Sr.ht, the hacker's forge, now open for public alpha - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availability.html <comment><USER3> Congrats on the milestone. This is a huge boon to the open source community. I love the pricing model.

Are there any plans or ideas for a migration path from GitHub to sir.ht? I would imagine that if there was a way to transfer issues and discussions it would encourage more users to make the switch.

Here's one data point for you: zig programming language. Influencing factors:

* If we had syntax highlighting in the file browser, that would be a win over GitHub, which insists that there be "hundreds of GitHub repositories" before accepting a syntax highlighting pull request for a new language. I could imagine it would be reasonable to support "repository-local" highlighting configuration.

* Transferring existing content as mentioned above. It would be unwise for us to give up all the issues and discussion.

* The fact that the build service supports FreeBSD is already a win. However, to switch from Azure DevOps we would lose Windows builds. Is that ruled out due to the open source nature of sr.ht, or is that planned? Related, it would be attractive if sir.ht offered more architectures, e.g. i386, ARM, RISC-V (I believe this was mentioned but I could not find it in the docs)

<comment><USER4> >* If we had syntax highlighting in the file browser, that would be a win over GitHub, which insists that there be "hundreds of GitHub repositories" before accepting a syntax highlighting pull request for a new language. I could imagine it would be reasonable to support "repository-local" highlighting configuration.

We use pygments, so patches to pygments would make it to sr.ht's syntax highlighting.

>* Transferring existing content as mentioned above. It would be unwise for us to give up all the issues and discussion.

Planned. Also planned to let you sync between both.

>* The fact that the build service supports FreeBSD is already a win. However, to switch from Azure DevOps we would lose Windows builds. Is that ruled out due to the open source nature of sr.ht, or is that planned? Related, it would be attractive if sir.ht offered more architectures, e.g. i386, ARM, RISC-V (I believe this was mentioned but I could not find it in the docs)

Eventually users will be able to add custom base images, which will permit the use of Windows (if you can get an sshd running there, at least). As for multi- arch, experimental support for aarch64 is there, and by the end of the year I expect to have RISC-V builds backed by HiFive hardware.

<comment><USER5> Nonetheless, it'd be nice to have some way of plugging in more of this kind of functionality at the instance, user, and possibly repo levels. Obviously syntax highlighting is one use case, but some others:

\- Sophisticated cross-referencing tools like Kythe and SourceGraph

\- Linking stdlib functions and imports to public documentation, like cppreference.com, python.org, etc.

\- Linking ticket/user names to my non-srht bug tracking tool (especially JIRA, but there are lots of possibilities).

\- Linking to public or self-hosted generated API docs (doxygen, swagger, sphinx, etc).

\- Linking to info pages generated from metadata-type files such a PKG-INFO (for example containing dependency tree information).

\- Propagating back information gathered from build or test runs, for example highlighting areas missing test coverage, or which are "hot" from a perf point of view.

Only some of these would be appropriate to go into the mainline version of the tool, which is why it's important to support plugging in these capabilities for the users which need/want them.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of what you're looking for is going to be possible through generic interfaces I plan on writing. It's not going to take the shape of "you can write code which executes on sr.ht's servers just for your repo in particular", but rather things like "you can POST to an API endpoint on git.sr.ht to annotate the sources in your tree for a specific commit sha with links to pydoc et al". builds.sr.ht would then be the place where you could run arbitrary code to automate this.

<comment><USER6> Sourcegraph CEO here. We would love to help integrate Sourcegraph into sr.ht for code intelligence (hovers, go-to-definition, etc.). We're kicking this off with GitLab next month.

<comment><USER4> Great! My email is firstname.lastname@example.com. I can't guarantee a lot of cycles right now, but get in touch and I'll keep it on my radar.

<comment><USER6> Awesome. Just filed [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/1027](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/1027) on our end to track it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My feedback:

\- It's left aligned, which makes it harder to use on an ultrawide, with the content in the first 1/3 of the page. Having a max-width on the main container and center aligning it would be great

\- Emails are GPG signed! Even if the usefulness is small, it's a awesome feature

\- Pricing seems good, but I would charge more. 3$, 8$, 15$, if following the pricing scheme you have. I know I'd be happy to pay for 15$/m for a useful service. You could also make it "pay however much you want", so it's flexible if people want to pay 5$ or 50$, and it calculate with the tiers (if over X$, use plan Y)

\- It feels very responsive. Great job on having the site being very light so far

\- Maybe having something like Turbolinks could be pretty cool. SPA are great because they feel instant, and with a few lines of optional JavaScript you could provide an experience which is SPA-like since the server-side rendering is so quick

\- The UI looks clean and minimalistic, which is great. Featureful isn't a bad thing either if done right. I think you're on the right path though

Overall, this seems like a great project. I haven't tried the builds system yet, but I definitely will. Keep up the great work Drew!

<comment><USER4> Thank you for your feedback!

>It's left aligned, which makes it harder to use on an ultrawide, with the content in the first 1/3 of the page. Having a max-width on the main container and center aligning it would be great

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht/112](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht/112)

>Emails are GPG signed! Even if the usefulness is small, it's a awesome feature

Encrypted, too, if you add your PGP key to meta.sr.ht.

>Pricing seems good, but I would charge more. 3$, 8$, 15$, if following the pricing scheme you have. I know I'd be happy to pay for 15$/m for a useful service. You could also make it "pay however much you want", so it's flexible if people want to pay 5$ or 50$, and it calculate with the tiers (if over X$, use plan Y)

I may adjust the pricing later, but I want to see how this works out. If you're interested in going above and beyond, I accept donations here:

[https://drewdevault.com/donate](https://drewdevault.com/donate)

Thanks <3

>Maybe having something like Turbolinks could be pretty cool. SPA are great because they feel instant, and with a few lines of optional JavaScript you could provide an experience which is SPA-like since the server-side rendering is so quick

Not interested in this for the time being, it's pretty fast without.

Thanks so much for your support!

<comment><USER7> Makes sense for everything! Great product, I will definitely check it out as it grows and probably buy a subscription.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I hope you like it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I adore the aesthetic! Absolutely smooth web design; top notch work Drew.

Just registered and hope to familiarize myself with everything. This is one of the few "Show HN" projects I've felt compelled to actually try. Heck, I'm so charmed by it I want to contribute.

What a lovely Thursday morning discovery.

<comment><USER9> Agree. Simple and not over-engineered.

<comment><USER10> >not over-engineered

Always keep in mind that many people have an interest in ensuring their own job remains relevant and necessary. How else can you explain e.g. google's constant UI changes? Designer's keeping themselves busy (even though there are no real reasons for the changes)!

<comment><USER11> Just because we know why it happens doesn't mean we can't complain if we think that "why" is stupid :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really exciting! I particularly like the lightness of the web-pages and the non-necessity of javascript. The support for the BSDs in the build system (FreeBSD at the moment, OpenBSD and NetBSD planned[0]) is also nice — as a Linux person I've far too often ignored the other Unixes and POSIX / general Unix compatibility.

I hate being THAT guy, but would you consider trying[1] to re-license the AGPL-3.0 bits to AGPL-3.0-or-later, unless sticking with just v3 was deliberate (in which case fair enough)? My rationale:

i) License-incompatibility is a curse that fragments the copyleft world.

ii) Worrying about AGPL-3.0-only being incompatible with AGPL-4.0, in ten years time, if/when the latter comes out, will be too late, as (hopefully) sr.ht will have had hundreds or thousands of contributors, many uncontactable, by then.

iii) Having AGPL-3.0-or-later instead of just AGPL-3.0 is unlikely to put off any contributors.

iv) (This is subjective and might not hold for you:) I trust the FSF not to do something sufficiently crazy with its next iteration of licenses (if such exist), that I would prefer my code not to be compatible with such licenses.

[0] [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- announce/%3C201808022145...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- announce/%3C20180802214500.GA5332%40homura.localdomain%3E)

[1] This obviously also depends on the other contributors, so you might not want to bother with the effort.

<comment><USER13> > I trust the FSF not to do something sufficiently crazy

Personally, I don't trust this at all, and would recommend against the "or later" that yields future licensing decisions to the Richard Stallman and that FSF.

<comment><USER14> Can you elaborate on your reasoning for that?

<comment><USER15> not speaking for OP, but the significant changes between GPL v2 and GPL v3 would make me absolutely paranoid, and represent a good example. A "v2-and- later" would have subjected people to licensing changes they absolutely don't want.

<comment><USER16> From GPL 2:

> either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

"At your option" means that no one is 'subjected' to changes they don't want. They just have the option to upgrade.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but this thread is about licensing the software as "version $x or later", which pushes the choice to the user of the license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love this. Everything I've read so far breathes this "made for devs" attitude. I hope that a few years from now in a HN thread that lists successful companies that got "launched" on HN (you know, the Dropboxes and so on), this will be among them---and that the product is still as honest and awesome as it looks right now!

