Show HN: WhatFreeWords: Open-Source Geocoding for What3Words - <AUTHOR> https://whatfreewords.org/ <comment><USER2> What3words is patented[1]. If you compare the explanation of their free implementation[2] with the claims section of the patent, it seems very possible that it breaches the patent. In particular, the equations that are described in claim number 7 of the patent are exactly the same as in their explanations.

I'm not a lawyer so I can't talk about whether it can be enforced in practice. But still, the fact that this open-source implementation doesn't reference the patent anywhere suggests that they didn't consider the legal implications properly.

[1] [https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2014170646A1/fr?oq=WO%2f...](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2014170646A1/fr?oq=WO%2f2014%2f170646+)

[2] [https://whatfreewords.org/about.html](https://whatfreewords.org/about.html)

<comment><USER3> It's open source. Good luck enforcing patent claims against something that can be copied endlessly for free. Ask how that turned out against ffmpeg.

<comment><USER4> Codec IP owners usually grant royalty-free rights to software video players.

They make money licensing IP to hardware manufacturers.

<comment><USER3> MPEG-LA does not. [https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/](https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/) is their license scheme - while they allow a certain threshold below which cutoff isn't required, there's a lot of companies (such as Blizzard Entertainment!) whose primary distributed product is solely for video playback. H.264 requires a license for personal, at-home playback of encoded files. You have such a license if you have a Windows OS, an Apple OS, if you're using Chrome, or if you use a set-top box, or other "single-use" device which can play back H.264. You do not have such a license on linux with mplayer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What3Words is a horrible idea.

It's primary use is as a rent extraction device for its owners, if they can gain sufficient market share.

It is utterly useless without their app, uses a non-universal language (English vs math) and provides zero information about geography. The 3-word identification strings provide not the slightest clue whether two identified points are corners of the same building or literally on opposite sides of the planet (vs LatLong making it obvious that e.g., 42.36N 71.31W is relatively near 41.92N 71.48W).

It provides zero value to anyone trying to actually navigate, without using their app, and if you are going to navigate with an app, why not use any implementation of OpenStreetMap, or even the nearly ubiquitous Google or Apple maps? Hell, we're even better off with old paper postal maps than this scheme.

A slight about of temporary convenience for innumerate people is no good reason to implement a rent-extractive proprietary system.

<comment><USER6> I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.

In contrast, Google's plus codes([https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)) provide the same functionality but avoid the most of the pitfalls you mention.

If you wanted to encode the same data using words instead of alphanumeric characters (which is a debatable goal), then you could just combine it with WCodes ([https://wcodes.org/](https://wcodes.org/))

<comment><USER7> Plus codes are also unencumbered. Their main disadvantage is being saddled, branding-wise, to the Google Plus fiasco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a list of other alternatives to w3w

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words#Alternatives](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words#Alternatives)

</comment><comment> m-chrzan The javascript implementation defines deg2rad as

      deg * Math.PI / 360

It's been a while since high school math, but shouldn't that be divided by 180? Looks like the numbers in the docs are based on this incorrect conversion.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, thank you. This is a mistake. This will be corrected as quickly as possible.

ETA: This has been corrected. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment> jon-wood Sadly this is likely to get shut down by What3Words, who are very protective of their algorithm.

<comment><USER9> The authors know that: [https://whatfreewords.org/faq.html](https://whatfreewords.org/faq.html)

<comment><USER10> A subpoena will figure out who they are.

<comment><USER11> And then extradition orders in every country they're in?

<comment><USER12> You don't have to extradite the authors if they live in countries in which patent protection is strong and the legal systems are functional enough to impose due process upon them and enforce injunctions/damages. Extradition is typically a last resort, typically for criminal proceedings.

Moreover, an injunction is much more likely to be sought than damages, in which case extradition is unnecessary - all the patentees have to do is get an order from a judge forcing the hosts to take their code and site down.

<comment><USER13> Many countries don't recognize software patents, and the ones that do have some strict rules about what patents are valid. So, are you sure that this is a slam dunk? You don't seem to have any concept that it might be ruled invalid.

<comment><USER12> It's a lot easier to accomplish this under the conditions I outlined above. That's all I'm saying. People have gotten away with worse.

<comment><USER13> Many countries have strong patent protections and no software patents. If you wanted to say "have software patents" instead of "strong patent protections", it would make a bit more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Independently of the fact that I'm thoroughly against the use of proprietary algorithm for encoding, there's an interesting problem of the implementation of a range of similar problems to which somebody here maybe knows a nice effective solution:

(from their FAQ):

"The JavaScript library is about 2.4 megabytes. Almost all of this data is encoding data about how regions of the Earth are mapped to n values. There are over 300,000 regions. The raw data for the regions is 1.8 megabytes, and getting the data encoded in a JavaScript file raises this to 2.4 megabytes even after compression.

The Go library is about 2.6 megabytes of source code, for similar reasons, and produces executables of at least about 5.7 megabytes.

If you can shrink any of this data or make any other improvements, then please contact us and we will be pleased to use your improvements."

<comment><USER15> For the go executable to be so much larger than the source code, when he majority of that is data, there must be something going wrong...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hello, I am Ujjwal - the inventor of WCode. Please checkout this page: [https://wcodes.org/patents](https://wcodes.org/patents) and [https://wcodes.org/location](https://wcodes.org/location) And my webapp: [https://location.wcodes.org](https://location.wcodes.org)

</comment><comment><USER17> I have only ever heard of What3words in internet tech forums etc. Is it a well known company for the general public in some countries?

<comment><USER18> I wonder this too.

Honestly I have never seen it in use. In most countries, if something is on a street, it has a street address, which is more convenient than W3W.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure how accurate "in most countries, if something is on a street, it has a street address" is. Even in USA, if my car breaks down while I'm going cross-country, I'd be nice to have a fast way to share location.

<comment><USER20> Would this not be possible though by sharing your lon/lat though? Plus easier to navigate to using gmaps or the like.

On the flip side, I have read stories of w3w success in giving an address to people where a normal street address is not possible, e.g. favelas [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-innovation- what-3-words/w...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-innovation- what-3-words/what3words-keeps-olympics-visitors-on-track-in-rio-idUSKCN10M1Q6)

<comment><USER19> lat, long:

"I have fallen and broken my leg. I am under a rock at *thirty three point five nine six one three degrees north and one hundred and seventeen point seven nine six nine two degrees west. That's thirty three point five nine six one three degrees north and one hundred and seventeen point seven nine six nine two degrees west." Then wait for them to read it back to you. Then repeat that as many times as there are different people involved in the rescue.

Versus 3 word:

"I have fallen and broken my leg. I am under a rock at 3 word code: off-road — starfish — postmark." Then wait for them to read it back to you. Then repeat that as many times as there are different people involved in the rescue.

Where I am rn, btw. (Though thankfully not my situation) And the number of decimal places more or less corresponds with the size of the 3 code and an appropriate level of precision, given the environment.

<comment><USER20> yes - very good point

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find the fact Steve Coast (the founder of OpenStreetMap) has worked for what3words pretty grotesque.

[https://www.spatialsource.com.au/latest-news/founder-of- open...](https://www.spatialsource.com.au/latest-news/founder-of- openstreetmap-joins-what3words)

It's a shame that he didn't have enough charisma and vision to become OSM's BDFL a la Python's Guido von Rossum. Having a single person could help transcend the current "continue status quo" and "lean OSM Foundation that does absolute minimum" paradigm which partially stem from from the fact that every change would meet with some opposition (which is hard to override if there's no clearly dominating power).

</comment><comment><USER22> It's been shut down already.</comment>


Show HN: FrontAid – CMS for JSON Files in Git - <AUTHOR> https://frontaid.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, OP here. FrontAid is similar to a decoupled headless CMS, but without the API. Instead, it stores your content directly to your own Git repository in a JSON file. That gives you all sorts of advantages like version control, content ownership, support for feature branches (soon), automation with hooks/CI/CD, easy data migration, etc.

To use FrontAid, you define a completely flexible data model in a JSON file using your IDE/editor. And thanks to JSON Schema, you can even use code completion and the model is validated on the fly. Commit that model to your Git repo and FrontAid will generate the forms to be filled in by a content editor accordingly. And when they save their changes, the JSON content file will be pushed to Git.

Criticism is highly appreciated. Thanks!</comment>


Class Action Settlements - <AUTHOR> http://dangoldin.com/2019/12/19/class-action-settlements/ <comment><USER2> Totally agree, i got the Zappos letter too and thought it was a sales hoax, 10% is. Joke, they readily distribute 10% coupons weekly. It's basically legal firm taking the juice and giving them a layup for forking over the 30mn legal fee. I wonder what fee the law firm ultimately got paid? Guessing 10-30mn

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea - and it was still better than the Equifax nonsense!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do all modems connect via Coax? - <AUTHOR> Here in NY the cable companys' and Verizon's modems both connect to the outside world using coax.  Is it like that everywhere?  mostly everywhere? <comment><USER2> I have AT&T gigabit fiber. Fiber from the pole to the house, through the wall, into a transceiver, which connects to the modem via a cat5e cable.

When I had AT&T DSL, it was standard telephone hookup to the DSL point of entry, then coax into the modem.

