Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-facebook-ad-traffic-90-useless-omid-sadeghpour <comment><USER2> Previously [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13404758)

</comment><comment><USER3> This line stuck out for me...

      Also when I turned off "Google Partners" and "external
      sites" from our campaigns, the ratio of idiot-clicks went
      down dramatically. I believe that most of the useless ?
      traffic (i.e.: bots or confused users) come from sites
      external to Google.

Most of the adwords best practices docs I've read, and going through the udemy course Isaac Rudansky put out on adwords, it sounds like the extended google partners network is best left turned off for all adword campaigns.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, that will open an infestation of bots.

<comment><USER4> What will, turning it off or enabling it? Your "that" is ambiguous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Enabling ads to third-party websites other than Google properties.

<comment> angry-hacker Or a lot of content farms and other bs that is using adsense.

There are decent sites too of course, but you cab target then manually I believe. Arstech for an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google's third-party ads are known to be almost useless. Referrals directly from a Google search have some value. But this article goes beyond that. It indicates that most clicks on third party ads are coming from bots.

It would be useful for a few sites to publish IP addresses and times from which they get bot-like traffic. Maybe a pattern will emerge.

<comment><USER6> A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest share of bot traffic. I'd further speculate that real desktop Linux users are substantially more likely to have an ad block running anyway.

<comment><USER7> And why would a bot disclose that it's a "linux user" and not just send some sort of Windows agent string?

<comment><USER8> A non-negligible portion of the bot networks are teenagers and college students learning how to manipulate the system.

Inexperienced operators like that make amateur mistakes like leaving in default user-agent strings for a variety of tools that are frequently linux- based as its cheap to go on something like LowEndTalk.com, pick up a couple $2/month VMs, pick up some proxies, and test out a small group of bots designed to fake traffic to generate Ad revenue.

The reason I said teenagers & students is you have to be really, really sophisticated for that sort of operation to scale beyond $100/month in profit so its generally something I've seen people "learn" on, realize the limitations, and move on. (i.e. Making no amateur mistakes that flag your traffic as non-legit and being able to use an IP address only a couple of times a day in random patterns)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have had similar experiences, but even if the traffic is 90℅ useless, that means 10℅ isn't. It's an auction, so bid an amount where clicks from each particular network are profitable to you. There are some niches where brand advertisers and well-funded startups willing to lose money will suck up all the inventory unprofitably. You simply won't be able to compete with that type of activity unless you also have money that you are willing to light on fire.

However, there are pockets of profitability within the PPC arena. They shift quite a bit at various times based on the competitive landscape...an unprofitable niche today may be a profitable one two months from now after someone that was driving up bids burns through all their cash. You just have to monitor and deploy when the CPC is low enough for you in your niche.

<comment><USER10> ℅ instead of %? this is off topic but curious if you use it deliberately and what you want the reader to feel about it :)

<comment><USER9> I was just typing on an Android phone I use for development purposes and that was the only key I saw for %. I didn't mean anything by it :)

<comment><USER10> And now we know ^.^ maybe I will start sprinkling deceptively similar symbols in my writing• :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Either your ads are effective at driving more sales than the ads cost or they aren't. It doesn't matter what % of the traffic is "fake" as long as the bottom line works.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's useful to some things, esp. when there is a high value potential click conversion, i.e. amazon and ebay items.

Some ads are bought by brand advertiser with little understanding of the impact because a) it's 'brand' and hard to measure in the first place, and b) they have a huge budget, need to spread it across channels, so they just 'buy X$' of 'social ads' on the 'trusted networks' because that's the marketing mix required of their bosses or client. To be fair - print and TV ads have the same problem. Marketing is not a hard science in many places, and they have big budgets :).

But it clearly works for some folks.

There should be no surprise at in-links from reddit: theres usually a degree of clear interest in the first place, and second, there is a 'voting' structure that naturally moves better quality stuff to the top of the pile.

</comment><comment><USER13> If the advertiser used the same bids on different properties, the campaign wasn't yet set up well. Also the device (mobile/desktop/tablet), query, language and many other features of the user session change the conversion rate, which means the bid should be different. The fact that the ads were useless meant that either there is too much auction pressure and the advertiser wasn't able to compete, or he just didn't set up the campaign well (which is of course a hard task).

It would be good to know if the advertiser was using Enhanced CPC or not, which can increase the effectiveness of the ads, but even then it takes money to set up the bids correctly.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a relevant product

<comment><USER4> What is "auction pressure?"

<comment><USER13> It means how competitive the bids are for the auction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When you think about it, "real" advertising is the same - think how many people drive past a billboard vs how many of them actually buy whatever is on the billboard.

Google/Facebook really shoot themselves in the foot by claiming that they only target your ads at people who are already interested in what you're selling. That makes their ad services sound like some sort of marketing panacea and sets the expectation that you'll get a lot more interest than you actually will. What they don't want to acknowledge is that people are just as desensitised to, and disinterested in online ads as they are in "real" ads.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish ads I put out there had a 10% conversion rate. Sorry, this just seems like such a click bait title, I could t resist.

</comment><comment><USER16> Gleaning value from their advertising will become the dialup of this generation as entrenched manipulation and adblocking grow concurrently and they can't thwart either group.

AOL still milks dialup, but the debate has long-shifted to how they could possibly be getting away with it. That's Google/FB style advertising in another decade when 1 in 1000s of clicks is an actual person you want to pay to reach but they continue to use contrived metrics to justify billing for 100s.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit- advertising...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/facebook-to-audit-advertising- metrics.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Had the same experience with Google and Facebook ads. ~80% of the clicks are simple bots that don't run javascript or store cookies.

Additional ~10% are more sophisticated bots that try to mimic real people behavior, but when you compile their actions to a video it's really easy to see that they are not human.

Most of these bots are run by agencies with the purpose of clicking on their clients' ads.

</comment><comment><USER18> It really depends on the product and the industry as well as many other factors like proper targeting, ad copy, matching expectations of the user, etc.

I've seen many ad campaigns with fantastical results or at least very positive ROI and many spectacular failures too.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried it once for a month and I got results, probably more than 10% (To sell a music album). I was super specific with the demographic, I guess that helps.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ah, but which 90%?

And 10% useful doesn't sound too bad....

<comment><USER21> 10%, yeah not so bad. an issue with CPC is that you still pay for the other 90%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This was already on here.</comment>


Did your deps make upgrading to React 16.x hard too? - <AUTHOR> I am struggling not to spout cliches about how the JS community make breaking changes constantly.
Up to now I was one of the proponents of how great the ecosystem is (these days). I have been deeply frustrated by the number of libraries that made major breaking changes across different React versions, without a straightforward upgrade path, so instead of being able to incrementally upgrade I've been forced to bulk upgrade and fire-fight and read all the documentation in one mega upgrade...
React itself has a really good deprecation / upgrade version support, but I inherited a codebase using react-router (complete paradigm shift across versions), redux, redux-saga and a bunch of other deps with code splitting and webpack too, and this has been painful unlike any other upgrade I've had to do too.
The hot reloading library was deprecated, there were changes in the history api, the router is no longer parsing query strings and also changing the signature of the properties routes create have changed... I could go on and on, there was even a breaking API change to react-select!
My point is not that breaking changes are a problem on their own, it's that I was left with the version change dilemma where breaking changes across 10s of deps were made without a straightforward deprecation / migration path in a single version of React and I ended up with little choice but to upgrade everything and work through all the issues, until the thing built correctly again...
Anyone else have a similar experience? <comment><USER2> As you've pointed out, none of that is really about React itself.

React-Router did completely change its API between version 3 and version 4, but my understanding is that version 3 is still maintained. So, you likely didn't _need_ to upgrade to v4.

React-Hot-Loader has always been something of an "experimental" tool. There's entirely too many edge cases around detecting components and trying to maintain state of component instances when hot reloading. The React team has suggested they have some ideas for ways to make hot reloading a better experience down the road. (Personally, I prefer to keep most of my state in Redux and use "plain HMR" [0], but I'm biased.)

It sounds like most of the issue here was really with React-Router. Were there other specific issues you ran into?

[0] [https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/08/blogged-answers- we...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/08/blogged-answers-webpack-hmr- vs-rhl/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct, this was voluntary. It was the difficulty level of the upgrade that was frustrating.

We also love the NPM known vulnerability scanner, and we managed to get down to zero known vulns in our deps, we like the direction of React, and Bootstrap and some other things. We want to be a good citizen and use recent versions of software, partly to play our part and decrease the maintenance burden for old versions of things, but also when we feel that holding back the tide will not help us.

Webpack has also got a lot nicer, the defaults are getting better. Its opinionated starting point philosophy is good, and did let us simplify a lot of config, and speed up builds etc.

