Automatic server hardening framework - <AUTHOR> https://telekomlabs.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a nice and comfortable way to set sane defaults for nginx, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and some Unix stuff - but they really should have been set by each software in the first place.

I like, the private touch the screencast and the developer-designed website gives the project, even if part of a big company. This actually raises its credibility.

<comment><USER3> _they really should have been set by each software_

Yes, and it seems to me that distros (at least those intended for "enterprise") should be hardened by default also. If I install RHEL or OEL and then have to run a Chef or Puppet config to "harden" it, something is wrong.

<comment><USER4> Well, thats been tried and rejected by the user base. If you harden too much it becomes a real PITA to do anything productive (SELinux running in strict mode).

RHEL aims to be secure, while also remaining fairly compatible with previous versions.

Red Hat do have documentation on how to harden, but most users don't use it and instead turn SELinux completely off as one of the first configuration steps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool, but seems like it would be nice to have the hardening steps documented outside of code too (for those of us with more exotic provisioning tastes).

<comment><USER6> I completely agree. I was looking for the SSH settings but I don't use Puppet or Chef. This is why I prefer shell scripts so I can see what's going on and run parts of it on my own.

<comment><USER7> You can check the references here in the lifecycle section: [http://telekomlabs.github.io/docs/](http://telekomlabs.github.io/docs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems bad that it disables IPv6 "for security".

<comment><USER9> Disable anything you don't use. I wish it weren't so but IPv6 is probably a safe assumption there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ansible support would be spiffy.

<comment><USER11> I was looking for the same thing; however I can't find any acknowledgement of Ansible's existence anywhere on the site or in the docs :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> tldr its a set of open source puppet/chef/others modules to harden the default configuration of common daemons.

</comment><comment><USER13> The audio on the demo video is really choppy, is that just me?

<comment><AUTHOR> The same is happening for me, didn't notice it when I watched it before I posted it though. Maybe Vimeo is having problems.

<comment><USER14> It's not vimeo. Downloading the video and playing it locally with VLC yields the same problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It this an arm of T-Mobile (the US carrier)? Their logos are strikingly similar, but their websites make no reference to each other.

Telekom Labs logo: [http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/public/Deutsch/Pages/def...](http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/public/Deutsch/Pages/default.aspx)

T-Mobile logo: [http://www.t-mobile.com/](http://www.t-mobile.com/)

<comment><USER16> T-Mobile is the US subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

<comment><USER17> Nitpicking: T-Mobile is the international mobile branch of Deutsche Telekom, not just in the US (though there is a US subsidiary).

Other branches include T-Online (private ISP, actually a former subsidiary), T-Systems (subsidiary proving services to the public sector and larger corporations) and T-Home (which I have trouble telling apart from T-Online). There may be other branches too, but in practice most people in Germany just lump them all together anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


ISIS Twitter Accounts Run from British Government IP Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.haktuts.in/2015/12/isis-twitter-accounts-run-from-british-Government-IP-Addresses.html <comment><USER2> TL;DR: IP blocks, that used to be british where sold and are now are saudi arabian. (IP4s are getting rare)

title is plain wrong</comment>


Changing the Way VC's do Business - <AUTHOR> http://h360capital.com/category/news-updates

<comment><USER2> I don't think many venture capital firms work precisely in the way this man describes. VC's aren't stupid, and they wouldn't do anything to actively limit their scope of companies to invest in. Every VC looks around for fresh ideas. I think that often times startups who know VCs will go to them with ideas, but not as a springboard or as an "I know you" handout. I think that startups often just go to the connection they have first because its the first place they think of, and VCs picks them up if they are a good idea like any other start up. If we found consistently bad startups which were made by connections then this gentleman's claims may hold weight. I think that this VC will likely find himself turning down many good connection startups by believing that they're doing good and being fair. Its tough to break into any industry, and a connection helps, but only as exposure, not sway toward automatic capital. Exposure shouldn't be taken as a handicap to other start ups. If the startups without many connections have a good idea the interns in VC firms will notice them in not very long and forward the idea to their boss. That or they can apply to Ycom. The point is that this is a pure enough industry that the door doesn't close after the first 10 startups get funding, and those first ten will be judged just like the next 20 or 30 because there's no VC deadline every year (first come first served on applies when there are first in a time frame. No time frame, no firsts). Any VC that doesn't is handicapping themselves or using a different business model. (Mind the poor english. Its nap time where I am. Also, this article seems to conflict with Ycom's systems, but it doesn't. People that would have had connections just apply to Ycom like everyone else. If anything Ycom has found an effective way of increasing their scope unlike this VC which limited their scope to startups they don't know.)</comment>


Ask HN: Are crypto-stocks the next big thing for startup funding? - <AUTHOR>

I found crypto-stocks amazingly interesting but I have seen only a few companies like ASIC Miner who successfully  implemented so far:
https://btct.co/security
Would this become best innovation landscape for startup funding raising? <comment><USER2> I am by no means an expert on Bitcoins or the economy, but here is what I think.

Bitcoin, as a technology consisting of self-sustaining peer-to-peer electronic currency, is solid.

Bitcoin, as a commodity or a security, is not solid at this time.

In the latter case, it is new, immature, and above all more volatile than traditional currencies. In the coming decades those three things may change, but I would not look into Bitcoins as a reliable investment or as a method of funding a company.

Just a simple example: your company has 50 common stocks worth 1 BTC each, and the value of BTC then suddenly goes from $120 to $160 by the end of the week, and then $110 by the middle of the next week. How do investors value you in such a case? Things get really complicated.

If the US dollar's value changed so drastically and so suddenly, the stock market would become pretty ridiculous. Plus there is the potential risk of major Bitcoin exchanges going out of business or being restricted by law enforcement in the future.</comment>


How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Visakan-Veerasamy/Posts/Cheating-to-Learn-How-a-UCLA-professor-gamed-a-game-theory-midterm <comment><USER2> Original link: [http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/04/15/why-i-let-my- st...](http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/04/15/why-i-let-my-students- cheat-on-the-final/ideas/nexus/)</comment>


Here is why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same thing every day - github-cat http://www.pixelstek.com/article/1425193215-Here-is-why-Mark-Zuckerberg-wears-the-same-thing-every-day

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds like an over simplification for something that requires minimal effort. I wake up, shower, grab a pair of shorts off the top shelf, grab a polo / printed t-shirt off the shelf just below it. Yesterday I wore a light blue t-shirt with a multi color (but mostly blue) pair of shorts; today I have a black t-shirt with orange shorts. The decisions took me 10 seconds to make, most of which was multitasking color choice while putting on a watch and deodorant.

Your appearance says volumes about you - some of us may take it further; i'll match the color on my Apple Watch face to the majority clothing color I'm wearing (so orange today) but again, takes seconds to do and doesn't require much thought, if any.

Once upon a time, this society didn't leave the house without a suit or a dress on; now your lucky if most people are wearing clean clothes I guess.

<comment><USER2> Your apparence says volumes about the people who watch and judge you. And if the sellers in a boutique snob you because of your apparence, then you can give your money to amazon.com instead: they don't care how you look at amazon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Few others too seem to have the identical reason for similar behaviour: [http://elitedaily.com/money/science-simplicity-successful- pe...](http://elitedaily.com/money/science-simplicity-successful-people-wear- thing-every-day/849141/)

<comment> github-cat Maybe when you at that position, you will have the same thought. :)

<comment><USER4> Rather they try to mimic wiser people. This behaviour is attributed to Albert Einstein wearing same-looking suits every day.</comment></comment></comment>


Going Serverless with OpenFaaS and Golang – Building Optimized Templates - <AUTHOR> https://martinheinz.dev/blog/11 <comment><USER2> About gives me a 404

If I understand that correctly, this structure implies that the function would directly call a DB if it would need to authenticate and or authorise a request (assuming the request claims to be for/by a specific user) wouldn't that be just like a monolith?

<comment><USER3> I am not the author of the blog post, but I am the founder of OpenFaaS. Here is an example with database access - [https://www.openfaas.com/blog/serverless-single-page- app/](https://www.openfaas.com/blog/serverless-single-page-app/)</comment></comment>


What happened to Firefox Send? - <AUTHOR> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-send <comment><USER2> See recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508880)

<comment><USER3> When the service went from unlimited open access to being put behind a login wall, I assumed they were using this tool to pull more users into the Firefox ecosystem (like what google does). I stopped using the service at that point since it effectively lost the privacy aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad. I really enjoyed using it while it was up. The code is open source, and they have docs on how to set it up for self hosting. I wonder if there is a chance some active forks might live on?

[https://github.com/mozilla/send](https://github.com/mozilla/send) [https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/docs/deployment....](https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/docs/deployment.md)

<comment><USER5> We still have Magic Wormhole though and it's awesome! (at least for techies) [https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html](https://magic- wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html)

<comment><USER6> "We" as in "the people who knows how to use the command line". Unfortunately very few of the people I send files to knows that.