<comment><USER3> Verizon DSL was phone all the way to the modem, IIRC. My FIOS is something that's neither Ethernet nor coax nor phone all the way to the modem. Not sure if it's fiber or something else proprietary, just that it's hard wired(!)</comment></comment>


When this post is 58 minutes old 38 Starlink satellites will be visible over SV - <AUTHOR> Should be going from high in the south to low in the east. They are usually pretty faint but noticeable after you spot them. This is not super unusual, but I happened to have been ready to post today, and they are pretty cool to see if you haven't already. Yes they could interfere with astronomy viewing. Found this on https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink-latest which is not my site.
Estimated time of appearance is 6:34pm.
Updated time in title link because post time changed when I updated text... <comment><USER2> Story time: Was once at a military installation in the middle of an experiment. At a critical moment, several security guards barge in and ask to see some paperwork. They had been tipped off to the fact that some of our shipping and receiving and inventory paperwork was out of date (they were absolutely correct, my bad).

I explained that we were in the middle of a _very_ time critical experiment and that afterward we would be happy to subject ourselves to the necessary sanctions; meanwhile could you (guard #1) tell me when the green trace on that o'scope starts wiggling because that's when you (guard #2) should see a flare across the sky around that hill.

This eventually turned out to be a successful experiment and the security guards had the time of their lives as impromptu laboratory assistants.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, that was underwhelming. The twilight was not dark enough yet! 7PM tomorrow might be better, visible high in the north going west to east.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, that was cool - not in SV but on the west coast and watched a bunch go over. Like you said, pretty faint but once I saw one it was easy to follow the line to the rest!

</comment><comment><USER4> The largest issue with this whole thing is that it seems super broken that like 0.00001% of the population knows about this going up, yet it's going to affect 100% of them in a few years. And still no say in it. I mean we're not even giving other countries a say in it. I hope China decides to shoot them all down when they're over with Covid19.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're referring to the impact on astronomy, I'm not sure it will be so bad. These ones that are visible have not yet moved up into their working orbit, and most of them will be coated with an ultra black coating in the future, and they are small, about the size of an office chair. Furthermore their orientation can be changed on demand to adjust their albedo for astronomy experiments. They are self deorbiting at their end of life. They are only visible because of the low orbit and during the few minutes when they are lit up by sunlight shortly after dusk. A few minutes after that, they pass out of the sun's illumination and blink out. And whatever negative effects you seem to think there are (not sure what, the astronomy was just a guess), there are also positives balancing that out. Imagine having cheap internet everywhere.

>And still no say in it.

The FCC and the ITU have a say.

>I hope China decides to shoot them all down

That is a less than stellar idea because of the randomly oriented harmful space debris it would create.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also worth reading for those not aware: [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/1/7/21003272/spa...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2020/1/7/21003272/space-x-starlink-astronomy-light-pollution)

</comment><comment><USER6> I know that comparing "hacker" "news" to reddit is "boring" (as dang would put it), but these types of "when this post is X <time units> old <some mundane thing> will happen" are low quality, but highly upvoted garbage that is super common on reddit. And now it's here.

<comment><USER7> Personally, I found this post interesting. I had never seen the site they linked before, and I found it to be a generally fascinating observation.

Why do you feel it's low quality?

<comment><USER8> it's useful for less than an hour after submission in one city on earth

<comment><AUTHOR> Meh, I see your point, however it's many cities, not one, and possibly one of the largest concentration of hn readers. We're talking about something in orbit, so the visibility is over a pretty wide area. And it't not like it ever reached the front page (as far as I know). I don't think there was great harm done. Glad some people appreciated it. I certainly won't repeatedly post it for the several viewings that happen per week! Maybe if there's an especially good one in the future... we'll see.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trial opens for hacker/sysadmin who allegedly locked out SF city officials  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/14/BAMU1B45AU.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><USER2> The issue of his bail ($5M) and the long lead time for a trial is ridiculous. American citizens are supposed to have the right to a speedy public trial. From what I've read his past criminal record had little or no effect on the bail figure. It seems kind of obvious that in this respect the legal system is designed to punish the poor and middle class and give the wealthy special rights. If Mr. Childs was a wealthy man he could have paid the $5M and been free 18 months ago. That is simply not fair.

That being said the way Mr. Childs handled this situation is equally as ridiculous. I have no sympathy for him based on the facts I've read about his withholding of information, hostility towards co-workers, and ego-manic view of network security, his inability to follow direct orders from supervisors, refusal to comply with city wide policies, etc. In my opinion he clearly deserved to get fired. The remaining charge, denial of service, seems reasonable enough and worthy of going to trial. No one is disputing that he withheld information so it's all about intent and that's something a jury should decide.

</comment><comment><USER3> The news here is that our "justice" system can throw you in jail without a trial for a year and half for a crime that resulted in no damage to anyone and not even a loss of data.

<comment><USER4> Well, besides the damage of not having access to the computer system. It's not as sensational as you make it sound. For example, an armed robber occupying your house for an evening who leaves with nothing and does not shoot or stab anyone can similarly be described, but he also would not escape the consequences of his actions.

<comment><USER5> 1.5 years in jail without a trail is a travesty.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but who caused it? As far as I understand trials normally follow accusations rapidly unless one side or the other spends a lot of the court's time on legal motions. Unless you're prepared to present evidence that the prosecution was the cause of substantially all of this delay, you have no grounds on which to complain about the handling of this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some background info (this is about the best coverage of the whole episode in a single story): [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/27/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/27/MND011UVRJ.DTL)</comment>


Server + Client-Side Validation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Dachande663/PHP-Validation/blob/master/examples/jquery.php

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked on a couple of older projects recently where previous developers had implemented only server-side validation (bad for UX) or, even worse, a mix of both client and server-side where the rules had come out of sync so decided to do something about it. Some of the code isn't the most logical, but this library helps to make sure everything stays in sync. Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> Looks clean, do you plan to implement any other client-side validators yourself?

Maybe you can add helpers to generate the HTML elements as well, since HTML5 adds some attributes that allow the browser to validate e.g. email or required.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've only really used jQuery Validation, hence it's intergration but there's no reason why different implementations cannot be added. What JS validation libraries would you want to see added?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is why I use Node/Express now; I use the same validation code client/server and where the client code, if required, uses socket.io for things which would normally only work on the server (validations using the db for instance).

</comment><comment><USER4> ValidForm Builder is a lot easier to use imho. Generates both server and client side validation including the form itself.</comment>


Ask HN: Post your OPMLs? What are your must-read sites? - <AUTHOR>

I just installed Shaun Inman's RSS reader Fever ( feedafever.com ) and I'm trying to collect a nice range of feeds to act as Sparks (feeds that help surface hot stories from your main 'Kindling' feeds). I trust the taste of Hacker News' participants and—furthermore—I'm curious to see just how long the long tail of sites we like is.<p>Care to post your OPMLs? In the name of broader discussion, what feeds can't you live without? What's a site that you think more people should read? <comment><AUTHOR> A snapshot of my subscriptions of the moment is at <http://brianseward.com/feed-me.opml>

I am constantly impressed by the curation of applications on <http://www.creativeapplications.net/> . Their posts inspire me to imagine creative, engaging interfaces for my own projects.</comment>


Why is one not able to tweet "Get Better"? - <AUTHOR> http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9543/is-one-not-able-to-tweet-get-better-because-its-something-dorseys-father-us

<comment><USER2> Seems to work for me. [1] Maybe they fixed it?

[1]: [https://twitter.com/ryanseys/status/442104260059488256](https://twitter.com/ryanseys/status/442104260059488256)

</comment><comment><USER3> super-interesting. Misleading headline, as it apparently works on any two-word tweet in which the first word is get (thus having nothing to do with Jack Dorsey's family). It seems like a bug that is a legacy of the SMS command-line interface, GET command.

Nice find though.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I get better at reading news? - <AUTHOR> I like the concept of the newspaper. You had to physically hold it in a place that required room because the paper was so large. Now I'm literally using two devices at work, connected to a constant stream of information and I end up reading news every hour.<p>How do you guys manage this stream, but still stay caught up? <comment><USER2> A few years ago, when I was similarly motivated I subscribed to the print edition of _The Economist_. I made a point of reading each issue cover to cover, which required a determined effort to complete every week. I don't know if I was ever "caught up" but I felt more informed and if something didn't make it into the magazine, then that was a reasonable proxy for it lacking great importance.

The disclaimer is that these days I just accept that it is impossible to keep up with things I'm not all that interested in, the things I can do little about, and the things someone wants me to be outraged over.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> This may not answer your question, but is still relevant: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

</comment><comment><USER4> I subscribe to an email newsletter by a major German news-website (www.dw.com). Every morning and evening, I get the most important news delivered to my inbox, one paragraph per item. It takes about a minute to scan and I am "up to date" on what's happening. If there is an item that really interests me, I'll look it up on the BBC. Of course this newsletter doesn't give me any kind of depth or breadth of coverage, but then, how often do you really need that?

</comment><comment><USER5> > I end up reading news every hour.

If you find that this is a compulsion, you can use [https://freedom.to/](https://freedom.to/) to block yourself from it. It costs a very small amount of money that is far cheaper than losing your job.

Physical newspaper and magazine delivery services still exist.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1) You cannot be "caught up".

2) What are you looking to get out of the news?

