The History of Magic: The Gathering Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-complete-history-of-magic-online

<comment><USER2> Tangential, but this is such a great illustration of how Blizzard as a company has succeeded time and time again in taking nearly impenetrable games and genres and turning them into something that new players can enjoy, while still retaining enough depth to make the games interesting for advanced players.

From MtG and its everchanging sets, significant expense, multiple formats and awful online experience/UI came Hearthstone. A card game that tens of millions have gotten into. It looks fantastic, takes no initial investment, and costs a fraction of what a MtGO deck costs to go from nothing to a top tier competitive deck.

Other examples:

\- Roguelikes -> Diablo

\- RTS -> Warcraft & Starcraft

\- MMO -> World of Warcraft

\- DotA/2 -> Heroes of the Storm

\- Team Fortress/2 -> Overwatch (not yet released)

It's an interesting case study on a company that's succeeded in taking genres usually reserved for a niche audience and bringing them to the masses. It's not a company without flaws and missteps, but it's an interesting lesson in bringing existing markets to a wider audience. I wonder if there's something more general that can be gleaned from their strategy to products outside of games.

<comment><USER3> I play MtG a few of my MtG friends have recently started playing Hearthstone. From what I've gathered talking to them key differences are:

No trading - cards are bound to the account if I have card A and my friend has card B we can't swap cards with each other.

RNG - apparently Hearthstone is more RNG influenced then MtG the argument being this makes Hearthstone less skill and more luck based then MtG.

The thing I find most objectionable about Magic Online is having to duplicate your paper collection - which essentially means paying for the same cards twice, which is not something I'm all that keen to do. Not an issue for sealed tournaments like drafting but I'm not keen to invest in an electronic constructed format.

<comment><USER4> It isn't just that hearthstone is more RNG influenced per se, it's that it is an incredibly shallow game tactically. Part of that is the discreet turns (which also makes the online game considerably more playable than mtg ever managed with endless "breakpoints" in play to confirm no response), but also the actual complexity and interactivity is flat out lower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been playing MTGO since the end of v2. Someone should write a book about how badly managed this game is. The guy in charge of the thing "Worth" has o real technical background whatsoever, and you can see how that affects the vision and goals of the product.

It's a disgrace. And should be a software case study.

PS: been playing MtG since 1995

<comment><USER6> It doesn't help that transitioning to digital is hilariously difficult.

Even with a properly managed team, moving 20+ years of edge cases and odd interactions for a turing complete game is going to be difficult. The fact that they need to come up with a usable ui on top of that only adds to the suffering. Its not unsurprising that what they currently have can only be considered working in the most generous and utilitarian sense.

Don't mistake me for covering for Worth: a top quality group led by management who knew what they were doing would be much farther in both correctness and UX.

<comment><USER7> What's interesting, I think, is that MTGOs failures have been basically 100% on the other side. They've been plagued by a nightmare lack of stability and scalability, to the point where they've had to shut the game down, roll back the database to restore corruption, aggressively limit logins, and for long stretches of time simply not hold the events which are the main attraction (and money maker) for the game.

On the other hand, the actual cards just work. The hard part for them, it seems, is "operating a game that more than a few hundred people want to play", not the rules engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very good recollection of the history of this game. I've been playing since 2002. I really wanted to keep up with this game but WotC just made it difficult to with each successive release of the game which tended to be worse than the previous one.

I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going.

It frustrates me to no end that we don't have anything playable on the web or all over mobile. DotP and Duels Origins don't count. I feel that this type of thing should have been figured out.

I also wonder what internal conversations were going on about the Hearthstone ascendant. I keep hearing that they're not trying to do the same thing and that they're not truly competitors but I see a whole generation of kids and adults that have moved on to that. I like the deep play of MtG but Hearthstone just feels holistically better.

<comment><USER9> _I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going._

Reports have indicated that Magic Online is around 17% of Magic's revenue ($43 million out of $250 million).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used MtGO version 1 as a filthy causal player and had fun, but the whole experience was very frustrating. For a game that involved occasionally moving a few rectangles around the screen, MtGO had huge (and ever increasing) system requirements for the time and never really ran well even on my fairly well- spec'ed machine. As I recall it also had some weird limitations on screen modes which led to stupidly crowded playing surfaces.

I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better, but it still isn't cross- platform or system friendly. It's a shame, because the basic game shone through the cruddy front-end and the servers actually enforced the rules well.

<comment><USER7> > I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better

Oh god no.

Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.

First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces. But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.

Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the client any more.

Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs than any MTGO client has ever had. :(

Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.

<comment><USER11> > Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter > crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, > stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2.

From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest, that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and they didn't know how to fix it.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if the entire thing was literally a single server, but there was clearly some immense scaling issues with the Leaping Lizard/v2 codebase.

One of the many huge problems with v3, however, is that they opted to combine a complete rewrite of the server with a complete rewrite of the client _AND_ a complete UI overhaul.

I don't know what the wire protocol for v2 looked like (probably crap; everything else was), but I struggle to imagine a scenario where they couldn't have rewritten the server code to allow scalability without needing to touch the client, or at least with minimal changes. (And let's not forget that v3 scaled like crap too, at least at first.)

Mind you, Wizard's wouldn't be the first (or the thousandth) team to inherit a crappy code base, throw up their hands, announce that they simply couldn't _possibly_ salvage it, and ask for permission to rewrite it from scratch. It's just most successful places learn to say "absolutely not" well before they're operating at the scale Wizards is. (Or they fail miserably and go under.) I think what makes MTGO so fascinating is that's it's one of the worst software development disasters I've _ever seen_ , and yet it's still a success...of sorts.

