Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30 - <AUTHOR> https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/google-unlocks-33-of-publisher-paywalls-on-july-30-this-is-what-happens-next/ <comment><USER3> My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That's about our limit for news subscriptions.

I'm _not_ going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.

It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).

<comment><USER4> This is Apple's News+ in the nutshell, so federated subscription service you're envisioning would have to compete with Apple.

<comment><USER3> Yup, you're right. I feel stupid now :-)

edit: apparently you have to use apple devices? oh heck no, what were they _thinking_?

<comment><USER5> Apple sells hardware.

That's what they're thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide.

Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.

<comment><USER7> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don't know or don't care that their news is fake, and aren't willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.

<comment><USER8> I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.

An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.

I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.

<comment><USER9> > I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.

Taler should allow anonymous payments, which means a possibility of one fix to the present model: you can read the news without the news reading you.

<comment><USER10> Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous at all.

<comment><USER9> I was told Taler is anonymous - for the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage... "intrusion attempt"? "master key"?

<comment><USER12> What is even more ironic is that it has anti-adblocker.

<comment><USER13> Which can be circumvented by sophisticated hacking techniques such as pressing escape before the page finishes loading all the bullshit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://outline.com/Vvztk6](https://outline.com/Vvztk6)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors.

The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.

The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.

The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It's a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don't have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.

Could it work?

<comment><USER17> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

<comment><USER16> > The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple > does with the App Store.

That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.

I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors.

> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies > specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.

Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify without getting sued into oblivion?

<comment><USER18> > Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested.

I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content.

To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.

<comment><USER20> As a publisher, there's absolutely no way I'm letting Google, Apple or Facebook manage the identity or control the authentication of my readers.

<comment><USER21> Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn't cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to preserve user privacy, there's a good chance you're too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.

<comment><USER20> My relationship with my readers is our most valuable asset, and I don't want it mediated by companies who compete with me for ad dollars. It's the same reason I publish content on our own domain and not Medium or Facebook or LinkedIn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since the article doesn't bother explaining the loophole being patched:

[https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect- incog...](https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/)

<comment><USER23> And so starts the next stage of the cat-and-mouse game: for instance detecting if the Incognito-allotted RAM filesystem is unrealistically small: [https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers- new-w...](https://9to5google.com/2019/07/23/researcher-discovers-new-way- detect-chrome-incognito-mode/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn't "unlocking" anything. They're just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn't have been there in the first place. And it's not like that was the only option for this. When these 'incognito detectors' first became viable, I just set up firefox where when you quit out it automatically cleared your entire history. So I would normally browse in Chrome, but then when I wanted to see paywalled contact I would just right click and open in Firefox.

Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple articles free" is _not_ a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.

<comment><USER25> Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies and local storage as soon as you navigate away.

<comment><USER26> Also see the Temporary Containers extension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see myself subscribing to any newspaper and paying $15+ per month for having a single source of news, usually with a single point of view and/or bias.

I would much rather pay a fair amount (more or less $15-$30 per year, which is what I pay on my landline), and then subscribe to a number of them.

This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that's not what their finance departments think.

<comment><USER28> I'm always shocked when I consider the cost of these things. Each newspaper provides a relatively tiny amount of differentiated content and then each of them want more than a netflix subscription a month? How in the hell do those costs compare?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> News publishers should get their asses together in one building and build a "netflix for news". No I don't want to register or put my CC info at your US 10k town TV station with a single overworked dude managing IT just to follow a reddit link, but link yourself with a central ID provider that manages payment and does _not_ disclose my personal data, and I'd be in for it.

<comment><USER30> We had this in Slovakia ([https://piano.io/](https://piano.io/) ), but it was not very successful, and all media companies now have their own systems. But they seems to expand to other markets.

I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media might work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Your local library probably provides content for free if they subscribe to news services, paid for with your tax dollars. Paywalls are just a tax on those too stupid to go to one.

Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.

<comment><USER32> I think you mean that paywalls are rent-seeking on those who lack _time_ (or some other resource) to go to a public library.

<comment><USER31> That's a much better way to phrase this idea, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why does Google not penalise them on search for this behaviour? Seems exactly against webmaster guidelines on hiding content or showing different content to a user and bot.

<comment><USER34> Google penalizing publishers for something, legitimate or not, sounds like a good way for google to get another few billion in fines from the EU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I feel for sites that provide a service that want to bring users in, and still offer them some content up front for free.

Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...

<comment><USER36> You can still offer people content for free and also not be defeated by incognito. Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription.

But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.

<comment><USER37> > while their subscription terms continue to be asinine

Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.

<comment><USER38> Same with the Economist. They must have crunched some numbers and determined this is more profitable.

I usually "unsubscribe" from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce.

<comment><USER39> With the Economist you can at least do it via email, or if you're doing digital only you can use a subscription via Apple's in app purchases etc and manage it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just curious... does anyone know what the main workaround sites were using to detect incognito?

And if there are other likely ones the sites will be able to fall back to?

<comment><USER41> TFA links to this in the first sentence: [https://www.blog.google/outreach- initiatives/google-news-ini...](https://www.blog.google/outreach- initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/)

Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This might be a dumb question as someone who isn't a pro on this topic but isn't it really simple to just log the IP of the request for the article and meter it based on IP instead of cookies, browser fingerprinting, or however they are doing it now? Won't that solve like 99.9% of the problem? I would imagine the amount of people that will rotate IPs just to read free articles is exceptionally small.

I suppose that might pose an issue with shared IPs at offices, for example. Also might cause a minor issue with people in the same household trying to read articles on the same site. But seems like a vast improvement over nothing at all, no?

<comment><USER24> No, mobile providers change your IP all the time, and these days most (or nearly most) news content is read on a mobile device.

<comment><USER42> Ah, good point. Wasn't thinking of mobile because I'm in the minority on news consumption. I do pretty much all of it from a desktop/PC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox) (or [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- chrome](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) if you still use Chrome) generally works pretty well for me, at least for US-based news sources with paywalls.

As long as sites have "backdoors" around the paywall for SEO purposes, these types of extensions will work.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't build your business model over a bug - I guess.

</comment><comment><USER45> If your entire industry is only barely viable through the use of user-hostile tracking, I find it hard to feel bad when the ad tech loopholes are closed.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Like Google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is this update preventing publishers from identifying if a reader is accessing its site using Incognito mode, or is it preventing publishers from identifying who the reader is and whether they've reached their article limit? If the former, why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue? If the latter, why wouldn't publishers just block all access to their site that is reached via Incognito mode?

<comment><USER47> It's the former.

> why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via > Incognito mode a privacy issue?

Because it makes Incognito less useful, and Incognito is a tool for people to control their privacy.

Anyway, Incognito isn't only used for anonymous browsing. For example, a user might use an Incognito window to register on a shopping site, providing all their personal details, just because they don't want Facebook to see their activity on this third party site (and they don't want to bother signing out of Facebook in their main browser context). So it's reasonable to consider "is using Incognito mode" to be private information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If we're talking about Chrome I'm guessing most of the target audience is on Android phones. Is it really not possible to use javascript on those phones to sufficiently fingerprint them for the purpose of metering? Webaudio, HTML5 Canvas, webgl, various timings, and probably a thousand other data points I don't know about...

And doesn't the clone army of iphones all essentially use Safari where the cookies still work?

</comment><comment><USER49> Love the Washington Post screen shot. "Private Browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers", which is a logical contradiction.

</comment><comment><USER50> Opening with a Niall Ferguson quote doesn't help the author's credibility for people familiar with the history of that particular "historian."

<comment><USER51> Niall Ferguson is a historian, what makes you think otherwise?

<comment><USER52> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Opinions_and_research)

<comment><USER51> Believe it or not, historians are supposed to have opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is not the big deal that they are making it out to be, and I don't expect it to have a huge impact on publishers.

The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.

If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.

I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).

</comment><comment><USER54> Newbie question: Would it work for publishers to key off of IP address instead of using cookies?

<comment><USER55> Large scale NAT is one reason that would fail. Some mobile carriers have most of their customers behind a handful of IPs. Wikipedia has dealt with this a lot, and has a page explaining why conflating an IP address to a person isn't usually the way to go.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not_people)

</comment></comment><comment> unclesams-uncle One of my problems is that even with the publications I subscribe to, I still get plenty of ads served up to me. This problem is especially acute with the NY Times, where their Android app seems to have an issue loading both ads and content efficiently.