<comment><USER19> Well worth the $100 for the year and I even plan on self-hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Don't have an immediate use, but I signed up for the $20/yr account. Seems like an incredible platform, and if I have this expectation that better software be built and not tied to huge corporations beholden to investors, the only way to do that is to support it. Looking forward to digging into all this.

</comment><comment><USER21> > On top of that, sr.ht is one of the most lightweight websites on the > internet, with the average page weighing less than 10 KiB, with no tracking > and no JavaScript

At the age of Spectre/Meltdown, it is no longer safe to leave JavaScript enabled, so thank you for this.

<comment><USER22> got a source on that?

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/ascendr/spectre- chrome](https://github.com/ascendr/spectre-chrome)

Then, keep in mind that new Spectre style vulnerabilities have been announced for CPUs, and the feasibility of using GPUs in this style of attacks is being explored now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love this, and wish it well.

I currently host my personal repositories on GitLab, as I see the monoculture that has developed around GitHub to be dangerous for the community in the long term. I went ahead and created an account on sr.ht, and subscribed for the $20 / year plan. Whether or not I end up using the service (though I think I will), I'm happy to spend $20 to support this work.

One note - the billing plans seem to be recurring right now. If you could offer an option to make a one-time payment, that would be much appreciated. If anyone else is interested in subscribing to support the project but doesn't want a recurring charge on their card, you can go to [https://meta.sr.ht/billing](https://meta.sr.ht/billing) and "cancel", which will turn off autorenewal but leave your account active for the term for which you've paid.

<comment><USER4> For the sake of sustainability, I want to discourage people from using one- time payments. For the time being charge -> cancel manually is the preferred way to do this.

Thanks for your support!

<comment><USER25> That is understandable, as long as it is not difficult to find the cancellation button.

Gonna go and subscribe as well, probably. Looks quite promising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A meta comment on the HN community: People constantly decry HN's "negativity" to Show HN posts or other tech related news, but I think when really cool projects (like this one) show up, people respond overwhelmingly positively. Maybe it's a good thing that HN as a community has high standards.

</comment><comment><USER27> I noticed that there's no link from, for example, [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/man.sr.ht](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/man.sr.ht) to [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/man.sr.ht](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/man.sr.ht) \- is there any way to link a project's pages together across multiple sr.ht services? Otherwise the navigation isn't so friendly for someone just discovering a project.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, improving this is a pre-alpha todo item.

<comment><USER27> It would be nice to be able to add custom links to whatever form this navigation takes, also (for example, if a project uses a different solution for code review/patch submission).

<comment><USER4> Aye, this is planned. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the CI builds are tied to a user/group account rather than being tied to a particular repo or branch. Bravo on that— it works much better for projects whose build is composed of assets from many small repos than the approach of Travis (and GitLab, who cloned it) of tightly coupling those things.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you like this, it was a key design decision of builds.sr.ht.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> You mention:

> lists.sr.ht finally modernizes mailing lists

What's new that lists.sr.ht brings to the table? I only had a quick browse of [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- dev), but as far as I could tell it looked like a pretty normal list of topic lines (like a typical web forum), and the e-mail conversations themselves are just the messages concatenated into one long page (e.g. [https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh- dev/%3C20180916165820.144...](https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh- dev/%3C20180916165820.14491-1-sir%40cmpwn.com%3E)).

Is there something interesting and new about the way these mailing lists work that I'm not seeing?

<comment><USER29> "Looking like a typical web forum" is a _huge_ improvement compared to what e.g. GNU Mailman offers.

<comment><USER30> Well, Mailman 3 with HyperKitty looks more like some web forums. But Mailman 2 is quite dated...

<comment><USER31> I also like how DFeed looks. It's written in D and simultaneously serves forums, mailing lists, IRC and (lol) Usenet; all on an SQLite backend. It's also compiled to machine code, so it's pretty fast:

[https://forum.dlang.org/](https://forum.dlang.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > builds.sr.ht, which is easily the most capable continuous integration system > available today

Azure DevOps pipelines are _really_ capable, with a great UI - I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison?

<comment><USER33> That _is_ a __bold __claim. More capable than Team City?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> With a service like this, I don't understand why a lack of tracking is touted as a feature - I don't want Google et al tracking my search history and across 3rd party websites, but I _want_ to provide usage data to services I value.

Usage data is valuable for understanding how users use your service, features that aren't used, or simply not discovered. I'd personally prefer that tracking was added, but as an opt-in model.

</comment><comment><USER34> this piques my interest. i've been looking for a set of project hosting and management tools which are deeply integrated with each other and with very minimal UIs designed as an extension of the tool's inherent abstractions, rather than obscuring the tool behind "simple" UI abstractions which ultimately force opinionated workflows.

the only thing that's missing for this to be useful to me is code review. re: the UI, gerrit has always been my favorite code review platform because it embraces git's abstractions.

drew: do you have any plans for adding a code review service?

<comment><USER4> Hiya! I do have plans on adding a code review service, driven by email on lists.sr.ht in a similar style to how it's done in other mailing list driven projects. Here's an example of how this works:

[https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh- dev/%3C20180916165820.144...](https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh- dev/%3C20180916165820.14491-1-sir%40cmpwn.com%3E)

My plan is to parse these discussions using this library my friend made:

[https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/python- emailthreads](https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/python-emailthreads)

Then provide a UI similar to Gerrit, but driven by emails underneath.

<comment><USER34> wow, that's such a natural interaction model. i will be eagerly following sr.ht's development. :)

actually, i bet you have a list for high-level development updates. can you point me to it?

<comment><USER4> I do!

[https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- announce](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-announce)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Forgive me if this is covered elsewhere, but I haven't found it yet.

One of the things that I _do_ like about GitHub is actually the community/social aspect. For example, I follow projects I am interested in, and I can see notifications from all of them on one page--without filling up my email inbox. I also follow users who have similar interests, and I often discover new projects when I see in my feed (which I read via RSS) that they've starred a project that sounds interesting.

I think it's great that you're supporting email as a first-class way to interact with the services, but will there also be anything like GitHub's "Notifications" page?

Another feature I enjoy on GitHub is the ability to view issues and PRs across all of my repos from a single search page (e.g. search for "user:repo-owner- username is:issue"). Will sr.ht have anything like this?

Thanks for your work and for sharing it freely.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your feedback and questions!

>One of the things that I do like about GitHub is actually the community/social aspect. For example, I follow projects I am interested in, and I can see notifications from all of them on one page--without filling up my email inbox. I also follow users who have similar interests, and I often discover new projects when I see in my feed (which I read via RSS) that they've starred a project that sounds interesting.

For the moment I've explicitly decided _against_ this. I want sr.ht to be a professional tool more so than a social network. This may change to varying degrees in the future.

>will there also be anything like GitHub's "Notifications" page?

There will be a feed of events, which you can use for a similar reason. At the moment, there are feeds like this, but they aren't global - they're scoped to each sub-site, like lists.sr.ht. Here's what my lists.sr.ht page looks like:

[https://sr.ht/SbLu.png](https://sr.ht/SbLu.png)

>Another feature I enjoy on GitHub is the ability to view issues and PRs across all of my repos from a single search page (e.g. search for "user:repo- owner-username is:issue"). Will sr.ht have anything like this?

Maybe!

<comment><USER36> Hi, and congratulations, it looks awesome and has that old school unix feel I like, so you have a subscriber here.

Regarding the social/professional divide, a way to follow releases/security patches/API breakages on the projects I follow might make me more productive. I don't care about who stars who, but a way to link projects brings something.

Following releases of dependencies and use this information to improve CI/CD and try to explain breakage or trigger new builds could be very useful.

<comment><USER4> I recommend setting up a mailing list, project-announce or project-security, on lists.sr.ht for that purpose.

>Following releases of dependencies and use this information to improve CI/CD and try to explain breakage or trigger new builds could be very useful.

This should be quite possible, perhaps even automatable through dispatch.sr.ht.

<comment><USER36> > I recommend setting up a mailing list, project-announce or project-security, > on lists.sr.ht for that purpose.

Indeed looks like it covers my needs. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> One of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Really excited to see where this goes.

Some quick feedback: viewing messages on lists.sr.ht on mobile gives the "<code> block experience" of moving a horizontal a scroller for every line.

This might be intentional (wrapping can wreck formatting/alignment) but it might be worth wrapping for it to be less painful to read from a mobile browser.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is deliberate. I don't want to wreck the formatting of anyone's emails. That being said, there are solutions to this... but they're a bit obscure and will require some effort.

<comment><USER38> a button for toggling the font?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This has all the hallmarks of high-quality, well-designed software. I will definitely be checking it out. Thanks for all the work you've put into it!

