'One million babies' created by EU student exchanges - <AUTHOR> http://yahoonewsdigest-intl.tumblr.com/post/98180077267/one-million-babies-created-by-eu-student-exchanges <comment><USER2> Media is summarizing a 220+ page report of analysis of Erasmus' impact to "1M babies!".

Here's a site with a better summary ([http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-14-1025_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-14-1025_en.htm)) where you can download the PDF of the report. The executive summary contains some interesting facts.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. The media report is an odd spin, considering the headline of the EU report is:

"Erasmus Impact Study confirms EU student exchange scheme boosts employability and job mobility"

The part about "1 million babies" is buried several paragraphs in as random statistic, but the author turns the entire story over and runs with that as the lead.

I think the submission should be changed to the EU report, as it's far more informative than the blog re-write, and has less of a smelly spin to it.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, without "1M babies" headline this link would be less likely to appear on Hacker News )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a reason the Erasmus program (through which I've met some really great people) is often known by the students as "Orgasmus".

All things considered, this is one of those positive headlines we so rarely see these days.

<comment><USER6> what is so positive about spawning babies?

<comment><USER7> Unless they're unwanted and accidental - what isn't positive about spawning babies? Specifically in the context of people leaving their own country to discover other cultures. It shows how easy it is to just be great humans together, without artificial segregation based on country boundaries.

<comment><USER8> > what isn't positive about spawning babies?

Overpopulation.

<comment> guard-of-terra Europe doesn't have this problem and the program doesn't concern Africa or India where they have this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a good way to reduce nationalism in Europe (which has sometimes led to wars).

<comment> guard-of-terra I doubt that Europe has much inter-Europe nationalism already. That is, between different nations of Europe.

And I'm not sure this program affects nationalism between locals and immigrants. It may do so, since a lot of university students are immigrants. But on the other hand, it is also true if you study locally.

<comment><USER10> If you think there's no inter-Europe nationalism I'm not sure where you live. There's a bunch of it. In my environment (German) growing up it was mostly about French, Polish, and a bit about British people. Sure, straight racism mostly happened towards e.g. Turkish immigrants but that's where it stops.

<comment><USER11> racism toward Turkish is where it starts in Germany (even those 2nd or 3rd generation born in Germany). Where it ends is the institutionalized discriminatory education system [1]. But this mostly gets swiped under the rug as even liberals in Germany have trouble accepting the problems.

1.en: [http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/st...](http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/standing- up-for-equality-germany-schools-english-20131024.pdf)

1.de: [http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/gl...](http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/gleichberechtigung- an-deutschen-schulen-fordern-20131025.pdf)

<comment><USER12> That pamphlet makes for some scary reading, but is this typical of all of Germany? Perhaps some folks who are living in Germany can comment?

<comment><USER11> I live in Berlin, Germany's largest city and most liberal(?) city, which is where the PDF is largely focused. The problem is that unlike a media- hyperbolic society such as the US where meme's travel fast, Germany is a bit more civil and people mostly mind their own business. This brings its own benefits and problems. The problem being that most citizens believe the state of discrimination to be what they have seen (as you will notice from many comments of Germans here and other places). When in-fact in a meme based society eventually stories of real discrimination would become more widely understood.

When I talk to people here about the problem of discrimination in the education system few believe it at first. A stalwart all people here hold is that their education system is "great". The stats even for the general population, not accounting for different classes or races, brings that into stark question. Until you relay to them the stories then they start consider it more closely. Then they may start to see that the Gymnasium system meant to promote excellence is actually just a Cast system. Being that promotion to Gymnasium is dependent on a letter from a students teacher. If nothing else tacit discrimination a result of the natural psychology to favor the familiar helps found unfair results.

Prior to the Information Era the Gymnasium / Hauptschule system had a function as professional labor was highly valued. This is no longer the case and not getting into a Gymnasium has stronger psychological effect than it would have before. This system, for this era, is discriminatory at its base.

Consider The Pygmaliom Effect [1] (aka self-fulfilling prophesy) that proves measured aptitude is dependent on confidence and attention within the education system. Here in Germany you have a system that reaffirm the predefined bias against immigrants and you don't give them attention so they don't perform as well.

At least in Berlin, there is evidence that teachers and headmasters of Gymnasiums are just blatantly racist. Consider the arguments some made against Affirmative Action for Gymnasium enrollment in 2011 [2]:

        Headmasters have objected, saying this type of policy would be
        "a disservice" to poor children, that they would not be able
        to keep up academically. The headmasters have also expressed
        concerns that children of working-class families would not
        feel welcome at gymnasien. Wolfgang Harnischfeger, headmaster
        of a well-known Berlin gymnasium, has stated:

            It can be noticed in children as young as kindergarten
            students, that children take after their parents. They
            emulate their language, their way of dressing, their way
            of spending their free time. Kids from Neukölln [a poor
            neighbourhood] would not feel good about themselves if they
            had to attend a type of school that mainly serves students
            from social classes different from their own. They will
            not be able to integrate. Every field day, every school
            party will show that".

Effectively this headmaster is saying his school is racist so immigrants wont feel comfortable. The situation is not going to get better. In 2011 Berlin finally reformed their system requiring %30 of seats in Gymnasium be randomly selected. From any angle you look at it, this measure is too little and completely awkward. It doesn't address the ability of teachers to keep qualified students out by not giving them a letter. It doesn't deal with the structure in Gymnasiums that segregate children. It doesn't deal with the problem that very early in your life you are told whether you are worth of University or not.

I feel most Europeans want to protect their idea that whatever problems they hear about in the US, that they don't have anything similar. It's convenient and comfortable but absolutely blind.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect#Rosenthal.E2....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect#Rosenthal.E2.80.93Jacobson_study)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_%28Germany%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_%28Germany%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
        showed that 27 percent of people who took part had met
        their current life partner during their stay abroad.
        Thirty-three percent of Erasmus students hooked up with
        people of a different nationality than their own,
        nearly three times the rate of students who had not
        travelled.

Obviously to meet people of a different nationality you have greater chance when leaving your own country. Next, there is probably something to meeting their partner suitable for starting a family during a certain period of their life that may coincide with Erasmus. So, not sure this statement or this part of the study means anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> The steam engine also did much to promote distant relationships and increase genetic diversity. You were no longer limited to dating someone from the local town or county -- in a few hours journey you could meet someone far away.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting point about the EU's actual argument - that Erasmus students are more likely to be employed - is that (as I remember from _my_ (entirely chaste) Erasmus summer, there was some competition for the places, and better students (or students who were better at presenting themselves) won.

I predict that it is not Erasmus that creates jobs, but students who win Erasmus places also win jobs that were already there.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a slightly more balanced summary article about this report on the BBC: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29310930](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29310930)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Thirty-three percent of Erasmus students hooked up with people of a different nationality than their own, nearly three times the rate of students who had not travelled."

Hooked up is the scientific term now. But in reality it's just human nature to want to couple up, combine that with the romantic notion of being in a different country and you have a fairy tale.</comment>


Ask HN: Turning over a website to a nontechnical "client" - <AUTHOR>

A few years ago I built a simple Joomla based website as a favor for a friend and agreed to host it gratis on my "project server". Since then he and I co-founded a start-up which failed and we are no longer on good terms. I am still stuck hosting his site, and removing the malware that gets installed every couple of months on his, now ancient, version Joomla.
I am currently in the process of changing hosting providers and have to do something with this site. Something in this case means either giving him his data and walking away or doing a migration to another platform and making him responsible for it. The challenges are: 1) He doesn't have the technical skills to keep it up to date or clean up the mess after a hack. 2) I'm not interested in being involved in the ongoing maintenance of the site.
What I'm looking for is any advice/best practices for doing this type of turn over. <comment><USER2> Here's what I would do. Send him a email saying that the era of you hosting his site for free is over as you're moving providers and can't afford to bring him along. Then get to work moving your sites over, leaving his site. Talk to your current host and get the account transferred over to him. Then hand him the keys and be done with it.

