Sometimes, a Greener Grid Means a 40k% Spike in Power Prices - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-26/sometimes-a-greener-grid-means-a-40-000-spike-in-power-prices <comment><USER2> This is energy industry FUD

In Australia the complete opposite happens. Extremely hot days cause coal and gas plants to fail [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/what-h...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/what- happened-to-our-electricity-system-in-the-heat-coal-and-gas-plants-failed)

Whereas renewables have been causing power prices to occasionally fall to $0. [https://reneweconomy.com.au/electricity-prices-across-the- gr...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/electricity-prices-across-the-grid-fall-to- zero-as-renewables-reach-44-share-77635/)

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you are talking about. Seems like prices are high in Australia: [https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2018/jul/01/austr...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2018/jul/01/australias-high-electricity-prices-the-new-normal-report- says)

It is pretty much basic physics and math:

1\. Power supply must balance power consumption. 2\. No one wants blackouts. 3\. Intermittent power sources must be backed up by non-intermittent power sources. 4\. You have to pay for the intermittent power generation as well as the backup power generation. 5\. Cost of providing power goes up because your capitol costs have increased.

<comment><USER4> I can't make sense of the sequence you've laid out but what do does capital cost have to do with daily (or even momentary) fluctuations in price?

Also, energy prices can be higher on average than elsewhere and dip to zero in some circumstances.

<comment><USER5> To deal with the inherent fluctuations in renewable energy sources, you have 2 options: 1) Storage, and right now while there is a lot of R&D into large- scale energy storage, there aren't really any great solutions yet, and 2) Non- renewable backup, e.g. natural gas plants. Since it's easy to have cloudy or windless conditions for days or weeks on end, your backup plants basically need to be able to run at full capacity if you want to prevent blackouts.

Thus, with renewable sources, you need to have the capital investments of both the renewable plant and the backup plant(s).

<comment><USER4> This does not answer my question.

The identifying characteristic of capital cost is: does not change over small time intervals, it is fixed up front and amortized over the lifetime of the asset.

This article and OP are talking about price spikes which are a symptom of short term (days, hours, minutes) market dynamics.

The reason that prices spike has nothing to do with capital cost and everything to do with short term demand/supply fluctuations.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. You were focused on the short term spikes and I jumped to the larger issue of a reliable grid that had backup power.

The connection in my mind is that if you shift your mix of generation plants towards renewables then you have less ability to respond to outages of _any_ kind. Could be cloudy days, windless days, failed transmission lines, and so on.

The advantage of a coal/gas/hydro/nuclear plants is that you can control the amount of power they are producing. That isn't true with wind/solar. You certainly can't turn them up and I think (but I'm not sure) it is difficult to shed power that they generate (i.e. turn them down).

Those price spikes are last ditch attempts to purchase power to meet demand before moving to brown/blackouts. Just another side-effect of not having an appropriate mix of generation capacity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The road to a world powered by renewable energy is littered with unintended consequences"

Yes, entirely unlike a world powered buy fossil fuels, which has provided no surprises whatsoever and continues to go off without a hitch.

<comment><USER7> idk, the consequences have really only been a surprise to people who are willfully ignorant. Can't argue the going off without a hitch though.

edit: I interpreted the comment as sarcastic, and responded to the opposite of the explicit as implied by the sarcastic comment. Kind of forgot that it was written that way and thus that it could be interpreted to mean I might be saying it has gone off without a hitch.

<comment><USER8> mmmm lead

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, renewable energy like wind and solar are intermittent, so we will need to invest (a lot) more into energy storage. So far storage has been expensive and need to drop a lot, so it can reach mainstream [1].

[1] [https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/08/12/new-us-study-finds- re...](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/08/12/new-us-study-finds-renewable- energy-storage-costs-need-to-drop-90/)

<comment><USER10> Good news

[https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a- surpris...](https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly- efficient-way-to-store-energy/)

<comment><USER11> 1\. The energy overhead seems quite significant - as the concrete barrels don't really drop. 2\. What guarantees non-collapse in case of winds (and ignoring floods)? 3\. Does this really scale? I mean, concrete is more dense than water, but I think it's only... what, twice the density?

<comment><USER12> Not the person you responded to, but you correctly identified some of the serious flaws in this idea. They claim to be using commercially available crane technology, but existing cranes are generally not designed to operate in high winds, so they seem like a poor match for wind energy. According to [0] tower cranes are typically limited to operating in wind speeds of 20m/s or less, where as wind turbines[1] top out at ~35m/s. That would mean when the turbines are at peak production (i.e, when you want to be 'charging' your storage) wind speeds would be too high for co-located concrete block storage to work.

The design also seems to have quite poor power density; their website[2] shows a single tower in front of fields of turbines, but they only quote a power output of 4-8MW - the equivalent of 1-2 large turbines - so in reality you'd need dozens of them for a single installation.

[0] [https://www.cranes.org.nz/uploads/2/0/5/7/20572552/wind4.pdf](https://www.cranes.org.nz/uploads/2/0/5/7/20572552/wind4.pdf) [1] [https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien- Portal/bro...](https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien- Portal/broschueren/pdf/EC_Datenblaetter_WEA_en_052019.pdf) [2] [https://energyvault.com/](https://energyvault.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes, a greener grid means you will be struck by lightning. It's true! If the power cables move from one place to another, a lightning strike could hit you instead of some power cables.

Also, sometimes a greener grid means you will fail to win the lottery. A news item about the grid may distract you from putting down the correct numbers!

</comment><comment><USER13> IIRC the 40% renewables in California only work because we can page from British Columbia's hydro reserves when we have a shortfall and then sell it back for cheap to let them recover.

I'm not sure you can go much higher right now without building more dams or retrofitting more of them for pumped storage and there's been enough opposition to recent hydro expansions to make it seem nonviable for the path to 100.

<comment><USER14> Renewables in CA are difficult because when the sun sets, electricity demand is high, but there's no source of solar power to the west.

(And coastal wind in CA is hard since the costal shelf drops much deeper than on the East Coast.)

<comment><USER15> Why would it be more during night? It's much cooler at night compared to the day when AC is used at most buildings.

<comment><USER16> The solar ramp-down is faster than the AC ramp-down. If you have a dumb thermostat, it runs the AC a fraction of the time which is a function of the outside temperature. However, the temperature stays elevated some hours after sunset, but the solar supply drops off quickly some hours before sunset. Solar supply is pretty well matched to AC demand except for a big mismatch a few hours around sunset.

Consider California. Currently, this mismatch is taken up by fossil fuel plants and imports, but the solar demand drops off so fast that they have real difficulty in ramping up as needed. Batteries are a major part of the solution, but another part is improved transmission of wind from states to the east. This will cost less than you might think.

California might use 800GWh daily; and yes, installing 800GWh of battery capacity would be prohibitively expensive. However, the wind picks up in the evening just a few hours after the sun goes down, so the batteries really just need to shift some excess power from midday to the evening. When I last calculated this, the additional transmission + batteries would cost around $40 billion.

Interestingly, smart thermostats can make this worse: devices with a home/away mode allow the house to warm up when no one is inside because the owner doesn't want to pay for cooling that they won't enjoy. However, as all of these owners return home after work and school, this creates a demand spike; also, the AC units on these houses, which have been allowed to warm up, now need to run far longer into the evening. Really, the home/away feature is a little bit of a hack: the real goal is to minimize cost with some constraints on the temperature, and the utility ought to pay owners to shift their demand forward from evening to midday. This is like getting paid to store energy temporarily.

So some combination of demand shifting---either with smart-er thermostats or batteries---adding other generation sources like wind, and some additional transmission, mean that California really can get to 100%. It will not be free, but it seems like the cost is less than $100 billion.

Now in Texas, the situation is somewhat reversed. There is too much wind generation, and not enough solar, but the upshot is similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't some of this due to Texas' Amish approach to the national grids? What I mean by that is that Texas has little interconnection with the rest of the country. Like the Amish, they mostly only use electricity they make themselves [1].

Unlike most of the rest of the country, this means that when demand is much higher than local capacity they can't import from other states, and when demand is lower than capacity they can't export the excess. So they get big price swings.

[1] It's largely a myth that the Amish do not use electricity. What the Amish avoid is tying their infrastructure too closely to the outside. Tying into the grid would be too close, but they generally are OK with electricity generated locally by solar panels, windmills, or gas powered generators.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/zKUak](http://archive.is/zKUak)

<comment><USER19> thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Clean energy advocates point to batteries as a solution to renewables' > intermittent nature

Not just batteries, but an efficient grid that uses all the resources in an optimal manner. This was always the goal in creating microgrids, to be able to not rely on the main grid unless required, and when required the main grid would be able to perhaps use another microgrid's resources.

