Monorepoize – Bash scripts for creating a monorepo out of smaller repos - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gigamonkey/monorepoize <comment><USER3> After working on a monorepo and then the split up repos for the same codebase, I cannot fathom _why_ somebody would want to take small repos and merge them in a single repo. The mess and complexity just increase.

<comment><USER4> In git I fully agree, and I wonder which company successfully runs a monorepo in git.

For me, I prefer git submodules, which seem to have the benefit of both monorepo and separate repo's.

<comment><USER5> > I wonder which company successfully runs a monorepo in git.

Microsoft

<comment><USER6> Microsoft does definitely use git, monorepo I am not so sure.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+monorepo](https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+monorepo)

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git- repo-o...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-on-the- planet/)

<comment><USER6> That doesn't say that everything related to Windows is developed on the same repo, just the kernel and several core components.

<comment><USER8> How did I miss this! Can you imagine someone claiming Windows is going to be in git as few as 10 years ago? This world never ceases to amaze me. What happened to SourceSafe?

<comment><USER9> SourceSafe was never used for anything internal major. They had their own custom source control system, based on Perforce, I believe, and then on TFS and then they switched to git.

SourceSafe was something inflicted on SMBs :-D

<comment><USER8> Interesting, didn't realize that. I haven't worked there but knew some people who did, and they were very proud of dogfooding - I guess at least the OS and IDEs, though maybe not the VCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the last few years, I saw a lot of people using monorepos, and discouraging using submodules.

Frankly, I don't know why. For small projects, sure - it it an overhead. For anything larger, I find it useful to encapsulate things - be it installable packages, or if it is not the case - at least other repositories.

In the last months I split one project into 4 repos ([https://github.com/Quantum-Game/](https://github.com/Quantum-Game/)) and couldn't be happier about that move. It makes the code cleaner, Pull Requests more separated, etc.

<comment><USER11> Once your code grows and you end up with too many repos you'll be yearning to get back to monorepos. It allows to make changes in one go instead of having 3-4 PRs that all have to be merged at same time or otherwise the build breaks.

Having separate repos only makes sense if they are maintained by separate teams with a well defined API in-between that doesn't change often. If the same team maintains all repos then it is just overhead, especially if you end up with a 100 repos and you have significantly less than 100 engineers in your team.

There are also potential build time savings when having a monorepo since you can do parallel builds across different subdirs without serialising at package boundaries.

<comment><USER12> I maintain such a project with many dependencies which I also maintain separately. Yes it can be a lot of extra work to publish but this argument is based on the assumption that dependencies need to be changed constantly and this assumption is wrong. There should be pressure to design dependencies in such a way that they are modular and don't need to be changed often - <USER2> unpleasantness associated with updating deep dependencies is good and necessary. These should rarely be updated, if they need to be updated often, then they were designed incorrectly.

Many of the dependencies and sub-dependencies which I maintain are several years old. They are small enough and stable enough that they basically never need to change.

If I need to update them (which is rare), I may need to do a cascading update of multiple dependents and this can take a while but if I have to do this big update only once every 6 months, it's totally worth having them in separate repos.

<comment><USER13> That depends on the scale of the project, of course - if you have thousands of engineers as MicroFaceGoog does, then it'a a daily, even hourly, occurrence for many dependencies.

You are not MicroFaceGood, of course, so you only do that every 6 months.

However, I what way are separate repos nicer for you? Personally, I settled on a monorepo with a "$dep-devel" branch for every dependency, which I occasionally have on multiple working trees out at the same time, and which I feel gives me all the benefit a multirepo could have (whatever they may be, I can't find them) while still making tracking, branching and merging across dependencies trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have worked on projects organized both ways with git and my observation is that regardless of the choices, the right tooling can make the workflows a lot more fluent.

For separate repos, share code as much as possible through a packaging system so one does not have to make a lot of refactoring across multiple repos. It sounds backward but an auto minor version update can ease a lot of merging pains in a CI environment.

For monorepos, figure out as early as possible what/how things should be shared and separated. I worked on a project with 20+ services and websites that form a whole product and each service chooses its own languages and build systems but shared deployment interfaces for unified service discovery. CI got tricky as it can be blocked because of an unrelated change. I have not found the unified commit history super helpful as I only have context on a few of the services and most of the time I only look at histories with `git log my/path'.

</comment><comment><USER15> I feel bad about plugging myself into a post to Peter Seibel's work, but if you're interested in this kind of git preservation, I wrote a script to move a _subfolder_ between two repos:

[https://github.com/jakub-g/git-move-folder-between-repos- kee...](https://github.com/jakub-g/git-move-folder-between-repos-keep-history)

(I didn't use it for a while, but it worked for my case a few times in the past).

</comment><comment><USER16> Why is there so much code? Both python and bash. What are the edge cases that it is handling? What niceties does it introduce that you might otherwise miss out on?

I combined ~10 repos last year use a few one liners and loops.

</comment><comment><USER17> Having done this migration, I recommend you look into filter-repo, [https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo](https://github.com/newren/git- filter-repo)

I don't remember the specifics but the method used here didn't produce the results we were looking for when migrating long histories and lots of branches.

</comment><comment><USER18> The single biggest impediment to monorepo's might be jenkins. Monorepos need a radically different way to do CI/CD and none of the existing tooling does it well. There is probably a market out there for some tooling to do good Monorepo CI/CD without requiring hacky scripts and polling.

<comment><USER19> This is really a build system issue - ie figuring out which parts of the (mono)repo are affected by which change. Bazel, for example, depends on explicit, per-directory, BUILD files, and does a fairly good job of finding dependants.

<comment><USER20> Bazel works great for our pretty simplistic monorepo. My main gripe is that it's a pretty big pain to add support for custom build requirements. There have been times where it takes a whole sprint to implement build functionality because, imo, it's hard to run with unless you've been in the ecosystem for a while to understand everything.

I'm curious though, am I the only one who feels this way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Repo[1] is another tool for this, which is pretty well-tested and widely used.

[1] [https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git- repo/](https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo/)

</comment><comment><USER22> My initial though was: "Oh! This lets me quickly build a repo that merges all the smaller repos using git submodules!"

And then I see, it doesn't do it, it just merges the repos... Why would you do that?

Honestly, I don't know why for years git submodules have had such a bad fame. It works out of the box. You can checkout subrepos but you don't have to if you don't want to. You can set up separate branches, have separate commits, CI/CD workflows for each of the repos.

AND you're still able to have all the monorepo advantages: to lock down the dependencies to an exact version; to let a dev/CI pull all of them at one go.

Why wouldn't you just use git submodules for that?

</comment><comment> seph-reed I have a custom script for my monorepo that circumvents sub-modules while getting most of their benefits.

Basically, on git pull it goes through and finds all the folders with `.x_git`, renames them to `.git` and pulls. On push it does the inverse. My submodules are really just copies of one small part of the monorepo, but it allows me to have a monorepo with some parts of it being public.

So far it's been amazing.. there's no real line between sub-repos and sub- folders, if I can push a commit that modifies many with a single PR, it's obvious that monorepo is for internal stuff while the public repo is for public facing discussions... I really like it.

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the advantage over using `git subtree`?

<comment><USER24> Git subtree wouldn't preserve hashes of the existing history?

<comment><USER25> You can preserve history. You can also squash it.

<comment><USER24> Maybe I don't know about git subtree. I guess it can "preserve history" in the sense of keeping a corresponding new commit for every old commit, but they wouldn't have the same hash id?

<comment><USER26> They have everything the same with old subtree. From commit message, history, object ID, commit ID.

git-subtree(1) also allows splitting subtree.

git-subtree(1) uses plumbing git command, which is stable interface, unlike this one, which uses porcelain command.

IIRC, Git's maintainer uses git-subtree(1) to merge gitk and git-gui to Git.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> globular-toast I'm constantly amazed at how fashions come and go in cycles. Only a few years ago everyone was vigorously splitting everything up into microservices and now the monolithic repository is the latest trend.