There's [https://webwormhole.io/](https://webwormhole.io/) and [https://file.pizza/](https://file.pizza/) , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Native open-source software for this would be a dream come true. It's 2020 and I still wrestle with sending files between devices. And no, don't take this as a wish for creating just another service. :)

<comment><USER7> I've started a UI for magic wormhole:

[https://github.com/sneakypete81/wormhole- ui](https://github.com/sneakypete81/wormhole-ui)

It's GPL, cross-platform, native (Qt) and uses the same Python library as the Magic Wormhole CLI.

<comment><USER8> I've tested it on my own devices and it installed and worked without a hitch. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really don't understand it.

\- Content was used to spread malware/illegal content

\- It was not profitable

How are those two things something you find out after the fact? What was the reasoning for launching the product in the first place?

<comment><USER10> Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. Foundation does not care either, since it is busy with increasing own remuneration and politics.

Meanwhile their core product lost around 10 percentage points of market share (from 15% marketshare to 5%):

1) Nobody works on Firefox any more. From 1000 people in Mozilla and how many working on Firefox? 50? and 950 doing various (useless) side projects?

2) they don't understand their own product and its user base: they killed extensions, killed ability to customize anything. Basically they rebranded to a "worse Chrome".

3) They dont care about quality and ship a half baked product. Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited.

4) Countless bugs and problems caused by their own decisions (e.g. all extensions need to be signed - they forget to sign them so they stopped working..)

5) Not caring about the product at all because some people inside are stubborn dinosaurs. Firefox didnt have proper installers for business, just because someone inside didnt want to provide them. It's like sabotage.

Their tech savy user base gets alienated every day: no more extensions, no more customization, constant broken workflow (changes for the sake of doing changes, while old things are never repaired - greenfileds are easier). At some point you start to wonder, why use a Chrome clone that is worse than Chrome?

I expect that the marketshare will go from 5% to 0.% What will be terrible for everyone. We are already losing the address bar due to Google AMP. [on a sidenote: when Chrome pushed for Google AMP, Firefox didnt capitalize on it - in fact Firefox also changed the address bar as if the Firefox team wanted to secretly support AMP..]

Those teams probably know very well that Firefox is a sinking ship, since development teams are not working on core product; but they dont care, they will jump. Meanwhile those few who worked on Firefox are left holding the bag, while they were "paying" for all those side projects, that just siphoned money / development time from core product that is Firefox.

<comment><USER11> > Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It > is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited.

Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF?

I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

<comment><USER12> They made simple workflows more complicated, removed features and move UI elements around for no apparent reason.

Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

There was a useful list of most frequently visited sites on the homepage, which they've decided to remove.

Opening a new tab or a favourite now requires at least two taps (one on top of the screen, and the second at the bottom), or one long press, while it required only one tap before.

With their experience in software development, Mozilla should now that users mostly hate changes, although we can be fine with it when there are improvements too. But in this case, there's no improvements as far as I could see, just random changes to the UI, a few things worse, a few things different for no reason, but nothing better.

Overall it gives very little confidence in what they're doing. It seems there's no leadership or overall vision at Mozilla, just random teams making random changes just for fun.

<comment><USER13> > Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the > screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

As someone with a larger phone, this has made things 100x easier. Previously, the address bar was out of reach with one hand.

Personally, I'm really happy with all of the changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sad! Developer of `ffsend` here.

I've built `ffsend` as CLI tool for Send to securely share files from the command line. It has been a great success! Thanks Mozilla, for building and providing this amazing service!

For the interested: [https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend](https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend)

I'm currently hosting a public Send instance myself so ffsend keeps working. Let's see how long I can keep this going (and funded). It's available at send.vis.ee .

<comment><USER15> Was this shutting down as surprising and out-of-left-field to yourself as someone more closely connected to the project, as it seems to me?

<comment><USER14> Pretty much. They suddenly took it down for 'maintenance'. The relaunch was delayed. Mozilla released a statement on laying off 250 employees. That's when I figured it wouldn't come back online again.

<comment><USER16> I don't have any specific knowledge, but my general impression was that malware was a very real issue that nobody could come up with a realistic response to. Other than that, it seems like Send was a breakout success.

(I work for Mozilla, but mostly on the JS engine.)

<comment><USER17> With the utmost respect, can somebody please tell if anyone thought of requiring a Firefox account? Or charge $2/mo and go from there? Products usually iterate on design and security, no? Not just give up right away?

Some of us recommended a Firefox+ service that bundles Firefox Send, the VPN, etc. and charge a monthly premium. I would've paid a lot of money. Nothing makes any sense looking from outside!

<comment><USER18> Somehow Mozilla nowadays reminds me of Yahoo! in the late 2000s and its struggles to remain relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 0-_-0 This is due to people sharing malware:

[https://www.techradar.com/news/mozilla-suspends-firefox- send...](https://www.techradar.com/news/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-service- following-malware-abuse)

The content can't be scanned server-side because uploaded files are encrypted

<comment><USER19> I mean... Were they really suprised by this? An encrypted file sharing service, of course it's going to be used for sharing malware and illegal content.. I'm not sure what would've been the solution for this issue, but it was pretty clear that that was gonna happen...

<comment><USER20> Exactly. Most definitely bad actors would use this free encrypted file-sharing service. But I suspect that this wasn't even sustainable for Mozilla to begin with.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Either Send is more long lived than I realized, or I have a very different definition of "legacy"

From the Mozilla Blog: ... we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes.

<comment><USER22> No, you remembered correctly.

> It was launched on March 12, 2019

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For transferring large files between machines that don't necessarily have the same clients installed I find file.pizza quite convenient.

My understanding is it basically loads a JavaScript BitTorrent client and let's you transfer using that protocol, so both ends needs to be online, but there is no file size limit, and good support on flaky connections.

There's a few services like this, but I always find file.pizza to be the one that I remember the name of :)

[https://file.pizza/](https://file.pizza/)

EDIT: as other people in this thread, I am also having trouble getting file.pizza to work, in both Safari and Chrome.

Maybe it isn't the answer it used to be.

<comment><USER24> Has been shared a lot on hn and i always find it funny that it is simply not working for me. I can't even transfer files between tabs in a single browser nor between browsers on the same host.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps your browser stops Javascript in tabs that are not active (?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To be honest, I think some form of abuse was bound to happen. Your files are encrypted client-side with JavaScript before uploading, so to the server it's just an opaque blob.

Out of curiosity, I did some technical analysis¹ of how your files were being encrypted to see if they were really secure and as a side-effect, also wrote a Go client for it.

An interesting property I did discover about the way the encryption keys are derived is that the scheme allows you to delegate an oblivious third-party to download the blob for you, without actually revealing the file contents to them.

¹ [https://irq5.io/2019/05/14/data-encryption-on-firefox- send/](https://irq5.io/2019/05/14/data-encryption-on-firefox-send/)

<comment><USER27> Might be a stupid question, but why server can't see the secret key?

You said that "note that URL fragments are never sent to the server", which is true when uploading the file. But when someone is downloading the file, they need to use this full URL with secret key right? By then, the server will get the key and can decrypt the file themselves.

<comment><USER28> See the post that OP linked:

> Note that URL fragments are never sent to the server. They are often used > for page anchors, and sometimes to keep track of local state in SPA.

Also see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment#Basics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment#Basics)

<comment><USER27> Thank you for the info. I thought it's setup specific, didn't know anchor string is never sent to servers _in general_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This was a great service for transferring 1 off files between 2 people (such as 500mb wav files for podcast episodes which is what I used it for).

As it turns out, you can get similar behavior with Dropbox. The person sending the file doesn't need a Dropbox account either. You just send them a URL and then they have permission to upload the file.

The only extra step vs Firefox Send is you as the receiver need to delete the file after you've downloaded it. Technically that's optional but in my case that's what I wanted to do.

<comment><USER30> The downside with Dropbox's way is that a lot of people using the link will think that they need to register an account.

I think the link offers you to create one but it's not clear that it's not required.

<comment><USER31> So use Nextcloud instead ;-) You can link-share files and folders as read- only, write-only (i.e. upload drop), or read-and-write.

<comment><USER32> Let me spin up a $5 vps on some random company, setup next cloud, and then send a link to my friend so he can download a song? Silly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tangentially, I wonder what's happening with Lockwise. [1] It also seems to be languishing without significant improvements. I was expecting it to be a competitor, at least on mobile, to the likes of Bitwarden, 1Password, and other solutions.

[1]: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/lockwise/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/lockwise/)

<comment><USER34> I'm so happy I decided to move away from Chrome's password manager and Firefox Lockwise and instead use Bitwarden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I once again don't have a good solution for 'how do I email a large file' but [https://webwormhole.io/](https://webwormhole.io/) is useful and simple, particularly for sending something big to someone you're video chatting with.

<comment><USER36> Up to 2GB

[https://wetransfer.com](https://wetransfer.com)

<comment><USER35> Thank you.

Do we trust them and their security approach? Genuine question - it was a major selling point to me that Mozilla were operating Firefox Send. I was happy to give some trust to them and their approach to encryption.