<comment><USER21> I'm pretty sure, the conditions that would lead one's switch to main grid would be similar to everyone resulting overloading the main grid which pretty much the article is alluding to. It matter diddly squat if I save 5c an hour if I have to pay $1000 / hour during over load

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Low tech magazine has a good writeup on energy stability and security as it relates to green energy: [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping- some-of-th...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the- lights-on-redefining-energy-security.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> That's a pretty big incentive to try and bring in new sources of greener power, isn't it?

<comment><USER24> It's also a great incentive to upgrade your infrastructure and upgrade buildings. I'm noticing a lot of office buildings in my area have switched to white rubber roof seals instead of black asphalt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> sound like texas is doing it wrong tbh</comment>


First public release of the Gosu programming language for the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://gosu-lang.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> As a bit of background, Gosu is based on the GScript language that Guidewire have been using for a number of years to build their Insurance application suite, so it has been proven in the development of non-trivial applications and the implementation should be more mature than a 0.7 version number might suggest.

<comment><USER2> And it's good advertising for them.

I contacted Guidewire thanks to their blog posts here: <http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/> and AKeefer's posts here at HN.

Unfortunately for them (and me) my higher-ups at the insurance company I work for are clueless and stubborn and decided to go for a reinvent-the-wheel approach at three times the cost (our current insurance solution is based on Sun's Forte4GL <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL> which, while good at the time, has been abandoned many years ago, and has no support or good IDE) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amusingly "not lisp" is a feature on their comparison matrix.

<comment><USER4> I found it a subtle admission of fault, because: 1) It's impossible for people who know Lisp to design a language that isn't Lisp(y). 2) You can't be a serious language designer without knowing Lisp, well.

Because of #1 and #2, the author wants to align himself with the amateur school of successful language design (the people responsible for most stuff that comes pre-installed in your Redhat box.) and distances himself from egg- heads and language purists, and their potential criticism.

<comment><USER5> _1) It's impossible for people who know Lisp to design a language that isn't Lisp(y). 2) You can't be a serious language designer without knowing Lisp, well._

Judging by the number of great languages that are not at all lispy, at least one of these is false.

<comment><USER4> Concrete instances please! :-)

I specifically said "amateur school of successful language design".

"Great" is subjective, but nearly all ground-breaking languages invented after Lisp are all Lisp-like (don't look at syntax.)

Industrial, imperative languages are nearly always "designed" on a whim. They're all incremental improvements over Algol, and they're probably what you're talking about if you're of the great majority of the programmers. As of late, they're more Lispy than you can imagine.

Except for a specific school of Lex & Yacc languages out of New Jersey, the great majority of professionally designed languages (i.e. by people with an appreciation for formal language design and semantics) have been Lispy and functional; characterized by clean minimal core, well specified semantics, even proven, and self-hosted implementation.

Just to throw the discussion a bone and offer some perspective; I consider ActionScript 3 "Lispy", but not AWK or C++.

<comment><USER6> How about K? It's a functional, "clean minimal core" APL with ragged arrays and lambdas. Lisp-influenced, but much less Lispy than one would expect if it's "impossible for people who know Lisp to design a language that isn't Lisp(y)".

 _"I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP (sic), but once I was dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations, APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary."_ \- Arthur Whitney ([http://cacm.acm.org/opinion/interviews/26246-a-conversation-...](http://cacm.acm.org/opinion/interviews/26246-a-conversation- with-arthur-whitney/fulltext))

<comment><USER4> You just supported my arguments, silentbicycle; it's "much less Lispy" but not "orthogonal to Lisp". Small, expression based, self-hosting, declarative, has a core-data structure it uses to represent most of its input ..

APL, Forth, and Smalltalk might not be proper functional programming languages, but they're of the same "spirit".

Now compare this to something horribly broken, like Basic ..

<comment><USER6> I suspected as much. "Lispiness" is a fuzzy concept, though - Lua is Lispier than Python, but is Tcl more or less Lispy than SML? Etc. K is probably the least Lispy language I can think of with that pedigree.

Joy may be another exception, but it's mainly an experimental / research language.

<comment><USER4> Tcl shouldn't be compared to SML; ML is a triumph of human achievement. See Alice: <http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/>

Some Lisps are more Lisp than others; compare Dylan to Emacs Lisp. Dylan has that refined taste, that well-thought out _essence_ , even if it's an infix, algolish language in apperance. While elisp is an orthodox Lisp, in every sense, and is unpalatable because of its true-to-form "Lispiness".

There are languages that are semantically consistent, and that's probably what I meant by "Lispy". Then there are languages which are nothing but compiler hacks; you can tell whoever dreamed them up "grew" this hairball by tweaking a parser until it did something he wanted.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I don't like Tcl either. :)

<comment><USER4> Also, take a look at the Lua 5 compiler. That fucker does matrices on par with Fortran, with just 500k worth of compiler + runtime!

I particularly loved their hack for sparse matrices; they're implemented as hash-tables where the indices are zero-based integers, so only the indices that are initialized are created. Meaning, you can have an array with a few indices without having to create all the empty cells in between. I benchmarked it and it's far more than adequate. Makes graph algorithms breezy.

Lua is very much an acceptable Scheme.

<comment><USER6> Each table (dict, hash, whatchamacallit) has a hash portion and an array portion, and contiguous integer keys are stored internally in the array. So, tables automatically adapt their internal implementation for use as an array, a dict, or both, at runtime. They're unique to Lua, AFAIK.

It also has an interesting hash table optimization (that I don't quite grok). I've been reading through the Lua code bit by bit, but haven't made it there yet. Lots of other interesting stuff, though.

LuaJIT's not too shabby, either!

Lua's my favorite language for quick hacks, period. I wrote a library to add fairly idiomatic pattern matching (<http://github.com/silentbicycle/tamale/>). Every language needs pattern matching. :) I'm still working on explaining PM to people who aren't already into Erlang or ML, but it's documented now.

<comment><USER4> You win this round, again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The feature list reads as "we added C# features to java": properties, type inference, lambdas, extension methods, generics without erasure, a friendly list initialization notation...

I do find the interface delegation feature interesting. Might be a good way to avoid those Demeter Transmogrifiers.

The null-safe property chains also look nice. Though I wonder if this is always the desired behavior?

<comment><USER8> i'm surprised their comparison matrix omitted fantom (nee fan), which would seem closest in spirit to this sort of java/c# cross

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other projects worth keeping an eye on:

Stab Language - <http://code.google.com/p/stab-language/> Mirah - <http://www.mirah.org/> Groovy++ - <http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest/>

<comment><USER10> Agreed. All interesting languages.

Not a groovy fan, but groovy++ and compile-time AST transformations sounds like fun.

Speaking of stab, an Eclipse plugin commit just hit svn:

<http://code.google.com/p/stab-language/source/detail?r=280>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This page is dog slow: <http://gosu- lang.org/doc/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm>

What's the Big Advantage of this language? It looks nice enough, but what will propel it past Scala and company?

<comment><USER4> Gosu is gunning for Groovy and Beanshell, not Scala or Clojure.

The later two are bonafide programming languages, not improvements on Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just a note -- Gosu is already the name of a neat little C/Ruby graphics library that wraps up sound and graphics programming in a tiny little package that mostly gets out of your way.

(I believe it was intended for people making little games -- I've used it a few times on my own projects and it's very uncluttered, minimal etc; I used it and Chipmunk to make myself a screensaver of all of my photos falling, bouncing off of each other etc).

<comment><USER13> Indeed . . . to be fair, back when we decided to rename the language internally, we looked for any existing projects using the name, and we actually contacted the Gosu library guys to make sure they didn't mind us using the name Gosu for our language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't say for sure where they got the name "gosu", but I know from many hours of playing Starcraft with Koreans that "gosu" is the Korean word for "expert".

</comment><comment><USER15> On the compare page: "Reified generics (check generic types at run time)"

Does anyone know how they've gotten around the issue of Type Erasure on the JVM?

<comment><USER4> Here are a few hints in the manual:

" _you can add objects to a collection, but not primitives_ ".

Why not?

" _The collection and list classes used frequently in Gosu rely on the Java language's collection classes. However, there are important differences because of built-in enhancements to these classes that use Gosu blocks, anonymous in-line defined functions that are not directly supported in the Java language._ "

It also has some type-inference that converts:

      var str = {"foo", "bar", "baz"}

To

      ArrayList<String> str = new ArrayList<String>();
      str.add("foo").add("bar").add("baz");

Or some such.

LtU wont be going wild over this any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any reason for not open sourcing the development? It seems to me it could use a helping hand of additional features and wrappers.

</comment><comment><USER17> > is being used in production by multi-billion dollar companies around the > globe

Is this a joke? Citation?

<comment><AUTHOR> No joke. <http://www.guidewire.com/our_customers> lists some companies that are using the Guidewire insurance products in production. These products are all built in a combination of Java and Gosu (or GScript, as it used to be called).

