Chinese Devs Using GitHub to Protest 996 Workweek (9am – 9pm, 6 days/week) - <AUTHOR> https://996.icu/#/en_US <comment><USER2> I collaborated on a project with developers at QQ a few years back and here are a couple of anecdotes:

1\. A 32 year old (!) developer I was working with one-on-one from QQ had a heart attack two weeks before, but was pressured (while in hospital) to come back to work as soon as possible. 2\. At the QQ office, I watched an entire group (50+ developers) have a nap heads down at their desk after lunch.

If any developers from China are listening in. Leave your company, take your colleagues and start one with better conditions. You are some of best engineers I've worked with and deserve better.

<comment><USER3> That heart attack incident is terrible. The nap part, however, is not particularly concerning. Nap after lunch is encouraged in the Chinese culture, and schools have a dedicated "noon nap" slot. Your Chinese coworkers likely nap not because they are so tired they have to, but because they and everyone else have done it their whole lives (and why not, napping feels good).

<comment><USER4> > Your Chinese coworkers likely nap not because they are so tired they have > to, but because they and everyone else have done it their whole lives (and > why not, napping feels good).

...unless institutionalized scheduled napping was established to extact just a tad more of energy from overworked servants.

Just saying.

<comment><USER5> It could be a custom. However, as a Chinese, my feeling is that the custom arises from the de facto 69x (x could be 5, 6 or 7) schedule of Chinese high schools, which is even harsher than that of Chinese companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This self advocacy is encouraging and long overdue IMO.

The Chinese colloquial term for developer is "码农". Its literal English translation is "code peasants" \-- not the most flattering or respectful way to call software engineers.

I've recently heard horror stories, where 9-9-6 is no longer enough inside one of the Chinese tech giants, and 10-10-7 is expected (10am-10pm, 7 days/week)

I hope this brings about some positive change and won't just get blocked by the authority.

<comment><USER7> Why not just 9-9-7? Was there any reasoning behind starting and finishing at 10? Its still a 12 hour day.

<comment><USER8> Maybe just a playful way of making a more clear distinction between the two

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funny. I just read about 996 in a comment on another HN post today. I couldn't believe that schedule could actually exist in Chinese workplace culture so I started doing some research. Sure enough, this hellish schedule is actually quite common and official at major Chinese startups and tech companies. It seems like it's not as common at western companies operating in China. There's even a joke about 007: 0AM-0AM, 7 days a week.

Of course this flies in the face of my own experience that for the majority of people, productivity tops out at 40 hours per week unless it's for very short periods of crunch time. It's odd to see people so burnt out they've lost the self awareness to see that they've stopped adding value with their perpetual motion.

<comment><USER10> Another funny part is that there are actually a portion of coders who not only agree on but also advocate such 996 culture. One of my roommate is an example who believes it's beneficial to the young workers (for seemingly high salary of course). He's heading to Huawei after graduation.

Bonus part: he doesn't like tech/CS per se. Choosing this profession is purely out of the interest of $$$

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are you a talented dev in China tired of 996? American and EU companies are looking for you.

<comment><USER12> 欢迎大家来珠海跟我们工作! Come work with us in Zhuhai!

<comment><USER13> Do you work in 955?

<comment><USER12> Most people are 955 with occasional overtime, I work more like 666...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's the actual protesting: [https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/issues](https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/issues)

<comment><USER15> Notably, the repo has set records in terms of GitHub Stars in a day: [https://github.com/trending](https://github.com/trending)

Likely because of the Star button the webpage proper.

<comment><USER16> What's the old record?

<comment><USER17> I believe it was freecodecamp (or something like that), because they had a github tutorial that told people to make an account and star their repo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always had a question about hiring Chinese engineers remotely. Is it easy to handle salary payments to China and will the Chinese Firewall interfere with any web development activity they have to do? Is anyone here doing it?

<comment><USER16> Looking for some 996ers of your own? This might not be the best time and to place to ask about that.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely not. Quite the contrary. If they are unhappy with this conditions (and they rightfully are), it seems like an opportunity to hire them and give them reasonable work hours.

I have met several Chinese programmers through out the years and was always impressed with their skills and work ethics.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry to question your motives. Somehow I horribly misread the tone of your comment the first time around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> An interesting aspect of this is that this is an online protest on a platform that the Chinese government doesn't control. They normally exercise strict control over their internet to prevent movements from getting out of their control (for example, censoring #metoo when it starts trending). Would the Chinese government be willing to block GitHub? Surely that would be damaging to China's tech industry.

What if people started creating repositories with nothing but information about topics that the Chinese government considers sensitive (like the Tiananmen Square massacre or other human rights abuses)?

<comment><USER20> > online protest on a platform that the Chinese government doesn't control

False (for Chinese residents). China used to block GitHub but stopped doing that when they realized they could politely ask GitHub to block access to certain pages from Chinese IPs. [0]

[0]: [https://qz.com/718465/chinas-fierce-censors-try-a-new- tactic...](https://qz.com/718465/chinas-fierce-censors-try-a-new-tactic-with- github-asking-nicely/)

<comment><USER16> That appears to be the first and last time they received a request from China. [https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns](https://github.com/github/gov- takedowns)

On the other hand, Russia...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember reading on HN before that this 'draconian' schedule included both a 2 hour lunch and a 2 hour nap after said lunch.

While it would still be crazy, it wouldn't be quite as crazy as it seems any more.

<comment><USER22> Normally, the 2 hour is for both lunch + nap, not 2 + 2 hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is taking longer and longer to get a work visa to the US if you work in ML or quantum computing. US don't want us.

<comment><USER24> The US people and companies do. We just have incompetent leadership in our government, we're waiting it out too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This kind of expression helps humanize the otherwise distance created between the Chinese development world and the otherwise Western portrayal.

A few thoughts from my experience living in China. When living in China, I didn't see any appeal in the overworking culture.

Most developers with families worked normal hours. People who were single made time to spend time with friends. I didn't see the overwork ethic it in a positive light at all. Keeping in mind normal developers salaries in tier 1 cities for China is sub-1k USD a month. In tier 2 cities, I can only imagine it gets exponentially lower and so forth for smaller cities.

<comment><USER26> I work in Shanghai, my first full-time job as a Rails developer was more than 2k dollars a month(I was just graduated with only a little development experience), and I think that's about the average in Shanghai.

<comment><USER25> Good to know. My experience there was approximately 8 years ago. Im curious how much base salary has increased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's why china is developing so fast than most countries.

<comment><USER28> If this is the cost, let them have it. It's not worth that human cost just to be ahead.

<comment><USER29> it doesnt work though, it's counter-productive to some extent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's often not a conscious decision to adopt a "996" schedule but just happens anyway in Chinese tech firms.

I remember visiting the Alibaba campus some time ago and they had devs sleeping in tents in the office at 8pm on a weekend. Their boss proudly told me that he was making them all stay to have them finish a feature he wanted shipped the following week.

</comment><comment><USER31> After a week of 10a-11p and 2 weeks of 10a-10p x 6, I feel terrible. My son asked me when I leave home: "Are you going to work to earn money so you can by me more toys?" "yah!" 996 is not optional, but mandatory, and is written on the contract.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish there will be more people know this outside China. It is against the law yet the government kept a close eye on it. It is not just in IT industry, there are a lot jobs where people are forced to work more than 9 hours a day.

</comment><comment><USER33> So...will the censors risk blocking all of GitHub for this?

</comment><comment><USER34> So will we see github banned very soon?

</comment><comment><USER35> they collected more than 100000 stars in github within 50 hours!!

</comment><comment><USER36> so GFW and censorship is not working as the media said.

<comment><USER37> it works. but IT worker are more likely to have the knowledge to use VPN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hi may be someone can work as "007": working from 0:00 to 0:00, 7 days/week.

</comment><comment><USER39> still fuck more working time and no repaid.</comment>


Save money and buy stuff in a new way with koBuy - <AUTHOR> http://kobuyinc.mystrikingly.com/ <comment><USER2> I love this idea - I want to get the new Valve Index, but can't justify buying it all myself and then letting it sit on the shelf 90% of the time.</comment>


The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance - <AUTHOR> https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/success-nonviolent-civil-resistance/ <comment><USER3> Sidenote: if you're ever a dictator somewhere, move your capital away from the big population centers. Invent some nutcase reason like "God told me to do it in a dream". Make sure that most inhabitants of your new capital are civil servants, whose livelihoods directly depend on your government's stability. Civil Resistance, violent or not, will be significantly less effective.

Eg Naypidaw (Myanmar), Astana / Nur-Sultan[1] (Kazachstan), Brasilia, Islamabad (Pakistan), Ciudad de la Paz (Equatorial Guinea), etc.

I'm not sure if there's statistically sufficiently many capitals-in-the- middle-of-nowhere but I bet there's a direct correlation between "capital is also the major population center" and "success rate of uprisings". It even holds for functioning democracies. I don't think the "yellow vests" people in Paris would've had a similar impact in Australia, where the government is comfortably far away from Where People Live.

[1] Woa check the new name! It's like renaming Washington DC to "Donald". [2]

[2] EDIT: Omg I just realized that George Washington did exactly that. Some ego! I had always assumed that it had been founded/named long after Washington was dead, but nothing like that was the case. It's really the "Trump Hotel" of cities.

