Ask HN: Where should I buy an SSL certificate for my site? - <AUTHOR>

I need some help navigating the SSL cert oligopoly.  What vendor has a reasonable price while delivering a no-scary-messages experience in virtually all browsers?<p>Personal experience with various vendors and any gotchas I haven't thought are especially welcome. <comment><USER2> FYI, if you buy a wildcard cert covering .example.com, example.com itself does not match -- only subdomains do.

<comment><USER3> This is true, and it makes hosting www.example.com and example.com on the same IP somewhat difficult. Certain newer browsers understand the Subject Alternative Name format. Here's a link about it: <http://www.digicert.com/subject-alternative-name.htm>

I don't know anything about the linked site, so I'm not endorsing their products.

<comment><USER4> Digicert is a legitimate provider of SSL certificates (my company uses them pretty much exclusively; I don't think they are any better or worse than other SSL providers that I've used professionally).

One exceptional thing Digicert provides is good practical documentation for generating a certificate signing request and applying a purchased certificate to any web or application server. Makes it really easy for junior admins to get up to speed when they have to apply certs to everything from IIS to Apache, Tomcat JBoss, etc within the same environment.

<comment><USER5> Actively considering using Digicert here so your info is appreciated.

We can work around the primary domain not matching because our landing page has no real need for SSL, however, we do very much need iPhone support on the subdomains.

Would you happen to know if Digicert Wildcard SSL certs work on the iPhone? Thanks

<comment><USER6> The DigiCert Wildcard cert does work on the iPhone.

<comment><USER5> Great, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I paid $14.99 for a GoDaddy certificate and I was up and going within a few minutes. The certificate creation process was pretty simple. You have to search "SSL Certificate" in Google to get the reduced price, otherwise they charge about $10 more.

<comment><USER8> Note that new domain registrations at Namecheap currently include a free SSL cert (1st free), and you can use them for arbitrary hostnames. Roughly same distribution of the parent cert in browsers.

<comment><USER9> I've used namecheap to set up a cert for my site. It's the only one I've set up so far so I can't compare them to other vendors but I had no problems and would happily use them again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Verisign and move on, or use your hosting firm if they provide the service. This isn't a question worth your time, really.

<comment><USER11> Verisign is the only realistic choice if you want your website to work with older mobile browsers and low-end mobile browsers. Many phones from as recently as two years ago only have the Verisign root cert installed in them.

If Verisign is too pricey, and you are willing to lock out older and low-end devices, but not all devices, then GeoTrust QuickSSL is the only alternative. QuickSSL is cheap enough that there isn't any reason to try to find something cheaper.

All other certificates being sold have one or more of the following problems: the root cert is in few devices or only in recent devices, the root cert is present in devices but will expire in the next 2-3 years, the certificate is a chained one which won't work in some devices, the root certificate uses relatively weak crypto (1024-bit key or MD5 signature), or there is some other problem which I cannot remember off the top of my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> GoDaddy is pretty cheap and I don't see why you shouldn't use them.

<comment><USER13> You want to beware of what you're buying, chained certificates are OK if it's for something where you have a small number of users (say site admins) but you will look like an incompetent nitwit if your clients customers are getting browser security errors because they don't have the intermediate certificate installed in their browser.

My recommendation for ease of use and fast turnaround is Geotrust or one of their resellers.

<comment><USER14> I think the ones from GoDaddy work fine in most browsers. Or no?

<comment><USER15> Actually, firefox 3 on xp is missing a godaddy cert line. Just install the certificate chain/bundle instead of the lone certificate and you'll be ok.

<comment><USER3> There are certain corner cases where this doesn't work (one that comes to mind is WPA enterprise certificate negotiation in Windows XP, completely unrelated to HTTPS).

If the requirement for "virtually all browsers" includes esoteric mobile stuff I'd be concerned about intermediate certificate authorities. If you're doing desktop applications/common mobile applications, these providers will have solutions for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anyone needs a cert (including the OP if he hasn't purchased yet) and help setting it up on pretty much any server/device/platform - email me. My address is on my profile. Mention HN and this thread, and I'll make sure you're looked after ;)

[Disclosure: I work for a CA.]

</comment><comment><USER17> we used thawte, but wish we used verisign because they have a cooler 'secured by' icon ;p

seriously

</comment><comment><USER18> Most of the resellers out there are reselling Comodo certificates. Comodo is probably the leader in terms of number of certificates issued and you can buy direct direct from them to save the middleman. They offer two classes of certificates but both are essentially the same. The difference is the amount of insurance Comodo provides you and the level of authentication you must go through to prove who you say you are.

You can check them both out at: <http://www.instantssl.com/> (the lower end) <http://www.enterprisessl.com/> (the higher end)

<comment><USER11> Comodo's default InstantSSL root is not present in many devices (Nokia Series 40 and Windows Mobile in particular, IIRC). If you file a support ticket they will issue you a certificate chained to a different root. But, that root certificate is going to expire relatively quickly, and it is hit-or-miss whether Comodo will charge you extra for it (since it effectively makes your cert. an EnterpriseSSL cert.).

Comodo is also on the verge of getting its trust taken away from them, due to negligent behavior that was widely reported a month or two ago. If any more negligent behavior is discovered (not unlikely), I think browser makers will be forced to remove Comodo's root, making all their certs worthless. (They are already worthless to me.)

<comment><USER19> Here's an article about said negligent behavior: <https://blog.startcom.org/?p=145>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I started my search by looking at the providers that offered certificates accepted by Firefox and Internet Explorer. My next level of filtering was to look at cost and the ability to try the certificate for free during a trial period.

I settled on Comodo (instantssl.com). The evaluation period went perfectly. At the end of the period, I paid (I seem to recall $99) for a one year certificate. They required a couple forms of indentification (driver's license, utility bill) and the process went smoothly. I am using the certificate now at bigtweet.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can find reviews and ratings of SSL vendors at <http://www.sslshopper.com/certificate-authority-reviews.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> I recently researched this and I thought Digicert looked pretty good. Digicert includes Subject Alternative Name.

Our CEO insisted on VeriSign so that's what we went with - way more expensive and to get both www.example.com and example.com you either have to buy another cert (for example.com) or go through their Sales team's Managed PKI to get a SAN - ridiculous!

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER22> cacert.org - And it is free :)

And running multiple SSL/https domains from a single IP is also possible when using recent enough software (Apache with mod_ssl which has SNI support). More info about the SNI here - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication>

<comment><USER13> SNI is not supported by IE6 or earlier, and probably not feasible if you're trying to reach older mobile browsers (or even current ones, iPhone does not support it).

Which really sucks because it is an elegant solution to a very real problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I honestly don't think it matters too much. You can get certs from $15-$20, and, while most of them will try to upsell you to a more "secure" version to "give your visitors confidence", 90% of your visitors probably won't know who issued your certificate. As long as it's trusted in MSIE, Firefox, and Opera you'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER24> I recently bought a domain from namecheap and got a 1 year SSL free. Havent tried it out though.

<comment><USER25> I'm using it and it works. Note that isn't just domains that give you a free SSL certificate, it's just about any product they sell, like Whois Guard. Make sure to add it to your cart at the right stage of the process, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What about thawte?

<comment><USER27> I'm using thawte and am very pleased with it. Compatibility was great in my tests - it covered all mobile devices (Windows Mobile at the time) and desktop browsers I cared about.

The also gave me a follow-up phone call to make sure everything went well (there were NOT trying to upsell, it was a genuine help offer).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone here have experience with StartCom? <http://cert.startcom.org/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Network Solutions Pro certificate was easy to setup, offers good value at $139/year.

<comment><USER30> I'll second this. Verisign is a racket. Network Solutions is still a reputable company and provides the cert at a good price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I found trustico to be the cheapest so far. Their service is decent too.

</comment><comment><USER32> I went with a comodo SSL through NameCheap.com - works great.

<comment><USER19> I'd have a hard time trusting Comodo. It's been recently shown that they will issue a certificate for any website to anyone at all, without verification: <https://blog.startcom.org/?p=145>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Trustwave</comment>


Show HN: I made a dashboard showing Portland housing and economic trends - <AUTHOR> https://trends.portlandiamaps.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN:

Inspired by ExplodingTrends and Meetglimpse I decided to compile a bunch of real estate data, construction permits and other stats published the city/state to make something useful for my home town.

Any ideas how I can better present those charts to give people a good sense of Portland? ie a crossover between Moody's credit ratings and weather forecast.

many thanks!

Tech stack: Pandas and React+Gatsby</comment>


Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/13/twitter-russia-data-deleted-investigation-243730 <comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Josh Meyer / Politico: Sources: Twitter deleted tweets and user data potentially valuable for Russia probe in keeping with its privacy policy_</comment>


Replace by Fee – A Counter Argument - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

<comment><USER2> Does the RBF patch have a realistic chance of being accepted? It seems like so much stability is lost that Bitcoin becomes practically unusable from the consumer perspective.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin Core development is based on consensus. Right now there is no consensus for this change, and it's not really a brand new proposal.