Accept 1, answer 2 - you'll be most of the way there.</comment>


Linux TCP/IP Tuning - <AUTHOR> http://www.lognormal.com/blog/2012/09/27/linux-tcpip-tuning/ <comment><USER2> _"nginx only uses HTTP/1.0 when it proxies requests to a back end server"_

No more:

[http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Nginx-talk-HTTP-1-1-to- upstr...](http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Nginx-talk-HTTP-1-1-to-upstream- servers)

[http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#...](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#keepalive)

[http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2011-August/028324....](http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2011-August/028324.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, unfortunately it will be a while before it gets into apt

<comment><USER3> If you're running nginx in production on Ubuntu or Debian, you'd probably be well-served by using their packages rather than the distribution default ones.

<http://nginx.org/en/download.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, will look into that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In order for a collision to take place, we'd have to get a new connection from an existing client, AND that client would have to use the same port number that it used for the earlier connection, AND our server would have to assign the same port number to this connection as it did before._

Ephemeral ports aren't assigned to inbound connections, they're used for outbound connections. So, for the client-to-nginx connection, both the server IP and port are fixed (the port will be either 80 or 443) - only the client IP and port change, so for a collision all you need is for a client to re-use the same port on its side quickly.

For the nginx to node connection, both IPs and the server port are fixed, leaving only the ephemeral port used by nginx to vary. You don't have to worry about out-of-order packets here though, since the connection is loopback.

Note that only the side of the connection that initiates the close goes into TIME_WAIT - the other side goes into a much shorter LAST_ACK state.

<comment><USER5> For the nginx to node connection, it's a unix socket. No issue.

<comment><USER6> So just to be sure, some noobs questions: The 'Ephemeral Ports' and the 'TIME_WAIT state' tricks are here to handle the connections from nginx to Node.js (not for the client to nginx)?

Socket from client to nginx are well identified by the client IP an the client port. On each client request, nginx create a new socket to node.js?

There can be more than one node.js intance running? That's the main goal of nginx here, or there is some additional benifices? > Edit, ok: "nginx is used for almost everything: gzip encoding, static file serving, HTTP caching, SSL handling, load balancing and spoon feeding clients" [http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for- product...](http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-production- part-2-using-nginx-to-avoid-node-js-load/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really surprised this article doesn't mention _tcp_tw_reuse_ or _tcp_tw_recycle_. These have a more substantial impact that simply adjusting TW, as those ports will still be in a FIN_WAIT status for a long time before reuse as well.

Excellent article on the subject.: <http://www.speedguide.net/articles/linux- tweaking-121>

<comment><USER8> Agreed. There are a lot of other possible optimizations, from the often- mentioned buffer size settings:

      net.core.rmem_max / net.core.wmem_max
      net.ipv4.tcp_rmem / net.ipv4.tcp_wmem

to metric tunings like:

      net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save / net.ipv4.tcp_moderate_rcvbuf

I've been playing around with these settings on very loaded machines:

      # Retry SYN/ACK only three times, instead of five
      net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 3
      # Try to close things only twice
      net.ipv4.tcp_orphan_retries = 2
      # FIN-WAIT-2 for only 5 seconds
      net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 5
      # Increase syn socket queue size (default: 512)
      net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 2048
      # One hour keepalive with fewer probes (default: 7200 & 9)
      net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 3600
      net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 5
      # Max packets the input can queue
      net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 2500
      # Keep fragments for 15 sec (default: 30)
      net.ipv4.ipfrag_time = 15
      # Use H-TCP congestion control
      net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = htcp

<comment><USER9> have you noticed much of a change with htcp as the congestion control algo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"A large part of this is due to the fact that nginx only uses HTTP/1.0 when it proxies requests to a back end server, and that means it opens a new connection on every request rather than using a persistent connection"_

Have you tried using upstream keepalive [http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#...](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#keepalive) This should help keep the number of connections, and thus ephemeral port and tcp memory loading down.

As for node.js, core only ever holds a connection open for once through the event loop, and even then, only if there are requests queued. If you have any kind of high volume tcp client in node, this will also cause issues w/ ephemeral port exhaustion and thus tcp memory loading. Check out <https://github.com/TBEDP/agentkeepalive> in that case. Related to tcp memory load issues in general, this is a helpful paper <http://www.isi.edu/touch/pubs/infocomm99/infocomm99-web/>

</comment><comment><USER11> There's some good info in here. We ran a flash hotel sale a while back. Only lasted for 60 seconds but with about 800 booking req/second. Discovered many of the same issues but I never quite got iptables stable (hash table flooding, then other issues) so I ended up getting it to ignore some of the traffic. Will try out the solutions in here next time to see how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know why nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established is set to such a high value? Five days seems like an awful long time.

<comment><USER13> Yeah that was a good take-away from the article. I was not aware of that either.

I would guess it's to allow long connections for ssh or similar without timeouts, but there are other ways to prevent timeouts without it eating all those resources.

I set it to 1800 myself, we'll see how that goes.

I noticed memory use went down after that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've found the low hanging fruit is to add _initcwnd 10_ to your ip route and setting _tcp_slow_start_after_idle=0_

<comment><AUTHOR> that helps reduce latency, but if you can't accept new connections, it's of no use.

Also note that initcwnd is set to 10 by default on all current OSen.

<comment><USER13> CentOS is used on a great percentage of webservers and it does not set initcwnd to 10 by default.

Sadly we have to wait even longer for _initrwnd_ support (minimum 2.6.38 kernel)

<comment><USER14> elrepo has up to date kernels for centos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do people seriously run out of ephemeral ports before they run out of server memory?

<comment><USER16> There are ~32k ephemeral ports. Typical servers have ~32G of memory. It's certainly not hard to imagine a request architecture where a single request can be handled in less than 1MB of per-request memory.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but you don't need a separate port for every request. Is it reasonable to believe that a single client will have that many conns open?

<comment><USER17> In this case, they were reverse proxying with an old nginx that only supported HTTP/1.0 for backend connections. So they do need an ephemeral port for each request.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Start-Up Takes on 'Patent Trolls' - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122749448645752369.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

<comment><USER2> _"With NPEs, you can't sue them which is what makes them particularly scary because you have no real defense against them," said Amster, adding that roughly 16 percent of all patent litigation is associated with these entities. Asked to elaborate on why the NPEs can't be sued, Amster said "they don't do anything."_

Ahh trolls. Buying tomorrow to keep it from happening. Almost like shorting the future. That's eye opening that we're coming up on 1 in 5 of all patent cases being troll related.

I wish these guys luck, I think. I just wonder what (really) happens if you're not paying your $35,000/year (the "startup" price) and you happen to use a technology that sounds kind of like a patent that's in the trust that IBM is also using.

</comment><comment><USER2> Want to read the article, but its behind a subscription wall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I went through Google News and got the whole article.

Just do a search on RPX [http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&...](http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=rpx&ie=UTF-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Intersting idea, but what's to prevent RPX from changing its model down the line and selling its portfolio to Intellectual Ventures?

<comment><USER4> I can't see a difference in business model between the two. Both are buying threatening patents off the market on behalf of their "investors". Both claim they will not sue people over the patents -- that they'll only be used defensively.

It's only a matter of time before the member companies realize that this "patent protection racket" is just as bad as the trolls were. The only benefit is that they extract their fees slowly instead of in lump sums, so they are easier to budget for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the same business model as the mafia: pay us and cede power to us, and we'll protect you. The danger being, of course, that you have no guarantee they won't turn on you.</comment>


Am I Being Tracked - <AUTHOR> http://amibeingtracked.com

<comment><USER2> Wow, they might want to check out doineednewservers.com :-)

<comment><USER3> Surprisingly that domain name is still available :O

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant information about this: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x- uidh](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh)

</comment><comment><USER5> Given the title, I was expecting that page to be just "Yes." in large bold font :)

</comment><comment><USER6> The header is sent for corporate customers.

The article said "But according to AdAge, "Corporate and government subscribers are excluded from the new marketing solution." We haven't verified (and Verizon refuses to say) whether the header is still sent for those subscribers or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> Coral Cache might eventually pick up the site:

[http://amibeingtracked.com.nyud.net/](http://amibeingtracked.com.nyud.net/)

<comment><USER8> which actually is also not working...

<comment><USER7> I _think_ that's a reflection that the origin isn't, though I'm not sure of that.

Still -- seeding the cache should help ensure that it does eventually show up. Which was the point of posting the link.

That said: CC does seem to have been spotty over the past year or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems similar (in concept, not implementation) to how google "worked around" Safari privacy settings and lost a lawsuit about it.

<comment><USER10> Huh, apparently it was the same Stanford grad student who busted Google for the Safari cookies and Verizon for the respawning cookies. Kinda cool.

[http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari- trackers/](http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/)

[http://webpolicy.org/2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie- cookie/](http://webpolicy.org/2015/01/14/turn-verizon-zombie-cookie/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This page doesn't even load on WP8 (Desktop and mobile versions tested, WiFi and 4G).

>Insert comments about WP8's irrelevancy below<

<comment><USER11> Wow! Three downvotes for trying to help test it. When I tried the website on WP8, it had loaded seconds before on Chrome/Linux. But yes, looks like it's down and I must have hit the issue on the phone just when it began and didn't bother to test again on the computer. Sorry about the joke in the end, it was sarcasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks like i am not being tracked but i am curious to how many people actually are.

<comment><USER13> Is that because you're not on Verizon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not able to open here...is it down??...

<comment><AUTHOR> downforeveryoneorjustme.com</comment></comment>


Bioengineers Build Open Source Language for Programming Cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/bio-fab-open-source-language

<comment><USER2> "Has the Senate authorized the creation of a clone army?"

