Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? - <AUTHOR>

I'm at that stage where the product is built, and it's time to reach out to leads. However, it's getting overwhelming quickly.
I was wondering if anyone has a system or process for managing cold email or cold-call leads? Right now I basically have a massive Excel spreadsheet and am considering Boomerang for receipt/click management. I feel there has to be a more methodical and steady way to reach out to hundreds of leads while maintaining each thread & progress state properly.
In my particular case, I'm currently cold-emailing but depending on the larger scale results could switch to cold-call. <comment><USER2> I once met a guy in Ruby meetup who has built [https://www.myphoner.com/](https://www.myphoner.com/) Sounds like it's something you are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you looked at Radius ([http://radius.com/](http://radius.com/))? Never used it, but recently came across it while doing market research.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't have the task of managing leads, but I think salesforce is the standard certainly beyond a certain size. Not sure if that is too big for your use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked at salesforce and my understanding was "it has everything, at scale, and costly". The IBM or Oracle of sales was the impression I got. It seemed a bit too much for one person to use for themselves.

<comment><USER5> If long-term your plan is that company is just going to be _you_ then keeping it simple is the right idea. Using a simple workflow with a Google form feeding into a spreadsheet with status on it will work perfectly well.

If you think that you're going to be dealing with the same customer on multiple occasions so you'll want to record the history of your interactions then you'll need a CRM. If you want to build up a database of people who showed interest that you'll then talk to regularly, then you'll probably want CRM. Finally, if your intention is to scale the company and so have many people talking to prospects and customers then you definitely need CRM.

Salesforce is the most well-known and it's relatively easy to get started with, very Cloudy and has a platform so you can build operations on it. You reference Oracle, they (and Microsoft) have complete enterprise solutions which are at a different level. SF is more at the middle of the pack. It's well-known and many people are familiar with it. But you're right, it's a full CRM so it does far more than just tracking your leads.

There are other light-weight Cloud solutions out there, and SugarCRM is probably a good Open Source option that (as a technologist) you could easily use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where I work, we use Podio (now part of Citrix).

It is free (until you reach 5 users) and is fully customizable. I highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER7> have you tried pipedrive? ([https://www.pipedrive.com/en/home/welcomeback](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/home/welcomeback)) or you are looking for something open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! This looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks! Will give it a try and see if it fits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> pipedrive.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks pretty great.

For future visitors to this thread: I've discovered that toutapp and yesware have integrated email receipt + click tracking along with a pseudo pipeline which actually fits my purpose of tracking email leads pretty well.

My only hesitation with toutapp/yesware/boomerang is data gravity - I don't think the information from any of those can be exported, effectively locking you in.

Alphabetical Summary of Results:

* BoomerangGmail - boomeranggmail.com

* ContactMonkey - contactmonkey.com

* MyPhoner - myphoner.com

* PipeDrive - pipedrive.com

* Radius - radius.com

* SalesForce - salesforce.com

* Streak - streak.com

* ToutApp - toutapp.com

* Yesware - yesware.com

<comment><USER9> * Zoho - [http://www.zoho.com/](http://www.zoho.com/)

This one can be useful too.</comment></comment></comment>


Squire: powerful lightweight rich text editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neilj/Squire

<comment><USER2> It's lazy of me, but I'd love to see a link to a live demo of the editor so I can get a feel for it without having to deploy it myself.

<comment><USER3> Not lazy. That's a duh for anyone who wants people to test something.</comment></comment>


How to Respond to Ageism in a Job Interview - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2019/08/5-ways-to-respond-to-ageism-in-a-job-interview?ab=hero-subleft-1 <comment><USER2> I don't know if these tips help that much. My dad is an older electrical engineer, with experience with embedded systems, telecommunications networks, Unix, and R, Python, and Data Science. He regularly has great phone interviews only to hear after the in person interview "We are moving forward with a different candidate."

My dad however is nearly bald with grey hair and his skin is a little worse for the wear.

I am very sad to seem him like this and wish I could do something for him. The only thing I can think of though is to tell him to look for remote roles so that they don't see what he actually looks like and won't discriminate against him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some good, constructive advice in here amongst some of the usual pablum. Reframing is clever: "We're looking for younger minds." "Well, what you're actually looking for is innovative thinking and here's XYZ that I can bring."

</comment><comment><USER4> > more people under 45 were exhausted (43%) than those over 45 (35%), with the > least exhausted group being those over 60.

Welp, they aren't making the greatest case against ageism here, are they.

<comment><USER5> > Welp, they aren't making the greatest case against ageism here, are they.

Huh? Are you assuming that less exhausted implies less productive? Would you assume the same thing if the results were the other way around?

<comment><USER4> Well it sure suggests that younger people work harder. I can assure you I am more exhausted when I am more productive.

<comment><USER6> _Well it sure suggests that younger people work harder._

...and/or less efficiently.

<comment> java-man ... and for less money

<comment><USER6> Upfront cost, or TCO?

<comment> java-man in my experience, often the decisions are being made not in the interest of cost savings, or efficiency, but following short term interests of the management.

as long as there is somebody to do the "work", they are fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You can now deploy on OpenShift *anything* that speaks HTTP. Boom - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/openshift/community/blogs/a-paas-that-runs-anything-http-getting-started-with-diy-applications-on-openshift

<comment><AUTHOR> Red Hat will also release the code of OpenShift. [http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/03/red-hat-sets-a- dat...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/03/red-hat-sets-a-date-for- opensh.php)</comment>


Ask HN: If you weren't going to be a web tech entrepuener what would you be? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> An entrepreneur in another tech/science field or an academic. Also, a nightclub/bar owner if I had enough capital ;)</comment>


How to Build the Machine that Builds the Product - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/18438001079/how-to-build-the-machine-that-builds-the-product

<comment><USER2> So true. Every startup is a machine.</comment>


Recharts – A composable charting library built on React components - <AUTHOR> http://recharts.org/ <comment><USER2> I always wonder why live data isn't more of a focus for charting libraries. In this case, it's almost ridiculous that live data (and examples of such) aren't front and center. Isn't the point of doing anything in React the reactive nature of the thing? If it doesn't make the process of having live interactive data easier, building it in react seems like a pointless exercise.

I'm sure it is possible to do live data with this, of course, I just don't see it obviously discussed in any of the examples or docs, and that's a shame. I can't think of any instance where I've looked into charting in the past five years that I didn't want live data and interactivity.

<comment><USER3> Worth a thought -> [http://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they- first-g...](http://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-give- real-time-analytics/) why you don't see more of this type of stuff. Like other commenters pointed out, "live data" isn't a "charting specific" problem, it's a front-end / back-end problem and having a chart library that updates on new data. D3 and other javascript charting libraries have had the capability for a long long time. It's just that when you get down to it very few people really need "live data".

<comment><USER2> I already have the data; charting is the missing piece. I use live data _daily_ in my work; so does every other system administrator in the world. top, vmstat, iostat, etc. are all live(ish) data, very useful to have access to, and useful to plug into a GUI. It is not opening a portal to another dimension, or something, it's just looking at the state of a thing as it is right now and printing it out. I'm sure there are many other areas where a live view is valuable in a user interface (stock prices, exchange rates, temperatures, etc.). There are all sorts of metrics that aren't necessarily well-served by live data, but existence of those does not negate the existence of metrics that are useful to have as they happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every example seems to be animated. I find this kind of off-putting. The animation just serves to demand my attention before I can really make any use of the graph.

