Best, Brightest – and Saddest? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-best-brightest-and-saddest.html?ref=international <comment><USER2> This is symptomatic of our society at large (actually many societies, maybe even modern 'global' society). The middle class is being squeezed by rising costs, so your two options are to be perpetually poor (basically limiting you to a life of indentured servitude), or to out-compete your rivals and achieve an upper-middle class to upper class income, and all the perks that come with it.

My wife and I struggle with this constantly - income and ability to acquire resources vs. quality of life. While I'm struggling through University while working full-time (and trying to find time for vacations, and time with the wife) and looking forward to a life of working 9-5 (more like 8-7 these days), we also think about the toll this takes on people.

Not going to lie, we've been looking at various locations where the cost of living is low (actually, more like where you can get by and start a business with a more reasonable amount of capital), and we can basically live a simpler, higher-quality life. The 'grind' as it is in North America is gruelling, I know many people trying to plot their escape, though it's tough when its all you know...

Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year...

<comment><USER3> >>Nothing like studying your ass off for 16+ years, only to work your ass off for another 40+ years, taking on debt that you wind up spending a large portion of your life repaying (while often paying more than double the original price just to service your debt), only to finally retire - old, broken and in poor health, and never enjoying much more of your life than 2-4 weeks every year...

With all due respect, and I can tell from your other posts you are grateful for what you have, but this needs to be put in perspective. That 16+ years of studying your ass off is an investment someone else made in you, hoping you become a productive member of society that makes life a little bit better for someone else while earning a living for yourself along the way. There are roughly 3 billion people on this planet who are desperate to get any sort of education, let alone the education you were given, for free (before college). I get your complaints, but a 9-5 gig (or even an 8-7 one) would be considered a life of leisure and luxury for most of the world for pretty much all of history. In fact, the only time a life you are wishing you had has been common has been in the last 50 years or so in the developed world. I'd say we're pretty damn lucky. If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this?

<comment><USER4> _If you want to get ahead, instead of thinking you need to out-compete your rivals, I would instead focus on ways to make someone 's life significantly better, then figure out how to do it for 10 people, then 1000....see where I'm going with this?_

This is a profound failure of imagination. The problem the GP is decrying is the late capitalist devaluation of humanity, and your solution is to suck it up and find a business model.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for calling this out. This is not only a profound failure of the imagination, but it's the terrible source of the problem that we find ourselves in. In many ways it is the box itself, just take another pull at the slot machines of casino capitalism, and remember nothing was every promised to you, not through your education, nor through the debt that you accumulated - it's all on you, and your inability to scale fro 10 to 1000, see where I'm going?

<comment><USER3> Both of you complain about a lack of imagination and then fail to offer any sort of alternative, just further complaining.

Figuring out how to make someone else's life better and make a living off of it isn't a roll of the dice. It's a process of observing and learning about the world around you, coming up with ideas of how to improve something (using what you learned in your education), and offering to take action on those ideas in exchange for money. This doesn't have to be done at scale or by starting your own business. It can easily be done anywhere, but instead of scaling (starting your own business), just continuing to come up with new ways to make your boss's life easier. This doesn't have to be super innovative or use technology either. Sometimes just simple words of encouragement are all a stressed out boss may need.

Higher education is an investment and comes with risk, it's not a promise to a better life. And on the other side of that coin, accumulation of debt is a promise that you are going to earn more money in the future to pay the money you borrowed back. You don't need to make more money, and you don't need to pay back your debt, just your standard of living will go down because you can't buy nice things, but you can live the life of leisure you so desire then.

edit: I should have clarified, you don't need to pay back your debt by going through the process of filing bankruptcy. Yes, this affects your ability to secure further debt and buy stuff, but if you want a life of leisure earning a low income and having lots of time off, then theoretically bankruptcy is a path to your land of milk and honey.

<comment><USER4> Head -> desk

 _Figuring out how to make someone else 's life better and make a living off of it isn't a roll of the dice. It's a process of observing and learning about the world around you, coming up with ideas... etc._

It is all the things you list _and_ a roll of the dice. It is working very very hard and also getting lucky.

 _just continuing to come up with new ways to make your boss 's life easier._

This is getting back to my original point: you are thinking incredibly small. We are talking about a societal problem. The GP wrote:

 _your two options are to be perpetually poor (basically limiting you to a life of indentured servitude), or to out-compete your rivals and achieve an upper-middle class to upper class income_

You do realize that what you're describing falls on the "out-compete your rivals" side of that scale, right? It isn't a rebuttal to what GP was saying, because it's just an example of it.

 _Higher education is an investment and comes with risk_

And who is making that investment? In most developed countries, the state has determined it has an interest in an educated populace, and pays for people to go to college. Young people graduate debt-free, and are able to do all this innovating you're talking about. For some reason in the United States, we look to private institutions to fund education.

 _you don 't need to pay back your debt by going through the process of filing bankruptcy_

You realize that student loan debt is incredibly hard to discharge through bankruptcy? And Congress has made it even more difficult in the last decade.

So, to clarify, in most developed countries, the state takes on the risk from education (just like health care!). In the US, who takes on the risk? Not the bank that does the lending - the government guarantees the debt! But not the government, either, because they've made it nearly impossible to discharge the debt. No, the risk falls almost entirely on the borrower, the individual in that trio that is least able to absorb the risk.

 _but you can live the life of leisure you so desire then._

This is not about leisure, it's about having the freedom to have a role as a human being separate from your role in the capitalist system. It's about not having to live your life in fear of losing what little you have, and being able to make choices that maximize factors that have nothing to do with capital.

 _Both of you complain about a lack of imagination and then fail to offer any sort of alternative, just further complaining._

This is the same argument I heard from people who supported the Iraq war during the worst of its quagmire phase. My response was that there were no good options (other than not having gone there in the first place), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the problem.

In this case, there isn't much an individual can do to change a society that has been withered and corrupted by corporate control. We have to live in it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't also point out that there are better ways to live.

<comment><USER3> >>This is the same argument I heard from people who supported the Iraq war during the worst of its quagmire phase. My response was that there were no good options (other than not having gone there in the first place), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the problem.

>>In this case, there isn't much an individual can do to change a society that has been withered and corrupted by corporate control. We have to live in it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't also point out that there are better ways to live.

Huh? Comparing a capitalist system that has raised the standard of living to every individual who participates in it to the Iraq War makes no sense at all. Also, you haven't pointed out any better ways to live, you've just complained about the status quo. Again, you've offered no alternatives, just complaining.

<comment><USER4> Oh my goodness. I was comparing the argument you were making to the arguments of those who supported the war. I was not comparing the Iraq war to capitalism.

 _Again, you 've offered no alternatives, just complaining._

Yeah, that argument. This isn't kindergarten, every criticism does not have to come with some uplifting solution. I'm pointing out the system is broken. That's a necessary prerequisite to making something better.

Also:

 _a capitalist system that has raised the standard of living to every individual who participates in it_

Come now, capitalism destroys plenty of lives. It may well be the "least worst system," but claiming it doesn't have casualties is either propaganda or survivorship bias. Still, the complaint, as you put it, is not about capitalism itself, but that in its current form it reduces our lives to a monetary "standard of living." I am not necessarily advocating the end of capitalism, just the end of its deification.

<comment><USER3> >>I was comparing the argument you were making to the arguments of those who supported the war.

I should have been more specific. Yes, the arguments made by those who supported the war. What are those arguments? Are you saying that there were no better solutions to the Iraq War? Really? Not invading, withdrawing troops sooner, there were plenty of other options. I don't see how this is analagous to an argument about capitalism.

You said:

>>But that doesn't mean we shouldn't also point out that there are better ways to live.

My point is, what are your better ways to live that you are supposedly pointing out?

<comment><USER4> _What are those arguments?_

The one I keep pointing out you're using over and over. The one where you say "You're just complaining, not offering a better solution, therefore your criticism should be ignored." People said this over and over again when the war was in full throttle. It was too late to not do it in the first place. You'll notice I mentioned that option before:

 _" My response was that there were no good options (other than not having gone there in the first place)"_

Withdrawing was not a good option, look how we just had to go back there again a year later! We were between a rock and a hard place, and there was no good solution. But that does not mean that criticizing the war was an invalid endeavor.

My point is, it doesn't matter that I'm not giving you an example of better ways to live. The issue at hand is that the system as it stands is broken. Whether or not there are better options (I contend that there are, but that's not the conversation we're having right now), that does not make my criticism invalid.

Feel free to respond, but at this point this conversation is going in circles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article resonates with me.

