On Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/the-greatest-of-all-novels <comment><USER2> I liked this paragraph from the article:

"The novel's wisest general, Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, understands this fact about battle, and about life, from the start. At the council of war before Austerlitz, Kutuzov dozes off. At last he cuts the meeting short: " 'Gentlemen, the disposition for tomorrow—or rather for today, for it is past midnight—cannot be altered now. And before a battle, there is nothing more important . . . '—he paused—'than a good night's sleep.' " If the world of human beings were amenable to science, then planning would be most important. But in a world governed by contingency, where immediate reactions to unexpected events matter most, one above all needs alertness."

<comment><USER3> My favorite quote. I read it as _it is too late now to change anything for tomorrow_ rather than as _planning is irrelevant_.

<comment><USER4> I read it as "planning may be important, but a plan can never be perfect and is not worth sacrificing sleep for"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation about 10 years ago. There were a lot of good references and footnotes.

But way into the novel, as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon's army retreating from Moscow, Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues:

        "But, that said, who invited them here? It's their own doing, f… th… in the f…", he suddenly said, raising his head."

But there was no footnote indicating what the redacted text was, which I found odd. I went to various other online translations and all had the phrase redacted in a similar way.

I even found an original Russian version online and even _that_ was redacted. (I don't know a lick of Russian so it took a bit to find it.)

The original text had:

— А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м… и… в г…. — вдруг сказал он, подняв голову.

I asked some of my Russian-speaking colleagues what this was and even they were a bit stumped but after some searching they found the redacted text was

м[ать] и[хъ] в г[узно]

Which they said was some crude old-fashioned way to say to basically screw their mother in the ass.

<comment><USER6> I recently read 'The Idiot', translated by Ignat Avsey (I enjoyed his 'Karamazov Brothers' translation), and it contained a few similar redactions with no notes as to why. I thought it was maybe just a stylistic device.

<comment><USER7> In my copy of Crime and Punishment it has some names (especially place names) where the end notes say it was partially redacted to get the manuscripts past censors. Not necessarily the case for every redaction though.

<comment><USER8> Even this can be pretending to pretend.

That is, the censor is some bored middle-class beaurocrat rather than a true believer. So all you need is to give the him plausible deniability so he can turn around to his bosses and say "Hey, he redacted the name, how was I to know he was talking about _your_ mother."

<comment><USER9> It was not the case at the time. Censors were bright guys, including e.g. great writer Goncharov, or Nikitenko, who hadn't written any novels, but left very thoughtful memoires. On many occasions censors of controversial books were reporting to the tzar personally, or were tzars themselves (e.g. Nikolay I censored Pushkin).

Most 19th century was depressing and stagnant time wrt politics, so books drew immense public interest.

That said, op's example would be automatically censored by the author himself, since this language was unprintable in 1860s.

I don't know about the Dostoevsky's places, always thought it was a traditional trope - places named with the first letter are ubiquitous in Russian novels.

Edit: also, it's worth noting that much censorship was made to make books suitable for morally unstable or easily agitated demographics, like women, so sometimes the motives for a particular edit could be hard to relate from modern relativistic perspective.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I'm aware of place names and certain people beginning with just the first letter (such as 'Prince S.' in 'The Idiot'), but certain words were blanked out with stars, such as 'B __* '. It happened only a handful of times in 'The Idiot', sometimes for a name a occasionally for a place. I don't recall that form of redaction ever appearing in 'The Karamazov Brothers', though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions.

Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy spends entire, insufferable chapters hammering home his message, sometimes in seeming contradiction to the plot. His portrayal of Napoleon in particular is comically ham-fisted, perhaps intentionally so.

One of his central points, on which he expounds endlessly, is dealt with in the first part of the article. Namely, that society and war are impossible to understand or predict. They just are. On the battlefield, it's not the army with the better strategy or equipment that prevails, but the one whose soldiers simply decide it's their time to win. It reminds me of Japan's "Shikata ga nai" (It cannot be helped) saying. While this is a valid coping mechanism for the incompetent or someone caught up in the heat of the moment, it's hardly a productive approach for those with the time to tackle tough problems. Kutuzov ends a strategy meeting on the eve of battle recognizing that it's too late for further revelations in understanding to be implemented, which is sane, but Tolstoy does indeed take things further and state such solutions are impossible to come by in the first place, which is unfounded. Complex systems can be understood. Just because they don't immediately surrender to analysis doesn't mean there is no solution. War and society are hard nuts to crack because they change based on the current understanding of them, like self-modifying code. That doesn't mean they're fundamentally impossible to understand.

This, at least, is my belief. Holding this belief made reading War and Peace a bit of a chore. Tolstoy creates wonderfully nuanced and realistic characters, but in War and Peace he hammers you over the head with his own philosophy and it's an unpleasant experience if you happen to disagree with it. The book would be better if he'd been more subtle, and could still benefit from having entire chapters (you know which ones) excised completely.

<comment><USER11> I suppose a lot of meaning and cultural context is lost in translation. I never understood how people in the West even approach these masterworks of Russian literature. They're challenging even for the natives.

That having been said, War and Peace is my favorite Russian novel by far. First time I read it I was 15, they force you to read it high school. I disliked it intensely. Second time I read it I was 40. I absolutely loved everything about it, even Tolstoy's relentless arguments in favor of his positions on historical events. To understand them, you have to understand the traditionally Russian fatalism, that still exists there even to this day. The overriding belief that things are largely predetermined, and the capacity of any single person (including Napoleon) to change anything is pretty limited. Which is not an unreasonable position to take, IMO.

There are a ton of subtle, impossible to translate details in it that you simply will not get if you read it in any language other than Russian and without the Russian cultural background. Same is true in the opposite direction: Russians will not get some of the subtleties in US classical literature. There's just far less of it, and nothing, as far as I can tell, quite of the same stature as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

<comment><USER12> Do you really believe that a person's comprehension of the world must be tied so irreversibly to the land they grew up on? There were some similarly condescending comments in a recent thread about the Master and Margarita. Personally I am more likely to respect someone's views on Shakespeare if they've read a lot of Shakespeare than if they were born in Stratford.

<comment><USER11> No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Books aren't just the words on the page. They also rely significantly on implied cultural contexts, meanings, things that _do not_ need to be said.

It's not condescension, it's just a simple fact. This actually becomes blindingly obvious only when you move to live in another culture/country about which you might have had some preconceived notions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "General Pfühl attributes every loss to the failure to carry out his orders to the letter, and since such precision is never possible in battle, he can always argue that, just as he predicted". I think this is a great insight that can benefit both the left and the right wings. From the left we've heard many times how actual communism was never achieved and each failure (such as Mao China or Soviet Russia) proved the point that the theory WOULD work if done differently. But another implementation brought different contingencies again ending in casualties, but the theory WOULD work etc. etc. Sadly, we hear a lot of the same about free market, Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics argued that neo-liberal economics tend to "naturalize" the theory using the scientific discourse, so if, for example, the banks fail it's because there's still too much government control, if liberated from the welfare state mentality the supply and demand and the competitive market would come to a balance. Milton Friedman, probably one of the gurus of the free market based a lot on mathematical formulas, but it's an open question if physics or mathematics can be applied to criticize social structures and predict development?

</comment><comment><USER14> An amusing footnote I found in Tolstoy's Confession:

The context:

>In spite of the fact that during these fifteen years I regarded writing as a trivial endeavor, I continued to write.* I had already tasted the temptations of authorship, the temptations of enormous monetary rewards and applause for worthless work, and I gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material situation and as a way of stifling any questions in my soul concerning the meaning of my life and of life in general.

The footnote:

      *It was during this period, when he "regarded writing as a trivial endeavor,"
      that Tolstoy produced War and Peace (1869).

<comment><USER15> I wonder if he was depressed when he wrote this.

<comment><USER16> just russian

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I liked this quote from Tolstoy: > That saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all life. One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seem to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur.

It reminds me of some words from another, more recent, visionary: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

(though some investigation shows this quote originates from before Lennon)

</comment><comment><USER18> Please resist the temptation of the hyperbolic title (which we've changed above). Comments on the shallowest thing in an article only lead to shallow discussion.

The article contains many subtleties and interesting observations. Comments on those, or ones of your own, will make for a much better thread.

