Google Pixel C Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/9972/the-google-pixel-c-review/8 <comment><USER2> It looks from where I'm standing as if Apple has a methodology for getting rid of legacy cruft while keeping the important bits, viz:

1\. Pick a product. (Pages, for example, or Logic Pro. Or the entire platform -- OSX.)

2\. Create a new version with significant feature regressions (e.g. Pages 5, iOS in the early years, Logic Pro X).

3\. Keep an eye on what features the customers are screaming about losing, and re-implement them (but not the bits nobody cares about).

4\. Screams subside, product reaches parity again -- but is a lot less crufty, easier to maintain on new platforms.

Google _hasn 't_ mastered this art, and they're unsure what their operating strategy is. First there was Chrome the browser, then ChromeOS (a thin client platform), and Android because they needed a phone OS, then running Android apps on ChromeOS, then this idea of giving ChromeOS touch support so it could replace Android, then the flagship touch-ChromeOS platform (the Pixel-C) has to ship before the OS is ready and it all falls apart. With much wheel- spinning, Google ends up falling behind an in-some-ways-inferior Apple competitor because they don't focus on iterative design.

(Am I barking up the wrong tree here? TL:DR is the Pixel-C hardware looks gorgeous but the software is clearly a case of "dammit, we have to ship _now_ , what OS can we dump on it?" rather than any strategic planning.)

<comment><USER3> Dunno, seems like if they had just called this a "Nexus" and not a "Pixel" most of your points would fall apart, no?

It's a 10" Android Tablet. Looks nice enough I guess. Don't really see what it has to do with ChromeOS or the Chrome Books other than the reuse of the name.

And re: the Apple point, this is pretty much exactly as "incremental" over a ChromeOS device as an iPad is with over a MacBook.

<comment><USER4> Pixel-C probably was supposed to run on ChromeOS.

Link: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy- ro...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-road-from- chrome-os-concept-to-android-adoptee/) Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713384)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Despite how fast Tegra X1 is, and the fact that the SoC is seemingly always > using its A57 cores, the interface can be quite janky at times. Normally > things perform fine, but both Josh and I have observed random lag and frame > drops when doing basic actions like scrolling, opening apps, and bringing > down the notification drawer.

This is aggravating to no end. Top of the line (mobile) hardware, years and millions of dollars in engineering effort, and perf still sucks. I've tried very hard for years to be charitable about this problem: programming is hard, and there are a lot of smart people working on this.

But something is fundamentally broken with Android's abstractions. I don't know enough about Android's architecture to say what it is -- but there is no other reason for perf to still be a problem [1]. Every Android device I've owned has had these issues, while my $45 Nokia Lumia Windows phone has been consistently responsive for over two years, on marginal hardware. What the hell is going on here?

[1] Either that, or critical code paths are being bloated with unnecessary features faster than the runtime and hardware are improving. Which would still be surprising, because that has to be a _lot_ of bloat.

<comment><USER6> Java.

<comment><USER5> Didn't want to say it outright, but that's my theory too. Having a VM manage everything in a resource/power constrained environment is a crazy idea in the first place. Oracle's JVM is competitive because of heroic engineering, _in spite_ of Java's design -- not because of it. And it still has tradeoffs, like insane memory usage. ART/Dalvik are operating under different constraints, which probably contributes significantly to Android's handicap.

That can't be the whole story though, because C# and VB.NET both (seem to) perform decently under a managed runtime on Windows Phone. Wonder how big of a role the CLR has in typical WP apps and the WP core, as opposed to unmanaged C/C++ code.

<comment><USER7> .NET is AOT compiled to native code since Windows Phone 8.

On Windows Phone 8.x, it uses MDIL (Machine Dependent Intermediate Language) meaning native code with symbolic names for the on-device linker.

On Windows Phone 10 onwards, it makes use of .NET Native.

Both are based on Visual C++'s backend, which is way more world battle tested than ART.

.NET also supports value types.

Also the XAML layouts are compiled to binay, not interpreted on load like on Android (aka inflated).

Windows Phone also only supports asynchronous code, graphics and sound APIs must be hardware accelerated.

<comment><USER8> The Go authors had a pretty good article on what's wrong with Java's performance : pointers everywhere. Every last little thing that isn't a primitive type is a pointer. Everywhere, in every bit of code.

That means a "new Object()" takes up 16 bytes (8 bytes for the object, 8 for the pointer to it). That means you fill a cache line by allocating 4 objects, or 2 objects containing a single reference, or ...

So in java you should never program a line drawing loop by using 2 vectors, because 2 vectors, each with 2 32-bit ints take up 8 _2 (2 pointers to the objects you 're using) + 8_2 (overhead for the objects) + 4*2 (the actual data) 40 bytes of data. No way you can fit that in registers and still use registers to actually calculate things. So instead you should use 4 ints and just forget about the objects, and even that will only work if you never call any functions.

Same loop in C/C++/Pascal/Go/... using structs takes 8 bytes (they don't keep structs on the heap), which, if necessary, fits in 1 register (granted, in practice we're talking 2 registers, but still).

People might reply to this with benchmarks, but if you actually analyse the java code where java beats or is comparable with C/C++ you're going to see zero object allocations. You're not even going to see them using bool in the extreme cases, rather they'll bitshift into ints to effectively generate packed bools (certainly in SAT benchmarks). This is not realistic java code, which would have been way slower.

Java's memory model is the main culprit at this point in time. Java can do incredible tricks with programs, and actually exposes them, enabling lots of language creativity on the JVM. But there's a pretty sizeable cost in speed and memory usage.

<comment><USER9> _People might reply to this with benchmarks, but if you actually analyse the java code where java beats or is comparable with C /C++ you're going to see zero object allocations._

I've noticed that tends to be true in general for benchmarks of high-level languages which show them performing as well as or sometimes even better than C/C++ --- the code performs so well because it's essentially using none of the other language features that most code in the language does. I touch upon this in my other comment here about culture: the language theoretically allows you to write quite efficient code, but it doesn't look "idiomatic" or perhaps isn't a "best practice", so it's discouraged and isn't done. The entire dogma of avoiding any optimisation compounds this problem even more, since once programmers finally realise they have performance issues, they've already created such complex and inefficient code that it's even harder to do any optimisation on.

On the other hand, idiomatic C tends to be written in a simple and straightforward style that is naturally quite efficient already. C++ is similar, although templates, OOP, and all the other new features can lead to inefficient code if not used in moderation.

I suppose the ultimate example of what could be called "intrinsically efficient" is assembly language. With Asm, every instruction, every byte you can save from typing is one the machine also doesn't have to execute, so you're basically forced to optimise as you write. There's certainly no desire to overengineer things, simply because of the extreme tedium and futility of doing so. With no IDE to help you generate classes and autocomplete indirections, it really changes your perspective of what constitutes efficient code.

<comment><USER7> Even on Assembly one might suffer from macro opcodes and the respective microcode expansion, for the sets that don't map 1:1 to what the CPU does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of this review is basically correct -- it's a device with a good screen and good battery life, it'll be a terrible laptop replacement because Android isn't well-suited for that -- but the stuff about poor touch sensitivity, crashing, and performance issues is weird.

If you read all the reviews of the Pixel C out there, you'll see that Ars Technica complained about touch sensitivity, but nobody else did; and not even Ars complained about performance or overall reliability.

I own a Pixel C, and haven't encountered any of these problems. It's on the crashy side for an Android device (it reboots itself randomly about weekly), but nothing like the kind of issues that Anandtech had.

My suspicion would be that they have quality control issues, and that Anandtech (and Ars) got defective units, but the Anandtech statement about Google preparing a software patch makes it sound like there's some kind of software issue -- but what kind of software issue affects a subset of devices?

