Gamers propose punishing Blizzard by flooding it with GDPR requests - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/df0zx5/upset_about_blizzards_hk_ruling_heres_what_to_do <comment><USER3> I have a Hearthstone package on NPM which gets a few downloads everyday (also from China). Yesterday I removed everything in it and now module.exports is "光復香港 時代革命" instead of Hearthstone data.

[https://github.com/pdyck/hearthstone- db](https://github.com/pdyck/hearthstone-db)

<comment><USER4> I don't like using GitHub for politics.

<comment><USER5> How is this politics. This is a stand against a tyrant, this has nothing to do with political opinions. As a human being you have an obligation to stand against tyrants, nothing political about that.

<comment><USER6> I'd argue that this is completely and absolutely political. Just deciding that this guy is a tyrant is political.

<comment><USER7> Not doing anything is also political. Everything is political in social context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would also suggest cancelling your account, even if you intend on reopening it later. These kind of events are short lived; you need a _seemingly_ strong drive of people who want to cancel their accounts, even it is only for short while. Maximum impact is what the CEO and management can see _now_ and _en masse_.

<comment><USER9> Here's an easy way to send a GDPR erasure request: [https://opt- out.eu/?company=activision.com](https://opt-out.eu/?company=activision.com)

<comment><USER8> Can you do this even if you are not an EU resident?

<comment><USER10> Even if such requests are ultimately discarded, it would slightly increase the burden they have to process such requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really think cancelling accounts would be more effective.

A mass request like is being proposed would just make Blizzard script out a response.

<comment><USER12> I'm canceling my account! I'm a long time Blizz fan, and ex-WoW player, who still pays for my account for some sentimental reason.

<comment><USER13> I just resubscribed for classic. Cancelled this morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why don't people just end their subscriptions? A financial hit will get their attention.

<comment><USER15> The problem is all recent blizzard games require a net connection, so it's not terminating your subscription, but rather stop playing games that you have already paid for.

<comment><USER16> I think there are still pirate servers out there.

<comment><USER15> But that would be illegal - I was initially thinking of this as a joke in the replay, but then I realized under US law at least this _would_ be a crime.

To be clear: a company can arbitrarily break something you paid for by terminating your account, or just taking the servers online, that is completely legal. That company can then sue you if you connect to someone else's servers or bring up your own, because that is illegal copyright infringement or contractual violation (and possibly CFAA violation because idiocy).

<comment><USER17> If you paid for the game client(wow) it is not illegal to play in private servers

<comment><USER18> In the US, it is illegal (copyright infringement) to run a private server.

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million- server...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million-server- private-wow-server-op-loses-big/)

And given that, a lawyer could argue that paying to play on (or even donating to) a private server is contributory copyright infringement. I don't know if that has been tested in court.

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

But oftentimes you can get away with it; few game companies go after small private servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If they're actually flooded with requests, someone will likely create a quick set of scripts once and they'll handle it semi automatically soon. Blizzard is a software company, they know how to do that. I'm not sure it will impact them in any significant way.

<comment><USER20> It's never a quick script for a big company.

I'd hate to be the engineer who has to talk to all people and ask them about how they are processing user data, where are they storing logs, what happens to it.... it's the most boring work you can imagine for a programmer.

At the same time it's great that people can learn about these things.

<comment><USER21> I fully agree with your first statement - not so much with the second one: data hacking can be fun!

But yeah there are no quick scripts in corporate software, even though Blizzard claims to use agile development I doubt the effectiveness of it. I remember some small vital features/fixes in world of warcraft would be delayed to next expension because "they already had a road map in place" \- agile my ass lol.

<comment><USER20> Data hacking is fun.

But what about reading law, understanding if your company is compliant to the law or not, making those compliance changes, and knowing that if you made a mistake the company takes a huge financial responsibility?

My girlfriend was doing these things for her 2 person software company, and she was more scared about making a mistake than having fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I see that BlizzCon's coming up. Like last year I'm sure there'll be ample opportunity to give the company a bloody nose.

<comment><USER23> Let's see if people remember that long, or if this is just flash in the pan.

<comment><USER22> If South Park decide to make China a recurring plot point over the next month someone might.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I doubt this would actually work as intended, but it's fun to see novel approaches to weaponizing the legal system against large corporations like this.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am curious since people are saying that Blizzard will just write a script to deal with all the requests, I was wondering is there a list of European names with addresses and emails and such that the request they are sending is asking for? If such a list did exist then could not someone script something to automatically swamp Blizzard, or any company for that matter?

<comment><USER26> It's only legal to make a subject data request for your own data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm all for protesting this against blizzard. Stop playing their games, stop watching it on Twitch or YouTube, organize protests outside their offices and at blizzcon. But abusing GDPR seems like the wrong way to go about it, should cause virtually no impact to them financially or publicly and can only create arguments to limit GDPR protections

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't like that GDPR is being abused like this. It will only hurt GDPR and likely not hurt the intended target at all and if it works it will encourage more abuse which will lead to GDPR being softened.

My point is that we should use GDPR for what it was made for and use other means to put pressure on Blizzard.

</comment><comment><USER29> What about a flood of small claims court? In USA it may be more effective?

<comment><USER15> what crime or contract violation have they committed? My (NAL) understanding is you can't sue/take-to-small-claims a service or company because of what they did to _someone else_. Only victims of malfeasance can go to court - <USER2> class actions need a number of people who are directly effected to start the lawsuit, before subsequently extending the small scale case to a class action.

In this case modern T&Cs give companies carte blanche to dry service to anyone for any (or no) reason, so you'd have to demonstrate it was a bias against a protected classification - race, gender, maybe age - but even then, US courts have repeatedly stated that the constitution applies _only_ to US citizens.

<comment><USER30> You can sue anyone for anything.

<comment><USER31> Even filing small claims costs money, and the cases would promptly be thrown out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A modest proposal: what if companies advocated neither for left wing nor for right wing politics? They could, for example, produce a product instead.

<comment><USER32> Neutrality always favors the tyrant.

There is no apolitical position in a situation like this.

<comment><USER33> Not even "the tyrant", it always favors the status quo. I do agree that there is no apolitical position here, I would even argue that everything we do, or not do, is political to some level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> About time gamers did something useful.

<comment><USER35> Like protest against a fellow gamer being denied access to a gaming platform? Given your premise it's hard to see the logic.

<comment><USER36> He essentially lost his job for political speech.

See the NBA story from today where the NBA refused to censor a player for supporting HK. See why this isn't just about "a gamer"?

<comment><USER37> Political speech they agree with.

We crossed these sorts of lines long ago but it was political speech they disagreed with then, so it's only bad now. If everyone had been more inclined to defend peoples right to views they don't agree with then we wouldn't be here now.

Plenty here were fine with Stallman being fired over his personal views, now they're seeing the other side.

<comment><USER38> Your argument is people should be just as upset by things which don't upset them as they are by things which do upset them.

It's a weird argument.

<comment><USER37> It's not that they should be just as upset, it's that they don't have any sort of principled stance and are in the cheer squad when the same thing is happening to the other side. They cheer people losing jobs because they disagree with them and get upset that the same thing happens to people they agree with, at least at the group level.

Should you be able to lose your job, be cutoff from a private service, be banned from a project because of your public opinions? It's a yes/no question and modern society appears to be converging on yes. This is a consequence of that decision. An easy to see consequence that many of us warned about but got drowned out of the conversation being called racists, christian fundamentalist, pedophile apologists and everything else when we speak for their rights.

So congratulations to the people that cheered Stallmans firing, various de- platforming techniques, codes of conduct, etc, you've normalized this and given the CCP all the weapons they need to control speech in the west.

<comment><USER39> You don't seem to think it's possible to be for "deplatforming" someone, and against "deplatforming" someone else. That's an odd take. I fail to see how that's incompatible.

<comment><USER40> I believe the parent is saying that the claims to be "against deplatforming" are fake when the same people happily supported deplatforming before. It's just a tactic to say that deplatforming itself is bad, what they actually mean is "deplatforming someone I like is bad". Saying that is fine, pretending it's more than that is dishonest.

<comment><USER38> I don't believe I've seen anyone say that they're against deplatforming, while being for deplatforming.

What I think instead is that people who were against previous de-platforming (whatever their reason) want to use this situation, which is obviously egregious and cowardly on the part of Blizzard, to muddy the water.

<comment><USER40> Isn't that the same, only in reverse? "Oh you're not okay with deplatforming, you're only saying that because you disagree with the person deplatformed this time".

It's hard to prove the innermost opinions, but I do believe that there's a lot of outrage coming, among others, from people who are absolutely fine with deplatforming and consider it a valid tactic but don't consider that player a valid target. There definitely are others who are against deplatforming on principle. They are consistent, but I don't think all are. Of course, anybody can change their mind any time, and if this incident converts the proponents of deplatforming, then the next case will be very different.

<comment><USER38> I doubt this incident would sour people on the general idea of de-platforming, anymore than people would sour on the concept of prison if someone innocent was found incarcerated.