I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.

That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.

</comment><comment><USER56> I just close my browser (i have it set to delete all cookies on close) and reopen it. No need for incognito mode.

If there was a way to pay _once_ for all sites i frequent to support them and at the same time _block the tracking_ , I'd be interested.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is a more general problem of sybil attacks.

Anyone can make unlimited accounts on a site, so users will need scarce tokens to begin with!

</comment><comment><USER58> > We tried to breach the paywalls of the publishers listed using Chrome's > current browser (v. 75), in Incognito Mode. Without fail, the websites > detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content.

Intrusion attempt? Excuse me?

</comment><comment><USER59> You could always just use a different browser, clear your cookies, or even just use another Google Chrome profile.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why is this a bad thing? The tone of the author makes it seem like this is catastrophic. Is it?

<comment><USER61> It's great for users because their privacy is improved in incognito mode.

It's bad for publishers but not catastrophic.

The tone of this article was very alarmist. The author says opening incognito is an "intrusion attempt". That's not what this means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of them (at least on mobile of what I know) already have a "Click here to see full article" button. This is where the paywall should be.

You start to read the article, it seems interesting ? You click (and then have to login, pay , or whatever).

Of course it might result of some sort of redacting bait, but why not try that ?

There's a french tech website [0] that does that, some article are free to read (mostly brief content), but those where journalist have spent time on it, you can only see the begining, and if you are a paying customer, you see the whole content.

You can pay from 0.99€ for a 48h test, so you can see if the content is worthy for you.

(not affiliated at all, I just think they do this the good way)

[0] [https://www.nextinpact.com/](https://www.nextinpact.com/)

</comment><comment><USER62> > As an unintended consequence of Google's browser update, it is a very real > possibility that a lot of publisher content would eventually disappear > behind hard paywalls, and the open web would grow dark for many news > consumers, with even darker consequences for publisher revenue streams.

Kind of disingenuous to talk of the open web in this context as what the publishers are trying to do it rather the opposite to putting the content on the open web (to the extent the term isn't already taken for meaning building on public technologies).

The journalists and publishers need to get paid for their work of course, and running a proprietary, closed, pay-for-access service at the periphery of the open web can be justifiable. But I find the rhetoric here has a tinge of hypocrisy.

</comment><comment><USER63> More content disappearing behind hard paywalls will expose a lot of publishers to the truth that very few people are interested in their content specifically, their link was just the first thing to come up about the subject in some aggregator.

The only reason I bypass paywalls is so I don't have to be annoyed by them, go back to the page I came from, and choose the next option. If the aggregators I use stopped linking paywalled content entirely (or gave me a checkbox option), I wouldn't even bother.

edit: there are outlets I donate to, and they don't even have paywalls. This may sound weird, but I donate to orgs so they produce content that _other people_ can read. People who want me to read their takes should really be paying me.

</comment><comment><USER64> Should I expect Netflix to work on Incognito?

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't get it, this stuff is already behind a paywall already. There's no darkening of the internet of news if news is already paywalled.

Looks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that's it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.

There's no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he's going on about?

<comment><USER66> They've been using soft paywalls which allow people to read a certain number of articles per month for free. To prevent users from simply using incognito mode to pretend every visit is their first visit, publishers started detecting incognito mode and blocking them from reading articles using it (without signing in).

<comment><USER67> Which was quite frustrating for us that only ever surf in incognito.

Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views per IP.

Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to read this link mess".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> "death of the metered paywall."?

I understand this is publisher-centric newspaper, but it's not like it was that hard to bypass it.

If I remember right, Chrome had "open guest window" functionality forever, which bypasses the detectors as wll -- and it only took 4 clicks (select all, copy, open guest window, paste-and-go)

Sure 4 click -> 1 click reduction is a big change, but it is hardly "death of metered firewall"

</comment><comment><USER69> But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers?

Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.

<comment><USER70> > _Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving._

Such as?

<comment><USER71> Most investigative journalism, at least in France, only live from subscribtion. And it is starting to works pretty well.

<comment><USER37> examples?

<comment><USER72> Mediapart with subscriber numbers exceeding 150,000 and net profits in 2018 at almost 2 million euros

See [https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven- ye...](https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-years- independence-mediapart-s-2018-results-facts-and-figures)

<comment><USER73> so... they are making 13 1/3 euro per subscriber per year. Is it a good amount or not-so-good?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Haven't we done this experiment enough times? When the publishers switch to hard paywalls their viewership tanks, their advertisers freak out, and they immediately roll it back. We've seen this in Europe we've seen this in the US when newspapers tried to force Google to stop indexing their content - <USER2> out it is much better to allow Google to index. I expect to see a repeat here. All the paywalls do is send more revenue to the other guys. As long as their is one single source for content that's not behind a paywall, no paywall will ever work. Furthermore most news outlets today focus on soft news and opinion pieces, and I really don't care what tantrum some star or starlet is throwing, what else Donald Trump said that offended someone, who isn't going to the Hamptons this summer, etc. It is news to someone but I'll never spend a penny on it.

</comment><comment><USER75> I hate paywalls. I rail a lot about my inability to adequately monetize my writing, but I want to put that information out there "free to the public."

Ideals: They don't seem to keep me fed.

But I'm not going to ever paywall my writing anyway.

</comment><comment><USER76> Do I want sites to know I'm in private mode? Probably not. So paywalls will have to find a different way.

</comment><comment><USER77> No. This isn't about Google unlocking paywalls. This is about Google fixing a bug where the presence of Icognito Mode could be detected with JS which is totally against the premise of Incognito Mode whose purpose it is to be undetected, not to be detected as somebody wanting to be undetected.

Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.

<comment><USER78> "Intrusion attempt" as alleged in the article is more like an "intrusion attempt" by the publishers to exploit a bug in the user's web browser.

Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> They should think hard about their next move because all that these paywalls have done is make it so I don't read their articles, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Maybe I'm the only one? I'm definitely not signing up to read them either.

<comment><USER80> I wish they'd just ban incognito-blocked articles from HN (or at least flag them, so I don't waste my time).

Modifying browsers is preferable to that. It will (hopefully) solve the the problem at the source, and make a HN-level solution redundant.

I imagine other news aggregators face the same problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> real hard paywalls should block crawlers, and no one would index and find these articles, leading to even greater loss, because no one will reach these sites in the first place

</comment><comment><USER82> > Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented > access to the content

Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.

<comment><USER83> The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt.

Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing.

The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.

<comment><USER82> I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's going on.

Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We _will_ track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"

I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?

<comment><USER84> I would think incognito would make it easier to track, if your session persists until you close incognito. Youd be much better off with umatrix blocking cookies and javascript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> This entire system is just borked. And part of it, is why fake-news spread so easily, since people can't read on newspapers without having to pay for it (which should be fine) but in poor countries, people are not paying for this and end up relying on low quality news sites, which are filled with fake and click bait stuff that gets shared on whatsapp all the time.

Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.

subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there's a few websites that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.

</comment><comment><USER86> NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you're in incognito.

<comment><USER37> > NYT already blocks you from reading articles when you're in incognito

hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...

<comment><USER86> ah i thought it was preventing people from a method of tracking you despite having incognito on. my bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Is this not anti-competitve? I don't know Google's share of the browser market but this action feels like tearing down a merchant stand at the farmers market. These firewalls are how publishers display their prices and establish a good faith "sample" of the work. If this goes to trial I can see myself on the side of publishers.

<comment><USER88> I'm amazed that an article about a tracking loophole being closed is posted on HN and the top comment is "is this not anti-competitive". This is not Google subverting advertiser networks for their benefit this is Google fixing a flaw in Incognito mode that has been lazily applied to prevent users from working around article limits.

The browser is an agent of the user, don't expect it to reliably hold information that determines what content they have rights to on your server.</comment></comment>


Configuring a usable Android emulator - <AUTHOR> http://codebutler.com/2012/10/10/configuring-a-usable-android-emualtor/

<comment><USER2> I just recently started playing around with Android development and searching for information on how to speed up the emulator. I never found this information. After following these steps I actually a have usable emulator; even the startup time is now more reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you, this is far more useful than the other confusingly titled article about android emulators

</comment><comment><USER4> The only real problem with using the x86 accelerator version of the emulator is that many apps that are ARM based won't run, like Firefox Mobile.

