When Will New York City Sink? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/new-york-future-flooding-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> > Jacob responded with a declaration that "our urban planning is irrelevant" > and decried "shortsightedness of decision-making." As an example, he cited > the Hudson Yards development, just one of many waterfront megaprojects that > the city has continued to enthusiastically promote, even after Sandy. He > thinks that the government should instead rework its policies to relocate > assets away from the water.

I think Jacob commits the opposite error, failing to discount the future. If Manhattan real estate is worth "hundreds of billions of dollars" as an asset, then it's worth tens of billions of dollars a year as a value-stream. If we're talking something like Hurricane Sandy causing $33 billion in property damage in New York, that's maybe _one year_ of the property market's value. That's a quite small "weather tax" in the grand scheme of things, and if we're talking a multi-century trend, well, it might come time to contemplate taking down the skyscraper after a few hundred years, assuming the world hasn't perished in a global thermonuclear war where Manhattan was the first target and assuming that the city still prospers.

And remember that Manhattan is an island literally named "many hills". The Financial District is low-lying but only because it's artificial land. Midtown would be pretty solidly unaffected for a good little while.

<comment><USER3> Also, because we've lost the ability to build things in the US, we've forgotten that low lying land is a solvable problem. In fact, we _already_ solved that problem in FiDi back before we gave up the social technology of building things.

(Just look at our inability to build subways - something we were capable of 100 years ago and which desperately poor India and China do today.)

When push comes to shove, we can just pay the Dutch or Singaporeans a lot of money to fix things for us.

<comment><USER2> > Also, because we've lost the ability to build things in the US

We have the ability. It's just that we've decided having a political process with umpteen layers of environmental review, and having "prevailing wage+" labor unions (who contribute to re-election campaigns) do the construction, is more important than having nice things.

(+ the "prevailing wage", of course, being not the _average_ or _median_ wage, but the highest wage out there.)

<comment><USER3> I think the concept of "social technology" is an important one.

[http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and- anarcho-...](http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho- tyranny/)

While we have the machines and such needed to build a subway or build a bridge, we no longer have the capacity to organize men in such an endeavor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got to see a small scale example of a city sinking when on vacation in some islands off of North Carolina's shore. Some of those islands experience pretty aggressive erosion. Streets simply appear and disappear during tides. Large chunks of asphalt sticking out on the beach were a street used to be. Yet people still live there (well vacation mostly) even though during high tide in part they can fish from their porch.

It was strange to see because that is not usually how homes and property are thought of. You buy, and hold on to it, and then sell it. There you buy and then the ocean comes and takes it, and it's gone. Most of those places were vacation homes, except for one where a little old lady was living permanently. We gave her all our groceries we had before leaving, She seemed rather grateful. I was wondering what her plans were for when erosion got to her house. I imagine asking that would upset her, so I didn't.

</comment><comment><USER5> As usual, nothing about prevention.

> "One way or another, we get educated, and it's much cheaper to listen once > in a while to engineers and scientists."

Global temperatures and the sea level are rising because of human behavior. If we want different results, we have to behave differently. Engineers and scientists know engineering and science but not so much leading people to change their behavior.

It's easy to blame others: "Listen to me! If you don't you'll be sorry!" isn't effective. Also, what fraction of engineers and scientists have, say, flown in a plane or something similarly polluting in the past twelve months?

If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is why I moved from science to leadership.)

This article's writing about flood-proof architecture and other rearranging- deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic behavior is necessary since it's too late to stop a lot of change, but it's not too late to stop the change that we -- you and I -- are contributing to now. As much as I wish past generations had changed their behaviors so we wouldn't see these problems today, future generations will wish we had changed our behavior today. Even if you don't have kids or grandkids, I would think caring about human society in general and empathy and compassion for future generations would be enough to focus on changing our behavior proactively, not just reactively fixing problems others bequeathed to us.

<comment><USER6> Call me a pessimist, but I don't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told them to. They won't change even if they begin to suffer for it. Homes in parts of Southern Florida are already getting flooded on a regular basis, even in clear weather. Are those homeowners burning less gas because of it? Not really.

The high oil prices of the early 2010s did little to curb CO2 production worldwide. People really don't want to change unless they're too poor to afford fossil fuels, and making everyone poor is probably not a good solution, either. Calling for abstinence doesn't work in energy consumption any more than it does in sex education. To hope otherwise is wishful thinking.

More depressing is the fact that even if a lot of us drastically reduced our carbon footprint right now, what's going to happen is going to happen anyway. The amount of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere is enough to cause catastrophe over the next few decades.

So I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming than trying to persuade them to change their habits. This Titanic is going down no matter how hard you try to steer it away from that iceberg. Stop wasting time trying to argue with people who think the ship is okay. Use that time to build more lifeboats instead, because we barely have any time to do even that.

Use nuclear power to sequester massive amounts of CO2 someplace deep. Bulld walls around major coastal cities. Relocate people in vulnerable areas to higher ground. Start planting crops that tolerate heat better, and move current crops further north -- there's gonna be a lot of newly arable land in Canada and Russia. Use desalination and new agricultural techniques to fight against drought. Put more research into malaria prevention, or better yet, exterminate mosquitoes altogether. (A very large portion of projected loss of life associated with global warming is due to 1. drought and 2. increased mosquito activity.)

<comment><USER5> > _I don 't think people will "change behavior" just because somebody told > them to_

Telling people what to do isn't leadership.

Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with _actually, effectively leading_ them is part of why we have been ineffective at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point.

> _I think the scientific and engineering prowess of the world would be better > spent trying to help people cope with the consequences of global warming > than trying to persuade them to change their habits._

Black-and-white false dichotomies are another problem.

Believing since we've already done so much that the cause is lost is another.

A better life doesn't require releasing more CO2. In fact, it can often come with less.

Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we never will.

<comment><USER7> > I moved from science to leadership.

...

> Confusing telling people what to do and other ineffective techniques with > actually, effectively leading them is part of why we have been ineffective > at changing people's behavior, illustrating my point.

...

> Effective leaders don't lose their cool in difficult times. Many shine then. > Instead of throwing in the towel on prevention, we can improve the future > relative to what it would be if we just say since we didn't succeed yet we > never will.

Please tell us what you are doing. Thanks in advance for whatever it is.

<comment><USER5> My profile has the link to my blog, but it's joshuaspodek.com. My bio is at joshuaspodek.com/bio and my courses at joshuaspodek.com/courses.

<comment><USER7> I meant regarding climate change.

Searched your blog and best I could find is:

> I talk a lot about how I try to avoid flying because the pollution it causes > hurts people.

Good for you! (I don't mean this sarcastically. Me too.)

I expected to find some things you've done that were _effective at changing people's behavior_, given your comments above.

<comment><USER5> Changing my behavior to pollute less is easy and rewarding.

Changing others' behavior unrelated to polluting less is easy and rewarding.

Changing others' behavior to pollute less is hard and punishing. People get angry and defensive about it. It's one of the main areas I'm trying to develop.

(Other things I do myself include not owning a car, using subways or walking nearly everywhere, not eating meat, avoiding packaged food, not using air conditioning at least at home, and a few things like that, although after doing them long enough, I generally do them because I prefer them to their polluting alternatives. I like walking, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, and so on).

<comment><USER7> I agree with and do all that also. I was expecting a bit more from you given earlier:

> If you want to change behavior, you need to learn and practice leadership > skills and apply them to yourself as well as others. The science is clear. > More is nice and I agree we should keep pursuing it, but the best way to > decrease the effects of global warming is to change our behavior. (This is > why I moved from science to leadership.)

