Start-Up Teaches Math to Americans, Indian-Style - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/indian-math-tutors-math-deficient-americans/

<comment><USER2> "For some reason, American kids seem to be willing to put in the work with athletics, but not put it in with the one subject that's going to matter more to their lives than any other activity."

"for some reason"? I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement. This is one of the ways in which popular culture lies to kids about likely outcomes, which distorts their ability to make rational decisions about the future.

<comment><USER3> Yes, part of the problem might be that mathematical achievement is not valued highly. But it cannot be the full explanation, since math is unpopular across the world, not just in the US. For example, I'm originally from Eastern Europe, one of the places where mathematical talent is supposedly valued highly, but I can tell you it absolutely isn't. I even went to a special math/programming-oriented high-school, and even there the cool kids were the ones that didn't seem to care about math at all, but instead had the looks/fashion/sports abilities.

Also, the comparison between American kids and Indian kids _in the US_ is not quite fair, since these Indians are a highly biased sample of the true Indian population.

So the difference must be in something else, too. My personal guess is that the math in the US schools must be just too "easy". So, if kids everywhere on average learn about 60% of the math they are taught, they will be better in countries where the math taught is more advanced.

<comment><USER4> Arithmetic is given a lot of importance early in a child's education in India. Kids learn multiplication tables (upto 10 atleast) even before they start their first year of school (1st standard).

This is so prevalent that reciting multiplication tables (the higher, the smarter you are) in front of guests, when you are 4-6, is a very common thing across all Indian cultures.

Extra math classes, like "Vedic mathematics", which provide shortcuts to faster arithmetic, are a rage in urban India.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but your examples do not truly reflect the situation out here. (I am not too sure how much time you have spent in India.)

My take on why an 'average' Indian kid is a little bit better than an 'average' American kid in math, is just because (s)he has done more of it and with a bit more rigor. Everyone needs to pass a mandatory math exam here (as part of what we call class Xth board exams), and only after doing that one gets a choice to pick a stream of subjects of his/her liking (that may or may not include math).

As everywhere, some kids do have trouble liking/understanding math, but they do not have much of an option initially and their parents also keep the ante up, on studies for this particular subject. (Of all the kids who are not able to clear the Xth board exams, the percentage flunking in math is the highest). Another reason that helps getting this subject more priority, is that for most of the better paying professions, it is a must. (Sadly, majors in humanities mostly have more trouble getting in to top earning bracket).

A similar example is about learning the English language. Kids in India do it more than kids in China/Japan, and hence do it better on an 'average'.

<comment><USER4> I have spent all my life in Bangalore, India and I'm nearing 30.

The Indian culture gives a lot of importance to having good math skills. If your mom asks you to get something from the neighbouring shop, you better have your math right. Kids are always taught to count the change and demand the correct change after a transaction.

So, addition and subtraction have to have on the spot without the help of a electronic teller. Perhaps that can give an insight into why I insist that the Indian culture requires you to be sharp with your basic math.

I have alternate story about maximum "fails" in the board exams. A lot of students dread Hindi (an artificially imposed third language in South India) and to a lesser extent English.

Yeah, I agree with your premise that good secondary math skills are a result of ultra-competitive nature of college admissions and job market. But, it still doesn't take away the fact that a student with average overall score in India will be better off than an average student in US when it comes to "usable" mathematics.

<comment><USER6> "A lot of students dread Hindi (an artificially imposed third language in South India) and to a lesser extent English"

Artificially imposed? Of the four states that make up South India, _one_ state (Tamil Nadu) considers Hindi "artificially imposed.

Three of the four(Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh) have no problems with Hindi and don't consider it an "imposition".

Careful with the snap judgments!

<comment><USER4> Just because the state syllabus mandates study of Hindi as an essential requirement to pass high school, it does not make the language welcome in all parts of south India.

The urban south-Indians learn Hindi, when necessary, by osmosis and from media.

AFAIK, passing hindi (score > 35/100) is no longer a criterion for getting one's high school diploma. Thank $deity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My response/plug: [http://geekstack.com/blog/indian-math-online-helps-you- study...](http://geekstack.com/blog/indian-math-online-helps-you-study-like- its-bangalore/)

</comment><comment><USER8> So... I spent the first 10 years of my life in India going through its education system and am currently a mathematics major at Caltech. From my experience, the Indian education system is heavily geared towards attaining high _average_ output. The education system in the US is much more laissez- fair in this regard. It allows students to adjust to their needs and capabilities. Neither system is perfect. In the Indian system, the exceptionally smart students get shafted because they are bogged down by the rigid and usually rote curriculum. For the average person, arithmetic is sufficient but for an advanced major, giving them problems is crushing (I speak from personal experience). The complete lack of intellectual stimulus is very counterproductive. On the other hand, in the US system, a large portion of the students slack off and fail to use their opportunities. Going through the US education system has put me years ahead of where I would have been if I was still in India but along the way, I have seen many students miss out and just sit on the sidelines. [1]

This startup can be immensely helpful but please, don't see this as a begin and end all for mathematics education. If a student is capably of grasping the axiomatic principles of mathematics, such a learning path is infinitely preferable to the do-lots-of-problems method. [2]

[1] This is pretty much the exact same gripe that I have with programs like Kumon which give students lots and lots of problems without giving a solid mathematical foundation for _why_ these problems behave as they do. For more information, Lockhart's Lament (<http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html>) is an excellent essay written by a mathematician on this topic.

[2] This is not to say that an axiomatic mathematics education is for everybody. For one thing, a student may not be interested or capable of such an education (just like how I am completely incapable of remembering anything). However, for students interested in mathematics, it is the way to go.

<comment><USER9> I totally disagree with this! It isn't a fault of the curriculum, it's the fault of your teachers. I had my entire HS/college education in India. And if I may say so, I would put myself in the "exceptional" category as well: I was in the international math olympiad, and rarely scored less than 100% in school tests.

Anyway, I found the math classes thoroughly enjoyable. The teachers pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't disrupt the class. I'd usually be a few chapters ahead, or helping out the kid next to me, or something like that. Very often, the curriculum was challenging even for me. We had Fermat's infinite descent in the eighth grade! I distinctly remember ruler and compass construction problems in my ninth grade that I'd have great trouble solving even now.

The good thing was, the super-hard parts that I've mentioned were all optional and were never on the exams. It worked out perfectly -- students who were both smarter than average and self-motivated would spend most of our time on those parts. My teachers were happy to answer my questions about that stuff after class, even though it was irrelevant as far as our grades were concerned.

One teacher in particular was amazing. She rewarded outside-the-box thinking, and if there was more than one way to solve a problem, she let us present them all. She acknowledged when she was wrong. Damn, writing this has made me all nostalgic and want to find her and thank her :-)

One time, I was working through a textbook that was two or three grade levels ahead. I had a question that she couldn't answer right away. She went home, did her research, and helped me out the next day. How awesome is that?

We had one horrendously bad teacher. They fired her after two months.

Some other great memories.. we all learned to program in the fifth grade. That was tons of fun. A computer cost more than a building back then in India :-) Vector calculus in the ninth grade. And so on.

Of course, everything except math and science was a disaster, but there's no way there was anything wrong with the math curriculum. I'm quite aware that 90% of my friends at other schools had completely unmotivated teachers, but again, not a fault of the curriculum.

<comment><USER5> I agree with the point that the teachers make a huge difference, especially in the formative years. (Not only in math, but all subjects).

I distinctly remember a few who made subjects like Sanskrit, Organic Chemistry, History (that itself is interesting in any case) appeal much more, and never let the curriculum dictate or slow down the learning process of fast moving kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When you look at the numbers, math scores in the U.S. are much more influenced by demographics than by teaching styles.</comment>


Apple Is Removing 'Do Not Track' from Safari - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/apple-is-removing-do-not-track-from-safari-1832400768 <comment><USER2> The contempt that tracking companies showed to this feature killed it. But it also provides the perfect ethical justification for me blocking trackers and their ads. You didn't listen to me when I politely asked you to respect my privacy, so now it's scorched earth.

<comment><USER3> That's how I feel. We warned them that they should either fix their ads or we would take more drastic steps. They did not listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Save you from reading the article 1) Nobody obeys it 2) It's actually being used as a heuristic to track users through fingerprinting

<comment><USER5> If (2) was a huge issue for them, wouldn't removing the UA header help tremendously as well?

(Sure, you'd know it was an apple device, but that's still less than currently. It's also less if other browsers followed suit.)

<comment><USER6> iOS user agents aren't very identifying. Despite having multiple version numbers in them, all they pretty much tell you is 1) what type of ios device it is (eg. iphone or ipad) and 2) what ios version it is (mobile safari is updated along with ios, so the version numbers are pretty much the same for the same ios release). Considering that most ios users are up to date, you'll be hard pressed to squeeze more than a few bits of entropy from it.

