Fire the "web designer" - <AUTHOR> http://briancray.com/2009/09/09/fire-the-web-designer/?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> _Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers._

What a load of crap. Graphic design is to print what web design is to the web. You cannot take a print designer and expect him to design websites. It is two _completely_ different fields.

Design has specialties, and it just so happens that the term graphic designer has evolved into describing designers that are good at working with the physical print medium. On the other hand the term web designer described people that are good at working with interactive display-based design.

Web designers, because they are working in an interactive medium, is expected to know UX design theory. It is part of the job. It is one of the many things that sets them apart from print designers. If they can't handle it perhaps they are just a crappy designer?

<comment><USER3> I hear what you're saying about the UX part... I think that this can be solved if the developer has knowledge in this area and can consult with the designer during the design process.

This is the process at the company I work for and it works quite well. For more complex projects that have a lot of interaction the designer comes up with a look and feel and a color palette and then the developer requests additional graphic elements as he feels they are necessary...

<comment><USER4> That of course requires that the developer have UX knowledge/experience which many developers don't. I think ideally all persons involved with the creation of a user interface would have both UX knowledge and interest in creating a usable interface.

The design process should be more fluid instead of just laying out a UI and then having the designer make it look pretty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternative title: "Change the title you your web designer's business card." This is all stuff that the web designer is supposed to do.

<comment><USER6> And don't give that card to someone who's just a graphics designer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many 'web designers' are actually print designers who have converted to web, and haven't grown with the web?

I think this should be a non-issue these days. If a designer has been working consistently for the past 15 years, I suspect they would have transitioned from print designer to a web designer. Either that, or if they are newer to the field, wouldn't they have learned web design.

UX is a completely different animal, though I see many designers who like to get involved and understand UX because it has a huge effect on what and how they design.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, I still see it happening. People whose experience in print vastly outweighs their web experience often tend to design for the web with only a superficial understanding of it. They don't understand the way browsers render things; they don't quite understand how people view things on a screen.

A good "web designer" has the same understanding of CSS and screen viewing as a good print designer understands paper weights and ink coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The term 'web designer' means different things to different people.

Expanding the term web to website - creates: 'website designer'. And it reads as someone that can design websites. It doesn't even imply that they can create or implement them!

I think of the expression in more holistic terms. But I don't know many individuals who are experts at all the parts. Finding a team of people with a blend of skills that complement each other, is the holy grail in my opinion.

Two print designers, come web designers I have worked with have both been excellent contributers to web projects. One heavily focuses on the look and feel, html and css. The other is gifted in the looks department and is a competent programmer. It took them both a while for them to get the hang of a new medium, but they love it. It does take a while for print designers to understand the elasticity of a web page, some find it hard to relinquish pixel perfection.

I can realise a site design from paper based mockups, bitmaps and vectors. I'd struggle to create a visual design myself but can work with an artist that understands 'web design' principles.

While it may be a nice idea to create 'out of the box' designs, you are still bound to your medium. Understanding that medium's strengths, weaknesses and conventions is very important.

So I'd like to emphasise the point again, that a mult-disiplined team can all contribute something good to a site. That's certainly my experience anyway. Someone without a clue about html or css, may still be the perfect person to organise and map content.

</comment><comment><USER10> "User Experience" is becoming such a buzzword.

I remember back when the "UX" guy was a freaking human-computer interaction psychologist who did lab testing...

<comment><USER11> You have to stay trendy, the new title is: User Interface Engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do agree that many times companies try to force their "print" designers into the role of web designers because it's usually cheaper than hiring another designer for the web. Most of the time this causes the project to fail. Either because the designer's work isn't usable online or they don't understand HTML and CSS so they can't implement it themselves and will then hand their work off to a programmer who doesn't know Photoshop.

It all depends on how motivated the "print" designer is in becoming a "web" designer. If it's their choice, they can be successful. "Usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design" can be learned as long as the web designer knows that this is a whole different ballgame than the print world.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think for small teams especially - if you've got a guy/girl who can't code CSS, HTML and some light JS - you hired the wrong person.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't agree more. If you application is heavily dependent on UI (like most any webapp), then you massively benefit from having one person that's able to do it all. It's a competitive advantage you can't live without.

There is just too much overhead, otherwise, in splitting and managing duties among 2 or 3 people. When I hire developers for my webapp consulting firm, they need to be badass programmers that can own every layer of the stack AND they need to be comfortable slicing PSDs themselves.

IMO, this should apply to Marketing and Biz Dev as well. It's super annoying when the "marketing guy/girl" can't render their own message on the corporate website and has to pass that task on to a developer. Marketing people need to know HTML/CSS at minimum. Otherwise, you just have an "idea guy" with a major handicap in executing on the web.

(btw, this being written by someone who's worked in both a marketing and a tech role)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure the idea of a "User Interface Designer" instead of a web designer will not fix a startup. Folks like Steve Blank and Eric Reis have been saying for a while that (for a web app) user experience is where a lot of startups fail. Eric Reis talked about having customers come in to their office and sit next to their engineers and talk through user experience. Steve Blank talks about "getting out of the office" and talking to your customers.

The answer to better user interfaces isn't having another "expert" in the office with a fancy title. It is making everyone in your company into a "user interface expert" by bringing in the real expert, the user.

</comment><comment><USER16> Good luck telling (and selling) your average small business owner they need to hire (or consider a firm that has) a graphic designer AND a user experience designer when building a new website.

Maybe on the corporate level where money is wasted and meetings are plentiful. But down here in the real world (trenches) it's unnessary if the "web designer" in question knows his/her shit.

All this guy is doing is splitting an existing profession into two sub- professions. You can do that with almost any job.

Example: Fire the painter! What you really need is a guy who paints and another guy who tells him where and what to paint (a paint experience designer?)

<comment><USER17> I don't think a lot of people have experience with graphic design, user experience design, and html/css skills.

I know a lot of tech and design people, and I know exactly one person who is good at all three things.

And yes, as mentioned above, how many people have their house built by their interior decorator?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The term "Product Designer" is one that suits the web well.

In my opinion a product designer should be able to create visually appealing designs that are usable. They should have an understanding of user experience and HCI issues - but not necessarily be an expert or have a PhD in the fields. They should be able to prototype their designs in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and do some minor back end coding to get things working (they don't necessarily have to do this all the time, but they should have the ability to do so).

FWIW, this is what Facebook's product design team does (from my understanding of it, anyway)

</comment><comment><USER19> The reality is that most people don't even know what a UX designer is-- so they get the designer, programmer, and biz guy in a room and mangle their way through it. The real problem is that there are not enough UX designers out there. UX is inherently multi-disciplinary. You have to have understand how business objectives interact with design interact with code. Our education system doesn't teach people to think holistically so most UX designers just stumbled into it on their own. Some come from the design side, others come from web-dev, but you can't fault them for trying.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I think this is correct, I'm not sure how practical it is.

For example, with my startup I'm trying to be as cost conscious as possible. Sure it would be nice to have one person in charge of UX and one person doing the graphics (people who are great at graphic design aren't _always_ great with usability).

The problem is that adds money and time. Instead I hired someone who is good at UX, graphic design, AND can implement their design with CSS etc..

</comment><comment><USER21> "Neither should do the others' job."

Why not, maybe some people are good at both things? Also I would have expected good graphics design to also be about good user experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is nonsense. Everyone building product should have some degree of understanding of UX. And its absolutely crucial that the designer understands all the complexities of UX. Great design is required to take this into account, as a designer there is no way you can ever separate the two.

There are many average designers who do not understand interaction design, but there are zero amazing web designers who dont care about UX.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's notable that every degreed UX person I've worked with has been incredibly good. By degreed, I mean a MS in HCI or similar, not "I got a MIS degree and couldn't write code." The percentage of people with respectable CS degrees who are good coders is much lower in comparison. I guess HCI isn't an obvious life choice, so those willing to invest in graduate school programs are pretty passionate about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I absolutely agree with this. The company I work for was forced to take this approach as our designers were unable to come to grips with coding, in the end it worked out to be a great thing!

One additional benefit is that if the graphic designer has less of an idea of the restrictions on design that web-design impose then they are more likely to think outside the box and come up with creative designs...

</comment><comment><USER24> This is nonsense, what people choose to call themselves changes all the time. When hiring you ought to look at people's qualifications and experience, not what they choose to call the job they do. This is trying to put labels onto the complex job of finding the right people.

</comment><comment><USER25> The author might be a specialist type, which is cool. But who's to say that the 2 jobs cannot be done by 1 person?

This blog post sounds like: "Hire a software architect that can build Interfaces for programmers to implement."

</comment><comment><USER26> Someone who is a "User experience designer" is simply someone who can't code or draw. That's the person you should be firing. Everyone on your team should understand "user experience".

<comment><USER27> UX is complex enough, and important enough, to be its own discipline. I've been a developer for eight years, and guys doing UX/IA have improved the quality of the sites I've worked on tremendously.

