HN, what do you think of my weekend project? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dream-home-rentals.com/

<comment><USER2> I think you should sanitize your input fields. Code Igniter has built in functions for XSS [http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user- guide/libraries/input.h...](http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user- guide/libraries/input.html).

$var = $this->input->post('some_data', TRUE);

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent advice. Major oversight here. Thanks, this is going in right now.

EDIT: I just changed this. Thanks again!</comment></comment>


Is Selenium Outdated for HTML5 Apps? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN Folks,
Is Selenium outdated for the new HTML5 apps? How do you get and test dynamically added Html components, I mean is it possible?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Not outdated. It reads from the live DOM and you can execute JS too.

Mozilla and some people on standards committees liked Selenium enough that WebDriver is now a formal standard.

Maybe there are better alternatives, but I haven't come across anything significantly better yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Typesafe releases Console for monitoring Akka applications - live demo - <AUTHOR> http://console-demo.typesafe.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately the error traces seem to be empty for the current errors. I'm quite interested in how they present these traces across networked nodes.

</comment><comment><USER2> Honestly, fairly useful as a general feeling of an Akka application, which tend to be a bit opaque.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gorgeous Interface. Not über-intuitive, but really gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now I really wish I used Akka instead of Jetlang...

</comment><comment><USER5> that's just beautiful</comment>


Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ <comment><USER2> I love how the writer is able to downplay all the issues regarding net neutrality.

Or how he's focusing on the carrier markets, instead of the broadband connections @ home. Because, there is no competition in the States when it comes to broadband connections. You can only choose one and it depends on where you live. How far-fetched is it to imagine that either Verizon or AT&T is implementing zero-rating for services like Netflix or some other service, basically urging people to lock-in on those services?

Anyway, it's exactly this attitude and mentality that requires net neutrality.

</comment><comment> adam-ff Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15798960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15798960)</comment>


Can Digg Keep Up with Facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_facebook_traffic_comparison.php <comment><USER2> First of all, this is an idiotic comparison. Digg and Facebook target different audiences, and even though Digg does have some 'social' aspects, you don't need to be registered to make use of Digg content. Not so with Facebook.

The comments bewildered me, too. Digg is hardly techie-biased anymore. Look at the front page of digg.com right now; I don't see much that is related to computing. The 'cool pics/videos' fad has taken it over like half of Reddit.</comment>


Ask HN: Do podcast ads depend on my IP address? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed some particularly well-targeted ads for some relatively local services in podcasts I listen to.
I've also had podcasts that go to commercial break, only to come right back to the program without actually advertising anything.  That'd be a weird editorial choice, if there's no actual ads.  I assume they just didn't sell the spot for whatever audience segment I fall into?
I don't consume podcasts through any app where I log in to anything, so it seems like it would be hard to build a reliable profile on me based on anything except things servers get when requests for the files are made.
So?  Could it be that the podcasts I listen to serve episodes that differ from listener to listener? <comment><USER2> Yes, many podcasts today do some type of dynamic ad insertion based on whatever data they can glean about you, such as your IP address.

</comment><comment> dan-robertson If you download a BBC podcast from an American IP it will probably contain ads. If you download from a British up it won't.</comment>


Google's Mobile Search Market Share: An Estimated, Whopping 98.29% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-mobile-search-market-share/

<comment><USER2> This makes complete sense — people who are capable of searching on their mobile device own a smartphone, people who own smartphones are either tech savvy or of a younger demographic (excuse my assumptions) but both of which are more likely to use Google.

<comment><USER3> Also, the two main smartphone platforms (iPhone and Android) have their default search engine set as Google.

<comment><USER4> I believe most (all?) BlackBerries default to Google also.

<comment><USER5> Depends on the carrier. Verizon took cash from Microsoft to set the default search on all their BlackBerries (and maybe other phones?) to Bing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Concurrency, State, and Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/9/13/concurrency-state-and-functional-programming.html <comment><USER2> I found this post to be somewhat disappointing. It doesn't really have much depth to it and the claims have little backing. It's not that I don't believe the claims, they have been made before with evidence to support them, by other people. It's that I don't really see how this adds anything to the discussion.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The author supports going outside of Clojure for larger scale processing, e.g. Hadoop. This is sensible, but it's some leap to call concurrency a fad.

It's likely that Clojure will target some other runtime (in the future). Concurrency primitives in Clojure (var, ref, atom, agent, future, promise etc.) are practical, elegant, and focused tools. Why work around them?

<comment><USER4> I am not calling concurrency a fad, I am calling the rush to try hot new concurrency primitives without understanding these basic tradeoffs a fad.

Clojure's concurrency primitives are just wrappers around the same java libs I mention in the post.

For locking, it just matters which code you depend on based on your need. If you need to deal with it yourself, using Clojure's STM is good, since Rich has done the work to wrap the locking. But if you just need a data structure with synchronized access, then you don't even need Clojure's STM. Similar arguments hold for Agents vs Executors.

I am not saying Clojure's concurrency primitives are bad, I am saying we need to understand the basics, and Clojure's primitves are not always necessary or the right solution.

<comment><USER2> > I am not saying Clojure's concurrency primitives are bad, I am saying we > need to understand the basics, and Clojure's primitves are not always > necessary or the right solution.

Your post seemed very light on actually discussing this point, which I think would have been appreciated. There are always a lot of trade-offs to be made in writing concurrent code. The shallowness of your post left me wondering why you made some of your choices, or if you even thought particularly hard about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't like this at all. I found the one-sentence format distracting and the article lacking a theme. It read more like a laundry list directly out of somebody's brain. What a strange style for an essay.

I freely admit bias though, since I wrote a functional article just this morning (shameless plug: [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/functional- td...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/functional-tdd.php))

I'm probably still ouching from watching it tank on the "new" page. Very sad experience, that. :)

It just doesn't seem like there is much here. Certainly not enough to warrant the votes it's getting. I must be missing something, because between the odd style and the lack of substance it doesn't seem to match up to the response from the community.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps this piece has a more engaging title than yours? It also has pictures. That makes the page nicer too look at--even if it would just be Sashimi and bore no relation to your content. Often it's also luck, whether your article makes it to the front page.

If you want to try again, just post your article under a different URL and re- submit at another time.

I guess if you do not do it too often, nobody will have anything against this practice. If you want to be ethical, just do a some work on your article, between each submit.

Nearly every piece can profit from rewriting anyway. Just as a suggestion, have a look at Haskell's QuickCheck and see how it applies to your argument. There's also a nice blog post about rolling your own window manager ([http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2007/05/17/roll-your-own- window...](http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2007/05/17/roll-your-own-window- manager-tracking-focus-with-a-zipper/)), that emphasizes using the right data structures to statically guarantee your invariants with the help of the compiler where possible instead of writing tests.

<comment><USER5> (excuse the meta) Nyah. It's not a big deal either way. What's so interesting/frustrating about the process is the degree of randomness involved. You spend five hours writing a story on something you think important and insightful, it tanks. You spend 30 minutes on a vapid rant, gets voted to the top. Go figure.