<comment><USER7> >Considering that most ios users are up to date,

That's what makes it so valuable really. You get little to no entropy for a large portion of users, but you get a huge amount of entropy about the people who aren't.

<comment><USER8> So you get amazing entropy on my grandma, which is quite possibly not worth the processing time you spent to track her, in terms of ad revenue or marketing campaigns. Sure - that's probably not the case in most of the cases, but it sure pollutes your otherwise good dataset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was a stupid premise to begin with. "Oh, please, here's all of my stuff, but I'm _asking_ you to not track me. I trust you won't" vs "I don't trust you and block all 3rd party cookies and scripts from being accessed by my machine except those I know and trust and explicitly allow through"

It's like leaving your door unlocked and with a sign on it asking criminals to obey your privacy and not enter vs having a lock on the door and not allowing them through until they knock, you can verify who they are and decide at that point whether to open the door to them.

<comment><USER10> You can do both though - limit the amount of information you do send _and_ ask those that do respect it not to track the information you _must_ send.

<comment><USER11> Its a completely pointless setting. No user would chose to be tracked and no tracker wants to shut down their business. You don't need a setting for it because everyone wants the same thing.

<comment><USER12> I have no issues with websites tracking my usage, as long as the tracking scripts aren't making my browsing experience miserable. And, especially for things like affiliate links, I'd like to make sure that the people that influence my decision to purchase an item get some credit for it.

<comment><USER11> >I'd like to make sure that the people that influence my decision to purchase an item get some credit for it.

This is a negative user experience. Affiliate links mean that people try to recommend things they get paid to recommend rather than what they actually think is best

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> W3C changed the DNT Candidate Recommendation to a "Note" now, and says that the working group is closed: [https://github.com/w3c/dnt/commit/5d85d6c3d116b5eb29fddc6935...](https://github.com/w3c/dnt/commit/5d85d6c3d116b5eb29fddc69352a77d87dfd2310) (the page is here: [https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking- dnt/](https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/))

If the other major browsers follow suit in considering it "expired" and remove it, I'm curious what effect this will have on the requirement in the California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA) for sites to state how they respond to the signal (more info: [https://iapp.org/news/a/how-should-i- respond-to-californias-...](https://iapp.org/news/a/how-should-i-respond-to- californias-do-not-track-requirements/)).

Will sites legally need to continue explaining how they respond to a signal that effectively no longer exists? Most of them already just said "we don't do anything based on this signal", but that will be even weirder.

</comment><comment><USER14> It was a well intentioned toothless innovation that didn't work. I'm pretty happy with Safari's content filters (using FireFox Focus) that actually help me from being tracked.

<comment><USER15> 1Bocker X is more efficient. I tried both that and Firefox Focus.

Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > almost no websites actually honor the request not to be tracked because the > government never forced them to comply with it.

Damnit Gizmodo. You had the first part right, that the setting is ignored, then you had to go and make up the reason. These blurred lines between reporting and opinion are the embodiment of fake news. There is a primary fact or two and then subjective garbage.

</comment><comment><USER17> The way this is written makes it obvious that the author has an agenda altogether and dislikes the idea of this feature. It's written with a very condescending undertone. Nothing wrong with that of course, just might be nice to be transparent around it.

2 minutes I wont get back..

<comment><USER18> People do tend to dislike features that don't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A shame, although I can see the logic behind the decision. We use this on sites we build so we don't even need to show those visitors a cookie notice, and just assume they don't want Google Analytics turned on.

</comment><comment><USER20> the "do not track" setting probably helps advertisers track users because it creates a more unique configuration/fingerprint... personally, I still use it in Firefox but probably should not since there are no consequences for them if they don't honor it.

<comment><USER21> Its true, I don't know why you are being downvoted

<comment><USER22> I haven't down voted but I would imagine it's because it's just repeating the article and some what obvious

<comment><USER20> if it is so obvious, why did hundreds of engineers decide to implement it anyways?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Artists Create Scenes For Google Maps Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1600600/artists_create_scenes_for_google_maps_users/index.html

<comment><USER2> Cool that Google hopped in on this one... reminds me of Improv Everywhere.</comment>


FCC ends a rule requiring broadcasters to have a local studio - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-24/broadcasters-no-longer-need-a-local-studio-as-fcc-changes-rule?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social <comment><USER2> "Local" must have been vaguely enforced at best for decades now. 97.7FM in the SF Bay Area (now KFOG's alternate South Bay channel) was a _Los Altos_ registry clear back to when local jazz station KPEN on 97.7 had a studio in Mayfield Mall (demolished 30+ years ago).</comment>


Ask HN: board control after series A? - <AUTHOR>

See http://paulgraham.com/control.html, from 2010<p>How common is it now (3 years later) for founders to keep control of their company (of their board) after a series A? <comment><USER2> I think it depends on what you mean by keep control? I'm still the majority shareholder, however, much of it will come down to the terms in the shareholder agreement (such as [investor] consent matters etc.).</comment>


Django 1.3 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2011/mar/23/13/

<comment><USER2> It's been fun watching these features play out in libraries over the last year.

I particularly like the idea of TemplateResponse - the earliest implementation I saw was in simonw's:

[https://github.com/simonw/django- openid/blob/master/django_o...](https://github.com/simonw/django- openid/blob/master/django_openid/response.py#L4)

This approach makes template rendering much more flexible!

For example, it would be easy to swap out a template for a mobile one ... or to A/B test a template. Or choose the content type of the output (HTML, JSON etc.)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was really pleased to see that they've taken that concept and turned it in to a real, tested, documented feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if they were tempted to give it the codename "WordPress"

<comment><USER5> hm?

<comment><USER6> Wordpress initially gave their latest release the code name Django (they always use jazz musicians as a theme), but quickly changed it to Reinhardt after a few polite complaints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So as someone who has just started my first Django project, is there any reason not to immediately switch to 1.3?

<comment><USER8> Read the release notes:

<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.3/>

If there's no conflicting code changes compared to what you've already written, upgrade away!

If there are changes needed to support the new version you'll have to weigh the time needed to implement the changes to the new features/improvements in the new version; is it worth it? Only you can make that decision.

<comment><USER9> Considering it's his first project and he just started, there's no reason to not be using the latest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, where's the "Congrats on Shipping" cake from the Ruby on Rails devs?

edit: Or maybe one from CakePHP would be more appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations to all the team,

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't believe it... not one comment telling the django guys to quit celebrating and get back to work on a version that supports Python 3? :-)

Seriously, Adrian, Jacob, and the django team, I love your product. I actually just bought a SECOND copy of your book (available free on the web). What's wrong with this picture?

<comment><USER13> I really want downvote you.

Excuse me for arrogance, but it's not their fault that Django (or Pylons or Flask) can't work on Python 3.

Look at <http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/foreword/>

"Because of that we strongly recommend against using Python 3 for web development of any kind and wait until the WSGI situation is resolved. You will find a couple of frameworks and web libraries on PyPI that claim Python 3 support, but this support is based on the broken WSGI implementation provided by Python 3.0 and 3.1 which will most likely change in the near future.

Werkzeug and Flask will be ported to Python 3 as soon as a solution for WSGI is found, and we will provide helpful tips how to upgrade existing applications to Python 3. Until then, we strongly recommend using Python 2.6 and 2.7 with activated Python 3 warnings during development, as well as the Unicode literals __future__ feature."

<comment><USER12> I agree (except for the part where you wanted to down-vote me). I wasn't trying to say it was their fault. It was more a comment about other comments, not about the django guys.

I love django. But I also I can't wait for the day when we can quit talking about Python 2, and that Python 3 will be the obvious choice for ALL environments.

Considering Python 3K discussions go back to 2006 (PEP 3000) or earlier, and Python 3 was released in 2008, and we're still probably years away from closing the book on Python 2, it's just amazing how long it takes to "turn a battleship". This transition to Python 3 might be a decade or more, from start to finish! amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Glad to see it!

Some of the new stuff is really cool, and means I won't have to rely on external libraries anymore (like passing context variables in template includes).

Also, the new logging functionality is really great!

Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats to the Django team! I know you guys have worked very hard to put this together. I've been waiting for this final release for quite some time, having tried the beta release since launched.

</comment><comment><USER16> Class-based generic view is a nice addition. I remember when I was learning Django and going through the official tutorial, that was one part that took me a while to understand. Kudos guys!

<comment><USER17> People have been using the term 'class-based views' to describe the new feature but am I right in thinking this only affects generic views?

<comment><USER18> No, you can make your own class based views with the 1.3 codebase. The docs describe them as replacing Generic Views, but nothing stops you from creating your own class hierarchy that inherits from the base TemplateView ([http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/class-based- views/#...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/class-based- views/#simple-generic-views))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They backported the Python 2.7 unittest module to Python 2.4 and included it in Django? It is getting enterprisey. Maybe with Django 2.0 they will ship their own Python version?

