Show HN: Secure Typeform and Jotform Replacement – at lower cost - <AUTHOR> https://www.globalpatron.com/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, this does not seem to be suitable for replacing Typeform, as the design is not really competing with the design that Typeform is providing. Quick look at the three examples on the landing page shows inconsistent white- spacing, poor contrast, not-ideal color matchings and outdated design in the forms (especially the bullets from the example in the middle, that almost look like a bug).

It's great to see a platform focused on security though, as Typeform has less- than-stellar record regarding that.

Something else that quickly got noticed was the long loading times when changing page.

Would be awesome to see "offline forms" feature though, maybe you could share a bit on how you are thinking of the implementation of that? When I used to work at Typeform (many many years ago), we had some smaller chats around it, and I think we always ended up in the corner of either having the users needing to keep the browser tab open until online (feels unlikely) or providing a native app for supporting background tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback Victor, it's appreciated. I'll get some professionally selected colour themes/designs added. Fortunately that's easy to do. The screenshots on the homepage don't do justice to what users can actually do in terms of styling so i'll get those screenshots replaced too (users can edit almost anything, padding, borders, colours, navigation styles, even add transitions). I'll ask a pro designer to create some forms in the editor, and we'll save the styles as pre-made themes that others can use.

Was there anything else you felt stood out as needing improvement?

Yeah offline forms will be cool. All of the form types (currently Typeform, multi-step, and classic single step), will work offline. It's on our dev mobile phones atm, but we're not releasing it yet until some additional security checks and cleanups are done. It's native apps so they can collect responses, files etc, then the app later pushes to server when they are in an internet-available area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like the recent Twitter hack tells us about potential security risks when it comes to data collection as well ;)! First impression is good! Will try it out!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is years of work. taking on the big guys in the industry. wish us luck.

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest a name change. It doesn't seem to relate to forms at all, which will make it hard for users to remember and awkward to share.

<comment><AUTHOR> its a bit too late for that now!!! but yeah I know what you mean. the name has a story behind it because this whole thing was built with a service focus that's not specifically related to forms, and there will be more branches totally unrelated to forms later too. A bit like Richard Bransons "Virgin" branding, except way poorer. In future they will likely be under their own subdomains. [https://www.globalpatron.com/blog/our-startup- story/](https://www.globalpatron.com/blog/our-startup-story/)

<comment><AUTHOR> oh one thing! did you mean people will feel awkward to share the link to the platform, or a link to their forms? (the forms themselves can be embedded in any website/domain). Thanks for your feedback btw. it's valuable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Fossilisation as a service - <AUTHOR> What do you think of this idea - when you die, we fossilize your remains so you can be rediscovered in 100 million years! <comment><USER2> Seems interesting. A lot of material science and physical overhead though. I would recommend starting with at least 10 million USD for the first batch.

The first difficulty I see is the resting place. Where in the world is geologically stable enough and will be undisturbed enough for the fossils to form.

You'd need a geologist on staff, some excellent salesmen and lawyers.

I couldn't see this getting off the ground for less than $350,000.

</comment><comment><USER3> I always wondered if it would be possible. I think it would be pretty cool.

<comment><USER2> I think it's definitely possible. Practical... maybe not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds cool , but definitely not something in the todo list .

</comment><comment><USER5> i dont like the idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> dumb.</comment>


Quantum encryption is now fast enough for voice calls - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/26/scientists-develop-fast-quantum-encryption/ <comment><USER2> Click bait title. From the article itself...

> Eventually, there may be a time when you could hold a secure voice chat > knowing that even the most determined spy couldn't listen in.

Point being the tech is not there yet. Not sure how you go from "someone did an experiment demonstrating a way to pack more info into a photon" to "QE now fast enough to make voice calls".</comment>


Fred Wilson: Time Is On Your Side, Yes It Is - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/08/time-is-on-your.html

<comment><USER2> Correction: Time is on your side, IF what you're building is inherently better than what the competition is building. In the long run, valuations approach inherent value; in the short term, valuations reflect market sentiment and irrational factors.

If, on the other hand, you're building yet another web 2.0 site, and the only thing distinguishing you from the competition is that you're YC-funded and have a cool name, eventually the market is going to realize that you have no clothes -- so you should either sell out as soon as possible or work hard on building something which is superior to the competition for reasons other than coolness. Google became popular because it was cool; but it stayed popular because it was technically superior to the competition.</comment>


Why Software Takes a Long Time - <AUTHOR> http://blog.untrod.com/2011/07/why-software-takes-long-time.html

<comment><USER2> You're trying to explain to nontechies, so I'd ditch the code fragments entirely for psudeocode or solely the plain english version.</comment>


Why Information Security Is Hard – An Economic Perspective (2001) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.acsac.org/2001/papers/110.pdf <comment><USER2> A very interesting read, and worth noting that most/all of the base problems described are still very much present.

Ross Anderson's security engineering book that gets a mention is this paper is available online for free at [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> On EDx you can find a cybersecurity economics course by Ross Anderson and other experts in the field.

I took it a few years ago and at that time it was not free, now it is. If somebody is interested here is the link: [https://www.edx.org/course/cyber- security-economics-delftx-s...](https://www.edx.org/course/cyber-security- economics-delftx-secon101x)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing, this is great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Abstract:

According to one common view, information security comes down to technical measures. Given better access control policy models, formal proofs of cryptographic protocols, approved firewalls, better ways of detecting intrusions and malicious code, and better tools for system evaluation and assurance, the problems can be solved. In this note, I put forward a contrary view: information insecurity is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of microeconomics: network externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, adverse selection, liability dumping and the tragedy of the commons.</comment>


Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence 2009 Accomplishments - <AUTHOR> http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/12/singularity-institute-for-artificial-intelligence-2009-accomplishments/

<comment><USER2> I've never understood singularitarians. Why make such a big fuss over super humans and real AI and whatnot? There is too much talk backed with no results. Let the real scientists continue doing what they do, and perhaps some of the ideas will bear fruit.

But the funny thing is that at the end of it all, being a "super human" won't make your life any better. Technology can't save humanity.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely true. Real problems are social problems.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Push to Deploy – a single button to deploy your app - <AUTHOR> When I was making my site, I kept having to deploy it with a command in my shell. I thought what if I could deploy my entire site with just pushing one big button. So I made Push to Deploy. It's a programmable USB button which deploys your startup, app, site (or rocket ship) when you hit it.
You can also program it to your own actions like: - Run a Shell script - Run git status - Add a Sublime shortcut or any other software shortcut - Refresh your inbox
Let me know your feedback, HN :)
pushtodeploy.io <comment><USER2> _crickets.._

cool idea but i wont pay for it</comment>


Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://pinode.pythonanywhere.com/ <comment><USER2> Or you could just buy a Raspberry PI, and send it to EDIS in Austria: <http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/>

And there you get FREE symmetrical 100mbit connection with no monthly payment. And you can always get your Raspberry Pi back if you need to, you just need to pay a few euros for postage.

<comment><USER3> This has been "out of stock" since right after it was announced.

<comment><USER2> They do increase capacity regularly, just keep checking.

<comment><USER3> Is there any way to be notified when slots open up? I've been checking off and on since it was announced and it's always been "out of stock".

<comment><USER4> Clearly you need to run a cronjob that checks every minute and texts you when it becomes available...

<comment><USER5> If only I had a cheap and minimal ARM based computer running in the cloud I could run this cronjob on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can I ask why (without trying to sound awful and steal someone's front page thunder)? If you want to do something interesting with the Pi you'll probably be wanting to connect other hardware to it. You can't when it is in the cloud. Otherwise, it is just a general purpose Arm/Linux board that has far less power than anything else you could get in the cloud-o-spehere...so I'm just genuinely wondering what you would use this for? Plus, the hardware is so cheap ($25-35 USD), it sorta defeats the purpose of HW in the cloud to save cost (hardware as a service, e.g. EC2, etc)..

<comment><USER7> Try buying it :)

<comment><USER6> [Edit] ah ok -- nice troll :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I forgot I had this extension enabled: <https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud- to-butt> and hilarity ensued.

<comment><USER9> I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love it. See what happens when you click one of the "Buy" buttons.

<comment><USER11> Agreed.

I found myself halfway to a facepalm until I clicked the "Buy" button. Beautifully executed trolling.

<comment><USER12> The bottom bit of copy was great -- but until then I was like "hmmm... is this real?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW I'd like to thank the guys at Zurb for producing Foundation. The whole Pinode site took less than 45 minutes to write, of which we spent about ten minutes on the design and the rest on the jokes. And we'd never done anything with Foundation before. Definitely a fantastic framework for putting a product site together quickly.

<comment><USER13> Would you say that Foundation is better fit for marketing/product sites, while Bootstrap is better for webapps/admins?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't say. We used bootstrap for our main product site and it was great. We found foundation better for the pinode marketing site but we've never used it for a webapps, so it might be better for those too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This should have been saved for 1 April. It's good advertising though, and since it hit the front page of HN it's probably driving a ton of traffic to their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We probably should have waited but it was one of those silly ideas you get on a Friday evening and we're probably never have got round to it if we'd not done it right away.

In terms of traffic to our main site -- not too much, 400 extra visitors or so. But that's not a problem, we did it because we thought it was funny, and put in the link to PythonAnywhere as an afterthought. Just wanted to share the joke.