What I think it boils down to is emotional impact instead of writing quality or topic. Articles, titles and _authors_ that have the greatest emotional impact in with the audience during the first 45 minutes or so (the time it takes to sink off the new page) do well. Others not so much.

An interesting "feature" of the voting system is that stories that get voted up a lot in the first part of a 3-hour period stay on front longer than stories with similar vote counts that all occurred at the end of the 3-hour period. The number of people that like it isn't germane -- it's the degree of swiftness with which the upvotes occur. That means that if your article is a hit with 20 folks in the community, you'd better know that those 20 folks are online if you want others to see it. Little things like this probably lead to voting-ring-like behavior on the part of users. I know it certainly can be frustrating.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Shuts Down Patent Search Homepage, Picasa for Linux & More - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/20/spring-cleaning-google-shuts-down-patent-search-one-pass-google-related-more/

<comment><USER2> Why not link to the horse's mouth: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/spring-cleaning-in- sp...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/spring-cleaning-in-spring.html)

<comment><USER3> Maybe people notice that techcrunch articles get upvoted. Hence they submit TC articles (to get karma. humans love to have more than their fellow of anything: green beans, salt rocks, pieces of paper etc).

This can be addressed in two ways:

1) Randomly allow a subset of users to upvote article (like slashdot's moderation system).

2) Cap karma from articles.

Sorry if I'm massively mistaken and people don't get karma from article submissions.

<comment><USER4> I also wonder if people repost a different article/URL for the same news story, hoping their post will be the one to get upvoted.

<comment><USER5> You'd think so, but if you look at both the comments and submissions of "sdtransfer," the poster of this article, they don't seem like they'd be terribly hope-y.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At least they are integrating Patent Search into the core (which I think makes sense and happens to be something I like).

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess Google should make a point and release a NaCl Picasa version.

If I could grant to a NaCl app the right to read photos from USB attached cameras and a folder on disk with read/write rights then there wouldn't be a need for a dedicated Linux version.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this the sound of a company that has reached it's practical limit of growth?

<comment><USER9> When you utterly own the search marketing space, yeah, you do run up against a hard wall unless you can either get that market to grow, or you can weasel into another market.

Android doesn't seem to have made much of an impact to their profits. Their other web properties, like Google+, make Apple's legendarily empty "eWorld" look like a boomtown. It seems like of all their acquisitions, only YouTube has really changed what Google is.

Still, better to take some projects out back and...bury them...than to Yahoo!-ize yourself with thousands of semi-popular things you have to maintain in perpetuity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dropping Linux Picasa is tellingly lame.

<comment><USER10> Telling of what? How few people use it, or . . .?

<comment><USER11> Commitment to excellence.

<comment><USER10> I disagree that Linux as a supported platform is a significant indicator of excellence.

<comment><USER12> Support for all three platforms is a requirement for me (and most other developers I know) these days, it's one of the reasons why I haven't bought various standard tools including Photoshop... yet use Filezilla, Gimp, Sublime Text 2, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Clementine, etc.

<comment><USER13> Holy crap, Clementine is on Windows and I didn't even know it. In case anyone else needs it - [http://clementine- player.googlecode.com/files/ClementineSetu...](http://clementine- player.googlecode.com/files/ClementineSetup-1.0.1.exe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We need more open source cloud based software. The trouble with relying on services provided by companies and corporations is exactly this - they make no promise to do a hand-over should the service be discontinued.

</comment><comment><USER14> Dropping Picasa for Linux is quite okay. Since it's a lame wined one. I hate it. Having a good HTML5 version would fulfill my needs to does not need a app for that.

</comment><comment><USER15> One Pass shutdown is most interesting to me. It isn't old cruft that isn't interesting to Google anymore, it was a pretty bold year old forward looking project that launched with fanfare (mostly due to the in-app purchase controversy of time) and apparently just fell flat. Replacing it with a more Googley type of business like Customer Surveys is probably for the best, but seems like a retreat.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is anyone else surprised at how many rounds of closures Google seem to announce? I'm not sure why these were kept through the previous 2 culls.

</comment><comment><USER17>
      Google Sync for BlackBerry

I wonder if this is a subtle way to nudge BBM users towards Android.

<comment><USER18> Actually RIM has added a lot of the features of Google Sync into the core of the consumer-focused BIS service. (thus, Google Sync is less necessary.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was using most of them quite regularly. They are doing this so they all can focus on what ? Google+ , the shit that all going to do is wasting my time without helping me in anyway ? Google should change their motto to "Do not do stupid." with immediate effect.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Patent Search shutdown is a dud to me. I wish the dedicated undiluted space continued.

<comment><USER21> They didn't shut it down.

<comment><USER20> I forgot to add the word "homepage". They have merged it with the Google Search results. Probably a side effect of SPYD. Let me try that again.

> The Patent Search "homepage" shutdown is a dud to me. I wish the dedicated > undiluted space continued.

The voting of comments here represents a fact of life. In no time, you get downvoted than upvoted. "Negative" opinions prevail over positive ones. Never understood this mentality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What is the reason why Google is shutting down Patent Search and (they already shut down Uncle Sam)? I mean - does it really cost them a lot of money to keep these sites running but not update them? For search products like that they should at least make a google product archive to at least access some stuff that could be easily found via those search products even though they no longer update or provide support for them anymore.

They are going away from their motto of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Yes you can find patents via other means or get government info via other means but it's defeating the motto of making it universally accessible.

Google+ is ruining everything.

<comment><USER22> the reason why i said google+ is ruining everything is referring to how they are focusing on one thing and that thing is Google+ as per the convo Sergey had with Jobs about concentrating on one thing and stop turning into Microsoft.

<comment><USER23> And... they aren't shutting down Patent Search. Your rant is baseless.</comment></comment></comment>


Why roboticists are raving about Google's new robot - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/02/25/why-roboticists-are-raving-about-googles-new-robot/ <comment><USER2> Finally, things predicted in the 60's are coming true. Now I'm waiting for my flying car. Seriously though, this is awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any direct ad networks for gaming sites? - <AUTHOR>

I am running a new gamers network ( with approx 11k members, 80k uniques, 1m pageviews, 13 min duration ) and I'd like to switch to a direct advertiser.
I already tried BuySellAds and iSocket but they rejected us. The most likely reason: the site is relative new and went online just 2 months ago.
We have a lot great user content and even more media, but our Alexa, Compete or Google ranking doesn't exist yet or is just too bad at the moment ( only Quantcast got it almost right http://www.quantcast.com/legendsnet.com ).
Can anybody recommend me an alternative direct advertiser with a less strict publisher policy ? ( especially in terms of new sites )
I would be really grateful if someone could help me.
The site: http://www.legendsnet.com/
-max <comment><USER2> I don't the the answer to your question, but here is a pretty crappy graphic of some gaming networks I have bought traffic r

Here are a couple bookmarks I had that might work:

      http://cpmstar.com/
      http://www.ad4game.com/
      http://www.epicgameads.com/
      http://www.adengage.com/
      http://www.ad2games.com/
      http://www.inviziads.com/
      http://www.advertisegame.com/
      http://www.game-advertising-online.com/
      http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/10/get-in-game-with-adsense-for-games.html</comment>


The Early Early Stage - <AUTHOR> http://blog.keen.io/post/16663334473/the-early-early-stage

<comment><USER2> It's pretty hard to start a startup while you have full-time employment you're relatively happy with, both because of physical time constraints and reconciling the risk mentally.

