. (For some reason the US can't have Germany-style streets that dip below cross streets.)

> The whole thing always had the feel of a land grab for real estate > developers, too.

Yep. A quote from the NYT article:

> "They're talking about greenbelts and all that, but I think it's a bunch of > baloney," he said. "I think it's going to be all condominiums."

I agree, the project is mainly about $700K 1-bedroom condos.

<comment><USER6> $700k would be a steal in Seattle for a waterfront condo.

<comment><USER11> For a 1 bedroom? Wow, guess I'm out of the loop on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seattle's Tunnel Project is cursed [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgIeuSlKQ3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgIeuSlKQ3w) (1:19 sketch comedy)

</comment><comment><USER14> Guess they never meet too expensive of a government project up there, Seattle was spending 625 million per mile on another tunnel (3.1 miles of it) for light rail extension.

Insanity all around.

<comment><USER15> Sound Transit's project, an extension of the Central Link tunnel north to the UW, is ahead of schedule and under budget. Most of us in the city are happy to give them more money since they succeed at their job.</comment></comment>


Node WebKit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit?

<comment><USER2> I don't quite understand what this is. Is it a Web browser that runs Npm?

Is it a server side html renderer?

<comment><USER3> Desktop software using HTML and node.

<comment><USER2> I still don't quite understand.

How is it different from a web browser ?

<comment><USER4> i suppose one difference would be that browsers don't have a web server process built-in (or most don't)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Livetext – A New Way to Connect - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/125351474614/yahoo-livetext-a-new-way-to-connect

<comment> Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 This makes no sense to me at all... you have a video of the other person open, but then you mute the audio and have to type everything out? Why?! Why would you just not... talk aloud?

Of course, this probably means it's going to be a crazy hit.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you're in a library?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is difficult to summarize video chat or phone call for documentation purpose, that is the only situation I can think of where this can be useful! A bit more than just texting.</comment>


SigInt for the Masses: Building a Signals Intelligence Platform for $150 - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet <comment><AUTHOR> My presentation is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyq6_IZ-2fE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyq6_IZ-2fE)

I presented this at CircleCityCon, a hacker con in Indianapolis IN. [https://ccc2019cfp.busyconf.com/activities/5c3a57314808fac10...](https://ccc2019cfp.busyconf.com/activities/5c3a57314808fac1050000b2)

The pictures of this device: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4cOL0DWAAIiD2P.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4cOL0DWAAIiD2P.jpg:large)

[https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet/raw/master/C...](https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet/raw/master/CircleCityCon%202019/assets/radioinstigator/RadioInstigator.jpg)

The details are as follows:

         Rx: 24MHz-1.7GHz (antennas 50MHz-1.2GHz)
         Tx: 100KHz-1.5GHz (antennas 50MHz-1.2GHz)
         CrazyRadio: non-BT 2.4GHz keyboards/mice
         802.1abgn wireless usb
         BTLE onboard bluetooth

I designed, build, and scripted its full build to a comprehensive defense/scanning and attacking platform. My repo linked contains the complete build instructions to build your own device.

Everything is under the GPL 3.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why should you care?

Radio is used a ton outside of 'wifi' (802.11abgn) and Bluetooth, yet the hardware manufacturers put little to none in security / authentication / authorization / auditing. So they're massive vulnerabilities in any house or org. My device allows detection _and_ attacking devices. It can be used to see for yourself what's vulnerable. And you can then make choices on what you want to do with it.

Vulnerabilities can include things like the following:

Garage door openers

car key fobs

refrigerators

ovens

washing machines

dryers

various IoT equipment

restaurant order alert devices

emergency sirens

municipal water pumps

P25 (police communications)

Plane telemetry (ADSB spoofing)

GPS spoofing and takeover

...and more</comment>


The Once and Future Rubinius - <AUTHOR> http://rubini.us/2013/10/11/the-once-and-future-rubinius

<comment><USER2> As I recall, Rubinius did things like attempt to document the Ruby Language through a series of test suites rather than the standard formal methods (Edit: they did have the quandary that Ruby had without much exact specifications but still, no number of test by themselves can formally capture a language).

Having play with "Test Driven Development" just a bit, I feel like it tended to involve a lot of arrogant posturing with a flavor of "who needs design, who needs formal specs, if you've got the balls to write test and dive into the code, you can do anything without knowing anything".

It's not entirely unpleasant to see such reasoning break on the shoals of reality.

Edit: This sounds mean spirited but it seems like tail of the problems of 2007-8 programming styles.

<comment><USER3> Because formal specs are open to interpretation, have you seen how much POSIX formal specs differ between operating systems?

<comment><USER4> Sadly yes, as I wrote UNIX portable code in 1997 - 2002 timeframe.

Unfortunely many on HN tend to think all UNIX are alike, which just shows how little have experiece writing portable UNIX system software.</comment></comment></comment>


Practicing Ruby, The Newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/028-practicing-ruby.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I run a free online training program, Ruby Mendicant University, in which I spend several days each week talking with intermediate developers while they work through the course exercises.

There are surprising amount of folks who run into similar problems, so I decided to start this newsletter to help others explore these topics and learn about them so that they can be more well-rounded developers.

I am hoping that my unique opportunity to spend a lot of time with intermediate coders helps me understand their problems so that I can help solve them for a more general audience.