I'm willing to accept that I'm grumbling, and perhaps the trade-off of better software but more serious breaking changes is worthwhile, but I think it could have been avoided if there was more of a focus on trying to bridge versions of React. It would be nice to be able to upgrade React and focus primarily on how that might affect my own code, than having to chase down all the deps that don't straddle versions.</comment></comment>


AT&T May Start Negotiating with Apple to Prevent Skype Calls over iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.betanews.com/article/Should-ATT-be-obliged-to-enable-Skype-for-the-iPhone/1239030900 <comment><USER2> Only AT&T would do something this stupid.

Someone needs to remind AT&T that the iPhone is a computer with phone service, not a phone with Internet service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Things like this go hand-in-hand with Time Warner's bandwidth capping, etc.</comment>


Lunr – an anonymous, private, and secure meta search engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/obsidianbit/lunr <comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

I am making a privacy oriented meta search engine. I would love to hear your feedback and improvement ideas and am open to questions. Please keep in mind that this is a very, very alpha version of the software.

Site: [https://lunr.xyz/](https://lunr.xyz/) GitHub: [https://github.com/obsidianbit/lunr](https://github.com/obsidianbit/lunr)

</comment><comment><USER2> The project might be abandoned, but there's something else related to search named "lunr". [https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js/](https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js/)

I'm not sure what you want to do with that information...

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the project is not abandoned. In fact it has only recently started development. Also that project is in no association with our project. To learn more about it please go to the github link.</comment></comment>


Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/technology/motorola-to-cut-20-of-work-force-part-of-sweeping-change.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> _>... Dennis Woodside, Motorola's new chief executive, in a rare interview.

"We're excited about the smartphone business," said Mr. Woodside, who previously led Google's sales and operations for the Americas._

Interesting. They put a Sales/Ops guy at the helm of Motorola, which implies that (in a way, naturally) all strategic decisions will be made by Google and passed down to the subsidiary. (I think this is actually an important piece of information to confirm, since a good portion of subsidiaries _do_ make strategic decisions for themselves)

 _> In addition to the coming cuts, Google has gutted Motorola management, letting go 40 percent of its vice presidents._

Great move, I'd have much more confidence in Motorola's engineering staff than the (former) upper brass.

 _> They will focus on Motorola's storied past and the ways the products are better than the competition's, like battery life. _

Not too sure about this; every OEM on the face of the earth is utterly _obsessed_ about battery life. I don't think any OEM can make battery life a differentiating feature. Every OEM presses all its suppliers and solutions providers for maximal power efficiency, and of course, said suppliers cross supply for many OEMs.

<comment><USER3> Truly agree about the battery life. It the one thing that defines a mobile device, be it a phone, a pocket calculator, a language translator etc. Motorola would need to improve it by a couple orders of magnitude for it become a game changer. Imagine having a mobile phone that only needs to be charged once a fortnight!

<comment><USER4> You mean smartphone. My old Nokia 1200 did have two weeks battery time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Got myself a Motorola Triumph last year, returned it within a week. The most awful Android phone I ever used. Nonexistent battery, missed taps (almost every 10 taps or so), GPS took about a minute or longer to latch on. Went back to a 3 year old Optimus V, slow as hell, but at least it works as intended.

Not buying a Motorola phone until there's major indication that they got their stuff together.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can they just fire everyone who works on MotoBlur?

<comment><USER7> I'd attribute that fiasco to management, not necessary the unfortunate employees forced to implement such a terrible idea.

<comment><USER8> I would just fire everyone that ever got close to that thing just in case

Ok, management told them to drive off a cliff, then they went and did exactly that.

<comment><USER9> ...so you're telling me if you were asked by your boss to implement a software feature you didn't like you'd leave your job on principle? Most people don't have that luxury. Sure, you can moan about it, but sometimes you have to suck it up.

<comment><USER8> Not a feature that I didn't like, but something that's _obviously_ a train wreck.

I've ended in situations like that, but then boss saw it was unsustainable and a major overhaul was needed.

But if the company only goes for actively making the user experience crap for nothing I would consider moving

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > And, people familiar with the companies say, Google could decide to follow > Apple's lead and build a phone from silicon to software, perhaps by creating > a separate operating system for Motorola that other phone makers cannot use.

The only way I could see this happening (within the next few years) is if Google makes a Firefox OS-alike. They have way too much invested in Android to give it up so suddenly.

<comment><USER11> Just make the next Android OS Motorola exclusive for 6 months, and then Open Source it... They just have to balance between what they want to do and their OEM partners.

<comment><USER2> I think that's too drastic of a move, and would severely alienate partners, especially since Google has cultivated strong relationships with OEMs via their GED programs.

A more sensible differentiating move would be to simply strive for a better user experience and more seamless HW/SW integration in their MOT phones by leveraging their deeper understanding of the OS and the framework.

<comment><USER12> They only have to do these two things \- Build more reliable hardware \- provide stock android on all Motorola phones

That would make more people want to have a Motorola phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >"It got left in the dust by the competition and kind of missed the smartphone transition," said Charles S. Golvin, a mobile analyst at Forrester Research.

Motorola's Droid was the best smartphone available at the time of its release and sold tons. They didn't miss the transition, they fumbled.

<comment><USER14> As an original Droid owner, the Droid was a great phone.

Tying the phone to a brand name owned by Verizon was probably a bad idea, all things considered, causing considerable confusion among mainstream non-techies as to what they should upgrade to post "OG" Droid. And then they also kneecapped the techie market by switching to locked bootloaders (they've since recanted on this, but I still view the Motorola brand negatively solely because of what they did with locked bootloaders in the past).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the changes they're making. Post-merger integration is the most difficult part of a deal especially when you have significantly different cultures. I understand "integration" here isn't combining them into one operating company, it is the delivery of Google's vision of what Motorola can become, a vision Motorola thought was wrong prior to the deal (or they would have already been doing it).

</comment><comment><USER16> This can actually only be a good thing. There's so many layers of management in motorola. Dealing with them is like a page form the script of brazil

</comment><comment><USER17> Motorola is notorious for hiring and firing employees every year or two.

<comment><USER18> Let's just hope they fire the right ones this time. ;-)

<comment><USER19> Agreed, it's almost like a public union -- where the ones who deserve to be fired are the last to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Those of you who are managers, can you tell me how it is possible to have a group which is "not afraid of failure" after 20% layoffs and with everybody wearing name badges with their expiration dates on them???</comment>


The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/katzbio.txt <comment><USER3> Reading this sounds like a hit piece. I don't doubt he drank himself to death. There is an embellishment of events and the author is writing from the perspective as though they/he/she were there.

I am writing this after coming back from the bar with friends. I would actually consider myself someone who drinks too much. I have written code for years, tried and failed on over four startups. I have spent a week in a hospital for suicide and depression. I currently work a cushy job where I make great money and write code that a first year CS student could write.

This man was depressed. He tried to find outlets, self medicate, whatever the garbage we need to say about his actions that we need to say. He needed help. Rather than criticize his failures, lets make a note of how fragile our human psyches are and work towards helping one another cope with our internal battles.

<comment><USER4> I agree whole heartedly and have been to some of the places you have. One thing I have noticed in some friends and acquaintances who've worked out of depression is that they can attain this loftiness to themselves. They feel superior to those who are where they once were. Once I saw that in real life, I began to extrapolate it to a lot of the comments on the internet that tear down the depressed. Somehow they lose their empathy along the way.

<comment><USER5> > They feel superior to those who are where they once were.

This is the thing I don't understand about these people. Once you've experienced depression but somehow you did manage to "leave it behind" you still have the feeling that's there, somewhere, hidden, and only the greatest fool would make fun of it or of people still suffering from it.

<comment><USER6> It is very simple - depression is like cancer in a sense that it expands and captures/modifies more and more reflexes, thought patterns, habits and other aspects of personality. The single most important thing is to stop trying to be accommodating and understanding to its effects (feeling sorry for yourself), which is needed in order to increase locus of control[1]. Another key part (which comes later) is to absolutely believe and be determined that you're not depressed and that mistakes are just mistakes. So, take lack of compassion and self-identification and you've got it. Still, being a bitter cunt is zillion times better than getting hit by a tram, because you don't care. Also, a lot of chicks just dig guys who are short on empathy, which is a nice reward. And when need be, empathy is extremely easily faked, because people are not very suspicious when they need it.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_self- evaluations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_self-evaluations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In contrast to the far overused sugary definition, Phil Katz really was a rock star programmer. He also died a rock star's tragic and pathetic death.

There is probably no line between self and business for a guy like PK. At that time you could build a significant program or even a game singlehandedly. Most likely he obsessively made his better ARC program for its own reward (you could use it for free) and he was surprised both by the commercial success and the subsequent legal attack. Very personal indeed, and if he wasn't already a completely tortured soul, that would be more than enough to take away any shred of sense he had made of the world. Give enough cash and free time to someone who has been cracked like that and he quite easily can end up dead from an existential crisis with no practical boundaries.