If it's important enough to him he'll hire someone to help him the next time the site gets hacked. If not that's when the site will die. Either way you're clear.</comment>


Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-twitter-dorsey-strategy/ <comment><USER2> Well, one would hope so. Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook. The stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary.

The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.

Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post- growth.

<comment><USER3> Twitter has huge room for growth, at least 10X from where it is. I just don't think they have done enough to figure out what is preventing so many other people to become its frequent user. In my own experience, I find Twitter's newsfeed algorithm pretty bad and completely lacking stickiness. I can easily find stories that would have kept my attention which should have ranked much above. The presentation of content is fairly complex (too many # and @ to parse). Ranking of re-tweets is especially bad. Lot of essential tools are still missing, for example, I can't even search my own tweets effectively. Lot of essential integration is left to 3rd parties (for example, no official Chrome plugin). If you think about it, we communicate a lot like Twitter by using medium of text messages. However text messages lack lot of desirable features (non searchable, history gets purged, hard to create one-off groups etc). Twitter, if done right, can replace text messages and even emails at large extent in addition to social aspects.

I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn away after few attempts. I can also see if they can turn this around and grow 10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning.

<comment><USER4> It's dying because they didn't manage the tweet-storm dynamic. Journalists love it -- it means they don't need to leave the office and find actual news stories to report -- but to the ordinary public it's a platform for expression that might as well have "DANGER: LANDMINES" signs posted all around it.

Come and hear angry people ranting at the internet!

Rants and tweet-storms get lots of views, lots of clicks. But they are not necessarily what most people want to see. Most people are not on Twitter most of the time. And for most people, their primary exposure to Twitter is "oh look, there's yet another news story about a "public backlash", with a selection of angry tweets embedded in the article".

<comment><USER5> This is certainly a big turn-off for me. Why should I care about a platform apparently tailored for self-promoting celebrity gossip and low-content, high- drama flamewars?

Beyond that, I've never been able to make any sense out of their threading system; the only way I can figure out what is happening is if someone inside the mess writes an article explaining it and quoting the relevant comments. The actual feeds all seem to be incomprehensible mishmashes of quotes and references to people who aren't present. (I assume there's a view which makes it all hang together if you have an account and actually log in rather than simply browsing, but the fact that I can't really see what's inside the box means I have no motivation to get involved.)

Furthermore, getting too comfortable with a communications medium solely owned and controlled by a single company seems like a recipe for long-term disappointment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and > has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing > people the most relevant tweets first.

The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.

Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.

When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)

When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.

<comment><USER7> That feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use twitter regularly for the first time.

I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt that there are people who are willing to let Twitter decide for them what content is worthwhile, just that it's sad that that's what the platform is now. A bland community for casual users promoting the same viral content you can get anywhere, rather than a unique community for power users. Those people are only going to see what Twitter decides what is (or what should be) popular which creates a watered-down experience at best, a disturbing and manipulative one at worst.

<comment><USER7> > a unique community for power users.

This hasn't been twitter's objective for a long time now. The idea that twitter caters or cares about power users (in my opinion) was put to rest when they decided to severely limit apis and third party tooling years ago.

As a company, they want to be as big as possible which means power users are not their target audience.

<comment><USER8> This argument works in general, and as much as it annoyed me as a user, I accepted for Google and Facebook changes in the past.

The problem with Applying it to Twitter is that they have never been as big or universal as people assume they are. The median number of tweets from an account is one, active in-stream users lagged freaking Google+ for years, etc. Their shoddy, unintuitive product is practically designed to be power-user heavy, and the network has been so since the beginning. Having a user base thick with big influencers like journalists, celebs, and politicians is a blessing, but Twitter couldn't understand that and blindly followed Facebook's playbook, despite being a hugely different company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. They really are Yahoo. Founders take a back-seat in the midst of hyper- growth. Outside management team sourced from other industries (CFO of the NFL, for a tech company?). Product pivot into believing they're a media company. Eclipsed by newer technologies. Founder CEO returns amidst flat stock performance and boardroom turmoil. Exploring a sale to other big companies, who can't afford it because the market cap is too inflated. Talk of needing a turnaround CEO.

Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer. I hear she'll be looking for a job in the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience.

<comment><USER10> Marissa Mayer is one of those women who believes their shit is rock solid, when in fact it's very runny which can be compared to the runniness of Yahoos market cap since she became CEO. She is also an elitist who believes you need to have a college degree in order to get things done that she needs done. Now, Yahoo is virtually worthless. Good job Marissa.

<comment><USER9> I actually don't get much of the Marissa-hate around here. I've worked with her - she was the executive sponsor of a couple projects I worked on when I first got to Google. She has her flaws, but in general she's both smart and very hardworking. CEO of Yahoo is a tough job for anyone - as evidenced by the 5 (!) CEOs in the 5 years before her - but the real mistakes made in Yahoo's history were made in the late 90s and early 2000s.

It's pretty likely Twitter will follow the same path, but the real mistakes made in Twitter's lifetime were made between 2010-2016.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe this is what Twitter is. It Generates a couple billion in revenue. Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs. If a company can consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good. They don't need to have 4000 employees. Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or 500. Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can find some people to run it.

<comment><USER12> That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter. Existing ad sales mechanism and super strong infrastructure seems like it would offer up a lot of opportunities to trim down.

<comment><USER13> > That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter

Someone else in a different thread mentioned that Twitter isn't exactly in great books with various world governments who are friendly, or at least neutral with Google currently. Is Twitter's revenue worth the additional risk of regulatory scrutiny/antagonism to Google?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Twitter keeps ignoring what its users want, and pushing ridiculous features nobody asked for.

Keep the timeline chronological! Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow.

Give me more options to discover interesting discussions. Let me subscribe to or follow hashtags.

Give me more options for filtering out the noise. Let me provide hashtags or keywords I don't care about.

Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great ways to interact with Twitter. But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter platform or apps.

Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data. Give users the tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an indispensable part of people's daily lives.

<comment><USER15> I found a tweet from 2015 via google and wanted to see the surrounding discussion. I couldn't find a way, so I tried just holding page down on the feed, trying to infinitely scroll my way to it. After around 5 minutes it stopped loading tweets.

Oh well.

edit: I meant this to be a reply to the "failure to handle the basics" post.

<comment><USER14> There's no way to refresh a tweet in the Android app to load new replies, either. Even if I leave that tweet and come back to it, it often only pulls up locally cached replies.

And the replies are often neither chronological nor threaded in any meaningful way. I know the 140 character limit strongly discourages meaningful discussion, but I'm starting to think they believe that every single tweet should stand alone. That replies, likes, and retweets are nothing more than a metric to judge the quality or interestingness of an individual tweet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my opinion this isn't about Dorsey but about Twitter.

In 1984, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus unveiled a unicorn. Later investigation revealed it to be a goat with its horns fused together.

<comment><USER17> [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/2f/e1/102fe1905...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/2f/e1/102fe1905b27fbc962a9a6f9e867c89f.jpg)

That's hilarious.

<comment><USER18> Do not click [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-the-hideous-goat- crea...](http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-the-hideous-goat-creature- ringling-bros-claimed-was-a-unicorn-in-1985-6667020)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is _the reason_ Jack Dorsey's return was doomed to failure. He was half- time and didn't take control like a general commanding troops must.

He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer.

For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build consensus and avoid ruffling feathers. An employee revolt could have gotten him fired. He had to worry what people thought.

Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating. He absolutely worked more than anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way. And he fired people and replaced the board with friends. Things people would have faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through.

But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably would have still failed. Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really knows what it is.

</comment><comment><USER20> There is only a finite amount of energy a person has and a finite amount of hours awake, you know? I can't imagine trying to re-steer Twitter while also being an effective CEO at a place like Square.

<comment><USER21> Elon Musk.

/s

<comment><USER22> Elon has some _awesome_ lieutenants; Shotwell at SpaceX being the best example, who is essentially Tim Cook or Sheryl Sandberg level. That clearly has never existed at Twitter (does/did exist at Square when Keith Rabois was there; not sure about Square now but probably.)

<comment><USER23> Right but Elon _put them there_. Part of being a leader is recognizing when you have too much shit to do and finding people you trust, are qualified and delegating tasks to them.

<comment><USER22> Absolutely. If we were to start cataloguing the ways Jack Dorsey is not Elon Musk we'd be here for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Turnarounds are super hard. A year isn't long enough and Dorsey would have been wise to both set expectations clearly that this is a 3+ year trek as well as lock in some protective provisions around that timeline.

Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty to consider all options.

Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply focus on driving revenue as a first step. Then circle back to product later.

It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic.

</comment><comment><USER25> On another note, I don't know why the Bay Area is so obsessed with cheesy. I mean, they do the most cliche, cheesy, predictable things in this regard, then try to poorly hype it as "profound and visionary thinking." They keep trying to recreate the magic that happened with Steve Jobs in 1997, for example. And they keep failing.

They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in that case. This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011). It was just more BS every time.

I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been successful" way) to look like something else.

Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way, as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht.

<comment><USER26> For the same reason Hollywood promotes "Glamour", "Celebrities" and fawns over them on the red carpet. Gotta feed the machine with the bright-eyed and the impressionable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> TWTR has such much potential, there is not single day goes by that I won't hear Twitter's name been mentioned in some news or on TV. With Donald Trump as your Chief Marketing Officer for free, working day and night diligently, how could you not grow your user number?

The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat. That is something really easy to fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. He lost interest long ago. TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would love to have more privacy-focused features and more distance from the whole "everything's public" mantra -- following a user without anyone else knowing, following a user for only a specific hashtag, private-only hashtags.

The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER29> You can create a private list and add people to that instead of following them publicly. The UX isn't the best, but it works.

<comment><USER30> A bad UX for privacy-critical features is worse than nothing. I don't want to be privately talking with someone and worry that it might be public to the world because I checked something wrong.

<comment><USER29> Oh ya, I hear you. All kinds of problems! Was just trying to be helpful for ihsw if they wanted to muddle through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Serious question, I'm genuinely not trolling here. How can Twitter (or any other social site) be expected to maintain a high rate of new users, forever? After the first few hundred million users, wouldn't one expect new registrations to slow down a bit?

<comment><USER32> There just aren't enough eggs shouting into the void at random celebrities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why are all the photos shaded blue? I thought I had highlighted it by accident.

<comment><USER34> This is a reference to the Twitter blue bird logo. But yeah, it also caught me by surprise at first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here is the legacy of Jack and Twitter, ex 1: Dilbert creator:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator- sco...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-scott-adams- shadowbanned-twitter-after-trump-support)

How much traffic is that?

Ex: 2 Milo. Etc. So... what business is he in?

</comment><comment><USER36> It's fair to say you've lost control, when the Saudi royal family owns more of the company than you do.

</comment><comment><USER25> Twitter needs to do the following:

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

\- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555

\- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly) to fix user experience and engineering issues

\- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed

\- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and decline

There's really not much to it. Twitter is only having problems because they keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things.

<comment><USER37> What the hell is with those numbers? Is it a joke I don't get?

<comment><USER25> What numbers?

<comment><USER37> 1,555 employees, for example, why that and not 1,500

<comment><USER25> It's based on some arbitrary thing I did some time ago to determine how large a company should be (6-8 reports per manager and N layers of management; 1 layer = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 = 43, 2 layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 = 259, 3 layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 * 6 = 1555, 4 layers = 9331, etc).

As Twitter seems to be twice as large as it needs to be (3898 vs. 1949) and as it's obvious more people will need to be hired after any cuts, I arbitrarily chose 1555 and 259/585 (same number of layers, but 8 reports, rather than 6) as the numbers since they add up to about 2000.

<comment><USER38> Was the arbitrary thing you did somewhat scientific (ie,from reading papers, etc about ideal company size)?

Asking just out of curiosity, I don't think your comment is going to be too popular. I care about this a little bit because of recent cuts I saw at Yahoo.

<comment><USER25> Twitter being twice as large as it needs to be isn't arbitrary. That's easily seen from all information available. It may not be necessary to have a round of layoffs, but it's at least clear that they've hired too many people. Rather than going the route of layoffs, they could stop hiring more people, clear out the idiot management team that's driving them into the ground, then wait until they've caught up before hiring again.

The number of employees being set to 1555 is what's arbitrary. The actual employee counts (1, 7, 43, 259, 1555, 9331, etc) aren't as arbitrary, as that's what results when one assumes 6-8 reports per manager, then calculates backward to determine the overall company size per added layer of management. That is, if you want 2 layers of management, and you want each manager to have 8 reports, then you'll have an overall size of (1 CEO + 8 executives + 8 * 8 managers + 8 * 8 * 8 individual contributors) 585.

The idea of having no more than 6-8 reports per manager is somewhat based on science (number of things one can hold in short-term memory lining up with the number of people one can effectively manage at a time), but meh.

Also, the less management layers that exist, the better. And as each manager is really only able to handle 6-8 people, once you increase employee counts past a certain amount, another layer of management becomes necessary. This could become more relaxed with better software and increased efficiency (a manager could have 21 reports, for example, if they don't have to heavily/directly manage them all), but I kept going with the 6-8 number, as it gave me a good sense of things.

Another (arbitrary?) reason those numbers seemed good to me was from assessing insertion sort vs. quicksort. That is, if you compare the two, then they are equal when there are 9 items, but insertion sort is a better choice when there's less than 9 items. It was somewhat random, but as I noticed insertion sort is how the mind naturally sorts (when it learns to be more efficient), it cast another vote for using 6-8. When there's more than 8 or 9 things in mind, one's natural tendency is to then try to break things up into chunks (like quicksort), then run the equivalent of insertion sort on each chunk, then merge everything back together.

<comment><USER38> Thanks for replying! Good analogy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Twitter where free speech isn't. There will be replacements and Twitter knows it.

<comment><USER40> It would be interesting to see how much twitters war against feelings and words is effecting their bottom line.

<comment><USER39> Indeed it would. It seems that after every purge they've fallen a bit farther. It seems very odd, on a platform dedicated to short witted public screeds, that they would get offended by...short witted screeds. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel The biggest problem I think is that they constantly add features that don't improve the core functionality. For example, Moments really don't help with hashtag filtering, conversation searching, and the like. All they need to do is make it easier to filter conversations, basically. It's not that hard to see why that would get more people on board since they could make sense of their time line. But it seems Dorsey and company would rather just pile on stuff that's not related to that. I don't get their motivation for this. Can someone can explain it?

</comment><comment><USER41> This along with the recent bidding could explain why Twitter is "suddenly" not censoring anti-Hillary/pro-Trump trending topics anymore. They didn't want anymore negative press about it when the negotiations started.

<comment><USER42> With the internet split halfway in the current culture war you cannot make money from only half of the audience.

<comment><USER40> That isnt stopping them from trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe he needs to stop managing both Square and Twitter at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER44> Twitter and Snapchat need to merge. But their stock prices are hyperinflated.

