An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month - <AUTHOR> https://www.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-estate-affordable-homes <comment><USER2> I think this headline is misleading in 2 ways.

1\. yes you might get a house at this price but it's either 1-2 hours out of the city center (which is fine, just saying Tokyo is large.) Or alternatively it's in bad neighborhoods. (bad is relative if you are from the US)

2\. your house will most likely look like this: [https://www.ii- ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg](https://www.ii-ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg)

Sayonara sunlight, hello neighbor.

here are listings: [https://www.homes.co.jp/smp/kodate/shinchiku/tokyo/list/](https://www.homes.co.jp/smp/kodate/shinchiku/tokyo/list/)

there are nice ones in the list. I am just saying that this is the eastern country side of Tokyo (check the map) when the title probably makes everyone think something different.

<comment><USER3> > 2\. your house will most likely look like this

Not sure what's wrong with that? That looks pretty amazing actually. I live in a unit that looks similar to that near downtown Chicago. My unit is north facing, and even so, there's more than enough sunlight.

<comment><USER4> The title says "house" for a "family", and the pictured structure is not normally what people think when they hear that, being significantly smaller than even a typical townhouse. In particular, a "house" suggests something larger than a small apartment.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with an apartment or microhouse, but it makes the quoted rent less impressive.

<comment><USER3> Well I guess that's true from a North American perspective. I've lived in several countries, and from my perspective, in Asia and much of Europe, that structure seems like it would be considered a passable family home in an urban area. Most urban folks have a different relationship with space — smaller spaces are ok if one is close to transit and city amenities.

<comment><USER4> But the whole point of the headline is to try and convince the reader that Tokyo housing prices are low relative to the reader's expectation. If the small housing price example is congruent with the size of the example house, there's no story.

<comment><USER5> I'd contend it's fair to adjust for the country's typical expectations. Just like you couldn't simply expect the same size of house in Hong Kong as you might in Europe.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean fair? This isn't a contest

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn't an investment. It's > a place to live.

Fixing this can be a major obstacle in countries with inadequate pension systems. In countries where dependency on rising property values is the chief or sole form of retirement planing for vast numbers of people, fixing a broken housing market becomes dependent on fixing the retirement system.

And when land values are consistently propped up by government to a greater degree than other investments, it moves people even more into land speculation as their retirement investment because of its artificial safety.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn't an investment. It's > a place to live. The country's slow population growth means that increases > in property values aren't guaranteed

I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses _decrease_ in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.

<comment><USER8> A big component of this is that building codes aren't really enforced for the construction of single-family housing in Japan. Even if you wanted to buy a used home, you run the risk that shoddy construction could put you at serious danger in the event of the country's not-so-infrequent natural disasters. This is one reason why most people tear down and rebuild.

<comment><USER9> So people rebuild houses just in case for a not-so-frequent natural disaster? Or are there other reasons too?

<comment><USER8> Yeah there are other reasons, from related insurance concerns to cultural/quasi-spiritual beliefs that old homes acquire the "fortunes" of their previous owners. Also, said lack of building code enforcement, makes new home construction cheaper, faster, and more plentiful.

But there are also A LOT of earthquakes, typhoons, and floods in Japan, so it's not exactly a minor concern either, especially when houses are typically seen as something you buy for life.

<comment><USER10> On the flip side. I have a friend she is native Japanese, divorced, clerical worker with low income. She got a used house in the suburbs of a small city. (30 minute bus/walk commute) She basically only paid for the price of the land. The house itself is in good shape and the only maintenance issues have been the ones you'd expect from a twenty year old house. Heater replacement, a kitchen vent. I've been inside the house and I see no evidence of shoddy construction. (not that I'm trained to spot it).

My point the housing market like it is makes it much less likely for people to become homeless. Japan's homeless numbers reflect this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is citing another article from the same source [1]

"The typical Tokyo metro area starter home would be an apartment (around 750 square feet) or detached wooden house (around 970 square feet) located in the outer suburbs. According to Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, the average Tokyo office worker has about a one-hour commute by train each morning."

So part of the answer is that homes are tiny by American standards, and it's not actually in Tokyo proper.

[1] [https://www.curbed.com/2016/6/21/11946606/starter-homes- swed...](https://www.curbed.com/2016/6/21/11946606/starter-homes-sweden- france-japan)

<comment><USER12> Even square footage isn't a perfect metric for cross-national comparison. For example, furniture in Japan (at places like Nitori) is often designed for smaller spaces. When I lived there, a $300 couch fit[1] perfectly in my living room, while it would've looked hilariously undersized in any North American house. I was more comfortable in that apartment, approx 480 sqft, than I was in a 1000 sqft apartment I had in North America

[1] たとえば [https://www.nitori- net.jp/ec/product/1141031-1140061s/](https://www.nitori- net.jp/ec/product/1141031-1140061s/)

<comment><USER11> No doubt. American homes don't use floor space very efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The cultural differences make this comparison less meaningful than you'd expect. In Japan you absolutely never have friends over to your house or apartment. Everyone meets at bars or restaurants. Similar to nyc, many apartments in Tokyo are a few hundred square feet and literally only serve as a place to sleep and shower. That means houses aren't such a major thing and so the Japanese invest way less time and energy (and place less importance on) their homes.

My parents lived in japan and I have a few friends there. I spoke with a friend who works in graphic design on the outskirts of Tokyo who doesn't even own a fridge - all his meals are eaten outside of his home.

<comment><USER14> > absolutely never have friends over to your house or apartment

Absolute statements like that are just clearly not true. I've been to Japanese friends' apartments, even visited friends' family barbecue or wine tasting night.

Less common doesn't mean it never happens.

<comment><USER15> I agree. When I lived in Japan, I was invited to (local) friends' places often, including for a couple of kotatsu sleepover parties. It was probably more frequent than being invited to a friend's place in Vancouver.

Probably because most of my friends in Vancouver live in sharehouses or basement suites where they aren't allowed to have guests by their landlord, while my friends in Japan had small but respectable spaces that they had much more permissive ownership of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You can do the exact same thing in nearly every part of the USA except Blue cities where regulation has moved home ownership out of the poor's reach. For example, California, new construction requires an electric vehicle outlet in garages. If you're poor, you have much better things to be spending $1500 than some charger outlet they will literally _never use_. Instead, regulations on how people want to live their lives and shelter themselves cement a cycle of poverty into these areas.

<comment><USER17> Extreme political bias aside, you need to check your facts. This article from 2014 estimates the cost for the required 40/80A breaker/conduit at a whopping $50. This is in contrast to the higher cost of adding such capability later.

[https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to- require-n...](https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-new- buildings-to-be-wired-for-electric-car-charging-stations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone interested in Japanese house architecture, the book _Jutaku_ , published by Phaidon, is fantastic: [https://au.phaidon.com/store/architecture/jutaku-japanese- ho...](https://au.phaidon.com/store/architecture/jutaku-japanese- houses-9780714869629/)

</comment><comment><USER19> "But zoning may be the real winner here. Japan's zoning laws are national—so no local weirdness hampering construction and driving up prices. The system has 12 zones progressing from residential to commercial and industrial. Any buildings allowed in zone 1 are also allowed in the following zones. Basically: Housing can be built almost anywhere, even on extremely skinny or odd-sized parcels of land. This increases the amount of usable residential space and helps builders continue to meet demand, keeping housing costs under control. "

Fighting for something like this here will be one of the fights of the younger generations, otherwise they will be permanently locked out in any city with jobs. (There is plenty of housing where there are no jobs.)

Local NIMBY zoning must die. Its basically a cartel: collusion to restrict supply and drive prices artificially high.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who's invested pretty heavily in real estate over the last few years (Seattle) I sometimes ponder if we are all eventually destined to a fate similar to that of Japan's. It seems to me that the US is only a superpower because we were geographically fortunate to not share contiguous borders with Europe post WWII and we've taken that for granted. Policy makers in the US don't have a long enough horizon to adequately plan for the future; and birthrates are projected to fall—it's hard to say how much, but, eventually, even below replacement rates (?).

As of late I have started to question the long-term prospect of indefinite economic growth, and what the implications of challenging the status-quo here are. I would be interested as to what people's perspectives are around the likelihood of advanced nations inevitably sharing a fate similar to Japan's.

</comment><comment><USER14> An average family in Tokyo does not live in a detached house so the whole argument is false. About 27% of the units are detached houses and the ratio is decreasing a bit.

Plus Tokyo is almost 100km wide. That's a huge area and of course there are places where housing is dirt cheap because people are fleeing away.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the more interesting point is the interest rate. 1% @ 35 years is exceptionally low.