<comment><USER9> _it reboots itself randomly about weekly_

Hearing about things like this makes me wonder, "What happened to the concept of uptime?" Recently on HN there was discussion about how Windows 10 would force reboots to update, and make users lose all their unsaved work.

20 years ago, I remember Linux/UNIX users would ridicule Windows users for their frequent crashes and need to reboot, and pride themselves on months or even years of uptime. Now we have Linux-based Android that appears to be just as unstable?

<comment><USER11> Obviously this is a mostly edge case. People Android phones and tablets aren't rebooting weekly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading this article on a Pixel C right now.

I can't say I haven't noticed a few of the lags and keyboard glitches mentioned, but probably not more than a handfull over a month. The Pixel C has nearly replaced my Mac Book Pro 2015 for all of my browsing, note taking and communication.

The keyboard is really good and with apps like Termux, I've also done quite a bit of coding in vim. I'm hoping it'll get split screen soon though.

Feel free to ask any questions.

<comment><USER10> How on earth are you coding in Vim on a keyboard with no escape key, no [], |\, or {} keys, and a misplaced +/= key?

<comment><USER13> In related news though I'm mystified at macbook popularity with developers. The first thing I noticed was the lack of page keys, home/end and delete.

<comment><USER14> Do programmers actually use those keys? I use Home and End in the web browser... but when coding, I just use the close-to-my-fingers shortcuts. Home = C-<, End = C->, Delete = C-d, Page Up = C-v, Page Down = M-v.

<comment><USER15> It depends on your text editor! I, for one, use C-a for home and C-e for end.

<comment><USER14> Ah, that's what Home and End do? Different from the browser. Like I said, I never use them for programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would suggest either changing the link to the beginning of the review[0] or updating the title to something like 'The Google Pixel C Software Review'.

0: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9972/the-google-pixel-c- review](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9972/the-google-pixel-c-review)

<comment><USER17> Some of the blame needs to go towards Anandtech and their pagination spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So. Google has all the best engineers there is, unlimited supply of money, Android is as old as iOS (in software terms a grandpa) and Head of UX that makes fun of iOS on every occasion he gets. And still. What gives?

<comment><USER19> No supply of money is unlimited, and throwing more people at a problem doesn't necessarily solve it.

No sane company is going to invest more money in a platform than they believe they'll eventually get a return for, so that's generally an upper bound. You don't spend 20 billion on a project you think will net you 5 billion in revenue.

<comment><USER20> >No sane company is going to invest more money in a platform than they believe they'll eventually get a return for, so that's generally an upper bound. You don't spend 20 billion on a project you think will net you 5 billion in revenue.

That is completely incorrect. It depend on strategy of company . If company consider some product to be strategic place, they will spend hell more than what they will get in return. About android it is same. Google does not think about Android as strategic product (they maybe change their mind after windows 10 attack and Microsoft revive, I dunno).

Mostly they think that is something we have , we provide it to the market , specially to the third world . Just for getting more and more people access to the internet.

That's all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It just shows this wasn't supposed to ship with Android on board. Also Google has a bit of a problem regarding Android on tablets and ChromeOS, because I'm not positive they're actually sure where the future is here.

It also feels kinda old seeing own Google apps completely un-optimized for tablets, while they're cheering for developers to do so for third party apps on IO. If Google doesn't bother, why would anyone else ?

</comment><comment><USER22> If you don't want to read the whole review, this paragraph is a fine summary:

      At this point I would normally continue to run our PCMark
      and GFXBench battery tests. Unfortunately, the Pixel C's
      software makes it incapable of completing either of them. I
      made five attempts to complete PCMark, which took a great
      deal of time as the test runs over many hours. In all cases
      the tablet locked up during the test and required a hard
      reboot. It may be possible to eventually get it to
      complete, but I didn't feel that it was worth delaying the
      review further in the hopes that I could eventually get the
      Pixel C to complete the test properly.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9972/the-google-pixel-c- review...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9972/the-google-pixel-c-review/6)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's really sad, that there is no serious competitor for Windows and OSX on desktop ATM. Linux is still somewhere between X11 and Waylaynd/Mir with it's GUI toolkits support and lacks commercial offering. Android is just not desktop OS and ChromeOS is not a full desktop.

<comment><USER20> Microsoft's new CEO is much smarter than these.They are shifting their product to be IT company rather than a pure software company. They will put endless money on bing. They did put Bing in the core of their best product -Windows 10-.

Google does know very well this Microsoft is going to hurt them really bad. The recent news about Google working on Desktop OS is google's answer to Microsoft moves. Microsoft prepares itself to make greatest Desktop OS in the whole market in next 3 year.

And Google does know if Microsoft unifies all its user under windows 10 and windows do provide them best desktop experience, eventually they will find a way to take away user from Chrome(browser)/Android to their own platform.

The only move google can make in this position, is to work on windows replacement. (and as news came out, they are doing).

and they choose android rather than Chrome os to be their desktop os. Let's not kid ourselves, chrome os will not be mainstream os maybe until 30 years . (the networking technology is not there yet, it doesn't have anything to do how great/secure is Chrome OS).At the other hand they had android.which is fragmented, which is not that great. but they have a huge userbase. And they are working on a desktop version of android.

<comment><USER24> What networking technology does Chrome OS need? It's entirely possible to write great offline apps for it, they are just built using web technologies so you can use the same code online and offline.

<comment><USER25> Apps are useless if they can't reach their data, because it didn't fit in (tiny) local storage anymore and external storage is unavailable due to lack of (reliable, fast) network connectivity. Although manufacturers could simply offer devices with local storage and solve that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had the same kinds of problems with my chromebook. It would freeze up, mouse pointer and all. Sometimes it would come back after a couple of minutes, other times it wouldn't. Sometimes the whole OS would die and it would reboot.

The wifi was flaky at best, often refusing to connect when my nexus 5x right beside it had no problems. Browsing the filesystem was an exercise in madness. My Amiga 500 running at 7MHz was MUCH more responsive. I used a stopwatch to time 27 seconds from double click to actual display of a jpeg image in the image viewer.

I averaged about two OS crash/forced reboots per day on it until I finally gave up and got a macbook.

<comment><USER27> Interesting. I recently got a chromebook (and not one of the nicer ones) and haven't seen any of this kind of behavior. It's actually been one of the best "just works" items I've bought in a while. I set up crouton so that I could use it for more than a browser, and the only piece of software that's caused any issues is WINE (though I haven't been too adventurous with the kinds of things I install on there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meanwhile, I've been using an Sony Xperia Z tablet for a couple of years. It's starting to get old, but Sony have updated it to Lollipop which I think is fair enough.

In my mind, it's a better experience than any of the iPads of various version that I also have, and it is also rock solid.

But really, laptop replacement? Even with a keyboard both an iPad or any Android device will suck. My poor kids are using their iPads in school, but if I had to do serious work with it, I'd probably go insane.

<comment><USER29> > My poor kids are using their iPads in school

I know this is not what you meant but I find this sentence hilarious. Poor kids indeed, having to endure using an iPad at school, nevermind that for most of us school consisted of just pen, paper, books and not much else :)

<comment><USER28> Hahaha!!! Oh the luxury. Back in my day we didn't even have concept of spacetime :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux Oh wow, they shipped a bad touch screen again? The Nexus 7 2013 had basically the same problem. They fixed it later with firmware updates that basically added a lot of filtering, so single finger touches work basically fine now but multi-touch is still hit and miss (it's too poor to play Love Live for example, but maybe that's a net win, heh).

</comment><comment><USER30> It's things like this that have pushed me away from the iOS/Android tablet ecosystem and towards an x86 non-rt windows tablet. Having a bigger screen than a phone shouldn't mean having to sacrifice useful development apps, good third party device support, and a liberal programming environment that tries to stuff me in the sandbox.