De-platforming is a consequence, and the debate is not "is de-platforming OK?" but "when is de-platforming OK?"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


History's largest child sacrifice response to devastating weather,archaeologists - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/06/historys-largest-child-sacrifice-was-response-devastating-weather-archaeologists-say/ <comment><USER2> The Carthaginians sacrificed quite a few more children, in support of their beliefs. In exchange for (hoped for) material success.

We do the same thing today with abortion, although the scale is much larger and the beliefs being supported are different. As a society, we believe it is more important to empower material success than to preserve life. At the base of it, sacrificing those who cannot defend themselves so the rest of us can achieve some material success has been with us for a long time.</comment>


At Home in the Liminal World - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/at-home-in-the-liminal-world-rp <comment><USER2> "We are redefining home"

Colonial anglo-american hegemony redefined home, the first two paragraphs start with how her brain had to be trained so she could remain relevant during the internet age and globalization. This is just a sad article about how people have to scramble after the capital that imperialism plucked from their motherlands, "liminal" a shitty euphemism for "unstable" or "my village's way of life wasn't efficient enough for multinational supply chains".</comment>


Official Launch "No Stress Booking" – blocks stressing messages on booking sites - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, My name is Assaf, and several months ago I've built a Chrome extension that hides all the dark patterns and behavioral manipulative messages that litter the experience of searching and booking. I called it "No Stress Booking" since that's what it does :)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress-booking/kkfmoaflbacidmgmkddkhjfdepckmggg
It basically started as a tool for myself, while using Booking.com. The red blinking messages were just too much for me, so I hid them. And then moved to another site. And then I've sent it to my friends, and it got some nice attention all around. Today it has around 1700 Weekly active users with a tremendous 5 stars score in the chrome web store (almost 200 voters.)
The extension is pretty straight forward. When you're visiting a site that uses such techniques, you'll see a nice guy on a hammock on the bottom left side of the screen. Clicking on it, and it will make all of the messages disappear. I also need to say that every message is specifically selected. there's no "one rule for all". There's no "remove all the red boxes" mechanism. I simply play with the platform, letting it show me all the big cannons so I can kill them one by one. As for now, the extension supports Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, Viagogo, Hotels.com, Kayak, OneTravel, and others and I'm willing to add more based on users feedback, so if you know more annoying sites like Booking.com - let me know :)
The extension does not track, store, collect or do any shit on the site, except hiding these messages.
I would love to hear your thought and inputs or even more sites that should be supported.
Thanks Assaf <comment><AUTHOR> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress- booking/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress- booking/kkfmoaflbacidmgmkddkhjfdepckmggg)</comment>


The $35 Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/the-35-tablet/ <comment><USER2> Similar articles for reference:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1544064>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543328>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540120> <\- This one has lots of comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540494>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541197>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541514> <\- This one has a few comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542275>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542557></comment>


IPFS is the Distributed Web - <AUTHOR> http://ipfs.io <comment> d--b I have a truly naive question about the distributed web: what makes the supporters of it think it will be any different from the original web. I mean, isn't it likely that at some point, there will be the need for a centralized search engine for it? Isn't it unavoidable that big companies like facebook runs their own non-distributed subnetwork, so that it can deliver standard functionality to all its users? The original web IS distributed already, isn't it? It's just that organically, the way people use it has become a lot more centralized, no? Or am I missing the main argument for a distributed architecture?

<comment><USER2> The difference is IPFS (or similar) would distribute _content_. Currently communication is distributed, but content is not. IPFS is like https, but where every page is a bittorrent. There are challenges for security in distributing services and monetization. However, the key is that content would be distributed. YouTube probably would not switch to ipfs, but DNS (what was targeted recently) would make sense. A DNS host list should be more distributed. Even with DNS there is a dynamic content challenge. When a DNS entry changes, it would still need to propagate.

This brings it back to a distributed communication problem. If you could distribute content more consistently and 100,000 computers could step in as dns providers _with authentic data_ rather than concentrating dns at dyn or Google it would help. That will still require protocol updates so that the fail over uses local content. Really ipfs and distributed content could be a component to help with distribution. It definitely isn't a complete solution alone (yet -- there is a push to make it the solution).

<comment><USER3> With the web going more mobile with less storage space. Why would anyone would want to be a node in such a network where you have to cache content for others.

<comment><USER4> Well apart from battery, If I was an ISP, I´d like it if a Youtube movie would flow from one persons mobile to the hotspot of the train said person is sitting on and on towards another person on the train. This scenario would require significantly less bandwidth overall. Same goes for neighbors accessing the same information. And this can be extrapolated to many situations.

The IPFS powered internet would perhaps lead to more uploads but it would scale significantly better and will be cheaper to maintain. Hence cost can also go down for end users/consumers.

<comment><USER5> > Well apart from battery,

... and that's pretty much the deal killer for this on mobile, even ignoring everything else.

> If I was an ISP, I´d like it if a Youtube movie

... except you are not allowed to download videos from YouTube or most (if not all) the popular video content services.

> a Youtube movie would flow from one persons mobile to the hotspot of the > train said person is sitting on and on towards another person on the train.

This would only work as long as person A is running IPFS, connected to the hotspot and has any cached content somebody else is concurrently interested in. The hotspot is _very_ unlikely to run IPFS _and_ to have any storage, so cache hit ratios would not only be low they would be dependent on person A's transit schedule.

> This scenario would require significantly less bandwidth overall.

No, the same amount of bandwidth would be consumed, but perhaps over a cheaper radio bearer.

> The IPFS powered internet would perhaps lead to more uploads but it would > scale significantly better and will be cheaper to maintain.

Somehow I doubt that. Total costs would most likely go up, but they would perhaps be more spread out.

> Hence cost can also go down for end users/consumers.

Consumers don't spend anything for accessing content on the Internet, so I really doubt there are any cost savings to be had.

<comment><USER4> > ... and that's pretty much the deal killer for this on mobile, even ignoring > everything else.

It is, for now, indeed.

> Except you are not allowed to download videos from YouTube

I think youtube would be interested in some load balancing if they could keep the income from commercials. Wait, what, there wouldn't be a need for YouTube. We'd only need a way to pay content creators build into the system (Ethereum coupling somehow?? I'm not sure, can views be tracked in IPFS?).

> This scenario would require significantly less bandwidth overall.

The same amount of bits are pumped around but they have to cover significantly less physical distance and hubs. This reduces bandwidth.

> Somehow I doubt that. Total costs would most likely go up, but they would > perhaps be more spread out.

Me pumping bits from my neighbor's house to mine instead of us both via the backbone from some server in a central location requires less (expensive) infrastructure between me and that central location.

> Consumers don't spend anything for accessing content on the Internet

indirectly they (we) pay for the copper and the fiber.

<comment><USER5> > I think youtube would be interested in some load balancing if they could > keep the income from commercials.

Firstly, it's not up to Google. Secondly, how would that even work?

> Wait, what, there wouldn't be a need for YouTube.

Yes, there would. YouTube isn't the solution to a technical problem.

> We'd only need a way to pay content creators build into the system

Why?

That's also a pretty big "only".

> The same amount of bits are pumped around but they have to cover > significantly less physical distance and hubs. This reduces bandwidth

No, it doesn't. What it reduces is bitmiles. Which may or may not be significant. Mostly not, but it may have some significant if we can lower the usage of some scarce and expensive radio bearer.

> Me pumping bits from my neighbor's house to mine instead of us both via the > backbone from some server in a central location requires less (expensive) > infrastructure between me and that central location.

Not really. You are still going to need that infrastucture, so no cost savings.

> indirectly they (we) pay for the copper and the fiber.

So we do, but using IPFS isn't going to result in us getting a check in the mail. Costs are still zero and savings likewise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem.

That the current web is centralized has little to do with its technical design, and everything to do with economic and structural incentives that have made it that way.

It's tempting to say "start afresh", but we'll just be trading our current problems for a new set of problems IPFS introduces. It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved.

I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got, in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it.

<comment><USER7> > I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and > political problem.

I'm so lost at this assertion. How is this a social / political problem?

IPFS is not permanent hosting. It is not an attempt to take power away from others and distribute it to the masses. It is purely a technical problem, which i think is objectively true.

I have a feeling that you believe IPFS is partially designed to subvert governments/etc. And to an extent, that may be _possible_ , but it is being built with DMCA's in mind. IPFS wants to allow governments / copyright holders to take content down from the network. It is not trying to become a pirate haven. Why? Well, mainly because piracy inhibits adoption. There may not be a way to DMCA _currently_ (i haven't checked in months), but there are Github issue(s) on it. The creators don't want to see IPFS blocked in countries because it can permanently host illegal content. Which makes a ton of sense.

The problem IPFS is trying to solve, as i see it, is purely technical. As advertised in pretty much every pitch i've seen for this technology, we are simply scaling too fast in storage and not fast enough in bandwidth. It appears impossible to handle the infrastructure load of files we are creating. IPFS solves this by automatically pulling content as locally as possible, reducing network overhead. Furthermore, it means that a DDOS/viral/etc of a central resource will not kill it. It's safely and mostly permanently (barring DMCA/etc requests) available.

So with that said, what political and social problem do you see IPFS trying to solve? I don't see any.

