BCAA's impact health and lifespan indirectly via amino acid balance - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814438/ <comment><USER2> Which foods are high in BCAA and which are low in BCAA?

</comment><comment><USER3> TLDR: diet with a high ratio of BCAA:non-BCAA leads to obesity and reduced lifespan in mice. This effect can be reversed with caloric restriction.

Interesting, given BCAA supplementation is fairly common in high-performing athletes. I suppose the usual caveats apply though - humans aren't mice, the metabolism of high-performing athletes isn't the same as sedentary office workers, and performance isn't necessarily consistent with longevity.

<comment><USER4> ..and high performance athletic achievements are typically beyond the bellcurve of health over activity.

i.e. if you draw health as a function of activity/performance, it forms a bellcurve of some sort, and high performance athletes sacrifice their long- term health in order to perform at a higher level than most people are able to. (Marathons lead to ruined knees, heavy lifting lead to explosive increases in blood pressure, throwing arms come with wear and tear on elbows and shoulders, etc. ) So BCAA supplementation being another trade-off would not necessarily be a deterrent in that respect.</comment></comment>


Why linux doesn't have a "wheel" group - <AUTHOR> http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/the-wheel-group/ <comment><USER4> A simpler explanation is that many Linux distributions discourage the use of su altogether in favor of sudo, which gives you finer grained control over this sort of thing than wheel ever did.

In any case, if you really care, just enable pam_wheel.so in your pam configuration for su (usually /etc/pam.d/su) and be sure to add yourself to the appropriate group.

<comment><USER5> Ironically, "sudo su" works really well if you do need to get to root. But yeah, "sudo" is a much safer practice.

<comment><USER4> I sudo su very frequently because I'm almost always executing more than one command as root. Standard warnings apply, but my approach for being sure that I am who I think I am is to put my username in my prompt and color code it so that when I'm root the username turns red.

I also color code the hostname so that I can tell at a glance what machine I'm on.

For example,

        export PS1='[\[\033[1;34m\]\u\[\033[0m\]@\[\033[1;30m\]\h\[\033[0m\] $newPWD]\$ '

where $newPWD is a friendly, shortened $PWD.

On that same machine, the root prompt is identical except that the color is set to 1;31m instead of 1;34m, which makes it bright red.

<comment><USER6> No need for 'su' to get a root shell. You can use 'sudo -s' for that, and you still set a root-specific PS1 in the bashrc file.

<comment><USER7> This doesn't always run the same rc scripts (depending on the shell and local convention). I'm used to typing sudo su - (with optional username) to get the environment as close as possible to what it would be if I logged in as the target user.

<comment><USER8> sudo -s launches a shell in non interactive mode (which goes through .bashrc or .zshenv and .zshrc depending on your shell) whereas sudo -i emulates a usrer login which puts the shell in interactive mode (.profile, .zshenv)

Also -i does more stuff to simulate a login like setting $HOME and cd'ing there.

Usually you might want to use sudo -i or 'su -' which both simulate a login. But sudo su - really isn't needed any more since -i has been added

<comment><USER7> Old habits die hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's actually interesting to consider Stallman's point. In a way, his ideals are ultimately incompatible with shared systems. A user should have their own resources if they're going to be Free. You can't have all of shared resources, security, and total Freedom in the sense of Stallman.

Application to the swing back to "cloud computing", multiuser computing's latest moniker, left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget that this info page was written something like 20 years ago - <USER2> even earlier.

At this time security requirements where completely different than today and it was not unusual for everyone in a lab to have root access to the machines.

<comment><USER11> I really miss the time when you could assume that, if someone had access to your computer, he or she was qualified to properly operate it.

<comment><USER12> I really miss the time when I felt that I was properly qualified to operate my computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure I understand Stallman's comment. He is against letting "a few of the users ... hold total power over the rest". Isn't that the whole point of a system administrator? He seems to be explicitly in favour of making it so that a leaked root password will allow any user to run riot over the system. Is he an anarchist? Or did they not have malicious users or idiots in 1984? I admittedly know almost nothing about system administration.

<comment><USER14> From "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software":

\---

 _"The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it."_

 _Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message came back something like:_

 _I see you chose the password "starfish." I suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords._

<comment><USER13> I can't conceive of a world where "there should be no passwords" or "keep these machines security-free" were ever serious positions held by software engineers. It's Garden of Eden thinking.

<comment><USER15> It wasn't a rationally-considered position, it was a reaction against the strict hierarchy and batch processing mentality of the time. (Disclaimer: everything I know about this I learned from Stephen Levy's book _Hackers_.) The admins of these machines would flaunt their power over the users, and were very antagonistic toward the hackers who wanted to do "cool" stuff on the computers. So, keeping the machines security-free and not allowing passwords was actually necessary to promote the idea that anyone could run a program on the computer, because that was not the _status quo_.

The fear that someone would take control and abuse power in that way was not an unfounded one.

<comment><USER16> Right, perhaps it was a different time, but you need to limit the power of most users, especially in a school setting, or you cannot maintain the uptime of the system for everyone.

I know in our computer lab in high school, which was a series of x86 PCs donated by Novell and sharing files from a Netware file server (this was 1989-1990), we used to try to get superuser privileges on the Netware server. Once or twice, the 20 year old kid they hired as a sysadmin would walk away from his desk and forget to logout of his workstation, and we would give ourselves superuser privileges on the network. We would use this privilege to play "Snipes," one of the first network based multiplayer text shooter games. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes>

This fun lasted for a few hours until the 20 year old sysadmin determined we had superuser privs that we shouldn't have and promptly revoked our rights.

<comment><USER17> ha ha - that's funny. We had a very similar setup at the same time - <USER3> workstations were "diskless" and the only way to get software onto the machine was to write it (in Turbo Pascal). The workstations were 8086's while the file server was a 286, and the other server was a (then very expensive) 386.

But the admins had installed "NetWork Eye" - sort of like a VNC for text monitors. So one guy in the class wrote an assembler (in TP) then got a NetBios book and wrote some low-level NetBios stuff in assembler. That allowed us to NetWork-Eye the servers to get some other funky stuff done.

One thing we did was to login on all 50 workstations (except one), and run the network eye in a cascaded chain. Then sit back and watch the first person come in. They're log in (on all 50 monitors simultaneously) and everything they did would come up on all 50. Usually took a few minutes before they noticed...

Ahh - good times.... <g>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > limits the number of people who are able to su to root.

Is irrelevant and archaic for many, many servers (99%) of ones I've worked on last 20yrs (web/internet servers vs file/print/lan type servers.

The only accounts who can login and get a shell are the same set of accounts who can su root to almost every server I'm involved with.

<comment><USER19> As a database consultant I can assure you there are great many servers on which I have a user, but no ability to "su root".

<comment><USER20> I bet if you were an "evil database consultant", you could get yourself a root shell on _many_ of those servers with a little bit of google fu. There is a startling amount of exploitable code waiting in just about every standard OS install for anybody with regular user privileges.

<comment><USER19> If I was evil and suicidal I could wipe up many companies by "drop database including backup".

When you have DBA access to production databases, lack of root does not stand in the way of doing evil.

It does stand in the way of using message logs to troubleshoot, checking contents of /proc to determine which directory a process is running from, tuning TCP parameters to maximize data transfer rates without nagging the sysadmins, etc.

<comment><USER20> True. But a _properly evil_ non-suicidal and supremely confident evil DBA could, if they wanted too, exploit the box from a local user account, rootkit it, and tidy up after themselves to remove all trace of who did it. I suspect that's actually script-kiddy-able these days, if you know the target well enough there's probably an automated tool ready to do all that for you.

(For evil-genius-DBA's bonus points for doing that via the database instead of the shell and censoring traces from the db logs too...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ironically the "wheel" construct is alive and well via sudo. The default /etc/sudoers for rhel/centos/fedora systems has a line that allows anyone in the wheel group the ability to run anything they want through sudo, its just commented out. Delete one character and voila, you can give and retract root privs via adding and removing users from the wheel group.

<comment><USER22> I noticed recently that my Debian now comes with a "sudo" group that is effectively the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my Slackware system, which does not use PAM by the way, it's perfectly possible to support the "wheel" group. In fact, the group is already present in /etc/groups and you can add users to it. Later, you don't need to change the permissions of /bin/su. The check can be run from the program itself if you edit /etc/suauth and add a line like this:

root:ALL EXCEPT GROUP wheel:DENY

But I think this may be due to the "su" program not being GNU su, but the one from the shadow suite. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> The title is incorrect on several levels. Not the least of which is that it is the distributions that determine whether to use wheel, not the Linux kernel.

For example, in Fedora 15 we are now using wheel to add users as administrators who are able to sudo to root. This is easily enabled by checking the 'Administrator' box during firstboot's setup of the user account.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nitpick about the title: "linux" is a kernel and doesn't care about how the userspace organizes its groups.

It's really about GNU su.

</comment><comment><USER26> So why allow for a root password in GNU at all? Is Stallman really saying that everyone should have root access?

If you accept that there's a use for a secret root password (which, I assume, Stallman has; otherwise why write an `su` at all?), having no wheel group would seem to encourage a /single/ admin with the password, to prevent the leaking of info he mentions. Which is more tyrannous?