My dad is an successful electrical engineer who people look up-to. I on the other hand hated physics and was never good enough for it. I took an alternate path to do Computer Science which I feel terrible about since I am not sure if I love it because I hated Physics or I choose it because I found it easier.

The cost of failure is really high, not because I will end up in the streets which I personally do not have a problem with but I would have to live with the fact that I would have let down what is expected of me. I would have no excuse since biologically I should be able to do it. There are no disadvantages or excuses I can point out to.

I have noticed this among many of my white male friends. They seem to have a higher burden when it comes to proving themselves in society. White male problems do not compare to everyone else's problem but its still something that needs to be addressed since mental stress is no joke.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say that white male problems don't compare because there are a bunch of very poor and struggling white males.

That being said, I think even the wealthiest most privileged people are often under a great deal of stress. They may have more pressure to marry someone from another wealthy family, there's the stress of expectations you mention...

I'm a hispanic male and often it can be easy to look at people from more economically privileged backgrounds and think to myself "they have it so easy!", but it's not really true. Maybe they have some things easier but they almost certainly have others harder.

I've worked myself up a few rungs on the socioeconomic ladder and each time I go up, I feel as if I gain some things and lose others. I never felt more free than when I was a poor person, but I would never go back :)

<comment><USER8> I read somewhere that stress before and during exams is commonly as extreme as war and near death experiences. In some cases there isn't that much of a difference biochemically, so I think there is certainly some 'social relativity' even if the first world is very privileged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is actually an even more extreme trend among some of the asian immigrant folks I've been in school with - their parents can be incredibly close-minded, overbearing and abusive.

The pressure kids feel is largely fictional, in the sense that the world ISN'T going to end if they 'only go to college'. For example when I graduated highschool and went straight to college and some of the folks I knew stayed behind for an extra year to get their grades up - my parents in unison with me, thought they were failures.

Looking back - it was smart. I am not working in the field that I studied, so the joke is on me :)

Another thing to realize is that there are a number of jobs that are not intellectual that can be quite fulfilling, honestly.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc)

This guy is a big proponent of more down to earth careers and I agree with everything he says, even though I'm a programmer.

In short - the pressures are due to having a narrow view of the world and what success means. If you widen it to include working construction or going to college to become an ultrasound technician - it's not so bad all of a sudden.

Parents just have to stop pushing their lack of achievements and phobias on to their kids - easier said than done of course. Solution? Incentivize intelligent people to breed more and try-hards and ignoramuses to breed less and the problem will be solved, in some number of decades :)

<comment><USER10> > Another thing to realize is that there are a number of jobs that are not > intellectual that can be quite fulfilling, honestly.

But won't the non-intellectual jobs continue to be automated away?

<comment><USER11> Electrician and Plumber won't be automated away any time soon. Both require more dexterity than any robot currently available and would probably require a 'true' AI as each situation would be significantly different. This is a problem where humans will be both cheaper and more efficient than a robot.

Manufacturing (by humans) is definitely on its way out though.

<comment><USER12> it's possible that as robots become more commonplace homes would be constructed with robotic/remote repair in mind, I hope that's the case anyways, plumbers and electricians are expensive.

Kind of like how mass produced products have structural/design compromises to allow for easier manufacturing. We'll then reminisce about the olden days when you didn't need amazon prime to replace the waste decomposition module every few weeks.

<comment><USER13> Notice how increasingly nowadays, if your laptop/desktop/mobile breaks, you just buy a new one. Maybe that could be the future of houses eventually. Ah, the circuit breaker keeps tripping out for some reason, time to call the 3D printers and have a new house built here

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to keep a horse at the horse barn on the Stanford campus, and I've met many Palo Alto high-achieving high school kids there. I asked a group of high school students, mostly from Palo Alto High School, who were discussing grades "What's considered a good grade point average now", and was told, in a bleak voice, "4.5".

Some of them thrive on learning. They show up back at the barn, years later, after graduating from a big-name college. It's tough on the ones who aren't quite bright enough for the selective colleges but have parents who expect that level of achievement. I've seen the pain in some who know they're just not bright enough.

It's getting worse. Suicides for Paly and Gunn students (those two high schools are the closest to Stanford) have been climbing since about 2009. I knew about the five suicides from Paly, but didn't realize it had reached the point that there are now guards watching the railroad tracks behind the school.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a young person living in the UK, it seems to me as if 'social mobility' is the zeitgeist, for lack of a better term. Everyone's talking about it.

There are two main issues I have with the idea. The first is that it presupposes a system in which some people are poor, and as long as it's possible for some of those poor people to climb out, we're doibg okay. I don't think that the issues surrounding that are worthy of further comment.

The other problem is that under capitalism it's fundamentally impossible outside of limited cases of entrepreneurism.

In order for a working class person to have the same lifestyle as a higher status person, they must not only match, but exceed the expectation placed upon an otherwise equal higher status person, because they have a head start.

Take homeownership in the UK. A 20something that has had a leg up into the housing market via parental donation or loan has an entrenched advantage forever. I could earn 60K GBP whilst my middle class (via birth) friends earn 40K and forever be 'behind' them in wealth terms.

I don't really have much more to say on the topic because I'm not sure how it could be fixed or what that even means, but it's been a central theme in my life since attending University.

<comment><USER16> This is so very true, I earn more than a lot of my friends and save more but I'm one of the only ones that doesn't own a house as I never came into a lump sum.

I guess you just need to work with what you've got!

<comment><USER15> Indeed, I've found a way to come to terms with it, but what does bug me is any sort of political discourse that seemingly ignores it entirely.

The idea seems to be that poor kids go off to University, get well paid jobs, and that's the end of the story.

Except it's not, because my 'well paid' is far higher that of someone who isn't paying rent.

Income inequality is a non issue to me. Wealth inequality is the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think depression may stem from the feeling of helplessness.

Being forced to perform meaningless tasks (because that's high school), having absolutely no power and control over your own life, and probably vitamin D deficient too from being cooped up inside all the time studying.

You could say many teenagers are already predispose to depression during these turbulent years. Their mind isn't completely prepared quite yet and having tyrants run your life doesn't help.

This trend of overemphasis on STEM education and grueling test prep in an effort to game the system started with Asian societies and it's slowly spreading to upper-middle class in western society.

I don't think the true upper class ever cared much for STEM education (legacy admission, "donation", MBA, ...).

This is not really a good path to go down. Not all of us were meant to be engineers and doctors.

Just look East and you will catch a glimpse of the future. Massive youth unemployment, many of them overeducated. Japan is dominated with contract workers. Korea has their "880000 Won generation".

Yea, their suicide rate is high. The problem is, everyone wants a piece of the dream and we can't all have it (or maybe we can?). They import manual labor from SE Asia just like we do with illegal immigrants here in the States.

With no hope of moving out on such meager wages, you'll have resentment and withdrawal from society. Is it any wonder that their birthrate is going down?

I feel like any technological advancement we come up with would still not be enough to overcome this problem. Mainly because the people with the power to make the change have every incentive not to do so.

Humans are imperfect. Human society will always be imperfect. The rift is a part of our genetic and the majority of humans will always be chained to indenture servitude. In a way, all this madness will always be a part of us.

<comment> guard-of-terra "Massive youth unemployment, many of them overeducated"

Maybe we just have a population bubble that bust? We complain about low birth rates but don't really have use for even that dwindled number of young people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a student in my last year at an `elite' high school, I can confirm anecdotally that many kids are near breaking point because they feel it is `Ivy or bust'.

I think this is an inherent problem with the American university system, where the top tier is so small and so universally desired. I think Canada does it very well. Expectations to get into top Canadian schools are grade-based and their undergraduate enrolment is much larger. If you can pull a 90%+ average,you can be sure that you can go wherever you want in Canada for university. Certainly an undergraduate education at University of Toronto might be not quite as good as Harvard's, but it seems to do wonders for the mental health of Canadian children; none of my friends in Canada have even really stressed about university admissions.

For me personally, the Canadian `safety net' also helped a lot: although I am going to Harvard next year, I knew from day one that if anything didn't work out I had myriad wonderful options in Canada.

<comment><USER19> I feel compelled to respond to this, as I know from first-hand experience it isn't true. The pressure is definitely there for Canadian high school students, and 90 isn't enough for some schools anymore. Programs like University of Waterloo's Software Engineering and Mechatronics Engineering and University of Toronto's Engineering Science all require 95+ AND extracurriculars. Same goes for the "best" schools in other categories - Queen's Commerce for business, McMaster's Health Science for premed, etc...