In the past I felt exactly like these guys did: apply for incubators, which will provide both validation and financing, which makes a transition a lot less painful. It's one thing to tell your wife, "yeah so I quit my $125,000 job to work with Joe on our startup, which is really just a bunch of unreleased code at this point" as opposed to, "yeah so I quit my $150,000 to work with Joe on our startup, but we're in YC, which is like Harvard for startups, and we're getting over $150,000 in funding, and like half these companies raise venture capital really quickly after the program." Hell, it's a lot easier to _tell yourself_ that.

A few months ago I wrote a post about my experience interviewing at YC and getting rejected, and I mentioned how we didn't continue working on our idea, and a lot of people asked me why. And the most honest answer I could give was, "I felt it was too big of a risk to take off my golden handcuffs without Paul Graham's approval," which sounds kind of absurd but is the most plain explanation I can give.

Well it's been over a year since then and I've realized two main problems with that way of thinking. 1) All an incubator can really do is _amplify_ your ability to conceive of ideas and execute well on them. But if you can do both of those things well anyway, then you'll be successful regardless of acceptance or not. 2) If you refuse to embark on starting a startup without getting accepted into an incubator, then you're limiting yourself to "incubator-friendly" ideas, which is generally something that is consumer- facing and disruptive in some theoretically huge market (or eventual market) (e.g. AirBnb, Dropbox) or is a tool/platform that can improve the startup ecosystem of tools and platforms (which it seems like Keen.io is, if I understand their value prop on their home page correctly).

So congrats to the Keen.io for getting into TechStars, and I'm sure their product will be great, and they'll go on to be successful without having to sacrifice much more than going out to dinner a little less and downgrading their Netflix subscription. But it's very possible they were going to be successful anyway.

<comment><USER3> Just for context, I'm the author of the OP.

First, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I remember your post about your YC experiences, and it was great, especially since I was considering doing something like this and really identified with it. I think I probably would have quit my job anyways, but getting into an accelerator like TechStars really made it a no-brainer.

I'd like to raise the point that the idea you apply with doesn't matter a ton. It should be good enough to show that you're not stupid, but that's about it. We've already changed what we're working on significantly based on early customer development and discussions with the amazing TechStars mentors. It's actually been a little hard to convince myself that the reason we got accepted was like 90% team and only 10% idea (totally made up numbers, of course, but you get the drift).

I completely bought into the concept of an accelerator validating your idea, and that was really just kind of wrong (at least in our case).

Anyways, thanks again for the comment. Here's hoping we'll be as successful as you suggest. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds to me like you guys are more focused on getting into an incubator and less focused on starting a company. Maybe it's just the gist of the post, but you guys _do_ realize that this is, for lack of a better term, the 'real deal', right? Every choice you make has consequences, and spending so much effort focusing on incubators when instead you could be doing the "schleps" that pg talks about may be opportunity squandered when you have the time together with this idea as a priority.

Balance in all things. Incubators are surely helpful, but they surely should not be your _primary_ focus right now, and you're setting yourself up for failure if you are banking on getting into one. This _is_ a zero sum game, and putting creative energy into a YC application when it could be going into a product is a real choice, and I hope you guys are _aware_ it's a choice. I'm not saying it's the wrong one, but this post led me to feel you are looking at the goal of starting a company similar to getting into college. It is not. It is not a game of one of one or two big victories and resting on your laurels, but instead a game of many small ones (hopefully peppered with a few big ones as well :)) If you are focusing just on the big ones then you are doing it wrong and will likely join the 99% of those who do not make it. Incubators, funding, and so on are a means to an end not an end in itself. Remember that and carve a path that makes sense for _your company_ and _your team_ , not one that you think is in line with what everyone else is doing.

<comment><USER3> Fair comments, and completely accurate. But you're responding to a post that was focused 100% on what our experience was when applying to an accelerator. So yes, it's going to sound like we're only talking about that stuff and not everything else that matters more (like execution). That's not the full picture of us and what we're working towards. We'll have future posts that are (hopefully) interesting and aren't at all about the accelerator process.

FWIW, though, it's hard to overestimate the value of getting into a program like TechStars. Forget about the money (although it's awesome that we have enough runway that we won't have to raise immediately following demo day if we don't want to). It's the network and relationships and simply amazing people that we get to meet. Of course that's not enough, but it's crazy valuable. I know for sure that we're already more successful because of it.

Thanks for the comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really connected with this post, because my startup is also in this "early early stage". It's only been a month or two that we've actually taken our idea seriously, after coming to the realization that "woah, we could actually do this!"

Too many blogs like to focus in on what it's like in the "early stage" but not enough focus on that stage before you get funding, when everything looks much scarier and your idea feels like total shit. Hopefully this post will help many other startup founders to realize they're not alone. I've added this to my "suggested reading" list in my company, as I think my cofounders will appreciate it as much as I did.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations getting into TS Cloud. I can't wait to see all the amazing companies to come out of the program. Beware of "Mentor Whiplash", I hear it can be a real problem.

I've thought of quitting my job to start a business. I know it would give me the best chance of success. With that said moonlighting makes much more sense to me. It has much less risk and if the business fails I'll still have something to fall back on. Getting into YC and TS feels to me like winning the lottery. With acceptance rates around 2%-3% it doesn't seem like a realistic option.

<comment><USER3> "Mentor Whiplash" is real and has already been felt. Whether or not it will get worse remains to be seen. :)

Getting in to one of these things is a bit like winning the lottery, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try for it. Regardless, there have been successful businesses started with both the "fuck my job, I'm going to do this full-time" and the moonlighting approaches. Do what makes sense and feels right for you is all I can say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So happy for you guys!</comment>


AtomNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Drug Discovery - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02855 <comment><USER2> Thanks for the link! I answered some questions about our technique earlier ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9157777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9157777) ), which may help elucidate context.

<comment><USER3> Is there an open source implementation?

<comment><USER2> AutoDock Smina is referenced in the paper, and its source is available under GPLv2: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/smina/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/smina/)

If you're interested in open source for deep learning, there are a number of toolkits here: [http://deeplearning.net/software_links/](http://deeplearning.net/software_links/)</comment></comment></comment>


This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/g00//sf/style/wp/2016/05/25/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/ <comment><USER3> This article is quite touching, but so much of it is about one girl processing her grief for her mother. I was left wondering what sorts of things she would have used to occupy her time if she had been born in a different era and experienced the same loss.

</comment><comment><USER4> Insightful enough, but not all too surprising.

