Watch Google's robot dog play with a real dog - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/watch-google-robot-dog-play-real-dog-140843627.html <comment><USER2> Groovy and testosterone-promoting, from a technical level, I guess.

But the bigger point, as someone pointed out in the comments below the original, is:

 _This dog is NOT playing with the dog robot. He is upset by it and is barking to make it back down. We better be kind to all our dogs and keep them around because they will probably be the only ones to detect those terminators._

The fact that the Google engineers don't instinctively realize this shows how (very) far they have to go toward understanding the robot-mammal divide.

Which reminds me, I really like this comment, also:

 _The future looks really creepy. That thing has as much regard for the dog as it does us._

<comment><USER3> > _The fact that the Google engineers don 't instinctively realize this shows > how (very) far they have to go toward understanding the robot-mammal > divide._

To be fair, the "playing" nonsense entirely comes from the article author. The video description is far less interpreting.

EDIT: Although the pure fact "it moves, makes noise and isn't something known (like a car)" probably already causes a lot of the reactions. How do dogs react to Roombas?

<comment><USER2> Good points. Still, all I can think about is that poor dog.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Google App Engine Rocks: A Google Engineer's Take - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/04/why-Google-App-Engine-rocks-a-Google-engineers-take.html <comment><USER2> App Engine is brilliant and strangely under-appreciated at HN, I think. (A cynical person might thank that it's AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs, but I guess it's more likely that the cause is groupthink.)

Last summer I switched jobs from a company where we developed loads of cloud thingies ourselves, because there really weren't any good options around ten years ago when we started a product line that needed a high quality global service (involving processing, networking and storage). We had a lot of fun basically building our own little (if 5000+ machines qualifies as little) AWS/Google-style Cloud. I heard about Amazon Dynamo in 2007 and then we basically re-implemented it ourselves. We added lots of neat features like datacenter-aware global replication, etc.

When I joined the new company last June, it was basically just me. A few months later we hired a great python dev. I'm so happy to find that the level of the openly available products/services had caught up _quite_ a bit by then, enabling us not to spend so much time on just making sure things were available all of the time, and ~infinitely scalable.

I spent _a lot_ of time evaluating AWS vs GC, but my inevitable conclusion was that.. in a small company where you don't want to invest in a 24/7/365 devops team you should go for the Google App Engine.

I would really like it if Google found some pragmatic way to make App Engine work inside China though, at least for companies that have chinese ICP permits.

(Why hasn't AWS launched a PaaS? Lambda is so neutered that it doesn't really count.)

<comment><USER3> > (Too many AWS "devops" people protecting their jobs?)

I don't think so. A good while ago GAE was incredibly limiting - it certainly was when I tried it. Python only (maybe also PHP?), forced to use Google Cloud whatever for storage, etc. By comparison, AWS was using MySQL databases and EC2 boxes that let you use whatever language you wanted.

I know things have come a long way since then, but the reputation persists.

<comment><USER2> > Python only (maybe also PHP?)

They now support Python, PHP, Java, Go.

And in beta, "flexible environment", which is like elastic beanstalk but more sensible: Python, Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby, <random docker images>.

<comment><USER4> While they are java keywords as we know them this is not a complete jdk, so many (almost single good one) libraries dont work. I remember spending a week trying to port itext pdf generation lib to gae. While it worked we got concerned by the legal issues of us riping code out of sun/ibm/harmony jdks to add missing jdk classes.

Java here is a pure marketing effort to convince a clueless manager saying hey we got java!

<comment><USER5> > Java here is a pure marketing effort to convince a clueless manager saying > hey we got java!

What if there exist Java-based system that somehow can be deployed to GAE with minimum changes...? (e.g.: not needing itext)

What if there exist a company that the majority of developers prefer Java?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Google App Engine under performing? I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this.

I hope they're not in trouble or anything, I have been moving my project from VPS over to GCM for the past year now. I love it.

<comment><USER7> I love using GAE as well, but I'll be damned if I can find a job using it. It is almost impossible. The few that exist are in the highest-cost locations in America.

In that sense I think it's a failure; it simply hasn't been widely adopted.

At my last job I pushed for using it, and the suggestion was shot down, on the basis that "If I left they'd never find another person who knows GAE."

<comment><USER8> Guess, it's about time there are more developers/devops who know GAE! Google have been quietly building a fantastic product line and when they start heavily marketing, there would be tons who would want to learn and switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe I've made this comment before - Google App Engine is good and quickly allows you to get a proof of concept off the ground. But the documentation SUCKs big time - the language is obtuse, the documentation is repeated in multiple places (meaning different paths to documentation explaining the same thing in different ways), and it is not uncommon to find that the documentation is not current.

<comment><USER10> You should take another look, as we literally rewrote most of the documentation in the last few weeks.

<comment><USER11> What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better than AWS.

<comment><USER12> > What's missing from this fluff piece is the top 5 reasons why its better > than AWS.

AWS and AppEngine aren't even the same kind of thing. AWS is a high-level collection of services (Google's equivalent is Google Cloud Platform.)

AppEngine is a PaaS offering within Google Cloud Platform. And, AFAIK, its one piece of GCP that AWS doesn't have a direct competitor to. (Lambda is, I think, the closest thing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A trend of comments I see whenever App Engine is mentioned is how limiting App Engine platform is and how it doesn't have MySQL, etc. No one seem to ever mention scalability? App Engine is built for just that! Datastore is infinitely salable so is the application and every other API on GAE. I can spend an hour writing an app from scratch that scales infinitely on GAE without a thought. I personally do not know of _any_ other PaaS (e.g. Openshift, Heroku) that's capable of doing that unless you spend a month learning ins and outs of devops for that particular platform.

EDIT: Also the Datastore is replicated in multi data centers and again, you don't have to think about backups either.

<comment><USER14> It has MySQL, by the way. I wish they had PostgreSQL, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe many see AWS offer as "we have the same *nix boxes you already have but cheaper/on-demand/easily scalable". Plus nice feature as local storage of your data (can be a legal requirement for some industries). Create an account and start deploying now with the smallest investment and commitment.

GAE on the other hand is "we can solve your scalability problems" that many simply don't have and "you should write/re-write your apps to use our framework" which is a red flag to many as well.

<comment><USER14> Actually, GAE is more about easier development for starter projects. GCE is more like a competitor to AWS, not GAE.

<comment><USER4> For starter project in starting companies maybe, for existing companies not that easy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A Google engineer's take on a Google product? I don't feel like this testimonial holds a lot of real value. Why not have someone who isn't being paid by Google tell you that Google products are cool?

<comment><USER11> Or at least minimally compare it to other products that do similar things and are more widely used to provide some basis for comparison?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One other 'thing' \- there are some services that you have to enable billing before they are available on app engine. Google also typically gives you a 30 day/$XXX credit for it. That is a nice feature. The 'challenge' for me is that typically, at this point I'm still trying to test out my code and basically have no traffic so the $200 credit basically becomes a waste. It would be nice if one could be allowed to 'decide' when to use this credit. At my testing/experimenting/design phase, the free quota would be enough for me or I would be willing to pay out of pocket (since I'm still testing I would keep the amount to the barest minimum).

</comment><comment><USER16> According to my depreciated appengine console, I would not say that Google thinks "App Engine Rocks."

<comment><USER17> Of course we do :) We deprecated the original appengine console, and we've moved all of the UI over to the Cloud Developers console:

[https://console.cloud.google.com/](https://console.cloud.google.com/)

It has all of the cloud stuff in one place. Should be a lot nicer to use too :)

<comment><USER9> With the old appengine console, you just went to one url - appengine.google.com and you found all the links in one place - application, logs, datastore, etc

Since the old appengine console was deprecated, it is difficult to remember the urls for the different services. One has to try and remember multiple urls. It is quite confusing and frustrating.

<comment><USER18> The golden rule of UI is that if you change it, it will ruin the experience for someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just logged into my GAE Console to see how my old apps were doing, and was treated to this:

[https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05...](https://annotate.driftt.com/view?i=7zvk40ibtjaaxhs%2F2016-05-06_at_1.57_PM.png%2F)

\-----

If you get that error, somewhere you need to agree to new T's and C's. The site doesn't redirect your properly, so you need to click around until you are prompted to agree.

Pretty cool to see my simple little GAE Emailing app I wrote for my startup back in 2012 was cranking away 3 years later.

<comment><USER20> Do you have javascript disabled?