In the US, say at a 3.5% and 30 year loan, your monthly payment would be closer to $1,350. Add property taxes and insurance, and you are probably closer to $1,500.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> By contrast consider Conor Dougherty's _Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America_ [https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing- America...](https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing- America/dp/0525560211), which is about how California in particular works hard to raise the cost of housing.

Places like Seattle are a little better, with an emphasis on "little." [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a- fut...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in- seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities)

<comment><USER22> That said, Seattle has a grass roots effort right now to try and get social housing on the ballot for November. There are folks here fighting for housing as a place to live, not as an investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Japan may not be the ideal economic model.

In the 1980s, Japan had an enormous economic bubble. (This was the period when MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, was the ultimate Platonic ideal of how to run a country's economy and the Japanese Fifth Generation computing project was going to eliminate "programming" as a job category.) This bubble burst in 1990-1991. It was bad.

" _GDP fell from $5.33 trillion to $4.36 trillion in nominal terms, real wages fell around 5%,... Many Japanese companies replaced a large part of their workforce with temporary workers, who had little job security and fewer benefits. As of 2009, these non-traditional employees made up more than a third of the labor force. For the wider Japanese workforce, wages have stagnated. From their peak in 1997, real wages have since fallen around 13%..[as of 2013]._ "

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_\(Japan\))

" _Japan 's annual land prices averaged nationwide have finally risen since the asset bubble collapse, though only mildly at 0.1%, a process that has taken 26 years to show up statistically._ [undated]

" _By 2004, prime "A" property in Tokyo's financial districts had slumped to less than 1 percent of its peak, and Tokyo's residential homes were less than a tenth of their peak,..._

" _The Nikkei 225 at the Tokyo Stock Exchange plunged from a height of 38,915 at the end of December 1989 to 14,309 at the end of August 1992. By 11 March 2003, it plunged to the post-bubble low of 7,862._ "

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

" _After a long climb during the decades of Japan's economic miracle, prices exploded in the late eighties in the frenzy of the bubble economy. Over the following decade, prices collapsed by over 80%, hitting a low in 2002. Since then however, prices have increased and we are not in the middle of a stable period of growth with a positive outlook for the future._ "

[https://housingjapan.com/buy/history/](https://housingjapan.com/buy/history/) [I note: " _Housing Japan is the leading real estate agent for international clients looking to rent, buy or invest in the Tokyo property market._ "]

" _Tokyo's property market has had its ups and downs. At the peak of the bubble in 1989, some condos were selling for more than 1 billion yen, and buildings with more than 30 floors started springing up._

" _After the bubble, prices plummeted. In 2002, the price per tsubo was about half that of the bubble era. But easier housing loans and low interest rates helped spur demand for new condos._ "

[https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Tokyo- prop...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Tokyo-property- prices-near-bubble-era-levels) [Has a nice graph of Tokyo condo prices, per- tsubo (3.3 sq. meters).]

<comment><USER24> This needs to be taken within the context of Japan hosting one of the largest economies in the world, despite being substantially smaller in population than countries with economies of comparable size; and also in that their real wage losses 1) pale in comparison to America's, and 2) mean that their real wages are still much higher than most of the world's.

I've heard it put that Japan's economy makes it relatively easy to live a stable middle class lifestyle, though almost impossible to accrue substantial wealth. I understand why this may seem horrifying to some, but looking at the relative affluence of the average Japanese compared to the average American, I don't see their situation as particularly dire.

<comment><USER25> > despite being substantially smaller in population than countries with > economies of comparable size

Which countries would that be? There are very few with economies of comparable size. The next above Japan is nearly three times larger (China).

Besides, it's super easy to avoid that GDP / population confusion by looking at GDP per capita.

The US GDP per capita figure ($65,111) for 2019 was 59% higher than Japan ($40,846), which has been tumbling down the per capita rankings for 25 years.

For reference, in 1995 Japan's GDP per capita was $43,440, nearly the highest of any nation. The inflation adjustment on that is $74,600. So not only is Japan missing $34,000 just to break even on inflation, by contracting 6% over that time, they've actually shrank drastically in real terms.

Since 1995 US GDP per capita has increased by about 127% by contrast, exceeding inflation by about $15,000.

The other legitimate comparables: Germany is ~15% higher per capita, Britain and France are nearly the same (only slightly higher than Japan). In 1995 Japan had a GDP per capita 100% higher than Britain, now they're even. Japan ranks #19 on GDP per capita (excluding tiny nations like Luxembourg).

> and also in that their real wage losses 1) pale in comparison to America's, > and 2) mean that their real wages are still much higher than most of the > world's.

That's not even remotely close to being true. The US has outperformed Japan dramatically on both GDP per capita and incomes. At the end of 2019, real US wages (both median and average) were at new all-time highs, according to the Federal Reserve. The full-time median income in the US hit near $50,000 for 2019, Japan doesn't come close to that.

Japan's peak on real incomes was hit 25 years ago. They've lost about 1/3 of their real personal income since then.

Japan went from having one of the highest income figures, to struggling to remain in the top 20. US wages remain among the highest of any nation (including on disposable incomes), comparable only to countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway.

Here are the average wages in the OECD. Japan ranks about 10% below the OECD average. The US is dramatically higher, ranking just behind Switzerland.

[https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average- wages.htm](https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm)

Here is the OECD better life index page on incomes:

[http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/](http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/)

Japan ranks in the middle of the pack, the US ranks at the front of the pack.

Here is the Wikipedia page on median incomes:

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

Japan again ranks well behind the US, and on disposable income ranks dramatically far behind the US.

More:

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

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

<comment><USER24> Yes, China and the US, which are both substantially larger in population. Japan also outperforms most countries that outsize it in terms of population.

>Besides, it's super easy to avoid that GDP / population confusion by looking at GDP per capita.

Not so much. A high GDP per capita is a poor measure of the average person's economic wellbeing on its own. Looking at it within the context of measures of economic inequality helps to mitigate the misconceptions that could otherwise arise.

For example, according to this Wikipedia article and its cited sources [1], Japan's rich/poor 10% average income ratio is 4.5. Compare to America, whose 18.5 is much closer to China's 21.6, and far away from France's 9.1 and Germany's 6.9.

What this means is that America's GDP per capita is substantially more affected by the high incomes of the highest earners than Japan's. In other words, the average American sees less of the benefits of that high GDP per capita than the average Japanese sees of their somewhat lower GDP per capita.

That's just income. Japan's wealth GINI indicates substantially more equality in that regard than for America. [2]

>At the end of 2019, real US wages (both median and average) were at new all- time highs, according to the Federal Reserve.

I'd like to see that citation. It's well-known that most wages for Americans, indexed against GDP, have fallen or remained flat since the 70s. The vast majority of the income gains have accumulated in the hands of the upper 2 quintiles. This is especially troublesome for Americans as (re: the subject of this comment section) the housing situation in Japan differs greatly from America's skyrocketing housing values in major metro areas; medical insurance and care in America is substantially more expensive; and the cost and quality of education is higher and less stable, respectively, in America than in Japan. This is today, after our respective economic histories over the past few decades.

What your numbers suggest is that Japan was very wealthy for a limited period of time and is now regressing towards the mean that would be suggested by their population size and level of development. However, the character of their economic and institutional policy is making this decline smoother and more comfortable than anything we're likely to see. I continue to hold that this is preferable.

1 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality) 2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_equality)

<comment><USER23> Real Median Household Income in the United States

Highpoints:

2018: 63179

2007: 60985

1999: 61576

1989: 56678

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

P.S. GDP in constant dollars since 1985: Japan, US, EU, and the OECD countries.

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?end=2018...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?end=2018&locations=JP- US-EU-OE&start=1985&view=chart)

<comment><USER24> No one is arguing that Japan's economy has grown more than others. The reliance on GDP-based data (obfuscates inequality) and household income data (Japanese and American households do not send both parents to work at an equal rate) fails to capture the relative fortunes of our country's middle classes.

This is also concerning:

>Thus, use caution when comparing median incomes above $12,000 for people or $18,000 for families and households for different years

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Decent family houses in Tokyo are definitely more expensive than this, but not hugely (also Kyoto surprisingly). There's some interesting things about the Japanese housing market, for example, many homes become "worthless" after the end of the mortgage -- so they depreciate and are more like buying cars.

Tokyo is also an absolutely enormous city with even more massive metro area. There's very few examples on the planet that come close. Tokyo is sometimes called "the infinite city" for good reason. This means that yes, you can pay huge money for a coffin in some areas, and little money for an entire house elsewhere in the same city. New York is kind of the same way in that respect, but is actually still smaller and less diverse.

I could write a ton more, but I think this series from "Life Where I'm From" which is pointed out in the article is a fantastic overview of housing for a nuclear family in Tokyo.