I have mostly quit my consulting work to focus entirely on RMU, so any proceeds from this newsletter will help offset my costs.

<comment><USER2> After you get the newsletter started I would love to hear about your thoughts on letter.ly. I've looked at it in the past and would like to start a subscription-only newsletter also.

<comment><AUTHOR> I avoided it at first because it feels a little buggy, and the service creator's motivation for creating the service is something that's not super compatible with what I care about (see the about page: <http://wlessin.com/posts/2010.html>)

But the bugs seem to be minor and the basic service is super simple and exactly what I need. The real test will be to make sure I can get money out of it, which I'm trying to set up now.

Please ask me about this on twitter in about a week or two, and I'll send you some feedback. I'm @seacreature there.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stockholm Startups? - <AUTHOR>

I recently moved to Stockholm for my wife's job. I'd like to work at a startup, and I've heard that there's supposed to be a decent community for that here (not like the valley, but better than most places).  However, I'm starting from zero, with no network of people to talk to.  I'm learning how easy it is to feel lost in a new country.<p>So, does anybody know of any good startups here?  Or any communities I should try to get involved with? <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about startups whose owners had grown to love the tyrannical VC funders who were ruining their lives.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Erlang community has historically spawned a lot of interesting startups in Stockholm (Bluetail, Synapse, Kreditor, tail-f, Mobile Arts, ...). There are pub nights.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out <http://www.arcticstartup.com/> and our index of Swedish startups <http://www.arcticindex.com/companies?search[country_id]=1>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to find to startup or developer communities here too. Do you speak Swedish ? I'd feel a bit awkward going to some meeting and being one of the few people who don't speak Swedish. I moved to Stockholm a couple of years ago but haven't had a chance to do any searching yet, busy with babies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm learning fast, but it'll be a while before I'm really comfortable with it. Every time I think I'm getting good somebody will say something that sounds to me like a long unparsable stream of borka-borka like the swedish chef and I'll get all depressed about my progress for a couple of days. :)

Rumor has it that most of this kind of work is done in English, which would help. I haven't been able to verify that yet though.

Anyway, maybe we can help each other out. Email me if you feel like it. It's a gmail account and I'm "davesimard".

<comment><USER5> I am self employed, and 99% my clients are in UK, so I speak English all day. When I'm at home I need to to speak English with my children so they learn some English. I have trouble finding any time to learn Swedish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One big thing that's happening soon is 24 hour business camp in late October. The event is already full (120 participants) but there will probably be an after-party the weekend after the event where you can build your network. edit: link for that is <http://www.24hbc.com/>

Mattias Swenson of Bloglovin maintains a Ning network at <http://swedishstartups.ning.com/> \- it's not extremely active but if you sign up for a membership you'll get emails when new stuff happens, mostly in Stockholm but also in the rest of Sweden.

I'm in Stockholm, feel free to drop me an email (contact info in profile) if you'd like to chat or have any questions. Welcome and gear up for the coming winter ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Start a business in 24 hours? Interesting... does that actually work for people?

Anyway, thanks for the links!

<comment><USER6> Yeah, people build a first version of their app, not a whole business in the 24 hours. I participated in the first iteration as well, which was back in January. Check out the list of projects after the informal vote: [http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your- favo...](http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your-favourite- start-up.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My own little humble database of Swedish startups is at <http://www.sweden100.com> Drop me an email if you feel like meeting up, my contact details are on the about-page on the blog.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spotify R&D is in Stockholm, they have users and are in the headlines, I hear they use Debian in their backend, and they let paying customers access their DRM service using third-party clients too. Draw your own conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not a startup recommendation, but if you're not aware of <http://www.thelocal.se/>, you probably should be. :)

It's a news site in English, and has what seems to be a quite lively forum section, which might be a good place to ask, too.

</comment><comment><USER10> HI - freelancers/entrepreneurs meet at www.2lance.net - online and meetings, there's and Internation community, an entrepreneur community at ning.com and a few more...

Niclas Carlsson runs "founders alliance" with an amazing bunch of startups.

Just to start the seach - welcome to Shining Stockholm!

Johan Lange

</comment><comment><USER11> With the exception of Stockholm, where in Sweden would be a good place to find startups?

<comment><USER4> I think Malmö(in Southern Sweden) is next to Stockholm.

<comment><USER6> Definitely, since Malmö and Copenhagen are almost the same city nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are your skills? What type of business areas are you interested in?

<comment><AUTHOR> A little bit of everything I guess. I'm a developer for sure, but I'm a generalist at heart which is why a small start-up sounds appealing to me.

As for specific skills, lately I've been defaulting to Python. I've been going through all the SICP lectures too which is re-exciting me about lisp, but I'm not too optimistic about finding a job using that.

As for business areas, I'm feeling pretty open-minded right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> checkout jameslist.com - they are in stockholm ...

</comment><comment><USER14> Other people have give good answers. Here are a couple of things you might want to do the first few years.

Education is free in Sweden. Check for if your background allows you to get into university courses. (The evening/distance courses are generally for older people that already works. Good contacts.)

You have checked for user groups of your favorite development environement(s)?

Disclaimer: I left the area for a nice job, a few years back. :-)</comment>


8 Weeks Later, How Do iPhone 4S Users Feel?  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/12/09/iphone-4s-after-8-weeks/

<comment><USER2> If your headline ends with a question mark you are failing at your job as a journalist.</comment>