Startup Meetup @ Stanford on Fri 30th, 5pm - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=161287638595

<comment><AUTHOR> Event is free so you can just show up with your friends, but if you can please RSVP, so we don't run out of beer too soon!

</comment><comment><USER2> rickyyean and I will be there to represent Stanford's Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES)</comment>


Show HN: Risk-First Software Development – About Complexity Risk - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/risk-first/website/wiki/Complexity-Risk <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, merry Christmas!

This is a post about defining and understanding the concept of "complexity risk" within software projects.

Hopefully this will be useful and interesting to people here.

Feel free to ask anything and let me know if you think I'm missing anything fundamental.

Cheers</comment>


Unstacking the deck - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattlereviewofbooks.com/reviews/unstacking-the-deck/ <comment><USER2> I think that the popular idea of inherited or generational wealth is getting a fat 6 figure check when a grandparent dies, which doesn't really happen to most of us. Rather, it looks like what the author describes -- a safety net that allows upper middle class kids to do things that their peers can't afford. As someone in the top quintile, you may not feel that much richer than the people in the next neighborhood over, but for a lot of folks, that dad could have said, "I'm sorry son, but I need to pay rent too." Instead, it was more of an annoyance at his son needing a handout. But these things accumulate over time, and this kid from a top-quintile family gets a better resume than his neighbor who washed dishes over the summer.

<comment><USER3> I think the gift that some upper-middle-class kids get that others don't always get is a belief in their ability to succeed. You also need a strong work ethic, but I'm not sure there is such a thing as a work ethic if a person has no faith in their ability to succeed.

Perhaps it looks a bit like this:

\- Some people you can't keep down no matter what you do. These people do things like work full time, go to school in the evenings, and graduate from college in four years.

\- Some people will succeed if given the opportunity to succeed. That is, if you give them a scholarship or financial aid or if their parents pay for their education.

\- Some people will succeed if you give them a big push. Take them to the financial aid office and help them fill out the form, ply them with encouraging words when they want to give up at midterms or finals, etc.

\- Some people won't succeed no matter what you do. Usually, because they have so little faith in themselves that they give up even when success is all but guaranteed.

So yes, government programs are needed to get enough citizens across the finish line. But I don't think this is really about class, I think it is about motivating people -- helping them learn to believe in themselves.

<comment><USER4> Don't tell me that I just needed to believe in myself more.

My belief in my ability to succeed was briefly shattered by my dad's employment situation. He was a well qualified engineer laid off from manufacturing. That made us struggle.

I was always thinking about money and feeling the need to optimize for $2 meals instead of $4 meals, and wondering if my car would hold in long enough to be able to get me to school in a week. These are things that only your first, most motivated, category of people will overcome.

I didn't overcome these obstacles. I temporarily dropped out. Don't tell me that I just needed to believe in myself more.

My story only has a happy ending because state schools are cheap and engineering internships are paid.

<comment><USER5> I didn't read a "just" in the previous poster.

I do believe that belief or trust is a necessary but inadequate precondition to success. Believing in yourself is not enough to help you succeed, but _not_ believing in yourself is enough to help you not succeed.

As a society, we do a very poor job giving people that trust or belief.

<comment><USER6> > As a society, we do a very poor job giving people that trust or belief.

So, do you address that with pep talks, proselytizing about "meritocracy", and "tough love"; or by actually addressing economic insecurity through safety nets that allow people to make a mistake or two without crashing and burning?

<comment><USER5> I think it's rational for people to not have trust or belief given our society as it is. So I think we should address the root causes of economic insecurity structurally rather than cheerleading people who have no reason to feel secure.

Empty cheerleading gives us no-doc jumbo loans at sub-prime rates... until the music stops and bad debts are revealed as the bad debts they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a decent article on a true problem, but there are two things I would mention that add context to the situation:

Genetics do matter. Adult intelligence appears to be somewhere between 50 and 80% determined by genetics. Thus we should expect over time _in a meritocracy_ for smart kids to come from the same families. This is compounded by assortative mating by IQ, which has become far more widespread in the last forty years. So things are going to look nepotistic (and they always will be to some extent, see my second point below) when, in fact, this is a natural phenomena.

So, what? Just let the people who lose the genetic lottery rot? No. Instead, we might want to focus on having a more balanced economy where, rather than everyone striving to become part of the elite, a working class person can have a perfectly reasonable life. Jordan Peterson discusses this problem in this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0)

Secondly, it is not immoral for parents to make large investments in their own children's lives. This behavior is no doubt somewhat driven by genetics (nearly everything appears to be at least 40% genetic) but it is also a learned behavior. Government programs that replace parental investment have been catastrophic for minorities in the united states: for example 73% of non- hispanic blacks are born out of wedlock. So delegating parental investment in children to the state, in the name of ending nepotism, may have some very detrimental effects that are difficult to predict.

All of this is to add context and suggest a different solution: making middle class non-elite life paths more attractive, not to deny that there is a problem.

<comment><USER8> _assortative mating by IQ, which has become far more widespread in the last forty years_

That's curious. Is there any explanation why? Naively, I would assume the opposite, although I can imagine some factors that would point in that direction.

 _for example 73% of non-hispanic blacks are born out of wedlock._

Why is that catastrophic? Is there good evidence¹ that the kids would have been better off otherwise?

¹ (by good evidence, I'm discounting simple comparisons between children born into and out of wedlock, since it's pretty easy to see why many confounding variables might play into that.)

<comment><USER9> women have started going to college in higher numbers than men. the vast majority of women will only date a man who is equal or higher education level than they are.

<comment><USER8> That seems to be outdated information: _" For the first time in 50 years, the educational balance among married couples has tipped towards women. Wives are more likely to be the better educated partner than the other way around. The trend is particularly sharp among newlyweds; in 2012 almost 40% of college educated women were married to a guy without a degree."_

[http://time.com/7442/wives-are-now-more-educated-than- husban...](http://time.com/7442/wives-are-now-more-educated-than-husbands/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Articles like these make me wonder about one metric. What "percentage" do you need to be in (top 20%, top 50%, top 1%), in the US, to be confident in having a secure retirement? And how has _that_ changed over the decades?

Because when I see the top 20% as being described as making $112,000 or more, I don't see that as even close to feeling confident you'll have a secure retirement. Until _that_ improves, I have a hard time criticizing a 20%-er or a 19%-er for having somewhat of an "every man for himself" attitude in getting ahead.

</comment><comment><USER4> The author's story makes me incredibly grateful for the current situation for developing engineers. I went to a cheap state school and had paid internships. Also, we have a long way to go on sexism and discrimination, but there are countless fields that are far more closed.

<comment><USER11> That was my path as well. Pretty much every smart, working class or middle class student at my high school picked engineering or science routes. Unfortunately many of the science routes led to academia, which everyone I've talked to seems to hate from a financial perspective. Of about 5 people I know personally, all but one has dropped out and picked up a mostly unrelated jobs or research gig.

I went back and checked LinkedIn for some of my old HS people, and it's interesting how different that patterns are. The children of doctors are doctors or lawyers. Some of the really motivated children of first-generation immigrants ended up equally successful though. Both groups tended to go to private institutions though.

I wonder if the difference is how risk is evaluated. Middle classes see hard sciences and engineering as reliable, accessible, career paths that minimize risks of joblessness and allow them to leverage existing connections by staying in state while studying (since most working and middle class folks have a family support structure local to the area, also in-state discount) without burdening their family more by picking a field where paid internships are rare.

Meanwhile, richer folks are not worried about needing to work while studying, and they don't need to stay in any one place, especially if the careers of their parents gives them connections to in-demand places for jobs and study (or maybe money just makes connections unnecesary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> At the end of the day I think very few people want to actually "pay" the price that a more equal society would entail, but are very happy to have others bear the burdens of "paying" for a redistribution of "opportunity".

<comment><USER13> Education and health care.

These two items are huge economic burdens, even for those in the top %20. But radically reducing their cost would also do wonders for improving economic opportunities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Raising a privileged family takes just one generation to sacrifice.

As numerous financial books will testify, if you are frugal (no matter the income) and invest wisely, it is possible to accumulate some measure of fortune. If you teach your children to do the same (as they grow up in a frugal household), they will become the next tier of the pyramid.

I really, truly believe this. I was raised in a large family and inherited nothing of worth. I'm not done working yet, but I'm encouraged by the way things are progressing and have hopes all of my kids will go to college and emerge without a mountain of debt.

In America, the dream can be obtained. It will take time, though.</comment>


What is your programming credo and how it helps you at every day code? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/koddr/conversation-club-what-is-your-programming-credo-and-how-it-helps-you-at-every-day-code-d38 <comment><USER2> Simple: divide and conquer. Works for more than just programming too. Trouble shooting electronics, building larger things.</comment>


KVM creators open-source fast Cassandra drop-in replacement Scylla - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/kvm-creators-open-source-fast-cassandra-drop-in-replacement-scylla/ <comment><USER2> The server is AGPL 3: [http://www.scylladb.com/opensource/](http://www.scylladb.com/opensource/)

Client libraries ("drivers") Apache 2.0.

