China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-of-uighur-minorities-meets-u-n-definition-of-genocide-report-s <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zenz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zenz) ... the china expert

> Zenz co-authored the book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be > Raptured Before the Tribulation which links modern trends, including gender > equality, homosexuality and bans on corporal punishment, to the power of the > Antichrist.

The more I look at it, history is one ethnic group against the other. The winners do what they want, the weak suffer as prisoners of war.

<comment><USER3> In reply to a flagged sibling: what's there to see in the edit history? There was an edit war (or maybe I should use the plural, didn't look too closely), which is common on controversial topics, and judging from the talk page it has been resolved with a compromise. Bottom line, dude did coauthor that book, and even the title is telling enough.

Also, unrelated, it's sad that any comment trying to discuss or question what's specifically in the article is quickly downvoted into oblivion -- except this one, curiously -- and only general threads suitable (or unsuitable) for any submission loosely on this topic remain. People are quick to post insinuations about astroturfing too, despite guidelines specifically banning that.

<comment><USER2> It seems the comments about iraq, yemen, afghanistan them have been downvoted / flagged. I guess this one too. There's a documentary on netflix showing the 13th amendment's relation to the labor camps, shocking to say the least.

I don't think there is anything new in the article. It's the standard rhetoric used by UK/US media. Also notice the conspicuous absence of Saudis, they too are involved in messy labor practices. Oddly enough not a single of these pointless articles will mention that its another country in some sense - Turkestan ... because if thats the context of the debate then US will have to give up puerto rico, california and indian territories and UK ireland and France guiana and so on .... Here's the irony of the whole situation, from their standpoint the chinese too are liberating the places from feudalism and they have made some progress in the regions as opposed to the reckless military interventions of other nations.

The fact of the matter is literally none of the allied powers cared for the genocides in WWII, they even welcomed it. The POWs were also completely ignored post war which is one of the unspoken tragedies. In democratically elected nations it seems the only way to go to war is to paint the other side as a dictator go to war with it. The lies are just tiring at this point.

<comment><USER4> China did liberate the area from feudalism by killing the ppl living there in the first place: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide) China intentionally and resettled the uighurs there in first place after having killed 80% of the population that lived there.

How can you make an historical argument without mentioning this small detail?

<comment><USER3> And you failed to mention the small detail that what you linked to happened in 18th century, not post WWII, or anywhere close to 20th century. Not even led by the same ethnicity — Qing rulers were Manchus. Do we really need to bring up colonialist genocides?

<comment><USER4> My answer was to a post that brought up "...puerto rico, california and indian territories and UK ireland and France guiana and so on..." Those also were not post WWII.

But the parents argument was that from chinese perspective China has liberated the foreign state Turkestan and brought enlightenment to this region.

Considering the Genocide this interpretation seems somewhat dubious. And yes, i would expect such colonialist atrocities come up same as with other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand that China is extremely powerful both militarily and economically, but it just makes me so sad that such atrocities against humanity are occurring at the hands of a superpower, deep into the 21st century.

Forgive my naiveté, but aren't we supposed to be past this type of thing as a species already? Wasn't that the whole point of the 20th century - to show us all the things we shouldn't be doing?

<comment><USER6> I had a professor (a historian who studied Auschwitz) who used to argue the opposite. Germany was a modern, industrialized nation, with an educated population - and yet the majority of the population either actively committed genocide, or were complicit in some fashion. My professor thus argued that the conditions for the Holocaust are not unique, and there could easily be another one.

<comment><USER7> ~50% of the population continues to support abortion, so I'd say we have a very long way to go.

<comment><USER8> If contraception worked 100%, or if we were able to disable the libido whenever we want and prevent all rape from happening, maybe i would agree with that.

Since we're not, until someone convince me the violinist argument is not receivable[0], i would continue to support women wanting early abortion.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion)

<comment><USER9> I'd like to see some of Thomson's thought experiments made into VR minigames and released on steam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For UK citizens, there is an open petition to Parliament asking the UK Government to impose sanctions on China as a response: [https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300146](https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300146)

<comment><USER11> UK cannot simultaneously piss off Brussels and Beijing. Not going to happen. And UK is 1/6th of China economy.

<comment><USER12> The UK _was_ 1/6\. Back when we had a financial services sector, before we brucked it all up for blue passports.

Strange how we ever punched that high. We only have 1/23 the people, and barely make anything ourselves these days.

<comment><USER13> Gunships + British Raj. Would have lasted longer too if the UK didn't start the road to bankruptcy by entering WW1.

<comment><USER14> Britain joined to stop Wilhelm making a blue water navy that could rival the royal navy. I don't think it's a given British hegemony would have lasted as long without joining ww1.

<comment><USER13> Germany's navy was never going to be more than Wilhelm's pet project because Germany's main threats were land based France and Russia. Britain joined because of honor over protecting Belgian neutrality, which shocked Germany diplomats who thought Britain would never fight over something with so little material gain for it.

<comment><USER14> Without Britain I don't think Germany would be required to transfer resources from ship building to the land campaign. As far as I'm aware Wilhelm was very serious about developing a navy and they were fairly close to parity with the RN in some aspects even in ww1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> #VICENewsTonight China's Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ)

<comment><USER16> Thank you for sharing that. Really strongly recommend everyone to watch this video, a rare glimpse at the people inside this nightmare

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > SIMON: People need to be careful using the word genocide. Why do you think > it's justified and important to use it now?

> ZENZ: I have long argued that the atrocity in the region is a cultural > genocide, not a literal genocide. I do continue to believe that, generally > speaking, the Chinese government does not intend to physically eradicate the > Uighurs and Kazakhs, just to integrate, subjugate, dominate and assimilate > them. However, this is coupled with a policy of ethnoracial domination, as > the government has brought millions of Han Chinese settler in the regions > with promises of high salaries, jobs and free housing.

> The reason why now this has changed - we do need to probably call it a > genocide - is quite simply because the evidence now, for the first time, > very specifically meets one of the five criteria set forth by the United > Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of > Genocide from 1948, which specifically says the suppression of birth.

<comment><USER17> This is similar to what happened to indigenous peoples here in Canada. For the most part, and while there are clear and heinous exceptions, the intent was to wipe out indigenous culture and society. Because it wasn't gas chambers it's been harder to get the general population to recognize what was/is happening.

Also, forced sterilization is still a thing, particularly outside of urban health authorities.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization- la...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization-lawsuit- could-expand-1.5102981)

<comment><AUTHOR> In Canada, it's due to the lack of proper or informed consent, and a class- action lawsuit is trying to correct that.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization- la...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization-lawsuit- could-expand-1.5102981)

In China, "[t]he population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply":

[https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c](https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c)

And Uyghurs have to flee China just to speak out against this practice. Do you see a lawsuit coming in China?

Huge difference.

<comment><USER17> Canada had sterilization laws up to 1972; and the link I provided was to an article about that class action lawsuit. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's fair to compare China today with Canada almost 50 years ago.

A lot of things have changed since then. Boston Marathon didn't have women's race until 1972.

Our expectations today should be higher.

<comment><USER17> The last residential school didn't close until the 90s. There are far too many communities without clean drinking water, let alone access to quality education and health care. We still struggle to maintain obligations regarding indigenous land rights and safe guarding indigenous culture.

Our expectations today should be higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As of right now, the post is 3-hour old, has 391 votes, second only to another post in the top 60 posts, and yet is is ranked... #59.

HN mods have likely flagged it as flamewar, or non relevant, or both, effectively contributing to the soft censorship on the topic.

Content platforms have many challenges ahead of them.

<comment><USER19> Only users can flag posts, mods can only unflag

<comment><USER18> There is an option for mods to accelerate or slow the decay function of the post.

This is a practice that all content platforms use and few know about. Burying content down, or removing from feed (for Facebook/YouTube) is a soft censoring that avoids user and regulatory backlash.

I would like the platforms to be more transparent about the practice. They could display a 'derank' or 'delisted' label to all users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of international politics/treaties enforcement boils down to - are you willing to bleed and die for that cause.

Unless we are willing to go to war - there are no viable ways to prevent China from doing whatever they feel like in the territory they control. Even the tiny Iran and Cuba survived decades of sanctions.

<comment><USER20> > Unless we are willing to go to war - there are no viable ways to prevent > China from doing whatever they feel like in the territory they control.

This just seems false. There are no ways to _guarantee_ that they won't do something, but China, like everyone else, is vulnerable to international pressure. An optimistic historic parallel to which one could look is the Helsinki Accords, where diplomatic measures far short of war wrung what turned out to be dramatic human-rights concessions from the Soviets.

<comment><USER11> It seems but it is not. China is ascending power whereas USSR was in the first stages of decay. The only game the big boys play is Realpolitik.

And they were not binding anyway. And I can assure you that USSR and the eastern bloc didn't comply at all.

<comment><USER20> > And they were not binding anyway. And I can assure you that USSR and the > eastern bloc didn't comply at all.