<comment><USER27> Both of those are current trends - microservices in a monorepo - as far as I can tell. (Not a fan of either.)

<comment><USER28> Right, microservices beget monorepos because managing permissions and build pipelines across 100's of repos isn't pleasant. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, coordination is really challenging across multiple repos and versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> From having done this a couple of times in the last few years: make sure you use the mandatory history rewrite in this process to get rid of history you don't want. Team christmas party videos that got checked into master (just kidding) can easily be removed before switching.

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems like github and gitlab are written for multi-repo work, especially the CI. Is there a selection of tools to make monorepo life on those services easier?

</comment><comment><USER12> Big corporations are extremely inefficient. Why does everyone want to copy them?

And why do we use all the bulky tools they produce when there are far simpler, better and more open alternatives available?

<comment><USER13> Because it turns out big corporations that use multirepos tend to be even less efficient (about versioning) than those that use monorepos.

What are those far simpler, better, more open alternatives?

<comment><USER31> > Because it turns out big corporations that use multirepos tend to be even > less efficient (about versioning) than those that use monorepos.

How do you measure that exactly?

<comment><USER13> Personally, informal survey of people I know who work at big corps.

Google and Microsoft have both evaluated this internally and reached that conclusion, with some of the evaluation criteria and conclusions publicly documented (though I don't have links available on my phone, google will likely find them for you)

<comment><USER31> Microsoft doesn't really use a monorepo.

This leaves companies like Google and Facebook that made a decision fairly early in their existence, set constraints, and then spent several hundreds engineer-years into developing their own infrastructure and tools to support that decision.

Does it work? Yes. Is it more efficient than what other companies of similar scale are doing? I don't believe anyone knows.

<comment><USER13> From reading articles, I got the impression Windows is one monorepo (but it doesn't include Office) and e.g. Visual Stduio is another. So it's true that Microsoft doesn't use a monorepo as a whole, but e.g. just Windows itself is a codebase significantly larger and more diverse than 99% of companies would have, and it does have multiple "independents" products - Notepad is an independent module from Solitaire and they are both independent of essentially everything else, whereas e.g. File Explorer, the win32 subsystem and the kernel often need to be updated together for new features.

GoogBook made it early, but re-evaluated. For sure, they found the cost of switching is higher than any potential benefit. I must say that I have not found anyone describing benefits other than "git is faster for smaller repositories" (which was very true but is only slightly true with sparse checkouts and shallow branches these days) and "I like it that way".

Yosefk has a convincing article about "if your culture is bad, it doesn't matter; if your culture is good, monorepos are technically easier until you hit some scale wall but then they don't become harder that multirepo at that scale" IIRc.

But w.r.t Microsoft I admit I'm not very well informed, thank you for setting the record straight.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Poll of Facebook Users Finds 94% Hate Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/19/facebook-polls-users-on-redesign-94-hate-it/

<comment><USER3> The issue with the new Facebook is that people used Facebook as a way to connect with random people they kinda met. Random people you've kinda met often have pictures you might find interesting or contact info you'd like to look up. You don't want to be updated on what they're doing every day - <USER2> just don't care. And so now people are inundated with information they just don't want because they really only care about a small subset of their friends. Twitter, on the other hand, being based around this philosophy doesn't require two-way relationships and people "followed" others knowing that they wanted this data flying at them.

I don't know whether this stat is valid or anything, but I think Facebook just has a different social graph than sites like Twitter and that Facebook's graph isn't people you want these style updates on.

<comment><USER4> That's why it's so great that they let you X out on anybody you don't want to see. Once you realize it's there, it's almost an impulse click.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably worth reading: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias>

<comment><USER6> Selection bias exists, but it doesn't explain away numbers like "700,000" and "94%". The fact is that Facebook pissed off a _huge_ number of their users, for seemingly no good reason, as the previous design was quite popular and functional.

<comment><USER5> First, 700,000 isn't "huge" for Facebook. They gain about that many new users in a day.

Second, the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way are irrelevant if the sample is biased. The poll is designed in a way that practically guarantees bias: a self-selected sample, a hot-button issue where one side cares much more strongly than the other, and the viral hooks of Facebook to make sure it gets spread far and wide.

It's worthless if you're looking to draw any real conclusions about how Facebook users feel about the new homepage. It's not worthless if you're looking to exploit people's confirmation bias and get an article all over the web.

So, YMMV, I guess.

<comment><USER7> Reference for ~700,000 new users per day

[http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now- growin...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/16/facebook-now-growing-by- over-600000-users-a-day-and-new-engagement-stats/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for this link.

It also reports 13 million users log in once per day. That, in the context of Facebook, is what I'd call an "active user". These, overwhelmingly, are the people who are taking this poll. 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

<comment><USER8> > 700,000 therefore represents about 5% of the core userbase.

Your math here is really flawed. Facebook's daily uniques are a magnitude smaller than their weekly and monthly uniques. Since this survey has been up since the redesign, you would have to compare 700k to the number of uniques over that period of time. I can assure you that number is much greater than 13M.

<comment><USER6> I'd bet you a dollar that at least 3/4 of the poll-takers are dailies. These are the users who really are taking this personally.

<comment><USER8> The whole point of this argument has been over statistical invalidity. Your guesses are pointless without data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=68992161659>

> This application was _not_ developed by Facebook.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, another semi-misleading headline from TechCrunch. It's not a "Facebook Poll" (since only Facebook itself can actually run polls these days, iirc), it's a third party app that is polling Facebook users.

Edit: Looks like Arrington updated the headline after someone pointed that out... still not a very clear headline since it misleadingly labels this a "Facebook Poll," when it is in fact a Facebook app that is polling users.

Perhaps semantics, but an important distinction given that actual Facebook polls are only available to Facebook.

<comment><USER11> Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The new Facebook is horrible and confusing, the main page is just a rubbish of "what country you are" or "what language would you be" from different friends, but I can't see any useful information in a see of stupid game scores and crazy app stuff. This stuff is not even chronological, and I can't remove a story to clean it up, I can only block all stories from a user (which is a bit much). Anyway, it's garbage.

Edit: also only 9 big stories on home page... wtf. And older posts returns "There are no more posts to show right now" after just two clicks.

<comment><USER13> They don't even stack posts by the same people, I've got 4 messages from one person, all within the space of an hour and no other posts between. Yet all four are displaying, why?

The highlights, display new photo groups... yet a selection of the photos are displayed on the home page anyway. The entire highlight section is completely moronic, it just displays less information in a _less_ convenient way and there's no way to control, remove or filter any of this.

I _really_ don't need to know my wife's cousin has joined the 'I Love Sex' group when I've already removed her stuff from my homepage.

I also have serious problems with Facebook's 'People You May Know' crap, because it's completely unintelligent. There's no way to prioritize your relationships with people, so I'm suggested friends of my wife's cousins who live like a 28 hour drive away. My wife doesn't have the person on, I'm not down as living anywhere near the person... so why does it suggest them to me off of 2 people I know who know them, but doesn't suggest a single one of my wifes friends?

It failed to suggest a family friend who comes over for coffee like 4 days a week, yet it has suggested me someone from a different country before despite having less mutual friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For what it's worth, I like the new layout.

In particular, I like that I can just type whatever I want as a status message instead of Facebook deciding that my message should be 'XYZ is <fill in>".

<comment><USER15> This feature is quite old ... statuses have been "is"-free since roughly the last overhaul, which was what, a year or so?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, but you still had to start it with your name, and it's really difficult to make correct sentences that start with your name in some languages (it can even be difficult in English depending on what you're trying to say).

You can tell that this update had a lot to do with simplifying localisation, in fact. A lot of text is gone. Instead of saying that someone was "tagged in 4 photos", it just says their name and shows the photos.

<comment><USER17> For what it's worth, that was the one thing I really liked about the Facebook status messages -- the last bastion of the old IRC /me command.