This is fine, but it really should be on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like awesome news!

\- How it compares to Cassandra regarding latency? \- How is the client API? Does it support lock free communication? Can you send things to nodes in batches?

<comment><USER4> We target < 1ms latency for 99.9% Some initial results here [http://www.scylladb.com/technology/cassandra-vs-scylla- laten...](http://www.scylladb.com/technology/cassandra-vs-scylla-latency- benchmark/)

DB API (CQL) is Cassandra compatible, so clients does not have to change.

For more on the lock free communication see [http://www.seastar- project.org/](http://www.seastar-project.org/) Seastar is the underline framework of Scylla

There is an open bug for batch [https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/332](https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/issues/332) hopefully we will fix it shortly.</comment></comment>


"That was a really bad Friday for us:" WIRED warns four stories were plagiarized - <AUTHOR> http://retractionwatch.com/2016/02/24/that-was-a-really-bad-friday-for-us-wired-warns-four-stories-were-plagiarized/ <comment><USER2> I have to give wired props for this. Most people would just pull the articles and sweep it under the rug. Keeping the article up but putting a big disclaimer at the top isn't too bad:

[http://www.wired.com/2016/02/china-hates-gmos-problem-is- chi...](http://www.wired.com/2016/02/china-hates-gmos-problem-is-china-really- needs-gmos/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't wired pay the original authors of the plagiarised material? Didn't see that mentioned.</comment>


Snooper's charter to extend police access to phone and internet data - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/01/snoopers-charter-to-extend-police-access-to-phone-and-internet-data <comment><USER2> I see the UK roll out what seems to me increasingly intrusive laws because "terrorists" but relatively muted responses to these encroachments. Do people just not care or have they become numb from the incremental changes over time (starting with surveillance cameras etc.)?

<comment><USER3> I work in the UK and live in a household where 3 of 4 people work in tech. It's mostly a case of the people outside of tech simply not knowing. Short of a prime-time TV special that outlined just how long the tentacles of GCHQ are and how it actually affects people; there won't be a change.

For those that are in tech, there are essentially two fields of thought I can extrapolate:

1\. There's those like myself who are just plain uncomfortable with the idea of someone somewhere having access to every facet of me and my online presence. Modern day tinfoil-hattery if you will. It's at a point bordering on paranoia and having to cover so many bases to have basic operational security of your day to day life is exhausting.

2\. There's those that say "I've nothing to hide, what do I care what the government sees". This is the overwhelming majority. What seems to be lacking is an education of the people on the freedom they're passively giving up. Education of these people in this country against the threat of omnipresent surveillance does not exist. It would have to exist outside the realm of the Government and as great as the EFF and various news sources documenting the abolishing of civil freedoms are, I feel it's not enough. I can almost guarantee that if I turned to any one of the 100+ devs on my floor, they wouldn't even know what TTIP is, let alone what the GCHQ is capable of doing.

I feel we've already lost. There's simply not enough force to stop what's happening.

<comment><AUTHOR> This, sadly, is the right answer.

There's advantages to not having a written constitution, but this is not one of them. We don't have amendments we can take the government to court over. We have the EU and the Human Rights Act as our last line of defence, but the popular media is too busy trying to ridicule it as part of the "reluctant European" agenda. In this case our history as very reluctant Europeans does not help.

Outside tech, no one seems to have even the vaguest inkling of what's going on within their mobiles, or meta data is just date and time isn't it? It doesn't matter. Look at this meme.

Within tech

1\. Those of similar mind can either withdraw and minimise exposure (ie use minimal apps, VPNs etc), join the open rights group, or... nothing. There's apathy in the extreme. The only other thing I could do, unless I made a solo stand in Parliament Square is contribute to Signal or similar on github.

2\. There's the majority view which is along the lines of "I've nothing to hide", but with a total unawareness of concepts like if there's enough data you can criminalise anyone the powers that be take an exception to. If it's not criminal you could easily let something slip to make someone unemployable. Even tech people seem to have little idea or appreciation of historical lessons of only 70 years ago, except GCHQ is a good thing, it's the follow on to Bletchley and that helped win the war.

We've lost, clearly. You'd get as much, if not more, takeup organising a demo against the mythical chemtrails than this.

<comment><USER4> Everybody knows that history runs in cycles, just like fashion.

The people before us have fought (and died) for freedom. We are the ones giving it up. And some day after we're gone, some people will fight for it again.

And the whole thing starts over once more.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may be right, but I'm not overly keen for my children's or future generations to have to die just to get back what we lost through apathy.

It might not be as easy to get back as getting them first time around. The pervasive surveillance will enable govt to hinder those pesky demonstrators far more effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > • Extend the use of state remote computer hacking from the security services > to the police in cases involving a "threat to life" or missing persons. This > can include cases involving "damage to somebody's mental health", but will > be restricted to use by the National Crime Agency and a small number of > major police forces.

Aka "Antisocial behavior" == "We can hack your computer"

> The home secretary told MPs she had rejected the committees' recommendations > to exclude the use of state surveillance powers for the "economic wellbeing" > of the UK. She also resisted their demand to scrap warrants allowing GCHQ to > undertake bulk computer hacking, describing them as a "key operational > requirement".

Aka "We can hack anyone who isn't in the UK for financial reasons"

All this is really doing is guaranteeing a digital police state in the UK with all level of access, powers, and data recording that would be the wet dream of literally any fascist regime.

As sad as it is to say...

I can't wait until the very exploits and databases the UK is going to gather get "hacked". It is the only way I think they might possibly wake up and realize how fucking horrific this is.

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems a bit excessive, being able to collect not just relevant files but all files regardless of their relevance with this new expansion on police capabilities. What's particularly scary is the ability to acquire the past 12 months worth of data of everyone. It claims this will assist with "threat to life" and missing persons cases, but would that not mean the police can now arbitrarily point fingers and say we need your data even when it's not clear that a person was involved? Yes, there's a double-lock system in place, but who are to say these two are responsible to hold such power without consensus of the people?

</comment><comment><USER7> The UK is always five years ahead of the rest of the West when it comes to codifying the destruction of their citizens' privacy into law.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Extend the use of state remote computer hacking from the security services to the police in cases involving a 'threat to life' or missing persons. This can include cases involving 'damage to somebody's mental health', but will be restricted to use by the National Crime Agency and a small number of major police forces."

I didn't think I could be surprised, given that the UK hands out "anti-social behavior orders," but now they want to hack the trolls?

edit: I can't HTML

<comment> ross-life > I didn't think I could be surprised, given that the UK hands out "anti- > social behavior orders," but now they want to hack the trolls?

I can kind of see what you're getting at and could agree that they are sometimes misused. However having lived in several locations where just one terrible family of 4-5 people can make the entire road hell to live on for everyone else, day and night, for years, I'm inclined to support their use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The Price of Dissent"

[https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7443-the_price_of_dissent](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7443-the_price_of_dissent)

Thus is a talk by Moazzam Begg[1] about the harassment by the UK (with US involvement) of political minorities, and Cerie Bullivant representing Cage[2]. It is a heavy talk, because it is very frank about what all this surveillance technology has been used for. The use of COINTELPRO-style tactics are not hypothetical.

This is the other half of the "snooper's charter" story. As said in the talk, this harassment of minorities is the canary in the coal mine, that hopefu9lly serves as a warning that other groups might be next.

[1] former detainee at Guantanamo

[2] an advocacy group that supports the victims of the War On Terror

</comment><comment><USER10> "The latest draft makes clear that the government will take a pragmatic approach, and no company will be required to remove encryption of their own services if it is not technically feasible."

Aren't the recent demands on Apple "technically feasible"?

</comment><comment><USER11> What if the "state remote computer hacking" target isn't running Windows?</comment>


New US visa requires applicants for social media handles from the last 5 years - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/336042-white-house-approves-social-media-checks-for-visa-applicants-report <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of Reuters story linked from this article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14465534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14465534) (84 points, 50 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> >The new questions are reportedly voluntary, but the form says that failure to provide the information may delay or prevent the processing of an individual visa application.

What I suspect will happen is that if you are European with typical European name, probably no delay if you don't report. If you are from a Muslim country, visa is denied.

This kind of thing is typical for autocratic governments. You make lots of rules and regulations that are typically not enforced. Their sole purpose is to cause difficulties for people rulers don't like. "We just follow the regulations."

<comment><USER4> If you are European you're probably part of the visa waiver program anyway.

<comment><USER5> I am an European, and am not part of the program (I have a passport issued by Polish government.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has to travel to the USA for business I welcome all this activity - it is so much more enjoyable to have the seat next to you empty when you fly. I do wonder how long the airlines can continue to fly on half load.

<comment><USER7> Does this affect the process for all visas? Including tourism?

<comment><USER8> Yes. It's part of ESTA. I did not fill my social media accounts in - because I don't have any - when made an application, and to my surprise it was approved. Still a question of whether I get to enter the US next week, though.

