Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop - <AUTHOR> I'm posting this as a warning to other small business who might be thinking of using Stripe to process payments. I own a small boxing gym & we signed up with Stripe based on recommendation of someone I know. At first everything was great - easy on-boarding process, clean interface, etc.. We have been working w/ them for 4 months & have several hundred payments without a single chargeback.
Then out of the blue I received this email:
[b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for
Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b]
I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments).
Worst of all, when I attempted to process a refund for a customer who had been injured & was unable to continue training, I get an error message stating I am unable to process refunds! Am I supposed to tell my customer that my payment process won't refund his money? FYI - The payment I am attempting to refund HAS NOT been paid out yet - the money is sitting in my stripe account - but they refuse to refund it or even dignify me with a response.
I can't express how disappointed I am in Stripe's total lack of communication and indifference both it's customer's and our customers. Big, BIG mistake I made in choosing them as our payment processor - just warning you guys before you make the same mistake <comment><USER2> My dad had a similar experience with his non-technical business. Basically there was a lien on his account, he cleared it up with the other party, but Stripe continued to hold his balance hostage. Customer support forms and process led to more black holes or repetitive automated responses. He didn't have access to his funds for several weeks. I was able to get him a direct contact at Stripe thru my network.

Horrible experience. I'll still use Stripe for the convenience and hoping that they improve the situation with these kinds of potentially life shattering account locks and provide more humane customer service

<comment><USER3> If you have a direct contact at Stripe, suddenly you can do things, and things become possible.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow - I didn't expect this many responses - seems like I'm not the only one who's experienced the same issue. Quick answer to some of the comments here:

\- We DO NOT have ridiculous membership commitments w/ auto-renew. Our membership is month to month (unless you've prepaid for 6 or 12 mos). \- It's been approx a week since I received the email suspending my account. At first, I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...of which I sent approximately 8 with no response. I realize it hasn't been that long, but we're a small operation - I can't afford (literally...cannot financially afford it) to let this drag on for weeks or months w/o a resolution of some sort.

Quick update - After sending an email to Edwin@stripe, I got a response within the hour. Thank You Edwin. This was the reply:

"Unfortunately, we will only be able to accept payments for xx for a bit longer. Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes. After reviewing your business and account information, we've found that your business presents a higher level of risk than we're able to work with.

As noted above, your service will not end immediately—we understand that moving away from Stripe can take time. To help with the transition, we are able to provide you five additional days (beginning today) to switch to a new provider. Because of the elevated dispute risk here, your account balance will be placed on reserve for the next 90 days, the industry-standard period during which most payments are disputed. During this time, the reserved funds will help cover any disputes or refunds on your account. The remaining balance will transfer to your bank account at the end of this period[1]."

Not really telling me anything new - we're not a "high-risk" industry (according to Stripe's list) and have not had any disputes or chargebacks AT ALL. Be that as it may... But I still CAN'T REFUND PAYMENTS TO CUSTOMERS! <sigh>

<comment><USER4> Stripe really sucks for this and it's discouraged me from using them in the future. That said, small gyms are likely a high risk business for charge backs because despite how well you run yours, many of them are predatory or scammy or generally just awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work at Stripe. Could you forward that email to me at email@example.com and I can investigate what happened? I'm really sorry for the trouble.

<comment><USER6> This should not be the outcome.

It should not be necessary for someone to come to an online forum and complain to get the customer support issue resolved.

Stripe customer support organisation should actually resolve customer issues.

Tech companies go on and on and on and ON about "culture", but one thing I can tell you truly needs to be built into culture is customer support. For example, everyone knows Google's culture of customer support - it's "avoid all human contact, send all support queries to a machine".

I think tech companies are super bad at customer support because the founders have rarely worked front line in customer support so they don't know how to build an organisation around great customer support thus it is not part of the culture/company DNA.

Seriously, Hacker News should have a "tech support" link at the top where people can post tech support queries for companies who can't manage to respond to and keep their customers supported and happy.

<comment><USER7> > I think tech companies are bad at customer service because the founders have > rarely worked front line

Customer service rep turned engineer here. I think this true, but I also think that so many founders just don't care about customer service. Investors are far more interested in new customer acquisition than retention, so naturally more resources are going toward customer acquisition.

Customer service is an afterthought cost center that barely pays and experiences high churn in 90% of the companies I've worked for in my career.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, plus customer service is one of those highly manual and error-prone business processes that are nearly impossible to (properly) automate which are so annoying to Silicon Valley.

In my experience the Silicon Valley approach to it is to optimize your product for the 98% of customers who won't need anything more hands on from you, throw some automation (in the form of documentation, chat bots, and phone menus) at the remaining 2%, and don't worry too much about anyone who falls through the cracks past that.

Which can lead to a great experience most of the time unless you're one of those unlucky leftovers, in which case the ground falls out from beneath you into a labrynthine Kafkaesque hell proportional in brutality to the size of the company and the extent to which you depend on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Folks have been complaining about Paypal in the same way. You buy yourself some safety as a company if you separate your payment gateway from your merchant accounts.

For instance, Authorize.net allows you to bolt on a merchant account, but retains the tokenization of the customers digits. So if one merchant account was restricted, a quick phone call to Authorize.net would allow you to switch over to another ready-to-use merchant account. And you could continue billing via existing subscriptions.

This is similar to the conversation about domain name hosting. Do you allow your name host to also be your web host? Or do you diversify to hedge against getting locked out?

<comment><USER9> Who do you recommend for payment gateway and for merchant accounts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So before Stripe goes the way of Paypal, there seems to be something that can be done about this. I'm assuming Stripe has enough funds to hire for customer support, and given that businesses are Stripe's main customers, isn't there a thorough human review that happens before banning a business?

Plenty of customers sign agreements without understanding what charges they will incur, and gyms are notorious for this. But Stripe cannot simply shut down a business without hearing both sides of the story.

If there was a human review in this case, then no amount of HN publicity should revert the decision. If it does, that would expose the review process as being heavily flawed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you mind to add a little more timing information? How many hours/days have passed since you got the email and since your first answer to stripe?

<comment><USER12> Agreed, this information is extremely relevant to anyone looking to use this story in a decision. I'd also point out that within minutes, a Stripe employee chimed in here with an offer to help.

<comment><USER13> Talk this with a grain of salt: (not just for this case or company) Employees offering help after a case reached the first page of HN is worth nothing.

<comment><USER12> From what I can tell, it was the _first response_. Stripe employees also actively chime in on HN threads both positive and negative.

<comment><USER14> It doesn't matter if it was the first or last response. A person shouldn't have to post on HN to get proper support. Actually good support would have resulted in this post not needing to be made.

<comment><USER15> You're adding a lot of bias, unconscious or otherwise.

"have to" and "need" are strong words that I don't think you're in a position to use here.

Maybe didn't "have to" and they were just panicking. Maybe this post didn't "need" to be made.

<comment><USER14> I'm not in a position to use specific words to form my opinion? Did we get teleported to a dictatorship that I didn't know about? I can use whatever words I want to say what I want to say, and I _know_ you're not in a position to stop me here.

Good customer service means that the issue is dealt within the standard support pipeline. That clearly failed, based on the wording of the post, especially mentioning that they received no response from support on the matter.

The fact that OP got support once they called Stripe out on social media, while great for OP, is not something to be admired because it means many people are also likely falling through the cracks and just giving up instead of reaching out on other channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hasn't a common criticism of Stripe always been lack of good customer support? IIRC there are dozens of threads similar to this one on here. This seems to be another example of that, not necessarily a new revelation.

<comment><USER17> We're using stripe and are overall happy. But their customer support is pretty bad. Lots of canned replies and ping-pong back and forth until you get someone to actually read your question.

<comment><USER16> It's always fine until you have an actual problem...

The issue with Stripe's ethos is that it wants to stay really lean, which usually means not scaling customer support. If the entire company is 2000, how many full time support staff do they have? How has the headcount grown with # merchants onboarded?

This isn't specific to Stripe, by the way. I think Google has the same culture around support. My Google Pay account has been in a permanently screwed up state for years and have never been able to reach someone to resolve it. They just care about operational efficiency above all else.

On the other hand, I actually think Square has a very mature and responsive support staff. I have gotten what would probably be considered low priority issues resolved in less than an hour through various channels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope this gets addressed. It would really suck if Stripe becomes nothing more than Paypal with a better API.

<comment><USER13> and in the meantime Braintree (Paypal) will become better than Stripe with a good support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That sucks. But how do we know that you aren't a fraudster? You haven't told us the name or URL of your business.

There's a lot of incentive for fraudsters to put pressure on payment processors with fake stories on social media. Their hope is that the processor re-enables their account so they can continue charging stolen credit card numbers.

</comment><comment><USER20> As far as refunds go is there anything stopping you from giving out cash? Not to be snarky or anything but the lesson I've taken from these sort of posts is to always have multiple payment systems set up, like Wikileaks: [https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate](https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate).

