The "Inside Airbnb" project has earned the home-sharing company bad press - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/a-lone-data-whiz-is-fighting-airbnb-and-winning-7fd49513266e <comment><USER6> There's no excuse for AirBNB permitting listings of multiple dwellings in the localities that prohibit it. In order to produce the Federally-mandated 1099K, they have to take the host's SSN and keep it on file. Even if someone uses multiple accounts, they can simple compare the SSN of an account adding a listing and reject the listing is the SSN already has a different listing on file for the locality in question.

<comment><USER7> I only gave airbnb my SSN because they were very clear that it would only be kept for purposes of producing my 1099K. If that changed (maybe it has? I don't use airbnb any more) then that would be a change of their TOS.

<comment><USER8> Would you have no/less concern if they encrypted your SSN and used that for non-1099k related tasks?

<comment><USER9> The keyspace of SSNs is only 10^9. I don't think password hashing would help much.

<comment><USER10> Okay, so don't associate the SSN hash with the account. Come up with a mechanism to store anonymized SSNs to detect duplicate accounts.

<comment><USER11> Bloomfilters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a single data point: [https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&check...](https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&checkout=25-03-2017&guests=1&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=j4d9g87T) I reported this listing to Airbnb more than a year ago and it's still up. As the review says, it's a shitty motel and if you look at the map [https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2](https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2) or go there personally (which I did) you will immediately see it can not be anything else but a motel because there are no private dwellings at the junction at all! (There's another room [https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&check...](https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&checkout=23-02-2017&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=wDMxzxQG) listed, same thing)

I did a crazy one week trip last January, every day sleeping somewhere else: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Beer-Sheva, Avdat - Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat, Petra, Amman, fly home. I do not drive. I do not read or speak any Semitic language. It was quite a trip.

<comment><USER13> Yikes. Airbnb really needs to deal with abuses such as those. That's just not fair for customers.

I'm interested about why you mention not speaking any Semitic languages. English is pretty-well universally understood there - did you have any problems with language barriers?

<comment><USER14> > English is pretty-well universally understood there

No, this is absolutely not the case. I was there just over Christmas, and we did have problems to communicate with locals. Sure, the college educated all speak English. They don't work as bus drivers or at the gas station though. But these are the people I interact with the most as a tourist.

That is not to say that people aren't multilingual there. I'm sure they all speak two or three languages. Such as Hebrew, Arabic or Russian.

Israel isn't just Tel Aviv.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point. You can get around Tel Aviv while only speaking English, but perhaps not so much in the north.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "data activist"

beginning of a new type of activism right here.

corporations manipulate the data. data activist or journalists are tasked with teasing out the bullshit in the data itself.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find the anti-AirBnB comments on this site quite confusing, because in most other cases HN seems to be pro-free markets. If a landlord wants to rent their place out to short-term tenants, and tenants want to rent it, and AirBnB want to act as a marketplace, I can't see what the harm is.

You don't have any right to say who comes and goes to your neighbours' properties, any more than they have any right to say who comes and goes to your property.

If you want to decide who gets to stay in a given house, you should buy that house. Otherwise it's none of your business.

<comment><USER17> Of course you have a right to say who comes and goes in your neighbors properties and what kinds of things they are allowed to do, as I am sure you would insist were they to open a concert venue or dog fighting arena.

<comment><USER18> That's an apples to oranges comparison.

A short term rental is residential use, just like a long term rental is residential use. In both cases the property is used by people to live and sleep in.

The question is does local government have the right to regulate the duration of a rental lease?

I would argue it doesn't, and it's a blatant violation of sacred property rights for a government to take that power.

The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew.

There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days.

<comment><USER19> > _The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will > keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for > violations of decibel levels after curfew._

Because as we know, if there's one easy thing to get, it's "pay later" fine money from tourists. And if there's one thing that really sparks police springing into action, it's an urban noise complaint.

> _There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans > are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days._

"$500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew" _is a regulation_ \- what twisted world is it where something involving the word 'curfew' isn't considered a regulation?

<comment><USER18> So you are saying we can't enforce our existing regulations, so the answer is to create new regulations.

I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new, broad ones.

<comment><USER19> So what are you going to do when tourists can't afford to immediately pay a $500 on-the-spot fine? Drag them off to jail? Are you really willing to jail people over a _noise complaint_? Your local Chamber of Commerce is going to love that.

> _narrowly tailored_ ... _broad_

Obviously enforcement of the existing _broad_ regulations isn't working, so we should create new _narrowly tailored_ ones instead.

This spin-doctoring stuff is fun!

<comment><USER18> Thats a nice straw man you created there and then argued against.

Of course we can fine people that live in other jurisdictions as we do with speeding tickets, and no one is dragged off to jail and fines are not collected on the spot.

<comment><USER19> Speeding tickets are where the government holds all the information on the person. Fining a tourist AirBnBer requires getting a warrant to get information out of a private company. How much effort do you think is going to go into pursuing a noise complaint? If you're not on-the-spot fining, just how many resources do you think the police will throw at pursuing that?

Are you aware also that tourists come from outside the country? Speeding tickets aren't particularly enforceable in that case.

<comment><USER18> AirBnB has entered into tax collection and information sharning agreements with State governments. Can we not add a system for sharing information for legitimate police noise complaints? I think we can.

I would like to see us come up with creative and tech based solutions for potential problems with vacation rentals, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There are a lot of good coming from vacation rentals, and a lot of people love them.

I am just very much against the idea that if any new thing inconveniences or even potentially inconveniences anyone in even a minor way, we should outright blanket ban it. And that is what the people pushing for punitive bans are saying.

Find solutions. Penalize bad actors. Don't practice group punishment. Screen guests with more and better data. Don't just ban the "other"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My town had a recent dustup over prohibiting AirBnB, some people claimed that it was against zoning regulations, the town attorney and planning and zoning looked into it and decided it was beyond their power to regulate tenure, or the length of a lease.

Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor.

Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios.

My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint, prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though.

The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even check the terrorist watch list!

One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB.

My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis.

Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town.

I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals to live.

Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more desirable place to live.

<comment><USER20> Is it a desirable place to live? Or a desirable place to vacation? It sounds like your town was already a destination if it supports 200 short term rentals.

<comment><USER18> The town is highly desirable waterfront community, the region has a bit of a jobs problem, and the town was in a funk, visitors were down, local businesses were struggling, all the towns talented young people move off to larger cities, to places that are fun.

Now this place is fun too, we have a nano-brewery opening up, hipster restaurants, new boat tours...

The town planner loves AirBnB because it lets the town use some slack housing supply like guest cottages and in-law suites to host visitors in the downtown area, where it would be impossible to build a new hotel.

And short term rentals bring in a different kind of visitor than the hotels ever did. People come and stay for a week with their family.

It's all really nice actually.

And a large majority of AirBnB hosts are women. AirBnB is empowering a lot of women to become micro real estate entrepreneurs and earn money.

When people support blanket bans, they are cutting off income and opportunity for people, mostly women.

Punish bad guests, have the police fine them. Towns make money off speeding and parking tickets, I see no reason they can't make money off the occasional guest violating a noise ordinance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow. As for the legality of all this, it's really beyond my ken.

Firstly, there's the question of jurisdiction. If a resident of the stste of New York uses a server outside of NY belonging to a company outside of NY to rent out an apartment in NYC, does the state of NY have jurisdiction? What about NYC?

Years ago Amazon took the stance that sales were interstate commerce and they shouldn't be forced to collect sales tax on interstate transactions. They ended up caving to New York's so-called "Amazon tax" [1].

Airbnb seems to be taking the view that it's not their problem if individuals violate NY/NYC law. Personally I think that's purely a self-serving stance a bit like how Craigslist turned a blind eye to prostitution.

I believe that illegal hotels in a few cities are Airbnb's core business and the efforts of cities to enforce laws prohibiting such are an existential threat. I believe Airbnb knows this.

