Ask HN: How to create an anonymous site? - <AUTHOR> The reasons are plenty, free speech, regulation and even criminal (piratebay?)<p>How can one register a domain anonymously and host a site without anyone being able to trace the owner's identity ? <comment><USER2> Much like security, you pick your countermeasures in advance in the hopes of raising the cost of an attacker to penetrating your security. You're not anonymous. You're anonymous to an adversary with a given amount of technical/legal/intelligence/etc resources to bring to bear on deanonimizing you.

People will probably give you links which describe adequate methods for securing you against adversaries without $1,000 or equivalent amounts of brainsweat. If that's your adversary, there. May you execute properly.

If your theorized adversary is a nation state, pick another adversary. You're guaranteed to lose that fight in the long run. If you bid the price of your identity up to $5 million, they will counter with "We routinely pay that to kill mosquitoes" and mean that _entirely_ literally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously there are limitations on both how hard it is for "attackers" to reach you and how hart it is for "users".

SilkRoad - Was extremelly hard to "catch" but also hard for users (only Tor)

BTC-E - Still identities hidden, easily accessible by users.

Does anyone know how BTCE set it all up ?

<comment><USER3> Not hard to find out, according to their whois you can just email legal @ instra.com to find out..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't.

More specifically, if you truly care for anonymity, you won't be using a plain DNS+Web site. Instead, you should go for Freenet [1] or a Tor-hosted website [2].

[1] [https://freenetproject.org/](https://freenetproject.org/)

[2] [https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden- service.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en)

<comment><USER5> What are the technical differences between Tor (hidden services), Freenet and I2P?

<comment><USER4> Initially, Tor and I2P only pass information from one node to another while obfuscating it. At either end, you can now what the information is, but you do not know where it went through. It's basically a tunnel that goes _somewhere_. It is why you can use Tor to browse the web: you just use it to hide where you are connecting from.

On the other hand, Freenet is a paranoia-driven network over the Internet which makes information available and resilient. There is no such thing as a webserver on Freenet. An encrypted version of the data is sent to some nodes and passed from one to another. You don't know where the information comes from, you just get it at some point.

Finally, Tor implemented hidden services. This is almost the opposite of the initial situation where an user wants to access a known website without being known. The hidden service is hosted on some node, and you access it through the "Tor tunnel", meaning that you don't know where the service is. The user is still hidden by the network too.

<comment><USER5> Is any of them good for SSH (MOSH) access to computers behind NAT?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are a couple of interesting links:

[http://untraceableblog.com/](http://untraceableblog.com/)

[http://voidnull.sdf.org/](http://voidnull.sdf.org/)

To answer your questions - you can buy domain for bitcoins and use some free hosting like Wordpress or Github Pages.

<comment><USER7> Domain names can be withdrawn if you supply invalid WHOIS information.

<comment><USER6> But that's not what OP asked for :)

<comment><USER8> To be fair the OP never asked anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Besides the technical measures in the other comments, there are a bunch of other tricks that might be useful. (Please don't take this as advice, but just as a thought experiment! If I were writing a spy novel, these are some things my characters would do.)

Find a homeless person, and ask him/her to register a bank account in exchange for some cash or a meal. Use that account to set up your website anonymously. You'll find that you need to dirten money if running such an operation - reverse laundering or taking "clean" money and putting it untracably into the business. Such a proxy account is a vital ingredient.

Don't rely on Tor alone. It might be completely subverted, you wouldn't know until it's too late. Buy access to a botnet and route your stuff over it.

Have multiple servers. If you have one single server, its easy to trace. Either by brute force: the ISPs disconnect/slow down 50% of customers for a split second, depending on wheter your site went down or not they know in which half you are, repeat until they find you. There are much more sophisticated techniques that don't require active interference. But if you have at least two or three identical servers at different locations, it makes it a lot harder to catch you. Don't forget tamper-proofing your servers.

Have trustworthy accomplices. Generally, the less people you tell what you are doing, the better. But if you have a close circle of people you can really trust, it becomes much easier to pull this off. You can work from multiple locations, give each other alibis, etc..

Build fake personas. Don't just take a pseudonym, but create fake identities. Keep records on their interests, their motivations, what you disclosed about them. The purpose is to throw investigators off. You should be aware of techniques used by them, such as behavioral analysis, stilistic analysis, etc.. Working with accomplices can help alot in creating these fake identities and concealing your own (e.g. writing style).

Go somewhere safe. If possible, move your servers, or even yourself, somewhere where what you are doing is not punishable, or the authorities can be bribed.

This list could go on for ever... I'm not sure how practical many of these ideas are, but one thing is clear, you'll need a certain amount of "criminal energy" to pull this off - no matter whether your intentions are criminal or not. (Disclaimer: I'm too pussy to actually have done any of the above, so it may or may not work :-))

</comment><comment><USER10> 1\. Buy BTC with cash

2\. Buy a domain with BTC via Tor

3\. Buy hosting with BTC via Tor

4\. Do not accidentally leak your identity in one of million possible ways

#1-3 are pretty easy, but #4 is next to impossible. If nobody cares about you there might be some small room for error. But generally it takes one smallest mistake and you are ultimately busted.

<comment><USER11> > 1\. Buy BTC with cash

This actually is harder than it sounds.

<comment><USER12> localbitcoins?

<comment><USER11> AFAIK sellers often require some data like a verified mobile phone number.

Than there is your registration on localbitcoin. You would need a truely anonymous email address.

And the site behaves really poorly if you try to use it over tor.

If you do the cash transfer in person, the seller might be able to identify you.

If you don't do it in person you would have to send it via some money transfer service.

It is allways hard not to leave traces when you interact with something / someone.

Edit: As 'austerity' stated: 4. Do not accidentally leak your identity in one of million possible ways. [...] But #4 is next to impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The untraceableblog.com below is a great resource.

However, in the end, there is always text analysis though that can give your identity away, which the untraceable blog does not address.

That's why you possibly need a ghost writer that you provide with a script or a robot audio recording if you want to go 100% sure. You need to be able to trust your ghostwriter a 100% though then. :)

<comment><USER14> It is addressed under the section "Word and character frequency analysis".

He runs his posts through google translate to another language, and then back to english.

<comment><USER15> Better use Anonymouth: [https://github.com/psal/anonymouth](https://github.com/psal/anonymouth)

The translation method is not really effective:

> We also show that automated attempts at circumventing stylometry using > machine translation may not be as effective, often altering the meaning of > text while providing only small drops in accuracy.

[https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylomet...](https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometry.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would go with a Tor [1] hidden service or an EepSite on I2P [2].

Both are easy to setup and are accessible by anyone using "inproxies" such as onion.to or i2p.us.

Another advantage is that you can host the sites anywhere even behind a firewall or a NAT as long as the computer it's hosted on can run Tor or I2P.

I personally have a preference for I2P, since this is its main purpose while Tor's hidden services are not the primary purpose of Tor (which is to anonymize users on the clearnet).

[1] [https://www.torproject.org/](https://www.torproject.org/)

[2] [https://geti2p.net/](https://geti2p.net/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Take this as a start: [http://grugq.github.io/presentations/Keynote_The_Grugq_- _OPS...](http://grugq.github.io/presentations/Keynote_The_Grugq_- _OPSEC_for_Russians.pdf)

<comment><USER18> And basically his whole blog: [http://grugq.github.io/](http://grugq.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe someone with experience of such hosting? Like: [http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)

I should add: Goes under US Law, so forget pirating or illegal content.

<comment><USER20> Nearlyfreespeech is explicitly not for anonymous hosting. They are just very unlikely to take anything down without a court order forcing them to do so.

<comment><USER19> They do accept anonymous money and do not keep logs of who you are, but yes, they will take down stuff based on court order - but so will all public hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think most answers here are over thinking it; I do not think he wants a website that can defeat the NSA, just one where the service provider could get subpoenaed and not lead them to him.

So, just buy webhosting with Bitcoin at somewhere that does not require contact details.

e.g.

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

[http://bitcoinwebhosting.net/](http://bitcoinwebhosting.net/)

Sign up at the local library to cloak that IP then use tor after that if you think you will have a dedicated adversary.

