Ask HN: Open source food? - <AUTHOR> I'm planning to start a snack food company and would like to make everything transparent and opensource (formulations, manufacturing processes etc)
Would like any advice or feedback from those who are involved in the opensource.
Are there any concepts or methods that could translate from software? <comment><USER2> I know there is something called open source Cola: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_cola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_cola)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, wasn't aware of it. Seems its dead now, have to read up on why it didn't take off..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think there is a value to this not because I want to replicate your product but because I want to know more about what's in the food. For examples, what are the ingredients for "spices" and "natural flavors"?

I have a couple of reasons:

1\. I want to know what crap i put into my body. If I'm going to eat crap, I want it to be my choice and I want to k ow what's in my food.

2\. I have a kid with severe peanut and tree but allergy. 1st such in our family. Now I have to read every package. I can't tell you how frustrating that is.

On a related topic, you may wish to consider including open sourcing your cross contamination prevention policies (if any) so that those with food allergies can have a clear picture of if they can eat your food safely. If my wife and I are not confident in the (lack of) cross contamination, we don't let our child eat the food even if there are no tree nuts or peanuts listed.

Before having a kid with such allergies, I thought so many parents were over reacting. I mean, few people my age have them, so it wasn't a thing when I was a kid. It worries me why the rates of food allergies are so drastically higher. I suspect it has to do with eating more processed foods. I'm not opposed to processed foods, but I'd like to know if/when I'm eating them and what they are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, hadn't thought of that angle before.

Yes would release all that information (basically what we know, we want our consumers to know, if they desire)

eg- agree on natural flavours, thats a big pet peeve of mine (I have no idea whether it's vegan or not, most cases am forced into a decision i'm not happy with)

<comment><USER3> Oh good point. I hadn't thought about vegan/not-vegan question. Though I eat a lot of vegan foods I'm not vegan, but I could see this being important to those that are.

You could conceivably extend this idea to listing sources of ingredients for those that are concerned with ingredient sustainability.

From my point of view the idea would not be to try and replicate the product but to have greater trust in it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understand, and yes plan to share source for ingredients, where I can find them out myself. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work a lot with Open Source software (both as a user and as a contributor), and the most important question is:

Who is your audience?

Everything else depends on the answer to that question.

Do you mainly want to tell your customers how you make your product? Then start a blog, hire a photographer, and post on Instagram.

Do you want to reach DIY bio hackers? Then put your recipes on Github.

Do you mainly want to share knowledge with other companies in your industry? Then maybe forget the internet and go meet people in real life at a trade fair.

I contribute to a bunch of different Open Source projects, and they all have a very different audience. Some have mostly users that just want to use the product (nobody is interestedin contributing), while more technical projects see more contributions from users. For the former, website and easy install instructions are more important; for the latter Github and API docs are more important.

So the lesson I would take from Open Source: Think of your audience first, and the best way of distribution follows from that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

The audience is mainly other vegan entrepreneurs (or those who want to be) so we can help each other with formulations and industry knowledge. It's a mission driven company End consumers to a minor extent, as I guess some of the formulations are not useful without machinery to make them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless plug, but I run [https://www.menutail.com](https://www.menutail.com) which creates nutrition facts labels when you are ready at that stage of your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will take a look when at that stage

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's people sharing recipes for soylent-like meal replacements: [https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes](https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes)

Regarding concepts from software, not sure. Source control is an obvious one for versioning, wikis make good documentation, but those aren't that software- specific...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that DIY soylent is a good home-brew case study. I guess I have more other food companies in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry if this comes off as snarky, but how is this different than recipes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not snarky at all. It's mostly about the manufacturing process (machinery, settings, process etc) that would make it different. This would be for a factory made product. THanks</comment></comment>


No, PHP Errors and Notices Do Not Need to be Encoded - <AUTHOR> http://randomdrake.com/2011/08/18/no-php-errors-and-notices-do-not-need-to-be-encoded/

<comment><USER2> The original HN submission for the post it's responding to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898087>

I've also taken the time to comment on the blog post itself. Reproducing my comment here:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Thanks for the response! I just have a couple points to make:

\---

 _"Seemingly reacting to this response, Poole's blog post appeared the next day instead of the aforementioned 26th"_

Yes. It was a reaction to the bug being marked public, which meant anyone could view the full details of the issue.

\---

 _"Providing two good reasons for this is not difficult and I am sure there are others:_

 _1\. I don't want to see anything to do with HTML if I'm not doing web-based programming with PHP (such as CLI)._

 _2\. I want my error messages to provide me with precise information. I do not want an error message to arbitrarily encode problematic code. If the user provided <s>test</s> then I want to see <s>test</s>. I do not want to see <s>test</s> since that is not what was submitted and, possibly, not what the problem is."_

As I pointed out on Hacker News, the CLI interpreter does not HTML encode fatal errors, warnings, or notices. The CGI interpreter DOES encode fatal errors and warnings, but not notices. As such, your points aren't really applicable to the situation.

\---

 _"No, Mr. Poole. A decent sysadmin has better things to worry about than PHP configurations. Regardless, sysadmins should be perfectly aware of the stupidity of letting display_errors remain enabled on a production environment; the same should be said for any developer worth their salt. There simply isn't a valid excuse and this is a perfect example of why configurations differ between development and production environments."_

1\. You're using a logical fallacy to make your point: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_true_Scotsman&#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=No_true_Scotsman&oldid=445159436)

2\. Many shared hosts do enable display_errors by default.

3\. I'm not arguing that this is a feasible attack to pull off against most applications: it most certainly is not. I'm arguing that it shouldn't be possible to pull it off at all, even in the small percentage of applications that might be affected. There is no good reason PHP should be displaying this information unsanitized.

\---

 _"How is this a proof of concept of an undefined index or notice?"_

You seem to have missed the line

        $message = $messages[$_GET['message']];

The string 1<script>alert(1)</script> passes the initial if statement but will trigger an undefined index notice on that line of code, with the name of the index under user control.

\---

 _"Recommending programmers turn off their error display without actually addressing the bad code is not good advice at all and something I would hardly expect from someone who works in web application security."_

First you tell me my recommendation is common sense, then you tell me it's bad advice. Make up your mind ;-)

Anyway, as I said on Hacker News, my original report only focused on the "Undefined index" message, which is a fairly benign issue (albeit a sign of sloppy coding). The other examples were discovered later and were only mentioned to demonstrate that PHP notices in general had an issue.

I completely disagree with your assessment of my recommendation though. Telling people to disable display_errors prevents the issue at hand, the cross-site scripting, from ever occurring. In contrast, telling people to go find and fix any PHP notices in their code is a reactive solution: it only works until the next piece of sloppy code gets checked in, at which point the site is vulnerable again. And of course, as you've said repeatedly, display_errors should not be enabled in production in any case.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Please, fix the problems instead of hiding them."_

I want to comment about this conclusion, lest anyone reading it actually follow the author's advice.

You should absolutely be hiding notices/errors from appearing. This is orthogonal to whether or not the errors should be allowed to occur. When during the course of assessing a web application I (or anyone who does this for a living) gets an error message generated by the framework or server (like ASP.NET's yellow screen of woe), that's an issue (albeit usually a low severity issue). If that error can display user input in a non-sanitized fashion, it's a more severe error.

The recommendation isn't to "make sure the application doesn't generate any errors" (although, hey, that's a great thing to shoot for), it's to capture those errors and not display them to the user (usually by displaying a generic error message that doesn't leak useful information to an attacker).

This includes things like disabling debug functionality.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, that CLI argument is a bit strange. Couldn't the default error/notice handler check which SAPI it runs in, and leave out HTML encoding for CLI while escaping in web server SAPIs?

<comment><USER2> It does ;-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898201>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how exceptions are HTML encoded by the default exception handler.

Oh, and <http://drupal.org/node/1168756></comment>


Facebook removes Indian page, says it spread Iranian propaganda - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/india/1629840/facebook-removes-indian-page-says-it-spread-iranian-propaganda/ <comment><USER2> What bothers me is that there are very few things that are not propaganda.

All Fox News article are propaganda, all CNN articles are propaganda, but yet they are accepted? Clearly a distinction is made between 'acceptable propaganda' and 'unacceptable propaganda', and this distinction is made by Facebook, an American company.