<comment><USER37> I used to work there, security was mostly decent with the exception of not encrypting files client side. We advocated for it many times but the founders wanted to keep the UI as simple as possible for users, which means that forcing users to send the encryption keys to the receiver via a secondary channel (ie not via WeTransfer, which would defeat the purpose as we would be able to MITM it) was a no-go. You can always encrypt the files yourself with the method of your choice and then send the encryption key over Telegram/Signal/whatever. The company has existed for over 10 years now and is profitable, so it's not going to disappear overnight or anything.

That said, the thing that apparently killed Mozilla Send (becoming a hub for spam and child abuse material) was much easier to handle. The last big project I was involved in was an automated photoDNA scanner to detect suspected child abuse material. It would pull in various lists of hashes of known bad material and flag any matches for manual verification by the department of the Dutch police that handles such things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is one thing they could have done better in partnership with someone whose main business is hosting and transferring files.

I said it yesterday: Mozilla and Dropbox should talk. Alone they will perish, united they'll be a real alternative to FAANG.

<comment><USER39> Netflix and filesharing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I switched to croc ([https://github.com/schollz/croc](https://github.com/schollz/croc)) to send large files. Works great across macOS and Windows. It's synchronous, one-time, so not a fire-and-forget system. But quick for large files (sending custom disk images for Raspberry Pi).

</comment><comment><USER41> This was really funny because I tried to use it for the first time just after it was taken down, but before the announcement. At that time, it loaded a page that made it seem like it was just offline temporarily.

<comment><USER23> According to the press release, it was taken offline temporarily and after that they decided to do it permanently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish we could get every major OS to work on an open standard for file transfer from device to device (locally).

<comment><USER43> +1 AirDrop is pretty cool but proprietary.

Android Beam looked promising but Google killed it for something proprietary. Samsung had an updated version that used WiFi Direct, but I don't know if it was open.

It seems that something that was somewhat plugable would be very useful.

\- NFC or bluetooth for setup. \- Bluetooth, Wifi Direct or Internet for transfer.

Mesh networking would be cool as well but I don't think it is actually needed for the MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> And mere minutes after reading this, what should come in on my newsfeed?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503077)

Another tool for sending encrypted files from one machine to another. Viva la Hacker News!

</comment><comment><USER45> I was under the impression Firefox Send was one of the upcoming paid service offerings. At least, that we were seeing the free service and waiting some premium features to be released later on. It will be missed, it was a really easy and intuitive solution for file sharing,

<comment><USER46> I was really hoping this would be the case. Sync + Send + Lockwise would be a bundle of services worth paying a subscription for. Provided that they also made them available on Chrome rather than using them as lock-in features.

But there seems to be zero plans towards financial independence for Mozilla Corp. The management board appears to be all too cozy with Google funds lining their pockets. A financially independent Mozilla Corp. would probably mean less money for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> ....oh.

I have used it a few times in the past for the classic task "move large file between two computers that are next to each other, how the hell do I do this simply", but yeah, I can't see how that would be cost-effective for Firefox.

<comment><USER48> Between Unix-based machines on the same network my go-to is netcat.

      receiver$ nc -l 2000 > file
      sender$ nc receiver 2000 < file

I usually check MD5 sums when I'm done.

<comment><USER49> SCP. simply for the encrypted transmission, and most *nix machines have ssh

<comment><USER48> It does require having an account on both machines though. I've used nc in situations where one machine is owned by someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Too bad. Never used it myself but it seemed like a useful tool from someone I trust.

</comment><comment><USER51> I used this service fairly often with clients to send me large files... pretty much drag and drop and send me the link to the file. I thought it was great.

I guess I'll check out some of the alternatives listed in the comments here now.

</comment><comment><USER52> The fact that you need a 3rd party service to send a file between two computers is a failure of the Internet as a whole.

Instead of addressing it, the technical community as a whole just keeps putting bandaids on it.

<comment><USER53> What makes it difficult are two problems:

\- Dealing with NAT

\- Security

Making a protocol for connecting to another machine and sending (or requesting) a file is easy. We solved that a couple decades ago.

But how do you do it when both ends are behind NAT? UPNP was supposed to solve this problem, but not everyone uses UPNP, and it's pain in the ass to deal with port forwarding, also, good luck trying to walk grandma through setting up a port forward on her router.

<comment><USER52> I know. And it's a failure of an Internet and software ecosystem as whole.

Somewhere between 2000 and 2010 we just accepted how much of fiasco and garbage everything have became.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Discussion yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508880)

</comment><comment><USER55> The challenge I have is when someone non-technical needs to send me a very large file.

I've resorted to spinning up a pureftp server in docker and having them drop it there.

<comment><USER56> jokes on you [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/09/chrome-86-...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/09/chrome-86-deps- rems)

<comment><USER55> I don't think you could write FTP via Firefox...I think it was read-only?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh dear. A stunning failure of another Firefox product which was hyped to hot air: [0]

Looks like Mozilla really needs to find something to _actually_ be more competitive than their current offerings of 'VPNs', 'File Sharing' and 'Web Browsers'.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367850)

<comment><USER57> I really wish they would focus on safe/private browsing and email and stay the heck out of everything else.

<comment><USER58> They gotta figure out a way to bring in revenue with safe/private browsing and email then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Hahahaha. I have always thought this looked like a great product but never really had a need for it.

I had a file slightly too large to email last night and thought I'd try FF Send for the first time ever, only to be greeted with `Service Unavailable`.

It's a real bummer this is going away, and I hope this isn't a sign of more to come.

</comment><comment><USER60> We have built an alternative to Firefox Send. End-to-end encrypted, faster, more space, and more features coming. [https://encl.io](https://encl.io)

</comment><comment><USER61> Hows firefox doing these days? I've not really used it since it used to run out of memory every few hours, did try it again after they rewrote everything but it was really buggy with half the sites I frequent not working.

<comment><USER62> Check your extensions and privacy settings. Firefox is more aggressive in blocking trackers and that _does_ break some authentication flows that involve trackers. You can always disable some of those protections to get the website to work, though I haven't had to do that in ages.

Other than that, Firefox on the Mac is consistently easier on the fans than Chrome, and unlike Chrome, I almost never get runaway processes.

Web pages are also as snappy as Chrome. If a page feels slow, I often open it in Chrome to compare, just out of curiosity. It used to be that Chrome would struggle less with these pages, but FF seems to have caught up in the past year or so.

<comment><USER63> > _Check your extensions_

Pro-tip: if you have uBlock Origin installed, disable all other extensions that are using EasyList, because they undermine uBO and visibly slow down the page. In Chrome too.

N.b Firefox's built in tracking protections don't interfere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Interesting. I thought it was discontinued due to malware and hackers using it. I wonder if they were ever able to successfully mitigate these threats with an encrypted file sharing service. If they did, the community ought to know so other projects in the future can learn from Mozilla's efforts.

[1]: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox- send-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-service- while-it-addresses-malware-abuse/)

[2]: [https://cybersecuritymag.com/firefox-send-suspended- hackers-...](https://cybersecuritymag.com/firefox-send-suspended-hackers- malware/)

<comment><USER65> That's also what it says in the linked explanation contained in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> File.pizza is also p-p file defer in the browser, though I liked send from Mozilla since it was integrated.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think this comes down to the fact that deploying an app and a platform are very different things.

</comment><comment><USER68> [https://transfer.sh](https://transfer.sh)

<comment><USER69> Have used this for years but it's being shut down at the end of October.

<comment><USER70> I run a similar project like this, I have for the last 8 years, it's pretty bare bones but you can build on top of it: [https://github.com/abemassry/wsend](https://github.com/abemassry/wsend)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> what are the good alternatives, I spent sometimes on google, and most services seem to required monthly subscription

I need to send large file securely sporadically , I cant like pay for like 10 usages etc .. as long as its not time bound

</comment><comment><USER72> What a blow. I loved it.

</comment><comment><USER73> > Unfortunately, some abusive users were beginning to use Send to ship malware > and conduct spear phishing attacks. This summer we took Firefox Send offline > to address this challenge.

</comment><comment><USER74> Get paid by Google; kill services like Google.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's like allpeers all over again?

</comment><comment><USER76> Okay, but what happened?

</comment><comment><USER77> From their Github repo, Deployment: "Optionally telnet, to be able to quickly check your installation"

</comment><comment><USER78> Mozilla sucks at software. They are prescriptive, and always changing. They practice the worst of open source (give today, take tomorrow, user no choice, auto-updates), and they cannot keep up with enterprise in their own domain.</comment>


Traffic sources: Forget what you think about tech PR - <AUTHOR> http://tripl.tumblr.com/post/14729514367

<comment><USER3> Compared to the news sites you've mentioned, I've increasingly discovered that the primary reason I read things on HN is the page load times. The professional commentary, snark, and community of TechCrunch are lovely - <USER2> they simply aren't worth a load time fifteen times longer than a text page full of HN comments and a quick link to the article/startup in question. Makes me wonder what other things I would more readily consume with a primarily text driven interface...

<comment><USER4> Also, TC dies on the iPad

<comment><USER5> I honestly thought it only happened to me. I've pretty much stopped reading TC because of it.

I cringe every time there is a good discussion going on HN over a TechCrunch article, because I just know it will inevitably lead to safari crashing on my iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I legitimately read this as "A note to all startups on here: HN killed TC in traffic driving to our startup." I came in to post condolences.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why is the link back to Hacker News a Facebook doorway page? For tracking purposes?