<comment><USER28> It's its own discipline, but it has to be melded with the job of graphic designer and browser coder to be effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How do they do that 'progress bar' on the links I open in new tabs? That effect really impressed me.

<comment><USER30> Just a guess but it is probably just eye candy that starts on click and ends on blur.</comment></comment>


Pandemics, Power, and Freedom - <AUTHOR> https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/pandemics-power-and-freedom <comment><USER2> Interesting set of writings on that site. I tend to agree with his conclusion:

"In the end, the lesson that I am taking is an old one: societies, however rich or technically sophisticated, cannot be counted healthy and resilient without adequate reserves of intangible human resources, such as trust, solidarity, and virtue, and the institutions and communities that sustain them."</comment>


Speech Recognition Leaps Forward - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/speechrecognition-082911.aspx

<comment><USER2> The really great thing about deep networks isn't that they're more accurate. It's that they're radically simpler.

Current speech recognizers are basically layer upon layer of tricks discovered by researchers over the course of decades. Chop up the input signal. Then take a Fourier transform. Take the log to even the signal out. Do another transform to de-correlate different components of the audio. Add noise to the input. Project down to a subspace. Switch objective functions halfway through training to trade off different kinds of errors. Use more Guassians here. Use fewer there. Pump it into a language model.

It works, and it's a marvel of engineering, but it's not "artificial intelligence." It's pretty much a big stack of statistical hacks piled up over the years.

The nice thing is that a deep belief network can figure out a lot of this structure automatically, much closer to how the brain works.

This paper is actually incremental, not a "leap forward." They've basically replaced two of the middle layers of a speech recognizer (the Gaussian mixture model and hidden Markov model) with a modified neural network. But the exciting thing is that the neural network can start there, and slowly eat its way toward the outer layers, replacing a big stack of hacks with one simple algorithm.

<comment><USER3> > _It works, and it's a marvel of engineering, but it's not "artificial > intelligence." It's pretty much a big stack of statistical hacks piled up > over the years._

i'm not sure about this attitude. it reminds me of a quote by dijkstra:

"The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."

why demand that intelligence proceed from a single parsimonious gesture?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree with that quote.

We can agree that what computers can do these days is quite different to human-style thinking.

But to imply what machines can do is somehow different from thinking, just as submarine propulsion is different from swimming, implies that thinking is different from computation.

Whether computation, a mechanical process, encompasses what we consider thinking is not a settled question, but I think there's a pretty good case for believing that computation does encompass thinking.

[EDIT: wording]

<comment><USER3> ? you aren't disagreeing with the quote.

just as our sense of what swimming entails is wrongly constrained by our familiarity with specific implementations, beyond "moving about under water", we shouldn't limit "thinking" to mean "activity in a neural network", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or does 18% seem like a high error rate - and this is after improvement?

I've used technologies (Nuance??) that have significantly lower errors rates than this, even for systems I have not trained personally. Is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER6> The difference in error rates is in large part due to the to the difference between dictated speech and spontaneous, informal conversational speech.

Switchboard ([http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=...](http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC97S62)) is a set of telephone conversations between two people. Speakers tend to say a lot of "ums", abruptly restart an utterance in progress, talk past the telephone handset, etc. Dictated speech, especially when speakers know they're talking to a computer, has less acoustic and linguistic noise.

<comment><USER7> It will be very interesting to see how this approach will work with dictated speech.

Also let's not forget that the word-level error rate can be reduced by using statistical data about words sequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The speech recognition on Windows Phone 7 is really, really, really good.

I suspect Bill Gates went on a chair-throwing rampage after that infamous speech recognition demo flop for Vista [1].

[1] <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472>

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if this will impact applications soon enough to matter to the typical startup that could benefit from better speech recognition?

<comment><USER10> Probably not. This web page is from the PR department of Microsoft Research. The probability is low enough even if it had come from researchers, not PR types.

<comment><USER11> Hmm, what's stopping anyone from just implementing these solutions?

<comment><USER12> 1\. Nothing. People ARE implementing similar things. It takes time, effort, and lots of computation. 2\. People often prefer to implement their own ideas and compete (especially researchers). 3\. Potentially lack of patents might discourage other firms from doing it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Battlefoam Learns Why Legal Threats Can Be Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.popehat.com/2013/05/02/battlefoam-learns-why-legal-threats-can-be-dangerous/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Popehat+%28Popehat%29

<comment><USER2> If you're bored, the legal filings are awesome.

One of the masterstrokes....

 _Therefore, Defendants are public figures who must prove, by clear and convincing evidence that Plaintiff acted with actual malice in publishing his article to Blood of Kittens._

Podcast is impressive too.</comment>


Cloudflare Attack Post Mortem; Apparent Google Apps/Gmail Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-todays-attack-apparent-google-app

<comment><USER2> The headline of this submission is misleading.

tl;dr; Hacker used social engineering to add a secondary recovery email address to the victims Google account.

2-factor wasn't even enabled on the victims personal account but the hacker didn't need a 2-factor code to reset the password on the victims company account.

From the article:

Google reports that they discovered a "subtle flaw affecting not 2-step verification itself, but the account recovery flow for some accounts. We've now blocked that attack vector to prevent further abuse."

<comment><USER3> How is that social engineering? It doesn't seem like human behavior played any role in this at all. The hacker interacted only with automated systems.

This is a security bug that was exploited. It should not be possible to reset a password without the 2-factor auth code, period. If that is possible, then that the 2 factor auth is broken.

<comment><USER4> When people say 2-factor auth code is broken, it implies there was an issue with the 2-factor authentication code itself. That would mean things like RSA and other Token based authentication might be at risk. So no 2-factor auth is not broken. Authentication in Google is broken.

-disclaimer: I am the founder of Authy.com.

<comment><USER3> Well of course the _concept_ of 2-factor auth is still sound. No inherent flaws in the math or the theory. But this particular implementation is quite broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We have senior contacts at Google who we worked with in order to regain control of the Google Apps accounts"

Boy, its nice they get that privilege. I love gmail, but god help me the day I lose access to my account- I can only imagine the support whack-a-mole us mortals would have to go through to get any resolution.

Anyone remember the "thomas monopoly" story from a while back where gmail disabled the guy for weeks with no comment and the dude had to contact every person in the world to get someone to look at it? (And then they reinstated his account)

<comment><USER6> Cloudflare isn't special. Any business (or individual) who pays for google apps gets 24/7 email and phone support. I hate this perception that google has terrible customer support. If you want support, stop being a free user.

<comment><USER7> I friend of mine got his Gmail deactivated (as you know, without any explanation or means to dispute it). With it, hundreds of purchased Android apps got lost as well. As there isn't much you can do, after a week, he created a new account and had to repurchase most of the Android apps and switch all his accounts to it. Some services require access to your old email, so, he had to recreate some of those as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are a lot of good reasons not to use gmail or google hosted apps (performance, especially, but apparently also security). Two factor auth as google implements it goes partway, but email really is the skeleton key to all accounts. I'm not sure how meaningful Google Authenticator is as two factor auth when you're actually using the iPhone or iPad to access mail much of the time. Google Authenticator protects against untargeted mass attacks, but if you are specifically a target, it's a pretty mediocre two factor solution. I think it's fair to consider administrators of any major SaaS app to be specific targets.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a great alternative. The next best thing I've found is to just run your own mail server, which is pretty obnoxious if you have any non-technical users to support. Kerio is the thing which most Mac shops I know use (since people want directory services and the other stuff you can't easily implement just from open source). Yet, there's better search on server on gmail than from iOS to IMAP (i.e. Kerio), so that's a sacrifice.

I kind of hate Google for being the Craigslist of email -- a crappy product at $50/yr which sets the maximum price people are willing to pay below the point where anyone can offer a less crappy product. More like $250-$500/yr/mailbox would be a supportable price for real email.

<comment><USER9> Please define "real email" and what justifies it to cost $250-$500/yr/mailbox in your opinion.

<comment><USER10> If you're questioning the grandparent's notion that Gmail is "crappy" compared to expensive email products, I'd agree with you.

For me, the answer to what justifies a cost for email is deliverability. Of course, having recipients receive your email promptly, and receiving theirs promptly. But more importantly, receiving next to zero spam in my actual inbox, and misclassifying absolutely zero ham in my spam folder.

The only solution I've found that accomplishes this at any price is GMail / Google Apps.

Not only does it easily keep 12 - 18 year old email addresses that have been on usenet spam free, it happily handled over 3000 spam per second per box while letting through valid emails for sex.com. The owners could actually use their addresses on Google Apps. They hadn't been able to on email systems costing 4 and even 5 figures. Refreshing the spam label while seeing the inbox stay empty, day after day and month after month, was astonishing.

<comment><USER8> Gmail does better than most alternatives for antispam. It's pretty good for deliverability (although it's actually kind of bad for receiving mail from semi-sketchy places; it doesn't even go into my spam box).