Considering this was some 25 years ago now, if he thought about intellectual property issues at all, the mindset at that time was very reasonable in that your source code and executable was considered copyrightable like a book - <USER2> didn't matter if it provided the same functionality as someone else's program as long as you wrote the code. Just consider the fate of the original spreadsheet for confirmation of this.

To summarize, before you take any stand against the tragedy that is the life of PK, consider that there is probably a huge concentration of people very much like the early Phil Katz right here on HN. The man simply needed help, and he didn't get it.

</comment><comment><USER8> An interesting point of view I found via Google:

[http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html](http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html)

<comment><USER9> This:

"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "

is contradicted by this:

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

"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.

...

After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."

Wiki also says

"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."

Any greybeards care to comment?

<comment> micro-ram I didn't care about the controversy I just remember re-packing all of my files in .zip to save more space on my BBS.

Unfreezing...Melting....OOOO00000oooooo........

<comment><USER10> That reminds me of ARJ, I have no memory of why, but I was a much bigger fan of ARJ than zip.

<comment><USER11> Me too. ARJ was easier to use IIRC, specially with muli-volume archives (frequent if you had to split an archive into several diskettes).

I used ARJ mostly, until RAR came in, of course ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "As soon as he started drinking, you could see a little smile on his face. That's when he could talk to people, or tell a joke."

Coders in general are susceptible to alcohol for these kinds of reasons. Add in flexi hours (hey it doesn't matter what time I show up as long as I ship code, right?), and it's practically the ideal job for a functioning alcoholic.

I've seen dozens of fellow programmers slip down the slope. It's particularly bad in the financial sector in London, where "trader culture" of hard drinking, drugs and women is seen as acceptable. Usually it's well concealed until early to mid-thirties. Often their situation rapidly degenerates after a relationship breakup or family bereavement. What's fun and social when you're with your friends in your 20s isn't so much when you're 35 and lonely.

It's striking how casual and uninformed the general attitude to this drug is in our industry, e.g. [http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works- creativity/](http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-creativity/)

<comment><USER13> Some personality types gravitate towards drug abuse and some types gravitate towards programming as a primary activity. The overlap between the two sets is very significant.

Add in money and a tendency to have few friends, and almost certainly no SO, and the wonder is there aren't even more casualties. Though there are a huge number of people who get older and wonder where exactly it all went wrong.

<comment><USER14> The other problem, apart from alcohol per se, was the fact that he never had a smile on his face when sober. If alcohol wasn't available, he would still have been tortured.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, a big text file isn't a documentary. Download this link for an actual documentary on the subject:

[http://www.esva.net/~thom/arczip.wmv](http://www.esva.net/~thom/arczip.wmv)

The takeaway is that Katz optimized existing code, his mother ran the pkzip business, they defamed the arczip guys, and Katz himself died a paranoid, drunken wreck. The problem with the doc is that pretty much nobody is there to defend Katz. It's an old war, and really doesn't matter now.

</comment><comment><USER16> This story might be a bit biased in favor of Katz. Read this take, too:

[http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html](http://www.esva.net/~thom/baker.html)

The team that owned ARC was even smaller than Katz's, and PKARC was based _directly_ on ARC.

<comment><USER17> Whoa this line really stands out from the end of Thom Henderson's (creator of ARC) take on Phil's death:

 _I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."_

(Apparently PKARC was blatantly ripped off of ARC and Phil refused to license ARC.)

<comment><USER18> I recommend 'BBS - the Documentary' by Jason Scott, episode #8. It should be available on YouTube. It is about the SEA vs. PKWARE controversy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I logged in to read about CodeCombat. Instead, I read this submission. Mostly because it was sitting there forlornly with no comments. Alcoholism is really painful. It in no way lessens the excellence of the contribution of talented people; it only makes us cherish them more. We just don't get to help often because the destruction happens in a way that is inaccessible to outsiders.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's brutal, and hard to read, especially when I've experience shreds of that loneliness, that unreasonable fear that you have nowhere and no one to go to.

Each morning I read a note to myself: "The high score isn't money, it's people who love you".

</comment><comment><USER21> _Katz talked freer, laughed harder, stayed up longer and dreamed bigger when he had a drink in his hand, friends say. Drinking brought a painfully shy man out of his shell._

I wonder if alcohol served him as an unfortunate remedy for his introverted person.

And on unrelated note:

 _He got real good at optimizing programs, and he learned to get the job done with the least amount of instructions and running times._

I like the culture of code bumping back in the day. Although, we now live in a time of abundant CPU cycles and memory, there's still value in that, even above many layers of abstraction. Sadly, increasing number of programmers do not care or even aware of their programs' resource footprint on the hardware.

<comment><USER22> Re: the remedy for introverts, yes.

I'm a strong introvert and I find that a few drinks makes me feel like what I suspect an extrovert feels like. Personally, I'd much rather socialize with a few drinks in me; and if there's a large group involved, it's almost mandatory for me to enjoy myself at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought this was incredibly sad. It reminded me of my best friend during high school, who took his own life last year:

[http://www.desototimes.com/articles/2012/12/18/news/doc50cfc...](http://www.desototimes.com/articles/2012/12/18/news/doc50cfcc5fa011b913849634.txt)

The brightest of us are the hardest to reach and the most difficult to persuade, but they're also the most painful to lose.

To anyone reading this: if someone that you care about needs help, don't wait until tomorrow. Don't make excuses. Don't fuck around.

</comment><comment><USER24> "I can think of no more fitting epitaph than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement: 'If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life.'"

Deep.

</comment><comment><USER25> Being young, I stumbled on PK Ware once while doing a task for a job. I started inquiring about their service, and was slightly rude to a rep. The conversation went something like...

Me: Why would I pay 40 dollars for zipping software I get for free? You guys are totally late to the game, winzip and winrar already exist.

Rep: ....... Yea, we started the industry, and our founder died from alcohol abuse...

Me: Good joke...

.......

It's a sad tale indeed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh gosh, I didn't know he had died. This makes me very sad for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER27> Phil was my teenage icon. Maybe he wasn't such a great genius, but he did a lot of money out of almost nothing, and never bothered himself much about anything.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's really sad to see someone bright self-destruct this way, but I _need_ to say I found the exotic dancer's name, Chastity, almost funny.

</comment><comment><USER29> to me this is a glimpse of the computer world near 2000. the idea of file compression just becoming popularized.

these days, every time a startup reaches an IPO, we get a movie, book or long series of articles. we learn the guys revolutionizing social media are total basketcases

</comment><comment><USER30> I used to work at PKWARE back in 2007-2010, and his legacy was rarely discussed by everyone was well aware. Seemed like a bad ass to me.</comment>


Schema Markup Shows In 36% Of Google Searches, But Almost No Websites Use It - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/schema-markup-shows-36-google-search-results-almost-websites-use-study-189707

<comment><USER2> While it generally makes sense to enrich data on websites with such metainformation, Google made the idea much less appealing to us when they decided they'd steal our merchant reviews in order to display them on their (competing) product search / price comparison pages. Who wants to become a pure content provider (with mostly Googlebot traffic) for Google's future cash cows?

Don't get me wrong - I'm very much in favor of accessibility and mashing up of publicly available information, it would greatly benefit everyone if this was easier. But I'm not going to follow a trend (and instructions) set by a monopolist who has only his own revenue in mind and strongly opposes similar openness for his own data (all of which is actually collected from elsewhere...).

</comment><comment><USER3> I've not found that schema.org provides clear guidance over what markup to use, and when. Nor a clear indication of what the value is to sites that do implement it.

Take Hacker News as an example... shared links with comments.

Is the link itself of type WebPage? [https://schema.org/WebPage](https://schema.org/WebPage) I would've said yes, except that the bit at the top states that all pages are implicitly WebPages and thus implicitly self-describing rather than describing a link elsewhere.

Unless the article/link is a WebPage.significantLink ? But that seems not significant enough for what is essentially the context for the entire page.

Maybe we're linking to an [https://schema.org/Article](https://schema.org/Article) ? So we can mark the link as that. Except you and I know that not all things linked are articles, it feels like a poor fit, especially as the Article type agains describes the thing itself and not the link to it.

Alright, let's forget describing content elsewhere and focus on content here on this site... comments.

Should I use [https://schema.org/UserComments](https://schema.org/UserComments) ? Looks like the right thing, except that this is a comment relating to (a child of) an event, which isn't a good fit.

But we do have a [https://schema.org/Comment](https://schema.org/Comment) which looks like a great match, it even has an upvote and downvote count.

So we have a good match for comments, but not for the links... unless the news articles/posts are in fact just comments themselves? Afterall, they have an upvote and downvote, a comment body and we could always use the `url` of `Thing` for the link.

But in the end I'd probably mark the list of stories as simply a [https://schema.org/CreativeWork](https://schema.org/CreativeWork) as at least that has a `discussionUrl`.

That works reasonably well (and I know schema.org well enough to do it swiftly), but I've given tasks like this to other devs and authors and seen wildly different results for similar things.