<comment><USER8> From the article:

"The Internet has been one of the great equalizers in human history and a real accelerator of innovation. But the increasing consolidation of control is a threat to that.

"IPFS remains true to the original vision of the open and flat web, but delivers the technology which makes that vision a reality."

This presents IPFS as the technological cure for the "consolidation of control" that threatens the Internet.

These are not purely technical problems.

<comment><USER7> That is unfortunate, because i have yet to see how IPFS is even remotely that. Especially since it wants to comply with DMCAs and etc.

The technology and the marketing seem at odds, to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So I've been thinking about creating a basic site running on IPFS and here's my dillema. The hash of each page is a sha256 of the contents right? So lets say you have 3 pages A, B and C, A links to B, B links to C, C links to A. How do you create all 3 pages with correct links to each other?

When you create page A you have to have the SHA of page B, but then to create page B you have to have the SHA of page C and finally to create it you need the SHA of page A. You get into this cyclical loop where you can't generate any page and link to others. What is the solution to this problem?

<comment><USER10> Well, IPFS allows you to upload trees of files to a single IPFS node. So you just create three webpages, put them into a single folder and use `ipfs add` on this folder. Your webpages will be available with relative links, being exposed at addresses like `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_a.html` and `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_b.html`.

Under the hood those pages will be standalone ipfs Duke nodes with separate hash addresses, and your root folder will be actually a set of pointers to those hash addresses — but you don't need to keep that in mind when uploading a site.

<comment><USER10> One can also study ipfs project websites (ipfs.io, dist.ipfs.io and so on). Those are just static bunches of files (html and resources) hosted in ipfs and served with a standard ipfs gateway (located on gateway.ipfs.io address). Gateway just looks up _dnslink TXT records for corresponding domains, and serves files from the ipfs hash address specified there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        > Each network node stores only content it is interested in [...]

Isn't that the issue here? Storing data that will maybe be there later isn't really storing data. People want to publish something that must always be available, so why inject data into the IPFS network and hope it will be there in a year, rather than set up a $10/yr VPS?

        > With video delivery, a P2P approach could save 60% in bandwidth costs.

In my opinion, this may be true, but total costs will be greater. P2P solutions are awesome because they are resilient, not because they are cheaper. Distributing pirated movies by dumping them on public FTP servers is much cheaper than BitTorrent. BitTorrent appeared because the centralized method was not resilient enough against adversaries, not because it was cheaper (quite the contrary).

<comment><USER12> If I get it right, the idea is that if you want to make sure it's there one year later, you set up your own server and host the files on your own. IPFS just allows others to distribute a mirror of the files.

<comment><USER11> Why would nodes in the IPFS network voluntarily act as a load balancer for my VPS? Usually I have to pay for load balancing, so I'm a bit suspicious when someone claims I can get it for free from IPFS.

<comment><USER12> There is a lot of (mostly free) content that people are willing to distribute freely.

Take Wikipedia for example, even though it's changing very fast, I imagine a huge portion of it is static. If the latest version of each page was served via IPFS, somebody could setup a local mirror and people nearby would automatically use that.

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree with the fact that IPFS has value. I just don't like the way it's presented as a generic transport protocol that's "superior" to HTTP.

<comment><USER13> Just take a look at old torrents of obscure stuff and you'll see just how resilient bit torrent is. (it isn't)

<comment><USER14> It's more resilliant than HTTP: When you grab a torrent, you can download from any seeder. With HTTP, the host is specified, so if that host goes down, good luck.

In either case, if all the hosts go down and you didn't mirror it, you're screwed. However, IPFS makes it easier to mirror things.

<comment><USER15> While this sounds like it "should" be true. I think managing that will turn into something of a nightmare. IPFS is making awesome inroads into achieving that, but its not clear of the benefit over something like say freenet (other than freenet is very slow because it prefers privacy and resilience over speed).

I can see it being "really" useful as a backbone for something like Open Cobalt - [http://www.opencobalt.net/](http://www.opencobalt.net/) And I'm really looking forward to seeing that mature.

But the last time Open Cobalt seems to have been updated is 2010 - that's quite some time ago.

I wonder if it's being held up by patent trolls, but really all of them feels like more like a solution looking for a problem. That can take a very very long time to mature. Which is a shame.

<comment><USER14> Alpha 22 was actually released just last year, and it's still actively being worked on AFAIK. It's just that the website hasn't been updated, save for the downloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I try to host a javascript application that uses LocalStorage for saving data, it would be visible to any other ipfs JavaScript application because they all exist under the same domain, right? Have you thought about having the URLs be something like ipfs://<hash>/index.html instead of [http://local](http://local) host/<hash>/index.html so browsers keep the LocalStorage for each ipfs hash separated?

<comment><USER17> We're planning to use Same-origin policy to prevent this. It was first brought up here: [https://github.com/ipfs/go- ipfs/issues/651](https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/651)

You can read more about same-origin policy here: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy)

<comment><USER18> Putting a hash in the hostname/domain would also be using same-origin policy. The issue you linked refers to using suborigins, which seems to still be a draft proposal with no implementer buy-in outside of Chromium [1].

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you want to tamper with content on the web, the idea that content is fingerprinted in IPFS is a huge deal.

IPNS (the name service) then becomes the vulnerability, but that is also distributed.

<comment><USER20> Well, as I understood IPNS is a bit limited; it only has one resource and there is only one authority that can change content, the node in this case.

It does protect against DDOS, since old content remains visible and online but if the private key is leaked or the node is malicious, it has exactly 0 protection.

Even worse, if the private key is stolen, you can't do much about it unless you have DNS setup... which brings you back to centralized.

<comment><USER21> IPNS is bug Proof of Concept that mutable content is possible in IPFS, there is long running goal of InterPlanetary Record System that would include much more complex validity schemes including revokeation.

<comment><USER21> s/bug/big/ in my previous comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do hosting providers fit in here, if at all? E.g., if I want to host a website on IPFS, do I publish it from my own machine and then wait a healthy amount of time for the content to be absorbed by the ether, or is there some way I can encourage other nodes to pick it up without requiring end-users to actively seek out my fresh material?

<comment><USER23> It seems that the role of a hosting provider could be: I pay you <amount> per month to fetch <hash> or <name> on <N> peers with bandwidth <bandwidth>.

Of course, the economics are quite different. In the normal web, you need to add more resources when a page becomes more popular. In a distributed web, more resources are a side-effect of a page becoming more popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Suppose I'm poking around IPFS and unintentionally download some unauthorized copyrighted content. Is my computer going to automatically start sharing this content, exposing me and my ISP to legal action?

Or if there is a way to prevent sharing particular content that I've accessed, what's to stop me from leeching everything and never sharing anything?

(Edit: Ah, now I see "BitSwap" as possibly addressing my second question, but I'm still concerned about the first.)

<comment><USER14> For #1, yes. For #2, also yes, and there's nothing to stop you from leeching save the goodness of your heart and your own personal laziness.

<comment><USER24> Since it's impossible to know who owns, claims to own, or has licensed any particular content, #1 is a fatal flaw unless users can officially receive immunity (which seems doubtful). Otherwise we'll have a situation like speeding on the highway, where "everyone does it" at the risk of a random ticket, but in this case the fines are thousands to millions of dollars.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how it's bad: the hosting user receives no credit, and local mirroring keeps retrieval speeds high. Your users effectively become a giant CDN for you. Who would sue?

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't sue anyone. But I can watch music videos on YouTube without contacting all of the the relevant rights holders to ensure both the uploader and YouTube have permission to show me the video. On a distributed file share lacking anonymity and/or immunity, I have to ensure that _I_ have those rights before viewing (thus distributing) any content.

Immunity is not likely to happen, as it would amount to granting redistribution rights to anyone who downloads a piece of content. So the political solution is out. Anonymity is a requirement.

That's not to say IPFS is useless. It's just not going to "replace HTTP" or any significant part of the web as long as it's possible to see who's sharing what. Or if it does, the sharks will feed.

<comment><USER14> No, that doesn't add up: You only host data that's already available on a public network, pretty much by definition. If the rights distributor didn'f want it to be globally accessible, they wouldn't have put it up on IPFS.

<comment><USER24> I'm happy to play the naivete card when it comes to downloading. (If the producers didn't want me watching this CAM footage of a new release on YouTube, they wouldn't have uploaded it, wink wink.) I'm a bit more cautious when it comes to uploading.

<comment><USER14> But you're not uploading something that hasn't been, you're mirroring something that's already up.

<comment><USER5> You won't have any luck with that argument in court.

If you doubt me, see all verdicts for infringement when bitorrenting.

<comment><USER14> But this is very different: This is more like the original copyright holder putting something on BitTorrent, inviting people to download it freely, and them suing anybody who seeds it: By putting the data on a P2P protocol, you've kind of implicitly stated that you're okay with people seeding, or whatever the local terminology for the same is.

<comment><USER5> Um, no.

You have no guarantees that the content put up via IPFS is by the original copyright owner.

Thus immediately after you receive the infringing content over IPFS and start seeding it, you are infringing on the copyright owners rights. You have no recourse and no legal defenses to protect you.

