Ask HN: Does anyone know of a good android app tutorial? - <AUTHOR>

I've googled already, I assure you.  But none of the ones I've seen so far do it for me.
Do you guys have any recommendations?  If so, what's good about your recommendation?
Thanks a lot! -M <comment><USER2> I have have sort of made my own path.

I watched this video which is not exactly a tutorial but gave me some good comprehensive knowledge, there is a part 2 as well. <http://marakana.com/forums/android/general/230.html>

Next I have been going through Hello, Android (Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 3rd Edition, by Ed Burnette) and will probably be doing the Apress Beginning Android book next.

Also check out <http://www.reddit.com/r/android>. Look on the sidebar as there are other subreddits of interest to you, especially <http://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev>.

Finally there is a tutorial in the Google documentation.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks a lot. I really appreciate the details.

<comment><USER2> No problem, now that I am on lunch, I looked up a few others.

Here is the Google guide I was talking about: <http://developer.android.com/> here are some tutorials from there: <http://developer.android.com/resources/index.html> They call these tutorials but you are really just copying and pasting but I bet you could reverse engineer simple apps from this starting point. [http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/views/index.htm...](http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/views/index.html)

Here are a couple tutorials, I have not reviewed them much so it is up to you to decide if they are any good: [http://www.activefrequency.com/blog/2009/ground-up- android-g...](http://www.activefrequency.com/blog/2009/ground-up-android- getting-started-with-app-development/)

<http://www.vogella.de/articles/Android/article.html>

These guys talk about their experience in app development. <http://www.kreci.net/> [http://www.bryandenny.com/index.php/2010/05/25/what- i-learne...](http://www.bryandenny.com/index.php/2010/05/25/what-i-learned- from-writing-my-first-android-application/)

Of course there is the App Inventor but when I did their tutorials I felt a little more like I was building a pre-fab kit rather than learning how to create: <http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again! What do you think of alternatives like appcelerator, or PhoneGap?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This one: <http://www.vogella.de/articles/Android/article.html>

I read it before making my first application.</comment>


'You Could Look It Up': The World Before and Since Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/you-could-look-it-up-the-world-before-and-since-wikipedia/2016/02/17/57d0cab8-d196-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html <comment><USER2> I vastly love being in a world where you can get answers. That said, I've noticed one trend in my younger co-workers and friends that is a little sad (to me).

I will often try to find concepts I don't know. Simple things like "Why do we say 'deceased'? Aren't they 'ceased'? If they are 'de-ceased', that leaves US as 'ceased'". I'm moderately curious, but mostly I enjoy finding the little perversities. Maintaining a sense of wonder, if you will.

Amongst my younger (I'm mid-to-late 30s, they are mid-to-late 20s) friends and co-workers, though, I typically get the response of "I don't know, what does google say?". Then they look it up, and stop wondering. (Sometimes the answer is pretty good, often it boils down to 'no one knows')

On the one hand, I'm glad to see people moving past the "I wonder..." stage towards GETTING answers. On the other, even when the answer is inadequate, they then stop wondering.

I'm curious if this anecdote is generally true, and if so, if it's a temporary fad in our relationship to information, or if this represents one step in a path of "permanent" change in our relationship to information.

I suppose I could google that...

<comment><USER3> I jokingly enforce a no-googling-at-the-lunch-table rule on my millennial coworkers (I'm gen Oregon Trail).

This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent conversation.

Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.

<comment><USER4> That's odd, what kind of decent conversations are based on fatuous speculation on facts that are a google search away?

I'd much rather have real conversation about politics, whether "The 100" is good TV, social issues, or just about anything really, than an argument about facts that could just be googled.

<comment> nommm-nommm It's called having fun!! lighthearted mindless conversation. Joking. Laughing! Using our imaginations.

No arguments.

I'd rather do almost anything else than "talk politics." Especially with people who like "talking politics." Playing in traffic seems much more appealing.

<comment><USER5> I agree.

I think there's a big benefit in finding out that you're often wrong. It's easy to look something up and go "yeah I knew that" when really it was just one of the things you thought might be true. Regularly seeing that what you were really, really sure about is actually completely wrong after having to try and justify what you're saying is wrong (e.g. that X was in film Y, etc). Similarly, realising you don't understand something too well when trying to explain it to someone else.

Also, mistakes and weird misconceptions form bits of jokes that grow and change over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and Wikipedia; here is a small sample of the articles (all excerpted from past editions of the Encyclopaedia):

* Space-Time by Albert Einstein

* Radium by Marie Curie

* Mass Production by Henry Ford

* Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi

* Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright

* Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

* Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia')

* Yosemite Park by John Muir

* Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan

* The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell

There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds?

I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)

<comment><USER7> Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.

<comment><USER8> Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter.

> _As long as the information is factually correct it doesn 't really matter > where it came from._

And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness.

I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.

<comment><USER9> I don't remember Britannica being any better.

Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it.

My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article.

Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format.

I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad.

Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.

<comment><USER10> > I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and > progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, > starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad.

I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed.

For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways.

1\. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level.

2\. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material.

Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral.

But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but _just_ the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof.

This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there a a lot of insight into the Wikipedia phenomenon in this rant on Penny Arcade:

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16](https://www.penny- arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16)

And in Jaron Lanier's article:

[http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards- of-t...](http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new- online-collectivism)

</comment><comment><USER12> The English language Wikipedia is great. Some other language have big problems with certain admins that prevent new articles or any additions at all (e.g. German language). WikiMedia should do something and "fix" those administrative issues.

<comment><USER13> This needs to be a bit more nuanced. I do see new articles popping up in the German Wikipedia.

<comment><USER12> > nuanced

Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation.

Read about the issues on English Wikipedia:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions)

<comment><USER14> German Wikipedia is not associated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia has no control over them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hello world.

I have a different gripe with Wikipedia that has nothing to do with whether articles within it are factual or not: poor writing style.

Wikipedia editor guidelines encourage cooperation and consensus, but this regularly results in edit wars, where editors aggressively delete each other's edits. To resolve this, editors will usually resort to an unspoken system in which one editor will write one fragment of a sentence and cite sources for that fragment, the other editor writes the next fragment and cites it and so on. The result is a horrible mess that, although most likely entirely factual, is perfectly unreadable.

Worse yet, it is very difficult to simply copy such a paragraph from Wikipedia and paste it to your friend's chat box - the inline citation marks remain as full blown numbers and have to be removed by hand.

<comment><USER16> I don't think the fact that citations occur inside sentences is necessarily because the articles are collaboratively edited. Scientific articles generally do the same thing, even if they are just written by one person, in order to make it clear which part of the sentence the citation refers to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"— in the words of Douglas Adams — "has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words 'Don't Panic' inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."_

"Worse is better."</comment>


Airbnb makes small admission on tax issue, saying its hosts should pay - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/10/04/airbnb-makes-small-admission-tax-issue-saying-its-hosts-should-pay <comment><USER2> People have been making short-term rentals on CraigsList for over a decade, yet nobody expects them to collect hotel taxes.

To expect Airbnb research hotel laws and taxes in every country they operate in seems like an undue burden.

In fact, it's such a burden, that I'm sure Airbnb will _support_ it in a few years time as a way to raise the barriers to entry on their industry.

<comment><USER3> Craigslist does not collect payment to facilitate the stay.

They do not offer insurance and serve as mediator during disputes.

They do not operate concierge services.

They operate _significantly less_ like a hotel than airbnb.

<comment><USER4> Actually, Craigslist _do_ collect payment for facilitate the stay _if_ its an apartment in New York. $10 per listing ([http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees](http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees)).

<comment><USER5> A property owner buying an advertisement is not the same as a renter making a rental payment. These transactions are not at all alike.

<comment><USER6> They're _somewhat_ alike in that the economic incidence of a tax on rentals will fall (in different proportions) on both of them, and in ways that the tax authorities can't control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TLDR; NYC and San Fran, we already pay enough of your bullshit taxes.

Let's take an imaginary trip to New York City..

Fly on an airplane to LGA -- pay Federal Taxes on the ticket approaching 50%. Pay a TSA "fee," pay an "Airport Use Fee," Pay a car rental tax of often 20% on top of the state and local sales taxes. Plus a parking tax of over 19%. If you take a taxi instead, the city charges a $0.50 tax on any trip within NYC, plus sales tax is automatically contained within the fare itself. Plus the driver gets to pay city taxes on the income from that fare as well and gasoline taxes on the fuel used as well as the insanely expensive cost of the taxi medallion itself. We're not even at the hotel yet. Perhaps you find a cheaper ticket flying into Newark? Cool, pay a Port Authority $13 toll just for using the Holland tunnel, though you do get to save on the $0.50 city taxi surcharge.

