Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/ <comment><USER2> Agreed. I also dislike the sites that require me to submit my address and credit card info before they will tell me how much the shipping charges will be. I almost never will do that. They should allow me to know the total price up-front before I need to enter my credit card info.

<comment><USER3> >require me to submit my address and credit card info

You do realize that for those that don't require credit card info that you can enter a random address in your zipcode to get past the "enter address" part before you can learn that the shipping on a $19.99 item is going to be 24.95 after 'handling' is added in, right?

I've entered random names and addresses many times to get to the "how much will shipping cost" pages. Then I can make an informed decision whether to continue or abort the transaction.

If I decide to continue, I just start over going through checkout with real info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> Even though we have recommended against this since 1999, some sites still force users to log in before presenting them with any real content._

It is constantly astonishing to me how dedicated we are as an industry to ignoring prior art.

Nielsen Norman are among the best-respected UX experts in the world. They publish several decades of research on their web site for free, so everyone can benefit from it even if they can't afford to hire them directly. And yet even _twenty years of them saying the same thing_ has not been sufficient to lodge that thing into the conventional wisdom. Just about everywhere, the whims of PMs and lead designers count for more than all that work by NN does. If those whims conflict with NN's findings, the whims always win.

I have no idea how to fix this. It would require a major cultural shift, probably. It's just depressing to see the same mistakes getting made over and over and over again.</comment>


Amazon or self-hosted? - <AUTHOR> http://my-inner-voice.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazon-or-self-hosted.html <comment><USER2> Both.

Amazon has a habit of going down when you least expect it, and while the outages aren't _usually_ system wide, you want an off-site backup site that can handle some percentage of the traffic, even if it's just a "we'll be right back" page.

Additionally, if all your data is on Amazon and it has a catastrophic failure, it's can be lost forever. Your databases should be hosted on your own network as Amazon can't guarantee that nobody will have access to your network segment but you.

If you take credit cards, be _especially_ careful as the service level you choose may not be PCI compliant, which is required by most credit card companies. Read this (may be out of date): <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=34960>

If you use their payment system, they do claim to be PCI compliant.

Regarding bandwidth, in your example, you show $8/mbit for bandwidth. I get 300mbps for $3/mbit from Cogent, and $6/mbit for a 100mbit commit.

Additionally, the example shows reserved instances at 51 and self-hosted instances at 131. This implies that Amazon's reserved instances are somehow magically more than twice as powerful as self-hosted servers.

EC2 Reserved instances are NOT an instance type, but rather a rate plan, and Amazon's servers are notoriously slow (and shared), and in my experience there's _no way_ an Amazon EC2 instance is going to outrun a standard dual or quad-core XEON server in a self-hosted model.</comment>


Ask HN: Just got laid off, need personal laptop for front end dev - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone. I got the news yesterday that I had been the victim of recent cost cutting measures at my dream job. Now I've been thrown back into the realm of freelance/contract work and am wondering if you have suggestions for a work laptop.
Now that I don't have steady income I have to really focus on cost cutting.
0. Looking for a light weight/sturdy machine that can handle photoshop and front end code. 1. I plan on being mobile/traveling a bit so a laptop is a must.
2. I'm used to Macbook Pros and have been using them for 5+ years 3. OSX would be preferable, but not an absolute must 4. I work with this stack Ruby/rails/SASS/html5/javascript/photoshop/illustrator/SVG. Dabble in Wordpress/Ghost
Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated. <comment><USER2> A few years ago, I had my main machine die and was totally strapped for cash at the time. That's when I found the Lenovo Outlet store, and got a _really_ cheap refurb. It was very underpowered, even at the time, but was enough to get me by until I could afford something nicer.

Maybe you'll be able to find something similar: [http://shop.lenovo.com/outlet_us/laptops/#facet-1=1,2,3,4](http://shop.lenovo.com/outlet_us/laptops/#facet-1=1,2,3,4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I bought a Dell XPS13 refurb recently and it is just excellent. I have ubuntu running on it. I don't know if Photoshop and Illustrator are available for ubuntu, but everything else likely is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, man. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dell refurb?</comment>


The Skysphere - <AUTHOR> http://www.theskysphere.com/ <comment><USER2> I LOLed a bit at the low cost on this and the authors treehouse. Its kind of like cheap ham radio antennas, where the wire to put up a 160M dipole is only $10 but it costs $3M to buy a piece of land big enough and unregulated enough to put it on.

Aside from that, cool project.

Where I live people would make the windows open/removable and call it the worlds most expensive and outlandish deer hunting tree stand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks more like a cool piece of architecture. The "tech" isn't outlandish. Nifty though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not exactly a "cave" if its up on top of a tower :-). Looks like a fun sort of observation tower. Wondering how it fairs in a lightning storm.

<comment><USER5> > Wondering how it fairs in a lightning storm.

"I thought about this some time ago, lighting takes tge path of the least resistance, so theoretically it will just travel straight down the main column and into the earth"

From his facebook [https://www.facebook.com/theskysphere](https://www.facebook.com/theskysphere)

<comment><USER4> There is that, but there is the whole 'coil' thing. Generally conductors have something called the 'skin' effect, which is that as they conduct the electrons move along the outer surface. So the skysphere's outer surface forms a ring where the current will move out to the edge, and then back to the center before going into the ground (or more literally coming from the ground but that is not important here). The change in current in the outer rings will create a magnetic pulse inside the ring that is proportional to the change in current, per Ampere's law. And for conductors that are inside the sphere part, they will experience a very large change in magnetic flux, which will then induce an electric current in any conductors they have inside of them.

It is entirely possible that every piece of electronic equipment inside the sphere will be destroyed by the resulting EMP. Or simply magnetized. But I'd really want to compute flux lines based on the lightning hitting the top, splitting down for four 'rings' (Kirkoff's law) and then going on down via the center into the earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I was slightly disappointed to discover he built it on the ground, was looking forward to seeing him handle pieces up in the air. Could be done, although obviously harder / more interesting job.

I'm sure the last thing he wants is suggestions but rotating the floor would be interesting, also folding and unfolding the floor and stuff would be interesting, and probably help with wind load calculations.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Tui gave his Kiwi status away!

<comment><USER7> Hah, yeah. I was wondering where it was, thought it could be NZ, but Ireland and Scotland look pretty similar.

It was the Tui that confirmed my suspicions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool idea, terrible website.

<comment><USER9> I was scrolling down the page wondering why he was dismantling it... Mondays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> By the end of 3 years it is no longer _high-_ tech.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is really cool. and I can see him recovering the $ just by airbnbing it

</comment><comment><USER11> It's like giant mcdonalds playground equipment with furnishing and lights. I wouldn't say time well spent, but to each their own.</comment>


Coronavirus, lifestyle diseases and the Shadow Mean - <AUTHOR> https://mattiheino.com/2020/03/01/shadow-mean/ <comment><USER2> I don't think the costs of shutting things down are nearly as linear as the author imagines. Just because they might be harder to measure than deaths doesn't mean costs of paranoia-driven decisions are not also nonlinear.</comment>


The two ways to build a product, according to Bezos - <AUTHOR> http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/09/20/the-two-ways-to-build-a-product-according-to-bezos/ <comment><USER2> This is so right on.

I've always expressed it as

       There are two types of innovation: Aspirational and Reactionary

_Aspirational Innovation_ - Where you, as the creator, aspire to provide something to customers they don't currently have or can't do. _You_ believe there's a great new thing customers can have/do that they currently don't have/do. It solves a problem that customers don't know they have (yet).

_Reactionary Innovation_ - Where your product addresses existing customer pain. It solves a problem that customers have today. It makes pain go away for the customers.

Both types of innovation are hard. I have built products along both lines. Windows Media Center was Aspirational ("People want to record and watch TV on their PCs"). The challenge here was convincing the market that this is what they wanted. Windows Home Server was Reactionary ("Multiple PC's in the home are painful to manage"). The challenge here was convincing the market that the product actually made the pain go away.

<comment><USER3> I may be arguing semantics but isn't the first a type of the second? It's STILL solving a problem people have today. It just is a problem that consumers don't recognize very clearly for some reason.. maybe because they framed an existing problem the wrong way (ie. they think problem X is a financial problem when it was really a psychological problem.) Twitter for instance solves the problem of not having our social/attention needs met. It's a problem that too's abstract for people to complain about, but it's there.

<comment><USER4> If you squint hard enough, sure.

But that's not the point of dividing the space along these lines.

Think of gunpowder, the steam and then internal combusion engines, electric distribution and lightbulbs, the automobile, heavier than air flight at all, helicopters.

Sure, each of those solved actual pain that people had (otherwise they'd have not caught on as successful products).

But the difference is that products in the first category solve problems that customers aren't complaining about, often because there's no frame of reference to allow them to complain about it. Their bow and arrows, oxen, gas lights, carriages, ships and hot air balloons are working just fine, maybe they just need a small tweak or two. (I even put TiVo/ReplayTV into the first category, even though we had VCRs at the time.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't it exactly the answer that finally clarifies the idea vs. execution debate?

You can't build a product to meet a vision if you don't have a compelling innovative idea, regardless of how good you execute. And the opposite is true in the established market.

Trashing ideas just seems so wrong to me because the history proves otherwise, and now Bezos has made it profoundly clear.

<comment><USER2>
        Isn't it exactly the answer that finally clarifies the idea vs. execution debate?