<comment><USER20> Mostly when we do this, it's because there's a really useful/helpful stdlib module that wasn't standard for one of the older Python versions we support. We check first to see if you have the stdlib version (or in some cases a third-party distribution of it), then fall back to our bundled copy.

In many cases we've had direct help from the maintainers of the stdlib modules in doing this, so saying that "we" backported it isn't particularly accurate.

(the big exception to all this was PyDispatcher, which we originally included verbatim, then essentially ended up forking to suit our needs, to the point where I don't think it's really the same library anymore)

We also do some similar but smaller-scale things to smooth issues in older Pythons or to enhance standard language features (for example, we monkeypatch Python 2.4's copy module, and ship our own implementation of parts of os.path to handle Unicode properly). Poke around in django/utils for the sordid history of all the stuff we've worked around in this manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congrats to the Django team! :) I'm in love with your API.

</comment><comment><USER22> Huge congrats to the Django Core team, and anyone who helped contribute to the project. It just gets more fun to use each year that passes!

</comment><comment><USER23> Congrats. Excellent work all around. Very interested in checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just in time for my next project, thanks!!!</comment>


Applying Dan Ariely's TED talk to software development - <AUTHOR> http://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/33/4

<comment><USER2> The TED Talk [0] being referenced is excellent.

What rang particularly true to me wasn't harder work feeling more rewarding, but that people are willing to work longer and for less direct pay when they see that their work is valued or at least not immediately discarded.

0: [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes exactly. In the startup world, we build products for users - they are the ultimate arbiters of a product's value. It doesn't matter whether the value is delivered by working two weeks or two years - all that matters to the user is the value delivered.

So smart founders should find ways of getting to that value delivery point via the shortest, cheapest most efficient path. Because that way you win over your competitors who might not.

BTW, this is also why companies led by technical founders often beat those that are not. If you're a non-technical founder, you are beholden to the techno-priesthood, which may care about building things in the most perfect way, which often ends up being an inefficient path.

Note that this is not meant as a knock on writing good maintainable and elegant code. It is more an affirmation of minimizing work that does not move you closer to the point of value delivery for your user.

</comment><comment><USER4> > "Embrace simplicity in your product and in your code. The value is in what > gets used, not what gets built."

There are all sorts of values. Usage value is only one of. If all that gets built is judged by what gets used, then a lot of great things won't get built.

<comment><USER3> There is a huge difference between building a product/startup and building something for the sake of building it. The first almost exclusively lives or dies by the value perceived by its users.

<comment><USER4> 1\. "The value is in what gets used" 2\. "the value perceived by its users."

Those are two types of value and they are, like, totally, not the same...

<comment><USER5> there is also marketing value. features that may rarely get used but many potential customers won't give your product a second glance if you don't have them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoyed Dan's book Predictably Irrational. If you have any interest in human motivation and rationality, I'd recommend you pick up a copy: [http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised- Expande...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded- Edition/dp/0061353248)

<comment><USER7> He also has an excellent course on Coursera on this subject:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon](https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome analysis!

Questions applicable to every hard working startup:

      + Do we solve a real problem?

      + Do we have customers who find our solution useful?

      + Can we make enough money to make our solution a sustainable business?

Questions for the execution team:

      + Will we know when and how people hear about our solution?

      + Will we be able to understand if and how they use our solution?

      + Can we change things quickly enough to improve our solution (based on learning)?

      + Can we measure the quality (usage) of our changes?

      + Can we reduce amount of work and test for need earlier (think MVP)?</comment>


Show HN: Startup Jobs for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://startupdeveloperjobs.com <comment><USER3> One thing I really like from a design perspective is the fact that you list the role (and Language) first. Often times I care a lot less about the company than about the position and stack I'd be applying for. Unless it's a particular well known startup most have likely never heard of the company anyway so it makes a lot of sense to not have that information be the focus of the listing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat site! Usability note, I would add something to catch all key strokes. When using the search bar(which is pretty cool looking) I started typing, searched, then I hit delete to clear the prompt and was sent back. Granted this is normal behaviour of any website, but given it's a command prompt, I'm used to it being always ready for my typing.

<comment><USER5> There is a search bar??

Let me look again... oh, wow, I totally ignored that, thinking it was just a design element to break up the header from the jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you have more than a billion dollars then you shouldn't call yourself a startup. The term has lost most of its meaning.

Maybe 'internet' 'high tech'.

</comment><comment><USER7> Add Groovy and Grails filter too. They don't fit in Java. Similar is the case for Scala.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those of us outside the Bay and not looking to relocate, the ability to explicitly filter by location would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great work. I agree with others that maybe Uber and Instacart aren't exactly startups, but I'm sure candidates can filter that on their own.

One minor suggestion: when posting a job, perhaps indicate the 300 character limit in the "why should candidates apply" textbox title, and maybe a little character counter would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Simple and Great Site. Is there any way to filter startups who can sponsor Visas or open for remote.

<comment><USER11> You may want to checkout my repo [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome- remote-job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

<comment><USER12> Your repo is awesome ! Thanks for sharing all these stuffs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jobs in Berlin! sweet! If you don't mind maybe I'll index you on _my_ meta- search engine [https://englishjobs.de/](https://englishjobs.de/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks great! We started doing something similar three weeks ago at [http://jobsBCN.com](http://jobsBCN.com), but with the idea of covering all job openings from startups in Barcelona city (Europe).

We have more than 250 job openings for engineers (+250 for biz) in more than 160 startup companies in Barcelona. Salaries are shown for some of them.

It could be interesting to see how different technologies rank against salaries, or regarding job openings. I hope to find the time to show some statistics soon.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really good! Love the clean style. We tried to do something similar a while ago with [http://www.zonino.co.uk](http://www.zonino.co.uk) although we scraped the jobs from startups sites which works quite nicely. Haven't updated for a ages though. You could consider doing something similar. I echo the comments about location filters! Please make that a priority!

</comment><comment><USER16> awesome, i subscribed to several search options. if there is a way to subscribe to several at once rather than each individually (with activation) perhaps it would be nicer. You seem like someone who can easily put that in. Great work. Also i think "remote" should be a search option up there, it has many results. Cheers.

Edit: The suggestions at the bottom of the detail page is perfect. it's what kept me on board.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! This is a planned feature.

<comment><USER17> In particular, I'm not sure if it matters, but I wouldn't mind knowing if "remote" also meant, say "remote from canada" was ok? Maybe "US Remote" and "Global Remote" tags?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This would be significantly more useful with the ability to filter by location. Believe it or not, not everybody lives in San Francisco and New York.

</comment><comment><USER19> > OpenDNS

> 23andMe

> Uber

Does startup just mean company in USA?

</comment><comment><USER20> AirPair's listing in HTML/CSS includes:

Machine learning, Spam and relevance detection, NLP problems

Not sure that these would really fit, but it could just be me.

</comment><comment><USER21> For posting a job, you might want to consider having the languages as tags (select many) rather than a category (select only one).

Edit: also, it's not clear if clicking Save will post the job immediately or not. After clicking around, I see that there are published and inactive sections.

<comment><USER22> I disagree with the select many suggestion. So many job postings are full of popular languages but when you actually look at the job its clear that there is 1 language you will be using

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish there were an equivalent for finding internships. One suggestion: integrate with Google Maps, allow the user to outline an area and show jobs in that area. I found myself searching the names of major cities in my area.

<comment><USER24> A friend of mine used to work on InternMatch, it might be useful for you ([https://www.internmatch.com](https://www.internmatch.com))

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Pretty sweet. Are all these entries posted by companies themselves or did you do the posting? I love how it's neatly organised by language. Are you planning on adding any other layers/filters?

Edit - Why isn't this in Show HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated to be in Show HN :) - <USER2>

Yes I'm planning to add City/Location filters as well as advanced search option where you can see all available filters.

There is for example also [https://startupdeveloperjobs.com/f/0/Erlang](https://startupdeveloperjobs.com/f/0/Erlang) but you can't see it since it has not enough jobs

Edit: To answer your other question. Jobs are both entered by companies and also added by me manually.

<comment><USER26> As-is the site is not useful to me, but it has potential. The simple layout is awesome, not cluttered but still presents a bunch of info.

Location filters are must-have - whether it's just a sort by name so all of the $MY_CITY jobs are in one place, as a true filter so I only see one location or as some kind of location-based sort-by-distance to give me the best options first.

Congrats on shipping!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is the best job postings site I've seen in a long time. Bravo.

<comment><USER7> Same thought here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great app ! Maybe you can add on the top of the list the number of results like in every search query ... so the user can estimate how much time he is going to scroll down...

</comment><comment><USER29> Great site! Just a little confusion when searching. I thought there is no searching for a few seconds until I accidentally pressed a key on my keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like the layout. There are many sites like this, but this one is easy to use and gave me the results I wanted fairly quickly.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm getting an SSL cert error, just FYI.