<comment><USER11> It's a success because of IP protection for Magic. Nobody else is allowed to make their own version of MTGO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Magic the Gathering Online was basically the entirety of online gaming in my teenage years (the rest was World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, ahem). The server problems and managers mentioned in the article triggered a lot of nostalgia, as it taught me back than that online servers are not made of magic and ponies, and QA is actually something companies should care about. I did actually get invited to a few beta tests for new MTGO sets, though. :)

I gave up in college after I learned that Magic the Gathering is actually kinda expensive.

</comment><comment><USER7> For another take on MTGO, see:

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic- Onli...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-Online)

</comment><comment><USER13> My friend and I spent about 5 years making an online collectible card game. We started around 2003, around the same time that MTG was reporting scaling issues. Their scale issues inspired me to architect a game server that was horizontally scalable-- theoretically infinitely.

Our game, from the start, was built to: 1) playable from the web with no client (1mb flash, I suppose) 2) bi-directional socket based to avoid polling and be snappy 3) server is scalable horizontally 4) adding complex cards and rules will not require a client update and would be easy.

We managed to complete all these goals and produce what I still consider to be our magnum opus of software development.

The scaling worked by having socket servers provide the end-point to the client, and then behind the socket servers were chat services, game services, trading services, card building services and deck services. So, lets say we had 4 socket servers running: you and I might end up on different socket servers, but we could still play against each other because all the socket servers are doing is relaying your commands to a game server that is running our game. In order to scale, we just add more servers. (Also, if we get disconnected you can reconnect easily. Also, spectating is easy.)

My friend came up with the idea of making the Flash front-end use generic commands. So instead of the server telling the front-end "Ship A attacks Ship B for 5 damage" it says "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456 and display a red number 5". This allowed us to make cards that did all kinds of crazy things without having to do anything to the client. To implement a card that does damage to all of a player's ships you just have to update the server to send the command "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456, Card #789, etc...".

Finally, the core game engine on the server was an event loop. Thus, making new cards and rules was super easy because all you had to do in code was say "I want this new card to subscribe to the Player Draw Card event, and in that event code: "if drawer is this.owner, draw twice the amount as regular and then this.sendtograve." I was continually blown away by what crazy cards we could make up and how little code it took to implement.

As we were creating this game our day jobs became more and more serious and when we finally had the final version complete we both agreed to burn the code and resources to DVD and put it on the shelve. The idea of starting a new journey in marketing and building a company was overwhelming. (Just three months ago I got it all running in the cloud with very little effort for nostalgias sake).

I still think about pinging WOTC and asking if they'd like to see what we have and maybe make use of it. I knew WOTC had an online version of MOTG but I had NO idea it had so many rough patches or I would have been down in front of their office with a sign asking them to look at what we have.

If anyone from WOTC or other would like to see or talk about the game, feel free to message me.

<comment><USER14> You should put up a youtube screencast or demo of your game. It'd be a great portfolio piece at work, seems like some solid decision-making

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still remember buying full boxes of cards starting with Antiquities and made a lot of money selling rares from Legends boxes later. What a time.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episode-609-the- curse-of-the-black-lotus)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've had a glance at MtG and my first thought was that this thing must be a nightmare to code with all the cards that change rules of the game. Anybody care to comment whether that's the case and how well did they cope with the complexity?

<comment><USER18> That part of the game (game rule logic) usually works (with some bugs) but the UI suffers from extremely poor UX and is unresponsive. This is endemic throughout the game including area where game rules aren`t being evaluated.

Add on poor server stability that causes players who paid to participate in events to get kicked out and loose due to the issues and the experience is horrible.

It`s a credit to the quality of the card game that such a crappy experience is even played at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember arguing in the Magic Usenet group as to whether such a thing was even possible. I was on the "Yes" side, touting the virtues of object-oriented programming.</comment>


Hungary's Index journalists walk out over sacking - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53531948 <comment><USER2> just waiting to see announcement of a new independent news organization in Hungary.</comment>


Chatroulette Creator Coming to America? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/chatroulette_creator_coming_to_america.php <comment><USER2> high five, for earlier discussion see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174494>, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123314>

what would be really interesting to see though are other Adobe P2P and RTMFP implementations, i don't believe he is the only one who made something meaningful out of this, but for some reason i don't see much coverage of this technology (<http://gigaom.com/2008/05/15/flash-p2p-now-thats-disruptive/>)</comment>


Apple acquired exclusive rights to LiquidMetal's technologies - <AUTHOR> http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1141240/000110465910042867/a10-15357_18k.htm <comment><USER2> The title is a little misleading apple has an exclusive right in consumer electronics while liquid metal reserves it's rights in other markets. Which is good their are a host of other applications ones that apple would not be interested in pursuing, that this technology will be be beneficial to. It stinks that apple has an exclusive on it, but at least the agreement is confined to consumer electronics.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.liquidmetal.com/technology/></comment>


Yesod 1.0 - a robust, friendly, high performance web framework for Haskell  - <AUTHOR> http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2012/04/announcing-yesod-1-0 <comment><USER2> I have one question about yesod: how easy is it to switch templating languages? I had a look at it more than once, but hamlet always turned me off. Is it easy to switch to, say, hastache?

<comment><USER3> hamlet is by far Yesod's best feature. I have already ported it to Ruby (hamlet.rb) and Javascript (hamlet.js).

Many users come with different pre-conceptions about what a good template language should be, but once they actually start using Hamlet, they love it. So honestly I am not 100% sure how much effort using a different template language is because not a single user has wanted to switch to an alternative.

That said, give us your use case on the mail list (after giving hamlet a shot) and we will figure out how to make it easy for you. Also, we have users using mustache client side after first generating their mustache templates with hamlet.

<comment><USER4> >hamlet is by far Yesod's best feature

In your opinion.

>but once they actually start using Hamlet, they love it ... not a single user has wanted to switch to an alternative.