</comment><comment><USER22> It is not as much creating an anonymous website as it is about protecting the users (keeping their anonymity) and their content (from prying eyes). A service can be in plain sight, but if it employs the correct (often needed - extreme) practices, it can provide its users with this level of confidence. I happen to be a Co-Founder of such a service :-) www.anongrid.com is an extremely secure and anonymous content sharing service. still in its infancy but you're welcome to check it out and see what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you need to ask these questions you are not qualified to run such a site, or at least not to ask anyone else to trust that you are not going to screw up when setting it up or at some point in the future and break anonymity. The more you move away from "free speech" to avoiding regulation and toward criminal activity the greater the chance that someone out there will actually try to see how good you really are, and then your whole house of cards will fall down. Seriously, don't.

<comment><USER4> From the way the question was phrased, I think this is precisely for learning how to do such things. You still need to start somewhere, and as long as you know you should not take inconsiderate risks, you can screw up sometimes and learn from your errors.

<comment><USER2> Importantly, you _don 't_ get to learn from your mistakes in "opsec." Dread Pirate Roberts asked a question about connecting to a tor site using curl on StackOverflow under his own name. Seconds later he realized "D'oh, that is in hindsight a bad move." and changed his name to a pseudonym.

Choose your own adventure:

a) He got to learn from his mistake.

b) That incident was recounted years later in the criminal indictment.

<comment><USER24> That was pretty shocking to read in the indictment.

He obviously didn't think it was a serious issue at the time, but jesus, could you imagine how it felt to read about that one mistake years later? Makes you wonder what you have left online that might bit you in the ass years from now. I know i certainly couldn't run for office now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Use subdomain on any known websites like [http://anonymous.wordpress.com](http://anonymous.wordpress.com) ?

</comment><comment><USER26> Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, couldn't you drop content on the blockchain? Not a traditional website, but relatively anonymous (depending on how you move the coin), and more importantly, it can't be seized or taken down (kinda scary when you think about the potentially implications for everyone who downloads the blockchain)

</comment><comment><USER27> Launching and maintaining fully anon site is close to impossible. And maybe not worth a hassle depending on your purpose of course.

Instead - register Twitter nick and link your tweets to pastebin or similar repository where you'd post something worthy of reading.

Use Tor for all above.

</comment><comment><USER28> if you host it yourself, don't forget to clean up your access logs. you might want to actually fill them with invalid data, rather than completely deleting them.

</comment><comment><USER29> What is really hard is to have a secure (SSL) anonymous website with a valid SSL Cert.

<comment><USER30> That's actually not so different from usual way. Matter of trust is generally hard.

<comment><USER30> And, one can use tools like "Certificate Patrol" (Firefox addon) to ensure cert isn't changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For how long? Get a dyndns pro account, laptop(s) and host the site from multiple coffee shops. I didn't give this much thought, internet advice eh.

<comment><USER32> I always thought it would be neat to create a raspberry pi server and throw it in the ceiling tiles of a hotel with free wifi. Setup some kind of routing to the IP, and let it go.</comment></comment>


Show HN: An HN-Style Site for Integrated Circuits Folks - <AUTHOR> http://clktok.efabless.com/

<comment><USER2> I like both the idea and the implementation but I hate it when links open in new tabs. If I want a link to open in a new tab, I can do it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted.

I'll change that damn _blank......

thanks mucho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a guy who dabbles in hardware this is a really cool, toying with my side smart watch idea (timepiece.io) may be somewhere good to test out what other IC people think of something like this!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Built this because my buddy kept complaining about how he didn't have other IC folks to chat with.

My first time dealing with a server and using meteor. Pretty fun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice use of Telesc.pe: [http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)

<comment><AUTHOR> They did an awesome job putting it together. I'm a huge fan of the app now. All tweets have a mention of them. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for taking the initiative to create this, really into IC!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, digita, no problem. I'd love to connect and get some of your feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> my email is kt [at] efabless [dot] com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice; I'm just missing a rss feed.

</comment><comment><USER7> looks pretty</comment>


NDA for Seed / Series A Rounds - <AUTHOR> How to start ups typically handle NDAs for investors during Seed and Series A rounds? I've heard that most investors refuse to sign them. Is there a basic template that would cover materials exchange and outline a non-compete and non-solicit? <comment><USER2> You will likely never get any investment if you expect a NDA/non-compete. More of less, investors won't take you serious.

Investors don't run around stealing ideas as it is bad for business, they also won't sign NDA's non-competes because it would destroy their business. Of course, I am sure there are some examples that can be pointed too where an investor misused data they were given, but of the thousands of deals reviewed every year if it was a rampant problem people would be screaming about it.

Find good competent investors, and drop any idea of an NDA/non-compete etc. If you get investment, your job is to move faster then everyone else to build your moat, focus on that. This is also why though you need to diligence your investors as much as they are you. When you are approaching investors you aren't sending all your secrets anyway. Especially when you are first looking for seed type money everything you present is mainly ideas with a little proof you aren't full of shit. Everything market and business related in those early decks is something that all your competitors and likely competitors would already suspect or know, with some exceptions. There just isn't anything really worth protecting that early. Investors at the early stages aren't coming in and going through your code etc, they are looking at the founders, business model, marketing opportunity etc to see if they think it is viable.

*edit for clarity

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply, very helpful</comment></comment>


Patent troll claims to own Bluetooth, scores $15.7M verdict against Samsung - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/patent-troll-claims-to-own-bluetooth-scores-15-7m-verdict-against-samsung/

<comment><USER2> Sigh, par for the course for any patent-related reporting on Ars.

1\. The headline is pure clickbait, and is obvious from the article itself. From a quick glance, the patents concern a specific feature of Bluetooth 2.0 that enable selecting different modulation schemes, one with a higher data rate, based on a header. Whether that's novel or non-obvious depends on the prior art, which isn't discussed in TFA. In any case, it's a far cry from a claim on "owning Bluetooth".

2\. The article and comments paint the plaintiff as a troll. But nobody asks, let alone bothers to answer, what somebody should do if they devise such type of an improvement to existing systems. "They are trolls because they make no products", is the argument. Well, what product would you build in this situation? Wireless communications are heavily regulated and standardized. Build an entire new protocol and standard around a single improvement? And then get people to build chips for that? Who's going to adopt your standard when there are powerful network (literally) effects in place? And how does that help when this improvement could be applied to any other protocol? Others can simply adopt this improvement in their own products and completely ignore yours.

I haven't seen anybody attempt to answer these questions. It doesn't take much thought to call someone a troll, though.

3\. HNer DannyBee, a patent lawyer, had once (jokingly?) suggested that defendants may start faring well in ED Texas if they, say, built a stadium in Marshall. Looks like somebody at Samsung is thinking along the same lines. Though it didn't help in this case, I guess it may help in the longer term, especially given that Samsung is not an American company, something jurors may be consciously or subconsciously biased against.

<comment><USER3> For point 2, there are a few factors that go into distinguishing a non- manufacturer patent holder vs. a patent troll. First, is the use of low quality patents. A low quality patent is one or more of the following:

* Overly broad

* Describes the problem space, and claims all possible solutions to that problem

* Written in such a way that you can't implement the covered technology based on the patent description

* Covers existing practice, or what is destined to become standard practice in a new field, but worded in such a way to make it appear more novel

* Doesn't pass the non-obviousness test (need to be careful with this one, because a lot of patent-worthy inventions are obvious in hind site)

Also, a patent troll typically waits till a technology is well established before suing, in order to maximize payout (see submarine patents). Another soft clue to identifying a patent troll, is if the party being sued had came to knowledge of the covered technology by way of the patent or patent holder/inventor. If it is independent invention, then that could indicate that the patent fails the non-obviousness test.

<comment><USER4> It seems like most of your points are already addressed in patent law. A good patent litigation counsel on the opposing side should be able to dig up prior art to invalidate any overly broad or obvious claims, and should be able to invalidate any patent that does not sufficiently teach how to make and how to use the invention due to lack of enablement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hear about these patent trolls a lot but I never really got an understanding of what kind of people and companies these are.

First of all, I know they are scummy and yada yada.

But they must be very smart, setting up shell companies and having deep (?) knowledge of the various tech stuff they are pursuing, it's not within the average persons knowledge to do things like these.

How do they get the patents? Do they validly have patents, 100% generic or not, before something similar comes up. Or do they somehow "craft" it towards the victim.

Is there some known person who is a patent troll?

Is it knowlegable normal people workin in the scene while doing these things "behind" the scenes or is it some proper company/office that delegates stuff to their "shells"? It must require a huge amount of work to fight these mega corporations, even if they give up quickly.

I find them faschinating in the same way as any high level scam artist since it requires some finess.