It's a slow UI (I often see 20-30 second page loading times on a fast network, over SSL), the support on the free tier is horrible (i.e. non-existent), the $50/user/yr support is below what I'd want for a company to rely on it (it's ok as second or third tier support for your in-house people, I guess, but not great frontline support for non-technical users when traveling).

The real killer, though, is lack of the enhanced features Exchange offers for directory, scheduling, etc. I always hated people who depended on those kind of things, but once I started using them, it made life annoying to not have them. Google Calendar and Google Contacts are feature-incomplete and often buggy (syncing to devices, other than maybe Android phones), especially when you have multiple calendars, sharing, etc.

It's all fine for individual users, but for a group of 5-25+ people (startup, pe fund, etc.), using google apps often sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I understand it correctly, the attacker managed to reset the password by adding a secondary, fraudulent email account as a recovery option, and Google just logged them in after the password was reset, not requiring a token from the 2-factor system.

That's quite the attack.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just an information - the unnamed customer was 4chan.org, and, according to the group ... I think twitter, it was because they don't like My Little Pony fans, that have a board over there.

Stupid internet drama indeed.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really important news. It was mostly social engineering hacking, but it seems to have been very clever. It's important to notice that it wasn't a flaw in two factor authentication itself, but on the recovery options.

I really hate the recovery options. I don't know what they are there. If I forgot my password, my recovery e-mail, I don't want to answer questions to be sure it was me. Who knows how this exactly worked, but it sure seems to be a problem with that logic.

<comment><USER14> So it seems that there was a bug in the two factor authentication affecting "some accounts" during the recovery procedure (see the update to the article). Slightly worrying that the two factor authentication can be bypassed when resetting a password.

<comment><USER15> But even after resetting the password, two factor authentication is needed to log in right? How was that bypassed?

<comment><USER16> The blog author didn't actually have two factor authentication enabled. The headline is wrong.

<comment><USER17> You are incorrect, quote from the article:

 _all CloudFlare.com accounts use two-factor authentication. We are still working with Google to understand how the hacker was able to reset the password without providing a valid two-factor authentication token._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems to me that there were two flaws evident here. One was Google's reset flow, which they have since (hopefully) corrected.

The other issue, that seemed to be glossed over, was that they were BCCing password reset emails to a compromisable account for support/debugging purposes. I understand the desire to be aware of fradulent submissions early, but we, as an industry, should be treating password reset emails (and tokens) like passwords. Do not store them in plain text.

I appreciate CloudFlare's transparency on this, but feel they missed an opportunity to address a flaw that probably exists in a large number of other apps.

<comment><USER19> Copying the emails stood out to me as a ridiculously stupid thing to do. It was probably a quick and dirty solution to save coding up a way to monitor resets on the backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The most interesting part to me is that somebody managed to get phone support for GMail.

<comment><USER21> Google Apps for Business (a paid solution) offers phone support: [http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/upgrade.html#utm...](http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/upgrade.html#utm_campaign=upgrade&utm_source=hc- global-upgrade&utm_medium=et)

Since they were using their own domain name, that's likely what they were on.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> as stated on Softpedia, UGNazi got access to all Cloudflare customers' IPs and IDs, and they will sell these informations [http://news.softpedia.com/news/CloudFlare-Reports-Breach- UGN...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/CloudFlare-Reports-Breach-UGNazi-Takes- Credit-273334.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER22> So on one side Cloudflare is saying that they just compromised a single account and on the other we have the hacker claiming that all data was compromised... I guess at that point the question becomes not whom is telling the truth, but what any Cloudflare users (myself included) should be doing right about now?

<comment><USER6> Presumably after the hacker compromised the CEOs email account he had access to any account he wanted, as I interpret the blog post he was only able to use that access to compromise a single account before being locked out.

Nobody is necessarily lying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The funny part - cloudflare still hosts DNS for UGNazi

       Domain Name: UGNAZI.COM
       Registrar: ENOM, INC.
       Whois Server: whois.enom.com
       Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
       Name Server: LEE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
       Name Server: RUTH.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
       Status: clientTransferProhibited
       Updated Date: 29-may-2012
       Creation Date: 22-jan-2012
       Expiration Date: 22-jan-2013

</comment><comment><USER24> Cloudflare supports hacking group by providing them services -> gets hacked by them. Reminds me very much of what happens in every episode of 24, the terrorists kill their accomplices after they're finished with them, it never works out for anyone involved.

<comment><USER25> Which "hacking group" was supported by Cloudflare?

<comment><USER26> Cloudflare doesn't necessarily "support" hacker groups- although their CEO did a great talk at Defcon last year about keeping Lulsec up (which I consider more of an activist group than a hacker group, personally). However, they do very little to keep their network safe- they have no dedicated abuse team (or, if they do, they're impossible to contact directly), are slow to response to abuse requests (if they respond at all), and even when they do respond take only the most basic steps to filter the issues (which takes literally minutes for their account holders to work around, and they don't actually disable the accounts).

Dozens, if not hundreds, of hacker and malware related sites use Cloudflare to mask their origin and essentially use the other shared sites as hostages. If you block one of the malicious sites then you also end up blocking legitimate sites, and since Cloudflare goes out of their way to not take down sites (even those hosting malicious programs- including the drive by exploits that install them) it makes it very difficult to trace the malware back to it's source or actually take it down and stop people from getting infected.

<comment> X-Istence I'm hoping that with the coming of IPv6 many of these issues are going to go away. At that point Cloudflare could give every customer their own /128 that is static across the world (they route their /64 or /48 however they please using anycast) and forward traffic as they have always done with caching.

Then it becomes trivial to block a single IP, since it is assigned to a single customer you won't have any collateral damage!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is the tweet where CosmoTheGod states that UGNazi hacked Cloudflare and 4chan <https://twitter.com/CosmoTheGod/status/208656791708508160>

</comment><comment><USER27> WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, JEFF? [1]

[1]: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email- hac...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-hacker- proof.html)

<comment><USER28> Have you read the article ? the 2 factor authentication wasn't compromised, it was mostly a social engineering attack. Even if it was the 2 factor authentication that was compromised, how would this be Jeff's fault ?

<comment><USER29> There was a flaw in the system that Google uses to allow the transfer of control from an account. Two-factor authentication wasn't compromised itself, but the attacker was able to bypass it to access it. That flaw, they tell us, has since been patched on their end.

