Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays - <AUTHOR> http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2012/05/engineeringinfrastructures/ <comment><USER2> The illustration of the door handle is a great example of piss-poor affordance. A slight ridge is not going to clearly communicate push vs. pull. Especially since our fingers, when gripping, actually like a ridge to fill in the open angle behind the first knuckles.

If you want someone to push, give them a big fat flat metal plate or bar to push on. If they _can't_ pull, they are guaranteed to get it right every time. I bet pretty much every restaurant kitchen and high school gym door in the U.S. gets this right.

<comment><USER3> The door handle could actually be described as an anti-affordance. I looked at the photo and thought to myself what a great idea it was that it gave you a comfortable ridge for your knuckles while pulling and a nice rounded bit (instead of a sharp-edged flat surface) to push on.

That is, it signalled to me the exact opposite of the designer's intended use. I would have been doubly surprised if pulling on that clearly "pull-only" handle didn't open the door.

<comment><USER4> Why not have a handle that's either concave or convex, bowing in or out, to indicate the desired direction? If it's shaped like a hook, you'll pull on it, or more like a dish, push on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an important lesson. Programmers are _constantly_ blaming users for this and that. Yes, it can make sense for stuff that's rare, but building your apps around the idea that users are rational human beings who read error messages and instructions makes no more sense than building your apps around the idea that computers have unlimited processing power and storage space.

99% of the time, "that was the user's fault" just doesn't cut it. You need to be design around the user's flaws just as you need to design around the computer's flaws, the network's flaws, the OS's flaws....

</comment><comment><USER6> That's interesting news to me. I did wonder why smoking paraphernalia continued to appear in planes that were covered in anti-smoking insignia. I always assumed that the bathrooms, seat etc were made in large quantities, and that there are a lot of countries in the world where you can still light up in a flight, not to mention privately owned planes.

I once flew on a Japan Air Lines flight back in the '90s. At that stage they still had the back 6 rows or something as smoking seats. The girl who assigned my seat at check in didn't realise this and allocated me there. I just sat there and took it for 8 hours - nowadays I would have loudly demanded an upgrade out of there - but I was somewhat meek in accepting my fate. The lady next to me had just been to bury a relative in a car crash and was on the way back home. She must have drank half a bottle of whisky and smoked two packets of cigarettes. When I arrived I smelt like a tobacco spitoon and felt as though I had sand rubbed in my eyes.

Allowing smoking on planes was and is a terrible idea. The fire risk alone should immediately discount it.

<comment><USER7> "The fire risk alone should immediately discount it."

A quick Google turns up only two airline accidents _possibly_ attributed to cigarettes (a 1982 Illyshin IL-18 crash in Guangzhou, China and a 1973 crash in France). Pretty minimal, given that smoking was allowed on millions of flights for close to 90 years.

<comment><USER8> We fly a lot more now than before deregulation, while many countries are just emerging with people who commonly commute via planes. I wouldn't be surprised if passenger miles from 1990 to 2010 were larger than 1900 to 1990. Flying used to be a high-class affair, now anyone can fly; not allowing smoking is probably a good thing in that context.

At least, here in China, people are not careful in the way they smoke, and I wouldn't get on a plane that allowed smoking. Ever see a Starbucks trashcan go up in smoke after someone was told they couldn't smoke there? Its quite funny the first couple of times, but it gets old after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of a presentation by Twitter at a conference where they discussed MTBR (Mean Time Before Recovery) instead of MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure). Instead of trying to prevent all possible failures, they focused on acceptable failure and speedy recovery. If a server takes twice as long to response to a request, mark it offline and let the automated recovery process diagnose the problem and if it's just an anomaly mark it back online.

It was pretty interesting and we took a good look at our architecture and found ways to better cater to acceptable failures.

<comment><USER10> Airliners are designed to withstand failure, not to not have any failures. It's a change in perspective, and is very effective.

Both the Fukishima plant and the Deep Water Horizon rig were unable to withstand single failures.

<comment><USER11> >> Fukishima plant

Actually it sounds like the plant failed due to some poor - in retrospect - design assumptions. The generators required to keep cooling systems running safely were buggered by the same disaster.

"fail-over" - they got it half right.

<comment><USER10> The problem is when the backup system is not independent of the primary, so one failure takes out the other. When I read about the step-by-step domino sequence of failures in the plant, the design was clearly deficient.

The erroneous thinking was "the tsunami wall cannot fail". The correct thinking is "what happens when the tsunami wall is breached? what happens to the plant? how can the plant withstand that?"

For example, the most obvious thing is to harden the backup diesel generators against flooding. This would not have been difficult nor expensive. Another solution would have been to have those generators located at some distance from the plant, so they could be repaired without irradiating the workers, and so a disaster at one would be less likely to affect the other.

Another obviously poor design was to have the emergency hydrogen venting go into an enclosed space, where it can build up and explode, rather than venting it outside.

<comment><USER12> I don't know what your background is but, based on your post, I am assuming it is not in civil or mechanical engineering. Please excuse me if I'm wrong.

The design of this power plant probably went like most designs in civil engineering where extreme design loadings were defined (500-year quake, 100-year flood, etc.) and the plant was designed to meet the loads that would be imposed by the most critical event. For a critical piece of infrastructure these loading conditions are quite stringent. While these loadings drive the design at one end, budget drives the design at the other. Most civil projects tend to be just safe enough and not more. This leads to the realm of acceptable risk/failure. The tsunami wall failing under a 1000-year quake is an acceptable failure. The backup systems were most likely designed for progressively lower degrees of acceptable failure. At some point though it becomes too costly to over-design.

Was hardening the backup generators against flooding "not difficult nor expensive"? I can't tell you that, I didn't design it. Based on the fact that they weren't hardened, I would say that it probably was difficult or expensive.

Would placing the backup generators off site be a better idea than having them on site? Possibly. Possibly not. Every meter you move the generators away from the plant is another meter's worth of risk. How many redundant transmission lines do you need for a generator a mile away? How many redundant generators do you need now that you have the added risk of possibly losing a generator's transmission lines?

Contrary to common belief, public works projects do not have an infinite budget. On top of this, working with municipalities generally results in ridiculous amounts of regulations regarding pricing, reviews, and permitting. While this maintains a minimum standard for designs, it also drives all designs down to that minimum standard. It is simply too costly to continually design for more and more unlikely events.

Users of this site should be well familiar with this based on the number of Internet Explorer compatability comments I've read lately.

<comment><USER10> My background is I am an ME and I worked on designing flight critical systems on airliners. I had the philosophy of designing to survive failure hammered into me, and when I see the Fukishima plants, all the red flags go up in my head.