I don't think this provides the definitive answer to anything. It think it is just a very good taxonomy that people can use to be more clear in their thinking and communication.

        You can't build a product to meet a vision if you don't have a compelling innovative idea, regardless of how good you execute.

I had a tough time parsing this. "a vision" implies "a compelling innovative idea", so I think you are saying "You can't build a product if you don't have an idea, regardless of how well you execute". Which is true.

       And the opposite is true in the established market.

I don't think this taxonomy has anything to do with whether the market is established or not. There can be aspirational innovation (products) introduced to established markets.

<comment><USER5> I was following along Bezos, who of course can be wrong and you of course may be write. Bezos' point was:

>> On the other hand if a market is established, to win market share startups must differentiate their products by better serving the customer. <<

And it generally means not coming up with an idea but following the already established customer pain. And in this situation execution matters more.

<comment><USER2> I'll give Jeff the benefit of the doubt and assume he mis-spoke and is not actually wrong :-).

As with any taxonomy (or tool) one can over analyze.

<comment><USER5> I think Bezos' argument is a very practical one. In the established market there are already lots of customers with pain. They know what they want and ready to pay for it.

So you follow them and fulfil their needs. Then you have the resources to innovate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot more ways for product development. Actually most products aren't in these categories.

A lot of products are a sum of little innovations made by others. Combining the right elements is the key. Just one of these elementd id the market.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot more ways for product development. Actually most products aren't in these categories.

A lot of products are a sum of little innovations made by others. Combining the right elements id the key. Just one of these elementd id the market.</comment>


Cryptocurrency: Lets hear your honest thoughts - <AUTHOR> Open discussion on what your thoughts are for the current state and future of bitcoin, and alt coins. There seems to be a polarised view of the cryptocurrency world: complete bulls on the market or absolute critics claiming it's a bubble. It's obviously much more complex than that - I'd love to hear your opinions. <comment><USER2> Still feels like a ponzi scheme to me. I don't understand the intrinsic value, nor the backing authority. _but_ I have a few buck in it to sataisify my FOMO

<comment><USER3> True dat...what will happen to ether value after bitcoin futures?

<comment><AUTHOR> Or the other alts for that matter</comment></comment></comment>


Keeping Customers Happy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lob.com/post/65550779081/keeping-customers-happy

<comment><USER2> While customer happiness is vital, some concerns or questions on this framework:

\- Affordability - does that mean priced appropriately for value provided or cheap? In our experience, cheap means more support requirements as customers who pay too little chew up most of the support bandwidth.

\- This framework won't scale as the organization gets bigger (more customers). First, low-paying customers will demand more support and providing 2 minute turnaround becomes an impossible standard.

\- Finally, this level of support is economically sub-optimal as some customers who want higher levels of service will pay more for that. Support is a feature.

Just my $.02. We have lots of happy customers of our SaaS biz so I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Just think it's important to be mindful of setting expectations correctly for customers as a 2 minute response standard doesn't leave much room for error and may not be sustainable.

<comment><USER3> I would say that this is a great example of doing unscalable things in the beginning of a startups lifecycle, which is an arguable section of a recent Paul Graham essay.

Take it for what it's worth, but if you believe PG then this might be viable after all. I don't think providing great service degrades the value of a service product.</comment></comment>


"Vendor Everything" Still Applies (rvm and bundler) - <AUTHOR> http://ryan.mcgeary.org/2011/02/09/vendor-everything-still-applies/

<comment><USER2> Im one of those people gitignoring .rvmrc. And the reason is that it interferes with our automated deployment on servers.

rvm will require manual approval of .rvmrc before its going to use it.

I suppose there should be a way to overcome this and I have it in my todo for a while. For now though its just easier for me to ignore .rvmrc and manage the ruby version on the server though passenger config.</comment>


Author: I sell 60 books on the Kindle to every one iBook - <AUTHOR> http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/08/23/author-i-sell-60-books-on-the-kindle-to-every-one-ibook/ <comment><USER2> At the risk of sounding like a troll, that's because iP[hone|ad] users aren't as interested in reading. Apple's niche has always been with the visual, not the verbal, crowd.

<comment><USER3> He wasn't trying to figure out the reason. He was directly refuting someone else's statement.</comment></comment>


Apple and others given green light to bid on Nortel Patents - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/06/going-going-gone-tech-giants-approved-to-bid-on-nortel-patents.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> This article discusses a recent decision to allow Apple to also bid on the Nortel patents. For those of you who aren't following this skirmish in Patent- a-geddon, what is at stake here are some key patents for implementing 4G radios and phones.

Google has an opening bid of $900M on the table. This will go up. I expect Google to pay between 6 and 8 billion dollars for the patents.

The strategy here is pretty clear, if you have patents which you can use against Apple in the phone business, then it mitigates, or even completely neuters Apple's ability to come after you with their own patents. Basically the table will be 'license us everything you patented about smartphones or we won't license you the ability to play in the 4G market'.

Apple on the other hand if they get these patents has an even stronger hand and can keep non-Apple smartphones price incompetitive for years and years.

The number 6B comes from it being 10% of Apple's 60B in short term cash and cash equivalents [1]. If they were to pay more than that in cash they would have to put it up for a shareholder vote and it might get out of hand, Google on the other hand pretty much has to own these patents. So Apple bids 6 and Google bids > 6 to force the issue.

Amazing that in 'life' Nortel was never worth so much :-)

[1] [http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/18/apple-reports- record-1q-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/18/apple-reports- record-1q-2011-6-billion-profit-on-26-74-billion-in-revenue/)</comment>


Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-can-still-discriminate-against-women-and-older-workers-despite-a-civil-rights-settlement <comment><USER2> > Nevertheless, the composition of audiences can still tilt toward demographic > groups such as men or younger workers, according to a study published today > by researchers at Northeastern University and Upturn, a nonprofit group that > focuses on digital inequities

>One reason for the persistent bias is that Facebook's modified algorithm appears to rely on proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender, said Alan Mislove, a Northeastern University professor of computer science and one of the study's co-authors.

Hypothetically, let's say that the trucking company in the article used "people interested in cars" as a targeted group. It would come as no surprise to me if this group was > 80% male.

It may even be by another mechanism- facebook's algorithm may look at the profiles of individuals that clicked through on ads in order to determine who to show the ads to in the future. This is a good way to provide cost effective advertisement. This also may be done in a way such that a small fraction of these ads are still shown to $membersOfProtectedClassX, even in cases where said class is statistically unlikely to click on the ad. What small fraction is necessary to be legally unproblematic?

If Joe Schmoe creates a facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job (a job which is 98% male), what percentage of those ads must be served to women to be legally compliant?

<comment><USER3> > facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job

That's a straw man. The situation of concern is failing to advertise high value or high status products and opportunities to people who would be disadvantaged. So to stay with your analogy, if you have a job to hire a React developer (a job which is right around 90% male), but you _don 't show it_ to someone because their browsing history includes Pinterest but not Reddit, then you're discriminating. And that's a problem worth worrying about and trying to address. Likewise ads for vacation timeshares that go to Taylor Swift fans but not to Diddy afficionados.

Yes, it's possible that there may be some collateral damage in the bricklaying recruiting industry. And, sure, maybe that's something that needs some regulatory relief. But mostly I think you're just looking for an example here.

<comment><USER4> Who's to say today's bricklaying job is tomorrow's "high status" coding job?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is beyond stupid. What they're saying is that even if you target people who write "I love programming" on their fb page, it's still discriminatory towards women because men are more likely to write those words.

<comment><USER3> > What they're saying is that even if you target people who write "I love > programming" on their fb page, it's still discriminatory

That is... not what they're saying. In fact the article doesn't claim to know the targetting mechanism at all (though it turns out that they found a way for some advertisements to circumvent the new restrictions on gender and race targetting). They're just claiming to have found ads that empirically _are_ targetting demographics in ways that Facebook has already agreed not to.

The "I love programming" bit seems to be something you've invented.

<comment><USER5> "Dolese's ad, for example, could have reached a predominantly male audience because it featured a man, or because an interest in trucking acts as a proxy for maleness, or both. (A Dolese spokeswoman said the ad targeted categories "that would appeal to someone in this line of work.") The settlement did not resolve the potential bias from proxies and ad content, but said Facebook would study the issue."

The "I love programming" bit is an example of the kind of proxy they're talking about. Something correlated with gender but not gender itself. The FB algorithm uses thousands of data points that might correlate in different ways. Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be forbidden is crazy.

<comment><USER3> > Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be > forbidden is crazy.

Once again, _they are not saying that_. You have applied a maximalist interpretation to the article that simply isn't present in the text.

The point of the article is that the end result is still discriminatory, something that Facebook had promised to fix. And they didn't fix it, and that's newsworthy.

Your point seems to be that solving the problem is really hard, so we shouldn't try to solve it, nor talk about whether or not it's being solved by parties who have promised to try to solve it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is silly. By definition, if you're advertising on Facebook, you're selecting for a certain demographic. It's a bit broader than the AARP but by picking any medium you are discriminating against the people who don't follow that medium.

It's also weird to say you shouldn't be able to target certain demographics. An ad that resonates well with seniors might resonate poorly with millennials. You might want to attract both! So you run multiple ads. Or you target youngsters on Instagram and oldsters in the NYT.

This is not something Facebook is in any position to police.

