Canada's top court has overturned all restrictions on prostitution - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/12/canada-lifts-all-restrictions-prostitution-2013122015318412319.html <comment><USER2> I'm heartened by the response to this, both on Hacker News and elsewhere.

Being a trans woman in IT is a bit weird -- because I can do incredible things with my mind, I'm off the hook my sisters are on, that makes them have to hook.

Several roommates ago, I literally came home and found that my (also trans) roommate, who in addition to being trans was also dealing with immigration and had recently lost her job and had begun turning tricks at home. Had I not come home early from the university, I wouldn't have known.

And I've always hated the Canadian legal system for making me kick her out. Because just being her roommate, under the previous legislation, would have classified as 'living off the avails' and would have made me legally indistinguishable from her pimp. Just for being her roommate.

That's the sort of pauperizing, soul-crushing bullshit that you never, ever forget.

Also, I'm a big fan of Katrina Pacey, the lawyer mentioned in the article. I've worked with her a few times on activist stuff (I got into sex worker advocacy after my up-close-and-personal. They can't do it themselves, they go to prison when they try. Well, before today. Go Katrina Pacey! Go Canadian legal system!)

<comment><USER3> There is a middle ground. It's not "either I work using my brain, or I whore myself out." Many women are waitresses, shopping mall sweepers, store attendants, cashiers, you name it.

<comment><USER2> Fun experiment for you. Go out and get a facial tattoo. Now try to get work. That's still easier than finding honest work when you're transsexual. Don't believe me? I can think of an even more decisive experiment...

<comment><USER4> Given the immense distress that most trans people seem to experience, I wonder if we (and they) wouldn't be better off if the culture were less supportive of those lifestyles.

I had some inclinations that way as a teenager, and I am SO glad I wasn't living in San Francisco or some other place that would encourage me to "be me".

<comment><USER5> Since the distress is solely caused by the the culture being "less supportive of those lifestyles," I think that will do the opposite of help.

Also, we'd become less supportive of minority religions according to that rationale - and ignore racial discrimination as an impossible problem.

<comment><USER6> >Since the distress is solely caused by the the culture being "less supportive of those lifestyles,"

But it isn't. Mental illness, depression and suicide are disproportionately high among transsexsuals, both pre and post op. Even in societies where they are fully accepted. It is not unreasonable to think that the differences that have been found in their brains predispose them to certain mental illnesses. You can't just blame it on society.

<comment><USER7> In what society are transsexual people fully accepted?

<comment><USER8> No society fully accept transsexuals, however, Some places in some countries are known to be more tolerant than others.

<comment><USER7> That's my point. Trans people get murdered for being trans even in the most 'accepting' areas. People like Sssnake don't help matters, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember that in Canada, prostitution was already almost legal. You could prostitute yourself so long as you didn't harass customers or walk up to people and offer your services. You could however put ads in the newspaper for "Angela, 38DD, busty and hot, will massage you... all over".

One of the things that you couldn't do was also very hurtful. You couldn't team up with other street workers in order to insure your safety. That would be a whorehouse, and they are illegal.

So, you end up with girls in the streets, with no security, who cannot even talk straight about what they were willing and not willing to do.

I'm very happy that those laws are lifted. And it doesn't come out of the blue. There has been discussions about in in the media in recent years, and I believe that most people understood that forbidding those girls to have security is an idiocy.

<comment><USER10> From what I understand, johns where being arrested for solicitation.

<comment><USER11> Good. Solicitation threatens girls and women simply walking in their own neighborhoods.

<comment><USER12> I think the GP meant, if a prostitute went up and offered her services to a john, and the john said yes, that would be considered "solicitation" on the part of the john. Which is to say, prostitution was legal for the prostitute, but illegal for the john.

<comment><USER11> Johns don't passively sit in coffee shops or stand in line at Best Buy while beset by offers of sex for money. They roll up on girls and women walking down the street in an attempt to purchase sex.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if you've ever _walked_ down a street where there are _desperate_ streetwalkers (usually drug-addicts; e.g. crack addicts on Hastings here in Vancouver) but even if you say nothing to them, they'll follow you for blocks trying to get you to pay them.

<comment><USER13> Hell, I was walking through the red light district in Buenos Aires and they followed behind me _grabbing my crotch_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As anyone who has actually read any of the articles about this can tell you, they did not actually overturn squat. The laws are still in effect and still being enforced. What happened is they gave the legislature a year to revise the laws to make them constitutional, but until then nothing has changed and there's a good chance these laws will be revised before the deadline.

<comment><USER15> The nature of the laws would have to change significantly as the court found the entire foundation behind the laws (largely moralizing/restricting the actions of others based upon personal values) unconstitutional. The government can't simply move a couple of punctuation marks and become compliant.

<comment><USER16> Actually they can: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_Thirty- three_of_the_Can...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_Thirty- three_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms)

Parliament can specifically say "we know this law is unconstitutional, but we like it anyway, so it's staying for 5 years. And then we can renew it if we want." They may not want to do that, as it's a pretty strong thing to do, but they are absolutely able to.

<comment><USER17> I must say its rather amusing to see the very American style hyper legalistic logic applied to most parliamentary democracies. According to the very letter of the law, the queen could become absolute ruler over Canada aswell :).

All hail Empress Elizabeth II, terror of all the known world?

Laws and customs only mean as much as a government willing to be responsible to the people, as the NSA has shown everyone.

<comment><USER18> > _I must say its rather amusing to see the very American style hyper > legalistic logic applied to most parliamentary democracies_

You would be quite mistaken to believe such hyper-legalistic logic only came into existence with The United States. The US only built on the myriad of legalese already put in place by the British, Byzantines[1], Romans, and Greeks, <insert dominate culture/country of the era>.

How do you think Julius Caesar came to power? He abused the laws put in place by the Roman Republic by refusing to step down at the end of his term.

[1] The Byzantines themselves[2] have become synonymous with "complex political system"

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantinism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantinism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Court's reasoning was that since prostitution itself is legal, it is unconstitutional to prevent prostitutes from taking reasonable measures to manage their business, protect their safety and so on. My prediction is that the federal government will react not by amending the law to eliminate the unconstitutional restrictions but rather making prostitution itself illegal.

<comment><USER20> I'm not so sure... I think there might be a genuine interest in actually helping/ protecting these women. Why wouldn't prostitution have been made criminal before? (instead of the de facto approach of arresting pimps and johns for soliciting and living off the avails?)

<comment><USER21> The current government is conservative, so probably not. They've shown a distinct lack of interest in practical solutions and instead have stuck very solidly with their "ideals".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In Germany they went one step further. Prostitutes are registered workers, they pay taxes and must pass monthly health checks. They also get unemployment support and state pension after retirement.

On other side many people lost unemployment support, because they refused to work in brothel as cleaners or maintenance personnel.

<comment><USER23> > Prostitutes are registered workers, they pay taxes and must pass monthly > health checks.

I fully support this. STIs are one of the biggest public costs of prostitution.

(Yes, this is a _public_ cost. Every time a new person is infected with (e.g.) HIV, from an epidemiological perspective, that increases the chances of some copy of the virus in some person mutating into a virulent - even airborne - version. This is why you should care about HIV infection rates, even if you practice safe sex and don't use IV drugs, etc.[0])

> On other side many people lost unemployment support, because they refused to > work in brothel as cleaners or maintenance personnel.

How is that any different from refusing to work in a hotel or a hospital as a janitor (or even as a nurse[1])?

They may not like the line of work, but that's no different from disliking taking a job at Halliburton. While I sympathize with the goal of choosing a job ethically, in the US (not sure about Germany), unemployment benefits and requirements aren't designed with that in mind.

[0] Even "curable" STIs are a public health problem We are already on the verge of creating - if we haven't already created - strains of gonorrhea that are resistant to _all_ antibiotic treatments.

[1] You wouldn't believe some of the stuff nurses in hospitals have to put up with on a daily basis.

<comment><USER24> What do you do about sex workers that become infected? How much more desperate can they get?