Stripe is really trendy but this site isn't so fond of them: [https://www.cardpaymentoptions.com/credit-card- processors/st...](https://www.cardpaymentoptions.com/credit-card- processors/stripe/). There are hundreds of other providers to choose from. I'm not sure I'd trust the site's recommendations directly, always do your own research too, but it's a useful starting point.

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps one solution to this problem, which is popular in the UK, is set up child companies to do things like payment processing. If your provider blocks one company, you can simply set up with another subsidiary. Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's the same case as Google and AirBnB. It's too expensive to have support at that scale so they skip it.

There is always a risk to go with a big player when you're small. They don't give a shit about you. You barely move the metric.

When you go with a small player, the risk is they may die.

Only a few companies have been able to do support at scale. Amazon comes to mind being last focused on customer. Microsoft may be second in hand holding their enterprise customers.

<comment><USER23> There are players between the small players and Stripe, which can get you decent support with a decent chance they will stay around.

I've extensively used both Merchant e-Solutions and Authorize.Net, both of which have been around a lot longer than Stripe, and not had trouble getting support from either. (Also, Authorize.Net is actually owned by Visa, which is certainly not small).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is worrying. We are planning to move to stripe hence I have a few questions. Were you experiencing any other issues before they did these, for example, there is a high number of refunds, fees charged etc..? Typically you are allowed by law to dispute chargebacks.

I learned from previous experience, never have a single payment processor ever. The best rule of thumb pay the higher fee but diversify.

<comment><USER23> > Typically you are allowed by law to dispute chargebacks.

One caveat. For online businesses it is very hard to dispute most chargebacks. The card company typically wants you to FAX back a copy of a receipt or invoice for the charge bearing the customer's signature. That's fine for businesses like the OP's, which deals with customers in person, but for most of us who deal with customers via an online shopping cart...nope.

> I learned from previous experience, never have a single payment processor > ever.

Note that if you are handling recurring payments then in order to have the flexibility to switch processors you need to either handle credit card storage yourself, or make sure whatever processor vaulting service you use provides a way to export the raw numbers in case you want to switch processors, or use Spreedly or something similar.

We do our own storage where I work. PCI compliance is a bit of work, but it is not as bad as most people think. (If you transaction volume is high enough to not be allowed to the the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, then it is probably as bad as most people think).

Every time it is time to renew the reserved instances at our hosting service that are involved in card storage and would no longer be needed if we used a vault at a processor or a service like Spreedly, we've taken a look at the number of cards we have stored and the transaction volume to figure out the vaulting costs, and so far it has come out cheaper to continue doing it ourselves.

Another issue with using a vaulting service is how to handle expiration dates. The expiration date printed on the card is the date after which the physical card is not supposed to be accepted, not the date that the number itself expires. If you have the card on file for authorized recurring payments, you can continue to charge the account after the physical card expires. But most gateways will reject a transaction at the gateway if the date you supply is in the past. Most gateways have some way to tell them you want to go ahead and try to charge the card even though the expiration date of the physical card is past. You want to make sure that when using such a card from the vault, you can still tell the gateway to try it.

Also make sure that vault works with the card updater services. Visa, MasterCard, and Discover (not sure about AmEx) provide a service whereby a merchant can provide a list of cards the merchant has on file, and the card company will tell them which are still good as is, which have new expire dates but the same number (and give the new date), which have both a new number and date (and give those to you), and which have had their underlying accounts closed.

You have to be able to give the updater service full credit card numbers, so if your cards are in a vault service, you'll have to have the vault service do the updater querying for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Way, way back I had similar sorts of problems with PayPal.

I was an early adopter of internet commerce but I got my fingers burned several times when companies made unilateral decisions against me and provided no simple means of contact between me and them.

I now refuse to use any super-duper payment system that does not have my bank as a buffer between me and them.

Call me a Luddite if you like. But I feel happier.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have heard the same about Paypal. They shut you down without an attempt to clarify or any kind of explanation. I think that's a warning about a lot of tech-driven companies. They are great for most people but when something goes wrong you are SOL because they have saved money by having insufficient customer service.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just want to point out that from my perspective the fact that this was flagged, and Stripe magically replied to the post here as opposed to getting back to them through customer service, on top of the fact they just took on so much investor money- this just screams Paypal 2.0

<comment><USER28> It was flagged by users, but I've taken the flags off. We are careful to moderate HN less, not more, when the story is about a YC startup: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20"not%20more"%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment)

That said, people should remember that there are two sides to every story and account for the fact that the other side isn't available here. That makes me think there's more going on than meets the eye, especially since the financial space is regulated and there may be legal or institutional constraints on what they're able to say. If the issue were simply a failure to do good service, they would be smart enough to say so and correct it; it would be in their interest to do so and that's what they've done in the past. So there's probably additional complexity and we don't know what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Agreed it's utter bullshit how they deal with customers getting their banks to refund them and charge us a fee for it. When most times banks have an incentive to side with their customer

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh my, I also was about to propose Stripe to a local boxing gym myself. This gym is also a 'not for profit' company, of which I'm a volunteer (unpaid).

Guess I'll scratch that plan!

</comment><comment><USER31> Weird. You'd at least think you'd get a phone call about something so serious.

Instead it's the ol' support over Hacker News I guess.

<comment><USER32> > Weird. You'd at least think you'd get a phone call about something so > serious.

right? how many accounts are they shutting down every day that somebody can't pick up a phone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for the article. Could anybody reading this suggest a reliable payment gateway and merchant service .. thanks!

<comment><USER34> You might want to specify if you will be doing a high risk business such as

* a fitness studio

* recurring memberships

* any type of discount or free trial period.

From stripe's ban list:

"offering substantial rebates or special incentives as an inducement to purchase products or services;"

From a high risk provider:

"The main reason for the high risk tag is use of the recurring billing model for memberships. Customers usually give one-time permission up front for the business to charge them monthly until the customer cancels the membership. If customers skip over or forget about the terms of the authorization form they sign, these recurring charges might come as a surprise, leading them to initiate a chargeback against the business. This is a very common scenario for free trial models that lead into recurring billing. After a free trial, the start of an auto payment plan might catch the customer off guard.

There's also the possibility of "friendly fraud"—when a customer abuses the chargeback system just to get their money back. Maybe they stopped using the membership and forgot to cancel. In any case, this can also lead to a chargeback against the business."

[https://www.bankcardusa.com/health-fitness-merchant- accounts...](https://www.bankcardusa.com/health-fitness-merchant-accounts/)

If you are going to be doing a business model that is not high risk - none of those items above are a yes - I would reach out to stripe and get things cleared up.

<comment><USER35> How about software SaaS which is charging monthly?

<comment><USER34> Depends on

1) how easy is service to cancel. Put your cancellation link online not behind a business hours automated phone tree.

2) how trial periods work. Send customer email 3 days in advance to notify them that billing will begin if they don't take action and amount of bill with an easy way to cancel if desired.

Some SAAS I think is always high risk, SEO tools, email marketing, adult services related etc? Someone probably has a better high risk SAAS list. Basically, can someone uses a stolen card, or even their own card and signup for this service, spend $10K blasting emails to people, then claim unauthorized?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Actual life hack: Don't email support. Email legal.

<comment><USER37> I have heard that is some cases it is worse...they assume you'll sue them so they'll avoid you

<comment><USER36> Imagine it from their perspective. There's a higher chance of actually getting sued if you just ignore them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Following.. I have stripe integrated into one of my apps and so far I really like it. No probs in the many years working with this company. I'm happy to see someone from stripe is reaching out.</comment>


Grep too slow? Use git-grep - <AUTHOR> http://developingandstuff.blogspot.de/2013/07/grep-too-slow-tired-of-waiting-for-it.html

<comment><USER3> I would like to know what version of grep is being used? GNU or BSD grep? My money is that it is a OSX box with BSD grep.[1]

Using a clone of linus' kernel on a six year old amd64 box running debian/sid:

      (master):dfc@fob-xray:~/lk$ time git grep "leap second" > /dev/null

      real    0m0.739s
      user    0m0.540s
      sys     0m0.650s
      (master):dfc@fob-xray:~/lk$ time grep -r --exclude-dir=.git "leap second" . > /dev/null

      real    0m0.833s
      user    0m0.400s
      sys     0m0.430s
      (master):dfc@fob-xray:~/lk$ du -sh .
      1.4G    .

[1] [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Augu...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

ADDENDUM:

After running a test on a Mac mini with 10.8.4 and a clone of the same repository I am overly confident that the title should be "BSD grep too slow? Use git-grep or GNU grep":

      jumbo:lk dfc$ purge ; time grep -r --exclude-dir=.git "leap second" . > /dev/null

      real	1m8.479s
      user	0m32.229s
      sys	0m2.348s
      jumbo:lk dfc$ purge ; time ggrep -r --exclude-dir=.git "leap second" . > /dev/null

      real	0m41.844s
      user	0m1.682s
      sys	0m6.035s
      jumbo:lk dfc$ purge ; time git grep "leap second" > /dev/null

      real	0m37.325s
      user	0m1.423s
      sys	0m4.213s
      jumbo:lk dfc$ gdu -sh .
      1.3G	.