<comment><USER6> Check out ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold [0] of Intellectual Ventures [1] infamy. He's also famous for his epic modernist cuisine cooking bible [2]. I also highly recommend the This American Life two-part podcast on patent trolls [3] [4].

You can read Nathan's attempted justification of his patent troll activities here [5].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures) [2] [http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-The-Science- Cooking/...](http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-The-Science- Cooking/dp/0982761007#) [3] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/441/w...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack) [4] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/496/w...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/496/when-patents-attack-part-two) [5] [https://hbr.org/2010/03/the-big-idea-funding- eureka](https://hbr.org/2010/03/the-big-idea-funding-eureka)

<comment><USER7> Nothing makes my blood boil more than Nathan Myhrvold's weird justifications for his behavior. It all sounds plausible, maybe even admirable, and then he turns around and funds 'inventors' that have patents for absolute malarkey. At this point, I hope he is ONLY remembered for being a troll and nothing else.

Once people make it to the top, they almost always try to change the rules so no one can follow in their footsteps. "Well, yes, that was okay _for me_ , but you are going to have to make it _on your own_ , kiddo."

Establishing a capital market for inventions sounds like a _great_ idea, but it is predicated on the notion that the patent office is not asleep at the wheel. Person-in-garage-invents-life-changing-technology is a great trope, but where the rubber meets the road we have the Eolas patent and various "using a computer or network of computers" patents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The telecom industry is unfortunately very patent heavy. It holds back startups from entering, and the standardization groups become a game of trying to push in things covered by your own patents while dodging others.

<comment><USER9> I used to work in wireless R&D (at a startup). It's frightfully expensive, and we would have never be able to do a whole stack with original technology, so we licensed and built on top of WiMAX. I'm not sure why we should've been allowed to build on all that technology for free.

Patents are a huge boon to standardization in capital-intensive industries like that. Getting your patent in the spec is what creates the incentive to contribute to this joint venture that's going to be opened up. Otherwise you're doing R&D for your competitors for free.

<comment><USER10> "R&D for your competitors for free" sounds like the open source movement to me.

In the brief amount of time I worked in telecom, I was shocked at how paranoid and backstabby it appeared to be.

<comment><USER9> The GnuPG maintainer is begging for nickles, while most commercial investment into open source is incidental to some other activity that generates the real money. Those aren't good things. When you make it difficult to monetize a product, you create a huge incentive for companies to vertically integrate until they control part of the stack that can be monetized. E.g. Android can exist as open source because it's an on-ramp to Google's proprietary web services.

If companies like Qualcomm couldn't directly monetize their R&D, the likely end result would be their getting sucked up into companies like Apple and Samsung that build end-user products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If companies spent more time on their Bluetooth stack implementations and less money on the legal wrangling, BT wouldn't be so shitty.

<comment><USER2> Many think that the spec itself is crappy, so there's not much an implementation can do to fix that. Witness, for instance, the number of hardware vendors like Logitech that eschew Bluetooth in favor of their own proprietary wireless protocols.

<comment><USER11> I have no doubt the spec is crap, but some implementations are better (read: somewhat less problematic) than others. Which leads me to believe there is some degree of freedom with respect to quality here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fully agree with you there. I'm working on some BT stuff, and find it to be lacking, mainly the software stack. The spec looks ok for a wireless interface, the quality of the stacks are all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what these guys are doing is sitting on their chairs, and trying to get money from people/companies that produce something?

Not that I am a fan of Samsung or anything, but this feels really wrong. Can't this be stopped?

I would understand if these guys had their patent before bluetooth, this is just plain stupid that they can earn money from it, isn't it ?

<comment><USER13> You could argue that companies like Rembrandt are the only way that indie patent holders can hope to compete with the likes of Samsung. Unfortunately the patent game appears to usually be one that is won by whoever has the largest legal budget.

It costs huge amounts to create, file and protect patents and any errors will mean that a patent is worthless once the opposition's lawyers get stuck into it.

Large companies in patent heavy fields all have teams of lawyers filing patents as quickly as they can and then defending them and attacking others as hard as they can. The little guy doesn't stand a chance.

Perhaps a solution could be to have government take the place of a company like Rembrandt so that independent patent filers can get the heft behind them required to support their patent.

<comment><USER14> Or how about we kill the parasitic patent industry once and for all? Declare all patents invalid, like the debt amnesties that were common thousands of years ago, and refuse to issue any new ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Inauguration Attendees Make Significantly Less Than Women's March Attendees - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/safegraph/inauguration-attendees-make-significantly-less-money-than-womens-march-attendees-7cb8b056556a <comment><USER2> Where does safegraph source their gps data? Is it too expensive for a lone open source programmer to have a crack at it? I'd love to push some through tensorflow for mostly fun and a slim chance at profit.

<comment><USER3> It's possible this isn't GPS data, but SafeGraph sources it from cell towers.

I used to have links to some cell provider pages selling this data, but they have all disappeared. You can still find the APIs though, eg [https://github.com/RestComm/gmlc](https://github.com/RestComm/gmlc)</comment></comment>


Nexus One Thoughts – Broken Glass and Quality  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.herlein.com/2010/05/nexus-one-thoughts-broken-glass-quality-oh-my/

<comment><USER2> Ok.. when i read "N1 glass was breaking from being put in a pocket" i knew i wouldn't read any further. I am sorry, but it is just not possible to break glass when putting it in a pocket, what the hell?

p.s.: ok, if he meant he wore tight pants and put it in the back pocket and sit down.. yeah.. what the hell.. those devices should only be sold to people with common sense.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/HTC-says-broken-glass- means-...](http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/HTC-says-broken-glass-means-Nexus- One-not-for-pocket-article-a_10034.html)

and [http://gizmodo.com/5486397/htc-dont-carry-your-nexus-one- in-...](http://gizmodo.com/5486397/htc-dont-carry-your-nexus-one-in-your- pocket)

I would be more worried, though, about wearing pants tight enough to harm electronics.

<comment><USER2> Yes, thats what i meant.. the picture pooks like the N1 was bent.. i wear it all day in my pocket but apparently i am careful enough not to bent an eletronic device.</comment></comment></comment>


'Carbon removal is now a thing': Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/carbon-removal-is-now-a-thing-radical-fixes-get-a-boost-at-climate-talks/2018/12/11/d22efd40-fd01-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html <comment><USER2> shouldn't there be a tax paid by the producers to cover it?</comment>


Why aren't more college students on LinkedIn? - <AUTHOR> http://roe.myedu.com/research/why-arent-more-college-students-on-linkedin/

<comment><USER2> Do people benefit from LinkedIn? I know I have been pulling back for a while in terms of the amount of information I share about myself on the internet. I have seen that I don't really benefit from giving Facebook my data - even in terms of personal enjoyment. I have received many LinkedIn invites - they're from people I know personally and/or people I could not potentially have a career-based relationship with. What's the point?</comment>


The Death of Rules and Standards - T-A http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2693826 <comment><AUTHOR> I can see some lawyers making pranks by setting up the micro-directives so that when you follow them, you'll end up in a loop...

Seriously though, an important thing about the law is the ability to (more- less) reason about it. That I can predict what rules may apply to my future situation and use that to adjust my behavior proactively. With the description from the abstract it'll be impossible by design - micro-directives tailored to specific situations will be too specific and too minutiae-dependent to predict beforehand.

\---

Skimming the paper, I realize the 'micro-directives' are basically cases of computers making decisions. They are not laws, they're machine outputs that tell humans what to do (operate or don't, drive forward or stop, etc.). So on one hand, it's not as scary as it sounds. On the other, does it make sense to view it from this angle? Why not just talk about what computers are better at deciding than us?

<comment><USER2> In other words, we'd use an always-connected device (like a phone or a watch) to help us comply with micro-directives. I can totally see some folks rebelling against that. There's already fear related to strong AIs.

On the other hand, this is _exactly_ the same class of problems Google and other self-driving car makers face when it comes to questions of ethics and morality. There were several recent articles on HN about that. The question posed was: should your self-driving car swerve to avoid those kids who just got off the school bus, sacrificing you and the passengers?

That leads to an implicit question: should Google and other engineers be responsible for writing such algorithms?

What these two law professors are proposing gives a different option. Change the way policy is made. Such micro-directives (which requires a computing device to execute) would include the behavior of self-driving cars as a general case, rather than a special case. The paper might talk about getting the benefits of rules and standards without the cost, but we're really talking about making our legislation legible for machines to follow.