How acceptable is that?

<comment><USER3> I don't believe that Fox and CNN have political propaganda in the sense you might imply.

Bias, narrative creating ... it's propaganda-like, but it's not the right word.

Interestingly - almost all US outlets have a pretty strong 'nationalist bias'. We don't think of CNN or MSBC like that, but if you watch the press from outside the US (especially during a war) it becomes quite evident.

When push comes to shove, the mainstream press in the US do work with government on some narrative issues of national security, which I think falls into the category of propaganda.

Zuck has painted himself into an impossible corner.

<comment><USER2> I 100% agree with you, so let me clarify what I was trying to say in my first comment.

US will label as propaganda any article coming from RT - for Russia, or that Iranian journal - for Iran, and now FB starts simply censoring those contents.

At the same time in Russia or Iran, news coming from US are labelled as propaganda as well.

Depending on where you live, you get fed either one of these "propaganda" and you feel you are on the "good" side and that others are on the "bad" side.

My point is the world is not divided between "good" and "bad", everything is not black or white, and the fact that a website with billions of users has the power to decide what is good or bad (or has the obligation to follow directives from a government) is a very bad idea imho.

<comment><USER3> Please don't put CNN/MSNBC/Fox in the same camp as RT, or Chinese state sponsored news. That's not fair.

This is not a situation of moral relativity.

CNN, even Fox, are actually very independent news outlets. Their news is news. (Especially the non-editorial stuff, is usually above bar)

On some, mainly political issues, they are biased.

On some national issues, they 'close ranks'.

But they are not propaganda outlets.

RT is absolutely _propaganda_ outlet. RT is an organ of the Russian state, created specifically to promote Russian interest abroad, and to serve as a mouthpiece for the government, specifically Putin.

Trump has friends in Fox News, but quite a number of haters; many popular folks there disagree with him quite loudly, a lot. Trump has _no friends_ in most of the rest of the press, and there's no opportunity for him to set the agenda directly for example.

RT was designed so that Putin could create the narrative he chooses, and to oppress any opposition to his regime, or the state.

Even the BBC/CBC etc. have quite a degree of independence from state organs. They have obvious political leanings in many situations, and surely will work with the state on some issues, but they are in many ways 'more independant' because they don't have to survive on click-bait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Welcome to Facebook Co. Where a clique of Silicon Valley exec yuppies now decide what is right and what is wrong for us to see.

It's a very slippery slope. Cannot wait for the next elections where any candidates with politically "wrong" ideas will see their pages silently being discarded or randomly hidden from timelines without warnings.

<comment><USER5> They are free to exclude whatever they like, they're a private company and not beholden to what you think they should be doing. If they do the wrong thing they will go on the trash-heap of bad ideas in history, so far they're doing okay as far as being a business goes.

<comment><USER4> They should be seen as a public utility.

I dislike Facebook but for a lot of people it became part of their life and some information is now only available on Facebook.

As a public utility they should be regulated on what they are allow to restrict from their users.

<comment><USER6> > _a lot of people it became part of their life_

So what? World of Warcraft became a part of a lot of people's lives, does that mean WoW should be a utility?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an Israeli propaganda page with 500k likes:

[https://m.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/](https://m.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/)

The "about" section presents it as:

"Sugar, spice, and everything nice.Changing the world, one mug at a time. We're your daily girl power pick-me-up.

Cup of Jane is a community launched by TIP's Future Media Project in DC. We love our communities!"

The discreet acronym TIP stands for "The Israel Project":

[https://www.theisraelproject.org/](https://www.theisraelproject.org/)

The page mixes feminist and feel-good messages with subtle propaganda for Israel. When is Facebook going to take it down?

<comment><USER8> Not sure if this is too far off topic or if I'll get roasted for this. "Cup of Jane" is the kind of title that's so awfully on the nose that I'd mistake it for satire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Their opinion is that it spread propaganda.

Everything written is propaganda depending on what side of the opinion you were on.

Although I don't like it, what is happening today is incredibly fascinating, watching it unfold since I have been using computers since 1990.

<comment><USER10> It all comes down to what specific definitions people are using, but I draw a strong distinction between propaganda and opposing opinions about things. Propaganda is basically marketing copy for politics. It's unreliable in the same way TV ads for pharmaceuticals are unreliable compared to actual advice from actual doctors.

People with opposing political opinions might accuse each other of parroting their side's propaganda, but that's just a way to try to discredit what the person is saying. Like advertising, the only constant with propaganda is that it's bullshit: it might be true, it might not be. The person telling it to you might believe it, or they might not. They may not even know whether or not it's true, and they may not care. The purpose of propaganda, like advertising, is not to convey facts to people, but to convey emotions disguised as facts, and they know ahead of time how they want you to feel about what they're saying. It's not an honest effort to communicate facts, it's often meant to discredit the very notion of facts, so they can conveniently dismiss opposing views as just someone else's opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the risk you take when you are a sharecropper on someone else's land. Probably won't be long until FB takes an Adblock Plus/Yelp gatekeeper approach where they'll ban something, and then allow them back if they purchase a certain amount of advertising.

They won't do it in the West as it would be picked up on the news, but bad actors in places like India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (those are the ones I know of) would pay to have that "feature".

</comment><comment><USER12> "Coordinated inauthentic behaviour", what a refreshingly honestly dystopian syntagm.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if there is any way to really decide what is inauthentic outside of say only allowing individuals who are verified to post....and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is up with any of the big corporations making these kinds of decisions 'without appeal or comment'. It borders on criminal to conduct business that way.

<comment><USER13> Science fiction generally seemed to assume some evil AI or robots would take over the world and make arbitrary / unappealable decisions ....but naw we humans are happy to do it to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> reading regular news like these. Guess FB is using Algorithms to ban than using human effort..

Facebook is a perfect example of how a monopoly will treat people

</comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: They were unwitting accomplices. The propaganda from well known Iranian government outlets was being shared frequently enough, with very little other content, that they were unwittingly part of the machine itself.

<comment><USER17> That still doesn't really explain why Iranian propaganda is unacceptable when the American, Russian, and Israeli propaganda go unpunished</comment></comment>


TurboTax Takes Aim at Smaller Rival in Fight for Filers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-22/turbotax-takes-aim-at-smaller-rival-in-fight-for-filers <comment><USER2> Intuit's PolOps are also continuously trying to keep the US Tax system complex, so they have a reason to exist that isn't the case in other countries:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/business/24digi.html?_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/business/24digi.html?_r=0)

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels- mill...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to- lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/)

If you want something evil to disrupt, disrupt this.

<comment><USER3> Yep -- this is some pretty evil rent-seeking. Unfortunately, disrupting it (i.e. automatic filing) requires political action rather than tech. For people with a single wage/salary job, the IRS already has a good idea what they owe thanks to their employers' reporting. IRS could simply mail them "we think $X is what you made, and $Y is what you owe," and they could either say "okay" if they agree, or fill out the forms otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much how it works in most of europe. Not even mailed, during the filing period log into the tax authority's site, check that the pre-filled declaration looks OK and validate.

<comment><USER5> Sounds glorious. In the U.S., figuring out taxes is like:

Take line 39b, multiply it by your age as determined by worksheet 6689. If you are between 41 and 43 years of age, enter '0'. If you were not subject to the Railroad Act of 1938's exempt dependent pension clause (this is not common), add 13 to this number in hexadecimal, else, subtract 2 and multiply by 1.388688. If you did not have healthcare for more than 14 minutes during the prior year and line 17 is 4 or greater and you live in a zone designated as "clown free" by your local municipality, draw a unicode snowman on this line and prove Fermat's theorem in the margins of Schedule Q...

<comment><USER6> Is this really the case? Can't most people can just file with a 1040(A or EZ) and be done pretty quickly. I was under the impression that you only have to break out the crazy worksheets or software if you want to get fancy with your deductions or take advantage of tax credits.

You can save alot of money this way, but really it's the deductions that are the complication (and the audit risk...) but how can you simplify the deduction process, you have to get specific by the very nature of the task.

