Archiving URLs - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs <comment><USER3> Warning: His mention of the "freedup" program piqued my interest, so I went to have a look at it. Overall, the description makes it sound like a solid tool, and the documentation seems relatively complete.

However, when I built it, I noticed that the Makefile attempts to write new lines into /etc/services, and yes, the program does contains socket/server code - which is apparently triggered by undocumented options.

Personally, I'm a bit leery of file-system level tools that contain undocumented server code, so I'll not be using it. (Although I might try to audit it, or maybe just try one of the other similar tools listed here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedup](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedup) )

<comment><USER4> While I'm not ready to make any judgements of nefariousness, it is worrisome from general security point of view that if I read the makefile correctly, it is configuring its network service to run as root.

edit: grepped changelog and todo files, found these:

        TODO:  1  - graphical web based user interface (full version with 2.0)
        TODO:v1.7 - first working web interface (non-stabil enhancement)
        TODO:done	+ single unmodified web template on GET request
        TODO:	+ non-interactive execution with display to web interface
        TODO:done	+ webpage streaming
        TODO:	+ providing a web interface for the interactive mode
        ChangeLog:  + gui defaults to off, activate and deactivate using "make webon/weboff/state"
        ChangeLog:  + basic web interface offered (reply not accepted yet)
        ChangeLog:  + first helper routines for web-based GUI

The networking code does not seem to be activated without the -W flag, so I wouldn't be too worried about it. Just remove the entries it tries to create under /etc and you should be fine.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm sure it's not nefarious. It's just very poor judgement to leave that code in the build without documenting it. So poor, that I don't feel I'm able to trust the rest of the code without auditing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From: [https://thoughtstreams.io/higgins/permalinking-vs- transience...](https://thoughtstreams.io/higgins/permalinking-vs-transience/)

For me, permalinking is a much deeper thing than a mere pointer to a resource, because the web is inherently transient, and forever shifting. Link rot is what defines the web. Very few people grok the concept of "evergreen domains", and "citable resources".

A domain must be kept renewed for, at least, ten years for it to be evergreen, and content must be citable if you want to go down in history for your efforts. How we go about implementing citable resources is tricky.

Unless you are a Zen Warrior and quite enjoy Sand Mandalas, then you shouldn't be reading this. This article is for those that want to be found on the web for their work in the foreseeable future, and for those who don't want their work attributed to other people. You want authorship of your resource to be correct.

Nobody ever really owns a domain. Much like land, it trades hands with numerous parties before it belongs to any one person; in which case that person can then sell it off and buy new land. Everything is borrowed. You own nothing, really. Imagine these scenarios:

\- Domain expires for financial reasons; content can not be found.

\- Webmaster dies; so he/she can't renew it indefinitely.

\- Your content is simply sold because you got greedy, and you don't have authorship anymore.

\- Domain stays up for 20 years, but the TCP/IP stack is rewritten, and Meshnets now dominate. You fade into darkness. (You are no longer discoverable).

\- URLs point to the correct resource, but require proprietary software to view them. Only the intellectual elite can view the content.

\- Cached copies exist, but only at the whim of Archivists who slurp the web using Historious / Pinboard / Archive.org / Google Cache / Reverse Proxies / Many Others... You can't rely on these people / companies for keeping your content permanent.

And so I conclude that permalinking is a much deeper concept than a mere URL that points to a resource. It entails a slew of other topics that all center around the age old philosophy of permanence versus transience. It's not just something bloggers use in Wordpress!

</comment><comment><USER6> Local archives are great, but they help only you.

Please consider having your archiving scripts/services store their content in WARC format so you can submit bundles to the Internet Archive for integration into the Wayback Machine.

That's how Archive Team's downloads are able to be integrated. The latest versions of wget support storing their downloads in this fashion.

You could even regularly spider your own site and package it up into a WARC for submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know how to usefully create WARCs. Wget has a WARC option, but when I tried it out, it created weirdly named files that littered the www tree and looked like the names would collide and files be overwritten. Plus the IA live request should be handling getting webpages into IA.

<comment><USER7> Here, have a Gist for creating proper WARC's, ready for the Internet Archive:

[https://gist.github.com/Asparagirl/6202872](https://gist.github.com/Asparagirl/6202872)

And a Gist for uploading the completed WARC's to the IA using their s3-like service:

[https://gist.github.com/Asparagirl/6206247](https://gist.github.com/Asparagirl/6206247)

Final step is to e-mail someone at Archive Team with admin rights to move your IA upload into the proper "Archive Team" bucket, instead of "Community Texts". The awesome Mr. Jason Scott should be able to help you with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This has serious implications for our entire legal system. [http://www.pogo.org/blog/2013/09/the-supreme-court-has-a- ser...](http://www.pogo.org/blog/2013/09/the-supreme-court-has-a-serious-case- of-link-rot.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great link. I'll add that, although I wonder why the people concerned about it are setting up their own web archiving systems rather than just asking the Internet Archive for an Archive-It account or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also the work of urlteam [1,2].

[1] [http://urlte.am/](http://urlte.am/)

[2] [http://archiveteam.org/?title=URLTeam](http://archiveteam.org/?title=URLTeam)

<comment><USER10> my vm to help the archive team is not working anymore. do you have a fresh link/vm to download?

<comment><USER11> Do you mean the ArchiveTeam Warrior? [http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior)

<comment><USER10> yep, it's not working on 2 different computers that i've tried (no item received after 30 seconds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A couple of "snapshot" services which weren't mentioned:

[http://www.peeep.us/](http://www.peeep.us/)

[http://archive.is/](http://archive.is/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Those look interesting and I'll mention them, but I'm not sure whether I can support them in my archive-bot code. Neither site seems to offer an easily scripted way to archive URLs; for example, the archive.is blog seems to reject adding such functionality: [http://blog.archive.is/post/60948358744/given- that-youre-not...](http://blog.archive.is/post/60948358744/given-that-youre- not-happy-with-the-source-as-it)

<comment><USER12> Yes, it seems batch downloading won't be implemented, but batch archiving is possible:

[http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend- th...](http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-the-best- method-script-so-i-may-batch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet. I've added archive.is to my archive bot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whilst the link to linkchecker @ sourceforge still works, they have moved the project to GitHub.

Perhaps checking for a recent last-modified date together with a large relative change in size would suffice for this situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll update that link. Checking for size changes would be a useful heuristic, but you'd need to load the equivalent URL off the disk or something like that, and my experience has been that links tend to go completely dead rather than half-dead, so I don't sweat it much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm quite a heavy user of WebCite and I think here would be a good place to remind people that they are in desperate need of funding to keep their service accepting submissions. [https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/aQMp7](https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/aQMp7)

</comment><comment><USER15> I actually lauched a WebCite kind of service back called Svonk back in 2009, unfortunately it got VERY little usage - like just a couple of hundred hits a month, and it got no external promotion. Here is a tutorial video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9b2Xgi- xLM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9b2Xgi-xLM) and the old press release if anyone is interested [http://www.prweb.com/releases/meronymy/svonk/prweb2900644.ht...](http://www.prweb.com/releases/meronymy/svonk/prweb2900644.htm) It had a RESTful interface and everything. I guess could re-launch it as I still have the source code, if there's an interest for it that is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Replied in OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tip #1: Don't add spaces in your URLs

<comment><USER17> What is wrong with spaces in URLs?

<comment><USER18> You need an (implicit or explicit) url encoding for it to work. The actual link to the linked article is[1] which is quite ugly, at least imho.

Much easier for everyone involved to just stick a dash in there.

[1] [http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs)

<comment><USER19> I think somewhere along the way my brain started processing %20 as a space, because I don't even notice anymore.

<comment><USER20> It might also be that browsers have started _displaying_ it as a space - <USER2> Firefox does, for example (until you select it - copy-pasting it preserves the %20).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember reading that Richard Stallman uses a program that grabs webpages via a remote command, which are then emailed to him. A side effect of this, I suppose, would be that he could have an archive of everything he read and wanted to keep.

<comment><USER22> I would love it, to remember too.

If I had a Save button, my Start button would have a balance.

I could live without Save as.. & upload-into-proprietary-backup if my operating system could just remember better.

We need to remember more. If we need to save forever press Archive / Email / Save.

I need that command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't do much writing for the web, but I do a lot of reading. For awhile I was using Evernote to save a snapshot of every (worthwhile) page I read, but once I had about 10,000 notes in my Evernote account it started to impair my ability to use it for things other than digital hoarding. Want to look up the baked tilapia recipe on my phone? Hold on 10 minutes while the headers for new notes are downloaded...

I like the idea of his archiving system, but is there a cross platform/device way to do it? The easiest option would seem to be proxying all your web traffic through a single Squid proxy that was configured to archive rather than just cache?

