A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_account_gave_me_stomach_ulcers/ <comment><USER3> I am not a fan of Dropbox. Stories like this are why I don't use it.

A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I'd never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company.

I discovered Dropbox wasn't very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can't find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out. So when new employees ask why IT can't access and share the folder, we had to explain that's how Dropbox works.

The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no way to audit or tell who has what folder. If someone was sharing something illegal from their folder, I had to turn on the auditing capability and download logs as they were generated. It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope. So we dumped Dropbox before I left to avoid scrutiny down the road for any acquisitions of the company.

Dropbox is still a consumer product trying to be a workplace tool IMO. Maybe others have a different opinion.

This is a good story to tell on Monday.

<comment><USER4> > The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no > way to audit or tell who has what folder.

Have felt similar pain with G Suite Drive. Perhaps I simply didn't find or didn't have the proper permissions (I wasn't the top level admin on the org) but at some point I wrote a Python script to output a list of users who had access to each file in our organization. I saw no way of generating this automatically.

<comment><USER5> Drive can be a nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I find interesting is that the "insane asylum" apparently knew that it was wrong.

e.g. when asked why they need so much space on their laptops, they were evasive.

To my mind this makes it much worse. Not only were they doing something dumb, but they _knew_ it was dumb, and they _hid_ it instead of fixing it.

It certainly invites speculation about the company culture in the acquired business.

<comment><USER7> Based on my experience: IT was well aware it was insane. Alas, IT got absolutely no budget for fixing it from top brass, as kicking the can down the road always made more sense short-term

<comment><USER8> IT of the insane company, or the acquiring company? Because the post says IT of the acquiring company didn't know until the problem blew up.

<comment><USER9> DD failed to find it during the M&A, issue didn't become apparent until the purchased company lost multiple employees who kept the plates spinning.

It's a failure all round but i would say acquiring companies IT team are least to blame here.

<comment><USER10> From the article, it doesn't seem to be the fault of the IT guys. It's more like some rich guy who goes out buys a shiny used plane and hands over to the pilot to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked in a software company once where we acquired a product to integrate into ours. It was developed by a self taught programmer in his 50ies that did versioning by making copies of the whole directory when he had something that worked, the way I also worked before university. Since he was the only developer and he was pretty good this mostly worked. His first name was/is Leif so from then on me and my friends speak of this style of "version control" as "using Leif Points". I guess because it is phonetically somewhat close to Save Points like in some computer games.

\- Are we using git or Leif Points for this project?

\- eh, how about git?

This story sounds like they also used Leif Points, but for their database :O

<comment><USER12> I won't name the offender, but a well-known company I worked for did something funnier: zipping entire directory and checking _the zip files_ in Visual Source Safe.

<comment><USER13> Given how broken VSS is, that might have been safer than using VSS as if it worked properly.

<comment><USER12> LOL, I used it in 1996-97 and it worked OK for a modest setup with only six users and blocking at file level. Later heard some horror stories from people working at big shops, but no worse than svn stories, anyway I haven't seen any of those.

<comment><USER14> About your time of using VSS, I was working at Microsoft in developer support (working on COM data access, and _not_ VSS, thank $DEITY). It was fine for small internal stuff we'd do, the stories I heard from industrial-strength use did not instill confidence for anything more than a half-dozen devs. OTOH, we shipped small components for a larger product using VSS, and I don't recal any issues. Hated the workflow and interface, but it worked

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > 5\. Audit has some explaining todo.

Yes, that's a total fuck up on their side as well. That an incompetent company dies while doing stupid stunts like that is understandable and how the market filters out stupidity.

That another company looks at it and thinks "Oh that looks fine", that's a total failure at their work.

<comment><USER16> What "audit" are we talking about here, though?

<comment><USER17> Usually when you acquire a company you sign of some intent lettet that shows you are serious about the purchase provided they can pass your smell test.

Then after NDA's and a few other docs if a company accepts being purchased they have to give access to their internal docs. Finance books, IT, etc.

If during this "due diligence" period the buyers find a major red flag they might pull out, revise the price down, etc.

<comment><USER18> Having seen a couple of acquisitions what I see is that things go forward because the top execs are close and went to the same school and so on. The technical details shared are light and often don't matter until things are settled and the plebs have to merge everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually have had the reverse experience.

My company was acquired 18 months ago. We were the smaller company, about 1/4 the size, and as the founder/CTO, I expected the acquiring company to be all over us. I mean, we had a pretty tight operation but there was only so much 16 people could achieve. There were plenty of things we could improve, and I was looking forward to the resources and experience of this bigger company to help us.

Was I in for a shock!

While their software dev practices were OK (certainly no better than ours), what hit me hardest was their secops. It was a nightmare. And these guys service some brand name clients.

As an example, not only was the corporate wifi password memorable - <USER2> actually "P455w0rd" but similarly bad - but it was written on a whiteboard in view of the whole office! Service passwords are still stored in clear text in the corporate wiki, and few people understand why this is terrible. It's like a 90s IT shop, where people used to ask me "why would anyone care about our password?"

Kicking the can down the road is fine for a while, but without strong technical leadership, kicking the can becomes how things get done, and that's been my experience here.

I'm not long for this place.

<comment><USER19> > Service passwords are still stored in clear text in the corporate wiki.

I know this painfully well :(. Can you recommend some good solution? Ideally open source and self hosted, instead of cloud password manager.

<comment><USER20> Disagree about the Cloud requirement.

Because: in this scenario you need to drive adoption first,if it is any complicated the humans will not use it. so you need the easiest tool possible.

when everybody is using it, THEN go for the real security move.

(you can try to find a non-cloud one that is super easy, but...)

<comment><USER21> > Because: in this scenario you need to drive adoption first ...

Be careful: that sort of behaviour can get you fired and potentially land your company in hot water from a legal and/or compliance standpoint, as well as lose them customers.

Compliance is often as much, or more, about having and following documented processes, as it is about having good processes. This can include an approved list of software and services. If you step outside this you are likely breaching your compliance regime.

In the specific case of passwords you may have policies and procedures around secret management that would be violated by storing this information in the cloud, even with a service specifically designed for this. As stupid as it is, the quality (or lack thereof) of your current solution is not the key point here.

If you decide to get all subversive and start using a cloud service then, at the very least, if discovered you're going to get into trouble. At worst, if customers become aware they might leave, and as I've already said, the company might find themselves in legal difficulties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember as a freshman in college using Dropbox as version control for a 4-person group project. Even then it was a hurdle. Even with everyone sitting in the same room literally saying "okay I'm working on X nobody touch that file for a couple minutes". Jesus.

<comment><USER23> I was imagining (wishful thinking, I'm sure) that they were pushing to a Git repo hosted on Dropbox, which actually works remarkably well.

<comment><USER24> No, he said that they had someone to manually download the last version of each file. If they were really using git hosted over Dropbox they could have simply cloned the repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It should be noted that the evidence that stress is a primary cause of gastric ulcers has been fairly weak since the discovery of H. pylori, though there is some evidence stress may be a contributing factor.

<comment> semi-extrinsic FWIW stress is a contributing factor in pretty much all diseases we know. Particularly those where the immune system is active.

<comment><USER10> I've got ulcer. My last ulcer attack, 5 years had me rolling on the floor. Since then, I avoided stress. Ate at the slightest hint of hunger, even as I grew a pot belly.

Also, I avoided situps, cos the muscle pains felt like ulcer attacks.

There's this specific food that I love. It's eaten RAW but often prepared in a not too hygienic manner. Since I banned myself from eating it, I've slowly become able to stay a few hours without food and can handle more stress.

<comment><USER26> What's the food?

<comment><USER10> It's called garri - popular in most (if not all) west african countries. Here's a video of Nigeria's ex-president eating it.

<comment><USER27> Have you seen this entry in Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garri#Health_implications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garri#Health_implications)

> Garri is made from cassava which contains hydrocyanic acid .../... can lead > to .../... worsening of ulcers.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link.

The ground cassava is left to ferment for some days which removes MOST of the cyanide. There's little to no health control for food in these parts. I've read that over 50% of food stuff exported from West Africa to Europe and US get culled at the border.

See: [http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/3074370](http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/3074370)

See the abstract at: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526674/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526674/)

When it's prepared with hot water, it forms a solid called Eba. And it's consumed with soup. The heating makes it safe from my own observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Uh, as much as I enjoy reading this, posting this on Reddit seems particularly unwise for job security purposes. This seems to be an ongoing incident and there's more than enough info shared to de-anonymize.

<comment><USER29> I've come to the assumption that either this happened already months ago, or the much more likely scenario that it's probably largely fake (if based on a true story)

<comment><USER8> It mentions December, so either that's a lie, it's recent, or it was December in some previous year.

<comment><USER13> Updates are written in present tense as actions being undertaken so this seems to be an ongoing trash fire.