<comment><USER27> su has uses even when everyone knows the root password. It allows you to run a command as a different user without logging out.

I also am not sure that Stallman accepted the need for passwords at all when he wrote that text. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman>:

"When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This logic only makes the tiniest bit of sense if 'su' is the only way escalate privileges. Almost every real system has many ways to escalate, especially for someone who already knows the root password. telnet, sudo, X11, ftp, and last but not least, 'login'.

"OK", you say "maybe all those are turned off for root". Well, even then there are likely many other accounts with some degree of privilege. Often these can be leveraged to root access. For example: the members of the wheel group.

</comment><comment><USER29> The etymology of the company WheelGroup (now aquired by Cisco) makes a lot more sense now... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WheelGroup>

</comment><comment><USER30> Strange, most distros I've used do have wheel. I think it's only Debian based distros that don't.

<comment><USER31> I've used Gentoo for years and it used the "wheel" group. Maybe it has changed now, though.</comment></comment>


Ford to mass-produce a completely self-driving car within five years - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/08/ford-to-mass-produce-a-completely-self-driving-car-within-five-years/ <comment> semi-extrinsic I think this is the key takeaway from this article:

<<Expect level 4 cars to take quite a while longer to reach private hands. "The economics simply don't make sense," [Ford CTO] Nair said.>>

Indeed: how much more are you willing to pay for a car where you don't do anything? Not much. How much more is a cab company prepared to pay for a car that doesn't need a driver? A lot.

For private cars I expect we'll see more and more refinements of driver assists in the premium market segment, but not much apart from the odd trickle-down to cheaper cars. Reason being LIDAR, tons of sensors and data processing power will still be very expensive, and in the cheap end of the market, people are still skimping on carpets and electric windows.

One example that immediately springs to mind is the flashing warning light in the mirror when another car is in your dead zone. Relatively simple, useful, "stupid" (as opposed to "smart") tech. I expect it will be standard equipment in five years.

<comment><USER2> Curious about what drives the cost difference vs. a "consumer" car. The sensor suite? (Is it just lidar vs. radar?)

<comment><USER3> Sensor suite, software licensing, and data licensing. If solid state lidar can get there soon enough, that will help. Data licensing for extremely accurate data for everything - traffic lights, stop signs, every single intersection, etc.

<comment><USER2> Really interesting; thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the important take-away here is that all the major players are now in a public arms race. Which means autonomous cars are almost certainly going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think we've all come to accept that Level 3 (return control to driver) is just not feasible.

Without the sensory stimulus that comes from driving the average harried American will be asleep in under 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apparently, 'just five short years away' is the new 'just ten short years away' \- an mythically ambitious number, remains irrefutable because nobody, including the people making the claim, can see that far into the research and development process.

</comment><comment><USER7> ,,...Fields said, adding that ride-sharing would make more efficient use of vehicles, with less time wasted for people and less pollution.''

If he would really care about pollution he would make sure that these shared cars are electric.

<comment><USER8> I think you'd do the self-driving market a disservice by bundling it with expensive range-limiting technology. If both are positive changes in their own right, then they're better off keeping them available separate for maximum adoption.

That's even more so the case with self-driving cars, since their ideal use cases (highways) are the least ideal use case for vehicles with short ranges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's like a Shit Elon Says quote, only Ford doesn't have any sorts of track record here whatsoever.

"Twenty launches a year, is not a crazy number at all. We expect that to occur without any miracles."

<comment><USER10> What in the name of anything are you on about? Ford has been doing cars for how long?</comment></comment>


Tornado Web Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.tornadoweb.org/

<comment><USER2> While relevant on its onw, right now, this is also linked to from both the top two stories...

<comment><USER3> Hackers don't need expository, they just want the goods. :)

<comment><USER2> Hehe, touché :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why isn't most server software (that can expect lots of simultaneous users) non-blocking yet? Are there any significant disadvantages with this method?

Can we expect a lot more non-blocking servers within a few years?</comment>


Recent Changes to jQuery Internals - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/jeresig/recent-changes-to-jquerys-internals

<comment><USER2> I am always amazed, impressed, and inspired by the care tended to jQuery code. I'm as comfortable using it as I would be if I made the whole thing myself, in the sense that I'm often very paranoid about javascript libraries in particular. jQuery is being developed perfectly -- they care about performance, size, and developer usability.

A million thanks to the jQuery team.

<comment><USER3> jquery is far ahead of some "real" programming languages; what a lovely little library. jquery UI is just perfect as well, along with themeroller.</comment></comment>


AirPods - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/airpods/ <comment><USER3> > Put them in your ears and they connect immediately, immersing you in rich, > high-quality sound. Just like magic.

I completely disagree with this. It isn't magic at all. Mine hardly ever work this smooth. Especially transitioning from my iPhone to MacBook Pro. I constantly have to go into bluetooth, manually select them, and even that usually takes a few tries. I like my Earpods from a sound quality perspective but they are anything but magic in the context of "connecting immediately." The UX NEVER goes as smooth as they describe. I've even taken them to the store twice to see if they were defective, which they were not. They always claim it's so much easier to connect than it really is.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say it never goes as smoothly as they describe, at least in my experience. My experience with the iphone xs + airpods is about: 50% as they describe 49% have to go through bluetooth menu for instant pair 1% they never connect, extreme frustration, have to completely re-pair (no different than any other bluetooth product here, just don't experience it as often with airpods).

With Macbook I almost always have to go into bluetooth. There is no switching experience as they originally showed in the airpods keynote. They actually ended up rescinding the statement that they would do this after the keynote, which is super disappointing.

<comment><USER5> You can option-click on the volume icon in your toolbar to select AirPods without having to go into bluetooth settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> AirPods are my best purchase in the last two years. I talk to my research collaborators and clients on Skype almost every morning. The calls can go on for hours. I love the freedom I have to walk around the office while on call, airpods connected to mac. I also use them in the gym connecting them to the ipad while doing eliptical and switching to iphone while doing weights.

<comment><USER7> A counter anecdote: My AirPod purchase was a complete waste of money. The quality is OK at best, handoff between my X and iPad pro is crap, they don't always pair, and they fall out of my ears if I tilt my head at all.

I end up just using my Bose headphones (which are still a PITA for multiple devices), the airpods sit around unused.

<comment><USER8> Counter counter anecdote: handoff has never been a hassle for me between iPhone and iPad pro, and I've worn them for working out for a year and they've never fallen out

<comment><USER9> I'm sure that's the case in your experience and perhaps the experience of all people whose ears fall within the range of ear size/shape that Apple designed for.

But these things don't fit everybody. The wired version flies right out of my ear very easily. No way am I going to buy these things if tilting my head means losing one or both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple's insistence that I should use wireless for my ear/headphone needs is a large reason why I'm giving up on Apple products. I love my 2016 iPad Pro and would love to replace it with the 11" 2018 model, but I also love my Sony MDR 7506 headphones and I'm unwilling to trash them for wireless earpods that cost a good bit more than I paid for my Sony headphones. No thanks. Similar deal for iPhone (and the shit keyboards + useless touchbar has already made me switch from MBP to Linux). I ignored Apple for so long and they finally won me over around 2015, only to lose me again because their products seem to be getting worse while getting more expensive.

<comment><USER11> Apple's insistence that I should use wireless for audio is a large reason I'm doubling down on Apple products. I don't need the tangled messes of headphone wires or the extra opportunities for water ingress. Please please let's get rid of wired audio!

<comment><USER12> Difference being that you used to have the choice between wired or wireless. Now it's wireless or nothing at all.

Not good for people who enjoy the higher audio quality or just don't want to mess about with charging yet more batteries

<comment><USER11> Not to put a too fine point on it, that's bullshit. I can plug in wired audio on all of my Apple products, except the Apple TV. I did like the optical audio the older models had. By default, I much, much prefer wireless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The big additions: 50% more talk time, hands free Siri, and a new optional wireless charging case.

<comment><USER14> Just curious, anyone using Siri regularly these days? If so, how/for what? I keep trying Siri every once in a while but it doesn't seem to stick. Only use I find is setting an alarm now and then, but I still often just open the app to do it manually.

<comment><USER15> Not regularly. But one interesting function I had with it was when I cant locate my phone in my home. I just shout out "Hey Siri" and I can tell by its answer where about it is. It may sound silly but there are countless times when I am about to leave home in a hurry and I cant find my phone. Normally I could have been extremely frustrated and spend minutes looking for it. Now it is just there within a voice command.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are not good headphones. The battery life is kind of bad, the charging system is finicky, the sound is poor, and there's not even passive noise isolation. I have a $50 pair of over-ear bluetooth headphones that have week- long battery life, sound pretty good, can be charged while being listened to, and have a 3.5mm plug for passive wired listening when the battery runs out.

Like everyone else, I bought and used a set of AirPods for a while, but I ended up going back to the wired headphones when I wanted tiny little earbuds while walking or biking. My wired headphones work everywhere (including my iPod, which I use every day) and the AirPods are finicky, frequently lost connection between themselves, and required charging all the time. Much easier just to tuck a wired set down my sweatshirt and use the in-line remote to control volume (which the airpods can't do).