The app store is surprisingly bare for popular apps when you are in x86 mode.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Not compatible with Linux" :(

Does anyone know whether this is planned for the near future?

</comment><comment><USER6> The ridiculously slow startup time of the default Android emulator makes app development excruciating. This article is the first one I'll be reading on getting back into Android development.

<comment><USER7> Make sure to enable snapshots when creating an emulator. It will still have the ridiculous startup the very first time, but after that startup is quick and shutdown is slow. Much in line with what the blog author is saying, this feature was added after the initial launch and isn't checked by default.

Also make sure you aren't closing the emulator each time you finish running. Just leave it open in the background and running the app again later will deploy to the same instance as last time without any startup at all.

Sorry if you know all this, you'd be surprised how many people don't at Android meetups and the like. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Still wonder why the emulator always eats up to 17% of cpu time on the Mac OS X host when the emulator is on idle.

<comment><USER9> This happens to me all the time. Every version of the emulator from the time I started with android in 2009 to present.

I NEVER leave it running on my machine when I retire for the night. Once or twice I woke up in the morning to see it somehow gobbling 100% of the CPU while idling, and the machine seemed close to overheating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank you so much for this. I honestly spent half this summer waiting on the emulator.

</comment><comment><USER11> yep, standard emulators are so bad I use my Nexus 7 to test apps. Even running unit tests</comment>


Launch HN: App Brainstorm – Predesign Prototyping for Drafting Apps - <AUTHOR> HN,
I'm Eric from App Brainstorm (https://appbrainstorm.com).
This project got me motivated because when making apps I wanted to:
- Figure out the content, try flow alternatives, and edge cases at thinking pace.
- Test a prototype I could interact with, and not have to memorize it, the case with graphic mocks.
- Understand requirements without reading much.
I hope you find it useful, and tell your colleagues about it.
From time to time I'll blog about the app drafting subject, examples, reverse drafting, etc. If you have suggestions about those topics in general please let me know too.
For private questions or comments, the site email: contact@ <comment><USER2> Yes, you can start creating apps without code with the use of this free tool called DronaHQ, which is the most trusted no-code app development platform that empowers business users and citizen developers to accelerate digital transformation by developing and deploying business applications at the speed. Get a free trial without adding credit card details.

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks very useful and feature-filled but a free or low-cost trial version would be better. That would attract people in the startup/side-hustle phase who might earn enough business to pay for the full version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Send me an email, I'll make you an account.

For now, a credit card is required for the 21-day free trial.</comment></comment>


The Corporate Radical Who Organized Visa Wants to Dis-organize Your Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/27333/trillion-dollar-vision-dee-hock

<comment><USER2> This sounds a lot like the co-operative model.</comment>


Literally Suffocating in Meeting Rooms, A Little - <AUTHOR> https://howonlee.github.io/2019/10/12/Literallt-20Suffocating-20In-20Meetings-20A-20Little.html <comment><USER2> I got a CO2 meter out of curiosity. They are, indeed, about US$150. I get a little under 500ppm indoors.

Incidentally, humans can tolerate much higher CO2 levels with accommodation, but, as with altitude, it takes days. The US Navy submarine people have done considerable work on this. So this is not a global warming issue.

Real CO2 sensors are still about US$60 as a part. The standard sensor has a heating element, and uses about 75mA, so this isn't suitable for battery operation. 1mA sensors are now available, but for US$160 or so. This cost problem is holding back widespread use in HVAC systems. HVAC systems for rooms where the people load varies widely (classrooms, offices, hotel function rooms, restaurants) should have a CO2 sensor to tell how much outside air you should be pulling in. But outside of hotels, they're rare.

Cheap "air quality sensors" measure volatile organics, which is something else entirely.

<comment><USER3> FWIW I have had this cheap CO2meter for a few years and it seems to work just fine. [https://www.co2meter.com/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air- qua...](https://www.co2meter.com/products/co2mini-co2-indoor-air-quality- monitor)

Windows open? Drops into 600ppm range. GF and I at home with closed windows and HVAC off, usually climbs into 1200pm range. Gas oven on? Easy to get over 3000ppm if there's no ventilation on.

> But outside of hotels, they're rare.

I haven't made it a point to look in all of them, but I've seen quite a few in microbreweries in the room they do their brewing. Not sure if required by law, but it's generally a good idea.

<comment><USER4> Large industrial facilities often track air quality, usually in certain areas, to prevent accidents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every meeting room in our office building has a little meter in it which rotates through displaying three different measurements: temperature, relative humidity and CO2 ppm. Most of my colleagues are surprised when I point this out to them.

The floors of our office that I sit in has two sizes of meeting rooms: one for eight/nine people and one for three people. Free meeting rooms are scarce during regular hours, so sometimes we cram in to three-person room.

It's fun watching the CO2 measurement climb from 800 to 1400. Supposedly 400 ppm is outdoors, 800 ppm is indoors and anything higher is a little unusual. I have fun pointing out the reason why we are all feeling sleepy and docile towards the end of a meeting is because of the CO2!

See also: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room- ai...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room-air.html)

<comment><USER6> I think by 2050 it might be 800+ outdoors

That's what scares me

<comment><USER7> The trajectory the _Keeling Curve_ (+3ppm/year) is on, the dumbing down of (human) cognitive abilities seems to be challenging climate change sooner than I thought on what is the more immediate problem to civilization.

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

<comment><USER8> Soon the wealthy will have C02 scrubbers in their homes and cars, and hoi polloi will have to live in a cognitive stupor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The effect mentioned in this article is certainly not suffocation. 2000 ppm of CO2 is about 0.2% of the air, and doesn't signficantly reduce oxygen levels. It's a real problem, but calling it suffocation is pretty dumb.

This is possibly even a more serious problem in tightly weatherized bedrooms. I was in a rehabbed house tightly weatherized by the contractor (to meet a typical building code). It had radiant heat. When my wife and I sat in the bedroom for 1 hour, a calibrated CO2 sensor showed levels rising to 1600 ppm. (Humans put out lots of CO2). Sleeping 6 - 8 hours in that environment is very likely to cause cognitive impairment the next day. So if you're in a "tight" house, make sure to sleep with the windows open!

Raising the question of course, of why then tightly weatherize the house? Well, so we can say, we're being environmentally responsible, of course!

<comment><USER10> > So if you're in a "tight" house, make sure to sleep with the windows open!

The right answer is to switch on your heat-recuperating ventilation.

<comment><USER11> Or get yourself some sansevieria trifasciata plants. Depending on the size of your bedroom, 3-4 should so it (about 1 per 100 square feet of room). They'll convert CO2 to O2 all night - and clean the air a bit as well. They are also easy to maintain.

<comment><USER10> How exactly do they do that without sunlight?

Also, just how big are American bedrooms? Mine is 172 sqf and I consider it a big one.

<comment><USER11> They use of a different mechanism to power it by delay. They use a second CO2 fixation pathway known as Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM). Basically they "store" the energy by day, then open up at night and to their thing. Only 5-6% of plants do it this way and, IIRC, almost all of those are succulents or desert plants. This pathway helps preserve water.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism) is a decent introduction to it.

Also, most "kid" bedrooms are around 10x10 or so, but some master bedrooms can be rather ... large. I said 3-4 to cover both not being the only one in there and the size of the plants. The tests are done on or projected to full-size mature plants, but if you go to the store and buy them they are rarely full size. They'll range from 6-8" babies to about 1/3-1/2 in size (1-2'). For the "full effect" from the reports they size based on a 4' tall plant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> RevK (who runs a UK ISP) has been looking at this since March:

[https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/air-quality-and-co- levels.html](https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/air-quality-and-co-levels.html)

[https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/understanding-co2-air-quality- be...](https://www.revk.uk/2019/03/understanding-co2-air-quality-better.html)

He's very much an old-school Hacker; it's worth reading the posts he's made since those two.