<comment><USER24> I've considered the proxy approach. Consider that proxies do not see the content of SSL connections though. Which may be just what you want, or absolutely not what you want, depending.

The archiving he outlines is _reasonably_ cross platform - most platforms have ports of the tools in question, and you "just" need a way to get the browsing history.

The trickier part is good/proper indexing if you want to be able to do more than look it up by url.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The real danger here is that citing webpages creates significant risk that the content will be altered in future.

For example, to re-write a portion of history:

1\. Scan wikipedia for any broken links

2\. Purchase domains

3\. Reinstate links with different content

4\. Update wikipedia article to represent changed content

We need a method of publicly verifying the contents of a link at the time it was cited.

Could we do something similar to bitcoin? Where we have a publicly available hash of each site when cited?

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to use [Furl]([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl)). I would periodically download their zip archive of my urls, until it became 2GB. I now use [Zotero]([http://www.zotero.org/](http://www.zotero.org/)) which takes a snapshot of the url I am on and puts all files into a folder. I realize that this is proactive work: taking snapshot when I find an interesting page, rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER4> One alternative approach would be to convert/"print" selected web documents as PDFs for archival. Especially with modern ajax(and other fancy tech)-heavy sites I don't know how reliable/easy mirroring is.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I understand it, you're actually much better off not 'printing' to PDF, but instead, saving to a format like MHT or MAFF, which preserve the DOM more accurately than a screenshot or PDF.

(I've been using MHT & MAFF a lot over the past few days to archive stuff relating to Silk Road - 183 files so far! - so it's on my mind.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, there are tradeoffs. But for archival PDF has one major advantage: it is actual, widespread standard widely considered being suitable for archival. Fast-forward 50 years, which one do you think is more likely: finding a PDF reader or a MAFF reader?

How do MHT creation tools handle dynamic pages? Another major win for PDFs are that you are essentially requesting a static version of the content if you use the "print to PDF" method, so it works nicely for archiving even if some fidelity is lost.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it is actual, widespread standard widely considered being suitable for > archival.

For archival of webpages? Who recommends that?

> Fast-forward 50 years, which one do you think is more likely: finding a PDF > reader or a MAFF reader?

If I can't find a MAFF reader, I can unzip the MAFF and deal with the files directly, as I have already done in automating some editing some of the SR MAFFs to remove my username. It was much easier than the last time I wanted to edit a PDF, where it took me several hours to figure out how to do just one edit by hand.

> How do MHT creation tools handle dynamic pages?

They don't, but I haven't seen any 'print to PDF' mechanism which handled dynamic pages either. So I'm not sure how this is a 'major win' for PDFs compared to MHT/MAFF.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Discover How Brains Keep Clean - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/brain-waste-cleaning/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I am completely off track, but you don't need radioactive marker molecules if you go for two-photon imaging, you need fluorescent markers.

Also, it is sad to see that even today, every publication in the neurobiology field has to mention Alzheimer's. It's about finding how the brain works, and if it is applicable to Alzheimer's, then great, but at the current state, this is a very long shot.

<comment><USER3> I think the connection is made to Alzheimers because ... there might be a connection.

Like they say right there in the article, one of the waste products is amyloid. Given amyloid buildup is pretty much what we consider Alzheimers to be, I don't see why it's ridiculous to pencil in an arrow here.

I mean if some people's bathtubs were overflowing and scientists had just discovered how drains work, don't you think it would be reasonable to speculate on a connection?

<comment><USER4> It's also an extremely important medical condition to treat. If you show promise of a breakthrough in treating Alzheimer's, you can save hundreds of thousands of minds every single year. With the upcoming wave of elderly in the US, the cost of untreated Alzheimer's is predicted to skyrocket.

<comment><USER3> In fairness to iSnow, I'm not a disinterested observer. I have skin in this game.

<comment><USER4> Last I checked, it wasn't clear whether the amyloid plaque buildup was a cause or side effect of Alzheimer's. Has the understanding of this changed in the past four years?

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that it's the "cause", insofar as plaque buildup interferes with the normal operation of brain cells.

Of course, I am neither a neuroscientist nor a neurologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen the title and the first idea I had was "oh well it must be the most optimized garbage collector, ever". It's not weird to think that, right?

</comment><comment><USER6> Could this be why vasodilators like vimpocetine improve mental performance? Maybe it's half about getting more nutrients to the brain and half improving the garbage collector?

<comment><USER7> Do you have personal experience with nootropics? :)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I've been trying several different types for the past 6 months or so.

<comment><USER7> Please email me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would not be surprised if exercise accelerated the brain's waste removal.

</comment><comment><USER9> Water channels around blood vessels... looks like the channels might be powered by heartbeats as well.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. So how does this affect people who have non-beating pacemakers?

<comment><USER9> good question

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to go drink another glass of water...

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like an exciting new avenue of research.

</comment><comment><USER12> To me, this article boiled down to two sentences: "Cerebrospinal fluid flowed along the outside of blood vessels, carried through a network of pipe-like protein structures. The fluid picked up waste that accumulated between cells, then drained out through major veins."

Unfortunately, it didn't deal with intracellular waste, which is a major issue over a lifetime. The only known way of addressing that is through caloric restriction. Some links:

[http://www.hyperink.com/Fasting-For-Cleansing- Autophagy-b274...](http://www.hyperink.com/Fasting-For-Cleansing- Autophagy-b274a336)

[http://www.pittsburghpatrika.com/2012/06/fasting-is-good- for...](http://www.pittsburghpatrika.com/2012/06/fasting-is-good-for-you-it- helps-remove-waste-debris-at-the-cellular-level/)

[http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v12/n2s/fig_tab/4401728ft....](http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v12/n2s/fig_tab/4401728ft.html)

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2670399/>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16874025>

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969996109...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969996109000047)

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2670399/>

Bottom line, there is NO FREE LUNCH!

<comment><USER13> Consuming trehalose (a sugar) may also help.

[http://metamodern.com/2010/09/15/trehalose-autophagy-and- bra...](http://metamodern.com/2010/09/15/trehalose-autophagy-and-brain-repair- sweet/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know about you, but my brain is totally dirty.</comment>


Can computer geeks save the GOP?  - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players-abc-news/computer-geeks-save-gop-meet-guys-trying-party-115212714.html <comment><USER2> No chance. Most of the younger generation (except right-wing radicals) is simply abhorred by the political stances of the GOP (abortion, gay marriage, army, political nepotism/corruption, internet policy).

Give them ten years and the GOP will effectively have disbanded itself.</comment>


Semantic UI 2.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.semantic-ui.com/introduction/new.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone using Semantic UI in production? Thoughts on if it's better than Bootstrap for prototyping?</comment>


Launching Beta version of a free alternative to Coinigy - <AUTHOR> http://silexapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> I have been working on a side project for the past couple of months. Mainly, my goal was to have a platform where I can login to all my crypto exchanges but not have to go through the login / 2FA steps and have a unified interface. I also didn't want to upload my API keys to a 3rd party server like it's the case with coinigy.

That's how I came up with Silex, the API keys are stored encrypted on your laptop and you only need a PIN code. The PIN code is just guaranteeing that someone who steals your laptop cannot access your funds before you have time to realize it and cancel your API keys.

How does the encryption work? The PIN code is sent to my server and is hashed with salt, the hash is checked against a hash stored in my database. If the hash is wrong a pin retry count is decreased. After 5 wrong pin, the account is cancelled. Their is no PIN reset available. If successful, the hash is sent back to the client and is used as encryption key for the local storage of account information. So the attacker would have to attack my database and steal / hack my laptop to gain access to my fund. This sounds safe enough for me, but I'm open to suggestions.

Not all exchanges are created equal and at this stage of development, not all exchanges allow all operations. That being said, in its current version, 7 different exchanges have been integrated: Binance, GDAX, Bittrex, Kraken, Kucoin, Poloniex, Cryptopia. Let me know who should be next.

Now you can give a try, just go to [http://silexapp.com](http://silexapp.com) and click download.

Feedback is the most valuable thing. In the app, you can vote for the next feature to be implemented by going to HELP > FEEDBACK

</comment><comment><USER2> What techno did you use for this? Are you using the exchange http APIs, or are you also using websockets?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was done using electron-vue. Yes I use both http API and websockets. Some exchanges don't have websocket, so I use polling with a 5 seconds interval. That's as close to real time as you can get...