<comment><USER29> But that could also be the day by day as it went in the past, it still fits the explanations I wrote out above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When Danske Bank aquired Sampo Bank in Estland, Danske Bank spend one million hours on moving and lifting Sampo Bank's IT into Danske Bank's systems.

That didn't work out.

And we all know what happened then.

When the board and ceo want's to aquired a business, IT is just something they believe can follow along easily.

Most developers are straight up lazy and uprofessional to do a job, and mixing in security is just scary as hell.

<comment><USER31> Danske had some _really bad_ technical ideas: [https://hsivonen.fi/sampo-epic- multifail/](https://hsivonen.fi/sampo-epic-multifail/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> haha this is the kind of shit that happens when the engineering team cant get anything from the either the sysadmins or leadership.

Can't run an application? Can't afford a license? Use the network share. No network share? Use dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER33> And this, kids, is why companies do a technical due diligence during mergers. :0

<comment><USER34> It doesn't matter. The board and CEO will _never_ listen to the CIO and technical team. If they want to do an acquisition, they'll do it. I've seen this at least a dozen times in my 36 year career.

<comment><USER35> I keep coming back to from the board and CEO's perspective they have a choice, spend a lot of their time and effort to gain market share by investing in their own company. Or acquiring it through an acquisition.

Seems like an acquisition is a lot less hassle and risk. And can be done quickly. Most 'problems' can be made to go away by throwing money and fixers at them.

<comment><USER36> This doesn't always work, see HPE vs Autonomy. That case is incredibly interesting for an insight into how idiotic and lazy execs can be. Usually though, it works out for them, probably by luck. Would be, err, "interesting" if there were more Mike Lynch around to provide similar insight (Autonomy's CEO). Then again, the case is interesting as HPE was willing to litigate, and a certain British tech news outlet picked it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What a complete nightmare! I bet that most of that data is useless, and the Dropbox account is just used as a dumping ground for everything and there's no tagging, cataloging, or any sort of data structures.

<comment><USER15> My assumption, given the storage requirements for laptops, is that the actual database is 2-3TB is size and that the rest is archived snapshots of the DB.

<comment><USER38> Assuming that this database has been building up over the past decade, I'm in awe over how much money they must have spent on Laptop's in the early part of this decade.

<comment><USER39> i had trouble understanding the laptop part of the story. You can't sync 450 terabytes to a 4terabytes laptop anyway. So why the big storage ?

<comment><USER40> It's probably as poster above says: each snapshot (sounds like it's DB + app instance or something, maybe a VM snapshot?) is probably > 1TB in size. If you have a 1.5TB image it would make sense to want 4TB storage so that you could have two versions locally at a time. Also explains how long it takes them to do things. Every time they switch versions they have to swap out TBs of data to pull latest. Because it also sounds like they don't have a way to grab just the diffs. They grab whole images at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The best worst thing I've ever read. No idea how they pulled that off for so long.

<comment><USER42> Reminds me of a firm I worked for. They decided to adopt Google Drive for the team of about 20 employees.

Every couple weeks an employee would mistake the synced folder for their local disk and rearrange files or delete files and then the files would disappear for the rest of the company.

Then we'd have to go into the backups and restore the files and send a message out to everyone to hold the files they were working on before saving them to the drive again.

<comment><USER43> How come? Google Drive has fairly granular access control access control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> That was a cool nightmare scenario story, but holy mother of mercy was it ever tedious to read!

I can tolerate some bad grammar, but somehow the combination of incorrect articles, words auto-spellchecked to something completely different, run-on sentences, and lack of punctuation, made it a real chore to read through without getting lost...

<comment><USER45> The author is probably a non native English speaker

<comment><USER46> It actually reads to me like the author is definitely a native English speaker.

<comment><USER47> Agreed.

The patterns sound like native English speech.

I suspect dyslexia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is this a problem with tech? I imagine the users who decided to put sensitive data on dropbox are personally liable? Legal might have work to do? But i fail to see the tech challenge?

<comment><USER49> It seems that Dropbox was hosting all of the production data and being used as some kind of document store / db system in this story.

<comment><USER48> Can tech fix it by 1\. Disabling the dropbox account? 2\. Stopping dropbox urls from resolving in their lan if need be? Or blocking dropbox ips? 3\. Buying a md1280 or similar storage quickly n put a freenas or similar on it? 4\. Put syncthing or similar on all the user computers n this new nas?

<comment><USER48> Actually why is dropbox involved if its a git directory???

<comment><USER48> Git annex? Sparkleshare?

Can tech just stop the dropbox bit n just set up sparkleshare for everyone if git is holding up? If git is less than efficient..then syncthing, seafile would all work for their file sharing needs n r trivial to setup?

<comment><USER50> I think you missed the part where it's not Dropbox as a file sharing solution that's the only problem - their entire web app runs via Dropbox API calls from Heroku!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I hate to be That Guy but how on earth is this not discovered during due diligence before "insane asylum" Company was acquired?

<comment><USER52> Reminds me of HP's 11.1 Billion dollar blunder of buying Autonomy....

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/business/hps-autonomy- blu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/business/hps-autonomy-blunder- might-be-one-for-the-record-books.html)

<comment><USER53> That article was worth clearing cookies for. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Dropbox would really let you get to half a Petabyte ? I know it says as much space as your team needs, but wow. Do Dropbox start to charge per data stored when you take out an enterprise account ?

</comment><comment><USER55> While it all feels insane from one perspective, it's not hard to imagine a different narrative where the "founders of 'insane asylum' hacked the startup system, were product first, got acquired, and used their new home to pay down tech debt."

<comment><USER56> and made everyone else suffer?

Also - they are NOT paying down the tech debt. The programmers and sysadmin staff doing overtime mentioned are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> What are the advantages / disadvantages of going panic mode like this?

Would just increasing the size of the dropbox to keep things muddling along and then trying to figure out a migration strategy come Monday morning be impossible for legal reasons?

<comment><USER58> Sounds like the big issues are at the compliance level. They're in a time of the year where lots of companies have much more limited availability of engineering, management, and legal staff. Sure they could easily eat the cost of temporarily upgrading the Dropbox account. But as OP describes, there are huge implications in terms of security.

They didn't find out until today that a number of senior staff were laid off during the acquisition. Lots of room there for bad feelings. That opens them up to all kinds of vulnerabilities from disgruntled ex employees.

Imagine the repercussions come post-holidays if something bad happens during the next few weeks before everyone is back on board and there's a security breach over the meanwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This story has many angles, the developer who built the software, the founder who took all the money, then sold the software and fired the developer. Then Dropbox who we all laughed at, is now used for distributed databases.

</comment><comment><USER60> I don't use Dropbox so I am wondering, is this fundamentally different from storing everything in S3? Is it like a single S3 bucket? Or multiple buckets on the same account?

<comment><USER61> Dropbox is essentially just a cloud synced folder. Anyone who had the shared login credentials had access to the entire production server and fragments of it could be left on any computers that were synced to it. Anyone could also delete or modify anything and it would propagate the changes to everyone else's copies with very little logging or version control. You can restore a previous version of the file, but it isn't like git or anything... just more like recently saved versions.

<comment><USER60> Is it shared credentials even for business accounts? Surely they must have some kind of team based shared access option for that?

<comment><USER61> The post said they had an enterprise account, which I assume could limit access via separate logins, but many of the users were sharing the same single set of credentials (e.g. everyone logging in with the same account), so there was no real access control or knowledge of who all had access using that account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This looks like how no-code projects will end up in the future.</comment>


When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/technology/when-the-ai-professor-leaves-students-suffer-study-says.html <comment><USER2> Pay the professor more money. Top Universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars of endowments, and are willing to pay football and basketball coaches millions of dollars. They are not insulated from market pricing.

In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and _less_ job security until they make tenure.

Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors.

I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very happy I went to industry.

<comment><USER3> Consider the plight of the medical student though. Worse than that of a CS grad student, that's for sure. Made to practice medicine on people while sleep deprived as a form of industry-approved hazing, a practice that doubtlessly has a substantial death toll associated with it.

<comment><USER4> > Consider the plight of the medical student though.

While not as bad, ML/NLP/CV/AI grad school is still pretty bad. Maybe 60-70% of what med students (more specifically, residents) go through.

<comment><USER5> No way. It's not even close. And I say this as a PhD candidate in one of these fields at Stanford. Grad school is what you make of it, to a large extent. There's definitely toxicity, but it's not as systematic or ritualized to the extent that it is in medicine. In grad school, you have wide leeway over who you work with, and you can distance yourself from the toxic personalities if that's what you want to do without taking a career hit. That's not really possible in medicine.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, med school is the only "brainy" career path that endures military-style hazing on a ritualized and widespread basis.