<comment><USER14> Well, then, as soon as you receive notification, you can immediately stop hosting the data: it's like a DMCA takedown, but you have to send it to way more people.

<comment><USER5> Too late. Once you've retrieved content via IPFS, you are already infringing. You can still be sued, waiting for a DMCA notice won't save you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As a devops guy, I sort of think ipfs seems more useful as a private, backend sort of solution where you trust all the nodes. I'm sort of vaguely imagining it running as a shared file system in AWS, running on docker containers.

<comment><USER26> > where you trust all the nodes

Why do you think that's needed? Of course if majority of nodes cheated and said "sure, I've got that file" and send you random garbage instead so you have to retry, that would be bad. But if majority are running proper implementation, you don't really need to trust anyone.

<comment><USER21> You need just one node to send you the right data. No need for the majority.

<comment><USER26> You need a reasonable number of nodes. Likely a large majority. Otherwise you'll just keep redownloading garbage data and discarding it. And likely doing it slower than bad nodes can leave/rejoin the network with new ips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Beware anyone on a metered connection - in 20 or so minutes, the ipfs daemon has used 3 gigabytes of bandwidth.

<comment><USER28> Did this useable continue indefinitely? I would hope that there was a socket throttling option.

<comment><USER27> Frustratingly I couldn't reproduce this and the bandwidth-using part of the IPFS daemon appears to be completely opaque - i.e. I had no clue what was using all the bandwidth (other than the fact there were 200+ connections).

No visibility into an app means it's unlikely to stay on my system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ive been using IPFS to port and make serverless webapps.

[http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGU...](http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGUAgYW2t/)

<comment><USER30> what is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does IPFS come with some kind of content filter or firewall to protect its users?

When child porn inevitably shows up, how do you protect yourself from accidentally downloading _and_ then seeding it?

<comment><USER31> By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;)

In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide to.

<comment><USER5> > By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;)

You seem to have glanced over the qualifier I used: accidentally.

Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it?

Once you have downloaded it you have committed a crime. There are no take backs with strict liability crimes and IPFS provides no anonymity, so there is a record of you downloading _and_ seeding child porn.

> In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide > to.

Really?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that immediately once you retrieve a hash via IPFS, you cache it and start seeding it.

<comment><USER32> > Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child > porn before you retrieve it?

Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it?

> seeding

[https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn](https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn)

<comment><USER33> > Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child > porn before you retrieve it?

As clueless404 stated, on the http web you don't automatically seed the content that you accidentally retrieved. On IPFS you're distributing it.

As an example, another posted here provided an IPFS link to resources, some of which are a copyright violation in some regions. In IPFS you can discover the nodes that are seeding it:

        $ ipfs dht findprovs ...contenthash...
        QmfWQHVazH6so9p27z27rr8TJSdBFGpH7hunDcaZ1EAQ2c
        ...

These are the node id's sharing the content. You can find all the IP addresses published by the nodes, including private ones:

        $ ipfs id ...nodehash...
        {
          ...,
          "Addresses" : [
            "/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/4001/ipfs/...hash...",
    	"/ip4/192.168.1.5/tcp/4001/ipfs/...hash...",
    	"/ip4/172.17.0.1/tcp/4001/ipfs/...hash...",
    	"/ip4/188.8.131.52/tcp/4001/ipfs/...hash..."
          ],
          ...
        }

If your node accidentally retrieved a hash containing content that was illegal or otherwise bad your physical IP is easily discoverable.

A database of bad hashes is easily calculated given existing content using:

        $ ips add -n foo.mp4
        added ...hash... foo.mp4

This generates a hash for a file without uploading it to IPFS. You can then use findprov to see if anyone is sharing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting, I have two questions:

Can you create your private ipfs network? (accessible by anyone, upload only me)

If you upload sensitive material to the global ipfs network, what do you think will happen?

<comment><USER17> Private networks is something that we're working on (track it here: [https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146](https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146)) but it would be private-private, only access+upload between your nodes. "Accessible by anyone - upload only by you" is not gonna be supported since it doesn't really make sense. If someone has a hash of a file, they can rehost it because they can access it. In IPFS you're not locating files based on WHERE they are but their name rather.

<comment><USER35> > Private networks is something that we're working on

Pretty sure you can already do it by setting up your a node on _e.g._ a Digitalocean droplet, removing _all_ bootstrap nodes from its config file, and having everyone on the network replace the bootstrap node addresses in their config file with your server's address. Granted that's not a very user- friendly way to do it, but when I tried it it seemed to work.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, there is two things that is missing for it to be good. First is encryption of content in case something happens to leave the network and secondly rejecting the connections from anyone who is not supposed to connect to you.

With your current setup, if/when a node gets connected to someone else (maybe someone connects directly to you), your entire network will connect from that, since the connections will be shared with the peers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What problem does IPFS actually solve?

<comment><USER36> Content distribution. Many people however don't even realise this is a problem, because they have been spoiled by free-as-beer services provided by Google, CloudFlare, Github and various other companies.

<comment><USER5> Just exactly how does IPFS solve content distribution?

You still have to serve the content from a server, since you cannot depend on the kindness of strangers to persist your content.

<comment><USER37> The idea is that some fraction of users will be configured to reshare content, which helps distribution for popular content scale. This seems to work in practice for bittorrent.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but only for suitably popular content, as all the dead torrents will testify. This doesn't make IPFS very appealing to Joe Blow, content maker unextraordinaire.

<comment><USER31> Joe Blow would _just_ need to find some fans who think that keeping his content available for others is worth their while.

I believe this could work amazingly well for netlabels and indie bands.

<comment><USER5> Regardless of whether I think this is a bit of a far fetched use case or not, this really does nothing for Joe Blow and his content distribution needs.

But let's roll with it anyway. How does IPFS solve this problem, and more specifically how does IPFS solve this problem any better than just publishing a torrent of Joe Blows collected ramblings?

<comment><USER31> Sorry, I don't really care about your theoretical questions. IPFS is nice and fun technology. If you don't want to participate, you don't have to.

<comment><USER5> > theoretical

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Asking what problem a technology solves is a very _practical_ question. Countering with "IPFS is a nice and fun technology", is the very opposite, i.e. alluding to that there might be some _theoretical_ benefits to it, but that your mainly into it for gits and shiggles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's an interesting emphasis on developing nations not engaging with the Internet, but I think that might be partially cultural too. What tools have we given the developing world to really engage with the internet? The easy-to-use publishing platform often require an email and usually a real name. Both of these things may be unavailable to countries where being connected to thoughts posted online could be dangerous.

Most content is not written in simple english, and there's just not much incentive for somebody who may not know how to think critically/complexly (due to lack of western education) to engage with the internet.

I think distributed web is an interesting idea, and that IPFS really lists out some issues with the internet that we'd all win in solving, but I think maybe some of these, like developing nation web access, are solvable with current tech, and more culturally based solutions

<comment><USER39> I think the better solutions come from within the society, rather than being imposed from without (Cuba's flash-drive sneakernet). An outsider might provide the gross implementation, but it should be up to the locals to work out the messy details, even if it means they don't connect to the net, as a whole, on a regular basis. It's their lives on the line, they're going to have the best ideas on how to preserve them. An outsider is going to be, at best, somewhat ill-informed and at worst, inimical to the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So I've got a (let's say) WordPress blog. Where's the "here's how to get your existing content on IPFS in less than an hour" guide?

<comment><USER41> I think it'd have to be saved statically. Which actually makes this question interesting: How do you store comments on an IPFS site? Constantly updating a single file on IPFS?

<comment><USER42> Interesting question. I know nothing about IPFS other than what I've read in the past five minutes on Wikipedia, but:

1\. HTML wants badly for a nested relational document format. Essentially tin or mutt's "in reply to" and "references" headers.

2\. A comments stream is a) a parent document to which b) multiple child documents, themselves possibly having c) parent-child relationships, d) are associated. Rather than thinking of "threaded discussion == single document" think "threaded discussion == a set of related documents".

That gives the option of having a discussion "occurring" across multiple sites, with some form of trust, whitelist, blacklist, or other mechanisms for reflecting what you do or don't include in the discussion. Individual comments, as their own docs, could also be freestanding instances.

Finding children from the parent becomes an interesting question.

There's also the matter of versioning a document. Tying a git-like capability to this could be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some content here to play with: [0]

Interestingly some links to copyrighted material end in ¨Unavailable for Legal Reasons¨ however, running the daemon and issuing an ¨ipfs get hash¨ the download does start.

[0] [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY2PDxNxG/ipfs_links.html)

<comment><USER27> The "unavailable for legal reasons" message appears to be issued by the ipfs.io gateway - IMO perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER4> Sure but it´s not really unavailable I mean.

<comment><USER43> Yep, but ipfs.io refuses to distribute it. Doesn't mean other IPFS hosts necessarily do

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hey I have a related question: so with IPFS we all host bits of the internet, and with IPv6 our machines are all directly world-accessible, right? So how do we prevent this from turning into a huge pwn-fest? If routers aren't doing NAT and a bit of firewalling along with that, would each machine be completely responsible for its own security?

