McDonalds answers $15 minimum wage with the Big Mac ATM - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldtribune.com/mcdonald-answers-15-minimum-wage-with-the-big-mac-atm/ <comment><USER2> "Soon the McDonald's workers Sanders and Democrats promised would get a "fair living wage" to take customers' orders for Big Macs "will have absolutely no wages at all courtesy of the 'Fight for $15,' " Zero Hedge reported on Jan. 26."

I love how these guys spin things, truly impressive. So Bernie wanted a $15/hr minimum, but didn't even get the Democratic nomination. Hillary _sorta_ backed $12.50/hr, but lost the election. Yet somehow the World Tribune lays the blame for some future job losses in the fast food industry at their feet? Incredible!

We are well and truly in The Zone now ...

<comment><USER3> > Yet somehow the World Tribune lays the blame for some future job losses in > the fast food industry at their feet? Incredible!

I don't think anyone is blaming Bernie and Clinton, it reads to me that they're criticizing the idea of a $15 minimum wage as counterproductive. And mocking the politicians who support it, sure.

<comment><USER4> It makes so much more sense to permanently freeze wages while inflation makes its steady march. What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER2> Are you for real? That is not what minimum wage is - you don't just set the level once and then forget about it forever. The UK has managed to have minimum wage for decades, increasing more-or-less in line with inflation every year.

Edit: ... furthermore at least this way you get some kind of increase. As inflation makes its steady march do you think the fast-food industry (or the service industry overall) have kept up?

<comment><USER5> I think he was being sarcastic

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ctrl-j It's silly to think this is due to a $15 an hour minimum wage. This was coming as soon as the cost of installing the thing was cheap enough to make back the difference.

Automation is coming for all jobs that do not require critical and/or dynamic thinking.

A higher minimum wage may have accelerated the process, but this would have happened regardless.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. We have had these things in Europe for a long time already. They tend to be really convenient when you are in a foreign country, since you don't need to be able to speak to them, you just press the buttons, and get what you want, without fear of the order getting "lost in translation".

And given that they are in use in thousands of restaurants in Europe, then you know that the price per machine is only going down, not up. Which means that at some point they will _always_ end up price competitive with humans, unless the humans also keep on accepting wage cuts to stay "competitive".

Forcing people into sub-poverty incomes is not a viable long term solution to this problem of low paid labour.

<comment><USER7> One of the reasons you see these in Europe is because of high employment costs (and I don't mean minimum wage alone, that one isn't particularly high in Europe).

These things are pretty common in the UK, but on the other hand in Asia I haven't seen those yet, Hong Kong, China, Philippines don't have them despite having on average huge McDonald's stores with considerably more staff and customers than the average Western European one.

It's also worth noting that you can pretty much follow the employment costs in Europe to see where are these things deployed and at any country that is below a certain threshold you won't really see those.

Service automation is a simple calculation of TCO of the automation vs wages, as long as the wages are even marginally lower than the cost of automation there is no point.

I would say tho that while I visit McDonalds maybe 3-4 times a year (I love their fries, even tho you can't get mayo in the UK anymore... because "health and safety") I much rather use the ATM than talk to the person at the counter. They can't hear/understand half of the things you say, and vice versa, orders are often taken wrong, and you some how always get stuck behind a group of 5 people that can't make up their mind.

So all in all they might also get a better customer satisfaction from automated service than from human employees.

<comment><USER8> McDonald's in China (at least in some branches in Shanghai) has automated kiosks for ordering. They're similar to the ones they've had in the UK for a while now, except that they have a way to scan a QR code from your phone's screen (commonly used for WeChat and Alipay payments via QR code).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that the article mentions Democrats. They were the ones who saw the inevitability of automation and tried to make education free to counter it in a real, long term way. The strategy of blaming immigrants instead can apparently win an election in the short term, but technology isn't going away.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here in Austria McD recently installed the second version of ordering machines. The first one was not bad, but it was deployed inconsistently and seemed like a trial run. Now just about every McD has at least 2 of those HUGE terminals with a reasonably responsive and friendly UI. You can order gluten free options, choose ingredients for every dish, and even choose kids' meal goodies (they call that Happy Meal here). It's also integrated with their smartphone apps, so you can order in the car and then just pick it up. At the same time, they restructured many branches' service counters into two sections - one for ordering with an actual human and one for picking up your finished order. And I think they already reduced active staff by 1 or 2 in the process (for most branches).

I have to admit, it makes for a more streamlined process, and your order is always correct (or it's your fault if wrong). One downside is that staff at the takeaway counter is very stressed since there is no switching between tasks - they become handing-out-food-machines.

<comment><USER11> Imagine if you will, a modern cafeteria in one of the 48 US states during the 1950's, back when McDonald's was really just a startup with less than 100 outlets, not universally familiar.

This would be in black & white.

There were already well-established positions as handing-out-food-machines in the cafeteria serving line.

These never have been high-paying jobs, but otherwise over the decades evolving levels of stress would seem to be dependent on benevolence of owners when it comes to balancing the gradual benefits of mass production/automation with their employees.

These were usually very low stress jobs back then, so at one time there was a lot to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The minimum wage is a step function -- if the employee is worth less than the minimum wage, then they get $0; if they are worth the same or even slightly more than the minimum wage, then they get _only_ the minimum wage.

The minimum wage essentially says "It shall be unlawful to employ people if they are worth less than a prescribed amount". If they are unemployable because of the law, then welfare will make them dependent on the state, and it will make sure that they are never fully employed.

These are the real consequences to well-meaning but misguided policy.

<comment><USER13> That's a really interesting way of putting it, and it makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised that those machines are just being set up in the US. We've had them for years here in France at most American fast-food franchises.

</comment><comment><USER15> I go to McDonalds once every 4-6 months or so. A couple weeks ago i noticed the machines and tried them. As an old fart I prefer the human interaction, also the machines seems slower to me to get all the details of the order right. Also I don't like the extra touching a place where everybody is touching (more so in the soda machine where the button is in the same place), seems very unhygienic.

I did ask the manager if the machines meant there were less people working at the location but he told me that no, same employees as before.

</comment><comment><USER16> People seem to think that minimum wages are some left wing idea. They're not. People not earning enough to live cost the state money. They cost it in terms of benefits (believe it or not, the cheaper option) or in terms of law- enforcement and the corrosive effects it has on your society. Paying people below a certain level is tantamount to taking government subsidies.

Where exactly that level is is a matter for debate, but everyone should stop pretending like it's a choice between "tough" and "kind".

<comment><USER17> _Paying people below a certain level is tantamount to taking government subsidies._

And the flip side to that: A minimum wage higher than the market rate, is tantamount to employees taking company subsidies which inevitably is passed on to consumers via higher prices.

<comment><USER16> You won't find any argument from me that higher wages can translate into higher prices. They're separate decisions, but in the case that the principal value comes from the labour, highly linked. So changing the wage of Apple Store staff is unlikely to impact the price of an iPhone too much, whereas I agree a burger is much more likely to be materially affected.

My point is, it doesn't matter what the "market rate" is if the consumer is going to be paying the price anyway, either in terms of taxes or other effects, such as an increased probability of violent crime.

Basically, it's the difference between micro and macroeconomics.

<comment><USER18> Higher wages will translate into higher prices, until you tie wages to executive pay, make it so no executive can take home more than 80X what the average worker in the company makes - Not including salaries of excutives in the tally - then raising wages = raising their own salaries. When executive pay is tied to employees' \-- you'll have surplus because they won't be able to give themselves bonuses or extra pay and will either have to grow the business and hire more employees are just keep it in the company bank vault for a rainy day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> France and Spain have had them for a while, and they're only mildly complicated. Used them twice, no complaints.

Spain has been really eye opening in terms of what's possible in big cities with cost of living. Everything here costs 1 to 3 euros, unless you're eating fancy, in which case 6-12 euros. It's nutty compared to the US. So I'm hesitant to believe we need to raise pay for unskilled, manual labor (no labor?) jobs when we pay so much for basic things (that don't come out of a trade deal or conglomerate pressuring global production to lower its cost with harmful side effects)

That said, they were just protesting in Barcelona against, of all things, tourism. Tourism! You know, the free money a city gets from charging people to stare at a building? Apparently hotel rooms raised property taxes. I'm somewhat of a dunce at tax laws, but I thought the ridiculously high tax rates for hospitality services were meant to help offset this? Either way it sucks that Joe Schmoe can't see the Sagrada Familia, and it sucks that their neighbors can't afford rent. But I think Barcelona is lame, so, meh.

Why don't they just make an app? Seems simpler.

<comment><USER20> > That said, they were just protesting in Barcelona against, of all things, > tourism.

You don't live in Barcelona, isn't? The protests were against the gentrification of the city. People that live or work there are suffering the increase of costs without having any benefit.

<comment><USER21> >People that live or work there are suffering the increase of costs without having any benefit.

 _Some_ people that live or work there are suffering the increase of costs without having any benefit.

On the other hand many entrepreneurs are making millions off the tourism.

<comment><USER20> Yes, there are a lot more entrepreneurs than people that doesn't work in the tourist sector, are you serious?

<comment><USER21> Admittedly my comment was poorly worded and could be easily misunderstood.

I'm saying tourism has opened up huge opportunities for _everyone_. Many are opting to not take advantage of those opportunities, but it feels hard to argue that they don't benefit from tourism.