<comment><USER5> Animating the loading of charts and force-directed graphs are the <marquee> and <blink> of the 2010s. In 5 years, they'll seem grotesquely tacky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to victory ([https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory))?

<comment><USER7> Recharts seems to be from Alibaba. They also open sourced a very good UI framework ant design. [https://github.com/ant-design/ant- design](https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey, all you makers of chart libraries!

First a big thank you for your fantastic efforts and for letting the world participate by open sourcing all that stuff!

But one thing: Please make it easy to generate VIDEO OUTPUT with your libraries!

This is an artificial limitation that I hit with many charting libraries - output generation is html (js) only and people who would like to create moving images have unnecessary problems shoehorning that nice chart library into outputting to a high resolution video.

Please do not limit your designs to one output medium.

Think video, too, THANKS!

<comment><USER9> Have you tried using Julia? Tom Breloff's Plots.jl[0] package has a built-in @gif macro, which already relies on ImageMagick and/or FFmpeg (depending on which one of them is present). So it shouldn't be too hard to extend that to mp4 (just pass different output parameters to FFmpeg). In fact, he has an issue open for it[1] so he appears to be working on that.

[0] [https://juliaplots.github.io/#simple-is- beautiful](https://juliaplots.github.io/#simple-is-beautiful)

[1] [https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/320](https://github.com/tbreloff/Plots.jl/issues/320)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The page is completely unusable on mobile: zoom is disabled and no responsiveness. Who thought that's a good idea?

<comment><USER11> I'm guessing the authors didn't decide that not making the page responsive was a good idea. It seems perfectly reasonable that there were other priorities. You can always send a PR if you think it's that important. (I'm assuming the source of that page is on GH as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is amazing. I've always said I'd switch from d3 to react as soon as transitions were better supported in react, and it seems like you guys were able to accomplish that?

How did you guys do it?

<comment><USER13> Looks like it actually uses d3 ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to react-vis ([https://uber.github.io/react- vis/](https://uber.github.io/react-vis/))?

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks very neatly done. Congrats.

Do you have plans for a theme engine ? I would to see a dark theme, I am using golden layout [0] for some projects.

[0] [https://golden-layout.com/examples/](https://golden-layout.com/examples/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I immediately want to do a project with this - looks very cool.

</comment><comment><USER17> Super cool. Excited to try it out.</comment>


The mercury doesn't lie: We've hit a troubling climate change milestone - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/03/04/why-degree-temperature-jump-more-important-than-trump-hands/ <comment><USER2> Paywalled? I tried to reach the page, but got a page not found notice using either of two different Web browsers.</comment>


Over 1M T-Mobile customers' data breached - <AUTHOR> https://www.t-mobile.com/customers/6305378822 <comment><USER2> > We take the security of your information very seriously...

I am trying to read this with a straight face. Perhaps T-Mobile was just waiting for their turn to get breached.

> with your prepaid service account, including name and billing address (if > you provided one when you established your account), phone number, account > number, rate plan and features, such as whether you added...

So your personal identifiable information has been accessed by the attackers? Fraudsters can now link my data from another breach and get my detailed phone number information. Jolly Good /s

There you have it folks, nothing more than just sitting rubber ducks with your data.

<comment><USER3> >We take the security of your information very seriously

Isn't that getting to be a little bit of a cliché to the point of insulting ones intelligence?</comment></comment>


Think twice before you hand your phone to police to show auto insurance: experts - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/digital-insurance-privacy-1.5276692 <comment><USER2> Have a look here:

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

</comment><comment><USER2> There is a big problem with overeach in those parts. the act of handing over your phone to a cop to view your insurance is subject to a twisted interpretation: "The individual surrendered an unlocked phone to assist in the investigation." there is no 5th amendment in that place. there is no 4th amendment, and to top it off there was nothing even approximating a Bill of Rights until mid 80s</comment>


Ask HN: Company Structure and Timing - <AUTHOR>

I'll keep it short and without much fluff:
My partner and I are committed to starting a company (so this is no "dream," rather a real commitment). We checked the market (it's viable, profitable, and growing), we wrote some test code for a proof of concept (so we'd be convinced it can actually work), we spoke with some potential business partners (they're interested), etc.  On the surface, everything is going smoothly.
At this point, we believe we should incorporate: to avoid potential problems between us in the future (so far so good), to allow investors to come in, and to allow us to work with other business partners and affiliates.  We have no revenue at this point (we haven't put anything out in the open, yet, only tests).
1) What does your experience tell you about forming:
  a. LLC
  b. C Corp (Delaware)
We understand the differences between LLC and C-Corp.  My question is really whether LLCs are so "bad" (we were told by a lawyer that VCs would be reluctant to invest in us in the future, if we choose this structure).  Is it such a big deal to change the LLC to a C-Corp in the future?
2) Considering we also want to bring in other individuals and offer them equity (again, we don't have money so our idea, proof of concept, and equity are the only way), is it the right time to incorporate now, or can the incorporation wait?
3) Did you defer payment to the law firm, or pay upfront? We spoke with one prominent Valley firm and we were told that it could cost us ~$5000 to set up a C Corp and write up all the stock verbiage.  Is it better we bite the bullet, dig deep, and pay now, or defer (again, from your experience)?
4) How much do you normally pay equity to UX specialists? A one time job (could take 3 months) vs. long haul. <comment><USER2> I will just share my experience:

We opted for an LLC and did it with Company Corporation (.com). If I remember correctly it was about $350. We then had an attorney look over the documents ($75 for initial consult) who said they were fine for a 'beginning'. We were careful to require vesting so that one of the partners couldn't 'walk away'. My only suggestion would be to have someone with LLC or legal ease experience walk with you through the application process as it isn't in plain English (at least not in my mind). You can dictate in your LLC agreement how to add equity employees and distribute more shares as needed. At some point in time, if you need to change over to a C-corp it will probably as you earn money or get funded.

</comment><comment><USER3> From my experience when on a budget the best thing to do is work with a good agent, I used CSC who can advise on most things. Then combine this with the document driver from Goodwin Procter <http://www.goodwinfoundersworkbench.com/document-driver/>

The document driver is a really invaluable tool for startups on a budget. Even if you then have the documents looked at by a lawyer. It will be much cheaper then having them draw the documents up.

</comment><comment><USER4> LLCs are fine for many things - but not generally for dealing with investments or equity. Whether they're worthwhile as an intermediate step depends on what you're doing and when. They're rarely appropriate for "build to sell" companies whereas they're often appropriate indefinitely for "build to own" companies.

Equity is for founders, core team, and investors. Equity is not for contractors.</comment>


NASA Has Been Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/06/20/confirmed-nasa-has-been-hacked/#7dbe7dc0dc62 <comment><USER2> I highly recommend reading the actual audit[1]. There's a lot of good details in there, similar to the Senate report on the Equifax breach a few days ago. There were several problems: the inventory tracking issue was particularly enlightening:

>system administrators did not consistently update the inventory system when they added devices to the network. Specifically, we found that 8 of 11 system administrators responsible for managing the 13 systems in our sample maintain a separate inventory spreadsheet of their systems from which they periodically update the information manually in the ITSDB. One system administrator told us he does not regularly enter new devices into the ITSDB as required because the database's updating function sometimes does not work and he later forgets to enter the asset information.

Other good notes

Lack of training:

> NIST requires that organizations provide security-related technical training > specifically tailored for their assigned duties... As of April 2019, JPL did > not have a role-based training program, provide additional IT security > training for system administrators, nor fund their IT security > certifications.

