German villagers build own broadband network - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelocal.de/20140601/german-villagers-build-own-broadband-network

<comment><USER2> The part that is completely missing in that article - and could be interesting to people from outside from germany - is that this shouldn't be necessary if you follow the official worldview. The ISPs are obliged to provide High-Speed Internet to the whole of Germany, but the government is not forcing them to do that, instead letting them promise and promise again to make that happen.

They do it somewhat with LTE, which they have to roll out first in rural areas before being allowed to go into the big cities (where the money is). But in the DSL-market, where there is no such force applied, they simply don't do it. Promises are worth nothing and the market doesn't succeed in providing basic infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> The moment that LTE started happening, people realized that they were not going to get decent internet. Because "rural" in Germany includes villages with 1000 inhabitants in it.

Just because the big Telcos don't consider it economically viable to invest there, these 1000 people would have to share the badndwidth of LTE among themselves indefinitely. So of course they became active. (Note, some communities already started to get involved in their own internet connectivity long before LTE was rolled out in Germany.)

Funny enough, once there is a decent alternative by a local/small provider, the big ones also start showing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is also happening in Finland. It worked well for single villages, etc. but then the municipalities discovered how cheap these co-operatives were and enlisted them to build big networks. Now these companies with very little actual expertise of network building have tens of millions of budget to network almost entire counties and are failing hard.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is not at all uncommon on Sweden. Rural communities come together and organize fiber buildouts in their own local areas. Average cost is around $2000 per connection. The biggest problem is generating enough interest to make a build out economically viable.

We've been working on this for two years where I live and the digging will finally begin in august, 180km of fiber to ~600 homes.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Good work. I live a bit more urban, but our local council (kommun), i.e. the tax payers, owns the local network and we have eleven companies providing different type of services (IP, cable TV, VoIP etc) on the fibre. We have about half of the houses (6000 of 12000) and essentially all the apartments connected. Getting my house connected by fibre was one of the best things I have ever done. Ran a startup from the basement for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is an interesting problem even in some areas that are not too remote. My parents are within 2 miles of the nearest cable or DSL connection, but it might as well be 100 miles. The spent a while considering a 50 foot tower for a line-of-sight radio link to a town a few miles away, but right now they still have HughesNet service with low caps and high latency.

I am really not sure how I feel about their situation. They have plenty of money to throw at the problem, so they could fix it if they really wanted to, but that isn't the case for everyone. For now it is just horrible when they want to show me a youtube video and then we all huddle around the laptop for a few minutes while it buffers.

<comment><USER7> Microwave link is the way to go. There may be a local small company that already has towers in place on a hill or something. I'm in rural Montana and can get 40 Mb/s, no caps, low ping. Get the latest generation of radios with the small (<12") dish if you can as they are much less effected by wind etc.

<comment><USER8> Affected?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of local citizen groups have tried to do this in small towns in the US but typically what happens is Verizon or Comcast comes in with a big budget Ad campaign rallying against it. Of course their plans usually involve using the cities tax dollars but the basic idea is the same.

[http://www.tricitybroadband.com/](http://www.tricitybroadband.com/)

<comment><USER10> Or the incumbent ISPs will sue them to hell for a few years to stop it.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/lousiana-fiber- ne...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/lousiana-fiber-network- running-despite-cable-telco-lawsuits/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure I understand how they did this. Did the residents' money go to building the local network for the village? Who provides the backbone? I just wonder how applicable this might be to small towns in the U.S.

<comment><USER12> Well, as far as I understand, some of the residents essentially formed a company (BBNG) which then built a fiber optics connection to the nearest TNG access point. TNG is a regional provider, serving in particular the town of Kiel (capitital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein) and is also (one of) the ISP for the corresponding state government. TNG in turn provides the actual service to the subscribers, and pays a leasing fee to BBNG. BBNG uses that revenue to reimburse the investors.

As for the peerings of TNG: [http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as- report?as=AS13101](http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS13101)

<comment><USER13> What I don't understand is how you figure out where the closest fibre access point is. I'm trying to get my head around how to carry out a project similar to this / B4RN and the first step seems to be to check if there's a fibre access point reasonably close by.

<comment><USER14> Find a local line-man and ask! Wherever you see one of those trucks working on overhead or underground lines there is a ton of knowledge about local infrastructure present.

Good spots to scout for: railroad stations, microwave towers, datacenters (unlikely, but still), highways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is interesting to see, especially the older Germans chipping in. My own in-laws who live in the Oberpfalz have no broadband nor do other family in the same building. I usually end up topping up a data stick when I go.

</comment><comment><USER16> Check out ffdn :) [http://www.ffdn.org/](http://www.ffdn.org/) This is not uncommon :)

<comment><USER17> And also taziden's talk: [http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_-_...](http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_- _saal_6_-_201312291130_-_y_u_no_isp_taking_back_the_net_-_taziden.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The UK is currently building out it's broadband network to provide 2MBps [0] to everyone by next year, and "Superfast" broadband to most people with the next couple of years. There is a local bidding process for who the funding goes to, but in most cases it is BT meaning people will get up to 24Mbps. There is a bit of controversy though as local initiatives like this are being shunned in favour of BT due to red tape [1].

I wonder whether it would be better to instead invest in 4G services in rural areas. Here I can't even get 2G (yeah this place is a bit remote), but most rural areas have that or 3G in the UK.

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk](https://www.gov.uk/broadband- delivery-uk)

[1] [http://northdorsetbroadband.co.uk/](http://northdorsetbroadband.co.uk/)

<comment><USER19> I feel that achieving the 2MBps by next year will be very unlikely.

I live in a very rural area and over the past 3-4 years our internet has gone from poor (0.5MBps) to nothing. We were told by an engineer that the wire is so badly damaged that there is nothing that he could do and the majority of the wire from the exchange from our house to the exchange would have to be replaced. Its so bad landline calls are no inaudible due to the amount of noise coming down the line.

What did BT have to say about this? Absolutely nothing, there is a flag on our account letting the call centers know that there is nothing they can do for us. They just keep telling us to move ISPs. But everything goes down the BT line anyway so thats just moving the problem elsewhere.

(Its quite sad that I can remember the sequence of numbers to press when ringing up to get through to the tech support and then the script they used to ask when tried to resolve our issues.)

There are about 5 other houses with us, then about 4 miles before the next town, and then the exchange. In total we are about 5-7 miles from the exchange (which is fibre ready).

The problem for us now is that everyone just expects broadband of some form or another, its like a utility. Nobody wants to buy a house with no water, or electric and now people don't want to buy a house without broadband. So we've got to the point where we are trying to move house to get access to the internet but cannot sell our current house to get the funds to move.

EDIT: Also just like to add that I've looked into 4G and due to the landscape, it wasn't an option :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know much about the broadband market, but i feel the future will be wireless highspeed internet. In many regions LTE/4G already reach very decent speeds with low latency, the main problem is insane traffic costs and probably not enough infrastructure to support many clients. But the technology is already there isn't it ? Or will companies always want wired highspeed internet ?

<comment><USER21> Companies might use wired internet but residential places without cable will likely move to mobile. This is exactly what is already happening in Nigeria.

<comment><USER22> I even know of a few people in Copenhagen who've done that. Companies are starting to offer all-inclusive packages for mobile+home 4G, where you can add a fixed wifi router onto your existing mobile 4G plan. If you're already paying for mobile 4G, the incremental cost to those packages is often considerably less than the cost of home cable+DSL, at least if your data usage is moderate.

<comment><USER20> thats exactly what i mean, i could see most of the population with moderate internet usage move to mobile internet completely in the next 10 years. Its a different story for power users and businesses of course.

On the other hand you have more and more services like phones and TV move to IP, so a wired highspeed connection might be even more important in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A small town in Alberta, Canada did the same thing.[1]

All 8,500 residents have access to gigabit for $57/mo.

[1] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets- ma...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets- massive-1-000-mbps-broadband-boost-1.1382428)

<comment><USER24> Serious question, but how does a town/municipality handle network maintenance? Many of these stories seem to feature a lot of grants, and one-time costs but I don't see much about the cost required to upgrade the network over time. I'm assuming some of the fee users pay is earmarked for this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They could also route some Tor traffic from their community project.</comment>


Delete files owned by root, without being root - <AUTHOR> http://paksoy.net/post/25231322320/delete-files-owned-by-root-without-being-root

<comment><USER2> Maybe my brain has been twisted by too many years of using Unix, but that's exactly how it's supposed to work. "rm" is really editing the directory, not the file, so the owner of the directory is what matters. The file may not actually even be deleted; if there's a hard link to it from another directory the file will still be there in the other places. inodes are awesome.

