Ask HN: How did you escape tutorial hell? - <AUTHOR> Currently experiencing it with Django. Am a undergrad "data scientist" and trying to build up more theoretical/statistical knowledge on the side, however I am a non-CS major and completely self-taught so I haven't built up many end-to-end applications; I would say that I am a decent programmer but I haven't learnt how to use heavy duty frameworks as of yet. With Django I can make basic stuff but I HAVE to be following a tutorial. After my exams I was thinking of making a basic CRUD social media app with Django/Vue but I can't figure out all the steps (even after intensive googling, the issue is I'm trying to look for tutorials for literally everything and that is not ideal; I can't do anything by myself). Any tips? <comment><USER2> For beginner Django materials, I highly recommend William Vincent's work:

1\. Django for Beginners: [https://djangoforbeginners.com/](https://djangoforbeginners.com/) 2\. Django for APIs: [https://djangoforapis.com/](https://djangoforapis.com/)

I helped edit the second book. :)

<comment><USER2> Solid, learning by doing material

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Step one, is realising that perfect is the enemy of done.

Choose to build something that you could use in your daily life, this will motivate you and give you are clearer path.

Next, just start. You know the basics, or at least how to setup the project and the gist of it. Start small, literally the smallest unit of work and build up. Be it a button, a single form, the login or whatever.

If you need tutorials find them specific to the issue at hand. Do not follow tutorials that guide you step by step but rather just extract the one piece you need.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used a higher-quality framework with simpler tooling to get the basics and rote out of the way, so I could focus on the creative part and use documentation instead of tutorials.

ASP.Net MVC with Entity Framework from Scaffolding, if you're curious. Leagues better than Django.</comment>


NightlifeNOLA Scholarship powered by SocialCHOMP - <AUTHOR> https://nightlifenola.socialchomp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> 15% of Sales from the store power the NightlifeNOLA Scholarship for the youth (High School & GED students) in New Orleans. This is a way for the community to place some cool art in their homes at the same time as help fund scholarships for students that need them.</comment>


High School teen turns down $8M in ads on his popular Covid Tracker site - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/high-school-student-avi-schiffman-made-a-coronavirus-tracker-2020-5 <comment><USER2> The $8M number is unverified. It's a claim that the guy has made to various media outlets. He's now also claiming he's given up an estimated $30m in advertising revenue, again by his own estimates:

> One offer in particular would have contracted Schiffmann to keep up the site > for $8 million, which he turned down, and he says he likely could have made > over $30 million if he'd put up his own ads, but he says that's not the goal > of the site.

Obviously, someone with an $8 million advertising budget would rather just buy the site from him for a few million. Also, no one I've talked to had seen the website before these media stories. Something's up with the claims.

In fact, his site doesn't appear to have been all that popular until all of the news articles about "Teen creates popular website" started circulating on March 3rd: [https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ncov2019.live](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ncov2019.live) If anything, it appears that the popularity was bootstrapped by getting media attention claiming the site was popular.

I have no doubt he has a lot of traffic, especially after bootstrapping it with all of these media pieces about turning down $8m, but I think he's smartly realized that the reputation boost of having a popular website and multiple media pieces from large outlets is worth more in the long run than what he'd actually receive from legitimate advertising sources:

> Instead, he cares more about the connections he's made from the project. > "Now I know a ton of VCs and investors...if I started a company tomorrow, > they'd at least read my business plan."

I just hope he doesn't overplay his hand and lose people with increasingly exaggerated claims.

<comment><AUTHOR> Early March was also the time people really got scared of Covid so...

As for the claims, yeah they are his claims and no doubt he's milking it for traffic. If he has anything close to 30m visitors a day, no doubt a lot of "cures" and related stuff can be sold. But it may short lived, all he has others can do it.

>> _" Now I know a ton of VCs and investors...if I started a company tomorrow, they'd at least read my business plan."_

I made $XX million in 4 months when I was 17 also opens doors. And the money is, essentially, FU money.</comment></comment>


Ex-Facebook employee spills social-network's secrets in new book  - <AUTHOR> https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ex-facebook-employee-spills-social-network-secrets-new-book-article-1.1104015

<comment><USER2> "At one point in the tell-all, Losse says female employees were instructed to wear T-shirts with Zuckerberg's face on them in honor of their wonderboy boss' birthday. Male employees were told to wear Adidas sandals, she said, a nod to the CEO's favorite footwear. To Losse, the order reeked of sexism and cult- like worship"

Is it just me or does this sound more like a funny prank than anything else?

<comment><USER3> It reeks of manchild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a case of muckraking to me. I have several friends at Facebook and they all say that Facebook takes abuse very seriously. You can be disciplined (up to and including termination) for calling something gay, and similar. Perhaps at one point it was like this, but I seriously discount this as anything reflecting present culture.

And no, I don't work for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm really skeptic, I can assume that unfortunately there was some sexual harassment but the stuff reported in the article/book seems too much. Where are the lawsuits?

This sounds very, very yellow. Probably just trying to score a lot of sales without much problem to exagerate/lie.</comment>


A Commercial Reuse License Can Be the Best of Both Worlds (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://kartick-log.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-license-can-be-best.html <comment><USER2> this post doesn't really attempt to hash out the details, but the general idea is good

i've taken a crack at writing such a license - [http://db4j.org/pupl/](http://db4j.org/pupl/)

would love any feedback

<comment><USER3> You didn't write the "automatic buy-out" clause is that intentional? I find it interesting because it allows big business to use your small project with an upper price tag, versus the current situation where they are afraid of mistakenly infringing IP because that opens to lawsuit with unbounded fines.

<comment><USER2> > You didn't write the "automatic buy-out" clause is that intentional?

i don't like the exclusive buy-out that the blog post mentions since that creates risk for other users

i toyed with a non-exclusive buyout but couldn't come up with anything i felt was general enough, and i wanted to keep the license as short as practical. however, a copyright owner could choose to offer such a guarantee in addition, and i'll take another look

i did include the "reasonable effort to comply" clause to try to avoid unbounded fines

what sort of a multiplier on the "full cost" do you think would work for you ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I guess the elephant is the room is piracy. How do you enforce people paying you if you let the source available so that other can reuse it?

Should you let your app be closed source and share the code only on formal request? So you have a paper trail?

Otherwise I like the idea.</comment>


A Flexible Reflection System in C++: Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://preshing.com/20180116/a-primitive-reflection-system-in-cpp-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Recently I've been using clang's parser Python bindings to parse c++ headers and generate code that reflect object's members and integrate that into cmake.

It beats the purpose if whatever you're going to come up with requires you to specify every field and maintenance becomes tricky.

</comment><comment><USER3> > This reflection system is based on preprocessor macros and templates. C++, > at least in its current form, was not designed to make runtime reflection > easy.

This is something I'd love to see changed in an upcoming C++ standard. (I lose track of exactly what we are or aren't getting with whatever's coming next so it's possible it is already...)

Creating C++ reflection systems seems to be a common need and oft-repeated. IMHO one of the appeals in doing so is that you have to be _clever_ and use either complexity or tricks to make it work. That's not intended to criticize the author here, but I would really like not to have to be _clever_ in solving a common problem.

<comment><USER4> > This is something I'd love to see changed in an upcoming C++ standard. (I > lose track of exactly what we are or aren't getting with whatever's coming > next so it's possible it is already...)