Hamlet is one of the major reasons we're using snap instead of yesod. Of the 5 devs here who worked on a test app in yesod, the most favourable reaction to hamlet was "well, I guess I could live with it if I had to". Just because we didn't come ask "how hard is it to use a decent template system with yesod" doesn't mean we love hamlet. We just tried out snap and happstack instead, where using whatever template engine you want is obvious and trivial.

<comment><USER5> What were the problems you saw in Hamlet?

<comment><USER2> First of all, working on a framework (Padrino) myself: I firmly believe that "there's nothing better then ours" without actually answering the question properly is a rude thing to tell someone who asks for replacing a part. So, is there a system in place that allows me to use any templating language that conforms to a given protocol? And where can I find that protocol? (in Padrino, for example, this is Tilt)

Okay, whats wrong with hamlet. It begins on google: "yesod hamlet" does not yield any meaningful documentation. "Shakespearean Templates" does. So "Shakespearean Templates"[1] is a whole family of languages that solves a lot of problems already solved, but type-safe. Well... okay, so I do not only have to learn a whole new framework, I also have to learn 3 new languages (-2, if I only care about HTML templating). So, to me, the whole approach rings a bit of "the world is wrong and we fix everything". Considering gregwebs answer: even more so.

Hamlet just doesn't suit my tastes. I don't like auto-closing tags on intendation - any decent text editor should assist you enough to do that properly. I like how you put thought into generating URLs, but thats nothing the templating language should take care of. Also, Hamlet assumes that you are templating HTML - I often template other types as well, for example plain text - hence a need for replacing it by something that fits all needs better. In the end, I also prefer strictly logic-less templates, so hamlet doesn't cut it.

Also, the documentation should see some love. There is no way to have a look at the features (and languages) in isolation: Its a stream of consciousness that introduces features in a half-sentence (I had to grep it to find what "^" means - it was what I expected it to be, but nevertheless).

That said, I still find Yesod a compelling framework and it will be the first haskell framework I'll try out next time I have some spare time. But the first thing I'll do is replace the templating.

[1]: I would prefer if they had anything to do with shakespeare, the esoteric programming language. ;)

<comment><USER5> > I firmly believe that "there's nothing better then ours" without actually > answering the question properly is a rude thing to tell someone who asks for > replacing a part

Sorry for being unclear, I asked because I am genuinely curious and I think all the yesod people love hearing feedback. If you check the yesodweb google group, you'll see that Greg and Michael are constantly begging for and responding to constructive feedback.

> Okay, whats wrong with hamlet. It begins on google: "yesod hamlet" does not > yield any meaningful documentation.

Yes, documentation sucks, they're working on it.

> I like how you put thought into generating URLs, but thats nothing the > templating language should take care of.

All the template does is provide some syntactic sugar with the @{...} notation. The actual URL generation is handled by the dispatch module entirely.

As for templating, shakespeare-text will do plain text, compile time templates. In general, as Greg has said, you can use anything you want.

<comment><USER2> > Sorry for being unclear, I asked because I am genuinely curious and I think > all the yesod people love hearing feedback. If you check the yesodweb google > group, you'll see that Greg and Michael are constantly begging for and > responding to constructive feedback.

Sorry for being unclear as well: I meant the initial reply by gregwebs but didn't want to start a second comment.

Thanks for the rest of your answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations! I have been working with Yesod off and on for about 6 months now. It is truly fantastic; I am actually transitioning off of Django in favor of Yesod. Type safety and conduits for the win.

</comment><comment><USER7> From the Learn More link at the bottom [1]:

 _> Note the awesome Shakespearean inspired name convention. Another good reason to use yesod._

Lol.

 _> Until here I believe it goes in the right direction. Even if I believe the real future is by generating HTML pages from the client (using javascript) and server limited to serve JSON (or XML, or any object representation system)._

This is a little unclear. Do you mean, prior to Yesod you thought web development was heading in the right direction, but Yesod made you realize there was a much better way, even if the future is HTML5 rich web apps with the app server as a JSON/XML API endpoint?

1\. [http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Yesod-excellent- idea...](http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Yesod-excellent-ideas/)

<comment><USER8> Mainly, I believe that most the energy put in Yesod goes on the problem I find the most important.

\- Security by default, directly imported from the Haskell type system.

\- Fast, also, because Haskell is quite fast compared to most languages used for the web.

\- Able to manage a lot of concurrent connexions,

\- Incredible foundation language, Haskell is simply awesome (look at my latest blog post for details[^1]).

On the other hand, IMHO, the future of the web might be:

\- an API server as good as possible (fast/distributed/clever)

\- many good quality dynamic (and generally native) clients

Therefore, I find most of the effort put in the HTML/CSS/JS generation while impressive not so essential for what I look. On the other hand, the notion of Yesod's widget is a very clever first step in the direction of web component abstraction. So in conclusion, yes, Yesod went a step further from what I expected from server side web technologies when I discovered it.

[^1]: [http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Haskell-the-Hard- Way...](http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Haskell-the-Hard-Way/)

<comment><USER9> Your Haskell tutorial is a very helpful introduction. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some points:

* Generating migrations automatically when saved may cause some troubles while making large changes. It's a default setting?

* Hamlet seems good but not so obvious for real-world designers. Would be great if you provide an easy way of switching to another template language.

* Keep the good work :)

<comment><USER5> It is a default but its quite simple to turn off. In one project, we turned it off and whipped up some quick shell scripts to do rails style up/down migrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Random question: I believe a while back Yesod did RSA encryption of client- side cookies. Is that still happening?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the default session storage is in encrypted cookies because it is convenient and good enough for many use cases. The session code is extensible though and someone has already written a Redis backend.

<comment><USER11> I'm asking because encrypting cookies seems like a pointless exercise, and seemed that way when it was first announced, as well. If you don't encrypt your entire connection, encrypting your cookie seems pointless, no?