</comment><comment><USER19> I sometimes think about Andrei and Pierre, such opposites and yet best friends. The way their fortunes seem to move in counterpoint. I've often preferred Andrei to the dreamy, idealistic Pierre, but on my most recent reading I think I finally saw why Pierre is the true hero, and not Andrei. I think it is this: Pierre was a seeker...always looking for the meaning in life. He was life-affirming, while Andrei was ironic and focused on what was artificial, life-denying. The scenes with Karataev are my favorite in the whole book. Such a joy to read. Tolstoy had such a good bead on psychology, what motivates individuals. It feels so _honest_.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to (or help someone else to) produce this for Standard Ebooks, but although Gutenberg has what looks like a nice transcription of the Maude translation,[1] there doesn't seem to be any 1922/1923 scans available to proof it from[2] so it's not happening at the moment…

[1] [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600)

[2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/standardebooks/kBnED...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/standardebooks/kBnEDrDIH2k)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm currently reading a remarkable novel modeled after War and Peace: Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

[https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and- fate?variant=10949301...](https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and- fate?variant=1094930101)

It's astonishingly good, both as literature and as an indictment of war and totalitarianism, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves War and Peace.

<comment><USER22> Seconded; Life and Fate is a wonderful novel, and the only viable literary response to the Holocaust that I've read. Grossman's Writer at War is also excellent, and IMHO mandatory for anyone interested in WWII. His chapter on The Hell of Treblinka is without parallel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a russian, reading twitter '1 like - 1 fact' thread about Leo Tostoy and his wife (including how much it is her merit that the novel as we know it actually have seen the light of day) was a better read than War and Peace.

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1068888815627055104.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1068888815627055104.html)

(google translate does a good job actually [https://translate.google.ru/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A...](https://translate.google.ru/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fthreadreaderapp.com%2Fthread%2F1068888815627055104.html))

</comment><comment><USER24> I love the subheader: "The greatest of all novels". It's true

</comment><comment><USER2> I do think though Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels, in a way that isn't, I think accorded to the French. For example dealing with events from the same period of time is Hugo's "Les Miserables" (it has a description of the battle of Waterloo lasting around 12 chapters), perhaps captures more of the variety of human experience.

<comment><USER9> Actually the battle scenes in War and Peace were written under significant influence of Stendahl's in la Chartreuse de Parme. I don't know, how the French treat their novelists, but from a Russian perspective, Stendahl's a big literature, and Hugo more of a teenage reading. I'm pretty sure Tolstoy shared this view.

<comment><USER2> Stendhal also has a description of Waterloo in his Charterhouse of Parma, but I think Hugo did a better description, besides it appears Stendhal wrote Charterhouse in a great hurry, as I recollect, he finished the whole novel in 52 days, I do find it not as finely turned out as Les Miserables.

The problem with Les Miserables is that of wide circulation of translations which are actually abridgements, I fear many readers would have missed the grandeur of the whole unabridged novel. Same seems to be the case with Count of Montecristo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A lot of great comments int his thread. The quotation that had the greatest impact on me was this one:

"We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it."

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone know why is Tolstoy's name usually in English anglicized as Leo? I know it's customary to do for Pope and kings, but I don't know of any other writer. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is Fyodor, not Theodore or Fred or whatever, so why has Lev become Leo? Publishers?

<comment><USER27> Basically yes, via French "Léon", according to this article: [https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/03/how-lev- tolst...](https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/03/how-lev-tolstoy- became-leo-tolstoy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I never finished this novel, but the juxtaposition of social maneuvers and war struck me early in the story.

</comment><comment><USER29> Most people dont think War and Peace was even Tolstoys greatest novel. Anna Karenina is regarded as the greatest novel of all time by lots of authors and critics though of course there is no consensus and its sort of a silly notion.

<comment><USER30> To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

<comment><USER31> And the greatest?

<comment><USER32> _" The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."_

Definitely the greatest line I've ever read. Such extensive imagery _and_ metaphor (well beyond just the sky), tucked into 15 words.

<comment><USER33> And teens today (or soon) would not visually know what "television tuned to a dead channel" meant...

<comment><USER30> It's almost more profound in some ways - on a lot of modern TVs, a dead channel is displayed as being a solid field of bright blue. So, it changes the way Sprawl's sky appears to each reader, but it makes the change take place in Case's head. If it's bright blue, and a person recognizes that first as related to a TV, what does that say about the way they perceive the world? Especially with how bad Case wants digital access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lesser known fact: the original title of "War and Peace" was "War: what is it good for?", but Tolstoy's mistress forced him to change it to the one we know today. The original title was then used in the famous Edwin Starr song. Source: Seinfeld.

<comment><USER35> That was a (lame) joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I understand the original title was, "War, What is it Good For?"

</comment><comment><USER37> The claim "often regarded as the greatest of all novels" right in the opening is so hyperbolically naive and unmatched by the general level of the piece that one wonders if some marketing person added it to boost up the clicks.

Even if one adopts the mundane definition of topping all time greatest lists put together by various organizations, I still think this would apply to War and Peace, as commented here Anna Karenina probably would be a better candidate.

People who make such claims should be forced to watch the first classroom episode in _Dead Poets Society_ till they get the idea.

</comment><comment><USER38> JSYK, The New Criterion sometimes features outstanding criticism, but it also has an ideological bent. Both Tolstoy and Shakespeare are often labeled as "conservatives," but that's a reductionist treatment of them and their art transcends base politics. However, that the first sentence of TFA extols Tolstoy's supposed conservatism is a clue to raise your ideological shields before reading further, lest you find yourself nodding along with a publication that invented the Edmund Burke Award and then bestowed it upon one of its commentators, Henry Kissinger.

<comment><USER38> Uh oh, looks like The New Criterion enforcers found me. I don't think pointing out the well-known POV of a publication (read the wiki entry) should result in down-modding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> it's "War and Society", not "War and Peace"

ah, whatever.

<comment><USER40> No. [http://gramota.ru/lenta/news/8_784](http://gramota.ru/lenta/news/8_784)

<comment><USER39> If you had read the thing, you wouldn't be throwing useless links around. Since you do and thus obviosly didn't read it, why you even consider commenting here?

<comment><USER41> Did you read his link? It directly addresses your point. I will summarize and add some context, since I don't know if you read Russian. The word мир in Russian has two meanings, "peace" and something that is translated in different contexts more like "the world" or "society." These were once different words with different spellings, but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be purged because they were naughty, so orthographic reforms were carried out that standardized some spellings and eliminated a few letters. So the previously distinguishable words "мир"(peace) and мір (the world/society) became orthographically indistinguishable. However, since Tolstoy published prior to the Soviet Union, you can tell what the likely intent was by how the title was spelled in pre- revolutionary publications. In almost all cases, it was spelled мир. There is just one instance when it was spelled мiр, and it seems likely that it was a misprint.

<comment><USER42> > but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be > purged because they were naughty

Just for reference, the grammatical reform had been designed during the tsarist times, started by the ephemeral Provisional Government, and only finished by the Soviets.

<comment><USER41> Thanks for clarifying! I was 90% just joking, but I wasn't actually aware that it had such a long history.

<comment><USER42> You're welcome! I found it interesting enough that this reform survives three widely different governments to mention it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualization of all Airbnb listings worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.airbnb.com/home/coverage

<comment><USER2> hmm, can't I now look up a listing to get the "somewhere near here" circle and then cross compare on this map to figure out exactly where it is? The dot for my listing is pretty much exactly at my house.

Also Airbnb is a great service, and since starting my wife and I have had at least one guest a week, making several hundred dollars a month in extra income while getting to meet interesting people.</comment>


AT&T will unlock phones for accounts over 60 days old in good standing - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57573331-94/at-t-ban-on-unlocking-phones-wont-affect-our-customers/

<comment><USER2> Note this isn't a new policy; AT&T has been allowing this for almost a year now (a story mentioning it from April 2012: [http://techland.time.com/2012/04/11/unlock-an-att-iphone- in-...](http://techland.time.com/2012/04/11/unlock-an-att-iphone-in-5-easy- steps/)). They're just reassuring customers that the LoC exception change won't affect their already implemented company policy.