<comment><USER20> I haven't really kept up with Waterloo's new requirements, but this definitely wasn't the case when I was accepted to their Computer Engineering program 6 years ago with mid 80s average with no advanced placement type courses except 2 IB certificate courses (CE was my first choice so I have no idea how SE or ME requirements would compare). They definitely do take extra-curricular stuff into account as well since some of my friends who had averages in the low 90s ish were rejected from the same program.

It's hard for me to believe they've since added a hard cutoff of 95+. It's next to impossible to get grades like that unless your highschool is handing them out like hotcakes at the eventual expense of their own reputation.

That said, the university application process is by no means a stress-free experience for students up here. Getting rejected from Waterloo would have been a huge blow to me at the time because I _really_ wanted to experience their mandatory co-op program and understood the value it would bring to my professional career over the lackluster alternatives at other universities.

<comment><USER19> There isn't a hard cutoff, those are the recommended grades to receive an offer. I'm currently in the Computer Engineering program here and I can say out of my class, most had around a 90. That said, CE is one of the less competitive programs.

Here's a chart of the number of students rejected from Waterloo Engineering with averages 90+: [https://profbillanderson.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/unadmit...](https://profbillanderson.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/unadmittednumbers.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was told from a very early age that I was going to be something special. I tested into Gifted Education in elementary school. I tested into the best public magnet school in Philadelphia.

The whole thing began to unravel in High School, really... got a "No Credit" for an extra-curricular college course, had to retake a year of Geometry, barely made it through High School Trig. But, I went to college to study Computer Science. And failed out. Failed the same Intro to Pre-Calculus class seven fucking times in three semesters. (Half-semester course.)

I took a semester off, and enrolled in a local community college. Changed my major to English. Graduated with a BA in 2008, in the middle of the economic crisis. I didn't have any Internships... couldn't afford to take one as I was working to pay my way through college part-time in the evenings. Got a shitty telemarketing job for the benefits, got fired, spent a year out of work, worked for the Philadelphia welfare office for a year and a half, and quit.

I lucked into a startup job as a Community Manager, but the environment was borderline abusive, and beyond the border unethical (buying lists of email addresses for their target market to add to their mailing list and calling them active users in fundraising presentations). After getting fired/quitting, I found a decent job doing Web Production for a speciality publishing company.

I'm 31, in debt up to my eyeballs with student loans, barely making ends meet, and working a job that offers no challenge and little opportunity for advancement. I have personal projects where I can get some joy, but it's hard to find the time to do those when you're working forty hours a week, with an hour commute each way, and seeing a huge chunk of your cash go towards paying off the creditors for your borderline useless degree. If I didn't have my self-taught HTML and CSS skills, I'd never be where I am, so that's something.

I still feel like I should be further along because of all the pushing I was given as a kid. They told me I'd change the world. Instead, I'm just some underemployed schlub. I'm not about to jump in front of a train, but for those kids with more pressure, I can't blame 'em.

Wow, that got long.

(I kept the names of the companies I worked for silent, because I try to keep this account semi-anonymous. The startup I worked for loves to threaten lawsuits against former---and current---employees who piss off the founder.)

<comment><USER22> Honest question: Why don't you leave?

If you leave the US, you can bail on your student loans, and you can start a new life with a similar/better standard of living.

<comment><USER4> Tell me more about this. Where can you go to "bail on your student loans"? I would think there would be hurdles to this, but I don't really know anything about it.

<comment><USER22> Haven't tried it myself, but I know for a fact that you can discharge student loans in bankruptcy in Canada. It is also pretty easy for an American to go to Canada, and there's minimal cultural difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While it's obviously sad, and in some ways more surprising when the best and brightest kill themselves it's not the most common group. From the Samaritans UK based research:

> Men from the lowest social class, living in the most deprived areas, are up > to ten times more likely to end their lives by suicide than those in the > highest social class from the most affluent areas. Men in mid-life are the > age group most at risk.

I hope more can be done to reduce suicide and make life more cheerful in general - I'm a member of 'Action for Happiness' for what it's worth that campaigns for the latter. In the past suicide and the like has been a bit ignored partly because there were worse things to worry about - death from war, car crashes, disease and the like. Now it's starting to become the biggest cause of death in younger age groups as the other causes get fixed.

[http://www.samaritans.org/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files...](http://www.samaritans.org/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files/Samaritans_Men_and_Suicide_Report_web.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think most people are underanalyzing this as being another instance of "keeping up with the joneses." I think however it's more fundamental than that about someone's place in society.

From what we can tell of recorded history, our societies and influence has grown exponentially. Several thousand years ago it was likely uncommon to be exposed to anyone who wasn't within a few hundred miles of you - at the most. Today every person on earth has the potential (if not necessarily the means) to be seen by thousands or millions of people.

This shifts how we view ourselves. It makes you think that if you aren't personally impacting the lives of millions of people - in a profound and reasoned way - you are worthless. Where as in previous years having an impact in your small community was good enough, now you need to be globally recognized just to be anyone.

It's quite an interesting time for the ego.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, for me to not be that overbearing, demanding parent. If current trends continue, when my daughter enters what's left of the workforce in 20 years, she's going to be living in a world where 95% of us are in abject poverty, fighting each other over the last few remaining jobs not already automated away, while the remaining 5% own the automation and means of production and are permanently, insanely wealthy. There will be nobody left in what we'd today call the "middle class". Education will be one's last (even if improbable) chance at class mobility-- and in such a world, only the best grades and best educational institution will do.

We're moving rapidly towards extreme class polarization--in 20 years, you'll be either an Ivy League graduate or eating dog food to survive.

<comment><USER26> " she's going to be living in a world where 95% of us are in abject poverty"

Whining excessively is a rich world problem.

" abject poverty is "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services"

The income level for abject poverty is defined by the World Bank as $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity .

Are you really saying that 95% of the world is going to be earning less than $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've thought about this before, and its left me with a pretty anxiety-inducing idea: that in poorer countries people suffer for their lack of food, water, and medicine, and in the developed world - better off in terms of nutrition and safety - societies as a whole suffer from depression.

</comment><comment><USER22> One solution is simply to GTFO the USA. Countries like Germany, for example, have a much better work-life balance.

The US is going down a very dangerous route into a class-stratified winner take all society. The only solution is strengthening social security nets and redistributing wealth.

</comment><comment><USER28> As a high school student in the Bay Area, from what I see the problem lies within the system as a whole. Tiger moms and ridiculous amounts of APs aren't the cause, merely the symptoms. I'm not sure what you can do in Silicon Valley, when a bunch of parents who achieved success try to force their students down the same path they took. It makes logical sense for it to be Stanford or bust, when so many alumni live so close together.

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone (anontime) posted something here and then deleted it before I could reply. Hopefully they see this..

It sounds like you might find [https://www.google.com/webhp?q=suicidal%20exhaustion#q=suici...](https://www.google.com/webhp?q=suicidal%20exhaustion#q=suicidal+exhaustion) interesting.

Good luck! There are plenty of people out there who feel like you do. Just survive a day at a time at first.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://archive.today/P6BhP](https://archive.today/P6BhP)

</comment><comment><USER31> we need more psychedelics

</comment><comment><USER32> What never fails to surprise me is our proclivity to think of things in terms of a simple order.

Surely, the there is enough diversity in humanity to disallow for so one- dimensional a topology.

(I say this after having been subject to years of down-nosery.)</comment>


Groupon to Replace Nearly All of Its Merchants' Cash Registers With iPads - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/05/19/groupon-will-attempt-to-replace-all-of-its-merchants-cash-registers-with-ipads/

<comment><USER2> > "Gnome will become a standard part of the experience of running a Groupon > for both merchants and consumers, and we'll handle any exceptions on a case- > by-case basis, spokesman Nick Halliwell said in an email.

Do I understand this right? So, if you are running a Groupon, in addition to everything you would previously have had to do, Groupon is going to expect you to _also_ replace your entire PoS infrastructure, or deal with a "special case", less optimized workflow with Groupon?

I suppose if your PoS is literally _just_ a cash register, that's great, but if its integrated with how you do business in a deeper way, it seems unlikely that you'll want to jump on this.</comment>


ASK HN: Could you give me some feedback on my startup's logo? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/joZCw.jpg

<comment><USER2> How do you pronounce this? It reads "shitty", which is probably not what you want.

Cool background, lots going on though - could you provide context for it's usage?

<comment><USER3> I didn't read it that way, I thought something more like "ch-eye-t". I don't have any idea what it means though.

But, that still doesn't mean that I like the logo. Could you put this logo on a shirt? How difficult would it be to get that background silk screened? Company logos have more uses than just being displayed on a website.