I also believe that Airbnb will ultimately lose this one.

What this PDF represents is at best misleading and data manipulation and at worse misrepresentation. If at some point Airbnb has or will respond under oath or to a subpoena with this information well that could be a crime.

Whatever the case I think this is going to take years to play out.

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet- sal...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sales- tax.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like the earned their own bad press.

</comment><comment><USER23> Inaccurate title.

</comment><comment><USER24> He's not alone. The article talks about the importance of his collaborator Slee. Weird, click-baitey article title.

<comment><USER25> Ok, we replaced the title with the subtitle (shortened to fit).

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I was criticizing the referenced article not your title on HN.

<comment><USER25> Oh no problem—the HN guidelines call for changing titles in that case ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)), so the observation was relevant here too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sifting through data looking for the unseen is one thing but this has got to be the biggest waste of time ever. AirBnB giving people a place to sleep. Yes, strangers in your apartment building..like you know your neighbors anyway.

<comment><USER27> I lived next to a popular airbnb rental. The lack of neighborly respect, trash, and noise are not imagined problems. At this point cops now cruise my rural dirt road once a day just because of it. Commercial activity in a residential area is a serious problem.

<comment><USER28> I just purchased a home next to an AirBnB house - it's a mixed bag - well, it's pretty much all downsides.

More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - <USER4>

Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - <USER4>

Trash cans are never brought back from the street - <USER4>

Yard care - non existent Socialization - <USER5>

There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the neighborhood (I don't blame them).

This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.

<comment><USER29> > when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate > in the community.

I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do with "community"?

EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating with him about office politics.

Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER30> Not really. I only know one neighbor, and only that because he is such an asshole. A large chunk of homes on my block are rentals, with a constant flow of new tenants.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Traffic deaths jump 14% in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/17/autos/traffic-fatalities-up-2015/index.html

<comment><USER2> The article makes no mention of services like Uber, or the myriad new delivery services popping up. Surely those must increase traffic and thus an increased risk of accidents, fatal or otherwise?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It'll probably take 10-20 years to have fully autonomous cars but with deaths increasing, the case can be made to provide more assistance from the computer driver.

<comment><USER3> I think it's actually unclear whether fully autonomous or driver assist will be the technology that wins in the end. There are points for both, and one may not actually lead to the other in a useful manner (people may be unwilling to make that small jump to fully autonomous where they would if forced to. There's actually historical precedence for the situation we see ourselves in now, elevators went through a similar technological change.

The 99% invisible podcast[1] actually went pretty deep into this in episodes 170 and 171, and they were excellent shows.

1: [http://99percentinvisible.org/](http://99percentinvisible.org/)</comment></comment>


Ageing in human cells successfully reversed in the lab - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/ageing-in-human-cells-successfully-reversed-in-the-lab-101214 <comment><USER2> This is like hundreds of similar articles I see every year. They managed in a lab to improve a particular genetic capability that seems to degrade with age. They improve it in the laboratory, then someone writes an overarching headline and it never goes anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> In summary, their new work is an "exiting start". They find a way to deliver small doses of hydrogen sulfide directly to mitochondria with a "molecular postcode". This chemical is toxic in large doses but has been shown to "improve age related disease features in animals" [0].

[0]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5964063/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5964063/)</comment>


What I loved about Paul Allen - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Remembering-Paul-Allen?WT.mc_id=10_16_2018_10_PaulAllen_BG-TW_&WT.tsrc=BGTW&linkId=58288095 <comment><USER2> "... Popular Electronics. It featured a new computer called the Altair 8800, which ran on a powerful new chip. Paul looked at me and said: "This is happening without us!" That moment marked the end of my college career and the beginning of our new company, Microsoft. It happened because of Paul."

What a magical moment, those youthful fancies. I know that very spot they stood and it still is the same I guess -- all the traffic on either side of the newsstand, street singers, students running to their classes, eating places to decide upon, bookstores ... and the ideas that bloomed from there are so many.

Bye, Mr. Allen.

<comment><USER3> One of my favorite movies growing up was Pirates of Silicon Valley (excellent movie, even today) and they portrayed that scene exactly the same as Gates recalled it.

<comment><USER4> except if my memory serves, it was Paul who was sleeping in a pile of dirty socks and Bill barged into the room saying that. Then the scene cuts to New Mexico

<comment><USER5> Bill was waking up from a hangover due to the previous night. He awakes to Paul waving the magazine saying, Bill! Bill!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have perhaps one friend that I've known more than 15 years. Part of it is that I seem to be bad at keeping friends, and also because I spent a decade moving around a lot and just lost touch with people.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates were friends from early teenage years until the 60s, until death. Through so much change in the world, much of it instigated by them. Through becoming some of the richest, most powerful people on the planet and then turning into philanthropists together. Nearly half a century.

I literally cannot imagine the emotions Gates has to be going through as he writes this note. My heart goes out to him as much as Allen's family.

<comment><USER5> They did have a falling out but it seems they reconciled. Paul Allen claims BillG tried to cut him out of Microsoft when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.

<comment><USER7> Source?

<comment><USER8> [https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried- to-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-rip-me- off/)

> Paul Allen: Gates, Ballmer tried to 'rip me off'

> "One evening in late December 1982, I heard Bill and Steve speaking heatedly > in Bill's office and paused outside to listen in," he writes in his memoir. > "It was easy to get the gist of the conversation. They were bemoaning my > recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft > equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. It was clear > that they'd been thinking about this for some time."

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Did we ever hear Gates' side of the story?

I can imagine there could be good reason to dilute someone by issuing more stock to the remaining productive collaborators. That would depend on the scale, and method used to calculate the proportion, and of on obtaining consent from the diluted party.

<comment><USER9> @DenisM: "I can imagine there could be good reason to dilute someone" ..

Cutting a business partner out of his fair share while he's in the middle of battling a life threatening disease, a good reason. I guess you went to the same school of ethics as Gates :]

<comment><USER10> Many companies can die with the dying partner if the remaining partners are not able to capitalize and run the business in his absence.

<comment><USER11> I see it more as greed than administrative prudence.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't we have to know about details of the situation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the caption of the first photo:

> _Here we are in school. That's Paul on the left, our friend Ric Weiland, and > me on the right._

In case you are wondering [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Weiland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Weiland)

<comment><USER14> Thank you for bringing this up. I had never heard of Ric Weiland.

Here is another article discussing how he distributed his wealth:

[https://www.geekwire.com/2017/remarkable-life-legacy-ric- wei...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/remarkable-life-legacy-ric-weiland- microsoft-employee-no-2-still-making-impact-decade-death/)

<comment><USER15> "A gay man who fell victim to HIV."

The number of times I have heard of this misfortune is sometime truly astounding. A whole community ravaged by an illness that we don't have a solution to, with the government turning their back to it.

<comment><USER16> Yup. It set back LGBT rights by decades; there's a sizable chunk of an entire generation of the community just _gone_ , people who might today have become leaders, activists, and mentors for young LGBT people.

Reagan and the US government not only "turned their back" and failed to act for _years_ , leading to conservative estimates of thousands of new infections that could've been prevented; they also also actively interfered: for example, Congress banned the use of federal funds for prevention campaigns that "promoted or encouraged, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities". So a lot of the prevention campaigns became ineffective fear-based propaganda rather than what was needed: targeted education to vulnerable communities about safer sex and needle drug use practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Growing up a poor kid in Seattle, Microsoft was always that shining beacon on the hill. The idea that anyone, if they study hard, can get a job at one of the most powerful technology companies on earth, was an amazing motivator and source of inspiration.

That beacon has grown a little bit dimmer.

And yet still, the impact Paul Allen has had on Seattle shall remain for generations to come.

<comment><USER18> Dimmer why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only thing I ever think of when Gates speaks about Allen is how they tried to reduce his equity when he got sick. It's something that has stuck with me for 20+ years.