<comment><USER3> I agree. This should not be surprising. The ability to link a file to a directory is different from the set of permissions necessary to change the data in the file.

Here's a practical example: I can create ~/public with permissions 777 (fully permissible) and allow my friends to read and write freely in it.

They can create files with permissions 600 (only they can read/write)

I can't open up these files and read the contents, but I can remove the entire thing from my home directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you leave a locked safe in my locked house, I cannot open the safe but I can easily dispose of it. I would argue that this behavior is intuitive.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I'm not sure why this is surprising, since the write bit refers to modification of the file itself, whereas the ability to create (or delete) files in a directory is related to the write permissions for the _directory_.

 __EDIT __: NelsonMinar explains this better in his comment, but if you think of the inodes, not the files, this behavior makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant `unlink` attack:

<http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/tmp_paper.txt>

<comment><USER4> This attack is actually not relevant because tmpwatch (the daemon whose behavior causes the problem) runs as root and is calling unlink as root (this is explicitly noted).

In fact, /tmp generally does not have the behavior cited by this article, as it is marked with a special access flag that only lets users modify the directory entries of files they own.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit>

<comment><USER6> True. Thanks for clarification. Actually, I never understood why "sticky bit" is called that way, wikipedia article gives an answer:

      The sticky bit was introduced in the Fifth Edition of Unix
      in 1974 for use with pure executable files. When set, it
      instructed the operating system to retain the text segment
      of the program in swap space after the process exited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to modify this behavior, ACL's or "Extended Attributes" are your friends:

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

See also the "chattr" or "xattr" commands, depending on your unix variant

</comment><comment><USER8> And this is common knowledge.

<comment><USER9> Yes, at the risk of sounding arrogant, what is this doing on the front page of HN? This isn't a security flaw and it isn't new, it's a well-understood Unix design decision.

If the aim was to educate people about Unix design principles, then it would have been useful to include references to the relevant specifications:

[http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/un...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/unlink.html)

or at least have some meaningful discussion about the rationale for this design and its consequences. But this is just a statement of well-known fact with no context or added value, placed behind a link-bait title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your point is well taken. I did not mean to imply that this is bad design decision on the part of Unix. I was also trying to articulate why the current behavior makes sense by describing the mechanics of inodes. However in my experience many novice developers, especially those with limited knowledge of Unix, find this behavior quite surprising. Delving into this curiosity presents a good jumping off point for finding out more about Unix file systems (and, yes, this is all the more reason including references). The HN audience surely includes many people, such as yourself, that consider this to be completely common knowledge but the fact that at least 9 people found the article useful indicates otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is of course intentional. As far as I can tell, though, you can't delete a non-empty subdirectory owned by root containing files that are also owned by root, even if you own the directory containing that subdirectory. In order to delete the subdirectory you need to delete the files in it, and you can't do that unless you have permission to modify that subdirectory.

</comment><comment><USER11> Delete files in directory owned by root, without being root <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit></comment>


Golden State Lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/california-bay-area-extends-lockdown <comment><AUTHOR> People who wail that lives are too precious to risk are ridiculously naive. By that logic, driving should not be tolerated, swimming pools and ski slopes should be closed, etc.

But it's very reasonable to argue that more caution is warranted when the danger triggers an unknown amount of additional danger rather than following the statistics of independent events, such as a new, infectious disease vs ongoing traffic fatalities. But the risk of putting a plastic bag over the head of an economy and keeping it there until you're sure all the germs are gone is also an unknown risk of cascading danger. Historically, infectious diseases and economic chaos have both had catastrophic social consequences.

We know more now about the features of this pandemic than we knew two months ago, more (not all but more) about how much it spreads and what happens when it does, but we don't know any more about the economic risks.

The same precautionary principle that grants disease control priority over traffic fatalities because of unknown risk of contagion now argues for an even higher priority for getting the bag off the head of the economy sooner.</comment>


Experiments to identify potential neural mechanism in "feeling of presence" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26516-ever-felt-a-ghostly-presence-now-we-know-why/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2017-Echobox#link_time=1509532068 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure that it makes sense to me that this explains the feeling a presence when no one's there since in this case there was someone behind them, its just happened to be a robot. Instead it seems to me that it just shows that the brain doesn't always realize that its actions caused an event if there is enough of a delay. This could be the explanation for feeling a presence if the person's own actions are causing the sensations that the brain is misinterpreting. However, the article doesn't seem to me to present evidence that that is necessarily the case.

Still an interesting finding though!

<comment><USER3> The difference was though that the participants _didn 't_ experience FoP when the robots were perfectly synched - even though the sensation that was caused was exactly the same.

I think the bigger point is the idea that FoP might be caused by the brain not correctly matching its own actions with sensations caused by those actions.

The example they chose to test that hypothesis might not have been the best, but it's certainly a good starting point to think up better experiments.

The sample size was also very small (12 people I think) - so I don't think they were planning to make any definite claims. This seems to me like a typical case of a "more research is needed" paper hyped up to "scientists discovered that..." by the press.

Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting direction to continue research in.

(Incidentally, it's amazing that the brain actually _does attempt_ to match up actions and sensations - shows once again that biological mechanisms are a lot more sophisticated than one might think at first glance)

<comment><USER4> Scientists often hype the claims in their own papers, in this case:

"These data show that the illusion of feeling another person nearby is caused by misperceiving the source and identity of sensorimotor (tactile, proprioceptive, and motor) signals of one's own body."

Which for a paper is quite a strong assertion (paper appears to be open access and is cited in the article by the way).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ...So people experienced a feeling of a presence behind them... when something behind them touched them?

That would seem to be pretty robust evidence of a presence behind someone, really.

(the bit with the sensorimotor lag is necessary for this, of course; it's pretty obvious that the brain accounts differently for sensory input that it can directly correlate with its own actions and that it can't. But I bet that you'd also get a feeling of presence if the robot was touching someone on an autonomous program, which would be just as completely unsurprising.)

</comment><comment><USER6> I prefer 'Scientists latest understanding is' to 'Now we know why'

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR: Ghostly presences – the feeling of someone near you when there's no one there – could be down to your brain trying to make sense of conflicting information.

</comment><comment><USER8> For all x -> y != For all y -> x

For all certain brain stimulations then ghostly feeling != for all ghostly feeling then certain brain stimulation

</comment><comment><USER9> It's just matching a different expectation pattern when you add a delay.

After my white cat passed away any light change in the corner of my eye made me expect to see it crossing the door, even tho there wasn't anything there. It had nothing to do about motor signals, just a pattern that had become fixated enough over time. I'd assume people that fixate patterns too easily have a bad time with this.

</comment><comment><USER10> So the experiment came down to experiencing a "Feeling of Presence" when a robot arm you are controlling touches your back out of sync. That almost feels expected, something is touching you and you didn't initiate it at that moment.

It would be great to see a follow on experiment where FoP is duplicated with direct stimulation of the associated brain regions.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is dogmatic to insist that there is a single accurate interpretation of people's subjective sensory information.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this this is the same area of the brain that causes the feeling of deja vu?

<comment><USER13> Isn't déjà vu just your brain storing something in memory quicker than another part of your brain "looking it up"? In other words it's a race condition on a dictionary insert.

<comment><USER14> That is a 100+ year old hypothesis. But as far as I know, there's no hard evidence to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, it's lag, basically?

<comment><USER16> Yep, three years' worth apparently! (Would have been nice to have a [2014] tag in the original title.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because the FCC needs their help to defeat Net Neutrality! Jokes aside, no, I can't recall actually ever feeling a ghostly presence -- how many people here have?

</comment><comment><USER18> God is dead and we have killed him.</comment>


A classic cracking challenge - <AUTHOR> http://3564020356.org/

<comment><USER2> Its a classic alright but being a classic just a warning to everyone some of it does require going back in time a little bit like dealing with a 16bit binary.