<comment><USER25> Treat them. Possibly put them on disability, since they have a health condition that put them out of work.

I'm not sure how else you would handle it.

<comment><USER24> I don't think it's as easy as it seems. Besides being a tough sell politically it's hard to say that an infected person can no longer work _anywhere_. It's also not clear how to avoid having the system gamed: How do you prove you are actually a sex worker? How do you prove you were a sex worker when you got infected?

Can society even afford to pay to put all of those people on disability for life (and pay for their healthcare)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >"It makes no difference that the conduct of pimps and johns is the immediate source of the harms suffered by prostitutes," McLachlin wrote. > >"The impugned laws deprive people engaged in a risky, but legal, activity of the means to protect themselves against those risks."

One of the things I've noticed reading newspaper articles and websites regarding legal rulings in Canada (the full depth of my research, admittedly), is that the reasoning seems to be governed by the judges' personal opinions of what would be fair ("we must protect the prostitutes from harm"), whereas American rulings seem to rely more upon the interpretation of texts such as their constitution. Is this an accurate characterization? If so is this a result of a differently structured legal system, or just a "cultural" difference?

<comment><USER27> Canada has a pretty good Charter of Rights. Section 7 involves security of the person. That's the rock the existing laws sunk on. Roughly speaking the laws made a legal activity more risky for no reasonable purpose (which is why Section 1, reasonable limits, couldn't save the law).

The Canadian SC is very good at their jobs. They definitely do not make their decisions based on their "personal opinions of what would be fair". Rather, their decisions are based on their measured, professional understanding of the charter, the law and existing jurisprudence, and the effects their decision may have on the administration of justice. Thankfully they are very experienced jurists with great respect for the rule of law and jurisprudence.

<comment><USER26> I'd like to see the intermediate steps between "security of the person" and legalizing pimping.

It would also be mildly alarming to learn that the SC consists of "very experienced jurists with great respect for the rule of law and jurisprudence" only "for the most part".

<comment><USER27> I have to retract my "for the most part". I was thinking of Nadon... but he was previous Federal Court of Appeal and Federal Court.

All the Justices were former jurists ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Canada#Current...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Canada#Current_members)).

<comment><USER26> > I have to retract my "for the most part". I was thinking of Nadon... but he > was previous Federal Court of Appeal and Federal Court.

Well even after the ninja edits, your comment still reeks of overclass condescension, using meaningless feel-words ("very good at their jobs", "measured, professional understanding"), essentially saying , "trust them, pleb, they know better than you".

<comment><USER28> _> Well even after the ninja edits, your comment still reeks of overclass condescension, using meaningless feel-words ("very good at their jobs", "measured, professional understanding"), essentially saying , "trust them, pleb, they know better than you"._

You don't think it might be an allusion to the American Supreme Court's habit of legislating how they personally feel rather than with any serious basis in fact or precedence? Chill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This will help suck the profits of org crime should legislation ever happen (won't with the current hawkish regime). Currently it is illegal to run a bawdy house unless it's a false front massage parlour so gangs run micro brothels which are condos stacked full of foreign girls. They tend to jack each other's brothels since it's a cash biz and police aren't called due to the condo operation being illegal. When sex workers can run their own and not worry about getting robbed these guys will have to get a job

</comment><comment><USER30> Here is the court case that brought this ruling: Bedford v. Canada

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

</comment><comment><USER31> Contrary to popular belief, (most of) the US, (most of) Africa, (most of) Asia and Russia are among the only places where prostitution is in fact illegal.

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

<comment><USER32> what's popular belief? US, Africa, Asia, and Russia seem to make up like 75+% of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One wonders...what is the legality of running a "service provider" from the US but incorporated in Canada for something like this?

Like, say, a scheduling/reservation app for this?

<comment><USER34> Next big idea: Uber for sex.

<comment><USER35> Grindr?

<comment><USER36> Wasn't that gay only?

<comment><USER37> Tindr is the straight one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ironic that we sitting in the West learn about this from an Arab news service, i.e. from the most conservative and anti-woman region in the world.

<comment><USER39> Al Jazeera has bureaus around the world. Pretty much all of the American content originates from the U.S. Many of the news people at Al Jazeera were formerly from CBS, ABC and CBC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Canada, where you can now find the world's most polite sex workers...in addition to the most polite everything else.

</comment><comment><USER41> I just wish that their ruling was a little more broad and far reaching in its effect. For those like myself who believe in self-ownership this is a no brainer, and it would seem that people are recognizing the basics of self- ownership in this case, but refuse to do so in almost every other facet of modern Western law.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is this on HN? I feel very frustrated and sorry for HN. Lately there has been influx of Reddit users who are posting similar content and encouraging such links by upvoting it.

PG - If you are reading this.Can we please do something to keep sanity of HN. Save HN.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sex workers may not have another choice, but the clients do.

<comment><USER9> Most people who turn to sex workers are people that have no access sex otherwise or who need, for some reason, to go see elsewhere.

Three choices here: 1\. Prostitution 2\. Rape 3\. One nights

One is an health risk, another is simply wrong... prostitution is expensive.

I would gladly give those people access to better, healthier, more regulated services.

<comment><USER44> 4\. Masturbation

I wouldn't count rape as an alternative to sex. It's more about having power over someone in a disgusting way.

<comment><USER45> Despite academic efforts to redefine the word, rape is sex. It may not be ethical or legal, and it may be violent, but anything that can get you pregnant is sex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> good good. now PLEASE legalize marijuana, tax it to pay off the olympic debt and free Marc Emery.

<comment><USER47> This article is about Canada.

<comment><USER48> I think (s)he knows that, the references all apply to Canada.

<comment><USER47> Marc Emery is Canadian, but imprisoned in the USA. So how could Canada free him?

<comment><USER49> There are mechanisms that nation-states have used to free people imprisoned in other nation-states without the cooperation of the imprisoning nation-state -- they frequently, however, have significant repercussions in the relations between the nation-states that make it inadvisable for a less-powerful nation- state to use them against a more-powerful one even if they have the capacity to acheive short-term success.

<comment><USER50> Neither Canada nor the US are nation-states. That term specifically means a country where the people are pretty ethnically or culturally homogenous.

<comment><USER49> The exact level of shared culture necessary to have a "nation" in the sense of "nation-state" is infinitely debatable, but the statement at issue is just true of states generally, so while your point might arguably be true, its not all that relevant.

<comment><USER50> I didn't mean to counter what you were saying - I was just mentioning that nation-state is not the appropriate term for these entities.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenTok + FilePicker - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokbox.com/blog/opentok-filepicker-opentokpicker-com/

<comment><USER2> I was using OpenTok for video recording and wanted to export videos to my blog. This helps me do that easily.</comment>


The posts I learned the most from this week - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2011/12/the-10-posts-i-learned-the-most-from-this-week/

<comment><USER2> It seems to me as though the community would be better served by submitting each of these posts to HN separately. I found some of the mentioned posts to be very interesting, but the blog didn't talk much about the posts beyond giving a link. If HNers want to have a conversation about any given post, it could easily get lost among people talking about all the other posts.

<comment><USER3> I will also admit that I was/am surprised to see this one submitted, for basically the same reasons. Not that I mind, exactly :)

I originally had a bunch of extra analysis/commentary with the links, but it made the post insanely long and wasn't very easy to read.

Will probably try tweaking the format a bit in subsequent weeks. Thanks for the input.</comment></comment>


The Why and How of Google AMP at Condé Nast - <AUTHOR> https://technology.condenast.com/story/the-why-and-how-of-google-amp-at-conde-nast <comment><USER2> Why are they crowing about how much faster it is?

I imagine if they stripped off all the stuff from their own sites that doesn't show up on AMP the speed would basically be the same, and they wouldn't be under Google's thumb.

No massive header with lots of images of other stories, no master folder with lots of images of other stories, no giant sidebar with lots of images of other stories… get rid of all of them. All of a sudden your page is really fast and doesn't take 45s to load.

Remember what the web was like on dial-up? Design pages for that but with large images. Text goes a LONG way for navigation and discovery of other stories. You don't need ridiculous big images.