<comment><USER19> Nope

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hehe, we're running GAE at work and I'm constantly looking for other options / trying to persuade management to spend the time on migration. I spend 8-12 hours a day fighting with GAE in one way or another, even though I very well might experience the "green is grasser" symptom.

Many things are nice with App Engine, outlined in the post. But so many things are not nice:

\- For us the performance characteristics for some queries in the NDB (NoSQL datastore) have really left much to be wanted.

\- The inability of calling C-libraries from Python code (except those provided by Google, they provide standard stuff like cPickle etc)

\- The UI for logs / querying the database / admin is quite bad and buggy. Can't really use it in Safari at all (might very well be the wrong doing of Safari, but still)

\- Limitations in how long functions / tasks can run. I've spent all of my Friday night tonight (I'm in CET) re-writing code for a batch-processing task that took just above the hard imposed limit of 10 minutes to run. According to the docs an exception is to be thrown when the task is nearing its limit but most of the time (intermittently…) the exception is not thrown and just kills the process…

\- Limited community / toolset. Using GAE feels somewhat like using something really old or obscure, quite few SO questions/answers (the upside is that many of them are written by Gudio, which lead the NDB project before quitting from Google), and extremely limited third party tools / plugins for enhancing the developer experience. For example I haven't found any good way, except the GAE provided one, to do performance profiling.

\- GAE has somewhat of a bad rep in some parts of the Python community I've found. A couple of Python libraries I've tried to use have not worked and then I've found bug reports where the maintainers have explicitly stated that GAE is not supported because of some limitation they have imposed. The biggest example I can come up with right now is probably Requests

With that said however, I feel like Google has started giving GAE more love recently. The documentation seems to improve, the dashboards/web UI:s have undergone major rework (not all of them improvements per se but still!). I actually said to my management a while ago that we need to move away from GAE in the medium term (1-2 years) because I feared that Google would start to "sunset" GAE. I wouldn't say that is the case today, but I could not go so far as to say that I would recommend GAE.

GAE is a very nice platform in many ways, but very limited. The tradeoffs for all the ease is quite high and should probably be considered very carefully before picked.

<comment><USER14> I have many years of experience with GAE, and still love it, the point is to use it where it fits.

Agree about slow web console, especially for logs. Datastore viewer got better, though.

I don't know about Python ecosystem, but I think that if you need C-libraries, then you shouldn't be running it in GAE. Low-level stuff sounds better fit for GCE, or AWS. Our team lives in Java world, and pretty much everything there plays fine with GAE. There are some low-level areas (like Unsafe memory management) where it doesn't -- but it's not web-serving part anyway, so it doesn't fit in GAE, IMHO. For example, we offload our recommendation regressions to Docker container engine.

Recently they released so-called Flex environment which is basically container engine (Kubernetes) for any Docker container that listens on port 80. And they have several pre-build containers for different languages and with stubs for Standard environment, so you can throw-in your existing GAE app there. I didn't like Flex environment for my web serving part, though, for two reasons:

1\. Too slow to deploy a new version, like 10 minutes. Really? It seems to upload all the files (Standard uploads only what's changed), and after that they spin up a GCE instance to build a Docker container from the files. And that takes time.

2\. I now must care about serving static files myself. In current Standard environment, statics are automatically served by Google's servers, even if my app has no instances running. For Flex env they suggest to upload statics to GCS, but it's additional ops work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Some were a LAMP stack on a managed hosting service. Some were running as a cron job on someone's workstation.

All that whiteboard interview pedantry doesn't seem to shield them devs who don't know how to deploy a basic production grade app. But hey they were able to memorize tree inversions before interviews so thats good.

</comment><comment><USER23> They're probably going to end of life it like everything else they get bored with. I can't imagine any sane business would risk putting any amount of development time investment into their stuff.

<comment><USER24> You know appengine has been around for 8 years right?

<comment><USER25> Same number of years Google Reader had been around when it was sunset.

<comment><USER26> I bet it's earned Google infinitely more dollars than Google Reader!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Launches Maps Engine API - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/google-launches-maps-engine-api-to-allow-enterprise-developers-to-more-easily-create-share-and-publish-custom-maps/

<comment><USER2> Direct Link: [http://www.google.com/enterprise/mapsearth/products/mapsengi...](http://www.google.com/enterprise/mapsearth/products/mapsengine.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't they already like several years ago? I don't get it.

<comment><USER4> Does one of these portions of the article answer your question?

"Google's Maps Engine, its enterprise-focused service for developers who need to be able to create their own maps based on custom data, launched about two years ago and has been available commercially since last year."

"You may be thinking that Google already has a Maps API, but as Dylan Lorimer, Google's product manager for the Maps Engine API, told me, the regular Maps API mostly focuses on giving developers access to Google's own mapping content. The Maps Engine API is meant to handle developers' own data."</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pinecoin – Money Grown on Trees - <AUTHOR> https://pinecoin.me <comment><USER2> I don't know how to say this in a way that's considered a substantive contribution, but I still want to know:

What's the point of "pinecoin"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for contributing to the discussion.

One of our goals is to increase the price of natural resources that markets aren't yet accounting for or undervalue.

Last night, our first trick-or-treater showed up with a plastic pumpkin already loaded with candy. He asked why there were pine cones with tags on them in with the candy that we were giving away. We said that it was a trick, and that he was welcome to take a pine cone, or one of the rolls of pennies we also had mixed into our candy cauldron. He took the pine cone.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting answer. Even more interesting anecdote, as I don't know what the point of it is meant to be!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've read the website a few times, and I am having trouble understanding how this helps a forest?

I am sure I am missing something simple here: You have replaced mining with pine cone collection. Ok, that sounds kind of neat in a few differing ways. What happens to the pinecones that are mailed in? How is this helping a forest?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that once cones are collected, packaged, and tokenized, they will be put up for sale by the tree's owners (or those given permission to collect on their land—anyone collecting forest products without permission in Maine already faces a fine of up to $500).

The hope is that this will enable property owners (residential, schools, camp grounds, corporate campuses, municipalities, land trusts, commercial forests, etc.) to monetize their trees without needing to cut them down or remove much biomass.

Since Maine is over 90% forested, the equation is different here than many other places. We collected our Initial Cone Offering from a tree next to our house, in a mixed-use zone of a city. It's less about helping forests per se, more about creating an incentive to plant and maintain trees beyond just aesthetics and lumber.

We're not quite at the point of selling our tokenized cones, and have yet to provide any free tokens to others who have collected verifiable cones. We hope to have updates on those fronts soon. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like an interesting game backed by a super expensive and unnnecessarily safe backend.

</comment><comment><USER6> Question: How is it sustainable for a forest if you advise people to take all the seeds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Step 5 of the Pinecoin Protocol specifies that cones must not still contain seeds, which are visible under the scales when dry.

[https://pinecoin.me/#protocol-5](https://pinecoin.me/#protocol-5)

<comment><USER6> I don't know what seeds look like on a pinecone. Perhaps you should include real photo examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER7> I second the other person's note regarding seeds.

A detailed illustration would be helpful.

Interesting project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted, thanks, we'll look at adding more information on identifying seeded cones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is either a misguided serious attempt or the greatest satire I've ever seen.

Either way a lot of effort went into this and good work to the developer!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This website is incredibly slow to load and hogs my Internet bandwidth. You should scale down images by at least 5x.

</comment><comment><USER10> I give up.</comment>


Show HN: Finding running partners to run together. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mile24.com

<comment><AUTHOR> A small site I put together as a weekend project. For now limited to NYC (because that's where I'm) to figure out the right features and get some traction in one small area before opening up to other areas. The goal is to help runners find other people to run with who run the same distance/pace.

All feedback/suggestions are welcome.</comment>


Fingerprinting SDN controllers - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02370 <comment><USER2> This isn't fingerprinting specific SDN controllers, it's really just detecting if the network is setup in a 'reactive' SDN configuration.

This means that certain network packets will be sent to a controller for a decision before a rule is installed in the switch describing what to do with future packets related to the same flow.

ODL, ONOS, or any other openflow controller can setup packet pipelines in both reactive and proactive modes. The latter would be completely unidentifiable from the data plane. Correlating the former to a specific SDN platform isn't really possible because the behavior is entirely dependent on the application running on top of the controller.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most openflow controllers in their default setup are in reactive mode. The thesis of the paper is that the probability of an admin keeping the default setup is quite high (as it is for operating systems for example) and hence proposes a few techniques to reveal the controller. The logic is similar to that of nmap, no technique is individually sufficient, but combining all the techniques gives a good intuition about the controller</comment></comment>


Xcode 8 Beta Release Notes [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://adcdownload.apple.com/WWDC_2016/Xcode_8_beta/Release_Notes_for_Xcode_8_beta.pdf <comment><USER2> Need Apple developer account. Go to [https://developer.apple.com/download/](https://developer.apple.com/download/).