<comment><USER7> I was curious about the source of Facebook's liability. It turns out their liability stems from the Fair Housing Act (FHA), 42 U.S. Code § 3604(c) ([https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3604](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3604)) which has been repeatedly interpreted over the years to apply to publishers directly.

Facebook has a duty to screen housing advertisements for discriminatory indications or intent. The question of whether this sort of disparate impact discrimination meets the criteria for 3604(c) is a different matter. (My uninformed guess is that it does _not_ , but Facebook is being attacked on all sides so will probably be judicious regarding when and how hard it pushes back.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> * housing, employment, and credit Ads

I think the easiest solution would be to disallow ads of those categories on their platform. I'd think the risk of "facebook/instagram is racist" damaging their brand and the cost of federal discrimination lawsuits would outweigh whatever revenue they project.

As an aside, I know it's faux pas to bring up any observed (and/or presumed) differences between the protected classes - but _maybe_ (just _maybe_ ) Facebook's targeting is smart enough to correlate "most likely to care" about things that tend to have skewed demographics without looking at the demographic data itself. Like the example in of truck driver ads targeting men, what is Facebook using to determine who they target? And do those data points line up with demographics?

I don't know, but these kinds of systems are tough to introspect from the outside.

<comment><USER9> Your aside is pretty much dead-on the big ethical issue with bias in ML right now.

For example, ML can do quite a good job of predicting recidivism rates in convicts, and justice systems have been using this to aid in sentencing and parole hearings. Obviously, these ML approaches are not supposed to consider ethnicity. So the factor that ends up having the greatest weight is "did your father / grandfather spend time in prison", which is an extremely effective proxy for "are you not white".

Basically, when your training data is based on a reality already heavily influenced by bias, your models will end up reflecting and perpetuating that bias.

<comment><USER10> The real problem is that there is an actual racial disparity in recidivism rates, so an algorithm that makes accurate predictions will predict the racial disparity that actually exists. There is no way to solve that without significantly impairing the accuracy of the predictions -- which is to say releasing convicts who we know have an unreasonably high probability of recidivism merely because there were too many other convicts with an unreasonably high probability of recidivism who were the same race.

You can also imagine what happens if you apply this recidivism "adjustment" to gender, which causes a lot of the people advocating it in the case of race to become nervous and defensive.

<comment><USER11> Accuracy is not the top objective in these systems, fairness is.

<comment><USER12> In this example, what is fairness, if not the most accurate prediction possible?

<comment><USER8> The effect of its use on policy.

<comment><USER12> That is incredibly vague. What effect and what policy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't understand, in succinct plain terms, what the desired outcome is here.

What would it look like if the ads were not biased, or discriminating, in any bad way.

<comment> munk-a Maybe it'd just look like it looked in the 90's, there wouldn't be targeted advertising and everyone except the marketers would be happier.

<comment><USER14> There was targeted advertising in the 90's. A lot of it uses direct mail, and profiled consumers based upon their magazine subscriptions. But other things like grocery store loyalty cards and the like were used back then, too. Television, radio, and print advertising was and is targeted by demographic.

<comment><USER15> Literally the entire purpose of the magazine industry is targeted advertising. The only reason to publish something like Cosmo or Hustler is to sell adds targeting the types of people who read Cosmo or Hustler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Targeted ads by definition are discriminatory. In fact the best ads are the ones that discriminate perfectly based on wishes of the advertiser.

<comment><USER17> The perfect ad is one that gives the consumer exactly what they want from the supplier. Ads solve the asymmetric information problem on imperfect markets, which require information to be efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender

Isn't that just how humanity, is?

Some things appeal to some demographics more than others?

I'm not sure anyone can prevent that.</comment>


What's stopping a startup from disrupting the academic publishing industry? - <AUTHOR> With the boycotting of Elsevier and the numerous other complaints about the industry I've seen over the last half year here, I wonder: Why doesn't a startup nonprofit completely demolish the pay-to-play publishing industry overnight?<p>The technology is painfully simple. What non-tech hurdles exist that make this a hard industry to own? <comment><USER2> In the U.S., at least: "Publish or perish".

There's a lot of momentum built up around the existing system/players, and a significant portion of that has a direct influence on careers. (I'm not arguing for said role of entrenched interests to continue, particularly at the prices they currently demand. But changing is not just a matter of free PDF's.)

P.S. I'm outside any role in said "industry", but as my perspective on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are many non-tech hurdles; The most significant to me being that the most reputable journals are behind the paywall, and academics is all about reputation. My organization, the Public Knowledge Project (<http://pkp.sfu.ca>), provides all the tools needed for academic publishing, but we're only recently getting some serious traction.

<comment><USER4> Hey that is cool that you are with the PKP. I stumbled across your Open Journals project last year. I think I was looking for academic journals covering economics in Nepal and one of the only ones I found was using your system. I was pretty excited about the open journal concept but I agree that prestige and reputation are huge barriers that will be difficult to overcome. The most promising areas might be niche journals covering new areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simple. Because it's not in any academic's pure self-interest, acting alone, to stop publishing in for-profit journals.

It is the "tragedy of the commons". Take overfished waters, for example. It would be beneficial for all the fishermen if they only took half as many fish, but it would not be beneficial for any individual fishermen to do so.

Thus, someone has to take the lead (thank you Tim Gowers!)</comment>


Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/115/52/13288 <comment><USER2> > Both the emergence of geologically novel climates and the rapid reversion to > Eocene-like climates may be outside the range of evolutionary adaptive > capacity.

A lovely little sentence, elegantly understated and used as a seemingly off- handed conclusion to the abstract, which essentially means "the world may be about to end."

Also, NASA is hosting the full article: [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20180008801.pdf)

<comment><USER3> What is the range of evolutionary adaptive capacity, though? Life has survived everything that has been thrown at it in several billion years. We just don't know what it would take to wipe it all. So I don't think the authors were talking about the complete end of life. They were just saying that we're going towards a phase of mass extinction, and that is not much controversial.

<comment><USER4> > we are effectively rewinding the climate clock by approximately 50 My, > reversing a multimillion year cooling trend in less than two centuries.

It's the unprecedented suddenness of this climate change that makes it doubtful organisms will be able to adapt. Maybe we shouldn't be concerned with whether or not some form of life will still exist, but whether or not _we_ will.

<comment><USER5> It's time to start building domes.

<comment><USER6> Not domes so much as greenhouses. The climate change doesn't kill _you_ , it kills the crops you depend on to live and then you starve.

<comment><USER5> Agreed; I think Sundrop Farms provides a path forward here.

[http://www.sundropfarms.com/](http://www.sundropfarms.com/)

<comment><USER6> Some other greenhouse examples that are decently large scale, although they don't necessarily use seawater or generate their own electricity.

[https://bchothouse.com](https://bchothouse.com)

[http://inspiredgreens.ca](http://inspiredgreens.ca)

In case it's of interest to anyone, the more general (and extreme) concept would be vertical farming.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pliocene like climates by 2040 is easy for me to swallow, after all the climates then seem similar to modern climates just warmer. Eocene like climates by 2050 is a bit harder to swallow. It's hard to imagine there being a tropical environment in the Arctic that can support alligators and Tortoises in about 30 years time.

Going from Pliocene to Eocene climates in as little as 10 years time makes me think the model either assumed a huge increase in greenhouse gas production with India and China becoming superpowers or assumed a runaway greenhouse effect.

<comment><USER8> > The Mid-Pliocene becomes the best climate analog slightly sooner, by 2030 > CE, but the prevalence of Eocene-like climates accelerates after 2050CE, and > future climates most commonly resemble the Eocene by 2140 CE

Changes towards Eocene accelerates by 2050 according to the models & doesn't reflect Eocene until 2140 CE. Still the rate of change is incomprehensible IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested in finding out more about the last 50-60 million years of climate history I would strongly recommend this talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think we passed the tipping point for the climate 25 years ago, we just didn't know it, or even today full grasp it.

I was saying 10 years ago they by 2024-2028 we would see runaway climate changes.

I have friends and relatives that are climate related research scientists. 10, 5, and 3 years ago they thought I was crazy, last year they have all expressed concerns that I might have underestimated the speed of change. They are very scared.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

<comment><USER11> Depends what you mean by 'runaway climate change'. It takes some time for climate to stabilize, even if we stopped all carbon emission now it would take a few decades for the planet to reach equilibrium. We've certainly reached the point where significant impacts are going to be felt but not necessarily to the point where, say, the Earth loses all polar ice and remains hot for tens of thousands of years.

> I was saying 10 years ago they by 2024-2028 we would see runaway climate > changes.

> 10, 5, and 3 years ago they thought I was crazy, last year they have all > expressed concerns that I might have underestimated the speed of change.

It's important to recognise that neither you nor I have the expertise to truly assess this. The climate models are the best we have but there are various uncertainties. I'm also concerned that they may turn out to be too conservative but it will take many years to find out.

The most optimistic scenario is that the models break in our favour, serious action is taken, technology bails us out somewhat and investment in low-carbon energy and sustainable farming provides employment. The worst case scenario is that crop yields and fisheries collapse well before the end of the century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Which of our major food-crops can handle Pliocene and Eocene climates?

<comment><USER13> None. Obviously this is suggesting mass human die-off or total extinction.

<comment><USER12> Famine -> law and order breakdown -> mass migrations -> wars and military conflicts -> population reductions.