<comment><USER45> Home routers are doing IPv6 firewalling by default, no need for NAT. NAT is strictly inferior to firewalling.

(Of course you shouldn't put things on your internet-connected network that need the firewall, just look at it as a porous defense-in-depth element, just like with IPv4)

<comment><USER46> Does that mean they are assigning random IPv6 addresses to computers on the network for each peer or connection and maintaining a mapping in memory?

<comment><USER26> Normal static address is assigned. Whether it comes from the external range or from the link-local range doesn't really matter. You could potentially randomise the source at the exit to prevent identification of your hosts, but you don't have to.

For most practical cases just imagine you're getting a big ipv4 range. Whatever you can do with it - you can do the same with ipv6. NAT, no NAT, filtering, static or dynamic assignment.

<comment><USER46> That's what I'm asking. IPv6 feels like a regressiin over NATv4 because it can leak which internal device made a request. Is there a standard way to randomize addresses that works with ofd-the-shelf router firmware. Also, are link-local IPv6 leaking MAC addresses?

<comment><USER45> Yes, there is a standard since about 10 years ago. It's not dependent on your router firmware, in accordance with IP's end-to-end design philosophy (keep the network dumb, and hosts smart). Here's some links to get you started:

[https://slaptijack.com/networking/osx-disable- ipv6-address-p...](https://slaptijack.com/networking/osx-disable-ipv6-address- privacy.html)

[http://andatche.com/blog/2012/02/disabling- rfc4941-ipv6-priv...](http://andatche.com/blog/2012/02/disabling- rfc4941-ipv6-privacy-extensions-in-windows/)

As for link-local IPv6 addresses, those aren't even accepted by the socket API[1] in place of normal routable addresses. They're only used for low level things like neighbour discovery (IPv6 equivalent of ARP) and apps that go out of their way to use them. They aren't routable outside your L2 segment.

[1] as in:

       $ telnet fe80::something:something:42
       Trying fe80::something:something:42...
       telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Invalid argument

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This sounds like distributed Geocities, where you can have any content you like so long as it's static, or at least, changes in iterations of static files like a HTML-generator blog.

If you do anything that needs a central server, suddenly its advantages vanish. I could imagine Wikipedia using this; I couldn't imagine gmail doing so.

<comment><USER8> Most of the pages on the Web are still static HTML or something close to it, though.

<comment><USER47> Maybe but very few of them can do their job with _only_ static HTML.

<comment><USER8> I would say most of the articles linked to on HN could be static HTML pages. How practical HN itself would be on IPFS seems less clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What I'd personally like to see is built in monetisation such that hosting and serving other peoples pages becomes a socialised cost and benefit although one would guess that such as feature would have to be deeply designed into the system itself, and cannot be added as an after-thought?

</comment><comment><USER49> I really hope something like this takes off.

Connecting and indexing documents has been the challenge of a few internet generations. Creating a document at a point of filing is a subtle but potentially large shift.

Hopefully this lands on homebrew soon to aid it's growth.

</comment><comment><USER28> I heard about IPFS at the Decentralized Web Conference in SF last spring. It sounded promising, long term. Anyone here using it right now? What are the costs for running it on a VPS, for example, bandwidth, storage, and CPU load?

</comment><comment><USER50> ipfs is fantastic, but it is half the solution. We also need a distributed p2p application framework, with which nodes can securely communicate and allow building distributed apps, like search.

We can think differently with ipfs. Traditional web allows everyone to publish content _somewhere_ , hoping that search engines will index it.

With ipfs, the same file (with the same content) is only indexed/stored once and then you reference the hash to get to the content.

This fact changes the problem of search.

Take all the world's movies. With ipfs + p2p network, you only need _one_ back end in the form of a distributed search index, which can index all the movies in the world.

Same with the world's music. You only need _one_ back end which can index all the music.

The index can be as simple as {"movie title": [sha256]}, where the array contains the hashes of different 'encodings' of the same content (eg. 'dvd rip', 'blue ray' or 'mp3').

Content can be indexed by all kinds of properties of course and it can grow organically over time to include more and more details.

With ipfs plus the p2p network we'll build 'apps', not 'pages'. People can have a list of 'apps' running on their machines - which are node instances in various distributed applications, sharing the same p2p network and using ipfs as storage.

Apps can have 'backend' and 'front end' parts - the back end is the part which participates in the p2p network, while the 'front end' provides a human interface to the back end, were users can search/browse/view the content.

Apps are distributed as git repositories stored in ipfs, while the 'core' running on the user's machine compiles the sources (inside a build vm) and loads the resulting binaries into containers running in virtual machines.

This would make it easy for devs to write and publish new distributed apps, making the network totally decentralised and virtually unstoppable.

Ps. If you feel that this insanity could work, then I'd love to discuss it in more depth - email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER20> IPFS is a pretty nice project, but it's pretty slow at times.

<comment><USER17> I work with IPFS so it would be very handy to know what you feel is slow exactly. We're working our hardest to make it as fast as possible but sometimes we fall through, so more information so we can fix it would be wonderful!

<comment><USER20> Most "slowness" is related to content that is either relatively fresh on the network or or rare content.

If my node is the only one seeding the file, accessing it via gateway.ipfs.io is slow but it's pretty obvious why; I'm the only provider.

So while for very public content IPFS is rather fast, if you share a couple files with a few friends, it's a bit slower.

Of course, this all depends on upload/download speeds, mine aren't stellar in both directions either.

Plus I'm rather certain that my ISP is throttling any kind of P2P traffic.

<comment><USER17> Ah, I understand. Yeah, it's not much we can do about that but in the future it can be expected that you'll be able to use some sort of service to help you with the initial seeding of the content.

So instead of you sharing a file from your home connection and five friends have to share that, you'll share your file with some hosting provider and once they have the file, you'll just send the same hash to your friends and you'll have at least 2 nodes providing the file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Who exactly runs these nodes that store data?

<comment><USER52> Everybody that pins it or retrieved the file from someone else (second one to maximum cache size that is configurable). Files and folders are referred to by hash.

Usually you still need to run a server to seed the files, but if a file becomes popular it will be served from anybody who also retrieved it and likely persist in the network even if your server goes down.

Think of it as BitTorrent for the web. It has Gateways that allow current browsers to access the network and pointers to update content with a new version (that's /ipns/ not /ipfs/ \- the old version persists as long as someone hosts it).

What's also interesting is that due to the nature of the hashing algorithm (it's a merkle tree), you can "ipfs add" a directory, preserving the file structure inside, so websites on IPFS can use relative paths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> We keep things that are important, and throw away the garbage. But if we keep everything, there will be mostly garbage.

<comment><USER8> It's impossible to keep everything. A system like this one keeps the things people access, rather than the current system where content remains available only at the will (and expense) of the publisher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> IPFS is vaporware. They are going to launch a token and try to take your money

</comment><comment><USER55> how does this differ from maidsafe?

</comment><comment><USER56> IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Everybody wants something this clever and community-spirited to work, but the basic problem is, I don't want my data to be vulnerable to slow, unreliable endpoints, or people switching off their IPFS servers. I can't really trust an unremunerated volunteer system with my data, and I don't believe that my keeping your data is remuneration enough for you to keep mine forever.

Peer-to-peer is excellent for ephemeral streaming stuff like chat, file transfer, even gaming. But it is not good for permanence unless some monetary remuneration gets involved, either via a centralizing entity asking for payments (dropbox et al), or a distributed monetization system like bitcoin. Somewhere, somehow, someone needs to get paid to keep the system running.

<comment><USER57> I would say the impermanence is one of the most appealing aspects of the system. Content that no one uses and that no one is willing to sustain gets culled from the network, what more could you ask for?

<comment><USER56> I assume you would also like ext4 to automatically delete your seldom used files, without asking?

<comment><USER57> That's absurd, ext4 solves a different problem. This is about distribution.

<comment><USER56> it is the Internet Protocol _File System_. The clue is in the name. The analogy is entirely relevant. This thing is not just a replacement for http.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> 504 Gateway timeout

A bit ironic :) (being distributed it shouln't be a single point of failure ;) )

<comment><USER26> It is distributed. The website should have a copy at /ipfs/QmRaS4AZriMzw9nekub7hojTnvQYsVTDqkYG7BggQsexNt (check TXT record). You just need to access it over the right protocol.

<comment><USER58> But I thought ipfs-js would make it run today within the browser...?

<comment><USER26> To use js-ipfs, you still need to host the script somewhere. Doesn't help when the whole host doesn't respond.

<comment><USER58> Right, ok, but then ipfs.io is already using ipfs-js itself? Because some time ago I checked and the reference impl was python, and the ipfs-js port was not complete yet.

<comment><USER59> (IPFS dev here)

js-ipfs, the Javascript implementation of IPFS, has made a lot of progress in the past 6 months. It's still early but totally usable.

We've been working on go-ipfs and js-ipfs interop so that browser nodes can talk to "native" nodes. It's not fully ready yet but soon. This will open a lot of doors for a more advanced network and applications using IPFS.

See [https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs](https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs).