<comment><USER7> You can't file for free on the IRS site if your income is above $62k, no matter how simple your filing is:

[https://www.irs.gov/uac/Free-File:-Do-Your-Federal-Taxes- for...](https://www.irs.gov/uac/Free-File:-Do-Your-Federal-Taxes-for-Free)

Edit: I'd love to know a logical reason for that policy beyond "f- the rich".

<comment><USER8> While you can file for free above $62,000 (you have to use the fillable forms, and not the tax prep software), the reason I think the reason for the divide is ultimately that the sub-$62k annual income segment isn't of particular interest to the tax prep (software/services) industry, so providing free tax prep software to them doesn't hit the kind of political pushback that a generally-available solution would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I last used TaxAct in 2011, and would still be using it but for an increasingly complicated business situation which necessitates lots of accountant time (one benefit of which is that form manipulation is thrown in for free). It's great. If any of you are doing uncomplicated W-2 or small business returns which don't have a gazillion moving parts, give it a spin; it's much better than the price suggests.

Edit to add: I'd be remiss if I didn't note "Small software company in Iowa which doesn't have a blog, didn't invent Rails, and which > 90% of HN has never heard of before has > $100 million in annual revenue." It's a great time to be alive, isn't it?

<comment><USER10> 57$ million of profit with just 150 employees too! I'll take 380k per head any day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, we're taking on TurboTax in Canada, [https://simpletax.ca](https://simpletax.ca).

The Canada Revenue Agency introduced an API this year that enables us to auto- fill much of the return: [https://help.simpletax.ca/questions/how-to-use- afr](https://help.simpletax.ca/questions/how-to-use-afr).

<comment><USER12> When do you guys think you'll tackle Quebec? There's a tech scene here, tons of people would jump on-board instantly (as well as help develop it).

<comment><USER11> We added Federal Québec support this year and plan to add the provincial component next year: [https://simpletax.ca/jobs](https://simpletax.ca/jobs).

Québec is a challenging province because of Revenu Québec and Bill 101.

<comment><USER12> It is, but I also think it is worth it. I will point the few accountants I know in your general direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've used TurboTax the past few years, and completely echo the sentiment expressed by others regarding the hidden charges that get tacked on when starting with a "free" return. Turned out that losing money on the stock market also cost me extra on preparation fees as well...

Partly because of the negative experiences with TurboTax, my co-founder and I just launched a company [1] in this space. We're actually "replacing" a TurboTax product that was recently discontinued called "Personal Pro". We're something of an "Uber" for tax preparation, acting as an online marketplace and platform for clients to get their taxes done by professionals. TurboTax had tried this for a few years but it appears they're betting on a continuing shift to DIY.

Has anyone had any experience here as a client of Personal Pro? Would love to hear how it went!

[1] - [https://www.taxaroo.com](https://www.taxaroo.com)

<comment><USER14> I use H&R Block TaxCut (going on 15 years). Costs about 39.99 a year for both my business and personal. Just keep an eye open for when it goes on sale (retail is 89.99 I believe).

I even dropped Quickbooks after their shit 2011 "upgrade". Worst fucking software I've ever used, but hey, it looks like it's WPF now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use a CPA for my taxes, since I never want to have to deal with an audit myself, but even if I wanted to do my own taxes, I would never use anything Intuit made, ever. My experience with Quicken has forever soured me on that company. Quicken was one of the worst programs I have ever used. Because of their need to sell a yearly version of it, the UI churn and addition of bugs, it got so bad it was nearly unusable for me. (I've been using Moneydancy for years and it's a great replacement for Quicken.)

<comment><USER16> > I use a CPA for my taxes, since I never want to have to deal with an audit > myself,

You realize the doing of the taxes and the audit defense are two separate things, right? You can totally do your own taxes, and in the .01% chance you got audited - hire someone to help. It's not that scary of a thing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> TurboTax should focus on making long term paying customers happy. I did not file taxes in 2014 since I didn't really owe much and decided to put it off. I went last weekend to do my 2014 taxes before submitting 2015.

Turbotax told me I had to purchase the software for $60 even though I always have used their online service until 2013. A quick Google search and I found a free service that allowed me to get my 2014 taxes done in 30 minutes.

It was FreeTaxUsa if anyone else is in the same boat.

<comment><USER18> TurboTax and many others still have a free option: [https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp](https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp)

<comment><USER17> Not for previous years which was my whole point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using TaxACT ever since I became an "adult" and started filing my tax returns. I can't really compare it to TurboTax, which I've only used for business taxes, but I can't imagine anything else being easier or cheaper.

It amazes me how some people who have really simple tax forms still pay accountants..

<comment><USER20> >It amazes me how some people who have really simple tax forms still pay accountants..

My W2 is "simple" (single, no kids, etc.) but I give it to an accountant anyway. Costs $30 or so but the accountant knows certain tricks to maximize my tax return. Not illegal, but she knows how broad exemptions can be. For example, I work from home some days. I built a new computer. Technically, it's exempt because it's a work expense.

<comment><USER16> > Technically, it's exempt because it's a work expense.

Ever play a game on it? Opps, it is no longer a work expense. Minor tax fraud is not exactly a "trick", anyone can do it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Speaking of smaller rivals ... This guy provides free US federal tax forms for Excel : [https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/](https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/) ( old school shareware)

Fill in, print out, mail in. (Absolutely great if you have to file previous years returns to qualify for Obamacare subsidies.)

Turbo Tax tries to trick/force you into buying "audit protection": "Please enter your credit card number to submit form".

<comment><USER22> There's a fair bit of sleaze when you use TurboTax, at least this year:

* If you enter any IRA contributions, including Roth IRA, it suggests you update to Deluxe to get "your biggest refund" even though Roth IRA contributions don't qualify you for deductions.

* They plaster "e-filing your federal returns is free!" everywhere while obscuring the fact that they want $20 to help you e-file a state return

* The audit stuff you mentioned

* They no longer include one free state as they have in previous years, but this fact is not mentioned anywhere in the product description

<comment><USER23> To add on to that, if you qualify for the free tier and used TurboTax in a previous year, they make a point of showing you all the information they can prefill from your last tax return. Then, they tell you that they will delete this information unless you upgrade to a paid version.

Way to reward loyal customers. I found another provider to do my taxes this year.

<comment><USER21> How marketing slipped this past QC is dumbfounding.

Maybe they know their little niche will face decline and they need to squeeze whatever they can out of it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Currently I use H&R and went that way after years of Turbo Tax simply for cost. Even now the F&S version was twenty bucks cheaper than the Turbo Tax equivalent. I figure many must think themselves locked into to continue with Turbo Tax.

<comment><USER25> I use H&R Block as well, because having an LLC it is substantially cheaper for me to do my business taxes than TurboTax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I switched this year from TurboTax to FreeTaxUSA, as I we fed up paying $90 for a simple return, constantly getting up sold, and supporting an evil company. FreeTaxUSA was $12 for state and federal, and worked just fine if you understand how tax forms work and don't mind manually entering your 1099 data from your brokerage firm (turbotax can login to your broker in order to automatically populate this data, and is admittedly better at explaining the various questions that you need to answer to do your taxes). For this crowd, I highly recommend switching to something other than turbo tax.

<comment><USER27> I used them as well this year for the first time, because they seem to be the only filer that will file contracting income for free. I really liked their interface and the lack of upsells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Due to a turbo tax bug my return was flagged for an audit. Not worth it. Never using it again.

<comment><USER29> Curious, did you review your filing documents before submitting? Was it something inconspicuous?

<comment><USER28> I did not. I filed electronically. I might have caught it if I'd reviewed everything but it was a pretty complex return.

Fortunately the audit was simple once I realized what had happened and explained it, but it was overall very time consuming.

<comment><USER30> How does an audit work? Do you go to the IRS office? Is the conversation pleasant or adversarial?

<comment><USER28> It was fairly formal, but the auditor was friendly and professional. My return was flagged as part of an IRS program to audit the forms and overall tax collection effectiveness, so there was never any presumption that I'd tried to evade paying taxes.

I sent over a bunch of documentation and then eventually met with the auditor at the office for a few hours to finalize things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If it wasn't for this story I would have used TurboTax again. I hope this backfires with free publicity for TaxAct and many people like me will switch this year.

<comment><USER32> Me too! I started using TurboTax years ago, and have always grudgingly paid the ever-increasing fees for the service. They're so slippery about state filing fees.