<comment><USER8> Facebook doesn't offer those metrics to third parties AFAIK, so I assume just a weird mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that was just a mistake because it was posted in our internal group page, my bad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Comments on HN are a huge value-add. I can't stand other tech sites now, where the quality of the conversation is pages of fanboys calling each other names.

<comment><USER10> I love that comment threads on HN are discussions, not a "who can come up with the wittiest insult" competition. The "keyboard warrior" mentality is usually absent here.

<comment><AUTHOR> very very very true!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If HN was so awesome for driving traffic, why is the link to the original post passing through Facebook?

<comment><AUTHOR> that was a mistake on my part, I copied the link from our Facebook group where I posted it to our team, changing now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A post by TC has still much more "social proof" and SEO juice (stupid word). We still get converting visitors based on a two year old TC post...

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right in terms of SEO. On a funny note if you search Tripl on Google, our SEO is so bad it comes up as domain description we originally bought. Google must of done some re-indexing. We are trying to fix that this week by using a site index.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't help that they automatically change searches for "Tripl" to "Triple".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tech PR is definitely overrated. Just take a look at the startups covered in January of 20102 and see where they are now. It's sexy having your site be covered by NY Times, Techcrunch, Gigaom, and all these publications, but it's no guarantee of success... I mean, whatever happened to Hipster????

Rather than focus on publicity, people should hang out in the communities where their target audience is. If you're building a travel site, that means Lonely Planet forums. PR is just smoke and mirrors. What really matters is reaching the people who will really use your site.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this means HN readers are way more 'engaged' than TC's. HN readers are more interested in the topics being treated here, and click-through rate is probably higher. It's also important the fact that in HN you only have a link to the site, not an article explaining what the site is.

Oh, and I also agree with gojomo: would be very interesting to have followup data, most signups, most active signups...

</comment><comment><USER15> This assumes that the kind of traffic you want to your startup is from industry peers - ie people who read industry websites.

I'd offer you'd be much better off using your resources to gain customer- traffic rather than industry-traffic. Spend the same PR resource getting into the publications and websites run by the people who will actually give you money or engagement.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting followup data would be:

Moreso than traffic, which resulted in the most signups (absolute or as a percentage of visits)?

Which cohort of signups had the most still-active users weeks/months later?

The service would seem to be of more interest to dedicated travelers than the kind of tech/startup junkies who visit HN/TC/TNW. Have you had any traffic/signup surges from coverage in travel-focused forums to compare?

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's be careful not to trade one publicity superficiality for another: it's not only number of page views that counts, but the prestige of the referrer.

For example, I once received 150,000 views through a Reddit/pics submission on my Flickr account. If the New York Times featured my photo on the front of its Travel subsite, I would bet my Flickr photo page would get a negligible number of hits...it's as another HN commenter noted, HN provides more click-throughs because HN only provides links, not articles.

I would also wager that the NYT Travel section gets fewer than 150,000 views a day...but in terms of bragging rights, if I were to try to shop my portfolio around as a professional photog, front page of the NYT Travel would mean a lot more than front page of Reddit/pics.

If you were a VC investor, would you be more willing to evaluate a startup that made it to the front of HN or was validated by a TN post?</comment>


Reverse engineering Facebook photo links; circumvents privacy settings - <AUTHOR> http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/02/11/new-facebook-photo-hacks/ <comment><USER2> Change the "s" to an "n" of the image name in the URL and you can still view full versions of the pictures in question.

Take one of my photos for example:

[http://photos-b.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll- snc1/v2339/95/113/...](http://photos-b.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll- snc1/v2339/95/113/8201087/s8201087_38543665_8350.jpg)

to:

[http://photos-b.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll- snc1/v2339/95/113/...](http://photos-b.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll- snc1/v2339/95/113/8201087/n8201087_38543665_8350.jpg)

This would largely be applicable when profiles are deemed private and all you can do is view the small profile picture. In the grand scheme of things, it is minor but it should still be fixed.

<comment><USER3> Wow, I've just lost a great deal of respect for the programming skills of Facebook and its employees. This is really obvious stuff. I can understand a junior programmer missing something like this (or a non-junior one, everyone makes stupid mistakes sometimes) but surely someone should be checking?

I've just set up a similar system (non-public media served from a faster server without access checking) and the fact that the urls needed to be non- guessable was pretty damn obvious. The timeout thing is also really really obvious if you don't want people to be able to pass around a permanent link.

<comment><USER4> Whn I interviewed at Facebook I was kind of thrown back by the lack of engineering discipline. If I remember the quote accurately (this was about 1.5 years ago), they averaged 1 hour of downtime per subdomain (i.e. <college>.facebook.com) per week, which may or may not effect all users associated with that domain. To make scaling issues easier, race conditions are also all over. There is no data integrity of any sort. Some/all of these design decisions I could see being justified, because it is afterall just social profiles... but I was a little surprised. The weird thing is they release some really cool open source stuff and have some pretty great engineers there, so I'm not sure where this stems from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an additional privacy "hack" that I noticed a few years ago. The surprising thing is that as of about a month ago the hack no longer works -- not because Facebook stopped it, but because your data on Facebook is now _less_ secure by default, removing the need for the hack!

It used to be that when a friend was tagged in a photo album of a non-friend, you could only view those photos that your friend was in. By removing the "id=xxxxxx" from the URL, you could view ALL photos from the non-friend's album.

As of recently, you can now view ALL photos from any non-friend's album if a friend is tagged in only one of the photos (alleviating the need for the "hack")! Hence, for all their talk about privacy and their very complicated privacy settings, it seems that in some ways your Facebook data is becoming subtly _less_ secure!

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone said on the blog, the second link is actually pointing to: [http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak- sf2p/v646/41/83/21013...](http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak- sf2p/v646/41/83/210132/n210132_34947682_4899.jpg) and not to: <http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/n210132_34947682_4899.jpg> as he says.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think FB is too worried, honestly. I reported some security issues with photos through the API, and it took weeks/months for them to fix them.

<comment><USER8> Write a blog post and they'll probably take you more seriously :P

<comment><USER7> Silly me, I used the bug tracker. :\

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do think that fb's current approach makes sense when you want to share photos to people who are not on facebook, and that the marginal return from that being possible outweighs the "information leakage" of the current setup

</comment><comment><USER10> Some of the techniques he discusses are for photos uploaded in Europe only.

Meaning that if you upload in the US you are a tiny bit safer.

</comment><comment><USER11> This has been around. I remember discovering this when I wanted to share pictures found on facebook with others. A simple "View image location" and copy/paste and they could see it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I remember finding this about videos too. Was going to try and work out the naming scheme, but never got round to it. Presumably it's a similar system.

</comment><comment><USER13> In case anyone's wondering, OurDoings, doesn't have this vulnerability. You can share the link to one photo without exposing related photos.

<comment><USER14> Nobody was wondering. If you're going to advertise your company, just be transparent about it.

<comment><USER13> Look at my history. I've been talking about OurDoings here for years. If somebody wants to say every such comment should include a disclaimer I'll listen, but I won't be lectured on transparency from an account like izboyd created just for posting this one comment.

This vulnerability is an example of Facebook's failure to think things through. It does push my buttons and I'm going to say something. Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good.

<comment><USER14> My issue with your comment is that you jumped on a /bug/ in Facebook to push your cause.

Analogy: Let's say I had a car company that competed with a fictitious competitor, Toyonda. There was a news story on HackerNews about a software bug that caused all Toyonda Freerunners to crash whenever somebody pushed the gas too long. I then posted a comment that my car, the Legendary Esquilax, doesn't have that bug. It's self-serving and adds nothing to the conversation.

Now, if you said something like, "Our Esquilax line of cars uses an O(1) lookup on the rotor hashtable to avoid a backup of 'gas' events which caused the bottleneck bug at the root of the Toyonda issue." That would be interesting, provide useful news about competing products, and potentially spark a discussion about the "right" gas pedal algorithms.

About your comment on lecturing: I signed up with Hacker News to post a comment. Every person needs an impetus to join a community, and your comment provided that for me.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for following up. I understand where you're coming from now. Unfortunately in this instance there's not a lot of potential for interesting discussion about the "right" way to form semi-private URLs on a host that isn't doing authentication. You need enough randomness; that's obvious. Apparently it wasn't obvious to Facebook.

PS Welcome to HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yet another reason why nobody should be using facebook.

In any case we can't expect a website as big as facebook to implement encrypted urls which dynamically change with each user's session, which the session data server-side is used to decrypt and execute. Its not necessarily the best way to do things (like say ensuring the given user HAS permission to access the photo before serving it.)

O well I guess if the problem is too big for facebook, it must be too big for the rest of us. I am going to go to work tomorrow and rip it out of our application since this should not be a solvable problem.