<comment><USER7> To be precise: med school is (comparatively) a walk in the park. Years 3 and 4 of med school are a sort of "residency lite" where you rotate in different specialties, but the doctors don't really expect you to be useful, so it's fairly low-pressure other than odd hours. Study up so you can know what you're talking about, don't get in people's way, and you'll be fine. Residency is when the 80+hrs/week institutional hazing happens.

<comment><USER6> Yes, "medicine" would have been the correct term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The blog post "You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation"[1] from prominent AI researchers Ben Recht, David A. Forsyth, and Alexei Efros also highlights the challenges of co-employment by big tech companies. Well worth a read.

[1] [http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co- employment/](http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Pretty much all of the highest paid state employees are medical professors.

[https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest- paid/](https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/)

Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself and gets you those high paid side gigs.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty incredible - #100 of the top 100 best paid still makes $652,640.

However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over $200k. That's pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely choosing to leave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the- barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income difference from University to Industry.

I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times. Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G, FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay.

We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).

</comment><comment><USER12> "Plundering" and "poaching" are inherently wrongheaded notions of gross entitlement from employers expecting unilateral loyalty.

The problem should be approached as "how can we attract and retain the best" not thinking of them as property and their competitors as thieves.

<comment><USER13> I can't even get software developers to think I'm terms of teamwork (Mostly I can filter by ones that are sympathetic). Imagine trying to get academics to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All this reminds me of the late 1990s, when 50% of academics who knew HTML ran to a dot-com. It didn't last, and a few years later an awful lot of former professors begged for their jobs back. Some of them got it, but most didn't.

<comment><USER15> I've noticed a trend of basically any PhD who knows Python getting hired to join any of the many growing "data science" teams in large companies. Despite having PhDs (usually in non-related fields like biology or even education) most of these people know very little about engineering, statistics, CS and surprisingly science. All they know how to do is stitch together a bunch of keras code and try to get some arbitrary cost function drop.

I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era, where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and solving interesting problems.

I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _Tech companies disagree with the notion that they are plundering academia. > A [typical large dotcom] spokesman, for example, said the company was an > enthusiastic supporter of academic research._

On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from those dotcoms.

Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics and objective understanding of current industry _before they applied for internships_ , and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting dates when they returned.

<comment><USER17> > Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics > and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for > internships

Even with an understanding of ethics, undergrads, new grads, professionals and startup founders _usually_ pick the "unethical" option.

\- Facebook knows this (in 2019) and thus offers more money to offset it. Several of my grad school friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley chose to work at Facebook because "they gave $300K-$400K total yearly compensation."

\- US-based start-ups routinely sell products, give up equity control, or sell directly to the Chinese government or investors. Many times precluding them from selling to US customers/government. My startup recently closed a $20M computer vision deal with a Chinese customer related to person re- identification. Unethical? Probably to someone, yes.

The reason for all of this? Because "everyone has a price." If you believe your ethics can't be compromised, well then you haven't been offered enough money.

<comment><USER18> You realize the Chinese government is going to use your tech in their concentration camps and you don't care at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps those academic institutions should simply offer tenure much faster if they want to keep these professors.

It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that universities _can_ offer.

<comment><USER20> From the article:

 _At Carnegie Mellon, 17 professors, all of them tenured, have moved into industry_

Not sure about other universities, but it doesn't sound like tenure made much difference at CMU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it.

This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and affected how some selected students.

I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting meetings.

I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's the study's control group? If we compare the number of companies founded by students over different time periods it doesn't say much about the effects of the "brain drain".

</comment><comment><USER22> First we should abolish the 5-7 year PhD program and make it three years. Second universities should use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink Their approach to entrepreneurism. Third this actually creates opportunities for students to become professors. In most fields good luck!

<comment><USER23> Reducing the length of PhD programs (in the U.S. -- PhDs in Europe tend to be shorter) would have the side-effect of having even more PhD grads (of lower quality) that can't find a job.

Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.

<comment><USER22> So keep them out of the workforce longer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences and medicine as well.

It isn't just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even if it could match the pay.

<comment><USER25> Tenured professors have vastly better job security than anywhere in the private sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there a way to access nytimes without signing in?

<comment><USER19> Use archive.is, e.g.

> [http://archive.is/2qktN](http://archive.is/2qktN)</comment></comment>


OpenCoffee 6/16 at Andala in Cambridge, MA - <AUTHOR>

My team's first big release here at TripAdvisor just went live!
I was going to be heading to OpenCoffee tmw, partly to blow off some steam, partly because I'm solo w/ the baby and partly to talk to folks that might be interested in joining us to build the next big thing.
I'm happy to buy breakfast for anyone that shows up that, at a minimum, can explain what we built.  Or why its cool.
I'm aiming to be there at 9am: www.andalacafe.com <comment><USER2> TripAdvisor is a big (by startup standards), well established company, but we're a small, young team and built this feature in a startup timeframe (~ 3 months). Much of our effort was rapidly executing on some ideas of how to make travel planning more social, while coping with changes to Facebook's API's and their various announcements at f8. Now we get to leverage ~10 million unique monthly site visitors and scale for those ~5 million active Cities I've Visited users sanj mentioned. Sure beats fighting for 10,000 views while eating ramen.

We've heard many folks say they will "change the game" in travel planning, but only have some VC funding to show for it. Seems like you might want a product to go with those claims...

Consider the gauntlet thrown.

 _east ~ side_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My team's pointed out that I didn't actually say what we built.

TripAdvisor runs the Cities I've Visited Facebook app: <http://apps.facebook.com/tripadvisortravelmap>

Over the last 3 years, we've collected over a billion "pins" worth of data across millions of users. Our MAU is about 5m.

We've added Facebook Connect to our site and now have a box on each geo- specific page on our site which shows you which of your friends know about that location, based on their data in our pin database.

What this means is that we find the short list of friends that can actually help and influence your travel decisions. The tools also pulls together responses from email & wall posts so that they don't disappear into the Facebook limbo.

The part that I think is awesome is that we got to build something truly valuable and useful based on data gathered from a compelling and popular Facebook app.

See it yourself: <http://www.tripadvisor.com/cambridge,ma>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to Andala. What should I order?</comment>


How San Francisco Planned Its Own Housing Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/demolishing-the-california-dream/ <comment><USER2> I spent a lot of time digging into this article. Very interesting and provocative reading for this Bay Area resident. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Fun with a few 9V batteries. (244 of them) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hwLHdBTQ7s

<comment><USER2> While I enjoyed all the sparks. I really just want to know who the hell keeps 244 9v batteries at home. In the video he said he did not buy them just for these experiments... so why does he have so many then?

<comment><AUTHOR> He did say they were all used, but still, that has to be a decent chunk of change.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: "Coinbase just sent you 0.002329 BTC" - <AUTHOR>

So I just got this email from Coinbase:
<comment>
Hi xxx,
Coinbase just sent you 0.002329 BTC (worth $0.99 USD) using Coinbase.
Attached message:
Thank you for applying to YC in the most recent batch! We're sending $1 of bitcoin to everyone who applied. Click here to sign in and view this transaction
Kind regards,
The Coinbase Team
</comment><comment>
It is very nice that they plan to give $1 to every applicant of the most recent YC batch, but I certainly did not applied for YC. I just sent them an email asking them if it is a mistake. In the mean time, I am curious if anyone else here got a similar message. Did you actually have applied to YC's last batch?
P.S.: someone asks question about whether this email is from Coinbase.
screenshot of email content: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2qx0SXGdTVZNzBUWGYxVGZzaWs
transactional detail on Coinbase: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2qx0SXGdTVZci1KTUZMVVVsTFU
P.P.S.: aspHax0 below mentioned "I got this as well. However, I applied to be placed as an intern at a YC company over the summer.". I applied, too. That is certainly interesting. </comment><comment><USER2> Very sorry for the trouble on this, the blame goes squarely on me for this - those emails should never have gone out. YC had nothing to do with this, and it was completely our fault in using this private list for marketing purposes.

There is really no excuse other than poor judgement and rushed decisions. I apologize and we will make an effort to be much more careful about this in the future.

<comment><USER3> To give an opposing view, as an applicant, I personally didn't feel there was any privacy breach. Everyone that applied knew they were applying to the entire conglomerate of YC companies, so when one sends a nice email, thanking all the applicants, there really should be no privacy issue. If anything, sending a more official looking email, explaining what it was for instead of just a transaction could have preempted any concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this kind of a privacy breach if it's true? Why does Coinbase get access to emails of people that have applied to YC? I'm not generally a data privacy zealot or anything, but that seems sketchy that YC would provide a batch list of emails to companies for what is essentially advertising/spam...

<comment><USER5> Coinbase is a YC company. One of the primary functions of YC is networking. In that light, it seems pretty reasonable to me for YC to put alumni in contact with each other. I don't know if this is the case, but there might even be a founders mailing list. That would not surprise me.