<comment><USER2> Thank you, I can see that the info looks more real time on some accounts than others, but it still good enough for my needs at lease

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems pretty awesome, thanks for the effort, I look forward to testing this out

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


MSI-1436 stimulates regeneration of heart and multiple other tissues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41536-017-0008-1 <comment><USER2> The latest news on the compound is from April 2019: [https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/nb- nba041019...](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/nb- nba041019.php)

If anyone is interested in a talk by one of the authors (Kevin Strange), he goes into the history of the compound here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aAr5pKW9Dw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aAr5pKW9Dw)

For progress on similar lines of tech, this is a good site: [https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation- roadmap/](https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/)

</comment><comment><USER3> ...in zebrafish. Settle down, the answer to all your health problems is still fasting.

<comment><USER4> "It is particularly noteworthy that MSI-1436 stimulates tissue regeneration in both zebrafish and adult mice, two widely divergent species that are separated by approximately 450 million years of evolution."

Also paper explained that the drug had been applied in Phase 1 clinical trials with humans as a treatment for diabetes and obesity.

"Importantly, the doses we have shown to be effective in stimulating tissue regeneration are 5–50-times lower than the maximum well-tolerated human dose."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hopefully this works too in Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials. Looks promising.

And doesn't get patented to hell with insane pricing.

<comment><USER6> patents don't mean shit. if it's safe, effective, and profitable I'll be able to custom order it soon enough.

<comment><USER7> Dep nding on how complex the molecule is sometimes they won't even be able to make it . More than the half the group buys on that specific longevity forum failed

<comment><USER8> Failed like nobody committed to the synthesis?

<comment><USER7> Failed as in it was too difficult to make . I know of one example. The oral version of glyx-13( nrx-1074 iirc) which a few tried to make and failed . Which is good since the non oral version failed fantastically at the phase 3 trials

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how this would affect patients whom have had cardiac ablation, possibly causing unwanted cellular re-growth

</comment><comment><USER10> ITT: People who read nothing past the first paragraph saying, 'Yeah, but only in zebrafish ppl'

</comment><comment> ur-whale Legitimate question : how hard would it be to synthesize in one's garage?

</comment><comment><USER11> Zebrafish != Humans

<comment><USER12> It passed phase 1 trial in humans as well.</comment></comment>


Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/11/rare-earth-elements-iphone-malaysia <comment><USER2> This article isn't very good. It starts by mentioning some information about Foxconn. Suicides, for example, are less common at Foxconn than in the general population. So things are a bit more complicated than this article portrays.[1]

The article talks about the radioactive waste products. That's normally thorium. But the Lynas site (Mount Weld) has high concentrations of rare earths, is a huge site, and has low levels of thorium contamination. People are rightly concerned about radioactive waste being left in Malaysia. Lynas wanted to ship the radioactive waste back to Australia for processing, but they are forbidden from doing so by Australian law.

Some people are suggesting that Lynas is using Malaysia to avoid environmental laws thus cutting costs. But Malaysia gave them a 12 month tax break, and was already cheaper than Australia, so environmental laws don't appear to be the main motivator. (Although cheaper costs because of less strict environmental protections is probably an important factor.)

It is frustrating that all reporting about this is emotive or otherwise sub- optimal.

[1] I think that conditions at Foxconn are appalling and need to be improved.

<comment><USER3> >Suicides, for example, are less common at Foxconn than in the general population.

I see this often cited when talking about suicides at Foxconn but comparing suicides at a company to the general population is not that useful. The population of Foxconn workers are young(typical age reported to be 18) and 100% employed. That's not a group of people you want to compare to a span-all- socioeconomic-classes general population.

<comment><USER4> Actually, if you compare to that age group specifically, it would seem to make the number even "better". In America, suicides in the age group of 15 to 24 are the _third_ leading cause of death, with 4000 suicides in 2004 [1] (whereas if you compare to the general population here it is the 11th leading cause of death).

Of course, its difficult comparing suicide rates in different countries, and other factors may be at play, but this just goes to show that suicides are not a good metric to make this otherwise perfectly valid point (when more teenagers kill themselves here than in foxconn plants, the argument becomes more difficult that everyone is killing themselves because things are _so_ terrible). Suicide itself is an incredibly complex topic that should probably not be trivialized. This is of course not to say conditions there are in any way good, they're not. I just think its better to rely on the other much more ample and obvious evidence.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_suicide_in_the_United_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_suicide_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER5> _"Actually, if you compare to that age group specifically, it would seem to make the number even "better". In America, suicides in the age group of 15 to 24 are the third leading cause of death, with 4000 suicides in 2004 [1] (whereas if you compare to the general population here it is the 11th leading cause of death)."_

Not necessarily. The #10 cause for the general population may be deadlier than the #1 cause for 15-24 year olds. That Here are some made up numbers:

       15-24 year olds: 0.1% deaths/year, of which 10% due to suicide

       general population: 1% deaths per year, of which 5% due to suicide

That would have 0.01% of all 15-24 commit suicide each year, but 0.05% of the general population.

As I said, I made up the numbers. However, I do not think they are completely out of range. 1% deaths in a stable population gives a life expectancy of 100 years, but the US population is growing and hence relatively young. Also, looking at <http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf>, Figure 3, I think 1% is a reasonable guess at that figure.

The x% due to suicide numbers likely are exaggerations (a Zipf curve will have trouble getting to 5% in rank 10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is always amusing when people without even a high school science education seem to write science/engineering articles.

A long half life is inversely related to activity. Heavy radioactive metals like uranium and thorium are toxic heavy metals, but negligible radioactivity, precisely because their half lives are so long. Until recently we didn't even think natural thorium isotopes were radioactive, since the half life is close to the age of the universe.

The really dangerous radioactive isotopes either have fairly short half lives or decay into isotopes with short half lives. A few hundred thousand years is the upper bound for caring, and most of the bad stuff is under a decade. Basically by simple logic none of this will be naturally occurring or it would be gone already.

Plenty of non radioactive material is dangerous, though.

<comment><USER7> _Until recently we didn't even think natural thorium isotopes were radioactive, since the half life is close to the age of the universe._

Huh? Thorium was the 2nd element Marie Curie discovered to be radioactive, in 1898 according to wikipedia [0]. In fact the whole thorium decay chain [1] was classified even before anyone could identify what elements they were, resulting in the historic names "mesothorium", "radiothorium", etc [1].

Were you thinking of bismuth? [2]

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#New_elements>

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Thorium_series>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth-209>

<comment><USER6> Yes, I was thinking of Bismuth :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When western countries moved their manufacturing to China and other developing countries they also shipped their pollution over there, which is one of the reasons it is so much cheaper. But we are all living on one single planet. That is why free trade agreements aren't really free, they should include western environmental standards as well as labor standards. Of course that will never happen since giant corporations are the ones that really write our laws. At the current rate we won't be leaving much resources for our grandchildren.

<comment><USER9> I think we should be very conscious of our material privileges as rich westerners before we start demanding that people in third world countries live up to the same safety and environmental standards that we hold ourselves to. $1000 in safety equipment isn't a big deal in the US, but it could be more than a third world-worker makes in entire year.

And if you complain that the problem is that we aren't paying third world worker enough, that's because they don't have enough capital to be as productive as workers in developed nations. You would need a really massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to the third world for their adopting western labor standards to not result in mass starvation. Safety conditions in third world factories might be bad, but third world farms are actually much more dangerous.

All of this isn't to say that the specific behavior in the article is acceptable, it's obviously going beyond the pale and ought to be stopped. It's just that your proposed solution is entirely unworkable.

<comment><USER10> >$1000 in safety equipment isn't a big deal in the US, but it could be more than a third world-worker makes in entire year.

We're not talking $1 a day subsistance farmer when we talk free trade agreements. We're talking about the standards billion dollar multinational companies must comply with to do business between countries. Indeed, $1000 in safety equipment means almost nothing to these companies, but they'll only do it if we force them to. Our efficient free market system favors those that can reduce their costs of operations to the minimum level possible. If we don't make the rules of the playing field encompass these standards, everyone will be beholden to the guy that meets only the bare minimums, because he can sell his stuff the cheapest.

<comment><USER11> > We're not talking $1 a day subsistance farmer when we talk free trade > agreements.

Yes, you are.

He is part of the same local economy and by placing a cost on those higher up the chain, you will affect him just as much.

> Indeed, $1000 in safety equipment means almost nothing to these companies, > but they'll only do it if we force them to.

If that was the case, they wouldn't have out-sourced the manufacturing to begin with. They wouldn't be buying expensive robots to replace that minimal- cost labor as we speak. Every penny counts.

> Our efficient free market system favors those that can reduce their costs of > operations to the minimum level possible.

This is true, but to a point.

> If we don't make the rules of the playing field encompass these standards, > everyone will be beholden to the guy that meets only the bare minimums, > because he can sell his stuff the cheapest.