Plus, with this for a logo, I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't like the surrounding design.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A fast lines-of-code counter written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cgag/loc <comment><USER2> Just cloned and cargo built it. Took a test repo and ran both loc and cloc to do a side by side comparison. Surprisingly there are HUGE discrepancies reported. Also loc took 2-3 seconds to finish whereas cloc took almost a minute, so in my case it's 20-30x speed improvement not the 100x that they claimed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I replied on github, but can you confirm that you ran loc with a warm cache? If not, can you elaborate on what hardware you're running on?

I'm going to have to do more digging on the discrepancies later, but I'm not confident the errors are on my end. I'm not 100% sure their not, but cloc definitely isn't perfect either.

edit: is your test repo open source by any chance?

<comment><AUTHOR> devy replied on github and with a warm cache loc completed in ~0.28 seconds, so something like 180x faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Loc > Tokei

Loc Ftw</comment>


Ask HN: Abandoned ideas, domains, projects? - <AUTHOR>

My domain registrations are up for renewal for a few of my forgotten side projects, and it popped into my mind, "What am I going to do with these?"<p>Do you have any abandoned projects? If so, what are you going to do with them? <comment><USER2> I own menumunchies.com - at one time it was making $, had good traffic. People still use it, but I have no time to run it. At this point in time, I'll consider it a piece from my portfolio.

I also have a bunch of domains for side projects - those I usually hold on to, just in case I have time. Granted, there's always sedo.com as a good placeholder.

<comment><USER2> following abyssknight's lead I have the following:

(some used to be full sites, some were just because I liked the name, and some were for projects I planned but fell by the way side)

* bgnm.com

* bigjibs.com

* billero.com

* bkexp.com

* boardingnation.com

* bubblerr.com

* costli.com

* divbill.com

* doldr.com

* elsewher.com

* guzzed.com

* fuelrr.com

* fourbean.com

* infilter.com

* revveo.com

* roqem.com

* shiftbase.com

* tabalizer.com

<comment><USER3> Costli.com would be an OK domain for building up a comparison shopping site.

<comment><USER2> Yea, I don't think there are enough of those ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I'm sitting on:

      * MeetTheDress.com
      * tweetfrag/fragtweet.com
      * hackmyjob.com

If anyone wants to pick one of those projects up and run with it, I'd be happy to part with them.

That last domain has put me through at least 3 or 4 ideas, and nothing has really jumped out at me. That's probably the only one I'd hate to lose, but at this point I'm not sure what I'd do with it.

<comment><USER3> Just let them expire. These are bad domains.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exremely blunt, and unfactual. I'm not saying they're great domains, but to preclude their worth before anything has been built is rather crazy. To each their own.

Now, as far as what has been _built_ :

TweetFrag/FragTweet

This started as a notification service so my friends and I could meet up in online games. I built a quick Ruby on Rails application using Twitter's oAuth to connect and send out game details. It wasn't anything mind boggling, but the concept worked.

MeetTheDress

This one was for my wife, since she's practically obsessed with clothing. She wanted a site where she and her friends could post photos of themselves all wearing the same outfit. The idea being that others could see how the outfit looked on different body types. What can I say, I'm not that enthusiastic about clothes? :)

HackMyJob

Bought this domain on a whim. I had started a job board that was integrated with HN. I still have the code somewhere, but being that I was just learning Rails its hacky and borderline unpublishable. The other idea for this, which a friend of mine suggested, was a site for job automation scripts and hacks.

There, substantial evidence of _actual_ projects that actually suit the domains they were built for.</comment></comment></comment>


Why newsletters beat social media - grey-area https://pjrvs.com/beat/ <comment><AUTHOR> Could someone be the first to send a newsletter via email that is not a web page. Spare me the HTML and just send me a plain text email please. That would change my experience of email newsletters for the better.</comment>


The digital detective: Mikko Hypponen's war on malware is escalating - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/the-digital-detective?page=all

<comment><USER2> The best thing about Mikko Hyppönen is no-one can spell his name the same way twice (including him - the rock and roll umlaut comes and goes). This makes him an absolutely awesome case for detecting people by name in text corpuses. Once you've solved it for Mikko, most other Western names present little in the way of issues.

<comment><USER3> Finnish people quite often find it easier to spell their name without the umlauts when appearing online. The situation used to be much worse when email headers and BBS usernames were still ASCII-only (before Unicode), but you still occasionally run into problems.

Most recently, I've had trouble using a street address with umlauts for Amazon AWS billing. Bad web apps tend to convert the umlauts into HTML entities and then recursively escape those entities with &s when editing data or resubmitting forms.

<comment><USER4> E-mail headers, BBS stuff, and of course IRC. I can't remember if it was { for ö or another special.</comment></comment></comment>


Why zooming on mobile is broken (and how to fix it) - <AUTHOR> http://coding.scribd.com/2012/02/29/why-zooming-on-mobile-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it/

<comment><USER2> This looks quite interesting. Even more interesting to see it come from a company that's done as much to damage the web and offend the notion of UI as Scribd. I personally will never forgive Scribd for encouraging people to post documents with them and then demanding a sign-up to get the pdf. It just has this spammy "re-hosting other people's content surrounded in ads" feel to it. Scribd should never have been made.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quite a few apps do this already. Hasn't the Android browser been doing this for yonks now?

</comment><comment><USER4> This technique is already used in the wild, Android devices have been doing this forever, Windows Phone 7 as well, although I'm not sure on the iPhone, I recall someone describing the effect even in their browser. The 'problem' is this is opt-in behaviour, so only a few apps use it, while it should be a default behaviour for any kind of formatted text.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whoa - I was looking for a hyphenation and join-back tool earlier today, and couldn't find anything even remotely useful. Scribd has a pretty good record of contributing to open source: any chance you'd make that component available? Alternately, is there something off-the-shelf that's almost as good?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try! I'm a big fan of open source, and I actually have a long list of components I want to open-source at some point, like for example Scribd's PDF to html5 conversion software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in September, Microsoft demoed a similar Windows 8 thing they called "semantic zoom". Obviously it requires the app to understand when zooming is taking place so that it's possible to do something smarter with it than just magnifying the pixels.

</comment><comment><USER7> Terrible typography, even worse than Kindle, etc. That's what you get when you try to reflow text with no hyphenation and only a crude linebreaking algorithm. Also, as others have mentioned, there's nothing new here.</comment>


How do math geniuses understand extremely hard math concepts so quickly? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/How-do-math-geniuses-understand-extremely-hard-math-concepts-so-quickly

<comment><USER2> I don't know if I would call myself a "math genius", but I've written a type- theory paper so that at least involved reading the work of legitimate math geniuses...

In my experience, you have to go at a concept from multiple angles, and work with it by hand. A lot. You can't just do repetitive problems, it's the variety of perspectives _combined with_ the quantity of problems worked-out that eventually makes it click and allows your brain to form an intuition of what this thing really _is_ and how it behaves.</comment>


A minimalism/ barefoot fad and inconsequential footstrikes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sportsscientists.com/2013/05/a-minimalismbarefoot-fad-and-inconsequential-footstrikes/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read this blog for a long time now re: minimalist running, it's really great. More interestingness:

[http://www.sportsscientists.com/2012/03/vibram-shoes- named-i...](http://www.sportsscientists.com/2012/03/vibram-shoes-named-in- lawsuit-the-danger-of-barefoot-running/)

I went back and checked this blog again (I haven't read it for a while) after seeing this:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27335251](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27335251) (Vibram has settled a class action suit for misleading advertising claims).

Barefoot running works well for me but I'm painfully aware there's really no good evidence either way. Certainly I don't advocate anything except that people should try it - now I'm not sure I'll even do that.

</comment><comment><USER2> I developed a stress fracture from running in minimalist shoes bad enough to require surgery, and now more than two years later it still hurts bad enough that I can't seriously run anymore.</comment>


The Magazine: For geeks like us. By Marco Arment - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magazine-for-geeks-like-us./id557744510?mt=8 <comment><USER2> > "The Magazine: For geeks like us"

... geeks "like us" who only care about iOS and are willing to pay for content. Just to be accurate.

Not that there's anything wrong with paying for content. Every time you're confronted by an ad that you didn't volunteer to look at, you're paying for content.

But iOS-only seems like quite a limitation, and seems to contradict "for geeks like us" as the headline appears in HN.

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem paying for content, but I do have a problem with IOS- only. Even though I own an iPad, I like to have access to my reading material in multiple places. I spend a bunch more time looking at my Kindle, for example, and prefer the reading experience there to the iPad.

A decade ago, something like this published in the closed formats of the time (MS Word, maybe) would have met with a huge backlash. Today, it seems like Apple have convinced the market that 'closed' is OK, because it's well- designed and a little bit shiny. I think it's a real step backward, especially given the great open standards that are available (like HTML5) and other tools which give similar control with more accessibility (like PDF).