</comment><comment><USER32> I was impressed by the number of listings (and really interesting seeming listings) -- great job.

</comment><comment><USER33> Really like the commandline-esque search bar

</comment><comment><USER34> This looks great! Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here is the Node.js? =(

</comment><comment><USER36> Like the interface. Not sure if SoundCloud is a _startup_ though.

<comment><USER37> The venture backed startup Uber

...

ugh

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> No salaries listed = useless

<comment><USER39> I'll have to disagree with you on this when you say "useless". Most sites don't post a salary, and for those few that do, a range is listed.

I like using [https://angel.co/jobs](https://angel.co/jobs) to find those companies that have raised $ and currently hiring. One thing about is that I'm not really sure how frequently these startups have the time to update this on Angellist.</comment></comment>


Mail Loop From Hell (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dbrgn.ch/2012/7/29/mail-loop-from-hell/ <comment><USER2> We had a Social email loop when I worked for a company with 33k employees. Someone sent out a newsletter to the company ALL mailbox, which had some tips for winterizing, and asked mostly rhetorically "What are your tips for preparing for winter?"

A handful people replied to the entire company w/o realizing it - stuff like "Well I'm in California, I don't have to worry about it. Ha!".

I think it would have ended there. But some grumpy programmer in NYC of course decided to reply "People. Stop replying-all!" One would think being a programmer he'd be smart enough to reply to just the people who had unintentionally spammed the whole company. But no. He spammed the whole company.

And after that it was on. Dozens of emails a minute. Tons of replies like "Please take me off this list." Tons more grumpy people complaining. Big bosses pulling rank "Ok I am Vice President of muckety muck and we need to stop this replying all right now!" And the best: "Stop replying all to everyone to tell them to stop replying all!" \- replied to all of course. O_o

It didn't help that a lot of people worked in labs and shared computers. So they'd log on and see a ton of emails w/o knowing what happened. By the end of the week it finally died down. Then the next Monday people came back from vacation, saw 500+ emails, and of course asked to be taken off the list. This went on for weeks before it finally trickled to a halt.

Why anyone was allowed to spam the entire company, or the address couldn't be blocked, I have no idea. I was tempted to use it to fish for a tennis partner. And then apologize and claim ignorance of course.

<comment><USER3> > I think it would have ended there. But some grumpy programmer in NYC of > course decided to reply "People. Stop replying-all!" One would think being a > programmer he'd be smart enough to reply to just the people who had > unintentionally spammed the whole company. But no. He spammed the whole > company.

It's probably _because_ he felt that he was in a position of expertise and authority that he tried to pre-empt the problem by telling everyone not to reply to the list. One last message to all, then the problem would be definitively solved, or so the logic would go.

<comment><USER4> If he had such expertise he should have sent his reply with all the recipients on bcc. Then even if a few people do reply they only go to him and things fizzle quite quickly.

I don't quite why so few people break reply storms in this way. Bcc isn't _that_ mysterious.

<comment><USER3> The reason is that a bcc'd message doesn't stop people from replying to earlier messages in the thread, whether or not they are using a threading email client. Threaded email reading interfaces probably make your strategy more effective, but they don't eliminate the possibility that people will respond to earlier messages, defeating your "firebreak" message (the more addressees, the more likely it is).

<comment><USER4> That's true, but it definitely works a charm in Outlook shops — Outlook tries to get you to reply to the latest message in a number of ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another story about inappropriate emails, luckily I wasn't the perpetrator here.

It was the late 90's. Email systems were generally wide open for exploitation. (It was the golden age of Spam)

I myself had figured out that it was trivial to send a message and make it look like it came from _anyone_. Simple:

      telnet <server> 25
      HELO
      MAIL FROM: <whatever you want>
      RCPT TO: <recipient>
      DATA <body contents>
      QUIT

I used this a few times to mess with friends, send them messages from God, etc. Good times.

Thing is, I wasn't the only one who'd figured this out, and the university had an "All Users" list with only 3 or 4 people whitelisted to send it messages.

Someone else knew about the forged FROM scheme, and _speculated_ that the "All Users" list didn't do any fancy verification of the "From" address.

This speculation was correct. And the University President was one of those 3 or 4 people whose email address was whitelisted.

The problem for this student was that they thought to themselves, "No, it couldn't be that easy..." And proceeded to send a test message.

It was that easy, and their test message sent successfully. The contents were... explosive. First, it cancelled all classes for the day (of course). Had it stopped there, this story might have ended as just an ultimately harmless prank. But it went further.

The message went on to describe how the president, with this free time from classes, would make herself available to provide, um, carnal knowledge of a very uncomfortable place at a particular time & location.

It didn't take long. IP addresses were statically assigned. It was easy to locate the offending computer, which in this case was in a computer lab.

So, cross reference login times against that IP address, right? Nope, not necessary: The computer was the one reserved only for the lab assistant on duty. Expulsion was rapid. In an interview with the student newspaper, the student decried, "I didn't think it would work!"

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of the time I was working at the Air Force Academy hospital in the basement warehouse in the mid 2000s. There were a few computers, and I wanted to mess with one of my coworkers (a senior airman) who was sitting at the desk in front of me.

There's a Windows command "net send" where you can make a pop up dialogue appear on a user's computer with a custom message. The problem was, I didn't know his exact username, so I did "net send * 'What's up dog??'". The dialogue popped up on his computer, he looked confused, and I was giddy. So I went further and sent a few more, including "You suck at computers" and "Your computer has been infected with a virus, sucka". It wasn't until a few minutes later when some visibly distressed IT personnel rushed into the warehouse and started interrogating people and checking the computers one by one that I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. Apparently the dialogues were popping up on _every single computer in the entire hospital_ , including the commander's (a full colonel).

I'm sure there would have been more disciplinary action had I not been a high school civilian intern. Everyone started calling me "Neo" from then on, but in a derogatory way.

<comment><USER7> I did the same thing in highschool, but on a loop... On a timer... Boy did I get in trouble.

<comment><USER8> I did exactly the same with the loop and net send when I was 13-14 years old. The school was connected to the city's network somehow so the IT department was not very happy. They figured out it was me but were nice enough to just say "if you ever want to test something like that again, just check with us first" and I got an internship with them the following year. I'm very grateful for their gentle and pedagogical approach.

<comment><USER9> I was about 17 years old and IRC was very hot at the time in school. We had a, for the time, very fast 512Kbps internet connection, and I had gotten used to be able to "ping people out from IRC", no idea why I would do that, but hey I was 17. I was experimenting with ever bigger packets, until I hit something very close to 2^16 but not just.

Until the friendly admin just suddenly stood behind me, tapped my shoulder and said: "If you step away from the computer, let me look at what you did here, there will be no repercussions for doing shit you were not supposed to on a school computer".

Turns out I managed to send a "ping of death" and the network gear in our own school had just died. Internet was so unreliable back then that I just assumed things were a bit slow....

<comment><USER5> I like this approach. Kids are going to test their limits, try things out of a natural curiosity of "what if..." without always understanding the consequences. The whole "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Dealing with it as a teachable moment seems the best way to go for minor infractions lime this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not a loop from hell, but let's not stop the procrastination loop: The 500 miles sendmail story still fascinates me, to this day: [http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles](http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles)

there is even a faq: [http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail- faq.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html)

<comment><USER11> I thought of this story a few weeks ago when I was using VS Code on an old machine and couldn't get the linter to work on longer files. Very similar problem and solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> At work, we had a mail loop once; a girl from accounting had ordered toner for our printers last thing before she went on vacation and enabled an auto reply on her mailbox.

Five minutes after she left the office, the order confirmation arrived, sent from email@example.com. Her mailbox sent an auto-reply. Our mail server sent her an error message, telling her that her reply had not been delivered. To which her mailbox happily replied with the same auto-reply mail...

When I walked into the office on Monday, her mailbox had accumulated around 50,000 of those mails. Fun times.

<comment><USER13> In the early days of "exchange" ... the email client. I discovered auto replies.

Very first thing I thought of was "What if two clients have auto replies set?"

So naturally I set one up, my cube neighbor set one up. I sent an email to my cube neighbor ... and fairly quickly email was down company wide for a good afternoon.

<comment><USER14> Why didn't anyone say anything when they were implementing this feature. It seems kind of obvious, not even with hindsight.

<comment><USER13> IIRC rules such as out of office (I'm not sure "rules" really existed). Were client side only... the server didn't have the option (or at least it wasn't automatic) to evaluate bad rules / out of office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Back when I was working at an SMS related company I managed to accidentally infinite loop sending myself text messages. The aggregator and AT&T had no issues, but my iPhone became completely unresponsive to touch as I saw the notification badge quickly ramp up from 1 to tens of thousands. If I remember correctly I had to wait a few hours for the messages to be delivered and processed by the phone and then wiped my device.