Refusing to let Department of Homeland Security (DHS) complete a thorough post-intrusion assessment:

>However, according to NASA SOC personnel, JPL was concerned with inadvertent access to its corporate network and feared disruption of mission operations. In addition, JPL was unfamiliar with DHS's standard engagement procedures. Collectively, resolution of these issues resulted in DHS being unable to perform scans of the entire network until 4 months after the incident was detected.

[1]: [https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-022.pdf](https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-022.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Back in the early 90s I had a summer internship for a contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center. My job for the entire summer was to track down and inventory a list of 1000s of devices across the entire campus. At the time they were building a tracking database for all the devices on the campus.

The printout I was handed on my first day had not been updated in several years. It basically contained a tracking ID, what building/room the device was supposedly located, and who it was assigned to.

I spent every day walking building to building, room to room, interviewing employees, trying to track down devices. I never finished updating the list simply because I was never able to track down over half the devices. Outside of a few secure areas I did not have access to, I pretty much turned the campus upside down looking for devices. I can only imagine where all those devices ended up.

<comment><USER4> I interned at Goddard in 2006 and my PI had a rogue wireless access point for his interns to use. Apparently it was a long and convoluted process to get network access for personal computers, so he didn't even bother trying. I remember some of my fellow interns complaining about having to work offline for the first month of their 10 week internship.

<comment><USER5> _it was a long and convoluted process to get network access for personal computers, so he didn't even bother trying_

"When people can't work with you, they _will_ look for ways to work _around_ you". - former IT boss of mine.

Every time.

<comment><USER6> Cool thing is: with that argument I was able to convince management to roll out WiFi worldwide at a large corp where the CISO hated WiFi and had halted all projects that sought to implement it.

Needless to say, there where dozens of rogue AP's in the network, which where a biatch to find (was a manual job actually walking around with a laptop trying to find them). With the global rollout we made sure "rogue AP detection" was implemented as an additional feature, which came with its own challenges (sometimes not knowing something is easier to deal with...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading the audit, this kind of confirms my base question when building infrastructure: If people don't do the right thing the business needs, why is it too hard to do? Can't we reduce the pain to do the right thing so doing the lazy / wrong thing is harder? People not doing thing tends to be an indication of boundaries and responsibilities being drawn in bad ways.

Something like the log reviews are a classical thing. Training a sysadmin to know all the new hot attacks and patterns they cause in a log is hard, because that world moves fast. It'd be much more effective to task the admin with a well-defined, easily monitored task: <Ship logs to splunk. Make sure logs are always shipped to splunk>. Might need some definition about format and which logs, but all logs go to splunk. And then it's the security guys job to look for malicious patterns in those logs, probably automatically. Ideally with something simple, like elastic-alert, logstash, you name it, from my own stack.

Similar, why do people have to manually enter systems into the host database? It depends on how far you want to automate that, but firewall all systems to access the central registry only, and widen the firewall after an authorized registration of the system. That way, the admins just have to rack systems with a usb stick with some credentials, and it goes or it doesn't.

If basic things are so hard people don't do them, something is structurally wrong.

<comment><USER8> > but firewall all systems to access the central registry only, and widen the > firewall after an authorized registration of the system. That way, the > admins just have to rack systems with a usb stick with some credentials, and > it goes or it doesn't.

Someone first has to build this system, and after accounting for all of the red tape and approvals and training and new audits required and tallying up the total man-hours required to implement, your solution that is supposed to be "less hard" might actually be much _harder_ than the previous system.

It's pretty easy to come up with a multitude of ideas to fix issues like this, but it's another thing entirely to actually implement them, _especially_ in a big government org like NASA. Obviously their current/previous system isn't working and they need to fix it, but I think you would be surprised at how difficult it is to do something even as simple as the system you've conceptualized.

Just to give a small anecdote: I've built asset management systems, and in one case at a major F500 company, one that used USB sticks for something similar to what you're describing. Just getting the approval to purchase the USB sticks and establish a process for properly handling the USB sticks once credentials were put on them was something that, _by itself_ , took _months_.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, size is one matter, technology focus is another one.

We've been acquired by a bigger shop with a lot less technology focus and exactly what you're describing is already happening. Things that should take 2 month waiting for customers already takes 1 month of planning and 2 month of scheduling the person that might be able to schedule the task of 2 month within the next 6 month or more probably never. It's a soft spot for me atm, because if that's the new norm, it'll be time to leave a lot of work behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Try to opt out of their data tracking, an option they're required to add.

"This may take up to a few minutes to process"

They make you wait at this long ass loading screen while they "process" your request not to have cookies.

Here's the outline for people who don't want to wait minutes to read an article. [https://outline.com/TZSBv4](https://outline.com/TZSBv4)

<comment><USER10> I discussed this recently here on HN [0], the fake spinner is a dark-UI to 'punish' you for opting out. If you just accept the popup disappears immediately.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20131381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20131381)

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's actually true. Rather, it's an architectural thing — because all these ad systems were designed without consent in mind, accepting is a no-op, whereas refusing consent requires an outbound request to set some sort of "do not track" flag somewhere (presumably as a cookie).

<comment><USER12> If accepting is a no-op then you are being tracked even before you make your decision - as the page already have been loaded.

A brutal violation of course but I absolutely expect that to be the case.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps the purpose of the spinner is to delete the data they've already collected?

Are you still being "tracked" if all copies of the data are destroyed?

<comment><USER14> That depends on who is doing the actual tracking/correlation and, assuming it's a third party, how quickly the site hands that data off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hopefully, this doesn't cause fear mongering around raspberry pi devices. It's not a stretch to imagine a bureaucrat reading articles like this, seeing _" a raspberry pi was plugged in"_, and forming a negative opinion of the device and people that use them.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately there already is. When I interviewed for a job in Antarctica we had discussed methods of saving on bandwidth usage and I suggested the use of a PiHole to strip out ads to save precious KB and was told that the Raspberry Pi was frowned upon due to previous issues, and it would likely never happen. :(

<comment><USER17> Then just use a server that does the same thing. If the issue is the buzzword then work around the buzzword.

<comment><USER18> Yes. Small ARM-powered server. Preferably not expensive, around $35.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I usually roll my eyes at meta comments on HN about ads or tracking on web pages getting in the way, but good lord. This page first slams you with a nearly full page ad with no dismissal, and then after you read a few paragraphs hits you again with a modal sign up dialog.

<comment><USER20> The magic combination of adblockers has spared me from this fate, but not from an annoying video about the top 5 richest rappers, for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately this will just make it more difficult to get real work done, as security is tightened further. Maybe they just ought to physically isolate their networks.

Working at a large engineering organization, I have given up and now do all engineering work on a stand alone computer, with dongle licensed software. I feel bad about the piles of CDR I burn through to transfer files, but it's the only solution to getting work done.

</comment><comment><USER22> IT security people need to stop thinking in terms of disallowing "unauthorized" devices on physical (wired and WiFi) and recognize start designing for human nature.

Assume that the physical networks are compromised, and have all privileged resources only accept connections over VPN. Is it perfect? No, but it makes further compromise harder. The assumption of no trust also means acknowledging that you need gate incoming connections.

<comment><USER23> Meanwhile DNS, which is a precursor to almost every connection ever, is rarely encrypted or authenticated in practice. Standards like DNSSEC and DNS over TLS exist but seem to have lots of vocal opposition without any serious proposals for improvement.

A Microsoft certificate training I took recently literally put emphasis on randomizing source port numbers as a way to mitigate attacks.... let that sink in.