<comment><USER4> I also share the concern with an iOS-only model, but give him a break: it's just a 2 months proof-of-concept.

He needs critical mass in order to make this sustainable in the long term - without having to resort to ads, sponsored reviews and all sorts of ways to keep the quality.

The choice for iOS for the initial platform seems obvious: it's much easier to monetize quickly. And it's easy to add Kindle, Android, HTML5 and others later on - at the cost of maintaining multiple versions, provided that there's enough interested paying subscribers to justify the effort.

I think that's exactly the right approach, and a real step forward.

<comment><USER3> > I think that's exactly the right approach, and a real step forward.

I disagree. I think, sales issues aside, that open standards like HTML5 offer enough to give a good reading experience on most devices. Where it doesn't, that's typically because the device doesn't support the format, rather than the converse.

As for how monetizing this is going to work for Marco, I don't know. Maybe iOS-only is the only way he could get that to work, and that's the right choice for him. If that's true, I still think it's unfortunate.

<comment><USER5> Do you think a multi-platform launch would have been possible with about the same effort? That's the important question here. Also take into account developer experience and what skills Marco Arment has.

We are talking about a small project with limited resources and a developer with a certain skill set. I don't think you can ignore that.

You can certainly ask for support on more devices and be disappointed that the magazine in the offered format isn't a good fit for your devices – but I do not understand the apparent moral condemnation of that decision. It seems harmless and morally neutral to me – maybe ill-advised (in that it might doom the magazine), but not morally problematic.

<comment><USER6> Really? Do we really have to make up stuff now in excuse? _The guy runs an Apple blog_.

<comment><USER5> I don't really understand what you want to say. Do you honestly believe that he didn't make the magazine multi-platform out of spite? That's just ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't surprise me that it takes an AAA iOS developer to finally make a good iOS magazine. It always struck me that Newsstand was a wasted potential: full of good publications trying to squeeze their paper format into an app instead of releasing the same content in a better format.

Does anybody know of "good" Newsstand apps? This might be the first.

I personally think Apple should release a more aggressive Newsstand API and a best practices guide: e.g. by all means customise your design and experience but that doesn't mean you should release an app crammed full of pngs that weighs half a gig. Newsstand apps should be low bandwidth and text-centric. Why can't I search all my magazines from a central location? Why can't I see a central list of articles I've favourited from a variety of publications? As it stands, the only way to do this is with an RSS reader or Instapaper. I'd be happy to pay for quality journalism if it was in a format that's convenient and sensible.

<comment><USER8> Not all of us magazine makers are coders. For a lot of us, its all about the words, not the format. My little iPad-only travel magazine isn't even in Newsstand because I have no idea how to code it, but our articles have won awards. The technology is not as important as the content. I wish I could do all those things you mentioned, but the fact is I have no idea how. A big magazine might be able to do them, but it requires a total revamp of business practices and a restructuring of workflow. And that's hard when a magazine is staffed by people who will lose their jobs when digital magazines take off.

<comment><USER7> And that's precisely why Apple should be releasing an API to help you :) to reduce the burden of coding something yourself. That's one of the big problems right now. A lot of magazines are using Adobe InDesign to publish their iOS magazine apps, because that's all they know how to use but it's not helping anyone because, instead of making something new, Adobe bolted-on iOS publishing to a tool designed to make paper products. Someone else needs to step in and provide an appropriate tool that publishers (big or small) can use.

I think it's fair to say we all want to see a way good journalism can exist in a digital world. There's no reason these people need lose their jobs if we can crack this problem.

As an aside, care to share a link to your travel magazine? I'd be interested in checking it out. I'm travelling to Japan for the first time tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, people have been using InDesign for ages. Its unrealistic to expect those same people to learn how to code, which means hiring an entirely new team just to design the magazine for another medium. We're lucky in that we only publish for the iPad. Here's the link btw: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overnight-buses- magazine/id49...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overnight-buses- magazine/id493329039?ls=1&mt=8)

P.S. Have fun in Japan, let me know if you by any chance come back with a long, well written travel essay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Interesting. First of all it's very nicely designed and after reading the introduction I like the philosophy behind it. Taking the Instapaper approach of focussing on text is interesting. While images and graphics can often enhance content having nice, plain text on a device the size of the iPhone makes much more sense. So first impressions of it are good. Hopefully the content is just as good.

Update:

After reading a couple of the articles it seems pretty high quality and justifies the price. It's also only the second good Newsstand app I've used (The New York Times is the other). I've tried several others and they are just 100's of space consuming images, difficult to read especially on the iPhone.

<comment><USER4> Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' that permeates the magazine industry.

Each issue of Wired is now 500+ MB (due to the Retina displays). If you're on 3G or at a public WiFi, it probably takes more time to download than to read the 2-3 articles you're interested.

In hindsight, you wouldn't expect anything different from Marco. Really hope he succeeds.

<comment><USER9> > Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: > no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' > that permeates the magazine industry.

HN is also like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see this as a webapp. I'm one of those folks that just doesn't use apps or even sign in to my apple account. I'm sure more of my kind exist.

EDIT: Whoops I see this has paid in-app purchases. I wonder if there's something out there that can offer as seamless an experience as iTunes in-app purchases for webapps.

<comment><USER11> Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.

<comment><USER12> Stripe for payment, Persona for auth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another victim is seduced by a leading "The", causing any attempt to reference this publication to become a tragedy of grammar.

<comment><USER14> The Strokes, The Walkmen and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs would like to have a word with you.

<comment><USER15> And especially "The The".

<comment><USER16> The Who?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks interesting. Finally, a use for the dreaded un-removable "Newsstand" icon on my iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER18> It seems like I am the target audience for this. I listen to his podcast, follow his blog, and read tons of other Apple & tech blogs. And use Instapaper.

But I really have no desire to pay a monthly fee for more articles. So I guess I'm opting out of this one.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd really like to give this a shot but am only interested in trying it on my iPad which can't get iOS6, so unfortunately, rather than passing on this, I am being left behind.

<comment><USER20> It's worth sending that feedback to Marco. He has said in Build and Analyze that the iOS 5 version is written (just disabled currently) and he is curious whether he should release support for it in a version rev or if he can abandon it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Too bad it is iOS6 only, leaving my iPad 1 out in the cold.

<comment><USER22> Wait, iPad 1 supports iOS6 no?

<comment><USER23> No, but I can't for the life of me figure out what technical reason is preventing Apple from allowing this.

If an iPhone 3GS can run iOS6, I am perplexed why the same can't be true for the iPad 1.

<comment><USER24> They were still selling the 3GS until just a few weeks ago; it would have annoyed many customers if iOS 6 wasn't released for the device. The first-gen iPad, on the other hand, stopped being sold when the iPad 2 was released in March 2011.

iOS 5 also doesn't run all that great on the iPad, so I'm sure that played into the decision not to offer iOS 6 as well. The 256MB of RAM paired with the large screen seems to be the biggest cause for this. The 3GS' hardware isn't great, but it's only powering a 320*480 display

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> All the articles are available on-line at <http://the-magazine.org/1> which is useful for sharing and reading on other devices.

I wonder how much evil it would be to create an RSS feed for it.

<comment><USER26> Those are excerpts :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This mostly seems to be a magazine for Apple afficionados. And thats a terrible thing, because there is nothing geeky about that company or even company worship.

</comment><comment><USER27> Newsstand?

ugh!</comment>


Ask HN:Homework submission and grading Apps - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I am trying to decide whether to create a specific focus on the assignment submission and grading capability of appynotebook.com.
However I would first like to know what's out there by way of Apps that simplify this often tedious task of managing assignments.
URLs would be helpful.
Regards. <comment><USER2> I think lore.com does this to some degree

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I have seen lore's, I think their grading App is nice but last I checked they didn't have an easy way to do the grading. Specifically you have to upload assignments and the instructor has to download and use some external tool like ms-work, then manage all the files.

 _Easy would be_

student does his/her assignment in word

hits a submit button

 _Teacher/Grader opens word_

There is a list of submitted assignments on the left panel

Clicks on anyone of the listed items

Item is opened on the right without changing views

Teacher Grades, annotates, adds comments and click a "done" button.

 _Student opens word_

Their graded assignment is also listed on the left panel

Clicks to open without changing views.

Perhaps they're asked to redo something

They do requested edits and hit submit button again

etc...</comment></comment>


Different languages: How cultures around the world draw shapes differently - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/994486/the-way-you-draw-circles-says-a-lot-about-you/ <comment><USER2> >they also suggest our tendencies get stronger over time. The more we write, the more our habits become ingrained.