Somehow, having your name at the start of the textbox (and not being able to erase it) seemed to force status updates to be terse and, well, third-person. I've noticed that just in the last few days, this beautiful brevity has completely disappeared.

[Edit: but I concede that it probably didn't work so well for other languages...]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess the awkward phrase "Facebook poll users" is a workaround for saying, "Respondents to a voluntary response unscientific poll." We have no idea what the majority of Facebook users feel about the new design. (I'm still deciding what I think about it.) The usual FAQ applies:

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

\-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [email@example.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: email@example.com; Kim Robinson Cc: email@example.com Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are _worthless_. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

[http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...](http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420)

<comment><USER19> I cant say whether you are the one, or someone else, but I see this exact, word for word quote posted in almost any news story or post that relates to polls or voluntary response data. I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, just the fact that you (or whoever) post the same comment/reference in many stories. Wouldnt it just be easier to link, instead of perpetually pasting this whole thing? I know it would annoy me less. /rant

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every redesign gets the same response.

</comment><comment><USER13> I joined Facebook for Facebook, not for a twitter clone because I already have an account for that.

</comment><comment><USER21> I might just be cynical but i reckon that they are having problems getting people to click on their ads. The redesigns seem to be attempts to fix that problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> All these missteps by Facebook sounds eerily like the MLS in the real estate industry: a closed database that started as private property (belonging to Realtors) and slowly being pried open by lawsuits and by companies who do a much better job presenting the data (Zillow, Trulia, etc). Maybe Facebook isn't a "platform", it's just a database, and eventually people will stop using the site all together and access the database from a completely different site that's customized to suit their needs/ tastes. People argued that everyone had a right to listing info with houses (even though the MLS has some confidential info, that was resolved), so why not with our personal data (with privacy safeguards, of course)?

</comment><comment><USER23> "Hate" is a fairly strong reaction, no? My casual FB experience led me to be lost, again, when trying to figure out how to set my status ... but I couldn't muster enough reaction to go beyond: "meh". All my weird acquaintances are still there and new/old friends/associates still find me through it, so the value is less the UI and more Facebook's ubiquity. Personally, I prefer this to Classmates.com, don't you?

</comment><comment><USER24> "I hate it and if it doesn't change I will only check it once in awhile"

Way to take a hard stance. </sarcasm> I think that this redesign, like the others, will face opposition from nearly everyone at first and once people get used to it they will like it or at the very least accept it. I think that quote says it all. The user is unwilling to stop using the site despite hating the design.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's Twitter, now, but a little better. It's okay.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, maybe it's better than Twitter, but it's not as good as it was a month ago. They have removed the organizational features which brought me back to the site after several years of avoiding it.

I can't see why they would want to "catch up" with Twitter, a distant second place in the social networking race.

Another good article is "Facebook's Lousy Facelift" here: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks- lousy-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-willman/facebooks-lousy- facelift_b_175358.html)

<comment><USER25> Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you. On the other hand, it seems more addicting now with a more constant stream of updates.

<comment><USER18> _Yeah, it is kind of weird to copy someone less successful than you._

Good general principle.

On my part, Facebook is less addictive to me than it was before the change. I could easily forget that I'm a member, as nothing interesting is happening there.

<comment><USER26> it is indeed weird to copy someone less successful than you, but very often in software and web services, the simpler service wins - think wordpress over the bloated CMSs of a decade ago, or SalesForce over SAP, or Adwords over Doubleclick - so maybe it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Don't use facebook, but when I hear about things like this I am baffled. Haven't any of these engineers taken human factors courses? One of my brothers works for Honda, and I asked him about the ergonomics of car design. His response: at Honda, it is imperative that you design for 95% of the population. It looks like facebook did the exact opposite.

<comment><USER28> First of all, Facebook is not just engineers. Believe me, they have plenty of interfacers designers, and they are masters of UI. Very very few sites have the kind of depth and subtlety that Facebook has built in its recent iterations.

What the users say about their opinion of the new design is completely irrelevant. Users who are used to something will _always_ resist change that removes something they are used to. The proof will be in the usage statistics. Eventually Facebook will saturate the market and at that point they may end up with more to gain by maintaining some level of familiarity. But for now I think they are making the right moves to increase engagement, and I believe the numbers will bear me out.

<comment><USER27> I hope that bet is right. Even so, there _must_ be a way to avoid this kind of response. Sometimes debate to get into the news is good, but I think in this case it would make more sense to have the response be "Facebook releases awesome interface!" Apple was able to do it with the iPhone and while there were people who didn't like the pseudo keyboard, the raves far outweighed the complaints.

<comment><USER28> The iphone was a new product, that's the difference.

The only thing comparable in the Apple world is the release of OS X. At the time there was A LOT of complaint, much of it extremely well-reasoned. Diehards clung to OS 9 for years for pure interface reasons. Of course Apple didn't take quite as big a public opinion hit as Facebook due to the technical benefits and the horrible obsolescence of OS 9.

Does Facebook need to avoid this backlash? Only if people actually stop using it, which seems unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's worth noting that those of us with the Facebook for iPhone app can just decline to update it, and retain an interface more like the pre-redesign Facebook. I find it much more useful.

<comment><USER13> Yet they've never given this option for people using Facebook on the PC. I mean even windows when they came out with all the Live crap allowed hotmail users to retain the original design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Facebook has mastered the platform but failed the interface.

</comment><comment><USER30> 94% of users are afraid to change.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is stupid and Bias... only people who 'dislike' the new layout would add the application AND people don't like change. It is much easier to say 'I don't like something' than to admit that it could be amazing! This riff raff will die down in a week, watch.

<comment><USER6> Is it wrong to dislike when features are removed from a website? Is removal of features and reinstating the single stream of everything, a la Facebook circa 2004, "amazing"?

<comment><USER4> There never was a "single stream of everything." There were always filters. Facebook's stream is live for the very first time now.</comment></comment></comment>


The women fighting back after acid attacks - chestnut-tree http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-4799f705-bc19-4b9f-8391-1f955f800d2a <comment><AUTHOR> > In the UK, attacks appear to be on the rise. Five hundred people have been > injured or threatened with acid since 2012.

Talk about burying the lede! That sentence is 80% of the way through the article! I was curious how much of an increase that was, and other articles put it at a doubling over the past decade.[1] That's crazy.

1\. [http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/30/acid- attack-h...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/30/acid-attack- hospital-admissions-have-almost-doubled-in-last-10-years)</comment>


Google shuts down spaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14731232/google-spaces-group-chat-shutdown <comment><USER2> Sometimes I think Google launches products and expects them to succeed by sheer luck. No marketing at all. Maybe they've been primed by the search engine, which sold itself by being vastly superior to anything available at the time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would have liked the idea of spaces only if it were open platform like reddit & spotify intermixed functionalities like \- where anyone can share public spaces with topics/tags so one can find the space with inbuilt search functionality. \- collaborative spaces with moderation \- Some auto curation like feeding rss feeds to collections so any changes would transfer there.

I think if it has that kind of features it would atleast be the best rss reader if not collaborative list.

What do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER3> Figures. Anyone seen [https://www.google.com/save/](https://www.google.com/save/) ?

</comment><comment><USER4> alternative app that has been around for a longer time: [https://www.myorb.com/](https://www.myorb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It was announced in May of 2016, so it'll be shut down in less than a year. That was the first thing I wanted to know after seeing this, so I figured I'd contribute that fact here.</comment>


The advantages of building your website from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/the-advantages-of-building-your-website-from-scratch-da5748a1baaf#.bnn43rnf5 <comment><USER2> Those are really great advantages, but creating a website from the very scratch is a time-consuming process. When I was setting up a website for my law company, I wanted a lot of flexibility. I should admit, I'm a techie person who knows how to code. Though I was looking for a tool that would allow me to customize a ready-made template in order to save much time. By accident, I discovered this amazing website builder that offers really breath-taking templates - [https://www.templatemonster.com/moto- cms-3-templates.php](https://www.templatemonster.com/moto-cms-3-templates.php) . Works great for me.</comment>


It Knows Where You Are, and What You're Looking For - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/technology/internet/03local.html

<comment><USER2> I believe that Loopt's aggressive integration with other related sites is a prescient move, as the services that integrate into more external sites in general will increase their relevance and reach. I can't wait to see the list of sites they have integrated with, and I wonder what sites will be next?