</comment><comment><USER16> A similar story from Microsoft: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me- too/)

>So those 15,000,000 email messages collectively consumed 195,000,000,000 bytes of bandwidth. Yes, 195 gigabytes of bandwidth bouncing around between the email servers.

<comment><USER17> That's pretty good!

Almost as good as breaking all internet e-mail for the whole world in August of 1996: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/16/who_me/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/16/who_me/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once made a mistake, but it wasn't a just a loop, it was recursive. I was working in an old version of FOCUS, a reporting language, mixed with DCL. (This was a VMS environment)

The details are fuzzy now, but IIRC I misplaced a single "GOTO" line of code. The result was doubly recursive: Each person on the list got the message once for every person on the list, with the content of previous recipients concatenated to the message.

So: person 1 got the message once. Then person 1 & 2 got the message again, only person 2's content was appended to person 1. The person 1, 2 & 3 got the message, with 3 appended to 2, and 2 & 3 appended to 1, and so on.

I was very lucky that it was an old VMS environment with low disk quotas, so my "sent" folder ballooned before the full list could run. I think I got through about 130 recipients, which came out to about 8000 messages.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not the same kind of loop, but a few years ago I had to quickly fix email sending in some PHP service. Being rusty in PHP, I at least managed to write a for loop iterating over the list and send mails. Or so I thought. I had forgot "$" in front of the "i" in the for-header, making it never terminate, since of course that's still valid php.

Luckily it was only my private email in the test-list. But I still got so many thousands of mails my Gmail account was blocked for days. Also lucky this didn't affect the delivery of our future mail (not blacklisted).

</comment><comment><USER19> There was a time when overnight I received 200 copies of an email in my inbox. The emails were sent manually, typos, delays and all. Very industrious individual.

I was discussing this with a colleague of mine the next day and it transpired that they'd recently taken delivery of two DEC Alpha workstations. They were both sitting on his desk, being configured for actual work.

We set up a system using .forward files where DEC Alpha 1 would forward an email to DEC Alpha 2. On DEC Alpha 2 we set up the same in reverse.

We sent an email to DEC Alpha 1 and CC'd in our individual.

We let it run for 5 seconds.

In that time the two workstations, doing nothing other than sending email, managed a combined 25k of messages.

We never did hear from that person again.

These days when I think back about that, it was probably one of the early DOS attacks. We were a little shocked how well it worked.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some years ago I run into a e-mail loop.

An e-mail request is sent to a marketing e-mail service. For a specific e-mail notification, we do not receive a confirmation from the marketing e-mail service that the e-mail reached the recipient. So our service re-sends the e-mail.

This goes on for several days. It turned out a filter did not let the notification reach our end. By the time we figured it out, someone received thousands of the same marketing e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds be of the classic Microsoft Bedlam DL3 story: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me- too/)

</comment><comment><USER22> You can still do stuff like that today. My friend broke Yahoo and gmail. Unfortunately, we didn't document the procedure very well, so the following, from my personal notes on the incident, (with handles changed to protect my friend) is all I got:

      How name_surname broke yahoo mail (and also gmail)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==
      - 21/03/17
      > She doesn't quite remember what she did exactly but:
        a) She went into firstname.lastname@example.com and added another yahoo mail box-
           email@example.com.
        b) This didn't seem to work (?) so she went into email@example.com
           and added firstname.lastname@example.com as a mailbox.
        c) Then she went into gmail and added firstname.lastname@example.com to it
        d) And finally she imported mail and contacts from both yahoo accounts
           into gmail.

        > The result: in email@example.com you can see the email@example.com
          mailbox which contains a email@example.com mailbox, which contains an
          firstname.lastname@example.com mailbox, but also email@example.com contains a
          mailbox called firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com contains a
          mailbox called email@example.com. And in gmail, all the email
          imported from firstname.lastname@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com have a very
          long listing of all the mailboxes in which they exist, which is the two
          yahoo mailboxes repeated several times. That's _many_ times.

        > Of course, when she tried to delete the mailboxes, whereas she only had
          5 messages it looked like there were 35. They were all duplicates,
          obviously.

<comment><USER23> It's hard to read on mobile due to your formatting, but based on knowledge I have of both (and lack of details in your story), I think the most your friend can claim is "broke my ymail/gmail", not broke either service.

<comment><USER22> Sorry about the formatting. Yes, she broke it for her, not everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love these sorts of stories. This is also one of the things that HN seems to aggregate and bubble up better than any other forum/aggregator for me.

Thank you for the link, and for the post on your site.

</comment><comment><USER25> Somebody managed to find a low level PDL that referenced nearly everyone in the company globally. Just the reply-all "I'm not sure this as anything to do with me, please take me off your DL" mails forced the servers to be taken down and nearly five hours of global mail handling was wiped clean... it was about seven hours before accounts started acting normally again. Sorta amusing from the random employee view.

<comment><USER26> This sort of thing was surprisingly common at my old job. Someone would find a list that seemed relevant, ask a question on it, and not realize the list had as a sublist something like basically all of software engineering. Then people would reply-all to that asking to be taken off the list that they didn't need to be on…

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A few years back I had mail to an address forwarding to a team at a different company. It was used to cc them on tickets, basically so they could make changes on their side when certain requests came in. At some point they decided to forward these directly into their own ticket system. Each email from our ticket system would forward and land in their own ticket system that would strip off the identifiers from our ticket system and create a new ticket which would reply to our ticket system, creating a new ticket on our side and so on. Unfortunately that queue on our side wasn't in use by humans so no one saw the exponential mail storm building. Many mail servers have relay loop detection based on IDs in the headers but reply loops are a different beast. Once we realized what was going on it was simple enough to black hole the various addresses involved but it was pretty cool to watch our ticket and mail systems DOSing each other in real time.

</comment><comment><USER28> I love these kind of stories this should be on bash.org

<comment><AUTHOR> Then you should check out [https://dbrgn.ch/stories-from-the- internet.html](https://dbrgn.ch/stories-from-the-internet.html). If you know more stories that should go on the list, let me know :)

<comment><USER29> Holy crap, the series surrounding the 'recorder' one is the most gripping and well written tales of combined technical and political achievement I've ever read on the internet. True hacker porn. Start here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/qrqsa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/qrqsa/ten_minutes_a_day/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I knew immediately .forward files were involved, before I even read it. I had done something similar and brought down my college's email system back in the 80's.

</comment><comment><USER31> I remember a story from my tech support days: someone forged an email to firstname.lastname@example.com from email@example.com, both of which had auto-responders.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell When I set up an autoresponder in my .sieve file, I specify ":days n", where "n" is the minimum number of days between allowing an autoresponse to be sent to the same address.

This isn't fool proof though. It would fail if the other side of the loop didn't have a similar defense, and also sent each email response from a different address.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a great, hilarious story. Something about IRC makes for a really nice story telling platform. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER33> If you like the IRC format, check out [http://bash.org](http://bash.org) \- some pretty hilarious IRC logs from a glorious time in Internet history

<comment><USER34> There are some gems on there, like this one:

#127039 +(13215)- [X] <wolf> 1\. Save every Free Credit Card Offer you get, Put it in pile A

<wolf> 2\. Save every Free Coupon You get, put that in pile B

<wolf> 3\. Now open the credit card mail from pile A and find the Business Reply Mail Envelope.

<wolf> 4\. Take the coupons from pile B and stuff them in the envelope you hold in your hand.

<wolf> 5\. Drop the stuffed to the brim envelopes in your mail and walk away whistling.

<wolf> I have now received two phone calls from the credit card companies telling me that they received a stuffed envelope with coupons rather then my application. They informed me that it they are not pleased that they footed the bill for the crap I sent them. I reply with "It says Business Reply Mail" I'm suggesting coupons to you to ensure that your business is more successful. They promptly hang up on me.

<wolf> Now, I did this for about a month before it got boring, so I got an added idea! I added exactly 33 cents worth of pennies to the envelope so they paid EXTRA due to the weight. I got a call informing me about the money, I said it was a mistake and I demanded my change back. After yelling at the clerk and then to the supervisor they agreed to my demands and cut me a check for the money. I hold in my hand at this very moment a check from GTE Visa for exactly 33 cents.

[edit]: formatting

<comment><USER35> Oh, wow. If they have no recourse, I think I'll start doing this, too.

<comment><USER36> Years ago you could simply tape the prepaid business envelope to a 2"x4" block of wood, a brick, or anything else heavy and the mailman would take it. Too much fun...

<comment><USER37> Yeah, postage on reply envelopes used to be unlimited in the US. In grad school, there were lots of lead bricks around. So we did that once or twice, for laughs. But you know, the lead was actually worth something. But not as much as the postage.