<comment><USER12> The clientsession package (which is what we use) both encrypts and applies a hash to the payload. Hashing prevents users from tampering with the data, and encrypting prevents inspection of the data. This means that you can even store sensitive data in a cookie without worrying if it's being compromised. (Not to say I recommend that practice, but it _is_ possible.)

There is of course some performance overhead to encrypting, but Felipe's skein package has been highly optimized, and Yesod is still able to achieve ~50,000 req/sec on modest hardware. (Apologies for not having more accurate numbers, I haven't run our benchmark suite on EC2 in over a year.)

<comment><USER11> The content of the cookie isn't compromised, but you can trivially sidejack a cookie on an unencrypted connection and access the information through the website itself, in essence stripping any security. Arguably encrypting the cookie is a waste of processor time, but more importantly I think you may be giving people a false sense of security. The proper way to do secure interactions is via SSL, and I'm not sure encrypted cookies vs simply HMACed cookies gives you any true security advantage (as session storage or anything else).

<comment><USER3> SSL is (important as you say but) orthogonal to this issue. If you steal a non-encrypted cookie and take over a user's session the result is the same.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's precisely what I'm saying. So, let me put it differently: what security advantage does an encrypted session cookie confer? I see two possibilities:

\- Someone who hijacks a request with the cookie in it cannot see the data in the cookie. But they can access the site as the user, so there is no real world benefit to this fact. \- Someone on the same computer cannot see the data in the cookie. But again, they have the cookie value, so they can access the site as the user, so there is again no real world benefit to the fact that they can't see the data in the cookie itself, because they can interact with the site and see the data there.

I guess I'm just looking for an example scenario where the cookie being encrypted offers a concrete benefit from a security standpoint.

<comment><USER13> I might be wrong here but I think it prevents against a user tampering their own cookie. Say I store User_Id:5 in a cookie and pass it over an ssl connection. The user can still change from User_Id:5 to User_Id:6 and get user 6's account info. Typically you would have to store a non guessable token instead to avoid this. I think by encrypting the cookie you provide the non- guessable part of the equation without having to think about it. This isn't really a benefit from a security standpoint (as in it doesn't provide more security), but it is convenient.

Could be wrong here, I'm not very familiar with Yesod.

<comment><USER14> the hashing prevents tinkering/tampering

the encryption prevents reading (and thereby also -- to some extend -- but not specifically tinkering/tampering)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A question I'd love to see a good answer to. We've got Yesod, we've got Happstack, and also Snap.

What are the major differences between them? Is one of them a clear winner, the way Django/Rails are in Python/Ruby respectively?

<comment><USER16> FWIW, since I only really have experience with Snap: When comparing to Ruby frameworks, you could roughly say that Snap is to Yesod what Sinatra is to Rails.

Snap is relatively simple and as such easy to fully understand. But since it is a relatively simple framework, you have to mix and match other packages to get the functionality that you want.

Yesod on the other hand is very elaborate - it contains a lot of functionality and relies fairly heavily on the use of Template Haskell and Quasi-Quoting.

As with Ruby and Sinatra, it is mostly a matter of taste. Some people prefer lightweight frameworks and add the components they need, while others like to do things within one well-integrated framework.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this comparison is accurate at all. I suspect the author has only used Snap and not Yesod. Actually I don't know if there is a single Haskell programmer that has seriously tried all three web frameworks.

<comment><USER4> As someone who gave up on yesod because it is so railsish and moved to snap, I'd say it is pretty accurate.

<comment><USER14> > gave up on yesod because it is so railsish

So what exactly do you feel is bad about "railsishness"?

I think Rails brought a lot of sane defaults and best-practices to a web framework.. I'm not surprised to see nearly all web frameworks that came after it borrow from it. See for instance "Play" on Java/Scala -- very new, very Rails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Based on the commentary, I'll wait for the next high-performance web framework in ocaml. ;)

<comment><USER14> lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They really have to change their website, but in particular that cheesy/glossy logo.

It just looks awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> See also:

* <http://happstack.com/> * <http://snapframework.com/>

Design time!

<comment><USER14> volunteering time! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't build with the gold linker. Feh.

</comment><comment><USER20> hahaha sorry I read the title and could not help but thinking, "a high performance web framework for Haskell" that will not actually output HTML without a doctorate in computer science...

</comment><comment><USER14> ULTERIOR MOTIVES WARNING:

There is someone under the name "papsosouid" [1] on this thread with an account that's "coincidentally" as old as the thread itself, and has only commented on this thread so far [2].

He seems pretty acquainted to this community (he was quick to show me the HN posting guidelines) therefor I suspect he must have another account at HN. I also suspect he has created this new account especially for posting in this thread: why would one do that? I cano only think of; (a) to conceal whom he really is, or (b) because he expects karma-negative results of his actions -- one not excluding the other.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=papsosouid>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=papsosouid>

<comment><USER4> It isn't a co-incidence, I registered specifically to post in this thread as it is relevant to my interests. I posted the posting guidelines as I just registered, so had just read them myself (they are conveniently linked under the little box you type words in). I am not sure whether I should be flattered or creeped out by your obsession with me, but I'll assume both.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to algorithms/data structures for software interviews? - <AUTHOR> Most candidates mention spending months on LeetCode/HackerRank/Spoj before interviews. If you need to spend months brushing up a set of skills, it's a clear sign your previous job(s) didn't use those skills.
Algorithms/Data structures knowledge is useful to software engineers, but using it as the most important proxy for candidates' software skills is debatable.
Some arguments for this approach include:
1) It's an objective approach, with little to no interviewer bias especially when interviewers use a common question bank.
2) New interviewers need little training, so practically anyone on the team/org is ready to take interviews after shadowing a couple.
3) Algo/Data Structures rounds can be easily automated with online judges.
What are some alternatives to algorithms/data structures approach that don't lose some/all of the benefits mentioned above? <comment><USER2> In general it's very difficult to interview in a way that would give insight into previous work experiences at a practical level. Every interviewee will have their own unique experiences and even though they may all have similar backgrounds, designing an interview question that would be general enough to gain insight into all of their experiences is nearly impossible. I've interviewed at places that attempt this and I've never felt that it worked out the way they were intending it too. They usually become too specific to the ideas/experiences of the person who designs the question.

