Programmers Don't Like to Code - <AUTHOR> http://rentzsch.com/notes/programmersDontLikeToCode

<comment><AUTHOR> "Programmers don't like coding, they like problem solving."

While that's true for me to some extent, but what I also noticed is that I really like doing is _building_ things. When I'm not coding, I woodwork, build RC airplanes, or find something else to work on.

<comment><USER2> Right, but you don't plan on making your own glue before doing woodwork, right? It's the same thing - I don't _want_ to write an XML parser, there are tons of them. I want to build something exciting to me.

Fortunately, there exist many someones that do like writing things like XML parsers, so I don't have to be one. I think that might be Wolf's point.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what his point was, because he kept sticking to the provocative "programmers don't like to code" line.

If he said "programmers don't like to write code that's not directly related to the problem they're solving," I'd agree. But if that's what he meant, then he should have said it.

I find the practice of starting out with a provocative statement, then redefining the semantics of the discussion until the unqualified thesis statement is true both annoying and disingenuous.

<comment><USER4> I'm always on the lookout for that sort of thing too, but I don't think you're right here. I get annoyed when people say "ellyagg likes to program" because it's dismissive, like I'm some strange creature who finds the task of putting various glyphs in parallel lines soothing. I _don't_ enjoy programming for programming's sake. I enjoy _creating_ and I enjoy my creations bringing value to other people's lives.

<comment><USER3> I guess I don't interpret "like to program" that literally.

I think it's accurate to say "I like to program" because it goes beyond problem solving for me. I enjoy solving the problem, yes, but I also enjoy _expressing_ the solution. I enjoy the process of figuring out what is the most concise, elegant and natural expression of the solution, and I find the result pleasing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "If programmers liked to code, they wouldn't value a language by its libraries."

Yeah, that's why I spend 16 hour days coding in Common Lisp and Mozart/Oz.

"If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client."

Because HTTP clients are a stupid display oriented and bug-tolerant little things. HTTP _SERVERS_ on the other hand, those are more tractable, since you can be responsible for following the specs yourself, and a treat to work with for all the interesting engineering possibilities they offer, which is _why_ more people have written web servers than web clients.

"I just want to update this field in this file, why do I have to write an XML parser?"

Oh, he is talking about _that_ programmer: the corporate data janitor. That sentence is just laden with idiocy; first, if your data is in xml and you don't have established tools to perform "CRUD" type operations on your XML files, you're doing XML wrong (lack of established process). Second, if you have to write an XML parser to edit an entity in a file, you're doing it wrong (refusal to use established tools, NIH). Third, if someone has to enlighten you on how to update one of your data files (inability to RTFM) .. Dear Neo, the salve of Hackingkind, you're doing it wrong. No wonder you hate programming then.

<comment><USER6> I really don't think he meant that last one literally; just an example of a situation where a throwaway, uninteresting program would be necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always thought that coding kind of came with the job. I don't like repetitious tasks in my coding life any more than any other, but I still enjoy the man vs machine aspect of coding.

And since when did 'Programmers' become such prima-donnas? I like whatever it takes to continue a career in developing software, sometimes that means tedious stuff, and sometimes really interesting ah-ha moments of coding.

Its all part of the CS experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are clearly different types of programmers. For me I think it would be more that I like designing and seeing concepts become something. Some people don't get that programming is actually a very creative process.

There is some problem solving, but if it was problem solving that I enjoyed I would have enjoyed math (more).

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't really agree with this article at all.

I think a large percent of programmers want to rewrite things because they focus on what's lacking in some way, expect to do everything better than the next person, it's easier/more fun/feels more productive to write than to read/grasp other people's code etc....

He quoted Andrew Leonard quoting Larry Constantine but took a light-hearted sentance and seems to deliberately misunderstanding or taking it too literally.

But the rewrite/reuse issue needs to be addressed in a per-case basis... but I've seen thing beeing rewritten way too many times that should have been reused and usually ending up in much worse shape after that....

Although, I've also seen rewrites that improves stuff a lot.. but usually it's very very obvious when that's the right action to take.

</comment><comment><USER10> consider "Asians don't like to code"

... can we plz stop making big generalizations? Different people like different things.

Programmers are not all alike.

<comment><USER4> Considering it's the basis behind science and pretty much all analytical thought, can we please stop pretending making generalizations (yes, even _big_ ones) is a bad thing? This generalization was interesting and contains a large degree of truth; if you'd like to disagree with that, or explain where the generalization falls down, do so.

<comment><USER10> Scientific Method, via Wikipedia:

2\. Form a conjecture

3\. Deduce a prediction

4\. Test

The basis of analytical thought is testable predictions.

Counterexample to "Programmers don't like to code" :

I am a programmer, sometimes I like to code.

Sometimes I like to code in C. I like to implement some basic objects, like a list, a stack, some math routines. It is a like a little zen garden. So it isn't anything impressive, it's just like some rocks and sand, but I arrange it in a certain way and I like it.

Maybe I should address the content rather than the title (although if the title fails to represent the content it is a poor title.)

"Programmers like problem solving" is the kind of vague positive statement that is pointless and devoid of content. Here is a problem I don't like to solve: configuring Apache . . . yawn.

<comment><USER11> that's an anecdote, not a counterexample.

<comment><USER12> An anecdote can be a counterexample.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> "If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client."

Writing an HTTP client, and server is actually something I believe every one of us should do. As well as providing you something useful, tailored to your use case, it teaches you a massive amount about how everything works. It's pretty much definitely good fun :/

(I wrote both of these, and a dns client, etc etc for Mibbit).

</comment><comment><USER14> I think programmers do like to code. This is why the most popular libraries are ones that feel like languages.

For example,

print urllib.urlopen('<http://news.ycombinator.com/'>).read()

feels more like a language statement than a library call.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd argue that there are a lot of different breeds of programmer who fall at various points on this spectrum. Some programmers like to rewrite things because they are perfectionists, other programmers find any working code (for some value of working) to be "good enough" and move on. Many programmers don't fall neatly under any single label.

In particular his distinction between a preference for "problem solving" or a preference for coding obscures a much richer diversity of attitudes. An understanding of the subtle gradations between these various different kinds of programmer is probably one of the best tools available to the truly thoughtful software manager.

Personally I am really only enjoying myself if I'm tackling a "hard (for me) problem", if the ratio of typing to thinking is high then I'm "working".

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm utterly lost when it comes to all the categories of coder, engineer, programmer etc. I tend to think of "people who write code" as all being in the same bucket. How well you do that just makes you a better or worse "person who writes code" rather than putting you into different categories.

<comment><USER17> There are probably some reasonable categories in there, but I would say they are more like "algorithmist" (more mathematically inclined), "systems developer" (more hardware oriented), "application developer" (more user experience oriented), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _after ... building it, ... they'll understand the whole._

While I agree that understanding is a motivation and that building it does help, as your ideas become more complex, just being able to code it does not mean that you understand it perfectly.

My coding thrills are for understanding, for automation, and for impact (including the childlike-joy of just seeing something happen when I do something).

For me, the PC is an experimental lab. I can quickly test my hypotheses; and get fresh data, which inspire new hypotheses. The PC is a means, not an end.

</comment><comment><USER19> Indeed. I like writing code, but I dislike writing more code than absolutely necessary to solve a problem.

Also, this might not be relevant in this case, but I feel like there's a difference between "coding" and "programming". In my mind, coding is a dull task of translating an existing design into code, whereas "programming" is more problem solving, which includes coding. Being called a "coder" is almost derogatory sounding to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Programmers DO Like to Sleep

 _That's_ probably the biggest reason we rewrite stuff. So we stop getting those calls in the middle of the night.

<comment><USER9> This is something that's not familiar to me. Do you mean as a sys admin, or do you get called during the nights because of program crashes?

<comment><USER5> I wrapped my web app with an error handler that sends an email to email@example.com and I get a tidy tiny error report as a text message, wherever the hell I am.

<comment><USER21> good lord that's masochistic.

unless you really really like your webapp.

<comment><USER5> When you handle certain kinds of data, you're required to take maximum possible care to ensure secure and continuous operations of the system, and the steps you have taken towards that end.

<comment><USER22> boy am I glad I don't have to do that anymore. Used to be on call for financial systems... ouch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Programmers can like to code _and_ solve problems.

If all I liked doing was to solve problems, I could be fixing that broken toilet.

</comment><comment><USER24> My favorite term in the article: 'code narcissism'.

This debilitating disorder affects 1000s of programmers worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it easier to understand the problem when you rewrite the code instead of reading it (twice)?