</comment><comment><USER3> Unauthorized Error: Sorry, you cannot view this page.

</comment><comment><USER4> yeah same here, unauthorized error</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use public JavaScript CDN(like cdnjs.com), or host your own? why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For quick prototyping, sometimes I use a CDN like unpkg.com. Otherwise, I always host my own to avoid unnecessary dependency and latency.

</comment><comment><USER3> I host my own, I want control and I need to be GDPR compliant.</comment>


Tesla Remotely Removes Autopilot Features from Cust's Used Tesla Without Notice - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-features-from-customer-1841472617 <comment><USER2> Vehicle owner should sue Tesla for the $8000 value of EAP and FSD removed and contact their Attorney General; as they bought the vehicle used from a third party, it's unlikely they're bound to arbitration as stated in Tesla's purchase agreement. One could argue Tesla's remote disablement of EAP and FSD is theft from the customer.

<comment><USER3> Vehicle owner should probably also sue the used car dealer for not delivering the car as described, with a valid license for software features described on the Mulroney sticker.</comment></comment>


Government report finds Gay and Bisexual Americans are more honest - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/15/health-gay-usa-idUSL2N0PQ1GF20140715

<comment><USER2> Misleading and incorrect title.

       (Reuters) - U.S. government data released on Tuesday showed that 2.3 percent of American adults are either gay or bisexual and that these men and women more often reported serious anxiety and having self-destructive habits than their straight peers.

Of course homosexuality is self-destructive in that it prevents the continuation of life and procreation in sexued animals.</comment>


On being sane in insane places (1973) - <AUTHOR> http://psychrights.org/articles/rosenham.htm <comment><USER2> Recent article questioning the validity of this research: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437852)</comment>


We Need Medium's Editor, Not Medium - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/we-need-mediums-editor-not-medium/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice if some graphical examples (maybe gifs) of the Medium editor were provided. As someone who hasn't published on Medium I'm not familiar with its user experience. Googling didn't really turn up any results other than the open source clone pointed out by nickjj.

<comment><USER3> I updated the reply to include a link to a fully working demo.

<comment><USER2> Great, thanks! I also found this video on the about page of Medium to include an example: [https://about.medium.com/](https://about.medium.com/).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A Medium'ish open source editor does exist at [https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor](https://github.com/yabwe/medium- editor). Almost 10k stars too.

You can demo it here: [https://yabwe.github.io/medium- editor/demo.html](https://yabwe.github.io/medium-editor/demo.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonder if it does Wordpress integration.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't be terribly difficult to swap out one for the other. Getting the UI/UX right would be something else, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny because I feel kind of the opposite. If I post something on Medium it's because I feel the name has some gravitas associated with it and I want to take advantage of that.

But their editor is pretty primitive, if you ask me. It's got a sleek design, but from what I've gathered is missing a lot of important functionality. Most specifically, there isn't a good way to do code blocks or an ACE editor or anything like that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't disagree more. If I could easily edit somewhere else and paste into Medium I would. For me, the main value in Medium is the follower model, easy distribution, and great UX for reading articles.</comment>


Maker Faire: World's Largest DIY Festival May 30-31 - <AUTHOR> http://makerfaire.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll be there with a desktop CNC miller and maybe a diy 3d printer.

Anyone else going? I'd love to meet up with other tech hackers while I'm in the San Francisco area.

ps - I'm currently looking for couch space, social events (I'll cook dinner if you can supply the kitchen and guests) and pickup frisbee.</comment>


Fastest-Growing Metro Area in U.S. Has No Crime or Kids - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-27/fastest-growing-metro-area-in-u-s-has-no-crime-or-kids.html <comment><USER3> This is probably an insanely pessimistic view, but my first instinct after reading this is that there's got to be some absolute misery juuuuuuust below the surface of this place.

Having seen and dealt with lots of HOAs (and seen how incalculably awful they can be), I've got to imagine that life in The Villages is probably pretty good if you play along with all the rules, trim your hedges just so, and keep paying those dues and growing old quickly and quietly. But if you're the kind of person who wants to change something, or is unhappy about something, or wants to improve something, or wants to do something even a tiny bit outside the boundaries, life gets rough pretty quickly. "I'm sorry, the board has decided you cannot do that." ... "I'm sorry, this decision is final." ... "I'm sorry, you must comply."

In short: The Villages is probably pretty nice if you're a follower, and pretty nice if you're an owner, and probably pretty awful for anyone else.

<comment><USER4> I've seen HOAs that are both full of petty bureaucrats with unresolved anger issues, and ones that are out to make the community as widely accommodating as possible. No way to know without actually going and talking to folks.

That said, any community with the ability to push out people unwilling to abide by the communities standards will have a higher satisfaction rating with members of the community. Whether it is by incarcerating people who violate laws (general practice in most US cities), disallowing member to said people (common in private clubs), or killing and torturing their families (seems to be a technique used in less civilized places).

Some friends of mine have speculated what a retirement home for hackers would look like. Basically catering to folks who have strong opinions about "how" to live their lives. It isn't an easy question to answer.

<comment><USER5> The key element is a shared opinion about how other people 'should' behave. That's what makes golf courses a successful focal point for retirement communities in a way that say a shared interest in hunting probably can't.

<comment><USER6> You're right about a key element being a (broadly defined) set of common values. But hunting also includes a broadly defined set of common values: appreciation for the land and conservation, love of marksmanship, support for 2A rights, etc. Which is why, of course, hunting-based mostly-retirement communities like Brays Island exist:

[http://www.braysisland.org/](http://www.braysisland.org/) "Recognized by enthusiasts as one of the premier locations for bird hunting in the southeast, Brays Island provides everything you need for a memorable and productive hunt. Of the island's 5,500 acres, 3,500 are untouched woods, marshes and fields set aside as nature preserves to guarantee your hunting enjoyment..."

"The Brays Island Gun Club is the premier site for the enjoyment of shooting sports. With the finest facilities for clay shooting, we offer numerous forms of target shooting, including skeet, trap, five-stand, plus a newly re- designed sporting clays course featuring a picturesque 15 stations..."

I'm not a hunter, but the inn looks quite pleasant. I'd go there for a visit if I were retired.

<comment><USER7> > support for 2A rights

Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I'm asking because I'm from Norway - a country with one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the world - almost exclusively hunting rifles and shotguns -, yet where most people would be absolutely horrified if anyone tried to push through a "US style" liberalisation of gun laws. We have very strict gun laws, both in terms of licensing, what type of weapons are allowed, and storage.

Maybe hunting is much more tied to a specific sub-culture in the US than it is internationally, I guess.

<comment><USER6> >Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating?

I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent.io). This is true in my experience. As <brudgers> says, you can be interested in shooting sports without being interested in hunting, but I've found that both groups of people tend to be broadly pro-2A.

Note this may not have been true a generation or so ago. But since then, we've seen a ratchet effect where anti-gun politicians have tried to impose more and more restrictions. One effect has been to turn the NRA into the potent political force it is today. This coincided with the rise of the anti-gun left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in this clip seems to say she wanted to ban all guns (or all rifles?) but didn't have enough votes: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs) Barack Obama, or his aide, filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported a state law banning the "manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns": [http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newes...](http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newest.html) [http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html](http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html) San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns: [http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/](http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/) And so on.

This has been done in the name of cracking down on gun crimes. But the same weapon that can drop a 250-lb deer can also drop a 180-lb man, and even casual gun owners have become politically active and aware in a way they were not a generation ago (when politicians on the left were not as anti-gun as they are today). Also some of the recent wave of anti-gun legislation sweeps in weapons used for hunting purposes, which helps to explain this support for 2A rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My parents live in a retirement village, similar much smaller and in Pennsylvania. I could rant about this forever.

For my parents, when they were very mobile and active it was a blast. Today both of them are in poor health with very little mobility. They live in a place far away from any amenities or in any commutable distance to the city, so all my siblings live far away. The community is designed like standard exurb suburban vomit - no sidewalks, houses spaced apart too far, the community clubhouse is miles from anything.

When there is a health emergency they're often left on their own. There are a lot of health emergencies. My dad now needs more or less 24/7 care. They have a nurse that comes by 3 days a week, the nurse staffing in the area is completely overwhelmed and the nurses they send are really unqualified to do much of anything and never show up half the time.