But in reality, of course that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what code is accepted in some git repository somewhere, what matters is which code is actually run in the wild. Miners and pool operators are the ones who really have the power to accept or reject RBF by running their bitcoin with or without the patch. Right now almost all of them don't use it and the author of this article argues that it will stay that way. We will see.

Worst case things go wrong and bitcoin becomes unusable for a usecase that it was never designed to address.</comment></comment>


Flow chart: How to find out which things to throw out - <AUTHOR> http://mortenjust.com/2010/08/30/finding-out-which-things-to-throw-out/

<comment><USER2> That is one of the least usable flowcharts I have ever seen.

Anyone care to knock together a much more readable one that doesn't use a 3d isometric view to not just confuse the read by splitting things over multiple levels, but also to actually obscure the text which is the point of the diagram?

Don't get me wrong - it's a lovely idea, but the execution is...less than optimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://cl.ly/0340cc29b2d0197d936b>

<comment><USER2> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's with the obsession of spending money on the "best" bed. I find I sleep best on a very thin ~$20 mattress on the floor or on a polyfoam mattress when camping. In general a plain flat and hard surface seems to feel best for the back. The more advanced beds remind me a bit of the other big scam: running shoes. (end of rant and I didn't even mention chairs :)

<comment><USER4> Are running shoes a scam? My legs and feet say they aren't. With beds I tend to agree with you, but try sleeping without a matress when camping. It's doable but you tend to still be tired in the morning. So it's possible that a very good matress makes you sleep even better.

<comment><USER5> The shoe scam quip references the resurgence of barefoot/forefoot running, which eliminates the need for heel shock absorption or "motion control" shoes (aka, the costly ones).

It's referred to ask a scam because running shoe retailers typically teach heel strike running and then offer costly shoes to mitigate injury.

If you're interested check out the book "Born To Run," google POSE running or check out crossfitendurance.com

<comment><USER4> I was never taught heel strike yet I use it. It's not that the shoe retailers teach it, it's just the most natural way to run when you're wearing shoes. When you run barefoot you naturally switch to front strike. I'm going to try running barefoot again. The problem I had with it last time is that you can't run fast because when you run fast and you're exhausted you're going to hurt yourself by making small landing mistakes and by stepping on stones and tree branches and cracks in the road...anyone have experience seriously (i.e. not light recreational) running barefoot on less than ideal surfaces?

<comment><USER6> While the term "barefoot shoes" seems highly oxymoronic, it does accurately represent shoes like the Vibram 5 Fingers. These shoes also give you that initial impulse to run on the balls of your feet. Their main benefit is smoothing over gravel and my old nemesis, crushed up acorns (damn you mighty oaks!!!) I've run 6 5Ks in the shoes and will never go back to the thick healed shoes. I'm still a bit overweight but was much more overweight when I started running. Running on the balls of your feet makes you use your body's natural shock absorbers and not the cushioned heel. I highly recommend for anyone to try out some minimalist shoes. Also, one of the better terms to find out more on Google is "minimalist running".

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, why would you never go back to normal shoes? How does sprinting on these shoes go?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists pull living microbes, possibly 100M years old, from beneath the sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/scientists-pull-living-microbes-100-million-years-beneath-sea <comment><USER2> The paper _Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years_ [1]:

> Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in > organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their > metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 > Ma.

> Dominant bacterial groups included Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, > Firmicutes, Alphaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, > and Deltaproteobacteria (Fig. 3b, c) with a minor fraction of Chloroflexi > (0– 2.6%).

It seems that it is the conditions that extends life since such a diverse community of aerobes was "reanimated".

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17330-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17330-1)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard that there is a hard limit of about 1 million years to recover ancient DNA because of deterioration processes [1]. Wouldn't their DNA have deteriorated by now? Or is it being constantly repaired?

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

<comment><USER4> You can 'reverse engineer' DNA. Though the DNA strand itself deteriorates rather quickly given the time scales. The peptide bond are extremely robust and can be used to recreate the original DNA string or at least some semblance of it.

<comment><USER5> Some parts of the DNA are not transcribed, for example the "Promoters" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promoter_(genetics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promoter_\(genetics\)) They are important so some proteins are build only when the they are needed. For a more concrete example, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_operon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac_operon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Makes me think that panspermia isn't so outlandish. 100 million years will get you from star system to star system with plenty of time to spare.

<comment><USER7> Has work been done on figuring out how long it would take to develop DNA/RNAthrough evolution?

I.e. has the earth been around long enough?

<comment><USER8> The fossil record indicates life on Earth appeared no later than about 800,000,000 years after it first formed, and possibly much sooner.

While there's no real evidence for panspermia, it is a fun topic to read about. I recall one hypothesis is that DNA (or RNA) based life evolved shortly after the Big Bang (500,000 years?) when the universe was a balmy lumpy-gas bath of 0-100C. If this were true, it would follow that life is as pervasive as the cosmic background radiation and we should expect to find it in every crevice. Mind-bending.

<comment><USER9> > I recall one hypothesis is that DNA (or RNA) based life evolved shortly > after the Big Bang (500,000 years?) when the universe was a balmy lumpy-gas > bath of 0-100C. If this were true, it would follow that life is as pervasive > as the cosmic background radiation and we should expect to find it in every > crevice. Mind-bending.

That's pretty unbelievable, since at that time stars hadn't formed to create heavier elements, so the elements available were hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium. DNA is mostly carbon and nitrogen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone with a passing interest in this or adjacent fields should check out the Deep Carbon Observatory website.

[https://deepcarbon.net/worlds-oldest-groundwater-supports- li...](https://deepcarbon.net/worlds-oldest-groundwater-supports-life-through- water-rock-chemistry)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate- reducing_microorganism...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate- reducing_microorganisms)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a big logical leap to the conclusion that this will "doom us all". It's even sillier to be afraid of sediment core incubation experiments with destructive sampling techniques. Don't you think?

<comment><USER12> SF author and marine biologist Peter Watts has a trilogy on a very similar premise, where an early "fork" of life (that is actually _more_ efficient than our entire tree of life) got stuck down in the ocean depths at the dawn of time, until we accidentally bring it up.

[https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm](https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related: I recently read "The Story of Earth" by Robert Hazen and it's a fascinating read. Highly recommend. The author also has a few Great Courses courses. "The Origin and Evolution of Earth" is a companion to the book (it covers much of the same material) but the two together left me with significant retention of the material. It's fascinating to go out hiking now with my kids and be able to entertain and educate them with facts about the rocks and formations we are hiking on :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if there's any depth we've searched where we haven't found life. It looks like life is everywhere we look. Is there anywhere on Earth there isn't some microbe living?

<comment><USER15> Reading [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/deepest- life...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/deepest-life-earth- mariana-trench-astrobiology-science/), scientists think temperatures above 250F (120 °C) aren't compatible with life as we know it (carbon-based, using water), and, because of that, there isn't life below 6 miles down.

Reading [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanopyrus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanopyrus), about a microbe that "can survive and reproduce at 122 °C", that limit may be based on observation, rather than first principles. Regardless, I would take it with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER16> Some archaea species like Geogemma barosii [0] can survive and reproduce at temperatures above 121 °C (the temperature used in many autoclaves for example).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121)

<comment><USER14> That's pretty awesome that the only limitations of life on Earth appear to be pressure and temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe now the bacteria revived from 40Mya amber are believable.

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't this a repost ? I remember reading similar article last year

</comment><comment><USER19> It's 2020. What can go wrong?

<comment><USER20> Remember the Mayan calendar brouhaha over 2012? They just forgot to carry the 1.

And here we are.

<comment><USER21> Would have made a great movie. "The Mayans were off by 8 years"

<comment><USER22> I'm sure the Mayan's original paper they submitted for peer review had the appropriate margins or error detailed, it was just lost once the newspapers picked it up.

<comment><USER21> Great point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They don't look a day over 61 million

<comment><USER24> Does my pseudopod look fat to you? How about now?

<comment><USER23> Dear, you always look wonderful to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do you want zombies, this is how you get zombies... /kidding of course(mostly)!

<comment><AUTHOR> But, but .. we did that in 1997-2005 for Spanish flu and nothing (?) happened.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/437794a](https://www.nature.com/articles/437794a)

 _> It is thought to have killed 50 million people, and yet scientists have brought it back to life … Working out how it arose and why it was so deadly could help experts to spot the next pandemic strain and to design appropriate drugs and vaccines in time, they say. But others have raised concerns that the dangers of resurrecting the virus are just too great. One biosecurity expert told Nature that the risk that the recreated strain might escape is so high, it is almost a certainty._

Grave digging: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic- resources/reconstruction-19...](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic- resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html)</comment></comment>


The Cuban CDN - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/ <comment> tuna-piano One super funny thing about the Wifi cards referenced in the article that I saw when I was there earlier this year.

You are only able to officially buy the wifi cards at certain government offices. Of course, many of these have weird locations, long lines, and inconvenient hours. You also need to show your ID, and there are certain rules about the cards you can buy.