<comment><USER20> True, but not fair, to Gates OR to Allen. "After a few years all that passes. Bill and I have always been friends, even through the ups and downs" [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/02/paul- alle...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/02/paul-allen- microsoft-bill-gates-ideas)

<comment><USER21> If you ever go into business with a friend, you should anticipate the worst. They're only human. You have to be on your toes from the start, and you can only blame yourself if you get beat or blindsided. At that point, its irrelevant to your friendship. It was just business.

<comment><USER22> I hope your friends read this! Sounds like you value money - _just business_ \- incomparably more than friendship. Why?!

<comment><USER23> I think you may be misreading the intent. I've also seen several friendships destroyed because of business disagreements. I take the message as "Don't get into business with friends if you value their friendship."

<comment><USER22> Replying also to the other comments: Ah thanks, yeah. I've painfully learnt not to lend/give friends money! It cost me a great friendship. But it wasn't deliberate on their part; I guess I read the GP as saying "Expect your friends to fuck you over, and that's ok/your own fault." I am familiar with the risk of business to friendship, but the GP seemed to be going somewhat further, although it seems ambiguous exactly what they're saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Did you also like that he got cancer and you tried to rip him off?

[https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried- to-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-rip-me- off/)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill- Gates-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill-Gates-tried- cut-Paul-Allen-Microsoft-fell-ill-cancer.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> I loved him because he was a proper guitar geek. Owner of a lot of vintage stuff and really a good player too. A lot of people wanted him to buy and revive Gibson.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does everyone know the story about why Paul left Microsoft? That when he told Gates and Ballmer about the cancer, in the early days, they immediately went in the other room to talk about how to divvy up Paul's shares in the company and Paul overheard them?

Don't read any of the more recent happy articles. Search for articles and books from the early days when the real truth was printed.

</comment><comment><USER27> The way he portrays Allen as a man he looks up to, and he choice of photos, is touching.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if he had to look up what the name of that Jimi Hendrix album was? :)

<comment><USER29> no

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Expected more from an eulogy from Bill, but that was not to be. Co-founding is obviously hard. Successful business or not.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems odd to have a popup over your eulogy of one of your best and oldest friends.

</comment><comment><USER32> comment unrelated, but do not track me with ?WT.mc_id=10_16_2018_10_PaulAllen_BG-TW_&WT.tsrc=BGTW&linkId=58288095

</comment><comment><USER33> anybody have a mirror? site's down...

<comment><USER9> > anybody have a mirror? site's down...

[http://archive.is/hldpY](http://archive.is/hldpY)

I wonder did Gates ever manage to get the shares back?

[https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/10/15/business/15reuter...](https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/10/15/business/15reuters- people-paulallen-obituary.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What a beautiful tribute!</comment>


Google Chrome To Have Real-Time Communications Capabilities - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2011/06/21/google-chrome-webrtc/

<comment><USER2> I've been looking through the spec. It's full of things that make me groan in agony, but at first glance, it seems like it might actually be sufficient to build a Skype competitor as an extension or web app.

Some problems:

0\. The separation between audio and video streams and other data happens in the browser, not in your own JS code, which is the root of most of the problems that follow.

1\. There's a .send() method on connections, which allows you to send arbitrary data to the peer. But it suffers from a variety of arbitrary restrictions: they recommend that browsers rate-limit it; although it's UDP, out-of-order packets will be discarded before you get a chance to look at them; packets over 504 bytes get rejected with an error. I suspect that the most sensible response to these problems in the end might be to encode other data as audio or video streams in order to get it across the internet, but I am not yet sure that this is possible.

2\. Only STUN and TURN are supported; you still can't connect to a person with a real internet connection unless you have a STUN server to nanny you through it. And of course the API isn't sufficient to allow you to implement STUN.

3\. You can't bootstrap a connection to a peer without already having a way to communicate with the peer, such as COMET through a website. You already know the IP address and port where they were five minutes ago before you restarted your browser, and also their public key? Too bad. You need a website to bootstrap the initial negotiation, and if the website is down, your app can't connect. (In my skimming I haven't been able to find the spec of how the initial negotiation works.)

4\. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure encoding other data as audio or video streams is possible. (I found an API for recording, but not one for playback.) If it isn't, that means you're entirely at the mercy of the browser's encryption and authentication algorithms to protect your communications; you can't write DH and AES and HMAC-SHA256 in JS on top of the provided API. Which means that the spec needs to get the protocol exactly right, and if and when weaknesses are found in the protocol, it's up to the browser vendor, not the JS app, to fix them.

Basically what it amounts to is that WebRTC doesn't amount to providing APIs for _writing_ a Skype clone into browsers. It amounts to providing a scriptable Skype clone in browsers, with virtually all the important decisions about trust models, fault models, and the like already made for you.

I found this very disappointing, because what I want to build is something _better_ than Skype. It also has the practical problem that writing a spec for such high-level capabilities takes longer and has more risk of a fatal flaw than writing a lower-level spec.

I haven't bothered offering these comments to the Google guys because they aren't really a matter of "Hey, I think that if this API had an extra parameter, it would achieve the goals you have set without breaking XYZ;" it's more a matter of "What you are working on building is not what I have been wishing for. Why don't you work on this other similar project instead?"

 _But_ look what we did with XMLHttpRequest and progressive document rendering and the DOM. It might still be possible to turn this shit sandwich into something awesome, if they don't cripple it too badly.

<comment><USER3> You might be (more) interested in the P2P _communication_ APIs currently being added to Chrome. Details are scanty to say the least, but allegedly they will provide P2P UDP sockets.

See for example [http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- revie...](http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- reviews/browse_thread/thread/67651882fafb45d4) and <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=51198>

<comment><USER2> Very much! Thank you! I had no idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At first, I thought that Google Chrome was preparation for Chrome OS... but now it seems like Google is building an OS right into Chrome browser.

<comment><USER5> aren't those two things the same?

<comment><USER6> No. One is an OS that hosts just a browser, the other is a browser that hosts an OS within another OS.

<comment><USER5> i don't mean that chrome os is the same as chrome the browser. i mean that building everything you need into a browser, and preparing to launch a browser-based OS are the same task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if this library will have encryption features built in?

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't find any documentation on the proposed APIs web developers would write to, does anyone have anything?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/complete/v...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/complete/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html)

<http://www.webrtc.org/reference>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just me or is Chrome getting a bit bloated? I hope it doesn't lose its lightness and speed that made it famous.

<comment><USER10> Chrome is gaining features, yes. However, since with each release the Chrome team manages to eke additional performance out of it, I think it's a little premature to decry it as "bloat".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Really slim on details.</comment>


Maesh 1.3 - <AUTHOR> https://containo.us/blog/announcing-maesh-1-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> The simpler service mesh, now even more reliable, flexible, and widely available. By the team who creates Traefik.</comment>


Do you have a TTS API to suggest? - <AUTHOR>

Hi people,
I have a project I want to develop. It's a fresh idea and so I'm currently looking for technical needs and one is TTS (Text To Speech) API, all platforms mingled for the moment.
And I'm looking for the opposite, Speech to text.
I have no knowledge in this at the moment so I'm asking for advice.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm just about to release a TTS API into alpha. Contact me (details in profile) if you're interested in chatting more about it and to try it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry but I don't see any details in your profile on how to reach you.</comment></comment>


The Art of Hidden-City Ticketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08subversion-t.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> This is paid PR for Southwest Airlines, right?</comment>


Farmers Slaughtering Dairy Cows Rather Than Lose Money Producing Milk - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/5299920/farmers-slaughtering-dairy-cows-rather-than-lose-money-producing-milk <comment><AUTHOR> One of the stories I remember being told by a farmer that lived through the depression was that the farmers were dumping milk into the streets rather than selling it and further depressing prices. Slaughtering milk cows is an even more permanent 'solution.'