For example, let's assume the wing spar fails. Junior engineer says "but the spar can't fail! We designed it to handle any predicted load!". Senior engineer says "Wrong answer. Anything can fail. How will you design the airplane to survive a wing spar failure?" (The solution usually is to have dual wing spars.)

This question is repeated for every single system and part in the airplane. Failure scenarios are also played out to ensure that failure of one part or system will not have a "zipper" effect of breaking other critical systems.

With Fukishima, I clearly see "the sea wall cannot fail, so we won't even bother to investigate if we can make failure of the wall survivable."

As it turned out, it would have been survivable if only the backup generators hadn't failed due to flooding. Hardening those generators (one way) is to simply put them in a concrete box. It's hard to believe that would have been that expensive. Videos of the tsunami showed a lot of masonry structures withstanding it.

> How many redundant transmission lines do you need for a generator a mile > away?

Good question. The general rule is to have an independent backup system for every critical system. That has made flying around the world in an airliner safer than driving yourself to the post office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was always awesome to me. I knew it perfectly from the moment I saw the ashtrays that it was a conscious and genius decision for the human-centered system of an airplane.

This has business implications more than UI implications, I think. We don't question airlines when it comes to safety regulations, pilot time off, good amounts of rest, all that. We regulate everything liberally. Air travel is a system designed like clockwork for every single variable and every single complex input. And it works nearly flawlessly.

Yet, in business—even in the best businesses—we expect far more of individual people than they are capable of, instead of improving the systems they're in. You have to control for both, and design for the realities of business and work; even the human ones. Don't believe in myths, don't depend on rockstars, and prepare for anything. Improve your systems as if it was as important as air travel. Your employees are great, but put ashtrays in the bathrooms so they don't set the plane on fire. So to speak.

For those interested in systems thinking and especially how it relates to people and business, look up W. Edwards Deming and read at least his 14 points. Read "Out of the Crisis" for more. Personally I think systems thinking needs to be more prevalent in business today, but we're still a very individualist society so it's very difficult to make the leap. Something to consider as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was thinking about this same idea earlier today: Buses in Philadelphia have a bunch of "No Eating and Drinking" signs and consequently no trash cans. The result is that the back of the bus is covered in trash. If they had just 1 or two trash cans it would be a much more pleasant ride.

<comment><USER15> I have never seen a city bus with a trash can.

<comment><USER16> Chicago's CTA busses have garbage cans in front of the rear exit doors. But then again we also have alleys so we don't have to put our garbage out on the sidewalks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If an errant cigarette is enough to bring down a plane why does the TSA strip search me looking for a bomb?

I bet you could get a pretty roaring fire going using the 120v outlet and all the paper goods provided in the bathroom.

<comment><USER5> Because, although it could bring down a plane, it's very likely not to. The fire will be detected quickly and then put out.

Your question is sort of like asking, if an airliner can fly on one engine, why do they bother putting on two? The answer, quite simply, is robustness.

<comment><USER17> My point is that it is very unlikely anyone will try. There is exactly nothing stopping anyone from packing an airplane bathroom with alcohol soaked paper towels and lighting it on fire; and yet it has not ever happened. The TSA is a colossal waste of time and money - the more ways that it can be pointed out the better.

<comment><USER8> I don't like the TSA's approach either, but this isn't a very good argument. They stopped disallowing lighters on flights for this reason; they don't want to care about the small threats and focus on finding...you know...terrorists. The change hasn't soaked in completely yet, but their is hope they'll do the right thing eventually.

It would be fairly easy to put your fire out with a fire extinguisher. But I'd rather not fly with you anyways :)

<comment><USER18> Aren't matches still allowed?

<comment><USER19> Yes, they are. "One book of safety (non-strike anywhere) matches are permitted as carry-on items, but all matches are prohibited in checked baggage."

Even better - matches aren't easily picked up by the X-ray machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
      Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988,
      complaining about their "filthy air" and their "lung cancer".

      This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge.
      In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial
      planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills.

Really? Does anyone actually think this was a bad idea? Forget the "filthy air" or "lung cancer", exposure to smoke can seriously aggravate asthmatics and other folks with respiratory conditions, not to mention _cause_ respiratory conditions in children. Surely smokers can abstain for a few hours instead of exposing everyone in a confined space to their cigarette smoke. I'm at a loss as to why anyone would complain about this.

<comment><USER21> And Poe's Law strikes again.

On the other hand, yeah, there _are_ people who honestly think that those regulations are a bad idea that bring us farther down the Road to Serfdom and the ultimate death of Western Culture.

<comment><USER22> I _always_ forget the name of Poe's Law, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can see the same principle in a lot of places. This makes me think of a passage I recently read about the legal system in Germany:

 _…Unlike many developing countries, German legal doctrine and practice avoid this result. German regulatory violations seldom void contracts, and German prosecutors seldom act on regulatory violations revealed in a civil trial. Thus a gardener in the German gray market who does not pay taxes can sue an employer for unpaid wages without fear of triggering regulatory prosecution. And a customer who buys a restaurant meal at an hour when law requires the closing of restaurants still has to pay his credit card bill. The same applies for a construction contract that violates zoning regulations, or a credit contract that violates banking regulations. Although seldom discussed in constitutional law, separating the civil courts from the regulators and police is an important part of the separation of powers, especially in countries with a large gray market._

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/sol...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/solomons- knot-and-gray-markets.html)

<comment><USER24> That's generally true of most first world countries, including the US and the UK.

Contracts _can_ be broken if they would require an illegal act (i.e., a "crime"), but regulatory infractions generally are not sufficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> <http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic> is a similar example. It's important to cater for what people are going to do rather than what you think they should do.

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems to be down now.

Here's the text if it continues to not work:

I've been lucky enough to have the chance to fly a lot over the past year or so. Working with Stephen Foskett and the rest of the Tech Field Day crew means that I've been to California almost every month. That's a lot of flying.

One of the things that I've noticed on my flights is that they don't want you to smoke. You actually used to be able to smoke on planes, which seems weird now that you can't even smoke outide.

I'm not a smoker, so it doesn't bother me. (As an adorable aside, when I was five years old, I literally glued hand-made no-smoking signs to the walls of my grandparents' house. They were less than amused.) But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk.

Then the bleeding-heart liberals attacked in 1988, complaining of their "filthy air" and their "lung cancer". The FAA banned smoking on flights less than 2 hours, presumably because the pilots were getting nic-fits after longer than that.

This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. In 2000, the FAA banned smoking on commercial planes altogether. Talk about a bunch of buzz-kills.

