Without even knowing: the HN post I missed | Hacker News Reader

Without even knowing: the HN post I missed

majurojs.org

143 pointsmapmeld39 comments

"I clicked the link, but Hacker News is often blocked in the Marshall Islands, so I got a 404."

Is there reason for the blocking? Is it the government censoring content? Or is it simply an island nation has to ration its bandwidth?

I ask because Marshall Islands are in a free association with the United States (where the US provides services and protection). Preventing residents from reaching US websites really rubs me the wrong way.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into the word block when he really means unreachable. Marshall Islands are rated as Free under the Freedom of Press Report, but are unclassified by the OpenNet Initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_country

edit: I am sorry for my tangent based on a single line in your write up. It really jumped out at me and I hope you can expand on the situation.

You have a cool product and congratulations on the exposure. Good luck!

I spent a year teaching in the Marshall Islands. There is definitely room for conspiracy theories, if you lean that way, relating to the testing that occurred there and even basic unexploded ordnance. I vaguely remember potentially relevant websites seeming blocked, but I never bothered to investigate and can't really provide more details. I certainly don't see why hacker news would have been blocked, anyways.

The issue most likely is bandwidth. I can remember living in Taiwan as recently as 2001 when the access to United States websites was often slowed by the narrow pipes of cables across the Pacific Ocean. The Marshall Islands, with their low population, are not on the most favored path across the Pacific for high-bandwidth cables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_submarine...

http://asia-pacific-map-2012.telegeography.com/

I've occasionally been at public wifi spots in the USA where HN is blocked, because on some 'safe internet' services, the site may be categorized as being related to illegal or controversial activities.

The HN name and occasional subject matter -- about censorship controversies, security breaches, and circumvention techniques -- contributes to this impression. Some paranoid law-and-order nothing-that-risks-the-children types will classify HN that way, and then choose to block all sites of that classification on certain public/free wifi services.

(IIRC, my experience may have been at a Whole Foods market in the US, which was subscribing to some classification lists via OpenDNS. This was years ago, though, and I reported it as a misclassification at the time.)

Yup. Sadly, we need to keep in mind that the word "hacker" still has negative connotations with the public at large (especially as regards security concerns). So it's a likely term to appear on very conservative blacklists.

"hacker" in the domain? Yikes - must be a dangerous site.

"Hacker" doesn't actually appear in the domain.

That's one of the things I love about this place. It's too underground to even have it's own domain name ;)

I joke, but the lack of 'hacker' in the URI probably does help keep some of the "riffraff" away.

Hacker News was blocked, unblocked, and then blocked again in my 3 months there.

My experience was that the Marshall Islands blocks domains with a wide net (for example, new domains or blogs with their own domains would almost always be blocked). I suspect that "Hacker News" would be blocked by a conservative algorithm or human censor, but on review ycombinator.com, the incubator, would be whitelisted.

I have a back of the mind low grade worry that some insecure squinty eyed troll at work IT is going to accuse me of vague and scary things if anyone ever notices "Hacker News" has been coming through the fire wall to me. "See! He's reading about Hacking!"

What is the reason you started this, as oppose to contribute to http://ideditor.com/ or OpenStreetMaps?

If people actually spend time on your site, they would be wasting it, as your data will not carry over to OSM based datasets, unless you spend more time converting the data into usable format for OSM. In which case, they probably should have been using http://www.openstreetmap.org/ to draw to begin with.

I actually built something similar idea wise just because it seemed like a fun project to play with (http://roofmapper.com). However my implementation was very simplistic in comparison.

That's cool, although I wouldn't rely on the Google map draw tools. It's cool to learn and have personal projects, but advertising yet another data collection tool without a clear idea for where the data is going or if it's even usable seems counter-productive to me, since we have a project like OSM.

I'm a contributor to OpenStreetMap, and last year I helped Code for America import thousands of buildings.

OSM is rightfully skeptical of uploads. Even when cities give specific permission to OSM, it's up to the community whether a large import is helpful or risks drowning out local mappers. If anything, this site would be helpful to download a subset of the city's buildings as KML and use JOSM to upload.

This site exists as a custom mapmaker. It's easier for a non-GIS user to get data out and make custom maps compared to OSM APIs and tiles.

It's interesting that you mention custom mapmaking. Google provides a similar service - creating a KML file hosted from a Google Spreadsheet. Here is the newest version: http://www.google.com/earth/outreach/tutorials/spreadsheet.h...

I've recommended it to a non-technical family member (he's a realtor) and they were able to create and host their own kml-based maps within an hour's time. Note that it does not use polygon based building markers, but rather addresses (and coordinates), which are simpler for non-GIS people to use.

The story regarding the Japanese volunteer sounds interesting. I hope we get to hear more about that.

I was hoping to see the same thing.

Can anyone give some insight into why HN would be blocked in the Marshall Islands?

Probably because someone has the power to block any website they feel like, same as every other country. There is very little reason needed and there may not even be one - I spent an hour the other week in Turkey trying to fix my ssl certificates on heroku before realizing their api had been blocked.

But why would the person in charge of blocking websites even bother to block HN?

Why does it matter what the reason is? There may not even be a reason and there definitely won't be one acceptable to anyone who uses the less-censored internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country

I've always had the impression that submissions on HN were done by the authors 99% of the time. It's funny to hear about it happening the other way around, and him not even knowing about it.

There was a popular story a while back about a guy who submitted a link to the announcement of a new version of node.js before the @izs could switch tabs from clicking publish to posting on HN.

That's far, far from the case. I've submitted multiple articles by others that would end up on the frontpage.

I've also tweeted a few people to tell them "Oh hey, your project is going to get hammered by traffic due to this submission". I think I did the latter, when WordLens blew up on HN.

Glad to see this project get more attention...the good thing about HN and other submission sites is that you always have the opportunity to do an explanatory/reflective post, as you've done here.

One suggestion I have is to SEO the title page a little bit...that is, put the tagline ("Interactive maps with open buildings data") in the title tag so that your site is associated correctly with what it offers, rather than just "Majuro.js"

Congrats on making the HN front page twice.

Very interesting being a developer when upload and download speeds are so limited. Paying 10 cents per megabyte sounds like you have to be very thoughtful about what you do.

I used 90GB from home last month, or a $9000 bill if I lived there. Ouch.

Wow. Wouldn't it be great for us content providers if there was a service that would tell us when our content appears on HN? (hint. hint)

He was out of phone as well as Internet contact. Maybe HN should send homing pigeons when a link gets popular?

Maybe HN should send homing pigeons when a link gets popular?

Finally! The perfect application for RFC-1149[1]. And people said it was just an April Fool's Day joke!

[1]: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

RFC 1149 has been implemented: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

Ping times were rather atrocious.

Alternatively, the ping times were great considering that pigeons were the transport.

The complaints from people at each hop were also a major issue.

This would be helpful for entrepreneurs in South Africa as well... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

That is a brilliant story. Especially enjoyable because I don't live in SA anymore. Thanks for making me chuckle!

Maybe the service would come with a satellite phone. I'd like that.

Doesn't Chartbeat do something like that?

Rob Fitzpatrick (@robfitz) had a service that does this via SMS...