<comment><USER24> What does encrypted/authenticated DNS gain you? If the application protocol is encrypted and authenticated like https then faking DNS responses just results in a connection that is closed immediately because authentication fails. Encrypting is also useless unless you use a proxy/VPN because otherwise the connection target leaks via the IP header anyway when you open the connection.

<comment><USER23> > What does encrypted/authenticated DNS gain you?

Many things, here's three to start:

* A measure of privacy - instead of every rando with ability to sniff packets (activities you have no way to ever know about, available to many parties along the path) only the DNS server (which you choose, presumably trust, and can change) knows what names you resolve.

* Stronger foundation for TLS - LetsEncrypt and other public certificate authorities depend on DNS to issue certificates. If an attacker controls DNS, they could easily generate certificates for any site they wanted to attack.

* There have been many shady incidents with certificate authorities. I just feel that beefing up some of the other layers in the stack is a good idea.

> faking DNS responses just results in a connection that is closed immediately

On the web it's often not closed immediately, the users often get a certificate warning that they may be conditioned to click through. Of course HSTS helps with that, but still... why the hostility to securing the name resolution layer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Link to the actual audit here: [https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-022.pdf](https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-19-022.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember back in the late 80s telnetting out of the NYU Bobst library on their VAX 11(?) system to some pretty interesting systems. The Johnson Space Center in Houston (running VAX 11/785s was one I particularly remember. Of course, back then things were not battened down as much as they are now; the spirit was an open network. A sysadmin would interrupt your session with quesitons like "Who is this? You are unauthorized to access this system, etc."

<comment><USER27> I used to love roving around VAX networks. In the UK the ones for science (and defence research) were all setup the same. They didn't design the login scripts for pests like me. So I was able to go round the different boxes looking for interesting datasets. I only wanted super hi resolution satellite imagery, convinced there was some sub-metre resolution stuff out there.

All was going well until I put my own backdoors in to speed up my remote logins. Accidentally I denied access to everyone but me to a MOD computer. I had to admit to that one! Luckily my boss handled it and was practically pleased with his student hire. But yes, I can actually claim to have hacked military computers. I doubt my boss has forgotten that day, the day when the men from the ministry arrived.

Happy times, VAX computers were cool and hacking them with genuine VT DEC terminals on those fairly open networks was living the lifestyle.

<comment><USER28> I have two DEC VT510 terminals in my lab, serving mission critical functions, right now.

<comment><USER26> Wow, that's wild. Never upgraded that system I guess. I hope mission critical is not something that could effect things outside the scope of your workplace. Although, security through obscurity or age here, might actually work ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's food for thought: while a proper firewall and network segmentation is a well-established best practice, I'm not sure this is a winning battle.

There are probably a few dozen organizations out there that are properly implementing strong information security practices, and my hats go off to them. But they are the few, and I have never worked for one.

Despite best laid plans and policies, every place I have worked has always had some improperly secured services somewhere on their network. And every place that I've worked has had segmented networks that people end up relying on. And the people working for these organizations are often aware of the improperly secured resources, but they're only in the DMZ, and there are many other things to worry about, so it lives on.

Especially now that we live in an IPv6 world, why not just run everything publicly. Push security all the way down to the applications themselves, and rely on the software development lifecycle process to catch security issues.

Every service has to be secure. And they can get an awful lot of help in this from things like a service mesh architecture, where you're getting mutual TLS from something like Envoy, and the applications won't accept a network connection unless they're specifically authorized.

We need to stop relying on firewalls and network segmentation entirely, and just run everything on the public Internet, and make sure every service is secured.

I will say, when a zero day comes out in whatever proxy you're using to secure your services, you are in for a world of hurt. But there are zero days in firewalls too.

<comment><USER30> I work at a non-JPL NASA center. My workstation and internal server resources are already locked down to a barely tolerable extreme. I can't imagine what kind of restrictions would be added if we went forward with something resembling the above proposal.

I don't want to go into much detail about our internal network architecture, but suffice to say it's extremely difficult to run any kind of service whatsoever even internally. It has literally taken me years to get approval to expose a fairly simple REST API to the public internet, and I'm not even there yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The JPL has been hacked, not just the NASA.

The JPL does much more interesting stuff than just NASA, like engines for military and also secret SW programs for the NSA (we know that from Larry Wall who was sysadmin there). And they are just administered by Caltech staff. Whow.

Random hackers are only interested in confirmation of aliens, but NSA or DOD stuff is very, very interesting to the Chinese who hacked these systems last.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow what a horrible website - the entire article was nearly completely covered with popover ads

<comment><USER33> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

Works also on mobile (Android)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Don't forget, CBP likely already compromised their security before.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/a-nas...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/a-nasa- engineer-is-required-to-unlock-his-phone-at-the-border/516489/)

</comment><comment><USER35> For further context, here's another report on NASA's security in 2012.

[https://oig.nasa.gov/congressional/FINAL_written_statement_f...](https://oig.nasa.gov/congressional/FINAL_written_statement_for_%20IT_%20hearing_February_26_edit_v2.pdf)

Sadly, it doesn't seem like things have changed.

<comment><USER30> Note that the report in the OP is a report on _JPL_ , not NASA. JPL is a federally funded research institution that does most of its work for NASA, but it is run by Caltech, not NASA directly. Having seen the process from the inside, I can attest that NASA's security posture has changed _enormously_ over the last 5 years. If anything, we've swung the pendulum so far in the direction of security that measures are being put in place that interfere with our work for little to no real security benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> And this is why you need to practice Defense in Depth. DO NOT assume your system is simply hardened and cannot be penetrated. You have to assume the opposite -- assume you will get fcked hard and apply separation among systems such that a wound is just a wound, and not a fatal death.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was hoping there would be more info about how exactly the RPi was compromised, and the steps that were taken from there.

</comment><comment><USER38> Raspberry Pi is all over HN today

</comment><comment><USER39> CAUDIT is a potential mitigation tool that is extensible for data breaches. Ref: [https://github.com/pmcao/caudit](https://github.com/pmcao/caudit)

</comment><comment><USER40> Finally ! Now send me the.megadownload-link for Bigfoot and e.t photos

</comment><comment><USER41> Not: it is NASA, not NASA. I've only ever seen the BBC call it Nasa because of their typographic rules.

<comment><USER42> > it is NASA, not NASA It's LeviOHsa, not LeviosAH

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> YTCracker did it first!

</comment><comment><USER44> > All in all it reads like a security basics 101 list that has been ignored. > System administrators lacked security certifications, no role-based security > training was in place and JPL, unlike the main NASA security operations > center (SOC), didn't even have a round-the-clock incident reporting > capability.

That is not security 101, that's CYA bullshit that corporations institute once they've been caught with their pants down. "Training" is worth jack. You have to actually _implement_ security practices for them to be worthwhile. Sysadmins are not always the brightest bulbs in the box, but they definitely shouldn't be expected to be doing a security team's job of regularly auditing security policy to make sure it's being enforced.</comment>


Dynamic target tracking camera system - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn5YQVvW-hQ

<comment><USER2> Very impressive in action in the video. My first thoughts are that this could make some sport games look like there video game conterpart in motion tracking of the ball in play. My second thought is the mirror system they use could be used to equaly send a laser onto the ball enaberling lesser/cheaper systems to track it.

Now whilst I'm sure many are thinking my games console does this, in part it does in the tracking, though you wont see the camera tracking as fast, ever.

One last thought is that such tracking mirror systems would be obselete with the Nokia large CCD appraoch with a fish eye lens and reduced down resolution, which due to the pixel density would still be as good, albeit a cheaper system with a lot less mechinical overhead and expense.</comment>


Websockets zeromq proxying - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hhuuggoo/ZmqWebBridge

<comment><USER2> If you really want to easily bridge websocket in the front-end with a backend using ZeroMQ, please take a look at Mongrel2. You get that plus a wonderful webserver.