So now we're flying without cigarettes, and they are not kidding around about this whole "no smoking" thing…all you have to do is open your eyes to see that they don't want you smoking:

That light is never turned off. I have actually seen a few planes which were new enough that instead of a no-smoking sign say "Please turn off electronic devices", under the assumption that everyone is already well-trained enough to not smoke, but those are comparatively rare. Nope, it's mostly the "no smoking signs". But in case you didn't look up, here's the safety information sheet on the airplane. See if you can count the number of "No Smoking" warnings:

And on top of this, there's a smoke detector in the bathroom (along with a heavy fine for disabling the smoke detector, too!)

No, planes are pretty much set up for not-smoking. Heck, there's even a "No Smoking" sign on the ashtray in the bathroom:

Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You've probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn't.

When I first started bringing this up to people, I encountered the same reaction again and again. People would say, "oh, it just costs too much to replace the door or take out the ashtray". This is absolutely not the reason, though.

Allow me to quote from the Code of Federal Regulations for airworthiness:

Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.

The plane can not leave the terminal if the bathrooms don't have ashtrays. They're non-optional.

That's an awfully strange stance to take for a vehicle with such a stringent "no smoking" policy, but it really does make a lot of sense. Back in 1973, a flight crashed and killed 123 people, and the reason for the crash was attributed to a cigarette that was improperly disposed of.

The FAA has decided that some people (despite the policies against smoking, the warning placards, the smoke detector, and the flight attendants) will smoke anyway, and when they do, there had better be a good place to put that cigarette butt.

There's a lot of wisdom in a decision like that. I think that it's a lesson that we can put to use in a lot of the things that we do. There's a really interesting book on a similar topic, called Nudge.. The idea behind Nudge is that every design decision that you make, as an engineer, affects the way that people behave toward your creation, so you should tend toward design decisions that encourage positive behavior in users.

This is similar to the design consideration called affordance. If you've ever walked up to a door and pushed, then realized that the door was supposed to be pulled, even though it looked like it should have been pushed, then you've come up against someone who didn't understand affordance.

Here's a good image of handles which afford pushing or pulling by Yanko Design:

It's a cross between form and function. We have "grippy" hands that open flat. We instinctively know how to use things like this because of how we are formed.

You don't engineer your systems with the belief that none of your computers will ever break. That's insane; you KNOW they're going to break. So don't assume that your users will never break the rules. Build in graceful failure as often as possible, whether you're designing a user interface or a security policy.

Likewise, when you are designing your infrastructure (or security policies), keep in mind the idea of affordance, and nudge people into making the "right" decision each time. The cynical Hanlon's Razor says

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be ascribed to stupidity

Instead of stupidity, maybe people are trying to push on the door that's supposed to be pulled.

<comment><USER27> The airlines actually save money by preventing smoking : The air in the cabins needs to be recycled less often. The flip side, though, is that air-bourne diseases are more prevalent on flights now, since the air is rebreathed more often before filtering. Source : Qi series 1 (BBC UK).

<comment><USER28> How exactly do they save money by not recycling air?

You don't have to pay for air during flight - it comes from the outside air and is free, it's not canisters or something.

<comment><USER29> You do have to pay for air if you care what pressure it is at. Non-Sherpas will demand a refund of their ticket price if provided air at ambient pressure at 35000 ft.

<comment><USER28> Lets do the math then: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=785+millibars+*+876+cub...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=785+millibars+*+876+cubic+meters+*+ln%28239+millibars%2F785+millibars%29)

Result: Each air change costs around .62 of a gallon of gas (assuming perfect efficiency). Or around $2.50 - let's call it $10 to account for inefficiency. In contrast it costs around $10,000 per hour (not including salary) to fly a large plane.

Saying they don't circulate air to save money is ridiculous.

<comment><USER30> Some airlines make just over $100 per flight. Not per person per flight, PER FLIGHT. They are looking for every saving they can get.

You can work this out my looking at an an airlines profits, and how many flights they did a year.

<comment><USER31> Life is complicated. So are airlines.

In this case, airlines are a business designed not to have runaway profit. The unions are very powerful. They know how much money the airline is making a demand large percentages of it. They leave a nominal profit for key investors but shareholders as a whole are regularly left out. In fact, if you look at the entire history of commercial flight, the industry is break-even.

That's not a fluke. If costs were higher, unions would get a smaller cut. If costs were lower, unions would take more.

Philip Greenspun has some great writing on this, as well as the old, shortlived but fantastic Enplaned blog.

<comment><USER32> You are referring, of course, to this excellent (and somewhat frightening) article: <http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> nice message with the real reason for the ashtrays.

one thing that bothered me however, was that push vs pull handle design. if you're really trying to provide affordance, why have a handle at all on a door that needs to be pushed? isnt it our natural tendency to pull on a door handle when provided with one?

all we'd need was a "Push" sign and we'd be done. The shape of the handle hinting how to use it seems subtler than providing the whole door surface as actionable; and if you had to unlock to open, we have well established pushable door designs already.

<comment><USER34> People frequently don't read signs, which is the point of the affordance design (plus caters to folks who can't read the given language). Also, hands make stuff dirty - you do want something there that's easy to clean, though that can just be a metal plate that can't be pulled.

<comment><USER33> but you could take the sign away and imo people would still open the door - simply because that seems to be the _only thing they could do_. plus with the whole door surface being available, why would you use just your hands? use your shoulder or even back (if you happen to be carrying stuff in both hands)!

seems to me like that would be more affordance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think the author gives the federal government too much credit. Which is more likely: the government out-witted people by thinking ahead and foreseeing people would break the law, so they write a law to counter it; or, they left the law on the books from when smoking was legal and never amended it? I think the latter.

<comment><USER36> The "federal government" as in the the FAA knows quite a bit about regulating airline safety. The probability that the FAA left a regulation in there because they just forgot to change it is pretty much 0.

<comment><USER37> I think you give them too much credit. When I was training to be a pilot some 10 years ago, I remember asking why a lot of regs were in the books. The answer was usually a shrug, or some anecdote about a corner case from the pioneer days of flying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Perhaps also because there are still airlines in the world (almost entirely in the Middle East and Africa) that still allow smoking.

<comment><USER39> I don't know about the Middle East. I've flown on just about all the Middle Eastern airlines over the past 7 years, I don't think I've seen a single one that permitted smoking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Any time you find what you think is an irrational rule in aviation, you can usually trace it back to someone dying.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not really surprised by smokers not being deterred by multiple warnings not to smoke on planes. Airlines rightly install ash trays to avoid smokers throwing cigarettes into the wrong place creating a real fire hazard.