Once you're at the hotel, however you get there you get to pay the following: New York State Sales Tax, New York City Sales Tax, and New York State Hotel Unit Fee $1.50 per unit per day.

I haven't even had a chance to buy a slice of pizza yet and already I've paid some entity or another a significant amount of money in taxes. That means that the my travel budget of x dollars is now reduced by y dollars, which means that is y dollars less that I have to spend on actually increasing economic activity within the city. Which means that the businesses I would have purchased from have y dollars in fewer sales which means that they will pay both less in sales taxes, but also less in personal and business income taxes. And since I'm getting less value from my total travel budget, the likelihood that I'll travel to NYC any more than necessary is far diminished, thus leading to a overall net loss for the city.

If you notice, anytime there is anything innovative (Airbnb, Uber, etc) within a city, they always are angling for a way to tax it. Perhaps if those lunatics in city government (especially NYC and San Fran) realize that the reason their cities are so expensive is because of the cumulative effect of all of this nickel and diming.

Want affordable housing for "normal" people in NYC? End rent control. There are people in 3 bedroom, nice apartments in Soho, paying $500 per month, and in the same exact building, market rents are $5500 per month because the landlord has to subsidize the loss on the $500 apartment.

And now NYC is crying about losing their occupancy taxes on Airbnb? As a former NYC resident I would like to cry about seeing police officer's driving $90,000 cars off-duty and using their "Police Official Business" placards to avoid paying parking fees. When I worked at General Assembly, I would see high-end Jaguars and Cadillacs parked in front of our building on 23rd street with police placards. While our unemployed students would have to go downstairs every few hours to stuff yet more money into the meter.

NYC and San Francisco -- you can go suck an egg when it comes to collecting an occupancy tax for Airbnb.

</comment><comment><USER8> With anonymous crypto-currencies thrown into the fray, the next version of AirBnB -- that is undoubtedly already somewhere in the making -- may be entirely off-limits to this kind local government requests. Anybody can see today already that it is "game over" on quite a few older forms of taxation. The internet has started treating money as just information and ,therefore, taxation as just a form of censorship. It will just begin to route around that too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, even after you invest heavily initially to buy a house with your own hard-earned money, you are still supposed to pay the government a cut for renting it? What has this world turned into! Shouldn't YOU be the one who should decide how you spend YOUR money, for renting out YOUR property?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps. Did you use any of the resources and infrastructure of the economy and society to earn that money? Did you in any way use or depend on the legal system? The financial system? The roads? Internet? Phones? The financial system? Law and order? Was your education in any way supported by public funds?

If you can answer no to every question, is the same also true for all of your paying customers?

<comment><USER7> I pay taxes. That doesn't mean that I owe the government for every accomplishment that I've achieved. You seem to subscribe to Obama's "You didn't build it" statement.

You also fail to acknowledge that a large majority of the spending you've described could be privately run. I'm not suggesting that it should be, however, it's possible some of it could be. If I went to a private school supported by no government money, does that mean I ought to pay taxes to that private school if I happen to become a billionaire? After all, if it weren't for that school, I wouldn't have the education to have built something that made me a billionaire.

Well that's bullshit. I pay a gas tax to drive on the road. I pay a telephone excise tax as well as state and local taxes. I also pay sales tax. I pay property tax, I pay school taxes. I pay taxes on buying and registering a car, I pay taxes when I sell and transfer the title to a car. I pay parking taxes, airport taxes, airline taxes.

I don't owe government a "debt" because of my success any more than government owes me anything because of my failure.

<comment><USER10> _That doesn 't mean that I owe the government for every accomplishment that I've achieved. You seem to subscribe to Obama's "You didn't build it" statement._

I didn't say you owe the government for every accomplishment. But perhaps I have a different perspective, which is hard to convey over a message board, from having traveled and lived in several countries where the government does not enable the infrastructure (legal, financial, etc.) for businesses to thrive that we enjoy in the US.

Unless you believe that Americans are genetically superior Übermensch, you have to give some credit to "the system" for making the success of this economy, relative to most of the world, possible. And your taxes, to the extent that they are wisely spent, support that system and ensure its survival.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Porn Company wants me to sign a release form for Pic. - <AUTHOR>

I work in the administration department for a pornography department, and they had a recent break in.  They are asking us to take a picture of us, and want us to sign a form (the one below).  As a porn company, should I be worried about what they are asking me to sign below?  The picture will only likely be a head shot.  A normal person would go to a lawyer, however, I have kids, and don't have the money for one.  Anyhow, here is the form.
---
PHOTO CONSENT FORM AND RELEASE
I, __________________________ hereby give [COMPANY NAME] and all applicable affiliated entities, legal representatives, successors, assigns, employees, officers and directors, the EXCLUSIVE, irrevocable right to collect and use a picture, portrait, digital image or photograph of me (collectively the "photograph(s)") for [COMPANY NAME] internal use and for security and management purposes only.  I waive any right to inspect or approve the photograph(s) and I agree that [COMPANY NAME] owns the Copyright in these photographs.  I expressly release [COMPANY NAME], together with all respective parent, subsidiary, affiliated or associated corporations, directors, officers, employees, and agents together with all representatives, successors and assigns, jointly and severally, from any and all actions, causes of action, complaints, claims, demands, torts, contracts and covenants, whether express or implied, to any entitlements under any statute, costs, interest loss of injury of every nature or kind whatsoever, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, in any way arising from the collection, use, and disclosure of the photograph(s).  I am of full legal age and competent to sign this release and agree that it shall be binding on me.  I have fully read this release and understand its contents.
SIGN... <comment><USER2> By all means get them to be moe specific! I had this float through my head:

Fade in: _Boom zoom over a bedroom set. Cameramen etc are doing their thing. Robed actors are chilling, laughing in the background. Entering stage left_ REP (modestly dressed middle aged woman, dark business suit, style to evoke sara palin) _carrying folder of important looking papers._

Cut to camera 1: _REP looks up, smiles_

REP: Hi, I'm here to tell you about the hard working people of hte adult film industry. Sure you know about the actors.

 _cut to camera 2 on the actors chilling, laughing_

REP (in voiceover): And all of thier hard work

 _cut to close up face shots of actors during hardcore scenes.. montage_

REP (still in voiceover): These men and women are people, who deserve your respect. Perhaps even your envy, who wouldn't want to be intimately involved with such beautiful people!

 _end montage, cut to camera 1_

REP: I know however, that lifestyle maynot be for everyone. It is a bit icky, gross even. I am instead talking about different people. The people in the back office. These are the men and women who keep the servers up, and manage sales. They are normal folks, just like you. They are the lifeblood of the internet.

 _begin montage of faces of smiling regular employees. Include first name and vague job description/dept_

REP (in voiceover): When you try to look at porn at 2am, do you know who is making it stream at peak hours? Howabout when your credit card is discreetly billed to a non-descript entity? Yep thats Debby, she is our "Cheif fake company expert". And don't forget larry, who spends half the year away from his wife and kids, in the cold russian winter, just to wrangle russian cam girls.

* Cut back to camera 1*

REP: Yes folks, the Adult industry in america is more than just sticky booths and shady old men. We aren't just coked up beautiful people who couldnt make it as real actors. We are normal people just like you. Next time you talk to bob the accountant at the block party, try and remember if you know his company -- he may be working at an adult store.

 _cut to bumper... brought to you by the national porn council_

END

Im just saying: captaincrunch-- dont end up in that montage, particularly if there is a PTA at your kids school.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL, but, this line does not seem very vague to me: "for [COMPANY NAME] internal use and for security and management purposes only." I guess you might question the definition of "internal" in this context, but I can't see any way for them to twist "internal" into "you're in a porno now."

Still, I must admit that I don't know why they need to you sign a consent form just to take a picture of you...

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, I wouldn't sign it.

You could ask them to add more specific wording about why they want the photo, and what they want use it for.</comment>


Twitter documentation hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.infectmac.com/2008/08/twitter-api-documentation-appears-to-be.html

<comment><USER2> They're called wiki vandals. Nothing has been hacked. Interesting thing could be that maybe now wiki vandals are automated, but "hacked"?! seriously?</comment>


Ray Dalio says the global economy is under threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/billionaire-ray-dalio-world-economy-threat-jobs/ <comment><USER2> If machines can produce every useful good and service better than humans -- including manufacturing copies of themselves -- then the global economy (denominated in units of currency) might be under threat, but people will materially prosper. It's not dollars or euros or renminbi that people really need. People need goods and services. If the machines-do-everything technology gets invented once, copies will soon spread globally [1].