Do something really simple. Make a page with content that looks exactly like the AMP page. AB test that against the AMP page. I'd be willing to bet they basically perform the same, modulo any benefit Google gives you for being part of their lock-in.

Text articles with pictures do not require the complexity of googles infrastructure and systems to be fast and lite.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be the missing the whole point of AMP's popularity. The glorious sliding carousel on Google.com that gives any news website a massive SEO boost. AMP is the biggest thing to hit the SEO industry in a while. I imagine most of these media companies could not give a shit about website optimization, its all about website monetization.

<comment><USER4> Which is short sighted on their part. As an AMP early adopter they get a boost. But, as the industry moves to AMP their SEO boost is lost. So, their boost is short lived, but Google's edge influence expands and persists over the long term.

<comment><USER5> For the most part, digital publishing's remaining lifespan isn't that long. Not as short-sighted in their remaining life...

<comment><USER6> care to elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an end-user, AMP breaks 'back' on my iPhone when I navigate to articles (including those from Condé Nast) linked to from Google News. I have to scroll up and use Google's custom back button; using left/right swipe gestures or the browser's back causes problems. Sometimes it's so bad that when I reload the page, I get some weird error from Google about how I got there, which is doubly weird because it's their fault I'm there because they're intentionally wrapping/breaking standard functionality.

<comment><USER8> Browser back button works fine in chrome on a Android with amp pages fwiw. Does safari mobile not support the session history management APIs? caniuse says it does, but it sounds like it doesn't work from what you're saying.

<comment><USER9> And ActiveX worked fine with Internet Explorer on Windows. We look back and consider that a bad thing for the web, how is this different?

<comment><USER10> Uh, because it's an open standard rather than a proprietary one?

<comment><USER11> And we are standardizing the benefits activex could give us. So no need for it anymore ;)

[https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/](https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted- media/)

edit: I can see it. Next iteration you will need a AMP key to publish your content and clients will need AMP key to consume content! Browsers that don't include the key will be excluded from the ampweb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > AMP delivers many benefits in terms of performance, consistency, and > experience for our mobile users.

Performance: yes.

Consistency: NO. It _looks_ like one of those annoying download-my-app bars, but it isn't, it's a back button. As if I didn't already have one of those.

Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it.

User feedback: can't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP. Unfortunately, I don't see anywhere I can give user feedback.

<comment><USER13> _can 't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP_

What are you referring to? Safari adds a feature _requested by Google_ that if you share an AMP page it shares the canonical URL and not the AMP url. Is that the "anti-AMP"?

The screeds and anger about AMP on here absolute baffle me.

<comment><USER14> Because AMP is Google's attempt to insert themselves in content distribution and capture an even bigger slice of the pie but with a thin vaneer of 'making the web faster'.

People are angry because Google exists on the open web, unlike Facebook which is pretty much self-contained, and they're big enough that they'll probably succeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, 36% of traffic seems pretty high. That's a huge chunk of mobile (79% apparently), with an almost doubled click-through rate.

As much as HN loves to bicker about Amp, in this case it was clearly a net positive.

<comment><USER15> Sure, they want their content to be read, to be "discoverable by the largest possible audience".

Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis of our current implementation."

Publishers find a number of benefits to AMP -- revealed frankly in the article -- but the only reason they use it in the first place is because Google is where a lot of those eyeballs originate anyway. If Some Obscure Search Engine with ~1% marketshare reworked their mobile page to prioritize pages that adhere to some criteria of limitations, used an iframe to frame the content so that it loads inside their page, and threw in a free CDN to sweeten the deal, who'd retool their publishing infrastructure -- as excellently detailed in this post -- to publish in this format?

AMP enables an alliance of convenience between one of the top sources of traffic (Google), and the authors of long-form textual content reliant on advertising revenue. To the AMP team's credit, it does so by aligning closer than its competitors to how the web actually works, despite the Google-Search- on-Mobile page then acting as a captive newsreader.

Most user criticism of AMP is focused on Google-Search-on-Mobile stealth- morphing into a captive newsreader, while most publisher criticism of AMP is from sites outside of its target market trying out the tech and alarmed at the lack of traffic reaching their server, forgetting that offloading traffic at high volumes is a good thing. AMP isn't for people who are upset that Google is stealing your content; it's for publishers who want Google to expose their content to wide audience and hope to generate revenue through means that correlate to that reach.

<comment><USER16> I think most of the criticism of AMP is the URLs being messed up, which is something that will soon be fixed.

<comment><USER17> No. This will not be fixed.

As long as they insist on using their CDN then this cannot be avoided.

<comment><USER16> It will be fixed client side - Safari is rolling this out in ios 11

<comment><USER18> Do you mean the URL shared or displayed in address bar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The real problem is the "why" which, whether people admit it or not, is because Google is blackmailing publishers to follow their rules else be punished in search results. The whole modern web is basically defined by trying to conform to what Google wants.

<comment><USER20> Google worked with some of the major publishers to create AMP just like facebook did with their instant article. So I wouldn't call it blackmail, more like a collaboration.

It's a way for major publishers to get a dominant/favored position and crowd out "fake news" and it's a way for google to get a monopolistic publishing platform.

So it is a "win-win" for google and some of the major publishing industry. It is a lose-lose for everyone else.

Publishing/media has been waging a war against social media and decentralized internet. They have to losing audience due to the fractured nature of the internet. And they are trying to get back their "captive audience".

Whether it works or not, we'll see.

<comment><USER19> I guess since I am in the everyone else category, I was focusing more on the lose-lose than the collaboration with big publishers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If Google ranks AMP pages higher than regular pages just because they're AMP pages and hosted on Google property, this simply spells the begin of the end for Google search as we know it. Who needs that kind of manipulated crap search? Given the race to the bottom on the web, soon Wikipedia, StackExchange, Reddit and HN search already covers everything that Google search does anyway. Oh, and Google, don't let the EU know about this new anti- competitive behavior of yours.

Interesting time for small-scale and custom search sites ahead.

</comment><comment><USER17> Completely 100% nit-pick here, but just wanted to say that The New Yorker was the first Conde property up on AMP (June 14th 2016), and we used WordPress. Wired and Pitchfork followed after that.

But its not a competition.

<comment><USER22> Vanity Fair launched 6/23/2016, the first brand on the Autopilot stack. Sorry if I didn't mention brands that launched AMP on Wordpress. That would have probably added confusion to readers outside the company that do not know about our Wordpress -> Autopilot migrations.

<comment><USER17> Don't worry. Total nit-pick on my part :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google AMP is an attempt to racket the web by stealing content and traffic while bribing a poor victim with "increased SEO" factor.

How dare are you, Google? Open and decentralized world wide web is the thing that allowed you to exist in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER24> FYI if you're interested in AMP but don't want to be served from a google.com domain, Cloudflare also has a compatible implementation: [https://www.cloudflare.com/website- optimization/accelerated-...](https://www.cloudflare.com/website- optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/)

<comment><USER25> This doesn't do what you think. Google search always uses the Google AMP viewer and the Google AMP cache; there's no way to make it use Cloudflare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Suggestion: use AMP-api to modify all browser requests to load Google CDN AMP page. Save data.

</comment><comment><USER27> I really wish Google AMP didn't overrule the Chrome android "force enable pinch to zoom" from an accessibility standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER28> Google AMP has a lot of success stories: [https://www.ampproject.org/case- studies/](https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/)</comment>


Can't Wait Until Payday? Apps Give Instant Access to Wages - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apps-let-workers-make-every-day-a-payday-1511528400 <comment><USER2> I'd cash out every day, too.

Better the money be under my control, earning interest for me, instead of for my employer. I don't see a downside to getting the money as soon as possible.

<comment><USER3> > I don't see a downside to getting the money as soon as possible.

There are transaction fees, which for the minimum wage shift workers targeted by this scheme, can add up to 2-4% of a day's take-home pay.

<comment><USER2> I understood that the employer pays the fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So payday loans 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is behind a paywall. Is it available anywhere else?