[I don't work for Guidewire - I worked for an insurance company that evaluated several insurance claims packages, including Guidewire's.]

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On a serious note, I'm not sure it has enough of an advantage over Scala to take a look at. Though if the type system is a bit more intuitive, that alone may propel it to the forefront of JVM languages...

<comment><USER9> " I'm not sure it has enough of an advantage over Scala to take a look at."

I can grok Gosu easily... Scala gives me a headache...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This actually kind of looks like ActionScript.

<comment><USER13> Funny you mention that; the original syntax was actually based on ECMAScript, so the syntactic similarities with ActionScript are not accidental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> reminds me of java-script. Still, it's a shame they never understood the power of prefix notation.

<comment><USER21> If you're referring to type notation, I'd argue postfix works much better for languages that are mostly type inferred, as then there is a consistent way of declaring things.</comment></comment>


Oxytocin enhances brain function in children with autism - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/27/1312857110

<comment><AUTHOR> Paper is here: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/27/1312857110.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/27/1312857110.full.pdf)</comment>


Alan Turing: Codebreaker and AI Pioneer - Video Lecture by B. Jack Copeland - <AUTHOR> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/423

<comment><USER2> I went through 4 years of C.S. curriculum and learned what an incredible mind Turing had, so far ahead of his time. But I never once heard how he met his demise until I was wiki-surfing one day.

So for anybody else with professors that never indulged in the details of his persecution and death:

Turing was homosexual, living in an era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and homosexual acts were illegal. Subsequent to his being outed, he was criminally prosecuted, which essentially ended his career. He died not long after from what was officially declared self-induced cyanide poisoning(a cyanide-laced apple) [wikipedia]

<comment><USER3> I really recommend Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges... this was a great read</comment></comment>


Has Clojure development stalled? - <AUTHOR> http://offtopic.bestinclass.dk/post/2532135003/has-clojure-development-stalled

<comment><USER2> This post pissed me off a bit. My comment here, for those that only read comments on HN:

I can imagine that the people that are and have been working hard on Clojure would be dismayed by this odd chunk of unfortunate FUD. As someone that does contribute a little bit of my time to Clojure and the community, I know I am.

This, after:

* three years of absolutely breakneck progress (dare I say innovations) on almost every possible front

* the fabulous success of the first-ever Clojure conference just two months ago (<http://first.clojure-conj.org>) where a variety of very significant chunks of work by a number of core contributors were first announced

* the "opening up" of the contrib library space ([http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+...](http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Better+infrastructure+for+contributed+libs)), with three new separately-managed contrib libraries implementing finger trees, unification, and a common REPL library (<https://github.com/clojure>).

* the modernization of the project's infrastructure: moving to self-hosted JIRA+confluence, a big push on utilizing hudson maximally, and support for getting all project artifacts (from Clojure itself down into all contributed libraries in the Clojure organization) flowing into Maven central

……and surely more that I'm not aware of.

I can't speak to the cadence of patch application, as I'm not involved in that side of the house. Maybe volunteering to help vet patches would help, maybe not.

In any case, it's an open effort; if you want to see movement on a particular front, step up and do something. Otherwise, idly speculating on things being "stalled" (especially "publicly" vs. just in IRC) is, frankly, bullshit, and could be detrimental to further uptake of the language and enthusiasm of volunteers that _are_ actively contributing.

<comment><USER3> For the record I mostly agree with this; I think it's fully appropriate for Rich and co. to have time to let ideas brew, and there's nothing wrong with a lull in their coding output. My comments in TFA taken out of context seem to imply that his is some kind of crisis--it is not.

On the other hand, if core people are going to slow down for a time, they would be wise to delegate responsibility to those who do want to continue coding on it in the mean time; having simple patches linger for six months (<http://www.assembla.com/spaces/clojure/tickets/315>) chills the enthusiasm of contributors. Having every single patch need approval of a single person is a policy Clojure has outgrown; somehow I don't think Rich is going to find something wrong with this substring patch that a lesser mind wouldn't have caught. (<http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-688>)

tl;dr: Clojure isn't dying; it's growing, and the patch submission process needs to be revised.

<comment><USER4> You are simply wrong about the patch process. It is no longer the case that I am the bottleneck. Many people have worked hard to put in place the organization and systems to make sure this is so. We have meetings on a regular basis, and many people dedicate their Fridays to Clojure tickets. There are several people who vet tickets, and a few who can screen them. Tickets are rarely waiting for my final approval, and rarely waiting long after that for application. And I frequently catch things while looking at them for final ok.

None of us appreciate having our ongoing effort characterized as 'stalled'. Everything in the commit log, Jira and Confluence activity streams belies that. More people are actively involved in improving Clojure than ever.

As for CLJ-688 - it's an enhancement request. Do you think every idea for an enhancement that anyone has should make it into Clojure? I don't - it would quickly become a huge mess. If not, then someone has to look at everything and decide.

Yes, there is a backlog from when it was just me, and it will take a while to whittle down. We have finite resources and have to prioritize. I can assure you we have more important things to concentrate on than your negative index substring enhancement, and are doing so. You'll just have to be patient. Or, if you insist, I'll just reject it now because a) IMO it's goofy, b) you can make your own function that works that way c) we don't get a free ride from j.l.String, d) it begs the question of negative indices elsewhere...

Want Clojure to be a free for all? - Sorry.

Can't cope with the necessity for prioritization given finite resources? - Sorry.

Want top priority? - Sorry.

tl;dr: This blog post is the idle chatter of people who are not involved in the Clojure development process in any significant way. Lau has never submitted a single patch. Apparently his free lunch isn't arriving fast enough.

<comment><USER3> > None of us appreciate having our ongoing effort characterized as 'stalled'.

Well TBH I'm not to thrilled that a few lines from a private chat would get splattered over the HN front page without much context either.

> Can't cope with the necessity for prioritization given finite resources? - > Sorry.

Said resources are a lot more finite than they could be. There are many capable folks in the community who would be willing to help. I brought this up last year and people seemed eager to help, but the official response was silence:

[http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/85a56203788e1283/f5f79245c41ba83c)

Anyway, keep up the good work; if you at any time decide you don't want to waste time with the boring stuff keep in mind that there are lots of people who can help ease the burden.

<comment><USER4> I think you are looking right past the people who _are_ helping, who have stepped up, volunteered, and are doing something. The priority isn't on giving the community fast response times. That is not a goal in and of itself. It is on making Clojure better.

>Said resources are a lot more finite than they could be.

That is arguable. If hundreds of people came up and said they wanted to help there would be real challenges in managing their efforts. It is something we'd have to grow into, in any case. I still contend dropping all impediments to rapid, ill-curated contributions is a recipe for a complete mess. As it stands, the 30-day report here (<http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ>) says 14 issues created, 14 resolved. So, we are at least keeping up, and many times doing better than that. The best way for folks at large to get involved is to patch bugs. Defect issues with patches are our first priority. I don't see any reason why we won't soon approach the no-known-outstanding-bugs state I used to maintain by myself in the early days. Enhancements are low priority.

Helping out at a higher level is something you earn by participating. If someone I don't know says they've screened a patch from someone else I don't know, what am I supposed to do with that? There is an ever-growing circle of people I trust, and, to the extent they have time to work on Clojure, I am taking advantage of that.

>There are many capable folks in the community who would be willing to help.

Being willing to help and helping are two different things. Helping means doing what needs to be done, not just what one feels like doing. If I gave someone commit rights and they whipped through and applied all outstanding patches they wouldn't be helping me or Clojure, however good it might make the patch submitters feel.

I guess Clojure is just too conservatively managed for your taste. That's fine, but I think it is the appropriate route for a language, even if it means it is somewhat slower and more of a hassle to participate in than the latest github project du jour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I asked a similar question[1] of Arc many moons ago and received an interesting answer from pg[2] that I think applies:

        A lot of people seem to feel that a language
        isn't real unless the designer is talking to
        them every day. But that's not the only way
        languages happen. Nor possibly the best way.[3]
        I feel like you get better ideas if you think
        in units of occasional essays rather than a
        stream of tweets. It seems likely the same
        will be true with language design.

Rich and Stuart Halloway have indeed been silent in the public forums recently, but I seriously doubt that they have stalled one iota.

[1]: [http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and- lolita...](http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/06/yegge-clojure-arc-and-lolita-or- days-of-future-past/)

[2]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470254>

[3]: Hammock-driven development <http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4457042/>

<comment><USER6> I think that's a bit apples and oranges. Arc is a long-term project that pg has said doesn't actually "have" to be useful to anyone anytime soon. Clojure, on the other hand, is under active, public development, as swannodette points out.

<comment><USER7> I think you might be missing fogus's point to a certain degree. His point is that active, public development for a language might not necessarily mean that the language designer is keeping contact every day. You might only receive periodic updates.

