How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald's Monopoly Game and Stole Millions - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions?via=twitter_page <comment><USER2> My aunt worked for Simon Marketing for many years. She was a designer. My cousin was pictured on a fry box once. All of their drinking glasses were McDonald's promos, much like a software developer's swag t-shirt collection. They had these Mickey Mouse glasses I loved but that had a habit of shattering into a million pieces under the slightest thermal shock or bump. She had a full collection of the 101 Dalmatians Happy Meals toys. We were all sure that'd be worth a lot of money some day. Looks like it's worth 50-100 USD on ebay now.

She lost her job, since this racket destroyed Simon Marketing.

<comment><USER3> Too bad for Simon Marketing. It raises an interesting question from a business's point of view. Who can you trust in a situation like this. Personally I would only trust a security expert to provide expert guidance but not have them do any execution. They would seem to me to be the least trustworthy, simply because they have had a professional lifetime of temptation and rumination.

<comment><USER4> You setup internal controls to separate duties and have different organizational silos and discourage fraternization.

Then you audit the process and the work often.

<comment><USER5> The complete lack of internal audits was something that struck me about this story. Million dollar game pieces constantly disappearing, and no one in the company was in a position to notice anything was wrong.

<comment><USER6> They didn't disappear, it appeared that he'd put them on the packages as expected and then people won the prizes as expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _The colorful court case, held in Jacksonville, Florida, started September > 10, 2001, the day before terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade > Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The stunned news media > quickly forgot about the McDonald's trial, which explains why so few > Americans remember the scandal, or how it ended._

In the months/years after 9/11 I remember that a recurring theme in longform stories was that their events took place shortly before or after 9/11 and had collectively been forgotten. One that I still remember is a Sports Illustrated feature about 8 Wyoming college cross-country runners who died in the worst vehicle crash in Wyoming history [0]. Though maybe in today's 24/7+ media cycle and attention deficits, plenty of interesting stories slip through the cracks on a more regular basis.

[0] [https://www.si.com/vault/2001/11/26/314466/cross-road- after-...](https://www.si.com/vault/2001/11/26/314466/cross-road-after-a-road- trip-to-celebrate-their-bonding-as-a-team-eight-university-of-wyoming-runners- made-the-fateful-choice-to-head-home-on-the-states-most-treacherous-highway)

<comment><USER8> Rainbow Farm. Never forget.

[http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html](http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html)

I have a friend who was there during this terrible incident.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a wonderful lesson in all of this to any current or future business owner: what is the minimum number of people in your organization that would need to secretly be dishonest to undermine what you do? And how much money is on the line encouraging those people to consider it?

In this case, the answer was one, and the amount of money was millions of dollars. Should we be surprised that it happened?

<comment><USER10> This is not an academic question. How many dishonest Apple employes would it take to insert a secret back door into MacOS, iOS, or iCloud?

<comment><USER11> a backdoor into a bitcoin app/wallet would be far more lucrative and easier to pull off (not that I am giving ideas). Icloud is mostly family pics and useless stuff like that. May as well go for where the money is.

<comment><USER12> but wasn't icloud where those people were stealing nudes from celebrity accounts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Not long afterward, Jacobson opened a package sent to him by mistake from a > supplier in Hong Kong. Inside he found a set of the anti-tamper seals for > the game piece envelopes—the only thing he needed to steal game pieces en > route to the factory.

While most people are focusing on the lack of human controls that allowed there to be a single person who could pull this off, I think an over looked issue was the over reliance on these tamper resistant seals. They had a single type of seal from a single supplier that was apparently used by itself to show tamper resistance.

This is actually less secure then the setup at the Starbucks I worked at where the tamper resistant bags had serial numbers on both the body of the bag and on a removable tag, so that if somebody was to open the bag (which you could only do by ripping it) and put it in a new bag, the serial number would no longer match.

<comment><USER14> Yeah and the fact that the supplier of the seals didn't contact Simon Marketing and say, "sorry, we seem to have mislaid a load of seals so we need to change the design/colour and send you some more".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A well-written and well-sourced article. I found it quite interesting. It's amazing how people seem to find a way around any regulation or control to satisfy basic greed.

<comment><USER16> The game itself is basically a thinly veiled scam anyway: "McDonald's makes one piece from each set of properties extremely rare, so while thousands have three of the four railroads, the odds of pulling the Short Line Railroad—and winning a PT Cruiser—were 1 in 150 million."

Sure, it's all written down in the rules somewhere but it's an elaborate effort to disguise the actual odds of winning to get people to buy more cheeseburgers. You think you are 3 quarters of the way to a PT Cruiser when you are in fact barely more likely to get it that you were before you got the first three.

<comment><USER17> The odds of winning a free hashbrown, Big Mac, or Egg McMuffin were pretty decent. Most people with have a clue realized that they didn't really have a chance to win $1M.

<comment><USER18> This is very similar to Safeway's Monopoly game started 4 or 5 years ago. The first year I had every category on the board filled in all except for the final piece. After that I would get the tickets but I knew my chances of winning anything were slim to none & would often forget to open them.

One thing I think is interesting is they allow employees to play but they have a different color for their tickets, which for consumers are handed out at the cash register based on certain items bought. I'm guessing this is to keep employees from taking a huge stash of tickets home at the end of a shift.

<comment><USER19> I've played that game three times and ended up with tons of tickets each time because my wife shops their for her classes. I've never won so much as the $5 Safeway Gift Certificate from the board. I'm not entirely sure that game is on the up and up.

The coupons are sometimes alright. We've got a huge collection of small cans of tomato sauce and small boxes of tissues. The online second chance thing is mostly a scam too sadly. You basically win entries into a sweepstakes for movie/tickets or a cruise. You can win $5 Fandango tickets, but it's a royal hassle to redeem them. You can also win gas points, but I'm not sure they redeem properly. It takes hundreds of dollars of purchases to even get the single gas point on average.

The whole thing is mostly a waste of time. The other promotion they do where you can earn up points to buy cookware is a lot better. Got a decent pot and a usable knife out of that last time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's mostly just shocking to me there isn't more separation of duties amongst a few people. The fact that one guy could pull this off suggests some major failure to consider single points of failure. He did allegedly have someone with him, but they didn't even sit in the same place on the plane!

The mark of a good security expert is that they will tell you the threat they themselves, potentially, are. (This is true for IT as well.)

<comment><USER21> There also seems to be zero analysis of the winners. Simple analytics would have raised concerns early on.

I guess the company just didn't care, as long as someone won and the marketing worked.

<comment><USER22> I think McDonald's could have cared less. They made & continue to make $$$ hand over fist with these promotions. The marketing for sure worked, whether anyone won or not. I used to play these games & I never remember hearing about any real winners. Didn't keep me from the dream of pulling one of those instant winners. People get excited for games of chance and it drives large amounts of traffic into stores.

McDonald's counts those millions good as gone when they start the promotion, but it's worth it since they assuredly get a huge return on the investment. They assumed Simon marketing was doing their job, and we shouldn't be surprised they didn't care to look analyze the integrity of the game. They were selling truckloads of Big Macs & Mcnuggets and that all that really matters to them.

Any-who... great writing, and interesting look into to a "game" I'm sure most of us have a connection to. Pretty amazing it was hijacked by a few people for so long. Really enjoyed this read!

<comment><USER23> There is some irony in the criminals paying restitution to the company who was making so much money from the game to be incentivized to turn a blind eye.

Running the last game that was known ahead of time to be rigged seems indefensible. The article doesn't challenge the position that catching the crooks is a good reason to defraud more people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Before each bi-annual game, Jacobson arrived at the drab Dittler Brothers' office at 5 a.m to observe their Omega III supercomputer making the McDonald's prize draw."

Does anyone know what the 'Omega III supercomputer' is?

<comment><USER25> It's a trickier one to find information on! Apparently it was made by Control Data Corp in 1979+. I'll edit this comment if I find more... I'm curious too!

Edit: It's pretty hard to find anything about it! Apparently the University of Georgia had one too, but I'm giving up now and getting back to work :)

Edit 2: Apparently it was IBM (360?) compatible: [https://it.unt.edu/sites/default/files/benchmarks-01-1980.pd...](https://it.unt.edu/sites/default/files/benchmarks-01-1980.pdf)

<comment><USER24> Great work! So I guess it's this CDC Omega / 480 Model III, as described in this March 1979 Computerworld?

[https://imgur.com/a/8TKIqNN](https://imgur.com/a/8TKIqNN)

(edit: and here's a manual I found for the Model I. Does indeed sound like a System/360 compatible. [http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/omega480/22291359A_OMEGA_48...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/omega480/22291359A_OMEGA_480_Functional_Characteristics_May77.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There was a similar story a couple months ago about the insider who rigged the lottery. I'm sorry, I don't recall the source.

In any case, the ones who get caught are done in by carelessness, and over- confidence. You have to wonder how many are not getting caught if they can manage these two faults.

<comment><USER27> A judge in NH recently ruled that the winner of the lottery doesn't need to come forward and be a part of lottery press and therefore their name does not need to be released. The reasoning is good on the surface that people who just won a life changing amount of money shouldn't have to have their personal details flashed on the news.