<comment><USER40> +1. This is the kind of software that makes me genuinely happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This looks really nice and it's working incredibly quick for me.

I have a couple of maybe stupid question.. I'm having trouble understanding the workflow. When I open something like [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/)

This is the issue page for a user, right?

And then when I go to

[https://todo.sr.ht/%7Esircmpwn/sr.ht](https://todo.sr.ht/%7Esircmpwn/sr.ht)

(oh, the tilde copy-and-pastes weird into the comment window.. not sure what that's about)

This is the "issue page" (in Github speak) for one of a user's repositories. But how do I navigate from there to the actual repository? The 'git' button at the top takes me to generic landing page? I found this link through the announcement page : [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn) but I dont get how to navigate to there naturally.

Or how to go from the git back to the todo. I get they're decoupled features, but surely there must be a way to go back and forth.

Also when I open up the 'tree' section, each line starts with file permissions in the style of 'ls -la'. Is this b/c the system is fundamentally tied to POSIX? (I've used git with no problem on Windows before - so I don't see why it would be)

<comment><USER4> >Also when I open up the 'tree' section, each line starts with file permissions in the style of 'ls -la'. Is this b/c the system is fundamentally tied to POSIX? (I've used git with no problem on Windows before - so I don't see why it would be)

Because the file mode is stored in git. The tree view is a representation of the git tree, and the mode is a property stored in the tree.

<comment><USER41> Gotcha. Thanks for taking the time to explain :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I remember a discussion with Drew on HN a while ago. I held that the GitHub model was more inviting to small contributions given the overhead of figuring out how to get said small contribution integrated was paid for every new project outside of GitHub(-likes), but only once for GitHub and friends [1] (see discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17803588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17803588)).

sr.ht takes a very good stab at that problem, while maintaining that old-style approach. (For example through predictable mailing list names, should the project choose to use lists.sr.ht, which is likely.)

Kudos, Drew.

One intriguing thing about sr.ht is the way builds.sr.ht is described: amazingly powerful [2]. It's been a while since I configured myself a Travis workflow, but remember it was YAML based as well and one could do quite a number of things with it. What I'm missing is a description of exactly how builds.sr.ht towers above all the rest.

[1]: By approximation, some projects hosted on GitHub have more specific rules and will not consider those who deviate.

[2]: [https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general- availabilit...](https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general- availability.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> Congratulations from an early tester. I'm happy you're making such a good progress on this.

Also happy to see more aliens here appreciating brutalist aesthetics :-)

</comment><comment><USER44> Just signed up. I like the old fashioned user URL, reminds me the age of public_html

[https://lists.sr.ht/~ontouchstart](https://lists.sr.ht/~ontouchstart)

BTW, please add a nice 404 so people won't see that you're running nginx/1.14.0 :-)

[https://sr.ht/~ontouchstart](https://sr.ht/~ontouchstart)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback! [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht/113](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht/113)

<comment><USER44> Following link listed on the man page [https://man.sr.ht](https://man.sr.ht)

[https://man.sr.ht/root](https://man.sr.ht/root)

also gives a 404, but in a little better format. :)

<comment><USER4> That's a git clone URL, not a web-facing URL :)

<comment><USER44> I have not tried to clone it myself. But if it is not a web-facing URL, you should list it in clear CLI command and remove the <a> tag. People will click if you make it clickable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How does this compare to Trac, which is _also_ a 100% free, open source "software forge" (also built on Python)?

<comment><USER46> One immediate difference is that sr.ht has a publicly-hosted version; I'm having trouble finding that for Trac.

Trac is also not JS-free, so for those who prefer to not rely on arbitrary Turing-complete code running locally without explicit permission, sr.ht has an edge there.

That said, Trac feels a lot more polished (unsurprisingly, given that it has a significant headstart in terms of development resource and time).

<comment><USER45> Right, Trac has an extreme head start; it was, before Github, practically the de facto standard answer to this "software forge" problem. But it also continues to work just great, and has a pretty decent ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I like everything.

Well, almost everything: The "View raw message" feature exposes way too much information about your contributors - including their email, smtp client, ip, and a bunch of other things. I understand and appreciate the usefulness, but as a contributor I don't usually expect my details to become that public.

<comment><USER4> The IP is the IP of your mail server, which is a lot less private (you can derive that just by doing a DNS lookup on your hostname). The email address is explicitly exposed, your email is not private in git repos either, and it's important that people are able to get in touch with you. It's a mailing list!

I'm glad that you like everything else :)

<comment><USER47> Many email servers report the IP of the incoming SMTP connection when you use a client (e.g. mutt, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or Outlook) as an "X-Client-IP" or similar raw header; often also the envelope "from", which may be different than the message "from" which is the only one usually shown.

It's not that IPs are very private - sending an email to someone often tells a lot about you. But having all that info publicly scrapable seems unexpected to me.

<comment><USER4> That seems fair. I can probably strip unnecessary headers from incoming emails.

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/lists.sr.ht/60](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/lists.sr.ht/60)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Looks fantastic, I just signed up to try it out.

Small ux thing; the nav bar on top are different for every subdomain. Probably easier to navigate if the elements are in fixed positions.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for signing up!

They're ordered by the time you accessed each last. I agree that this is, in retrospect, unintuitive and poorly designed. Will be reverting it soon enough.

<comment><USER49> +1

Was very confused by the changing order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You are my hero Sir! I've recently switched from i3 to sway beta, and now this, do you ever sleep?

<comment><USER4> 8 hours a night! I get lots of help from my friends. Thanks for your kind words :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Very impressive! The [https://builds.sr.ht](https://builds.sr.ht) service looks especially interesting - any chance there's a way to use it without fully moving over to sr.ht? It would be nice to be able to try out the build system without having to fully commit to moving to to sr.ht, especially for projects with a large history on other platforms.

I went ahead and registered and signed up for a plan. If this is the kind of project you like to see, I encourage you to consider signing up to contribute.

Feature request: I'd love to see U2F support added.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for signing up!

>any chance there's a way to use it without fully moving over to sr.ht?

Yep. I currently use builds.sr.ht in combination with GitHub, for example, to build sway & wlroots:

[https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1377](https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1377)

You can wire this up at [https://dispatch.sr.ht](https://dispatch.sr.ht)

The API is also pretty simple: [https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/api.md](https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/api.md)

postmarketOS uses the API, for example, in combination with some custom tooling around their package manager.

>Feature request: I'd love to see U2F support added.

[https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/meta.sr.ht/62](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/meta.sr.ht/62)

This has been discussed before, I would accept a patch but can't work on it myself until my browser (qutebrowser) grows U2F support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is this orthogonal approach to GitHub, etc ?

On GitHub you navigate to project(repo), then drill down to sub section provides specific piece of functionality (repo, commits, issues, wiki..)

Here you navigate to app then drill down to project..

<comment><USER53> According to comments elsewhere on this post, this functionality is in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is excellent. I've started moving projects over, and I'm looking forward to shifting from fosspay donations to actually paying directly for this. Excelsior!

<comment><USER4> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55>
      All features work without JavaScript

I'm not sure why this is a selling point. Yes, there are many upsides to this, particularly from the maintainer's standpoint, but I think it might just be a side-benefit that only certain users really care about. Eventually, there might be advantages to removing that "feature", and you might turn off users who joined largely because of it.

<comment><USER56> I see it as a reflection of the website's overall design stance: no frills, no stupid material design, no js junk scripts. Just a fast-loading website that loads what it needs to. This kind of website is quite refreshing in 2018.

Maybe one day it will have a tiny amount of JS, but let's cross that bridge when it comes. That's still better than the vast majority of modern websites built today.

<comment><USER53> It does already have some JS. On the builds page, when it is running a build, it refreshes every second to show new output.

<comment><USER4> This is accomplished without JavaScript.

<comment><USER53> There's a script tag on the builds page that reloads the page every second, according to the page source. How is that not JavaScript?

<comment><USER4> The key to doing it without JavaScript is this:

<meta id="refresh" http-equiv="refresh" content="5">

The script you found removes it and does it a different way so it can scroll to the bottom. Optional progressive enhancement.

<comment><USER53> Ah, optional JavaScript. Makes sense

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> You should make a more thorough comparison with other "100% open source" forges. Your main arguments against GitHub and the like are the license, tracking, and ads. Instead, you make no good arguments for why this tool is so "special" compared to other equivalently free tools. I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but the post looked like a hard sell to me.

</comment><comment><USER58> I see for now there's only package repositories for Alpine and Arch ([https://man.sr.ht/packages.md](https://man.sr.ht/packages.md)), any plans to expand this list any time soon?