I don't see cookies being all that different from Arc in that respect. Cookies doesn't have to be useful anytime soon either because, well, it _is_ useful already.

<comment><USER6> I think you are arguing a connection that is at best stretched.

Fogus' point is well-meaning, but it tars an active project with the brush of being some guy's (even pg's) hobby language, like Arc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. <http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ>

If anything Clojure development has been moving _too quickly_ for the past year :) It's clear from the mailing list and the IRC channel that people are _still_ trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas in 1.2.0, I know I am.

That's not even taking into account newcomers to the language that need to digest the 1.0-1.1 feature set.

Even more importantly 1.3.0 alphas have been appearing regularly and they have significant changes that people need to account for, try out in existing code bases and tools (new rules for dynamic binding, new rules for arithmetic, primitive math support, unchecked math support).

</comment><comment><USER9> Best in class = Clojure linkbait

I've yet to see a 'best in class' (what a way to name your self best in class anyway) post that was both correct and interesting, if they're interesting they tend to be factually wrong and if they're factually right they are boring.

The titles _do_ make you want to click though, that's the one thing they have in common.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has Clojure development stalled? Not at all!

Is Clojure core project management frustrating for small contributors? Definitely! I also think that would be the case for most similar projects.

We must not forget that Clojure is a very young language. The core team is still getting used to running a project of this nature while continuously improving it. Also the recent move from Assembla to JIRA clearly doesn't help for now, but I'm confident that things will get more streamlined in the ((hopefully) near) future. I've personally stopped trying to contribute to core/contrib because of the slow process and JIRA (which I've not spent time learning yet (not even sure I've got the right permissions)) so that I can concentrate on libraries. One thing that is really annoying tough is that the whole patch submission process must go through the centralized issue tracker, bypassing github which I think is much better for smaller changes (and even getting quite good for the whole process).

P.S.: One sure thing is that Lau is always good at driving traffic to his blog! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Great. Now by having this headline fly by on HN, there is going to be yet another bit of FUD I have to fight through to use Clojure when it's appropriate to do so.

</comment><comment><USER12> One thing I always wonder when I see stuff like this: is it because development is actually stalled, or is the project just finished? At some point, it can be useful for things to stop changing except to the extent that it is require to prevent bit rot.

<comment><USER8> There's a _lot_ left to do. Huge upcoming projects:

      * Pods
      * Clojure-in-Clojure compiler
      * High performance higher order operations
        on persistent data structures filled with primitives

Projects that have been talked about but no-one's helmed:

      * Predicate dispatch
      * Datalog (fast enough for the above)

Community projects in development:

      * design for asynchronous code (think Microsoft's Rx Extension)
      * network REPL
      * unification library
      * exception/conditions design

I could go on, but you get the idea.

<comment><USER13> Also: * integrating fork-join!

<comment><USER5> Also:

      * Scopes
      * Better type inferencing
      * letmacro
      * The things in Rich's mind that are baking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Let us pretend for a moment that is has stalled. Who cares? Look at the ground that clojure has covered recently. It has time to stall.

It hasn't stalled of course but still... just pretend.</comment>


Uber's Losses Reach Double Digits in IPO Debut - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-shares-decline-second-day-091656484.html <comment><USER2> I don't know why this is portrayed as a negative -- this is the whole point of an IPO. If the price goes up significantly, it means that the company lost out on capital that it could have raised. If the price goes down, then it means that it extracted more capital from early participants than the market at large thought was justified. It's far preferable, for the company, to be in the second bin than in the first.

If they need to raise more capital in the future, then the higher the stock price is the less dilution is needed for the same amount of money, so eventually they want the stock price to recover, but for now they're sitting pretty on top of a pile of cash that they got despite what the market seemed to indicate.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that employees whose RSUs settled on IPO day are taxed at the IPO price, not the price when the lockup period ends.

<comment><USER4> Since the lockup expires in the same tax year, can't they just sell after the lockup, take the loss, and then use the loss as a write off against the RSU gain so they only pay taxes on the actual realized gain?

<comment><USER3> The initial RSU settlement is taxed as ordinary income. If they sell below the IPO price in future (e.g. to cover their remaining taxes) they'll indeed realize a capital loss but it can only be carried forward against future capital gains from e.g. longer-term holding of UBER or another stock, or using the $3000/year deduction for ordinary income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I consider the Uber IPO to be a 'bookend' on what has been a dozen years of insanity in Silicon Valley. It started off so promising with the sale of YouTube to Google in '06, but it started to feel increasingly 'off' in the early '10s with Groupon and Zynga. Color app was the first canary from my perspective.

Again, this is just one guy's opinion but it has been a hell of a spectacle. May we all find chairs when the music stops...

<comment><USER6> Color! What a wonderful story of failure. Thanks for the reminder.

<comment><USER7> Remember when it raised $50 million and people thought that was a lot of money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots of people have commented on this impacting retention of current employees negatively, and that this will make it hard to invite new employees to Uber.

Aren't both assertions off base?

If I'm a current employee, I'm underwater. And my tax implications are scary. So, am I not motivated to stay and let things recover, rather than walking away when I vest after six months? Like golden handcuffs, but made out of feces or something?

Given the alternative, for Uber management, isn't this moment of the stock going down a good thing generally for retaining the big fish at Uber?

And, for new people, isn't the calculus for the recruiter pretty easy: hey, jump in now, the stock is really low, get in while you can?

Long term this has big implications for Uber if they need to raise a few more billions, but that's a big problem no matter what, right?

<comment><USER9> For said big fish, they can say to the new company "hey, I have this much value locked up, which I'd lose by moving to your company, you'll at least need it match it, for your offer to be competitive."

<comment><USER10> "My Uber stock is currently worth -$3.2 million." Is probably a value that many competitors can meet. :)

<comment><USER8> My point exactly: the competitor can say "Let's give you a $0 signing bonus, it's a $3.2M bump over the value of your Uber stock!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is Uber's competitive advantage anyway? Subsidizing rides with Saudi money? The mobile app is pretty simple and competitors are popping up wherever you look. There is almost no cost to switch for the end user and all the taxi companies will end up competing on price. I don't get it.

<comment><USER12> It's true. There is not any technical bars of ride-sharing app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its going to get worse too before it gets better - you know the underwriter was in there manipulating the market the last couple of days trying to prop the stock. When that's gone, look out.

<comment><USER14> The same could be said for the Facebook IPO (propped up, etc), but Facebook recovered after they demonstrated success in mobile advertising.

Not really offering a counterpoint here so much as I'm saying this has played out in the past with an ending quite a ways different from what's being foreshadowed here.

<comment><USER15> Uber could possibly find an opportunity like that by expanding their delivery options beyond restaurants.

<comment><USER16> Like bike-messengers, but with vespas and 4-doors? Isn't that a super crowded and niche market anyways?

<comment><USER17> Last mile logistics is a huge market (FedEx, UPS). On-demand last mile logistics as opposed to once/twice a day delivery is likely a lot smaller.

<comment><USER18> Only because it's so expensive. There's probably a lot of demand to pay $5 to skip a trip to the store or get food delivered. If Uber gets it to the point where a driver's trip encompasses retail goods, restaurant food, and a passenger at the same time the business looks pretty good. Tough to get there of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The market as a whole has done really bad during the period Uber has been trading, which is unsurprising as someone is introducing uncertainty in the form of a trade war.

</comment><comment><USER20> The steep decline (vs. the market at large) so far today seems like a reflection of an investor flight to security (and away from risk) during a highly volatile situation the stock market.

Curiously, another recently IPO'd company, Beyond Meat, is currently _up_ 3.75% on the same day that ride-share companies are down 7-11%, and the market at large is down 3-5%. That suggests that investors at least, have some pretty high confidence in alt-meat companies.

</comment><comment><USER21> Honestly everyone needs to chill out. The markets on Friday and today are extremely negative and volatile in general. This was a very tough week to IPO. Market negativity or positivity is amplified with freshly listed stocks. We won't really know what the market thinks of Uber for a few months at least.

</comment><comment><USER22> Will a perception that IPOs are now quite risky cause VCs to push for earlier or later IPOs?

I can't figure out if it's in their interests to keep funding these companies privately for a longer period, or bite the bullet and push for an IPO sooner.

<comment><USER23> They likely want to IPO ASAP in response to expectations of a looming recession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good job Uber for maximising capital raised for development of the company.

Unfrotunately for them (this is not sarcastic) they have built a machine that hasn't had a focus on profit. It's hards to change that after years.

<comment><USER25> That's what every round of VC incentivizes: Here, take our money and spend it in 12-18 months, so you'll need to raise more money from next-round investors and we can mark-up the value of our stock to show to our LPs, so we can raise our next fund and collect more management fees....

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So they raised something like 8 billion (I forget the exact number)? So they have that cash.

