LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance - <AUTHOR> https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/lgp-30 <comment><USER2> From the company in "The story of Mel" [http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of- mel.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

<comment><USER3> Mel Kaye's hack was actually performed on an RPC-4000, so the story goes.

When I was doing my CS degree and had plenty of time in my hands for that sort of thing, I had a look at the manuals for the two systems and tried to follow Ed Nather's story.

It looks like Ed Nather misremembered the story (in his defense it had been several decades since he'd seen it) because the whole hack rested on the machine having an index register bit "between the address and the operation code in the instruction word", but the RPC-4000 had the index register bit ("index tag") at the end of the instruction word [1] and nothing between the current instruction and operand address, which is, I think, the natural reading of "operation code" and "address" respectively. There's also nothing between the operand address and the next instruction address. The RPC-4000 word looks like this:

      [COMMAND][OPERAND ADDRESS][NEXT ADDRESS][X]
      |0     4||5    11|12   17||18 24|25  30||31|
                       |              |
                 TRACK | SECTOR  TRACK|SECTOR

What Nather remembers could be an overflow of the NEXT ADDRES field, through the index tag, and into the COMMAND field. It depends on whether the RPC-4000 handled overflows by wrapping or saturation (I can't find that in the manual).

On the other hand, Nather's account states that the hack changed an instruction to a jump instruction- and the RPC-4000 does not have a jump instruction, because it doesn't need it: like Nather's story says, every instruction has its own GOTO- in the NEXT ADDRESS field.

Here's some alternative ways the hack could have played out, from what I can tell:

1\. The hack used the "Branch control" facility.

The RPC-4000 had another facility, the "Branch control", an internal flip-flop with only one bit that was turned on when an arithmetic overflow was detected. Kaye could have used this instead of the index tag and Nather may have misremembered it as being the index tag.

2\. The hack was actually done on the LGP-30

The hack might also have been possible to pull off on the LGP-30, that had two bits between the opcode and the operand address [2] and an uncontrolled jump instruction ("Unconditional transfer" in the manual). Kaye could have kept those two bits set and caused an overflow, as told in the story.

3\. The hack was done on an RPC-4000 emulating an LGP-30.

Royal McBee had an emulator written for the RPC-4000, specifically to be able to run LGP-30 programs on the new machine [3]:

      My name is James William (Bill) Bryner ... In 1960 I was hired by Royal-McBee
      to write the assembler for the replacement to the LGP-30, the RPC-4000.

      Mel Kaye designed the RPC-4000 assembler. It was titled ROAR (Royal-McBee
      Optimizing Assembler Routine). Edward W. Dubbs and I programmed that
      assembler.  Following that, I wrote an LGP-30 simulator to run on the
      RPC-4000. This was meant to allow all programs written for the LGP-30 to be
      executed on the RPC-4000 without further programming. A drum computer
      simulating a drum computer is agonizingly slow!

I bet, the blackjack program that brought everyone to the Royal McBee booth would have been top of the line of the programs to be run on the RPC-4000. Perhaps, then, Nather was working on Mel Kaye's "port" of the original blackjack program, not on the RPC-4000 but on the LGP-30 emulator running on the RPC-4000. Judging from the descriptions of Mel Kaye's programs in Ed Nather's account, just having an emulator for the architecure would not necessarily mean that Kaye's programs would run without any changes on the RPC-4000.

I have no clear idea how any of the above could have worked. Just guessing.

_____________

[1] [http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/royalPrecision/RPC-4000/RPC-400...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/royalPrecision/RPC-4000/RPC-4000_Programming_Manual.pdf)

[2] Here's an example from the LGP-30 manual, as in the article:

        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
                               (</comment></comment><comment>-)   (</comment><comment>----)(</comment><comment></comment><comment>)
                               order bits   track bits     sector bits
                                 = bring       = 20           = 00
                                           ( address = 2000 )

[3] [http://ed-thelen.org/comp- hist/lgp-30.html#Historical%20Note...](http://ed-thelen.org/comp- hist/lgp-30.html#Historical%20Notes)

<comment><USER4> The LGP-30 version had a 'cheat switch'. A paper-tape image is available¹ and I've disassembled it.

The LGP-30 has one conditional branch instruction, 'T', which normally tests the sign of the accumulator. But it has a variant form: if the sign bit of the instruction word is set ('−T'), _and_ the front panel TRANSFER CONTROL switch is set, then the branch is unconditionally taken.

This variant instruction form appears once in the game. In the normal case, a player using a simple strategy (take another card if ≤16) will quickly be in the hole. But if the TRANSFER CONTROL switch is set, they'll be ahead.

I don't have my notes handy, so my description of how this works may be slightly wrong.

The game has no seed for its pseudo-RNG; from a fresh load, if the player makes the same choices, the computer deals the same cards. (I can't think of any way to implement a changing seed on the LGP-30, other than asking the user to enter one.)

The game has a table of cards, indicating whether each card has been dealt or not. To deal, it pseudo-randomly selects a card, and checks whether it has been dealt already; if so, it tries again. (Yes, this is slow.) When all cards have been dealt, it clears the table to 'open a new deck'.

When the program starts, it initializes the deck, _unless_ the TRANSFER CONTROL switch is set. If the switch is set, the game starts with the deck table as loaded from paper tape. That (if I remember correctly) marks two aces as already used, and _that_ is enough to skew the game play in the user's favour.

¹ ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/lgp30/

<comment><AUTHOR> The "t" (test) instruction with the sign-bit option and the "Transfer Control" button are mentioned in the post as well (see operations). On the LGP-30 this would have been the only means of manipulating the control flow from the console in a sensible manner. (I didn't have a look into the RPC-4000 yet, so I really don't know, if there had been additional options.) So the way to implement an option would have been to have a zero or positive value in the accumulator and then have a test instruction with the sign-bit set. If the "Transfer Control" button was deployed, we would take the branch (unconditionally), if not, we'd fall through to the next instruction, since the condition 'AC negative' was not met.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This machine made ingenious, economical use of the technology available in the mid 1950s. Only 16 instructions. The ALU used all diode logic. The CPU only used a few tubes for flipflops to store control state.

The rotating magnetic drum provided all memory -- including CPU registers. A tiny oscilloscope on the front panel showed register contents as they rolled by the read heads!

<comment><USER6> How do you implement a whole ALU in diode logic? All i know about diode logic is what it says on the wikipedia page, but according to that, you can't implement a NOT gate, which i would have thought would make it very hard to implement anything of significance - even a half-adder requires a NOT!

<comment><AUTHOR> Allegedly, there were just 15 flip-flops, which are reused a lot…

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's I found a source for this: Stanley P. Frankel on the design of MINAC and the LGP-30 in IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers. (15 flip-flops, presenting both normal and inverted output to a logical network made of resistors and crystal diodes, providing basic monotonic Boolean functions like And, Or, and Xor.)

Stanley P. Frankel, "The Logical Design of a Simple General Purpose Computer" in: IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, March 1957, pp. 5 [1]

[1] [https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/misc/MINAC-IRE- March-1957....](https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/misc/MINAC-IRE- March-1957.pdf)

<comment><USER7> This is awesome! Thank you! This should make the Boolean equations in the manual quite a bit easier to decipher.

XOR isn't monotonic — you can't make X ⊕ Y with diode logic given just X and Y, the way you can make X ∧ Y and X ∨ Y. However, you can make it given X, Y, X̄, and Ȳ. I'm not sure if you can make it with X, Y, and just one of X̄ or Ȳ.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding XOR: This is sloppy quoting of Frankel, who writes about the monotonic functions "And and (nonexclusive) Or" – so, yes, inclusive Or only. However, as described, both the normal and the inverted (negated) outputs of the flip-flops ("toggles") are fed into the network, so there's X and Y and negated X and negated Y available.

<comment><USER7> Right, and as I explained at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488446), if you have negated versions of all the literals available, you can make not just XOR but any arbitrary Boolean function as a sum of products (or a product of sums, CNF), just like a PLD does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Notably, you need XOR (single-bit add) for an ALU anyway… (So the somewhat weak exclusion of "exclusive" in Frankel's paper is a bit luxurious.)

<comment><USER7> "Luxurious"? I'm not sure what you intend to say. Do you perhaps mean "unnecessary" or "essential" or "very strong" or "very weak" or "well-thought- out"?

As I read it, he's pointing out that since the diodes and resistors can't do things like XOR, because it's not monotonic, it's necessary for "[e]ach input variable" to be "presented in duplicate".

Another example that is in some sense more fundamental than XOR is the MUX function b if a else c. If at some point b = 0 and c = 1, the output is the negation of A, which diodes and resistors alone cannot achieve.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Luxurious" is a term from psychology, where it's used to describe "ornamental" behavior, which may be hinting at something deeper. ;-)

In the particular case, I just found it interesting, since the duplicate outputs are already well established, before the text "withdraws" to monotonic functions (for which both inputs are used). A bit of an understatement.