The real problem is more likely to be the transitional turbulence. If self- driving vehicles _do_ wipe out millions of truck driver jobs in the year 2029, but automated doctors aren't ready until 2059, large groups of workers lose income without seeing deflationary relief in the prices of services they need.

[1] The spread of maker machines could happen "legitimately" \-- Gates Foundation or a similar organization financing freely shareable re- implementations. It could also happen "illegally" \-- a government in a poorer country will just decide to tell international patent/copyright holders to pound sand in favor of their own domestic constitutents. This would be similar to South Africa's treatment of HIV drug patents in the 1990s.

<comment><USER3> The truck drivers who lose their jobs will get new ones. Same story has been told for generations and it is never true. So-called AI won't eliminate the need for workers, they will just shift into new jobs.

No one shed a tear when the carriage drivers lost their jobs. Except maybe the carriage drivers and their families.

<comment><USER4> What did the carriage drivers do? Asking for a friend.

<comment><USER5> Drive trucks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems very clear to the man on the street, the fights are getting more fierce. Assets prices increase and the bottom 80% are getting squeezed out of many things, slowly but surely: education, housing and with that also out of participation in society.

There is literally nothing, that hints at progress at this point: Tech and internet will has turned into permanent surveillance, the home surveillance is rolled out, the internet of things and workspace will be next, allowing for google analytics on labor.

And if workers complain too much, increase investments in software and data tools and replace a bunch of wet ware with some tool; heck, half of the "knowledge workers" today might be obsolete already.

The average person won't have much to laugh for the next few decades. We live in a sad time, where the most miraculous things man can create (machines that "think") will be the prime weapons of the owners against the non-owners. I fear this will be a costly battle.

<comment><USER7> The hilarious part to me is the elites saying "but look at the data". No. The whole point is that we've reversed engineered the economy so that "inflation is under 2%", meanwhile an entire generation is basically condemned to never own their dwelling. Unemployment is "historically low" but that's because you have people with Masters degrees driving for Uber and in the "gig" economy. The stock market is performing tremendously, but that's because we've pumped nearly 4 Trillion dollars into it beginning with Obama's presidency.

I am not sure how much longer it goes, but if there is an uprising it's going to be brutal. It's not going to be just bankers and politicians, it's going to come after the technocrats who helped engineer all this and the celebrities that pretended everything was okay.

<comment><USER8> Home ownership rates for the under 35s are down, but not substantially. They are also increasing.

Putting $4T "into the stock market" as if it's vaporized is simply nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >He sees "transferring money to people who are unproductive" [universal basic income, UBI] as less optimal than finding a way for them to be productive.

Why can't we let the individual find a way to make themselves productive? And, why do they _need_ to be productive? Some of my best times in life are watching and playing games with my friends. Socializing. Loving people.

I, and most people I know, can look around and see things that need to be done. If our lives aren't so focused on paying the bills all the time, we can relax a bit and be creative.

I remember I used to get _great_ school lunches. I knew the cafeteria staff by name and they knew me because I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths... skinny as a bean pole. Lunches were made fresh every day. The staff were there at 6am cooking for the kids. Fresh bread. I used to love watching that dough bounce around in the industrial mixer. It was bigger than I was.

A decade after I was out of school, I saw one of the ladies and asked how the school lunches were. She said they don't get to make them anymore. The menus are decided in Washington DC now and they have very little control over what is cooked or eaten. Kids don't come back for seconds and thirds and fourths anymore.

The federal government took local control away from the schools and homogenized everything and basically ruined it from what I remember.

Why do we think the federal government knows better how to manage our day to day lives than we do ourselves? Get out of our kitchens and homes.

The government doesn't need to find a way for me to be productive. People who need to be productive to keep their sanity will find a way. They'll clean their bedrooms, volunteer in their communities. They won't be judged by what their job is, but rather, what they do for themselves and the people around them.

The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill.

We need more freewill in the world.

<comment><USER10> >"The need to grind out a day at the office or the shipyard or in the truck hauling cargo saps a person's freewill."

I'm not sure of that.

Couple of things. I've worked with working class people. They may complain about the job or the boss, but if they didn't do one of those jobs, they'd feel less empowered.

I've heard people essentially say I don't want to be on welfare but I can't get a job. So they'd prefer a job to being on the dole.

Two, people with lots of time and nothing to do tend to just while away time, either in the form of any kind of entertainment or some times in counter productive activities. Doing "make-work" actually gives people _some_ purpose.

I'm saying UBI will bring other unintended problems. I think UBI could be like people who have dogs and give them all they need [like UBI] but don't take them out for walks. Work, any kind of work is like taking the dog out for a walk.

<comment><USER11> People having "nothing to do" is a self-inflicted problem of modern societies. There's plenty of stuff to do, all over the place. Just because it might not meet some wholly-arbitrary standard of a 'living', 'sustainable' level of productivity doesn't mean it's "make-work".

<comment><USER12> People will leave the mundane and repetitive to automation and focus on what they find truly fulfilling, utilizing "creative intelligence".

Creative intelligence involves always striving for the new thoughts, fresh ideas, novel ways to solve problems....repetition makes people mentally weak and depressed.

Many of the problems we discuss today about humans in the era of automation have already been addressed in ancient Indian philosophy (many millennia ago). This isn't new....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dalio unquestionably has had success with investing. But his ideas are often called crazy. (i.e. the bond-heavy nature of his 'All Weather Portfolio'.)

He's also at odds with stalwarts like Warren Buffet, who point out that gold doesn't really have a reason to be a hedge against a crash. It doesn't do anything, it just looks pretty. Once people begin to figure that the emporer has no clothes, gold will just be cheap, pretty metal.

Dalio is worth listening to, but with a large grain of salt, IMHO.

<comment><USER14> On gold Dalio has been right for the last 6000 years and Buffet has been wrong.

<comment><USER15> It's not clear what you're asserting. For raw return on investment, there is a compelling analysis:

[https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren-...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/news/warren- buffett-bashes-gold-2019-2-1027977003)

which demonstrates that Dalio has been wrong over time (as long as we have been around, at least).

This does not preclude Dalio from being right about specific small periods of time or decidedly in the future. So far, not so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> chroem- As someone who likes to crack jokes at the expense of goldbugs, Dalio saying to buy precious metals got my attention.

<comment><USER16> I mean gold will likely get expensive with the amount of outstanding debt worldwide, explicit and off-the-books like underfunded pension liabilites and health care costs. I.e. it's the value of all major currencies that will go down.

Japan cannot ever have anything even close to 2% interest rates because at 2% the central government will pay 100% of the tax take just to service interest payments. This, of course, cannot continue forever without pushing down the value of money, one way or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People taking seriously what a hedgefund manager says in a public speech... it is to laugh.

If productivity were going up because of automation to the point where mass unemployment is an issue, interest rates would be higher: the end. Anyone who disagrees doesn't understand how finance works.

<comment><USER18> That's an interesting thesis. Could you explain why?

<comment><USER17> If automation were increasing producitivity, you could invest capital in it and get giant returns, making capital more rare and valuable, as it would be tied up in productive ventures. It isn't. Even freaking google is basically punting on a basket of dumb ideas, absolutely none of which has worked out, and none of which are likely to pan out, and (rationally) sitting on a huge barrel of cash from their looting of the US media system. Therefore, negative interest rates. Negative interest rates = negative productivity increases. So it is, so it has always been.

That's what finance is! You loan money to people to do useful things with. If there's nothing useful to do, the money isn't worth as much. Most of it, these days, goes to dumb shit like real estate bubbles.

All you need do is look at times when human power over nature was obviously increasing; capital was dear and interest rates where high because you could invest in the Bessemer Process or the Concorde or the Haber process or, like, the invention of computers and telecommunications. These days, we have ... apps for your phone. Of course we have negative interest rates; there is literally nothing to invest in.

<comment><USER19> How does the creation of trillions of dollars of new capital out of thin air fit into this theory?

<comment><USER15> Propping up the industries that are losses but whose failure would cause massive instability and upheaval. Those in power, have no interest in this outcome while they are in power. So Quantitative Easing part X and punt to the next election cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If I guy that got awfully rich by shuffling money around instead of actually producing anything of value gets scared, then I feel like perhaps the economy may get a bit more fair. Bring it on.