Remember being on a long haul flight and passenger next to me would disappear to the lavatory clearly sneaking a smoke. He also snuck off to sleep in first class. We have rules in place for the minority of society who lack common sense.

</comment><comment><USER42> Very good observation. I've never paid attention to the ashtray in the airplane bathrooms and thought they were relic from the plane design in the old days.

<comment><USER43> I thought they were a relic not of plane design, but from "flight certification" of the lavatories or the doors.

The FAA and the major US plane companies (of which only Boeing is left) made a huge process of flight certifying every little trinket and gewgaw. Once certified, the technology on a plane was essentially frozen, as it was too expensive to certify anything else. I give you the seatbelts and their pressed-steel 50s-style buckles as another example. They look like something Dr Benton Quest developed just after he graduated from college on the GI Bill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Here's a link to the book site and Amazon page:

<http://nudges.org/> [http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health- Happi...](http://www.amazon.com/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health- Happiness/dp/0300122233)

</comment><comment><USER45> I thought "and their "lung cancer"" was the best part.

The fact that some on HN cannot detect the sense of humor is a little scary.

</comment><comment><USER46> So in that case, we should put ashtrays in libraries, gas stations and everywhere, so we prevent fire?

<comment><USER47> Fires on planes are a little more serious. If not stopped quickly, they can spread through the space between the fuselage and the cabin, filling it with smoke. At altitude, they don't have enough oxygen to burn that well, but if it's spread far enough, as soon as you're on the ground the inrush of oxygen will turn it into an inferno in about two minutes (this is why manufacturers have to be able to show that the plane can be entirely evacuated on something like 90 seconds with half the exits blocked.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I can't imagine being stuck in a floating smoke pit. The airlines would have to pay me to fly.

</comment><comment><USER49> First of all: why airplane toilets called bathrooms?

<comment><USER50> It's not the airplane; those facilities are simply called by different names in different parts of the English speaking world. Toilet, restroom, bathroom, WC, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> And Sweden.

</comment><comment><USER52> Alternative idea: allow the flight attendants to hand out nicotine patches. :-)

<comment><USER53> Ryanair sell "e-cigarettes" on their flights.

<comment><USER54> I've heard of flights saying they're not allowed for various reasons, encouraging people without them to have a normal cigarette being the most unsurprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Site is down. A conspiracy by the TSA to bring down those that would thwart security, no doubt. ;)

</comment><comment><USER56> Nice writeup :D

<comment><USER57> I'm sure it was, but now it says

"This website is offline. No cached version is available"

<comment><USER58> Try the google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outpu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy- ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.standalone- sysadmin.com%2Fblog%2F2012%2F05%2Fengineeringinfrastructures%2F&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=777765211aff8a58&biw=1596&bih=789&ion=1)

<comment><USER13> Or this gist I made while I had the page up:

<https://gist.github.com/2766143></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Google lying in its own ad? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/Yj4Nj

<comment><USER2> That's not even the number I see in the iTunes.app version of the App Store (1559).

<http://i.imgur.com/0bBUL.png>

ED: It's possible that the number we see is based on the current store location the user is in. Google presumably has access to the overall count, and the original post contains the number of US reviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> google search results count in million is a fraud as well, click sequentially the number will fall in logarithmic scale

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this Reddit?</comment>


Google Analytics Announces Content Experiments API - <AUTHOR> http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/google-analytics-becomes-robust-testing.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pleased to see Google validating Myna's technology choice of multi-armed bandits ;-)</comment>


Is it possible to reassemble a shredded document? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2223844/ <comment><USER2> After the Iranian revolution, carpet weavers reassembled shredded US documents by hand, revealing all the espionage that was going on.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#Unshredding>

<comment><USER3> The Stasi documents are probably the biggest project in this category:

"The Stasi files are something else entirely. In 2000, the BStU collected them and sent them to Magdeburg, a decaying East German industrial city 90 miles west of Berlin. In hand-numbered brown paper sacks, neatly stacked on row after row of steel shelves, they fill a three-story, 60,000-square-foot warehouse on the northern edge of town. Each sack contains about 40,000 fragments, for a total of 600 million pieces of paper (give or take a hundred million). And each fragment has two sides. That's more than a billion images."

[http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_sta...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER4> Though it has dark side: I heard rumours that the reconstructions is deliberately slowed down by low-tech. The Stasi (east German secret police) amassed documents that could embarrass powerful people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's entirely possible if you're working with a reasonably small amount of material. Not even that hard to do. It's easier than a jigsaw puzzle. It's also possible to build a primitive crossbow out of pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips. (had a boring office job for a few years)

<comment><USER6> I'd have thought that the security services, NRO for example, have software that receives scans of paper strips and does edge matching to reconstruct the page.

It doesn't seem too hard algorithmically (to this non-programmer) to do that, something like: take all strips and analyse them for position of edge markings; take all edges and compare the edge-marking positions giving a matching score by pair, match up the best scores and display to a user for final arrangement.

If you were looking at fragments of paper I'd probably go with a letter matching based on pre-analysis of the font used (by machine). use the letter matching to arrange the fragments as if they were strips and proceed from there.

I'd be amazed if such things don't exist.

We shred and compost if more security is needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes.

It has gotten even easier to do now...

If you need to have something be permanently "shredded", you should consider a "high security" shredder. That is, one that not only shreds vertically, but horizontally as well. After that is finished, but the little pieces into water and turn it into mash.

The other option is using acid, or....

not writing things down that will get you put in prison.

<comment><USER8> _not writing things down that will get you put in prison._

Well, that's just unreasonable. Everyone has to write things down that would get them thrown in prison, right?

Right?

:(

<comment><USER9> «Que l'on me donne six lignes écrite de la main de l'homme le plus honnête, et je trouverai de quoi le faire pendre !»

("Give me six lines from the hand of the most honest man, and I will find in them a reason to hang him!")

\-- Cardinal de Richelieu, Mirame

<comment><USER10> Well writing your secrets in French will probably keep them safe in America, but not in other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People think of shredding as destroying a document, but in fact it's just scrambling it. And with enough time, someone will be able to unscramble it. Documents which truly need to be destroyed should probably be burned or pulped.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good thing I put my shredded paper in my worm compost bin. (Well, actually I do that because it's beneficial to mix some lower-nitrogen waste in with the higher-nitrogen waste (vegetable scraps).

But it really does destroy the shreds nicely, even if it takes a few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well in China everyone use a 0.25 dollar ligher instead of a shredder to destroy documents.

<comment><USER10> Trying burning modern laser printer/copier paper, it's not easy, especially lots of pages together

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> yes, absolutely:

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction- News.asp?NewsN...](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction- News.asp?NewsNum=1033)

The east german stasi tried to get rid of truckloads of documents this way and lots of it got recovered.