The other three major carriers have also had similar policies for some time, and don't appear to have drastically changed anything since the LoC rule change: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57572492-94/what-the- dmca-c...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57572492-94/what-the-dmca-cell- phone-unlock-ban-means-to-you-faq/)</comment>


Russian Domesticated Red Fox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox <comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite things. Look at what they achieved with foxes in less than a century, then think of the tens of thousands of years we've domesticated dogs. The whole field of "dog science" is both fascinating and heartwarming.

<comment><USER3> I read about those before. As I remember, they managed to breed the aggression out of them pretty quickly, but it's much harder to make them want the company of people, the way dogs do.

<comment><USER4> The article quotes someone speaking about the foxes:

 _Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old._

It took them a long time to get them to mostly reproduce with those traits (the modern ones only reach 80%), but the traits appeared in 6 generations.

<comment><USER5> Reproductive maturity at 10 months, so wild to at least some offspring fully "tamed" in less than a decade of selective breeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this is a downer, but given that the article states that 18% of the population are "elite" after 10 generations, and there are 2000 elite foxes now, doesn't "strong selection pressure" imply there were around 10K-30K individuals culled in this project for not belonging to "elite"? Is this normal breeding practice? Speaking as a somewhat guilty owner of a beloved papillon-breed dog.

<comment><USER7> I think your probably right. But then, 3.8 million animals were killed in Australia in September alone for human consumption.[1]

Although I do feel a bit moralistic about dog breeds that have been selected for specific physical appearance characteristics without much apparent attention given to the animals health. Pugs are a good (bad) example, the RSPCA takes a pretty dim view.[2]

Papillons have only minor health concerns although patellar luxation, seizures, and dental problems can be issues. Additionally they can be at risk for PRA, intervertebral disk disease, and allergies. [3]

It amazes me a bit that "dogs" are all the one species, Canis familiaris (which translates from Latin to 'family dog', cute). I wonder what we could do with humans if we selectively bread them for hundreds of generations.

1\. [http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/7218.0.55](http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/7218.0.55) 2\. [http://www.rspca.org.au/campaigns/pedigree-dogs/the- pug](http://www.rspca.org.au/campaigns/pedigree-dogs/the-pug) 3\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_(dog)#Health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_\(dog\)#Health)

<comment><USER8> I wonder what humans could do with "us" (you? them?) if "we" selectively bread them for hundreds of generations!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Radiolab on NPR had a great episode (New Normal) where one of three bits (New Nice) was about Dmitri Belyaev and these foxes. They also present the interesting idea that humans might have domesticated ourselves.

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new- nice/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have always wanted one of these foxes, but alas being in Australia would make it impossible.

<comment><USER11> You might want to think twice if you've never smelled fox urine.

<comment><USER12> (Dog|Cat) urine, on the other hand: a delightful bouquet.

<comment><USER11> Fox eclipses dog/cat by many orders of magnitude. You can smell it from quite a distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't forget there were two experiments, they also did a lineage of super aggressive foxes.

</comment><comment><USER14> I want one of their hyper-aggressive rats: [http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/04/17/004234](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/04/17/004234)

<comment><USER15> If it had a rat, I'd want it to be this specific one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPK_ij0llc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPK_ij0llc8)

The cats' expressions are priceless. :)

<comment><USER16> In Soviet Russia, mouse eats cat...</comment></comment></comment>


National Enquirer claims "good faith negotiations" with Bezos - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/08/national-enquirer-publisher-believes-it-acted-lawfully-on-bezos-story-vows-to-investigate-matter.html <comment><AUTHOR> Outline - [https://outline.com/rCxLjM](https://outline.com/rCxLjM)</comment>


From Google Sheet to #5 on ProductHunt in 10 days - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mvremmmerden/from-google-sheet-to-5-on-producthunt-in-10-days-5c60703ec7d2 <comment><USER2> There are a lot of good takeaways from this, and I think this is a great idea and wish there was something similar for my area of work.

That said, in this writeup you fail to explain what you were building is. You kind of just start talking like the reader is familiar with your goal.

I read the whole thing and thought you were building a software product that you were going to resell, and all I could think was that you chose a horrible URL.

Only after finally clicking on the link to your product, did I finally understand what you were building.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great points, thanks for the feedback!

The code base I created is super flexible, if you let me know what your area of work is, I might be able to set something up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Something I'm genuinely curious about and not trying to downplay success here, but is Product Hunt really a metric of achievement now?

<comment><AUTHOR> It all depends who you are trying to reach. My audience is obviously designers or people who are interested in this field, and ProductHunt is certainly a great place to reach this audiencw. And as you might have seen in the article, it was trending on other Design-related places as well, but I chose ProductHunt for the title simply because it's what most readers can relate to.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any tips to create an restful api with json and php - <AUTHOR>

Is to display the menu of restaurant online and register the customers orders <comment><USER2> Use a modern PHP framework like Laravel(0) with decent dependency management system like Composer(1).

0\. [http://laravel.com](http://laravel.com) 1\. [https://getcomposer.org](https://getcomposer.org)</comment>


Show HN: Gitly.io – high performance Git service with a 10s installation time - alex-m https://gitly.io <comment><AUTHOR> It's so cool to see people focusing on web app performance. Everyone complains about it but no one follows up their complaints with action. That's a big plus and I will definitely keep my eye on this.

This is going to sound petty, but I think it's important: you might want to come up with a better name. "Gitly.io" is, like, three different regrettable startup naming fads in one.

<comment> alex-m Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, I'm not good with names. I'll most likely come up with something different.

<comment><USER2> Don't change your name. It doesn't matter and it's short. Good luck

<comment><USER3> Google was called "Backrub" before it was called Google[0] so a suboptimal name doesn't portend failure - focus on the product first! Nice work.

[0]: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the- tru...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/the-true-story- behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will that 10s install be anything like production-ready? As a sysadmin, one of my pet peeves is tools where the "install process" is "run this executable and it's a webserver," because for me to put a tool in a place where my teams rely on it I'm almost always looking at SSL termination, LDAP auth, not to mention putting it under systemd or something so that it'll get restarted if the host system does, and the fact that I'll inevitably be deploying via automation.

The takeaway is that I hope the easy install process won't only be easy in the absolute minimal case. Ideally I'd love to get RPM and DEB packages and example configuration snippets for a frontend web server. At the very minimum, distribute in a form that is amenable to deployment to Ansible/Puppet/etc (no 'setup wizard' please!) and placement behind a reverse proxy.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, from my sysadmin perspective, I don't give much of a damn about installation time, provided it's not absurd (e.g. picking a figure out of thin air 30 minutes?)

What I care about around install, is can I do it in a automatable fashion, including all configuration. I don't want to have to do anything by hand after the first exploration and evaluation work!

<comment><USER6> I must be a terrible sysadmin, because I have never in my life have deployed anything in under 30 minutes, unless I have already deployed several instances and have it scripted. If I can get something up and running [and actually doing what the tool is intended to do] in my infrastructure in a day's amount of work I call it huge success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You may want to check with the Software Freedom Conservancy wrt trademark:

"In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code."

[https://git-scm.com/trademark](https://git-scm.com/trademark) [https://public- inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...](https://public- email@example.com/)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Does this mean that the popular existing sites (GitHub, GitLab, etc) did get permission? Or is this a looming issue?

<comment><USER9> Read the 2nd link ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alex-m Hi,

Gitly is my side project I've been working on for a couple of months. It is an open source repository manager with a focus on performance, ease of use, and productivity (especially for larger projects).

It's still in an early alpha stage, a lot of features are missing. The source code and the ability to self-host will be available within a month.

There's GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, gogs. Why create another solution? Gitly has been designed to be very fast and ridiculously easy to maintain. It is much faster than all of the above. It also offers a couple of unique features.

You can self-host gitly in 10 seconds. It has no dependencies, and doesn't require a database or a web server. Updates are automatic and seamless. It's easier to set up than gitweb! At the same time gitly is going to have the same features GitHub/GitLab offer, and even more.

How fast is gitly? Every single page takes less than 0.5s to load, no matter how big the project is. There are no JS libraries used (in fact, there's barely any JS at all), so the client side performance is great.