<comment><USER20> And exactly how someone that works in an office in Barcelona, an elderly or a couple that is looking for a flat can take advantage of those opportunities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I say AMEN -- let's move to automation faster, the faster we get robots and automation the faster we will realize the need for universal basic income.. Bring on the robots so maybe we all can work 30 hours a week so more people can get hours, and have a more productive happier society, and share the leisure that a 75% or higher automated society can bring. There's plenty to go around we can choose to enrich the 80 families at the top, or spread the resources and wealth so everyone can have the necessities of life, and at least a little bit of comfort.

</comment><comment><USER22> It was only a matter of time until fast food chains did this. I'm more shocked that they didn't do it sooner. Ordering in any language, with zero human interaction, I think society is not only primed for it, but in a weird sort of way, looking forward to it. Give it ten years and companies will starting using the fact that they employ actual people as a selling point. "Stop ordering from machines, and enjoy dinner with a real human being." Until they too are replaced by AI humanoids.....

</comment><comment><USER23> Why isn't anybody paying attention to the fact that this is a "fake news" site without so much as a mailing address anywhere on its site?

<comment><USER24> Here's some more info on the World Tribune. Looks like the publisher was at one time associated with the Reverend Moon.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/08/fit-to- print-2](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/09/08/fit-to-print-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >"Soon the McDonald's workers Sanders and Democrats promised would get a "fair living wage" to take customers' orders for Big Macs "will have absolutely no wages at all courtesy of the 'Fight for $15,' " Zero Hedge reported on Jan. 26."

Because even if there were no fight for increasing wages McDonalds wouldn't automate their restaurants

<comment><USER25> They maybe would, but many years later, maybe so many, that it wouldn't even matter. Tons of people would get to keep their jobs for a little (or not so little) longer.

<comment><USER20> And you know that it will by many years later exactly why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps governments shouldn't try so vigorously to make it expensive and legally risky to hire people?

<comment><USER27> Why is this being voted down? It is a simply a restatement of the basic economic concept that when the price of a service goes up the demand will go down. In this case the service is labor.

In general I think labor costs in Europe are higher than the US and the observation in another comment that these sorts of ordering systems are common in Europe doesn't surprise me.

The cost of labor isn't just the hourly wage, but all the associated regulations and liability that surround having a human employee. Changes in minimum wage are just the most visible cost component.

<comment><USER5> Because, as has been pointed out by most of the other comments here, this was going to happen anyway. It didn't really matter that wages went up, other than it potentially hurried it along.

<comment><USER17> _this was going to happen anyway_

As pointed out by other comments here, this is not happening as much in Asia where labor and regulatory costs are lower. The parent comment has a valid point. It's a balance. Higher labor and regulatory costs tilt the scales toward automation.

<comment><USER5> > this is not happening as much in Asia where labor and regulatory costs are > lower.

 _Yet_

It's still going to happen, it just isn't happening as fast. Even if you are paying a person $2 a day, a machine that costs $1 a day, and doesn't need breaks is cheaper.

<comment><USER27> This is true but not very interesting observation.

Machines and humans are not 100% substitutable. There are tradeoffs and cost is just one of those tradeoffs. Humans, for example, are pretty good at improvising when something goes wrong, not so much for machines.

When regulatory policies (including minimum wage rules) raise the cost of labor the tipping point with regard to those tradeoffs switches towards automation. It isn't a universal tipping point though. It will be different for every particular industry and job type and regulatory regime.

While automation is getting better, it is obviously not sufficient to replace humans in all situations. But if the costs of human labor go up (direct costs and indirect regulatory costs), then the tradeoff changes in favor of automation sooner and in more situations.

There is a significant difference between automation that rolls out because it provides a better solution, all other things being equal, and automation that rolls out because the regulatory environment just took human labor out of the running.

I've actually had conversations with party activists regarding the minimum wage where I asked why $15/hour?, why not $20, $25, $50? What was magic about $15? The answer was stunning. They actually wanted to go to $20, $25 or higher giving the argument that that way people would have more money to spend and it would boost the economy. They really and truly believed that there were no consequences to raising the minimum wage. That everything else would stay the same and that workers would simply have more money in their pockets. That amount of economic ignorance is stunning when coming from someone actively involved in state level party politics.

As a final note, when automation isn't available to substitute for labor and the labor costs costs up then the result is simply that the service evaporates. Suddenly there is absolutely no supply for the service/product because the regulatory regime has made it economically infeasible. For example there are businesses leaving or actively avoiding California because the labor regime is too onerous for some economic activity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jeff Atwood is trying to kill me - <AUTHOR> http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/2008/10/Jeff-Atwood-is-trying-to-kill-me.aspx

<comment><USER2> "Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt

</comment><comment><USER3> A handy caveat lector: everything after the "What we say to dogs" comic is completely and entirely useless. I'm not really spoiling a cool story by saying "he was so annoyed by Jeff he didn't hear his tire disintegrating, and blames Jeff".

Still, everything up to that point was pretty funny, and makes me want to listen to the podcast. The guy just needs to learn to edit his posts to cut out all the extraneous crap (and it's really just crap, it's not "well this is only really interesting to a niche audience...").

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratz Jeff. You've made it. Your famous enough that people are trying to get famous by mentioning you.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to stop reading Hacker News! Too many links to rambling posts with no payoff!

</comment><comment><USER6> wtf?

I think he's in love.

</comment><comment><USER7> Im not the "Too long didn't read" kind of guy, honestly! But whoever wrote that sure was trying to kill _me_.</comment>


Facebook Buys Secure Server Technology Provider PrivateCore - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/facebook-buys-secure-server-technology-provider-privatecore/

<comment><USER2> Wow, congratulations! Super exciting given that a PCIe card for doing memory attacks for $30, only mitigated by PrivateCore right now, is being launched at Defcon.

[http://www.nsaplayset.org/slotscreamer](http://www.nsaplayset.org/slotscreamer) (Joe Fitz)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Joe Fitz is working on some malicious active memory prototypes as well. Could be very interesting and scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe they'll open source it.</comment>


Show HN: We made Wcurl – a dialogflow sales bot for LinkedIn automation - <AUTHOR> https://wcurl.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. We built Wcurl as an internal tool after spending hours a day responding to outreach messages on LinkedIn. Our ultimate goal is to automate all outreach-related things up until the first call. We'd love to get your feedback. It is very MVP-ish – we just connected the dots between Slack, LinkedIn and Dialogflow :)

<comment><USER2> Does LinkedIn actually allow this? I thought they didn't allow bots on their platform...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bit of a grey area. But there are other LinkedIn Automation tools already available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome concept

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :) LMK if I can help you understand it. Onboarding still needs a bit of work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What service would you pay $1k/mo for? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If I would have that kind of spare money I'd like to have a private secretary who takes care of all the small things like booking flights, booking hotels, doing taxes, sorting mail, sorting documents, administrating my software licenses and netflix/github/dropbox/... subscriptions, and all those other things.

<comment><USER3> If only you could find a (trustworthy and competent) secretary willing to work full time for $12k/year...

<comment><USER4> That's at 40 hours per week, though. I suspect most people interested in this service could get a lot of headaches dealt with at ~10 hours, which raises the possibility of a PA taking on four clients and making median salary.

That's not going to get your grocery shopping done, but 10 hours/week seems like it would comfortably cover many people's paperwork/bureaucracy hassles.

<comment><USER5> This would be an awesome service. You have your emails auto-forwarded to them, you pay them for 10-14 hrs a week and send them any information you want them to process. Then they prepare daily emails or phone calls for you.

These people could have like 3 or 4 clients a piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently paying $2k a month for a service. I pay Remote Year that sum, and they provide consistent workspaces, living spaces, and travel to a different country every month.

The jury is still out on whether it is actually worth that value; in many of the countries, a workspace membership and acceptable housing can be found for $600-900 / month. They attempt to make up the rest of the value in the community that they provide.

<comment><USER7> Do you stick with the same people each month? Seems like quite a markup to pay for not doing it yourself, and you could use the extra $1-1400 for social activities?

<comment><USER8> Yes, they move the entire cohort together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This will sound a little weird but a food service. I eat mainly organic food and/or local food and always really high quality stuff. I spend over $300/week on myself, my wife, and my toddler-aged daughter.

If someone can figure out a decent (dietary restricted) meal plan and get me the food in a box every week, I would not mind paying that $1K for it (as it would be cheaper than what I currently pay).

A lot of the food box services that are out there currently are either more expensive than the store (and still charge on top of it for the service) or have a super crappy selection, or just not enough food.

There is one service that I continuously used until I moved and dropped $150/week on it and that was Houston's "Rawfully Organic" because it was on par with store prices, really good variety, and awesome community.

<comment><USER10> +1. My family is in the same boat. A good meal planning/delivery service that provides healthy meals with local ingredients where possible would be great. Heck, I would pay the same as my grocery budget now (~1300/mo) just to avoid going to the store.

The biggest factor for us is dietary restrictions. For example, my wife is going through a "elimination" plan right now trying to find what foods are triggering health problems. One ingredient that is off our table is garlic. It is hard finding a variety of meals that don't include garlic. A service would be welcome!

<comment><USER11> Is eliminating certain ingredients the only dietary restrictions in your family?

Currently working on a product (shameless plug: pantryplan.io) which I am currently building dietary restriction into.

Grocery delivery is in the roadmap but just trying to get the "meal planning" bit down first.