However, it seems like being named in public is the best way to prevent fraud. Many of these scams are through second counsins' friends and weird sources. Now an insider could just go through their best friend and no one would ever be able to connect the dots.

<comment><USER28> Depends which kinds of fraud you care about. Being named in public as a lottery winner is a pretty good way of making someone the target of every fraudster, con artist and swindler in the area.

<comment><USER29> Indeed. Anonymous collection protects the winner, public collection protects the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bit of trivia: the monopoly character was said to be based on Samuel Insull who became Edison's private secretary and right hand man.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+game+%22samuel+insu...](https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+game+%22samuel+insull%22)

Having successfully argued for the creation of regulated utility monopolies, he assembled a huge empire which subsequently collapsed in the Great Crash of 1929, investors and indeed himself were wiped out...

<comment><USER31> Hmm, I had also heard the Monopoly Guy was based on JP Morgan (at least in looks), but I could be incorrect.

<comment><USER32> >Monopoly Guy

His name is Rich Uncle Pennybags

<comment><USER29> I would argue that he is more commonly known as Monopoly Guy - as this is the first I've heard "Rich Uncle Pennybags", and I first played Monopoly ~30 years ago.

<comment><USER33> you can be the citation on the wiki article! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Uncle_Pennybags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Uncle_Pennybags)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > "The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently > recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars."

I'd love to learn more about this. How do you separate inconsequential details told by liars from inconsequential details told by excited people?

<comment><USER35> Liars provide more details because they get bogged down in the story, whereas truth-tellers give you a broad overview and can still provide a coherent story when pressed for details.

One study found this by analyzing insurance claims [0]

[0] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How-s...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How- spot-liar-Their-story-far-detailed-true.html)

<comment><USER36> i just finished Never Split The Difference ([https://www.amazon.com/Never- Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...](https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split- Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805)) and they also tend use different pronouns (they do not use I as much, but use other pronouns more often)

<comment><USER37> This accords with a recent a high profile rape case in the UK involving rugby players where the defence barrister was questioning the alleged victim's account because she kept using 'you' rather than 'I' when describing her behaviour during the alleged rape. (The players were found not guilty in court but not on media and social media and were fired.)

<comment><USER38> Or perhaps she found the experience traumatic and wanted to disassociate herself when describing the events? It's dangerous to read too much into how people describe traumatic experiences.

<comment><USER37> I agree with you and yet people are convicted based on the basis of one person's word against another's all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > When Jacobson revealed his scam, Hart, an honest businessman, found it too > good to be true. But he agreed to try it, to "see if it worked," recalled > Jacobson.

I think I might have to revise my understanding of what it means to be an honest businessman.

It is depressing to me that greed so easily trumps morality.

<comment><USER40> Morality is easy to talk about. Being tested is hard.

<comment><USER41> It sleeps a bit like a shoe horn. Bit by bit shifting your perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > _Jacobson's $70,000 salary was six times his police officer's pay_

How is this possible?

<comment><USER43> The 80's. Minimum wage was around $2.65 or $5512/yr. He was making roughly twice minimum wage at the time.

Even then, in 1988, that $70,000 salary was pretty good. That's the equivalent of $149,000 today. (Or $52,000 in 1981 when he was a cop).

<comment><USER42> Perhaps the police pay is just the base, not including overtime or hazard pay that make up much of an officer's total compensation.

<comment><USER44> Not to mention official and unofficial benefits; health care and a police pension obviously, but also running drugs on the side, free prostitutes, bribes, immunity from other police, and near absolute power over other individuals in the regular course of your job.

Not all of these still exist today, but many do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> They rigged it against Canada? Can Canadians file a class-action lawsuit?

<comment><USER46> Yeah, for me - across the board of the entire story - the most alarming thing is that there seems to be little blowback against McDonalds for this. Considering how much that promotion was "worth" to them and how much business they got because of it, they lost almost nothing for misrepresenting the chances of winning to their customers (which they could have prevented if they were a little more careful). If I were a McDonalds exec, the unfortunate moral I would draw from this is to rig the game for myself next time, because it doesn't hurt the company at all, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am less-than-half-joking when I say this sort of cheating could be prevented by:

McDonald's Monopoly on a Blockchain

<comment><USER48> All the sweepstakes promotions I see now involve entering some unique ID code online, which makes them much less fun I think.

<comment><USER49> Yep, the last time I even cared about one of those games you had to text in the number to see if you won anything and twice in a row they came back as "already entered", think the employees were doing it in their spare time since it was just printed on the outside of the box.

Had I known the FBI cared about these things...

<comment><USER50> Yeah the last one of those I tried did the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> How was this promotion not regulated? Sounds a lot like lootcrates.

<comment><USER52> It's been a long time since I've looked into this, but things like this generally are regulated (in the US). The sweepstakes promoter generally must post the odds of winning, and can't actually require a purchase of a product to enter (though you might need to pay return postage and wait 2-4 weeks for the free entry option). Some states have stricter requirements and you'll often see nationally advertised sweepstakes specify that they're not offered to residents of those states.

<comment><USER53> To this point, one guy mailed ~100 letters to McDonalds asking for monopoly pieces. McDs had to reply with game pieces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I knew one winner. She won an Oldsmobile in 1988. Interesting enough, she was a Mormon so and had to ask permission from her elders to claim the prize. This was in Minnesota.

<comment><USER55> Mormon here. Hope your friend wasn't connected to this Baker fellow ;). Seems a little odd to me though that she needed to ask permission from anyone in the Mormon church to claim a prize. Normaly the only person you would be expected to talk to is your Bishop and that is under the circumstances of a large enough sin. You can seek guidance and counsel from the Bishop, however this is not expected.

By the way random facts, but we prefer calling ourselves and being called members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) instead of Mormons. Mormon was the name of an ancient American prophet- historian who abridged records of other prophets into a book of scripture which would later be called The Book of Mormon. We by no means worship Mormon, but instead Christ that's why we prefer the other name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Unless I missed it, we never found out who the informant was.

<comment><USER57> I think it was implied to be the mob wife's angry in-laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I found this funnier than I probably should have:

> a disgraced Ronald McDonald actor who was convicted of making harassing > phone calls while posing as the clown

<comment><USER59> What was the source of the disgrace?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> A fun-to-read-about (but not illegal) sweepstakes hack was done by a bunch of Caltech students in the 70s. Coincidentally, McDonald's was the target there, too. [http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_...](http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_caper)

</comment><comment><USER61> This type of scam can probably be much easier to spot with Facebook.

Any lottery game or house raffle with little transparency should be suspect.

</comment><comment><USER62> I remember working on a Monopoly game knockoff for Buddig meat at one of my first dev jobs. I wish we had put in nearly the same effort to protect the game as MCDs did. We had some "situations" also. Not this bad though.

</comment><comment><USER63> McDonalds was dumb for entrusting the security of this system to one person. This is like security 101. If you want good physical security, you can't trust it to a single person.

<comment><USER64> There was an auditor following him, except in the bathroom, where he was doing the switch.

<comment><USER63> Right but the auditor was only an observer, not part of the process. You need to have two people be active participants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Jacobson sent a $1m winning ticket to a hospital, where the donations clerk immediately turned it in. Imagine what would have happened if she'd decided to keep it for herself? I wonder whether and how Jacobson would have taken steps to expose her, without exposing himself.

</comment><comment><USER66> I often wonder with the McMonopoly prize thing how often they pay out, from my observation quite a number of people just threw out their tickets, so it seemed like there was a good chance they didn't have to payout

</comment><comment><USER67> I am pretty sure the only way you -can- win the Monopoly game is to rig it in your favor. It's not a game anyone is meant to win. That's likely why so much is spent trying to figure out how someone won. The only prizes anyone is meant to win are maybe an Xbox and free chicken McNuggets. In some ways I sympathize with the idea of playing the unwinnable system against itself.

<comment><USER68> If you know which of the three or four tickets are scarce (something that could easily be determined by a few enthusiasts online by collating their ticket data), winning a grand prize is as simple as buying more McDonalds until you have the tickets to complete the set. The trick is that most people who receive the rare tickets won't know and will either bin them or not obtain the remaining tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> ripping off one big corporate via a game named to a big banker. classic. they should give this man a medal!

</comment><comment><USER70> Good story, but man, I think this story sucked up like 30% of my battery, and the ads didn't even load half the time.

</comment><comment><USER71> Now we know who orchestrated 9/11: it was McDonalds.

Great piece. I somehow missed all this too in the 9/11 aftermath.

</comment><comment><USER72> Nice!

</comment><comment><USER73> I came across a situation where an asset protection head at a Walmart was looking the other way while an acquaintance would dress up in a suit, and put an expensive vacuum cleaner in a shopping cart and waltz out the car departments side door minutes after it opened each morning. An employee noticed this. Asked the person for a receipt and the scam came to an end. The employee, however, got wrote up by the asset protection head!He claimed he was just about to apprehend this fellow. But Walmart quickly ended their relationship with their asset protection head(Within weeks), while NOT GOING BACK TO THE SIMPLE EMPLOYEE and admitting any wrong in his being written up. This is why when people rob these huge corporations like this, nobody should care. They don't give 2 craps about honesty or integrity. They are more worried about a thief falling down, breaking an ankle, suing them for millions, than you helping them not lose assets.