Hmmm. I have read this in human history before.</comment></comment></comment>


Cave That Housed Neandertals and Denisovans Challenge View of Cultural Evolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cave-that-housed-neandertals-and-denisovans-challenges-view-of-cultural-evolution/ <comment><USER2> _And last year a team reported they had retrieved DNA from what was apparently a hybrid individual who had a Neandertal mom and a Denisovan dad._

This article makes me want to start a "Quest for Fire" style prehistoric RPG campaign, with Neanterthals, Denisovans, and Cro-Magnon character classes.

The last 3 panels form a relevant comic: [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0555.html](http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0555.html)

<comment><USER3> Kind of done, try Far Cry Primal</comment></comment>


Spreeder: Learn to Speed Read. - <AUTHOR> http://www.spreeder.com/

<comment><USER2> Excellent to quickly read some articles online, copy paste, set speed to what u like, n go!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do with your old iPhone when you buy a new one? - <AUTHOR> I read a lot of HN comments/posts where people mention they've upgraded their phones to the new one that had recently come out and such, and I keep wondering what they do with their old ones.<p>Where do these used iPhones go? <comment><USER2> Softbank (Japan) will buy it back from you. Yesterday they gave me $240 (structured as $10 a month for 24 months as a statement credit) for my iPhone 4S. ([http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/campaigns/list/tada- kisyuhen/](http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/campaigns/list/tada-kisyuhen/)) Generally they're rather less generous ( [http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/campaigns/list/shitadori/](http://www.softbank.jp/mobile/campaigns/list/shitadori/) )

I assume that Softbank processes 10,000 of these at a time and then sends them to China for resale.

<comment><USER3> $240 is a good price for a used 4S! Now I'm thinking how can they afford to do that so?

<comment><USER2> I assume that a portion of the calculation is "We got him to switch from a $60 plan to a $90 plan to support the iPhone 6, so rebating him $10 a month is not a hard decision."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have five old Android phones serving as IP cameras in my house. Some WeMo motion sensors can alert me to a possible break-in, then I can check the cameras from my phone. Also lets us check in on the pets while we're out.

<comment><USER5> What apps are you using? It'd be great to have an android app that could do the motion detection and IP camera

<comment><USER6> I hesitate to link to this because they're still one year away from shipping but this could be one option: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smartrico/rico-turn- you...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smartrico/rico-turn-your-used- smartphone-into-a-smarthome-de)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> keep it, with the intention of using it as a development platform for a robot or something, but then never end up doing anything because who wants to learn another toolchain, right? Instead, lets just drop that in the box next to the palm pre and the old windows mobile phone.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't buy new iPhones if I already have one. I don't see myself in need of doing that. I am trying to keep all expense as minimal as possible, especially in tech hardware because it gets improved so fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> I give it to someone in the family who uses an android phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> I give it to other family members (mom, cousins, aunts/uncles, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Gazelle [1], because I upgrade every 2 years, and they pay me enough for a 2 year old iPhone to cover almost 90% of the cost to upgrade.

Sure Gazelle likely turns around and sells it for 1.5-2.0x what they pay me, but they're very fast, reliable, they send real bank checks for the full amount rather than AT&T or Amazon store cards or prepaid debit cards, I don't have to deal with anyone else (individual buyers on Amazon marketplace or eBay, or worse: locally), and most importantly I don't have to spend more than a few minutes on the whole thing, which is more valuable to me than the minor additional money I could get selling it myself.

[1] [https://www.gazelle.com](https://www.gazelle.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Pass it on to my wife. And my wife passes her old one on to either her or my parents.

</comment><comment><USER12> I keep them in a drawer with the intention of putting them in a frame in an office when I have one. It will be nice to see the evolution of them over time...and that way I dont have to part with them!

I dont upgrade every single time so i only have a 3G and a 4, will probably get the 6S but am quite enjoying my moto e atm!

I also keep them all charged, so the batteries don't get all bloaty. (and I still use the 4 as a camera!)

</comment><comment><USER13> Unlock 'em and put them on Ebay. If you assume some risk of shipping them overseas to countries that don't have easy access to them, you'll get bidders who are willing to pay a premium for previous-generation devices. I sold an unlocked iPhone 4 to someone in a remote South Pacific island for nearly the price I paid for the new iPhone 5 that replaced it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm residing outside the US, where iPhones cost a lot more and the new models are available 2-3 months after the release day.

I use that 2-3 months gap to buy my new phone abroad and sell my old phone to somebody while there's a demand. I recently upgraded to iPhone6 and sold my iPhone 5 for ~$400 (USD), so essentially I paid $300 for the new phone.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just got my first iPhone (5s) and I still use my android phone every day: as my alarm clock. There isn't a good way to turn off the vibrate part of the alarm on the iPhone, and my wife can sleep through the alarm sound, but not the vibration noise, so it doesn't work for us.

If it wasn't for that I would recycle it.

</comment><comment><USER16> My 3GS exclusively sits in my car and plays music connected via Bluetooth. I also used it traveling to another country, since AT&T would unlock my old iPhone but not my new one. They said the reason was that I was "currently on contract and it's not their policy to unlock contracted phones".

</comment><comment><USER17> Give it to my wife.

</comment><comment><USER18> Placemeter* will turn your old phone into a smart sensor that helps to measure pedestrian traffic and car speed in your neighborhood: [http://placemeter.com](http://placemeter.com)

*I'm Product Manager there

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be cool to install Linux on a bunch of iPhones and use them as servers at home. They wouldn't take up much space :) But of course it wouldn't be practical when considering the lack of drivers and ports (e.g. Ethernet).

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a personal assistant in Mexico. I tried to ship him my old iPhone 5 so he could do some iOS app debugging for me. FedEx wouldn't ship it and told me that Mexico customs would confiscate it. Way to go Mexico!

<comment><USER9> Strange, I'm from Mexico and I have ordered some phones without issues. But they got shipped via USPS and UPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly my 4s is still sitting on the desk in the exact spot I put it when I last used it after replacing it, I have no idea what to do with it.

Suggestions welcome, I'm in the UK

</comment><comment><USER22> I sell my old iPhone and use the funds for the new iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER23> They turn into wifi-only devices for their kids to use.

</comment><comment><USER24> funnily enough at my old workplace, the wives get the newest phones and pass them off to my colleagues when they're done..

</comment><comment><USER25> Sell it on Amazon. I sold my 32GB 5S for $450

</comment><comment><USER26> Travel back in time to replace IBMs datacenters of 1995.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sold it on eBay, made about $370 for 16gb iPhone 5s.

<comment><USER28> Did you take any precautions to limit the risk of getting scammed? I'm worried that whoever places the winning bid will file a dispute claim stating that they didn't receive it or some other nonsense and ebay seems to always side with buyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Give it to my mum normally

</comment><comment><USER30> give it to me dude? or sell on kiraya... lol

</comment><comment><USER31> Are you really asking just about iPhones or should the title be changed to "old Smartphone"?

Anyway, yeah - I use my old phone as a stop-watch for short coding sprints.</comment>


A New Train Station in Cambridge Has Sparked Controversy Among Mathematicians - at-fates-hands http://www.archdaily.com/872799/a-new-train-station-in-cambridge-has-sparked-controversy-among-mathematicians <comment><AUTHOR> I quite like how this journalist appears to have identified Wolfram's most prominent character features from just reading a single blog post :)</comment>


Linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices - <AUTHOR> https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/02/18/linkerd-twitter-style-operability-for-microservices/ <comment><USER2> The blog post talks about the ideas for what Linkerd does, but offers little for how and why it actually does it. So I'll take a shot at it.

Linkerd runs a proxy on localhost that all local services speak to, as is being done right now commonly with HAProxy. Linkerd proxy handles all the routing. Service discovery is handled by Zookeeper (or Consul or Kubernetes or Marathon). Based on load and latency statistics, It does client side load balancing to these services, similar to Netflix's Hystrix -- which makes me wonder about how it handles routing to 3rd party services on the clearnet, and what it does for circuit breaking on local or remote services.

Linkerd+Finagle are written in Scala, so running one of these on every app server means running a jvm on every server. Is anyone running this in production and can speak to how heavy the linkerd process is? One of the main HAProxy advantages is its efficiency.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the thoughtful comment! Here are some quick answers to your questions:

\- Routing to 3rd party services: on the roadmap!

\- Circuit breaking: Finagle has some very sophisticated mechanisms for this (see [http://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Clients.html#circuit-...](http://twitter.github.io/finagle/guide/Clients.html#circuit- breaking)). The current release of linkerd doesn't really expose a lot of that in the config file, but that's also a subject of future work.

\- JVM cost: yup, this is definitely something we are aware of. Fortunately, the JVM is a pretty tunable beast, and like HAProxy, there's a relationship between concurrency and memory supported. In our experiments, we can get healthy performance <(1ms p99) for low concurrency setups in ~120mb. Higher concurrency, of course, requires more memory.