<comment><USER26> Often, yes. Reading code very rarely induces me to understand what I'm reading (and I'm pretty undisciplined, so rather than being able to force myself to think deeply about it, I often just reread until I "get" it). However, figuring out how to build something like it myself promotes understanding much faster, in my experience.</comment></comment>


Don't believe the hype on GM's loan repayment  - <AUTHOR> http://www.edmondsun.com/business/x563631288/Don-t-believe-the-hype-on-GM-s-loan-repayment <comment><USER2> I confess to loving a good conspiracy theory ( _some_ of them must be true, we just don't know which), but this "GM paid everything back 5 years ahead of schedule, with interest" story is making my propaganda Geiger counter beep. Just like the Toyota takedown did a couple months ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> "To claim success at this point is nonsense ... The bailout was and is a complete failure."

So it's too early to claim success, but evidently not too early to claim failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your statement doesn't follow from that quote. The bailout failed, so to claim success is nonsense. At this point, or at any point in the future.

<comment><USER4> I believe that Marty was saying it is too early to claim the bailout failed. Gm has not gone out of business, and while I would not place any money on gm thriving in the future, it is still within the realm of possibilities that they could. If the point of the bailout was to save gm from failing, you cannot declare the bailout as having failed unless gm fails. Likewise, you can't claim that gm won't pay back the money eventually as long as they remain in business. You can say the bailout is likely to fail, but that is hugely different from saying it has already failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Edmond, OK is my hometown. Seeing its paper on HN is a major shock. What are you doing reading their op-eds? :-)

<comment><USER6> (I just spent 5 minutes figuring out how to mention that I currently live in Edmond and make it relevant to HN. I couldn't.)

I feel bad about not subcribing to the Edmond Sun though- they have much better articles than The Oklahoman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> All the questions of juggling funds and how this will be re-payed and how that will be afforded etc seems fruitless and pointless.

Sales are falling, they are loosing money; there may be many things to do, but everything is for naught if they can't do the most important thing.

MAKE A CAR PEOPLE WANT TO BUY.

Maybe I'm naive, but I figure if they do that most of the other problems can be sorted out- and if they can't do that, they have no business doing business.

<comment><USER8> This American Life had an episode a month ago that went into previous attempts of GM's to fix their problems. It has some great details on why their corporate culture is so messed up, and why they're so incapable of fixing their problems: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/403/n...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/403/nummi)

<comment><USER2> It's so interesting that the most vital journalism in America is from the margins: TAL, Daily Show... I wonder what's out there that I'm missing.

<comment><USER9> I highly recommend noagendashow.com if you're interested in media deconstruction

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, the guys on it know almost nothing about anything, but rather only follow up stories that confirm their biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The GM bailout marked the arrival of state corporatism to America. Truth is one of the casualties.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you use Windows 10 Virtual Desktops? - <AUTHOR> Would love to hear about people's setups and learn some new tricks to enhance my own workflow! <comment><USER2> I use a free tool called Dexpot. It's basically Windows 10 virtual desktops on steroids but also works with older versions of Windows too.

I did a whole write up about it here: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/see-how- virtual-desktops-let-...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/see-how-virtual- desktops-let-you-get-more-done-in-less-time)

You may also be interested in some of my development environment related blog posts which covers things like WSL and more: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/tag/dev- environment](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/tag/dev-environment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! I'm really into that sort of things, will definitely check out your blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Download latest Long Path Tool 5.1.6 free and remove long path files in two clicks.</comment>


How It Feels to Discover Your Son Was the Secret Founder of Silk Road - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59x8en/how-it-feels-to-discover-your-son-was-the-secret-founder-of-silk-road <comment><USER2> American sentences look incredible from a European perspective. A man has just been extradited from Ireland to America for facilitating child pornography on the internet. He wanted to be tried in Ireland where the maximum he could have gotten would be 14 years, he's now looking at 100 years.

<comment><USER3> The difference between rehabilitation and punishment. The difference between public and private prison ownership.</comment></comment>


Hacker Kevin Mitnick shows how to bypass 2FA - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/hacker-kevin-mitnick-shows-how-to-bypass-2fa/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17044397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17044397)

11+ comments, including why the title is clickbait

<comment><USER3> To me, the title isn't clickbait because "social engineering" is what Mitnick is known for in technical circles. He's not just famous for being famous. _Takedown_ is still probably worth a read. There's also a website to provide historical context, [http://www.takedown.com/](http://www.takedown.com/)</comment></comment>


Abstreet: Traffic simulation game written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet <comment><USER2> Hi, author here! Didn't intend for this to wind up on HN quite yet, but I'm excited to answer the good questions coming up here.

<comment><USER3> Question from a completely clueless perspective. The points you mention I always have and I have been wondering where to simulate it and get numerical answers to all those behaviors that can be infuriating. In your seattle full map you say you heuristically got the time for the lights, but where is that coming from exactly, like would it be possible to infer that for another city from some kind of public data. Is it in the domain of science fiction, there are so many parameters to take in account so it probably is impossible, that you could model the usual behavior of commuters in a city and then simulate whether the current traffic lights are set for the right length of time. I suppose some are updated live to react to traffic jams but in these circumstances there could also be way to simulate how shifting times would be the best to refluidify the traffic, instead of just going with brute force and empirical intuition which I assume is how it works most of the time.

<comment><USER2> I don't have real traffic signal timing for Seattle. I'm waiting on a reply from some folks at SDOT and King County GIS.

In the meantime, I have heuristics like [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/ed2f703e859d57d...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/ed2f703e859d57d9333738d3fd97942fce725ae7/map_model/src/traffic_signals.rs#L200). They're not great at all. If you're interested in improving these, [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/8](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/8) is a great bug. ;)

Some traffic signals are adaptive (they'll switch phases sooner/later based on real-time vehicle detection, bus priority, etc) or even centrally controllable. I'm not modeling that yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty cool! One thing that bothers me about every traffic simulation I've ever seen, though: all of the vehicles and pedestrians here seem to be obeying the law.

That's just not realistic -- especially on Mercer, which is blocked (both directions) every few minutes in rush hour by some jerk trying to make an illegal turn onto a packed street. I'd say the _main_ causes of traffic blockages that I encounter during rush hour are drivers blocking the box, and pedestrians entering the crosswalk against a red hand. I also see a lot of lane sweeping, too, which I assume is from the influx of drivers from California (where it's legal).

I hope traffic engineers aren't making real-world decisions based on simulations that follow all state laws perfectly, but I fear they are.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you. However, this may be obvious, but some of that could be due to people trying to follow Google Maps, Waze, or other similar navigation system directions where the routes are generated based on what other users have done.

I drove in downtown Seattle rush "hour" traffic for the first time in almost a year earlier this week, and Maps was giving me all kinds of dangerous, traffic-jam-causing directions. Things like "make a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection, from a side street onto an arterial that's gridlocked for about a kilometer in either direction". Apparently it had been happening for awhile, because the city had installed a barrier across the median, and I couldn't have followed the directions even if I'd wanted to.

IOW, it's not just drivers ignoring the law, it's tech companies explicitly instructing drivers to break the law and cause traffic problems that the simulations need to account for now.

<comment><USER6> > it's not just drivers ignoring the law

It is. If a driver comes across the situation you described, any action other than a right-hand turn means they should probably take a driver's ed course again. Regardless of what a robotic voice on their phone is telling them.

Google maps once instructed my wife to do a U-turn on Lakeshore Drive. Nope.

<comment><USER5> That's certainly the ideal approach, but I don't think it's realistic to plan for normal people behaving that way.

By the time I realized that Google had given me a route that would not work, breaking out of it cost me 10 minutes of sitting in traffic going the wrong way. I think most people would take the "drive like a jerk" alternative at that point, because the sunk-cost illusion is hard to let go of.

A self-driving car is basically just going to do what the mapping software tells it to as well, so the "bad instructions from tech companies" factor is a problem that needs to be addressed specifically anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A/B Street would fit really well into the Citybound project, as they are both striving to produce realistic simulations.

[https://github.com/citybound/citybound](https://github.com/citybound/citybound)

I really hope A/B Street and Citybound developers will work together.

[https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/20](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/issues/20)

[https://github.com/citybound/citybound/issues/361](https://github.com/citybound/citybound/issues/361)

</comment><comment><USER8> I swear I was discussing exactly this sort of simulation with my brother as both of us wondered how many city planners model the changes they are making to the road networks before pumping millions into projects that dump traffic from one point to another. Additionally, it'd be interesting to simulate the cascading effect of traffic violations like bad parkings, straddling lanes.

Kudos to Dustin for working on this.

<comment><USER9> in nyc it's quite common (maybe even required) to run simulations of changes of infrastructure before making them to see how they will effect traffic.

source: my partner helps run these simulations as part of their job/their company gets contract work from the city all the time to check changes of bus routes/etc.

<comment><USER2> I've had some trouble getting in touch with the engineers who did this around Seattle. Any details they can share about the software they use, what metrics they base decisions on, where they pull demand data? Any thoughts on making the input and results of these simulations public so anybody can reproduce the analysis, experiment on their own, etc?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice work. I'm wondering since this project seems to use its own nicely modularized GUI library, what motivated you in particular to write your own instead of using an existing Rust GUI library/game engine ? And would you make the same decision if you started now (vs 2 years ago) ?

