Ask HN: Any alternatives to SproutSocial.com? - <AUTHOR>

We use the service and it works decently enough but the pricing is ridiculous. They just raised the pricing recently and we will stop using the service. It just doesn't make sense at the new price point, we'll do it by hand.... however, I was hoping there were other alternatives out there? Anyone know of similar services? <comment><USER2> What about Hootsuite or Buffer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Know about those two, any others?</comment></comment>


Larry Wall's Very Own Home Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.wall.org/~larry/ <comment><USER3> Larry Wall and his wife are some of the nicest people I ever had the pleasure of meeting. I posted this story on HN before several years ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890504)), but I think it's worth reposting here:

I have a very charming Larry Wall story. He came to give a seminar to the research center where I was working, and gave a fantastic talk on Perl 6. Late in the evening, I ran into him and his wife on the bus when getting home from work - and started talking to them. Apparently, nobody from the department had arranged to take them out for dinner, so we ended up going out for dinner together, where we had a fantastic discussion covering religion, tolerance, and lots of other topics. I am a staunch materialist and atheist, while both the Walls are serious committed Christians, but we had a really pleasant discussion on religion and the nature of evidence.

I ended up giving his wife a copy of Hume's Dialogue on Natural Religion, and they were kind enough to sign a copy of the Camel book for a friend who is a huge Perl fan.

A lot of people know Larry by reputation - but his wife Gloria is just as smart and kind. It was a bit of a strange evening, but it was a rare privilege to meet two such interesting people.

I cannot emphasize enough how unassuming, kind and decent the Walls are. If you are also interested in very intelligent writing about religion, their son, Aaron, has a very neat blog: [http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/](http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/).

<comment><USER4> This sort of interaction, where multiple grownups just talk about a topic they have fundamentally different beliefs on, and being curious and mature enough to have a civilized discussion about it, seems just so distant and alien in these times.

I've had conversations like these, about VERY sensitive topics, with friends who disagreed, and none of us held a grudge (that I know of). I miss that.

I know this happened years ago, but still, thanks for sharing. It gives me hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh man, this brings back memories.

Larry Wall is a wonderful human who I had the privilege of meeting back in college. He came out for a summer tech conference we were hosting and was the keynote speaker. When we broke out into small groups he was in mine and we chatted a bit. He was the first internet famous person I had ever met - <USER2> and unassuming, and also the creator of something highly successful in the Perl programming language.

Perl was one of the original web languages and the Swiss Army knife of scrappy programmers and sysadmins everywhere. It was a direct influence on many more recent programming languages, including Python and Ruby to name a few.

My friends and I discovered this very own home page back around the time I met him some 10 years ago. It was where I first learned the word "chartreuse", and I'm still not fully sure what color that refers to. You can find some of his writings under the "My Ravings" section, which are a hoot.

One of my favorites of his writings is The Three Virtues of a programmer ([http://threevirtues.com/](http://threevirtues.com/)):

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

<comment><USER6> I learned Perl 4 back in the mid-1990s, before the massive piles of cruft got bolted on that turned it in to Perl 5. It was basically just glorified sed/awk meets shell script in a single process, and it was awesome.

As a junior programmer, I had to do some maintenance work on a couple of daemons written in C that were just launchers for other programs. A couple thousand lines of messy, badly structured C. So I had the clever idea to just rewrite them in Perl. Suddenly they were 50 lines, easy to read, robust, and had really useful logging.

Perl 4 also spoke Sybase really well, which made it our reporting tool of choice. We could grab whatever from our Sybase databases, and format nice printed/screen reports easily in Perl.

I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess. Worse, there were three of us writing it, so consistent coding standards were a big challenge.

I don't use Perl anymore for anything but one-liner fancy greps on the command line. If I have to write an actual script, it'll either be plain sh/ksh/bash, or Python or Ruby if it needs structure. I'm not going to waste my brain trying to write readable code in Perl anymore.

<comment><USER7> > I was really excited when Perl 5 came out, but ugh. I wound up writing about > 10,000 lines of it at a dotcom, and it was so, so ugly. All the stuff that > made 50 line Perl 4 beautiful made 10,000 line Perl 5 an unreadable mess.

I find that Perl gets a bad rap for being "unreadable". In my experience the readability of Perl is the direct result of the discipline of the person writing it. It's not hard to write readable, maintainable Perl 5, but it's _easy_ to write _crap_ Perl 5. So, you have to be disciplined in how you create things.

<comment><USER6> Just about any programming language _can_ be made readable, with sufficient discipline. But it shouldn't require "discipline" to have basically readable code.

Python is like the opposite of Perl in that respect. It's inherently readable, and you have to go out of your way to make it difficult to grok what the code is doing. (Ruby is somewhere in the middle, but Ruby is more eloquent than Python, so I'll take a little clarity risk for the potential of even greater clarity.)

There's a joke running around Twitter about how it's hard to tell the difference between Perl and a cat stepping on your keyboard. You'll never see that for Python or Ruby.

<comment><USER8> That Python is fundamentally more readable is a myth. Unless by "readable" you mean that any Python program is superficially more visually similar to other Python programs than are programs in other languages. Syntactic white space will do that.

In comparing Python, Ruby and Perl, each relies to a certain extent on symbols in the code to express meaning. Python uses symbols very sparingly, and those it does use are either very much like other languages or established patterns from mathematics, even going so far as to ban braces for indicating structure --nothing is exotic. Perl is the opposite extreme, with to sigils encode variable context (which is a concept foreign to other language) and complex regular expression and quoting schemes built into to language. Ruby sits very much in the middle between these languages.

The use of all non-word symbols to densely encode meaning helps reduce code size at the cost of apparent readability. That's why you think Ruby is "more eloquent". Perl can be even more expressive than Ruby, but it's compactness can intimidate people, leading to defensive "humor".

Real readability comes from good structure and explicit code, whatever the language. It is especially important for developers using dynamic languages to document the contents of their data-structures.

If Python tends to be readable, it comes from a culture that values readability and focuses heavily on choosing a single, consistent style. Not from any inherent technical factor.

This is a nice piece on code readability in real life terms: [http://www.pgbovine.net/python- unreadable.htm](http://www.pgbovine.net/python-unreadable.htm) (TLDR: code may be readable in over small sections, but what really matters is whether you can understand the whole program. If you get lazy, you will make a mess. Be explicit.)

<comment><USER6> You can quote all the "facts" you want, but I've done a lot of both Python and Perl, and it's a _lot_ easier to walk cold into a bunch of Python code, even badly written Python. What you call "superficially more visually similar", I call consistency. If I have to use conscious thought to figure out the structure of the code, it's taking from the conscious thought I need to understand its function.

And yes, Perl is even more powerful than Ruby when it comes to making code compact, but compactness and eloquence are two different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In 2000, I managed to put together $ for a US trip from India to attend YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) at CMU. I had been on #perl for years, and knew a lot of rhe community, but I had never spoken with Larry. I remember I was given a shared dorm room (even though I had requested a single), and as I was settling in, this guy in all black walks in, and says hi I am Larry, I am your roommate. I was like hey Larry, and went back to unpacking, and in about a minute realized it was _the_ Larry. It was awesome as Larry then took me around the conference and introduced me to many of the other legendary Perlers. A+ dude.

</comment><comment><USER10> Larry used to do consulting engagements in Boulder, and I had the honor of meeting him several times. Larger then life person but in just how he carried himself - he was quiet and unassuming, but still got people to work well together. I was always impressed with how he worked with Tom Christiansen, given the two of them seemed as different as you could be.

Perl never made the javascript transition, but I think you call tell a lot about a programmer by the look in their eyes when you say perl. If the eye twinkles with delight at perl's simplicity, and then the expression is occasionally replaced by a murderous look of rage when you have to maintain a 5k line script, you can tell that the programmer is a great programmer and has a tale or two to inform more junior members of our profession.

<comment><USER11> _then the expression is occasionally replaced by a murderous look of rage when you have to maintain a 5k line script_

Try dozens of 5k line Perl scripts

I think my expression will soon be permanently fixed into a look of murderous rage

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Heavy Perl user over the years here. Its the only language after Lisp, that will let you feel the power beneath your fingers. Back in the day I would do with Perl do over a weekend, what a Java programmer would budget 6 months to do. It was just a productivity catalyst from hell.

I still think nothing comes to beat Perl when it comes to regex, and unix level scripting work.

I eventually moved on to other backend languages/stacks. But I still miss the productivity boost Perl is.

Over the years, I came to realize I like Perl so much, not because what Perl is, but the underlying concepts. Eventually I realized Perl is the closest to Lisp in the C world. And I like Perl, because I liked Lisp more. Lisp offers everything Perl offers, and more. And Lisp is infamous for almost the same reasons. These days I think Perl refugees will eventually find refuge somewhere in the Common Lisp or Clojure camps. And that is really good, because Perl like languages are basically a programming philosophy.

Lastly, Higher Order Perl(free to download online) is one of the best programming books you will read. Its a book on the same lines as OnLisp from Paul Graham.