Hope that's helpful. Feel free to email us or to hop into our Slack at any point, of course!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tell me about modern databases - <AUTHOR> Day after day, I sit here crafting data for some vague analytics with Postgres, close to despair. All I want is for the query planner to take a view, go away for five or ten minutes, and then run it optimally, or at least suggest some indexes, but this isn't the way it seems to want to allocate resources.
I suppose I've always been slightly suspicious of modern database technology beyond stodgy stuff like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL, but I'm at the point when I would like to know what my options are.
I don't think my workload is particularly outlandish - 35m events with around 100 attributes, timestamped, some GIS data. Some typical workloads include things like sessionization, grouping events together, and asking questions like "how long after events of type X did an event of type Y happen?", "what was the last event in session Z?", "how long is the path from event A to B to C?" On top of that, all sorts of aggregates get computed over events. Training data gets extracted and predictions fed back in via bits of Clojure or R code.
I am reasonably au fait with modern SQL, I write a lot of window functions, I avoid some common pitfalls, I can generally index my way out of most performance bottlenecks, but my word it feels like a slog some days. So, I suppose my question is this: what am I missing? What fancy new technology exists that can take complex queries, optimise them and give me answers. I don't care about scaling to millions of requests, I don't care about latency, I care about how much time I'm losing looking through EXPLAIN ANALYZE outputs instead of doing real work. <comment><USER2> Dell Software's Toad Query Optimizer (for Oracle and SQL Server) has an engine that does exactly that. It takes your SQL, tries rewriting it a bunch of different ways, throws in different compiler hints, and measures the response time/reads/CPU/etc for each execution, then gives you a set of graphs and recommendations.

I wanna say it was around $1500/seat last time I looked at it. It's worth every penny if you have to write a lot of complex queries. I've bought it for just one senior member of a dev team, and everybody brings their worst queries to that person for tuning.

Here's the trick, though: after it optimizes a query for you, keep your original query around. You're not going to want to try to edit the query that Toad produces - it can be horrifically complex. Instead, edit your original query, then run it through Toad again.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a mistake to only have one member of team have it. Why does this member get special treatment?

<comment><USER4> Why does it have to be a special treatment?

<comment><USER3> By definition, this person gets special treatment. I don't know why it has to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like the first question to ask is, where is the query planner falling down? What are you finding in those EXPLAIN ANALYZEs that is wrong? When you say "that isn't the way it seems to want to allocate resources," what does that mean - do you mean you want it to auto-create indexes? SQL Server used to have a tool to suggest indexes based on a query workload, is that what you mean? Have you used [https://explain.depesz.com/](https://explain.depesz.com/) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I spend a large part of my day looking at explain output, often on that site. The SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor is reasonably good, and something like that for Postgres would be great, but ultimately it doesn't seem to look at a query and come up with a semantically identical but structurally better way of phrasing it - it will never fix unnecessary big-O performance issues (in the way that, for example, posting a single query on Stackoverflow might). But even if such a tool exists for Postgres, I'd be running it _all the time_. I'm just naively wondering if technology has moved on. I have basically no writes outside an ETL process, much of the time this is effectively single-user ad-hoc stuff. I realise I might be being hopelessly naive, but it feels like I can clearly specify a query, and I have complete control over my schema. Something must exist that requires me to pay more money but ultimately care less about endless performance tweaks to create a view that is fast?

<comment><USER6> If you're doing sufficiently focused sorts of queries - the question mentioned "find the path from A to B to C" \- then you might get value out of a DB specifically focused on that question (a graph DB, or a time-series one). The Postgres FDW stuff may help you make integrating one of those less painful.

Before you do that, though: have you thrown RAM at the thing? 35m events sounds like a lot to humans, but not when you can rent machines with 1.2TB of _RAM_ by the hour...

<comment><AUTHOR> I was more thinking of spatial stuff when I talked about paths, and PostGIS is a pretty productive platform for me so far. Example calculations would be taking the geodesic distance moved over a series of events over the total length of the path to calculate a score for 'directness'. PostGIS has aggregates to create lines from points, measure the total length etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd suggest the little red book (Stonebraker's not Mao's):

[http://www.redbook.io/](http://www.redbook.io/)

</comment><comment><USER8> You're missing something like this: [https://www.monetdb.org/](https://www.monetdb.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I seem to be the exact target market for this sort of thing, thank you! The SQL implementation seems reasonably modern, and while the GIS features are a little rudimentary there's at least something to work with.

My worry about column stores is that I can't guarantee my workload is optimised for that paradigm either - imagine a window function with multiple partition criteria etc etc, but I suppose it's worth testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> SQL is horrible for many use-cases. have a look at [http://datomic.com](http://datomic.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Datalog naturally fast for certain types of queries, or do performance gains for Datomic over RDBMSs come from being able to scale up a cluster? I don't have a feel for what Datomic's sweet-spot is, despite having much love for Clojure and its ecosystem.</comment></comment>


Self help for nerds. Or: What happend to the host of Singled Out? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/tag/chris-hardwick/

<comment><USER2> True story: I once had drinks with Chris Hardwick and Bob Saget at Madison's (now closed) in Westwood, near UCLA while I was in school there. I made them take a forest fire shot (half vodka, half Tabasco sauce).</comment>


South African Dept of Education effectively bans FOSS - <AUTHOR> http://dkeats.com/index.php?module=blog&action=viewsingle&postid=gen21Srv8Nme0_40332_1381256759&userid=7050120123 <comment><USER2> I can't get to to the article, but I've read about the issue elsewhere. This outrage is a bit misplaced:

1) South African teachers/vendors/Education Departments lack the skills to manage non-Microsoft systems. Yes it shouldn't be that way, but it is.

2) Java is not really a great first programming language (see Joel on JavaSchools). Pascal, and, later Delphi have been taught for years, and are well understood by teachers. They should probably just dump Delphi, and stick to Pascal. Attempts to look "relevant" end up looking foolish.

In the early-mid 1990's, when I was in what's today called grade 8 and 9 I did LOGO, for non-examinable Computer Studies, and it was brilliant. Although I didn't choose Computer Studies for my later school years(where Pascal was used), when I got to university, my positive early experiences drew me back into the world of CS. I doubt I would have gotten the same visceral thrill that I got from LOGO, if I had to wrestle with AWT or Swing at the time.

School Computer Studies is NOT meant to be a gateway to a career, and there are plenty of post-school options for people who want to become programmers. Computer Studies isn't even a prerequisite for university CS - everything is taught from scratch again. It also seems like recent graduates of some of the insitutions ("Universities of Technology", formerly Technikons) that supposedly focus on carreer preparedness struggle with concepts like writing loops. Perhaps these Technikons and programming colleges should also focus on the basics first, before worrying about "career readiness".

SA schooling is a mess. Maths and science teachers don't understand their subjects. Teacher unions obstruct reform. We have sunk to the bottom in the world rankings. This particular issue is a meaningless distraction.

<comment><USER3> Yes indeed, the freedom to chose a F/OSS alternative in a environment where software is 60-70% of the TCO of a PC, is a _BAD_ thing because _learning isn 't in the job description of teachers_.

I do disagree with this oft regurgitated anecdotal (sorry in advance) shite :-P

<comment><USER4> "I do disagree with this oft regurgitated anecdotal (sorry in advance) shite :-P"

"A long time ago, in a country I won't name, I was contracted to provide..."

:P

<comment><USER3> I think you'd need to cite other examples of me, specifically, relating that story to qualify it "as oft regurgitated" _and_ anecdotal, and as my anecdote doesn't set out to present the case for less choice being good, I'd argue relevance :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _made me as angry as I have ever been in my life_

Wow - if the author has lived a life where software limitations are the greatest injustice experienced, then I am truly jealous.

<comment><USER6> No, I think he's mad about the blatant corruption behind the decision. Our government does't even hide it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title makes this out to be worse than it actually is: SA didn't actually ban all software under permissive licenses, but requires the use of non-free software to complete its courses. Though I'm not extremely in-tune with SA politics/education, I can't imagine they have much money, making it all the stranger that they'd lock themselves into licensing with Microsoft instead of using free software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Re the title: yes, and no. At first glance it seems alarmist, but if you take into account the wider implications (no exposure to free alternatives, extra cost to a population mired in poverty, and general lack of exposure to IT for large parts of the population), it's not too far from the truth.

Funding for the education department has been increased drastically over the last decade or so, but misappropriation of funds, mismanagement, corruption, ineptitude, geographical separation, lack of proper oversight, and just the sheer pressure on the system in terms of the amount of learners it needs to support means this is just another thing that reduces the value for the learners from tax money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had to drill into the PDF linked from the article to learn that SA (in this case) refers to the Republic of South Africa.

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad...I only realised a few minutes ago it could be South Australia (and definitely a few others) too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> SA is South Africa for anyone else who is wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed now ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why don't anyone listen to rms ? [http://www.gnu.org/education/education.html](http://www.gnu.org/education/education.html)

<comment><USER11> How do you listen to him after gems like this: "Free Software supports education, proprietary software forbids education"? You know what? I got my education without software free or proprietary. I also saw many getting education and knowledge using proprietary software. Does Internet Explorer ban you from going to wikipedia or coursera? Heck, I even educated myself about free and open source software using Windows. Model of the world where FOSS is at the center of the universe and rms is the brightest star in it is hardly correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As an IT professional that has lived in RSA and several other countries in the region, I have to say this is absolutely common place.

Local industry giants with preferred partner/solution provider status with <INSERT GIANT CORP HERE> will lobby and get F/OSS solutions knocked out of the running especially where public tenders are involved. They will of course then use the corrupt officials co-opted into this process to milk the budget for absurdly expensive solutions to non-existent problems.