<comment><USER13> The ISP appears to be "AAISP", at [https://www.aa.net.uk/](https://www.aa.net.uk/) , for anyone else in the market for a UK ISP soon.

<comment><USER14> The amount of CO2 in their offices is the first thing I look at when I'm picking a new ISP.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely, the last thing you want is your technogamekeeper suffering a suffocating malaise. :)

That, and perhaps their street cred as O.G. Hacker. A distant second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In high school I remember being consistently very tired in certain classes. One of them was health class, which replaced phys. ed. for one quarter, meaning that an entire gymnasium worth of students was crammed into a classroom. Others such classes were internal classrooms with no outside walls, and hence no windows. I suspected CO2 was an issue at the time but obviously had no way to prove it.

<comment><USER16> Reversely, I was surprised at how healthy (tall, notably, and a healthy skin) Australians are compared to France. I highly suspect that Australia has proper air ventilation in classrooms and we don't in France. In France it is common, for a class, a meeting, and and even in a theater or music show, to cram people in a room, and not worry about ventilation. People complaining will be seen as weak.

I wonder whether proper air venting through school increases the global IQ and total skills of students.

<comment><USER17> It's also that Australians are the descendants of criminals who were shipped to a hostile land at minimal expense and managed to survive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But if the air is so much charged with CO2 we feel it and we end up opening the windows it seems? At least at my job meeting rooms windows are systematically opened between meetings.

<comment><USER19> A lot of office buildings in the us have the windows permanently closed so you can't open them.

<comment><USER20> A lot of office buildings in the US have no windows at all.

<comment><USER21> This has been why I have enjoyed living and working in Europe (DE and CH): high-quality windows to be opened at a moment's notice at home or in the office.

<comment><USER22> I agree, the small "people" in other continents don't truly enjoy the atmosphere in the same way that we do, with the highest quality windows demonstrating the apex of European craftsmanship. Air just doesn't feel the same when it's being wafted through a lesser window in an inferior continent.

I heard that other places don't have toilets, opening windows, or even the opera!

<comment><USER23> They may have been referring to "tilt and turn" style windows ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT8eBjlcT8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT8eBjlcT8s)) which I saw everywhere in Germany but I've never seen in the US.

Too bad, they're pretty great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ok, so which ones should I get? (Amazon.de preferred, but please throw in all links)

<comment><USER25> This one has worked really well for me and friends who are also using it: [https://www.amazon.de/TFA-Dostmann-AirCO2ntrol- CO2-Monitor-K...](https://www.amazon.de/TFA-Dostmann-AirCO2ntrol-CO2-Monitor- Kunststoff/dp/B00TH3OW4Q/)

<comment><USER25> There's also software to read the measurements it makesover USB, but I haven't personally used that: [https://github.com/huhamhire/co2-monitor- exporter](https://github.com/huhamhire/co2-monitor-exporter)

<comment><USER25> Looks like the underlying logic came from this blog series, which made me originally buy that particular device: [https://hackaday.io/project/5301-reverse-engineering-a- low-c...](https://hackaday.io/project/5301-reverse-engineering-a-low-cost-usb- co-monitor) :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I suspect this may be why I'm so tired after meetings, but I'm not sure. It would be nice to test the air in the meeting room. There are dozens of different sensors on sale on Amazon, but if I buy one, how do I know if it's correct?

<comment><USER27> You could be tired after meetings just because they require a significant cognitive load.

<comment><USER26> That was my initial assumption, but the air quality seems both plausible and fixable. Worth investigating.

<comment><USER11> Talk to remote people. ;) We get tired after/during the meetings, too, and we often have better air quality than those cramped meeting rooms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I hope we'll have those kind of sensors in our phones someday. Also you have to be lucky enough to be working with people who care about this stuff

</comment><comment><USER29> Air-conditioning, CO2 monitoring, etc.. Vs opening a window and have a few trees and plants around

Isn't the latter (when possible) better for cognitive capacities and well- being? and most importantly for the global environment

<comment><USER30> AIUI plants don't consume nearly enough CO2 to compensate significantly for even one person's output.

<comment><USER11> You need about 1 sansiveria per hundred square feet or so. NASA has spent quite a bit investigating the efficiency and effectiveness of a wide array of plants for CO2 -> exchange. In an office you'll want plants such as bamboo palm, english ivy, peace lily, boston fern and a few others as they do their work presdominantly by day and sequester oxins such as formaldehyde and benzene.

They don't have to fully supply everyone's oxygen to be effective, nor do they have to fully consume your CO2. That said, you'd be surprised at how well some of these will do just that. As a rule of thumb, about four mature sansevieria trificiata will convert as much CO2 to O2 as a single human does on a daily basis. But with those they are storing the CO2 by day and releasing O2 by night so while they will sck up the CO2 in your office by day, you won't see the O2 "come back" in that same time - at least not significantly so.

Others such as some of the palms and lillies, and a few ferns, would do that same "effort" but in the daytime. Even then, in the context of offices and other rooms in this discussion the part to look at is their CO2 consumption, not the production of O2.

Some plants, such as Ficus benjamina are very effective. One (or more) of those with a total leaf surface area of 1 square meter can take a closed room from 2,000ppm CO2 down to 400-500ppm in one hour (variance based on temperature and light levels).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I always suspected this. I recall several times in crowded lecture halls feeling drowsy and uncomfortable. My theory was co2 but I didn't know enough about how it works.

Interesting to think though about the whole co2 thing, if we keep burning fossil fuels we won't be able to think properly anymore?

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure we will notice the destructive effects of global warming long before we notice any cognitive decline from atmospheric CO2 levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This reminded me of [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an- open...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open-door- policy/).

After reading it I started leaving either a window or a door cracked, but honestly did not notice a difference.</comment>


Considering Python's Target Audience (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2017/10/considering-pythons-target-audience.html <comment><USER2> > " Things get significantly more complicated when an application runtime also > enjoys broad popularity as a scripting engine."

I think this phrase towards the end succinctly captures the big mistake the author is making.

 _All_ scripting _is_ application development. Having variation of application lifetimes, deployment circumstances, etc., does not at all represent any difference of kind in terms of reliance on third party APIs, shared abstraction layers, or the standard library. It is all just application development.

I strongly disagree that these different use cases imply different requirements, e.g. for separately versioned instances of the same standard library module.

Python is not unique in this at all. The exact same phenomenon has happened since virtually the dawn of C programming. Some people make educational applications with a deployment model of sharing code or binaries from a website, some people make huge web service frameworks, some people make database drivers, some people make video games.

The same thing is true for C++, Haskell, Java, Scala and many more language ecosystems.

It's all just application development.

<comment><USER3> Scripting is different, though, because there is often little or no ability or desire to use a 3rd party library from a script. When's the last time that you installed a bash package? (that was not distributed as a second-order effect of installing something via apt or yum or what have you). Python plays in this space - perhaps with just Perl and to a lesser degree Ruby similarly situated.

Python has to work productively for people who have never heard of pip through to those who are building multi targeted native modules as part of a complex application build.

Michael Kennedy of the Talk Python podcast refers to Python as a "full spectrum" language, and I think this discussion is a good illustration of that point.

<comment><USER2> I install new command line utilities to use in scripts all the time, rsync, cloud storage clients, silver searcher, linting tools, many things.

Same with Python. Virtually all data cleaning scripts I write rely on special scientific computing and structured data libraries.

I'd venture to guess _most_ scripts desire third party tools, because scripts are very often highly specialized for unique purposes.

> " Python has to work productively for people who have never heard of pip > through to those who are building multi targeted native modules as part of a > complex application build."

Yep, sounds pretty standard and sounds exactly like every other mainstream programming language I've ever used.

<comment><USER4> > I install new command line utilities to use in scripts all the time, rsync, > cloud storage clients, silver searcher, linting tools, many things.

> Same with Python. Virtually all data cleaning scripts I write rely on > special scientific computing and structured data libraries.

This is the point of view of a programmer.

You would be baffle by the number of people that code daily in Python without ever having used the terminal even once. They don't install 3rd party libs. They don't know how. Sometime they use some, using the ones provided by a distro like Anaconda installed from their sysadmin 5 years ago. Sometimes they are using Python emmbeded in a another system and just script that. Sometimes they teach and there is no reason to even use anything else. There are so many use cases that are just not yours.