The area they live in was previously mostly rural and the local hospital is unequipped for anything my dad needs, or any qualified doctors so they drive 30 minutes to the next hospital away.

Long story short the real problem is what they hinted to - most of the retirees in this places are in their late 60's early 70's still. When they all hit 80 something what happens? The services in the area where these things spring up aren't even remotely equipped to handle the volume of long term medical care needed to keep these folks afloat. They're going to suffer and families are going to scramble to deal with it en masse

</comment><comment><USER9> Amusing that this should be on the front page at the same time as the Atlantic article about Denver's transportation policy. The Villages is basically a pedestrian's nightmare, without sidewalks or anything worth walking to or past. It also has no businesses, being completely reliant on the surrounding area for goods and services and entertainment.

Anyway, whenever you see the claim "fastest growing" you should just go ahead and substitute "small" and then the whole phenomenon makes way more sense. There was a period where Bryan/College Station, Texas, was the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. That didn't make it a nice place.

<comment><USER10> I resemble that accusation. (I live in Bryan/College Station, and did not graduate from TAMU, although I did work there for a few years.) No, really, B/CS is actually rather a nice place to live. It's continuing to grow pretty rapidly, the neighbors are nice, there are places to live without HOAs, and there's more than enough to do that doesn't involve drinking or college students.

<comment><USER9> Maybe it's lovely now. Twenty years ago it was a dump, literally ... the TAMU socialist party newsletter (yes, really!) busted employees from the local Elf/Atochem factory dumping arsenic into the local reservoirs at midnight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd love more company-designed-and-built towns. There's plenty of land. I'd be happy to look at a town built by a private company (probably a single-purpose entity, but imagine if Whole Foods got into this?).

As long as there's a basic level of legal protection from state/federal law, having municipal-level government handled by a hybrid of company (as vendor/owner) and residents would be interesting.

It's also something people have looked at for outside the US -- e.g. the "Free Cities" projects, and various free trade zones around the world.

<comment><USER12> One of the most famous planned, corporate-developed communities in recent memory is Celebration, FL, originally developed by Disney. It's got a very Stepford feel to it. Almost like living in Main Street, USA in Disneyworld or Disneyland. Some people dig that, though. It's not unlike the community mentioned in this article. I wouldn't want to live there, but I can see the appeal to those who would, and I don't begrudge them their tastes.

A little less extreme are some of the privately planned cities in Southern California, like Irvine or Mission Viejo. These are generally affluent "commuter cities" whose governments aren't necessarily privately run, but whose majority landholders (and de facto bosses) tend to be the original developers.

I'd say the jury is still out on how successful these projects have been.[1] The SoCal privately planned communities have done pretty well for themselves, but they've benefitted tremendously from the expansion of the city, services, and infrastructure around and between them. It would seem much harder to make an isolated, self-sustaining community work.

[1] As cities, that is. As corporations, they've done phenomenally well for their developers. The developer of Irvine is worth about $14 billion, which puts him in the running for richest man in Southern California.

<comment><USER13> Irvine is definitely not a commuter city. It is the hub of business in Orange County with many people commuting from other cities and counties into Irvine. Mission Viejo on the other hand is a commuter city.

Both are the brain child of Donald Bren (who happens to have donated a large sum to UC Irvine and the CS school is now named after him )

Zot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can take any well off group and isolate them and think you can extrapolate all sorts of things out of it.

This place is an anomaly nothing more nothing less.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought for certain this was going to be a prison, but it turns out to be something kind of the same for retired people.

The article mentions some demographic peculiarities, but the main point they seem to miss, is if every generation is poorer than the last as a national economic policy, and they're not leaving money on the table with this one, then who is going to live there in the future? I surely will not be able to afford it by the time I retire, at present trends.

If you build something thats not sustainable on the assumption it'll be sustainable, thats not going to work well.

<comment><USER16> Here is a house there for $157,900, so it is not like they are being exclusive by pricing people out.

[http://www.thevillages.com/HomeFinder/Results/detail/L15.510...](http://www.thevillages.com/HomeFinder/Results/detail/L15.5107)

The average person could probably cover the mortgage payment with their social security check.

<comment><USER15> I donno about that.

According to

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States)

my family is in the top 10th income percentile. My wife and I make about the same, so I plugged my half that into

[http://www.ssa.gov/oact/quickcalc/](http://www.ssa.gov/oact/quickcalc/)

and ended up with about $1500/month. So 90% of the population will have less than us, or less than me, anyway.

Some mortgage calculators for the $157K house estimate $1012/month for that house leaving not too much for food, electricity, repairs, hobbies, "life". Medical care...

If a dude in the top 10% income bracket can't really afford to live in the cheapest house in the entire village its getting kind of elite not "average person".

(admittedly I'd have other sources of income than SS, which is probably going bankrupt before I retire anyway, and I'd probably have my wife to double the income... unless she got sick (or I got sick) in which case its pretty much financial death penalty declare bankruptcy and start over... Of course I could have a roommate, or several of them, assuming the HOA allows it)

My mom is on SS and that house would cost more than her check...

<comment><USER16> The median house price in the US (Jan 2014) was $188k, so it doesn't make sense to say 157k is targeted at the top 10%.

The average SS benefit check for a retired worker is 1,298.40. A spouse would add another 652.57. And they'd have medicare, and hopefully some savings for a down payment.

[http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/2014...](http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/2014-04.html)

<comment><USER17> The median house price is not affordable for the median worker. As you say, though, characterizing someone who can afford the mortgage on a $157K house as in the top 10% is way off.

That was the _lowest_ priced house available though, so who knows what proportion of the community those homes constitute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"You basically have a city of 100,000 people, owned by a company."_

It sounds like there are many things that can go wrong with this kind of "company town" scenario, like the company being able to overcharge residents for all sorts of goods and services by controlling what businesses can set up shop on the property. Since this complex is the size of Manhattan, it could be difficult for a resident, especially someone with impaired mobility, to go shopping in the "outside world".

<comment><USER4> True of course, but no more or less so than regular "government" of the people. You need look no further than Bell California, the poster child of how a few crooks can take over a small town and line their pockets. Unlike Bell, the Villages actually seems to care what their residents think :-).

Given the changing demographics of the developed world (lower birth rates and longer lives shifting the median age higher) this sort of system is inevitable. It can also be an effective way to keep costs in line. If the 100,000 residents are cared for by hospitals that are not trying to maximize profits (the profits being driven by home sales, services etc) you can get pretty efficient at maintaining a solid quality of life for folks.

<comment><USER19> _You need look no further than Bell California, the poster child of how a few crooks can take over a small town and line their pockets._

I don't share your pessimism about government. Bell isn't a regular occurrence, and most important, it's being dealt with in the courts. Overpriced everything in company towns, on the other hand, is baked into the design. Look no further than your average college campus, where one caterer tends to have negotiated the whole concession. Independents can't even set up if they wanted to and prices do reflect the fact. On my campus we can't even order pizza for a seminar, except through Sodexo. And there's nothing you can do.

<comment><USER7> > where one caterer tends to have negotiated the whole concession

Airports is one of my favourite examples, because you're not even able to go elsewhere once you're past the security gates. It's not unusual for a single company to get the concession and then set up franchises of brands that people would normally expect to be separate. E.g. at Oslo Airport every place to buy food in the international departures area from Pizza Hut to the "upscale" champagne bar and lounges is run by the same company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of my mom's extended family lives in The Villages, I've been there quite a few times. It's a nice place and my grandparents have few complaints about how things are run.

<comment><USER10> Have you had discussions with your mom's extended family about what should happen as they near the end of their lives?

My grandparents moved to Hot Springs Village in their 60s. Grandpa died this year (after having a major heart attack with EMS more than 45 minutes away...) and they hadn't really discussed what to do with the house, or Grandma now that she's losing her faculties. She certainly can't stay in the house because there's no help for her and she cannot live by herself.

I'm reading this thread because my aunt and uncle moved to the Villages, and it's really split them from the rest of the family. My parents and I disagree with their choice strongly. We intend to stay as mentally and physically active as possible as long as we can; to do this we're going to put ourselves in places where we're around people of varying ages who will open us up to new ideas, that have good medical infrastructure, and we're going to live in places where we aren't dependent on cars.

<comment><USER20> Many times. My grandmother was a hospice nurse for most of her career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Villages: where baby boomers go to die.

<comment><USER22> And what about you?