<comment><USER13> I can't upvote this enough. Thanks for putting my thoughts into words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just in case you don't quite know who Larry Wall is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall)

I wrote code for a bank using perl. I'd say 95% of their code at the time was in perl. Website called perl, back-end processing was perl scripts. Cron jobs were all perl script that needed to run to do house-keeping.

<comment><USER15> It's a shame Perl isn't still used. Maybe not by those who have to maintain poorly written Perl admittedly.

(Edit: disappointed to see the Perl link doesn't actually work).

<comment><USER16> It's not sexy enough to be talked about, but it is still there.

50% of my (new) projects remain in Perl. The other 50% in a mixture of C, Go, and C++.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Larry Wall's State of the Onion talks are pretty entertaining to read. As someone else said in this thread, he has the skill of linking to many other topics and making them seem related, then jumping back to the main topic he is on, and making it all sound interesting, and smooth and natural, not contrived. He also makes lots of good jokes and puns (well, at least some are good [1]).

And speaking of Damian Conway, who was mentioned in this thread as a possible heir-apparent, he is brilliant. I bought and read an intermediate Perl book by him. Some really good stuff in there. Forget the name of the book now, but it should be possible to find it by a web search. It might have been Object- oriented Perl.

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

[1] That was a kind of mild good-humored jab at him, BTW, the kind of thing that he does a lot in his talks and writings :)

<comment><USER18> Rule of thumb.

If you have a chance to see Damian Conway talk, do. I don't care if you aren't interested in the topic. I don't care if you think you'll be lost in 5 minutes. Just go.

You won't regret it. I promise.

<comment><USER17> Great rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Funny that he lists his personality type, and that it's INFP. I find this is one of the coding types most likely to get a) amusingly literary/language- focused and b) extremely detail-oriented about their code. INFPs are also known for their "do what I wanna" values so the chartreuse decision was amusing in this light. I haven't used Perl much, but I wonder how else it might echo these values. He seems like he's made it his own, at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER20> I learned perl almost solely because I love Larry Wall's personality.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, that background color peels off my retina.

<comment><USER19> Recurring corneal erosions sufferer checking in. Yeah, this color scheme is not one I'd be spending reading time on during a bad eye day :-)

<comment><USER22> FTA : "I'm also keeping a diary all about my cornea transplant."

<comment><USER19> Wow. Is that linked? I'll check it out. Eye conditions are weird that way, maybe the color really helps him out. I need relatively dark and low-contrast when part of my cornea has just been peeled off :-)

<comment><USER23> Yup! [http://www.wall.org/~larry/cornea.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/cornea.html)

It's actually a really cool read - I wish he had more stuff posted on his blog to read :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh man I haven't seen geekcode in years

<comment><USER25> Even when it was popular, there certainly weren't many people who couldnt legitimately claim P+++++

<comment><USER26> According to the Code of the Geeks, P+++++ means: _I am Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz_.

So yeah, not many people may claim that.

<comment><USER27> Full decode of the P section is even more amusing:

GEEK PERL CODE [P+++++(--)$]

My tendencies on this issue range from: "I am Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz.", to: "Perl users are sick, twisted programmers who are just showing off." Getting paid for it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Larry's Perl page is a bit telling:

[http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/perl.html)

Perl 6 is still the future of Perl?

[https://www.perl6.org](https://www.perl6.org)

<comment><USER29> Perl5 definitely isn't the future IMO, but many will point out that neither is Perl6.

Perl5's CPAN is still very useful, the language is still available on most UNIX systems, it has some really nice OO modules like Moose, and the community still has lots of conferences and releases regular updates. I personally prefer Python in this space though.

Perl6 on the other hand is gorgeous. You can write beautiful OO, FP, imperative...whatever code. Grammars and MOP are great. The parallel support is cool and the Unicode support is top notch. You can also do really cool stuff not normally seen in scripting languages like restrict the type going into a function to be a non-negative integer in the range of 1..10 kind of like in Ada. The downside is that the language is still immature and adoption is slow. The VM is getting better, but with things like Nim, Julia, Crystal(fast languages), Perl6 is a tougher sell.

<comment><USER30> I will never understand why it was not possible to leave Perl5 as Perl and call Perl6 something else, maybe 'Butterfly'. They share very little except their creator.

<comment><USER31> One of the most active Perl 6 contributors made a repeat plea to Larry on the topic of its name just the other day: [https://perl6.party/post/A-Request-to- Larry-Wall-to-Create-a...](https://perl6.party/post/A-Request-to-Larry-Wall- to-Create-a-Language-Name-Alias-for-Perl-6)

<comment><USER32> Larry was just discussing this with my wife (the official(?) Perl poet) yesterday. His wife and my wife didn't like the name he proposed. I kinda liked it.

I don't feel at liberty to disclose the name, but it might be in the recent irc logs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> His "Web and CGI programming" part cracks me up.

I really like this, and hope that at least some part of the web moves towards a similar federated approach (as opposed to having all personal information on other services like FB or LinkedIn etc)

Other efforts in this vein: [https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)

And my very own try on a webpage ( I started last week, its even worse than Larry's, please dont judge): [http://www.hmontenegro.com](http://www.hmontenegro.com)

<comment><USER34> Doesn't have a chartreuse background so +1 :-)

(I can't believe I spelled chartreuse right on the first try..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's with the

> Getting paid for it!

On his geek code explanation?

[http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/ungeek.html)

<comment><USER24> It's been decoded from geekcode, the $ on the end translates to "Getting paid for it!" in whatever was used to decode

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was just thinking about Perl and how they dropped the ball. I'm sure Perl powers way more things than we want to admit - but its sadly not the first language that comes to mind when you want to write a quick script...

<comment><USER37> Perl is still my goto language for scripts. It all depends on what you're used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> _I hate my telephone. Please don 't ask for my phone number._

cool. he's one of us.

<comment><USER39> If only he would publish his phone number there, then we could all help him hate it together ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > I hate my telephone. Please don't ask for my phone number.

Yup, who doesn't :)

<comment><USER41> I think we hate our telephones more than we used to and I have a theory about why. The time lag between saying something and the other person hearing it is very noticeable on cell phones as compared with landlines. This makes conversations very annoying. Person A will begin speaking and then half a second later, they'll hear Person B "interrupting". Of course Person B didn't know he was interrupting because he hadn't yet heard Person A begin to speak. Then they both stop talking, followed by some dead air. And then they both yield to one another. "No, you go ahead, please". For whatever reason, landlines seem to have lower latentency and this doesn't happen.

That and of course there are a zillion more interesting things to do on a smart phone than talk to someone.

<comment><USER42> Huh, I never noticed the latency when talking on a mobile phone, but I also don't remember the last time I used a landline, so maybe I just forgot how much better it was.

The reason I hate the phone function of my phone is that I see calling someone as an ultimate disrespect: "I demand your attention and I demand it now, I don't care what you're doing, it will be up to you to call me back if you don't pick up the phone now!" Then I hate calling other people because I don't want to be disrespectful towards them.

Maybe it was different back when phones were a nice thing, nowadays, like someone mentioned, they usually mean trouble, annoyance or more work. Ugh.

<comment><USER43> Maybe they just want to talk to you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This page loads so fast , why can't all pages be like this? :)

<comment><USER45> The static site movement seems to be the modern embodiment of this philosophy. The tools to generate them (eg Jekyll) might be clunky compared to Notepad but it's definitely a positive thing in this day and age of ever-bloated websites.

<comment><USER46> My personal site does not have any JS, but honestly at this point what I really want is an app where I can edit the page and see the markup and then press a button and it will generate and upload the content to my website.

I tried to finagle gitlab into it (since they offer free hosting and CI) but I haven't gotten the last step to quite work yet. Would be awesome to be able to work in both of line mode or through my Chromebook, and sync everything with git.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Geez I think I just found a broken link - his link under the family section for his daughter Heidi links to [http://summonedcreature.com](http://summonedcreature.com) which is a comic illustrated by his daughter Geneva instead. Geneva's own link is broken.

Time to write an email to firstname.lastname@example.com! It's like I'm back in 1994!

<comment><USER32> The comic is by both. One of the names is a pseudonym.

<comment><USER47> Oh cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Makes me less embarrassed about my own web page on neocities.

</comment><comment><USER49> > "Finger me for my public key".

Double entendre, or unix geek obliviousness?

<comment><USER50> [https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger](https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger)

<comment><USER49> Pretty clear from my comment I know what `finger` is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Much nicer than my homepage from that era.

</comment><comment><USER51> rememberry when homepages were called wallpage?

</comment><comment><USER52> Anyone else spot the Brainfuck in there?

</comment><comment><USER53> I miss sites like this being a greater proportion of the internet.

When everything else was just fields... and javascript was to be used as little as possible.

<comment><USER54> I've been on a rant lately about how much I miss the wild west days of the web, 33k connections and all. I used to visit a blog (it was basically a blog, but probably 5 years before I'd heard the word blog) written by a guy who was chronicling the government controlling his mind with electricity. It was endlessly fascinating, and I can't even find it now. I miss finding the unexpected.