Introducing this feature signals of a shift in focus, either toward opening up their platform, and allowing third party services to make their own service more useful, or establishing a foothold in event listing market with ambitions to later directly compete with them.

I believe that the former would align with their business interests, while the latter would align with improving the user's experience as well as allow loopt to focus on its core product. I'm curious as to how they define their core product, and how that might evolve.

Any ideas?

</comment><comment><USER3> It will be extremely exciting to watch location-based advertising and associated monetization models become a reality. I have a feeling Sam and Loopt will be at the forefront of carving out this new frontier...

<comment><USER4> I'm not excited about it at all. I don't need more companies interrupting my brainwaves trying to convince me to part with my money.

<comment><USER2> That's not the point. Though those companies will inevitably exist, there will be others that build more creative, less intrusive/distracting business models.

Remember advertising before adsense? Users with purchasing intent are now provided a convenient means of acting upon that intent, and those without it are far less annoyed by text ads, that are less interruptive than the banners that that used to dominate the scene.</comment></comment></comment>


Sherlock Holmes: examining the evidence – in charts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2015/jun/29/sherlock-holmes-examining-the-evidence-in-charts <comment><USER2> In viewing the page titled 'The Criminal is Disproportionately Likely to be a Foreigner', I am reminded of the "New Yorker's View of the World": [http://i.imgur.com/A3JwoFr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/A3JwoFr.jpg)</comment>


NSA engineer gets 5+ years for security breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/25/nsa-engineer-security-breach-841055 <comment><USER2> Assuming the judge determined that the convict was merely incompetent, this was still a light sentence.

<comment><USER3> It was. Technically the convict was a senior citizen, so maybe that had something to do with it.

I also like that the judge went on a tangent about the injustice of senior officials getting lighter sentences for more serious perpetrations of the same crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hilary. That is all.

<comment><USER3> Before you get downvoted by the group-think, I just want to say yes & I agree.</comment></comment>


Is Slack Down? - <AUTHOR> http://slack.com <comment><USER2> I wondered why I was enjoying work without interruptions...

Now, seriously, how do we convince people to go back to less synchronous forms of communication such as e-mail?

<comment><USER3> Chat is pretty asynchronous for me. I only read or respond to things when my name is mentioned or if there's something particularly relevant or important going on.

I just mute notifications for all but the most important channels, and sometimes even mute those while working. That way you only get a notification for @everyone-type mentions, personal mentions, and personal messages, which is not unlike email.

<comment><USER2> Even doing that, I still think it's very distracting.

<comment><USER4> At that point, it's only distracting if you work with distracting people. Maybe without IM the barrier to being distracting would be having to go to your desk, but it would still be an occasional issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the heads up I was wondering what was going on! In the future, linking to a company's status page (almost always located at status.companyurl) is even more helpful! [https://status.slack.com](https://status.slack.com) in this case.

<comment><USER6> When something is down it's almost never immediately reflected on the status page. I always resort to Twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> same. didn't see anything on twitter too. (at least for the first five minutes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please link the status page next time like a normal person.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tech productivity goes up 10x.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes.

[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=news&q=slack&sr...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=news&q=slack&src=typd)

</comment><comment><USER10> While it is still working for me, I have also seen some issues with some Office 365 services. According to Azure's Twitter account, there is also an outage going on there (although they have yet to update their status page for some reason).

</comment><comment><USER11> Yep! [https://status.slack.com/2019-05/6d7541f932dd628c](https://status.slack.com/2019-05/6d7541f932dd628c)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Try Slack with your team for free" should be become "Try Slack with your team for free with limitation of 10000 messages per month"

<comment><USER13> The message limitation works for a small group I'm in - we just export the messages every week and back them up to Github, so we don't really need Slack to archive for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I sure hope so; then I can actually get some work done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Able to access now, but I was getting error 500.

</comment><comment><USER15> Had a glitch but seems to be working now (NYC)

</comment><comment><USER16> Not. Not here.

</comment><comment><USER17> Confirmed down in Florida here.

<comment><USER17> Back up now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No.

[https://status.slack.com/](https://status.slack.com/)

Edit (from 3 minutes later): maybe.

<comment><USER19> I do get an error 500, trying from Brazil.

<comment><USER19> aaand it's back

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Working fine in WA.

</comment><comment><USER21> yes, from san francisco</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find article writers who are knowledgeable about a topic? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to hire somebody to write articles on robotics and AI for http://roboticsaustralia.org and wondering if anybody has suggestions for finding good writers who are actually interested in and knowledgeable about a specific topic. I've posted in forums, looked on Upwork etc. and not really had any luck. <comment><USER2> I've hired/mentored and worked with a ton of writers at varying experience levels. So, I have a note of caution - often, your results will be better if you optimize for research skills and the ability to write professionally. Subject matter experts often suck with deadlines and they're hellish to edit!!

That said, if I was looking for robotics/AI writers, I'd go to my local University and talk to the Computer Science/Software Engineering/Electrical Engineering student associations.

Good luck!

</comment><comment> git-pull I think Quora would be a good starting point.

Maybe by googling:

site:quora.com robotics

And seeing the people who answer and good writers.

Also, consider scientific journals and people who are PhD candidates at universities.

This balances their expertise with their willingness to be pitched to write on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stackoverflow,

edit: i was once hired thru stackoverflow, for writing here [http://www.baeldung.com/](http://www.baeldung.com/). They had a screening process, made me write one article to test and then finally onboard.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's your budget? A good, professional writer will get interested in a hurry if the price is right.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe on Medium? They have great search functionality and lot's of high quality content.</comment>


Stuxnet's Secret Twin - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/19/stuxnets_secret_twin_iran_nukes_cyber_attack <comment><USER2> The original report, of which the Foreign Policy Article is a summary, is here: [http://www.langner.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/To- kill...](http://www.langner.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/To-kill-a- centrifuge.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Serious question:

Why THE FUCK are industrial controllers connected to the Internet still running Windows?

What is going on here? Why did anyone _ever_ think this was a good idea? Your customers may use Windows, but you don't code your site as a batch script ...

<comment><USER4> It's a great question, and as someone heavily involved in industrial control systems, I ask myself and others that a lot.

The only real reason I've heard comes down to cost and support. It's easy to develop software for Windows, easy to find developers, easy to support the operating system, easy (debatable) to use in an industrial environment. It's a known factor.

Always remember that people on the shop floor (or hydrocarbons refinery equally) aren't interested in maintaining a PC they don't understand, and their management aren't interested in maintaining a well-educated IT department. It's a simple cost/benefit equation, and so far the benefits have been completely ignored.

Likewise, vendors of control systems don't want to put the time and effort in to develop their IDE's, display tools etc for a Unix variant. System integrators (ICS programmers and configurators)... well, we'd be cool with a Linux-based control system, if it worked well.

That's why you see Windows in industrial control environments. Couple this with the extremely conservative nature of industry, and you have a huge, glaring problem. We (ICS engineers) know it's a problem, clients are starting to realise it's a problem, but the wheels move slowly.

At least Stuxnet has made the wider industrial community aware of just how deep the shit is. Now begins the slow process of crawling back out of it.

<comment><USER5> Sorry but in this scenario maintaining a 5-person skilled IT department was/is imperative. The TCO should of the IT department, even if you hire D. Hartmeier[1] to configure the firewalls, should be negligible compared to the operation's TCO.