<comment><USER11> Iced has emerged as a strong favorite for game GUIs: [https://github.com/hecrj/iced](https://github.com/hecrj/iced)

<comment><USER12> Looks promising. But I don't see any sort of XML-like component layout/config so I assume it's all done by calling methods? That sounds kind of kludgy. Or am I missing an example?

<comment><USER13> What makes you think xml isn't kludgy

<comment><USER12> Oh it is. And I don't want the XML-style solution.

But I don't see any configuration option in the examples other than chaining method calls to set each config option. Is there something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I'm not overly optimistic about his goal of getting solutions from the game to be enacted in real life Seattle, it's a really admirable idea and an impressive execution to boot.

I'm wondering if, with a big enough budget and a team of skilled devs like Dustin here, the local government could create more refined simulations to tackle these planning issues. Or would that inevitably run into the problem mentioned in his Project Mission: 'People are local experts on the small slice of the city they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that always backs up or a certain set of poorly timed walk signals'?

Perhaps, with a large enough data pool, even these small quirks could be worked out via simulation?

<comment><USER4> > Project Mission: 'People are local experts on the small slice of the city > they interact with daily -- the one left turn lane that always backs up or a > certain set of poorly timed walk signals'

100% of the intersections I see that get backed up are backed up because someone blocks the box. Can we get more enforcement for that? They don't even need a patrol car. Just have an officer stand at the corner of Mercer and Westlake from 4pm to 7pm, and each time the light changes, walk out into the intersection and ticket the guy who's blocking it. You could write $1000 in tickets an hour, every night of the week.

Many intersections have threatening signs to this effect, but they don't do any good. I've never seen or heard of anyone getting ticketed for that.

<comment><USER15> Seconded!

I would also like to see some pedestrian bridges or tunnels that would allow walking commuters like me to cross our major streets (Mercer, Denny, Westlake, and Dexters) at any time. This, I strongly believe, could reduce traffic, make residential neighborhoods effectively closer to commercial areas (due to reduced walking time), and improve both vehicle and pedestrian safety. Bridges should be far less expensive than roads, and could be built very quickly.

<comment><USER2> I would love this too. [https://lidi5.org](https://lidi5.org) is the only proposal I know of right now to do some of this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The next step would be writing a program to modify intersections, monitor how long cars take to get a journey done and optimize the streets for total transit time, or emissions, or whatever. That's probably faster than letting people discover optima along their usual routes.

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure that is a NP-complete problem (or worse). Which means on the scale of a city all the computers in the world couldn't solve it in a human lifetime. A small town is easy, but in a large city is out of control.

Ignoring that, cities change. You can come up with an optimal system, but people get new jobs, move to new houses, have kids, die, just to name a few obvious things that affect traffic - it might seem minor but they all add up to your optimal system today being wrong for tomorrow.

Even ignoring that, budgets are finite. The ideal solution probably is to tear down all buildings, move the mountain a few dozen miles east, re-reoute the river, change the shoreline, and then rebuild. Any one of them is possible on a small scale, but not on the whole thing all at once (you wouldn't move a whole mountain, but we have created passes).

Really the best we can do is come up with ideas that are affordable and then test them. One thing this can do well (if the simulation is good!) is let us see if fixing one are makes a different area worse - which helps as talk about the trade offs in the projects we can afford to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really fucking cool. And I love your ultimate objective: to allow informed public participation in transport planning. Nice developer info, too. Looking forward to playing with this.

<comment><USER19> Yes it's awesome! Calling it just a 'traffic simulation game' is probably a disservice to the potential applications of something like this. Very inspiring!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very cool!

That reminds me of Sumo[1] a open source traffic simulator I used at university to import a OSM map of town, populate it with activity based traffic and simulated the traffic under different conditions.

While that isn't quite as 'gameified' as this, it was fun!

[1] [https://sumo.dlr.de/index.html](https://sumo.dlr.de/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Very impressive simulation! For others unfamiliar with the term "lane sweeping", it means crossing/changing a lane during a turn. You must turn into the lane closest to you. [https://cherinlawfirm.com/2018/01/what-is-lane- sweeping-and-...](https://cherinlawfirm.com/2018/01/what-is-lane-sweeping-and- is-it-illegal/)

(It's scary thinking a half-mile traffic jam starts at 4am... and I can't help but wonder what it looks like at more sane hours such as 8:30am or 5:15pm. Is everything just red for miles around?)

<comment><USER2> The jam is probably not realistic. Because that area is a divided set of one- way roads, there are a few intersections each tagged with a traffic signal in OpenStreetMap. I'm simulating each signal independently right now. In reality, it's one signal with more reasonable timing.

(Also sorry for the slow replies, HN is rate-limiting comments because this is a new account.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Link to a slide set in this distribution -- the overall approach.

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cF7qFtjAzkXL_r62CjxB...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cF7qFtjAzkXL_r62CjxBvgQnLvuQ9I2WTE2iX_5tMCY/edit#slide=id.g6201f22714_0_144)

A beautiful piece of work. What else to say.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a theory that restricting an on-ramp/off-ramp for one street during peak rush hour will significantly improve traffic flow on my freeway commute. I've taken the time to propose the change to my department of transportation, suggesting they simulate the change. Expect that suggestion went straight into the trash can.

Realistically, modeling this section of the freeway would be difficult, and proving there would be a net benefit - even harder, because there are accidents due to this on-ramp merge which cause the delays. The simulation has to model accidents to be valid.

If anyone knows of a way to simulate traffic, including changing accident probability based upon traffic flow (quick stops caused by merging traffic likely increase the accident probability), I'd like to model my commute and provide that to the department of transportation.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this is a one person show? If so bravo! It looks like there's a mirror at google though, is this like a mini-google project?

<comment><USER2> I started the project while I was working at Google, went through the open source process, and then left a short while after to work on it full-time. There's no affiliation with Google.

<comment><USER25> I'm super-curious to hear more about this, in that it's hard to imagine walking away from a significant stable money-stream like Google.

<comment><USER2> It's a bit more of a story to tell offline. In short, the stable money stream quickly leads to a comfortable savings, giving me time to try an experiment like this. Right now I'm motivated by technically interesting projects that might lead towards good things in the real world, and once I was in a position to realize that, there was no way I wouldn't be working on A/B St.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Amazing! This is basically a live action more detailed version of Cities:Skylines. That game taught me how much of a blocker traffic turning across other traffic is, and the benefits of one-way systems in avoiding that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looking to learn rust. Anybody know how/what library was used to build those graphics?

I'm looking for 3D or 2D graphics libraries that are good for prototyping stuff in Rust.

<comment><USER28> Looking at the Cargo.toml for ezgui this uses glium which is an attempt at making OpenGL safe using the typesystem. I don't think it's worth the hassle.

For 2D I'd recommend ggez, it's easily the simplest and most polished rust game toolkit.

There's a good wrapper for SDL2, but I forget which one it is.

wgpu-rs is a really cool next-gen-but-easier-to-use cross platform graphics API. It's early days though so you have to be willing to do some legwork.

Amethyst is taking a shot at a Godot or Unity style modern integrated game engine. It'll be a while before they get to that level but it's still useful and reasonably well documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice work! How would I go about to use it for my own city?

<comment><USER2> In theory, [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new_city.md). There are a bunch of unsolved problems -- for example, most places in OSM don't map on-street parking, so there won't be any. For Seattle, I'm inferring from an extra shapefile. Have to figure out how to generalize that.</comment></comment>


Physical Implications of a Fundamental Period of Time - <AUTHOR> https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.241301 <comment><AUTHOR> >Theorists calculate upper limit for possible quantization of time

[https://phys.org/news/2020-06-theorists-upper-limit- quantiza...](https://phys.org/news/2020-06-theorists-upper-limit- quantization.html)</comment>


ZTE to launch webOS phone later this year? - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_m&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://it.sohu.com/20120918/n353382300.shtml

<comment><AUTHOR> A better link: [http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120919PD207.html&usg=AL...](http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120919PD207.html&usg=ALkJrhi2VjJ8JqIwYbSyCO64e6ZdShxdkw)

<comment><USER2> I would love to see Open webOS take off. Not because it's open source but because I really liked the platform.

Sure it had it's faults (which platform doesn't though?), but most of them are relatively minor fixes and on the whole, I just preferred webOS's way of working than its competitors (eg cards view for switching tasks).

I know it's all down to personal preference at the end of the day, but I think it's a great shame that Palm came in so late with webOS (and on such underwhelming hardware too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Translation is awful. Does he really mean webOS (as in Open webOS) or a "Web OS" (as in Mozilla)?