<comment><USER9> You do have a HN account though.

What's listed within ESTA at the moment?

<comment><USER8> HN is not one of the sites listed. Although, you could select 'other', but I did not consider HN social media. Maybe my definition of 'social media' is a lot narrower than the US government's. I mean, does being a member of a classic bulletin board count?

<comment><USER10> Which social media are listed outside of FB, Twitter, and IG? Can't seem to find this. The article mentions it includes email. Is this included?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Social media companies need to fight this. If they don't and it becomes widespread all my SM accounts will be deleted and I'm sure I won't be the only one. I'm not wasting time having two accounts or taking chances lying. I'm just going to delete the accounts. Global travel + my privacy is more important to me.

<comment><USER11> I don't like it but honestly, how would social media companies fight it?

<comment><USER12> A good donation to EFF for a freedom campaign would go a long way at coordinating the fight. And boost their image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The US destined travel is down since October and the trend downwards is consistent. Square who should have fairly up-to-date stats recently published their stats: [https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/coming-to- america-52831...](https://medium.com/foursquare-direct/coming-to- america-528312934221)

At one point these trends will be impacting main street but by then it will be too late.

<comment><USER14> It already has in NYC. Look up hotel room rates tonight for Manhattan, they're in the $150s even for full service hotels. In my experience, for a sunny summer Saturday night in Manhattan, a lot of hotels used to have minimum 2 night stay restrictions, and only Sat nights would be $300+ per night. There were tons of more rooms built, but still, demand was not expected to drop this quickly this much.

<comment><USER15> how do you know the low rates are not the result of competition from Airbnb ?

<comment><USER14> I work in the space, and while I can't conclusively state that it isn't, industry reports indicated a downturn in demand or increase in supply mostly towards the end of last year (via reduced occupancy percentages and average daily rate). Airbnb has been around for a while in NYC, and if anything, per news reports, I would expect their listings to actually be fewer or holding steady based on the local governments restrictions. Even if it was increased supply, there seems to be a more sudden drop in average daily rate in the past 6 to 9 months than before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is everybody blaming this on the current administration?

from June 2016:

Agency Information Collection Activities: Arrival and Departure Record (Forms I-94 and I-94W) and Electronic System for Travel Authorization [1]

Comments were accepted up until August 22, 2016 on the proposed changes.

[1] [https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/06/23/2016-14...](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/06/23/2016-14848/agency- information-collection-activities-arrival-and-departure-record- forms-i-94-and-i-94w-and)

<comment><USER17> _Why is everybody blaming this on the current administration?_

That doesn't seem to be especially true (so far here people are mostly discussing the details of the implementation).

In any case, the current administration is responsible for choosing to continue existing policies. That doesn't make the current administration solely responsible for the trajectory of US immigration policy, but it shares the power to change things with Congress and so will of course be a focus of criticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is really worrying though is the normalization of privacy devaluation. Soon the uk will follow suite and then others. And sooner than later we ll be "back" to 1984

</comment><comment><USER19> "Consular officials can now request all prior passport numbers, five years of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers from applicants, as well as addresses, employment and travel history stretching back 15 years"

Heck, I don't even keep records of my old passport numbers and much less travel history stretching back 15 years. As I travel weekly or bi-weekly, the list is not easily remembered or reconstructed. Does travel include ferry, boat, car or bike rides or is it just air travel?

<comment><USER14> Everyone in the world should enable Google location history tracking, just in case they want to travel to the USA in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is the US trying to be the most immigrant unfreindly place to discourage new immigrants and there by reduce immigration?

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't use Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc, but ordinary people seldom believe it ("come on, you are a programmer, how come you don't use web?!") and often assume I don't want to share my profile with them. I'm afraid the gov agencies will take the same approach and automatically assume the absence of the social media as an attempt to hide something. Luckily in this case, though, I hope not to have to visit USA anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm, this is worrying. Certainly makes it less appealing to move to the US any time soon.

Though I also wonder whether you can avoid this by simply having two accounts, one with a fake name and details that the controversial stuff goes on and one with your real name that's mostly squeaky clean. How much do they research this stuff?

<comment><USER23> The problem then is that you've made a knowily declared false information which itself is a crime a could reasonably be used to investigate further. If you wish to visit the US these are the rules you have to accept. Personally I've decided to not attend conferences in the US or visit for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER24> For me it is the accumulation of all these annoyances together, not each individually, which makes a trip to the US now really unappealing. Long queues for passports on arrival, long queues at the security, laptop & tablet ban (some planes are still using VCR based flight entertainment, and most movies suck), this attitude that airports, airlines and law enforcement have of ending each interaction with their customers with a threat. Now this. Some people actually like to spend their holidays in some boot camp where they will be shouted at and get their ass kicked. I myself don't enjoy that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This was already "optional" information requested in the ESTA application since at least last year, so what's changed since? That it states more explicit that a failure to enter the information could prevent you from getting approved?

</comment><comment><USER26> Is it just me or does the headline fail to parse? "requires applicants for..."???

</comment><comment><USER27> Another example of bullshit from governments. Last time I said something, someone told me to slow my roll.

People's freedom is being eroded an inch at a time! (Or ~2.5 cm if you prefer the metric system).

</comment><comment><USER28> Thank god. They don't want my HN account.

<comment><USER12> Especially our HN accounts where we say the NSA/TSA/FBI are threats to our safety (depending on context) and we use false names with burner phone-based authentication on Facebook. Honest question, I still wonder what is so bad that I'm now using the same protections as criminals, apart from hiding that I don't want to be tracked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As if they don't know already? Check out Canadian immigration papers as well - same thing.

</comment><comment><USER30> No mention of them requiring a password as well though.

I wonder what happens when I don't remember -- I deleted my facebook account over a year ago, and legitimately don't remember my handle. All I can say is that my usual username (hobarrera) was taken.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does this impact citizens from visa waiver countries?

<comment><USER32> Yeah they need to fill in the ESTA forms which asks for social media. Last time I saw the form it was marked as optional though - unsure whether that part changed</comment></comment>


Apple's New MacBook's Trackpad Does Not Move - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/apples-new-macbooks-trackpad-does-not-move/#3Kwfc0:rogg

<comment><USER2> Is this really as good as they claim it to be? I remember using 'haptic feedback' with the Samsung S2 and it really wasn't very good - definitely not like a real button.</comment>


Days with my father - <AUTHOR> http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/ I wanted to share this because it made me feel as though, no matter how important and great 'our work' may feel, the relationship we have with those close to us is worth so much more than anything! This book does a great job of conveying the core in all of us. <comment><USER2> I already read this a year or so ago, and I did it again today. Got me again, and will get me every time I read it. It's beautiful and sad at the same time. Sigh.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's so powerful, isn't it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Does that site uses HTML 5 ?

<comment><USER4> All flash.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trackerjacker – Map and track wifi networks you're not connected to - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/calebmadrigal/trackerjacker <comment><AUTHOR> trackerjacker also provides a simple python plugin system that makes it trivial to extend to do all sorts of interesting things (e.g. to look for anomalous wifi devices). One of my original use-cases was to trigger my sirens if a security camera detected motion (based on a data thresholds that uploading a video triggers).

I demoed this at Thotcon and DEFCON this year and will be demoing it at Derbycon in October.

<comment><USER2> Have you looked at MAC randomization filtering at all? It should be easy to filter based on probe vs established.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just lightly. Seems difficult to detect for sure, but probabilistically some insights could be gained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's pretty sweet. I'm tempted to build some kind of Android UI wrapper for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is your opinion on the morality of running this, compared to the morality of data collection by a small blog for advertising and analytics?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like almost everything in life, it depends on your intentions.

<comment><USER5> like the ends justifies the means?

<comment><AUTHOR> More like the context determines if something is evil or not. For example, if I'm listening for drones flying around my house so I can deauth them to prevent them from spying on me, I would say that is justified, but if I monitor people to determine when they are home so I know when to break into their house, that would most likely be a bad usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could an esp8266 be used for this purpose? the last 2 boards that I ordered are defective and can't test it...

</comment><comment><USER7> Saw your first presentation at DEFCON! Great job - will definitely use this when I get back to Australia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man this is cool... I have no reasonable use case for it, but I might just make one up.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm trying to use this, but I cannot get it to see anything by following the examples. Will this work with any wifi card on linux or only with certain ones? Perhaps not all cards support monitor mode? I have an Intel 7260 card.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not all cards support monitor mode. I have some recommended cards at the bottom of the README.md file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just tried with a Raspberry Pi 0 - No luck.

"SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported"

On the roadmap, or is this just a driver issue?

<comment><USER11> What wifi dongle are you using?

<comment><USER10> I tried both the built-in wifi and a Realtek dongle

<comment><USER11> Does the RPi Zero have onboard wifi? ( [https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi- zero/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/) )

It sounds like your realtek dongle may not support monitor mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> The RPi Zero W does ([https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi- zero-w/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/)). I haven't tried the Zero W yet, but I have tested the Pi 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your own Ifttt for Wifi, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the social network for wifi routers?