<comment><USER21> What you call "shuffling money around", other's call funding companies with potential so they can sustain or accelerate their business, hire more staff, develop new products, provide those products in new regions etc.

Investing is how you get rich in this world. Whether it's real estate, stocks, bonds or any other non-depreciating asset classes. Investing is not without risk. America would not be what it is today without investors risking their money since at least the 1920's. If you think continuously successful investors don't work for their money, then you are simply ignorant about the complexities and time consumption that continuously successful investing requires.

<comment><USER20> You mean the country where the rich get richer and are the only one enjoying education and healthcare? The country where poor is the new "middle class"?

Money makes money in our current (imho diseased) economy, but it is coming from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> People have been saying robots will take all the jobs and kill everyone for centuries: [https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all- the-...](https://timeline.com/robots-have-been-about-to-take-all-the-jobs-for- more-than-200-years-5c9c08a2f41d)

<comment><USER6> There's a company in my town, hiring devs for a fully robotic kitchen setup. Ingredients are deposited, machines cook meals. A single person can take care of the joint. You can replace a $100k/month bill on personel for a mid-size fast-food outlet with $10k/month for a few guys helping the machine. No strikes, overwork, just ingredients, meals and a bit of maintenance.

Imagine, you are a 50 joint franchise, that's a whopping 50 mil per year in savings (and few hundred people desperately looking for jobs).

<comment><USER23> As long as the price of that food is lowered to reflect its mass-produced nature, it seems fair: win-win for society. Then on (those more rare) occasions when we want a superb michelin-level meal, we pay the fair price for a human to prepare it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is ccn?

<comment><USER25> [https://www.ccn.com/about-us/](https://www.ccn.com/about-us/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the same guy that wrote worthless self-help ("principles") and claims capitalism is bad, not practicing what he preaches he also benefits the most from it.

<comment><USER27> Agreed. Audio book was unlistenable. I had to tap out after the first few vacuous chapters. This guy is talking his book, not reality. Buyer beware.</comment></comment>


Apple is taking 94% of profits in the entire smartphone industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com.au/apple-94-percent-smartphone-industry-profits-canaccord-genuity-2015-11 <comment><USER2> Samsung has nobody to blame but itself for the steady trickle of Android users leaving the platform for greener pastures on the Apple side.

Samsung's bloated, poorly-performant "value adds" are the reason Android is perceived to be laggy and unresponsive. Instead of just selling quality devices with a polished, professional operating system, they seem to have this pathological need to alter the vanilla Android install and bundle a bunch of crapware with every release. They're the budget laptop maker of the mobile space, like Dell used to be in the laptop space, back when the standard first step after receiving a new laptop was (is?) to instantly reformat so you lose all the OEM apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anecdata:

After a few years with a great Nexus 4, my phone broke down and I switched to a Moto G Pure (the best thing I could find on a short notice, as those Nexus phones take a while to ship..)

It's a mostly _ok_ phone, but the devil is in the details.. some of which I hate:

\- The phone's vibration feel like an earthquake. I got a case just to ameliorate it and it still buzzes off everyone 100ft around me. Heck, I turned it OFF for voice and alerts but it still somehow vibrates for whatsapp and some games. Now I just don't play those games and have the phone in "do not disturb mode" so it doesn't vibrate like crazy.

\- It has no led, so if I was away from the phone I can't see if I have an alert without touching the phone (perhaps that's why they made it vibrate so much? so that no matter where I am I know if I got a text?)

\- It still uses the previous version of android even though it's a 2 month old phone which I just bought. This means no per-app permissions, etc.

So my point is.. yes you do need to get the details right! Just getting 95% there is useless, and that's where Moto and Samsung are. Maybe if they go back to only a few models they could get them right..

</comment><comment><USER3> Another explanation: the android market is competitive, so there are no extraordinary profits there left. It's like the salt market, etc.</comment>


Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz dies from suicide - <AUTHOR> http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-12/news/chi-aaron-swartz-dead_1_reddit-websites-computer-network

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry if I sound callous, but I think the only notable thing about this particular article on the subject is the atrocious wording of the title.

EDIT: sorry, only now I realized how old this submission was. I didn't take into account I haven't checked HN for a good couple days.</comment>


Can licensing Blackberry OS save RIM? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/01/04/rim-jefferies-says-moving-toward-licensing-bb-software/

<comment><USER2> OK, say I am a phone maker who is not sinking into the mire like RIM - so why would I buy into the Blackberry OS?

If I am RIM and I am finding it hard to compete in the smartphone market at the moment - why would I want other manufacturers competing with me for the market segment that still wants a Blackberry?</comment>


A Look Inside the Lowline, NYC's First Underground Park - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2015-10-13/inside-the-lowline-new-york-city-s-first-underground-park <comment><USER2> Great pics, and an impressive lighting system. Here's a more detailed look at the lighting: [http://www.archlighting.com/projects/lighting-the- lowline_o](http://www.archlighting.com/projects/lighting-the-lowline_o)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is offtopic, but can anyone with design chops explain Bloomberg's thinking with their page's design? It's not traditional, but I think I like it.

<comment><USER4> it's quite bold, and I applaud the management for not shooting it down, especially considering their initial front page was very jarring to looking at. But they've refined the design quickly to get to where it is now.

The Specials page like the one OP posted particularly nice, and it's just an FU to the prevailing sterile flat white design. The irony is, there has never been better time to use dropshadow, gradients, and transparency via CSS. But nobody is using it.

<comment><USER5> > there has never been better time to use dropshadow, gradients, and > transparency via CSS. But nobody is using it.

Just because you can do these effects doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but people are deliberately not using them at the expense of good usability because that's the trendy design.

<comment><USER5> Many people are using them, just more subtly than you might think. Projects like Google's material design may seem 'flat' to the lay person, but it's full of delicate transparencies, animations and shadows. It's leveraging the technology, but in a very understated way.

Examples here: [https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/bottom- sheets....](https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/bottom-sheets.html)

<comment><USER4> yup that's a great example. It's definitely step it the right direction to neutralize some of the extreme flatness we've seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a great testament to the how NYC has improved that this is even possible. In the 1980's, just the notion of doing something like this as a public park would be laughed out of the room.

</comment><comment><USER7> I imagine this could be a prototype for growing food in tunnels on Mars or in the Moon.

</comment><comment><USER8> Actually some plants need UV, which is why they needed to change the glass at the tropical island park:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort#Proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort#Problems)

<comment><USER9> > Actually some plants need UV

Are you refuting someone or just want to point that out?

The article states that only infrared is removed, UV is kept

<comment><USER8> Ah, I should read more carefully</comment></comment></comment>


Authentic Form & Function is looking for a Frontend Developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/22769/frontend-developer

<comment><USER2> You should post the job announcements in the official post: "Who is hiring? (December 2014)" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681040) (282 points, 7 hours ago, 385 comments)</comment>


Chess match unveils underlying widespread belief in a soul - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19179

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else's mind jump to _The Seventh Seal_ after seeing this headline?</comment>


Designer Combines Papyrus and Comic Sans, the End Is Near - <AUTHOR> https://creativemarket.com/blog/2015/03/25/designer-combines-papyrus-and-comic-sans-the-end-is-near

<comment><USER2> Filth, pure filth.</comment>


The Making of Candystall - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitfellas.org/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.674

<comment><AUTHOR> If you'd like to see the final product, check out <http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31522> . It's nice to see a breakdown of such a cool project. Being a demoscene newbie, I'd really like to start seeing more of this.

</comment><comment><USER2> _there are a couple of D3DX functions that come in handy_

Used to be that demos were nearly compltely self-contained executables capable of running with a minimum of system API calls. I wonder what the rules are regarding using other APIs. Can't seem to find a link to Assembly 2007's rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't speak for Assembly 2007, but generally the rule is that if it's installed by default on whatever OS the compo machine is running, it's fair game. Some compos have restrictions on using .NET (and Java, but it's not installed by default in most cases), but they're the minority.</comment></comment>


Justice Scalia on the right to privacy and NSA powers - <AUTHOR> http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/09/scalia-chides-activist-colleagues-on-eve-of-constitution-day.html

<comment><USER2> It's sort of an open secret that Justice Scalia is nuts. Nobody comes right out and says it, but articles like this surely suggest it.</comment>


Pretending That You Care - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/pretending-that.html

<comment><USER2> The current situation has occurred because it makes economic sense. Parking attendants and sports store attendants don't require many skills (since they have computers, automated cash registers or other staff to call upon), so they're cheap.

Workers in grunt-level jobs will, in the majority of cases (though not all!), do as much work as is necessary to keep their job. It makes economic sense.