Mongrel2: <http://www.mongrel2.org>

<comment><USER3> Mongrel2 has some great ideas behind it, but it just doesn't seem to be able to generate any momentum in uptake or community "buzz".

I think it may be solving problems which just aren't big enough for most people to warrant the switch in their technology stack. HTTP proxying and text config files work "good enough". Maybe everyone else is like me, and waiting for feedback from some big deployments in order to see how it all works in practice.

<comment><USER4> Ironically, your comment just inspired me to try out Mongrel2. Even during its initial buzz, I never looked into Mongrel2 at all because I simply had no need for a new web server. Well, after finally looking at it... it looks fricking sweet and I can't wait to play around with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori Interesting idea, but a huge security nightmare. Essentially you're opening the door for anyone to send and receive arbitrary ZeroMQ messages to any address via your server, bypassing any outward-facing firewall that might be in place.

One way to make this a bit less of a nightmare is to give the addresses via a server name, and have the proxy map that to an address. That way, the Javascript code can only access specific services known by the proxy.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, agreed, I provide 2 functions, one which you override to determine whether a given websocket can connect, and one where you determine whether a given fake zmq socket can connect. you should definitely override both and set them to something sane a list of allowed connection sockets, etc... I might end up making a list of allowed sockets required in the future, or go with your approach of requiring some mapping of strings -> sockets, so chatservice -> tcp://127.0.0.1:9001 for example and then teh client must reference chatservice, rather than tcp://127.0.0.1:9001

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea. Are you planning on opening up other zeromq protocols like pub/sub?

The web server could validate the subscription before establishing the connection. That would be a little easier for setting up control over who has access to what resources. I suppose you could do this with REQ/REP but PUB/SUB would simplify the server side implementation.

For my current project I'm using PUSH/PULL with filtering at the server because it was fewer connections to deal with between the web server and zeromq router. PUB/SUB directly between the router and end user client could potentially cut down on bandwidth for a large implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also wanted to mention, that on the REQ REP side, in the bridge I actually implement the REQ as an XREQ socket, that way I only need one XREQ socket for all js side REQ sockets. I simply tag the message with the identity of the js REQ socket. I had thought it would be nice originally to create a one to one mapping between javscript side REQ sockets and server side REQ sockets, however creating one zmq socket per js client may present scaling problems, running out of file descriptors, etc..</comment></comment>


GoCircuit: Simple language-agnostic cluster programming - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gocircuit/circuit

<comment><USER2> Gophercon talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2VaXnRhob0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2VaXnRhob0)

Gophercon slides: [https://github.com/gophercon/2014-talks/blob/master/petar- ma...](https://github.com/gophercon/2014-talks/blob/master/petar-maymounkov- go-circuit.pdf?raw=true)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a nice fit for cloud environments.

<comment><USER4> I've played with this ... it's close to being a distributed version of channels ... mature and well designed.

<comment><USER3> Cool! Does it do anything interesting during a network partition?</comment></comment></comment>


The chat room/forum problem - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/02/the-chat-roomforum-problem-an-apology-to-technosailor/ <comment><USER2> [cue rambling]

So you want to see what interesting people do. How do you do that? You go to the places interesting people go to and stand around them, looking over their shoulders to see what they're up to. All is nice and well, except others are also interested in what the interesting people do, so more and more people are starting to look over their shoulders, and the place gets too crowded. Now the interesting people tire of all the people staring at them all the time, so they find a new place to hang out - who wants to be where everyone else is, after all?

They find a nice little place where they're just about alone, but soon a few of their hangarounds start finding their way to the new place, and it all repeats.

After a few rounds of this, the interesting people start going to private clubs with strict guest list policies, and the problem of hangarounds disappears. Now they can be interesting without distractions, but nobody will actually know any of the interesting stuff they're doing, since it's all in private, and they cease to be interesting.

So... What what I trying to say? I guess it's a variation of the curse of being a public person: people take interest in what you're doing and want to interact with you, but they do it all the time and not just when it suits you. In the end you either go Britney Spears or you go Howard Hughes.

<comment><USER3> You're not addressing the other half of Scoble's point, which is not just lamenting that forums inevitably break down, but that blogs and Twitter and other such explicit lists offer a way out. I've been making this point for about eight years now, and while I (obviously) will still participate in forums such as this, I do it with the certain knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it falls apart and there is nothing I can do to prevent that, only delay it sometimes.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader remains as high quality now as it was when I first started using RSS nearly ten years ago. Not a whiff of degradation, because when a blog goes south, that blog gets evicted. If anything it's better.

It's a different type of community, and it isn't perfect in every way, but it scales radically better. A forum falls apart sometimes in the mere tens of active users, certainly by the thousands, but an RSS feed is just sitting there, serenely serving out.

(This is part of the reason I'm so against things like SideWiki, which threaten to bring forum user economics to every part of the web. Yes, to some extent you can just "not use it", but even the overflow of crap from the forumification of everything can reduce the value of a blog to you. This is also why I don't think it is necessary for a blog to have a comment section; why forcibly attach a forum to something that is superior in its own way?)

<comment><USER2> I'll try to make a point that I had in my head while I was writing my ramble. In the forum case, the method of finding interesting persons is to go where they are. It's the same mechanism that drives the crowds to popular clubs and pubs - people want to be where it's cool to be. That will lower the percentage of cool people there in that place, and the cool people will move on to the next place. The clubs try to counter this by having guest lists and bouncers that only let you in if you're cool enough (that's not an easy thing to do online).

In the RSS case, you're not trying to find cool people by going to their favourite place, instead you go to their homes. Which is all nice and well, except you have another problem: how do you find out where the cool people live? Especially if you get all your input from the world through the RSS feeds, you're well on your way to getting a very limited view of the world (sort of like only watching Fox News, or one of the other more or less biased news outlets). Your RSS sources will act as gate keepers by only linking to what they find interesting, which can lead to a narrowing spiral.

In short: RSS is very useful, but make sure you're not only listening to a single subset of opinions. To prevent this I do what I suspect what most people here do: I keep track of my favourites using RSS and look for new stuff on HN, Reddit, etc.

<comment> alan-crowe I'm trying to develop <http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html> around the idea of shared hierarchical white lists.

this avoids narrowness because you can set the tree depth deep enough to put lots of people on your whitelist.

Scobleizer complains about the other people inviting other people into your life. Outer Circle suffers from this problem, but you do get to control who gets to invite other people into your life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure Scoble is a nice enough guy and all, although I've never found a reason to read him.

After this one article, I still haven't found a reason to read him.

Dude. Dude. We've been talking about this topic over here on HN for at least 2 or 3 years. Welcome to the party. Wish you had brought some new concepts with you.

Worst yet, the wrong conclusions seem to have been drawn. It's not just "people that teach" it's "things I will enjoy experiencing" because nobody is in learning mode all of the time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Curious responses. Most HN'ers seem to be saying "same old same old". But I thought this was a very interesting and thought-provoking article.

In any case, the question of how to provide a good (for various values of "good") social environment on the web is a difficult and important one. The more people that think about it and talk about it, the better.

(And, on a rather unrelated note, I printed the article out, so that I could read it more carefully later, thereby learning that Linux FF 3.5 -- which came with my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 -- has that wonderful print-preview interface that Win FF has had for years. That's cool, and it removes almost [but not quite] the last reason for me to keep my Win machine around. Still, I wonder why it took them so long; after all, the Win & Linux versions of FF have been more or less identical in most other ways.)