If this type stuff interests any of you but is too hard, give mine a try ( 0x0539.net ). It is not intended to be a significant challenge, instead all the stages focus on introducing some basic concept related to offensive security. Its mostly aimed at some young teens that have expressed an interest in learning that stuff rather so the target is very introductory.

I update the site every so often with new sets of challenges and rotate through former sets if someone requests it. The current one I ran for a bit in 2013 and then brought it back earlier this year and plan to cycle in a new binary exploitation focused one in December.

<comment><USER3> I've gotten so far as finding the first secret and turning that into something viewable so I can read the two word question. Not quite sure what to do with the stuff that's left over yet though.

<comment><USER4> There are 10 types of people.. ;)

<comment><USER3> Sure, that gives me an address, but the host isn't reachable.

I played around with it and found a login page that might be similar but _no clues_ as to how to gain access. Feel like I'm missing an intermediate step here.

<comment><USER2> Oh sorry, that is a side-effect from bringing it back the domain was slightly different.

As for the login page, sometimes the way in is not through the front door.

<comment><USER5> I really enjoy these puzzles, but I'm also stuck at the login page. Even poking around, and ignoring that the subdomain isn't working, I don't see anything else. Have any suggestions?

<comment><USER2> Everything you need to figure it out is on the login page.

Consider how hackernews works, there is the login page but that is not the only means to authenticating. You don't after all have to type your user/pass out for every page request.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tip! I'll be attacking this again tonight, I think I have an idea now that you mention auth. By the way, some subdomains are public (not sure if part of the game), like source.0x0539.com, oxidized etc.

Awesome work, thanks for the fun!

Edit: Just got past login, what an _awesome_ puzzle. That being said, I hate that it looks like I have a run an executable from your site. Seems dangerous, so now I have to spend the time getting a VM setup.

<comment><USER2> You don't have to run the executable. You can, but the problem is absolutely doable without running it (static reversing).

As for the subdomains, you can safely ignore them. There are a number of them most are not primarily mine. I just give some friends free hosting(or point subdomains to their boxes)

And yea there are random subdomains that are not part of it. Most of the subdomains are not even mine (I give free hosting to friends). The only subdomain that was part of it was clcs.0x0539.net but thats no longer the case.

<comment><USER5> Thanks so much for all of the clarification; it's really helpful to know I don't have to execute the app in question. I'll keep going down the rabbit hole, hopefully others find this site and enjoy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wonder what happend to +Mal and others +HCUers now. Probably still in reversing business .. Good ol' days

<comment><USER7> Fravia died, unfortunately ;(.

[http://search.lores.eu/index.html](http://search.lores.eu/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> somehow related: [http://io.smashthestack.org](http://io.smashthestack.org)

</comment><comment><USER9> You might like

[http://try2hack.nl/](http://try2hack.nl/)

too

</comment><comment><USER10> spoiler for first challenge:

       data = 'MAL TIRRUEZF CR MAL RKZYIOL EX MAL OIY UAE RICF MAL ACWALRM DYEUPLFWL CR ME DYEU MAIM UL IZL RKZZEKYFLF GH OHRMLZH'
       c = {'I': 'a', ' ': ' ', 'L': 'e', 'Y': 'n', 'F': 'd', 'H': 'y', 'P': 'l', 'K': 'u', 'O': 'm', 'G': 'b', 'D': 'k', 'A': 'h', 'Z': 'r', 'C': 'i', 'R': 's', 'W': 'g', 'X': 'f', 'M': 't', 'E': 'o', 'U': 'w', 'T': 'p'}
       "".join((c[i] if i in c else i for i in data))
       > 'the password is the surname of the man who said the highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery'

<comment><USER3> Isn't the point to be able to do these yourself?

<comment><USER11> Yes, exactly. In that case, perhaps using the algorithm described in the same place as one may find the reverser's credo: "what one man can invent, another can discover"? (As can women and others, of course! I've always assumed the "man" a forgivable historical artifact there, given the now 110-year gap.)

One might tolerate an occasional hint, but _please_ , please, please do not spoil the crackmes and such things. They are for the practice and instruction of those who seek knowledge, not those who want to merely find it. The act of seeking trains the mind in the inference of their creators' intentions and thoughts: a skill that needs to be learned, and I do not think can simply be taught.

I am, of course, biased. There is a remnant of elitism, I will admit. Before we had the web, such things used to be swapped via post, and obscure BBSes. It's quite emotional, even, to be reminded some of the old forgotten places still exist. It has been many years. Even... a certain shrine's still running, somehow. Old crackers never die: they just nop! +akr

<comment><USER12> 90 90 90 90

<comment><USER13> I do love me a good NOP ramp.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The ideal Founder Duo: Product Guy & Engineer by Fred Wilson, Partner at USV - <AUTHOR> https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/05/29/the-yin-and-yang-of-product-engineering.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Brilliant essay on how important the balance between product & engineering is and why it makes sense to have a product & engineering founder composition.</comment>


Show HN: MyBot, a chatbot playground for AI enthusiasts - <AUTHOR> https://mybot.be <comment><AUTHOR> This is a personal project. It is a simple tool for creative AI enthusiasts who don't have programming knowledge to play with the idea of chatbots.

You teach it by writing example questions and answers, and it uses recurrent neural networks to learn a language model, and react to similar questions that were not taught explicitly.

I need your candid feedback, whether you enjoy it or not. Please be specific about what you like or don't like.

Thanks for your time!</comment>


Show HN: The Wide Language Index - <AUTHOR> http://widelanguageindex.org/

<comment><USER2> You need to seed the dataset with samples before promoting this site. I just went to the webpage, typed "English" then "Chinese" into the search bar, both times: "There are no samples of this language in our dataset."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know. The data's there, it's actually just a UI fail.

The autocomplete turns language names into ISO 693-3 three-letter language codes. Language names themselves are a large kettle of fish. "English" is ok, but "Chinese" is a whole language family, with about maybe 15 modern members.

I'll provide some more useful error messages, to point people in the right direction.</comment></comment>


Why China's stock market bubble was always bound to burst - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/why-chinas-stock-market-bubble-was-always-bound-burst

<comment><AUTHOR> The author is a China scholar whose writings I have read since the 1970s. I haven't always agreed with his take on conditions in China, but what I have appreciated about Orville Schell as a writer about China is that he takes a long-term view informed by deep study of Chinese history and a thorough knowledge of the Chinese language (too rare among writers about China) and culture. Some of the social and political forces he comments about in this thoughtful piece have been right on the surface ready to be noticed by other observers for a long time, but they have been willfully ignored by many people who view China simply as a place to get rich quick.

</comment><comment><USER2> Retrospectively.

I wonder why most people don't realize that if journalists had nearly the informational value people think, they wouldn't be journalists, they'd be monstrously rich.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any bubble will eventually pop, it's inevitable.</comment>


Facebook's 'Like' button makes me lonely - <AUTHOR> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/05/23/facebooks-like-button-makes-me-lonely/ <comment><USER2> The other week we were looking into the Facebook like buttons for a client who was thinking about installing them on their website.

The conclusion we came to was the same as this article and we calculated it using almost the same route. For cnn if 1,000 people like a story, given that there are 400,000,000 Facebook users and if we assume my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users and that I have 300 friends, we get that their is a ~1/1000 probability that my friends like a cnn story. Sum up over 10 major stories that day, we get that I only have a 1/100 chance of seeing any activity at cnn.com from my friends. And this is the case for cnn, one of the largest websites in the country; the probability of seeing any friend activity on a smaller site will be much much lower. The numbers just don't work out for mainstream adoption of the Facebook like button.

This does however work better on a site like yelp or pandora, where if my friend ever liked a restaurant it will stay relevant for a longer period of time. Still, I think that the Facebook like button will only make sense for a few websites on the entire web (and likely not one that anyone who is reading this is working on).

<comment><USER3> Here's where I'd guess you're wrong: "my friends visit cnn with equal probability as other Facebook users". CNN visitors are likely to be highly grouped, plus you can share these stories back to Facebook and with your friends, increasing this clusteredness.

<comment><USER4> Also, consider this: you share an article with your 300 friends on Facebook, liking it before you do. Your friends see the article, and of the first 20, 4 of them also like it. The next one of your friends will to see the article will have at least one friend (you!) who liked it, up to five. Not bad that way. If you're randomly browsing, of course you're going to find fewer articles that your friends have liked -- it's random!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _move across web sites and allow you to Like any page without logging in. It set off all sorts of privacy alarms_

Why would this set off privacy alarms? It's just an iframe. It's not like the site owner can see what's going on inside of it; they still have to follow the cross domain rules in the browser.