You can host your repositories on gitly.io, and it offers the same high performance. Cloning the entire Spring framework on gitly.io takes 11 seconds. On GitLab.com it took 7 minutes and 50 seconds. Of course GitLab.com is massive. However, the way gitly was built, performance will always be this good: it can be scaled horizontally very easily. And if you host it locally, the cheapest 256 MB instance should be enough for most users.

Gitly works great with large projects. I successfully tested it with a 10 year old repository with 4 million lines of code. Bitbucket took almost an hour to cache. Gogs crashed, and I didn't manage to install GitLab to test it locally after trying for 2 hours.

Many of the unique features are to improve productivity and help understand the code base better, which is very useful for large projects.

One of them is called "top files". It shows the largest files in any directory of the repository on one page with detailed language stats. Here's how it looks like for the Spring framework:

[https://examples.gitly.io/java-spring-framework/top- files/ma...](https://examples.gitly.io/java-spring-framework/top- files/master/spring-core/src/main)

Another unique feature is language stats. Gitly displays detailed language stats for every single directory. This can give a better picture of the structure of the project.

One of my favorite features is the search. Unlike all other search engines, the one in gitly will search exactly what you asked for: character by character.

For example, if you are a Rust developer, and you need to search for the following declaration:

fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {

You type it, and you only get the results you are interested in:

[https://examples.gitly.io/rust- alacritty/search?q=fn%20next(...](https://examples.gitly.io/rust- alacritty/search?q=fn%20next\(%26mut%20self\)%20-%3E%20Option%3CSelf%3A%3AItem%3E%20%7B)

Gitly also has discussions, which is like a simple forum where you can discuss the project, ask questions and so on. Mailing lists will be integrated as well.

Like most other solutions, gitly has a Trello-like issues board, and you can import all your Trello boards.

It's still an alpha. There are a couple of rough edges (e.g. markdown support is not great). Here are the missing critical features that will be implemented within the next two weeks:

\- Forking, pull requests, code review. \- User profile (password change, SSH keys etc) \- SSH support (only HTTPS for now, making SSH authorization secure takes time)

Some of the upcoming functionality I'm excited about: \- Go to definition support for most popular languages \- Issues as part of the repository, so that it's possible to manage them locally \- Pull request interface that would make Linus happy \- Search in commit history \- A way to organize a large amount of repositories

Thanks for your time, looking forward to your feedback.

<comment><USER10> Hey! I think this is a fantastic tool. There's only one thing:

CHARGE MORE!

This is easily worth $5 per month per user. It's Github, but lean and fast. There are very few people who would sign up at $1 per month who wouldn't sign up at $5 per month.

Also- if you're trying to make this into a business, self-hosting is something that you can get companies to pay for. Github Enterprise pricing is [obscene]([https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing](https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing)) compared to the pricing for hosted, and companies pay it.

I think this is fantastic- great work.

<comment> alex-m Thanks for your feedback. I'm glad you like it.

The pricing is not final, but I do want to keep it simple and affordable.

<comment><USER10> Let me know if you're interested in talking about pricing (probably once the work from launching settles down)- I'm working on a pricing analytics service and would love to get your thoughts/feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is so refreshing to see slim, fast websites. Only the minimal JS is used. Even though I don't have many repositories, I'll certainly consider supporting gitly.

Please remain true to your current vision.

Just a minor point: although the website uses so little JS, the Signup form is broken without it.

EDIT: by broken I mean it returns a JSON instead of an HTML page or HTTP redirect.

<comment> alex-m Thank you! I knew I'm not the only one with this vision. It will always stay this way.

The form should work fine, I'm getting registrations, but I'll check it. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER11> It's Chrome 56.0.2924.87 on macOS, but the issue is that the form point to an API endpoint, so without Javascript I can only see the JSON response instead of being redirected to the protected page.

<comment> alex-m Ah, right. If JavaScript is disabled, you are going to get the JSON response.

I will definitely make it work without JavaScript.

Thanks for reporting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the sub-domain approach. It's fast and nice enough. I'd focus on UI consistency; pages have different navigation elements. Issues trello-style board is cool but let down by over-simple styling.

FYI the default avatar image ([https://errant.gitly.io/img/avatars/default.png](https://errant.gitly.io/img/avatars/default.png)) seems to be missing? On the issues page, JQuery UI seems to be missing too.

If you keep working on it I'll probably keep using it :)

<comment> alex-m Yeah, I really wanted to have unique subdomains for each user.

The design will be improved. This is a very, very early release. I'm also not a great designer, so hopefully I'll get some help there :)

The entire issues section will see a huge update in 2 days.

<comment><USER13> What's the actual benefit of a subdomain for each user?

<comment><USER14> Hopefully "user" really means "company" rather than individual user. Otherwise copy/pasting URLs between colleagues won't be much fun.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure it does. But I still can't see the benefit of a subdomain rather than a subdirectory.

<comment><USER15> It could be easier for load balancing or if you want to shard. You could do it at the DNS level at that point, without needing to strip the TLS bits, decode the HTTP request and go from there.

For the end user though I can't see much of a benefit of a subdomain over a URL path, or the other way around. I don't think it matters much but the author might have bigger plans in which having the subdomain could be easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the simplicity and speed of this. Its endearing. No fuss. Reminds me of Gogs, easy to setup, easy to use. Great job on that. Of course its early days but I do hope you make the right trade offs and retain the simplicity.

Those with the complex use cases should take the technical debt rather than now in a lot of software where every possible complex case is accommodated and the complexity is offloaded to all users.

And I hope you give credit to git for the fantastic piece of engineering it is. So many projects use Git as the central piece yet push it into the background.

<comment> alex-m Thanks. I'll do my best to keep it simple and fast.

I absolutely love git. It's definitely going to be the central piece of the software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like that code is shown with a proportional font. I've been coding like that for a couple of years. It took a week to adapt but code is far easier to read now. After all we're using proportional fonts for nearly everything, why not code?

Compare proportional on Gitly to fixed on GitHub, same code.

[https://tensorflow.gitly.io/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflo...](https://tensorflow.gitly.io/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/examples/saved_model/saved_model_half_plus_two.py)

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/examples/saved_model/saved_model_half_plus_two.py)

However it's not what most people see in their editors. I wonder if anybody noticed or complained about it.

Two things that can go wrong with proportional code:

* Alignments like this

        a =    1
        long = 2

you can't do that unless your editor is very cooperative. That could make sharing code with coworkers difficult.

* Sans serif fonts don't distinguish between I and l and I didn't find a proportional serif font that does look good enough for code.

<comment> alex-m Hi,

The default font is not proportional, BUT you will be able to set it to whatever you like. There will also be an option to disable syntax highlighting.

Could you tell me what browser you are using?

<comment><USER18> from css/main.scss `$monoFont: 'Courier New', Monaco;`

I think it's caused be the missing fallback `monospace` in that list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Self-hosting will be available on April 1, 2017.

Really, or is that just an April Fool's joke?

<comment> alex-m :)

I didn't even realize what date I chose.

No, it's not a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks promising. Can't wait to check out the source. How exactly do you plan on monetizing while allowing unlimited free private repos?

Also, for anyone looking for a good self-hosted git service like this, check out the existing open source project GOGS [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

<comment> alex-m Hosting on gitly.io for $1/user/month (if more than 5 users).

For self-hosting maybe I'll go the GitLab route, which I don't really like. I think the product should have the same set of features for all customers. Maybe I'll just go for paid extended support. We'll see.

<comment><USER21> i have generally seen that a piece of software that is built for self- deployment is not optimized for scalability. in fact, optimizing for scalability screws around with ease of deployment.

It will be interesting to see you pull this off if you are indeed thinking of making your software dual purpose - self deploy as well run a scaleable/fault- tolerant hosting company.

<comment> alex-m You are right, these are two very different tasks. That's what makes solving this fun and challenging. I had it in mind when I was designing the architecture of gitly. In the end it really is going to be easily deployed and scalable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just so you know, your email for verifying an account signup comes through with a pretty high spam score (for me at least.) The first email was rated 4.5 and the second 5.9 (I signed up two accounts: personal and business.)

I use Fastmail as my provider.

<comment> alex-m Thanks for reporting! I'm using SendGrid, I'll make sure it's fixed.