<comment><USER29> Well it really depends on what you want the tablet for. As a device to just relax, browse the web and dick around, mobile OSes feel generally faster than full blown desktop ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There is an interesting point in this review... Seems like industry has get good enough to make hardware -Microsoft and the beautiful magnesium surface pro -Apple and the aluminum design (the possible saphire screen and the new aluminum alloy) -Android several devices...

But we are lacking on the software, and you see it everywhere

      -Microsoft and the tablet/desktop os which haven't get
       that much hate lately
      -ios and let's fix everything we break with the ios7
       and newer (e.g. small tiny buttons for music controls on
       the lock screen of the ipad....)
      -android and... oh well you have the above review.

Interestingly some of the things that have been fixed and make the os nice have been done by apple, ad filter, the future screen color shifting a.k.a. "fluxing".

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder why people persist in speculating about OS unification. Chrome OS is great on cheap laptop form factors where Android would suck.

A web UI isn't good for a touch-only configuration. The web grew up with pointing devices, and "mobile web" apps haven't been competitive with native apps on touch-first devices. A web tablet would suck, too.

Microsoft has been banging their heads against this unwise unification until they missed the whole mobile market. You can't drag Windows into a touch-first world, and your ISVs will never get to where their apps work well in a touch- first world. It just ends up being a not-quite-getting-there mess.

Another way to look at it is: Try using a Google web app on a touch convertible. They're terrible. Not even trying to get touch right.

</comment><comment><USER33> Did anyone see this quote from the review? "It's honestly shocking to see these issues on a device designed by Google running software designed by Google." Gold!

</comment><comment><USER34> Are there recent Google devices that ship with ChromeOS ? While I believe that Android makes more sense (since it also has a browser and can run classical apps) I wonder what the state of ChromeOS is.

<comment><USER10> The Chromebook Pixel is new in 2015, and is wonderful. ChromeOS is an excellent, rock-solid OS built on solid technical foundations.

<comment><USER35> I'm typing this from a Pixel 2015 LS. ChromeOS is great if you're not a dev, and it's still pretty good if you do dev work on it. The problem isn't really ChromeOS (you can replace ChromeOS with Arch or Ubuntu with a little work), but that (judging from the G+ community) a lot of Pixel 2s have been RMA'd for flash disk and audio issues. If you get a good Pixel 2, it's an amazing machine. You might have to RMA it once or thrice to find that machine though.

Tbh, I would pay an additional $500 to a company that cloned the hardware but offered at least a 512 GB hard disk. I've even give up the touch screen. I'd like a quad core Skylake upgrade while we're at it, but I'm not greedy, I just want a reasonable amount of disk. They could even price it at $2000 and I'd still buy it in a heartbeat. As is, I'm still using my Pixel 2 LS, albeit with a slimline USB key pseudo-permanently attached to provide extra space. Nothing else approaches the power and battery life of a Macbook Pro if I want fully supported hardware under Linux.

<comment><USER36> Google could sell a ton of Chromebook Pixels to developers if they would put a 512GB SSD in it.

ChromeOS + Crouton + a decent SSD would make a killer development laptop.

<comment><USER37> Honestly I use ChromeOS + SecureShell and connect to a workstation from wherever I am. No Crouton or SSD necessary.

<comment><USER38> Yeah I do this with my raspberry pi, edit with vim, for web applications the pi is plenty fast. I use the asus flip got it on sale for less than $200.

<comment><USER38> Which currently does the web fine but doesn't work for native android I have an intel machine for that stuff but for web development the pi is pretty sweet I run rails and node just fine on it with postgresql.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As a side note, that "third world" posts in the article's comments are just disgusting.</comment>


LightSail Energy Enters "Hibernation", Quest for Energy Storage Runs Out of Cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lightsail-energy-cheap-compressed-air-storage-hibernation <comment><USER2> Here is my wild ass idea. Repurpose the storage tanks to hold beer or wine as it is fermenting. I think 100 psi can be achieved without much training of the yeasts. Maybe energy from the tanks could be useful to brewers for their operations.

</comment><comment><USER3> No relation to the similarly named LightSail solar sail project by The Planetary Society. As a TPS contributor the title had me worried for a moment.</comment>


How I Made my own Smart Glass Under $10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkB1Nahi-X0 <comment><USER2> It's over 8,000!

Seriously, very cool. My only critics:

* There is a lot of sharp edges. It really needs buffing.

* The plastic could be a little thinner because it look heavy.

Still very cool.</comment>


"Peer review" is younger than we think - <AUTHOR> http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is-younger-than-you-think.html <comment><USER3> The journals published by the Royal Society, where modern enlightenment science was born, was informally peer reviewed by the mid 1700's, and peer review was systematized in the 1800's. The explosive growth of the industrial revolution, the reordering of society in the enlightenment, and everything we call modern and progressive is associated with a sequence of events that is also tightly correlated with the birth of peer review. Most philosophers of science don't consider this a coincidence. Science gave birth to exponential progress, and science itself is dependent on peer review.

Maybe the integration of peer review into practical industries, medical studies, and government regulation came later. But those were cases of taking something that worked astonishingly well and apply it to other domains. It's hardly fair to say that peer review "started" in the 1960's or 70's.

<comment><USER4> Just for the sake of solidity, would you care to have a citation there?

<comment><USER3> Ironically there's some given in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the key factors missing in this discussion is that there are two overlapping forms of peer review: One which is merely technical, checking for correctness and completeness. The other is a much more subjective form, in which a reviewer is asked to comment on the "merit" or potential "impact" of a given study. The former is often necessary, as honestly there's a lot of crap out there, but more often it comes down to minor details that the expertise of another scientist's specialty can best address. The downside is that this can inspire a certain pedantry and pressure to undertake what is essentially unnecessary formatting.

The latter is essentially the real problem of science in its current state: prestige. There is no reason to not just publish everything in a mega-journal that doesn't consider "merit". It would mean more replication studies and less publication bias against "negative" results (i.e. this drug didn't work as hoped). High-prestige journals also tend to charge correspondingly higher subscription fees, while adding nothing special to the scholarly ecosystem, beyond delaying (often by months) the eventual publication elsewhere. However careers are made on publishing in high-prestige journals.

A recent tweet makes one wonder what the value of high-prestige journals in the first place, if they don't even bother to correct or improve the scholarly record. A PNAS editor's rejection of a paper with greater statistical power and improved methodology, but which fails to replicate a highly cited PNAS paper was on the basis that "in these days of computer literature searches, I see no reason a journal needs to feel compelled to publish follow-up papers on previously published work. The follow-up paper would be found by those interested where ever it is published" [https://twitter.com/mendel_random/status/917115714544324609](https://twitter.com/mendel_random/status/917115714544324609)

</comment><comment><USER6> Another interesting tidbit is that Evidence Based Medicine, what we've come to known as randomized controlled trials with systematic reviews, is /much/ younger than people think. The movement properly started in the 1960s, but only came to fruition after Archie Cochrane (1970s). Still Evidence Based Practice is a contested thing, and very few systematic reviews eventually end up informing policy.

<comment><USER7> Blind experiments in medicine were carried out a lot earlier. See for example the revolutionary work of Claude Bernard in 1865 [0]

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

<comment><USER6> Sure, but I was specifically pointing to EBM [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence- based_medicine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Peer-review is deeply flawed and in its current form merely an advertisement form. We should focus on formatting science in a way that accounts for merit based on reproducibility, falsifiability and paying for real-life usage for recipe invented. Problem is not all science work is technological application.