A long time ago, in a country I won't name, I was contracted to provide local support for the installations of PCs in rural schools. Upon turning up at the regional center, I had access to a warehouse with a gigantic stack of PCs to be delivered. I merrily went about installing them at every school locally. I've never had more fun or a better challenge, every installation was unique. One site needed a full solar installation because of proximity to a township where power theft was rampant meant electricity on the schools side was virtually never available. At another site, I teamed up with a local carpenter to build 30 simple desks and benches, leaving the hardware sitting on bare concrete floors seemed absurd. For seven months this went on, I never saw another contractor doing the same as I did, yet the pile of PCs diminished so I assumed there must be several others. I queried to find out who they were so we could coordinate, I didn't want to spend hours driving to a site only to find they'd already been. That never happened and I never did get a response.

The problems begun when it came to more remote areas. Firstly there was significantly more hardware per student allocated for the rural areas, than urban areas, which was puzzling. Secondly I was not permitted to go and install them, I was told my fuel expenses wouldn't be covered. When I offered to waive those, I was told there was no point, because they would require upgrades shortly. The vendor advised we leave them another two months and they would have the service packs rolled out in the central storage site, then the hardware could be delivered. Their stated intention was to save the local govt money. How very noble. Over the course of the next month, that pile of undeliverable hardware diminished significantly as the various people from the purchasing process cashed in by selling it to local vendors on the cheap, some of it was probably re-exported. Who knows. Nobody cares, there was no investigation, that was over a decade ago - the entire process has probably repeated several times since then.

It's absurd. It's arrogant. It's corrupt. It's ultimately detrimental to everybody involved and robs the most desperate of a resource that just might have lifted them out of poverty. It's Africa. Sorry for the ramble, I never can just explain how much I love and hate that place.

Edit: spellin'

<comment><USER12> This is why I always urge people to consider private charity whenever possible, and always ask for accountability.... Of course, government also decides who's allowed to operate tax-free charities, so the market smells.

The government will always do whatever they can for the appropriate campaign favours, a politician or official gives absolutely no care as to how the programs continue after their term, since it doesn't matter; this works especially well when you can tack expenses onto a debt rather than stealing more immediately.

<comment><USER3> Unless the charity actually operates their own direct distribution outlet in the target country, let me bust your bubble: all that donated gear? It gets sold.

Go to any township market in any Southern African nation you like, those clothes being sold? Go ask them to buy the tarpaulins they were bound in, I guarantee you three things: they'll be blue, the logo will feature a laurel wreathe encircling a globe, and the first two letters will be U and N. You'll probably have noticed them already because many stalls in the market will be using them for roofing.

<comment><USER12> Right, thus the accountability bit. Most distribution of goodies intended for those who can't get ahold of them ends up with yet another theft and pawning, regardless of where the goodies come from and how they're distributed.

Of course, UN involvement brings brothels along with the tarps.

Do you know of any charities which actually offer direct distribution?

<comment><USER3> I don't believe in aid or charity in the "give away something in return for a tingly sensation of benevolence" sense. That accomplishes nothing, it increases corruption and lets the donor off with the impression that they've accomplished something that they haven't.

That said, there're some who make it work. The names escape me (it was long ago) but I've always been impressed with the work of some of the missionaries in the region - they're actually on the ground effecting change and helping people. From what I've seen they tend to avoid unilateral donation/collections, but go in for the specifics. For instance, the school I installed the 30 desks at, they donated virtually all the classroom equipment and props along with an instructor to help local teachers integrate the new material into their classes. As I understand it the financing for all that came from donations through collections in their churches. Now whilst I'm an atheist, that impressed me. The peacecorps too, I've met a lot of them and their hearts are definitely in the right place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> while the south african govt say they support oss and all gov departments ahouod be using it, in practice they hardley ever implement oss. there is actually a project on git hub to use information access laws to perform a ln audit on the use of oss

Using MS office makes sense, since majority of businesses use MS office.

Though I would question the use of delphi, someone else posted that delphi is popular in South Africa. As one, I disagree most of the code still being written in delphi is mostly legacy code.

The delphi dev shops have since moved on to .net for e.g my first job was a co that used delphi.

one of the biggest users of delphi in za (mr price) , now mostly do their dev in .net

I think a language like python or ruby would be a much better option.

<comment><USER13> Sorry about the repeat post. Posted from one of the mobile apps seemed to have messed up somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Delphi… Delphi? Delphi?!?!

<comment><USER15> I am really having trouble understanding how anyone could choose Delphi without some sort of corruption going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Turbo Pascal was the standard when I was in high school (matriculated in 98). No idea what has been used in the interrim, although the article makes it look like Java, among other things. If this hadn't been the case, I could understand Delphi, but it makes very little sense now.

<comment><USER16> Pascal is a pretty good teaching language, Java is hopelessly complex. Delphi is too bloated for intro stuff. Simple, featureless, procedural languages that are not C are pretty good for beginners.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be tempted to agree, but in that case you can even look at things like VB (in whichever flavour). You would need to somehow keep the subjects relevant to the current environment too, otherwise the clued up kids will get bored, and the less clued up ones will be more clued up, but in mostly irrelevant tech (school IT doesn't teach abstract computer science - it teaches stuff you can use to a degree).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not just a technologically absurd decision, the resulting expense is a terrible injustice for the children of South Africa.

The Evil Empire never stops. The next time you hear someone blather on about the Gates Foundation, tell them about this story.

<comment><USER3> This is probably a dumb question, but why is your text in gray?

<comment><USER18> His comment was downvoted by other users. (Not me, though - I don't have enough rep/karma points yet.)</comment></comment></comment>


Teenager charged over offensive remarks on Lee Kuan Yew - <AUTHOR> http://www.daijiworld.com/news/news_disp.asp?n_id=308195 <comment><AUTHOR> Said clip is on youtube here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMODDfNE0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMODDfNE0Y) or if that gets taken down again, search for "Lee Kwan Yew is finally dead".

I have to say, the kid raises some relevant points, but he really needs to work on his people skills.

<comment><USER2> Be that as it may, the unfortunate thing is that, perhaps due to some skewed sense of propriety, a lot of Singaporeans actually agree with the arrest, rather than seeing the video as food for thought at best or an ignore worthy adolescent rant at the worst.</comment></comment>


Jeff Immelt no longer pursuing Uber CEO job - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/08/27/business/27reuters-uber-ceo.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15111571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15111571).</comment>


The lsm command for Latent Semantic Mapping - <AUTHOR> http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/lsm.1.html <comment><AUTHOR> Latent semantic mapping is a technique which takes a large number of text documents, maps them to term frequency vectors (vector-space semantics), and performs dimensionality reduction into a smaller semantic space. This then lets you determine how similar in meaning different documents are. You can use this for a variety of tasks.

Wikipedia: Latent Semantic Mapping <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_mapping>

WWDC 2011 talk, now available: "Latent semantic mapping: exposing the meaning behind words and documents" <https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/>

<comment><USER2> I would really be interested in some use-cases. The examples they give are fairly limited.

<comment><USER3> Classification (e.g. spam detection) and document categorization, as well as clustering similar documents.

You can do all these tasks in the original document space, instead of in the latent space, but the advantage of the latent space is that it can capture patterns across the entire corpus. This is called _unsupervised learning_.

In particular, if I have only 100 training examples (e.g. 10 examples of spam and 90 examples of ham), I will learn a better classifier if I first use LSM and then train my classifier, than if I train my classifier over the original documents. In the former case, unsupervised learning detects patterns over the entire corpus, which I use to discriminate between spam and ham. In the latter case, I can only use features from the 100 labeled documents, so it is more difficult to generalize.

More examples:

* What language is this document?

* Is this document about sports?

* Is this news article similar to 50 news articles that I previously marked as "highly interesting" ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We used this, when I was at Apple, to make the Parental Controls web content filter (which I worked on), among other things. It works surprisingly well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just can't ever see Microsoft shipping something like this available to every user. This sort of quiet progress is why I like Apple. Sure they highlight the glossy stuff, but below the surface there's so much blood and guts progress.

<comment><USER6> While Microsoft may not be shipping a LSM program to every user, they are doing a ton of scientific research, much more than Apple. For example googling "latent semantic analysis microsoft research" turns up several research papers on the topic by Microsoft. They do cutting edge research comparable to a good university on a large number of topics like programming language design, compilers, machine learning, distributed computing, graphics, automated theorem proving etc.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft research does some amazing things. But like Xerox PARC they never seem to ship anything. Except for the kinect, that's been a reasonable success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So is anything like this available on other platforms? Because it's way faster than <http://classifier.rubyforge.org/> , even with rb-gsl installed. I'd love it for generating related posts on my Jekyll blog.

</comment><comment><USER8> How have you used this? Looks pretty interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been playing with some clustering stuff in my free time for the past few months.

What I've found is that the problem seems to get a lot more reasonable if you know how many clusters there are.

K-Means requires this information, but afaict agglomerative techniques don't. I wonder why this tool's agglomerative clustering method requires the number of clusters as an argument.

<comment><USER10> You're right that agglomerative clustering (unlike K-means) does not inherently need to know the # of clusters in advance. However, it still needs some sort of termination criterium, and # of clusters is one possible criterium.

Since lsm operates in a transformed space, other commonly used criteria like cluster distance may not be as convenient for the user to express.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it available on Linux?