\- Obi Wan Kenobi broadcasting from planet Kamino

/s</comment>


Yahoo Expands Maternity, Paternity Leave - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/tech/NATL-After-Work-From-Home-Ban-Yahoo-Expands-Maternity-Leave-205377421.html

<comment><USER2> To be honest, this is exactly why I do not plan on starting a family in the Bay Area, and instead, will return back to Toronto.

[http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pubs/guide/pregnancy....](http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pubs/guide/pregnancy.php) [http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/ei/types/maternity_parent...](http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/ei/types/maternity_parental.shtml#eligible)

Basically, in Ontario, mothers are eligible for 17 weeks of pregnancy leave. After giving birth, both parents are eligible for up to 37 weeks of parental leave.

This time is unpaid, but has no impact on your benefits, length of employment, seniority, etc. Many companies do pay for this time off, especially since the government employment insurance program will help if your weekly income drops below 40%.

The money helps significantly, but for me, it's more about the time. These are important and formative weeks during your child and family's development. A couple of my friends just had a baby, and I can see how much they cherish every moment they spend with him.

I won't be worrying about these kinds of benefits for a few more years, but it's still something that I view as important.

<comment><USER3> Here in Sweden you get 16 months to split between the parents. It amazes me how crappy the benefits are in even the most "progressive" Bay Area companies, like Facebook trying to recruit with "25 vacation days", makes me laugh.

<comment><USER4> We can crap on the Bay Area all day long, but then the question becomes: why isn't Silicon Valley in Sweden?

<comment><USER3> Man, I can list so many reasons, starting with a very risk averse society, then continuing with very bad economic policies during the period after WWII up until our big finical crisis in the 1990. Please note that I have some libertarian tendencies so my views are perhaps coloured by that.

But that was not my point. My point was how low the barrier for "great benefits" where even for "spoiled" software engineers in Silicon Valley. Why not try to move the goal post a bit further?

<comment><USER5> I agree, US companies should have better policies, but that would rely on the government enforcing an even playing field (not very libertarian). Otherwise there is no way any single company can stray too far from the pack without seriously damaging their competitiveness.

Maybe something like the government covering 70% of the your away pay (capped, obviously), and giving the company 15% to go toward to whatever they chose (covering you more, hiring a temp, the bottom line, etc.) The size of the company could also be a factor on how large that payment is (the smaller the company, the larger the percentage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kudos to Yahoo!! It is shocking how little maternity leave is provided by the average company. I have a friend who got 8 weeks, took 8 more without pay ... she was so pissed off that she used part of the leave time to find another job. The company lost a top notch worker for being so stingy with maternity leave!

<comment><USER7> Let's not forget that 16 weeks is still way below what employers in other countries are obligated to offer, on average. Have a look at this graph, linked to by the article: [http://childrenschances.org/global-maps/parents- and-children...](http://childrenschances.org/global-maps/parents-and- children/is-paid-leave-available-for-mothers-of-infants/)

Paid leave from work for mothers of infants: Canada 50 weeks, Mexico 12 weeks, USA zero.

Paid leave from work for fathers of infants: Canada 35 weeks, Cuba 40 weeks, USA zero.

In Eastern European countries like Belarus, Ukraine, and Slovakia, mothers get 3 years paid leave – that's 10 times more than what Yahoo is offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone aware of how the courts have interpreted things like this (if at all)?

> _"Under the new policy, mothers can take 16 weeks of paid leave with > benefits, and fathers can take up to eight weeks"_

Would that not be considered discriminatory?

<comment><USER9> The problem is that different paternity/maternity times makes employers view women as more hazardous. This also reinforces the sexist notion that fathers aren't as integral to early childhood development. I'm sure a new mother would love the extra help for another 8 weeks!

Also, lets say that you're a child adopted by a homosexual married couple and you only get 8 weeks. How is that fair to the adopted child versus 16 weeks for a birthed child?

Equality means treating people equally--including men and children.

<comment><USER10> The point at which your politics leads you to claim that sex (in this case we rather _aren't_ talking gender, but actual sex) experiences in childbirth should be treated precisely equally is the point at which you need to sit down with your politics and have a long, heartfelt discussion vis a vis your politics' connection to reality.

Some recognition of the differences in experience and particularly in consequences are called for, I think. Because they exist.

<comment><USER11> bluthru's more important point is that by offering different amounts of time off for men and women you're disincentivizing managers from hiring women.

The simplest way of removing this "hidden tax" on hiring women is to make the tax the same for men.

A proper policy would give equal maternal/paternal time off for both parents for either birth or adoption, and also have some sort of paid medical leave program in place for complicated pregnancies (and of course, all other medical problems).

<comment><USER12> > have some sort of paid medical leave program in place for complicated > pregnancies

Anecdotally, _lots_ of women in Italy have "difficult pregnancies" because the incentives are there for it. They're happy to have extra time off, and doctors, when in doubt, are not going to choose the riskier option.

<comment><USER13> In the US, similar: it is standard for doctors to prescribe 6 weeks of rest, for use with employers and insurance companies that are moved by such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's really hard for me to see this as something other than reactionary to all the criticism after the WFH policy fiasco. I think it's great for those who are expecting, but this feels like trying to save face.

After one year, I expected more in terms of results from Yahoo under Mayer's tenure. I'm not as close to it, but I just didn't see benefit and work policies as the difference between success and failure in the marketplace for Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sweet.

Now can we see some news about tech innovations by yahoo?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a pretty fair deal. As the sole income for a family of 5 in the bay area, these kind of perks are good. Well, not that it matters for me anymore. No more kids for us!!!

</comment><comment><USER17> 8 weeks for fathers is very good.

</comment><comment><USER18> One has nothing to do with the other.

<comment><USER19> They are more related than you think . When WFH was banned, one of the groups that got the most attention was mothers who complained that they were no longer able to work and take care of their kids at the same time, but Meyer built a nursery for her own kid on-site.</comment></comment>


Latex support for blogspot using MathJax - <AUTHOR> http://ramblingsoullt.blogspot.com/2012/04/resetting-latex-setup-for-blogspot.html

<comment><USER2> I hate to nitpick, but it is written in as LaTeX[1].

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_.22LaTeX.22)

<comment><AUTHOR> no worries, good point though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sweet. Mathquill (mathquill.com) will do the same, I believe, as long as you wrap your math in an element with class "mathquill-embedded-latex".</comment>


Apple Inc: A Pre-Mortem - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/apple-inc-a-pre-mortem-568d1a0b7d72#.ylvo4dpyf <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but all these articles burying Apple are kind of dumb, if Ballmer couldn't kill Microsoft, then it's not a long shot to say that Apple is going to be alright

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple is dead, if you re-define death to be something like "no longer in its former glory" or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> How many companies would love to be as successful as the apple watch alone.

</comment><comment><USER5> So much conversation like this, it's crazy. Here's the simple truth. Apple makes phones. The best phones you can buy. Nearly every person over the age of 13 buys a phone. Many buy a new one every year or two. Apple controls approx. 12% of the overall market and approx 91% of profits. That's it. Compare this with the PC-market of the early 90s (10 years into a market segment). Apple is CRUSHING it's closest competitor (Sammy). Their phones are literally BLOWING UP. Take a flight recently? "No Samsung Galaxy S7s allowed". Sheesh. Apple and Tim Cook can piss into the wind for the next decade so long as the iPhone engine continues. And it WILL CONTINUE. It's getting better every 12 months.

<comment><USER6> I'm an Apple fan, and have spent several thousands of dollars with the company over the years. I've owned 8 different iPhone models.

> Here's the simple truth.

I think you're not letting facts interfere with your theory.

> Apple is CRUSHING it's closest competitor (Sammy).

Depends on how you measure that. Samsung sells more phones. Also, about 45% of the market is "other", compared to Samsung's 20%, so it's not like Apple has the one competitor to worry about. And those competitors have nice products. I've owned both the S7 Edge and the Google Pixel - the Pixel is a very nice phone. Were I not so dependent on the Apple ecosystem, I'd happily make the Pixel my primary phone.

> "No Samsung Galaxy S7s allowed"

Galaxy Note 7. Even after the recall, their S7 sales actually remain strong. Samsung isn't the only competitor.

> Apple and Tim Cook can piss into the wind for the next decade so long as the > iPhone engine continues.

I'm sure the company will definitely survive, but non-iPhone sales are very important. They made about $24B from the iPhone, about $14B from other products (Mac/iPad/Watch mostly), and $6B in services (like iTunes).

[http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market- share/vendor;jses...](http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market- share/vendor;jsessionid=7B1F2B6DB5D605B3654D2DB397A64D5E)

> It's getting better every 12 months.

Read any article on marketshare. Apple is losing marketshare every year in the smartphone segment. Their Q4 2016 across the company was lower than Q4 2015. (about 8% drop; if you look at only the iPhone, it's about 12%)

[http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...](http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial- results-iphone-mac-sales-down-again-3581769/)

<comment><USER7> I think everyone looks at this backwards. The iPod didnt change the world, the iPod changed Apple. The iPhone is the next evolution of the iPod. The question isnt whether Apple can release a revolution that changes how we use technology, the question is whether Apple can release a revolution that realigns Apple around that product.

And whether Apple wants to admit it or not, the iPod and iPhones success is in part due to them being cross platform devices that didnt require Macs.