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome! The one thing I'm missing is the current status of the network. It tracks all the networks and the clients, but I can't see when the network was last seen. So if I'm tracking for 30 minutes, I can't see if a client or network is still available. Besides that, I love it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I may add that. One thing to keep in mind though: you can create a simple plugin to keep as up-to-date on whatever data you care about as you like. Here's a simple example of a plugin: [https://github.com/calebmadrigal/trackerjacker/blob/master/p...](https://github.com/calebmadrigal/trackerjacker/blob/master/plugin_examples/count_apples.py)

Note that it's about as simple an interface as possible (e.g. no inheritance).

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I'll look into that. I'm not a good programmer, but it looks doable :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Writing a plugin would be a great way to get into programming.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What bank accepts founders abroad? - <AUTHOR> I'm living outside the US and I've recently raised $5k from local entrepreneurs and need to get set up. Opening the Deleware C-corp looks fairly painless through Clerky, but they don't offer any guidance on which banks will allow business accounts to be opened with a foreign address.
After a fair amount of searching, the answer seems to be none (except possibly Stripe Atlas, which is limited to those who already have connections). What's the best way to go here? I definitely want to be able to raise funds from US investors down the road.
In this case would it be better to incorporate in another place, such as Hong Kong or BVI? <comment><USER2> Feel free to email me (HN username at stripe.com). I work on Atlas. There exists the possibility that we can help there, through our partnership with Silicon Valley Bank.

</comment><comment><USER3> Founder of Clerky here :) Feel free to shoot us an email and we can see if we can help... there is no good one-size-fits-all approach (as you've discovered), but we're happy to see if there's something about your situation that might make it easy to connect you with a bank. For example, it's not necessarily the foreign address that makes it difficult - a lot of banks will be happy to open bank accounts for people with SSNs that happen to live outside of the US.</comment>


Wikipedia contributor sued for uploading images - <AUTHOR> http://www.t3.com/news/wikipedia-contributor-sued-for-uploading-images?=39715

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699713></comment>


Digital Twin Example for Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.verypossible.com/blog/what-is-a-digital-twin-an-engineers-guide <comment><USER2> A "digital twin" is a online mathematical model/function/simulation that is continuously fed with sensor input data.

It's a new term for an old idea that has been around for decades in manufacturing; but what's old is new again in the context of IoT devices.

And it's only the first step -- manufacturing has gone a few steps farther.

Digital twins are primarily concerned with constructing a digital _representation_ of a physical process/asset.

Model-based predictive control [1] (developed in 1980) has been used commercially to not only automatically control said assets, but do so optimally (by iteratively solving an optimization problem based on a mathematical model at every time period, and then reading new measurements off the feedback loop to update itself).

This type of optimal control technology is the reason why oil refineries are run so efficiently today.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Relevant wiki article for those wondering wtf a "digital twin" is: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin)

</comment><comment><USER4> The first three paragraphs could be replaced with an actual explanation of what it is.

<comment><USER5> No man, blogs always need at least 3 paragraphs of wasted time aka exposition. Haven't you ever looked for a recipe online? No one can get to the point and actually show you the recipe, they need to first force you to read stories about their childhood that you really don't care about when all you want is to make buffalo chicken dip.

<comment><USER4> Augh

<comment><USER5> Exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Boss Will Call Your Boss - <AUTHOR> https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/haiti-contractors/index.html <comment><USER2> > If [the United States] believed in the institutions, why did the embassy > prevent the contractors from facing a judge?

No single citizen in the United States respects any foreign government's judicial system. The entire nation state concept is a joke and an administrative nuance at BEST to anyone here.

The whole story is about how a random autonomous federal agency in the US was either about to cause a regime change, or help the current regime destroy documents in a fake Central Bank heist gone wrong, and people are worried whether we would waste time with an irrelevent judicial trial that we were going to undermine anyway?

haha, okay. well if it wasn't obvious before it should be obvious now from me writing it out. The US provides financial support to everyone to maintain relationships, it has nothing to do with respect for an institution.

<comment><USER3> > _If [the United States] believed in the institutions, why did the embassy > prevent the contractors from facing a judge?_

USA almost certainly sent them, directly or indirectly (i.e., closed both ears and eyes) in an illegal operation. Illegal in a lot of ways. So why would US let them face a judge?

<comment><USER4> It was the local gov that let them off, it was them that hired the group. Being an American national doesn't mean you work for the US Gov.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I think it's more likely friends and associates in the military complex got them out of a jam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm the only one who thought to the dialog at the end of Lord of War?

<comment><USER7> Which one?

<comment><USER8> "Soon there's going to be a knock on that door and you will be called outside. In the hall there will be a man who out-ranks you. First he'll compliment you on the fine job you've done - on you making the world a safer place. That you're to receive a commendation or a promotion. And then he's going to tell you that I am to be released. You're going to protest. You'll probably threaten to resign. But in the end, I _will_ be released.

The reason I'll be released is the same reason you think I'll be convicted. I do rub shoulders with some of the most vile, sadistic men calling themselves leaders today. But some of these men are the enemies of your enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss - the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year - sometimes it's embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can't be seen supplying. So. You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I'm a necessary evil."

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah. Sorry, confused the title with War Dogs.

Definitely one of my favorites! (Both movies are)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's very strange. There's really nothing to indicate what they were there to do.

All the theories about motivation make the whole operation seems kinda clumsy and weird.

<comment><USER10> We do know that these "contractors" do sometimes carry out missions that the military wants performed, but either needs to be kept at arms length to maintain plausible deniability on the world stage, or is used to implicate some other group. There have been a few exposes on these types over the years and their stories are pretty interesting.

I'm not sure this op was clumsy though. They are probably used to operating in regions where the police force is less effective.

<comment><USER11> Are there any particularly interesting exposes that you'd recommend? I'm curious to read more about this sort of thing.

<comment><USER12> The case of Raymond Davis[0] is probably the most mind-boggling in recent memory: A private contractor with a cover story as a cultural attache at the US embassy in Pakistan sees he's being followed by a couple guys on motorbikes while driving through Lahore, thinks he's going to get assassinated by Pakistani security forces, and shoots and kills both of them. He's arrested shortly thereafter with IR cameras, magazines full of bullets, and other espionage-related gear.

The US ultimately negotiated a payment to the families of the men Davis killed and secured his release.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "That evening, the Haitian minister of justice personally intervened for the contractors' release, according to local reports, independently confirmed. "

\-- So someone high in the Government hired them.

<comment><USER14> the highest level as supposedly suggested one of the "special forces" members.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wonder how many "contractors" (aka mercenaries) are hanging around the Colombia-Venezuela border right now.

<comment><USER16> Quite a few on many different sides -- Venezuela is a de-facto narcostate at this point, and they're in deep with everyone from the Mexican cartels to Islamist terror groups in North Africa. The military is getting rich off drug money while the people starve, and a starving populace can't revolt. Unless the US intervenes, there is a lot more money on the side that wants to keep Maduro in power. You're not wrong about the mercenaries, thus the side with the most money is the most likely to win.

<comment><USER17> > a starving populace can't revolt

It has nothing to do with starving. It has everything to do with having all their personal firearms confiscated by the government a few years ago.

<comment><USER18> How exactly did Eastern Europe revolt during the fall of the iron curtain? The first thing that the communists did, when they sized power after WWII, was take away everyone's guns.

And yet, as soon as the USSR stopped guaranteeing the security of the Warsaw pact states, their regimes fell like dominoes.

<comment><USER17> By that point, though, the people who had guns (i.e., the military) supported the overthrow of the existing order. It certainly wouldn't have happened with their active opposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Never seen or heard of this source before... Is it credible? Had this story been reported anywhere else?

Don't mean to claim it's not, I just feel wary of believing stories that sound incredible lately....

<comment><USER15> I did read it some days ago, it's real [https://www.democracynow.org/2019/2/20/headlines/haiti_polic...](https://www.democracynow.org/2019/2/20/headlines/haiti_police_arrest_5_americans_amid_political_unrest)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is no surprise.

I am of Haitian descent, my parents both immigrated to the US in the 70s and 80s and just this past holiday my aunt told me a story about how she paid hundreds of dollars for a fake passport to obtain passage in the US.

Ever since Columbus arrived Haiti has been a semi-lawless zone where something shady is probably going on facilitated by foreign powers (usually the French and Americans). The amount of corruption in this country is so great it's hard to imagine. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and if you were to cumulatively rank all Western Hemisphere countries governments we'd probably be at the bottom as well.

It's tough to see because Haiti has some potential. The northern port of Labadee is a tourist destination and other parts of the island could be too with the correct investments and stability in government. It's one of the largest nations by population and land in Central America / Caribbean and labor is so cheap that it could be a great spot for American multi-nationals to set up shop. I always wonder when Haiti will get on it's feet and experience growth like Vietnam or Bangladesh. I guess the answer is still: 'not any time soon'.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unusual to see the IT department get involved in politics. Sloppy.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's all fine if the US does it

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone have a tl;dr? I know a lot of you like to read these like thriller novels, but there's a lot to read here just to know what it's even about.