<comment><USER4> [1] Checked it, writing from there, and probably will be for few more months.

Been selling widgets to rapid transit company there. Can't wait to go back to China, but it seems that there is a new local client on the horizon =(

<comment><USER3> Wow, what was the popular response to the name change?

China can't stay behind now, can they? Can't wait for Beijing to be renamed to Jinping.

<comment><USER4> > what was the popular response to the name change?

There was a ~15-20 people scuffle few weeks later, and 1 day without Internet. Nothing though on the day of the renaming. Locals more or less grew apathetic to the idea of ruling elites being a joke over last 30 years. Some I'd say even like it that way, saying that "Imagine our joke president for life would've been a proper dictator, like somebody as sharp as that Paul Kagami dude, no, things are better this way"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The nonviolent civil resistance is only effective when your opponent is a regime that is beholden to the opinion of its people or of the world. For oppressive opponents who don't actually care very much about human rights, nonviolent resistance is simply ineffective at all.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Ghandi was very brave, it's true, but his success in India says as much about the British as it does about the power of nonviolence. Try the same stunt against ISIS or North Korea and you'll only achieve being shot out of hand.

<comment><USER7> I have a feeling you haven't read much British colonial history. Amritsar? Boer concentration camps? Indian emancipation had nothing to do with British goodness. It had much to do with mass uprisings, clever tactics, and more than a few blown-up railway lines.

<comment><USER8> The grandfather comment said and implied nothing about British goodness. It was a pragmatic decision.

<comment><USER7> I read taneq's (admittedly sketchy) comment as suggesting that the Gandhian part of the Indian independence struggle was effective not because of its nonviolent tactics, but because of the relatively benign nature of British colonial governance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Next thing destruction of property is also called violence.

Let's think of the abolition of slavery as an example. This was a huge, important change that came about by civil resistance: slave owners were mostly backed by law during the period of resistance.

It was not non-violent, especially if destruction of property (e.g. freeing a slave) is counted as an act of violence against the slave owner/ law. I do not believe this change was easier to provoke non-violently and/or non-property- destructively.

<comment><USER10> If you are going to count freeing slaves as violent then you have an odd definition of violence.

<comment><USER9> It was "loss of property" by law... It's not my def, it's the def-by-law of those days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The statement about the successrate is based on the following database

>To these ends, we constructed the Nonviolent andViolent Conºict Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, which includes aggregate dataon 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.35

>The NAVCO data set contains a sample of resistance campaigns based on consensus data ofscholars of both violent and nonviolent conºict. Resistance campaigns include campaigns for do-mestic regime change, against foreign occupations, or for secession or self-determination. Omittedfrom the data set are major social and economic campaigns, such as the civil rights movement andthe populist movement in the United States. To gain inclusion into the NAVCO data set, the cam-paign must have a major and disruptive political objective, such as the ending of a current politicalregime, a foreign occupation, or secession. About ten campaigns (four nonviolent and six violent)did not ªt into any of these categories but were nevertheless included in the data set. The codingscheme assumes that each campaign has a uniªed goal, but most campaigns have multiple fac-tions. The dynamics created by these circumstances will be further explored in a later study

[https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/file...](https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/IS3301_pp007-044_Stephan_Chenoweth.pdf)

[https://www.du.edu/korbel/sie/research/chenow_navco_data.htm...](https://www.du.edu/korbel/sie/research/chenow_navco_data.html)

<comment><USER12> So it seems like you need some proprietary thing called Stata 11 to see the data. I think I'm just going to continue being profoundly sceptical.

<comment><USER13> Stata is a pretty entrenched tool (never figured out myself what past colleagues got from using it, other than it was just what they had been trained on), but luckily there are software libraries that make it easy to import and then export to something else, such as R's `foreign`:

[https://www.statmethods.net/input/importingdata.html](https://www.statmethods.net/input/importingdata.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems incomplete.

Humans and most animals tend to naturally resist along a spectrum (sometimes referred to as the force continuum), and for most that spectrum will include violence at the extreme end.

Nonviolent civil resistance scales tends to scale more quickly because there is less at stake for the individual participants under most circumstances. But it's still resistance, and still an indicator that some percentage of the populace has less tolerance for provocation before things begin to turn violent. That's where i think at least some of the effectiveness of the nonviolent approach comes from...the threat of a lot more people turning violent.

About the only thing I would take away from this is that if I want to organize resistance, it might be more effective to spend time marketing it and scaling horizontally first than to flame out on a skirmish and scare possible supporters off. Once the tribe starts to grow, however, it becomes much easier to turn up the heat when necessary.

Also, no tiki torches.

</comment><comment><USER11> A while back I read "The failure of non violence" by Peter Gelderloos on the topic who argued for the opposite. Not an academic work but I found it interesting to read about a different point of view.

<comment><USER15> I skimmed the first 6 pages here: [https://web.stanford.edu/group/peacejustice/Gelderloos- Failu...](https://web.stanford.edu/group/peacejustice/Gelderloos-Failure-of- Nonviolence.pdf)

It seems he's arguing that a diversity of tactics is more effective than nonviolence alone. Chenoweth's methodology if I understand correctly was to divide a lot of civil resistance campaigns into violent and nonviolent, and compare the success of the two groupings.

It's possible that they're both right, that a diversity of tactics wins, but is more likely to win when that diversity is skewed toward nonviolence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I read it best put in the book "Blueprint for Revolution" (which, believe it or not, was mentioned in Adam Grants' "Originals").

Long to short, Popovic wrote: nonviolence is more successful because it casts a wider / deeper net. Adding violence to your tactic severely reduces the number who will embrace and participate in your change movement.

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

<comment><USER17> A black bloc uncle old me once, that in political struggle you need a militant and a civil/political branch. With as little direct connection between the two as possible. One of his reasons was the one you pointed out. The other that the persons that participates in violent struggle, are a bad fit for dialogue and building something lasting up afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is probably the reason why the Israeli state is so fearful of the BDS movement. Violent resistance is easy to quell, but reduced trade due to the boycott is harder to do something about. It is also hard to motivate how people exercising their right to not purchase goods for ethical reasons are acting in bad faith.

I believe that is how South Africa's Apartheid system was brought down. The ANC actually engaged in terrorism - but that wasn't what ended the system - <USER2> was the global economic boycott.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nonviolent or violent civil resistance can easily be co-opted by other actors like the CIA or KGB for their own nefarious agendas. Be wary of being pawns for assholes. Transforming your country into a liberal, democratic country requires the fact the country evolved itself into some sort of democracy. Not someone forced that on you through a manufactured war or revolution.

<comment><USER20> CIA covertly backed Solidarity with non violent aid.

In that specific ring fences example, did anyone outside of the Soviet/Polish regimes have issue with it then or since?

Would any/many Poles consider it a mistake or criticise the effort or result?

<comment><USER7> Same with Serbia's Otpor! IIRC there was a fair bit of criticism of them within Serbia for taking American (if not CIA?) funding, and who knows whether that specific act was the right decision. But the did get rid of Milosevic, remarkably peacefully given the nature of the regime.

<comment><USER20> I had Otpor! Co-founder Srdja Popovic as a lecturer for a Harvard/JFK School course on non violent social change.

It was a really interesting opportunity to learn from someone who has actually led non violent social change, rather than just researching/writing about it.

A bit like YC compared to other accelerators. Experience doing over talking.

Optor's 'Laughtivism" Strategy was quite creative and funny.

While it was never discussed, I suspect you may be right about Otpor's sources of funding.

It could be disinformation, but it could also be true.

<comment><USER7> Yes well, that's real-world experience in spades - actually taking part in deposing a regime!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?"_

[https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> History class in U.S. high schools greatly emphasize the success of nonviolent protest, and it was surprising to me that they actually are twice as effective. I had recently come to the conclusion that this history lesson was mostly an intended plan to indoctrinate people away from tendencies to perform violent protest; it is nice to see that it is actually measureably correct.

</comment><comment><USER20> Solidarity in Poland would be an outstanding example of successful non violent civil resistance that was a catalyst for a cascade of largely(but not entirely) non violent revolutions across Eastern Europe and Russia between 89-91.

It is also a successful example of external non-violent support as the CIA provided strictly non violent support in the form of cash, communication, printing, and copying equipment and supplies.

Largely shipped covertly via Swedish maritime cargo and other means.

The key learning point, especially for governments interested in interfering in the affairs of other countries, is that it requires a committed and motivated existing and self sustaining organisation.

In the case of Solidarity/Poland, CIA simply provided some additional momentum to what already existed.

Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan also provides considerable moral support and political capital to put the spotlight on the existent Solidarity.

Not only are non violent movements twice as successful(on average) than violent revolutions, but they are also more sustainable/resilient.

There was an excellent course run out of Harvard JFK School called "Leading Non-Violent Movements for Social Change".

It was led by Srdja Popovic, founder of Otpor! that helped remove Milosevic fro. Power in Serbia.

Check out CANVAS: [https://canvasopedia.org/](https://canvasopedia.org/)

Great free resources.

<comment><USER23> > Not only are non violent movements twice as successful(on average)

This is a meaningless comparison because they aim at entirely different things. The French revolution was different than the fall of communism.