<comment><USER17> Baby Boomers' parents generally didn't die in weird corporate towns - <USER2> would their children or grandchildren necessarily follow them? Although, if I squint when I look at planned corporate communities, they do somewhat look like an extended iOS. This may be the future:)</comment></comment></comment>


Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hbis7/us_congress_going_full_1984_on_bitcoin_and_assets/ <comment><USER2> It sounds as though governments are simply trying to amend existing law around money laundering and terrorist financing to try to deal with the invention of digital currencies. This sort of thing has happened before.

Back in '06 I was an intern in the tech department of FINTRAC, Canada's agency for stopping money laundering and terrorist financing, so my knowledge is outdated and only specific to one country- but everyone has roughly the same rules and goals with these laws- track large money movements to find money laundering operations and stop money from finding it's way to terror groups. They use the $10,000 rule- banks report your info if you move more than that in or out of your account and border security reports it if you move that much in cash across a border.

Over time though, new tricks are always figured out, and laws updated. In '06, it was casinos ("yeah I won big last night, that's where the money came from"), currency exchanges ("oh yeah, we do a huge amount of business and over charge everyone"), and jewelry stores (buy diamonds in cash, carry them over borders instead of money). So reporting laws were updated.

Now the trick is "I bought a lot of bitcoins in 2009 and finally sold them today, that's where the money came from". If the laws aren't updated, money laundering becomes easy again.

What else do we expect governments to do? Now, are these laws well written and not overreaching? I'm not sure, and that's worth debating.

<comment><USER3> > What else do we expect governments to do?

We expect it to not both support the laws that create a $100B black market for drugs in the first place, and then try to combat the consequences of its own actions and claim it's solving a problem, rather than creating two of them.

<comment><USER2> I'm very much in favour of legalization of drugs.

But there are other crimes that create illicit money: extortion/blackmail, human/child trafficking/exploitation, murder for hire, theft, ransomware/malware, and whatever new horrible ideas get created next.

Making money laundering harder makes criminal activity less beneficial to commit. And while ending the illegal drug trade will greatly reduce the need for anti-money laundering organizations, it certainly won't end the need entirely.

<comment><USER4> Sure, and the government should be investigating people who have lots of suspicious cash. That's a lot different than penalizing people with private wealth just because they have it.

<comment><USER5> How do you expect the government to _know_ about people who have lots of suspicous cash? That's what the reporting laws are intended to help detect...

<comment><USER4> They shouldn't unless they have reason to investigate me. I live in the US. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy and it shouldn't be a crime to not proactively confirm that I'm not committing crimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there an analysis somewhere that isn't so, uh, /r/bitcoin? There's a kind of occasional Chicken Little style there that seems to add more heat than light.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and please don't take this as a snarky comment:

ctrl+f "digital currencies" and you will see exactly how involved the bill is with Bitcoin.

You are right to suspect this is the reddit crowd over-reacting, and the amendment to the title is probably better. Basically, there is a proposition to include the words "Digital Currenc(ies/y)" into a few places in the bill.

I am somewhat reminded of an earlier court case from Florida where the judge dismissed charges involving Bitcoin because there was no legal definition for it. This bill is basically addressing that and presenting a legal framework for Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing investigations to allow investigation of Bitcoin as well.

The fallout from this can be interpretted by others, but this isn't a specific bill or "1984" attack on Bitcoin, it's adding digital currencies as part of a legal framework for two specific crimes.

edit: added "investigations" to the second paragraph to clarify that it presented a legal framework for such investigations.

<comment><USER8> But ETH is not a currency - it's GAS!

<comment><USER9> Gas that acts very much like a currency insofar as it is a store of value due to its utility and scarcity.

This is pedantry at its worst.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just a reminder when talking about this with people: Money laundering is not an actual crime that harms anyone. It's a made-up thing to make prosecutors lives easier by lowering the bar on what they can go after people for. We need to undo the marketing that governments push out and media plays along with. It's sad that not telling the government your every financial move is seen as wrong in any remotely free society.

<comment><USER11> Money laundering itself might not be something that harms anyone, the problem is it's often done to conceal actions that _have_ harmed someone or _will_ harm someone. If I'm selling drugs or weapons, someone is going to start asking where all this money came from. It's easier for my legal case to say "my laundromat" or "my car wash" than it is for me to say "selling crack and Glocks".

You could make the case that money laundering itself should not be considered a crime, but it should be strongly considered with other evidence of wrong- doing. There are very few legitimate reasons to go out of your way to conceal the source of your income, so in doing so you're already behaving suspiciously.

Like it's not illegal to swerve back and forth in your car without ever leaving your lane, but if a cop see you doing it you're probably going to get pulled over. Because the only reasons you'd be swerving like that tend to be actual illegal activities.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like you're trying to argue against the person you're replying to, but aren't you both saying essentially the same thing? It's a made up thing that makes prosecutors lives easier when they're trying to catch somebody committing a real crime.

<comment><USER11> Every law is a made-up thing. There's no inherent laws of man that govern the world divined by God himself.

What the parent is trying to argue is that the entire idea of money laundering should be forgotten and there should be no negative public perception of money laundering. What I'm arguing is sure, maybe people shouldn't go to jail for money laundering by itself, but there are zero legitimate reasons to launder money. The very fact that someone has gone to any length to hide the source of their income means they've committed a crime. Not the crime of money laundering, but the crime of _whatever they did to earn the money_. Because if they didn't commit a crime to earn it, they wouldn't go through the trouble of hiding it. Money laundering is probable cause for further investigation.

His argument sounds to me like people who argue that since the Constitution doesn't say the government can collect taxes, that means taxation is theft and we shouldn't pay them. It's the libertarian ideal that money is private property, humans are inherently good (unless they've won an election), and laws don't apply to you if you just _believe_ it hard enough. Unfortunately that's not the way the world works. In reality, where there is smoke there is fire, and where there is money laundering there is someone concealing a crime.

<comment><USER10> Really? Zero? What if I work in something I'm embarrassed about and want to front it through something more respectable? Or what about the simple idea that _I shouldn 't have to tell anyone about my income sources_?

I agree that a front is a reason for someone to be suspicious. Find a laundromat doing a million a day? Sure, investigate them. But that alone should not be a crime.

<comment><USER11> >what about the simple idea that I shouldn't have to tell anyone about my income sources?

That's not even an argument. That's the lack of an argument. That's throwing a temper tantrum and saying "but I don't wanna!"

It's a sovereign citizen argument and I love seeing YouTube videos of people telling the police that exact thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >detailing a strategy to interdict and detect [...] digital currencies [...] at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States;

Uh what? They want to detect the presence of crypto currency at the border? How would that even work? Something tells me none of the sponsors for this bill know any specifics for how bitcoin et al. work.

<comment><USER14> My assumption would be if they were to see someone with a foreign address come and try to cash out 1000 BTC in USD (or even 10BTC currently) on one of the exchanges, then they would want to know where those bitcoins came from. It would be able to combat another form of layering (with the normal process of placement, layering, and integration). So "at border crossings" here would probably mean any bitcoin exchange operating in the US that deals with foreign entities.

<comment><USER10> That would be a strange way to word it, wouldn't it? More likely they want to scan your device and use it against you if you are "carrying" undeclared "currency".

<comment><USER13> You don't "carry" crypto currency though, you hold the private key to an address. I don't see how they could determine some random binary blob on your laptop/flash drive/etc. is in fact a private key that is responsible for a number of coins. What if I used an Electrum wallet and just kept the master seed saved, then it's just a string of random words. I could just as easily memorize that or physically write it down somewhere instead.

<comment><USER10> I think that's why they have a part about determining if technology can be invented to detect this. And a lot of these laws seem to have a point of making easy things illegal, so they have more ways to go after you if they need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of silly given that with Bitcoin anyone can see all transactions ever made.

<comment><USER16> Mixing is a thing.

<comment><USER17> The thing I don't understand about mixing is that shouldn't it pretty much always be taken as an indication of money laundering? I can't think of any reason someone would need to mix / tumble coin if it were all legit.

Seems to me that receiving bitcoin from an address known for mixing should be an automatic red flag.

<comment><USER18> Financial privacy. You can still report it on your taxes. Maybe some of the coins you now own were stolen and you just happened to get them from the exchange and you are concerned about the fungability of bitcoin in your legal jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this mean that someone with a $10K credit card could be picked up and have their assets stripped? What about those business guys with oversea bank accounts that are undeclared? I wonder if anyone would use this law to stop political opponents..