That stopped working in maybe the 80s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Still easy to do, even between a couple of hosts:

[https://imgur.com/DwbRfDs](https://imgur.com/DwbRfDs)

Embarassing, yes. Especially since it was ongoing for, um, months.

nullmailer really likes to send mail. But some MTA's don't like to accept mail larger than a certain size. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER39> > I managed to bring down 13 CIA offices, all FBI offices east of the > Mississippi, and the entire Southeastern university Research Network.

I'm skeptical. Even assuming this is true, would the CIA divulge this info?

</comment><comment><USER40> Would be fun to build a GUI app atop an event loop like that.

Subject: Fwd: mousedown 52 48

Then you could trigger interesting dialogs to the user:

Error: failed to receive a mouseup for 72 hours. Do you want to cancel clicking? Click one (Ok) (Cancel)

</comment><comment><USER41> In January 2017, NetApp had a reply-all storm. One would think that sysadms would know better than to participate, but one would not be wholly correct.

</comment><comment><USER42> I crashed lotus notes at a federal agency after sending a pirated dvd as an attachment. I somehow did not get fired (late '90s)

<comment><USER43> A government agency with a file size limit above a couple of mb in the 90s?

<comment><USER42> It didn't have a file size limit at all until I did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The infamous Rudy Giuliani tweet needs to be added here

</comment><comment><USER45> log4net + java dev app server + debugging the db layer + database outage on a Sunday = annoyed exchange admins on a Monday.</comment>


Hello Europe - <AUTHOR> http://hello-europe.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apart from the utopian idea of cross-European connections between people, I wonder how difficult it would be to achieve such a realtime full-size videoconferencing system.

Considering it should allow public communication as well as private talks (like in the real life as drew in the video), I thought it would require some sort of distributed mic/camera/speakers over the wall surface.

And you would still need to sort out the bandwith/latency issues.</comment>


There's a new open source cloud in town. Meet Apache CloudStack - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/theres-a-new-open-source-cloud-in-town-meet-apache-cloudstack/ <comment><USER2> Traditionally Apache projects have been seen by the bigger companies like IBM, HP as common ground and (with exceptions) well managed. It will be interesting to see if some of those companies building solutions on top of OpenStack shift their interest/resources to CloudStack. It is certainly more production-ready than the alternatives.

<comment><USER3> I have no experience with the OpenStack but I would be extremely surprised if anyone with any experience with the CloudStack switches over.

Last time I checked it out, the CloudStack had a homemade ORM, no messaging queue, windows line endings on nearly every source code file (primary deployment platform is linux, I don't find that encouraging) and worst of all, the test coverage was in low single digits. It felt like a project being run by a marketing team, built using contractors and absolutely riddled with bugs. That said, if you're planning to run a private cloud with it and don't mind it falling over once in a while, then it's simple to setup and get running.

<comment><USER2> Your account was created 4h ago, so I really do not know if this response is for real or just trolling. The CloudStack offering was one of the few that got traction in the marketplace and had several high profile production deployments, including major telcos, Zynga and GoDaddy. You can discuss many other aspects, but in terms of maturity it has always been ahead of the rest of private cloud implementations (and that was one of the reasons for the Citrix acquisition)

<comment><USER3> I didn't want to associate my main account to the comment because it was candid, negative and I don't work with the CloudStack anymore.

I last looked at it in December and they might've worked every issue out by now. That said, you're welcome to investigate every single claim I made, as of then at least, each concern I listed was still present. Marketplace traction or acquisitions are not going to change the fact that what you're dealing with is 200K lines of code with 5-7% test coverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First Eucalyptus moves for AWS API offical blessing from Amazon and now cloudstack becomes an Apache Project. Looks like the private Cloud space is just heating up with lots of moves by companies to become the de-facto Open source alternative to AWS.

Lots of parallels to the Desktop space (MS Vs Linux flavors)

</comment><comment><USER5> Chasing the AWS model is a bad idea. It's all well and good to provide AWS API compatibility, but do that as a layer of abstraction on top of a better system with more flexibility underneath.

Shooting for AWS as your gold standard, to me, seems to be aiming too low. AWS is a far from perfect system.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't matter. AWS still wins!

As @Adrianco puts -

Tenses and predictions: Eucalyptus have; CloudStack will soon; OpenStack will eventually reluctantly; license the AWS API #gameover

<comment><USER7> "License"? I wasn't aware Amazon was claiming any sort of control over use of the AWS API. Certainly any such assertion would raise serious legal questions like some of those now at issue in Oracle's lawsuit against Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If folks are wanting to check this out, my work build some VMware appliances for it. You should be able to get the server running in just a few minutes. Anyway, in case it's useful:

<http://www.rpath.com/solutions/cloudstack.php></comment>


Hacking goes squishy - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14299634

<comment><USER3> _But the FBI may genuinely be wary of biohackers_

Obviously, the government has never seen any invention it's not scared of. This goes all the way back to the steam engine.

Before anyone here dredges out the old tired super virus or gray goo.

There's no such thing as gray goo and never will be because you'd have to violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to get it.

There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.

<comment><USER4> >There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.

It sounds like you're saying that each supervirus mankind creates marginally increases the chance that a Bad Thing will happen. Isn't marginally increasing the chance that a Bad Thing will happen also Bad?

Also, how close do you think that HIV and MRSA are to the upper bound on supervirus potency?

<comment><USER5> MRSA is pretty close to sending us back in time, a time before penicillin, it wasn't a good time, but obviously we survived.

We got super lucky with HIV because you have to exchange bodily fluids to catch it. If it ever becomes as easy to catch as the common cold, we're screwed.

And while the marginal danger may increase with research, the marginal utility will also increase, in fact it will increase faster. We'll discover more cures then diseases. And yes, regulation is a blunt weapon which stops not only the bad, but also the good.

<comment><USER4> >We got super lucky with HIV because you have to exchange bodily fluids to catch it. If it ever becomes as easy to catch as the common cold, we're screwed.

If some asshole creates a contagious HIV, then discovering cures faster than diseases will hardly save us.

You get diminishing utility from curing diseases anyway. Say you discover cures for half the world's currently incurable diseases at random. My guess is that our life expectancy would increase by less than a decade. People are still going to age.

And I'm not sure the threat of a contagious HIV would ever go away. It'd be hard finding a cure for a disease that wasn't even created yet.

My guess is that there's already too much momentum behind this sort of research for us to halt it. Do you think requiring background checks for purchasers of biotech supplies would make the field more or less attractive to a hypothetical evil mastermind?

<comment><USER5> Requiring background checks is like requiring any bureaucratic red tape, it annoys the good and does not stop the bad.

But I completely and totally disagree with your implication that more research will only marginal increase life spans, and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.

That's like saying in 1989 that in 2009 all the progress in the computer industry both hardware and software would only give us marginally better VisiCalc.

To me at least it is OBVIOUS more biotech research will radicaly change the world not just slightly improve things.

And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.

<comment><USER4> >But I completely and totally disagree with your implication that more research will only marginal increase life spans

Unless the research is directed at curing aging, aging will always cause people to get more and more susceptible to disease as they get older.

>and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.

What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?

>And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.

There are six billion humans on Earth and the population is growing. All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race. I agree that person would be very atypical. I disagree that we can be confident no one will ever fit that profile.

<comment><USER5> _What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?_

Absolutely. Many drugs targeting one disease have been found to cure others. The list includes cancer drugs, antibiotics, antiviral compounds, etc. And that's just drugs, what about the research itself, isn't it obvious it has implications well beyond any one single thing. And isn't that the case for every kind of research, not just medical? To me this seems obvious.

 _All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race._

Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.

Here's where I see the problem with your argument, it assumes great asymmetry.

Here's what I mean by asymmetry, I think you imply that if we have the technology to create super viruses on demand that does not mean we'll have anywhere near equivalent knowledge and technology to fight them.

I happen to consider that an extraordinary claim. To me the symmetry of knowledge is self evident. Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power. Almost as soon as we can gene splice, we have gene therapy for humans which has already been successful applied.

If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.

Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.

<comment><USER4> >And that's just drugs, what about the research itself, isn't it obvious it has implications well beyond any one single thing. And isn't that the case for every kind of research, not just medical? To me this seems obvious.

I agree there will be unexpected good benefits associated with biotech research.

>Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.

None of those were _designed_ to be harmful.

>Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power.

This is not an example of symmetry. The nuclear bomb gave humanity the power to destroy itself forever. Nuclear power has not given humanity the power to preserve itself forever.

>If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.

Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? You call that _cosmically improbable_? Remember, we are talking about things that _haven't even been discovered yet_.

Let me put it this way. If you had such extraordinary predictive power about which technologies will be invented in what order, you could make a lot of money in the stock market. And extraordinary predictive power is what you need to rule scenarios that are compatible with all formulations of the laws of physics as being "cosmically improbable". I agree that such predictive power may exist in astronomy. I disagree that such predictive power exists in technology forecasting, or pretty much anything involving humans for that matter.

If you continue to stand by this position, I will decide that you're not worth convincing and unlikely to be convinced and leave the discussion.

>Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.

"Mother nature" has no quest to kill us. All the damage that's been done by naturally-occuring viruses has been by accident. So someone who was consciously optimizing to create a maximally harmful virus might be able to do a lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be the first time I've seen a mainstream news publication use the work "hacking" to mean something other than "criminal subversion of computer systems." And we're talking Economist here, not Wired or another geeky outlet.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but they used it a little too often in the sense of "amateur", which doesn't do justice to what hackers are in computing today. In biohacking it's a different matter in 2009.

<comment><USER7> _amateur_ is one who loves a particular activity; doing something for nothing is a matter of choice, not of inability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, but I think most hackers nowadays are not amateurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, interesting, although I'm not sure that we're quite comfortable yet about GM here in Europe, especially for things that enter the food chain.

<comment><USER3> I don't give a damn about food GM. It's not about feeding the hungry or helping the planet. That's the marketing speak. The reality is that it's hacking roundup resistant genes into crops so that you can (or have to) buy and spray MORE roundup. That's very good for Monsanto and DuPont's bottom line.

GM work in industry, think bio manufacturing of industrial compounds, and obviously human health is absolutely worth pursuing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just in case anyone from Vienna, Austria is reading this: There's a talk on exactly this topic at local hacker space Metalab tonight: <http://metalab.at/wiki/Metaday_25> [german]

</comment><comment><USER10> That is one freaky picture. <http://media.economist.com/images/20090905/D3609TQ7.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER11> Article concerns biohacking particularly manipulating living organisms - <USER2> HN have some editorial system to ensure articles posted have a proper descriptive title or maybe a categorisation system.

<comment><USER12> Squishy was a pretty good indicator that it wasn't going to be your typical hacking article IMO...

But if you are insinuating that biohacking is not relevant: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER11> No insinuation.

Squishy suggested it may not be programming, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a neologism or brand name in that field.

<comment><USER12> ah, I didn't think about that possibility - so that means it's still yours for the taking

Although I love the economist, I find they tend to touch upon computer technology less frequently as compared to the natural sciences

<comment><USER11> There's an article in Compute! from July 1991 that uses the term "squishy" to describe technology with a natural feel - soft buttons, rounded corners, etc. (I'm thinking Existenz!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> reminds me of "Our Neural Chernobyl" by Bruce Sterling

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(anthology)#.22Our_Neur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_\(anthology\)#.22Our_Neural_Chernobyl.22)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there something wrong with internet right now? - <AUTHOR> Down Detector (http://downdetector.com/) is showing a huge spike in reports over the past 30 minutes. Many of our users are having trouble reaching our LB in Northern Virginia.<p>Anyone else having this issue or any insight as to what's going on? <comment><USER2> I'm a Comcast user in Hayward (Bay Area), CA, USA.

Some sites are easily available: Google, Yahoo.

Some sites are partially available: Twitter, Hacker News.

Many sites are completely unavailable: Down Detector.

<comment><USER3> I was having maddening issues with Comcast Business in Portland, OR this morning.

Switched over to my VPN and haven't had any problems since.

My initial pokes at the issues I was seeing were DNS related, but even switching the DNS hosts to Google or OpenDNS didn't completely fix it. Maybe they've got some deep packet inspection issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in the province of Quebec (Eastern Canada), and we're having huge problems with most websites. Strangely enough, LTE network is working on the three providers I've tried.

<comment><USER5> Southern Ontario, everything is slow as all hell

<comment><USER6> Also Southern Ontario (Toronto), I've noticed nothing. Been or reddit, HN, many random programming websites, starcraft, etc.

I've checked all the urls people said they had problems with so far (spotify, cloudflare, downdetector) and haven't had any.

<comment><USER7> Are you on Rogers or Bell? I'm on Bell and it's slow. Also slow at Starbucks which is Bell...

<comment><USER5> everything's back up for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IT worker here... Everything is on fire and my phone is ringing like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://cloudflare.com](https://cloudflare.com) is down for me. Comcast in California. HN is really slow.

<comment><USER4> Same here. Slack is working great though.

<comment><USER10> And giphy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lots of similar reports on the outages mailing list: [https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2017-November/0108...](https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2017-November/010891.html)

"Anyone having packet loss, please send traceroutes to the list. There is clearly something happening, but not much useful data yet. Some traceroutes might help narrow down the cause of the problem."

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm having significant issues as well -- it happened quite suddenly an hour ago (9:50 Pacific Time, northern California). Thought it was a local issue at first and spent the last hour debugging my network. I think my apartment is on Comcast, although I'm not 100% certain (one of my roommates is in charge of it).

Spamming `date` at an affected SSH connection suggests it's entirely a download problem, since all of the timestamps are very close, but they're received multiple seconds apart.

Like some other commenters here, my mobile connectivity is just fine.

EDIT: Certain sites (including Hacker News) are now qualitatively more accessible, and I'm now hitting expected speeds at [http://testmy.net/download](http://testmy.net/download). SSH to my DigitalOcean is also better. Here's hoping everything else smoothes out soon!

<comment><USER13> Same here on Comcast in Menlo Park (CA). T-Mobile is zippy, though, so I guess I'll switch to mobile hotspot for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637412)

There are I think three threads talking about this right now. This one won the front page and topical title fight.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've read anecdotal reports of an Level3 outage that makes Comcast have poor connectivity outside its network.

I have websites that are up right now according to monitoring tools, but they are inaccessible to me from home.

</comment><comment><USER16> Comcast Business in Nashville is terrible right now for anything that's not local (Facebook, Reddit, etc.). Some are worse than others (HN is just slow; Reddit's very slow but loads eventually; Down Detector won't load at all on our work connection now).

AT&T (in Nashville) doesn't seem to be impacted; I'm RDP'd into one of my home machines with Uverse and everything's working great there.

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/ReportOutage/status/927600102918811648](https://twitter.com/ReportOutage/status/927600102918811648) shows a problem with Comcast.

That tweet links to [http://outage.report/comcast](http://outage.report/comcast) .

</comment><comment><USER17> Comcast says it's been resolved for most customers now: [https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/927636388517838848](https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/927636388517838848)

</comment><comment><USER18> I was just thinking, shouldn't there/couldn't there be a site that aggregates _actual_ statistics (as opposed to the crowd-sourced DownDetector) regarding internet connectivity/health globally to provide an accurate snapshot of what might actually be happening?

Edit:

Sorta like this[0] I suppose.

[0][https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/intelligent- platform/...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/intelligent- platform/visualizing-akamai/)

<comment><USER11> For many years there was a site called the Internet Health Report which would show packet loss and problems between multiple carriers. It was pretty useful until Dynatrace deep-sixed it this year.

I haven't found a suitable replacement, would be interested to hear any suggestions.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I just headed there for the first time in a while.

DISAPPOINTED.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Malaysian here. I'm surprising a Comcast issue would reach all the way here.

I noticed a lot of sites were working really badly, thought it was some problem with AWS or some damaged internet artery cable.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is how WW3 will start

<comment><USER22> Last night I had trouble with Google, Netflix, Reddit redirect links, and some other sites. I was trying to think of places an explosion could happen that would cause my issues.

This morning I've narrowed the explosion's epicenter down to the Wifi card in my PC. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I contacted Comcast Network Operations Center. They confirmed they're aware of the issue and working on fixing it, but didn't provide any more details.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sweden here. Facebook and other select sites down.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm in the SF area and Comcast is between slow and not working. Cellular data is working fine though

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm in Northern California and also having issues.

One thing I noticed is that it is only Downloads having issues. My uploads are as fast as ever.

I then connected to my VPN, and everything is working great. I think it is their routing that is having the issues, not the connection itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe. I am getting a weird issue when trying to open a page for research I am doing for paid work. I can't get to the page and it offers to open as a PDF or something and then fails to open anything. Just more error messages follow.

</comment><comment><USER23> It appears to be a Comcast issue: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637412)

</comment><comment><USER28> Dang I can't even access downdetector. I'm in California in the central valley. Everything is very sluggish and the ol' router/modem reboot did nothing. :/

</comment><comment><USER29> Second Life is reporting major problems. [1]

[1] [https://status.secondlifegrid.net/](https://status.secondlifegrid.net/)

</comment><comment><USER30> The situation here started to improve within the last two minutes.

</comment><comment><USER31> I thought it was just me. I'm in Colorado. Bandwidth seems to be reporting as normal, however I'm having issues loading Facebook, imgur, some advertisements on reddit, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Colorado as well! Glad to know it's not just me. Are you on CenturyLink or Comcast?

<comment><USER31> Comcast

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, 126.96.36.199 DNS is down. Probably your problem.

<comment><USER33> Might as well be a symptom.

<comment><USER9> Symptom of it being a primary cause would be no loading, then all of a sudden loading of site. However, I've had intermittent connection with HN, so not sure that is necessarily the primary. Edit: clearly spell check is down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Issues here in San Jose area - it appears to be Comcast from what I can tell. Same as others, cellular via ATT is fine.