</comment><comment><USER16> epic fail</comment>


Joi Ito to Be Named Head of M.I.T. Media Lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/science/26lab.html?_r=1&src=tptw <comment><AUTHOR> Just noticed that the MIT release containing this same information is on the front page and trending. I'd encourage you to vote for that one instead of this one. ;)</comment>


Google Blog: Federated Learning: Colaborative Learning - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is a good idea but I am a little surprised that averaging small diff's to models works.</comment>


Google's Schmidt Sees Signs of Internet Bubble — Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/95607/googles-schmidt-sees-signs-of-internet-bubble-report/

<comment><USER2> He's right, of course, just like Ballmer in 1999 when he caused the stock market to drop 5% by saying something similar...</comment>


Why Autocorrect for Passwords Is a Great Idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601451/why-autocorrect-for-passwords-is-a-great-idea/ <comment><USER2> Assuming they're right, if you don't store passwords in the clear, you'd have to build all acceptable variants of a password when you get the original, then hash and store all of them, then check them all at next login attempt.

If you wanted to add a new kind of "allowable typo" (eg "correct except with capslock") you'd have to wait until the user next logged in to store that variant.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Websites should be changing their password policies to make users' lives easier. The security degradation is pretty small."

Security isn't supposed to be convenient. Autocorrecting passwords sounds like a bad idea all-around and will be exploited.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the article, they ran simulations and it only provided a .2% increase in likelihood of a breach</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build, that you can't be bothered to? - <AUTHOR> No matter how small or un-monetizable, what's that one product or website you'd love... yet, just don't have the time to make yourself, or may not know how to? <comment><USER2> A cloud-optional system for storing, tagging, and sorting family photos, videos, and documents. Maybe with a timeline or optional integration with family tree services. I've been spending the holidays over the past few years scanning, digitizing, and sorting these things, and an easy-to-use sharing system where other family members can add information is completely eluding me.

<comment><USER3> Google photos or FB photos do a pretty decent job at this, except for integrating into family tree services.Not sure that's monetizable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A creative assistant slash agent that pours over my uploaded data (pics, video, fiction, field recorded sounds, journal entries) and tries to find a market for them, comes to me with proposals, then submits them for sale and negotiates a good price. You know, like that scene in 'Her'.

</comment><comment><USER5> Full wireless mesh networking where each computer has a broadcast-enabled wifi card and can do impromptu ad-hoc networks.

<comment><USER6> I think this type of thing would be very good at working around the recently struck down FCC NetNeutrality policy. Imagine plugging little self contained boxes into power outlets all around the city, building a mesh network organically, piece by piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want a widget library that allows me to draw translucent shapes on top of functioning widgets, without trying to align to widget boundaries. Ideally this library would also be able to draw shapes between toplevel windows as well. It would need to be cross-platform and have bindings to common scripting languages.

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to search for something in one place, and find it, no matter if it's in any of my gmail accounts, yahoo email, trello, git, google docs, my home pc or work pc anywhere. Basically, search though all my personal accounts.

<comment><USER9> Add "securely" to the features for this one. Because if it's going to log on to all your accounts, it has to have names and passwords for all your accounts. If it can be compromised, the attacker gets _all_ your stuff.

<comment><USER10> Probably can't be cloud based then. I would never trust one single entity online with that much information about myself.

>inb4 Equifax

I have no control over what they do. Sad, but these are the times we live in. However, users should have control for the above idea.

<comment><USER11> Password reset functionality effectively gives this universal access to your email provider.

<comment><USER12> Not for services that enable 2fa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A css assistant that can answer the question "why is this over here".

(for when some elementary appears where you don't expect it).

It could do stuff like try changing the size of various elements to see what rule changes move things.

</comment><comment><USER14> A Kinesis Freestyle2 tent accessory (or 3D printing plans for one) similar to the Ascent, for much less than $219: [https://www.kinesis- ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-ascent-accessor...](https://www.kinesis- ergo.com/shop/freestyle2-ascent-accessory/), [https://www.amazon.com/Ascent- Accessory-Freestyle2-Ergonomic...](https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Accessory- Freestyle2-Ergonomic-Keyboard/dp/B00455EU7U)

</comment><comment><USER15> A password manager that is open source, self hostable, works on all platforms, and most of all, is good. Even the 'good', proprietary ones (1Password, Lastpass), just aren't very good.

<comment><USER16> Define "good", and how the best existing ones fail to be "good"?

<comment><USER15> Just the UX in general, 1Password is the best IMO. But it's still not great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A game like GTA, but open source, hackable, running better on Linux than Windows, so that users are finally attracted to Linux, making 2018 the year of Linux on the desktop.

<comment><USER18> If it is open source or hackable or both, it's going to be extremely difficult to work out an online multiplayer that works decently well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A story generator. So I can read procedurally generated stories and worlds rather than watch movies and novels.

<comment><USER20> So, dwarf fortress?

<comment><USER19> Exactly, but without having to manage an entire fortress. I would sit and read the civilization and artifact backgrounds, the histories, the forgotten beasts, but it's just not built for that.

It would also be nice if it didn't feel so random, like masterwork obsidian battleaxes that menace with spikes of orthoclase. Or 6 armed bat winged llamas that spit bile.

Rimworld tries to tackle the story part, but ends up being too dramatic instead.

There was a game called Firan MUX, which did an excellent job of generating families and backgrounds for each character and I would spend hours on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An adblocker that's harder to detect.

<comment><USER10> Send a letter to the editor telling them to dump AdSense for something better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Something that quickly cleans dog shit or whatever else I step in off the bottom of my shoes.

</comment><comment><USER23> decentralized web, or, any semblance of escape from ad-based monetiztion models

<comment><USER11> How is the current web not decentralized?

<comment><USER5> Comcast

<comment><USER11> L3 != L7

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> iPhone 4S replacement board that runs Linux.</comment>


Volvo acquires Luxe - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/08/volvo-acquires-car-valet-startup-luxe-to-boost-its-digital-services-business/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> This seems like a talent acquisition play. There was probably a lot of work that went into find a soft place for the whole team to land; so, kudos to the leaders / investors / whomever helped make this happen.

It's not a big exit, but if you are a luxe employee, it's the best of the worst outcomes.

<comment><USER3> > It's not a big exit, but if you are a luxe employee, it's the best of the > worst outcomes.

This data wasn't in the article. It is probably the more likely outcome, but we just don't know (yet).

<comment><USER4> i know this isn't definitive, but the article does include: "One source close to the deal tells us that the terms here were closely guarded, and that the assumption at this point is that it was 'pennies on the dollar' based on the last valuation."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's Volvo's motivation here? The entire Luxe business model was wildly unprofitable and the UX as a consumer (egregious weight times at both drop off and pick up) was awful.

<comment><USER6> I used it a few times in Seattle under a promo, and it was so painful. Getting the timing down so the valet wasn't waiting out in the rain for awhile waiting for me was difficult, and than it always took 15-20 minutes longer for them to get my car back to me than what was shown in the app. I found myself better off just using Lyft when I'm worried about parking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can you be a tech company and expect to make tech company margins when all you do is aggregate demand, parking spots and valets to match them. Luxe making $3/hr x 200 valets and maybe a bit more on the parking arbitrage during peak hrs.

Sounds like any of the local garage joints. I feel some markets are best left fragmented.

<comment><USER8> Not sure about "fragmented" but perhaps not VC-appropriate.

This stuff will all go away once (a) the non top-tier investors realize their entire portfolios are underwater and (b) interest rates rise a bit.

Stepping back, it is pretty remarkable that a company I've heard of, with a launched product and some degree of use, just _fails_ like this. Tech entrepreneurship is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More proof that if you lose money on every transaction, you can't make it up in volume.

The on-demand valet parking space has been a great place to lose money. Zirx pivoted, Caarbon failed and now this acqui-hire of Luxe which was somehow valued at $157M in its last round.[1]

Other companies in the space haven't raised in a while including Ubo of China and ValetAnywhere.

[1] source: CB Insights

</comment><comment><USER10> Reasonable acquisition to expand the Volvo Concierge [0] services. The digital services are likely the strongest selling point in a few years when luxuary car makers all offers self driving, electric powered cars.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPKDy7k5hHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPKDy7k5hHE)</comment>


Every book that Art Garfunkel (from Simon and Garfunkel) has ever read - <AUTHOR> http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library.html

<comment><USER2> This is a very interesting list. One of the most surprising things to me is how consistent it is. He doesn't seem to change much. It's as if his algorithm the entire time was to choose at random from the Penguin Classics. One could do a lot worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> at first I thought "are you kidding me, someone actually tracked this?" and then I found myself being by pulled by an invisible force to find how many pages he read from his "favorites" - 50,623

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you think this could be as big as Oprah's book club?

<comment><USER5> No, the books he likes seem to require way more intellect than the average book on Oprah's book club.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who keeps track of the books that they've read? And why? I can think of better ways to spend my time.

<comment><USER7> Err... It takes about 5 seconds per book. You finish a book, you write it down. I've been doing this for years. Sometimes it is fun to look back and see all the books I forgot I read.

<comment><USER8> Even simpler. You read a book, you shelve it in your home library. A new shelf/section every year.

<comment><USER9> Thats nice if you have the luxury of space and don't ever trade books in for credit at second hand stores. Sometimes its nice to pass a book on to someone else after you have read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Incredible. I wonder if he kept notes on what he learned from each book. I've wanted to do that.