It sounds like you're asserting a "best way" but haven't come any closer than the rest of us to figuring out how to implement, which makes assertion questionable. But I hope that in trying to develop this area you do figure out something new. Thanks in advance, again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of the articles that focus on rising oceans, and how they might effect the USA, seem to confuse the general issue of global warming with the specific issue of Florida. The situation in Florida might be hopeless, but why should that effect how we talk about other USA urban centers? This article is an example. It talks about New York as if the situation in New York is as hopeless as the situation in Florida.

It's important to remember that much of the USA coastline can be defended the same way that the Dutch defend their coastline: build a lot of dykes around any urban area that is of high value. This strategy would work just fine for much of the northern eastern coast of the USA.

The big exception is Florida. Because much of southern Florida sits on porous limestone, it is useless to build dykes for Florida. The ocean would simply go under the dyke. Figuring out how we might save Florida is a very difficult issue, and it might be impossible.

But figuring out how to save New York is straight forward. The techniques that the Dutch developed 500 years ago would work just fine for New York today. Yes, it would be very expensive, but the payments can be stretched out over 100 years -- the projects can be implemented gradually, as the oceans rise gradually. A staggering $1 trillion price tag is a trivial $10 billion a year, over 100 years.

One could reasonably argue that we can't build a dyke for the whole east coast. That is probably true. Some farmland will be sacrificed, some fishing villages will be sacrificed. But can we build enough dykes to protect New York? Obviously. If the Dutch could do this in the 1500s, why can't we do it now?

<comment><USER9> Promoting ways to protect ourselves from global warming instead of preventing dilutes the popular rhetoric of "reduce emissions now or we're doomed!" If there's enough publicity given to your kind of idea, then people might relax and not worry enough. Without them worrying enough, they might not do anything to prevent it. That kind of makes you wonder why try to prevent it anyway.

So to answer "why can't we do it now?" We can. We just don't want to talk about it yet because sheeples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somehow related to this article, I recommend reading the interesting SF novel "Depth" by Lev Ac Rosen ([https://www.amazon.co.uk/Depth-Lev-AC-Rosen- ebook/dp/B00XGXA...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Depth-Lev-AC-Rosen- ebook/dp/B00XGXAJXG)).

The novel takes place in a future where New York is underwater and life is now arranged on the skyscrapers that are high enough to step outside. The isolation of the city, culturally and physically from the mainland affected a lot the city and this aspect is highly detailed in the novel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why any concern about private land being flooded? Landowners who are worries about it can sell it now, before anyone else has cottoned on or if they want to take a risk, they can keep it. It's an individual decision for each land owner, and they're the ones who'll suffer the effects of their own personal choice. Doesn't seem like something for anyone to really worry about.

<comment><USER11> You're right, no one should worry at all about the simple matter of private land ownership in New York as the sea comes in.

It's a simple matter of private property ownership, right? No complicated information economies need be considered, right? No state programs might seek to intervene and disrupt the predictable linear progression of climate change, right?

Anyone that's worried surely feels silly after reading your comment sir. Thank you for your godly libertarian insights.

<comment><USER12> Geez. He didn't really take it quite as far as your rebuttal, where you proceeded to beat on the strawman you created. He said nothing about state programs intervening and all of that. He's being downvoted quite unfairly for his apparent political stance, but he did have a point.

While it would never work the way he suggested, it should more often. Instead, we privatize profits and socialize losses. I think a lot of people are or should be very sick of that trend by now. That was his point.

<comment><USER13> > "While it would never work the way he suggested, it should more often. > Instead, we privatize profits and socialize losses. I think a lot of people > are or should be very sick of that trend by now. That was his point."

Perhaps the rebuttal was as strong as it was because flooding of land does not only affect landowners, it affects everyone who relies on that land (in one way or another).

To give some examples:

* People could live on the land and not own it.

* People could work on the land and not own it.

* People could rely on the land as part of a major transportation route and not own it.

* People could rely on the land as part of the infrastructure that provides their food (e.g. a local supermarket, a farmer's market, a shipping dock, etc...) and not own it.

Therefore, to restrict the concern to landowners only is shortsighted. The impacts are potentially far greater than just those felt by landowners.

<comment><USER9> All those people have decades to see it coming too. They too can start changing their dependence on it if they really think it'll affect them. Of course most people don't think ahead nearly that far and won't actually look for a new job until their employer literally goes underwater. But maybe we just need a bit of public education about the predicted future to help those people who aren't thinking about it themselves.

Still, my point was focused on landowners, which the article seems to be too. Of course there are public services and so on that don't follow the free market and they're a different issue. I just don't think we should be fearing for the poor troubles that the owners of NY city property might suffer in 50-100 year's time. Those people are smart enough to evaluate risks themselves and make their own decisions long before anything is forced on them.

<comment><USER13> I'm all for personal responsibility. However, I don't see the problem in the government playing their part also. Whilst some people have enough privately owned resources to work around the issues without too much fuss, there are those who have more limited resources who are less able to do so.

Let's take the case of flooding in Manhattan. Let's imagine it hits the subway first. There's a large number of people in NYC who live outside Manhattan but work in Manhattan, travelling to work on the subway from the other NYC boroughs. Whilst people may choose to move away from NYC over time, what about those first few weeks after the flooding hits the subway? Other forms of transport are already heavily used, so it's not like NYC could continue to function smoothly by all former subway users using buses instead. In cases like this, I'd want the government to intervene to help speed up the implementation of flood defences and organise resources to help people continue to live their lives until they were at a point where they had the resources to move.

<comment><USER14> One of the reasons that governments have a hard time executing on large public works projects are the costs.

Advocating for regulatory changes that reduce the cost of public works projects (e.g. prevailing wage rules) would result in more of those projects actually being completed.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I'm not sure what you're advocating for. Are you looking for ways to cut the pay of government contractors?

<comment><USER14> I'm suggesting that we should look for ways to complete projects with less $$. That doesn't mean 'cutting pay', because that presumes you've already hired someone at a high pay rate. How about don't hire them at that high rate to start with?

[http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us- infrastruct...](http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/04/7-reasons-us- infrastructure-projects-cost-way-more-they-should/8799/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've seen a lot of projections like this, showing areas that will someday be underwater when sea levels rise. But am I missing something? Why wouldn't people just build barriers to keep the water out?

That may be prohibitively expensive for some places, but for Manhattan, I have to imagine the cost would be small compared to the alternative.

<comment><USER16> The author addresses it in the essay. Flooding comes in the form of storms every X years and super-high, rare tides, so barriers don't help. If storms are unfrequent enough, people keep occupying the area. In Manhattan, they've already thought about a barrier on the Hudson river, but it's prohibitively expensive, covers a few percent of the risks only, and worse, gives people the feeling that there's a solution. Plus they may solve the 2070 problem, but few things solve the 2100 problem, and nothing solves the 2200 problem: When the water is 30 feet higher, you just have to transform NYC into New Venice.

Which makes me think, a change of name into "New Venice" might help people identify better with the new situation than every barrier.

<comment><USER17> Why is it possible for the Netherlands to prevent flooding and reclaim land but not for New York City? Is there some inherent difference in geography?

<comment><USER18> Tokyo has solved this problem already.

Random article I found, perhaps not the best.