(Fantastic job by the way, as other commenters are pointing out this is the type of project hosting suite that I've been looking for)

<comment><USER4> I do intend to expand this list, probably with at least Debian packages. This isn't a high priority at the moment, though, I have limited bandwidth for sr.ht until it's profitable and have to focus on other features. This is definitely an area where an interested Debian user could contribute packages, though, especially if nicely integrated with builds.sr.ht like the other packages are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I love that you are able to support FreeBSD but Travis CI couldn't even be bothered. Is there support for Windows as well?

<comment><USER4> No, for the time being I'm only adding free (as in freedom) operating systems. In the future you'll be able to upload custom build images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Have you considered adding a docker image repository similar to Dockerhub to the ecosystem?

Alternatively, have you considered contacting the folks at dockerhub and request integration similar to GitHub [1]?

[1][https://docs.docker.com/docker- hub/github/](https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/github/)

<comment><USER4> This was discussed here: [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- discuss/%3CFA9122A8-8BD1...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- discuss/%3CFA9122A8-8BD1-41C4-88AF-661AF8241CA2%40nderjung.net%3E)

<comment><USER60> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This sounds too good to be true. Who's funding this project?

<comment><USER4> Hi, I made sr.ht. The users are funding it! There's some information about this here:

[https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md](https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md)

<comment><USER61> Thanks, I also found this information in the site: [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- discuss/%3C2018071822544...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht- discuss/%3C20180718225440.GA4503%40homura.localdomain%3E)

It seems a fresh revenue model after so much the-user-is-the-product models. Here's is to your success!

<comment><USER4> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is impressive. The level of thinking that you've put into this project is totally amazing. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is amazing! Just what I was looking for! I love this project, thanks a lot for this!!

<comment><USER4> I'm glad that you like it! Please don't hesitate to send me feedback.

<comment><USER64> I like look of it too, but I'm not sure how to pronounce the name. "Shirt"? "Shart"?

<comment><USER4> As mentioned in the article, I pronounce it "sir hat", but you can pronounce it any way you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Browsing from mobile so not easily able to poke around, hence pardon my ignorance, but what is meant by "software forge"? Is this common terminology? I haven't heard it before. Initially I assumed this was some sort of web-based IDE, but I guess it's more of a source control, continuous integration, devops, and deployment system? Is it like Github meets Jenkins meets Jira? It might be valuable to have a more clear overview message on the site.

Edit: The actual project homepage has a much better overview of what this is, sorry for my initial cluelessness. The more I look into it, the more impressive it looks, thanks for the great open source contribution!

<comment><USER4> It's a catch-all term for projects which fill the same niche as SourceForge, including GitHub, BitBucket, Gitlab, gogs & gitea, and so on.

>The more I look into it, the more impressive it looks, thanks for the great open source contribution!

I'm glad you like it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Im intrigued by the choice to enforce all lowercase usernames, why is it like this?

<comment><USER4> Usernames must be valid Unix usernames. This is a forward-looking design decision for some interesting features down the road...

<comment><USER66> :o

Thanks for sr.ht!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Wow. I've only glimpsed at some parts, but I'm really liking what I'm seeing! I also love the look and feel.

I look forward to doing deep dive the next few days and looking to contribute anyway I can.

</comment><comment><USER68> Hey, this is pretty neat!

One quick bit of feedback: In the audit log, I noticed oauth tokens being issued even though I didn't recall granting any. I had a moment of pause worrying I was breached until I realized it was the various sr.ht services requesting the tokens. It would be cool if there was something to map the client ids to the names of the different services in the audit log.

Anyway, thanks for building this service. Like other's have already said, it's cool to see a useful dev-focused tool from within the community.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I should hide internal oauth tokens from the audit log. I'm glad you like sr.ht!

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is a very cool project, and I'm interested in using it for some of my private repos.

Some thoughts:

* Thanks for adding support for 2FA via OTPs, this is a requirement for me

* Access control is a little weird. I start without any users having access, but I can push to the repository. I can then add myself as "ro", and still push. I know this is an edge case but wanted to raise it

* I keep getting logged out while navigating through pages, though I'm guessing this is related to the 502's I'm getting occasionally (HN Effect)

<comment><USER4> >I can then add myself as "ro", and still push. I know this is an edge case but wanted to raise it

Thanks: [https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/git.sr.ht/128](https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/git.sr.ht/128)

>I keep getting logged out while navigating through pages, though I'm guessing this is related to the 502's I'm getting occasionally (HN Effect)

The 502's are a bug, rather than a scaling issue. git.sr.ht seems to have a memory leak, which I'm investigating. Are you logged out as you browse between different subdomains? There's a ticket for logging you into everything at once, but for now you have to click "login" on every sub-site.

<comment><USER69> > Are you logged out as you browse between different subdomains?

This is probably it. Clicking "login" logs me right back in. The move between the subdomains is very smooth, so I did not even notice. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I still prefer the GitLab UI for viewing project files, cgit style seems a bit "old-fashioned" to me.

Other then that I'm quite interested how this is going to look long term.

</comment><comment><USER71> > average page weighing less than 10 KiB, with no tracking and no JavaScript.

Good Lord, I had a _visceral_ reaction to that. (It was like the opposite of the urge to throw up.)

</comment><comment><USER72> This is great ! I just subscribed for a year. Just what I needed to keep track of my current project.

All I wish for is a budget software built in :)

It reminds me of NearlyFreeSpeech.net in a good way !

</comment><comment><USER73> It looks great and the minimalistic UI is a welcome breath :)

Could you share any details on how you implemented the build system? Are you running of different public cloud providers or are you using something different? Your announcement speaks about KVM so it looks like you implemented something yourself but I guess the cost and performance could easily become difficult to manage, so I'm curious how do you back this system :)

<comment><USER4> I built it all from scratch, and I host it on dedicated machines colocated in Philadelphia, with backup facilities in SF. It's pricy for the current scale, but as it scales will become very price effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> As someone who fell in love with Sway a month ago, this is the best opportunity for me to support the work you've been doing. Thanks Drew!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your kind words :) I'm glad you're enjoying sway!

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This looks fantastic! One feature I would like to see in a service like this would be support for custom domains. Personally, I would be willing to pay extra for such a feature. It's nice to have control of the domain for personal work, but self hosting for a handful of personal projects is a big ask - <USER2> would rather pay for someone to do it the right way.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your feedback! This is definitely something I'm interested in adding in the future. I don't think I can prioritize it right now, because I have limited time to spend on sr.ht (I still have a day job), but I want to tackle it post-alpha.

<comment><USER75> Thanks for the response! I would definitely imagine a feature like this coming later on. Just signed up at $20/yr, and I hope everyone reading this does too... sr.ht is something that desperately needs to exist!

Drew, please keep doing phenomenal work.

Other stuff I'd love to see once sr.ht is more mature would be nice, clean, UNIX-ey alternatives to GitHub Pages and github.io. I'll be looking forward to OpenBSD support, especially for running CI jobs on as well.

<comment><USER4> Great, thanks for your support! I definitely intend to implement something similar to GitHub pages, but even more powerful - how about using any static site generator you want? OpenBSD support is also coming soon!

<comment><USER75> > how about using any static site generator you want?

That would be excellent. I have my own solution[1]... being able to have everything built with a CI job on one platform would be great!

1 - [http://cdaniels.net//2017-11-22_make-static- site.html](http://cdaniels.net//2017-11-22_make-static-site.html)

<comment><USER4> Awesome! Check out how I currently deploy my blog:

[https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com](https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com)

[https://builds.sr.ht/api/jobs/10416/manifest](https://builds.sr.ht/api/jobs/10416/manifest)

If you already have a server to host the static content on, you can use this today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> This is the type of project announcement that gets me excited to work on my own open-source efforts. Congrats Drew, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER77> Having an OAuth error. I'll check back later because maybe you're messing around with it at the moment. Cool project.

<comment><USER78> I was about to say the same. I'm able to login at meta but not the others. Admittedly I haven't paid yet so I thought that might have been the culprit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> This service looks promising, but it is unfortunate that we have to go as barebones as 'no javscript' to convince people that they are not doing any malicious tracking. Javascript is becoming inevitable and some service/company that helps us trust a site's javascript will be most welcome in the future.

</comment><comment><USER80> Is the old file hosting service that was once on sr.ht still accessible to people that had an account?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but it will eventually only be accessible via the old API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Sweet, I was complaining about how I'd like to have a bundle like that some days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18423984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18423984)

</comment><comment><USER82> My feedback:

Don't change the order of the header for each page

        dispatch
        lists
        git
        builds
        todo
        man
        meta

Currently the active page is moved to the left. Just make it bold and retain its position.

</comment><comment><USER83> Trying to register, and got a 403: Forbidden You don't have the permission to access the requested resource. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.

<comment><USER4> Can you try again now?