<comment><USER15> Can you explain this? After the attacker reset the password of cloudfare.com email address what exactly did they do? How exactly did they login?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and I'd appreciate some advice. (Long Post) - <AUTHOR> Even though I'm looking for general advice, I'd like to go over my situation in detail to minimize the chances of being offered advice that could further injure me. I therefore apologize for the length of this post. I understand that you folks aren't doctors, and nothing you say is medical advice. I'm here because this community is probably at a higher risk than average for this sort of injury, and so there's a better chance of hearing from people who have lived through this here than elsewhere.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago I started getting pain in my wrist while I was typing. I managed to get an appointment with my family doctor for a week later, but because of the pain and my fear of doing more damage, I opted to go to a walk-in clinic I've been to a number of times previously.
The doctor at the clinic seemed to assume it was most likely Carpal Tunnel Syndrome just based on the fact that the pain was in my wrist. He had me flex my wrists (Phalen's Maneuver) and tapped on the underside of my wrist (Tinel's Sign) but neither of these tests really did anything to me - there was no pain or tingling present in either case (NB: When I try Phalen's now, I feel a bit of pressure in the underside of my wrist, but that's it).
The doctor told me to get a wrist brace, and specifically told me to get one made for CTS. He told me that a lot of people flex their wrists into odd positions in the middle of the night, so I should wear the brace when sleeping and when typing. I looked this up later, and there are mentions online about CTS sufferers mangling their wrists like the doctor said, and that this can present as waking up with your hands numb/asleep. I had noticed this a few times recently, so things seem to line up there.
After looking at various models in the drug store and discussing the situation with a girl who worked there, I eventually purchased a relatively expensive model (http://www.amazon.com/M-Brace-Wrist-Splint-Size-Regular/dp/B000X9SUKA). I wore this brace home that day, and have generally worn it when typing since then and always while sleeping.
Things seemed to be improving until I went to my doctor the following week. At my appointment, my doctor did hardly anything to check on my condition, except trying Tinel's again (no symptoms presented during this test this time either). He examined the brace and had me put it on, and he said it was good. The point, he said, was just to limit the range of movement for my wrist, and that the brace did its job just fine. He asked me why I wasn't wearing it when I came in, and I told him that I only really wore it to bed and while on the computer. He told me I should be wearing it all the time, but that I could take it off to sleep (which struck me as horrible advice, given what I had researched). He told me I should wear it all day, and through the night if I wanted, for maybe the next week or 10 days, which I've mostly done. I asked him if that was a bad idea since I had read that leaving the brace on all the time could weaken the muscles, but he said that that only occurred over the long term, and a week wouldn't do any damage.
After wearing the brace all day for several days, I started noticing that the base of my thumb was stiff/sore and the area around my pinky was sort of the same. Everything else felt more or less ok, so I started not wearing the brace through the day, thinking that maybe the brace was constricting my thumb too much. Things have been pretty good for the last couple of days, but there's still lingering... awareness, I guess. I'm aware of a bit of a strain in my wrist/forearm (and there's a tingle in my elbow sometimes) from time to time, but it's mostly alright. In fact, I've typed this entire post without the brace mostly without pain. There is some noticeable strain, but by taking a lot of mini-breaks it's very manageable. I'm also aware that I shouldn't be pushing this hard, but I wasn't really expecting to write quite this much.
Another factor seems to be that I'm typing sitting upright on my smaller couch, with ample room for my right arm (the pained one). Normally, I type lying down on my other couch while watching TV or just relaxing, and my right arm can sometimes get pinned a bit. Another factor I think is probably relevant is that not terribly long before I started getting the wrist pain, my elbow/shoulder would feel a bit cramped while lying down and typing. I moved the pillow beside me out of the way and that seemed to help the issue. For this reason I'm wondering if I might have pinched a nerve or something which is helping cause these issues.
Before it's mentioned, I know that my "laying on the couch" arrangement isn't good for me, but it's a habit that formed out of convenience. I don't have a good desk chair (and even my cheap piece of crap chair is broken to the point that my posture would suffer), so I don't really use my desk anymore (I really never have since I got this laptop three years ago).
I'm currently unemployed (one year today!), so money is extremely tight right now. This means that I consider a lot of typical fixes (better desk, better chair, laptop dock with ergo-keyboard and trackball mouse) are hard for me to considr out of financial concerns.
The one expenditure I am considering is massage therapy. There is a school across the road from my apartment that only charges $27 per session, so I think I could talk myself into paying for a single session to see if it'll work out any pinched nerves I might have.
I have a few questions regarding the "free" fixes I can try:
* I've been taking a lot of Ibuprofin as an anti-inflammatory on the advice of my doctor. For the last couple of days, I've been taking two pills right before bed on the assumption that if my body does most of its healing while asleep, then the anti-inflammatories would do the most good if they reduced inflammation during periods of increased healing. Is this an accurate assessment, or is this more likely to be a placebo?
* Regarding icing, I've read a number of different options for this (rubbing ice directly on the wrist until the skin is pink to promote bloodflow, icy dips followed immediately by hot dips and repeated several times, gel packs, etc.). Is there a "best way" to go about icing? How often should I be icing the arm?
* Regarding stretching, am I risking damage by stretching (see http://lifehacker.com/5195481/exercises-that-protect-against-carpal-tunnel-syndrome) while the condition persists, or should I wait until the pain has dissipated via rest before beginning a stretching regimen?
* I lead a pretty sedentary lifestyle at the moment, but I've been thinking that cardio is likely a great idea since increased bloodflow would likely promote healing in the wrist. I'm told that the wrist, being a smaller tunnel, doesn't always have the best bloodflow, which is partly why wrist injuries like this can take so long to heal. Does this seem like a good idea? I'm thinking of walking all the way up the stairwell in my building (it's 9 stories to the top from my apartment) and back down.
* I've heard that the electrical nerve tests (or whatever they're called) are extremely painful, but would they be worth it to determine if this really is carpal tunnel? If the problem is carpal tunnel, I've heard that the surgery is pretty much batting 1000 in terms of permanently ending the pain. If the nerve conduction tests show carpal tunnel, should I get the surgery as a preventative measure? What's recovery like?
Sorry for the extremely long post, but I'm extremely worried about my present condition. I'm only 25 years old and I'm terrified that I'm going to end up unable to work or go back to school because of this issue. Just writing this post has been incredibly theraputic to me, especially since it hasn't been particularly painful to write (though there are pre-cursor signs in my wrist, so I should really rest a bit after this).
Thank you so very much for any advice or anecdotes or support you can provide! <comment><USER2> _I may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and I'd appreciate some advice. (Long Post)_

That is your major problem, right there - you are still typing a lot! When you're in a hole, _stop digging_. I had similar problems about your age, made some splints at home to correct some weird posture habits I had developed (eg crooking my pinkie fingers), and I took a break from typing for most of a month. Amazingly, the world continued to revolve without my help :-)

So here's what you do. First, set up an auto-responder on your email: 'Hi, this is me, but I've hurt my wrist and can't type for a few weeks. You can call me on 555-1212 if it's really important, but otherwise I may only be able to send you a one-line reply, if at all. Sorry!'

Next, like Zed says, stop lying on the sofa. this is bad for you in a bunch of ways. Sit up straight - it's uncomfortable at first but once you get used to it it's actually much more sustainable for hours at a time. You can't type, so don't torture yourself by surfing. As you're unemployed but still consider going back to school, how about a few textbooks (cheapie used on amazon, or from the library) to pass the time in a useful manner? You can make notes with a pencil and notebook - not much strain on your wrist when you're doing it at a leisurely pace, and writing is slow enough compared to typing that you'll be a bit more selective about what _needs_ to be noted.

Of course, I am no doctor, and certainly not your doctor. But based on my own experience and that of many others I've spoken to, simple rest is one of the best therapies. You can still perform other tasks, the nature of carpal tunnel and the like stems from spending too long performing a limited set of movements with poor posture. Take it easy, chill out, and you'll find your brain still functions perfectly well without a keyboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm considering going back to school at some point in the distant future, assuming I can save enough cash that it becomes feasible.

I know how this sounds since I'm _typing_ this comment, but I've been really afraid to write lately. The problem first presented right as I began taking notes on an Australian CS course available on YouTube/iTunes. I had only been watching and noting for a few days when this hit. At first I thought it was just unused muscles complaining about the sudden workload, but as it persisted I started to realize I was wrong.

Perhaps I'll start up again today, now that my wrist feels a lot better.

As for taking a break, I've been trying, but it's not easy for me. In addition to my usual laziness of browsing reddit all day, my unemployment and severely depleted funds mean cover letters need writing and resumes need tweaking. I think the break is finally doing good though, so a little while longer can't hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It could be another form of RSI (Repeditive Strain Injury). Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is one particular form of RSI affecting your wrists, but it's also possible to get RSI and pain in other muscles. Just because the Carpal Tunnel tests are negative doesn't mean you don't have some other illness. You shouldn't be in pain. If you're in pain, and all the Carpal Tunnel tests are negative, then it's something else.

I've frequently had RSI pains for about a year now. One solution is to change (somehow) your typing set up. e.g. if you use your right hand to use the mouse, and have pains in your right hand, then change to your left hand. This will give the (damaged and strained) muscles in your right hand a break and they will start to heal. Likewise, change your keyboard. I got a €25 Microsoft Natural Keyboard. When typing on a laptop it's common to rest your wrists on your laptop (before the keyboard). This means you have to bend your wrists upwards. If you do that a lot (like I used to), then you'll get pains along the top of your lower arms. The solution is to not do that as much. I got a new keyboard which means I don't bend my wrists up like that. This means these muscles are not doing as much, and hence aren't being strained, and hence are given a chance to recover.

Install a typing break programme. This is something that will lock your screen every X mins for Y mins, forcing you to take regular breaks from typing. If you're using Linux & Gnome, this is built in as part of the keyboard preferences.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cmx8r/has_anyon...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cmx8r/has_anyone_suffered_from_carpal_tunnel_syndrome/)

I have 3 exercises here, which involve the Dyna-flex spinning ball thing and a wrist curl bar. You also need to pay attention to not cock your wrist at funny angles when you're driving, riding your bike, using power tools, etc and don't sleep on your arms.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269951>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

[http://lifehacker.com/5195481/exercises-that-protect- against...](http://lifehacker.com/5195481/exercises-that-protect-against- carpal-tunnel-syndrome)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104977>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199493>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224604>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427743>

(lots of reddit threads too, google those)

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't be too quick to conclude that its a physical condition. It could be emotional or psychosomatic. That would be consistent with being financially strapped, unemployed, not in school, no clear life direction, etc. Not judging, just pointing out that such a state is emotionally stressful and could manifest in phantom physical symptoms.

For more, start here but the net is full of success stories using Sarno's approach, so do a search... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno>

<comment><AUTHOR> I read an article (found via SearchYC actually) earlier today about this. While I definitely understand how that emotional turmoil can lead to psychosomatic symptoms, I don't think that is what is happening here.

My last job, by pretty much any measure other than income, was worse for me than being unemployed. Near the end I had been out on multiple stress leaves (I think the total was 5 weeks out, beginning about 9 months prior to my dismissal) and was generally in bad shape. My stress level was so high, in fact, that my boss (the good boss I had for about six months, but before the stress leaves) took me on a detour during our morning coffee run and bought be a bottle of Valerian pills to try to calm me down.