<comment><USER6> It's "same old same old" because people have been writing variations on this article for over ten years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its the age-old question of being able to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. The bottom-line is that the more "democratic" a forum/board/discussion media gets, the more clueless it becomes. There doesn't seem to be a way to get away from that.

<comment><USER8> "The bottom-line is that the more "democratic" a forum/board/discussion media gets, the more clueless it becomes."

The voice in the back of my head reading that is shouting" but what about the "Wisdom of Crowds"? I think the problem we are seeing here though is that we are starting with a very "smart crowd" and only adding people with less knowledge of the subject.

<comment><USER9> The "Wisdom of the Crowds" is simply a specialization of the Law of Big Numbers to average out the noise and leave the signal. As such, it has two weaknesses: (1) if all you have as input is garbage, no matter how much garbage you put in, you will get garbage as output, e.g. "the Emperor's nose" (2) every action has to be independent, or the math behind it is no longer sound; due to the anchoring effect and social pressure, early noise tends to be amplified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Twitter partly solved the spammer problem as well. Nobody will follow a spammer. The only thing I hate about Twitter is too much trivial RT's

But there's a problem with Twitter's model, if you join twitter too late, you don't know where to start, too much fresh ideas to understand how twitter works quickly, and you have no friends to get attention to.

<comment><USER11> >> Nobody will follow a spammer.

I'm pretty sure people do, they get tricked all the time into following spam accounts. It's pretty common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forums break down after they the number of users passes the Dunbar Number. It's only when you have so many users that the community loses cohesion that this happens. In many of the communities I participate in, forums simply split every time they get too large.

<comment><USER13> I agree, in general, that there is some threshold above which forums break down, but I suspect that your guess that it's Dunbar's Number can't be right.

Are you counting lurkers? Visible participants tend to be the tip of an enormous iceberg below the surface, and it's not always the same set that happen to participate in any given thread.

Also, must the threshold be the same for every participant? Dunbar's Number has to do with a cognitive limit on social relationships. There are many who pay little attention to the identity of those who post, focusing instead on what is being said. If I'm not tracking the people, why would Dunbar's Number be a limiting factor in what I can get out of a forum?

<comment><USER12> You are right that it isn't exactly the Dunbar number. In a forum with a normal participation curve (what percentages of users have what activity level) the breakdown is around 300. In forums where everyone participates actively it breaks down a lot sooner. Lurkers are basically disregarded.

On a site like Hacker News where I don't recognize many posters at all, you are right, it doesn't really matter. Except that whatever "culture" HN is aiming for might be diluted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What it boils down to, is that if you create a community, then there will be people there that you do not like.

This is not a new problem with software. It happens even in person. If you have public meetings in a cafe or a library, with your small group of friends, they will want to invite others. Or somebody might come over to you and start talking.

Groups are always full of people you won't 100% agree with, or who will "dillute" the thing that you think you love about the group.

And people leave groups, too. Or they change.

Twitter, on the other hand, is not really social software. It's not groups.

Instead of people going to the cafe to meet - and, god forbid, having to deal with their friends' friends habits, or strangers - it's as if everyone has their own cafe, where only they can speak, all the time. And sometimes, like ships bumping in the night, those cafe-bubbles overlap.

Which is why Twitter is great for a lot of things, but not building the kind of community that Scoble is lamenting.

Because to form that deep type of connection, you REQUIRE "off-topic" chat, and adjusting to each others' idiosyncracies and social engagement styles. It requires compromise, and annoyance, and fighting and making up.

Without those things, you can't have a true relationship.

Relationships, among two people or groups, are messy and changeable.

Their frustrations are the very reason that they are valuable.

</comment><comment><USER15> An interesting explanation of why discussion forums remind me of fashion and why HN's time is ticking:

Both systems can be modeled as a few cool types trying to stay away from some clueless followers. They move someplace else -- and are followed by the clueless. So they have to move again. And again...

I guess I qualify at least as a clueless follower here. That is better than fashion, where I'm not even a clueless follower. :-)

Ah well, it is a stark reminder. I'll take responsibility and just read in the future, unless it is a subject I know quite well.

<comment><USER16> it isn't boolean. there is a distribution ranging from bleeding edge to last guy in the room to know. it would be cool to see the popularity of things graphed over time and compare distributions (twitter may make this possible).</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Web App for Casual Video Surveillance with Webcam - <AUTHOR> https://videosurveillance.webcam/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any feedbacks would be very welcome, thank you!</comment>


Source code to CS:GO and TF2 leaks - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/g610dc/source_code_to_csgo_and_tf2_torrent_is_now_on/ <comment><USER2> They say this leak might enable more malware developed targetting these games.

The code seems to have already been leaked 2 years ago.

[https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599332362?t=03s](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599332362?t=03s)</comment>


The planets of our solar system viewed in the Moon's orbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/the-planets-of-our-solar-system-viewed-in-the-moons-orbit-2012084/ <comment><USER2> Oh, I interpreted this headline slightly differently--I was expecting to see a set of epicycle-orbit-diagrams given the Moon as the center of the Solar system.

<comment><USER3> For diagrams with Earth as the center, see: <http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/work/orrery/>

Launch the Flash simulation, click on Tychonian, and trace a planet. Venus is unexpected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is neat to see, though I'll admit I was hoping to see broader views of what the sky would look like if, say, Jupiter or Saturn were that close to us.

If you're interested in a direct size comparison like this, I've recently made a poster for our campus planetarium that shows all the planets at once. It's CC licensed, so you're welcome to print your own copy:

<http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/solarsystem/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I've recently bought my first telescope, a 6" reflector. I'm glad I bought it instead of a new iPad or Retina MacBook.

I fear that with the current urbanization trends, in the near future most people will never live to see a dark night sky.

Considering that astronomy played a huge role in early human history and civilization, I think we're losing a huge part of the human experience.

<comment><USER6> Wayne Rosing has [1] a company that put telescopes out into places with good viewing conditions, a camera sensor, and an internet connection. Scheduling time on his 'mini' telescopes was pretty easy at one time.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cumbres_Observatory_Global_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cumbres_Observatory_Global_Telescope_Network)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Extend your arm with a quarter between your thumb and index. That's the moon.

Now take a coaster in your hand. That's our earth as seen from the moon.

</comment><comment><USER8> also of interest

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Star- size...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Star-sizes.jpg)

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Planet- st...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Planet-star- sizes-01.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be pretty cool to be a moon orbiting Jupiter

<comment><USER10> Has anyone done the math on what would happen if we were? Would the heat coming from Jupiter be enough to keep Earth warm enough for life?

<comment><USER11> Jupiter's radiation belts make for a very inhospitable place.

[http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3010/hiding-from- jupiters-...](http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3010/hiding-from-jupiters- radiation)</comment></comment></comment>


Scanning books at 250 pages a minute (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/vision/BFS-Auto/ <comment> jonah-archive I am not the domain expert on this project, but here at the Internet Archive we ended up developing our own system (not dissimilar from this one, albeit with significantly less automation) at a fairly low cost. Some links for details:

[https://archive.org/scanning](https://archive.org/scanning)

[https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem](https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem) (links to additional detail pages there)

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5kjy/saving- hum...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jp5kjy/saving-human- knowledge-at-800-pages-an-hour) (a few years old)

We've found that high-cost implementations are less appealing to smaller sites and libraries (which may have mandates that books not be shipped away), and we can achieve high scanning rates through parallelism rather than single extremely high-throughput stations. Additionally, many books are much more complex, valuable, fragile, or simply not amenable to automatic methods whereas skilled scanners can move through them with ease.

