Popular Local News Sites in the US and Canada Are Fake - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/fake-local-news-sites-albany-edmonton <comment><USER2> From the story -- _" The Edmonton and Albany sites make the majority of their ad inventory available via Google's ad network, meaning the tech giant facilitates the programmatic sale of ads on the sites and takes a cut of revenue when ads are displayed. Along with Google, the sites also list their inventory with AppNexus, another large ad network."_

Basically the people who are getting screwed here are the advertisers, Google gets their cut, the web site gets their cut, and the advertisers just burned a pile of money advertising out into space. It is very sad, and one which takes advantage of the fact that all of the brands have outsourced management of their advertising to third parties. It is like giving your office the manager the ability to approve invoices and sign checks. Never a good strategy.

<comment><USER3> More like the people who would have genuinely benefited from the advertisement in the first place (i.e. local papers).

If your claim is true - that the advertisers have abandoned all good sense and just throw good money after bad without checking if its good value for money - it's hard to call the advertisers victims. Maybe Google is good value for money - better than billboards - even though a certain amount is wasted. What is the alternative? Something independently confirmable like buying adloads on twenty percent of pageviews on www.crazy-popular-news-site.com in July?

Google keeps asking me if I'm a fully legit human. I assumed they used this also fully legit human status to decide whether to charge for the ads they don't show me. But is the claim here that Google just uses fully legit human status to annoy people who don't use Chrome? Seems a little anti-competitive.

<comment><USER4> ask yourself what is in Google's financial best interests, and I think you will figure out what the path of least resistance is for them to take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      A Google spokesperson said the Edmonton and Albany sites were not violating any of its policies

So, _even having their attention called to this fraud_ , they do nothing.

<comment><USER6> I'm not as up to date with Google's public opinions on moderating truth (a very sticky thing indeed), but it seems to me they're taking the opposite approach to Facebook (for all its ills and merits).

If anyone has more direct info, please post it. FB is getting all the attention these days with truth and whatnot.

<comment><USER4> This article has nothing to do with disinformation/"Fake news"

It has not much to do with censoring people, and more that this "popularity" of these sites is almost certainly driven by illegitimate means (scripts, botting, popups, malware etc), purely to collect ad revenue. After all who is going to bother with such worthless and out of date articles from a completely unknown "news" org.

The fact its extremely obvious, and Google can't even be bothered bodes poorly for the veracity of the online ad ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The annual losses from ad fraud are estimated at billions, and even tens of > billions of dollars.

I like it when such estimates are linked to no source at all.

<comment><USER8> It's still Buzzfeed, but on wikipedia they do state some of these numbers.

Not even sure advertisers mind at this point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "A related trend is the emergence of local news sites in the US that are run by politicians or are closely linked to political causes or entities."

I can't help but notice that ABC news spiked the Epstein story, NBC suppressed the Weinstein story (both for 'editorial standards'), yet both blared Kavanaugh allegations nonstop.

It's not just small news sources that are steered by politics.</comment>


Ubuntu 14.04 LTS supports TRIM on SSD drives - <AUTHOR> http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2013/12/ubuntu-14-04-lts-supports-trim-ssd-drives/ <comment><USER2> Instead of being happy, I'm rather horrified to learn that this hasn't been supported until now.

<comment><USER3> It has been supported for ages, this is just making it automatic. From the article: "SSDs are now being trimmed automatically out of the box".

<comment><USER2> Well, if I hadn't known about it until now, there's not much between the two scenarios for me, is there?

<comment><USER4> You just want to blame someone other than yourself for not knowing stuff, right?

<comment><USER5> Ubuntu is a customer/"average joe" oriented OS, Canonical spends money to actively promote it as such (!), therefore it should be fit for this purpose.

I know this kind of stuff, but the average user isn't required to know this. Even if the product is free, having a default setting that shortens hardware lifespan instead of an automatic configuration for best lifespan/performance is to me simply _cheating the customer._ You may wave in may face the "no guarantee to be fit for a particular purpose" or whatever is written in the license, but when you are a commercial company that actively promotes a product, you are responsible to make it "just work", "by default" and to "not require me to think."

...and generally thinking, I think that we as software developers should take the "don't make me think" philosophy more seriously and ditch the "RTFM" mindset, even if we write libraries or tools that are to be used by other programmers. "RTFM" simply _can 't work at scale:_ when you use tens or hundreds of devices, apps and technologies, you just don't have the physical time to "read the manual" for all of them, so you should just be able to assume "sane / mostly optimal" defaults. And no, not even a large company can't just hire one professional that is expert in each particular technology they use, open-source or not: nobody can afford this, most shit should just work by default, and when we'll have technology that will be able to "read our minds" or "know stuff for us" we should actively demand that is does so.

<comment><USER6> > [...] is to me simply cheating the customer.

You become a _customer_ , when you start paying them. Until then you are just a user. The license which most of the packages included in Ubuntu use says: "BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES", so what did you expect?

<comment><USER2> > You become a customer, when you start paying them. Until then you are just a > user.

^ The problem with free software: you're not supposed to expect it to work correctly.

<comment><USER7> ^ The problem with randomly downloading stuff from the internet without reading the instructions: you likely won't know how to operate it correctly.

<comment><USER2> You just _have_ to say something even if it doesn't make sense don't you?

TRIM isn't mentioned in what you call "the instructions" [1].

[1] [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mountain out of a mole hill. Glad someone got some sense knocked into them and enable this flag by default, but Linux has supported TRIM for a long time. It was just a matter of adding the mount option.

And by the way, last I checked there's still a long laundry list of non- default incantations to optimize SSD usage on Windows, where you're stuck harder because you don't have control over things like the I/O scheduler.

<comment><USER2> > last I checked there's still a long laundry list of non-default incantations > to optimize SSD usage on Windows

Would you mind listing them?

<comment><USER9> Here is a great guide: [http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans- windows-7-install-o...](http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans- windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds)

:)

<comment><USER2> Looks 99% BS to me, and the other 1% seems to be unnecessary.

Would you mind listing the items you think are actually necessary here, instead of pointing me to a 489-page forum thread?

<comment><USER10> From near the top of the opening post:

 _A quick word on SSDs: SSDs do NOT require the confusing and intense setup that a lot of people seem to suggest. The current day SSDs are much more reliable and literally all that is necessary is to change the SATA mode to AHCI or RAID in the BIOS /UEFI, install, and you are good to go. _

<comment><USER11> Even the move to AHCI isn't strictly necessary with most drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Trim has been already supported for years. It just was not on by default.

</comment><comment><USER13> So it's news that a feature supported on other platforms for anymore from months to years [1] will be supported on Ubuntu 5 months from now?

Huh. Colour me unimpressed.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_%28computing%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_%28computing%29)

Full disclosure: I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years, switched to OSX on an Air a few months back, and cannot imagine going back to an inferior user experience on inferior hardware. Open source OS was an interesting experiment, begun to ensure access to my data, but given cloud apps with export capabilities and native OSS apps, I cannot imagine wanting to suffer another moment with an OSS user desktop. Server maybe. But even there my conviction levels drop....