On an even bigger scale: how do micro-directives change how we conceive of and think of a democracy or a republic? Are policy makers sufficiently versed in engineering to reason through the impact of the laws? But then again, the idea was to use Big Data methods to collect that. Does that require specialists to design and deploy that system? Wasn't the original idea behind the American form of democracy, a literate voting public that can reason and discuss the impact of policy and make informed votes for those that represent them? Are Big Data methods more accurate representation of the will of the people? Or less?

Now, I've only read the first few pages, but I kinda wonder know if the paper will mention any this (and in particular the self-driving car example). Gonna have something to talk with my law geek buddies for a while.

<comment><USER3> > The question posed was: should your self-driving car swerve to avoid those > kids who just got off the school bus, sacrificing you and the passengers?

That strikes me as seeing the car computer as having the same limitations as a human driver.

More likely the car computer has long since recognized the bus as being, well, a bus, and thus slowed down to provide shorter breaking distance etc.

These are the same exact rules that will be drilled into any driver if they get a sane course before being issued the license.

Keep in mind that right now what is regulating speed limits etc, is human reaction times.

Once held down, breaks can make a car stop very quickly.

But the actual breaking distance is just a fraction of the distance needed for a human driven car to stop.

Most of that distances comes from how long it takes for the human brain to go through the steps of noticing, recognizing, and acting on something.

Likely any computer driven car out there will be the most defensive driver on the road. Frankly more vehicle related deaths comes from driver hubris than anything else.

<comment><USER2> What you say has merit, yet it sidesteps and ignores the deeper, more troubling issues: is it possible to go Asimov Three Laws of Robotics? Is it possible to specify ethical and moral coding precisely, programmatically?

That car example is just a stand-in for an entire class of ethical and moral dilemmas coming out of it. Let's look at it from a different angle. There is a hospital in Oregon who are trying to squeeze more profits, so much so that they induced doctors working there to unionize. The hospital promptly dropped their attempt at outsourcing. It won't be last attempt at this. As the pressure for profits increases, and as machine learning technology gets more advanced, there will come a point when it is the AI that makes the judgement call on who lives or dies. Who is going to program that? Are software engineers necessarily all that better in creating systems that computes the optimal outcome that includes both ethics and morals, than say, lawmakers or philosophers?

Are you really OK with having moral choices taken out of your hand and given to a computer, assuming that whomever wrote the code actually knew what they were doing and didn't make mistakes?

From this frame, what you are suggesting is that a properly designed computer is better at making moral and ethical judgements than humans.

<comment><USER3> I could have sworn that those 3 laws were specifically there to show how damn hard it would be to codify morality.

Either by demonstrating how awry things went with strict adherence, or similarly how one could twist things to get around them without violating them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The abstract is definitely scary.

But this could never get out of development, at least not with our current corpus of laws. The product designers and engineers would quickly realize that there are hundreds of conflicting laws, and beta-testing would show that it would make life nearly unlivable.

Maybe it'd be a good thing, ya know? Instead of having selective enforcement of laws, we'll have the oppressive boot coming down on each and everyone's faces. That'll help smash the state.

<comment><USER5> The really scare thought is that so called "beta testing" may happen in fairly unambiguous contexts, and the real problems will be discovered after wide scale deployment.

As painful as it might be, it's straighforward to turn off a malfunctioning system that support a core business need. It is a whole new dimenssion to turn off a gizmo that gives you boneheaded interpretations of the law, but that comes with a preinstalled meta-rule that makes a felony to turn it off or tamper with it in any way.

Imagine the amount of red tape required if each bug-fix required an executive order to be deployed!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A paradise where everything not compulsory is forbidden.

</comment><comment><USER7> I for one, welcome our new micro-directive overlords

</comment><comment><USER8> This is absolutely insane, but I wouldn't put it past today's society to let it happen.

On a positive note, it may become very quickly apparent just how many ridiculous laws there are.

Imagine, you're in your lovely Canadian basement, eating doritos. You're engaging in a religious debate on youtube, and suddenly "blasphemous libel" comes out of the spybot's speakers: you said "fuck" in a conversation about scientology.

</comment><comment><USER9> The abstract alone really scares me. Micro-directives?

<comment><USER10> The language in the abstract does seem a little vile. I'm certain I don't want government machine micromanagement directing citizen behavior. Yikes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What made you fall in love with programming again? - <AUTHOR> There must be some out there like me, who used to love programming but then got burnt out or bored with it for some reason, then rediscovered it years later and fell in love all over again?<p>I'd like to read your stories.  How did you fall in love with programming again? <comment><USER2> VR development, or just game dev in general.

After getting burned out on web dev, I bought a Vive and started learning Unity/C#/GLSL. It's incredibly intuitive and _fun_. Graphics programming is a whole different ballgame from any other kind of coding. It really made me grow as a developer and realize just how wide and varied the field of programming actually is.

Also, working with C# after years of dealing with JS is just plain awesome. Having a fully featured "real" programming language with first class IDE support makes things a million times easier and more productive. Definitely the best general purpose programming language in existence IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got burnt writing brain-dead code for awesome profits in startups, these days I write awesome code for free instead. Profit corrupts, it's a shame it's so damn difficult to find a sustainable middle road in this world.

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas- gone-wild/snackis)</comment>


VR based teleconferencing and collaboration - <AUTHOR> http://www.rumii.net <comment><AUTHOR> Step into your virtual reality office. rumii can be used across virtual reality headsets and desktops for collaboration and meetings. Built-in audio means no more dial-in numbers and access codes. Do more than share presentations. Teams can manipulate objects for 3D product design and innovation. Great for remote teams, education and digital nomads.</comment>


Are Gravitational Wave Detections Becoming Normal? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us//blog/are-gravitational-wave-detections-becoming-normal?utm_source=Nautilus&utm_campaign=a94cfa3e65-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_dc96ec7a9d-a94cfa3e65-60565561 <comment><USER2> (I'm a Ph.D. student working on LIGO)

I think the author is missing the point a bit. LIGO is an observatory, and as it gets more sensitive, we certainly hope to see GW detections become normal!

It is already interesting and surprising that the universe contains so many intermediate mass black holes. This was unexpected, and our continued observation of them means that they are unlikely to be a statistical fluke.

Others have mentioned that LIGO also searches for other source types, like neutron star mergers, continuous GWs, and core-collapse supernovae. Assuming our predictions are right, these will be exciting to see, but eventually some of those observations will become routine.

However, you still gain a lot of information from routine observations! Routine observations let us start understanding the statistics of phenomena, which lets us figure out things like how common black holes are and when they evolve in our universe's history. It doesn't sound as sexy as a new discovery, but it's the kind of stuff you use to brainstorm and test new cosmological theories. You need it in order to do real science!

I'll also add that, as a new type of observatory, LIGO and Virgo are like an entirely new sense. It's like we can hear the universe all of a sudden, and our hearing is improving with time. What is _really_ exciting to me is that we will most likely see things that nobody has predicted yet.

<comment><USER3> >"It is already interesting and surprising that the universe contains so many intermediate mass black holes. This was unexpected, and our continued observation of them means that they are unlikely to be a statistical fluke."

Interesting. Can you put a number on how unexpected this was? What is the probability "the universe contains so many intermediate mass black holes" independent of the LIGO data?

<comment><USER4> There's two main formation pathways for black holes: ongoing stellar collapse and galaxy collapse in the early universe. The former makes stellar-mass black holes. The latter makes enormous million-stellar mass black holes or larger. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference.

What's interesting is that we can measure/infer the mass of a black hole from these gravitational waves and we are finding a lot of ~1000x stellar mass black holes. Too big to be stellar collapse, too small to be galaxy centers. Where do these come from?

The number for how many there should be is very close to zero. Presumably you'd only get one from a stellar black hole gobbling up enough mass to get that big, but 10 doublings is too much to have happened except by freak accident, and these are regularly occurring.

The current best theory is that they formed in the early universe before or during galaxy formation by some process that we don't yet understand.

<comment><USER5> Where did you get this 1000x stellar mass figure from? According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_obs...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations) so far the observed merger components were between 7.5 and 35.4 solar masses.

The sample of stars in the night sky is biased by luminosity and longevity. I'd be curious to see a distribution of stellar masses that compensates for these two biases. On such a chart, extrapolating the trend in the high-mass range just before the error bars become too large would tell us whether 30-solar-mass stellar remnants are expected or unexpected by observation data.

<comment><USER4> Those are solar mass.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate- mass_black_hole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole)

<comment><USER5> I mean, where did you get this 1000x figure as what "we're finding a lot of"?