During all of that, I never developed these sorts of symptoms. The only physical effects I can really think of were the insomnia and a case of strep throat during one of the leaves which that same boss said was likely caused by my stress decompression.

Having said that, however, after reading that article this morning, my wrists have felt better than they have in months. I've been attributing that to a) the stretches I found on YouTube this morning, and b) the right-before-bed ibuprofen regimen I described above.

I'll definitely give Sarno's work a second look, but I'm so worried about ruining my life by permanently damaging my wrists that I doubt I can really commit to any approach which requires me to actively ignore signs of potential damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You want to get what's called a Nerve Conduction/EMG Test to determine whether it's actually Carpal Tunnel or not.

There are other neuropathies that can look like Carpal Tunnel like onset peripheral neuropathy, an entirely different condition.

If it is indeed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and it's moderate to advanced you might want to consider surgery. They're standard and minimally invasive these days.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey, so, I've been coding and playing guitar for ages, two things that _definitely_ give you carpal tunnel. But I also studied Aikido and Judo, two things that give you strong flexible wrists. This means that I generally rarely get pain in my wrists, and when I do I can fix it with some exercises and stretches.

So, I'll try to give you some advice, and hopefully this helps without hurting you.

The very first thing you need to quit doing is:

"I'm typing sitting upright on my smaller couch, with ample room for my right arm (the pained one). Normally, I type lying down on my other couch while watching TV or just relaxing, and my right arm can sometimes get pinned a bit."

What the hell is wrong with you? I'm saying this to kick you in the ass, but in no way is this comfortable or good for your body. You are probably contorting your whole body into all sorts of weird problems, and I'm betting you don't exercise, stretch, take breaks, or do anything physical to maintain your health.

First clue, get a damn desk and a good chair, or invent one. Then, don't sit at it for too long at a time. Take breaks. Setup a rule where you don't code while watching TV. It's just a bad habit and it's actually hurting you.

Next up, your whole body is probably screwed. You need to start doing some stretching at a minimum. Stretching your whole body. You can easily go get a book on how to do it, and you should do it every day, twice a day: when you wake up, and before you go to sleep. If you can take a yoga class then that'd be even better.

You should next make sure you're eating right. Stop eating crap, and in fact, eat out if you can if for no other reason then it gets you away from the computer and walking around. Eat vegetables. Lots of them, and not too much meat. Quit eating junk food, meaning fake food that's crapped out of a machine into a plastic bag. Eat real food.

Finally, for your wrists. As you start fixing up the rest of your body and learning to relax through stretching, you'll probably find a lot of tension in your neck, upper shoulders, and back. It's important to stretch your whole body, but focus on these areas specifically. As you sit and code, keep track of tension in your body and give it a number. Then try to change the number up and then down. You want to start analyzing where you hold tension, and using a number system helps you visualize it.

Once you've got some control over tension, and you've got yourself getting more relaxed, you now need to start working on getting your wrists mobile. Now, your doctor sounds like a retard, but he's a doctor and I'm not, so he wins. However, keeping your wrist in a sling is not going to make it improve, so unless he's giving you exercises that improve it, then you need to find a new doctor.

There's no way in hell I'm going to give you wrist stretches online, even though you need some. You could sue my ass. I will say you should talk to your doctor about getting exercises to work with, and potentially that you should find a free Aikido class and see if they will teach you their wrist exercises. They probably won't let you do them since they also don't want to be sued, but they can teach them to you and then you can ask your doctor.

But, the most importan thing is quit living so unhealthy. I'm not saying become a granola eating hippie, but hell man I work at home and I've got a decent setup and don't kill myself coding for hours without breaks infront of the TV.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've lurked HN for a long time, barely even commenting, so of course I realized the sort of people who frequent this site. Despite this, I did a double take when I read your username. I just got told off by _the_ Zed Shaw! Sorry, I digress...

I'm using this situation with my wrist as a wake up call. I suppose I never really realized the damage I was doing to myself laying on the couch with my laptop. It started as a necessity when I lived with an asshole and confined myself to my closet of a bedroom where there wasn't room for really anything other than the bed. Slacking off, lying down watching a vid feels pretty comfortable (for the record, are you against lying on a couch in general, or only when that _in_ activity is coupled with a laptop? I've always thought of lying on the couch as being a good way to decompress, but I can change my ways if it's an overall bad thing) but I definitely see how I let things get out of hand.

I _may_ have a job lined up to start in a couple months (I'm not a rockstar like most people on this site, so this is the best I've been able to do), and I'm bookmarking a few articles and HN comments to setup a proper office when cash allows. For the time being, money is quite the issue. I do have a desk, but as I said my chair is absolute shit. How important are laptop docks? Just sitting up at the desk will, I'm sure, be at least a step in the right direction. Can I get away with a shitty $20 Staples chair for now (as a first step) or is it essential that I dip deep into my reserves and get a $200+ proper office chair?

I'll Google for some introductory stretches for my whole body. I had real stress issues due to being a workaholic and having an asshole boss, so I need to learn stretching/relaxation tecniques as a matter of survival, since at least one of those two problems will persist throughout my career. From the tone of your post, I'm definitely leaning toward trying the massage thing at least once, if for no other reason than to get an initial boost on releasing any pent up tension.

As for the wrist stretches, I've been doing some I found just before I wrote my initial post tonight. I haven't felt any pain so far as I write this post. I guess they help.

These wrist problems seem to be a good kick in the ass to correct a systemic problem. I guess I came to HN looking for what amounts to band-aids for a bullet wound, and your additional ass kick was a good reminder that that's not what I need to be doing. I'll go price some new chairs tomorrow, and I'll take some initial steps towards better overall fitness.

Financially, some bigger measures have to be post-poned, but I can at least start with the things that are in my reach now.

Thanks for the kick in the ass. Seriously.

Edit: Oh, and you're right about the doctor. This isn't even close to the first time I've questioned his treatment (For instance, his office completely failed to fax in an ultrasound request for me last year, though when I called to check up on it they said they'd sent it and were just waiting on the hospital. At my appointment last week, he noticed there was no fax date on the form, so he had to admit it was likely never sent). There's a reason I tend to go to the walk-in clinic before I bother making an appointment with him.

<comment><USER7> Oh, laying around, relaxing, getting good sleep, are all healthy things to do. What will mess you up is contorting your body while you type, which includes laying down, propping your feet up on the desk, or just generally not sitting comfortably.

Typing is already pretty weird and unnatural for the body, so you just want to reduce the stress on it as much as possible while you work. Same goes for playing guitar, sewing, drawing, writing, anything that involves lots of tiny motions and focus. It's these activities that tend to turn off your awareness of your body and make it so you don't notice you're hurting it.

Also, definitely take some yoga and focus on meditation. It'll help you a lot, more than you know.

Finally, very few people on here are rock stars. Don't let their blowhard attitude make you think they're so damn awesome because the truth is, human aptitude is a power curve, not a normal curve, and 99% of people doing anything suck because of it.

Myself included.

Edit: And you're welcome. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society - <AUTHOR> http://ncase.me/polygons/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic! We were just noticing how segregated our own neighborhood near Boston is, and wondering what drives that and what could be done about it. You can see the same thing all over the city -- neighborhoods that are much more white than average right next to neighborhoods that are much less white than average.

Really interesting that this could be self-generated with very little bias (setting aside that there's definitely still some intentional housing discrimination in Boston). And really interesting that it could potentially be reversed if people started to avoid neighborhoods that are highly segregated in their "favor."

I wonder if integration could be advertised as a benefit of certain properties on real estate sites like Zillow. What would happen if home listings had a "well integrated neighborhood" indicator for neighborhoods that have about the same racial balance as the larger area, the same way they have indicators for good schools and public transportation and so on? Would that be appealing to actual buyers the same way it's appealing to the Polygons in the model?

The risk is that an index like that could be used to _encourage_ segregation instead -- but I'm hopeful that, on average, we're better than that at this point.

Here's one census map if you want to check out your neighborhood:

[http://www.socialexplorer.com/](http://www.socialexplorer.com/)

You can show racial data under "Change Data." We also found it helpful to change "Show data by: Tract" to "Block group" (more fine-grained), and to use quantile cutpoints under the color palette menu.

<comment><USER3> I think one of the problems with the "avoid neighborhoods with segregation" solution is that it's more or less the same idea as affirmative action. As soon as you choose not to rent an apartment because "there are too many white people and not enough black" you're effectively practising reverse racism.

Living in rural Maine, I've watch the deleterious effect this has on a rural community as young white people flock to Portland or Boston looking for black people for their kids to grow up near.

In the meantime, there are 20 other non-race related variables in your community that you're ignoring, like age, health, wealth, gender, sexual orientation, language, education, technological proclivity, Meyers-Briggs results etcetera and so forth.