Understandably, this has led to an underground Wifi card selling business - which is strictly illegal. I shit you not - go to a wifi park in Cuba, walk around for a bit, and a sketchy man might glance at you or secretly flash you a wifi card. You then can discretely approach him and pay him $3 (CUC) for the officially priced $2 card.

But be careful buying the card... you never know who's watching and you probably don't want to end up in Cuban jail.

<comment><USER2> That reminds me of a funny story.

I used to live on Tehran, Iran. All restaurants, stores and businesses must be closed after 12:00 AM in Tehran.

So one night me and a friend were driving around the town in midnight and we were quite hungry. So we found a nice guy selling tea in the winter and there were other people around. We asked them if we can find food anywhere in town in this hour.

One of them gave us an address and told us we should just go there and wait in the car.

We didn't really believe, but we gave it a shot.

I kid you not. At 4:00 AM in the morning, in an alley, we stopped and a sketchy man came over and handed us a menu!

It was fast food. Pizza, burgers and chicken strips. It wasn't really good.

It was a few years ago. Nowadays there are always a few people hanging around and they sometimes open the doors and let people in.

<comment><USER3> Similar story, I was in Barcelona, and if you walk around the beach at night, you see dodgy-looking immigrants that will approach you and quietly ask if you want a cold beer.

See, it's illegal for stores to sell alcohol past a certain hour, so these guys provide a valuable service. However, I was with a friend who wanted to smoke some weed instead, so he went and asked one of the guys "do you have any weed?"

The guy looked _horrified_ and quickly blurted out "No, no, only beer! You can't get that stuff!" before moving along.

It just struck me as funny that they would dodgily sell you illegal beer but that they would be righteously indignant at weed. "That, sir, is where I draw the line of illegality!"

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's righteous indignation, or maybe they don't know your friend isn't an undercover cop.

<comment><USER5> Because alcohol laws don't tend to get enforced unless there's a problem, because most of Southern Europe operates on a "village and neighboring villages" field of view and it would be socially uncouth.

Weed on the other hand is very strictly enforced for the most part, except in more touristy and "Americanized" places.

<comment><USER6> Is the illegalization (made up a word) of weed in Europe at all a USA export as well? Or did they come to it on their own?

<comment><USER7> Hard to say. The history is murky and involve a whole mess of international conventions.

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

Seems to be the convention that brought cannabis into the fold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind:

1\. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete"

2\. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old

3\. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata

Thus: what the fuck!? It'd take me _weeks_ to assemble this kind of thing, especially given point #1 above. Sure, a lot of this stuff could be farmed out to scrapers/sickbeard/whatever, but this level of curation plus the quick turnaround plus the distribution (how many portable 1TB drives are circulating?!) plus the download speed requirements... Who is doing this, and how? There's clearly _some_ really great high speed connections in Cuba. Are these guys backed (or at least tolerated) by the state or something?

<comment><USER9> "... at 851GB ... 11Mbps 24 hours a day" I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB, those guy store all that information in a lot of common hard drives and distribute the package just coping from a portable hard drive to another one, that's the "cloud" for Cubans :(

this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN and the Cuban cloud'

<comment><USER8> >I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB

Right, thanks! I made the erroneous assumption that the bulk of the data changed weekly (thanks to that "... 851GB ... at 11Mbps 24 hours a day" thing). Keeping the AV updates/some text-heavy-craigslist-alike current is an entirely different proposition.

Here I thought this was a revolutionary high-throughput sneakernet content accretion system possibly operating under the government/telcos collective nose, but as others point out it's probably more like the warez FTPs of the 90s. Here's hoping wider pipes, both technologically and ideologically, come to Cuba soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was expecting an announcement for a new Cloudflare CDN location in Cuba.

What I found instead was extremely interesting and funny.

I won't spoil it, so go read the article :)

<comment><USER11> It's not out of the question that we'll have a PoP in Cuba.

<comment><USER12> In fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by the end of 2017.

<comment><USER13> > we'll have a PoP in Cuba

Why though?

Cloudflare doesn't have POP's in most countries, and Cuba isn't somehow very advantageous compared to having a POP in Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico, or any of the more connected Caribbean nations.

Is it for the novelty, or am I missing some advantage of setting up infrastructure in Cuba... ?

<comment><USER14> Cubans would benefit from infrastructure in Cuba.

<comment><USER13> Cubans would benefit from having access to the internet... Cloudflare doesn't provide any of that, nor is a PoP required in Cuba for Cubans to browse websites (even those running behind Cloudflare). Nor will Cubans benefit from a data center being built in Cuba, since majority of said data center's clients will be internationals (not businesses nor people in Cuba).

It does seem like a Cloudflare PoP in Cuba is merely for the novelty.

<comment><USER15> It seems shortsighted to say "Cubans won't benefit" because international people will benefit first. If more international people go to Cuba, whether for tourism or to invest in businesses, or start businesses, isn't there a benefit to the Cuban people? And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone.

In the US the benefits of the connected network initially reached only the US DoD and its partners. Then university communities. Then early tech companies. Then everyone.

<comment><USER13> > And eventually it becomes less expensive, and within reach for everyone

Yes, but as a paying Cloudflare customer, I'd much rather Cloudflare spend their/my money tangibly improving their service, not propping up a small nation's economy in some sort of idealistic hope that better things will follow.

From my understanding, and from the article's description, most Cubans simply don't have easy access to the internet, or in some cases, no access at all. So putting in data centers which will primarily service foreign corporations seems very imperialistic as well as opportunistic (cheap land, cheap labor, etc).

They need last-mile carriers more than anything, and even though ISP's generally terminate at a data center, there's a whole lot that must happen first before Cubans will feel any benefits.

So, Cloudflare adding a PoP in Cuba by 2017 seems to have zero benefits, for anyone really. Even after Cloudflare does setup a PoP, the benefits to Cubans are minimal-to-none.

Perhaps if Cloudflare is simply itching to burn extra money, they could instead consider lowering the price of their business tier - making it immediately more accessible for more companies. This brings SSL to more sites, protects them from attacks, and can in some cases dramatically improve performance. Those a tangible benefits for the entire internet.

<comment><USER16> I haven't used Cloudflare, but aren't you paying to make your website globally available? Good access from Cuba is one small part of that. Maybe not the part you care about, but other people might - that's what happens with bundling.

<comment><USER13> > aren't you paying to make your website globally available?

No, any website (unless blocked by a nation-state) is by default accessible globally.

Yes, Cloudflare's CDN offers increased performance for global visitors, but with so few people online in Cuba, there's very little sense in fronting the cost of building all this infrastructure just to have a Cloudflare PoP there. There's many other nations much larger and better connected that CloudFlare does not have a PoP in, so why pick Cuba?

Cubans have bigger concerns than getting a page to load a few milliseconds faster. Getting online in the first place might be a bigger concern for starters...

<comment><USER16> You pay a CDN to get better performance (globally) than you would get by default. It's up to the provider to decide what "better performance" means and build more infrastructure to support that.

As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved (which new endpoints to open). You pay your money and they decide which countries to spend it on.

<comment><USER13> > As a customer, I don't see why you think you have the right to nit-pick > about how they go about this or where global reach needs to be improved

This was a public discussion, and therefore I have every right to "chime in".

As a paying customer, I have even more of a right to "chime in", as Cloudflare decisions may impact my business.

Putting a PoP in Cuba because "bleeding hearts from decades of terrible government policy" isn't a sound business decision. Nobody has offered any better explanation of advantages other than the novelty, and frankly, if that's the core reason... that's a bad decision and a blatant waste of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what the future of _El Paquete Semanal_ will be once Cuba inevitably gets less ridiculously priced and more available internet access. As it stands, there could be a large percentage of users who don't even have NICs, as all you'd need for _El Paquete Semanal_ is a USB port.

I'm also interested in whether it's more of a loan/library service where this org has hundreds or thousands of hard drives that get loaned out once a week and swapped out for new content or if someone has to physically sit and wait for the subscribers to copy data over. The logistics of this are so fascinating, I just want more!

<comment><USER18> It will disappear.

El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS' were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was hideously expensive.

The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and 3.5; and when it came available, in CDs. They were professionally packaged, and they restocked every Tuesday. The demand for content was high enough that restocking so frequently didn't mean throwing out old content. If 1tb USB drives were available then we would have used those; but they weren't, and the most economical way to deliver content was through CDs and discs. Since burners were rare, and because disc and floppy medium aren't zero-cost, it made sense for the local bookstore to sell the packaged content.

With the advent of high-speed internet to our homes, we were a test area for the deployment of cable internet in around '96, the bookstore stopped selling shareware altogether.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for your input, this is a really interesting parallel. Although, you didn't have to worry about censorship and a repressive government in Canada, you're probably right that it will disappear.

Do you remember what kinds of software was available at the bookstore? Was it only media like games/simulations/etc or did they have business/productivity software and operating systems?