<comment><USER14> > inferior hardware

For an inferior price, you should add to that. It's kind of obvious that expensive products have decent hardware.

I'm not against apple and this is not Apple bashing (I'm even considering buying a Macbook) but telling the whole truth.

<comment><USER13> I cannot find anything on the PC side that rivals this stuff. $1000 buys something that feels solid, really well built. I've looked, I really wanted to stay on Linux, I was even willing to pay the Windows tax (but wasn't looking forward to the tweaking that was getting more and more necessary)...

...until I switched. Now I cannot imagine going back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That reminds me that I need to enable TRIM on my Ubuntu SSD. I usually do it, but I had forgot to do it with my recent install. I've used this article in the past ([http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in- ubun...](http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubuntu-for- better-performance/)). It is fun to measure your IOPS before and after.

<comment><USER16> That article suggests enabling automatic trim with the discard option, but that's not recommended any longer.

A more up to date article: [http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to- enable-trim](http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim)

<comment><USER17> That article is useless for dm-crypt encrypted volumes.

<comment><USER18> You have to disable TRIM on the encrypted filesystem with the discard option in crypttab and then set issue_discards to true in lvm.conf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr "Embarrassingly late, but at least in time for 14.04 LTS."

<comment><USER20> TRIM has been supported for ages, just not by default.

<comment><USER21> For consumer software, if it's not the default, it may as well not exist. And no, Linux is not an exception to this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has TRIM support for SSD drives out of the box. No need to setup a cron with the "fstrim" command or set the fstab "discard" option, like in earlier versions.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone comment on the contrary advice here, which is referenced from the debian SSD Optimization wiki page?:

[http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html](http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html)

<comment><USER23> As befits a post on the linux-raid mailing list, that advice seems to be primarily concerned with using SSDs in a RAID array. I suspect that most users have only one SSD and plan on using most (if not all) of their drive's space.

The Debian wiki page you mentioned [0] was changed from saying TRIM "is not strictly necessary" to "is not needed" if your SSD has enough free space. The editor wrote that the section was rewritten to ensure consistent style, [1] which suggests that they probably did not mean to change that sentence's meaning.

[0]: [https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization](https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization)

[1]: [https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&...](https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization?action=diff&rev1=74&rev2=75)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now, if they can adopt F2FS (flash friendly file system) for SSD's, that would be neat, too. On Motorola's latest phones and in benchmarks it shows substantial performance difference (~50 percent more on average or so).

</comment><comment><USER25> Does this support encrypted drives? I had a really big pain trying to support an encrypted ssd under rhel 6, I gave up after an entire day of work.

<comment><USER26> Encrypted drives are problematic. I've found it easier to just run fstrim manually once in a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a terrible linkbait title.

This implies that Ubuntu hasn't "supported" SSDs and the discard mount option. That's inaccurate, TRIM has been in Linux since kernel 2.6.28–25 released in Dec 2008.

A more accurate title would be "Ubuntu 14.04 adds fstrim cron job, so you don't need to mount with discard anymore if you don't want to".

</comment><comment><USER28> Wondering when they're going to support Trim for Software Raid?

</comment><comment><USER29> This reminded me to do the chore again.

[http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png](http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4143/1zx2.png)

</comment><comment><USER30> # cat /etc/fstab

...defaults,noatime,discard,barrier=0,commit=600

Linux consumers...</comment>


A pessimistic vision of India's looming environmental and economic collapse - <AUTHOR> https://thewire.in/217773/india-systematic-destruction/ <comment><USER4> The thing that worries me the most is lack of fresh water. I belong to the Indian state of Gujarat mentioned in the article, and the pessimism isn't exaggerated at all. Soil erosion and fresh water coupled with rising temperatures is a real and present danger seeimingly ignored in favour of populist and industrialist projects such as GIFT (that keeps on winning elections for the incumbent). There's no reversing desertification that plaques my home state. It is heartbreaking, to say the least. It's taking us towards a Mad Max Fury Road esque world, and how.

Uttar Pradesh, the quintessential Indian state that 200* million people call home, along with another 200 million in the Hindi-Urdu heartland, has always had abundance of natural resources but its utter mismanagement has led to an unprecedented ecological crisis that no one in the political setup seems to be bothered about; and that may be since they continue to grapple with challenges of heavy population, unemployment, casteism, and near absence of law and order in every fabric of the society. Most of its major cities are on the verge of collapse, whilst the elites along with the politicians have cornered an enormous amount of wealth for themselves at the expense of the environment and the people; unlike in 2000s China, where the distribution of wealth seemed more fair, in comparison.

I think, India and Pakistan (I was astonished at the very similarity of what's happening to India's biggest states like Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, and Punjab; and Pakistan's Punjab and Sindh) and most other tropical countries favouring unabated development at the cost of the environment are going to end up in a very sorry state that's going to get worse along an exponential curve for entities with larger than sustainable populations.

I don't understand at all the increasing rents, property prices amidst the impending crisis. Given that, especially, only a handful hoard most of the wealth and could afford buying or renting at today's rates.

India is being held hostage in a prison of corruption by greed, will promptly be taken to the altar of doom by ignorance, where civil unrest will have a final swing of the sword culling the Virus, as Agent Smith would put it.

*edit

<comment><USER5> Making big sacrifices _now_ to avert a disaster that is "only" forecast, but not yet tangible/certain in the mind of most people, is incredibly difficult everywhere, not just in India. To cite an example from Italy, everybody who had a basic understanding of economics knew that we had unsustainable rate of growth of public debt and pensions promises, but there always somebody promising that they had a magic bullet solution (or that there is no problem at all), and most voters in the end prefer to believe in those. This is true even now that the consequences of those policies have struck hard with years of economic stagnation and a worsening general situation.

<comment><USER6> Romania is beholden to a post-communist party since 1989 using the same tactic - promise pension raises. Old people mostly vote with them, sacrificing the future of the country. They make a mess, then step down for a term to let the opposition fix it, then come back with more promises. And the old people love them because "What has the opposition ever done for us?" and "They are all corrupt, anyway, no matter the party".

But now even the leader of this party has a huge corruption case against him, so he tries to change the laws to save his ass, by making corruption legal. In the last 12 months he changed 3 prime ministers (all from his party, absurd as it seems) because even they were afraid to do the illegalities he demands. He's a joke and we can't get rid of him. Why can't he directly take the PM seat? Because he has already been condemned for corruption in a past case, so he's barred. He can still lead by proxy, though.

Sometimes I think old people shouldn't be allowed to vote because they got little time left and don't care much for the rest of us (the future they won't get to see), so they'll gladly sell our futures for a modicum raise in their pensions. If you vote, you should be held to the reality of what you voted on. It's unfair to vote and die soon (same thing happened in UK where old people voted out and young people are left with the consequences).

<comment><USER7> And if you introduce a voting threshold of 80 because "they're going to die soon anyway", thus ensuring their lifetime of experience is ignored, what stops you deciding that it's now all the fault of 75 year olds? Where does it end?