<comment><USER10> If you consider dairy an ingredient :P

But yes, For us it is more about allergies than vegan, kosher, etc...

<comment><USER11> Ah okay.

Yeah, lactose intolerance / no dairy is definitely going to be in there. I am lactose-intolerant, my SO is lactose-intolerant plus they are also allergic to gluten, soy and nuts! (I feel so bad for them. :))

Just polling to see what people are more interested in seeing touched.

I likely won't be touching a lot more complex exemptions like vegan or kosher any time soon but I might see if it can be crowd-sourced.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think a early education service for toddlers that has play, projects, STEM etc all built in. Everyone wants the best for their kids and this is one thing many people spend big on. The local Montessori wants $2k a month for full time 5 days a week, but I think there are other opportunities that could be realized with some technical input.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lead/sourcing generation tool with direct dials, cell phones, email (personal and work), for every software developer, senior developer, lead developer, architect, dir of sw development, vp of sw development, CTO, and CEO in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

I would pay a lot of money for a tool that actually works, updates its database, and has companies other than the IBM/mega corporation.

<comment><USER14> Question : If someone starts this type of service , where would they get this data in the first place?

<comment><USER13> They would hire a team of sales/researcher people to call into companies and get this information. That's what the company I currently use does but they are more focused on the IT vertical than software development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A guarantee that, after 6 months of this service (or whatever), I won't be fat anymore.

<comment><USER16> Hire a personal trainer, spend that on the personal trainer and just do what the personal trainer tells you. Even a bad personal trainer will get results if you're spending that sort of money.

<comment><USER15> How do I find a good personal trainer? I've met some and don't know how to distinguish the good from the meh.

I guess for 1k a month I'd want something more than that. I know HOW to workout and eat right...I just don't. I need a willpower pill. :\

<comment><USER4> Honestly, find someone fit, ideally someone who does some kind of competitive athletic, who uses the trainer and recommends them.

Personal trainers can be excellent, but the low end is "dangerously incompetent". The only requirement for starting a service, or getting hired at many gyms, is being buff and knowing how to look competent on some machines. As a result, there are plenty of PTs peddling junk-science nutrition, or giving out plausible-but-harmful workout routines that undervalue stretching or produce dangerous imbalances and overextensions.

Assuming you don't need someone teaching you how to be healthy, though, things get easier. Some trainers focus on education and drop unmotivated clients, but some offer "willpower pill" as a decent chunk of what you're paying for. Knowing that someone expects you at the gym at 7PM, and will pump you up to not bail early, can do a lot of good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would pay that much for a small, private, furnished office within walking distance of my apartment.

I work from home and generally enjoy it. But living and working along side my wife in a small one bedroom apartment in New York City presents its challenges. There are plenty of coworking spaces but none close enough that I can walk to and I refuse to become a slave of the commute. I simply need a tiny room with a door I can close, wifi, a desk and a chair.

<comment><USER18> I thought i was the ONLY one in this exact situation. I moved out to long island. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> An outstanding Bloomberg terminal alternative

<comment><USER20> with a better design /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A good place to live, not much else.

</comment><comment><USER22> A chauffeur.

I currently pay the equivalent of $650/mo to park my car, catch a train, then a subway to get to my office. But the trains are frequently standing room only, delayed, and noisy.

My alternative is to pay around $300/mo to park my car, take a coach, then a subway. The coach is more pleasant (seating! WiFi! Power sockets!) but takes longer due to the various stops around town.

In both cases, the services are infrequent.

When I've worked in India or ZA, it's quite common to have a chauffeur. But that only works with the massive disparity in wages. That's less likely in the industrialised world.

I _could_ rideshare - but that's fraught with risk. I _could_ take a taxi, but that would quadruple my cost.

So, if you can find a way to make autonomous cars work in the UK - and can charge a per-journey fare - let me know!

<comment><USER4> I'm really curious what autonomous cars are going to do to urban planning. The demand for car-fleet services will rise as they become reasonable ways to commute, but that's not the whole story.

Presumably there will be a lot of people who still want to own a car (e.g. for weekend trips), but no longer need to park near their office or a train station. If you have a short commute or predictable schedule, it'd be far easier to just send your car "home", or even pay for remote parking somewhere you _don 't_ live and use it like a privately-owned Uber. Great for reducing parking demand, but with the potential to create a weird reverse-commute of empty cars streaming out of cities just after 9:00AM.

And on a similar note, there's a possibility of more congestion from circling traffic. "I'm just popping into the store quick, drive around empty until I get back". Exactly what someone with a chauffeur might do today, but cheap and easy.

Hell, will we see a HOV-lane-equivalent arise on highways where non-empty cars get priority status? Or a reverse solution, where empty cars are low priority and have to keep right like semis?

...I've completely abandoned your point, but there are _so many questions_! It's going to be fascinating to see how universal-chauffeur traffic works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Analytics, customer support & automated marketing are converging.

I would pay 1k/mo (scaling far higher with volume) for a solution that is implemented by a (reasonably) on-site team over the course of a few weeks that can interact with the various teams responsible to integrate (dev) and use (marketing/support/management) it.

I would sacrifice features, which seems to be the de-facto differentiator in these classes, for a product which supports an opinionated but well thought out product development strategy. One based on the current norms for iterating products based on feedback from customers and funnel data.

\- I work in payments / e-comm

<comment><USER24> I just started using Resend.io, which has all 3 of these features in a simple package. The founder has been responsive and the product keeps improving. I was looking for a simple Intercom replacement, Intercom has become very complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are you asking us as individuals or business owners/leaders? If the later, say so or you will get 90% irrelevant answers.

<comment><USER26> He's asking us as potential customers for his next startup, of course!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anything that gave me a return on that investment.

</comment><comment><USER28> A domestic robot to clean/tidy the house (dishes, laundry, dust, vacuum) + cook at home.

</comment><comment><USER29> A service to fix my chronic back pain. I already spend 1-2k / month on useless physical therapy and alternative medicine.

<comment><USER30> There are real back pain specialists (as in MDs), my brother is one. I herniated a disc in my spine doing deadlifts and also went through useless physical therapy. My brother gave me two injections in my spine it's about 90% better. The pain was so bad I could hardly sit still for more than a couple hours, so it was affecting my work among other things.

Google "back pain specialist" in your area, it's covered by health insurance most of the time. Strangely, back pain specialists have a big patient education problem. Nobody knows they exist even though so many people have back pain.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the recommendation :) Unfortunately I've already seen several physiatrist MDs and gotten 2 epidural injections that didn't help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A full-on nanny. Someone who can take my kids to/from: school, doctor's appointments, activities, prepare/give them food, help with homework if I'm coming back late.

Child rearing takes a lot of your time!

</comment><comment><USER32> I pay this for daycare (actually slightly more).

I also pay about 1/10 of this to membership to a non-profit hackerspace where I have access to a 3d printer, electronics bench, laser cutter, etc.

Other than that... if one of my side project takeoff, I would pay an outsourced programmer to work on my side projects that I don't have time to fix myself. (I'm a programmer myself but there are only so many hours in the day)

</comment><comment><USER33> A service like AirBnB where you can check into any one bedroom apartment nationwide so you can travel and feel like you have a home.

</comment><comment><USER34> Rent. Yup, that's about what I'm paying for rent nowadays. Seriously can't afford another $1k/mo service.

</comment><comment><USER35> A service that can double my income.

</comment><comment><USER36> A Meeseks Box [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUYvIAP3qQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUYvIAP3qQk)

</comment><comment><USER37> Unlimited really good food for 10+ people

<comment><USER38> If it's truly unlimited, you just need really good food for one person.

<comment><USER37> Aw crap. You are totally right. How i distribute the unlimited resource is up to me. :)

Still. A good food service for 1k/month could be a nice business. Lots of dependencies though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anything that allows 500+ users. As an example, Jira cloud monthly is US $1,500 for 501-2000 users.

<comment><USER4> There are a bunch of studies showing that you get weird market distortions at regulatory "cliffs". The classic example is that a company with 49 workers might see marginal profit from a 50th worker, but would suddenly hit the health insurance cutoff. Since insuring all 50 workers is expensive, the value of hiring one more person is massively negative.

...does this happen with B2B software pricing? Jira probably isn't expensive enough, but are there lots of companies doing elaborate limbo to keep their user count for a service just under a pricing threshold?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> slack/hipchat + trello + github/gitlab + jira issues + continuous integration + docker repository rolled into one. All with mobile apps.

i would easily pay you 25 bucks per person.

EDIT : i would start with Phabricators codebase and go from there.

<comment><USER41> Gitlab is closing in on that pretty fast.

<comment><USER42> GitLab doesn't have apps yet, although there are those from other companies like Trident[1]. Other than that, chat is provided by mattermost, and can be enabled in 30 seconds.

All other feature are all already available, right now.

[1] [http://somerobots.com/](http://somerobots.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> individual: child care, higher education that improves career prospects, insurance

business: certain high-end dev environments & tool suites, contract automation

<comment><USER44> I'd pay $1k a month for _quality_ higher education on topics that interest me. My interests have a wide range, but I mostly want to learn math and physics and university classes are too expensive for their quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Daycare.

</comment><comment><USER46> Childcare.

<comment><USER47> Seconded, that would be a good deal around where I live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> i pay 1200 a month for health insurance for me and my wife.

</comment><comment><USER49> Unlimited Uber rides

<comment><USER50> Sounds ridiculously overpriced.