Frequently, consumers take many other factors into a purchase decision. Not just the price. If I know that a product was manufactured in a responsible manner, I'm willing to pay more for it.

If this wasn't the case, the organic movement wouldn't exist. Neither would the local-food movement.

People _are_ willing to pay for higher quality goods and even identical goods that were manufactured in a more responsible manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The radioactive waste discussed is Thorium. If we develop Thorium reactors, we could have carbon-free power with greatly reduced weapons proliferation risk, two orders of magnitude more plentiful fuel, and less waste which only lasts 300 years, as opposed to 100,000+. Also, this would open up domestic US reserves of rare earth metals.

<comment><USER13> I do hope, that we will have thorium reactors soon, but I don't completely agree with the reduced proliferation risk. In thorium reactor you would have weapon-grade uranium (isotope 233 and a hint of 232), which can be chemically isolated. Sure due to U-232 it will have radioactivity of levels, which in long term are harmful. However the levels aren't so high, that they would prohibit the handling of the material by people, who don't care about radiation safety that much and I can easily think that to be the case with nations and groups most eagerly trying to achieve a nuclear bomb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel sad that no comments got to the core - the unchanging corporate mentality of "man, here's some fertilizer, cement or whatever, dump it somewhere and you'll get bonus if it's fast".

This happens right now too, as you can see from the totally void answers of anyone from Lynas, and that's the main reason why they want to spend huge ammounts of money for shipping to Malaysia - it's still much cheaper than respecting the western environmental laws.

</comment><comment><USER15> I may be alone in this, but I have a hard time giving credence to any article posted on a site with a specific political agenda.

<comment><USER16> Forget the political slant; either their writing is correct or it is not. Fox isn't evil because they're a right wing propaganda machine, they're evil because they lie.

This article is weak, not because Mother Jones is left slanted, but because the writing shows a profound lack of basic science understanding and carries a lot of unsourced scaremongering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> An efficient modern wind turbine uses at least 82kg of neodymium. Older designs use much more.

[http://www.vestas.com/en/about- vestas/sustainability/sustain...](http://www.vestas.com/en/about- vestas/sustainability/sustainable-products/life-cycle-assessment/rare-earth- elements.aspx)

<http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2011/5094/pdf/sir2011-5094.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER18> Motherjones as top result on hacker news? Linkbait article rife with poor understanding of radioactivity and economics. Who's up for another erlang day?

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe this is a crazy idea, but wouldn't market forces drive down the costs of mining/processing the material if the consumer or the companies purchasing/processing REEs had to pay into cleanup efforts?

Apple makes some pretty serious claims about its environmental impact (<http://www.apple.com/environment/>). But it doesn't mention refining REEs. Lots about carbon, reducing chemicals such as PVCs, and recycling... Perhaps the market forces that brought carbon to the fore could help correct REEs and reduce the impact on the environment these mining operations incur.

If I were a resident of that area I would be concerned about the plant. While I am suspicious of the technical reporting it seemed clear to me that Lynas isn't being entirely transparent about its environmental assessments and who exactly is approving their projects. When engineers involved are talking to reporters about suspicious activity and large firms are pulling out of the project it does raise some concern that perhaps Lynas isn't doing as much as it could be to ensure even minimal safety concerns are met.

Either way I don't think it's unreasonable for Malaysia and other countries in these sorts of situations to raise awareness about the environmental impacts these kinds of projects have and to enforce a higher degree of scrutiny in approving them. It may raise prices on consumers receiving these goods but it's clear that enough wealth is being generated that we could afford a price- bump.

With enough investment in better recycling technology and hazardous materials management we might be able to slowly reduce that price-bump over time.

But then again, I don't understand enough about economics to believe that is even possible.

The article may be making a rather strong appeal to emotion but it does raise the question of whether there is enough being done from an investigation and regulation angle to protect people from the hazardous side-effects of mining REEs.

</comment><comment> shawn-butler It should come as little surprise for readers to learn that the US government has used its occupation of Afghanistan to survey regions rich in rare earth deposits [0]. USGS geologists working under direct cover of military protection in a war zone. I can't wait for the movie version.

Some have argued that part of the reason for prolonging the US engagement has been that these resources are located in regions of Taliban control, but that seems highly speculative. Developing that resource would certainly alter the economic history of that nation.

[0] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistan...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistans- buried-riches)

</comment><comment><USER20> Are there any journalists that understand radio isotopes? "OMG a half-life of 14 billion years" as if thats a bad thing. An extremely long half-life means it's not very radio active, thus not a big problem. Just wait until they hear how long the half-life of a proton is, 6.6×10^33 years! I'd be much more concerned with the swimming pools of sulfuric acid and chemical by products than the radioactivity.

</comment><comment><USER21> So is there any product that hasn't been somehow manufactured with the help of chinese atrocities?

Tomorrow: The insane secrets behind bottled water (spoiler: the guys driving the trucks hauling the water check their deliveries on a touchpad device that uses one gram of a rare earth metal that came from China!)

</comment><comment><USER22> How is the waste radioactive? Doesn't that mean that the original materials were also radioactive?

<comment><USER12> When you mine rare earths, you often get Thorium.

<comment><USER22> OK I guess my question is, how does processing make the radiation more dangerous? Can't they, I don't know, put the material back near where they found it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a question of exposure. When the material is encased in solid rock hundreds, if not thousands of feet blow, the exposure risk is very low.

Once you pull it out of the ground - exposure becomes a real problem. They mention that some of the materials must be kept in liquid, so it does not become a dust that can get blown away. At the same time, they need to line the storage pool with a material that will block it from seeping into the groundwater. For centuries.

<comment><USER23> > At the same time, they need to line the storage pool with a material that > will block it from seeping into the groundwater. For centuries.

Not for thorium. The stuff is almost harmless, and is insoluble in water, so tends to just stay put.

Plus, even if you did have to isolate it, centuries would be nothing. It's has a half life of 14 billion years! Just bury it back in the ground and that's all - it's really not very radioactive. (Just deep enough that it won't be dug up by accident and that's all - you don't need to block the radioactivity, since even a piece of paper is enough shielding.)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing since you are confusing cesium from nuclear reactors and thorium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem with the radioactive waste is not its radiation. Its usually in check unless it is pulled out of reactor core. The problem for the people in contact with it more often is that it is extremely poisonous.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something that bothered me about this article was the subtext that "treating" the waste wasn't good enough. How much of that scaremongering is justified?

</comment><comment><USER25> Well, I hope <http://www.fairphone.com/> will do a good job, then.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wait til motherjones finds out that their servers are just as dirty as Apple's iPhone. Rare Earths are essential to all electronics, not just smart phones.

<comment><USER27> > Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you'll be hard-pressed to > find a phone, laptop, or TV that doesn't contain at least one of the rare > earths. The elements are also key to all kinds of green technology: > Neodymium is found in wind turbines; hybrid and electric cars often contain > as many as nine different rare earths. Yttrium can form phosphors that make > light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Rare earths are > also crucial for defense technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, > smart bombs.

From the second page of the article.

Nobody is denying whether or not they're essential. The issue is that they're produced in poor countries so that the refiners can offload most of the cost of refining rare earth metals in the form of environmental damage.</comment></comment>


Free programming tips are worth every penny - <AUTHOR> http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/02/free-programming-tips-are-worth-every.html

<comment><USER2> _Seriously, how often do you say to yourself, "I think I'll dive into this messy code today and try to make it nice and pretty without adding any functionality?"_

Maybe I'm just weird, but I do that _all_ the time.

 _Nobody is going to pay you for that._

Sure they will: refactoring and code cleanup is a commendable activity at plenty of competent software shops.

<comment><USER3> You're not weird. Or at least you are no weirder than me.

I sometimes enjoy refactoring more than writing new code. Deleting code, in particular, is pretty much my favorite professional activity.

<comment><USER4> Unacknowledged type-B procrastination? :-)

<http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html>

<comment><USER3> Maybe. However, I haven't really regretted it yet.

I always regret type A. I do a lot of it.

I'd like to think I am pretty good at type C...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"Don't write code until you know what you're doing. Now, you may not be able to "know what you are doing" just from thinking, in which case you should start a TEST project and write a bunch of ugly code to make sure your ideas are correct.

Then, start again, in a new directory. We had seven or so different test project directories during the making of Delicious Library"_

Wow! Must some inflexible language. In Python, Lisp and Javascript, (those are the ones I am 'happy' with) you can coax "test project" code into real and beautiful code. You can explore as you code.

Many other issues he mentions can be transcended simply by using a better programming language and a good helping of bottom-up programming.

<comment><USER3> Maybe for a small bit of code: a method or a simple class.

But once you are talking about a serious system? Your prototype code is guaranteed to be of prototype quality. Starting over from scratch is a strong way to mitigate the risk of it infecting your production code.