Your example of the UK gives away the problem. Lots of young people voted in, because they naively believed the predictions of catastrophe and doom that were being announced at max volume by the academic and governmental elites. Older people who perhaps remembered their long history of failed economic forecasting were less worried. Who was right? The older people were - <USER3> forecasts that were made in the run up to the referendum have by and large been systematically proven wrong since then, to the extent that senior members of government and business are openly stating the forecasters at the Treasury and Bank of England have no credibility and should be ignored.

<comment><USER8> The original forecasts were based on immediate invocation of Article 50, and without a significant intervention by the Bank of England, and without an uptick in global growth (which Britain is bottom of the class in). Instead what we got was a big devaluation in the Pound, slicing billions off the wealth of the country.

The other elements of the forecast are coming, they're just following on a time lag because they're dependent on choices getting locked in. The not so funny thing about Brexit is that it's like a game of chicken: the market doesn't believe Britain will choose drive off the cliff edge, so it hasn't priced in the damage; but that lack of pricing information makes it more likely Britain will drive off the edge.

It's one situation where markets might ironically be ill-suited to judge because of feedback effects. The worse the outcome, the less likely the market is to believe it, which sustains the delusion that it won't be bad.

<comment><USER7> The forecasts were not based on that, you can go read them. That's something invented later to try and explain why they were wrong.

But even if you were right about that, Article 50 was invoked and no insta- recession occurred.

Regardless of how you try and slice it the consensus of economists was wrong, 100% and completely wrong. There is no way to deny it.

 _The other elements of the forecast are coming_

Wrong, totally wrong. Go read the Treasury's actual forecast:

[https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-to-enter- recessio...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-to-enter-recession- with-500000-uk-jobs-lost-if-it-left-eu-new-treasury-analysis-shows)

 _New Treasury analysis shows a vote to leave the EU would tip Britain's economy into a year-long recession._

 _Speaking at B &Q in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the Prime Minister and Chancellor set out the Treasury's analysis of the impact on the nation's economy over the immediate period of two years following a vote to leave._

Do you see that - vote to leave. Very clear. There was a vote to leave. Their predictions did not come true. My point remains.

<comment><USER8> Still a game of chicken. See the poll results in today's FT - businesses still don't believe a hard Brexit is coming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly, most of the article thesis isn't specific about India being destructed, it's about the World being destructed (over exploitation of natural resources + pollution).

But the element that I find strangely missing is the one about population growth. I'm pretty sure that GDP per capita can grow, if not indefinitely, for a very very long time - if the population isn't too big. India will soon be the most populous country in the World and still growing strongly enough; I would be curious to know if this is seen as a big problem in India, or not...

<comment><USER9> The population growth isn't a problem "yet" but it is a problem when those people want to develop (ie increase energy consumption). Hans Rosling explains it well: [https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine/transcript)

<comment><USER10> will energy consumption be less of an economic problem thanks to the break even of solar and coal?

<comment><USER11> World as a whole is hungry for energy. Industrialized nations have been able to reduce the link between economic growth and energy consumption, but the same is not true for the rest of the world.

Globally alternate energy adds to the global energy production, it's not replacing. When the industrialized world moves to alternate energies, developing world can afford to consume more oil, gas and coal. When solar becomes cheaper, it makes hydrocarbons cheaper due to decreasing demand. I don't see how solar power replaces the global hydrocarbon production significantly before it's too late. It certainly will not do so in the short or medium term.

Markets value large oil and coal companies and producers like the demand will continue. EIA estimates that global petroleum and other liquid fuels consumption and production are in constant upward path: [https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php](https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php)

<comment><USER12> Fossil fuel production is highly competitive, so prices are pretty much set by the costs of the last marginal producer.

If the world decreases its consumption, the prices may go down (possibly by a large amount). But any increase in consumption will very likely push the prices up, it does not matter it the competition between consumers is small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Economic growth is a central assumption to political and economic systems… But strong growth is not normal, being a recent phenomenon over the last two centuries… It was based upon the profligate use of mispriced natural resources such as oil, water and soil. It relied on allowing unsustainable degradation of the environment. The human race refuses to accept that it is not possible to have infinite growth and improvement in living standards in a finite world."

Exactly this - it seems that while we are aware of it as individuals, we act as of it were not so as societies.

<comment><USER14> Yeah and the Malthusians have been predicting the downfall of civilization due to "non-infinite growth" for the last couple centuries as well. And they keep being proven wrong.

Just because growth isn't "infinite" says nothing about how far away we are from reaching the limits of the planet.

Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. So we've got a ways to go.

The facts show, that by every metric of quality of life, life is better than it has ever been in the history of the world.

<comment><USER15> Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation.

The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the _theoretical_ capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its _practical_ capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity.

It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of the well-known type of question in introductory calculus:

Q: "A population of bacteria in a petri-dish doubles every hour, after 24 hours the petri-dish reaches 100% saturation. At what time did the petri-dish reach 50% saturation?"

A: 23 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not being able to drink the water is bad enough, but not being able to _breathe_ takes it up another level.

It's such a sad state of affairs that in many parts of the world we can't even breathe the air. I'm in Thailand up in Chiang Mai where the "burning season"[1] has just begun. The mountains in the distance, normally plainly visible, are gone, hidden behind a blanket of smoke/smog. And the locals tell me, "hah, this is nothing, wait until March [when the air quality goes from merely unhealthy, to hazardous]".

Berkeley Earth[2] reveals the state of the air in this side of the world. Am thinking of heading to northern India but it seems there's no safe haven short of climbing Mount Everest. Maybe at other times of year the air quality is much better; for the locals I hope so.

[1] In Asia apparently every spring the farmers burn the previous season's rice fields in order to enrich the soil for the next crop.

[2] [http://berkeleyearth.org/air-quality-real-time- map/?z=4&x=10...](http://berkeleyearth.org/air-quality-real-time- map/?z=4&x=107.07813&y=31.13512#links)

<comment><USER18> You could consider going to Laos, the air is definitely better here

<comment><USER17> Thanks, think I'll probably head somewhere in southern Thailand until my visa expires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't help but think that these problems won't be solved until there's an obvious, short term incentive for our lawmakers to actually tackle these problems in any tangible way.

The public outcry has been constant for decades. The information and alarmism has existed for just as long. There's no shortage of reasons why we shouldn't tackle these issues. Those in the power to enact significant change to environmental and economic models aren't incentivized to. How do we shift perception to incentivize sustainable growth, rather than growth in isolation. How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes at the cost of finite resources?

<comment><USER20> > How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term > changes rather than short term successes

Make sure they stay in office for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find neo-Malthusian arguments like this need to be taken with a serious grain of salt. Much of the article would have applied word for word for China a decade or two ago, and that country continues to struggle with environmental problems as gargantuan as India's -- but it's now also equally clear that they have turned a corner and are not just taking the issue seriously, but starting to make an impact.