<comment><USER6> To me it's a privacy alert because Facebook now potentially knows every site I visit.

I ended up adding "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" to my /etc/hosts.

<comment><USER5> Oh, that's very true. I hadn't realized that at first, but the original site is probably in the Referer field... Now that I think about it, that is scary.

<comment><USER6> Not just in the Referer field. Facebook widgets need to know which site they're referring to, so the widget code that site owners include on their site contains the site id.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exif.tools – A multimedia file metadata tool - <AUTHOR> https://exif.tools/ <comment><USER2> I love exiftool. I wrote a more practical blog post on how to use it to manage thousands of photos and update the EXIF data easily with it. You can update the EXIF data based on the file modification time, based on an EXIF field, file name, etc.. there is so many things you can do. Here is the blog post if anyone is interested: [https://arslan.io/2018/04/18/tips-tricks-to-batch-edit- exif-...](https://arslan.io/2018/04/18/tips-tricks-to-batch-edit-exif- metadata-of-photos/)

<comment><USER3> I have recently been trying to organize an old photo library, looks like these tips could come in handy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I looked up the tool that this website wraps. I hadn't heard of exiftool before and generally use mediainfo, font-config, and ffmpeg for this sort of data. I haven't read perl in a very long time, but this library is clean and well written.

Primary Site: [https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/](https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/)

Github: [https://github.com/exiftool/exiftool](https://github.com/exiftool/exiftool)

</comment><comment><USER5> Exiftool is great and has all kinds of functionality that might be little- known. For example, I often use exiftool to automatically geotag pictures taken on my camera while I travel, by using the GPX trail I save from my phone or Garmin.

</comment><comment><USER6> Site seems buggy. I can see that it uses exiftool cli behind a PHP (?) web server, but instead of returning the actual, presumably parsed, results it returns an error along with stdout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, What error are you seeing? An uploaded file or URL?

exif.tools is my little project/wrapper for exiftool to make it easier for me to examine photos/pdf files online just by prepending the domain before the URL. I.E. [https://exif.tools/https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif](https://exif.tools/https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please add a privacy policy stating how you promise to handle the uploaded images, if/how quickly you would permanently remove them, any logs your wrapper creates and how you deal with those, how you use the information from the uploaded photos, etc.

The privacy policy should preferably be somewhere on the beginning of the page, since the page is very, very, very long with the Top Document Meta Tags section that has several hundred lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> exiftool is lovely for wiping metadata from photos. I always use it when i upload photos taken from my own phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> What command line switches are you using?</comment>


Feedback my startup pls. Sharing platform for who lives in the same neighborhood - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xdk.intel.ad.circle <comment><AUTHOR> I need feedback for my startup. Positive or negative does not matters.

Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xdk.intel.ad.c...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xdk.intel.ad.circle) IOS : [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-circle-local- craigslist/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-circle-local- craigslist/id970232536?l=tr&ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER2> "Sharing platform for who lives in the same neighborhood" is literally NextDoor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Permissions required:

Identity

Location

Photos, Media, Files

WiFi connection info</comment>


Ask HN: What things would you like Google+ to change/do better? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> A good start would be for them to obey EU law vis their G+ policies regarding use of real names.

EU citizens have legal protections that are being broken by Google:

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/18/m...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/18/made)

This matter has been reported to the EU Data Protection Commissioner's Office.</comment>


What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/19/success-motivation-what-entrepreneurs-should-not-do

<comment><USER2> This reads much less like a clear explanation of "What Entrepreneurs Should Not Do", and much more like, "Huhuh, dude, check out this idiot and his idiot paper, huhuhu!".

Classy, Cuban.

<comment><USER3> These things are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps harsh for your tastes but being an idiot writing idiot letters is certainly something one should not do in professional and business correspondence. Be concise, write well (and if you can't get help from people who can) As advice, it may be mundane and obvious but it's hardly unclear.

Similar things can be said for his other point - cut the bullshit/fluff. Perhaps we've become so used to filtering it out due to its prevalence that a reminder that it actually tends to have zero informational value is helpful to those sending pitches to people who put some value on their time.

Just as a random example, I loaded up the Rails front page and was greeted by the following [annotated]:

"Web development that doesn't hurt. [ok catchy tagline]

Ruby on Rails is an open source web framework [actual information]

that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity [are any web frameworks optimized for unsustainable productivity or programmer misery? Fluff]

It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration [Fluff]"

Then you get the following quote, also essentially zero-information-content fluff. Well, you learn that Tim O'Reilly is excited about Rails.

""Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days." -Tim O'Reilly, Founder of O'Reilly Media "

This style of writing flaunts its disregard for the time and intelligence of the reader. It's simply bad on a website aimed at technical users looking for information and a few download buttons. It's inexcusable when asking for money.

<comment><USER4> Apart from actually delivering, rails was the first framework to actually "market" itself as sexy that I have heard about. And it worked. Maybe programmers want to be excited, and not just read detailed specifications all day ;)

<comment><USER3> This is a bit of a straw man, though - the opposite of 'bad, vapid, uninformative writing' is not 'detailed specifications'. It's writing that's good, succinct and informative. There's no reason such writing should not convey one's enthusiasm or infectious excitement about the topic. There's certainly a lot more leeway in a general product website, especially when your product is so well-established the bad writing almost doesn't matter. It's hardly a luxury an unestablished player, let alone someone looking for funding can afford, though. Besides, simply because you can afford to get away with badness doesn't actually make it anything better than bad. One way to read Cuban's message could be 'You're likely misestimating the point at which you can pass drivel for communication so don't.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Blows my mind that someone thought asking for money like that would work. Reads like a Nigerian phishing scam. Hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER6> > First, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to > overlook a great opportunity we have for the near future.

Thank YOU. I will be glad to "overlook" your "opportunity".

</comment><comment><USER7> You gotta give the guy credit for writing 3 whole pages without saying a single, solitary, concrete fact about what exactly the company does. It's almost like a challenge where he's daring the reader to figure it out.

<comment><USER8> Why? The only reason this didn't hit the round file is 10 seconds is because it was so bad. Slow blog day, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > They sender has come up with a name, but doesn't have the focus or > confidence to put up a website.

The say that focus is in they eye of they beholder

</comment><comment><USER8> Too easy. _Anyone_ could have written that.

Know what I'd like to see? Mark Cuban critiquing something that appears to be pretty good by my standards. _That's_ data that would make a difference to me.

<comment><USER10> What if you happen to have better standards than Mark Cuban? Let's not rule out the possibility that Cuban's circumstances could be in part due to any number of random variables (i.e. right place, right time) that anybody with a reasonable amount of ability could exploit to become wealthy.

<comment><USER8> I may write better code than Mark Cuban, but I doubt that I have better deal making standards than he does. He does this as often as I write programs. By sheer repetition, he must have something to share.

Cuban would be the first to admit that he was in the right place at the right time. But he knew the right thing to do, time and time again. Nothing wrong with trying to learn something from someone with a track record like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup layoffs will continue as venture capital dries up, analysts say - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/techflash/2016/03/startup-layoffs-shyp-instacart-venture-capital.html?ana=twt <comment><USER2> While will be bad for workers in the short-term, I think it's better for everyone in the long-term.

Companies that have a solid business model won't be folding every 6 months and workers will have more stable employment.</comment>


AWS icon quiz - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnEEo0o2JgnIt8VOGffhkcYj-C2h9m5_NFzM0Q1AU-P8d0zA/viewform <comment><USER2> A note on methodology: typically in experimental surveys you don't want to prime your subjects with words or phrasing that could lead to positive or negative bias.

Additionally, negatively-biased phrasing on a public survey could also attract mostly those with negative views. This would skew your sample even further than solely priming.

With that said, I have no idea what any of those icons are.

<comment><USER3> Even if the title was "AWS icons are awesome" my results would have been the same

<comment><USER4> But you might not have taken it, then.

Also, presenting options such as "dried arterial blood red" and "slightly but not too radioactive green" might also make you less likely to put in effort to select the _real_ one, rather than just picking randomly.