The question I'd ask, why? Why bother? It seems like a lot of work for inconsistent quality of answer, for what benefit to the sites that go to the effort?

With little guidance and examples for really common scenarios (blog, forum, business word press site, ecommerce shop, calendar), time and effort is poured in without any understanding of the value to be derived from that investment. It may have potential but if a client is spending money today, what value is there?

<comment><USER4> I think you have the wrong perspective of Schema. Although it is sometimes useful to describe what links relate to (both externally and internally), Schema is most useful when content describes itself. E.g., it's not so much saying "This link refers to an Article" but "I am an Article". I very rarely markup links with Schema, as whatever page I'm linking to describes the content therein.

I don't know if there is a definite benefit to implementing Schema, but I've noticed that new websites I have launched seem to rank a lot quicker than without Schema markup. And, I think it looks nice, and provides a better user experience. There could be more guidance on Schema.org, but I think it does a good job. The real problem is getting into the mindset about what Schema is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is hard to get schema properties right, because Google is changing how it uses it for its search results all the time.

A year back I optimized some product pages so that they displayed the price and availability in the search results. Very nice. Then, two weeks later, Google changed something and the pages stopped showing their special properties and were back to normal in the search results. No idea why...

</comment><comment><USER6> blogspam, source: [http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/searchmetrics/press/schema-o...](http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/searchmetrics/press/schema- org-in-google-search-results/)

full study in pdf (7 pages): [http://www.searchmetrics.com/media/documents/knowledge- base/...](http://www.searchmetrics.com/media/documents/knowledge- base/searchmetrics_schemaorg-study_en_2014.pdf)

> The survey was conducted in March 2014 for Google USA.

the overall conclusion seems to be that sites using schema.org rank higher.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with schema markup; what is it? This article doesn't appear to be a good place to learn about it.

<comment><USER8> Here's a definition from the Google Developers site[1]:

"Schema.org is a markup vocabulary that is standardized and managed as a collaboration of Google and other companies. By working with schema.org, we are creating an open standard, so that the markup you embed can be used by any email product that receives them."[1]

[1] [https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/overview](https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/overview)

<comment><USER7> Hmm... this is one application for emails.

After looking at [http://schema.org](http://schema.org) it alludes to benefiting search engines in parsing structured data. Know any specifics?

<comment><USER9> You should look in webmaster tools if you want to understand how to use schema in SEO results. I've found things like Events are well supported and relatively easy to mark while things like product offers and reviews are more inclined to be ignored (or intermittently held to higher unpublished standards?) by google probably due to their high utility for abuse.

Personally, I mark everything I think is meaningful to a human and check that google thinks it is validly formed and how they would display it, but I don't rely on whether they do. With good and consistent metadata, Client side code+CSS can be a bit cleaner and better abstracted and it seems to help a little in the long tail of search engines/aggregators, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't help that Google's documentation on a lot of this is vague or nonexistent. The best thing Google can do is add more examples to their documentation.

<comment><USER11> Happened to us too, they changed how it worked so it doesn't show for all websites[1], just some, but we're still not sure if they took it off or if there's a bug in our code.

Worse still, it doesn't really seem to have affected our incoming traffic, so the whole thing was a complete waste of time and trying to fix it is now very low on the to-do list.

[1] Matt Cutts mentions it somewhere in here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7JhnWHbwnE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7JhnWHbwnE) sorry don't know the exact time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Serious question, but why would anyone want to do this? The first example on schema.org is for movie information. If you have a website with lots of movie information, why would you make it easier for google to take your information, cut you out and provide answers to queries before they even hit your website? It simply is not going to turn out well for you.

<comment><USER13> But on the flipside, what if Google decides to adjust their algorithm and demote sites that don't use the appropriate Schema to markup their content? Then Google is still going to cut you out by ranking you lower than your competitors. And actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Google already ranks sites without schema lower than sites with schema.

Personally, I'd rather spoonfeed the info to Google, rank #1 and run the risk of Google cutting me out with Knowledge Graph, or however else they want use the info, than not spoonfeed the info to Google and rank #10 while my competitors rank higher than me.

Obviously it's not that cut and dry, but it creates an interesting dilemma.

<comment><USER12> _But on the flipside, what if Google decides to adjust their algorithm and demote sites that don 't use the appropriate Schema to markup their content?_

Well then you'd deal with that when it happens. Currently you _know_ google will take the content and present it without hits to your website, but them penalising sites that don't is just theoretical.

<comment><USER13> > Currently you know google will take the content and present it without hits > to your website

In some cases, yes, but not always.

For example, using schema to markup product reviews and aggregate review scores can add value to an e-commerce site's organic search listings and increase their CTR - assuming the review scores are favorable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bottom line: this is an easier way for Google to steal your information. Once they steal it, you will get almost no traffic as Google will show the answers themseleves</comment>


EU Parliament recommends Jabber instead of WhatsApp and checks signal - <AUTHOR> https://www.en24.news/2019/10/eu-parliament-recommends-jabber-instead-of-whatsapp-and-checks-signal.html <comment><USER2> Curious to know where they got that info from. The source seems to be heise.de, and that's the only other article I can find about it.

As for the EU, did they just ask the nerd in the IT department? I want to see them as our (XSF) next marketing person.

</comment><comment><USER3> XMPP would be the best choice ever. But I don't believe in miracles.</comment>


Visualising sorting algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brucemerry.org.za/2010/09/visualising-sorting-algorithms.html

<comment><USER2> <http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/>

Insertion, Selection, Bubble, Shell, Merge, Heap, Quick and Quick3 sort compared and visualized.

<comment><USER3> Lol, I call this site "Sort Porn"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Inspired by recent videos that visualized various sorting algorithms w/audio, I decided to create a Radix sort video using using Python:

<http://rasterburn.org/~sgt/stuff3/radix/>

(YouTube link, although video is laggy so I recommend the previous link): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ8QKkei7QY>)

</comment><comment><USER5> One of my favorites is merge sort, visualised in Protovis:

<http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/sort.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511332></comment>


Honeypot Turing Test - <AUTHOR> http://adversarial.ai/blog/honeypot <comment><USER2> Although the general idea of simulating a protocol for a Honeypot is reasonable, it does not seem like the authors have anything to contribute here. They vaguely hint toward using an LSTM to solve a difficult AI problem. An LSTM's output would be significantly worse than a hand coded solution at simulating a network protocol. They do not provide any data, metrics, or analysis.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think it'd be significantly worse?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they want to translate some input to sensible output they would be better off using a translation model that has two LSTMs and a ton of data. See: [https://github.com/harvardnlp/seq2seq- attn](https://github.com/harvardnlp/seq2seq-attn)

They are also not giving credit for the graphic they are using: [http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding- LSTMs/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like a decent middle ground between high interaction honeypots and full on vm's would be leveraging something like containers.

I've considered doing this before but, you know, if free time grew on trees...

The benefit of using containers is that you can blow them away after every session, they have builtin networking so you can make entire honey nets, they're dirt cheap, and sharing the configs is a no brainer.</comment>


Ask YC: The AppJet shutdown and the future of proprietary cloud platforms - <AUTHOR>

I just finished reading the Sitepoint article at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/03/appjet-discontinued/.  The AppJet example seems to highlight the inherent risk of building your business on proprietary cloud platforms.  Although AppJet offers some suggestions for porting your app to another server (http://appjet.com/hosting), it seems that building anything beyond experimental apps and services upon these platforms is extremely risky.  Is the trade-off of easier maintenance and faster time-to-market worth it?<p>Perhaps the approach of selectively outsourcing components of your application to a cloud service provider with a real SLA is the better model (as people currently do with Amazon). <comment><USER2> A startup cloud company is prone to death even moreso than other startups I would think. You've got a physical deliverable which has extremely high expectations and low acceptance for growing pains.

Further corporate cloud services are something that can't easily (to my knowledge, I'm not an expert on them) be done by three guys out of an apartment.

<comment><USER3> depends on what you mean by "cloud" - if ec2 is the cloud, yeah, three guys in a basement can do a hosting company. Takes some capital, but not that much. EC2 is not competing on price. I believe few weeks of hacking on a good provisioning system is all that is stopping me from claiming to be a 'cloud computing' provider, in the sense that ec2 is a 'cloud'

The ec2 cloud is a lot like traditional dedicated servers, only with a nice provisioning interface.

The advantage of that is it's linux; and there are many providers willing to rent you linux boxes. you just need to modify your provisioning setup.

Now, if you mean 'the cloud' like google's app engine or something else that is a platform that is only offered by one provider, then yeah, I agree. you never want to be in a position where you are dependent on one supplier.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Transaction Malleability - <AUTHOR> https://eklitzke.org/bitcoin-transaction-malleability <comment><USER2> > _These txids are immaterial to how the Bitcoin blockchain works: their > primary use is as a convenience for humans when referring to transactions._

This is incorrect. Each Bitcoin transaction input references a previous transaction output as the txid+output index. Transactions spending unconfirmed outputs are orphaned when the parent is malleated and confirmed.