Edit: I think, "luxurious" as used this way is a great term, because it doesn't attempt to apply any classification. It's just pointing out that there's a somewhat independent process, which consumes energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> radford-neal Ah, the LGP-30!

I've actually programmed one, back around 1980 or so, at the University of Calgary.

Some friends and I got a collection of computers to play a musical piece. The LGP-30's role was to do the percussion. It was a bit of a challenge to get it to output the rhythm (pounding on the flexowriter) at speed, but we eventually figured out how to get the program to go fast enough for this. Of course, we probably didn't know all the good tricks...

<comment><USER8> So it could be used as kind of drum computer in nowadays use of the term, too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's wonderful to see this investigation being done on such an important early computer; I've attempted to make my way through the logical equations in the carefully preserved manuals, but so far have not finished the job. The LGP-30 appears to be substantially simpler than later minicomputers, even the PDP-8, and I've long wanted to understand how it could work at all. This article should help me quite a bit.

Thank you, Norbert! You are a true hero.

<comment><USER9> It's also interesting to me that these sorts of posts have so much, and so better presented information than was available back in the day to those who had to maintain these machines.

For example I found this fascinating animation by kens more useful in understanding how the hydraulically powered 1403 printer worked than any training at the time [http://righto.com/ibm1401/printchain.html](http://righto.com/ibm1401/printchain.html).

<comment><AUTHOR> One thing I was wondering, but is probably a bit too ephemeral to find out more about in primary sources: I have always been amused by the "DEC Chair", which came with all bigger PDPs. Some of the Royal McBee materials suggest (loosely so) that the LGP-30 came with its own chair as well and that this may have been a broader habit in the first few decades of computing, when computers were still voluminous and expensive. (However, I don't think that IBM did ever ship a chair with their equipment. But this is just a personal impression.) – Are there any personal memories?

<comment><USER9> Never heard of that, but the Cray-1 (not that I ever saw one) came with a magnificent circular seating arrangement around the machine itself [https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10...](https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10/7).

I can only imagine the rarefied conversations that would have taken place in such a setting.

<comment><USER3> >> I can only imagine the rarefied conversations that would have taken place in such a setting.

Yes, me too. Typical conversations you hear in data centers:

Alice: "I ...aid the... is... ...misf..."

Bob: "WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

Alice: "I ...AID THE ... ERF... MEF... NAH!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Learned LGP-30 assembly language for my high-school's programming class back in 1973, but we didn't actually have one, or even access to one. The teacher had learned on a (real) LGP-30, and thought that we students ought to learn how CPUs really worked before graduating to a higher-level language (NEAT/3 for the NCR Century 100 that the school district did have). So, homeworks were handed in on paper, and the instructor would run them in his head.

One aspect of programming the LGP-30 is that, by convention, to call function FOO, the caller would store the return address at $FOO and then jump to $FOO+1, where the actual code for FOO started. Then, to return, FOO would do jump to the address in $FOO. So, no recursion was possible by default. (There was a single instruction that did "Store the already-incremented PC at a given location, and jump to just after that location", so it was all very efficient.)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really interesting, because this is how later machines did it (at least with sum call instructions). I was actually surprised that the Programming Manual suggested to insert the address directly at the final jump to return.

(Regarding recursion, you could emulate a stack by storing the top of stack in a particular address by convention, say 0000, and fix up the 'r' command on the fly to insert PC+2 at this location. Then, every subroutine would look up 0000 for the top of stack and fix up its final jump to return. However, this would seriously mess up the accumulator and you had to store any return values in another conventional address, etc...)

<comment><USER10> Hmmm; you're closer to correct than I. Actual details are covered in [http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R3.16](http://ed- thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R3.16) where it explains that the "R" instruction would store away the address part of what was typically an unconditional branch. So, it was only by convention that this would be kept at $FOO, and that FOO would return by branching to $FOO. A super-smart compiler (they existed) would know the address of the last instruction of each routine, and be able to R into that location directly before calling (actually, just jumping) to $FOO.

One other cute thing was that all memory was on a spinning drum, and you could really speed up your program's execution by placing variables at addresses that were just about to be under the read head when the current operation was being performed. Otherwise, everything had to wait for up to a whole drum rotation. Kind of the original "pipeline stall".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In addition to influencing Lorenz and Licklider, the LGP-30 was also the machine first used by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth. Their experience with its interactive programming and their discovery that undergraduates could be enthusiastic and effective programmers inspired them to get a bigger/better computer and create BASIC.</comment>


Successful Launch for Antares - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3L7crGudVU&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> Great stuff. If I'm not mistaken this is the first actual launch for the NK-33 engine (rebadged as the AJ26). Those engines are 40 years old and have a higher thrust to weight ratio of anything produced since!</comment>


How BofA froze my account for supporting my children - <AUTHOR> https://edfine.io/blog/2015/12/20/how-bofa-froze-my-account-for-money-laundering-because-i-pay-child-support/ <comment><USER2> Tl:dr; frequent transfers to South Africa for a long time that led them to categorise him as a Money Service that needed to provide business documentation. From his conclusion it appears that the DoJ rules would lead any bank to do the same, so now he uses wire transfers instead of ACH with his new credit union account.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the summary. I'd like to add a couple of salient points to it.

1\. The insidious nature of the DoJ rules allows the DoJ to target "risky" industries (with no need to pass new laws), such that companies in those industries can't get a bank account, making it hard or impossible for them to do business. This helps the DoJ to push out industries it doesn't like, using the banks to do its dirty work.

2\. It's much worse than it sounds, being required to "provide business documentation". Being classified as an MSB would force the account holder to implement an anti-money laundering program that is subject to independent review, and possibly report transactions of a certain range of values. For a personal bank account? This is, frankly, an egregious abuse of the law.

Disclosure: I wrote the blog post. I struggle to "omit needless words", sadly.

<comment><USER2> It really sounds like your problem is with the DoJ, but your blog post is all about Bank of America. Nobody gets surprised or very interested by a story on "Bank fucks over customer" so I don't think that focus helps you.

<comment><USER3> Your point is well taken.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here's What Happened - <AUTHOR> http://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

<comment><USER2> Am I being too cynical if I'm not quite ready to take training and performance data from the Tour de France at face value?

<comment><USER3> True, though that may not tarnish the general concept. It's also being pitched by a training firm.

This is really a question of "Is it better to apply continuous improvement everywhere, or just focus on a few areas?" Some situations call for the former (mature firms squeaking out every dollar, or experts who have already applied all the known best practices) while others the latter (firms with glaring holes, or those doing dramatic strategic changes).</comment></comment>


How Duterte Turned Facebook into a Weapon, with Help from Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook <comment><USER3> From what I gather of this article I should be siding with rappler but I can't help but strongly dislike rappler for being part of facebook's effort to destroy the internet with their internet.org thing.

I also have a hard time having sympathy for a news outlet that choose to live inside facebook and then complains for having to deal with facebook's shenanigans. You should know better than that and you kinda deserve what happens to you when you choose to be subservient to a global master.

On the other hand this Duterte guy seems to be the usual violent dictator kind and there is no way I can get behind that.

I guess it is a story of two evils, one involved in violence and death but limited to a national local reach and the other empowering the first while having deep global reach and influence on a third of the world population.

Reading this was informative and I've learned about something I was not aware of but this leaves me in an incomfortable place where I feel powerless to help and unhappy to choose the 'right' side.

I wish we could get rid of facebook, this thing is epitome of everything wrong in our western world.

<comment><USER4> The news orgs have discovered placing 10th grade problem sets on the desks of 2nd graders is very lucrative.

It's what the Rush Limbaugh and Jon Oliver types do day in day out (and if you are observant with zero long term impact). All the news orgs are doing it too and they will never regain the trust they once had. Journalism was never about making people feel helpless. Today's journalism is about making people feel helpless for profit.

So my advice don't read stuff that's above your grade level.

<comment><USER5> How does Oliver encourage helplessness? There's often a direct call-to-action at the end of particularly pointed segments, from contacting local representatives to the more frivolous hashtags for e.g. Phillip Morris. While I have issues with his style, the targets are usually well chosen.

With regards to your analogy...you would not have much luck encouraging a 2nd grader to improve their reading comprehension beyond 2nd grade by telling them to stick to a 2nd grade level of reading.

<comment><USER6> Oliver's segments often climax with the host desperately sputtering "its 2016 for Christ sakes!!!" His whole brand is pessimistic cynicism.

<comment><USER7> The person you replied to gave 2 specific examples of Oliver making calls to action. If you're going to refute that point, you need to provide examples as well, not just vague assertions. Remember, the meat of Oliver's show is the 15-20 minute segment that is well researched, credits sources and contains a call to action at the end. The most famous example is probably Oliver's video about Net Neutrality 2 years ago galvanised support for it and is used even today to explain NN to laymen. Its absurd to claim that the show promotes cynicism when Oliver always exhorts his viewers to do _something_.