I estimate I'll be saving about $60 as a result of this article this year. For TurboTax, because I have a small mutual fund account, I have to upgrade to the "Premium" option just for those extra two or three boxes. H&R Block had similar pricing last year. TaxAct has a similar pricing strategy but much lower prices: instead of $50 for the federal and $40 for the state, it's just $15 each (or something like those numbers).

I'm thinking of it like this: TaxAct needs to afford their $200k houses in Iowa, while TurboTax needs to afford their $1M houses in the Valley.

<comment><USER33> > TurboTax needs to afford their $1M houses in the Valley.

FYI: While Intuit's main headquarters may be in Mtn View, TurboTax is primarily based in San Diego. That's not Iowa cheap, but it's somewhere in between.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My tax situation is complicated enough that I no longer want to do it myself, but I also can't find a good accountant easily.

Why isn't there a web service which will let you easily hire a good accountant online? There's absolutely no reason your accountant has to be local to you, yet all the information I've found online has been for finding a "local" professional.

I can't wait to see the Uberization of professional services.

<comment><USER13> I'm sorry to come in with a blatant promo, but we've just done exactly what you described! [https://www.taxaroo.com](https://www.taxaroo.com).

We can match you with a preparer from anywhere in the country, we quote you a hard up-front price, and you interact with your preparer entirely online.

My co-founder (a CPA) and I just launched it this year, and we've received extremely strong interest from professional tax preparers. We actually did a Show HN a little bit ago, but didn't get much traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074466)

Would love to hear your thoughts!

<comment><USER34> That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for and I'm giving a try right now.

It'd be nice to have some sort of ranking/rating system, or just some way of knowing that the preparer you recommended is qualified and good. Also it seems odd that nearly all the accountants you suggested were in CA despite me setting NY (not that that's a problem, it just seems odd).

<comment><USER13> That's awesome! We're excited to have you giving it a try.

Thanks for the feedback. I absolutely agree regarding the ranking/rating system. We've really just recently launched, so right now we just don't have many reviews. We do have the system in place, though, and we'll be building up those reviews.

Regarding the preparer locations - we plan to add the ability to sort/filter preparers, but we do only show you those that have specifically indicated that they can handle the type of returns required based on your quote. So, if you said you worked in NY and lived in NJ, the listed preparers will be able to handle both states. Same goes for rental property, capital gains, etc.

If you have any feedback or issues as you go, feel free to reach out to me directly at email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used TurboTax for years, but last year they messed me up so now I will never use them again. They wouldn't E-File my NY State tax form for my business because of some missing information on their side and kept saying it would be available soon until right before the deadline I gave up and switched to TaxAct in a hurry. Then I had to wait for Intuit to refund the cost of my software. It was a very unpleasant experience. I didn't like TaxAct as much because I was used to the Turbotax interface and it couldn't automatically pull in the numbers from the previous year, but I think it worked out OK in the end.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have been using TaxAct for about 10 years. Thus far, I'm very happy with it.

There is one minor gripe that I have, they moved the location of the data files so the process of making a backup copy is a little different but that's easy to overcome once you're aware of it.

<comment><USER37> That, and they are started to get a little gimmicky with the upsells etc. Still, I enjoy using them for about 10 years too. Taxes done in about 1 beer - can't beat it!</comment></comment>


PayPal Acquires Modest - <AUTHOR> http://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/paypal-acquires-modest/

<comment><USER2> also here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085093)</comment>


The Number of Public Companies in the US Has Fallen by Half - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/the-other-reason-for-the-stock-market-rally-stock-scarcity/ <comment><USER2> Actual title: "The Other Reason for the Stock Market Rally: Stock Scarcity"</comment>


Ask HN: URLs for emails - <AUTHOR>

Is there any way to create a URL for an email?
This would be very useful for work groups, ie:
>I finished feature #12 per Bob Smith's email (http://gmail.com/bobsmith/emails/12345)
Of course this would need a robust auth/permissions system.
Has anything like this been done? If not, why? <comment><USER2> Internally an email server uses directories like Windows or Linux. There is nothing really unique about directories. Externally though it works in a different manner.

The "http" protocol is an internet standard that is set aside for a specific purpose that does not include email. You could probably modify an email server to allow posting the messages in an email mailbox to an apache web server directory to be able to use the "http" protocol. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol>

Email has its own set of standards about how it works so that one email server can talk to other email servers and the DNS system. The http protocol is not part of this. So it seems like the email would need to be sent via standard email protocols and then moved to an Apache webserver directory as a copy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address>

Email is pretty simple, if I were doing it I would set up an email server and an apache server on Centos5x and play with it. You can probably make it happen.

Postfix/Dovecot is a popular email combo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't a modern email server use a database and not a file system with directories?

<comment><USER2> There is no reason it could not use a database, but not that I know of. The email messages end up in a directory in plain text. So for instance if you are running MS Server 2003 with the MS email server setup, the system admin (with the proper permissions) can go in and read your emails with notepad. Same goes for Linux email servers. Maybe Gmail (or another huge service provider) uses a database on the backend, but as far as I know email is just directories and text files.

<comment><USER3> Even if it does write to a database, assuming that you can programmatically access it, you could build something that works with apache (or runs its own webserver) to translate URLs into doing database lookups.

If you were to actually go about doing this (regardless of whether it is text files or a database), you'd also want to automatically include the URLs within the emails themselves, which I would think many mail servers would let you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks like ccing messages to Google Groups would work.

Example:

[http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker- news/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker- news/browse_thread/thread/301040897998361d?hl=en)

I also checked a closed group that I belong to and verified that you can use a link there as well but it requires that you log in with an account that has access before you can read it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Basecamp lets you link to messages, comments on messages, to-do items, etc. It has a robust per-project auth/permissions system. Other collaboration sites offer something similar.

In general, when dealing with work that occurs via emails, it seems like it's easier to build a separate system that has email notifications, versus trying to glue features onto email.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gmail at least used to support sharing email URLs among the sender and recipients of an email, so long as they had Gmail accounts. (Nobody else could see them, naturally.) Useful for "...When did you send me that email?" "It's _this_ email, <plink>."

I haven't tried it in awhile, though.

<comment><USER5> Update: Doesn't work, anymore. Sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be interesting to make a service where you forwarded your email to email@example.com and it replied with a link to that email so that you could easily share it.

I haven't done my google homework. I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists.

You could always use code pasting web sites as a quick fix.

<comment><USER7> Why wouldn't you simply forward the email to the people you want to share it with?

<comment><AUTHOR> To refer to it outside of an email application.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Primary news Sources for Covid 19 - <AUTHOR> I'm getting really tired of reading news stories from people that don't understand technology or science on what the latest understanding is about how covid19 works, what's effective at improving outcomes and where the research is currently going. Are there any blogs/posts from doctors, researchers and field experts that HN readers are tracking that that would be worth following that have more direct understanding and involvement in the work that do a good job updating on the latest progress and summarizing the latest research. <comment><USER2> Johns Hopkins University's 'COVID-19 Resource Center' has a wealth of trustworthy information. I visit this page [0] a few times in a day to stay abreast with the latest developments wrt COVID-19.

[0] [https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/news](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/news)

<comment><USER3> I know many people who work with JHU's data and have said it's extremely unstable and problematic.

If you want good coverage I recommend the following:

The New York Times for national news about the pandemic. The Washington Post for what's happening in government Your local newspaper for local coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big news today is stay home. The rest is infotainment. Same as yesterday. Same as tomorrow for a while. There's probably something more satisfying than going ever deeper down the black hole...something you are glad you did instead of surfing the internet ten years on. When what you are doing is not working, doing something else is an alternative to doubling down. Or not. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe you should stop expecting someone to spoon feed you everything and learn to do your own research.

</comment><comment><USER6> entry points

[https://reddit.com/r/covid19](https://reddit.com/r/covid19)

[http://biomed-sanity.com/](http://biomed-sanity.com/)

[https://covid19primer.com/](https://covid19primer.com/)

[https://www.researchhub.com/](https://www.researchhub.com/)

[https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/](https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/)

[https://twitter.com/balajis](https://twitter.com/balajis)</comment>


Online Overload – It's Worse Than You Thought (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dashlane.com/infographic-online-overload-its-worse-than-you-thought/ <comment><AUTHOR> A bit of background on this.