Funny enough, the October revolution was also largely a non-violent event, with just a few casualties. The ensuing Civil War, however...

<comment><USER20> It is a perfectly meaningful comparison.

A domestic, intrinsically motivated movement, supported externally with non violent diplomatic, financial, and moral aid, acted as a catalyst to the largely non violent removal of many authoritarian repressive regimes.

All of which have largely avoided civil war with the exception of Ukraine due to a resurgent Russia responding to excessive NATO expansion.

Former Yugoslavia doesn't count as it excluded itself from the Soviet Warsaw Pact sphere Nd attempted non alignment.

<comment><USER23> Okay? You haven't shown that it's a meaningful _comparison_. What does it mean for nonviolent movements to be "twice as successful"? Nothing, because you can construct any arbitrary measure of movement or success.

<comment><USER20> It's actually quite simple and easy.

Did a fundamental shift in incumbent political power occur? Yes/No

Was that fundamental shift away from the previous incumbent political power sustainable, or did it fall as well(after X time)? Yes/No

I sincerely hope I'm not coming across in an unintentionally rude or abrasive way, if so, I apologise.

To be honest, you kind of are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

So you can have a 'violent' movement that does not get round to using violence. The movement can be effective enough to not need to fire a single shot.

Because of this it is a bit silly to compare and categorise non-violent vs. violent resistance.

If you read The Art Of War then the keep the powder dry idea is quite key to winning. Timing and leadership matters more. How many 'leaderless' movements, e.g. Extinction Rebellion, Occupy Wall Street etc. have got anywhere? Precisely zero.

Modern day capitalism demands war and terrorism. It is all part of the illusion. Over the centuries UK/US interests have got to be good at it. The terrorism meme invariably gets rolled out but no genuine resistance movements ever use terror tactics. It is a sure way to lose popular support. The distinction between sabotage and terrorism isn't widely appreciated. So although 'burning down the parliament building' might be a perfectly valid act of sabotage it will always be an act of terror in the media whether it is Guy Fawkes or Hitler doing it.

I would be more interested in knowing what resistance movements succeeded based on their counter surveillance skills. If a movement has a non English language and other culture that is hard for spies to learn then success is much more likely.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article says that nonviolent civil resistance is effective

But truth is that nonviolent civil resistance is not effective. The few "regimes" that were "toppled" by it never stood in ranks of real regimes, or were at their dying breath.

I wish authors of the article ever told that to Ugandans, North Koreans, and after all Chinese.

China sees sporadic riots nearly weekly (which are almost never covered by Western press.) I'd say that as a percentage of population, the amount of people who ever raised a hand on policeman/official person and served term should be around 5-7%.

That was way higher in eighties when forced sterilisation campaign was at its peak (imagine men having to stand still while a communist pokes his dirty finger into their wives'...)

<comment><USER25> Literally the first sentence of the video description:

> Between 1900-2006, campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance were twice as > successful as violent campaigns.

You're just saying "No." without providing anything more than an opinion and some anecdotal evidence. You're absolutely right that under many oppressive regimes like China pretty much _any_ kind of protest beside outright civil war is suppressed, but that doesn't defeat the point of the article.

Also, saying things like

> dirty communist pokes his finger ...

really doesn't help you here.

<comment><USER4> > but that doesn't defeat the point of the article.

It does, very much. Read what is my point above. What argument they have against that?

Their reasoning is shallow, their data is very meticulously gathered, but is nevertheless massaged, and people behind the report... take a look at their bios and judge yourself.

I have a lot of anger for types of people calling for peaceful sit ins when crowds are already being showered by machine gun fire. Those share the blame for people's deaths as much as regimes doing the killing.

Doing that is an advocacy for moral frailty.</comment></comment></comment>


Google-Facebook Scammer Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison in $122M Scam - <AUTHOR> http://alugy.com/news/google-facebook-scammer-sentenced-to-5-years-in-prison-in-122-million-scam/ <comment><USER2> Why does white collar crime get such low punishments?

Sure he didn't put a gun to someone's head, but this guy ruined lives.

<comment><USER3> Is 5 years not a lot? Imagine everything that you accomplished in the past 5 years didn't happen and that you are now an ex-con. I doubt that you would say that that was not a low punishment. Now you could ask, why do other criminals receive such hight sentences? That would be a better question. But 5 years for robbery (I assume he forfeited all of the money he took) sounds harsh but fair

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 5 years for 122M? Sounds like a bargain :/</comment>


Wait, What? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-java-driver/blob/master/src/main/com/mongodb/ConnectionStatus.java#L213

<comment><USER2> This reads like they were in a hurry. How many of us have written crazy debugging lines? There seems to be a morbid desire to crawl gh source code for obscure wtfs and expose the coder as a Bad Programmer. This line is in an oss project, enter an issue, fork it, and submit a pull-request. Way more productive way of wtf mining than submitting ssomething to community ridicule.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it's preventing most exceptions of that type from being logged. That would make sense if it's the type of exception likely to repeat itself constantly (until addressed). Using a random number as a gate is easier than measuring/throttling the rate that you're logging at.

<comment><USER4> Also, if we ignore for a moment how hacky it is to implement throttling like this - why would someone write

       if(!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1)))

when you could use

       if(!(_ok || Math.random() > 0.1))

or just

       if(!_ok && Math.random() < 0.1)

    ?

<comment><USER5> Because Math.random's expensive and you don't want to execute it unless you're sure.

<comment><USER6> Expensive only really matters in a loop. And this logical operator would short circuit anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5788975>

</comment><comment><USER8> My imagination of how this happend:

One Evening, Close to 5:

Boss: "I see we're getting quite a few exception reports in the code."

Developer: "Yeah, working on that. I just need a bit of time."

Boss: "Well, I want to see at least 10% fewer exceptions by tomorrow morning."

Developer: "..."

Next Morning:

Boss: "So I took a look at the reports this morning. Glad to see the number of exceptions are down."

Developer: "..."

Probably got a raise.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now _this_ is where the comment should be!

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't figure out why some developers love writing lines of code like that. It's like they think there is a cost for every line of code so they attempt to use the fewest lines possible while making their intent difficult to discern without comments.

I had a young developer work for me that did this all the time. He was actually quite brilliant - but he would put sometimes 20 statements into one line of code that would scroll past the end of the screen. It was difficult to discern intent but even worse it was impossible to debug. I asked him several times if he was taking his programming style from:

<http://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html>

<comment><USER11> `but he would put sometimes 20 statements into one line of code`

This is why Python's PEP8 recommends an 80 char limit on line length. Not because at column 81 the code magically becomes more complicated, but because if you're struggling to make it all fit on one line, it's probably a good sign that you need to factor out some complexity.

Although you could certainly still write extremely terse (read: unreadable) code with less than 80 chars per line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://omg2.thedailywtf.com> could validate this.</comment>


Fusion finally outputs more energy than is input - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/13/fusion_lawrence_livermore/

<comment><USER2> Um. It's great progress but while the energy that was absorbed by the target may have matched the output way more energy than that was used to produce the laser pulse and was NOT absorbed. So, we are waaaay off from more power out than power in.</comment>


A Comparison of Ruby Application Servers, Part 2 – Performance - <AUTHOR> https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/ruby-app-server-arena-pt2 <comment><USER2> Phusion Passenger author here. I'd like to say: if anybody is still on Passenger 3, you should upgrade to Passenger 4. Passenger 3 is _very_ old, over 2 years now. Passenger 4 has received _tons_ of improvements, as documented at "Recent Technical Advances in Phusion Passenger": [https://vimeo.com/85970704](https://vimeo.com/85970704)

Honestly, I'm surprised anybody still talks about Passenger 3 nowadays. The improvements in 4 are so huge that 3 shouldn't even be worth looking at.

Also, the tests don't seem to say how the servers are configured. Passenger's out-of-the-box configuration is designed to _conserve resources_ , not performance, because a lot of our users are on low-memory VPSes. It needs a few minor tweaks to optimize for performance like Unicorn is. With settings like these, it behaves almost exactly like Unicorn:

        # 'x' is whatever your Unicorn worker count should be
        passenger_max_pool_size x;
        passenger_min_instances x;
        passenger_pre_start_url http://yourapp.com/

</comment><comment><USER3> -1 no visualization

-1 seems like the author didn't use EM-friendly sleeps & http clients when appropriate.

-1 not clear if the author used a separate, in-DC machine for load testing or his laptop, and what the CPU looked like on the test machines during those tests. If they're sitting idle at 20% usage because RTT between your desk and EC2, that's not a great test. Additionally, it takes some sysctl tuning to really make OSX able to run a decent number of requests/s necessary for load testing of any type.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure it's even possible to get OSX into a state where it's a reliable and useful tool for IO-based load testing. It's not 100% clear to me that the author of this was using OSX for any part, except that they mention installing siege through brew, but if they did that pretty much renders the results meaningless.

There needs to be a mantra: Benchmarks are hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just wanted to chime in and say that even if it wasn't perfect (as already discussed ad nauseum in the comments here), I thought it was a really interesting comparison and I learned a lot from reading it. Thanks for the writeup!

<comment><USER6> It's not that it might not be perfect, but the fact is that if the experiment was run with incorrect parameters the result might just be plain wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Benchmarking on VMs (especially on EC2) is a no-no. It introduces a lot of other factors that can skew results drastically. There are entire companies built around the idea of variable performance in the cloud. If you want to do a decent benchmark, do it on a real piece of hardware.