If you're objecting to a "its 2016!" at the end of a throwaway 30-second joke then you're being too sensitive IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lets not stray away from the main topic. Eg. Duterte is Hitler, etc. Those deserve their own thread. Its basically this:

The founder of Rappler, was a former head of ABS-CBN news, a TV station aligned with the liberal party, the party who lost to Duterte.

Rappler, as an online media outlet, and itself a propaganda machine, is threatened by Facebook. That is why we have this article.

Basically, in HN speak, Facebook is disrupting the propaganda machine market and Rappler is scared to go out of business.

<comment><USER9> Never thought I'd ever say this on a hacker news comment, but this comment is pure, unadulterated BS.

Rappler, as a news organization, is head and shoulders above 90% of most other news outlets in the region when it comes to factual reporting.

Your comment is effectively the Philippine version of Fox News binging, functionally brainwashed, that say that the New York Times is fake news.

<comment><USER8> > Rappler, as a news organization, is head and shoulders above 90% of most > other news outlets in the region when it comes to factual reporting.

Citation needed. Or you are just pulling stats out of pure, unadulterated BS.

Every form of media is a propaganda machine. Its why China spends a great amount of money and effort for the Great Firewall. Its why advertising is an industry.

The bigger question here is Facebook, and its power to influence the people on a huge scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Online communities need active human management and engagement. You can't automate yourself out of this, Facebook. It seems like this pattern is repeated over and over. Slashdot figured out a way to have human cultivation aided by software. And the result was high quality. Digg came along and tried to go all software, and it failed. Ignoring these lessons, many, many newspapers open up their articles to unfettered commenting and are shocked when anonymous users with no sense of accountability produce ugly comments.

<comment><USER11> It only works for Slashdot because it's a very homogenous audience.

<comment><USER12> Slashdot is still used? I thought HN is the replacement of what Slashdot once was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Facebook sometimes does good, sometimes does bad, depending on how its algorithms are tweaked. And it's likely the algorithms are mostly tweaked to maximize profit.

Currently, the only way to get the company to focus its efforts on truthful news and protection from abuse is through regulation, which happily it looks like the EU has started doing.

But the deeper issue is Facebook being a for-profit, closed-data-garden, global social media behemoth who strangles competition aggressively. As a result, there are few other social media sources to get the truth from, and there is no real competitive pressure on Facebook to make it care enough about protecting its users from abuse.

<comment><USER14> Why does the truth have to come from social media sources? Did people suddenly forget about old-school journalism? Newspapers, publicly-funded radio and TV programmes etc. Those are far better sources of 'truth' than you'll ever get through social media.

<comment><USER15> In the Philippines, the old school journalism that you are referring is dead. Most journalists here can be bought and this is a fact. We use social media to get information from government agencies pages without the "spin" included.

<comment><USER14> The "spin" is included in the reports given out by those gov agencies ;) It's a pretty neat way for the government to manipulate its people.

<comment><USER15> In the west that might be the case, check and balance for journalists. Our previous administration used to do that as well. Duterte doesn't want to spin information. If you're in doubt you can request something from their Freedom of Information website.

<comment><USER16> I truly hope you're paid for this, and not a true believer.

<comment><USER17> Would accepting money to defend a mass murderer really be any better though?

<comment><USER15> Mass murderer? You have no idea what you're talking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> He certainly aspires to be. Here he is, unedited, expressing his desire to slaughter 3 million drug addicts: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/sep/30/philippi...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/sep/30/philippines- president-rodrigo-duterte-likens-himself-to-hitler-video)

<comment><USER18> His government has murdered thousands of people. If that's not mass murder...

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/rodrigo- duterte-philippines-drugs-killings.html)

<comment><USER15> Yep a website full of spin. It's a joke.

<comment><USER18> What's the argument here? Those people didn't really die? Or do you have an alternate explanation for who killed them, something the NY Times isn't telling us the truth about because of their _secret liberal agenda_ that extends to the Philippines for some obscure reason?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Facebook can be toxic even without any govt involvement. In Czech republic FB death threats are widespread and virtually unchecked. [https://news.vice.com/story/lawmakers-cant-keep-up-with- all-...](https://news.vice.com/story/lawmakers-cant-keep-up-with-all-the- facebook-death-threats-in-czech-republic) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885779)

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminded me of CBC's piece on Duterte from earlier this year (many of the people in the Bloomberg article are represented here). Most of the comments on the video are critical of Leila de Lima, the CBC and the reporter.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVckX_- MYng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVckX_-MYng)

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't time for facebook to be regulated by the government ? This is just unbelievable.

<comment><USER22> Which government? The Philippine government?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The other way to see it is that traditional media may be losing the monopoly of information because people now have internet and social media as alternative.

It concerns me because it seems that Maria Ressa is now turning to foreigners to intervene and destabilize my country?

What if some of these "journalists" are the ones spreading fake news?

Recently, Rappler reported this. [https://www.rappler.com/nation/171702-isis- resorts-world-man...](https://www.rappler.com/nation/171702-isis-resorts- world-manila-casino-attack)

Then she followed up with this article. [https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in- depth/171784-terrorism-...](https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in- depth/171784-terrorism-isis-resorts-world-attack)

But the blogger RJ Nieto AKA Thinking Pinoy ([http://www.thinkingpinoy.net/](http://www.thinkingpinoy.net/)) pointed it out as fearmongering and fake news.

"Rappler cited Agence France Press who cited Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group who cited an anonymous "Marawi Contact". THAT IS DOUBLE HEARSAY (OR EVEN TRIPLE HEARSAY). You did not even bother to ask Katz herself and instead relied on a news wire!" [https://web.facebook.com/TheThinkingPinoy/photos/a.568177789...](https://web.facebook.com/TheThinkingPinoy/photos/a.568177789995995.1073741828.567419693405138/844956232318148/?type=3&theater)

Thinking Pinoy is labeled by her as a troll and seems to be going around the world trying to convince other people. [http://www.getrealphilippines.com/blog/2017/06/people- shriek...](http://www.getrealphilippines.com/blog/2017/06/people-shrieking- fake-news-starting-sound-like-boy-cried-wolf/)

Here, Thinking Pinoy shows that bloggers are having more engagement in Facebook than traditional media. That may be one of the reasons why she's trying to put down Thinking Pinoy. [https://web.facebook.com/TheThinkingPinoy/posts/681350205345...](https://web.facebook.com/TheThinkingPinoy/posts/681350205345419:0?_rdc=1&_rdr)

Is Pres. Duterte a tyrant or dictator? One may say that it depends on who is affected and why.

Previous administration promised Freedom of Information (FOI) but only Pres. Duterte implemented it. [http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/798612/full-text- executive-orde...](http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/798612/full-text-executive- order-on-freedom-of-information)

Here's the FOI online portal (Browse over 2662 requests and 217 government agencies). [https://www.foi.gov.ph/requests?agency=&status=SUCCESSFUL](https://www.foi.gov.ph/requests?agency=&status=SUCCESSFUL)

When I saw this online and fully functional, I was glad and convinced that he is the opposite. He is a leader that upholds freedom and embraces technology (this is very important to me because I'm in the tech sector).

He promised to try to uphold peace and order to the people during the campaign. He openly told the people what he's going to do and it's his priority. People voted for him and he won. Well, that's democracy at work. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/philippines- pr...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/philippines-president- rodrigo-duterte-urges-people-to-kill-drug-addicts)

He tries to make peace with the communists and muslim insurgents. He even let one of the leaders of our muslim brothers speak on the president's podium. [http://www.mindanews.com/peace-process/2016/11/nur-and- digon...](http://www.mindanews.com/peace-process/2016/11/nur-and-digong-when- brothers-and-presidents-meet/)

According to a survey, majority of the people "agreed they can say anything they want openly and without fear even if it is against the government. [http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/07/02/1715565/freedom...](http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/07/02/1715565/freedom- speech-strong-sws)

He let protesters rally on the streets. Now, isn't that a working democracy where people are free voice out their concerns? [http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/848056/duterte-to-protesters- yo...](http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/848056/duterte-to-protesters-you-can- protest-with-no-limit)

How about some of the anti-Duterte who label other people as trolls and try to silence them by taking down their Facebook account, what do you call them?

I was just scrolling here for tech news but then I found this which prompted me to write this. Sorry for the long read. I'd like to know what you think about this. Just refrain from senseless bashing please. By the way, I live in the PH since birth.

<comment><USER24> > You did not even bother to ask Katz herself and instead relied on a news > wire!