<comment><USER23> Try postmark instead. You'll get a good idea of the user interaction with your transaction mails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't find a public test-repo on the front page. Anyone wanting a test drive without signup, here you go: [https://niko.gitly.io/ruby- shout](https://niko.gitly.io/ruby-shout)

I love the speed and the (repo internal) search. Looking forward to the announced missing features.

Note: the "Add Collaborators" link works for anonymous users. Sending the form then fails with a JS error.

Is there a plan for a global repo search?

<comment> alex-m Good point, I'll add a a link to a test repo to the front page.

I'll fix the "Add Collaborators" link, thanks for reporting.

> Is there a plan for a global repo search?

Yes! I hope to implement that before the end of April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Always nice to see competition in this space. Keeps people on there toes though it's a steep hill to climb feature wise to bring out something as polished as the alternatives.

> Self-host in 10 seconds

> You can run gitly on your own server. It requires no installation or > maintenance. You don't even need a webserver or a database. (Self-hosting > will be available on April 1, 2017.)

Maybe April fools day isn't the best choice for a future release date? Though I guess it worked for Gmail...

<comment> alex-m Maybe :) You are not the first person to note that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice project.

IIRC, doesn't github have some trademarks on their designs or something? If so, please be weary of this (and their lawyers) OP

</comment><comment><USER27> Very nice. It really took me just 10s seconds to sign up and clone a repo. I believe this kind of easy of setup should be much more common - across many domains and languages.

That said, details will matter in the longer run. The markdown and code rendering on github has gotten such a large amount of attention over the years, that it's hard to compete.

<comment> alex-m Thanks for signing up! I'm really passionate about simplicity, and gitly is always going to stay this way.

<comment><USER27> Me too. It's just hard to achieve. Are there any projects or books that inspire you regarding simplicity in design and implementation?

<comment> alex-m The Go language. I can't really think of anything else right now.

I was inspired by GitHub of course, I really liked its design when it came out (it was a breath of fresh air after SourceForge and others). I tried to make it even simpler and more efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looks cool. There seemt to be some styling issues with fenced blocks in readmes, e.g. I cloned this repo: [https://charlieegan3.gitly.io/personal- website](https://charlieegan3.gitly.io/personal-website)

<comment> alex-m Thanks for reporting! Yeah, markdown needs a lot of work. It will be fixed this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, the design is so "inspired" by GitHub… the language percentage thing especially

</comment><comment><USER30> What's the difference with gogs/gitea or is it another fork? Is this open source?

<comment> alex-m Gitly is not related to gogs. It is going to be more stable and easy to use, work better with larger projects, and have a set of unique features.

Yes, it's going to be open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks great. May I ask, how can you provide free self-hosting (even if it's free only for <5 users)?

edit: I didn't receive email confirmation yet, after signing up (15 minutes ago). HN server effect?

<comment> alex-m Are you asking about how I'm going to be able to offer it for free for small projects?

The hardware is pretty cheap, plus there are special Compute Engine offers for startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What's it written in?

<comment> alex-m Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's there a way to try it out without signing up? The first thing I wanted to do was test your claim for speediness. There is a road block in front of doing that.

<comment> alex-m You can check out one of the test repos.

In order to clone a repo, you have to sign up, sorry. That's a really fast process, but it requires email verification.

I'll add a "sign in with GitHub" button today to speed that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is it that the C++ code is pink in one screenshot, but blue in another? And Python is blue in one screenshot and pink in another?

Looks like a great project! Thanks for sharing!

<comment> alex-m Good question. I'm not using unique colors for languages. The main language is always blue, the second one is always purple etc.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That it should work without javascript is very nice. :)

The "at least four letters for username" limit is not. Why is this a restriction?

<comment> alex-m You are right, I will change it to two letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Very cool. I've been thinking about something like that for a long time.

I also don't mind paid solution if it'll be open source.

<comment> alex-m Thanks.

> I also don't mind paid solution if it'll be open source.

That's exactly what it's going to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great start! Looks good works well. Can't wait to see more.

</comment><comment><USER37> This looks great. Definitely interested in the self hosted option.

<comment> alex-m Thanks! Glad you liked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This looks very nice indeed and the pricing is not bad either.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can you clone a bitbucket repo, or only GitHub?

<comment> alex-m You can clone anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I want it and I want it now! :)</comment>


The Annoying Site: Source - <AUTHOR> https://theannoyingsite.com/index.js <comment><USER2> DO NOT CLICK OPEN THE REAL WEBSITE. Jeez, I just made that mistake. Omg, that was bad.

I can't perfectly describe what happens but I'll try — the page jumps around with a cat image, every time I try to kill it with cmd+w, it repawns into another small window. I think it remaps cmd+w to cmd+p, and just plays dubstep in the background. Oh, and at some point, a random cat headbanging cat appears, and the voices goes from saying "a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a" to "I can't see the inside of my mouth".

I think it also logged me out of gmail.

I had to kill Chrome. Don't open it in your main browser, use incognito mode, or the private browsing mode of a different browser so that you can kill the entire browser without losing HN access — because that's what you'll probably end up doing.

Edit: Oh, it seems to be easier to kill on Firefox. Also, it keeps asking for webcam and mic access, and to be set as the default application for bitcoin links?!!!

Edit: A way to get out without killing Chrome is: "press cmd+w" to get to the "print" screen. That seems to stop the windows from moving around. Then kill all the other windows first, and kill this "print" window last. You'll it say "please don't go" every time — but don't give in!

<comment><USER3> As someone who browses the internet with JavaScript disabled by default, I've never felt more vindicated.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, it's just a white page for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > 'YouTube': ['POST', '[https://www.youtube.com'](https://www.youtube.com'), > {'action_logout': '1'}]

Didn't knew it was post possible to `js` fire a post on a third party website.

<comment><USER6> So my understanding is that they just had to find a Google site capable of logout and has a weak CORS setting? Am I getting that right? Usually you would just configure, "no, don't accept VERBs from other origins."

I'd love to know why YouTube needs to allow logout from other origins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That was awesome, although it sounds like it would have been more annoying if I wasn't using Firefox (which didn't make it too difficult to close the site).

Hats off to the guy, though - that was well trolled. :) And well worth it for these 2 gems alone:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNyG- xu-7SQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNyG-xu-7SQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb1B3KI1u-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb1B3KI1u-I)

</comment><comment><USER8> Brief but revealing discussion from a year ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15935568).

It was courteous of tosh to submit the source. For those who dare, the link is [https://theannoyingsite.com](https://theannoyingsite.com).

<comment><USER9> Just a warning: this will make your machine unusable by opening a bunch of pop-ups, download images, and playing annoying audio while flashing the screen.

<comment><USER10> Or will have no effect if you disable javascript by default as any sane person should do.

<comment><USER11> It's wonderful to see that humanity has so many different definitions of 'sane'. Heterogeneity is beautiful; it makes browsing the internet like walking through a tropical jungle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting

      /**
       * Sites that link to theannoyingsite.com may specify `target='_blank'` to open the
       * link in a new window. For example, Messenger.com from Facebook does this.
       * However, that means that `window.opener` will be set, which allows us to redirect
       * that window. YES, WE CAN REDIRECT THE SITE THAT LINKED TO US.
       * Learn more here: https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the-most-underestimated-vulnerability-ever/
       */
      function attemptToTakeoverReferrerWindow () {
        if (isParentWindow && window.opener && !isParentSameOrigin()) {
          window.opener.location = `${window.location.origin}/?child=true`
        }
      }

I checked in Chromium 70 and this only seems to work on the same origin - attempting to access `window.opener` cross-origin results in

      Uncaught DOMException: Blocked a frame with origin "https://example.com" from accessing a cross-origin frame

The article linked in the code [0] and the MDN page for window.opener [1] mention the use of `rel="noopener"` to prevent `window.opener` from being set, but that it's not supported in all browsers - particularly Firefox, which needs `noreferrer`. I am sure CORS headers also play a role in protecting from this. OWASP calls this technique 'reverse tabnabbing' [2].

There's a demo [3] of the effect - you can manually inspect the first link and change the href to [4] and then click the link to test how cross origin requests work.