That said, the Pinode site is running in one of our standard $5/month accounts and is handling a Hacker News front page (a few dozen hits/second) without even breaking a sweat. Just sayin'...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would love to see some pictures of the 'data centre'

<comment><USER16> I imagine it would looks something like this: [http://cdn- static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/...](http://cdn- static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/raspberry-pi- supercomputer-1-620x465.jpg?hash=AQx4MwRjZG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.

</comment><comment><USER18> How do you do the DVI video capturing? Framegrabbers and IP KVM modules are dead expensive, AFAIK - and how do you handle reformatting?

<comment><USER19> eh, I've been looking at doing something like this (hosting PI units) and the OOB solution I'm considering is soldering on a serial console.

I would also need to figure out some automated bootloader setup, of course.

<comment><USER20> Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc.

You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.

<comment><USER19> maybe. My partner has experience with that sort of thing, so yeah, that's an idea for a kickstarter or something. It would be awesome publicity for the sorts of people I like to sell to.

But from what I'm told, it's a fairly simple soldering job to put a serial port on a regular pi.

Personally, I'd want to add more ram if I'm going to bother with a whole goddamn board spin, and maybe remove the video hardware, but then, I don't know how involved that would be, and meh, I have a tonne of other work she could be doing now that she's working here that would probably provide a better return, and eh, the window for starting a custom spin of a pi board and having it done before the pi is obsolete is probably closing anyhow, so maybe next revision?

That's big problem with custom hardware... By the time you are done with all the Engineering effort and debugging, well, there's better hardware out there. Remember the neo? That's why you'd want to start with something mostly done (that was only recently released) and then make minor changes (and why removing video and adding more ram might be a bad idea?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I call BS, I would really like to see someone prove that these are all really raspi units and not just Debian Squeeze instances running on a virtual server.

Also, I have a raspi myself. The beauty of the raspi is not that you get to eat the pie, its that you get to make it yourself. Cloud connected? I think you mean Internet, not cloud. You know, unless these are Debian Squeezes on a virtualized box. Don't have the time? Then you can't have this hobby. End of rant.

<comment><USER22> Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Excellent!

I was about to close the webpage when I looked at more than just the bronze subscription.

</comment><comment><USER24> I so wanted this. :(

<comment><USER25> Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Shouldn't this announcement have waited about a week?

</comment><comment><USER27> love it!</comment>


Sprint fed customer GPS data to police over 8 million times - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/12/sprint-fed-customer-gps-data-to-leos-over-8-million-times.ars

<comment><USER3> Funny, when my phone was stolen sprint assured me that 'legally' they could not use the GPS info from the phone for anything but emergency purposes - <USER2> even to tell the police where my stolen phone might be.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not 8 million people.

Each court order lasts for 60 days, for a ping every 3 minutes, which is 28800 per order.

So the 8 million could actually be as low as 278 orders.

<comment><USER5> Or a "time" could be the setting of the "start bit" on a single phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a shame the general public doesn't care about privacy. Even techies use AT&T despite their involvement with the NSA's secret spy program.

[ source: [http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy- program/2100-10...](http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy- program/2100-1028_3-6033501.html) ]

<comment><USER7> I don't care about privacy in general. I _do_ care about asymmetry of privacy. Although it would be a radically different world to the one we currently live in, I think I would actually be quite ok with the idea of _everyone_ having access to the GPS data, all the time.

<comment><USER8> So you can know that the family down the street is on holidays (in Wallyworld!) and you can now rob their house?

<comment><USER9> But wouldn't they also know when someone that didn't know was in the house?

<comment><USER10> only if they monitored it from their holiday location

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real question isn't if 8 million times is too many, but if one time with out the approval of a judge is too many.

If it is important for law enforcement to have the information, they should get the OK of a judge, to prevent abuse.

</comment><comment><USER5> Everyone is talking about court orders and legalities, and no one is questioning the basic absurdity of one's own bought-and-paid-for hardware acting as a stool pigeon. Required reading: <http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html>

<comment><USER12> A good read... I'll be thinking about that one for awhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I believe that this kind of thing is why Congress, the courts, and regulators do not break up certain industries even when there is clear cartel or monopolistic behavior.

It is just so much easier to control an industry sector when there are just a few large players.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's why there has to be warrantless wiretaps. Can you imagine the paperwork of having to fill out a warrant for these 8million pre-criminals, it would cause terrible writers cramp.

<comment><USER15> So... cops don't have the capability for a simple bash script and phone lists?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sprint has a sort-of response to this article: [http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/buzz-b...](http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/buzz- by-sprint/announcements/blog/2009/12/01/sharing-location-information)

It doesn't really say much, though, other than attempting to clarify what "8 million times" means. I don't know about anyone else, but that portion didn't really require much clarification.

Someone from the ACLU posted a comment on their response which asks for more specific information.

</comment><comment><USER17> The speculation I'm seeing elsewhere is that this was 8 million pings sent by a much smaller number of survielled phones, with each sending pings every 30 minutes or whatever.

Anyway, the original blog post has much other interesting info, despite the probably inflated numbers in its title. <[http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for- re...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real- surveillance.html>);

<comment><USER18> Exactly, though the 8 million is not pings from phones but rather requests from police. Maybe the police are different, but when I use a web app to get live data, I tend to click refresh quite a bit.</comment></comment>


Study casts doubt on anti-depressants - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fce3400-e3d5-11dc-8799-0000779fd2ac.html

<comment><USER2> The title of the article is misleading. SSRIs were the focus of this article, and they're but one of many classes of anti-depressants.

</comment><comment><USER3> Auditing worked for me!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never heard of auditing... unless you mean you were audited in the conventional sense, and it was so depressing that life felt ok by comparison!

<comment><USER2> Maybe he's making a joke about Scientology. I pray it's a joke.

<comment><USER3> it's a joke</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Remote Jobs for French Companies - <AUTHOR> https://remotestash.fr/ <comment><AUTHOR> A community of French companies recruiting full remote</comment>


HostGator is Down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/search/hostgator <comment><AUTHOR> From HostGator Support: "We are aware of the issues you are currently experiencing. Unfortunately, I have not been told what the cause of this issue is, but rest assured we are aware of the issues and a team of server monitors are actively working to resolve the issues. We appreciate your patience on this issue. I am told this will only last a few more minutes."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And they are back. According to their Twitter update they rolled out an Apache update.</comment>


Sous vide Supreme Review: How To Cook From The Inside Out - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5461100/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been cooking SV for about a year now, not with the super-expensive SVS appliance, but with a PID controller from Auber Instruments (~$120) and a $50 rice cooker.

Want to see something funny? Check out Amazon's recommendations on the bottom- of-the-line Black and Decker rice cooker:

[http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer- Stainless/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer- Stainless/dp/B000MVQE66/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=home- garden&qid=1265057639&sr=8-19)

I'm not going to waste much time talking about this stuff if nobody cares (I have a LOT to say about it), except to sum it up as: this is _at least_ as important as the microwave oven. Every house in the world will have this capability in 50 years.

<comment><USER2> I think SV is pretty interesting; but it seems like most people care about saving time more than they care about food cooked well.

I constantly fret about how done things are whenever I cook, to the point of obsession. I inspect every steak after it's been cut open... Did I evenly heat each side? Is one side more cooked than the other? Is it overdone? So on and so forth. It seems like SV would be nice just to get over that sort of cooking anxiety.

What sort of additional time does it take to cook? I mean, it's pretty quick to heat my cast iron to where I want it, and then just 16 or 17 minutes later I can have a nicely rested steak ready to go... I'm sure this takes longer, but no idea how much longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really unhappy with this Gizmodo review, but they've got the steak part nailed. It's exactly like they say: you take a steak, bag it (I season it and throw some butter in), and then set the temperature for 130. Wait one hour or 48 hours or any time in between: you will get a uniformly perfect steak.

Do this two or three times and you'll stop poking or probing the final product. It simply _is_ 130f, inside and out, when you remove it from the bag. Checking the temperature is essentially second-guessing a very very accurate electronic thermometer.

The quality of that finished product will be higher than anything you can accompish on cast iron, because cast iron doesn't heat meat uniformly. To get a rare center on cast iron, you have to accept a medium-well band of meat on the outside of the steak. Skill and technique dictate how wide that band is, but it's there regardless.

What you lose in SV is the seared crust. So, of course, after you cook your steak SV, you sear the outside --- for seconds, not minutes, on each side --- and then plate.

There are three major benefits of SV for steaks.

First, no matter who you are, SV is the one way you can set up a couple steaks in the morning before you leave for work and come home with a perfectly cooked steak waiting. It's this benefit that makes me think SV is the future for the American kitchen.

Second, if you're a typical home cook, SV kills the margin of error. Unless you type the wrong temperature in, you're getting a perfectly cooked steak no matter what you do.

Third, if you're a pro chef, SV frees you from having to be an extremely expensive meat thermometer. Electronics are better at watching temperatures than people are. Chefs are freed from the drudgework of monitoring cooking, and can spend that time innovating or refining actual dishes.

<comment><USER2> Ahhhh _unattended_ cooking really would be a huge difference. For some reason I was thinking you'd start it up, sit around for awhile waiting for the water to heat, throw in your vacuum bag and then wait for it to cook. The idea of starting dinner before you leave for work is pretty compelling (on top of having it uniformly cooked to a specific temperature).