</comment><comment><USER22> As an Indian living in the United States, I hope the development choices made in India skip some of the unsustainable choices made by other countries. Car ownership should be discouraged to a higher degree than what it is today, and we should focus a lot more on efficient carpooling solutions. Things like bikeshare, etc however may never be a realistic solution in most urban cities.

One other thing is most places in Mumbai for example don't have strict zoning practices. I do think that this has some unintentional benefits like lower travel time for commuting by colocating housing and offices.

<comment><USER23> As an "American" who's visited India as a tourist once, I have some questions to educate myself.

1) India is a very large and very diverse country. How is the culture of acceptance towards carpooling and resource sharing, especially when it will gain an ascendant middle class like we're seeing in China?

2) Vehicles have always had a status communication role. Is there something we can tap into that can impede this desire?

<comment><USER24> > 2) Vehicles have always had a status communication role. Is there something > we can tap into that can impede this desire?

I really doubt it. People are always looking around for honest signals about each other, and a vehicle is the most expensive possession other people will see in a casual social setting by at least an order of magnitude. Whether you're at school, work, a bar, hiking, etc, people will see you get into your car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It shines new light on the mindset that promises bullet trains and 'smart cities' while neglecting public health and malnutrition; the pursuit of heartless policies calculated to keep agriculture economically unviable, driving the rural poor "wholesale into the cities to serve as cheap fodder for India's 'economic miracle'; and the permanent destruction of million-year-old mountains, forests and rivers to create a 'nine-day' industrial wonder."

I cannot agree with this more.

</comment><comment><USER26> I live in South America, where we have plenty of space. Bangladesh is half the size of my state, but has 14 times its population. And 18% of Bangladesh floods during the monsoon. China has more people than India, but because it is so much larger, its density is similar to a European country's (Italy is denser than China).

India and Bangladesh make me very afraid for the future.

<comment><USER27> China's population is unevenly distributed. There is a large concentration in eastern coastal regions. There are provinces with larger population than Italy and MUCH higher population density.

The whole of Europe, similar in area to China, has 1/2 the population density of China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article on China linked to is also excellent: [http://www.truth- out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-c...](http://www.truth- out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse)

</comment><comment><USER28> It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion...

6 minute American Museum of Natural History animation

[https://youtu.be/PUwmA3Q0_OE](https://youtu.be/PUwmA3Q0_OE)

The fundamental problem is over population IMO

</comment><comment><USER29> I was recently in Delhi for a few days.. the pollution really is truly awful. Indeed, I even had an layover on the way back (where I didn't even leave the airport) and I almost needed to wash my clothes after walking from the terminal to the plane doors. :/

</comment><comment><USER30> Always nice to see mention of Kumarappa in an article. His viewpoint deserves more consideration than it gets.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Kumarappa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Kumarappa)

</comment><comment><USER31> Article discusses only one side of the debate, and media just publishes it without proper research. It should also mention the efforts taken to overcome the issues of environment, economy or infrastructure.

<comment><USER32> So what are the efforts taken to overcome these issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's an Interstellar like scenario. Things literally are very bad in India. Ecological disaster has already started. But the same is true for most countries.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think Govt should focus on Solar based Lift irrigation projects [https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/gujarat-model-of- hate-i...](https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/gujarat-model-of-hate-is- evident-everywhere-economist-202946)

</comment><comment><USER35> You could change "India" to "United States" in this article and still be pretty accurate.

</comment><comment><USER36> I read the other day that chicken farmers are working on a solution to this problem [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281316)

</comment><comment><USER37> I hope that one day, government corruption will be a solved problem. []-[]-[]-[]

</comment><comment><USER34> 1% in India cannot own 73% Wealth unless they're running Pyramid schemes.

Govt should impose 30% #InheritanceTax and use those funds for free healthcare/education/pensions.

</comment><comment><USER38> Are short-term sea rise forecasts really up to 11 feet? Won't that wipe out a big chunk of Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER39> If you ignore the IPCC reports of 1.5m because it was based on inomplete data and consequently intentionally ignored several positive feedback liops, the most recent studies suggest 3m-4m by 2075-2100 are very possible and even likely. This obviously totally floods places like miami, osaka, all three airports in NYC, Bangladesh is gone, many of the coastal Chinese cities, parts of vancouver, etc. I haven't looked in detail at Silicon Valley but the western coast tends to fare better because there is a rapid rise from the coast (many cliffs as well though they are extra vulnerable to increased erosion and you will see many collapses) and because of how the rise won't be even (due to gravity and other variables), places like the east coast will see a much greater percentage of that water focus there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Exploitation and inequality is innate to the industrial-capitalist system; a fact well-known at least since the time of Marx." Citation needed?

<comment><USER41> I mean, Marx would be the citation, but it's important to remember that exploitation in this context is a neutral term, not a judgment. It just means that people who own means of production (i.e. capitalists) can extract economic rent from people who don't (i.e. workers, who need access to those means of production to generate wealth). That shouldn't be controversial - <USER3> problem with Marx wasn't that he pointed this out, but rather his statement that it is a fundamental problem, and remedies offered for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> One of the biggest flaws of democracies is that they strongly incentivize policy makers to follow short-term gains over long-term goals.

<comment><USER7> Because dictatorships are so famous for their 100 year horizons?

The USSR planned its world in 5-year spans. That's about the same length of time between elections in most democracies. Lots of people like to say things like "one of the biggest flaws of democracies" but I've yet to see such a statement that actually doesn't also apply to other systems of government.

<comment><USER43> Except china had the one child policy which clearly had long term goals in mind. Singapore also implemented eugenics policies and still has them to some degree.

Realistically population one of the few things you can take a long term view on, since so geo politics and technology are so unpredictable. With population planning much of the effects are only to come a generation later so mostly only a long term concern. It is also completely radioactive as far as modern democracies are concerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 100</comment>


Google has created a maths AI that has already proved 1200 theorems (PayWall) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2200707-google-has-created-a-maths-ai-that-has-already-proved-1200-theorems/ <comment><AUTHOR> The paper:

HOList: An Environment for Machine Learning of Higher-Order Theorem Proving[1]

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03241](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03241)

</comment><comment><USER2> Wasn't ~40% of the proof of Kepler conjecture was discovered by a tool like Sledgehammer?</comment>


We are not Consumers, We are the People, as in We The People - <AUTHOR> http://katzr.com/2013/04/we-are-not-consumers-we-are-the-people-as-in-we-the-people/

<comment><USER2> _I may buy a lot of stuff, but should I only be viewed as "a consumer" in the eyes of the government and my democracy?_

Notice that the author is attributing words in a blog post on thehill.com to "the government and my democracy".

<comment><USER3> The word "consumer" does appear in CISPA, but only in one paragraph, referring to "consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements". I don't see what's so bad about using "consumers" to refer to people who consume a particular service, though. It's not denying them personhood; it's just a way to refer to the subset of people who use a service, whereas "people" would refer to all people.

<comment><USER4> It's like saying collateral damage that's why it's bad-ish.