</comment><comment><USER73> I stopped reading the article as soon as they got to the part about him checking all the employees and even following them into the bathroom(Illegal BTW). This is why police departments have INTERNAL AFFAIRS DEPT. Just like pedophiles find a position of trust to prey upon kids, really accomplished scammers find one to take advantage of security. Where would a better position be than to head up the security! When they started giving examples of him check shoes, it reminded me that in my lifetime I realized the worse thieves are always worried about getting robbed! Because they figure if they thought of it, so haven't others. I was reading before that about all his ailments prior and thinking, the author hasn't figured out those were scams ..too!</comment>


WebKit based Opera for Android launched in beta - <AUTHOR> http://business.opera.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-for-android-launched-in-beta

<comment><AUTHOR> Video preview: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wtrZ-Ovtq0></comment>


The Z1: Architecture and Algorithms of Konrad Zuse's First Computer (2014) [pdf] - vezzy-fnord http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1886 <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't read the whole document, but I'm amazed how modern the Z1 was.

All-binary architecture, programmable, 24 bit floating point, microcoded ALUs.

The author seems to come to the same conclusion: _What I find most surprising is how the young Konrad Zuse could come to such an elegant design for a computing engine. Whereas the ENIAC, or Mark I teams in the US consisted of seasoned scientists and electronic experts, Zuse was working in isolation and without real previous experience. From the architectural point of view, we compute today as Zuse did in 1938, not as the ENIAC did in 1945._

</comment><comment><USER2> You can see the Z1 replica, as well as an implementation of the Z3 with relays in the Deutsches Technikmuseum - The Museum of Technology, in Berlin.

I was fortunate enough while there to run into Zuse's son, Horst Zuse, also a computer scientist, fixing the Z3!

</comment><comment><USER3> The pdf mentions... "I could only see a short video of parts of the machine operating (filmed almost 20 years ago)" ... but i cant find a video where the Z1 is actually running. Would be very amazing to see this thing computing :)

</comment><comment><USER4> A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1886](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1886)) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc. Thank you!

<comment><USER5> Ok, url changed from [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.1886.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.1886.pdf). We should probably write code to do that conversion automatically, since this has come up from time to time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you help me search this particular job listing website? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to find a job website that was posted on HN (not sure of the timeline).It had location filters on top. Locations were statewise for the US.
The killer feature was the no BS UI of the website. The site looked very clean, white background, bluish links and on click or hover had a fresh yellow background. Fonts were small. None of the links were underlined if my memory serves me right.
Unfortunately I had not upvoted and have tried keyword searching through HN but was unable to find it. I am not sure if it was a SHOW HN but have tried searching a compiled list of show HN too but unsuccessful.
If anyone knows what I am talking about, it would be great if you could point me to it.
Edit: links looked like that on craiglist except onhover color <comment><USER2> [https://www.staticjobs.com/](https://www.staticjobs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> You mean lever? e.g. [https://jobs.lever.co/wish?team=Engineering%20-%20Infrastruc...](https://jobs.lever.co/wish?team=Engineering%20-%20Infrastructure)

<comment><AUTHOR> nop, the links blue color looked like craiglist styled links.</comment></comment>


How hip-hop is introducing children to coding and technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/08/spitting-lines <comment><USER2> > One lesson centred upon Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high school pupil who > was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of building a hoax bomb when he brought a > self-assembled clock to school.

I remember that one, then later reading how it wasn't really a self-assembled clock but just a taken apart 70's or 80's clock that was put in a different case.

[http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse- engin...](http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering- ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/)

> Mr Mims aims not for lecturing, but for dialogue

In that spirit wonder how much Mr. Mims allows discussion of Ahmed being in on the idea of provoking a response. He packaged the disassembled clock in a briefcase then after being told to put it away and keep it his backpack for the rest of the day he took it out later and set an alarm on it. I think it is an interesting discussion how fear / xenophobia / prejudices can be taken advantage of in multiple ways.

Later on the family demanded $15M compensation from the school district with a threat to file a lawsuit. Wonder if that is on the allowed spectrum of discussion in the classroom as well.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why you phrased this so combatively. The whole point of having a discussion is to "allow" stuff like this. Discussions are usually pretty boring if everyone agrees, and the idea here seems to be getting people more engaged.

<comment><USER4> It's phrased combatively because wording like "self-assembled clock" plants an intentional picture of naivety. I'm okay with HN readers pointing out when it happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > He puts printed pictures of Mohamed on the wall, and asks students to scan > them via an app. A menu of items pops up instantly: Mohamed's Twitter feed; > a 360-degree view of an interrogation room (meant to simulate the one > Mohamed was taken to); a SoundCloud song; a quiz; a hip-hop video produced > by Mr Mims.

What was this a lesson for? (My knee jerk reaction makes me feel like that was politicized.. but I don't know the full story so I won't put that out there)

<comment><USER6> You just did put it out there, so why not elaborate on your reaction? What politicization are you concerned about?

<comment><USER5> I did write it, but I stated it was a feeling I didn't have a lot of support on and admited it.

Politicization: That the thing was more about "feel bad for this person/person with attribute (religion, race,etc) insert police state here."

If they're teaching people to feel bad rather than think, they're teaching people to react badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a book to teach JavaScript to sound artists that is is loosely related.

[http://javascriptforsoundartists.com](http://javascriptforsoundartists.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> I had to double-check that this wasn't satire.

</comment><comment><USER9> In Toledo, OH, USA in 2005 we put out a hip hop album titled 'Reboot' where every track was about computers and society.

See:

\- [http://www.toledohiphop.org/reboot/](http://www.toledohiphop.org/reboot/)

\- [https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Pass-Message-toledohiphop- org/...](https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Pass-Message-toledohiphop- org/dp/B00K4CR91W) (no affiliate, just linking since I'm glad to see the cover)

</comment><comment><USER10> "...fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon!"

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like this is becoming a template for click-bait articles. "How X is introducing kids to coding!"

I've stopped paying attention unfortunately.

<comment><USER12> Despite "How X is introducing kids to coding!" perhaps being a common trope, this is not a click-bait article, in my opinion. They're real-world events providing positive experiences mixing art and technology for kids and adults.

(Full disclosure: I've helped to organize a few of these events as part of [http://monthlymusichackathon.org](http://monthlymusichackathon.org))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ben Horowitz is a hip-hop fan too, see his book Hard thing about hard things, I like the fact the Hip-hop can be used to instruct technology and business and make things interesting.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't there a PHP compiler at Facebook called Hip-hop?

<comment><USER15> I don't want to be rude, but are you looking for something more than a reply that just says 'Yes' or something? Searching for anything like "facebook php hip hop" would easily answer your question.

<comment><USER16> I don't think it meant to be a literal question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Until they get introduced to Futuristic Sex Robotz...</comment>


Steve Blank: Can You Trust Any VC's Under 40? - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/09/14/can-you-trust-any-vc%E2%80%99s-under-40/

<comment><USER2> Chris Sacca's under 40, right?

If so, I would consider him to be a counter-example.

<comment><USER3> Why?

Also, he's not a VC.

<comment><USER2> I would trust him because I've been following his career since 2005, and I think that, in addition to being passionate, a nice guy, and very smart, I think he's well-suited to being a VC. He seems to have a good mix of interests in technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and politics.

If I was in the market for a VC (or an investor, as he is until he gets Lowercase off the ground), he would be up there with some other investors with more years of experience, because he's been learning at a very quick pace and in a way that gives him perspective--by speaking, meeting founders, and making small investments.

<comment><USER4> Steve Blank's issue isn't with how many years of experience the VC has -- it's about whether the VC has had _any_ experience prior to 1995. Silicon Valley's rules changed in 1995, around the time of the Netscape IPO. Steve argues that entrepreneurs and investors raised after 1995 are unlikely to have experience running a sustainably profitable business. Their experience will be solely focused around "flipping" companies for a quick IPO or acquisition.

<comment><USER2> I think the need to understand the rules before 1995 is a decent point, but the headline implies that people can't gain perspective from before 1995 without actually being there. Not true. People who are curious enough can find a way to understand it.

<comment><USER4> Good point -- definitely agree with you there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cog 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.operable.io/announcing-cog-1-0-c460a4612b5f <comment><USER2> Here's some quick overview information on Cog:

Cog is a chat bot built for chatops-style workflows. In contrast to other bots out there, Cog has security features built in, with a customizable permission and rule system, allowing you to control who can execute commands.

Another neat feature is that you can write commands in whatever language you like. You can even distribute commands as Docker containers.

The bot itself is written in Elixir, with a command execution agent written in Go. It works out-of-the-box with Slack and Hipchat, but could be extended to other chat platforms with relatively little work by implementing a small interface.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really neat! It took me a while to figure out what it is though, the README should have a better explanation of what it is and some use cases.