Seems like the ground hog just popped up and saw his shadow and is headed back for a longer rest.</comment>


Ruby on Rails 3.2.1 is out with some fixes and doc improvements - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/26/rails-3-2-1-has-been-released

<comment><AUTHOR> The changelog is here <https://gist.github.com/1685812></comment>


IBM has more employees in India than in the US - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/ibm-india.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage <comment><USER2> Effective immediately, the I in IBM is short for International.</comment>


Android Developer's Guide to the Google Location Services API - <AUTHOR> http://www.toptal.com/android/android-developers-guide-to-google-location-services-api <comment><USER2> Pretty handy! I built a similar app with Phonegap a couple of weeks ago because I didn't want to build it natively, but this seems the perfect start for my Android programming course, thanks Danny!

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, very helpful Article. Keep it up man.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice guide, really clear, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice article, the walkthrough is very thorough. The parts on the time/accuracy tradeoffs regarding GPS_PROVIDER and NETWORK_PROVIDER and setting request intervals and power/accuracy priorities for the request are especially helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, looks easier than I thought. The 20 second interval also explains why my phone fails to track peak speed when I'm skiing ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great article Danny!</comment>


Ask HN: Artificial General Intelligence: emergent consciousness impossible? - <AUTHOR> What is wrong in this?
Let's assume emergent consciousness is possible (whatever consciousness might mean), so that a program can eventually say "OK, I exist / feel / think".
How would this program understand time though? You and I (even animals) understand time by being present here and now. We can rely on our memory to know what happened before, but we don't confuse right now with the past. Not even a second back.
But for a program, with (say) a memory defined as a traversable memory, and cpu cycles defining the moments, all it can "see" is a database with states. It could traverse to any such state independently and declare that to be "now". It has no way of really knowing when is the real now.
Interaction with an agent solves some part of this problem. The newest feed from its sensors could define the now, or the last line of the database. But with perfect recall, why would the conscious program choose to stay there? For it, every state is as real as any other. Any interaction with its sensors might just be interpreted as noise in one dimension, something that can be tuned out with the appropriate response. With every passing tick, the traversal scope keeps increasing.
We don't have such a choice. I can't choose to live in the past (barring mental illness). But I guess what I'm saying is that such a program could choose to "live" in any state in its past.
Clearly this is absurd. Permutation City discusses this problem a little, but still thinks emergent consciousness is possible. I didn't find that satisfactory for the reasons above.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> I am going to make two claims:

1) Consciousness is not a computation.

2) Science will never be able to disprove claim (1).

If you doubt claim (2) then explain how you could prove to me that you are a conscious being as opposed to a figment of my imagination invented by my subconscious mind in a similar way to the "beings" one experiences in dreams.

So obviously I don't accept your assumptions and further I think that your confusion follows from those assumptions.

You seem to be imagining an AI as some kind of independent being that can make "free" choices. But an AI, at least to the extent that anyone working in the field is able to conceive of it, is nothing like that whatsoever. An AI is little more than an optimization algorithm that attempts to optimize some utility function provided by its programmer. So the answer to your question is that if it is useful for the purposes of optimizing its utility function for a (sufficiently advanced) AI to process data in temporal order then it will do so, otherwise it will not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I was making the same point as you - that consciousness is indeed not a computation.

But I actually wanted to hear from someone who thought otherwise, rather than you - dream brother :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I guess what I'm saying is that such a program could choose to "live" in any > state in its past

It could, but if an algorithm is somewhat conscius, could also probably have concurrent access to the stored information (the past), and just like us, it won't be able to make much of it after some time, there is just so much information you can generate from a given set of data.

Specially if the algorithm has a purpose, or 20.000 purposes .

At that at point the AI could choose to advance its relative point of view of the time to the current events, in order to try to add new stuff to the whole almost unvariable dataset it already has generated.

No guarantees can exist if the algorithm has no purpose at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> > How would this program understand time though? You and I (even animals) > understand time by being present here and now. We can rely on our memory to > know what happened before, but we don't confuse right now with the past. Not > even a second back.

What ever question you can make about anything related to time, and get answer of information already stored, that is the past.

Anything about you can make a question and you have no stored information, you determine there is no existing information about the subject, that's the present.

Anything after the absent of information is the future. Empty patterns.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _But with perfect recall,_

This assume an infinite hard disk (or at least big enough). And even in that case, some info can be simplified to get faster access, and keep the details in a cold storage.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I meant was - the ability to revisit the past perfectly, rather than a "dimmer" version of it.

<comment><USER4> To revisit the past perfectly, you need a huge hard disk.

Video uses about 1GB/hour, that's almost 9TB/year. And now add something like 360° video, or a quality, or more fps. And now add all the other senses. To revisit the past perfectly, you need a huge hard disk.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker says he'll livestream deletion of Zuckerberg's Facebook page - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/28/zuckerberg-facebook-page-hacker-livestream/ <comment><USER2> He cancelled his plans to hack Mark Zuckerberg page, instead he filed a report to facebook.com/whitehat

[https://twitter.com/phwd/status/1045674238751969280](https://twitter.com/phwd/status/1045674238751969280) [https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188](https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188)

<comment><USER3> I mean it makes sense. If he can get account access or remote execution, that's a lot of money. Unless the hacker is already pretty well off and doesn't need it, it's probably not worth the publicity stunt.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like he's getting the best of both worlds by promoting and cancelling: the publicity and the bounty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "A white-hat hacker is promising to livestream his bid to hack into Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook account on Sunday (30th September). " That isn't white hat...

<comment><USER6> Somewhat OT, but reminded me of this classic:

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/35681-now-it-is-such-a- biza...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/35681-now-it-is-such-a-bizarrely- improbable-coincidence-that-anything)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, gosh. What a way to make sure this doesn't succeed.

You don't announce ahead of time you are doing something like this. You livestream it for maximum gotcha and shock value, make a tape of it and then have that go viral after you pulled off this wizardry.

This is like announcing you plan to break into Fort Knox on X date. Hello?!

<comment><USER8> What if the attacker is already in the system, and using this announcement as a probe for response and as an opportunity to harvest more info?

(ie announce server x is going to get attacked, and stand back while logged into server y and monitor where/who the increased security presence and attention is coming from, and use that to target the next sigint / humint attack)

<comment><USER9> That seems like a bit overkill for a random publicity stunt.

But a pretty solid plan for someone doing actual corporate espionage.

I hope you work for the good guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, how about he never to intended to livestream it in the first place and just said so to gain attention

<comment><USER11> This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Finally, a cool PHP project.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it even possible? I mean FB has no such feature as delete account. (I'm sarcastic here..)

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems like an easy thing for FB to make "undeletable".

<comment><USER15> Zuckerberg's profile is already "special." It's known that no one can block his profile, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's other stuff as well.

[https://qz.com/1066804/facebook-fb-wont-let-you-block- mark-z...](https://qz.com/1066804/facebook-fb-wont-let-you-block-mark- zuckerberg-and-priscilla-chan/)

That doesn't mean that this guy doesn't know about that or found a way that bypasses those application-level checks. After all, he could always just issue delete statements on the database through some SQL injection or something.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps this is where the hack is? Maybe he can ONLY hack zucks page due to its unique setup...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He's like a low rent V for Vendetta

</comment><comment><USER18> I tried see the link to the "hacker"'s Facebook in the article and i got a "page not available", so probably there won't be a livestream from his account.....with 26000+, ah sorry, 0 followers

</comment><comment><USER19> A part of me really wants this to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Do you think Facebook are likely to deploy any sort of additional monitoring/security around Zuckerberg's page whilst he's streaming?

</comment><comment><USER21> Something weird happened to me when I opened [https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188](https://www.facebook.com/robots.tx/posts/1198980273583188)

After opening the page I hit the back button and was automatically logged out from FB. I was logged in when I opened the page initially. Anyone experienced the same?