Also, as a data hash with no checksum, txids are not convenient for humans at all.

> _Transaction malleability is already more or less fixed in Bitcoin_

A couple months ago, there was a significant malleability attack on the Testnet, in which nearly every transaction was malleated as it was included in a block.

<comment><USER3> It's also confused with the sources of malleability, listing DSA sign and DER encoding (which you note it calls asn.1) as the only sources; unfortunately there are a dozen of them... and as we came up with workaround with some, we'd find more. This is why are complete fix was needed rather than a series of hacks.

<comment><USER4> For the uninformed, nullc knows a thing or two about Bitcoin[1]

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master?author=gma...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master?author=gmaxwell)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > However, OpenSSL did not do strict validation of the ASN.1 data by default

The more interesting problem was that this was non deterministic, you could encode fields with 64bit integers and they would bomb out on 32bit systems. ASN1 is also mind bogglingly complex, you can encode to arbitrary depths completely nonsensical things like negative numbers and strings, containers of multiple elements, none of the implementations manage to decode blocks the same or adhere to the same limits.

<comment><USER3> We've identified ~some~ of OpenSSL's strange behaviors and documented them for the purpose of making a bug compatible implementation ([https://github.com/bitcoin- core/secp256k1/tree/master/contri...](https://github.com/bitcoin- core/secp256k1/tree/master/contrib)), which required that:

\- All numbers are parsed as nonnegative integers, even though X.609-0207 section 8.3.3 specifies that integers are always encoded as two's complement.

\- Integers can have length 0, even though section 8.3.1 says they can't.

\- Integers with overly long padding are accepted, violation section 8.3.2.

\- 127-byte long length descriptors are accepted, even though section 18.104.22.168.c says that they are not.

\- Trailing garbage data inside or after the signature is ignored.

\- The length descriptor of the sequence is ignored.

But some things were just too awful to implement, e.g.

\- Using overly long tag descriptors for the sequence or integers inside, violating section 184.108.40.206.

\- Encoding primitive integers as constructed values, violating section 8.3.1.

This last is especially fun, in OpenSSL you can create a constructed value (like a struct) of constructed values of constructed values of strings.. and it will just concatenate up all the bytes in the last level primitive elements and treat the result as a number. ... but only if it's not more than 7 (IIRC) levels deep.

<comment><USER6> What's the bar here for 'too awful to implement', out of curiosity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a list of nine different types of malleability here: [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0062.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0062.mediawiki)

And if you want to see what a malleability attack looks like at the byte level, I analyzed one three years ago: [http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin- transaction-malleabili...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin-transaction- malleability.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a very complicated way to explain TX malluability. It'd say that the problem is that signatures only sign a portion of the transaction and the resulting TXID that is used in the blockchain is based on hashing the entire transaction.

So the signature can be mutated as the author suggests, but the signature doesn't sign the entire section of the transaction anyway (where data is provided to the redeemScript to satisfy its conditions. This section called the scriptSig includes the sig which cannot sign itself.)

So with the scriptSig, anyone is free to add whatever new data they like to this section which gets added to the input stack, and as long as you leave the stack the same way as you found it you can insert any arbitrary junk as you like and it will change the resulting TXID as seen in the blockchain without invalidating the transaction.

This is a bad thing for "smart contracts" on Bitcoin because many contracts depend on making chains of unconfirmed, future transactions, based on hashing the entire transaction to compute its TXID (as Clarkmoody suggests.) An example of this is a cross-chain contract where you might want to send funds to a partially shared address between a stranger and yourself, and you need a way to setup a time-locked refund in case the protocol doesn't succeed (no longer necessary due to OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY but its an example.)

To do refunds in this way you would need to be able to sign chains of unconfirmed transactions without previous transaction IDs being changed from transaction malleability. Bitcoin does include a fix for this called "segregated witness" but the fix has been controversial. I don't keep up to date with the "scaling progress" now but I doubt it has been merged yet.

<comment><USER9> Segregated Witness is almost locked in through BIP91.

[https://www.xbt.eu/](https://www.xbt.eu/)

<comment><USER10> I hope you are right. There is reason to believe that some of the signaling for BIP91 is false (e.g.: bitmain has announced intentions to do a fork [http://bitcoincash.org](http://bitcoincash.org) / [http://bitcoinabc.org](http://bitcoinabc.org) )

I expect they are serious and we will have a fork into BCC (Bitcoin cash) and BTC (bitcoin)

Certainly on the BTC chain segwit will be locked in. Whether it claims the mantle of "bitcoin" or not is to be seen.

<comment><USER11> Bitmain has stated that they will throw their hashrate at BitcoinABC _only_ if BIP91 fails. It's their "big red button".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing that strikes me as weird is the reference to ASN.1, I always thought that bitcoin only uses DER encoding for the signatures themselves (because that is what is usual for ECDSA, even thought it is suboptimal for multiple reasons) and the rest of the protocol including transaction format is specified in terms of bytes and varints. Have I missed something?

<comment><USER13> I thought that was the entire point (though it is possible that I misunderstood myself): that the transaction identifier is formed by taking a hash of the entire transaction _and the signature_ (which, of course, could not have been signed); if anything in the data being signed were modified then this would be a very different issue, so the only options for malleability are the signature and any structure connecting the signature to the data.

<comment><USER5> The script language itself is malleable due to being executed. `NOP NOP NOP PUSHDATA` has the same result as `PUSHDATA`, despite having different bytes and a different resulting hash. The `PUSHDATA` opcodes are also in themselves malleable, you can do a `PUSHDATA2` (push the next 2 bytes to the stack) or a `PUSHDATA4 (push the next 4 bytes to the stack) and get exactly the same output. These can largely fixed with policy, but for a lot of cases that add back in this behaviour- Segregated Witness simply doesn't include this data in the TXID hash (but it is hashed in a commitment for the block to avoid other attacks).

<comment><USER13> For purposes of my intentionally super-zoomed-out view of this (as I think that is what is most valuable from a cryptography perspective), the script is part of the "structure connecting the signature to the data".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla-Knight's Beyond Comment Threads Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/beyond-comment-threads/

<comment><USER2> Not really addressing the concerns they seem to be dealing with in the article, but "embedded comment threads" was my favourite thing about Google Wave - you could embed a thread anywhere (like, one wave for each blog post) and see/reply followups directly from your mail client (well, wave client).

That way you weren't making little "data islands" all around the internet (that you're not likely to get back to) and there was more chance that a given idea/topic would be more thoroughly discussed. In theory!

</comment><comment><USER3> I am working on a project Comment Reader. It's a tool to follow updates on comments through different sites or singles pages.

In my view the biggest value it would have that you can track comments from sharing portals like reddit,HN and others.

Idea came by other person who don't want to subscribe email updates after leaving comment in some regular site but want to know if there are replies.

I have told about it to several people but they weren't that much excited. As it's almost ready for launch I will make it public.

If you have idea how smartly it can help someone, please let's talk :) <http://comreapp.com/>

<comment><USER4> Okay, let's see it already! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> These challenges are interesting. The space for collaboration between journalism and tech seems to be really hot right now.

I can't help but think that with all the stuff that's been thought of and implemented in commenting systems like slashdot and reddit and hacker news, that we've plateaued out, and it's time to think of systems that don't involve direct mass communication between participants.

Hacker News works alright, but if you look at Slashdot there's just so much content for so little value.

<comment><USER5> but how do we cross-check & cross-verify comments & opinions across various web/media/news outlets? for example if this current challenge info is posted/covered on reddit, boing boing, slashdot, hackernews etc.

it would be really beneficial if we could have a unified commenting system that can aggregate feedbacks from all publishing mediums and social-media channels. that in itself could create a single narrative & storyline for each story/news article on a global scale.

<comment><USER6> I actually think some separation of comments is a good thing. Without it, discussion is going to fall to the lowest common denominator. It'd be like bringing together people at a scientific conference and some folks at bar because they happened to be discussing the same topic. The scientists will have one perspective, and the average Joe will likely have another. To combine them would probably just make the discussion worse for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's my entry:

<http://threadit.kaizenrails.com/discussions/691>

I'm experimenting with redesigning thread layout to focus on context and making it easier to follow and comprehend a complicated thread.

It's not as ambitious as other ideas out there, but I feel this is a improvement over what we have currently.

<comment><USER6> I actually found this more confusing. My immediate thought of the up/down arrows was that they'd up/downvote the comments, but they instead take you to others. I don't really get how they're grouped either, since they don't seem to be replies...