Uh. Because the press relies on news wires all the time? While standard practice, I am not claiming that news wires are infallible. Mistakes can happen. But the difference between traditional journalists and Facebook bloggers is that traditional journalists are held to a standard in factual reporting. You might notice that the first Rappler article you linked to [1] is subheaded by an update which conveys a message different to the headline:

(6th UPDATE) The Philippine National Police says the 'isolated' incident is not a terrorist act but Defense Chief Lorenzana tells Rappler, "We're not ruling out that this is ISIS."

In contrast, bloggers (like RJ Nieto in the Senate hearing regarding fake news) would often just hide behind the excuse "I am entitled to my opinion". Sure, no one contests that you are entitled to your own opinion. But never peddle your opinion as fact.

> Previous administration promised Freedom of Information (FOI) but only Pres. > Duterte implemented it.

I don't think this wins points for Duterte. The FOI came relatively late into the last administration's term. The previous administration basically did the bulk of the legislative footwork necessary to pass a bill. Almost all that's left for Duterte to do is to sign the bill.

Had the FOI been raised a few legislative seasons earlier, it might as well be Aquino who signed it into implementation. Carry over projects are common when administrations transition.

> Here's the FOI online portal (Browse over 2662 requests and 217 government > agencies).

I think a better measure of FOI's efficacy are the actual statistics. [2] The graph isn't completely clear but it would seem that, as of this writing, there are 797 denied requests (278 labeled as "Denied requests" and 519 merely labeled "Denied"). Compared to 820 successful requests, that means it is roughly 50-50 on whether your FOI request will be granted. So much for "freedom" there.

Granted, some of the denied requests were unfulfilled allegedly since the office from which the data was requested did not have said data. While a believable response, I find it frustrating that our government could not cross-check with other agencies when reasonable. But that is as much freedom as you can get from bureaucracy, I guess.

[1] [https://www.rappler.com/nation/171702-isis-resorts-world- man...](https://www.rappler.com/nation/171702-isis-resorts-world-manila- casino-attack) [2] [https://www.foi.gov.ph/statistics?type=outcomes](https://www.foi.gov.ph/statistics?type=outcomes)

<comment><USER23> > (6th UPDATE)

Initially, they reported without verification that ISIS was responsible. Isn't that fearmongering? Does that not qualify as fake news?

> traditional journalists are held to a standard in factual reporting

Who checks them? They're not infallible just like the bloggers. Don't get me wrong, I'm for free speech and not for censorship. What seems to be happening now is that "journalists" label bloggers in Facebook as trolls to silence them and still label Pres. Duterte as dictator. Who's the dictator in that case?

> bloggers (like RJ Nieto in the Senate hearing regarding fake news) would > often just hide behind the excuse "I am entitled to my opinion"

The same RJ Nieto who is one of the people to be the first to raise the issue about Dengvaxia, an unproven vaccine against Dengue administered by the previous administration to about 700,000 children. Dengvaxia is reported to worsen the condition for those who do not have a previous case of Dengue. I think RJ Nieto peddles his opinion quite well to make people accountable. Why do "journalists" label him as troll? Is it because he does not conform to their narrative?

> The previous administration basically did the bulk of the legislative > footwork necessary to pass a bill. Almost all that's left for Duterte to do > is to sign the bill.

Pres. Duterte issued an executive order. Please don't try to frame it as if he is credit grabbing. Even so, why didn't the previous administration just signed and implemented it? By making it as a priority when Pres. Duterte took office, I think he deserves a kudos.

> But that is as much freedom as you can get from bureaucracy, I guess.

Yeah, the government must improve.

<comment><USER24> > Initially, they reported without verification that ISIS was responsible.

Because that's what came from the news wire, which as I pointed out is standard practice for professional journalists. News wires work under the assumption that the origin of the story (AFP in this case), have verified the story themselves. In case a mistake happens (as it sometimes does, as it seemingly did here), reporting outlets issue erratum.

> Who checks them? They're not infallible just like the bloggers.

You can check them yourself. One of the hallmarks of proper journalism is citing your references and, in cases where your references request anonymity, publish _other_ references which would either corroborate or rebut your other reference. It is this nuance that makes journalism "professional", a trait which these bloggers sorely lack: Mocha Uson, when asked whether she even tried _at least once_ to ask for an account from the other side (Bam Aquino in this case) invokes her right to "self-discrimi...err...incrimination". Oldest way to cop-out in the book.

> ...and still label Pres. Duterte as dictator. Who's the dictator in that > case?

Assuming without conceding that traditional media is wrong in labeling these bloggers as trolls, the difference between them and Duterte is that Duterte is in a position of power to actively act against these journalists. On the other hand, all journalism can do is make their case (in a _professional_ manner) and let the public/other offices of government decide. By themselves, they cannot act against bloggers, let alone the government.

> The same RJ Nieto who is one of the people to be the first to raise the > issue about Dengvaxia...

As you can tell, I don't waste my time following Nieto. Aware as I am on the issue of Dengvaxia, I'd withhold judgement on whether Nieto did this in a proper and professional manner.

However, assuming without conceding that this act from Nieto is praiseworthy, this does not change the fact that in most other instances, Nieto fails in basic journalistic rigor, bordering if not crossing over to acts of trolling. Examples: [1] [2]

> I think RJ Nieto peddles his opinion quite well to make people accountable.

Again, you _do not_ peddle opinion to hold people accountable; you hold them accountable with cold, hard, verifiable __facts __. How can you demand accountability based on opinions from people which, as you yourself concedes, are not infallible? Double whammy there.

> Please don't try to frame it as if he is credit grabbing.

I'm not saying Duterte is credit grabbing but that people are giving him more credit than he is due. There's a difference there.

> Even so, why didn't the previous administration just signed and implemented > it?

Because even in legislation, there's a due process that must be followed and the previous administration followed it. Even if for a bill like FOI which I fully support, I will be critical of Aquino had he dubiously manipulated the legislative process just so he could claim the FOI under his belt.

[1] [http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/10/04/1745517/blogger...](http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/10/04/1745517/blogger- slammed-false-claims-vs-photojournalist)

[2] [http://www.mindanews.com/statements/2017/11/statement- nujp-o...](http://www.mindanews.com/statements/2017/11/statement-nujp-on- thinking-pinoys-threat-against-female-journalist/)

<comment><USER23> > In case a mistake happens (as it sometimes does, as it seemingly did here), > reporting outlets issue erratum

That would seem that they reported fake news that could have caused panic but later on just conveniently issued an erratum.

> You can check them yourself

So, it's a standard that "journalists" can disregard with impunity.

> Duterte is in a position of power to actively act against these journalists

But Pres. Duterte does not as this Bloomberg article clearly shows. Maria Ressa still speaks freely and accuses him openly. That's one less reason to label him as a dictator don't you think? I think I will commend him for that. For upholding freedom of speech.

> Examples: [1] [2]

Regarding the live updates[1], He called it out because it may endanger the soldiers. How should you call them out and get them in check instead?

Regarding the NUJP's condemnation[2], Nieto seems to be joking. Well, I consider jokes and figure of speeches as gray areas in freedom of speech. I don't have to defend him anyway. He can do that for himself.

> Again, you _do not_ peddle opinion to hold people accountable

I just playfully used your words peddle and opinion. Calm down :) That may have made it vague. What I meant is that he effectively raises issues using his words such as the Dengvaxia scandal. Now that it has gained awareness, we may now expect accountability to those who administered it during the past and the present administration. I hate it that the people responsible did it to the children out of greed.

> I'm not saying Duterte is credit grabbing but that people are giving him > more credit than he is due. There's a difference there.

Well, I'm giving Pres. Duterte credit because he delivered what the previous administration did not. That's the big difference there.

> Because even in legislation, there's a due process that must be followed and > the previous administration followed it. Even if for a bill like FOI which I > fully support, I will be critical of Aquino had he dubiously manipulated the > legislative process just so he could claim the FOI under his belt.

Maybe you should be critical of Aquino if you really fully support FOI. Knowingly that legislative is slow, he should have at least issued an executive order just as Pres. Duterte did. You just gave me another reason to give Pres. Duterte credit because he found a way to do it quickly in his first few months what the previous administration wasn't able to do after many years in office. Maybe you should too ;)

[1] [http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/10/04/1745517/blogger...](http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/10/04/1745517/blogger- slammed-false-claims-vs-photojournalist) [2] [http://www.mindanews.com/statements/2017/11/statement- nujp-o...](http://www.mindanews.com/statements/2017/11/statement-nujp-on- thinking-pinoys-threat-against-female-journalist/)

<comment><USER24> > That would seem that they reported fake news that could have caused panic > but later on just conveniently issued an erratum.

You are taking excerpts of my response out-of-context to argue your point.

Again, they had reason to believe it was true, because the information came from a source they trust (AFP/the news wire). I would not call it "fake news" if they admitted the case from the other side later on.

If you'd sneer at people admitting their own mistakes (like by issuing errata)...well I hope you don't make mistakes of your own.