<comment><USER4> In the languages that I mentioned (js,lisp,py), you will write a small function in the interactive shell (repl) and play with it and tinker it until it works perfectly. Then you'll write another function that uses this and other such functions etc. You'll build functions on top of functions until you have a fully usable system. As you know, this is bottom-up programming. While you can continue to improve things and refactor code as much as you want, at no point do you have to throw everything out and start clean. You don't lose any work.

I don't know much Objective C. I've just written some tiny iPhone apps in it. But my feeling is that it strongly encourages top-down programming, which results in the programmer having to do the things mentioned in the article (plan ahead, rewrite from scratch etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a GREAT article. I love the author's "axiomatic" approach to programming -- these aren't your standard programming tips.

<comment><USER6> Yeah - its a good read - his approach seems quite at odds with the currently heavily talked about "agile" approaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is important to realize that different styles suits different programmers doing different things. Wil Shipley works better with being more careful and spending more time analyzing before coding. I remember reading about a programmer who writes hours of code (or was it days) before compiling. Or TDD where iterations are shorter and focus on incorporating unit tests. Etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> funnily, this approach is the _complete opposite_ of the way of the samurai, which stresses swiftness and decisiveness

cf. kamikaze

</comment><comment><USER9> The article's tips are mainly aimed at beginners, but I think correct.</comment>


A Model Estonian Soldier Who Spied for Russia - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/06/estonia-russia-deniss-metsavas-spy/592417/ <comment><USER2> >> He had accepted money for information—"That was the first step," he told me—and met the man who would be his handler for the years to come, Anton.

So Russian. So KGB/GRU. America will spend billions putting a satellite up in orbit to spy on a man in a tent. Russia will get the same level of information with a couple fake cops, a girl, and a few dollars paid to vulnerable kid.

>> an artillery specialist

He was the perfect target. Artillery doesn't translate into the civilian world. Artillery people are more afraid of losing their military jobs than other trades. A sex video would put more fear into an artillery person than say a pilot or medic, people who could walk away from the military into a stable civilian career.

>> While Metsavas was in Afghanistan, GRU agents had traveled to Russky Island, off the coast of Vladivostok, to meet with his father. Volin had retired there from London years earlier to be closer to his new wife's parents, but his partner had fallen ill.

And he has family retired to somewhere accessible to Russian agents? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that his father's new wife was also an agent. Again, sooo Russian. They checked every human intelligence box. America leverages technology. Russia leverages people.

</comment><comment><USER3> The frightening thing about an intelligence officer pitching you is the moment that it happens and feelings of fear, being overwhelmed (Is this really happening? Who are they? Where are they from? I thought they were X but really they are Y? Why me? Why now? What do they want? Will they hurt me or my loved ones if I don't agree? Are they recording this? Who else can I not trust? What do they know about me? How much do they know about me? How did they find out about XYZ? Do they know about my other thing? How can I stop this? Do I want to stop this? Can I trust them? Etc etc etc)

If the person being pitched can compose themselves and buy time to think there is _nearly_ always a way out. Despite what people think intelligence pitching usually has an element of bluff. A handler making a pitch deep down knows this.

If the person being leveraged can find a way to call the bluff (and fight the fear of blackmail) usually the handler will back off - despite what they may say they might do ("We will expose you"). It's generally too risky for the handler to get involved in games and threats of exposing the blackmail evidence. Afterall, they want to continue in their job and aren't gonna risk damaging their own cover, career etc by trying to burn a source who rejected them. _Most_ pitches fail.

Plus a person willing to fight their fear and run the risk of the blackmail compromise being exposed isn't likely to be someone who you are going to easily be able to control. The KGB trying to blackmail the Indonesian President over sex tapes comes to mind...the perfect response:

 _Given Sukarno's boasts, the KGB shouldn't have been too surprised that its efforts to blackmail him went astray. "When the Russians later confronted him with a film of the lurid encounter, Sukarno was apparently delighted," Lister wrote. "Legend has it he even asked for extra copies."_

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to- bl...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to-blackmail- this-world-leader-with-sex-tapes-927fc7ddbd48)

Of course it is worth pointing out that blackmail isn't usually a very good method of pitching someone and turning them into a source. It comes with too many problems. Smart and more effective pitches tilt towards cooperation not coercion.

<comment><USER4> How do you know so much and can you talk more about the intelligence trade?

<comment><USER3> I've done various bits of training over the years. My company provides security for NGOs, journalists and activists all over the world. It's an unfortunate part of the job that this sort of stuff happens to a lot of the people we work with.

<comment><USER5> If the lady is cooperating with the intelligence agency - he would then be imprisoned in Russia for her rape. Esp. knowing how they do that in Russia.

I think the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is to do what another comment in the thread mentioned: to contact your commander.

But in this situation there was another issue for the guy: his relatives live in Russia, so there might have been a case of him never seeing them again. Or having to work as a double-agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it funny that Christopher Nolan is shooting a spy movie less than a hundred meters away from this guy's prison cell.

Somehow I don't expect the movie to be as interesting as this real story is.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, so she must have led him to the camera bugged sex motel and particular room, where he was then accused of rape

exasperated by prostitution being illegal in Russia and just fighting that alone would have torpedoed his military career in Estonia

fascinating.

so many tweaks to personal choices as well as that society which could have prevented all of this.

<comment><USER3> That's his perception and what (if this story is fully true) led him to take that particular option.

The alternative and smarter choice would have been to walk straight into his commander, tell them what happened, pass it up the chain to Estonian Counter Intelligence, deal with the short/medium term repurcussions and live a normal life. This stuff happens all the time in business and government. Though it seems like it, it's actually not a massive deal to report this stuff, it's why counter intelligence exists (or corporate security in the business context).

I would guess and say there have probably been dozens of times in Estonia alone when people took the smart option and reported things.

<comment><USER8> Well, he doesn't know it's an intelligence op at that time, right? He's only overwhelmed and doesn't actually know what cooperation means. They're subverting the same instinct that people in America have which needs to be protected by "Don't talk to the police" which is "you've done nothing wrong. Just be upfront and we'll help you out". Then as time passes, the hold constricts around him.

An allegation of rape will have finished off his career. No doubt about it. Take the Assange situation, then add an actual video of him having sex. Even if it were obviously not a single cut, enough people will hate him for it. "It's a GRU op" people will be treated as conspiracy theorists.

I'm not saying the Assange situation is like this (that he was entrapped) to be clear, but the reactions you read online to that will be similar to what this man would have received had the video been made public.

On the up-side, he wouldn't have been imprisoned for spying against his country. On the downside, his blossoming career would have ended. But in the moment, the upside seems unlikely, rare and far off. The downside is immediate. The upside is subject to hyperbolic discounting.

The reason I doubt the theory of "this happens quietly many times" is that KAPO would be aware of the strategy and would have every incentive to inoculate Estonians about it, and to crow about their native heroes who escaped Russian clutches. Instead they only allowed revealing of the strategy via a caught spy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Looks like you are offline" \- the Atlantic. HTTP response code : 200 . Interesting way of framing.

</comment><comment><USER10> New Netflix show?</comment>


Japan to hack its citizens' routers and webcams in name of cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90299216/japan-will-try-to-hack-its-citizens-routers-and-webcams-in-the-name-of-cybersecurity <comment><USER2> This is actually a great idea. The government acting as a white hat and securing the vulnerable network infrastructure, including the home routers.

Not only can a compromised home router be used to target its users, but they are often used to attack other targets while hiding the tracks, those routers seldom log anything and if they do, the log is either in volatile RAM or otherwise easy to delete.

As long as it is indeed white hat activity without shades of gray.

<comment><USER3> the last part is the crucial part. I have no idea about Japan, but if my government tried something like that i wouldn't trust them at all.

But maybe devices should force password change for both admin login and wifi password when they are first booted up?

<comment><USER4> All they need do is contact the owner first and suggest changing the password, then offer the penetration test service. There is no need to do it without the owner's explicit consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Government right now are starting to become orwellian.

<comment><USER6> "starting" is putting it lightly...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Looking for your feedback on a super-light RSS Reader I've built - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id290537970

<comment><USER2> Judging from your reviews I'd focus on bugs and performance. If you want a feature idea - I'd build in a search function for adding feeds. Currently users have to first copy the feed URL from Safari and paste it, not sure that's a great flow...

Nice, simple UI though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, do you/does anyone know a db of RSS feeds?</comment></comment>


Is Anyone Proud of Their Company Blog? - <AUTHOR>

Who is responsible for it? Who writes for it?<p>Are there any best practices you can share? <comment><USER2> Kind of a lurker here but thought I'd step in since this is where I spend at least 10% of my week. I am in fact proud of our company blog. I do about 80% of the posts and try to get authority figures in the industry to guest post whenever I can.