<comment><USER24> Some dudes from the US (and a Serb) flew to Haiti to do something, they were stopped and detained by police. "Our boss will call your boss" was said. Boss duly made the call. Dudes were released because of high ranking intervention.

Theoreis abound because there were a guns, several magazines (clips), and sat phones found but nobody is talking. All higher-ups/agencies involved are staying tight lipped. It seems like a professionally-run, clandestine op that was botched by a security guard that prob makes hourly pay.

The rest of the article goes on to highlight the suspicious aspects of the whole case, but the reason for it all is speculative. The most suspicious thing is how it went sour and how they were freed from orders from very high up - yet nobody can figure out what was going on.

<comment><USER25> Thanks - I'm glad I didn't spend time reading the whole thing just to see that it says "and we know nothing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So weird to see two Serbian (like me) contractors in all this.

<comment><USER27> Why? Sadly, Serbs (and other nationalities from the Balkans, but Serbs are a majority,) have a lot of trained and experienced "operatives".

Rember Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and the '99 bombing? That's a lot of experience gathered in ways more useful than a regular soldier would have. Those wars were full of improvisation, asymetric warfare, lack of logistics and what not. Count in members of paramilitary and covert government agencies, people leaving the country to make a living from crime during the '90s, and a mentality that you don't have too much to lose, and you've got a nice pool of people you can hire for some funky business. Besides, those Serbs are in general good with English, look westerly (Caucasian, not raising suspicion), not overly hindered by religion, cheap...

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Serb, but this isn't anything new.

<comment><USER28> Not to mention the reputation for been seriously scary bastards (whether lived up to or not I wouldn't know).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like some local cops overstepped their bounds and probably messed up some kind of operation.

<comment><USER30> Lets turn that scenario around - if a group of armed military professionals from outside the USA were hanging around a bank in NYC, and when stopped, told the police that they were on a mission for their government... would the NYC cops be overstepping their bounds by not accepting that answer, and detaining them to investigate?

<comment><USER4> If the US Gov was dumb enough to hire them, then they would act in the same way.</comment></comment></comment>


Distributed Algorithm for Constructing Minimal Spanning Trees in Networks (1976) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/76/111/CSL-TR-76-111.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News's character limit is too short for the full, unminced title, which is:

 _A Distributed Algorithm for Constructing Minimal Spanning Trees in Computer- Communication Networks_

I think it's worth sharing because (aside from the technical merits of the paper) it highlights how, despite the field not being that old, it has the memory of a rodent: a lot of the vocabulary found within is opaque without further inspection, even though a lot of problems described within are still relevant today.

<comment><USER2> What exactly did you find interesting in the paper? It's a pretty bad paper. The kind of paper you would expect from pre Lamport "distributed algorithms".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems that that work didn't make much impact because it sat as a tech report and wasn't published until 1987, by which time Perlman had published her algorithm that received more exposure in SIGCOMM in 1985.

<comment><USER4> Interesting I was wondering why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> why is spanning tree gaining so much interest recently?

<comment><USER6> No idea. It is old as shit and equally annoying. There are many reasons why we (architects) minimize L2 domains - namely because we can achieve re-route / convergence quicker with other protocols, with STP being the long pole. Hell, containers are just L3-L3 forwarding in a lot of cases - no L2 domain, conceptually.

TLDR: Spanning-Tree is the previous war. E-VPN + Modern L3 segmentation is the new way.</comment></comment>


Abbott's Fast, $5, Antigen Test – A New Era of Coronavirus Testing Begins - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/08/abbott-covid-19-rapid-tests-trump/615826/ <comment><USER2> Issue with this (and other antibody tests) is both that levels of antibody vary wildly from person to person and across time.

The same person can show positive for a swab test, and then negative for antibody tests at months one and 2 and only start to show at month 3.

Equally some cases will never be revealed by an antibody test as the patient fought the virus solely with their T-cells - not antibodies.

-

This obviously doesn't mean that a cheap and reliable test is not of use - just that it will no doubt reveal more issues and edge cases with our understanding of the virus.

</comment><comment><USER3> It comes with an app. We need to reverse engineer it and check it's security... It's not like we can trust the FDA to do that.

[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1527297235](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1527297235)</comment>


ALS Association Files Trademarks for "Ice Bucket Challenge" - <AUTHOR> http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=86375292&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting read on the subject: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2002/02/can_you_trademark_the_phrase_lets_roll.html)</comment>


Deployments at Yammer - Deploymacy - <AUTHOR> http://eng.yammer.com/deployments-at-yammer/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that these single click deployment systems are fantastic. What is really awesome is all of the devops and deployment automation that has to go on behind the scenes of this fancy UI in order to make it all work. Just thinking about it gets my brain spinning on all of the improvements that I want to make to my own deployment systems.</comment>


Lessons learned about how to make a header-file library (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/docs/stb_howto.txt <comment><USER2> Please don't make header file libraries. It will be messy and a nightmare to modify. Header files are for declarations and implementation should be in a separate file.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree, header file libraries are great and the apparent advantage to header/source pair are negligible in practice (I use the STB headers all the time in different projects). One advantage is that you can simply add all the configuration defines (e.g. what assert macro and allocation functions to use, all the configuration options, ...) simply in front of the include statement and you don't need to mess around with the build system or compiler command line options to define those.

Of course you usually wrap the header-only-lib in a central header/source pair of your own, so that those configuration defines and the implementation are in a single place instead of directly including the library header in different places.

<comment><USER4> What's the advantage of packing everything into a header file if every single user of this "library" has to unpack it back out again? Why not just ship a header+source file, like civilized people have been doing since the dawn of C?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Docverter, the hosted document conversion service, is now open source - <AUTHOR> http://bugsplat.info/2012-11-23-docverter-is-now-open-source.html

<comment><USER2> An remarkably odd bit of timing: I saw your initial announcement 6 weeks ago, bookmarked your site for a project I've been working on, and just tonight finally got to the stage where I'm ready to use Docverter. I went to the site and was puzzled, because I'd remembered that this was a paid service, and I couldn't figure out whether I'd bookmarked the wrong link or had gone crazy. Then I checked the github repo and say everything committed ~10 hours ago, and lastly, checked HN only to see the #1 story is your announcement. It usually goes in reverse order! :)

So anyway, a slightly longwinded way of saying sorry that it didn't work out as a business (though I was about to sign up!) and many many thanks for open- sourcing it. I'll be installing in the AM and am deeply grateful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll gladly accept your money if you'd still like to pay :)

<comment><USER2> Done and done :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Too bad you couldn't make it work as a business.

I have something similar, but a slightly different focus (image->image and pdf->image using Ghostscript/Imagemagick) here:

<https://github.com/lookfirst/convert>

It would be good to combine it all into a single service.

<comment><USER4> Shameless plug, I have a webservice (<http://thumbr.it/>) similar to your project, but I also added instagram like filters to the images and it converts word and pdf files to images, and I'm adding html and pdf as output formats and html as input format.

It's a pity that docverter didn't work (so far?). Have you tried broadening a bit the range of formats that you cover? Obviously (as I'm also working on the same space) I think there is a real need to cover here. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My advice, for what it's worth, and based on my experience building and running <https://openexchangerates.org>, would be to continue to offer it free (in your case, open sourced) but provide the hosted version as a service.

For example: I'd very gladly pay a small monthly fee to use your API for my invoicing system which I'm working on right now. I already have a load of open source tech I rely on, and some things just make more sense to pay for (e.g. using GitHub instead of self-hosting something like GitLab - it's a tiny monthly fee that saves me hours of hassle). I'd much rather use a hosted API that I can integrate in minutes than spend hours potentially faffing about with installing stuff from the repository, and worrying about keeping it up to date, explaining it to outsourcers/team members, etc.

If I do end up using your solution in my biz, I'll gladly donate - make sure you have donate buttons up and prominently displayed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Donate buttons are a good idea, thanks. I'll have one up later today.

As for keeping a hosted version running, I'll consider it. Your reasons for wanting one are the same reasons I built it in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment> z-factor I've implemented a very nice word to html converter previously but market research have shown that people are barely willing to pay for such a service. Maybe related consulting services can make it worthwhile for you. Good luck!

<comment><USER6> This is a B2B play. Talk to companies that would find this feature useful.

<comment> z-factor Any suggestions as to what companies to try?

I did talk to some companies who could use it to speed up SEC/EDGAR submissions, but they were trying to get it almost for nothing and still wanted customizations.

<comment><USER6> Customizations..? Is this sass or stand alone package?

If it's multiple companies and they all want the same thing, I would do it.

That said, it's all about business development. Gotta put your sales hat on! Tell them you can do customizations but to match their price, you'll have to do recurring $y amount for at least z number of months with the first 1 month free for trying it.