<comment><AUTHOR> There's three sub-wins to unattended SV cooking (warning: I am unlikely to ever shut up about this).

First, you can cook a meal for your family in 5 minutes before you leave for work. You can already do that with a crock pot (you don't know how amazing crock pots are until you have kids and a working spouse), but only for braise cuts, and only for braised applications.

Second, you can cook a meal, cool it rapidly, and store it in the fridge for later. In other words, you can cook a week's meals on Sunday night, and bust them out night after night.

Third, you can prep a meal, seal it, stick it in the fridge, and throw it in the SV when you're ready to cook it.

Unlike microwave, "boil-in-the-bag", or crock-pot meals, SV will do these things _and_ produce a restaurant-caliber protein for you more reliably than if you cooked it conventionally with your full attention.

<comment><USER2> Regarding your second point, I assume you store in the vacuum bag; but how do you reheat? Back in the SV?

I've seen these on a few of the Food Network reality shows (The Next Food Network Star, The Next Iron Chef), and they always talked about them as though it was some sort of rocket science. It's nice to know that it's just a temperature controlled water bath.

It seems like it's right up my alley. I have a fondness for cooking food slowly - barbecue by way of smoking and dutch oven / crock pot cooking. Of course, those modes of cooking are left for the weekends so I'm sure my wife would be happy if I found a way to cook more during the week.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do it in the SV, which is I guess what you're supposed to do, but I just unbag it and heat it through on the stove.

I do cook things SV and hold them in the fridge, but honestly most of the time I do that I do it for lunch. For instance, I've got a rice cooker full of cheap chicken breasts going for my next several lunches right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the impulse purchasers here, let me screw you out of a couple bucks:

[http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&...](http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=44)

[http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer- Stainless/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-RC880-Steamer- Stainless/dp/B000MVQE66/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=home- garden&qid=1265057639&sr=8-19)

[http://www.amazon.com/Seal-A-Meal-VS107-Vacuum-Food- Sealer/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Seal-A-Meal-VS107-Vacuum-Food- Sealer/dp/B000KL5IJM/ref=pd_ts_k_9?ie=UTF8&s=kitchen)

The rice cooker plugs into the Auber PID controller, the PID controller plugs into the wall. You set the temperature on the controller (say, to 130f for perfect steak), and it turns the rice cooker on and off to maintain that temperature. You bag steaks with the seal-a-meal, put 'em in the bath, and walk away for a day or two. Done.

Side benefit that my partner Dave noted: your kitchen now looks a little bit more like a meth lab. Sexy!

<comment><USER3> Why stop there. You can get a high precision scale and pick up some sodium alginate (make caviar out of anything), some transglutaminase (meat glue), Tapioca maltodextrin to turn any fat into powder (bacon fat powder anyone?). The molecular gastronomy rabbit hole.

<comment><AUTHOR> I highly recommend the maltodextrin, if only for peanut butter powder and brown butter butter powder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh the problems I have with this review:

* He got "inedibly flaky" chicken after holding chicken in the bath overnight. In other words, he probably set the temperature too high. You don't need to hold chicken at 160f if you're cooking it for 24 hours.

* He cooked duck _in the prepackaged Duck L'Orange bag_ he got at Costco.

* He declared SV "not worth it" for lamb and rib roasts because he doesn't cook them often enough to care, and the conventional oven techniques are "tried and true". The conventional techniques for _everything_ are tried and true, and error prone and inconvenient.

* Short ribs are a draw? You can "fool-proof" braise short ribs for most of a day and wind up with stew meat --- which is great --- or you can "fool-proof" SV short ribs and end up with medium rare short ribs, which is something you can't get out of any other cooking technique. And if you want a "caramelized sauce" when you're done, you reduce the bag goo. How hard is that?

* Anybody buying a SV setup will have no problem doing perfect fish under a broiler? What?

</comment><comment><USER3> Another benefit of sous vide that I didn't see in the article is that the cooking of items in sealed bags causes them to retain their volatile compounds. You might say, what's that? Every item releases volatile compounds that give it smell/taste. When food is heated the molecules vibrate and volatile compounds are released into the air, gone forever. In sous vide, these compounds are retained. This leads to increased flavor. The side effect of this is that you need to be very careful about adding spices and herbs to your food. In sous vide, a little bit goes a long way.

Have you ever wondered why foods go together. Like tomatoes and basil. The trick is that they share some of the same volatile compounds. That is how many high-end restaurants know to put seemingly strange combination's of food together and it works. There are volatile compound databases available for many food items.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is supposedly one of the wins from cooking in a pouch (here's the old Good Eats transcript on that: <http://j.mp/4EN80H>), which is something I've never had any success with.

The flip side of this --- I think --- is the reason you can't put whole garlic in SV.</comment></comment>


Diff.blog() – Discover and follow developer blogs - <AUTHOR> https://diff.blog/?20 <comment><USER2> I like the idea. Is it possible to search for one specific tag (e.g. #python)? Have you implemented the CMS yourself? BTW, I got "Server Error (500)" after github authentication.

</comment><comment><USER3> why not just use twiiter?</comment>


New to App Development – Objective C or Swift - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I have been programming in C since past 4 years. I am comfortable with the complexity of pointers in C.
Currently I am working for a MNC in India, but I want to become an independent app-developer. I purchased a Mac book Air and an iPhone recently and want to get started with iPhone app development in near future.
My concern is what language should I start learning, Objective-C or swift ? I prefer performance/features over easy learning curve.
I browsed the internet only to be more confused. Would like to hear from people who are into Apple App development since quite some time now. Also, it will be very helpful if you can list some good source to learn objective-C/swift. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Since you already know C and are comfortable with it, start with Objective C. The hard part of app development is Cocoa and the other Apple frameworks (because they are huge), not the language. Because Swift is so new, most of the documentation and open source code are in Objective-C.

Additionally Cocoa was designed with Obj-C in mind. There are current learning pains with Swift on trying to understand how to best bridge Cocoa.

And Swift is a more complicated language than Obj-C. There are a lot more concepts to learn in Swift. (It seems like every other Swift article I come across is something about optionals.) Brent Simmons just posted this which expresses this issue:

[http://inessential.com/2015/02/04/random_swift_things](http://inessential.com/2015/02/04/random_swift_things)

And the performance of Swift is not at par with C in most cases. And debug build performance is terrible for anything realtime/multimedia/game centric. This was recently discussed by David Owens II:

[http://owensd.io/2015/02/01/the-optimization- game.html](http://owensd.io/2015/02/01/the-optimization-game.html)

As for resources, I recommend Aaron Hillegass's (of Big Nerd Ranch) Cocoa Programming books. He has trained generations of Cocoa programmers well, since the NeXT days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your time & effort. Appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just start with the latest Stanford iOS class in Swift. First link under Getting Started: [http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> What about F#/C#? [http://xamarin.com/](http://xamarin.com/)</comment>


The diagnosis - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/09/the-diagnosis.html <comment><USER2> I shudder to think what could have happened, had she delayed the exam. From what I understand, she was not in a risk group and didn't yet require periodic exams. Not many people will jump through the hoops unless they have been told by a doctor that it is something they _need_ to do.

And that's not even counting the heavy procrastinators, such as myself, that will postpone exams even when the doctor asks for them. Which reminds me...

In any case, I find the bureoucracy a pain. For most exams, you have to schedule an appointment in advance. Depending on what prompted you to seek medical help in the first place, you might even be feeling better already. Too many times I have been told that there was nothing wrong - no kidding, I was feeling better already.

Don't even get me started on how hard it is to find good doctors...

I believe we are reaching a point where we have the technology to cure most maladies, but which doesn't do us any good because it is not applied consistently enough, even disregarding economic factors.

I guess that's why the Star Trek's sick bay appeals to so many people. It is not hard to envy a future where one just has to walk-in with an obscure disease, get state-of-the-art scans, done by one of the very best doctors, who will not stop until he finds what's wrong. And not go broke afterwards.

Yeah, give me that over a transporter any day.

<comment><USER3> Were she to delay the exam, her life would have gone on pretty normal for a while, Eventually the lump, the cancer, would have grown, all the while trying to sneak into the rest of the body. Perhaps she would have eventually made it into a GP, and not a place that specialized diagnosing breast cancer. Lumps are normal, she's young, it's probably not anything to worry about, come back if it grows.

It's cancer, of course it grows, she goes back in a couple of months, eventually it's large enough to warrant removal regardless of what it is, they'll do the biopsy after they remove it.

Biopsy comes back, now she know it's cancer, but hopefully it's not too far along. They get her a PET scan, hopefully it's not in the blood.

The PET scan comes back, it confirms multiple tumors in the body. Metastatic, they call it. Atleast that explains the back-pain. Her options are limited now, there are treatments that can slow the growth, but not much hope in the way of getting rid of the cancer.

Chemo is much less useful at this stage, Chemo is a much more distant worry now, loosing your hair a much more distant worry, which makes it feel, a bit less real. The treatment is still very minor. She still feels pretty healthy all things considering, and this is just what the doctors are telling her. It's not real, but again, the cancer doesn't much care.

<comment><USER4> I don't think they ignore lumps on the basis that you are young because cancers in younger people grow significantly faster.