<comment><USER8> Aren't most application hosted in the cloud anyway? I understand how VMs are not ideal, but aren't they more "real-life" than "real hardware" nowadays (not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious).

<comment><USER9> The problem with benchmarking on a VM is that VM effects may totally dominate code effects. It's sort of like using laptop speakers to mix a dubstep album.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Server configuration (for example, how many unicorn workers was the app running?) isn't given. Without this (and the many other testing methodology issues pointed out in other comments), the entire article is meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think I skimmed the first one. When I heard about Torquebox (or the upcoming Torqbox), I thought it would be interesting to try JRuby for beefier web apps to scale out better. Unfortunately, no one really seems to focus on web app server performance for JRuby in particular (skimming part 2 shows mention of JRuby, but none of this is JRuby specific).

Does anyone know where to get reliable information on using different webservers specifically on the JRuby stack, specifically the beefier Java options?

<comment><USER12> Try the JRuby mailing lists[0] or IRC. JRuby is actually quite impressive these days and people are using it in prod with servers like Torquebox. However, benchmarking JRuby is even more skewed and complex due to waiting for the JVM caches to warm! :)

0 - [https://github.com/jruby/jruby/wiki/MailingLists](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/wiki/MailingLists)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the note. I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see Chef/Puppet/Ansible build/deploy scripts for the test boxes, and the same for the box that siege was running from, assuming it's not a personal laptop (and if it is, it shouldn't be).

Benchmarks are hard, and it's a lot easier to be confident about results if others can easily repeat the experiments.

</comment><comment><USER13> Where are the graphs?!?

</comment><comment><USER14> > It didn't even make it a quarter of the way through /sleep.

my understanding of Ruby is limited to JRuby[on Rails] 1-hour demonstration i saw 10 years ago, and somehow the result above doesn't surprise me and is very consistent with my absolutely uneducated opinion of Ruby and its ecosystem.</comment>


Cisco to layoff 6,500 employees - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/18/technology/cisco_layoffs/?cnn=yes <comment><USER2> _Of the 6,500 employees being cut, Cisco expects 15% to come from the vice president level and above._

...

<comment><USER3> Out of a current staff of 73,400. Even wildly assuming that is half of their VP+, I've seen a lot worse ratios.

<comment><USER4> Quick math:

This means that about 975 VP or higher are being laid off. Assuming that you are right about it being half their VP+, it means that one person in 37 is (before layoffs) VP at Cisco.

I haven't work in such large firms, but it seems excessive to call VP someone who is in charge of 30 people, no?

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Goldman Sachs have Vice Presidents who have no people reporting to them? Back in the Golden Days I used to read about programmers, who actually programmed all day, who were Vice Presidents. Of course they made several 100k but still, they weren't in charge of anyone. (All of this IIRC)

<comment><USER6> A VP at a financial services firm is not a VP at Cisco or really any "non financial services firm". Firms like Goldman hand out Assistant VP and VP to, essentially, 3-5 year tenured employees. Directory and Managing Director are where the rubber really meets the road in these organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No longer is it verboten to mention Juniper and HP in the same breath as Cisco when talking about quality networking equipment. Hopefully, Cisco can get back on track and refocus on it's core networking products.

Interesting that they are letting go 6500. "6500" is their workhorse networking device but has been in market for about a decade now and needs a serious overhaul to be competitive again compared to Juniper's MX and the Brocade XMR devices.

<comment><USER7> I have a neighbor who manages Juniper support engineers. These engineers are typically working onsite at Juniper customers. He has been almost constantly recruiting new support engineers (who seem to either have CCIE certs or a similar experience level) for probably 18 months.

Since this recruiting is primarily for new customers, I would guess that Juniper is doing quite well competing against Cisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I bought a bunch of Cisco "Small Office" series equipment recently. Some of the items, particularly the NAS (NSS 300 series), have been very disappointing.

More disappointing, though, is that there seems to be no simple way to get meaningful support or contribute feedback afterwards. Half the canonical links on their web site don't even work. They seem to have a whole bunch of forums scattered around the site, but it looks like you can only participate after jumping through all kinds of hoops that we just don't have time for.

You can't even download documentation on how essential features work. Obvious example: If we're using encryption on our NAS, how does the key system work and do we need to keep a back-up copy of anything like that in case one of the disks in the RAID array fails? More subtle example: If there is this great integration with Mozy to deal with off-site back-ups automatically, why can't I even find out the prices and do basic due diligence about data security before I sign up for the service, and why did the Mozy call centre staff apparently not even know about the deal and the Mozy sales e-mail address not even reply to a basic enquiry? Is there even anyone at Cisco we can talk to about this?

Given that the only other reason to buy the Cisco version of the NAS rather than the original model from QNAP seems to be the Cisco 5-year "support", and the QNAP has had all sorts of enhancements and new functionality rolled out in the intervening period while Cisco have done squat, it's all one-way traffic in our office, and it's away from Cisco.

So I'm not surprised they're tightening up. If their other groups are performing as poorly as their Small Business people, I imagine they're suffering a rapid exodus of customers to organisations that understand the meaning of the term "customer service" and realise that professionals working with their kit have a job to do and don't like to waste time.

<comment><USER5> But aren't those all derivations of the Linksys products? I mean I loved Linksys for home use, but they're hardly in the same class as the 'original' Cisco products and quality (or at least as it was 10 years ago, I don't know how they compare nowadays).

<comment><USER8> No, I don't think so. The Linksys ones are a clear level down, now badged as "Linksys by Cisco" or something similar. The "Small Business" ranges aren't the kind of equipment home users would normally need, but should be plenty for a small office. I'd point you to a link on the Cisco site so you could see the sort of devices for yourself, but as I mentioned, they seem to keep moving them around. :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What happened on that one day where the graph drops so suddenly?

<comment><USER10> This, apparently: <http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/09/technology/cisco/index.htm> . I couldn't find any article from later that day, when the drop happened, but it seems that in spite of "beaten expectations" the investors weren't that happy with the 18% drop in profits.

Also, "temporary" URLs are so not cool. I had first tried to link to a Reuters article which I had found via Google Finance and it just wasn't there anymore. at least not where GFinance said it was supposed to be. And we're talking about a web resource published online only ~6 months ago, not about some 1998 article documenting the ongoing dot-com bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 6,500 employees ... 15% to come from the vice president level and above ... up to $1.3 billion in severance expenses ...

Wow. If I'm not mistaken, that's $195 million split up among an unknown number of VPs (let's say, what, 50 of them?), leaving around $171k per remaining employee.

Either those are very, _very_ nice severance packages, or there is some tremendous overhead that I don't understand.

<comment><USER12> I think 15% means the number of employees to lay off, not the ratio of severance expense.

<comment><USER11> You're right. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway, it still sounds like Cisco has ridiculously good severance packages!</comment></comment></comment>


Anyone using Lucene (or Nutch or Solr)? How's it working? - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/002262.html <comment><USER2> We are using lucene at <http://www.todotoh.com>

We're using it to index questions and answers and have plans to extend it to recommend questions and answers to a user based on their interaction with other q's and a's.

What are you using it for?

</comment><comment><USER3> We're using it at my day job, for search and indexing of financial news. I'm not directly involved with that part of the product, but I haven't heard any complaints from the programmers that are, and it seems to give us fairly nifty capabilities.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://lucene.apache.org>

<http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/>

<http://lucene.apache.org/solr/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think they're using it successfully at Krugle.com</comment>


Side Project: GoBlabble - Instant Voice Recording and Sharing over the Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.goblabble.com

<comment><USER2> Nice concept, I like it. The large images on the homepage though make me scroll/scan more than I should to get the concept. You can probably explain that concept in a much smaller space that's quicker to look at.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely consider that.

\--Update--- I switched to smaller icons. It looks somewhat misaligned but it's a good start.

<comment><USER2> Much better! I think the icons add little value really, they could be even smaller, or even leave them out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> are you using twilio or tropo or something else for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using Twilio. The API just works. Haven't tried Tropo, though.

<comment><USER3> tropo's got an unlimited free dev account. you might want to build something that could abstract the calls to either and switch between them as need be (twilio restructured pricing recently, tropo may do the same, etc).

I did something like this some time ago, before twilio (or at least before I knew of them) and may revisit this basic idea at some point.

good work :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What in your experience has management gotten right? - <AUTHOR> There is currently a great Ask HN post going the repetitive mistakes of business management. Considering the excellent conversation around that, I'm curious what the other side of the coin looks like. Who's had experience with good managers, and what made them so? <comment><USER2> Apologizing. When they screwed up, one way or another, they owned up to it and said so to as many people who would listen. This kind of culture is infectious, in the good way.

Be respectful of calendars. When I block off some time to focus on a hard problem, they don't interrupt me. If something does come up, they cautiously IM, "when would be a good time for an important interruption?" and nothing else. No phone calls, no swinging by my desk, no details of the issue, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently doing an internship at a law office (in Liechtenstein) and the one thing management is doing right is treating employees and partners like humans, not capital.