I don't blame javascript, I blame businesses for swallowing everything in an attempt to make money. I think I miss it because people mostly created pages out of passion or curiosity, and they hung out on IRC because they didn't care if everyone could see how poignant their comments were.

<comment><USER55> I think I remember the blog you're talking about, and now I'm wishing I could find it too. Everyone knew about the Time Cube guy, but the guy whose brain was being controlled by government electricity, that took your links page to another level.

I distinctly remember getting sucked into it and then having the realization that a percentage of the population were paranoid schizophrenics and that they could publish now. He helped me build some armor (and compassion) for the social media age.

<comment><USER54> Man, I'm really glad to have some confirmation that I'm not crazy and that page really existed. I recall spending hours reading his reports, it always sucked me in somehow. I think he was actually a good writer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> :-)</comment>


The Art of Trivialization - <AUTHOR> http://five-sigma-software.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-art-of-trivialization.html

<comment><USER2> "Don't show me something complicated. Show me how you can make something complicated, simple" \- My mentor when I started development</comment>


A pre-K teacher on the trouble with lockdown drills - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rehearsing-for-death-a-pre-k-teacher-on-the-trouble-with-lockdown-drills/2014/10/28/4ab456ea-5eb2-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html <comment><USER4> It was a really great essay on the absurdity of the drill, all up until the last two paragraphs. Next they'll be ducking and covering, and the teacher can conclude by quoting the model numbers of some Russian ICBMs. You know, the cold war seems to be amping up again after all...

My daughter was in JK ("Pre-K") last year. If the school pulled a stunt like this, she wouldn't be attending it anymore. It's offensive and pathetic... I really thought I was fully jaded enough with the public school system that nothing could surprise me anymore, but well I guess I was wrong.

Is this is some sort of Orwellian conditioning process to prepare these young minds for the friendly Homeland Security Officers that will be riding armored tanks around town in the not-to-distant future?

Do people think these drills are reasonable, proportionate, and beneficial? It's sounds completely toxic to me. There are innumerable ways you could help increase K-12 students likelihood of surviving a multitude of common disasters, or fatal accidents. Let's talk about what to do if you see a downed electric wire. Or how to recognize a stroke. Or teach them the the Heimlich maneuver. Or how to find people to talk to if you're feeling depressed. Or not to drink the shit under the kitchen sink, or eat anything in the medicine cabinet. Or how to safely cut with a kitchen knife. Or how to make a disaster readiness plan with your family. You know, shit that actually maims or kills more than 1 in 10,000,000.

Practicing hiding in the closet because a killer is roaming the halls with an assualt rifle... Either this is an "agenda" or someone needs to get a fucking clue. I guess in that sense, the last two paragraphs of the article clarified it for me.

<comment><USER5> > Let's talk about what to do if you see a downed electric wire [etc]

Absolutely! Isn't that taught?

> If the school pulled a stunt like this, she wouldn't be attending it > anymore.

That's kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Would you really make such a binary choice about such a small part of the school? And what school would you choose instead?

> Either this is an "agenda" or someone needs to get a fucking clue.

Surely its a combination of small factors such as people being genuinely scared that their school will be next or that its dictated from above the school level?

<comment><USER4> No, these things are definitely not taught enough. For example, ask grade schoolers what the signs of a stroke are, and what to do if you see someone exhibiting those signs. What percent can answer? Google says strokes kill 130,000 Americans every year. So, I'm thinking... what's the "Expected ROI" of 15 minutes per year on stroke education? Somewhere between 10,000x and infinitely more than the Expected ROI of this drill. But that's just one random example, I think you would be hard pressed to find literally any use of 15 minutes of classroom time with a lower ROI than this drill.

To me, it reflects so poorly on the judgement of the school administrators that it should make people seriously question what's going on. Every school does fire drills, probably because there's some regulation requiring it, and the mental framework for the drill is that there's an accidental fire in the building. This is an entirely different league. This is a "terrorist loose in the hallways" training exercise for 5 year olds. I'm mad enough it happened to someone else's kids.

Just to give some context, my daughter's JK teacher brought her _horse_ to school for show-and-tell, she gives my daughter riding lessons (and yes there's a lot of trust involved letting someone help your 5 year old ride a horse), she had my daughter over for dinner one night when we had to take my son to the ER. It's a parent-participation school so regularly I spend time in the classroom. I could not imagine a more nurturing, peaceful, and loving environment. The juxtaposition of that with this terror drill is hard for me to reconcile.

I totally agree this is a combination of fear and horrible policy-making by administrators. I in no way hold the teachers responsible/accountable for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By this time I know better than to waste my effort trying to make Americans see why guns really _are_ a problem, and one that can be identified, analyzed and solved far easily than trying to address the "motivations" that turn people into mass killers. Because guns are freedom; guns don't kill people; we need our guns to protect against criminal's guns; blah blah.

I've realized many Americans will never see high-caliber/high-capacity assault rifles as an easier problem to solve than mental health or psychopathic triggers. It is also not an XOR, because you can try to solve both in parallel.

The rest of us non-Americans are just glad our psychopaths and murderers are nowhere near as effective as American ones. And that our children can go to school without having to practice hiding under their desks to avoid being slaughtered mercilessly by some random guy. With a gun.

<comment><USER7> > _" By this time I know better than to waste my effort trying to make > Americans see why guns really are a problem,"_

> _" assault rifles"_

Maybe part of your problem is that you are not particularly informed when it comes to gun laws and crimes committed with guns in the US. Americans, who _are_ familiar with both, immediately notice your ignorance and tune out whatever you are saying.

Assault rifles in the US are _heavily_ regulated at the federal level (as are all other automatic weapons). Since 1934, there have only been _two_ murders with legally owned automatic weapons. One was in 1988 (the murderer was a cop^), the other was in 1992. In _neither_ case was the machine gun an assault rifle (both were machine pistols). To put this in perspective, there are _hundreds of thousands_ of legally owned machine guns in the US.

Legally owned assault rifles simply are not a problem for America.

 _^ Worth noting since law enforcement are are still allowed to purchase new automatic weapons, while other American civilians are not._

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Guns are pretty funny in this country. It is a very polarizing issue. I don't really get it. Why people care so much to either have them or not have them.

Maybe they should be worried more about road safety, heart disease, diabetes, wars so many more pressing issues.

I hear all this talk about "well it is in the Constitution". Let's talk about Constitution. It is a not a scroll passed down from God, contrarry to what many believe. Founding Fathers are not Moses and Abraham. It was a piece of paper written hudreds of years ago, when arms meant rifles and pistols. Some things in it cannot be taken literally anymore. What was the purpose of letting people have arms? Presumably not just to hunt rabbits, but mostly to protect against government abuse and to be able to overthrow it.

Except arms doesn't mean rifles anymore. It means ICMBs, sattelites, fighter jets, shaped charges, IEDs, EMPs, aircraft carriers. Climbing on the roof of your house with a rifle will do jack shit to being able to oppose or protect against "government abuse". It is pointless and stupid. I've seen people go to Startbucks with their AR-15 slung over the shoulder. Really? This is a grown up toddler walking around showing their toy off. Maybe it should be one of those thing if someone really really wants a gun, they shouldn't be allowed to have it, because they are a little too obsessed with it.

On the other side, I don't get the "lets ban the guns" crowd either. So what if some people want to go to gun ranges and shoot soda cans. Or even be idiots and show off their AR-15 at Startbucks. They won't overthrow the government because they'll start shooting each other first. Criminals will find ways to get access to guns anyway. Want to save the children. Best way is to put more money into education, healthcare, social care, after school programms, assist parents and so on.

<comment><USER9> > Except arms doesn't mean rifles anymore. It means ICMBs, sattelites, fighter > jets, shaped charges, IEDs, EMPs, aircraft carriers. Climbing on the roof of > your house with a rifle will do jack shit to being able to oppose or protect > against "government abuse".

You are actually quite wrong. All those weapons you mention are useless for dealing with small groups of people. Those weapons are for taking out huge installations and entire countries.

Even the most oppressive government you can imagine does not kill its citizens in mass, they do it in small numbers. And rifles work perfectly fine to protect against that.

They might not help if the government decided to take out an entire city - <USER2> the government can't do that very often before having no one to govern.

Look at Syria and ISIS. What weapons are they using against the established government of the area? (Not making moral judgments here by saying "established", just using them as an example.) They are using small arms, not fighter jets.

<comment><USER8> > Look at Syria and ISIS. What weapons are they using against the established > government of the area? (Not making moral judgments here by saying > "established", just using them as an example.) They are using small arms, > not fighter jets.

In that case I want to demand legislation to have rocket launchers, AA- manpads, propane tank cannons, Shilkas (ZSU-23-4, they work very well for the ground, especially in urban areas, never know where that armored police trunk will roll by) and so on. Semiautomatics and pistols would be a joke there.

Is there any recent example of any of these millitia groups successfully opposing the US government and winning?

\- Waco Seige?

\- MOVE standoff, where Uncle Sam bombed a whole city block.

I wouldn't call those successes exactly.

<comment><USER10> >Is there any recent example of any of these millitia groups >successfully opposing the US government and winning?