Not to mention a lot of people don't even have the right to install anything. They are in corporate env with firewall and security policies that give them an immutable setup for years.

> Yep, sounds pretty standard and sounds exactly like every other mainstream > programming language I've ever used.

Definitely not.

There is no other language that have all the following characteristics combined:

\- extreme popularity (exclude haskell, lisp, Ocaml, etc)

\- very easy to learn and fast to be productive with (exclude c, c++, java, etc)

\- ridiculous number of different ways it used IRL (exclude ruby, php, bash, etc)

\- very heterogeneous user base (exclude JS, perl, c#, etc)

Python is used in banking, by geographers, in embedded systems, in movie pipeline. Several OS rely on it, the education system is using it everywhere, it is included as a scripting engine in strange systems...

Yes, you can find that some languages have similarities for some situations. But not all of them. The closest one in JS, and yet, it doesn't come close because most people use JS in one plateform: the browser. The other use cases are dwarfed by it.

You could argue with each point individually, but combined, it would be moot. Scripting in C/C++ is not popular. People don't regularly analyze their biological data in Javascript. It is not a common thing to make operating system core services in Java. C# is not even a blimp in Unix, or bash on Windows. Perl user base is dying. Lisp/Haskell/Ocaml are still niche languages after decades. Ruby and PHP never got out of the Web.

And yes, this put the language in a very odd position.

It definitely doesn't "sounds pretty standard and sounds exactly like every other mainstream programming language".

There is literally zero example of a similar occurrence in the history of programming.

<comment><USER5> > \- very heterogeneous user base (exclude JS

Er, what?

<comment><USER4> JS is very popular and has a large user base. But it's not very heterogenous, espacially compared to Python.

The vast majority of JS coders are interested in the web. A few for apps and UI in other area thanks to react native and electron. The rest is anecdotal.

There is not an entire banking industry analyzing data with JS. Biologists and chemists do not rely on JS to make their models. JS is not the de facto solution for machine learning. GIS systems are not massively scripted in JS. The cinema industry do not include JS as a core element in their rendering pipeline. No sysadmin every said "well, I know how to provision those 300 servers, I'll make a JS script". Security experts don't reach first to JS for pentesting. apt is not coded in JS. JS is not the stuff that all students will be taught in math classes. If you have a dumped csv to download from an ftp to insert in your database every night, JS is certainly not the first tool that comes to mind.

I could go on and on.

Not saying you can't do this is JS. Not saying it never happens. It's just not popular to do it.

All those tasks match some kind of user base, with different profiles, needs, skills and constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article considering it's so rare to see people with a decent overviow of the python user base. Most just live in their use case bubble and are, as pointed in conclusion, baffled when they discover what others do with it.

In fact, the best you are at programming, the more you are likely to ignore the diversity that exist behind other entities firewalls.</comment>


Security Company Building an International Database of Banned Bar Patrons - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/id-at-the-door-meet-the-security-company-building-an-international-database-of-banned-bar-patrons-7c6d4b236fc3 <comment><USER2> > When a bargoer visits another PatronScan bar and swipes their ID, their > previously flagged transgressions will pop up on the kiosk screen. Unless > patrons successfully appeal their status to PatronScan or the bar directly, > their status can follow them for anywhere from a couple weeks to a few > months, to much, much longer.

"Appeal" to a private company to seek what's effectively forced arbitration only ends one way en masse.

This sounds horrible. I hope there's some legit privacy regulations passed to ban passive practices like this. Scanning an ID locally to check for duplicates that night sounds reasonable. Auto uploading it without notifying patrons to a central DB is not.

<comment><USER3> Look down the road a bit.

This is the "social credit system" for western nations forming. I only know how this works in the US, so I'm concentrating on it.

Firms like this that succeed will be bought out and rolled in to the existing credit firms as new dimensions. (They already track much more than your credit use - google "experian data services", and substitute the other two in as well.)

It is private, so in the US there is little regulation to worry about. And the third-party doctrine means no warrants are required for LEO access.

Can you smell the freedom yet?

<comment><USER4> No worries. Just don't forget to get your free annual "Drink Establishment Behavior Report" free from Experian/Equifax/TransUnion if you live in New York or California.

Alternatively, just pay a low low price of $1 a month for our "Bar Behavior Report" monitoring service!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This system is going to be a nightmare to maintain long term due to bad data (GIGO). Imagine a large number of bar employees able to determine who get's a global bar ban. What prevents an employee from inputting all the people they dislike? Seems like a recipe for failure.

<comment><USER6> This is a case where you hope it flames out in a big, obvious fashion, with lots and lots of false positives, as opposed to being merely kinda bad with a few unlucky saps being barred (or dis-barred, in this case) but the badness never being serious enough to discredit the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh great, a private company promising to store my home address and other sensitive personal details in a database. That surely won't get breached at all, ever, in any way, due to terrible malfeasance of even the most basic security principles.

Oh, and combined with lobbying cities to force adoption?

Realistically, how do we prevent every blockhead with an unsecured database from hoovering up personal information? Can we start instituting major fines and the requirement to carry liability insurance or something?

<comment><USER8> I can't read TFA because it's paywalled, so I don't know if it talks about the information saved, but they don't need your home address, ID number and issuer is all they need to store as far as PII goes and you don't even have to store those directly - you can encrypt them like a password.

<comment><USER9> The article states that they store in their database your "name, gender, date of birth, zip code, and photo", but currently they don't store your address or id number.

The information stored though is certainly sufficient to find your street address and a great deal of other information in almost all cases since a full legal name + DoB + zip code match is nearly always a unique identifier.

Storing the id photo is fun and no doubt useful for further tracking of the patron using things such as the cameras on the table kiosks. Also the photo has value for sale to other interested parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be a real business of making "lists" of things and people to accomplish trust related activities. I know a few folks starting / running companies like this based on just scraping facebook profiles or google results.

Most of these seem pretty unscientific / dangerous.

Everyone wants to be the key-master.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this is technically a type of defamation.

I'd think the tracking company would need to have some degree of proof as to the "bad behavior" they're sharing with it's member bars to hold up in court.

<comment><USER12> It absolutely can be. Defamation definitions vary by state, but in general it's something like:

1\. A false statement

2\. Made to a third party

3\. About a specific person

4\. That causes damages (eg, to their reputation)

If they repeat something false, it absolutely is defamation. Damages could be hard to prove or show - perhaps a business meeting at a bar would qualify. Likely way to use this is through sending the company a demand letter basically saying "remove these false statements from your database or I will sue you for defamation."

<comment><USER13> If all they are doing is recording that one was thrown out of a bar, and the reason _the bar_ says it happened, those are all truthful things. They aren't saying you did that, they're saying that _the bar_ said you did that.

It seems rotten, but I'm sure that's the kind of loophole they'd use as defense. :)

<comment><USER12> It's complicated, but this is explicitly _not_ recognized as a defense by courts. If Alice tells me "Bob says that Charlie started the fire", whether or not that statement is defamatory depends on whether or not Charlie actually started the fire, not on what Bob actually said.

The more likely legal defense is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online service providers for liability for hosting online content from third parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Casinos do this too, to boot card counters. They're doing license plates and face rec.

[https://www.onlinecasinoking.com/insights/casino-id- facial-r...](https://www.onlinecasinoking.com/insights/casino-id-facial- recognition-technology-used-in-casinos/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like it could be useful screening data for employers. Would that be legal to do?

It does seem we could use some modern privacy laws to prevent this type of thing occurring...

<comment><USER8> Why would it be useful? Most employers don't care about if their employees are also bar patrons and bars are a place to socialize - going to bars doesn't mean you're a heavy drinker. I frequently go to bars without drinking more than maybe a sip of alcohol. Either I'm the DD or I simply don't feel like drinking that day and my friends wanna meet up, or even if I just want some food. Doesn't apply to me but people go to see the band as well.

<comment><USER16> > Why would it be useful? Most employers don't care about if their employees > are also bar patrons and going to bars doesn't mean you're a heavy drinker.

Most don't care about your personal life.

But some care incredibly deeply about it. There are Christian employers in Canada and the United States, who will fire you, if they discover that you, say, had pre-marital sex at some point in your life. Others will fire you for undergoing a medical procedure.