<comment><USER5> I am terrible with colors but I thought "slightly but not too radioactive green" was a perfect description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aws feels like it was built by a bunch of siloed teams. There's a lot of design inconsistency I notice every time I'm in the console. For example, deleting entities is never consistent. Some just do it, some ask you to type in the name, some as you to type "delete me".

Some entities have a name and a description field that are immutable on creation, even though they also have a unique id. I now have drop downs everywhere that list "Rds creation wizard VPC" or something long those lines.

Its not clear what fields are drop downs so I have to type stuff into them to see if they'll give me a list of options.

The UI uses the same styles but inconsistent language. In ECS there's a list of entities. To delete an entity you have to go into it and delete all its children. Then the entity disappears.

I know there's engineering reasons for all this, but I feel like they can do better than settle for engineer grade UI.

<comment><USER7> Console is just for checking stuff. Real infra is managed by APIs.

<comment><USER8> The "No True AWS Guru" ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)) argument...

I don't think I've ever used the CLI to manage infrastructure on AWS.

I usually use the console for one offs. When something needs to be repeatable, I'll create a Cloud Formation template.

Anything that's more conplicated, I'll either use Python directly or create a custom resource that gets called from CF.

<comment><USER7> Yes, Cloudformation is my main tool too. I just simplified my comment. Read it as managed by code, be it CF, python, awscli from shell, and all of it in the end boils down to specific API calls.

<comment><USER9> The key thing is a repeatable process that's checked in, which pointing and clicking in the console is not.

<comment><USER8> Not always.

For instance we have a process that sends sns messages for alerts. It's just as easy to go into the console and subscribe to the sns event notifications (emails and sms).

Second example. I initially configure passwords with CF (of course with parameters that are added when you run it.) It's easier to go into the console afterwards to change passwords as it would be to update the stack and renter the passwords.

You aren't going to store passwords in source control anyway.

<comment><USER9> For SNS I'd use the API just to make sure every new team member gets signed up for every appropriate deployment (test, prod, whatever) and every old team member gets removed.

I agree it doesn't add much value for a single user rotating their own password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Truth!

Names and Icons on AWS were made by people who don't realize who helpful names and icons can be.

If it's a database, use the cylinder icon that everyone knows is a database and then add some identifier to show which database it is.

If it's DNS, don't be too clever and name it Route 53. Name it Amazon Cloud DNS. Then anyone knows how to look for it in the console, web search for it, etc.

If you want something that the marketing folks can feel proud about wasting time on, add the silly name to the descriptive name: Amazon DNS Potato

<comment><USER11> what about calling the database app "database"

<comment><USER12> There isn't just one database app. They have Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Neptune, RDS, and Redshift.

<comment><USER13> "fast sql database," "fast nosql database," "redis cache nosql database," "graph database," "rds (is actually named right lol)," "big analytics SQL database."

<comment><USER14> As a longtime supporter of Remote Desktop Service in Windows, seeing AWS RDS took a while to get used to.

They could have named WorkSpace as Remote Desktop Service, which it is. Instead, many of my co-workers think AWS means only Amazon WorkSpace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not jus the icons. It's the names too since a lot of them are completely unrelated to the product itself.

I actually find myself referring to "Amazon Web Services in Plain English" [0] every once in a while.

[0]: [https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain- english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english)

<comment><USER16> Seconded. This link was huge to me when learning AWS products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In general, I would not expect questions around expect people to remember details about a logo just from a name to work very well. People in general can't do that even with extremely famous logos: [https://www.signs.com/branded-in-memory/](https://www.signs.com/branded-in- memory/) Nor can they generally even draw a bike, with physical necessity available to guide them: [http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html](http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html)

However, it is absolutely a reasonable request of a logo that you be able to go from logo to designated product, and while quizzing about details like "which horizontal pole is higher" is definitely a bit of an ask, you should still see a lot of people getting that right from just "feeling" which seems right.

<comment><USER18> I agree with both parts of this. My biggest frustration is that even _after_ I looked at the answers, I couldn't explain many of the logos.

There's a clear attempt to create logical connections: 'directory' manages to evoke a bunch of cards in a file, EMR is a solid reduce block above a bunch of map blocks, and so on. The MediaFoo family is actually quite good - I swapped Package and Store, but otherwise got them all right despite never using the service. The family color scheming is genuinely very good, despite the weird outliers like grey.

But then there's all the rest. Kinesis and Cloudwatch are each a bar graph with a base, but Kinesis is rotated, and has 2 layers of floating base instead of 1 joined layer, so that totally clears things up. (And Athena is 1 layer floating base, with bars going both directions, to help confuse the existing two.)

ELBs and ECS are both multiple full-size layers on the left with a 4-rectangle split layer on the right, but ELB is 3 filled layers and a flat split layer. ECS is hollow layers and a 'long' split layer. Memorable!

Database Migration Service is a mix of Direct Connect and RDS theming, which actually makes sense, but also Elasticache is a disjoint version of Direct Connect in database coloring?

(I had a hell of a time looking these up to check, because about half the guides on Google Images are simply _wrong_ about some services. Check out Elastic IP, which is listed with the icons of 3 other services!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> AWS do put a lot of work into their icons set. That said, we (draw.io) get a lot of direct complains about the icons because:

1) They can't find certain AWS icons (the problem is it's there, they didn't expect it to look like that).

2) They change and move between sets rather a lot. That was more a problem previously, the set hasn't actually changed yet this year.

If there's a designer out there willing to create an alternative set, we're more than willing to add it in and see what people prefer. Probably more constructive than just saying "they are bad", show us something better.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work with AWS every day, and I just realized that even though all the symbols have a consistent look, the style is so generic I don't mentally associate it with AWS. To me it looks like symbols from a design diagram where somebody was in a hurry and picked random symbols from their drawing program's image library.

<comment><USER21> That probably isn't too far off from how they were picked

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think they have a 'bad icon' problem as much as a 'too many services' problem. I'm not necessarily saying that they need less functionality, just that they need to divide it up into fewer named/iconed chunks of functionality.

<comment><USER23> I feel like Adobe has a similar problem but handle it much better.

<comment><USER24> And similarly, Jetbrains. Having the product intitials in the icon is incredibly helpful.

<comment><USER25> Jetbrains products' icons are OK, but there's clearly a gradual Adobification going on.

Their designers recently declared that colored icons were distracting (?) and are currently moving most of the them to gray. Quite confusing when gray usually means disabled.

<comment><USER24> Oh, let's not confuse the product icons with the in-app icons. I can't believe they're taking color away. It's just stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Very entertaining and bludgeons you over the head with the point of the survey. I got 6/20 and several correct answers were lucky guesses. I only really recognized EC2, Lambda, and VPC. That doesn't mean the icons actually convey what those are to me though - it's just memory since I use them often.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure where one goes in the AWS web interface to view these icons. Poking around the EC2 menus for a while, I don't see an icon anywhere.

I wouldn't say the icons are _good_, but I wonder if part of the reason the quiz is so hard is that Amazon doesn't really care if you know what the icons mean anyway. Seems like they're mostly used for branding and marketing, not anything users will see regularly.

<comment><USER28> If you click the pushpin icon in the web interface, you'll get a dropdown with the services and their icons. You can drag icons into your top bar as shortcuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> To me, the icons are far too abstract to mean anything. They all look like the results of someone playing around randomly in a 3D modeling tool. For example, look at the CloudFront icon. I'd expect something more evocative of clouds or similar, but it's just a cube that's been cut and exploded with the rear two subcubes removed.

That said, they're probably extremely easy to generate procedurally:

[http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctio...](http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm)

</comment><comment><USER30> There's a famous story about early UI fail in some CAD software.

Icons had just come into vogue (yes, there was a time before icons). The CAD system in question used a puck on a big mat to choose functions from a grid of names, which were labels like GRAPH and CONNECT and DEL and so forth. But all- caps names weren't very sexy, so the company decided to replace them with more intuitive icons, cool little pictures of the operations. Getting rid of the tiresome and uncool simple text labels was going to win back market share!

Predictably, users complained that they had a hell of a time trying to figure out which of the tiny, intuitive pictures corresponded to the concrete operations.

The company's response? Supply users with a printed cheat sheet that let them find the icon for each operation. To do a CONNECT, you'd look at the cheat sheet and find the corresponding essentially arbitrary (but intuitive!) squiggle, then search for the intuitive squiggle in a sea of other intuitive squiggles. ("No, not that one!")