The only real way that I know of getting rid of paper is to burn it or to dissolve it.

And with burning you still have to make sure that the ashes get crushed!

Paper is incredibly hard to really destroy.

Try burning a phone book and see how much you can still recover from it afterwards.

<comment><USER4> In waste-energy plants they use special equipment to burn phone books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Summary: yes, unless it is _too_ shredded.

Also, water is wet.

<comment><USER16> Water is not always wet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> See also:

[http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+doc...](http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+documents)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ecch. Years ago, working on genomics stuff, it occurred to me that the same kind of approach could unshred documents. I didn't pursue it, because I didn't think of who the market would be. (Well, that and the usual other million distractions.)

</comment><comment><USER19> In some contexts it may be easier to find a hard drive with the electronic original text of the document that was subsequently printed, filed for a while, and then shredded.

</comment><comment><USER20> A quick lesson: if you're doing something where unshredding will get you in prison or shot, pay the extra $$ for a cross-cut shredder.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes.</comment>


As long as we're posting our chess-variants, here's mine - <AUTHOR>

I invented this when I was in high school to play with friends during study hall.  It was fun.
1. The chess board is the real projective plane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_projective_plane .  So if a bishop is on h1 and moves forward and to the right, it comes out on a7 and would proceed to b6.  A rook that moves down from f1 comes out on c8 and proceeds to c7.
2. The board starts out empty.  Players begin with each of the eight non-pawn pieces in their "inventory".  A turn consists either of moving a piece or of placing a piece from your inventory.  You must place your king on the first turn.
3. All pieces except for pawns follow the same movement rules as in regular chess.  Pawns can move one space in any orthogonal direction or capture one space in any diagonal direction.
4. Whenever one of your pieces other than a pawn is captured, you get a pawn placed in your inventory.
5. If one of your pawns captures a piece, your pawn transforms into the piece it captured (but remains its own color).
6. The object of the game is to capture your opponent's king. <comment><USER2> Me and a friend tried to invent poker-chess. Can't remember the rules but I think when a piece would ordinarily be taken their was a showdown. Anyhow it sucked.

</comment><comment><USER3> This one is fun: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichess>

<comment><USER4> An IOCCC entry (gasp, is that language allowed to be mentioned here?) implemented this game awhile back.

<http://www.ioccc.org/2001/dgbeards.c></comment></comment>


How to Trend on the App Store - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@adamturnerLA/how-to-trend-on-the-app-store-a66130950730#.24qiw1hov <comment><USER2> tl;dr: To get to the number 2 trending spot, we had 6,200 organic downloads within a period of 24hrs, with 3,000 of those packed within the first 3 hours. We gained over 12,000 downloads total in 4 days.</comment>


How  to Hack Dressing Well - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pistollake.com/post/63019155955/5-ways-to-hack-dressing-well

<comment><USER2> I feel like shopping online has helped my fashion sense. Before I would just walk into a store, try on the first thing that look agreeable, and if it fit I'd buy it and leave. Mostly I just wanted to get in and out. But most online retailers have lookbooks and recommendations. You get a better idea of what clothes look good with other clothes. Plus because you're in the comfort of your own home, you can take as much time you want deciding what you think looks best. Also the simple act of browsing clothes becomes a lot easier/faster. Rather than rummaging through a store you're just scrolling down a page. You can literally glance through hundreds of styles in a matter of minutes.

<comment><USER3> I think the inspiration side of it is huge - seeing how a look wears on someone else is completely different than seeing something hanging or on a mannequin. Which online retailers do it best?

Personally a huge fan of MFA on Reddit for inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very relevant article from the opposite sex pov from awhile back: [http://blog.timoni.org/post/24619757935/why-i-wear-the- same-...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/24619757935/why-i-wear-the-same-thing- every-day-and-what-i-wear)

Really made me rethink what was in my own closet and what was worth owning (and nice obligatory hat tip to William Gibson). As with most things, less is more.

<comment><USER3> Damn, this author did a way better job than I did too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shopping online has made me hate shopping 100x less than I used to. I dig that its becoming increasingly easy to buy legit stuff online without having to go to a freggin mall.

<comment><USER6> I bought two pair of Levis online. Same size and style as each other, and as the pair I had at home that convinced me I wanted more. All three pairs are radically different fits. The two pair came from different suppliers, shipped by $ONLINE_RETAILER.

It's not a paradise by any means.

EDIT: this was meant to be a reply to wsul's sibling comment.

<comment><USER3> I've had the same problem before. Store shopping as well. Sometimes I'll try on two colors of the same shirt and they'll fit much differently. The fix to this though is just to find the manufacturers that understand how important consistency is. It isn't easy.. manufacturing clothes is fairly imprecise, depending on methods used, but some companies care more than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> you've omitted the single greatest hack - actually being in shape. it makes buy clothes so much easier, most certainly when shopping online.

<comment><USER3> Haha, very true. I think that'll be the next blog - MED/tl;dr on being in shape - especially when you're time-constrained / building a company.

<comment><USER7> skipping, planks, & pushups. it won't make anyone super strong but guys can be far more fit than average. nothing worse than a fatty wearing the clothes you've described. also, MFA is fantastic.

<comment><USER3> skipping ... ? [http://reallifemaggie.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/skipping.g...](http://reallifemaggie.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/skipping.gif)

I'm of the mind that 95% of being in shape is in the kitchen - and a lot of the same principles apply - find what works, put in the prep, then set it and forget it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My Quarantine Project, The Bell - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebellisringing.com/ <comment><USER2> A little backstory would help here --

@jwworth: _Well, here 's my social-distancing project. It's called The Bell; a way to stay connected when you're apart. Ring away, send me your feedback, and take care of each other._

My first reaction was 'meh', until someone rang back. What an odd feeling with all the isolation recently. For some reason i can't hear when someone else rings the bell, not sure if that is intended, but it'd be a cool feature

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't thought about hearing when others ring; that's a cool idea!

<comment><USER2> And i guess the next logical step after would be to implement an API, and allow people to create a physical bell to interface - ring your bell at home, 200 bells ring around the world :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like this take on the project!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome work.

After trying it out I was curious about the "timeout" mechanism. After a quick glance at the code, It appears the timeout is purely client-side. Which isn't a problem, but it won't stop any modifications to the client-side script from sending any number of 'increment_ring' events.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

I thought there might be an issue with such behavior, but didn't get around to addressing it in the proof-of-concepting this project never quite graduated from.