Do you think bosses like that give two shits about an employee splitting hairs as to what exactly constitutes living in sin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This practice can only be stopped if people stop attending any bar that uses this company's technology...

<comment><USER18> I mean, laws that regulate data privacy for companies like this could probably help too. I dont think its reasonable to allow storing data from scanned legal ids without explicit, written consent from the ID holder to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So it ten years we'll have commercial social credit systems, voluntarily accepted.

</comment><comment><USER20> Social filtering is often heralded as a great thing to improve society so that its citizen can learn to behave. Survival of the fittest in its greatness.

Merit is overrated anyway, so all people have left to do with their lives is sorting and filtering people to pretend they can enjoy a better evening.

</comment><comment><USER21> Cool, I'll skip those bars if I see them using this.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, I might want to go to those bars.

<comment><USER23> I think the greatest thing about this is the choice. If you don't like this practice, vote with your wallet. If you do, then the same rules apply. I think the biggest issue a lot of people may have is the possibility that the choice aspect is taken away.

<comment><USER24> Ah you don't know abut the pressure licencing bodies and local politicians can put on land lords.

One pub I used to goto was well know as the only pub in town that did not have bouncers at the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does "patron" mean boss or regular clients ?

<comment><USER26> In this context "patron" means anyone that goes into a bar, basically customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Which is safer-- a municipality where the set of violent patrons is distributed across all its bars, or one that creates a huge incentive to cordon off that set of violent patrons into a few "rough neck" bars?

Any relevant research on that topic?

<comment> 52-6F-62 I'm going to guess the proprietors of this company haven't thought that far ahead, and instead are banking on growing large enough, fast enough, that it won't be their problem.

<comment><USER27> Very likely. I mean, I certainly wouldn't be writing a comment like that if I were making money off this type of data mining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To those people saying this is no big deal because your address is public record and has to be shared to buy things: how would you feel if online retailers put together a private list of problem customers who sent a suspicious number of returns, failed deliveries or other signals?

Edit because I was too vague: I am saying multiple online retailers collaborating on a list together that bars customers from purchasing/ returning from all of the participating members. I am aware that companies individually fight return fraud using their own private lists and fraud detection software from external companies.

<comment><USER8> That already exists

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/12/ret...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/12/retailers- tracking-customers-returns/2642607/)

Since you asked, my personal opinion is "I don't care."

<comment><USER29> How would you feel if it was a single system used by all retailers?

<comment><USER8> 1) I'm pretty sure it already is.

2) I still don't care.

Just my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> International? I've never seen an ID scanner outside the US

<comment><USER8> I saw one attached to a vending machine in Germany. The vending machine sold alcohol and the ID scan was only for alcohol purchases.

I live on the East Coast, I've traveled around the country a fair bit, and I go to bars. I've only seen an ID scanner literally once in my life.

<comment><USER31> Cigarette vending machines in Germany are the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone else thinking of George bringing the book into the bathroom at the book store, and getting flagged by every book store in New York? haha

<comment><USER33> IIRC, it was the book that was flagged, not him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Readable: [https://outline.com/CczEzy](https://outline.com/CczEzy)

</comment><comment><USER35> everyone must have way more upscale bars than i do. the 8 or so bars in a 5 mile radius from the house dont even have video cameras, let alone care who enters the bar (as long as they are over 21).

I can see where this would be helpful, but i can see most small bars not really caring as long as no one starts a fight.

</comment><comment><USER36> Could this fly with GDPR in Europe?

</comment><comment><USER37> As long as they're compliant with the credit reporting laws in the USA I don't see a problem with this. Under such laws you may see whats in your file, make corrections to it, and there's a expiration policy for negative behavior.

</comment><comment><USER9> Will also be useful to keep track of who are good tippers. Also with the little video kiosk things they have at the tables, you can serve them targeted ads. Also, keep track of who they are drinking with, this information is worth good money to someone. Also even if they are polite and never cause problems but drink frequently that's helpful information regarding health risks for setting car and health insurance premiums. As well as evidence to police after a fender bender, will definitely want law enforcement to have access to this info. And maybe they checked a box when applying for life insurance saying they didn't drink, but this proves they did - policy is rescinded after filing the claim. Big savings there. Back to that tipping information, maybe they tip people of certain genders and ethnicities higher than others. This could be useful to prove bias in a discrimination lawsuit if they have hiring authority.

Few parties dealing with people in any capacity wouldn't want to pay something for access to this really great database.</comment>


Show HN: Min – web browser with better search and built-in ad blocking - <AUTHOR> https://palmeral.github.io/min/ <comment><USER2> For a _truly_ minimalistic browser with support for modern HTML and a serious orientation towards security, see xombrero at [https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero](https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero) . It provides fine-grained whitelisting for plugins, js and cookies, and options for enabling/disabling many other security/privacy-critical features, like 3rd party cookies, referrers, etc. The same guys also have made AdSuck, which blocks ads at the DNS level.

These tools do not have the eye-candy that Min has though. Kudos for the design, it's indeed lovely.

<comment><USER3> For a _truly_ _truly_ minimal browser (albeit without support for modern HTML) check out the Dillo browser [1], in active development since 1999 [2]!

If all you need is to render HTML, it's tiny and fast. It supports HTTPS and no JavaScript (so you don't need NoScript for that ;)

[1] [http://www.dillo.org](http://www.dillo.org) [2] [http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw- file/default/ChangeLog](http://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog)

<comment><USER4> IMHO the truly one because of it's render engine (not webkit/gecko/blink- based).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I hover the "Download" button, a message saying "OS X 10.10 is required" appears, but when I click the button I get a .deb file. Did I miss OS X switching to Apt?

EDIT: This seems to happen only with the bottom download button, and only on my desktop (Firefox, Arch Linux). On my phone the button says it's available for Ubuntu too. I guess it's just a bug with recognizing the user-agent string or something.

<comment><USER6> Looks like they fixed this. For the top button anyway.

<comment><USER7> The bottom button still seems to have the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell "Tabs you haven't looked at in a while dim, so you can focus on what you're working on" \- I like the sound of this. Is anyone aware of a Firefox addon which does the same?

<comment><USER8> And on that note, anyone aware if a Chrome extension does this?

<comment><USER9> The Great Suspender, which actually suspends the processes of these tabs, very useful if you have lots of tabs

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

<comment><USER10> Yes it suspends the process, but doesn't visually indicate this by fading/sorting the tabs for you. At least, not the version I used a year ago. ( _edit: it does now!_ )

<comment><USER9> For me it fades the favicon slightly

[http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png](http://i.imgur.com/y1xSEtF.png)

To be fair the suspend feature is the killer here

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Serious props to you for making a web browser. That is legitimately impressive.

However I feel like most people won't be willing to sacrifice the feature support, stability and security that a larger browser can provide for a potentially better experience.

If this was made by a single person you should really do a write up about the development process. I think many people would also be interested in that.

<comment><USER12> It's built on Electron[0] which is built on Chromium, so it's very much building on the work of a larger browser and just adding a (seemingly) very different UI experience.

[0] [http://electron.atom.io/](http://electron.atom.io/)

<comment><USER13> > ... built on ... built on ...

Well, considering the dependencies, it is impressive that it still is lightweight :)

<comment><USER14> It's "lightweight" in terms of UI, not in terms of speed or (especially) file size.

The user experience is not bloated and it stays out of your way, but it is very much not a small program. Electron-based anything is huge, on the order of ~100MB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I the only one who thinks that "tabs" should really be handled by the window manager, rather than by the application?

<comment><USER15> I don't think so: I have a number of programs that support tabs or multiple groups of windows in some form, including my editors (Emacs/Vim), browser (GNU IceCat), and terminal multiplexer (GNU screen). It can be argued that each of those are window managers in their own right, but what this does is provide distinct points of context that I can switch between and ignore.

I also use a tiling window manager (Xmonad); it would not be realistic for my window manager to handle tabbing, as that would prevent me from tiling my browser.

I also have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tabs open in my browser, which I arrange hierarchically using the Tree Style Tab addon, which I find incredibly useful and essential to how I use and understand the Web (...and my train of thought as to how I got 10 levels deep into Wikipedia and various other sites while trying to research something completely unrelated...).