[http://newlaunches.com/archives/a-tour-of-tokyos-alien- like-...](http://newlaunches.com/archives/a-tour-of-tokyos-alien-like- underground-temple-drains.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I saw this in AI: [https://youtu.be/-isE7cFJTzU?t=1m36s](https://youtu.be/-isE7cFJTzU?t=1m36s)

<comment><USER20> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Shifting_Waters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Shifting_Waters)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> interesting talk on the global implications of climate change and rising sea levels:

[http://www.paragkhanna.com/home/2016/7/29/will-climate- chang...](http://www.paragkhanna.com/home/2016/7/29/will-climate-change-force- human-migration)

</comment><comment><USER22> Waterworld?

</comment><comment><USER23> Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets</comment>


The Professor Who Chases Financial Bubbles - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703447104575118070057646044.html

<comment><USER2> _And he continued to flex his forecasting muscles, looking for certain "fingerprints" in market prices that help him identify bubbles. While there's lots of complex math behind it, one key pattern is essentially this: periods of unsustainable growth, in which the growth rate is itself accelerating, punctuated by waves of panicky selling. Key elements are the "positive feedback" generated by optimistic investors pushing the price ever higher into bubble territory even as more pessimistic investors produce waves of selling. In the midst of this tug of war, there's an accelerated development of the bubble._

The number of dollars being created by the fed?

</comment><comment><USER3> non-paywalled link: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870344710457511...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703447104575118070057646044.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines)

<comment><USER4> Still doesn't work for me.</comment></comment>


Horseshit - MG responds to Topolsky's rant - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/14286785030/horseshit

<comment><USER2> You can agree or disagree with Siegler as much as you want, you can like or dislike his clear bias towards Apple, but geez, Siegler doesn't seem to be able to defend himself.

Against the accusation that Siegler is part of a "class warfare", the only thing he has left to say is that the Nexus is actually more expensive, which was not the point of Topolovsky since he was criticizing the notion of condescending behavior against Android (re: they just dont see the polish).

Also he quotes a long argument with the Mercedes vs. Honda analogy and the only thing he has to say is:

"Okay Josh, I read my words out loud. They still sound pretty good to me as an (albeit simplistic) comparison. Your entire post, on the other hand, makes you sound like a fool.

Moving on."

Nothing. No defense.

Siegler, no one accuses you of having an opinion. But of unfair treatment.

<comment><USER3> Where I come from we buy our phones not from a carrier but from a retailer and we are not forced into a payment plan that makes the phones look cheaper than they are. So an iPhone 4S costs from $830 and up, a Galaxy Nexus costs from $770. Both phones are pretty expensive but the iPhone is still the most expensive one. Those figures might be off in the states of course.

<comment><USER4> Yes, when I read this argument I thought: "You must be fucking kidding". Just because some companies offer cheaper initial subsidised phones it doesn't mean that the phone itself is cheaper. And it's not. At retail, most iOS products are $100 or $200 more expensive then their comparable Android equivalents (not talking about $99 tablets, of course, but I wouldn't consider them equivalent).

When I saw the initial Transformer Prime price I thought that it actually was incredibly cheap compared to the initial price iPad 2, especially considering that it comes with a dock and still is cheaper. At this rate I might be able to afford one when the prices drop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not terribly familiar with with this MG author but he comes across as a self-righteous egotistical bigot.

His quote:

"I don't know about you, but when I read my favorite technology writers, I want an opinion. Is the iPhone 4S the best smartphone, or is it the Galaxy Nexus? I need to buy one, I can't buy both. Topolsky never gives us that. Instead, he pussyfoots around it. One is great at some things, the other is great at others. Barf.

Fucking pick one. I bet that even now he won't."

I must be getting old but I thought the job of a journalist/columnist was to give a fair unbiased assessment in their review. No MG, I don't need you to pick one over the other. I have a brain and can reach my own conclusion, thank you very much. I don't need you to tell me what to spend $200-$300 of my own hard-earned money.

He seems to forget his job (I assume he has a job). What we need from journalists/columnists is a balanced honest review with pros and cons, that's all.

</comment><comment><USER6> I cant help but think that there are a lot of other personal grudges at play here instead of just an honest discussion about iPhone 4S vs Galaxy Nexus

<comment><AUTHOR> Well there are __now __, but you have to admit that Josh started it. Seems like a good time to bring up other things that have been on your mind...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I reread Josh's response and other than his use of language in his title, he seemed mostly respectful and not angry. I think MG might have missed the point with the analogy since he mentioned that the nexus was more expensive.

But really, android vs ios is the new emacs vs vim.

<comment><USER8> What your reading is really representative of MG's and Josh's respective writing styles. MG is opinionated and polarizing. Josh is informative and (tries really hard to be) objective.

<comment><USER9> That's one way to interpret it. You could also see it as MG being decisive and Joshua constantly waffling and attempting fake objectivity.

A great example would be the review scores for the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4S. Really? They just both happen to deserve an 8.6? What a coincidence.

<comment><USER8> I can definitely appreciate that viewpoint. I think I fall somewhere inbetween. Josh's writing style can strike me as mushy or even cowardly at times.

<comment><USER9> For the record I wasn't espousing that viewpoint, just providing a counterexample. Personally, I have a very similar opinion as you on Josh. I do find MG and Gruber a little haughty on occasion but I read their blogs regularly and appreciate their ability to articulate many points I've attempted to argue all over the net.

The issue I take with this little exchange is it feels like a very defensive move from Josh, perhaps with reason. I have to be honest, from the moment I tried a Galaxy Nexus at my local Best Buy I lost a little respect for his reviewing skills.

His description of the UI lag being virtually non existent in 4.0 is just flat out not true. Homescreen transitions have the exact same lag that was present on Honeycomb tablets and it's arguably worse than 2.3 IMO. They've done little or nothing to improve touch response. The massive screen and plastic body are matters of opinion, but the quality of the Android OS is still lacking.

I think calling out opinions as "horseshit" and taking the people's stance is a fairly childish move when those being called out are saying something reasonable, which is that Josh basically gave a pass to some still present downsides to Android and therefore there is more to say on the topic of the Galaxy Nexus from the perspective of those that choose to stick with iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is why I like MG's writing. He says what he thinks. I'm a fan of Josh too, but I must admit I do get a sense of fake balance from his writing.

<comment><USER10> I'm not that familiar with MG's writing, but based on this he seems to need the world to be black and white. It's not black and white and I don't have a lot of respect for that sort of thinking.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linux on the go - <AUTHOR> I'd like a setup where I can sit down and do some light coding and some general, keyboard-driven linux use. I'm thinking of a bluetooth keyboard for my phone, and then SSHing into a cloud setup. I think this could be very workable with heavy tmux/vim/emacs and tiling Window Manager use. I would love to hear about your folks' experience with doing similar! <comment><USER2> A friend of mine does something similar.

Long story short, he uses a foldable bluetooth keyboard and his phone cover as a stand (that folds too).

Not much really, once you a mean to get an ssh terminal you're ready to go.

But quite frankly, I find it quite a waste of money and time. Such setup is practically unusable for anything useful.

In order to have a shell on the go I just got an used ThinkPad X200s and a compatible battery, all for less than 75€.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did that last summer using a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.4 as screen and a Bluetooth keyboard probably made for a 10" tablet. I sshed to a Ubuntu server and coded with vim there. I checked the result with a browser. I used the split screen from Samsung, half browser half vim. The battery didn't last long. A phone would have a smaller screen and I'm not sure I would recommend working on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use the Termius app. Have not tested it out yet with a bluetooth keyboard on iOS. But it has nice basic security features, programmable commandsand more. If you are on a Apple of course.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Lenovo X1 Carbon ultraportable. It's lightweight and powerful. I only wish it had longer battery life so I could stay cordless longer.</comment>


Show HN: CatchUp – The fastest way to stay on top of React - <AUTHOR> https://www.catch-up.io <comment><USER2> As someone unfamiliar with React, does it or its ecosystem change so frequently that you need to stay on top of it? That sounds a bit worrying, or I'm just taking it out of context.