<comment><USER2> Sadly computer generated translations generally are.

There were references to Palm and HP within the linked Google transcript. So in lieu of a better translation (preferably from someone who can read the language), I would guess they're talking about Open WebOS as opposed to Mozilla Web OS.

<comment><USER3> A Reuters report clarified it's the Mozilla OS. Ah, well.</comment></comment></comment>


Suing Equifax in Small Claims Court - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-are-suing-equifax-in-small-claims-court-its-totally-brilliant-heres-why.html <comment><USER2> This story is gaining a lot of traction, and publications like Inc are picking up on it as a David-vs-Goliath tale. Some of them link to Christian Haigh's blog posts ([https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in- small-...](https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in-small-claims- court-heres-how-you-can-too-f0ce6925c079)). What seems to get lost in the secondary articles is that Christian Haigh works for Legalist, and the entire article, while I believe it to be true, is an advertisement for his legal services company to help you sue Equifax as well. This isn't David-vs-Goliath, this is someone well-versed in the law with the resource of a company behind him, taking on Equifax armed with knowledge and resources that the average consumer does not have. It may be possible to repeat his success on your own, but it's certainly not likely. He was prepared to respond to common legal tactics that Equifax's lawyer would easily defeat a normal plaintiff with. And again, this is all an advertisement for his legal services company, so I've got a bag of salt we can all share.

<comment><USER3> To take the same information and present it in a different way: this legal services company is able to win a lawsuit that an unassisted or naive litigant would lose. They make some money, the person who was harmed by Equifax gets some money, and Equifax is disincentivized to mishandle people's personal information. This is good, isn't it?

<comment><USER2> Equifax may be terrible, punishing them may be good, this may be a good way to punish them. One might debate whether small claims court is the right venue, what the role of the government is, whether this is a civil or criminal matter, and more generally what the impact of litigation is.

None of this is to say that I disagree. This is a feel-good story where the little man gets to stick it to the Big Evil Corporation. I just think it's disingenuous to present it as a story of what one man can do in the face of injustice, and then have a publication like Inc. repeat the story while leaving out important details about the plaintiff's qualifications and incentive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> small claims court may be dismissed by major corporations as inconvenient and worthy of quick settlement, however many may be mistaken in this judgement. Small claims court victories, if added up over time work as a sort of cancer that erodes at the foundation of the supremacy of tacit communal beliefs in an industry or corporate entity. These victories can be evidenced in "real" trials, and often have the overwhelming power to issue a damning indictment of the company at hand.

What equifax is trying to avoid is a sizable majority of victories that would in turn erode the foundation of the "identify theft" myth that the blame lies with no one at best, or the customer at worst. Its why Equifax and other companies often issue an appeal to their loss in small claims court as the appeal process can include a lawyer. In the case of equifax theyre likely to throw their VP level legal team on a plane and show up with a top brass firm to contest your victory. Sure, it costs them in the millions to do this, but costly battles like these prevent losing the war.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that doesn't scale. If this spreads, it'll quickly grow beyond their ability to contain it.

</comment></comment><comment> r-bryan Not Equifax but here's a story about how another David once met his Goliath in Small Claims Court. I wish I could find an online citation to confirm the details :-(

In the 1970's, financial conglomerate Transamerica owned a credit card brand, Diners Club I think. An ordinary citizen had a dispute with Diners Club and was getting nowhere. He convinced a small-claims judge to place a lien on the Transamerica building in S.F. That got their attention real quick because they needed clear title to the real estate for some finance shuffling.

<comment><USER6> It happens every once in a while.

Wells Fargo: [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/patrick-rodgers- fo...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/patrick-rodgers-forecloses- on-wells-fargo_n_824765.html)

BofA: [http://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida- foreclos...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclosed- angry-homeowner-bofa/story?id=13775638)

Turns out it gets their attention pretty quick.

> On June 3, Nyerges, two sheriff's deputies and a moving truck showed up at > the local BofA branch. The deputies informed the manager that he could > either pay the Nyerges' legal fees— $2,500—or the movers would start taking > away the bank's furniture and cash. The manager, after conferring with his > superiors, gave the deputies a check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a counterargument, here's a reddit thread about CA small claims case that (possibly?) got appealed to a higher court: [https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/7h9tn2/i_sued_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/7h9tn2/i_sued_equifax_and_won_they_filed_an_appeal_whats/)

I haven't parsed through the updates so I don't know what the current status is, but I remember the consensus being that this guy was fucked if Equifax actually was able to drag this into a 'real' court. So, YMMV.

<comment><USER8> Also to note just because it may work for one or two times if they start to see a possibility of a large impending loss they can allocate resources to fight small claims cases also.

<comment><USER9> There is no way they win that if enough people do it. It's so much overhead that the small plaintiff is at a substantial cost-benefit advantage even if they send fresh grad associates by the busload to small claims courts around the country. The Zerg Rush attack might be the best way to tackle this problem ... until of course Equifax gets Congress to pass some kind of legislation to make it impossible to bring Equifax-related suits in Small Claims court.

<comment><USER10> I doubt "enough" people will do it. It takes some time to prepare and to go to court. Let's say that 5000 people do it,(IMO, not realistic unless organized by someone): 5,000 X $10,000 in damages = $50 million.

Say another $20m for My Cousin Vinny Attorney at Law used to dealing with such cases, and it's not a company killing expense. That's assuming that all win. You could say that word spreads, "he won $10k so you should file too," but I doubt it.

<comment><USER11> You are only accounting for money, not time.

See, for example, what the Church of Scientology was able to do to the IRS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In the process, his company started funding other people's small claims > suits against Equifax, too. (Legalist pays lawyers in plaintiff's suits on > an hourly basis, and takes a contingency fee if the case is successful.)

Wait: I thought the idea of small claims court was that you had to represent yourself, and no lawyers were allowed to represent you?

<comment><USER13> IANAL, but from what I understand in California, if a small claim is appealed a lawyer may represent on either side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Based on the headline, I would have liked to hear about more than 1 person and a slight mention of a few others.

<comment><USER15> On the other side of the coin, perhaps this will encourage others to follow suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I truly hope this works, and that Equifax is forced to close down. They have repeatedly demonstrated they do not deserve to continue being a company.

</comment><comment><USER17> Discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217241) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556000).

</comment><comment><USER18> In my experience, articles that end with _"...and It's Totally Brilliant. Here's Why"_ tend to be shallow clickbait, and this one pretty much meets that definition.

Obviously, not all 143 million victims of the Equifax breach are going to prove damage. In fact, almost none of them can. Even if your identity is stolen, can you prove where the thief got your info?

The best and most realistic action individuals can take is to freeze their accounts at the big three credit companies. If you need a new credit card or apartment lease, you can un-freeze it temporarily. Otherwise, turn it off; why should it just be available to anyone who wants it, from year to year?

<comment><USER16> But that costs money. Why on earth should I have to pay to ensure that these corporate leeches will actually protect my data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fantastic bit of earned media for his startup.

</comment><comment><USER20> This will hopefully spur the company to lobby congress for government identification that is NOT the social security number, and in keeping with modern standards of information security, so that they can limit damages.

<comment><USER21> Nah, they will just lobby congress to outlaw suing them.

<comment><USER22> It's sad, but likely true. Binding arbitration anyone?

<comment><USER23> Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't have a contract with Equifax so there's no way binding arbitration can apply.

<comment><USER24> "By putting information on this website you are agreeing to legal arbitration with Equifax", heh I could see this in a TOS somewhere.

Also, more worryingly, there is a good chance that you've signed a contract somewhere that says that in all the paperwork one does in their life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone done this recently? Has Equifax upped their small claims court game?

<comment><USER26> Not a lawyer and just spent the past hour reading into this. It depends on what state you're in — in California, defendants of small claims can appeal in the superior court (with lawyers) in what is called "de novo". r/legaladvice says it is not recommended to go to small claims court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There was a post a while back about submitting your information and some company would file the paperwork for you. I, foolishly, submitted my information. I believe others did as well and I never heard anything of it.

Anyone recall the link?

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this could be handled the same way as Payment Protection Insurance fraud in the UK - companies specifically set up to find complainants and litigate on their behalf in return for a cut.

</comment><comment><USER29> The title would've been just as descriptive without "and it's totally brilliant"

<comment><USER30> Agreed, we've updated the headline here.</comment></comment>


Your Job Outlook Is Cloudy And That's A Good Thing - <AUTHOR> http://thomaslarock.com/2012/12/your-job-outlook-is-cloudy-and-thats-a-good-thing/ <comment><USER2> Do not work for cost center. Work for profit center.</comment>


What happens when you go buy ink - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/KdNCV.png

<comment><USER2> Mostly true, but printers don't tend to come with full ink cartridges, whereas stand alone cartridges are full.

<comment><USER3> Though with ink "drying out" (either for real, or digitally expiring) it probably does make sense for some particularly low-intensity users.