You can read `ggrep` as either _GNU grep_ or _good grep._

<comment><USER4> Well shoot. `brew install grep` is is then.

And there's also ack, and ag... no shortage of options that are better than BSD grep, apparently.

It's not "WOW GNU grep is fast!" it's, "wow, BSD grep is _slow._ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Silver Searcher is where it's at:

[https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)

<comment><USER6> I'm glad you (and many others) like it. I've neglected Ag lately, but I'll definitely come back to it once I'm less busy (probably in the fall). There are some features users still want, but it's tricky to implement them without performance regressions.

<comment><USER7> It amazes me every time that I use it. You did a fantastic job. Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's another interesting method for speeding up regex searches as well - <USER2> trigram index[1]. This is what Google's code search used to do. A simple command-line version written in Go[2] was released for local use. There's even an ack replacement based upon it[3].

[1] [http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html](http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html) [2] [http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/](http://code.google.com/p/codesearch/) [3] [https://github.com/rliebling/fastrAck](https://github.com/rliebling/fastrAck)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this? Would anyone with a better understanding of the situation care to explain why it would be faster?

<comment><USER10> I'm not quite, sure. But here's why GNU grep is fast [1]

1\. [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Augu...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

<comment><USER3> See my comment[1], your intuition was correct.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6016352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6016352)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't been able to figure out how to match a one-sided word boundary using git-grep. For example, say a file includes the word "router". You can do this to match the exact word:

      git grep -w router

But what if you want to match just the word boundary at the start ("rout") or at the end ("outer")?

<comment><USER12> The "\--perl-regexp" flag to git grep enables perl flavored regexes, which contain explicit word boundary matching. To match only word starts, you could use the following:

        git grep --perl-regexp "\brout"

and for just word endings

        git grep --perl-regexp "outer\b"

<comment><USER11> This doesn't work for me, nor do the other two users' suggestions. I even just rebuilt git in case my version was out of date.

<comment><USER3> Are you using homebrew?

      $ brew info git
      git: stable 188.8.131.52, HEAD
      http://git-scm.com
      /usr/local/Cellar/git/HEAD (1324 files, 29M) *
        Built from source with: --with-blk-sha1 --with-pcre
      From: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/commits/master/Library/Formula/git.rb
      ==> Dependencies
      Optional: pcre, gettext
      ==> Options
      --with-blk-sha1
    	Compile with the block-optimized SHA1 implementation
      --with-gettext
    	Build with gettext support
      --with-pcre
    	Build with pcre support
      --without-completions
    	Disable bash/zsh completions from "contrib" directory

What does "built from source with" say?

<comment><USER11> I don't use homebrew, but your comment made me realize what I needed to do to successfully compile git with pcre. As a result, this now works:

      git grep -P "outer\b"

Yay! Thank you and moonboots.

This is an important feature for me, because I organize my code lexically (primarily by being disciplined about using unique names for things) and rely on grep to quickly find what I want. Occasionally one unique name overlaps with another, and then I really want to match the word boundary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Grep too slow?" no...

<comment><USER14> On large enough code bases, git grep is much faster than grep. Couple that with repo for git and repo grep, and searching is painless. grep is fast, but the nature of git grep only makes it faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another way of speeding up grep is to turn off Unicode. Check your _LANG_ environment variable -- if it is set to en_US.UTF-8 (or simething similar), set it to _C_ then run grep. Also speeds up wc, and makes sort behave better.

Note, you can also export environment variables for a specific command, if you don't want to change it for your whole shell, by specifying "variable=value" before the command:

      LANG=C grep ...

<comment><USER3> Are you sure this is still true? I thought that bug was fixed a little while ago?

ADDENDUM:

I remembered discussing this a while back and I just found my old comment. Someone said "fun fact, gnu grep is slow with UTF8"[1] and I said "funner fact gnu grep was slow with UTF8"[2]. I reran the same grep that I used elsewhere in this discussion with C and with UTF8:

      root@fob-xray:lk# sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
      root@fob-xray:lk# declare -x LANG=C ; /usr/bin/time grep --exclude-dir=.git -r "leap second" . > /dev/null
      0.51user 3.04system 1:28.40elapsed 4%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 992maxresident)k
      0inputs+0outputs (3major+340minor)pagefaults 0swaps

      root@fob-xray:lk# sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
      root@fob-xray:lk# declare -x LANG=en_US.UTF-8 ; /usr/bin/time grep --exclude-dir=.git -r "leap second" . > /dev/null
      0.41user 3.44system 1:27.01elapsed 4%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1100maxresident)k
      0inputs+0outputs (2major+367minor)pagefaults 0swaps

I think you must have a version of GNU grep before 2.7.3 or 2.7.1. The UTF problem seems to have disappeared. There is a decent amount of information in the debian bug report[3].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860932)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862543)

[3] [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604408](http://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604408)

<comment><USER15> Your right -- I've been stuck with older RHEL 4 systems at work, and they run grep 2.5.something (although I'm not able to reproduce the problem at home now, maybe I'm not on an old enough RHEL 4 system -- will check when I get back to work). Problem disappears with the grep in RHEL 6. However there are still glitches in the sort command. For example:

       ls -lh |sort +4 -5 -h

doesn't work (at least on my RHEL 6.4 box), yet:

        ls -lh |LANG=C sort +4 -5 -h

does work.

<comment><USER3> Wow sort is misbehaving, but I cannot verbalize the problem. I ran your two ls invocations on the kernel source directory and diffed the output.

      --- /tmp/withutf 2013-07-09 21:03:23.060064079 -0400
      +++ /tmp/withC 2013-07-09 21:03:30.069578205 -0400
      @@ -1,26 +1,26 @@
      total 544K
      -rw-r--r-- 1 dfc dfc 252 Jul 9 19:27 Kconfig
      -rw-r--r-- 1 dfc dfc 2.5K Jul 9 19:27 Kbuild
      -drwxr-xr-x 113 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 drivers
      +drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 init
      +drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 ipc
      +drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 mm
      +drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 usr
      +drwxr-xr-x 3 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 block
      +drwxr-xr-x 3 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 virt
      +drwxr-xr-x 4 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 crypto
      +drwxr-xr-x 9 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 lib
      +drwxr-xr-x 9 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 security
      drwxr-xr-x 11 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 kernel
      drwxr-xr-x 12 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 samples
      drwxr-xr-x 13 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 scripts
      drwxr-xr-x 17 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 tools
      drwxr-xr-x 22 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 sound
      drwxr-xr-x 26 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 include
      -drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 init
      -drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 ipc
      -drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 mm
      -drwxr-xr-x 2 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 usr
      drwxr-xr-x 32 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 arch
      drwxr-xr-x 36 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 firmware
      -drwxr-xr-x 3 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 block
      -drwxr-xr-x 3 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 virt
      -drwxr-xr-x 4 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 crypto
      drwxr-xr-x 55 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 net
      drwxr-xr-x 73 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 fs
      -drwxr-xr-x 9 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 lib
      -drwxr-xr-x 9 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 security
      +drwxr-xr-x 113 dfc dfc 4.0K Jul 9 19:27 drivers
      -rw-r--r-- 1 dfc dfc 7.4K Jul 9 19:27 REPORTING-BUGS
      drwxr-xr-x 101 dfc dfc 12K Jul 9 19:27 Documentation
      -rw-r--r-- 1 dfc dfc 19K Jul 9 19:27 COPYING

There were differences in the output but I am not sure if that is a bug or if it has to do with locale rules for sorting. What do you think is broken with sort?

There seems to be a bug regarding utf and sort in debian[1] but I am not sure if it is the same problem. Do you know if there is a bug in redhat's bugzilla for the issue? Up until this thread I did not realize sort behaved differently depending on the locale.[2] Are you sure its not a difference in locale expectations on how strings are sorted?

[1] [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695489](http://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695489)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5909404/sort-not- sorting-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5909404/sort-not-sorting-as- expected-space-and-locale)

<comment><USER16> One is sorting "intelligently" numerically, the other is just comparing ascii values, on the first numerical field.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for indulging our rather off topic curiosity. Just so I am clear are you saying the reason for the difference in sorting has to do with locale interpretations and is not a bug in sort?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Even better: use pss ([https://github.com/eliben/pss](https://github.com/eliben/pss))

It's not git-exclusive and has a ton of additional capabilities and features. Besides, being a pure Python program it's very easy to tweak if there's something you want done differently.

[Disclaimer: shameless plug]

<comment><USER18> I use ag, but it's good to know this exists, I hadn't seen it before; good to have if I ever needed grep-as-library-code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use the silver searcher: [https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)</comment>


Call yourself a brogrammer? Let's hang out. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jenius.me/post/18751105257/call-yourself-a-brogrammer-lets-hang-out

<comment><USER2> I have no problem with people having a great time. I have no problem with people enjoying themselves. I have no problem with jokes, and laughs, and general messing about.

In some cases I just find myself feeling that people will probably be brilliant to work with in 10 years time when they grow up and mature a bit. Similarly, sometimes I cringe, or even step up and say that certain behavior is unacceptable, being rude, insulting, inappropriate, or offensive.