How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home - [https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w](https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w)

Brand New Japanese House Tour - [https://youtu.be/Jv6SbFlZMbU](https://youtu.be/Jv6SbFlZMbU)

Are Japanese Homes Really Worthless After 30 Years? - [https://youtu.be/1SiPGP_BDS4](https://youtu.be/1SiPGP_BDS4)

Old Japanese Apartment vs. New House - [https://youtu.be/SI3_PJoAa04](https://youtu.be/SI3_PJoAa04)

What a Very Old Japanese House is Like - [https://youtu.be/r8zECc4JM1Y](https://youtu.be/r8zECc4JM1Y)

Living in Traditional Japanese Townhouses: Kyo-machiya - [https://youtu.be/NljSnaZ2WiY](https://youtu.be/NljSnaZ2WiY)

Checking Out New Japanese House Design and Technology - [https://youtu.be/5AiLSyNhEXg](https://youtu.be/5AiLSyNhEXg)

I'd also point out this young couple who are expecting their first child (Paolo from Tokyo)

What a Japanese Moving Company in Tokyo is like - [https://youtu.be/q0RX59G2jaA](https://youtu.be/q0RX59G2jaA)

$1500 Japanese Apartment Tour in Tokyo Shibuya - [https://youtu.be/Qtc_zrpRIs8](https://youtu.be/Qtc_zrpRIs8)

Average Daily Living Cost in Tokyo Japan - [https://youtu.be/xrgrBJc-64c](https://youtu.be/xrgrBJc-64c)

</comment><comment><USER8> Zoning is important, but let's also remember that single-family housing isn't really a speculative investment vehicle in Japan like it is here.

You can either have private equity buying up foreclosed homes and house flipping tv shows or housing being used as housing that most people can afford. America chooses the former, Japan, the latter.

<comment><USER27> > You can either have private equity buying up foreclosed homes and house > flipping tv shows or housing being used as housing that most people can > afford. America chooses the former, Japan, the latter.

Even in very expensive markets like Silicon Valley, foreclosures are typically less than 1% of total home sales.

Homes are not a speculative investment either. Recent studies have shown investing in housing to be safer than investing in stocks, but with similar returns, over a time period stretching back to 1870: [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the- case-for-real-estate-as-investment.html)

<comment><USER28> If the housing prices are growing by 6.7% year by year, and inflation is around 2%, younglings without parents money will have to be priced out and have to work ~5% harder every year which sounds fun /s ;)

I've earned a lot on owning a home, and even have friends who "earn" more per year in owning the home than their salary for a particular year.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I build a open-source code snippeting tool? - <AUTHOR>

A command line tool that saves important code snippets. What do you guys think about this idea? Would you guys use it? <comment><USER2> If you need it yourself then build it, otherwise don't</comment>


Twitter testing timelines that are not in chronological order - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/twitter-is-testing-timelines-that-arent-in-chronological-order <comment><USER2> twitter is becoming more and more like Facebook. actually when facebook started deciding for me about what I wanted to see it made me abandon it and move to twitter in the first place. sad to see twitter now going that way also.</comment>


How many IT Consultants does it take to migrate a business into the cloud? - <AUTHOR> http://www.getapp.com/blog/how-many-it-consultants-does-it-take-to-migrate-a-business-into-the-cloud/

<comment><USER2> If you're only using consultants you're doing it wrong. I moved 16,000 employees to Gmail in three months, but the pilot and preparation phases lasted 12 months. It took about 6 dedicated internal staffers to work the project and multiple thousands of hours of localized and personalized training led by other IT employees. ... and I'd consider this a big success. Compare it to the City of LA's Gmail migration, which is being conducted almost completely by CSC and moving very slowly (at significant expense).

<comment><USER2> Captain Obvious: It's even worse if you're doing anything related to critical business systems. This was just a simplistic example to get the ball rolling.</comment></comment>


DEA teaches agents to recreate evidence chains to hide methods - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-parallel-construction-guides/ <comment><USER2> I object to parallel construction because it warps NSA's incentives and encourages them to develop deeper domestic capabilities.

Having said that: it's worth understanding what parallel construction actually is.

Parallel construction does NOT allow law enforcement to:

(a) Introduce evidence that is the product of NSA surveillance

(b) Literally manufacture probable cause to effect a search to generate introducible evidence

In order for an LEO to act on data from a surveillance source, they must not only be "at the right place at the right time" (which is what surveillance allows them to do), but, once there, discover probable cause to effect a search. That's why you see slides in this deck about how long you can stop a car in a traffic stop; one of the pitfalls of trying to launch a search from a traffic stop is that if the stop exceeds the duration allowed for a detention without arrest, all the evidence generated after that time period elapses is excludable.

Obviously: (i) the probable cause mitigation is damaged by drug dogs ("our search was authorized by this dog over here"), and (ii) all search mitigations are damaged by the fact that they come into play only once someone is arrested and threatened with prosecution. Those are both very serious, important, valid objections. However, I contend that they are objections to the entire process of evidence collection with or without surveillance. Judges need to stop pretending that dogs can judge whether a search is reasonable. Prosecutors have too much unchecked power in our system.

Here's an extremely detailed cartoon flowchart of how 4th Amendment protections come into play (or are thwarted) in the real world:

[http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2256](http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2256)

<comment><USER3> > discover probable cause to effect a search.

Right so when you get arrested at that traffic stop, all you need is about $15-20k+ for lawyer, tons of time in courtrooms, bail money, potentially jail time in between, months/years stressing a criminal charge...and hopefully some decent evidence you can convince a judge or jury your rights weren't infringed.

There are a ton of externalities that goes into proving the state wrong and protecting civil rights at the court level. The majority of drug convictions happen to people in lower socio-economic positions (if not, asset seizure will ensure it). So the fact lawyers are capable of destroying the DEA's evidence in a courtroom doesn't make me feel any better about the situation. Reducing the use of drug dogs is a good start, far too many false-positives.

<comment><USER2> Just so we're clear that we're on the same page, I'll point out that I wrote the same thing in my comment, and agree that it's a real concern.

On the other hand, it's also worth understanding that "parallel construction" (it didn't always used to be called that) isn't new. It's also what happens when the DEA manages to get an informant placed high up in a cartel or organized crime operation. You want to be able to exploit your source, but you don't want to burn that source, because they'll keep being valuable going forward.

<comment><USER4> An informant and NSA monitoring are only similar things when the informant happens to be the suspect's phone, computer, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Parallel construction allows intelligence agencies to make criminal allegations that might turn out to be less than factually accurate, while facing no review and no repercussions.

The concept of allowing evidence from secret sources should offend anyone who believes in a just society.

<comment><USER2> How does parallel construction allow:

(i) intelligence agencies to make any criminal allegations

(ii) criminal allegations that turn out to be false

Can you be as specific as you can? There's plenty of rational arguments to make about why "parallel construction" is bad, but too many people argue about it without understanding at all what it is.

<comment><USER6> > criminal allegations that turn out to be false

That's not the issue. The problem is that it gives the government the ability to arbitrarily circumvent the usual ethical safeguards and legal protections which come into play when bringing a criminal allegation.

Since the practice obfuscates at least part of the evidentiary chain, there's no way for a private citizen's legal defense to audit it for compliance with ethical and legal standards.

Also, given sufficient surveillance data and complexity of law, you can probably come up with some criminal charge against any arbitrary person under surveillance at any time when it would be useful to do so.

> intelligence agencies to make any criminal allegations

"Here's some data, that guy is inconvenient to us, please accuse them of this list of legal violations which we have just given you supporting evidence for."

If you know a reason why it wouldn't work like that - one which can still be enforced in open court, not a secret court known for rubber-stamping virtually anything brought before it by the government - I would love to hear it.

<comment><USER2> Prosecutors are required to present potentially exculpatory evidence, but they have never been required to present all the data they generate in their investigations. Defendants have never had access to the entire "evidentiary chain" using the definition you present here.

Meanwhile: prosecutors "accuse", and to do it, they need evidence. They can't use evidence from NSA or DEA "fusion"; the whole point of "parallel construction" is that they need a chain anchored by probable cause to do anything.

<comment><USER7> Yes that's true. But the idea that there's an entity which can "magically" drum up a precise interdiction point where probable cause should be manufactured by law enforcement isn't good.

If a police officer wouldn't suspect you of a crime without the special instructions given to him by someone with access to sensitive information then you've just done an end-run around probable cause. Sure the police can manufacture probable cause to stop and search nearly everyone all the time. But they don't because they'd prefer to have some kind of actual probable cause because that gives them a much higher chance of not being on a wild goose chase. Subverting this limitation due to resources also subverts the even application of the law which is a bad thing.

The idea that drug dealers can't be caught the old fashioned way and spying on all American citizens in order to catch some people engaged in largely victimless criminal activity is laughable at best and terrifying at worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This finding is evidence that the DEA actively subverts the democratic rule of law by covering up the bulk of their investigative methods from the public. If the public can't have an honest look at what the DEA is actually doing to make its cases, the public can't consent. This line of thought is nearly explicit in the slides on muckrock.