I'm not saying that this rationale works for everyone; this is what works for me, and I like it.

<comment><USER16> Well I, for one, wish that my editor didn't have built-in window management functionality and relied on an external window manager. And I don't use the window management features of multiplexers, although I did before I used a tiling window manager.

I'm curious why you think having your window manager handle tabs would prevent you from "tiling" your browser. I use i3 with a web browser that doesn't support tabbed browsing (surf). For basic web browsing I just throw a bunch of surf windows into an i3 tabbed container, but for more complex tasks I can tile my browser however I want. I can place complex tiling arrangements inside of the tabbed container that I use for regular web browsing, and I can place that tabbed container inside of another tiling arrangement.

Hierarchical tabs is a thing that I miss in i3, and someday I'll write a patch. Thats a reasonable complaint, but also one that would be a non-issue if everyone magically agreed that window management should be the domain of a single global window manager, because then you would have hierarchical vertical tabs, and you could use them for more than just your web browser (for example you might put a terminal window within your web browser tab hierarchy to group it with the browser tabs that are contextually related to it).

<comment><USER15> > I'm curious why you think having your window manager handle tabs would > prevent you from "tiling" your browser.

For example, I have this arrangement on one of my monitors:

      .</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---.</comment><comment>.
      |         |   A  |
      | Browser |</comment><comment>-
      |         |   B  |
      `</comment><comment>---`</comment><comment>`

If I have more, it continues in a Fibonacci spiral. But this is a very simple layout, and easy to understand. If I add a dozen windows where I would normally have tabs in Browser, then I'm in an awkward situation, because I only want a single tab displayed in Browser at a time. I'd have to write some window layout that will know to completely hide certain windows rather than tiling them.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I'm understanding your setup correctly, but is this what you mean [http://i.imgur.com/dlheReA.png](http://i.imgur.com/dlheReA.png) ?

The browser area is tabbed, and only shows one page at a time, the terminals tile.

Since my i3 isn't configured for this setup it took some finessing to get things into position, but it was intuitive, at least for someone that's been using these keybindings for some months. If I used this layout often I could save the layout and make a keybinding to automatically put windows in position.

I don't know how Xmonad handles tabs, it seems more focused on a pure-tiling experience.

<comment><USER15> > I don't know how Xmonad handles tabs,

Your layout is essentially what I'm referring to.

I now understand what you're saying; yes, I use Xmonad exclusively for tiling, but from my understanding it does support some degree of tabbing.

i3 looks very interesting, though; I think I might have to research it a bit.

Thanks for the discussion. :)

EDIT: Okay, I've spent about 15m reading documentation and playing with it a little bit, and I'm sold. On the WM, that is; I'm not so sure about dropping tabs in browsers just yet, but I can see how you'd want that, and how it might even work well.

...so damn you; I'm going to be very tired in the morning playing around with this thing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Min (along with Brave) do ad blocking at a different layer than plugins? Is there any advantage to having the browser do it instead of something like uBlock Origin in chrome?

<comment><USER18> In Min, it's still javascript[1].

Also, by the look of it, the current implementation in Min is very inefficient: for every network request, _all_ the filters will be evaluated to check for a match.

Statistically, on average the majority of network requests are no match, and in the current implementation, no match means having iterated through all the filters, thus a significant overhead added to every single network request.

Furthermore, the evaluation of wildcard-based filters is itself quite inefficient: every time a wildcard-based filter is evaluated, an array of substrings is created and discarded.

[1] [https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/blob/master/ext/abp- filter-p...](https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/blob/master/ext/abp-filter- parser-modified/abp-filter-parser.js)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! How does uBlock avoid checking every filter? It looks like it splits filters into buckets, and only checks one bucket of filters, but I'm not understanding how the filters are split up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A web browser in a web browser :) Is that like a Turing test for web browsers? Something like compiling your language in your own language.

<comment><USER20> Where does it say it's a web browser in a web browser?

<comment><USER21> It's built on chromium and atom, but written in JavaScript and CSS, so technically I guess you could say that it's a browser in a browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I will say it's awesome that someone has the time/ability to make a web browser... even if it doesn't support everything yet.

I do have a general question for the programmers out there... just to see what people's stance is on the topic. If a programmer builds something and wants to make money off of it, one very common way is using ads. I was wondering if programmers are for or against a tool like this that integrates ad blocking. I have no bias either way, I was just curious.

<comment><USER23> Ad blocking is just part of the game we have to play. If users are willing to go out of their way just to avoid seeing your ads, they aren't going to be clicking on them even if you find a way to show them ads no matter what.

One thing to keep in mind is that even if a user is using ad blocking, it doesn't necessarily make him worthless to your business. Users still share, invite friends, and help drive traffic to your product. And they're especially valuable if there's a network effect to your product.

<comment><USER24> Not in my case, but some people might be blocking ads to remove the temptation to buy?

<comment><USER24> I guess the down-voter dismisses the power of ads...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Eh, On Ubuntu 15.10 backspace doesn't work and there are no buttons to navigate, no way to close a tab as well. Am I missing something?

Edit: Ctrl + W closes the current tab.

</comment><comment><USER26> Haven't looked at it yet, but a tip for the OP:

After clicking the download link, the page displays a message describing how to get around the Mac security check.

There's an easier way: Right-click on the Min app in Finder and select Open. This time the Mac security dialog will show an Open button, allowing you to override the security check. No need to go into System Preferences.

<comment><USER27> Or ideally support OS X code signing. :)

OP, I'm guessing you're reading. If you need help with that, feel free to email (addy in profile). Sweet project, just wish it had proper signing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I notice that the way tabs are displayed is by drawing the top in some color from the page, and showing the active tab in a lighter shade of that color. The issue is, sometimes the color is white, so the active tab doesn't stand out - I wonder if it could switch to a darker color in that case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Filed [https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/20](https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/20) about this.

<comment><USER28> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is really cool.

A couple years ago, when some browsers still had tabbed windows as an option that could be disabled, I tried browsing with only one tab at a time and found it quite refreshing.

Does anyone know of a browser today with a similar "feature"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Min has this feature, actually. Go to the view menu, and there is an option labeled "focus mode" that limits you to one tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really like the direction this browser is going in. I noticed I cannot go back/next using a mouse or keyboard (though i can imagine one would be able to swipe to do that).

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one having real trouble with navigation? I can't figure out how to go back, and closing a tab is cmd-w which requires me to be in that tab? Odd setup.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd like to have this, only with no tabs support but with access to extensions of chrome. _That_ would be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER33> Requires OSX or Ubuntu? Damn it, well, it looks interesting...

<comment><USER34> It's using Electron, so there shouldn't be much of a barrier to a Windows version (or other Linux)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really like this a lot. Let me open tabs in the background.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice to see deb packages.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been using eww (the emacs web browser) for reading docs, I highly recommend it. DDG is the default search engine. Plus you can display the docs right next to your code :)</comment>


Mozilla Firefox Development Process - <AUTHOR> http://people.mozilla.com/~sayrer/2011/temp/process.html <comment><USER2> This is a very good thing. It looks like they're going with Chrome's model:

<http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel></comment>


Hyperproductive development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jessitron.com/2017/06/the-most-productive-circumstances-for.html <comment><USER2> I have had the opportunity to both design a complex application from scratch as the sole developer and to be thrown into a complex system developed by someone else (who had since left the company). I have found the same truth: being the original developer makes you 10x (or more) productive than anyone else. It takes a lot of effort to bring anyone else up to that level and it will slow you down as you try. What makes perfect sense to you as the original developer will rarely make sense to anyone else, and understanding is critical to making changes.

Being a 10x developer is always situational. You have to be 10x faster than someone, and that difference in speed should not be attributed to "natural talent" when clear organisational issues already exist to explain it.

<comment><USER3> Having the entire design of a system in your head is invaluable. I'm in that situation with one of the products I work on. It can be frustrating, at times, when there is more to do than one person can handle, and you have to delegate tasks out, so you end up spending much more time explaining how something works and guiding someone else as to how to implement a feature, than it would to just go in and make the necessary changes. Eventually, it does pay off, but it requires constant effort to keep abreast of the changes and document everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just partition work and make your team members experts in their own areas, while requiring that they explain what they do and why, and have them review each other's PRs. That's how I run things. I don't know where the author of this article works, but we can't afford to "like seriously slow down". I'd rather figure out a way for us to further speed up without working any harder. Loose partitioning is one thing that helps with that.