Are there any immediate impacts for a company regarding a price drop after an IPO?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once they burn the $8B and have to return to the markets for more capital, the terms start to look much worse. It's also pretty bad for employee morale if the only people who get a decent exit from their shares are the VCs & founders.

<comment><USER27> Might you or anyone else know how big their float was on the IPO? Wouldn't the market punish the stock if they went back to the markets for a secondary offering too soon? For that matter what would even would be considered too soon? If they were to sustain their current loss rate wouldn't they have to return to the market sooner than later? Or are there some other instruments available to them that would be preferable to a secondary offering so soon after the IPO?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How long before they get acquired by Amazon? Also what are the chances of that deal getting blocked?

Getting all of these uber drivers to deliver packages, groceries and food for amazon customers makes too much sense.

EDIT: Looks like Amazon is already making moves in that direction with their own employees [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19901196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19901196)

<comment><USER29> The drivers are not loyal, they are already on Lyft and whatever app offers them a better deal that day/week/month (depending on incentives they sign on to).

<comment><USER28> Yes, they're loyal to whoever pays more and has more work. Slapping Amazon deliveries on top of Uber pool would mean more work and better unit economics, which should ideally translate into more money for the drivers.

<comment><USER30> Surprisingly the background of drivers who do deliveries and food is very different from what is legally required to transport humans. What has been found is that there actually isn't much overlap in competing "supply" as those who are clean on background and DMV checks will always pick transporting people first because its more profitable.

<comment><USER31> Source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The public markets aren't particularly efficient, but they can be ruthless in sniffing out irrational enthusiasms.

</comment><comment><USER33> if everything is a debacle then nothing is a debacle. what word are journalists going to use when there's an actual debacle?

<comment><USER34> This one is certainly a debacle. Uber was the 1 unicorn left. There is no other darling startup that's gonna be scratching $100b anytime soon. This IPO failure ended the crazy run of cash since the '08 crisis.

It was also a debacle because anyone who is not an idiot sees that Uber is doomed. You think their little GPS app is actually an advantage with respect to self driving? There is no barrier for entry, none. They are as likely to lose as they are to win, if full automation is actually a viable technology in the next 10 years (it isn't).

<comment><USER35> I thought "unicorn" referred to anything >$1 billion. Slack IPO is rumored to come soon, their last valuation was >$7 billion.

<comment><USER34> I have heard that but it is my opinion that companies valued >= $1B are becoming a dime a dozen. I work at one climbing that ladder and we could be displaced in 6 months by a better implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem is people joining Uber only for becoming rich quickly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Has there been a big IPO that didn't fall? It seems like shorting these is the obvious thing to do, but I admit ignorance when it comes to investing.

<comment><USER37> The vast majority of IPOs are successful and pop on opening.

Failing IPOs are the exception , not the norm. There were two very high profile failure lately (Uber and Lyft) so I understand why you are feeling so though

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Uber stock will touch $25

</comment><comment><USER38> About time a profitless company gets what it deserves. I've been concerned with endless VC funding for years.

From what I've seen, most current tech companies are not doing well going public. I remember a similar lukewarm response when Snapchat went public.

In fact, I probably would've advised them to stay private. Tech companies have seemed to survive indefinitely bleeding VC money.

My guess is the stock will probably recover after a couple months.

<comment><USER18> >About time a profitless company gets what it deserves.

Yes, a 63 billion dollar market cap is sure showing them!

>Tech companies have seemed to survive indefinitely bleeding VC money.

That's somewhat of the issue here. The outcome for VCs at this price is still somewhere between massive return and breaking even. It's the public at large that bought into the IPO via retirement funds that is hurting the most.

<comment><USER39> I highly doubt in the few days Uber has been on the market the "public at large" has purchased any significant share of Uber using their pension accounts. It's not in an indices so they're certainly not exposed through that.

<comment><USER18> I said the public at large via retirement funds. Teachers get less because CalSTRS lost money* either via direct purchase or through asset managers.

* Just an example I don't know if they bought into the IPO or not.

<comment><USER40> Large index weighted funds don't buy into IPOs until significantly after the fact.

<comment><USER41> Really? For the CalSTRS example, they issued PR that they bought into the FB IPO, and had also bought into pre-IPO private companies.

eg:

> _CalSTRS has owned shares in Facebook, Inc. since its initial public > offering in 2012, as well as through privately held assets prior to the > IPO._

[https://www.calstrs.com/statement/calstrs-ongoing- engagement...](https://www.calstrs.com/statement/calstrs-ongoing-engagement- facebook-focuses-risk-mitigation)

<comment><USER39> Something run by California was mismanaged you say? I'm terribly shocked

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> _Before you continue... Yahoo is part of Oath. [...] Select 'OK' to continue and allow Oath and our partners to use your data, or select 'Manage options' to view your choices. _

More Oath BS, where _Manage Options_ leads you on a merry dance and does absolutely everything except allow you to manage any options.

I'd love to see Oath sites banned from here.

<comment><USER43> I always open these links in a private window, accept all the tracking, read the article and close the window.

<comment><USER44> Piggybacking on this (as I do it too) how robust is this method?

<comment><USER45> You've just given them permission to fingerprint you. If they're good at what they do then the private window trick had no effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Uber Technologies Inc. shares extended the free-fall on Monday

Everything was in free fall on Monday. Nothing noteworthy about Uber going down too.

<comment><USER47> Found the Uber employee.

<comment><USER48> Personal attacks aren't ok here. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and following them when posting to HN?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN - Kalei - Auto generate styleguide from CSS comments - <AUTHOR> http://kaleistyleguide.com?

<comment><USER2> This is cool, but the tracking script included in the default setup is NOT cool.</comment>


The new iPad: how Apple is training us to understand the half-life of a tablet - <AUTHOR> http://untether.tv/2012/the-new-ipad-how-apple-is-training-us-to-understand-the-half-life-of-a-tablet// <comment><USER2> "Technology is at its best when its invisible."

I think that's an interesting point, especially with Apple since they try to make things magical. Although Apple releases are sometimes disappointing (partly because of all the hype leading up to it), it gives early adopters a chance to get the best stuff.</comment>


Penney's game [as described in Knuth's Croncrete Math] - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penney%27s_game

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not as symmetric as it looks at first. Proving the optimality of the advertised strategy can be done with finite automata.</comment>


Hello, World: Meet Xobni - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/05/hello-world-meet-xobni.html

<comment><USER2> Why do people make a big deal of this Outlook plugin. I remember using Eudora email and back in 2001 Eudora mail had some of the same features.

Not all the features but the majority. I hate when people make a big deal out of a basic Outlook plugin. I give them credit for building a good product but I am sure microsoft could develop something better, after all they own the source code of Outlook

<comment><USER3> Because it's a yc combinator startup and their are lots of yc combinator fans out there.

Don't you see that many of the startups are boosting each other (which might not be a bad thing) and are using each others services to improve their chance of success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What would be really cool would be if Xobni could write my emails for me and keep in touch with my contacts. I really kind of suck at that.

<comment><USER5> And not only with clients, but also send sweet nothings to your girlfriend, endearing and respectful letters to your parents, stern and firm letters to the IRS, and so on. And make coffee.</comment></comment>


What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/how-death-itunes-explains-2010s/604291/ <comment><USER2> I stopped caring about iTunes when I updated and 99% of my music got deleted because of whatever licensing change they had made without explaining the implications of said update.

Thankfully I had backups - as a musician, I have a LOT of songs, samples, and tracks that wouldn't ever have licenses from Apple. Now my music is all in a single Read-Only directory, and I only use music players that understand the use of Meta data for proper song sorting.

It was only the second time Apple screwed me over musically. The other time was when they updated Logic Audio to 64-bits and didn't include a utility to convert the old directories. To this day, there still isn't a way to convert old Logic files to the current format unless everything you did was mixed down as stems.</comment>


Media Are Pursuing Nakamoto in a Car Chase Across Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/06/satoshi_nakamoto_car_chase_bitcoin_creator_pursued_by_media_as_joe_bel_bruno.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

<comment><USER2> The media in the US is out of control. Leave the guy alone.

</comment><comment><USER3> We could perhaps consider treating this man as a human being worthy of dignity and basic rights, but this story is just too wild and 21st century

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit This is why we can't have nice things... some assclowns always come along and ruin it for everyone.</comment>


From Subprime Loans to Failing Newspapers - Business opportunity? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/from_subprime_l.html <comment><AUTHOR> I figure whereever there is a possible problem there is a business opportunity. That article is a bit long though. Basically the issue is that as content become more and more free, media organisations will start disappearing and then a small percentage of good journalism that you really have to pay for will disappear.