> So, it's a standard that "journalists" can disregard with impunity.

You are the only one saying that. If their reporting does not check out with their references, they lose credibility at best or get sued for libel at worst.

> But Pres. Duterte does not

I am not claiming that he is doing it. I am claiming that he _can_ do it. He CAN dictate the police/influence regulating bodies to strangle institutions. In contrast, these institutions do not have any similar influence. That is why, unless you are using the word "dictator" in a context other than political, you cannot label institutions as dictators.

> Regarding the live updates[1], He called it out because it may endanger the > soldiers.

Now this, my friend, is a clear example of what you are calling "fake news that could have caused panic". Quoting the article: "But Aznar stressed that if Nieto's accusations of him endangering the troops were true, why is the Armed Forces of the Philippines still allowing him to cover the Marawi siege?" Surely, on-the-ground AFP units know better than Nieto on whether Aznar is endangering them? And yet Nieto saw it fit to raise an online hue-and-cry. Errata/apologies from Nieto: 0, nil, zilch, nada. Makes it hard to believe that his intentions were for the best interest of the AFP (and in fact, had that been the case, would it not make more sense to discreetly raise the matter to AFP, seeing that he has contacts in the government the ordinary Filipino does not?).

And also,

> Regarding the NUJP's condemnation[2], Nieto seems to be joking.

Imagine if a professional journalist made "jokes" in bad taste like that. Imagine the professional backlash they would face. And yet Nieto who keeps passing off his opinions as "fact" is not held to the same standard.

Point: any professional journalist who value their own credibility would be careful not to say things like this, joking or not.

> What I meant is that he effectively raises issues using his words such as > the Dengvaxia scandal.

Ends do not justify means. You originally raised Nieto's part in exposing Dengvaxia in response to me labeling Nieto as "fake news". I stand by my original assertion and that even if Nieto's role in exposing Dengvaxia is significant, that does not redeem him from all the other times he peddled baseless accusations or outright lies.

> he found a way to do it quickly in his first few months what the previous > administration wasn't able to do after many years in office

Duterte would not have been able to implement it quickly were it not for the legislative foundations (House meetings, Senate deliberations, etc.) that happened in the previous administration. It is not as if all the work on this bill was done exclusively by Duterte's administration. To claim that the previous administration weren't able to do anything for FOI after many years in office is outright false.

In fact, no amount of executive orders can will an ordinary bill into a strong law in a matter of months. Should any president try, there are checks and balances in the government (hi Supreme Court) that could question the process and hold the implementation. Heck the RH Bill took its sweet time before it even became a document awaiting a president's signature and it was still issued a TRO for over a year. Not to mention that today, the RH Law is a toothless version of what was originally passed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an extremely biased piece of journalism that almost anyone on the ground in the Philippines would disagree with. Very dishonest and should not be trusted at face value.

<comment><USER26> For those of us on the other side of the world, Would you be willing to give a quick summary of the biases you see in the piece, a taster of your experience of the reality on the ground?

<comment><USER25> The article makes it sound like it's fake accounts who are against some in the media, but it's really the entire population.

The article calls out fake profile pictures on facebook as some indication of an artificial message. This is wrong - many people on facebook use fake profile pictures. I use a fake profile picture myself, although my account is genuine. Probably a third of your facebook friend list uses fake profile pictures - go check for yourself. The article also says they have collected a database of facebook accounts that post pro-Duterte messages as if this is somehow an indictment. With Duterte having an 80%+ approval rating across 100mil people population, many of whom have Facebook accounts, do you think a database of 2mil posters is somehow unexpected or fake?

From my time in the Philippines, everyone on the street supports Duterte because he's given them a sense of safety again. For many in western countries, this kind of feeling is unknown because you've likely never walked the streets expecting to be killed at any moment - you have working police and institutions that keep you safe. For many years, the Philippines did not have this, and they see Duterte as having helped make them safe. This breeds an almost fanatical devotion for obvious reasons, and most Phillipinos on social media will defend him with ferocity. The article tries to associate this as something bad and fake. But it's not, it's real and genuine. You can open up Twitter right now and go to Trump's feed and you will see people who hate him and many who wish violence on him. That doesn't mean those people are fake - and the people supporting Duterte aren't fake either.

Here's a quick video on how regular people in the Philippines feel about articles like this one: [https://youtu.be/siAjsu0ZmKE?t=429](https://youtu.be/siAjsu0ZmKE?t=429)

<comment><USER27> The issue with fake accounts is they can help skew popular opinion. It's not a defence to say "yeah, there's fake accounts, but popular opinion agrees with them". All that means is they (might be) working.

> The article calls out fake profile pictures on facebook as some indication > of an artificial message.

It did not; it called out fake profiles. Nowhere in the article did it suggest that a fake profile picture was itself evidence of a fake profile.

> The article also says they have collected a database of facebook accounts > that post pro-Duterte messages as if this is somehow an indictment.

It's a database of (mostly real) accounts that post messages that originate with fake accounts; it's a way of measuring the scale of the problem. If millions of real accounts echo these fake messages, it does't mean that there isn't a problem, it means the problem is _really big_.

> For many in western countries, this kind of feeling is unknown because > you've likely never walked the streets expecting to be killed at any moment > - you have working police and institutions that keep you safe.

The homicide rate in the Philippines isn't that high; it's comparable to where the US was 20 years ago. That's obviously not ideal, but there are countries where when expecting death when you walk down the street is reasonable. Honduras has a murder rate of 90 per 100k people; El Salvador is 70 per 100k people. The Philippines is 9 per 100k.

> The article tries to associate this as something bad and fake. But it's not, > it's real and genuine.

You're talking about a "sense of safety" and "feelings", and then discounting claims of fake stories _as if those stories couldn 't possibly influence these feelings_. Nobody is claiming that Duterte isn't popular; we're discussing _why_ he's popular. Maybe he's popular because of stories spread by fake Facebook accounts that made people feel safer, even though the fundamentals haven't changed?

Plus, if you look at the _actual numbers_ , in Duterte's first year in office, according the the Philippine National Police, murders actually increased by 22.75%.

> everyone on the street supports Duterte because he's given them a sense of > safety again

You don't see any issues here?

<comment><USER25> The article gives zero proof of any kind of fake accounts aside from fake profile pictures, and calls Facebook out for not removing the accounts, even thought Facebook says they have removed the fake ones. So clearly Facebook does not feel that those particular accounts are fake either.

Calling someone you don't like a "fake account" (as someone has already hinted about me in this very comment section!), does not suddenly turn it into a fake account. It's a real account until you provide absolute proof - <USER2> when the supposed fake account has the same opinion as 80mil+ people in a country. Sorry.

The rest of your argument hinges on the idea that 80mil people are terribly stupid and can't tell fake accounts from real accounts - even though they live in the country - and have fallen for a ruse. While you, in your great wisdom - who has probably never been in the Philippines? - know them all to be fake without any evidence. That's a fairly poor argument in my opinion.

<comment> LV-426 > Calling someone you don't like a "fake account" (as someone has already > hinted about me in this very comment section!)

I don't know where someone hinted that you're a fake account, but you are certainly disingenuously passing yourself off as some kind of authority on what ordinary Filipinos think, when you don't even _live_ in the Philippines, but a country thousands of miles away.

This explains why your only evidence of "the entire population" favouring Duterte is a Youtube of people who like Duterte saying they like Duterte, and what some people allegedly told you when you visited the country.

> even though they live in the country [...] who has probably never been in > the Philippines?

And why are you even getting so worked up and fanatical about this? Because you spent two weeks in Boracay? It's not your country - you live in South Africa - so why are you acting otherwise?

<comment><USER25> I spent a number of months there talking to people while doing remote work. It's a great place to visit - highly recommend it to anyone!

As for why I'm posting: all it takes for evil to win is for good men to stay silent.

<comment><USER28> So a foreigner who talks to some people while doing remote work is presenting himself as an authority on the views of people of said country. Well then, I've visited Cancun on a number of occasions. I can say for a fact, that all Mexicans drink Corona beer.

What is baffling is how someone who has no idea what they are talking about, does nothing but make Trump like complaints about bias and how "everyone" likes the dictator etc etc. Troll

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FYI, since 2016 a certain Liberal Party Senator and Maria Ressa wants total control of social media and internet.

For those who have no idea about the Philippines and its politics. Rappler is a George Soros funded media outfit and Maria Ressa is well known Aquino (former president) or Liberal Party apologist. In the Philippines, Facebook, not twitter, is the more popular medium people used to engage in social media and politics and Rappler is losing the social media battle in Facebook that's why Maria Ressa is so desparate to get the attention of foreign media. And, from what I read Rappler is in trouble with funding.

The main reason why people are staying away from Rappler is becuase they spin almost all of their news about Duterte and the present administration. Yes there are fake news in Facebook but there are certainly a lot of fake news in Rappler, really.