And it depends on the context. But to be blunt, when someone describes themselves as a brogrammer it just makes me expect the worst.

Impressions count.

</comment><comment><USER3> the inherent irony in all this brogrammer stuff is that these guys want to get into software and programming "for the chicks". me thinks someone watched 'the social network' one too many times.

also, i know plenty of programmers who will crack a beer while they code. i know plenty of programmers who will listen to techno and drum n bass when they code. i know plenty of programmers who are funny, friendly, and socially well adjusted people. having these qualities does not make them "bros".

if you're only meeting geeks who "suck the life out of everything" and who are "boring and stupid" then i think the issue is that you're not getting out of the office enough.</comment>


Tons of forum members getting Google CR-48 Netbooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromeosforums.net/forum/chrome-os-news/33-worried-you-wont-get-google-cr-48-netbook-think-again.html

<comment><USER2> > On the ChromeOSforums.net site alone we've seen at least 5 unrelated > individuals receive the laptop

I wouldn't call that "tons."

<comment><USER3> If they all weigh 200 pounds, then its half a ton of forum users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Self-selecting. People on the Chrome OS forums are more likely to have applied for the pilot program.</comment>


US Government Auctioning Off DC9-32 from Airforce 2 - <AUTHOR> http://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucdsclnk?sl=91QSCI13056100

<comment><USER2> Background and a picture: [http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/05/12/can-own-piece- history-f...](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/05/12/can-own-piece-history-for- as-little-as-50g/)</comment>


Trying to find a recent HN post to JSON sample data generator - <AUTHOR>

Hello I recently saw a post on hacker news to a site that generates JSON sample data.  I can't seem to find it now.  Can anyone point me in the right direction please? thanks <comment><USER2> I see some in Google: [http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=p...](http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy- ab&q=%22json+data+generator%22)</comment>


REST API simplified - <AUTHOR> http://www.oded.us/2012/12/rest-api-simplified.html

<comment><USER2> The problem is that it violates the basic REST principle. Google REST vs RPC differences.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I do not refer to the vocabulary of methods that HTTP has, but more to naming conventions... But I definitely see your point.</comment>


Rate my startup: AppMentor.com - <AUTHOR>

If you have considered pursuing an MBA, you no doubt have seen how competitive entry to the top schools is.  High GMAT/GPA and great work experience are pre-requisites rather than differentiators.  Setting oneself apart comes through application essays.
There are many consulting services out there to help with this.  Most cost thousands of dollars and either do more than many applicants feel comfortable with (ethical dilemmas) or offer services that applicants simply don't need (brainstorming, line-by-line editing).  To make matters worse, it's rarely clear who is actually offering the advice (expert?)
AppMentor is different -- real experts (students who have been accepted to top programs) offer ONLY high level feedback on applicant essays, for one very low price.
We have been fortunate enough to sign up a large number of mentors (currently 38 accepted students), but we are having trouble raising consumer awareness.  I am very curious to hear what everyone thinks about the service, the execution, and any marketing insights!  Thanks in advance for your help!
http://www.appmentor.com <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link: <http://www.appmentor.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> interesting site good luck with it, would you like to rate my startup it's called

"R8 Your Politician"

<http://nitechblog.com/blog/p.php?id=543>

<http://www.R8YourPolitician.co.uk> <http://www.R8YourPolitician.com> <http://www.R8YourPolitician.TV>

R8YourPolitician.US & .CA are their but not much done on them</comment>


The birthplace of the modern apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181120-the-birthplace-of-the-modern-apple <comment> mark-r Interesting trivia: the apple trees planted by Johnny Appleseed in the US were not meant for edible consumption, they were meant for hard cider. The apples were practically inedible.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny- appl...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed- brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/)

<comment><USER3> Almost all apples coming from planted seed are practically inedible.

Only a small percentage turn out to be useful for eating, cooking or cider. Once you find one that is the whole population comes from grafts and cuttings. All the varieties we know came from a single, often accidental, tree somewhere.

If you happen to lose all stock of an old variety you have roughly no chance of ever recreating it.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure?

I seem to remember my grandfather taking me to transplant saplings that grew from seeds from fallen apples from around a few trees.

I was young, and my alcoholic memory is faulty, but I don't recall any grafting. (This was in the blast plains of Wyoming, so, not near the idyllic nooks of the Idaho Rockies)

<comment><USER3> You can grow from seed, and they do inherit characteristics of parents, but they are also very, very variable. They can vary to such an extent you will often get a completely new variety. Some will be closer. Cider is perhaps less dependent on consistency, particularly rough cider, than you'd want from eating apples.

They are not consistent like the seeds of many other plants. Apples seeds seem to produce more variation than other fruits, though other fruits share this tendency.

Still, if you want an orchard of consistently good cider apples you'd plant grafts from a consistently good cider apple on a suitable root (dwarf, cold- resistant and so on). If you hope to find a new, interesting, variety or can live with that variation you'd plant many seeded trees and see what fruit results. Then keep, and propagate, the good ones. :)

More here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Cultivation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Cultivation)

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

We probably ended up with 10 or 14 trees in total (there would have been more, but crop dusters in the north of our place kept not dusting low enough and their herbicides would kill our trees ... which is a travesty on the blast plains, but what are you going to do?), and we didn't notice a heck of a lot of variability, but there was certainly some.

They were mostly all medium-ish sized and red-ish - and only fruited once per year. They tasted kind of like a McIntosh I guess? But you are right - <USER2> were a lot more variable between themselves than the cherries or (say) the berries or rhubarbs.

FWIW: I wasn't particularly interested in cider apples - I was interested in the claim that apples can't be grown and kept consistent from seeds.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. When I was a young un a relative did something similar, after they were winding down the orchards, thanks to changing markets. I remember more than a couple as inedible failures that were dug up, but came from good eating varieties. A short time later all except just a couple were gone and he was growing house plants and for garden centres.

Now I'm past my knowledge or knew less than I thought I did. Maybe some parent varieties vary more wildly than others?

<comment><USER4> Maybe. I don't know. Your comment simply caught my "is that so?" filter. I'm going to have to go learn more. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a couple of other species which have more recently contributed to the modern varieties by genetic introgressive hybridization. See for instance M. Sylvestris, the European wild apples: * [https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002703) * [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016895251...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016895251300190X)</comment>


Ask HN: What cloudflare settings do you use? - <AUTHOR>

And what pros or cons do you see by using them?
I just signed up for the $20/mo plan and am scratching my head as to what to pick for "Security" and "Performance" options at the end of the signup page.
The options for Performance are:
- CDN ONLY
- CDN + Basic optimizations (faster)
- CDN + Full optimizations (bleeding edge speed)
And the options for Security are:
- Essentially Off
- Low
- Medium
- High
I chose the highest security and the full optimizations as I figure I may as well get what I paid for. I am a little worried about the mention of possible captchas for accessing my site, however. <comment><USER2> I'm not a CloudFlare expert but my guess is that there are some risks to the "bleeding edge" optimizations. The decision probably comes down to a trade-off of how much you want to minimize risk and support older browsers in exchange for speed.</comment>


Two-laser boron fusion lights the way to radiation-free energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/two-laser-boron-fusion-lights-the-way-to-radiation-free-energy-1.13914

<comment><USER3> Readers may be left wondering…

• How many protons and nuclei did they have to fling to get one to hit?

• How much Boron-11 is there accessible on the planet?

• How much energy is released, relative to energy required isolate Boron-11, turn it to plasma and generate a proton stream? (Not in this setup, but could this ever be used for energy production?)

• Are there other isotopes to which this proton bombardment technique could apply?

<comment><USER4> 1) They were creating a plasma from a sheet of boron and sending the protons at that. From the publication: "1 in 300–3,000 protons will be able to induce a p11B fusion reaction".

2) There seems to be a fair but not infinite amount: [http://www.rsc.org/periodic- table/element/5/boron](http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/5/boron). One site listed $500 per 100g.

3) It doesn't seem that such a calculation is readily available. However, now that the physics has been demonstrated, one can start to entertain such questions. Also, we are continually improving the efficiency of our laser sources, so as those improve the energy cost for this setup decreases.

4) Also from the publication: "Although our results are specific to the p11B case, a similar approach could be used to study the reaction of other light isotopes."

Bonus: Actual publication link (I'm not sure if the link is paywalled): [http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3506/full/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3506/full/ncomms3506.html)

<comment><USER5> 2) There is a lot of Boron 11, it makes up 80% of Boron.

3) Yes! You can use this for energy. In fact see my other post - I believe this is the future of fusion. The Boron doesn't need to be a plasma, so you don't need to confine it. You just leave it as a solid and hit it with protons.

4) You can also use Lithium (both isotopes) and Nitrogen (the rare 15 one).

<comment><USER6> What's more notable is that you can directly convert this to energy - <USER2> reaction yields charged particles, which will cut flux and induce current.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We really ought to be investing more broadly in fusion technologies. Please spread the word to scientists that they can back this recommendation if they agree. [http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...](http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&year=2013&month=09&day=23&id=105%3Aopen- letter-on-fusion&Itemid=90)

Supporting broader funding will increase the richness of the science in the field, which gives us more angles to understand what works and what doesn't. I support funding an array of approaches instead of going all-in on ITER that seems to have no future, but I'm not a professor.