I think algorithm and data structure problems can be useful if used correctly. I think the main issue is that most companies tend to use leetcode style problems which are a bit more on the brain-teaser side and are often usually harder to solve if you haven't spent a significant amount of time solving such problems. These questions might make sense for super competitive positions at places like Google where they can afford to reject good candidates, but at most companies it doesn't make sense. I think simple problems that involve working with the same data types required at the job would suffice. The purpose of the question should be to screen out candidates who can't solve them, not to judge how good they are.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is scaling a process, the number of people who can catch bullshitters during an interview are not enough to scale up a conversational interview. Most tries to solve "How would I interview someone?", instead they should ask themselves "How would an engineer with mediocre social skills interview someone?", because that is what you'll get when you scale up.

So, conversational interviews are out, no way someone with mediocre social skills will catch a bullshitter.

Take-home problems work as a screening tool, but has the problem that you don't know if they wrote it or if they spent an extraordinary amount of time on it. You need to evaluate this on-site somehow. Many here say "Just have a conversational interview about it and we'll catch the bullshitters!", would you expect a mediocre interviewer to catch those? So no, doesn't work.

That leaves on-sites. We have 3 on-site interview styles which are known to work, each with their own problems:

1\. Technical coding interviews where you solve an algorithm problem. Even the most junior interviewer can use this style and requires basically no training. Lots of experienced engineers feels this is unfair since it experience doesn't help candidates much.

2\. Technical design interviews where you are given a high level problem and discuss how you would architect the solution. Note that this requires significant technical skills and experience from the interviewer so only senior engineers can administer it, so you can't be too liberal with them.

3\. Structured behavioral interviews, ask a series of "Tell me about a time when you disagreed with a coworker, how did you resolve the issue?". This style is extremely popular in non-tech fields, so there is pressure that we get more of them in tech as well. Popular in Amazon, "Leadership principles".

Now, it is not like Google could substitute more coding interviews for design interviews, they don't have enough people who are qualified to administer design interviews. Also I am not sure if people would be happy if Google did mostly structured behavioral interviews. I know they recently changed 1 technical interview to a behavioral interview, but I am not sure this makes anyone happy since you still have 3-4 coding interviews.

</comment><comment><USER4> Our process is, first, a phone conversation, maybe a half hour. Then the interview is two hours.

The first half hour is just talking to them about their background and stuff. Then we give them some code to read, to see if they can figure out what it does. Then we have them write a bit of code (nothing leetcode-style, just a simple function). Then we have them do a bit of design.

Since we do the same to everyone, we are by now fairly calibrated as to what a good candidate looks like.

</comment><comment><USER5> This my problem...spend months working on these kinds of problems, finally get a job, get rusty because I'm doing totally different stuff at work. Find myself needing a job again...study and grind for months just to have a chance at passing interviews. It's all so tiresome.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had a particularly interesting on site interview where part of it involved fixing a bug in a previous version of a well known open source framework. They gave us the relevant tests to run which showed us what was failing on which inputs. We were welcome to use our personal laptops/coding environment to debug and fix the bug. I personally thought it was a good way to demonstrate the ability to actually navigate a larger codebase, understand what tests were doing, and to follow program logic through a large project and ask pertinent questions. Granted this was for new grad interviews, but it did seem a lot more relevant to day to day work than leetcode problem #X.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hire people with masters degrees

<comment><USER8> I have a master's degree in CS... I'll have you know having that degree does NOT tell you more than a whiteboard interview</comment></comment>


Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/hacking_airline.html <comment><USER3> Can people please stop using "hacking" about every little tweak, tip, or technique to gain something?

<comment><USER4> A hack is a novel solution using existing technology outside of its primary intended use case. Even though this is a 'social hack', a hack is nonetheless exactly what this is.

<comment><USER5> It can be taken too far though. If I go shoplifting am I "hacking the shop"? If my shower breaks and I pour bottled water over myself to clean am I "hacking bottled water"?

<comment><USER6> Shoplifting can be a bit of an art. I agree with you that the "hacking" thing is overused, but I think it makes sense to call something like booster bags a "hack", for example. There are lots of "hacks" for shoplifting.

<comment><USER7> Aren't hackers notorious for being interested in things like lockpicking? And that interest is based on an interest in taking apart a system? Shoplifting has worse consequences than recreational lockpicking, but I could see it having some of the same system deconstruction appeal if approached in the right way (not advocating shoplifting, by the way)

<comment><USER6> I completely agree, except I am advocating shoplifting. I also wish there were more hackers who would use their lockpicking skills for more than just recreation. I feel like the idea that "hacking" can only be motivated by pure curiousity, and not by anything political or in any way threatening, is an idea that serves the interests of the people in power. They don't want us to think about or analyse our political situation, or to try to change it; they would rather divert our attention and our abilities towards solving rather pointless puzzles, which at best are inconsequential, or at worst just make them even more money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In any airport I frequent, this would not be worth the money. Some garages offer free parking for 30 minutes for pick-ups, but by the time you park, go through security, eat, and return you would owe at least $4. Then there's the time/gas cost of getting to/from the airport. Even if you used public transport it could be expensive, it's like $16 round-trip on BART from SFO to downtown San Francisco.

<comment><USER9> It's really not a problem for places with decent public transportation. There are parts of the world where it makes sense to have a monthly or annual pass. I've no idea what it is like in the area where this occurred though.

<comment><USER10> The Skytrain in Vancouver goes from the downtown to YVR in about 30 minutes. It is possible to go to the airport and back on a $2.75 ticket (on weekends and holidays; the ticket is valid for 90 minutes).