<comment><USER2> We've also got a pretty extensive documentation site, as well: [https://cog- book.operable.io/](https://cog-book.operable.io/)

<comment><USER4> Extensive != "Plain English description of your product".

Anyhoo, based on what I've seen so far, Cog is a shared CLI that integrates with Slack? Is that accurate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since I had to click through 2 links to find this, I thought I'd save others the time:

"Cog brings the power of the command line to the place you collaborate with your team all the time -- your chat window."

<comment><USER6> Which still conveys almost zero information about what it actually _does_.

<comment><USER5> True. But it was enough at least for me to know I don't need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be confused with Cog, the Smalltalk Virtual Machine:

[http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/](http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to all our early adopters and beta testers for making this possible.</comment>


Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20410424

<comment><AUTHOR> A related work is the The Black Book of Communism:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism- Repression/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-Communism- Repression/dp/0674076087)

"Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. [...] As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."

<comment><USER2> Just like Nuclear Power != chernobyl

Stalinism != Communism

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s? I guess they're too busy digging up the Chinese..."commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British"...China had famines for thousands of years, including in the 20th century before the communists took over. The one they mention is their last one. The unusual thing is not the 1961 famine but that there have been no famines in China for a half century. Because the communists smashing the Four Olds and industrializing the country and kicking out the foreign imperialists got the country on track. Of course the British ignore the famines they cause, and dig up so-called famines by their former imperial conquests. China would not have had to industrialize so quickly if England was not threatening China from Hong Kong and so forth. That does not count of course. Thankfully, anti- imperialists are crashing into the US/UK all the time now, showing those hubris-filled imperialists who live by the sword shall feel the sword coming from the other end as well.

<comment><USER4> 1\. The author profiled by the BBC is not an agent of the BBC.

2\. The author asserts that the Chinese famine is unique in that it occurred despite the lack of pressure from natural disasters. The Irish potato famine was exacerbated by the blight.

3\. The estimate for the Chinese famine is 36 million dead and dwarfs the death toll of the previous Chinese famines. The potato famine death toll was about 1 million.

<comment><USER5> FWIW and from what I can tell, that is 1 million out of a total Irish population of 6 million at the time (1845, Wolfram Alpha), versus 36 million out of a total population of 682 million (1960, W.A.). So in 1 in 6 vs 1 in 20.

So one could argue that the Great Famine was a much more widespread (factor 100 population), but less severe (factor 1/3 mortality) catastrophe. Disregarding all other factors such as causation. The "baseline" mortality due to starvation may also have been different in both instances.

Of course such number games are both cynical and insufficient to deal with the subject (e.g. your point 2).

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Dikötter's 2010 work _Mao's Great Famine_ , seems like a very similar book with very similar conclusions.

<comment><USER6> As long as we're playing number games, the combined population of Ireland and the UK was 28 million in 1845 according to WA. If we're going to blame the UK, we should probably include citizens of the UK in the tally. Really, it's hard to make a direct comparison since it appears to me that we're trying to compare a problem in a single province controlled by the UK and a general problem across all of China. If Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and India had all had huge famines in 1845 that might be a little more comparable to the Chinese famine.

But as you say it's not incredibly instructive to look at it by the numbers.

<comment><USER7> You might want to read up on UK/Irish history before you call Ireland a province of the UK.

<comment><USER7> Not sure why the downvotes, but it's true. Ireland was an occupied state, and most of its food production went overseas to the UK. Including England in the total population makes no sense.

<comment><USER6> I was using province in the classical Roman sense. Ireland did not have self- determination.

Removing England from the tallies would be like removing members of the Chinese communist party from the population of China. You're basically making the tacit assumption that the oppressors had no right to the food and therefore the fact that they did not have a famine is irrelevant. There's an interesting argument there, but you're not actually making it, you're just manipulating the numbers to tell a specific story.

<comment><USER7> The whole of Europe had potato crop failures at the same time, but only Ireland had famine. Imagine, in China's case that xighur had a famine while the rest didn't. Now does it make sense to include the whole country in the statistics?

You might as well include France in the stats too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster."

<comment><USER8> Ask your government what happend during the dustbowl years and what lifted the people out of starvation...

Ask them whether people starved to death because of crop failures or the agricultural policy of the new deal... then try to figure out why crops would be burned while people starved.

<comment><USER4> Government offices are closed today because of Thanksgiving, so what's the answer?

In the book "Tombstone" (the book by the author in the OP), the author reiterates the claim that no democracy has ever suffered from a major famine, but are you asserting an equivalency?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great- shame...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/chinas-great- shame.html?_r=0)

> _The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could > undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political > legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was > the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no > major famine has ever occurred in a democracy._

<comment><USER8> I believe the potato famine would count as a famine occurring in a democracy.

<comment><USER7> Ireland under UK rule was hardly a democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kind of a wake-up call for me. In the west we'll have some incident where a few people were killed, say the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, and there'll be books, movies, TV specials, and so forth.

In other countries you lose 36 million people -- six times the size of the holocaust in WWII -- and you're not supposed to even ask any questions about it.

We truly do have a lot to be thankful for.

<comment><USER8> They have great leaps forward, we have wars on drugs. They aren't allowed to know when their troops fire on civilians in Tienamen square, we aren't allow to know when our troops fire on civilians in another country.

They have celebrated massacres too...

We might write books about St Valentines but many fewer are written about the trail of tears, mainly because St Valentines serves a political purpose where as the trail of tears does not.

It's all "five year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains"

<comment><USER10> Hm. If the US and China are morally the same, why are there so few Americans moving to China?

I mean, they shouldn't be able to tell the difference in styles of government, am I right?

<comment><USER11> I'm a Canadian who has moved to China. One of the reasons I decided to move here was that everyday life feels more "free" in China (as long as you don't get involved in politics). However, I would never argue that the Chinese government is more transparent than any Western government and when it comes to political freedom/freedom of press, there is no comparison possible.

On the other hand, I'd say that life in China is in many ways more compatible with libertarian values then Canada/US. If you are socialist/communist leaning, you probably won't like China.

Here's a related comment I posted a few days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766206>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese- Famine-1958-1962-ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Chinese- Famine-1958-1962-ebook/dp/B008MWNEXI)

<comment><USER4> I bought the ebook a few days ago, almost obsessed with detail though I suppose that was the author's intent. It has a very poignant opening, with the author describing e lengths to which his parents cared for him, and how long it took for him to realize how Mao's policies led to his father's death.

In many ways, it reads like a non fictional 1984

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".

<comment><USER14> _Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts"._

Yes.

[http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret- Famine/dp/08...](http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret- Famine/dp/0805056688)</comment></comment>


Minecraft API proposals - <AUTHOR> https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MCAPI

<comment><USER2> Why not just use Bukkit? Even single player is running a server internally now, it is easy to just run craftbukkit as an instance, plus if people want to change it they can just write plugins.

All you really need now is an API for sending custom packets to and from the client.

<comment> dale-cooper You mean make bukkit an official API?

<comment><USER2> Yeah.</comment></comment></comment>


Android Will Surpass Windows By 2016, Say Gartner Stats - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-android-research-idUSBRE89N11J20121024

<comment><USER2> In a world where technology life cycles are difficult to predict even 1 year out it sees a bit arrogant to presume to know how Windows and Android will evolve over the next 4+ years and the "stats" don't even consider the possible impact of emerging technologies. Here's a prediction Worth exactly what we paid for it.</comment>


Ask HN: Imposing a feedback on a school. - <AUTHOR> Dear HNers, this is a rant.
I am EE student in a small school of engineering at one of the unis in Europe. Every day I feel this is a waste of time, as most courses are conducted in downright wrong fashion, and yet I am forced to stay because I actually need a diploma.
Lectures are delivered by professors who dumb down every single topic because of their insufficient command in english. At extreme cases, writing a test requires me to limit my vocabulary and I don't even find myself fluent.
Programming classes are half-assed to a degree my colleagues don't know what pointer is after three semesters of C/C++ or find ls to be a mystery of unix world. Some of those people can become TAs in two years  and contribute to making next generations of students even lousier programmers via kind of a negative feedback loop.
But this doesn't end there, there were classes which were sort of free credits, because profs implicitly told us they are incapable of teaching in english. And thus I don't know how interpret stats in a research paper which is pathetic to be honest.
There were a few solid classes, mostly about the basics, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I would like you to ask a question, is it possible to influence quality of teaching from the bottom? If not for me then for the next years of students, otherwise this country will never be innovative and stay piece of shit forever. <comment><USER2> "I actually need a diploma."

Start by making sure you're confident in that statement. Depending on your desired path, it well may be true. Many never bother to ask themselves the question.

And seek out people in your desired field. Imagine the role you want to be in in 5 years and go introduce yourself to someone in that role. Even if it has to be via email. They likely will have a better pulse than your instructors on what you should be learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> > is it possible to influence quality of teaching from the bottom?

Highly unlikely, university bureaucracies are engineered to be resistant to change. This is an age-old problem in all disciplines.