<comment><USER18> There was all manner of shareware; applications and games alike. There was also your regular boxed software, where the likes of Microsoft Works and Turbo C were available for purchase at obscene prices.

I picked up Linux at that same book store, it came on a CD with a book from SAMS publishing called "Using Linux". It was Slackware, iirc, using a 1.x kernel of some kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to live in Iran when I was a child and we had the equivalent of this but for VHS tapes. Once a week, a man with a large suitcase would come by our house. He would set his suitcase on the table, open it up and show us his collection of American and Europeans (and very illegal) movies.

My mom would pick 5-6 and return the tapes we borrowed from the week before. I was very young back then but I remember it vividly. I'd always beg my mom to pick at least one cartoon or a kids movie.

<comment><USER20> Very illegal in Europe or very illegal in Iran?

<comment><USER21> Take a wild guess...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > For 2 CUC a week Cubans have access to a huge repository of media while > turning a blind eye to copyright.

I find this a very strange thing to say. Why would you even bother to write that? It's not as though they could choose to import this stuff legally for the past many decades, or export any of their own works (the whole reason they would have any respect for some mutual copyright scheme, protecting their exports...) That's not even considering the crappy infrastructure, low income, and probably other issues I'm sure I'm overlooking.

Anywhere that's been sanctioned or embargoed for a long time has an insanely high level of piracy, check Iran for another example.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of my college days. I studied at a college in India that was located in the mountains (in Sikkim). While there was decent Internet for all academic work, access for fun stuff was very limited. So our solution was to download as much stuff (games, movies, series, books, etc.) as we could during vacations at home, bring them back and share them on a organically grown LAN. The downloads were sometimes pre-planned: one person downloads this and the other person downloads that.

The take is that people always find a way to access stuff from the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER24> Back when internet was _really_ slow here in Spain I used to send CD's and DVD's filled with music, comics, films,etc to an internet friend I had from Greece(can't remember now how we met, maybe soulseek?), and he'd send me back his own curation of contents. This article reminded me a bit of those times. Too bad we are not in contact, we could have a laugh about it :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I was at the last FISL ([http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en](http://softwarelivre.org/fisl17?lang=en)) in Porto Alegre and attended a session by Pablo Mestre ([https://twitter.com/elmor3no_](https://twitter.com/elmor3no_)) on the free software movement in Cuba.

I was really impressed by what they achieved, given that they have little internet access. He mentioned that the largest network was the one linking health-related institutions and that many doctors had internet at home (even if at slow speeds).

</comment><comment><USER26> This brings back memories to the Twilight CD-ROMs [1] we had in the Netherlands in the late nineties that came out every month and had all the latest (cracked) games and applications on it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD- ROM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_\(CD-ROM\))

<comment><USER27> Oh man, that's some nostalgia. I grew up without internet access, but every once in a while a visitor would bring a bunch of computer magazines (Computer!Totaal was my favorite) that usually came with CD-ROMs full of stuff.

In fact, my first experience with porn was because of one of these CD's. One day I found a hidden folder that wasn't accessible through the (godawful) interface, and it was filled with high-res porn images and a few low-res GIFs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++ and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet. Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file from pen drive to the computer.

This entire thing was run by students.

<comment><USER29> Purdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to auto download new tv shows, etc.

<comment><USER28> I am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan was pretty fun. This was in 2011. Its interesting to know that Purdue has strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are much more stringent in US about file sharing and colleges enforce it much more strongly.

<comment><USER30> DCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how chat is handled by the newer Dtella).

Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website. From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully entertaining.

I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps 50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed to speed along at 100 Mbps.

I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :)

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

Some user experiences with Dtella:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/4lzzdh/anyone_still_using_dtella/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/39y81f/dtella_purdues_secure_file_sharing_community_is/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off!

In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.

<comment><USER32> Have you seen this?

FedEx Bandwidth: [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/)

<comment><USER33> Along the same thought is RFC 2549 and RFC 1149 for IPv6, IP over Avian Carriers.[1]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What a fascinating curation problem! A collection of these would make a fine addition to archive.org.

<comment><USER35> Nope. They all include (many, _many_ ) things which the copyright holders will actively fight over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if mesh networking could take off in Cuba, there is obviously a desire strong enough that a strong sneakernet has evolved.

It'd also be interesting to try and create a better UI for distribution of Internet content with latencies of up to 1 week.

<comment><USER37> We in the western world don't think about smaller limitations. In most countries, all private radio communications are banned. In India, during even first part of last decade, wifi frequencies are illegal for the people to use. Those days, MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte made a special trip to India to explain to the people who matter, that don't stupidly implement radio ban on WiFi usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of the time, when CDs became mainstream and suddendly many of the classic games fit on one of such CDs. There was one with Warcraft, CnC, Doom, Quake, Monkey Island, One Must Fall, T.I.M., etc. pp.

Thousands of hours of fun on just one disk...

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm disappointed by this article and I'm disliking the "noble savage"[1] tone of the rest of the comments. Yes, you may like it for it's quaint feel but I wanted the author to go into details of how the internet actually functions in Cuba, what sort of restrictions are in place and whats happening to move away from this regressive system. [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage)

</comment><comment><USER40> We never had something nearly as elaborate as this but in Fiji, having anything more than dial up was considered a luxury. Portable Hard Drives weren't as common and USB sticks didn't store as much as they do now. It was all about burning CDs and handing them to friends at school/work. I think this might be the reason why most bus drivers in Fiji have the same damn songs playing ad nauseam.

</comment><comment><USER41> This has also been discussed on the podcast 'This Week in Google' by digital nomad Mike Elgan: [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in- google/episodes/349?autos...](https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in- google/episodes/349?autostart=false)

</comment><comment><USER42> Remind me of a (sort of) similar story of how Iranians consume online content [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552423), though for a different reason.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how much of that data is downloaded in digital form from somewhere and how much is digitized specifically for this collection (e.g. movies recorded in a cinema, magazines scanned from print, etc.).

<comment><USER11> Watch the embedded Vox video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> edit: I'm in the wrong. Cloudflare allowed me to post the comment it just seemed like it was removed because of some delay.

Since it seems Cloudflare doesn't like criticisms of the cuban government on their blog I'll repost what I posted here

The paquete is censored and only contains harmless information with respect to the government. that is why they don't allow people to implement their own mesh network to create their own ad hoc internet.

<comment><USER11> What are you talking about?

There's a moderation delay before comments are posted. I hadn't got around to hitting Accept on yours yet.

<comment><USER44> Im sorry for overreacting, it seemed like it was deleted because the comment wasn't appearing even with the "awaiting for moderation" tag so it seemed like it was removed. Things relating to Cuba are personal to me.

<comment><USER11> The only comments we don't post on the blog are spam. You'll find plenty of comments on there saying that CloudFlare sucks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder who it is that downloads a TB of data to distribute, and if they have a special means they're able to do that.

</comment><comment> tech-no-logical so, when you did have access to the internet, did the cloudflare captchas drive you as crazy as they do me ? how was the cpm (capthas per minute) ?

seriously : it seems cloudflare drives about 90% of the sites I visit, judging from the "I'm not a robot" questions and captchas I get. congrats on the market share.

</comment><comment><USER46> might be a superior method of curation than streaming. I wouldn't mind grabbing one every friday.

</comment><comment><USER9> They don't download 851GB each week, what's really new weekly is up 200 Gb

</comment><comment> shahriar-alam A whole different world! Unbelievable!!</comment>


Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler - <AUTHOR> http://puzzlemuseum.com/puzzles/amb/eng_botts/harry-eng.htm <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to know more about Harry Eng, the creator of these, there is a fascinating post here [http://www.everything2.com/title/Harry+Eng](http://www.everything2.com/title/Harry+Eng)

Incredible man.

<comment><USER2> So, HN readers, how would _you_ get a lightbulb in a bottle?

<comment><USER3> Just grind it into a fine powder and pour into the bottle.

Done.

<comment><USER4> You. I like you. You're like an evolutionary algorithm satisfying a fitness function. Spirit of the problem completely ignored, but problem bloody well solved.

<comment><USER5> (S)He's really more of a wave function

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suspect the "plank" is actually a wood veneer glued over a set of blocks. The veneers are extremely flexible (you could roll them up) and would look like this once carefully assembled. A side view of the 'plank' would be interesting.

<comment><USER7> I was just thinking the wood could be soaking in water for a few days to get it good and mushy, compressed and shoved through the neck via clamps. The knot you could tie (or partially tie) via thin shipbuilder's pliers. I have no clever thoughts on getting a metal nut or a lightbulb through the too-small neck of the bottle though.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps the metal parts are manipulated from the outside with magnets somehow?

<comment><USER9> My thought was that they weren't an actual bolt, but magnetically attached inside the bottle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this makes me so curious... how does he do it?

<comment><USER11> The description of the second last one gives a quite good explanation. That, combined with a huge amount of patience and craftmanship I assume.