<comment><USER5> You wrongly assume that all doctors think the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 35 year old sister found out earlier this year that she has Stage IV breast cancer (spread to one of the lymph nodes and into both of her lungs).

I can't express how fortunate we've been that she has responded extremely well to tamoxifen therapy, which seems to have halted growth (and even resulted in some shrinkage) for almost 11 months now. Hers is apparently not a common result. In spite of the frightening diagnosis, she has stayed very active all these months and has suffered almost no ill effects from the treatment (a few pills each day).

As some people have pointed out, the long term prospects aren't good for advanced stages of breast cancer, but last January, the surgical specialist who examined my sister didn't give her more than a year to live. Thankfully we met a spectacular oncologist who has been as much terrific support network as he has been a doctor.

It's worth reading Stephen Jay Gould's great essay on his fight with cancer: "The Median is not the Message"

<http://cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html>

He was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma (a cancer of the abdominal lining) and told that the median survival rate for it was 8 months. He researched his cancer and decided he would do whatever was necessary to get on the good side of the median. He was treated with chemo, radiation and surgery, and ended up surviving 20 years (eventually dying from an unrelated metastatic cancer).

I really wish Xeni the best of luck and hope things go well.

<comment><USER5> It's great to hear your story. My sister, at 22, has just started with a similar treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you haven't read the article, you should. This is one woman's journey -- being diagnosed with breast cancer. It's amazingly well written.

<comment><USER8> I was amazed by the laser-guided precision of its emotional payload. The transition from relative playfulness to delivering the realization of the mercilessly impending dread in small portions, always quick to cover it up - only to open it up again shortly after in yet another, more devastating fashion is absolutely ravaging.

Reading it, I was taken by what I imagine to be a homeopathic dose of the feelings that Xeni may have gone through in that situation. The sentences sometimes don't make immediate sense - you have to reread them carefully. And then they hit you. Hit you in a place where you are not sure how to deal with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jardin has always been a fantastic writer. While this news is certainly terrible, the silver lining is the beauty and honesty with which she delivers it.

<comment><USER10> That's..... really not much of a silver lining in this situation.

I would have gone with caught early, modern medicine, etc, but A for effort.

<comment><USER11> It was not caught early. It had already metastasized (gone into a lymph node.) It was good she went in when she did, but not going to the doctor for 10 years was pretty stupid.

<comment><USER12> Involvement of a nearby lymph node can still be classified as Stage II.

<comment><USER11> Stage II is not early, it's actually right in the middle. There are 5 stages: 0, I, II, III and IV. <http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/diagnosis/staging.jsp>

<comment><USER12> You'd know better than I do, I'm just saying, how ever early it isn't, it's also not "late".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For what it's worth, this makes me want to go get a routine physical again. I've been avoiding it because "I'm a man!" ... but really, men get cancer in our more personal places, too... and often we ignore it/think little of it.

Best to catch these things early.

<comment><USER14> Is it best to catch prostate cancer early?

The treatment is harsh, and the cancer is slow growing. I understand that many men die with, but not of, prostate cancer. But then maybe I'm totally wrong?

<comment><USER15> Testicular cancer is probably the more pressing matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Over the phone, the clinics all sounded like places you'd take a pork chop to be examined, not a human breast, not a person, and not me."

Our technology is improving. Rigorous, evidence-based practice is the standard of care.

And yet we often fail to help.

Oft-used aphorisms in medical training include, "The secret of care of the medical patient is _caring_ about the patient" and "Recommend to your patients what you'd recommend to your own family". Yet that approach often vanishes somewhere during training or soon after. Some may start viewing people as "consumers" rather than "patients".

Compassion is curative, and by that I don't mean a bunch of hand-waving mumbo- jumbo. I mean that people will seek preventive care, trust diagnosis and treatment, stay in treatment, and work with docs when they feel they'll be heard, when their pain and fears (often unspoken) and questions will be addressed, and when their choices will be respected.

For lack of a better phrase, there remains a science _and_ an art to medicine. Both need to advance lock-step.

Best wishes to Xeni. Her writing has always been brave as it is here, and selflessly sharing what she's going through will help others.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. So well written.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fantastic delivery, doubly so given the gravity of the subject. I sincerely doubt that I could write this well, given the circumstnces.

Here's to hoping that whatever the outcome, she has a speedy recovery and a long life.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ouch. From the biopsy onwards it just makes me shudder.

</comment><comment><USER20> Did her lifestyle choices contribute to her getting breast cancer(being overweight, not active, etc)? it would really help to know if it was simply bad luck or if her life decisions were risk factors.

<comment><USER15> It's hard to say in an individual case. Even with smokers, how can you _really_ say with any certainty, that it was the smoking and not an independently malignant cell that was the seed for lung cancer?

We have group statistics that say healthy diet, getting your vitamin D, etc. are associated with lower incidences of cancer. But on a human level, cancer is not like getting an e. coli infection, where we can point to contaminated food or something as a direct cause.

So personally, I encourage my loved ones to eat well and live healthy and all that jazz. But if heaven forbid they come down with a major illness like cancer, I'd leave their life decisions out of it; as much as we can say with statistics, I don't want them to feel like that last unlucky coin flip was in any way their fault.

TL;DR: I don't know, and people are probably going to downvote you for being insensitive.</comment></comment>


How to keep your ISP's nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/how-to-keep-your-isps-nose-out-of-your-browser-history-with-encrypted-dns/ <comment> mike-cardwell If you care about privacy, use your ISPs DNS servers.

Your ISP can see exactly which websites you're visiting regardless of how you do DNS, thanks to being able to see which IPs you're sending packets to, and thanks to SNI.

The only thing you get from adding some third party encrypted DNS service to the mix, is an _additional_ party which can also see what websites you're visiting.

<comment><USER2> I'm still pissed off we didn't get encrypted SNI in TLS 1.3

It would've broken so many dpi based censorship systems in countries like Iran, Turkey, and Russia.

<comment><USER3> how would encrypted SNI work? sure, you can probably do some sort of DHE, but that's vulnerable to MITM, which is why we have certificates to begin with.

<comment><USER4> What if we could have first class SSL certs for IP addresses? You connect to the IP and verify the cert it presents you with your PKI, then switch to the desired host via SNI or some other mechanism after DHE is established. I suspect you could do this without any extra hops but I haven't really thought through how that would work.

<comment><USER5> > What if we could have first class SSL certs for IP addresses?

They're not routable.

<comment><USER6> What does this mean?

<comment><USER5> What's the next hop for a cryptographic hash? With IP addresses, you have a heirarchy: You match on a prefix to find the router to handle the next path, and that one matches on a longer prefix to find the next hop, and so on.

That allows you to have routing tables that don't include every single host on the internet. This is what allows efficient routing to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm probably being really stupid, but how does using encrypted DNS prevent your ISP seeing what websites you go to? (I haven't done network stuff for many years, and am a bit out of touch with the current stuff).

Can't ISPs still see the eventual target IP address, and do a reverse DNS lookup of that? Even with HTTPS/TLS I thought encryption is done after a handshake isn't it, which would imply a TCP level connection is made first which would be sniffable?

<comment><USER8> It increases the cost and complexity of an ISP tracking you, which is a win within itself. Plus some services share public IPs or are behind a global cache (e.g. Cloudflare) making it harder to pinpoint exactly which endpoint you tried to access.

Is it perfect? No. It is better than yesterday? Yes.

I call these "micro-wins." One micro-win won't make a difference, but two, three, four, and so on eventually start to have an impact. And that's all we can hope for.

Even often cited VPNs just shift the problem downstream. Instead of your ISP monitoring you, the VPN provider themselves could, or if you host it yourself then your server/virtual server's ISP could. VPNs themselves are another "micro-win" but people often claim they're a complete bulletproof solution.

<comment><USER9> >"I call these "micro-wins."

I like this term :)

It's also believe its a win when computer privacy and security begin to edge into main stream lexicon. Somewhat anecdotal but I recently saw that NordVPN is advertising on CNN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also mentioned in article: Use DNSCrypt Proxy V2 (a golang rewrite) for DNS over TLS and/or DNScurve [https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt- proxy](https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy)

E.g. on a Mac with Homebrew. First:

        brew install dnscrypt-proxy

Second: Edit your /usr/local/etc/dnscrypt-proxy.toml and put e.g. google or cloudflare there inside

Third: Put your DNS to 127.0.0.1

<comment><USER11> I'm a bit concerned about using it yet because it was written from scratch just about three months ago and probably hasn't gone through enough testing.

<comment><USER12> How about an actively-maintained 3-year-old project? [0]

[0] [https://github.com/alterstep/dnscrypt- osxclient](https://github.com/alterstep/dnscrypt-osxclient)

<comment><USER10> I used that one before. I don't like it technically. It only supports DNScurve and installs itself deeply into the system (e.g. system preferences). I also think it's more unreliable because they don't do the caching in a good way (sometimes a DNS server fails is my experience). I like dnscrypt proxy V2 more because it's more rock solid, works better on caching and also supports DNS over TLS. Only downside on dnscrypt proxy is that you don't have a nice UI and you have to type the local DNS 127.0.0.1 manually into your Wifi or LAN connection point.

<comment><USER13> I use this as an UI for dnscrypt-proxy v2: [https://getbitbar.com/plugins/Network/dnscrypt-proxy- switche...](https://getbitbar.com/plugins/Network/dnscrypt-proxy- switcher.10s.sh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This preoccupation with ISPs is akin to concern about a pin prick while blood gushes out of knife wound unattended.