Of course I'm making a lot of assumptions about your want of adding features and giving the first month free...gotta start somewhere!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for this. It boots pretty much out-of-the-box on our platform thanks to the Heroku support: <http://docverter.a.pogoapp.com/> \- very cool buildpack use BTW

I sent in a little PR with some URL changes: <https://github.com/Docverter/docverter/pull/1>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, merged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it illegal to run a Microsoft Office web based front end? Install a copy of Office 2010 and have it scripted to open and export files.

<comment><USER9> It is not illegal but violates the license

<comment><USER10> Can you expand more on this ?

<comment><USER11> Probably meaning it is not illegal in the criminal sense but violates the terms of the license (which is a civil/contract law issue).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is neat! Thanks for making it open source.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the incredible response, everyone. For the people wanting to donate, I've put up a Stripe-powered donation page here: <https://docverter- donate.herokuapp.com/donate>

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for making the product open source.

Any "lessons learned" you can share on the venture?

</comment><comment><USER14> is there something good for pdf conversion to epub?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. The problem is that PDF is basically a destination format. Converting to PDF strips all of the semantics out of it, leaving you with plain text, fonts, and boxes. The latest versions of the official Adobe Acrobat Reader are able to convert PDF to Doc but I have no idea what the quality is like.

<comment><USER15> It's probably possible to do, but nobody's needed one badly enough to do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is actually an Apache project that can extract the text from a PDF. It does a passable job, but like I said all of the formatting is gone.

<http://pdfbox.apache.org/userguide/text_extraction.html>

<comment><USER16> There is a very good pdf-to-html converter at [0], so it's a two-step process.

[0] <https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thank you!</comment>


Go and Rust – objects without class (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/548560/ <comment><USER2> Being from 2013, this is speaking about Ancient Rust, but after giving this a quick re-read, it still seems up to date, with maybe minor syntax and idiom issues.

We _will_ be adding some sort of thing kind of like inheritance to Rust. [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/349](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/349) is the RFC issue, and it outlines:

      * cheap field access from internal methods;
      * cheap dynamic dispatch of methods;
      * cheap downcasting;
      * thin pointers;
      * sharing of fields and methods between definitions;
      * safe, i.e., doesn't require a bunch of transmutes or other unsafe code to be usable;
      * syntactically lightweight or implicit upcasting;
      * calling functions through smartpointers, e.g. fn foo(JSRef<T>, ...);
      * static dispatch of methods.

That being said, we don't expect this to ever be the primary method of modeling in Rust. It's just that sometimes, you do have something which is legitimately represented by inheritance or something like it.

<comment><USER3> Is there any schedule for when that'll be worked on? It's a big thing I'm waiting on for porting some UI toolkit work to Rust.

<comment><USER2> Everyone is working on HIR/MIR at the moment, because it will enable a lot of different kinds of work to happen in parallel after it lands.

The stage it's in is "Niko has a draft RFC that he hasn't published yet." Then there will be discussion, and then implementation.

<comment><USER4> What's HIR/MIR?

<comment><USER2> To build on the other answer, right now, the compiler does

      AST -> LLVM IR

Which works, but you have to do all of the compilation passes and static checks on the AST. After this work is done, we'll have

      AST -> HIR -> MIR -> LLVM IR

These two intermediate representations will make it easier to write frontends and backends to Rust, as well as making it easier to implement various optimization and analysis passes, and making them faster.

Also, in today's world, for example, we can't stabilize syntax extensions because we'd have to stabilize the AST. But we _can_ stabilize {H,M}IR, much more easily. On the backside, we're very coupled to LLVM right now, and while that probably won't change, if someone wanted to write a backend, they could write their own codegen based off of MIR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Smalltalk-72 (well, Smalltalk before Smalltalk-76) did not have inheritance. And I believe Alan Kay is on record indicating he felt that inheritance in Smalltalk had often been misapplied or not well understood, and spoke well of Self and other experiments with classless object models.

If we're in the "OO" world, and need something analogous to inheritance, I'd rather have an object system with tools for explicit delegation over a system which tries to conflate delegation of behaviour with subtyping. IMHO this is one of the greatest uglinesses of Java (C++ has it too but it's not used much these days.)

<comment><USER6> Yes, Alan Kay was very clear that he does not believe inheritance to be a key part of object-oriented programming.

> OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of > state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in > Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is > possible, but I'm not aware of them.

For context, he said this in 2003, at the height of Java's popularity.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I also seem to remember him saying (maybe on a Squeak mailing list or somewhere else... many moons ago when I followed this kind of thing) that Smalltalk 72 was his personal favourite Smalltalk.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of Newspeak:

"Why is it called Newspeak?

In Orwell's novel 1984, Newspeak was a language that grew smaller over time. Unlike the case of natural languages, for a programming language this is actually a good thing. It is an ideal we strive for - a shrinkable language."

[http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/](http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's refreshing to write software with these languages and not having to deal with standard OO.

<comment><USER9> > Both Rust and Go add some new and interesting ideas which, like languages > before them, will initially attract programmers, but will ultimately earn > both languages their share of derision, just as there are plenty of > detractors for C++ and Java today.

<comment><USER10> "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" \--Bjarne Stroustrup

<comment><USER11> That's a bad cop out. There are widely used languages like c# and python that cause very little whining.

<comment><USER12> Define "very little"...

<comment><USER13> Language feature-wise, I think python 3 has very little complained about it. The chief complaints about python I hear are anything to do with packaging software and multi threading the second of which will hopefully be fixed by 3.7.

Obviously, the 2 to 3 debacle is a constant source of grief, but I don't think that necessarily fits in with the subject at hand: language features that people contest over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lisp's CLOS has defclass for class defintions, but not your typical class that encapsulates data and code. You can do just fine with defstruct and make good use of CLOS. There are very few things that are new under the sun. :-]

<comment><USER15> DEFSTRCUT uses inheritance, too. single.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _If this restriction were to be encoded in the type system, GtkMenuShell > would not be a true subtype of GtkContainer as it cannot be used in every > place that a GtkContainer could be used — specifically it cannot be the > target of gtk_container_add(myButton)._

This is easily solvable by making the Container be a generic class "Container of <T extends Widget>". If the language supports such things of course, so not really talking about GTK specifically here. Then a Container<MenuItem> is not a subtype of Container<Widget> (so you're not violating LSP), yet you can still write code that operates on all kinds of containers without giving up any compile-time type checking.

I agree with a lot of the other things in the article, just this was not a particularly good example, because it's more about the shortcomings of a specific language than the shortcomings of subtype polymorphism in general.

</comment><comment><USER17> Structure embedding is not inheritance. It's just structures as first class types. This becomes clear as soon as you create a structure that contains two strings.

</comment><comment><USER18> Javascript's influence?

If so, the circle is now complete, as we are about to get classes in ES6

<comment><USER5> Classlessness in OO systems was around a long time before JS was even conceived of.

I recommend this book: [http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field- isbn=9...](http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field- isbn=9814021253)

"Prototype-Based Programming: Concepts, Languages and ApplicationsMay 14, 1999 by James Noble and Antero Taivalsaari"

The first OO language I learned was the embedded programming language of LambdaMOO ("MOO"), which was used to extend the virtual world. It was prototype based, with a single delegate called the parent subbing in. It still had inheritance, but a different kind.

<comment><USER18> _Classlessness in OO systems was around a long time before JS was even conceived of._

Oh I know that. It's just that being the most popular programing language in the world helps setting trends, even when you don't invent them.

<comment><USER5> I find it unfortunate that lack of classes is seen as some chief defect of JS. It's actually one of the things I like about it.

Messed up scoping rules, and bizarre type coercions, yes, ugly. But the object system I think is nice.

<comment><USER9> Well , not anymore since ES2015 has classes,class inheritance,super and co. Prototypical inheritance is bizarre, verbose and dangerous.

<comment><USER19> ES2015 doesn't have classes, it has a class statement which desugars to prototypal inheritance.

And as Self demonstrated long before Javascript even existed, prototypal inheritance is neither bizarre nor verbose let alone dangerous. As with most other things, Javascript just has a completely mangled version of it for (I can only assume) original implementation simplicity.

<comment><USER5> Yes I find it very unfortunate that 99% of people's exposure to 'prototype inheritance' is JS's rather inelegant form of it. Though like many things with JS if you are disciplined it can be used elegantly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Insulting source code (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454 <comment><USER2> It's amazing to how much effort some people will go, just to not be nice to a person.

</comment><comment><USER3> Alright, I guess I am off to grep a bunch of source code for colorful words.</comment>


Show HN: Say hello to Instatus, my first app - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
here's my first app on the App Store, a week end project I've made with a friend. I had the idea - questionable - and did the UI.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/instatus/id622077531?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2
(there's also the free version)
The concept it's pretty simple, share your thoughts on Instagram, only words on white background so it will seems that your words will float into your friends feed - I suggest to not use any filter! - got already some ideas for future upgrades.
I'm giving away 3 code to get the full version, if you want one, just ask!
Best, Filippo
p.s. This message wasn't intended to be a "spam" for my app. I'm just happy that my first app is online! Hope you'll understand and apologize if I'm wrong. <comment><USER2> Congrats on your first app! A minor suggestion: change the "What's up" text to something more inline with Instagram users. I could see them using it to share quotes and such, but posting generic statuses ("What's up") isn't really the use-case for Instagram.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Keiferski, thanks, yes your "vision" is true, I will think something for the next upgrade!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats.