<comment><USER38> I don't know, with unlimited Uber rides I could start a long distance delivery company:

Want to take a taxi from Manchester to London because you hate the train or want to arrive overnight? Fantastic, that'll be £50, even cheaper than taking the train and you don't have to take a taxi from the train station.

Need to same-day-deliver 50 tons of Plywood? Fantastic, I'll order 50 ubers and we'll move it a hundred KG per taxi and have it done by the end of the day, how does £250 sound? Cheap enough?

The power of the word "unlimited" is almost magical. Of course, Uber would go out of business pretty quickly so £1,000 / month wouldn't get them very far, but to me, it doesn't sound too overpriced. I just hope there's no fine-print.

<comment><USER4> "Unlimited", like "arbitrage", is business-speak for "someone is going bankrupt". Hence the sad reality that "unlimited" anything is usually just "a lot".

I remember being pretty disappointed when I learned that deals like "unlimited candy" generally just deliver more candy than is healthy for one person to eat. I also remembering being floored by the story of American Airlines offering actually-unlimited flights for $250,000. And as you point out, that turned out to be a stunningly bad deal for the company.

[http://business.time.com/2012/05/08/the-250000-airline- pass-...](http://business.time.com/2012/05/08/the-250000-airline-pass-that- was-worth-every-penny/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> taxes. oh wait, it's already the case.

</comment><comment><USER52> 10 leads

</comment><comment><USER53> A service that makes me make $2k/mo before pay</comment>


The Most Old School Website My Search Engine Has Crawled - <AUTHOR> http://www.robyndonald.com/ <comment><USER2> Compared to what the web looked like in '95, it's downright modern.

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of search engine is it? Is it public?

<comment><USER4> It looks like there was a Show HN a few weeks ago for it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11783742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11783742)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> that lady rocks... love it!</comment>


Sex with Google Glass - <AUTHOR> http://www.glassandsex.com/ <comment><USER2> "You'll be able to watch your videos for 5 hours until they are deleted forever."

Fixed that for you:

"We'll be able to watch your videos for 5 hours until they are deleted forever."

</comment><comment><USER3> NSA is going to love this. Blackmail with Google Glass?

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/nsa-tracking-online- po...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/nsa-tracking-online-porn-viewing- discredit-radicalizers)

[https://olduvaiblog.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/is-the-nsa- blac...](https://olduvaiblog.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/is-the-nsa-blackmailing- its-overseers-in-washington-washingtons-blog/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think I'd be able to keep from constantly laughing.</comment>


NULL license plate not such a bright idea - <AUTHOR> https://knrs.iheart.com/content/2019-08-12-clever-vanity-license-plate-backfires-on-man-winds-up-with-tons-of-tickets/ <comment><USER3> I read years ago in comp.risks about a similar story. A guy in 1979(!) requested a personalized plate "SAILING", with second choice "BOATING". He didn't want a customized plate if he couldn't get those, so for his third choice he put down "NO PLATE". Of course, he ended up with "NO PLATE". He ended up getting 2500 parking tickets, since cars with no plate had "NO PLATE" written on the ticket.

References: [http://www.mekabay.com/overviews/risks/risks03_1986_06-04-19...](http://www.mekabay.com/overviews/risks/risks03_1986_06-04-1986-10-30.pdf)

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to- bill/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/)

<comment><USER4> I remember a different story where the guy had to fight every ticket in court

<comment><USER5> On the plus side, he could also contest legitimate tickets unless they recorded other information.

<comment><USER6> I managed to do this at my university. I had vanity plates with a design made by my local Australia shire, which had the shire emblem between two parts of the plate. The plate was something like "123ABC" but I'm guessing emblem read as an O, so their scanners saw "123OABC", which was not a plate registered with the uni.

Each day there was a 10-20% chance I would get a ticket on my windshield. I would collect them and take them to the uni security office once a fortnite to have them cancelled in bulk. I actually got pretty friendly with some of the staff there.

At least 4 of them were legitimate tickets because I parked overtime, over a line, etc, but the staff cancelled them anyway (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A colleague used an app's "generate secure password" feature to change their ISP's web portal login - which then also became the WAN router's password - which they didn't realise.

It was about a week before the router dropped its connection and needed to re- authenticate - and that's when I was called in to investigate the loss of connectivity - which Windows 10 very unhelpfully reported as the network cable disconnected and was resetting or power-saving on the NIC so the "link active" LED on the switch was going out for about 2 secs every 10 sec. Cue a round of cable and switch swapping to no benefit. The LEDs for all other devices on the switch (running Linux and mostly internal servers) were behaving normally.

I finally backtraced to the router and a useful error message. We put two-and- two together and my colleague called up the auto-saved details in their password manager; it was long, and ALL non-alpha numeric characters - <USER2> with a backtick, which the router would not accept. I tethered my phone to my laptop and tried to login to the Web account portal - which would NOT accept the passphrase. I tried it without the backtick "just in case" \- nope.

We had to do a "lost password" reset on the portal..and wait for the email with link.

Lessons learned:

The ISP's password change page did not seem to validate input, but the login page did.

Avoid backticks in passwords.

<comment><USER8> >Avoid backticks in passwords.

Is there even a reason to include special characters in passwords? They add 10% more security[1] but cause all sorts of issues with systems. Just use an alphanumeric password that's 10% longer, and if special characters are mandatory, use a safe character at the end like _ or -.

[1] 6.55 bits per character (all printable ascii characters) rather than 5.95 (only alphanumeric)

<comment><USER9> > 10% more security (6.55 vs. 5.95 bits per character)

That's not how this works. By your logic having a password consisting of 1,2,3,4 is only twice as secure as having just 1,2.

<comment><USER10> That's absolutely how bits of entropy work.

<comment><USER9> That's most definitely not how security works. The strength of your password is _not_ proportional to the number of bits of entropy it has.

<comment><USER11> The way you're phrasing this may be misleading.

The strength of a password / passphrase increases with the power of 2 raised to the bits of entropy.

That's an exponential proportion, rather than a linear one. But a proportion all the same.

Example:

Given mixed-case alphanumeric (62 characters) and an 8-character password length, the number of combinations is:

        62^8 = 218,340,105,584,896 (keyspace -- 218 quadrillion)
        l(62^8)/l(2) = 47.6 (bits of entropy)

A 10 character password (if randomly chosen from the same character set) has 10^17 possibly combinations (about 4,000x more), and 59.4 bits of entropy, 11.8 bits more. 2^11 = 2048.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was a foolhardy college student I figured out that if the cited vehicle make on my city parking ticket didn't match my registration, I could get appeal the ticket via a web form very easily and succeed every time.

Naturally I removed the badges from my car and put on different badges from another manufacturer. After a while they started to cite me as "other" and the trick no longer worked.

<comment><USER13> All we had to do was register our cars in each others names. When I was married, my car was registered to her and vice versa. The redlight/photoradar laws in my state required that the company operating the devices had to match the pic of the driver violating the law, to the pic of the registered owner via the license plate. If they couldn't match them, no ticket was issued as you can't prove who was driving. That's probably changed now that a lot of DMV's are doing facial scans with datapoints. They probably just scan the whole DMV DB now to find the driver. Wear a mask.

<comment><USER14> Where i am from the ticket is issued to the vehicle owner, doesn't matter who was driving. On the plus side it means that you can get a photoradar ticket for driving 300km/h and not lose your licence, just pay the fine.

P.S. If the driver must be recognized does it mean that motorcyclists are exempt from photoradar fines?

<comment><USER10> I thought that motorcycles already didn't really show up on the photoradar scanners. That's the way it is here, but I can totally see that being a jurisdiction by jurisdiction thing.

<comment><USER14> Here it is easier to avoid getting a photo with motorcycle because there are places where it targets front plate. If photoradar targets back plate then you will get a ticket for a motorcycle just like any car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office. Sometimes we find success by prepending the necessary number of zeros, before the VIN. Other instances in the same system require appending zeros after the VIN. The true VIN has a hyphen but that never makes it into the DMV's system. One time I got stuck in a particularly nasty loop where the DMV mailed over thirty notices claiming the register would expire on 01/01/0000.

<comment><USER16> >I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office.

I have a similar problem with my own identity. I was born in Canada's smallest province, PEI, and now live in its largest, Ontario. Some Ontario government software seems to have problems recognizing the relatively low numbers on PEI birth certificates.

<comment><USER17> Which numbers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tangentially related somewhat-common bug: YAML files will interpret the literal 'no' as boolean false if it's not quoted, instead of as a string.

Many developers have wondered why, when they stuck country-specific configurations in a YAML file, that things suddenly stopped working when they expanded support for Norway.

<comment><USER19> I always felt Yaml is far too complicated of a format for storing hierarchical data. JSON is too simple (no comments; hard to store multi-line strings).

HCL, the hierarchical data storage language used by Terraform, is the closest thing I've seen to a happy medium between JSON and Yaml.

Another option, if the string values are not multi-line, is CommentJSON (use the Python module or write 10 lines of code that strips out comments from JSON if using another language).

<comment><USER20> Both a bare > and a sequence of 3 quotes are invalid in JSON, so it should be really simple to add multi-line strings wither Python or Perl style.

<comment><USER21> The Hjson format does this: [https://hjson.org/](https://hjson.org/). It's just JSON plus syntax sugar such as // comments and '''multiline strings'''.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of the story of Ireland's worst Polish driver who never got caught: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171.stm)

<comment><USER23> I've also heard a similar story of a Finnish man who got a ticket in the UK, and on closer inspection found his name on the ticket listed as Mr. Ajokortti Körkort. Thats "driver's licence", first in Finnish, then Swedish, and is written at the top of the driver's license card.