They don't want us knowing what is going on.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are three concrete harms from the current operations of the surveillance state.

\- Retroactive investigation/ parallel constructions: An arm of the government decides an individual is undesirable and merely needs to look up their permanent record to find a crime to convict them of.

\- Chilling effects: People are unwilling to express unpopular political opinions because privileges of will be taken away from them. This undermines policy discovery.

\- Reduction in trust. Companies can be compelled by secret law or court order, systems are compromised, standards are undermined and government officials are blackmailed. A constant burden of suspicion creates enormous costs on society and makes everyone poorer.

</comment><comment><USER10> So for everybody that says that various intelligence agencies collecting all kinds of information isn't bad, because they'll never use them politically: here's your answer. You'll never know whether or not this information was used politically, because what they'll do is 1) find the person, 2) find the crime, 3) construct the evidence chain so that it doesn't reveal methods.

I don't think "evil" begins to cover it.

Given this operational scenario, you'll never, ever catch the government using intelligence information for political reasons. Even if the practice is widespread.

(And, for the record, I'm all for law enforcement, and law enforcement keeping intelligence files on people who may be dangerous. This collection does not include the scenario I outlined above)

</comment><comment><USER11> From the slides:

"What is _the problem_ with combining IC collection efforts & LEA investigations in US courtrooms?

Some answers to this question:

Constitutionally protected liberty interests.

Discovery and due process of law expressed in the FRCP & FRE.

And, _Americans don 't like it_!"

But we're gonna go ahead and do it anyway, right, guys?

</comment><comment><USER12> This should be _extremely illegal_ and a zero tolerance policy should be in place.

Also, I don't think I've heard Obama mention any of this in his recent speech on how to fix the surveillance abuses, and it came out in the news at least twice last year. I think it's time we send a review panel into DEA (and FBI for that matter), too.

<comment><USER13> A review panel? If only we had a department that had the power to arrest these people for breaking the law. That would be the DOJ unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Feb 11, just 8 days away. Please join.

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

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/february-11-day-we- fig...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/february-11-day-we-fight-back- calling-international-community)

<comment><USER15> This isn't related to the topic - the practice under discussion, while terrible, has nothing to do with the Internet at all.

<comment><USER14> It's about hiding the work of intelligence agencies behind the scenes, to keep it out of public eye and courts. It has a lot to do, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like going to court and saying "yeah the lead investigator for this case just happened to stumble upon what appeared to be a shipment of watermelons bound for the local Stop & Shop, and decided they looked suspicious. After a full body cavity search of the driver, and a thorough search of the contents of each of the 742 watermelons, a small bag of marijuana was recovered" when in fact the reason for the search wasn't "suspicious looking watermelon shipment", but rather "3-letter organization tipped us off, one of their interns stumbled upon it while casually perusing some cell phone recordings over lunch" is certainly perjury and patently illegal.

</comment><comment><USER17> Parallel construction, by definition, requires perjury in court on behalf of those presenting the evidence.

Not that such a silly thing ever stopped anyone ...

</comment><comment><USER18> If you are a defense attorney and can get a copy of this teaching (ie materials, interviews, etc) you could easily create reasonable doubt in anything the DEA touches.

</comment><comment><USER19> What happened to the republic? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi)

<comment><USER8> It was left defenseless by the public and so it was cannibalized for the sake of power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somehow, somewhere, the whole 'consent of the governed' thing was forgotten.

<comment><USER21> Somehow, somewhere, the whole 'consent of the governed' will be reminded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Such a long way to go on this issue, these documents only emphasize telling the truth under oath, they don't talk about warrants and evidence. I really can't see how parallel construction can be performed either legally or in a way that would still make that evidence admissible in a court.

When the debate about the existence of domestic surveillance was hot, one of the counter-arguments against those who believed there to be a large-scale network was a Fermi-like "If it exists, then where is it?" since signs that such a network exists, such as evidence gathered by it appearing in court documents, were not appearing. The counter-argument was parallel reconstruction, but I recall a further point made by a lawyer who said they would be stupid to do that, since all the reconstructed evidence would be thrown out of court.

Wiretaps, search warrants, indictments etc. are all legal and sworn documents made by officers where they are required to disclose everything. I'm no means an expert, but i'd imagine a good defense lawyer (heck, or even a judge) would argue that the sworn statements were not entirely true and were compromised by using a surveillance system that is a black box and not open to court oversight. Search warrants get compromised for simple things such as showing up 5 minutes late, or taking something from the property that wasn't covered (these rules are there for a reason, to protect us from all-knowing and over- reaching police forces).

As an aside, there was a case of parallel reconstruction in a mainstream news story last week. In the News Limited trials in the UK where former editors and journalists are being prosecuted for phone hacking one of the private detectives who was hired to hack phones for News spent an entire day in the witness seat talking about his methods and what they did.

In one of his stories, he had hacked the phone of Daniel Craig (an actor) and retrieved a voicemail left to him by Sienna Miller - an actress who is married to another famous actor - which indicated they were having an affair. He played the message for the editor of the News of the World who jumped up in excitement and said they had their new front page story. One problem: how will they reveal the source of the message since it was legal? Simple, the editor instructed the PI to place a recording of the tape into a brown paper bag and to drop it off to the front desk of the newspaper office while nobody was there. It would be an 'anonymous tip'. It worked - the story said 'an anonymous source, believed to be somebody close to the pair', etc.

During the entire decade long phone hacking scandal there were all sorts of new 'anonymous' sources popping up in news stories that it drove the celebrities mad. One actor spent tens of thousands of dollars sweeping his entire house for recording devices, another cut off contact with all friends because he couldn't trust anybody anymore and another had all their staff undergo intense security checks to make sure they weren't leaking.

In one case it led to someone being fired. The manager of a famous model was fired because a story leaked about how that model had been having an affair (or something) and even through the real source was a phone hack, the paper attributed it to a 'close source'. The model fired her manager after a few stories - blaming her, and only found out years later that it was phone hacking. The manager is now suing both News Corp and the model.

If the DEA are practicing parallel reconstruction to the extent as many believe they are, one can only imagine the scope of similar unintended consequences. The stakes would be much higher: suspected snitches being murdered or disappeared by paranoid drug bosses.</comment>


Dating Denial of Service attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/evkwy/what_are_some_lifehacks_youd_never_admit_to/c1bb70v <comment><USER3> So they created fake accounts and pretended to be attractive women, just to get with a random girl? If that's not the definition of creepy, I don't know what is. The fact that he doesn't want the girl to find out should make this obvious -- _any_ woman who found out you were doing this would be put off immediately, as they should be.

Instead of spending so much time with some weird scheme in an attempt to put down the "hunks," how about just becoming a more attractive and more interesting person on your own? Newsflash, guys: women are attracted to confidence and a sense of self-worth, among other things, not complex mechanisms to distract the other guys.

 _There are two ways to be the biggest building. One is to tear down the other buildings. Or two, just build the biggest building._ \- Gary V

Sorry, but this is just really strange, and the lack of ANY negative feedback on here or Reddit is even more disconcerting.

<comment><USER4> So you've done this online? It worked well for you?

So you know the three sentence opener that is going to compensate for a less than attractive picture?

Let's hear it.

Or is your answer just a stand-in to let you morally condemn these others?

In person, one can project confidence, intelligence, humor etc. Online, being unique is bit harder, not just because someone can copy your words but also because you get to use far fewer of them before a decision is made.

I'm not condemning or condoning the original post. But it's telling that a lot of condemnations for "gaming the dating system" that I hear are prefaced by "it's easy, just become more confident/relax/be yourself". Supply-and-demand says that the common measure of "success" in dating aren't inherently easy. They might not be desirable either but that's a different story.

I think online dating with photo does create a real quandary because it gives one very little time and thus makes the likely winners more based on immediate visual factors.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you would like to explain what is wrong with morally condemning others when what they did is in fact morally wrong?

It's very simple and clear cut: he distorted the truth in order for him to get an advantage and put others at a disadvantage. There is no greater good behind the lie, it's just self-interest.

<comment><USER6> Morally wrong by whose standards? Just because you consider it morally wrong, does not make it morally wrong by all standards, or even necessarily by society's standards.

<comment><USER5> Morally wrong by general societal standards such as: * lying is wrong - especially when done with self-serving interests in mind such as in this case. They lied to the other members of the site and he is hiding the truth from the girl. He KNOWS that what he did is wrong and he knows that she would dump him if she found out. * more lying is worse - he now wants to "automate this"

So this is a typical case of someone breaking the rules, getting away with it (even getting commended!) and then wanting to break the rules on a larger scale.