<comment><USER2> It's reporting requirements, not making it illegal to have money.

If you've ever bought a car or house, or really made any purchase over $10,000, your bank filed a report to the government with every detail they know about you and every detail about the transaction made. That's not paranoid delusions, that's publicly known law.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_intelligence#Unite...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_intelligence#United_States_examples)

<comment><USER20> This is not true.

The Currency Transaction Report only covers cash transactions. That means green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them, not electronic money in a bank account.

Deposit or withdraw cash, buy money orders or cashiers checks with cash, buy a car or house with cash, and if it's over $10,000, it gets reported.

But if you write use a check, credit card, ACH or wire transfer, that's not cash and the bank doesn't have to file a Currency Transaction Report.

That's because these transactions are already in the banking system, so there's already a good audit trail of what money is moving where.

<comment><USER21> Partially true.

In the US, there is also this thing called Suspicious Activity Reports. They are triggered with any transaction >$3,000 (typically cash-equivalents; but that can be wide reaching). There are some requirements where banks must report but there is also the discretionary part. This is where banks can be held liable for not reporting suspicious activity. Because of that, it is safe to assume most banks report every transaction above $3,000 of any type.

But let's face it, most bank databases probably have something like this going on; GRANT SELECT ON Transactions TO USGOVT

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "(7) 'prepaid access device' means an electronic device or vehicle, such as a card, plate, code, number, electronic serial number, mobile identification number, personal identification number, or other instrument, that provides a portal to funds or the value of funds that have been paid in advance and can be retrievable and transferable at some point in the future.".

Would this not also cover carrying a debit card linked to an account that contains >$10k?

<comment><USER23> I don't think a debit card (linked to a bank account) would be considered "paid in advance". If you had a prepaid card, then it would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some other most wondrous endowments from the seraphic beneficence of Pecuniaria:

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act)

</comment><comment><USER25> None of this is particularly new information. I mean he mentions that bill at the top but no real discussion about it's contents. John Oliver did a great piece on civil asset forfeiture a while back and the $10,000 rule has been around forever. I'm not saying this isn't a bill that we should care about but this post is useless bullshit.

<comment><USER26> Did you read the link[0]? It seems there are amendments to the current bill.

[0]: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate- bill/124...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate- bill/1241/text#toc-idea0e9489fc8f46379f95bb56c8bbbda5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The answer here is Monero.

</comment><comment><USER28> There was no terrorism prior to bloom.bg/1O04ymn

<comment><USER29>
      > There was no terrorism prior to [1974]

Simply false.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you find the self-help books useful? - <AUTHOR> Some bestsellers like "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", "Power of Positive Thinking", "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", ..., anyone ever changed life by following these books? <comment><USER2> Anecdote here: I think that self help books are full of two things 1) obvious stuff, and 2) garbage. I've never found much use for self help books. My roommate in college read several self help books, and put into practice a lot of the tips on leadership and management. I think we've both done fine in our respective careers- me, a statistician, and him, a manager.

I think there are people that can benefit and also people for whom self help books are a waste of time. It depends on your mindset, and in my opinion whether you can think for yourself or whether you prefer "experts" to tell you what the best practices are.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, bunch of mind candy with almost no redeeming value. Talking about you Tony Robbins.</comment></comment>


Chess: Who will win in this riveting game of Math.random() vs. Math.random()? - <AUTHOR> http://chessboardjs.com/examples#5002 <comment><USER2> Because check mate is a very small subset of possible moves at the end game, I'm guessing the vast majority of games will end(?) with 2 kings moving around randomly for all of time.

This assumes most games will make it past the hump of mid game where its possible the king's motion will be limited and a checkmate can erroneously happen, I suspect this is a rare case as well.

On a side note I wonder what kind of useful information could be mined from a huge set of random-random games. Maybe the relative power of each piece in terms of the number of pieces it captures on average? Also with some heuristic tweeks you could probably start exploring the power of various openings. Of course then its no longer random-random.

<comment><USER3> It's not just random vs random. Two extremely weak players will take hours to finish a won game, because the player with the major material advantage does not know how to win!

When teaching kids, it's not uncommon to, after teaching them how to move all the pieces, spend time teaching them how to perform the most basic of mates: KQ vs K, KRR vs K, KR vs K. Only after those three are mastered we have a good opportunity of having beginner games ending in anything other than a stalemate.

<comment><USER4> I still don't know how to checkmate with two bishops. I mean, I've read how to do it, but if you stuck me in an endgame situation, I'd probably draw. Luckily, I have never actually had an endgame with a king and two bishops versus a king. Same thing with king, knight, and bishop.

<comment><USER5> I have a humble level and did checkmate both with two bishops and with bishop and knight... yes, I've found both finals. I had learned the mecanics years before, didn't remember exactly how, but it wasn't so difficult to find the path with enough time.

What I don't want to find is queen vs. rook. I played once queen and pawn vs. rook and won, but it was _painful_. It seems there are some masters that are specialists in drawing in this positions, even if it should always be a win. Computers with end tables have not this problem.

<comment><USER6> The mate King-Bishop-Night vs. King is a bit elaborate.

From a random position on the keyboard, you typically need around 20-25 moves to achieve it, and there is a rule that draws a game after 50 moves without any pawn moves.

I've seen an International Master offer draw to his opponent in KNB + K game because he didn't remember what the winning method was (I suposo that after 5+ hours playing your eroded mindset also plays a role.

<comment><USER5> I did remember the general strategy: take the opponent's king to a corner of the same colour as the bishop. There are a couple of moves that must be thought carefully. But the rest comes very naturally, provided you've practiced it a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Never thought this comment would end up on HN when I wrote it ;)

I remember writing this example and being mesmerized watching the games progress. I think I made an alternate version that speed up the time and opened a handful of browser tabs to watch the games. Most of them do end up in insufficient piece draws or the 50-move rule.

Glad to see others are enjoying it :)

<comment><USER8> _I think I made an alternate version that speed up the time and opened a handful of browser tabs to watch the games. Most of them do end up in insufficient piece draws or the 50-move rule._

I also made an alternate version which runs faster, and I added some code to count games. About an hour on Chrome got me to this point:

        44 white wins.
        415 ties.
        41 black wins.
        500 games played.

EDIT: Another hour, and the stats are now:

        74 white wins.
        847 ties.
        79 black wins.
        1000 games played.

<comment><USER9> 4 hours later, how does it look now?

I would expect that white/black position would be very similar in results (for random games only, of course).

<comment><USER8> I stopped it running after 2 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that is on my (way too long) list of things to try is n-gram chess. 1-gram chess would, for every move from black, have a dictionary of (following move, win probability) pairs, and it would pick one that is legal using the win probabilities to generate a distribution (if there is a sure win, almost always pick it; if there is a move that always lost before, pick it very rarely)

You can start this of with empty dictionaries, and have the thing learn after each game (let two copies play for a few days to get let them teach each other how to play chess)

2-gram chess would improve on this by using (white move, black's reply) as the key in such a dictionary.

I think that would make for better chess than this. For some N, N-gram chess might even superficially look like the real thing at times.

<comment><USER11> I'm trying to figure out how you could store this without having massive dictionaries after a night of training games. I guess it's all just integers which helps.

<comment><USER2> You could probably just drop moves that are below a certain threshold after every k games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I found myself getting mad at Math.random() pretty quickly. "Argh, you just got to promote two pawns, and you made them both black bishops!?!? I oughta fire you and hire an LFSR!"

<comment><USER13> I had exactly the same reaction. I was thinking it was going to be hilarious to watch, but it turned out to be extremely aggravating. The random pawn promotion was particularly egregious.

I'm curious if other people had the same visceral reaction.

<comment><USER14> I did. White had two queens to black's none. It promoted a pawn and made it... a knight. And it was all by itself too. That part was hilarious, but...

In the endgame black had only a king and a pawn and the pawn was hung up on another pawn in the g column. Black's king was trapped in column a by two white rooks in the b column. White managed to create a stalemate with black king at a5 and white rooks at b4 and b6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I once wrote a chess engine that played completely random moves and let it play on the Internet Chess Club against humans for a day. It played 1/0 games (1 minute for all moves). The final result was 46 wins, 22 draws, and 446 losses.

Here's a breakdown.

* 446 losses by checkmate

* 23 wins by time forfeit

* 18 wins by resignation

* 5 wins by disconnection forfeit

* 15 stalemates

* 5 draws by insufficient material

* 2 draws by repetition

Obviously it never won by checkmate. The rest basically came down to whether the human opponent figured out that it was playing against a bot.