<comment><AUTHOR> Staying up-to-date with the changes to the core of React is definitely possible without CatchUp. It's how the community is using it (patterns, best practices, etc) and the open-source library changes that are hard to keep up with especially because there are so many sources where you need to check (twitter/newsletters/youtube/medium/etc)</comment></comment>


Asteroids JavaScript Bookmarklet to blow up any web site - <AUTHOR> http://erkie.github.com/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. Now someone needs to combine it with websockets/node.js (or similar) so I can see the other players on the same page!

<comment><USER3> Exactly what you wanted: <http://realitymachine.net/asteroids.html>

And the HN article, if you want to drum up some more players: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738543>

I hacked together a very (very) basic multiplayer with a paper-thin node.js server in coffeescript.

Yes, really: <http://github.com/cushman/asteroids.js>

It might deserve a newspost of its own, but I'd like to have a working server running so people can actually, you know, use it. Unfortunately, I haven't thought to get node running on my VPS before now, and it's almost 02:00 here...

<comment><USER4> So who is up for a shootout on HN? Or were do the asteroiders hang out?

Maybe something like Twitter, where new stuff to shoot appears on a constant basis?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, Farmville can get what it has coming to it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, thinking about writing defence script to my sites and start js-war.

<comment><USER7> Surround important elements with DOM shielding...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How did I live for so long without this?

</comment><comment><USER9> Holy crap, I had an _extremely_ similar idea last month for a bookmarklet that let you machine gun and blow up pages. In fact, it's sitting half complete in a projects folder. Erkie, get out of my head!!!!

At least it's open source, so I guess I can fork it and add in my ideas.

<comment><USER10> Don't feel bad - this idea is pretty old. A program called "Desktop Toys" from the Win95 era comes to mind, and there are probably more examples.

<comment><USER9> Actually, my memory of Desktop Toys is what was basing it on :)

I didn't realize it was that popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This + the AutoPager extension for Chrome = infinite game

<comment><USER12> I wish I could give this comment more points. It's a blast!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery.

I think these Asteroids are a fun to use, web design tool to cut out what is not necessary. :))

</comment><comment><USER14> Not only great, in a few situations it's a useful and fun way to 'cross off' content on a site you don't need to see anymore. Like stories you wish were not on hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER15> what an awesome stress reliever. now i can get points for destroying facebook.

<comment><USER16> Protip for the paranoid: the author could nab your session cookie at the same time, too! :)

<comment><USER17> Could, but doesn't: [http://github.com/erkie/erkie.github.com/blob/master/asteroi...](http://github.com/erkie/erkie.github.com/blob/master/asteroids.js)

Though, it appears he was trying to implement high scores, which would send some information to another site, including document.location.href, but it is commented out in the version I linked, and removed in the minified version.

<comment><USER16> > Could, but doesn't

Could, but doesn't _yet_.

If you're not locally rehosting the 'known-good' version that you just audited, you're not being paranoid enough.

<comment><USER18> If you're _on the internet_ , you're not being paranoid enough.

Though that's a good reminder :) Thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is awesome! Too bad I'm the only one in the office at the moment...I guess I'll just go blow up Stackoverflow until somebody comes back.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now, this is an ad-blocker with style.

<comment><USER20> Now to see something like this work with a net-enabled 3D television.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The HN homepage is very reliant on everything being there. One shot to a number did this: <http://skitch.com/jackowayed/d29n5/hn-ass-kicked>

<comment><USER22> Tables for layout will do that.

<comment><USER23> Another disadvantage to tables for layout, they are weak against attack!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the most creative time sinks I've ran across in a while, had to link it here.

</comment><comment><USER24> use the bookmarklet mutliple times on the same page if you like armageddon- style destruction

<comment><USER25> The TDs didn't last long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone should add touch events so it works on iPad / iPhone.

<comment><USER26> Not a bad idea. Trying to think through them. I might mess with this today. Too bad you couldn't get the entire page to tilt/rotate, or you could use the motion sensor too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This should be integrated in Adblock. Adding filters by blasting the ads you don't like actually sounds fun.

</comment><comment><USER28> Fun, and it doubles as an easy way to spot table layouts.

<comment><USER29> Spot....and _kill them_

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's oddly non-deterministic. Add two ships and fly around a bit. They're paths will quickly diverge.

<comment><USER31> It's not that it's non-deterministic, it's just that, since your javascript interpreter doesn't execute each instance and its event handlers in parallel, each instance will receive slightly different inputs. This is because the number of times each instance's main loop fires before its keyup/down handler gets called will vary.

If you load up, say, 6 instances, hold the up button for a while to get them up to full speed, then turn for 4 or 5 seconds and let go, they'll be a bit divergent, but not too badly. They should all be going roughly the same direction, and wrapping around at roughly the same time.

If you load up 6 instances again, hold the up button for a while, and then turn back and forth very rapidly for a short period of time, they'll be much more divergent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm surprised no one has commented on the security issue about the bookmarklet allowing javascript to be placed/executed on any website... I can see the next wave of session hijacking in the making. Your DOM is not safe ;]

</comment><comment><USER33> Let's have a leader board for every site with Points accumulated/second. "Kunjan Killed this site with a score of 1700". Are headings and hidden fields worth more points?

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of Quelsolaar's excellent toolkit for his LOVE game: <http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/tool_video.html>

It also has Asteroids integrated in a similar way, as shown at around 70% into the video (unfortunately the video doesn't have a timecode, but it's worth watching in its entirety anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER35> The best bookmarklet I've had since Readability!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is one of those creations which seems so obvious after it has been made. Good Job!

</comment><comment><USER37> this wins 2010's most innovative app ever

</comment><comment><USER38> It's even more fun if you load several copies - they are choreographed!

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice! Maybe it can be hooked up to a gmail or facebook stream to literally "destroy" spam or unwanted messages... email cleanliness could be a few laser shots away :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> Facebook profile pages are pretty fun to destroy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone want to explain how this works? I had no idea dragging onto a tab could start up javascript on a page. It's amazing!

<comment><USER42> What you're talking about has been around forever, and is called a "bookmarklet"

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

<comment><USER43> What a terrible explanation..

<comment><USER44> I thought it was bad too, so I blew the shit out of it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Awesome. Doesn't seem to work on Gmail.

<comment><USER46> Interesting. It worked great on google reader. On Gmail I can sometimes get to the point where I can thrust & fire, but as soon as I destroy anything the gmail client seems to reset itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This guy better get a job offer from Chad Hurley. Seriously though...genius idea.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is absolutely brilliant.

<comment><USER49> It would be awesome to add some js to a website you own to spawn a computer controlled defender if someone uses this script on your site.

<comment><USER50> I wrote a defense: <http://github.com/bl4k/astroid-defense>

(bit scrappy, 10 min of code, but funny)

(test it by running asteroids on this page: <http://bl4k.github.com/>)

<comment> joe-mccann ha nice one, but astley video is blocked.

<comment><USER18> Nooo! You're spoiling it for everyone who hasn't seen it yet!

<comment><USER51> Eh, I clicked the link without reading the replies :[

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Got 4880 points for blowing up current HN new links.

</comment><comment><USER53> Simply ingenious :) Loved the idea!