<comment><USER9> The problem is not primarily peer-review, the problem is the ridiculous publication pressure we're under. I'm a postdoc in the humanities and some of my colleagues publish 10+ bullshit papers in crappy journals per year - <USER2> career is virtually guaranteed, even though everybody knows and agrees that it's impossible to write that much and maintain any level of quality. It doesn't matter how bad or insignificant your work is, if you manage to push out 5+ Scopus-indexed articles per year, nobody will be able to fire you or overlook you in tenure track applications, and I see more and more people gaming the system in that way.

It's leads to a horrible display of mediocricity, of course, and anyone with a genuine interest in substantial scientific research has a hard time competing. Yes, some decision makers still take quality into account, but overall there is a clearcut trend towards chickenshit and bean-counting, at least in Portugal where I currently live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The term "peer review" has gained usage relatively recently but the term "refereeing" has been in usage much longer. The practice itself, as noted in kobeya's comment, is 100's of years old.

</comment><comment><USER11> The next revolution needs to be in reproducing what has been "peer reviewed". During my time at a genetics company I learned bad science abounds even in the " top" journals.

One particular example is people "collabing" just to get their name on more papers, which they turn around and use as a marketing tool.

Any time I hear the phrase "I've been published $number of times" these days I tend to think they are worse scientist's not better.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand the second part of the title. I don't see anything in the essay to suggest it can or should go away.

The first part is probably solid: peer review is new. But older scholarship was performed in a very different context - few professional scientists, etc.

But the second part of the title, while provocative, makes no sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has the "modern way" of doing science been evaluated and compared against older ways of doing things?

While discoveries do go down in numbers it seems most of past advancements wouldn't have survived modern standards (while a lot of one-off studies do go through today)

<comment><USER12> This is an important point, but the comparison is difficult. Past advancements occurred in a drastically different time period - few professional scientists, for instance.

I don't defend current peer review as optimal, but I can't see an easy way to carry out a fair comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Typography of this article was not peer-reviewed. They somehow managed to use two different fonts within a single word.

        T<span style="font-family: LMRoman10-Regular-Identity-H;">he earliest usage

oO

</comment><comment><USER15> While the concept of peer review of intellectual property work products may be relatively new, there is long history of craft guilds applying peer quality controls on physical work products in part to protect the reputation of that class of products within the market.

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel that this title is putting words in my mouth.</comment>


Google Maps incorrectly estimating Australian outback trip times - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-14/outback-queensland-businesses-urge-google-to-investigate-maps/10712268 <comment><AUTHOR> The example cited in the article is from Windorah to Birdsville (379km) - Google were estimating 11hrs. This has since been revised to 7hrs 47 however locals claim they do it in about 4hrs.</comment>


Even SSL Gmail can get sidejacked - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=842

<comment><USER2> _"Sidejacking is a term Graham uses to describe his session hijacking hack that can compromise nearly all Web 2.0 applications that rely on saved cookie information to seamlessly log people back in to an account without the need to reenter the password."_

and

 _"Web 2.0 is fundamentally insecure because data isn't encrypted"_

Uh no, many "web 1.0" (and 1.2, 1.5, 1.6, 2.6, 3.0, AND 3.3... but not 1.8 or 2.5) sites are also vulnerable... it has nothing to do with a particular version of the interwebs.

Anyway, from Robert Graham's article it sounds like XMLHttpRequests that are normally protected by SSL will fallback to non-SSL in the case of failure. Normally that should never happen, since http and https are considered different "origins" in terms of the same-origin policy. I couldn't tell if this is a browser issue, or if Gmail is doing something crazy. Either way, it's a big problem and should be fixed.

<comment><USER3> Could you put your ssl stuff on a different subdomain to prevent the browser from doing this?

<comment><USER2> Subdomains are also considered different origins. There are other ways around it, like using <script> tags.

As far as whether or not that would prevent falling back to non-SSL, I doubt it.

<comment><USER3> But if it can't make the connection to a non-SSL server on that domain then it can't send a cookie, I'd think. Unless it falls over to the non-subdomain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This is actually a very common scenario anytime a laptop connects to a hotspot before the user signs in where the laptop will attempt to connect to Gmail if the application is opened but it won't be able to connect to anything."

I'm sure this sentence just flowed in the author's head, but what? It's a pity because this is the most crucial sentence in the article.

<comment><USER5> I think what it means is that if you have an application that logs into gmail (either as a home page when you open your browser, google talk or other compatible client, or an email client such as outlook) automatically (after you've connected to the network but before you're connected to the internet) the application will try again, disabling ssl to see if that works. After you've finally connected to the internet, your application will log in to Gmail and open a session in Gmail without ssl. Then someone who is monitoring the unencrypted data will be able to sidejack your session.

I'm pretty sure this is how it works, but correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> That sounds about right, thanks; however it depends on the extant client-side javascript reverting to http while you're not connected to the internet, as pmjordan said.</comment></comment></comment>


Is negative PR still 'good' PR? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> My web company <http://www.campusassassins.com> was recently featured in the USA Today, but the article is what you might call 'negative.' It warns people not to engage in the activity that my website organizes. Do you think that negative PR is still good?

Here's the article

<http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-04-24-student-assassin- game_N.htm>

<comment><USER2> I like it. The name is good too. Don't worry about school administrators. If people want to play, they'll find a way to play

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the vote of confidence. I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't exactly call that negative PR. They didn't blame you, or come out and call you a monster. It was more of a casual reference. If my company was featured that way in a large publication I'd be fairly happy.

As a side note, nice idea for a site. Every game I've been involved in was run by hand. I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay $2 a person to organize it though. Have you considered having an 'unlimited' account or the like for $100 or so?

<comment><AUTHOR> No we haven't considered it directly. We've had a lot of trouble figuring out how to price things though. An unlimited plan sounds like a pretty good idea.

<comment><USER4> I think you would be better off charging $20 to host a game of up to 50 people. $2/person just seems really high to me. It's gotta be relatively cheap for the organizer to take money out of the pot and put it towards your site.

edit: Read the article... you seem to be getting a decent amount of business, maybe it's worth charging significantly more for an unlimited option. It's certainly a hard service to price.</comment></comment></comment>


Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements - <AUTHOR> https://pi-hole.net/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion from a few months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19258717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19258717)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is [https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/...](https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/files) .

Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists, no need for an additional device, and you will benefit from router features produced by the openwrt community and maybe unavailable in your router proprietary firmware. Much recommended.

If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your crumbling unpatched router, the question _" what's today's good cheap router running openwrt without trouble?"_ is frequently answered by [https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/) :) .

<comment><USER4> Curious about anyone's experience with adblock for OpenWRT.

I use Pi-hole now, and it works great. The one feature that I use quite a lot is the ability to disable it for a short period of time -- when I'm shopping for something, Google ads are sometimes actually useful!

I'd say I use that feature about once a month. That's the sum value of advertising for me.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, Where do you see relevant Google Ads while shopping; is it on some product review blogs?

Did you check the 'Shopping' tab of Google search?

<comment><USER6> One example I've run into...

When you google search for something (like say a product or service that you want to purchase), you'll see a couple ads at the top of the results.

Pi-hole usually prevents most ads from even displaying, but those always show up. If the ad was useful and you want to click through, it will generally block the request. I think the click through sends you to doubleclick or something.

I've never disabled pi-hole in that situation, but there have been times when it was an annoyance because the ad was actually relevant.

<comment><USER5> Understood, I think Google features those products in the shopping tab. But the results may vary depending upon the country you're in as I think they ran into some trouble for that in EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pi-hole is my most prized addition to my connected home. It was simple to set up, easy to manage, and easy to access for whitelisting. Now, all of my devices throughout my network benefit from the service, as opposed to relying on locally installed solutions.

If you aren't using it, you should!

<comment><USER8> I see it as an advantage for all the devices on your network. I mean, to block trackers from Windows computers, or Roku devices or android apps.