Some people ARE naturally friendly or gregarious even at minimum wage and we've all bumped into a few friendly McDonald's servers here and there, but people like these are rare in areas where their pay is low and their costs are high. It makes sense, then, that people earning a pittance in New York City - one of the most expensive places on earth - are going to be, on average, surly and not very Mary Poppins-esque in their behavior.

If the city of New York or the sports store wants customers to get a better service from their employees (which they generally don't), they need to pay more money and give them incentives. As it is, companies tend to give the employees incentive to be MORE unfriendly, whether by incentives to issue more tickets or with store policies that prevent staff helping customers to their full extent.

<comment><USER3> There doesn't seem to be much evidence supporting the claim that people who earn more money are therefore more friendly. Particulary not in NY, where being nice in public can mean not being taken seriously.

<comment><USER2> I guess what you say might be generally true for public facing staff, although I still think friendliness (or fake friendless) can appear when incentivized or required. Examples would be the hotel industry, sales (think prestige car dealerships), and any low-demand hospitality industry generally.

This effect is particularly true amongst the self employed who generally want to keep your business. My dentist, for example, is friendly, otherwise he knows I'll go elsewhere. My doctor, however, is not, but he's state-employed so doesn't care whether I stay or not.

<comment><USER3> True, of course, but I wasn't talking about friendliness not happening in New York homes and offices. However, from my experience, in public life there you can get more easily punished for not sporting a pokerface than elsewhere, and it's one of the very few places where I've been going out at night with locals habitually carrying guns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the spirit of this site may I suggest that the problem is that business owners see no cost-effective ways of aggregating customer feedback. Clearly some of them don't even care, but even those who do have no way to do it - barrier is too high. This an opportunity for an enterprising hacker out there. Difficulty: involves a lot of working with people. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Parking inspectors aren't even supposed to deal with customers. Why should they be trained to "pretend to care"? Sounds like a waste of money to me.

<comment><USER6> Because they can skip a _ton_ of angry complainers by treating people a little decently.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but what's in that for them?

<comment><USER3> I think the point Godin's trying to make is that people who habitually "play nice" with others, even if starting out as pretenders, supposedly end up living a happier life. This might be a contested claim, and I'm not sure whether there's any research on this exact topic (the results that I've seen published by Martin Seligman point in this direction, at least), but personally, I've seen it working: "radiating niceness " seems to create a feedback loop of sorts. The theory would be that a parking inspector of above- average niceness would lead a life of above-average niceness, which would be the reward (for some).

However, the scene Godin describes plays in New York. And I'm not sure that the average New Yorker can be convinced that "playing nice" is compatible with being a true New Yorker...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BitStore (iOS Bitcoin Wallet App) - <AUTHOR> http://bitstoreapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! We made this bitcoin wallet app, since we were unhappy with the current options. I would love to hear your feedback!

Some key features: \- No Account setup (start using immediately with generated wallet) \- Secure (keys stored on Apple's Secure Keychain, we don't see them) \- Fast (native, data cached) \- Send / Receive coins \- Push notifications on transactions \- Multiple currency support \- Offline use \- Contacts \- Passcode (plus finger print authentication in iOS 8) \- Frequent updates (iterating everyday)

Coming soon \- buy/sell coins \- beautiful new design \- merchant integration

We are also looking for seed funding, so any tips/referrals would be much appreciated :)</comment>


Monitoring Go Applications with Monit - <AUTHOR> https://boakye.yiadom.org/go/monit/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why it is necessary to add Monit into the mix given that the distribution is using systemd, and a `Restart` (and maybe also `RestartSec`) directive in the `[Service]` section of the unit is all that is required?

<comment><USER3> Possibly not _all_. There's OOMScoreAdjust as well. (-:

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Monit is a gem that doesn't get enough attention. The developers also have a web app you can easily install to aggregate a bunch of monit instances with a nice web interface, alerting, and historical statistics. Absolutely the best value in systems monitoring for small-to-medium environments. [https://mmonit.com](https://mmonit.com)

<comment><USER5> Agreed.

Have used monit instances on every server I manage for nearly 10 years and have been using m/monit since about a year ago (finally provided them with some money after all these years) and with it, I can check every servers' health from a single web app, I can make alert message to Mattermost (or anywhere else as it can run custom script) and its performance metric graph capability is good enough I dropped munin for it.

The great thing about it is that it's absolutely lightweight and its config files are so easy to understand and has broad checking mechanism. I can also check SSL certificate ages and in case certbot fails to renew them, I get warned well before the expiration date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are running Go you should check out Mike Perham's inspeqtor, which is Monit-like but also Go and therefore potentially simpler for dependencies.

[https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor](https://github.com/mperham/inspeqtor)

</comment><comment><USER7> I see that you created an init script, but then you called systemctl. Any reason not to use systemd units?

<comment><USER3> Then one would not have the fun of writing

        #! /bin/sh
        ...
        source /lib/lsb/init-functions

and have it not work on systems where /bin/sh is (say) the Debian Almquist shell. (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you could restart the app before peak of memory usage and OOM? If the app performance depends on OS cache hits then this e.g. process line will prevent its long slow death:

        if total memory usage > 80% for 2 cycles then restart

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I think that would only help when the problem is that your application is using too much memory in the first place, in which case the real solution is to fix your app so you're not leaking memory. But it looks like what's happening here is that something else on the system uses enough memory to trip the OOM killer, which case a preemptive restart won't really help.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. I think the app may have interesting challenges, like whatever some real-time stream processing could be introduced to avoid loading entire stuff into memory or even to skip disk IO. But I assume the OP did some effort/gain calculation which made him choose the existing path.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. You're right. The processed outputs and the recorded tracks are expected to be available <= 2s after the stream ends. That forces our hand to not be able to use memory conservatively. For example, one way to avoid massive memory usage will be to record concurrently (this has small memory footprint since we flush to disk after the write buffer hits 512KB so for about 50 concurrent recordings we need ~25MB), but process and upload sequentially. The recorded audio tracks are big, and have to be loaded to memory since the other tools we use for processing can't work with file on disk yet. The <= 2s requirement is impossible to meet when things are done sequentially.

<comment><USER8> Check memory-mapped files, may possibly work for you [https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/exp/mmap](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/exp/mmap)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Remove some offensive/archaic terminology from OpenSSL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089 <comment><USER2> You know, the problem with letting people's sudden emotions swing you back and forth without possibility of reasonable discussion is that some day it will come to bite you in the ass. That is, in terms of what kind of behavior you're incentivizing.

In this kind of environment, people who raise even reasonable objections to questionable changes will be labeled as the enemy by fanatics. Like this guy. I don't know where he gets such a motivation to destroy or rewrite this corner of the world because he thinks it's his responsibility to stamp out oppression in C code. Which is about as far from the social problem as you can get.

The list of words being considered as prejudiced include:

\-- parent/child \-- whitelist/blacklist

Some of this is really ridiculous.

How are we to decide what terms are offensive enough? Vote? There are going to be objections at some level about any term, by someone out there. Someone needs to be an authority and say how much self-censoring is reasonable, and what terms are reasonable to keep.

I object to the term SSL. It is a deep insult to my culture. We should rename it because of that. Who are you to question my being offended?

Please let this issue not be determined by this guy or this ilk. Or at least, let this argument settle for a few months and see whether it still makes sense before getting caught up in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, time tells whether you were reasonable or not.

<comment><USER3> I get keeping 'parent/child', but why is it so ridiculous to change 'blacklist'? It seems reasonable to not want to associate 'black' with 'bad/evil'.

Thinking about how we use the term 'blacklist' doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice on our part.

If you disagree, I would love to hear your logic.

<comment><USER4> We should also change all of these doubleplus ungood words: Black market Black magic Black Sabbath Black widow Black soul Black sheep Black eye Black mark Black rider Black out Black box Black book

I was triggered twice just typing this up.

<comment><USER3> If someone proposing using a better term than 'blacklist' makes you take an all-or-nothing reaction, it might be a case where if you have a hammer, everything you see is a nail.

<comment><USER4> Can't you empathise with people who identify as black and have to see phrases like "black magic" meaning evil while "white magic" is good? Why not start here? Are we only changing open ssl because it's easy?

<comment><USER3> If you don't like using the term, then by all means say 'evil magic'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really don't understand how it helps against racism to purge language from certain words in contexts where they're not even applied to humans.

<comment><USER6> Feels good without effort. Meaningful progress takes enormous amounts of time and tireless efforts, comparatively speaking.