A few years back, another HN user commented in a thread that they had over 700 entries in their password manager. I chalked that up as a power-user problem, though a notable datapoint. My own list is similarly extensive.

(packet_nerd reports this from 7 months ago, though I recall this being several years ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899))

Reading through an Experian report on online identity and fraud, the statement that the _typical_ online user had "about" 100 accounts struck me. I've tried sourcing this claim, which is uncited, and it seems strongly similar to the Dashlane study linked here. The 100 services number is worldwide, for US users, it was 130.

Which is from _2015_ , which is to say, four years ago, nearly five. The rate of growth, which is often more critical than the absolute scale, is given as 15% per year. Which, applying the rule of 70, means the _doubling_ time is five years. _If_ that trend has persisted, the number is now on the order of 200 - 260.

There are some caveats: Dashlane are apparently basing this off of a base of 20,000 users, who have an inbox-processing tool installed, which classifies messages, and from which the accounts-per-user information is gleaned. Even a 20k _nonrandom_ sample of a large userbase my have profound biases (this is a self-selected set of users who've installed a specific processing tool, etc., etc.), and it's likely that the actual overall median and mode values are much lower. _But the values are still high and growing rapidly._

Upshot is that I really don't think that an accounts-based, relationship-based approach to services can scale. In the spirit of "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop" (Stein's Law), the question becomes _how_ this might stop.

We might see a vast consolidation of services, the widespread adoption of throwaway accounts, or some form of non-acount authentication (e.g., PGP signed messages, rather than authenticated users). The likely direction is quite uncertain.</comment>


Facebook fan page with contact form, dialogs, navigation & AJAX with static FBML - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/creating-a-custom-facebook-page/

<comment><USER2> @callmeed, Yes that is almost correct...they allow you to run FBJS on load.

@poundy, A mouseover will not work to run JS, I have tried.

I have been playing around with FBML,FBJS for the past few weeks...Say you wanted to load a external page(or for your case your recent image galleries) in a iframe, you will have to do something like this...

 Click here to view your image gallery

 <fb:iframe width="560" height="560" src="hxxp://mywebsite.com>

<fb:js-string var="the_iframe"><fb:iframe width="560" height="560" src="hxxp://mywebsite.com></fb:js-string>

 \-->

Really not a big deal for the users to have to click, but after reading thru there wiki I think using an iframe on a static fbml tab is frowned upon (I may be wrong?)..But anyway,I managed to do some pretty cool stuff with FBML+FBJS that I haven't seen done yet...If anyone wants to chat about this topic,leave your aim/skype/gtalk..=]

</comment><comment><USER3> " _Facebook does not allow Javascript to run on load_ "

Does this mean you simply can't have dynamic content in one of those tabs (without adding an extra click/link)?

I'd like to connect one of our apps to Facebook in such a way that customer could show their most recent image galleries on their FB fan page.

How would this be accomplished?

<comment><USER4> this is exactly the type of thing you would build a facebook application for, though. if the Page uses a tab, when someone clicks the application tab on their profile, facebook requests a page on your server and just puts it in the tab.

so, while you still wouldn't be able to use JS on the tab load, because it was just requested from your server, it could show the last few images on their account.

<comment><USER5> Yeah this is the best solution I've found for putting dynamic content on a Facebook Fan Page. It requires a custom solution but I'd like to eventually build an app that allows anyone to add a custom/dynamic tab to their fan page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this would be a good method if youre marketing in fb. create an win an ipod offer and use the email submit @ the fb page itself.</comment>


Erlang: An introduction to gen_fsm by creating an ATM (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://spawnlink.com/articles/an-introduction-to-gen_fsm-erlybanks-atm/

<comment><USER2> I think this article and the one before it is great, but I have a hard time understanding real world usage with Erlang.

I know Facebook chat and other high-scale applications were done with Erlang but apart from that, how is it useful over say Python for more simpler applications and systems?

<comment><AUTHOR> Erlang is useful for writing concurrent, high availability systems. If you're writing a simple script to grep a directory and delete a few files or something, a scripting language like Python is fine. If you're writing a basic blog even, I'd say a scripting language like Python is the way to go.

But if you're writing a service like a database where there must be a lot of concurrent connections, Erlang has the feel of a high-level scripting languages, while being a compiled byte-code language.

Also, since Erlang processes are so lightweight and can run across multiple cores, it scales nicely with new CPUs coming out. So, usually without changing any of your code, as 4, 8, 16 core CPUs come out, your Erlang script should theoretically run 4x, 8x, and 16x faster, respectively.

<comment><USER3> > So, usually without changing any of your code, as 4, 8, 16 core CPUs come > out, your Erlang script should theoretically run 4x, 8x, and 16x faster, > respectively.

You might want to read this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law>

The program would have to be 100% CPU-bound _and_ the problem would have to be inherently parallelizable to see Nx speedup with N times as much CPU resource.

The kind of code that benefits most from more cores is the kind of code you probably should _not_ write in Erlang actually.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand this but its purely theoretical. Of course you won't see those kind of increases, but you would see increases.

Why wouldn't you want to write something that benefits from more cores in Erlang? Erlang is written for concurrent processes and in the face of more cores (with SMP enabled) it will spread them across the cores for you.

<comment><USER3> Well, CPU-intensive code is likely to do some sort of number crunching. Erlang was not designed with such tasks in mind and it has no supporting libraries. C++ or Fortran would be a better fit, or even Python with Numpy.

Erlang (and by this I mean the whole runtime, not just the language) was designed for fault-tolerance; that's where all the features such as ease of distribution, shared-nothing architecture, built-in lightweight concurrency etc stem from.

Right tool for the right job and all that...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, its not a processing powerhouse but for concurrent applications, Erlang is a clear choice. You don't have to do anything special to gain multiple core support.

Even with cpu-intensive number crunching, I would rather write an erlang linked-in driver in C and use Erlang's concurrency model to run the code rather than write multi-core enabled map/reduce type things in C. (ewwww)

<comment><USER3> > for concurrent applications, Erlang is a clear choice.

No it's not. Not necessarily.

Concurrency is a means to an end, not a goal. Erlang is great for problems which lend themselves well to modeling with a large number of communicating processes. A parallelizable number-crunching task is not such a problem.

By the way, just to be clear, by "number crunching" I mean something like rendering CGI.

> Even with cpu-intensive number crunching, I would rather write an erlang > linked-in driver in C and use Erlang's concurrency model to run the code > rather than write multi-core enabled map/reduce type things in C. (ewwww)

Concurrency in the Erlang VM will not magically translate into concurrency in your driver. By default only one emulator thread at a time is allowed to execute code in the driver. You can override that, and then probably have to deal with a lot of synchronization and locking issues in the driver. Why bother?

Most number-crunching software out there is written in C, C++ or Fortran -- probably for a good reason (I have no experience in this area). There are many libraries, frameworks and tools to help you with parallelizing things (e.g. OpenMP). Erlang is simply not a good choice for this sort of software.

Too many people focus on how Erlang is well-suited for multicore systems. _Forget multicore._ It's neat, but the real awesomeness of Erlang is in distribution and fault-tolerance, not parallelization.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right in many ways. I think I'm thinking too generally at the moment and not about specific tasks :)

Erlang has its strong points just as every other language. =]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Automatically Deletes Some Terms Critical of Chinese Regime - <AUTHOR> https://www.ntd.com/youtube-automatically-deletes-some-terms-critical-of-chinese-regime_466721.html <comment><USER2> Topical discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219)

<comment><USER3> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264)

<comment><USER2> Ah, I must've missed that one. Busy weekend!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is obviously an attempt at manipulation, and the article is from a more than dubious source. This should really not be on HN.

These terms are used to troll and insult posters some people disagree with, not to criticise or to have any substantive discussion.

It's like trying to pass off calling someone "Yankee MF" as criticism of the American government...

<comment><USER5> After discussing this with some Taiwanese friends they say it's not as strong as you are making it out to believe.

More on the level of calling someone a member of the 50 cent party or a paid shill.