<comment><USER2> RE " ....ended up developing our own system...." The Internet Archive should more clearly credit where this design originated from. Whose work it is based on. It is only reluctantly that you gave them any credit.

<comment><USER2> It's based on an open source design . SNIP ( from bottom of page [https://forum.diybookscanner.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3161](https://forum.diybookscanner.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3161) ) page "...the way the TableTopScribe was handled wasn't great (there's a long, long behind-the-scenes story that goes with that), but I was able to convince them to post that credit at the bottom of the page after some back- and-forth with Robert Miller. When the Archive uses and changes our technology, It shows that our ideas are viable and that our approach has merit and value. Ultimately, the intention of making things Open Source was to get people to copy it, and so if I step back far enough, I feel a real sense of pride and accomplishment when I see things like this. (even when the purple tinge shows they are still using the cheap COB LEDs... sigh). Truth be told, at least when I was there, the Archive people were my people and I still care about them and their mission.

Unfortunately it was the Archive (through my work with them, when I worked there, and later, when they rebuilt the design in China) that unintentionally taught me that Open Hardware is a toothless thing. They did, in the end, "release" their "source files" \- an .easm which requires Solidworks and doesn't give you the ability to change things*, but does give you a functional assembly to take measurements from. For the Archivist, I chose to share DXFs, STLs, and dimensioned drawings, which have a different set of problems, but at least have wide interoperability. All in all, it's an imperfect world, but a good one. Ultimately, I care far, far more about scanning books than I do about the specifics of their operations, so I've come to peace with all of it and feel good that they've taken it as far as they have. Scan on....." and their reluctant acknowledgement where the idea came from ..right at bottom of page ( [https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem](https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem)) .... "...Before we close, we want to recognize the early work of Daniel Reetz and the DIY community. They saw a need for a DIY image capture device and developed a working prototype offered under an OpenHardwareDesign license - CC-BY-SA[2]. You may find information about that here - [http://www.diybookscanner.org...."](http://www.diybookscanner.org....")

<comment><USER3> Thank you for posting this.

<comment><USER4> Hey Dan!

Thank you so much for your work on the diy book scanner project!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is indeed very interesting to see and made me want to share my stories. I've also scanned over thousands of books (mostly Japanese manga, in a way to digitalize them and make them persist) myself and ever wondered where tech could bring this digitalization to. I've spent more than 10,000 hours on this for more than a decade and will probably do it until I couldn't.

Due to the requirement for maximum restoration of manga contents, especially for those cross-spine scenes, the high speed camera-based solution like above or other places which focus on formal prints won't work quite well and that leads to two major ways in the trade for decades since some Japanese started this self-scanning thing around 80s:

1) Destructively break the book into unglued pages (which also invovle cutting the glue with heavy-duty paper cutter) and send them to scanner with auto feeder, (then try to glue it back if keeping the book is vital, at best effort). 2) Manually press each page on flatbed scanner (thus A3 scanner works better as it allows vertically scanning spine area usually with the greatest shadow) and scan each page using predefined rough area which would therefore include non-content area as shown in : [https://imgur.com/a/2ITBlJg](https://imgur.com/a/2ITBlJg) (left/right edge and spine).

Solution 1) works great in terms of efficiency but could be a pain for those who love to keep book still in the collection (though malformed anyway, and I myself might consider this when I get old and couldn't bear the effort). 2) would cost a lot more time (on average, #1 takes less than 30 mins per book and #2 takes at least an hour) especially for manually removing noises as shown above. I've tried some basic CV tools/scripts to auto cut at least the edges (middle spine could be troublesome and I'm fine with manually working on that), which work really poorly since content itself could also be largely variant if we try to determine "edge" by checking pixel distribution.

Hopefully before 2nd decade finishes, I either give in to destruction or find a perfect way to automate the noise-clearing process.

</comment><comment><USER6> #IDidTheMath

There are about 129,864,880 books in the entire world. The median length for all books is about 68000 words. It would roughly translate into 250 manuscript pages in average.

If you must know, it would take 247 years for one scanner to do its magic and digitalize all the books ever written.

Ps: Pretty sure I screwed something along the way, would appreciate if you don't roast me for my math :v

<comment><USER7> Or one year with 247 scanners. :-D

<comment><USER8> I am pretty sure it takes a long time to put a book in that device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For us mere, mortal humans, there is [https://www.diybookscanner.org/](https://www.diybookscanner.org/)

<comment><USER10> pretty cool. I'd improve the design by adding a foot lever and footswitch for taking the photo in order to reduce the back and forward hand motion

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And what about the processing of all those images?

There seems to be a lack of free software for efficiently tidying up images obtained from an ordinary, non-automatic scanner. Sometimes turning raw scans into a nice PDF takes much longer than the manual scanning, so making the scanning faster wouldn't be the first priority for improving things (though better hardware might give images that need less tidying up).

Rotating and skewing the image so that the lines of text are horizontal and the margins vertical doesn't seem to be a very hard problem, but I've not seen an easily available and easy-to-use program for doing it. If you end up GIMP- ing each page you can see how that takes longer than the scanning.

There are several programs that look for the bounding box of the text and rotate based on that, but they don't work very well: they get confused by page numbers, chapter headings, side notes, and random blotches. It would be better to recognise the lines of text, which is what you really want to be straight and parallel.

</comment><comment><USER12> Still under-performs the fictional predicted rate of robotics in the 80s. [https://tenor.com/view/johnny-johnny5-johnnyfive-reading- sca...](https://tenor.com/view/johnny-johnny5-johnnyfive-reading-scan- gif-12961036)

<comment><USER13> There's also Vernor Vinge's "librareome" idea: chuck entire books into a heavy-duty shredder, photograph the resulting shreds with lots of high-speed cameras as they're blown through a wind tunnel, and finally reassemble images of the original pages with software.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very interesting idea, but I can see a whole pile of practical issues with it. Still, top marks for out of the box thinking, it's like shotgun sequencing for books.

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

<comment><USER14> I think that's where the name comes from. I suspect that it's satirical to point out the whole pile of practical issues with shotgun sequencing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know of any commercial solutions for this that don't involve e.g. having to disassemble the book and feed in a stack of pages? Ideally something on Amazon but "prosumer" lever stuff is good too.

I would love to have digital backups of my library and personal notebooks.

<comment><USER16> I worked for a company that did this. We chopped off the spines to turn them into looseleaf, which could be rapidly scanned in an automated fashion. Then disposed of the original materials and mailed our clients CD-ROMs of high-res scans, optionally OCRed. Obviously there are downsides to this approach, but for situations where fits, it makes a ton of sense.

Please don't take this sentence out of context, but I kept a lot of severed spines as souvenirs when I left that job.

<comment><USER17> > I kept a lot of severed spines as souvenirs when I left that job

Brutal.

<comment><USER18> Would be a fantastic way to outfit a bar or lounge. Severed spines with an e-interface for content access. Maybe some kinda laser pointer based lookup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Suddenly those fake bookshelves that people buy to look as if they're well read make perfect sense. Have to re-calibrate.

<comment><USER19> Speaking of spines and copyright issues:

In K W Jeter's excellent dark cyberpunk novel "Noir", intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood, so copyright violators were punished by having their still-living spinal cords stripped out and made into high quality speaker cords in which their consciousness is preserved, usually presented to the copyright owner as a trophy.