Everybody is treated with respect and not looked down upon, not even the cleaning personnel. It creates an atmosphere of trust and wholesomeness, that intrinsically motivates the people that work here. People are encouraged to speak up when they see possible improvement without the fear of mistreatment or sanctions (which is another good thing, too).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We currently do this at my work. The WHOLE company is privy to sales projections, financial health, etc... It's fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My best personal experience with a manager is one that saw their sole job as insulating the team from the necessary friction required to operate within the business. Clearing roadblocks to productivity and advocating for the team's best interests.

Managers that are both advocate and agent for their direct reports do wonders for a team's ability to produce.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty much every office is open-floor now. So, great job on that, guys!

<comment><USER5> Are you being sarcastic?

<comment><USER4> What do you mean? If everyone is doing it, it must be good. Right?</comment></comment></comment>


Which VPN Is Best - <AUTHOR> HI,  I use ExpressVPN, wondered if there are any better VPN's out there? <comment><USER2> Doesn't "best" matter for your use case? Are you trying to watch your country's geo-locked media while traveling? Are you protecting your data as you go around your daily activities? Are you making a private connection between machines for your business? Different providers can do different things better or worse.

I say this mostly because I'd love to also know what VPNs folks have found that stand out in specific areas around, say, ease of use (ala Tunnelbear), ability to work around geo-blocks (like Netflix refusing to let me, a paying customer, watch some things when I travel), etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check this site [https://thatoneprivacysite.net/](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/) has an extensive comparison between VPN providers. I've been using NordVPN for a couple of months and I am pretty happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've installed Wireguard on my VPS. All is nice so far. I don't know how secure it is, i-e if people can do a whois on the IP and see my identity (it seems protected by my hoster, though).

</comment><comment><USER5> Look like a strange way to promote expressVPN

Been using them in the past and didn't like their UX too much

</comment><comment><USER6> Wireguard

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks guys!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No promo, just wondered

<comment><USER7> No promo</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Chrome sucking badly lately? - <AUTHOR>

It seem like Google Chrome (on osx at least) has become really unstable lately.  Suddenly when it crashes it takes down the entire browsers (aka, all tabs become unresponsive). I thought this wasn't possible?
I wonder, is this a problem on other OS's, I've read others are having this issue on mac like I am.
Also wondering if this is because of Flash being built-in now. I actually never installed Flash on Chrome because I like it that way, and now I don't even have the choice.  Drag. <comment><USER2> I've had similar problems on my Mac and Linux, but not on Windows, where Chrome is one of the most stable browsers.

I suspect it's a matter of the Mac/Linux versions being a bit less mature than the Windows version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny you mention Windows - while true on a full desktop, I've been having issues running Chrome in a Win7 VM. It doesn't crash, but something isn't right with their js engine, things like jquery run very erratically (timing issue, aka animations/transitions don't run correctly).

<comment><USER2> Do you see that for all JavaScript, or only animations?

I ask because virtual machines often wreak havoc with video performance. I had terrible results with VMWare + Firefox back when I was doing my JS gaming startup, and similar results with virtualized IE at work. Oftentimes things don't work right under virtualization, and it's not the browser or the OS's fault, it's the virtualization layer's.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say it isn't just javascript, but Chrome in general. Animations of course are the most visibly noticeable effect of whatever is causing it. Might be the way it compartmentalizes it's processes/tabs and parallels just isn't as good at that sort of thing.

Safari and even IE run really well however.

I agree, the only way to really know how well your stuff will run is to run it on real hardware. I might have to look at VMware fusion again, maybe they are more accurate in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you go to "about:plugins", you can disable the built-in Flash plugin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Both Chrome on OSX and Chromium on Linux are rock solid for me. On 5.0.375.99 x86_64.</comment>


A Climate Modeller Spills the Beans - <AUTHOR> https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/a-climate-modeller-spills-the-beans/ <comment><USER2> Yes our models are crude, and the predictive accuracy may be good, or may be as useful as the medical theory of "humours".

But the response to these models is demands to stop using non-renewable resources like fossil fuels for energy, moving to less polluting and de- centralized renewable grids. It's been demands to reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment, reducing cattle emissions, the impact of aquaculture on the oceans etc.

These demands are good, in and of themselves. So let's do them, anyway.

</comment><comment> chris-hexx Well, okay, at what amount of warming attributable is it okay not to invest in reducing CO2? What's the spread in impact estimations if we should have reduced emissions, vs if we shouldn't?

Basically, how do we do Pascal's wager?</comment>


Bloxp: Download any blog as an ebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloxp.com/

<comment><USER2> looks like you don't support jekyll sites yet</comment>


How to Avoid Some Startup Danger Points - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/05/21/how-to-avoid-three-startup-danger-points/

<comment><USER2> I'm almost at the point of launching my project -- in point 2, but I cut a lot -- and the things I'm most worried about are:

1\. Once it's up and people actually use it, I have to be much more careful about uptime, monitoring, and changing how data is stored. This is by far the scariest thing.

2\. Handling a large temporary spike in load when I publish the URL here or elsewhere

3\. How -- if I actually knew what I wanted to charge for -- to integrate payment into the application, and what I'm supposed to do tax-wise with the money I'd get.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Yeah, that stuff is a pain, but it's a "good problem to have." Nothing to be scared about, just annoying.

2\. Cache your landing page and upgrade your server beforehand. If it's any help, I survived getting to #4 on the reddit home page with a Django app that used middleware caching for anonymous users on a 2GB Slicehost slice.

3\. Incorporate as a business, avoid processing credit cards at first (use PayPal, Amazon, Google, etc.). If you make money now, you have until next tax year to worry about the accounting stuff. Another good problem to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've fallen for both 2 and 3; they are absolute killers.

There is a fourth too; stagnation. I actually had a startup a little while back (actually before hanging out here). I had the idea nearly 5 years before and spent about 3 years building it in fits and spurts (major warning signs there).

We went through about 4 rebuilds before I got bored for the last time (through total luck I was able to sell parts of the code/company).

[this is somewhat of an aside] I think it has made me a bit of a cynic about starting up. I see all these big ideas but there is little or no money in most of them.

I know the current fad is to fund lots of small, lean ideas. But ultimately I think a better approach is to contemplate your ideas, get hooked onto something really significant to you and then build it. I'm still looking for mine - but it feels the "right way".

</comment><comment><USER5> "Once is up and people actually use it"

Be careful with that one. It looks like you are assuming people are going to use it.

I know first hand that they don't :)

Getting traction is VERY hard. Plan for that.

Hope it helps.</comment>


The F-35's Vertical Landing – 60 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ye9auxJPVg

<comment><USER2> it's just a _simulator_.

Like Camelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail</comment>


Facebook to Invest $300m in Supporting Local News - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/doing-more-to-support-local-news <comment><USER2> > Last year, we worked to better understand what kind of news people want to > see on Facebook.

This opening line is just all wrong. News isn't about 'what you want to see', writing news to garner clicks is basically another way of saying 'our news reporting is fundamentally biased'.

Real journalism isn't entertainment. But, I get it, real journalism doesn't sell, people don't have time to understand world problems, don't care much about corruption unless it's dramatic, don't care about plain boring facts.

Facebook understands that in order to own a market they have to spoon-feed it what it wants. Curate an audience of idle minds and feed them what they measurably want.

This play to 'local news' is simply a tool to advance their own agenda, they want to own local news and help you feel that FB is all warm and 'local' to your needs.

Your 'local' world-view, sponsored by Facebook. It's kind of sick really.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with nor endorse Facebook. I actually deleted mine for 6 months before making a new one to keep in touch with friends.

But, I will not knock a company for wanting to maximize profits. They want their users to want to use their platform. If I owned a social media, or any product really, I would want to do everything I can to keep them coming back. I feel like as long as it isn't illegal, and done with best practices (ethically and morally) then that is what a free market is about. Should a competitor arise and do it better then That would be fantastic! Markets thrive through competition and freedom of choice. But as it stands there is not a whole lot of competition state side.

I don't agree with a lot that Facebook, or Mark, does. But I have respect for them from strictly a business point of view for staying above water as long as they have. I just wish there was a viable competitor.

<comment><USER4> > I will not knock a company for wanting to maximize profits.

This statement only exists in a vacuum. The only way you can truthfully make this claim is if you can put absolutely anything inside the blank in the following sentence:

"I will not knock a company for wanting to maximize profits, even if they ______"

> If I owned a social media, or any product really, I would want to do > everything I can to keep them coming back.

Again, you should be able to place absolutely anything in the blanks here and still believe in your statement:

"I would want to do everything I can to keep them coming back, even _______"

> I feel like as long as it isn't illegal

Slavery was legal for a very long time, and had its own "best practices".

> Should a competitor arise and do it better then That would be fantastic!

Yes, what this world needs is a cutthroat surveillance complex even _more_ smart and ruthless than Facebook.

> But I have respect for them from strictly a business point of view for > staying above water as long as they have.

Facebook hasn't even been around for two decades. My grandmother's small business has been around longer than that, and she doesn't have a board of advisors.

> I just wish there was a viable competitor.

This entire argument feels like a strawman. No one is saying Facebook needs a competitor. People are saying Facebook is too powerful. Any viable competitor would thus also be too powerful.