<comment><USER12> I may deal with the playing cards but I am still curious how to put the wood board into the bottle. :-O

<comment><USER13> There is a trick where you can wet wood for a very long time and it becomes more malleable. This lets you do things like, place a solid metal beating within a single hunk of wood.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO7aFRO5WMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO7aFRO5WMw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Our venerable curator has gone nearly blind with a magnifying glass but has > failed to find any sign of breaks or glue in this plank.

So the bottom was cut open and sealed by heat then.

<comment><USER2> Or the wood is soft and compressible when wet, but returns to its original shape when it dries.

Some woods (including pine) are much more compressible than you might expect: [http://www.ewpa.com/Archive/2006/aug/Paper_306.pdf](http://www.ewpa.com/Archive/2006/aug/Paper_306.pdf)

<comment><USER15> My favorite example of this is the "nail in wood block trick."

Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEATei2wewY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEATei2wewY)

Instructions from the patron Saint of Woodworking: [http://www.woodwrightschool.com/downloadable- plans/tooth%20a...](http://www.woodwrightschool.com/downloadable- plans/tooth%20and%20nail.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So wait. Where's his book? The one with the numbers. Did he finish it? Did any copies ever get printed?

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure his wife had it, last I spoke with her shortly after his death. Nowadays, it's likely his daughter might have it.

Have a lot of great memories thoroughly enjoying that book as a kid. Used to flip through it and test him through-out our sessions. Loved every minute of it.</comment></comment>


GNU/Linux distro timeline (svg) - <AUTHOR> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Gldt1009.svg <comment><USER2> That's a pretty awesome SVG; the titles are links to distro sites, it's attractive and readable, and SVG makes it easy to Ctrl+F. I am happy to the author of that file. Thanks for sharing it here.

<comment><USER3> They've open-sourced the code they used to generate it as a general-purpose cladogram generator: <https://launchpad.net/gnuclad>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I took one look at this, especially the Debian branch, and immediately felt _old_.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's probably no way to easily gather the data, but it'd be very interesting to see this same chart with the number of active contributors (or some proxy like number of committers/patch authors within the previous month) to each project represented by the width of the line. It would give a better idea of which branches are serious and invested in and which are one-man hobby projects, which ones are growing fast and which are dying, etc.

<comment><USER6> It's further complicated because of upstream development (everyone benefits from Red Hat's kernel updates, CentOS benefits from pretty much everything Red Hat does), as well as dowstream bug collection and triage (Debian benefits from Ubuntu's installed base).

Current models do not exactly apply.

<comment><USER5> Another interesting parameter to look at would be number of users. Comparing number of active developers (for each project specifically) with number of users would give a pretty good idea of which projects were benefitting from upstream development and which were serving as backbones for downstream user- oriented projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's an impressive effort, although it's missing the first Linux I regularly used: Tom Oehser's tomsrtbt (<http://www.toms.net/rb/>), a single-floppy release aimed at system rescue.

Highlighting the lineage aspect, however, loses useful context information. For example, Robert Shingledecker was a significant part of the development of Damn Small Linux for five years before he started the Tiny Core Linux project. While there's no commonality in the distribution-specific code that I'm aware of, and hence no reason for a graphic connection on the chart, I think it's safe to say that Tiny Core's design is a continuation of Shingledecker's thinking on what makes a good minimal Linux.

</comment><comment><USER8> Impressive.

It's interesting to see that most distros are descended from either Debian, Slackware or Red Hat. I guess that trying to improve what already exists is less work than starting one from scratch.

<comment><USER9> Wikipedia page on SLS states: "Similarly Ian Murdock's frustration with SLS led him to create the Debian project".

Slackware originated from SLS. So strictly speaking SLS and Red Hat appear to be the two originating distro's from others have decended in one way or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Brought back some good memories..of visiting distrowatch.. compiling custom kernels..swearing at KDE/GNome for being too slow and using fvwm..moving from xine to mplayer..

I used linux for 5 years and used redhat in 2001, gentoo for a brief time, slackware for 2 years, fedora for a year, back to windows for 1 year and now I'm a happy OS X user for 3+ years.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not sure if I'm going to get downvoted for my dislike of the fragmentation, but I've been always wondering what if all the efforts could be somehow combined to make a really great one...

<comment><USER12> There are many, sometimes very different measures of what "a great one" does and would mean for an OS, as I'm sure you know. And therein lies the beauty of having rich diversity to choose from.

I can sympathize with the irritation of seeing duplication of effort. But when that irritation pushes a mind toward the tempting presupposition of some single measure of goodness which could have been a guiding light the whole time, paring away effort duplication and dead-ends... well, the thinking has gone a bit absurd.

       There are many regions of possible-OS space, not everyone needs or wants to be in the same one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The chart shows Edubuntu fading off, but the project is still alive and strong: <http://edubuntu.org/>

</comment><comment><USER14> The best part of that was learning about gnuclad. I've been looking for a timeline generator for the past few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER15> I never knew there were so many Linux distros whose names referenced _Cryptonomicon_.

</comment><comment><USER16> Misses <http://www.exherbo.org/>

<comment><USER17> yeah and Hannah Montana Linux

<http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html></comment></comment>


An Open Letter to Rackspace Cloud Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://www.snipe.net/2010/01/an-open-letter-to-rackspace-cloud-hosting/

<comment><USER2> I fail to see how this has anything to do with Rackspace.

They are there to provide infrastructure, not to support you on an application level.

Rackspace's responsibility is to keep the infrastructure running and help with backups if you are compromised. They aren't there to fix your wordpress plugin's spaghetti php.

FWIW I used to run a dedicated box with Rackspace and now run about half a dozen cloud servers with them. I think they are pretty great, personally.

If the OP wants ssh, logs and all that - fire up a Cloud Server and you have an instant linux box of your flavour preference. Stop using Cloud Sites if you want more control. You're using the wrong product.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. If you want that access, go over to Slicehost (also owned by Rackspace), get a 1024 slice, and you now have full root access to everything.

I've been running several WP blogs on it for a while with no problems.

I do agree that Wordpress isn't the best platform any more. It's too big, and with over 100k lines of code, it's tough to keep it as secure as it needs to be.

Also this guy doubts the WP-Supercache plugin as the vector, but wasn't that the vector for the Techcrunch hacks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> With wordpress's track record, you should _expect_ your site to get hacked at this point. Migrate to a less vulnerable platform or go static.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking through the comments on this article, it seems like there is more to the story. Looks like the OP has been having a lot of issues with service, CS response time, and cooperation when dealing with security issues.

I don't think it's RS's responsibility to figure out what's wrong with your application, but I can understand the frustration one would have when confronting a breach and not having the tools to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> A number of Rackspace hosted sites are reporting problems like this, unrelated to WordPress vulnerabilities.

So calm down with the WordPress crying (yes, its basically a dropper) as it may let an unrelated vulnerability off the hook.</comment>


Show HN: Send an Electronic Letter via the Internet - bobby-tables I was bored today, so I put together a website that lets you send someone (maybe a colleague or a loved one) a letter over the Internet.
Go to sendaletter.website and compose your letter. The recipient will receive your letter in 2 days' time.
Letters are posted daily at 11:00 GMT. Excluding Sundays - there's no post on Sundays. <comment><AUTHOR> So it's an email with a 2 day delay?</comment>


Someday Worth Billions, but Now, They Need a Desk - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/realestate/commercial/someday-worth-billions-but-now-they-need-a-desk.html

<comment><USER2> _Even in the hot San Francisco market, however, RocketSpace appears to be making a 20 percent premium to current office rental prices, based on its 580 desks, leased by some 130 companies. Mr. Logan, who leases space inside two buildings near the old Pacific Stock Exchange, charges $700 to $800 a month for a "desk," or table space._

Yet another example of "sell shovels, don't dig for gold".

<comment><USER3> Yes, and it's out of control. There are at least three different, huge co- working spaces that have popped up near my place. All were formerly businesses that were interesting and useful. Now they're just deadzones of douchebaggery.

Not only are these places generally providers of really lame office space (the people who congregate at co-working spaces are often the worst kind of wantrepreneur -- all talk and "hustle" and zero ability to _produce_ anything of value), they drive up the rents for everyone else, drive out street-level retail and other businesses that help make a neighborhood livable, take up parking spaces during the day, and cause an urban flight problem, wherein everyone leaves the neighborhood when the sun goes down.

IMO, the city needs to change the zoning laws to make these sorts of office desk sublets harder to produce.

<comment><USER4> "IMO, the city needs to change the zoning laws to make these sorts of office desk sublets harder to produce."

The only reason these types of facilities exist is due to outrageous real estate prices caused by extreme regulation. The solution to regulation induced issues is rarely more tiers of regulation.

<comment><USER3> _" The only reason these types of facilities exist is due to outrageous real estate prices caused by extreme regulation."_

Yeah, I was wondering how long it would take before someone corrected me that San Francisco's real estate prices were due to our zoning laws.

Kudos to you for not disappointing me. Now that you mention it, I'm sure that our real estate prices are indeed a byproduct of the evil, evil guv'ment, and have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this is one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

<comment><USER5> San Francisco's density is 6,800 people per square kilometre.