So the question is obviously there is a demand for good journalism, how do you connect that demand directly with the journalists without paper organisations. There is an argument that this is already being done, but I think its not done well enough. Maybe it will just happen without intervention. Just a thought.</comment>


Free Is Evil - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/free-is-evil-d2be55b028d4 <comment><USER2> That innocent google search box is feeling evil. I like to think of UI as obstacle, in the way of the thing you are trying to get to. Ideally it shouldn't exist. In any case, we approach UIs with endurance in mind and our desire to outsource hard things leaves a large gap for exploitation.

The solution supposed here reminds me of the idea that everything in commerce is either a bundling or unbundling. Counter UIs you pay to bundle interactions with abusive UIs will save us! I don't think so, sounds like an escalation of hostilities is brewing to the point where you will be too far removed to tell the difference between good or evil UI. You'll just be paying to feel and signal you're free from evil's influence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Today's solutions always become tomorrow's problems. Thanks for raising some potential issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice view presented. I ike the sentence "Selling human behavior to the highest bidder is the business model.'. I think openness is key for freedom. The title is a click bait imho, free is not evil, unless you are using a product or service and you pay with your privacy. This article should not be published on medium if you live by your own talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliments! I pay Medium an annual fee as a reader, that is how they pay the bills. I think it's a pretty honest place to publish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paying doesn't make you immune to surveillance, behavioral profiling, tracking, ads etc. Businesses will tell you that by doing all this crap they can offer you a discount.

This "if you're not paying, you the product" served us well but it's not accurate any more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it's more precise to say if anyone else is paying any of the cost, you're not really the customer. You're right that there are situations where the consumer pays (say, for a smartphone) and companies pay to have bloatware installed that tries to manipulate and monetize the device owner.</comment></comment>


Magellan was first to sail around the world, right? Think again - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/09/magellan-first-sail-around-world-think-again/ <comment><USER2> > the expedition reached the Philippines. To the crew's surprise, Enrique, an > enslaved man Magellan had purchased before the journey, could understand and > speak the indigenous people's language. It turned out he was likely raised > there before his enslavement—making him, not Magellan, the first person to > circumnavigate the globe.

But it's an interesting article.

<comment><USER3> Magellan himself was killed, he didn't complete the journey in the first place. So, the title already didn't make sense (clickbait)

What most mean when the say Magellan did that, they mean his project/vision/mission to sail around the world. In that spirit everything remains the same, even with this additional information.

<comment><USER4> Didn't Magellan visit the Philippines previously, coming from the other direction?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first man to sail around the world was a Philippino? Can't wait for the film.

<comment><USER6> Not on one voyage. However, I'm sure his life was an interesting one.</comment></comment>


JavaOne - Speedy Scripting: Productivity and Performance (Kawa, Clojure) - <AUTHOR> http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2010/09/javaone-2010-abstract-of-day-12-speedy.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're at JavaOne, please note that this talk is today at 1pm, in Parc 55's Divisidero.</comment>


The age of envy: how to be happy when everyone else's life looks perfect - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/09/age-envy-be-happy-everyone-else-perfect-social-media <comment><USER3> Is it strange that I've never experienced this? I'm a fairly heavy Facebook user and I can't remember ever feeling envy or any other negative emotion about what other people post.

<comment><USER4> No, probably not strange.

There's a lot of variation in personality and life circumstance. When I was younger Facebook made me feel really shitty about myself. Now it doesn't. That's probably mostly because I am more established now (and, thus, more confident about my position in life) and have more perspective on life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The grass is always greener on someone else's lawn. But the mold is always greener on someone else's bread, too. That is, there are people better off than you, and there are people worse off than you. But when people post to Facebook, they post the picture of the green lawn, not the green bread...

</comment><comment><USER6> >> Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?

Don't use social media?

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of one interesting thing I heard about younger generations - <USER2> know social media is a facade intuitively growing up with it. I guess it is the adults who fall for the keeping up with the Jonses facade gilding contests and don't realize their lawyer neighbor managed to get deep in debt despite making six figures in a five figure COL area.

I have noticed a fundamentally disturbing thing about many who are essentially LARPing adulthood by following social pressures blindly - going through the motions of social spending, marriage and having kids not out of a desire for any of them but because they think that is what adults do.

<comment><USER8> > essentially LARPing adulthood by following social pressures blindly

I see this over and over. One example I think of is the stag do - it used to be a few jars in the pub, but now it has to be some kind of ridiculous Vegas blowout wasting a month or two's salary, simply because that's become the done thing. People are utter sheep.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge Alsup orders Oracle, Google to disclose paid advocates - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/name-your-shills-judge-orders-oracle-google/

<comment><USER2> I've been getting this feeling lately every time Alsup steps up like this. At first I couldn't quite put my finger on it. it was more than just "finally some sanity for that patent stuff."

I figured it out today. When Alsup shows up, its like suddenly there's an adult in the room.

</comment><comment><USER3> For what it's worth, PJ directly says[0] Groklaw has "no financial ties to anybody".

[0] <http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120807180515808>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think he's going to be sorely disappointed - Google doesn't have to pay anyone, they're one of the easy categories tech blogs ride for easy traffic and this case has provided especially good fodder for them to convert into ad impressions.

<comment><USER5> Uh, Alsop has to issue order for both parties but the implicit target is Oracle and some would claim, Florian Mueller. [http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/judge-hey-oracle-and- google...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/judge-hey-oracle-and-google-turn- over-the-names-of-your-paid-bloggers/)

<comment><USER4> Mueller outed himself _4 months ago_ so it seems a bit unlikely that he'd be the target of an order now. It does make a nice hook for the tech rags though.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the judge is looking for a confirmation from Oracle on the record, for some sort of legally reason?

(IMNAL, obviously)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love to find out if there's any paid influencing going on here at HN or reddit. I would not be surprised.

<comment><USER8> What sort of paid influencing do you think would happen on HN?

<comment><USER7> Just general defending of a company's positions. A good reputation among engineers is very valuable to these companies.

<comment><USER9> The biased comments here are too childish to smell professionalism and probably hurt the brands more than help. Florian posts are extremely professional and often fool many readers and even other professional bloggers. Compare that to the average HN/reddit trolls. [1] Huge clear difference, I doubt any of them are professionals.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=taligent>

<comment><USER5> But your argument cuts both ways. If a poster doesn't seem professional, then they do seem "real" and showing you have real fans may seem useful to companies.

Apple in particular probably doesn't need that but a company like, say, Microsoft might feel they'd benefit having trollish fan-boys making their case (making them, indeed seem more Apple-like), since they also wouldn't have to answer for the arguments of these "obviously unprofessional" fans...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "be of use on appeal or on any remand to make clear whether any treatise, > article, commentary, or analysis on the issues posed by this case are > possibly influenced by financial relationships to the parties or counsel."

I spent a few minutes googling around for "remand" but I still cannot understand what this means. Could anyone please translate this legalese and explain why exactly does Alsup wants them to disclose paid bloggers?

<comment><USER7> When an appellate court sends a case back down to a trial judge to reconsider a decision or retry the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wonder if they mention the EFF, which has received at least $1 million from Google this year: [http://epic.org/privacy/ftc/googlebuzz/EPIC_Google_Buzz_Sett...](http://epic.org/privacy/ftc/googlebuzz/EPIC_Google_Buzz_Settlement.pdf)

It's been argued that such class action settlement, where the defendant essentially gets to pick which advocacy organizations they "settle" with, more or less amount to disguised funding of such organisations: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316764>

</comment><comment><USER5> I wasn't alone when I called Florian Mueller an Oracle shill way back when.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4014814>

Now things are getting really exciting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does it matter? Articles and commentary shouldn't influence the outcome of the case.

Patent Law isn't a matter of public opinion... or is it?

<comment><USER12> Law, in general, is a matter of public opinion.

<comment><USER13> And if the opinion of the majority doesn't work for your case, you can seek an appeal to the court of social justice for the opinion of the minority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If they mention Groklaw...

<comment><USER15> I'd believe that Oracle has employed people to attack PJ's integrity, before I'd believe that PJ is in the employ of Google.

There's a problem with making these kinds of vague (and not so vague) accusations against PJ in a place like this. Many of us remember the SCO v. IBM case, and have been following Groklaw for _years_. SCO tried slinging the same kind of mud at PJ you're slinging now. None of it stuck, because it was obviously unfounded and obviously disingenuous.

<comment><USER16> I've noticed that the attacks are quite vague and consist of demanding some sort of proof that PJ is not engaged this or that (e.g. eating babies.) Also, there's some ridiculous notion that she hides behind a pseudonym because she uses her initials as her nom de plume. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4014768> , you might want to select the page text so you can decipher the downvoted comments.