<comment><USER8> ITER seems to be the best bet that can get financed currently...

<comment><USER9> ITER is crazy expensive unlike the project linked above which has spent about $1 million total. Tokamak designs have been around for decades and still have not achieved commercial viability. I think ITER is a long shot at best. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics seems to be much farther along than some of the other well-funded projects.

Of course, who knows who will do it first and when. I sure don't. But we should be funding as many possible designs as we can not less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the future of fusion, not D-T fusion. Or use Lithium instead of Boron.

Lithium is even better than Boron because you don't need isotope separation (since both work), and you get more power out of it.

The Boron or Lithium doesn't need to be a plasma, and you don't need to confine it. This makes it much simpler to handle.

You leave it as a solid and just hit it with protons. Not all the protons will do anything. If you can recycle the energy of the failed protons then the low efficiency can be mitigated.

Those that hit will leave behind helium (both H3 and H4) you probably need to remove that to prevent interfering with incoming protons. But there is no other ash to worry about. (And the H3 is very useful - you can even use it for energy.)

<comment><USER10> I'm confused as to why it would leave behind h3 and h4?

<comment><USER11> Mass is conserved in nuclear fusion.

p+Li6 fusion is a single proton (a bare hydrogen nucleus) smacking into an atom made of 3 protons and 3 neutrons. (Lithium-6) The reaction products have to have the same number of protons and neutrons as what goes in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aneutronic, not radiation free.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but that's very important. Alphas, especially slow ones, are easy to stop and are good at heating things. Free neutrons are hard to stop and can activate nearby material. An a-neutronic process, especially a clever one that works with comparatively low energies, can be important.

<comment><USER14> And since alphas are charged particles, you may even be able to generate electricity without going through a steam cycle. Tri-Alpha and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics are both planning to do it that way, and papers on petawatt laser fusion with boron have mentioned the same. Resulting energy costs could be dramatically cheaper than fossil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The resulting heat could be used to reduce boria to elemental boron, which makes a decidedly energy dense fuel:

[http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html](http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> After reading the full text article I was surprised to find the protons from the aluminium foil/picosecond pulse interaction actually come from hydrocarbon impurities that were on the back surface of the foils.

If they don't guard that hydrocarbon film on the back of the aluminium from the Boron-ionizing nanosecond pulse then they don't get protons. So that is why the second thinner aluminium film is there; to shield the impurity layer on the thick aluminium film.

<comment><USER17> I would like to say that contrary to software engineering, physical engineers tend to use quirks more often than software engineers, but the reality is that in both worlds quirks are heavily used and accepted. Hence MVP and other quick and dirty delivery models are popularized...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lies! It's not radiation-free because light and heat was generated (and thus radiated)!

<comment><USER19> When it's mentioned in the "potentially harmful" scope, "radiation" is shorthand for ionizing radiation.

<comment><USER18> Yet there's no shorthand for the "potentially beneficial" scope...

I just hate that the general public connotes "radiation" with "harmful".

<comment><USER5> > Yet there's no shorthand for the "potentially beneficial" scope...

Yes there is. The main word is "light". And also "warmth" or "radio waves".

<comment><USER20> ... and X-rays, radiotherapy, scintigraphy...

Still, the fact is that "radiation", for the layman, means nocive radioactivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> p-B11 fusion would be the holy grail for energy, since ordinary Hydrogen is very common, Boron-11 is the most common isotope, and Boron itself is fairly common on Earth (annual production is around a million tonnes). Moreover, the reactor design could be remarkably simple and highly efficient. Power could be directly converted from the plasma to electricity without a need to use heat exchangers or steam turbines. Additionally, the low neutron flux would make the reactor remarkably safe, as would the fusion products (primarily ordinary Helium).

However, as far away as D-T fusion energy is today p-B11 is even farther. p-B11 fusion requires plasma temperatures 10 times higher than D-T fusion, making it that much more difficult to build devices capable of inducing fusion. Worse yet, at those conditions the bremsstrahlung radiation loses using conventional plasma confinement technologies would be significantly higher than the power produced by the fusion reactions. What that means is that for every watt produced by fusion that might be converted to a fraction of a watt of useful power there would be more than a watt of power radiated away in x-rays and gamma rays, meaning that it would cool faster than it could be heated by fusion energy, rendering it useless as a power source.

In short, p-B11 fusion requires the development of novel approaches to plasma confinement and ramping up their capabilities up to and orders of magnitude beyond what we've done with tokomaks et al today. To say that this would be an enormously challenging scientific and technical enterprise would be a gross understatement.

Nevertheless, it very much does warrant continued research. No matter the difficulty there's no way to get to a destination without spending the time on the road there.

<comment><USER14> All true but several groups are attempting it. LPP has published a paper in Physics of Plasmas showing they'd reached 1.8 billion degrees C, well over the minimum required for boron fusion. They claim that bremsstrahlung is suppressed at the extreme magnetic fields they generate, and that this effect is well-known to astrophysicists.

There are also papers claiming that side ignition of boron fuel is possible with a 60-petawatt picosecond laser, about six times bigger than our largest today. Tri-Alpha is also attempting boron fusion: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/tri-alpha-energy- review.htm...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/tri-alpha-energy-review.html)

<comment><USER6> The perspective to keep in mind is "attempting" is the same thing we're doing with a lot of these things. I wouldn't want to be picking winners yet.

<comment><USER14> Yes and I think most people researching alternative fusion methods would agree. The LPP guys certainly do.

It's arguably unfortunate that we picked tokamaks as the winner quite a while ago. LPP is trying to get scientists to sign a letter supporting a broad range of research, from other approaches to tokamaks (like the recently-cancelled Alcator C-Mod) to completely different devices. Several promising projects were cancelled in 2011, like MIT's levitated dipole, and non-tokamak approaches have struggled to get funding for decades.

[http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=c...](http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&year=2013&month=09&day=23&id=105%3Aopen- letter-on-fusion&Itemid=90)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about a three-laser system?</comment>


What Americans Don't Know About Science  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/what-americans-dont-know-about-science/283864/ <comment><USER2> Seriously, lots of these questions are ambiguous to educated people:

> The center of the earth is very hot

Not it's not. Stars are way hotter.

> Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?

Yes. Both? Neither? Depends on which point of view is the most useful.

> The universe began with a huge explosion

No. It did _not_. The universe _expanded_. It is a huge difference.

> It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl

What is "this gene" you're talking about? Are you sure you now the difference between a gene and chromosome?

> Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of > animals

This is way more ambiguous that you may think: from this statement, you could infer the theory evolution or something totally stupid.

Additionally, other questions are just made to be answered wrong for common people.

> The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and > will continue to move

The question is long, there must be a trick somewhere, I'll answer no just in case.

> All radioactivity is man-made

I have heard that bananas were radioactive too, but I guess that's not so important so this is not what this question is about, right?

> Electrons are smaller than atoms

Err… whatever, I'll just guess.

> Lasers work by focusing sound waves

Lasers is dangerous light. I don't know how they are made though and this explanation sounds sciency, why not?

And just as a bonus:

> Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria

You _do_ know that viruses are not commonly considered as living beings, right? Using "kill" make it so that you don't know what the question is about anymore.

tl;dr: these questions were just selected to trick people into answering wrong, I would say they were other questions whose results shown opposite trends (due to randomness), but were not disruptive anough for the article

</comment><comment><USER3> What I find more shocking is that the EU number is even lower than that. I would very much like to see this divided up by EU countries because I seriously don't understand what is going on here.

This is what I would personally expect from a survey here in Germany: Answers shaped by "worst-case" assumptions and disdain towards nuclear power, genetic engineering and possibly some misinformation regarding vaccinations and homeopathy. With the "Is all radioactivity man-made" question, for instance, I would expect sub-par performance of my fellow countrymen.

But the Earth moving around the sun??? I mean even if somebody were to get all their information from watching television over here, they would know _that_.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and what's up with Japan

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why this unattributed. The passage is from _A Study in Scarlet_ , by Arthur Conan Doyle.

<comment><USER7> Also, this is when Watson first meets Holmes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?"_

Fortunately, Americans are not stupid. They know that "A goes around B" and "B goes around A" are _equivalent_ because there is no real Galilean reference frame.

The Earth goes around the sun _from the Sun 's perspective_. Considering this is true means the Sun has a fixed position. This holds for the Solar System — by definition, the Sun is fixed at the center. Moreover, there is a lot of other stuff going around the Sun — while the Earth only has the Moon and a bunch of metal boxes.

Concerning the Universe, neither the Sun nor Earth are fixed. Depending on the reference frame, one is going around the other, and vice-versa. So both _" true"_ and _" false"_ are correct answers.

<comment><USER9> I'm probably taking your comment far too seriously, but....

The Sun's reference frame is privileged compared to ours: it is far closer to being an inertial reference frame[0], deviating from wobble induced by Jupiter and its long orbit around the galactic core.