New York City's density is 22,200 people per square kilometre. In fact every borough, including Staten Island, is denser.

Tokyo's density is 35,600 people per square kilometre.

Manila is the world's densest at 42,900 per square kilometre.

San Francisco is the 20th most-densely populated area in the United States.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density)

<comment><USER6> That's a pretty ridiculous list of US places to try to argue against SF being dense for the US. Not all of them are as absurd as the 362 people near Louisville, KY, bit, but basically that list says "NYC is denser than SF, as are a few relatively small parts of LA, but SF is easily the second densest large city in the US."

<comment><USER5> I agree, the US list is skewed by the effects of county size. However, the 5 boroughs of NYC are geographically large in a human scale. All of them are more densely populated than San Francisco, including the ostensibly suburban Staten Island.

Meanwhile, Tokyo is _vast_ and, until recently, could not have Manhattan-esque skyscrapers. It is substantially more densely populated.

San Francisco is more densely populated than a suburb. But the idea that it's amongst the most densely populated places is just not true, either in the world at large or the USA in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have to comment anonymously, as I still work in PR.

Quentin has a reputation for being easily pitched by PR people... and well, you can see for yourself:

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/quentin_hardy/index.html)

Stories that are just pitched by flacks, and written up.

This "trend" piece reeks of the same.

</comment><comment><USER8> This could be optimized. Catheters. Feeding tubes. Keep everybody naked and shaved. Daily sponge baths.

<comment> __--__ There's no reason to hire extra employees for the sponge baths. Just put a drain in the floor, a shower overhead and a pull cord to activate it.

As for the feeding tubes... soylent. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well this is what you get for wanting to live in the cool city. I get that more and more startup activity has moved up from the valley to the city but you also get far more of the folks with money to burn who want to play entrepreneur who sit around these places chatting with each other more than doing anything.

Down the peninsula we have the hacker dojo for a $100 per month membership with great space and a nice atmosphere. Very rarely do you have to put up with overly loud frat boys playing entrepreneur for show.

</comment><comment><USER10> You could live and bootstrap from SE Asia for the $700-$800 rent that's being charged for 1 desk.

You are making your money on the internet[1], leverage it into not paying premiums for location based stuff...

[1] Of course, this is the step that may be lacking for a lot of companies that pay these kinds of rents.

<comment><USER11> You could live and bootstrap in SE USA for that rent too...no sense moving across the planet.

<comment><USER12> Oh, but the food is better here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My $100 Hacker Dojo membership sounds like a steal in comparison to their rates.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yearn for privacy? "Headphones are the new cubicle," he said.

<comment><USER15> Milk jugs are the new bathrooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "Headphones are the new cubicle," he said.

What will be next to go?

</comment><comment><USER17> Pure insanity.</comment>


US weekly jobless claims total 6.6M, vs. 3.1M expected - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/weekly-jobless-claims.html <comment><USER2> Building on my analysis from last week: 1\. This week's 6.6M jobless claims represents ~4% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.

2\. This is incremental to the 3.3M jobless claims filed week ending 3/21, totaling ~10M total jobless claims in the past 2 weeks

3\. The US unemployment rate was ~3.5% as of EOM February, so cumulatively that means we've hit ~10% unemployment as of EOW 3/28 and that number is likely low (not accounting for gig workers) and almost certainly worsening this week.

[1] [https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's cute number...

For the record forecasts ranged from 500 thousand to 6.5 milion..

</comment><comment><USER4> main discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758227)</comment>


Understanding Traceroute [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://major.io/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/RAS_Traceroute_Book_Format.pdf

<comment><USER2> I wrote the original tcptraceroute in 2001.

The article mentions many traceroute implementations change the source port to associate queries with responses. Another technique is to use the IP ID field, leaving the source port static. In tcptraceroute, you can choose either method using "\--track-id" or "\--track-port". By comparing the two, you can sometimes see traffic being load-balanced across multiple links.

I just did a quick write up of this at [https://gist.github.com/mct/2ae1dbc2d596f59f5aff](https://gist.github.com/mct/2ae1dbc2d596f59f5aff) (which I should add to the examples.txt file)

</comment><comment><USER3> Another (incorrect, but hilariously so) interpretation of the output of traceroute: [http://youtu.be/SXmv8quf_xM](http://youtu.be/SXmv8quf_xM)

<comment><USER4> Excruciating lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a quick glance, this looks to be a rewrite/reformatting of a presentation at NANOG 47 entitled "Tutorial: How to Accurately Interpret Traceroute Results". From the abstract [0]:

> _Many people think they understand how to use and understand traceroute, yet > the large number of traceroute based tickets at any sizable ISP proves that > the vast majority of people do not. Even the ISPs themselves are frequently > unable to come up with staff who are qualified to look at a traceroute and > interpret it correctly._

There's a PDF of the slides [1] as well as a WMV [2] available. As a network engineer at an ISP, I send out these links fairly often. To quote someone else [3]:

> _This is an incredibly useful presentation. All the little bits and pieces > you can 't learn from text books._

Seriously, watch the video or, at the least, listen to it as you do something else. I'd almost guarantee that you'll learn something.

[0]: [https://nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=1442](https://nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=1442)

[1]: [https://nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sunday/RAS_...](https://nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sunday/RAS_Traceroute_N47_Sun.pdf)

[2]: [https://nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/breakout%20...](https://nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/breakout%20rooms/TraceRoute_tutorial.wmv)

[3]: [http://lists.usenix.org/pipermail/lisa- members/2009/001426.h...](http://lists.usenix.org/pipermail/lisa- members/2009/001426.html)</comment>


Wal-Mart's Dallas optical lab loses over 90 jobs to automation - <AUTHOR> http://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/2016/11/21/wal-marts-dallas-optical-lab-loses-91-jobs-automation <comment><USER2> I wish there was more discussion about this during the election. Certainly many jobs have been lost to NAFTA and resulting exporting of manufacturing jobs...but so many jobs were just lost to automation. If NAFTA was cancelled, some jobs would come back, but many most would just come back to a US robot worker.

I'm sure the costs depend on position and constantly based on technological progress, but I imagine it is something like this:

$ US Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost > $ Overseas Human Wage I imagine the two right-hand categories swap around given technological progress, but the logical conclusion for most jobs would likely be:

$ US Human Wage > $ Overseas Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Protectionist trade policies are going to be great for software engineers. What was a bad investment in automation software when it replaced a $1/hour job starts looking like a good investment when it's a $15/hour job it's automating away.

We've already seen this with jobs that are impossible to outsource, like retail. That self-checkout machine may have been expensive to develop, but it's a lot cheaper than employees. (The machines aren't perfect, but one employee can now check out 10 customers simultaneously.)

In some ways, nothing will change in America. The jobs were already gone, so nobody is going to lose their job to a robot. That said, it's time to start coming up with a real plan for unemployment. We aren't taxing automation. We aren't considering a world where labor demand is less than labor supply. We have no plan for the future, and the future is not going to be coal mining and making cheap flip flops for Wal-Mart. We are going to have to fund basic income, or some sort of welfare system without a social stigma. (All the foreign investment driving up housing prices isn't helping either.)

Of course, we aren't immune either. Most software isn't actually needed; as we improve off-the-shelf software, custom software will be in lower demand. (Ever pay anyone to write you a custom image manipulation program? Nope. Photoshop is fine. Really not sure why we aren't "done" with HR databases or shopping carts yet.) And, of course, machine learning will help fill in the one-off customizations that are sometimes necessary. And, maybe it's going to start creating art, music, literature, and whatever else we consider "uniquely human". Pretty sure I'll be dead by then, but someone should probably start planning. You thought "peak oil" was a problem... but we're already past "peek labor".

<comment><USER4> > Protectionist trade policies are going to be great for software engineers.

So in addition to manufacturing jobs coming back demand and therefore jobs will increase for one of the best paying professions in the country.

<comment><USER5> Yes, if you _actually believe_ that the new trade policies will be genuinely protectionist towards American labor in any substantive way.

<comment><USER6> Which they won't be. The average American can't seem to understand that trade negotiations are just that, _negotiations_. Each side gives up something they would like to have for something they'd _really_ like to have.

Additionally, protecting American labor isn't inherently good. Maybe these companies decide to bring back a few hundred $40k/yr manufacturing jobs, but offset the cost by outsourcing a few hundred $60k/yr office jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was just wondering about local/regional eyeglass manufacturing. Is there anything proprietary about the process?

I'm ignoring scale, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER8> There are specialty processes and materials, but even multi-focal lenses are fully automated production. Stamping out and polishing cheap polycarbonate was already a razor thin margin at the lab end.