That said, I find these stories a little hard to credit, since you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard EU driver's license layout.

<comment><USER24> I once had a BevMo cashier in California ask me, "Massachusetts? Is that in Canada?"

Very little faith left.

<comment><USER25> I once had a cab driver take me to MIT. Cab driver: "what is this place?" Me: "MIT" Cab driver: "what's MIT?" Me: "the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Cab driver: "what's Massachusetts?"

<comment><USER26> I had a cab driver in New York who was unable to take me to the Brooklyn Bridge.

<comment><USER27> Possibly didn't want to take you into Brooklyn. The Manhattan side isn't really walkable.

<comment><USER26> I was already on the Brooklyn side. But the issue was literally that he had no idea what the Brooklyn Bridge was, not the precise drop-off location. (We just wanted to look around Dumbo for a bit.)

<comment><USER27> Wow! Hard to think of a more iconic landmark in that case.

<comment><USER25> Someone else is probably out there complaining a cab driver wouldn't give them a ride to the Statue of Liberty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a family member who's license plate started with "&". The DMV accepts it, plates were ordered online fine, but police systems can't handle it apparently, to my family members ultimate discomfort. I commonly joke it probably gets the individual out of automated tickers for speeding and red lights, but when an officer pulls them over we sometimes need to explain that the "&" is dropped in the system (or so we've been told) and that seems to clear up issues

<comment><USER29> I sometimes see California tags with a heart character in them. Does anyone know if those considered part of the number, or are they just ignored as decoration?

<comment><USER30> They're a special vanity style plate in CA. They probably just are ignored/not entered when searching. [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/online/elp/elp](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/online/elp/elp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I love when people double down out of principle, when the only person getting hurt is themselves.

He refuses to change it because he did nothing wrong...sure, but you are also the only one being hurt by it. Is this really the hill to die on?

<comment><USER32> Die on?

But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.

<comment><USER33> On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code ( _insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code_ ) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.

<comment><USER34> The problem is it's a "a privately operated citation processing center" that's causing the problem. They might even be instructed to hand-enter a NULL for these cases.

I'm don't really see an incentive for the govt agency to do anything about it. It's no skin off their nose. They'll just keep sending the tickets.

<comment><USER35> Don't you have some kind of illegal prosecution laws? In my home country people could go to jail for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There was a similar issue in California where, in the days before on-line choosing of vanity plates, you would give three choices. One guy couldn't come up with a third option so he wrote "NO PLATE" and ended up with that as his plate with similar results. Snopes has the story:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to- bill/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Earlier this summer I decided that I'd found a loophole and ordered 'N0 TAG' and 'N0NE' (zeros) for my motorcycles. The license plate font doesn't distinguish between 0 and O but the computers seem to account for visually similar characters -- I could not order the same plates with Os after they'd issued.

Haven't caught anyone else's tickets so far. SunPass won't accept 'N0 TAG' being associated with my transponder tho (have not tried 'N0NE' yet).

I did get pulled over on my very first ride with 'N0 TAG' and the first words out of the cop's mouth were 'Is that tag legit?' That may or may not have been a factor in catching a warning instead of a ticket that I absolutely earned.

<comment><USER38> Lol. Third vehicle should have _N0 L1C_

<comment><USER39> P0L 1CE

<comment> dfeojm-zlib FUZZ 5 0

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Related, for those who missed it the last time it was here on HN, the tales of Christopher Null, who has an unfortunate surname: [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/) , and Jennifer Null , [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that- brea...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break- computer-systems) , likewise.

<comment><USER41> Much-needed Outline.com of the wired.com article: [https://outline.com/WMzjYK](https://outline.com/WMzjYK)

<comment><USER42> It seems meaningful to me that the wired website works (sort of; the left margin is 1/3 of my screen) with JavaScript disabled, and outline doesn't work at all.

<comment><USER41> If there were a better alternative I'd gladly use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude I once had a product owner for a student/university web app who complained that for a particular user, their lastname was displayed as 'None'.

This was a Python project and the product owner apparently already had learned 'None' equals NULL.

I dug into the file which we used to import the users from and discovered the user's lastname actually was 'None'.

<comment><USER43> Maybe it could be added to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about names: [https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods- programmers...](https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names-with-examples/)

<comment><USER44> Now, was it a case of number 20 and they were required to enter _something_ , or was it actually legally None?

[https://www.houseofnames.com/none-family- crest](https://www.houseofnames.com/none-family-crest)

<comment> the-dude Maybe the case. However, this was an international student org and the student was from Africa.

We assumed it was correct and did not dig to the bottom.

Whatever the truth was, I could close the ticket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Years ago (in the late 90's or early aughts) when ordering vanity plates online became a thing, I got approved for the plate "127.0.0.1". This was a California or NC plate- can't remember as I lived in both states. I checked the mailbox excitedly every day like Ralphie from A Chrismas Story for my uber cool plate. When I finally did get something from the DMV, it was too small to be a license plate and was simply a note that said "Sorry, your requested plate conflicts with a motorcycle plate, so we have to deny your request." Huge bummer, but I guess 127.0.0.1 becomes 127001 in their systems.

</comment><comment><USER46> Could someone devise a SQL injection attack using a custom-made license plate? I'm imagining someone printing up

      x'; DROP TABLE drivers; --

on a plate, and driving up and down the highway past automated license-plate readers.

<comment><USER47> Ah little Bobby drivers ...

<comment><USER48> It always makes me so happy to see a "little Bobby tables we call him" reference when data inputs are discussed!!!

I will assume that we are all aware of the Exploits of a Mom, but just in case we have anyone reading this that doesn't already appreciate XKCD: [https://www.xkcd.com/327/](https://www.xkcd.com/327/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is funny. I wonder what would happen if you could put a 'NOT ' in front of your plate number... would everyone but you get a ticket?

<comment><USER36> Nah, because it's not unsanitized SQL at fault, but people writing a literal NULL in the license plate field when there isn't one.

<comment><USER50> I wonder, what will "DROP *;" license plate do?

<comment><USER51> Probably can't do special characters, but maybe ASCII (0x23) will let you get around it.

<comment><USER52> 0x3b so your plate is just ";" in some systems, maybe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I presume this is already on thread but Irish police conducted a manhunt for serial traffic offender "Prawo Jazdy" \- till they realised that was "Driving License" in Polish

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/47...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/4732923/Prawo- Jazdy-Identity-of-Irelands-most-notorious-driver-uncovered.html)

<comment><USER54> I need to change my name to that

<comment><USER53> Guarenteeing you get chased for hundreds of other people's Traffic violation fines?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I recently saw a car with a license plate of B8B88BB8 (or something to that effect) that I am almost certain the owner chose to make it hard to read and transcribe correctly by either humans or computer vision systems.

I was honestly kind of impressed.

<comment><USER56> I read that someone tried to register a license plate with a random sequence of Os and zeros (e.g. "OO0O00"). Unfortunately, it worked too well because the person doing data entry at the DMV ordered him a plate with all Os. :)

<comment><USER38> Or all 1's, L's and I's with a license plate frame that "accidentally" covers up the differentiating marks. >:)

PS: Reminds me, I should get one of those LPR T-shirts with license plates all over it.

<comment><USER57> [https://xkcd.com/1105/](https://xkcd.com/1105/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Droogie contacted the DMV who told him to change his plate. He refused because he didn't do anything wrong. While they wiped the fines off his record, unfortunately for him, they didn't fix the problem in the system so once again, Droogie has accrued another $6,000 in tickets"

So wait, after he knew this was the outcome from using this plate he just decided 'nope, the DMV will definitely rectify this error'? Maybe he has a much higher tolerance for dealing with the DMV than I do, but surely there are far more productive ways to spend your time than constantly battling against invalid tickets. Additionally, I would be concerned about not being able to waive some of these tickets at some point and actually having to pay them,6k isn't exactly an insignificant amount and could also really impact insurance rates.

<comment><USER59> Its a matter of principle though. Droogie hasn't done anything wrong, and is receiving fines due to errors made by the DMV.

You're right that when faced with a choice between acting on principle vs acting pragmatically/for one's own benefit/convenience/need, people often don't have the luxury of (or patience for) choosing the former. But it's nice to see when someone does.

<comment><USER60> > Droogie hasn't done anything wrong

That's arguable, actually. The article states, but doesn't provide evidence, that Droogie "hoped it might confuse automatic license plate readers or the DMV's ticketing system".

If this was done in an attempt to evade enforcement of existing laws, then sorry: that's a crime, folks. You aren't allowed to pen test live systems!

<comment><USER61> Why would that be a crime? Intent is irrelevant. The crime is that the DMV is running shit code that is wrongly accusing people of crimes.

<comment><USER60> Intent is absolutely relevant in criminal law. The phrase "with the intent of" or "for the purposes of" appears everywhere in the field. Go browse through the quoted text of the CFAA here and see what you can find: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

I'm not interested in getting involved in a philosophical discussion about whether anarchic hacking "should" be a crime. I'm saying that given the text of that article, an enterprising prosecutor could probably get a conviction for one.

Don't fuck with other people's systems. Even (and especially) when they're running shit code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This post has way too much traction to flag now but I wish we didn't have sites like this that take a bit of admittedly interesting content from elsewhere and repost it with an infinite scroll of spammy ads.