</comment><comment><USER11> 6 more Harry Potter books to go...</comment>


Google will eat itself: buying Google shares via their own advertisement (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.googlewilleatitself.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> So basically they have many websites, serve advertisements on them, and then buy Google stock with them? I don't see how this is special.</comment>


Places You Will Find Beacons – Collect Data About People and Send Notifications - <AUTHOR> http://desmart.com/blog/5-places-you-will-find-beacons-in-2015-desmart

<comment><USER2> The writer is very excited about all the possibilities.

Like: 'Connecting data from the online shop + offline activities gives you enormous possibilities to target the user and maybe even predict his next behaviours to be at the right place and the right time with your product.'

And: 'you can not ignore the technology, because it will surrounds you anyway. What you can do, is to adapt and make it useful for your needs.'

But it does not make me happy. I am nothing but a wallet that is profiled continuously online and offline - to be triggered to spend as much money as possible.</comment>


Javascript Frameworks Are Too Small - <AUTHOR> http://codebrief.com/2012/01/javascript-frameworks-are-too-small/

<comment><USER2> The author's assertions about code size are a bit misleading. Backbone is 4.6k _minified_ , and 41k normally. Most frameworks provide minified versions of their libraries, because in web dev, you don't own the page.

Also, unlike server code, which is run on beefy custom-configured servers, client-side code is run on your grandmother's old desktop computer in IE6, and the entirety of the source code is sent over the wire. You can see where the ethic of 'micro-frameworks' comes from.</comment>


AWS Security Toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://zoph.me/posts/2019-12-16-aws-security-toolbox/ <comment><USER2> In general pretty nice idea. I made a couple of Github issues with some nitpicks that can help cause less confusion for you over time (env varibles) and one that should cut down the image size (cut down dependencies)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks zbruhnke. Will check this and reply using GH.</comment></comment>


The future of Java - <AUTHOR> https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/Future.html <comment><USER2> Is this meant as a joke? It's just a javadoc of the java.util.Future.</comment>


Why Cloud is Like Email in the 1980's - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3933111/Why+Cloud+is+Like+Email+in+the+1980s.htm

<comment><USER2> I don't get the analogy. Why do clouds need to be interconnected in some way they aren't now?

<comment><USER3> You could build an infrastructure across multiple clouds. When AWS went down your software would automatically fire up more instances on GAE or Rackspace Cloud to replace it. A complex layer of software that knitted everything together would result in a large increase in reliability.

<comment><USER4> How is that not possible today?

<comment><USER5> It could be 'serverside' rather than 'clientside'.

As in, sure you can connect the AIM and MSN chat networks, but you yourself have to run a server to connect the two.

Currently one also has to have migration functionality written by themselves. Instead, amazon could provide it, just like AIM could provide an MSN gateway themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not so sure. Even instant messaging has not done much interop. Users on AOL and MSN cannot IM each other. This is a very popular, end-user scenario with network effects. Wouldn't that be the "same pressures" as email?

Why would "clouds", which are mostly a concern of IT and software implementation folk, get pressure to interop like email?

He's obviously smarter and has better perspective than me, so what does he mean? Perhaps API compatibility because everyone will adopt AWS and OpenStack APIs?

</comment><comment><USER7> This article used everything required to get a frontpage HN submission:

        1. The word cloud

</comment><comment><USER8> So what is the cloud protocol? I'm not sure this guy even understands what a cloud is. Email messages all look the same (headers, then message) and they were mostly transferred on SMTP. How would anyone possibly interconnect AWS and Rackspace? Dropbox and Let's Crate? etc.

<comment><USER9> There was a time before SMTP. Vint Cerf was there.

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

The historical analogy is sound and worth considering.

<comment><USER8> > There was a time before SMTP.

That is why I mentioned common format (headers + message) and 'mostly' SMTP.

But for early email, allowing users to email someone at a different computer wasn't an issue of profit.

'Cloud' companies don't want you to use another company's products. Google doesn't want your docs stored on Dropbox. That issue didn't exist with email, and if you look at something like Facebook messages, you can't send a message from a Facebook account to a Myspace (or whatever else) account.

That, more than anything else, is going to inhibit 'cloud' growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> it's more like '.net'.

Remember when this was the latest buzz words and nobody really knew what it meant?</comment>


Ask HN: On eBay, $50 Amazon gift cards are selling for $80-85.What am I missing? - <AUTHOR> Here is an item I just came across: a $50 Amazon gift card at a fixed price of $85.
That in itself is not the ridiculous part; some people can be tricked into overpaying for anything once in awhile. (Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people...")
But there have already been 4 sales via this listing at $80 or $85 each!
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidsLogin&item=282876678114&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2564
(You can click on the Item Link to the right to see the original listing.)
What am I missing?  Really clumsy money laundering? <comment><USER2> There was a promotional code circulating for 20% off anything on eBay last week. Yes you read that correctly - 20% off anything, from any seller (got myself a new 4k monitor). Purely speculating here, but perhaps people were gaming the system by listing marked-up gift cards and buying their own listings. During this promotion eBay was paying out sellers the full amount - which leads me to the following: why was eBay intentionally taking these losses? Perhaps a last-ditch effort to temporarily boost sales on paper?

It's not coincidence that they are replacing Paypal with Adyen - I think these are indications that there's some sort of merger or acquisition in the works...

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of when Bing launched and they had a 20% or so off many retailers that you clicked from their results. One was Ebay. I must've been 17 or 18 and used my summer savings to buy silver bars from Ebay 20% off and relist them.

Not long after I noticed they severely restricted the types of discounted items.

<comment><USER4> It was 30% cash back for the first few days! I'm still using the suitcase that I bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They may be being used for money laundering.

<comment><USER6> Money laundering is definitely a possibility since you can buy amazon gift cards directly from PayPal. I also think some items (not necessarily these gift cards) are being used as placeholder items for a product or service (drugs, etc). For instance I saw a very commonly available $2 bottle of salad dressing go for $20 the other day. I was intrigued and saw that a lot of items from the seller had sold for mulitples of their market value.

<comment><USER7> This is interesting. I would expect eBay fees to crontradict the utility.

<comment><USER8> How much does your money launderer charge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For what you lose on each one, you can make up for in volume.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some buyers are using crypto via a third-party to buy these items on eBay. They use the Amazon GC afterwards to buy online services or buy a product to ship to their home country.

eBay seller has to pay a hefty commission to eBay so that is part of the expense. Seller mails or sends eCode. Both can be risky because the buyer can refute that it was received. Post office even with signature confirmation is not always recorded correctly. UPS & FedEx Signature Require is expensive to use. You also have dishonest "buyers" that will submit a chargeback claim to the credit card for fraud (card does not work, etc). There's a myriad of expenses and risk to the seller.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anonymity?

Buy gift card from random ebay person.

Pay for something that you'd rather keep secret using gift card.

Reduced chance of getting caught?

e.g. [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card- paymen...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-payment)

<comment><USER12> You can buy amazon gift cards at almost any retail store, with cash.

That's even _less_ trackable than a payment to an eBay seller.

<comment><USER13> That does not apply in the non-US world (Maybe also EU, I don't know if they are being sold there)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So yes you can sell your Amazon Gift cards; there's a market place for people selling used cards.

[https://wellkeptwallet.com/sell-amazon-gift-card-for- cash/](https://wellkeptwallet.com/sell-amazon-gift-card-for-cash/)

Why else would you spent 500$ for a 300$ Gift card so you can get the card now to turn around and sell it for 250$

The profit!</comment>


Is Email Making Professors Stupid? - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid <comment><USER2> No, I think ever-creeping (and often pointless) administrative duties are making professors stupid.</comment>


Volvo Lifepaint: the best way to survive a crash is not to crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.volvolifepaint.com/

<comment><USER2> Volvo: if one of our cars hits you, its now more likely your fault since you didn't apply our line of reflective paints to your person and property before crossing the intersection.

I'm not in favor of shifting the blame, in an accident between a 3-ton vehicle and the 200lb union of human and pedal-operated-device, to the more vulnerable.

<comment><USER3> What a strange way to interpret this. Not sure if humor or genuine bitter pessimism.

In either case volvo seems to have a genuine interest in cyclist safety. They have another system in their cars that will automatically brake if a collision is imminent with a cyclist.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/business/volvo- business...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/business/volvo- business/10100527/volvo-cyclist-detection-video.html)

<comment><USER2> Mostly humor, but a little pessimism as well. A little hard to imagine, but I was thinking of a scenario in the future where a news report on some cyclist accident will not only mention "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet", but also "the cyclist did not apply hi-visibility paint".