<comment><USER6> I was able to read it if you visit the page via the link they tweeted out, [https://t.co/z6PZgSpdzr](https://t.co/z6PZgSpdzr)

([https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/934104348640018432](https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/934104348640018432))

<comment><USER7> Works but...

If you've previously been blocked by the paywall you have to go to the twitter post and follow the link from there - via incognito</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131730912/wikileaks-leaves-amazon-host-servers

<comment><USER2> Choose your news source:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697> \- techdirt.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655> \- cnn.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633> \- arstechnica.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607> \- bgr.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335> \- npr.org

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328> \- guardian.co.uk

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308> \- readwriteweb.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305> \- reuters.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257> \- techcrunch.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142> \- foxnews.com

</comment><comment><USER3> This was a bad move on Amazon's part. We expect Joe Lieberman to be a horror.

But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be yanked at any time? Kinda of a Godaddy/nodaddy type situation? (I use both Amazon (EC2) and Godaddy (domains) products)

Granted this was a pretty big case but I think situations like this either affirm or enhance trust in a third party platform/provider. If Amazon had relented and kept hosting, it would have spoke volumes on customer dedication.

Of course they probably didn't like the DDoS attacks constantly.

It wasn't wikileaks that did the actions or stole the information. They just posted it. In this day and age of tepid media for profit and intertwined news organizations with gov't/business, real news like wikileaks is needed.

This is an attack on the messenger.

<comment><USER4> Note: I _generally_ agree with the leaking of relevant government data to expose abuses.

> _"But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be > yanked at any time?"_

Not really. Illegal content _already_ puts you at risk of getting yanked at any time. If you were hosting pirated material or anything else that is illegal in the jurisdiction of the host, it _can_ be yanked.

This is not a judgment on whether or not said content ought to be illegal, but rather a simple statement that nothing has changed.

That being said, I am uncomfortable with this sort of thing having no set procedure, and being instigated/pressured upon by government officials. We have a clear process for DMCA takedowns, and likewise a request to remove illegal information needs to come from law enforcement within their jurisdiction, and not from self-interested politicians.

<comment><USER5> Do we have a clear declaration that this content is illegal? I wasn't aware we did.

<comment><USER6> They at least have copyright infringement, and could probably get a big enough fine to shut down wikileaks.

<comment><USER7> US (federal) Government documents are not entitled to copyright protection within America.

<http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105>

<comment><USER6> That depends on how much of the data is strictly government property. If any of it is was written by contractors, etc. it may still have that avenue.

<comment><USER5> Any work derived by government contract is also not covered by copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's being reported that the US gov (read: Joe Lieberman) pressured Amazon to stop hosting the site.

Here is a more thorough update on this situation: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks- websit...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website- cables-servers-amazon)

<comment><USER9> government censorship of dissenters...China would be proud.

this is actually pretty stupid on their part, it's the equivalent of locking the barn after the animals escaped.

<comment><USER10> Joe Lieberman can call for whatever he wants. It's his right under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

A Senator calling for a web host to take down a site no more constitutes "government censorship" than a Senator calling for pickles not to be put on hamburgers constitutes "food and drug regulation". Down with Wikileaks! Down with pickles!

The Constitution simply does not give individual Senators the power to censor websites, or, for that matter, all Senators en masse the power to circumvent the Constitution without having that action overturned by SCOTUS.

China would be embarrassed --- perhaps murderously --- if its censorship apparatus was this much of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

<comment><USER11> As a simple counter-example, imagine if a sitting US Senator advised the public not to do business with black people. It can be hard to distinguish the personal opinions of a government official from the edicts of his office.

<comment><USER10> I don't see the parallel; calling for people not to do business with black people is absolutely indefensible; Lieberman would have a civil right to do so, but might also be impeached as a result.

<comment><USER12> What about French people? Remember "Freedom Fries"?

<comment><USER10> Are you seriously suggesting that "Freedom Fries" is as serious as an open appeal to racism? You can have the last word; I'm done here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While unfortunate, I don't necessarily fault Amazon here. Amazon is a shopping website first, cloud computing platform second. I do find Joe Lieberman calling for a boycott of an American company reprehensible though.

<comment><USER14> But it does show the Achilles heel of cloud computing. Is it wise to depend on 3 American companies that have other interests to protect? The potential cloud computing oligopoly could be bad for freedom and openness on the net.

<comment><USER15> The vagueness of the term "cloud" could help the cloud oligopolists. There could be hundreds of so-called clouds, with all but a few of them being brokers for the real cloud service providers. Then it would take a couple sentences to point out the situation. Not good. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there an official way to mirror wikileaks data, just to help in the event the public internet presence (they're also available on .onion, iirc) is somehow taken down? I have the cryptic "insurance.aes256" file from earlier this year, but is there any way normal users can help back up readble parts of wikileaks?

<comment><USER17> <http://126.96.36.199/mass-mirror.html>

That IP address is just wikileaks - the DNS is down for me currently is all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is truly fascinating. I wonder to what extent things would have played out differently were there not the looming threat of a boycott during the holiday shopping season.

<comment><USER19> And to think I wrote this less than 14 hours ago, trying to sound all ominous and dramatic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957467>

:-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This scenario is where my previously discussed startup idea would do really well - if someone could pull it off - [http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion- dolla...](http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dollar- startup-idea)

A completely distributed web host, hosted on people's machines. A lot more difficult to shut down (although, I guess if enough government pressure was put on some local chokepoint, it could be a problem). But if it was designed in such a way, as to mitigate these issues - it could be very powerful....imho that is :)

<comment><USER21> Freenet is basically what you describe, and it's free.

<comment><USER20> That's very interesting. Thanks for that link. Will look into it.

I was more thinking of a commercial product/platform that could be used for a variety of reasons.

So what is the only anti-dote to a DDOS right now? A bigger pipe...no?

Well imagine having a service that you can 'spin up' any number of nodes/machines to intercept all those packets. I am not sure how the economics would work, but in order for it to be a good service with good support it would have to be commercial - not an open source project.

The only issue with that is that if there is one company, it makes it easier for major governments to try and get their hands on it. So for WikiLeaks case, it might not be completely helpful, but imagine the many other cases where popular/large sites are hit by constant DDOSs. I think there could be significant use there. Especially as high-speed & fibre connections become more prevalent and latency (around the world) comes down even further than it has over the years.

Just my $0.02.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The lack of an official response from Amazon is telling. I wonder if DHS just gave Amazon an ultimatum along the lines of host wikileaks and we'll raid your servers. (Also the DHS/Amazon communication, if there was any, is probably classified so Amazon can't even mention it).

Our government has come a long way since 2000.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the only way wikileaks can stay alive over the long term is probably through torrents, the combo punch of govn't takedowns and constant DDoS attacks probably doesn't make hosting a website feasible. It would make more sense to release it in digest as a torrent, right?

</comment><comment><USER24> Everyone appears to be assuming it's for political reasons. Quite possible, but it doesn't seem like there was any serious pressure so far and there could be lots of other reasons. ("Hey, our shared infrastructure is being DoS-ed because of you")

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel sorry for Amazon lately, thrust into Catch 22s left and right. I'm guessing that in addition to political concerns hosting Wikileaks would put a huge target on their backs from cyber attackers. That's probably the additional justification they needed to make this call.

</comment><comment><USER26> so is amazon going to even attempt to frame this as a terms-of-service violation? not a peep so far.

<comment><USER27> Like most hosting TOSes, theirs is written so they can boot you if they find you inconvenient, without a specific violation on your part. They say they can terminate service when (among other possibly applicable points):

 _we determine, in our sole discretion, that our provision of any of the Services to you is prohibited by applicable law, or has become impractical or unfeasible for any legal or regulatory reason_

— <http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/> 3.4.1 (viii)

They would have a fair point that, even if it isn't illegal, dealing with an investigation and bad publicity isn't worth their time.