[0] [https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the- most-u...](https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the-most- underestimated-vulnerability-ever/)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/open...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/opener)

[2] [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Reverse_Tabnabbing](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Reverse_Tabnabbing)

[3] [https://rawgit.com/waltertamboer/experiment-html-js- window-o...](https://rawgit.com/waltertamboer/experiment-html-js-window- opener-vuln/master/public/index.html)

[4] [https://gitcdn.link/cdn/waltertamboer/experiment-html-js- win...](https://gitcdn.link/cdn/waltertamboer/experiment-html-js-window- opener-vuln/master/public/vulnerable.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The author gave a talk on this: [https://www.dotconferences.com/2017/12/feross- aboukhadijeh-t...](https://www.dotconferences.com/2017/12/feross-aboukhadijeh- the-most-annoying-website)

Some great links present there.

[https://feross.org/webcam-spy/](https://feross.org/webcam-spy/)

[https://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api- attack/](https://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api-attack/)

[https://feross.org/](https://feross.org/)

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

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/open](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Window/open)

</comment><comment><USER14> Disappointed that I wasn't logged out of Hacker News when visiting the site... Where is the love Annoying Site?

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that this entire domain is blocked as malicious by my ad blocker.

<comment><USER16> It also seems to be on pi-hole's list of blocked domains that it uses, as I don't resolve DNS when I try to access it from behind my pi-hole.

<comment><USER17> Yeah my pi-hole blocked this one too and after reading the comments here I am glad :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I control w'ed twice and got out of it. Maybe I have chrome dialed up to the max?

</comment><comment><USER19> Extensively commented source code. I rarely see JavaScript like this.

</comment><comment><USER20> maybe it targets chrome users. In firefox it was mildly annoying but very easy to kill. I did get logged out from youtube, but no big deal

</comment><comment><USER21> Glad I found this video: [https://theannoyingsite.com/hasan.mp4](https://theannoyingsite.com/hasan.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER22> be afraid. if you must, use a distinct browser you can kill.

</comment><comment><USER23> Made me laugh</comment>


Maintaining a Sense of Urgency - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jabbik.com/2008/04/sense-of-urgency.html

<comment><USER2> In my experience most of us only maintain a sense of urgency over time out of fear. That's certainly the basis of most of this advice. I've always been somewhat conflicted about using fear to motivate myself and others. I feel almost guilty that it's the best tool I've found. I feel much better about the work I do out of pure excitement, but most of the time after the initial excitement wears off, I find it's fear of failing that keeps me going strong.

<comment><USER3> And that's why your startup needs an enemy. Otherwise you will have to be the one everyone is fearful of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 6) Leave your job and move to San Francisco to work on your startup full time.

Like he said, don't treat it like a hobby. I've found that moving has really focused my mind and put my efforts in another orbit.

<comment><USER5> This has been true for me as well. Moving was completely necessary for me to really get things rolling with Jabbik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Urgency is the key to driving business deals. If there's isn't any, everyone adopts a "wait and see" stance.

</comment><comment><USER7> Excellent read. There is a lot of great advice in this post, especially the note about urgency at the end.

</comment><comment><USER8> Huh. A coincidence that this showed up today, right after I posted this:

[http://www.gmathacks.com/gmat-verbal-bible/coming-soon- the-g...](http://www.gmathacks.com/gmat-verbal-bible/coming-soon-the-gmat- verbal-bible.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great advice. I especially like:

2) Spend A Lot More Time Building Something Than You Spend Thinking About, Reflecting On, And Analyzing Your Ideas.

It's so much easier to think about something than to do it.

<comment><USER10> In some situations that can mean that thinking about something is better than doing it. Like if you can dismiss a plan by thinking about it, you have wasted less energy than if you execute the plan and fail.

<comment><USER9> Maybe. Maybe not. I know it seems counterintuitive, but sometimes it works out better when you build something you never needed in the first place. At least you have a "bird in the hand".

This advice struck me particularly hard because I have done both. I have laid out the most fantastic apps with pencil and paper. OTOH, things never really became crystal clear until I actually built it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I disagree.

Startups succeed and fail for many reasons. For example, lot of startups fail simply because the idea doesn't work, not execution. Read the "black swan" book, the single most important reason for failure or success is actually luck. Keep tinkering with things, and you may get lucky.</comment>


JS developer claims copyright infringement, bullies open source alternative - <AUTHOR> http://craigsworks.com/projects/simpletip/sandbox/

<comment><USER2> It is sad to see someone whose business so heavily relies upon understanding copyright laws, licenses and derivative works fail to understand in such a fundamental way. The claim that "the result is what matters" is ludicrous, and should be laughed out of court. While the site design may have been copied, that has no bearing whatsoever on the legality of the script itself.</comment>


Javascript Parallax effect (hover over the header) - <AUTHOR> http://david.weebly.com/

<comment><USER2> Wow, neat! Hadn't seen this before.

This is implemented with jParallax, a jQuery plugin: <http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax.html>

A few pretty demos: [http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax_demos_stalkbuttons.htm...](http://webdev.stephband.info/parallax_demos_stalkbuttons.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's sweet. I pretty much felt required to waste some time adding a js easter egg to our blog.

<comment><USER4> Does it also support the BurnTheCPU feature?

Is there not a way to do something like this without burning the CPU?</comment></comment>


Show HN: My consultancy built a project management tool made for client work - <AUTHOR> http://www.projectorpm.com

<comment><USER2> Full disclosure: I'm a developer at We Are Titans, but my involvement in Projector has been limited to being one of the first users. :)

My favorite use-case for Projector so far was putting together a recent project proposal:

On my side, I: * broke down the project into stories and estimated those stories in _hours_ , not points. * also added the regular template of tasks that take place to get a project off the ground, launched, and the known time required for those. * entered the hourly rate. * invited the prospective client to the project.

The client sees: * The sticker price. * How his request translates into work. * How larger features are broken down into smaller features that account for the cost of a feature. * He sees which features and areas of the project account for the most money. * He saw a line item for 'back and forth' design with a bunch of hours attached to it, which communicates: Nice design can be done on the cheap if you avoid the back and forth. Use us as a saw and not as a flash light. Measure twice, cut once.

This client accepted the proposal and the project management software is already configured for the project and ready for us to get started.

Like thedelchop (one of my co-workers) mentioned, the nice thing about Projector for a team like ours is that features and budgets are in the same place. I'm used to managing projects in Pivotal Tracker and my billing in Harvest. Clients are used to seeing progress daily in Pivotal Tracker and a sticker price on paper every couple of weeks. Now we all see it in one place, every day.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just so you're aware, I've used a PM tool called Projector before, but it's not you guys: <http://www.projectorpsa.com/project_management.html>

It also does time tracking and whatnot for a consulting firm. You may run into some TM issues with the name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, my attorney brought this up to me the other day. We'll more than likely ultimately need to rebrand - probably sooner than later.

Thanks for the heads up :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Do I need a credit card to sign up?

Nope. All you need to sign up is an account name, email address, password and the name of your first project. When your tiral expires, we'll calculate your plan based on the number of developer accounts you've setup. You can always remove developers (ask them first!) in order to downgrade your account._

Just a couple things here to note.

The first is a spelling mistake. "tiral" should be "trial".

The second is the usage of the word "Nope". Although the gist of the pricing page looks to be informal, "nope" is an incredibly informal word, especially when "No" is sufficient enough in this context.

<comment><AUTHOR> We just pushed the new marketing site yesterday. Good thinking - making those edits now, thanks!

<comment><USER4> No worries. It can be difficult to catch spelling mistakes in things that you write or read over many times.

Pro-tip: When I don't have the luxury of a spell-checker, I read the paragraph backwards, one word at a time, and I find that it helps to catch most of the common errors.

When you read text normally, your brain reads ahead[1] and skims (or omits) a lot of errors out of your field of view so you miss a lot of easy typos. Reading backwards mixes up your brain just enough that it stops "helping" you read.

[1] <http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full disclosure, bdunn's firm built my app (@aeir_talk), and take it from me, they make great products. I am so excited to see them putting their own products out. Especially one that is meeting a critical need for its users.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the kind words, Joe. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using this tool for a while, and I really think it captures the needs and concerns of a consultancy (Are we going to make our time/budget) in a way that tools like Pivotal Tracker just can't match.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me or is the #features div broken, having a 620px width but makes more sense to be 880px. Or am i missing something?