Do you (or anyone else) know of patterns or libraries for timing out channel pushes from one particular client to the backend? I'm using Phoenix Channels with WebSockets.</comment></comment>


HyperFoods: Machine intelligent mapping of cancer-beating molecules in foods - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45349-y <comment><USER2> > _Plant-based foods (i.e. derived from fruits and vegetables) are > particularly rich in cancer-beating molecules . . . Evidence from > experimental studies has implicated multiple mechanisms of action by which > dietary agents contribute to the prevention or treatment of various cancers_

I prefer to say that a lack of fruits and vegetables causes cancer rather than they prevent cancer. Logically equivalent, but it leads me to consider them normal and packaged food abnormal.

Anyone can define normal for him or herself, but this way motivates me to eat more of them, as does discovering through experience how much more delicious they can be.

<comment><USER3> Some studies linked meat to cancer due to viruses, viral particles, prions and other molecules present in the meat.

That said dietary studies are extremely hard to conduct in a controlled manner and thus replicate.

A diet which is heavy on plant based foods might be cancer preventative since you need to consume calories; additional plant material itself might contain molecules that help you combat cancer or at least serve as a barrier to potential carcinogenic pathogens.

As far as cancer and meat consumption goes it seems that pork and beef are the biggest offenders it's not clear yet if it's simply because they contain more pathogens which can impact humans as they are mammals or because those meats tend to be consumed at larger amounts.

Poultry and fish don't seem to have as much impact with the latter showing no increase in cancer at all by most studies iirc.

<comment><USER4> Wild caught fish often contains mercury though, hence the recommended weekly limit.

<comment><USER5> Different fish, and different sizes of the same fish contain different mercury levels (big fish == more mercury). Many wild caught fish are quite safe to eat: [https://www.fda.gov/food/metals/mercury-levels-commercial- fi...](https://www.fda.gov/food/metals/mercury-levels-commercial-fish-and- shellfish-1990-2012)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was wondering if there was any merit to a theory I once saw, and if it is called something or written up somewhere as I lost track of it.

If it is total nonsense, that would be great to know as well.

To the best of my memory, it goes along the lines of the following.

Most plant matter, in particular the parts that are considered vegetables(stems, leaves, roots), have a toxicity to prevent consumption by animals.

Many animals are immune to most or all components that would be very toxic if not processed by digestion, the liver, enzymes, etc.

But the act of processing the plant matter, in and of itself, minor amount of toxic residuals or derivatives from processing, or minor amounts of unprocessed toxins present that are not enough to be harmful in small quantities, keep organs and the immune system challenged and exercised, like how exercise keeps your strength up and your body challenged.

An exercised immune system and organs, while not perfect, are much better at keeping anomalies such as cancer minimal and fighting cancer overall.

<comment><USER7> That sounds like homeopathy... But your account sounds a lot more plausible.

<comment><USER8> Maybe you're thinking of hormesis? That's the term for small amounts of damage bring helpful, as with exercise. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis)

But this is a detectable amount of damage, so it's not homeopathy.

<comment><USER7> No, I'm familiar with the concept but the OP was specifically talking about plant toxins.

I don't know if the idea of extreme dilution and water memory have always been a part of homeopathy. I don't believe those ideas have any merit. They seem like a perversion of legitimate herbal medicine. Perhaps I should have lead with that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the notion that you can eat your way to health or longevity is wishful thinking. We all _want_ to solve our health issues by eating, which is an activity we enjoy.

In reality, the positive impact on your metabolic, bio, age, and cancer markers of _not eating anything_ (fasting) are marked and distinct as opposed to magical formulas of "dark colored vegetables" and "antioxidants" and "polyphenols" whose effects are difficult to ascertain _at best_ and at worst are probably non-existent.[1]

If there were some combination of blueberries and red wine and pomegranates and acai juice that made us live noticeably longer, or more disease free, we would know it. We wouldn't have overlooked it accidentally. We are hardly the first people to think long and hard about the problems of aging. What we _do know_ is that vigorous exercise and calorie restriction make people immediately healthier and less afflicted by disease - cancer and otherwise.

It's quite sad, frankly, how terrible and unacceptable that simple recipe is for so many people. People are, literally, _dying to not exercise_.

[1] For a good discussion of the inability for "antioxidants" to reach the inner portion of the cell where the "oxidation" occurs and for a discussion as to how bad that might be if it could happen (oxidation and free radicals are probably essential cell signaling methods that cause ill mannered cells to commit apoptosis, or "suicide"), I recommend the excellent book _Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life_ by Nick Lane.

<comment><USER10> It is remarkable how so many tech spaces seem to be positively marketing eating disorders nowadays. Like, seriously, some of the rhetoric here is very similar to stuff I've seen on pro-ana spaces.

Please, it may be physically healthier to fast, but it's a very easy slippery slope into full-on EDs. Eat, but eat less if you want the benefits.

<comment><USER11> Instead of full on fasting there is the option of "intermittent feeding", where you only eat part of the day, without restricting calories. This has some very interesting health benefits [1].

It's still advisable not to overeat, obviously.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5064803/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5064803/)

[edit] typo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the general topic of healthy eating, anti-cancer foods and general disease prevention through diet, I found the (sensationally titled) book How Not to Die[0] pretty interesting and quite motivating. Would love any other recommendations or critical reviews!

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961)

<comment><USER13> +1 On how not to die, the research is very well done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They should have added some model for which foods to avoid based on any known carcinogens..

</comment><comment><USER15> This article sums up modern medicine, and tech, rather well. Let's boil things down to common molecules, rather than viewing the world as holistic.

Your body needs food. Not soylent with a "cancer beating booster pack."

Eating Kale, Spinach, or Lettuce won't have different "cancer beating" scores. Just eat leafy fucking vegetables.

<comment><USER16> Exactly this; also, as a computational biologist I cringe at the stacking of dubious models that produced this "mapping". First is the "interactome", a terrible way to model biology, which is used to predict drug interactions, a highly dubious proposition, which is used to identify similarly-acting molecules in foods, again highly dubious - this isn't even GIGO, it's GIGIGIGO. And at the end of the day, none of this crummy methodology is going to result in any wisdom superior to "eat more kale". It's unfortunate that this is the prism certain investigators have trapped themselves in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> TLDR: drink tea and eat your vegetables.

<comment><USER18> My father was a big tea drinker, was eating a lot vegetables and fruits... but died of cancer. The think is cancer is so complex you can't avoid it with TL;DR.

<comment><USER19> Reducing your cancer risk is more about delaying getting cancer until something else killed you.