As for your question re. ipfs.io using js-ipfs, the answers is no, it doesn't use js-ipfs implementation yet.

<comment> david-given Is there a working ipfs demo page anywhere? I've had a look around and can't find one (the closest appears to be Orbit, but the ipfs-js version is down).

I'm particularly interested in using ipfs pubsub capabilities. It looks like an interesting way of allowing multiple users of a web app to talk to each other without needing (much) server side support.

<comment><USER59> Unfortunately there's no proper demo page :/ We're working on improving the docs (we know this is big issues atm).

There's an old version (from June) of Orbit at [http://orbit.libp2p.io](http://orbit.libp2p.io) which you can try. Much has happened since and we're working on bringing the js-ipfs version Orbit back to a working state.

Re.Pubsub, I'm personally also very excited about it! :) The specs and general info are located here [https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub](https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub). go-ipfs merged pubsub into master some time ago with this commit [https://github.com/ipfs/go- ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc9812...](https://github.com/ipfs/go- ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc98126d422c495dc157b3642) and we're working to get it into js-ipfs here [https://github.com/ipfs/js- ipfs/issues/530](https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/530).

<comment><USER14> Can I just take a moment to talk about how happy I am that the IPFS team is actually taking protocol documentation seriously, allowing for multiple implementations and the ability to understand how the protocol works?

IPFS and Matrix seem to be the only teams doing this: Dat and SSB have vague protocol documentation at best, only documenting bits of the protocol at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The new Information Worker Resume or CV Template - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheNewInformationWorkerResumeOrCVTemplate.aspx <comment><USER2> _" Cannibalism quickly followed."_

It usually does ;-)</comment>


RAMPAGE AND GUARDION Vulnerabilities in modern phones enable unauthorized access - <AUTHOR> http://rampageattack.com/ <comment><USER2> site appears to be down, but from what I understand this is basically the rowhammer attack on mobile phones. very curious to see the details.</comment>


User Interface Development in the Next 5–10 Years - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/digio-australia/user-interface-development-in-the-next-5-10-years-f19edcd6d0b0 <comment><USER2> We probably need to distinguish between consumer UI's and office or "productivity" UI's. The first is more subject to fads and gimmicks, or at least should be.

As far as office UI's, there seems a push back to desktop based applications. Microsoft is improving the deployment process such that deployment is becoming almost seamless. The web failed to give us sufficient and reliable widgets and screen control. JavaScript + DOM is a hack. We waited it out, hoping, but are gradually giving up: it's not coming; the web is _stuck on suck_ for that niche. Desktop IDE's are more productive than web stacks for office CRUD development. And they use screen real-estate better. Bootstrap is finger- centric waste-strap. We gotta mouse, use it! And MVC? Gimme a break.

Hopefully a cross-platform GUI browser and related standard are created. But MS still rules the office screen for now such that cross-platform is less an issue. If you don't like MS, there's always Delphi/Lazarus, but I cannot comment on their application update deployment yet.</comment>


Ask HN: Quickest way to get up to speed in Scala ? - <AUTHOR>

Title says it all. I've come to the conclusion that I need to go and invest time into Scala but I haven't a clue where to start from. <comment><USER2> Do some Project Euler problems in it:

<http://projecteuler.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a spam site...

<comment><USER2> Oops, and it's too late to edit the comment. Here's the correct link: <http://projecteuler.net/></comment></comment></comment>


4 things I want to see in Python 4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/4-things-i-want-to-see-in-python-4-0-85b853e86a88?source=linkShare-ec39004dd57f-1488340971 <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a defacto GUI library for python that is better than Tkinter like the beeware folks are working on.</comment>


Louisiana, Sinking Fast, Prepares to Empty Out Its Coastal Plain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/louisiana-sinking-fast-prepares-to-empty-out-its-coastal-plain <comment><USER2> No mention of the cause: Diverting the Mississippi River. In the 20's / 30's The Army Core of Engineers built a series of levees to redirect the Mississippi to flow east of its natural course. Before then, the river would seasonally shift back and forth (think of the end of a garden house spraying left and right).

It naturally wanted to flow into the Atchafalaya Basin, instead all the silt and sand that would've gone into building the wetlands is being diverted and dumped directly into Gulf.

Look at a map sometime and you can clearly see it, the "toe" of Louisiana (south of New Orleans) is growing out into the gulf, this is the trillions of tons of silt and sand. Meanwhile the "heel" is shrinking, as the Gulf slowly erodes it.

 _Note_ : This is not an anti ACoE diatribe. Its just that anytime this story gets national coverage they fail to mention the cause, which is locally well known and well understood.

<comment><USER3> Geologist here: while overly managing of the Mississippi does make a difference, that only controls where new sediment gets deposited. Even if new sediment was deposited in sinking urban areas, it wouldn't ameliorate the problem of subsidence because it would be deposited on existing infrastructure, burying it.

The real reason for the subsidence is that the sediment that makes up river deltas slowly compacts under its own weight, expelling pore water and becoming more dense. This is natural and unavoidable, although it might be marginally enhanced by oil and gas extraction (it is a bigger problem with groundwater withdrawal in other areas).

<comment><USER4> You're the expert, but I thought subsidence (land sinking because of fossil fuel extraction) and compaction were two different phenomemons. Plus erosion (loss of coastline) and rising ocean, there's multiple factors involved.

<comment><USER3> They are related phenomena. Basically, sand and mud have pore space in between the grains that is filled with fluids (water, oil or gas). When those fluids are extracted, the rock contracts because the pore pressure decreases, causing an increase in density (compaction) and a decrease in volume, which leads to subsidence. Some of this is recoverable, and some of it isn't, because the grains will find a more efficient packing arrangement.

You are completely correct in that there are many different factors involved that are all causing problems; unfortunately they are all interrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a classic river delta problem. Look at the Nile delta. Just can't build long-term on low ground.

Objections from the right can be answered with this:

 _Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash._

Matthew 7:24-27

</comment><comment><USER6> The article says federal government is funding ($40M so far) the program that in part educates people on climate change and rising waters and people are appreciating the honesty.

It also talks about oil and gas exploration as one of the reasons for coastal erosion. Lastly they'll force people and their properties out but still allow commercial development on the property(I guess more oily and gassy things?).

I am not sure what to make of it all but at least they're doing something about it.

<comment><USER7> "Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings' eventual demolition."

This is actually an extremely sound policy Louisiana has put forth for handling a situation they have little control over. I'd expect it to become a model for other coastal states who will be facing similar issues as sea level rises (with exceptions for very wealthy communities, such as Miami Beach, where they can fund hundreds of millions of dollars in preventative measures for the moment).

<comment><USER8> "...preventative measures for the moment..." doesn't sound particularly reassuring when making long term real estate investment decisions. But I suppose people who buy property in Miami Beach don't really care about losing the 10 million they put into that condo or whatever. That's probably a rounding error for those people. And I'm pretty sure there is no critical infrastructure in Miami, so it wouldn't matter to the rest of us anyway.

Places like New Orleans, Norfolk, Portland, Houston, New York etc should probably take priority. Those are the places where if they disappeared tomorrow, people in other places in the US would definitely feel a pinch. Not just the US either... if some of those ports disappeared, it would directly affect the nutritional intake of children in other parts of the world.

<comment><USER9> After what has happened in recent years with Katrina (even if it's a 100 year storm in an area that gets them yearly), Houston (more familiar with hurricanes but not as clueless as New Jersey) and Sandy (hitting a totally unprepared area in the worst way we've had in my lifetime) I'm surprised there isn't so much more emphasis on prep for future natural disasters. I, obviously, worry that climate change denial and other science denial is preventing the masses from believing that these types of storms won't become more frequent or scarily the norm. I say that it can't hurt to better prepare if not over prepare and I scratch my head wondering why it barely seems like steps are being taken to do so.

I can only speak for my local area but New York City and New Jersey were not prepared at all. I was in a pretty good physical location when the storm hit, all things considered, but we were without power for 10 days. Luckily we had a gas station within walking distance and they gave priority to people who walked up with gas cans over cars in the mile long line idling around our neighborhood.

There were a bunch of news stories about people stealing generators. Necessities were sold out basically everywhere with little chance of restocking. Things got hairy, for sure.

The amount of people who scoffed at warnings were most likely the ones depending on a handy neighbor who was better prepared and better suited to calming down and making the best of the bad situation. I think it was a much needed, although terrible, wake up call for unprepared folks.

It was really nice to see so many people band together but the main takeaway I got from it was that I've never seen my area so close to complete breakdown and eventually mass chaos.

Why we aren't doing more to prevent that exact type of fallout from something we _KNOW_ is coming? It feels like the definition of insanity to do otherwise. After witnessing it first hand and having no idea what it would be like to live in a hurricane or natural disaster-prone area, having to deal with it yearly, I NEVER want to deal with that again. Since I really have no say in what mother nature does, all I can do is say I NEVER want to be as unprepared for another disaster as I was before.

I also realize it's not so simple to pack your entire life up and move to a "more safe" location but there has to be some sort of graph where the cost of paying out insurance, cleaning up the mess, restoring supply chains, and all the other costs that come with a natural disaster equalizes with the cost of preparing as best as possible.