Seems to be a clever technique here too, ending the article with what seems like a non-ending, so the user will keep scrolling.

If I remembered where the original content was I'd post it, or had a desktop/laptop browser to search with right now, I'd post a link, but I don't. I just remember having read a much better article about this in the past.

</comment><comment><USER63> Stan, are you in here?

My buddy Stan registered for firstname.lastname@example.com back in the early 2000s so you could link sms to email delivery. Wound up with so. many. text messages. Reminders to take medicine, personal convos, sports results, everything.

Was great fun to read while waiting for class.

</comment><comment><USER64> Similarly I used to wonder how awful it would have been to own example.com ... until I found out it was an IANA special-use domain.

But someone still owns test.com, and I can't imagine what that mail server goes through.

<comment><USER65> Not unlike whoever gets all the email at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Source article: [https://mashable.com/article/dmv-vanity-license-plate-def- co...](https://mashable.com/article/dmv-vanity-license-plate-def-con- backfire/)

</comment><comment><USER67> Similarly don't get 'none', 'no plate', or 'na' :-)

It would be cool if you could do punctuation so you cloud get "'; drop table;" alas little Bobby Droptables will likely never get that plate. :-)

I did see a plate "I<heart>0X45" which was a cute nerd joke, I expect that would be more difficult to get these days.

</comment><comment><USER68> I recently bought a *.ninja domain name and started using it for my personal email address. Probably 20% of the time, when I try to sign up for a service it gets rejected by web forms that have been hardcoded to check for traditional top-level domains.

<comment><USER69> Oh you think that's bad? My email address ends in that most exotic of domains, .net

I find websites that won't accept it because they think it's an invalid address all the time. I have no idea what logic they're using, would love to find out.

<comment><USER70> Interesting. I have a country topdomain email and never had problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> If I recall correctly, this comes up a lot with null.com too with respect to emails, etc. I think there was even an HN post about all the email@example.com emails collected by someone.

</comment><comment><USER72> Let's talk about one specific thing from the article:

>Things started to go awry when he first registered the tags. He tried typing in his license plate but the DMV website wouldn't accept it.

Let's talk about the fact that the DMV website wouldn't accept it. Do you think this is all right behavior on the part of the DMV website?

It's really interesting because if you're coding up the DMV web site, it makes sense to disallow NULL just as a preventative measure, like not allowing '\-- in a query (to prevent SQL injection attacks.)

I would generally think that on the whole you should accept -- as a substring in a password. But is it wrong programming if you don't allow that substring?

Disallowing it could cause someone's chosen password to fail, so they have to change it for you to accept the password they want, but if you know for sure that you use sql as part of processing passwords you might well decide that it is acceptable to make people have to try a new password before you'll accept theirs, in case you are not confident that you are escaping everything correctly.

So from my end it seems okay to do something like disallow NULL.

If you consider the choice of the programmer on DMV's web site, what do you think about their choice to reject this input, even though in fact it turned out to be legitimate? Is it acceptable programming practice?

<comment><USER73> I don't believe this is acceptable. By any modern sane best practice, the word NULL in a string from a web form (where your input is basically by definition a string) is a string like any other

Blocking -- in a string does not prevent SQL injection attacks. Using proper parameterised queries does. This might sound mildly hostile but "you are not confident that you are escaping everything correctly" \- when this is a well defined and solved problem - means you should not be building this application as you're too incompetent to. For the millions of taxpayer money wasted on this kind of thing, it is absurd.

Blacklisting keywords used in XSS is also completely futile, pointless, useless, and does nothing but piss off users that can no longer use anything containing the word log or window or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Bobby Tables started school in 2007, so he'd be around 17 today, seems about right.

</comment><comment><USER75> That's a bit curious though. If the code relies on a magic value, you'd think it's in order to skip trying to get data it doesn't have, like the address of the unidentifiable cars.

Even if NULL then does have this address attached, why does it take the branch where it looks for the data?

I suppose it would be in a relational DB, perhaps there's a join that drops missing entries, but if they aren't missing they show up?

<comment><USER76> The code doesn't rely on a magic value, the humans have decided that an empty value will be typed, by hand, into their terminals as the characters "NULL".

The problem is that the employees with access to the system are required to enter a 'valid' value. But in some cases there is no value. So the 'valid' value they've come up with is the string "NULL" \- they can't use "~~NULL~~" because ~ isn't allowed on a license plate. So because A) anyone can request a valid value on a plate, and B) nonce values must also be "valid" within the system, the tax payer is capable of ordering a nonce value on a plate.

<comment><USER77> >the humans have decided that an empty value will be typed, by hand, into their terminals as the characters "NULL"

Almost certainly because of software constraints, like the form not allowing the plate number field to be blank.

<comment><USER76> Yeah, I addressed that:

>employees with access to the system are required to enter a 'valid' value.

<comment><USER77> ... did you edit that second line in after the fact, or am I losing it?

<comment><USER76> I did not edit that in. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I bricked my profile page on Zomato, There is(was) a feature where you can choose a custom URL for your profile page, I chose something which already was a valid URL for them. Now when i click on "my profile", it goes to "[https://www.zomato.com/genjs"](https://www.zomato.com/genjs") . I can't edit anything in my profile now.

</comment><comment><USER79> Seems like a brilliant idea to me, hopefully it forces them to fix their shitty software. I would chip in to crowdfund this guy's battle for sure.

</comment><comment><USER80> Danny White, a resident of Washington, DC, had a similar problem: his vanity license plate read "NO TAGS", which happens to be what police there put down in the license plate slot for missing plates.

[https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox- b-d&q=danny+whi...](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox- b-d&q=danny+white+no+tags)

</comment><comment><USER33> This kind of thing makes me question how tightly we couple (or fail to couple) the "code of Law" to the "code of Computers".

</comment><comment><USER81> The same issue is seen on social networks that identify users by their usernames: - before it was suspended, twitter.com/null had just 2 tweets, but over 70K followers: [http://archive.is/Dt6af](http://archive.is/Dt6af).

</comment><comment><USER82> I have a friend who told me his story enrolling in his university. He's a German national who grew up in Spain. I'm going to call him Andres Schmidt, as the actual name is not relevant.

In Spain, people normally have two surnames, one from the mother and one from the father (no, it doesn't exponentially grow with generations :D). He had issues enrolling in uni, as the system required two surnames so he ended up with "Andres Schmidt Schmidt". He had issues down the road as well, having to explain himself every time he needed to register for something. I think the student id was also a hash which included the name and he hadn't been consistent with his "full" name in all systems.

</comment><comment><USER83> See also, the person who had the personalized license plate "NO PLATE" (and similar).

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to- bill/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/)

</comment><comment><USER84> Moral of the story: Test at your own risk!

At least his story brings to light the poor quality of software the DMV is using.

I'm curious about the other, unintended consequences of naming things null in other web applications; maybe its time to explore ...

</comment><comment><USER85> The interesting question this article poses is whether there's a system in place for the government to revoke vanity plates it's already approved. Can they force him to change the plate?

<comment><USER86> They usually can, and various states have before.

<comment><USER87> My favorite such revocation: [https://jalopnik.com/virginia-dmv-revokes- worlds-greatest-li...](https://jalopnik.com/virginia-dmv-revokes-worlds- greatest-license-plate-5724684) (Virginia's "EATTHE" Children First plate)

I think they should have been allowed to keep it, frankly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I never understand how these sorts of bugs happen - is the database something like:

        plate VARCHAR(8) NOT NULL DEFAULT "NULL"

Or rather the type is actually Option<String>:

        plate VARCHAR(8) NULL DEFAULT NULL

In which case, how is it the software can't tell the difference between Some("NULL") and None()?

The only thing I can think of is the software (or it's database driver) handles everything in strings; so None() and Some("NULL") both get converted to "NULL"?

<comment><USER89> Based on the description in the article, it's a separate system that is actually entering "NULL" in the license plate string field, probably for things like red light camera violations. Chances are it's a human doing this according to a procedure or the system is setup to require entry of some text in the field, so they have to enter something and opted for "NULL" if the actual plate is unreadable / unreliable / not present. This is unfortunately how a lot of things in the real world work, especially on legacy systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> It would seem to me that issuing frivolous citations to a man who has not actually broken the law is a violation of the general prohibition against unreasonable fines and punishment.

</comment><comment><USER91> For those interested, you can find the slides for the presentation here: [https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/DEF%20CON%2027%20pre...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/DEF%20CON%2027%20presentations/DEFCON-27-droogie- go-null-yourself.pdf)

This article is garbage and a lot of the discussion here revolves around the spin and emphasis on facetious scenarios I mentioned in the presentation

</comment><comment><USER92> I don't know how being able to put any random word in the plate can even work. Always found it funny in movies and thought it was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER93> Do any states allow emojis on plates. I saw a red heart recently. ButI don't know if that was the license number or the background.

</comment><comment><USER94> I've seen several combinations of B's and 8's - like "8B88B8". Wonder how effective they are at confusing plate readers.

<comment><USER95> It would be the same as having a single 8, but I guess it's not a problem or plate readers wouldn't be in use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> > He refused because he didn't do anything wrong.

Cool the DMV fixed it. Just try that with so called "identity theft"

</comment><comment><USER97> Reminds me of myself: when gmail came out I got my name@gmail

The name is my 6 letter last name.