<comment><USER4> I understand a mailing list for alumni, but this is for applicants.

I have never applied to YC - but is there a checkbox that says "It's cool to share my email with the 500+ YC alum companies"?

<comment><USER3> I received this after applying for the internships for YC companies, so yeah, in a way, everyone that applied certainly did give YC and all their alumni their email address, seeing as that was part of the application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can you confirm the amount given was actually deposited in your SSL-verified coinbase.com account?

I know coinbase users have been the target of some phishing emails lately.

EDIT: Do not use the link given in the email.

EDIT 2: Now that we know it's not a fake, let's just hear what Coinbase or YC have to say.

</comment><comment><USER7> I got this as well. However, I applied to be placed as an intern at a YC company over the summer.

<comment><USER8> Same here. I applied for the intern. I also got the email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I received a similar email and have applied for an internship sometime during March. YC did mention they received over 1600 applications for it.

Pretty cool gesture.

Though, I think you are slightly luckier than I am because I received 0.002315 BTC :P

</comment><comment><USER10> Allowing their applicant list to be used for unsolicited marketing seems out of character for YC.

Has either party confirmed this? I'm skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeah I got the email as well... And it's not spam it's legit because I opened and it actually got the balance... Equivalent to $1... I had applied for both internship as well as YC so can't comment at to which one triggered it but the mail mentions the application and not internship..

</comment><comment><USER12> Probably spam/phishing. When in doubt, look at the full smtp headers (or at least post them so that we can look at them).

[https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/messageheader/](https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/messageheader/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I applied to YC in the most recent batch and I haven't received anything from Coinbase

</comment><comment><USER14> Are you sure this email was from Coinbase? Have you actually received the BTC? Is this post meta-spam? b^)

</comment><comment><USER15> I received this email today too, I applied for the summer internship.

</comment><comment><USER16> It has probably been given to the guys that have applied for the internship earlier this March (at least that't when I gave that email address to YC)

</comment><comment><USER17> You can try using your bitcoins at [http://www.bitoomba.com](http://www.bitoomba.com)!

</comment><comment><USER18> /u/chosen you appear to be hellbanned.</comment>


Ask HN: Google Analytics for Startups? - <AUTHOR>

We're planning on launching our service this week, so I'd like to bone up on how to use Google Analytics efficiently.
Currently, all I have setup is standard page tracking, and this is about the limit of my knowledge at the moment.
Can anyone point me in the direction of some resources (websites, slides, books, anything) that can help me understand what metrics I need to track, setting up goals/funnels and anything else that may be useful? <comment><USER2> There are two great books for you:

1\. Web Analytics 2.0, by Avinash Kaushik. He's the Analytics evangelist at Google and his book is very easy to read. Start here. He also keeps a blog: <http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/> . The archives are a gem of a resource.

2\. Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton. A much drier read (the guy has a PhD in Chemistry and writes with the dry academic style) but an excellent resource. There is a blog with much lower volume of posting: <http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/> .

<comment><USER3> web analytics 2.0 is amazing.

Also watch this (GREAT) talk on the metrics you should be tracking off the bat: [http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of- fresh...](http://carsonified.com/blog/business/mike-mcderment-of-freshbooks- on-web-app-marketing-metrics/)

He suggests that you build an internal tracking system to compliment something like Google Analytics.

Also if there's one thing you learn first in Google analytics, it's "Custom Segments." Build a segment for your paid users or return users vs. new users. USA vs. World. 3:00 on site vs. <1 minute on site. etc. Comparing differences between these groups is invaluable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My biggest gripe with Google Analytics (if I was their product manager), is that it collects lots of data, but doesn't tell you _what to do_.

Google Analytics made a small step in that direction when they added the trending analysis. But it's such a small step.

Where is the dead-simple analytics _recommendation_ engine? It needs to analyze the data and tell you what works, what doesn't. Ideally, with a big "ON" button to do more of what works, and an "OFF" button to stop doing whatever doesn't. Everything else is beyond the comprehension level of 99% of people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Set up goal tracking. For beginner level that's all you really need is the basic installation and some form of goal tracking (ecommerce tracking if you have ecommerce transactions). That will let you make business decisions.

Once you figure out exactly what else you'd like to report on then post again, most things are possible but it's not really worth setting it up unless you can gain some actionable insight from it.

<comment><USER6> Give Clicky a try for 30 days. I found that it gives you more actionable metrics out of the box AND it is real time. It makes a huge difference when you launch.

affiliate link: <http://getclicky.com/219826>

non affiliate link: <http://getclicky.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google Analytics has a series of videos as part of their "Google Analytics Conversion University" that are really helpful. I dig the way they've divided up each section of the video too.

<http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/?hl=en>

</comment><comment><USER8> Beyond basic data on visitors, browsers etc, the next step is to think about the goals of your website e.g. purchase, signup, download etc.. Once you've decided the goals you have for your website's users, take a look at Google's docs on setting up goals: [http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55515)

</comment><comment><USER9> Also worth checking out is mixpanel - an HN startup (see link at bottom).

</comment><comment><USER10> What do you want to learn from your analytics? Remember that Google Analytics is just a tool — the hardest part of using a tool "efficiently" is asking the right questions, and right now it sounds like you don't have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER11> Check out how events work: you add a simple .js call to any action you want to track (click on a button, ...), and it will get tracked. Great for things like tracking videoplays, certain ajax interactions you want to track etc...

</comment><comment><USER12> Watch Startup Metrics for Pirates first: [http://www.techstars.tv/watch/2714618-dave-mcclure- startup-m...](http://www.techstars.tv/watch/2714618-dave-mcclure-startup- metrics-for-pirates)

I would suggest using <http://kissmetrics.com> to track goals and funnel conversion.

All the best!

<comment><USER13> Any of McClure's presentations, which you can find on Slideshare trivially, are very worth reading in their entirety. Most are rated ARRRRRRRRR, though.

In particular, note how a) track stuff before you can necessarily make sense of it and b) time spent looking at numbers which does not result in decisions for the business is wasted time. (B suggests against spending lots of time in Google Analytics for most people. Get funnel tracking and A/B testing going and you'll rarely use it anymore except for looking at search keywords.)</comment></comment>


The World's Smallest Engine Runs on a Single Atom - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/extreme-machines/the-worlds-smallest-engine-runs-on-a-single-atom-16451781?click=pm_latest

<comment><USER2> Probabbly not:

> _However, any claims that an engine can break the laws of thermodynamics > deserves extra scrutiny and skepticism. According to Taylor, this ultrahigh > efficiency is only a matter of perspective. "There's no free lunch here," he > says._

(I should read all the reference papers before commenting in the Internet, but let comment anyway.)

An important point is that not only the energy must be conserved by the engine, the total entropy must increase. The claim this is more efficient that a Carnot cycle is equivalent to a decrease of the total entropy.

They have a squeezing step, where "no energy" is transferred. But in spite of no energy transfer, there can be some entropy transfer. This is probably where they are hiding the difference in entropy, that is "lost" in this machine, but it's really going to part equipment.

</comment><comment><USER3> This things proposes to be a new rage in green revolution.</comment>


Ask HN: Template for SaaS service agreement? - <AUTHOR> Could someone recommend a template or generator for a SaaS service agreement?<p>I have a customer asking for a contract for my business's monthly subscription service and curious what others have done in similar situations. <comment><USER2> Go take a look at the SaaS agreement by YC. It's a really solid starting point. [https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/](https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/)</comment>


Heroku working to fix Heartbleed - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/incidents/606

<comment><USER2> Heroku Product manager here, we're working as quickly as possible to assess and address all details around the issue. Three hours is our worst case to provide details as unfortunately is has been a slow evolving incident, though all hands are on deck and we're working to update status.heroku.com as broadly as possible as well as more direct channels.

<comment><USER3> What's exactly the problem? Could be fixed by either getting the latest package upgrades from you favorite distro or compile an old version yourself with a specific flag set as mentioned in the security report. Or are you behind some third-party SSL proxy that doesn't react that fast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most if, not all, competitors have already pushed their fix (eg [http://blog.cloud66.com/security-vulnerability- cve-2014-0160...](http://blog.cloud66.com/security-vulnerability- cve-2014-0160-heartbleed/)). Ouch, 3 hours to go for the next update, ie not a fix.