<comment><USER7> Here's an example of a HN comment with 200+ comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530963>

Here's the same thread in my layout:

<http://threadit.kaizenrails.com/discussions/839>

<comment><USER4> I have to admit, I don't immediately get it. Kudos to you for hacking on comment thread presentation and interaction, however. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> as most things, this could be attacked with semantic web technologies, specifically SIOC[1] does this. Alas, 12 years after the RDF standard, the semweb has still not been widely embraced.

[1] <http://sioc-project.org/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I sort of think that the focus on commenting and debate itself is possibly distracting. I think it'd be interesting to see what people think about how users could interact with news more, rather than just interacting with each other.

<comment><USER9> What _exactly_ is "news", as you are using the word, and how _exactly_ are you proposing that people interact with it? And how exactly is the form of interaction you are seeking already not being done in a world of freely available blogs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny you should ask!

I think the focus on news pieces as being long form text documents is fundamentally flawed. The paragraph (or proposition or whatever) is probably a more natural atomic unit, and makes a bunch of the problems currently plaguing how we interact with news content/knowledge go away.

The idea i've been thinking about, is why can't we harken back to the days of text-based adventures (really the distilled essence of user interaction), and make news queryable and navigable by users?

You get to know what your users what to know about a topic, and how they explore your content, and you can get that info w/o all the social overhead and shouting matchings.

<comment><USER9> Now I'm glad I asked; I was ready to go off on another tangent that would not have been related.

I've often thought that the New York Times ought to be a wiki, not in the sense that it is publicly editable, but in the sense that the staff ought to be linking stuff together much more aggressively. Why isn't there a page on the New York Times I can go to that is Their Index for Guam? (Deliberately choosing a neutral topic to avoid trigger political reactions.) All their stories collected, sorted, in some chronological order, etc., with new stories added as they come in. The value of the NYT is greatly lessened by being an undifferentiated mass of articles. It would even help them in their own research.

<comment><AUTHOR> How dare you mention Guam! The US military's decision to move pacific operations there is going to destroy the culture and subject the populace to the sorts of abuses they're guilty of in Okinawa!

Okay, i'm kidding. :)

The real problem with hyperlinking is that it's difficult and time consuming. Wikipedia can kinda manage it because there are thousands of Wikipedians with a lot of free time. The NYTimes is the opposite. They're a smallish organization trying to do original news reporting and research, and put it up online. Time spent deciding what hyperlinks to put where are a distraction from the other stuff they could be doing.

That's why time has been spent on systems like Apture, which are frankly, completely useless. Automated systems can't provide the sorts of editorial control that users actually want to find out more info.

In short, wikis are really hard for organizations to build and maintain, if it's not core to what it is that they do. And they're particularly hard for quick moving targets.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioral Decision Making Is a Fallacy - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-the-most-important-idea-in-behavioral-decision-making-is-a-fallacy/ <comment><USER2> I can't trust anything in this article when its counterexamples are bogus and it doesn't cite evidence for its position.

Paying a higher price is not a loss. Loss is when you have something and lose it. Paying more money in exchange for a product is something else.

"You will lose out if you don't buy our product" is not a loss. It is lack of a gain, which is psychologically very different.

People's ratings of a $10 loss may not correlate very well with people's actions when faced with a $10 loss.

With this many basic errors, I can't make out whether the author's strawman has any substance or not. The author is hung up on things that could be logically equated to losses, which is bizarrely irrelevant when the effect under question is specifically about how people's actual behavior differs from logical behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a number of related psychological and behavioural concepts which strike me as modestly-useful but wide-of-the-mark.

The Marshmallow Test -- an assessment of short-term vs. long-term trade-offs -- is one such case. It seems that the outcomes are far more reasonably explained by whether an individual has been exposed to a high-trust or low- trust environment, one in which promises are kept or broken. That is, even under controlled conditions, the cognitive priors the subjects bring to the experiment differ widely, and interpretations of claims differ.

Sunk cost strikes me as similar.

In the case of loss-aversion, there's the issue that under different circumstances, a given loss may represent a minor setback, an entirely inconsequential event, or a major, life-changing precipice. The distinctions are highly contextual, and depend on both personal background and circumstances.

This applies, incidentally, to organisations and firms as well as people. If you're flying along with ample cashflow, a $5 billion penalty (a magnitude recently experienced by a large tech firm) could be tolerable. If you're scating on a wing and a prayer, tight margins, and market perceptions subject to wild swings (say, as a short-term office-space "tech" startup headed by a dynamic leader with flexible moral and epistemic standards), a few well-timed blog posts might prove disruptive if not fatal.

Context matters. Discontinuities exist. Priors differ.

<comment><USER4> "The Marshmallow Test -- an assessment of short-term vs. long-term trade-offs -- is one such case."

The problem with psychological research is that researchers assume they have thought of everything that could possibly occur to a subject, and that subjects take everything they are told at face value whenever necessary for the validity of an experiment.

<comment><USER3> I've lived long enough to see many of my own "obvious but lay objections" become mainstream.

In multiple fields, not just psychology. That's problematic. If mildly reassuring.

(Though suspicion is not experimentally validated refutation.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With anything to do with the brain (from sociology to physiatry and right through behavioral economics), we're really still deep in the dark ages. We know basically nothing and the fields themselves seem to be more about styles than objective truth or repeatability. Generously I assume that's because making measurements and doing experiments is as hard today as it was for scientists in the 10th century...

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the reason for believing one scientist's result over another's? Perhaps the author is wrong and his predecessor is right?

The OP is an opinion piece with a clickbait headline.

</comment><comment><USER7> Loss aversion may not be a psychological phenomenon, but it is definitely a real thing in most financial markets.

The entire insurance and reinsurance industry are based on loss aversion.

<comment><USER8> Insurance is about risk aversion (which is reasonable in some cases), not loss aversion (which is completely irrational)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure of the difference, but before I go look for educational material on how these phrases are used, obviously(?) risk is an abstract idea that we can never actually measure or demonstrate even in retrospect, whereas losses are a fact of life that everyone experiences. So it sounds very odd on the face of it to say loss aversion is irrational and risk aversion is not.

Would you say that evolution is fundamentally irrational? It's certainly unavoidable.

<comment><USER6> Loss aversion refers to a preference for "not getting something you don't have" over "losing something you do have", even when the thing you don't gain is worth more.

It's nearly wholly irrational.

<comment><USER4> Worth more? Who considers value to be an objective thing? Certainly not any economist I've ever heard of. How could you have trade at all if value was objective?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand the author's claim that the sunk-cost fallacy has nothing to do with loss aversion because, "...[loss aversion] requires a comparison be made between losses and gains." Any consideration of sunk costs is an implicit comparison against what might be gained by investing one's resources differently.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sadly, as Kahneman now admits, many of the studies behind behavioral economics just haven't replicated.

Along with Loss Aversion, the whole idea of Priming also seems null.</comment>


Sexy developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.downapp.com/theytookourjobs#about-bang

<comment><USER2> Lots of comments against this posting, but I don't find it that bad, I'm sure there are worse. If you think about the product they are building, I think this ad is suitable. They don't want to hire people who are afraid of sex. They want to hire sexually liberated developers. I don't find anything in the ad which is particularly offensive to women, unless you're just considering the photo (which I think changes if they think you are a guy or a girl).

The sexual innuendo fits. Clearly if you're offended by this, you're not the right person for this company, but I suggest they've done a good job of balancing the type of people they want to hire, without sounding like they only want horny boys who are trying to get the inside scoop on a hook-up app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to defend this but it kind of goes along with a company whose app was originally named "Bang with friends."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The brogrammer ad to top all brogrammer ads? Seriously, who thinks this is okay?

<comment><USER4> I found this demeaning to me in every single way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow... this is horrible. This is definitely not an OK thing to have posted. Who the hell would join a company this disgusting?

<comment><USER6> Seriously. The sexual innuendo almost made me forget that I was viewing an _actual_ company.

<comment><USER5> I sincerely hope this is some kind of fucked up joke.

<comment><USER7> Why? I see nothing wrong with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Increasing HPC Utilization with Meta-Queues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/03/20/increasing-hpc-utilization-meta-queues/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author of METAQ. I wasn't contacted for this story, but feel free to ask me anything of interest!</comment>


Current Time Magazine Cover (Depending on Country) - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/magazine

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are some other ones highlighting the same trend

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601070402,00.html>

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601100920,00.html>

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601090406,00.html>

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601081103,00.html>

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601090928,00.html>

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601110808,00.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> I fail to see what is supposed to be interesting about this. Generally the cover story from those other editions is in the US editition, it just doesn't get the cover.

If you examine the contents of each edition, you'll see the US edition has the most stories, so it makes sense that it might have a different cover on occasion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think what is interesting is the choice of subject deemed suitable for front cover for the audience in each case.

Edit: especially with the current OWS movement. Do you not think the choice of cover is interesting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://thedailywh.at/2011/11/25/one-of-these-things-is- not-l...](http://thedailywh.at/2011/11/25/one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the- others-of-the-day/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Blog spam.

Please read the guidelines here <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they > found on another site, submit the latter.