Race, while a dominant segregator in our society, is not he only one, nor, perhaps, the most pervasive here in 2014.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes we have to look at questions in a hard, unflinching way, and prepare ourselves for the answers that come.

It could be that "too much" focus on diversity could create "reverse racism" where there are somehow institutional oppressions exerted over white people. That seems very unlikely in any place where white people are a racial majority and also control all institutions of social or political power.

It could also be that focusing on such things leads to the death of communities in rural Maine.

But what do we care about more: creating a world where black youth are not gunned down by police officers on a literally daily basis for either absurdly petty crimes or literally no reason (like Oscar Grant, for example), or preserving rural Maine?

Personally, I don't care at all if rural communities die. I'm living in a rural "community" in New England myself right now, and it's honestly torturous. I'm glad people are moving to Portland or Boston to raise their children because, frankly, it seems abusive raising a child in this environment. There's no Uber, basically no other apps, very few amusements, and virtually zero culture beyond what the majority in the area (old white people) prefer. The lack of competition in general means that there are very few new things, and lots of old, crappy things. Raising children in this area deprives them of stimulation that will literally mean their brains are less dense and less able to fluidly adapt to new situations.

I doubt very much that rural Maine, like my own area, has very much diversity in terms of any of the other factors you've listed (I exclude the MBTI because each MBTI axis is effectively randomly distributed, because the test is based on Jungian psuedoscience that means it has no correlation to the real world -- all areas are diverse in MBTI because all areas are diverse to a random discriminator variable). It is not a bad thing for these areas to die. In the near future, I can easily see the area I'm in dying off as well, and it'll be great for all the people who don't have to live here anymore.

<comment><USER5> It hard to keep track of who to hate. Apparently it is OK to hate old people. Or maybe just old white people. Or is it just old people who live in rural areas? And also apparently we should hate those who aren't serviced by Uber. And those whose culture we don't like.

<comment><USER4> It's funny you read 'hate' into my comment. I certainly don't like living in a place where people who are actively trying to perpetuate a society of domination along class, race, and gender divides dictate the culture, but that doesn't imply that I hate them.

The actual hate, and worse, the cold, seemingly-benign, hate, is in your attacks (you seem to have created this account exclusively to do this) on progressive politics on Hacker News.

Maybe this is actually 'hot' hate. Maybe you truly think that non-whites have no great books of 2014 or no cultural contributions for you. But I don't think so.

I think it's more likely that you just see any divergence from the status quo you grew up used to as "going too far." Because you somehow think that a thousand years of liberatory struggle ended in 1985.

That is a thing worth hating. People will die because of that. The longer we allow white supremacy to exist, the more black children will be gunned down in the streets.

Personally, I don't think areas that are the equivalent of a white rice diet are good areas to raise a child, because I'd think it was cruel to raise a child on a diet of nothing but white rice. But it's a stretch to say that I hate old white people in the country because of that. Plenty of them are fine.

It's just you who isn't.

<comment><USER5> >It's funny you read 'hate' into my comment.

It is not so funny, because you could make a very minor tweak to your comment, and even you can see it is unacceptable:

"Personally, I don't care at all if urban Detroit dies. I'm living in an urban "community" myself right now, and it's honestly torturous. I'm glad people are moving to away to raise their children because, frankly, it seems abusive raising a child in this environment. There's no Uber, basically no other apps, very few amusements, and virtually zero culture beyond what the majority in the area (old black people) prefer. The lack of competition in general means that there are very few new things, and lots of old, crappy things. Raising children in this area deprives them of stimulation that will literally mean their brains are less dense and less able to fluidly adapt to new situations."

<comment><USER4> That is not a minor tweak, it changes the entire meaning of that statement.

It's also factually wrong, because Uber has launched in Detroit, plenty of other apps have launched in Detroit, and Detroit is a cultural nexus. Virtually all of electronic music has origins in Detroit house and techno. Detroit is still a center for cultural innovation along multiple axes. And it's a city dominated by the young.

You are:

1\. Not understanding my point in a factual manner

2\. Implying that you if you swap "black" and "white" or "men" and "women", sentences retain any meaning, even though you've totally changed the context in which they exist

3\. Very literally a white supremacist apologist, because every one of your HN comments is attacking progressivism.

Please leave HN and the tech community. Racists are not welcome here.

<comment><USER5> The only racist person in this thread is you. And progressivism is a morally bankrupt enterprise whose existent is justified to cure the problems it creates.

<comment><USER4> >The only racist person in this thread is you

>progressivism is a morally bankrupt enterprise

...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was surprised to find that this was partly done by the incomparable Vi Hart. But why should that have been a surprise: she has a distinctive knack for presenting mathematical concepts in a way that makes them understandable.

</comment><comment><USER7> This one is incredibly fascinating, even though it is simplified. One thing to keep in mind is that even if you exclude racial biases, you will maintain segregation if people have other - correlated - biases or limitations on their ability to move:

In many countries, poverty is highly correlated with race, for example. This is certainly the case with the US, but also elsewhere. I live in London, and you see interesting effects of this.

The inner city boroughs are quite segregated, both by race and wealth.

Meanwhile, some of the outer boroughs are showing the reverse effect, where property price points appears to be a driver for mixing. E.g. Croydon, where I live, is one of the most mixed in London - it's at a price point that creates both young professionals of all races, and more established families of all races who are united in finding the inner boroughs either too expensive or too poor.

But overall: Imagine that nobody had a racial preference, but had a wealth preference - and limitations.

Now to overcome segregation, you face a near insurmountable barrier: Wealthier people would need to be willing to settle for housing and an environment of a much worse standard than they can afford, and poorer people would be unable to find housing that makes much difference.

This is one of the biggest problems. The recent US situation with demonstrations over police killings, the race aspect has been blown out of proportion: You don't solve anything by focusing on the race issue, because so much of the violence is correlated more strongly with poverty than with race. You want to solve racial issues, start by addressing poverty. You'll _still_ have race issues at the end of it, but it will turn out vastly smaller than what it appears, and you'll have removed a substantial source of excuses for racial biases.

<comment><USER8> > _"Wealthier people would need to be willing to settle for housing and an > environment of a much worse standard than they can afford, and poorer people > would be unable to find housing that makes much difference."_

That is actually very easy to manage: don't make all houses in a neighbourhood the same. Make some to the standards of wealthy people, and others to the budget of poor people.

The apartment building I live in has some houses that are rentals, and others that are purchased. Some are bigger, others smaller. As a result, we've got reasonable diversity (though still whiter than the rest of the neighbourhood).

Of course addressing poverty is still a good idea, for this and many other reasons.

<comment><USER7> It's easy to manage in newbuilds. Many places the property replacement cycle is 100+ years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow! Not only an educational game about social diversity, but also: agent- based models, phase transitions, irreversible thermodynamics. And, last not least - cute shapes.

I am definitely adding it to my educational game recs: [https://hackpad.com/Science-based- games-J0X4MSberlM](https://hackpad.com/Science-based-games-J0X4MSberlM)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing the list; I'm saving it and will check out some of those games after work!

However, I'm a bit surprised that Kerbal Space Program didn't make it. It's extremely fun and playable, and captures the "parts of real scientific phenomena" known as orbital mechanics (orbiting, docking, landing, interplanetary transfers, etc.), aerodynamics (at least with FAR mod) and bits of structural engineering (aka. how to make rockets that don't tip over or disassemble themselves upon launch).

Yesterday I spent like 3 hours figuring out how to assemble a skycrane and then used it to land a rover on the moon ;).

Another thing that maybe could fit on that list is "Fate of the World" game from few years ago, in which you play as international government to fix climate change, world hunger, poverty, lack of education, etc. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be updated or to have any active community around it.

<comment><USER9> "Fate of the World" is on the list (though, the link is now dead).

By no means I am omniscient - thanks for letting me know about "Kerbal Space Program". Or even better - feel invited to add it to the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wanted to point out one of their conclusions in particular:

> _1\. Small individual bias → Large collective bias._

> _When someone says a culture is shapist, they 're not saying the individuals > in it are shapist. They're not attacking you personally._

This is a really important point that gets a lot of arguments hung up on nonproductive "not all men"-type fooforaw lately. If someone says that e.g. gamer culture is sexist, or even if they (perhaps inadvisably) use shorthand and say "gamers are sexist," they are not saying that I and every other single person who plays games is personally sexist.

<comment><USER12> They are saying that, and they are acting like that.

Asking people to agree that they are not is simply a shibboleth.

<comment><USER11> > _They are saying that, and they are acting like that._

This is trivially false, since most of the people saying that gamer culture is sexist are themselves gamers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beautiful!

For the math and game theory links, make sure to go all the way to the bottom. The post is based off the work of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling and the style is inspired by Bret Victor's Explorable Explanations. There's more in the post, of course.