Not really a surprising/revolutionary conclusion, IMHO.

As a side note, this other experiment is interesting, what happens when you are asked to draw a "common enough" (i.e. something everyone has seen and used) and simple (yet more complex than a circle) object, like a bycicle? A designer/artist asked people to draw a bycicle and then 3-d rendered the sketch, Velocipedia:

[http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html](http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html)

<comment><USER3> That was a great project - it showed more nuance in how people communicate. Interesting observations too; got a good laugh at the fact that oft noted doctors' ownership of most unreadable handwriting prize translates to other fields:

 _Some diversities are gender driven. Nearly 90% of drawings in which the chain is attached to the front wheel (or both to the front and the rear) were made by females. On the other hand, while men generally tend to place the chain correctly, they are more keen to over-complicate the frame when they realize they are not drawing it correctly. One of the most frequent issues for participants was not knowing exactly how to describe their job in short. The most unintelligible drawing has also the most unintelligible handwriting. It was made by a doctor._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you think of a circle as a big O, then most Westerners will start at the top and go anticlockwise.

Myself, I start on the left and go clockwise. That's because my Os tend to be egg-shaped, and I find it slightly easier to draw a consistent circle as two semicircles, like a rainbow and its mirror. And of course from natural handwriting, shapes like a, n, m etc. will incline me to go clockwise.

So to my mind it's the letter in your alphabet that's closest to a circle given where you started, rather than direction, that matters.

<comment><USER5> Ha! That's interesting. As stated in an other comment, I drew the circle clockwise (I am French).

After reading your comment and imagining the circle as a big letter O, I draw it counterclockwise...

And then again, a neutral circle - again clockwise.

<comment><USER6> Ditto here, and I'm American so guess I don't count as western.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In drawing the circle I think it is more important where you place your starting point than the direction of the stroke. Indeed if I start at the top I draw it clockwise, while when starting from the bottom I draw counter- clockwise. This seems to be the main difference between 'western' drawing and japanese ones: the starting point.

<comment><USER8> That's a good point. At least in my case, I started at the top, kind of thinking of a clock, and drew in the appropriate direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating article!

I wonder how much of this specific data was shaped by the fact that this is on a computer? E.g. I "drew" with my trackpad. I ended up drawing the circle clockwise, which is interesting, since I'm a native-English speaker, mostly read/write in English (not much handwriting), but actually live in Israel.

I'm pretty sure I'd have drawn it counterclockwise if I was doing it on paper, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is fascinating. I'm an American and assumed most Americans would draw their circles clockwise. Just all around a really neat piece. THIS is the type of article that keeps me here. Great post OP.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I drew my top start clockwise circle thinking all Americans/westerners did this. Guess not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really interesting article. Nice read indeed. I always draw circles clockwise. Actually I can write in several different alphabets. Regardless of which hand I use. Just tested that. Latin/Cyril based ones on right hand. Clockwise. Arabic or Kanas on left hand and again clockwise. But I don't think starting point really matters. It's just muscle memory most of the time. Once you learn, you keep it. If it was different, It should be counter clockwise on left hand.

</comment><comment><USER13> Study cleverly skipped India. May be since it has lot of languages and has been under western influence for long

<comment><USER10> Maybe it was less sinister and just that there was not enough interesting data?

Mini rant: No idea your nationality - most of the Indians I've met are some of the most egotistical people in the world, and constantly feel the need to interject themselves into everything. Maybe people from India just don't draw statistically interesting circles.

<comment><USER14> Now that's an insult I'm going to have to pocket for the Culture Wars: "$YOU_PEOPLE draw statistically uninteresting circles!"

Truly _this_ is the argument that shall be the first ever to result in the win-by-acclamation that so many have fantasized about online, yet never experienced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of something I saw in a symbolic logic course in college.

Many Western kids struggled to produce a nice-looking existential quantifier (∃). I guess they instinctively thought of it as a mirrored "E" and found it rather awkward to draw from right to left.

Chinese kids, on the other hand, treated the symbol as if it was the Chinese radical 彐, which has an obvious stroke order: → ↓ → →. This resulted in a much better-looking symbol. (Strokes within a single Chinese character almost always go from left to right, even if the composition as a whole goes in a different direction.)

I'm Korean, so I just drew a 크, which has the same stroke order as above.

</comment><comment><USER16> Incidentally I drew clockwise. From India. A native speaker of Tamil, and grew up writing scripts that are circular [0](a even more rigorous circular ones before[1]).

Not sure if the bucks the trend of others in India.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatteluttu_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatteluttu_alphabet)

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D)

</comment><comment><USER18> I drew the circle clockwise because I thought about clocks but yes, I draw c, q, etc counterclockwise.

If you ever need to draw a circle without a compass see [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LvpCX89lHvU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LvpCX89lHvU)

</comment><comment><USER5> I am French, I drew the circle clockwise.

I then asked my wife and she asked "left hand OK?", and drew it counterclockwise. I then realized that I would draw it counterclockwise with my left hand as well.

When asked to draw with her right hand, she drew it clockwise.

We are both right handed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not just the way you draw shapes but the shapes you draw are influenced by culture and geography.

Draw a tree.

Did you just draw a stick with something puffy at the top, or something like a christmas tree, or a palm tree? If you live in Hawaii, you probably drew a palm, for example.

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem with this is that I instinctively drew a circle starting from the bottom and clockwise just because I was using my touchpad. But when given a pen and paper, I would start from the right and draw counter clockwise.

<comment><USER21> Why would you not use a compass to draw a circle is that because I did TD (technical drawing) at high school

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Also westerner and also draw them clockwise.. Mostly from the top. I also thought that most people would start "to the right" as we write in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be interesting to see the results of the same experiment with illiterate people, or even people that can read but not write.

</comment><comment><USER24> And I drew it clockwise because I was using my right handed mouse with my left hand. ( That way I can rest my elbows on my desk... )

</comment><comment><USER25> Couldn't it just be the difference between right handed and left handed?</comment>


Typekit hand-hinted fonts - <AUTHOR> http://typekit.com/libraries/full?tags=paragraph

<comment><AUTHOR> Found via Quora ([http://www.quora.com/Typekit/What-are-the-best-Typekit- fonts...](http://www.quora.com/Typekit/What-are-the-best-Typekit-fonts-for- Windows-browsers)) that "all of the fonts tagged with "paragraph" have been hand-hinted to perform well, even in the most unforgiving environment ( _cough_ Win XP _cough_ )" as said by Mandy Brown, Community Manager at Typekit.

This is very useful because these fonts look really awesome in Windows (which is still the vast majority of users for most sites).</comment>


Show HN: TradeSafe – Know Your Customer - <AUTHOR> https://teamtradesafe.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting - but why? I will assume this is a service that is useful for UK companies who need to verify that someone buying something from them is not a "Terroiriste"?

What is the use of knowing if someone is a "Politically Exposed Person" (and how can I become one??!)

Just curious. Basically - I'm asking: who is YOUR customer?</comment>


Talk with your customers in real-time. Try unlimited free - <AUTHOR> https://www.talkerify.com <comment><USER2> The design of this is way to close to intercom in my opinion.</comment>


Gigapixel Image of Crowds at Trump Inauguration - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/ <comment><USER2> Just 2 or 3 where smiling. Time will tell if

<comment><USER3> While this picture captures a single moment, you suggest people should have a grin over the whole ceremony ?

I hope your logic process when choosing your voting preferences is more sound that this statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No one is smiling

<comment><USER4> Ah.. it could be because it is cold.</comment></comment>


This security camera was infected by malware 98 seconds after it was plugged in - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/18/this-security-camera-was-infected-by-malware-in-98-seconds-after-it-was-plugged-in/ <comment><USER3> Previous discussion on the original tweets: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985974)

</comment><comment><USER4> This brings back memories of Windows 95-98 era, where a fresh install would get infected in matter of seconds after connected to the internet.

I expect the IoT to go though a similar phase, but eventually get fixed and be secure enough.

<comment><USER5> Maybe. Windows had a single company behind it, and as I recall Bill had to issue a company-wide cease and desist order to get people to stop developing and focus on security for a while.

IoT may always be plagued by cheap hardware with buggy software from fly-by- night companies.

<comment><USER6> Whoa, any reading you can point to on that historical note?

<comment><USER5> [http://www.zdnet.com/article/10-years-since-the-bill- gates-s...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/10-years-since-the-bill-gates- security-memo-a-personal-journey/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having flashbacks to the 'bad old days' of similar things happening to Windows machines (PCs, ATMs, etc). Microsoft, the gigantic, near-monopoly company in the space with a jillion very smart people working for it, struggled with such issues for many years (though eventually reined it in).