But as an adblocker - I feel like I'm missing something. It acts as a DNS server for your local network and blocks what's essentially a host file.

So how does it handle ads served through websockets?

How does it handle ads that come from the same domain as legitimate content (which is increasingly common)?

The complexity of rulesets by addons like ublock origin or PrivacyBadger seem to far surpass what PiHole is capable of.

I think PiHole has it's place on a network - obviously, but people have been promoting this thing like you can just get rid of your adblocker on your browser now.

People also downplay that this can be a pain in a home with a handful a streaming devices, each with a handful of apps. You end up whitelisting so much for those devices, you might as well whitelist the whole device just so the apps can work.

Your wife downloads a game on her phone, and you get that look like "ok, why isn't this working.. what did you do now?"

It just seems like a lot of effort for fairly imperfect results.

Sure installation is easy, but long term maintenance (the OS, the app, constantly whitelisting or troubleshooting when a new service or app breaks for someone in the house).

<comment><USER9> > Your wife downloads a game on her phone, and you get that look like "ok, why > isn't this working.. what did you do now?"

THISSSSSS. The only thing stopping me from using Pi-hole at home are my family members and the inevitable "this isn't working!?!?" rant and then I need to figure out how and what to whitelist. No thanks. I have ad blockers on the kids' PC and when something doesn't work, it's one click to temporarily turn it (browser extension) off.

<comment><USER10> I've been running it for months now and so far none of my family has come back with any 'major' issues. The only ones, which I could whitelist are when they use something like google shopping that has affiliate links and they're blocked.

<comment><USER11> >The only ones, which I could whitelist are when they use something like google shopping that has affiliate links and they're blocked.

If you have impatient shoppers in your household, the blocked affiliate(s) might be a benign issue at first, but when you miss out on a buying opportunity and then an algorithm prices it higher (while you are conducting a 'whitelisting' exercise) - things can escalate very quickly..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [tinfoilhat] Given that Chrome now became Google's weapon against adblocking, how long until it starts refusing to use Pi-hole specifically?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430) [/tinfoilhat]

<comment><USER13> How would a web browser know which DNS it's using?

You set your DNS preference to point to the PI-hole and it should behave like any other DNS server. I guess it could attempt to resolve some spam domain like doubleclick.net and if it was incorrect it could complain...

<comment><USER14> There is a clear and definite trend of taking DNS out of the user's control, see all the hype with DNS over HTTPS etc etc.

Firefox is working on using DoH (opt-in at the beginning, but who knows) from "select" providers. Chrome has a similar switch, surely. Same with Android 9, opt-in DoH, but maybe it'll become opt-out or no-opt in the future.

In the name of privacy and security of course, but with the totally unintended side effect of users unable to dodge ads via DNS/hosts. Interesting, no?

<comment><USER15> The argument you are making is a huge stretch.. Cloudflare is one of the bigger driving forces for DoH and they have nothing to do with ad revenue. Claiming that DoH is some sneaky way to get rid of things like pi-hole is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER14> DoH in itself is not sneaky, no more than ping is. The push to centralise DNS resolution in the hands of a few questionable actors is and this is what is happening.

Cloudflare for example would absolutely love to know what you're up to all day; and because they can now correlate data from their "omnipresent" WAF with the data from 188.8.131.52 they could get some interesting information... And believe you me, they're not sending it to /dev/null.

<comment><USER16> Cloudflare makes a pretty specific statement against what you are saying:

"22.214.171.124 does not mine any user data. Logs are kept for 24 hours for debugging purposes, then they are purged."

Are you claiming they are lying?

<comment><USER17> I'm all for assuming the people who work there are good eggs with the best intentions, but Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S. company. As I understand the U.S. legal landscape with regards to data and privacy protection, they could be forced to lie at a moment's notice and not talk about it.

<comment><USER16> So far as I know there is no _legal_ way for the US to make a company lie about its activities. That is the basis of warrant canaries, which have not been tested in court yet. You can find cloudflares [https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/](https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/).

They could be forced to not talk about something via a gag order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why hasn't anyone, or pi-hole themselves, made a public DNS that does this? Pass everything not on the blocklist thru to 22.214.171.124.

The fact that this requires special hardware, bash commands, etc is severely limiting the audience. The more people blocking ads the quicker the internet changes.

Edit: thanks for the replies!

<comment><USER19> Just to be clear, what change are you expecting to happen? Not /s.

<comment><USER18> Most of the blogs and content aggregation sites shrivel up and die. A bunch of pay walls go up around the good content ppl would actually pay for. There's less crap on the internet because there's less spying to make the crap profitable. Everyone claps.

<comment><USER19> I think your vision just concentrates the spying power into the hands of a few. Is that ideal? Additionally, a pay-to-play model would essentially make the internet only relevant to those with privilege and money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you're running some type of hypervisor (ESXi, Proxmox, etc.), you can create a tiny VM running Debian and load Pi-hole on it. No need for extra hardware and wires.

<comment><USER21> I use ESXi and one of the VMs is pfSense. pfSense has an additional software package called pfBlocker, which is highly configurable and just plan awesome for blockings ads/trackers/etc for the LAN. pfSense has tons of other options - I setup a vLAN and all of my IoT devices are segregated onto it. That way they can't interact with the rest of the devices on the LAN.

<comment><USER20> Yep... my pfSense is virtualized, too. I need to get pfBlocker configured, but pi-hole works so well, I'm too lazy to do anything about it! I'm also working on an IoT VLAN - that Ring doorbell is a chatty Kathy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

<comment><USER23> What's wrong with the "old" way, where you visit a Mopar automotive related website and saw Mopar car part ads? Or when you visit a computer magazine and saw ads for computer parts? Or when you went to NYT and saw basic shit like paper towels and fall fashion?

It became a problem when everyone and their sister started needing to know what kinds of kinks I'm into just to sell me dish detergent.

<comment><USER24> One big problem with _entirely_ static ads is that websites are global but the ads running on them are for brands that are likely local (at least to a specific country.) If I visit the NYT website in e.g. Norway, should I still see ads for an American brand of paper towel that doesn't exist here; or should I see ads for Norway paper towel brands?

The flip-side of this is that I've noticed that YouTube shows me PSAs from my own municipal government ("there's an election soon" ads, "we're building a new piece of civil infrastructure" ads, etc.) I actually kind of like that; I don't have cable, so it's not like I would see them anywhere else.

The entirely-static ads model _does_ work when the consumption of the media is entwined with the consumption of the advertised brands, though. For example, a podcast can certainly advertise its own tour, since—given that you're listening to the podcast—you likely _want_ to see the podcaster speak in person, even if you can't make it there.

Or, of course, if a (global) website is just advertising another (global) website. The NYT can advertise Amazon just fine.

<comment><USER25> This not necessarily a problem. There's nothing to stop the website operator calling out to an ad provider, with the ip/location of the user, and getting an ad to embed.

The upside for the user is that location and whatever the one site is able to determine about the user is all that can be shared. If the user hasn't logged in with their real name - that probably isn't much.

<comment><USER26> The issue is that you can make considerably more money using ads that 'track' you.

So instead of one ad being enough to pay for your content, you have to fill your website with banner ads, embedded ads, scroll over ads, animated ads, etc etc.

It's a slippery slope, more people use adblockers causing content creators to add more advertisements to generate the same amount of income. More people are bothered by the increase in ads, and download adblockers themselves. Rinse and repeat until ad supported content is unrealistic for all but the biggest of websites.

And I'm pretty sure even checking location is controversial. I've at least seen it included as part of tracking in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ad blocking via DNS is relatively easy right now because a content provider like CNN.com will use a domain like "ads.evil-surveillance-media.com" to load their ads into your browser. But what happens if all these companies switch to just using their own domain to load ads? If the ads as well as the content BOTH come from CNN.com then there will be no easy way to filter the ads out. This will be the next stage in this war between ads and adblockers.