I've received thousands of emails from random people. There are so many letter.name or number.name similar addresses that I'm constantly getting very personal emails of other people (deaths, marriages, invoices, business reports, etc)

</comment><comment><USER98> Reminds me of a recent groceries delivery to my home. I had ordered online the day before and had some trouble filling in the form but managed to validate it anyway.

The delivery man called to tell me my address was incorrect. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me it said 'Null Null Null Null'.

</comment><comment><USER99> I've got AFK plates... makes it super easy to remember :-P

A couple of cars in my city have plates like "0O00OO" or "BB88B8B"

One guy that I've seen driving near my place has two cars both with variations of "11ll11l" Both the same make and model and color.

I really dont think this will help him much.

</comment><comment><USER100> This wouldn't be a problem if people wrote programs in languages that have _proper type systems_ that can correctly classify failure.

I'm thinking of types such as Maybe/Option or Either.

I hate it for example when a C/C++ function has to return a -1 in case of failure.

</comment><comment><USER101> The Wired article is better [https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate- landed-one-ha...](https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one- hacker-ticket-hell/)

</comment><comment><USER102> Actually, it was brilliant because it pointed out how flawed the system is, that it can be passively broken or circumvented. This could be used to invalidate all citations that were issued from agencies using that software.

</comment><comment><USER103> Well that's what happen when you use a special value that's actually not that special and is part of the valid values domain.

If they had to use a string (and I doubt they had to), they could at least have used the empty string.

</comment><comment><USER104> LOL! Can we have a new subcategory on HN for comic relief stuff like this! :)

</comment><comment><USER105> I rather think that it _did_ work. Or, at least, if he continues being successful having tickets for "NULL" dropped. Because any tickets he actually gets will be to "NULL".

</comment><comment><USER106> >Apparently, when they didn't have the right data for a vehicle, a privately operated citation processing center used the word NULL in the license plate field for many tickets.

>used the word NULL

Oh god, I feel faint.

</comment><comment><USER107> I would think a cease and desist, followed by a lawsuit, would clear things up very fast.

BTW, California has a problem with issuing both plates with 0 (zero) and O (letter) in them. They both look the same.

</comment><comment><USER108> I have named my phone "Null Pointer Excpetion" whenever I connect my phone to friend's Bluetooth they immediately scream- "oh look! null pointer excpetion!"

</comment><comment><USER109> Is this actually possible? Aren't strings at least surrounded by quotation marks ('NULL') while NULL isn't?

<comment><USER110> It's not a database sanitization issue. The problem is that for cars that don't have a plate or the plate wasn't entered for whatever reason, in some cases people were entering "NULL" (the string). That then ended up matching his plate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I once saw a parked BMW and the plates were the current day of the week and date. I am still scratching my head over that one.

</comment><comment><USER112> update Table set LicensePlate = 'NOPLATES' where LicensePlate = 'NULL';

</comment><comment><USER113> The case for stronger type systems for layman programmers in an easily understood parable.

</comment><comment><USER114> Great idea. Any cop writing you up and any traffic cam will suffer segmentation fault.

</comment><comment><USER115> That's the closest way yet that I've seen Little Bobby Tables come to life :D

</comment><comment><USER116> Confusing the _value_ NULL for a non-null string-sequence which says "NULL" shows the clear sign of a system where no data can be assumed to hold any integrity.

These bugs and categories of errors should simply not be possible in sane languages or frameworks.

<comment><USER117> That's not what's happening at all please reread.

> Apparently, when they didn't have the right data for a vehicle, a privately > operated citation processing center used the word NULL in the license plate > field for many tickets. Since that just happens to be Droogie's license > plate, he got all of them.

So it's 'confusing' the string NULL used incorrectly (kind of, it's fine under the assumption that no one will have the license plate NULL but that assumption is wrong) with the string NULL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Sounds like it worked. He can now accrue tickets without penalty.

</comment><comment><USER51> There's a lot of interesting options. How about NaN NaN?

<comment><USER119> Or "[object Object]"

<comment><USER120> Can you have brackets in license plate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like my new vanity license plate:

 _DROP DATABASE;_

</comment><comment><USER121> Stories like these and the bobby droptables xkcd are the reason I ended up with this plate, [https://i.imgur.com/O7KEFrn.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/O7KEFrn.jpg) It gets a lot of compliments and attention even if most people don't know what "null" is

</comment><comment><USER122> Should use nullptr :P

<comment><USER123> i guess nil wouldn't work either - it probably worked because of sql NULL keyword. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(SQL)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_\(SQL\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Hahahaha best thing I've read all day.

</comment><comment><USER125> It sounds like a bright idea to me.

</comment><comment><USER126> NULL strikes again, this time IRL!

<comment><USER127> This time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> Ah yes, we call him Bobby Nulls.

</comment><comment><USER129> Guess I should FOIA the DMV to find out what my state's default value is.

<comment><USER83> These tickets were issued by a privately operated citation processing center.

<comment><USER129> My state doesn't allow for private companies to automatically mail you a ticket but requires an officer pull you over and cite you.

<comment><USER52> In any state private companies' tickets don't count since they aren't issued by an officer of the court. You can just straight up ignore red light camera tickets.

<comment><USER129> > You can just straight up ignore red light camera tickets.

How does that work? They send you a ticket you're under no obligation to pay or otherwise respond to? What's the incentive?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> So this guy doesn't have to pay parking tickets anymore right?

</comment><comment><USER131> Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

</comment><comment><USER132> This reminds me of the bit that mentions that St. Peter has a list of questions he asks people at the Pearly gates. Among them he asks, "Did you have a vanity plate?"

</comment><comment><USER133> This is clearly an entirely fake anecdote. Show me a pic and change my mind.

<comment><USER134> It's been blogspammed.

There's photo evidence in the much better article at [https://mashable.com/article/dmv-vanity-license-plate-def- co...](https://mashable.com/article/dmv-vanity-license-plate-def-con- backfire/) from the DEFCON talk.

<comment><USER133> OK, a screenshot of a list of tickets. An 8-year old could create that in Excel. A photo of the license plate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> There are ways to properly sanitize inputs these days so NULL becomes "NULL" (string), BUT also tons of systems moved into JSON format assuming its safe. It is not. JSON is not binary safe and there are tons of unicode chars that will break JSON. I was once overseeing system that people would bring down all the time by registering usernames that the app could not properly sanitize and they in return were breaking JSON format to the halt of the whole system. I should not admit but using same chars I myself broke few youtube channels when comments and votes were working in JSON format themselves without properly removing unsafe char codes. Good times.

<comment><USER136> No, it's not the JSON format that is broken - it's the parser you use for JSON that is broken.

<comment><USER135> Well not me. More like large vast of websites used to or still have. The assumption was all I need is JSON and it will properly format data during exchange.

<comment><USER136> Then you would be surprised it also doesn't handle big integers well in JavaScript, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> This isn't even a coding error, NULL is apparently valid license plate, and for some reason there is a private processing center typing it in to the government system.

First of all they are accidentally committing fraud (libel?) against this guy. But more importantly, why is there a private processing center? Don't the officers type this in as they fill out the ticket? or even just scan the plates? If there aren't plates on the vehicle it should be towed or booted. What is the point of recording tickets with no plates? Is the processing center paid per ticket recorded?

<comment><USER138> It's not fraud or libel, it's an unavoidable problem with in-band signalling [1].

I assume the government entry system doesn't have an explicit way to set the data as missing, so they work around it like this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In- band_signaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-band_signaling)

<comment><USER139> Guess they should have used the Maybe monad!

<comment><USER140> They'd type in: Just "NULL"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER141> Shout out to all the Python programmers from the other frontpage thread who are responsible for bugs like this with their crappy scripting languages.

<comment><USER142> Crappy code can be written in any language, see all of the CVEs in C code, even when written by experts.

As surprising as it may be, bad code is often written by bad programmers. It doesn't matter what language you use if you write bad code.

<comment><USER141> But scripting languages make it especially easy to do so. That doesn't mean people who use them are bad programmers. They just chose a bad tool.

<comment><USER142> And php makes it easier than python, but it isn't a scripting language. Your original point is still invalid.

Alternatively, some amazing tooling has been written in these "terrible" scripting languages. Instagram was sold for a billion dollars and was a glorified Python Django webapp ontop of a Postgres database.

I got in a similar debate with a coworker recently over some go code he wrote. He told me that go code didn't need full unit tests because the compiler checked for bugs. Amusingly, he swapped the order of two int arguments in a pull request literally an hour after our discussion. I pointed out how a unit test would have prevented the production regression he caused, and then he started writing tests for his changes. So yet again, scripting languages have nothing to do with "good" or "bad" code. It is all about good vs bad developers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump Supporters Score Higher on Verbal Ability Tests - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2020/01/30/trump-supporters-verbal-ability/ <comment><USER2> I picked three of those questions and had a look at the actual data on the GSS Data Explorer:

[https://imgur.com/1tL4cPt](https://imgur.com/1tL4cPt)

[https://imgur.com/PhbXNqG](https://imgur.com/PhbXNqG)

[https://imgur.com/3efeYtU](https://imgur.com/3efeYtU)

Let's just say it's very difficult to draw the same conclusions as this article here - small sample size, inconsistent results, etc.

The actual results I found for EARTHSUN's choices "Earth around sun" and "Sun around earth" are 76.5% correct for the Clinton camp and 76.7% correct for the Trump camp. Technically still in line with one conclusion of that article, but a single respondee answering differently would have changed that outcome.