(This is from a purely Newtonian perspective: both would be considered inertial in GR.)

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

<comment><USER8> I think you mean "both would _not_ be considered inertial in GR". An inertial frame of reference suggests the existence of a homogeneous, isotropic region of space; in general relativity, gravitation shapes space and, since gravitation has infinite range, such a region does not exist.

The closest relativistic thing would be a reference frame free-falling inside a gravitational field: it is locally inertial.

So yes, the Sun is _more inertial_ than Earth, but neither are a real inertial reference frame — because such a thing cannot exist. In Newtonian perspective, they can both be considered inertial — but you will also need to pick three stars far enough so they seem immobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The existence of a left hand tail is not evidence that a distribution is skewed.

 _Americans may be answering not based on knowledge, but on belief. As shown above, only 48 percent of Americans responded "true" to the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." But if the question was reframed slightly, far more people responded with "true." Given the statement "according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," 72 percent answered "true." (Emphasis mine.) A similar pattern happens with the Big Bang question. When the statement is simply "The universe began with a huge explosion," 39 percent responded "true." When it is "according to astronomers, the universe began with a huge explosion," 60 percent said "true." This seems to indicate that many Americans are familiar with the theories of evolution and the Big Bang; they simply don't believe they're true._

To wit, people don't believe everything they read.

<comment><USER8> Yes, they do.

Just looks like _The Bible_ is more trustworthy than _On the Origin of Species_.

<comment><USER10> It demonstrates a huge lack of judgement to assume you understand how other people think from telephone survey.

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/147824/adults-estimate- americans-...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/147824/adults-estimate-americans- gay-lesbian.aspx)

[http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/who-responds-to- tele...](http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/who-responds-to-telephone- polls-anymore-20120719)

[http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/01/young- pranksters...](http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/01/young-pranksters- skewed-landmark-sexuality-study)

TLDR: It's not unknown for people to answer these things like Bart Simpson, and sniggering in the background.

<comment><USER8> Disclaimer: That comment was a joke. I do not pretend to understand anyone's way of thinking.

Thank you for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So apparently, a quarter of Americans gets "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?" wrong. Imagine my surprise that of EU citizens, a third got the question wrong! We score lower than India and Malaysia, which scored significantly lower at the earlier questions.

I'm totally baffled about how so many people from well-educated nations with space programs can get this wrong.

<comment><USER12> Well - I had a friend of mine that didn't knew who Cardinal Richelieu was - and he had two masters degrees with flying colors.

So he never bothered to remember the history lessons thought at school (the Cardinal was somewhat influential figure during the uneventful times known as the 30 year war that shaped modern Europe and set in motion the processes that culminated in WWII) and never even watched or read the Three Musketeers. Sometimes ignorance could be found in the most surprising places.

<comment><USER8> _" the Cardinal was somewhat influential figure during the uneventful times known as the 30 year war that shaped modern Europe and set in motion the processes that culminated in WWII"_

I am going to take this point by point.

\- Cardinal Richelieu was extremely influential: he was the "Prime Minister" of Louis XIII, King of France, for 18 years, and he had a drastic impact on his time.

\- The Thirty Years' War was not _" uneventful"_. Millions of people were slaughtered, notably about 60% of the population of Central Europe.

\- The first half of the 17th century changed the shape of Europe: absolutism won over feudalism, while catholics massacred a great deal of protestants in Western Europe, almost destroying the Holy Romano-German Empire _en passant_. But the shape of Europe changed again after that.

Your reference to WWII is so far-fetched that I will wait for you to provide me with a reference before I start arguing against it.

<comment><USER12> Richelieu introduced the concept of raison d'etat which elevated the nation and national interests above that of the church (he was supporting protestant rebels against the catholic aligned rulers to avoid encirclement of france by the Hapsburgs) The 30 year war lead to fragmented germany kept this way for two centuries, dominant france up to the Napoleonic wars. The dominant france lead to the whole balance of power concept that GB tried its best to upheld up to the 1940s. The fragmented Germany was natural battleground for the bloodiest conflicts on the continent since which lead to the ingrained desire for strength power and security above all. Germany never had the chance to mature out of it as a country after the unification - Bismarck left it with too much power for the leaders to absorb and control which led to WWI - it was the braking down of the balance of power order. And WWII was just extension of WWI mainly because of the idiotic treaty of Versailles that did squat to reconcile overpowered germany with the rest of the continent and the inability of USA to contain the great depression.

<comment><USER8> > _Richelieu introduced the concept of raison d 'etat which elevated the > nation and national interests above that of the church (he was supporting > protestant rebels against the catholic aligned rulers to avoid encirclement > of france by the Hapsburgs)_

Yes.

> _The 30 year war lead to fragmented germany kept this way for two centuries, > dominant france up to the Napoleonic wars._

Oversimplified. The Peace of Westphalia destroying the Empire and its ideals is a common misconception (Axel Gotthard, _Das Alte Reich 1495–1806_ ). Despite a bad financial situation, the Empire lived on. A _" dominant"_ France is an overstatement: yes, Austria and the Iberian Union were hit hard, but England and Russia were unharmed by the war, and the Republic of The Netherlands became independent.

> _The dominant france lead to the whole balance of power concept that GB > tried its best to upheld up to the 1940s._

No. The United States were a British colony that the French helped free: looks more like France upholding the British balance. Then they won the Napoleonic wars, and the British Empire started indisputably dominating the world again.

> _The fragmented Germany was natural battleground for the bloodiest conflicts > on the continent since which lead to the ingrained desire for strength power > and security above all._

Yes, German unification was a long and painful process. No, it was clearly not the stage of the _" bloodiest conflicts on the continent since"_ — since when, by the way? I did not read a lot of German literature from/about that era, so I cannot argue for/against the _" desire for strength power and security"_.

> _Germany never had the chance to mature out of it as a country after the > unification - Bismarck left it with too much power for the leaders to absorb > and control_

I do not know enough about Bismarck's political manoeuvres, so I will take your word for it.

> _[...] which led to WWI - it was the braking down of the balance of power > order._

No. It took more than Bismarck to start WWI — actually, it took more than all Germans. WWI was the result of escalations between France, the British Empire, and the German Empire, respective to their colonies, due to the mesh of alliances tying all those countries together and to the rest of Europe.

> _And WWII was just extension of WWI mainly because of the idiotic treaty of > Versailles that did squat to reconcile overpowered germany with the rest of > the continent and the inability of USA to contain the great depression._

No. Oh, no.

Yes, the Treaty of Versailles had major flaws, and some of those played a part in the settings of WWII. Yes, Germany was not fully reconciled with the rest of the continent. Yes, there was the Great Depression in the USA.

Germany was not overpowered: they were severely underpowered at the time. They lost a lot of land, mainly to Poland and the Czech Republic. They were forbidden from having real armed forces. They got hit by the economic depression harder than any other country.

Also, a major cause for WWII was a guy named Adolf Hitler, who either misunderstood great philosophers like Nietzsche, or understood less great ones like Thomas Malthus.

* * *

Just look at the length of your explanation — disregarding my own remarks. I think it screams _" far-fetched"_.

You could look at all events in history and try to highlight links between them, and overjustify those links. Some links would always be far-fetched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We should remember though that the earth does not revolve around the sun.

They revolve around each other in an ellipse. Practically speaking, the ellipse heavily 'favors' the sun such that it doesn't move much ... but it does in fact move in response to the earth's gravitational pull.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just want to double facepalm, then bang my head against a wall whenever someone recommends taking antibiotics against the flu or the common cold, as I've given up trying to explain why it doesn't work ( _viruses are basically bacteria, right?_ )

<comment><USER14> Viruses are smaller than bacteria, so obviously you need more antibiotics to hit them all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't quite understand what model people have if they think the sun goes around the Earth.

It's a bit like the people who don't understand the miles per hour thing ("a car is travelling at 60 miles per hour. How long will it take to drive 60 miles?")

<comment><USER16> We had this contestant in "Who wants to be a millionaire" in France : [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmLwnSXNpFU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmLwnSXNpFU)

Facepalm with the audience results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A poll like this should ask the questions both ways around (and/or with multiple phrasings), so you can distinguish guessing (which should come out at 50% correct if the question is not biasing people and no-one knows the right answer) vs incorrect knowledge (which will come out <50% whatever the phrasing).

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't thing that those are the right questions to ask. Most of then expects a 'simplified' answer, like the earth revolving the sun and the Big Bang being an 'explosion'.</comment>


Saying goodbye to encrypted SMS/MMS - <AUTHOR> http://whispersystems.me/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/ <comment><USER2> It's actually [https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted- sms/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/)

Maybe use this thread for comments instead: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159510)

</comment><comment><USER3> looks like the post is down?

<comment><USER2> Not for me?

EDIT: No. wait. I came /from/ the post (through a link in the bottom of the post), so i thought it was working, but it seems they used whispersystems.me for some reason...</comment></comment>


Boeing's 737 NG was manufactured using unsafe structural components (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/practical-travel-safety-security-issues/1201276-aljazeera-claims-737ng-structurally-unsafe.html <comment><USER2> I think there are two things that would actually satisfy me at this point.