For what it's worth, I certainly wish they stood up at least until they were under specific legal threat. But they never advertised themselves as a data haven.</comment></comment>


SSL/TLS certificate validity chopped down to one year by Apple's Safari - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/24/apple-chops-safaris-tls-certificate-validity-down-to-one-year/ <comment><USER2> This will cause some large problems especially with wildcard and WAF certs that cannot be automatically renewed.</comment>


Programming with distributed functional futures - <AUTHOR> http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rs46/posts/2015-09-07-distributed-functional-futures.html <comment><USER2> For the interested, here's the summary from the bottom of the page

 _Dataflow can be used for pipelined parallelism, which is often exploited on fine grained concurrent embedded hardware such as FPGAs. The dataflow programming style can also be used for task parallel scheduling on CPUs. There are a number of Haskell libraries for shared-memory parallel dataflow programming, including monad-par for deterministic and lvish for quasi- deterministic parallelism. There are others that support distributed-memory parallel dataflow programming, including the HdpH DSLs, and the Cloud Haskell Platform library, which closely resembles the Erlang Remote Procedure Call functionality. They don't share a common notation for creation of and operations on futures, and this post gives their correspondence._

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not sure about Erlang's RPC and futures. The feature is there, but I am not sure how popular or known that is.

Distributed programming usually involves sending messages between processes. So you might spawn a process locally and then send a message to a remote process and wait for response. But heave "future/promise" use not a common pattern as far as I know.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm confused by the claim that "Erlang's RPC library supports multiple node distribution, but the Erlang VM does not support automatic load balancing."

Erlang's VM definitely runs each node on as many cores as are available. It has done so for several years now. For example, running his fib_rpc program on a single node on an 8-core machine using Erlang R18 happily consumes all available CPU on all cores.

Perhaps he's saying that there is no automatic support for placing tasks on particularly underutilized nodes?

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that load is balanced across CPUs within a node but load is not balanced between nodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> His other blog articles are also pretty interesting : [http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rs46/posts/2014-10-23-leaky- interp...](http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rs46/posts/2014-10-23-leaky- interpreters.html)

laziness leaks.

</comment><comment><USER6> related: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/flow-based- programmi...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/flow-based-programming)</comment>


YouTuber Sued Over Stanley Kubrick Movies Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/youtuber-sued-stanley-kubrick-movies-analysis-160606/ <comment><USER2> I wish I could see the original video. I watched the new one where he's edited out the infringing content. It was very good. However, if he was using the infringing music in the same way that he was using music in the new one I can see why he's facing an issue. All of the music in the video I watched was used as a music bed. It wasn't subject to his analysis or criticism except for a brief mention at the end of the video. On that note, I hope he's received permission to use the remaining music. Many people don't realize that the performance and recording of a classical music score may be copyrighted even though the score itself could be in the public domain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or has there been a lot of these aggressive takedowns lately?

Nostalgia Critic, Louder with Crowder, now Criswell... I'm sure I'm missing more too.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the old days, if you used torrents to distribute p2p you'd get sued. If you used someone else's website to distribute, the website would get sued.

Now, people use YouTube to distribute but people get sued, not YouTube. Why is this? Morally, and for a purpose of balancing powers, it should be the big guy that gets sued, not the individuals.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that's a totally fair reason to ask for a takedown. Like they said, the music wasn't the subject of the analysis so I'd think it isn't fair use.

However I'd be interested to know if they contacted Lewis directly with good intentions before leaping to litigation.</comment>


Apache CouchDB 1.5.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/apache_couchdb_1_5_0

<comment><USER2> Nice, small release. Fauxton is interesting. Getting ready for the 2.0 release with all the Cloudant goodies.

</comment><comment><USER3> IMHO the real race in the NoSQL world is CouchDB versus Riak. These are the two teams to watch.

<comment><USER4> No RethinkDB?</comment></comment>


SoftBank and WeWork Are as Bad as Each Other - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-11/softbank-and-wework-are-as-bad-as-each-other <comment><USER2> Wow, it's _high leverage_ on top of _unusual leverage_ on top of _high leverage_. Quoting from the OP:

"Boil things down and WeWork is a leveraged real estate company[a] propped up by a leveraged pool of late-stage venture capital (the Vision Fund)[b], which is in turn controlled by a leveraged telecoms and technology company (SoftBank).[c]"

It's like Peter borrowing a large amount of money to invest with Paul, who then, unusually, borrows on top of Peter's investment to invest with Mary, who then borrows another large amount of money on top of Peter's investment to invest in her own scheme. What happens if Mary can't pay back?

\--

[a] WeWork has borrowed and wants to borrow more to finance operations, both in the form of corporate debt and in the form of long-term lease commitments: [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1533523/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1533523/000119312519220499/d781982ds1.htm)

[b] The Vision Fund has borrowed money on top of Softbank's investment: [https://archive.is/o/9I97g/https://www.ft.com/content/b6fe31...](https://archive.is/o/9I97g/https://www.ft.com/content/b6fe313a-4add-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791d43)

[c] Softbank has borrowed money to invest in the Vision Fund: [https://archive.is/o/9I97g/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar...](https://archive.is/o/9I97g/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-17/softbank- says-leverage-not-a-problem-rating-firms-not-so-sure)

<comment><USER3> As far as the debt in the vision fund is concerned, that all seems to be held by investors who already have skin in the game. For the company this seems to be fundamentally safe? the interests of shareholders and bond holders are aligned, bond holders won't be clamouring to wipe out the shareholders and visa versa.

I'm sure you'll find some leverage if you look at Softbanks debt holders also.

<comment><USER4> I find good parallels in how today's "high finance" begins to resemble late Soviet Union's economy.

There was an extreme amount of pointless and doomed enterprises, but given just how much "national capital" was invested, and how much credibility economic planners had at stake for their imagined economic theories, an absolutely ridiculous amount of self-deception was made.

And from that on, lies and economic data falsification went into a downward spiral. The amount of "funny money" being going around state institutes in a convoluted scheme of mutual bailouts, reciprocal investment deals, capital parking arrangements, "kickback backed credits," and LBOs (Yes! The Union had LBOs, at least on paper) began to outnumber the amount of cash going exchanged in the tiny real economy by triple digits.

<comment><USER3> Ignoring the last paragraph, you just seem to be describing a bubble, which the vision fund could well turn out to be.

Its just human nature, no political or economic system is immune.

<comment><USER5> What the grandparent poster described in the first two paragraphs is a typical large company. You could replace the words 'late Soviet Union' with 'almost any Fortune 500 firm', and it would be an accurate description of its internal economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Between WeWork and Uber (which is trading at a valuation below its raise in May 2016), SoftBank's Vision Fund isn't looking so hot. How will this affect other companies who took money from SoftBank?

I wonder if some of these companies have painted themselves into a corner by accepting such high valuations. Each round of financing is coming from greater and greater fools...except the public markets are not as foolish as SoftBank and sovereign wealth funds. This isn't going to be good for the employees who want some liquidity.

</comment><comment><USER7> They also own close to a majority stake in OYO, with pretty much the same story. OYO is also entering coworking now after Softbank had to scale back on their planned wework investment. The common thread seems to be that real estate has a massive market size, in trillions, making it easier to tell a bigger and bigger story and boost valuations.

<comment><USER8> It stopped being cool hiring 10 engineers and a nice space in San Francisco, burning $250k / month.

Or maybe there's so _much_ VC money that it's someone's job to invest _all_ of it. And you can't do that $250k at a time.

Someone surely is incentivized to make these investments outside of any long- term payback. Perhaps they fear investors will take their millions back if it stays fallow too long?

<comment><USER9> I think a reason these valuations "seem" out of line to most people is because there is simply so much money sloshing around. No one has time to write million dollar checks anymore. Almost anyone who has that much capital has so much capital that it doesn't make sense. More and more capital is focused on a smaller and smaller sets of companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> " Son may turn out to be the Victor Frankenstein of the cheap-money era. He's helped create a monster that could do him serious harm."

Why is it that all Frankenstein metaphors are poor? This one at least doesn't confuse the monster and the creator. In the story it's Frankenstein trying to destroy the monster, not the other way around.

In the spirit of productive discourse I'd suggest the sorcerers apprentice as a better comparison.