<comment><USER17> There's a case to be made for their shortcomings, but this is more of a "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame" style critique, not seeing anything about their unique proposition, and criticizing them for what they are not even supposed to be (e.g. high-end or noise cancelling). Some of those things are not faults with the Airpods, but personal taste which can be satisfied with another headphone/brand.

> _These are not good headphones._

Yes, they're not good. Just the best in their category.

> _The battery life is kind of bad_

For two tiny isolated, on-each-ear earbud style headphones? Compared to what, your "over-ear" set?

> _the charging system is finicky_

Put them in the case, they're charging. The case stays charged for days of casual use. What exactly is "finicky"?

> _the sound is poor_

Good enough for music, movies, and calls. I also have (from past purchases) the Parrot Zik 2, the ATH-50x (for simple DAW monitoring), and Sony WH1000XM3, and I could not care less for the differences in sound compared to the convenience of the Airpods.

> _and there 's not even passive noise isolation._

A fact which probably saves lives of people crossing the street constantly.

<comment><USER16> First off, I just want to be clear - not trying to sound confrontational, but I want to respond because I'm having fun reading and thinking about your comments.

>Compared to what, your "over-ear" set?

Yeah, that's the comparison I was making. The airpods didn't provide any functional upgrade over earpods (or any set of cheap wired headphones with a remote/mic in them) for me. The airpods made things harder. The double-tap to skip tracks was far from ideal given that it just resulted in slamming this little headphone into my ear, and that kind of hurt. The inline remote/mic was better for that, and it also allowed me to change volume - the airpods not having volume adjustment on them meant I had to keep my device in my pocket, so now the advantage of bluetooth (device set further away, not in the pocket) is gone. The over-ear set has volume controls and a play/pause button.

>Put them in the case, they're charging. The case stays charged for days of casual use. What exactly is "finicky"?

Charging my over ear set is uncomplicated - everything I have charges off of microUSB so I always have that connector around, and to charge the headphones I just plug in the charger. I can use them while they're charging. Airpods require me to stop using them to charge. Nothing else I have is like this - phones, iPods, laptops, or other bluetooth headphones.

I don't worry about the over-ear set coming off. They're comfortable and sit nicely while walking. I always wear a hat when using airpods because I worry about them falling out. When an earpod falls out, it dangles off the other one, and I put it back in. Especially useful while biking (helmet makes wearing ear-covering hats harder).

I get that airpods are probably the best in the category of tiny little 'true wireless' earbuds. I get that 'put them in the charging case' is really the only way to do charging for this type of headphones. I understand they did the best they could, and that with this style of headphones there's severe limitations. But after having owned a pair, I don't understand why anyone would want to use them over something 1/3 the cost that offers much more convenience.

<comment><USER17> > _Airpods require me to stop using them to charge. Nothing else I have is > like this - phones, iPods, laptops, or other bluetooth headphones._

That goes with the form factor (which is the main selling point for its other benefits, mainly freedom from cables when using them), not some special problem of the airpods themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I bought my AirPods the month they came out, and they're still going strong - and are the only reason I haven't switched my iPhone to an Android.

I hate to be "that person," but, man, they just work. Even though I use bluetooth headphones when working in the office, I get a sense of pleasure when I put my AirPods in and hear that "ding" to indicate they connected instantaneously to my phone. I don't need to turn them on / off, or fuddle with bluetooth settings and shit. Customizing the taps on each ear to have different functions has been a cool feature too that might be nice to have additional customization options in the future (maybe tie in with the Shortcuts app in some way?)

Granted, I feel lucky that they fit my ear perfectly - I definitely feel empathy for some others that have had to buy the extra rubber pieces to help them fit.

I've tried the Pixel buds and a few other competitors, but the gap in quality is pretty wide IMHO.

<comment><USER19> you can use them with an Android? I have a pixel 3 and it's pretty seamless when I borrow my wife's to go for a run.

<comment><USER18> Oh I didn't know that! I'll have to try them out with my buddy's Pixel to see how the experience is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm just glad that they let you buy the Wireless Charging case by itself. From the press release it wasn't obvious but when you hit 'buy' it gives you the option for $79

[https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR8U2/wireless- charging-c...](https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MR8U2/wireless-charging- case-for-airpods)

<comment><USER21> It works with original AirPods too which is a good surprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really believe the AirPods are an amazing New platform.. I think people are far more on the go lately and so the AirPods are a perfect way to consume content, that isn't just music. It started as a silly joke that everyone made fun of but now, at least where I live in NYC, seemingly everyone on every train has them on.

I am a little disappointed in Apple for not adding storage to these though, it wouldn't be very hard to add a few gigabytes to them and then they would work even without your phone and it would be the iPod all over again. Missed opportunity by Apple for sure.

As a shameless plug I am working on what I think is the perfect companion App for iPods. My app let's you listen to any article by using some amazing sounding Machine Learning models to grab the articles and convert them to audio. You can check it out here if you like:

[https://articulu.com](https://articulu.com)

<comment><USER23> You can pair them with Apple Watch for similar effect. But yeah, not having to have a second device would be nice;

<comment><USER24> I think Watch+Wireless headset is potential replacement for phones. Watch needs a camera and unfoldable screen, and it's a done deal!

<comment><USER25> Does it?

When was the last time you took a selfie on your commute?

The screen thing is likely still an issue for mainstream but for me I mostly listen to my content. Screentime only happens at lunch or at home.

Maybe some people can't live without a big screen their commute, but some of us can.

Also, I think given the option I would prefer to carry a tablet in my bag for the situations I want and have time for a screen, and make do with the watch+pods for the majority of scenarios.

In other words, give up a cellphone altogether and replace it with a watch/pod pair and an optional tablet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love my AirPods but I am close to taking mine to the store again to be replaced for a second time. I wear them every day to listen to podcasts as I run for 30 minutes. The accumulated sweat has corroded the charging contacts in the case. I am currently working around this by charging them in my girlfriend's case.

Amusingly, the instructions for AirPods say to not get them wet. I don't know how one could exercise rigorously and not get sweat on them.

<comment><USER27> Should probably wipe them off before putting them in the charger...

<comment><USER28> "Just avoid holding it in that way"

<comment><USER29> An expectation that you wipe your sweat off something before putting it away doesn't seem that unreasonable.

<comment><USER30> honestly, i would expect them to be at _least_ sweat proof -- i find that most people use wireless headsets while working out.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I really did think they were. The phone and the watch are waterproof. I don't know why the AirPods are not.

<comment><USER31> I can see the ad campaign two years from now: Swimmer taps watch to play then dives into a backstroke with airpods visible.

Then you try it at your local pool and the airpods immediately fall out the minute you hit the water, and are kicked by a 6 year old into the pool filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The comments seem pretty back and forth on wether AirPods are good or not. I just got some anyhow, for my wife. She uses her iphone, her apple watch, and an iPad. She isn't very techy, doesn't care about the sound quality or anything, but she does use a lot of apple devices. She also likes to talk to her family in the mornings on the phone while getting ready for the day (curling her hair etc.). To me it seems like headphones that allow her to be ultra mobile and also swap between the devices that she uses make sense. It fits her use cases well

<comment><USER33> This is the use case of most people, just let me hear the sound and get out of my way.

The HN crowd, especially the more focused and tech-savvy people, find issues with the sound quality, ambient noise pickup, and sync issues. All valid issues and the reason I don't care for wireless earbuds in general.

I will stick to my over-ear headset, but I definitely see how airpods are revolutionary and convenient for non-tech users that just want something cordless and simple that works most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I purchased mine when they were first released (end of 2016), and as much as I love my AirPods, they are now down to ~2.5 hours of listening time per charge from my iPhone and <2hours when listening from my MBP for unknown reasons.

The battery replacement is prohibitively expensive and I would rather purchase a brand new set but this update is rather underwhelming: same sound quality, same listening time with improved talktime, better latency and wireless charging - nothing that I really care about.

</comment><comment><USER35> Behold, the airpods internals. A marvel of incredibly small scale engineering and manufacturing. It's simply stunning, and to think that this is a consumer device that you can buy and pop into your ear.... And lose just as easily :)

[https://fccid.io/BCG-A1722/Internal-Photos/A1722-Internal- Ph...](https://fccid.io/BCG-A1722/Internal-Photos/A1722-Internal- Photos-3118427)

</comment><comment><USER36> I know this is a tired trope, but can we please stop with the "everything is magical" rhetoric? There is literally nothing groundbreaking about this release. Also, this page feels quite disingenuous when it claims 24 hour life. Maybe I'm just salty, but having to recharge my headphones every 3 hours, regardless of how short a recharge time, does not equal 24 hours of battery life.

<comment><USER37> *every 5 hours

<comment><USER36> Oh sorry, I was going off this metric from Apple: "15 min. of charging provides up to 3 hours of listening time". A full charge will get you 5 hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love my airpods. Using them right now actually. But I see no reason to upgrade at this time.

<comment><USER39> I wrote off the airpods when they first came out, but then received a pair as a gift. They ended up being one of my must have items. I wish they wouldn't automatically switch to the lower bit rate when they connect to a mac or that I could tell the mac to never use them as a microphone.