</comment><comment><USER54> Best used on clients web sites =)

</comment><comment><USER55> yahoo was a great site to play on. endless targets.

</comment><comment><USER56> so many container divs on twitter to blow through!

</comment><comment><USER57> Try it on John Gruber's Daring Fireball. Everything collapses quite nicely and it's fun to start at the top and then shoot everything as you go down!</comment>


Lifecycle of a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://lab.blossom.io/blog/2011/08/24/lifecycle-of-a-startup.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It pays off to go through the material he mentions in his talk and look into them. I've listed some of them in the bullet points of the article. I'm currently reading inside the tornado, great recommendation.</comment>


ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/tonecheck/?utm_source=TweetMeme&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=retweetbutton

<comment><USER2> Any ideas how this could work? Is it some kind of machine learning? I can't really picture it.

<comment><USER3> In a crude fashion this isn't difficult to do: Simply look for things like emotionally charged words and phrases, certain sentence structures, or maybe even word and sentence length.

This is a fairly well studied area, search on the keyword "sentiment analysis" for more information, including a number of open source implementations. ToneCheck even seems to be using the 6 basic emotion categories that everyone else uses, although they've tweaked the names a bit.

It looks like they've crowd sourced evaluating the emotional content of words and phrases at <http://toneaday.com/>.

My guess, largely without evidence, is that they are primarily basing their analysis on words and phrases and are relying on a better word->emotion dictionary than most to provide a competitive advantage. There are a number of open source tools that do this sort of thing, the ones I've seen relied heavily on the dictionary approach as well.

This is a very clever idea and positioning, certainly a better way to productize this technology than the ideas that had been floating around my head.

<comment><USER4> Good find ;-) in face you're right. We're heavy on the crowd sourcing models. But.... it goes further than that. We've got patented technology that surround the connotative capabilities to truly collect and measure the emotional effects of words, phrases, punctuation, emoticons, etc. We've built an adaptive learning engine that is learning new language that's spoken today. It's also self-healing - the more the tool is used, the smarter it gets.

Thanks for your feedback! We're certainly happy to hear people's interest in our tools. We've abstracted our system into an API (called ToneAPI).. if you're interested in building emotional tools - sign up!

Thanks!

Josh</comment></comment></comment>


Can you take back open source code? - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/09/27/can-you-take-back-open-source-code/ <comment><USER2> Which is why the FSF demands the assignment of the copy right from each author to the FSF for the GNU project.

I don't think they did that for Linux, did they?

In any case, they should start collecting copyright assignment forms quick, they won't be able to get them all!</comment>


Show HN: Music Player for YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://zinamen.com/youtube/ <comment><USER2> Damn, beat me to it. I've been thinking about this for a while. I just starting doing something for myself a few months ago. I'll have to try yours out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you seen Streamus? YouTube shut them down over a year ago.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9873552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9873552)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is good, but I can't log in and find my own playlists unfortunatly ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that! Can you give me some info on which browser/OS you were using?

<comment><USER4> Google chrome, windows 7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you. I've been searching for this for years.

Simple and brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is freaking amazing</comment>


CSS Fractal - <AUTHOR> http://yuanchuan.name/css-fractal/ <comment><USER2> I just get a white screen in Firefox.

<comment><USER3> Chrome seems to work</comment></comment>


Pearl Harbor 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://nation.time.com/2012/12/07/pearl-harbor-2-0/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I wonder what the history of Japan and China would look like had the samurai won their uprisings against the Meiji government. The samurai had opposed Japanese expansionism in Asia. Perhaps there would have never been a Pearl Harbour... In Pearl Harbour 2.0 will hackers have been replaced by a belligerent imperial army?</comment>


Syslog is terrible - <AUTHOR> https://www.bouncybouncy.net/blog/syslog-is-terrible/ <comment><USER2> > A popular sentiment is that binary logs are evil and the only way to > properly log information is by using plain text.

> I don't particularly care about the argument between plain text versus > binary logs. However, if your reasoning for not wanting to use binary logs > is because they are opaque and can be corrupted then you should take a close > look at your log rotation or archival process. If you are archiving logs by > first compressing them using something like gzip, you no longer have plain > text log files.

I found quite a few people disliked binary log files due to concerns around their portability. Specifically when they depend on a platform-specific utility to read them. If they are compressed using a standard algorithm, it alleviates concerns about portability.

</comment><comment><USER3> _If you are archiving logs by first compressing them using something like gzip, you no longer have plain text log files._

Well yeah, but that's because I'm already done parsing the log and/or using it for debugging. If I wasn't done with it, I wouldn't have archived it.

But I know that when I pull a 3 year old log out of the archive, I can gunzip it and will still be able to read it, no matter how much the file format has changed since then, and I don't have to dig up a 3 year old magic decoder program (that may only run on one operating system) to be able to see what's in the file.

<comment><USER4> > But I know that when I pull a 3 year old log out of the archive, I can > gunzip it and will still be able to read it, no matter how much the file > format has changed since then, and I don't have to dig up a 3 year old magic > decoder program (that may only run on one operating system) to be able to > see what's in the file.

Oh, but you can rest assured that systemd will never, ever have a breaking change. Lennart Poettering can be trsuted to _never_ do something that would cause anybody any trouble! /s

And that's the problem: systemd is a great idea, and it does a lot of really great things, but the man in charge simply can't be trusted not to break things. It was one thing when he was breaking desktops with PulseAudio; it's an entirely different thing now that his decisions can break servers (how many systems have broken due to nohup no longer doing its job?), and break the ability to retrieve logs over time.

I honestly think that systemd is going to arrive at a good place eventually, and a great deal of credit will belong to Poettering. But it will also cause a great deal of harm before it gets there, and he deserves a great deal of the blame.

<comment><USER5> Can you summarize how he "[broke] desktops with PulseAudio"? From my perspective as an end user it didn't seem to go badly at all. Was I insulated by my distribution maintainers?

<comment><USER4> > Can you summarize how he "[broke] desktops with PulseAudio"?

For a long while it was flaky and buggy, with audio periodically failing. It was never the end of the world, but it was annoying, and I think it runs decently enough now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First,

The article seems to mostly complain about text logs VS structured logs. That is unrelated to syslog because it is simply a log transport mechanism.

Applications should send structured logs. (e.g. JSON messages). The message may be delivered by whatever means (e.g. syslog).

\---

Second,

I am surprised that the article doesn't mention the issues with syslog not being defined properly and suffering from interoperability issues.

Truth is: "syslog" refers to multiples, incompatible protocols that evolved other time. See two independent specifications for example:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5424](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5424) and [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3164](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3164)

Applications, libraries and middleware (graylog/ELK/rsyslog/syslog-ng/fluentd) have interoperability issues because of the different syslog protocols. Just because two things are speaking "syslog" doesn't mean they speak the same "syslog".

Switches/routers/appliances cause even more issue because the custom implementations tend to not format messages perfectly for any of the RFC. ^^

<comment><USER7> Hi, author here :-)

> That is unrelated to syslog because it is simply a log transport mechanism.

Only partially, RFC5424 defines the structured data format (that unfortunately is not widely used)

syslog is also the syslog() interface, and as far as I know there is no reference implementation for encoding structured data in the format the RFC describes.

Personally I'd rather it be something like json.

I could patch openssh to log using json, but the chances of that ever getting merged are probably 0.