<comment><USER22> Per Google Translate, the second to last paragraph reads:

>If someone has just been logged out,

>it's just being logged out.

>Don't worry.

<comment><USER21> True. FB translation is not as accurate. Could it be that the logout is being forced by something in the post? If yes, that's worrying.

<comment><USER23> I believe Facebook started logging people out last night through today for some reason. Not due to any links, but it could have been related to this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think we all know what this was about now:

Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094823)

</comment><comment><USER25> Ha, he probably wanted FB's attention and got it. Not sure about his hacking skills but great marketing tactic :) many hackers have claimed that fb doesn't reply or follow through on their bug findings let alone pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Stuck at the pop-up page, just no. There are now so many sites where you have to agree with over 300 companies and their terms to track you for ads... How about finding another business model? This is beyond annoying.

<comment><USER27> They're often filled with dark patterns too. I have to dig about seven pages in to turn of tracking to third parties in some of these popups.

Might be a difference with me being a European visitor though?

<comment><USER26> This is just too much work at some point. And I'm guessing the GDPR scare plays a role too for European users—and often a counter productive one at that it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Likely to clone Zuck's profile and delete that, with people rushing to FB and finding out it was a joke.

Or perhaps delete Zuck's profile from his friended connections, maybe replacing the connection with a fake.

</comment><comment><USER29> s/hacker/cracker/g

</comment><comment><USER30> How much more would it cost to delete Facebook, Inc?

<comment><USER31> How much is Facebook worth overall? Buying it outright could give you that kind of power.

<comment><USER30> The argument I'm making is that Facebook isn't actually worth its market cap. Its value is in fact negative when viewed in the larger context of humanity. So, my question sought to discover the sum of money that would become payable to whoever makes the scourge go away.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for your input on a Docker/Dokku hosting service - <AUTHOR>

I'm a general partner and advisor to one of the most respected web hosts in the industry. Recently we have been having discussions on new offerings from our standard high-end shared hosting service and custom dedicated server services.
The vision is to provide different levels of VPS containers that are pre-loaded with Docker and/or Dokku. Your control panel would have,
* automated/scheduled backups to either our off-site redundant storage or your storage option of choice; single-click restores included with varying retention rates
* scaling options (both up and down)
* one-click installs of Docker and Dokku plugins
* configuration settings for your node and its software
* standard usage graphs and metrics
* support for multiple IPv4 addresses per node (justification required) and plenty of IPv6 (and it's ready on our network)
* clone a node; share node (e.g. you want to share this environment and running software; we'll clone it and share it to the user you specify)
* community-driven plugins and addons
* simple integration with third-party services like Heroku's marketplace
* multiple users with user level permissions
* an API, of course :)
There are of course things I'm not thinking of either.
The company owns 100% of its hardware and has 10 strong years being an industry-leader. There won't be any cutting corners with hardware like some similar providers: utilizing enterprise-grade SSDs as opposed to consumer-level drives.
Is this something you would use? Why or why not? This isn't by any means validating the idea, but on behalf of the company, I'd like to gauge potential interest with the small niche that is the hacker-heavy HN before we take the next step. <comment><USER2> Most will go with google docker service or use amazon. Scaling to sustain will be difficult.</comment>


Fixing an old hack – why we are bumping the IPv6 MTU - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/increasing-ipv6-mtu/ <comment><USER2> 2015:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001576)

</comment><comment><USER3> From a software point of view, it has always seemed to me that typical MTUs are an order of magnitude too small:

Disk operations as well as CPU operations (authentication, encryption, e.g. TLS) all benefit from using larger block sizes of 65536 bytes and up.

This amortizes system call overhead, enables larger sequential operations, enables more use of SIMD instructions, reduces instruction cache misses (working on one thing for longer), reduces context switches, and serves to increase the leverage that the control plane has on the data plane.

Just one specific example, something like TCP needs to keep track of packets (for retransmission, acks etc.). When you're sending Gbps, small packets mean much more bookkeeping overhead (more method calls, more bits in ack packets, more hash table lookups) compared to large packets. Throughput should be much better with an MTU of 65536 (and latency sensitive applications don't have to send that much).

I can imagine that in the past the cost of memory was radically different, implying a smaller MTU, but it seems like sticking with 1500 for IPv6 was an opportunity missed.

<comment><USER4> The problem here is ethernet. Even the latest greatest many gigabits per second ethernet can be bridged to plain old coax based 10 Mbps ethernet.

Within the ethernet protocol there is no way to negotiate the maximum frame length between stations. So IEEE standard still has a maximum of 1500 octets for the payload.

There are some RFCs that go beyond 1500, but mostly the IETF follows the IEEE specification.

Note that the 1500 link MTU applies to ethernet (and similar link technologies). For anything else, you can have larger (or smaller) MTUs.

<comment><USER5> Most network devices support jumbo frames¹, which are an IEEE standard, but they aren't the default. The point is not the IEEE standard, but what most devices are configured for.

Transit operators and IXPs just don't want to configure their equipment to use jumbo frames. It's probably just a coordination problem.²

[1] [https://www.networkworld.com/article/2224722/cisco- subnet/ju...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2224722/cisco-subnet/jumbo- frames.html) [2] [https://lists.gt.net/nanog/users/187984](https://lists.gt.net/nanog/users/187984)

<comment><USER6> > Most network devices support jumbo frames¹, which are an IEEE standard, but > they aren't the default.

Jumbo frames are not an IEEE standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> lack of frag/reassembly along the path is a huge huge barrier.

by now, link speed growth compared to MTU growth is a sad story. we should be jumbo everywhere.

This is a pragmatic story, I understand why my jumbo dream isn't happening in the wide.

But for anyone who direct connects to an agency like Akamai or FB or Google or (gasp) Cloudflare.. Why not up the default?

Whats the downside?

<comment><USER8> Jumbo means lots of reassembly on the most common end-link, Wi-fi (which cannot support larger datagrams without huge drop rates due to the error prone nature of the medium). Uncorrectable errors are pretty rare on wired links but regardless, as a general rule the higher the MTU the higher the ratio of bits that need to be retransmitted.

<comment><USER7> I don't have anything here. I sort of wonder if we misunderstand the problem and combine wifi noise/size with 4G noise/size issues. There are times I think bursty RF signals with big packets might be better than pessimal small packets in chains. At one level, the quoted 5Ghz wifi speeds have to be taken with a pinch of salt, if what you say is true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently spent some time with IPv4 MTU. I don't know how much it applies to IPv6, but my TLDR is MSS (+ size of minimum header) is usually a good indicator of acheivable MTU, but some small fraction of people are misconfigured. A lot of that is syns indicating 1500, but actual MTU is 1492 (pppoe is a scourge). But there's some other issues too, it's hard to track down. Some client oses are capable of probing for mtu black holes, but Android doesn't do it (thanks Google), even though the kernel has it available, and there's no way an app could turn it on (thanks Google). If you want to avoid this problem, you can send back MTU - X, depending on how conservative you want to be. 8, 20 and 50 were good values of X, but you're adding some overhead too.

<comment><USER10> As a quick summary, first of all the host at each end of the connection knows it's MTU and advertises this as MSS in the TCP connection so that in theory the connection is established at the right MTU but this is never tested until a large packet is sent (which may or may not arrive). ( _the MSS is actually smaller than the MTU since its the data size without headers and even on a given link can change e.g. if IP options are in use.. but in any case it 's derived from the MTU.. RTFM for the gory details).

Most consumer routers having an MTU of 1492 due to PPPoE will modify the MSS in-flight of the TCP connection to the MSS it knows for the next hop. This is not a standard feature in other routers though, and obviously wouldn't really work on the internet at large where paths can change mid connection. So it's best used at endpoint routers only.

Ideally such routers might advertise the MTU using DHCP or similar, and it is possible to do this now (and this is commonly used e.g. openstack clouds) however it does unnecessarily then limit the MTU of the local network unnecessarily. In theory I guess it could send a mtu for the default route and local subnet separately but basically in practice no one does this afaik.