However, I also see little reason to upgrade.

<comment><USER40> Strange that they switch to a lower bit-rate on the Mac for you. I use mine all the time with my MacBook, only when an application starts using the mic will it downgrade to a lower bit-rate. Do you have any software running that continuously claims the microphone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why is this still only available in white?

<comment><USER42> Branding.

Remember the iconic dancing shadow iPod commercials? The person was not the focus; not even the iPod was the focus. The white headphones, unique at the time, were the focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've been holding off buying the Airpods knowing an update was incoming. The question is...will there be AirPods 2 announced in 5 days at the keynote? Much like Murphy's Law, any time I buy an Apple device, it drastically accelerates the space-time continuum and somehow causes the new version of the product I just bought to launch right after.

<comment><USER44> The king of Apple leaks, Mark Gurman (who originally leaked this products features last year) tweeted about this [0]

> These AirPods were initially planned to go on sale last year. They're also > working on a future version with noise-cancellation and water resistance. > Those were planned for later this year, but would now imagine that's for > 2020.

I'd take any dates with a healthy dose of salt, as his track record there is less accurate (and obviously dates change pre-announcement).

[0] - [https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1108360407020789760](https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1108360407020789760)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not one mention of the Samsung ear buds. Samsung is continuing to beat Apple in technology innovations. Wireless charging, heartbeat monitor. You can even charge them on your S10.

The other thing I don't like about the pods is how much sound the let out. Ever been in an elevator with someone with airpods, you can hear everything they are listening to.

<comment><USER46> The problem with Samsung ear buds is the same as with other samsung premium products: they are really nice, but at the end they are only slightly cheaper than apple ($150 vs $180) whereas they are worse in a few categories - <USER2> life, multi-device support and microphone quality being just three of them.

Not to mention charing from S10, which for now seems to be as terrible idea as the built-in fingerprint sensor - using S10 as charger generates significant amounts of heat that will quickly kill your phone battery.

And that's a problem with every samsung products - cheaper, but still really expensive considering all of the drawbacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Press release: [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/airpods-the-worlds- mo...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/airpods-the-worlds-most-popular- wireless-headphones-are-getting-even-better/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Sad to see no improvement to audio quality. It is the only gripe i have with the current AirPods.

Siri and wireless charging are small qol changes that i would rather see with a major upgrade. Currently I see no reason for anyone to upgrade their existing AirPods.

</comment><comment><USER49> The new case should have come with a USB Type-C connector, not a lightning one.

</comment><comment><USER50> Almost insta-bought these, but all they've done is add voice activated Siri (because tapping is too hard) and a wireless case. My two biggest issues (color and the materials used) remain unaddressed.

</comment><comment><USER51> I love the concept and features of AirPods but unfortunately they aren't for my ears. I'm still waiting for the day they make a true in ear with rubber tips so that people like myself can finally buy into this experience. You'd think they took some notes from acquiring beats. Pretty sure this would open a whole new market of people that aren't currently able to wear, let alone the massive improvement in sound quality to an already great product.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is it just me, or are they heavily changing their product announcement/launching strategy?!

</comment><comment><USER53> Can a single AirPod be used, to maximize talk time and have access to ambient sound?

<comment><USER54> Yes, you can just use one at a time and it'll route audio input/output accordingly. They charge pretty fast in the case, too, so you could go a long time switching between each one at a time.

<comment><USER55> For long calls I often alternate them, charging one while I talk on the other one.

If you're playing music or podcasts, removing one from the ear will pause the playback by default, and you have to tap play again. But with phone calls, the call just continues if you remove one for charging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wish they came in different sizes. These fit me very loosely. If I add foam covers it's a much better fit and much better sound but a hassle to add the foam and keep them clean.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wanted them in black. White ones look weird in people's ears.

</comment><comment><USER58> I wished they used USB-C for the wired charging.

<comment><USER59> Apple should really get rid of the lightning port, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Any word on additional waterproofing capabilities? I can't find any mention

<comment><USER61> Since another comment is talking about replacing them a 2nd time because of sweat I think it is safe to assume they're not very waterproof

<comment><USER62> That comment was about the first generation AirPods; the poster you replied to is asking about the just-announced second generation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> $159 is really too expensive

<comment><USER64> I don't know how much that equates to in UK money but it's pretty common for people to spend around £150 on earphones or headphones.

<comment><USER65> Not especially uncommon, but the average amount spent on headphones is somewhere in the $40 range, and I'd expect the median to be even lower.

<comment><USER64> The average user wouldn't buy an iPhone XS nor iWatch either. Apple have never gone after the lowest common denominator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think the easiest way to make a lot of money in the actual market for personal tech products is to double down on whatever HN and Reddit claims to hate. I suppose it's just sampling bias, but the more hate I see here, the more money Apple makes, and it's been consistent for many years.

The inverse seems to hold true, too. When Microsoft hardware gets discussed, there's usually a lot of effusive praise, but their market impact is negligible, at least in terms of public mindset, if not in sales.

The closest Apple store to me is nearly always standing room only. There's also a Microsoft store in the same mall. The only reason it still exists is as an impromptu Fortnite LAN party.

<comment><USER67> the expert crowd doesnt like admitting that commoditization means a shift towards non-pro parts, and where less features and less complexity is a feature.

and with everybody, youll always have crowds of people with "the old way worked fine" who are more vocal than the "ill give it a try, it looks cool i guess. i didnt even know people where complaining about thing thingers deficiencies."

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> why does anything Apple releases come with an expensive price tag? I know the quality is supposed to be high. But, come on.

I can literally get a Audio Technica Headset for that price tag.

<comment><USER69> Why does Porsche or Ferrari only make expensive cars when you can get a Kia for 1/3 the price?

Same reason.

Interestingly, Steve actually compared Apple to Porsche in a quote back years ago. [0]

[0] - [https://www.macworld.com/article/1029181/themacturns20jobs.h...](https://www.macworld.com/article/1029181/themacturns20jobs.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> All it takes is one odd jostle on your morning commute, and suddenly your $150 headphones fly down a storm drain.

Why can't we have high quality wired headsets?

<comment><USER71> I embraced airpods early because I had the opposite problem: my corded headphones would get caught by a dog leash and pull my $1000 phone out of my pocket.

<comment><USER72> I decided to go with Bluetooth headphones after the second time I managed to cut the cord while pruning bushes in our garden :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Disappointing. No improvements to audio quality (that they mention), no new color options. The wireless case was already available before.

I guess it's good if you're a frequent user of Siri, talk/listen for exceptionally long periods, or really hate the pairing lag (3-5 seconds).

</comment><comment><USER74> Tried the Airpods a couple times. Got myself a 20£ Taotronics bluetooth ones from Amazon. Sound quality seems better on the Taotronics, battery life is the same and...they just work as well. Let me explain how: bluetooth is enabled on my cheap android phone so when I turn on the headphones they bind automatically and guess what...MAGIC, THEY JUST WORK :D</comment>


Hillary only needed to switch 53,650 voters to win - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/hillary-only-needed-to-switch-53-650-voters-to-win-94940ff263b7 <comment><USER3> There is no non-tyrannical way to actively govern such a divided country except for some sort of radical federalism, which isn't happening.

We will continue flipping back and forth between two warring and, to the opposition, insane governments until the demographic death of the GOP.

I'm not optimistic about what happens at that point.

<comment><USER4> I'd actually say neither the GOP nor the Democrats are heading towards a demographic death.

GOP isn't going anywhere because of the birth rate of religious groups, and the fact that religious immigrants tend to skew right the longer they've been in the country.

The Democrats aren't going anywhere because of the rate of attrition from religious groups. They have lower birth rates than the Republicans, which balances things out.

Balance of power is going to depend on:

1\. The ratio of birth rates 2\. The level of religious attrition in future generations

Look at that. It's all about the children :-)

I left fringe groups out of both sides.

<comment><USER5> they have gotten 60-61 million votes in the last three elections. it seems stable but not growing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of the Dictator's Handbook's earliest lessons (a book I cannot recommend enough, extremely insightful especially in the context of this election - [https://smile.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior- Almost-...](https://smile.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost- Politics/dp/1610391845)): Even though the path to victory in a democracy with a large electorate seems like it's about swaying millions of voters, the numbers are far, far smaller than they look especially in the US system.

<comment><USER7> Not so sure it's that "easy". The millions of voters have to already be swayed in order for a few thousand in just-the-right-places to make the _final_ difference.

Thanks for the book link - it looks interesting!

<comment><USER6> True, although it's not that high. In a 2 party system, a lot of people will just vote around the party lines.

In fact, we talk a lot about how Trump was crossing the party lines, getting democrats to vote for him and republicans to vote against him, etc... but at the end of the day, red states voted red, blue states voted blue, and swing states were won/lost on very few votes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow that's about as many as signed up for Revolt Against Plutocracy by May.. (a group promoting #BernieOrBust).. Interesting coincidence? -- there've been a number of polls and articles online stating that 40% of Bernie supporters would not vote for her. If he had 10 million voters, that's 4 million people.

That's a lot of votes that you're leaving on the table. It really wouldn't have taken Bernie much more votes to win had he been the candidate. All of his supporters, and Jill Stein's would've voted for him, and a large swath of the Independents (which make up 40% of the electorate)..