Afghanistan. Not just the American government, the USSR had to withdraw from there as well just about 20 years before.

<comment><USER8> General posession of fire arms is illegal in Afghanistan. Do you know otherwise? I know Mexico and Guatemala I think have a right to bear arms in their Constitution.

Also, can't think it would have been legal during the Soviet occupation. Presumalby we should then ban the guns here as well if we are to follow the model then?

Or, if we don't then I want an ammendment to let me have Stinger missles. Pretty sure just semmiautmatics and pistols wasn't quite enough to shoot down military helicopters and blow up whole convoys between mountain passes.

<comment><USER10> I am sorry, I have no clue about Afghani law. I just gave an example of militia, armed basically with rifles and improvised weapons, successfully defending against not one but two modern military forces.

Also, from the history of recent internal conflicts (e.g Ukraine) a militia fighting its own government can obtain and use tanks and artillery quite easily as there are plenty of people on the both sides who are trained to use such equipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not just about gun control.

It's about people in this country treating guns like their favorite playtoy.

Every freaking thing glorifies guns and what used to be people just committing suicide is now "hell I'll take a dozen people with me because it is so easy".

It's a mental illness and we absolutely refuse to deal with mental illness in this country.

</comment><comment><USER12> The real questions that need ask is what motivates someone to undertake in a premeditated fashion the mass murder of young people.

The firearm is just the means, the motivation is the real question.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Italy its socially unacceptable to be publicly drunk.

Think how nice your country would be if that were so where you live too.

In Switzerland - where most men have a proper army rifle at home - <USER3> there's a break those men don't think "where's my gun?" to go get it and use it but rather to hope that the thief doesn't find it.

(Just picking countries I have actually spent time in; if you can pick out other local norms that you think would make the world a nicer, safer place please share; there's bound to be loads more!)

Social norms will police society. Who wants to live in a bigger society where people seem to buy guns with the explicit intention of actually having the ability to use them on others?

The US doesn't need laws it needs a change in the definition of acceptability. Let guns be the defining acquisition of low-life scum and let the idea that respectable people would arm themselves against the scum be ludicrous and giving in to letting the scum terrorize.

I know everyone is going to downvote everyone in this whole thread based on whether they are pro or con guns, which is a shame; better if we used the votes to promote a meaningful debate regardless of which side we personally shoot for?

<comment><USER13> If you lived in a high crime area, would you deliberately choose to be unarmed, despite knowing that statistically speaking you'd be safer armed? Just to make a political or cultural point?

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. Which was the thrust of my argument. Culture can change.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. What if you had dependents? Would you expose _them_ to higher risk in order to (hopefully) facilitate long-term cultural change?

<comment><USER5> As a law-abiding family, we can only ever be _victims_ of crime. And we've have break ins etc and it sucks. There is a really horrid fear for the first glance at the flat's door every time you come home, fear that it'll be ajar. And the fear that the car window will be broken again.

Now I'm not the kind of man to shoot my own kids or anything like that, but statistically its the man who is most likely to use a handgun to shoot his own family rather than use it to protect them in any kind of superhero intervention dream.

Every American who thinks guns solve disputes should live in Scandinavia and get a feel for how good things can actually be when life is looked at differently and norms are different. I strongly recommend that therapy. Change cultural norms I say!

<comment><USER13> Right, so: that's a yes? If the stats showed your dependents would be in greater danger if you were unarmed, you'd _still_ be disarmed?

<comment><USER5> Its a No. I would not be armed. I am advocating that we don't arm ourselves to protect ourselves.

<comment><USER13> I get it - I'd meant "yes" in the sense of "yes you'd choose to be unarmed".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Instead of controlling guns and inconveniencing those who would use them, we are rounding up and silencing a generation of schoolchildren, and terrifying those who care for them. We are giving away precious time to teach and learn while we cower in fear.

It's time to have a serious chat about gun control, America. Is the NRA really that powerful that all sensible debate is quelled?

<comment><USER13> Indeed. It's beyond ridiculous; teachers are being put in charge of classrooms of minors, while being denied the right to carry arms to protect them effectively. (Perhaps you and I might have different points to make during that conversation).

<comment><USER15> _It 's beyond ridiculous; teachers are being put in charge of classrooms of minors, while being denied the right to carry arms to protect them effectively._

It literally boggles my mind that people make this suggestion with any sincerity.

<comment><USER13> What does a mind look like when it's literally boggling? :)

Seriously though, either:

\- school shootings are a statistically significant threat, in which case, arming teachers who wish to be armed seems reasonable

or

\- school shootings aren't statistically significant, in which case, enough with the fear-mongering already

<comment><USER16> It really is too bad that there are only those two options. /s

<comment><USER13> How long would you say it'd take to disarm America? To a point that had an effect on school shootings? What do you plan to do in the intervening, say, century or so?

You can't point to other countries with no guns and just wish it were like that where you are. It isn't, it won't be for a very long time, and to pretend otherwise is just wishful thinking.

<comment><USER16> Why would it take a century? Idk, 2-3 years? Like 5 tops.

<comment><USER13> Really? You genuinely believe that you could usefully reduce the number of guns in the US in 5 years?

<comment><USER17> "usefully" to what purpose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I enjoy this article:

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this- says...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only- nation-where-this,36131/)

Yes, it's satire.</comment>


Startup marketers to watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.rocketscope.com/list-of-50-startup-marketers-to-watch/

<comment><USER2> who markets marketers? marketer marketers market marketers. stack overflow.</comment>


https://analytics.google.com returns 404. No issue with "http" - <AUTHOR> https://analytics.google.com/

<comment><USER2> 7 points.. front page. i really don't get HN anymore. it's not community, it's editorship

<comment><USER3> DevOps news

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.google.com/analytics/](https://www.google.com/analytics/) ?

</comment><comment><USER5> Oops.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you drop the 's' it'll redirect to the correct url. [http://analytics.google.com/](http://analytics.google.com/)

Edit: Sorry, didn't read the whole title.

<comment><USER7> >didn't read the whole title

Today's internet in a nutshell :)</comment></comment>


Details of Clickjacking Attack Revealed With Online Spying Demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.cgisecurity.org/2008/10/details-of-clic.html <comment><USER2> Surely the fix: Change the button so it says "Allow users to view my cam" instead of "click here", and disallow anything from changing the style of it.

Doesn't seem like a big threat to me. Any evidence it's a threat for anything other than flash settings?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the problem though. The problem is that there's a layer on top of the flash which clicks still register to. There doesn't have to be a button at all, it just so happens that this example uses a button (controlled via javascript on this extra layer) that knows the pattern of where to click to allow the cam/mic to be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah but how many clicks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll tootsie pop?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never made it without biting. Ask Mr. Owl.</comment></comment>


NSA finds Snowden hijacked officials' logins - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/sysadmin-security-fail-nsa-finds-snowden-hijacked-officials-logins/ <comment><USER2> > The National Security Agency (NSA) is the font of information security > wisdom for the US defense and intelligence communities. But apparently, the > NSA's own network security is so weak that a single administrator was able > to hijack the credentials of a number of NSA employees with high-level > security clearances and use them to download data from the agency's internal > networks.

Thats a bit hyperbolic and out of touch with reality. Sure I as a sysadmin with root to most UNIX machines in my companies environment could have been able to copy the raw Oracle db files to steal company secrets, SAP databases for other juicy data that I could sell to a competitor, run a network sniffer on important login servers to steal passwords, that is how the real world works. If anyone believes that you can totally lock down access to every system on your network from your trusted sysadmins and have 100% audibility and accountability you are unfortunately living in a fantasy land. NSA or not, this really isn't something that is 100% preventable.

<comment><USER3> Is it? I'd expect a write-only logging system that runs at a low level exporting logging to remote servers that other admins don't have access to. As the article suggests, you layer admins so no single person can truly compromise things.

It should be pretty basic to catch someone that's resetting user's passwords.

<comment><USER2> Sure, you can remote syslog everything to a remote logging service, but:

1] Do you log _every_ single thing that happens on the machine?

2] If not, did you actually log the proper set of commands that were used to possibly commit a crime?

3] Granted you are not a small startup, do you have a process in place already to data mine, extract and analyze these potentially dangerous commands from log sets that are potentially TB in size?

4] Do you have the personnel in place with the qualifications and time each day/week/month to audit these potentially large results?

5] If you've caught something, aren't you already too late? Do you have some type of magical software in place that will somehow recognize these types of crimes in progress and cut off access in realtime?

Many of these articles totally ignore how these real world systems work (mainly I'm guessing because the authors have never been involved with companies that run 10k-200k servers around the world). It really is more complex than you think. Most companies that aren't startup size are continually playing catch up. Sure they need to put logging in place, auditing, yada yada. That is being balanced with the other day to day pressing tasks also. It always seems to be a game of catch up...

<comment><USER4> Re #1 – at the rate the NSA is reported to be archiving data, do you _really_ think logging every single keystroke that every employee/contractor with any elevated privileges at all ever types would be even vaguely a problem? TB- sized logfiles and processes to datamine them are surely interview tasks or intern familiarisation exercises at their scale?