I'd be really interested in how these internet-centric lifestyles develop later on. I've always thought Gen Z has the potential to be the most intelligent generation alive simply due to the infinite access and more advanced aggregation of information. But does this come at the cost of dysfunction due to the bombardment of consumerism, narcissism and emotional isolation?

The feeling I get from this story is the daughter is very involved, nearly consumed by the game of social media. Does the infinite access to information provide them the wisdom they need to mature past it? or will it continue to consume them?

<comment><USER5> Being glued to a phone makes it more visible and potentially harder to escape, but I wonder if it really changes much.

Girls have always treated high school as a popularity contest far more than boys. If anything, I suspect systematising it might even help, as it would replace "I am afraid that I am not really cool enough" with "I can see that I'm not and I have a plan to fix it". The latter might _seem_ scary, but is it worse than silent angst and worrying? At least this girl is taking charge of her own popularity and learning how to shape her appearance from her peers, which in the absence of a mother might be the next best way to learn. I guess her dad isn't going to teach her much about female beauty techniques.

When I was a teenager I spent nearly all my free time on the computer, and when we got it, on the internet. It was only the fact that it tied up the phone line (and endless amounts of homework) that stopped me using it all the time. And of course my mother worried. She had very little visibility into what I was doing, it seemed to consume infinite amounts of time, and it was nothing like what kids in her day did. Plus back then there was a lot of fearmongering in the press about the (then new) internet.

You know what? I turned out fine. Nowadays she looks back on that period and realises she worried herself for nothing, heck she says she's actually embarrassed to tell other parents what her children are getting up to because it sounds like boasting.

The reason I spent so much time on the computer was simply that I lived in a very wet and rainy place far from parks, so playing outside wasn't really feasible, most of my friends lived too far away to just drop in on, and - <USER2> biggest reason - no matter how fondly adults today may remember them, traditional childs play activities were _boring_. There's only so much time you can spend on football even if you're sports mad.

In contrast the world of the computer had an almost limitless list of things to do, and many of them were very constructive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Generation Z? That's a new one to me. Does this mean the apocalypse is just around the corner, or do we go back to Generation A?

The Like button has a strange, understated power, that's for sure.

<comment><USER7> > Generation Z? That's a new one to me. Does this mean the apocalypse is just > around the corner, or do we go back to Generation A?

Perhaps this book would help answer your question: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to have my Bill Gates moment here, and say I seriously hope this turns out to be a fad. Doesn't seem healthy to depend on such a small concentration of companies for everything. Or a single device for that matter.</comment>


At Google, groups are key to the company's culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_18333328?source=email&nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> At 30,000 employees, they're the size of the town I grew up in and it doesn't surprise me that they're acting like one.</comment>


Is this goodbye to Lonely Planet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/22/lonely-planet-melbourne-staff <comment><USER2> No, at least not IMO: [http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=2...](http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=2312639&start=30)</comment>


Quantum Darwinism spotted in diamond spin - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-darwinism-spotted-in-diamond-spins/ <comment><USER2> Just another "X1 implies Y, X2 implies Y, X3 implies Y, ..., Xk implies Y; we observed Y; therefore X2" article about quantum interpretations.

<comment><USER3> Is there anyway to assign a reasonable conditional probability to those Xk's and recover some useful science?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The use of "darwinism" seems like another way of just saying "thermodynamics". I assume though that physicists are smarter than I, at least when it comes to physics, so can someone explain what else there might be to this than "local minima"?

</comment><comment><USER5> Any Darwinian theory should clearly explain the mechanism for selection.

The selection mechanism for quantum darwinism is usually said to be "those states that agree with classical mechanics". This seems like extreme circular reasoning when the goal of the theory is to explain why/how QM experiments result in classical observations.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not clear if they found the mechanism of this alleged evolution, or merely found behavior that suggests evolution is taking place.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10456](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10456)

</comment><comment><USER8> Can quantum Darwinism be used in the blockchain as a engagement service?

</comment><comment><USER9> What even is 'Darwinism'? Are diamonds reproducing and competing amongst themselves for scarce resources in a tragic Malthusian drama, leaving only the fit diamonds to survive? Is this how we account for the wide variety of diamond species that we see in the wild? Is this how the favored diamond races are preserved in their struggle for life?

<comment><USER10> A general notion of "universal Darwinism" exists, whereby any system that implements variation, selection, and retention is said to exhibit "Darwinism".

<comment><USER9> Ah I see. I now propose the theories of typing Darwinism, shopping Darwinism, snacking Darwinism, 'making up my mind' Darwinism, Darwinism Darwinism, 'picking my boogers' Darwinism, 'doing my homework' Darwinism, 'programming' Darwinism. We should come up with a Darwin award for all the different sorts of Darwin theories and the most Darwinian of them all.

<comment><USER11> What's the point you're trying to make here?

<comment><USER9> If everything is 'Darwinism,' what's the point of the theory? What does it tell us? What explanatory power does it have? What possibilities does it exclude?

Darwin's original theory was groundbreaking because it could explain how you can get a large variety of species from one or a few simple organisms. But, if all one has to do to have a brilliant insight is to prefix 'Darwinian' to any process of change, then it all seems exceedingly pointless. I can write an app where you give it a name, and it prefixes 'Darwinian' and now you have a brilliant insight. I can replace a whole host of researchers with a Python script. It just seems ridiculous.

<comment><USER12> > any process of change

The previous comment was fairly clear: it's not any process of change, it is evolution within a system that has mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity.

<comment><USER9> My point is that there are so many processes that fit under that characterization that it seems fairly meaningless to prefix "Darwinism". Plus, that something follows a process of variation, selection and heredity seems fairly uninformative. I still fail to see why it is considered such a breakthrough, as per all my tongue in cheek examples.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's meaningless; it's a tool or perspective that can be used to explain and predict observations in systems that possess certain characteristics.

A loose analogy could be made with e.g. systems that have an observed variable which responds linearly to an input. This applies to a very wide array of systems. The theory of linear dynamics was nevertheless an insightful breakthrough at the time, and it's still interesting to explore whether particular systems can be modeled effectively with it.

<comment><USER9> I agree with linear response systems (elec. eng. class), but what predictions can we make from this 'Darwinist' definition?

<comment><USER12> That's a well-posed question, and after some thought I think the answer is simply: those units of replication which are better adapted to surviving and replicating in their environment, will spread and thrive.

I understand that this seems like a tautology, but I think that is actually the first part of Darwin's genius. Once the model is understood, then the outcomes appear obvious, at least at small scales. The second part of the genius is to grasp how small changes can build up over immense time scales to produce a plethora of species large and small.

When it comes to "universal darwinism", the idea that first springs to mind is the theory of memetics, somewhat like cultural evolution via natural selection. A quick google suggests some movement is being made towards formalising this into a predictive science [0].