[https://cppx.godbolt.org](https://cppx.godbolt.org) (and [https://herbsutter.com/2017/07/26/metaclasses-thoughts-on- ge...](https://herbsutter.com/2017/07/26/metaclasses-thoughts-on- generative-c/))

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the info. It looks like we've a little while to wait, but there does at least appear to be a push for this kind of feature. I'll keep my fingers crossed :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> and part-2 is available here: [http://preshing.com/20180124/a-flexible- reflection-system-in...](http://preshing.com/20180124/a-flexible-reflection- system-in-cpp-part-2/)</comment>


Microsoft is quietly merging Office code into their react-native-macos repo - sahin-boydas https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-macos/commit/4332d900c0f597e2da2962334c9094726172d9dc?ref <comment><AUTHOR> I think you can remove "quietly" as is implies something sinister. This is a good thing. They are just reusing code they had internally to better an open source product. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER2> But it's Microsoft! They must be up to something! /s

<comment><USER3> Historically, Microsoft had an explicit strategy of infiltrating and subverting open standards in order to bring them under their control. I believe that Microsoft are now deeply committed to being a reliable and trustworthy open source contributor, but I understand why other people might be more sceptical.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you really just repost my thread, with exactly the same title, only two hours after I posted it?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515)

Pretty shameless.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get what the big deal is about this, am I missing something here? To me it looks like it's just a repo Microsoft forked from react-native.

The repo has only 9 stars and they haven't even changed the README yet. It's not like it's a big open source Microsoft project they're now sinisterly adding Office code to. And even then, the commit title directly mentions Office.

<comment><USER4> I gave some narrative regarding the 'big deal' in the original thread, and OP shamelessly reposted it just two hours after, so you're missing that ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515)

Check the 0.51-macos branch if you missed it; it's got ~350 changed files specifically to support macOS.

HN title lengths are very restrictive, so perhaps it was unclear, but what I was trying to say was that this repo is likely receiving merges of the very same codebase that Microsoft is using to build their RN Mac apps. This is the first indication of which fork they're using for it (and it's surprisingly not derived from the fork that has 14k+ stars!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off-topic: I wish they'd started the merge from Office 2010 instead of current versions where they've removed essential features like a real dark mode and slimmer to-do bar. Every Outlook release since 2010 has been worse than the last for power users and those with low-res screens or light sensitivity. Outlook 2010 was as good as it needed to be.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think people are reaching to form a narrative behind the possibility that Office is gonna become an awful unusuable Electron app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it looks like what may have happened is Microsoft is using React Native in their Office apps (to some extent) and with this project are trying to open source it.

<comment><USER4> See my full narrative in the original thread (this one is just a shameless repost): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17728515)

They've revealed that they're using RN for all their main products now, but never explained how they were targeting macOS. _This_ is the repo they must have been using; and surprisingly, it's unrelated to the repo of the same name that has 14k+ GitHub stars.

What's brilliant too is that they are indeed open-sourcing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this "quietly"? It's Microsoft's fork, also the code is not Office specific.</comment>


Show HN: TankardApp – Easy two-factor-auth code generation for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://tankardapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN. TankardApp is a small Mac utility that scratches an itch I've had for a while when it comes to 2 factor auth.

It took a little over 2 months in total to build, working on it close to 3 or 4 hours per week.

</comment><comment><USER2> awesome app dude....</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want to see on your browser's new tab page? - <AUTHOR> What do you think would be most useful? When you open a new tab, what would you like to see?<p>An image? A text editor? Frequently visited sites? A clock? The weather? Something else? <comment><USER2> Personally, I want to see nothing. I want the fastest-loading thing possible that uses none of my bandwidth (especially on mobile).

If I want to go to a bookmarked site, I'll type the first letter or two in the address bar and it will likely appear without needing to take my hands off the keyboard. I don't need a UI for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see Taco (task list aggregator) but I haven't set it up properly with Wunderlist so it just shows my Trello boards/list.</comment>


40 Years of David Patterson Symposium – live stream [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/XRG/patterson2016/ <comment><USER2> This is really long, but my sampling of 3 talks were all excellent.

Here's a link to the Foundations of Data Science course that Michael Jordan discussed in his talk: [http://data8.org/](http://data8.org/) [quote: _[Statistics] is a 300 year old field that got encrusted; it got hyper- mathematical [...]. You get these formulas that nobody believes because they don 't understand, and they're not the right ones to use. [...] We got to get the math out of it and get the computing in. No calculus, start with inferential principles meets Python computing, and then they will want to do the math to prove that that works._]</comment>


Ask HN: How to find business problems to solve as a data scientist? - <AUTHOR> To provide some context: Our entire data scientist team is about to join our parent company. In anticipation, how can we determine a business problem to solve given that 1) we don't want to do the dirty work for other data science teams or steal their work, and 2) there is no clear mandates being passed down to us from the higher up.<p>Obvious processes to go through include talking to all the data science team and learn more about their work and future pipeline, speaking with the business folks if possible to understand their needs. But is there something else that we can do that hasn't been listed yet? <comment><USER2> > there is no clear mandates being passed down to us from the higher up.

SEEK Clarity -

Get 1:1 time with the Higher Up.

Probe for his Top Priorities.

What does he really want to accomplish?

What does success look like?

Dan Sullivan offers a terrific technique for this, the R Factor Question. > [https://resources.strategiccoach.com/the-multiplier- mindset-...](https://resources.strategiccoach.com/the-multiplier-mindset- blog/if-you-want-people-to-trust-you-ask-them-this-question)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is kind of significantly dependent on the type of work you're doing.

When in doubt, nearly every company has bottlenecks we're either a human or a series of humans have to perform parts of a single task. Usually a data science team can find ways to reduce the number of hands in cookie jar.

If the data science team has any natural language processing expertise, then usually there is some work in organizing text documents of some sort.

Data scientists are kind of a general title oh, so you're going to want to know what specializations they might be coming in with. Many data scientists got their starts in business intelligence. Those data scientists will probably have strong opinions on how they can inform the business.

</comment><comment><USER4> #2 is somewhat problematic. I would suggest finding someone in your organization that truly knows the business you are in and it's day to day challenges. Identifying this person or people might be hard but it is crucial. Establishing true and open relationship with this person or group is the next step. It has to be genuine. Once that's established you will see the stream of real pain points and it will be your job to map them into data science opportunities. An alternative option is to shadow day to day ops crew and distill requirements that way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Try to see the world through the eyes of the product managers/finance/ops guys (pick whichever makes the most sense, or all of them). Then pour through their excel workbooks to look for something that they are currently approximating, but which would benefit from a rigorous approach.

</comment><comment><USER6> Watch the news and solve problems they can't seem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER7> This might inspire you:

The problem with problems

[https://link.medium.com/qDH4gV224Z](https://link.medium.com/qDH4gV224Z)

</comment><comment><USER8> LOL, you know you are doing a BS job when you have to look for a problem to solve

<comment><USER9> Please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

<comment><USER8> Its not a personal attack, Its just true

<comment><USER9> True things can be personal attacks.

<comment><USER8> Describing the state of something is not an attack

<comment><USER9> You can't reduce communication to simple rules like that. It depends on who is communicating what to whom and why.

For example, when a middle school kid has acne and another kid goes on about their face, that is not a neutral "describing the state of something". Everything they say may be perfectly true, yet it is certainly a personal attack—and the more cruel, the more true it is.

<comment><USER8> Seriously are you taking child behavior as an example?

"Argument by analogy" look it up

<comment><USER9> Adults are no different from children in this respect, and the example is particularly easy to relate to.

Please don't post rude swipes in HN comments. It's against the site guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)), even when addressing a moderator.

<comment><USER8> The bar for what is offensive is very low it seems. Any good discussion will always end up offending some one. Just don't take it too personally

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't personally frame this in terms of "the bar for what is offensive", with its overtones of "what you can't say" and all of that. It's rather that we want users to remain kind to each other, when talking about difficult things. The intention is not to exclude or suppress communication, but to enhance it.