There's a wonderful Mark Twain quote— "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".

Best advice- complete your degree program requirements, get the credential, and move-on quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> "this country will never be innovative and stay piece of shit forever"

Sounds like America, but then...

"small school of engineering at one of the unis in Europe"

If you're saying school in Europe is bad... try getting worse education in United States and then also being in $50,000 debt for it.

I would say people at the bottom usually have to vote with their wallets. Education is becoming distributed and you can learn from high quality courses online for free now a days.</comment>


Show HN: bmrk.it - a simple bookmarking service - <AUTHOR>

I wanted a simple, lightweight and easy to use bookmarking service so I took to the task with this little side project, here's the result:<p>http://bmrk.it <comment><USER2> Cool. It took me a moment to figure out how to add bookmarks. You might want to highlight that a little more.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I added a screenshot which hopefully makes it a little clearer.

</comment><comment><USER3> well done</comment>


Forget Ping Pong and Snacks: How Buffer Digs Deeper With These 4 Startup Perks - <AUTHOR> http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/startingup/business-management/forget-ping-pong-and-snacks-how-buffer-digs-deeper-with-these-4-startup-perks/

<comment><USER2> Free beer, free pizza, free Netflix, free this and that.

I admire Buffer's attempt for a healthier lifestyle of their employees. It might not sound as attractive as beer and pizza but it's better for everyone - healthy and happy employees are a backbone of a successful company. Maybe gym memberships and sports/cinema tickets are next step for them.

On the other hand, free eBooks aren't as convincing when attempting to lure a good employee to the company.</comment>


Stop Copying HelloSign: An Open Letter to DocuSign CEO, Keith Krach - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hellosign.com/docusign-copying-hellosign-open-letter-to-keith-krach/

<comment><USER2> > Copying hurts innovation and the tech world as a whole.

Whaaat? Copying only accelerates innovation. To claim that you wouldn't improve _your_ UI because someone else might similarly improve their UI is specious - no one is going to intentionally hinder their product because they're worried that someone else might equally improve their product.

> Copying is bad for customers.

And music piracy is literally taking money out of Bono's wallet. Product evolution tends to happen in cycles, and things that were previously design decisions become design standards. That's how design works. If you think your UI is better, DocuSign, by copying your UI, has made their UI better.

> Copying is unethical.

This is purely subjective. Copying is how software __works __.

\-----

DocuSign is suing SkySlope for pretty blatant trademark infringement. HelloSign is whining because the design (which looks very generic) is similar to the DocuSign design?

And from the linked article:

> When we attempted to check DocuSign's new design ourselves, we didn't see > the potentially HelloSign-inspired design at all.

Then what the hell is Joseph Walla whining about?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a very clever (and FREE) way for HelloSign to get Publicity and new users / "sign"-ups.

Until I saw this post, I didn't even know HelloSign existed :)

<comment><USER4> yeah, looks like PR. "We thought it was worth starting a conversation. <other CEO>, I'd love to hear your thoughts." Not sure if you start conversations with open letters on blogs. The other company's lawyer will probably advice not to join the conversation.</comment></comment>


The Yahoo Firehose: Get access to our public Updates activity stream - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/yahoo_updates_firehose.html <comment><USER2> Ha! When I tweeted the following a few days ago I had no idea this announcement was coming.

<http://twitter.com/random_walker/status/11917456790>

"within a few years there will be a real-time stream that aggregates essentially all activity anywhere on the web"

While Twitter, Wordpress, etc. have firehoses, this announcement is different -- aggregation across multiple services. I think the concept is very powerful and is something I've been looking into over the past few weeks.

I'm curious how many people know about Spinn3r (spinn3r.com) -- they claim to provide a real-time hose of all updates in the blogosphere. They quoted me $6k/mo. Unfortunately, Spinn3r's main product was deadpooled last year, so I'm not sure what their future is as a company. I think they should have made the real-time stream their main product. In a way they were too early.

Another startup called Superfeedr takes a different approach. They charge on a per-feed (or per-entry) basis, so their up-front costs aren't as huge. They currently cater to customers who might only want a few hundred or a few thousand specific feeds, but as they scale up they should be able to offer a bulk stream of essentially the entire blogosphere.

Then there's Google Buzz, which is also about aggregating different services. They don't currently offer a firehose but apparently you can build one yourself using PubSubHubbub, although developers report that it isn't working so great: [http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz- api/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz- api/browse_thread/thread/8dd226beacccd7f4)

But the long-term trend is clear. We're going to have an "uberhose" at some point! I have a few applications in mind of things that such a pipe would enable that are fundamentally not possible today, but I'm curious what ideas other people have.

<comment><USER3> Nice market segmentation :) As for Superfeedr, we already have a pretty big chunk of the blogsphere and as long as you know what you want (feeds), we can provide that to you. Other services that you mention suffer from spam, because they have a "extensive" approach. In our case, we'd rather let our users decide what they want, rather than filter for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First off, why would Yahoo!'s firehose have "YouTube favoriting" in it?

If they continue to aggregate 3rd party data and put it all in an easily accessible firehose, I could see this being _really_ useful.

I haven't used them a lot, but Yahoo!'s developer stuff seems pretty handy. Would be nice to see them reinvent themselves or really push this division much like Amazon AWS has.

</comment><comment><USER5> How much will this cost?

It's a very cool service that only a company the size of Yahoo! (and Google, Bing, etc) can provide due to the infrastructure needed for crawling and serving. It would be interesting if this was the first of many Yahoo! moves in which they shift from a pure search + portal to data providers. Their APIs already do that, but this is much bigger.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yahoo suffers a lot of stigma. Maybe because most of us passed a fase where all serious programers had switched to google. I know ppl thar dislikes yui only based on preconcepts about yahoo.

how comfortable are you on depending on yahoo services and why?</comment>


Satellites auto detect buildings in OpenStreetMap - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@astrodigital/satellites-auto-detect-buildings-in-openstreetmap-b5bfb8840114#.ux0i1hboo <comment><USER2> This has been heating up. Here's the seminal paper that kicked off the Cambrian Explosion: [https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/Mnih_Volodymyr_PhD_Th...](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/Mnih_Volodymyr_PhD_Thesis.pdf)

And I saw two presentations about this at State of the Map US.

* Anand Thakker of Development Seed had a cool live demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BftllmqXSpA&list=PLqjPa29lMi...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BftllmqXSpA&list=PLqjPa29lMiE3eR-gK80irr3xdUiRbIMeg&index=2)

* Facebook mapped a bunch of roads in Egypt, and has an ongoing effort. Facebook apparently didn't allow their's to be taped.

I have a similar project called DeepOSM: [https://github.com/trailbehind/deeposm](https://github.com/trailbehind/deeposm)

There is starting to be a conversation in the OSM community about allowing robot edits into the map, I'm definitely pro robot. Google has been doing it for years. Mike Migurski touched off debate on the OSM Slack and blog comments with his post: [http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a- crossroads.h...](http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a- crossroads.html) (added this link after maxerickson's comment reminded me what touched of the debate).

[http://terrapattern.com](http://terrapattern.com) is also a related project from some CMU people.

<comment><USER3> > _" There is starting to be a debate in the OSM community about allowing > robot edits into the map"_

What do you think about a hybrid: bot detects and recommends changes, which are then queued or tagged for human verification?

I've been looking at scuba data in the OSM dataset, and there are a number of bot-added entries, with a tag "verified": "no, please check and del this tag" (e.g. Maaya Thila dive site [1]).

[1] [http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/663869880](http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/663869880)

<comment><USER2> That's the status quo.

I'm in favor of a regime where there is a benchmark for the recall and precision rates for the automated analysis, and anything that hits the benchmarks is acceptable. I don't regard this as a philosophical matter - let's accept any bot analysis that hits a certain threshold.

1) We can certainly set the threshold above the TIGER import in the US, which most people agree is positive, but very crufty.

2) It's the developing parts of the world that need automated road creation the most. The opposition seems to emanate from rich, European nations.

<comment><USER4> Robot edits are great when they _add_ data. When modifying or removing work that humans did, I'm much more hesitant. This is probably why there's opposition from "rich, European nations": the developing world has little data that anything could go wrong with.

I'm not necessarily pro autonomous robots unless they either hit very high benchmarks, or it's purely for initial groundwork (or improving on previous bots' work). I totally see how it could be great for unmapped places where it could add grass/forest areas, houses, roads, rivers, etc. but tampering with existing data with no review queue (if not an approval queue, at least post- editing review)... I'm hesitant.

<comment><USER2> Again, I wouldn't be philosophical about "When modifying or removing work that humans did, I'm much more hesitant."

If a robotic system can demonstrate some high bar of precision in modifying human updates, then let the edits happen. If a human mapped a road, then that road changed places or perhaps changed from being two-way to one-way and a robot can detect that reliably, let the robot edit.

That said, I don't think "robots changing human edits" is where the robots shine. Most human edits will be good, unless the data later changes. I agree that the low hanging fruit is 1) mapping new features, 2) cleaning up imports like TIGER, 3) providing "lint" type tools to give human editors feedback if their new edit might be wrong.