Here's a good article that explains how two ideologies are on the rise (Egalitarianism/Nationalism) and that neoliberalism is on it's way out - <USER2> isn't to say corporations aren't going to fight tooth and nail to keep it in place which is exactly what we saw this election.

[https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie- sanders...](https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2016/02/10/why-bernie-sanders-is- more-electable-than-people-think/)</comment>


Ask PG: Polite ways to scrape HN? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I've been thinking about doing an HN related project and was wondering if the topic of crawling HN has been covered before. A search of "Ask PG" didn't bring up anything relevant nor did the guidelines and FAQ links. I'm also unaware of any api availability. There seems to be new HN side projects popping up every few weeks or so. How are you getting your HN data?<p>Obviously the basic rules apply, aka. don't hammer my server, duh. Assuming sequential article id's currently clocking in at ~1721000+ It would take a fare amount of time to slurp down HN even at 1k pages/day. Maybe look into pulling down the google cache. Eh, I dunno. Don't want to get any of my ip addrs banned or worse (hehe). Just looking for some guidance... Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> You can crawl so long as you respect robots.txt and don't retrieve more than a couple pages a minute. (Conservative, I know, but we're serving 800k pages a day off one server, using an app written in a slow language.)

<comment><USER3> Paul, have you considered asking the community to volunteer resources?

You've mentioned several times that the site is on one server and that performance is an issue at times. I would donate time/money to make those problems go away, and I suspect others would as well.

Proposal: Post a new thread, "somebody build me a HN server farm", and include the software and hardware prerequisites for an Arc webserver. I bet within 48 hours you would have a 3-4 servers and a load balancer at your disposal.

<comment><USER4> I think the issue is that news.arc doesn't use a distributable storage system. It is as far from "shared nothing" as you get.

<comment><USER3> Hm, interesting.

You can scale _anything_ , though. For example, a pair of reverse proxies in front of the single "share nothing" app server could reduce the load on that one machine. I'm sure the collective brilliance of the HN readership could come up with solutions.

<comment><USER5> Simple: buy a bigger server. It's amazing how powerful one machine can be these days.

<comment><USER6> Assuming nothing has changed, it's running on a "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1."

Upgraded on 4/19/09 from a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3.

rtm's comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122>

<comment><USER4> Yeah, well, this is a middle of the road server these days. I have a 16-core server with 64G of RAM as a dev server at work. They get even more powerful than this, too.

Not saying pg should spend any money on this, though. A redesign of news.arc will stretch the hardware a lot further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here you go: <http://api.ihackernews.com/>

It's an unofficial API though and it might not do everything you need.

<comment><USER8> is this condoned by PG?

<comment><USER9> For now, the answer seems to be _yes_.

<comment><USER10> I'm inclined to agree. Remember, pg doesn't provide an RSS feed for his essays.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/rss.html>

<comment><USER11> Any words on why there is no API for HN?

<comment><USER10> It might be a philosophical thing. One APIs became popular, scraping started to be viewed as breaking the rules. I think this has discouraged many from writing search engines. Crawlers are just scrapers on a big scale.

I know I'd like to see more serious attempts at vertical search engines. I wonder if getting backlash, in the form of people complaining to hosting companies, would be the hardest part of writing a search engine for ruby blog posts that understands regular expressions. I could certainly use such a tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This works great: <http://api.ihackernews.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> You can start with [http://hotfile.com/dl/71319191/96579fe/ycombinator- news20080...](http://hotfile.com/dl/71319191/96579fe/ycombinator- news20080906.tar.gz.html) \- a mirror of old 'Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts Version 1.7' from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=296919> .

Also, could you please post final dataset somewhere when done?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why not crawl the google text cache instead?

It indexes HN within a few minutes of any post.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a good, question and api.ihackernews.com doesn't look bad

</comment><comment><USER15> You could monitor <http://hackerne.ws/newest> so you wouldn't need spider to many pages, if you only wanted the latest content.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just curious, what kind of analysis are you thinking of doing?

<comment><USER17> That's what interested me as well. What could you possibly want to scrape HN for? I suppose it would kind of fun to see who the most active users are. Or, who has the most karma. Maybe incorporate additional game mechanics?

The only site outside of HN that uses HN data that I use regularly is ihackernews.com. All of the others I have just registered and the sites lay dormant.

<comment><USER18> Some of what you want is here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists></comment></comment></comment>


The little black book of scams (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.accc.gov.au/publications/the-little-black-book-of-scams <comment><USER2> I recently fell victim to a nasty scam I've never heard about before. Wonder if anyone had similar experiences.

Happened in Serbia on a highway. We had an RV on German plates and slept on a gas station there, next to the truckers. Morning comes and the clutch pedal is dead - no resistance when I press it (this is a manual transmission car). Obviously not driveable, and we're not car gurus to debug it. We call the insurance but it's not responding (perhaps because it's Sunday). I find a tow car nearby and ask the guy for help, to which he suggests to tow the car 10km to his garage to investigate. I agree.

There they use the debug interface of the car to figure out that we need some part replaced (language is a bit of a barrier now) and quote us 700 EUR + VAT. I agree because we need to drive, and because I cannot contact insurance.

After the job is done I ask them for the old part (the replaced one), and they just say it's "software", after which I realize that I was just massively overcharged/defrauded.

Later when we discuss the situation with my girlfriend she tells me she's seen that tow car waiting seemingly for us for several hours, which suggests that the clutch damage was perhaps inflicted by the very people that fixed our car. I became scared of the whole situation and decided to not report it to the Serbian police and just leave the country asap (I mean if people cut cables in cars on the highway to get 700 EUR I have very low trust in the local law enforcement).

<comment><USER3> > she tells me she's seen that tow car waiting seemingly for us for several > hours

FWIW, at least in the U.S. it's common for tow truck operators to wait alongside various roads. Breakdowns are predictable and service is faster if the operator is already nearby. It's not like the driver has anything better to do during his shift.

That doesn't mean you weren't overcharged or even scammed. Really can't say without more information.

<comment><USER2> Yeah the cable cutting is just a conjecture, have no evidence for that. Overpriced repair - pretty sure about that one.

<comment><USER4> Most clutches are hydraulic, not cable-operated. There will be a bleed valve under the car which can be opened with a wrench, causing the symptoms you experienced. Would take an experienced scammer maybe a minute to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember the first time I got one of these "Nigerian scam" mails. In retrospect it is funny that what made me suspicious was not the offer to make millions in return for an upfront price of a few thousand bucks; it was the fact that the mail did not address me by name but started with the claim that I seemed to be trustworthy person. If I was trying to move a huge amount of money out of the country, would _I_ ask some random stranger on the Internet for help? Exactly.

At dinner, I told my parents about it. My mother's husband, who is a (now retired) police officer who worked in white collar crime for more than a decade, started to laugh. "Do they _still_ use that old trick?" And so I learned that this particular type of scam dates back at least to the 1980s, when scammers used fax to contact their potential victims.

<comment><USER6> It dates back longer than the territorial boundaries of Nigeria: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Prisoner)

<comment><USER5> My mother's husband had lots of interesting stories to tell that involved scammers and con artists; it seems people very quickly let go of all skepticism when faced with the prospect of making lots of easy money.

I also remember that kind of email that used to go around back in the late 1990s that said Microsoft was sending out this mail to measure the size of the Internet or something silly like that, and that if I forwarded it to people from my address book, I would get some stupidly large amount of money for it, like 10$ per person.

As far as these things go, this was fairly benign, of course, but I almost fell for it. And what made me delete the mail without forwarding it to anyone was not that "to good to be true"-aspect, but the fact that I started wondering how Microsoft would know I had forwarded this mail. And then I wondered, _if_ everybody did forward this mail to everyone they knew, for $10 a pop, how much would that cost Microsoft? I mean, they were filthy rich back then, but still, such a thing could easily get out of hand.

And even when I got the first phishing mail from "my bank" asking me for my PIN and a TAN, what made me delete it was not the fact I had deleted dozens of these from other banks where the scam was obvious because I had no affiliation with them, but the fact that I had not ever given my bank my email address.

It is so easy to think that _I_ would _never_ fall for an obvious scam like that. But it pays to remember that the human psyche has some major bugs, and scammers know disturbingly well how to exploit those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You sit with an old friend in bar, already quite drunk. You haven't seen this guys for years but now that you had such a nice evening you really feel like old brothers. Now he tells you about this great house he has and that he considers to move to another town. He might let you take it before he puts it on the market and to a friendship price that he could certainly not achieve on the market.

Will you, at this point, remember that "Scammers dress up 'opportunities' with professional looking brochures and websites to mask their fraudulent operations. They often begin with a phone call or email out of the blue from a scammer offering a 'not-to-be-missed', 'high return' or 'guaranteed' opportunity. The scammer usually operates from overseas, and will not have an Australian Financial Services licence"?

Probably not. But you might remember the story that guy on hacker news told you. You might remember, just as in that story, that you should look out carefully when a "great opportunity" arises. You might check your emotional state and find the comradry you feel to that old friend might not be based on facts since you haven't seen him for a long time. It's rather related to you two having a great night together.