Still, you're welcome to frame it in whatever way works for you. The point is that you need to follow the site guidelines if you want to continue posting here. If you'd please review them and take their spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to track application knowledge? - <AUTHOR> When developing applications, there are always artifacts involved: requirements docs, contact sheets, the code itself, diagrams, charts, etc.  How do your projects keep these artifacts organized?  File shares?  Sharepoint?  SCM? <comment><AUTHOR> Nobody uses anything, huh?</comment>


Ask HN: Google search result initial vs. actual count - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know why google searches say an enormous number when you search, but then show an extremely small fraction of that number of results?
For instance, running the query:
free online revenue growth modeling tool
says "About 5,970,000 results (0.70 seconds)".
Clicking into the result pages though, there are no more links when paging 100 results at a time, and you end up with this on the third page: "Page 3 of about 236 results (0.65 seconds)".
I looked into it a bit but didn't see any info on it.  Curious if anyone here knows.  Thanks!
Edit: based on this analysis, it seems the distributed systems implementation is part of it, and user behavior is another part of it https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-only-return-50-pages-of-10-results-when-it-claims-that-there-are-560-000-results <comment><USER2> Anecdote: In the early days of www search engines, before Google, I recall this total number of documents searched being much more important to www users. I believe when Google began vying with AltaVista as the most popular search engine, that total was an important signal. Users wanted to feel they were tapping the largest database of www pages.

With AltaVista, a user could page through 100's of pages of results. There was no temporary IP ban triggered as there is today if one tries this with Google.

It's unfortunate that many www users of today never experienced the old AltaVista and being able to dig deep into pages of results without triggering IP bans. They thus are unaware of alternatives to the way Google has set up their search engine.

The question I have is: Do you think Google's approach of restricting users to only the top, "most popular" results is more beneficial to users or to Google? Why is Google limiting the user's search in this way?</comment>


Portal 2 LEGO set enters final review stage - <AUTHOR> http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/18258

<comment><AUTHOR> In case you were wondering. LEGO Cuusoo is an official LEGO design incubator. Members can post an idea for a set. If at least 10,000 other members support the idea, then LEGO evaluates the idea against a set of metrics (playability, cost, branding, etc). If it passes that final evaluation, then LEGO will start selling the set as part of their official line.

(The person or group that made the initial submission then get a 1% royalty of net sales)

<http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/CUUSOO>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Cuusoo>

<http://lego.cuusoo.com/guidelines>

[I'm not connected to the groups submitting the Portal sets... I just happen to really like both LEGO and Portal]

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm in the love with the first couple images, but not this [0] one. Why would they make it so tiny like that? Reminds me of what they did with the Minecraft lego set [1].

[0]: [http://cuusoo.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/9cc0d/c0a44/45a9b/7...](http://cuusoo.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/9cc0d/c0a44/45a9b/767a3/4dddd/fb6b7/6f262/cce50/thumb640x360.jpg)

[1]: <http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Minecraft-21102>

<comment><USER3> The two biggest factors in LEGO set price are licensing costs and piece count. That's why official sets tend to be simpler than fan sets. When they do make complicated and large builds, they tend to be expensive, like $100 for the Sopwith Camel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain what the relationship is between Lego, CUSOO, and the rights holders of the properties that the sets on lego.cuusoo.com are being designed around?

<comment><USER3> CUUSOO is part of LEGO. After a CUUSOO project reaches 10k supporters, it goes through a review by LEGO corporate which includes stuff like Brand Fit Analysis (too violent?) and Business Case Development (will this actually sell?) and License Agreements (can we license this?). If it passes that, then it gets a model designed by a LEGO designer which is not necessarily the same as the submitted idea.

[http://legocuusoo.posterous.com/the-quarterly-lego-review- ho...](http://legocuusoo.posterous.com/the-quarterly-lego-review-how-does-it- work)

<comment><USER5> That is not quite right. Cuusoo is a Japanese company and independent from Lego. (In the beginning Lego Cuusoo also launched only in Japan – but it blew up internationally.) They offer their "social creation platform" (also called Cuusoo) to customers – of which Lego is now most certainly their biggest and most prominent one. I'm unsure of the exact relationship, but I think it's fair to say that Cuusoo is a SaaS business.

Cuusoo seems to host the platform and I assume (but don't know) that they take care of all technical issues, Lego seems to take care of the review process. So Lego Cuusoo is basically the Cuusoo installation run by Lego.

You are completely correct about the review process, though (basically everything you wrote after the first sentence).

<comment><USER3> Wow, I had no idea. I knew it was originally Japanese since the first two projects were very Japanese, but not about the separate company. Shoulda done my research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like Lego Star Wars and Lego LOTR, I'd actually enjoy to see a lighthearted, Lego Portal game.

</comment><comment><USER7> If this goes through I await the inevitable set of blue/red TF2 class minifigs!</comment>


China's instructions on reporting on Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/24/AR2010032402511.html

<comment><USER2> We all knew they were doing this, but for some reason, reading the actual guidelines is chilling.

I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...

<comment><USER3> To me it's also chilling that the US owes a country like this 1 Trillion dollars in debt.

Also related, I think Google is f@$# awesome for standing up and doing what's right.

<comment><USER4> When you owe someone $1 million, you have a problem. When you owe someone $1 trillion, they have a problem.

<comment><USER5> Not sure I follow the reasoning here. Can you explain?

<comment><USER6> When you owe someone 1 trillion dollars and you and your citizens have the fruits of their labor, if you decide not to pay them they are screwed. Since China is politically unpopular it would be fairly easy to orchestrate a politically suitable reason for not paying them.

e.g. We're taking a stand for the citizens of the world and refuse to trade with China until they implement the Kyoto protocol.

e.g. Due to human rights abuses and the refusal to make progress on the issue we are suspending trade with China.

I'm sure there is some more politically suave reason but if we can't pay look for China's human rights / eco record to become an issue, ultimately culminating in our refusal to pay them.

<comment><USER7> If the US could make excuses for not paying off its debts, US Treasury bonds wouldn't have a triple AAA rating.

<comment><USER4> US Treasury bonds are not rated.

<comment><USER8> Yes they are, and all three major bond rating agencies have recently publicly stated that treasuries are in danger of being downrated due to the massive increase in federal debt.

<comment><USER4> Actually no, they are not. Rdtsc is correct that _sovereigns_ are rated, which is why I upvoted him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note how it's written in a totally non-bureaucratic language. You don't need it when everyone is afraid of you. Just make sure you're understood.

<comment><USER10> I expect that's more a function of the translation, or of how Chinese bureaucratic language works.

<comment><USER9> I can't read the "original" text in Chinese, but it is also very short. However, it could be shortened on purpose, so that the leak would be harder to track.

<comment><USER11> where is the original chinese text?

<comment><USER12> Original here. [http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/the-latest- directives-f...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/the-latest-directives- from-the-ministry-of-truth-032310/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This certainly speaks for itself and is a drastic measure. Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media, though. James Fallows (spent some years in China as senior editor for The Atlantic and has written lots of articles about China) has often argued that it's not as extreme of a picture as is often presented in the mainstream media. The Chinese government has relaxed quite a topics of regulation in the last years (e.g. introduced some kind of property laws for farmers, for the first time ever) and it can be argued that they have indeed helped several hundred million people rise out of extreme poverty, the most in the world. China is just really intend on tightly controlling a few important parts of society, public opinion being one of them. Chinese society in general can probably be said to place more importance on getting out of poverty and growing into materialism than fighting for individual rights with a 'dubious material value' to them.

<comment><USER14> I'm not going to applaud China for being ever so slightly less evil than they used to be.

<comment><USER13> You could applaud them for helping several hundred million people get out of extreme poverty, a grand social experiment if there ever was one. I know it's easy to take the moral high ground here, just think about if any other country recently has accomplished something remotely similar. You probably cannot accomplish such a feat by going from socialism to capitalism in a day (simplified).

<comment><USER15> Who put them into poverty in the first place?

<comment><USER16> Poverty is the default state, so...no-one?

<comment><USER15> What, poverty is the default state for all humans everywhere, or just China? Is silence part of the "default state" too?