<comment><USER4> Title should be: Heroku still hasn't pushed a fix for HeartBleed</comment></comment>


China is running out of American goods to slap tariffs on - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1246297/trump-just-threatened-to-impose-tariffs-on-100-billion-more-of-chinese-goods/ <comment><USER2> Why not raise tariffs on pre-existing goods? Eventually it will push the US to find alternative sources or make their own, pushing China into further debt.</comment>


Hacking a parking ticket system - <AUTHOR> http://www.ronreiter.com/free-parking-for-life <comment><USER2> > _I 'm sure there's a bit more elegant way to find the missing thousand > component, but for me it would be just quicker to do a bit of brute- > forcing:_

The calculation the author wants is

      LastThreeDigits(secret*23) = 642

that is equivalent to

      secret * 23 == 642 (mod 1000)

that is equivalent to

      secret * 23 + dummy * 1000 = 642

The standard method is to solve this first for 1 instead of 642

      other_secret * 23 + other_dummy * 1000 = 1

and this can be solved with the Extended Euclidean Algorithm: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Euclidean_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Euclidean_algorithm)

(But in this case, and with a computer, it's easier the brute force solution.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A friend of mine in college did this, but it was even simpler- there was no barcode, just a number that increased by one for each ticket sold. He went the entire year just making his own to avoid paying $3 per day. Just take the last three days tickets, increment by the average difference, print and display.

When they caught him (he parked in the wrong lot or something) he admitted everything, paid $80, and offered to help them catch others doing the same thing.

He told them to change the end-of-day expiry time to 1 minute earlier than normal, tow everyone with a ticket that expires at the usual time.

<comment><USER4> A much simpler "hack" occurred to me recently. Suppose you wanted to store your car for a long time in a gated garage that also holds ZipCars.

Drive your car in and take a ticket as normal. When it's time to leave, book a ZipCar for one hour. Grab its parking pass and use it to exit the garage with your car. Park on the street nearby, walk the pass back to the ZipCar.

Are there typically countermeasures in place for this? Match the pass to the license plate with ANPR? Don't allow an exit without a corresponding entrance? Sucks for the next person to use the ZipCar. But how will they know it was you? Are video archives good enough to find the plate associated with a particular card swipe without a ton of manual effort?

(Assume you're trying to store a car for a month or more. At a fairly normal Chicago visitor parking rate of $25 for 2 hours, that would cost $9,000.)

<comment><USER5> There are protections to this type of abuse in just about every comercial parking system -- so much so it is not even listed in advantages/features for most of their marketing materials. It is commonly refereed to Single Entrance Gate or Stateful Egress; basically the card is tracked in a stateful database and is either in use (it has been used to enter but not yet to exit) or not in use (it has exited since its last entry). If you attempt to use the card for entry when it is in the "in use" state it will deny and log the action.

Edited to add: For the next common "game" on this line "why dont you just walk past and card swipe exit" you will note the cameras positioned at the card terminals at all of these lots for this issue. Basically they will have a record of: your license plates for the entry/exists (the sipes and video systems have timecodes that can be matched) and of your person walking by on foot to trigger the exit state.

<comment><USER6> At our place there are also some kind of car detector, presumably magnetic coils in the ground. You can't walk past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the Dr. Dobbs editors made the following confession years ago in an editorial, when Dr. Dobbs was still published on glossy magazine paper. (According to the text, the statute of limitations had already run out.)

When faced with the situation of working on a mainframe at city hall, but not being issued a city parking permit due to bureaucratic oversight, he came up with a solution in code. It just so happened that the system he was working on issued the parking tickets, so he just added conditional logic to detect his name, then deleted the ticket! Problem solved, and no bureaucratic runaround to solve it!

</comment><comment> jo-han The checksum algorithm they used will only produce 73 different checksums (00000000-99999999: 0-72) - and all of them even. There is space for 9999 different values.

Tips to improve: f(x) = ( x * secret) mod 1000

\- mod 10000 instead of mod 1000 (as mentioned in the article)

\- make sure the 'x' varies between 0-9999 (e.g. by splitting the number in half and adding the parts 03001909 > 0300+1909 = 2209)

\- make sure the 'secret' is larger than 10000 and non-divisible by factors of 10000 (2 and 5) (e.g.: 54321)

Pretty sure it wouldn't be so easy to hack then.

<comment><USER8> It is probably just a barcode checksum/error code, otherwise they wouldn't have to rely on the values of the first 8 digits. Instead they should generate 4 random digits and store them in the database along with other information, then it basically works like a pin number (and xor it with a proper checksum).

Edit: If it is really a checksum, it is a crappy one.

<comment><USER9> A lot of symbologies support some kind of modulo check digit. It's mostly there to detect erasure and substitution errors, because those are relatively common errors in decode. A modulo sum is better than nothing, considering that each additional digit increases the length of the barcode. If you're length- constrained, then adding more check-data is a difficult trade-off between stronger protection and smaller module size, meaning that you could add so much data that the barcode becomes too dense to print or read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sure this will be a big hit with the legitimate purchasers of the tickets to which those barcodes were assigned... who will find them mysteriously invalid when presented.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct, unless you manage to hop out of the range of the assigned ranges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A really simple "hack" of a car park with an entry barrier that issues you a ticket is that you can usually exit the car park with an unpaid ticket if it's under 10 min old. So just get a new ticket from the entrance when you want to leave.

They do this so you can get out if there are no spaces.

I haven't done this myself and don't condone it. You will probably get in trouble and it's not nice.

<comment><USER12> > So just get a new ticket from the entrance

Getting a new ticket from the printer before the barrier will be hard if your car is inside the car park. Often the ticket printer will only work if it notices a large metal object (such as a car) in front of the barrier.

<comment><USER13> Many automated garages ban motorcycles because they're unable to trigger the sensor.

<comment><USER14> Or they make the barriers slightly shorter so that motorcycles can park for free.

<comment><USER15> Which they do, recognizing the fact that if there are a few motorcycles parked in your lot, it makes the whole lot look cooler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I got about half way through this article before starting to feel inadequate and just looked at the big numbers thinking this guy seems clever.

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the guy who was caught a few years ago for putting homemade UPC stickers over the printed UPC symbol for expensive LEGO sets so that they'd ring up as inexpensive LEGO sets.

After the felony fraud charges, he would have been better off just shoplifting the sets instead.

<comment><USER18> I can find some stories on the Internet about a wealthy person doing this:

[http://lego.gizmodo.com/high-profile-silicon-valley-exec- gui...](http://lego.gizmodo.com/high-profile-silicon-valley-exec-guilty-of- mass-lego-th-1084170411)

[http://gizmodo.com/5912141/multimillionaire-software-exec- ar...](http://gizmodo.com/5912141/multimillionaire-software-exec-arrested-in- lego-thieving-bar-code-scam)

[http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/incredibly- wealt...](http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/incredibly-wealthy- silicon-valley-exec-arrested-complicated-high-185525605.html)

[http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_20675946/silicon-valley- tech-e...](http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_20675946/silicon-valley-tech- executive-lego-theft-barcode-scheme-charged-sap-toys)

But there's this earlier story too:

[http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29272](http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29272)

<comment><USER19> Wasn't there a site years ago that hosted images of bar codes for just about any common item sold at chain stores? I seem to remember the idea being that you could just print out something with a lower price that's still believable and stick it on the item before checking out. The idea was that if anyone caught on, you would claim ignorance and apologize.

From what I remember this didn't work out well for anyone and was handled as you might expect. I'm definitely not someone who would try to give himself a $500 discount on an HDTV but it got me musing about the scam when it crossed my radar. It always seemed to me that in order to be worth the risk and hassle you'd have to do it on a scale that dramatically increased your chances of getting busted. Like you couldn't give yourself a big discount (obvious at checkout) or give yourself lots of little discounts (more chances to get noticed) so aside from the "heehee I found a dirty trick" aspect, it seemed like kind of a terrible scheme (not even counting the fact that you're engaging in fraud).

<comment><USER5> Related, this is why manufacturer's coupons have changed in the last few years. It was previously possible to create a manufacturers coupon barcode for any UPC that would represent one of the standard discounts before GS1-128 including Buy 1 get 1. The new GS1 barcodes encode much more data that allows better fraud protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised the scheme is so weak.

Wherever money is involved, even the small amounts for carparking[1], you're going to have people attacking the system to get free stuff.

And car park machines[2] have extensive audit trails.

[1] an individual stay is quite cheap. Over a year it's a lot of cash.

[2] At least, the Almex Control Systems machines did. As did the TIMTronic and System B and System C and Delta bus ticket machines.

<comment><USER20> They don't need it to be strong, you are leaving your car and license plate as collateral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of something you'd find in a copy of 2600.

</comment><comment><USER22> Over a summer I lived in "intern housing" at a university in the DC area. They wanted $150 for parking for 2mo, yeah, nope. A little bit of research told me that the parking services were a separate entity from the school and that the school would put a hold on my student account and transcripts if there were unpaid charges. I also found that they supposedly boot you after 3 tickets. Tickets are $100 minimum and go up by $50 for every unpaid 30 days. As someone who never took and classes from them they didn't have much leverage over me. I just pulled my front plate, got a few spare plates from the junkyard and slapped one over my real plate when I got home for the night making sure no one plate had more than three tickets. For ~$3 day it was well worth the hassle. They're still sending me notices every two months about my unpaid fine for the one time they ticketed me with my real plate.