<comment><USER8> To extend this idea, you can see Siri (Alexa) and some sort of AR device in the near future. These could be centered around the iPod/iPhone ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> Siri doesnt run on my android. Alexa runs on everything. Siri will never be the iPhone next while it runs exclusively in a closed ecosystem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Redis Request iRregularities with Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://gist.io/3993155 <comment><USER2> Thanks for speeding up the loading time of my rails environment!</comment>


Meloader: Linux i386 tool to load and execute Intel ME modules - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peterbjornx/meloader <comment><USER2> Temporary link to associated CCC talk: [https://streaming.media.ccc.de/36c3/relive/10694](https://streaming.media.ccc.de/36c3/relive/10694) (starts around 15:45 mark)

Proper recording will be available at [https://media.ccc.de/c/36c3](https://media.ccc.de/c/36c3)

<comment><USER3> [https://cdn.c3voc.de/relive/36c3/10694/index.m3u8](https://cdn.c3voc.de/relive/36c3/10694/index.m3u8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess ME modules are a kind of plugin for Intel's management engine: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Module...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Modules) Could someone explain what kinds of things this loader could be used for?

<comment><USER5> It is a loader for loading ME modules in an emulated environment not for loading new ME modules into existing Intel system.

It could be used for debugging and dynamic analysis of existing ME module code. Other use would be developing exploits for ME by providing an environment where they can be tested and debugged.

<comment><USER6> More like to replace privileged closed binary blobs with open and better code. To avoid possible bugs and backdoors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does this work for unloading followed by summary execution?

It says it's useable for developing code for the CSME, does that take care of the whole thing or are there ROM areas left which cannot be worked around?

</comment><comment><USER8> Fresh out of the CCC talk, congrats on the upvote points loot! :P</comment>


Tesla Discloses Worst Quarterly Loss Ever - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2018/08/01/tesla-discloses-worst-quarterly-loss-ever-but-where-are-the-17000-model-3-cars-it-produced-but-didnt-deliver/ <comment><USER2> Is this an exercise by shorts to try and force publicly visible references to TSLA stock down? It feels a bit odd, because I would have expected anyone with finance chops in YC to have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals here.

I don't understand why anyone would post this here, unless they seriously don't understand what motivates people on YC.

</comment><comment><USER3> getting really sick of these articles...</comment>


Uber Raises Funding at $62.5B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/uber-raises-funding-at-62-5-valuation <comment><USER2> Uber is now too big to fail. Possibly the most important company this decade. I never cease to be amazed by their phenomenal execution across the world.

I was in Mexico City last week where I truly came to understand the enormous impact Uber as a company has had in these past few years. The service was highly prevalent, popular, and the experience was completely seamless — just like in the US. It barely skipped a beat. Their execution is likely a prime business case study in that no other company has built a technology business that has a huge, real-life logistical component this fast — and in dozens of cities around the world, spanning an equal number of ways of doing business and cultural barriers.

<comment><USER3> The most important company this decade? I'm not saying you're wrong but I have to ask... what makes Uber so important?

<comment><USER4> The most successful redefinition of labour relations since the begining of overseas manufacturing.

<comment><USER5> Successful for the company. Not necessarily the population.

<comment><USER2> I'd disagree with that. It is providing a means of income for many who are unemployed/underemployed. It's much better than nothing. It probably can be better, but most of these drivers aren't complaining.

<comment><USER6> They aren't complaining yet because 1. they effectively have no collective voice other than social media, and 2. this "gig" industry Uber has propelled into the stratosphere is just too relatively new to see any significant societal fallout.

Wait until we see more and more drivers whose only job is Uber no longer able to work. What do we say to the veterans who, after being rejected everywhere else due to a dearth of skills took out a car loan on a new $60k SUV to drive for Uber, only now to get injured? Who's going to take care of them? Won't be Uber, who will just be shoving the middle finger in their faces. And I don't think you can call this a strawman, given how aggressive Uber is with vets.

<comment><USER7> Sure. But why don't we blame literally every other company who is worse and isn't giving any better opportunity. It would be fantastic if everyone had hundreds or thousands of options and they could compete for the best opportunity, but for some people that's not the case. I'd blame every other company before I blamed the one doing the most to help provide a compelling opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So by now Uber has raised capital and debt from:

\- some pretty famous angle investors

\- some pretty famous venture capital funds

\- some pretty famous investment banks

\- some pretty famous private equity firms

\- some pretty famous hedge funds

\- some pretty famous mutual funds

It's worth asking, if they have reached the point where their success becomes less about their execution, though that's still important, and more of a self fulfilling prophecy.

I mean you now have some very influential people to call on if you need help on navigating the IPO process, or government lobbying for rules changes, etc.

I've completely changed my mind on Uber, 18 months ago I would have felt nervous as employee joining them when determining if my options would be worth much. Now, I'd be asking if i could put 50% of my paycheck towards buying more options.

Steve Balmer was famous for acquiring as much Microsoft stock as he could, even after he became the CEO. I'd be mimicking Steve Balmer here and acquiring as much Uber as I could right now.

<comment><USER8> Your question about self-fulfilling prophecy is very relevant to a recent piece written by a transportation expert. Among other points he makes:

>Uber-type companies need to be understood as a radical departure from Amazon/EBay type models. Instead of displacing competitors through actual efficiencies, or by creating entirely new markets, its model is entirely based on getting the world to believe that it will inevitably dominate the entire industry. This requires aggressively suppressing any discussion of empirical economic evidence (which would undermine its case) and emphasizing the factors driving inevitability--the brilliance of its early stage investors, the ruthlessness of management, and the raw political power of the company's wealthy supporters. PR is a component of every start-up; at Amazon/EBay it played a supporting role and relied heavily on economic evidence of competitive strengths, but at Uber PR is the heart of the plan, and replaces the need to figure out how to provide much better service at much lower cost.

[https://pando.com/2015/12/01/has-pando-missed-heart-uber- pro...](https://pando.com/2015/12/01/has-pando-missed-heart-uber-problem- transportation-industry-expert- writes/a5c239cf3fc961d10b17a4892d0f74e899b77fd9/)

<comment><USER3> I can only speak for myself here but I feel like I am part of a new market that Uber and Lyft have created. I live in Austin TX and have had bad cab experiences here and so I frequently use Uber. I am from New York, however, and when I'm back there I almost never use Uber because I have no problems with getting a cab.

I would be surprised if the market for cab companies in Austin is as large as the market Uber serves. I really cant recall the last time someone here told me they got in a cab. I think those people just drove themselves places before Uber instead of taking a cab. I certainly did.

<comment><USER9> I live out in a relatively remote area of Queens in NYC and never, ever took taxis before (I would have had to call an unreliable, surly car service). Now I spend $100+ a month on Uber, which is never more than 5 minutes away.

<comment><USER10> OT, the "5 minutes" I believe is an estimation and one reason why we feel that the response is fast. As a thought experiment, if they say your car is "10 minutes" away, it would perhaps be a different experience.

<comment><USER11> This is very important, because I time my rides to the minute, and almost every time, the driver that accepts my ride is sitting in his living room (or at his office) and takes five minutes alone just to get to his car and start driving to my location. Drivers aren't just sitting there idling like taxis at a taxi stand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's close to Basecamps valutation :) [https://medium.com/@jasonfried/press- release-basecamp-valuat...](https://medium.com/@jasonfried/press-release- basecamp-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc- investment-c221d8f86ad7#.k5znmketf)

<comment><USER10> Reminded me of the SV episode where Russ Hanneman asks Richard to not generate revenue because once you do people would start quantifying it.

If they don't generate revenue then the sky is the limit!

<comment><USER13> They make a ton of revenue....

<comment><USER10>
      They make a ton of revenue....

I was commenting on the medium article linked which said...

      In order to increase the value of the company, Basecamp has decided to stop
      generating revenue. "When it comes to valuation, making money is a real
      obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation," said Mr.
      Fried. "Once you have profits, it's impossible to just make stuff up. That's
      why we're switching to a 'freeconomics' model. We'll give away everything for
      free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we
      wanted to make money. That way, the sky's the limit!"

<comment><USER13> GOTCHA gotcha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet mostly still unregulated. I cant get over all the bad stuff they did to get where they are now. I am not defending taxi drivers (it seems that ANYONE against Uber business model = taxi supporter - at least according to majority of A/B society) but Uber is what corporations shouldn't be - breaking laws, throwing money to shut people and lobbying every politician they can. While I understand love by people that use it to make money or communicate, their whole model is just wrong and example of how corporation shouldn't be imo.

<comment><USER15> It's so easy to never deal with Uber if you don't want to that I don't see the point of regulation.

<comment><USER16> Because Uber pushes out transportation providers _who do follow the rules_. Hence, regulation required.

<comment><USER15> This is an argument for deregulation, not regulation. Why bother with regulation in a highly competitive market?

<comment><USER17> Taxis pre-regulation were highly competitive.

Each driver did his best to cut costs and raise revenue like: break traffic laws, not pay for insurance, not service their cars, not clean their cars, etc.

And since hailing a cab doesn't really give a lot of consumer choice besides what cabbie happens to be driving by at the moment, "competition" is loosely applied at best.

Pre-regulation, this would mean chances were fair that you'd enter a cab driven by a verbally abusive asshole who can't drive well, blows smoke into your face at a 15 second interval, doesn't know the city, and has basically no regard for human life or decency.

At least according to Time magazine in 1976: Modern Living: Call Me a Taxi, You Yellow Cab!

<comment><USER18> And now the internet and mobile apps has changed all that. Now consumers can pick the best service and simply download a different app, and the services themselves can weed out bad drivers by looking at their ratings.