<comment><USER3> I think the author's hypothesis is

> Even without looking at the data, it would be surprising if there were any > VERY LARGE differences in intelligence between the average Trump supporter > and the rest of the general public.

Which the data does seem to suggest. The sample size is sufficient for statistical significance, though I would say the difference in intelligence is not likely significant

Which gets back to the author's point, that the perception espoused by CNN anchors, claiming Trump supporters are significantly less intelligent, is incorrect.

> In this essay, I analyzed the results of over 30 questions from 22 different > representative national surveys, involving over 20,000 respondents. Not one > of the questions I examined here supports the idea that Trump supporters are > significantly less knowledgeable than Clinton supporters, and some of them > point to small or moderate differences in the opposite direction. The idea > that there are very large differences in intelligence or knowledge here is > implausible without strong evidence.

<comment><USER4> What's sad is this SHOULD BE OBVIOUS to anyone that's be emotionally detached from politics. It's the same people on both sides, just tribalism skews that the other side must be idiots.

I don't think the people opposite from me are stupid, just a different viewpoint than my own. That viewpoint comes from their experiences and their environment that is different than mine, that's totally fine, until they insist that I need to live like they do.</comment></comment></comment>


[Not Tech] Current Events – Gaza Mushroom Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weeRDGfnixo

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what that is, let's hope for mankind it wasn't a nuke.

<comment><USER3> Be realistic. What's the likelihood it's a bomb vs the likelihood of propaganda ?

<comment><USER2> Good point.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Archive is ending its free books program - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/books/internet-archive-national-emergency-library-coronavirus.html <comment><USER3> The decision to do what they did is mind boggling.

I can only assume they were caught up in the atmosphere of unknown that was COVID... and somehow decided that their actions made sense.

It was poor judgment executed on a huge scale that potentially puts the whole Internet Archive at risk.

I would love to have been able to hear what the discussions were surrounding that decision and if / how they dealt with the obvious objection of "hey guys this is illegal".

<comment><USER4> They published a blog post explaining why they saw this as legal, and at the least it doesn't seem as clear cut as you imagine.

<comment><USER5> The original model (lending out one digital copy per physical copy held) has merit [0]. It's called "controlled digital lending."

The issue is that the Internet Archive is lending out unlimited digital copies if they hold even one physical copy. At best, that's a legally dubious position. The Internet Archive even admits this practice wouldn't qualify as "controlled digital lending." [1]

[0]: [https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360042654251-Nati...](https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360042654251-National-Emergency-Library- FAQs#h_11e65d8d-badc-499a-aa93-8242abbab2e3)

[1]: [https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360042654251-Nati...](https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360042654251-National-Emergency-Library- FAQs#h_994793fd-f604-4dda-a781-e5571f3ee117)

<comment><USER4> >At best, that's a legally dubious position.

Hence the lawsuit. The internet Archive is arguing this as part of the CDL's "fair use" portion. Presumably they view the program as allowing libraries to continue offering their "vital function to society" while being closed.

[http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive- responds...](http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds-why- we-released-the-national-emergency-library/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This whole copyright case is a whole load of bollocks. Hope that Internet Archive will fend that off, because otherwise it would be a very tragic loss for the internet.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how they can fend it off?

It seems like their actions were illegal in the most obvious way. I don't think there's much grey area here.

<comment><USER7> Imo the goal for the IA must be to haggle down the ridiculous damage claims to something that they can pay via donations.

<comment><USER3> I'm hoping that's the case. I'd like to see it settled in a way that preserves IA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's ending its unlimited free books program, and going back to the old version, which is limited.

<comment><USER9> To be more precise, it is returning to Controlled Digital Lending [https://controlleddigitallending.org](https://controlleddigitallending.org), where it lends out one digital copy for each physical copy it has purchased or acquired. CDL is unlikely to face major legal challenges, because it's effectively lending the digital copies exactly as if they were print copies.

The issue that caused all the outrage was the National Emergency Library program, where the Internet Archive was simultaneously lending out an unlimited number of digital copies of a book, regardless of whether it only possessed one physical copy.

This is (on its face) a violation of copyright. Under the first-sale doctrine, you're free to lend out a copy you've purchased. But you aren't free to make unlimited copies of a copy you've purchased and lend them out.

<comment><USER10> The publisher's believe the CDL is illegal too, and are suing on this basis too. From the article:

> The lawsuit, filed June 1, does not just object to the National Emergency > Library but to the way Internet Archive has long operated. Traditional > libraries pay publishers licensing fees, and agree to terms that restrict > how many times they can lend an e-book. Internet Archive, by contrast, takes > books that have been donated or purchased, scans them and posts them online.

<comment><USER9> I am an author, and three of my books were published by one of the Big Four publishers who are suing the Internet Archive.

I fully support the publishers' complaint against the National Emergency Library program. Lending out more copies than you own is the same as making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works, and it should be stopped.

But I do not share their opposition to Controlled Digital Lending. I think it is a reasonable system of lending that attempts to achieve parity with lending of physical copies, and I think it has a good chance of being defensible in court.

Of course, I know why these publishers oppose CDL. E-book licensing is an income stream they don't want to dry up. And it's quite possible that losing that income stream might mean that they will need to make cutbacks or reduce the number of titles they publish, which could be bad for authors. But I can't see how CDL can be a violation of copyright when lending physical copies under the same terms is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is very unfortunate. I agree they probably infringed on copyright, but I also think they were in the right. If we respected the law in this emergency when none of our social systems could cope with unprecedented crisis, the human costs would mount even higher.

The publishers will continue to do what's in their interest (immorally imo), but what they could have done instead was jump onboard and say yes these books will be offered for the duration of the crisis.

Of course, I feel that publishing should be at least partially publicly funded so that copyright wouldn't be a concern and we could read everything for free above production cost and authors would get paid. However, the private system should have at least tried to legitimize itself by providing necessary services for the public instead of continuing to deprive people of what they need out of concern for their own profits.

<comment><USER12> IA could have easily coordinated with publishers beforehand and got them on board as a good publicity opportunity. Instead they did it on their own, very clearly violating the copyrights.

Like it or not, copyright holders can set whatever terms they want on the material they own. That includes making choices that you think are dumb or bad for business. It's not the job of copyright to ensure companies serve the public good or even do things that keep them in business. That's up to the market.

<comment><USER13> _we_ are the market, and the market is expressing its will (here and elsewhere), like it or not.

<comment><USER12> The only decision the market is allowed to make is "do I buy this, yes or no?" It (you) doesn't get to change the rules whenever it feels like it when you don't feel like paying for something.

<comment><USER13> no, that's a pedagogical model of a market. real markets are rich in information channels going every which way that also inform price, product, etc. (i.e., marketing). real markets are highly and nonlinearly dynamic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting to see the HN community at large suddenly supporting copyright law status-quo...

<comment><USER15> I think most people agree that creators should be paid. It's the greed of big publishing companies (especially in research) that drive people up a wall with anger.

<comment><USER16> IA likely also agree that creators should be paid.

<comment><USER17> And how did they expect them to get paid when they were giving away unlimited copies of the authors books?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The free books program that they had already planned on ending on June 30th.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't say I'm surprised; it was a lot of legal risk. But also, not a fan of copyright as-is. It's a real mickey mouse game, and it's not authors walking away with the fat paychecks.

</comment><comment><USER19> As discussed quite a bit:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if something like this could assist the archive. As legal costs mounts, they could scatter their library and make it all free forever - <USER2> even those lending limits with Controlled Digital Lending will remain. Might make the publishers come to a truce, since they must fund the lawsuit as there is no pot of gold in the archives to give a contingency law firm to take it on. Get China on board for the good it's billions of citizens!!

[https://sci-hub.tw/](https://sci-hub.tw/)

<comment><USER21> "Let's say you wanted to back up the Internet Archive"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_sa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/h02jl4/lets_say_you_wanted_to_back_up_the_internet/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, I think this is the right decision. Books can and will be archived by publishers; The Internet Archive is most important as a repository of culture that won't be preserved any other way.</comment>


How I designed the Envato Blog in 8 days - <AUTHOR> https://envato.com/blog/ <comment><USER2> I think you meant to share this link: [https://envato.com/blog/designed- website-one-8-days/](https://envato.com/blog/designed-website-one-8-days/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's what I meant to do! Thanks.</comment></comment>


What I learnt building 3 high traffic web apps on an embedded key value store - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/what-i-learnt-from-building-3-high-traffic-web-applications-on-an-embedded-key-value-store-68d47249774f <comment><USER2> Author says scalability, but provides nothing in the way of metrics. He says he has "almost a terabyte" of data and talks about partitioning when it gets too big. So the story here is that just about any key-value store can fill modest requirements as long as you implement your own sharding strategy.</comment>


'Mindware' and 'Superforecasting' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/books/review/mindware-and-superforecasting.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> > "There are fewer customers, so we need less light?" I asked. "Correct," he > said. His non sequitur had me leaving the store fortified with both a six- > pack and the reinforced conviction that books on how to think should be > required reading in high schools across the country.

Let's say increased lighting increases average spending per customer. Reduced lighting saves on the electricity bill.

Maybe when there are less customers, the increased customer spending is not worth the electricity bill. This is plausible enough that the clerk is not making a non sequitur.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I couldn't really understand the objection here. If it was meant to be an example of sloppy thinking it is a poor choice.</comment></comment>