People talk about actions gaining or losing X time from someone's life. That should not be taken literally as it's simply a way to interpret statistics. Much like how playing the lottery is a net loss of around 50% of the ticket price. That does not mean you always get 1$ back from a 2$ ticket.

<comment><USER20> Not to mention that years of potential life lost is tricky to define, and the method in vogue isn't very good: take all the people with a condition, filter that group down to those who died before age X, and the years of potential life lost is the difference between X and the ages of death. Funnily enough, this method says the name "John" is a condition which reduces your expected lifespan.

The method can be improved, but after a certain point it's just a bad imitation of relative survival.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitly News - <AUTHOR> http://bitlynews.com/

<comment><USER2> For those wondering _wtf_ (like I did for a couple of minutes after clicking through), from <http://bitlynews.com/about.html>:

 _It works by automatically discovering bit.ly links on Twitter in real-time, then posting stories with high click activity on bit.ly. Each story's score is periodically updated with recent stats from bit.ly, so the most clicked-on stories bubble to the top._

<comment><USER3> Unless they are doing some clever filtering, this can be very easily abused.

<comment><USER4> It's already half garbage anyways. Recipes and fashion tips? Just what I always wanted!

Would be cool if things could be categorized somehow so I could only see the top stories being shared for things I actually care about. I realize this isn't really possible but one can dream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm the developer of Bitly News.

One thing I'd like to add to the site is automatic categorization of links, like on Google News. If anyone has suggestions on how to accomplish that, please comment.

I'm also struggling with intermittent 502 proxy errors on the server where Apache has problems proxying to news.arc on localhost.

<comment><USER6> Re: categorization, would this solve your problem?

<http://www.kosmix.com/corp/developer>

<comment><USER5> That might work. I'll look into it - thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uses a version of news.arc vulnerable to the identity stealing problem described in <http://xach.livejournal.com/228481.html>

That's still the latest version of news.arc publicly available, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be REALLY awesome if it also scraped the text of each tweet (sans link) and converted it into comments on each thread. Identical tweets would translated into 'upvotes' on the comments.

This is great.

<comment><USER9> Yes I was hoping for this. In fact, why limit yourself to Bit.ly links? You could literally index every link coming through Twitter. Future expansion: move from Twitter to all public links shared on the entire internet.

<comment><USER5> At first I tried indexing all links (not just bitly ones) but the volume of results was too much to keep up with. I'm just using the plain old twitter search API.

And the project was for the Bitly API Contest, so I figured I'd just look at bitly links and leave it at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This just won the bit.ly api contest. Congrats to the developer(s), it looks great!

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like this for just my "network", maybe people I follow and people they follow.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry for being off topic, but where can you get the news.arc code?

<comment><USER13> This should send you on your way - <http://arclanguage.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 502 Proxy Error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

\--

Dead already? edit: it's up again!

<comment><USER15> Dead again.

Edit: Up again.

<comment><USER16> Dead again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks familiar!

</comment><comment><USER10> Just got picked up by tech crunch: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/bitly- news/>

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Nice. It would be even nicer if it could intelligently handle deduplication. At the moment there are 6 World Cup news stories on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER18> Forgot I had clicked the link, was wondering how the technical level of content plummeted so quickly. I need more coffee.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very very cool in concept. In practice... the content is borderline unreadable. Though I guess thats a me thing.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I have to agree, but I still find this app very interesting and worthwhile. It's just a shame the most tweeted stuff is such dire, pointless BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very cool. I will be bookmarking.

</comment><comment><USER22> Heh, whoever put this together didn't remove the user account stuff. I just created an account there and was able to comment & submit stories.

Although, I guess that might have been intended functionality.

<comment><USER23> To me, ability to comment makes sense, ability to submit stories does not (as per the about page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Funny, I made this only yesterday: [http://pepijndevos.nl/the-age-of-apis-and- virtual-ghost-town...](http://pepijndevos.nl/the-age-of-apis-and-virtual- ghost-towns)

</comment><comment><USER25> Love it. I finally have a one-stop resource for breaking news for popular culture and other things outside of the web/tech/digital news that I spend the vast majority of my time reading.

<comment><USER26> Reddit is awesome for that, BTW, especially as it's sorta categorized and you can add/remove subreddits depending on your interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not sure why, but I feel reticent to comment on an aggregated link. I think this might be an issue. Not sure why, but I want to know that someone had a stake in the submission.

</comment><comment><USER28> This thing has real potential. Props to whoever put it together.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why is there a login button and register form if all stories/links are picked from bit.ly automatically. I mean, there is not much registered/logged in users can do.

<comment><USER30> they can add comments.

<comment><USER31> The first three commenters are doing their best youtube comment impersonation. I do wonder how you start a new site and keep this kind of thing away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> See also <http://pulsememe.com> (top 10 story list generated from Pulse news app usage)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm surprised so many of the links are in English.

</comment><comment><USER34> Great site, fun summary of popular links.

</comment><comment><USER35> heh if this takes off, I can imagine almost every aggregator site having a HN clone of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love the "welcome" feature.

</comment><comment><USER37> categories are needed as you don't have a unified community submitting content

</comment><comment><USER38> Simple. Effective.</comment>


Fujifilm's first surveillance camera can read a license plate from 1km away - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/7/24/20708236/fujifilm-sx800-security-camera-long-range-1000mm-focal-length-image-stabilization-heat-haze-fog <comment><USER3> I have a Nikon P900, which I bought 4 years ago. I think it would be able to identify a license plate from 1km too. I took a photo of a couple at a restaurant ~3km away, and you could identify the gender and skin color.

The P900 has been succeeded by the P1000, which is the same focal length as this one.

<comment><USER4> From the article: "Nikon's P1000 has a 125x, 3000mm-equivalent zoom lens for example"

This new camera has a 1000mm-equivalent lens.

<comment><USER5> I have the P1000, it is amaaaazing.

The moon will completely fill the frame.

You can look at airliners and read the tail numbers. At high zoom levels tracking the airliners is the hard part. You have to have a steady hand, although the image stabilization really helps. It also has a quick-zoom feature allowing you to zoom-out, locate and center something and snap back quickly.

The article seems to indiate the p1000 doesn't have optical image stabilization, but it does.

But the p1000 does NOT have ISO 819200 or heat haze correction. That sounds pretty cool. With the p1000 you will see atmospheric shimmering pretty often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finally! CSI movies will make actual sense now with their once absurd zoom on blurry pictures ^_^ hahaha!

<comment><USER7> haha sadly no, not yet. Yes for live video but not for reviewing recorded footage. That would require something closer to gigapixel video recording.