<comment><USER3> > _" Most human edits will be good, unless the data later changes"_

One concern is the date of the bot's data-source/satellite imagery.

\- Bot reviews satellite data, creates building. \- Human notices that the building's actually been demolished, so removes it from OSM. \- Bot reviews satellite data, recreates building.

When I was in Georgia (the Eurasian country, not the USA state) in 2014, I was making changes to OSM and noticed that the satellite imagery was very different to what was on the ground. I couldn't find any way to work out how old the satellite data was, but my gut feel is that there will be some places where the pace of development is much faster than the rate of updates in satellite imagery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fallacy in the concept we're discussing here is assuming that OpenStreetMap is being held back by the speed with which we can add infrastructure geometry (I'm specifically excluding mass doodling of buildings as that is a topic on its own, and, hey, google does just fine without buildings nearly everywhere).

Given reasonable quality aerial imagery (on which automatic detection a la Facebook depends too) the limiting factor for years in OpenStreetMap has been meta data collection (names, road attributes, POIs, addresses and so on). Humans are quite fast and good at tracing roads and the couple of minutes it takes to add a few dozens of streets is just inconsequential compared to the time and effort it takes to go there and actually survey and add the meta data.

Now despite some bloggers, that themselves haven't noticed that OpenStreetMap is very different than in 2007 (but you know xkcd 386), claiming that OSM is standing still, the OpenstreetMap community is quite welcoming to new and better ways of surveying and obtaining data. Mapillary and now OSV have made lots of aspects of meta data collection easier and faster and have found wide spread adoption in OSM including automatic sign detection and so on.

But even with such advances, gathering and entering the meta data is still by the order of magnitudes the dominating time consuming process in OpenStreetMap (and for what it is worth in any mapping activity).

<comment><USER6> Tracing buildings by hand is quite time-intensive even with stuff like the buildings plugin for JOSM. And it is a prerequisite for going out and mapping addresses. In cities metadata acquisition might be a much larger thing, but it isn't here on the countryside where I live. Tracing landuse form aerial imagery is probably 90% of what I do here.

<comment><USER5> Having buildings is definitely not a prerequisite for mapping addresses (when I go mapping I will typically and them before too, but again that is only a minor amount of time compared to actually gathering the data).

Mass mapping buildings is a rather recent phenomenon in OpenStreetMap and you can have a high quality, fully functional map with not a single building outline (as google shows too). Not to mention that we have had a country with full address coverage since ages that only has a small number of buildings mapped (DK).

Now there are certain high detail tasks for which having building outlines make sense: for example adding entrances with addresses, but that is fairly far along on the path of iteratively adding more detail to OSM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This space is heating up a bit.

Facebook (!) has developed a system for mapping roads and is working towards using it to add data to OpenStreetMap:

[http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=55220](http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=55220)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150862) (no comments)

There's several other people/groups working on similar projects, like DeepOSM:

[http://www.deeposm.org/](http://www.deeposm.org/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808639) (some discussion)

And no shortage of feels about how all the parts need to work together:

[http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a- crossroads.h...](http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a- crossroads.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187782) (no comments)

[http://tomlee.wtf/2016/07/31/introductory-openstreetmap- poli...](http://tomlee.wtf/2016/07/31/introductory-openstreetmap-politics/)

[http://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the- cros...](http://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads/)

There have been earlier efforts to do automated feature extraction, but it seems that improvements in AI and better, more liberally licensed imagery are moving things towards some sort of tipping point.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting area and the most important recent change is the opening of the data. More and more municipalities provide web services where you can download high-quality imagery, e.g. have a look at [https://www.wien.gv.at/ma41datenviewer/public/](https://www.wien.gv.at/ma41datenviewer/public/) in the left menu you can select "Luftaufnahmen" (aerial imagery) or DOM (Digitales Oberflaechenmodell == Digital Surface Model) and the resolution is quite high (unfortunately the imagery is watermark-raped, but most training methods are robust against that kind of errors). One might think aerial imagery is not a problem, as we have Google Maps, Bing, etc., but you reach there (free) API limits quite fast, if the goal is to get bulk data to train classifiers.

In particular laser data is a game changer and makes building footprint detection much simpler (you can make pretty training masks from the provided vector layers and train e.g. a NN for segmentation). Current state-of-the art in building and street detection from photos only is around 85% to 95%, which is quite high, but a bit too low for fully automatic usage in e.g. urban development or environmental engineering. In particular there are images where it is nearly impossible to distinguish the roof from the nearby place, if the roof is not enclosed by a green area or a garden.

At the moment classifications/segmentations are polished by humans (and providing accurate (satellite or aerial) imagery classification is a big business), but DSM data is so good, that it makes fully automatic approaches feasible and I would say one could reach ~99% there.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The green buildings are existing structures captured in OpenStreetMap. The > red buildings are the ones we detected as missing from the map.

And which color is existing structures _not_ identified by the software? Because that would be a very quick and easy way to spot how well it's actually performing.

<comment><USER9> or which red buildings aren't buildings. It'd be nice to verify on a city such as Philadelphia that has an open parcel layer, but then again cities with parcel layers are probably well mapped out in OSM

<comment><USER10> Yeah, usually there are scripts that can update and import building outlines from open government data. Usually this is done with human guidance and by request. So if a mapper in a certain area notices missing or outdated building, he or she might request that someone in the community familiar with those import tools import the outlines for that area. Ideally the local mapper can then verify and enrich this data.

In a lot of developed countries almost any building barring small garden sheds is meticulously described in government parcel databases with decimetre precision. In the past few years these outlines have been imported in the Netherlands in OpenStreetMap; it really looks a lot better than just a bunch of rectangles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't this mean the OSM repository will be used as a cache of the output of someone's version of some ml algorithm?

Why not distribute the data as well as the tagger and let the users tag the data themselves? This will give more freedom to the user and arguably lead to a better quality data (e.g. some additional tuning could give better results than the general case for a given region, which can be best performed by a team more familiar with that particual area) as way more eyeballs are now on the tagger itself, not just its output.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a demo of the project: [http://ryfeus.github.io/urban_osm_sentinel/demo/](http://ryfeus.github.io/urban_osm_sentinel/demo/)

Also does anyone know if it's possible to get the code for this? Haven't found a github or bitbucket repo for it yet.

</comment><comment><USER13> As an infrequent but repeat contributor to OSM, this is fantastic! While there is an historic bias against automated edits (sometimes for good reasons but I do often wonder...), automating the tedious parts of mapping is, imho, a very good thing.

That said, I don't see much detail here regarding what happens when a missing building is detected. Does it get automatically added to the map? Or maybe a note is made indicating a building needs to be added? Maybe the building is auto-added but with a FixMe note for manual mappers to examine it for accuracy?

<comment><USER14> Automated building detection isn't exactly novel in remote sensing. People have been doing it for years so they can measure how fast cities develop, monitor inhabited areas after natural disasters and so on. This kind of work is never 100% correct. It usually relies on multi-band imagery so you can figure out what's vegetation and what's roof tile.

As far as I know Google does something similar to automate mapping of roads, and then they have a huge team of people cleaning up afterwards.

The best solution here (IMO) would be to add a list of potential buildings that should be checked by people either by cross-referencing satellite imagery or by people who actually live in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice! OSM data unfortunately wasn't comprehensive enough for a project of mine, but I still love what they do. It's great seeing these kinds of improvements!

<comment><USER16> What was your project, and what did you end up using?

<comment><USER15> unstructured blob:

I'm working with data from a FOIA request for ~5yrs worth of parking tickets in Chicago. About 18m rows in total. The end goal is to be able to say whether a parking ticket was valid or not. It's been ongoing for about two years now, but when I have chunks of time I find myself getting back into the old code or just rewriting chunks. Part of the reason it's taking so long is that a personal requirement of mine is to treat every ticket on the same footing, so throwing rows out during cleanups etc isn't something I'm necessarily comfortable with. It's kinda frustrating but it's a hopeful goal.

Since ticketers don't record lat/long and only [badly typo'd] addresses, I'm stuck doing the address to lat/long translation myself. It's not easy by any means since there are many, many many edge cases. The rate limits on common street address resolution tends to be pretty low (~10k/day) and the paid APIs are ungodly expensive.

SM has been a great tool to help things go a bit forward, but when an address is missing, so is its lat/long which in many cases means rows get thrown out - which I'm not comfortable with. Interpolation using shapefile data would work, but the number of edge cases makes that difficult. I believe the data I have right now uses a combination of census data, OSM data and shapefiles from data.cityofchicago.org. Someone in the local data civics group put together a cleaned up copy of that where I was originally using the sources separately. I can pull it if you're curious.

To complicate things, having missing data adds noise and false positives when correcting typos. There don't really seem to be many address sources that are consistent with address types - eg, "pl" vs "plaza" vs "place". I threw together some pretty decent python code with recursive difflib to clean typos using other typo'd addresses as a path to the correct address and it does pretty well to correct much of that. For example, in a few steps 'nrragansitt' becomes 'narragansett'.