</comment><comment><USER14> On the third board (the first one with a slider), setting the bias to 100%, segregation stays under 10% (I've run it for a bit and the max was 8%). Obviously we need to tell everyone be act like "I'll move if less than 100% of my neighbours are like me"! ;)

<comment><USER15> This is just because when a piece moves, the destination is random. If you allowed the bias to affect the choice of destination and not just the decision to move or stay put you'd get the result you expect.

<comment><USER16> Right, but you can't demand more realism for the results you don't like and accept the conclusions for those you do like.

For example, in a more realistic scenario people move for all sorts of reasons: leaving parent's house, changing jobs, marriage and divorce, etc. This stirring may lead to decreased segregation for slight decreases in bias, unlike what this more static model suggests.

<comment><USER15> This is not intended to be an accurate model of what actually happens in the real world. It's only supposed to test the hypothesis that minor but widespread individual bias can result in large-scale segregation.

<comment><USER17> ...which is then treated, in the remainder of the text, as though it were an accurate model of what happens in the real world.

<comment><USER7> No, it is not. You may want to reread it. Including the part where they explicitly state that the real world is a lot more complex, and where they give references to more in depth treatments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I enjoyed playing with the graphs and everything, but I question whether this model has much relevance to the real world. Is there a strong reason to believe that these effects would survive a model of "I want to move" that is not solely based on "too many people unlike me live near by" and/or "not enough people unlike me live near by"? Indeed, is there a strong reason to believe that a binary modality of "I'm happy/unhappy," (the post gestures in the direction of a third mode, "I'm neither happy nor unhappy," but in fact in their simulations that third mode is indistinguishable from "happy") is a good abstraction of people's moving decisions?

The data paper they posted a link to suggests that there is unlikely to be an equilibrium, contra the message of this post.

It seems like it's more an explanation of a mathematical model and a prescriptive political position, rather than a description of anything real in society.

<comment><USER19> Certainly it's a model but you can work up to more complex models. Check out NetLOGO, which comes with a huge library of simulations and a fairly friendly IDE for creating your own agent-based simulations.

<comment><USER18> I think that as it's presented, the authors are suggesting that it's a model that is necessary and on some level sufficient to understand the dynamics of self-segregation in housing.

They subtitle the post "This is a story of how harmless choices can make a harmful world." Reading it, I get the powerful impression that the authors think that this model has the basic answers for all self-segregation in housing.

But obviously an even slightly more complicated model undermines many of their points. Like, they make a big deal of the idea that if you have a fairly high level of "shapism" and thus get a fairly segregated society, and then you lower the level of "shapsim," nothing changes unless you actively reverse your bias and move if your neighborhood is not diverse enough.

But clearly people don't only ever move for diversity reasons. Sometimes you move because you got a job or a SO that's far away. Sometimes you move because you can afford more or less living space. Sometimes you move because you have a child now and want to get into a good school zone. Or whatever. And if your preferences are now, compared to when you last moved, more tolerant, that WILL reduce the level of segregation of your society.

In fact, people probably move for economic or family reasons far MORE often than they move for diversity reasons.

I mean, that's not a small difference from their model. It's one of their major points! That, once segregated, societies won't become less segregated unless people actively work on it.

And, honestly, I don't think that the model holds at all unless you understand that people probably mostly use economic proxies for race over primarily making decisions based on race. For the most part, I don't think people are saying, "I don't want to move there, there's too many black people." They're saying, "I don't want to move there, it's too poor or too crime-ridden" or whatever. And yes, they may be exaggerating the extent to which it is poor or crime-ridden because they have internalized racist ideas about whether majority-black neighborhoods are poor or crime-ridden. But the point is, you can't really address this segregation by telling people to prefer mixed neighborhoods: you need to address the complex relationships of economics and race and how economic class affects neighborhoods and whatever.

<comment><USER19> But they're not saying that people only move for diversity reasons. They're saying that one simple metric at a fairly low level could nevertheless give you drastic results, which is a counter-intuitive conclusion - most people expect output factors to be proportional to input factors.

Don't get hung up on the explanatory power of the model for real conditions - for the same reason you would not get hung up on the simplistic assumptions of most economic models, which often involve two variables and all other factors being held equal ('ceteris paribus'). People sometimes dismiss all economics because micro starts out from these extremely simple foundations rather than being fully reflective of the real world, but that's a bit like dismissing math because arithmetic is so basic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great post, though I'm missing a definition of how do they mathematically define segregation. (Checking from the JS code, it seems to be an average over the shapes of the proportion of neighbor shapes which are like them.)

Also, the title confused me a bit as I expected something related to Flatland.

By the way, one of the two people behind this is Vi Hart, which has also made some brilliant videos featuring math, music, and brilliant silliness: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794&list=UUOGeU-1Fig...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794&list=UUOGeU-1Fig3rrDjhm9Zs_wg)

</comment><comment><USER17> > it's about deciding what we want the world to look like, and settling for no > less

Perhaps it's about accepting people for who and what they are, even when they fail to satisfy your _own_ biases, and building an understanding of the social world on that basis -- rather than being about privileging your opinion of how the world ought to be over your perception of how the world _is_ , and bridging the gap between there and your thesis via the _post hoc_ fallacy.

...nah. That would be stupid.

<comment><USER21> …what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Beautiful UI. Schelling's models of segregation is a great example of how simulation and data-vis can create insights in the humanities & social sciences.

I made a similar (though much less beautiful) simulation for a workshop in in computational philosophy last semester - but replaced intentional with random movement when uphappy.

[http://dave.kinkead.com.au/models-of- segregation/](http://dave.kinkead.com.au/models-of-segregation/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Problem with this model. If you turn the bias way up (demand 80-90 percent of your neighbors be like you) the segregation drops to zero. That doesn't seem to make sense and I think it's because they're moving to random locations that have low probability of being "better" by the binary nature of the metric.

<comment><USER24> Right. If you make them super-racist, you get a chaotic state because the polygons move around constantly. I don't see it as a problem with the model. I think that it makes sense, because people who are extremely racist are (in addition to being morally in the wrong) impractical and chronically pissed off. However, you can get a very-segregated state by gradually turning up the racism (from 33% to 50%, then to 60%, then 70%). If you do it too fast (i.e. change the racist temperature too quickly) you get the chaotic state you're talking about.

In the real world, this chaotic effect might be a negative (i.e. violent) interaction. Or, more hopefully, people might recognize such extreme bias as untenable and gradually find it undesirable to live in monoculture.

By the way, I was able to get 99% (ETA: 100%) segregation (because engineering racist dystopias is the point of this exercise? :) ) by altering the racism level to move around the patches and "attack" small enclaves of blue in the yellow area. If you think of it as abstractly playing with optimization parameters with a hand-controllable Lagrange multiplier, it feels less evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a fantastic visual demonstration of a simple, but surprising (if you haven't seen it before) effect! Congrats to Vi Hart & Nicky Case (I presume Nicky did the web/javascript side of things?).

This isn't _just_ about race / skin colour either - you can see exactly the same effects in things like political viewpoints where people also tend to segregate into areas or simply social circles of people that share their own preferences. (pace the praphrased quote: "How could politician X win the election? _Nobody_ I know would vote for them!")

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how we could maybe put this idea to work as part of immigration reform or the much-discussed work visa topic. After all, moving is tough so not everyone can just up and move for diversity's sake, but if someone is already moving, maybe a requirement should be that they move to communities unlike them?

</comment><comment><USER27> What does it say that anything over 75-85% "segregationism" leads to an almost completely desegregated community of shapes over time (though, they are _constantly_ moving)?

</comment><comment><USER28> "I'll move if less than 97% of my neighbors are like me" leads to less segregation because everyone is always moving...

</comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes it feels like the open source web development environment I find myself in is all triangles.

</comment><comment><USER30> That last sandbox taught me very small minorities make everyone unhappy.

</comment><comment><USER31> Are mobile devices supported? I can't make the page do anything.

</comment><comment><USER32> Brilliant. What else can I add?

<comment><USER17> Substance.

<comment><USER32> reached maximum dillusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are many settings for which this process doesn't converge. I consider it a feature rather than a bug.

For example, if you have the parameters at 33% and 100%, you converge on a racist/segregated state. However, at 33% and 95%, people keep moving around. You see the large contiguous regions that would otherwise be suburban enclaves hollow out. But you never get to a stable state, which is kinda like real life so it works.

 _Small individual bias → Large collective bias._

This is so incredibly true. I wrote about this. The blog post is specific to VCs, but I think the Racist Judges Problem is much more general. ([http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/vc- istan-2-th...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/vc-istan-2-the- racist-judges-problem/))

Let's say that we're having a cat beauty contest and, for the sake of argument and egregious simplification, that 35 states are completely non-racist and 15 states are extremely racist against orange cats. Let's also assume that beauty is uncorrelated to kitty-race and that there are only two colors: white (80%) and orange (20%). You'd expect that 7 contestants would be orange: a proportionate share from the non-racist states and none from the racist states. But you'll actually get very few, because the non-racist states still want their cats to win, so they'll be _de facto_ racist for strategic reasons except for an occasional "weird" state (say, Minnesota) that nominates an orange cat and Fox News doesn't shut up about it being "political" in its "making a statement" (even if the orange cat from Minnesota _was_ the most beautiful). Thus, when you look at the contestants and see 49-50 white cats, it creates a horrible and completely false perception that white is the standard of cat beauty and that no one finds orange cats beautiful.