Also, I think that the explanatory power of a model can be just as helpful to us as the predictive power. For example the interplay of memetic and genetic selection gives satisfying explanations for behavioural phenomena that can be tough to accept on purely genetic grounds [1]. The existence of purely celibate positions of authority in many societies (shaman, priest, monk...) can be explained on the grounds that the "meme" defined by such a position frees up a lot of the host's energy. They no longer have to spend time and effort on maintaining a family or gathering food, and this energy can then be poured into spreading the meme to the next generation. I think you could even make a concrete prediction on similar grounds: there will continue to be strong groups forming around an idea of celibacy well into the future, such as is happening now with "incel" and "journey to purity" groups.

[0] [https://www.ies.be/files/metaspaper.pdf](https://www.ies.be/files/metaspaper.pdf)

[1] [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMGEN.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMGEN.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Evolution is learning, so this implies that learning in some form is intrinsic to matter and that the quantum->classical transition represents some kind of learning process, which is absolutely fascinating. I also think it has implications for the question of life's origins and perhaps supports a super- gradualist hypothesis in which life as we call it is merely an extreme expression of certain universal characteristics of matter. This doesn't necessarily imply really extreme ideas like panpsychism (the idea that consciousness in some sense is ubiquitous), but it doesn't rule them out either.

<comment><USER14> This is why they really shouldn't call it "Darwinism". I won't say it's completely certain you're wrong, but I think you're extracting way more meaning from the fuzzy term "Darwinism" than the mathematics of this concept justifies... like, _waaaay_ more meaning. It's possible this might end up there, but only via a lot more steps. On its own terms this is like talking about how important wave function collapse is because it shows how the universe is biased towards consciousness or how it must have wanted life... it isn't necessarily possible to completely eliminate the possibility in the most rigorous sense, but there's just a hair's breadth separating those phrases from outright word salad.</comment></comment>


Why Rebel Groups Love the Toyota Hilux - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/14/why-rebel-groups-love-the-toyota-hilux.html <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794419></comment>


Want Google without the input field? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/109828394194059139561/posts/dZXySuyxCcf

<comment><USER2> Still not on the linux version of chrome-dev.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had this feature for at least a month now on Chrome Canary for Mac. It's definitely useful but its still buggy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, makes sense to eliminate the input field, and save screen real-estate, mostly for smaller mobile devices.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely lovely way of saving space. But we're blurring the line between browser and content now, and this is going to confuse less technologically gifted people if not done properly.

Furthermore, are other sites able to use this feature as well?

I'm personally worried that the current trend of browsers deviating far from a "standard" look will create problems for those who are not as prone to tinkering as we are. For them, things seemingly disappear and (re-?)appear at random and apart from the back button and the address bar there's really not much in the way of consistency anymore.

Even Explorer windows in Windows do this by hiding the menu bar unless you press Alt. It's not intuitive; "our kind" is very much an exception with our ability to find these things after the fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's embarrassing that Chrome can't do things like address bar in full-screen. Another obvious problem is lack of tab overflow.

<comment><USER7> Chome does address bar perfectly fine in full-screen mode. <http://i.imgur.com/YOdp2gP.png>

Presentation mode (pictured in article) hide away all window chrome for... presentation

<comment><USER8> If I recall correctly, Opera did this in the best way (unsurprisingly): The URL bar in fullscreen is hidden until you move your mouse to the top, then it slides down, eliminating the need for separate fullscreen and presentation modes.

<comment><USER9> Firefox does that too, at least on Linux

(worst ever? the full screen functionality change in OS X Mountain Lion for those of us with more than one monitor: it blanks the second monitor for apps that uses the OS provided mechanism for full screen - at least some apps now "fake it" to avoid pissing off users).

<comment><USER10> (that full screen thing really is annoying)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The CIA is reportedly preparing for a major cyber attack against Russia - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/16/13294490/cia-cyber-attack-russia-dnc-obama-administration <comment><USER2> -CIA +NSA

The NSA would be the organization with the technical know-how to do this. The CIA could be involved, but is very unlikely to play a starring role in cyber- warfare.</comment>


Kubernetes clusters being hijacked to mine cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://blog.binaryedge.io/2018/12/06/kubernetes-being-hijacked-worldwide/ <comment><USER2> Ugh. I mean, I recently got in an argument if anything but a hard firewall could or should be exposed to a WAN interface on the internet and we kinda agreed to not agree for now.

But, popular services, on default ports, with default APIs enabled, without hard authentication on a WAN interface? That should be a paddling. That doesn't fly. Or, well it does, except not for the guy paying the power.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, kubernetes itself and most distributions are quite secure by default. So with kubernetes it's not the same as it was NoSQL databases that didn't have authentication that were bound to the internet.

I'm not familiar with enough distributions to know if there is a popular distribution that totally disabled authentication by default, but in my companies distribution, kubeadm clusters, and I suspect all managed clusters (GKE/EKS/AKS/etc), the vector outlined in the article would only work if an admin specifically disabled the authentication.

In gravity (my companies distribution), we even disable anonymous-auth, so someone would have to do real work to allow API access to the internet.

<comment><USER4> You will have to patch a critical vulnerability every year on production systems, no matter what language or who develops it.

Secure defaults are irrevalent if you pay attention to the news.

<comment><USER5> > You will have to patch a critical vulnerability every year on production > systems, no matter what language or who develops it.

Interesting. I've got a few openbsd boxes that do not have vulnerabilities that impact them nearly so often.

It turns out that if you practice defence in depth, the majority of security vulnerabilities in the news have no impact on you.

For example, on my openbsd boxes I have only a single user. I do not run any untrusted code. That means spectre/meltdown doesn't actually impact me because no one can run code which will perform such a timing attack.

There was a recent openbsd/Xorg security issue. I didn't have X installed, and even if I did since it's only a single-user server, it again wouldn't have impacted me (privilege escalation means nothing when everyone is effectively root in my threat model).

All vulnerabilities are not created equal, and with enough good practices it's possible to have boxes that are secure for years and years with no need for patches.

<comment><USER6> Yep. The bloated, overhyped and chruny mainstream crap needs updating all the time (and it kinda tends to break too). Build on that, and hope the updates get done before someone fires and exploit. That's defense in "pray and hope we're faster."

I'm not so concerned about my OpenBSD box with >800 days of uptime, which runs very limited and carefully selected services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Got in a pretty heated debate with a colleague once about this. We had a really great infrastructure setup with a VPN bastion host that would get you into our VPC. You couldn't reach any of our kube nodes externally. Your Google account was your VPN account. It was pretty solid.

When this engineer redid things they opted to go the public internet route where the master runs a public api and auth is done via a certificate. The logic here was so that external 3rd party stuff (CI) could control our master.

To my knowledge this setup is still running and chances are these machines are vulnerable to this issue.

Contrast to the prior setup where, immediately upon being offboarded from the company your VPN access became automatically terminated (thank you LDAP and Foxpass!)

<comment><USER8> Why is a web server's demand for a certificate different from a VPN server's demand for a certificate?

<comment><USER9> Complexity and publicity.

Complexity: Single purpose apps built with a very specific threat model in mind for a boring, established usecase tend to be more secure. K8s is a fast evolving labyrinth of complexity with contributions from thousands of people, very few of whom have a grasp on the whole codebase.