"In the cables lacing up Alex Turbiner's stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who'd thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him."

[https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/noir/](https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/noir/)

>There's a lot to like in the novel.

>My favorite section is the middle section where the origin of the asp-heads is detailed via McNihil's pursuit of a small time book pirate and the preparation of the resulting trophy. The information economy did, in this future, largely come to place. As a result, intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood. Therefore, death is a fitting punishment. McNihil, in his point by point review of the origin of asp-heads, notes that even in the 20th Century there was the phrase: "There's a hardware solution to intellectual property theft. It's called a .357 magnum."

>Actually it's decided that death is too good and too quick for pirates.

>Their consciousness is preserved by having their neural network incorporated in various devices. (Turbiner likes to use stripped down spinal cords for speaker wire.)

>This sounds like a cyberpunk notion but, in other parts of the novel, Jeter takes a swipe at such hacker/information economy/internet cliches as information wanting to be free (McNihil destroys a nest of such net hippies) or the future economy being based on information. Villain Harrisch sneers at the notion stating that information can be distorted but atoms – and the wealth they represent – endure.

>Still, his novel is chock full of the high-tech, low-life that characterizes cyberpunk.

(I'd quote some more, but as a high-tech, low-life net hippie, I'm afraid of having my nest destroyed and getting my spine ripped out!)

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect the writer to be showing a bit of his bias here. Wonder what his stance was on librarians, death by being buried under books perhaps?

<comment><USER19> K W Jetter was a good friend of Philip K Dick, and the character Alex Turbiner had some similarities and might have been based on him! From the review I linked to:

>A sort of Dick-like (in the sense of a largely ignored and prolific author of paperbacks and lover of music) author and idol of McNihil shows up in Turbiner. (Jeter wryly notes that authors were particularly "mean bastards" in regard to copyrights.)

It's ironic and fitting that PKD has been reincarnated as a robot and new versions of his mind and his work have been reconstructed by infringing on his intellectual property rights with machine learning.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/sep/14/copyright...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/sep/14/copyright.guardianweeklytechnologysection)

[https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11787262/blade-runner-neural- ne...](https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11787262/blade-runner-neural-network- encoding)

K W Jeter also wrote some authorized sequels to Blade Runner (the movie, not the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/reading-through-a- closed-...](https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/reading-through-a-closed- book/overview/)

Some nerds have done this ... scanning through a closed book.

</comment><comment><USER21> In 1985 ucl had a camera co produced with the British library for photography of rare tomes which couldn't be opened flat for risk to the binding. Wedge/prism shaped descending digital camera</comment>


Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act - <AUTHOR> https://energyinnovationact.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is the first bipartisan carbon pricing bill to be introduced in 10 years.</comment>


How many blogs one can read in a day? - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking about writing a post about this since long but somehow never worked out. But I think this place is perfect to ask this question.
How many blogs one can read in a day? Especially when you are a programmer or co-founder of a startup. I have tens of blogs subscribed in my google reader starting from Techcrunch to PsyBlog. It does give me a feeling of knowing it all but how much it is really useful in day to day life? Does all this time worth spending behind reading them?
Whats your opinion? How much time do you spend everyday to read blogs and how many you are able to read in a day? <comment><USER2> I've got 99 subscriptions in Google Reader right now, but over 1000+ stories unread. I'd say half are from sites that post 30+ items a day. These I won't necessarily read but instead will just skim the titles for key interest words.

The rest, I'll eventually skim through and read maybe 30% of, but over the span of a few days.

With Hacker News though, on a good day, there's potentially 30+ great posts that I'll try to read throughout the day (the headlines of course go through my interest scan filter), from many blogs that I don't subscribe too.

I'd say I do the Google reader thing for about an hour daily, and reading Hacker News stuff another 1 or 2 easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats good number and good amount of time in a day you spend for reading. But how useful those 30+ posts blogs are? I unsubscribed mashable because of the same reason and I don't think I am missing anything.

<comment><USER2> It's hard to say, because those 30 vary in topic by the day. I should note that some end up being web comics, or straight up photos and things. Others end up being on topics like Emacs (you can always use more emacs tips, right?), Programming Languages, Usability, Security, new sites/utilities, Photography.

I learn a lot of new things, or at least get pointed to things that I might need to know about some day. I guess I sort of try to be a swiss army knife of knowledge. If you ask me a question, I may have a small tool to help answer, but you'll need a workshop if it's extensive (I normally know where the closest one is though).

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I have also developed this kind of ability (swiss army knife) after couple of years of reading habit. Google reader has changed everything :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some subscriptions act somewhat as filters for other (possible) subscriptions. I have quite a number of feeds bookmarked; however, I visit only a subset daily, having found over time that they generate or cite the majority of the items I find interesting. Other feeds I touch on somewhat less frequently, when I am in the mood for something different or when an item causes me to "see what they've been up to".</comment>


Supreme Court says Uber driver is employee entitled to unemployment benefits - sahin-boydas https://www.reuters.com/article/employment-uber/penn-supreme-court-says-uber-driver-is-employee-entitled-to-unemployment-benefits-idUSL2N2EY239 <comment><AUTHOR> This title was shortened by leaving off "Penn." from the beginning of the original title which unfortunately significantly changes the meaning.

Penn. Supreme Court refers to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and this was a ruling regarding the drivers status under Pennsylvania state law. Although significant it is much less so than a ruling from the US Supreme Court which is what is generally referred to when "Supreme Court" by itself is used.

</comment><comment><USER2> Misleading title. It should read "Penn. Supreme Court says Uber driver is employee entitled to unemployment" instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> This needs to be retitled. There is a huge different between the US Supreme Court and a state supreme court</comment>


ASK HN: I completely lost access to my main Gmail account - <AUTHOR> What are my options?<p>Google is not helping at all. I don't have backup codes, I broke the phone that had the 2FA app and I don't remember the password.
There is no manual processing, no passport photo etc verification process. I lost all my old emails and probably offended so many people in my circle by not seeing/not replying to their emails. Is this really the end of my relationship with my old email addr? This doesn't make sense to me. I would pay to recover this trove of data and my personal reputation is in line here. Does Google not help at all in a situation like this? <comment><USER2> No, Google does not help at all. You are stuck in a Kafkaesque hell. I know because I helped my brother out of one.

The only way I helped him was by having a friend who worked at Google. I hope you do too. You can tweet at them, but I think your Twitter account needs to be linked to the email address you no longer have access to.

I'm still so angry at Google that it actually made me emotional to type this. From the bottom of my heart, fuck that company for tricking us into thinking we can trust it with the most important parts of our digital lives. I hope the US breaks them up.

<comment><USER3> You can at least get your whole family to pull down Google Takeout archives (yearly, or even quarterly for extra credit).

Having a recent backup makes the thought of losing everything there a while lot less threatening.

<comment><USER2> Because I have to use it for business, I also have a couple other paid email services that pull and archive all my Google mail, and I similarly mirror my photos/files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have a complete answer for you, but:

> probably offended so many people in my circle by not seeing/not replying to > their emails.

If I were you, I'd BCC everyone whose addresses you remember with a short note saying to the effect of "I lost my other mail address email@example.com, gimme a sec pls" and I'm sure this incident will have no long-term impact on your reputation. Shit happens.

As far as getting help from Google goes, I think the only reliable method for non-paying customers is to raise a huge stink on websites like this or Twitter. Take this with a grain of salt, however; I'm much more likely to observe these big stinks and less likely to hear about people just calling support and getting help. It _may_ be possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it possible to repair the phone?</comment>