> See two independent specifications for example:

Well, RFC5424 says it obsoletes 3164 at least. 3164 is just embarrassing, especially the section on timestamps: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3164#section-5.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3164#section-5.1)

Adding a year to the date was "not consistent with the original intent of the order and format of the fields". 5424 at least says "Use this specific form of RFC3339"

> Switches/routers/appliances cause even more issue because the custom > implementations tend to not format messages perfectly for any of the RFC

Ugh, I know it. As I said in another comment, we run syslog collection as a service so we receive logs from a large number of different devices not under our direct control.

<comment><USER6> > about json and syslog structured data

I found syslog design to be well done about that, ignoring whether it was accidental or not :D

+1 for json. Format messages as JSON for logging. Update/reconfigure applications to write json logs.

The structured data headers of syslog can be used for enriching log messages with metadata (instance id, instance ip, tags, environment, etc...).

The RFC 5xxx design allows to manage the message (application's responsibility) and the metadata (relay's responsibility) separately, so it's nice.

[Note: If ALL messages were JSON logs and the tooling could manipulate json messages directly to add/remove fields, there would be no need for a different metadata channel.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I went in to this article thinking, "this guy is stupid." I came away thinking, "syslog is stupid."

<comment><USER9> Working with SIEMS a lot, I agree it needs a serious revision.

1\. Define an encryption standard, both symmetric and asymmetric (to prevent log tampering). 2\. Define a compression standard, with scheduling options similar to cron jobs but defined in syslog.conf. 3\. Overhaul the facility field, define some generic ones like "Auth", "Audit", "Kernel" etc and don't hardcode any numeric mappings. Article covers this well. 4\. Make CEF the standard format for writing logs to disk or forwarding to other devices. All modern applications and kernels should be writing their logs in CEF format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Using DAQ's properly eliminate process blocking when using TCP delivery and there are connectivity issues. You can do TLS encryption natively. Rsyslog action templates are complex but extremely powerful. After reading this post I just wonder if you have ever read the Rsyslog documentation or done any large scale deployments with it? Our network is handling over 50k log messages a second using Rsyslog and while it's not perfect I can't think of any other standards based system I could rely on.

<comment><USER7> Hi, author here :-)

We do use rsyslog.. The rates we see aren't terribly high, but it is a fairly large deployment. We have a setup consisting of redundant tcp load balancers fronting redundant syslog relays feeding into additional applications and an archival box.

Basically this example in the RFC, but with a frontend load balancer cluster and additional collectors:

       +</comment></comment><comment>----+         +-----+            +</comment><comment>---+
       |Originator|---->----|Relay|----></comment><comment>-|Collector|
       |          |-+       +-----+        +---|         |
       +</comment><comment>----+  \                    /    +</comment><comment>---+
                      \     +-----+      /
                       +->--|Relay|-->--/
                            +-----+

For the pieces that we control and can use RELP things work great. The problem is that we run this as a service for a large group of heterogeneous systems. We split out logs by hostname, and it's not uncommon to wind up with an INFO.log at the end of the day because someone is sending us INFO where the hostname should be.

If every client could use rsyslog+relp and things like imfile to send us application logs, the whole system would work a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER11> OpenBSD's sendsyslog(2) made syslog_r(3) really cheap and usable virtually everywhere, also solved fd exhaustion issues.. and despite any protocol quirks.. syslog has a standard place in Unix arcana.

It would be great of other systems adopted this.

[http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD- current/man2/sendsyslog.2](http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD- current/man2/sendsyslog.2)

</comment><comment><USER12> At least we have wtmp/utmp that can be reliably parsed, unless musl libc is used.

</comment><comment><USER13> An aside: I like writing the log message in logfmt: [https://brandur.org/logfmt](https://brandur.org/logfmt)

</comment><comment><USER14> So syslog supports structured logs via JSON natively now.

<comment><USER7> Hi, author here :-)

Does syslog actually support this? I mean, you can send a JSON blob as part of the MSG field, but you still need to send the

      PRI VERSION TIMESTAMP HOSTNAME APP-NAME PROCID MSGID

header.

You can't just send something like

        {"ts": "2016-09-..", "host": "www1", "proc": "nginx", ..}

to a syslog server and have it understand it.

We do ship some json logs in rsyslog using imfile, but that's a bit different.</comment></comment>


What do you think about my summer internship application? (open for comments) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1asSsvwP9lzKLau_A457WBEOJdVsqujPBsuGJy-F0KFQ/edit?usp=sharing

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I'd love to get feedback on my CV, I'm looking for a summer internship abroad in 2015. How do you think I could improve it? Do you like it? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Best regards, Marcus from Sweden</comment>


Show HN: tailblocks – Ready-to-use Tailwind CSS blocks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mertJF/tailblocks <comment><USER2> And now we have come full-circle to discover that Bootstrap was right all along.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is quite awesome!</comment>


The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2543971 <comment><USER2> Incidentally, I started my PhD around the time this article was written. My thesis, which discusses the design and implementation of Scala.js, ended up being titled "Cross-Platform Language Design" [1], as it focuses on the language interoperability issue, combined with concerns for portability and performance.

[1] [https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/256862?ln=fr](https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/256862?ln=fr)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for all you've done for Scala.js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The section titled "The VM Delusion" seems a little superficial. It focuses on interoperability with C++ which is hard for nearly every language and then says that because it's annoying in Java the VM concept doesn't work.

I think VMs had a pretty successful run (esp. in the time frame of this article) - and the only thing that has attenuated it is the rise of containers and standardisation of Linux as a default server platform which finally made "cross platform" a reality for non-VM languages.

The real residual problems with interoperability b/w different languages now lie in things like internal data structures being mapped onto different memory layouts which creates very high cost to passing large data sets between them. Hence projects like Apache Arrow [1] which try to solve this.

[1] [https://arrow.apache.org/](https://arrow.apache.org/)</comment>


Hulu Struggles To Survive The Influence Of Its Parent Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3001736/hulu-struggles-survive-influence-its-parent-companies?utm_source <comment><USER3> It's a little disappointing that we're even having this conversation at all. Online content should be so much more valuable than broadcast content, both to consumers and advertisers. And yet, online is still the red-headed stepchild.

Online content can target ads _individually_! I've filled out the survey on Hulu, they know that I'm a guy, my age, etc. They probably have pretty good guesses about my income and my interests. The full set of shows that I watch paints a pretty detailed picture of who I am and what I like. In an ideal world, they could use that information to show me very precisely targeted ads.

That famous quote, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." is probably mostly right, except I'd bet that it's a lot more than half that gets wasted. And Hulu should have the ability to fix that, by individually targeting ads! But they're still showing me, a fairly nerdy guy, lots of Febreze ads and Glade sense & spray ads and even the occasional tampon ad or whatever.

Google is proof that precisely targeted ads are really, really valuable. And I think targeting ads well even makes them less annoying; if you're showing me something that's actually relevant to me, I feel less like my time is being wasted. But Hulu and its advertisers still haven't figured out how to match up ads and users.

It's sad. But whoever actually solves this problem will make oodles of money.

<comment><USER4> The major difference is ad load. Watch a 1-hour show on Hulu, and you'll see that the content is typically ~42 minutes long. Which means that on-air, it's 18 minutes of ads that fill the balance. But online is showing way less ads than 18 minutes. Even with 4-5 ad breaks, you're watching, at most 2 30-second ads per break. In online streaming, revenue per ad (CPM) is competitive with TV, but revenue per viewer is much lower.

Also, targeted advertising isn't a panacea. I agree it can be better, but if you're a big brand spender like McDonald's, Nike or Target, you're targeting just about everyone. Gender, age, income, and interests matter a whole lot less.