A pull request, many even, isn't going to fix systemic injustices and inequalities at societal levels. Slavery continues to exist today in the 21st century [1]. I'm unsure how some feel this is the case, but the bluntness seems necessary.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century) (The International Labour Organization estimates that, by their definitions, over 40 million people are in some form of slavery today.)

<comment><USER7> Virtue signalling, plain and simple. Makes you look good to your peers without doing anything of substance.

I don't get why there isn't a sustained campaign to reach out for commitments from elected representative while they are largely working from home and more immune from the political pressures that keep them in lockstep maintaining the status quo. Now is the time to push for change from those who hold the power of the purse and frame laws.

<comment><USER8> This realization is what motivated me to start participating in charity over the past few years.

There has never been as much empty virtue signalling by privileged people as there is today. They declare the deck chairs on the Titanic to be offensive, remove a few of them, congratulate themselves and call it a day like their responsibility is absolved. Maybe they go the extra mile and try to get somebody fired for not speaking the same doublespeak as them.

But fixating on their theater achieves nothing. It just gives them more of the attention they crave. So I decided instead to donate my time and my money to good causes and _actually_ help make things better, because this is in short supply.

The virtue signallers may or may not take note, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that if they're going to absolve themselves of doing the real work, someone else has to step up.

<comment><USER7> I avoid simply giving money to a lot of large charities. Fancy offices with executive level pay while they largely rely on donations and volunteers to do the real work for free. Kind of a corporation version of virtue signalling.

I'd rather donate food to the local animal refuge than give to them.

<comment><USER6> Some large charities are very effectively run. Charity water comes to mind. I think it's important to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that donating to large nonprofits can be an effective use of resources if you've done your homework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some other problematic words in this repo:

Parent: to orphans and those who have been in the foster care system

Child: to those who cannot have offspring

Sibling: to only children

Dead: to those who've known someone who passed

Disabled: to anyone with a handicap

Fire: to burn victims

Smart: to those with low IQ

Small: to the vertically challenged

I'm very glad to not see the word Zombie because that is very triggering to French Haitians.

I'd also like to remind people that we need new words for male/female plugs because those terms are transphobic.

<comment><USER10> Ever notice how the default theme in software is typically a light/white theme?

This. _clap_ Has. _clap_ Got. _clap_ To. _clap_ Go!

<comment><USER11> I want a nice'n cool black theme! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is one of my favorite sections from 1984. Maybe there is some relevance to draw from it; maybe not.

      'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost
      sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read
      some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're
      good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
      to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.
      You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that
      Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller
      every year?'

      Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not
      trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the
      dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

      'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
      thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,
      because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that
      can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
      rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
      Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the
      process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year
      fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
      smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
      thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.
      But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will
      be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc
      is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever
      occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a
      single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation
      as we are having now?'

</comment><comment><USER13> People will always find something to be offended about, and it's sad that we as a society have let this "weaponisation of offence" grow unhindered and some people have even encouraged it.

I feel sorry for people who do things like this, only because if [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833377) is any indication, 4chan is about to make his life very _very_ miserable.

"Inclusiveness includes stupidity too."

</comment><comment><USER14> Note it contains this commit with the message "Fix whitespace." That is hilarious.

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/commits/b7d2ec...](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/commits/b7d2ec51cf2abf6f827c580a5ebea07acc23ee52)

<comment><USER15> I don't get why it's funny. Isn't whitespace named because of the screen color which happened to be white?

Maybe I'm missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem isn't the words that seem to offend some people, it's that people associate themselves with words that they should not. I would love to live in a world where people stop saying "I'm black" or "I'm white". Your skin has a colour, but I bet it's not one of those. Perhaps a light brown? The point is, no one alive can say they don't share some heratage with one side or another. If you are so offended by some historical act of slavery in your ancestry, then perhaps you should also carry out some due diligence and check if there is any enslavement by the part of your ancestors also? If things like this is a big deal, why are we ok with dressing up as pirates or murderers? I personally feel like the problem lies in our inability to accept some historical events as unchangeable as crap as they are, and focus instead at how wonderful our differences as a species is in the 21st century. We should be accepting humanity as the collidescope that it is rather than just "black" and "white". FFS!

</comment><comment><USER17> The problem with saying change something if it offends someone is that is open to abuse. Are you going to remove something that speaks out about a government killing its own citizens because that government finds it offensive? That would be stupid.

In the case of master and slave i don't mind the defaults for new projects being changed but this new trend of going around and demanding everyone update their projects right now is just silly. You are asking people to put in a huge ammount of effort and possibly break lots of external things for the sake of making a few white guys feel like they did something.

<comment><USER18> It gives also ammunition to force everyone to change their current repo.

If I don't change my repositories for regardless what reason there is, I risk myself now being called a racist. And that can have serious consequences (again though public rage "that company employs racists").

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember my time studying Freud's sex theory in literature class and how there are symbols that signified the sexual desire scatter around the story we've read, say, the male character took his pen(phallic symbol) and pierce some hole in the pink clothes(symbolizing female), and you can see this everywhere in the text if you look for it (though Freud humorously said that sometimes cigar is just a cigar, not everything has to be about sex)

At the end of the day, I cannot help but think that half of the interpretation is just what my professor just made up because she really engrossed in Freud's theory.

That being said, you will see anything you really _want to_ see, if you look for it hard enough. If you think it's there, it will be there...

</comment><comment><USER20> Taken to its ultimate end, we will have to have

      Colors.Black == Colors.White

And, courtesy of Douglas Adams:

> _" Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that > black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."_

</comment><comment><USER21> Everywhere is search black & white now. But no one cares about yellow or other.

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/454afd9866300b984306...](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/454afd9866300b984306c5b565a9d55568a5bc50/test/property_test.c#L90)

Why Yellow is Groan?

As someone living near to or will become a sensor place soon, I'm worried one day that's a list to remove/replace these words automatically. (or suggested not to say that)

There's a country you'll get in trouble if you say that 2-digits out of 0-9

</comment><comment><USER22> From the diffs:

master -> changed to main/parent (depending on context)

slave -> changed to child

blacklist -> changed to blocklist

black magic -> changed to magic

white space -> changed to whitespace/empty space (depending on context)

[https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/files](https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/12089/files)

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't it be great when the parent node/process needs to kill the child node/process?

<comment><USER24> So, like abortion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What should tomorrow's Scrum Master be called?

</comment><comment><USER26> Social progress leaves the trace by giving old words new meanings, regress - by hiding old meanings behind new words.

<comment><USER27> These are technical terms that are evoking real-life concepts, not the other way around.

Words can be reappropriated, yes, but only by the group the word affects: otherwise, you haven't been at the other end of the word and it seems out of place to dictate how they should feel about it, as an outsider.</comment></comment>


Erik Spiekermann: No Free Pitches - <AUTHOR> http://99u.com/articles/55323/erik-spiekermann-no-free-pitches <comment><USER2> Spiekermann is an inspiring designer, but also a hypocrite.

He's always preaching "no spec". Never! Not even for charity!

Well, unless it's a high-profile competition of the United Nations, with himself on the jury. Then it's an awesome opportunity. And for a good cause...</comment>


A boy the bullies love to beat up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html <comment><USER2> I read this story, too, wondering why it was here. But I kept reading anyway because I had already noticed 18 comments and I was curious to see what my fellow hackers had to say about this. (I'm a hacker news addict; I value your comments as much as the original content.)

I expected my fellow hackers to condemn this bullying behavior and support the bullyee. But instead I was very surprised (more like stunned) to read some of these responses.

I empathized with the boy in the story because it could have been my story. And probably the story of many people here. Just because you're not a jock or a ladies man, then something must be wrong with you.

The attacks on this boy were unacceptable and inexcusable. I don't know the answer to this problem, but blaming the victim is NOT.

<comment><USER3> The funny thing about hackers is that they have the intellectual capability to hack their own life, and rarely try.

Users who merely use a computer system don't get that feeling hackers get when they are able to push into that creative realm, to shape and mold a system, often ideas that had not been anywhere. It's that experience of bringing something out of nothing, I think, is what makes coding so much fun. You get to make choices when you code.

But just as you can make these choices when you code, you can do the same for your life. Why else would people flock to Hacker News? Sure, it is about Paul Graham's ideas on startups. I think, though, we flock here because we want to take control of your financial situation.

What about your social life? What about that bully in high school ... or that asshole boss of your's that keeps taking advantage of you?

In this civilized society, physical abuse is grounds for punishment by the community. Verbal abuse leaves a lot of room to seriously damage someone without leaving a mark. The question I have to ask is, are you going to depend on the civilization's operating system, or are you going to use the skills learned from hacking code to _really_ understand how the social OS works?