<comment><USER2> Yes. A previous employer of mine was apparently logging a PB of log data a day between all departments, it isn't something that is just tossed up and somehow works in a month.

Do you have infrastructure in place to store all of that? How are you storing all of this content coherently so that you can go back and audit records of systems at a point in time you are concerned about? Do you have an internal Hadoop cluster configured (not trivial) and the hardware to ingest and process these logs? How are you actually logging _everything_? Do you have dedicated and qualified people to write this software and maintain it? When someone has su -'d to root, how are you logging _everything_ they type coherently? Is your regex smart enough to ingest and contextualize multiline commands as root and add them to your report? What if no actual "bad" commands on your list were typed as root? What if I as a luser copied the "bad" commands to /tmp/kittens.txt, then su -'d to root and ran them there? Is this somehow captured? Are you 100% sure syslog is running 100% of the time on all hosts you are concerned about? Can't I as a sysadmin kill the syslog pid before I commit a crime? Are you using redundant syslog hosts? Are you using TCP and not the default UDP so that syslog doesn't drop packets under load?

Like I said, this isn't as simple as everyone thinks...

<comment><USER4> Ballpark numbers - an employee typing at 100wpm for 40 hours a week generates not quite 70MB worth of keystrokes in a year - and I'd guess that estimate is probably something like 2 orders of magnitude too high - no-one actually types 100wpm nonstop all day every single day at work. Even ignoring that, I've got enough disk space sitting under my TV to store (uncompressed) every keystroke typed in a year by something like 100,000 such mythical "100wpm typists working at 100% utilisation" employees. 1PB would, to a first approximation store every single keypress it'd be possible for the rumored 4 million "top secret or above clearance" people in the US typing flat out for something like 15 years.

So I don't think your "do you have the infrastructure" argument holds too much water here.

The "do you have internal Hadoop clusters" question falls the same way. Sure, I don't have that connected to my 8TB of external USB drives plugged into my media server - but if I worked at Google or FaceBook or Twitter, I'd fully expect to be able to provision and spin up adequately sized clusters of VMs and storage to effectively consume and run reports on data that size and bigger. And it's surely not just the NSA and Google/Facebook/Twitter routinely dealing with collecting and processing data at that scale - any decent sized telco, any non-trivial web analytics service, any large financial institution, every HFT business, most bio-med businesses, probably every physics and astronomy department at any university – there must be tens of thousands of businesses routinely dealing with that sort of sized data sets.

It's not simple - certainly not simple enough for me to do it on a Mac Mini and a bunch of external hard drives – but I also don't think it's anything like "uncharted waters" territory. (I'm pretty sure I could find the expertise required in my 1st level LinkedIn connections, and have absolutely no doubt I'd be able to manage designing, developing and deploying exactly such a system if someone came to me with a high six or low seven figure budget.)

<comment><USER5> I think your approximations are focusing solely on keystrokes, whereas the parent specified just "data", which makes me believe that network traffic, application logs, etc are included in this. I can believe the 1PB/day number, it's not that far fetched when you consider the above.

I also agree with the parent. There are so many possible scenarios and things to log that eventually you're playing a "logging" version of whack-a-mole. Even just managing these files (as the parent talks about) is really no trivial task. Honestly, I wouldn't even know how to begin managing a petabyte worth of _daily_ data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Snowden's escape from the NSA exposed two things: 1) _illegal_ kleptocratic behaviour on part of the government 2) gross security incompetence on part of the government. The NSA has spent all its time on #1 up until now, so they're going to hype him up as much as possible so as to diminish the embarrassment from #2.

> He _wasn 't_ just a community college stooge, he was brilliant! The obscure > flaw that he exploited has since been fixed, hooray too!

Meanwhile 'sudo su' has been criminalized as a precaution.

<comment><USER7> that's why I like to use `sudo sudo su' ;) And of course, `sudo vim', :!bash

<comment><USER8> On a more serious note, you should (almost) never do `sudo vim', but stick to `sudoedit'.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious; what's the reasoning behind this?

<comment><USER10> sudo vim means vim gets root privileges. Meaning vim can do anything it wants if it's bugged or somehow compromised. Not likely on an otherwie secure system but not impossible.

sudoedit (according to the manpage) makes a copy of the file first, lets your editor edit it, then copies back when you're done -- so even a compromised editor couldn't do much damage beyond corrupting the given file.

<comment><USER9> That's awesome I never knew that; thanks so much for explaining it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's this kind of stuff that really scares me.

1) Some government agency builds massive computer system containing lots of information about the general public.

2) There are numerous obvious holes in the "massive" computer system for obvious reasons (government's haste, lack of oversight, etc).

3) The government's computers get hacked.

In my opinion, numbers two and three are inevitable when number one takes place.

Something similar just happened in Canada a few years ago with all of our driving information: [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/06/service-ontario- kios...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/06/service-ontario-kiosks- ontario-government_n_2081077.html)

<comment><USER12> And it will always be happening, as long as data gets stored.

The only way to prevent it is to not store data.

<comment><USER13> That's not entirely true. Take for example, passwords. If your requirement is "store passwords securely, so they can only be used to check logins", then you implement that as salted, one-way encryption. But if you add the shadow requirement "and be able to retrieve anyone's password when the government requests it", then your password storage will inevitably be much more vulnerable.

<comment><USER14> Short of a one-time pad, there's no such thing as truly secure, only theoretically secure according to time and processing constraints.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just saying, it's not mathematically impossible to crack a salted encryption without the cipher key.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, data not stored is more secure than data that's stored, but I stand by my point that data stored in such a way as to provide the minimal necessary access can be substantially more secure than data stored in such a way as to provide that access, plus additional back-door access for spooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personal observation: Internal security best practices in spy organizations are rarely 'overlooked'. It is all about trade-offs. II think the more important question is "why would the NSA have lax internal oversight on both user-privledges AND audit-logs?"

The answer is that it is much easier for black bag operations to be scrubbed from potential oversight when an individual holds the power to run the hidden|illegal analysis and clean their own log trails.

</comment><comment><USER16> Spring clean time at the NSA? Apart from anything he might have done, Snowden has provided a convenient dumpster, which may be used to neatly wrap up and dispose of pesky unexplained incidents.

<comment><USER17> "General, these logs say your account pulled the intercepts for a bunch of corporate board meetings, everyone within two hops of Senator Wyden, and General Petraeus. That was all just brilliant superspy Snowden, right?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> AKA he typed "su". Or whatever the Windows equivalent is. I do this all the time to diagnose problems and no one has ever written an article about me. :/

<comment><USER4> FWIW, there are some things that lots of sysadmins do on a week-to-week basis as part of their job – that other people have ended up with felony convictions for…

See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz)

(Note: all 3 felony convictions were "expunged" eventually, but for 12 years he had all the restrictions and problems a convicted felon lives with, all for "doing his job", or possibly "overstepping the bounds of his authority while doing his job".)

<comment><USER19> Also see: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/30...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/30/the- free-web-program-that-got-bradley-manning-convicted-of-computer-fraud/)

Describing how Bradley Manning using 'wget' was considered computer fraud because it was not on the list of approved programs.

<comment><USER20> CFAA is a ridiculous mistake. It's like if you used a programmable coffee machine and the company's policy forbade making decaf you would be a felon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Article is filled with speculation and extremely vague details on his purported "attack". Seems largely like a filler article to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> If they couldn't detect Snowden, it raises the question of what the Chinese government has access to. I imagine every government and hacking group in the world is doing everything they can to get access to that pile of data. Even if you trust the US government not to abuse these capabilities, what will happen when that data falls into even worse hands?

</comment><comment><USER23> Unless this audit was independent, can we really trust their analysis? The NSAs credibility is shot at this point.

<comment><USER4> Presumably "independently audited" by the Presidentially approved investigator James "No means Yes" Clapper…

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Snowden reportedly used high-ranking official's profiles to troll NSA's intranet."

trawl?

<comment><USER25> To troll means to fish. In fact, looking up the definition of "trawl," it means "to troll"

[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trawl](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trawl)

<comment><USER26> I think it's a US thing though. Obviously I know that in US English the word has both meanings, but in the UK a troll is something that hides under a bridge, and the fishing is trawling.

Took me a while to figure out the humour inherent in the double meaning when I first came across it (in the 90s)

<comment><USER27> I always thought trawling involved dragging a net whereas you trolled with a lure (enticing fish out to chase it).

e.g., you might trawl for prawns but troll for snook.

<comment><USER26> Never heard that in UK english.

I just assumed that with an american accent the words sounded the same so people stopped using 'trawl'... I've been wrong before though.

<comment><USER28> I can confirm that this is not the case; trawl and troll shouldn't rhyme any more than Paul and pole, tall and toll, fall and foal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This appears to be a snowjob against Snowden, and BS -- Look at the language:

1\. ___Snowden impersonated NSA officials, sources say_ __

2. __ _Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials_ __

3. __ _forensic investigation has included trying to figure out which higher level officials Snowden impersonated_ __

4. __ _if an employee was on vacation while the on-line version of the employee was downloading a classified document, it might indicate that someone assumed the employee's identity_ __

5. __ _NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else's user profile to access documents_ __

6. __ _"The damage, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 12," said a former intelligence official._ __

7. __ _The NSA declined to comment_ __ <\--- WTF, then who are the above sources?