<comment><USER5> Not that it makes up the whole difference, but Hulu shows about twice as many ads as you're saying. The typical hour-long show has 4-6 ad slots (including beginning and end), and they average 60-120 seconds (with a rare ad group over 2 minutes), not 30-60.

<http://i.imgur.com/ZnB3Q.png>

There are fewer ads on shorter shows, and even fewer on clips, but it's still not what it as sparse as when Hulu first came out.

<comment><USER4> You're right -- thanks. They've been slowly increasing their ad load every year since they've launched, and it looks like they're doing three ads in a break now for some shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's astonishing how difficult it is for content companies to get this right. Torrent sites have had it down for more than half a decade. I started using private torrent sites to obtain TV shows more than 6 years ago, and even though very little has changed in a substantial way since then (excepting the rise of Project Gazelle), the process is great. You can download _any_ show, _any_ time you want after the show has been released (+15 to 20 minutes), with _no_ restrictions. I find it ridiculous that this is still an issue in _2012_.

<comment><USER7> You don't get paid for the value you produce, you get paid for the value you can withhold. The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only reason that Hulu and Netflix stay in business; torrents are fantastic, but in a free-info model, there's nothing to withhold and no way to get paid. Embedded commercials would get immediately edited out, and product placement only goes so far.

I don't like the situation either, but without a new business model (or a new economic system), we're stuck with what we have. (Most) video content is insanely expensive to produce, and physical disc sales continue to decline.

<comment><USER6> > The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only reason > that Hulu and Netflix stay in business; torrents are fantastic, but in a > free-info model, there's nothing to withhold and no way to get paid. > Embedded commercials would get immediately edited out, and product placement > only goes so far.

How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. And what about torrents? If people wanted to download and copy files, they could do that with torrents. But instead, the people who actually _bother_ to pay for the movies and TV shows are punished.

And this same argument could be applied to music stores, but Amazon and iTunes operate without DRM, and there are no issues there. A lot of pro-DRM people said the iTunes store would collapse without DRM, but things seem to be working just fine for them. We've been through this _exact_ same argument half a decade ago with music. The only reason it's being repeated is being the old farts in charge of the media companies are too shortsighted to see what will benefit their companies in the long term.

<comment><USER7> I didn't mean to imply that DRM-free video stores can't work; I meant that (a) torrents themselves are nigh-impossible to monetize, and (b) suits at Big Content will never feel comfortable with opening up their precious data, even though you and I know that the raw data exists already.

Though millions are sometimes spent to market music, that's peanuts compared to the costs of producing movies and television, and that money won't get spent without some confidence that it can be recouped. It's one thing for Louis CK to gamble $0.2M on a DRM-free standup special, and another for Disney to gamble $220M on a DRM-free Avengers.

> How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu- > rays? You can copy videos very easily.

Nerds can, but DVD ripping is still much less friendly to regular people compared to MP3 swapping, and requires much more work to play back compared to iPods and CD burning. If the industry ever got behind open standards, eventually many more people would pirate movies instead of just college kids. Borrowing a DVD from a friend would be no different than taking it permanently, resulting in fewer total sales.

Don't get me wrong: DRM is a plague. Hell, I'd even support a tax that made all content part of a universal digital library, with funds distributed proportionally to usage. But without somehow creating a new economic system for digital content, every "rational actor" is going to do whatever they can to maintain maximum leverage. The only reason the RIAA caved was that the damage was already done, and they had lost most of their leverage already. (Also, it was something of a ploy to give Amazon an advantage over iTunes, which was enjoying a brief hegemony over paid music downloads; user freedom was a happy side effect.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since the article mentions the site redesign, I think this new design is not going to work out for them. The information density is too low, resulting in the site feeling empty and making it less interesting to browse around. I think they'll lose a lot of casual viewers because of this. My assessment may be wrong and I am curious to see how this plays out.

<comment><USER9> Just to offer the opposite opinion, as a frequent user of Hulu I love the new redesign. To me it has less of the useless stuff and more of the useful stuff immediately available.

The new front page has helped me discover many new shows that I wouldn't have found any other way

Additionally the new design feels much faster and more responsive. If given a choice I would not go back to the old design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am routinely baffled at some of the choices content-holders make regarding not just Hulu, but on-demand availability of their content.

I remember when I first began watching "Shameless" on Showtime. I had missed pretty much the entire season before somebody recommended it to me. I found it on Verizon's "On-Demand" and watched a couple episodes, loved it, then came back the next day to find out that all the episodes had been pulled off of On Demand for a few months.

I can only assume it was pulled to keep from scavenging DVD sales or something like that, but at that time, I hadn't watched enough to build up a love for the show that would have persuaded me to buy a DVD.

I work from home, so I will often put TV shows on that I can mindlessly watch while I'm working. This generally excludes shows that require lots of attention, but most prime-time shows are pretty digestible with only a modicum of attention required.

All too often, despite having all channels on FIOS, Netflix, Hulu Plus et al, I find that I can't watch the first season of a new show that looked interesting.

You should _always_ give away at least the first few episodes so that I can get hooked. I don't have a problem with releasing the episodes the day after, or even a week late... but don't deny me the ability to fall in love with your show by only showing me the past few episodes, unless your show is only into its fifth episode of the first season.

<comment><USER11> I share your amazement but at Teller (of Penn & Teller) said in one of his interviews, "People only believe what they are prepared to believe." Over the years I've discovered that while this makes a lot of magic tricks possible, it also profoundly affects how people react to environmental changes.

Whether its executives at a large content conglomerate debating the economics of content or parents at a school debating the validity of the scientific method, if someone is given a choice of what to believe, and one choice would violate some other deeply held belief, they always choose to believe the explanation that doesn't challenge the status quo. Regardless of how ridiculous it might seem to a neutral third party observer.

This mis-feature in the human brain seems to cause a lot of trouble.

The deeply held belief that I have heard expressed by many different big content holders is that the 'true value' of a work can only realized by keeping absolute control over the use of that work. Thus they work to maintain absolute control by technology, by regulation, and by the force of law.

<comment><USER12> Our tendency to minimize cognitive dissonance has a lot of terrible consequences, but the Wikipedia article points out a few ways besides magic tricks that we can exploit it for good: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applicatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Applications_of_cognitive_dissonance_research)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked for a streaming media startup that partnered with old-line media parents. Parents killing their new-media spawn is by now well-established practice, and nobody should be surprised about the struggles of Hulu.

The media giants depend on their existing distribution partners - <USER2> companies, DVD sales and theatrical. They aren't going to put these channels at risk. Streaming media won't be first-class until a new streaming-centric content power emerges, or until the strength of cable is broken.

Eventually the transition will happen. But when. In our lifetime? Not sure.

</comment><comment><USER14> How streaming _should_ work in 2012: a provider-agnostic protocol allows any video producer to place content online, either for streaming or download. There are no codec wars or patent issues. Digital video "warehouses" collect all these sources of video, providing bandwidth and an open API for purchasing streaming and/or download rights to a video, with a simple algorithmic pricing structure. Frontend websites and applications then compete for user attention, mixing and matching video from any source they please, with the only requirement that they pay the streaming rate to the video aggregator. Any video, any time, with any UI.

Instead we have ever-increasing ad durations, limited episode selection, proprietary players with _terrible_ video quality (e.g. some of them use nearest neighbor scaling in fullscreen, there's no vsync so there's massive tearing and jitter, the latest versions of Flash for Linux and YouTube swap the red and blue color channels, etc.). Television as a medium is broken, IMO: advertisements are timed to start right at the point your mind starts to get absorbed into a show, causing frustration and a desire to change channels or close the tab.