All sorts of solutions are offered enthusiastically while the elephant in the room, tens of thousand of engineers and billion dollar companies incentivized to hoover up and collate every minutiae of user data as a business model, is met with hand wringing and apologism about ad revenue.

In this case solutions have to emerge from outside the tech community by something like GDPR. Given that reality and the primacy of ad driven business models in SV its difficult to contextualize this preoccupation with ISPs. It feels like a distraction, insincere and driven by commercial concerns.

<comment><USER15> I agree. To play devil's advocate you can choose not to use Facebook or Gmail or Android. In many areas (of USA) there's exactly two choices for Internet access, and in some there's only one. Additionally the quid pro quo of free online services for personal data may be considered less objectionable than additional monetization on top of the monthly fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sadly not really a solution yet for SNI being unencrypted. So while they may not see your DNS query they can just use DPI to capture the sites.

VPN is a solution but not always deployable.

<comment><USER17> VPN is not really a solution because you have no reason to trust your VPN provider more than your ISP.

<comment><USER18> >you have no reason to trust your VPN provider more than your ISP.

A lot of people really do distrust their ISP enough that even with knowledge that you're shifting the responsibility to the VPN provider they still trust a random VPN more than their ISP.

Would I trust some random unknown VPN provider more than Comcast? Maybe.

<comment><USER19> I would trust the Russian mob before I would trust Comcast

<comment><USER20> Well, as in anything human it is a matter of incentives. Comcast probably has an incentive for logging and selling your data to advertisers, whereas the Russian mob probably has other, more pressing things to worry about.

I follow the same logic by setting up my own VPS in a rented $big_provider VPN. VPS companies are succulent targets that surely attract many eyes, whereas I doubt any non-state actor has the capacity of capturing and filtering the traffic of the millions of random VPNs that $big_provider has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I cannot begin to understand how is it better to reveal your DNS access patterns to the global company like Cloudflare, as opposed to revealing them to your local ISP?

Who do you think can smoother monetize your data - your local ISP or Cloudflare? Or maybe Cloudflare solemnly promised never to do it?

If an effort is to be taken, the best thing is to run your own DNS resolver that will query root servers and follow the chains directly.

<comment><USER22> It's fragmenting the data - CloudFlare _only_ gets your DNS data, whereas your ISP has DNS, content of non-HTTPS traffic (Cloudflare gets a non-zero percentage of this anyway), billing information, real identity etc. Your ISP can _immediately_ tie your DNS records to a real identity (or a member of your household at the very least), whereas CloudFlare can only make inferences from the data and the source IP location. It gives two companies an incomplete picture, rather than one knowing EVERYTHING. CloudFlare promise to not do so is also a non-zero consideration - it's clearly unenforceable/you would never know, but the mere promise is probably better than many ISPs.

I'd also say most users' ISPs are probably are global companies (or at least national) anyway.

> the best thing is to run your own DNS resolver that will query root servers > and follow the chains directly

Only if the first step is also encrypted. If it is plain DNS, then your ISP can see the requests almost as easily as if going to their own servers (or transparently redirect the requests to their servers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dumbass question: is there a difference between setting one's DNS to [https://184.108.40.206](https://18.104.22.168) versus 126.96.36.199 unadorned?

<comment><USER24> I am not a sysadmin but you can't add [https://](https://) (or any other prefix) in front of a DNS address. Secure HTTP is a different protocol, suited for web page hosting.

<comment><USER25> DNS over HTTPS (DoH) works in the latest Firefox Nightly: [https://facebookexperimental.github.io/doh- proxy/tutorials/f...](https://facebookexperimental.github.io/doh- proxy/tutorials/firefox-nightly-doh-proxy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From the article it seems like 'DNS over HTTPS' (DoH), seems to be the _winner_. Seems the authors best advice is to set up DoH via DNSCrypt Proxy 2, possibly using a raspberry pi to make it easier to manage ur whole network.

Do people here agree this is a pretty good approach?

<comment><USER27> I thought that dnscurve was the method to actually prevent domain snooping. Regardless, I think running your own authoritative dns which updates from root servers is the real way to go.

<comment><USER28> Your traffic still has to go to those servers, so your ISP still can track the terminal server IP, can't it? (TOR, or tunneling aside)

<comment><USER29> An almost unlimited number of domains can be hosted off a single IP. That said, the SNI header can still be sniffed on an HTTPS connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> After all these posts, I still don't get what is the problem with the ISP seeing my DNS queries. That's still private telecom information protected by law. Unless you're doing something obviously illegal, and are under investigation. They can't do anything with that data legally. Using Cloudflare or VPN most likely won't solve the problem anyway, at least if you're doing something criminal enough. Therefore claiming it making you untraceable on net, is snake oil anyway.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why are so many clients still running stub resolvers?

Just type "apt-get install unbound" already. You won't miss that 200 kB resident memory.

</comment><comment><USER32> ...Or one could just run one's own DNS servers.

<comment><USER33> Yes, it isn't that hard to do:

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- conf...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure- bind-as-a-caching-or-forwarding-dns-server-on-ubuntu-16-04)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is not much about privacy, but about the integrity of your data.

Your ISP can see the IP addresses and all the meta data for your traffic. With the current way DNS is setup, they can modify the responses and re-route you any where they want.

With HTTPS and encrypted DNS, it makes a lot harder for them to inject content or redirect you without browsers warnings.

</comment><comment><USER35> Isn't there an option to polute the information the ISP sees to such a level that their information is useless?

E.g. contact a friendly service that gives back N different random domain names; then lookup those domain names, spread over, say, an hour; then repeat.

<comment><USER36> I just realized I'm obfuscating my internet usage inadverently. Here's how:

Good source of reasonable randomness is twitter. I've set up a scrapper for various twitter accounts and I'm downloading every page that is linked by those accounts automatically.

With this approach you can even select what you want to look like based on your browsing data by selecting proper accounts. Gold bug? Bitcoin fool? Knitting expert? No problemo. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Now we just need a an encrypted DNS provider that isn't NSA's puppet...

<comment><USER38> Namecoin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> does/can Pi-Hole use encrypted DNS?

I have a raspberry-pi on my home network running Pi-Hole and my router's DHCP server gives all devices on my network the Pi-Hole as the DNS address

<comment><USER40> Yes, you can follow the instructions from the wiki [https://github.com/pi- hole/pi-hole/wiki/DNSCrypt-2.0](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/wiki/DNSCrypt-2.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now if we can just get a default encrypted email protocol....

<comment><USER42> I thought the reason that these critical infrastructures are not encrypted after decades and decades of use is that there are powerful agencies who want to snoop on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is the first I've heard of cloudflared (aka Argo). It's a DNS over HTTPS proxy. As far as I know Firefox is working to get DNS over HTTPS into Nightly so it can be used directly in the browser, but this proxy allows your whole system to use DNS over HTTPS without having to change anything (other than pointing /etc/resolv.conf or equivalent at 127.0.0.1). Pretty cool!</comment>


Offer HN: Mock YC interviews - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm David, the founder of Retool (https://tryretool.com). We went through YC almost two years ago. Since then, we've built a product (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966), become profitable, and learned how to do sales (as a technical founder, this wasn't easy).
We're still very far from being successful, but Retool wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this far without YC. I'm endlessly grateful to everyone there. If you're wondering whether or not to do YC, feel free to ping me anytime (email in profile). I think the answer is easily "yes" for most first-time founders.
When we first applied to YC, we were "outsiders". We had went to uni in the UK, where startups were much less popular. And I remember cold emailing every YC alum (I could find) from the UK to get them to do a mock interview with us. Many agreed (thank you, Tom, Joe, David, and Justin), and without them, we wouldn't have gotten in to YC.
It's a weekend here in SF, and I'm around for most of today and tomorrow. I know there are people with YC interviews coming up soon, and I'd love to help you prepare. Just email me (email in profile), and I'll send you a calendly link where you can book a time to chat. If you're in SF, I'm happy to buy you a coffee too.
Besides nostalgia (I remember preparing for my own YC interview!), a desire to help, and a fairly free weekend, I have no other motivations. I will be honest and upfront with my feedback. <comment><USER2> I'd be interested to see videos of these mock interviews. Would be helpful for folks who aren't interviewing now but might some day.</comment>


Stop Lying About Our Sons - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@egsanzi/stop-lying-about-our-sons-e039bdc661d2 <comment><USER2> One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is the increasing lack of productive physical activity available to men in a lot of settings. Idleness and sedentary lifestyles are increasing in prevalence. Manual labor and sports are both on the decline. Physical activities are good for the body and soul, and it's sad to see them disappearing.

I think catharsis is important for men in particular, and idleness is particularly destructive for men. If there aren't engaging activities available for men, they will make something up to stay busy, often in destructive patterns.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure, but I might be able to shed some light on this growing up in a "boys" world and then coming out as trans and transitioning to female.

I have also spent 6 years in the Navy (on submarines in an all male environment) before I transitioned.

Toxic masculinity is a real thing, the amount of men don't cry, men don't show emotion, and the large amount of "locker room" talk involving treating women as sex objects was incredibility high.

I've been in these male spaces, not saying anything, but watching and I can truly tell you, it's completely disgusting.