<comment><USER3> What phrasing would you use instead of "consumer", and what makes your phrasing better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IANAL; I think the term "consumer" is from the relationship with the providers. The people being protected are specifically the ones that use the service.

Congress is a black box to us. I've read the text of CISPA, and I don't think it's unreasonable, but you have to trust the people using it, and we don't. That pretty much ends the conversation.

My friend has been working as a PA in a law office that's involved in health- care legislation. We recently had a fight about Internet regulation-- copyright. He took the position that we should write good legislation before somebody else skews it in their favor. I agreed, but I thought it was premature. You write the legislation now and you risk things like nation-wide lock-in to IE6. Software takes time, and the Web's immature. Right now, it's very noisy, it's not private, it's socially chaotic, and it's not quite secure enough - online elections, anybody?

That said, the things that IT touches tend to become more open in the long run, and eventually that'll include Congress. I don't know if CISPA is a good bill, but I don't think it helps to make a cause against it either. If we care this much, we need to participate in the writing of the laws. If we can't do that, then the Web isn't ready yet, and Congress stays a black box.

EDIT: brevity

<comment><USER6> >I don't think it's unreasonable.

Given that laws mean whatever those in power say they mean, the test is not whether _you_ find the text reasonable, but rather whether _they_ can find the text to mean something you would find _un_ reasonable.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but we live with that all the time, don't we? At a certain point, we have to just trust that it will be used as intended, and then trust that we can improve the law later if it's abused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I have said before, and will almost certainly say again, words are important, the words we use to say our thoughts are the thoughts that other people will have about them. Thoughts are the intent of the message, but the words _are_ the message.

<comment><USER8> these kinds of comments are the reason I browse HN daily

<comment><USER9> You might also enjoy: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only use of the word 'consumer' in CISPA is in the context of the following recurring clause:

"Such term does not include the purpose of protecting a system or network from efforts to gain unauthorized access to such system or network that solely involve violations of consumer terms of service or consumer licensing agreements and do not otherwise constitute unauthorized access."

I get that people need a reason to grandstand, but can we grandstand about something more worth grandstanding about? Right now there is some big evil oil company trying to figure out how to get away with taking the cheapest measures possible to protect water resources in the course of fracking activities. There is some coal company pushing yet another iteration of the total bollocks that is "clean coal technology." Can we make noise about something like that instead? Because that's actually going to have repercussions and effect people, unlike the wholly imagined nefarious terms of CISPA.

</comment><comment><USER11> A mixture of not understanding the article and wanting to rail on CISPA?

Where does it mention that the government views citizens as consumers? From what I understand, it says that government would have access to data about consumers, as in 'consumers/customers of private businesses'.

Anyone can misunderstand or misread something, I don't blame the author. What's irritating is how many upvotes this has and how many people have piled on.

</comment><comment><USER12> 1776 to 1847: Citizen America. 1848 to 1932: Producer America. 1933 to 2007: Consumer America. 2008 to ???: Cosmopolitan America.

Citizen America was an experiment in rational government that succeeded with flying colors in some ways (secularism, increasing confidence in popular government) but struggled immensely with the division-of-labor question, ultimately falling into bitter conflict (then war) over slavery.

Producer America started with the Industrial Revolution (which solved division-of-labor issues) and ran through the Gilded Age, and ultimately fell apart with the Great Depression, which taught us how bad things get for _everyone_ if people _can't buy_ the things being produced by industry.

Consumer America started with the New Deal and Keynesian economics, reached its cultural height in the 1950s-60s, and is now unraveling because it's unsatisfying and culturally empty. Also, the foreign policy (need to justify this hyperconsumptive lifestyle in which people eat 3x as much meat and do 2x as much driving as makes sense) has been horrid, to the point that even most Americans don't support it.

Cosmopolitan America is driven by a generation of people who see themselves as _global_ citizens and want to improve the rest of the world through organic, democratic, and compassionate means (no more "bomb 'em till they love us"). Also, it seeks to allow more people to have involvement in production. It turns out to be a very unrewarding existence to be a corporate drone whose only real contribution to life is to consume (especially as those pointless, menial jobs get cut, thanks to technology).

What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America.

<comment><USER13> _What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America_

Cosmopolitan America, if it exists as a mass paradigm, is at this point mostly aspirational. Our entire culture and economy revolve around consumption. Most jobs are in service, not production. It is difficult to be a citizen of the world when the world is so disunified -- see attempts to do anything of use to combat global warming.

Meanwhile, capital is doing its very best to coopt any nascent consciousness of Americans as producers rather than consumers. You can see how quickly, for instance, hipster culture, which started out as anti-consumer (thrift stores, reclaimed industrial spaces, living in the cracks of society producing art instead of having normal jobs) was commodified and turned into fashion, and people who were drawn to hipsterdom were channeled into more appropriate avenues for buying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my low-priority, when I find sufficient 'tuits projects for a while now has been to find and download the transcripts of Presidential speeches over the last several decades and compare the incidence of the words "citizen" versus "consumer" over time.

I'm pretty sure I won't like what I find.

<comment><USER15> Sounds similar to Aaron Swartz' project to analyze the research being done at universities. Might be worth forking that project to jump start yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excel is a challenging tool to learn. It's not necessarily Excel that's the problem - it's called "human error". It happens everywhere.

<comment><USER17> ^ Case in point :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Couldn't agree more. Businesses calling people "consumers" is sad but understandable. But the government?

<comment><USER19> While I don't agree with CISPA, but what about the Consumer Protection Agency?

<comment><USER20> Just a guess, but would it not be that the CPA protects you if you chose to be a consumer. If you are not a consumer, it doesn't apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Like many laws, CISPA would have an effect on people who are not citizens of the U.S. That is why many laws use terms like "consumer" in the context of business, "patient" in the context of health care, or often just "person" otherwise.

Words matter; "citizen" is a more restrictive class of people than "consumer."

</comment><comment><USER22> "Anonymous Calls For Internet Blackout On April 22 To Protest CISPA"

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/19/anonymous- blackout-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/19/anonymous-blackout- cispa_n_3116509.html)</comment>


Building an Android App with AWS Amplify - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mobile/building-an-android-app-with-aws-amplify-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Has anyone had much experience with Amplify? I was thinking of going "all in" on a greenfield project - but am hesitant about all-in-one type frameworks.

<comment><USER3> I started using it around v0.3 and quite a bit has happened with aws-amplify since then. After migrating an IoT cloud from a competitor to AWS IoT, our team decided to leverage AWS Cognito (user identities) and Amplify really saved some time for us in this regard. User identities, JWTs and signing requests to lambda endpoint worked, for the most part. There are some struggles with ill-documented issues or just flat-out wrong Typescript definitions, but for the most part, I probably would have made the same decision again being that our platform is "all in" on AWS. I doubt I would use it if AWS Cognito was not in the mix.</comment></comment>


C4H 2.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.computeforhumanity.org/blog/introducing-2.0?r=0267EF8C-E41B-478C-B6AB-496E79D7CC7D <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, creator here. Questions and feedback very very welcome!</comment>


TSB board lacked common sense before IT meltdown, says report - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50471919 <comment><USER2> "Obviously, if we had been aware of Sabis's shortcuts in the testing programme, the TSB board and I would never have pressed ahead with switching to the new system at that time."