I'm guessing at least part of the price disparity is that they assume anyone with a clue will shop around and order online in advance of running out, whereas a harassed, last-minute shopper will gladly pay over the odds for the ink they need for their current printer rather than deal with the horror of installing new printer drivers in XP.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SpreadJS – JavaScript Spreadsheets, Grids, and Data Views - <AUTHOR> http://spread.grapecity.com/Products/SpreadJS/ <comment><USER2> Can someone explain why this is $700? Its not responsive, looks awful, and is slow as shit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> GrapeCity SpreadJS is a one-of-a-kind JavaScript library that gives you versatile spreadsheet and grid views. It is really easy to implement and a new version was just released.

<comment><USER3> FYI, you have a typo in cell F32 of this demo: [http://spread.grapecity.com/Demos/JS/ExcelLikeSample/](http://spread.grapecity.com/Demos/JS/ExcelLikeSample/)</comment></comment>


"Catastrophic" hack wipes out email provider's entire infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/catastrophic-hack-on-email-provider-destroys-almost-two-decades-of-data/ <comment><USER2> I will continue to stand on my soapbox and proclaim that backup _has_ to include an offline component (preferably one that's verified independently). An attacker has to be willing to bring "kinetic" means to bear if you have offline backup media.

<comment><USER3> Also, a backup that you don't fully restore somewhere to check it actually _fully_ works isn't really much of a backup at all.

<comment><USER4> I feel like these are self-contradictory unless you're really going to go through the effort of periodically restoring each of your offline tapes to a server (which I'm sure some organizations end up doing, to be fair, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass).

<comment><USER5> I also hear people say that all the time. Usually they're managing measly small 1-100 GB databases, not multiple ones > 1 TB in size. Restoring them in a regular basis is _easy_ in that case.

But I'd love to hear how people practice restoring _all_ their backups on a regular basis when it requires having an enormous amount of space. Practically, I just restore a few backups every month, and if it works, I just assume the others work as well (which I know is a false assumption, but what are you going to do?)

<comment><USER6> I'm confused. Why does the number of restores affect how much space you need?

<comment><USER5> You're right, we could restore each, one by one.

However, we have around 30 different databases, each of which take more than a day to restore. We backup databases every X days, upload them to S3, and delete the previous ones, keeping only the last 3 or so.

So if it takes us 30 days to restore all the databases, those backups might already have been gone in S3 as part of the cleanup operation anyway.

It just gets complicated, and non-trivial when you have multiple databases, each TB's large.

<comment><USER7> If you already have the DBs in S3, it seems obvious that you could bring up EC2 instance(s) with gigantic EBS drives attached, restore a DB to it, and run verification measures on it. Parallelize as your budget allows.

<comment><USER8> EC2 is not an airgapped machine. That's known as cloud backup not offline backup.

The solution is to have a tape or disk library and have the other machine take over for restore. If you have TBs of data you can afford a library and another PC to run the recovery test.

<comment><USER6> > EC2 is not an airgapped machine. That's known as cloud backup not offline > backup.

Nobody said it was. This subthread is about the importance of testing backups _in general_.

> If you have TBs of data you can afford a library and another PC to run the > recovery test.

They already explained how that's not enough. Yes, they can add more, but you're missing some info there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From their FAQ page[0]:

> What is your backup strategy / data retention policy?

> VFEmail feels it's important to provide a long-term, stable, environment for > our users. In that effort, we perform nightly backups to an offsite host > from all on-site and off-site mail storage locations. This backup runs at > 12am CST (-0600) and contains all user data. > 3rd party storage of user > data is generally not wanted by privacy-conscious users. If you fall into > that category, you will want to use POP3 and download your mail daily. Our > backup is on a daily/weekly rotation, initiated by a snapshot. If you do > recieve mail between your last POP and the snapshot at 12am, it will exist > on backup for a week - unless it's on Saturday night, then it's a year. You > should set your POP program to download every 5-10 minutes in order to avoid > having your mail caught on backup.

[0] [https://www.vfemail.net/faq.php](https://www.vfemail.net/faq.php)

<comment><USER10> Good chance the SSH private key for that offsite host was on one of the servers the attacker compromised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You should have an offsite backup. If for some reason you don't, you have options to secure a backup host.

You can harden a backup host to prevent most every conceivable method to destroy the backup. You can lock down network access to prevent any connection but one to the file retrieving service itself, and prevent operations such as deletes or overwrites. You can use an append-only filesystem. You can use a SAN or NAS to allow a backup host access to one particular mount to dump files, and a different host can then move files off that mount onto a different mount that the backup host has no access to. Or you could even have "rotating backup hosts" that went effectively offline for a week at a time each, giving you several weeks worth of offline backups in case one backup server got compromised.

But probably you should just do offsite backups.

<comment><USER12> A nit, but it is important to differentiate between offsite and offline backups. VFEmail did have offsite backups, but they were online, and the attacker reformatted those disks as well.

offsite: prevents against physical damage to a single site.

offline: prevents against network-based attacks.

You should have offline backups and offsite backups, which can be the same, or separate. Eg backup to disk/tape, and send it somewhere for storage, or backup to disk/tape kept offline locally, combined with online backups to a server offsite.

<comment><USER11> Good point! I used to assume offsite implied offline, since I'm used to offsite tape backups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "A tale of woe and destruction where our hero learns the value of offline tape backups..."

Ok, so that is pretty harsh but its part of any disaster recovery scenario where the datacenter explodes (or burns to the ground, or gets flooded, etc). And while LTO tapes are slow and nobody likes maintaining those cranky tape library machines, they will save your bacon when the unthinkable happens. Of course if it is a really nefarious kind of thing you might find that your storage unit where the tapes were stored is also torched. No good financial reason to protect against that, its an unlikely scenario.

That said, when you "catch someone reformatting drives" you turn off the switches that give them access to your machines. Or at least you start logging into machines and halting them until you can be physically present to preserve them.

<comment><USER14> Turning off a switch isn't going to kill any existing sessions or dd commands that were in progress - at least not until the SSH session times out and hangs up the commands it was running.

<comment><USER15> I know some people might only ever think about "switch" as meaning a piece of network hardware, but there are other kinds. Remote power off is a thing, and damn well _will_ kill any existing sessions etc.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. When you've got active destruction going on, power down everything first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just speculating here, but perhaps there was a party _very_ interested in destroying data on their infrastructure. Maybe to erase evidence of wrongdoing, or something else entirely.

<comment><USER17> That appears to be the case. The post says that hacking into all of these systems required access to multiple passwords, and because of the speed with which the systems were destroyed, I would guess the attacker had them all in hand to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's always a risk of disgruntled employees doing things like this.

I'm not 100% certain offline backups would prevent going out of business either. A mass exodus of customers from the extensive down time plus inevitable loss of recent data is catastrophic for a mature business in more maintenance than growth mode.

At one of my early sysadmin jobs decades ago, a few weeks into the position an ex-employee broke into the network and wiped the partition tables and whatever else was in the first megabyte of the disks - usually some of the root fs, on all the ~1000 shared hosting servers.

That was a very long week of headaches, and the business never fully recovered. There were offline tape backups, but they were of filesystems not disk images so we didn't have a backup of the MBR/partition tables. There also wasn't a high throughput restore mechanism. It was a minimal single enterprise-class tape drive with a small robot changer holding 10 tapes at a time. Sufficient for asynchronous backups and selective restores over NFS but not at all sufficient for restoring the entire datacenter from tapes in a timely fashion.

<comment><USER8> Restore of even huge offline backup should take no longer than 24 to 48 hours... Only situation that can take longer is a police seizure, since they will seize offline backups.

Worst case you buy a remote host for a temporary runtime and if needed contact your DNS or other host and CA face to face to reset or sign new keys. Given airplanes, this is relatively fast but tedious.

It is quite cheap... As long as you have the data backed up offline. They didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The service owner is sloppy enough with his online presence that his personal website advertised in the Twitter profile is pointing to an SEO landing page. Would make me think twice before entrusting any of my data to his company.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've occasionally wondered what the best way to secure your backup host from the individual clients, and possibly clients from a compromised backup host would be.

The most promising option I've come across so far is Borg running in append- only mode[1] with a client-push type model.

I imagine it wouldn't help in this case, if the attacker has the creds and access to run `dd' on the backup machine directly.

Anyone had any good/bad experiences with Borg append-only (or have other suggestions?)

[1] [https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html#append- only-mode)

<comment><USER21> What about backup server being a client? That should do it.

<comment><USER20> as in, the backup host connects to the target machines and pulls them back to itself?

Biggest concern I have with that is that to get around file permissions, the backup user needs to be effectively root.

It's much more of a problem is the backup server gets compromised and now they also have root level creds to every target machine.