<comment><USER10> Thank you. Living in a successful metro area as I do, I'm fairly sure that the _entire area_ is one or two failures away from Mad Max-level hysteria. It doesn't take much (a few days without potable water or gasoline, say). And yet, we're balls-to-the-wall consumer capitalism all the way, baby. A bit of planning would make months of difference.

<comment><USER9> Sorry for the delayed response but:

>the _entire area_ is one or two failures away from Mad Max-level hysteria

That hits the nail on the head about what I was trying to say. Thank you for saying it much more succinctly!

New Jersey got hit in striations of severity so while 1/2 of the state was in maximum emergency mode the other 1/2 of the populous wasn't affected what so ever. They were awake Monday morning competing with all of the folks struggling to survive except they were on their normal routine of heading to work. They acted as if everyone else experiencing trouble were inconveniencing them, also. It was really shocking to see the cognitive dissonance of that group of people during Sandy.

That striation of severity was odd although not impossible to conceive. It caused a sort of suspicion that things really couldn't have been that bad for "neighbors" considering the unaffected people had no damage, no flooding, no power outages, and no felled trees in their yard or local roadways.

My area, on the other hand, was an utter disaster. I was living a bit away from my parents but my first thought after securing my home was to head to my parents house and ensure they were warm and taken care of. There are about 15 different routes I could have taken to get from my area to my parents area. Two were main roads and the other ~13 were back roads and other arteries that cut through the main routes I'd usually take. It took me 9 tries to find a route that wasn't completely blocked off by fallen trees. Once I finally did find a route to make it to my destination it was, of course, the steepest route. The entire roadway was covered in a thin layer of black ice and my poor front wheel drive Honda Civic was barely gripping that ice to get me to the top.

Of course it was my luck to get behind a big SUV. That SUV had no trouble climbing the hill but the real problem was that SUV's decision to brake -- for no reason at all -- before the top of the hill. The slow down in momentum for me killed my climb and I wound up having to pull off onto the shoulder. I slammed on my horn out of fury but I doubt the SUV driver realized what trouble they caused me. It took me 15 minutes of dropping my automatic car into "1st gear" and slamming the gas pedal until my hot tires melted some black ice which gained me the traction needed to gain my momentum back. I was all but 75 feet from the top of a .75 mile hill. It was really shitty, for lack of better words.

That scenario was playing out all over New Jersey since 1/2 of everybody was locked indoors and the other 1/2 was "free" to act normally. Quite an odd scenario. I hope I never have to live through another storm so wicked with a fallout so near Max Max-level, as you said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aJZ9Ul...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aJZ9UlL1pvIJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/louisiana- sinking-fast-prepares-to-empty-out-its-coastal- plain+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Solution to being assumed a ddos attack agent

</comment><comment><USER12> Waiting for this to hit other costal areas. Can't imagine how much it would cost to empty out Cape Cod if required

<comment><USER13> one thing is for sure, no one is going to relocate at a loss if they can wait a year and then pass the bill to the government

the dangling incentive will artificially sustain coastal developments

frankly if we are going to bail out home owners on coasts, why not home owners near fire risk areas?

<comment><USER14> We send people to risk their lives to save homes in fire risk areas. That's already a pretty profound bailout on the part of the government and her citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Says "terms of service violation", no article. Is there a second source?

<comment><USER11> same happened to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably a very dumb question but here goes … why do the people have to move, can dykes/floodbanks/levees not be built?

<comment><USER17> The buyout for one family in the article is about $25,000 per person and the article talks about ~60,000 people.

That family is probably on the lower end of the buyout cost, but it puts the total cost of a buyout in the range of $1 billion or $10 billion.

So then the question is how much flood protection can be built for a similar cost.

I think there's also issues with flood controls for one area making flood control in other areas more difficult. So drawing a line can help with that.

<comment><USER16> But isn't the land valuable (or potentially valuable) and won't its loss be irrecoverable?

Of course they are allowing commercial developments to continue, check this out:

Louisiana – Other Oil & Gas Infrastructure: [http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries...](http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries/LA_Other_Facilities_rev031808.jpg)

Louisiana – pipelines and platforms: [http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries...](http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries/LA_pipelines_2008.jpg)

<comment><USER10> For some definition of "value". The reality seems to be that much of Louisiana is terribly polluted. People are stuck in homes which have lost much of their value due to both encroaching industrial plants and (thus) poor environmental quality. I just finished reading Strangers in Their Own Land, and the author goes into a lot of detail about this.

I had never heard of salt dome storage until reading this book. Scary stuff.

[https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own- land](https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Le Chal: Shoe for visually impaired - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelonomics.com/shoe-for-visually-impaired-le-chal/ <comment><USER2> This is one of those ideas which present themselves perfectly in hindsight.

Nike+ was the shoe which knew where you had been, invert that principle and you're lead to the shoe which knows where you are going.

Certainly a valid creative catalyst is inverting existing problems.

<comment><USER3> Strongly agree. I like the simplicity with which George explained this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A white cane also alerts people in the vicinity - I wonder what the designer's thoughts are on this aspect of the problem. When I saw (what I assume are) the proximity detector LEDs on the front of the shoe, it made me think about some kind of flashing (visible) light-based solution.

</comment><comment><USER5> how do you deal with gps errors / brownian noise?

<comment><USER3> I guess this is the reason why they have started the tests with Bangalore Blind school.</comment></comment>


White Gold (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://story.californiasunday.com/mushroom-hunters-oregon-tokyo <comment><USER2> Why isn't something so valuable farmed? I have seen great mushroom farms in abandoned tunnels in Pennsylvania.

P.S. Great photos.

<comment><USER3> It's not for lack of trying. Whoever finds out how to farm these mushrooms will be filthy rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is about a sought-after white mushroom, prized in Japan for infusing dishes with nuances flavors, but it hijacks a term that's been used since antiquity to refer to cotton fiber... Interesting none the less.

<comment><USER5> Also used for rhodiated or palladiated gold-as-in-the-element-aurum.

<comment><USER4> Sure, I think that's more a literal meaning, rather than the metaphorical sense the article was going for. As a metaphor, it's more common and way longer associated with king cotton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the area that I live there are plenty of eatable mushrooms but sadly none like that. I wonder how it actually tastes but wouldn't ever pay so much for a mushroom</comment>


Google Launches Real-Time Search - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/12/07/google-real-time-search/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981902>

It's the same link but with different munging and more comments. I've flagged this one because it's redundant, even thought the URL dup logic didn't find it.</comment>


Python Makes Me Say God Damn - <AUTHOR> http://sam.tregar.com/blog/2010/05/19/python-makes-me-say-god-damn/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see how different people's complaint lists can be. I have my own list for Python (e.g., mutable/immutable/reference semantics/blah blah blah stuff messes me up all the time), but my list has almost nothing in common with the one in this article.

In particular, I've thought about the first issue -- range specifications -- off & on for years, and I've come to the conclusion that this writer is wrong; Python does ranges the right way. The crux of the matter, for me, is that sometimes includes-the-end feels right, and sometimes does-not-include-the-end feels right. _However_ , sometimes includes-the-end is _definitely_ wrong, but I don't know of any case where does-not-include-the-end is definitely wrong. So if you're going to pick one convention, then go with the one Python did; use it all the time, and you'll never have to wonder which one you're using. It _is_ true that this convention takes some getting used to, but I think it results in fewer bugs in the long run.

Other advantages: b - a is the number of items in range(a,b); also range(a,b) and range(b,c) partition range(a,c) nicely.

BTW, I believe E. Dijkstra has an essay that also takes this position on range specifications; he probably explained it a lot better than I did.

As for Unicode, no one seems to know how to do it well. But this writer is talking about the Python 2 way of doing things. Python 3 has improved things, IMHO.

<comment><USER3> Range as [a, b) is definitely one of the best ways of thinking about them in the context of most algorithms. b-a is reliably the length; and when you choose a midpoint m, [a, m) and [m, b) don't overlap. Thinking in these terms makes implementing e.g. quicksort and binary search much easier.

<comment><USER4> My math is rusty. Could you explain your use of square and regular brackets in [a, m) and [m, b) ?

<comment> alan-crowe The common useage in mathematics is in analysis and topology, to specify subsets of the real numbers. Remembering that _open_ and _closed_ are jargon terms in topology:

(a,b) is an open set and contains exactly those x such that a is less than x and x is less than b.

[a,b] is a closed set and contains exactly those x such that a is less than or equal to x and x is less than or equal to b

For example, one might be thinking about the interval [0,pi] but the function 1/sin x has singularities at both ends of the interval. It is only defined on (0,pi). Notice that 1/x is defined on (0,pi]. It is sometimes convenient to mix up open=exclusive=() and closed=inclusive=[].

These conventions can be carried over into computer science in the obvious way [0,3) = {0,1,2} while (0,3] = {1,2,3} but the motivation is different. In computer science we are more concerned how smoothly our subranges chain together. For example

[0,r)+[r,s)+[s,t) = [0,t)

while

[0,r]+[r+1,s]+[s+1,t] = [0,t]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aside from the unicode thing, none of the items on that list bother me particularly much. There is one that I find really irritating though:

      def foo(a = [])
          a.append(123)

or the class based version:

      class Foo(object):
          a = []

          def foo(self):
              a.append(123)

Neither example behaves like I would expect it to.