<comment><USER16> Those 15 stalemates were probably other people running bots :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I briefly wondered why the King felt smarter than the other pieces before realizing the rules prevent it from taking immediately risky moves or staying in a risky position.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh wow, I thought it was a joke at first, my game was only a half-dozen moves: [http://i.imgur.com/kmKQ2Wi.png](http://i.imgur.com/kmKQ2Wi.png)

<comment><USER16> That position is close to the fastest mate, black in 2. Not something, you'd stumble upon in actual play, but if novices ever move that f pawn early, you can usually destroy that side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I forced white to always take a piece if it can. It initially tears black to shreds, but then the lone Black king battles back and slowly picks off the white pieces.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's truly a spectacle to witness the elegant tactics of Math.random().

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems like it always queens pawns; I'd hoped to see some exciting random promotions :/.

<comment><USER22> Just saw it promote to bishop :)

<comment><USER23> Two bishops here. It gets boring when there is a few pieces left.. there is hardly any chance random will actually win - it will keep moving around forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are you guys watching this? _eats popcorn_ I've been watching for like 3 hours and nobody won yet.

<comment><USER25> It's impossible, I watched it for several minutes, then it stopped moving, not sure why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is strikingly similar to a web interface for chess that I just made, even down to the public domain icons. Really slick, but playing against randomized opponents is not very thrilling. There are also limitations to just optimizing for the best turn with one turn lookahead. Although I have to say the drag and drop is better on this version, I think the problem of trying to find the best move in a client-side web application is relatively tricky. The most naive attempt might use a brute-force method, but this could lock up the web browser. And using large data structures would be taxing, too.

link: [http://greg.team-duck.com/chess/](http://greg.team-duck.com/chess/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I made something that did stats on this a few months ago

see it here

[https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/random- move...](https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/random-move-chess- aka-infinite-monkey-chess/)

<comment><USER28> Those statistics are surprising.

<comment><USER27> Correct, hence part two was required. This went into some of the possible errors that came up

[https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/infinite- mo...](https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/infinite-monkey-chess- part-ii/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It is also interesting to play the Play Random Computer example ([http://chessboardjs.com/examples#5001](http://chessboardjs.com/examples#5001)), and try to checkmate the random computer without losing a single piece.

It combines the fun of steamrolling the opponent with the strategy of planning captures that leave your piece perfectly safe, or managing the board so that the computer could take your piece but probably won't.

</comment><comment><USER30> Some interesting things happen here, the queens almost always seem to go first in my games (perhaps because of their freedom of movement they tend to end up in dangerous territory quickly). Also lots of pawn promotions make the mid-end games a lot more fun, although as the promotion is also random I've ended up with unwinnable endgames (e.g. two knights).

I don't play chess beyond knowing the rules, but this is a lot more fun than watching a tournament!

<comment><USER31> The random move is chosen by generating all legal moves, then choosing from them. This favors pieces with more legal moves, and thus tends to favor the queen the most. Compare with choosing from all pieces that have a legal move, then choosing a legal move for that piece, which would favor a lot of pawn motion, at least until they got themselves killed.

<comment><USER32> To avoid the pawn favoritism you could first select a category of piece, then a specific piece of that category and then finally select a legal move for the piece in question. I think this would be the most even handed way to make the game more entropic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's interesting how closely the midgame resembled a real midgame. But superficially. Better than some chess arrangements you see in movie scenes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some risky moves from the white and we've got a pretty quick checkmate [https://www.dropbox.com/s/q66h70kuauog3zq/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/q66h70kuauog3zq/Screenshot%202015-01-26%2001.37.56.png?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER35> So i simulated 2 games and both of them had a result. Quite interesting, my intuition says that there should be more draws but guess i am wrong. [1] [http://imgur.com/rN1zfDD,sQXY6zQ](http://imgur.com/rN1zfDD,sQXY6zQ)

</comment><comment><USER36> This was INCREDIBLY frustrating to watch, even as an amateur chess player. Fun project though!

</comment><comment><USER37> Finally a chess engine I can beat.

</comment><comment><USER38> I just had black pull out an epic victory over white in truly random fashion: [http://imgur.com/9CTukc5](http://imgur.com/9CTukc5)

I'm also curious how rare a victory is here, and if it can be modeled with math.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very dramatic! One plucky white pawn made it all to end before getting slaughtered.

The two queens got _very_ friendly before the white king killed the black queen in a fit of jealousy.

Meanwhile one black knight just stood off in the corner watching. Waiting.

</comment><comment><USER39> White down to King, Black with Bishop, King, Knight, pawn promoted to Queen... but oh, the mistakes. White swept up piece after piece and could Black still take it with a King-Knight combination? No. No he couldn't. Stalemate.

</comment><comment><USER40> Very original and fun :)

Near the end of the game the probability of something interesting happening decreases. Maybe in the end it could at least prune out some moves and choose randomly only amongst those that make pieces go closer to each other?

</comment><comment><USER9> Oooo, that makes me want to use genetic algorithms just to see if I can come up with a great chess player... Is there an online tournament where I can match my algorithm against others?

<comment><USER41> You can play bots on FICS if you disclose it.

[https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8066/is-it- possibl...](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8066/is-it-possible-to- play-vs-bots-on-fics)

I guess you would want to program it to only play against other bots, and many of the other ones are probably quite strong (since they're based on relatively advanced chess software). So maybe that's not the ideal environment for starting from zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> First game I watched and I was expecting stalemate, but down to just a pawn (f2) and a king (b3), white checkmated the opposing king (at b1) by promoting the pawn to a queen

</comment><comment><USER43> Some ideas:

* host a tournament of many different PRNG seeds.

* generate long strings of moves (random numbers) up front and then use a genetic algorithm to breed and mutate the winning strings.

</comment><comment><USER44> The computer could probably store moves that ended up in a win. Or collecting statistics on what moves have a higher chance ending up in a win.

</comment><comment><USER45> White caged its own king in a8 by putting pawns in a7 and a6 while black king just chilled about in c8. Checkmate!

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder how long it would take to run all the possible games, assuming there is no sleep time between moves.

</comment><comment><USER47> Out of curiosity, anybody know the relative strength of this vs. other real engines?

<comment><USER48> Uh, zero?

<comment><USER49> Probably, but is it that obvious? Having an opponent that is not even _trying_ to win is much harder to predict.

I've heard several poker players saying that it's hard to play against novices, because they do nonsense.

Surly there is some game theory that says something about this. Anyone?

<comment><USER50> I wouldn't have thought so, because there isn't the same element of unknown information that there is in poker (i.e. I don't know your hand in Poker), but I know the board and if you're just playing random moves, then I can probably use some variation of Scholars mate to end the game early. (some beginners keep playing it until they finally reach a level that their opponents know how to defend against it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> $100 to the first person to calculate the expected probability of a checkmate

<comment><USER52> To what precision? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is almost as good as the goldfish vs. goldfish Street Fighter battle...

</comment><comment><USER54> Is the board continuously flashing for anyone else? Mac OSX 10.10.1 Safari.

</comment><comment><USER55> Also would be fun to do with the secure random generator in Web Crypto.

</comment><comment><USER56> So, when exactly did you record my average chess play?

</comment><comment><USER57> Theres a bug in this when Math.random() === 1

</comment><comment><USER58> Obviously, Math.random() must win inevitably.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm guessing white wins more often... ;)

</comment><comment><USER60> surprising how riveting it is.

</comment><comment><USER61> what .. why ..

</comment><comment><USER62> there's a black king and a white king and white knight and its just stuck...

</comment><comment><USER59> The real question is if these wins would change as a result of "global consciousness"

(Global consciousness project is a bunch of computers generating random numbers all over the world that seem to spike when catastrophes occur [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project) )</comment>


How ISIS Came to Control Large Portions of Syria and Iraq - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/world/middleeast/syria-iraq-isis-rogue-state-along-two-rivers.html

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305) with comments by the creator, jashkenas.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just too beautiful a visualization! This is how I hope newspapers of the future will look like.</comment>


Open Source Infrastructure? - <AUTHOR> http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/08/25/open-source-infrastructure <comment><AUTHOR> I'd be curious to hear opinions of people here, too.</comment>


Show HN: Event-driven, user-space and highly-scalable TCP/IP stack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RaphaelJ/master-thesis/raw/master/thesis.pdf

<comment><USER2> There's something nice about a Master's thesis being developed on the master branch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice!