<comment><USER12> I've used this LDA code <http://code.google.com/p/plda/> on multiple systems, however it's not really as well packaged as the Apple code seems to be.</comment></comment>


Cross compilation just got better in Go 1.5 - <AUTHOR> http://dave.cheney.net/2015/03/03/cross-compilation-just-got-a-whole-lot-better-in-go-1-5

<comment><USER2> I had a recent project that I built with go 1.3. It was a small project ( < 4 weeks ) but it had some interesting requirements -- my app had to be deployed to ARM (raspi), and on an OSX laptop for control, and I use a linux laptop.

The cool part was that it "just worked".

       GOARCH=arm go build myapp.go
       GOOS=darwin go build myapp.go
       go build myapp.go

All three "just worked" with absolutely no surprises, including use of the http engine, json, and a third party serial port library. The native binaries run like a champ.

Looking forward to the continued evolution of golang.

<comment><USER3> > All three "just worked" with absolutely no surprises

Jeez. That's pretty incredible. As someone who absolutely hates dealing with build configuration it's almost tempting enough to take a closer look at go, despite the fact it's garbage collected and I'd never be able to use it (or, if we're being completely honest, want to).

<comment><USER4> Go tooling is excellent. Above anything else IMHO. Sadly the language itself is not so good.

<comment><USER5> This is completely true. "Everything about Go is amazing, except the language."

No snark intended, I say this unironically as someone who uses Go regularly, even for new projects.

<comment><USER6> The language is pretty polarizing--you either "get" and appreciate the design decisions or you find them limiting and archaic.

<comment><USER5> They are the people you hear from. A lot of people are neutral. People who get it, but don't care either way. They don't write opinionated blog posts every Sunday to lament or idolize the newest feature in Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome.

Back in the day, writing cross-platform code meant knowing the ins-and-outs of each platform you wanted to support and coding specifically for each one. Interpreted languages (like Python) and runtimes (like JRE) take a lot of the pain away, but that means all those programs have a dependency: the interpreter or runtime.

Go isn't interpreted and bundles its runtime inside the executable. That has always been pretty great, but with Go 1.5, the programmer won't even have to run `env GOOS=... GOARCH=... make.bash --no-clean` before compiling for another platform.

With veteran OS and systems engineers working on the language, this is why we can have nice things.

<comment><USER7> > Back in the day, writing cross-platform code meant knowing the ins-and-outs > of each platform you wanted to support and coding specifically for each one.

If you mean C and C++ POSIX behavior, yes.

If you mean native languages with rich runtimes like Ada and Modula-2, not really.

Finally Go doesn't get rid of OS specific stuff like pathnames, security, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really looking forward to see more tools ported to go. The simplicity of copy/paste deployment is really something you don't realize until you've experienced it.

Now, the simple idea of installing python and dependencies then doing pip install for wal-e installation, made me search for an hour on git in hope for a standalone golang binary.

<comment><USER9> That is the same experience with Delphi.

Is weird is not more popular (not just Delphi/pascal, but the idea of easy copy/paste deployment)...

<comment><USER10> One could make an argument that with PHP, copy-paste deployment _is_ popular. Of course, it's not quite the same thing, as you'll need Apache/etc. setup, however that is one of PHP's strengths. It's good to see another language doing something similar, but in a nicer, far more performant way: specifically for web development, the way Go does stuff is brilliant in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome stuff! :)

In case someone wants to try out this cleanly in a docker or virtualbox without breaking their host machine's golang install, it is now available as a commented-out ansible role in the vagrant box I created over the weekend:

[https://github.com/samuell/golang-vagrant- ansible](https://github.com/samuell/golang-vagrant-ansible)

(Instructions for enabling the Go 1.5 role in the repo README ... but in short, just uncomment "\- golang-1.5" in playbook.yml, and comment out "\- golang" instead, before running "vagrant up docker" or "vagrant up virtualbox").

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been away from go for a long while.

Did they ever figure out dependency versioning?

<comment><USER13> They've started to think about it: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- dev/nMWoEAG55...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- dev/nMWoEAG55v8)

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Unsurprisingly they've taken the Plan 9 approach, sardonically contrasted with the GNU one here: [http://aiju.de/rant/cross- compiling](http://aiju.de/rant/cross-compiling)

</comment><comment><USER14> I haven't checked in a while. Does cross-compiling now support libraries that are implemented in C? As this includes some of the standard library, this seems like a rather large stumbling block.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it work if I first compile for GOARM=5 and then for GOARM=7 (or vice versa)?</comment>


Benchmarks: LLVM, gcc - <AUTHOR> http://www.cocoageek.com/2008/08/llvm-gcc-benchmarks/

<comment><USER2> Soft benchmarks, but it is nice to see a real word data point from an independent person.

LLVM being a little faster is nice, but that isn't the biggest reason for its popularity.

1) IDE developers (well one) that don't wish to be GPL compatible needed a compiler that communicates semantic information to the IDE that they could integrate without infecting themselves with a GPL license. clang/llvm exists for this.

2) API and JIT. If you wish to generate code programatically this can be a win. I've written functions to temporary files, forked a gcc, and dynamically loaded the objects, but it isn't the fast way and it isn't the clean way.

3) LLVM is modular and agile. Extend or twist it fairly easily. Try to twist gcc and it may take your hand off.

<comment><AUTHOR> the _other_ gcc alternatives are pretty obscure (ok, distcc's not obscure):

pcc <http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1168313>

clue <http://cluecc.sourceforge.net/>

ucc <http://sourceforge.net/projects/ucc></comment></comment>


Using Awk and R to parse 25tb of DNA sequencing data - <AUTHOR> https://livefreeordichotomize.com/2019/06/04/using_awk_and_r_to_parse_25tb/ <comment><USER2> One note, this type of data isn't traditionally considered "sequencing" data, as it's a much simpler form of point measurements. Yes, you get the base call at a place of common variation, but "sequencing" is generally reserved for those cases where one gets extended sequences of bases, rather that just data from here and there.</comment>


Adventures of Porting MUSL to PS4 - <AUTHOR> https://dayzerosec.com/posts/adventures-of-porting-musl-to-ps4/ <comment><USER2> This is an interesting post but the author seems to have a bit of ignorance/bias to the bsd libc that led them down a particular path. It's not difficult to pull the libc out of src, start with a minimal make copypasta, and keep iterating adding in just enough support until you eventually make it through a compile and link, then work out the few remaining port differences. IMHO this would lead to better long term outcomes for the indented platform but both approaches offer interesting learning opportunity.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I did just that (with NetBSD long) about 20 years ago on a Dreamcast.

<comment><USER4> Would love to hear more about your experience if you've ever done a write-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FWIW, building FreeBSD libc (under FreeBSD, obviously) is as simple as "cd src/lib/libc && make all install".

</comment><comment><USER6> Not the same, but a reminder that Perl works on ps2: [https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/caretx.c#L120-L125](https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/caretx.c#L120-L125)

<comment><USER7> But that's because there was an official Linux release for PlayStation 2 by Sony.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2)</comment></comment>


The Sounds of New York City, Circa 1920 (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/22/239870539/the-sounds-of-new-york-city-circa-1920 <comment><USER2> It's crazy to me just how different voices and the accent were back then.

So many women had this very high-pitched and constricted, and almost childlike "shrill" voice.

While men had vowels that were so wide-open laterally, but lacking in upper overtones (the opposite of nasality).

And I don't think you can ascribe any of it to the recording technology -- even if you record someone today and cut off higher/lower frequencies, they don't sound anything like that.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting for me too. I wonder if vocal fry existed back then, or if that's something people will point out as a period thing 100 years from now.

<comment><USER4> People point that out as annoying now.

<comment><USER5> Annoying as it may be, it doesn't have to be pleasant to or even popular with broader society in order to be something iconic to our era. I can't speak to whether that's the case, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who has done field recording knows that even with the best directional microphone in a zeppelin, you get an amazing amount of unwanted/unexpected noise. This is why people record 'wild' track in the field, so when they do studio over-dub they can include the right kind of background noise, to make the overdub sound right.

Those wild tracks in the city scape would be fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER7> I tried opening [http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html](http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/NYCsound/777b.html) but it requires Flash, so nothing worked there :(

<comment><USER8> Chrome has a built in Flash player. You just have to enable flash for that site (click on the flash icon). It worked for me. FF however requires a separate download of the runtime.

<comment><USER7> I'm using Firefox and rather not touch Flash to begin with. Besides, all browsers are going to ditch it for good soon, due to Adobe declaring its EOL this year¹. So all such sites should really do something about it.

1\. [https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash- update/](https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And the trams... On both sides of the square...

</comment><comment><USER10> They spoke so beautifully and clearly. As if playing in an old movie</comment>


Ask HN: Edward Tufte 1 Day Course - Wothwhile to Attend? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone ever taken the Edward Tufte 1-day course? If so, what did you think of it? I like the books, curious if the seminar was worth it or if it was just a rehash of what is already published. <comment><USER2> I loved it but I did not read the books before attending, so I can't say whether you'll find it repetitive or not. Understanding how to better communicate through visualizations is immensely useful for work, so you could see if your company would pay for it.</comment>


Code hosting choices - <AUTHOR> http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200903/code_hosting_choices.html

<comment><USER2> I pay something like $7/month for webhosting on Dreamhost and I get SVN along with it.