<comment><USER7> That's really a short-sighted way of seeing things. If you lie to your sister about her not looking fat in that new dress then that's not morally wrong. If a girl goes into a relationship with you after you used this trick then she still did it willingly.

<comment><USER8> _she still did it willingly_

If, of course, you confessed everything and left no false pretenses.

<comment><USER9> Confessing everything is better than continuing to hide that you lied. But it doesn't excuse lying in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was another pretty interesting post a while back along similar lines. The guy set up a fake profile with a very attractive guy, a great job, and an exciting persona. Basically every woman's dream guy.

He then used this fake profile to message the girls he was interested in. Pretty much every woman opened up their souls, dreams, and wishes to this fake Cassanova. He then uses this inside information to make his real self more interesting and the conversation more engaging when he messages them and goes on dates.

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised that nowadays this trick is considered so fresh. I've done it back in the day in the 90s on chatrooms. But then I was a stupid teenager, nowadays I wonder why these guys do this nonsense. I'm not into online dating right now, but couldn't they gather the same information by simply talking? Isn't this hack a trick reserved for socially awkward people who can't make up a decent conversation on the spot?

<comment><USER12> You only get one chance to make a first impression. With this hack, you get two.

<comment><USER11> Every day I discover a new reason not to use dating websites. I think if all these dudes used this time to improve their social skills, they would one day realize such hacks are pointless. And if you imagine adapting these techniques to RL, things start to look really creepy, don't they :)?

Unless they are teens, that's like a hack 'how to avoid natural human communication'. Nevertheless, I wish them good luck in dating experience.

<comment><USER13> You might as well say that every day you find another reason to not go dating, at least that's how I feel about it. Saying that "not everyone you like will be attracted to you" is a very nice way of putting it. In my experience, most people are attracted to stupid things. I've tried the classical "acting like a charming douchebag" routine, and I've been horrified at the rate of success in the traditional meat markets.

The point is that dating outside of your social circle is a numbers game. You will be seeing the averages most of the time, and most people are simply not worth your time. At least that's the impression I've been left with after playing around with this stuff in different places the last year.

As to whether playing games like this is pointless or not...if you're looking for the love of your life, then probably yes. But if you're looking for sex and short-term, uncommitted relationships, games like these are the best way to get what you want! I see this as just a natural extension of all the phoniness that happens in night clubs. The point is, playing games works! You'd be horrified at how many women, especially under 30, treat dating as a game..and have the most stupid reactions as a result. These people are probably not worth investing too much time in, but they do represent the average person you will meet. Which is really sad, but it's the impression you'll be left with after going out a lot.

<comment><USER11> Dating IS a game no matter if you're looking for sex or a relationship. It's always a stack of little challenges and responses, and yes, there's also tricking involved. What I implied in my post is that no matter if these online hacks get you where you wanted, in the end you only got there because you were faking accounts just to start a conversation.

Second of all, IRL or online, for me it's about doing it the natural way - <USER2> know - talk to people. That's what dating online on dating websites should look like, but from the ammount of 'hacks' and 'howtos' I read about, seems it isn't. If I'm to waste my time playing against bunches of creepos with armies of fake accounts instead of socializing with real girls - sorry, I'm out.

 _Saying that "not everyone you like will be attracted to you" is a very nice way of putting it_

Aren't you replying here to ZoFreX's post above, which is not mine? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guys, if you do this, just remember that when they use their best friend to hit on you to see if you'll cheat, and how upset that makes you when you find out.

Turn-about is fair play if you aren't going to be straight-up about things.

<comment><USER4> Uh,

If that happened to you, it's one woman who did it, not "they".

<comment><USER15> It's a pretty common stereotype - I don't know if I've ever seen it happen IRL but I've seen it happen a lot in movies/TV. I think ck can be forgiven the generalization.

<comment> brown9-2 We accept fact-less generalizations and stereotypes around here now?

<comment><USER15> So long as they're presented and taken as such, I don't see why not. ck2 never said "Every woman does X" or "Your girlfriend will surely do X".

I guess I took the "when" as a colloquial "if" - if your reading was more literal then I suppose I can see why you're upset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I saw this earlier today and thought, while it was a less than honorable thing to do, it was a pretty clever bit of social engineering.

<comment><USER17> I redirected reddit.com to news.ycombinator.com, so I haven't read the article.

I did however, just spend some time talking with my attractive single sister- in-law about dirty guy tricks in the dating scene. She's pretty broad-minded, so I don't think she represents every woman, but I liked her attitude.

She said something like: "Girls stuff their bras, and play all sorts of mind- games to get guys to like them. I would consider social engineering fair turnabout, man! The guys are way behind in this area!"

<comment><USER18> _> "Girls stuff their bras, and play all sorts of mind-games to get guys to like them. I would consider social engineering fair turnabout, man! The guys are way behind in this area!"_

This is only that start of it. If you think date-engineering is something typically done by creepy men, you may want to reconsider.

<comment><USER9> Yes. It's also done by creepy women.

<comment><USER19> I don't mind stuffed bras.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is similar to the Sybil attack in peer-to-peer networking. From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack>: "A Sybil attack is one in which an attacker subverts the reputation system of a peer-to-peer network by creating a large number of pseudonymous entities, using them to gain a disproportionately large influence."

<comment><USER21> Only when the fake female accounts upvote his real account in some way.

<comment><USER22> He should use his female accounts to message his real account, and only "reply" to a few of those. OkCupid would then inform other girls that he "replies very selectively" when they message him, and would thus see him as hard to get!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> i don't see how this would work since most guys use the shotgun approach, so none of the women would stop receiving messages.

\+ most women get something like 200 messages a week..so even if the numbers went down, they'd still have plenty of messages.

Granted it might work somewhere in the middle of Montana with 20,000 people within 200 miles.

<comment><USER24> Guys will email the most attractive chicks first then work their way down the ladder (so to speak) ... if any of the chicks at the top of the ladder respond to them, thats where their attention is going to be until the figure out something is up or otherwise lose interest ...

With 50 impossibly (fake) hot chicks on the radar and only 30 real ones who probably fall below the 50 on the scale, that would give our boys more than enough time to seal the deal

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This seems like a great answer in response to the YC application's "hack" question.

<comment><USER26> To be honest, for the past few years, every time I have read about something like that, I have thought about that question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Survival of the fittest in 2011.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone else slightly reminded of that scene from A Beautiful Mind reading this?

<comment><USER29> It's been a long time since I've seen that movie, which scene exactly?

<comment><USER30> John Nash and some guys see a blonde at a bar, which inspires his theory of governing dynamics:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5jrNoNNtrE>

It's a great scene.

<comment><USER31> <http://xkcd.com/182/>

<comment><USER30> Heh, quite. I console myself with the thought that good storytelling owes has no obligation to reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A visionary, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER33> i think that the fact that (1) they perceived this was necessary and (2) this worked, shows that online dating needs a better way of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER34> Highly recommend the Catfish Movie if you have not seen it. A variant of the same technique is employed.

<http://www.iamrogue.com/catfish>

</comment><comment><USER35> Somehow reminds me of this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbJHkwHZCCM>

Will this approach work on the job offers websites?

</comment><comment><USER36> Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

:(

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems to me the woman would only be impressed by his resourcefulness, and flattered, if he told her how he got her in a joking way over dinner. I, personally, would be impressed if a woman did it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Haha! This is f-king awesome! :)

</comment><comment><USER39> Reddit posts are generally useless talks. Cross posting from reddit, solves anything ? This looks out of scope to me.

<comment><USER39> would you please mind, explaining for the down vote?

<comment><USER40> I did not vote, but I understand:

You commented solely to complain about the main post. Your comment added no more information than a flag would have.

Your comment was completely generic. It made no specific argument against the link except to disparage reddit. The stereotypical HN reader prides himself on being the type of person who'd appreciate clever, insightful material even from /b/, let alone from reddit.

Also, I realize English is not your first language, but it's the lingua franca of this site; and your English was distractingly poor.</comment></comment></comment>


Captive-Portal Identification Using DHCP or Router Advertisements (RAs) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710 <comment><AUTHOR> I think this is much needed. Currently, devices try to make requests to "special sites" [0] and compare the responses to hardcoded expectations.

The WiFi operators usually try to redirect to (or inject) the captive portal site, where the DNS server and/or gateway do some MITM. If you use DNSCrpyt, or if they only MITM on HTTP and you use a custom DNS server, then you'll simply end up with connection errors. Connecting to a site with HTTPS (intentionally or due to HSTS) will also fail because it can't be redirected.

The only way to fix this is obtaining a valid SSL CA cert to redirect HTTPS traffic (not really :) - or this approach via DHCP/RAs.