In other words, small differences in preference, once they gain a certain social currency and acceptability, snowball into something a lot more horrible. This is also why it's so important to keep racism socially unacceptable, and why Stetson Kennedy's infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan (he exposed it as childish and ludicrous) was so powerful.

</comment><comment><USER33> It plays with many variables to show the consequences of these choices, but never questions the basic assumption that shapes are happier in a diverse environment.

It then goes on to conclude "Demand diversity near you".

I know what they try to accomplish, but I still think it's a dishonest (or at least incomplete) approach.

<comment><USER11> If you read the base assumption naively as "white people are happier with a certain fixed percentage of black people around," then yes, it sounds silly. I think what you should be taking away as the basic assumption is: all other things being equal, an integrated society is healthier than a segregated society.</comment></comment>


Dwolla launches Dwolla Credit – Real-time payments without interchange - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dwolla.com/real-time-payments/

<comment><USER2> I started to sign up for this to see what it was all about. It looks exactly like a credit card to me, backed by a bank. Here's the introduction to the standard terms and conditions you get with any credit card application:

> Prior to applying for a Dwolla Credit Account, Comenity Capital Bank > requests your consent to provide you important information electronically.

The APR stated in my "prescreened" offer was 24.99%, which is staggering compared to my existing revolving credit accounts. There must be some subtle feature that makes this product novel, but I don't know what it is.

<comment><USER3> This is why the interchange is not going away from the marketplace - any new CC-like product w/o interchange will be more expensive for 'cardholders' than the current creditcards, simply because credit card issuers can earn their money from the interchange fees that only the merchants care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The post is light on details, unfortunately.

As far as I can tell, it's more similar to BillMeLater than it is to a credit card. The only other information I could find on Dwolla Credit is a support FAQ[1]. Interestingly, the credit provider is Comenity Capital Bank, which is also behind BillMeLater[2].

I still don't completely understand the difference in models between something like Dwolla Credit (or BillMeLater) and a credit card. Why do credit cards cost the merchant 2+%, while Dwolla Credit only costs 25 cents? It seems like the same risks apply.

[1] [http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/1330333-cred...](http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/1330333-credit- faq)

[2] [https://www.billmelater.com/help/index.xhtml](https://www.billmelater.com/help/index.xhtml)

<comment><USER5> If I had to guess, one thing that makes services like Dwolla less risky than traditional credit cards is that credit card security is built around end users keeping secret a string of numbers written on a plastic card that they hand out to random strangers on a regular basis. As a secondary fraud- prevention measure, merchants may ask you to sign a receipt that may or may not match the one on the back of your card.

To be fair, there are a number of fraud detection algorithms at play as well, but those algorithms often have wholes in them or come into play only after the fraud has occurred.

As an online service, Dwolla requires users to authenticate directly with them, where they can take steps to mitigate fraud by requiring two-factor authentication, etc. Authentication with merchants is handled via a token- based method. In addition, fraud detection may also be substantially easier because Dwolla is privacy to additional information about its users (IP address, purchase details, cookie tracking, etc.) that may not be available to traditional credit card providers. Dwolla may also be privy to additional information that allows them to assess the credit-worthiness of their customers and minimize the danger of default.

This probably doesn't totally explain how Dwolla dropped the cost of fraud detection down to a flat 25 cents (e.g. it doesn't explain why PayPal charges a percentage-based fee), but I bet it's part of the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: BillMeLater Draws Federal Scrutiny

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-22/ebay-probed-by- regu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-22/ebay-probed-by-regulator- over-loans-pioneered-by-payday-lenders.html)

EBay Inc. (EBAY) is facing a probe by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over a loan program that mimics a structure used by high-interest lenders to evade state rules before the practice was stamped out by regulators. The program, called Bill Me Later, is a service of the online marketplace's PayPal unit that relies on Salt Lake City, Utah-based Comenity Capital Bank to make loans that are then purchased and managed by EBay, according to regulatory filings. Under federal law, banks can lend in any state without being licensed there, or complying with local interest rate caps.

<and> In 2008 EBay acquired Bill Me Later, which also lets users finance purchases in online markets run by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), The Walt Disney Co. (DIS) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) Customers can avoid the annual 19.99 percent rate by paying off the loan before the end of a six-month promotional period. If they pay later, they incur accumulated interest and fees that effectively raise the annual rate.

</comment><comment><USER7> When Dwolla goes international this will get interesting. Until then a lot of us just shrug. That's not intended as an insult -- I just wish they'd go global already.

Signed, A New Zealander.

<comment><USER8> The deliberate balkanization of all finance in fiat money will backfire big time. The dinosaurs are simply herding everybody in the direction of bitcoin, and there will be no turning back ;-)

<comment><USER9> Sure, bitcoin is free to transfer for now, but soon exchanges will have to start charging a fee.

Currently the "proof of work" kills two birds with one stone: it allows transfer of the currency and also mines new coins for the exchanges doing the transfer. But that only lasts until the 21 million cap is reached; after that, no mining, no free money for exchanges, but since someone still has to do the work ... it'll be for a fee.

<comment><USER10> Bitcoin does not require exchanges!

It's also not a cap, it's a target. "Reaching" the target means either:

1) all of our speculative bitcoin money becomes worthless as miners stop mining because it ceases to be profitable, so new blocks are not produced, so transactions don't flow.

2) miners stop processing transactions below a certain size or without a certain fee included, so only poor peoples' money becomes worthless as they can't afford the fees, don't meet the size limit, etc. or

3) the algorithm works, all of the money is fungible, and fees that are a fraction of what you and I would consider money today are enough for miners to make a living, as long as they are contributing a fraction of a percent of the hashes that sustain the whole network globally.

There's nothing "Free" about the miner fees. The subsidy of block rewards are meant to compensate early adopters for their hardware and electricity costs. If miners don't horde bitcoins to themselves, they don't "need" the money to be viable, once their investment is paid off they can just as well unplug the machines and let them sit on a shelf, assuming it's not worth their time and electricity to go on mining.

Bitcoin is "free to transfer" at exchanges because exchanges collect their fees through other vectors than transfer... eg, trade fees, merchant fees, venture capitalist infusion, ... there's no free money, and if you think there is, ask anyone who's already become rich on bitcoin how many they're keeping "in case the value goes sky high" eg. so others can make money off of us all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If nobody seems to be "excited" about this new "opportunity", there is only one explanation possible: bitcoin does all of that and more and better ;-)

<comment><USER5> Except that there are merchants who prefer to be paid in USD and customers who want to pay in USD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >We're starting with eCommerce and then rolling out to other retailers.

Isn't it illegal to charge the customer before the goods are shipped. Do they handle pre-auth and settlement?

<comment><USER12> No it's not illegal to charge before shipping, why would you ship something out that costs $$$ when you run the risk that the card will not be good?

<comment><USER13> That's what an auth step is, like nahname mentioned. Many (most?) credit card charges come in two parts: the auth, which appears on your statement and kind of verifies that your payment won't be rejected, and the settlement, which actually finalizes the charge. When you buy something from a large online retailer like amazon, they immediately do an auth, and then only settle when the item is shipped. At least I think that's how it works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After Dwolla banned Bitcoin transactions I lost most of my interest. Bitpay and Coinbase have much better merchant programs and their fees are much lower.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone getting phsihing warning from Chrome? [http://i.imgur.com/MSESJYS.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/MSESJYS.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER16> I scrolled down and had a look at the comments on Dwolla's blog post. I was shocked to see that they're all about bitcoin!

<comment><USER15> I think they were ambushed a little by Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1p69z7/so_this_is_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1p69z7/so_this_is_why_dwolla_stopped_all_bitcoin_related/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How are chargebacks handled in this system?

<comment><USER18> Chargebacks don't exist in the Dwolla universe. Its not a credit card.

<comment><USER12> We have disputes though.

You can read about them here: [http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/1203299-how-...](http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/1203299-how- do-i-dispute-a-transaction-)

and here: [http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/87923-file-a...](http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/87923-file- a-dispute)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is this different than PayPal credits or any other credits?

You don't prepay?

<comment><USER12> It's more like mastercard, visa, amex, discover line of credit. Not prepaid- a line you can pull from to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> nice

</comment><comment><USER12> nooice!

</comment><comment><USER21> Go Dwolla, go!

</comment><comment><USER22> Slowly takin over ...</comment>


Thanks for subscribing - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/success <comment><USER2> I don't get it. What's the point of submitting this URL?</comment>