<comment><USER17> Given that you have a fixed area the tickets can be in, and you know every possible address, it seems like you could investigate string distance measures. It would solve your pl vs plaza vs place problem.

<comment><USER15> That's what using difflib does. Plaza vs pl vs place is just one example of many, though. There are about 1k different street names in chicago and about 18k different street names in the data. Many are missing street type and there are many street names which have different street types. So that tends to open up cans of worms. That, and street names that have 'street' in their names. Also, 'avenue' is a street name which screws things up left and right.

It's not a simple problem, and none of the popular machine learning libraries which use string distance for this sort of problem have been very effective.

<comment><USER7> Have you tried [https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal](https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal)?

<comment><USER15> Yep - it's actually been pretty invaluable in getting this project to where it is now. :) It definitely has its own flaws, but those are easy to work around.

Edit - looks like they have a similar problem from dealing with hand typed data. From their road map:

Ambiguous token classification (coming soon): e.g. "dr" => "doctor" or "drive" for an English address depending on the context. Multiclass logistic regression trained on OSM addresses, where abbreviations are discouraged, giving us many examples of fully qualified addresses on which to train

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've drawn a few houses on OSM a few years ago. Great to see projects like this that are automating this process!

</comment><comment><USER19> In places with an active OSM community, like Europe, the community usually maps the new buildings faster than the satillite imagery is updated.</comment>


Rackjure - <AUTHOR> http://docs.racket-lang.org/rackjure/index.html <comment><USER2> I guess I'm alone on this, but I want as little special syntax as possible, it's the primary thing I like about Scheme. ' ` , # <\- that's enough, let's stop there. Everything else should be in an s-expression.

<comment><USER3> Well, I suggest not using anything but scheme.

<comment><USER4> Downvoted for facile snark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion one of the primary characteristics of Clojure is the implementation of the collection types. Without that it's not going to be an implementation of Clojure to me.

<comment><USER4> This got me curious about whether persistent data structures are available in Racket. It seems like they are.

[https://docs.racket-lang.org/functional-data- structures/inde...](https://docs.racket-lang.org/functional-data- structures/index.html)

<comment><USER6> Being fundamental to clojure means everyone uses those data structures. That matters quite a lot when you aren't writing everything from scratch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: I'm writing similar thing as a hobby sandbox project: [https://github.com/kovrik/scheme-in-kotlin](https://github.com/kovrik/scheme- in-kotlin)

It started as a Scheme R5RS implementation in Java, then I translated everything to Kotlin. Finally, decided to make it a hybrid (abomination?) of Scheme and Racket and Clojure.

Still in development, don't know how to implement macros properly. Also, it's only an interpreter for now, there is no compiler (for the same reason: don't know yet how to write a compiler for Kotlin. Use ASM?)

Anyway, it is a great and enlightening experience and I would recommend everyone to write your own lang.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why are there two variations for ~> and ~>> ? It looks like it limits you to using only functions that take parameters in the same position.

Why not have one position-independent version? Something where you can specify at every level which position you want to use, like this:

        (~>>> #"foobar"
              (~> bytes-length)
              (~>> number->string 16)
              (~> string->bytes/utf-8))

But that still only limits you to first and last position. Why not use a positional special form like JavaScript has with __dirname called __var?

        (~>>> #"foobar"
              (__var bytes-length)
              (number->string 16 __var)
              (__var string->bytes/utf-8))

This way you can use it no matter what functions you want. But I don't write my code in Racket so maybe this is already a solved problem.

<comment><USER9> In clojure, you can do this with as->, but there are reasons to be careful. Stuart Sierra has a great (brief) article about it[0]. The long and short of it is that it's really easy to change the "type" of an expression as it goes through your pipeline in unintuitive ways. This can cause surprises later down the line, so it's probably better to refactor the functions you are calling so that they play nicely with thread-first or with thread-last.

[0][https://stuartsierra.com/2018/07/15/clojure-donts-thread- as](https://stuartsierra.com/2018/07/15/clojure-donts-thread-as)

<comment><USER10> Did you mean Stuart Sierra? :-)

<comment><USER9> Whoops! Clojure is the only community I know with a confusion of Stuarts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would have called it Clacket. Cool project nonetheless.

<comment><USER12> Portmanteaus for naming new technology should be banned :P

<comment><USER13> > portechteaus

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would love to see an Arcket.

<comment><USER15> I think you can use Anarki in exactly that way:

[https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki#racket- interop](https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki#racket-interop)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Creating html – templates vs. code - <AUTHOR>

With react and the likes creating markup in code, i wonder if people find templating solutions (in general) having some limitations or otherwise being inferior? Or it's just me being too attached to templates and seeing doing via code somewhat of a step backwards. <comment><USER2> A year ago, I would have agreed (that templating is cleaner, better separation, and going back to generating HTML from code would be a step backwards). Since I have been using React.js, my opinion has changed 100% -- and I realized that the supposed "separation of concerns" that drove us to template languages in the first place was an arbitrary separation. Separating components (a button, a form, a site header, what have you) is the kind of separation you want, not separating languages arbitrarily. If you look at the evolution of template languages, they sometimes start simple, but all of them have added sufficient logic to approach or surpass turing-completeness -- it turns out that you want to write templates with logic in them, that that is actually how you separate concerns effectively. The logic and rendered markup for a particular component should be cohesive; components should be loosely coupled together.

<comment><AUTHOR> I pretty much agree with the reasoning how templating doesn't promote anything other than separation of languages. It always frowned how people emphasised templates being logic-less, which imo oversimplifies the matter.

Yet i still don't seem comfortable writing the markup in js. Even react's JSX preprocessor doesn't seem right to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love templating, particularly handlebars. If I'm working solo on a project it doesn't really matter...But if I'm partnering with a designer who only knows html + css, then the templates are a great way for them to contribute without a steep learning curve.

IMHO the best blend of templating and 2-way-binding (and other fanciness) is probably ember.js.

</comment><comment><USER4> My favorite library for this:

[https://github.com/cgrand/enlive](https://github.com/cgrand/enlive)</comment>


Flipboard CEO outs iPad Mini's existence - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/baratunde/statuses/259231757260427264 Screenshot here: http://cl.ly/image/3l1e1M1P1C2K <comment><USER2> it says this page does not exist. did you save a screenshot?

<comment><USER3> The page works for me, it's just a tweet which reads:

"we've got a mythical version of @flipboard ready for a mythical version of the #ipad" -@mmccue #founders #ipadmini

It doesn't really sound like he's got any more information than the rest of us, it just sounds as though they've prepared an app for the expected screen size of 8-inches.</comment></comment>


Microsoft I will use torrents (just joking) - <AUTHOR>

I bought Office 2013 which doesn't come with a DVD (you need to download it only after signing into your "Microsoft Account").  Sadly this doesn't always work as can been seen here: http://pastebin.com/GFWT1pC0 After a long battle with Mary from Microsoft our chat goes like this:
john: I think I will just download this software instead from a torrent site
john: at least that way I can get it
john: I can then just use that code if it asks for it
Mary: Obviously, I cannot comment on that.
Mary: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
john: yes
Mary: Yes
john: Please ask Microsoft to keep DVDs with their products, or provide URLs to download the software
john: thanks <comment><USER2> Wow - I guess I missed the news that MSFT is not selling these in DVD format anymore [1]. I hate that. As a customer, it's a catch 22 of convenience and inconvenience. The "pro" is that I can download it anywhere, anytime. The "con" is that there's a lot more work on my part now. Download speeds aside, I still have to (a) learn (and remember) how to download it, (b) find where it was downloaded to, and (c) remember to back it up/copy to another location because my "privilege" to download it only is for one year (typically). Oh sure, to you and I those are trivial tasks but to our parents and grandparents, those are far from trivial tasks. I suppose MSFT is saying, "IT departments are the ones who should be installing this, not regular folk."

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3927866/office-2013-pricin...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3927866/office-2013-pricing- office-365-subscriptions-available-now)

</comment><comment><USER3> oh yeah, isn't that amazing? Absolutely ridiculous what Microsoft is doing with Office.

You also cannot install 2013 on any other account/computer (yeah, ONE account per ONE computer) as far as I have heard. I'm sticking to 2010. forever. Next step might just be Libre/Open Office</comment>


Router man - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2006/anniversary/032706-routerman.html?page=1

<comment><USER2> Never realized he was deeply involved in JXTA. Used the JXTA project about 4 years ago and it seemed to be in a constant state of flux. Not sure what happened to it and if it's still being actively developed....was one of the better P2P frameworks at the time....

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an old article from Netword World but it is interesting. I read it a while ago but I remember that was very informative in how William Yeager conceived the architecture of the multi-protocol router (which in deed I think it was the multi-protocol feature the big hit of Cisco over Wellfleet).</comment>


Show HN: Word.to – Word Editor, Word Counter, Word Converter API - <AUTHOR> https://word.to <comment><USER2> You should also include "word per minute for reading". Apparently "The average adult reading speed is between 200 and 300 words per minute (same reading rate you want to achieve by the 6th grade). For success in college you should be able to read 350 to 450 words per minute if you want to have any extra time."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I'll add that to the list</comment></comment>


Scientists close in on hidden Scottish meteorite crater - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48560989 <comment><USER2> I'd be interested to see gravity field data from space covering the area.