<comment><USER4> There's examples in the article I linked to. (FWIW finding any at all, let alone the half dozen or so found in the last few years is "a lot" given the minuscule priors involved.)

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry I still don't see it. Your linked article says at the very top "There is as yet no unambiguous detection of an IMBH". Concerning gravitational waves, reference [7] says "We show that space based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna _are likely to_ detect several of these sources". Reference [8] says "gravitational-wave observations _could_ be used to accurately measure masses of black holes in merging binaries and probe the existence of intermediate-mass black holes". So no discovery yet, just theoretical work on what the signal would look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For LIGO, mergers are just the beginning. LIGO isn't just a merger detector, but an entirely new window of astronomy. There's also teams looking for stochastic background signals from the big bang (similar to the CMB), or a constant hum from spinning neutron stars. And not to mention, if the sensitivity continues to improve, the moment of merging from BH-BH collisions could lead to new breakthroughs in GR.

<comment><USER7> Also at some point we'll be able to hear neutron stars colliding and a black hole being born for the first time

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the author may be making an incorrect assumption, that the recently published black-hole/black-hole merger was the "knock your sox off" detection leaked in August.

LIGO scientists have a pretty clear understanding of what a BH-BH merger sounds like in comparison to a neutron star merger. With a clear signal they would be unlikely to confuse one for the other. And the published BH-BH signature is very clear.

The sky location for the published BH-BH merger is in the constellation Eridanus. The rumored NS-NS merger was in galaxy NGC4993 in the constellation Hydra.

The published BS-BS merger was detected on August 14. The rumor leaks started August 18, hypothesizing a relationship to gamma ray burst GRB 170817A detected on August 17.

I hold out hope the NS-NS rumor is true, that paper is just taking a bit longer to prepare.

<comment><USER9> How would a NS merger compare with a BH merger?

<comment><USER10> If the rumours are true, we're about to find out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _" For now, the faint sigh of spacetime rippling from the collision of two black holes is still momentous. But revelation turns inevitably to registration. One day, detecting phenomenal cosmic events through gravitational waves will not make the news."_

Ok? Gravitational waves move the earth by about the width of one atom, so detecting them has always been more about verifying theories rather than anything else super exciting. What does the author expect?

<comment><USER12> Experimenters don't do their work just to verify theories. (Source: I'm a theorist, but used to do experiment.) They built these 'telescopes' because they want to observe the world via a new medium. They're going to be doing cutting edge astronomy with them for decades.

<comment><USER13> Dude, we still do cutting edge astronomy with optical telescopes (1608) and spectrographs (1876)! I'm pretty sure the awesomeness horizon of the GW observatories is a lot longer than a few decades. ;)

<comment><USER12> Fair point, although I meant these specific instruments, not the more general class of instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> LIGO is really the 21st century telescope. Instead of receiving electromagnetic waves / photons, it receives spacetime waves / (gravitons???). As we have been building larger and larger telescopes, we would certainly build larger and larger LIGO's. Put them in space, put them on the moon, and put them on Mars. Galileo would be proud.

<comment><USER13> Physicists are already working on the -in-space version:

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

It got approved this summer for a planned launch date in 2034!

See also this feasibility study:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISA_Pathfinder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISA_Pathfinder)</comment></comment>


Concurrency in UI Toolkits - <AUTHOR> http://www.guigarage.com/2015/01/concurrency-ui-toolkits-part-1/

<comment><USER2> One solution is to use generators in Python. The new Asyncio framework makes it easier to think about concurrency in GUI applications, and it can be used to cooperate with several GUI frameworks' event loops, like QT and Kivy, as well as websockets and other contexts.

It's not immediately obvious how to "yield from start_button()", but the solution is to have a FIFO command queue like in this article. The UI thread pushes commands to this queue and then the coroutine can act on the command.

This also simplifies changing the exact meaning of buttons/keys like "back" depending on the context, and handling multi-step network tasks, like using external APIs, ssh commands to a server, file downloads and the like. Using a command queue in Asyncio makes UI actions and IO events interchangeable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part 2 here: [http://www.guigarage.com/2015/02/concurrency-ui-toolkits- par...](http://www.guigarage.com/2015/02/concurrency-ui-toolkits-part-2/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Today every UI toolkit that is not running in a browser needs a UI Thread

This highlights why the idea of running a UI in the browser is actually seriously broken.

<comment><USER4> Code running in the browser also has a UI thread that it needs to run on. Just that until recently the UI thread was the _only_ thread you had access to.</comment></comment>


What You Need to Know About Mozilla's New Firefox Browser Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-mozillas-new-firefox-browser-coming-next-week/ <comment><USER2> Don't forget other relatively new features like only being able to install add-ons approved and cryptographically signed by Mozilla unless you use the beta, the non-firefox branded version, or your distro has negotiated a deal with Mozilla to provide non-freedom infringing full versions in their repos (ie, debian, arch).

</comment><comment><USER3> > Mozilla will flip the switch on a completely new browser with the release of > Firefox 57

It's not a completely new browser. It's still Firefox with some components swapped out, a lot of cruft taken out (due to cutting support for legacy extensions) and lots of individually small performance fixes (which were mainly made possible thanks to the recent rollout of multiprocess).

These new components have been taken from Servo, which is an actually new, written-from-scratch browser engine, but which is still far away from being production ready (might never be), so they can only retrofit finished components for now.

> Firefox 57 is the end of the road of a few Mozilla internal projects that > aimed to fix most of Firefox's previous problems

Not the end of the road. Just a major milestone with PR drumrolls. More is very much already scheduled for the next few releases, the biggest of which will be WebRender.

> meaning developers of some Chrome extensions may soon port their add-ons to > work on Firefox.

As is written directly below that, this API has been shipped in Firefox for a while already, so lots of Chrome extensions have already been ported.

> These users will be put in the unfortunate situation of having to choose > between running Firefox without their favorite add-ons or finding a new > browser where similar add-ons exist.

Or switching to Firefox 52 ESR, which will receive security updates until June 26, 2018 and continue to support these legacy extensions until then. Not a final solution, but it might bridge the gap until viable alternatives have been created.

Also, switching to a different browser will rarely make sense, as Firefox still is the most extensible browser by a long shot.

> Firefox 57 will also be the first Firefox version to support the new Quantum > engine. Announced last year, the Quantum engine replaces some parts of the > old Gecko engine with new components written in a mixture of Rust and C++.

"Quantum" is marketing kerfuffle from Mozilla. The engine is still called Gecko, it's just getting some components swapped out. Again, the components came from Servo, which is written in Rust. I am not aware of major components being included that have C++ code.

> Firefox 57 will include more Project Quantum code, such as Quantum Render, a > brand new, GPU-optimized rendering pipeline based on Servo's WebRender > project

As I already mentioned above, WebRender is not in 57, but should hopefully land in the next few versions.

> Mozilla claims that all these changes have resulted in considerable speed > boosts to Firefox's boot-up and browsing behavior, although this claims > should be taken with a grain of salt, as all browser makers say the same > thing when they launch a new version.

Or you could look at the fucking thing and notice that, oh hey, it is actually massively faster than previous Firefox versions. You don't even need benchmarks for that, it's clearly visible.

Some of the changes that are kind of counted into Quantum have been happening since Firefox 48 already, which is also why Mozilla's claim was that 57 is twice as fast as _52_ , so yeah, it won't be as significant of a difference going from 56 to 57, but it should still be relatively obvious.

I won't blame the author for misunderstandings or not being aware of every little detail, but to write something like that and not even test the two versions against each other is just lazy and bad journalism in every way.

> Also starting with Firefox 57, new Firefox installations will disable the > search widget that used to appear in the top right corner of the old Firefox > UI, an iconic part of the browser's old interface.

They did plan this, but apparently lots of people do actually use the search bar, so they've decided to put it back in by default.

> The planned UI changes are most likely to annoy some Firefox users because > the Classic Theme Restorer Firefox add-on will also stop working, meaning > users won't be able to control how their browser UI looks.

Or to 1) increase performance, the new UI is more efficient, 2) reduce maintenance cost, the new UI uses vector graphics for most things allowing it to be reused across OSs, 3) be more flexible, the vector graphics also allow for Mozilla to ship a Compact-mode and a Touch-mode out of the box, 4) _look_ faster, the animations keep your brain busy and make it feel like things are faster, 5) help with marketing, a new UI is a far more visible change than a higher score on some obscure benchmark and will attract press coverage.