<comment><USER16> That's an extremely naive point of view about something so critical as transportation infrastructure.

<comment><USER18> Seems to be working pretty well so far, especially compared to the highly regulated taxi industry.

"a verbally abusive asshole who can't drive well, blows smoke into your face at a 15 second interval, doesn't know the city, and has basically no regard for human life or decency" sounds a lot more like taxi drivers than Uber drivers (with the exception of "doesn't know the city", fortunately we have other mobile apps for that too!)

<comment><USER16> Unless you're disabled, which is part of regulations in place for taxi companies (that Uber and Lyft ignore):

[http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/uber-lyft- disabled/](http://fortune.com/2015/05/22/uber-lyft-disabled/)

[http://www.wired.com/2015/08/uber- disability/](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/uber-disability/)

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/uber- disabi...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/uber-disability- laws-don-t-apply-to-us.html)

[http://time.com/3895021/why-the-disabled-are-suing-uber- and-...](http://time.com/3895021/why-the-disabled-are-suing-uber-and-lyft/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lyft "lost $127 million in the first half of 2015 on $46.7 million in revenue, according to the documents. Lyft said last month that it has gained market share in key markets, such as San Francisco, and has a gross revenue "run rate" of $1 billion."

I had no idea lyft was losing 3x the their revenue. That is crazy.

<comment><USER20> Because most people Uber...?

It became a "verb" and well, here we know what that means: "xerox that paper", "google this term"... Nobody is Lyft-ing and everyone is Uber-ing. Once it's verbified, it's hard for competitors to overcome it.

I, for one, have used neither. But I have friends and family who travel a lot. Some are in their 20s, 30s, and some in the 60s and they all say they Uber places vs taking a taxi. They don't know about Lyft-ing.

Now what is the underlying reason for that. Maybe luck, maybe time to market, maybe pricing, I can't tell you.

<comment><USER21> Disagree that "most people Uber" is the reason Lyft is losing so much money.

I'm not exactly sure when Lyft stopped focusing on international markets to double down on the U.S., but I feel like much of the losses are from "failed" international experimentation.

With my experience in Ohio, I use both preferring whichever can reach me quickest (a 15-20 minute wait here is not abnormal).

<comment><USER20> Yeah I went by most people I know (some from Ohio too! btw, but they use Uber when traveling only to other cities) and extrapolated to "most" just by them being average Americans -- non techies, various ages,...

Most tech people I know have both apps installed and use both, like you do. But I don't think that's representative of the general population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whew!

I get worried when more than 60 days goes by without them announcing a MegaRound(tm) at an InsaneValuation(R).

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Uber used their last round of funding to poach the entire Carnegie Melon robotics department for their self-driving cars, so it will be interesting to see they do with this $2.1 billion dollars.

</comment><comment><USER24> Presumably the deal terms include a liquidation preference and thus the implied valuation is essentially horseshit.

</comment><comment><USER25> Funding rounds are usually preferred stock (though I hear Uber may have done some common stock in the last round, anyone know more?).

Preferred stock gets paid out first, so the actual "valuation" here is less meaningful. Preferred investors would still make a profit if Uber exited for $8B instead of 62.5B.

<comment><USER26> How will this affect the employees?

<comment><USER25> After the preferred money is paid out, the preferred stock converts to common stock at some multiplier. The multiplier is usually 1x, though it varies. At that point, whatever money is left is generally split between all common shareholders (investors and employees).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow, we need a new monetary unit. I dub it the Lucasart, and it's worth an even $4B USD.

Uber is now valued at 15.6 Lucasarts!!! Hooray and congrats to all involved in this grounded and logical valuation!

<comment><USER11> Hah! We play this game in the office. "Any new Space Shuttle program would cost like 0.25 <our company name>s"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >The number is typically calculated by annualizing a recent week, month, or quarter of the company's gross revenue, which means actual annual revenue may differ substantially.

Maybe I am reading this the wrong way but in broader context of this article it reads as they are trying to say that the actual revenue may be much lower. They should explicitly say that for a growth company like Uber, the actual revenue # would be much larger.

<comment><USER29> Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. all typically report 'Gross Revenue' which is pretty misleading since the majority of Gross Revenue is passed through to the driver / apartment owner -- That may be what that sentence is in reference to. The interesting number is 'Net Revenue' which is how much Uber actually receives to pay their bills, etc.

Quick example, if 10 riders take an Uber and their cost is $20/each, Uber would report $200 in Gross Revenue. Since their driver split is something like 80/20, their Net Revenue would only be $40.

<comment><USER30> From my limited understanding, I believe Groupon tried something similar and was shut down by the SEC during IPO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Close to 1/10th of Apple's market cap, still a huge huge number. Nearly $2bn in revenue when reported by recode on August 2015. Facebook market cap was approx $81bn when launched. Probably once it will get closer to $100bn and then we will see an IPO.

</comment><comment><USER32> Their IPO is going to be huge.</comment>


Ask HN: How to integrate my software with hotel PMS? - <AUTHOR> I am working on this hotel software and need to get- A- When a reservation is made, B- Canceled C- Over. How can I integrate with hotel PMS systems? Is there a standard way or you just need to work with each of them? <comment><USER2> Most hotel PMS have their own api called an interface. Micros Fidelio (Opera) is the most common hotel PMS out there. There are alot of other hotel PMs out there but alot copy the Micros Fidelio interface spec so if you can get your software working with that interface you should be good with alot of vendors. Just to note each vendor has their own costs associated with letting third parties interface and some are not cheap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. I have been looking at lots of hotel solutions. They seem to be integrated with PMS, GDS etc. They all have very low pricing as well. I can't seem to figure out how they have done this. If you have more information, that would be helpful. Thanks again.

<comment><USER2> Yeah there are lots of different interfaces for each PMS. For example take Opera by Micros Fidelio. They would one interface for phone billing, one interface for mini bar billing, one interface for GDS, for POS, for in room entertainment, for phone maintenance (enabling disabling n room sphones etc), for in wifi billing etc etc etc. So Basically one PMS will have multiple interfaces each for specific purposes. I have no idea what solution you are thinking about but lets say you were thinking of providing wifi to a hotel chain(for the purposes of our example). Now the hotel chain use Opera as their PMS. So you get the spec for that specific wifi billing interface. Then you pay them for the access to the interface and a test system and then you would write your code to enable your system to communicate to that interface. It all goes thru their testing in their mothership and its either approved or denied etc etc etc. Its a slow. process.

Not sure if this is any help to you. I understand why you might be apprehensive about giving more specific details in your scenario but without that Its hard for me to be more specific and hopefully more helpful in my answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again for your answer. It gives me more direction to investigate and hopefully I would find something that works for me. As you noted, can't divulge too many details: corporate contracts that I signed :) Thanks a lot though!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dutch lawyer 'refused US visa' because of terrorism defence work - <AUTHOR> https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/04/dutch-lawyer-refused-us-visa-because-of-terrorism-defence-work/ <comment><USER2> John Adams (2nd president of the US) famously represented the British soldiers who were tried for the Boston Massacre. He argued that everyone deserved a legal defense, regardless of how heinous their alleged crimes may be. A good test for a legal system is whether it fairly doles out justice to those accused of the most terrible crimes.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the same site: Dutch lawyers drop terrorism cases for fears of similar travel ban.

[https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/04/lawyers-drop- terrorism...](https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/04/lawyers-drop-terrorism- case-after-us-visa-concerns/)

<comment><USER4> Chilling effects. Damn. Surprised this news hasn't made it to sites like TruthDig or Democracy Now yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is happening to computer security professionals too. If they don't like your client your esta and visa are denied.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a surprise--they've found too many lawyers for terrorists were helping the terrorists.</comment>


"Walmart's bleeding this town" official says as Raytown faces police layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article175722651.html <comment><USER2> But the most important thing in the US is paying less tax, right?

So don't complain when there's no money to pay for services.</comment>


'This Is a New Phase': Europe Shifts Tactics to Limit Tech's Power - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/technology/europe-new-phase-tech-amazon-apple-facebook-google.html <comment><USER2> Paywall Bypass:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200731062723/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200731062723/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/technology/europe- new-phase-tech-amazon-apple-facebook-google.html)</comment>


Show HN: www.AlwaysHttp.com – Be redirected to login sites - tuna-piano http://www.alwayshttp.com <comment> tuna-piano I setup a website a while ago and hadn't gotten around to making it HTTPS. I noticed that I would often attempt to go to that website when starting up hotel wifi networks, as HTTP sites seem to redirect to a login page, while HTTPS sites often just seem to hang.