I've done consulting work on projects that use Beanstalk. <http://beanstalkapp.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Besides the ones mentioned in the linked post and its comments, I've also seen that Unfuddle offers a free 200 MB private Svn/Git repository (<http://unfuddle.com/about/tour/plans> ).</comment>


Milan Airport WiFi sends your MAC address to advertisers and trackers - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/pimterry/status/1192028773526441985 <comment><USER2> Based on the screenshots it looks like the mac address is leaking out because its in the referer. I would guess this isn't intentional and shouldn't be hard to fix.

I've worked with a number of captive portal systems and they all basically work the same way. The AP/controller intercepts http requests and redirects to the captive portal page with identifying information about the device (ip,mac,ssid,ap_mac,etc.). The captive portal http server shows the user a splash page to accept terms or enter a username/password or a credit card. Once the captive portal server decides the user should be allowed onto the network it needs to communicate that back to the wireless hardware which is done with the user's mac address.

Based on the requests it looks like they have some ads/trackers on the splash page that are getting requests with a referer set to the original splash page url (which includes the client mac address). A no-referrer meta tag or an intermediate redirect would prevent this from happening.

<comment><USER3> While the mac address is a particularly egregious note, really they shouldn't be sending any data to ad firms whatsoever without consent, and fixing the referrer alone won't help much.

Aside from the data they're explicitly sending in those requests, they're running the response as JS, thereby exposing a bunch of data about your machine & browser, and the response itself is setting a long-term 3rd party cookie too, so that ads on every other site you ever visit can tie all this (and the fact you've used the wifi in this airport) to a long-term profile.

In Milan airport you can make a reasonable bet that most people are EU citizens, so sharing any of their identifiable user data at all for marketing purposes without consent is a huge and expensive no no.

It's not a good look. Referrer aside, I suspect there's no legal option other than dropping this ad script from their wifi login page entirely.

<comment><USER4> Consent is not needed for quite a bit of electronic marketing. It is for setting cookies, which is probably going on here to facilitate the marketing, so your point stands, but it's a breach of the ePrivacy Directive not GDPR so fines are lower. No excuse though.

<comment><USER3> For the marketing itself consent isn't needed, but for collecting/processing personal data for marketing I'm pretty confident it is. Why wouldn't that fall under GDPR?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps they are not storing the personally identifiable data (unclear whether the MAC addresses are logged on-site), but are merely passing it on to advertisers for their own use. Neat loophole if that is the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Milan Airports answered that they have submitted the issue to the "Information technology staff"

source: [https://twitter.com/pimterry/status/1192038174408753152?s=20](https://twitter.com/pimterry/status/1192038174408753152?s=20)

<comment><USER3> Update - apparently they've now fixed this: [https://twitter.com/MiAirports/status/1192433053743927296](https://twitter.com/MiAirports/status/1192433053743927296)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On my Mac, I leave this running all the time:

[https://github.com/halo/LinkLiar](https://github.com/halo/LinkLiar)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing this! I know it's included in Win10 and in iOS, surprised it's not in OSX yet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the title I suggest substituting Milan Airport with Milan Malpensa MXP Airport (for there are multiple Milan airports)

</comment><comment><USER10> iPhones randomize the MAC address when connecting to hotspots (on a per-ssid basis, I think?). Other platforms do too (Windows 10 now has an option to do that automatically as well, but I can't recall if it is enabled by default).

<comment><USER11> The MAC randomization only applies to probes it sends for known networks when not connected. Once you are connected, it uses the real MAC.

iPhone also still sends the device name to the DHCP server when requesting an IP, so if you haven't changed it, it is broadcasting "<Your first name>'s iPhone" to the network.

<comment><USER12> > iPhone also still sends the device name to the DHCP server when requesting > an IP, so if you haven't changed it, it is broadcasting "<Your first name>'s > iPhone" to the network.

Awareness of this is probably going up. Comcast is actually running TV ads that point it out [1].

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H45-5Rga1B8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H45-5Rga1B8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have a theory on what the "advertisers and trackers" want a MAC address for? If they're using it for anything load bearing, it seems like there is an interesting CCC talk lurking here for anyone who wants to visit that airport with a few hundred dollars worth of devices and stuff a few tens of million spoofed MAC addresses into the system.

<comment><USER14> Since MAC address ranges are allocated to certain manufacturers, it is a simple way to track your device type. Additionally, all MAC addresses are unique so it is the easiest way to match/combine your data from different trackers.

<comment><USER15> > Additionally, all MAC addresses are unique so it is the easiest way to > match/combine your data from different trackers.

This is not true. While it's intended for MAC addresses to be unique, there are plenty of instances where manufacturers re-use MACs when they run out instead of registering more.

Additionally, there is no issue with multiple devices having the same MAC address as long as they're never on the same Layer 2 domain.

<comment><USER14> As far as I know, IEEE is quite strict in this matter but I just searched for it now and have seen a couple of cases where people ran into duplicate MAC addresses.

I would assume this is a rare occurrence and if not, it should still be okay to sometimes run into address collisions for advertising purposes.

Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://github.com/feross/SpoofMAC](https://github.com/feross/SpoofMAC)

<comment><USER17> Does this work with OSX? Its 5 years since the last update...

<comment><USER18> Had this alias for years and it still works:

        alias random-mac='openssl rand -hex 6 | sed '\''s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'\'' | xargs sudo ifconfig en0 ether'

<comment><USER17> Awesome, so does that change the permanent mac address that comes with the laptop, and it is forever gone? Or does it somehow "reset" when you restart, and you rerun this command multiple times

<comment><USER18> It resets when you turn the NIC on and off, I believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Linux lets you reassign your own MAC. There's no reason to use the same one twice in public! :)

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem with constantly shuffling MAC addresses is that they are used for device authentication on corporate/school/university networks. Does anyone know of a utility that generates MAC addresses as a hash of the SSID?

<comment><USER21> A bash script?

You can scan for the networks in the area, select the one you want, run the name through, say sha256, select the first 8 characters and reset the mac address to that.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, not that hard to do manually--I have a nice script for that. But I haven't looked into the logistics of hooking into the wifi connection process and doing this automatically :)

<comment><USER21> Back in my misspent youth I had a bash script that would connect me to whatever access point I needed.

I can't imagine much has changed since then, just add the logic to change the mac address between entering the SSID and actually connecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> macchanger

Also extends time limites wifi.

Or use my gypsy code

import random

import os

mac=''

os.system('/etc/init.d/networking stop')

os.system('ifconfig wlan1 down')

os.system('ifconfig eth1 down')

os.system('ifconfig wlp8s0 down')

os.system('ifconfig wlp7s0 down')

for i in range(0,3):

__r=random.randint(16, 256)

__mac=mac+":"+str(hex(r))[2:]

mac="00:07:E9"+mac

print mac

os.system('/etc/init.d/networking stop')

os.system('ifconfig wlan1 hw ether '+mac)

os.system('ifconfig wlp8s0 hw ether '+mac)

os.system('ifconfig wlp7s0 hw ether '+mac)

os.system('ifconfig eth1 hw ether '+mac)

os.system('ifconfig wlan1 up')

os.system('ifconfig eth1 up')

os.system('ifconfig wlp8s0 up')

os.system('ifconfig wlp7s0 up')

os.system('/etc/init.d/networking start')

os.system('ifconfig')

print "echo 'MAC changed..."

print "new random MAC "+mac

<comment><USER23> You need to indent the code by at least 2 spaces so it doesn't collapse into a paragraph like that. Also, that script isn't really portable. Not everyone has those interface names nor /etc/init.d/networking.

<comment><USER22> It is gypsy code and works for me. Use macchanger instead of adopt the script for your purposes.

<comment><USER23> What is "gypsy code"? I first thought you were referring to a library or some kind of platform, but that doesn't seem to be it. The only definition I find of gypsy is that of the people. Maybe you're saying that it was written by a Gypsy, but I don't know why that'd be of interest.

<comment><USER22> It meant a quick and dirty fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great. Guess they have the MAC address of my laptop from when I was there last week then. Fortunately it was a burner Chromebook running Gallium Linux so that makes me care a little less.

</comment><comment><USER25> What I'm more worried about are probe requests, because sometimes I forget to turn off the wifi. Do you know whether the MAC address, or other identifying data, is sent in this case?

<comment><USER26> MAC address of your radio, plus the BSSID of every wireless network you've ever connected to and saved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oof! Does anyone recommend any tools for protecting against this sort of stuff? I feel like a VPN wouldn't even be enough here since the MAC address is coming through the headers.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER8> I think the full answer is to never trust anything on a page that isn't from the host domain: achievable via the uMatrix plugin. I dont understand why anyone would trust random scripts from a random company (and sometimes just an unnamed cloudfront endpoint).

A less intense version is to use a PiHole or otherwise block bad domains at the DNS level via a regular ad blocker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can someone post a TLDR? Twitter blocks Tor exit nodes, so the content is unavailable:

> 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill > it.

</comment><comment><USER6> We can't be sure about this, maybe the airport mask the data to a relay

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks like a fairly significant GDPR breach</comment>


Residents vowed to avoid the police to protect people of color - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/minneapolis-george-floyd-police.html <comment><USER2> So stupid. To apologize for being white, being born with privileges, etc... isnothing more than virtue signaling and does nothing positive for blacks or any other minority. If anything, it's an insult to them.

Will they also avoid black police officers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume their hearts are in a good place. But a handful of individual residents can't fix societal problems that require collective action.</comment></comment>