<comment><USER6> How is calling someone a member of the 50 cent party or a paid shill less bad than calling them a Yankee MF?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's just a dry run for their censorship implementation that they plan to use in China mostly (and wherever else China needs it).

</comment><comment><USER8> I appreciate the clear headline since the other thread was flooded with what about ism stooges preventing anyone from understanding the significance of a single post complaining to Google with no context and locked comments.

</comment><comment><USER9> From The Epoch Times [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times)

</comment><comment><USER10> what a shame google

</comment><comment><USER11> My God, new Tang dynasty on hacker news, what have we come to.

<comment><USER12> Why Tang specifically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> ... I tested with the terms, those are not affected.

I seriously doubt the truthfulness. Those words are not even banned inside the GFW. How come they are banned on CCP's biggest nemesis?...

<comment><USER14> I just tested 共匪 and it appears to be true.

<comment><USER14> Google translate just translates these characters as 'gangster'.

[https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E5%85%B1%E5%8C%AA)</comment></comment></comment>


Would NATO Go to War Over a Cyberattack? - <AUTHOR> http://nationalinterest.org/feature/would-nato-go-war-over-cyberattack-11199

<comment><AUTHOR> Earlier this week, NATO agrees cyber attack could trigger military response.

Today: [http://map.ipviking.com](http://map.ipviking.com)</comment>


Please ban sites which fail to function using vanilla HTML - <AUTHOR> https://joindiaspora.com/posts/16973302 <comment><USER2> How is this different from somebody demanding that Microsoft refuse to allow any app to run on Windows if it only works via a GUI and not also on the DOS CLI?

The purpose of websites is to provide information and functionality to humans. It's up to publishers and developers to decide how to deliver their work in a way that is accessible to their chosen audience.

It's already a high bar for people to write content and build apps.

The higher you raise the bar, the less content and functionality will be available to all of us.

Also, many people who write content are not developers, and will simply publish their writing where it's easiest for them to do so.

Are they now required to audit all the publishing platforms available to them, to see whether or not their content will be allowed on HackerNews? How are they meant to learn how to do that?

And what about web-apps that are not just text content, but rich apps and games that could never possibly work via text alone.

Are they now not allowed to be viewed by anyone via HN?

Overall, this idea is impractical but also reeks of a sense of entitlement.

We should show gratitude and encouragement to anyone who makes the effort to produce content or functionality for us to read and use, not punish people for failing to cater exactly to our narrow preferences.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have found myself using Firefox's Reader View for nearly every article I read these days. And if FF can't render a site or article in this way I usually skip it.

It doesn't work on this article. The initial served HTML page contains no content -- which is more than a little ironic.

<comment><USER4> Does this exist in Brave or Chrome?

<comment><USER3> It does in Chrome, but it's a little hidden away;

[https://www.howtogeek.com/423643/how-to-use-google- chromes-h...](https://www.howtogeek.com/423643/how-to-use-google-chromes- hidden-reader-mode/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a person who is often in a network that enforces very aggressive active content blocking I am very sympathetic to the idea of penalizing content that does not work well without javascript. This said, I do not know how that policy would be reliably implemented.

The linked post suggests banning all content on a domain/site after content which does not render in basic html is submitted and continuing until that site appeals the determination. I don't think that would be a good idea as 1) it may hide content which non-HN users produce and would not otherwise know to appeal and 2) penalize broader domains due to bad content produced by say a single user posting to a multiuser site.

I also wonder what would count as not being usable in plain html. Sure there are obvious examples like the article the post links to which display zero content but what about all of the in-between spaces. As an example, what if a site has textual content viewable as plain html but also very informative figures/demonstrations that require javascript to make some of the points in the piece. Would this content be removed if it was partially unviewable and meaningful information is lost?

If folks do want to move forward with some kind of penalization of content perhaps it would be better to agree to vote down this content as a community practice or have a per submitted article flag that either ads a tag of shame [requires JS] to the title or removes only that single article rather than broader domain/site bans that are permanent until appealed.

Maybe it's worth trying to force the change, but if enough people are able to view the content and like it enough to vote it up perhaps we should also just leave it alone and just deal with the consequences of choosing not to run javascript and let everybody just view potentially valuable content that they can see.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

 _My suggested implementation is to institute site bans based on reports / awareness, and to leave those bans in effect until the problem can be verified to be fixed. That is: the system needn't be perfect, but it should exist, bans should be instituted when requested, and sites themselves must take positive action to see them lifted._

(Author)

The point is to make noncompliance painful.

If the main body content is feasibly viewable in a GUI _and_ a console browser, that's sufficient.

In the case prompting this request, I was able to successfully view the content _with the additional steps_ of locating the Markdown source, and re- rendering that as HTML, via a pandoc pipeline:

        pandoc --standalone -f markdown -t html -o - \
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net/master/entries/16/entry.md |
        /usr/bin/w3m -T text/html

In 0.3s as it happens, for those concerend with efficiency measures.

I wouldn't consider the _process_ of that as sufficient, but the _result_ certainly was.

Collateral damage is unfortunate. Responsibility lies with the violator.

<comment><USER6> Probably best to make it clear you are the author at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware Diaspora itself doesn't render without JS. It's what avails itself, my apologies.

Post text: [https://pastebin.com/raw/9K5h6c5V](https://pastebin.com/raw/9K5h6c5V)

I nominate joindiaspora.com as the first banned site.

</comment><comment><USER7> I see what you are going for and in an ideal world, I would love for there to be some way to prevent those types of abuses. But the problem with this proposition is that it would effectively ban every modern SPA and take us back to web 1.0.

<comment><USER8> _> it would effectively ban every modern SPA and take us back to web 1.0_

You say that like it would be a bad thing!

<comment><USER9> yeah, like there was anything wrong with having 6 levels of nested tables and dozens of placeholder gifs all over the page...

<comment><USER10> Even if that ever was the norm, which it wasn't, it still is better than what we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this were to happen, product teams would simply create more server-side fallbacks for their design patterns. All Javascript has done is make the web require fewer full page redraws. We'd be back into the days of server-side HTML rendering. I'm not sure that's a step forward. Stamping out a technology just because it enables a behavior you don't like won't stop the behavior. Meanwhile, you'll punish a lot of good actors.

Video on the web, specifically, has a storied history, which is the bigger reason for what's going on with Smart TVs and how they relate to naked video files. Javascript has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER10> What... server side html rendering is vastly superior.

Performance is better. Privacy is better. Battery life is much better. Usability is much much better.

<comment><USER12> Performance depends on how many refreshes are asked of your connection and browser, but that mostly pertains to forms and login screens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The purpose of HN is to share interesting information with others, not to lobby for changes in the way web sites are implemented. I personally dislike the gratuitous use of JavaScript, but I don't think I should deprive everyone on HN of interesting articles because of my personal preferences.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think there are many other things worse. e.g. Medium, sites with pop-over menus, cookie popups, etc.

<comment><USER15> Headers that slide in and hide the content whenever you scroll to read the content in the first place.

<comment><USER14> I was mystified by some of the strange things I've seen on content sites in the last few months but then I realized they were doing click fraud.

That is, strange things happen when you scroll, content moves around so that when you click on a link you accidentally click on an ad "ka-ching!"

I started complaining to advertisers and anandtech stopped doing this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > And yes, I'm aware of the irony that Joindiaspora.com does not function > without JS. Please ban Joindiaspora.com as your first site ban instance.

LOL

</comment><comment><USER17> Ironically this page says:

> This website requires JavaScript to function properly. If you disabled > JavaScript, please enable it and refresh this page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically, the post explicitly references that point, and calls for a ban of Joindiaspora.com as the first HN site ban.

<comment><USER18> a) that isn't irony

b) couldn't you have found a better host for this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't submitting your own stuff usually subbed shunned upon on here? Or was that Reddit?

</comment><comment><USER20> SPA apps only add about 30 milliseconds to the time required to load content, which is far faster than human perception. If folks really think they can tell the difference, we should get James Randi to set up a challenge.

<comment><USER21> >30 milliseconds

On what type of connection? Does my packet loss matter? How many idle cpus do I need?</comment></comment>


This Website Will Self Destruct - <AUTHOR> https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com <comment><USER2> Hey,

Thanks so much for checking this out. I made this site as part of Ludum Dare 46, a game jam. The theme was "Keep it alive." I wanted to do something that was positive and that would give people an outlet to write about their experiences related to Covid. I've had to deal with some abuse, particularly after the first week, but overall it's been an incredibly positive experience.