<comment><USER29> Bullshit. Fake news is different from bias. CNN is biased. Fox News is biased. Rappler is biased. What they don't do is pass of fake information or rumors as news, like saying " _since 2016 a certain Liberal Party Senator and Maria Ressa wants total control of social media and internet._ " You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

<comment><USER15> You should watch the 2016 senate hearing</comment></comment></comment>


JWZ: Interface cruft versus my mom (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/12/interface-cruft-versus-my-mom/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the really ancient Mac he links to was. The link is broken since Apple has since drastically redesigned their support site at least once.

<comment><USER3> One of the horribly compromised x2xx series Macs, which did 64-bit operations through 32-bit, 16-bit and _8-bit_ buses to save 10c on a chip. Quite possibly the most compromised Macs ever built. I used to have one, we called it the "iTurd". It could just about crawl Mozilla 1.3. We eventually just used it as an oversized desk clock.

[http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/x200.shtml](http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/x200.shtml) (scroll down past the script errors for the text)

<comment><USER2> Ah, yes. Somehow I was fortunate enough to skip over that. My first couple of Macs that I remember getting second- or third-hand as a kid were a Performa 640CD DOS Compatible which was actually not bad at all, and had the interesting property of containing within it a 486 on a daughtercard, and then later a Power Mac 7200, which wasn't great, though at least had PCI and managed to avoid the Road Apple designation from LowEndMac.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your preferred time tracking tool? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for something that's so easy to use I'll actually remember to use it.  Preferably something with a desktop app, but open to web-only if it's good.  I've tried Klok, but don't care for the interface. <comment><USER2> I wrote this: <http://stufftodo.dedasys.com> \- although it's currently undergoing a major overhaul. If you're interested in hacking on it, improving it, selling it for a cut, or whatever, feel free to write.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried <http://www.paymo.biz/> I'm using it, it has a desktop version and a web version, works very nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, looks promising. I'll try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've yet to find a decent free offering, so I just use a spreadsheet in google docs.

</comment><comment><USER5> F5 timestamp in Notepad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Do you keep a separate log for each activity, or add a note with what activity you're working on? Also, any easy way to make that work if your default program for .txt files is not Notepad?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hamster</comment>


Ask HN: Review my first MVP - <AUTHOR>

Site: finishstart.com
Premise: Write funny stories with random strangers... one sentence at a time.
My Design Goals:
1. Be a true MVP - test the idea without wasting any time
2. Go from idea conception to deployment in 1 day (I nearly achieved that)
3. Try to develop something with some viral marketing potential
4. All content to be user generated
5. Moderation sessions should be fun
6. Try out heroku.com to see if it would be a good fit for another product
7. Do something silly and fun (I come from the enterprise software world)
You can follow my thinking through the process at http://twitter.com/finishstart
All feedback more than welcome.  Especially in the areas of:
1. Conversion - I consider a conversion to be someone who adds some well thought out content and who submits their email address to get a copy of the story sent to them on completion
2. Viral Marketing approaches
Cheers <comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

1\. You need a reason to keep people coming back - some sort of hook to keep people interested. Off the top of my head:

-private stories (restricted to a group)

-solo stories (one sentence a day for one user)

-stories limited to people with a certain birthday

-graduation class stories

-drama/english classes

-let people upvote/downvote/move sentences

-publish a blog of anything that turns out good

-allow combination of random sentences from different stories into new stories

2\. The "Anything Goes" section could easily turn into porn/adult content. That can make advertising revenue difficult and make it unusable by schools, etc.

3\. If you get a lot of traffic, this blows up and becomes hard to manage. A story could grow very rapidly if you're not careful. Although on the edge of "premature optimization" I would keep an eye ont his as you work.

Fun site. It will be interesting to see if you can take it from "interesting curiosity" to "something I check when I'm bored".

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dude I had the very idea =) Except mine was one word at a time. It came from an exercise we did in improv101.

I think you can make the UI a lot tighter. Imagine just a WHITE screen with THE story...constantly refreshing. Along with an inputbox at the top to add your contribute to it. Perhaps integrate with twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> The UI does need some work but I probably won't invest too much effort until I work out if the idea is viable.

One story is a bit hard for lots of people to concurrently work on unfortunately. Part of my strategy is to have short stories so that I can email it to the contributors when it is completed (hopefully within a day or two). Then I'm hoping they will forward the funny story to their friends (with a link of course).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good work, esp idea-to-deployment in about a day. I found this to be pretty addictive. i.e. I started filling out stories rather than hammering HN, Google News when I've got time to kill.

Suggestion: email users once per week/fortnight with a partial story + embedded form so they can play via email, especially if they haven't played for a while. Increase/decrease frequency of email sending depending on how they respond to playing via email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a ponder about your email idea. Ta.

I think I'm up against a lot of tough competition in the time killing market on the web :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had the exact same idea a long time ago. I just kept toying with it in my mind. It's so awesome to see someone actually make it.

You've made a very good first version. Just get lots of people to use it to write at least one line and then publish and popularise the finished stories on social networks. You will get to see if the stories are actually any good and also might get ideas on improving the app itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The idea is fun, but getting people back is tough. Let alone getting them to share the link with their friends. I had fun building it and iterating it over the last few days.

I'm going to give it a couple more days and if I don't see much traction I'll probably let it pass away quietly.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if this is better suited as a Facebook or twitter "game", at least for a start. For example, some friends dragged me into playing the name game on facebook and although I hardly check Facebook, that thing made me go back quite a lot. Once you get a good base of users you could get them to an independent site which is more usable and focussed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does mvp mean in this context?

<comment><USER7> I had the same question, and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product> was quite helpful in this regard :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://finishstart.com></comment>


Why Apple's 'indoor GPS' plan is brilliant - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9242393/Why_Apple_s_indoor_GPS_plan_is_brilliant

<comment><USER2> Sounds like _public tracking device_ to me. Put such a beacon in every street light and you've got something the guys at CSI would be jealous of - only that it's also public, so everyone who wants can track you if he just installs some sender. (On the other hand, the concerns with the fingerprint reader seem miniscule in comparison now.)

<comment><USER3> Cell phones have pretty much always been public tracking devices. This increases the accuracy, but for many uses, it's not that important.

The concerns with the fingerprint reader always seemed minuscule. People willingly carry around a radio tracking beacon that can not only tell people where you go every single day but also record and transmit your conversations in real time and, with a smartphone, steal all your passwords. But start using your fingerprint to unlock it and suddenly it's _oh no the gubmint is going to steal our precious bodily fluids!_ It makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> I agree 100%. First of all, I highly doubt that one of the largest tech companies in the world would blatantly _lie_ in their marketing material. Apple claims that fingerprint data never leaves the SoC and is not even accessible by the OS. I don't think they would say this if it wasn't true. Second, what use would the government have for a persons fingerprint anyway?

With regards to this iBeacon tech, my main concern is not being able to walk down the street without being bombarded by push notifications and offers from nearby retailers, although if used correctly this technology could enable a great deal of novel use cases that NFC can't due to it's short range.

Can we for once just be excited about a new piece of technology instead of hypothesizing how the government will misuse it?

<comment><USER2> > we for once just be excited about a new piece of technology instead of > hypothesizing how the government will misuse it?

Not this year at least, no.

<comment><USER5> Yup. I'd be happy if we all as an industry took a year or two to evaluate all our current technology and fixed as much as possible to make everything resistant to eavesdropping by intelligence agencies all over the world. Until I have confidence that I can trust the device in my pocket, I don't really want to be granting it even more privacy invading features ripe for abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another disappointment - these beacons will (of course) be closed off to Apple devices only. I don't think we'll see another widely-used standard like GPS for a long time.

<comment><USER7> Android already does something similar using wifi signals.

<comment><USER8> Like this: [http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/indoor-google- maps-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/indoor-google-maps-help- you-make-your.html)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yep. I will be disabling this.</comment>


My Self-Hosted Life - <AUTHOR> https://webworxshop.com/2016/10/10/my-self-hosted-life <comment><USER2> For me the problem is making stuff secure (..enough, and that would require my "full" attention).

That's why I would love if a company like Mozilla, that offers stuff I support like Firefox, started offering a paid "Google suite" with custom domains. Or at least e-mail and storage. I understand most of it is a race to the bottom but it might be viable if it was open source, community driven. What I care about is knowing my data is not being sold and paying for not having to monitor logs, update servers and all of that.

I do use the cloud but only for encrypted tar files.

I do know about alternatives like the ones listed at privacytools.io, but it's all about trust (in before someone tells me why I shouldn't trust Mozilla).

<comment><USER3> Of all the companies, I think Mozilla is one of the best ones these days. I'd not be surprised to hear there has been bad behavior from an employee or some corporate manager, but overall, they still stand for something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Completely sympathize with the reasoning behind this.