<comment><USER3> What is gravity field data? Can you elaborate more?

<comment><USER4> Gravity is not uniform everywhere on earth, because the Earth's density is not uniform. (This is ignoring the other consideration that the earth is not spherical. Because the Earth bulges at the equator, gravity is also weaker towards the equator and stronger at the poles.) Satellites[1] or humans on the ground can track variance in the gravity field. This is normally done to find underground deposits of valuable minerals or metals, as may be slightly denser or less dense than the equivalent volume of earth/stone.[2] I think OP was wondering if the presence of the impact site would show up on such a survey of Earth's gravity field.

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Me...](https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Measuring_Gravity_With_Grace.html)

[2] [https://mbfsz.gov.hu/en/geophysics/gravity-and- microgravity-...](https://mbfsz.gov.hu/en/geophysics/gravity-and-microgravity- measurements)</comment></comment></comment>


The US Has One of the Worst Math Gender Gaps in the Developed World - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/02/08/the_math_gender_gap_the_u_s_has_one_of_the_worst_in_the_developed_world.html

<comment><USER2> From my own personal experience I believe that the overall way that maths is taught at a young age is broken (at least in the UK).

The first time that I actually got to apply mathematics to an interesting real life scenario wasn't until I studied economics at A level, by which time most people (predominantly women) had lost interest an opted to take less maths intensive subjects.

This is my experience of early mathematics, I'd be interested to hear if most peoples were the same.</comment>


Show HN: Hasher - Developer's toolbox for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kignjplbjlocolcfldfhbonmbblpfbjb

<comment><USER2> This is incredibly useful, thank you! There have been far too many times when I've found myself googling for online base64 encodes, timestamp conversions and basically everything else in this tool.

Fantastic work, thanks once more!

<comment><USER3> Agreed! This is highly useful :) Nicely implemented too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good job, I love it! A suggestion: add some network aware features, like GeoIP, IP/domain whois, etc. They'd have to call some external API's, but they'd fit right in.

<comment><USER5> I am sure there are people who would no long trust it to calculate cryptographic hashes and ensure their security if the plugin had internet access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the function but why is it a browser extension?

<comment><USER7> Maybe so that it's always at your fingertips, figuratively speaking? I like that now I won't have to open a new tab and search for an online base64 converter, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool!

</comment><comment><USER9> thank you!</comment>


Pygments, a generic syntax highlighter - <AUTHOR> http://pygments.org/

<comment><USER2> Yay, a major project using hg instead of git. This makes it seem like my work on hg is still worth something (as are the pull requests I have sent to pygments).

Btw, the next hg sprint will be at Pycon in Montréal!

[http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/3.4sprint](http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/3.4sprint)

<comment><USER3> > Yay, a major project using hg instead of git. This makes it seem like my > work on hg is still worth something (as are the pull requests I have sent to > pygments).

Mostly because nobody spend time to make the move. All other pocoo projects move to git (Flask, Werkzeug, Jinja2, Click, Sphinx, etc.).

<comment><USER2> Aw. So you have no intent on staying with hg? I thought Georg Brandl was a big hg fan. :-(

And hg is so cool! Templates! Revsets! Evolve! Extensibility!

[http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising- mercurial-l...](http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial- like-a-pro/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NSLv...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NSLvERZQSok#t=973)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg)

[http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/x-men-in-mercurial- evol...](http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/x-men-in-mercurial-evolve/)

<comment><USER4> Whether or not hg is good or even better than git is pretty much irrelevant at this point.

Github's popularity has made all other project hosting platforms irrelevant. Git's popularity means that every potential contributor knows how to use it, which significantly reduces friction for new ones.

<comment><USER2> I don't buy the popularity argument. If I were to abandon software just because it wasn't as popular as the alternative, I would have to stop working on GNU Octave in favour of Matlab, and I would have to wipe GNU/Linux from my machines and just use Mac OS X or Windows.

I understand that git transcends organisation, programming languages, and operating systems. I still don't want to be stuck to the git way of doing things, no matter how popular it is. Concessions have to be made for git users coming to hg, but there are some things that hg does that git just will probably never be able to.

I may one day work on improving hgit, which is an hg front-end to a git storage backend proof-of-concept, but so far the hg-git workaround for git's popularity is good enough for most purposes.

<comment><USER4> Popularity is a strong argument. It's however not the only argument. In the case of git and hg popularity is important because the other arguments are too weak to matter in comparision.

That's not the case for GNU Octave or Linux. Those offer significant financial, ideological and technical benefits over alternatives. Benefits a large part of their user base actually cares about. Hg doesn't have that luxury. Git is simply good enough and hg is not good enough to offset the cost for choosing the unpopular option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is writing Clojure, you can use Clygments [1], a bridge to Pygments I wrote a year ago

[1]: [https://github.com/bfontaine/clygments#clygments](https://github.com/bfontaine/clygments#clygments)

</comment><comment><USER6> Just the other day we added syntax hilighting to [http://doc.perl6.org/](http://doc.perl6.org/) backed by pygments. Yay!

</comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago i've converted some popular vim color schemes (Twilight, Wombat, Mustang,etc...) to pygments css styles: [https://github.com/uraimo/pygments- vimstyles](https://github.com/uraimo/pygments-vimstyles)

</comment><comment><USER8> Pygments for me has been easy to get working on my blog but extremely difficult and so far impossible for me to customize. My blog is Ruby based and so first of all I don't quite understand how a python program can be added as a ruby gem. Second, I really don't understand how to create my own lexer. Do I edit the Ruby gem? Do I need to create my own gem? If I edit the gem locally I may be able to do something but how do those edits get to Heroku? The task is much more complicated than I have the knowledge for.

</comment><comment><USER9> I used Pygments to power the syntax colouring of ulisse ([https://github.com/JulianBirch/ulisse](https://github.com/JulianBirch/ulisse)) a Clojure documentation generator (specifically, a codox writer).

Here's some example output: [http://julianbirch.github.io/arianna/arianna.html](http://julianbirch.github.io/arianna/arianna.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I switched to Pygments from a JS-based solution, and I highly recommend it. The parser is great and the resulting CSS and HTML are much cleaner.

<comment><USER11> What is the js based solution?

<comment><USER10> It was this: [http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/](http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Freenode #pocoo is also the channel were Flask users hang out.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use it as LESSPIPE and it's very nice. The only problem is it is slow, so you can't view longer files immediately as in regular less.

<comment><USER3> > The only problem is it is slow, so you can't view longer files immediately > as in regular less.

For most lexers this could be fixed to be iterative. The lexers can do iterative processing, it's just that the command line tool does a horrible job at supporting that.

<comment><USER13> I should check it out sometimes, then. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think that REST service for Pygments would be a nice thing for solutions that could not run python scripts directly.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly enough, there is one unofficial API [http://pygments.appspot.com/](http://pygments.appspot.com/), but supports an outdated version (1.5).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Agda highlighting is as uninteresting as it can be.

It should be on par of the real Agda highlighting but it is not.

<comment><USER17> How about you contribute this missing bit or improve it instead of whining on the internet? This is really a _minor_ feature for pyglets (most people would use it for more mainstream stuff than Agda), so how about you take it over?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love pygments, but I wish the C lexer were better and I wish it were written in C.</comment>


NASA Memo: Thoughts on the Space Alien Race Question (1963) - <AUTHOR> https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v25/d383 <comment><USER2> _There likely is nothing to be done at the moment to prepare for these possibilities (the only body of writing on the subject available in an emergency is science fiction), because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic._

An entertaining conclusion.

<comment><USER3> "because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic."

Pretty much sounds like every DR/BCP plan, long term scalability and performance architecture design recommendations, or anything that is more than 4-5 sprints away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Our biggest telescopes cannot resolve planets at the distances even of the nearest stars, so no direct confirmation is yet available._

This Slate article has some fantastic images of exoplanets, though it's from 2012: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astrono...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astronomy/2012/11/exoplanet_pictures_astronomers_have_photos_of_alien_planets.html)

A list of directly imaged exoplanets here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets)

50 years of progress.

<comment><USER3> If any one wonders what are the techniques and how the actual "imaging" looks like CNRC has an awesome presentation[0] on the subject (no actual scientific knowledge required, the pictures are pretty (amazing) on their own).

Whats even more amazing is that the images we can take of exoplanets now are not that far from the images we can take of Pluto and other post Neptunian object with terrestrial telescopes.

[0] [https://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/files/exep/marois- Tahoe-20120317.p...](https://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/files/exep/marois- Tahoe-20120317.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _"...I would expect the Martians to be scared to death of what they have seen recently on this planet, and would expect that the highest priority development program in the solar system is being conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission of Mars."_

Probably (one of) the best note(s) to take from this entire article.</comment>