Seriously, the easiest way to abuse (private) parking systems is usually to make them write the ticket to a plate that doesn't come back to you.

Another "hack" was that the parking gates at most public garages in the DC area had a rubber sweep on the bottom and were tall enough that most 90s compacts could squeeze under if you retract the antenna, saves about $6 per usage.

<comment><USER23> That's risky because they may be able to look up your car by VIN. You'd probably need to randomize it by parking in different locations every day, hoping that you get different meter maids who wouldn't recognize your car. Your car would also have to be so generic in appearance (not just model/color but also condition) that it didn't stand out.

<comment><USER22> My truck was anything but generic. I got tailed by the campus pigs (I'll call them that because that was my experience with them) and stopped several times for no reason (and let off with a "warning" because whatever I had done wasn't something one normally gets cited for, they basically wanted to check my papers and see who I was) because my truck was a decade too old and and several tax brackets too low to be common in that area. They always seemed to see me like I was some tweaker who might steal and scrap their aluminum hand rails to get my next fix.

I figured out that parking way out back significantly reduced my chance of being ticketed. More than once I saw the parking services truck drive up and down the rows making sure everyone had something in each windshield, not actually scanning them. This was during the summer so there was always parking available and 90% of the enforcement I saw was during the first two weeks when everyone moved in.

The permits were a paper with a bar-code displayed in the center of your dash (students got ones that hang from mirrors). I thought of just putting a piece of paper there but I figured any attempt fake would piss them off. The policy was worded such that it made it sound like you only got booted after three UNPAID violations so I think what was happening was that when they put each new plate (all three I used were from the same state) into the system it didn't tell them to boot it because no plate had more than three citations on it. I got six tickets over the course of the summer. Two, two and one on junkyard plates and one on my real plate.

Parking in the same place with a ticket under your wiper would probably work for awhile too.

When I looked on their online parking pass system I don't recall a way to input a VIN so I assume they didn't record it, just a photo that includes the plate and a description.

Like I said, I wouldn't do this somewhere that the municipality does the parking enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think he is forgetting that the barcode is generated and exits not in a silo but with knowledge of a controller. I would be amazed if the system did not both track the barcode creation and exit events and trigger protocols on any outside system event.

Print out your card at home, park at lot, scan to checkout, your barcode is in one of three states: 1: Not valid because it has not been issued by the controller, 2: Valid and first use (you left before the other car on the lot with the duplicated barcode has exited), 3: Invalid because it has already been used on exit (the duplicate barcode has already left the lot).

In what scenario given an active controller that is not braindead would this give you any kind of advantage? You are more likely than not going to be in a situation where you trigger an alarm on exit.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice.

You have a typo here:

f(21) = (23 * 854) % 1000 = 17934 % 1000 = 934.

I wouldn't be surprised if the last four digits are some form of built-in barcode error checking, and are not used anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER24> Over my summer interning in NYC I found even weaker vulnerabilities with the the NY Waterway ferry's e-ticketing system. Trivially cost can go from greater than $296/month (for some routes) --> $0. Fortunate for those who instinctually think of weaknesses in systems.

</comment><comment><USER25> now the question is: why did they choose 854?

<comment><USER26> That's what I was wondering.

      ~$ factors 854
      854: 2 x 7 x 61

Factoring 854 doesn't seem to help unless those meant something to the person who came up with it (old high school locker combo?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice reasoning. How long did it take you to figure it out?

<comment><AUTHOR> About 10 minutes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> That was too easy.</comment>


Hi HN, Are we the anti-eBay? - <AUTHOR> http://hopponit.com My friend and I are tackling group-buying on the web. Sign up to be notified when we launch. <comment><USER2> You appear to be vaporware to me.

Also, you appear to think @@@.@ is a valid email address, not to mention the empty string. Makes me wonder if you think SQL injection is a valid email address too.

<comment><AUTHOR> We aren't vaporware but thanks for the heads up on email validation / SQL injection.

Perhaps we can have a better discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818342>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds a lot like this internet boom era company: <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-250529.html>

" _2001: The financial woes of Mercata, which lets shoppers band together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk, are just another sign of how cash-strapped Internet companies are having a hard time getting investors to come back to the trough. It also marks another investment by Allen's venture firm, Vulcan Ventures, that has folded its doors."_

<comment><USER4> I worked on another boom-era company with the same idea: actbig.com. And just recently here on HN someone posted <http://groupon.com> which is part of this most recent round o' startup frenzy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hard to tell from just the splash page...

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course not.

You're a form on a webpage and an empty promise.

</comment><comment><USER6> good question. you tell us.

</comment><comment><USER7> No</comment>


Granular convection - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection <comment><USER2> I remember a journal club where we read a paper in which they demonstrated the inverse brazil nut effect ([http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2007/ph210/spector2/](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2007/ph210/spector2/)). The scientists built a physical nut shaker- like, a huge tube that they bounced. that's when I realized I had picked the wrong field (theoretical biology instead of experimental physics).

<comment><USER3> What do you do in theoretical biology?

<comment><USER2> Nothing anymore- I became disillusioned with modern scientific research, especially biology, because I believe that most of what is published is simply false or wrong (it's much harder to publish false crap in experimental physics because everybody knows more math, is better at analyzing experiment design, and the systems are "simpler"). Now I work on software engineering related to neural network performance (focusing on things that have worked well for years).

That said, things I've worked on include: classifiers to identify genes in DNA, molecular dynamics simulations of proteins and nucleic acids, methods to discover new drugs, analysis of protein function from an evolutionary perspective, protein design.

<comment><USER4> > I became disillusioned with modern scientific research, especially biology, > because I believe that most of what is published is simply false or wrong

I'd love to hear more about that. Do you have any good examples?

<comment><USER2> Sure, there was a paper about yeast. They created a collection of 6000 clones- each one had a "single gene deletion" and nothing else. THey were able to study each clone and explain whether the gene deletion was fatal (IE, if you delete this gene that is essential for yeast to grow, the clones all die).

I was tasked to analyze the paper results, specifically a table that listed "all the genes we newly discovered that, when removed, are fatal".

Since I'm interested in overlapping genes, I took the list of new genes and intersected it with all the other known genes, and noticed that for each gene they newly discovered had a fatal outcome, it intersected a gene that was already known to be necessary for yeast to live (housekeeping genes, essential enzymes, dna checkpoint repair, etc).

The most likely conclusion from this is that when they deleted the gene, they also truncated or deleted the other gene, which abolished the function of the known-necessary gene. Therefore, they didn't discover anything new- they just disabled things that we already knew broke yeast, by accident, by ignoring the fact that genes overlapped.

I showed this to my advisor, who said "Good catch, why don't you write them a letter?" So I sent them a letter showing my results, never got a response back. They published a paper a year later, totally unapologetically, saying how they had "discovered interesting interactions between overlapping genes"...

You can also look back at the original human genome sequencing papers, they were massively overestimating the accuracy of the assembly and the representation of the genome (compared to the wider population). It took decades of additional large-scale sequencing to verify this, but it still bothers me just how overly egotistical and self-confident the folks who worked on the human genome project were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Farmers know the rocks come to the suface over the winter.

<comment><USER6> interesting, I suppose if the top 6 inches of a field freezes then it slightly expands in volume and when the soil thaws the smaller soil particles would then have an opportunity to fall beneath the rock... not sure if this is dependent on the top or bottom thawing first though...

<comment><USER7> In many places, the frost line is more like 3 to 6 feet, than 6 inches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a recurring problem in the animal feed industry. Easiest explanation for the phenomena: the small particles fall through the gaps gaps between the large particles.

</comment><comment><USER9> My first instinct would be that this is due to entropy rather than minimizing energy, but the article doesn't mention that hypothesis. Is it easy to rule this out?

<comment><USER10> Isn't "minimizing energy" a definition for entropy?

My idea is that, when shaking, all pieces try to move. Big pieces can only go upwards, while small pieces can go sideways (and take the space that was previously taken by a big piece). This ends up with the effect of big pieces floating to the top

<comment><USER11> > Isn't "minimizing energy" a definition for entropy?

No. If you have a system with a well-defined energy/entropy exchange rate (temperature) you can use it to put entropy in units of energy, add it to your energy term, and model the combined system behavior on the basis of this "free energy." The free energy is not a fundamental quantity, though, and it doesn't define entropy. That's why the first two laws of thermodynamics are "Energy is Conserved" and "Entropy Increases," not "Free Energy decreases."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here I was this morning just thinking about this - weird how that happens.

My wife got this gift recently, that at first looks like a snowglobe, but actually has fine sand and seashells inside. You can kind of shake it or rotate it about, and the seashells that "rise" to the top on the sand change as you do it.

For some reason, that got me thinking about this topic. Then I see it on HN...