</comment><comment><USER31> Where is the "no fucking clue" choice for each? I only use S3 for personal archive and I forget what its icon looks like.

</comment><comment><USER32> They must have the nicest automatic 3D icon generator out there....

<comment><USER33> I've always imagined it is like Skyrim character generation and they just hit the randomize button until something "cool and modern-looking" generates

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I use AWS every day and got 17/20\. Thanks to a couple of lucky guesses.

But, I believe that at least two of the questions have incorrect/incomplete answers:

One of the questions that requires a typed answer (instead of multiple choice) shows an icon that is used for both EC2 & Appstream. However, only EC2 is considered correct.

In the Route53 icon question - there are multiple versions of the Route53 icon used in different places (do a google image search and you'll see a dozen variant). The icon in the top left ("Pole with two offset rectangles") is used in the console - but this is considered an incorrect answer. The icon in the top right ("Pole with two slightly less offset rectangles") is sometimes used elsewhere and is the only answer considered correct.

</comment><comment><USER35> Icons are the least of AWS's UX problems. The AWS console is godawful. It should be a case study in terrible design. I hate every second I spend on it.

<comment><USER36> Route 53 looks like it was designed by the Marquis de Sade. Not only was it designed by a sadist, it looks like it was designed last century.

They'd be better off putting up a text file because then at least the IT guys would already know how to use it. And making changes would be a hell of a lot faster too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think the icons actually are cool and futuristic but there are so many of them an average person cannot realistically keep track of them all. I can only assume they're for marketing purposes to show in slide decks or websites.

I also wonder if they painted themselves into a corner early on by having them for their early services. I guess they're a big-boy company and have stopped doing this earlier but who knows.

</comment><comment><USER38> SPOILER: AWS inspector has a magnifying glass icon[1], but the correct answer in the quiz is incorrectly marked as "some boxes"

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/](https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/)

<comment><USER39> If you go to AWS inspector in the AWS web console then you'll see why they chose "some boxes" as the right answer.

<comment><USER40> For those that want to see [https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O](https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 7/20, and my correct/failed guesses seem uncorrelated with services I've used or ones I never touched. Anecdotal evidence about how arbitrary these icons are.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think AWS icons are great and I vastly prefer them over Google Cloud's icons.

Every icon in Google Cloud is a nearly-identical blue hexagon. They might as well not even have icons.

</comment><comment><USER42> 17/20 But I'm in AWS all day every day. I also question a one or two that I missed :)

People suggesting that they follow Adobe's lead. That's all well and good, until you release like 1000 products a year. You tend to run out of two letter combos for your icons.

</comment><comment><USER43> Speaking of AWS, shouldn't they also hold a poll on naming? I've seen some saner alternatives in the wild:

[https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain- english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english).

<comment><USER44> A lot of those names are actually pretty sensible, but who thought "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server" was a good alternative to S3?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Since there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment here about the icons, I'd like to offer a different perspective.

While using AWS services and leading huge migration projects, I've never thought to myself: "These icons are terrible and slowing down my progress". As in to say, sure the UX icons are a little wonky, but at the end of the day, do are they really impacting people from getting the value out of the services and using them quickly? Maybe Amazon is partaking in what is often sentiment around here: not optimizing things too soon.

Summary: while icons might be confusing and not great, I find zero impact in me architecting systems and communicating designs.

</comment><comment><USER46> In most cases, the icons are more closely related to the service than the names are, even if they are pretty abstract. Aurora? Fargate? Kinesis? Snowmobile? Sumerian? Obelisk? Gravelbean?

(Ok, I made the last two up, but I bet you would've had to look ...)

</comment><comment><USER47> I couldn't even name 10% of the AWS services themselves.

Just hover over the products menu at the top: [https://aws.amazon.com/](https://aws.amazon.com/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I do not think it is plausible that, for most complex abstract things, there must be an icon that intuitively represents it. The most you can hope for is that the icons are sufficiently distinctive and memorable that a frequent user would come to recognize them without confusing one for another.

I am more bothered by names that do not give you any clue as to what they are about, though there is also a limit to the amount of information you can put in a name.

</comment><comment><USER49> this was one of the more difficult quizzes I have taken in recent memory, and I use AWS every single day. 5/20

<comment><USER50> Same here. I'd be happy to get 20% right on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The author of the survey should have allowed "don't know" as an answer. I didn't finish the survey because I didn't want to choose responses I knew probably weren't the right ones. If there are others like me who refrained for this reason, this will skew the results.

(The main point of the survey came across very well, though.)

</comment><comment><USER52> The worst part of the AWS UX is the login page. I regurarly have problems logging in with my accounts

<comment><USER53> I have SSO with Okta. It's literally a browser plugin and I select which account to enter, and I'm in. You should definitely look into setting up something like that. It takes away all the pain of logging in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> 7/20\. i have never used aws. most of my points were from the matching section.

those are some garbage icons.

</comment><comment><USER55> Point well made. I got 2/20 and I've historically been paid to use this stuff.

<comment><USER56> Yup. 4/20 made me realize how much I use the new type-ahead feature on the dashboard. Not sure it's even worth using icons with so many services being offered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is only tangentially related but it seems that many of the shapes are built in some sort of 3d program and then exported to svg. If you inspect the official released svgs you can see tons of artifacts in most of the shapes[1]. You would think that Amazon would have the resources to release very optimized icons for its public facing documentation.

[1] [https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png](https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png)

</comment><comment><USER58> This reminds me of those children's puzzles on diner mats to "spot the difference". You either see it immediately or stare at it for 5-minutes with no results.

</comment><comment><USER59> I just started using AWS a few months ago, professionally, had a couple hobby projects before that.

I don't think I could answer any of those questions. I actually gave up because it started to feel ridiculous, like I was just looking at random geometric shapes.

But my point is that I still use AWS and I find what I need without ever having seen those icons or remembered them. The console remembers my most used tools so usually I find them in that shortcut menu.

</comment><comment><USER60> I mean, is there anywhere in the console where you select/identify a service by its icon alone, without the name next to it? I don't remember any such place.

If not... who cares? They're not branded consumer products that need recognition, just a bunch of services and it's not like I'd have any even remotely good ideas for most of these jargony things anyways... :P

<comment><USER61> You can configure the top bar in the AWS console to show icons only, but that would be madness. (I usually do the opposite and have it show no icons and only text.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I thought this was going to be about the infamous AWS Service Health Dashboard[1] icons.

Would be cool to do a similar quiz describing different failure modes of various services and having the user select which icon should be showing.

This is great though!

[1] [https://status.aws.amazon.com](https://status.aws.amazon.com)

</comment><comment><USER63> In Amazon's defense, there's a lack of design consistency from Google and Microsoft as well:

[https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization...](https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization=amazon- web-services,google,microsoft)

</comment><comment><USER64> Amazon, like many enterprise tech companies treat UX designers as second-rate citizens. One of the best UX designer I know left Amazon to work at a startup because he was tired of Amazon's policy of assigning UX designers to work under engineering managers.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've always had issues telling the icons apart, but in fairness the recent UI updates have already been phasing out the icons. They're no longer on the management console home page, and they've been replaced with much improved category icons.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron I got 3 right, even though I currently have the AWS console open and was checking every now and then.

The services don't even have consistent icons displayed between them, I tend to think the icons are actually completely meaningless.

Sorry if you worked on these icons I guess.

</comment><comment><USER66> 4/20 not bad !

</comment><comment><USER67> As a survey design principle, there should be an option for "I don't know"

</comment><comment><USER68> This makes an excellent point, but is a bit out of date, as AWS have already revamped the user interface.

They got rid of the myriad of abstract icons, and now use a smaller set of recognisable icons, with related services grouped under the same icon.

</comment><comment><USER7> Icon are funny, agree, but nobody actually uses them in design diagrams. WONTFIX :)

</comment><comment><USER69> For those who don't use AWS ...

I use the AWS console all day every day, and I couldn't name a single icon. So my guess is they are just intended to be art icons, nothing purposeful. Or they're too similar to be mnemonic.