<comment><USER16> All humans everywhere. It takes rather a lot of work to get out of it; it takes a lot more for newborns to be somewhat reliably not-in-it. I suppose the same would go for silence, too, but the road from silence -> sound is a lot shorter than the one from hunter-gatherer -> first world industrial economy.

<comment><USER17> I think the big difference here between hunter-gatherer and 3rd world poverty is that your stone-age people weren't living in the toxic waste dumps of an industrializing nation that doesn't care about the environment.

Typical hunter gatherers would have had better nutrition and better access to clean water and the ability to relocate/move without the government forcing them into only certain areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event."

"4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy."

\-- attacking government perceived as dirty, so must be cleaned up. So too is cheering Google, and must likewise be cleaned up. How sick.

</comment><comment><USER18> Those instructions read eerily like a passage of _1984_ , namely the parts where workers are getting instructions on how to rewrite history to portray the State in an infallible, beneficial light.

<comment><USER19> What struck me was the opposite, like raquo pointed out elsewhere: this is eerily non-Orwellian.

Virtually no euphemisation, no wink-wink double-think. No figure it out yourself using your subtle semi-conscious understanding of the party philosophy. This is strangely conscious and straightforward, cold.

I wonder what Orwell would have had to say about this.

<comment><USER20> I've seen things like that in the west... for example, in the corporate world, they're often straight to the point about disciplined damage control. Which might not sound so bad, except that corporations are so omnipresent that the media is dominated by them. (Like with this Washington Post article; both the advertisers and the media company are corpoate.) So by an analogy, I guess it feels kind of like working for a really big corporation, where everyone knows you're basically supposed to say what the bosses want, refined by specialized PR organs. (One where they don't merely control the government; they ARE the government.)

Maybe China's censors get to work in pleasant offices, and have incentives like climbing the job ladder, more luxuries and status, greater pay if they move to the private sector, etc. Some might be ideologues, others cynical; maybe most just treat it like a job and they're just cogs who kind of know better but are too comfortable where they are, like the people I know about working on facial recognition for CCTV systems.

But yeah, the Chinese system is a lot cruder. The cost of disobedience isn't just losing your job and healthcare; it can be jail, maybe worse.

<comment><USER19> I wasn't commenting so much on the content as on the, for lack of a better word, style.

In Orwell's world, which I believe correctly describes many real corporate, religious and government worlds, such things are emphasised, alluded to. Never directly acknowledged. People still respond as if they were given a clear, directive, but it's never said.

" _News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites._ "

should be

" _News recommendations should refer to accurate official sources_ "

" _Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden._ "

should be

" _Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must be recognised authorities in their field. Verify the reputation of such individuals with the appropriate sources ahead of time._ "

If not for their content, such clear directives might be construed as the rule of law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's odd that certain societies don't value discovering or reporting the truth, but instead attempt to create it.

<comment><USER2> Don't confuse a whole society with the people who hold power (and thus control the guys with the weapons).

<comment><USER22> Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

One could argue it's because of the education/brain-washing but the facts remain.

<comment><USER2> > Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government > and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

How do you know that? Without free elections and trustable surveys, it's hard to know.

<comment><USER23> Because I, at least, pretty frequently hear from person X about their friend Y in China who supports their government and what's being done.

Yes, it's effectively impossible to actually measure it, but I get that feeling too from my browsing history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sometimes people ask me: why do you support China? My answer is this: Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death. In Africa, South America, India, etc. When you stop shaking hands with the upper class business men and go live with the poor, you'll understand suffering.

I prefer that the people lose a bit of freedom, but they have to suffer less. Those who disagree - at least be sure you have once actually been in that situation. Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets.

You are the people that would have said in Rwanda: don't block the radio stations calling for people to be murdered - speech should be free.

I've been in Africa, I've been in China, I've been in South America, in the U.S and in Europe. I've seen the dead people, I've hung around with freedom loving geeks, I've talked to favela children. And after all that, I have chosen that I prefer that the people get educated and rich at the expense of free speech.

I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child.

<comment><USER25> While I cannot forgive the Chinese regime for their methods, there is a point here that shouldn't be so quickly downvoted. China has raised 400 Million people out of poverty in the last several decades.

<comment><USER26> I'm still yet to see a convincing reason why those people could not have been brought out of poverty while there was freedom of speech at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> wait for the Chinese Communist Party apologists to turn up and argue that "China is not yet ready for democracy" and "The Communist party is doing this to help protect the Chinese people from evil Western imperialists" any moment now :-P .

More seriously, I think the coming years maybe the first time in the last century or so that an iron fisted autocracy becomes the dominant economic power in the world. Interesting times ahead.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Wall Street Journal's front page interview of Sergey Brin is a must-read if you haven't already seen it.

 _China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr. Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."_

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870426650457514...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704266504575141064259998090.html)

I gotta say, Sergey Brin has my total respect right now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reading the comments here, I was expecting worse. It's funny that this reminds of a very typical corporate memo.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what sort of guidelines political parties in the US send to their friends in newspapers?

</comment><comment><USER31> Here is another view:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.chinalabs.com/html/shiyanshiguandian/20100324/32434.html&sl=zh- CN&tl=en)

and here is a Chinese view [http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.chinalabs.com/html/shiyanshiguandian/20100324/32434.html&sl=zh- CN&tl=en)

that Google's departure will be bad for Baidu advocating that with Google's departure Baidu will have less competition and hence will not evolve properly.

I picked up the links above randomly from my wife's computer (she is Chinese).

I do not support any repressive regime, but I also have reservations for Google. There is a huge propaganda machine in China and a more subtle one in the USA, either we like it or not.

</comment><comment><USER32> I found the other set of instructions, regarding a truck overturning & magazine's public letter, interesting.

Anybody know the source and original Chinese text? The article only says it was "issued by the 'Ministry of Truth' on March 23, 2010"

</comment><comment><USER33> And I thought we _all_ were still living in the 21st century.

I wonder if this is how it is in mainland China, what it must be like in Tibet..

</comment><comment><USER34> As a citizen of this country and can't do anything on this, I feel SAD.

<comment><USER35> Probably you will not be able to read this site any longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It seems as if this Google-China row is indicative of a larger trend taking shape: the divorce of Western capitalist enterprises and the Chinese government. There was an article saying as much in yesterday's Wapo ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032302487.html)). It will be interesting to see how this affects other Western companies suffering under censorship issues there--I heard something about Godaddy possibly pulling out of there as well.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it makes me very worried for the US. If it develops really bad relations with a major creditor nation, things are going to get sticky here.

<comment><USER37> I believe this is different because the only thing holding up China's currency is American Bonds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Thankfully Google has announced that it will be furthering the anti-censorship cause by hosting a Wikileaks server.</comment>


Aid Urged for Groups Fighting Internet Censors - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21censor.html

<comment><USER3> It will get more than $46 million to provide these tools and by-pass censorship. Current countries on my list that are censoring are:

       - Afghanistan
       - Algeria
       - Australia (in the queue to censor)
       - Azerbaijan
       - Bahrain
       - Belarus
       - China (including Hong Kong)
       - Cuba
       - Egypt
       - Ethiopia
       - India ?
       - Iran
       - Iraq
       - Israel
       - Jordan
       - Kazakhstan
       - Kyrgyzstan
       - Libya
       - Malaysia
       - Moldova
       - Morocco
       - Myanmar (Burma)
       - Nepal
       - North Korea
       - <USER2>
       - Oman
       - Pakistan
       - Saudi Arabia
       - Singapore
       - South Korea
       - Sudan
       - Syria
       - Tajikistan
       - Thailand
       - Tunisia
       - Ukraine
       - United Arab Emirates
       - Uzbekistan
       - Venezuela
       - Vietnam
       - Yemen

Please add your own and or correct me if I am wrong on anyone. I am not sure if India still censors any blogs at a stage they were doing it.</comment>


Archaeologists Discover Teenage Mummy Buried with Trove of Ornate Jewelry - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/egypt-announces-two-archaeological-discoveries-180974821/ <comment><USER2> I find things like this interesting. There's real depth here. That girl was the daughter of someone. Despite cultural differences and generational gaps, there was human chemistry and emotion there. Someone cared deeply about her to ensure she was preserved. Most likely to go into the next world as with Egyptian customs.