<comment><USER10> Not only that, but the Creature was rather intelligent and civilized to an extent, it's actions the result of the abandonment by its creator that it suffered at a critical moment. An abandonment cause by horror at a physical appearance, which in turn caused the Creature to be horrible in actions as well as appearance.

I'm not sure I've ever seen it adequately used as a metaphor that rose above the "Oooh, it's a monster!" level.

<comment><USER11> In this metaphor, it's unlikely that either WeWork or Uber could be taken aback by suddenly viewing their reflections in a mirror. The horror is common knowledge to everyone, excepting perhaps the money blinkered investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worry that once WeWork fails, it will discourage other companies/innovators from getting into the realestate sector which desperately needs more innovation and progress.

<comment><USER13> It might also discourage other companies from getting into the fraud/scam sector, which would be great.

<comment><USER14> That seems optimistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://archive.is/9I97g](http://archive.is/9I97g)

</comment><comment><USER16> The article states: >"Neumann bought properties and rented them to WeWork"

Does anyone know where the money to buy properties came from? Was this his own money? VC money?

<comment><USER5> Loans backed by his shares in WeWork, and by promises of rental cashflow from letting the properties out to WeWork.

This makes a fantastic amount of money for everyone involved, as long as WeWork stock is valued > the price of toilet paper, and as long as demand for shot-term office real estate continues to be high. If either of these assumptions fail to hold, there are going to be very serious problems.

There's no conflict of interest in this sort of self-dealing, none whatsoever...

<comment><USER16> Wow - borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. I'm curious if you or anyone else knows who underwrote such a loan? I'm guessing it wasn't a commercial bank? Where does the money come from to do the debt servicing on those loans?

<comment><USER5> The debt servicing comes from the rental income. You submit to the lender a business plan of how you are going to use the borrower money, how your shares act as collateral, and how you will use the cash flow of the rental income to make interest payments.

It's no different then any other corporate loan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "fair value of holdings" ... yikes ... magic pixie dust.</comment>


O'Reilly Auto Parts – Part 121g Flux Capacitor - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreillyauto.com/flux-500.html <comment><USER2> > Non-Functional Item Displayed for Entertainment Purposes Only

They almost had me...</comment>


Amazon VPC - Far More Than Everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-vpc-far-more-than-everywhere.html

<comment><USER2> But when will they support micro instances inside of a VPC? This is the one feature I need before I can use VPC.

In fact, the main appeal of VPC is that it makes it a lot easier to manage hordes of micro instances.</comment>


The Dining Cryptographers Problem (1988) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23931727/Dining%20Cryptographers%20-%20Chaum.pdf

<comment><USER2> Lets say that Alice, Bob and Charles play this game.

To simplify, let's say heads is 1 and tails is 0. Then the scheme can be defined using XOR. r1 represents the value of the coin Alice and Bob can see, r2 represents the value of the coin Alice and Charles can see, and r3 represents the value of the coin Bob and Charles can see.

Let x be whether Alice paid, y1 whether Bob paid, and y2 whether Charles paid.

Let * denote XOR. Alice computes v1 = r1 * x * r2, Bob computes v2 = r1 * y1 * r3, and Charles computes v3 = r2 * y2 * r3. They all then compute v1 * v2 * v3 which is equal to x * y1 * y2. Since they each know one variable, (e.g. x for Alice), they can compute y1 * y2. Since they assume only one person paid, if y1 * y2 = 1, Alice knows either Bob or Charles paid.

The scheme is insecure if Alice wants to go against the protocol and tell Bob and Charles a different v1 (v1_1 for Bob and v1_2 for Charles), and Bob and Charles will announce the result.

Lets say Alice works for the NSA, and already knows that x = 0 (she didn't pay), and y1 * y2 = 0 (her employer didn't pay), but she wants to find out if y1 = 1 or y2 = 1.

She tells Bob v1_1 = r1 * 0 * r2. She tells Charles v1_2 = r1 * 1 * r2. Bob computes and announces v1_1 * v2 * v3 * y1 = r1 * 0 * r2 * r1 * y1 * r3 * r2 * y2 * r3 * y1 = y2. Charles computes and announces v1_2 * v2 * v3 * y2 = 1 * y1 = y3.

<comment><USER3> I don't think your attack violates the security model of this protocol. One of the proofs in the paper is that if you have a network of good and bad nodes the bad nodes can use tricks like you posted to discover whether a good or bad node sent the message. I think that's all they can discover: did an attacker send this or not? But then again they already knew that, didn't they? So I think your attack is only interesting for 3 nodes.

<comment><USER2> It is a side channel that breaks the intention of the protocol - Bob and Charles are 'good nodes', one of who paid for the meal. Alice (bad node) is not supposed to be able to find out if it was Bob or Charles who paid.

If the participants don't share or talk about the outcome at all, this particular attack is avoided, so it is a side channel and not a direct failure of the protocol itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here a Youtube video to help visualize this protocol and more. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQQcoROQoI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQQcoROQoI)</comment>


Extract GnuPG private keys by L3 cache monitoring - <AUTHOR> http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448.pdf

<comment><USER2> The takeaway for a lot of people on HN is that gnupg keys on AWS are vulnerable to side-channel attacks...

</comment><comment><USER2> Arg this article title really misses the point.</comment>


Show HN: an attempt at an open source web based irc client in node.js - <AUTHOR>

github repo: https://github.com/cjstewart88/nirc
demo: http://nirc.jit.su/ (not sure how stable this is)
This by a long shot is not complete and bugs are crawling, but I wanted to get this out in front of as many people as possible.
If you're interested in contributing please don't hesitate, this is a learning experience for me and any help to make this an awesome app would be much appreciated! <comment><USER2> This is awesome! The qwebirc client everyone seems to use is seriously lacking in features. I will definitely try to contribute!</comment>


Open and Shut - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2013/03/open_and_shut

<comment><USER2> Customers buy into visions, not products. The iPhone is successful because it's both a great vision and a great product. In its time, Windows was a great vision, at least from the perspective of the people who signed off the budget for buying Windows PCs. Gruber is right that open vs. closed has nothing much to do with it.

However, I think that it gets harder to stay closed over time. As markets mature, products have to do more - interface with more hardware, be deployed in more scenarios and so on. The "ecosystem" becomes important - how many apps do you have, how compatible are you with the relevant bits of hardware? Apple have done fantastically well at both of these things, ensuring a large and high-quality app store, and good integration options. You can switch almost your entire digital life over to Apple products and this works.

But will it always work? Will Apple always be able to ensure that your Apple devices integrate smoothly with your self-driving car, your 3D printer, your home automation systems? As the size and scope of your "entire digital life" gets bigger and bigger, it becomes increasingly difficult for Apple to control the entire ecosystem. Not _impossible_ , but to do it they need to keep on executing at a very high level. They need to be able to say to people that across a very wide range of devices, the Apple device is always the best choice, that you don't need openness and interoperability because why would you ever choose something that's not Apple? And to do that, you do need "genius".

They're already failing somewhat. I don't know many people who think that iCloud is better than Google's equivalent, or Dropbox. iTunes is unloved by most people who use it, surviving largely on lock-in effects and Apple's good commercial skill in dealing with the music industry. If I stop caring about iCloud and iTunes, it becomes much easier for me to stop caring about my iPhone and use an Android (or WP or Firefox or Sailfish or whatever) device instead, because Dropbox and Spotify are open and don't make it difficult for me to do that.

TL;DR: Maintaining a closed ecosystem is difficult in direct proportion to the number of different components in the ecosystem, and the number of components is only going to go up.

<comment><USER3> > _"Customers buy into visions, not products."_

While I agree with the rest of your comment (esp the tl;dr), I completely disagree with the above. It's always about the product. Think of every recent Apple ad you've ever seen and ask yourself if they're showcasing the product or some nebulous 'vision'.

People who sign off on budgets don't get lauded because they bought into a 'vision'. It's because product X fits their requirement and likely solves a problem.

Vision, from the perspective of someone about to part with cold hard cash, isn't much of a factor.