Besides that, Classic Theme Restorer is already broken anyways due to legacy extensions being removed.

And the new UI is actually more "classic" than Australis (square tabs, back/forward/refresh not glued to the URL-bar, dropdown-menu-like Hamburger- menu as opposed to the touch-optimized Hamburger menu in Australis etc.), so while Classic Theme Restorer did do lots more than that, the new UI should make a lot of users of CTR happy just by not being as unconventional as Australis.</comment>


Ask HN: CSS frameworks, older browsers, CSS Grid – what do you use and why? - <AUTHOR> It's 2019 and browser support for CSS Grid is strong (using the latest browser versions). Many supporters of CSS Grid suggest that CSS frameworks are no longer necessary for layout if you only need to target modern browsers.<p>What's your current state-of-play with CSS? Are still using CSS frameworks? Do you still need to support older browsers? Or have you ditched a framework and fully embraced CSS Grid? <comment><USER2> Don't use grid, the main thing I'm working on has hand-made CSS (with a mobile first layout (with some sizing for larger display) [https://doplaces.com](https://doplaces.com)

On another I'm just getting into - working on a simple one/two column thing (large screen two block columns, small screen goes to one some text/image scaling).

I find a lot of CSS frameworks are over-engineered, and with addition of various modules and tools adding redundancy to a site's CSS soup.

I can see a lot of refinement can be made by paring out CSS parts into several sub-classes and then mix them together in the element class assignment (I cant say all my stuff is like that yet, but that what I'm striving for.) I'm just getting into front-end so I'm learning as I go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends. If I'm working on a team project and others are using a framework, I won't exactly tell them to stop using it. Similarly, if I'm lazy/don't want to worry about design, well Bootstrap will probably get me a nicer looking site than anything I'd be able to come up with on my own.

But if it's possible, and there's a designer willing to create designs for components, then I'll use CSS Grid and Flexbox without a pre made framework.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've found that when you reach a certain degree of complexity in an application, a functional CSS library like Tachyons ([http://tachyons.io/](http://tachyons.io/)) or Tailwind ([https://tailwindcss.com/docs/what-is- tailwind/](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/what-is-tailwind/)) is the only sane choice.</comment>


So you're a startup news junkie? Startuply Social Newswire with Slinkset  - <AUTHOR> http://news.startuply.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of our features at Startuply lets startups import their blog RSS feeds into their company profiles. We think it helps give you a little extra context about the company and some insight into what they're thinking about. We also aggregate all of the feeds together into our little Startuply Newswire.

Well, the RSS stream became a river, and the river a flood. With hundreds of startup blog feeds, our newswire has overflown its banks. To help keep it interesting, we used Slinkset (which is amazing) to build our own social news site: check it out at <http://news.startuply.com>. This is startup news straight from the source, told by the companies that are making it.

The feed has been in my reader since launch, and I've already found a load of fascinating stuff that hasn't been covered or reported anywhere else. We're pretty excited to see what rises to the top with your help.

Personally, I'll be down-modding just about every Etsy story that comes through. Don't get me wrong, Etsy is great; I'm just tired of reading about handmade dreamcatchers that only let neon hipster dreams through.

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks like people are finding a lot of creative ways to use slinkset. A lot of niche markets and companies could benefit from a site like this

</comment><comment><USER3> You could also create a Netvibes universe. <http://eco.netvibes.com/universes></comment>


Ask HN: Is my project worth pursuing? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a project: localbeer.me - for just over a year (on and off). It started off with the idea of finding 'beer brewed near me'. The idea is if you are in a strange city you can pull up the site and find some locally brewed beer.  There are many beer/brewery databases, but the foundation of my idea is that it geolocates you, and the brewery, and lots of cool things can happen because of that geolocation. Now I'm branching out into geolocated brewery news and even geolocated brewery tweets.
Traffic is at about 20 visits per day, and I'm about 1/3 through the massive data entry project of entering every brewery and beer in north america (then, the world) and I'm having serious doubts as to whether it's worth continuing. Pretty soon, I'll have to start spending money on graphic design, promotion and better servers. I'm not ready to start promoting the site until the brewery database has more data, but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other project.
So I'm asking for HN's honest opinion. Graphics design and Data completeness aside, do you see some nugget of value in this project? What would you do if this was dumped in your lap? What have you done when you've been faced with a similar decision? <comment><USER2> I like the idea of being able to figure out that beers are brewed near by. But the data entry piece sounds a little arduous for the result.

Have you thought about crowd sourcing it? Maybe make localbeer.me a giant google map with all the breweries you've entered so far on it and the have a super simple form that lets people add their local breweries and their beer offerings. I feel like I know some hardcore craft beer drinkers who'd totally be into dropping in their favorite local breweries.

In the long term, you're going to have keep all the data you've entered by hand updated, and it seems like crowd sourcing would be a good way to get that info anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, see my comment below. Users can already enter breweries/beer. Maybe it's just as simple as making it easier/more obvious.

<comment><USER3> I suggest a big red button that says "the location i am at is a place that sells beer" and then have a form where people enter a name and can easily associate beer brands with the location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it does have value, but a few things that struck me as "must dos":

\- make it better for mobile, since that's likely the platform I'll use in a strange city. Maybe this is part of the graphic design piece that you were talking about.

\- make it easier to see ALL the breweries/beers near me. I would think that would be the main page instead of one at a time (I hate refreshing the page)

If this project was dropped in my lap, I would do this:

\- work on UX above all else (and before data entry). Make it easy and enjoyable to see what breweries are near me and to add breweries and beers.

\- focus on a single geographic area for data entry. I'm in Chicago, so I would make this a killer website to visit if you're visiting Chicago. Promote it heavily in Chicago (Facebook ads is super targeted and great for something like this, you can target beer drinkers ages 21 - 40 in Chicago only, and might even be able to narrow it further).

\- Let users add content for additional cities if it becomes popular in your homebase. Remember, we already made it really easy to do that in step 1.

\- I might even look into signing up bars to be listed on the site as carrying a particular beer/brewery when a user is near their location. In exchange they put up your flyer. Free promotion if the functionality is there.

I think there is definitely value here, but I would devote some serious time to improving UX before data entry. As others have said, there are ways around doing the data entry, but not too many ways around good user design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Mobile is a work in progress. Actually I had a working mobile version but it was not very good so I disabled it.

What do you mean, make it easy to see all the breweries near me? It should automatically show you all the breweries in a certain range. Do you mean that you had to increase the range, and didn't like the refresh - and that instead of refreshing I should do it via ajax?

Users can actually add beers, breweries. Since you're the second person to mention that, clearly I need to make it more obvious and easier. I did focus on adding California and New York first, they are very complete. Now I'm thinking I need to focus on my local area, and physically go to the breweries to get their help promoting the site, as you mentioned.

Great feedback. Up until now I have been focusing on data entry, but I do see the need for UX improvement.

I've actually done a couple of Stumble Upon campaigns, they're at least as targeted as Facebook ads, and very cheap. I might have to branch out but it seems a bit crazy paying for visitors when I'm not actually making money on the site.

<comment><USER4> Sorry for getting back to you so late. What I meant by making it easy to see the breweries near me is, instead of showing me a map with arrows on it, it would be more useful (for me at least), to give me a list of breweries/beers within a certain, reasonable radius (like 50 or 100 miles).

The "Featured Beer" is a prominent on your page, which is great as it highlights a specific beer or brewery, but I think it makes more sense to list ALL beers brewed near me, and have the location of the brewery available on a subsequent page if I'm interested, like the page of the specific brewery (which you already do).

Another thought: sort all the beers in my area by how high their ratings are. Maybe you could be the Yelp of craft beers?

Just my thoughts. I understand the hesitance to buy ads with no clear monetization strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > but that's going to take months - months I could be working on some other > project.

Then get someone else to do it. Is there anyway you could automate the brewery discovery and addition process such that you could distribute the actual thought process work through something like Mechanical Turk?

It's just the first that occurs to me reading through your post. If you could offload that task to machines/other people you could focus on more value-add features, moving the project forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure... I could go the mechanical turk route, and have thought about it many times, but that is a $ investment. I could start scraping the other directories, but there is both an ethical issue there ('stealing' content?) as well as development time required to do that. It is set up right now so that anybody can add information, but without the critical mass of users that's just not happening.