So I decided it would likely be useful to others to have this as an easily rememberable URL!</comment>


Your social network is owned by advertisers. - <AUTHOR> http://ello.co/

<comment><USER2> I really can't discuss anything about this because I have to request an invite to see any part of the product. Also, how would this be different than Diaspora?</comment>


Ask HN: Database for efficiently storing many numpy arrays - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a database that can store dense N-dimensional numpy arrays. Query performance is not as important as storage efficiency, the arrays are dense but mostly 0's and 1's and compress well.
I tried pg's array support (very slow) and storing it in pg's JSON field (also quite slow, but more acceptable)
I should also add, we're going to be writing a lot more than reading -- potentially for many processes, so anything with ACID-like support would be great.
But there must be dedicated databases out there for dense numerical data like this? <comment><USER2> pyarrow and parquet may fit your requirements. There are a number of analysis engines (spark, drill, hive, etc) that support parquet. For more detail see:

[https://tech.blue-yonder.com/efficient-dataframe-storage- wit...](https://tech.blue-yonder.com/efficient-dataframe-storage-with-apache- parquet/)

[https://www.slideshare.net/julienledem/strata- ny-2017-parque...](https://www.slideshare.net/julienledem/strata- ny-2017-parquet-arrow-roadmap)

If ACID guarantees are a must then use Kafka as a message broker between memory and file, but this has the cost of added complexity. For more info:

[https://eng-staging.verizondigitalmedia.com/2017/04/28/Kafka...](https://eng- staging.verizondigitalmedia.com/2017/04/28/Kafka-to-Hdfs-ParquetSerializer/)

[http://activisiongamescience.github.io/2016/06/15/Kafka- Clie...](http://activisiongamescience.github.io/2016/06/15/Kafka-Client- Benchmarking/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not databases as you asked for, but, I stumbled on this data while looking for persisting numpy arrays. You might find it interesting: [https://github.com/mverleg/array_storage_benchmark/blob/mast...](https://github.com/mverleg/array_storage_benchmark/blob/master/README.rst)</comment>


Shyp is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/shyp/status/978678233280364544 <comment><USER2> Link to actual article: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see- what-we-d...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-do- next-kevin-gibbon/)

> Consumer growth slowed. People close to me and the business began to warn > that chasing consumers was the wrong strategy. After all, how often do > consumers ship things? I didn't listen.

Looks like they should have gone B2B sooner.

> About two years ago, we reallocated resources and shifted our focus to a > more profitable customer cohort: small businesses. But, we decided to keep > the popular-but-unprofitable parts of our business running, with small teams > of their own behind them. This was a mistake—my mistake.

It also looks like they should have ceased all consumer focused activities immediately as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice writeup. Reading between the lines, while it sounds like they turned the ship late, ultimately "ran out of runway" means the investors gave up. Something was still fundamentally wrong, even after all the pivots.</comment>


Lavabit appeal confirms original ruling [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/lavabit-usca4-op.pdf <comment><USER2> Note that this opinion rests almost entirely on the fact that Lavabit/Levinson failed to raise any of his legal arguments before the trial court. Any lawyer can tell you that, if you want a court of appeals to consider a legal issue, you have to raise it before the lower court first to give them a chance to rule and to develop a record for the court of appeals to review. I'm sure there are those out there who will want to make this into a major privacy ruling, but it just isn't.

<comment><USER3> Is an unconstitutional act acceptable if a defendant's defense is sub-par?

<comment><USER2> No. The problem, though, is that it is difficult for a court of appeals to determine whether an unconstitutional act occurred when a party does not raise the concern before the lower court. A court of appeals does not collect evidence and is constrained by the factual record developed below. I don't think we would be better off if courts of appeals resolved a constitutional issues without the issue's having thoroughly investigated and litigated.

In considering this, remember that the record might sometimes be deficient in ways that the court of appeals cannot identify on its own. And it seems likely that inadequate development will cause courts of appeals to things wrong as often as it permits them to get things right despite the procedural "technicality."

<comment><USER3> Hm. Is there provision for, "Gee, it sure looks like important investigation may not have occurred in this case, perhaps it should be revisited"?

      catch( DefenseDidNotDoSomethingImportantException e ){
         Case.Retrial();
      }

As a defendant (or coder), you don't want to have to rely on exception- handling to save you from error, but as a citizen, I'd like to prevent technicalities from blinding our judicial system to proper consideration of major issues. Technicalities are often there for a reason (as this one is), but that shouldn't stop us from getting at the heart of an issue.

<comment><USER4> Really, this is a case for legislation. The judiciary is responsible for comparing fact and action against agreed and applicable law. The "proper consideration of major issues" is why we have legislation: we're supposed to do this consideration _before_ laws are passed. That's why it takes so much effort to pass a law; it provides time for such consideration. That's where the allowance for filibusters came from: if someone has another angle to bring to bear on a subject, you will goddamn consider it even if it takes a hundred hours.

The judicial system is thus, in a sense, the very exception-handling system you want. It's catching exceptions called "Oh shit, we didn't think of this case and we need to decide consequences _now_ ".

<comment><USER5> Which goes back to Chief Justice Roberts statement on the ObamaCare ruling. "It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Levison should have hired a competent and experienced attorney the day the FBI contacted him. The errors and failures cited in the appellate opinion are ones that nearly any attorney that passed a Bar Exam wouldn't have made.

<comment><USER7> With emphasis on experienced - Levison was represented for a bit by a business attorney. He may have passed the bar, but he was completely inexperienced in federal criminal cases.

<comment><USER8> He was, but I think he only had representation after day 10 or something. The first few days you was way out of his element. I think his business attorney was experienced enough to get someone else on the case as well since it was a bit out of his domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The more I read about the case, the less happy I am about having donated to Levison.

Pages 8-12 of this decision convey a narrative about Levison's handling of the FBI requests. In particular, they detail an escalation that Levison himself provoked:

* The DOJ reached out demanding metadata regarding (presumably, and let's just stipulate) Snowden's use of Lavabit.

* Levison rejected the request, on the auspices that Snowden had enabled the "storage encryption" feature of Lavabit.

 _Here it 's worth knowing that Levison had previously complied with similarly narrow requests._

* Levison confirmed to the DOJ that he had the ability to circumvent the storage encryption.

* The DOJ responded to that concession by doing exactly what anyone would have expected them to do: they escalated their demand to include the decrypted Snowden data.

* The DOJ spent _eleven days_ trying to meet with Levison, who stonewalled them; Levison "ignored the FBI's repeated requests to confer".

* Only upon being threatened with a contempt citation did Levison actually enter a productive discussion with the DOJ.

* Four days after being threatened with contempt, Levison presented the DOJ with a proposal to charge the DOJ $2000 to design and implement his own pen/trap system which would provide data to the DOJ _only at the conclusion of the order 's time window_, with timely updates being provided only at Levison's discretion and only with an additional charge attached.

* Only _after_ this sequence of events does DOJ demand the TLS keys that would have compromised all Lavabit users activities.

Levison's attorneys and the DOJ litigated the question of whether the pen/trap order required him to cough up his TLS keys. But that only happened after Levison did his best to deter the DOJ from collecting information about Snowden. As evidence for this: the DOJ eventually did install a pen/trap device of some sort, without the TLS keys, and attempted to use it to collect evidence. Had Levison complied with the DOJ productively from the beginning, he probably could have worked with them to produce the information they required without compromising the rest of his users.

I already had a problem with Lavabit as an inept and dangerous privacy solution (you can obviously see that it was; Levison was trivially able to subvert the privacy of all of his users, and was eventually forced to do so).

But almost as bad as that is his handling of the legal situation here. Read the language of the decision carefully and you'll see that had Levison simply began this process with his proposal, minus the time lag problem, but perhaps even including the price tag, he might have had that solution accepted! Instead, he seems to have seized an opportunity to poke a giant bear with a stick. The bear then ate him and his users.

 _Later: Also, bad facts make bad law. Great to see that we now have more case law establishing that pen /trap orders demand TLS keys._

<comment><USER10> I agree that legally, Levison probably made a mistake by stonewalling DoJ.

However, I worry about what losing this case means in the grand scheme of things. DoJ's argument was that they should be able to get the _key_ to decrypt all e-mails for all of Lavabit's users, and the Court says that's fine because the government "wouldn't" use the key for anything other than the "target" \- which seems like a ridiculous and incredibly reckless argument post-Snowden.

Would Google just hand over the key to all of their Gmail users? Let's imagine they weren't using PFS - or let's imagine they were asking Microsoft for the Outlook key, instead.

<comment><USER11> > Would Google just hand over the key to all of their Gmail users?

No, Google would comply with the narrow, specific warrant the first time. Again, it bears repeating that the _only_ reason DoJ asked for the master key in the first place is because Levison refused to comply with the narrow requests. If Levison wouldn't do it, then the government would figure it out on their own, but the only reason this situation even came up is because _Levison wouldn 't do it_.

Not complying with a narrow and specified warrant is highly hypocritical, especially in this case since Snowden's initial claims were entirely about wanting the NSA to have to have specific warrants for their searches instead of using broad search authorities. But when push came to shove and the government presented a narrow and specific warrant, of a type Levison had previously honored, all of a sudden that was no longer good enough for this particular privacy advocate.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't it his right to fight a court order (don't think it was warrant) like that? I think Twitter has fought court orders in the past, while refusing to give the data in the mean time.

I think Levison's mistake was that he did it all by himself, instead of hiring a lawyer and following the proper procedure for doing that. The government escalated with a broader request, which I guess was also their right to try (even if it's wrong), and then Levison tried to fight that with a lawyer, but I guess it was a little too late for that, and what he did initially complicated things for his case.

<comment><USER9> He didn't simply fight the order; he deliberately antagonized the DOJ.

Presumably Twitter's lawyers avoid brinksmanship, knowing that they'll inevitably lose and, in the process, lose credibility with the court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sigh.

Why does every landmark case involving online privacy have to involve incompetent, unsavory, or sometimes even downright despicable people (e.g. child pornographers) on the defense side?

In order to force the legal system to take a serious look at the core issues (whether the Feds can compel a company to produce its SSL private keys, whether they can compel a man to produce the password to his TrueCrypt drive, etc.) instead of getting distracted by all sorts of procedural bullshit, the case needs to have a competent defendant and even more competent counsel who make no serious mistakes throughout the course of the trial. That's the only way we're going to get a clear, decisive precedent, because otherwise the procedural blunders will dominate the legal result.