</comment><comment><USER70> I won't bother taking the survey, I only use a couple of services (EC2, RDS, SES, S3, Cloudfront) and I have no idea what the icons are for any of those services, even if I login on AWS daily.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is so on point. I can't recognize more than 1 or 2 AWS things by icon. I've always wondered if I was the only one who found it kind of impossible to tell what's what in AWS.

</comment><comment><USER72> Amazon would never care about this stuff unless someone independently did enough unpaid work on the project proving it they could determine an economic value to changing it... so congrats?

</comment><comment><USER73> This is amazing and I'm jealous of the idea. Wonderful!

</comment><comment><USER74> I've been in the AWS ecosystem for a _long_ time and I actually got frustrated and abandoned the quiz. Thought I'd ace this no problem!

Nice one.

</comment><comment><USER75> > how well do you actually know AWS? How many AWS icons can you correctly > identify?

I know this is mostly for fun, but that is a wildly faulty premise.

</comment><comment><USER76> Unrelated, I'm looking for a "Save File" icon that doesn't use a floppy disk. Does anybody here have any good ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> Downwards arrow towards a disk: [https://imgur.com/a/dMrixoi](https://imgur.com/a/dMrixoi)

<comment><USER76> Thanks, but the problem is: these days most users don't know what a disk looks like anymore.

<comment><USER77> They do know how "Save" icon looks like though - floppy disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Aren't many of the services in the quiz unrelated, so a user wouldn't have occasion to have seen the icon in context?

</comment><comment><USER78> I may have heard of map reduce, but I have no idea what EMR is; turns out its map reduce (not sure what the E is for).

<comment><USER79> For most AWS stuff, "E" stands for "Elastic".

<comment><USER80> My favourite AWS naming was when E became EC2, as in ECS.

<comment><USER81> I always thought it should have become E3CS. I recall there's some old lisp manual that followed this kind of naming scheme.

<comment><USER82> EC3S

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Equally, who can explain what most of the AWS services do in less than 10 words? Therein lies the problem I think.

</comment><comment><USER84> @elfakyn Please submit a follow of the funniest answers. I imagine you're going to get some jokesters .

</comment><comment> anton-107 I would guess text labels with services' names are supposed to be part of those icons

<comment><USER79> In that case, what point is there in having a non-descript icon? Just select a nice font and turn the text itself into a logo...

<comment><USER85> Because, while I might not remember/recognize all their obscure logos, I actually remember/differentiate between the few frequently-used ones.

Also, the logos are color-coded by "service category" if I'm not wrong

<comment><USER79> I agree with you about that in a smaller bunch you do recognize the target icon relatively quickly, but they could have just used the color for the text itself :)

Off-topic (and sort of translated):

Salut Virgile, complet de acord cu tine, dar dacă făceau textul colorat în culoarea "service category", viața era mai simplă pentru toată lumea :) (lume mică, domne, uite de cine dai pe net :D)

<comment><USER85> Lots of vividly-colored text is hard to read and makes a pretty bad interface, too. Also, apparently the whole quiz is kinda' moot - here's how my console looks now: [https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri](https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri) (apparently they moved to "one icon per service category").

Ref offtopic: nu e cinstit, eu sunt usor de recunoscut dupa ID (plus am mailu' in profil). Nu stiu cine esti :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I didn't think I'd do great, but amazingly, I got every single question wrong.

</comment><comment><USER87> I got a solid 3. When using AWS I only look at the colors... Not the symbols.

</comment><comment><USER88> 3/20\. It was all wild guess as I didn't recognize any of them.

</comment><comment><USER89> Looking at those icons makes me physically uncomfortable haha

</comment><comment><USER7> But excellent platform. Much prefer it that way :)

</comment><comment><USER90> I think I only made 7/20 from guessing.

</comment><comment><USER91> Hilarious quiz. Thanks for the laugh

</comment><comment><USER92> aws icons _are_ just noise to me: totally useless

</comment><comment><USER93> got 5/20 with the help of google photos search,

</comment><comment><USER94> They should do an Adobe and put 2/3 letters inside a box, maybe also color coded

[https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png](https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png)

<comment><USER95> Adobe made a really gutsy move IMO. Some of their products had very memorable icons, which they chose to ditch in favor of the fully unified look. Ultimately I think it was a good one - Amazon's current struggle to properly iconify their dozens of abstract services illustrates this perfectly.

I actually would be curious now to see how a company like Apple might approach the problem. Apple's well-known icons are largely focused on popular apps, which have very distinct and concrete functions. I wonder if there really is a clear and unambiguous icon for something esoteric like a NoSQL database store - I suspect that there isn't, largely because (unlike apps) it just isn't something that is in the public eye.

<comment><USER96> > Adobe made a really gutsy move IMO.

Indeed. It's hard to make changes like that since it often results in existing users getting pissed off. Even if it's for the better in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> It has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them difficult to understand for outsiders. Microsoft who is traditionally bad at naming too is surprisingly good at it for its Azure services. App Services, DocumentDB (CosmosDB now), DataLake, ... are more easily remembered than cryptic 3 letters acronyms.

<comment><USER98> _> It has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them difficult to understand for outsiders._

I almost think this was a deliberate choice. Makes the services sound more important than what they are. At any rate, many engineers I know love to smugly use this acronym soup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> hahaha, this is great

</comment><comment><USER100> Hosting this quiz on GCP / G Suite ... hilarious :)

</comment><comment><USER101> Why they don't use normal naming? Like why they don't call the DNS manager "AWS DNS Manager" but "Route 53"?

<comment><USER102> Because they are cool internet people and you are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> :( Why so much hate on hacker news? Leave amazon alone!</comment>


Hashcat – advanced password recovery - <AUTHOR> https://hashcat.net/hashcat/ <comment><USER2> I made this a while back to ease the barrier to entry to Hashcat: [https://github.com/brannondorsey/naive- hashcat](https://github.com/brannondorsey/naive-hashcat)

Not that it's that big of a barrier, but it can be somewhat daunting to new password crackers.

<comment><USER2> Or, if you want to get experimental with it, I've been working on a distributed browser password cracker here: [https://github.com/brannondorsey/distributed-password- cracki...](https://github.com/brannondorsey/distributed-password-cracking). It can be embedded in websites to borrow your visitor's CPU cycles to crack md5 hashes.Note that it is very slow in comparison to Hashcat, but its a proof-of- concept for something that I am hoping to soon add WebAssembly + WebGL GPGPU cracking to.

<comment><USER3> Smells like in-browser cryptocurrency mining! Maybe you should compare notes.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15528247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15528247)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15470244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15470244)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15333899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15333899)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270799)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145) <\- Show:CoinHive

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124211)

(All 40+ comments within the past ~2 months)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Used Hashcat in the Student Cluster Competition[1] of SC16 conference. There was a task where students were asked to recovery as many passwords as possible from a vault consisting of md5crypt and bcrypt hashes[2]. The performance was amazing - 8400k md5crypt per second with 2 NVIDIA K80.

I also profiled the code trying to discover possible optimizations, and found that the code has been heavily optimized. Computation and data transfer are well overlapped, so GPU utilization is pretty high. It's a really great tool.

[1] [http://studentclustercompetition.us/2016/applications.html](http://studentclustercompetition.us/2016/applications.html)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tXBy9-ajFtO_b8hvbuleqRbc...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tXBy9-ajFtO_b8hvbuleqRbcNYvgoGUQgvQN1vzPWHM/edit)

</comment><comment><USER5> I can recommend Hashcat, used it myself for cracking bitcoin wallet using multiple GPUs. Great tool if you forget your password and it works with so many applications/file formats.

<comment><USER6> I thought cracking a bitcoin wallet was technically beyond the limitations of today's computing power??

<comment><USER7> If you have enough of the bitcoin wallet, cracking the rest is possible with todays resources.

If he was able to crack any random bitcoin wallet, I don't think he'd be sharing it on this website.

<comment><USER8> You need the entire encrypted wallet so you can extract the password hash from it even then you need to know your password to the point of only 3-4 variable chars to be able to effectively crack it or use a pretty simple password that is either moderately short Witt a small key space or is in a dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was in undergraduate engineering (~3 years ago), hashcat was actually a key part of some great computer security assignments. I'm happy to see it's updated, although it was pretty solid when I had to use it!

</comment><comment><USER10> Will this work on a something like a 100 character plaintext password that was written down with 3 transcription errors? Can it try all permutations of the 100 char password changing up to 3 characters at a time?