I'm not sure if something like apparmor or selinux could allow for some sort of 'read-only root' type user, and if that would actually be safe in teh circumstances.

<comment><USER22> It only needs root _read_ not write.

There are a number of ways to do this, including a backup client that only sends data but doesn't write, a read only bind remount, or an lvm read only snapshot.

The last one is best I think. Make the new lv device readable to the backup user and have it mount it, then copy the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, as someone working on an email service provider startup… this is basically my worst nightmare.

On the upside, the tooling around infrastructure has improved so much since vfemail launched in 2001 that there's a lot more I can do. With AWS, I can do automatic database backups, S3 bucket delete versioning, IAM auditing, whitelist firewalls, etc.

<comment><USER24> > With AWS, I can do...

Can you remotely delete all the data and backups? (It's an honest question; I'm not intimately familiar with AWS but from glancing at the documentation it seems that even glacier archives can be deleted without delay)

Because if you can, then so can an attacker who has sufficiently compromised your business.

 _edit_ : I see some stuff about "vault locking" which might do the trick. Are you using that to protect your data?

<comment><USER23> Yep, AWS doesn't seem to have any time-lock delete mechanisms as far as I know, which is a shame. I still have to research this, but as far as I can tell the best practice seems to be using MFA delete:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Versioning.h...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Versioning.html#MultiFactorAuthenticationDelete)

And then keeping root user credentials on a cold storage laptop.

Vault lock seems to be for Glacier, but it'd still be worth looking into for cold storage backups. More layers of defense are always good.

<comment><USER25> You can also use S3 legal hold in compliance mode, although, I'm not sure how you would eventually delete it.

"S3 Object Lock can be configured in one of two modes. When deployed in Governance mode, AWS accounts with specific IAM permissions are able to remove object locks from objects. If you require stronger immutability to comply with regulations, you can use Compliance Mode. In Compliance Mode, the protection cannot be removed by any user, including the root account."

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2018/11/s3-object...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2018/11/s3-object-lock/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've run efficient email hosting before. They didn't have backups, they had snapshots. Anything that isn't physically offline with vaulted, off-site provider isn't a backup.

</comment><comment><USER27> So many duplicated posts about this..

<comment><USER28> I haven't seen one that got significant attention on HN yet, which is the standard we apply for dupes ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)). Did we miss it?

<comment><USER27> I've seen at least 4 or 5 posts about the VFEMail thing just today so I dinged this one when I saw it.

No idea what's considered significant.

<comment><USER28> Significant is just a question of whether it got many points and/or comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you are a target, you will be hacked.

<comment><USER15> ...and sooner or later you will be a target.</comment></comment>


SaleInvaders: Rent-a-sales organization - <AUTHOR> http://salesinvaders.com <comment><AUTHOR> I am a developer, several years back, a couple friends and I wrote a loyalty app/saas. The site, allowed a restaurant/shop/bar owner setup a couple types of deals ie "Buy X get Y Free" among others. Each restaurant had a QR code, and when someone would purchase something, the customer would scan it and get a "punch". The owners could track everything via the web. Due to all of us having a 9-5, and this being our first project, we failed, because we didn't realize beforehand that you had to hit the streets every day, and we didn't have the capital to quit our jobs when we figured that out. The only way, to really sell a product like this, was cold calling. Adwords, facebook, etc etc, does not work when trying to reach a small business owner/manager. They are too busy working, to go out randomly searching for stuff. Needless to say, we learned a ton about selling. So, I developed Sales Invaders!. A "sales staff as a service". Things are pretty simple right now, as I'd like to figure out if there is a market for this. If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask!

<comment><USER2> I think its a really great idea, my only concern is that the sales staff you hire won't be as dedicated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable about my product as I am. Sales is a core aspect to a company, and while it may be possible to outsource sales in an existing company after you've established processes, a young start up won't have that yet. Its a job the founders SHOULD be doing because you're still trying to get a feel for the market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. If you haven't sat down with your potential customers yet, we probably aren't for you. If you have visited 5-10 places, can list the questions that get asked over and over, and have your pitch down, but just don't have the resources to hire a staff, then we can help. If you aren't _sure_ what your customers want yet (ie haven't cold-called), we do provide the feedback relevant to a startups needs, but that is not the core offering.

<comment><USER3> can you put up your email. I keep getting an undeliverable. email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This service definitely has merit and I love you guys just putting it up right away rather than building out a full-site.

A lot of founders underestimate the importance of sales people early on. Suster has a couple of good pieces about start-up sales people vs corporate sales people (they are very different skill sets). My biggest concern would be outsourcing the feedback loop that is created by those initial sales calls. The salesperson is your window to customers and your compass to finding product-market fit. It's so critical you often see founders taking on the sales task first-hand. Obviously that doesn't scale and I believe that's where you guys come in!

I would really need to see how you're providing me sales call data and feedback. A screenshot of a dashboard, spreadsheet or something. Allotted phone time with the sales people to discuss what they encountered in the field. Anyway to formalize sales feedback would be of great value. Good luck!

<comment><USER5> Ah ha! I love when someone "gets it". Which you do. The feedback, is going to be extensive, we are still early in the process, but one thing we considered, is taping the sales interaction, and providing it to the startup, but it may "skew" the comments and feedback from the business owner. It's a problem that we are going to solve, and knock out of the park though.

<comment><USER6> That's a lot of commas.

On a more serious note, I think more information about the service would be nice. My personal interest would be in enterprise sales. Is this within the realm of possibility for you guys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Our team (YCW11) did "sales as a service" as ElasticSales for 2+ years. You can read some of our story here:

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

<comment><USER8> "ElasticSales is currently booked out for the rest of the year and therefore not able to accept any new clients at the moment."

"Think Amazon AWS for Sales."

Have anyone ever seen a message on the aws.amazon.com website saying "Sorry, AWS had sold all available computing resources and would not be able to buy more servers till the end of the year"?

Don't get me wrong, I like what you did and I like close.io (and I may use it soon), but the page you're now showing on elasticsales.com has the word "Failed" written all over it. Well, at least that's how I see it, I might easily be a minority (and I usually am).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the industries you pitch question, definitely take off what you currently have and put more difficult industries. Restaurants are ok, but dog groomers? No. I'm looking for someone who can pitch heavy machinery dealers and large international brokers, not a dog groomer or hairstylist.

<comment><USER10> If your company has extraordinarily complex deals like that, I can't see why you'd even consider outsourcing them to a generic sales service like this. Being able to close those sorts of deals is going to be an essential core competency for your company, and even if Sales Invaders was successful in deals like these, you're essentially throwing away an opportunity to learn how to do these sorts of deals in the future.

It's like demanding that Heroku focus on servicing billion dollar companies - there's really no benefit in using an "easy to get started and scale"-type service in large, complex scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How lovely, a pixel guy greeting :)

A tip: due the nature of the service, an "about us" page might help earn an initial trust

</comment><comment><USER12> From your site: How much does it cost?

We have packages starting at $1000, depending on your needs, we can pitch up to 100 customers in your vertical. \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

So you are going to visit 100 customers for me, for the price of $1000? This seems to be quite low. From my experience (10 years, outside sales B2B, full commission) a sales person can only visit about 10 locations a day if they are actually talking and not just pitching something for 30 seconds. If you get any traction with the customers, that will drop to 5 per day.

By my numbers you would work for 10 days for $1000 and have the traveling expenses as well. Sounds good for me, and bad for you. I am also curious about performance. How will I know that your sales person did cold calls? How will I know if they are any good, or if your guy is out there damaging my companies reputation?

We currently use manufacturer reps, about 16 of them. It is a continuous challenge to understand the actions that they are actually taking (not what they tell me they are taking) and hard to track direct results because many of our products are sold through multiple tiers of distribution. These reps are old school, with companies that have been in business for 20+ years.

I hope it works, it would be a great service to use. Feet on the street are hard to manage. Good luck.

<comment><USER13> Can I ask a noob-ish question?

For the outside B2B sales you mentioned, what the compensation structure is like? Purely commission or with a fixed part / retainer? If it's a high-tech software sales, do you have an idea of what's the going commission rate is?

The only experience I have is with salaried sales with tiered commission, so I just want to understand how the alternatives work.

<comment><USER12> I made between 5% and 15% on the sale. Sales were typically $10,000 - $50,000, and I was selling capital equipment. I sold about 1.2M per year, at an average of 12.5% commission (in the 90's). There was a $600 per week draw against commissions, and health care. All the other expenses I had to cover - fuel, vehicle, etc.

Top sellers liked the program, because they made a lot of money. Lower sellers would complain and want to be put on salary (so they would earn more). I preferred the full commission, but I was always #1 or #2 in sales so I earned on the high side.

It was nice, only worked 4 days a week (Monday morning and Friday afternoon off).