And you might recognize that this combination of great offer, excitement, and a person who doesn't spend time with you often are combining to red flags for a scam.

But that is all because it was a specific example, a story. Not just a list of facts and attributes that generally relate to a set of scams that can be categorized as rather similar.

Therefore I'd argue that such a general list of scams, without specific examples, is not worth much. People's brain simply doesn't work like that. Rather check on Youtube for actual scams. Like "tourist scams in <countryX>".

<comment><USER8> I think I must not be a people, because my brain does generally work that way.

Perhaps it can be that some peoples' brains work one way and others another way, and perhaps there are multiple ways of working.

<comment><USER7> Can you explain how that works out? Like, do you have virtual checklists and for everything you experience over the day your head goes "check check check -> we must be in event X"? It's really hard to imagine.

What I already know is emotional pattern matching. E.g. one smells a spice that one's mother used as a child and one is immediately transferred back to that time. In that way if one recognizes that high excitement is often related to advertisements or scams one might recognize when one feels that way that something might be fishy.

Or what I also know is path recognition. E.g. "at first we did this, then we did this, then we did this, and therefore we arrived at X". In that way we can remember processes like riding a bike or our way home. That's also how memory palaces work.

<comment><USER9> Experience helps a lot. For example, I will never give money to a Buddhist monk walking the streets asking for donations, er, ever again.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-09/victorians-warned- aga...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-09/victorians-warned-against- donating-to-shameless-fake-charities/6008622)

"Genuine monks do have a practice of having gifts or giving alms as part of their religion but it is meant to be a generous donation of those who wish to give without any solicitation whatsoever."

In a similar way, I'd never work for another startup again. While I'm sure many startups have great intentions, others are out and out scams, and the vast majority will never break even enough to pay you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that they promised you. Once burned, twice shy etc.

<comment><USER10> I was once waiting to board an airplane and a Buddhist monk sat beside me. I had a glance at him and notice a rolex watch. "That's odd", I thought. But sometimes Buddhist monks have stuff like that. And then I noticed that he hadn't shaved his head. Or his beard. "That's odd", I thought. But different orders do different things. And then he got called up to the desk and the attendant asked him, "I'm sorry sir, but I noticed that you didn't have a the vegetarian meal ordered. Would you like me to order one for you?". He said, "No thank you." "That's odd", I thought, but even monks have free choice in their meals. And then some guards with sniffer dogs walked up to him and took him away. "Oh. Not so odd after all".

<comment><USER7> Well, well. You still have a lot to learn, my Padawan. The better answer is not "that's odd" but "we'll see". ;-)

[http://buddhistinspiration.blogspot.com/2011/12/well-see- zen...](http://buddhistinspiration.blogspot.com/2011/12/well-see-zen- story.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FYI: I've put together an Awesome Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) Truths page. Subtitled The Art of the Steal - The Scammers' Big Lies at [https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico- truths](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-ico-truths) . Buyer beware! Cheers. Prost.

<comment><USER7> Great that you put actual examples together. I like that. But I'm not sure if you can really improve the world through that. A lot of these problems are quite obvious and if people iwll still put their money into ICOs I'm not sure anything could help that.

That, I feel, is the hardest part of learning more about scams and how to protect yourself. You inevitably see a lot of people who simply can't avoid it, almost going for getting scammed like a moth goes to the lamp, never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich.

<comment><USER12> >never learning from bad experience that you simply can't get rich quick if you aren't already rich.

or a scammer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These TV shows are very educational about this, especially the Real Hustle, which was a documentary demonstrating how to avoid scams in real life situations. I'm sure you can find them on some streaming service as repeats.

The Real Hustle [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0791615/)

Hustle [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379632/)

<comment><USER14> Coworker of mine fell for this same scam in Turkey that was featured on Scam City [https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleSca...](https://turkeytravelplanner.com/details/Safety/SingleMaleScams.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As my brother often says:

In life, you can be greedy, you can be stupid. But you cannot afford beeing greedy and stupid at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Only pay via the website's secure payment method—look for a web address starting with 'https' and a closed padlock symbol"

Someone should notify the Australian govt. that a padlock and https do not equate to security.

<comment><USER17> "Never pay via a website with an address that does not start with HTTPS" would maybe be better?

The padlock is the first step, and possibly the most impactful security check that a non-technical person can do. Recognising Fake webpages, XSS, CSP, malware, etc is very hard and impossible to expect from any visitor of a website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I didn't know there's a special "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence" (and apparently there are separate versions for other countries as well).

<comment><USER19> It was the old Creative Commons v3 license. At that time, people thought, in addition to the "international version", it would be good idea to write many localized licenses for each country, so that people from each country can use the license in their native language and the legal experts can take special cares to make sure the license is completely valid under the copyright laws of a country, and the courts can understand it easily.

But people eventually decided that localized CC licenses were "considered harmful" \- The biggest problem is that you can never be sure whether all the localized licenses are equivalent. It makes things very complicated when you want to create a derivative work of a project, even under the same conditions, if the work released under another localized version by the author. Also, it creates lots of ambiguity in a international community project. Finally, it was difficult to maintain, they need legal experts from all the countries if the license needs changes.

So localized CC licenses have been abolished when Creative Commons v4.0 was released, v4.0 only has the One True Version, the international version, it was made to be a perfectly valid license for all countries that signed Berne Convention, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a teenager I fell for the most dumb in person scam. I was coming out of Barnes and Nobles with my gf and a guy approached me asking for money. I said no initially but then he made up this whole story about being out of gas on the way to see his kids and so on. You'd have to be an idiot to fall for that and idiot I was. So I ended up giving him $20, left feeling weird right away. I got in the car, looked at my gf and said "I bet that was a scam". We went some place to eat then started driving home when not more than a few hundred yards away I see the dude buying booze at a nearby gas station. The only time I felt shittier in my life was when an elderly person sold me a car with a leaking gas tank, knowing that it had a leak.

I can confidently say I'm scam-proof today, learned the hard way to trust nobody, especially unwelcome advances. Ah, the things I did as a stupid kid!

<comment><USER20> Getting off the bus in NYC one day, guy comes up to me, seemingly nice guy asks if I have $5 so he can get home.

Give him some money, feel scammed, couldn't say exactly why.

Talk to my Dad about it later and he asks what was it? Was he holding a book or something? Yep, right in his hand obviously when I recalled it was a cheap rough condition paperback book. My dumb brain saw that and said _"surely this guy is ok, he reads!"_. Dad informed me this was an old scam.

<comment><USER21> 5am in Penn Station, waiting to board the early Acela. I've been in NYC 20 years at this point and have become tolerably good at deflecting our local street scammers, for the most part. I'm printing my ticket out and a construction worker comes up to me, wiry dude with a hi-vis jacket carrying a hard hat. $5 to get home to NJ, his truck got broken into and wallet stolen, blah boo hoo. He got the $5, and it didn't take him much talking to get it. The hard hat sold me. Soon as he turned I realized I'd been scammed.

<comment><USER22> I gave money to these people, and I don't think it's a scam. They're just begging by another mean. Often I just assume they don't have the chop to just ask for cash, or want to ease me into giving. I just ignore their made up story and give them change if I have some. It's charity, not "being scammed".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was hoping it included the fiddle scam from American Gods.

<comment><USER24> This one?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fidd...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks#Fiddle_game)

<comment><USER23> That's the one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good guide.

</comment><comment><USER26> I didn't notice these scams:

Higher Education Mental Health Religious Organizations Political Elections

<comment><USER27> Can you tell me why each one is a scam? I'm curious because none of those to me seem like a scam.

<comment><USER26> Higher Education is increasingly a bad investment, including unforgivable loans.

Religious Organizations that take your money while oppressing your sexuality and agency.

Mental Heatlh system that gives you drugs that often makes your problems worse or at best placebo.

Political Systems that promise change and consistently simply advance the interests of the rich.

Scams meaning these are things people spend money on with a particular result in mind, they end up without that result and the people promoting it are pretty aware they can't deliver the result.</comment></comment></comment>


Actors are not a good concurrency model - <AUTHOR> http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/2010/01/actors-are-not-good-concurrency-model.html

<comment><USER2> I don't feel like an expert here, but this just seems... wrong.

Some of the arguments made about actors are silly - like, "..extract from it the missile launch codes and launch the missile.." What exactly stops any other function or method from doing something like this? This has nothing to do with actors.

The middle seems to be very specific criticism based entirely on Erlang's model (which I'm not familiar enough with to comment on specifics) and then attributed to the entire theoretical model.

And then the rest of it rambles about pure functions, which again has little or nothing to do with the actor model.

<comment><USER3> 'What exactly stops any other function or method from doing something like this? This has nothing to do with actors.'

Richer type signatures than what you may be used to if you're coming from Java or C++. Haskell can write a function that can guarantee that it can not be used for launching missles (as long as you don't use unsafePerformIO, which I say for completeness, but generally you can ignore this caveat).

This is also related to the pure functions he talks about later; the author basically has a very Haskell/ML view of the world. Which may not be wrong, I'm just trying to contextualize it for you. Anything that doesn't have a strong "pure function" distinction will suffer from the "missile launch" problem, you are correct that doesn't really have anything to do with actors.