Of course, there is no such thing as a binding international agreement—a state that feels itself empowered to abrogate an agreement will do so, regardless of anything that it has signed. As you say, in the end, the only sure-fire tool of enforcement is war, and even that is not sure fire, because victory in war is not guaranteed. Nonetheless, despite the many and flagrant violations of the Helsinki Accords, it is plausible to trace the beginning of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact directly to the accords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't worry people, according to the Chinese media, It's all western media lies. [https://www.jfdaily.com.cn/news/detail?id=261301](https://www.jfdaily.com.cn/news/detail?id=261301) [https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cgjed/chn/zt/xjfk/t1767376.htm](https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cgjed/chn/zt/xjfk/t1767376.htm)

</comment><comment><USER21> A database of Uyghur victims is maintained here, with over 9000 entries. The site is also low on funds and in desperate need of donations.

[https://www.shahit.biz/eng/](https://www.shahit.biz/eng/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Europe Portrays Both America and Iran As Rogue States At the UN

[https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/europe- portrays-b...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/europe-portrays- both-america-and-iran-rogue-states-un-163851)

</comment><comment><USER22> "Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth", - that is a propaganda technique.

Some countries so desperately want chaos in Xinjiang as in HongKong.

</comment><comment><USER23> Whataboutism seems to be the key feature linking many posts here. It's not a convincing argument

<comment><USER24> Is it just me or does this happen for every article about anything China- related?

<comment><USER25> I've noticed it to be the primary defense mechanism of China sympathizers. Funnily enough USSR used similar arguments

<comment><USER26> > Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism in Stockholm, argues that the > accusation of whataboutism is itself a form of the tu quoque fallacy, as it > dismisses criticisms of one's own behavior to focus instead on the actions > of another, thus creating a double standard. Those who use whataboutism are > not necessarily engaging in an empty or cynical deflection of > responsibility: whataboutism can be a useful tool to expose contradictions, > double standards, and hypocrisy

> Others have criticized the usage of accusations of whataboutism by American > news outlets, arguing that accusations of whataboutism have been used to > simply deflect criticisms of human rights abuses perpetrated by the United > States or its allies. They argue that the usage of the term almost > exclusively by American outlets is a double standard, and that moral > accusations made by powerful countries are merely a pretext to punish their > geopolitical rivals in the face of their own wrongdoing

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Objectively, it may be relevant to note that the rich history of the Silk Road includes numerous cultural genocides, the largest of which was contemporary with the coming of Islam.

We have yet to even comprehend the vast trove of materials recovered from the region indicative of those past cultures, which includes a trove of languages, scripts and religious affiliations.

An amazing international digitization project hosted by the British Library at has full document search capabilities. [http://idp.bl.uk/](http://idp.bl.uk/) ... scholars are desperately needed to sort and interpret the material, which crosses the Chinese, Indian, Central Asian and Tibetan worlds in addition to endemic kingdoms. [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/73/5d/59735daf093ccb7787c7...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/73/5d/59735daf093ccb7787c7deae823fd8f3.png)

A fact little known amongst modern Chinese is that one of China's most celebrated poets, Li Bai, actually hailed from Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan). He relocated to Sichuan. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai) Other popularly remnant modern Chinese cultural links to this region from China include the coming of Buddhism and the fictionalized account _Journey to the West_ , the romanticized export of silk technology, former military significance of 'blood (sweating) horses' and no doubt various contributions to medical, astronomic and scientific knowledge.

The Uighurs, like hundreds of ethnic and cultural minorities globally, and dozens within China, are facing a difficult integration with the modern world surrounded by far more significant economic and cultural spheres. It's also objective to say that a minor Uighur-affiliated violent separatist group has been operating with a distinct anti-government position since at least the early 1990s, and prior to that the region was a victim of the Great Game: [http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak-exodus/](http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak- exodus/)

China historically allowed members of registered minority groups to be free of the one child policy, which otherwise affected all Chinese. The linked article asserts it is still being applied in Xinjiang and specifically against the Uighurs which is different to the rest of the country at present, but not historically. It would be good to see what the primary sources are on this.

There are potentially reasonable grounds for an international relations argument that nominally recent anti-Uighur measures might be, at least in part, traced to immediately contemporary post-911 "anti-terror" rhetoric by the US providing global laisser-faire on rights suspensions and heavy-handed tactics.

Conclusion: There is more to the story than a timely and simplistic villification, none of which excuses the actions being taken, but all of which add context.

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh come on, China's a big powerful profitable country. And genocide has a special meaning, we can't just call any ethnic extermination a genocide, that'd be improper.

China will just keep on killing their Uighurs and companies will keep doing business there. There's perks, too, I bet CEOs can get organs if they need them, CHEAP, these days, if they bring manufacturing into China.

</comment><comment><USER29> >Adrian Zenz is a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

HAHAHAHA

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't think it's "whataboutism" to question the validity of a source as cartoonishly biased as the victims of communism foundation. These are the people that claim every covid death is a victim of communism.

</comment><comment><USER31> Another holocaust is being committed right in front of everyone. What will the world do now? Sit back and keep taking advantage of the benefits of cheap Chinese labour? Isn't it time to wake up and cut this barbaric behavior if we're going to claim we moved past what happened in WWII?

<comment><USER32> Are you willing to die or have your countrymen die to stop it? Because that's likely what it would take.

<comment><USER31> Many Muslims are willing to fight to save their Uighur brothers and sisters being genocided.

<comment><USER33> How many pre-dominantly Muslim countries have come out in outrage to criticize China's policies?

<comment><USER31> The people are genuinely and deeply upset. Just because they don't go out on the streets in protest, it doesn't mean it's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "I have long argued that the atrocity in the region is a cultural genocide, not a literal genocide"

Headline is extremely misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The reason why now this has changed - we do need to probably call it a > genocide - is quite simply because the evidence now, for the first time, > very specifically meets one of the five criteria set forth by the United > Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of > Genocide from 1948, which specifically says the suppression of birth

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Adrian Zenz is a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation."

Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation? Ah ok.

Just as there is no prejudice or bias of any kind slipping into your scientific research ...

<comment><USER35> The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation counts all COVID-19 deaths worldwide as victims of communism, in case anyone was wondering how credible this organisation is.

<comment><USER36> Source?

<comment><USER37> [https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/voc- news/2020/4/5/blame-t...](https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/voc- news/2020/4/5/blame-the-chinese-communist-party-for-the-coronavirus-crisis)

It's a hilarious read:

> If Beijing had given the real number of infected people and deaths, other > countries would have recognized the danger, and taken necessary steps.

No matter what transpired, eventually there was a warning, and most countries still took no steps until they had high numbers themselves. Hell, Italy could have been the warning and it would have helped.

<comment><AUTHOR> A Nature paper [0] suggests that 66 or even 95 percent of the cases could be avoided, had China acted on the coronavirus 1 to 3 weeks earlier [1].

[0] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2293-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2293-x)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/research- finds...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/research-finds-huge- impact-of-interventions-on-spread-of-covid-19)

<comment><USER37> But that paper, at least in the abstract, talks about preventable deaths _in China_. The anti-communists talk about China being to blame for the deaths in other countries because those countries had no warning.

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper was posted on March 13 [0], before Covid-19 peaked outside of China. Of course it didn't focus on other places.

The abstract shows the authors believe its findings have relevance elsewhere:

> These findings improve our understanding of the effects of non- > pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19, and will inform response efforts > across the world

[0] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20029843v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20029843v3)

<comment><USER37> But what does that have to do with countries having plenty of warning and doing next to nothing? I feel like you replied to the wrong poster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yet American prisons don't meet the UN standard? Abu Garson, etc.

All this hubbub about China's human rights record is paving the way for Trump to stir up a fake conflict just before the election.

</comment><comment> dis-sys Seriously, suppression of birth?

According the exact same logic used by this ZENZ guy, China's majority group (Han) has been subjected to such "genocide" for decades. As a result of such "suppression", only 400 million Han Chinese were born in the last 30 years rather than the estimated 800+ million.

<comment><USER39> I may be mistaken but Han Chinese weren't forced to undergo sterilization. If you had a second child, you were fined and your child wouldn't be recognized as a Chinese citizen. Still horrible though.

<comment><USER40> Sterilization was standard procedure for Han Chinese women for decades: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/asia/after-one- chil...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/world/asia/after-one-child-policy- outrage-at-chinas-offer-to-remove-iuds.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> But are Han Chinese sent to concentration camps?

> The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces > intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of > thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and > sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

> But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the > abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many > children that are forced on Xinjiang's other ethnicities, interviews and > data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having > the three children allowed by the law

> Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp > detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having > too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp > — what the government calls "education and training" — for parents with too > many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by > Zenz confirmed

> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control > pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, > tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released > and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were > sterile

[https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c](https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c)

<comment><USER41> > But are Han Chinese sent to concentration camps?

All of them? Certainly not, China would look pretty empty. Some of them? Yeah, unless you have a special definition of concentration camp.

The organ harvesting also does not seem to have an ethnic component. You tend to be targeted if you're loudly critical of the government or engage in unwanted religion, your ethnicity does not spare you.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The organ harvesting also does not seem to have an ethnic component. You > tend to be targeted if you're loudly critical of the government or engage in > unwanted religion, your ethnicity does not spare you.