<comment><USER11> Here in Guatemala you can take public transportation for about 0.125 USD, if you live near to the airport it could be worth the time.

<comment><USER12> I don't specifically know about Xi'an, but I remember in 2012 subways in Beijing were a flat 2 rmb (about 0.35 USD) and in Shanghai something like 2 to 4 rmb depending on distance. Nanjing was similar, but I don't remember the specifics. So assuming all Chinese cities that have subways charge the same order of magnitude, this loophole would have indeed been valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The idea of having to go through security everyday for free meals sounds unpalatable.

<comment><USER14> This story happened in China. I don't know about China, but maybe their airport security is not as bad as U.S.

Personal story: Bringing liquids to airplanes is not allowed in Iran. I remember on our flight back from Shiraz, we brought about 8 liters of rose water, orange blossom water, etc. with us. The security saw it in the screen and asked what the liquid was. "Herbal water", I said. He nodded and called, "Next". Didn't even open the bottles to make sure.

Also many people bring back several liters of water from the holy Well of Zamzam[1] in their flight back from Mecca. The record I've heard of was 40 liters.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzam)

<comment><USER15> They follow the American protocols, and then some.

Last time I was there, after handing my bags over I got called to the inspector's room. They'd x-rayed my bags and seen a cigarette lighter [1]. I have no idea how they recognized it as such, but they pointed to the area in my bag where it had been seen, and asked me to open the bag and remove it.

On another flight, we were all waiting in line to check-in, but the agents hadn't shown up. Somebody gave up on waiting, and just left their bags sitting in line - this while the recording about unattended bags was playing (yes, they've got that in China, too). It was funny to watch everyone in the line studiously ignoring the unattended bag, for fear that they'd shut down the terminal while calling the bomb squad, and we'd all miss our plane.

[1] I don't smoke, but it's in my first aid kit for sterilizing a needle.

<comment><USER16> What about domestic flights? Some domestic airports like Melbourne have the lounge outside the checkpoints, and even if they are through them domestic security in Australia is very quick and easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This has already been debunked to be false: [http://shanghaiist.com/2014/01/29/passenger-with-first- class...](http://shanghaiist.com/2014/01/29/passenger-with-first-class-ticket- eating-free-for-a-year-myth.php)

</comment><comment><USER18> Another interesting story in the comments of that article: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/hacking_airli...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/hacking_airline.html#c4187941)

</comment><comment><USER19> In comments: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/hacking_airli...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/hacking_airline.html#c4187941)

Good story about buying a suit at 6 am: _" Upon exiting customs, I was greeted (by name) by a number of large men holding submachine guns (rare in UK)."_

<comment><USER20> They take it all very seriously!

In January 2004 I took my mum to Disneyland Paris.

Someone had accidentally left their luggage next to the belts below the customs booths.

The airport was shut down and cleared on that level, whilst a brave man with a machete hacked carefully at the bag to discover sausages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I work in a pretty big GDS/IT company and that wouldn't happen in our systems. Virtually no airline asks for such a retarded business rule, flexible classes allow generally 1 to 5 changes in departure date/time(no questions asked), after that it requires manual intervention on a case by case basis.

<comment><USER22> I'm thinking he never changed the actual flight info, he just manually "photoshopped" the data on the ticket. Even with the barcodes, many airports and lounges do not actually check the barcodes, they just visually verify the info.

There was a story a few years back when Delta and some others started doing boarding by zones. People were doing online checking, saving their printable ticket as a PDF or whatever, and editing that file to change the "Zone 4" text/image to "Zone 1", and then getting early boarding.

If you travel with any regularity you soon realize that all these special checks and verifications are pretty weak. Even when you are in a place that DOES use the barcode reader to pull the data, it wouldn't be that hard to hack the barcode. The reader devices appear to be non-networked, so they are just scanning a code and displaying text. I haven't personally tried it, but that kind of "encryption", if there is any, is pretty easy to reverse engineer. You can have multiple data samples (tickets), and you know at least some of the key info contained within (passenger name, flight info, etc.) and you can experiment endlessly until you figure it out.

<comment><USER23> I don't understand the apparent desire for early boarding. Almost every airport lounge I've been in has been more comfortable than the aircraft. The plane's not going to leave without you. I much prefer sitting in the lounge and wandering on last.

<comment><USER24> Space for carry-on luggage is limited. If you board last, there is a high possibility that the airline will check-in your carry-on luggage instead. This will cause you a delay since now you need to wait in the baggage claim area after arrival. Had you boarded just 5mins prior, someone else might have to wait 30mins in baggage claim instead of you.

<comment><USER25> Ever have this happen? It doesn't happen this way.

They have special space for "checked carryon." they ticket it with a special ticket and put it in a SEPARATE part of the plane. When you unload the flight attendants get the "checked carryon" and put it next to the door, then you grab it on your way out.

I sat on the front of a small plane before and there was no space for carryon at all on that seat. There was no seat in front to put it under, and the overheads on that seat had a bunch of flight attendant stuff in them. Being the first on the plane wouldn't have enabled me to avoid the "checked carryon."

<comment><USER22> This is by no means how it commonly works. _Some_ planes will "gate check" your carryon, but most of the time that last-minute checked luggage gets checked through to your final destination.

And for the other comment above, the plane certainly WILL leave without you.

I travel 60-100K miles per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From the guidelines:

> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they > found on another site, submit the latter.

Should this submission be amended to the URL and headline of the original article? [http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/01/24/Man-uses- fi...](http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/01/24/Man-uses-firstclass- ticket-to-get-free-meals-for-almost-a-year/)

<comment><USER27> No, because the comments on Schneiers blog add value that isn't on the original source. Which is why there are now (two even) comments here that link to comments on the linked blog post. Schneier also found the comments on HN helpful, which is why he now links to this HN thread, even though the HN thread just linked his blog.