It may seem like blaming the "user", but you protect users from themselves because they don't know how to hack. I too empathize with the boy, but I also think he already has a lot of the tools he needs to get himself out.

<comment><USER2> Some of us just need a little more time than others. What concerns me most in this case is whether so much damage has been done to cripple the boy for life. Hard for us to imagine but still easy enough to happen.

<comment><USER3> There are other societies who force this issue through a rite of passage. Though that can be just as crippling.

I don't have to imagine the crippling effects of this. I've met a few people whom I can see it happen. As for myself, though I've never been bullied to the extent this kid has, I have had bad life strategies that took me years to disassemble.

At the same time, some of the gifts I've been given are things that'd help even with crippling damage. As cheesy as that sounds. And assuming I remember if after suffering the damage.

Civilization is what lets people behave like ... people ... without going around bashing each other on the head. Yet at the same time, you cannot let the civilized abstractions separate you from your survival instincts. We are not just the identity we form with other people; we are each in these fragile sacks of water called the human body. I may try to increase the general level of civilization to ensure the safety of the people, yet just as importantly, I'll also try to pass on survival skills that I have learned. Including surviving crippling damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree that this is not Hacker News.

On the other hand, this relates to one of my pet causes. It is a shame that the boy's parents have no options except to A) petition the school board for relief B) mount a political campaign to unseat the school board incumbents and then reform the school system (a large undertaking) or C) move to another school district. Why can't they just take their money to a better run competitor?

School choice doesn't answer every school quality problem, but there is a certain perverse anti-logic in bureaucratic monopolies that pervades much of what goes on in primary education.

Hopefully my rising to the bait won't pollute Hacker News discourse too much, as only those who click on this comment thread will read my comment.

<comment><USER5> D) Home School

<comment><USER4> The problem with home schooling is that one cannot benefit from specialization and the division of labor as one can in a school-institution. While the average parent might be a better teacher than the average public school employee, there are probably others out there who are even better teachers than they.

Still, a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER6> We homeschool because our daughter does very well with it but if we could afford a _good_ private school (I've been to bad ones), we would probably consider it.

I once hired a private tutor to help me fill in some gaps (see lame private school comment above!) After I had caught up (in a couple of months), we spent about 95% of the time learning random things rather than anything I was doing in univ (he hated computer science - not a real science he said!) I think he enjoyed our sessions as much as I did. From time to time, he helped me on hard problems I would do outside of the university curriculum but by and large we were _just learning_. This is the way we run our homeschooling. Just learning.

Ah brings back memories. He used to complain about all the other students and how they never do their work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those not hacker news comments are so tiresome. I was curious about the article, but it didn't seem to have a punchline. But then I was still curious about the comments on Hacker News. After all, it seems to be a system with a problem. Billy most definitely seems to not have managed to hack the system to his advantage.

It seems unlikely that there could be a technological answer to those problems, but who knows?

</comment><comment><USER8> The consensus seems to be that this doesn't qualify as Hacker News, but I tend to think that a large percentage of the users of this board can empathize with this boy. I certainly went through some of this (though not nearly as much, and at a much younger age), and I'm sure a pretty large percentage of today's startup founders and programmers went through similar tormenting at some point for being smart, different, or just unlucky. Thus, this gets a well deserved up vote from me.

<comment><USER3> Ender's Game.

<comment><USER5> That's different: Ender won his fights.

<comment><USER3> Ender didn't win all of his fights. He gets regularly beaten up by his older brother.

Remember this? Ender didn't like how his bullies fought, strong versus weak. He didn't like how he fought, smart versus stupid. And none of it worked with his brother, who is just as smart and much more ruthless. Ender just wanted to be left alone.

What about the Buggers? Weren't they bullying the humans? What happened later when Ender found out the Buggers didn't even know they were killing sentient beings? What was the human response? To get a bigger stick.

What are Billy's parents doing? They are doing what Ender realized couldn't happen in Battle School. He couldn't go to the authorities. He had to finish it on his own.

Why did Billy's sister stopped him from finishing the fight? To win, you have to to win all the fights that come after -- that was what Ender saw. What happened in the trial at the end of the book? Those kids had died. If Billy did that, he would win that fight, and it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Instead of a New York Times article about bullying, we'd have a media fest about another Columbine.

Ender won almost all his fights, but it nearly destroyed him. To win, he had to empathize with the enemy until he loved them. Then he annihilated them. He kept seeing Peter's face in the mirror, until he realized his sister Valentine was always with him. He beat the Giant who kept killing him with those poisoned drinks ... by cheating. And that's when he came to the End of the World.

My point with Ender's Game is not to say that Ender had the solution to this, but rather that the book discussed all the issues people are bringing up here in these comments. In detail. It is too bad it seems so few people have read it or regarded my comment as pointless enough to downmod it. Too bad for them.

<comment><USER5> I forgot about the fights with his brother. FWIW I upmodded you (a while ago, before reading this).

<comment><USER3> Neato, and thanks :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > (not (hacker-news-p))

T

:(

<comment><USER10> Come on guys. You can get this news at Reddit. This isn't hacker news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I miss being a minor. I hung out with a lot of other nerdy kids, so it was always fun to walk up behind a guy who was hassling one of my friends, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face.

</comment><comment><USER12> Time for Catholic school, maybe.

At any rate, you will see this time and again in any institution that has an internal disciplinary system. The effect is twofold:

1\. Small infractions are amplified in importance. Thus, it is possible to be socially humiliated for...writing on a desk, talking out of line, chewing gum.

2\. Large infractions are covered up. Thus, beatings, which in the real world could result in prison, are punished with 3 day suspensions.

Both of the above are designed to _preserve the power structure_. Minor infractions are punished for the sake of exercising that power, reminding people of it, to prevent cracks from forming, etc etc. Meanwhile, large infractions are covered up so that the outside world doesn't realize that it needs to intervene.

</comment><comment><USER13> Bah, I've been a loser from ~7 to ~18 (I'm 22) and I see right through the BS. I've been bullied repeatedly during that time. Fortunately it was "only" words in my case but the ravages and dynamics are mostly the same, I think. Here are some couple points, in random order:

\- Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy. He will _never_ get out of this hell if he doesn't accept a big part of responsibility. There's a reason he's the only one that gets beat so much and so hard. I'm sure his mother is well-meaning, but she's not helping him by putting all the blame on the other kids and the authorities which don't do squat. Which brings me to my next point.

\- Trying to get Billy out of hell by counting on authorities or throwing lawsuits is mostly pointless. The perpetrators are mostly untouchable and they're fully aware of it. Those that push for the authorities to enforce Billy's safety are only taking his destiny out of his hands and giving him a good excuse to blame others for his predicament. "It's not my fault if I'm not safe, it's the authorities that don't protect me enough". There will always be waves and waves of people that will attack Billy, verbally or physically, because guess what, there are tons of people in this world that are in dire need of better status and self-esteem and a lot of them will opt to pray on easy targets to make themselves feel superior.

\- I'm sure Billy thinks he can't reverse the tide because everyone knows him and how he gets beat. But throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur. That's because he's projecting a bloody image of himself that the sharks will no doubt sniff real quick. When I was bullied, when people I had never even seen called me names I thought the word somehow had got around. But what I should have understood is that it's just the blood and shark thing. It's not that everyone knows you, it's that everyone can picture you in the generic loser template. Those days, I can recognize the "old me's" at a glance, and it's painfully obvious I could become a bully if I hadn't matured properly.

\- Trying to find external motivations like "he's too tall" or "he wears glasses" or "he has learning disabilities" is BS. When I was a loser, I was indeed "too tall", and there always was "something wrong with me" (ex: unfashionable clothes), but now I'm as tall as ever and I still have unfashionable clothes but nobody notices that anymore. Weird, eh? No, it's just my attitude that's changed.

<comment><USER14> "Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy."

Do you have any unsubstantiated claims that DON'T come from "The Secret"?

<comment><USER13> I don't know what "The Secret" is, and that one certainly doesn't come from it because it's my own. In any case I came up with this unsubstantiated claim on my own (is it unsubstantiated if it stems from 12 years of first-hand experience?)

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate a bit? What was the 50%, at least for you, that caused the bullying?

<comment><USER13> k, first I'll admit that 78% of statistics are made on the spot ;P

But really, how can you explain that I had mostly the same attitude for 12 years and had the same problems and then I changed pretty fast and the problems went away just as quickly? Coincidence?