[Edit: I wanted to add a little bit of clarity here: the language used is very vague and references things that could never possible be confirmed: sources say, "might indicate", "has identified" \--- This story is like a bunch of paragraphs typed out, randomly put into a hat then shaken onto the floor into the pattern of the story. It is not a decisive, cohesive piece of information -- then it is ended saying that the NSA has no comment.

THe TITLE is "NSA finds Snowden hijacked officials' logins" NSA FINDS....

So, if the NSA doesn't comment - and the "analysis by NBC" and the NSA declines to comment are all used -- then NOTHING in this piece can be believed.

Even if the entire premise is true - this is hands down the worst framing of the information, supposedly factual, one could imagine!

\---

In my informed IT professional opinion, they are using this to brand him a hacker - and they make a bunch of "what if" type claims. Then they slide into a confirmed report. Then they claim the damage is off the scale (12 on a scale of 1-10)

This is a completely MISO built PR piece for the NSA.

As administrator on any system (administrator in Windows, and Root in *nix) one will have access to whatever you want.

Whilst at lockheed, I had admin rights to every machine and document in my realm - I would have had no need to "impersonate" any other lockheed employee...

The mistake here is if NSA was using the same root passwords/keys across entire tiers of machines. In that case - call it criminal negligence on the part of whomever architected that disaster.

<comment><USER30> My thoughts exactly, they are setting him up for CFAA charges either to pile up on him or so they can drop espionage taking away the reasons for Russia's asylum.

<comment><USER29> I edited my post to add some stuff....

But, yes - it is pretty clear that they have the MSM on their freaking sqwak- box right now against Snowden.

Funny how it was also revealed that they (the UK) were lying about being "leaked" info from Snowden to the "Independent" \-- where Snowden came out and said he never communicated to them anything, and the "leak" was a lie and information that Snowden was specifically avoiding getting out because it was too pointed at actual personnel...

This info needs to KEEP COMING -- as we need to get to a tipping point where change is a reality.

<comment><USER31> The "budget PDF" referenced "media exploitation" and my first thought was manipulating the mainstream media into basically reporting what they wanted and if some of the taxpayer funds given to the NSA goes into the pockets of various reporters and journalists.

Maybe the "media exploitation" is what you mentioned in your original post; in effect, "NSA officials", "sources inside the NSA", etc. all "anonymously" making off-the-record comments to journalists.

<comment><USER29> Yes. One way to look at it is this:

If the biggest story in the history of the NSA is that some college drop-out "genius" was able to exfiltrate 20,000 docs from the NSA - and the biggest key argument they have against the guy, to prove that he were some "hacker" who was impersonating people to gain access to said files -- how is it that "NBC" is revealing this with "sources say" "an official" etc...

Don't you think that the most critical point to the credibility of the NSA is to come out and state via an official means - that they have electronic logs of this activity?

Digital forensics are binary: Either you have a digital trace of actions taken, or you do not. Period.

Either they can determine 100% that Snowden logged into station X as person Y to grab file Z -- or they do not.

THe language used in this article is textbook MISO/Psyop PR.

"Oh, an official source with knowledge of the incident has said.." \-- cool, I guess they have it figured out then, huh! I shouldn't dare question that. But if I do: "We can't comment" "we cannot reveal the details of an ongoing investigation" etc...

Utter crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To me this simply looks like the folks in charge are locking in their cyber crimes case against Snowden. If he's ever brought in--for whatever reason--and even if he magically avoids every charge of espionage, treason, leaking, spying, misuse of company keyboards, or whatever, they'll have the hacking angle sunk so deep that it won't matter.

If Bradley Manning got what he did for scary wget wizardry (making no statement about the validity of that charge or verdict) then I think Snowden can safely expect more consecutive life sentences than he has fingers and toes.

</comment><comment><USER33> Has anyone figured out exactly how high Snowden's clearance went?

They're really non-specific about what he did (and play it off like he couldn't do anything), but it's coming across more & more like he really had his crap together.

</comment><comment><USER34> Am I the only one who finds it funny that the article quoted Oracle's Enterprise Manager docs?

<comment><USER35> Clearly, Oracle is unbreakable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?</comment>


Is This Who You Want To Be? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ryanholiday.net/archives/post_30.phtml

<comment><USER2> Dull indeed, an old post about an even older post about some one's book list. Read it if you are bored and can't thing of anything else to do ... or you could read a book.</comment>


Where International Communities Cluster - <AUTHOR> https://pudding.cool/2020/01/diaspora/ <comment><USER2> This shows the largest _percentage_ irrespective of population, which skews the figures quite a bit, since statistical anomalies easily get propelled to the top spot. For example, I'm pretty sure there are more Nigerians in New York City than the site's pick of "Fort Bend County, Texas", and I wouldn't be surprised if the nation's apparent #1 Belgian community in Weber, UT (which seems to be flying under the radar as far as Google is concerned) was a single large Mormon family.

<comment><USER3> Same for Uruguayans (and almost all Latin Americans), there are a lot more in Miami, NY and San Francisco than in Worcester, Maryland (although I do know of one there haha).

Edit: I am impressed, there ARE a lot of Uruguayans in Leominster (1200 out of 40.000 inhabitants), as a whole Miami, NY and SF have more, but it's indeed where they're more concentrated.

[https://datausa.io/profile/geo/leominster- fitchburg-&-gardne...](https://datausa.io/profile/geo/leominster- fitchburg-&-gardner-cities-puma-ma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure how accurate this is. Just from what I know about "my people", the Israelis, are clustered in the east coast, perhaps to a similar number as on the west coast. While in the west coast itself, I am not sure that the Los Angeles community is larger than the one in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER5> Since this is only counting people born in Israel it's probably a much smaller group than the wider community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Russia seems like a weird country to not have (or am I blind? cant find on mobile).

<comment><USER7> You're right, its not on there. May have been missing from initial data set for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well-known to me from my mother's side of the family: Punjabi Sikhs in North America form an archipelago with Brampton, ON, Surrey, BC, and San Jose, CA as anchoring vertices (with possible moorings in Renton, WA).

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems pretty accurate from what i've seen in my life. Indians somewhere in central NJ, Koreans in Bergen, Georgians in Brooklyn, Egyptians in Nashville.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 One of these days we will annex Maine and Vermont. It's a soft, slow takeover—but it is inevitable. Did I say that out loud?

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat. I really like exploring demo data like this.

One thing to note is that you have the following the countries:

Czech Republic

Slovakia

Czechoslovakia

If people are from Czechoslovakia does that mean the immigrated to the US before the end of the Cold War?

</comment><comment><USER11> Kazakhstan in the Portland metro area? Where are they all hiding? I've lived here for decades and have never heard of anyone being from Kazakhstan.

<comment><USER12> Maybe there aren't many Kazakhs in the USA, so an abnormal concentration in smallish Portland that is still difficult to notice would win the percent count.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, 70 Kazakhs in Portland (population ca 700K) and 800 in NYC (population ca 8.4M): Portland has percentage-wise more Kazakhs than NYC! (0.01% vs 0.0095%)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It was nice of the creators to mention their dataset (2018 IPUMS dataset), but can anyone tell me what frameworks are used to create this?

<comment><USER2> Seems to be primarily Mapbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Works really well for Poland. Chicago is sometimes (jokingly) considered the second biggest Polish city.

<comment><USER16> There was quite a large Polish population in Greenpoint Brooklyn which is still present but largely gutted by gentrification. There's also another sizable pocket in Ridgewood/Fresh Pond.

<comment><USER15> Ah yes. There's a few Polish pop songs about Brooklyn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is Czechoslovakia still considered a single country?

<comment><USER18> If it was called that when someone left, what country did they leave? And when you don't know which half?

I guess the list could say "Former ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's got England and Scotland but no Wales :(

<comment><USER20> I noticed that too, but it's a public dataset from a single year, so possibly it's just that no Welshmen settled in the USA in 2018?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lots of Dutch in Austin?

</comment><comment><USER21> Surprisingly accurate</comment>


US utilities have finally realized electric cars may save them - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1230297/us-utilities-have-finally-realized-electric-cars-will-save-them-and-asked-congress-to-put-more-evs-on-the-road/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago I was working with a custom builder on a house plan (that we didn't end up pursuing), but one of the things I suggested was future proofing the garage for electric cars. Given that a Tesla can charge on 80 amps, it seemed reasonable that a two car garage in a custom home should have 160 amp service. It may not useful right away, but it would very probably be useful over the life of a home.

He thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But articles like this make me wonder.

<comment><USER3> I would suggest 200A service as a bare minimum, with 400A being ideal (this will be heavily dependent on your electric utility service entrance). Consider two EVs, HVAC loads, and possibly electric water heaters, clothes dryers, and a stove. Also, NEC 80% derating (100A circuit required for an 80A 100% duty cycle load).