I honestly started off just because I knew blogging was good for SEO, but now I love blogging and would do it even if no one read my posts.

Since the time I started blogging a few years ago, our traffic has SOARED in ways I never thought it would.

I focus on writing about general news in the industry as well as theory. As far as best practices:

1\. The number 1 rule I stick by is _only write posts that I would read myself, and that I am proud of._

2\. I try not to newsjack, if I can be one of the first people to write about a piece of news that is going on in the industry I will take that as an opportunity. When that happens the traffic comes pouring in.

3\. Although I do a lot of SEO myself, I don't ever worry about stuff like keyword density or other stuff that could drive away readers.

We've had dozens of clients and employee hires that have found us through reading our blog.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regarding our blog, Reefpoints ([http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/](http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/)), all employees are encouraged to publish articles. We have designers, developers and project managers writing about technology, design and process. Moreover, it serves as a place for opinion and experience pieces regarding tech communities and conferences.

We publish it through a public GitHub repo ([https://github.com/dockyard/reefpoints](https://github.com/dockyard/reefpoints)).

We've found the process of using Git for blog posts helpful. We submit pull requests and receive immediate feedback from our coworkers. Moreover, after officially publishing the article, our readers are allowed to submit pull requests of their own (usually correcting typos, or incorrect code blocks). Furthermore, we can open up GitHub issues to save our blog ideas.

Personally, I've found this process great.

</comment><comment><USER4> We have a few contributors for the G2 Crowd blog ([http://about.g2crowd.com/blog](http://about.g2crowd.com/blog)), but it's a great place not only for sharing company news, POVs, media coverage and more, but to publish highlights from your user/customer base as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> What fraction of traffic does your blog do compared to your main site?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't work there, but I would venture a guess that employees at Basecamp (37signals) are proud of [https://signalvnoise.com/](https://signalvnoise.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've moved on from the company in question, but as technical co-founder of Cloudability -- yes, I am proud of their blog. I just wish the brilliant folks there would WRITE MOAR!

</comment><comment><USER7> Buffer does a great job with their blog. And they publish best practices and who writes etc all the time.

<comment><USER8> Seconded. Their blog is one I hold up to potential clients as an example of a well-done B2C blog. Then I explain the strategy and planning that goes on behind it.

Potential clients look baffled that a blog could be so much work :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> not really. But I like gilt and hubspot blogs

<comment><USER9> custora's among really new ones as well.</comment></comment>


Facebook Pages: Why I don't like Nest thermostat or anything else anymore - <AUTHOR> http://ninjasandrobots.com/facebook-pages-nest-thermostat <comment><USER3> This is pretty simple: just don't "Like" anything. Seriously. It didn't take an oracle to figure out that "Likes" were always going to be a gateway to direct advertising.

And for things you "need" to "Like" (eg to enter a contest or get access to something) then just use a dummy account like many do for playing Facebook games, for much the same reason: (almost) no one wants to spam their friends with "I milked a cow!" messages.

This is Facebook's (and Twitter's for that matter) biggest problem: their apparent monetization paths are at direct odds with the user experience.

<comment><USER4> The problem with this is that at the time, to my knowledge, Facebook wasn't doing the "Social ads show an advertiser's message alongside actions you have taken, such as liking a Page" kind of thing. Since they keep all of this data, anything you do today could be used to promote something in the future without your knowledge. Hell, even visiting a group/business may pop something up "jetti came and saw [insert business here]...shouldn't you?". If they are changing the rules but applying them retroactively, it becomes a situation where you either stop using facebook, log in and do nothing or get them to stop using past and current actions to promote ads.

<comment><USER5> You can disable this functionality: they allow you to explicitly set whether your actions are allowed to be used together with advertisements to your friends; they call this "social ads".

To control this, go to "Account Settings", "Facebook Ads", "Ads and friends"/"Edit social ads setting", and tell it to "Pair my social actions with ads for" "No one" and click "Save Changes".

[https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social)

<comment><USER4> That was in the article. This shouldn't have to be disabled, this should have to be enabled. If you are going to enable it by default, how is it ok to show history? There is no possible way you couldn't opted out to a feature that didn't exist when something was liked 3 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Is this definitely enabled for everyone by default? Mine was already set to "No One" and i'm fairly certain i've never seen that page before.

<comment><USER7> This was enabled for me by default, and I'm certain I've never seen that page before. I created my FB page in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> This has to stop. There has to be a setting to turn this shit off.

You can put a stop to all of this by deleting your Facebook account. It is the nuclear option, but it's one that more and more of my friends (tech geeks - <USER2> who cares, right?) are doing.

I think the real problem here is headlines like this. OP's blog post title says "I don't like NEST" this is a problem for their brand and all the other companies that support Facebook's business model. If they start leaving because Facebook's UX opacity hurts their brand more than it helps, then it's lights out.

<comment><USER9> As much as it's good to "fight the good fight" against FaceBook, it's fast becoming an expected means of communicating. Believe me, I deleted mine years ago and finally had to come back because I realized I was actually hindered in real ways by not having an account.

I personally think FaceBook will reach an inflection point where public interest will wane and people will use it less and less... but still have accounts. Then something better will come along and there might be a mass migration. For now though, the reality is it's somewhat essential.

<comment><USER10> In what way were you hindered? I deleted mine years ago and the only downside is that I occasionally can't see a photo album someone sends me. It's not like photos only exist on Facebook.

I can't speak for other people, but the effort it took to maintain a Facebook presence (deidentify unflattering photos, take a few minutes every day to get caught up on people's minutiae) was far greater than the benefit it brought me.

People who want to talk to me know my email address and phone number.

(edit: clarification, first paragraph)

<comment><USER11> I'm keeping my account because it's the tool 90% of my friends - including my wife - use to plan social activities. I can see which events I'm invited to, and who's coming over to our house next saturday for dinner.

We could use Google calendar for this, or any number of other tools, but that would put a burden on our other friends to learn a new system. The end result would be that some people would flat out not attend the event, and some others would attend but not RSVP, throwing off guest counts, etc.

<comment><USER12> Does facebook really provide that much value add over a simple email invite? Every response you get can go into a special folder for that party. When the party is over, you delete the folder - or leave it - maybe even put it in an "old parties" folder.

<comment><USER13> Using facebook for events provides a few benefits over email: 1\. You don't need to know your friends' email address 2\. You can add pictures/video from the event 3\. It automatically generates maps, directions. 4\. People not interested in getting emails every time someone responds with "I'll bring the salsa!" can choose not to get notified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a really really valid point. This is a HUGE problem, believe me. In fact, here's what happened to me - I got notified in my feed that a friend of mine kept liking her ex-boyfriend's music page, and I got this continuously, consistently for several weeks in my feed. After a while, I got pissed off, sent her a long E-mail , advising her to forget the past and move on. At that time, I didn't know Facebook was the culprit. She naturally was shocked+agitated and defended herself after which I thought she was lying and deleted her from my list. Today, we both are no longer friends. All thanks to Facebook. So, atleast in my case, it did more harm than good.

<comment><USER15> If you stopped being friends (I assume you mean real friends, not FB friends) with someone because of a single FB like you couldn't have been very good friends to begin with.

<comment><USER14> No you didn't get it, I stopped being her friend not because of the like, but because I thought she was _lying_ , as I had data that spoke exactly the opposite of what she said.

<comment><USER16> That's not facebook's fault. You just handled it incompetently. The way you brought it up would turn anybody off, facebook or no facebook

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I started to see this slippery slope about a year ago, saw my name (and face!) appearing in advertisements on friends feeds, saw messages from me appearing in my friends feeds without me being (totally) aware I was about to spam them, saw timelines of my entire life with pictures that other people had taken and I was only vaguely aware I had noted I was in them.

I just deleted my facebook account.

With the exception of technical friends who have children, and are trying to find an easy way to share pictures with the grand-parents/inlaws/family, the majority of my colleagues in the valley have just stopped using, and in many cases, have deleted their facebook account.

End of problem. No more intrusions of this kind.

Not the solution for everyone, but it's a pretty straightforward mechanism to eliminate this problem, and, in my case, really cost me nothing.

Now, if I had to delete my Amazon account to avoid those tracking ads, that would be a whole new level of pain. I don't know if I'm ready to do that, yet.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. The social ads, creepy frictionless sharing, the history of privacy issues, the "hidden options" UX, the lack of anonymity, and the lack of support for multiple facets to our identities -- these issues all combined together made me deactivate my account.

I'm still trying it out to see if I can live without it for a year. But I'm hoping to delete it altogether.