<comment><USER84> Ftw I got the same error if I tried to log from the signup page. But when I tried to sign up from the form in the sidebar it worked

<comment><USER4> Ah, thanks, that explains it! The fix is being deployed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I've always wished this to be open sourced. Oh man I'm glad there is no javascript nonsense, overall design is great. Thank you so much for opening this beauty :)

</comment><comment><USER63> Will we be able to selfhost it on our own infra?

<comment><USER4> Yep.

[https://man.sr.ht/installation.md](https://man.sr.ht/installation.md)

<comment><USER86> I didn't happen to see install instructions for dispatch on that page. Is that an oversight or is dispatch a component of builds.sr.ht?

<comment><USER4> dispatch is the newest sr.ht service and docs are scant. They'll come eventually... but it's pretty similar to the rest of sr.ht, you could probably figure it out if you gave it a shot.

<comment><USER86> Very cool. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Hi Drew -- awesome job! I want to migrate my projects there. Do you plan on supporting static sites a la GitHub pages?

<comment><USER4> Yep! This is planned and partially working through builds.sr.ht. I deploy my blog, drewdevault.com, through builds.sr.ht: [https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com](https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/drewdevault.com) This is built with Jekyll and used to be on GitHub pages. The plan is to have a place where you can dump static content, then you can use any site generator you want with builds.sr.ht.

<comment><USER87> Wow. Excellent. What serves drewdevault.com -- sr.ht itself?

<comment><USER4> It's just running on my personal infrastructure. In the future there will be a place to host it on sr.ht.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Man I love this idea - signed up. But I've been getting 502s consistently, HN "Hug of Death"?

<comment><USER4> It's a memory leak in git.sr.ht, rather than an issue of scale, thankfully. I'm working on it. After a few refreshes you should get through, and the problem is isolated to git.sr.ht in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Got a 502 just now on my first attempt to log in to git.sr.ht after signup. Second attempt was fine.

</comment><comment><USER90> It would be nice if you could tap the red header text and move to a different module.

</comment><comment><USER91> Does the mailing-list PR model show you at a glance which PRs have been merged?

<comment><USER4> No, but eventually it will.

</comment></comment><comment> loa-in-backup That's something I'll bookmark. Do you plan on including 2FA?

<comment><USER4> TOTP is supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Looks great, nice work! Registered my account, bill_barnhill.

</comment><comment><USER93> Feature request for the lists: cross-list Message-ID search.

<comment><USER4> Definitely going to add this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> for self hosting, does it support LDAP/AD/etc?

<comment><USER4> Not presently, no, but I'm not opposed to adding it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> This looks fantastic. Well done!

How well does it work with teams?

</comment><comment><USER96> no github like social features=how is this a hacker's tool?

hackers always collab frequently with anons

</comment><comment><USER97> great work,thanks for you to open source

</comment><comment><USER98> >On top of that, sr.ht is one of the most lightweight websites on the internet, with the average page weighing less than 10 KiB, with no tracking and no JavaScript.

You have my attention!

<comment><USER99> Server side html rendering will always be less efficient, but I can see the application of using curl to request and parse pages.

<comment><USER100> You mean _more_ efficient, right? Because the single page "applications" that download UI and data with javascript take a three-digit number of requests and multiple seconds to render everything and be "done".

<comment><USER99> No, because once you download the js you don't redownload it on every page request. When you want to update contents you get the new data to be displayed. This is how any other gui application does server communication.

The traditional page based responses re-send all the html content over again. If the client can cache it then it doesn't have to be, but caching something like a git frontend does not work with page based responses due to the amount of new data.

Just because Facebook and Google abuse js to the nth degree does not mean it's automatically bad. It's how you use it, and you can infact do things without react and Vue.

<comment><USER101> When most of the web looks like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17655316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17655316)

I'm happy about Drew's decision to not include JS.

<comment><USER99> As I just stated, you don't need to have 1MB of JS to do things, it's that software companies typically do it because they're about actually providing a service and solving problems than worrying about non-issues such as 1 second more of initial download time.

This is 2018. You don't have a 56K modem, I don't have one. Those that do will benefit from smaller data requests after the initial download. Holding back the real issues the web can solve over an arbitrary problem like that is damaging to what can be achieved.

The web is a software platform, and unless you want to equally complain about applications in C that go over 1MB, you're making mountains out of mole hills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> The word "distributed" does not appear in the announcement telling me everything I need to know about not using it</comment>


Lenore Blum describes why she left CMU (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextpittsburgh.com/features/lenore-blum-speaks-out-about-sexism-in-the-workplace/ <comment><USER2> > our [CMU] undergraduate Computer Science program now has near gender parity, > way ahead of the rest of the nation

I set out to say "but not ahead of MIT!" (it's CMU after all:), but it looks like MIT's undergrad CS (Course VI-3) is still in the low 40's percent. :/ I'd though we'd gotten further. CMU CS is at parity[2]. MIT MechE is too.

[1] [https://registrar.mit.edu/statistics-reports/womens- enrollme...](https://registrar.mit.edu/statistics-reports/womens-enrollment) [2] [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234346-how-computer- sc...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234346-how-computer-science-at- cmu-is-attracting-and-retaining-women/fulltext)</comment>


Don't Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist - <AUTHOR> https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/11/Climate-Change-Realist-Face-Facts/ <comment><USER3> The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor beyond current global demand without producing net CO2. The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this that don't rely on burning carbon is extremely short: nuclear fission.

I don't see any possibility of the required power generation capability being built. Even if the economic resources were made available, which is at least plausible in the abstract, the irrational politics around nuclear power in the developed world would guarantee that there would be little actual progress.

Constructively addressing climate change means massively increasing power generation capacity as a primary input. Given the ample evidence that this is not politically achievable, I think it is fair to call pessimism "realism".

<comment><USER4> > The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this

... solar and wind are scaling much better than every prediction, for many years now, yet somehow that's not good enough for the people who claim to be realists. Odd.

<comment><USER5> You still need baseload power plants, and the economics of battery-based storage plants aren't there yet.

Hydropower is a nice solution, but highly geography-dependent. China is attacking this problem by investing heavily in ultra-long-range HVDC power transmission from dams in the west to cities on the east.

<comment><USER6> For using power to suck carbon out of the air, would you need baseload power, or could you have a machine that ran whenever cheap solar electricity was available.

Removing CO2 is important, and urgent in the medium term, but it isn't urgent in the "must happen this second" sense. Intermitten removal would be fine if the removal tech could be power intermittently.

<comment><USER3> Most steps of an industrial process will work with intermittent power, albeit with substantial loss of process efficiency that will therefore require building more infrastructure for the same effect than if you were using baseload power. Some steps of an industrial process may effectively _require_ non-stop baseload power because restarting it is prohibitively slow and costly.

It may be possible to do atmospheric CO2 removal with intermittent power, I haven't attempted any kind of chemical engineering deep dive into what that process entails, but that is likely to incur a significant loss of productivity. Given that it is already an extremely expensive proposition, we will probably need to maximize process efficiency, which means reliable continuous power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of assumptions baked in here. Chief among them is that renewables deployment will continue to be slower than new energy demand. If you look at the charts, this is pretty unlikely since the renewables trend is a consistent exponential increase year over year while the demand curve is very lumpy and mostly linear when averaged.

Next is the assumption that renewables have to be deployed at grid scale, with the materials and transmission costs associated with that. This is also not true - solar + battery is a perfect use case for distributed deployment by homeowners, businesses, parking lots, etc. in any sunny location, and trends in non-grid installed solar reflect this where non-utility accounts for over a third of new installs per year.

Next is the questionable bundling of global statistics rather than breaking out by country. If you break it out by country, the trends are _a lot_ different. For example, most of the west already reached effective peak energy demand (or close to it), and renewables deployments are offsetting dirtier production methods at a decent pace, mostly due to economics. The "bad" trends the author points are are specific to developing locations.

There's more, but this is already a long comment.

Edit: Another one... solar panels don't last "a few years more" [than turbines], they last a decade or more longer. Current estimate is 25-30 years with proper maintenance before performance is significantly degraded, and even at that point they still work just fine. It's not like you don't have to replace or overhaul major power plant components every few decades for other energy sources...

<comment><USER8> _This is also not true - solar + battery is a perfect use case for distributed deployment_

This is simply not feasible. Do the math. To store 3 days worth of current US energy use, you need to build $50 trillion worth of batteries. If you assume that the battery installation lifetime is 20 years, and amortize it over that period, you're looking at over 10% of US GDP spent just on building and installing the batteries. Seriously, do the math.

<comment><USER9> > _To store 3 days worth of current US energy use,_

There is absolutely no need, of any kind, to store 3 days of US energy use. It's a complete strawman.

<comment><USER8> So where do we get energy from in case we get a windless week in winter, if not fossil fuels or nuclear?

<comment><USER10> The wind is always blowing somewhere.