The businesses are very similar. The products are similar. The trends are similar. Even the demographics are similar. It is a shame that Twitter can't be more, when it totally needs to be more. And snapchat can do so much better too.

But the problem might be they are tripping over the problems in front of them, not pursuing solutions to problems that lie ahead.

</comment><comment><USER45> The sooner Twitter dies the better...

</comment><comment><USER46> "Jack is a good entrepreneur," Slingerlend said. "But Twitter needs a turnaround CEO, and that's a completely different job."

I am not sure if I agree with the above conclusion that Twitter needs a turnaround CEO. I think Twitter needs to fully execute the live streaming strategy and see where they go from there and Jack needs to become a full time CEO and handoff Square to somebody else. Bring Mark Zuckerburg on to the board so they start learning how to execute on social. These are some small changes they can make to win back investors and win back some credibility.

</comment><comment><USER47> The USGOV spends roughly $90 billion a year hoping to influence or read the policy intentions of other states and non-state actors. Having shattered the wall between public and private institutions with its $11 billion dollar bailout of General Motors, why not partner with Blackstone Group and take Twitter private? The company's value in advancing US interests is immense and that value will die a swift death in Disney's hands.

<comment><USER48> Doesn't Disney also export American values, similar to say CNN's contribution to the "soft power" mantra?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I hope you're all happy when the product gets fingerbanged to death by legions of mediocre corporate managers at whichever soulless quarterly-earnings addicted too-lobbied-to-fail corporate institution acquires them, just so the financiers can get their fucking Twitter check.

If Twitter didn't change a fucking thing for the rest of my life I'd still use it and love it. Forever.

<comment><USER50> It loses money and stopped growing a long time ago. The product you love is unsustainable unfortunately.

<comment><USER51> It's only unsustainable because they refuse to cut back and do what the top comment on this page talks about: run Twitter like a post-growth company. There's nothing wrong with the product that cannot be fixed. The problem is that investors are demanding unrealistic growth and dividends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Noto is just dominating hacker news lately.

</comment><comment><USER53> As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.

<comment><USER54> >I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too.

What does this mean?

<comment><USER53> I am thinking of Yishan Wong, formerly of Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It does speak volumes of Twitter that even Google and Facebook want to keep distance. Is it because there is nothing to see here? no product that works meaningfully?

</comment><comment><USER55> ouch

</comment><comment><USER56> Slightly off topic, does anyone know if the portrayal of Jack Dorsey in Hatching Twitter is accurate?

<comment><USER57> I'm something like twitter user 1019, and joined on day 2 or 3 after it was launch. Before twitter was Odeo, a podcasting company. Their blog post announcing twitter back in the day went something like this:

1\. Odeo isn't doing well. 2\. We broke into small teams to brainstorm ideas. 3\. Jack, one of our devs, had this idea for SMS messaging. 4\. Oh, and it also had a web interface. 5\. It was quick to build, so here you go (link to twitter). 6\. Tell us what you think.

It was, IMHO, incredibly boring at that point, and I didn't use it again for years.

That's my personal recollection of how it was announced. I think history was rewritten a few times maybe?

Edit: Oops, it was NOT doing well. Big difference, sorry.

<comment><USER58> Slightly off topic again, but what was Odeo like?

I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do, and what worked/didn't work?

<comment><USER59> > I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do, > and what worked/didn't work?

It was discovery for podcasts and was destroyed when iTunes included podcasts.

<comment><USER60> They also had Odeo messages, which was a replacement for the Seattle free Voice Mail numbers that Podcasts often used for audio feedback. For those who had a mic, but didn't want to fiddle with recording software and encoding and emailing an mp3.

It was an awful flash app that rarely worked. Mostly a good way to freeze your browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> But at least he's still got some sweet Rick Owens jackets.

</comment><comment><USER62> i don't use twitter because i have no idea what my user/pass is. They should just allow authentication via FB</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no way to prevent scroll-jacking on a webpage? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Fortunately, most sites don't do this. I don't understand why it's done in the first place, though.

It's mentally agitating when I go to scroll on a webpage and it doesn't do what I expect.

And what content authors should be most concerned about: it distracts viewers from the site's content, because I'm thinking "what just happened to my mouse". And that reaction is the antithesis of what content creators should want: they should want to engage me, and explore the site more deeply.

<comment><USER3> My best guess has been changes they've made to slow down scrolling on ipads and similar.

My follow-on guess is that management figures you're scrolling past the adds too quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A general-purpose scripting language and general-purpose elements, where it isn't easy to see what the high-level impact of low-level actions will be.

Though we're at the point where browsers really _need_ to clearly separate what _requires_ advanced capabilities from what really _doesn't_. For example, a browser could always display exactly two tabs per page: "Read" and "Interact", where ONLY the Interact view can access scripting capabilities and dynamic content and the Read view may only display trivial things like images and text. If you've ever installed something like uMatrix on the desktop (and you should), it is _astounding_ how much crap from how many entirely different domains is loaded _and executed_ just by loading a "simple" page now. It has to stop.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh man, if there was a way to find sites that use that new mobile pattern where the ad slides up as you scroll down, I would nuke all of those sites from orbit.

<comment><USER2> Stop visiting those sites -> ad revenue dries up -> problem resolves itself. But my approach is woefully idealistic.

<comment><USER6> Besides ad-based sites, some of the sites that I've seen scroll-jack the worst are small hip restaurants. To some degree Facebook and Yelp have started to make restaurant sites irrelevant but I still end up clicking through frequently for the most up-to-date menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because, in most cases, it wouldn't work. Most pages using scroll-jacking create and/or show certain layers upon scroll. The content isn't there before.

There are some, like I believe most Apple product pages, where scroll-jacking is used to create a one-slide-at-a-time-effect where it may work. But even on those, individual slides often undergo transformations upon scroll revealing information you'd otherwise not see.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is a Chrome extension that claims to be able to prevent it: [https://joshbalfour.github.io/disable-scroll- jacking/](https://joshbalfour.github.io/disable-scroll-jacking/)

<comment><USER9> That extension is no longer installable.

<comment><USER8> Looks like the author only recently submitted it to the store for review: [https://github.com/joshbalfour/disable-scroll- jacking#update](https://github.com/joshbalfour/disable-scroll-jacking#update)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Because all major browsers support creating `onscroll` event handlers and some people offer money to javascript developers if they will do annoying and mildly evil stuff and a large number of those javascript developers say "Sure boss, whatever you want".

The browser creators, people paying for websites, and (many) javascript developers all seem happy with this, unfortunately.

<comment><USER11> Problem is, `onscroll` is not bad per se. I really like those progress indicators that some sites implement, esp. on mobile where the scrollbar is not permanently visible. That's the (IMO) legitimate use-case for `onscroll`.</comment></comment>


The Day of Two Noons - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=730727038 <comment><USER2> File under the same category as:

\- everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards

\- British motorists start driving on the right*

\- United States adopts the metric system

\- Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the population as a whole

* yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden

<comment><USER3> Well, switching to metric and switching to right-hand driving would be good things, painful in the short perspective, but extremely beneficial in the long perspective.

Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how beneficial switching to the metric system would really be. It's trivial to convert between systems if need be and pretty much all serious engineering/science work (where confusion can be costly) is done using the metric system these days anyways.

<comment><USER3> The imperial system has shortcomings for small units, which means that regular people will encounter grams/millimeters/milliliters in their daily lives, so they are effectively using a hybrid system already, which is just the worst of both worlds.

Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a calculator to do it.

<comment><USER5> _> The imperial system has shortcomings for small units_

Don't forget the medium and large units!

I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.

And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet.

Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time.

Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.

<comment><USER6> 0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension (or jail) speed

<comment><USER5> I don't mean they're close enough to be interchangeable, just that they're close enough that it's dumb to have separate scales.