Thanks for the link, I was not aware of other Volvo technologies for cyclist safety. It seems Volvo does genuinely care for cyclists. I was wary that they were continuing a precedent of saddling cyclists with the responsibility in an accident, but if they are doing things on the vehicle side, then its a two- pronged assault for increasing cyclist safety, and something I can get behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could take this way more seriously without the intense marketing style.</comment>


Google Collecting Kids' SS Numbers Under the Guise of an Art Contest? - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/22/google-ssns <comment><USER2> Here is Google's press release from the Huffington Post article:

 _This year we started accepting doodles from kids even if their school hadn't registered for the contest. To help us keep entries distinct and remove duplicate entries from any particular student, we asked parents for limited information, including the last 4 digits of a student's social security number. We later updated our forms when we recognized that we could sufficiently separate legitimate contest entries while requesting less information. To be clear, these last 4 digits were not entered into our records and will be safely discarded._

 _As for the city of birth: The city of birth helps us identify whether contestants are eligible for the contest, as winners must be either U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents of the U.S. The information isn't used for any other purpose."_

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google- been...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been- colle_b_825754.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone needs to lookup Hanlon's razor: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor>

Also, daring fireball doesn't add anything. Link to the original source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google- been...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-bowdon/why-has-google-been- colle_b_825754.html)

<comment><USER2> Your wikipedia link is dead. Try <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Uh, the last four digits. If it was the whole thing, I'd say this is somewhat valid, but the required information seems to be kind of just... checking that they're real people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yup. Google went through the effort of creating of an art contest to collect SSNs. Cause after all, if they were that unscruplous, an art contest makes more sense rather than looking at people's Gmail accounts or keylogging their Chrome usage.

I swear something about the word Google causes Gruber and apparently many other people to stop functioning at their normally intelligent levels.

</comment><comment><USER6> Let's talk about paranoia...</comment>


Show HN: My embarrassingly simple printscreen weekend webapp - <AUTHOR> http://www.easyprintscreen.com

<comment><USER2> I love it. Fantastic for multiple reasons.

1) I can never remember the "intuitive" keyboard combinations to do this on my mac, but I can remember "easyprintscreen"

2) Useful. I can capture my screen, draw on it, highlight issues or bugs or whatnot, and share it.

3) I know you'll keep it running because it has an obvious, lucrative business model (assuming you monitor what screens people capture for the occasional useful password, credit card numbers, stock tips, blackmailing opportunity, etc...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, there's no monitoring setup, infact there's no backend at all :)

<comment><USER3> If there's no backend, where are the images saved to? Just curious.

<comment><USER4> From looking at the source, imgur.

<comment><USER3> Sweet! Feature request: Would you expose the imgur link directly? I often want to take a screenshot and send it to someone, but I almost never need to draw on it. So getting a direct link to imgur would be perfect.

Also, would you consider removing the 5-second "Redirecting..." countdown?

EDIT: Right clicking on the image and clicking "Copy image URL" gives the imgur link.

EDIT2: When you click save, could you automatically copy the imgur link to the clipboard? That way you can save, alt-tab, and immediately paste the imgur link into email/IM/whatever.

Great work! Thanks for this.

<comment><USER5> Not to take away from the OP but you can enable a new feature in DropBox where screenshots are immediately moved to your DropBox directory, uploaded, and a share URL is stuffed in your clipboard. A notice is given on screen and on Mac OS X you get a notification center alert. I think I also hooked it into growl.

The screenshot is only moved, not deleted. It's in the DropBox preferences — and along with this feature you enable photo syncing and all your phone taken pics get put in your DropBox folder in "Camera Uploads", or the "Screen Shots" directory. You also get a good deal of bonus space for enabling these features.

You won't have time to grab the screenshot and edit it or draw on it. It happens fast. I use Skitch, which is a screen shot collaboration and editing tool. Once done, you can drag and drop the image to DropBox and get a share URL. Or drag and drop out of any app onto "Droppings", a small "app" I wrote.

I wrote a small script that fishes out your DropBox ID, which is used as your ID in a URL ( this is done once on install ). On receipt of a resource, the script creates a directory and time stamps it. This script is wrapped up in an app that accepts drag and drop. Drop a batch of jpg and gif etc., images, and it will copy them to the DropBox public folder, and put unique URL's to imgur on your clipboard. Full support for maintaining Mac Resource forks and all that as long as you compress on the Mac.

Drag and drop a zipped or compressed set of files, and it will do it's best to look and see if they are all web displayable, extract them, and give you a set of public links. If it contains other zips, binaries, etc, the original format is maintained.

All these actions are logged. I engage with Skitch, a screenshot type app, which I've also integrated logging for and created "cron" ( Launch Items in my case ) actions to clean up the mess Skitch leaves behind. I don't use Skitch as an image storage app, so it keeping multiple copies of everything only ads confusion.

It's pretty handy. If I want to send anything to anyone, I just find it, drop it on an app in my dock, it's 99% bash, the rest is an app that is made to take a shell script and give you same basic UI controls to make a pseudo app.

I started to have tons of link rot on DropBox. Screenshots to CSS questions that I would see posted by others but the screenshots were long since deleted.

My ~/DropBox/Public/drops/date-stamp/the-files.{html, htm, CSS, jpg, gif, png, tif, eps…etc. } directory has been filling up from this droplet for two years now. I think I have about 500MB of stuff that will forever resolve.

I do remove huge files via a "find" command that looks for specific things that I would not want in DropBox beyond a certain date or that I know were meant for specific people and the file will never be needed again. Sort of how I do IMAP image attachment maintenance in gmail but have to use a desktop app to remove attachments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Biturd seems like you're using a lot of screenshots in your workflow but what are they for? Product development? I only stumbled upon this as a side project and would like to see how it fits in with people. thx

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you could be clearer that 'Save' uploads the screenshot to your site, and does not (as I assumed) open a Save-as prompt.

</comment><comment><USER7> I really suggest you give some warning that this saves to a public site, I hit save and had my email in the background, thankfully there was no private information on screen.

This gave me quite a panic, please fix it or else someone else will make a bigger mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies, I've added it to the save button now.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I forgot to mention in my panicky state that I really liked the app, nice work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work! It might be helpful to show images of common keyboards to show where the print screen button is. For example, on my keyboard it's labeled PrtScn. I've had to explain hundreds of times where the print screen key is. [https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard+images&oq=keyboard+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=keyboard+images&oq=keyboard+images&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2562j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8)

To make it even more dead simple, you may even want to show a video. I'm not kidding.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think that it is clear to a user what to do here? What does "this keyboard shortcut" mean? What should a user do once they get the image in there? The paintbrushes should be labeled better? Then what?

</comment><comment><USER10> I believe this tool has legs and is a bigger deal than you think.

<comment><USER11> Skitch is bulky. Dropbox/Cloud.app are great, but too simple.

There's definitely middle ground for quick annotation, without going crazzzyyyy. If you can screenshot, annotate, and upload in 5-8 seconds, you've got my $$.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll add more tools this weekend and polish it up a bit. How much would one be willing to pay for something like?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder, on my macbook I always did cmd+shift+3 or cmd+shift+4 without hitting ctrl.

I am not sure if there is a difference, if not maybe you can simplify the message :)

<comment><USER13> Without ctrl, the print screen is saved on your Desktop as a PNG. With ctrl, the screenshot is copied to the clipboard.

<comment><USER12> ah awesome thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm assuming you don't keep people's screenshots to sell to the highest bidder. ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> This has a lot of bones but no flesh. All I can do is a mark up a picture with really think ink.

The only thing this seems to be is a picture paster with save to server function that can be linked to using a short url.

<comment><USER15> Also, ink55 has other nifty small tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Loved it. Combine with browser version/OS/etc and let the user send the info directly to the person who requested it. There's a company doing something like that here on HN, but I couldn't find it.

</comment><comment><USER16> How do you delete something saved to Imgur? Need to have that option available.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't work for me on Safari version 6.0.5 (8536.30.1) on OS X 10.8.4

<comment><AUTHOR> I ran into a security error 18 with Safari after pasting the image from clipboard and running the data through Canvas .getDataURL(). Perhaps Safari devs could make an exception for clipboard images?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On mac, Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4 will work with this for regions. If you hit space before selecting anything, you can select by window.

This is nice, as I rarely want to capture my whole screen.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nothing to be embarrassed about. This is excellent. I can already see this being useful for our less technical users who need help reporting issues.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very cool. It frustrates me to no end when users send a docx file containing screenshots.

As a precaution, I minimized everything. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like that you can edit after you've saved it. Doesn't matter if it's simple if it's intuitive and works.

</comment><comment><USER22> Fantastic. Can see applications in technical support. You could easily enough combine with support details functionality.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit confused. I can only manage to screen shot the website itself. How do I, say, screenshot my desktop?

</comment><comment><USER24> I like it. I only wish there was the option to crop an image. Especially useful for people with multiple monitors.

<comment><USER9> Also the ability to crop off or to blur out/cover up anything that the user does not want shown

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I've apparently accidentally just uploaded a screenshot of some closed source code to imgur...

<comment><USER9> newsmaster posted: "The imgur id is in the URL after you press save :)" so you could go delete it off there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't WFM :( (Firefox + Linux)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, I tested on Win+Mac. Guess I'll be downloading linux then.

<comment><USER27> i think linux doesnt save the image in the clipboard after you pushed the button, in ubuntu however a dialog is displayed after pushing the button that allow you to copy the screenshot to the clipboard, but this tool is specially designed for this purpose. AFAIK this wont work out of the box in linux :(

<comment><USER28> Well I guess that's expected behavior. So you may need to explicitly state that the feature works if you save an image on your clipboard -- not just pressing printscreen ;-)

nice work for a weekend app!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You only need Shift + Command + 3 (no need for Control) to screenshot. Makes it much easier!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, you could actually mess up a workflow. The current instructions would over-write your clipboard, maybe you had something you needed in it really bad.