<comment><USER11> What are the transmission power losses over large stretches of land?

<comment><USER8> 2/3rds of the electricity produced in the US is lost in transmission: [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy- facts/](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/)

EDIT: this is actually wrong, I misinterpreted the diagram, see the comment below.

<comment><USER12> Go look at [https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/electr...](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/electricity.pdf)

I believe you mis-quoted the figures. You rolled up total conversion costs and bloated them into transmission losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We are going to need technology that will pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Yes, doing that is very energy intensive, but we have tech like nuclear power that could power such a process.

People want to have their lifestyle and telling people in developing countries that they can never have the Western lifestyle and telling people in developed countries that they have to reduce their lifestyle are simply untenable politically.

We should be focusing on climate change mitigation.

<comment><USER14> > We are going to need technology that will pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Yes, > doing that is very energy intensive

Wouldn't you need even more energy to pull it in that it took to release it? So to undo 10 years worth of global emissions, you'd need more energy than was generated worldwide over those 10 years? Sounds impossible.

<comment><USER15> No, technology like Direct Air Capture requires about 250kWh as a theoretical minimum to capture 1 ton of CO2. Current methods require about 600kWh. Meanwhile, one ton of coal generates about 2,500kWh of electricity.

<comment><USER3> This is not correct. Per the DAC literature I've seen, the fully burdened energy cost to capture a ton of CO2 is around 12 MWh. The numbers you provided appear to violate the laws of thermodynamics on their face, whereas the 12 MWh number does not.

The 250kWh number likely only accounts for the operational energy requirements, not the fully burdened energy requirements of creating the consumable inputs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's an interesting point here on the resource intensiveness of creating 'renewable' energy itself (ie. windmill costs).

I share the authors concern here that doing the exact same thing we're doing now but _handwave_ electric is not going to get us to where we're going to need to be. We need to be smarter about how we use energy and our resources and use less.

For example shifting our entire automobile based transportation infrastructure to the exact same thing but electric is not nearly as impactful on lowering CO2 emissions taking those cars off the road via better public transit and land use that enables active transportation (ie. walking/cycling).

<comment><USER17> Even if people used electric bikes instead of electric cars, it's way more impactful on lowering CO2, and still creates a better land use proposition (ie: less need for parking, less need for roads, less traffic jams, things can be closer together which leads to less need to go as far for people who aren't using electric bikes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This makes me think we should be investing a lot more into nuclear energy.

<comment><USER19> No ROI for 10 years at least. Other technologies are getting cheaper, better, faster.

<comment><USER20> Other technologies may be better economically, but they won't be enough. Every carbon neutral energy option needs to be on the table if we want to survive.

And who knows. If we actually had an effective carbon tax that internalizes the externalities of carbon pollution, nuclear fission might suddenly look very cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's the hard truth. As it is, there's just no way to solve the problem without some sort of global cataclysm. I think people in power have the logistics to know this, which is why I'm so skeptical about the political movement today in western nations that largely revolves around consolidating power over world energy even further into the hands of a small group of elites that more or less exist beyond the reach of any one nations political process.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the progress in de-carbonizing electricity is promising - <USER2> was already at less than 50% fossil fueled electricity production in 2018 [0]:

Carbon-emitting generation:

35% Natural Gas

3% Coal

11% "Unspecified" (lets be pessimistic and assume all of that is fossil fuel)

Non-carbon emitting (or carbon neutral):

11% Large Hydro

9% Nuclear

31% "Renewables" (solar, wind, small hydro, etc)

Yes, transportation is still almost entirely fossil fuel based. Many homes and businesses use natural gas for heat. Industry uses fossil fuels as well in significant amounts. None of these can be ignored.

But de-carbonizing electricity is a crucial first step.

[0] [https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> "11\. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature."

Part 2: [https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis- Realis...](https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realist- Memo/)

This is highly disturbing. With the 11,000 scientist warning the other day they proposed something similar. I find it very worrying. Who will decide who lives? Or who has kids and a family? This will not end well...

<comment><USER24> Probably just family planning. Nobody needs to die to save the earth, well, not execution at least

<comment><USER23> Family planning how? Who will decide who can have children and who can't? Governments? A global one child policy? That's insane

<comment><USER25> Is it insane to alter social norms to save the species as a whole or let people drive it off the cliff by treating a uterus like a clown car?

We're so far away from having to debate this as realistic thing politically right now, the discourse is an exercise in fear mongering.

Plenty to be freaked out about before next month is passed.

<comment><USER23> Having kids is not a social norm (at least not in every case). Who are you or any politician to decide how many kids can a couple have? Even if it only is fear mongering, I bet you this will be a political discussion in some years.

<comment><USER26> > Who are you or any politician to decide how many kids can a couple have?

I'm someone who subsidizes families having children, my taxes are paying for their healthcare, their schools, their childcare, etc. And while I'm happy to do that because maintaining society is important I'm not happy to do it for someone pumping out 15 kids.

> I bet you this will be a political discussion in some years.

I bet you it won't, reproduction rates have plummeted in developed nations.

<comment><USER23> How many 15 kids family are there out there? Besides, they also pay their tax share...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> He forgot one alternative besides fission: fusion! And I'm not talking about Iter, that's probably still decades away, but much smaller sized portable fusion generators.

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

The smaller scale might simplify things.

Borrowing from the analogy in the article, fusion is a magnetic field management problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bets based on advanced technology not presently in _at least_ the practical demonstration phase are ... highly unlikely.

Fortunately in the case of solar, we're already in the active commercial use phase, and there is a long-term declining cost trend. Whether that's sufficient remains to be seen, but it's promising.

Nuclear has tended to become _more_ expensive over time, as consequences of utilisation become more apparent.

<comment><USER27> I agree that it's probably on the verge of Sci-fi, but one can dream :)

I'm not sure we should care about costs now. It sounds really lame on the long run to say to past generations that "we could have changed things, but it wasn't cost effective, anyways good luck rebooting the Golf stream and stuff"

<comment><AUTHOR> My argument is that the time for dreaming is past.

We need to _do_. Or plan / prepare for the alternatives.

Sustaining a modest research program on potential long bets is probably defensible. But don't hinge all hopes on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The events around climate change have been predicted in the scriptures for a long time (ice melting, storms, quakes, waves of the sea heaving themselves beyond their bounds, fires/smoke, and other significant catastrophic events-- not just the usual levels of them). We need not be surprised, but we really can be OK.

I do appreciate the science and am glad for progress in our efforts. It seems to me we are not competent enough to solve such things when we have largely rejected the instructions given by the earth's creator (like, honesty, the Golden Rule, etc, etc): we have a hard time trusting each other even when we say we agree. I'm glad we can share our own thoughts. We need His help both to address important issues globally, and in our personal lives.

(More details on these thoughts at [http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html](http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html) , a simple site w/o javascript).

</comment><comment><USER29> I think solutions to climate change that require global coordination are doomed to failure. When things start getting rough it's going to be some entity independently pursuing a geoengineering solution, with whatever risk that entails. It's not the best approach, but it's something that someone can impose on the whole world without conquering them and shutting down their coal plans.

<comment><USER30> I'm afraid you're right, but I'm also afraid that no one has the necessary combination of money, technological skill and military might to undertake that kind of geoengineering unilaterally.

<comment><USER29> This paper estimates the cost at ~$2.25B/year, and notes that more than 50 countries have military budgets exceeding $3B: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d#...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d#erlaae98ds5)

They point out the plan assumes you can launch planes from a few different points around the globe. You don't need global agreement, but at least access to some foreign airports.

<comment><USER31> The scary part is how to resolve disputes over geoengineering. What if China decides to make the Gobi desert farmland but downwind it makes California the new Sahara desert?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The effects of climate change will play play out across many localized areas. Some will be dramatically more impacted than others. The impacts will require remediation solutions, some difficult and expensive. Millions will be displaced and affected, and complex engineering challenges will arise.

This will not end humanity. The apocalypse is not coming. Humans will adapt because we have no choice. Engineering a solution to a global climate problem is borderline impossible. Engineering a solution to imminent local direct impacts of climate change is a more coherent, approachable problem.

I agree with the author's assessment - humans require fossil fuels for society's function. Thus, instead of moping around about how we are all fucked, it seems a more productive exercise to sort out how to cohabitate a world where we are going to continue consuming, for the medium term, our near infinite supply of natural gas for energy.

<comment><USER6> This worldview implies abandoning all coastal cities and several entire countries, correct? Sea level rise alone requires that, to say nothing of other effects.

And then there's higher wet bulb temperatures in heat waves. With enough warming, that should render a large chunk of the planet effectively uninhabitable without AC.

Do you accept these consequences when you make such claims?

<comment><USER32> Yes, my expectation is that we will build habitats which withstand sea level rise and temperature fluctuations, and abandon habitats which cannot be retrofitted to withstand present conditions.