In the end, I'm actually sad that most men don't feel like they can talk about their vulnerabilities and emotions. It's a hard world to live in like that.

<comment><USER4> >the amount of men don't cry, men don't show emotion

>I'm actually sad that most men don't feel like they can talk about their vulnerabilities and emotions.

Do they not talk about it, or have they not talked about it _to you_?

I used to believe the narrative that men don't talk about emotional issues, assuming my lifetime of experiences talking to other men about our perspectives, fears, limitations and feelings was some sort of aberration. It finally fell apart when I made some friends in the trades. If _they_ didn't even follow the mold, and were willing to confide in me whenever something was on their mind, then why is this assumed to be a widely-pervasive male trait?

As far as I can tell, men are more than willing to talk about personal topics they keep guarded. It just has to be with someone that they care to have a real conversation with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to be interpreting any attack on "toxic" masculinity as an assault on masculinity in general.

Things we consider "toxic masculinity" are (for example)

* Sexism and misogyny - that is women are less than or inferior to men, and should be focused on serving them.

* Violence is a reasonable response to being upset

* Men who aren't sufficiently "masculine" (often defined in terms of the above), are also lesser

* Women who aren't sufficiently "feminine" need to be put in their place (understand who's in charge, and who they should serve)

Are there a few idiots who go beyond that? yes. Just like there are idiots who go bizarrely far on any other topic.

But attacking toxic masculinity is not attacking masculinity. It's not attacking men and boys.

If you feel attacks on toxic masculinity are attacks on you fathers/husbands/sons maybe there should be some thought about what about their behavior overlaps the above, and whether you think that's ok?

<comment><USER6> You're not fooling anyone.

<comment><USER7> Your comment seems to be assuming bad faith. This is not helpful for a discussion, nor does it add anything to it.

My own problem with GP is that they claim "attacking toxic masculinity is not attacking masculinity", but I don't think the people using this term would defend similar language if the genders were reversed. If we called stereotypically bad feminine traits "toxic femininity" it would be called out as sexist. Indeed, it is[0]. I can't imagine most racial descriptors would fair much better. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," and we shouldn't be surprised when attaching a descriptor of a subset of humanity to a negative term sparks backlash. It seems like we face this general problem where it's shitty to use group descriptors for negative behavior, but sometimes groups of people are disproportionately responsible for some subset of negative behavior, and we've traditionally been more willing to attach negative terminology to oppressed groups, but now some of us are simultaneously realising that was a shitty practice _and_ deciding to attach negative descriptors to the oppressive groups instead... which is kind of understandable, since those groups have been oppressive, but we're still dealing in broad group identities that encompass some individuals who have behaved less oppressively than other individuals who fall into less oppressive group identities, and using group identities as a linguistic weapon in this way is sort of obviously going to engender mistrust and negative reactions. So, maybe it would be more helpful for the dialogue if we found linguistic constructs that didn't pair "man-" or "male-" with some harmful follow-up. If we find ourselves in a situation where it is useful to discuss the intersection of group identity and negative behavior, it might be nice to slow down and say exactly what we mean rather than calling it "toxic masculinity" and then being surprised when this is taken as an attack on men.

That said, I do agree that GP's subpoints are actual issues which we should address. I just have serious reservations about this language.

[0]: [https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Toxic_femininity](https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Toxic_femininity)

<comment><USER6> The thing is, it's not a good faith instance of accidentally misleading terminology, and the sheer fact that these people condemn the phrase "toxic femininity" is an illustration of that fact. I would characterize it as an instance of motte-and-bailey rhetoric. It's not quite a dog whistle because the whole point is that it's pretty obvious what "toxic masculinity" _really_ means, even if they are reluctant to openly admit it.

<comment><USER7> Language, and communication in general, is hard. I have used terminology in good faith that later iterations of myself have found issue with, and I expect that later-still iterations of myself will find issues with my current language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uh oh social justice starting to get away from you? I can see that,</comment>


Yosemite's "Mail Drop", with plain text emails, considered harmful - <AUTHOR> http://gigliwood.com/blog/yosemites-mail-drop-with.html

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty terrible bug if this post is accurate.

EDIT: I just tried it out and duplicated Dan's results. It's pretty bad, because it means you never want to use Mail Drop to send files to people unless you KNOW that they use a mail client that will show the message (e.g. a recent version of Apple Mail or MS Outlook).

From an engineering standpoint, it seems clear that the current Mail Drop behavior is Doing It Wrong.

The right thing would be to render the plain text of the message, along with the download URL, in the plain text message part.</comment>


A demo of I'm in like with you, which CN fails to understand - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/im-in-like-with-you-demo-review

<comment><USER2> I am a big fan of IILWY and I think they have a fantastic product. That said, the presentation didn't go well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps this forces them to tell the world more themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IILWY is sort of interesting, but every woman on the site seemed to either be married, in a serious relationship, ugly, or someone paid to join.

</comment><comment><USER4> I never tried IILWY. I think, as Blored mentioned, that the problem here is their presentation. At the same time the quality of this videop is poor, so that is working against them. Maybe we need to see a good presentation b4 we can judge. That being said, I still think that online dating stuff is for teenagers and really old people. Anyone in the middle can do fairly ok by wearing a bleu shirt (most attractive color to women), a nice watch, going to a bar and shut up. You will find soon more women trying to figure you out, then you can find online.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean to complain about the presentation or judge their service. On the contrary, it was interesting to get a peek at it.

One good reason to date online could be that you don't like to go to bars to meet women. Perhaps it's the setting there, or the kind of people it selects, or the N clearly smaller than on the net.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk and John Carmack Discussing Rocket Design on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/536354292396228608

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. I have no idea what the heck they are talking about, but all I know is two smart guys I idolise are talking about rocket designs and I am okay with that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Serious question: which book(s) do I have to pick up to begin understanding half of what they are talking about?

<comment><USER4> We used the Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD by Wertz, Everett, and Puschell for my senior capstone project.

It's pretty comprehensive about all things involved about space missions.

You would specifically want to look into its chapter about launch vehicles since that is what SpaceX does (they're basically launch-to-orbit-as-a- service). Dragon is their payload capsule while the Falcon is the launch vehicle (the rocket).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The slower the descent, the less useful the wings will be, correct? I can understand John Carmack's logic that little thrusters could be more stable.

</comment><comment><USER6> How does one view the actual conversation between the two? All I see is one tweet from ELon to johns and a bunch of random people commenting on that tweet

<comment><USER7> Once the random people started creeping on Elon and Carmack's conversation without adding anything to it the conversation stopped.</comment></comment>


Coca-Cola is discontinuing the Odwalla juice brand - <AUTHOR> https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2020/07/02/Bittersweet-moment-for-Odwalla-co-founder-as-Coca-Cola-axes-the-brand-and-focuses-on-more-scalable-innovations <comment><USER2> Makes sense, the logistics to transport (Refrigeration required) vs soda and sugar concerns made it hard to compete against Pepsi brands like Tropicana and Naked.

AFAIK, Pepsi products don't require a refrigerated supply chain.

</comment><comment><USER3> I shifted to buying another brand that wasn't owned by a mega-corp when I found out it was purchased. I wonder how common that is?

</comment><comment><USER4> Going to miss Odwalla. Naked never did it for me.</comment>


Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You?  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> This seems like deja-vu, I swear this was on HN before. (yeah probably without the _m=1_ on the url)

Anyway, super easy to try on linux servers.

First double check your existing setting

        sysctl -a | grep tcp_slow_start_after_idle

then

        sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle=0

if you want to enhance to IW10 then first check the last line of

        ip route show

should be something like

        default via 126.96.36.199 dev eth0

then copy it to the middle of this

        ip route change default via 126.96.36.199 dev eth0 initcwnd 10

if you are using a VERY current linux kernel, you can also add initrwnd like so:

        ip route change default via 184.108.40.206 dev eth0 initcwnd 10 initrwnd 10

Note the ip route change is not permanent unless you add it to something like _/etc/rc.local_

You should be able to see the change before/after in wireshark if you look very very carefully at the milliseconds before the first real ack.

<comment><USER3> Is there any reason to use sysctl over "echo > /proc" or is it just a matter of taste?

<comment><USER4> "sudo sysctl -w ..." works as expected, but "sudo echo ...> /proc/..." doesn't, since only the echo and not the redirection happens as root.

<comment><USER5> That depends on what you expect, doesn't it? At any rate, you can easily do something like

echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/foo

This has the added bonus that you can replace "echo 1" with a complex script that may not be safe to run as root.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off topic: the Blogspot mobile theme is killing me with their swipe left and right gestures to navigate posts. When I'm scrolling down the page on my iPhone, I accidentally activate it constantly.

<comment><USER7> This happened to me twice while trying to read this post.

It's frustrating how often a website will provide a client-specific rendering which is much worse than the default. (I'm looking at you, Wordpress).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought this is actually in the process of being standardized?

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd-02>

</comment><comment><USER9> Ben fails to mention that the equation he proposed is "violated" is expressly "optional" and in fact the standard allows that "a TCP MAY start with a larger initial window".

<comment><USER9> Maybe I'm not reading rfc3390 right? This:

"This increased initial window is optional: a TCP MAY start with a larger initial window."