<comment><USER7> > simple algorithmic pricing structure

I'm completely on board with everything you're saying, but algorithmic pricing is non-trivial; were it to be achieved, it would fundamentally rewrite the rules of economics as we know it.

Prices aren't decided by value or fairness, but by negotiating leverage. If Mad Men knows they're in high demand, they ask a high price or walk; if Netflix knows that a horror B-movie is in low demand, they offer a low price or walk.

Getting content owners to cede their negotiating power in either case to a universal formula will be nigh-impossible without fundamentally rewriting IP law (which for the record, I am enthusiastically in favor of).

<comment><USER14> It is my opinion that in an ideal world (ideal as in, most pleasant for humans to inhabit), pricing of video would be constant, and high demand would be its own reward through higher sales volume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Hulu ... $600 million this year

> TV still generates more than $70 billion ... viewership is down 12.5%

I can totally understand their decision here. Hulu cost them 9b in revenue, and only returned 600m.

(Whether this drop is actually because of Hulu or not is more at issue, but I can see them thinking it is.)

<comment><USER16> Just curious... where are you getting the $9B number from?

<comment><USER17> Looks like 70*0.125

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They need to make Hulu Plus more appealing. I am currently subscribed to it but I have no reason to resubscribe. I can't find any of the shows or movies I want to watch on it that aren't already on Netflix.

<comment><USER19> I hate hulu plus.

If I'm paying a monthly fee for something I don't want to have to sit through an enormous amount of advertising. This is doubly true online when it's trivial to get it a higher quality version without advertising for free. I'm happy to pay the monthly fee for the convenience of advertisement free streaming (which is why I love netflix and spotify), but it's insulting to pay to watch advertising (and even more so when you also have a cable subscription).

All hulu plus does is what cable tv should have started doing years ago which is let you watch all shows on demand, it fixes nothing else and charges too much for that obvious privilege. The way the introduced ads also bothered me and reminded me of how the cable networks brought them in (initially cable tv had no advertising which is one of the reasons you paid for it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So how much could Netflix pull in with ads? They streamed a billion hours in June, so if it was one ad per half-hour (on average), at 30$ CPM does that imply 60M$\month? That's a serious amount of money.

</comment><comment><USER21> I used to be a Hulu+ subscriber until they introduced the "brain-spray awesome" experience last month. Now I am not a subscriber and since there is no free Hulu to watch on TV - not even a customer.

They took away the ability to add an entire show to queue and the notifications of the new episodes in the shows in your queue among many other things. I am not sure who thought the removal of these features is somehow making the service better but I would be really surprised if it were its parent companies. Seeing how the company spends money to cripple whatever UX it had before and lose customers I imagine Hulu has much bigger problems than the influence of its parent companies.

<comment><USER5> They didn't take that away. You just click the favorite button on the show's page. Updates to that show are added to your queue. All that changed is the name (Favorite instead of Add to Queue).

<comment><USER21> "Updates to that show are added to your queue" != "all show episodes are added to your queue". There used to be a choice: "subscribe to new episodes" and "subscribe to all episodes" now there is not and it's "subscribe to new episodes" only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Media companies suck. CBS now delays start times by 2 minutes to break DVRs. And certain shows (ie person of interest) don't exist legally on the Internet.

What do they expect people to do?

</comment><comment><USER23> The big corporate egos can't step aside and allow a business to be successful.</comment>


U.S. VC Investment Down 8% in 2008. Last Quarter Slowest Since 2005  - <AUTHOR> http://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journalid=86354652

<comment><USER2> It's actually kind of encouraging that the last quarter wasn't worse, considering how serious the economic situation is supposed to be. 2005 wasn't a terrible year. The Nasdaq is back where it was in 1998.

</comment><comment><USER3> Consider the following before you start worrying whether or not some VC will or will not start pouring money into your application. Are your users pouring time into your application? Is your application even in production? What is holding you back from putting your application into production?

Quit whining about the economy and put your application into production; IMHO, VC is over-rated, and even if your new application does find funding, it is a poor indicator of the success of your product. Over here at HN, I think we sometimes get all caught up in whether or not we can find funding and pre- optimize our product for profitability. Don't do it, remember what you're making, who will use it, why they are using it, and how often they are returning to use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> great, just great. So much for funding this year :(</comment>


Svn to git protips  - <AUTHOR> http://pivotallabs.com/users/jsusser/blog/articles/1024-svn-to-git-protips

<comment><USER2> "Protips"? Funny. The article is ridiculously light on details. From experience, I've found there's a lot more involved to converting a svn repo to git. After done, there's also something else I consider very important: verifying all the data after it's been moved. A few months ago, we (xfce.org) switched from svn to git. I kept track of what I did and published the scripts I used:

<http://git.xfce.org/admin/xfce-git-migration>

Some of it is Xfce-specific, but I tried to abstract most of the site-specific stuff into env vars and such, so it should be reasonably adaptable to other sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article didn't seem to have anything to do with actually switching to Git; it was just a list of SVN commands without the Git equivilant. It did mention one difference thats worth mentioning:

 _Since git doesn't keep empty directories, you can add a .gitkeep file to empty directories that you don't want to go away._

However, I thought one of Git's selling points was that it didn't add a file to directories?

And the site adding a link back to the blog when I went to copy and paste that quote? Eugh.

<comment><USER4> I think you might be missing the point of the article. It's tips for converting a Subversion repository to a Git repository.

<comment><USER3> I did get that. What I didn't get was why it only showed the relevant svn commands, not how to do the same thing in git for all the items listed (ie: for "Find all authors"; format of an authors file? a link to git's docs? or how about recommending a specific module for "Show all externals"? or, again, a link to where to start looking for one?)</comment></comment></comment>


ASK HN: How did they break in to my Gmail acct? - <AUTHOR>

So I woke up today, checked my email and there's this whole list of undelivered mails, apparently someone or something had broken into my gmail acct and sent the following msg to everyone on my contact list:
Hey, how are you doing recently? I would like to introduce you a very good company and its website is www.ele-stores.com. It can offer you all kinds of electronic products that you may be in need,such as laptops ,gps ,TV LCD,cell phones,ps3,MP3/4,motorcycles and etc........ You can take some time to have a check ,there must be something interesting you 'd like to  purchase . The contact email: email@example.com.  MSN: firstname.lastname@example.com
TEL:  0086+13717782599
Hope you can enjoy yourself in shopping from that company !
Regards
They also decided it was a good idea to put that msg into my signature as well as set my account to vacation mode with the same vacation msg.
Obviously this was a very brazen thing to do, and they clearly made no effort to cover it up, neither was my password changed. So I figure this is more likely an automated thing, I left my account logged in with a firefox 3 browser at work (university firewall) overnight, which is when this occured. So all signs point to some sort of an automated attack through the browser, does anybody know more about how this happened? <comment><USER2> Are you using <https://gmail.com> and/or have configured your account to always use https? There are cookie based hacks.

<http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33207/108/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I see.. I wasn't using https before, I'll read more about this when I get back home. Is this really common? Why does gmail not set https on by default

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello I have just lost danish to this firm so I will WARN everybody to deal with this firm becaurse is a humbug firm. My last mail from them: FORGET YOUR MONEY AND YOUR LAPTOPS

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

<comment><USER3> I mean danish kroner

<comment><USER3> SORRY ONE MORE TIME 6000,00 danish kroner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Gmail, Settings > "Browser connection", set to "Always use https"</comment>