<comment><USER19> I made it about 10 months before I caved in and recreated an account. It's so ingrained with my family and friends. But, just don't log in and cancel all the email notifications, works pretty well.

I've had friends say "oh we forgot to invite you to the party because you weren't on Facebook." I'm glad of the friends that use evite.

<comment><USER20> I'd seriously find some new friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The solution in this post doesn't work. It just changes your settings for the ads on the right. Not the ones in your feed.

<comment><USER22> Exactly right. Here's a Facebook help page of interest:

"Can I opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories?" <http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How long before Twitter goes the same route? You are asking for people to follow you "safely" on Twitter. Don't hold your breath, you have not seen the future, nobody has.

These are the reasons I don't click on Like anywhere, certainly not on brands.

Facebook has been a mess since they have introduced the promoting stories. They have even added an additional Page Feed, which in my case, has been sitting idle gathering unread counts.

Update: IMHO, the best is to use Facebook publicly in a read-only mode. If you must follow the updates from someone, follow their RSS from their website or their email newsletter, they must have one or the other, or else they are not worth it. It is also better to keep yourself logged out of Facebook when you don't need to use it. Twitter is not that bad right now but it still shoots spam messages with bad links without you knowing about it. So your actions or inaction on any social media can directly or indirectly affect your relationship with your friends/contact.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, I thought when I opted out of having my names next to ads that I wouldn't show up in the sponsored stories of people, either, but apparently that's completely different, and I can't turn it off. (see: <http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>)

Is there an easy way to "un-like" everything? Facebook automatically made me "like" everything that I had on my interests a long time back, and now that's turning me into an advertising icon for those brands to my friends? No thanks. So do I have to go through each one individually, or is there some way I can get rid of all these "likes" at once?

<comment><USER25> <https://www.facebook.com/browse/other_connections_of/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "I was actually experimenting with how these "like gates", as they're called, work because for my own company we were also playing with creating tools to encourage people to like someone's Facebook page."

Sounds a little hypocritically for criticising facebook about these dirty tricks and then building a business around them. That feeling you get when you see these adverts with your name on? That's the same feeling I get when I'm forced to unnaturally 'like' something on facebook in order to see something else.

<comment><USER27> Sorry if I made the timing not clear. It definitely would be hypocritical if I was building this business after I wrote this post.

I had no idea these sponsored posts ended up in people's timelines in such a way no one could tell what's real and what's bullshit. I stopped development on any "like-gating" tech over a year ago for a bunch of reasons. The tech is still up on a website in demo mode, but I don't sell it anymore or intend to revisit selling it again. I wouldn't want to work on encouraging likes again if this sponsored post thing continues to be used like I describe in this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As soon as they insisted that one's likes be(come) public, I decided that that was the end of that (for me, at least).

Remember: Likes (or whatever they used to be called back then, e.g. items listed on your profile) used to be content you could restrict to your friends. Pointers for them to stuff you found cool and interesting. Then FB assigned them to the "forced to be public" part of your profile. Now, eventually, they've become primarily a vehicle for 1) Gaming people to participate (self- serving contests), in order to 2) Spam their graph.

Likes no longer represent user-generated content.

</comment><comment><USER29> When it comes down to making money, FaceBook is acting exactly like every other big media & communications company: they are doing everything in their power to extract economic rents, to the extent permitted by law, so long as it doesn't annoy or push away too many customers. This isn't really news.

<comment><USER30> Blanket cynicism doesn't add anything to the discussion.

<comment><USER29> moultano: my comment was not meant to be cynical; I'm sorry if it came across that way. In hindsight, I could and probably should have worded it differently.

My main point: this is not an isolated incident of FaceBook pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable by users to make money; there have been other such incidents in the past. Given the history, should we really be surprised?

<comment><USER31> If they're toeing the line of acceptability, they're bound to cross over it at some point. This is a discussion about how one user thinks they've crossed that line, what effects that might have on their business and their users and customers, and what can be done to bring it back into line.

Must every article and discussion be about something "surprising"? Meta- discussions like this are dull; if you're uninterested in an article, ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This! My fb news feed is heavily spammed by products a few of my friends 'liked'.

Making the situation worse:

\- Some ads, one example for me is TD Bank, are shown repeatedly and redundantly months after months. You'd think they would know I am not interested by now.

\- On 4.7" screen phone, these are almost full screen ads.

\- I'm pretty sure the people who 'liked' these companies aren't aware they are continuously spamming me.

I usually don't mind a few ads if it will pay for a free service and when they are well targeted I might even click on them. Just the other day, a fb ad reminded me to go to a delicious local burger place I don't enjoy nearly often enough. However the current level of ad aggressivity is way past the limit of what is acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Amazing to me how many people bitch and whine about a free service. If you paid for Facebook access then it would be completely understandable, but you don't. So change the settings or go to Google+ (if that's still around).

</comment><comment><USER34> I hardly go on Facebook anymore mostly because of all the advertisements that get interleaved into the news stream. It's definitely a case of, if you don't like it then don't use it. There is no one forcing you to use Facebook and if they have a user base that is willing to put up with an Ad supported experience then so be it. AdBlock helps a lot in keeping at least the right hand ads to a minimum. It's funny going on a friends computer who doesn't have AdBlock and being surprised at the amount of advertising on Facebook. As an aside, I love my Nest thermostat.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow. You can't opt out. That's pretty disgusting. <http://www.facebook.com/help/173332702723681/>

</comment><comment><USER35> Massive overreaction. It's very obvious that these news feed posts are sponsored. It clearly says so. 99% of users won't even notice this or care.

</comment><comment><USER36> An interesting wrinkle on this was the recent Presidential election in the US. Some of my contacts "Liked" Romney's or Paul Ryan's page (or both) Every 3rd or 5th day they were there when I looked at my feed "Romney is great" and your 3 friends liked this etc. My first reaction was "Wow, my friends are pretty hard core Romney fans if they're liking every new post he puts up on his page" So from endorsing him once they sent the message indirectly to their friends about 8 - 12 over a two month period that they're a supporter. That's probably a lot more in your friends' face with your political belief than most realize. It's like the guy at a BBQ who casually says "I think I'm voting for Obama" vs the friend whom every time you see them in the build up to the election wants to talk about their candidate and you're voting for him right?

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Related to liked pages, I've noticed a few times in the past month or two that friend's months-old status updates that have links to products on Amazon.com now re-appear in my current news feed as "sponsored posts".

So it seems like advertisers can also sponsor posts containing links to their domains to re-appear in your feed.

<comment><USER18> Ugh. So even if you don't Like anything, your shared links can become promotional stories. Terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There is no word for this except spam.

I am so tired of seeing that a very weak connection has liked Samsung Mobile... every... single... freaking.... day...

As a result, I've contacted friends in the exact same manner: "Hey, can you unlike this product, I'm tired of seeing it every day for the last few months."

<comment><USER38> Why don't you use AdBlock?

<comment><USER37> And, to be honest: I don't think I'd mind as much if it wasn't the exact same ad multiple times a day, every day, for over a month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've always seen those like ads and wondered... why?!? I can understand liking a struggling business or artist, but in what situation does it make sense to like Visa or Walmart or Sprint or whatever? It doesn't. It should be pretty obvious that everything you do on Facebook these days will be monetized. And Facebook hits the jackpot when you explicitly state a preference for a particular corporation.

When Facebook took my comma delimited list of "interests" and turned them all into ads, I figured out Facebook had _sold out_. Call me melodramatic, but this was years before Zuckerberg claimed "we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

</comment><comment><USER40> I've never been a fan of Facebooks behavior and attitude toward users. I signed up for an account a while back mainly to make it harder for anyone else to 'be' me. I watched as the privacy continually eroded. ( an excellent 2010 chart here: [http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy- Er...](http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2196-Facebooks-Privacy-Erosion- Strategy.html) ) I've been forced to sort out privacy snafus several times over the years, as they added new on-by-default options that I don't want. I think it's time to leave.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't ever "like" major brands. But I do click like on small local businesses, or things my real-life friends are involved with. For a small business, every little bit of free promotion helps.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do people (professionals who are not in marketing) use Facebook?

As a user of HN, Twitter, Reddit, Google Groups, and Usenet, I honestly don't see the attraction. Seems like it is fraught with annoyances.

<comment><USER43> Facebook is where the clueless people are. Unfortunately, I love quite a few of those clueless people - so I join them where they are.

When all your friends decide to meet at that fake corporate fac-simile of a cliché pub, you go there too because you like your friends and might meet some nice girl there too. You may suggest a place with beer that does not taste like llama piss, but you drink that beer with a smile anyway because in the end it is all about people, even with stupid UI, satanic EULA and sprawling ads.