Audited by an independent (E.G. EU's) agency, with open records...

EITHER: A review of the actual paper trails and sources of the news story and build logs.

OR: A randomized sample of like 5-10% of the planes from the suspect time range looking at the suspect parts in question.

<comment><USER3> Are you suggesting that you'd rather trust EU agency than FAA?

I think FAA had a fantastic record until this whole MAX PR nightmare - they've certainly damaged their reputation. But I feel like domain experts at Boeing or Airbus definitely are going to have an edge vs a lowly paid government auditor. EU's agency or whatever are still going to have to rely on Boeing engineers input.

Having worked in the aviation industry (I was designing C-130 fuselage section) as a Mechanical Engineer, I can tell you that the whole enterprise sometimes feels like it's supported on stilts, it's a house of cards.

<comment><USER2> I'm saying that, BECAUSE of the loss of trust, yes. I currently would prefer the EU to review US made air-frames, and the US to review EU made air-frames, with the results open and reviewed by the other global agencies.

<comment><USER4> As do the Ethiopians. They sent the black boxes to the French NTSB, clearly they don't trust US investigators not to be leaned on by Boeing.

In any case the root cause of the problem is Boeing cheaper out on the Angle of Attack detector, by default only one is installed, a second one as an added-cost option. To be fault-tolerant, you need a quorum and thus a minimum of 3, as Airbus does. I would also add the 3 need to be made by different manufacturers to avoid systemic issues, if disk array manufacturers can do it, so can Boeing for safety-critical equipment.

<comment><USER5> >Boeing cheaper out on the Angle of Attack detector, by default only one is installed, a second one as an added-cost option.

This is incorrect.

The 737 MAX 8 comes with two AoA vanes.

The paid upgrade package is to wire them both into the flight computer, and to add an AoA disagree notification light.

>To be fault-tolerant, you need a quorum and thus a minimum of 3, as Airbus does. I would also add the 3 need to be made by different manufacturers to avoid systemic issues, if disk array manufacturers can do it, so can Boeing for safety-critical equipment.

This is correct, but not infallible. It's really complicated as the last batches of discussion here have gone into great length on.

Boeing fubar'd by not accurately categorizing MCAS as a safety-critical system, as their original classification was "Hazardous" instead of "Catastrophic".

The original implementation had only +/\- .6 degrees authority. After the paperwork was filed, they upped the gain to 2.5 degrees up to maximum trim down over time, without reclassifying the subsystem as safety critical. Therefore no-one ever made sure that subsystem chain was bulletproof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reiteration of the whistle blowers lawsuit from 2005. [https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-195565.html](https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-195565.html)</comment>


Please critique my weekend project - <AUTHOR> http://whatcrackin.com

<comment><USER2> 1) What am I looking at? A brief one liner would be nice.

2) Took a while for the first tweet to pop in. A simple "wait" prompt would provide ample user feedback.

3) Color code the pins to the tweets on the left hand side. That would be a simple but effective UI improvement.

All-in-all, nice work for a weekend!

<comment><AUTHOR> excellent points. thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks cool. However I don't see anything in any of the places (no pins and I'm not sure what it is suppose to do)?

So some more info would be appreciated

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I was kinda hoping people actually used Twitter's geolocation service a bit more than they do and it would just be obvious. Austin is pretty decent today, with the first tweet usually one popping up within a minute.

Agree it could be more descriptive. I got to this point and it was working well so I deployed. (Thats a feature, right?) Any thoughts on how to explain whats happening that wouldn't interfere with the page structure too much?

<comment> adam-_- Maybe a "first time here? Check the FAQ" flash message like the stackoverflow sites?

I had no idea what was going on or meant to happen.

<comment><USER4> An "about" would have been cool... but by the time I had realised there wasn't one, I was about to close and a tweet popped up and it was immediately obvious.

Neat site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks cool enough, but I'm a little unclear what it's doing. Mapping your twitter friends? Is there something else here that I'm just not getting?

<comment><AUTHOR> its posting any geotagged tweet in those cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A very closely related / similar idea:

<http://austin.vicarious.ly/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> node.js + twitter streaming api + comet + google maps</comment>


Divine By Zero - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Divine-by-Zero.aspx

<comment><USER2> I was confused about the "php" == 0, until I found <http://php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php>. So "php" == 0 is true and "php" == true is true, but 0 == true is false. Yikes! It seems like comparisons in PHP are as bad as they are in JS.

I have a hard time believing this is real. Does WTF do any verification?

<comment><USER3> Those PHP "features" are the real WTF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there an opposite website to The Daily WTF - a collection of short, elegant and clever code?

<comment><USER5> <http://rosettacode.org> is a wiki with concise algorithms/solutions/snippets in as many languages as you can think of. The algorithms listed range from mundane to clever to anywhere in between. If you haven't already been there it's definitely worth a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't you think this is made up? I can't believe someone actually wrote that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh man, this gave me a flashback to 4 years spent working for a large newspaper company trying to keep the affiliate papers' "developers" in check. Needless to say I don't miss that job at all.

After spending a couple years specializing with Drupal I'd almost forgotten how ridiculous it can get out in the trenches.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lets say for a moment that this _isn't_ made up. The questions that struck me immediately are as follows:

1\. What was the motivation for creating this function? Was it (hopefully) to show off how "smart" he was? Was the company he worked for doing any kind of calculations related to (dear god no) financial or medical data that he thought he could improve?

2\. How does anyone in this world escape grade school without knowing that one cannot divide by zero?

3\. Someone thought dividing by zero should be a recoverable error?

<comment><USER9> Regarding #3: Division by zero should be a recoverable error in many programming situations. That's part of the beauty of NaN as defined by the IEEE standard for floating point numbers. It's quite a handy thing to be able to just do the operation and sort out the NaNs afterward. Suppose, for example, that you want to calculate the pixel-wise percent change in intensity between two grayscale images A and B. In a language with good built-in support for matrix datatypes, such as MATLAB, the ability to handle division by zero gracefully can quite often simplify the code.

result = (A-B)./A*100;

Now I can just use the isfinite function to produce a matrix of logical values that tells me which pixel locations have valid values (simultaneously handling the case of numerical overflow). Granted, this doesn't do much to simplify the code above. We could have just checked beforehand to find the pixels of A that had zero values. However, if you have a complicated expression involving multiple divisions, logarithms, or other functions that are undefined for some portion of the real numbers, treating these situations as "recoverable" in some sense allows you to write cleaner, more readable code if your implementation language permits you to just do the operation and check for NaN values (+Inf and -Inf too) afterward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As much as I love TDWTF I have to say I'm disappointed to see a submission from there get 46 upvotes on the front page. Great story though

<comment><USER11> Yeah, agreed. The whole premise of the function is insane but I'm pretty sure the story is a lie because I just can't see how anybody would write the code this way unless they were intentionally trying to obfuscate code for humour/annoyance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The comments on this page are better than the code. Ok no they are not.

<comment><USER13> I actually LOL'd at geordish's, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love the flowchart. "Ah, now it all makes sense!" I even printed it on the wall at my work right next to Ballmer Peak strip.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can someone explain why he does two more if checks after he's set the denominator to "php"?

<comment><USER8> Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. :)

Aside from the whole function being asinine the only way to know "why" would be to ask him. The answer would probably also qualify as asinine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't mean to be a buzzkill here, but I don't think anyone with an ounce of a brain will find this funny, which I believe was the original intent.

<comment><USER17> Daily WTF is all about cringe-worthy programming stories. If you find them funny, so be it... But they're almost all cringe-worthy.</comment></comment>


Hire Sander to your awesome team - <AUTHOR> http://hire.sandersaar.com/

<comment><USER2> On the one hand, this is competing with _resumes_ , which are possibly the only paper product which looks up to "that thing around the Starbucks coffee cup" and "toilet paper sitting in a broom closet" and thinks "Man, if I try my hardest, I can be as compelling and persuasive as they are!" Resumes are created to be ignored. Even if it is really just a resume in Kickstarter- inspired CSS it shows orders of magnitude more creativity than the traditional resume would.

I struggled with whether I should say the following, because I never want to say "Don't make things." Do make things... but for the next thing, there's improvements that can be made. This site doesn't really show much understanding of the psychology which induces people to share. The pitch is "retweet this to say something about me." Successful virality is generally some variant of "retweet this to say _something about you_." (Getting added to a thank you page is, probably, not that motivational.) A small part of me wants to say that, if one is pitching one's skill as a digital strategist, being a good digital strategist in the execution of that pitch is probably a good idea.

Your ideal working environment doesn't have a problem putting up websites. They grind out websites all day. Putting up a website is less than impressive to them. Their problem is that they mostly put up websites that nobody other than the client will _ever_ care about. This is why they hire hip twenty- something college grads: for that vision thing that can hang a story around e.g. Coca Cola or Old Spice or some insurance company such that anybody would ever care about what a commodity product's advertising website says about them.