<comment><USER9> Polycarbonate isn't a common material for glasses. It's very soft, so it needs an anti-scratch coating, and it has high dispersion so the chromatic aberration is very bad. It's only really good for safety glasses where the high impact resistance is important. Most cheap glasses are made from allyl diglycol carbonate (eg. CR-39) which has the best optical properties of any material commonly used for glasses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In case anyone were not familiar, Luxotica virtually-monopolizes sunglasses and prescription eyewear [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica)

<comment><USER11> They too are moving operations to China:

[https://consumerist.com/2010/08/31/sunglass-hut-to- customer-...](https://consumerist.com/2010/08/31/sunglass-hut-to-customer- italy-and-china-are-the-same-dont-be-picky/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It didn't occur to me that eyeglasses manufacturing still required production line workers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do we really have to go threw the next 20 years and its news whenever something new gets automated?</comment>


The health care scare - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/06/health-insurance-canada-lie/ <comment><USER2> This is a sober self reflection. Whether you agree with the politics or not, it ought to be inspiring as a way to reflect on one's impact on their society.

On the political side, it does seem to confirm that there was a strong intentional push against welfare maximizing healthcare policies motivated by private profit. It's hard to see positive intent if intelligent, well resourced people intentionally made statements to lawmakers and the media about facts that they either knew were false (for other countries) or chose not to verify in the slightest. That's grave damage to the public in a republic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not mentioned were fictions like George H. W. Bush's campaign claim that there were only 5 chemotherapy machines in all of Ontario. But we unfortunately accept a high level of outright lies from our politicians, especially in campaigns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At least this guy was an exec at CIGNA, and his job was to protect the interests of his company, his industry. What happened to Sen. Max Baucus and other politicians, who is supposed to represent the public interest?

Any "mea culpa" from any member from the political class? I don't expect it. Instead, they are busy being on the payroll of pharma, healthcare, lobbyists, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations, but you're still a bastard. Don't ask me for forgiveness, try a higher power, maybe he/she will give you what you're looking for.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggested backend(s) for JavaScript MVC tutorial? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering writing a tutorial on JavaScript MVC frameworks, and a large part of it would ideally use a backend for server dependent demos like signing a user in and making RESTful API calls.<p>What do you suggest as ways of making this backend easy to run locally for a range of developer experience and operating systems? The only thing the developers would have in common is that they know some JavaScript. <comment><USER2> PHP is known for being widely supported and easy to get running. It does require integration with a web server, though, which can present some complexities for novice installing it on random environments (which may already have a web server running, so configuration instructions become complex).

Node.js would be an interesting alternative because you could keep it JavaScript-only across the tiers. It is supported across operating systems and it's easy to install. For instance, on Windows it can be installed as "cinst nodejs".

For database I recommend SQLite since it would avoid a lot of friction associated with database servers (ports, permission, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Try [http://www.redbeanphp.com/](http://www.redbeanphp.com/) and [http://redbeanphp.com/extra/beancan_server](http://redbeanphp.com/extra/beancan_server) specifically - it's a minimal bit of php with some magic that will probably mean you won't have to get too much into the server side of things with your tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER4> For quick testing rest Apis I use [http://sailsjs.org/](http://sailsjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> if static data is enough, you can simple place it to files and serve as simple http

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a particular server you'd recommend?

<comment><USER5> sry for the late answer.

you don't even need to run apache or a node.js file server for this.

just put your responses into files on a relative path according to your request. eg: api/product/31.json api/product?orderby=name api/product?orderby=price

so if you have a demo webapp just package the static data with your app and redirect/configure api calls to the service in the live app</comment></comment></comment>


Google TV: No Need to Tune In Just Yet - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575620751716977686.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_6

<comment><USER2> Same negative leaning review at nytimes:

"[Google TV is] all customizable, unfamiliar and mostly baffling, and you don't get a single page of instructions. (I learned how to use Google TV by shooting a fusillade of questions to the Google P.R. people — an option I'm guessing won't be open to you.)"

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18pogue.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple failed with the Apple TV; now it's Google's turn to fail.

</comment><comment><USER4> WSJ, Owned by News Corp, who ownes Fox, who recently blocked Google TV.

Not exactly an unbiased source.

<comment><USER5> I don't think they're telling Mossberg what to write in a review. Most reviews of Google TV have had similar sentiments.

<comment><USER6> That's not how biasing and influence work 99% of the time, they don't explicitly tell you; you just know. It can even be unconscious.

That doesn't mean it was a factor here, but Mossberg himself should have done the conflict-of-interest disclosure.

<comment><USER7> Do you mean beyond what is described here? <http://allthingsd.com/about/walt- mossberg/ethics/>

I know it can be tough to hear that the new GoogleTV might not be complex or unfriendly to use (both are true if you have used one), but the AllthingsD staff disclaimers are really good. They are prominent and not mired in legal- speak unlike some other high profile "main-stream media" like Newsweek. In which, I still don't understand how Dan Lyons gets away with not stating FSJ site. Read Kara Swisher's again, is there any blogger or old media columnist that has anything that clear?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automatic compilation of partially available C source code - <AUTHOR> http://cuda.dcc.ufmg.br/psyche-c/ <comment><USER2> Aiui Eclipse JDT (and probably other IDEs too) do something similar. It takes code that currently is not valid and tries to massage the AST until it becomes valid so that it can perform type-inference and use the type information to offer valid autocomplete suggestions even at the currently invalid location.

<comment><USER3> Yes, a few IDEs perform some disambiguation during parse. But notice that the ability to deal with ambiguities and to come up with a proper AST is just step 0 of the pipeline. The challenging part is type inference - as far as I know there are no other tools that can reconstruct sources as we do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can somebody in simple but technical terms explain how this works? (I tried to no avail)

<comment><USER5> It builds the set of type and other constraints that must be fulfilled for the program to be valid. It uses a constraint solver to solve the set of constraints and generate a program that satisfies them.

IE For "List list" to work, there must be a thing named List available as a typedef. For list = 0 to work, tlist must be a pointer or an int. For list->data to work, list must be a pointer to a struct, and that struct must have a member named data. for list->data = val to work, the member named data must be compatible with a double.

It simply generates all of the constraints like this on the program, and then solves the constraint set, which produces a valid program (hopefully. it is possible it may not have enough data in some cases, given how C is parsed)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Some programs are inherently ambiguous. In such cases, we cannot do much. \- Example 1: `void f(){x * y;}` It's impossible to know whether that is a multiplication or pointer declaration. \- Example 2: `void f(){x y = 0;}` We can only know that x is a scalar type (in C terminology), but it could be an int, int * , int * * , etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish it was called "Psychi-c"

</comment><comment><USER7> This should've been around in my early days learning C and trying to get my project to compile :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat.

</comment><comment><USER9> The header code generated contains

 _typedef int bool;_

I am not sure if I want that in my header.

<comment><USER10> What's the right type then? There is no bool type in C90. It appears in C99.

I've seen this in the wild, including the top answer on a StackOverflow question:

#define bool int

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4159713/how-to-use- boolea...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4159713/how-to-use-boolean- datatype-in-c)

Besides, if you want _correct_ code, don't ask a tool to guess it! This tool is for patching up fragments enough to get them through the compiler front end analysis.

<comment><USER11> Well if you care about space efficiency, char is smaller than int.</comment></comment></comment>


BodyPix: Real-Time Person Segmentation in the Browser with Tensorflow.js - <AUTHOR> https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/11/updated-bodypix-2.html <comment><USER2> This seems like it can be used to lower the bar for (repressive) governments to identify people.

E.g. by making it easier to distinguish parts of the body, identification via them, or gait analysis, becomes easier.

Are there compelling use cases that make this risk worth it?

Or are we just producing tech because we can?

</comment><comment><USER3> This update is for the 2.0 version.

It's a shame there isn't a Python TF implementation of this (apparently due to a different file structure between the tf.js model and TF SavedModel?), and it doesn't sound like it's a priority for the team.

<comment><USER4> TF 2.0 in general (SavedModel included) has been a giant clusterfuck so far. As we used to say at Google "the old thing is deprecated, the new thing is not ready yet" \- internally Google is pretty much entirely like this. I get that they had to ship it sooner or later, but IMO they shipped 2.0 a bit too soon. Shipping sooner is fine if you fix the bugs quickly, but that's not really happening either - some rather potent bugs remain open for half a year or more.

So at the moment you have a choice of working with a version that's officially EOL (1.15) or using a version that has several critical features broken or missing, and on which TF Model Zoo doesn't work. Oh, and EOL version is also busted beyond belief. Worse yet, Google does not reward maintenance work, and since this is considered "launched", you can count on the bugs being there for an extended period of time until Google itself moves to 2.0, which I'd wager is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Facepalm.

<comment><USER5> So basically everyone should move to pytorch and ONNX?

<comment><USER4> ONNX is a turd in is present state as well. Too many unsupported ops and you can't really run ONNX on e.g. a phone or really anywhere. You could theoretically convert it into something that does run where you need it to run, but then you have to deal with the converter's supported ops as well, and design your net around the intersection of the two sets of ops and their parameters. If you're doing anything more complicated than basic classifiers, you're going to run into issues.

That said, I think in a few years with enough elbow grease ONNX could become pretty exciting.