Originally, a router along the path would know the MTU was smaller on the subsequent link, and would fragment the packet. For various reasons this is an expensive operation for all involved so we decided to instead take advantage of the "DF" (Don't Fragment) flag to instead generate an ICMP message back to the source asking them to please adjust their MTU/MSS and re-transmit. This flag specifically prevents the router fragmenting the message (that will never happen now) and is the default behavior at least on Linux and I assume most OS now.

This can go wrong in two ways, firstly ICMP may be blocked somewhere so it never arrives even at the end host or by some over zealous firewall. Secondly, the MTU may be misconfigured somewhere at layer 2 so the packet is silently dropped rather than having an ICMP message generated. The ICMP message requires that a router _knows* the MTU of the complete l2 path to the next hop. If it get's that wrong, it will just send the packet and assume it is OK, when in reality it is dropped silently. (This same problem can be seen on just a local network, if you configure e.g. 9000 MTU on two hosts but an MTU of 1500 on your switch, your connections will break. It's not purely a routing issue).

There is a second protocol designed to detect PMTU "passively" to solve this problem called TCP PLPMD (Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery). This basically uses heuristics to detect that packets are being dropped and then start probing the real path MTU by doing something like a binary search between some base MTU (e.g. 512) and the known max MTU (e.g. 1500). It tries various values until it settles on the actual MTU. The problem with this of course, is that packets may be dropped by packet loss rather than MTU issues and so there is a bit of luck and strategy to getting this right - and it also introduces some extra latency while some packets are being dropped.

For whatever reason this option is currently off by default in Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) and if it was on, it would silently fix the MTU on a lot of connections that are currently not fixed. The option is sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing. This has been enabled by default since Windows Vista, which explains why we still see people with their MSS misconfigured since Windows Vista onwards will just fix it. In linux at least it also has two modes, one where it waits to detect an ICMP blackhole and another where it always uses the protocol from the start. The former results in a 1-2s delay before it kicks in to fix a connection, so not ideal if it's happening on every connection but OK for the odd broken connection.

There is of course, like all topics, more to it than this.. but hopefully that helps.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the summary. I'm aware of all of this; but from the server side, when clients mysteriously don't send packets of a certain size, it's hard to know why --- because I'm only on the server side, and I haven't had any luck getting knowledgeable people on the other end.

I can tell it's an MTU issue, because I get later packets, but I'm missing a block that happens to be an exact multiple of the MSS. It could be simple packet loss, except this pattern comes up too often, the client will sometimes send probing acks, but never the missing packets, and it never retries with smaller packets. This is especially bad when you're communicating with default Linux servers that always send syn+ack with their local MSS, because so many clients think they can send 1500 byte packets, but they can't. It's less bad when using most versions of FreeBSD [1] where it returns whichever is smaller of client side MSS or server MSS. There are a number of systems/networks that clamp outgoing SYNs but not incoming SYNs, so downloads mostly work, but uploads are broken. Mirroring the sent MSS isn't enough to make every connection work though, because of exciting things you mentioned -- somewhere in the middle, something is dropping large packets, and ICMPs aren't sent or otherwise don't make it to the client, so it just kind of sits around waiting forever.

Edit to add: I wish the codified behavior was simply to truncate IP packets to the size available, rather than either fragment or alert. TCP Peers would be able to notice that only shorter packets get acked, and adjust, and in the meantime, some data would have gotten through. Not terribly great for UDP, but I dunno.

[1] there's a change in -CURRENT to use the Linux behavior, unfortunately

<comment><USER11> > I wish the codified behavior was simply to truncate IP packets to the size > available

If a router could replace the packet with a "truncation sentinel" that's compatible with most firewalls, detectable by new implementations, and doesn't cause data corruption for old implementations, then perhaps truncation could be incrementally deployed? Like a "packet too big" error, but in the forward direction.

However, it might be impossible to construct a packet satisfying all of those conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe they used a picture of a Vietnamese tunnel</comment>


Ask HN: Are you looking for pro bono work? London, UK - <AUTHOR>

There are a few threads here asking about pro bono work, would you be interested in helping us offer free showers for the homeless?
We see the Web increasingly becoming a homeless first port of call for information on shelters, day centres, hostels, and available services also to keep in touch with friends and family, Facebook is often mentioned.
What we need?  If you are homeless, a website so you can find us, and see where the showers are. If you are a donor, a payment gateway and real time visualisation of our finances, see where every penny is going.
We are a team of 11 volunteers from different backgrounds, non-profit, finance, science, media, for instance, I volunteer as a mentor to get people back into work and at a winter night shelter. It's a chance to use your skills.
If you'd like to help, it'd be great if you could join our next meeting 9th July in Soho to discuss the project as a whole and meet the team. We already have UX and design covered, and a sponsor for the first 100 showers, so you are joining a solid team.
Please reach me at email@example.com <comment><USER2> "silly ideas is the portfolio of a brazilian advertising creative.

a really silly idea would be to make an integrated campaign out of a digital thought, so don't be silly."

So tell us more about your agency's involvement in this. Is this a play for free publicity?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can appreciate the suspicion. No agency involvement whatsoever. This is an idea evolved from conversations with people without a home at the shelter I was volunteering in the winter. Our shelter was only open on Mondays [1] and the shower was a big hit, but the shelter on Tuesdays didn't have showers. When I spoke with my girlfriend, who was volunteering at the Big Issue Invest [2] at the time, about offering the shower at our place on Tuesdays, during that conversation it became clear that my idea wasn't sustainable nor scalable, and now we are 11 people committed to getting this done. If you're in London and want to meet me or come to our next meeting to confirm our legitimacy, you're more than welcome. Is this helpful?

[1] [http://www.carisislington.org/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/1381?ope...](http://www.carisislington.org/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/1381?opendocument&part=4) [2] [http://bigissueinvest.com](http://bigissueinvest.com)</comment></comment>


Families Hear from Completely Paralyzed Patients via New Device - <AUTHOR> https://singularityhub.com/2017/02/12/families-finally-hear-from-completely-paralyzed-patients-via-new-mind-reading-device/ <comment><USER2> It sounds like the novelty here is in the use of NIRS. A (very) similar approach was done in fMRI some years ago.

Paper cited by the present article: [http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002593)

Original fMRI paper: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.sci- hub.cc/doi/10.1002/ana.23...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.sci- hub.cc/doi/10.1002/ana.23656/full)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it really fascinating that there's been problems using traditional brain-computer interfaces with these patients, and the researcher who developed this device specifically believes it's because once completely locked-in they actually experience a dramatic shift in the nature of their mental activity that prevents them from utilizing traditional BCI:

 _Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva and coauthor of the new research, has an idea about why this may be, although there's little evidence to support it so far. He proposed that it becomes harder over time for patients to channel their thoughts into voluntary action. "Anything you want, everything you wish does not occur. So what the brain learns is that intention has no sense anymore," he says. "It is too difficult for them to switch from [a] more reflective state into an attentive state. "_

And that the device they used itself was designed to be more a passive monitoring of mental perception of input: _The team stuck to simple questions that could be answered with a yes or no. "The answer in your head…occurs quickly and it occurs like a reflex. You don't have to mobilize a lot of resources for such a simple answer," Birbaumer says._

Earlier paper from Birbaumer: _We propose that a lack of contingencies between goal directed thoughts and intentions may be at the heart of this problem. Experiments with chronically curarized rats support our hypothesis; operant conditioning and voluntary control of autonomic physiological functions turned out to be impossible in this preparation. In addition to assisted communication, BCIs consisting of operant learning of EEG slow cortical potentials and sensorimotor rhythm were demonstrated to be successful in drug resistant focal epilepsy and attention deficit disorder. First studies of non- invasive BCIs using sensorimotor rhythm of the EEG and MEG in restoration of paralysed hand movements in chronic stroke and single cases of high spinal cord lesions show some promise, but need extensive evaluation in well- controlled experiments. Invasive BMIs based on neuronal spike patterns, local field potentials or electrocorticogram may constitute the strategy of choice in severe cases of stroke and spinal cord paralysis. Future directions of BCI research should include the regulation of brain metabolism and blood flow and electrical and magnetic stimulation of the human brain (invasive and non- invasive). A series of studies using BOLD response regulation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and near infrared spectroscopy demonstrated a tight correlation between voluntary changes in brain metabolism and behaviour._

[1] [http://www.popsci.com/new-brain-computer-interface-helps- com...](http://www.popsci.com/new-brain-computer-interface-helps-completely- paralyzed-people-communicate?dom=rss-default&src=syn)

[2] [http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002593)

[3] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151357/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151357/)

<comment><USER4> So... in essence, people are so psychologically and behaviorally devastated, that they lose the ability to even formulate whole classes of thoughts? That sounds like they've been utterly broken as people.