<comment><USER33> Which is the way humanity has always responded to crisis. They move and adapt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or fail to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The real problem to me is the Climate TMI. There are just too many arguments/opinions/facts etc., there's no way to tell which one I should believe based on my gut feelings (which is the only thing I can rely on at the end of the day). This OP looks sensible, but I'm sure I'll be persuaded by any other article that has an opposite argument. I'm practically drown in the sciences. I hope it's not just me.

</comment><comment><USER35> > The modern world is deeply addicted to fossil fuels and green energy is no > substitute. Am I wrong?

Maybe not, but what would you suggest we do otherwise?

<comment><USER36> His only specific measure is this:

"A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature."

Same 'ole Club of Rome, population control policies.

<comment><USER23> Highly disturbing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Well, all this is besides the point. Which is, our economic activity is destroying the environment (and not just through climate change) but we 're not stopping because it would cost a lot of money.

So basically we're putting money over the survival of the species and generally life on earth. Our priorities are back to front, and discussing how cheap or expensive it is to switch to renewables is pointless. We're just headed for extinction. And good riddance to us, because we're bloody stupid monkeys who can't control the processes we set in motion. Becaues we are reckless and destructive and we do not trust each other enough to work together to avert our shared catastrophe.

</comment><comment><USER38> point 11 on part 2: a smooth transition of the global population to 2-3B.

Over how long a time-frame does Dr.Rees expect this to happen? Thanos only killed half the population. Mao only starved ~40M/50M.

He has no imagination for what could be with all the will and imagination of a generation faced with dire results and instead draws bleak resolutions that sound like the aftermath of a WW3.

<comment><AUTHOR> The usual mechanisms are the historic threats to mankind: famine, pestilance, war, disorder.

Depending on the timeline for achieving a 2-3B population, any period of less than ~100 years is not attainable without a huge increase in mortality. That's shown in numerous models suggested by the 1970 Limits to Growth project.

In pre-industrial times, and as recently as 1850s Ireland, massive population declines _in regional areas_ were fairly commonplace. The Irish Potato Famine, through direct mortality _and_ emigration, reduced the population of Ireland from 8 million to 4, over a period of 60 years:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/medi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_\(Ireland\)#/media/File%3APopulation_of_Ireland_and_Europe_1750_to_2005.svg)

Ireland has _still_ not regained its 1850 population peak.

Note too that Ireland's population had increased tremendously from the 3 millions of 1740. The potato primed the trap the blight triggered.

There were numerous other notable famines in the 19th century, several in China, then as Ireland under strong British influence. These continued through the 20th century, including in both Nationalist and Communist regimes. The Ukranian Holdomor struck at the same time as famines elsewhere in the world, and was somewhat contemporaneous with the Dust Bowl in the US, a localised famine, in which there was some starvation, though largely manifested as a massive internal migration (see especially Steinbeck's _The Grapes of Wrath_ ).

The people who realise this is a potential path are largely wholly aware of just how horrific the prospect is, both in direct misery and the all-but- certain breakdown of all social, governmental, commercial, and technical institutions. While there are some who embrace this, they tend to be extreme outliers.

Most see this as the scenario to avoid at all costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Where was Question 2 in the article? The author seemed to indicate two questions would be addressed, but then the article just ended.

<comment><USER40> [https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis- Realis...](https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/11/12/Climate-Crisis-Realist- Memo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Not on the table are ecological tax reform (beyond investment incentives and > carbon taxes), structural changes to the economy that would lower consumer > demand and reduce energy and material throughput, policies for income/wealth > redistribution, major lifestyle changes or strategies to reduce human > populations.

The broadside attack on capitalism is going to be the undoing of the climate advocacy movement. Neoliberalism has become the global consensus, and it's not going anywhere. Neoliberals and outright conservatives have been in charge of the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States, etc., for decades. Even "socialist" Macron has reinvented himself as a neo- liberal. People remember the depredations of socialism and the stagnation of "democratic socialism" and don't seem eager to repeat them. (Greta Thunberg's home country of Sweden cut spending as a percentage of GDP by almost 20 points since 1990, slashed corporate taxes, deregulated and privatized, etc.).

Telling people we need a command economy to effectively combat climate change is a non-starter. "Major lifestyle changes" or ghastly thoughts like "reducing human population" will result in climate advocates being pilloried.

There are basically three possible outcomes:

1) We don't change, technology doesn't save us, and climate change turns out to be not as bad as some people feared. (A recent UNDP report estimated that a "high warming" scenario would case Bangladesh's GDP growth rate to decrease from 6% to 4% by 2100. Bangladesh would be vastly better off taking that hit than departing from neoliberal economic policies.)

2) We don't change, but technology reverses climate change.

3) We don't change, technology doesn't save us, and contrary to consensus science, runaway greenhouse effects kill us all.

</comment><comment><USER42> He's not wrong. If governments were to deliberately starve their economies of fossil fuels on the scale we need you'd see the same response as in Chile or France except much bigger and more violent- the government that does that, collapses within a fortnight.

</comment><comment><USER43> Matt Ridley rendered his entire argument specious and kinda stupid years ago: [https://youtu.be/0BM_p5fWoI0](https://youtu.be/0BM_p5fWoI0)

</comment><comment><USER44> This essay, which purports to be telling hard truths about climate change, only mentions nuclear energy in passing, as part of a laundry-list of options it deems not good enough.

Some "realist" this guy is.

</comment><comment><USER45> What happened to iron fertilization of the ocean?

</comment><comment><USER46> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA)

<comment><USER47> (Just FYI, I automatically downvote links that have no context or description.)

"Jancovici : Can we save energy, jobs and growth at the same time?"

08/01/2018

Jean-Marc Jancovici

Jancovici's conference in ENS School of Paris - 08/01/2018

> The depletion of natural resources, with oil to start with, and the need for > a stable climate, will make it harder and harder to pursue economic growth > as we know it. It has now become urgent to develop a new branch of economics > which does not rely on the unrealistic assumption of a perpetual GDP > increase. In this Colloquium, I will discuss a "physical" approach to > economics which aims at understanding and managing the scaling back of our > world economy. Biography : Jean-Marc Jancovici, is a French engineer who > graduated from École Polytechnique and Télécom, and who specializes in > energy-climate subjects. He is a consultant, teacher, lecturer, author of > books and columnist. He is known for his outreach work on climate change and > the energy crisis. He is co-founder of the organization "Carbone 4" and > president of the think tank "The Shift Project".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So much I want to say here...

I'm part of the choir to whom the author is preaching but I find this weak tea. (Although he's not preaching, he's RFC'ing his assumptions.)

If we grant that _fusion_ isn't around the corner (and I don't, see "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" [https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788](https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788) abstract: "Theory for a gridded inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion system is presented that shows a net energy gain is possible if the grid is magnetically shielded from ion impact. A simplified grid geometry is studied, consisting of two negatively-biased coaxial current-carrying rings, oriented such that their opposing magnetic fields produce a spindle cusp. Our analysis indicates that better than break-even performance is possible even in a deuterium-deuterium system at bench-top scales. The proposed device has the unusual property that it can avoid both the cusp losses of traditional magnetic fusion systems and the grid losses of traditional IEC configurations." So that's neat.)

If we grant that we must massively reduce our energy consumption that is not necessarily mean lower Q-of-L. Our systems are _hugely_ wasteful (count the number of LEDs in your house tonight. A first-world household burns so much energy so pointlessly. The not-really-off nature of modern electronics is a small part of it. Bad insulation. Pilot lights. Refrigerators that open like cabinets rather than drawers. Incandescent "light" bulbs that put out more heat than light: they're literally _heaters_ that also give off light. I could go on and on and on...)

Bottom line: if we took physics seriously and gave a shit about efficiency we could cut our emissions in half overnight without any major technology change in production. (Although we should still do that too.)

Also, ever since the 70's people have studied e.g. passive solar design for buildings. We can easily make our cities more efficient and more ecological with just a little cleverness. (Remember that time when we _accidentally_ built a solar furnace in London: [https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science- news/london-skyscrap...](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london- skyscraper-can-melt-cars-set-buildings-fire-f8C11069092) ) The _power_ is _there_ we just have to use it wisely. "It's raining soup, grab a bucket!"

And with _applied ecology_ (e.g. "Permaculture", regenerative agriculture, urban "food forests", etc.) we should be able to recycle wastes and produce food _in situ_ in urban and suburban areas in densities great enough to sustain _Arcologies_ ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) ) integrated ecological city-buildings that provide high quality-of-life in an ecologically harmonious and sustainable way. (The beginnings of this are already happening in parts of asia. ( E.g. [https://www.quora.com/How-is- China-able-to-provide-enough-fo...](https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able- to-provide-enough-food-to-feed-its-population-of-over-1-billion-people-Do- they-import-food-or-are-they-self-sustainable) ))

<comment><AUTHOR> "RFC'ing"?