I tend to agree that there is a bit of a muddled point here; the author really seems to be driving at saying that pure functions and functions with labeled side effects such as we get in Haskell are what we need to build highly composable software systems. I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to this view over time. But the introduction of actors into this essay as a result ends up being almost an extraneous point to the main point that's trying to come out and I think the clarity suffers greatly. It's not so much anti-Actors as anti-anything-but-pure-functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "It's possible there are some other ideas from OO worth salvaging, but more likely I think OO is just an evolutionary dead-end."

I don't know why it is that some functional programmers insist on putting a diatribe against OOP in every little thing they write. I understand where they're coming from, but can they just not fathom that there could be a _different_ way of doing things than what they're used to?

<comment><USER3> OO is the current dominant programming paradigm and has been for the past ~15-20 years. Functional programmers in general can't help but know about OO; most of them were OO programmers before they became functional programmers. Combined with the fact that being popular has advantages (more people working on core code, an increased ability to get a job in $YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE), which causes a desire to recruit more to their cause, you end up with a strong likelihood of seeing a recruitment pitch targeted at the largest recruitable demographic. In this case, this means promising fire and brimstone to the OO heretics unless you come to the light of FP. (The linked post is not that strong, but I've seen much stronger.) You generally don't see recruitment pitches for logic programmers or VDHL programmers.

You should listen to the functional programmer's complaints against OO, then make up your own mind. My programming has gotten a lot more functional lately, but there are certain domains where OO really, really shines and I still end up using it there (GUI widgets, etc). It's definitely not the right solution to every problem, though. (I am aware you did not make that argument, I'm just sayin'.)

<comment><USER4> It's less the strength of the complaint as much as it is the context. If I'm reading an article about the strengths and weaknesses about functional programming vs OOP, it's fine to include such things. However, I think in this post it detracts from the author's main point. By the end of the first few paragraphs, I was focused more on thinking "Oh, this is another of _those_ rants against OOP" than I was on the actual content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps you have to _hardcode some action to take once the result is available_ in an FP language. In a late-bound OO language, you just send a message and take whatever action is appropriate based on the state of the program.</comment>


An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle - <AUTHOR> https://cloudfour.com/thinks/an-html-attribute-potentially-worth-4-4m-to-chipotle/ <comment><USER2> In the race to use fancier and fancier tools to make web user interfaces go I think we loose out a lot by avoiding the browser's inbuilt support for these things.

Like how eBay's new search feature does not allow me to click in it and type in one motion. I have to click, wait for it to redraw without the magnifying glass, and then click again to put the cursor where I wanted it, before editing the query.

Or how some sites hijack the scrollbar, or muck with it, or how about that endless scroll that gets mucked up every so often and you gotta start over.

I suppose web programmers need something to do.

<comment><USER3> This has nothing to do with web standards. A developer decided to limit a field which could be either 2 or 4 characters to only 2. They could have used 10 different approaches to do this and they all would be broken for autocomplete and copy/paste.

<comment><USER4> From TFA:

> To test what would happen if Chipotle's form used these standards, I opened > my browser's developer tools and edited the expiration year field:

> _Video of autofill on the Chipotle order form after `maxlength="2″` has been > added using developer tools. It works!_

> Adding the maxlength attribute to the field fixes the problem. This makes > sense. We're telling the browser, and by extension the autofill feature, how > many digits it should use for the expiration year.

> Autofill is smart enough to know that if we only want two digits for a year > field, that the form needs the last two digits of the year. We just need to > tell the browser how many digits we expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have still never encountered a perfect masking implementation for the web. I don't believe that they exist. If you think you know of one, please tell me and I'll see how many seconds it takes me to find bugs in it. Normally it's less than ten. I'll be mightily impressed if someone can present me with one that I can't find bugs in.

Masking is generally surprisingly user-hostile. It's better to instead take arbitrary user input and make sense of it after the fact—if you want to reformat the value they've entered, you might be able to get away with doing that after they blur the field (though even then there are often downsides to doing it), but I believe it's genuinely impossible to accomplish in a side- effect way before then, across all devices. (It's not easy, but _possible_ to do it for desktop; but various mobile keyboards are particularly weird and do all kinds of crazy things if you meddle with the value while typing.)

I'm talking about the web specifically here. It's possible to do things properly outside the web, but the web just doesn't give you _quite_ the right tools for bug-free implementations of masking.

<comment><USER6> This.

This is particularly terrible for addresses. The _only acceptable solution_ (that nobody uses) is as follows: allow FREEFORM addresses. Like, I'm OK with the website or the server doing some post-hoc validation, and suggesting to the user "This address doesn't seem right, are you sure it is correct?" But the amount of time I have to enter "county" (or whatever) for my London address (and sometimes it's Greater London, other times just London, or probably something else as well...) is ridiculous, doubly so because mail in the UK arrives without problems with little more than just a postcode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate the way companies try to do custom formatting and validation as you type. It breaks form handling in many different and exciting ways and pretty much ensures that autofill (or even just copy/paste) will fail.

If you must do client-side massaging of form data, at least wait until the user has pressed Submit before messing with the form's contents. And don't assume that the keypresses are the only way your inputs will change.

<comment> martin-adams When I was a UI tester, one thing that would almost always break these validators was to select some text on the the surrounding page, then drag it into the text box. Right-click paste is another way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would doubt that it really results in lost orders as people have already invested a lot of time by selecting their food choice and by that time are hungry.

<comment><USER9> Not everyone will understand that the problem is related to their autofill not behaving properly - it's not too far fetched to think that after trying to submit a few times, that someone would abandon their efforts because the "site isn't working". Probably not as high of a lost revenue as proposed, but I wouldn't doubt it leading to some lost orders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting read, but the dollar figure is author guesswork. I appreciate this kind of digging into web behaviour though.

<comment><USER11> "but the dollar figure is author guesswork" any figure presented would be guesswork. It's impossible to measure how many users left your site because they thought it was broken.

The estimate provides meaningful context. Without an estimate, this article amounts to complaining about web standards. With an impact estimate, it is actionable. We have a problem, we know roughly how bad it is, we have a solution.

Maybe it's off by an order of magnitude or 2. If it's costing them $44k/year, it's still worth fixing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Side question, does not displaying the credit card number and CVV provide any real security value? An overwhelming majority of sites that accept credit cards don't do that and I can't say I have ever been worried about that fact. At least the expiration year is displayed to the user so it is possible to notice if something is entered incorrectly And considering the expiration year masking issue only impacts people who use autofill, likely a small minority of users, I wonder if not displaying the credit card number leads to an even higher number of lost sales.

<comment><USER13> Yes, most browsers treat password boxes as sensitive input which has implications to a lot of things. For instance if a blind person types in their CVV using assistive tools on Firefox on macOS, making it a password stops it from being read out loud like other input (it's probably the same on an iPhone, and in some cases this would be annoying if you're in public, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1,000,000 Online transactions per week is most likely browser + mobile based, the larger chunk of transactions being mobile based (I would assume).

This problem does not happen on native mobile apps due to saved Apple Pay/Android Pay cards.

Still a nice article.

</comment><comment><USER15> There was a much less juicy bug in the previous iteration of Chipotle's website. Due to demand, the pickup time would often be several hours away from time of ordering. But there was no server validation of the time being sent. A little manipulation of the dropdown picker, and you could send any time (or indeed, any text at all), and it would be printed on the ticket at the restaurant.

It was so easy that half our office was able to figure out that you can right click the picker, "Inspect", then type in any time you like.

</comment><comment><USER16> If there was lost sales from this I would bet it would be related to the error message of failing to save card. I would think more people would leave because of fear of their card being saved.

</comment><comment><USER17> My bank in the U.S. (BOFA) has some weird autofill problems. When I try to log out of one business account and log into another, often at the last second the autofill will re-fill in the other account (and clash with my LastPass!) and I find myself logged back into one account when the form had the other login info right up to the time I pressed submit.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are several issues with this. Narrow thinking as regards the sort of input to expect from users. But asides from the input and what sort of data to expect, I'd like to think they have some sort of analytics which shows drop off rate and what actions occurred before these drop offs, this should have made the problem obvious.

</comment><comment><USER19> I understand why maxlength would be appealing but it takes the hacking skills of a fourth grader to change it in the browser's html and submitting any number that they'd like.

<comment><USER20> So? That is true for either client side option, which is why you need server side validation as well.

</comment></comment><comment> martin-adams This would make an amazing A/B test to get the real data about how much money was in fact lost due to this issue.

</comment><comment><USER21> Click bait title. TL;DR: Chipotle is manipulating the year field in CC transactions and expecting a two digit year instead of a four digit, but didn't set a max length on the field.

ALWAYS SANITIZE YOUR INPUTS. When that sanitation is complete, replace what's in the form. You don't always have to sanitize the frontend, but ALWAYS sanitize the backend.

Click bait because there's nothing substantial claiming that this actually resulted in a loss of revenue for Chipotle other than some napkin mathematics. A counter point I would make is that I assume most people don't use CC saving in their browser as everyone seems to make a big stink about it. Additionally I would wonder about the amount of people that would notice their info was correct, but failing, and then go through and manually change the information before submitting again. In this case, they may be more inclined to follow the standard 2 digit year that everyone seems to ask for.