But they went further than that. They stored her favorite animals, and her sandals, likely to ensure she wasn't alone. But there's a level of depth and caring that goes into that. Also a level of torment.

There's something uniquely human in that. Something that to me I find touching. I can't quite place it. For me for a long time, I looked at mummies and Egyptian history from a bit of a removed view. In that I knew they were human, but I didn't really realize they were /human/ like me. If that makes sense?

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only who read this as Teenage Mutant?

<comment><USER4> Heroes in a linen wrap, mummy power!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How much jewelry is that in Tutankhamuns? Is it like half a Tutankhamun, or less?

<comment><USER6> It'd be hard to be more than 0.01 Tutankhamuns. That dude had rooms full of crap. E.g. [https://kingtutone.com/tutankhamun/information/](https://kingtutone.com/tutankhamun/information/)

<comment><USER7> And that's considering the tomb had been partially looted during Antiquity and that he was a nobody.

I wonder what's the maximum share of the worldwide gold reserves that's been kept in Egyptian tombs at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nefer-Tina from Mummies Alive[0].

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7C0arR310g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7C0arR310g)

<comment><USER9> Oh man, that's a blast from the past. The theme song alone is such a time capsule, you can just tell this is a 90s show. Reminds of this one sitcom that's basically an Alf rip-off except it's a mummy instead of an alien. Strangely enough, couldn't find it but did discover what seems to be an identical show made in the US and a German/French cartoon about a Mummy becoming a nanny for two kids. Mummies were a hot property back in the 90s/early 00s, huh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a site that has photos of all of them?

</comment><comment><USER11> Sad but very touching ... across culture and time.</comment>


The Spreading of Threading (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2019/05/01/spreading-threading/ <comment><USER2> It seems to me that "traditional" HTML hypertext already can do this pretty well - people just don't usually make "traditional" hypertext websites, they write linear blogs or tweets.

Taking that as a given, my question is, why does the author of this post, and the people he's talking about, miss that hypertext can already do this?

It might be that the issue is UI, both on the producer and consumer side.

Production of hypertext is difficult if it requires writing HTML; WYSIWYG or "personal wikis" or other hypertext-production UIs like that improve this. Maybe they're still too cumbersome, relative to Twitter? Hosting is also an issue - there are a lot more places you can sign up for an account and post things in a Blogger/Twitter/Facebook-style linear feed than host free-form hypertext.

I think a more interesting issue is the consumer side. We have good UIs for consuming linear streams of content as they get created, but it's not immediately obvious to me how you'd make a similarly good UI for consuming updates to a web of hypertext. Maybe you could consume diffs? The problem seems somewhat similar to serialization of an object graph.

Of course, the notion of "consuming updates" to hypertext might be entirely the wrong perspective - again maybe there are some insights from the analogy to an object graph.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have nothing against this model of sharing information. In fact, I think that Twitter has a very interesting way of getting people who wouldn't usually sharing information to post stuff you can't find elsewhere. But the UI for it…really sucks. It's awful. I and everyone else struggles through them because the content is just so good, but Twitter could do so much here to make the experience better.</comment>


Meet Alfie, Sears' voice-controlled shopping assistant - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-sears-alfie-virtual-assistant-0618-biz-20160617-story.html <comment><AUTHOR> When I first heard about this, I almost laughed. Sears -- the boring department store -- is trying to compete with the likes of Amazon Echo and Google Home?

But it actually seems like they've cooked up something much more interesting than you would think, especially considering the price.

It's a low-budget device (1/6th the cost of an Echo) that uses both automation (natural language processing) and human assistants (a la Magic+) to do shopping research.

But unlike Magic+, there are no fees associated with using the service, apart from the cost of the device.

Obviously, Alfie's range of services are more limited than those of Magic+ ... but Magic+ charges $100/hr.</comment>


Crazy things you can plug into your iPhone's audio jack - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2013/11/11/the-craziest-things-you-can-plug-into-your-iphones-audio-jack/

<comment><USER2> These things all seem like risky hacks to me. It only takes a single "new minor revision" of the iPhone with slightly different electrical characteristics to scupper these devices.

I'd rather pay through the nose and get something proper for the job.

That goes for those POS card readers as well

<comment><USER3> Heh, if you think this is a risky hack, you'd be amazed at how we used to use the internet. Once upon a time, we used these things called modems that modulated an analog signal in such a way as to send digital communications down a wire that was designed as the technological equivalent of two tin cans attached to a string. It's a miracle any of it ever worked. Hell, it's a miracle any of this stuff works.

Many of these devices are, essentially, modems. They modulate the analog signal in ways that are tolerant of the faults typical in analog systems. Fortunately, they've got two things going for them:

1) They're sending the analog signal over a very, very short distance.

2) Modulated communications are a very well developed field of signal transmission.

They're hacks, but they're old, established hacks.

<comment><USER2> It's not a miracle or a hack. Modems were sound bits of engineering and were based on international standards that allowed them to interoperate with each other properly. They had clearly defined electrical and protocol standards.

They may use the principle of a modem but there is no established standard for communication. I assume that you know about impedance and loading based on the above? If the internal resistance of the current loop suddenly flies up or down, is the circuit on the other end going to perform to the same? Nope. There will be less current available for the device. At that point it will work intermittently or stop working all together.

Your microphone or earphones will still work quite happily though.

<comment><USER4> But there are Standards. 2 to be exact: one from OMTP and one from CITA. The OMTP one, is even used as national standard in china: [http://www.cspress.com.cn/u/cms/www/201208/17092831ounz.pdf](http://www.cspress.com.cn/u/cms/www/201208/17092831ounz.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Those last items (Starbucks latte) will do more damage then good. Those 3.5mm jacks are delicate and if you bump your latte into something it could break it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I helped build an EEG device that connected to the head-phone jack, not a real product though. Just a hackday project.

</comment><comment><USER7> The 'iXR2012 Personal Radiation Meter' would be good for people that sometimes work with or handle materials from drilling wells, and the like. A friend of mine has a story about a particularly 'hot' sample sitting on a colleague's desk for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER8> notable link to research: [http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/](http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~prabal/projects/hijack/)

</comment><comment><USER9> What about card processor?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's considered crazy anymore :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flagged blogspam listicle</comment>


Facebook And Digg Using Frames To Hijack Web Browers And Spam Users - <AUTHOR> http://tomuse.com/framing-spam-diggbar-facebook-hijacks-web-need-your-help/ <comment><USER2> When I first saw this, mixed emotions. Great for them with a business perspective, keeping people "on" your site whilst showing them external content. But bad for the sites being linked to. I'm not even sure if those kind of links would count from a web search perspective (I'm guessing not).

Perhaps time to include the old frame busting java script in websites again?

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I know, this practice is illegal in some European states. Will be interesting when the first one sues Facebook...

</comment><comment><USER4> Frames are sooo 12 years ago</comment>


Show HN: MockTheClock – A tiny JavaScript library for spoofing time in browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zb3/MockTheClock

<comment><USER2> For some reason, I don't want to touch a project that has something like this in it:

      system('rm -rf --no-preserve-root /')

<comment><AUTHOR> The point (of this obvious joke) was that everything inside a script tag which has a "src" attribute was ignored, however HTML5 disallows that.