Have done similar myself, trying to make the most of low-resource software to run on low-powered hardware.

Self-hosting email, while a PITA at times (must use mailinabox next time... but spf, dmarc, tls everywhere wasn't too bad to set up, just the multiple accounts were fun) is extremely satisfying. And no, it doesn't mostly end up in a gmail inbox. But even if it does, Prism leaks resulted in Google de- pwning themselves (internal encryption), supposedly. For now, etc.

Otherwise RSS (newsbeuter), XMPP (finch), email (mutt), IRC (irssi), Drupal with nginx + php opcode caching + microcaching, Hugo sites with nginx, letsencrypt/certbot. SSH tunnels for socks and remote connections. Cheap router with tomato firmware... Quite amazing what you can run on a pi, router and low end VPS with a bit of time and effort.

Even transitioning much of my word processing to markdown/latex/pandoc for dead simple clean and quick publishing.

I may be completely deluded, but for me the future is still the command line, low powered hardware and FOSS. Its strength is in its fluid development that seems able to endure decades of change and advances, weathering rises and falls of shinier things.

More power to the OP, may many more share their non-shiny setups.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was interested in Piwik until I noticed the many, many open security issues:

[https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue...](https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22c%3A+Security%22)

Includes an issue from January about insecure random-number-generation: [https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/9473](https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/9473)

and one from March claiming that it doesn't reliably use TLS to update plugins: [https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/7582](https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/7582)

It bothers me a lot when people advocate self-hosted services with really bad security posture to increase privacy (or "control", as the author says).

<comment><USER6> Having seen the issue trackers of many closed source SaaS products, let me tell you that this is hardly anything. If anything, it's great that all this is in the open and I can assess and prepare myself in terms of sysadministration accordingly.

<comment><USER5> Maybe!

But for example Piwik's main competitor is Google Analytics. It's reasonable to not trust Google for privacy reasons, but Google employs one the largest security teams in the world and produces very well-regarded research. I trust Google with securing Google Analytics more than I trust Piwik's developers with securing Piwik.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, snicker at the failing server of the self-hosting guy, ye who are made rich by SaaS.

I applaud him for denying money to an industry that doesn't deserve it

<comment><USER8> SaaS isn't IaaS, and administrative incompetence happens on both IaaS and self-hosted.

<comment><USER7> It's software as a service, is it not?

And administrative incompetence? Dude had his server temporarily overrun with traffic. C'mon.

<comment><USER8> No, you would run Wordpress on EC2 or Google Compute; that would be IaaS, not SaaS.

As far as competence goes: you're submitting yourself to Hacker News and your Wordpress site isn't caching content? Yes, that's incompetence.

<comment><USER7> Sure, if you're a Hacker News(tm) web developer.

But computin' is such a big field...

<comment><USER8> Or if I'm a high-school student in 2005. Because I was building Wordpress sites for people then. And staticize (or, later, staticize-reloaded) was on everything I built. If you can't step to a high-school student in a backwater state who had access to state-of-the-PHP _eleven years ago_ when you want to start virtue-signaling your way to glory (and don't pretend creating an account just to post a story is anything but), you are not building a argument for yourself.

The best part is, though? For all his very manly self-reliance, this blog of his _is_ on a DigitalOcean droplet. He isn't "denying" anything to anyone, whether they deserve it or not (and that's a laughable sentiment in your OP anyway, _while we 're at it_).

<comment><USER7> Well, technically Linode. Not DO, but close enough :P That is pretty funny though.

My sentiments remain. I want a world of self-reliant experts, not halfwitted idea-people who see technology as a means to an end. That may not be this world, but one can dream.

PS: He admits as such in the blog that it is hosted on a VPS. And no one person is going to be able to step to another on every possible criteria. (Frankly, I read your high-school 2005 PHP staticize story with probably the same eye-rolling you gave that dude, cause i was building static HTML in elementary school in the 90s and was doing dynamic flash sites before AJAX became a think in the mid-aughts... and the dude sitting one cubicle over would roll HIS eyes at me because he used to program simulators and missile code for the military in the 70s and 80s. Holier-than-thou can backfire)

<comment><USER8> I was building static sites in elementary school in the nineties, too. I was building _correct things_ that _worked in a business context_ in high school in 2005. In your haste to praise the guy for nonsense virtues of "self- reliance"\--and let me be real for a sec, I've been paid in the last year to debug kernel drivers on physical hardware and architect self-bootstrapping, multi-tier, cross-datacenter systems, I could be said to be big on "self- reliance"\--you missed the forest for the trees: _his stuff doesn 't work_.

Setting up mail is easy. Setting up a web server that doesn't go down under medium load is easy. If you want to lecture others about this sort of thing, you had best come correct. Because those of us who _do_ \--and who especially those of us who are capable of using tools hosted in either our own racks or Amazon's without trouble, who are likely to have a problem with the shitty virtue-signaling in his post--will call you on it. Because the world is not so simple as to scream that "SaaS is bad!" and, _sometimes_ , there are economics of scale worth leveraging. There is no virtue in refusing them; there are places for self-hosting and there are places for cloud systems and ascribing the rise of cloud services to "halfwitted idea-people" is a sign of a profoundly juvenile understanding of both the technologies and the economics involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kind of comically ironic. I can't currently load the article.. Hug of death I'm guessing? So much for self-hosting?

<comment><USER10> Keeping the site online despite being self hosted and on the front page of HN might be the ultimate challenge for the people fond of self hosting!

<comment><USER11> Not using Wordpress to serve static blog content should be a good start.

Also running the database, webserver, mail server, etc. off a single machine is just asking for trouble.

<comment><USER8> Wordpress can trivially handle "static blog content" with any of a number of caching plugins. (And you get a lot more out of it, in my experience, than trying to use Jekyll or the like.)

nginx, PHP-FPM and APC, your caching tool of choice, done.

<comment><USER12> And yet after all these years, they've never bothered to roll functionality like that into the base install.

<comment><USER8> I much prefer, as somebody who uses this stuff pretty heavily, to make the choice of caching particulars myself and to not have to unscrew their defaults. A cache API would be fine, but I'd rather have as few decisions made inside Wordpress as possible.

<comment><USER12> I know that attitude well, but really this is a problem that's persisted for years and they have basically acted like it's not their problem, which leaves me unimpressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the first I've heard of Syncthing. Would be interested to know if hn people think it is reasonably secure. Finding a good self-hosted sync option is hard, one of the last places where I'm reluctant to give up SaaS (using Egnyte now since ~2010). Waiting for magic folders from Least Authority. And then even if they put down zcash long enough to finish the magic folders project, someone still has to build a GUI for idiots like me. Is Syncthing security OK for relatively normal people who don't have any secrets of interest to the Russians?

<comment><USER14> Syncthing has a good reputation in every department except the usability one. It's workflow is generally considered a bit clumsy, but it's a good product.

You could also look into librevault if you're interested in pursuing this avenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good post! I run a homeserver too. It serves media content (1080p) to everyone in the house and never has any trouble. It's main purposes are running Plex and nginx, and soon, e-mail. Only port 80 is accessible to the internet atm (it's fun to read the access logs & see the latest exploit attempts)

It's hard because you have to really be on top of security, but it's worth it.

> You might say that this is a bit of a cop out, since this all runs on a > virtual machine, which itself runs on someone else's computer. I would > agree, however it's a nice middle ground between going all out with your own > servers and running everything in the cloud. To me the reality that the VPS > is in the cloud is obscured by the ability to control every detail of its > running software.

Hmm. Contrarily, this part convinced me to completely self-host all aspects of my internet life.

Also, sorry about your blog going down! What was the cause of that?

</comment><comment><USER16> > I have taken the decision to self-host as much of my online services as > possible, rather than relying on the cloud (since that's just someone else's > computer)

I understand the desire to take control, and have been on a similar kick lately to reduce my dependence on The Cloud. But I'm not an experienced network or system admin and I'm not concerned about using Someone Else's Computer when it's convenient for me. What I am worried about is my data being locked in to any particular service or being a pain to migrate somewhere else if I want.

I've also been documenting my progress, if anyone's interested. It's on a not- self-hosted-but-still-extremely-portable GitHub Pages site: [http://ajashton.ca/decloud/](http://ajashton.ca/decloud/)

</comment><comment><USER17> For those looking into self-hosting, there are many great options these days. [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#self- hosting-...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#self-hosting- solutions) has a full list.

</comment><comment><USER18> I believe Monit could have solved this, check it out: [https://mmonit.com/monit/](https://mmonit.com/monit/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I second your self-hosted life. "The Cloud" is just someone else's computer running Apache instead of mine. I will never pay for someone else's servers. That just makes no sense to me.

<comment><USER20> Do you homeschool your kids? Grow your own produce? Kill your own cows?

I mean, why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?

Unless you do servers. In that case, sure. Whatever.