As to what people should use for research: just use PyTorch. I switched to it when it first came out, and never looked back, _except_ when I need my stuff to run on e.g. a phone or something, which is something PyTorch won't help you with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was a lot younger, I used to play softair sometimes with my friends (wargames with BBs gun). I seriously researched ways to build automatic turrets.

Rules are simple: shoot at a foe until it raises its hand, that means the person was shot.

Unfortunately (?), the available software at the time was subpar, and I forgot about it because of two problems:

* How to identify a foe? It would need facial/body recognition from a few set of examples (team pictures before starting, better if it shots everything else).

* How to know when to stop shooting?

These new technologies would make almost trivial to build such an application, and make it quite reliable. I guess there is a market for this in softair... I'm even tempted to have a go at it, BUT... I don't think I will because I now have to ponder the ethics of building something that can take a gun, identify targets, aim at them accurately, and fire until they are down. I am usually all in on open source software, but that's just the kind of things that sound dangerous to share (same as defense distributed, TBH).

I hope enough persons share the same misgivings, otherwise there is no point for me to refrain from building this. (Except perhaps spending my time on project that are actually useful for humankind).

</comment><comment><USER7> Since I quit smoking, I noticed how many tv-series and movies are loaded with cigarettes, alcohol and pharmacy pill consumption. Almost every social event good and bad on screen is dealt with by drinking a shot of liquor. Is this my personal paradigm or are we constantly fed with what we should view as our western culture?

I wonder if it is possible to make an estimation per actor / producer / studio how many alcoholic, drug, cigarette they consume on average. Would be awesome to see if there is a correlation with project budget. And maybe even more important is there an increasing trend of average number of drug consumptions per hour.

<comment><USER8> comment on the wrong article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Person segmentation

Consider the defense applications!

<comment><USER10> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage)

<comment><USER11> I think they meant disassembling the actual persons. >.>

<comment><USER12> I believe gp's point is that Dazzle camo should do pretty well to defeat this system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> JavaScript is about my fifth favorite language - way down the scale of languages that I enjoy using.

That said, I think TensorFlow.js is awesome on so many things: examples are easy understand and the build system makes them easy to run, many possibilities for using trained models in browser based apps, on my Linux GPU deep learning box training models is fast, great documentation, etc.

In some ways I like the TensorFlow.js ecosystem better than the C++/Python ecosystem.

So far, Swift TensorFlow has been a disappointment for me, but every few months I check it out again.

</comment><comment><USER14> What can run client-side will run client-side.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can this potentially be used in 2D animation replacing the manual skeletal animating processes?

<comment><USER16> That's how we did this; [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jfZ6zLkWF0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jfZ6zLkWF0) (was running live on-set)

<comment><USER17> That's so impressive!

What company do you work for? This is super cool.

Can you talk about the rest of your stack? Or other projects of a similar nature?

<comment><USER16> [http://newchromantics.com/](http://newchromantics.com/) is my own little company, (website is criminally out of date) I did the tech, [http://analogstudio.co.uk/](http://analogstudio.co.uk/) did the art/comp/post work.

The setup was essentially an app (c++ engine on osx running models), ingesting camera feeds, outputting skeletons, running sound->mouth poses, to unity which puppeteered 2D sprites.

On-set we output to a monitor which mixed the real shots with our graphics.

Nothing crazy! But it was a solid setup (except for overheating DSLRs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> is there a serverside version of this. I've been looking for somethign similar in python all day. Actually seems a little buggy seeing this test -> [https://superanimo.com/bodypix/](https://superanimo.com/bodypix/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Does this work in Safari for anyone? I've tried on iMac, iPhone and iPad.

Only Firefox/MacOS works for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool demo but how can it figure out that all 3 guys are wearing briefs?

<comment><USER21> What's weird about the pelvic area coloration is that as far as I can tell it doesn't line up with any of the body parts they say the segmentation is looking for ([https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/tree/master/body-p...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/tree/master/body-pix#the-body-parts))

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow that's impressive.

Is this library MIT license or something else? I would try using this to cutout people from images/gifs for my animation platform SuperAnimo:

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

<comment><USER3> Apache (which is sufficiently permissive), like most open-source Google projects.

<comment><USER22> Meh - it didn't work that well when I tried it. [1]

Params I used were {architecture: 'ResNet50', outputStride: 32, quantBytes: 2}, with segmentMultiPerson function.

The same images DeepLab handles perfectly. [2] If anyone sees a problem with the params/method I used let me know.

[1] [https://superanimo.com/bodypix/](https://superanimo.com/bodypix/)

[2] Deeplab: [https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/de...](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/deeplab)</comment></comment></comment>


The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career  - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/04/single-most-important-thing-you-must-do.html

<comment><USER2> I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.

<comment><USER3> I think you misread the article.

The article was about improving your programming career, not creating solutions, forming a startup, becoming a great programmer, etc. To improve a career, you need to communicate better. It didn't say that it was the single most important thing to do overall. It was specifically about career advancement.

Even in the startup arena, there are lots of capable coders who have created awesome solutions who just don't know how to connect and communicate to the right people. After all, it's not the idea -- heck, it's not even the code, it's the ability to communicate effectively to people that makes a startup run. You can have the next best thing to sliced bread and if you're not able to communicate (market, sell, persuade) it doesn't really amount to much, right?

<comment><USER2> I didn't misread the article. I disagree with it. While he mentions improving communication skills in the general sense, specifically the article seems to be about presentations and public speaking. I don't think this is the most important thing you can do to improve your career.

In fact, within the spectrum of interpersonal communications, you are probably better off learning how to schmooze on a personal level before you hone your presentation skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I often say that starting to smoke was my lucky break career wise.

When I got my first IT job it was a very low level help desk job with a big 3 consultancy. I smoked though so I was often in the smoking lounge/smoking area with the other smokers and we would naturally chat. This chatting/familiarity got my name around enough that I was able to get extra chances to move ahead and was out of the call centre and into a development job in no time at all.

I did finally quit though. Now I got for the smoke breaks I just leave the smokes out of it. I get the same benefit with only having to risk second hand smoke a couple times a day.

<comment><USER5> there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it.

<comment><USER6> >there is no evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous, so don't worry about it.

regardless of what studies may have said or not said, it seems obvious that it is not good.

<comment><USER7> _regardless of what studies may have said or not said,_

Good one. I like that honest approach to inquiry: Fuck science.

<comment><USER8> re: parent - it's called sarcasm, people.

<comment><USER5> but the parent of the sarcastic post wasn't actually anti-science at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming > career

... stop reading social news sites and start writing some _( &#@!_ing code?

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow. The Jobs Reality Distortion field existed even in 1984. The crowd was going apeshit over a pitiful demo--the Amiga was already being shown to press in '84 and was released less than a year later...I certainly knew that the Mac wasn't all that impressive at the time. My Commodore 64 even had 16 colors and could talk using SAM, and the C64 scene demos blew away everything that Mac slideshow was doing. But the crowd is simply orgasmic.

How does he do it? What is it that Apple people are seeing that makes them so excited by everything Jobs demos? Really, it's something I've never understood...I see overpriced underpowered machines, and yet, for fans, every Apple product is a little piece of heaven.

So, obviously, I'm managing to miss the point of the article pretty resoundingly, but oh, well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know what a "presentation deck" is?

He says it's the most important thing it the world to have for a talk you give, but it's the first I've heard of it...

<comment><USER12> That would be a "deck of slides." Nowadays it's a keynote, open office, or that-other-thing file, but once upon a time it was a set of 35mm transparencies you would load into a carousel.

Stacked up, they looked a little like a deck of cards, thus the nickname "deck." You can probably find one (and someone old enough to remember when they were called decks) in a museum somewhere.

<comment><USER13> I'm old enough to have presented from transparencies on an overhead projector, though I've never had occasion to present using an actual slide carousel.

BTW, I'm not sure I understand why you think it's so important to present with a Powerpoint (or similar). I tend to think Powerpoints get overused, and I often like to present working just from notes (3x5 cards, since I'm bad at memorizing) or from a demo when appropriate.

What's the win of working with a deck, in your view?

<comment><USER12> There are two questions: what's the best presentation for a given subject and audience, and what's the best way to improve your skills.

IMO, a good presentation with whatever-you-call-the-visuals is more difficult to do well, therefore that's what I think you should practice.

Speeches and demos are always easier to give. They may be more appropriate for certain subjects, no doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> the more you grow as a programmer your power to abstract things improves; with little more effort you can convey the same thing vividly to fellow programmers/managers and that is what this article talks about.

you cant communicate effectively if you dont hold the authority over the subject or havent done significant handson on the same topic.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is the basics of presentations, to bad all it is presenting is the opportunity to buy a book through amazon

<comment><USER12> IMO the article is worse than "the basics of presentations," actually doesn't say anything about _how_ to present, it merely explains that it is a skill worth improving.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether an article that spends half of its time explaining why presentations and the other half explaining how to present is better or worse than an article that tries to make one point succinctly and stops.</comment></comment>