Publicity: the general Internet doesn't find your VPN server just by using your API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At least cryptocurrency has removed most of the creativity from script kiddies - there's so many more interesting things you could do than just mine coins.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, exactly. It's almost like a bounty for find a vuln. It seems to be a mostly harmless attack that doesn't cause global internet grief like a DDoS or something.

<comment><USER12> WannaCry's very public global ransom brought attention to a Monero mining botnet which was using the same exploit for weeks beforehand, it was making $40,000 per day. It made much more than WannaCry and its operators are still unknown and would have been able to cash out

Script kiddies are just annoying and their actions resulted in the patch killing that silent mining botnet as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is one of the side-effects of products having enormous hype in this industry.

Far too many people are adopting Docker/Kubernetes as they have been the hot new product for the last couple of years, often regardless of whether they are actually the best or most appropriate tool for the job.

A lot of the people who get sucked into the hype are often inexperienced programmers, devops or admin types who are in positions of power or influence in companies that they probably shouldn't be, IMHO.

As a result, they don't have the Linux or networking experience to be able to know when they are deploying these complex products securely or not, and they are putting their employers businesses at risk.

<comment><USER14> >A lot of the people who get sucked into the hype are often inexperienced programmers, devops or admin types who are in positions of power or influence in companies that they probably shouldn't be, IMHO.

I cannot agree more. Many times, I feel you da easily do away with ansible and terraform to setup VMs / docker. you dont quite need k8s. Just cuz K8s are cool.. people feel the need to use it.

<comment><USER15> It's more complicated that that. Whilst some people are probably jumping on kubernetes for the hype, there's a lot of things it makes really easy, especially for less experience teams.

For example:

\- You want to spin up ephemeral environments to test PRs end2end. Sure, create a namespace, deploy your charts and run your tests. You want to do that with ansible, sure you can, but it's harder.

\- You org is running apps via a multi-cloud and on-prem strategy? Okay, lets just write lots of tooling per cloud and another for on-prem, or we could abstract that away via kubernetes and only worry about tooling for kube itself.

\- You want to do have rolling-upgrades. Sure, you build them with ansible then, or you could just use kubes.

Further to that, kubernetes is guiding reasonble abstractions, seperating infrastructure from code. Sure, it comes with complexity, but so does most things when you start throwing in scaling and auto-recovery.

For example, deploy terraform from your laptop? The device you probably browse porn on has becomes an attack surface. Move this to Jenkins, the CI is the attack surface. Put your code on Bitbucket? Bitbucket and the Jenkinsfile becomes the attack surface. Pretty much everything we do has complexity and attack surface _problems_ and using a managed k8s service will allow you some easy wins so you can actually think about those other problems, and those solutions will work on all platforms you can run k8s on.

<comment><USER13> Can I ask because I'm genuinely interested - what on earth do you do for third-party applications (for eg. closed source) that have to be integrated into your environment that don't come pre-packaged in a convenient container?

Do you containerize these yourselves, whether or not the vendor says that will support that? Or does it get pushed to some other team that manages whole VM's/AWS instances that are not container hosts.

Or is this a scenario that just doesn't happen in your environment?

Genuinely curious.

Also:

> using a managed k8s service will allow you some easy wins so you can > actually think about those other problems, and those solutions will work on > all platforms you can run k8s on

None of which matters one jot, if one cannot properly manage ingress/egress filtering on one's API endpoints, or a reasonable level of password/credential security. One will be used for cryptomining or worse, as per the fine article.

In that instance, one needs to go back and get some basic UNIX/Linux/network and security training before one starts playing with complicated software on publicly connected clouds. Or hire some people who actually know what they are doing with respect to that.

<comment><USER15> > Can I ask because I'm genuinely interested - what on earth do you do for > third-party applications (for eg. closed source) that have to be integrated > into your environment that don't come pre-packaged in a convenient > container?

Depends what it is. I've taken a number of apps and wrapped them into docker containers and then written a helm chart. Some orgs get a bit skittish over "vendor support" but this usually only matters when they think it's a key product.

The point is, once you have a fleet, you should manage everything the same. If you're off building other pet services, you're going to have capacity problems.

> None of which matters one jot, if one cannot properly manage ingress/egress > filtering on one's API endpoints, or a reasonable level of > password/credential security. One will be used for cryptomining or worse, as > per the fine article.

I mean sure, but I did say use a managed service, which will come with auth. Similarly I wouldn't recommend you host services on any cloud or network facing the public, without a professional involved.

For example AWS is easy to get wrong all the same. One of my current client is busy hiring developers with no experience to put services on AWS, and they came up with no encryption, no auth, no monitoring, misconfigured IAM. What's really the difference between that and kube?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> CTO Binaryedge here. For those wondering, We have detected more than 15k Kubernetes APIs with Auth. This post focuses on ~1.5k found without Auth, that are fully open.

It's not just a Kubernetes Problem. Like many have posted, many databases, other types of clusters, shares, are accessible without Auth for those that know how to look for them (not that hard now days), mainly malicious actors.

</comment><comment><USER16> JSON file is still available ([http://22.214.171.124:8220/222.json](http://126.96.36.199:8220/222.json))

<comment><USER12> > "algo": "cryptonight",

Nice, Monero mining

Cryptocurrencies makes the bug bounty market A LOT more efficient than companies, legislation or HackerOne ever could.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Heading continued: "... thieves make off with $4.50"

</comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone else a little tired of "X used to mine crypto" stories?

Yes - if it has a CPU and access to the public internet, someone will hack it and make it mine "cypto". Let's stop pretending we aren't aware that the internet of things exists and writing breathless stories every time a toaster, router, or adult toy starts churning out Monero.

<comment><USER19> This is an important vulnerability in widely-used software. Crypto is relevant because the inherent design of crypto makes hacks like this more profitable, but it's not the main thing about the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, the main story is Kubernetes being exploited in the wild and in large numbers, Crypto mining is just one of the "attacks" tacking place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is kubernetes a mongodb of orchestrators?

</comment><comment><USER21> These guys are amazing. They have a lot of data and an excellent app with a lot of potential!</comment>


Duff's Device - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device <comment><USER2> Duff on his Device: [http://www.lysator.liu.se/(nobg)/c/duffs- device.html](http://www.lysator.liu.se/\(nobg\)/c/duffs-device.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Duff's device can be used as a test of familiarity with good old unstructured way of procedural programming. If you find it weird, you don't get it. More practice needed.</comment>


Our Aversion to A/B Testing on Humans Is Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/our-aversion-to-ab-testing-on-humans-is-dangerous <comment><USER2> Were people freaked out by Facebook's tests because "omg tests", or were they freaked out because Facebook made some people's lives worse ("slightly"), manipulated emotions and is generally not a trustworthy company?