If Surgeon Enver Tohti's testimony is to be believed, then Uyghurs are indeed targeted for organ harvesting.

[https://chinatribunal.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/A15_Sub...](https://chinatribunal.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/A15_Submission_ID459T_EnverTohti_PD.pdf)

<comment><USER41> Most likely, my point is: so are Han Chinese that are imprisoned for a variety of reasons. It's not an ethnic thing, it's primarily an authoritarian-regime- with-little-regard-for-human-rights-thing. Falun Gong practicioners for example are also heavily targeted, and they are predominately Han.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hahaha, Zenz. People, please look at the sources before you go blindly believing the latest anti-China scare story.

[https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining- millions-...](https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions- uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/)

> The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was > authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes > homosexuality and gender equality, supports "scriptural spanking" of > children, and believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China.

> As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of > obscurity and transformed almost overnight into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang. > He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the > Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now!, and delivering expert quotes in the > International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' recent "China Cables" > report. His Twitter bio notes that he is "moving across the Atlantic" from > his native Germany.

[https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1208837915687706624](https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1208837915687706624)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not like China didn't have mandatory birth control on the ethnic majority.

<comment><USER15> The difference is now the population growth is collapsing, even after they loosened the limit to 2 kids per family, China desperately needs more babies.

<comment><USER3> > loosened the limit to 2 kids per family

Still a limit, and a low one at that, so doesn't sound "desperate" at all.

TFA says "I uncovered evidence that the Uighurs are subject to internment in camps if they violate birth control policies, have too many children." Presumably too many is greater than 2, but who knows.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.statista.com/statistics/250650/number-of- births-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/250650/number-of-births-in- china/)

The trend is clear, the limit was loosened late 2015, and it's not working coz people don't want/can't afford 2 kids.

China didn't care minorities having 10 kids before, why bother now?

<comment><USER3> > why bother now?

Of course I can't answer that question, it's not like I'm particularly perturbed by minorities having 10 kids. (I am in general perturbed by people giving birth to many children without the means to properly support and educate them, though. This is a problem in many parts of the world.)

My point is either one child policy was a genocide against the ethnic majority (which would frankly be ridiculous) or this one is not a genocide against an ethnic minority. Pretty sure whether the two occurred at the exact same time isn't a factor in the cited definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why was "report says" just removed? It's in the headline of TFA and it was in the HN headline a minute ago. I'd consider it a salient piece of information given that the report isn't authored by the UN but by some christian fundamentalist.

EDIT: it's back now.

<comment><USER44> It was never in the HN headline until I added it a minute ago (before I saw your comment btw—this is standard moderation).</comment></comment>


An Introduction to Model Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> http://download.imatix.com/mop/introduction.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article the other day from Pieter Hintjens [0] led to this intro written by him. Seems like it would pair well with domain-driven design [1], but it's a very different paradigm from what is commonly seen in industry (by me at least).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547212)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain- driven_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design)</comment>


SpaceX wins injunction to stop USAF buying Russian rocket engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/01/us-spacex-unitedlaunchalliance-idUSKBN0DH2G420140501

<comment><USER2> Need a lawyer-ish person to help me with this:

So SpaceX has an open lawsuit against the US Government for the awarding of a contract to a joint partnership between Lockheed/Boeing, and now SpaceX is granted the legal ability for the courts to stop the Lockheed/Boeing partnership from entering into any rocket-buying agreement with a Russian company.

How can this injunction bar Lockheed/Boeing partnership from performing this seemingly separate business transaction? (More to the point, I mean, a separate business transaction that Lockheed/Boeing could 'claim' was unrelated to the government award)

Does it have anything to do with the fact that Lockheed/Boeing created this new company (Open Launch thing) which technically won the contract and presumably is the entity making the purchase to this Russian company?

<comment><USER3> The Atlas V rocket built by the United Launch Alliance (ULA), which was scheduled to be the rocket to launch the majority of missions for this USAF contract is build using Rocket Engines bought from NPO Energomash part of the Russian Space Agency, specifically led by Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister of Russia.

Obama issued an executive order sanctioning Dmitry Rogozin and any organization he is involved with. Given that ULA were buying rocket engines from an organization that Dmitry Rogozin is involved with, they would be breaching the executive order by doing so.

Now this doesn't the contact has been stopped yet, as ULA have stated that they already have a 2 year stock of the engines and the injunction doesn't stop any sale pre-injunction. But if no other rulings come up as to why the contract should be stopped, they will still need to figure out a way to fulfill the launches that they do not have engine stock for.

<comment><USER4> Rogozin tweeted a couple of days ago that US astronauts should go to space on a trampoline. It's interesting that a deputy PM can be so unprofessional as to say things like that in public, but that's modern Russian politics for you: top level bureaucrats saying embarassing things purely for internal consumption.

<comment><USER5> Rogozin's twitter timeline is pretty much designed to provoke US administration (he has Russian and English feeds, both equally ridiculous). It isn't just for "internal consumption" anymore. It's Cold War 2.0, kids, at least as Kremlin sees it. And Rogozin isn't some small potatoes in Russian admin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The senate hearing was a nice watch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0)

<comment><USER7> This is a very long video. What was nice in it? Can you give some highlights?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Move over Lockheed and Boeing. There's a new guy in town.

</comment><comment><USER9> While I'm all for SpaceX advancing the industry, I'm curious what exactly was illegal/wrong about the Lockheed/Boeing deal to buy rockets from Russia?

<comment><USER5> Umm, have you been living under a rock during the past two months?

<comment><USER9> Nope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> earlier thread on this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679372)

<comment><USER11> Yes. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like how they said that buying Russian rockets will ensure US to secure its space program growth and future. Like buying Russian technology today when US is putting more sanctions on them is what they call "secure". If you have player building rockets of similar price point and giving jobs to US people why anyone would go and buy foreign rockets anyway?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the video where Elon Musk challenges the government about the "block buy" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iukfjdsGsyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iukfjdsGsyk)

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh wow, this is huge and going to upset a lot of old players.

<comment><USER15> Most large contracts are contested, regardless of the outcome. it has become part of the scheduling in gov acquisitions it is so previlant.</comment></comment>


Surprised by the hot hand fallacy? a truth in the law of small numbers - <AUTHOR> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA14943?mod=article_inline <comment><USER2> [https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA14943](https://sci- hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA14943)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's something I wrote that I feel gives an intuitive explanation:

[http://www.jellyjuke.com/a-conceptual-explanation-of-the- hot...](http://www.jellyjuke.com/a-conceptual-explanation-of-the-hot-hand- fallacy.html)

<comment><USER4> This is a good mathematical analysis. But here's another way of looking at it: the hot hand fallacy is stating that every shot is strictly independent. You don't have good days and bad days, every day is exactly average. Which is ridiculous, especially in the negative direction:

\- A player could be sick

\- A player could have an minor injury they are playing through

\- A player could have not eaten properly before the game

\- A player could have been practicing a new shooting form and not quite adjusted properly yet

If you can have bad days, by definition all the other days are good days even if they are only "normal" days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR; if you count proportion of 1s and 0s in a random binary string (of a bounded length) after each 1, then you'll get <50% for 1s for the obvious reason, that you always skip the first 1.

Unsurprising, as the 50% expectation is only obvious for infinite sequences. All kinds of statistical correlations happen if you start adding arbitrary preconditions to finite sequences.

<comment><USER6> From the paper

> We observe that the canonical study in the influential hot hand fallacy > literature [2],Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky(1985), along with > replications, have mistakenly employed a biased selection procedure that is > analogous to Jack's. Upon conducting a de-biased analysis, we find that the > longstanding conclusions of the canonical study are reversed.

> [2] The hot hand fallacy has been given considerable weight as a candidate > explanation for various puzzles and behavioral anomalies identified in the > domains of financial markets, sports wagering, casino gambling,and lotteries > (Arkes(2011),Avery and Chevalier(1999),Barberis and Thaler(2003),Brown and > Sauer(1993),Camerer(1989),Croson and Sundali(2005),De Bondt(1993),Long et > al.(1991),Durham, Hertzel, and Martin(2005),Galbo-Jørgensen, Suetens, and > Tyran(2016),Guryan and Kearney(2008),Kahneman andRiepe(1998),Lee and > Smith(2002),Loh and Warachka(2012),Malkiel(2011),Narayanan and > Manchanda(2012),Paul and Weinbach(2005),Rabin and Vayanos(2010),Sinkey and > Logan(2013),Smith, Levere, and Kurtzman(2009),Sundali and Croson(2006),Xu > and Harvey(2014),Yuan, Sun, and Siu(2014))

Their claim is that people do apply "arbitrary preconditions" in the analysis of various situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the point you only consider measuring success in the case of an initial success? Thus you are conditioning on data with at least one success contained within it and have biased data?

<comment><USER8> No, the point is about a subtlety in the way averages of averages are calculated, and how that introduces weighting biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A rich guys later success is predicated on their early success, but over time we begin to understand the laws were arbitrarily written under bias of the initial success, not that one individual is so uniquely qualified we should coddle their fee fees forever.