To turn this on it head, one wonders how much pressure was coming from the board for Sabis to be afraid to tell the truth?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the UK, Lloyds TSB split into 2 banks (Lloyds and TSB) in 2013.

tl;dr

In April 2018 1.9 million TSB customers were left unable to bank online, some for several weeks; this was caused by customers being moved to a new system, which was only tested offline.

"Other failings by TSB that it identified included setting "unnecessary" time constraints, which did not understand the complexity of the project, and being dishonest about the reasons for delays."

The outage has cost TSB £370m.</comment>


Floating point gotchas: Trick for computing log(1+x) - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/07/25/trick-for-computing-log1x/

<comment><USER2> A good example of why programming is not always as simple as it seems. Postings like this are always interesting both for the insight they provide and for the tricks they demonstrate.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To the moderators:

Yes, I've changed the title from that on the original, but I've done so specifically to help people judge, in advance, whether this might be something they're interested in.</comment>


Show HN: "Who is hiring" mapped - <AUTHOR> http://gaganpreet.github.io/hn-hiring-mapped/ <comment><USER2> It's strange how in California hiring is completely absent in all parts but Los Angeles and San Francisco. No San Diego? No Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo? No Sacramento? Interesting. I knew tech was concentrated in the hubs, but I would have expected a little dissent.

<comment><USER3> It's a lot easier to relocate to Palo Alto from e.g. Davis than to anywhere in California from, say, St. Louis.

<comment><USER4> Exactly: the magnetic pole effect. Similar with nightlife. People wbo love the night go to san francisco in droves, leaving the south bay quite tame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Creator of curatedhnhiring.com here. This is good stuff. I'm going to hand enter all the locations for October tonight, but you can compare your auto- generated September data against [https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated- hn-hiring/blob/gh...](https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn- hiring/blob/gh-pages/data/2013-09.js). Also, I don't know if you care about accommodating this, but a lot of HN Who's Hiring posts list multiple locations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying to match for multiple locations might have resulted in more false positives (eg: a job listing mentioning they received funding from someone in SF). In any case, I felt it made sense to show only one data point per post.

Thanks for sharing Curated HN Hiring, it looks really good. I'll cross-verify the data sometime later today.

Edit: Wrote a quick and dirty script to match the locations. I noticed 4 wrong matches, the rest matched up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quite similar to the GitHub map from a few days ago[1], i.e. no Latin America, (almost)no Asia, no Africa.

[1] [http://aasen.in/github_globe/](http://aasen.in/github_globe/)

<comment><USER7> That map actually made me wonder if I should start a local open source consultancy practice in East/Southeast Asia (which has been my home for a decade or so). If anyone else's in the region and potentiall keen, feel free to get in touch by email. I've run a few businesses here already.

<comment><USER7> Picked up interest from Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand so far. Meeting Monday in Bangkok: the more the merrier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great job! I have always been curious about which HN Hiring posts were in my general area (Washington DC) and only got exact matches when doing a simple Ctrl+F. This map shows a few companies just outside the city in NOVA (northern Virginia), Maryland, and the like.

</comment><comment><USER9> <rant>

Ugh this just makes me sad. I want to move to Portland next summer, and I've been watching for jobs in Portland. Right now I don't see any jobs but I keep seeing more, and more jobs in DC. I hate DC, I want out!

</rant>

<comment> jim-greer We're hiring in Portland (Kongregate)

<comment><USER9> Hey thanks for responding. I'll take a look at your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'be been building a command line Perl app Gutsy [https://github.com/gryftir/gutsy](https://github.com/gryftir/gutsy) to parse Who is Hiring and export to text/html, but this certainly displays a lot nicer.

The one thing is, does it only check the first line for info? While that's where it should go per the posting guidelines, I found people don't always follow the suggested format.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe people should put their GPS rather than just location, I wanted to see exactly where in London, unless everyone works on The Strand.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just a random tip for anybody casually looking at the Columbia, MO or Bloomington, IN jobs. I know nothing about either job, but I do know the area and those are both pretty hip little college towns, so I wouldn't discount them entirely if you talked to them and liked the gig, but were turned off by the location.

<comment><USER13> If you're into hip college towns, I agree. You won't find a big tech scene there though. If it ends up being a good job, that's great; if it doesn't, you won't likely have many other options.

<comment><USER14> That's kind of the tradeoff of hip college towns, right? The good news is that if you're willing to relocate there, you're probably also willing to relocate away from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seattle representation is on par with Chattanooga, TN. This is surprising to me.

<comment><USER16> My Seattle post is missing from the map, so the accuracy is questionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your post skipped my pattern because it matches for "Seattle, WA", not "SEATTLE, WA".

<comment><USER17> So make it case insensitive?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's just cool: [http://cl.ly/image/2a1q381Z3M09/Image%202013-10-01%20at%204....](http://cl.ly/image/2a1q381Z3M09/Image%202013-10-01%20at%204.36.07%20PM.png)

</comment><comment><USER19> Incredibly useful for job hunters and well executed! The map view needs some clever hack to increase readability in popular places like SF and London - maybe a brief description pop-up would do the trick?

<comment><USER20> Seconded being able to see all the roles in an area as a list would be really usefull.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> OP: regarding this comment in your README: "I'm not sure if there's a better way to organize the gh-pages branch so it's convenient to manage and use via Github Pages at the same time."

You can, in the repo settings, change the default branch to gh-pages: [http://screencast.com/t/VTHVE6oXRT](http://screencast.com/t/VTHVE6oXRT) Then you can delete the master branch if you want.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh cool. There are two within 1,000 miles of me.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice. Looks like some datapoints failed to get mapped and defaulted to West Africa though. Also this looks like it could be a good fit for web-gl globe? [http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/](http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/)

<comment><USER24> 0,0 is where coordinate conversion fails end up. As a GIS developer, when something is not showing up on a map, I always zoom over to W Africa to see if it is showing up there.

<comment><USER25> Interestingly, going to 0,0 in Google Maps shows an icon for Ace Lock Service Inc.

<comment><USER26> Just noticed that too. What surprises me the most about this is that only ONE business/landmark is listed at 0,0 in the entire Google Maps.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps they only allow 1 landmark per location? That would help solve the problem of having multiple entries per business in their database.

<comment><USER27> But run into problems when two separate businesses are located on different floors in the same building. Not to mention you don't need many lat/long decimal places at all to get tens or hundreds of possible points in a medium- sized building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice visualisation, thanks for sharing.

Perhaps add the option to reset the view, as currently have to rerun the search.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can you do the same for HN's "Who's available for hire" monthly posts?

<comment><USER30> Is there such a post? I only know of the "Who is hiring" and the freelancer posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It would be awesome to see this for the freelancer / seeking freelance posts too.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is the location filter busted? I keep ending up lost at sea when entering queries like "Europe" and "United States".