<comment><USER2> OK, I may have phrased that badly. By "product" I meant simply the physical item itself and by "vision" I meant "what that thing can do for you". It's possible to make a beautiful, well-designed and all-round awesome product that's still useless because it doesn't actually fit any real use-case that potential customers might have.

<comment><USER3> That makes more sense to me now. I lump that all together in 'product' whereas vision is more about where a company is going and what philosophy is driving it (if you get my meaning).

It is possible to have customers who purchase based on vision/direction but this pretty much the defining characteristic of 'innovators' [1], who are willing to take risks on unfinished or poorly supported products.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: Gruber says Apple not being as open isn't important; that everything is fine with Apple; that Apple really do 'Think Different'.

<comment><USER5> Stopped reading after a few paragraphs. He himself contradicts his arguments.

<comment><USER6> Which part?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Attn. John Gruber, I'll save you 3000+ words:_

Shorter Tim Wu...

(1) Apple is the most successful and profitable company in the world today.

(2) Apple is one of the most closed companies in tech.

(3) Ergo closed is bad.

<comment><USER8> if you actually read the article, he wrote open/closed had nothing to do with companies' successes.

<comment><USER7> If by article you mean Gruber then yes. If you meant Tim Wu's article then you didn't read the same one I did, he says unequivocally that barring magic pixie dust, closed loses.

I'm not arguing that closed wins because Apple is successful. I'm saying Tim Wu's underlying argument is a complete non sequitur and that is more effectively exposed with 35 words than 3,500.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > > Apple, in contrast, always treats itself better. (Try removing iTunes from > your iPhone.)

> That's the entirety of Wu's second meaning of "open" — a comparison between > a web browser and an operating system.

I think he missed the point here. In Firefox everything gets treated more or less equally, whereas on the iPhone certain apps get treated better than others. For example, there's the whole "only allowed to use Safari renderer" nonsense.

>Mozilla now has its own mobile OS, on which, I'll bet, there are at least some apps you cannot remove.

I imagine the only apps on Moz you won't be able to remove would be ones that deal with system settings. To be seen, but there'd be no reason not to build it that way.

<comment><USER10> Try putting a different browser renderer on Firefox OS. You're pretty much locked in to JavaScript — unless you can somehow build WebKit with Emscripten, you're already behind what iOS can do — even with Apple's rules.

<comment><USER9> In Firefox OS, the browser is the OS. It'd be like saying you can't replace Dalvik in Android.

It's not about replacing the browser, it's about being able to replace things that you should be able to. There is no good technical reason to not let people replace Safari on iOS.

<comment><USER11> Not so sure about your last sentence. Can a replacement browser be any good without using JIT compilation somewhere? Is the sandbox going to allow it to jump into dynamically generated data? Are there any valid technical reasons for having sand-boxing in the first place?

(I'm guessing "probably not", "no", and "yes".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR Gruber says "open vs closed" isn't really useful for determining commercial success.

I agree, however, Gruber's writing doesn't make it really obvious that he's slamming someone for confusing making money vs, say adoption of a technology. In fact, if you read both articles, neither author has a clear concept of "open vs closed".

The fact that high-tech systems eventually have to somehow integrate with other high-tech systems is always glossed over. This "ecosystem" like behavior is what separates high tech from, say, steel (an example used by Wu). You build steel for a bridge, your customer buys that steel, they probably don't think, "well, in 10 years, if you go out of business, where am I going to get some more steel?"

</comment><comment><USER13> It's kind of funny because for the most part I think Gruber proved the point of his article. BUT I think he also proved another point as well, that history is repeating itself and the IPhone might be in trouble. Not in trouble as in people will stop buying it or it will not be a top phone. But in trouble as in it will never dominate the smartphone market again. It may lead at some point but not dominate. This paragraph really pointed it out to me

"The Mac was closed in the '80s and thrived, much like Apple does today: with a decent but minority market share, and very healthy profit margins. It began to suffer — both in terms of scarily low dwindling market share and unprofitability — only in the mid-'90s. At this point, the Mac had become no more closed, but had become technically and aesthetically stagnant. And then came Windows 95, which altered the closed/open equation not one bit, but which closed the design quality gap with the Mac significantly. Windows thrived, the Mac withered, and it had nothing to do with openness and everything to do with engineering and design quality. Windows had gotten a lot better, and the Mac had not."

There are a couple of more lines in the article that highlight this point as well but this paragraph really brings the point home. It also shows that Wall Street is not completely crazy when it comes to dropping the stock price of Apple. Wall Street cares (short term) more about growth than anything else. And unless Apple opens up and dominates another sector like it did with the IPhone and the IPad we will not see the same rate of growth as we did before.

</comment><comment><USER14> Open-Closed is classic Innovators Solution stuff. When products aren't satisfactory for customers, vertically integrated companies can optimize better. When products improve to exceed customer satisfaction, open ecosystems let new companies combine components in new ways to serve new customer expectations.

Even the newest, shiniest phones have poor battery life, limited wireless availability, and difficult input, so vertically integrated companies will dominate (Apple, Samsung). When batteries, chips, antennas, etc are so cheap and great that tinkerers can make a serviceable phone on Kickstarter, phones will cease to be huge profit centers and design and manufacturing will be distributed and fragmented, like PCs are now. The Open will have won.

Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution will teach you more than a thousand flame wars. Open-closed is a meaningless distinction unless you also know product quality and customer needs.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a rather silly analysis.

Open beats closed over a longer time scale. It's an overall industry trend, not a scoreboard for individual companies.

<comment><USER16> That's pretty much Gruber's point - that open technologies/standards beat closed ones in the long run, but that "open vs closed" is nonsensical when applied to analyse company performance.

<comment><USER15> Oh. Okay. It needs a TL;DR because I did read it, but it didn't help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "better and earlier tend to beat worse and later."

windowsphone/surface fanboys, take note.

<comment><USER18> also android fanboys who are instead falling all over themselves to claim that later and worse but open somehow beats better and earlier.

It's an ideology, mindless anti-progress, anti-innovation ideology.</comment></comment>


Regulators Prepare to Dig Into Google-ITA Deal - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/regulators-prepare-to-dig-into-google-ita-deal/ <comment><USER2> If Google has no intentions of selling airline tickets, as they claim, I wonder what their intention IS then. It would be interesting if they made said ITA data available through an open API ala GData</comment>


Show HN: Keyword Tool to Find Available Domain Names - <AUTHOR> http://domaingroovy.com/keyword_tool/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this keyword tool to help find a domain for a new project I am working on.

I thought it turned out decent enough, so I'm releasing it, hoping others will find it useful.

There are tons of these domain keyword tools around, here's why I built this one:

\- Wanted to check the best keywords first, then fallback to less popular keywords

\- Handle plural/singular keywords gracefully (like greatguitar.com, guitargreat.com, greatguitars.com, but not guitarsgreat.com)

\- Use WHOIS rather than DNS to determine availability (more accurate, but slower)

\- Simple to use

\- Fast

There's still a lot to do, but in the spirit of release early and often, I'd love some feedback on this.

Do you find this useful?

<comment><USER2> Really nice. I tried it and it suggested some genuinely useful domain names, unlike most of these tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find <http://impossibility.org> to be a fair bit faster and with a bit more control over options. Suggestion: it'd be nice if one could toggle between what registrar they wish to use and have the URLs automatically updated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

I'll work on adding more registrars, this is planned.

The site is slower than normal right now due to increased load, but should return to normal after the HN spike. If not I'll more workers.

My goal is that you should never have to wait for results. By the time you click "Load more results", they should already be available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great--I've already bought 2 good domains for a project that I've been trying to rename for months. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, tldrpower.com is available.

How are you checking for name availability? Every option I've looked at either wants to charge me money, or has a TOS that's hostile to scripting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Big fan-- already gave us some new domain ideas to discuss for our next project. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> it works. To make this even faster., Try to memcatch frequently searched domain names and flush it for every 24 hours(Incase someone registered one).

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am caching domain results for a small period of time, so this does help with some of the speed/load.