<comment><USER3> > I never said 'even if they ______'. That's kind of a stretch of what I > originally meant. What I had in mind when I said that I guess was imagining > someone running flyers or business cards around town advertising their > startup. Stuff that does not manipulate, put at risk, harm, or exploit the > user.

I do believe a line should be drawn regarding the reach of any company. It was why I left Facebook in the first place, because yes I considered them too powerful. Not only technology wise but playing a too powerful role in my own personal life. But then I figured the 20+ years I have already spent on the internet has already garnered a healthy data profile on me and just dropping the one service wasn't going to dent that too much. So I came back to keep in contact while now minimizing my time spent on there.

When I mention competitors I am thinking of a company that closely provides a lot of the same functionality as Facebook but without the censoring, surveillance, exploiting of its users. But, even if one existed the only way that would work is if people moved to it. I think it is entirely possible for that to happen. But like you said, who is to say down the road they won't take the same turn that Facebook did?

Its a risk that will always exist on these type of services. One thing remains is that there will always be a demand for socializing / connectivity.

Comparing Facebook to slavery is a bit of a stretch. I think we as a people now have a better understanding of our inherent rights and where boundaries should be. The problem lies in the fact that a majority of the people do not care or acknowledge being the product of a company.

I'm not sure what else to say other than I believe that everyone and every business should have a market that they can succeed in. You're grandmother probably does so because she treats people right. Makes them feel welcome and listens to their concerns and requests in whatever it is that she does. The same should go for larger corporations. They should listen to their users feedback and provide them with what they are wanting. Whether or not these things should even exist is not an argument I am qualified to explore.

<comment><USER4> > What I had in mind when I said that I guess was imagining someone running > flyers or business cards around town advertising their startup.

Which is exactly why I explained that your claim only existed in a vacuum. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don't say "I will not knock a company for wanting to maximize profits" in the context of Facebook trying to create a larger echo chamber and control local news consumption if you don't mean it. That has nothing to do with running flyers.

> When I mention competitors I am thinking of a company that closely provides > a lot of the same functionality as Facebook but without the censoring, > surveillance, exploiting of its users

The larger arc of this conversation is that Facebook shouldn't be allowed to do certain things. Another Facebook clone in the wild only increases the odds that more than one company will try to completely subsume your digital life and influence your thoughts and conversations, it does nothing to address the above problem and is irrelevant to the conversation. Here lies the straw man.

> Comparing Facebook to slavery is a bit of a stretch.

I agree. But I obviously didn't do that. I was clearly making a statement about the fact that there is no basis for the belief that the laws in a country reflect what is actually right and wrong.

There was no comparison between Facebook and anything. I'll chalk that up to a misunderstanding rather than another straw man argument.

> I'm not sure what else to say other than I believe that everyone and every > business should have a market that they can succeed in.

A lot of people disagree with you. With the idea that legislation should be business-first instead of people-first. Because that is the ultimate eventuality of such a system.

We end up with the situation we now have in America where corporations run rampant across our human rights, destroy the environment and cause mass extinctions, lie and steal from our pockets, pay absurdly less taxes than they are supposed to, breach our privacy and sell our transactional history for a buck fifty, buy overwhelming majorities of local news stations, implant reporters, displace native cultures in order to build oil pipelines, engage in economically-motivated paramilitary operations all over the world, support oppressive regimes and the dismantling of democracy everywhere south of the border, etc etc etc.

Your Candyland world where businesses listen to users, users who are educated enough to engage in serious conversations with Facebook's support about major technological and socioeconomic consequences of their platform, and these businesses respond in a moral fashion, flourishing in their free markets, where scarcely a law exists which puts a dent in their bottom line, inevitably ends in an apocalyptic wasteland.

A company is just a group of people with a common goal. Nothing magically transforms it into some other entity with legislative preference. Claiming that a group of people with a common goal should get legislative preference over a singular individual (which is required if you believe in free market capitalism) is just absurd, and the consequences are incredibly obvious: the strong will bully the weak, groups will bully individuals, companies will take advantage of individuals if the individuals are not legally protected from certain kinds of "business".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has been running a local newspaper for the last four years in a town of about 11 thousand people, getting money or support from Facebook would feel like someone robbing you and then being so kind as to split the money with you. My trust in them is exactly zero.

They have practically monopolized news distribution, helped to destroy the business model of an important social service and now they would like to make up for it by giving a fraction of the money back?

<comment><USER6> I also run a local news outlet, digital-only though and not print. Facebook is both the reason for our success and also the source of our biggest pain. They almost put us out of business within the last year.

For how they're helping, it's really hard to get people to care about websites. People as a whole just don't care. They don't want to visit your website. So we publish our stories and share them to Facebook. We get about a 10% click through of people who saw the story, which is better than we'd do without publishing to Facebook.

On the other hand, our biggest draw is the event calendar, organizing all of the city and business events into one local calendar. People visit for the events, and then also click on news headlines they find interesting. Up until April 2018, we got this event data from the Facebook events API and linked it all back to Facebook if people wanted more details. A win-win I think. In April 2018, they shut off the events API with zero warning. So these public events from businesses who want people to attend their events, events which are visible by people who are not even logged into Facebook, are now considered private data by Facebook and no longer part of their API.

The big draw of aggregating them is that people see a curated list of good events that are actually near them: in a small town, just clicking Discover on Facebook events shows you mostly stuff from the big cities nearby. It takes a few clicks to get to events actually happening in the small town itself. We still have it, but we have to type it all by hand every week, which leaves less time for writing stories, talking to story leads and city officials and customers, selling ads, you know the actual "local news" part of the business.

Facebook, if you're reading this and want to help local news: turn the public events API back on. A local band playing at my local brewery is not private information, it is the definition of "things that should be shared".

<comment> steve-benjamins That's interesting- would you be willing to share your publication? I'd love to check it out.

<comment><USER6> It's very closely tied to my real-world identity so I'm not comfortable linking it here at this time. It's only interesting to the people living in/around my small town, to anyone else it would just look like a generic small town news website full of unimportant small-town topics.

<comment><USER7> Are you capturing these folks from FB through email sign-ups? Have seen a couple local news orgs successfully get people to visit their site directly by investing in email.

<comment><USER6> I have a call-to-action on every page asking people to sign up for the newsletter, but the number of people who actually do that are so insignificant that it doesn't matter. Over the past year I've had about two dozen signups, compared to 15,000 people hitting the site.

I haven't explored more of the popular avenues for this though, things like "if the mouse moves to close the tab, show a pop up asking for a signup". It might convert but it's not something I'm comfortable doing at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Facebook already has way too much power in their ability to shape reality for billions of people. Now they have even more power as the local news companies will be beholden to their investor.

</comment><comment><USER9> Best win-win outcome IMO would be for Facebook to pay itself this $300M as an incentive to stay completely out of news, local and otherwise.

<comment><USER10> prevent people from posting news articles? you know that facebook doesnt post or promote news itself... right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favourite story involving Facebook and the news is when Facebook's head of news - Campbell Brown (the former CNN anchor), went down to Australia. She was hired after the 2016 election as a go-between for Facebook and news organizations.

According to a report in "The Australian" she is quoted to have allegedly said "We will help you revitalise journalism... in a few years the reverse looks like I'll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice" and "We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals anymore. That is the old world and there is no going back – Mark wouldn't agree to this"

Then Facebook denied that this happened.

So to summarize:

\- Facebook is accused of not doing enough to combat fake news

\- Facebook hires Campbell Brown to be a point person to deal with the fake news situation

\- A newspaper reports that Campbell Brown allegedly tried to push them around

\- Facebook says this is fake news

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting timing, the day after Newspack was announced.[1] I know which one I'm going to support, but it's going to be tough to take on a $300mm commitment with a $3mm commitment.

1\. [https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/newspack-by- wordpre...](https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/newspack-by-wordpress- com/)

<comment><USER13> With Google Reader Gone, Facebook and Twitter essentially have taken the place of feed readers. It makes a lot of sense for Facebook, it's not merely a social network anymore. It's acting like a social 'OS' for the users now.

<comment><USER14> Yahoo.com used to be that "social OS" in the 1990s and early 2000s, and look at them now. They even had a Facebook-like feature as part of their service, Yahoo 360.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interestingly the post says nothing about Sinclair which makes me think this is nothing more than a gigantic media partnership and yet another reason to distrust the news.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah yes the bastion of journalistic quality that is local news...wait...what?

FB gets a lot of flak for fake news and then decides to invest in local news? Why not in institutions that set the standard for journalism and bring accountability such as Pro Publica?

<comment><USER17> Pro Publica was created by billionaire bankers a little more than 10 years ago. They aren't in need of any funding. Also, it's a bit of a stretch to say that pro publica is the standard of journalism or accountability. Pro Publica is an advocacy institution.

<comment><USER18> You may not intend it, but when you write, "created by billionaire bankers" it doesn't add to the conversation much (specific behavior influenced by that funding would be more useful, if it exists) and is recalls some kind of unpalatable language/imagery used by far right groups - which I'm definitely not accusing you of, to be clear.

One thing you may not know is that they publish their full financials, in accordance with the mission statement around transparency. You can see their full 2017 finances here: [https://assets.propublica.org/2017-Financial- Statements-for-...](https://assets.propublica.org/2017-Financial-Statements- for-Pro-Publica-Inc.pdf) (and you can see they are financially conservative, but are very much in need of funding to support their operations).