Really love the philosophy of the project, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Location filter is based on what's returned by the Google Geocoding API. United States is stored as USA. Europe's a continent, so it's not there but you can use a regex like, "Germany|Netherlands"

<comment><USER32> Ah. Could I persuade you to enter some examples in the input field as a `placeholder=` attribute such as

        placeholder="USA, Germany|Netherlands"

<comment><AUTHOR> Done! Github will take a few minutes to show the latest version.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I posted something late last night. Are you planning to update it again? Great tool. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a college student looking for an internship at the kind of company who posts on Hacker News, thank you so much. This is great.

</comment><comment><USER34> I loved how AngularJS jobs have exploded!

<comment><USER35> Me too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hey, Intercom is hiring in Dublin, Ireland (along with Gilt, and Hubspot). Just FYI.

(Irish people love to be represented :) )

</comment><comment><USER37> Do you update manually, or wrote a parser?

If the latter, how do you know which words correspond to location?

Nice job btw.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why is Portland not marked ? There is at least 1 job opening posted for that location.

<comment><USER39> hm, I just checked, and I was surprised to not see any either. Someone from Kongregate mentioned that they're hiring, but otherwise, seems like no one's posted a job listing with the characters "Portland" or "PDX" this month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Lots of offshore development going in the Gulf of Guinea!

This map is extremely helpful. Thanks gsa!

</comment><comment><USER41> Really neat tool. Thanks for building and sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is quite an amazing interface, very cool indeed!

</comment><comment><USER43> A backend/frontend filter might be useful.

</comment><comment><USER44> The most useful visualization of the thread.

</comment><comment><USER45> why not include China?</comment>


Keybase proof not showing in about section - <AUTHOR> Is there any reason this is not working? It was fine a few days ago. <comment><USER2> It's intentional: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21227974)</comment>


Gawker finds making it harder for comments to be seen leads to better comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/tough-love-gawker-finds-making-it-harder-for-comments-to-be-seen-leads-to-more-and-better-comments/

<comment><USER2> I read jalopnik from time to time, and I can't say I've noticed that the comment quality has been anything special.

The best comment model I've seen is the NYTimes, which combines moderation and featured comments (the user recommended comments are too heavily biased towards what was posted first to be useful).

<comment><USER3> Posted recently, "How to correctly sort by average rating":

[http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average- rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the headline, I thought this meant that making all comments harder to see will increase quality.

In fact, the proposition is that rewarding good commenters with higher visibility will increase quality. Makes sense, and it's nice to see some quasi-empirical evidence for it.

</comment><comment><USER5> shouldn't this graph be controlled for traffic? if traffic has grown, that's probably where a lot of the extra comments came from.

<comment><USER6> The graph is designed to illustrate that heavily controlling comments still generates a lot of comments.

That said, it would be interesting to have a graph that shows the engagement rate for users; something like Comments for every 1 Million page views.</comment></comment>


What is your favorite programming/computer-related book? - <AUTHOR>

I need a technical book to read. What do you suggest? <comment><USER2> Seven Languages in Seven Weeks[1]

[1] [http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven- wee...](http://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks)

<comment><USER3> Good choice! I am hoping to get this for Christmas :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Computer related:

The Cuckoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll. A really nice description of his process to understand the system, and why something was wrong, and the progress to catching hackers.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want maximum inches of shelf space, then The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth is your best bet.

Myself, I love slim books that are high density yet well written. The C Programming Language by K& R and The AWK Programing Language by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan are good examples. These books are just a joy to read.

</comment><comment><USER6> The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.

If you ever need to give a presentation or write a report that uses any graphs or charts, this book gives simple guidelines that makes the visual information as clear as possible.

<comment><USER7> I received this as a gift literally yesterday (having asked for it). So far very impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Pragmatic Programmer: <http://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic- programmer>

It talks about what to do, in your life as a programmer, and how to approach it.

EDIT: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/10/a-pragmatic- quick-r...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/10/a-pragmatic-quick- reference.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Hackers : Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Steven Levy, first published in 1984 )

It's not really a programming book, mind you. It's a collection of stories that shaped the evolution of early home computer hardware and software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let Over Lambda, 50 Years of Lisp by Doug Hoyte

It is one of the most challenging and inspiring technical books I have ever read, covering macros in great depth.

</comment><comment><USER11> Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

</comment><comment><USER12> Hackers & Painters, Paul Graham

Read it recently, now consider it required reading for hackers

</comment><comment><USER13> Newton's Telecom Dictionary</comment>


Sherlock Holmes May Not Have Been a Real Crime-Fighter, but His Creator Was - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/sherlock-holmes-may-not-have-been-a-real-crime-fighter-but-his-creator-was/2018/07/09/84146ef4-839b-11e8-9e80-403a221946a7_story.html <comment><USER2> Conan Doyle was fascinating, I highly recommend the biography Teller of Tales, he was prescient about a lot of things (submarine warfare, other military issues during WWI) but also fooled by the rampant fraud in the spiritualist movement, like the Cottingley photographs.

This article makes it seem like he personally investigated the cases, he didn't. What he did was help publicize them and write long book length summaries of the evidence to convince people. He also published a "pamphlet" on Belgian colonial exploitation of the Congo. He worked directly with the lawyers / investigators to get the facts and used his fame and writing ability to get public attention.

<comment><USER3> He was also one of the prime suspects behind [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man) fraud which set back scientific community in general, and anthropology in particular quite a bit.

<comment><USER4> I thought Doyle was fairly quickly ruled out. Charles Dawson seems most likely, has been connected with other frauds and half his collection was fake.

<comment><USER3> Right you are. [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/10/sir-arthur- co...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/10/sir-arthur-conan-doyle- cleared-of-piltdown-man-hoax/)

I remember reading this in the 90s in SciAm which was supposedly linked to his deep resentment of scientific community in general.

<comment><USER4> Memory is a funny thing - that's much more recent than I thought!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was explored in a semi-fictional and slightly humourous way in the short- lived period drama 'Houdini & Doyle':

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_%26_Doyle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_%26_Doyle)

<comment><USER6> As well as in the book "Arthur and George" by Julian Barnes. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot about Doyle that was atypical. Brilliant mind. But he believed in some pretty supernatural stuff as well. Faeries and the like.

Imagine what you believe in now that will seem fanciful in a century.

<comment><USER8> Is that weird? Tons of brilliant people through history have believed in God, spirits, and other supernatural stuff.</comment></comment>


It Has Begun - Singapore Considering Following USA's Lead With SOPA/PIPA - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/k.shanmugam.page/posts/147669282014158 <comment><USER2> Singapore is already 'ahead' of the US in having a site-blocking mechanism:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Singapor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Singapore)

One nice thing about the US political culture is that even those who want to censor things will try to spin their efforts as being something else; 'censorship' is a dirty word here, and even professional censors know it.

This isn't the same in less individualistic cultures; there it is often more broadly accepted that censorship for the 'public interest' must occur. The responsible agencies will thus speak with a frankness and pride about their censoring activities – unlike here in the USA, where the same topics only get euphemistic discussion.