For a language that espouses 'there should only be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it', that is not obvious to me at all!

Oh, and I wish it had multi-line lambdas / blocks.

<comment><USER6> Granted, it is not completely intuitive. However, it makes sense if you know pythons module loding mechanisms:

The function definition is a statement which is evaluated at module load time, and it registers the foo-function in the module namespace. During creating the foo-function, the default-parameters are evaluated (resulting in a single list instance), and the results of this evaluation are used as default parameters in the following. That is also why something like def foo(x = random_value()) is kind of tricky and should be documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are probably 10-15 things that really bother me about python, but none of them are in this list. This list is really pretty darn awful.

My biggest issue with python is its stupid tendency toward imperative programming in the standard library. For an instance of this irritation, try running python, then executing dir(<any object you pick>). Then, try dir(<obj>).sort . Notice anything? Yeah, the f'er sorted it in place, and didn't return anything. Nice job, library.

I once tweeted that python was a c programmers version of lisp, and ruby is a lisp programmers version of c, and the more time I spend working with both languages, the more I am convinced of the truthfulness of this statement.

<comment><USER8> The reason .sort() doesn't return anything is _because_ it sorts in place. That way you won't get confused between the returned list and the sorted one.

Maybe you're looking for sorted(dir(<obj>)), which gives back a new list?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I could agree with some of the points, here are some comments:

 _range()_ \- "Perl has trained me", well lolcode taught be that I end script with KTHNXBYE, but that's not the reason to expect it in other languages :( It's just an arbitrary choice and there's no reason to discuss about it really.

 _Python is happy to do nothing_ \- Meet PyLint. Perl has "use warning", python has PyLint, which will tell you that:

        C:  1: Black listed name "foo"
        W:  3: Statement seems to have no effect

_Unicode support is a mess_ \- I really hate how it's done, but it definitely is not a mess. It's clean and strict. It's just hard to achieve some stuff with it. I really miss a "just give me an ascii version and ignore any errors, because I really don't care in this case" option...

The rest... I can see why you might not like them, but I don't see them as design errors in any specific way.

<comment><USER10> > I really miss a "just give me an ascii version and ignore any errors, > because I really don't care in this case" option...

You can use options to either ignore or replace invalid characters.

        >>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='strict')
        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
        UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
                            ordinal not in range(128)
        >>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='replace')
        u'\ufffdabc'
        >>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='ignore')
        u'abc'

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Python is my favorite language, but finding a way to iterate over a list while changing the list kills me. I remember there is a good reason for Python's behavior but it always surprises me how non-intuitve a solution is.

<comment><USER12> Python is not unique in this regard. Consider a functional approach, where you leave the original list intact and construct a changed one.

<comment><USER13> List comprehensions or map are the way that a Pythonista would do this:

[transform(x) for x in my_list]

map(transform, my_list)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unicode was fixed....in the newest version of the language. All of us just need to switch to that unfortunately.</comment>


Winklevoss twins lose Facebook fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d4cd520c-6490-11e0-a69a-00144feab49a.html

<comment><USER2> No, they haven't lost the fight with FB yet, though it looks really grim. They have the option to get an _en banc_ hearing. Unlikely but still possible. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_banc>

They can also appeal to the Supreme Court. Again, unlikely but still possible.

<comment><USER3> Would they even get a better settlement this time round? Do they have legitimate claims on an gains Facebook has made since the last settlement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best quote:

"Frankly, I am quite incredulous that they're continuing to pursue the matter," (Prof. Goldman) said. "I think they would be a lot happier and wealthier if they would take that money and invest it in their therapist."

<comment><USER5> I, for one, probably wouldn't try to take on Facebook. They're pretty big and scary - especially that big Zuckerburg meanie :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Winkelvi have made a career out of suing Facebook. They can't stop and they will take this case to the Supreme Court if they can. It's unfortunate, they should take the freaking money, but they won't it's not about the money for them. It's about the fact some middle class kid beat them and they can't let it go.

</comment><comment><USER7> The story does not say whether their previous settlement with Facebook is still valid. Is it still valid?

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I understood (from this article and others that I read on the subject), the previous settlement is still valid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Winklevoss lose; get 65m.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps a malpractice lawsuit against Winklevi council is next?

</comment><comment><USER10> Damn right.</comment>


Ask HN: Reporting Phishing Attack - jf- Hi HN, this one might be a bit mundane but I'd like to prevent others getting scammed. My girlfriend has just received a phishing email that contains all her contact details, and asks her to sign into (what appears to be) a fraudulent website to track an order that she has never placed. I suspect that this is related to the easyJet breach earlier this year, as there are relatively few potential sources of this information. I've checked haveibeenpwned.com and her email returns no results.<p>I've emailed the domain registrar reporting the email. Is there anything else I should do? <comment><AUTHOR> Might have been in one of these 18 data sets [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker- leaks-...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker- leaks-386-million-user-records-from-18-companies-for-free/)

<comment> jf- Thanks for the list, she doesn't recognise any of the sites listed there. Also she has burner/spam email addresses she uses for smaller/less reputable sites, this is the main email address so it must have come from a big, reputable site.</comment></comment>


Can We Finally Kill Advertisement? - <AUTHOR> http://www.highnoonsolutions.com/solopost.php?name=1336693950

<comment><USER2> As far as I know micro-payments is not a solved problem yet.

> _So why can't YouTube ask me to Pay to not have to see ads? In my experience > the amount that they would have to charge me for such a premium feature > would be ridiculously low – meaning they could make ridiculous money by only > charging me a modest fee. Hell charge me a lot, time is money and you have > no idea how much my time is worth._

I would love to pay for content. I'd love to pay to have ad-free content. Let's use The Atlantic as an example. I never read the whole thing. I only read the occasional article that appears in Longform or HN.

Should I pay per article? How much? 0.05 USD? 0.25 USD?

Or should I pay for an online subscription? That would possibly encourage me to read more of the product, but might put me off actually getting an online sub. Especially if I'd want to sub to very many newspapers.

Maybe they shouldn't have ads or micro-payments. Perhaps once a year they can have a fund-raising drive; HUGE banners with photos of James Bennet asking for funding?

But, whatever they do they now have a more complicated mix of revenue streams - free users; ad-supported users; micropayment users; online subs; IRL subs. That's a complex mix of numbers to present to advertisers. I know you're trying to get away from ads, but that's a big ask.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we finally kill blogs like this?

Any one and everyone is free to do as he or she likes, use adverts on their own site or not. Tim Moody should start his own video service sans any adverts.

What does he propose, a legislation or a movement to stop sites from using ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you really arguing in favor of youtube ads?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What gets you in the zone? - <AUTHOR>

What are some things that help you get in the zone when you're coding?
What are some things that ruin your focus? <comment><USER2> If I can hear my own inner-monologue then I can concentrate.

Similarly, if somebody else's voice is talking over the voice in my head, then I'm screwed. I don't mind traffic, or music, or white-noise or even crowds. But a single solitary voice (like a person at a cafe talking on the phone 10 feet away) can completely upend my concentration.

Earbuds help, but there's something strange and pervasive about the human voice. I'd have to have my earbuds at deafening levels to drown out a voice nearby.

</comment><comment><USER3> > What are some things that help you get in the zone when you're coding?

* Music - Typically something with a fast beat buy few/no words, although I sometimes do waiver and go with rock with lyrics or Jazz/Classical. I find Jazz and synthesized music are the best for me.

* A drink of some kind - If I'm at home, a good beer, however if I'm at the office then something with strong caffeine is preferred, ie. Rockstar or similar.

* Lots of gum - I've found chewing on stuff somehow focuses me a bit better. Typically some sugar-free gum is my go-to, ie. Tident or similar.

When I'm really focused, I either tend to sit up very straight and get close to the screen, or I sit back in my chair sagging a bit and shake my leg(s).

</comment><comment><USER4> I get a better focus when I work without internet - I normally go working in a public library for that, and don't ask if I can get the wifi.

It requires me to be very familiar with the libraries/language I am using, so I can't do it when I want to explore some new tools, but when I do it, I put emacs full screen and I think I can get much higher levels of concentration.

</comment><comment><USER5> inertia. Getting started is the hard part. I really have to force myself to do some things, then once the ball is rolling there is inertia to do more things. Then I can fall into the zone.

It's sort of like reading a novel. When you first start reading you see the letters on the page. It's a chore and not fun. A minute or 2 in you no longer see letters, but pictures. You are in a dream state like watching a movie. Welcome to the zone!

I would like to extrapolate and say that Lisp programming environments lend themselves to "Zoning" better. The ability to eval as you write makes it easier for me to gain inertia needed for the zone.

Little optimiztions such as key-bindings help. Gross motor arm movements to the mouse breaks my zone.

</comment><comment><USER6> My cat can easily ruin my focus.

</comment><comment><USER7> caffeine.</comment>