I use a clipboard manager which is nice, and past copies are saved for a defined few hours or additional entries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen before trying out the web app :)

<comment><USER31> I guess i am not the only one who checked my whole screen after trying out the web app :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It supports multiple monitors. Windows 7 Pro 64-bit + Firefox 25.0.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice, Can you add a progress bar for larger uploads?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was halfway creating a progress bar when I thought the design sucked so I kept it simple, but yes coming weekend a progress bar will be made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a great little MVP, nice work. very useful

</comment><comment><USER35> Didn't work for me. Mac + Chrome.

<comment><USER35> Ignore me. PEBKAC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Have you seen on paste.com?</comment>


Show HN: Webmatr – It's Like IFTTT or Zapier but for Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://webmatr.com <comment><USER2> Great thing, if it works I'll try it someday.

I've been so pissed off by IFTTT and Zapier's huge forms complexity and slowness so many times when I just wished to call a single API command.</comment>


Show HN: MongoApp for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yildizberkay/MongoApp

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I am developing a MongoDB app for Mac OS X users. MongoApp is a GUI based tool that allows you to run MongoDB on the Mac. The app is developed using Python, TkInter and MongoDB.

If you have any idea, I'd be glad to hear.</comment>


Isle of Man and the ramp up in Bitcoin regulatory competition - <AUTHOR> http://dailyfintech.com/2015/06/26/isle-of-man-and-the-ramp-up-in-bitcoin-regulatory-competition/

<comment><USER2> Startups are all about small companies moving fast, so maybe small countries moving fast are part of the future of startups.</comment>


The smartphone app that can tell you're depressed before you know it yourself - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612266/the-smartphone-app-that-can-tell-youre-depressed-before-you-know-it-yourself/ <comment><USER2> Wow, can't access the technology review in incognito mode...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My reaction when reading this: WOW. This is awesome

<comment><USER3> there is an other thread concerning the use of apps or social media algos to "diagnose" a mental status and make a welfare check call to the police</comment></comment>


TAO: The power of the graph - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-power-of-the-graph/10151525983993920

<comment><USER2> After a history of performance improvements starting with Mark Zuckerberg putting memcache on Facebook's Apache servers in 2005:

" _In early 2009, a team of Facebook infrastructure engineers started to work on TAO ("The Associations and Objects"). TAO has now been in production for several years. It runs on a large collection of geographically distributed server clusters. TAO serves thousands of data types and handles over a billion read requests and millions of write requests every second._ "

It is solving some impressive problems, and kudos to Facebook for continuing to share neat bits of engineering with us.

</comment><comment><USER3> The interesting part is that they have not gone for a custom graph representation on disk like neo4j et al, but are persisting the graph data as MySQL records itself.

<comment><USER4> Titan ([https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki](https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki)) persists its graph as records in a distributed Cassandra or HBase cluster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some interesting files that go along with the talk/presentation:

[https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protec...](https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protected- files/nishtala_nsdi13_slides.pdf)

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi13/nsdi13...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi13/nsdi13-final170_update.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: What's a good checklist/ goal setting app? - <AUTHOR> Preferably:<p>1. Free 2. With a calendar 3. Can create multiple levels of subtasks <comment><USER2> I've been using Todoist for a while, and am very satisfied with it.

It can integrate with google calendar, it's very easy to add tasks and date, and the free version is sufficient for most uses.

It also supports sub-tasks, although I don't use it personally.</comment>


12 Killer Ways to Make Extra Income On the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/11/12/12-killer-ways-to-make-extra-income-on-the-web/

<comment><USER2> Of course, the best way to make extra income on the web is by telling others how to make extra income on the web.

<comment><USER3> The three wise men of making money online by telling people how to make money online are John Chow, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker. There are others, but John Chow is probably the best example of using social media (Digg) as a launching pad for a successful money making blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ooof...

I'm tired of such articles. A lot of people post such articles. Now it's sitepoint.

 _Of course, the best way to make extra income on the web is by telling others how to make extra income on the web._

thomasmallen, you hit the nail on the head.

AndrewWarner: yeah mturk does pay, but just for a hotdog once in 60 days. :D

 _Cash in on Your Photos_ I need to be a photographer.

 _Help People Search_ For cents?

 _Flip a Website_

Damn! If my site was that valued to flip then why wouldn't I make profit from it?

 _Becoming an eBay millionaire is far from a piece of cake_ that was under _sell your stuff_ then why is the word 'killer' used in the title. The statement contrasts the title.

The only thing I saw that was of quality was " _doing odd jobs_ " coz this works. Ex: compose music on sites like audiojungle and sell them. Or sometime back there was a rush to create a 1px ad site(even though we now know its real stupid) or to sell t-shirts.

I would say, trash common ideas some do something that you can. Hackers can code. Make your money from that. Can you make funky electronics projects (and do you love it)? Do them. sell them or make videos of those projects and put them up on some video site that shares revenue with you.

Not everybody can do freelance dev or design. And nobody wants t-shirts with your blog logo. I'll better go pick a new tee from the shop down the street.

And these "ideas to make money" actually have worked and there are leaders in those respective fields who make the most of the money and that's why its being posted. If you wanna make good money then find and do something unique and your idea might as well be featured on such an article a year later. You'll then be watching from your window and still making money while other _copycats_ are using your idea(that would be decade old to you) and wondering how you made the money.

P.S: Out of curiosity, is it the official sitepoint HN account?

</comment><comment><USER5> If you aren't an extremely talented designer with nothing better to do and/or aren't working to work at developing country rates, look elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER2> I really wish that sites asking freelancers to bid _down_ against each other went out of business...

Are there any good freelance sites out there that don't follow this model?

<comment><USER6> Not a big fan either, but it is the basis of capitalism. There are, however, lots of proven ways to overcome cutthroat price competition. Namely:

\- create barriers to entry (the best way to do this on elance et al is to serve your good customers well, they'll become attached).

\- differentiate (prove you're better and worth extra money).

\- focus on a niche (prove you're the best choice for a specific kind of product or service).

<comment><USER7> Well, if there is a demand for a "clever" get-a-freelancer site, where focus is on qualifications and portfolio, and not down-bidding, the market should be providing one. Capitalism isn't just about down bidding :)

I'm probably going to need a remote, freelance Django dev or two soon, but I'm not too sure how to go about it.

<comment><USER6> <http://djangogigs.com/developers/> ?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's my best bet so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most of these options don't pay real money. Amazon Mechanical Turk? Really?

</comment><comment><USER9> Most of these seem like wastes of time that are not worth the effort-to-reward ratio unless you start out doing them for fun or as a hobby.

<comment><USER3> Great for supplemental income, stay at home moms and folks who can't go the traditional job route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about start a local business? As a web designer/developer it's much easier to sell a website to a local biz than it is to win a project on Elance for peanuts all the while competing against 75 huge Indian firms.

I know that doesn't quite qualify as making money 'online' but it's pretty darn close.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author suggests several "contest" sites, but these typically rip off rather than reward freelancers.

<comment><USER11> If you're desperate(I once was), they're great ways to build your portfolio... but once you have something to your name, run and don't look back.

(But keep your loyal customers. They're usually cool once they realize that you don't suck.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is sad to see the idea that there are easy money to be made on the internet still reinforced.

I mean easy is a relative term of course, but I doubt there was anything easy about creating digg, google, or facebook, nor do I think it was a walk in a park to make any decent money generating website.

I think at some point we need to eradicate this idea that the internet is somewhat different than the real world because in my opinion it is not, it is simply a medium or maybe a platform but not a second reality.

<comment><USER3> There is easy money to be made online, just in small amounts. I made thousands with PayPerPost, hundreds with AdSense and hundreds more from a small collection of other services.

It's not money I'm going to retire on, but it helped pay the bills (my AdSense account pays my electricity bill every month) and for some people could mean the difference between keeping their homes and not.</comment></comment>


So, British Airways just kicked in the door at Heathrow - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/search?q=%23LHRdrama <comment><USER2> I love how one guy, MikeTonge, says a plane has engine damage, no citation or anything, and the rest of the channel is people "re-tweeting" it. WTF is the point of that even, everyone in in the channel would have seen it the first time. You did that on IRC you'd be kickbanned.</comment>


Real Time Super Resolution GAN for Up-Sampling Videos - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HasnainRaz/Fast-SRGAN <comment><USER2> When your only surviving 'photo' of great-grannie is a group portrait captured at such low resolution that each of her eyes is a square pixel. Minecraft is training for our future-past dark age.</comment>


Ed's Coral Castle Quarry and Flywheel [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOoCuDnmtyM <comment><USER2> I visited Coral Castle a few years ago. It's a truly strange sight (it reminded me of Opus 40 in NY [0]), and definitely worth checking out if you're in Miami-Dade area.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_40](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_40)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wikipedia about Coral Castle and Ed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle)</comment>