(Quite the circle by now)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The "hack" I've seen the most frequently is buying a ticket that gets you in the priority lane in addition to a standard ticket so that one can go through minimal security wait times and then cancel the ticket in time for a refund.

<comment><USER29> Couldn't it get you in trouble? You'd have to check your bags under the standard ticket, but enter security under the premium one, and airport security might realize they have the same person on the flight twice.

I thought that was a classic red flag?

<comment><USER30> Barring extraordinary circumstances, checking bags while flying is a textbook case of doing it wrong.

<comment><USER31> Why is that?

<comment><USER32> Checking bags adds a lot of time to your trip after the plane lands, you have to wait ages in many cases for the ground crews to unload and process your baggage. In addition the size for carry-on luggage is pretty large with a small amount of work you can pretty easily get all you need for a trip into the carry-on baggage.

<comment><USER31> Except for a few bad days, I generally don't wait long for my checked luggage. It's sometimes already there by the time I make it to the claim area. Finding overhead space can be a hassle and I much prefer boarding and unboarding without dragging a ton of stuff. And carry-on obviously limits the items you can bring along on a plane.

Your arguments are perfectly valid for some, but this is isn't a case of "this method is obviously right".

<comment><USER33> Your arguments are perfectly valid until the first time you arrive to your business meeting w/o your bags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Be sure to read the comment left by "askme" on the linked page. It is a similar story but it actually made me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER35> Most airline lounges in the U.S. offer free snacks, wine and beer – not meals.

<comment><USER36> Not saying it's the same everywhere but with British Airways you can access a better lounge if you're First Class (not sure if they have meals - <USER2> someone can confirm that).

<comment><USER37> Both the Business Class and First Class BA lounges at LHR T5 have meals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is not "hacking." This is just scamming.

</comment><comment><USER39> You could buy a first class ticket and hold on to it for a year, then use the lounges whenever you actually do travel.

It doesn't look like this is possible in the US though. I don't see an airline that offers their lounge just for having a first class ticket. Alaska even requires a ticket for the day you're there.

<comment><USER40> Most US airlines don't offer lounge access for domestic first class tickets, but they generally do for international business/first. And sometimes for "premium" transcontinental routes (like JFK-SFO).

Then again, the food in US airline lounges leaves a lot to be desired. The free meal would probably just be cheese and crackers and carrot sticks...

<comment><USER41> Very true, I can't imagine going thru the effort to do this to get some pre- packaged cheese and Bud Light.

Probably better to just hang out in a hotel lobby which has the same amenities and less hassles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Once upon a time the lounges in the US had unlimited free drinks. (I don't travel as much now, so I'm not sure any more) It might not be worth the commute to an airport for a mediocre lunch, but for all you can drink?

The real issue is the time involved though. A few hours is worth more than a couple dollars saved.

</comment><comment><USER43> It wouldn't be worth getting exposure to that level of radiation on a daily basis from the security process</comment>


Braid Cleanup (part 4) - <AUTHOR> http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2016/07/19/braid_cleanup_4.html <comment><USER2> This series of blog posts is pretty great. I wonder if releasing Braid's source code as free (as in freedom) software would have had similar results.</comment>


Akhenaten: mad, bad, or brilliant? (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10561090/Akhenaten-mad-bad-or-brilliant.html <comment><USER3> If you are interested in this kind of history, you might be interested in this book:

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

Which looks at the cosmopolitan trading civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean during the 1400-1177 bc era, and how it collapsed.

[https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed- Turni...](https://www.amazon.com/1177-B-C-Civilization-Collapsed- Turning/dp/0691168385)

<comment><USER4> There are, of course, alternative theories about "The Catastrophe" as historians call the event, when almost all the cities facing the Mediterranean were sacked in a few short years, preceding a 400-year "dark age".

One well-supported theory suggests a military innovation that enabled a cheaply-outfitted, quickly recruited army of 10,000 to defeat a standing force of 1000 charioteers. Such an army might be easily filled out from among the overtaxed farmers surrounding each walled city. In this alternative, the "dark age" might rather indicate freedom from centralized oppression, with "civilization" arising again only after its faults were forgotten; and the Catastrophe an early sort of "Mediterranean Spring".

There was never more than conjecture supporting the "Sea Peoples" idea. For the popular-uprising approach, we may imagine a core of a few hundred organizers proceeding from one city to the next, with local recruiting promises (and testimonials from the last) of rich spoils from each new target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Just imagine, though, what would have happened if his new religion had caught on: perhaps today we would mention Atenism in the same breath as other great monotheistic faiths such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam."_

There are theories that Akhenaten _was_ the inspiration for Jewish monotheism. Israelite slaves in Egypt picked up the new idea, then migrated under Moses to the Promised Land, while reinterpreting or suppressing their previous polytheistic Abrahamic origins.

For example, the Ten Commandments from that migration are just a few trivial and obvious rules for communal life, together with fanatical paranoid proscriptions about worshipping other Gods. Why the stress on the one God if it was a long established fact of life? Sounds much more like enforcement of the new exclusive monotheistic doctrine.

<comment><USER5> ... and where was this Promised Land?

In the east, where the sun rises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing his face carved is one of the highlights of visiting Neues Museum in Berlin (as well as his wife, obviously). He is indeed an intriguing person, who is also the subject for a rather wonderful eponymous opera by Philip Glass.

<comment><USER7> The opera is absolutely epic. I saw it recently at the Coliseum in London. Looks like it's last night is tomorrow if anyone wants to catch it:

[https://www.eno.org/whats-on/akhnaten/](https://www.eno.org/whats- on/akhnaten/)

Binoculars were handy because the Pharaoh costumes were amazing.

You don't have to be an opera buff - Glass is is great if you like electronica. It's an opera that could justify having a dance floor for throwing some shapes.