One suggestion: Post an example of how a 'status' looks amongst a feed of other pics on instagram.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes, totally true your suggestion.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately you must now post an updated binary (and wait for review) to update your App Store screenshots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I know, that's boring. Btw I guess I'll wait some more little enhancements before sending the update</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exploring Bayesian Optimization - <AUTHOR> https://distill.pub/2020/bayesian-optimization/ <comment><USER2> Good job making all these accounts to congratulate yourself!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article and presentation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good work. Very informative!

</comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to the team

</comment><comment><USER6> Really helpful. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work. Keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great Visualizations

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazing visuals!

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice work..

</comment><comment><USER12> Great work!

</comment><comment><USER13> Great work</comment>


Ask HN: Continues documentation for Github? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an open-source developers on Github. I have many small and big repositories from one to one-hundred contributors in each project.
My main problem is with contributors and the projects is that when a new contributor come and ask me about the project, I have to describe whole project, methods, functions and... to him/her. That just waste my time.
I need a system that read my code from repository and build my code documentation (using document generating tools, Doxygen etc.) after each commit, so I have my updated document always and I can refer all new contributors to this document...
Does anyone know a system/solution like that? <comment><USER2> Which languages do you use? There's a wide variety of options: Doxygen for C, PHPDocumentor for PHP, literate tools for Ruby and Coffee, etc. If you describe your software using email, why can't you write the same docs on github using Markdown?

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually I use JavaScript and Python. I don't have problem with software, I know the correct tools for generating the doc from my code as well. But the problem is that HOW can I integrate it with Github so after each sync/push on the Github repository, document generated automatically from code also?

<comment><USER3> What about generating a wiki from the code documentation, and then uploading that to the Wiki section of your Git repository?

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be useful also. Do you know any method for doing that?

<comment><USER3> well a quick "goog" brings up this: <http://code.google.com/p/doxygen2gwiki/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Court Rejects Silicon Valley Hiring Settlement - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/technology/settlement-rejected-in-silicon-valley-hiring-case.html <comment><USER2> Apple makes an annual revenue of $2m/employee. To put that into perspective, Goldman Sachs makes about $1.2m/employee. Apple has a perfectly good mechanism at it's disposal for retaining staff - pay them more.

I hope they get taken to the cleaners over this.

<comment><USER3> What's even more telling is that engineers probably make up a smaller percentage of Apple's employees than bankers make up Goldman's employees (since the latter doesn't have much of a consumer retail presence). The engineers and designers at Apple are generating tremendous value for the company, but not getting compensated anywhere near the bankers at Goldman. People might not like banking as an industry, but it has the right approach to hiring. Instead of colluding to suppress wages or preserve relationships or whatever justification tech companies use, they write big bonus checks. That's how a free labor market is supposed to work.

<comment><USER4> You think this has to do more with cultural differences due to Goldman's historical roots as a partnership, or with structural differences in the banking vs technology industries?

<comment><USER5> And has this been true historically for the banking industry? Or did the workers claw more and more of the compensation over time?

<comment><USER4> Definitely true historically. Probably even more so. All the big banks used to be partnerships (like law firms) not public companies beholden to stockholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is the primary source:

[http://de.scribd.com/doc/236259646/Koh-Rejects-No-poach- Sett...](http://de.scribd.com/doc/236259646/Koh-Rejects-No-poach-Settlement)

</comment><comment><USER7> Major discussion of this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154730)</comment>


I'm Writing a Book on Security - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/04/im_writing_a_bo.html <comment><USER2> I sort of wish he'd write a new edition of Applied Cryptography. I learned so much from that book in the 90s, but so much has changed since then.

<comment><USER3> Schneier isn't involved in cryptography enough today to be able to write the kind of crypto book people would expect. For example he knows very little about ECC, and stream ciphers aren't really on his radar either. Also he said on his blog that he'll probably never write another crypto book.

What do you wish to know? Whatever it is, there are already high quality sources of information out there right now. If you say what you're interested in people can point out good guides.

<comment><USER4> If he's not the person, somebody else should do an update.

<comment><USER5> Daniel J. Bernstein would probably be a good candidate. Then again it looks like he has written a couple books already (disclaimer: no referral).

[http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%...](http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ADaniel%20J.%20Bernstein)

<comment><USER6> DJB's homepage: [http://cr.yp.to/djb.html](http://cr.yp.to/djb.html)

Wikipedia: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein)

Twitter: [https://mobile.twitter.com/hashbreaker?lang=en](https://mobile.twitter.com/hashbreaker?lang=en)

Verified Google Scholar: [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ToxxF5oAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ToxxF5oAAAAJ&hl=en)

Example Presentation: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bT4cKwBROno](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bT4cKwBROno)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This problem is quite similar to the GAI problem: the more automation we have, the greater damage an attack can have. The question is whether there is any way to limit the biggest attacks that can happen? I don't think, but I wish there would be a solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the GAI problem?

<comment><USER8> gai = general artificial intelligence

the gai problem = superhuman ai negatively affecting humanity

<comment><USER6> It's AGI, not GAI: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellige...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)

"AGI Problem" is bs, humanity is more of a threat to AI than AI will ever be to man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there is a whole new category of books on modern computing that is relatively empty and those with a knack for explaining important but challenging concepts should really go after the projects. Multi-core programming, security, and many other topics need good Dummy 101-style books for non-dummy professional developers who may not have had to do a lot of it before.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is Schneier still a practioner enough to do this? After all his VC-funded companies and being on boards, etc. he seems more like a guy at 10K feet than some researcher who's deep in the weeds and knows the nuances.

</comment><comment><USER11> You missed the main war for power.

[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/discussion/21278...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/discussion/21278/surveillance- is-power-the-information-advantage#latest)

<comment><USER12> That webpage won't load. did the ai war already start?</comment></comment>


Legofy – Python program to make an image to look as if it was created with Legos - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JuanPotato/Legofy <comment><USER2> That is not at all what I was expecting. I was thinking conversion of actual objects in the picture into blocks, i.e. like minecraft but with lego style blocks. Instead it looks like a bad impressionist style painting done on one of those flat lego pieces you use as the "ground" when making something with legos.

<comment><USER3> It's absolutely baffling how such a trivial little program is able to attract so much stars and attention. Seems like GitHub is turning into a kindergarten these days.

<comment><USER4> Come one, don't be that person. People love to bookmark things that are fun or interesting, regardless of whether they are 'trivial'. This is fun and/or interesting. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now pull [https://github.com/JuanPotato/Legofy/pull/19](https://github.com/JuanPotato/Legofy/pull/19) and write code to automatically put an order in for the needed bricks on lego.com to recreate the digital images as real life lego pictures :-)

<comment><USER6> I think the colors would need to be posterized a bit more (which would be a nice addition - make the actual colors match all known official Lego brick colors). 32 shades of green looks nice in the demo image, but it's probably not buildable.

<comment><USER7> That's exactly what's in the linked PR...

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

I wish there was a demo available on the web so I did not have to install it to try it out.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. And more example images. But neato none the less!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seeing "Legos" on the Internet has always annoyed me, even though it must be a decade and a half since I last even touched any LEGO bricks. Apparently the company doesn't want them called "Legos" either.[0]

[0][https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/502086477652959232](https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/502086477652959232)

Edit, further interesting discussion [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/legos- not-l...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/legos-not-lego)

<comment><USER11> Most people I know call tem Legos, with a few calling them Lego (as if mass uncountable object nouns --which seems weird) but yeah, I don't care much for their trademark protection technique (though I concede they may protect it), so I don't see the need to perpetuate their trademark crusade on their behalf and happily call them Legos.

<comment><USER12> To me it's not at all about trademark protection (I wouldn't write it in all- caps), it's just about how weird it sounds to make it a plural.

In Swedish (Lego is from Denmark, but our languages are pretty similar) it's exactly that, a mass uncountable object.

A bit like saying "this castle is made out of sands" when talking about a sand castle. It's grains of sands vs sand; pieces of Lego vs just Lego to me.

Of course this is all natural language and there is no right or wrong and so on, I just wanted to provide a perspective since it seemed like you interpreted the parent comment differently from how I did.

<comment><USER13> We'll see what the sands of time have to say about this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It may be a good moment to introduce you to Hexagonator ([http://josetomastocino.github.io/hexagonator/](http://josetomastocino.github.io/hexagonator/)), a simple experiment to turn images to hexagon-tiled compositions, within your browser!

</comment><comment><USER15> The README is really short, one or two more lines can make the life of those just learning python a bit better.

<comment><USER16> It's on GitHub. Don't complain, make a pull request! Or at least submit an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kudos to writing the converter - good exercise.