And specifically this: "MAY start with a larger initial window". "larger" than what?

a.) larger than that proposed?

or

b.) larger than was standard before this proposal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article: > Being non-standards-compliant in a way that privileges their flows relative to others seems more than a little hypocritical from a company that's making such a fuss about network neutrality.

That's completely off the mark. NN was a reaction to the plan by ISPs to throttle large sites (e.g. YouTube) that _their own customers_ were requesting unless they were paid protection money. It later became a political thing, with people mostly deciding to support (or oppose) it based on party lines.

It has nothing to do with tuning one's network, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary. It was just an attempt to stop rent-seeking by greedy ISPs that has morphed politically after attracting lobbyist attention.

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't seem that unreasonable to make a starting point of the median number of packets that Google's customers can cope with at once, and then fail down the way for those that have problems.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's kind of interesting that Google breaks TCP/IP protocol rules (RFC 3390) and their home page has never been valid HTML either.

<comment><USER13> You'd probably be inclined to cheat if your business had the most-viewed web page in the (Western?) world.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure I would call it cheating. When I think of cheating, I think of a restricted action that gives an unfair advantage over competitors, of which is incredibly difficult for competitors to duplicate. But implementing the same hack, in this case, is easy, fairly common, and it isn't stepping outside of any _real_ boundaries so it's not like the playing field is uneven. It also works and works well to provide users (customers) with a better experience.

<comment><USER15> The problem is that if everyone implements a very large initial congestion window that just causes more network load on networks that can't handle that amount of data all at once.

So it's not "cheating" in terms of your competitors, but it's "cheating" in the sense that either you're basically jumping the queue for your TCP flows or everyone else does the same thing and then things are back to square one, if networks can't deal with it.

An argument that networks now can deal with much larger congestion windows can be made, and Google is making it in the IETF, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> the microsoft behavior of disabling SS completely seems downright immoral to me. Who cares if the internet melts as long as they can deliver their home page a few ms faster. And it's not even a very interesting homepage</comment>


A judicial no-man's land in the Idaho part of Yellowstone (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/theres-a-50-square-mile-section-of-yellowstone-where-you-can-get-away-with-murder <comment><USER2> Up until 2015 there was a related but more consequential issue that made it extremely hard to prosecute crimes committed on reservations by non-Natives. Tribal governments couldn't prosecute non-Native offenders, instead those crimes fell under federal jurisdiction--and the federal government itself is generally uninterested in prosecuting petty crime. [1] Off-reservation offenders would deliberately go onto the reservation and target the population there because they knew that it was practically impossible for them to be prosecuted, allegedly. Native American women experience sexual violence at much, much higher rates than the general population at least in part because of the jurisdiction issues. [2] VAWA passed in 2013 though, closing the loophole as far as I'm aware. [3]

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/on- indi...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/on-indian-land- criminals-can-get-away-with-almost-anything/273391/)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/us/native-americans- strugg...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/us/native-americans-struggle- with-high-rate-of-rape.html)

[3] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/06/vawa-native- america...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/06/vawa-native- americans_n_6819526.html)

<comment><USER3> Former resident of Montana. A lot of the eastern reservations are considered no-stop zones. i.e. you better have enough gas to get through. Western reservations, not so much. Western reservations are pretty congenial and open to others. Flathead reservation strikes one point, but my high school also had a friendly rivalry with Polson (also on a reservation).

<comment><USER4> I was married to a mostly white girl (one-quarter Indian) that grew up on the Crow reservation and we visited frequently. I found the Crow reservation to be nothing like I'd heard. People were friendly to me and I could count on one hand the number of times I ever got a mean mug. At the time, my unit had just reclassed from infantry to cavalry, so I was a US Army cav scout married to a Crow Indian. Anyway, I realize it's anecdote and only one point on a graph. But people were always friendly to me and I never felt unsafe, or like I should just keep on driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a lawyer, but did go to law school. I definitely see why the author of the original paper found this interesting (and it's infinitely more interesting that 99.9% of law journal articles). I also agree that it's an arguable loophole that should be closed.

That said, there's an entire branch of law related to moving trials amongst jurisdictions, oftentimes to venues with very, very tenuous relationships to the crime. If any part of the crime took place somewhere that had an ability to seat a jury (and judges have ruled that things like purchasing an item used in the crime can qualify in some cases), the prosecutor wouldn't have much trouble getting it removed there.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I first read this a number of years ago. It's analogous to when programmers find some exploitable corner case and go "Gotcha!" But, meanwhile, in the real world, a judge says "Nope" and finds some reason to do the sensible thing. Law isn't (and really shouldn't be in spite of sometimes bad results) a matter of applying precise algorithms.

<comment><USER4> Right, I feel like the law doesn't have loopholes for things like violent crime. Some kind of twisty scenic routes might work for cornering the market or employing dragnet surveillance on a population. But you swing a crowbar at somebody for their wallet, you're pretty much going to jail, even if you think you've got some kind of genius loophole.

<comment><USER5> Most of the time, that's true. Unfortunately, as the OJ trial demonstrates, it's not universally true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article opens talking about a novel in which a character commits multiple murders, confesses, and evades prosecution by being in an area with ambiguous jurisdiction.

But loopholes like this don't work, because the legal system is implemented by humans. Imagine you're a judge, and a murder suspect is arguing before you that they can't be prosecuted in your court because it's not an appropriate jurisdiction. What do you do? You ask their lawyer what would be an appropriate jurisdiction, and you don't accept "nowhere" as an answer.

This can be a problem for minor crimes, and for courts that are severely short on resources. It can be harder to find detectives willing to work a case in an area like that. But a high-profile crime solves all of those issues.

</comment><comment><USER8> > And being federal land, the state would have no jurisdiction.

Can that be right? It still occurred within Idaho, even if it was on land owned by the federal government. I want to see a case on point before I go killing people.

<comment><USER6> It depends how you interpret this (and IANAL):

The Yellowstone National Park, as its boundaries now are defined, or as they may be hereafter defined or extended, shall be under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States. All the laws applicable to places under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, shall have force and effect in said park. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to forbid the service in the park of any civil or criminal process of any court having jurisdiction in the States of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. All fugitives from justice taking refuge in said park shall be subject to the same laws as refugees from justice found in the State of Wyoming.

And then you also get into issues around juries, etc.

It's a unique situation (hence why it was an article). I don't actually believe anyone would get off with this sort of "technicality" but it is a real corner case.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I saw that too. I guess I have no idea what it means to be "under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States." I wonder if that clause (or anything like it) has ever really been litigated.

<comment><USER6> I think it's probably one of those weirdo cases that makes for good movies and books but, in practice, you get arrested and the judge laughs at your creative defense and orders you remanded without bail. (And it's not even wrong because law != code.)

<comment><USER9> I mean... maybe. Judges do have a certain amount of discretion and ability to interpret. But they are also supposed to stay within the law, and not just go to "well, this seems like the right thing to do."

If a Judge wanted to ignore this and seat a jury from... where? Somewhere else in Idaho? Then they'd probably at least need to advance a theory for why they got to do that in their response to your motion.

Now, as others have pointed out, unless you could plausibly assert that the crime was wholly and totally contained within the zone of death, and you didn't plan it outside the area or purchase items with the intent to use them in the crime or so forth, there is existing precedent to use that place as a venue for the crime.

But we're talking about a Constitutional right in terms of jury seating. Judges don't get to just wave their hands and say, "Well, the Constitution is dumb, so we won't do that." If they do, it's likely to get overturned on appeal.

(I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice; don't commit felonies)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's not a loophole... maybe it's by design... and maybe that's why it hasn't been fixed!

/Sarcasm, but not totally

<comment><USER11> Funny. My first thought was to wonder how far this was from annual Fed hoedown in Jackson Hole.</comment></comment>


Emotions killing your intellectual productivity - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2009/01/20/emotions-killing-your-intellectual-productivity/ <comment><USER2> I love emotions and they challenge my intellectual sense of productivity. I don't see research without handling (but having) frustration. Emotions are good flight instruments.

Since I love to find intellectual boundaries, it will be sad to have boundaries without emotions.</comment>


JQuery plugin to create rich animations ( works on iPhone ) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spritely.net/gallery/ Spritely is a jQuery plugin for creating animations in pure HTML and JavaScript ( therefore no Flash plugin is required ).<p>Resulting animations also work on iPhone. <comment><USER2> This is the kind of thing that Adobe should be working on. Tools and libraries for a post Flash world.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the most frustrating website I have visited in the last year. If I click on a link (or anywhere) I don't want to have it obscured by a fluttering bird!

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know if CPUs can support it, or if there are enough events. But, somebody, please, hack together DuckHunt. It would be awesome to play on an iPad.

<comment><USER5> So you're thinking that you'd use a finger-gun for that? Maybe mount some kind of wii-mote or lightpen on your index finger?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice, except it maxes out a full core for me. Reminds me of one of those arguments against Flash... something to do with performance...