<comment><USER18> I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I wouldn't call them "clueless" - maybe unaware, or unconcerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This kind of crap is why I unliked everything I possibly could, and then created LikeBuster. I don't want people getting the wrong idea about me because of an ad I didn't actually promote. I honestly think Facebook makes everyone they use for their ad platform look foolish, and I'd prefer not to see my friends insulted like that.

There are Chrome and Firefox add-ons for LikeBuster linked at <https://github.com/relwell/LikeBuster>.

</comment><comment><USER45> Good post, as someone who occasionally uses promoted posts, it made me realize it is a little weird to target friends of fans, which I believe is the FB default.

</comment><comment><USER46> I was under the impression that these were the user-facing side of Promoted Posts that go to friends of friends. So I see that one of my friends liked the GRE several times. But I also see "Sponsored Story" under that line, so I ignore it and blame the page itself. On the iOS app at least, it tells me when the Like occurred, which felt a little comical when a friend's Like from 2008 gave me a Sponsored Story a couple weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER47> Until people start being willing to pay for services like Facebook or Twitter these kind of antics are inevitable.

Unless you're paying you're the product.

<comment><USER48> Are we the product of HN, then? Or if HN is "not the same", how are Identi.ca users its product?

It's a nice soundbite, but it's oversimplified. There are many business models, and some don't involve neither direct payments nor ads/tracking, and others have ads even when you pay (e.g. Cable TV). It's just not that simple.

<comment><USER49> You know we are a highly technical audience and YC companies can advertise jobs, etc. here, right? I think that post is right, and things like cable TV or Hulu are just squeezing some money out of their product before they pass it on.

<comment><USER48> OK, how are we Wikipedia products?

Advertising (users as products) and charging are just two characteristics that may appear in a business model together, or just one of them, or none, depending on its design. There's simply no rule that makes ¬paying ⇒ product an inevitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Did Facebook change something related to the use of Likes recently? They just managed to tick me off this morning. My nephew's like of a product showed up as an advert for me - and I'm sure he didn't know this was happening.

Between this and their social plugin (I've tried disabling this many times), I am a hair away from disabling my account.

</comment><comment><USER51> Facebook likes have been showing up on advertisements for years. The fact that they're in the news feed now is all that's new. I've mistaken a few of these ads for new posts from friends as well, but it became immediately apparent after my friend like Samsung USA for the 2nd time that it was simply an advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER52> I agree. They are going way to far. I don't care if they want to mislead people, but please don't do it on my behalf.

When I logged in to cancel "Ads shown by third parties" which you linked to, I had a new notification (normally reserved for my friends information) which was a Groupon of the Day. WTF? Seems like two sinking ships.

</comment><comment><USER53> With gmail you have a marketplace. Gmail might be nice, but email is a protocol and you can take your business elsewhere. Not so with facebook. They've built what's essentially treated as a protocol, but it's completely under their control. Clearly, this makes it rife for what we might perceive as abuse.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is an unfortunate title. It should read: "Facebook Pages: Why I don't like things anymore". There are going to be more than a few people who might have been on the fence about buying a Nest thermostat and will make a snap judgement based on this title.

<comment><USER55> Maybe they should stop advertising with Facebook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I learned recently that legally, "liking" something on Facebook is considered an endorsement of that product or service. I'm sure the law still needs to catch up to technology, but this news stopped all my "liking" activities.

<comment><USER57> What does it mean to "legally" endorse a product or service? What are the legal consequences of this? I've never heard of this concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've removed all my likes to try and clean up my news feed, though my facebook profile still says I still have 110 'likes' , I'm guessing those are websites without a facebook page and I've no idea how to remove those.

</comment><comment><USER59> this is why i only "like" something by consciously posting about it in my status via a link to product or article. i always found those "like" buttons to be completely moronic and entirely out of my control.

</comment><comment><USER60> businesses have recently been complaining about facebook forcing them to pay to reach their 'likers', but this is the flip side. I'm seeing more and more sponsored stories about things my friends like, and not seeing the updates from the pages i really do want to see. even in 'most recent' view, facebook fails to show me updates from the pages i have explicitly told it to put in my news feed. which means i'm going to get those updates by other means. which means i'm going to use facebook less.

</comment><comment><USER61> Facebook should offer an ad-free membership level for a monthly or yearly fee, or give people the option to ignore/hide "Likes" from showing up in their newsfeed.

<comment><USER62> I think they've figured out that you as a user is worth X amount more to advertisers than you're probably willing to pay a year. Would most people be willing to pay $100 a year if that is what you are worth to Facebook's advertisers?

<comment><USER63> People who have $100/year to drop on facebook are also people with enough disposable income to be worth advertising to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Great description of what really happens in these situations. Scary.</comment>


Show HN: Intro.js Hints - <AUTHOR> http://introjs.com/example/hint/index.html <comment><USER2> Good similar libs on github :

[https://github.com/zurb/joyride](https://github.com/zurb/joyride)

[https://github.com/heelhook/chardin.js](https://github.com/heelhook/chardin.js)

[https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch](https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch)

[https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap- tour](https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour)

[https://github.com/HubSpot/shepherd](https://github.com/HubSpot/shepherd)

[https://github.com/usablica/intro.js](https://github.com/usablica/intro.js)

Once I had a requirement and ended up trying nearly all of them and unfortunately, had to write my own (took about a day and a half) that accomplished the tour exactly the way I wanted. Off the top of my head, I can't recall what each of them missed but primary reason was that often they take off with a great experience and then the lead developer can't devote enough time to meet the diverse requirements of a huge community. The library ends up with a huge user base with lots of open issues, some critical to the user experience on the myriad of mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also a great library for onboarding purposes is Hopscotch [1]. It is allows you to create a interactive tour through the UI.

We are using it to introduce new users when launching the webapp the first time (Because having a 100% intuitive UI is a hard thing). We also made a study which showed us that using a onboarding mechansim really helps the user to get started and does not scare them away (which was a concern of some people).

[1] [https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch](https://github.com/linkedin/hopscotch)

<comment><USER4> Hopscotch is one of the few tour libraries that can jump to steps on a different page and (mostly) perform actions on behalf of the user.

<comment><USER3> It's also great that they have a simple, but extensible API to use custom actions to trigger the next step by e.g. a drag of a specific element.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool to see a project using Skeleton. Was disappointed when that project fizzled out once the creator left. It hit the sweet spot in CSS frameworks for me: small, un-opinionated and hard for people to tell you're using a framework (unlike Bootstrap which you can spot a mile away). Haven't found anything to replace it yet.

<comment><USER6> I've used Skeleton in some projects while I was contracting. I've moved on to Milligram.

<comment><USER7> I like how Milligram operates... very 'clean'. Link for everyone else: [https://milligram.github.io/](https://milligram.github.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an awesome library, and seems to be very vibrant on Github.

If you're looking for something commercial (and paying for something commercial) however, I'd probably recommend one of the step by step tutorial tools that allow you to build the walk through using a visual editor, and without having to add code for each individual walk through and tool tip.

This is one of those cases where I just want to add a short JS snippet to my site, and allow product / marketing to customize and fine tune the tutorials and on-boarding without developer involvement.

<comment><USER9> Can you recommend a commercial product that does this?

<comment><USER10> I'm not the parent, but was curious and did some digging. So far I've found this Quora post with a few options: [https://www.quora.com/What-tools-can-I- use-to-create-a-guide...](https://www.quora.com/What-tools-can-I-use-to- create-a-guided-tour-walkthrough-of-my-website)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used Skeleton in the past and loved it for the same reasons. I'm trying out Imperavi Kube for a new project and it's clean, minimalist, and easy to use. I'm on mobile, otherwise I'd find you a link, but I'd recommend you check it out.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is exactly what I need to quickly explain elements of my dashboards to new users! Alternatively, this could let me explain new elements as they are added over time. Perfect!

<comment><USER13> Be aware of the licensing though. It was MIT but as of March 9 the license file mentions having to purchase a license if used commercial. Seems contradictory with "to deal in the Software without restriction" part of the MIT license text.

<comment><USER14> Right, I didn't notice at first. [http://introjs.com/#commercial](http://introjs.com/#commercial)

Looks like if you use it as part of a commercial product, you have to pay the license.

<comment><USER5> Which is only fair IMO, open source developers have to eat too!

<comment><AUTHOR> ah thanks God! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neat! I was just looking for something like this. Good call out on the MIT license.

</comment><comment><USER16> Write an unintuitive UI and then plaster it with 'hints' \- great!

<comment><USER17> UI is hard... takes a lot of iteration to get right and even then... hints help IMO

<comment><AUTHOR> indeed.</comment></comment></comment>