Now there's a political platform embedded in math I can get behind.</comment>


Steel In The Field: A Farmer's Guide to Weed Management Tools (1997) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/stream/SteelInTheField/Steel%20in%20the%20Field#page/n0/mode/2up <comment><AUTHOR> Maybe we don't need as many "roundup ready" crops? Before the blanket use of herbicides there was cultivation. Some farmers are rediscovering it.

<comment><USER2> Using mechanical weed reduction is roundabout ten times more energy and time intensive. The fields have to be processed several times and if done with heavy machinery the soil will be compacted at a depth of roundabout 3-6 feet leading to drainage problems.

The compacting effect is already subject of research. Reducing tyre pressure is the counter mean of today, but the problem still persist.

So yes, roundup can be replaced or reduced, but there are no simple solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually dreamed about really lightweight possibly robotic cultivator. There really isn't a reason to pull a multi-ton tractor over the soil when you are burning or just scraping an inch or two down. For a heavy disc or plow yes... you need the horsepower and thus the weight (and fuel) but it seems a cultivator could be a lot lighter. I also dreamed about building a pedal powered seeder/cultivator on a bicycle frame because I wanted a small farm and couldn't afford a tractor.

I particularly used to dream while driving a tractor when I was young. Talk about boring.... and you have to pay attention so as not to swerve into the crop row:)</comment></comment></comment>


AV1 beats x264 and libvpx-vp9 in practical use case - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/253852078523394/av1-beats-x264-and-libvpx-vp9-in-practical-use-case/ <comment><USER2> Meanwhile, there are 2.8 MB of images in the article with the header image alone being a 1.6 MB JPEG (!). They can be reduced by at least 50%, given that the deringing filter works fine on contrast text/charts. Even more, the optimal format for this type of images is PNG not JPEG. After the conversion and optimization, they take 889 KB [1], >3 times smaller, and doing the same on properly resized originals without JPEG artifacts can bring them down to 100-200 KB.

[1] [https://github.com/vmdanilov/optimage/files/1898955/images.z...](https://github.com/vmdanilov/optimage/files/1898955/images.zip)

<comment><USER3> Totally appropriate self promotion, I approve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Our tests were conducted primarily with Standard Definition (SD) and High > Definition (HD) video files, because those are currently the most popular > video formats on Facebook. But because AV1 's performance increased as video > resolution increased, we conclude the new compression codec will likely > deliver even higher efficiency gains with UHD/4K and 8K content._

This remark about higher resolution reminded me of something I've been wondering about frame rates, which are essentially also a higher resolution, except across the dimension of _time_.

Assuming low to negligible noise from the camera (or a CGI, which avoids the problem altogether, shouldn't doubling from 30FPS to 60FPS have less than double the size increase? The reasoning being that changes per frame are lower, leading to better predictions.

Is there any rule-of-thumb formula for expected size increase as frame rate increases?

<comment><USER5> The delta encoding will be more efficient with higher frame rate, but also x264 has a tweak which decreases quality factor as frame rate increases. Why? The reasoning was that, since the frame is displayed for less time, you don't have as much time to appreciate the details and hence fewer bits can be used, while still maintaining the same perceptual quality.

I found this out the hard way when encoding time lapses, even if the delta between frames is identical, the final choice of frame rate greatly affects output file size.

<comment><USER6> If all frames have lower quality wouldn't it still be perceived regardless of frame rate?

<comment><USER7> I'm no expert but I would say no. Each frame delta might have less/same information, but since you're applying more deltas/second, it gets better again.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't this lead to bigger error accumulation? At least, my gut feeling says "less information per delta = larger error accumulation", and on top of that we have more deltas/second

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Our testing shows AV1 surpasses its stated goal of 30% better compression than VP9, and achieves gains of 50.3%, 46.2% and 34.0%, compared to x264 main profile, x264 high profile and libvpx-vp9, respectively.

This sounds like AV1 is actually worse than H.265, at least at low-ish resolutions. Am I misreading these results?

For context, I've moved to using H.265 (via the x265 encoder) for archiving 720p and 1080p video. At least for low bitrates (in the 500-1500 kbit/s range) it gives me over 50% smaller filesizes compared to x264 high profile at roughly the same quality. The encoding speed is much slower, of course, but not by more than 10x on modern CPUs, typically less. I had hoped to move over to some AV1 implementation in a few years, but these results make that look doubtful. Are the supposed advantages of AV1 over H.265 confined to ultra high resolutions and/or high bitrates?

Please note that this is a purely technical question. I don't care about the patent issues and for those that do, they've been covered at length in other comments already.

<comment><USER9> "compared to x264 high profile at roughly the same quality"

Compared how? With what kind of source videos?

Unless you are matching SSIM on similar content I don't think you can meaningfully compare your numbers to the ones in the article.

<comment><USER10> Me, I just take x264 video I downloaded off the back of a truck and re-encode it to x265 with default settings on FFmpeg. It looks the same visually to me on my TV but the file size (including audio) is typically 25%. I realize this is the opposite of a carefully controlled codec experiment. Just saying in practice it works pretty well.

If you're curious about x265 in practice, the pirate scene group PSA-Rips is doing a good job recoding stuff to x265. [http://psarips.com/](http://psarips.com/)

<comment><USER11> To be a little fairer you should transcode it to both x264 and x265 so that the outputs are can be compared to each other (rather than comparing the transcoded x265 to the source x264 as you did, which isn't quite the same thing).

<comment><USER10> I did that experiment with a file I found online. The source x264 video stream was 1600 MB. My x264 recoding was 290 MB, and the x265 was 80 MB. (There's also a significant savings in ffmpeg recoding the audio, which accounts for the file sizes I reported). In all cases I'm sure my result is lower quality, but still more than acceptable for me watching TV with low expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AV1's competition is x265, not x264.

<comment><USER13> AV1 is a codec, not an implementation. Its competition is the upcoming H.266. VP9's competition was H.265, and libvpx-vp9's competition was x265.

<comment><USER14> The exact correspondence between the VPx-es and the MPEG codecs is not that relevant, because old codecs don't go away when new ones come out. In fact, hardware decoders are irrevocably baked into devices where consumption happens, so anything H.264 or newer becomes difficult to displace -- like Google's ham-fisted push [1] for VP8 and VP9 on YouTube for their own benefit, burning through people's batteries in software instead of serving H.264.

But I'd argue that the MPEG codecs roughly slot in between each tier of VP8, VP9, and AV1, because the MPEG codecs are tremendously flexible (as can be seen in Netflix's tests [2]), have dozens of competing encoders of different qualities, and dozens of profiles that constrain or unlock advanced features. So in a way, it can be simultaneously true that AV1's competition is both H.265 and whatever comes after H.265.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230676) [2] [https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/more-efficient-mobile- en...](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/more-efficient-mobile-encodes-for- netflix-downloads-625d7b082909)

<comment><USER15> How is serving better quality with less bandwidth "ham fisted"? Both Netflix and Google says the codec is better. If anyone was ham fisted it was Apple who fought to stop free codecs'.

<comment><USER16> He explained that in the same sentence. An imperceptible quality improvement is not worth an order of magnitude increase in CPU usage, and the network savings aren't enough to make up for dropped frames on hardware which is more than a year old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder about CPU decoding. I never cared about codecs, because every movie was played at proper FPS on my 2013 MacBook Air. But recently I downloaded 4k H.265-encoded movie and it turns out that MacBook just wasn't able to decode it at proper speed. I hope that AV1 will be more efficient.

<comment><USER18> The determining factor is hardware decode support, not efficiency. H.264 is worse than H.265, but if that movie was H.264, it would have played back flawlessly due to the Intel hardware decoder.

<comment> TD-Linux It would also play back flawlessly even without the hardware decoder, because H.264 is so fast to decode nowadays. If AV1 is fast enough it can allow people to use AV1 without buying new hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Encoding time is 667x compared to VP9. How can it be used in production ? 667 TIMES LONGER

<comment><USER20> How about decoding performance, which is much more important.

<comment><USER21> Decoding is going to have be supported in hardware for any sort of mass adoption anyway.

<comment><USER20> Isn't same true for encoding.

I don't see hardware support hardware support coming in next 2-3 years. Then also everyone is not going to change their hardware immediately. Good Software performance is quite important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The interesting bits for me:

"Our testing shows AV1 surpasses its stated goal of 30% better compression than VP9, and achieves gains of 50.3%, 46.2% and 34.0%, compared to x264 main profile, x264 high profile and libvpx-vp9, respectively.

"However, AV1 saw increases in encoding computational complexity compared with x264 main, x264 high and libvpx-vp9 for ABR mode. Encoding run time was 9226.4x, 8139.2x and 667.1x greater, respectively…"

<comment><USER14> Let that sink in:

'Encoding run time was 9226.4x, 8139.2x and 667.1x greater, respectively…'

The codec is good, but the encoder has a long way to go. This places it squarely in the realm of only worth it right now if you're serving the same video millions of times (someone graph this?).