0: e.g. [http://www.google.com/blank.html](http://www.google.com/blank.html), [http://www.google.com/generate_204](http://www.google.com/generate_204)</comment>


The gap between learning code and producing usable software - <AUTHOR> https://yassine.substack.com/p/the-gap-between-learning-code-and <comment><USER2> For whatever reason, this big picture knowledge about how to bring everything together to make effective software is rarely taught explicitly. Rather we mostly see guides to the latest syntax or features of the framework du jour. Having been in this game for over a decade, I know full well this sort of surface knowledge has the shortest shelf-life.

If you've got more of a taste for the slower-changing, thoroughly unsexy principles behind writing stable and maintainable software, I'm devoting myself to exploring these ideas with my screencasts - topics like data integrity, building instrumentation for knowing what's happening in your code (esp. in production), non-brittle tests, leaning on unix tools and the OS to debug things, the timeless editor vim, etc.

The first 12 videos are available over at [https://www.semicolonandsons.com/](https://www.semicolonandsons.com/) \-- it's a new side-project of mine that I hope will bring some value.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to watch these and appreciate you've put a decent chunk of work into the content.

But...as a desktop user the video player only has two screen sizes...too small to be readable and full screen which is pretty useless because I like to multitask. Could I suggest offering different sized embedded players, or something that resizes with the browser window?

Hope you don't take this as negative criticism.

<comment><USER2> I very much welcome the feedback. Full-screen is something I personally didn't consider.

I use the Wistia player and it seems to be fully responsive on page resizes -- the issue is more that the player is constrained by the size of its column in the css. I'll put that on the list of things to sort out once I get around to hiring a designer. The css at present is an extremely rough proof of concept.

<comment><USER3> With a bit of fiddling, bookmarking this wee snippet does the job good enough:

        javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('.lg\\:mx-8').remove();document.querySelector('.lg\\:w-3\\/5').setAttribute('class', 'w-full');})()

It removes the right hand panel and the width restriction in the player's containing div. Until of course you change your markup :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This comes off a bit as "knows how to produce a product on a particular platform (iOS, with Swift via XCode), doesn't demonstrate the theory or fundamentals". Talking about "retain cycles" from an iOS perspective with no mention of "memory leak" or "reference counting" or "garbage collection", which are more widely-applicable terms.

I don't think going wholly to the other end of the theory-praxis spectrum is the answer in addressing the gap :-)

There is a good main thrust here but requires a lot of work/editing to be really useful IMO.

<comment><USER5> I had very little idea what retain cycles were - what a weird term (to an outsider)! I thought it was related to using a variable for looping or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> All solid advice. This is a nice checklist of things to remember if you have been through it before. However, I don't think the target audience of "knows how to code, but not how to build a product" will be able to do much with this individual article. Any one of this points can spiral into days, weeks, or months of learning and experimentation. Even how to set an environment variable can be a difficult task for a new developer that doesn't have a good concept on what the shell is beyond that they type magic commands into it from stackoverflow.

I really think more established apprenticeships would be good for the software industry. This is a list of things that you only learn if you have been through launching a product, and it takes a few years of experience to have a chance to both do it and have time to digest and understand it.

Also almost 30 points on a business advice article with no comments, smells a bit fishy.

</comment><comment><USER7> The gap between learning to code and producing usable software is...

... ability to perform complicated abstract reasoning, ability to reflect on own performance plus some experience.

Almost everybody is able to perform simple programming tasks in isolation. For example, follow a tutorial to build simple app using framework X or google solution to problem Y and ctrl-c/ctrl-v into your codebase.

Complicated abstract reasoning is necessary to be able to put together abstract concepts, flows, in new patterns that are required by the application.

Ability to reflect on own performance is necessary to learn from mistakes, look critically at the code, understand strengths weaknesses, evaluate solutions, etc. A person that lacks ability to reflect on own performance might be for example deaf to complaints of other people, might be blind to problems with the code they are producing (for example overcomplicated code), or trying to find faults anywhere else but themselves.

If you can't reflect on yourself you are cut off from being able to effectively learn and improve and this is critical to being able to produce usable software.

Regardless of how intelligent and self-reflective you are, some experience is needed.

<comment><USER8> Quoting this because I would only fail to phrase it any better:

> Getting hooked on computers is easy — almost anybody can make a program > work, just as almost anybody can nail two pieces of wood together in a few > tries. The trouble is that the market for two pieces of wood nailed together > — inexpertly — is fairly small outside of the "proud grandfather" segment, > and getting from there to a decent set of chairs or fitted cupboards takes > talent, practice, and education.

\- Poul-Henning Kamp

[0]: [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257)

<comment><USER9> The thing is; there is actually a big market for nailing two pieces of wood together; there is just no market for someone whose only skill is nailing two pieces of wood together [0]. Consider a chair where one of the cross supports got unattached. You could by a new chair, or hire a carpenter to fix it. In most cases, unless you already have a maintenance staff, you would probably just fix it yourself.

Similar with programming. If you core product is software, you should probably have an expert. However, if the software is just ancillary; you can often get by with just the basic skills.

[0] Maybe assembly lines; but with modern manufacturing technology, I doubt that is the case anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any sort of HCI or design stuff was absent from my CS education, and it seems to be one of the bigger gaps I see with engineers: not many people will try to have someone actually _use_ their software after creating it, and there's a ton you can learn by seeing how people fail to effectively navigate your UX or try to use it for something they wanted but wasn't originally scoped.

I got that through years of providing helpdesk service to end-users, and it's staggering how much UX kludginess gets into production that would have seemingly been caught by watching 1-2 people (other than the software authors) actually try to use it.

Those responsibilities are ostensibly handled by other business units, but that either doesn't actually happen in startups (what's a design team? we don't have one!) or would be smoothed by the engineering side having a basic foundation of the concepts involved, enough to understand the rationale behind UX stuff and challenge bad design before it gets in front of users.

<comment><USER11> > Those responsibilities are ostensibly handled by other business units, but > that either doesn't actually happen in startups (what's a design team? we > don't have one!) or would be smoothed by the engineering side having a basic > foundation of the concepts involved, enough to understand the rationale > behind UX stuff and challenge bad design before it gets in front of users.

Even more directly, _someone has to operate (from the back-end, not as an end- user) the systems you build_ , and usability (or even existence of) tools for that is often terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with pretty much all of this except:

> Don't keep "Logs" (similar to print) when building for production!

Not logging in production code is a recipe for not being able to fix some key user problems. Remote logging is mandatory for a high quality app.

<comment><USER13> Similarly, logging too much makes logs meaningless. Purpose-based specific log platforms can be useful, like, stack traces go to sentry, tracing goes to jaeger, stdout for global context stuff, etc. All of these going in one stream makes it almost as useless as no logs.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. If you have too much, you can always filter. If you have too little, you're blind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > I include a random environment variable that I can keep track of which > dictates how the password will be generated for a specific user depending on > the information provided. And we are set! I don't need to know my users' > password, I trigger the "sign-in" by triggering the same hashing function > using the environment variable I stored before and everything is secure.

Wait, what?

</comment><comment><USER15> > and if you are logging sensitive information you'll get in trouble.

This is one of the areas, where strong types can help you. Have all your sensitive information in separate types from your non-sensitive info. For example, if you store the user's name in a type called SensitiveString, you can write methods/traits/overloads/etc that can either make it a compile time error to log a a value of that type, or log a placeholder - ie " __SenstiveInfoHidden __* ". This also helps ensure that you don't accidentally assign or append sensitive information to a non-sensitive variable. Put the compiler and type system to work for you.

<comment><USER16> This sounds interesting, my only experience with Types is via TypeScript, would you mind sharing a really simple example of how this could work in TS? Or maybe some link/resources you think are appropiate for learning more on this topic, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I saw title of the post I thought it would be talking about principles that you learn the first time you have to write production code, such as reliability, maintainability, validation (testing, continuous integration, rollout processes), performance tuning, security, contingency planning (backups), etc. Those are definitely part of the steep learning curve right after you learn to sling code but before you are able to work in a team setting on apps/services with substantial usage.

I suppose the actual contents of the article makes sense for apps on a specific platform, but I feel like there's a more generalizable set of lessons that fit the bill for "all of the problems you get once your hacked together app/website/service has real users."

</comment><comment><USER18> Luca Palmieri[0] is trying to fill that gap with his series called "Zero to Production" in Rust that assumes the reader can solve project euler problems and is instead going to focus on "how do I build and deploy production software."

You can read the introduction[1] to the series to get a better sense.

[0] [https://twitter.com/algo_luca](https://twitter.com/algo_luca)

[1][https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-05-24-zero-to- productio...](https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-05-24-zero-to- production-0-foreword/)

</comment><comment><USER19> The gap between writing code ("programming") and producing software that is going to be available after a while, in a team ("software engineering") is maintainability.