I suspect that people feel very differently about A/B tests depending on what's tested, the way it is tested (negative impacts of the test?) and who is testing it (aka "is this to improve lives? or is it to better manipulate me into spending more time on FB?")</comment>


Why Digg Lost #1 Spot to Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://zurb.us/eVMBdu

<comment><USER2> Digg lost to Reddit because they thought you could have a community-driven site which sidesteps the community to cater to advertisers.

So the community left. And felt so betrayed, they salted the earth behind them.

<comment><USER3> Until Reddit posts a decent profit it's not clear either of them really 'won' is it?

Digg tried to monetize and drove away their users. I'm not sure Reddit has really tried to monetize as much yet apart from their 'donate' thing.

<comment><USER4> I really don't think it's the monetization that drove people away. I left because I found the content to be increasingly bland, repetitive, and irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> Try subscribing to /r/BestOf or /r/IAMA. Some of the more non-bland/repetitive stuff comes up there. Though whether it's relevant depends on your individual measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People keep thinking that Digg lost to Reddit because of v4. This is flat out wrong. Reddit had passed Digg in most metrics months before the redesign. It had been steadily gaining users for years, whereas Digg had been steadily losing them since at least January.

Personally, I think the subreddit system did its job. It was put in place so the site could scale without losing its community feel, and I think it's done that admirably. I've long since removed most of the major subreddits from my frontpage, added a bunch that interest me, and now it feels like a fairly small site that's perfectly tailored to my interests and sensibilities.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. Originally, everyone wanted subreddits to be like tags, myself included. But overtime I've realized how awesome subreddits are (even though it is a pain to have multiple subreddits covering the same topic). But now that I've subscribed to some wonderful subreddits, I love my personal reddit experience (/r/doctorwho, /r/askscience, /r/linguistics, /r/skeptic).

Everyone talks about having a personalized experience on the internet, from Netflix & Amazon's recommendations to customized dashboards but nobody has got it right except for Reddit. When I go to reddit.com homepage, I only see what I want and if I don't like a subreddit, I remove it from my list. I don't ever feel like reddit is going down the hill or that the olden days were better. It really is a community of communities.

<comment><USER8> Making the same point a different way- A lot of sites don't really have a compelling reason to login, except that you're forced to login before you can comment. With reddit, I want to login- to see more than the default frontpage, to see replies, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to enjoy listening to This Week in Tech until they started focusing on Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. I still listen because I genuinely like Leo Laporte's presentation and personality. However, I am disappointed with him and tech journalism in general in how they covered Digg's downfall. They really didn't cover it at all. I really think they turned a blind eye, hoping that things would bounce back because they apparently gained so much traffic from Digg. I understand Digg still gets decent traffic so maybe they just don't want to make things worse.

To me it seemed to be a big story. Kevin Rose was on TWiT a couple episodes ago and they hardly mentioned Digg's problems. Journalism indeed.

<comment><USER10> Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose worked together on The Screen Savers many moons ago, they're probably friends at this point.

<comment><USER11> That's an understatement: Leo effectively _discovered_ Kevin. I'd bet that Kevin asks Leo to be godfather to his first-born child.

I remember listening to the TWIT episodes around the Digg V4 fracas, and I thought Leo made it very clear that he would be unable to cover the story without bias.

Also, TWIT is an _opinion_ show by its very nature. It's the tech equivalent to an OpEd page in a newspaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone written a good post-mortem of the Digg v4 debacle yet? An old fashioned expose built on interviews with the people involved, I reckon there's a lot of lessons around building and maintaining a community in there. These "Top X reasons this happened" posts can not do this subject justice.

<comment><USER13> I think you'd need to wait for the people involved to leave their jobs. I'm not sure Adelson has shown too much willingness in talking either. There's not a lot to gain from it.

<comment><USER14> There really is an interesting post-mortem to be had, but I'm just not sure you're going to be able to interview employees to get it. The most candid talks happen between employees in IM conversations and over beers, and likely won't be hashed out online.

I loved my time at Digg. I worked on some great things, learned a ton, and yes, came out with some cautionary tales that will serve me well through my career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Digg started out for me (a long time ago) as a place where I could "discover" the "stuff" that interested me with a minimum amount of noise from the stuff that didn't. Eventually though, it became broader in it's appeal and my own private little corner of discovery became infested with memes, lolcats and motivational lolsters. I was tiring of Digg by this point and the redesign simply made it easy for me to jump ship. Then I found Hacker News and I couldn't be fucking happier. Void filled.

Digg isn't losing to Reddit, the market for that kind of site is shattering into millions of tiny little peices. Hacker News is one of those tiny little pieces. Stack Overflow is another.

</comment><comment><USER16> That was a bit hand-wavy. The basic thesis seems to be that Digg asked the wrong questions. Slow down champ, don't get too specific.

<comment><USER8> And comments Rose made defending the design after the fact are going to try and spin a positive light. That's not "misinterpreting the results". Internal discussions may have been very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Digg lost when it became Reddit's front page. Pure garbage.

Reddit won when they diversified their front page into groups. I rarely visit the front page now, only programming, coding, webdev, python and javascript groups.

Noise levels were reduced almost to zero.

</comment><comment><USER18> They lost because they failed to understand what problem they were solving and redesigned the whole system (and site)which targeted to solve some problem that they couldn't.

Why users went their was some games, some content and personal communities and power-play (that's my view of it, it could be different) and then they tried to make it user centered like twitter - which solves entirely different problem.

Now if I can't do what I used your site for, why would I use it anymore?

</comment><comment><USER19> digg was losing to reddit well before all of that. It is actually why I think they took such a huge (and in hindsight stupid) risk with the design. The way they implemented the new design and how they reacted to users frustration that was the last straw.

I honestly think whoever was in charge got pressured and acted with money and greed in mind instead of the actual users. Karma is a bitch.

</comment><comment><USER20> Duplicate:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009244>

1 comment there.

</comment><comment><USER21> hmmm... Compete.com says that while Digg lost 17%, reddit gains only 2.6%

</comment><comment><USER22> 'cause they took a big fat shiaat on their users. nuff said.</comment>


A tube map of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=internet-tube <comment><USER2> Why do I need Javascript to display a simple image? Here is the direct link:

[http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/Int...](http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/InternetTube.png)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the sanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: This is the first time I've noticed a website hijack the Page Up/Down keys to navigate between articles. This is stupid. I can't imagine anyone equating Page Down (the universal key for "scroll down a view") to "Next Article".

It's almost as annoying as "swipe left/right to navigate between articles". I'm never going to want to do that. I'll rarely click a next article link. But with the swipe/tap to navigate thing, I'm terrified to touch my screen in case the site I'm on behaves in some non-standard, ridiculous way.

<comment><USER5> I strongly agree; it's a nasty antifeature. It might be tolerable if there was no vertical scrollbar and the page loaded immediately, but there is and it doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we're being honest, [almost?] every developed nation should have the surveillance badge; pretending otherwise is remarkably naive.

<comment><USER7> At least Britain should also have censorship too. Maybe imprisonment too after we jailed people for inciting riots, but that's certainly not comparable to some others. Also it was the FBI that shut down Megaupload, should we consider that US-sponsored censorship that just happened to affect the rest of us?