They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly.

Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish most of the comments weren't so snarky.

I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different.

What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font.

This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".

<comment><USER8> >What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times

It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other OSes either.

I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate time zones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Oh, my goodness, there 'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as > people readjusted their schedules._

Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure.

And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades.

Seems.... Risky

<comment><USER3> "readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea.

One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky.

If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours.

In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean?

Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.

<comment><USER10> And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...

<comment><USER3> If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I did a lot of scientific research and I've come to the conclusion that if we all just agreed to stop coming up with ideas that start with the phrase "if we all just agree to X." we'd stop wasting so much of each other's time.

</comment><comment><USER12> In Urumqi they are using Beijing time, but doing everything two hours later. The official working hours are from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00. Even after being there for two weeks, it kept confusing me. Every time I looked at a clock (and you do this many times a day), it took me some mental effort to 'translate' the time on the clock to my own time of when I am used to do certain things. And this was only a two hour shift. Imagine if it would be 7 hours.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

</comment><comment><USER14> > STEVE HANKE: You can trade 24 hours a day, almost around the clock in gold, > currencies, stocks and everything else under the sun. And those are all > time-stamped using Universal Time.

A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.

</comment><comment><USER15> "William F. Allen realized that time is not just some objective measurement of where the sun is in the sky. It is also about the needs of society"

As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would make the most sense. I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-...](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention- of-standard-time-feature)

The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than america's NPR would have us believe.

On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian. (Go raptors).

</comment><comment><USER3> Obligatory: [https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

<comment><USER18> Definitely a great resource. It explains steady-state drawbacks of universal time, that is, drawbacks that would keep existing even after everyone has adapted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Sometimes the time changed every few minutes._

Wait, what did it do in between?

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone else catch that Helm seems to think that meteorology has to do with shooting stars?

<comment><USER21> "40% chance of meteor showers this evening."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> GMT is used in ham radio too. Gives me an excuse for s 24 hour watch.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think we should have two numerical time zones. One should be sun time and the other should be world time. Sun time could eventually become obsolete if not helpful for workdays and sleeping habits.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a great idea. While we're at it, we should standardise "up" so everyone is on the same page regardless of their location. "Up" should be the vector pointing at Alpha Centauri. This would make it so much easier for people around the world to talk about directions.

<comment><USER25> A "vector pointing at Alpha Centauri" is an incomplete definition, since a vector has a magnitude and direction. Also, Alpha Centauri has a declination of –60° 50′ 02.3737″, which makes it necessary to adjust for the time of the day. That would make people dizzy, which is unfortunate.

So I propose the following very simple definition:

Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North).

Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).

<comment><USER26> _> since a vector has a magnitude and direction._

How is the direction represented?

<comment><USER27> A normalized vector; i.e. a vector with magnitude 1.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is OSX terminal so much better than Windows command prompts? - <AUTHOR> http://theludwigs.com/2013/10/why-is-osx-terminal-so-much-better-than-windows-command-prompts/ <comment><USER2> > I don't give a hoot about the native command line tools, except for needing > SSH to be present WHICH WINDOWS SCREWS UP AS WELL.

Yes, that's true, and as usual, but there's always BitVise: [http://www.bitvise.com](http://www.bitvise.com) , which, in spite of the impression created by the Website, has a free version that works very well.

I mention this because I have always required SSH access to any OS that I respected and expected to make use of, but until recently the Windows offerings were pretty terrible.

I have no connection with BitVise except having successfully used their SSH product.

<comment><USER3> Whats wrong with putty?

<comment><USER2> Simple answer -- I didn't know they offered a Windows SSH server. And I just checked and -- whoops -- they don't.

The problem isn't an absence of SSH clients, the problem is a shortage of SSH servers.

I much prefer to have all systems serve SSH -- that way they can all talk to each other as equals. If I accepted putty as a solution, I would have to sit at the Windows machine to make transfers. Thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><USER4> You want Cygwin.

("Cygwin - Don't leave Unix without it!")

<comment><USER2> Believe me when I tell you ... I don't want Cygwin. When I want a Linux-like experience, I return to one of my primary computers, all of which run Linux.

For Windows, what I want is a way to make it appear as much as possible like a remote Linux server, granted that it's running an absurd operating system with a bunch of peculiarities like drive letters, confusion of upper and lower case pathnames, and the inability to register anything less precise than two seconds of time (in file and directory access times). So a simple SSH server seems like the best approach.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Google TOS with a diff - <AUTHOR>

I noticed Google has a new TOS https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/changes/ then I noticed there's a difference tool available if you click the Updates link, kind of like a "git instaweb" for TOS's. Pretty neat. <comment><USER2> [https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/archive/201203...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/archive/20120301-20131111/)</comment>


Out of Their Love They Made It: A Visual History of Buraq - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/09/21/out-of-their-love-they-made-it-a-visual-history-of-buraq/ <comment><USER2> Why is that dude's face is masked?</comment>


Colorado School District Switches to 4-Day Week to Save Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/08/14/638715749/colorado-school-district-switches-to-4-day-week-to-save-money <comment><USER2> > It is the 98th district in the state approved by the Colorado Department of > Education to adopt the shorter schedule.

I'm surprised this made the news, it's becoming common for districts in eastern Colorado to do this.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are working parents doing about child care on the fifth day? I wonder whether properly funding the schools 5 days/week actually costs more than paying for child care.</comment>


UK Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an "unlimited" fine - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/police-download-a-file-go-to-jail-for-10-years-and-pay-an-unlimited-fine.ars

<comment><USER2> I'm really getting sick of this, i really cant believe we live in a world where someone downloading a file, perhaps unknowingly, can potentially get more jail time than sex offenders and criminals who commit violent crime.

<comment><USER3> Should not be surprised, we don't have real democracy after all.

<comment><USER4> What is real democracy if not representative democracy? Direct democracy?

<comment><USER5> Of course. Study how the Athenian Democracy worked for example, for, after all, this is the origin of our notion of democracy (and take the exclusion of slaves and women aside, as this was a historical accident --everybody did so then-- and not the essence of the Athenian democratic process --which nobody did like them then, or even now--).

But besides direct democracy (which has many forms), there are forms of representative democracy far more democratic. Like every percentage matters, so if a party gets 3% nationwide he gets 3% of the seats, instead of losing it to a "winner takes all" scheme.

<comment><USER6> You dont even have to go that far back in history. Switzerland has a thriving, functioning democracy where anyone can get into politics, the will of the people is what counts most and all actions by politicians can easily be overturned by a referendum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As I understand it copyright violation is a purely civil matter unless it's down as part of trade, when it becomes criminal. That is, it's illegal, but you're not going to face arrest or criminal trial unless you're making money from copyright violations.

I'd be interested to know what law they reckon someone who merely downloads (or even someone file-sharing) a file could be prosecuted under.

<comment><USER8> Some places in the world, there's no exemption for non-commercial copyright infringement. A grandmother sending an old wedding picture (without a copyright release) to her grandchild is liable for up to $73,500 and 5 years of jail in Australia.

Also, the police have the potential to bring up non-commercial copyright infringement and seize all electronics. And I mean everything that has a CPU/RAM/etc.

<comment><USER9> There's no non-commercial argument (or fair use rights) in the uk either.

A school for example could have licenses for a TV program do be played in a lesson but if the soundtrack includes music then they can be in breach of copyright in those songs ... if you're listening to a radio at work and someone else overhears it then it's considered to be an unlawful performance and you can be given a hefty fine (the PRS, as it was, did over several police forces on this one). You can buy a license of course for only a few hundred pounds (yes to listen to advertising-paid radio or even the BBC).