<comment><USER13> Thank you, this is helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First off, I want to say this is a great concept. All startups either hate sales or need more sales, so it sounds like your business fits for both categories. I have some experience with door-to-door sales teams and cold calling for 2 different startups. The few comments I have are similar to other discussions but still need to be addressed:

1) Sales Team - Who is your sales team? What is their background? When I was on the door-to-door sales team I was working along side a lot of college students that were not motivated. This was a huge let down to the owners who paid for the sales team. Be upfront with your customers on who will be contacting their potential customers. As a startup founder I do not want my name/brand to be tainted in the industry as a company forcing outsourced sales team to pressure my customers into buying my product (this is an extreme case but does happen).

2) Channel - It sounds like you are cold-calling only, if this is the case then do not include "door to door" and "feet on the street" in your title if you are not going to be talking to potential customers in person. My recommendation would to have packages for cold-calling and a separate package for door-to-door sales. This may be beneficial for businesses to have the option and would be a great upsell for SalesInvaders!

3) Customers - It sounds like you are trying to cover most small business as a target customer. My recommendation is to specialize in one industry. This will allow your team to get better at coming up with pitches for the same industry while understanding your target customer. Also, your chances for getting other clients in the industry will increase when you can tell them that you got X amount of sales for another company in that same industry. This is a crucial selling point, as you would know since your in the business of sales.

Good luck with the idea!

</comment><comment><USER15> Local businesses, particularly restaurants, bars and nightclubs, are extremely difficult to sell to these days, particularly in major cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, etc.

These folks are pitched on new "apps" all the time and unless you have a really compelling proposition, standing out from the last 10 people who walked in trying to sell a new technology-based service is tough. In fact, one of the first things you're likely to be asked selling to restaurants, bars and nightclubs is the size of your audience. If you don't have a meaningful enough number, drumming up interest is all but impossible for most.

</comment><comment><USER16> As one of the few full-time sales people that hang out on HN...

Business to business sales (which is the usual code for high volume cold calling jobs) is a slog. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. I've done it, but never really liked it. I'm more of an enterprise sales guy for start ups. Maybe the variety of different pitches every week is a selling point for potential staff? I really don't know. I do now that you couldn't pay me enough to do the job :)

Outsourced cold calling (phone) is a pretty major industry in the enterprise space. It'll be interesting to see if this scales down to a feet on the street model.

<comment><USER3> There's only a few markets that can cover the sales overhead of feet on the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We took "Show HN" out of the title because Show HN implies something you've made that users can play with. Things like landing pages, fundraisers, and email signups don't meet this criterion.

</comment><comment><USER18> In general it is a good idea but there is to little information on the homepage. Do you also work for provision? Do you work with more technical saas products such as CAD/CAM?

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like a cool service, but I don't understand the quality of the sales people. What experience do they have? What have they sold before?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this might work for my latest startup. I have a market, automation and a clear funnel. I'll be chatting with you guys very soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a good idea and I can see why a lot of small business could have a reason to use it. Just wondering, you may come up with lots of "what people want" ideas as part of your discussions (not necessarily connected to your "client"). You could perhaps try to do something out of those ideas to serve as "leads" for others.

</comment><comment><USER22> How do you do in person meetings? Are you only available in SF, or do you have a system to train people locally anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is really cool. Maybe brand it "Sales as a service"?

Are you offering 100 customers for $1000? Or did I misread?

<comment><USER24> I read it as for $1000 they will pitch to 100 potential customers. They say on their site that they provide value if the lifetime value of your customers is over $100, which implies they expect a success rate of at least 1/10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Site is down. Here's a cached version [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LtRGkef...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LtRGkefTOCIJ:salesinvaders.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

</comment><comment><USER26> Cool. You mention restraunts/salons/dog groomers. Any plans to move higher up the chain to SaaS enterprise type sales? I haven't formalized my process enough to hand off sales to someone else, but I am champing at the bit to try something like this once I get there.

<comment><USER3> I think enterprise sales would be difficult to do other than salaried employee with commission. The sales cycle is too long.

<comment><USER26> I think there is a sort of "enterprise light" market where this could work. Let the outsourced staff handle most sales, and hand off to the company for the more complex sales.

<comment><USER8> This.

I'm also looking (as in 'ready to pay') for a similar service for enterprise IT SaaS with a very light entry level offering to boot from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This model has had some success in the pharma business, but that business is uniquely about just getting to the doctor and passing out info. I'm somewhat skeptical of this idea in any business that requires real, motivated salesmanship.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding with how business works unless you have a new angle or technology to accomplish this. Is there a physical business that doesn't have a $100 Lifetime value per customer?

<comment><USER3> smart phone games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is short on details but nothing like this exists today that I'm aware of. I read HN for stuff like this!

I've emailed our team internally and said "this exists...how do we plug in?"

We shall see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I'd love to see how I can help out. If I can answer any questions, feel free to shoot them to email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this for cold-calling, or an actual salesperson that is on the ground? It's a little unclear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both. Cold-calling to me, as I am using it on the site, is contacting a business who is not expecting it. Rather than use the phone, or email etc, we are sending someone into the restaurant/bar/dog groomer etc for an in-person interaction, pitching your product/service/app etc.

<comment><USER31> To add to the feedback of others, this was confusing to me as well. I saw repeated use of "call" and "calling," and understood that to mean using the phone, which was inconsistent with "feet on the ground."

Doesn't matter what you think it means - if it confuses everyone, just change it.

<comment><USER32> To be fair, it's actually quite correct, as in "to call on someone at their doorstep". That usage is a bit archaic, but the terminology is pretty standard in sales. I'd suggest rather than change it to something nonstandard, just clarify what packages may include with a bit more copy.

<comment><USER33> I second this.

It may seem archaic here, but it is standard terminology in sales to refer to a physical stop-in as a 'call'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have ideas for products for small businesses and I'm looking for ways to test the waters. Is that something your service would be useful for? Or do you think I already need something built?

By the way, I'm feeling like using your service would be "cheating" since I'm terrified of making cold calls or showing up places myself :-(

</comment><comment><USER34> So, anything else to add? The 1 page site is short on details.

<comment><USER35> The call us button shouldn't be a hard link. Not everyone has VoIP integration yet...</comment></comment>


Managing multicore memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/managing-multicore-memory-0913.html

<comment><USER2> They wait until almost the end to tell us why this isn't really such a great idea:

 _Mars cautions that a system like Jigsaw dispenses with a layer of abstraction between chip hardware and the software running on it. "Companies like Intel, once they expose the microarchitectural configurations through the software layer, they have to keep that interface over future generations of the processor," Mars says. "So if Intel wanted to do something audacious with the microarchitecture to make a big change, they'll have to keep that legacy support around, which can limit the design options they can explore."_</comment>


How to use Rails routes in Steak scenarios (and RSpec specs) - <AUTHOR> http://codeulate.com/2010/11/how-to-use-rails-routes-in-steak-scenarios-and-rspec-specs/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. I'm the author of this post.

If you have any feedback or questions, I'll be checking this thread.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm not confident in my startups ability to execute - <AUTHOR>

I recently began as the first employee and second engineer of a startup. It went well for the first couple of months, but now I'm beginning to have doubts. The idea is fine, not stellar, but alright. The problem is both I and the founder recently learned to code, and I don't know if we have the technical prowess to accomplish what we set out to do. Furthermore, I don't know if the founders or I are simply clever enough to do this startup. Both are down to earth, nice guys, but I'm having reservations. I'm a high school junior in the new york area. What should I do? <comment> shane-armstrong Continue. Everybody has doubts at some point in their career, should I pursue this course, should I get rid of this one.

This is not failure to launch, rather, it is failure to fly.

If your skills are not yet good enough, then improve them as you code, the best way to improve is to keep coding, even if it doesn't work out then at least you will leave with a sound knowledge of your chosen platform.

You have already invested months in to this project, the very least you could do is release the minimum viable project and then using requests from your users, improve upon the project in real-time.

You are clever enough. Coding is as simple as adding one and two, getting three, outputting it, making it look nice and shiny and then poking the user with it.

It is only as difficult as you make it. You can do this. Have faith. Not the crappy faith you might possibly get if you ask your chosen deity for help, but the faith you can use to keep the will to continue.

You _can_ do this.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think it depends on your opportunity cost. You are 17, the world is your oyster (as long as you're willing to work for it.) Don't be a jerk, but don't feel like you have to stick with these guys forever.

If you've got other opportunities - either learning, or working, then I wouldn't let this gig hold you back.

If you're still in school and have no better project to work on right now, then stick it out till it becomes a solid resume piece.

In the meantime, blog about everything you're learning and doing. That's the way to turn your meh experiences into long term assets.

</comment><comment><USER3> The part that would make me pause is that it sounds like you don't buy in to the product. If it is truly just the limitations of the skillset, I say press forward. If it's just a weak idea that is just wanting to die, let it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Alternatively, you might just level with your bosses and encourage them to pivot to something simpler/smaller.