This time, though, I don't see a tenable path to actually fix this. The IoT industry is terribly, terribly fragmented. Few business models incentivize providing ongoing maintenance once they've sold you their gizmo. Few consumers have the ability to detect that this is happening.

I suspect that security and compatibility issues will cripple a large chunk of the IoT industry, with bigger players slowly picking off the profitable/useful chunks with niche products customers will think of as 'safe' (read: Amazon/Google's many IoT products).

In the mean time, I'll continue avoiding smart/IoT devices in my house. The risks seem to far, far, outweigh the rewards.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many of these cheap things are going to get plugged in this holiday season with default login/passwords.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is a good security camera? Who makes good ones?

I haven't been able to find a company who provides a quality POE device that allows me to control the feed into something like Zoneminder.

Do I have to use something more analog to be "safer" from something like this?

<comment><USER10> We use Ubiquiti Unifi. We use their software with it, but I'm sure you could feed it into Zoneminder. Very happy with it.

<comment><USER9> Do they host their software or is it installed on a local device?

<comment><USER10> It's all self hosted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the expected time between port scan for an arbitrary IPv4 address? Is the level of scanning activity so high (or so well-targeted to "promising" address spaces) that one should expect to be scanned in minutes?

<comment><USER12> I have between 2500 and 40,000 SSH login attempts on a server on my home broadband in Denmark, usually around 30,000. That's one every 90 seconds or so.

Wow.

I don't know about other ports, other than HTTP I don't have any open.

A server on slow home broadband in the UK is only receiving 100-300 attempts per day. It's almost identical to the one in Denmark, except the broadband is terrible.

Several servers in a university's IP space has about 5000-10000 attempts per day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Better-quality devices will almost certainly be better protected against > this kind of thing, and may for example block all incoming traffic until > they're paired with another device and set up manually. Still, this is a > good reminder that it really is a jungle out there.

This seems like a bold claim, unless they define "better quality".

</comment><comment><USER14> How would the malware even know that the camera was connected in? Especially if you're on a home network (which is firewalled / has NAT on).

I suspect that it must be the central server that this camera reports to that is infected, either directly, or indirectly with some program sitting at a nearby router listening for traffic.

<comment><USER15> Because the camera requests port forwarding from your firewall using UPnP. Now your mobile app connects directly to port 83785 and streams video from the camera without any firewall hassles. The problem now is that hackers can also connect to port 83785 and exploit unpatched security holes.

If a firmware update exists, its probably too technically challenging for Joe User to find and install. For a lot of these devices, there isn't even a published fix. These manufacturers are just rebranding some generic camera from a larger manufacturer or using the same camera and IoT guts and putting them into different cases. These companies probably don't even have a software developer on staff who has access to these firmwares, just perhaps a binary blob, assuming they have any software people on staff at all.

<comment><USER16> so are you stating the hacker was notified, or was the hacker polling to check the port?

<comment><USER15> They're just mass scanning for known IoT ports. UPnP opens up the port for everyone. My port number is an example. This blogger found his camera opening up port 80 via UPnP:

[https://www.pentestpartners.com/blog/hacking-the-aldi-ip- cct...](https://www.pentestpartners.com/blog/hacking-the-aldi-ip-cctv-camera- part-2/)

Also Brian Krebs examined that Foscam camera and found it enabled a P2P protocol and opened a port on the firewall using UPnP as well:

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people- fear-...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-the- internet-of-things/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> News flash: If you expose a device web-accessible port to an internet IP with no firewall and leave the default user name and password intact, it will get hacked.

Put your shit behind firewalls and change the default user name and password to something secure. This is common sense stuff, people. Port scanners have existed for ages.

<comment><USER18> What if the device opens up some random port via UPnP? What then? Do you turn off UPnP? If you did, why did you even buy this camera?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the tweet pics, it looks like the outside IP was able to connect to the camera via telnet.

Does the camera firmware open a UPNP tunnel in AP to its telnet port?

Does this guy's Wifi router enable anyone one to open tunnels in his AP router?

<comment><USER20> UPnP is turned on by default on almost all access points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article missed an important fact:

Question: interesting tweets Rob, is it used Dynamic DNS when it is initially setup? If no , how is it exposed to internet?

Answer: I had to map the external port 23 on the firewall to the device.

</comment><comment><USER22> Eek, who knew the rise of cheap CMOS-based surveillance cameras would lead to DDOS attacks?

</comment><comment><USER23> Are most of these things spread via random IPv4 address probes? Are we going to be a somewhat safer when networks are IPv6-only due to the size of the address space vs the used addresses?

</comment><comment><USER24> a tech industry veteran - Internet-scanning(his hobby) - cheap camera - <USER2> firewall - wannabe famous -> make your pick. 100% he infected it himself.

</comment><comment><USER25> It almost looks like the camera producer/someone from an internal team was responsible for either giving out backdoor or actually infecting the camera...</comment>


Flaming Wreckage of Clinkle Rebuilds as a Referral Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/29/i-know-you-thought-it-was-dead-but/ <comment><USER2> Is this even a startup at this point, or just a guy good at making mock-ups that get covered by TechCrunch?

<comment><USER3> What's the difference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $30m in funding and all that's left is an SDK that could be done in a month in a lean startup, implemented by contractors. That CEO's career is in tatters

<comment><USER5> What's the betting on him being in charge of something in a couple of years time? After all, are we not repeatedly told of the importance of failing repeatedly with other people's money as a learning experience? At least he didn't make the mistake of failing with his own money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe two years ago I interviewed at this train wreck of a company and left laughing.

I interviewed for a devops engineer and there was 0 built in production. They were so paranoid about competition reverse engineering their app. At the time I was told they had a lot of dev turn over so no one was really an expert.

the best part was I got a call the next day from the manager asking me if I knew anyone hiring cause the CEO fired they whole ops team

</comment><comment><USER7> > A former Yahoo exec Chi-Chao Chang quit after just a day on the job

I would love to hear the story behind that!

<comment><USER8> I wonder if this was the inspiration behind the scene in the 2nd season of "Silicon Valley" in which a top engineer speeds out of Hooli after spending a few minutes with the team led by Baghead:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of- clinkle-2014-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of- clinkle-2014-4)

Everything below is directly copied from the Business Insider story linked above:

One day prior, Duplan had proudly announced a new hire, Chi-Chao Chang. A former Yahoo and xAd executive, Chang was Clinkle's new vice president of engineering. It was a position recruiters had been trying to fill for months, and Chang had come highly recommended by former Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz. The soft-spoken engineer had stood up and shared a few words about his background. He said he was excited to be joining Clinkle.

Now, just 24 hours later, Chang was nowhere to be seen.

Duplan cleared his throat, nervously shifting his weight. "Chi-Chao has left Clinkle," he announced. "He decided it's too much for him."

There was a long pause. Duplan stumbled over a few more sentences trying to explain. Instead he talked in circles, a trait employees described as typical. Some began to wonder whether even he knew why Chang had left.

McCarthy stepped in.

"It's not the kid's fault," McCarthy said, defending his flustered boss. McCarthy sometimes took over for Duplan during the weekly all-hands meetings on Fridays, correcting him and referring to him as "kid."

Chang had been well-vetted during the interview process, McCarthy insisted. The news came as a shock to everyone.

"It was disheartening," says one ex-Clinkler. "That was the moment when we were like, 'Oh, no. Things are not good.'"

"It obviously looked bad," another former employee recalls. "Like the guy saw our product and it scared him away."

<comment><USER9> Adding the last part of the story

\----

Chang left his first day of work feeling uneasy. He called Duplan that evening to share his reservations. The conversation lasted well into the night. The next morning, Chang told Duplan he wouldn't be coming back to the office. He left a long list of recommendations about how to launch Clinkle, then they parted ways amicably.

Of course, the only person who really knows why Chang left is Chang himself.

When reached for comment, Chang declined to elaborate, stating simply, "Lucas is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. I believe he will lead Clinkle to a successful outcome and I wish them the best."

\----

The comment at the end interests me. Does McCarthy and Duplan have enough connections to make Chang's life hell? Or is it that if Chang says the truth ( Duplan is duplicitous ) would that alone make prospective employers look down on him?

Perhaps both.

<comment><USER10> Most likely it's just that Chang has enough class and good sense to not bad- mouth a former employer publicly.

<comment><USER9> I believe it would be just a matter a class if Chang had said nothing. The Theranos article posted yesterday had oodles of that. He decided to say nice things, however, which to me, means he wishes to reduce his association with failure by reducing Clinkle's failure.