The electrician's time is the most expensive part; oversize for decisions such as these (load center, EV run to outlet, subpanels, etc).

<comment><USER4> 200+ A circuits in a residential home really makes a point for 400 V three phase (where the same load would be ok with a standard 63 A circuit, which is still a lot). [1]

However, when more and more people try to have fast chargers in their homes for EVs, then not only the residential installation poses a problem, but utilities would need to rebuild ~two layers of distribution to accomodate for a 100-200 % increase in residential power consumption.

[1] Not just because high currents are more difficult to handle properly, but also because you need a lot less copper.

<comment><USER5> If you live in a subdivision built within the past couple decades, your electric runs underground, making it quite expensive to run a second or third primary phase. You also then need a three-phase transformer, which is considerably larger than a typical one-phase. Oh, and your service will be commercial/industrial, which typically comes with demand and energy charges that can be quite steep: [https://www.northwesternenergy.com/docs/default- source/docum...](https://www.northwesternenergy.com/docs/default- source/documents/E-Programs/E-demandcharges.pdf)

<comment><USER4> That's true, for North America, but entirely misses the point I made (i.e. when you try to push dozens of kW into a house, single phase becomes worse than a below-average idea).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't forget the potential load from those kitty hawk autonomous electric helicopter/planes.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/business/dealbook/flyi...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/business/dealbook/flying- taxis-larry-page.html?referer=https://www.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is maybe off topic, but it also may pave the way for us to use nuclear energy to produce electricity without greenhouse emissions. I think the problem we have yet to solve with nuclear, is safety diligence. Maybe some automation can help with modern tech? Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?

<comment><USER8> In the case of the Three Miles Island Accident, modern sensors and more automation would have helped. With Fukushima, automation wouldn't have helped, what they were lacking was better tsunami protection, more resistant construction, bigger battery backups. At Tschernobyl they had an inherently unsafe reactor type, operated the reactor outside the safety parameters and had safety systems deactivated. Not much you can do about that.

Automation would help, but more modern reactor designs that are less prone to causing problems likely have a much bigger impact.

>Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?

Tearing nuclear reactors down on regular basis sounds like a much worse nuclear waste problem than the power production already is. All the stuff that would be interesting to tear down and rebuild is contaminated from radiation exposure.

<comment><USER4> > With Fukushima,

The main issue with Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear plants is Japanese regulation enforcing 1960s nuclear safety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who finds this whole logic upsetting?

We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event and with the news that efficient electronics are in fact using less energy is somehow _bad news_.

The profit motive doesn't work for utilities...well it does most of the time, but this is a clear example of when it doesn't.

<comment><USER10> It's sad how anything but continuous growth is "bad".

<comment><USER11> I don't think you want to live in a society that doesn't grow.

<comment><USER12> There's a finite need for ovens, or lamps, or whatever. In some countries, I'm sure that need isn't met, maybe everywhere, who knows.

But at some point you can't sell more product than what breaks down and needs replacing, which I would call maintenance mode, not growth.

At that point, you either start designing obsolescence into the products (arguably already done in both lamps and other various electric appliances), or you need to disrupt the industry to supply something worth replacing to, or you (or at least a majority of the workers) move to another industry where growth can happen.

I absolutely don't want to live in a society where electricity needs grow in perpetuity, or every house gets more and more lamps "just cuz".

The end goal for any company should be monopoly in their market, at which point they slash their workforce to just keep the market, and divest into another market (where they can then employ the workers again).

<comment><USER11> Growth isn't just about consumerism it's about human flourishing. We grow not just because we produce things we grow because we get better and better at using the resources around us which provide more flourishing for more and more humans. Without growth we can't do that as we won't have the surplus to invent and invest in new technologies.

Improve medicine, explore space, optimize production methods, invent new energy method etc. for more and more people. Those require growth.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that definition applies to what you initially responded to though, as it was about the utilities market.

Other than the definition, I agree with what you're saying.

<comment><USER11> I understand that but I don't think you can isolate the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> @dang: Article title is now "may save them," not "will save them."

</comment><comment><USER14> From repoweramerica.org in 2009

"The Problem: The US electricity transmission and distribution system – or 'grid' -- is in critical need of an upgrade. It is old, balkanized and too limited in its reach. The current grid is a series of independently operating regional grids – it can't meet the needs of a nation whose economy would benefit substantially from the system optimization that comes with national interconnection. Its limitations and vulnerability to failure are also reported to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues.1 And most critical to clean energy development, areas rich in renewable resources like solar, wind and geothermal are currently not well-served and thus have no 'highway' available to move power outputs to the markets where that power is needed"

I wrote a post on ZDnet [http://www.zdnet.com/article/al-gores-unified-smart- grid-vis...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/al-gores-unified-smart-grid-vision- for-repowering-the-usa-will-it-happen/) discussing efforts for a unified grid, but haven't seen much progress since then to support the demands of electric vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER15> US utilities don't need saving. It seems like a bizzare statement to make. The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.

Also having such a high burst in demand will be a major problem, not a benefit. Maybe we need to account for grid expansion, peak demand management and production capacity increase costs in a new bill of EV taxes. Arguing that it's good for the economy because of jobs is the same like arguing war is good for the economy because you get to rebuild infrastructure. It's not, we can use this potential for more useful things.

<comment><USER16> >The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.

That seems like a pretty dubious claim. For one thing, how often do you (or any home or business owner) not turn stuff on because of how much it might cost them? For another, the largest driver in my understanding is growing energy efficiency (e.g. LED's use fractions of the old incandescent bulbs)

<comment><USER15> Energy efficiency has been a big factor, but an even bigger one is the energy- intensive heavy industry fleeing from the developed world to china and other places where power is cheap and plenty. Countries like Germany that kept their industry at home face extraorbitant prices. I think they pay close to 30+cents/kWh.

<comment><USER4> Residential power is more expensive (per kWh) than industrial power, which might also be subsidised depending on industry — likely the same for most western countries. Half of the residential price is a good approximation for Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't the energy getting cheaper due the advances in regenerable sources? This can't be good for utilities.

<comment><USER18> Why not? Utilities make money by power transmission. Even if every single house in the US has solar panels there still is a massive market around transferring power between houses to balance loads and time of use issues. In my direct and relevant experience talking with r&d folks and strategic planners at big utilities, they treat cheaper utilities as another market to get in to. They don't think of it as a threat to their business.

<comment><USER19> I'm not following. Let's say current transmission and generation is the baseline. In the future when there is distributed generation, transmission is definitely going to go down as generation will be tightly coupled with supplying private, commercial, or industrial entities (eg panels on the roof). So generation goes down (since more renewable), and distribution as well on average (due to coupling mechanisms).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not if those cars are going to be largely powered by home solar.

<comment><USER6> A lot of the charging will happen at homes at night, so until energy storage doesn't add 200% to the cost to take a solar install to solar + storage, the utilities are still going to be the power providers.

There are also going to be (hopefully) some low cost utility scale storage options that, along with the 50% cost advantage of utility solar over rooftop, could be combined with the existing distribution infrastructure to provide low-cost and low-carbon energy for transportation.

<comment><USER21> It's a reasonable idea if car batteries become easily swappable.

<comment><USER22> Not likely any time soon. There's absolutely no way humans are going to pull >1000 lbs worth of batteries out of the car every day, and put the same >1000 lbs worth of batteries into it. With a unit of work of 50 lbs (reasonable for fit people), and a minute to pull out each pack, stow it away, take fresh pack and put it back in, it would take half an hour of hard physical work every day. No way regular people are going to do that.

<comment><USER23> Ofcourse this would be automated, you don't see a person hauling jerrycans to fill up his car in gasstations do you?

<comment><USER22> I definitely carry jerry cans when I want to fill up my vehicles at home, which is the context we are in — we were talking about home rooftop solar installation, and how it can or cannot be used to charge cars overnight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I laughed long and hard when I read this. You never really know who your friends and enemies are.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for telling us.

<comment><USER24> Ok, fair point. Sometimes though you have to take a step back and appreciate the wonderful complexity of the universe. So long have we railed against utilities for their environmental destruction - when it looks like they might be the actual solution for what we face.

It really makes you question all of your assumptions about what you know and the people who you think might be working against you. Maybe there is some way they can work with you.</comment></comment></comment>


World IPv6 Launch - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/world-ipv6-launch-keeping-internet.html

<comment><USER2> I just purchased a new Comcast internet connection two weeks ago, leased their default router, have a vanilla MacBook Air.

I'm happy to report that I was required to do precisely and absolutely nothing - beyond spending a few minutes unpacking the (largish) cardboard box they shipped me, plugging in a coax cable to the router, ethernet cable to my USB dongle, and then activating my account.

15 Minutes later I was online. I've got 2001:558:6045:ba:24b2:f727:e418:328f/128, and I haven't found an IPv6 network/host that I can't route to natively, though I'm sure they are out there.

Zero effort and, if I wasn't paying close attention, it wouldn't be clear to me which services are communicating to me over IPv6 verus IPv4.

It Just Works.