<comment><USER11> almost. You can write a script (language of choice) swapping out three letters at a time to create a custom dictionary...hashcat doesn't do it, the dictionary you feed it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last time I tried Hashcat, it didn't support my 18 character password.

<comment><USER13> It does now - that's one of the main features in 4.0. They rewrote the CL hash engine to work modularly, which gives up some hand-optimized speed in exchange for simpler code and longer password support. 3.x supports 16 chars, with some hashes supporting up to 32 chars. 4.x supports 256 chars across the board.

Full details at [https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6965.html](https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6965.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me to move to passwordstore with a gpg key on an Yubikey.

<comment><USER15> I hope you remember that GPG keys created on a Yubikey are unsafe, due to an overly simply RSAlib implementation there for their Infinion chips.

<comment><USER16> Keys created on _some_ Yubikeys (it's easy enough to check).

<comment><USER17> I've had a really hard time finding information on this. What exactly is potentially broken and how do I check my key?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.yubico.com/2017/10/infineon-rsa-key- generation-i...](https://www.yubico.com/2017/10/infineon-rsa-key-generation- issue/)

<comment><USER17> Oh dang. You're quick. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love the thermal watchdog feature!</comment>


Unpublished Photos of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley's Early Days - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos-of-steve-jobs-and-silicon-valleys-early-days/?pid=3625 <comment><USER2> The photos on a single page: [http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos- of-s...](http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos-of-steve- jobs-and-silicon-valleys-early- days/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Ftechbiz+%28Wired%3A+%28Section%29+Tech+Biz%29&pid=3633&viewall=true)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Their interface was awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> "Today there is no patient money in Silicon Valley," he says. "And that means that there isn't enough time to make a similar kind of breakthrough."_

Is this true? If this is indeed true, what are the underlying factors? What does it mean "to change everything?"

One example: I suspect that lots of people fall into the trap of monetizing businesses in ways that trap them into old ways of thinking. Advertising is a prime example of this. I think advertising is obsolete. We should be using social graphs to make people more efficient at correctly judging products and extracting value from the transaction. (Amazon is doing some of this already, but the groups engaging in this are at arbitrary social distances. Make it easy for people of close social distance to collaborate, and you will have a game changer.)

Much of the social fabric of North American society has fallen apart. The kind of social capital that old communities had was powerful. Networks can be used to build this kind of social capital to great effect. (Witness the Arab Spring.) The emphasis should be on emergent trends, with some way of enabling users to efficiently filter information without deluging them.

<comment><USER5> "Is this true?"

No. But in terms of deals done it makes a much smaller percentage than the ones which expect a faster return. Any chip startup, and most hardware startups, are 'patient' money as there is a lot of R&D to pay off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hardly think that 1987 counts as the early days of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER7> That was exactly my thought. Early days of Silicon Valley reaches as far back as the 1930s.

Learn your history, whippersnappers, and get off my lawn.

<comment><USER5> Many (most?) people put the 'start' of the technology culture in Silicon Valley around the same time that Stanford started the Applied Electronics Lab [1]

[1] [http://steveblank.com/2009/08/17/stanford-crosses-the- rubico...](http://steveblank.com/2009/08/17/stanford-crosses-the-rubicon/)

<comment><USER7> YMMV I guess.

IMO, Silicon Valley's "early days" starts with the founding of HP.

In any case, I don't think 1986 can be considered "Early days" by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you're just focused on the modern era of the Valley, I don't think you can reasonably make a case for anything earlier than the mid-1970s. To put the dates in some perspective (not for you but those who think 1986 are the "early days"), Jobs had already been pushed out of Apple by 1986.

<comment><USER5> The founding of HP is an interesting place to start, most people put the 'Silicon' in Silicon Valley with the founding of Fairchild [1] in 1956, it was the making of transistors, and later integrated circuits which really drove investment. I didn't arrive until '84 nearly 30 years later and in what was clearly the twilight of semiconductors as the driving force (also in a pretty big recession). HP's founding in '47 pre-dates Shockley coming to the valley but all of them were friends with Terman who created the Applied Electronics lab.

Some people use 1971, the introduction of the Intel 4004 as the seminal moment, but those folks are more 'computer' focused and less 'technology' focused.

The bottom line is of course that was definitely wayyyy before '86 :-)

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands "For Menuez, so much of the current tech scene is preoccupied with profit, whereas the digital word he documented, at least at the beginning, was less interested in making tons of money and more interested in fundamentally changing the world."

I haven't spent a lot of time in SV or around the people in that tech scene, but this seems like accurate portrayal of the current situation.

Can anybody elaborate on his comment?

<comment><USER5> Sure, the engineers here are interested in building cool stuff, sometimes it becomes wildly profitable stuff, then a bunch of profit seeking types swarm in and try to figure out how to get that wealth, the snap and fight, much like piranhas stuck in an evaporating side pool, becoming increasingly unethical until it blows up on them. Then they die off and the folks working on stuff get to do so again with fewer interruptions.

Sadly they re-use the office buildings and so we lose the fossil record. It would be a fabulous art installation to do something along the ruins of Pompei but with places like Webvan, Pets.com, and Flooz.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a picture entitled "Sunlight, NeXT. Sonoma, California, 1986." with the text "At tech startups it was rare to get outside or even see the sun for days at a time. A young NeXT employee working on an original Macintosh at a company retreat focuses on the task at hand."

But to me, the device clearly looks like a Macintosh SE, which wasn't manufactured until 1987.

<comment><USER9> Also, the photo of "Steve Capps" looks a lot more like Woz to me...

<comment><USER10> Steve Capps reportedly looked a lot like Woz: [http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&...](http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anybody can explain the background behind this one: [http://www.wired.com/rawfile/wp-content/gallery/silicon- vall...](http://www.wired.com/rawfile/wp-content/gallery/silicon- valley/4_010_024563_19_sm_DSI.jpg) ?

<comment><USER12> Are you asking what is the background behind the caption?

 _"A Steve Jobs "to-do" list made at a company brainstorming session, with a set of very difficult technical challenges remaining for his team to solve in order to complete the NeXT Computer."_

<comment><USER11> humm, somehow I missed the caption. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Menuez: "A couple of co-workers who were falling in love celebrating with abandon at the Adobe annual holiday party of 1988. They were married shortly after the party but divorced a few years later."_

The phrasing here bothers me. I'd rather it read: They were married shortly after the party and divorced a few years later.

Using "but" is editorializing to me -- like saying they _shouldn't_ have gotten married in the first place, since they later divorced.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Silicon Valley's Early Days"?

"Finally Surface".

What an unimpressive group of photos.

In reverse order here are the dates. Only two of Steve I think there were more of Adobe:

1998

1990

1997

1994

1988

1989

1987

1988

1993

1988

1991

1992

1986

1987

1986 s

1992

1986

1988 s

That title would make you think this is some significant find and centered around Steve and the Valley.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, I did expect a bit more, but damn...

You put just 23 lines and some amount of research into purely shitting on the submitter's choice of title. Did that do anything to help your obvious disappointment?

<comment><USER14> "purely shitting on the submitter's choice of title."

It's the title of the article. It could also have been re-written by the admin's even if the submitter had chosen a different title (which no doubt would have resulted in less points).

Your comment smacks of "look what you waste your time on" in a belittling way. Perhaps I type fast, work fast and I'm not lazy and would prefer to back up the point I am making if I decide to make a point about something.

<comment><USER15> You don't have a point, just an opinion.

You're verbosely bitching that the article you got didn't live up to your expectations salted with the inference that the submitter was somehow whoringly complicit in your perceived deception.

<comment><USER14> "You're verbosely bitching"

<CR's> are not verbosity.

Re-read what I said because the submitter was not "whoringly complicit" (I like your creative use of language by the way I'll give you an upvote for that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> also relevant: [http://www.retronaut.co/2012/08/steve-jobs-unseen-images- by-...](http://www.retronaut.co/2012/08/steve-jobs-unseen-images-by-norman- seeff-1984/)

</comment><comment><USER17> the set of all sets that do not include itself a.k.a. unpublished pictures published in a newspaper

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, WIRED has really declined. It is nice to see these photos, but the text is so often completely wrong, nonsenseical or misrepresentative that I'm just astounded.</comment>