Interestingly, when I was going through the history of Clinkle, I saw one person who was ostensibly there for a very long time write:" "without a product" is not at all an accurate reflection of the state of things (as the TechCrunch article and plenty of other sources can corroborate)."

This was contradicted by the very same TechCrunch article which asserted that they had no app, let alone product for a very long period of time: "Still, there was no app, and Shontell reported that contributed to internal turmoil."

I see a pattern between the words of Chang and this commenter, which is that if a person invests considerable resources in a venture that fails, they'll do everything in their capacity to make it sound right in their head. Even if that entails making it sound right in the public sphere.

I would be hard pressed to do differently in the same position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is definitely gambling.</comment>


Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease - <AUTHOR> https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1905136 <comment><AUTHOR> Conclusions:

Preclinical studies and clinical trials have shown that intermittent fasting has broad-spectrum benefits for many health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorders. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the life span, whereas clinical studies have mainly involved relatively short-term interventions, over a period of months. It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models. Furthermore, clinical studies have focused mainly on overweight young and middle-age adults, and we cannot generalize to other age groups the benefits and safety of intermittent fasting that have been observed in these studies.

Although we do not fully understand the specific mechanisms, the beneficial effects of intermittent fasting involve metabolic switching and cellular stress resistance. However, some people are unable or unwilling to adhere to an intermittent-fasting regimen. By further understanding the processes that link intermittent fasting with broad health benefits, we may be able to develop targeted pharmacologic therapies that mimic the effects of intermittent fasting without the need to substantially alter feeding habits.

Studies of the mechanisms of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting in animal models have led to the development and testing of pharmacologic interventions that mimic the health and disease-modifying benefits of intermittent fasting. Examples include agents that impose a mild metabolic challenge (2-deoxyglucose, metformin, and mitochondrial-uncoupling agents), bolster mitochondrial bioenergetics (ketone ester or nicotinamide riboside), or inhibit the mTOR pathway (sirolimus). However, the available data from animal models suggest that the safety and efficacy of such pharmacologic approaches are likely to be inferior to those of intermittent fasting.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I'm still waiting for any conclusive evidence at all that long-term intermittent fasting in healthy, active humans with good diet has significant positive effects. So far everything seems like snake oil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Full text PDF: [https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2019-decabo.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2019-decabo.pdf)</comment>


AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/announcing-aws-elastic-beanstalk-support-for-python-and-seamless-database-integration.html

<comment><USER2> A couple friends and I just spent the past 48 hours building an app that recreates a lot of this functionality. Some key things to note with this is that you're stuck with RDS, and locked in to amazons platform choice.

If anyone is interested in the work we did this weekend, <https://github.com/jawnb/badatcomputers>

<comment><USER3> Can't you use RDS like any MySQL database? And since you're writing a standard WSGI app, it seems like there is very little lock-in. This seems to basically automate the provisioning of EC2 instances for the web app and the DB. and since you just have a standard app, you're free to move it around as needed.

Or is there something that I'm missing with the Elastic Beanstalk? (I've only used raw EC2)

<comment><USER2> Yes RDS is like any MySQL db. The key word there being MySQL. If you want to use another data store like say, postgres or even some NoSQL solution. You're outta luck.

As for platform lock-in, my comments were less towards the web services level and more about system level concerns. It's not entirely clear how you would run persistent background tasks (read: celery). This doesn't even get into the headaches of learning yet another DSL to define OS packaging requirements.

That being said, IMO this would be great for simple apps, with no strenuous requirements. In addition, anything that allows more people to easily deploy their django apps is a good thing.

<comment><USER4> RDS isn't just MySQL - you can also use Oracle or SQL Server, if you don't want MySQL.

For NoSQL, look at the other stuff that doesn't have 'Relational' in the name :) (DynamoDB, SimpleDB, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone here used Elastic Beanstalk? What were your experiences?

<comment><USER6> I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - <http://www.degreedays.net/api/> \- for about 12 months.

So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules).

The tools for updating a Java app are great. Each deployed version of your app gets stored in the AWS system, and you can rollback to any version with a couple of clicks in the AWS control panel.

It's also pretty easy to set up a staging environment to test new versions before deploying them to the live environment. Only issue I have with that is that there's no way to pause a staging environment (like you can pause an EC2 instance and not pay for it while it's paused). So you either have to keep a staging environment running all the time (paying for its EC2 instances), or set one up afresh each time you need it. The latter isn't a huge hassle, but it would be much better if you could just set one up and keep it paused for most of the time.

I think development on Beanstalk is nicely approachable, and in my experience it's been pretty reliable as well, or at least as reliable as EC2. The current version of our app has been running well, with moderate load, for several months, without so much as a restart of an EC2 instance. On two occasions 6+ months ago one of the EC2 instances went a bit screwy, having problems connecting to external URLs, but in both cases we just terminated the problem instance and Beanstalk did the rest (provisioning a replacement and putting it behind the load balancer). We could probably avoid that sort of problem in future by improving our internal monitoring (in conjunction with the beanstalk health checks that ping a URL on each EC2 instance at frequent intervals to check for problems).

<comment><USER7> Can you tell me the reason you'd want to run a load balancer in front of a single instance? I read the feature spec for the elastic load balancer and can't it out.

<comment><USER8> There's 2 main reasons. 1, if the AZ that your single instance is running in dies completely, ELB can help fire up a new instance in another zone quickly without having to handle re-routing DNS, etc. 2 if you need extra capacity in a hurry (e.g. you just got linked from HN and 10,000 people sign up), you can add more instances without re-achitecting.

Whether it's worth paying for those capabilities is always up to you though.. :)

<comment><USER9> This is a great point. Although it's a slight extra cost, we have adopted this a best practice because it's still cheaper than a more responsive DNS service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anybody else looking to move from AppEngine? I can't wait to try this out, AppEngine has become too expensive and AWS has more and better deployment options, and more and better associated services.

<comment><USER11> AWS doesn't have anything even remotely approaching Appengine Datastore in functionality and scalability. S3 is also inferior in functionality to Google Cloud Storage, e.g. eventual consistency, no atomic operations. That's actually a big deal if you're building anything slightly more complex. OTOH, Google is now introducing their Compute solution, so you can just move parts that don't fit very well within Appengine to that (if you have beta access).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are some advantages of using something like Elastic Beanstalk versus Heroku, if any?

<comment><USER13> Price! Heroku is vastly more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great day indeed to be a python developer. Greatly appreciated, thanks Amazon!

Now, if you could support PostgreSQL in RDS, that would be a nice feat.

<comment><USER15> Isn't Postgresql on EC2 called Heroku?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is that really their official blog? I'm not usually one to care about a professional looking UI, but I feel like it matters here. A non tech boss is going to see this next to cloud.google and have a tremendous bias, regardless of what his/her tech people think

<comment><USER10> Hosted on Typepad, which apparently still exists. That blog template is probably 10 years old

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this will lead to Heroku reviewing their pricing plans sooner than expected. Elastic Beanstalk is catching up, AppFog had their public launch recently... they must be feeling the heat.

<comment><USER10> Heroku's main supplier is competing with them, so they need to provide a better value add layer than Amazon can to justify the price or get off AWS, do it themselves (not easy) and take that part of the margin

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if this has _explicit_ support for a task queue like Celery?

<comment><USER19> I never tried it but I guess you can use SQS for queues on AWS.

<http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/>

<comment><USER20> If you go with SQS, keep in mind it doesn't guarantee that messages will be received exactly once[1]. I've used SQS for large projects and this was killer because we had to implement message locking ourselves to prevent messages from being processed twice. Since then, this has been a deal breaker for using SQS again (now use Celery).

[1] [http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/faqs/#How_many_times_will_I_receiv...](http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/faqs/#How_many_times_will_I_receive_each_message)

<comment><USER21> I was under the impression [1] that a message would only be received more than once if the first attempt at processing failed to complete in the lock time - for example if the queue consumer crashed. Is it more complicated than that?

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/#functionality></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cool stuff with Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> Just wondering what cool stuff you guys built with a Raspberry Pi, I bought one, and set up a media centre but endeed up not using it very often. <comment><USER2> I primarily use mine for OctoPrint for controlling my 3d printer. Plan on getting a second to finish up a ambilight TV DIY mod.

<comment><AUTHOR> An amblight! thats sounds like something I could use, are you gonna follow any tutotial for that? do you have the link?

<comment><USER2> I don't have the link handy specifically, but if you @brianjking me on Twitter I'll find it and send it to you tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool, done!</comment></comment></comment></comment>