Levison's failure to contact the EFF or ACLU the moment he received the first pen/trap order has led us all to waste a lot of time and resources litigating mostly peripheral issues, and probably caused a lot more hardship for Levison himself than he ever needed to get into. Meanwhile, we still don't have a clear idea of what the U.S. legal system thinks about forcing the disclosure of SSL private keys.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, so maybe there are adequate explanations for why he thought it was a good idea to wave a middle finger in the face of the DOJ.

But in the grand scheme of things in the battle for internet freedom, I think we just missed a golden opportunity to get the courts to tackle some serious constitutional issues. Just like in all those other contempt cases where TrueCrypt drive in question obvious contained CP, or all those other surveillance cases where the defendant was a heavy uploader. Assholes, pirates, and child pornographers have rights, of course, but they usually don't make effective crusaders.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Levison provided the FBI with an 11-page printout containing largely illegible characters in 4-point type, which he represented to be Lavabit's encryption keys"

This made my day.

<comment><USER14> We've all chuckled at the "man pays divorce settlement with truckload of pennies" stories before.

But this is the story of a guy without good legal representation pissing off the judge and setting bad precedent that could affect all of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see this as a cautionary tale about the limits of cloud-storage of anything. If you really care and you're facing an adversary with subpoena power over your ISP, the only solution is to ensure the ISP simply never sees the plaintext. Thus PGP, S/MIME, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't see why the court couldn't 'refashion' Levison's statement ...

"[I object] to turning over the SSL keys because that would compromise all of the secure communications in and out of my network, including my own administrative traffic."

... into "anything remotely close to a statutory-text-based challenge to the district court's fundamental authority under the Pen/Trap Statute"

As a lay person, it sounds like the court wasn't trying very hard.

<comment><USER16> It's clear to me, even as a lay person, that Levinson's statement does not refer to any statutory text. Or any legal procedure, etc. On what grounds was he objecting?

"A party does not go far enough by raising a non-specific objection or claim"

<comment><USER14> Obviously Levison is attempting to argue that the pen/trap statute is limited to specific information ("metatdata") and it does not allow interception of "all of the secure communications [and] administrative traffic".

That he didn't cite the chapter and verse which this contradicts seems like an situation where he needed a real defense lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I fought the law and law won... just started playing in my head.</comment>


Is Mark Twain's 100-year-old+ autobiography covered by copyright? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101022/01035811534/is-mark-twain-s-new-autobiography-covered-by-copyright.shtml

<comment><USER2> It might also be worth noting that works published prior to 1923 are in the public domain only in the United States. In Europe, the "life + 70" rule makes no such exemption.

Given this situation, the famous _Prelude in C♯ minor_ by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) dates from 1892 and technically is still copyrighted in Europe until 2013. At the same time, there is a public domain recording made in 1919 (by the composer himself!) that is available on Wikipedia, where it is presumably legitimate under US copyright law [1].

Meanwhile, various machinations by parties without the best of intentions, coupled with a special case in French law to extend copyright because of the world wars, make it such that _Boléro_ (1928) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) still won't enter the public domain until 2015, with royalties sucked up by a "management agency" while the composer's own home falls into disrepair [2].

On the other hand, it looks like Ottorino Respighi's _Ancient Airs and Dances No. 3_ (1932) would be public domain in Europe while not in the US because of the automatic copyright.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sergei_Rachmaninoff_perfor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sergei_Rachmaninoff_performs_Rachmaninoff%27s_Prelude_in_C_sharp_minor,_Op._3.ogg)

[2] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/apr/25/arts.highere...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/apr/25/arts.highereducation)

EDIT: Argh, it took me a half dozen tries to get the first URL right. Apostrophes seem to get dropped from URLs HN comments, rather than encoded with %27.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately it depends upon whether parts of the autobiography were published after 1923. Those parts that were not published after 1923 would be in the public domain. And those that were published after 1980 would be as well (he died in 1910 + 70).

That said, publishers slap copyright notices all the time on works in the public domain. They cover things like the foreward, introduction, cover, etc.

See this complex chart if you'd like, uh, more clarity: <http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm>

But this is once again one of those "copyright law is a mess" scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's complicated. The unpublished work is certainly in the public domain insofar as copyright is concerned. If the work was edited for publication, those changes might be copyright. The final book is a compendium of materials including the autobiography, front materials, and so forth. The ancillary materials may have a different copyright than the body of the book. If there is only one copy of the unpublished work, even if copyright does not apply, other property rights may. Nothing is ever easy about copyrights.

What can be copyrighted is frequently confused. In particular (Section 102 USC17):

102(a). Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include ...

102(b). In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

On top of this expression/idea dichotomy there is a large body of case law which further explains what is meant.

<comment><USER3> Copyrightability isn't really what's at issue here, as this is all written text, which is clearly a form of copyrightable expression.

There is the issue, though, of a copyright on a compilation of public domain works, or on the edits on top of a public domain work that create a derivative work. These copyrights don't subsist in the PD works themselves, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've wondered about things like this. I once bought a print from the Getty Museum of a painting by Gerrit Dou (done in the late 1650s), and the Getty had a copyright notice on the back. Obviously anyone can reproduce the original, but is the Getty trying to claim that no one can make reproductions of their reproduction?

<comment><USER3> There is actually a debate as to whether photographs of paintings in the public domain can be copyrighted. The current consensus in the US appears to be no. See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

If it was a print of the painting, it would depend upon whether a court would construe that it had sufficient originality to be a derivative work. But that wouldn't stop Getty from trying to assert copyright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Artists should start negotiating for contracts that explicitly contribute their work to public domain after XX years. Shouldn't be that tough for major directors and musicians, after all the CEO's they negotiate with run public companies with quarterly spreadsheets. They will be willing to sell out the 20+ year upside for a point or two on the deal.

Artists gotta start thinking about their legacy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting bits about prior publication. Apparently this new edition will see more than 50% of the content published for the first time. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twains_Autobiography>

</comment><comment><USER8> It is unfortunate that copyright and patent protections exist in the form they do today. Not only is the span of copyright a complete joke (if things continue as they do now, nothing published after 1940 will ever enter the public domain) but the span of many (if not the majority) of patents is completely unreasonable given the pace of today's innovation.

Example: software patents. For an industry that moves so quickly, the patent protection, which was once supposed to foster innovation by giving the inventor time to bring his invention to market without worrying about it being stolen, is now used mostly to stifle innovation by patent trolls who do not bring anything to market themselves, but just sit in wait so they can sue someone who does.

The marketplace brings about authentic business models that may thrive within it when they make sense, but not forever. People have to move on and old industries must give way to new ones through the action of the market. Just as the luddites futilely tried to hold back progress during the industrial revolution, just as the printed newspapers are fighting to survive in a world increasingly dominated by democratized internet news, so too must the industries -- that once depended on copyright protection -- reinvent themselves. The record companies and publishers of the world must realize that with the new technology, the cost of publishing has gone down to pennies. And therefore, affording copyright protection or any other protection is something that may not be in the best interest of society anymore. Is this done to promote the creation of magnificent works of art (which otherwise presumably no one would undertake) or is it done to cater to the lobbying of a select few (e.g. Disney lobbying Congress to keep extending the copyright protection)? Why don't we draft an alternative proposal that fits the current times and let the people decide?

I have nothing against government protections that make sense. But it seems to me that these days, such long-lived copyrights and patents are doing more harm than good.

<comment><USER9> _I have nothing against government protections that make sense. But it seems to me that these days, such long-lived copyrights and patents are doing more harm than good._

The issues that you and everyone talk about, exists since almost the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. Do you really think you're going to get away with historical ignorance and change the world for better? Surely, you could do better than your predecessors in this debate, no matter what sides of the same coin you are on.

You have fallen into Thomas Jefferson meme and is stuck there until you have forced yourself to look at radical ideas.

Why do you think and assume that patent and copyright _make sense_?

Have you look at the bygone era of 19th century American literacy market wheb American writers are starving due to the piracy of massive British literature? Even more surprising is that some British writers have earned more money than they would have gained in royalty for a number of years.

What about James Watt? Isn't he a hero of the industrial revolution? Nope. He is simply one of those steam engine inventor amongst many. He slowed down the industrial revolution with his patents and wasted his massive intellectual energy dealing with lawyers and lawsuits against his opponents.

Can we move beyond the tired cliched arguments of enlightenment era rationalization?</comment></comment>


Tell, don't Ask. - <AUTHOR> http://iffycan.blogspot.com/2013/10/tell-don-ask.html

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting post, thank you.</comment>


Personal digestion tracker based on H2 breath sensing - <AUTHOR> https://foodmarble.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting concept. I like the fact that it comes with specific compound sachets (e.g. lactose, fructose) so you can systematically test for specific intolerances.</comment>


Why urban planners should pay attention to restaurant-review sites - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/urban-planners-restaurant-neighborhood-0715 <comment><USER2> > the researchers found they could predict 95 percent of the variation in > daytime population among neighborhoods... 95 percent of the variation in > nighttime population, 93 percent of the variation in the number of > businesses, and 90 percent of the variation in levels of consumer > consumption.

This is impressive and their ML algo is only going to keep improving upon itself. Hope this can be implemented beyond China as these type of predictions with accuracy can be very useful indeed.</comment>