There are certainly a lot of improvements I hope to make soon. I honestly built it in an evening and expected it might be dead within a day or two. That it's lasted over a month is incredible.

With a large influx of new readers, I'm sure you'll come across a few less savory posts. I'd encourage you to click the report button on the bottom of the page.

Thanks so much for checking it out!

Edit: Since this is HN, and I'm bound to get the question - It's built with Rails and Vue, with PaperCSS for the styling, Postgres for the database, and Redis is being used as part of the spam mitigation system. Oh, and the DB really will wipe itself if it goes more than 24 hours without a post.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Thank you for doing this

2\. It's strange how the simple things, efforts and connections mean so much these days

3\. It is joyous and comforting how many interesting, loving, quirky, emotional, sincere messages I've found, and how few trolls I've stumbled upon. Hope it stays that way (understanding that it may be unlikely if it keeps getting more visibility).

4\. I have no idea if by deleting reported spam you become more culpable/liable for any offensive messages you _don 't_ remove, or any freedom of speech issues - check the laws in your region I guess, and yes it's sad that one has to think about these things :-/

5\. Best of luck! :)

<comment><USER4> Regarding 4, it's a private website. I don't think freedom of speech applies. If you have some sources that say otherwise I'd be interested to read them.

<comment><USER5> The recent Section 230 executive order[1] would be relevant here. Normally social networks have immunity from prosecution if they publish a defamatory or libelous statement (this is the so-called "magazine stand" model). But if the executive order is legal then selectively censoring (or "moderating") what your users post means that immunity no longer applies and you can be sued for any statement that you allowed a user to publish on your network.

This isn't directly related to First Amendment freedom of speech rights, the issue is one of liability (but the purpose of the liability is -- allegedly -- to force platforms to uphold the principle of freedom of speech).

[1]: [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive- or...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order- preventing-online-censorship/)

<comment><USER6> Democrats in Congress specifically grilled social network execs in the wake of the perceived "fake news" crisis in 2016 and pushed the social networks to adopt these fact-checking measures. Now the White House wants to strip their immunity for it. So, which is it? Rock and hard place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In high school I thought of the opposite idea:

"This website contains a timer for seven days. If this timer reaches zero a one million dollar donation will be made to numerous charities. The button below resets the timer."

I was going to call it "This is why we can't have nice things"

But I couldn't find a million dollars.

<comment><USER8> I love the ideas in this response. To reset to the timer requires donating $$ to the cause.

<comment><USER9> I love the game theory of this.

For a charity, you could choose a good cause that upsets assholes. So they have to donate money to the charity to prevent it from getting the money that was donated.

<comment><USER10> Last donation dictates the charity that gets the money and resets the timer

<comment><USER11> And the minimum amount must be >= last donation.

Edit: Wait, are we reinventing poker?

<comment><USER12> What if you donate on behalf of a charity and which ever charity has most donations gets the entire pot?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Didn't Reddit do something like this with one of their April 1st experiments? What ever happened with that?

Ah, here we go:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_\(Reddit\))

Looks like it lasted about 4 months. So I guess that gives us a baseline for the over-under on the lifetime of this site.

<comment><USER14> The major difference is that an individual reddit account could only press the button once and anonymous presses were not allowed.

A single person can send an unlimited number of messages to this new website.

Given that I would expect this to go longer.

On the other hand, The Button was an april fools experiment on one of the internet's most popular websites and thus garnered a ton of attention. This could easily fade into obscurity much faster.

So who knows!

<comment> DC-3 Also worth noting that accounts created after the start of the event were barred from participating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Dear Website,

I wish I didn't make this life I have. I wish I had made different choices and had the foreknowledge to not meet certain people. I wish I felt happier with what I have, instead of yearning for the things and situations I don't._

I just wanted to say, whoever posted this, things can get better. I was in much the same situation about four years ago.

One thing that helped greatly was antidepressants. But that's a can of worms that seems to upset people whenever it's brought up, so perhaps I'll just mention it in passing.

Good luck, whoever and wherever you are.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for this.

I am not person who wrote the message but I am in similar situation, may be it's the quarentine and being alone at home for weeks now but I have been thinking about my choices and mistakes.

I hope it gets better eventually.

<comment><USER17> It will get better eventually, take care & feel free to email me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Toss this into a cronjob and the website will never die ;)

curl -XPOST -d 'body=you cant die. you will never die' "[https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com/api/send_letter"](https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com/api/send_letter")

<comment><USER2> Hi! I made this. I'm not going to talk too much about the back end of the system, but that won't work.

:)

<comment><USER19> Would you be willing to talk about it once it self-destructs?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I'll definitely do a postmortem of some kind, and go into the moderation tools I built for this.

<comment><USER20> It's a shame really, I both really want to see the technical details from that post-mortem but, at the same time, I don't want to see such an amazing project go.

<comment><USER21> The cynic in me thinks the website won't self destruct, but instead will stop working because the domain isn't renewed or the server isn't responding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Please considering adding a privacy policy and some CYA legalese. I know it probably seems excessive and unnecessary but I would just hate to see someone wind up in a whole mess of trouble for a super cool side project that was supposed to be fun.

The FTC has resources for small-business COPPA compliance and there are plenty of free tools to help with a privacy policy.

<comment><USER2> This is extremely high on the todo list. It was going to be done this weekend, but then I ended up living a little too close to some of the ongoing protests in the US to concentrate on getting it done.

Thanks for the reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm late to the party, but wanted to say I really liked the slight tilt on the wonderful floating buttons, with their gentle shadow and floaty-but-satisfying animation.

Great page and excellent attention to the little details that makes it feel like it was made with love :)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is wonderful. How is content moderation being addressed? That's always going to be my primary concern with this sort of thing.

<comment><USER25> There's a "report" button at the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the notes included a base64 encoded message that reads:

"You are Big Brain. Good job finding an Easter egg. Know that God is Real. Believe in Jesus Christ and repent for your sins. It's not just a bunch of rules you have to follow but a relationship with him. Know that everything happens for a reason and God only wants the best for you."

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone else experience that if you highlight the seconds counting down on the webpage that they disappear?

And that if you reload the webpage, it's always at the appropriate seconds for 24 hours?

<comment><USER28> Concerning the second question: I assume it is displaying the placeholder value before replacing it with the actual value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> First message I read below.

A Narcissist's Prayer:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did…

You deserved it.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a great idea and what a coincidence, just one week ago I posted a side project to HN that aims to build a website completely by user requests from scratch, while your website is destructing itself. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315733) // [https://userbricks.com/](https://userbricks.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> lol - I expected to see this in the messages... was not disappointed.

1 AND 1=2 UNION SELECT table_schema, table_name, 1 FROM information_schema.tables

</comment><comment><USER32> The website could sell advertisement space for crypto currency, and pay its hosting fees automatically. It could become autonomous.

</comment><comment><USER33> Dear Website,

If you were a person you would be the type that threatens suicide for attention. Not the most healthy. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER34> Unique design. When I right-clicked to view page source the tilted orientation surprised me. It's like in life, you can realize something is a bit-off, and then time passes, and you get used to it. Then one day, a 'true north' appears and you realize how tilted your perspective was.

</comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of "the really big button that doesn't do anything" from www early days

[https://krystalrose.com/rosewood/library/BigButton.htm](https://krystalrose.com/rosewood/library/BigButton.htm)

</comment><comment><USER36> I remember something like this, it was not the website itself but you were keeping a character in space alive by supplying air to her? or something similar.