<comment><USER28> With the prevelence of ad blocking tech, the question becomes why haven't they already?

The answer being that content providers can't be trusted to self report metrics that determine how much advertises pay. At least not for pay per view/client/etc models.

The people that self select themselves from viewing advertisements might be doing advertisers a favor. They're perhaps less likely to make purchases based on impressions//click ads on purpose; per dollar, ad campaigns might be more effective without said people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it easy to disable adblocking on sites that won't work with adblockers? I like to have the option to disable adblocking in my toolbar. For example, certain bank websites, business websites, etc.

<comment><USER30> People here are gushing amazing over pihole but I don't find it that amazing in the least. In fact what you're describing is one of the most annoying parts of it. I still use it and I did donate to it but it's hardly without it's annoyances. In fact if I didn't already own one I wouldn't build another.

There isn't a chrome extension or anything to white list a site quickly. You have to go back into the interface, login, and whitelist, go back and load the page then you'll find that you needed to whitelist a few subdomains/cdns as well. This is really fun when you've got all your devices using the Pihole for DNS and you can't load something on your phone/TV and need to run to your laptop to deal with it.

If you just got your pihole you probably threw in a bunch of community generated lists and you'll find a good amount of stuff you do visit gets blocked. You can get to Google but not Google drive, so you whitelist it. And you do this over and over again until you finally get annoyed because you just want to make a car payment so you permanently disable it for 5 minutes, or 60 minutes if you've gotten annoyed enough.

Sometimes weeks will go by and you'll forget you even had it disabled at all.

FWIW, I also don't use NoScript because I find it incredibly annoying. This is one step further from the NoScript annoyance because you have to go into the webUI and make your changes.

If you don't mind NoScript you'll probably be fine with Pihole. Or if you have the time to curate and pick lists that fit exactly within your browsing habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> File this away for the holidays, too: Pi-holes and NAS backup devices make good gifts.

I know it doesn't sound very sentimental, but the first time I showed my relatives what the Internet looks like without ads, I think those were the strongest hugs I ever got from family members.

<comment><USER32> Are these devices maintained by someone or are they sitting there running years-old crumbling stacks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've just tried it via the install script they provide and it was amazing. Took me through a simple checklist of stuff automating everything it could and giving me nice Curses interfaces for stuff where it needed me. Up and running within 5 mins!

</comment><comment><USER34> I keep meaning to set one up one of these days. Does anyone know what effect a Pi-hole has on internet speed? I play a few games where latency is a big deal, and don't really want to artificially throttle my internet.

<comment><USER35> It shouldn't have any impact on internet speed as it only comes into the picture for DNS requests. It doesn't sit in line with your internet traffic.

<comment><USER36> It helps a great deal for web browsing. Having a DNS cache on LAN at 1ms reach speeds up browsing noticeably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love pi-hole. It's very passive and easy to use. My only issue was when the pi hosting it went down for whatever reason and I didn't know immediately, so I thought my ISP connection went down. I just had to restart the pi to get it going again. It's only happened once in around 6 months. And it's running on one of my older pi!

<comment><USER38> Specify a secondary DNS server to avoid your network going down due to a DNS failure. The downside to this will be that you won't know if the Pi-Hole instance goes down other than possibly seeing Ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I haven't tried Pi-Hole yet but this was the impetus I needed to decide to set it up tonight.

I commented on a different post last night, that I was a bit shocked and saddened to see their Patreon is only pulling in $1,700/mo.

Do they have another significant revenue stream? Is it just too much hassle to bother signing up to Patreon to commit to even $1/mo? Do they have something on the Admin panel where users can click to pay directly?

I'm not judging, I don't even _have_ a Patreon account. I'm curious how such an apparently crucial and useful piece of software — one that no doubt is responsible for providing millions of dollars of value to its users, and perhaps blocking tens of millions of dollars in ads — how can the project be sustainable after 53 releases and 2,700 issues on Github while pulling in less than $24k/yr?

<comment><USER40> > only pulling in $1,700/mo.

This is an astonishingly huge amount of money for an open source project to raise directly from its users. Most open source projects get basically nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like Pi-hole but it ended up causing more trouble than it was worth for me.

First, certain streaming websites would fail and it was too much trouble to try to find the URL to whitelist.

Then after I had disabled it from the Pi-hole interface everything was fine but it wasn't actually active. No problem...until I forgot my router was using it as a DNS server and I moved and didn't set my Pi up yet. Then it took me a couple weeks going back and forth with Comcast to find out that my router was still pointing to a DNS server that wasn't running.

Somehow my FireTV bypassed the bad DNS server at one point (still no idea how this happened cause my router was routing all traffic through the IP for pi- hole) and that made me realize that I can get data from Comcast somehow so maybe it really was my router.

</comment><comment><USER42> The pages you use the most serve some ads from their own domain. E.g. Youtube et. al.

Also beware as most ads in your phone apps come from ad intermediaries that are either dynamic or constantly change.

Pi-Hole is a cool project but please take in consideration those two when using it. We are far from the 90's in ad-tech.

<comment><USER43> Yes, this isn't the ultimate solution, but what you said is an overstatement. The biggies like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc serve ads from their own domains, but almost everything else uses an ad network which can be blocked.

> most ads in your phone apps come from ad intermediaries

I don't know about the intermediaries you are talking about, but all the ad- ridden proprietary mobile apps that I use (the ones that don't self host ads) are blocked by DNS based ad blockers.

The one thing that these DNS based ad blockers can't do however, is block in page annoyances which is why using an extension like uBlock Origin is still necessary.

<comment><USER42> It depends on the ad unit in question. Ad-tech is a very tricky world with a ton of meanders and intermediaries/mediators.

Anyway good luck with that if the app is using a mediator from a big known name as it will likely block all of their services as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Anyone else seeing:

      [] Root user check

            \e[1;32m.;;,.
            .ccccc:,.
             :cccclll:.      ..,,
              :ccccclll.   ;ooodc
               'ccll:;ll .oooodc
                 .;cll.;;looo:.
                     \e[1;31m.. ','.
                    .',,,,,,'.
                  .',,,,,,,,,,.
                .',,,,,,,,,,,,....
              ....''',,,,,,,'.......
            .........  ....  .........
            ..........      ..........
            ..........      ..........
            .........  ....  .........
              ........,,,,,,,'......
                ....',,,,,,,,,,,,.
                   .',,,,,,,,,'.
                    .',,,,,,'.
                      ..'''.\e[0m

      [] OS distribution not supported

</comment><comment><USER45> I haven't moved mine off of the Pi personally, but I've read positive reports of people using Digital Ocean or similar to host PI-Hole. That could also, in theory, allow it to be used while remote or for mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love the idea of pi-hole. However, I run my own local DNS server already. And my DNS server is actually serving some local domains for various servers, etc. on the network. Can I in any way get the list of domains to block from the pi-hole project and use them in my own regular Bind DNS server?

</comment><comment><USER47> Apparently it blocks some domains necessary for the Washington Post articles to load. Whitelisting washingtonpost.com doesn't remove the adblock notice :(

<comment><USER48> Can you check which domains don't resolve using dev tools and check if they are on the pi-hole block lists?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm running pi-hole in a docker container on an Intel NUC; no need for an actual-factual Raspberry Pi. Works great.

</comment><comment><USER50> Pi-hole users should know that in the default configuration it allows your ISP to reconfigure your blocklists at will due to lack of authentication:

[https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/issues/2704](https://github.com/pi- hole/pi-hole/issues/2704)

</comment><comment><USER51> Does anyone have a recipe for using pihole via OpenVPN using docker?