It's a bit hyperbolic to claim that this is a 'practical use case', but maybe at Facebook/Netflix/YouTube's scale, it is. But it will be exciting to watch this space.

<comment><USER23> I'd assume encoding was largely software-based using a POC encoder while x264/vp9 video encoders probably already take advantage of hardware acceleration shortcuts evolved over many years.

> the main focus of current AV1 development is on speed optimization to make > it practical for use in production systems

Remember: first make it work, then make it right, then make it fast. Seems they're only starting the 3rd step now.

<comment><USER14> libvpx, the VP9 encoder library used in this test, has no support for any hardware encoder blocks for VP9 [1], so it does everything in software. There are ways [2] to compile some support into ffmpeg-with-libvpx that makes it able to invoke the hardware encoder in newer Intel CPUs (Skylake or newer) [3][4] (using vp9_vaapi) but it's doubtful that this was used, since their command-line switches indicate nothing of the sort.

x264 is a software-only encoder that provides no hooks into hardware acceleration. Their ffmpeg command line indicates that no hardware acceleration hooks of ffmpeg were used.

[1] [https://github.com/webmproject/libvpx/blob/master/CHANGELOG](https://github.com/webmproject/libvpx/blob/master/CHANGELOG) [2] [https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/24de2edef08866c3040805048...](https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/24de2edef08866c304080504877239a3) [3] [https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libva/commit/?id=fb57f5c15e72c3...](https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libva/commit/?id=fb57f5c15e72c39efeb2a10492a327110d6a06c8&utm_source=anzwix) [4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_implementations)

<comment><USER24> but let's remember that x264 has had a lot of time to find drop optimizations in simd use and time for CPUs to start optimising for it as a use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this going to be supported as a native platform on iOS and Android? Let's say I would like to start a new company that delivers video content to people. Could I use this today as the primary format for that? The performance numbers look great.

<comment><USER26> No, because there's no hardware decoder support for it yet in common chipsets. We're probably three years away from that, realistically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> From Doom9

Harmonic showed a comparison demo at NAB, pitting AV1, AVC, HEVC and JVET against each other. At the equivalent bitrate of 1.9 Mbps they got the following results:

Codec -- PSNR -- VMAF

AVC -- 32.7 -- 58 HEVC -- 36.7 -- 80 AV1 -- 37.2 -- 83 JVET -- 38.5 -- 88

</comment><comment><USER28> (Several have asked, but I haven't seen a good response yet.) What are the computational requirements for AV1 decoding compared to x264, v9 etc? Is it in the same order, multiple orders worse? Or lower?

<comment><USER29> They are nearly identical. But your current CPU does not have a integrated hardware decoder for AV1, thus it might practically be slower for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if anyone has tried rendering directly to AV1 (or x264, or what-have- you), e.g. in a video game. There is all this hardware devoted to turning a few bytes of input into lots of pixels out. Maybe you could do less work producing just the few bytes, and let dedicated hardware generate the pixels. Of course you don't need for the CPU to generate the bytes; code running on the GPU would still do that, but with less work to do, you might get higher frame rates, or better detail at the same rate.

You heard it here first. (That is, unless it doesn't work.)

<comment><USER31> > Maybe you could do less work producing just the few bytes

It takes _more_ work to produce fewer bytes, because you've to pack the same information in fewer bytes. Entropy and all that.

<comment><USER30> Not if the information starts out in fewer bytes. Then, you're just rearranging the bits into renderable order. "Chicken" is a very small number of bits that would need to be expanded to more bits (leg down here, wing over there, beak up here) before handing them over to the decoder to make actual feathers. The representation in a game's scene list is overwhelmingly more compact than the input to a decoder would be, and most of it barely changes from one second to the next, as the pixels are all replaced dozens of times over.

<comment><USER32> The information does not start out in fewer bytes. It starts out in all the bytes that represent the 3D models of entities you're interacting with in your game and the textures to cover them, at least. That's usually more bytes than needed to show a 32 bit 4K picture. The rendering process reduces all the jungle you have in your VRAM to a few kB that are briefly shown on your screen.

It seems like you don't know the basics of 3D graphics nor the basics of video encoding. It is extra work and would save some bandwidth needed to pump the picture to the display, which is not an issue in 3D graphics (we have dedicated cables).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Compression standard finalized in 2018 is more sophisticated than one from 2004? Say it ain't so.</comment>


Twitter Banning Anyone Whose Date of Birth Says They Joined Before They Were 13 - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq3dm/twitter-banning-anyone-under-13-date-of-birth-gdpr <comment><USER2> Seems like it wouldn't be all that difficult for Twitter to give users the option to delete tweets made before they turned 13 or to deactivate their account.

This seems like a last minute knee-jerk reaction to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given that a single tweet can (now) ruin your life, allowing minors on Twitter seems like rank irresponsibility.</comment>


Legislation to stop US border agents from demanding passwords is on the way - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/20/wyden-letter-dhs-passwords-warrantless-border-searches/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading after "In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden called ..."

Unless it's sponsored or at least co-signed by a republican it ain't going anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Pretty clear what republicans think of the constitution. Which is in diametric opposition to what they say.

<comment><USER4> This policy started under Barack Obama. He could have squashed it via Executive Order if he wanted to. Thanks, try again.

[https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/06/23/2016-14...](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/06/23/2016-14848/agency- information-collection-activities-arrival-and-departure-record- forms-i-94-and-i-94w-and#h-11)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this a situation where they shouldn't need more legislation but rather, Government employees should already be following pre-existing law?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that the Border is not technically U.S. soil and as such the normal laws don't apply there.

<comment><USER7> We need a movement to make borders a part of the normal legal system. It's stupid to have this no man's land bullshit in the civilized world. It's uncivilized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought it was already plainly addressed in the constitution.

<comment><USER9> Very little in the constitution could be described as "plain." Most of it was as broad and ambiguous at the time it was written as it is today.

Rather than hoping justices read the tea leaves the same way you do, clarifying the law with statues to protect our liberties is a good strategy.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Generate personalized swim workouts - <AUTHOR> http://www.swimsolo.com/

<comment><USER2> Why do I have to signup for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses your best swim times to accurately calibrate all of the intervals. I guess it could have persisted that information with cookies, etc, but its using vanilla django accounts at this point. It's a lot of information to enter in, so I figured accounts were best.

thanks for the feedback though.</comment></comment>


Cryptome Attacked and Censored by Webcom and Network Solutions - <AUTHOR> http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/webcom-netsol-attack.htm

<comment><USER2> The site actually had at least one infected php file at the moment it was blocked by Network Solutions and John admits that. It would be interesting to know how long the file was in that state. It certainly appears that John doesn't do some regular patching of the software that drives his site.

The reason they blocked the site was to make him _upgrade the whole infrastructure and clean all the possibly infected files_ and they state that in their e-mail:

[http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/netsol- violation.htm](http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/netsol-violation.htm)

"It appears you are running vulnerable PHP that has allowed your account to be controlled by an attacker. You will need to remove all PHP files from your hosting account and update your content to a more secure system. Failure to do so will result in your account remaining suspended.

Example hacked content found on your account (NOTE: _This is just an example and all hacked files will need removal; we cannot provide a full listing of your hacked content_ ):

/data/13/1/84/46/1247698/user/1330594/htdocs/xxx/xxxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxx.php

This can be caused by code vulnerabilities in an existing content-management system (CMS) or other script that has been compromised. The most common cause is an outdated, hacked CMS such as Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress. To rectify this issue, you will need to secure your CMS. If your site is a CMS, you will need to update the code/script(s) via FTP."

What he notifies them then is just

"The offending file has been removed.

/data/13/1/84/46/1247698/user/1330594/htdocs/xxxxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxxx/xxxxxx.2.php"

Thanks for careful monitoring."

It was obviously not enough of maintenance needed for his server. The minimum expected would be to confirm that other PHP files were checked and were found to be clean. Maybe some of the files installed but not used should be removed. Of course he has the right to never update the software for his site, but then the hosting provider also has the right to block the site, limiting the chances for further infections.

Interestingly, it seems that John believes that Network Solutions should maintain the software side of his site. In 2010:

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/breaches-galore- as-c...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/breaches-galore-as-cryptome- hacked-to-infect-visitors-with-malware/)

"Cryptome founder John Young said in an e-mail that he believes the attackers were able to infect his website with a poisoned PHP file by exploiting a weakness in security or server software provided by Network Solutions, which hosts the Cryptome website."

If he really uses web.com, they have a pitch like this:

[http://web.com/hosting/unix.aspx](http://web.com/hosting/unix.aspx)

"Simple Blog Set Up With Web.com: Log into your Web.com Account to manage your Web Hosting / Visit the Open Source Library within the hosting control panel / Install a WordPress® blog on your website with a single click"

Is it possible that after that one click, the software is never updated by Network Solutions? How are such sites supposed to be managed then?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link to the NetSol Violation email. The link on the article is broken.