<comment><USER13> Maybe OP bought pack of assorted nuts for Christmas and wondered the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> this also has application in mixed spice grinders. you can shake it right side up or upside down to get the desired effect</comment>


MorpHex, a hexapod robot - <AUTHOR> http://zentasrobots.com/2014/04/17/outdoor-footage-of-morphex-and-a-servo-failure/

<comment><USER2> The original post debuting the hexapod design: [http://zentasrobots.com/2014/03/17/morphex- mkii/](http://zentasrobots.com/2014/03/17/morphex-mkii/)

</comment><comment><USER2> What an awesome design. I would love to build one of those if they had a kit you could buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me a lot of [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Droideka](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Droideka). Would be very interested in reading about the software used to coordinate everything.

<comment><USER4> It reminds me more of the Planet Ice tanks from Shadow Raiders[1]. They even rolled like the MorpHex[2].

[1] [http://youtu.be/7TfF3TUFNE8?t=8m49s](http://youtu.be/7TfF3TUFNE8?t=8m49s)

[2] [http://youtu.be/-R_QhDBjKBQ?t=11m34s](http://youtu.be/-R_QhDBjKBQ?t=11m34s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out his robotic ant too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaNkff5Yyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaNkff5Yyg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Beautiful. Is this the only one of its kind or are there other known hexagon- based robots? Seems such a practical design after seeing it in action.

<comment><USER7> How is it practical? It's a beautiful design, but far simpler designs can run circles around it in every scenario I can imagine. A small version might make for a fun desk toy. When I think practical, I think Boston Dynamics.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wish sometime in the future such devices get waterproofed and can be used to search missing airplanes. Lost a loved one :(

<comment><USER9> Very sorry to hear that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's with the high-pitched noise in the videos? Is that coming from the robot or the camera or what?

I'd like to see this robot be built: [http://youtu.be/cU- cO0RvpwQ?t=23m31s](http://youtu.be/cU-cO0RvpwQ?t=23m31s) FlexBot by Jamie Hyneman

<comment><USER11> Motor and gear noise from the servos, probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very Masamune Shirow! I like it. Seems like its mobility is pretty limited, though - except going downhill, of course.

I wonder if you can steer it at all while rolling, perhaps by going into that sort of pill bug shape a bit and messing with the weight distribution?

<comment><USER13> You should probably watch the video.

<comment><USER12> I did. Where else would I get "Masamune Shirow-esque"? I mean control while it's rolling downhill. They put it in semi- mode later, but I don't remember them controlling it while it was going down the driveway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing but I did have to check myself when I said what a cute robot!

<comment><USER15> No it's creepy IMO. (But cool.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazing, looks like transformers will someday be a reality!</comment>


Why Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. - <AUTHOR> http://tumblr.com/xp11qb35vf <comment><USER2> For weather, which I find more natural depends somewhat on the climate. In Denmark, the celsius system seems quite natural, even as an American. Freezing being at 0 C is a reasonable reference point; below it is cold, above it is okay, >10C above it is warm, >20C above it is grilling on the beach. I find it a bit less natural in Greece, though admittedly it may be different if I had grown up there. The main awkwardness is that I find myself mentioning specific temperatures more often; it seems that the colloquial equivalent for an expression like "low 70s" is "around 22".

I don't have a problem with people using whatever they want, though. In scientific and engineering work I'd stick to C, but I don't see great benefits from consistency in daily life; it's not hard to approximately convert in your head. The way I usually do it is to start at an approximate reference point suitable for the climate, like 0 C/30 F or 20 C/70 F, and then have the F temperature be twice as far from the reference point as the C temperature. None of those numbers are quite right, of course, but it's easy in my head to say that 5 C = 40 F or 80 F = 25 C, which are 1-2 degrees off but close enough for discussing the weather.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only reason: Because Americans are raised used to it. Humans hate to change, learn new things or getting used to them goes against our comfort zone, humans rationalize almost everything according to what their emotions dictate them.

As a European, like anyone in the world that is not American or English, I have been raised using Celsious degrees, so I am on the other side of the coin.

Biased arguments are not useful. This is a debate instead of dialectic.

<comment><USER4> Having lived in Europe and the US, I see what he's saying. He's referring more to Miller's "seven, plus or minus two" guide for the human's ability to differentiate values along a single axis.

With Celsius, you're using an extremely narrow range in day-to-day life, the most common use case. Do I need to wear layers today? Hmm, there will be a high of 21, and a low of 15, so I guess I should grab a vest. If I ask someone the forecast, and they say,"around 20 degrees," I don't know if I'll need the vest, as that could cover 18 to 22 degrees.

Except in rare circumstances, you're not going to need to tell people it's going to be 40+ degrees. If you do, you don't really need the precision anyway, as anything above 30 degrees is probably going to be "hot."

Therefore, that 40-100 range (and beyond) is basically useful for cooking. Sure, it's important on a day-to-day basis, but you generally have specific targets for what you're cooking.[1] I'd argue Fahrenheit is even more useful in cooking, as the difference in one or two degrees Celsius can ruin your fish.

Fahrenheit, with a broader range, is easier to digest and more resilient to signal loss. "Forties" means "wear a coat," "eighties" means "call in sick and go play," "nineties" means "I wonder what's playing at the cinema so I can sit in air conditioned darkness."

Peace comes at -40 degrees, when C = F.

[1] Don't get me started on gas marks, from the people who brought you L.s.d.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've started using Celsius in my everyday life. As an American, it's not the easiest thing to do, but I'm used to that from my use of the 24-hour clock and the metric system (even my car is in km/h). I prefer Celsius because it seems much less arbitrary. (A physicist-friend is trying to get me to switch to Kelvin, but absolute-zero has no implication on whether or not I should wear a coat when I leave my house.)

Fellow developers: _please_ allow me to use the measurement system I choose to use. In my transition, I realized how much we take this stuff for granted and assume everyone does things the way we do it ourselves. It doesn't take much work to give people a toggle b/t Fahrenheit and Celsius, 12/24-hour clock, or English/Metric.

</comment><comment><USER6> "The scientific community adopted Kelvin instead Rankine, and that pretty much sealed the deal for Celsius. Today's familiar units such as joules and the calorie (the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of a gram of water by 1˚C) assume we're working with Celsius-sized degrees."

<http://www.ericpinder.com/html/celsius.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd say the primary difference for day to day weather use is cultural. If you grew up with F or C, that's what you're used to and is what's best for you.

I'm in Vancouver, BC. I'm really close to the US border and have spent a fair amount of time in the states traveling. Going to the states is always confusing as I don't have the experiences to know what their temperatures mean, nor do I have a map in my mind. I know what 0C, 5C, 10C, 15C, 20C, 25C, 30C and 35C feel like. It's no different that 30F vs 70F for the author.

I know freezing is 0C and boiling is 100C and the body temp is 37C. I have know idea what the corresponding values are in F, and I really don't care because it rarely affects me and if I need to know I can ask my iPhone.

The one place this isn't true, at least in Canada, is cooking. We still use the imperial system. The oven is always at 350F, and sometimes 425F. But those have no relation to my normal day to day temperature uses. They are just numbers I'm used to because I use them on a day to day basis.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes and:

\- horses are better than cars;

\- the telegraph is better than the phone;

\- fixed line phones are better than cell phones;

\- bulletin boards are better than the Internet;

\- dialup is better than broadband;

\- black and white TV is better than colour;

\- standard def is better than hi def;

\- windows 3.1 is better than Windows 7;

\- and so on.

<comment><USER9> You're not really addressing the arguments presented in the linked post, you're just being snarky. I can appreciate that, but the linked post makes some really good points.

Also, the converse of the point you seem to be trying to make with your litany above is also true: new things are not always necessarily better than old ones.

<comment><USER8> > You're not really addressing the arguments presented in the linked post, > you're just being snarky.

Correct.

> ... the linked post makes some really good points.

No, it doesn't (IMHO), hence my (admittedly) snarky response.

The TL:DR version of the post is "I'm used to Fahrenheit and like saying and hearing 'in the fifties'". That's not an argument, it's an historical artifact (being what they were exposed and thus accustomed to) dressed up as preference.

> new things are not always necessarily better than old ones.

Who ever said they were? I cited specific examples. Please don't erect a straw man and put words in my mouth.

The theme of what I said can be described as:

\- people resist change; and

\- when someone describes something as "better" what they normally mean is that they're used to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The TL;DR version of the post is that celsius throws away 70% of the 2-digit numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only thing I know about Fahrenheit is that -40C == -40F.

Furthermore, Good case for Fahrenheit being more intuitive. The same points can be made for Celcius though, so the whole point is moot.

</comment><comment><USER11> "A random temperature scale is better than another random temperature scale because I'm used to it."

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you read the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This always bugged me too. Fahrenheit is more than double the precision of Celsius. The thermodynamic properties of water just aren't important enough in daily life to make sacrificing that precision seem worth it.