My motto: If you can't build a demo of your app in a weekend, then you're aiming too high

</comment><comment><USER4> Normally, I would say quit. But, since you are a high school junior, I would recommend sticking it out. There are all kinds of things you can learn from this experience.</comment>


Metal Dice on indiegogo - <AUTHOR> http://x.co/d6

<comment><AUTHOR> These are sweet! Great for gaming and gambling.</comment>


Show HN:Elementary CA – A method to reduce Rule 30 computational effort - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aparker/a-method-to-reduce-rule-30-computational-effort-62bf304b71b9 <comment><AUTHOR> I decided to post what I have been working on, as I have been researching this largely in isolation and would value feedback from the community here. I _think_ the approach is novel, it certainly allows one to compute n rows with fewer lookup operations and I haven't found anything else that proposes this particular method, but there may be an iceberg of knowledge I've only just scratched the surface of here, so I hope the community here can provide some insight and feedback.

<comment> core-questions This is fantastic work and you've presented it very well. Thanks for the writeup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yours is the first response, thank you for the kind words :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just had some feedback, and did some more number crunching which revealed this is not O(n) but still O(n^2) - I have modifed the article accordingly but will leave it up as the algorithm still provides significant improvements in efficiency for larger numbers of rows.</comment>


Don't panic over the secret copyright treaty - <AUTHOR> http://www.out-law.com/page-10507

<comment><USER3> It should be pointed out that he is referring to the UK. Just because UK (and EU) citizens have allowed their rights to be taken away from them doesn't mean that Americans should not be outraged at what this treaty forebodes. It is an affront to anyone that values the freedom of speech and due process.

<comment><USER4> I agree; the "well, it's almost like that already, so what's a little more law" argument is unconvincing to my ears.

<comment><USER5> True.

But he's still right about the "don't panic" part. Until this actually shakes out into the real world, we don't know how much of an issue it will be. If it's one of those things that no one bothers to enforce, then who cares? If they _do_ try to enforce it, then there will be class action suits and it will eventually go away.

In short, I don't think we can prevent it, but I do think we can get rid of it if need be.

<comment><USER6> You're not considering the worst-case scenario: "they" don't enforce it for a while, just so the public outcry wears out, then "they" start to threaten some ISPs...

<comment><USER5> At which point the lawsuits and such start up. I don't see the problem--the delay before enforcement is irrelevant, it's only the question of enforcement that matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not inclined to panic over the "copyright treaty" part, I am inclined to panic over the "secret" part. If there was nothing to worry about, why is it secret? The article above seems to hold the position, "Don't panic, we don't really know what is in it." My position is "Panic now so that we can know what is in it!"

</comment><comment><USER8> "Though it is thoughtful of trade negotiators to spare us the ugly sight of the horse-trading and chicanery that makes up every law-making process"

This sentence relates point of view is so misaligned with my own that I'm not sure I can take the rest of the article seriously, if at all.

<comment><USER9> I read that sentence as tongue-in-cheek. It's a jab at both the normal way of doing law and also the trade negotiators (they're still doing chicanery, just behind closed doors). The second part of the sentence also makes it seem like the author is laughing at the negotiators: whatever their scheming intentions, the plan blew up in their faces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Overreaction in this case is absolutely rational. You lose nothing by panicking loudly, but you bring more public attention to the issue.

<comment><USER11> Only if your worries prove valid.

And only then iuf your government is inclined to listen to the loudest amongst us.

If the the treaty appears less extreme than is complained about it pretty much invalidates all the panicking.. wrongly of course but that is politics.

They're playing a game; we should too. Stay calm and see what appears - <USER2> go out all guns blazing :)

<comment><USER10> > Stay calm and see what appears

It is easier to fix bugs earlier in development

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The parts of the ACTA that were leaked terrify me to no end. I work from home, and therefore I absolutely rely on my internet connection for my well-being. So what happens if the RIAA makes a mistake and tells my ISP that my internet needs to be cut off? Since such proceedings would not work through the legal system, what recourse would I have?

When I saw the headline for this article, I was really hopeful that maybe the leaked ACTA documents had been discounted, or maybe misinterpreted, and therefore I could stop panicking. However, the headline was an absolute lie; especially for those of us in the US that still have a few freedoms left.</comment>


Cool Things in Rails 2.3 - <AUTHOR> http://railspikes.com/2009/3/30/10-cool-things-in-rails-23

<comment><USER2> Rails has really kept up its development pace nicely. Nested assignments and forms are a wonderful addition. Dealing with related data (in forms and saving) had always been quite a pain and they've done a great job of making that a lot easier.

Some things not mentioned in the slideshow that were important (at least in my opinion):

* Dynamic scopes: you can say Article.scope_by_XXX and it will allow you to use scopes without explicitly naming all of them.

* Batch processing: this allows you to get the results of a query in smaller batches so that you don't have to load everything into memory at once.

* Rack support: it's nice to have Rails being able to be deployed in the way that the community is going for Ruby apps.

* Try: probably one of the best additions. It allows you to say @person.spouse.try(:first_name). Normally, if the person didn't have a spouse and you did @person.spouse.first_name you'd get an exception saying that nil (which is what @person.spouse would evaluate to) doesn't have a method first_name - which is true. This way you don't have to keep saying, "only call @person.spouse.first_name if the @person has a spouse".

* Application Templates: These are basically shortcut files you can make for setting up a new project. We all have slight variants and we can set up the default things we want in all our applications so we aren't starting from such a blank slate (and that way you don't forget to do things like create a .gitignore file before you put your database password out there for the world to see).

<comment><USER3> Oh, good to hear about try() -- that totally beats Object#andand.

<comment><USER4> Hmm.. not really. But its ok. andand is much cooler since you can call functions directly, and with arguments. Try is good for sending simple messages like :size and :errors and not have to care if the object is nil

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> #9 is especially important. The parameter parsing code in Rails < 2.3 was painful to work with for all but the most rudimentary forms. Great to finally see it in there!</comment>


TDecision to Publish Against Government  - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/publiceditor/2013/09/06/decision-to-publish-against-government-request-was-not-a-particularly-anguished-one/?smid=tw-share&_r=1&

<comment><USER2> The article presents it as if the Guardian approached the Times wanting to collaborate on the story. If they have been collaborating with the Post on the the other NSA stories, why switch to the Times for this one?

Does anyone know how these partnerships work?</comment>


Java Bytecode manipulation : Tools of the trade - <AUTHOR> http://eblog.chrononsystems.com/java-bytecode-manipulation-tools-of-the-trade

<comment><USER2> I have longed for the day of no more println() statements

</comment><comment><USER3> Helpful list....Thank you very much.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a HN that's not tech-focused - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a site like Hacker News, except without the tech focus. Basically a HN/Reddit-like forum focused on current events, important societal issues, etc. where the quality of content/discussion is high.
8 years ago Reddit was amazing, but now it's an absolute joke (outside a few specialized subreddits). Quality of content is generally terrible (eg. memes), political correctness (ie. the "hivemind") is rampant, upvotes are based on wittiness/terseness/political correctness while anyone with a dissenting opinion is downvoted, and the demograph of the site - at least in the default subreddits - seems to consist primarily of 12 year olds.
Anybody know of any alternatives? <comment><USER2> I think that the internet, by its own nature, self-segregates people. I might not have data to back this up, but it is apparent that people go online to ratify their own views, rather than to listen to others.

I have also left reddit, mostly because the discussion around any controversial topic is toxic. Toxic. At least here you get the occasional moderates who are willing to actually have a discussion, where they try to check their assumptions and the logical leaps that they make to justify a point.

But to answer your question, I simply say that perhaps HN is the best place to have this type of discussions. Simply because politics, important societal issues, etc permeate our lives, including the technology that we use. In that sense, a good way to ponder about these issues is not to face them directly, but to deal with them as they arise within the confines of our daily lives.

By the way, I have made plenty of weird assumptions and assertions in this post, and so have you, and the weird thing is that instead of focusing on those issues, it is likely that I would feel personally attacked if I were shown to be wrong. That is part of being human, but it is also ultimately why talking about any issue is hard:

critical thinking is hard, and uncomfortable, and a concept that everyone talks about but that nobody is really willing to utilize.

</comment><comment><USER3> metafilter.com

<comment><USER4> Seconded. Metafilter is one of the best-moderated communities out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are your subreddit recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER6> Just improve your Twitter feed - follow the right people and you got it. ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm baffled by the notion that a site with such a powerful and motivated faction of actual white supremacists and open misogynists is apparently too "politically correct" for you.

I consider myself fortunate that I can't even imagine what level of mentality one would need to be too extreme for a site that once allowed rape jokes about its own CEO on the front page, and once mass trolled itself in great number because someone dared shut down a sub devoted to discussing the murder of black people.</comment>