<comment><USER7> Also, perhaps update the expected date of the videos. Otherwise it looks cool, i've signed up and am going to give it a go.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Crypto Warrior. Monitor Crypto Like It's Ultima IV - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stevenpack/cryptowarrior <comment><USER2> This is an awesome idea! Much more fun than my boring crypto trading/analysis api.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! What's the link to your API? I only discovered gdax-tt halfway through, which is an attempt to offer a level of abstraction over the various crytpo exchanges.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately it's private at the moment. Not nearly ready to show off yet.

What I can tell you is we are using the poloniex API and working on simple trading strategies using traditional trading metrics like the ones found here:

[http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:techn...](http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:technical_indicators)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> very visual, I love it! As if the price watching wasn't addictive enough...

<comment><AUTHOR> You sound like the one to submit a PR to auto-refresh the line chart! Set it to minute mode and watch your retirement tick closer :)</comment></comment>


Feedback from rec.models.rc.air on my idea for remote flying of model planes (using justin.tv tech?) - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/rec.models.rc.air/browse_frm/thread/370ab19a29339553 <comment><USER2> The idea is interesting.

However, I think an activity such as flying a model airplane is something that people want to experience first hand, as in right there with the remote control in their hands, and watching the plane physically maneuver.

Also, issues with gauging airspace and having a full 360 view of your surroundings via the internet will be extremely, difficult, in my opinion, if the camera were to be mounted on the model aircraft. There are lots of liabilities.

Personally, flying a model airplane via the internet isn't something I'd look forward to doing. It just doesn't come close to the real thing.

I hope that's not discouraging.

That's just like, my opinion, man.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I didn't expect such a negative reaction, but some of the feedback is quite good anyway.</comment>


Popular Security Software Came Under NSA and GCHQ Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kaspersky/ <comment><USER2> The source, with more details and the links to the documents:

The Intercept: "Popular Security Software Came Under Relentless NSA and GCHQ Attacks"

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq- targe...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted- kaspersky/)

The Intercept checked some claims themselves: "Testing performed by The Intercept last month on a trial copy of "Kaspersky Small Business Security 4" determined that, while some traffic was indeed encrypted, a detailed report of the host's hardware configuration and installed software was relayed back to Kaspersky entirely unencrypted. By the time of publication, Kaspersky told The Intercept via email, it was unable to reproduce these results."

<comment><USER3> Kaspersky traffic being easy-ish to intercept may be a feature, not a bug, considering Kaspersky's ties to the Putin regime. Some details here: [http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/](http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/)

I think AV is a tricky thing as it gives ring 0 (or equivalant) access to workstations and has its fingers in pretty much everything. Intelligence agencies probably see it as a huge win if they can commandeer one without anyone knowing.

Shame FOSS AV never really took off. I wouldn't be surprised if all AV had some relationship with their host government.

<comment><USER4> Is there a model for giving the maintainers a larger incentive to be honest, than the incentive that could be provided by a bad player?

To restate - Many FOSS maintainers live a ramen lifestyle. If someone either A. wanted a zero day exploit, or B. wanted a virus to be ignored, they might be able to pay the maintainer enough to violate ethics. Is there a way to incentivize maintainers enough to counter this risk?

<comment><USER5>
      > Many FOSS maintainers live a ramen lifestyle. If someone either A. wanted
      > a zero day exploit, or B. wanted a virus to be ignored, they might be able
      > to pay the maintainer enough to violate ethics. Is there a way to
      > incentivize maintainers enough to counter this risk?

Weirdly, people living on ramen lifestyles are often the most difficult to corrupt with money. There's a reason they aren't using their intelligence to trade financial instruments or writing programs to do it for them.

The most vulnerable to corruption are often those with middle-class lifestyles who are living above their means and stretched to make ends meet. They often value the appearance of a comfortable lifestyle, and once you start playing golf with Alice, drinking fine wines with Bob, and horseback riding with Carol, you are in a deep financial hole.

Worse, it's really all about the social aspects for such people, so the idea of a tight fiscal diet to regain control of their finances is anathema to them. They can't suffer the shame of having to admit to their social circle that they don't belong.

It's easy for authorities to target those running up debts.

The irony is, sometimes everyone in the same social circle are all in over their head. They're all suffering from a kind of impostor syndrome, each of them thinks that everyone else can afford the Suburban in the driveway and the jet-ski in the garage, and that they're the only one in trouble. In reality they're all in a Red Queen's Race.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article confusingly conflates several very different things:

1\. Reverse engineering popular antivirus software so the agencies can see what data it sends home.

2\. Monitoring the emails of cybersecurity companies.

The first of those is _totally fine_. It's the agencies' whole mission. The question is not whether they're allowed to reverse engineer software, but who/what they start spying on using the things they learn. If they're spying on Al Qaeda, I don't care if they're using antivirus vulnerabilities, OS zero- days, or a wiretap at the ISP. Seems OK. The choice of technology doesn't seem relevant. And if they're spying on teenagers sending naughty pics to each other, it's equally as _not_ OK no matter which of those technologies is being used.

The second set of behavior is far more worrying though. Our government shouldn't be spying on the internal communications of law abiding companies.

<comment><USER7> > 1\. Reverse engineering popular antivirus software so the agencies can see > what data it sends home.

How is this totally fine? The DMCA in the USA prevents this sort of thing, look at Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, he was jailed for several weeks and detained for five months in the United States. I'm not a big believer in "intellectual property", but if the act of invention is sacred, and confers property rights on the inventor, then spy agencies need to respect that. Otherwise, either (a) the DMCA is an instrument of oppression or (b) the spy agencies are instruments of oppression, or (c) both (a) and (b).

<comment><USER8> Most of what spy agencies do would be illegal if we didn't make exceptions for spying.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how to interpret your remark. Generally, we want people to obey the law for a number of reasons, like their own safety, safety of others, morality, protecting rights of minorities (or even majorities), the ability to speak out about wrongs or injustices. Generally, we have laws that we hope encourage us to do good things, and discourage us from doing bad things.

Shouldn't spy agencies do good things, and avoid doing bad things? Letting spy agencies not be accountable for bad behavior seems like a policy that won't work out too well, that will lead to contradictions like eating meat, but hating the butcher for killing animals.

That is, if freedom from being spied on is a good policy for US citizens, it seems like it's a good policy for everyone, regardless of citizenship. The opposite policy (no spying on citizens, but spying on everyone else) ends up making the lack of surveillance a temporary privilege, to be revoked by someone if and when the policy becomes inconvenient.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't a normative statement. Rather, it was intended to point out what you just did: if you want spy agencies to follow the same laws everyone else does, you're effectively arguing that there should be no spy agencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not really surprised that the NSA would reverse engineer AV software, this seems like a no brainer article that I would expect from techcrunch.

The most surprising thing to see in the slides is 'DNS Interdiction' which isn't mentioned in the article at all. It seems like they are compromising the DNS system to have the request sent to the wrong location so they can log it. This probably leaks all sort of information about your AV set up.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord See also the various Attrition errata pages:

[http://attrition.org/errata/autofail/](http://attrition.org/errata/autofail/) (auto-update failures in AV software)

[http://attrition.org/errata/cpo/](http://attrition.org/errata/cpo/) (vendors shipping compromised media)

[http://attrition.org/errata/vulnerability.html](http://attrition.org/errata/vulnerability.html) (vulnerabilities in security software, sourced from OSVDB)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is like the government randomly placing dynamite in a very small percentage of fire extinguishers. The overwhelming majority of people will not be affected by this, but it shakes confidence in an important safety item and may encourage large numbers of people to stop using AV software, to the detriment of their own computers and networks in general.

So, what AV software _is_ safe?

<comment><USER11> This "leak" seems to be a way to hit at Kaspersky. It seems like Western governments are really out to get them eh? It's like these bozos aren't in our pocket so let's try to destroy their credibility in hopes that companies will switch to Western companies for their security products whom we can then control using security letters etc.

<comment><USER12> You might want to look carefully at the history of Kapersky before you cast them into a white knight role. Would you blindly trust a company with known KGB and FSB ties?