UK have been considering making format shifting legal though. We'll finally be able to legally watch a movie we bought on a mobil device then; as long as you watch it alone and no-one hears the soundtrack or looks over your shoulder at the screen ...

<comment><USER7> Am I right to say there's no no-commercial argument in the UK; but copyright infringement without trading means the rights owners get to sue for loss of earnings, whereas copyright infringement as part of trading means the police (or some other body) gets involved.

UK "Fair Dealing" (Fair Use) is much stricter than the US equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's ironic a "frame" is called a "frame" - you realize why?

Because you could send your enemies in the UK a webpage with a hidden frame to download a file in the background they do not know about - and send them to jail, ie. "frame" them - with no possible defense.

Politicians and law enforcement are starting to turn the internet into what the TSA is doing to flying in the USA - making it terrifying and very risky.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wont get this heavy a punishment if i go ransack a music store and steal all the copies..

<comment><USER12> God forbid you sneak in the back door of a movie theater. How many years should you get for that? (of course, it's harder to "scale" that sort of crime, but it still seems ridiculous, so let the ridicule begin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The MPAA, RIAA, and their overseas counterparts are ratcheting up the contempt with which they are viewed by society. DIY gravediggers they are.

</comment><comment><USER14> Note that US warning quotes specific laws and specific paragraphs, while UK warning does not specify anything and pushes some recording industry alliance site (I wonder is somebody got paid for this?)

</comment><comment><USER15> When I first saw SOCA, I thought it was a parody.

</comment><comment><USER16> "The majority of music files that were available via this site were stolen from the artists"

How can UK police (or SOCA, or whoever) claim that before trial? When that notice was put on the site, the "individuals behind this website" (another loaded term right there, geez) had only been arrested. Trial hadn't even begun yet.

Without knowing UK laws - aren't these solid grounds for a libel and slander claim?

<comment><USER17> No. They can know on the basis that the files are hosted for download but that the site operators have made no revenue payments or signed contracts with the publisher/distributor of the media in question. The UK does not have the same kind of common carrier provisions in Telco law that exist in the US.

Edit: downvote away, but I didn't write the law, I'm just telling you how it operates: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010#Sectio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010#Section_17_and_18_-_Blocking_Internet_locations) The government is considering alternatives: <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/hargreaves.htm>

<comment><USER18> I don't think that the parent post was talking about common-carrier provisions[1]. The point being that the police are stating something ("these files were stolen") as fact prior to the trial. The assumption being that these facts need to be proven at trial. The same reason that the accused is called the 'suspect' and not the 'criminal' in police press reports. I'm not sure that this quite equates to something like saying, "he's a drug dealer," prior to getting a drug dealing conviction, though.

[1] Actually, 'common carrier' only applies to phone companies in the US. You're thinking of the 'Safe Harbour' provisions that are part of the DMCA.

<comment><USER5> _The point being that the police are stating something ("these files were stolen") as fact prior to the trial. The assumption being that these facts need to be proven at trial. The same reason that the accused is called the 'suspect' and not the 'criminal' in police press reports._

However the police does call the victim "the murdered guy" and the place the arsonist burned "the burned down building". Some things are a simple statement of fact.

Similarly, the presence of "pirated files" is not something that is that difficult to examine and state as a fact pre-trial. And the other side would only win a libel trial if they could prove that this is not the case, which, I guess, it is. Else, they would be punished and counter-sued for that attempt too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1 million Chinese download file ..no jail time ..MPAA/RIAA crickets..chirp chirp

<comment><USER20> why so racist? I guarantee you that 1 million Caucasians download copyrighted files.

<comment><USER21> Racist? Isn't being able to download without risking serving time in prison a good thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Queen does not approve of such shenanigans. The peasants should know that by now.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-cash-railway <comment><USER2> This is one of those things where it's like, are people just making stuff up? Like dogs "bred to run on a wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_Dog)

</comment><comment><USER3> I continue to be amazed by how much effort over the years went in to moving and managing random physical objects around (money, file folders, books, etc). There have been two parallel processes, one optimizing the process (e.g. containerization, JIT delivery, et al) the other eliminating the physical stuff (e.g. files as data, money as data etc). Both processes are at their core ones of abstraction, though all sorts of vestigial traces remain (e.g. calling directories "folders", or even the term "file").

When I go to offices I feel that a lot of that subject matters (physical stuff) has merely been replaced by people moving _data_ around (copying entries into a spreadsheet, for example, or writing reports). That's what we'll get rid of next and again, I believe it will be through a process of abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER4> _high-spirited sales clerks would occasionally try to prank them by placing live mice or dead spiders inside the canisters. In-store gossip and romances could be covertly conducted by secret messages passed back and forth via the cash-carrier wires._

Create a link between people, capable of carrying messages (or dynamic entertainments), and hijinks and love will follow.

</comment><comment><USER5> After reading this article, I still don't understand what problem these were solving that is now solved by other means. Why was there a need to rapidly transport cash around the store in the first place? This apparently isn't needed anymore, so what problem existed then that no longer exists now?

The article says cash carriers went away due to 1. pneumatic tubes, and 2. automatic counter registers. However, pneumatic tubes isn't much of an answer, because that's just a _different_ way of rapidly transporting cash, and those are now gone as well.

So presumably the real answer has to be these "automatic counter registers". But the article never elaborates on what those are. How does an automatic counter register differ from earlier cash registers, and why was it that without them one needed a rapid cash transport method?

<comment><USER6> The idea seemed to be that the customer could check out with clerks around the store, but the cash was stored and counted in a secure area by trusted employees.

A decline in robberies probably also helped. Department stores like Sears and Macy's now have distributed cash registers around the store, sometimes in low traffic areas, but I've never heard of them getting robbed.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that in the past stores had more staff and more different departments, which were each smaller. Think more like market stalls. Each department might not have staff dedicated to payments, but instead roving salespeople designed to advertise the benefits of goods, and then to complete the sale there and then on the shop floor.

These salespeople probably weren't paid well, or identified well, so the shipowner couldn't trust them. Instead, for every payment, they need to get a receipt from a central place, which prevents any dishonesty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disneyland Paris has one of those, built by Disney Imagineering.

<comment><USER9> Do you have a link to pictures?

<comment><USER8> There's a whole site for cash railways.[1] It's on there.

[1] [http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/](http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/)

<comment> jagged-chisel direct link: [http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/photos/dlp.htm](http://www.cashrailway.co.uk/photos/dlp.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many Costcos still have their pneumatic tubes in place.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm fairly disappointed with the quality of discussion/things posted here, but from time to time, there is an article like this and all is good with the Universe again.</comment>


Students Commit Suicide in India After Failed Tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.voanews.com/4895982.html <comment><USER2> Parents, educators, and older siblings need to own some of that suicide rate, for not teaching reality. Scoring low on an exam is not the end, but instead a situation that must be handled. Learn how the fuck to survive disappointment.

Everyone is NOT going to get top grades. In fact, if you look at percentiles, someone has to be on the bottom.

Instead, consider a test score as an indicator of strengths and weaknesses but not an all encompassing measurement of a person. Easy to say, right? Look at the bigger picture of a person and it becomes obvious how much of a waste it is to not teach young people to look at the bigger picture and deal with life on that basis.

Kids, you have four options: Accept / get better / retest / change path.</comment>


Nsync: a command-line for the NSA's free and secure backup service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marianzange/nsync <comment><USER2> Haha, seriously I don't know why they don't just offer free email,cloud storage,and messaging... it would have to be orders of magnitude cheaper than what they are doing now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Before sending them data, make sure you are OK with "How to restore your data". Otherwise the following could happen to you: [http://acmedia.alaskacommons.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/...](http://acmedia.alaskacommons.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/my-computer-hard-drive-crashed-nsa-wont-send-me-their- backup-copy-first-world-problems.jpg)</comment>


A Hierarchy of Needs for Software Development - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/04/27/software-development-hierarchy-of-needs/ <comment><USER2> Decent article but it's missing a lot of the things I expected to see, given the introduction. This seems really focused on the things I'd consider most analogous to "physiological" and "safety" needs. Writing code is a very basic part of software development, like chopping vegetables is a basic part of cooking.