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks cool with the Hacker News Chrome plugin ... the blackbirds are flying over HN as I type this.</comment>


Let's Make a (D3) Plugin - <AUTHOR> http://bost.ocks.org/mike/d3-plugin/ <comment><AUTHOR> D3 4.0 is being developed under the (new?) D3 Github organization at [https://github.com/d3](https://github.com/d3) and with a new "everything in D3 is a plugin" architecture, making it easier to extend D3 and easier to import parts of D3 piecemeal into other projects.</comment>


China's bloggers, filmmakers feel chill of internet crackdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-internet-content-idUSKBN19O21X <comment><USER2> I work in Chinese publishing, and the same thing is absolutely happening there. Books are being pulled off the shelves, publishers are being warned away from anything potentially controversial. The basic attitude is, "Don't risk it", and it's absolutely deadly to creativity and culture. On the one hand, the central government is trying to encourage Chinese culture to "Go Out" and wow the world. On the other, it is absolutely strangling the country's cultural creators.

<comment><USER3> This is very concerning. I'm curious how all this is delivered as far as the actions of officials to enact this behavior in general populace. How exactly do they pull it off? Are there new strategies employed or do they leverage years of chilling requests and punishments for people to generally know better not to cross the government? Do people personally know political prisoners and what not or see punished individuals paraded on TV and what not? Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER2> The framework of control has been in place for a long time, it's just that they've been tightening down the (already-in-place) screws over the past couple of years.

The basic mechanism is control of ISBNs: the supply of these numbers is tightly restricted, and a book cannot be published without them. A fixed number of state-owned publishers is able to issue ISBNs, though privately- owned publishing companies can buy the numbers or work with a state-owned house to publish their books.

An ISBN acts as a chain-of-custody token for the publication of books. While some books are subject to approval before publication, the vast majority are not, and publication is done at the publisher's discretion. Should a book cause problems _after_ publication, however, the consequences are catastrophic. The ISBN (and a "responsible editor" whose name appears on the copyright page of the book) allows the government to track down everyone who was involved in the production of the book, and squash them. People lose their jobs, in some cases publishing companies are suspended or dissolved outright.

It's a system carefully designed to make writers and publishers more cautious than they would actually need to be.

Publishing, while highly controlled by the government, isn't really an area where people end up in prison, or you see televised trials. The worst that usually happens is the ruining of a career, or in extreme cases the dissolution of a company (in journalism, by contrast, people get put in jail, or disappear). I've written about this distinction before[1], which I think is lost on most international observers.

[1]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/the-real- censors-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/the-real-censors-of- china.html)

<comment><USER4> Well, I feel for any form of censorship, the essence is to disrupt the communication among the people in the society. The goal of this disruption is to prevent a formation of synchronization in the population. It could be carried out on all kinds of communication media and for all their different stages.

A system of censorship could be much easily implemented when one has the visibility over the entire society and the access to all its social resources. Before the age of internet, their focus was on book/newspaper publishing; and in our current age of internet, the focus was on internet as well as book/newspaper publishing.

And in terms of their practical methods, you can just imagine what you would do when you want to disrupt the information flow and when you have the absolute control of every sub-system in a society (i.e. the courts, the police, all the newspapers/websites/tv channels/radio stations, as well as the ability of not needing to worry about your livelihood when you do not work on anything else...)

It's almost an impregnable castle, as long as it does not crumble from inside the ruling system itself...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another fascinating "censorship" story playing out right now:

Tencent Loses $14 Billion After Criticism From Chinese Media

[http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/tencent-loses-14-billion- ho...](http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/tencent-loses-14-billion-hong-kong- stock-exchange-criticism-chinese-media-1202487199/)

To call this "chilling" is a gross understatement!

<comment><USER6> So, 4 something percent. Do you find this chilling, too?

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/11/investing/donald-trump- press...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/11/investing/donald-trump-press- conference-markets-economy/index.html)

> Trump said that many companies were "getting away with murder" and that > there would be more competitive bidding practices for federal contracts in > his administration.

> Dow component Pfizer's (PFE) stock fell more than 2% immediately after the > comments.

> Mylan (MYL), which has already come under Congressional scrutiny for > dramatic price hikes of its life-saving allergy medication EpiPen, fell > 3.5%, and Bristol-Myers Squibb dived 4%.

> Allergan (AGN) and Valeant (VRX), two other biotechs that have been > criticized for raising drug prices, also fell more than 3%. And the iShares > Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (IBB), which owns many of these companies, fell 3% > too.

That's just the first hit for "stock prices fell after criticism". There's plenty of that, and four percent are nothing. What's so chilling? That 4 percent of anything can mean billions of dollars? The mechanism of stock markets? That social media and "traditional media" have this reach and effect just by things being said? That the gaming industry became this huge and heartless after such short time, and how some in it would LOVE to be able to "capture" audiences like the pharma industry can? None of these things? Or really just mostly the Chinese Communist Party, the one thing most of us have no say and no responsibility in, rather than those aspects of this which we share in every day?

And what comes after chilling? Freezing? Is it really "gross" to merely call this chilling? What would be neither an under- nor an overstatement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably not Xi's problem but China will lag economically and creatively because of this restriction. It's just ceding the entertainment initiative to other creators, outside of China. Even if they ban all creative content from outside China, don't they know that a terabyte HDD can hold enough movies to last for a year, and be copied easily?

<comment><USER8> Ha! CCP don't give any shit about _creativity_.

They want to be in control, including controlling creativity.

In fact, if you're a Chinese people like me, you probably learned CCP's "Three Represents" when you in mid school. Which is:

\- "Represents advanced social productive forces" stands for economic production

\- "Represents the progressive course of China's advanced culture" stands for cultural development

\- "Represents the fundamental interests of the majority" stands for political consensus

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

What that said is:

\- We (CCP) decide what is important to this country

\- We decide what you can do when you're boring

\- We decide what you can have (and your needs)

So, I won't be surprised one day we had that Sea Ban thing and what's followed all over again.

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

<comment><USER9> Wow, I didn't realize that Japan had mimicked this sea ban. I only knew about the Japanese version.

But how could such a move be reconciled with China's recent expansion into global politics?

<comment><USER10> That was a totally different China. Since then there was the communist cultural revolution and then "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" which is where China is currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well... Fortunately, there is still Taiwan, the only Chinese-speaking country where creativity and freedom of speech is nurtured and not censored!

<comment><USER12> Well, Singapore isn't that bad. Regardless, I'm not sure what Taiwan is going to save us from.

<comment><USER13> Singapore's not that bad as long as you're not gay (which is illegal and punishable by a prison term), a political activist for the opposition party, too independent thinking or otherwise labeled as undesirable by the government.

<comment><USER12> Oh, sure, totally. But they aren't as bad as the PRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Newbie question but what is China's rationale for their internet censorship and firewall? What are they afraid of?

<comment><USER15> The concept they use is "social harmony."

This is a sort of shorthand for discouraging people from developing strong, dissident, aberrant or divisive political positions. Discouraging people from taking on political identities in general, other than a unified chinese identity. Discouraging people from disparaging and/or distrusting the government. Keeping fringey social trends out of the mainstream.

If you think of how strong political identities are currently in the US, this is exactly what they are trying to prevent. They want to keep everyone on the same page in terms of political and social norms.

The skeptical take is that the CCP is protecting itself from popular and democratic revolutionary movements.

<comment><USER16> China will consider democracy only when the credit bubble pops which will delegitimize the Communist party. Tianamen square was at the inflection point when Investment flooded into corrupt post maoist china, democratic movement was everywhere but was quashed by increasingly belligerent communists apparatchiks.

<comment><USER12> The CCP has only been able to eliminate dissent by eliminating moral hazard. They promised that the bubbles won't pop, so when they do, it isn't going to be pretty at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel stringent censorship is among the most unbearable things.

If we look at the censorship history in different countries over the world, such as France (before the 20th century) and USSR, the only way to end a very stringent censorship in a society is by ending the ruling government itself, which is usually an autocracy, or an oligarchy at best. But that could mean a period of turmoil that would destroy many people's lives across the entire country. It seems one way to avoid this great destruction is for most of the population in the country to rise up in synchrony and simultaneously topple down the government together -- but this concurrency at a society level is one of the major targets that the current censorship implemented in China aims at.

Sigh...It just seems impossible to have hack out a consensus in a distributed system when the powerful system admin with his privileges at the root level constantly interferes...

</comment><comment><USER17> Xi Jinping is pushing massive censorship because he thinks it is good for China, but I think that is a big mistake. History has shown that when you don't have open, public debate on important issues, the government becomes close-minded and makes poor decisions. Yes, democracy is messy, but the alternatives are worse.

Part of the problem here is that China is still running according to Confucianism, which was a wonderfully effective political philosophy for a largely agrarian society, but is quite ill-suited for the modern world. The Chinese need to think out what is the right form of government for the modern industrial world, but to do that they need free discussion, which is just what Xi is making impossible.

<comment><USER18> No, Xi Jinping is pushing massive censorship because he thinks it is good for Xi Jinping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reuters is blocked in China. China has been "closing" for 5 years now. According to "china watchers", this is expected to continue. Blame Xi.

<comment><USER12> 5 years? China has been closing ever since the Olympics ended in...2008. Its been almost a decade now. Theory is they'll start opening up again in the run up to 2022...they can't really hold an Olympics while blocking all the major worldwide internet sites, too much face lost.

This definitely isn't just Xi's fault.

<comment><USER20> It's almost like having a single political party is a bad thing for a society or something.

<comment><USER21> Being limited to only 2 parties is fucking awful. I can't imagine how bad the USA would be if we were suddenly forced to just have one.

<comment><USER22> It would be exactly the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> No Teresa May this is not to be copied!</comment>