</comment><comment><USER35> I can't connect to VPN (on AWS), but AWS CLI is working fine. Weird. But, I'll just do something else for a while ...

</comment><comment><USER36> Salem, Oregon here. Everything is zippy. Seems like it's location dependent? Just checked reddit and facebook.

</comment><comment><USER37> Everything loading blazing fast (Romania).

</comment><comment><USER38> No problems reaching any site from the UK

</comment><comment><USER39> None of the sites mentioned in this or other threads are down from the vantagepoint of Cox in Arizona.

Sounds like an ISP issue.

<comment><USER9> More likely BGP or similar border gateway routing things. In some cases, gateways can become overloaded because of bad destination routes that other gateways are routing correctly. Not that I'm an expert at this stuff. I'm not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> some in Seattle are complaining: [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/internet- issues-plague-users-a...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/internet-issues- plague-users-across-u-s-monday-morning/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought it was just me - was about to head to a cafe. On comcast here in Berkeley FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER42> Also Comcast (in Portland, OR) also having major issues, resolved by tethering.

</comment><comment><USER43> Gizmodo is reporting that it is a DDoS attack.

[https://gizmodo.com/this-is-probably-why-half-the- internet-s...](https://gizmodo.com/this-is-probably-why-half-the-internet- shut-down-today-1788062835/amp)

[edit] Dang, I thought I had checked the date. Sorry everyone!

<comment><USER44> That's a year old article, FYI.

<comment><USER45> Goes to show you how incredible slow this attack has made the Internet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> yes, lots of sites offline for me. I'm in Atlanta GA.

</comment><comment><USER47> downdetector.com now seems to be down. never a good sign.

</comment><comment><USER48> Spotify has been down for me since ~1:00 EST in Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER49> There should be a service sysadmins can run that sends controlled pings, download/upload requests, etc, to specific hosts. The idea being that the results are shared publicly.

\--

Copypasting [https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-tiny-error-shut-off-the- in...](https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-tiny-error-shut-off-the-internet-for- parts-of-the-us/) (dated today):

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

A YEAR AGO, a DDoS attack caused internet outages around the US by targeting the internet-infrastructure company Dyn, which provides Domain Name System services to look up web servers. Monday saw a nationwide series of outages as well, but with a more pedestrian cause: a misconfiguration at Level 3, an internet backbone company—and enterprise ISP—that underpins other big networks. Network analysts say that the misconfiguration was a routing issue that created a ripple effect, causing problems for companies like Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, and RCN across the country. Level 3, whose acquisition by CenturyLink closed recently, said in a statement to WIRED that it resolved the issue in about 90 minutes. "Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services," the company said. "The disruption was caused by a configuration error." Comcast users started reporting internet outages around the time of the Level 3 outages on Monday, but the company said that it was monitoring "an external network issue" and not a problem with its own infrastructure. RCN confirmed that it had some network problems on Monday because of Level 3. The company said it had restored RCN service by rerouting traffic to a different backbone.

The misconfiguration was a "route leak," according to Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at the DDoS and network-security firm Arbor Networks, which monitors global internet operations. ISPs use "Autonomous Systems," also known as ASes, to keep track of what IP addresses are on which networks, and route packets of data between them. They use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to establish and communicate routes. For example, packets can route between networks A and B, but network A can also route packets to network C through network B, and so on. This is how internet service providers interoperate to let you browse the whole internet, not just the IP addresses on their own networks.

In a "route leak," an AS, or multiple ASes, issue incorrect information about the IP addresses on their network, which causes inefficient routing and failures for both the originating ISP and other ISPs trying to route traffic through. Think of it like a series of street signs that help keep traffic flowing in the right directions. If some of them are mislabeled or point the wrong way, assorted chaos can ensue.

Route leaks can be malicious, sometimes called "route hijacks" or "BGP hijacks," but Monday's incident seems to have been caused by a simple mistake that ballooned to have national impact. Large outages caused by accidental route leaks have cropped up before. "Folks are looking to tweak routing policies, and make mistakes," Arbor Networks' Dobbins says. The problem could have come as CenturyLink works to integrate the Level 3 network, or could have stemmed from typical traffic engineering and efficiency work.

Internet outages of all sizes caused by route leaks have occurred occasionally, but consistently, for decades. ISPs attempt to minimize them using "route filters" that check the IP routes their peers and customers intend to use to send and receive packets, and attempt to catch any problematic plans. But these filters are difficult to maintain on the scale of the modern internet, and can have their own mistakes. Monday's outages reinforce how precarious connectivity really is, and how certain aspects of the internet's architecture—offering flexibility and ease-of-use—can introduce instability into what has become a vital service.

</comment><comment><USER5> facebook, discord, reddit; all unusable

what the hell?</comment>


Why Apple's Artificial Intelligence Acquisition Is Much Bigger Than Siri - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/10/03/why-apples-artificial-intelligence-acquisition-is-much-bigger-than-siri/ <comment><USER2> cool

<comment><USER2> nothing</comment></comment>


A/B testing with Jekyll (and Google Analytics) - <AUTHOR> http://biasedbit.com/ab-testing-jekyll-ga/

<comment><USER2> Won't this approach have a FOUC-type experience, where the A/B div disappears after being shown to some users?

I think it's cool you're attacking this.

I think you should check out Google Web Optimizer (iirc), which will do some of the heavy lifting for you.

For example, there's no stickiness here, which I think is a typical best practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post.

Have you played around with some of the Rack based gems out there like Split?

*<https://github.com/andrew/split>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This gem looks interesting but doesn't apply here since with Jekyll you're basically serving static html pages (hence the need to make the A/B split with JavaScript).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank you! After deciding to go with Jekyll for my website I was wondering how to do A/B testing. This is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this concrete example of practical coding to do something quantitatively and empirically valuable. Yes, there are great analytics packages, but sometimes you need to do some custom analysis</comment>


Brown professor markets CDs to stimulate, soothe the brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/02/22/brown_professor_markets_cds_to_stimulate_soothe_the_brain/?page=full <comment><AUTHOR> Cool line of the article:

 _He subtitled a recent grant proposal "Bats with Frickin' Laser Beams On Their Foreheads."_</comment>


Do you use native PHP settings? - <AUTHOR>

I always see libraries and sources based on user-defined configurations, how many of you use native PHP settings or OS based configurations? http://it2.php.net/manual/en/ini.list.php <comment><USER2> my settings for php 5.5.5 on debian wheezy with the dotdeb.org apt-repository:

      error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT & ~E_NOTICE
      expose_php = Off
      log_errors = On
      display_errors = On
      display_startup_errors = On
      date.timezone = 'Europe/Somecity'
      magic_quotes_gpc = Off
      max_file_uploads = 256
      max_input_vars = 10000
      post_max_size = 296M
      upload_max_filesize = 256M
      session.cache_limiter = ''

      opcache.enable=1
      opcache.memory_consumption=128
      opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
      opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
      opcache.revalidate_freq=30
      opcache.fast_shutdown=1
      opcache.enable_cli=0</comment>


3DCone - stereoscopic addon for iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/149090903/3dcone-make-3d-stills-and-videos-with-your-iphone

<comment><USER2> A great idea, definitely worth pursuing!

</comment><comment><USER3> i would like a green one too ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool!</comment>


Challenge HN: Can we please solve the 'voting online' problem? - <AUTHOR>

After reading the recent report from Mary Meeker (http://tcrn.ch/gowSqd), I am more convinced than ever that we need to change the demographics of our career based elected officials. Our politicians need to run their country as a startup, lean, failing fast and agile.  During lunch, I saw that more than 70% of Americans on a CNN poll, cared more about medicare and social security than reducing the deficit.  Can we please figure out a way to securely vote online? If we can do our taxes online, why can we not vote? This is the only way to change the landscape of elected officials and promote voting from the younger generations. <comment><USER2> The results of the 2016 presidential election were officially called into question today. A committee was formed to look into possible corporate sponsorship of the botnet, which is estimated to have tampered with the ballots of at least 17 million voters. Flying aboard the Monsanto Air Fortress, President Elect Sarah Palin addressed concerned Americans, asserting that the investigation was nothing more than left-wing extremists constructing a smear campaign.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can't make voting-from-home secure, someone at home could always show how they voted to a third party (allowing vote selling) or be forced to vote in a particular way (by someone standing next to them with a gun.

The current vote-in-booth solution solves both of these problems.

It's not the only way to promote voting, if you want everyone to vote then just make it compulsory.

</comment><comment><USER4> A country shouldn't be run as a startup. Most startups fail.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are two sites I know of so far dedicated to online voting.

My site: <http://www.openpoll.us> (shameless plug, still needs a ton of work)

Also <http://opengovernment.org/>, they just opened in January.</comment>