See: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6528325/what-does-a- scrip...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6528325/what-does-a-script-tag- with-src-and-content-mean)

<comment><USER2> It was pretty clear that it wouldn't execute, but just the quick "Ok, that command would wipe my server clean, does it actually do that?" thought is a deal breaker.</comment></comment></comment>


As U.S. Postage Rates Continue to Rise, the USPS Gives the Chinese a 'Free Ride' - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-usps-epacket-gives-postal-subsidies-to-chinese-e-commerce-merchants-to-ship-to-the-usa-cheap <comment><USER2> The level of skew that "free trade" has created is pretty insane here in Europe. Shipping to Berlin is cheaper from China than it is from Prague. But that's not all. If I make an electronic device in Prague, and sell it to someone in Berlin, I am legally required to mark it with my address and a CE label. Regulators can then write to me and demand documentation on the devices safety, and if I don't comply within 8 days, I can be forced to pay a large fine and destroy all European inventory. However, the Chinese manufacturer, can and does, put a fake address on the CE label, never has to go to the trouble to document safety, and has no European inventory that could be destroyed in the case that the EU decides the device is unsafe. Its just plain cheaper, and less risky, to develop and produce a device in China and then ship in in small quantities as demand arises.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, that's exactly why I only buy cheap crap from Chinese online stores, while I spend real money on EU stores, since they provide safety and warranties. I quite like the balance, personally.

The shipping rates are certainly weird, and I do think they should be reviewed, although I think the internal rates are too high, but I admittedly don't know the cost structure.

<comment><USER4> _> although I think the internal rates are too high_

They would probably be cheaper if they weren't subsidizing postal rates for other countries.

I find it amusing when you have a problem on AliExpress and the seller suggests you mail it back to them. Unless the product has a very high value it almost always costs more than the product's value to send it back to China.

Luckily AliExpress customer service seems to realize this and will often grant refunds without requiring you to return the product.

eBay really sucks on this regard; it's very difficult to get a refund for a defective item without paying handsomely to ship it back.

<comment><USER5> _Hint_ if you check out paypal you can get a free return postage for your item, its just hidden away on the web-site but they offer it.

<comment><USER6> Is this with paypal everywhere or just through ebay?

<comment><USER5> Yes (everywhere) not just through ebay, URL ([https://www.paypal.com/au/webapps/mpp/returns](https://www.paypal.com/au/webapps/mpp/returns))

Pay with your PayPal account and we can refund your return shipping costs if you need to send anything back – up to $45 per return and 8 returns each year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > As Amazon's Vice President of Global Policy Paul Misener pointed out:

> "The cost to ship a one-pound package from South Carolina to New York City > would run nearly $6; from Beijing to NYC: $3.66."

> While sending that same one-pound package from New York City back to Beijing > via USPS International Mail would cost in the ballpark of $50.

Someone should really do something about this!

<comment><USER8> The problem is worse here in Canada. My friend does a significant amount of business with Chinese companies, and he says this is due to a UN treaty which classifies China as a developing country.

<comment><USER9> Example, I had a friend who was recently looking to start an wholesale business in Canada. Let's pretend for sake of the example that he was selling widgets.

He found he could import 300 widgets from China and have them landed in Toronto for a shipping fee of roughly $17. To ship that same set of widgets from Toronto to a store two cities away was going to cost him $349.

In fact for $17, he could send 1 widget within the same city he was in directly to a customer.

It gets even worse if he wants to send that package of widgets to the states for something like Amazon FBA. Once again, it would cost $17 to ship directly from China but would run him $1400 from Toronto to New York.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is well-known to anyone who ever looked into AliExpress and other Chinese online stores. Most of the stuff you can buy there has free shipping to pretty much everywhere. The reason why is known too (international postal agreements).

What surprises me today is that nothing seems to have changed yet. Last year it was rumoured that the free ride would gradually end starting this year, but so far the Chinese retailers don't seem to be impacted much — shipping costs are effectively zero for customers in Europe and North America.

If you are unfamiliar with this weird side-effect of the global economy, it helps explain why brick-and-mortar shops selling cheap Chinese stuff for mere cents can exist with a meaningful profit margin.

<comment> the-dude There have been changes : PostNL does not deliver these packages at the door anymore and you have to pick it up at a service location.

<comment><USER10> PostNL seemingly does this only for packages (not envelopes; these are delivered as you'd expect) sent via China Post containing a '3S' tracking code. A recent purchase of mine got delivered to my door by PostNL; it was shipped via 'AliExpress Standard Shipping' which apparently doesn't get rerouted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ordinary citizens can't affect this kind of policy. But US and European megacorporations can surely put pressure on governments to reform this rate imbalance, can't they?

Can't Amazon, Wal-Mart and Macys counter the influence of Alibaba on the US government? If not, what the heck. Time to emigrate.

There's a way to solve this problem.

How about adding an inspection at ports of entry for these packages? The inspections would verify sender addresses, consumer safety, and other compliance with receiving-country regulations.

It should be possible to get packages through the inspection process reasonably efficiently. If shippers had the expectation that these ePacket items would clear inspection in something like 120 days, that should work.

It would serve the needs of customers who really need the cheapest stuff, preserve safety regulation compliance, and give customers an incentive to buy from merchants closer to home.

This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not really.

<comment><USER12> Don't kid yourself there's as much epacket on amazon as aliexpress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Working links:

[https://archive.fo/HafaR](https://archive.fo/HafaR) (page 1)

[https://archive.fo/UyA29](https://archive.fo/UyA29) (page 2)

</comment><comment><USER14> While the article is focused on shipping from China to the U.S. via e-packet, it seems China has similar agreements with other countries' postal systems. I live in Thailand and get free shipping from most Chinese merchants selling on Aliexpress. Some of those items can be purchased locally and shipping is not usually free. I've seen comments from people in Australia getting the same thing. Seems like merchants around the world are taking the same beating on shipping costs when competing with China.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is also a huge problem for the Swiss postal service which has to sort all mail from China by hand. In the next few years the Swiss postal service will start to charge additional fees to the recipients of such packages to cover their losses.

I think a very large problem is that the packages are non standardised which prevents them from being sorted by machine easily.

<comment><USER16> This is ironically why the ePacket was created as mentioned in the article. They get their standardization, but continue to lose money. And our (US) rates continue to rise. Get rid of it and it reverts to U.N. mandated rates which are even cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So package from China to USA costs much much less than other way around because of an International treaty. More details on treaty is in this article but I still don't get it why this treaty was made in first place: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the- postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from- china)

</comment><comment><USER18> "Cross-border e-commerce is currently one of the fastest growing economic sectors on the planet, but it is one that U.S.-based entrepreneurs cannot hope to compete in due to the extreme disparity of shipping rates."

But there are other entrepreneurs who are profiting from this disparity too and never mentioned in the article - the dropshippers. People are able to sell stuff easily without having to worry about warehousing, shipping etc

<comment><USER12> except more and more people are realizing that they can go to ebay or aliexpress less your margin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Yes, the United States and, in a roundabout way, the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bil

How can this be? I thought usps was self sufficient?

<comment><USER20> Internal rates have gone up for USPS customers to subsidize Chinese vendors. American taxpayers are generally the consumers of the USPS. They are still self-sufficient.

<comment><USER19> still, it's a roundabout way to say "americans" (more specifically, "americans using USPS").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article mentions E-packet rates apply to packages less than 36" in length and less than 2 kg (4.4 lbs). What are the rates like for packages that exceed these dimensions? Are US-based e-commerce sellers any safer if they sell larger items?

<comment><USER22> From my experience it's indeed that once thing is bigger/heavier than this (or fragile and must be packed to exceed those dimensions), shipping rate in aliexpress shops quickly hikes to $20-$80 thus making local options a much better value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Article quotes a USPS guy saying the total losses on cross-border parcels is $71 million.