<comment><USER17> You do own your own phone right? Owning a server on the cloud is no different. There will be a future shortly where everyone keeps their data on their own servers instead of handing out to all these corporations.

<comment><USER20> I own my phone, but the data is still in the cloud.

I'm not sure I agree with your version of the future. People don't know enough ( and don't want to) about security, scalability, availability, etc.

<comment><USER17> OK, since you own your phone. Do you have any clue about security and availability of your phone? Why do you think millions can own and "run" their own phone but not own and run their server?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What about just the simple fact of internet connection? Bandwidth limitations? Are you on a business line? If not, I probably wouldn't be a very happy neighbor ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is how computer nerds have been doing it since the 80s.

</comment><comment><USER22> FTFA:

For those that know me, I've made no secret of the fact that I believe that you are better off doing something yourself than outsourcing the task to someone else, especially in areas that you are interested in or have some expertise. For me this has particular value in the case of my computing. As a result, I have taken the decision to self-host as much of my online services as possible, rather than relying on the cloud (since that's just someone else's computer). I've been working on this for years (actually the whole time this blog has been dark and before) and at this stage I'm mostly there: almost all of my digital life is provided by Open Source software, running under my control.

This post will detail what I'm using and how it all fits together. I'm not going to go into technical specifics since otherwise this post would be huge, perhaps I'll focus on some of that in future posts (feel free to make requests in the comments). Also, please note that my setup is by no means finished and probably never will be, it's an ongoing project and it has become pretty much my main hobby to install and maintain this stuff. In the Cloud

I'm going to start right here, with this blog, since that was where the whole thing really started. This blog existed well before my undertaking to self- host. In the early days it lived on a shared hosting plan provided by Dreamhost. The site has always run WordPress, although I've toyed with the idea of moving to a static site over the years, I've just never quite managed it. In 2011 I moved the site to a shiny new VPS provided by Linode, where it has lived ever since. There is also a Piwik install for tracking website stats (which I've blogged about before).

The main motivation behind the VPS was to install and configure my own mail server setup, something which I ranted about shortly after. This setup has be serving myself and various family members well since then, with really very little maintenance on my part (almost everything is automated).

There have been various other uses for the VPS over time, many of which haven't stuck. Probably the most successful has been an installation of TT- RSS, which started life on my home server and at some point moved to the VPS for convenience of access. I've also dabbled with various chat applications, mainly XMPP based, but they've never really been that useful due to the network effect of no-one else using them! At this stage email has become my primary form of communication.

You might say that this is a bit of a cop out, since this all runs on a virtual machine, which itself runs on someone else's computer. I would agree, however it's a nice middle ground between going all out with your own servers and running everything in the cloud. To me the reality that the VPS is in the cloud is obscured by the ability to control every detail of its running software. Its also pretty nice for services which I want to be reliable, since Linode almost never skips a beat. At Home

So the VPS is one thing and is really used for critical services or stuff that needs to be accessible to the wider Internet (like this site), but the real magic happens on my home servers (yes, there is more than one). My main server (now on its second hardware iteration) started life as a MythTV system and still does a great job in this respect. Many other services have been added over time, such as an MQTT broker (mosquitto), git server (gitolite+gitweb), a calendar/contacts server (Radicale) and file synchronisation (Syncthing). At some point I also switched out the MythTV frontend and replaced it with XBMC (now Kodi).

In the last couple of years I've been moving further down the home automation route, rather than just sensing and logging via MQTT. I've finally settled on Home Assistant as my automation controller and UI, along with an instance of Node-RED to do some miscellaneous processing. This all runs on the main server, with a Raspberry Pi 2 in the garage functioning as what I like to call 'the gateway' (it has a couple of radios and some sensors connected and runs another instance of Node-RED to shuttle this data to MQTT). In addition I have my home CCTV set up using a couple of webcams and MotionEye. One of the cameras is located remotely and connected to another Raspberry Pi (this time an old model B) and streams back to the main server with mjpg-streamer.

I also run a pfsense based firewall to protect my network and provide remote VPN access. This runs on an old netbook with an extra USB ethernet adapter. The internal network is partitioned using VLANs to provide a separate firewalled subnet for the home automation gear, some of which is cheap Chinese stuff which needs to be forcibly prevented from talking to the cloud. The networking gear consists of two TP-Link routers, flashed with OpenWRT which provides nice VLAN support. These have been configured to just provide switching and wireless access points and delegate all the firewalling, DNS and DHCP stuff to the firewall.

Within the last year or so I've been working on streamlining the management of all of this. The principle focus of this has been monitoring all the services I've got running. For this I've settled on Nagios, which I run in a separate VM hosted on the main home server. Although complex to set up, I can't talk highly enough of Nagios, it's brilliant and it saves me so much time just by knowing what is going on on my network. Email notifications from Nagios of course go via my own mail server! I've also played around with collectd, InfluxDB and Grafana for performance graphing, although I've yet to deploy this to everything. Conclusion and The Future

So that was a probably non-exhaustive list of my self-hosting activities. I'm sure I've probably forgotten many things and of course there are the huge amounts of supporting software that I haven't mentioned. As I said, I'm now at the stage where this meets almost all my computing needs although there are a few areas where I want to improve.

The main thing is automating and persisting my configuration, since I'm still mostly doing things manually. For this I've settled on a combination of Ansible and Docker. I've played extensively with both but haven't really made much progress with deploying them for much more than testing purposes.

I'm also constantly evaluating new software to fill gaps in my ecosystem. I'm currently looking at Rocket.Chat and Hubot to provide a chat based interface for remote administration, but don't have a usable system yet. I'm also toying with the idea of a Gitlab server to replace the gitolite+gitweb system and to utilise the CI in my automation strategy, but I've heard it requires a bit in terms of resources (incidently gitlab.com is really the only 3rd party service I heavily use).

That I am able to do this at all is a testament to the power of Free and Open Source software and cheap commodity hardware. I find it pretty awesome to think that almost every interaction I have online utilises my own infrastructure and that it works tirelessly for me 24/7.

I'm only just getting started documenting my setup here, for instance this post hasn't touched on any of the client applications I use on my phone and desktop machines. I'm also going to do some more technical posts on various aspects as time goes on, so please stay tuned (or even subscribe to the RSS feed or mailing list!).

</comment><comment><USER21> What to do when your self hosted life crashes? Get a new life?

</comment><comment><USER23> Wait is this a joke? Like if you self host, you're stuff gonna break and you have to deal with the maintenance headaches? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER24> "Error establishing a database connection" Oh the irony :) Poor guy!

</comment><comment><USER25> "Error establishing a database connection"

<comment><USER26> We did it once again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27>
      My Self-Hosted Life
      "Error establishing a database connection"

I think this may have been one of the more unintentionally ironic and hilarious blog posts Ive seen in awhile.

While I run my own server for some personal projects I'd never advise people to do it unless they absolutely have to. The maintenance, security updates and embarrassing events like these for the most part are not worth it.

<comment><USER3> Just as many non-self hosted Wordpress installs go down. It's Wordpress that's extremely slow.

Edit: Besides, the article mentions "the VPS is one thing and is really used for critical services or stuff that needs to be accessible to the wider Internet (like this site), but the real magic happens on my home servers". That isn't the self-hosted part anyway. /end of edit.

> I'd never advise people to do it unless they absolutely have to.

I'd compare it to work. When doing a project for a client, all else being equal, you'd rather have them pay a bit more so you have more time to develop a great product. Rush jobs are never fun and you usually have to cut corners. If you can make your code nice, it can be made flexible and neatly extendable.

Same for hosting: yeah it takes a little more time than getting shared hosting, but it gives you so much freedom to install and configure your own software. Save for perhaps mail servers, it's pretty much always worth it in the long run if you can afford it in the short run.</comment></comment>


Why I am Switching from Chrome to FireFox  - <AUTHOR> http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/19/why-i-am-switching-from-chrome-to-firefox/ <comment><USER2> Firefox is better for development. Chrome for fast browsing. Firefox loads slower, but has FireBug. But browsing pages, reading news is cool with chrome. Those crashes are true. I hate them. I think these two are the best browsers and I use both of them. They both have their strengths.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a better solution, which saves me from crashes, and allows me to use the browser of my choice: I don't have flash.

Problem solved!

</comment><comment><USER4> Another firefox wish: And have the tabs pointing upwards above the address bar instead of under the bar so that you save screen estate.

<comment><USER5> I know! They took a good Chrome UX idea and only half-implemented it. There's a good 10px up there being totally wasted. Google would never let that happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been very impressed with the speed, UX, and functionality of FF4. Yet, I still haven't switched.

I don't see how you are getting Chrome crashes though. I NEVER get a Chrome crash (but I also use Flashblock)

</comment><comment><USER6> turn off the built in flash for chrome in "about:plugins" and leave flash from macromedia on and it works fine.</comment>