<comment><USER4> Where maintainability is composed of documentation, version-control, testing, building, issue tracking, soft management, automating all of the above, adhering to conventions even if they are crazy, and more. All are non-trivial but won't be gleaned from your average programming course.

The article brushes with some of these but misses the mark overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me when I used to interview people with masters and phds who were obviously helpless when it came to actual program construction.

I like to think that my early ability to create code, a make file and package it up into something that just worked really helped my career early on.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Don't keep "Logs" (similar to print) when building for production!

Aren't we supposed to log exceptions in production? How would you know if your software has unknown problems otherwise?

</comment><comment><USER22> See also: The difference between correct definitions and a correct runtime system.</comment>


Sketching Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://airbnb.design/sketching-interfaces/ <comment><USER2> Some similar experiments, dating back as far as 1996:

SILK: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLQcW6SpJ88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLQcW6SpJ88)

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

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the links

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really incredible.

I've always loved the idea of "box and arrow" programming for flows, but in practice the interface was always too cumbersome -- typing was faster.

But coming up with a design language that a human can sketch and a machine can interpret really breathes new life into that idea.

Love it!

</comment><comment><USER5> Seeing things like this just make me want to get into ML. I'm sure there's a ton of complexity behind it but it seems that it just feels so rewarding.

<comment><USER6> Just know that ML jobs are just statisticians with sexier names

<comment><USER7> Depends 100% on where you are. Data Science/ML engineers can mean dramatically different things at different companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be inclined to agree with Adam Michela when he says design systems restrain creativity. It is the industrialization of user interfaces.

<comment><USER9> Roads certainly limit where one can drive, but the alternative is pretty disastrous.

As with anything: there is a time and place. Design systems are wildly powerful for scaling, creating a cohesive language across a brand or product, and moving quickly.

Just because you have a design system doesn't mean the buck stops there. You can keep building new roads if you know where it is you need to go that the existing roads won't take you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Software development is applied semiotics.

I've been saying this for a while but software development hasn't ever really felt like symbol making (rather some engineering type profession) so people dismiss this notion. I'm beginning to feel vindicated.

</comment><comment><USER11> Correct me if I'm wrong but is this basically doing what Adobe & others have already done? The only difference I noticed is they're using a camera & image recognition as the input instead of the designer dragging & dropping 1 of the 150 components on to a digital canvas in a software application?

I do get that it's a demo that shows the possibility. I just feel I'm missing something that makes this stand out. I did only watch the first video & skim the article.

<comment><USER12> In practice there's a big difference in thought process and workflow between drawing freehand on paper and flipping through a UI library with a drag and drop interface. I think this is true even if your task is just composing from the same well defined set of components.

If they can actually pull this off it I can see it being very useful. And if it works really well in conjunction with other experiments currently ongoing, I can imagine it even affecting the way teams are structured and how a designer's day to day work goes.

<comment><USER13> The recognized seems to be fixed to a limited UI language, so is it fair to call this freehand? Rather, there is palette that you access via roughly sketching out a predefined form.

This won't be that useful for many designer sketches,l where the visual language is mostly undefined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A perfect example of several congruent technologies being combined in novel ways to create something that opens up entirely new ways of working. Design systems + ML computer vision. Incredible.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking at the embedded youtube video the article might have been published after Sep 7, 2017. I can only guess, though, since they don't include dates on any articles they publish.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is insanely great. An ideal system would be developing something like this to do PSD to HTML, instead of having it identify predefined components.

</comment><comment><USER17> If I'd want to build something like this as a copy-paste nerd with some python experience, where would i start?

<comment><USER18> From my 5 minutes understanding of the problem: Non deep learning solution

Step 0: you should have some training data. Draw it < I believe 50 of each class you want to detect should be enough to start, but you can think about doubling it>

First you need look at the opencv library, specifically in the findcontours function [https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/imgproc/doc/structural_a...](https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/imgproc/doc/structural_analysis_and_shape_descriptors.html?highlight=findcontours#findcontours) \- I'm linking to the c++ api but the python has the exact same function.

Make sure your contours are clean of rubbish data because this can affect the outcome of the classifier.

With the extracted attributes of each individual class you pass on this data to a multi class classifier ([http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/multiclass.html](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/multiclass.html))

Parameterize your model, Split your data into training and testing ... yada yada ...

With the generated model, you can receive individual detected contours and it will give you the fitting probability to each class, use it to feed an api which provides data to a react component that renders html.

>> ps: Ah you need an image capture app which reads the image in real time, pass the filters and detect contours to then pass it to the classifier.

>> ps2: I'm available for projects :P

<comment><USER19> How much time should this take to build? I'm really interested in trying out to build this. or maybe creating an open source package?

<comment><USER18> I suspect someone with enough experience can hack this in a couple of days.

<comment><USER17> How can I contact you?

<comment><USER19> Are you interested in building this? I'm interested too if you're looking for collaborators!

<comment><USER17> Yes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The video demo showing their sketches created into a high fidelity design was really neat

</comment><comment><USER21> It's great!

</comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting concept. It reminds me of the discussion I've seen around smalltalk, in which smalltalk fans say that dev environments should be live and should immediately react to changes. The idea of being able to sketch something up on a whiteboard and having the UI come to life on a screen next to me instantaneously really feels similar.

On the other hand, who is the guy doing the talk at the bottom of the page? That was totally cringy. I felt like he didn't know what he was talking about.

Edit: wording. tone.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our Landing Page Copy - <AUTHOR>

A couple months ago, we submitted our landing page for here review. We learned that we needed to simplify our message, add a clear visual hierarchy, and improve our design.<p>So, we were wondering if you could give us advice on our writing. Is it understandable? Is it well written? Does it convey our message? Thank you so much. http://signup.musicmind.co/ <comment><USER2> Couple of comments that just immediately came to mind:

1) Ugh, Launchrock. I'm very tired of LR pages, they give no info and serve no purpose. You'd be better off with your own landing page and fake screenshots. With so many Launchrock pages that end up being fake, I think there's a weariness about it now.

2) You use a lot of words but I'm still not sure what you do. Are you a web app? Are you a social network? Can I listen to music, or just talk about music? Why do I need another music app when I have Spotify and iTunes? Answering these questions will make it more likely that I WANT early access to your site.

3) If you stay with the LR page, at least mock up some fake screenshots for the background. Try to be as real as possible, even if you have nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your reply. On the first point.

We decided to use Launchrock because we were tired of spending so much of our development time on building a launch page (maybe because we're not designers). We used Launchrcok because we were pre-launch and believed that we could communicate effectively in one paragraph what we are trying to do. But if the sentiment is so anti-LR, or it causes us to look fake, I guess we will change.

On the second point. We're a social network for people to listen to their music, share their music, and connect with their favorite artists. This is beneficial to you because you are supporting artists with your song purchases vs streaming, you can consolidate all of your music listening and sharing in one place, and we allow you to connect with artists.

And on the third point. This is a really interesting point, which we haven't considered before. We'll try to do this.

We really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Unlike some of the other commenters, I like the vagueness a bit. I would have probably left you my email address until I found out it was a social network. In other words, if you're still not sure exactly what you're going to end up being and are open to the idea of changing your model as you go, I wouldn't limit yourselves/shrink your userbase before you even have a site.

I'd also cut this sentence. It's redundant and adds no value: "Each listening to the same band, you were drawn together over music?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Its simplified, but now it's a bit vague. What exactly does "consolidate their personal library" mean and why would users want that?

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the repsonse I'm one of the other MusicMind team members. We'll definitely work on making this more concise. We're referring to creating a way to store your complete music collection in one place without the huge price tag. I appreciate it.

<comment><USER4> The statement above from your other team member was pretty good, you should use it: "We're a social network for people to listen to their music, share their music, and connect with their favorite artists."

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about replacing social network with website?

<comment><USER4> That works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For all of your clicking needs: <http://signup.musicmind.co/>

</comment><comment><USER6> It is best if you can make the page open w/o having to provide an email and register

<comment><USER4> Its a landing page, the point is to drive registrations. But you might be right in that they need to provide links to who they are and what they're about at the bottom so that people can learn more about it before they sign up. Maybe a tour?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I guess we really weren't clear in saying this, but this is a pre- launch page, so we're really trying to just gauge interest an get emails. I'm sorry we didn't say this well enough. Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Comparing file parsing in 8 different languages - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/hay/74908efe0d79557a97ff

<comment><USER2> I find it pretty surprising that bash is at the bottom of the list. I'd have imagined it to score substantially higher than say, ruby or python.

<comment><USER3> Not really. The bash programmer would have been done with this task hours before the others, so his 8 seconds longer average execution time is quite justified. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. I really like to see C, C++ and asm.js versions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm open to pull requests! :)</comment></comment>


Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany's academic community - <AUTHOR> https://www.hrk.de/press/press-releases/press-release/meldung/deal-and-elsevier-negotiations-elsevier-demands-unacceptable-for-the-academic-community-4409/ <comment><USER2> "Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable."

Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.

<comment><USER3> Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their databases.

This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I would _pay_ for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the choice.

<comment><USER4> One thing to keep in mind is that European universities have encouraged this situation by insisting that faculty publish in "legitimate" journals, where "legitimate" means "published by one of the major academic publishing companies." It has been a problem for CS faculty who have to convince universities that conference proceedings carry more weight in CS than journal articles, which is why you see Springer publishing "official" copies of so many conference papers (while "unofficial" copies can typically be found at the authors' personal webpage).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their journals are not even doing their job properly and have published a plagiarised version of a paper already in Nature:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_plagiarism_in_a_peerreviewed_journal/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope to see more open source online journals like [https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/) in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.

<comment><USER4> Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."

Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers ([https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/)), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.

<comment><USER7> distill.pub IS a legitimate journal.

From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.

<comment><USER4> Not according to European universities, at least for the purpose of judging faculty CVs when making hiring or tenure decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hell yeah.

I am so, so glad that Open Access is being fought for instead of being appeased with concessions.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

The folding of other consortia modelled after DEAL during negotiations has been shameful so I am glad that DEAL are standing firm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't help but think sci-hub has something to do with their ability to walk away.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty much undeniable. That said, German academic libraries have also supposedly spent a lot of effort into making sure that accessing the content is still as painless as possible, e.g. through making Inter-library Loan easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a semi-successful media campaign against studies published in "less than reputable" journals in Germany right now. Elsevier always features prominently as "a good example", while Open Access often is associated with "bad practices".

Geez, I wonder who might have paid for that campaign.

</comment><comment><USER13> A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should boycott all of them

<comment><USER14> The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at least not in my field.

<comment><USER15> German Universities could no longer accept Elsevier papers for hiring purposes going forward. If they did it with 2 years lead time maybe they can tip the scales without punishing the researchers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is great. Hopefully the entire academic world will switch to Open Access for all future publishing. Then by fixing copyright lengths we can just wait them out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier

<comment><USER18> They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good luck with that) or ad hoc laws, they can't be forced to give up the golden eggs goose otherwise and they know it.

In the meantime, it would be nice if everybody uploaded their reviewed papers to arXiv. No one should have to pay for new content already been paid by the taxpayers.

<comment><USER2> IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their work as they see fit.

In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students simply republishing their work elsewhere and Elsevier could not nothing about it.

What they can't do is publish copies of works that Elsevier has edited (significantly). So if Elsevier contributed to the document then the editor as Elsevier and by proxy Elsevier has the copyright on those parts _IF_ they are significant enough (significant is a huge burden of proof here, spelling mistakes being corrected don't count).

<comment><USER18> That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published page numbers), but what you get for papers up to more or less the 90s is scanned documents, it's unlikely that you can find other versions around. The transition to a sane model won't be frictionless nor fast, it might be cheaper to make a bid for the publishing companies outright (fees of subscriptions are simply absurd, their whole business model is a legal racket).

<comment><USER2> For dead authors, the inheritance regulates who gets to control the copyright. Usually inheritance works out, the state puts a lot of money into finding lost relatives if everything else fails.

The publisher to my knowledge cannot claim copyright over composition, layout, typesetting or the PDF unless they can show they had significant copyrightable work in each step. (Copyright in Germany first requires you to do some significant intellectual work, where significant changes based on what you do but science usually has a higher barrier)

If the PDF contains a trademark of theirs then that's a problem.

Generally a pre-print PDF should be available in almost all cases and could be published without Elsevier's input. If not that, Universities do archive the Tex files (or similar inputs) if possible so they could take those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great, because this leads to less references to Elsevier papers, which will cause their importance to decline. Papers and academics "worth" are measured by the number of references. If the papers are not free to access for academics, their importance declines.

I had the same trouble with the ANSI, ISO and Lisp papers behind expensive paywalls and just chose to ignore those. In the end the free versions won and the greedy elitists lost.

</comment><comment><USER20> Gigantum ([https://docs.gigantum.com/docs](https://docs.gigantum.com/docs) \--- [https://gigantum.com/](https://gigantum.com/)) is trying to solve this and related problems by making the whole research environment open-access and reproducible (code, data, results.. not just the manuscript).</comment>


Ask HN: Side-project you are working on? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've been working on [https://www.sanitycheck.io](https://www.sanitycheck.io) for the past 18 or so months. It started as a project to archive Google Search Console data - but now the most useful part to me is the SEO change testing aspect.

It's a tool I use myself every day on my own sites - which is something I've found critical to keeping up progress on side projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool one. Would love to try it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on a few different side-projects. Two of my more current/active area are fine-woodworking for furniture construction and open source work within the linux audio realm. The latter mostly focuses on [http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks impressive. Looking forward for more projects by you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm writing my own webserver in python, my only purpose to this is to learn python and to force myself to do TDD and to write more functional code instead of OO or procedural code with side effects. I would like to have a fully working webserver with threads and serving full html pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Best wishes. Looking forward to see your project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to provide community funded VPN and VPS, eventually more services for those in need. Rather than do a startup or nonprofit I think it should take the form of a physical open to the public church resembling an internet cafe, but with development environments and such.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am working on a fitness/nutrition tracking webapp and a service for landlords to track rental, tenant, repair, etc. information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I have access to WebApp?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working on [https://www.idiopage.com](https://www.idiopage.com) for a week, MVP should be finished in the next couple of days. Hoping this side project can make some money but I want to try and improve my sales and marketing skills in the process even if it flops.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have been working on [https://knowledgetrybe.com](https://knowledgetrybe.com) for the past few months. It's Hacker News for Science/Learning.

It's an MVP and I'm working on introducing comments.

</comment><comment><USER9> I launched [https://dndemail.com](https://dndemail.com) last year -- it adds do not disturb to your Gmail on all your devices. I built it for myself and released it because I found it so useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am working on MVP stage of a suite of tools for commercial real estate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice.</comment></comment>


Facebook, Twitter, Google Face Free-Speech Test in Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-google-face-free-speech-test-in-hong-kong-11593790205 <comment><AUTHOR> No paywall version of the article: [http://archive.is/gj0Mh#selection-2013.5-2013.65](http://archive.is/gj0Mh#selection-2013.5-2013.65)</comment>


The Trouble With IBM - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-22/ibms-eps-target-unhelpful-amid-cloud-computing-challenges <comment><USER2> CIA CTO kind of touched on it:

 _Hunt said that the intelligence agency adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build its own procurement system. "The security was really superb," he said, noting that this was also true for a lot of other cloud providers. That security, he said, was end-to-end and on every layer of the infrastructure onion.

For the chief information officer, Hunt explained, inner security is just as important as the fence around a company's networks.

"If they can't find you, they can't attack you. And if they find you and attack you, you want to be really hard to attack," he said._

[http://www.zdnet.com/former-cia-cto-speaks-out-on-snowden- le...](http://www.zdnet.com/former-cia-cto-speaks-out-on-snowden-leaks- amazons-600m-cloud-deal-7000028745/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cringely has written some interesting pieces about it. He seems to essentially think that the current management is just trying to suck the last bits of value from the organization. [http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm](http://www.cringely.com/?s=ibm)

<comment><USER4> As the article for this topic, and Cringely's current 2nd and subsequently articles in that search point out, the previous CEO made a promise to massively increase earnings by 2015. In the face of declining sales/revenue, there aren't that many ways to accomplish that, and of course few aren't actively harmful to its future.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting quote for me:

 _A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the "overall inferiority of its proposal," IBM "lacked any chance of winning" the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and '80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true_

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, further down, that cloud offering is being retired:

" _[CEO as of 2012] Rometty's most significant investment has been SoftLayer Technologies, a smaller rival to Amazon in selling cloud computing to companies. IBM paid $2 billion for SoftLayer last summer, in the middle of its bruising CIA fight with Amazon, and afterward began to wind down its own corporate cloud product._ "

Whether SoftLayer's people can survive in IBM's culture ... well, look at this compared to, oh, Watson, Sr's 1911 "THINK":

" _Last year [Rometty] began distributing black plastic cards bearing the phrase "One Purpose: Be essential" to IBM's roughly 50,000 managers and has been known to demand to see them as she walks the halls. At IBM, even clarity is complicated—on the back of the cards are three values and nine instructions for making customers happy, including "Unite to get it done now" and "Treasure wild ducks."_ "

And while the article doesn't mention that services as a business line are typically a race to the bottom, it does go into how the cloud looks like a game of thin margins, which doesn't fit IBM at all.

 _Lots_ more bad news further down.</comment></comment>