That said, in this case I believe that the software to manage the centrifuges is made by Siemens (Germany) and it's written on Windows. So partially it wasn't the consumer's choice to use windows. Even if they used linux, is not hard to think that the NSA could have written a Linux clone worm. The only thing that can keep away such threats is "security" as Schneir mentions here[2] "security is a process" and that process can secure any operating system out there imho.

[1] [http://www.benzedrine.cx/index.html](http://www.benzedrine.cx/index.html)

[2] [https://www.schneier.com/crypto- gram-0005.html](https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0005.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Try this link if you get hit with registration:

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC8QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foreignpolicy.com%2Farticles%2F2013%2F11%2F19%2Fstuxnets_secret_twin_iran_nukes_cyber_attack&ei=ffaMUuuKOIPuiQL9nYDwDg&usg=AFQjCNGFQ0XkzPz1DfHTsyARvAbCqssAGg&sig2=9mAX5PgUYUDDetuPvXd3rQ&bvm=bv.56643336,d.cGE)

<comment><USER6> that one requires registration as well.

<comment><USER7> Full text [http://pastebin.com/z7XxVHVx](http://pastebin.com/z7XxVHVx)

<comment><USER8> that is 5 to 10 years of computer crime you are looking at, sp332.

<comment><USER7> I was aiming for $9k in statutory damages :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is incredibly interesting and extremely important. It has clear implications for infrastructure and security, particularly energy infrastructure which I am most interested in.

This is the future of war.

<comment> at-fates-hands My Dad used to write software for large technology companies. When he was with Control Data, they had just finished a huge project where they automated a ton of processed for the local energy company to make it more efficient.

When I was in college and the internet got big I and I was touting all this cool stuff you could do, he told me about this project they did way back in the 70's. He said it terrified him at the time because it took the human element out of the equation. If something went wrong, it could do some serious damage. A misplaced decimal point here and it could basically bring down an entire region of the power grid.

He always said the software was great, but it made the people using it lazy - which is where the real danger is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Q: How could governments get something so complex right?

A: Trick question. Nice. Next question.

-[http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002040.html](http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002040.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Here you go: [http://www.readability.com/read?url=http%3A//www.foreignpoli...](http://www.readability.com/read?url=http%3A//www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/19/stuxnets_secret_twin_iran_nukes_cyber_attack)

<comment><USER12> That link also presents a registration form. Thanks anyway.

<comment><USER13> You can just right click the overlay, click Inspect Element, then delete the div that contains the overlay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's the Foreign Policy Article, linked so there's no registration banner: [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/19/stuxnets_se...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/19/stuxnets_secret_twin_iran_nukes_cyber_attack?page=0:0)

<comment> vhost- Thanks! I was using firebug to kill the overlay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Readability link: [http://www.readability.com/articles/6ycbi4jx](http://www.readability.com/articles/6ycbi4jx)

I highly recommend downloading this extension for websites with crappy overlays like this one!

<comment><USER16> I just removed the overlay with firebug :p

But that's a great service, I didn't know I could use it without registering. I will use the bookmarklet from now on, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Website requires registration/login to view content. No thanks.

<comment><USER18> Or open your web inspector and delete the node.</comment></comment>


Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5971328/the-most-futuristic-predictions-that-came-true-in-2012

<comment><USER3> I hadn't thought of these individual achievements as being that big until I saw them all together in one place and now I can say that this has truly been a breakthrough year all across the technology sector.

Every year we seem to be accelerating our speed of development when it comes to technology, I'm only 19 and in my life I've seen us go from 56kb/s internet to 1gb/s internet, go from the rare NASA launch to regular private company launches (don't forget, SpaceX is not the only private company engaging in these kind of activities, there is also Virgin Galactic in the UK who are breaching the barriers facing them very quickly.) and medical breakthroughs across every sector.

We live in the golden age of human history up to now and I would be willing to place a long bet that in 100 years, we will look back on the last 30 years as the dawn of the _modern_ age.

<comment><USER4> > _We live in the golden age of human history up to now and I would be willing > to place a long bet that in 100 years, we will look back on the last 30 > years as the dawn of the modern age._

Well, we live in the golden age of human _technology_.

But, I'd argue, far from the golden age of human history.

And maybe closer than ever to the extinction of mankind, if that "let's fix the climate issue with even more technology and continue on the same 'development for development's sake' path continues. Not to mention crazy politicians with nuclear, biological and what have you weapons on their hands and a battle for global resources like oil and water...

<comment><USER5> Enlighten me then, when was golden age of human history then in your opinion?

I have a problem with you new age romantics, bitching about issues of current civilization without providing alternatives or even realizing what "reversing" current state of affairs would really mean.

<comment><USER4> > _Enlighten me then, when was golden age of human history then in your > opinion?_

Ever occurred to you that it might be in the future?

Or that human history was perpetually in the same state of mess? Good for a few, a nightmare for others?

Or that "good for humanity" and technological advancements are not necessarily the same thing, and that e.g living an agrarian life in some 18th century farm could be better for someone than living as an industrial worker in a highly modern Foxconn factory, despite increased odds of dying from a decease preventable today or having to get your water from the well?

Damn, I'd take living in the sixties to living in the '00s any day of the week, despite having to let go of my iPad.

> _I have a problem with you new age romantics, bitching about issues of > current civilization without providing alternatives or even realizing what > "reversing" current state of affairs would really mean._

When there's a problem, like a cancer, you need to remove the cancer. You don't need an "alternative" to it.

Also, I'm not sure how to read the part about not realising what "reversing the current state of affairs would really mean".

Who said anything about "reversing"? There's a lot we can do without reversing anything. Stoping the market craze is not the same as "reversing" progress or anything. Not to mention that progress != building more advanced things cheaper.

<comment><USER5> I believe you don't understand that the term "Golden Age" by definition refers to the past. What you are talking about is denoted by the term "Utopia".

> Or that "good for humanity" and technological advancements are not > necessarily the same thing, and that e.g living an agrarian life in some > 18th century farm could be better for someone than living as an industrial > worker in a highly modern Foxconn factory, despite increased odds of dying > from a decease preventable today or having to get your water from the well?

Excuse my ad hominem, however your attitude would lead me to believe that you are at least a middle class kid with romantic perspective. What you are proposing is an actuality for a class of people who are called, gasp... Foxconn workers. There is nearly two million of them saying that you are wrong and that they prefer working for Foxconn over 18th century farm somewhere in north/central China. And as a guy who grew up on a modern farm I decided that farming is not my cup of tea (and from family heritage that 18th century farming where you would be sentenced to hard manual labor from the age of 4 even less so). Don't get me wrong, I love nature and I like that one of my hobby's is gardening. However I absolutely adore that I have a choice.

> Damn, I'd take living in the sixties to living in the '00s any day of the > week, despite having to let go of my iPad.

I believe you have no idea what 60's were like. And I believe that you should go and see more of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane at landfall. That's pretty much the opposite of a SUPERSTORM.

Much larger hurricanes have hit New England before. For example, the "Great New England Hurricane of 1938" made landfall on Long Island as a Category 3 storm, killing over 600 people. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 also was Category 3, killing 390 people.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Hurricane_of_1938>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Atlantic_Hurricane#Impact>

Imagine if two Category 3 hurricanes impacted the North East within six years today. We'd never hear the end of how Global Warming was destroying the world. But since it happened in the early 20th Century, no one cares.

<comment><USER7> You realize that hurricane category is only one measure of a storm, and not necessarily even the most important one?

"Superstorm" Sandy is not called that because if its wind speed (which is all that "category" is about) but because of its _size_ , as in physical extent.

<comment><USER6> Excepting instances of extremely small storms, Category is in fact the second most important factor when determining the destructiveness of a storm.

First most important is geography - where the storm hits.

Size of the storm is the least important factor. A large but weak storm (such as Sandy) will always be less destructive than smaller but more intense storm - assuming that they make landfall at the same location.

Sandy killed only 131 individuals, despite making landfall in an extremely densely populated area. Within the US, far smaller - but more intense - <USER2> have killed far more people in areas far less densely populated.

<comment><USER8> Aren't you leaving out storm surge, which is just as much of a result of wind speed as it is of size... it was the surge that made Sandy at landfall truly unique.

<comment><USER6> Storm surge is related to intensity much more than size.

<comment><USER8> If that's the case, then why did sandy surge to a record?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rounded corners being worth 1 billion dollars in patent-lawsuits evidently not among them. Pantent-trolling being more profitable the producting neither.

Seriously. We have come a _so far_ in technology the last decades. Things we would consider science fiction or maybe even ipmossible ten years ago is every-day stuff now.

And our "tech leaders" (and I say that with the most disrespect possible) are now busy engaging in frivilious lawsuit over the shape of the plastic which all this technology is packaged in instead of doing amazing stuff. People claim to "own" rounded corners and flat-screens. Designs already put to market in the 60s.

In my books 2012 goes down as the year when tech stopped being about tech and became dominated by anti-competitive lawsuits instead of innovation. The year where no new tech arrived, only new lawsuits.

And a sad year it was.

<comment><USER10> "tech" a hundred years ago was the beginnings of the aviation sector you see today. What you're seeing now is "tech" moving away from the _____ sector (the one HN belongs to) into to the _____ sector (the one with brain-machine interfaces as well as brain enhancing implants).

So I agree with you, 2012 may well be the year the technology sector of 2011 is not the technology sector of 2012.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A very important breakthrough is missing in the list : Human Genome sequencing cost dropped to $1000 with processing time of only a day. Just 12 years ago it cost $3 billion dollars and 15 years of work.

<comment><USER8> I thought we were still hovering above $1000 but getting close?

Either way another important milestone of exponential gain is the cost of solar!

<comment><USER12> Are you sure? 23andme.com apparently does it for $100.

<comment><USER13> 23andMe doesn't fully sequence your genes. They just look for specific patterns.

<comment><USER14> I think that's a misleading description. They do identify specific base pairs of your genotype (and you can download this data as a file), the difference is that they only identify a small subset of all base pairs, whereas sequencing identifies all of them.

More info: [http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/23andme-moves- into-...](http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/23andme-moves-into-the- world-of-sequencing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How could they forget this prediction of the smartphone by inventor & futurist Nikola Tesla?

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." - Nikola Tesla 1926

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there any citations for the initial predictions? Or is this just a list of cool technology related things in 2012 that _seem_ like someone might have predicted them? "The World's First Cybernetic Hate Crime Occurs at a McDonalds in France" seems awfully specific for a prediction.

<comment><USER17> Well no, nobody predicted it would be specifically about an ocular implant at a McDonalds in France, but the concept of cybernetic hate crimes have been generally predicted by various sci-fi writers for some time; I, Robot, The Matrix (in the backstory in the Animatrix at least) and Deus Ex spring to mind as several examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only one I would quibble with is the one that has nothing to do with technology. Sandy was the largest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, but it was still not as large as the Pacific's Typhoon Tip in 1979. If three decades of accelerating climate change explains Sandy, it doesn't explain Tip, or why its record has yet to be broken.

<comment><USER19> Yes it does - it's about trends, not isolated occurrences (so in that sense I agree with your quibble, just not with your rationale). The frequency and intensity of extreme weather incidents is on an upward (and exponential) track.

<comment><USER20> Honest question: Is there a good source for this information?

Anecdotally it _feels_ like weather is getting more extreme, I'd be very interested in seeing the numbers.

<comment><USER19> It's difficult to find all the data in one place, but this article has links to good sources:

[http://ccap.org/extreme-weather-trends-climate-science- and-p...](http://ccap.org/extreme-weather-trends-climate-science-and-public- opinion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd say that Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature[1] beats the crazy geoengineering businessman with its massive scale. This includes the draining of the Aral Sea, and was followed by attempts to refill it by diverting/reversing several rivers.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformation_of_Nature)

</comment><comment><USER22> Hysterical exploitation of the "first true superstorm" meme sticks out like a sore thumb. I stopped reading there, and will be reluctant to visit that site again.

</comment><comment><USER23> They missed out on the continuing merger of state mass-surveillance and corporate mass-surveillance. That's IMHO one of the biggest stories.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was really skeptical of this article, but turns out that this is actually a really interesting list. A lot of them are still up-in-the-air as far as end- results and I'd expect at least a couple of them to fall through in the end, but still a really neat collection.

</comment><comment><USER25> So I notice that Elon Musk was involved with two of those - the Tesla and the Dragon space docking. Congratulations to him.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Cybernetic Hate Crime

Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a thing. And if it were, the thing that happened at McDonald's would not qualify.

<comment><USER27> I agree with you. Once everything became clear, it seemed that the conflict was partly fuelled by the wearer of the "cybernetics" being belligerent.

The "hate crime" was simply the wearer being asked to leave, and responding haughtily. Consequently both sides behaved immaturely, but not in "hate".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The McDonalds affair was not a Cybernetic Hate Crime.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really hope the one point about communicating with patients in a vegetative state is wrong. Not because it's not a groundbreaking discovery, but the implications are horrifying to me. Imagine all those patients who are left to just lie there their entire lives, and those that like Terri Schiavo that were allowed to starve to death. If they were actual aware of what was going on, that is the most horrifying fate I could imagine.

<comment><USER30> I don't see how discovering this was true or false has any bearing on the reality of it?

Reminds me of that scientist that discovered that germs are cause of diseases and that doctors are spreading the germs with their bad hygiene. So doctors said "Well I know this theory isn't true, since I'm not responsible for all the manslaughter I'm committing according to this person. He is clearly insane.". And several decades later here we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How are they planning to do the FTL one?

<comment><USER32> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reading about our _positive_ technological advances makes me feel optimistic about our future. Go science!

</comment><comment><USER34> What about the Higgs Boson?</comment>


Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-police-raid-the-pirate-bay-site-offline-141209/ <comment><USER2> The organisation that reported Thepiratebay and therefore is the reason for this raid is called Rättighetsalliansen (The Alliance of Rights). The Alliance of Rights is the same organisation as The Anti Pirate Bureau but with a new name. This is what they say on their website (roughly translated):

"The police raided The Pirate Bay today inside an Internet company in the Stockholm region. Rättighetsalliansen is behind the report against The Pirate Bay.

\- Pirate Bay is an illegal commercial service that makes great sums of money by putting up other peoples movies and music on their site. The producers wont get payed for their work and the legal services growth gets prevented, says Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Rättighetsalliansen."

In other words they don't now what they are talking about. Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are (of course nothing is even uploaded, only seeded from user to user). I can recommend the documentary about The piratebay, TPB AFK where you will meet Henrik Pontén from the Anti Piracy Bureau among others.

Rättighetsalliansens website and article about this: [http://rattighetsalliansen.se/nyhet/118](http://rattighetsalliansen.se/nyhet/118)

EDIT: I think their website crashed.

<comment><USER3> It's a common mistake by techies to think that technical details make a difference in (Swedish) court. They don't. Technical details are rarely important in Swedish court, where the court is free to consider all evidence, even if it's obtained illegally or just is weird.

So called "technical evidence" is rarely "technical" for techies. It's often just HTTP logfile print-outs or a screen shot of a file sharing program. That's as technical as it gets. The judges don't know Excel from Word, and the prosecutor don't know HTTP from UDP. The defense have to work on the judges, not on the truth.

And in the end, they judges judge people based on emotion and political opinion anyway. After all, isn't a law but a formal moral opinion?

<comment><USER4> now explain how that is different from anywhere in the world...

<comment><USER5> It's not different, and I believe that was the point. There is a weird stereotype that I've encountered about Sweden that I wasn't aware of until the first time I lived outside of our country...whenever something like this comes along, there's a notion that some people think "Oh it's Sweden, they'll do the right thing," as if our laws or courts are somehow "more right" or "more just" than others. I think what the preceding comment was trying to point out is that that is not always true.

<comment><USER6> That's very true. In Europe, Sweden is in our minds like one of the two or three countries where everything seems to be "good". Economics are good, people are nice, unemployment seems low and somehow those countries act as "The goods and respectables guys from the north". That's a very common feeling in EU.

<comment><USER7> The same sentiment is held by many in the US. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are viewed as more modern and civilized societies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a statement from Peter Sunde:

[http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down- foreve...](http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726110)

</comment><comment><USER9> New URL: [https://thepiratebay.cr/](https://thepiratebay.cr/)

A .ac mirror should to be coming up. We'll see if this has the desired effect or is just another whack-a-mole effort.

<comment><USER2> Could anyone care to explain how this works?

<comment><USER10> It doesn't actually. That's a proxy, not a mirror; designed to make TPB available from countries where it's blocked. Try a search, it won't work.

[https://proxybay.info/](https://proxybay.info/)

However, there's a script where you could download the whole TPB, it's only 90 Mb. That's possible because now they're using only magnet links, so a torrent is pretty much just a URL.

[http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay- it...](http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-its- only-90-mb-120209/)

So if someone have a recent copy, it would be easy to setup a mirror.

Or people could just use one of the dozen torrent site still up and let the whack-a-mole game continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So....what happened to the "raid-proof" server array they were talking about in September? ([https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid- proo...](https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof- virtual-machines-140921/))

<comment><USER12> I'm imagining a Daemon (as in the Daniel Suarez book) like system that gets paid by web advertising companies in Bitcoin, and automatically spawns it's servers on cloud providers who accept payment in Bitcoin. One or more hot backups on a single VM would silently wait for the live system to go down, then respawn itself and switch over the DNS. Namecoin could be used in place of, or augmenting, traditional domain names.

The only really tricky bit is "raid-proofing" secrets (Bitcoin/Namecoin private keys, DNS credentials), but Amazon and presumably other cloud providers are starting to offer HSMs. Or perhaps some combination of Shamir's Secret Sharing and multisig wallets + voting pools.

<comment><USER13> You might be interested in Charles Stross's "Accelerando", where he posits a similar system of python scripts acting as decentralized companies, constantly shuffling ownership of themselves among themselves.

It's been too long since I've read it, so I forget what the actual point was.

<comment><USER14> Ironically enough, sub-second music IP rights swap between the shell corps, so as to dodge any lawsuits getting anything out of them.

Worked great too, unless you discount the whole "convert the earth into computronium" in later chapters implying it's origin from the same subsystems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly, I think the pirate bay getting busted would be a good thing, as it would probably lead to the creation of more distributed, robust filesharing platforms.

The actual bulk data distribution is already quite P2P; the only remaining centralized part is the part that distributes the magnet hashes.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure you can actually download the magnet links as an archive, which shouldn't be too big either.

<comment><USER17> You can download "an archive" that has all of the magnet links at the time of the creation of the archive. This is not helpful for finding new content. Most importantly downloading a 9 gig archive of magnet links is not a workable system for average users; Bittorrent is only as good as the number of peers in the swarm.

<comment><USER18> I actually made a magnet link archive a year and something back ( [http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/](http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/) ), mostly as an experiment

Only the magnets and names - 76 MB; all the magnets + descriptions + comments - 631 MB

It's not that workable for any particular usage (other then statistics I guess) and I never upgraded it since then. There were some attempts by other people to regularly archive TPB (and semi-mirror sites like torrentz.eu and bitsnoop were "mirroring it" by reposting its torrents until the very end) but I am not sure if somebody actually dumped it online regularly in an archive

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In an internet-ubiquitous world, the idea of restricting the flow of data -- any data -- is basically a magical fantasy of those who understand neither the technology nor its sociology. The Pirate Bay will be back in a day or two tops.

I wonder how much longer people will keep trying to put the information genie back in the bottle?

<comment><USER20> Ever heard about Demonoid?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Funnily enough, for the past year I've been using TPB pretty much for finding very specific versions of Linux distros

<comment><USER22> Do they come with very specific pieces of malware too? kidding aside, I hope you check the ISO checksums.

<comment><USER23> I would hope most linux users knows how to use checksum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's probably not the RAID level they planned to use to ensure maximum availability.

</comment><comment><USER25> I noticed weird behavior on multiple VPNs lately (those that should protect torrent users using OpenVPN) as the IPs given by VPN provider upon connecting were suddenly located in the US (Massachusetts) instead of Sweden, Finland etc. where you intended to connect. Always check the location of the IP address you get to be sure you aren't MitM-ed...

<comment><USER4> vpn for anonymity? are you making a joke that i didn't understood?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Will be interesting to see if this will influence the Swedish parliament reelection in march.

<comment><USER26> Is Pirate Bay & file sharing really that big an issue among the general public in Sweden?

<comment><USER27> No, not really. The somewhat associated Pirate Party used to be a big thing here, but then the party was hijacked by a new leader who mostly seemed to care about LGBT issues. Said leader just resigned last week, and the Swedish Pirate Party is now in a reboot phase.

<comment><USER28> Anna Troberg stepped down? I can't find documentation of this.

edit: found it.

[http://piratetimes.net/leading-swedish-pirates-step- down/](http://piratetimes.net/leading-swedish-pirates-step-down/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I dont know a lot about the organizational structure anymore, but having just watched "TPB: AFK" I assume that Peter Sunde isn't involved? I think Gottfrid and Fredrik are still in prison?

<comment><USER30> Correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anyone have any good technical info on the hardware/software architecture for TPB? When I watched "TPB: AFK" it looked lean, just a handful of 1u servers and only one of them public facing/entry point.

</comment><comment><USER31> eztv.it is down too (imho much more useful than tpb) interestingly enough seems they used cloudflare.

<comment><USER20> Many filesharing and streaming services are down in Spain, too. Seems it's an european scale raid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought file sharing was recognized as a religion in Sweden.

<comment><USER2> Yes it is, kopimism is a recognized religion. But it is a minority religion treated quite badly. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism)

<comment><USER32> They should file with the UN for religious persecution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I scouted some sites and found out that TPB will be backup soon and they also say that it had happened before. Ttuely I hope the best

<comment><USER34> Good to hear that, I hope this police issue will be resolved soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Had this been happening before? I've been searching the sites about it and I found out that TPB will be back up soon but they don't know exactly when it will happen.

<comment><USER33> Yes, they can't prove anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The last uploaded torrent, from what can I tell (from what Google indexed)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v346Sjm...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v346Sjm9naMJ:thepiratebay.se/torrent/11671306/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&strip=1)

State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION

magnet link:

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9d12bfa80f937b7fbed3601ebda9d725d483a2de&dn=State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

<comment><USER35> I'm sure TPB gets torrents added faster than Google caches.</comment></comment>


A quarter of Iceland's cabinet members held offshore companies - <AUTHOR> http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56fec0cda1bb8d3c3495adfc/ <comment><USER2> I've known several senior executives in Silicon Valley and they all had many offshore stocks. Once you got to know them, they freely admitted it (they were legal, and set up by the Big 3 or Big 5 accounting firms.) But they usually didn't talk about how offshore stocks were also used to "reward" competitors for killing the right products, or dropping prices against other competitors. And they were also used to finance other offshore companies providing fake services to the US-based companies - so that profit could be turned to loss and hidden offshore for individual executives or groups of executives. This has been standard practice for decades.

And people wonder why the .1% has so much of our society's money -- while others claim that it is just free market economy working fairly. I wish they would catch a clue and make these financial instruments illegal except in very rare and transparent cases.</comment>


Syncing and merging come to Bitbucket - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/02/04/syncing-and-merging-come-to-bitbucket/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a really nice feature! At work I maintain an open source project but also have a private fork containing customizations just for our centre. This should make it very very easy to keep my private repo in sync with the public version.

BitBucket has been pushing a lot of nice features lately!

<comment><USER3> I think on the whole, github and BitBucket are very refreshing. They both come out with great ideas, and it fosters a very, very healthy space in which to provide services to users (source code hosting, versioning, and management).

It is also a space that _every_ developer should become intimate with, and I think it's great that it's been brought to the forefront of software development like it has, especially for the visibility it has to new developers. When I started my bachelors in CS 5 years ago, I didn't have source control until my 2nd/3rd year, now it's something at the forefront of learning to program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my daily workflow, a feature branch is there on the server mostly for it's part of a already-sent pull request. So in this case, do a syncing does not make any sense.

For a feature branch from my local clone, I do love to sync with upstream/master as often as I can, but I can do it quickly and knowingly(rebase or merge) with command line.

So for me, thanks but no thanks.

But I do know a lot people use the remote feature branch as a tmp backup of the WIP feather branch, in this case, the fact that you can quickly sync with upstream/master does help, but what if you click "sync branch" and merge conflicts happen?

<comment><USER5> I'm a bit green to the workflow my self, but I agree with you, this doesn't seem to add anything.

Why is having the server doing the merge advantageous to doing the merge locally?

<comment> brown9-2 From the blog post: _without ever needing to go to the command line_. So I think their goal is to make things even easier for users that have trouble (or don't like) the command line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its nice to see Bitbucket moving away from simply copying the design and featureset of Github. The newer design and features like this are very welcome.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a graduate student, I prefer bitbucket to github for maintaining my codebase for course projects and homework assignments, for the simple reason that it provides free private repositories. For the sake of maintaining academic integrity, making my course projects and assignments public is not recommended till the course ends.

<comment><USER8> It may not be enough, but GitHub does provide free private repos for students -- <https://github.com/edu>

<comment><USER7> Oh cool. I just registered. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Bitbucket (because it allows for private projects, I use in the company), and this feature sounds very interesting.

It is great when you can just fork a thing, and keep working on it, and Bitbucket keeps it synced for you, without you needing to remember to pull every day.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure how this works. Does it rebase?

On an unrelated note, I think it's pretty funny you can sign in to Bitbucket using your Github account :) Reminds me of how I signed into Bitbucket for years using my Launchpad OpenID :D

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone guide me on how you'd normally sync feature branches?

If you have already pushed the feature branch, doesn't rebasing mess things up because the parent and hence the hash of the commits in that branch change?

My feature branches get outdated compared to the master and I'd like to sync them with master and make it merge-ready so I can create a pull request and someone can seamlessly merge it in.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I usually keep the feature branch on my machine and rebase master on to it every day. I would also like to know how to push it while continually rebasing it on top of master.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For what it's worth, I think that the service Bitbucket.org is offering is great and these guys are doing a really good job.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel my next project will be hosted on Bitbucket rather than github :-)

First they removed downloads and now they do not have this useful feature :-)

<comment><USER15> Downloads is a valid missing (or rather removed) feature, but as others have pointed out, this feature at core is not very different from rebase.

<comment><USER16> Neither is fork or pull request something that you can't do easily without Bitbucket and Github, but people still use them mainly because those two sites make it easier for them to fork a project and keep the fork up to date. I guess it's all about convenience, and time will tell if people will use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Glad that BitBucket is developing original features. It's a great alternative to GitHub especially since the pricing is so much saner.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bitbucket has the potential to become much better than GitHub - as long as they keep filling feature holes like these - since they're not tied to just one DCVS.

For the first time, I feel compelled to set some time aside and test the service throughout. GitHub stability/availability has been lacking lately, and a better bug tracker would be useful.

<comment><USER19> > since they're not tied to just one DCVS.

Just for the record, neither is GitHub. :) We've supported Subversion for almost three years now.

<comment><USER20> I think he means hg(mercurial). I don't think svn is considered a DCVS, though the fact that you guys support traditional CVS is great.

<comment><USER21> Does the hg-git extension (<http://hg-git.github.com/>) not suffice?

<comment><USER22> It's a definite help but no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It can't possibly be rebasing since the changesets on BitBucket are "published" in HG parlance and cannot be rewritten. I'm assuming it does simple merges.

</comment><comment> deepak-kumar Wow, tried it and I am already liking this feature. Always helps to know where my fork stands w.r.t. parent repo. Way to go Bitbucket, keep it coming!</comment>


Causal Inference Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/

<comment><USER2> Not from the book, but if you are checking the comments to find out what "causal inference" is and why you should care, here's a readable general overview that tries to explain: [http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if- correlation-doesnt-impl...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation- doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/)</comment>


Federation Is the Future for an Open Web - <AUTHOR> http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/federation_future.html <comment><USER2> What is the difference from a Federation vs a facebook cluster?

<comment><AUTHOR> Federation means there is no single entity in control of all the servers. For the Facebook cluster that would be Facebook the company aka Zuckerberg.</comment></comment>


Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity Seat for iPad device - <AUTHOR> http://www.fisher-price.com/en_US/brands/babygear/products/78030

<comment><AUTHOR> Insanity defined. There are plenty of studies that show that having children in front of screens stunts their development.</comment>


A new way to edit a stack of commits [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://files.lihdd.net/hgabsorb-note.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't understand the problem this is trying to solve. What is wrong with just adding a fourth commit? Why mess around with altering history?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I protect my side project IP at work? - <AUTHOR>

I like coding up various projects in my free time, and there's the potential for one of them to gain a little traction now that my employer wants to use it to promote their API. It was largely put together before I worked there, but it's being constantly improved and updated.<p>I've talked to them and they're cool that I'll continue to own the IP. However, I also want to get confirmation in writing to be doubly sure, but I'm not sure what such a document or contract would look like. Does anyone have an example or pointers? More general suggestions are welcome too! <comment><USER2> The knowledgable folk will probably benefit from knowing your region and if there is anything regarding IP in your employment contract.

Anecdotally, my employment contract has a clause that grants my employer shared copyright to all my work unless they officially disclaim interest, but because that clause exists there's also a pretty simple process: I present a 1-paragraph overview of the project and someone with signatory authority writes on the paper "[My employer] is not interested in this project." Then signs it.

I don't know how well this would stand up if it ever came down to a court case, and there's definite benefit in that there's only 8 of us here so pinning down such an authority is a matter of me putting the paper on the desk next to mine.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL. If it's related to what your employer is doing _and_ you involve it with one of their projects you're asking for trouble.

The best you can probably do is:

a) Keep a very detailed (hand written) log of all work related to your side project.

b) Don't use any company resources for your side project (laptop, accounts, anything).

c) Sign an agreement licensing the code to them for use in promoting their API.

</comment><comment><USER4> This should cover most of the basics for you: <http://blog.asmartbear.com/working-startup.html>

I think patio11 also has a blog post on that, but I'm too lazy to look it up now.

FWIW, I've done it twice and neither time did I write up a formal contract. I just emailed my supervisor describing what I was doing and asked if they had any objections. No problems either time.

Since it sounds like there is some intermingling of your side project and your day job, I would definitely get something signed. Probably nothing formal, just something like the asmartbear post describes.

</comment><comment><USER5> The IP agreement I was forced to sign by my previous employer claimed ownership of anything I did that "related to their business interests". Since they were one of the largest corporations in the US with myriad companies and divisions I didn't see any way to assert that any technological development did not "relate to their business interests".

This agreement is one of the main reasons that they are my "former" employer.

I'm curious how widespread such all encompassing IP agreements are in the industry and what people here think of them. (What I think of them cannot be expressed in polite conversation.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hi

i'm in a similar situation for the last 9 or 10 years. What I do is not develop anything (not a single line) with either the time or the resources of my current employer (a Greek university).

If you are involved in any kind of contract as your company's employee, don't include your IP as background IP. It is better to declare none.

Also you have to rule out all previous (if there are any) employers from any demands. You have to make clear (through a legal document) your conditions on the fair use of your IP as well as your obligations and benefits.

-kavi

</comment><comment><USER7> If there is any sort of paper trail already created (i.e. emails) make sure you save those as well.</comment>