<comment><USER5> Could you explain how you get around the knowledge silo problem? Fungibility across the team is useful for resource allocation and can prevent bottlenecks - for example if a part of the codebase is higher priority or someone is ill or on holiday.

Loose partitioning seems like it would work if either:

1\. the partitions were similar/simple enough for other members to grok easily 2\. the documentation and code sharing were thorough and extensive

I don't know how feasible it is to rely on (1) and (2) seems like it would cost an investment in time that would subtract from the efficiency gains of partioning. If it is (2) what are the exact reqs/mechanics for docs/PRs that seem to have worked?

I'm especially curious as "how to structure development teams" is something I am beginning to actively learn about.

<comment><USER6> > Could you explain how you get around the knowledge silo problem?

IMHO, you can't. Imagine either extreme. In one case, everything is so well documented and test, and every developer has all of the necessary domain knowledge for every problem. In the other case, everyone is hyper specialized, and hasn't the foggiest idea what's happening on the other side of the interface they're calling.

The reality is, some people like small, diverse problems, and want to make small-ish changes over a big codebase. Some people like big, deep, gnarly problems. Furthermore most people vary from week in their productivity and quality.

It's a puzzle. each person is a tile, and you have to cover the whole problem with tiles. As people produce solutions, you have to consider, how much of the codebase could be handled by your most jr developer. Does the code need to be so simple anyone can work on it? Generally, yes, but not universally. There can be some scary parts of the code where, perhaps only half the team can be trusted to mess with it. The thing that sucks, is when you have a scary corner of the code that only one person can handle.

Both extremes suck. Be judicious about how much scary code you're willing to tolerate. All i can really offer is hand wavy advice. I don't have a formula, and i kind of think a formula can't exist, because there are so many constantly changing factors. Time pressure, turnover, inconsistency, changing needs, there's just a ton.

Trying to match people with stuff they like to work on, and not being afraid to pull people back when they start getting a little too clever seems like the best heuristic.

<comment><USER7> I like this answer. I'd say it differently : provided you work on some non- genius-level code like your average (no disrespect!) website, the problem will be more human than technical. Figuring who's good at what is quite connected to who likes to do what and how they want to do it (small fixes, small projects, long projects,...). Some people are super good at coding batches but will just stop working if they have to interact with a non-cooperative person (say, a customer). Other will do marvel at understanding one's need but will make very approximate code. Some will like to review someone else's code but will hate to be reviewed. Some will need constant attention or else they'll drift to facebook, youtube, whatever.

Managing people is so much more about soft skills than technical ones. I've managed people who learned to code alone, people who learned at college, or university level, up to phD. Each of them is different.

The only thing I don't know how to do is : how to motivate people who work- for-eat, who are not passionnated about their job. I have no idea and it drains a lot of my energy :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Modularization helps massively. I recently designed and built a new application, which consists of a core part and a number of modules which all have a very small interface to the core. I then strategically brought in colleagues to implement these modules while I focused on implementing the core logic and its extensive test suite. Also, documentation, documentation, documentation. I made three different documentations: one for users, one for admins (how to deploy the stuff) and one for developers (how the code is structured and how you can spin up a development environment).

</comment><comment><USER9> So the real problem is that the system is not divided in small and independent chunks of code. Or, we didn't hire an achitect. Or, we just fixed all the small things without any consideration of how they affect the whole system. Somethimes a small change is just that, a small change. Often times a small change requires you to rethink the architecture of the application. Excep you don't receive the time needed because "it's just a small change".</comment>


America Wants to Put a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon - bra-ket https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33468598/america-nuclear-power-plant-reactor-moon-mars/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, said his organization is concerned the parameters of the design and timeline make the most likely reactors those that use highly enriched uranium, which can be made into weapons. Nations have generally been attempting to reduce the amount of enriched uranium being produced for that reason"

The enriched uranium for a handful of deep space reactors has pretty much a zero chance of being used in weaponry, especially once it's been launched.

This seems like a trivial proliferation issue when you realize the US still has thousands of nuclear bombs and continues to make new nuclear weapons.

<comment><USER2> If you have the tools to produce enriched uranium for space applications, you can also use them to produce weapons, in secret.

<comment><AUTHOR> The US Military already has those tools and already does produce weapons in secret.

What does that have to do with building high power to mass nuclear plants for space applications?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Referring to "one lab of the US Department of Energy" as "America" is pushing it a little bit. One of those is a whole continent.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, the USA is not the only United States, so if you're not going to call it America because that isn't specific enough, then you shouldn't call it the US either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Nuclear startup NuScale's modular reactor uses low-enriched uranium, for > example, but couldn't meet the requirements for the moon without _some > modification and further development._

The NuScale reactor has a shipping weight of 700 tons and requires an on-site concrete pool of cooling water. Sounds like a lot of modification to me.</comment>


Microsoft: First dead, then dropped - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/04/11/msft-dead-then-dropped <comment><USER2> Good way to lose money: Believe free advice from Goldman Sachs (or any financial corp).</comment>


Your People - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/09/07/your_people.html

<comment><USER2> _The best way to discover if someone is Your People is absence. If, when they return, it's as if they never left, they are Your People._

I have found that this can even be true for people who I've never even met before.

Ever meet someone and you hit it off so well that it seems like you've known them forever? This has only happened to me less that a dozen times, but now, thanks to OP, I finally have an explanation; they are My People.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of test cases for unit testing web apps? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working as a solo developer on a website. I need a place to store my steps to repeat my unit tests that involve manual interaction w/ the browser + tools. Right now I'm using Evernote to store/track these. I'm just wondering how others do this sort of thing.
Here's a slimmed-down example of a test case that I need to write down + perform:
<comment>= Test: Response header is correct for custom 404
1) Enable debugging in Visual Studio
2) Set a breakpoint at Application_Error()
3) Enable the Firefox user agent switcher - switch to a new agent
4) Launch Fiddler
5) Browse to http://myurl/
6) If logged in, log out
7) Browse to http://myurl/filethatdoesnotexist.aspx
Expected result: 404 custom error page + logging in IIS of the 404 + breakpoint hit + headers report 404
</comment><comment>=
* This isn't a legit test case - but it's the kind of thing that Selenium can't really do (that I know of). And sometimes I also want to do other things at various points during the test - things that require manually stopping/pausing the test (maybe I want to repeat steps 3-6 n times, once for several other user agents for example).
How do you handle this sort of thing? </comment><comment><USER2> It's possible to do selenium with manual steps in, no? A previous company I worked for used Twist, which is a slick GUI on top of selenium with explicit support for manual steps (personally I felt it was a terrible tool and encouraged the wrong style of testing, but it might be what you're after)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is, yes, but where would you document the "outside of the browser" steps that need to be performed?</comment></comment>


Social coding - <AUTHOR> https://koding.com

<comment><USER2> I tried to watch the video (and the page didn't load). I read the front page. I still have no idea what this is supposed to be.</comment>


Ask HN: Affiliate network for private jets - <AUTHOR>

We are a global aircraft charter company with offices in over 30 countries worldwide.
I am currently looking to create an affiliate scheme for our private jet business. We would look to pay a fixed percentage of profit for every charter flight that goes ahead.
I have already contacted Commission Junction although they feel our site gets too little traffic for their platform (20,000 unique/month).
Does anyone know of any networks that would fit into this kind of market - obviously whilst volume might be low, the payouts per sale could be very large. <comment><USER2> I don't imagine there are going to be hordes of affiliates in this space. It should be manageable to run something in-house. There's affiliate program software you can run on your own servers and not have to give any network a cut of the commissions.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try ShareASale : [http://www.shareasale.com/](http://www.shareasale.com/)

Alternatively, feel free to email me - I may be able to suggest a couple of private contacts.

</comment><comment><USER4> You might want to try pitching forums WarriorForum and DigitalPoint...most of the users are amateurs, but there are some big players who might be able to assist you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please let me know some more details. If you have some european offices, please let me know.</comment>