I'm using this[1] but I'm surprised there isn't something more official/baked.

[1] [https://github.com/mr-bolle/docker-openvpn-pihole](https://github.com/mr- bolle/docker-openvpn-pihole)

<comment><USER52> I just set this up yesterday, was quite easy.

[https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/openvpn- as/](https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/openvpn-as/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I was looking at their github repo and couldn't immediately see where pihole gets its block lists, just a very large soup of shell scripting that seems to make a lot of assumptions about your Linux distro.

Anybody familiar with this code able to point out where it does the "interesting" work?

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you tell from the command line what version Pi you're running? I think mine's an original B+, but not sure. I typically get sub-millisecond DNS resolution (presumably from cache).

>root@pihole:~# uptime > 17:02:51 up 587 days, 22:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.05

<comment><USER54> cat /proc/cpuinfo

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I love the pi-hole, but I can't seem to figure out how to get resolving of .local hostnames back when I use it. Like, I can no longer ping my media server at media.local, I have to use the exact IP address. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

<comment><USER56> If you point the PiHole Upstream DNS to your router's DNS (Or whatever DNS server is hosting the .local domains) it should resolve .local hostnames again. I think by default it uses 220.127.116.11 or 22.214.171.124

[https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/change-upstream-dns- server-i...](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/change-upstream-dns-server- ip/7808/2)

<comment><USER55> Thanks! I've tried that, but then got switched around with what was pointing where. DNS is definitely a part of the stack that still confuses me, despite on the surface seeming somewhat simple!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I was planning on installing this on my RPi3B but I wonder due to its low compute power could result in a somewhat slower experience in my home network. Could anyone comment on what his experience has been in this case?

</comment><comment><USER52> I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my phone so that I can disable the blocking for 5 minutes very easily. Highly recommended if you have family members that occasionally need something unblocked.

<comment><USER58> How does one acquire this kind of magic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I run pihole on Raspberry Pi with recommended block lists and it's been an absolute pleasure. Raspberry Pi runs with a static IP I changed DNS settings the devices I want to go through pihole.

</comment><comment><USER60> A router that I can install Pi-hole and host a VPN on would be a dream.

<comment><USER61> If your run a NAS on your network that has some extra horsepower, most of them can run containers now.

I run both pi-hole and my own DNS server inside my network as containers on the NAS. I then have my router configured to default to the pi-hole and then the DNS server.

Advantage of my own DNS server is it exclusively resolves using DNS-over-TLS so my queries are private.

Final fallback for resolution is 220.127.116.11 but based on logs my setup hasn't hit the fallback.

I imagine you could also use a container to host VPN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Given how Google has, literally this morning, informed me that they're discontinuing text-only AdSense units, I can't think of a more appropriate time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Pro-tip: pi-hole will eat SD cards in a rpi if you enable logging. Use industrial flash (e.g., seissbit) to avoid a headache every six months.

<comment><USER64> If you don't care about persistent logs, you can mount the /var/log directory on tmpfs. For example, add to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/log tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> i am very much intrigued by this, atleast from consumer prespective. I am completed noob, is it "simple" enought to set up?

<comment><USER66> You'll need to be able to install Raspbian, run the install script, give it a static ip address and configure your router to use that ip address as its DNS server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> have a nanopc-t4 laying around that i wanna try for a pi-hole + opnsense install. looks like i'll need to add a usb3 ethernet card unless i want to live with 50% the line speed and putz around with tagged vlans using a single nic...although 50% of 1GBit is a lot more throughput than i can get through my isp.

anyone have this type of setup?

</comment><comment><USER68> Anyone doing a pi-hole version for android? We all have an old phone that could be used instead of a rpi.

<comment><USER69> The issue with that is that WiFi is a lot higher latency than Ethernet (even rPi Ethernet which goes over USB) and DNS is one of those things that hurts a bit with higher latency.

<comment><USER70> You're right, but there's nothing stopping you from installing Pi-hole in Termux, I would think, aside from having to run a DNS resolver as a normal user and doing some messy DNS and network configuration. It'd probably be easier to set up by hand than to use Pi-hole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Interesting. How would this integrate into a network running DNS Resolver (i.e. Unbound) in pfSense?

</comment><comment><USER72> I assume, like everything else, Pi-Hole usage can be detected and used to fingerprint users?

</comment><comment><USER73> Pi-hole is fantastic! I run it on my Rockpro64 at home.

Previous discussions =>

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19258717](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19258717)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857887)

</comment><comment><USER74> Is this available as a Synology package I could install on my Synology NAS?

<comment><USER75> Not directly but, depending on your Synology model, you can install it via Docker. I've been using it in that fashion and has been extremely stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Couldn't apps start hard coding DNS servers to avoid pi-holes?

<comment><USER77> Some already do (Chromecast, Google Home devices).

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Pi-hole is fantastic and I will _gladly_ donate to them.

</comment><comment><USER79> if only pi-hole could block the in-app ads that served from the same host :( sneaky youtube, the ads are becoming more and more

</comment><comment><USER33> Love the name and the product looks amazing.

</comment><comment><USER80> [https://www.lostinablackhole.com/](https://www.lostinablackhole.com/)

</comment><comment><USER81> content is blocked in non-browser locations, such as ad-laden mobile apps and smart TVs

</comment><comment><USER82> can this block Hulu ads and maintain access?</comment>


Dropship: teleport files into your Dropbox account - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/laanwj/dropship <comment><USER2> This program tricks Dropbox into thinking that you own a file when all you actually have is hash values for each 4MB block of the file. Dropbox will add the file to your account whether you own a copy or not. There are two major consequences:

-This can be used for piracy of copyrighted files. If hash values for each block of the copyrighted file are distributed online then any Dropbox user can trick Dropbox into handing them the file. This is probably faster than using BT and, imo, it places the legal consequences on Dropbox.

-This can be used to sniff out what files other users have uploaded to Dropbox, which has serious privacy implications.</comment>


Money Changes Everything - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/money-changes-everything/

<comment><AUTHOR> Had to link to this because the comments made for such interesting reading. Is there anything in the entrepreneurial world that suffers this stigma? (socially acceptable if free, illegal/frowned upon if money changes hands)</comment>


The Great EU Debt Write Off (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://econ.anthonyjevans.com/2012/08/eu-debt-write-off/ <comment><USER2> > The idea is very simple – if Portugal owes Ireland €0.34bn of short term > debt, and Ireland owes Portugal €0.17bn

Yes, it's a simple idea. And the reality is even simpler; they _don 't_ owe each other those amounts. Rather, a large number of individuals are owed those amounts. If I, a private individual, own a $1k bond issued by Portugal, and you owe a $1k bond issued by Ireland, obviously we can't just say that sums to zero. Nor can we do so even if I happen to be in Ireland and you happen to be in Portugal.

This whole thing is a non-starter, grounded on the most absurd assumptions with no bearing on reality. If we're just going to make things up, why not just assume that all interest rates are zero; now the debt burden is totally manageable.

<comment><USER3> The author is a professor of economics at what is apparently the oldest business school in Europe, and is apparently also one of the most prestigious business schools in France.

Despite this, you have concluded that in fact the author has failed to understand the nuance of the situation rather than yourself.

<comment><USER2> > you have concluded that in fact the author has failed to understand the > nuance of the situation rather than yourself.

By no means; I'm sure the author is being _purposefully_ misleading; I highly doubt it was mere accident. :)

In any case, your blatant appeal to authority is not needed; the linked article was kind enough to provide sources, and it's the work of a moment to check them.

"Overall gross external (or foreign) debt is taken from the latest 2011 World Bank/IMF figures and includes all debt owed overseas, including that owed by governments, monetary authorities, banks and companies."

Man, I guess just because you work for a prestigious business school you might not be above making a misleading graph to advance a political argument! Who knew?