<comment><USER2> Anybody knows what John is supposed to maintain on his site? Is the upgrade of the software the responsibility of his provider?

cryptome.org seems to currently run Apache 2.2.22, whereas 2.2.27 is the most recent in the 2.2 branch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Typical hyperbolic writing from John. I'd be pissed too if one of my hosts pulled down sites without notice and didn't restore them quickly after resolution but saying it was "attacked" and "censored" are ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> Consider the nature of his site makes Cryptome a massive target for state sponsored hacking, among others. even a site with experienced staff is going to have challenges. Since he has been running Cryptome for free since the 90s be sure to support their Kickstarter, even if you only agree 50%.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What I find surprising about this is the configuration Cryptome is running. I would have expected them to be in a data center in Iceland or on a box in John's closet.

</comment><comment><USER6> If every site with some bad PHP were taken down with such force... well... so much for the internet.</comment>


Life After YC @ SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7526

<comment><AUTHOR> Programs like Y Combinator have garnered much attention in the media. Many of the startups are highlighted and critiqued upon launch, but how do these programs fare over time? What lessons have graduates of Y Combinator learned in a post-Y Combinator world? How do they turn ideas into real businesses? Help vote on this panel to hear answers to these questions!

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a documentary I'd watch. Filmmakers?

<comment><USER3> I'd think I'd be interested too, problem is startups are just two guys sitting on their computers for the majority of their days. Not sure it would actually be an interesting documentary after all.

The docs on Kozmo and Govworks were pretty good though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What earbuds do you use? I need help - <AUTHOR>

I wear over the ear headphones a lot, Beyerdynamic T70P.
For earbuds I use the Apple Pro in-ear with small ear pieces. The Apple ear pods don't fit. I have tried the $150 Beats ear buds and they didn't work in my ears.
The problem is I am breaking the jack of the Apple Pro in-ears. Twice now I have cracked the jack off. I am not sure how it is happening.
Can anyone recommend a sturdy pair of ear buds that have small in earpieces like the Apple Pro in-ears? <comment><USER2> I also require earbuds that have a small, in-ear design. Standard Apple earbuds do not fit my ears. I have bought several pair of these:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BN0N0K8](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BN0N0K8)

They sound great for the price and have the 3 button design for controlling volume and answering calls.

<comment><USER3> Second these. I have two pair and for price/quality they work great. Comfortable fit, sound clear/good, stay in my ear perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd recommend the Monoprice Enhanced Bass Hi-Fi Noise Isolating Earphones with the Comply TX-400 foam tips. You'd be amazed at the sound these earbuds can put out.

[https://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=108&cp_id=10823&cs_id...](https://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=108&cp_id=10823&cs_id=1082303&p_id=8320&seq=1&format=2)

[http://www.complyfoam.com/products/Tx-400/](http://www.complyfoam.com/products/Tx-400/)

Good luck with the search!

</comment><comment><USER5> Having owned several higher-end earphones including from Klipsch & Etymotic, I found that expensive weren't necessarily more durable than sensibly priced stuff (such as those Sonys, which I also own), and in fact were sometimes even less so due to the cables & jacks getting "svelte" designs.

My conclusion was to always expect earphones to fail in the not-so-distant future, and not to spend so much that it's a major aggravation when it occurs.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sennheiser CX 685. They are a little pricey but work well. I got them for the gym and for when I run. They stay in your ear pretty well even when your running and all sweaty. That might not be what your looking for but I figure I would throw it out there. It's funny you posted this because they just crapped out on me last week after 2 years of daily use. I've had Sony earbuds before them and they would only last about a year. [http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser- CX-685-Adidas-Headphones/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser- CX-685-Adidas- Headphones/dp/B0094R4POC/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1438016815&sr=1-10&keywords=sennheiser+ear+buds)

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like the Bose ie2 earbuds [http://www.amazon.com/Bose-627476-0020-IE2-audio- headphones/...](http://www.amazon.com/Bose-627476-0020-IE2-audio- headphones/dp/B003XU6H8I)

While Bose is generally overpriced, these earbuds are the best I've found in the sub $100 range. The pair i bought has lasted 2 years despite my abusive use (shoving them in my pockets, tossing them around). And I like the sound almost as much as my overear Grados

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://solrepublic.com/relays-in-ear-headphone-3-button- vari...](http://solrepublic.com/relays-in-ear-headphone-3-button-various- colors.html)

Sol Republic Relays, they're awesome, don't ever fall out, and have full 3 button iPhone controls/mic.

They also have a right angle jack, which may help with your breakingness...

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing but love for these

[http://www.soundmagic.com.cn/en/products/Details51c33p34.htm...](http://www.soundmagic.com.cn/en/products/Details51c33p34.html)

Incredible sound for $50, best earbuds I've ever had* and they block out outside noise well too.

*For reference, my other headphones are AIAIAI TMA-1 and Audio Technica M50x.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anything with a removable cable should last a lot longer, you would only be replacing the cable with any regularity. Depending on your budget, check out IEMs from Westone or Shure: both carry models with replaceable cables and are reputable brands in the recording industry.

</comment><comment><USER11> RHA earphones are affordable and come with a 3 year warranty. Probably the best i have owned in a while.

<comment><USER12> Another vote for RHAs.

Not sure which model you have, but I have the MA750i. Really pleased with them.

Used to have VSonic GR07s, but the cable became broken. The build quality on the MA750i seems much better, so I'm not expecting the same outcome for these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> klipch</comment>


-2000 Lines Of Code (metrics == bad) (1982) - <AUTHOR> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

<comment><USER2> Actually this might prove the opposite. The intention is of course that his removing of 2000 lines of code while improving behavior is a good thing. Therefore a change in number of lines of code is significant. Therefore you should track lines of code. I track lines of code to get a sense for when there's more lines of code than seem necessary so I can go chopping it away until it becomes manageable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do a similar thing on a file by file level. Once a file or single function grows too long, it is time for a refactor.</comment></comment>


Forget Shorter Showers - onreact-com http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this kind of article worrying. It clearly claims that the only true way forward is "to abolish the industrial society".

I think that's a very limited view of the situation.

Whenever faced with a big new problem, there are two ways to get past that problem: either you backtrack, regress back to times when the problem didn't exist, or you move forward, and figure out ways to solve the problem without turning your back on progress.

This author effectively advocates turning our backs on progress, giving up the last few hundred years of development. He would have us go back to living in small self-sufficient communes, rather than focusing on growth and progress, to "save the planet". This suggestion is dangerously wrong. It is not "solving the problem", it is running away from it. The way through this problem is forwards, not backwards.

Ultimately, there is only one reason to "save the planet": so that we can enjoy it. There is no point in saving the planet if it means sacrificing ourselves along the way. AS the author rightly points out, killing ourselves to save the planet misses the point. Well, so does regressing back a few hundred years. We are who we are, we are a people/species who want to enjoy our lives, realise our potential, look to the future, move forwards, built greater, better, bigger things. That's basic human nature. The proposed solution goes against this basic human nature, and so it must ultimately fail (but it can probably cause endless misery before finally being thrown in the bin along with communism, theocracy, feodalism, and other Bad Ideas).

It is quite possible that fanatical ecologism will be the great blight of the 21st century, as fanatical nationalism was the great blight of the 20th.

<comment><USER2> The article isn't worrying, it's just wrong. We can easily reduce US emissions by 80% without having to destroy the industrial economy. In fact, the most pessimistic of the economic studies shows (IIRC) that cutting emissions 80% would put our economy on track to double in size by June of 2040 instead of January of 2040.

The people who think that reducing emissions means destroying the economy are just idiots. California is well on their way to doing it already, and they have by far the strongest economy of any state.

<comment><USER3> _the most pessimistic of the economic studies shows (IIRC) that cutting emissions 80% would put our economy on track to double in size by June of 2040 instead of January of 2040._

Wow! Can you please provide a citation?

<comment><USER2> [http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/06/d...](http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/06/daily_chart_what_waxman- markey_will_do_to_the_economy.php)

It's actually even less bad than I thought, because that six month difference is for 2050 rather than 2040.

<comment><USER3> Well that is indeed impressive, with two caveats:

1) I'm not sure why it's the forecast of the _most_ pessimistic

2) The 80% reduction won't kick in until 2050. Indeed there won't even be a 20% reduction until 2020.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People that blame an amorphous faceless other named "industry" always make me suspicious - suspicious that they're morons. The output of "industry" is things we, the people, use directly or indirectly. Saying that 90% of water is not used by humans, but rather used by "industry", is a mischievous and deceitful fallacy; _we_ use that water by consuming the output of industry.

By taxing industry's use of things we'd rather "they" use less of, and taxing industry's output of things we'd rather "they" create less of (such as pollution, CO2, etc.), we are actually taxing ourselves: these taxes will increase the cost of those outputs of industry which use and produce more of what we want them to use and produce less of. By embedding the harmful effects in the price system, we can alter the balance of supply and demand and shape industry to where we want it to go, not because it's punishing "industry", but because it's punishing _individuals_ , i.e. _people_ like us.