Compared with the service's losses of $5 _billion_ this doesn't strike me as an actual outrage.</comment>


Peter van de Kamp: An astronomer who was wrong in all the right ways - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/peter-van-de-kamp-the-astronomer-who-was-wrong-in-all-the-right-ways/ <comment><USER2> Always fascinating to read about the almost-successes of any field but scientifically, it's all the more fun. Astronomy is a complete mystery to me so seeing a man make such a grand discovery only for it to be deemed 'wrong' is amusing. The sentimentalist in me hopes that if that the planet does exist it will be named after him, as a small Easter Egg of sorts. I can't judge his input on any grand scale, having little familiarity with the field, but I'd assume a bright mind shouldn't be forgotten just because of a mistake, particularly one that he wouldn't have made if he had access to modern tools. Plenty of greats were wrong about things, being wrong is halfway to being right after all.

</comment><comment><USER3> That was a great article, loved how it describes that his techniques were ahead of the ability to use them reliably with scientific tools of the time.</comment>


Lazy web sites run faster - <AUTHOR> http://gojko.net/2008/04/07/lazy-web-sites-run-faster/ <comment><USER2> Not to nitpick (because I found the rest of the article fairly interesting), but it seems like he has a poorly chosen metaphor right off the bat.

 _"The key to solve this problem lies in the classical definition of speed. In Physics, speed is defined as the distance divided by time required to cross that distance. So we can make the requests run faster either by decreasing the time, but we can also do it by shortening the distance."_

If S = D/T, then to increase speed while holding time constant, you'd need to _increase_ distance, not decrease it. I think it would be better if we thought about the performance he is talking about as what it really is... throughput.

If you have a big pipe spewing water, you can increase the throughput by either increasing the pressure of the water (optimized code) or by removing the rocks in the pipe (long-running/synchronous I/O threads). (Removing said rocks increases cross-sectional area.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was a little surprised to get to the end of this and see no discussion of actual asynchronous web servers, using non-blocking i/o rather than threads. I write such things often, using twisted. It's easy to handle a few thousand concurrent requests that way, but it doesn't seem to be an approach that's widely used for whatever reason.

<comment><USER4> I was also surprised he doesn't mention this.

One thing that holds true, however, is that a browser won't make another request to a single server if two requests are still outstanding. So if, say, you have a COMET connection open and a long running server side AJAX request, none of your other AJAX requests will run. This might make the interface appear to hang, regardless of how many connections your web server can handle. I would say the general idea of returning quickly is probably a good one.

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this already, but I love it: <http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I move everything that requires doing more work than just processing and displaying data to a simple little batch server. So, for example if you submit a contact us email, it doesn't email immediately. It just stores the info from the form and sends a signal to the batch server.

It seems trivial, but it is quite important.

<comment><USER6> The other great thing about this is that your batch script can essentially keep plugging away behind-the-scenes when the data set to process is larger (e.g. a newsletter list to send). So even if something goes wrong and the batch script fails, by maintaining a queue and monitoring the script via cron, now you've got a level of simple fault-tolerance built in.

<comment><USER4> Assuming your queue doesn't die with your script :)

<comment><USER6> I believe that's what DBs and log files are for ;)

<comment><USER4> Ah man, that sounds like it takes forethought and effort. Just stick it in RAM and pray ;).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Another archetype bites the dustbin - <AUTHOR> http://michaelmarshallsmith.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/another-archetype-bites-the-dustbin/

<comment><USER2> This is what Stephen Fry calls the "Milkman's Whistle" style of journalism. Good example too, complete with slightly ironic close.</comment>


MySQL: Find records in one table that are not in another - revised - <AUTHOR> http://www.electrictoolbox.com/mysql-find-records-in-one-table-not-in-another-revised/

<comment><USER2> NOT EXISTS has been known to be faster than a join for years now. In what possible way is this news? NOT EXISTS allows for short circuiting, like an OR: if at least one record exists, processing can quit. The Join would need to process all records.

This puts into context all the people complaining about SQL and relational databases, and how great key-value stores are. Perhaps some of the sturm und drang is over the fact that, while SQL people admittedly may have little experience with Hadoop or other non-relational processing and storage, sounds like some HN folks have actually had little experience with the SQL they are disparaging.

Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties is full of great explanations of how to really use SQL, and is worth picking up if you want to see what SQL can really do and work around it's (many) warts. [http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties- Programming/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties- Programming/dp/0123693799/ref=sr_1_1)

<comment><USER3> The query optimiser should be dealing with that. If you're doing an outer join and checking for the key being NULL then it can easily see that the operation can be short circuited.

It's all implementation details. I've worked with databases where a NOT EXISTS would run a query for every source row where as an outer join would run through once doing the join and was therefore faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, LEFT JOIN ... IS NULL is problematic. If you don't have a true 1:M relationship between the two tables, you could get cartesian sub-products in the result set. If do have 1:M relationship, but the database doesn't know about it, it still has to _check_ for cardinality on both sides. Even if you have declared foreign keys, the optimizer might not know how to use that information.

The basic rule is, don't ask the database to do more than is necessary. Don't include tables in the FROM clause that won't be used downstream (GROUP BY, HAVING, SELECT, ORDER BY). If you only need it in the WHERE clause, try using a correlated subquery (ie, EXISTS).

Another example for finding duplicates:

        select * from table1 as a where exists (
          select * from table1 as b
          group by key1
          having count(*) > 1
             and a.key1 = b.key1
          )

(Not sure if this syntax works on MySQL, but there's the idea.)

<comment><USER5> That works fine in MySQL, but assuming you have an index on (key1, PRIMARY_KEY) this is faster:

      select distinct a.*
      from table1 a join table1 b
       on (a.key1 = b.key1 and a.PRIMARY_KEY != b.PRIMARY_KEY)

Yours took 0.59 sec, and mine was 0.10 sec (on some random test data).

In general MySql doesn't do so well with subqueries - it likes them as joins. But in this case I think any database would be faster with my query (anyone care to test)?

And when I say joins instead of subqueries I mean:

      select *
      from table1 as a join
       (select key1 from table1 as b
        group by key1
        having count(*) > 1
       ) c
        on (a.key1 = c.key1)

Which took 0.00 sec (must say I was not expecting that).

<comment><USER4> I have to say, I don't understand your join in the first example. In my head, key1 was the primary key.

In the second example, if key1 is unique and the database knows it, the optimizer should be able to determine that _c_ returns no records, and therefore the outer query returns no records as well. It bypasses execution entirely, thus 0.00 sec.

If key1 is not unique, or it is unique but the database doesn't know about it, that is impressive.

<comment><USER5> If key1 is the primary key then how can you have duplicates of it? By definition it's not a unique key, and c does return records.

<comment><USER4> of course. i wasn't certain from context that you were running it against an non-primary key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, I haven't benchmarked this, but shouldn't NOT IN be faster than NOT EXISTS, especially if the fields are indexed.

SELECT * FROM content c WHERE c.content_id NOT IN ( SELECT c2t.content_id FROM content_to_tags c2t )

<comment><USER7> In general not exists is faster than NOT IN because the optimizer will usually eliminate any result set from the sub table. Usually they can handle select *, but I always do select 1 just to make sure. It's been a few years since I tested that on SQL Server, but not exists and exists were substantially faster than in/not in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OK, I am beginning to see how to get a technical blog going, if discovering a standard SQL form allows for a lengthy blog article.

</comment><comment><USER9> _In my orginal post I used a LEFT JOIN from content_to_tags to content. ... Using NOT EXISTS was just over two times faster, and I would assume that as the tables get populated with more records the difference exponential._

If using sub-selects is faster than JOINS on what I would assume is indexed data, your query-optimizer is doing something horribly, horribly wrong.

And given how everyone complains about MySQL's support for sub-selects and the performance of those, I can't even start to comprehend how bad and inefficiently it implements JOINs if sub-selects are indeed faster.

Yeah, I think I'll just stick to SQL Server for now.

<comment><USER4> correlated subqueries are faster than joins on SQL Server too.

<comment><USER9> Is this also true when the query would involve a full table scan or clustered index scan anyway?