<comment><USER11> No one's a saint, everyone's a sinner. We're casting the spotlight a certain way. I am sure it works equally well the other way. The point being there should be choice, not unilateralism like the Five Eyes want. It's all business, and never nothing personal. If you don't want Russia to have your secrets because they have something to gain, then by all means avoid the Russians. But it's for sure the case that Americans and the British will take your secrets and give them to their own industries for competitive advantage... while wagging their finger at everyone else for doing the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's scary how much information antivirus software nowadays send home every day. It's often marketed as "cloud-based heuristics" or something similarly nebulous. What it really means is that the antivirus software will send home a sample of anything it's not sure about. It could be a confidential document of yours. It could contain your personal information. Oh, and don't forget that MITMing your TLS connections is now a highly desirable feature. A lot of them have Superfish built right in!

In the past, if you bought an antivirus software, that was it. The antivirus would download new signatures at regular intervals, and not bug you until your subscription expired. Nowadays, every antivirus requires you to be logged in to your account all the time, ostensibly to ensure that your subscription is valid, but also in order to allow anyone with access to the web-based control panel to trigger all kinds of scary actions. Every vendor also tries to upsell at every opportunity, sometimes even after you've paid.

I tried to stick with Microsoft Security Essentials for the longest time, because if I had to open a backdoor to somebody, I might as well trust the company that wrote my OS in the first place. Also, MSE was pretty good when it first came out. But its detections rates have steadily gone down, and a number of people to whom I recommended it have gotten viruses that MSE couldn't catch. I use BitDefender on my Windows boxes now. It's the only antivirus I could find so far (apart from MSE) that doesn't constantly nag me to upgrade, but who knows? I might have just opened a backdoor for the Romanian government or something.

<comment><USER14> Trusting something from Romania feels to me like it's only one or two steps up from Nigeria.

I hope that prejudice is outdated.

I'm pretty sure it was justified at some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meanwhile, how many NSA backdoors are there in US-made AV software? Note that no reverse-engineering effort targeting such companies was described in the memo.

<comment><USER7> I saw that too, in the page of AV company logos. All from outside the USA.

As one of my kids pointed out to me last week, you really need to trust your locksmith. It would appear that you really need to trust your AV vendor, too.

<comment><USER16> You need to trust your OS vendor first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tom's Guide has a pretty decent article on this same event: [http://www.tomsguide.com/us/kaspersky-hack-israel- nsa,news-2...](http://www.tomsguide.com/us/kaspersky-hack-israel- nsa,news-21084.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> The only thing worse than getting a computer virus is having to run anti-virus software.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some of L0pht (which was a community, which might be described now as a hackerspace/collective centered in Boston) became a security consulting shop @stake (atstake), which was the sold to B4 PwC and then sold to IBM (perhaps integrated into GBS, the consulting svcs arm that tends to accumulate exceptionally smart people.)

</comment><comment><USER20> So, they have a problem only with russian antivirus? All others are no problem?

<comment><USER21> It's most likely the case that all western AV companies readily respond to National Security Letters and/or Warrants - providing the NSA/GCHQ with all the information that they need. Kaspersky on the other hand, is probably more difficult for the NSA/GCHQ to secretly coerce, hence they need to exploit their software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is fucked up ...</comment>


New evidence supporting the existence of the hypothetical X17 particle - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459 <comment><USER2> Worth noting: they even propose it could be the sign of a fifth fundamental force of physics.

<comment><USER3> Is it more correct to say interaction instead of force?

Why only 5? Couldn't it be a result of multiple interactions?

One thing I wondered was how it was for long time not possible to measure the weak and strong force/interaction due to measurement limitations. Perhaps, at scale there are unmeasured(able) interactions. Like _____ is to our scale as quantum scale is to ours.

Like a Macro qanta,the maximum scale of all interactions where forces that cause expansion become too weak and no interaction of any kind,not even electromagnetism is strong enough to exceed this incomprehensible scale...and that is the "universe" boundary. Perhaps at this scale gravitation that causes contraction is stronger and at this boundary and starts "pulling" back all matter and energy. What if just like there is strong and weak forces at the subatomic scale, maybe there is similar strong and weak gravitation? Of course I am asking uneducated questions with no background in science.

<comment><USER2> Well, each type of force is mediated by some type of boson. And the fact is that the new particle would be a new kind of boson - not fitting in existing categories. So it really is a new force that they would have discovered.

As each type of force correspond to one type of boson - which mediates the interaction - it is indeed right, in this meaning, to call them also types of interactions.

Also important is the fact that the discovered particle is a fundamental particule, so it is not a composite of other fermions and other bosons. That excludes the possibility of mistaking a mixture of existing forces for a new one.</comment></comment></comment>


Monkey in Kenya Survives After Setting Off Nationwide Blackout - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/world/africa/monkey-kenya-survives-blackout-internet-vervet.html <comment><AUTHOR> Does this count as an example of single-point-of-failure?

From the article:

"A nationwide blackout that knocked out lights, severed internet service and paralyzed countless businesses for more than three hours on Tuesday was caused by a monkey, the electricity company announced.

"The monkey, which appeared to be of the Vervet species, with a collar of white fur, climbed onto the roof of the Gitaru Power Station and fell or jumped onto a transformer. The transformer tripped, which in turn tripped other machines at the hydroelectric power station, setting off a nationwide blackout, the Kenya Electricity Generation Company, or KenGen, said."</comment>


WBO Has a New UI - <AUTHOR> https://wbo.openode.io/boards/anonymous <comment><USER2> It's down. TypeError: Cannot read property 'Color' of undefined.</comment>


5 reasons someone making $75,000 would live paycheck to paycheck - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2015/04/22/5-reasons-someone-making-75000-would-live-paycheck-to-paycheck/

<comment><USER2> The title says "someone" but the article is talking about families that make $75,000. There is a big difference between a 23-25 year old making $75k and 2 30-35 year olds making 75k combined.</comment>


The battle for the soul of the internet has well and truly begun UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-freedom-2017-jonathan-luff <comment><USER2> We already have Snoopers Charter, aswell as High Court-blocked websites. She's probably going to demand a UK Cert Authority that they can use for "securing" and then someone will find out the CA.

</comment><comment><USER2> The issue is Theresa May doesn't understand the Internet and outlawing encryption or similar would be idiocy.</comment>


Show HN: Siproc – A primitive SIP client that spawns processes for each call - <AUTHOR> https://schm1dt.ch/git/siproc/file/README.md.html <comment><USER2> Spawning a process for each call / endpoint is how almost every large phone switchboard does it. See also: Erlang The Movie:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKfKtXYLG78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKfKtXYLG78)

<comment><USER3> Who uses Erlang in telephony besides Ericsson?

<comment><USER4> AFAIK Motorola does (did?) too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a project I desperately needed a few times in the past, but could not find anything covering my needs.

What it does is to act as a SIP softphone, and spawn a process for each incoming or outgoing call, which can handle events (like DTMF tones) or do actions (like playing files) via stdin/stdout.

Currently, I am using it to spam filter incoming calls at home.

As a side question: I wonder where one can publish software like this nowadays, when freshmeat etc. are either gone or read-only. Preferably a place that is not GitHub.

<comment><USER5> I didn't look at the code yet, but this looks like it would be super useful for a home project I have now (interface with DoorKing gate controller) and would have been very helpful at my last job (verification code delivery).

Please consider adding a license.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point with the license, GPLv3-ified it now. This should not be a hindrance to use the software, since one never needs to link against it.

Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment>


Buffet's Alpha (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://docs.lhpedersen.com/BuffettsAlpha.pdf <comment><USER2> The article finds the Buffet's Alpha closer to the end.

Buffet is a good investor, but his real genius is that he has build a permanent advantage relative to other investors. His leverage is cheap and he has money when others don't.

> One reason might be that this structure provides a steady source of > financing, allowing him to leverage his stock selection ability. Indeed, we > find that 36% of Buffett's liabilities consist of insurance float with an > average cost below the T-Bill rate.

>In summary, we find that Buffett has developed a unique access to leverage that he has invested in safe, high-quality, cheap stocks and that these key characteristics can largely explain his impressive performance. Buffett's unique access to leverage is consistent with the idea that he can earn BAB returns driven by other investors' leverage constraints.</comment>