<comment><USER3> I didn't know that. Thanks for helping out a noob.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I have anxiety!</comment>


The Wicked Lasers Krypton S3 Will Fry Passing Satellites - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/05/the-wicked-lasers-krypton-s3-will-fry-passing-satellites

<comment><AUTHOR> You can buy the wicked laser but to use it out side you need to fill out a paper work:

<http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/form/faa7140-1.pdf>

Really?!

FDA has this to say:

"Laser lights beamed at aircraft also have FDA concerned. Incidents associated with laser lights beamed at aircraft have tripled in a 4-year period since December 2004, when the Federal Aviation Administration began tracking reports. In 2008, pilots reported a total of 950 cases of laser light striking an aircraft or illuminating a cockpit."</comment>


Ask HN: What do you want out of a SMS gateway and API? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, everyone!
We're thinking of putting together a new SMS API specifically catered to application developers and hackers. Our platform can handle two-way messaging, advanced routing, subscriptions and keywords, etc., but we've found that most of you don't really need all that additional "stuff". So we want to know what it is that you _do_ want out of an API.
Is the major determining factor the features of the API? Is it the price? Deliverability & reliability? Simplicity?
Is it something in between our platform with SMPP binds <http://privatelabelsms.com/api/> and PennySMS with SMTP connectivity <http://pennysms.com/docs>?
We'll take your feedback into account as we move forward. <comment><USER2> 1) don't use email like pennysms does (I'm guessing they mass email all the email address a number could have at any carrier, there can only be one "hit")

2) give me my own dedicated number. i don't care if its 10 digits

3) price and simplicity are my two major decision factors, with price far and away #1.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Links:

Our API <http://privatelabelsms.com/api/>

Penny SMS <http://pennysms.com/docs>

</comment><comment><USER3> What's up with the setup fee's? Exactly what will you be setting up?

<comment><AUTHOR> New accounts on our current platform take some setting up, including administrative message copy (help, stop, etc), usually some custom work to make sure we interface with the external application properly, some training on MMA best practices, and more. This is something we would definitely like to streamline, which is why we're asking for feedback.</comment></comment>


Current draft of The Art of Computer Programming pre-fascicle 6a [ps] - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc6a.ps.gz <comment><USER2> If you don't want to DL the .gz just yet, and just want to read _about_ it, see here: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news.html](http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news.html)

Side note: I've always thought Knuth looks delightfully like a resident of Whoville. [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/45/16/e3/4516e3256...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/45/16/e3/4516e3256d744ca4cff19402da907d75.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is art then I'll have to admit - after 20 years of learning and practicing programming, I'm still a mechanic (or craftsman), not an artist.

I will not be able to read and understand this book fully and I probably won't even try, unless I'm locked in a cell with it.

Although I've helped build software used by millions, what I did was stitch together things that are too brilliant (or insane) for me to fully understand. And I assume that most of my colleagues did the same.

There are pylons of brilliance on the shoulders of which everyone builds, and Knuth must be one of the strongest.

Thank you Mr Knuth for holding so much weight on your shoulders.

<comment><USER4> Everyone with a good computer science education should be able to digest his books. I know that around here college education is often derided as outdated, impractical, too costly (which is a USA-ian problem), or outright irrelevant, but what Knuth writes about ain't rocket science yet important for many a programmer to understand. He writes in a quite readable style about the fundamentals of programming and computer science theory that's relevant to that programming. I know most programmers mostly glue together prefab components into working systems that successfully serve millions, but if one wants to go beyond the surface, to ask why it all works the way it does, a good computer science education is an advantage.

<comment><USER5> I like your sentiment, but your "good computer science education" sounds a lot like a "true scotsman". A lot of the people I work with have BS's in CS and a lot don't. I haven't seen any correlation between a real in depth understanding of computer science and a CS degree.

I agree programmers should be able to read and understand Knuth's books, but I don't think a CS degree is preparation. Would you think someone needs a CS degree if they already have a good understanding of the books?

My complaint with college is that it seems to be mostly fluff. If you show up and pay the bills then you'll get your degree.

<comment><USER6> Define 'need'. In college I learned, besides all the normal CS stuff:

* writing * accounting * organizational psychology * small amounts of business stuff * lots of EE, digital and analog * how to read and write research papers * how to research * how to prove theorems (important if you are inventing your own) * linear algebra, calculus, stats and probability, discrete algebra * physics I-III, plus 1 semester of experimental physics * chemistry (I,II, no organic) * a bit of philosophy * circuit design * numerical computation

It would be a Herculean task to take all that up in your spare time to the level I did at school (I still learn on my own time, so you have to catch up not just with what I did at school, but everything afterwards). It's 4+ years of opportunity to bump against really good minds. I went to professors and said "I want to learn x". (think of the course catalog as a suggestion!) That got me, among other things a co-authorship with a professor on an academic book. All of that has been relevant to my career except for the chemistry. Even with that, my first job could have used it if I had stuck around more, and it is useful to know if you want to be scientifically literate.

Or, you know, you can punch your time cards, do the bare minimum, and graduate with a pretty useless certificate.

College as voc tech to learn to manipulate the LAMP stack is probably a poor choice of time. If you want to be able to take a job to compute cancer statistics, program robots, build digital interface cards, perform computer vision, simulate the ocean, write aircraft wing simulations, model and research traffic flow, work on medical devices, you almost certainly need more then votech and/or self learning, IMO. I've done most in that list professionally, and friends of mine have done the rest (no rockets in that list, but I was offered a job to do that, turned it down).

There are multiple paths to life, but the chance to just think and learn for awhile is pretty incredible if you can afford it.

<comment><USER7> This. You realise the value of the time you pissed away only when it's too late. Unfortunately, college coincides with the most callow years of your life, when you scarcely know the value of time, or the opportunity you are about to squander. Sigh...

<comment><USER8> _college coincides with the most callow years of your life, when you scarcely know the value of time, or the opportunity you are about to squander_

THIS IS THE BEST COMMENT YOU WILL READ TODAY, IF NOT THIS WEEK!!!!

Sorry for the all caps, but "truer words were never spoken".

So, anyone reading this who hasn't gone to college or who hasn't yet graduated, heed those words.

You will thank the poster perhaps 30 years later.

<comment><USER9> "I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both." ― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Thus, follow your heart- dwell not on what you did, nor on what you do, but listen to what you need. Long after, look back, and see, more clearly, what you need now.

<comment><USER10> I won't say you're wrong, but I still think I'd rather regret having gone to school than, as I do now, regret having not gone; not that I haven't done rather well for myself, so much as that I'd have liked to do more -- I've learned from experience that the ancestor comment, about how much you have to make up, to be absolutely true; however autodidactic you happen to be, there's a lot of value in the distilled knowledge university courses can provide, and only so many hours in a day -- and days in a lifetime -- besides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Chapter 7 will eventually fill at least four volumes . . . assuming that I 'm able to remain healthy._

Apparently TAOCP has a lot in common with the Wheel of Time.

I have a ton of respect for these huge, decades-long, life-defining projects and the people who undertake them (Robert Caro's LBJ biography is another example.) So the end of this project always receding further into the distance makes me wistful, even if the quality of what gets put out is still excellent.

<comment><USER12> "You can have a sneak preview... As usual, rewards will be given to whoever is first to find and report errors or to make valuable suggestions."

If you want to frame one of those cheques, get in fast.

<comment><USER13> You don't get cheques, anymore. Only certificates from his fantasy bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just picked up my father's old copy of vol. 1, _Fundamental Algorithms_. It's amazing that a book published in 1973 (second edition) can still be worth studying. I'd like to work from the copy I have, largely for sentimental reasons. My father passed away a few years ago, and it feels really good to work from the same book he studied decades ago.

Is it reasonable to study the second edition, or should I buy a copy of the third edition? I've been a hobbyist programmer for 20+ years, and I'd like to strengthen my understanding of basic data structures.

<comment><USER15> Knuth is a mathematician, and these are, mainly, books discussing mathematical results. Math is eternal - only the notation changes. You can, and, until recently, many did, learn geometry directly from Euclid.

<comment><USER16> Indeed he would need to change the books if there is a breakthrough in some of the algorithm areas described, but TAO is an excellent way to "quicky" move to the state of art in many areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For anyone curious, this section is on SAT solving. It's section 184.108.40.206 of TAOCP, and is over 300 pages long. Pretty thorough for a section of backtrack, within a section on generating all possibilities, within a full chapter on combinatorial searching.

<comment><USER18> For what it's worth, I went to a presentation by Knuth on this exact section with a SAT expert who frequently commented how (for the presentation at least), significant amounts of relevant material had not been mentioned, and some techniques introduced were not particularly close to the state of the art, or good for educational purposes.

What I'm saying is that there's plenty of literature on SAT Solving already, and some of it is probably better.