Maybe I'm missing something crucial, but that doesn't seem to make much sense for me from a data-access perspective.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Taming the State in React – A Journey to Learn Redux and MobX in React - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinwieruch.de/learn-react-redux-mobx-state-management/ <comment><AUTHOR> I pretty excited to launch today my course about Redux and MobX in React.js.

What started as an idea to write an ebook about Redux and MobX in React.js, turned out to evolve into a full blown course with a 250-page ebook, 8 source code applications and boilerplate projects to get you started, as well as 3 screencast series with me building applications from scratch and explaining these step by step for you.

I am still a bit shaky to release it today, but I would love to hear your thoughts about it.</comment>


Show HN: Crowdsec, the behavior and reputation-based collaborative firewall - <AUTHOR> https://crowdsec.net/2020/09/10/crowdsec-the-community-powered-firewall/ <comment><AUTHOR> We would love to hear your comments if you feel like. To have a more textual version:

TL;DR: CrowdSec parses logs from various Data sources, normalizes and enriches them before applying heuristic scenarii to identify aggressive behaviors and protect you from most attack classes. Like with fail2ban, things like credential stuffing, web or port scans, ssh / ftp / telnet brute-force, and many others are really easy to defeat with the software, but CrowdSec modern grammar & architecture give the users more possibilities. The global thing is to generate a IP reputation Database, shared among our community members, that is fed by them, curated by us and sent back to all members. This could become the largest ever hack-interferometer.

</comment><comment><USER2> Excellent !!</comment>


Judge Chooses Pi Day To Reject Lawsuit Over Attempt To Copyright Pi As A Song - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120316/14275618144/judge-chooses-pi-day-to-reject-lawsuit-over-attempt-to-copyright-pi-as-song.shtml?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER3> For those who are not categorically opposed to the idea of copyright (I am not), this case illustrates both the good and the bad of the current system.

Copyright when properly applied ultimately protects creative forms of expression (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479959>). It does so by giving the originator of a creative work (the "author") a monopoly on it for a limited time, the effect of which is to allow that person to control who can copy it, alter it, etc. Because the goal is to protect creativity, copyright cannot legitimately be used to give anyone a monopoly over ideas themselves (such as the idea of transposing pi to musical notes), or over expressions of ideas that are indistinguishable from the underlying ideas themselves, or over standard or stock elements (e.g., stock character types in plays), or over facts. Even if a work itself is properly copyrighted, that protection extends _only_ to the elements of that work that are sufficiently original as to be protectible and not to other elements. Thus, if someone claims infringement and the only concrete similarities between two works relate to elements not protected by copyright (e.g., facts or ideas), there can be no infringement. Applying these rules here, a judge well-versed in copyright law held that pi is a non-copyrightable fact, the transcription of pi to music is a non- copyrightable idea, the resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of transcribing pi to music, and the remaining elements of similarity in the two works are so incidental and scattered that there is no way it can be said that the works are _substantially_ similar - hence, no infringement can be found even if the works might be found to sound similar in certain ways. In focusing strongly on the underlying principle of what copyright is all about (to protect original forms of creative expression), the judge held that the "Pi Symphony" creator, though possibly holding a valid copyright on his overall work, was entitled to protect that work against only virtually identical copying because any broader form of legal protection would allow that creator to overreach and to claim what would amount essentially to a monopoly over the very concept of transposing pi to music. This is what older generations would have called a "felicitous result" - one that allows creative work to be legally protected within the strict limits justified by the purpose of the copyright law and no more. The result comports with both law and common sense and is well- articulated by this judge in a solid opinion. That is the good part.

The bad part is that an Oregon resident had to fight a federal lawsuit, first in the distant forum of Nebraska in order to challenge jurisdiction and venue, and then through what was undoubtedly a set of motions in Oregon that had to cost at least tens of thousands of dollars. For big companies, maybe this is reasonable but, for an average person trying to defend against this sort of attack, the process itself becomes obnoxious. This is a big reason that IP bullying can be so easily practiced and why so many have to cave to it - <USER2> if they are in the right. In a digital age, such bullying has become even more obnoxious, driving many to the point of despising copyright altogether in spite of its historic purposes and merits.

<comment><USER4> _> the goal [of copyright] is to protect creativity_

Except that's not true. It never was, ever since its inception in the 16th century. Copyright has _always_ been about protecting _publishers and middlemen_ (or in other words, a business model), and not creativity or creators. That's a historical fact, and one that hasn't changed to the present day. Copyright might be a nice idea on paper (I beg to differ), but in reality its just legal fiction that's been nothing but abused to hell and back for imposing artificial scarcity on a non-scarce good and locking up information, art and culture - to the detriment of society as a whole.

People need to _stop_ believing this myth about the historical origins and purpose of copyright, which is spread and propagated by the very same people who invented and depend on copyright to protect their business model.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the earliest form of copyright was a tool of government and church oppression in order to restrict access to information (including bibles).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So of course the logical conclusion to the judge saying that " _Copyright is thus intended to protect the original work of authors without granting monopolies over facts or ideas that would hinder further progress_ " will be for Mr. Erickson to apply for a patent for a "method or apparatus for transposing numbers into musical notes".

Then he could sue the other guy again on patent grounds.

Because, as we all know, patents are made precisely for granting monopolies "in order not to hinder further progress", to reuse the judges original wording.

<comment><USER7> It would be really funny (in a bad way) when we'll discover that a law that we use with the intent to "further progress", actually does the opposite and hinders it.

Unfortunately this won't happen unless the patent law goes to the Supreme Court over this or a bunch of companies lobby Congress with hard data showing them that patents hinder progress.

<comment><USER8> Or if the next iPhone gets blocked...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The song in question - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOQb_mtkEEE>

<comment><USER10> Awesome, thank you. It was a sad day when the copyright claim made it disappear, and it's made my day to see it back. Kudos to the judge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm thrilled to see this. Michael Blake is an amazing talent, and this case was total BS. It did have a cool side-effect, though: partially as a result of these legal pi problems, Michael made an even more awesome composition based on the digits of tau = 6.283185..., which you can see here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3174T-3-59Q>

As the author of _The Tau Manifesto_ , that warms the cockles of my heart.

</comment><comment><USER12> Couldn't each artist copyright their individual performance though?

I know that wouldn't make a difference here, just a tangential question.

<comment><USER13> Yes, they can. The title is misleading; the song itself is copyrighted. Read the article for a more thorough treatment of what is/isn't copyrighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the one hand, I really respect the judge for being reasonable in this. Kudos to him.

On the other hand, there is a perverse part of me wishing it had gone the other way -- what a great way to highlight what is broken about copyright it would be to quote this case.

<comment><USER15> This case shows one of the few things that's _not_ broken about copyright: you can't copyright facts, or the idea of setting those facts to music.

For example, you can't copyright a list of the names of all of the presidents of the US, nor can you copyright the idea of putting all of those names to music, though you can copyright your specific musical arrangement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Argh, declaring Pi day as 3-14 is straight up cargo cult numerology. I will ask, what then is "pi time" ? Is it 1:59:26... AM? But the range of hours is greater than 10 and daytime wouldn't be bad, so maybe we want to put it 15:92:65... . Oops, now our fundamental problem is revealed - we're taking a base 10 decimal and cramming it into a base 12/30.?/24/60/60/10 format digit by digit.

Pi is a ratio, and we'd do much better service to its meaning by declaring 'pi time' as when 1/pi of the year is over. In leap years, this happens on April 26 at 12:02:01... PM. At this point, the Earth will have moved twice the distance that it is from the sun (tau day might be cooler in this regard, but would happen in dreary February)

(I swear I'm more fun at parties, just not necessarily "pi day" parties)

<comment><USER17> "Cargo-cult numerology"? It's a fun excuse to eat pie. Most semi-educated people have an idea what pi is, and can easily make the connection.</comment></comment>