And that's the thing. I have no problem spending the time or money needed on this project, if it's worth it. I'm just worried that I've gotten so mentally invested in it that I can't think critically about it's future. Of course I think it's an awesome idea, but a year of essentially flat traffic seems to be telling me otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A little late in the conversation. I think if it is something you are passionate about, you should stick with it. Maybe you can find a partner that can do UX/Graphic design or whichever skills you need but lack.

I strongly agree with all the advice around mobile. I would even consider trying to use mobile to crowdsource some of the data entry. Maybe incorporating some game mechanics will help here. For inspiration, maybe you could make the "beer" version of Spotify, Forkly, or DishOnIt.

Consider creating an API around your beer database and promote that some, could be win/win as it sounds like a pain point for more than just yourself.

Additionally, you should try and get in touch with the users that use it every day and the ones that abandoned it. Try to determine why they stay/left, this could really help you focus on the important aspects.

Lastly, go learn about Dave McClure's AARR metrics, get them in place so you can experiment more with the Acquisition and Activation funnels. I am guessing if you had a lot more users, you would be much happier.

Hope this helps a little.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have been working on Had That Beer, www.hadthatbeer.com/signup?c=earlyaccess to check it out, for about 8 months now. I am the sole developer, designer, admin etc. I know the pain of all the manual data entry that has to be done for beers and by the time you are done a new batch of something else has been brewed and you are out of date. I would go through select geographic areas, get as many beers in as you can and start promoting it in that area. Best way to get feedback is to get users, and some of those users might not mind helping add a few brews.

I think your project is definitely worth pursuing. If you don't think so then maybe we could team up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I just signed up and I'll give it a try. You might want to check out the Open Beer Database: <http://openbeerdb.com/> \- I just got ahold of the guy yesterday and we are discussing exchanging databases, it might be worth it for you to check it out too.

If I ever do decide to give up I'll get in touch with you, but I've gotten some great feedback (even a direct email from someone) and it sounds like it's worth pursuing.

I really like the graphic design on your web site - very simple - something I know I need to work on. I like the idea of a really simple rating system, that's what I've done too. I think most beer drinkers see the big sites like beeradvocate as too snobby (I know I do).

Thanks again for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems, I'm too late. Aside, Technicalities..

My suggestion is, Why don't you create some content like beer reviews, Preferably videos.

Gary Veynerchuck had been hugely successful, by his wine reviews. Good news for you is, he doesn't deal with beers.

I'd suggest two things: 1\. Beer Reviews 2\. Interviews with Beer brewers (who doesn't want to give interviews)

You can host videos on youtube, and embed them on your website. That way you won't have to pay for video hosting.

In my opinion, humans judge a lot by seeing other humans, than seeing text, statistics or beer pictures. If you can throw in some charm, fun and honesty, you can make it big. Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER9> Check out taphunter.com. They do something similar and, from what I understand, are getting pretty good traction here in San Diego.

It's at least one data point that users might want what you're building.

</comment><comment><USER10> If your traffic is 20 visits per day, why on Earth would you need to spend money on "better servers"?

To answer your question directly, I don't think enough beer consumers care about that stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for being honest. Obviously I don't need better servers right now, but someday maybe.

I disagree though - the stats show that beer sales from the huge companies are declining, while craft brewing is seeing a huge explosion (in the US anyway). I think it is a rapidly growing audience. It'll never be the size of Facebook's potential audience, but I do see tons of opportunity in the craft brewing industry, and many craft beer drinkers closely align with the high tech, early adopter startup crowd.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure an 8$/month VPS will be sufficient for a very long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just added Twitter signin/account creation, in an attempt to remove a barrier to entry. Facebook signin coming next week. Here's hoping...</comment>


Ask HN: Why is remote work not mainstream in 2018? - <AUTHOR> It seems pretty old school to have to commute to an office in order to work. Why is remote work not mainstream yet? Seems pretty obvious we'll end up all working remotely in a near future. Instead of putting 100% of our resources in green and self driven vehicles. I think Elon Musk missed that one :) [sarcasm] <comment><USER2> I think you are underestimating how much has to change in company culture, communication and structure to make a remote office work efficiently and effectively. I am remote and we work hard to try to minimize the issues but there are always extra delays and miscommunications because of time zones or multiple communication channels etc.

And there is something to still getting together to bond as a team, work through problems together and learn how each other work. I travel enough to make sure I work with the team, bond with them and so we all learn how each other function. This makes remote possible, but it is never a panacea of perfection.

Don't misunderstand me, I am very much in favor of remote teams/people/work, but taking a company that is established and adding remote workers just doesn't work without a lot of process changes, additions, the right expectations and time. Starting a company as remote friendly is a lot easier if you follow well known patterns that work but even than there are challenges you wouldn't face otherwise.

Even business structure/registrations etc have to be updated/changed, let's say you are small company in the U.S. state of Colorado and now you employ people in 5 other states. Your company will have to register in each of those states as a "foreign" employer and pay workers comp, taxes etc within those states. Yes, 3rd party payroll services help with a lot of the tax side, but there are so many more things that have to be monitored, registered etc. Now, say you do this cross international boundaries, it gets even more complex if you want to do things legally and have employees. Notice I said employees not contractors, that is a different situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the problems that you mentioned are actually easy to fix.

Team bonding doesn't exist anymore, it's very old school. I spent many years working in tech for various companies, I see more angry colleagues than ever before. Majority of them, not all of them of course. Team bonding is usually an awkward social event with people you don't really appreciate. Management usually set that up (not always). It's great because it helps people getting away from their desks for a little while but a remote employee would rather spend that time away from a screen with family and friends.

Working remotely or from home doesn't necessarily mean that employees are located throughout the world. A company can still be located in only one city and its employees can work remotely within the same state (in the US for example). No commute time, flexible hours and less frictions.

I agree though, some people really need a structured enviroment to function "properly". But again, it's a cultural thing someone came with one day and everyone followed. Cultures evolve with time.

<comment><USER2> I agree the issues can be addressed, I disagree with your assertion they are easy to fix, not to mention the cost to address some of them is not free. And yea, I totally agree there are some people that just won't due well in a remote environment while many people can thrive given the right circumstances.

It is interesting to me why more startups aren't remote friendly early on today as if you build that culture early it actually has a key benefit of forcing good process and communication skills on the entire company, versus relying on the office chatter which is common in startups. This is my primary reason for preferring remote from the start of any company I am apart of, it just forces good habits and lets you find awesome people anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I can only think of Automattic (wordpress), Github and InVision in terms of mid-size fully remote companies. They are more early stage startups that do that... It really sucks because the companies I mentioned are pretty successful and they have a very solid and strong culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "If you can do your job remotely, we can hire someone in India to do it for 1/3 the cost." \- a former boss of mine.

Mindsets like that are a huge reason and in corporate America, "presenteeism" is still very common. Many people still pride themselves on long hours in the office.

<comment><USER4> At my company, my boss felt the same way, and he pushed everyone to work long hours. I campaigned to work remotely part time, saying I'd get more done. This was routinely denied until eventually I left and worked for them as a consultant.

In my first month as a consultant, I got way more done than anyone else, and my boss was so surprised that he announced how much I got done at a company meeting (apparently I outperformed everyone).

Managers need to realize that some people thrive when they're able to set their own hours and completely eliminate distractions for hours on end. And no, just because I can work from home doesn't mean someone in India can do my job (we tried that, and it failed miserably).

We absolutely need to break this culture. I get way more done in less time when working remotely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to work remote, unfortunately my country is just beginning to have people work from home 1 to 2 days a week if their "title" allows for it. As an architect I could do all my work remote, even meetings. But it's, as was already mentioned, a big cultural change, many companies also don't "trust" their employees. They come up with the excuse that people will be doing non- work related chores at home (washing dishes, laundry, etc...) while they should be focusing on work. They expect you to sit 8h at your desk at home. If mentalities don't change at the top it's not going to trickle down.

<comment><USER6> The argument of more productivity is just too ambiguous and weak.

You have to realize what allowing remote work means for a manager : losing control.

I see only a few reasons for management to change their attitude towards remote work

* it saves money

* its harder to get good folks to work for you without this perk

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've worked with distributed, entirely remote, and partly remote teams. My takeaway is that there are some people who just communicate much more effectively in person. And no, videoconferencing doesn't help.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to follow up on my sarcastic comment about Elon Musk. I believe this would actually compromise his own companies. If all his employees were to work remotely, he could not put the them pressure on people to work unlimited hours with no interruptions.

If he would have adopted a remote work culture, tesla and space X would be a bit behind in terms of progress today. But does it mean the results would be different at the end? Are we looking at a 2-3 year delay? Is this a big deal?