To me, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is interesting because it tops out at "self-actualization". Maslow is effectively saying that the most important need a human can fulfill in their own life is the need to have a purpose and to live out that purpose.

The top of the analogous hierarchy of software development needs in this post, on the other hands, fizzles out at "patterns". What about understanding how different patterns are used to make a working piece of software? What about fitting separate software systems together to make a functioning product? What about shaping a product to fill some kind of need in the world?

My hierarchy would look something like this (with less bad ASCII art):

               /</comment><comment>-----\
              / Meeting requirements
             /</comment><comment></comment><comment>---\
            / Designing software architectures
           /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-\
          / Manipulating software systems (e.g. implementing an HTTP service, setting up a database, etc.)
         /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----\
        / Writing code (e.g. accessing APIs, implementing a function, etc.)
       /</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---\

with "meeting requirements" at the top since that is the most important thing to be done as a software developer, and it can't be done without addressing the needs below it. It's not as lofty of a name as "self-actualization", though.

<comment><USER3> I like yours better, especially wrt reqs and the reason for the software to even exist, as it's not just in service of itself. To simplify even more, the pyramid goes What -> How -> Why

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "They should know 'the web'" \- what!? I thought we were talking about software development in general here, not about web development specifically.</comment>


Open letter on the future of mathematics in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/interactive/2011/sep/20/letter-prime-minister-future-mathematics

<comment><USER2> English government gives the impression of being scientifically and mathematically illiterate. ([http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/18/michael- gove...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/18/michael-gove-exams- gcse-schools)) - the minister for education saying { "What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton's laws of thermodynamics and Boyle's law."}

I doubt this open letter will make any difference. Or even be understood. I predict some politician will be using nursing, or primary schools, in an example of where money needs to be spent and as a justification for cuts, even though the letter says this is not about cuts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Link to the EPSRC:

(<http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx>)</comment>


$400 billion worth e-commerce to be traded on Indian Govt. eMarketplace - <AUTHOR> http://ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-moves-to-amazonize-400-billion-of-government-purchases-1632547 <comment><USER2> big deal</comment>


Urban Landscapes: Then and Now - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/wxXMs

<comment><AUTHOR> Another comparison...

Seoul in 1969 (when I was a little kid living there) => [http://cluster1.cafe.daum.net/_c21_/bbs_search_read?grpid=1C...](http://cluster1.cafe.daum.net/_c21_/bbs_search_read?grpid=1CxsU&fldid=680V&datanum=495370)

And Seoul today => [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Gangnam,_...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Gangnam,_Seoul,_Korea.jpg)

I'd love to see then vs now pics for other people's home towns. A good year end salute to progress!</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite blogs? - <AUTHOR> - Coding Horror by the guy who made stackoverflow<p>- Melting Asphalt was sooo good but he's not writing much anymore<p>- Farnam Street is always pretty solid<p>What else do you guys like? <comment><USER2> OP runs an iOS app founderchronicles.com "Easily find and follow your favorite startup blogs"

Last week OP got called out for copying blog content without consent from the authors. Multiple users said it's copyright infringement [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14957047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14957047)

I take it with a grain of salt to see OP asking others for favorite blogs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was just curious. I wanted to see what people on hacker news were reading. I am sorry about all of that from a while ago. I realized I was taking too many shortcuts and deleted everything that I shouldn't have posted from that account.

<comment><USER2> All good. [http://www.founderchronicles.com/](http://www.founderchronicles.com/) looks great by the way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> More a collection of stories, not from a single author:

\- [http://thedailywtf.com/](http://thedailywtf.com/)

\- [https://clientsfromhell.net/](https://clientsfromhell.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shameless plug continues: [https://engineered.at](https://engineered.at)

Startup/Tech/Engineering blog aggregator with an HN-style interface. I'm working on a few features this week:

1) Feeds index so you can browse them

2) User Profiles

3) Automated post tagging with tag browsing (going to be a bigger initiative but excited for this one)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Scott Adams' blog is also great: [http://blog.dilbert.com/](http://blog.dilbert.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> avc's and james altucher's are always solid</comment>


StartSSL denies SSL certificate based on the current employee mood - <AUTHOR> http://serverfault.com/questions/743596/startssl-server-ssl-certificate-denied-why <comment><USER2> This is why we need to decentralize the CA function. Let's Encrypt is a good start.

I can't get over how awful it is that in the year 2015 practically every website in the world is secured by paying gobs of money to a member of some shadowy cabal of random companies that are in every browser's default trust list because somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who worked at Netscape in 1995.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had the same issue, with the very same person. I even tried to get personal validation and they wanted a phone bill with my name on it. Guess what, the company pays for the phone not me. To much hassle, so I went elsewhere.</comment>


World of Goo Releases Rapid Prototyping Framework - <AUTHOR> http://2dboy.com/2009/05/27/rapid-prototyping-framework/ <comment><USER2> Woo! It has the "do whatever you want with this framework" license, too!

Someone should port it to Linux and OS X, or at least have some instructions for those platforms. I'm sure it will work on those, as WoG is available.

Also: If you even mildly enjoy casual games, I would highly recommend playing and/or purchasing World of Goo. It has wonderful artwork and a some very nice pop-culture critiques between the lines.

</comment><comment><USER3> I took a look at the source and demo apps, and it's a pretty minimal framework, providing only a few things and a series of conveniences that you won't get with pure SDL. Still, what it aims to do it does pretty well, you will just have to do lots of Model-side heavy lifting, as there's no collision code or other such handy things. I presume this is because many games could ask for many approaches to those problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is cool--and public domain? That's awesome.

For the record, it's _2D Boy_ that released the framework, not the piece of software World of Goo.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hard to understand how a gaming framework without a scripting component could be considered "rapid prototyping".

<http://love2d.org/> is a similar wrapper around SDL, but you script it using Lua.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great. Not entirely surprising since world of goo started out as an app built in a week as part of a series of rapid prototypes built by competing graduate students [<http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_pfv.htm>]</comment>


Defensible App Updated to include overlay for PGE projected outages - <AUTHOR> https://defensibleapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Modern MapboxGL based map of general wildfire risk updated with PGE's "Historic" power outage planned for later today.

Easier to view than the various other sources, especially on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a good link.

You are likely to get more attention if you mark this s "Show HN".</comment>


Android Home Mirror - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/HannahMitt/HomeMirror <comment><AUTHOR> Note: This is not mine. All credit goes to Hannah Mittelstaedt. I just happened to see it on Twitter and thought it was worth sharing.

</comment><comment><USER2> Pretty neat. Does the touchscreen still function under the acrylic?

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the touch screen doesn't work through the mirror, however, we're using reusable sticky stuff to attach the mirror to the tablet, so its easy to remove if needed.</comment></comment>


Review our Project: TextRAR.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.textrar.com/

<comment><USER2> Just had a quick glance. Could'nt really figure out what your service was trying to do. Looks to me like you let people search through spreadsheets/dbases and also show keyword density clouds. You definitely should write some clear and concise copy for your landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Simply put: TextRAR let you transform any spreadsheet into searchable data; you can either share the search page or use the API to integrate with your application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The sign up page could be redesigned...but I am sure it is work in progress

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this like Dabble DB? The first impression I got and on that note the whole idea could be clarified a bit some sort of elevator style pitch.</comment>


Millennial-Bashing Is Class Warfare - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/millennial-bashing-is-class-warfare-106bf0367996 <comment><USER2> I agree with the overall point of the article, and think it's important to point out that the author missed something of importance: When did we start lumping GenY in with Millennials?