<comment><USER22> Exactly - complete click bait.

Auto fill messes up the entry, people refill manually. This happens all the time on numerous payment forms

<comment><USER23> > people refill manually

Only if they suspect that might help. This case doesn't exactly make that clear.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Wins $480M Army Battlefield Contract - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-11-28/microsoft-wins-480-million-army-battlefield-contract <comment><USER2> just from yesterday - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18556284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18556284)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have details on how these could be used in a combat mission?

"for use on combat missions and in training"

I assumed it was just for "immersive job training" but it seems like there's more to it.

<comment><USER4> The story says the project intends to "increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy"

So I would guess feeding information from scout and observer drones and other types of sensors to the soldiers so they can more effectively see camouflaged or hidden enemy positions, be more quickly aware of enemy movements, etc.

<comment><USER3> I can't imagine fighters using the existing version for an extended period of time while engaged as some sort of AR tool (see around corners etc.). However, maybe they'll produce a "military spec" version that does just that. Maybe they will be able to toggle on/off like night vision to reduce fatigue.

<comment><USER5> You don't need everyone to wear it, perhaps someone designated as a scout.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Dropbox public folder replacement - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/khromov/dropbox-public-folder-replacement <comment><AUTHOR> Dropbox are removing their support for public folders on September 1,2017. I made this script to be able to easily swap out my old links.

More info: [https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public- folder](https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-folder)

<comment><USER2> That's cool!</comment></comment>


All Advice Is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://inspiredworlds.com/all-advice-is-wrong/ <comment><USER2> I disagree. Yes, there is nuance and variables to different situations. A good advisor will apply his experience to your situation / perspective / variables.

There may be multiple correct answers, but that doesn't make a specific set of advice "wrong."</comment>


Deadlines, lies and videotape: The tale of a gRPC bug - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hostedgraphite.com/2018/10/30/deadlines-lies-and-videotape-the-tale-of-a-grpc-bug/ <comment><USER2> Good war story.

One thing I was wondering:

> It essentially showed our layer0 service freezing, and even stop reporting > its own internal metrics, only to recover a few minutes later. As we didn't > know how to reproduce the problem, it was hard to make progress.

I don't know the environment (and not too much about the current affairs of e.g. web development in general), but since the problem was noticeable and lasted for minutes, up to almost an hour according to the graph, is there anything that would prevent them from logging into an affected machine and taking multiple stack shots of the relevant processes in close succession?

That would immediately show which threads are hanging where. The rest of debugging is still required to figure out why it hangs there (especially if you are not familiar with the internals of the code at the top of the obtained stack shots), but at least you know where to look.

<comment><USER3> Since the root problem seems to have been inside gRPC, the stacks may or may not point to an actual cause, depending on underlying architecture.

For example, if there is some sort of asynchronous queue for message send/receive, the stacks might just show threads waiting.

I'm speculating obviously. But for any complex application you usually are looking at a mix of verbose logs and live debugging when troubleshooting.

The advantage of good logs is that you can follow the control/data flow in the application, whereas attaching a debugger gives you current state. Figuring out why you're in that state may be quite difficult, depending on the application.

<comment><USER2> > For example, if there is some sort of asynchronous queue for message > send/receive, the stacks might just show threads waiting.

Yeah, that's the point, it will show the threads waiting, but it will normally also exactly show where, with what call stack, the threads are waiting. The full call stack of several stuck processes usually gives you a pretty good idea what is being waited on, and why.

I say "usually" because things get murkier with e.g. interpreted languages, where what the program is actually doing is on a different abstraction layer than the presented stack traces, but even then you have a good chance of at least figuring out what the stalling resource is, and what processes are involved.

> Since the root problem seems to have been inside gRPC, the stacks may or may > not point to an actual cause

I'd go so far to say that they are unlikely to point at the actual _cause_ (as said, you still need to continue debugging, and good logs always help), but at least you now know what code to look at without having to guess reproduction steps.

It's how we debug hangs in modern complex operating systems, where there often is a lot of IPC involved. The very first thing to ask for and look at is stack shots comprising all processes and threads in the system (either in kernel land or user land or both, depending on the problem), preferably many of those taken in close-ish succession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It's important to note that by default, this deadline is set to unlimited, > which is almost certainly not what you want.

For interactive use this is somewhat reasonable as a default. When you're processing an RPC request, it's also reasonable because when the incoming request is canceled you can cancel the outgoing requests too.

I would encourage people to think carefully about deadlines and not just pepper them everywhere.

<comment><USER5> How is that reasonable ? With an infinite timeout, you are liable to have dead connections pile up forever on any network event that causes the peer to go silent

Or you have to handle timeouts at another level in your code, which is reasonable - but can make things a lot more complicated.

<comment><USER4> Infinite timeout is often (rather, almost always!) better for layers where the timeout should be higher in the stack. The timeout or cancellation happens at the topmost level and then propagates downwards.

This is not any more complicated than a timeout, and it saves you an enormous amount of pain.

For example, let's suppose a particular operation is timing out, and while you might want to fix underlying issues, for now you might to increase the timout. You can fix it by adjusting the timeout at the topmost level without worrying about other levels. If you use timeouts everywhere, you might have to adjust timeouts everywhere.

So as a default, I would say, only put timeouts at the top. You can then evaluate putting timeouts elsewhere as necessary. I've also found it very helpful in certain to do things like stream results as they are generated, so you can set a deadline and use whatever partial results you get before the deadline. In particular this is very useful if you have flaky hardware, or very large queries (in terms of number of systems they touch).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not handling the return of sendmsg (or any send operation on a socket) is a common mistake (I hate to say "rookie",but the shoe does fit here).

The proposed solution of setting the TCP_USER_TIMEOUT is worth internalizing.

In my experience, the one thing anyone writing an RPC transport over TCP should always do is set a short TCP keepalive timer to detect network connectivity breakdowns. I am talking about a per-socket basis, of course. On Linux, I guess you'd use the above option to get the same effect.

On Windows, you can set SO_KEEPALIVE_VALS, which allows you to set the TCP keepalive intervals. I couldn't find an equivalent Linux socket option by a cursory google.

The TCP keepalive defaults were designed for an age when sending packets too frequently was considered impolite. As a result, a network hole (where packets are being silently dropped) can take several minutes to detect.

Have been bitten a few times by this, so now I just make this socket option part of my standard template code for connection protocols.

<comment><USER6> If I understand it correctly, the issue was't caused by not checking the result of sendmsg, but sendmsg blocking the program when the send buffer was full.

<comment><USER3> no, if you look at the github issue, sendmsg fails with EAGAIN. It's probably an upper layer that hangs.

<comment><USER5> Note that in this case EAGAIN is just an indication the socket buffer is full - which can easily also happen on normal operation when you're blasting off calls at full speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I only ever had horrible experience using grpc, its overly complicated, badly documented, has bad code quality and is full of bugs especially in combination with multiprocessing/asyncio. maybe i'm the only one with that experience but at least with python you probably are better off using something less bloated.

</comment><comment><USER6> So it boils down to the Python implementation of gRPC using synchronous I/O.

<comment><USER8> It's not specific to the Python one, and if it were synchronous I/O sendmsg would block, not return EAGAIN.</comment></comment>


Chance to buy shares in Shaolin Monks? - <AUTHOR> http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2009/12/19/do-you-want-a-piece-of-me/

<comment><AUTHOR> What a shame the IPO doesn't seem to be true...</comment>


Rounding Algorithms 101 - <AUTHOR> http://www.clivemaxfield.com/diycalculator/sp-round.shtml <comment><USER2> "Round Algorithms 100" would be a better title. Just sayin.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is a 2006 article by the same author [1] which was updated recently, and it includes a link to MATLAB source files for some of the algorithms [2].

[1] [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1274485](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1274485)

[2] [http://m.eet.com/media/1061430/max-round-filter- source.zip](http://m.eet.com/media/1061430/max-round-filter-source.zip)</comment>


The Exclusive, The Embargo and The Arrington - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/arrington-embargo

<comment><USER2> It seems whenever something doesn't go right for Arrington a huge story comes out of it, 40 blogs write about it, and we hear about it for an entire week.

All I can say is: Yawn.</comment>


Starbucks will begin filtering pornography from its Wi-Fi networks - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/starbucks-will-begin-filtering-pornography-from-its-wi-fi-networks/ <comment><USER2> So how good is the filter? How many false positives and false negatives are to be tolerated? Will it successfully distinguish between pornography, sexual health, classical statuary, Victorian and other paintings, etc.?

Does it apply only to pictures or does it also filter out sexual texts? Is Fanny Hill allowed? What about Fifty Shades?

And, who decides where the lines are drawn?

<comment><USER3> I've encountered some false positives in Panera Bread -- some Japanese sites were falsely blocked, I remember.

I honestly don't understand how this will be any good, other than making a false sense of mitigation, perhaps other than deterring most casual viewers. Considering circumvention technologies are readily available, and actually they don't even have to circumvent, they can use their phone...</comment></comment>