I don't want to say that nobody but the client could care about this website, because clearly that it is not true, but it is very client-centric as opposed to being "customer"-centric, in a way which is directly against the "client"'s economic interests. As the hip kid with the vision, now is a great time to have a heart-to-heart with the client and tell them that in addition to having a clever idea they also need to have a clever idea that motivates disinterested third parties.

Of course, virality is kinda bonkers, so if it goes viral then I'm wrong even if I'm right.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is sweet.

You may want to put a focus on how you can create value for your future employer when talking about yourself and your skills. I like this example [http://www.cenedella.com/job-search/leonardo-da-vincis- resum...](http://www.cenedella.com/job-search/leonardo-da-vincis-resume/)

And I was told once that telling a positive story of your ideal working environment may sweettalk a VP to push you through the HR.

<comment><USER4> Thanks very much. Will keep that in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Links don't work with annotations disabled. Took me a while to understand what links he's talking about.

Very nice presentation, though.

<comment><USER4> Thanks very much. YouTube on mobile is without annotations :( Will note that for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny and interesting production, I'm sure you'll land something on this :-)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Good to hear, you liked it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice initiative, good luck!

<comment><USER4> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You're hired!*

*I'm 23 and don't have jobs to offer, but if I did..!

<comment><USER4> Cheers.</comment></comment>


A new crop of hands-on universities - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/international/21701081-latest-push-disrupt-higher-education-new-crop-hands-universities <comment><USER2> you want hands on, try Deep Springs: [http://www.deepsprings.edu/](http://www.deepsprings.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Curious how these school end up doing. When I was deciding what to do for college I really liked a place in Florida called New College. Horrible area (lots of old people) and apparently the place is weird (never visited), BUT the idea they have of creating contracts per semester and graduation based on completion of the required number of contracts is pretty cool version of this. It sounded like a whole college exp of basically self-researching/learning.

Didn't think it'd be good for CS so I didn't, but I imagine that's what the most successful of these schools will do to keep people creative and avoid the whole "one person does all the work"-group-projects.

<comment><USER4> I faced the same decision you did, had the same concern, and chose New College. I was fortunate in that CS at NCF has blossomed recently. A couple more professors were hired recently and there's increased student interest in the field. I've graduated, but I imagine there's also cross-pollination with the Data Science masters program that NCF founded this year.

As for what it's like to attend - the experience is less radical than you may think. People generally stick to taking listed courses. Creating your own course (tutorial) and finding a professor to sponsor it takes work. You can do it, I took several, but it's rare and the ease probably varies with your major.

With that said, even if you stick to taking courses, you'll still have to do an independent project each January and a thesis project before you graduate. Also, the experience of taking courses at NCF is different from the experience elsewhere. The size enables more discussion-based classes and the pass- fail/narrative evaluation grading changes student incentives and culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Companies often sponsor the projects and provide instructors"

welcome to costco, i love you...

</comment><comment><USER6> I kind of don't understand how this is not the standard. It it 1786?

<comment><USER7> What's special about that date?

If you want to understand where modern university come from a look at the Prussian education reforms after their defeat by Napoleon is instructive.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_reforms#Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_reforms#Education)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cringe when I see articles such as this, leading research universities will always be superior to "teaching" schools. Not only is conducting quantitative research far more difficult than teaching, the research garners prestige and leads to higher rankings which attracts a more intelligent and ambitious student body. Ultimately the real value of a degree comes from the networking and signaling ability granted by it, I can always learn on my own by working through textbooks or reading journal articles. What I'd really like out of a university experience is to befriend people who will be starting innovative companies or researchers publishing in top journals.

<comment><USER9> There are a series of logical fallacies in this post...to the point that it is nonsense.

For starters, what is a "teaching" school? is it the same as a teaching focused university? If so, not only do the faculty at teaching focused produce research of their own, much of which is extremely high quality, but the research often includes undergraduates in far more structured and educationally meaningful ways than occurs in similar programs at R1 type universities.

Another...and I'm going to stop after this...why the narrowing to quantitative research? Your incorrect assertion that research is more difficult than education goes against not only what we know about education, but against basic logic itself. Education is immensely more complicated than most research, its just a complication that people chose to ignore (because hey, your education worked sufficiently for you).

I have worked with several of the schools mentioned in this article (and if you want to know anything about me check out my prior comments and profile)...you say research universities are superior. On what metric? a lot of Olin students chose Olin over MIT. A lot of Deep Springs students (mentioned lower in the thread) choose it over places like Harvard and Yale. I feel like you might be better off reading some of the responses to your last effort to 'solve' education on HN.

<comment><USER10> Your post is nonsense. The grandparent post had no logical fallacies, it was structurally incapable of having logical fallacies, by virtue of not making a deductive argument, just describing a factual belief.

The grandparent post stated a belief that research universities are superior to "teaching" schools, and then described ways in which they are superior, with an addendum about what the author really wants out of a university experience. It was an informative post (that I disagree with), but it had no premise, no conclusion, no deduction that could be fallacious.

> For starters, what is a "teaching" school? is it the same as a teaching > focused university?

As you seem well aware, there are many conventional ways including R1 to classify research-focused vs teaching-focused schools, which all broadly agree, especially on the leaders in each category.

> why the narrowing to quantitative research?

This is an excellent point, and one of the reasons I disagree with grandparent.

> Your incorrect assertion that research is more difficult than education goes > against [...] basic logic itself. Education is immensely more complicated > than most research

Seriously, this is not how logic works. "You're wrong" is not a logical fallacy.

Regarding the actual point: while there's a case to be made that education is more complicated than research (perhaps even "immensely"), due to the same reasons that social sciences are more complicated than "hard" sciences, it doesn't seem any stronger to me than the case for the reverse. In particular, objectively there's more pay, status, and recognition for quantitative research than education (how many more people have heard of the Nobel Prize than...whatever awards they give out for teaching?), due at least in part to supply and demand, which says something about relative difficulty.

> ...you say research universities are superior. On what metric? a lot of Olin > students chose Olin over MIT. A lot of Deep Springs students (mentioned > lower in the thread) choose it over places like Harvard and Yale.

Now you're making an actual point. Good for you.

<comment><USER11> > _Your post is nonsense_

> _Now you 're making an actual point. Good for you._

Please edit the uncivil bits out of your comments here. If you like, you can do as I do and set 'delay' in your profile to up to 10 minutes to give you some editing time before your comment appears to others.

<comment><USER10> Oof, being chided by dang, I definitely fucked up. I do think my window for editing it had long lapsed by the time you commented?

Not that I'm entitled to your time, but I'd be grateful for clarification on the uncivil bits? "Good for you" was kinda condescending, I see; "Your post is nonsense" was in direct response to the first sentence of my parent, which said that grandparent "is nonsense", and is also factual and I made a good- faith case for it, is that really not okay?

I guess "nonsense" is a charged word, perhaps it should have been something like "That post was not nonsense, it is your post that makes no sense."?

<comment><USER11> Well, you get points back for using the word 'chide'. And you didn't break the rules that badly, which is why my comment was mild. But here's a detailed explanation.

Beginning a comment with "your post is nonsense" is leading with a left hook regardless of what was said upthread. Nothing good can come of it and it frames everything else that you say as hostile (even if it isn't). Perhaps there's a semi-technical meaning to "nonsense", but in the context of an internet forum it can only count as name-calling, which the guidelines prohibit ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). (By the way, rough-and-tumble discourse can function well in smaller, more cohesive contexts, e.g. research communities or literary salons. But it emphatically does not port to large internet communities. That's something it took me years to figure out.)

Replacing it with "it is your post that makes no sense" doesn't help much, does it? (It reminds me of "I'm sorry the honorable member is a liar.") You'd be better off not rewording that bit but dropping it altogether. Sticking to the substance is a better way to show (not tell) the weaknesses of another comment.

"Now you're making an actual point. Good for you." is just two condescending swipes in a row. That's like finishing with a couple of right hooks. And "Seriously, this is not how logic works" sounds condescending to me as well. If I read your comment without those bits it becomes much more substantive and respectful.

The editing time I was talking about isn't the two-hour window for which comments are open to be edited, but an up-to-10-minute window you can have before your comments appear to others. (That's the 'delay' setting in the profile.) That lets you see your comment in the wild before it appears to other users, which sometimes helps clarify where it crosses into incivility—which can be difficult to see beforehand.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GoCryptFS: encrypting FUSE filesystem in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs <comment><USER2> I wrote a competing implementation (I wasn't aware of gocryptfs before) at [https://github.com/netheril96/securefs](https://github.com/netheril96/securefs). Many points are similar: for example, a random file ID, 4KiB blocks encrypted with AES-GCM mixed with the ID and block number, sparse file support. The major difference is

* The directory structure. GoCryptFS goes the easy route of encrypting filenames, while mine has its own directory implementation independent of the underlying filesystem. Mine is theoretically safer as it never reuses the IV, but the safety margin is probably so slim that it doesn't matter in practice.

* In addition to authenticating each blocks individually, mine has a HMAC that authenticates the concatenation of all block level IVs and GHASHs. It prevents the attack where replacing a block with its past revision does not show up as invalid.</comment>