Singapore has many admirable qualities but the space afforded non-traditional expression, and especially governmental criticism, is much more limited than in North America. Wikipedia has a nice summary of general cross-media censorship in Singapore...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Singapore>

...and the use of domestic libel suits and other pressure to discredit or pressure news publishers occasionally gets mention in major Western papers, as with this example...

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04pubed.html>

<comment><USER3> > Singapore has many admirable qualities

Could you enumerate them? Do you (or have you) live(d) in Singapore?

<comment><USER4> \- successful economic development (those born in rich countries seem to take richness for granted. It is very valuable to those being born the country for the country to be rich. Singapore is now rich. It was poor just 40 years ago) \- safe city (probably the safest large city in the world) \- nice, warm weather \- great food \- easiest country to set up a business in the world \- good educational system \- very good health results \- budget surplus (they are not creating huge debt for the next few generations to deal with) \- very good public housing \- very good mass transit (people want it better, but it still is better than most other large, rich cities) \- good parks \- emerging art scene (it doesn't beat most other rich, world class cities, but is good and growing) \- international crossroads, very multi-cultural city which is nice in many ways but also a good position to be in as the world moves in a similar the direction) \- extremely well run government, you (or citizens...) may not like everything they are trying to do, but they are very effective at what they aim to do (something many governments are not able to do). They are willing to do very interesting things. Singapore will pay for the education of excellent students from Malaysia (as one small example - Singapore does many innovative things governmentally) \- very walkable city (don't need a car - can walk and use mass transit) ...

I have lived there. I now live across strait in Malaysia. Here is my blog on Singapore

       http://singapore.curiouscatnetwork.com/

I realize Singapore also have things they could do better. But this was a list of things Singapore does well.

<comment><USER5> > easiest country to set up a business in the world

Could you elaborate what your base of comparison is to make such statement? How many countries have you set businesses up in?

Speaking just of Asia, I set up businesses in Singapore and Hong Kong. The latter was easier to setup and proved easier to run, with less running costs over the course of 3 years so far. I also found Hong Kong to be way more founder-friendly when it comes to getting angel money or VC.

Regarding the police state: 1st time I spent a day in Singapore, in 2005, on a 14h stopover from a long haul flight to Australia, I wanted to take a nap on a lawn in a public park. Two police offers told me I can't and they'll have to fine me but they'd make an exception since I'm a tourist. I was wearing a tailor-made suit btw., not some daggy traveler attire.

That was when I knew Singapore was not for me.

Don't get me wrong, I have friends living there and they like it a lot. They are a family of four and they do fit in the 'ideal standard' box of people the government there wants to have as citizens.

But be careful if you don't. Singapore has laws that make homosexuals face legal threats. And you can be fined if someone spots you walking around in your house naked (in your own 4 walls, mind you!).

<comment><USER4> World Bank ranking: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/10-easiest- countrie...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/10-easiest-countries-to- s_n_1194511.html#s598394&title=1__Singapore)

Granted most any subjective ranking has plenty of room for argument. There isn't likely truly any clearly #1 for "setting up a business" as so much depends on the situation. But Singapore consistently is ranked very highly on this measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Singapore already has all of the infrastructure they need to censor whatever they want (online and offline) and they're perfectly comfortable using it. SOPA/PIPA may change what is "trendy" to censor (Singapore currently focuses on high-profile pornography, I believe, in addition to monitoring and limiting dissent, of course), but that wouldn't be a fundamental change.

Instead, what I'd say is that the example of Singapore is a reason to oppose SOPA/PIPA. Giving a government comprehensive censorship tools will inevitably chill democracy no matter what those tools are "supposed to" be used for.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article that the Law Minister linked to: [http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/vi...](http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1176385/1/.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that the primary reason why the current state of copyright law in Singapore is overwhelmingly skewed in favour of the copyright cartel is due to the free trade agreement signed with the USA. They are obliged by the treaty to put in places laws which are draconian by US standards.

<comment> guard-of-terra But why they actually do it? Why they enforce such laws (or do they?) They're net losers from doing so.

You could not force them to if they didn't want, I argue, so why they bother?

<comment><USER8> Because the U.S. won't ratify the Treaty if they don't. Same thing happened here in Australia.

From Singapore's perspective, the FTA brings trade benefits. Presumably they judged that those outweighted the negatives.

<comment> guard-of-terra Okay, why then enforce those laws? You can pass them but never enforce. It's your country, who can tell you what to judge for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please don't editorialize in the subject title. "It has begun" is unnecessary on HN

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Why do they do this? I bet Singapore is a net importer of IP: I don't think they have much own music or movies or books or off-the-shelf software to care about the issue.

I can see how US would press them into protecting IP, but what's with the centuries-proven tactic of promising and then never doing anything?

</comment><comment><USER10> NOTHING has begun. It's the same money pushing in other countries. It will be defeated everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER11> So they are going to cut and run once their population becomes aware of the legislation despite a traditional media blackout?</comment>


3D Time-Lapse Reconstruction from Internet Photos - <AUTHOR> http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse3d/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion from 7 months ago here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9558976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9558976)

Whenever I see a trolley go by in SF with dozens of people simultaneously filming video (and that trolley runs dozens of times a day) I always wonder about how well we could reconstruct our worlds digitally with everything we've got now.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's from the same researchers, but is a different project. Note that this is 3D.

[http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/](http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/)

[http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse3d/](http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse3d/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems like we've got to be pretty close to Blade Runner home photos now, where you take a couple of pictures from two angles and then can use probability to look behind things, etc. The NFL sometimes shows the ability to blend two camera angles together by time-locking them.</comment>


Ask HN: Infrared camera demos for 5th graders? - <AUTHOR> Here's an odd one for you, a departure from code, but an opportunity to hack some love for science into some fifth grade (10-11 year old) minds.
Tomorrow, I will be demonstrating infrared thermography to a class of fifth graders, while volunteering in my son's classroom. I plan to show them why metal "feels colder" than wood (showing how conduction extracts heat energy from their hands at various rates), why they can feel heat without touching something really hot (like the Sun!), and what parts of their body have (and therefore lose to radiation/convection/conduction) the most heat energy when there is an large difference between body temp and ambient temp, such as after exercise or when outside on a cold day.
Can you think of, or can you point me to, short but impactful demonstrations of heat energy and temperature that could best be visualized using infrared thermography, or ideas for hypotheses that could be quickly tested with an infrared camera?
I will be using a high quality FLIR E8, showing its live video stream to the classroom projector, and I am able to have student volunteers participate in experiments and/or in formulating hypotheses. <comment><USER2> Maybe point them at a computer or phone and show them that you can see where parts are (inspired by seeing this tweet [https://twitter.com/windyoona/status/692120239765602305](https://twitter.com/windyoona/status/692120239765602305))

</comment><comment><USER3> Extracting PIN codes from temperature differences on a smartphone screen. (If your camera will detect that)</comment>