<comment><USER5> Good point. One way to measure this is by the concept of _virtual water_ : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_water>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article raises a few points you already knew if you read The Economist that aren't wrong but aren't unusually insightful either. Other than that, I really don't like that it separates civilians from politicians and corporations. We form and staff our corporations and elect our politicians.

The Us vs. Them mentality doesn't work because there's only us. Those in power don't want to live on a destroyed planet any more than we do, and even if they did, we're the ones who keep voting them and their policies into office. The destruction has occurred almost entirely in democratic countries over the last century.

</comment><comment><USER7> One point is missed: if we start making the small changes in our personal lives, we are more likely to notice the changes that need to happen in our corporate lives -- we are our corporations, after all.

Further, they hint around it in the article, but the single biggest thing that we can do personally is move away from eating and using animal products. I'm still an omnivore, so I'm certainly not doing my part, but I have started eating meat less than I used to.

<comment><USER8> _Further, they hint around it in the article, but the single biggest thing that we can do personally is move away from eating and using animal products. I'm still an omnivore, so I'm certainly not doing my part, but I have started eating meat less than I used to._

Or, don't buy industrially-produced meat. It's quite possible to raise animals in a sustainable manner, but it requires us to not eat meat at every meal.

I think the author is railing on folks who think that by driving a Prius and taking shorter showers, they are saving the world. It's not the practices are wrong; it's that unless they are coupled with a greater awareness of how poorly industry treats our natural resources, they are worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had long assumed that most people realized that short showers, recycling plastic, driving small cars, turning off lights, and all these other little things don't actually affect the environment at all. We all do them, but only for the _sense_ that we're doing something. Not because they actually _do_ anything.

Over time though, I've met enough people that get worked up enough about these things to realize that many people actually think they are making a difference.

I usually just nod along.

<comment><USER10> Would you please explain how driving a small car (let's take a Prius as the obvious example) has exactly the same effect on the environment as driving a gas-guzzler? I don't get it.

<comment><USER11> Because you are comparing apples to apples when in fact you should stop eating apples and eat spinach instead. In relative terms, the Prius vs. Hummer comparison is easy. Prius is considerably better than the Hummer. The problem is that in absolute terms, other than different amount of fuel, both of them require almost the same materials and resources for construction, maintenance, and lifetime operation. Prius drives on the same roads as the Hummer and hence needs the entire highway infrastructure to function properly. Prius uses plastic, metal, and synthetic materials and so does Hummer. Sure, it uses a lot less of each but the factories that produce these compounds still need to be built, serviced, and fueled. The spinach to this apples problem? Better trains and transportation across the entire US such that Walmart no longer needs a fleet of 10,000 trucks.

The big picture is not the comparison between using Prius and Hummer. It is whether automobiles should be the primary mode of long-distance transportation across a nation of 300+ million citizens. The author's point is that the pride from driving a Prius is overshadowing the anger and fury that we all should have at the lack of real, efficient solutions. Prius is a wonderful band-aid but it is not a cure and will never be a cure.

On a personal basis, it is in the best interest for everyone to use fuel- efficient cars, and reduce energy usage. However, this does not mean that doing wonderful "green" things will make more than a minor dent to the real problem of what is actually going on. It is very comforting to use textile bags instead of plastic at the grocery store but it's really not such a big deal in absolute terms. Not having to import every single item from China across the ocean is. The externalities of cheaply manufactured products are borne by China and the world as a whole. The benefit goes only to the shareholders and consumers of Dollar stores. What's the easy fix? There isn't. But using textile bag makes you feel wonderful and proud enough that you no longer think about the big picture and thus have no real voice when it comes to changing the big things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How did this get posted twice? Does the duplicate check not work for articles that have been flagged to death? - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700251>

Edit: Cached link to that HN page before it got deleted: [http://184.108.40.206/search?q=cache:TPxg1J2JO8cJ:news.ycomb...](http://220.127.116.11/search?q=cache:TPxg1J2JO8cJ:news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D700251+forget+shorter+showers+site:news.ycombinator.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you come across someone with major arterial bleeding and apparent internal bleeding then do you attempt to stem the external bleeding or do you just leave them because you can't do anything about the internal bleeding. Personally I'd apply first aid and call an ambulance, others it seems would counsel that I leave you to die as one can't immediately solve the whole problem.

Do your bit for sustainable living short-term and use your vote to progress long term solutions. Use your consumer power to promote good governance by businesses.

<comment><USER14> He's not saying don't do anything. To use your metaphor, he's saying: Don't put a bandaid on it and claim you saved the man's life.

Moving towards personal sustainability is OK, but there is no use pretending it is a major fix. It is more of a start, a way to get people thinking about the world they live in. After that the real work must be done, and not just harm reduction, but actively fixing the things we've broke.

In fact the article points out one thing that struck me as particularly insightful: Current environmental thinking suggests we can only live in such a way as to harm our environment. This suggestion is way too convenient, as it reminds us all that we are sinners (environmentally). I think that maybe this sort of thinking is what bothers people about environmental types: it feels like religion, not any sort of fact based solution.

<comment><USER4> Environmentalism _is_ a religion, no doubt about it. The full extent of my involvement and support is in raising taxes for things we want industry to produce and consume less of, period. Price signals in the economy will do the rest of the work. Piety not necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> onreact-com "Why personal change does not equal political change"

Good point but in fact you need to reach critical mass for the personal change to become change on the whole. When a large enough number of people changes in private the private becomes truly political.

If you just change in private and don't tell anybody you might nit change anything.

With critical mass you should of course apply pressure tactics to gain momentum. The boycott or recently the "carrot mob" are great examples of that.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree. To build a society around gain and growth is a bad idea. Several large civilizations have fallen (think Romans etc) due to this simple mistake. Modern capitalism is heading the same way.

Society will divide into those who adapt and those who take. The latter will always fall.

<comment><USER5> While I agree somewhat with your sentiment, I don't think your reference to the Romans would really stand up to analysis. The problems we face today don't have much to do with being overrun by visigoths.

I also don't like your dichotomy between "those who adapt and those who take". We are all of us taking, every second of our lives. Everything we possess or covet on our silly little planet is the gift of our great benefactor the Sun, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What software crashed because of year transition? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A video rental place started saying people owed huge late fees. [http://www.deseretnews.com/article/807541/Y2K-bug-tags- video...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/807541/Y2K-bug-tags-video--- with-100-year-late-fee.html?pg=all)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a problem called 'Year 2038 problem'. It's going to be an interesting year... It has also been discussed on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5644292)

</comment><comment><USER4> There was an interesting Y2.01K bug on the Apple Newton (fixed with a community-supplied patch) [http://newtonpoetry.com/2009/05/28/newton-2010-bug- fixed-use...](http://newtonpoetry.com/2009/05/28/newton-2010-bug-fixed-users- rejoice/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not confirmed it was because of transition, but the core software that handles the ambulance service in London went down just after midnight

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38482746](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38482746)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.wired.com/2008/12/zune-freeze- res/](https://www.wired.com/2008/12/zune-freeze-res/)

The Zune software stopped working for a day due to a leap year in 2008.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not exactly because of year transition but because of a leap second issue, CloudFlare had some DNS outage on 1st Jan, 2017 : [https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-and-why-the-leap-second- affe...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-and-why-the-leap-second-affected- cloudflare-dns/)

</comment><comment><USER8> SGI IRIX unpatched rejected all login attempts after january 1st, 2000

Not a crash per se, but would require to stop the host and go single user to roll back the date to 1972 if you were unable to patch it (like my SGI indigo workstation EOLED before y2k)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My app crashed because someone in my team wasn't using the year provided to compare two dates.</comment>


Ask HN: Googler, looking to find a technical co-founder - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a strong Google technical product manager, who is ready to leave the good life at Google, go to zero and build a successful company with a technical co-founder. What do I bring to the table?
- BS, MS in CS; Ex-SWE at FANG
- Deep understanding of how to ship products
- Expertise in being able to ruthlessly prioritize features
- Deep understanding of Computer Science, System software and the state of the art
- Understanding of what it takes to build and ship software
- Deep understanding of what it takes to build a successful product
- Deep understanding of building a business around the product
- Excellent communication & presentation skills
- Knows limitations and will delegate / request help when necessary
- Ability to get people excited and rally around a cause
- The will to win.
- Ability to get funding from a top notch investor
What am I looking for?
- A technical co-founder who can jump in and write high performance code in any language, any stack, and do it fast
- An equal who will bounce ideas off me
- Live in the California Bay Area
- Have 3 years of cashflow / runway. We'll be on $0 salary for about 6 months as we try to find the elusive product / market find.
- A co-founder who wants to win (finding product market fit; getting funding; possibly getting acquired; taking our company to IPO)
My philosophy
- If smart & hardworking people get together and focus on a problem that has a business need, then you will find gold.
- We tend to worry about the downside (Failure) than focus on the upside (Taste: Discover Product / Market fit; What does that taste like, I'd like to know!)
If you find this interesting and are serious about building something we should talk. Email me: email@example.com <comment><USER2> I am sorry but your post is too general other than the fact that you are an ex-googler. Can you list specific achievements of yours that can help us understand what you bring to the table ? For example, you said "Abiliy to get investment from top notch investors". Anyone can make that claim as it is too general. What ability is that specifically ?