If I only had 10% responsibility, seems to me I would have been mostly powerless to change things. I don't think my neighborhood has gotten any more or any less safer than it was. If it wasn't my environment that changed and it wasn't me that did either, yet all the situation changed, how do you explain that?

When I say it's his fault, it's not to put him down, it's to empower him.

<comment><USER3> Were you empowered by someone else, or did you seize on this yourself?

In my (purely anecdotal) experience, telling someone they have a "choice", or they can change things, ... it does not work very well. That experience of knowing you can reach out and make a choice was something like becoming enlightened. You get it or you don't.

<comment><USER13> That's the sad thing about it, there's stuff you can't just get told. I know all the things my parents said to help, but it didn't really help at all when they said it, it's just now that it's over that I get what they meant.

I guess you just have to reach a point where you're fed up enough that you want to change for the best, whether it takes a year or 12 to reach _your_ bottom of the barrel.

edit: There's this guy on the street that told me to raise my head instead of looking on the ground, and that kickstarted my process. I know it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't been fed up with my current situation and didn't have a clue I could do something about it. Like, if he had told me that 2 years earlier it wouldn't have had any effect probably. But it's just to say, if you're in deep trouble like Billy my hints might be worthless but for someone farther along, "on the fence", it might help.

<comment><USER3> So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point".

I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do.

I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes this realization.

Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this has always interested me.

It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it.

It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun.

Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning _budo_. Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the bullying.

The other is the Chinese word, _kungfu_. It's used in America to mean "martial arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). _Kungfu_ means refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."

<comment><USER16> I keep hearing people talk about this Ender's Game book. Should I buy one to read? It's gonna be a hard endeavour since I will have to import it (can take up to 2 months to arrive), so is it worthwhile?

<comment><USER3> It was worth it to me. It's the kind of book you give to a kid who is too brilliant than his own good: smarter than the teachers and authorities around him yet still treated like a second-class citizen and never an adult. All of my friends loved the book. You might be able to find an ebook of it lying around somewhere -- check it out before you import it. You can also read the first n-pages on Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen I disagree with claims it's his fault.

</comment><comment><USER17> You would think that the parents would have enrolled the child in some sort of self defense class or program. Teaching the kid how to defend himself from the bullies would have been the most effective way to handle the situation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why are you modding up this article

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe time to add down-arrows.

<comment><USER19> I can't help but think, over and over again, that the "we need a down-arrow" and "take it to reddit" comments are more polluting than the occasional non- programming/startup related stories. The comments don't appear on the front page, however, they do have a much lower information content.

This article and xkcd are both more informative than "time to add a down arrow," no matter how much I may agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems highly unlikely that this happened as randomly as the kids parents seem to think. Kids are brutal, but they are also inconsistent. The fact that they are all beating up on the same kid, day after day, means there is something more to it than typical teenager douchebaggery.

Everyone thinks their child is sweet and innocent, but in reality the kids who get beat up repeatedly are doing something to cause it. They may not deserve the end result, but their actions do encourage it.

</comment><comment><USER21> IMHO there is something wrong with the boy:

1.- Not being able to physically defend himself.

2.- Not being alert of his surroundings.

3.- Not being able to have friends who would look after him.

4.- Even having a behavior that exasperates other students.

I may even ask the question: What is he getting out of this? Is he getting more attention? Is he getting to feel like a victim? Is he getting the right to feel sorry about himself? Is he able to justify his low grades?

</comment><comment><USER22> Learn karate.

<comment><USER3> That might not be a great idea, not because of the violence involved, but because that twists the training. If the kid lucks out, he'd find a training group willing to work out whatever it is that is attracting bullies to him. If he doesn't luck out, he ends up being the guy getting beaten up in the dojo.

I actually know of a guy who didn't luck out. His father forced the guy to go learn karate as a kid. Because he was getting picked on. His father yelled at him when he sucked. I imagine his teachers then yelled at him too. The worst part of it was that after he grew up, he is _still_ taking some form of martial arts. He is _still_ getting picked on by his training group, even though he switched to a different art, twice. He is so desperate for friends, he whines about the verbal abuse of his current teacher yet refuses to quit because the training group and the teacher are the only friends he has. These are not the reasons to go learn a martial art.

That's not to say Karate won't work. The main thing is to get him around people who act like _sane_ , socially-healthy adults -- people who takes initiative in a civilized society yet have not lost touch with their survival instincts. That may or may not be karate.

<comment><USER23> It worked for me. I stopped getting bullied after a couple months of martial arts, even though the closest I ever came during that time to getting into a fight was one incident of locking a guy's arm behind his back and then letting him go when he tried to shove me in the lunch line. Simply projecting greater physical confidence was enough to make the bullies leave me alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bad voters, bad.

</comment><comment><USER5> So when Billy says, "Mom, I don't want to go to school today. I fear I'll be badly hurt," his parents make him go anyway?

Awful story :(

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Reminds me of La Ciudad y los Perros (The Time of the Hero).

<http://www.enotes.com/time-hero/></comment>


Spy with Openvpn - mr-cribo hi guys
I wanna know that is it possible to spy with openvpn in the arch linux ??
I got a openvpn file from my pal and it was related to a project , but I don't have trust to it .
based on your opinion Do think is it possible ?
I mean is that buy a dns server and monitoring the site traffic . I apologize because of my terrible English. <comment><AUTHOR> Your ideas sound crowds and nonworking.

What about investing your interest on technology for something good. What about learning the basics of Linux and Networking? Installing Arch Linux is a good exercise. Setting up an OpenVPN server, too. I bet your friend has experience and is willing to support you.

One day, this move could bring you a good education and income.

<comment> mr-cribo Thank you because of your respond . to tell the truth I was started learning Arch Linux one year ago and now I know a lot of stuff about Linux, specially Arch . but I apologize , I don't understand your mean from this sentence : " What about investing your interest on technology for something good. What about learning the basics of Linux and Networking? Installing Arch Linux is a good exercise . " ?? Yeah , My pal is one of the best programmer that ever I have seen before he's so professional .

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect, so you should learn about OpenVPN. Forget about IPv6 in the moment, learn about classical TCP/IP, routing, CIDR. Spend 10€/m for a VPS, it is a great investment for learning.</comment></comment></comment>


A New Apache Commons Component: Text - <AUTHOR> http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-text/ <comment><AUTHOR> It includes edit distances, and part of Apache Commons Lang string related methods and classes. This latter will be deprecated in Lang and later removed.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the pros/cons for developers leaving Ubuntu/Linux for Mac OS X? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about leaving my PC notebook and go for a Macbook Pro 13".<p>I currently use Ubuntu. Any thoughts on the transition from Ubuntu to Mac OS X? Specific annoyances? <comment><USER2> I'm using Macs and Linux machines since many years now as a web developer. On the Mac you just have a few tools available (first textmate, now sublime) that for everyday work I would miss on Linux.

Otherwise there are not that many differences. On the Mac getting and installing the newest distributions of some packages can be a tiny bit more difficult. Sometimes you need to google to find some instructions to get some things running that are more easy to install on Linux (sometimes it's the other way), especially if you need to compile something.

That said it may depend on the kind of work you want to do. Both systems may offer advantages in different areas, the Mac may shine for graphics processing and software you have to pay for, while many oss projects target the Linux world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Con: *NIX software isn't as easy to install. I mean there's stuff like brew and ports, but it's just not the same. You have to sit there and compile and then oops you have a problem you need to go fix. For instance, postgres9.0 on ports has a bug where you have to specify the hostname, so you're doing psql -h localhost just to bind to the local database. I hear brew is better but there's an opportunity cost to switching and making sure everything installs.

No hibernate option, not that it always works in Linux.

Pro: No Unity interface :). I jest, but some people don't like the UI and that could be a pro for you.

Mac App store is definitely a plus, but apparently Ubuntu has one too.

You can use Xcode and be able to play in the iOS sandbox.

<comment><USER4> """No hibernate option, not that it always works in Linux."""

Actually there _is_ a hibernate option, and it's enabled by default too. It's just that it's used only as a fallback (from normal "sleep" mode which is way better) when the battery dies.

OS X also saves to disk (hibernates) after you close the lid, so if when sleeping the battery dies, you don't loose anything. So, you get the best of both worlds --sleep for normal use PLUS hibernation as a (transparent to you) backup.</comment></comment>


The Top 7 Technology Trends That Will Dominate 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/10/31/the-top-7-technology-trends-that-will-dominate-2014/

<comment><USER2> They totally forgot Bitcoin.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- True.</comment></comment>