The site may be a little slower than normal right now because of HN traffic, but I'm working on keeping it going.

Thanks for your feedback.

<comment><USER7> Fine., Also try to find "heat map" of user's mouse activities(hover) or click ratio. Try to give rating for those available domains for yourself and prioritize them based on it. Diff colors, Diff font size.. This will start rocking your popularity & aff earning ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> ___Also try to find "heat map" of user's mouse activities(hover) or click ratio. Try to give rating for those available domains for yourself and prioritize them based on it._ __

I had thought of clicks, but not hover ratio--that's pretty interesting.

I may have to experiment with that, thanks for the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I scroll down a little and try to highlight a domain name, as soon as I click on the white-space, it scrolls to the top. All I am trying to do is highlight: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBDPYnNryJE&hd=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBDPYnNryJE&hd=1)

Great tool. I like its results more than impossibilit...

<comment><AUTHOR> What version of Chrome are you using? And what OS are you on?

Thanks for the video, that makes debugging much easier.

<comment><USER8> I am on firefox 4 RC1. Windows 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> throwing errors:

TemplateSyntaxError at /keyword_tool/

Caught OperationalError while rendering: (2002, "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)")

Request Method: GET Request URL: <http://domaingroovy.com/keyword_tool/> Django Version: 1.3 rc 1 Exception Type: TemplateSyntaxError Exception Value:

Caught OperationalError while rendering: (2002, "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)")

Exception Location: /home/domain/domaingroovy/env/lib/python2.6/site- packages/MySQLdb/connections.py in __init__, line 187 Python Executable: /home/domain/domaingroovy/env/bin/python Python Version: 2.6.5

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, load was over 100 which makes it extremely slow to fix.

I've tweaked some settings to try and handle the load better (250K domains checked in 2 hours was a little more than I expected).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is actually quite useful. Speed would improve the overall user experience. Also, I'm not too sure what the links are at the bottom of the page?

All in all, great first start. It'll be powerful once you start including other domains (.me, .us etc)

</comment><comment><USER11> Additional value would be to check associated Twitter/Facebook usernames - you're not just searching for a domain name, you're searching for a brand, right?

Great service though (impressed by Impossibility! too).

</comment><comment><USER12> I got a Django exception... maybe this will help you out: <http://i.imgur.com/RiSZU.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this, just reminded me I need to set DEBUG = False

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice work. I still prefer <http://domai.nr/> for ease of use and those extra techie tlds.

</comment><comment><USER14> Jasber, thanks for building this. You're really really making it easy for me to find a great name for my projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's groovy! Seriously - that's fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks, excuse me while I register "poopcrunch.com"</comment>


New Da Vinci bio portrays a man obsessed with knowledge, impossible to know - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/the-secret-lives-of-leonardo-da-vinci <comment><USER2> This article is a (one of many) in recent time due to promotion of new book: [https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter- Isaacson/dp/150...](https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter- Isaacson/dp/1501139150)

Not to deny Leonardo's might, but quite similar to the pattern of (e.g.) more Depeche Mode songs on the radio signals new album/tour.

<comment><USER3> Yes. And it's a fact mentioned right in the first sentence. So what?

<comment><USER2> It's not.

There is nowhere stated: reason for this article is to promote the book sale.

Knowing true reason/motivtion of somebody's actions is important. You can also draw conclusions if somebody is hiding their true motivation under pretext.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The book was published yesterday, and I just got it this morning.

I just got finished with the first 150 pages, and this book is amazingly great at conveying how obsessed with knowledge he had while dissecting all of his works. Highly recommend everyone to read it.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.

<comment><USER6> I have grown up surrounded by two people with extraordinarily high IQs, and they were normal people. They have more curiosity than normal people, and they have lots of interests that span many, many subjects, but for all intents and purposes they are normal in manner and demeanor.

This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly beyond me.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.

<comment><USER8> Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity required to create new stuff.

<comment><USER6> > most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense

I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a _heavy_ love of language, a decent dollop of it.

Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube- Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.

<comment><USER8> What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then neither do most intelligent people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone else find the ostentacious sentence structuring in the article distracting, and a little infuriating? Sure, writing is an art form; I get it. I sometimes wonder if this very thing is what readers of _The New Yorker_ actually want.

<comment><USER10> I didn't... you mean the overuse of commas?

<comment><USER11> That depends on how you were taught, if you were taught using the Oxford style, than it really becomes more natural to write, as if you speak.

An example being, each time you would make a slight pause in your sentence, than a comma is required, otherwise you would keep writing until a sentence has ended with a period, or as I was originally taught, a full colon.

<comment><USER12> What is "Oxford style?" Do you have a reference?

If you're talking about the 'Oxford comma', then that is definitely not a style advocating for gratuitous comma usage in general, only an extra one on the final item of a list.

Outside of lists, commas are used to separate clauses. They are never used so separate subjects and verbs, as that is always awkward and superfluous. It has nothing to do with pauses, and much more to do with coordinating intonation patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw a feature about this book on CBS Sunday Morning that lead me to believe any biography written by Isaacson is likely to be a hagiography.

<comment><USER14> Do you, by any chance, have any information on Da Vinci that's negative?

<comment><USER13> My comment is about Isaacson.

Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to read multiple biographies to try to put his books into reasonable context. My comment is an attempt at getting someone who may have to weigh in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The idea that Europe went from the middle ages into the Reinassance unassisted thanks to a handful of people in Italy is eurocentric revisionism.

What really happened was:

After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century)

...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own.

There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism.

You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.

<comment><USER16> No one preaches that the Reinassance was unassisted, or that it was the source of all knowledge - but the technological development that allowed this boom came from Europe.

It's not by random chance that this creative boom came after the print press was invented - in Europe.

After it, the knowledge that was limited to a few people, was spread out via a media development: books, the medium that fueled all of this.

Leonardo was just curious, and had fuel to feed the curiosity, with answers.

<comment><USER17> It's questionable whether the printing press was an entirely novel invention. Movable type printing had been around for centuries in China, it was just less useful there due to the large number of pictographs. In fact one of the major innovations of Gutenberg was the alloy he used for the type that was both easily workable and durable in use.

Additionally, the major change people usually aren't aware of was the spread of papermaking knowledge through Europe around the 12th and 13th century. Before that point, most books were created on Parchment, which was much more expensive. I've read somewhere that a single bible took ~3000 sheep to produce.

<comment><USER16> But I didn't said it was a novel invention - yet it was indeed the European concept/invention that thrived and allowed for the boom in Europe.

Regarding the papermaking, I believe we can fit it in the same boat as other craftsmanship that evolved previously and allowing for the development for the press itself (but definitely papermaker had a greater role in some dimension - cost/manufacturing/distribution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're going to read one bio from HN today, the one to read is the Joni Mitchell one and not this:

[https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni- mit...](https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop- music-canon)

(This one is also good, the Joni Mitchell one was just better.)</comment>


Open letter to people of Brevard who were laid off from Shuttle Program - <AUTHOR> http://mysqltalk.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/open-letter-to-the-people-of-brevard-county-who-were-laid-off-from-the-shuttle-program-11/

<comment><AUTHOR> DOH. You're not supposed to submit your own links, are you? Sorry about that. Got so immersed in this idea that I did it without thinking it through. Mods, feel free to delete if I broke the rules.</comment>


Welcome to 1986: Inside "Halt and Catch Fire's" High-Tech Time Machine - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3063135/most-creative-people/welcome-to-1986-inside-halt-and-catch-fires-high-tech-time-machine <comment><USER2> Just started watching the first episode on Season 3. About four minutes in, they've just succeeded in booting up an old IBM mainframe, and it displays the _" IBM Personal Computer DOS Version 2.00"_ bootup sequence (an operating system that never ran on mainframes). I can't remember seeing any technical blunders like this in the first two seasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just watched Season 2 to catch up before Season 3, and I noticed this:

      LOAD "SONARIS.EXE"

It's missing ",8,1", and we didn't named our program with .EXE extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this show. I think they've really captured the excitement of being part of something new.</comment>