FYI, there are numerous such tools available on the web: [https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+to+lego+converter](https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+to+lego+converter)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does PIL use a linear colorspace for downscaling? I coudn't find it in their documentation. My intuition says that your sample image would look much better if it was downscaled in a linear colorspace, especially because of the thin bright lines disappear in the legofied image.

I recommend imageworsener for downscaling, its homepage links to many good articles about this topic too. AFAIK imagemagick can be tamed to use linear colorspace for downscaling, but it doesn't do it by default.

[http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/](http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Nifty! There's an Android App which does much the same thing - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixel.came...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixel.camera) \- also also you to convert GIFs.

</comment><comment><USER20> Needs an option for "lego resolution/scaling", i.e. 1x1 vs 2x2 vs 4x4 blocks per output pixel. For times when I want to make a more detailed (hence physically bigger) Legopic from, well, a pic.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like to create a similar program that uses simultaneous photograph and depth sensor data (e.g. from a Tango device, or Google Camera app) to make a 3D version.

</comment><comment><USER22> Pretty cool that it also works with animated gifs!

<comment><USER23> Surely these are just a set of images?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> made js clone: [http://codepen.io/yonax/full/MaXwqo](http://codepen.io/yonax/full/MaXwqo)

</comment><comment><USER25> if a line of blocks are all close to the same color, should erase the divisions (draw 1*X blocks)

like this it just seems like a simple imagemagick script</comment>


GNUnet 0.11.5 - <AUTHOR> https://gnunet.org/en/#gnunet-0.11.5-release <comment><USER2> Previous discussions include 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961018)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194553)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845435)

2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515519)

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly is GNUnet? It says it is supposed to replace the old internet stack, but that it also runs on top of it? It looks like it is some kind of research project, so do I just not have enough background information to understand what they are saying?

Can anyone ELI5 what GNUnet is and why I should care about it?

<comment><USER4> Here's a few things GNUnet replaces and why it's better:

Bittorrent is replaced by GNUnet "filesharing", it's trackerless, it provides a search function, users can adjust their level of anonymity for publishing, downloading, and searching.

DNS is replaced by "GNS", it covers the "decentralized" and "secure" points in Zooko's triangle, it a pet name system.

VPN is replaced by GNUnet VPN, which is just VPN over GNUnet so it can take advantage of the p2p network.

TCP/UDP/SPDY/QUIC is replaced by "cadet", takes advantage of the p2p network.

There's also a DHT.

And there's lots of other stuff that's in-progress.

<comment><USER5> We should maybe include a "GNUnet in 5 minutes or less" on the website. The old LEGO analogy is nice, and lynX did a great comparison here: [https://secushare.org/img/stack- comparison.png](https://secushare.org/img/stack-comparison.png) We don't really need the ISO OSI model here, but even this can be added, as we've already used it throughout the years to compare to the GNUnet stack.

<comment><USER5> I think somewhere we mentioned before that gnunet does not require ISPs and IXPs, but using them today is the de-facto default state.

<comment><USER6> May I draw your attention to my old comment here, as well as (more importantly), the entire thread of even older comments /it/ links to:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959687)

Which I shall also link to directly, but the above also has some relevance:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808)

See especially here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867532)

And here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867467)

<comment><USER5> Please give me a summary of what you intend to express here. I just don't have the time to cherry-pick the information here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found this 6-minute video from Oct 2018[0] which gives a great overview of GNUnet and compares it to the existing internet layers. It's pretty cool.

I wish they'd write a tutorial or something so that I know how to get started playing around with it.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdHfySAPas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CdHfySAPas)

<comment> some-username Tutorials:

Install: [https://gnunet.org/en/install.html](https://gnunet.org/en/install.html)

In a Nutshell usage (wip): [https://gnunet.org/en/use.html](https://gnunet.org/en/use.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Worth noting GNUnet has been around in at least name since 2001, back in the heady days when peer-to-peer was the new hotness. Was it the next Napster? Competition for JXTA? An evolution of Freenet? The reality is it wasn't very much of anything back then. I've got no idea how the project of today relates to the project of the same name 18 years ago.

<comment><USER5> Would this help? [https://docs.gnunet.org/#Introduction](https://docs.gnunet.org/#Introduction)

If anything could be made more clear, let us know as feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was a student in Google Summer of Code for the GNUnet project. I just want to say that Christian Grothoff (one of GNUNet leader) is a wonderful mentor. I own so much to him for many aspects of my technical and academic life. I highly recommend to anyone who have an interest in distributed systems/security to participate in this project.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like GNUnet. Very great project. However trying to figure out how to use it was a utter pain and no 'kiler app' for it exists. Its very researchy. But I really like everything they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Be aware that this project is still in an early alpha stage when it comes to > software – its not an easy task to rewrite the whole Internet!

</comment><comment><USER12> Anything that uses GNUnet ?

Can you use it by its self like i2p etc ?

<comment><USER13> It's sort of like an arbitrary mesh with lots of layers of plugins providing primitives like private key-based identities, a decentralized DNS alternative, block storage, tunnels, etc, and these combine to build more complex tools like filesharing, chat, etc.

It doesn't do onion/garlic routing, although that's planned to be added in the future. It is possible to make a service available over GNUnet like you can with i2p, and with the name system you can give it a convenient name and add it to your address book like in i2p. That being said, this service in particular offers no real anonymity at the moment, and is currently buggy. Filesharing is its most mature application in my opinion, it doesn't have any severe bugs I'm aware of and it is optionally anonymous (although the network only has a few hundred peers at the moment so its anonymity isn't as strong as it will be when more people use it).

<comment><USER5> A short addition: (1) various forms of onion routing are in active research. (1.1) see for example the "big data, little data, no such data" presentation of Christian Grothoff from 2017

(2) what we are still trying to solve here, mainly, is making it harder to know the path of communication. Today, if User Lora with Node A talks to User Charly on Node B, the data goes through N nodes. The N nodes between A and B are aware of (parts of) the path, but the communication remains encrypted (in very short terms explained).

(edit: no markup here)</comment></comment></comment>


Did wikipedia backpedal? - <AUTHOR>

well, for me wikipedia works fine now. I tried from chrome and firefox on linux, and from IE on windows. Am I doing something wrong, or did they back pff the whole thing. <comment><USER2> Nope, it works for me. Or it doesn't work for me. Er, the SOPA black out works for me. ;)

I have to be on the English version though. The other languages just have a blackout banner at the top. The black out won't work if you have JS disabled. Also, the main page which lists all the different language choices isn't blacked out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got JS enabled and im on the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> link, and I just get a banner on the top.

I also tried to click in to articles, and it works fine, and I'm in NYC.

The weird thing is, that on my mobile phone, if I request desktop version, I do get the blackout page. I don't get it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> :I</comment>


Tom Brady's Tips on Leadership - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/style/Major_Tom.shtml You always need to pay the price in advance for SUCCESS. <comment><USER2> those pictures are embarrassing. at least he doesn't have a yankees hat on.

<comment><USER3> leaders delegate who pop their collars for them

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Step 1. Cheat!

<comment><AUTHOR> Umm.. I am not sure if I would discredit all the Brady's accomplishments for the spying scandal.

<comment><USER5> I would. When there's a fine line between winning and losing, an edge received dishonestly (what the defense is going to do) can make all the difference.

Maybe that's why there are so many Microsoft bashers. Not because they're so big. Not because the software leaves much to be desired. Because they cheated so often when almost everyone else played by the rules. (Don't believe me? Send me your source code - if we like it, maybe we'll do a joint venture.)

<comment><USER6> please. Microsoft <i>is</i> hated because they're big and more profitable than God. Not that I love microsoft, but the sensational story of Bill Gates making it while he stole QDOS is largely one promulgated by the press.

<comment><USER5> He didn't steal QDOS and it wasn't promulgated by the press. Microsoft purchased the rights for it from Seattle Computer for $50,000. Well documented.

[http://www.google.com/search?as_q=qdos+50000&hl=en&n...](http://www.google.com/search?as_q=qdos+50000&hl=en&num=100&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&as_rights=&safe=images)

They are notorious for their strategy of backing out of deals with small independent software developers (like a lot of us) and having that code conveniently show up in the next version of their OS.

Here's one example: <http://judiciary.senate.gov/oldsite/jeffress.htm>

"At one point, we nearly sold our product to Microsoft. In January 1996, Microsoft invited us to its Redmond campus. It told us it was interested in acquiring Electronic TV Host and in hiring our employees. We understood that Microsoft would continue to offer our electronic television guide as a stand- alone computer program. We were excited. We shared our technology with Microsoft, and all our hard-earned insight about the industry. We even shared our business plan.

Then, negotiations broke down over price. Microsoft wanted to purchase us for less than half the price we offered. Microsoft told us that if we didn't sell at its price, Microsoft would compete directly against us. Of course, Microsoft could compete against us very effectively: it has the resources, and it has our hard-earned knowledge."

You can google hundreds of others yourself.

Whoever can stay in business while still paying their lawyers wins. Nice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>