<comment><USER19> Could you convince this SAT expert to review Knuth's fascicle and send his comments to Knuth? or blog about it for everyone's benefit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm wondering if someone should be starting a new generation of TAOCP as wiki. As wonderful as TAOCP is, frankly, first volumes are bit outdated. Many problems that were mentioned opened have had huge progress and many new fields have opened up since their publications. Several Level 50 problems are now being taught in CS Masters or some even Bachelor levels. Besides I really find MIX too arcane and getting in the way. In a way, it's kind of disturbing that we still fall back on ~40 years old material for the field as fast moving as Computer Science. Sure, much of the CS is timeless but we are ignoring so much progress and growth in fields such as Computational Geometry, Number Theory, Cryptography, Semi-Numeral algos and so on. Also, even if Knuth manages to complete all of his planned volumes, it would still have scratched only tip of the tip of a iceberg. Of course, some of material will start becoming stale pretty much as soon as it was created. Currently Wikipedia is not a great option to create such writing because it doesn't allow content in "teaching style" or things like creating exercise. If we can distribute this effort out with editor that can approximate Knuth's meticulousness, it could be great boon for our field. Knuth as an original flame bearer could be a great person himself to start such an effort.

<comment><USER21> Technology is fast moving. Computer Science, the real kind, moves slowly. TAOCP is still extremely relevant and MIX is cool, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For Windows users the incantation to get a version with fonts that aren't great but readable is this:

gswin64 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o fasc6a.pdf fasc6a.ps

You can get ghostscript here: [http://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html](http://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html) and you will need it on your path.

If you want nicer fonts you can download your preferred latex distribution (miktex is easy to install but big) and your preferred perl distribution (ActivePerl maybe). Then you can run pkfix (which you may need to install) on the ps file like this:

pkfix fasc6a.ps fasc6a-pkfix.ps

Finally you can run

gswin64 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o fasc6a-pkfix.pdf fasc6a-pkfix.ps

Which will give you a pretty nice pdf.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's some speculation about where the next breakthroughs will come from at the end of the chapter; it will be interesting to look back in 10-20 years and see if Knuth was correct.

<comment><USER19> A surprising tidbit: Knuth believes that P=NP is true, but the algorithm to solve NP is unknowable - footnote on page 1 (pdf page 9).

Proponents of RSA, DHE crypto - take note.

<comment><USER24> I too saw this footnote near the beginning (page 9):

"At the present time very few people believe that P=NP. In other words, almost everybody who has studied the subject thinks that satisfiability cannot be decided in polynomial time. The author of this book, however, suspects that N^O(1)-step algorithms do exist, yet that they're unknowable. Almost all polynomial time algorithms are so complicated that they lie beyond human comprehension, and could never be programmed for an actual computer in the real world. Existence is different from embodiment."

But would the existence of such "step algorithms" be fully equivalent to P=NP or a limited case applicable to only a subset of NP problems (i.e. one's thought previously to be NP)?

I don't know the answer and am genuinely curious.

<comment><USER25> I read that not as 'step algorithms' but as 'algorithms requiring N^(O(1)) steps'; in other words - polynomial time algorithms.

One way to think of this is in terms of galactic algorithms, which are algorithms that incrementally improve the exponent in a polynomial time algorithm, but have constant terms so huge that they're effectively useless, practically. He's suggesting that there could exist a polynomial time algorithm for an NP problem which is similarly useless - but with the additional caveat that we won't even be able to prove theorems about it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >>These so-called "SAT solvers" are able to handle industrial-strength problems, involving millions of variables, with relative ease, andthey've had a profound impact on many areas of research such as computer-aided verification.

I would be very interested in hearing of industrial/practical applications of those. Anyone with some experience?

<comment><USER27> One neat example that comes to my mind is how some package managers use SAT solvers to resolve package conversioning conflicts.

I would say that SAT solvers (or SMT solvers, depending on the problem domain) are applicable to almost any kind of problem where the first thing that comes to your mind is implementing a brute-force search using backtracking. SAT solvers implement lots of tricks that are likely to leave naive backtracking algorithms in the dirt (knuth's chapter covers lots of them)

One silly example I like is the time I used a SAT solver to find the solutions for a little Flash puzzle game.

[https://github.com/hugomg/hexiom](https://github.com/hugomg/hexiom)

My favorite part is how I could add some symmetry-breaking predicates to greatly speed up the solver on highly symmetrical problem instances. Those instances are very hard for hand-written algorithms and a SAT solver let me work around the symmetry problems in a highly declarative manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Much SAT. Such generating function.

Algorithm W on page 79 (WalkSAT) is the workhorse.

Lemma L and Algorithm M page 82 were my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does Knuth have a protege, helping him today, and to carry on the task should it take decades still?

Also, is there a condensed version of his work that preserves the spirit and rigor?

<comment><USER30> > Also, is there a condensed version of his work that preserves the spirit and > rigor?

I am not sure if this is useful for you, but Sedgewick's and Cormen's books are among more digestible alternatives.

<comment><USER29> Thanks! I've read Cormen, but not Sedgewick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've been holding off on reading TAOCP because of the modernized assembly language promised for the next version -- is this at all justified?

<comment><USER32> Nope, except for the fun, the assembly part does not add much to the matter. The essence is how to design, describe and analyze algorithms, so it is largely orthogonal to the language you use.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is actually a little humbling to see just how well written and understood some assembly can be. In particular, the section simulating elevators is clearer than many high level examples I have seen of similar complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone's got PDF? I can't open this .gz.ps file.

<comment><USER34> I'm reluctant to post a PDF because of the copyright, but I'd recommend running the ps file through "pkfix" before converting to PDF. (This will replace the bitmap fonts with outline fonts.)

<comment><USER33> i wish i knew how to do that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thanks dang et al for fixing the title so quickly!

</comment><comment><USER36> 524 exercises

</comment><comment><USER37> ps.gz? It's 2015!

<comment><USER38> One click to download, two double-clicks (one for the gzip, one for the PS) to open on my Mac.

<comment><USER39> [http://view.samurajdata.se/](http://view.samurajdata.se/)

<comment><USER40> [http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=1778783f&page=1](http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=1778783f&page=1)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Horrific Bombing of People Trying to Leave Village in Syria - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/17/middleeast/syria-photographer-bombing-rescue-trnd/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This story just left me so sad, so horrified, tears in my eyes. I don't know what we can do in the west to end the Syrian war. I can't imagine anyone who would setup a bombing of basically refugees. I know it probably happens all over the world every day, but my government better not be supporting anyone who does thinks like this.

<comment><USER2> Yeah now multiply those 100 dead by 5000 to 10000 and that's what our foreign policy has wrought in Syria and Iraq.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, us and lots of other countries that want to work out things through intermediaries, and we often have very conflicted goals and shielding our country from repercussions is one big one.</comment></comment></comment>


WWII pigeon message cracked - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/16/world-war-2-pigeon-code-cracked_n_2311364.html

<comment><USER2> It's total nonsense. He claims they are Word War I codes (for some reason I can't quite fathom) but then says it includes the word "Jerry", which was not commonly used until WW2. Lots of other incongruities as well suggest this is someone after their name in the paper, rather than a real solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I understand it the message is not crypted but just obscured with acronyms of plain phrases (PABLIZ = Panzer Attack Blitz). Young used a phrase book from WW I, which had phrases and acronyms similar to those in the pigeon message. Not saying the paper is legit, but doesn't seem too unlikely to me that those phrases and acronyms didn't change much between the wars.

Can you point out the other incongruities you have found?

<comment><USER2> Other suspicious things...

William Stott of the Lancashir Fusiliers was a private, never a paratrooper, and died fighting on the front. The Fusiliers are a line regiment, they had no airborne element.

There is no such thing as 'K' Sector Normandy.

He claims 27 1525/6 "translates" as 27/6 15:25 - which is rather a big leap, especially when you look at the actual message slip.

The message is laid out in standard one-time cipher style for the British Army at that time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are travis-ci.org secure variables really secure? - <AUTHOR>

It is often useful to have access to secret keys during the execution of the script running on travis-ci.org servers.
To do so, the travis doc [1] tells us to encrypt these keys with "travis encrypt SOMEVAR=secretvalue" and publishing the encrypted text in the public .travis.yml config file. The encrypted keys are decrypted by the travis-ci.org server during the build.
Lots of people seems to use them and travis-ci.org ends up with access to millions of secret keys. To me, centralizing such a big amount of secret data in the hands of such a small organization is a really bad idea but nobody seems to care.
Should we really trust the travis secure variables?
[1] http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption-keys/ <comment><USER2> If it makes you nervous, switch to a hosted solution[1]. There will apparently be a hosted "Travis Pro" at some point in the future as well.

1\. [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-alternatives-to-Travis- CI](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-alternatives-to-Travis-CI)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not using CI today but I will definitely use a hosted solution if the build server needs secret keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not have a separate configuration just for test? It's easy and solves all the issues</comment>