This question alone raises a lot of doubts about where these articles come from and their intent. There are also some important cultural differences: most GenYers didn't grow up with the internet, social media, or cell phones. They spent a lot of time outdoors and share many of the same paradigms and values of GenX VS millenials. They were also singled out in a lot of articles and in a much different manner.

So what happened?

The attack on Millenials definitely looks real, especially considering these facts. Rich narcissists who lack foresight are bound to take this as far as they can. They're parasitic and spreading their short sighted bullshit with these articles the author calls out, and it's bound to backfire. Hard.

<comment><USER3> I thought Gen-Y _is_ the Millennial generation? At least, according to Wikipedia it is [1]. To your point, there certainly is a broad range of exposure to technology within the generation. (And I wonder if that holds in every generational cohort, or if the ever-increasing pace of technological change exacerbates the differences in each cohort?)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y)</comment></comment>


THIS is how you code.  - <AUTHOR> http://mikecavaliere.com/images/This-is-how-you-code.jpg

<comment><USER2> Since I am a Vim user, I think mine "hjkl" and "esc" keys are way more used than the ones in the picture.

</comment><comment><USER3> You code with half of your keyboard missing?

</comment><comment><USER4> Clearly not an emacs user.</comment>


UK General Election 2019 – Live Facebook Ad Tracker by Age and Gender - <AUTHOR> https://adsp.ai/7charts/demo/ <comment> todd-davies Wow, it's really fascinating to see the differences in the targeting strategies between different parties:

\- The Conservative party rarely targets large groups of people in comparison Labour

\- The Brexit party's targeted audience is 76% male with an average age of 58

\- Recently (last 4 days), the Conservative party's marketing skewed proportionally male (from 45% to 70%)

\- None of the average target ages are below 36

\- Conservative messages are longest, and Brexit party messages are shortest

I'm not sure if we can draw many conclusions from this data though since: \- It doesn't include all the parties

\- It includes only Facebook ads, not all political ads

<comment><USER3> I agree, looking forward to how this changes over the next few weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll keep it updated daily - just need to make sure it's not information overload...gotta love Tableau design challenges :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is super interesting. I especially enjoyed being able to contrast the messages being sent to a younger audience and those sent to the older audience. The Conservative party seems to be customising their ads much more than the Labour party. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah it's nice to be able to perform that kind of analysis - <USER2> tuned for daily updates!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good work David! It's great to see all the ads in one place, alongside which users see them and the amount spent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Chris!</comment></comment>


Share what ever is in heart do not keep it because it is important to share - <AUTHOR> I am an introvert and for me it is very impossible to share anything. I was very shy from my childhood and it is very tough for kids like me. When I was in college a girl proposed me I did not tell anyone about a relationship. For five years I was with her. We were in different college. after four years I got to knew she was cheating on me. I never had a sex with her as to waiting for marriage and after four years I got to knew she was cheating on me from almost 3 years. I can not tell that to anyone kept that inside. I loved her very much and for me this is the one thing I never wanted. I dropped my college. I was so disturbed went to rehab and almost become insane. Did not know what to do all my life was around her. She was just not my love, she was also my only friend. Then she married to someone else. it is the pain that even it is like four year I still have that in my heart. Can not tell my parents my friends. I started a company raised seed amount of half a million and them my partner cheated on me and ran away with all the money. fighting in court but he is still not traced.I can not tell that either to anyone. I am lying to my parents, family and I am totally broke. Every where it seems that world is not good for me. And few months back i was travelling and I found there are so many people like me who are afraid of sharing with lots of reason.I visited a rehab and there was a girl she was sexually harassed by her uncle and she can not tell that to anyone. I met a young student who wants to do designing but his parents want him to join enginnering and he can not tell that to anyone and this is the reason that every 3 out of 5 people in the world are depressed as they are afraid to share. So I created a platform Dilspeaks.com where dil means heart it is an hindi word.I want everyone to share what ever is in heart no need to keep it in heart and suffer. Share and it really worked for me and I hope will work for many people especially introvert. dilspekas.com. <comment><AUTHOR> www.dilspeaks.com</comment>


Each new Y Combinator class worth more than a billion dollars, president says - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/05/each-new-y-combinator-class-worth-more-than-a-billion-dollars-president-says/

<comment><USER2> Well, if that's true, YC is making 12X return on their investment on average per startup. If we assume average exits as 5 years, this would be equivalent to more than 2X return per year per startup. Either we are in bubble, or YC is the best investment vehicle human kind has invented, or there is lot of smoke and mirrors. Either way, interesting times...</comment>


6 months with Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://olabini.com/blog/2012/08/6-months-with-clojure/ <comment><USER2> _One aspect of breaking up functions like described above, is that the operations involved are usually highly abstract and sometimes not very coupled to domain language. I find naming of those kind of functions very hard, and many times spend a long time and still not coming up with something I'm completely comfortable with. I don't really have a solution to this problem right now._

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" — Phil Karlton</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know of a road conditions data source? - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying to find one -- an API of some kind that allows you to enter a location or a freeway and get back road conditions. If you know of something like this let me know, thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://developer.yahoo.com/traffic/> ?

</comment><comment><USER3> traffic.com owned by navteq owned by nokia is your friend. The data is not free though. INRIX may have something but I'm not sure.</comment>


How can I avoid a 404 for non-existent pages and serve a default page instead? - <AUTHOR> Instead of returning a 404 error for a non-existent page I want nginx to serve a PHP script that returns some dynamically generated content and return a 200 as if the page existed normally, is this possible? <comment><USER2> Have you looked at this? [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- conf...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure- nginx-to-use-custom-error-pages-on-ubuntu-14-04)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have now! Thanks.</comment></comment>


P2P mobile devices, hack the telecom - <AUTHOR>

Would like to have some opinions on this topic, from those who think this is good or bad idea.
The title is self explanatory of what I am interested in. I am not talking about P2P applications on mobile phones etc., rather about true P2P phones that doesn't depend on operators infrastructure. I have not seen or hear of any such initiatives in global direction. The telecoms we know today might in response of the current crisis rise prices of voice and SMS services. Particularly such ad-hoc solutions have crop up as proposals in some countries (this is rubish solution). We talk here on global aspects, US, Europe countries, etc. I also believe that in this century, voice and messaging over mobile phones should be independent of operators, classical telecom infrastructure. You can call it alternative, but I will call it evolution. The number of population is increasing, and it seems of natural selection that P2P mobile devices should be brought alive.
Now, of course neither classical telecom would like such a P2P telecom succeed because that would mean less and less market share for them. I am a tech guy, have some common sense reasoning on business, and I do not care about telecom companies at all. I would propose simply (or at least consider) to hack the telecom.
Cheers <comment><USER2> GO FOR IT & GET IT DONE! ITS GREAT!!</comment>


Fantasies and Fantasies with Money - <AUTHOR> http://epaley.posterous.com/fantasies-and-fantasies-with-money-0

<comment><USER2> "He said that until startups are funded, they are basically just fantasies."

Until startups are _profitable_ , they are basically just fantasies (or nightmares). (Which pretty much sums up the article.)</comment>


Silicon Valley Legends Launch Beyond Identity in Quest to Eliminate Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://www.securityweek.com/silicon-valley-legends-launch-beyond-identity-quest-eliminate-passwords <comment><USER2> On the surface, this seems to me to be a classic case of confusing Authentication (are you who you say you are) with Authorization (are you allowed to do the things you claim to be allowed to do).

Hint: identity != password</comment>