<comment><USER47> Sorry, "Request for Comments": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, that was a chief possible match, though a somewhat odd comparison in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> In part two is an 11 steps plan:

 _11\. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature._

Another anti-humanist Malthusian loony. It's probably the effect of Vancouver's dump weather. Ignore.

<comment><USER49> It has nothing to do with being a "Malthusian loony".

Which of these do you prefer:

\- >10 billion people living on this planet, depleting resources so that inequality levels will rise while total (real) wealth will decline.

\- A lot less people than now living on this planet in a way that we can actually permanently get close to the current western standard of living for ~all of them.

<comment><USER50> _> Which of these do you prefer_

Neither. You, like the author of these articles, left out the third choice:

\- Continue to improve technology so it can continue to supply increasing real wealth with a smaller ecological footprint.

This has already been happening for pretty much the entire history of technology. The computers we are using to have this conversation consume orders of magnitude less power for orders of magnitude more computing operations than the ones people used to have similar conversations a couple of decades ago. The cars we drive are much more efficient and emit much less. The widespread availability of telecommunications and the Internet reduces the need for people to physically go somewhere in order to get something done.

People can adapt to change if they are given the tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> By what specific mechanisms does, has, and can technology deliverthose increases?

What are the net gains provided by millionsfold increases in compute capacity and performance? How much such gains remain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> NUCLEAR REACTORS will be needed soon to desalinate water. May as well learn to build them safely! Especially don't make them giant targets for terrorists and hackers.

BUT ALSO we need to end factory farming and transition the vast majority of cars to electric. The main reason they are still locked exclusively into hydrocarbons is the massive subsidies the US government has given to fossil fuels. Otherwise we could have had great battery tech 30 years ago after Suez Crisis and OPEC would jolt markets awake and people would clamor for alternatives.

<comment><USER33> What are those subsidizes? If you don't count the negative impact of releasing carbon, then the subsidies are a myth.

<comment><USER51> Just the oil ones

[https://www.eenews.net/assets/2017/10/02/document_gw_01.pdf](https://www.eenews.net/assets/2017/10/02/document_gw_01.pdf)

But these days other countries are far worse in fuel subsidies

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united- states-spend-ten-times-more-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-than-education/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It makes me wonder if the slaughter of so many people by different horrible governments in history actually helped prevent climate change from happening sooner.

</comment><comment><USER53> When the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation flip negative, and the deep, multi-decade solar minimum we are about to enter kicks in (it already has begun), we will see temps lower globally (and especially in the northern hemisphere). But of course, with this, we will be dealing with a set of problems much more difficult than warming. Warming is good for crops and humanity. Cold temperatures, shortened growing seasons, and the like are much more difficult to deal with.

<comment><USER54> Appreciate the unpopular "opinion".

The world oscillates. It has so for a long, long time. We should stop polluting not with some agenda to think we'll have an effect on global temperature, but to stop poisoning ourselves.

<comment><USER55> How do you suppose formerly trapped carbon will oscillate back into the earth's crust?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG: Why is Bitcoin so severely penalized on HN? - <AUTHOR>

Every bitcoin story gets buried rapidly, and now we can't even post something about Satoshi (goes dead directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364582<p>Why is that? <comment><USER2> People flag bitcoin submissions if they have no information or context.

I guess some people are flagging Bitcoin articles in general because there are just so many of them and they are not particularly interesting.

Some of them Trigger the flamewar detector. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7359084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7359084) is an example with appalling quality comments.

There have been _many_ submissions about the identity of satoshi in the past few days. I'd link to a few but I genuinely cannot use the HN search on mobile.

<comment><USER3> Is there some robot I'm not aware of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Low quality submissions get buried. Really low quality submissions often are killed. Bitcoin is attracting a lot of attention and therefore generating significant blogspam and redundant submissions to HN.

If your submissions are not generating interest, assume they are low quality even though it may be bad luck. If your submissions arrive dead, find better sources.

The system provides good feedback. It's up to each of us to act on it in ways that meet or exceed the norms of HN. One way is to create and blog original content and then submit a link.

</comment><comment><USER5> My views are quite pro-Bitcoin, and I don't think Bitcoin gets severely penalized on HN.

The community here appears reasonably open to fair discussion, unlike some other sites.

I don't know why your post is dead, because I can't see it, so I can't comment on that issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you look in new, all the post linking to Satoshi's comment are dead, my post got killed right when I posted it (so it's keywords that triggered the kill)

<comment><USER5> If you mean the story about the real Satoshi Nakamoto's comment on the situation, then it was already posted, got lots of upvotes, and that's probably why your post are being killed

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150)

<comment><USER6> It's even simpler than that, ning.com is on whatever block list (or at least, many of the subdomains there).

<comment><AUTHOR> that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The news about Satoshi emotionally affects a substantial number of readers on HN. Whilst it could be argued to be interesting and relevant, the news item is considered to be tasteless and infringing on the privacy of a member of a technology community.

In the wider world, news about a tech personality would be interesting and "in the public interest". Here - it's too close to the bone. Thus I have seen two posts being removed by the OP who posted it, and I imagine that other posts have become flagged.

In short whilst I agree that this news item is probably the worst kind of journalism, HN is self censoring, which I find more interesting, as do you OP!

</comment><comment><USER8> "Satoshi Nakamoto: I am not Dorian Nakamoto" is not relevant to HN (see first paragraph in [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).

It could have well been killed manually.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently it is for many of us: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358150)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On HN, general news and human interest stories get buried(usually) and rightly so, as this is not the place for them.

Bitcoin gets treated faily on HN as long as the discussion has some technical merit.

For example posting comparing coding styles of Dorian and BTC Satoshi, that shouldn't get buried.

Similarly, there has been almost nothing about Ukraine on top of HN, because nothing too hacky has been posted just general news.

</comment><comment><USER10> A community without some moderation tends to become filled with low quality spam, so I'm not against that.

But I think it would improve things if there was some more transparency about which posts were banned, which moderators or people flag posts, why they were banned, etc.</comment>


Facebook exec: Employers SHOULD be allowed to ask women their plan to have child - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268697/Sheryl-Sandberg-Firms-SHOULD-allowed-ask-female-staff-plans-family-says-Facebook-head.html

<comment><USER2> Employees are never rewarded for their openness and being forthcoming, only punished or worse replaced.

Maybe one company in a thousand is loyal and wants to empower their workers by helping them live fulfilling lives but until that is the norm and not the exception, employees have exactly zero incentive to play it any other way than close to the vest.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it how she is the self-appointed poster girl for you can have it all, family and career...if you're worth a cool $1 billion or so.</comment>


Mirror-owner Reach cuts wages, furloughs 20% staff - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-reach-wages/mirror-owner-reach-cuts-wages-furloughs-20-staff-idUKKBN21O0KE <comment><AUTHOR> It should be noted that Reach does not own the Daily Mail, despite what the article states. The Daily Mail and General Trust still owns that title.</comment>


A practical relational query compiler in 500 lines of code - one-more-minute <comment><AUTHOR> [http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2016/10/11/a-practical- re...](http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2016/10/11/a-practical-relational- query-compiler-in-500-lines/)

</comment><comment><USER2> The link is missing.</comment>


Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins (1923, Full text) - <AUTHOR> http://scientificadvertising.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> I read this book a few years ago. It is seriously the real thing and I highly recommend it. Particularly astonishing is how recognizable the techniques he pioneered are in the internet age. For example, he A/B tested everything. It's also remarkable how many of the brands Hopkins created remain household names nearly a century later (Goodyear, Palmolive).

</comment><comment><USER3> I literally keep this book on my night stand. The techniques he recommends are spot on - and more importantly geared toward generating a return. Highly recommended.</comment>


Looking for tech co-founder to join Cool Startup - <AUTHOR> Trying to bring all of Africa's info to the internet. First by getting every small {business} website. Looking for a tech co-founder to help me build a website builder with a twist? Next big thing. <comment><USER2> Hey, would like to know more,am in Uganda, tell me about it. email@example.com</comment>


A two-qubit gate between phosphorus donor electrons in silicon - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1381-2 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's also the newsroom article, containing more marketing-speech, which might be a bit easier to understand:

[https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/200-times- fas...](https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/200-times-faster-ever- speediest-quantum-operation-yet)

Can someone more familiar on the subject explain what the main accomplishment here is compared to previous two qubit gates?</comment>


We must begin by making sure that youth are safe [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/7508

<comment><USER2> Interestingly the constant connection between "youth" and "bullying" may be unhelpful for adults who are being bullied.

For someone to say that they are being bullied is for that person to admit 'weakness', and that's not something that most people feel comfortable with.</comment>