<comment><USER5> "Thoughts" isn't quite what is being lost. Instead, you've still got the neurons that understand how goals relate to motor operations, and you've still got the motor neurons, but they've lost the neurotransmitter "protocol" (the calibrated receptivity-weights on the synapses connecting them) that allows them to communicate.

For me, an analogy to speech helps: a baby learning to speak must learn not just language in a high-level sense, but at a lower level, they must "learn" (i.e. calibrate neurotransmitter receptors attached to motor pathways) for how strongly each muscle in their vocal cords should respond to a given low-level phonemic motor-intent-signal from the brain.

If you didn't talk for years, those calibrations would drift, and although you'd remember what it was like to talk, you'd have to "learn to use" (i.e. calibrate) your vocal cords all over again.

The interesting thing here, is that this "calibration" (or lack thereof) continues to cascade through the entire graph of neurons: think backpropagation in machine learning. Motor-neurons that have nothing to talk to lose their ability to talk; and then the motor-intent-recognizing neurons find the only thing _they_ had to talk to (the motor neurons) are now silent—as good as dead—and so _they_ no longer get reward-trained and lose _their_ receptivity-calibration—and on and on, back until you reach whatever subset of neurons is still doing things that achieve "rewards."

<comment><USER6> Is this essentially the idea of "muscle memory"?

<comment><USER7> Muscle memory is generally for referring to higher order things like blocking in a fight, swinging a bat, and other fast reactions that get better through practice instead of thought. Eg actions that your brain higher order plans but isn't thought by many to be consciously controlled. In fact when you think about a lot of these things consciously you mess up. Think throwing darts, shooting pool, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Why would patients locked-in for years be "generally happy"? Any theories?

2\. Did the fMRI people (see top comment) respond similarly as happy?

<comment><USER9> 1\. Survival instinct? Perhaps man's search for meaning (Frankl) in the most dire situations? Realizing that being depressed about the situation will not help you and you make a conscious decision to accept the situation and be happy and find meaning within it's constraints. Perhaps because of the dominant western worldview people are inclined to view these locked in people who are the apex of the 'poor man' as being miserable and weak (See Andrei Plesu's article 'The Splendour and Misery of Humanism') [http://www.fonselders.eu/wp- content/uploads/docs/I_am_a_Euro...](http://www.fonselders.eu/wp- content/uploads/docs/I_am_a_European_citizen_- _Europe,_humanism_and_Andrei_Plesu_1-5-2008.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can foresee an application of this kind of technology along with VR being able to provide a rudimentary autonomy for these types of patients.

<comment><USER11> Remote control of a cyborg body via BCI and VR goggles. Wasn't that the plot of a movie that came out a few years back?

<comment><USER12> You may be thinking of Gamer, but Surrogates also matches up with this. Both pretty interesting movies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's amazing to me is that these patients can see. They can't focus their cornea, because that would require muscle response. It's not even clear that they can blink so they would require eye drops to keep their eyes open.

<comment><USER14> Nitpick: The cornea is a fixed focal length, and it's a separate lens behind the cornea which flexes to 'accommodate' or focus the eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> They say they want to make improve it so patients can choose letters and spells stuff. But with with just a binary choice that can be done with 5 bits. Of course they will need more than that in order to increase accuracy.

<comment><USER16> A few years ago I was at a demonstration for an interface like this. It worked by measuring the effect of having an expectation fulfilled, i.e. the patient is shown a number of shapes in sequence, each representing a different choice, and when the one the patient wants appears, this can be inferred from an EEG.

IIRC, they used five different shapes and repeated each choice at least three times for error correction, and two or three choices selected one keyboard key. The poor grad student demonstrating the procedure made quite a few typos, after which he had to select backspace, and the process was excruciatingly slow anyway, so it took a few minutes until he managed to write "Hello, welcome to ...". But definitely better than nothing if you are locked in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Black Mirror

</comment><comment><USER18> I call bullshit.

The original paper is not bad as the article though, they call for replication for instance -

"In view of the gravity of the subject matter (i.e., establishing communication with nonverbal, completely paralyzed persons with preserved cognition), a call for replication of the current results by other investigators would be welcome. "

<comment><USER18> What I find interesting is this is a known scammy field.

HN is Reddit+

I wonder if there is a good opportunity for HN+ (Or is there already?)

<comment><USER2> >known scammy field

It really isn't, though. It's not a scam to publish with a p>.05 standard and get false positives. It just means you need to take studies with a grain of salt.

Note that this is a replication of a similar technique used in fMRI, but this time in a different modality (=> different signal space). [See Owen, 2012]. Unless you think the academic field of machine-learning is a "scam", then this is starting to look somewhat credible. It's getting interesting, let's say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _The system, a portable brain-machine interface, translates brain activity into simple yes or no answers to questions with around 70 percent accuracy._

Let's not forget that this means that (in the current version of the system) about every third answer output by the system is wrong.

<comment><USER20> They mention compensating by asking the same question many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _"Anything you want, everything you wish does not occur. So what the brain learns is that intention has no sense anymore,"_

That sounds like incredible hogwash. Why not admit you are doing the equivalent of connecting an oscilloscope to some random signal on a extremely complex high-speed board, and well, _it 's not that easy_.

<comment><USER22> Because the same method works for people who aren't completely locked-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Should to reliveing to thousands paralyzed or with motor control difficulties.

Another similar field that can be even helpful to normal humans, is connecting the biological neural network to artificial one via nanobots. Immense benifits for increasing average human intelligence, education ...</comment>


Beyond Zork - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2015/11/beyond-zork/ <comment><USER2> Funny, I've been working on a little fun side project to embed a Z-Machine inside a Skype For Business chat bot.

Limited as interactive fiction is as a medium, its really impressive how immersive an experience can be created with technology as simple as plain ASCII text. You don't _need_ photorealistic, PBR graphics to make a fun, engaging game.

The Z-Machine itself is a pretty remarkable piece of technology, especially given the very limited capabilities of the PCs it was implemented for. Reading the spec[1] has been very interesting.

[1] [http://inform- fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index....](http://inform- fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html)

<comment><USER3> In the late 80's there was a company selling a database with a front end that reminded me quite a bit of an Infocom game. I think the database was named something really generic (Q&A).

<comment><USER4> Cornerstone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_\(software\)) was the database Infocom released. Is that what you're thinking of?

It could also have been the first versions of Progress. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Software)

<comment><USER3> It was 't from Infocom (thanks for that link). I just remember it weirded me out and it had a really generic name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you enjoyed this article, consider supporting the author on Patreon:

[https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian?ty=h](https://www.patreon.com/DigitalAntiquarian?ty=h)

Jimmy has done a non-trivial amount of work in bringing high-quality articles about past gaming history and shared them for free with everyone.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I'm currently supporting him on Patreon because I enjoy the articles he writes.