<comment><USER17> "PJ" really is a pseudonym (and I think it's fair to call it that even if we now know who she is); per her own post ([http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050414214437...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050414214437589)) she'd originally intended to remain anonymous.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A young Andrew Mason pitches an early iteration of Groupon - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSCMw9wSjGU

<comment><USER2> The point was basically a kickstarter/activist mashup. Seems cool... I guess he needed a monetization strategy and so pivoted to group buying.</comment>


Ask HN: Email analytics for your business or newsletter? - <AUTHOR> A friend and I are tossing around the idea of building a Chartbeat for email. Using pixel tracking we'd show helpful real-time data (number of opens right now, opens today vs. one week ago) and deeper stuff (users that open emails most often, read newsletters the longest, etc.). Would this be something anyone would want to use? <comment><USER2> Yes

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't do this.

I really don't want to have to consider whether or not my email is tracking me. Even the IAB said that users don't like intrusive tracking[1]. So yeah....please...no.

[1][http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/online- advertisers-a...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/online-advertisers- admit-they-messed-up-promise-lighter-ads/)</comment>


Re: Proposed Statement on "HTTPS everywhere for the IETF" - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.html <comment><USER2> Not all information needs to be secure, pure and simple, and individual anonymity is more important for the health of internet culture than all the security in the world.

This section covers my feelings on the topic:

"TLS does not provide privacy. What it does is disable anonymous access to ensure authority. It changes access patterns away from decentralized caching to more centralized authority control. That is the opposite of privacy. TLS is desirable for access to account-based services wherein anonymity is not a concern (and usually not even allowed). TLS is NOT desirable for access to public information, except in that it provides an ephemeral form of message integrity that is a weak replacement for content integrity."

<comment><USER3> > _individual anonymity is more important for the health of internet culture > than all the security in the world._

TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP (ie, none), so it is not trading that away. It only wins security without losing anything.

Mr Fielding suggests a hypothetical system that would keep the same amount of privacy as HTTP while ensuring the integrity of the content. But without a proof that it works (or even a full design — how does it prevent a MITM from substituting the signature too?), we can't know that it has any potential. And it certainly doesn't have value now, since it doesn't exist yet.

Even if it did exist, the same amount of privacy as HTTP is still the same amount of privacy as TLS.

And _integrity is not something we can overlook_. Imagine that, say, the Chinese government changed a set of RFCs inside its border by MITM them, in such a way as to suggest a different but compatible implementation of cookies that allows them to read them. Then chinese implementors would create insecure tools, and weaken privacy tremendously!

<comment><USER4> > _TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP (ie, none), so it is not > trading that away. It only wins security without losing anything._

This is simply not true. If I request a resource from a server that is cached by my ISP, my request never reaches the source server and they'll never be able to measure that I requested that resource.

<comment><USER5> In that case, you just unexpectedly told a third party about your request, whereas with HTTPS, you only tell the intended party about your request. How does it improve your anonymity to unexpectedly have third parties intercept your request, read it and respond to it?

If you want to choose to use a third party mirror, then you can do so: just explicitly request the mirror, over HTTPS to avoid a MITM attack.

<comment><USER6> That's message confidentiality, not privacy. The win to privacy is that instead of telling the intended party _and every third party in the middle_ about you accessing some resource, you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache.

Since it's more difficult to intercept access to all possible caches than to a centralised server, that's a win for privacy. At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message content doesn't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a resource), it's not a big loss.

<comment><USER3> > _you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache._

That's not a privacy win at all if you want privacy from the cache, if you don't trust the cache, if the cache is wholly owned or used by you alone.

Even if all of that doesn't apply, you don't even have a guarantee that it will hit the cache. If it is a cache miss, no "privacy win".

How many asterisks does this claim of a privacy win need before it should no longer be considered valid?

> _At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message > content doesn 't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a > resource), it's not a big loss._

You are forgetting the loss of message integrity, as well. That is a big loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _TLS everywhere is great for large companies with a financial stake in Internet centralization. It is even better for those providing identity services and TLS-outsourcing via CDNs. It 's a shame that the IETF has been abused in this way to promote a campaign that will effectively end anonymous access, under the guise of promoting privacy._

I think he makes a very good point here: if browsers did not support plaintext HTTP at all, and only CA-verified TLS, it would be practically impossible for those who want to run a server somewhere, to anonymously serve a site containing public information. If everyone has to obtain a certificate from a CA, that is another way they can be tracked by a central authority.

<comment><USER8> > _if browsers did not support plaintext HTTP at all, and only CA-verified > TLS_

That's a very big "if", and it reeks of FUD.

Show me a browser that has any plan to drop support for plaintext HTTP any time in the foreseeable future.

Firefox ain't one of them. Last time I checked, their plan was to reserve some of the more dangerous features (such as access to the camera) for secure websites. Hardly a plan to drop support for plaintext HTTP.

If you still aren't convinced that the current controversy is just a bunch of FUD, I'll bet $100 that 10 years from now, I'll still be able to post public information (say, the full text of RFC 2616) on a plain HTTP site and have you access it with a mainstream browser.

<comment><USER9> Firefox is moving in that direction. Maybe by 2020 you'll have to click a lot of prompts to see an "insecure" site.

<comment><USER8> Classic slippery slope argument.

When abortion was legalized, some people argued that we'd be murdering children soon. Has that happened?

If something is moving in the right direction, but if you're worried that it will go too far, the solution is to get involved and stop it at the right time, not to spread FUD about the hypothetical doom of the world.

<comment><USER10> > Firefox ain't one of them. Last time I checked, their plan was to reserve > some of the more dangerous features (such as access to the camera) for > secure websites. Hardly a plan to drop support for plaintext HTTP.

So basically, by your own admission, you say that websites with a near-future version of Firefox will only be able to offer a "full" web-experience if they are offered via HTTPS.

HTTP-based websites will be reserved for an inferior web.

> Classic slippery slope argument.

But somehow saying that this is moving in a HTTPS-only direction is a slippery slope argument? How long until Javacript is only allowed via HTTPS? How long until video and media-APIs will only work with a "secure" DRMed connection, signed by the MPAA?

Taking HTTPS everywhere and removing support for HTTP is the slippery slope and we're already walking it.

Every feature of every part of the HTML spec has to be supported for every transport. End of discussion.

HTTPS everywhere is a misguided effort. Trying to artificially limit HTTP to further your cause is just GOT-level political bullshit. Stop playing dishonestly. If HTTPS everywhere can't win through on its own merits, you should let it die.

<comment><USER11> > How long until video and media-APIs will only worked with a "secure" DRMed > connection, signed by the MPAA?

The slope is so slippery I think I might actually fall off my chair. I don't think you know what the fallacy actually _is_.

There's no arguing against facts - moving to promote HTTPS and make some features HTTPS-only does go in that direction. But that doesn't mean things will _continue_ going in that direction.

If I keep driving north I'm sure I'll fall off a cliff eventually. The magic happens because the road isn't straight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist,[1] one of > the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an authority on computer > network architecture[2] and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project.

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

A good read, and he's not just blowing smoke.

> If the IETF wants to improve privacy, it should work on protocols that > provide anonymous access to signed artifacts (authentication of the content, > not the connection) that is independent of the user's access mechanism.

But it seems to me that there is basically no way to request access to any kind of data, without it being traceable in some manner; at the very least the ISP would still see the traffic. I guess you could argue for TOR, but that still allows vectors and has its own issues to worry about.

Funny, we need the same kinda access that radio and TV used to provide; where you could just "tune in" to something and have a listen, and you were more or less untraceable; even if you were to broadcast on that frequency your traceability, while triangulable, is still fairly anonymous. But on the internet, there is no such way to broadcast like that. Maybe that's a design flaw, maybe it's a feature.

<comment><USER13> ....And the guy that came up with REST [https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm)

<comment><USER14> REST was more just a clarification and formal study to describe the intended way of using HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 100% agree. If you want to ensure the integrity of content, then sign the content. If you want to protect people's interactions with websites when exchanging non-public data then use encryption when that's warranted. But credential-based encryption should never be used across sites or with public data because (as the poster notes) it just becomes another way in which broader interaction with the Internet can be tracked.

It's trading yet more liberty for just a little bit more security, and haven't we all done enough of that already?

<comment><USER16> _" 100% agree. If you want to ensure the integrity of content, then sign the content."_

That's what "subresource integrity"[1] is about. For static data, a cryptographic hash of the linked content is attached to links. This detects any modifications of the document. Now you can use a CDN without trusting it.

A big problem with "HTTPS Everywhere" is that it encourages termination of the secure connection at a CDN. The CDN can then tamper with the content. Some do, adding ads and trackers. Subresource integrity will detect such tampering, but HTTPS Everywhere will not.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/](http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/)

<comment><USER17> As the name implies, this only works for subresources (scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.) and is mainly useful for cross origin requests.

HTTPS on the other hand also gurantees that the article I'm reading hasn't been modified. And that no one has injected ads into the site.

<comment><USER16> If you're using a CDN, you don't know if the CDN has injected ads or spyware. If you use Cloudflare's RocketLoader, what the user gets is not what you sent.