Similarly, measuring things in feet is more precise and easier to me than measuring in meters. Tenth of meters is awkward, and decimeters are just never used colloquially. 5 feet tall vs. 6 feet or 1.5 vs 1.8 meters? Yuck.

<comment><USER13> Usually people would mention their height in centimeters, such as 183 cm -- which is more precise than feet and inches. But that's not the point. Metric is "better" because it's decimal and since you very often need to perform arithmetic on distances, having them in a format that is easy to do arithmetic on is a good thing.

Unless you're doing physics, you'll never do arithmetic on temperatures, and therefore the ability to more intuitively describing the weather is much more valid.

For the record, I'm European, and have no intuition of Fahrenheit temperatures. But the guy is actually making a valid point.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Eric Prinder.com link makes a related point to yours: People often conflate "metric is better" with "Celsius is better".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article says we don't need to be scientific, that a scale going from the 1800's coldest temperature (ice houses) to the body's internal temperature is better than one going from one change of state of something we can easily access, manipulate and judge, to the other state change.

No. Celsius. For all I know it's another one of those silly anti-colonial things like driving on the wrong side of the road.

<comment><AUTHOR> This argument is about significant figures, nothing else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The argument that scientific relevancy is not relevant in the choice of measuring unit is somewhat...ironic?

I do however agree that this doesn't deserve discussion and falls into the category of "someone with too much time on their hands and nothing useful to do with it"

</comment><comment><USER16> Growing up in Canada, in the generation I did, we tend to use both.... though metric is official.

For winter temperatures, we tend to work in C.

0 is freezing - it's convenient. We'll say it's +5 or +10 or -5 out... we know we're talking about C.

Occasionally I'll catch my parents, or even me, saying "It's like 90 degrees out" - we're talking F obviously - only used for pool heater and hot days... because 100F is damn hot.

As to better.... in that all measurement systems are provably equal, the metric one is the world accepted standard, so just go with it already, jeeze...

<comment><USER17> I'm trying to figure out how old you are if you use both. Older than me (33), as I haven't the slightest clue what the temperature in Fahrenheit is, but younger than my parents (mid-60s) who insist on talking to me in Fahrenheit (and I still never managed to pick it up!)

<comment><AUTHOR> 30 + celsius degrees * 2

<comment><USER17> I hope that's 30 + (celsius degress * 2), otherwise he's older than my parents!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess. Having next to no experience of using Fahrenheit, I'm happy to take other peoples' word when it comes to day-to-day usefulness.

It seems to me, though, that the relative merits pale into insignificance compared to the potential benefits of picking a standard, doesn't much matter which one, and being able to forget about converting between the two.

</comment><comment><USER19> My real life is better without two different temperature scales. And I happen to have learned some chemistry.

It's all about what one is used to. Of Fahrenheit I only know that 100 is about body temperature. Above is too hot, below - could be okay. So yeah I prefer Celsius, which happens to be a little less of a boolean scale to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's Boolean about either?

<comment><USER20> Boolean in the sense of: Is X Fahrenheit warmer or colder than the average body temperature?

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't Celsius equally "boolean" in that sense then, as in this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313288> ? Above or below freezing.

<comment><USER19> Sure is. To some people. I was talking about my own perspective :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is stupid and not worthy of Hacker news. And a stupid graph with a "FFFFUUUU"-style clutter in it wont make me go "lol!" and change my mind either.

Go away. Keep this to reddit please?

<comment><USER22> I think there's a very relevant point here. Listen carefully to his arguments and set aside any attachment you may have to C or F. Personally, I lament our reluctance to switch to the metric system here in the US, but setting that aside, the author does a good job of relating why _he_ likes Fahrenheit. He expresses how he's able to relate to it better than Celsius, and he makes some good points.

How is that applicable to HN? Imagine the author is one of your customers. Further, imagine that he probably represents the majority of your customers in the US. Now imagine that you're building a cool new social weather website. As an international standards fanatic, you decide that you're going to use Celsius on your new website, because "that's what the world speaks gosh- darnit, and US users are coming with us, like it or not!" _raises fist_

This is a neat little exercise in listening. Is it realistic? No, it's patently absurd. You won't find many people who would roll a US-targeted website using metric units of measure. The implications are too obvious. But what if we apply this rationale to the other decisions we make. What aspects of our craft are affected by our attachment to "correctness", even when our users cry out for something different? Ask yourself these questions:

What attachments do I have that I force on my users/customers?

What aspects of my craft confuse users the most?

Then let go of your attachments and try a different approach, measure the results, rinse and repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think what's interesting is "X has a useful property P that everybody talks about. But P is not what we want to optimize on."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ok, I'm not even going to bother commenting...

</comment><comment><USER24> Water freezes at 0 degrees C. At what temperature does water freeze in F?

<comment><USER24> Downvotes ftw?</comment></comment>


Fed refuses to disclose recipients of $2 trillion - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGvwttDayiiM&refer=exclusive

<comment><USER2> Bloomberg is suing to get the information, BTW.

They're one of a handful of news org's I still put value in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Crony capitalism! This is outrageous.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anybody can find the text of the response?

Here's the text of lawsuit (08-CV-9595) [PDF] <http://people.bakersfield.com/file/document/339038/2/0/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blog commentary: [http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/fed-refuses-disclose- reci...](http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/fed-refuses-disclose- recipients-2-trillion-lending/10144)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why of course it's all going to me. Me and Bernanke are bros, go way back, and he's hooking me up before we drive this titanic right into an iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER6> Since this involves the use of public funds, isn't there a law requiring full disclosure of where they are going?

<comment><USER7> The FED is not a gov't entity so the laws might be slightly different in this case.</comment></comment>


SU researchers discover an ugly truth about attractiveness - <AUTHOR> http://news.fsu.edu/news/2017/07/13/fsu-researchers-discover-ugly-truth-attractiveness/ <comment><USER2> 'New research from Florida State University finds another factor — attractiveness of a romantic partner — can be a driving force behind the desire to diet and seek a slim body'

Wow, pretty strong assertion there, how did they establish causation?

'"The results reveal that having a physically attractive husband may have negative consequences for wives, especially if those wives are not particularly attractive"'

Oh wait a minute, 'may'? Weren't you just saying 'can'?

'"The research suggests there might be social factors playing a role in women's disordered eating,"'

Hmm, and so now it's 'might'?!

'"One way to help these women is for partners to be very reaffirming, reminding them, 'You're beautiful. I love you at any weight or body type,'" Reynolds said.'

What world is she living in? A certain amount of attraction is physical. If someone values the physical aspect of their relationship, they will invest the time and effort required to remain physically attractive for their partner.

'"Or perhaps focusing on the ways they are a good romantic partner outside of attractiveness and emphasizing those strengths: 'I really value you because you're a kind, smart and supportive partner.'"'

That sounds more like a description of a friend than a lover.</comment>


Most reported power laws lack statistical support and mechanistic backing - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6069/665.summary

<comment><USER2> Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

Full text here: <http://220.127.116.11/misc/powerlaws.pdf>

(See profile for why I do what I do.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a 2007 article on the same topic for those like me without the ability to get past the Science paywall:

"So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special?"

<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> See also: Ode to Power Laws

<http://messymatters.com/powerlaws>

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a non-paywall version somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies for this. I get the magazine in the mail, I didn't realize the full-text link would hit the paywall.</comment></comment>


The Most Comma Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/the-most-comma-mistakes/?hp

<comment><USER2> _The syntactical situation I'm talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, "Jessie") is the only thing in the world described by the identifier ("my oldest friend"), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you've come to the end of the sentence). If not, don't use any commas._

I've never heard of this rule before.</comment>


Ninefold – yay or nay? - <AUTHOR> https://ninefold.com/

<comment><USER2> Yay.

But I'm a biased Ninefold employee... There's a one month free trial, so give it a try and see how you go. If you have any issues/queries - our support staff will be more than happy to help.

You can find the getting started guides here: [https://help.ninefold.com/hc/en- us/categories/200060984-Gett...](https://help.ninefold.com/hc/en- us/categories/200060984-Getting-Started)</comment>


My beta design - www.craftepee.com - <AUTHOR> http://techenvent.blogspot.in/2012/04/my-beta-design-wwwcraftepeecom.html

<comment><USER2> Looks pretty good. Theres only two things that I personally don't like. The text under the CraftEppe logo is kind of hard to read, both on the top and bottom logo. And, the oval that appears when hovering on the navigation looks weird to me.</comment>


Lessons From A Serial Entrepreneur Who Started When He Was 15 Years Old - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/albert-lai-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> Another good one, keep on trucking Andrew!</comment>


Designing a Code Teaching Robot for Kids - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/W3785 <comment><USER2> I wish there was more information on the specs and design choices and not just the prototype evolution in pictures</comment>