Eventually she died because because of website having issues and people not being able to support her

</comment><comment><USER37> Someone posted this, whatever that means:

𐐌 𐑊𐐴𐐿 𐑉𐐴𐐻𐐮𐑍 𐐮𐑌 𐑄𐐮𐑅 𐐻𐐯𐐿𐑅𐐻, 𐐮𐐻 𐑊𐐳𐐿𐑅 𐐿𐐭𐑊. 𐐶𐐲𐑉𐐿𐑅 𐐼𐐮𐑁𐐲𐑉𐐲𐑌𐐻 𐑄𐐰𐑌 𐑅𐐻𐐰𐑌𐐼𐐲𐑉𐐼 𐐬𐑊𐐼 𐐢𐐰𐐻𐐲𐑌 𐐰𐑊𐑁𐐰𐐺𐐯𐐻, 𐐺𐐲𐐻 𐐲𐐻 𐑄 𐑅𐐩𐑋 𐐻𐐴𐑋 𐑁𐐫𐑉𐑋𐐼 𐑁𐑉𐐲𐑋 𐑄 𐐢𐐰𐐻𐐲𐑌 𐐰𐑊𐑁𐐰𐐺𐐯𐐻. 𐐆𐑋𐐰𐐾𐐮𐑌 𐑄𐐮𐑅 𐐺𐐨𐐮𐑍 𐐲𐑅𐐲𐐼 𐑁𐐫𐑉 𐐹𐑉𐐰𐐿𐐻𐐮𐐿𐐲𐑊 𐐹𐐲𐑉𐐹𐐲𐑅𐑆.

𐐡𐐰𐑌𐐼𐐲𐑋 𐐼𐐭𐐼 𐐮𐑌𐐻𐑉𐐨𐑀𐐼 𐐺𐐴 𐑄 𐐔𐐯𐑅𐐨𐑉𐐯𐐻 𐐈𐑊𐑁𐐰𐐺𐐯𐐻 .

<comment><USER38> That's Deseret, an alternate alphabet for English. According to a converter, it says:

> I like writing in this text, it looks cool. Works different than standard > old Latin alphabet, but at the same time formed* from the Latin alphabet. > Imagine this being used for practical purposes. Random dude intrigued by the > Deseret Alphabet.

* The converter gave me "/f/aw/r/m/d/" here

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surprisingly low number of SQL injection attempts and hateful screeds in the "read a message".

Although I did see what looks like a blockquote rendered in what looked like code blocks. Markdown?

</comment><comment><USER40> first one I got encouraged suicide (starting "Being dead is actually not that bad") and it was such a "dead dove do not eat" situation, why did I fall for this stupid link

<comment><USER41> People write what they want. I only saw nice messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can anyone explain what's so special about this website?

I'm missing the point

<comment><USER43> In the creator's own words:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374842)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Damn op that's addictive as hell.

Some of the things you read can be incredibly sad, to be followed by something inspirational.

Excellent job, I'm interested in just how long it lasts!

</comment><comment><USER45> The amount of CSS went into those boxes is mind-boggling.

</comment><comment><USER46> This reminds me of an indie game (or a web game) where players have to press a button to keep a girl alive. Does anyone remember what it's called?

</comment><comment><USER47> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531265)

</comment><comment><USER48> Looks like the messages can serve XSS payloads. I just came across one. Perhaps self destruction of this codebase wouldn't be so bad.

<comment><USER2> That shouldn't be possible. They might try to, but it won't work. If you really did see one, please let me know what it was doing so I can figure out what happened, and if someone else does, please report it. There's a report button at the bottom of every page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Funny thing is that no website will live on forever, so, in some way, every website fate is just to self destruct at some point.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a cool concept! Lots of messages appear to be people spamming their twitch or whatever IDs asking for followers.

</comment><comment><USER51> How can i create a similar website for a polling or getting a survey on some topic? I am no coder.

<comment><USER52> You can use sites like surveymonkey.com or strawpoll.me

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The design of the site is just perfect. I love it. (And the idea is awesome too)

</comment><comment><USER54> Surely the post-to-hackernews button should self destruct after one use also..

</comment><comment><USER55> Very beautiful and inspiring. How did you get the word out once it was ready?

</comment><comment><USER56> "Depression is like drowning in a shallow bath. Never give up."

</comment><comment><USER57> It reminds me of Space Email but with a twist. This is cool!

</comment><comment><USER58> That's great that it'll self destruct!

</comment><comment><USER59> someone said "Could you publish your source code thx" lol

</comment><comment><USER60> First message I got:

"Dear Website,

I wish I was aborted."

</comment><comment><USER61> Dear Website,

I wish you would put the "Read a message" button above the content so it doesn't jump around vertically each time I click it.</comment>


CSS transforms unprefixed in Firefox nightly - <AUTHOR> http://paulrouget.com/e/transformsunprefixed/

<comment><USER2> IndexedDB is far bigger news here. Does this mean saving Blobs in IndexedDB is finished?

I hope this doesn't mean Firefox is going to stop working on it because their implementation is much slower than in Chrome and IE (albeit Chrome is using the old spec).

<comment><USER3> Yes Blobs are working, no I very much doubt work will stop (there is a bug open to switch to a levedb backend - <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679267>)

<comment><USER4> At this point we are unlikely to switch to leveldb, work on that has stopped. During integration and testing for leveldb we made a lot of progress on sqlite optimzation and the leveldb advantage diminished significantly, if not disappeared.

(Notice that the bug you referenced hasn't had any real progress since it was filed in August 2011, and work has stopped on the parent bug for integrating leveldb.)

I don't know much about the particular performance problem you're referencing, but I doubt it is as simple as sqlite not being fast enough.

<comment><USER2> I write an indexedDB library and have 25 unit tests that have multiple operations per test, let's say an average of only 2 per test. So about 50 operations, mostly just get or put. Chrome takes about 1 (when warm) to 1.5 (cold start) seconds to run all of the tests, Firefox takes 3.5 (warm) to 5 (cold). IE10 is phenomenally fast, less than _a half_ a second even when cold.

This is some combination of slowness from pulling js from the cache, raw js speed, and indexedDB speed. I assumed it was mostly the latter but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER3> I was about to agree with you, for PouchDB I have a test suite of 460 tests which take around 20 - 30 seconds and are mostly indexedDB operations, I remember having to increase some timeouts to have tests pass in Firefox

But I just ran the test suite again and after a few runs, there was little difference in timing, firefox even came faster a few times.

And this is in latest stable, I cant test nightly yet due to some api changes, and I know there was a lot of work done on idb performance improvements last week.

Pleasantly surprised

<comment><USER2> Just out of curiosity, have you tested IE10 and if so what were your results?

<comment><USER3> I havent, but do plan on doing so soon

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ugh. We should get rid of prefixes already. They are a hassle for web developers, and reality is the web moves so fast that what's supposed to be "experimental" may be very quickly put into production use. Removing them would not prevent changing the syntax of a CSS property. Prefixes are bad anyway because they ensure only 4 engines can be ahead of the curve, unless web developers decide another matters enough to add the prefix for it.

Edit: Actually, if we don't get rid of prefixes entirely, we should get rid specifically of vendor prefixes. Using -experimental- or -x- is fine with me. Just don't segment by vendors so only some browsers are explicitly supported.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you understand why the prefixes are there. CSS was designed in a way that things should either work or not. There shouldn't be different ways to interpret a property. With browsers battling over several syntaxes for CSS3 implementation, the last thing we want is to have webdevs build a separate stylesheet for every browser out there, because (for example) "transform:" works different on Firefox 3 than on Firefox 4, and Chrome's implementation is also different. The prefixes help a lot here: you can group all these different stylesheets into one by using the prefixes, and once the standards are finalized they'll just use one syntax that can't be interpreted any other way.

<comment><USER5> CSS parsing rules mean it doesn't matter. You can simply specify a property with several syntaxes, and browsers ignore the ones they don't recognise.

<comment><USER7> Let's say that you have a property that takes in two color parameters, crazy- coloring. Webkit implements crazy-coloring: bgcolor fgcolor; Gecko implements crazy-coloring: fgcolor bgcolor;.

How do you propose we differentiate these and know what the designer meant? That's why we have prefixes, until it's standardized.

<comment><USER5> Usually we don't end up with cases that are that drastically different. And in that case, now only Webkit, Gecko, and maybe Trident and Presto are considered. Other, less popular rendering engines are rarely included in the set of prefixed properties, excluding them from the ability to use new features.

<comment><USER3> indexedDB specifically had very different behaviour in webkit and firefox, it still does afaik

<comment><USER5> There's also different behaviour across versions. Prefixes don't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not transitions. Transforms. [fixed]

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm an idiot :( Sorry! _edited_

<comment><USER8> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment>