A few thoughts about Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/48 <comment><USER2> > First of all, open source for me is not a way to contribute to the free > software movement, but to contribute to humanity. This means a lot of > things, for instance I don't care about what people do with my code, nor if > they'll release back their modifications. I simply want people to use my > code in one way or the other.

As other people (buster) have mentioned, they feel that releasing GPL code is contributing to humanity too. Here's the difference as I see it:

You want to maximize the number of people who use your code, because that makes you feel good about yourself and your contribution.

Someone who releases GPL wants to try to maximize the good outcomes that result from their releasing that piece of code.

For example: the FreeBSD hackers get to know that their code was incorporated into OS X and used by many millions of people. That's pretty cool for them. But the contribution to humanity of their code is limited by that -- the OS X kernel's closed source, so no-one can benefit from learning how that works, and in the meantime the FreeBSD project itself is dwindling. Meanwhile, e.g. Android is based on Linux, and is available to everyone to study. Linux is growing hugely, and is an amazing example of humanity working together to achieve a public good. I can't really say the same about FreeBSD.

So, I think the question is -- is your aim somewhat selfish, in wanting to maximize the consequences that can be directly traced to you, or is it driven by wanting to maximize the consequences to the rest of your society of your actions?

If the latter, I think there's an entirely reasonable argument that says that the GPL is a better way to do it. There's no question that, as you argue, the GPL has less immediate freedom for each individual user than the BSD licenses. But why should we measure freedom for each individual, if what we care about is the final level of freedom for everyone in society?

To put it another way, I think the BSD license can result in "tragedy of the commons" scenarios where maximizing _individual_ freedom has worse total consequences than would have resulted by applying regulation to maximize _societal_ freedom instead.

<comment><USER3> our company recently expunged all LGPL code from our product. The cost of that license outstripped the usefulness. We wrote or got around the need for any of it; it wasn't too hard. Generally we were after a fraction of the IP, and there were alternatives.

LGPL is fine for non-commercial folks. For business I need a license to do as I please with the code, with no futzing around.

<edit: LGPL>

<comment><USER4> LGPL lets you do as you please with the code. If you need to modify the code, which in my experience isn't all that often, you simply provide the patch back to the committers. They're not required to take it, but that doesn't affect you. You simply had to provide it.

And since you took from the community, doesn't it make sense to contribute back when you have something to contribute?

<comment><USER3> LGPL requires us to ship the libraries in particular ways. Our product runs on mac, windows, android, pad and phone. It was impossible to conform.

An now, we don't take from the community, so no we don't feel the need to give back in that way.

And in my experience, much of open source does have to be modified. Usually to extract the IP needed without the cruft sticking to it - all the assumptions made by the authors about how it was going to be used.

<comment><USER4> IANAL, but I believe you're incorrect about shipping the libraries in particular ways. My understanding of the LGPL is you don't have to ship the libraries with your application, you just need to provide the relevant copyright notices - usually in your Help/About.

I worked with the legal department at my company to get a list of approved open source licenses for components included in our applications. The GPL was immediately ruled out. Because of the GPL they spent several weeks scrutinizing the LGPL. They approved it.

Obviously your mileage has varied with your lawyers. And if we want to keep our jobs we can't cross the lawyers, even if we believe them to be wrong. It'd be nice if our community had a common understanding of the LGPL. There seems to be a lot of confusion.

<comment><USER5> Nope. The LGPL basically requires you to make sure that the end user can replace the LGPLed code with a modified but ABI-compatible version (for instance, because there's some bug in the code). Think back to the libpng security vulnerability a few years ago, for example - because that was under a more permissive license than the LGPL, users of proprietary software that included the insecure version couldn't update to a fixed version by themselves and were reliant on the companies that supplied them the software.

<comment><USER3> That may be correct, but its an engineering description of a legal document. We're great at deconstructing things - lawyers are great about enforcing the letter. SO I'm not sure anything that boils down to "The LGPL basically requires..." can be trusted - certainly that argument has no weight with our lawyers.

Consider for a moment anything shipped on an iPad or iPhone. How does the user replace pieces of your application, exactly? Its not possible, by design (thank you Apple).

<comment><USER6> Speaking as an open source lawyer, the question of whether it's legal to use LGPL 2.0/2.1 software in an app store app is a very open one, exactly for the reason given above. You will find people taking opinions on both sides.

It certainly happens that people use LGPL 2.1 code in IOS apps, but that doesn't mean it's okay.

The answer is more clear for other licenses, including LGPL v3.

I wouldn't trust what you see app stores doing as "okay". Among other things, I do due diligence on mergers/acquisitions, and without a doubt, app store apps are one of the places I see the most license problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting point of view and i can understand that he embraces the "total freedom" BSD license gives (aka "do whatever you want, i don't care"), but in contrast i can also understand the GPL and i would argue that GPL is more about "contributing to humanity" then BSD just because it forces someone to contribute back and thus enforce more "contributions" to humanity then a formerly BSD licensed closed down fork of something that once was freely available.

As a developer i enjoy BSD because i know i don't have to take care of license issues and just go ahead in contrast to "mhh, GPL, LGPL, version 2 or 3, MPL, Apache, what can and what can't i do?!".

All in all, from my point of view, GPL has a very good motive and approach when it comes to "contribute to humanity", even more so then BSD.

edit: Also about his thought "if something is useful people will contribute back in some way, because maintaining forks is not great.":

This just doesn't apply to software companies that have a closed down software approach. The in-house forks are just frequently rebased but never contributed back. In my life i have seen several in-house repositories including a lot of BSD licensed libraries that never were contributed back. It's sad but it's just the outcome of closed-down "Whatever we pay for in development work puts us ahead of competition, we don't want to help competition, we leave it closed source".

<comment><USER8> GPL is very restrictive when in it comes to integrating GPL libraries into closed-source applications. Here is short description on Wikipedia:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works)

I think it is ludicrous to require to open source an application that may be using library as is without any modifications.

<comment><USER9> > I think it is ludicrous to require to open source an application that may be > using library as is without any modifications.

If it's my library you do as I say or you don't use it. If you don't like the license, you are free to write your own library.

The GPL is about giving freedom to the users.

<comment><USER10> > The GPL is about giving freedom to the users.

> If it's my library you do as I say or you don't use it.

That sounds more like giving control to the developers than giving freedom to the users.

<comment><USER9> > giving control to the developers

The only freedom GPL denies the developer is the freedom to take freedoms away from their users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suspect there is some incoherent thinking about the BSD license. If you are a BSD advocate, consider this:

Someone takes a BSD project and bases a proprietary program on it. Is that person doing something wrong? Well, no, you say, because that's the whole point of the BSD license. It's also fine to keep rolling in new versions of the BSD project.

Now suppose someone takes a BSD project and relicenses it under the GPL, announces it on the internet, gets it into all the Linux distributions, and starts soliciting contributions of new GPL-only features while also rolling in new versions of the BSD project as they become available. Is that person doing something wrong?

I suspect that a calm, "No, that's also great. That's why we made it available under BSD." would not necessarily be the response.

<comment><USER12> This is how I think about BSD vs. GPL issue (of course, it's a contrived example and numbers are not accurate):

You have created X (say, redis). 5000 individuals and companies need it right away and want to use it momentarily.

If it's in public domain, all of them will use it, then make separate forks, and maintain them (individually, or in groups).

If it's a commercial product (say, $20.000), you might get 10-20 customers. They won't contribute back code, but will give you loads of money so you can hire more people. It's great business, but a couple of teenagers can't hack away with it because it's just too expensive.

If it's GPL, 500 companies (10%) will use it. Because if they use it, they have to re-licence their code as GPL also, which is unacceptable in many cases. They all contribute back their modifications though, which is great.

If it's BSD, everybody (5000 people) can and will use it (as it doesn't require you to contribute back your modifications, and you can have a private fork). So, we have 5000 companies using X. How many of them are contributing back? If it's more than 10%, then it's a win. If it's less, it's a loss (compared to GPL).

In other words, if you GPL you code, your pool of potential contributes has shrunken substantially.

\---

So, the question is this: which is bigger? the percentage of companies that can use a GPL-licenced software, or the percentage of companies that are using BSD-licenced software _and are contributing back their changes_. I think in a lot of cases, the second one is bigger.

<comment><USER13> _If it's in public domain, all of them will use it, then make separate forks, and maintain them (individually, or in groups)._

SQLite is almost exactly analogous to what you described (database, public domain).

AFAIK, there is no widely-used SQLite fork.

IOW, the situation you describe with every company "maintaining their own fork" literally _did not happen_ to the software that's the closest case study in real life to what you describe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There simply can't be a perfect licence, since the licence reflects the conditions the author/owner value, and well, people value different things, something licence profileration is a good indication of.

Beyond that, I think we can (imo) see that different types of licences are more popular in certain types of open source projects. GPL is very popular for 'full application'-style projects, more permissive licences like BSD/LGPL etc are in my experience more likely to be used in libraries, frameworks, component code in general.

Antirez wants to promote his personal choice, the BSD-licence, and that's perfectly fine, other programmers are vocal in their support for other licences aswell.

One thing struck me though (apart from the complaints concerning 'another' available licence which felt unecessary), which is that after his words of how he 'just wants to better the world with his code' his concern of 'what open source does not recieve enough of' boils down to money, not code contributions. And as such he suggests that companies should send part of their earnings the programmer's way, not an unreasonable request by any measure (although sadly perhaps unrealistic).

It's no surprise then however, that he does not favour GPL, in which the source code is paramount.

There's no right or wrong here of course, just different preferences, Antirez has little interest in source code contributions but feels that monetary contributions are lacking, the GPL on the other hand is all about 'the source code' and that it (and enhancements made to it) remains open.

Choice is good!

<comment><USER15> I agree 100% with you, but one reason why lately I look at GPL with suspicious is that it's long and complex enough that I'm not sure every contributor to GPL fully realizes the implications. It's not just "if you modify you need to release the modified version" as I believed. The SDR Touch affair clearly shows it. Also the problem when linking to closed source code.

This idea that it's ok to make money using the GPL in one way (just using the software as it is, as a service, like when you run a copy of MySQL) and not into another way (by using a GPL library in your closed source app, just releasing back what you changed in the GPL code) is very odd IMHO, probably not in the spirit of code sharing.

<comment><USER16> Well yeah, the GPL states that it needs to be trivially easy for end-users to replace the GPL chunk with their own code. Because in the past (Tivo) GPL code was used against people. Two separate packages is the simplest way to do it. And I feel the 'no bundling' thing is a little over the top. As long as rtl_tcp was a separate file that you could easily replace, it seems it fit the letter of the license.

I know I'm[1] not going to convince you, but the GPL exists for a reason as does the BSD. BSD puts the rights of the programmer first and foremost. This is useful at times, but it also lets bad apples ruin a code base. GPL puts protecting the _code_ first. (And to a lesser extent, the end-user.) In the end, it means that GPL code is basically immortal because no one person/group can control the code base.

[1] keenerd from rtl-sdr

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Stopped reading at the "GPL folk are anti-commercial" straw man attack. This is not "a few thoughts", this is just another attempt at starting a flame war.

If you want a constructive discussion, you should consider listening to other people's arguments.

</comment><comment><USER18> What people take for granted:

It is still legal to develop/install your own software on most devices.

You don't have to pay to some corporation for the privilege to be allowed to distribute your program to other users or even to start developing your program in most cases.

You may build whatever program you like without thinking whether it confirms to some corporation's rulebook/opaque acceptance process.

You can create a popular application without using API that is controlled by a corporation that will pull plug on you if your application becomes too popular/not aligned with its interests.

\-- What license better enables the above?

Enjoy the freedom to choose whatever license you like. Don't bash GPL in the process.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've given a lot of my time to open source projects for the same reasons without getting monetary compensation, however:

1\. I don't think that companies will ever give back to a project if there is no "ask". To do this GitHub, etc. could provide an easier way to take gifts.

2\. The odds of companies giving gifts would seem to be very low even if there was a big "give" button, because:

a. The person that would typically see the value in giving would have to provide a very good reason for the need for that gift to the administration of the company, whose interest is making money, not giving gifts to external entities. And it needs to look good on the books, too, so in my experience they would rather for the development time or just pay for a support license.

b. It isn't a gift if you are getting something for it. If it can be proven that you were funding something that was a product/service, you may need to pay VAT, etc. on it. The rules and laws surrounding this vary depending on country and province.

c. Could your gift be considered funding to a project you didn't intend to fund without documentation saying explicitly what the gift was to fund (and at that point, if you have that document, then it is no longer a gift- it is payment for a product or service). You don't want to give a gift for X project and then find out that it looks like you gave a gift to someone that also wrote a virus.

d. Instead of a gift, if you are taking payment for services to write software, then ownership comes into account. Is it work for hire or not? Who owns the copyright? You may need to have a contract and declare that you are an individual contractor and that the work is not work for hire. But again the rules may differ depending on location of the developer and of the business that wants to "give" to that developer.

<comment><USER20> I think crowdfunding could offer a solution to these problems.

I think there are some special requirements to make this work. First, the companies that want the work done need to commit to pay before it's done, so the developer knows how much they can expect to receive. Second, on the other hand, there needs to be an evaluation step, so the contributors don't have to pay if the work does not live up to their collective expectations. I don't think the Kickstarter-style model, where the developer receives all the money in advance unconditionally, can attract a lot of contributions from businesses.

And as you say, companies would need to know exactly what they're buying with this money. Fundamentally, they're buying _influence_ : influence over what project the developer works on, influence over the details of the work, and influence over the evaluation process.

All this is a shameless plug for my crowdfunding site: <https://bountyoss.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with most of your thoughts.

You say: "unfortunately it is not possible to pay bills with pull requests", that's one of the reasons I'm working on <http://issuehunter.co>, a project to get paid for OSS development. It's a crowdfunding platform based on GitHub issues, it should improve and accelerate open source software development process.

I'll shortly release a beta version and I'd really like to get some of that big percentage of developers that "do a lot of work in their free time for passion" as beta testers. Well, there's an alpha version at <http://issuehunter.herokuapp.com> where you can sign up but it's not fully functional at the moment.

You can follow <http://twitter.com/issuehunter> to get notified about project updates.

</comment><comment><USER22> I loved the text until he got to the GPL. Honestly, I really don't care what licence you're using in your project as long as the result is open source software. It is your work, so use any licence you want, I won't say if _in my opinion_ it is the right choice or not, and please don't judge me if I choose a different one.

We're all in the same ship, don't we?

EDIT: I can't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I appreciate the feedback of the downvotes, but in this case I find it confusing. If you don't agree, it would be nice if you post a reply.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm no license expert but isn't MIT the least restrictive license?

<comment><USER15> BSD two-clause and MIT should be substantially equivalent AFAIK.

<comment><USER24> Yes. I have always wanted to ask. So what is the difference between BSD and MIT?

<comment><USER25> BSD 2-clause = MIT (aka X11)

The BSD 3-clause and 4-clause variants are a little bit more restrictive, though none of them have this "viral" character of copyleft licences like the GPL.

I would advise MIT, because it does not have this "how many clause" confusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand where people are getting this meme that the GPL or FSF has anything to do with (not) charging for software. It's about protecting the people you distribute your software to, by affording them more equivalent rights you have as the author of the code or its derivative works.

Here it is from the horse's mouth:

> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html>

> Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. > Don't waste it!

There exist legitimate practical problems to grouse over, like certain business models (shrink wrap) made significantly tougher to pursue, or license compatibility (did you know that the main reason GPL has its incompatibilities has little to do with copyleft, but rather section 6, which mandates one is free to use the software for _any purpose with no added restrictions_...that's why GPL2 is incompatible with GPL3 and Apache2, as both have restrictions with regard to patents...and JSON, which states that the software must be used for "good, and not evil", or OpenSSL, which has the infamous BSD advertising clause), but this idea that the FSF or Free Software movement has anything to do with making software available for zero cost is a misconception that just needs to curl up and die. It's about the non-servile interaction between author and consumer. The author has the right to distribute and modify. So does the consumer.

I honestly don't understand where people are getting this idea that software for zero cost is part of the FSF/GPL ideal from other than the fact that, regrettably, the preferred word of the FSF includes "Free".

</comment><comment><USER27> The GPL is the best free software license to hamper indirect users' freedom to not license source code under such terms. GPL is also extremely ambiguous for many types of software, especially when it comes to dynamically typed languages. We just don't know what "linking" means under those environments.

Having that said, I too have been wondering about the same thing antirez talked about. I wondering how many OSS developers actually receive back monetary compensation for their _time_ put into writing their software. I'm not even talking about compensation in direct relation to the _value_ their software, which for all I know, if that were the case, Linus and Stallman should have been as rich as Steve Jobs.

There's definitely a mismatch between what people are _paid for_ and what people _most valuable for_ in our current industry. I wonder if there was another GPL version that's better suited for JS/Python/Ruby or whatever will actually start forcing the companies to hire more OSS developers.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have released under BSD and GPL2 but I understand one thing - unless and until there is a significant and tested base of case law, in every jurisdiction I care about, these licenses are just contracts between happy parties. Angry parties define case law.

Having said that I strongly suspect that the GPL preamble will be the most common piece of text in code in 2100

<comment><USER2> > unless and until there is a significant and tested base of case law, in > every jurisdiction I care about, these licenses are just contracts between > happy parties. Angry parties define case law.

There is a significant and tested base of GPL case law. Large corporations regularly find themselves with no option other than coming into compliance.

The beauty of the GPL as a license, I think, is that there's no way to contest its validity -- if you're distributing GPL-derived code yet you don't think the GPL works, then you're distributing someone else's code without any valid copyright license, and you have lost.

<comment><USER28> I did think that there was minimal precedent-setting cases. There is the "world first" of iptables in Munich, Germany, from 2004, but afaik most stuff is settled quickly - the GPL _looks_ water tight and the PR shitstorm is not worth the effort. Only companies like D-Link and Cisco have even come close - so there is precendence in US and Germany for embedded GPL violations.

Not in the UK to my limited knowledge though.

It might be untestable however - everyone wants it to be as it is, almost no- one benefits enough from breaking it, at least not blatently. Which I think is the thrust of your second paragraph.?

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lega...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Legal_status)

* [http://www.twobirds.com/English/News/Articles/Pages/2007/Rev...](http://www.twobirds.com/English/News/Articles/Pages/2007/Review_German_GNU_General_Public_License.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article reminded me of something I've always wondered about software licenses:

Suppose I write a book of "software licenses" with a short introduction, copyright page, etc. The rest of the book's content are the actual software licenses (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, the CC variants, etc.), one license per chapter.

At the end of the book, I include a final chapter with the source code for a small software program, without any license or copyright declaration. I then distribute the book on the Internet, for free.

What license is the source code at the end of the book under, if any, for the people the book is distributed to?

In particular, would any of the GPL licenses necessarily apply, due to their "virality"? And if not, why not?

Would _all_ licenses apply equally?

<comment><USER29> I would expect that there would be no license granted to a the source code in a separate chapter and therefore copyright law would apply.

The GPL "virality" only applies to code that has been published under the GPL so if you had written the code it wouldn't apply.

Now another form of infectiousness would apply to the code, that of copyright itself. Anyone who copied the code would be infringing copyright as would anyone who copied them (although they might have a claim against anyone that told them they could copy it). Almost all proprietary licenses are at least as infectious as the GPL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The problem with open source is it's poorly documented making it difficult for a new person to join the effort. Someone should make an open source project to document all other open source projects.

<comment><USER2> <http://openhatch.org/>

<comment><USER30> I think this is in the right direction. What would be cool is if this could be tied in with the open source repository managers like SourceForge so that soon as I start a SourceForge project, I get tied in with OpenHatch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _In my opinion instead what the open source does not get back in a fair amount is money_

I'm not really sure what the problem is. I don't know the numbers, but I expect there are thousands of full-time open-source developers. (I was one of them.) Meaning that anyone who has made a substantial contribution to an important project could probably find a decently-paying job to work full time on the project.

There have also been a number of very successful startups based on open-source efforts from the founders.

</comment><comment><USER28> Something hit me as I read this - that the profusion of frameworks in languages - where there is no simple and easy way to combine output of one code in one framework into inputs of another (it's why Django plugins do not chain to tornado or pyramid plugins - a problem Rails does not have)

It really needs to be something along the http === unix pipe solution that way we can mostly ensure open source code written by one can be reused by another.

</comment><comment><USER25> I should have waited [0] for this discussion to submit my licence chooser [1].

Also, I assume he meant BSD 2-clause, not the 3-clause variant.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118241> [1] <http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/licences/>

</comment><comment><USER20> _a lot of smart coders could provide an economical boost if they could be more free to write what they love and what a lot of people are probably already using to make money_

I'm trying to solve this problem with crowdfunding: <https://bountyoss.com/>

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the concept of redistribution is more interesting than which license. By what method could redistribution be achieved? Transparently accounted voluntary micropayments shared out though the reputation graph of a repo.

Call it, ahem, redis-tribution.

</comment><comment><USER33> I mostly agree with antirez on this. When I was first starting on the Fogbeam Labs[1] projects, I thought a lot about what license to use. The "stock" model for "commercial open source" seems to be to use the GPL, with the business model rooted in the idea of "people pay if they want to use the code without conforming to the GPL". But somehow that never seemed quite right to me. We're doing enterprise software, and - by and large - I doubt most of the firms who would ever use our products would ever want to redistribute them, and would never wind up having an GPL issues to begin with.

And, like antirez, I just want our stuff to be used, even if the business side of things never takes off at all. I finally decided to go with the Apache License v2. The risk, obviously, is that it is now possible for a competitor to fork our stuff and compete with us, even if their product is closed source. On the "pro" side, however, is the "business friendly" perception of the ALv2 and the absence of the stigma which is (fairly or unfairly) associated with the GPL.

As far as the risk of competitors goes... I figure we should, to paraphrase Steve Blank, "be so lucky as to be successful enough that somebody would _want_ to fork and compete using our stuff". And if somebody does a closed source fork, we'll be happy to compete with them anyway, since we believe that being closed / proprietary is a competitive disadvantage in 2013. Simply, we believe that the world is moving more and more towards a place where software is _expected_ to be open source, and where being open source will be part of the "cost of doing business". Obviously this hasn't yet bubbled up to the point where the SAS's, or SAP's of the world are being forced to go open source, but I think that day is coming. Or, at least, the day is coming when there will be significant OSS competition for SAS, SAP, etc. I'd mention Oracle, but Oracle is already a big part of the OSS world, after acquiring Sun. Think about that for a minute... for better or worse, freaking _Oracle_ is one of the biggest players in the "commercial OSS" space.

 _Many developers do a lot of work in their free time for passion, only a small percentage happens to be payed for their contribution to open source._

Of all the reason I wanted to start a company, and an "open source company" in particular, this is a huge one... I _want_ very much to one day be able to hire programmers, lots of programmers, and pay them to work on open source projects. It's kind of the old saw about "if you can't find the job you want, create it". I never found the company I'd ideally love to work for, so I want to create that company, a company that's hacker friendly, largely engineering driven, and a place where people will be excited to hack on the stuff they're hacking on.

"But", you might protest, "who wants to work on enterprise software"? Well, that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does. "Enterprise software" doesn't have to be boring. It's not all CRUD screens for updating customer records. We're talking about social software, machine learning, text analytics, search, knowledge management, semantic web, and related stuff here. If you would, for example, find hacking on Lucene or Mahout or Activiti or S4 or Kafka or Hadoop or something of that nature, then we're on the same page. Heck, or Redis as far as that goes. Redis certainly could be "enterprise software" in some contexts.

Edit: vis-a-vis some of the other discussions on the post, I just want to be clear about one thing: At Fogbeam our stance is that if/when we fork an existing OSS project, our modifications will always remain open and freely available to all, even if the license doesn't require it. Everything we are working with _right now_ is code we've written ourselves, and it's all ALv2 anyway, and it's all on Github for the taking. That is the way we expect to always do things, even if we did, for example a "Fogbeam Distribution of Hadoop" or something like that. We also develop with an open bug tracker, publicly available mailing lists, etc. When we talk about being "an open source company" we're not just talking about the license(s). We're not interested in a Google/Android model where we build stuff in the dark and then throw it over the wall in piece-meal fashion and then ignore the community.

[1]: <http://www.fogbeam.com>

</comment><comment><USER34> I bet that copyright and patent laws make life unfair for a programmer. If he is protected by a large patent portfolio, he can attempt to make a profit, otherwise he must beware.

</comment><comment><USER35> Counterpoint:

<http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html></comment>


Ticketmaster Investigates Potential Data Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.rte.ie/news/2018/0627/973682-ticket-master-data/ <comment><USER2> £600 of fraudulent transactions reversed in the last few hours here, card blocked and new one being sent out.

Cirque du Soleil better be bloody worth it!</comment>


Fun at the Unix Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1483 <comment><USER2> > _Well, the rig utility can help, it creates a random identity. For some > reason rig will never generate an identity that lives in Utah._

Heh, I was curious why that is. Was the author from UT? Afraid of breaking some laws? After looking at the source, the author has a list of 60 or so cities and they're spread across 25 states: SC, AZ, TX, OH, KS, IA, WI, MI, NJ, NY, PA, IN, VA, NC, RI, TN, WA, MS, CA, IL, CO, FL, GA, MN, NE. So UT was not the only one omitted.

Oh well, at least my curiosity was satisfied.

<comment><USER3> Is there something similar which also creates email adresses and stores the generated profiles in a database in order to retrieve them again later? May be even have the ability to store associated passwords?

<comment><USER4> Fakenamegenerator[1] will generate disposable email addresses based on the identity it cooked up. No https without paying, though...

[1]: [http://www.fakenamegenerator.com](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Instead of:

        $ fortune > my_fortune.txt
        $ say -f my_fortune.txt

One could use the underrated (bashism) process substitution:

        $ say -f <(fortune)

Which works wonders for e.g diff'ing live:

        $ diff <(ssh elvis ls -1 foo) <(ls -1 bar)

<comment><USER6> Why would you even bother with that when `say` can take a string or read from stdin?

Just use

        $ say $(fortune)

or

        $ fortune | say -f-

For bonus coolness, add "-i" (it prints the lines and highlights the current word during reading).

<comment><USER7> Because it's fun spawning a new process and watching the otherwise idle cores of your box reach 0.1% usage for a millisecond.

<comment><USER8> Don't all three of those commands spawn new processes?

<comment><USER7> Not _shell_ processes, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Me having fun with true color and Unicode 9.0 characters:

[https://github.com/daleroberts/tv](https://github.com/daleroberts/tv)

</comment><comment><USER10> For those of a certain age, piping figlet into your local line printer was a fun, if noisy, way to make giant banners.

<comment><USER11> It was "banner" for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For fancy text Toilet is great too. It's like Figlet but supports colours, filters, and comes with more fonts.

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbsmC.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbsmC.png)

<comment><USER13> Where does the pink term border come from?

<comment><USER12> A tmux or screen theme possibly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug for a CLI *say derivitive that a coworker and I made: RabbitSay. [http://www.rabbitsay.wtf](http://www.rabbitsay.wtf)

      $ pip install rabbitsay
      $ rabbitsay "shameless plug"
      ┌───────────┐
      | shameless |
      |   plug    |
      └───────────┘
      (\__/) ||
      (•ㅅ•) ||
      /   づ

<comment><USER15> It is actually really easy to create custom cow templates for cowsay: [https://github.com/schacon/cowsay/blob/master/cows/bunny.cow](https://github.com/schacon/cowsay/blob/master/cows/bunny.cow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> sl [0] is always my favorite.

[0][https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl)

<comment><USER17> Is there a way to lolcat sl?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > This is aimed at grade 6 students

I read through the whole thing with joy, and I am 20

<comment><USER19> Same, but I'm 36!

<comment><USER20> I can confirm that enjoyment can be found up to age 46.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Unix terminal can be endless fun with piping and process substitution. One of the reasons people like GUI is because recognition memory is usually better than recall memory.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't remember where did I get this from but it is a cool thing to add to your .bashrc

      #!/bin/bash
      #teach you some new commands every time you open a new terminal
      echo 'Did you know that:'
      echo $( whatis $(ls /bin | shuf | head -1))
      echo $( whatis $(ls /sbin | shuf | head -1))
      echo $( whatis $(ls /usr/bin | shuf | head -1))

edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone have a place/site for browsing through new/popular utilities? I've been on Ubuntu for the last year and I love it, but reading this I just realised I don't have anywhere to browse or find things like this.

<comment><USER24> You can view a list of new Ubuntu packages from its website [0]. You might also want to check out the packages in the games [1], misc [2] and text [3] sections, which are full of fun utilities. You might also want to view the man pages from the games section [4].

[0] [http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/newpkg?mode=byage](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/newpkg?mode=byage)

[1] [http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/games/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/games/)

[2] [http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/misc/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/misc/)

[3] [http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/text/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/text/)

[4] [https://linux.die.net/man/6/](https://linux.die.net/man/6/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You kids today and your fancy command lines. When I was in sixth grade, state of the art joking around with technology meant multiplying two numbers on a calculator with red LEDs and turning it upside down to (sort of) spell SHELL OIL

</comment><comment><USER26> On Ubuntu, say isn't available by default, but I think `espeak` is, and it works mostly the same. At least, it's always been there on my Ubuntu systems, but I may have installed it manually and then forgot about it :)

</comment><comment><USER27> For rot13, I've found it particularly helpful to have an alias set up to translate the contents of the clipboard. I basically always have a terminal on screen, so to read rot13 text I just have to copy and run a single command. On OS X:

        alias rot13='tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M'
        alias pbr13='pbpaste | rot13; echo'

(echo adds a newline to play well with bash; on linux I use xsel instead of pbpaste.)

</comment><comment><USER28> Surprised nobody commented on bb yet. This thing is really impressive - and I thought that mplayer -vo caca is jaw-dropping!

<comment><USER29> and then realising the last time the BB project page was updated was 1997.. 20 years ago!

([http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/](http://aa- project.sourceforge.net/bb/))

<comment><USER30> bb is not a project, it is a demo[1] from the demoscene. It ranked 10th at abduction 1997[2].

The demoscene is an unending source of awesome and amazing. The 4k and 64k categories will blow your mind, if you ever wondered "can a FPS game could be done in under 100kB?", the answer has been released in 2004 and its name is .kkrieger[3]

[1]: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17468](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17468)

[2]: [http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=75&when=1997](http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=75&when=1997)

[3]: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is great, I've recently asked a related question about CLI commands that would be fit for kids: [http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/185988/linux- command...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/185988/linux-commands-for- kids)

</comment><comment><USER32> A couple of days ago I created "jazzup" a fun cli utility that adds a soundtrack and movie quotes to your long running boring commands. Check it out on npm : [https://www.npmjs.com/package/jazzup](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jazzup)

<comment><USER33> Speaking of sound and CLI, I created this musical command-line alarm clock recently (in Python):

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical- al...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-alarm-clock- in.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> aafire(1) is fun too, especially in colour with fixed term font.

Likewise aaxine(1) which renders videos in ASCII art.

<comment><USER35> With friends using VLC on their linux box and unaware of the beauty of libaa/libcaca, I'd type:

        vlc --vout caca videofilename.ext

and then look at them being scared/curious/amazed in that order!

<comment><USER36> Hey, cool. Here's how to do that with `mpv` on macOS:

        $ brew install mpv --with-libcaca
        $ mpv --vo=caca --really-quiet videofilename.ext

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> That's nice! I'll try to show them to my young brother (13). He's never used the Terminal before and he might find some fun in this. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER38> Surprised there is no fun with urandom. I clearly remember my first fun with cat'ing /dev/urandom > /dev/pcm0 back in 1999 :)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's a shame the author polarizes having fun and learning. I've always thought of them as the same.

<comment><USER40> The same? That's pretty odd. You've never had fun without learning something at the same time, nor learned something without having fun.

For me only one of those things is true: I think I always have fun learning, but I certainly have had fun without learning anything, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Had no clue bc accepted new definitions.. RTFM strikes back.

</comment><comment><USER42> He left out nyancat.</comment>


The Uninterrupter: GPS that sings along with your car stereo - <AUTHOR> http://evolver.fm/2010/10/20/gps-that-sings-along-with-your-car-stereo/

<comment><USER2> The sound samples were horrible. I couldn't understand the "singing" voice at all. I think this would be more distracting due to the uncanny valley ("Was that directions or road noise or the actual song?").

<comment><AUTHOR> As the author, I certainly agree that this isn't useful yet in anything like its current form.

Intelligibility was one of my biggest concerns while making the hack: singing can be harder to understand than speech. On the other hand, the vocabulary is limited. Phrases like "turn left" and "turn right" are easily distinguishable, and other unobtrusive audio cues could make it clear that the words came from the GPS. Over the course of the hack day, intelligibility improved dramatically as I tweaked parameters.

Mainly, this is an experiment, and there are lots of ways to improve on the first day's results to make it more practical. Instead of following the melody exactly, the pitches could be chosen from a limited range to be consonant with the song. That would split some of the difference between traditional GPS speech and these results. Also, Yamaha has apparently withheld their higher- quality Vocaloid voices from the free Canoris API, so there's potential for improvement there as well. (The documentation warns that the initial release of the free voices works better in Spanish.)

Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

<comment><USER3> >> Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

I really like that idea. Of course, the GPS tends to be a bit of a nag, so it might be hard for it to find enough pauses.

I don't have my GPS integrated with the car, so I can just let the GPS audio compete with the car audio, and adjust GPS volume to mess with the intrusiveness factor. After listening to the original sample... wow that would annoy me a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is from Boston Music Hack Day. Text and audio samples from the 2-minute presentation are here: <http://blog.ashearer.com/music-hack-day-the- uninterrupter>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is truly great, second only to a silent GPS navigator.

<comment><USER5> I really like the new Jaguar XJ (not that I've driven it, but I've seen pictures) where the dials in front of you are a screen, and when you approach a turn one of the low-priority dials (fuel and temperature, I guess) becomes a little round GPS screen to tell you which way to go.

I guess that will be common in a few years.</comment></comment>


Starz content to be pulled from Netflix in February - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/01/us-netflix-starz-idUSTRE78063S20110901?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=71

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a shame, I will miss all that great content. Hopefully this is just a ploy for a better deal and eventually an agreement will be reached...</comment>


Google unveils Hangouts: a unified messaging system for Android, iOS, and Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4332556/google-hangouts-unified-messaging-google-io-2013

<comment><AUTHOR> I find the term "unified" in this instance misleading - they took the chat feature out of their G+ Android and iOS app and called it 'unified.' It's nothing like iMessage, and it will still require anyone who wants to use it to install a separate app, and likely to get a G+ account.

</comment><comment><USER2> Article says they are replacing Google Talk IM, and later, Google Voice with Hangouts.

This is a really bad move, yet again forcing Google+ down everyone's throats, when they've clearly said that they don't want to participate in it.</comment>


Sleeping in on the weekends might prevent an early death - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/2018/05/23/sleep-weekends-early-death/#eTTpmmTIfsqp <comment><USER2> Better title : "Catching up on your week sleep deprivation in the weekend : it might just help you avoid dying prematurely"

Don't mess up your sleep schedule on weekends if you already sleep 7/8h in the week. The study was done on people sleeping less than 5 hours. Title is a bit misleading in that sense.

<comment><USER3> Whilst I think the conventional wisdom that getting enough sleep consistently throughout the week is the best way to go makes sense, I've known for years that catching up on the weekends for lost sleep during the week makes me feel a whole lot better.

For me it all started when I moved from a job where I could roll in whenever I wanted, and thus got a consistent 8 or so hours of sleep every night, to a situation where I had to be in at 8.30 - 9AM consistently - which, btw, is a real pain in the ass if you're a night owl.

Sadly I have largely lost my night owl capabilities due to a few years of having to be at work at a set time, but I still "catch up" at the weekends, and it's definitely better than _not_ catching up by a _very_ wide margin, and it keeps me a functional non-homicidal human being.

<comment><USER4> What would you describe as "night owl capabilities" that you have lost, as opposed to merely adjusting your sleep schedule? Is there a downside to up early / bed early?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think modern society is in a sleep deprivation epidemic that needs to be addressed, and just weekends isn't going to cut it.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I work 8 hours every weekday with an hour train ride- not much time to sleep after eating and leisure are accounted for.

<comment><USER7> Something has to go if you don't have time to sleep. That is the most important thing you do, you can't function or stay sane without sleep. I'm not kidding. Priority should be something like 1. Sleep, 2. Drink and eat, 3. Work, 4. Leisure.

If you have to, use the train ride to sleep. That is two hours per day of sleep if you can fall asleep fast.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget exercise, which is great for your sleep hygiene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting tired of these articles. Maybe I'm cranky today from lack of sleep (except I had 9 hours last night).

Here's an article that says that over sleeping shortens lifespans:

[https://www.allure.com/story/oversleeping-shortens- lifespan](https://www.allure.com/story/oversleeping-shortens-lifespan)

Or human longevity is related to regular sleeping cycles:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4067693/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4067693/)

Or why you should stop sleeping in on the weekends:

[http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/sleeping- weeke...](http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/sleeping-weekends-may- give-you-social-jet-lag/)

Did you know that more than 8 hours of sleep is bad for you?

[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/7333.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/7333.php)

</comment><comment><USER10> Waking up on a Sunday morning, realise you don't have to get up, roll over and go back to sleep. One of lifes pleasures.

<comment><USER11> I'm looking forward to the day my kids don't wake me up at 7, every day. (They are 5 and 2)

<comment><USER12> I almost don't have the heart to tell you but... by the time they get old enough to start sleeping in, you'll be too old to. After about 40, you'll wake up on Saturday thinking, "oh my gosh, it must be nearly noon!" and realize it's only 8:30 and you're wide awake.

<comment><USER13> "After about 40, you'll wake up on Saturday thinking, "oh my gosh, it must be nearly noon!" and realize it's only 8:30 and you're wide awake."

Good news: if you maintain your exercise regimen - especially your resistance/weight training - you can maintain the ability to sleep 8 or 9 or 10 hours in a night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now, how to explain this to my 3 year old...

Man, I wish sleeping in was still an option.

<comment><USER12> So having children leads to an early death? Sounds about right...

<comment> vhost- Glad I snipped that in the bud

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sleeping in on the weekends might also _cause_ an early death if you're married to my wife who wants to go on a shopping spree on Saturdays...

</comment><comment><USER16> From the article: "There were limitations to the study, such as the participants only being asked about their sleeping habits only once, making it impossible to detect changes in their sleep habits over time."

Asking them one time about their behavior over many years? I wouldn't place much credence in the study's reported results then.

</comment><comment><USER17> less than 5 hours a day? sleeping more than 5 hours a day does not count as "sleeping in".

also

> For those who only manage to get less than five hours of shut eye throughout > the week, but then have a longer snooze on the weekends, there was no > heightened mortality risk.

this is just clickbait

</comment><comment><USER18> And they define it as a sleeping for more than 5 hours:

"people under the age of 65 who get less than five hours sleep on the weekend had an increased risk of death"

<comment><USER19> The safest part of the day for most people is likely the time they spend asleep in bed. If the baseline is 16hrs of consciousness, an extra 2hrs of it every day presents a ~12% increase in opportunities to off yourself accidentally. That's exacerbated by the side effects of loss of sleep of course, but there's a fundamental there that you're not likely to erase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsr.12712](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsr.12712)

Summary of the paper this mashable post is based around

</comment><comment><USER21> I avoid stuff like this. A few months ago, I read a similar article stating that trying to catch up on sleep during the weekend doesn't work. If you wonder why people are so skeptical of science, it's stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Highly recommend this [1] podcast to understand what sleep actually does and how sleep deprived our modern society is.

[1] [https://youtu.be/pwaWilO_Pig](https://youtu.be/pwaWilO_Pig)

</comment><comment><USER23> Sleeping in on the weekend can also be a symptom of being rich, which might also prevent early death.</comment>


China's Pearl River Delta overtakes Tokyo as world's largest megacity - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-river-delta-overtake-tokyo-world-largest-megacity-urban-area# <comment><USER2> They managed to write an article comparing the populations of the Pearl River Delta and Tokyo without actually giving the population of either. Nice work.

<comment><USER3> They've also picked a photo of downtown Guangzhou on a smoggy day (because all Chinese cities are polluted, don't you know...)

In actual fact it gets about 10 times fewer smoggy days than Beijing. Still bad, but I have found the weather to really be quite nice.

The local equivalent of Google Maps is done in an isometric SimCity-style cartoon format which looks really cool.

[http://gz.o.cn/](http://gz.o.cn/)

Scroll down and to the left a bit to see the area depicted in the photo - it's a new(ish), central park positioned over a shopping mall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we're going to compare apples to apples, the Yangtze River Delta (including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and other cities, all of which are very close to each other), is substantially bigger.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the article really needs to specify what its definition of "megacity" is. The YRD is a patchwork of many different cities, towns, and villages, some parts of which are substantially less urban that others. If you take the train from Shanghai to Hangzhou, you'll pass by some farmland on the way. I'm sure the Pearl River Delta is no different.

<comment><USER6> The distances between any 2 of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou on a map looks far greater than Beijing to Tianjin, or Guangzhou to Shenzhen, so perhaps Beijing-Tianjin and Pearl River Delta would qualify as urban conurbations in way that the Yangtze River Delta doesn't.

<comment><USER7> A fair amount of people commute daily from Tianjin to Beijing, so I think it is a fair comparison.

The commute (train) takes about 1 hour (per direction, so 2 hours per day), and is good for people with offices/homes near the terminating station, but not so good for people that need an additional 1-2 subway rides to their office.

One hour commute times are pretty typical for largish modern Chinese cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article doesn't actually mention the population of the Pearl River Delta, which I find a bit odd... anyway, from Wikipedia:

Population • Metro 63,724,157~120,000,000

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta)

For comparison Tokyo's metro population is 35,682,460. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo)

<comment><USER9> That did seem like a strange omission, agreed. Neither is quite what we would traditionally have called a 'city', though - Tokyo is an entire prefecture (aka state, or province, depending on how your country divides its regions), the PRD is a Gibsonesque Sprawl of huge cities and smaller ones. So while I agree with the general premise that these are the largest urbanized areas in human history, we will need to revise our terminology to call them cities (or they'll need to implement a single local government, tax structure, address and street naming, etc. to fit the exiting definition).

<comment><USER10> It sounds like you refer to the definition as it is in the USA, which is not exactly the same as it is in the rest of the English speaking world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The total area of the Pearl River Delta is about 40,000 km^2... The total area of the Greater Tokyo Area is about 4,000 km^2... Seems like a pretty arbitrary comparison if you ask me.

<comment><USER12> Of course larger metros will be...well...larger. I don't think the physical area is meaningful. How about integrated infrastructure, commerce, social groups, etc?

<comment><USER11> Of course it's meaningful. Because, due to its size, the Pearl River Delta contains what are essentially 11 different cities - each with its own city center. Where as the Greater Tokyo Area includes 6 - all substantially smaller than, and largely centered around, Tokyo.

Speaking about your other attributes... I think the most telling thing about the Pearl River Delta is that 2 of those 11 cities were governed by the UK until 1997 - and you still have to pass through customs and immigration to cross into and out of them...

<comment><USER12> "each with its own city center" vs "largely centered around Tokyo" is the answer then - Tokyo is cohesive, PRD is not.

The customs thing is interesting. Citation?

<comment><USER13> I don't know about 'citation', but when I crossed from Hong Kong to Shenzhen last month I had to exit Hong Kong's immigration and enter China's and vice- versa on the way back.

It's substantially easier to visit Hong Kong than China (visa at the airport vs. visa in your home country before you travel), unless you have an APEC card of course

<comment><USER14> You can also buy (180 rmb for most countries) a 5 day visa for Shenzhen at the Luohu border too but the visa is not valid for Guangzhou or Dongguan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article sort of misses the real issue- the demographic. The PRD is very young, well educated and highly ambitious. Tokyo has the education, but it otherwise increasingly stagnant.

New difficulties here in Shenzhen buying the required markers of Chinese status (cars and houses) mean young Chinese are increasingly interested in startups and entrepreneurship as an alternative signaling method.

<comment><USER16> Why is this getting downvoted? Tokyo's population is projected to peak in 2020 and then go into rapid decline (joining the rest of country, which is already shrinking fast). The PRD is set to keep growing for at least several decades, although eventually China will hit the same crunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The region is not as tightly integrated as Tokyo though. There's a good chunk of people who commute daily from Shenzhen to Hong Kong through the electronic customs but for most people, going in and out of the mainland is not that simple. The culture on both sides of the border is also very different. It's only anecdote but a surprisingly high percentage of my friends in Hong Kong have never set foot in Shenzhen (let alone Guangzhou) and vice versa (I live in Shenzhen). I've even had friends tell me they were scared of going to Shenzhen because they don't consider it "civilised" (which is laughable of course).

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a pretty debatable claim, since it depends almost entirely on how you define what "a" "city" is. By UN stats, the PRD is now the world's largest "urban area", but Tokyo still retains the top spot as world's largest "metropolitan area", and by a long shot (37m vs #2 Seoul at 25m).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was in Hong Kong last week and one of the things that amazed me is that the "city centre" (Kowloon and Hong Kong Island) is fairly small and has lots of green spaces. Hong Kong Island has a density of 16,000/km2 but the actual urban area is around 20% of the island [0]. Housing really is densely packed (I haven't ever seen people queuing for an elevator to get into their apartment building before), but I think I'd much prefer that to living in an urban sprawl where I have to drive 30 minutes to see something green.

[0] [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hong+Kong+Island,+Hong+Kon...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hong+Kong+Island,+firstname.lastname@example.com,114.1888396,14152m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x3404002b7e463e87:0xe4c58f8e0fb01840)

</comment><comment><USER18> I am from Hong Kong and I had relatives in Foshan, and, on a good day, it was a 4 hour "commute" to visit them, through two sets of customs and 2 to 3 changes of transportation so I'm not sure how they can be counted to be in the same city.

<comment><USER19> I don't think they are including Hong Kong - at least it's not labelled on the map.

<comment><USER18> Ok. I saw Hong Kong listed in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And the inevitable march towards the future we learned about in 90s cyberpunk gets a little closer. Needing to cross through customs to get between different parts of what's essentially a contiguous urban area makes this _just_ a little more salient.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder of the US northeast counts as a single megacity.

<comment><USER22> It is a megalopolis! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis)

"A megalopolis (sometimes improperly called a megapolis) or megaregion is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term was used by Patrick Geddes in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution,[1] by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and social decline."

vs megacity: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity)

"A megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of ten million people.[1] A megacity can be a single metropolitan area or two or more metropolitan areas that converge. The terms conurbation, metropolis and metroplex are also applied to the latter."

NYC alone is a megacity. The US northeast is a megalopolis.

<comment><USER23> An easy way to tell, I think: a megacity very likely has a single encompassing public transit authority, because the transit needs of the individual underlying municipalities involve a lot of "I live in this city, work in that city, and need to commute every day" and that can't be easily handled if it's a bunch of separate systems.

The Vancouver Metropolitan Area in British Columbia, for example, is six cities, with one transit system. There's also the Greater Vancouver Regional District, which is a megalopolis that consumes a few more adjacent cities, but those _aren 't_ linked by transit.

<comment><USER24> This doesn't always work, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), even if you take the most narrow interpretation, is made up of a bunch of different transit systems. Walking along on Google Streetview, there is no way you could tell when on Yonge Street you have "left Toronto", and need to pay extra fare on TTC, or take YRT/Viva/Blue etc.

But it's a neat idea to think about transit and accessibility. I'd love to know at which point in the world you can reach the most people within an hour of transit for example, or two hours... This is the advantage in the Pearl River Delta (and probably Tokyo) - there is tons of high-speed rail, subways etc, so you can probably reach about 40 million within 1.5 hr (an hour high speed rail and half an hour on local transit). Whereas it takes me an hour and a half just getting to the airport in Toronto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ask Chinese people if they would live in Tokyo.

<comment><USER26> not sure what the point is, but there are Chinese people living in Tokyo. There are about 300 000 Chinese people in Japan, I happen to know a few of them personally.</comment></comment>


My Poem to Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://tonigemayel.com/index.php/posts/my-poem-to-twitter

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but this is a bad poem. The (lack of) rhythm makes it really hard to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> This gave me a good chuckle. Im definitely not an expert poet, I just attempted to rhythm the last words of every sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the last few months I have been trying to get an inactive username from Twitter with no luck.

Today I decided to try something a little bit more creative, so I wrote twitter a poem hoping to get their attention</comment>


Water seems to flow freely on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/water-seems-to-flow-freely-on-mars-1.14343? <comment><USER2> Is anyone else tired of hearing about the dangers of interplanetary contamination, particularly from the Earth to Mars? I want to see the whole place terraformed and I can't imagine that we'd be so successful in our lifetimes that we'd wipe out whatever scientifically interesting traces of extant Martian flora there are. Whether or not there was life on Mars is a fascinating question, but I think the more important one is when will we expand life on Mars?

<comment><USER3> We basically have one shot, per body in the solar system, to find an example of life with an independent abiogenesis point. Right now biology only gets to work with a _single_ example; the impact that finding another would have on the field really cannot be understated _^W overstated_.

Now, you may not be particularly interested in biology, preferring space travel, but you should be. Any realistic attempt to terraform Mars will require a _lot_ of skill with genetic engineering. Furthermore, the discovery of life that can only be properly studied on Mars would provide a major boost to any colonization effort. The more 'kinds of science we use to justify the initial expenditure, the better.

<comment><USER4> That's just begging the question. The whole point here is that we shouldn't need "science" to somehow "justify" the colonization of Mars. Saying that it's a good thing because it "justifies" expenditure, is like saying that it was good for Hitler to continue WW2 because that's what incentivised the US to invade Europe: pragmatically it's correct, but pragmatism is really not what's debated here.

Personally I would like to see the priorities of "colonization vs science" reversed.

<comment><USER3> The expenditure does not need to be justified to people like you or me; it is obvious to us that we should colonize Mars even if it is currently a dead sterile rock. Sadly however I have not yet become emperor (work in progress), and funding for space exploration often requires short-term tangible justifications. This becomes more true the more expensive it gets.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it is important that any life that may be on Mars is discovered so that we can use those results to push for more funding. Anything that could accelerate the process should be investigated.

If that is unsatisfactory for you, I'll point out again that it isn't just a matter of politics and funding. The discovery and study of non-Earth life would provide countless opportunities for the advance of biology. An advanced understanding of biology is essential to the core mission of colonizing and terraforming Mars, even if I _am_ made emperor.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but what you are saying is "assuming the status-quo, let's see if we can find something good about it". Whereas I'm saying: you might be right, but the status quo is still wrong, and we shouldn't be happy about it being wrong.

Concerning your last paragraph - while it may be true, I'm pretty sure that gaining terraforming-related knowledge plays a very minor role in NASA's research decisions, which is also something we shouldn't be happy about.

<comment><USER3> Anything that we learn of biology will help with the eventual terraforming. That is not the sort of thing that necessarily needs to be researched directly right now, researching things in general expands our knowledge base, giving something for terraforming research to stand and build on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the key part of this research is that this adds significantly to the evidence that there's liquid water deep in the crust of Mars. We know that there is water in the form of ice in lots of places on Mars but the idea of subsurface liquid water is exciting because there might be life in there! If it's gushing up to the surface periodically, we might even be able to sample it and see if there's signs of life! There's been previous evidence of these streaks before - but researchers had generally thought that was due to ice melting during the planet's warm season. Now they've found "streaks near the equator, including in the gargantuan Valles Marineris canyon". Any subsurface ice here would likely have sublimated. So it's looking pretty likely that this is subsurface liquid water that is leaking out from time to time. An alternative explanation - dust avalanches - was offered when the same scientists unveiled their initial results back in 2011. With the observation of so many streaks at the equator now the simplest explanation appears to be groundwater welling up to the surface. Similar streaks on Antarctica are known to be caused by water.

</comment><comment><USER6> I know this is an unpopular opinion here but:

NASA needs to stop milking the "water on mars" thing. Every few months it seems their PR department lazily says to themselves "Hey! let's do another water on mars story!" (I know, NASA doesn't do PR and these are just completely objective releases of scientific papers... believe what you will.)

I hope within my lifetime we have some disruption in this space and NASA stops constantly taking blatant advantage of its near monopoly on space exploration.

<comment><USER7> >NASA needs to stop milking the "water on mars" thing.

Perhaps. I'm inclined to cut NASA some slack though - they are in a tricky catch 22 position: To get spectacular results they need funding and to get funding they need spectacular results. So I'm all for them milking whatever seems viable.

>its near monopoly on space exploration.

When it comes to space exploration I tend to agree with Nike & their slogan. I really don't care whether the US or the Chinese does it as long as someone acts. Same thing with costs...humanity as a whole needs to get off this rock to have any hope of long term survival. If it takes X billion USD...who cares? Raise some notional debt ceiling if you must...

<comment><USER8> > humanity as a whole needs to get off this rock to have any hope of long term > survival

Or, people could have <= 2 kids on average. Seems more achievable to me than terraforming another planet.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Your answer is entirely sound. We are talking past each other here though.

We are talking about fundamentally different time scales here: I was thinking more asteroid hitting earth / nuclear MAD. Sooner or latter something scary is going to screw over earth. Given sufficient time its inevitable - earth is going to die...maybe tomorrow, maybe in a billion years. If it happens tomorrow...so be it. Nothing can be done about that. If it happens in 200 years & humanity _didn 't_ plan for it then I'd say humanity fcked up things in royal style.

Thats also why I don't care whether the US/russians/chinese make progress...they're all humanity in my book.

Terraforming - admittedly not happening right now. Forget terraforming. I just want to see progress. The above risks are real & we don't have an answer right now. Fine - so be it. Republicans & democrats arguing about debt ceilings and NASA budgets...that I have little patience for. As I said - Nike slogan. How exactly progress is achieve - I really don't care as long as it happens. Frankly I'm thankful that the Chinese are playing the space race. Their political structure and resource allocation seems uniquely well suited to said nike slogan approach.

During the Apollo era the US gov had both the political will & the public support. In short - they were invincible & the outcome was certain. If a nation like the US is collectively hell bent on putting a man on the moon...then a man shall walk on the moon. The US has lost that spirit & right now the Chinese are humanities best hope - yes the US has mars ambitions - it'll go nowhere. This I'm certain of - unless something drastic changes. Compare the __ emotional content __ of Kennedy's moon speech vs current NASA budget cuts. Forget budgets, technical ability etc...just emotional content. That is why I'm cheering for the Chinese - they have the will power and the resources. The US has politicians squabbling about budgets.

<comment><USER8> What extra percentage of taxes are you willing to pay? Assume that the everyone gets the tax hike and the money is well spent solely on this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh how I wish Mars had a thicker atmosphere.

<comment><USER10> You'll love this!

[http://wikitravel.org/en/South_Pole](http://wikitravel.org/en/South_Pole)

Rocks, water ice, _and_ a thick atmosphere with oxygen. For only 0.00001% the price of a Mars vacation.

<comment><USER10> I'm half joking, but I'm worried someone will try to sell spaceplane trips to some inhospitable alien desert like Namibia and market it as "the interplanetary experience"...

edit: Actually that could be interesting..

<comment><USER11> Ooh, I'll happily build the spaceship's "earth communication unit" so it has realistic delay:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/614795/simulate- delayed-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/614795/simulate-delayed-and- dropped-packets-on-linux)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, how legitimate is this claim? I feel like we hear about this all of the time, only to be disappointed later after further analysis.

<comment><USER13> As far as I can tell, this is not a claim at all. It is an observed phenomenon, for which the presence of water is one possible explanation.

<comment><USER14> As far as I can see, shadows being the other one. Depending on the time of day / position of the sun of course, so it should be easy enough to rule that one out.

<comment><USER15> Could it also be explained by saltation[1]? If avalanches can behave like a fluid due to a saltation layer, and saltation can happen to sand particles in wind, then couldn't the streaks be caused by sand/wind instead of water?

Any geologists reading that could offer an opinion? Would this part of the article support this hypothesis:

> Some of the streaks seem to begin at the tops of ridges, too close to the > surface to easily be explained by subsurface aquifers

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltation_(geology)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltation_\(geology\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why not send a drone plane together with the Curiosity? It sounds more efficient doing exploration from sky than land. I get that the weather could be a problem. Anyway, just food for thought.

<comment><USER17> Not enough atmosphere to generate lift. Same reason we can't fly satellites into orbit.

<comment><USER18> Silly question, but why is it that we can't fly a satellite into the orbit of Mars? What is it about the space 300 miles up from Earth that differs from Mars? (unless we also want to discuss geosynchronous orbit)

Edit: I should have written "launch" a satellite into Orbit from Earth to Mars

<comment><USER19> Orbit isn't about going up - it's about going sideways so fast that the planet curves away just as fast as you fall towards it. While you can use the atmosphere to lift yourself up to a certain extent, it doesn't help you achieve orbit. The 100km boundary for space on Earth isn't picked as just a clean number - it's the altitude at which a plane would have to fly at orbital speeds to generate the required lift, and if you're going orbital speeds you don't need lift.

I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, but it might help to frame it better.

<comment><USER18> I probably should have phrased it better, actually. I understand the concept that the satellites are falling along a path in orbit that causes them to "miss" the planet as you describe. I misunderstood the parent's phrasing use of flying, which implies the presence of an atmosphere, as opposed to just "putting" a satellite into Mars orbit(by way of launching a rocket with the desired payload or whatever).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's suppose there is water there and we could somehow take advantage of it. Why would human's be inclined to spend any time on Mars?

<comment><USER21> Hunting for liquid water on mars is mostly about trying to find life. If there's anything living on Mars, it'll be in the water.

<comment><USER22> Can you imagine what it would be like finding some sort of living organism observable by the human eye? That would be the most profound moment ever.

<comment><USER21> It would be, but realistically any liquid ecosystem on Mars is just too small for respectable evolution. It'll be a miracle if it's more complicated than Earth's prokaryotic microbes. But then, it'll be a miracle if we find anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This link (without the trailing '?') was submitted 5 days ago and it was ignored: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884527)

</comment><comment><USER24> So Curiosity and all the other rovers are not sterilized?!

<comment><USER25> Actually I was thinking: wouldn't the exposure of hardware in the cold space vacuum sterilize everything?

<comment><USER26> Apparently not [http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/1998/a...](http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/1998/ast01sep98_1/)

<comment><USER27> and if you keep going down the rabbit hole you'll end up here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If this water evaporates so quickly, there must be a ton of it. Or else wouldn't it have run out by now?

<comment><USER29> I'm by no means an expert but wouldn't it work the same way as earth as in the evaporated water would make it back down to the surface and repeaet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mars really doesn't seem that bad; it's just too cold and you can't breathe the air.

<comment><USER31> Actually the major issues are; low atmospheric pressure and radiation (which is related to atmosphere density, as is temperature).

So live underground in air-tight domes, at least in the beginning before industry takes off.

To actually fix the cold, pressure and breath-ability? My bet is on either a heavily optimized artificially created vegetation that exploits Mar's soils enough to generate greenhouse gases, or, more realistically, shit loads of (or massive) machines doing that same thing. Here's to hoping 3D printing-esque evolutions in technology and automation permit this to happen within 150 years instead of 500.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "spacecraft will probably have to steer clear of them unless the craft are carefully sterilized"

Question: How could they still be carrying live earth bacteria after the trip? What kind of sterilization is going to be more effective than interplanetary travel?

<comment><USER33> There was a post on HN a little while back about the possibility of a large earth impact event sending debris into space which would take life from earth to Saturn's moon. I guess some single-celled organisms are very resilient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If true, this is huge.</comment>


Ask HN: Organic Social media growth advices - <AUTHOR>

I recently hired a Community manager to work on the social presence of brainedpage.com. I'm not sure if we are doing right because his techniques are a bit "manual". <comment><USER2> Are you trying to grow your audience on Twitter? You have to be consistently active on there. So that means logging in every hour, do some stuff to look active and then doing it again in another hour. It's not rocket science. It just takes a lot of god damn work.

There are tools like bufferapp.com or crowdbooster.com where you can queue up a bunch of articles once. They then tweet out the articles for you throughout the day. That will at least make you look like someone who shares content consistently.

But of course if you have no followers there's nobody there to even read what you're tweeting. So I would argue that building your initial audience is the hardest part.

You mentioned organic growth, but a lot of established businesses do cheat in some way. They'll pay $25 on eBay for 25K followers just to give it a nice kick start. Having that audience really is powerful.

For those of us that want to do it the legit way, you can pay for Twitter Ads to make you a "promoted" follower. Although, the conversion rates on those aren't great.

I'm working on another non-manual legit method of growing your audience that I think your community manager would love. Just check out my profile if you're interested.

Let me know if you have any other questions about social media growth. I'm happy to help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @sherm8n, great advice.</comment></comment>