One thing that I couldn't spot is the number of concurrent connections this setup does? That's a really important use case when testing middleboxes. There are relatively easy ways to generate 10Gbps of traffic, not so many ways to generate traffic with 1M concurrent connections.

The performance is not the greatest in absolute terms, but indeed there's only so much general purpose computing you can do on these miserable network accelerators :-( You'd probably do 10x as much traffic per core on a 5 year old low end Xeon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Handling a lot of connection should not be an issue for the network stack, at there is no shared state between TCP streams. The bottleneck would rather located at the application layer, if resources are shared between connections.

I do not think that you could get a 10 times improvement by using x86 hardware. It should rather be somewhere near a 2 or 3 times improvement.

<comment><USER3> Hm. So the load generator with an integrated userspace TCP stack I use at work does about 7Gbps with 100k concurrent connections on a single Xeon E5506 core (released in 2009). It's not quite the same thing as your project since it's a simpler application level protocol than HTTP. But that's still a big difference, and your architecture didn't look insane.

There are some reasons why performance doesn't scale nicely when you add in more connections, even if you've got no shared state between the streams. For example the socket table lookups tend to get more and more expensive, and you start hitting issues like frequent cache misses on the socket records themselves especially. Especially if the representation is at all bloated. So getting a number on the scalability in terms of connections would be a good idea if you intend to continue developing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Rusty is the name of the TCP /IP stack that was developed to increase the throughput of the traffic simulator. The software is written using the C++ programming language._

Awes, I was hoping (due to the name) that it would be written in Rust.</comment>


Ask PG: Want to settle on one account but everything from it gets killed - <AUTHOR>

Hi PG and HN community,
I am new to this community. I started visiting this community after someone posted one of my blog posts here which received a lot of hits from this community about 6 months ago. Back then, I was an infrequent visitor to HN and I ended up creating a couple of new accounts every time I tried to login.
Gradually, I've come to like this forum because of the good quality posts that appear on the home page and I want to contribute regularly in discussions. As a result, I want to abandon this account I am posting with and settle with only one: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=spal My reason for settling on this account is that I use this nickname in most other online forums and IRC networks. This nick provides me the right mix of anonymity and identity.
Unfortunately, whatever I post with that other account gets killed automatically. As a result, I am forced to continue using this account. I am not sure why anything from that account gets killed. I've posted only a couple of links to my own blog as well as other articles on the web from both these accounts. I'm not sure if that amounts to spamming considering I've only posted 3 or 4 links only from each account.
Is there a way to resolve this issue? Any help or suggestion on this matter would be very appreciated.
Also, if this isn't the right place to ask this question, could you please give me the contact details where I can ask this question? <comment><USER2> You probably got banned for <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3282690>. You could try to petition firstname.lastname@example.com; you may want to point to this account as evidence that the banning may have been a bit hasty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Been there, done that. I have two other accounts that have been hellbanned for comments that moderators most likely disagreed with. I have learned to filter my posts through a "would this opinion be unpopular?" filter. It's unfortunate, but self-censorship of even slightly controversial ideas is the only way to maintain a viable account on HN.

<comment><USER4> Comment content on HN is user-moderated. Your account won't get nuked by mods for anything but spam, but the community will vote you down for violating the rules:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

People don't get "hellbanned" here, there are no dictatorial moderators.

EDIT: the above is false--please see child comment.

<comment><USER5> That is completely false. There have been _hundreds_ of accounts hellbanned for bad behavior. Here's a random sampling:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gilesgoatboy> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sharkfish> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=losethos> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Arrington>

if you turn on showdead in your profile, you'll see that all of these people tried to comment past their bannings, but they were silenced.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do I find out why my other account was banned? I've hardly used it and never been rude to anyone with it. Or could it be that multiple accounts for the same user isn't allowed and that's why that one is banned?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rise of Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://robsheldon.com/riseofhacking.html

<comment><USER2> The author seems to me to be arguing that it is now more accessible to be a hacker, and while I would agree with that, I don't think that really translates to a rise of hacking. There is a key point in here: _If someone wants to learn about how things work now, you have some really great resources._ See, the resources may be there, but I'm just not so convinced that are more people now who have the curiosity and motivation to learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there are more people interested in it now. I wouldn't go so far as to agree with the older folks that seem to think that "all those young kids know everything about technology", but at the same time, there are classes now devoted to introducing kids to some pretty high-tech stuff.

When I was in school -- in the East Bay -- about the most advanced tech class around was the a/v class in junior high.

I would also point out the meteoric rise in popularity of programming forums and the like.

(I am the author of the rebuttal post, in case it wasn't clear.)

<comment><USER3> a/v pfft, that was a signal generator and an oscilloscope when I was at school!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When all you had was the machine and some electricity you had to _learn_. Typing listings made me good at debugging. Basic with inline assembler, the sheer joy.

javascript, keep it</comment>


Show HN: Crowdsourced visualization of neighborhoods in cities - <AUTHOR> https://hoodmaps.com <comment><USER2> It's somewhat currently useful with how broad it is, but would prefer even more specifics.

Like in Chiang Mai where the street food is just to the east of the square wall area, I wanted to mark that as having street food, because that would be useful to the inherent tourist site visitor, but there's just a huge "tourist" zone and this can't be done. "Tourist" is only so helpful to tourists :)

<comment> nathan-wailes You can add a label that says "street food"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been followed the development process of hoodmaps on Twitter since the beginning. I must say impressive

</comment><comment><USER4> For those who want to see how it was built, he still has a few videos about the early stages of its development on his YouTube:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBUDudoxW18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBUDudoxW18)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XBOCY_LdGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XBOCY_LdGQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAs5TOozedQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAs5TOozedQ)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! I Twitched the development live! I only lost the first episode where I wrote the first lines. I'll re-enact it this week (maybe tomorrow) and upload it too and make it a series.

<comment><USER4> I did download it if that helps (the video when you started with "test 123"). Will be up in ~2h [https://youtu.be/qFoKjhIFGsk](https://youtu.be/qFoKjhIFGsk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh my god thank you! I lost it! How did you get it? Can you tweet me @levelsio?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is cool, but I feel areas overlap significantly. For example, I live on the cusp between a rich and a tourist area in London; in reality, the area used to be social housing, so is more affordable than the surrounding area. Furthermore, pretty much all the tourist areas of London have other use cases, whether residential or office buildings. The suburbs will also have light industry too.

<comment> nathan-wailes I thought the same thing when I first used hoodmaps, but the ability to add labels does a lot to make this less of an issue. You can just label a neighborhood as "Rich people and tourists" or "Tourists and office workers".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea, but please allow narrower (street-specific) areas. Often the tourist street is right next to a nice authentic street in the same area. The tags are good enough to warn for a tourist trap, but tags seem only coordinate based, not street based. A tag warning for a crap tourist street is unclear whether it's about an area or a street

<comment><AUTHOR> It does allow that. The zoom level directs the level of detail is shown. That means if a person brushes on a lower level (like a street), it'll show up over the more high level (area) data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool project, especially all the funny comments ppl give => local cultural insights

<comment><USER8> Where do I see the comments?

<comment> nathan-wailes He's referring to the white labels/text that you can see on the map for a given city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> May want to reevaluate the color-scheme -- it's currently unusable for colorblind folks. Also it works great on a desktop browser, but was too laggy to use on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had this same idea a few years ago - glad to see someone actually make it!

<comment><USER11> Honestly, I'm not quite understand how is it exactly useful. Though I believe in crowdsourced data - this is distributed approach rather than centralized source that's limit and boring.

<comment><USER12> How are you conceptualizing "crowdsourced" such that the approach can be anything other than distributed? As I understand the term, that's something of a _sine qua non_.

While we're on the subject of meanings, I'm more interested in how this is described as a "startup" on its author's Twitter. It's nifty enough, to be sure, although I find the categories rather limited - but how on Earth does it purport ever to make so much as a single thin dime?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm OP: it's uncertain but a few monetization models:

1) text ads: charge $500/m per city, sell 20 city ads = $10,000/m 2) sell city prints: charge $100 per poster, sell 5 per day = $15,000/m 3) sell area data and embedding, not sure but B2B data sales could be another $5,000-$20,000/m depending on customers

Obviously I have not validated any of this, that's the fun. Monthly revenue is therefore $45,000, amplified by odds (e.g. 10% chance this works = $4,500/m).

<comment><USER12> I love the optimism! Here's hoping it plays out to the good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is like Urban Dictionary meets Google Maps.

The results are both hilarious and practical. Great work here!</comment>