Once a CDN is involved in "HTTPS Everywhere", it's security theater.

<comment><USER17> I (as the the website's owner) have to trust one more party, which I know and have a contract with. That's a whole lot better than having to trust any random third party between me and the user of my website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "authentication of the content, not the connection"

Popular websites that hold themselves out as businesses, i.e. "exclusive" sources of content (often generated by users, go figure), they have no reason to support this concept. Because then it does not matter where the user gets the content. But they might have reasons to support TLS.

One could argue users want authentic content (signed content), not authentic "websites" (single sources for content trying to serve too many users, all at the same time).

Or maybe many users do not know the difference?

Van Jacobsen gave a good talk on this at Google:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF- PS8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8)

There is another thread on the HN front page right now about a Blackhat conference talk on x86 CPUs. There is another talk on that page about how TLS relies on the trustworthiness of internet routing.

What is the point of securing connections when you have no control over routing?

Instead of relying on securing "connections", I think schemes that send out "encrypted blobs" with the hope they arrive at the proper destination make more sense.

Encrypting blobs is not something for which an "authority" is needed. This is something over which the user can retain full control without involving third parties. As it should be.

TLS might have encryption that works well enough to "secure a connection" but if I am not mistaken it still has no reliable way to verify an endpoint (recipient) is the one you want it to be. Some people call that "authentication".

I'm not even sure that TLS can reliably perform "authentication of the connection" as Fielding states.

For that, I think SSH is a better protocol.

</comment><comment><USER19> This doesn't feel right to me. No one can touch this man's credentials, but lets suspend the argument of authority for a second and look at what he is saying critically: Is TLS more private overall than plantext http?

If you want to remain private, how could TLS prevent this that plaintext would not? HTTP is not tor.

<comment><USER20> I think the argument is "HTTP is edge cached (by your ISP, etc) and so a request need not imply a connection received at the remote end. HTTPS is not subject to caching or other benign man-in-the-middle operations so knowledge of who clicked what is centrally available." This feels like a weak objection to me, since the government will just snoop at the ISP level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone explain what he's referring to with the statement

> _with TLS in place, it becomes easy and commonplace to send stored > authentication credentials in those requests, without visibility, and > without the ability to easily reset those credentials (unlike in-the-clear > cookies)._?

Cookies are orthogonal to presence of TLS, I thought (unless they're marked as secure, in which case they are only supplied to https hosts?)

Is there some other way of identifying a particular user/browser/session[1] other than the quirks & features enumerator along hte lines of Panopticlick?

If there is (ISTR some 'session storage' for resuming TLS in nginx), is that cross-trackable across different services (potentially all TLS-terminating in the same place, such as Cloudflare or AWS)?

One good point is that I hadn't considered is that the lack of proxyability means every request which can't be filled from the browser cache _must_ hit the actual endpoint, making it easier for them to follow along action-by- action when it might otherwise have been served up before getting to them by a caching middle-proxy.

My (limited) understanding is that you're potentially providing more information to the remote service, but are better secured against people snooping on your traffic as it flows between you and them.

[1] also not including client certificates, because exactly 1 site on the internet actually uses them :P

<comment><USER22> Besides Session IDs and Session Tickets[1] which already exist in the TLS protocol. He could be referring to the Token Binding Protocol Draft[2] which, quoting from it's summary, "allows client/server applications to create long- lived, uniquely identifiable TLS bindings spanning multiple TLS sessions and connections".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Resum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Resumed_TLS_handshake)

[2] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tokbind- protocol-01](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tokbind-protocol-01)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found the title a bit misleading.

He's arguing that viewing public information over HTTPS is no more private than doing so without encryption.

Sure, insofar as an entire response consists only of public information, this is a tautology, isn't it?

<comment><USER24> No, because you would want to keep the fact that you read something private.

<comment><USER25> Yes, and Roy's claim is that TLS doesn't provide that privacy, so is still basically useless for public content.

<comment><USER26> His argument is mostly based on analysing the size of the data transferred. Let's assume HTTP/2 for the moment. You have a single encrypted channel to a particular website that contains multiple interleaved opaque streams. It's not easily possible to extract the exact size of a single request from this. Furthermore, for a typical news website, for example, there will be an huge number of pages, they are dynamic and constantly changing and they will all have a very similar size.

You do get privacy. If anyone claims otherwise, he should go and prove that it's possible and easy by providing a firesheep-like tool. It would make for a nice research paper.

<comment><USER27> Here's an article describing how to find out what someone is watching on Google Maps by analyzing the encrypted traffic. [http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on- goo...](http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-google- maps.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > If the IETF wants to improve privacy, it should work on protocols that > provide anonymous access to signed artifacts (authentication of the content, > not the connection) that is independent of the user's access mechanism.

He basically wants a better version of Freenet. Fine. However, that's orthogonal to the effort to make all channels secure channels. IETF can do _both_ , if people are interested. Plaintext TCP needs to die, and building the infrastructure to move everyone to HTTPS is a step in that direction.

He shouldn't obstruct HTTPS just because it's not Freenet(bis). To use his Freenet(bis) vaporware, people will need to become familiar with managing private keys. HTTPS has a similar requirement, so HTTPS Everywhere is a step in the direction he wants to go.

</comment><comment><USER29> > TLS is NOT desirable for access to public information, except in that it > provides an ephemeral form of message integrity that is a weak replacement > for content integrity.

TLS both encrypts and authenticates the response. Is TLS authentication a "weak replacement" for some other, better "content integrity" system that's widely available in browsers?

Roy suggests content signatures... but is there a web mechanism to authenticate _those_? Or is he just wishing there were something better than TLS? (Don't we all?)

<comment><USER30> I think his point is not that TLS is not good at securing information from the host to the viewer, his point is that in doing so, it leaks information about the viewer to the host and potentially to third parties. For public information, TLS effectively asks each viewer to sign the guest register in return for seeing the page.

Contrast this with the case where you could download one giant file with hashes for millions of public sites. Once you have a copy of that file, you can now fetch a copy of any of those pages from any source you like, and still validate that your copy is authentic without losing any trace that you accessed that file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31>
        > If the IETF wants to improve privacy, it should work on protocols
        > that provide anonymous access to signed artifacts (authentication
        > of the content, not the connection) that is independent of the
        > user's access mechanism.

       [...]

       > It would be better to provide content signatures and encourage
       > mirroring, just to be a good example, but I don't expect eggs to
       > show up before chickens.

If I wanted to have the eggs before the chickens, what would I do? Sign my content with PGP? Sign the HTML file? Offer it as separate signed download? Are there examples of pages doing this?

</comment><comment><USER32> HTTPS link: [https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416....](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> This sounds like complete PR reality distortion.

How exactly is TLS different to plaintext in anonymity? - There is no client- cert.

Also HTTPs everywhere does not necessarily mean "real" CAs. Self signed certs, even without pinning, would raise the bar of snooping from monitoring (easy) to traffic manipulation (hard). In this case there would not be a green lock in the address bar of course.

This whole thread feels like one propaganda attempt to sway the techinal community. And yes, here is where the people to manipulate are.

</comment><comment><USER34> I would wager that absolutely no one has ever become uniquely identifable as a result of using TLS. People have MAC and IP addresses tied to their real identities. People have social media profiles and run scripts from dozens of places on every page load.

Can someone please describe a situation in which someone reasonably wouldn't have been trackable to Google or to the NSA, but becomes trackable as a result of HTTPS?

I can't think of one. Screw this guy and his politics.

</comment><comment><USER20> The thing being commented on is here: [https://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/iesg/trac/wiki/HttpsEveryw...](https://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/iesg/trac/wiki/HttpsEverywhere)

</comment><comment><USER35> >It would be better to provide content signatures and encourage mirroring.

What does it mean? Mirror Site?

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a way I can view this with line wrapping in Firefox or in Chrome?

EDIT: Using Firefox Dev Ed, there's a little "Reader View" icon on the right hand side of the address bar that seems to do the trick.

</comment><comment><USER37> Https for everything is worthy for at least one reason: to shut up the scum operators who insert their ads. Privacy and confidentiality are of a much less importance.

</comment><comment><USER38> agree also

tls is not https3.

tls already has been broken 3+ times.

this is an open ticket for 1 year in the TLS repo for an exploit.

and the author of TLS released a MITM exploit on TLS he wrote (not that other protocols are not vulnerable to MITM)

theres no reason to put this in SSH/SSL/HTTP and run all internet communication over it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Roy is a wannabe industry shill who plays politics at a very amateur level. Roy could care less about your privacy, as long as ads and tracking work. He fundamentally thinks that ad blocking is theft and that you have no right to privacy.

\- an ex-tracking protection working group member.

<comment><USER40> It certainly seems that hes more obsessed with some hypothetical potential political economic scenario than the tech aspects of it.

Stick to the tech.</comment></comment>