My preference on Patreon is to support people producing valuable articles for free, enriching everybody. Locking them up in Patreon exclusive subscriptions is not my preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> +1 for any link from HN to an article that mentions Wizardry!</comment>


The simplest e-commerce platform ever (thought for the makers) - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, we are trying to design the simplest e-commerce platform ever (thought for "the makers" - See Up&Sell.me).
We want to share our "vision" (and ask for a feedback).
At present, in the e-commerce space we see 2 kinds of players: 1) the retailers and 2) the makers.
1) THE RETAILERS. The retailers typically have big product catalogs (x00/x.000 products).
If they are really big they use enterprise e-commerce platforms (e.g. Demandware), if they are medium or small they use e-commerce platforms which are more simple (e.g. Shopify). The e-commerce platforms thought for this target (retailers) are designed on the metaphor of the "shop + catalog + shopping cart".
2) THE MAKERS. The makers typically have smaller product catalogs (x/x0) products, they don't use "classic" e-commerce platforms (even if someone, among the biggest, is using Shopify), but they use tools like Gumroad, Sellfy, Selz & co.
The e-commerce platforms thought for this target (makers) are not designed on the metaphor of the "shop + catalog + shopping cart" but they are designed on the metaphor of "product page + checkout".
The product page + checkout is the core of the platform.
With Up&Sell.me we are trying to disrupt this second market.
In this space, we have competitors which are trying to position themselves as an alternative to Paypal. It is to say that they are trying to position themselves as a sort of "payment institution" for the long tail. On the contrary, we are going in the opposite direction.
We don't want to become a payment institution, but we want to become the "Shopify for the makers".
It is tu say, we want to design the simplest e-commerce platform ever for the makers.
We strongly believe that there is a huge market space for an e-commerce platform designed for the long tail of the makers and we still don't see the "de facto" platform for this target.
What do you think of this vision?
(thanks for the comments) <comment><USER2> At the company I work for, Wool and the Gang ([http://woolandthegang.com/](http://woolandthegang.com/)), they are trying to realize the same idea for the niche market of hand made clothes. Basically, a `hat` will be hand-knitted by a person who is part of the `gang` and sold through the web site as a platform. However, in practice, a not so significant percent of sales come through this practice, in comparison to the traditional retail goods (such as yarn).

We use the Spree Ecommerce system for the purpose.

I know of another idea of the same sort, which is for the establishment of an online marketplace for brewery ingredients.

I guess such marketplaces are in need, for that a good alternative to the awful ebay should exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is Netflix's streaming quality so pathetic? - <AUTHOR> I am just curious what's the structural difference Netflix's streaming implementation and others like YouTube/Vimeo?
I can stream 4K content without any hiccups on YouTube but Netflix struggles even with 480P <comment><USER2> Never had an issue with Netflix and quality is usually much better than on other platforms.

Have you checked [https://fast.com/](https://fast.com/) to see what speed you get from their servers and what servers are closest to you?</comment>


Anatomy of the thread suspension mechanism in Windows - <AUTHOR> https://ntopcode.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/anatomy-of-the-thread-suspension-mechanism-in-windows-windows-internals/ <comment><USER2> I don't know why, but I have a profound love for learning about how Windows works. I could go out and read the raw linux source code and find out everything, but I tend to find NT's architecture more appealing. I ended up buying the Windows Internals books for fun.

This interest has lead me to have a much better understanding of how and when things go wrong on my personal desktop, and how to troubleshoot them. I wonder how much of the hate Windows gets from developers is simply people feeling confused and left out of the information bubble.

<comment><USER3> Any resources you'd recommend?

<comment><USER2> The series of books known as "Windows System Internals"[0]

Raymond Chen of "Old New Thing" fame and all his friends[1]

The creator of process monitor occasionally writes nice blog posts about troubleshooting[2]

A lot of historical NT stuff is still valid, or at least mildly relevant today.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part- architecture-m...](https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-architecture- management/dp/0735684189/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516387923&sr=8-1&keywords=windows+system+internals)

[1][https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)

[2][https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/31/sony- rootkits-and-digital-rights-management-gone-too-far/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If people are so keen on managing their threads on so low level, why not go the officially supported path and use user mode scheduling - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/dd6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/dd627187\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

</comment><comment><USER5> That code image reminds of how much I hated Windows code. Everything is bad: the layout, spacing, capitalization, colors and fonts. From the overall screen to the individual pixels, they all make me want to scratch my eyes out. Look at those {} and @ glyphs!

Compare to [https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1645-codewarrior-4-gold-...](https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1645-codewarrior-4-gold-68k-), which manages to look fine in a similar number of pixels.

If your source code/editor/fonts produces screen contents so ugly that people with taste can't bear to look at it, the end-user experience isn't going to be awesome.

Edit: I see now it's decompiled code. But the original source was probably written by someone looking at that same font (FixedSys?). Assuming that function originated in Windows NT, they would have been editing on an earlier version of Windows.

<comment><USER6> You're looking at a screenshot of some pseudocode and somehow asserting that this is what "Windows code" looks like, as if Windows code is stored in PNG format instead of a text format that allows you to use your own preferred editor, font, and coloring. That's not even what Visual Studio looks like. It's pseudocode generated by IDA. It's literally not even "Windows code".

You're somehow even critical of the "individual pixels". The individual pixels are in your screen and if you can't bear to look at them, get a better monitor.

What you're doing here isn't demonstrating taste. Your criticism is shallow and uninformed. This is at best snobbery.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee and generally annoyed by superficial snobbishness.</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg tried philanthropy before, stumbled and learned - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/07/mark-zuckerberg-tried-philanthropy-before-and-failed-heres-what-he-learned/ <comment><USER2> So did Bill Gates. When will these people learn that though they can create products and sell them, they can not fix complex systems.

<comment><USER3> Who are the people that can fix complex systems? If a group of people like this exists then why do we still have broken complex systems?

I think that the more influence and wealth you wield, the better your chances are of 'fixing' a system and I think what they are trying to do is more commendable than what the majority of us do with our spare time and cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dear Mark,

Please pay your corporate tax instead.

thanks, Planet Earth

<comment><USER5> How does paying America's unique worldwide corporate tax help planet earth?

<comment><USER4> There are loopholes everywhere, and Facebook is not paying corporate tax _anywhere_ including the UK and other places. It is not only the USA.

<comment><USER6> Facebook _avoids_ taxation just like Google, Apple and countless other multi- national corporations. You don't even have to be in the Unicorn club to make entirely legal tax avoidance schemes a worth while endeavor. Call up EY, PCW, or really any law firm/accountant/tax advisor and you too can enjoy an effective tax rate in the low teens or even lower.

They do pay taxes. They play loopholes in numerous jurisdictions to avoid tax as much as possible.

Why do they do that? Because everyone else does. Also they have a fiduciary duty to do so. Yes, it's technically, actually, illegal for them _not_ to avoid taxation as much as possible because, well, then they wouldn't be doing everything they can to maximize shareholder value.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We just released our 1st Open Source Project, PyFrogger, what do you think HN? - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/froggerpythoncollaboration/

<comment><USER2> I saw the name, and suspected immediately that you might be infringing on a Konami trademark. <http://www.trademarkia.com/frogger-74652881.html>

I dislike how the modern legal system has conditioned me. :P On the other hand, I didn't know about Trademarkia until a few minutes ago (since it doesn't look like you can link directly into the USPTO's TESS system), so I suppose that's useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you explain what Frogger is and what is it good for?

</comment><comment><USER4> "We have been developing this under moderately strict coding standards"

Which evidently doesn't include PEP8.

<comment><USER5> Appreciate the feedback, I am one of the developers on the project. There are some standards in PEP8 that we choose not to utilize such as the assignment operator alignment. We drew up paperwork initially how we were going to handle most of the style of the code and we tried our best to stick to it, hence the term "moderately." It's great to see people however, who know their standards :).</comment></comment>