Realistically, all 3 - surveillance, censorship and imprisonment are way too nuanced for such a simplified diagram. Trying to fit them in was probably a mistake IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why Sweden is not listed as a surveillance country. Also the connections to Sweden looks odd since I think there are direct cables to the UK for instance.

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Establis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defence_Radio_Establishment_\(Sweden\)#Mass_surveillance)

<comment><USER9> Mistake? Oversight? Not being listed as one in whatever source document that was used to create this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Poland-Denmark-Norway-Iceland-Sweden region seems incorrect. Also I'm not sure how to read Finland-Estonia-Russia or Cyprus-Israel-Turkey sections, the map would be clearer if the splits happened only in nodes (ie countries) and not in-between.

Overall the map seems hugely simplified wrt Europe, which I believe to be far more interconnected. If simplification is desired then imho it would almost be better to just bunch all of Europe as single node

<comment><USER11> I agree, I know for a fact that Denmark has several cables going to Sweden, of course, it's the direct link from main land Europe to Sweden and Norway

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The original is cooler. [http://cablemap.info/](http://cablemap.info/)

<comment><USER13> I disagree. While the original is far more comprehensive and interactive, this map is a superior visual summary for the same reason the original London tube map was so revolutionary - it allows you to see the layout of the network without geography getting in the way (not an obvious thing to do at the time). I for one, despite having looked at many such cable maps, have never managed to grasp the actual topology of the internet.

Here's a pre-schematic London tube map:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Tube_map_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Tube_map_1908-2.jpg)

<comment><USER14> > Here's a pre-schematic London tube map:

That seems...fine? It's easily readable with all the stops clearly labeled, and you can see exactly where in London they are.

It could of course be cleaned up in a modern version, but even as-is it seems quite useful.

<comment><USER15> That map does seem pretty useful, it's certainly easier to figure out if it's quicker to walk somewhere(sometimes what looks like a long route on the tube can actually be a 10/15 min walk). Bear in mind that there's far more information on the modern map though. There's additional tube lines (e.g. jubilee, victoria, and the whole DLR) and it covers a far greater area of London.

<comment><USER16> Tube map with walking lines:

[http://commutingexpert.com/underground-overground- wandering-...](http://commutingexpert.com/underground-overground-wandering- free/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blown away! Any idea why Brazil is the 2nd largest user of Twitter and has such a huge geo footprint? Was not expecting that, also Indonesia being 3rd is crazy as well.

[http://i.imgur.com/ZlPSuAB.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZlPSuAB.png)

<comment><USER18> Indonesia currently have a very big "relationship" with twitter as more people are getting smartphones everyday.

And getting stuck in traffic would contribute to a lot of tweeting. FYI, Indonesian more people access YouTube from phones than other countries compared to the pc web version, at least in South East Asia.

<comment><USER18> wait too much word. I mean compared to other countries, a bigger portion of Indonesian people access YouTube through their phones than "traditional" computers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having recently moved to Sydney from London, I was shocked that it cost more here for a 16mbit ADSL connection with a 200GB limit, than it did for an unlimited 120mbit cable connection at home. Upload speed is horrendous.

This map makes it patently clear why!

</comment><comment><USER10> Hmph. I tried to draw something similar based on [http://www.submarinecablemap.com](http://www.submarinecablemap.com) data, but graphviz is uncooperative. Here is a gist of my dot-file if someone is interested in trying their luck: [https://gist.github.com/zokier/9963061](https://gist.github.com/zokier/9963061)

I made the assumption that submarine cables are bus-like topologically, ie all nodes can communicate with all other nodes connected to that cable.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of missing censorship warnings there... see: USA, UK, all the middle east, most of western Europe...

<comment><AUTHOR> The pages says that it was based the the "Enemies of the Internet" report from Reporters Without Borders[1].

There are plenty of issues with internet freedom in the USA, UK and Western Europe but I don't think they're on the same scale. I'm happy to criticise the government from my UK connection[2]. Would you want to do the same from a Chinese, Syrian or Saudi ISP?

[1] Probably [http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/](http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/) , but the list of countries looks clearer in their 2013 report [http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/20...](http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2013/03/enemies-of-the-internet_2013.pdf) [2] David Cameron sucks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So this is an interesting visualization, but not very helpful if you want to understand how data flows on the internet.

As an example, referring to the list of internet exchanges [1], the 1st and 2nd largest data flows on the internet (through the main German and Dutch exchanges) now seem to happen in an isolated tube segment. This of course implies there are a quite a few other tubes that are more important than the tubes displayed here if you want to understand the data flows.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_poin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm very surprised at some stances taken on this map. Only a handful of countries have the censorship badge, whereas reports globally indicate otherwise... I'm thinking of Turkey, but also South Korea, and others...

</comment><comment><USER22> Great. Would it be possible to add interactivity to this map.

E.g. I am now in China, checking some website hosted in France. Can it tell me the usual routes? Could it trace route real time and show me which one was chosen?

</comment><comment><USER23> Slightly off topic, but wow there are a lot of really cool info-maps on this page. Really enjoyed reading through [http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=the- world-through-the-ey...](http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=the-world- through-the-eyes-of-a-search-algorithm)

</comment><comment><USER24> This whole slideshow was too pro US for my taste, academia everywhere seemed too big there in comparison because all other countries where chopped up in such small pieces. The only fair comparison was the # of top ranked school in the world, where actual continents where being compared.

</comment><comment><USER25> Which country abbreviations are these?

(Pseudo-)Edit: Looks like ISO 3166-1 alpha-3. I wonder why I don't see it more.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, you really wouldn't guess from looking at this map that Lithuania has some of the best fibre infrastructure in the world, and the fastest upload/download speeds per dollar (or litas, in this case) in the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't get the surveillance icons part. Technically every country should have that eye thing because, so we've been told, the NSA can vacuum up every bit out on every wire.

<comment><USER28> It's based on whether the government of the country spies on its own domestic network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a much better version without the inconsistent editorializing: [http://www.submarinecablemap.com/](http://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> reminds of the ol' Web Trend Map [http://cloudfront4.ia.net/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/wtm4-fi...](http://cloudfront4.ia.net/wp- content/uploads/2009/07/wtm4-final.png)

</comment><comment><USER31> skeptical Israel is not watching the internet

</comment><comment><USER32> where the hell is Czech Republic?

<comment><USER33> We will have to conquer some land with access to the sea to appear on a map of submarine internet cables, I'm afraid ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> no censorship in turkey? fun!</comment>


Searching for Coronavirus inhibitors: Rapid screening and open data - <AUTHOR> https://www.diamond.ac.uk/covid-19/for-scientists/progress-highlights.html <comment><AUTHOR> Twitter thread with more explanation: [https://twitter.com/MartinWalshDLS/status/123635508358517964...](https://twitter.com/MartinWalshDLS/status/1236355083585179648)

An unrelated paper describing an inhibitor: [https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30229-4](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(20\)30229-4)</comment>