I have no connection to them other than admiration for how they are operated and their mission.

<comment><USER17> We were discussing whether facebook should fund pro publica like they are supporting struggling local news companies. Since pro publica is supported by billionaire bankers, they aren't struggling for money and if they need it, they can tap the foundation that the billionaire bankers set up for them. Frankly, I don't think facebook should be supporting either, but given the choice between struggling local news and pro publica, I think struggling local news is the proper choice. Also, I'm not accusing you of being a far leftist to be clear, but it's an unpalatable tactic used by the far left to label everything as being far right and it really doesn't add much to the conversation. Also, if a company is financially conservative, they wouldn't be in need of additionally funding. That's the central idea of financial conservatism, the budget drives your needs rather than your needs driving the budget.

<comment><USER19> That preamble in his post was most likely drawing a a connection between "billionaire bankers" and the far-right triple parentheses anti-banker sentiment (to be a bit euphemistic).

<comment><USER18> Yeah. And your response to my original comment is fair. It is definitely a dog-whistle for some people, but I had ceding ground to people trying to steal common usage words to encode hate speech. I was on the fence about mentioning it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone else not want local news support coming from FB of all places?

</comment><comment><USER21> Or Facebook to Invest $300m in Influencing Local News.

Facebook newsfeed model inherently works against local news and small guys (unless some certain piece goes viral once in a while). Local news outlet based out of some small locality does not have a huge follower base that gets Facebook's attention. This is just another PR stunt by Facebook.

<comment><USER22> Same problem when using google youtube, they push CNN ahead of other news bloggers. CNN is also excluded from being blocked like normal channels.

The future of Facebook news is their curated hand picked news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Know what would actually help local news? Ad revenue share on their pages. So many older people treat Facebook as "the internet" are rarely venture off platform.

<comment><USER24> Maybe we have a different idea of "older" people, but my experience is that older people actually still read newspapers (ie dead trees).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lion invests $300M in the preservation of gazelles.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a good idea, but facebook can't be trusted.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/13/they- dont...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/13/they-dont-care- facebook-fact-checking-in-disarray-as-journalists-push-to-cut-ties)

>Journalists paid to help fix Facebook's fake news problem say they have lost trust in the platform

>"They've essentially used us for crisis PR," said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. "They're not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don't care."

<comment><USER27> > It's a good idea, but facebook can't be trusted.

In my opinion it seems like the foundations for a Patron/Client relationship. Those typically only really work out for the two parties involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "We noticed that others were using our platform for psychological manipulation, we can no longer continue to allow this unless it's Facebook approved messaging"

-Mark Zuckerfuck

</comment><comment><USER29> The old local news model is dying because it's top heavy and has enormous overhead. Local news isn't dying though, and is as valuable as ever. It's just in the process of completely changing.

One person can now do more with 1/1000th the budget of a local Newspaper with the barrier to entry being hard work, good writing skills, social media savvy and a love of the place they are covering.

More money to these organizations will just keep them on life support longer. Now if they changed their model 100% that would be a completely different story.

The future of journalism will be a lot of small teams (1-4) of writers/journalists/personalities running their own show in their city or state.

The financial woes of the old news industry is a symptom. A change is needed.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great! Though nothing on how the Facebook click-bait business model is at odds with good journalism, which has led to the decline of reputable newspapers and rise of Buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Facebook's idea of news is "anything that keeps you more addicted to our app, and/or more easily targetable for ads".

</comment><comment><USER32> The more they force themselves into the people's lives, the more people will be pushed away. Just watch.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am a publisher of a medical technologies website since 2004.

To really help journalism, Facebook and Google need to get out of the surveillance capitalism business.

I left this comment before on a different thread.

What we have now is monopolized internet. Few entities, like Google and FB, took over the internet and crafted the landscape to their advantage. They monopolized ads revenue, search traffic, and more importantly, they are actively spying on the general public, taking away any possible advantages from publishers. So website for doctors cannot make money by advertising to doctors. Doctors will see Google ads on Candy Crush. The result is a dearth of advertising money for publishers and regulations aimed at destroying any attempt to take over these behemoths. Local news is dead, because Google and Facebook know your location, and they sell it.

When was the last time you saw GFPR notice on Facebook or Google? Do you think publishers enjoy having "Please Donate" pop-ups? When was the last time you heard of investment rounds in online publishers, or any publisher? Why do you think Denver Post and USA Today are barely alive?

In the olden days we had websites and blog networks being born, Gawker, Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch network, political networks, etc etc. And what do we have now? Central stations with fake news shenanigans and retarded memes. While publishers, including your local newspaper and your favorite websites, are struggling.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do these execs / decision makers live in some fantasy land where they think this looks and sounds okay? I assume none of the employees were asked about this, as any rational person would tell them "wait a second, I think this is stupid."

</comment><comment><USER35> it's amazing how facebook has become an internet within the internet for stuff like looking at news, company information, etc.

<comment><USER27> my wife just told me that they're presenting recipes to her for her to save in some other corner of her facebook ... experience.

they really are attempting to become an "internet within the Internet." kinda reminiscent of how AOL started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A platform that is renowned for sanitising the world around us to fit their agenda, invests in news outlets. Is anyone else seeing the problem here?

I am glad I left that platform.

</comment><comment><USER37> lol sure. Supporting local news with Russian propaganda

</comment><comment><USER38> Might as well have been posted by The Onion

</comment><comment><USER39> With stipulations, of course.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

<comment><USER14> Not sure if I got that, did you mean "Do not want." perhaps?

<comment><USER40> Facebook has already proven to be liars. They are also biased with everything they do. Facebook has clouded the minds of everyone! Get the f off facebook and go live your life! Facebook needs to die in a fire.</comment></comment></comment>


Linux on the TI-Nspire Calculator - <AUTHOR> http://ndlessly.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/linuxa-new-milestone-for-openness/

<comment><USER2> I really need to get around to writing a Lisp for the Nspire. Should be easy to implement the roots of lisp [0] in TI-Basic without resorting to Ndless.

[0] quote, atom, eq, cons, car, cdr, cond a la [http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/jmc.lisp](http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/jmc.lisp)</comment>


Statistical Proof that Marketing Web Stuff is Useless - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/2522/Statistical-Proof-that-Marketing-Web-Stuff-is-Useless.aspx <comment><USER2> Figures can lie and liars figure. The reality is that if you are looking for some type of objective authority, then use statistics. People are relationships not numbers, though the issue is looking at the numbers representative of the relationships. I find it amusing at how the web marketing world continues to look at the wrong numbers.</comment>


Struggling to come up with product ideas - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any advice for someone who rarely has problems in their life? I generally make do with what I have and am generally a happy person. I dont need more, I dont really want for anything. (Other than much money of course)<p>How can someone like me come up with problems to solve when I myself have none? <comment><USER2> My guess is you're young and have had few jobs (if any), so business problems are out. Therefore, you are looking at consumer-focused products, and consumer products are typically of the vitamin variety rather than medication. I would probably look at your parents, siblings, and friends to see what they complain about.

Edit: Woops! I HN-stalked you and realized my assumption was horribly wrong. Sorry. I bet you solve problems in your life all the time using tools most people can't use (i.e. grep). Here's a problem you might solve: How to determine and deal with all the phones, tablets, computers, dvd players, and TVs on your home network 'dialing home' and pushing data you might or might not want pushed? In other words, a cheap firewall/IDS/IPS that is easy to use without overwhelming a laymen with things they don't understand.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it comes down to 'is this really the path you should choose?' an example. an owner of a car repair shop wants to hire a new mechanic. He's going to look for the natural/creative problem solver who can improvise and is really into mechanics. So if you are not always thinking about solutions or deep into some technology or industry and wondering how to make it better, more efficient, then why choose this path? (round peg in a square hole).

what are you really good at, or interested in? work hard at that. many ways to contribute in a startup than being the founder / idea man. In fact, it seems there are a fair share of tech startups whose engineers really helped the founders make the service/product marketable. without them it would have been just an idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get where you're coming from, extremely valid advice, I'm certainly a square so to speak. I love solving problems, I love learning, I love coding. Solving problems and constant learning is precisely what got me into software development.

I feel I'm so entrenched with solutions to every problem I don't need anymore solutions. I need problems.

I think I need to go against my assumptions and do what many have said: start to focus on other people, start looking outward. Looking inward hasn't really helped anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would suggest going out and having some adventures! If you don't have any problems, you probably aren't taking a lot of risk with your decision making. Get out in the world and experience things. Perhaps start by volunteering, this way you can help others AND see how others are struggling. It will help you to sympathize with others, and allow you to view the world in a more realistic sense...therefore helping you to identify problems that you could help solve!

<comment><AUTHOR> That is... a really good idea. I think you're right on the money there, I take almost zero risk in everything I do, I've been working on it but not nearly as hard as I could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pick a really boring, antiquated industry. Think about how you can add glamour to said industry. Think about how you can redefine workflow, transactions, purchasing, sales, marketing, etc. Change the way business processes run. If the industry dictates everything, try and build something that gives the consumer greater power/choices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this resonates greatly with how I would like to tackle things, while I guess your advice falls under industry disruption, I think I like it more simply because it challenges status quo and that is me through and through.