</comment><comment><USER8> Because studies show that people are more collaborative when they work in the same office as their co-workers. Studies also show that collaborative teams are more productive. There is a lot of value in personal face to face conversations with your co-workers and you don't get that when working remotely.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is old news right? What if we improve our resources to make remote communication like face to face communication? Using VR, etc.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't help - you get better business meetings, but you don't get the non-business conversations that might lead to something more.

Real collaboration happens at the coffeepot - when people who didn't know they should talk accidentally run into each other and happen to talk about something they can help each other with.

<comment><USER9> I work as a developer on a fully remote team. I agree with what you wrote, but a nice thing about being remote is you can conduct these "non-business" conversations on your own terms. When you're at an office all day you probably only interact with your coworkers. When you work remote, you meet people outside your specific industry at cafes/coworking spaces.

<comment><USER8> That is useful for you, but it isn't useful for your company. When it is co- workers you talk to the talk [sometimes] turns to solving work problems.

Remote work isn't all bad, but there are serious downsides that cannot be ignored. Companies that choose to do/allow remote work need to figure out how to deal with them. Of course working in the same office has its own set of downsides to deal with.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you customize the Facebook like button? - <AUTHOR>

I vaguely remember seeing someone hack together variations of the Facebook like button for their website.  I'm wondering, can you edit the CSS or other parts of the code to change the size, color, and overall look of the like button?  Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you! <comment><USER2> Not sure if you are asking whether you can do it according to their policies, or whether you can technically accomplish it. If you are asking the latter, you can whatever you like with the button, then just call the Facebook Graph API (<https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/>) via Javascript when the button is clicked.

Hope that helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> According to the TOS (<http://www.facebook.com/brandpermissions/logos.php>) you can change the size but nothing else.

"While you may scale the size to suit your needs, you may not modify the Like Button in any other way (such as by changing the design)."

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What other online communities are you a member of? - <AUTHOR>

Hacker News introduces us to some very interesting topics and opinions. Are there any other online communities out there worth being a part of? <comment><USER2> My friends are pretty cool, with similar and different types of experience, but that's private in email.

I wonder how many large or small communities exist in email? I guess only the NSA and Google knows.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's possible to find good subreddits, to make a few 'multis' to read a few times a week.

Meta filter, twitter, something awful, LinkedIn will come up.

</comment><comment><USER4> metafilter is the big one, It's just excellent and well run and actively moderated.

I read but rarely post to Reddit. I was at one time an active slashdotter, and I was active with plastic.com, back when plastic.com was a thing.

I occasionally am on StackOverflow, but I think they need to spin off a meta programming question site for half the questions they get rid of as vague or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://bit.ly/reddweb> (my web dev multi-reddit).

</comment><comment><USER6> StackOverflow, /r/developers, LifeHacker, TechCrunch</comment>


Ask HN: If an obvius idea wasn't tried yet, is it a bad one? - <AUTHOR> I have an idea for a key-value database architecture, and it seems quite obvious for me and how could one come up with such idea. But when searching for prior works, I haven't found anything. Could this mean the idea is bad, as I think it should've came up for at least few CompSci students before. <comment><USER2> Every great idea is obvious in retrospect. The entire history of science is that of one person finding out something that was true which no one else had found before. Your comp sci invention could very well be one of those things!

Best bet is to scaffold your ideas in working code and then see if they are as practical as you think. You might be positively surprised.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if it has been tried before implementing it yourself will be a great learning experience :) And if you think it will perform better on some work- loads than most currently existing solutions then you should try executing those benchmarks as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, someone has to first come up with an idea. Chances are, the idea is bad but you'll never know unless you try.</comment>


Jagged, Ragged, Awkward Arrays - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NxWpU7NArk <comment><AUTHOR> > Data processing languages, such as SQL, R, MATLAB, and Numpy/Pandas, > implicitly loop over identically-typed objects ("rows") of a dataset > ("table"). This makes for a succinct syntax in an interactive environment, > but what do you do if your table doesn't have a regular shape?

> Particle physicists have this problem: each collision of high-energy protons > can produce a different number of electrons, photons, quarks, and other > particle species. As a table with one collision per row, this dataset has a > jagged edge of unequal-sized rows, sometimes referred to as a ragged array. > Traditionally, physicists have used general-purpose programming languages > like FORTRAN and C++ to deal with big, irregularly shaped datasets, but at a > loss of interactivity and abstraction.</comment>


Show HN: Decided to sell my Voxel engine source - <AUTHOR> So to finance a bit of my time for indiedev, I decided to put up full source code for my Qake - Voxel engine. $10 for full source.<p>Buy on site: http://qake.se/demo/ <comment><USER2> This looks interesting. I couldn't figure out how to play it though. It would be good if you turned this into something like a course on "How to build a simple Role Playing Game with HTML5". It might take some time to put together, but you'll probably be able to monetize that better.</comment>


Ask HN: YC W2020 Invites/Rejections - <AUTHOR> Has anyone gotten a response? I checked apply.combinator.com/interviews and I see a "sorry" message which from old posts here seem to imply I got rejected :(. <comment><USER2> I'm nervous as well but I constantly remind myself that I have nothing to lose. Just doing the application was an exercise in itself that has proven to be valuable long after we applied. Good luck to everyone and let's all stay positive. Whatever happens, let's stay connected. I'm always open to give product feedback and bounce ideas. Contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com or on twitter @steddyrockin. Each one, teach one.

<comment><USER3> Hey, goodluck to you too! Nice lean MVP there at tadaw.app (fix you privacy policy headline though).

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the heads up and likewise. Built for targetted engagement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Post your startups here on Twitter great conversation going on here: [https://twitter.com/Mat_Sherman/status/1184674061231607809?s...](https://twitter.com/Mat_Sherman/status/1184674061231607809?s=20).

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think they've gone out yet. Last I saw everyone was hard at work reviewing applications still.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, just got a bad vibe from the "sorry." after visiting apply.ycombinator.com/interviews. Thanks for all the work you all are putting into these

<comment><USER4> I personally haven't contributed to reading applications in a long time, being internet-saturated already. But you wouldn't believe how hard the team has been working on this. Where by "the team" I mean basically the entire company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Feeling quite nervous about it. We're an international team based in Amsterdam and didn't get a pre-interview call. Hopefully, that means that our application was clear. I'm nervous but confident that we would at least get interviewed. Fingers crossed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ok.. received the email, we're not selected :( it is a bit disheartening. A lot of hard work and hope goes into an application and to be not selected is indeed disheartening, But nothing to loose hope though..

<comment><USER7> We neither... But we go again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That looks like the link to the page that becomes active when the invites have been sent out. It has information about scheduling your on-site interview, expensing the trips, etc.

So I would say it doesn't mean anything and you just need to be patient for a couple more days :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish everyone good luck... mehn! am so nervous

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone received an invitation yet?

<comment><USER9> Apparently yes. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271555)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How was it known in advance that the RSA numbers were semi prime? - <AUTHOR> So the RSA team published their RSA numbers many years ago to encourage research on number theory.
The basis of the challenge was that the published numbers were known to be semiprime (having exactly two prime factors).
My question is how did they choose these numbers? Did they just arbitrarily pick large prime numbers and multiply them? Is there some way to search for semiprime numbers aside from the method I just mentioned? Or is there some reason why the numbers why the numbers they picked are especially well suited? <comment><USER2> It's exactly the same as generating an RSA public key -- pick two prime numbers and multiply them. The only interesting part is that the _sizes_ were chosen carefully to give an increasing ladder of difficulty.

There's nothing more mathematically interesting or distinctive about the RSA numbers compared to other semiprimes of similar sizes. In a way, they were meant to represent typical moduli from RSA public keys, to mimic the difficulty of attacking an RSA public key of a particular size by factoring.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to the wikipedia article "RSA Factoring Challenge":

>The RSA numbers were generated on a computer with no network connection of any kind. The computer's hard drive was subsequently destroyed so that no record would exist, anywhere, of the solution to the factoring challenge.

referring to reference 3:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130921043454/http://www.emc.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130921043454/http://www.emc.com/emc- plus/rsa-labs/historical/the-rsa-factoring-challenge-faq.htm#)</comment>


Why Your Personal Brand Matters More Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140516062449-2143418-why-your-personal-brand-matters

<comment><USER2> I find it deeply concerning that a Klout score would be used for anything. Klout is not a measure of value.</comment>