Looking forward to World IPv6 Launch day on 6/6.

<comment><USER3> Does that IPv6 address change? I know Comcast changes your IPv4 address periodically unless you pay for a static one.

<comment><USER4> Amusingly even if the Comcast LAN prefix is static most operating systems by default will cycle your address anyways. In IPv6 a dynamic address is now a Feature!

Whether or not the Comcast LAN prefix changes is a good question though. I've seen no evidence that they plan to deliberately change them. My Comcast IPv4 address stays static pretty much until I reset my modem and even then it often grabs the same v4 address again.

I did a bit of really basic testing earlier today and no amount of modem resetting seems to cycle the IPv6 prefix I am getting delegated.

In the end though, dynamic DNS does a very good job of dealing with the occasionally changing prefix and IPv6 gets rid of the need to do port forwarding so maintaining dns records with public addresses to machines on your home network is actually possible now. I am happy to report that (with the proper firewalls in place) it is downright awesome to have IPv6 at home and at work and on your phone. I can't wait to see what sort of new home cloud tech this will enable.

<comment><USER3> Well if Comcast only assigns you a /128 then you're kinda stuck :) Good to know, thank you.

<comment><USER4> comcast assigns a /64 if you plug in a router that supports DHCPv6. You get a /128 if you plug your macbook air straight into the modem. =)

<comment><USER3> I will have to experiment with this. I can't get a Comcast rep to explain how a static IPv4 address (which doesn't use DHCP) plays with IPv6 access :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a little restartless Firefox addon that tells you if the page is loaded over IPv6: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sixornot/> and one for Chrome (written by p1mrx here): [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ecanpcehffngcegjma...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal)

<comment><USER5> Actually, IPvFOX (<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipvfox/>) is even better. Sixornot only shows dns lookups for the page's domain, this one shows IP address for every loaded resource in it.

<comment><USER3> If you click SixOrNot's down-arrow, it shows the same information, right?

<comment><USER5> Not really, at least according to description text of IPvFOX addon. And I remember that sixornot's verdict over a loaded page hasn't always been correct in the past - lot of sites have v6 DNS entries, but aren't really connectable, etc.

<comment><USER6> Ah... yeah, okay, I really should update that. SixOrNot used to be DNS only, but now it monitors connections too.

There's also 4or6, which has easy access to the IPv6-related preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My ISP still hasn't deployed it, but I have a he tunnel, which works quite nicely. If nothing else, it's nice to be able to easily run several webservers with SSL on the same machine without feeling like an address hog.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone shed light on how privacy will be affected by IPv6?

From what I've read, the typical case is that the ISP assigns statically a 64 bit prefix to the user, and the remaining bits are assigned from the MAC address of the devices, or a more opaque scheme when IPv6 privacy extensions are enabled. But doesn't this leave the user fully traceable based on the prefix only?

Compared to cookies for example, IP addresses are a serious threat to privacy/anonymity because they are logged everywhere, sometimes exposed (e.g. Wikipedia anonymous edits) and basically constitute a universal ID that can be used to make links between all kinds of network activities (web, BitTorrent, Skype, whatever...)

<comment><USER9> within the specification for privacy extensions is the option to change addresses periodically.

<comment><USER8> But that won't change your prefix will it?

<comment><USER9> no, but the issue is essentially the same as ipv4 at that point

<comment><USER8> Exactly, and my point is that currently my ISP assigns IPv4 addresses dynamically, so I'll get a different one every time I turn on my ADSL modem. I think this is quite common, and as a consequence IPv4 addresses are not a reliable way of identifying a home computer. If every home connection is assigned a static IPv6 prefix, that becomes a reliable identifier. Then you can credibly say "This comment on my blog is from the same computer as this Wikipedia edit from last month!", something you currently cannot say for home computers in general (while work computers are much more likely to have static IPv4 addresses and in that case IPv6 doesn't make it worse).

As I understand it, the privacy extensions in IPv6 were designed to solve another, bigger privacy concern that was totally absent from IPv4: if the second part of the IP address is based on the MAC address, then smartphones and laptops can be traced globally, no matter where they connect to the network (home, hotel room, 3G...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ipv 6 launch, on the 6th day of the 6th month.

666

Yes, the nerds are still in charge of the net. Thank satan.</comment>


Hacker leaks database of dark web hosting provider - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacker-leaks-database-of-dark-web-hosting-provider/ <comment><USER2> All of those attempts to provide a hosting service on the darknet are doomed to fail, because they are a huge target and have many people constantly berating the servers with requests trying to get in. I know setting up a hidden service is not for the faint hearted, but there's nothing stopping people reading Tor's manpages and diving in, figuring out how to host a .onion. It can't be _that_ hard surely.

Doing mitigations on the server to avoid leaking the true location of the service could be tricky however, and requires you to do defense in depth. Apache is infamous for leaking details about the server.</comment>


Stock prediction using Weather, Twitter, News & Stock sites... - <AUTHOR> http://184.108.40.206/scatter/sc.processtext.php?x=0 While waiting for a few final things on my start-up I mentioned in an earlier posting, I wrote a simple stock prediction program in less than a day...
This program was created in 20 hours. It pulls in tweets, weather forecasts, stock market websites, current and breaking news, as well as looks as the trends of the stocks that it finds over time, to create the following collection of stocks. The stocks are rated based on all the factors previously mentioned. I am constantly tweaking each parameter, everyday, and the results seem to be getting better, and better. I will be releasing the source code over the next few days once I clean it up. If you have any suggestions on how I could make the predictions better, feel free to contact me at the email address below.
The entire project is written in PHP using MongoDb and memcache.
Here is the link: http://188.8.131.52/scatter/sc.processtext.php <comment><USER2> I'm just really amazed by the license a bit down on the page:

"BY VISITING OUR WEB SITE, YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS, AS WELL AS OUR PRIVACY POLICY WITHOUT LIMITATION OR QUALIFICATION."

I mean, how could I read the damn notice without "accepting" it? Also, helpfully put BELOW the useful part, which you cannot "unsee" if you don't want to accept the license...

<comment><AUTHOR> It was thrown up quickly, as I make things better, I will separate the annoying license from the goods. I just got really paranoid after making this type of site...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's an amusing idea, but I'm not sure how interesting this is without a performance history or measures against similar automated predictions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here it is: doing auto-trades with history.

<http://188.8.131.52/scatter/sc.transactions.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"Key: Symbol/(Perc. we estimate success)"_

Not a very useful key. Maybe I'm missing something. At first, I thought maybe the colors were the prediction: green means up, red means down, but they just seem to reflect the percentage of "success".

What are the actual predictions? Is there a time frame for them? What do you mean by "success"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose I missed this when I whipped it all together.

The success is a percentage - the higher it is, the more ideal of a buy it is. The lower, the more chance it should be shorted.

The 16 hour predictions are more "short term advice" where the > 48 hours is more of a long term state.

It does not act on data older than 48 hours as things change to often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Better not to give any suggestions to them as their license states:

>Please Do Not Submit Ideas, Suggestions, or Other Content to Us Unless Your Intent is to Give Us That Information Unconditionally

</comment><comment><USER6> No offense, but in another thread that's at the top of HN right now ('Ask HN: Please explain short selling?), you're asking people to explain what short selling is. Based on that, I'm not sure I trust any predictions coming from this system, at least not on the sell side. This is a complicated problem you're trying to tackle, which requires a thorough understanding of the markets.

</comment><comment><USER7> Measuring the psychology of the markets using web seems to be an interesting idea. This a better shot then most I have seen. Next step is to see if each stock's results are leading or lagging and over what time period.

</comment><comment><USER8> What to the colors mean? There are various shades and also blinking colors -- it's maddening when you think you should focus on something, but then you have to figure out why you should focus on that....

</comment><comment><USER9> The hugely long disclaimer at the bottom is rather distracting.

One can only assume, the creator has had some problems before with previous sites, or has had extensive legal dealings in offline world.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sure is, I'd be rather worried having no disclaimer. How is this a bad thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do your predictions work? Until you have some evidence either way, there's not much to say about this.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Predicting" stuff is easy. The hard part is: do your predictions perform better than a coin flip?

</comment><comment><USER12> If you actually spent 15 minutes to audit these picks you'll realize its a massive failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Prove it? My trades are often purchased and sold in 30 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not often you see websites just going by IP. New trend?

<comment><USER14> no

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> what is the "percentage" rating? return predictions should be in return space.

someone should write a "how to write a trading algorithm" tutorial.

<comment><USER16> just read this recently found it ok: [http://www.puppetmastertrading.com/blog/2010/04/08/pairs- por...](http://www.puppetmastertrading.com/blog/2010/04/08/pairs-portfolio/)

ernie chan's blog is also a decent starting point: epchan.blogspot.com

<comment><USER15> Oh, I know how to do this.

It'd just be nice to have a clear, concise guide to point to every time something like this comes up.

There's two parts: there is the strategy itself. And then there's everything that surrounds it: what a generic strategy looks like, how to test it, how to operate it, how to build risk models, etc. There's probably more work to the second part than the first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Event arbitrage</comment>