<comment><USER8> There _are_ security systems that stream a lower bandwidth zoomed out stream to clients reviewing footage, then sub in the full resolution version of the region being viewed when you zoom in, as a bandwidth savings mechanism - multiple 30Mpx camera feeds are impractical to stream around all the time.

Of course, they automatically substitute this when you zoom, they don't make you click "enhance", that'd be terrible UX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the breakthrough here? It seems they just mated a security camera with a telescope lens assembly, both of which we've already had for decades.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was pretty cool. Almost everything is legos now; you can't claim something isn't novel just because the components exist independently - <USER2> they haven't been used in that combination I say it's still novel.

"What's the breakthrough here? It seems they just mated peanut butter with jelly between two slices of bread, all of which we've already had for decades"

<comment><USER11> > Almost everything is legos now

I strongly believe that this was always the case. There was never a 'breakthrough' invention.

<comment><USER12> The wheel?

<comment><USER13> Pretty much. After that it's all been wheels. Take the lenses, that's just a wheel with a piece of glass on each side, easy. The camera? More wheels of different sizes somewhat cleverly put together to capture light and store it - boring. It's almost depressing really, kids nowadays don't know how to make new things, just strap two things together with tape.

<comment><USER12> The transistor is a wheel with differently-doped semiconductor areas?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not impressed. What is the (field of view) FOV at the 1km distance? Extremely narrow I assume.. IF they can read 1km away with a wide FOV, then color me impressed!

</comment><comment><USER15> People often discuss of surveillance in the context of companies they interact with every day, but kinds of tools like this camera are typically used by public services. What 's the discussion about privacy wrt to the data that govt services have? Event GDPR glossed it over, giving these services basically free reign.

<comment><USER16> Georgia Power has recently started to sell license plate scanners to police departments in my area. They use their utility poles to place small cameras that scan each license plate and alert authorities when a stolen car is spotted.

The city I used to live in did a trial. They recovered more stolen cars in the first month they tried it than the whole year before. Here's a press release about the program in general[1].

[1][https://www.brookhavenga.gov/police/page/brookhaven- police-c...](https://www.brookhavenga.gov/police/page/brookhaven-police- cameras-score-nearly-100000-hits-month)

<comment><USER17> Not one word in that press release about privacy safeguards.

The benefits are real, but without safeguards it will be abused: police officers and, in this case, also power utility workers likely have full, unaudited access to this data. That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends, in addition to legit uses.

<comment><USER18> I'm far more worried about the use case where the people in power decide to robo-fine everyone for everything and do not get tarred and feathered in response than I am about a few cops stalking their exes. The latter we basically all agree is not ok (and there's existing well known channels for punishing that kind of stuff when it happens). The former makes our society worse and we have no good way of countering it until it becomes revolt worthy.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I like the idea of stolen cars being found very quickly, but there's a huge potential for this to be abused and used for robo-fining, which would truly be awful, and reminds me a lot of that 90s movie "Demolition Man".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bird watching is pretty popular too.

</comment><comment><USER21>
      > With a focal length equivalent to 1000mm

Otherwise known as a meter.

<comment><USER22> Focal lengths are, by convention, stated in millimeters even though most are at least a centimeter.</comment></comment>


Mathematical Components for the Coq system - <AUTHOR> https://math-comp.github.io/mcb/ <comment><USER2> Cool. People interested in formalized math might be interested in metamath: [http://us.metamath.org/index.html](http://us.metamath.org/index.html) or one of several other systems; here's a list of some and what they've proven: [http://www.cs.ru.nl/%7Efreek/100/](http://www.cs.ru.nl/%7Efreek/100/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a wonderful book and I recommend it to anybody learning Coq. The mathematical components project has made (and continues to make) great strides when it comes to formalizing research level mathematics. Before this book, there was only a small manual for ssreflect and information scattered throughout a dozen research papers. It's good to finally see more of a focus on documentation, since there are many people in the community who could benefit from using mathcomp instead of developing their own implementation of common mathematical structures.

</comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft is kind of like McDonald's. If I want a decently cooked burger I should cook it myself. If I am totally unfamiliar with an area, I go to McDonalds.

I expect a certain minimum from Microsoft and the book exceeds that. Also UPenn's Software Foundations is written in CoQ [https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html](https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html)</comment>


Ask HN: cheap reliable host for Wordpress blog - <AUTHOR>

I had a post at the top of HN earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6989971) but Bluehost went belly up and is down for some hours. Any reliable (no downtime) and cheap WP host you can recommend? <comment><USER2> Webfaction! You can't go wrong. It's screaming fast with it's fine tuned nginx servers, 512MB so it's more than most shared hosting environments will give you for applications.

I'm a big Wordpress blogger and run [http://winthecustomer.com](http://winthecustomer.com). I've been offered several free VPS accounts from various hosting companies in exchange for a plug for their services but after testing them out, I end up sticking with my PAID shared hosting account with Webfaction.

I've been a HUGE fan for 4+ years now. $7 mo. is the best $7 of hosting you can buy and better than others that cost $20+ per month.

NOTE: Webfaction doesn't gimmick you with "unlimited" crap with their hosting accounts. When others offer "unlimited" they really should included about a million ______* next to that. I used to work in Web hosting and know for a fact that after several gigs of space or bandwidth usage, they 'll kick you out and force you to upgrade or find another host.

<comment><USER3> Another vote for Webfaction from me. Their support is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the past for WordPress, I've found TigerTech.net quite good for reliable, shared hosting. They are helpful too if you have problems.

</comment><comment><USER5> AWS (or similar) so you can switch to a bigger instance when you have a traffic spike.

Or just use Cloudflare.</comment>


OCaml 4.02.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/release.en.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm personally looking forward to trying out the new compiler, if only to see if it can reduce the size of the executables it generates from "huge" to simply "big".</comment>


PHP RFC: Reclassifying Engine Warnings - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_warnings <comment><AUTHOR> The big headline here is that (if this RFC passes)

         echo $undefined_var;

will cause an exception where before it caused an easily-ignored notice.

If you don't use any static analysis tools, PHP allows you to write some objectively poor code that still sort of "works".

This RFC will make the experience of writing PHP more in line with other modern languages - much less second-guessing how the engine might behave.</comment>


Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the mouse in 3-5 years - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7508842.stm <comment><USER2> Is there a website anywhere that tracks what Gartner (et al) predict and what actually happens?

At least Wired are consistent. A cover story predicts the technology is doomed :-)</comment>


Dublin Web Summit 2011 - Largest tech start-up conference in Ireland & UK - <AUTHOR> http://flax.ie/dublin-web-summit-2011/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm Carl, the one the article mentions, so I can answer questions if anybody's got any.</comment>