<comment><USER5> Then it sounds like you know exactly what you need to do :) Go tackle the giants!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your problem is your lack of problems. Build an app that adds empathy to a person they can understand the problems of other people. Make zillions.

Write an app that summarizes complaints from around the web and collates them into an organized list. That should help.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you don't see a problem that needs solving, then don't make a product or service.

Perhaps you could offer something that doesn't solve a problem, but instead offers something nice that didn't exist before. Writing, art, comedy, and other things fall under that umbrella (one can make money off of these, though you have to be good).

Trying to find a problem in need of a solution just so you can develop a solution is nearly always a recipe for future failure and disappointment.

</comment><comment><USER8> Stop focusing on yourself. Solve other people's problems.

</comment><comment><USER9> Take a look at what problems others have in their lives.

Likewise take a look at what problems businesses have and come up with solutions.

</comment><comment><USER10> You're looking the wrong way. It's not about you.

<comment><AUTHOR> While thats correct, if I have a problem which needs solving it should be a lot easier to define the product, isn't that generally good advice.

Do you have any examples / tips on how to see problems in a world where you don't see many?</comment></comment>


Plane – minimal visual improvements for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wfpaisa/plane <comment><USER2> This is for gnome. It will be appropriate to have it I the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> a collection of themes and no screenshots?

<comment><USER4> [https://github.com/wfpaisa/plane-theme](https://github.com/wfpaisa/plane- theme)

It wasn't hard to find.

<comment><USER3> sorry, I was on mobile and not to agile :) thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.6079 <comment><USER2> I researched TorCoin. I feel like I know a fair amount about Tor and BitCoin.

What worries me most about Tor is that people do not realize how trivially an exit relay can MITM your traffic. The value proposition of Tor is NOT keeping all your traffic safe. It's _anonymizing_ your traffic from end to end, so that nobody who sees your data knows both where it came from and where it's going. They can still see the data itself.

For all intents and purposes, traffic from Exit -> Internet is plaintext. The relay operator can MITM it. Tor is only safer than a VPN or proxy because the exit relay does not know your _identity_. It can still access the data you transfer through it. [4]

Anyone can start a Tor exit relay, and setting up a MITM proxy on it is trivial. Siphoning bitcoin transactions is equally trivial. Just listen for the proper traffic patterns.

You should not be transferring any business-critical data over Tor. It's a great tool for protecting your identity, but not your data.

With HTTPS, you're relatively safer, since you'll get an alert if a relay is MITM'ing you and modifying the certificate. But with plain HTTP, you won't even know when you're getting MITM'd.

More Resources:

[1] [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/34804/how- safe-i...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/34804/how-safe-is-tor- from-mitm-snooping-attacks)

[2] [https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/mitm](https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/mitm) (includes links to research papers)

[3] [https://www.petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Winter.pdf](https://www.petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Winter.pdf)

[4] Emphasis on "for all intents and purposes." Not a true statement universally.

<comment><USER3> Siphoning bitcoin transactions is not trivial.

Transactions need to be signed by the holder of the private key to the inputs. A MITM attacker still does not have access to any keys.

If it was that easy, bitcoin would be worthless.

<comment><USER2> You're right. Let me clarify:

I'm not worried about the transactions themselves, as they appear on the blockchain. What worries me is the "meta transactions", if you will. The Bitcoin ecosystem is full of off-blockchain transactions. For example, mining pools use their own communication mechanisms, which the BGP attack this summer exploited. Also, dozens of exchanges, marketplaces, and services rely on HTTP API's for transacting. Even if the blockchain is not vulnerable, the external transactions that reference it certainly could be.

Imagine how many "send X bitcoin from wallet Y to wallet Z" requests route over HTTP. Quite a few.

So yeah, not "trivial" as I said. But certainly not impossible.

(Welcome to HN! I'm glad my mistake brought you out of the woodwork.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Yes, I somewhat agree with your clarification.

And to further your point, it appears this guy ([https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2k38ta/my_wallet_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2k38ta/my_wallet_was_just_emptied_stolen_but_i_dont_know/)) just got his coins stolen by using blockchain.info over TOR.

However, I still believe nothing is fundamentally broken. Any important protocol should be using SSL - especially when operating over TOR. Lapses like this are still simply user error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> " Many of these details do not appear in any specifications and were obtained by a careful analysis of the corresponding source code. This is especially true for Bitcoin for which there exists no official documentation except for the original white paper [14] and Bitcoin Wiki[3]."

Well that seems a bit odd.

<comment><USER5> You have no idea how deep that rabbit hole goes. Bitcoin Core is referred to as a "reference implementation", which means "you should implement all bugs referenced by Bitcoin Core in transaction verification, or you have your choice of being kicked off the Bitcoin consensus immediately, which is bad, or at any point of an attacker's choosing, which is catastrophic."

<comment><USER6> That's the way a blockchain works though. If there is a bug in the client that 99% of people use then of course you'll have forking blockchains. And all of this matters less anyway, because clients can fallback to blockchain.info if there is a fork detected, and just warn the user that the client may have a bug.

<comment><USER7> > because clients can fallback to blockchain.info if there is a fork detected

Unfortunately bc.i's implementation/instance is not immune to bugs, forking, lying or collusion. I don't know why you would expect it to be.

<comment><USER6> The point is that it is a trusted enough party. If the client gets a suspicious block it can check against that party as a way of seeing if the client itself may have a bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tor and Bitcoin hide fundamentally _different things_ in their pseudonymity specs. It's like people think Tor is magic anonymity peanut butter they can spread on whichever project they wish.

<comment><USER9> In fact Bitcoin design does not contain elements hinting that anonymity was ever a goal. People using Bitcoin over Tor might just want to circumvent censorship aka Tor as glorified proxy.

<comment><USER8> Right, but it doesn't work. That's the whole point of the article. Tor+random app usually equals massive vulnerability.

I should add I learned that the hard way trying to integrate Tor with OpenBazaar.

What might be fun is stenography over the Tor protocol. Anybody interested?

<comment><USER10> There is a project that uses stenography to hide the Tor protocol from inspection. I need to tie up a few loose ends to some of my branches for it (I am not the originator, just a contributor) but have gotten caught up in schoolwork these last few months. Any assistance is appreciated!

[0] [https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus](https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus) [1] [https://github.com/SRI-CSL/stegotorus](https://github.com/SRI- CSL/stegotorus)

<comment><USER8> Cool, I'll check it out. I was thinking more along the lines of hiding messages in the Tor protocol itself, rather than hiding Tor traffic (which is desperately needed.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting in that it highlights a number of problems that _every_ peer-to-peer network that wishes to use something like Tor for privacy needs to take into account.

I also wasn't aware that Tor hidden services can be "blackholed" so easily (it sounds like this is probably well known to regular Tor users, though).

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the recent (~2 months ago) addition of a new, very fast Tor relay (faster than any other relay at the time) that only relayed Bitcoin traffice [0].

Wonder if that has anything to do with this research, or if someone else has independently arrived at the same result?

[0] [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2bwds2/what_does_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2bwds2/what_does_the_worlds_fastest_tor_node_have_to_do/)

</comment><comment><USER13> > [...] control which Bitcoin blocks and transactions are relayed to the user > and can delay or discard user's transactions and blocks.

Bear in mind that we can detect when a node does this, by monitoring it, and measuring whether blocks or transactions are withheld, kind of like in this paper: [http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/techreport.pdf](http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/techreport.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is Matthew Green & team's ZeroCash still getting an implementation?

</comment><comment><USER15> So what are the choices for people in oppressed countries? Use an altcoin or just hope that nobody implements this attack?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is why something like Darkcoin should exist. It fixes one of Bitcoin's biggest issues, anonymity.

</comment><comment><USER17> For a better way of pseudonymity check darkcoin and it's masternode network.</comment>


Show HN: librg - Build simple and fast cross-platform multiplayer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/librg/librg <comment><USER2> This is cool. I'm trying to learn how to do multiplayer networking from scratch, and it is a challenge. I have a C++ game project in my to do projects, might try it out.

It says that all the logic is coded on the server side... would it also be client side too to do the interpolation? I'm coming from the perspective of this article, which I'm following for my networking experiments: [https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game- architect...](https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game- architecture.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Game logic can be written on either side, as it largely depends on the use case. We strongly encourage developers to design their game logic to be run at server-side due to security considerations however.

As for interpolation, yes, that is entirely possible and completely in your control as well.

librg allows for entity peer streaming, which means that you as a player can take control over a specific entity (or entities) and provide your own updates for the server (such as player position or view angles, etc). It is entirely up to you really.

As an example, we also develop an unofficial multiplayer for Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, so we use librg as a server proxy for players. Since we can't replicate the game logic on server side, we trust the player in various aspects, such as his player position, animation states or even vehicle handling. This case leads us to librg being used on server as a proxy with minimal logic, that shares game-generated content between players and provides basic fact-checking.

See: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s3Ox5_4rQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s3Ox5_4rQo)

With librg, you are free to do as you please. Feel free to contact us on Discord or via GitHub issues/E-Mail.

<comment><USER2> Great thanks for the reply, I'm going to star this on Github for using later, thanks for offering contact info; makes this a little less daunting.</comment></comment></comment>