<comment><USER4> This is pure paranoia.

The "author" is conducting a learning _exercise._ There is no sign of a political argument, nevermind a political point here.

He's focusing on certain elements and not others because that's what he has data for, and that's what the exercise is about. The data he's got is bonds: bank bonds, government bonds & corporate bonds. That's what he's playing with, trying to see how this information can be unpacked, analyzed and understood. I haven't seen the actual exercise but I assume students might be able to do things like "how can we cancel the maximum debt with the minimum number of transactions?" The fact that this does not consider relative bond ratings, macroeconomic effects or whatever else _you_ care about is a red herring.

Every economic model everywhere simplifies reality. Otherwise nothing is fungible/general and nothing can be modelled.

You ascribing sinister motives is _you_ being blinded by whatever you think is the important debate in economics.

<comment><USER5> That's not paranoia. He misunderstood what this is about, jumped to conclusions, and now can't backtrack. Notice how _Lazare_ started by rejecting the validity of the exercise as:

> _" absurd assumptions with no bearing on reality"_

But the argument suddenly turned into rejecting the credibility and motivation of the person proposing it as:

> _" making a misleading graph to advance a political argument"_.

Also while his "demonstrations" kinda' sorta' make sense when viewed from the plane, it's the details that are completely off that give away that there's no formal knowledge or training behind them but a mish-mash of ideas probably gathered from the media, internet, and his personal conclusions and assumptions.

The whole line of reasoning for this discussion is that all physics problems that assume the ideal gas, the perfect sphere, etc. are unrealistic, so they are political statements. Don't feed the troll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the joke, probably with many variants:

> It is a slow day in a little Greek Village. The rain is beating down and the > streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody > lives on credit.

> On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the village, > stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel > owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend > the night. The owner gives him some keys and as soon as the visitor has > walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay > his debt to the butcher.

> The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt > to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay > his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.

> The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks > bill at the taverna. The publican slips the money along to the local > prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has > had to offer him "services" on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel > and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note.

> The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the > rich traveller will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveller comes > down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not > satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town.

> No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However the whole village > is now out of debt and looking to the future with optimism.

<comment><USER7> This isn't a joke. It's a parable about the velocity of money. ;-)

<comment><USER8> This has very little to do with the velocity of money.

It's a lesson on the benefits of the securitization of debt. If people could have traded their debt, they could have zeroed out the whole thing without the Germans.

Honestly, there isn't that much benefit from this story. Everyone in the story went from a net $0 net worth to a net $0 net worth. I'm sure clearing debts (or credits, depending on your perspective), from the books does benefit people, particularly psychologically, but the idea that everyone became massively better off is pretty silly.

<comment><USER9> Unless you are paying a third party for the debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Clicking the link with no prior context, I read this as being purely an economics lesson. And as an econ lesson, none of it makes any sense because most government debts are owned by banks and citizens, not other governments.

From the link to the journal article in the post: >Aim. To give students experience of researching important data and to conduct a policy-relevant negotiation exercise.

The blog post isn't bad because of the author isn't informed on economics. The author is a professor in the subject. The real problem is that the post never states its purpose, and misleads everyone to think this is an econ lesson. In actuality, it is a classroom exercise about international negotiation, and the toy economic model isn't supposed to have real world utility.

<comment><USER11> Why is it described as "policy-relevant" if it's not meant to be about the real world? Economists don't control policy. If they think it's policy- relevant what they mean is, the exercise is intended to train economists to make misleading claims to politicians!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When it says that 'countries own debts' do they mean that governments own other governments' bonds or that citizens own other countries' bonds?

<comment><USER13> It's totally unclear and for some reason I seriously doubt governments are lending to other governments and borrowing at the same time.

It would be easy to line the numbers up against reality to find out if this is private debt, public-to-private debt etc. (which I suspect it is), or some kind of public-to-public debt (which I doubt).

Also, all debt is not equal, the loans are on different terms with different amount of risk, so it's the value of the current bonds and market prices that need to be compared, not their face value.

<comment><USER14> > _I seriously doubt governments are lending to other governments and > borrowing at the same time_

TARGET2 balances are bilateral and cumulative [1]. But they aren't really debts intended to be paid back, and more an EU payments system accounting side effect. (When Greece threatened exiting the Euro, calling these balances did come into question [2].)

[1] [https://www.yardeni.com/pub/target2.pdf](https://www.yardeni.com/pub/target2.pdf)

[2] [https://www.euromoney.com/article/b12kjh8s0kpncx/target2-pay...](https://www.euromoney.com/article/b12kjh8s0kpncx/target2-payment- system-gives-ecb-a-100-billion-reason-to-keep-greece-in-euro)

<comment><USER15> > But they aren't really debts intended to be paid back

They are intended to be equalized at some point.

<comment><USER16> That point always being 30 years away.

To me, TARGET2 is a politically acceptable way for rich euro countries (Germany) to transfer money to the poor ones (Greece), in exchange for the poor ones accepting the fact that the rich countries deciding EU policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tragedy of the commons means it won't happen</comment>


A radical business plan for Facebook: Charge people. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2203436/pagenum/all/#p2 <comment><USER2> I disagree with this. Social networks have value because of the people, not the product itself. The social networking aspect (ie, finding friends and communicating with them) has to be free.

The key is to create products that leverage this network but have their own distinct value. Then, charge for those.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your assessment of the value, but disagree with your conjecture of the solution. It'll take too long to create products that leverage the network and are profitable.

A better short term solution is to sell the data on the user base to mailing houses and other companies that are looking to find more information on their customers. Example target customers are political campaigns, nonprofits, associations, and magazines looking for new subscribers. This is an old fashioned business that has been around for years. It's proven, it works.

FB is headed this way with Connect, but Connect is too muddied, unproven, and relies too much on cooperation with 3rd parties.

A second set of customers, which in retrospect may be what you are referring to, are universities. The alumni network websites of schools are inactive wastelands. Facebook should be marketing walled garden solutions to Universities. Why build your own network from scratch (or expensive off-the- shelf vendor software) when you can just subscribe to a service from Facebook that will instantly give a University access to a huge percentage of their self-identified alumn...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's radical because almost nobody would want to pay with so many free networks around, and most of the people are foreigners and couldn't afford to anyway.

<comment><USER5> Foreigners don't have money? I missed your point there.

<comment><USER6> It goes like this:

Say Facebook charged US $1/month/user.

$1 is more for someone living in Argentina than in the US, and less for someone living in Europe. That seems bad -- you want to get people to pay what they're willing, and no less (price discrimination). Europeans would pay more, Argentines less, in USD.

Now, say you charge local prices. What's to stop someone from the US changing their network to Zimbabwe or whatever?

Once you start charging you start distorting how your users behave. Since Facebook rests on network effects any small change in user behavior has a huge impact across the network.

I think getting users to pay Facebook directly makes sense, but they have to be careful about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Facebook should compete with TicketMaster. Allow Admins to sell tickets to Events and charge a service fee.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd probably just make it premium for people with 100 friends or more. $10/month or something. Won't affect most casual users, but will affect the more hardcore users who are so addicted they'll pay

<comment><USER4> I bet most of them wouldn't. For one, what is Facebook going to do about the ones who already have 200 friends but don't pay? Force them to un-friend 100?

For another, what percentage of people actually have that many? It seems high to me because I'm one of them, but probably there are, in their user numbers, masses of people who have a handful or none at all.

I know I personally would just find the best free social net. I only use Facebook for playing a couple games anyway.

<comment><USER9> "I only use Facebook for playing a couple games anyway."

May I ask which? I've been involved with some of the bigger games on Facebook, so I'm curious to know what's got you hooked.</comment></comment></comment>