I can understand the need to hide your identity possibly but if you are looking for a co-founder, you need to be a bit more open. Otherwise, it seems unfair that you expect people to contact you without providing any meaningful information.

</comment><comment><USER3> I fail to understand why you need to mention you are a Googler? It's unhealthy to tie so much of your your identity to who you work for rather than who you are. Besides that I wish you the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! Google is a huge part of my brand and identity. It's where I've learned everything about building products. It's where I've perfected my craft. It also helps others know my background and my pedigree to some extent.

<comment><USER4> But the fact that you mention it is too braggy. also why are you hidden behind a fake account? You don't even say what city you work in. the world is full of ex-google coders. I'm one myself. this just comes off as trolly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Latteland, I'm in the bay area, California. I'm hidden behind a throwaway account to protect my identity. Sorry to come across as braggy I don't mean for it to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like if you were truly as good as this post makes you seem, you could do it alone

</comment><comment><USER6> What problem spaces are you passionate about? What type of societal problems are you personally interested in solving?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few areas. Building a better ...

\- Baby camera (As Alan Kay likes to say: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware)

\- Car discovery / car-dealer software stack

\- BabyCenter for working-new parents

\- Video capturing and creation experience for consumers (Think a personal snapchat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wasn't this thread already flagged before? Is this a resubmission?

<comment><AUTHOR> hi Nathan, Am I going against HN policy? I'm just looking to find a person who shares a similar view to mine.

<comment><USER8> Good HN posts are ones that have broader interest than this.

Individual "Looking for a co-founder" posts are not something we ever see on HN, probably due to the prohibition on recruitment posts (apart from the monthly Who Is Hiring?) thread.

Which is not to say that co-founders don't ever meet via HN, but it happens organically after people have spent a solid amount of time contributing good content and discussion to the community.</comment></comment></comment>


What I have learned from science fiction - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=952

<comment><USER2> It's a really interesting article, and I completely agree. Sci-Fi is a great genre, and it's a real pitty that some people only think about it as space and laser books :(</comment>


Haskell has memcached bindings; maybe GHC could memoize directly to memcached? - <AUTHOR> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/memcached-0.1.1

<comment><USER2> Ghc could memoize _what_ to memcached?

Is there some context I'm missing? I feel like I'm coming in half-way through a conversation.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, in Haskell, each function is pure. If you want to modify the state of the world, you thread the world through your function.

Just as a thought, it'd be interesting to see if Haskell could use a memcached backend to memoize the values of old function calls.

<comment><USER2> Ah, you mean programs compiled by ghc, not ghc itself.

It shouldn't be too difficult to write a `memo` function that memoises its argument using `unsafePerformIO` and memcached. There's no need to modify ghc.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Medium Will Succeed Where Quora Did Not - <AUTHOR> http://ajjuliani.com/why-medium-may-succeed-where-quora-did-not/

<comment><AUTHOR> And more importantly, what they understand about people that Quora struggled with in the beginning (at least when I was using it for 9-12 months).

</comment><comment><USER2> Aren't answers stories too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and that is the point...Quora and Medium are very similar, but Medium frames their content as stories and Quora frames it as answers. That is the main difference to the general public.</comment></comment>


IRS Loses E-mails from Six More Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380576/irs-has-lost-more-e-mails-eliana-johnson

<comment><USER2> Surprisingly, these are not "random" six employees, but "six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups"

<comment><USER3> Sometimes you don't realize it's gone until you go looking. It could be 6 missing emails from people of interest out of many many more people that are also missing emails, and that complete a random set of individuals.

That said, I have no idea. Just throwing it out there.

<comment><USER2> If I recall correctly, the Lerner's email loss was explained by the crash of _her_ computer. Thus, we are having a strange series of 7 computer crashes for employees involved in the scandal: "He ran in to my knife! He ran into my knife ten times!"</comment></comment></comment>


The target="_blank" vulnerability by example - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ben/the-targetblank-vulnerability-by-example <comment><USER3> \- Interesting that this has been posted six times [0] over the past 4 days

\- Earlier discussion [1] on the same topic posted elsewhere

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292)

</comment><comment><USER4> Most organizations don't see this as a valid vulnerability. If you read terms of most bug bounty programs, they almost always specify that window.opener is out of scope.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why on earth does target="_blank" expose window.opener to the new page - <USER2> opens up some mad tracking possibilities if you have JS in the opened page (e.g. Analytics or comments).

Seems the default should be rel="noopener"...

<comment><USER5> I've worked out why this is allowed... if you middle click (open in a new tab) a pop up that uses a link (but intercepts the event by default) window.opener will still work in the new tab. The sibling is right, this should be same domain only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I never knew about this API. Seems very ripe for exploitation; check the referrer for an incoming request and route the other tab to a mirrored version of the site, on a host you control, preferably with a "you've been logged out due to inactivity, enter your credentials" modal.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another demo page, with links to open bugs in various browsers: [https://mathiasbynens.github.io/rel- noopener/](https://mathiasbynens.github.io/rel-noopener/) (not all browsers implement the `rel="noopener"` attribute)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much work it would take to get real information...

</comment><comment><USER8> I followed the three steps below "To clarify" multiple times in different browsers and (3) did not work at all. I don't see the problem. This article has left me confused.

EDIT: Oh, seems like Instagram has fixed this after all. If you inspect the link on his Instagram profile, you will find _rel= "nofollow me noopener noreferrer"_ and if you remove that attribute, it works just as described in the blog. I learned something new.

<comment><USER9> Seems to be fixed now. On Instagram the link has rel="nofollow me noopener noreferrer"</comment></comment>


Dropbox - No release candidate for almost nine months and counting - <AUTHOR> http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=27724&replies=1#post-173170

<comment><USER2> Lesson learned: even if you build an amazing product that basically is magic and way better than anything else out there, there will still be assholes bitching about how you're just not doing enough to meet their inflated expectations.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Here I am thinking Dropbox is awesome because it's both stable and _just works_. Who knew a product needed to have a steady stream of feature updates until it subsumed the very operating system it sat on top of.

<comment><USER4> I have three computers running OS X. Currently Dropbox eats around 33% CPU on all of these modern machines. Am I the only one experiencing these problems?

<comment><USER3> Do you have processes that actively write to files in your Dropbox folder on a regular basis? Dropbox averages < 0.5% CPU on my Mac, but your mileage may vary. I do consider even that much somewhat odd considering that I'm a very occasional user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a member of the Dropbox team, I can say without a doubt that everyone on the Dropbox client team is working hard to make the next version of the Dropbox client as stable as possible before release. The Release Notes Page ( <https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes> ) shows that we have been making fixes to the next (testing) version of the client on a near daily basis for months.

In many ways the new client has been updated to be as stable if not more so than the current stable build. However, new features open new possibilities for bugs and we want to make sure that our software is bulletproof before we label it a stable build. Pushing the client out before completion would be far more dangerous in our opinion. I do apologize that we have not been able to release the latest build sooner, but I can assure you that we are working hard to get the current release ready.

While the client has been under development, we have been able to complete a large number of other features including mobile clients for all of the major handheld devices, an API for interacting with Dropbox as well as numerous improvements to the Dropbox web portal.

I can assure you (because I can see the client team right now) that they are working as hard as ever to get the current testing build ready for every one of our users.

</comment><comment><USER6> When we get users like this at TekPub we kindly refund all of their money and cancel their service - life is too short to deal with assholes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Regardless of what one thinks about the service vs. product discussion, it's hard to argue that no official Dropbox client released in 9 months is reasonable. Especially when important features are not in the current client (selective syncing, performance improvement...)

<comment><USER7> I don't see why it is prima facie unreasonable. I use plenty of applications which are at least nine months old (including the Dropbox client). None of them has failed due to old age yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Development clients are inherently unstable. If a dev client blows up on a client's machine and deletes all of his or her data - or releases it into the wild - the customer bears the full liability for having taken a chance on a dev client."

How is that any different with a client that isn't "beta" or "dev"? What are you going to do, bring a civil suit against Dropbox because a bug corrupted your data?

</comment><comment><USER9> I would venture to say that they have something very large in the works. I checked out their team page and they have quite a few employees. They have been funded and are also looking for new hires.

<http://www.dropbox.com/about>

Regardless, when you purchase something you are buying its current iteration, not something that you hope for it to one day be. This was alluded to in the comments of the original article and I thought it was worth repeating.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sure he was an arsehole about it but he had a question, I say this as a dropbox pro customer, closing the thread with the Happy syncin'! signoff comes across really badly for me, It would have take 20 seconds to say something like, we don't comment on releases or things were tougher than we thought they would be (Hell Valve delay every bloody release but at least they are upfront about it) but ignoring the issue and making a snappy comment just leaves a bad taste..

</comment><comment><USER11> That's only for the desktop client. They've been updating their mobile clients quite rapidly, as well as promoting their API allowing for awesome apps like PlainText (<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/plaintext>)</comment>