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

<comment><USER8> I also saw it a couple of weeks ago at the Coliseum. I was dubious about a three-hour Glass opera, but it was fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This post made me look up the Philip Glass opera to see if the 2016 ENO production has ENO ally released a DVD, and it looks like they're coming to NYC!

[https://operawire.com/a-philip-glass-opera-confirmed-for- met...](https://operawire.com/a-philip-glass-opera-confirmed-for-metropolitan- opera-premiere-in-2019/)

</comment><comment><USER10> In service of relevance: some claim that Akhenaten was the first rationalist, or even the first scientist. (IIRC from my half forgotten libart coursework)

I couldn't find any citations from a 5 min goog search on the latter claim, but here's an even more recent article (2018) that talks about Akhenaten anticipating the Athenian philosophers.

[https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/Does_Western_Philosophy...](https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/Does_Western_Philosophy_Have_Egyptian_Roots)

<comment><USER4> The best story we have on the invention of science as practiced comes from Al- Haytham's "Optics", of a thousand years ago, written while he was under house arrest and cut off from access to reference materials. It did originate in Egypt.

<comment><USER10> "Heliopolis" is almost not a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think I've encountered this smooth bulbous figure art in any other dynasty, or even under any other pharaoh. And while to some this may feel like still fairly similar to all other Ancient Egyptian art, it must be noted that concepts of _trends_ in art or fashion were basically absent until the Ancient Greeks, a seafaring & trading nation. It reminds me more of ancient predynastic figurines so, combined with sun-monotheism, it all looks a bit like a "back to the roots" kinda thing.

This was a really huge departure from tradition in almost all the ways.

(It's so fun to speculate about all this.)

</comment><comment><USER12> One explanation is that he made drastic reforms related to the tax collection capacity of the priestly class. This was in addition to/a consequence of his re-conceptualization of the state religion.

After he was deposed by that same priestly class, they did the thing that usually happens -- defiling all monuments and writing a version of the events that put them in the best possible light.

<comment><USER13> I think the exact changes that he (or his agents) made are kind of immaterial - ultimately, it seems, he tried to implement too large a change too suddenly, and it failed.

There's a lesson in Akhenaten's history for many areas of many sectors - <USER2> least the tech sector.

<comment><USER14> I find it hard to imagine such a vague lesson lending support to any view I don't already agree with

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Amarna period is endlessly fascinating to me - it seems such a clear example of how little has changed in the way politics and society interact for thousands of years.

<comment><USER15> We are all still humans, now as then.</comment></comment>


The Mac App Store is upgrading illegal and trial software for free - <AUTHOR> http://theverge.com/2013/10/24/5023560/the-mac-app-store-is-upgrading-illegal-and-trial-software-for-free

<comment><USER2> Someone is getting fired</comment>


Empty studio sets: BBC backgrounds for your video calls - open-source-ux https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/empty_sets_collection/zfvy382 <comment> 52-6F-62 Ohh. I was hoping for Mr Bean's apartment or the office from IT Crowd. No dice.

There are some classics in there, though

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the IT Crowd office:

[https://www.channel4.com/microsites/I/it- crowd/wallpapers/48...](https://www.channel4.com/microsites/I/it- crowd/wallpapers/4840x1080.jpg)

[https://www.channel4.com/microsites/I/it- crowd/wallpapers/20...](https://www.channel4.com/microsites/I/it- crowd/wallpapers/2048x1280.jpg)

<comment> 52-6F-62 NICE! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I failed to find the BBC World News Studio backdrop, which might be very useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> As opposed to the usual on-BBC background of an impressively scholarly bookshelf, with a copy of your own book casually prominent.

</comment><comment><USER4> No BBC News backgrounds :(

<comment><USER5> No IT Crowd, no Blackadder, No Father Ted, and none of the modern reboots (Perrin, Porridge etc).

<comment><USER6> IT crowd and Father Ted were Channel 4, so unlikely to be included in this collection.

<comment><USER5> Right. Totally forgot. They are just filed under "Britcom" in my system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two sets from Fawlty Towers but neither of them is the lobby.

<comment><USER8> Watched that show not so long ago, for the first time really. I guess I had fawlty expectations, I thought it might have more good jokes and less racism.

<comment><USER7> It's been a long time since I saw it last, but Fawlty's racism is meant to be backwards even for 1970s standards, so you're meant to laugh at him for idiotic prejudices that often backfire on him. I guess a similar American example of that time period would be Archie Bunker. Fawlty is a little bit less overtly boorish than him.

I guess there are a lot of cheap jokes at Miguel's expense and they don't really fit with what I've seen of Spanish culture. But also Spain was under Franco in that time so a pretty different place too.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I do get all that, and that it is meant to be in jest and actually making fun of Fawlty. I also can't fully appreciate the context... for instance in the UK I've heard it was common in the 50s and 60s for the N word and it's variants to be used but weren't meant to be derogatory (still having a hard time with that one).

However, in Fawlty Towers there was a lot of use of several racial epithets, and Miguel's character seemed overtly racist in portraying a clumsy/clueless Hispanic much in the same way as Blacks being portrayed as overly cheerful willing servants in other shows from the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How would you actually use these, save getting a green screen fitted?

<comment><USER10> Zoom and other such software allows you to swap the background out during video calls. Don't know the tech behind it, but I do believe someone posted about it a couple of weeks ago on HN.

<comment><USER11> I have never found that setting. I wonder if its not included in their linux version, or perhaps, like Teams, it requires a newer CPU than what I have, so its not shown.

<comment><USER12> I dual boot windows/linux and the linux client does not have the virtual background options.

I'm using an i7-9700k so it's not a lack of cpu power.

edit: Maybe there's a newer version that supports green screen? The options simply don't exist in my version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r My first thought when I saw the headline was the inside of the Tardis. I'm happy that it's not only available, but featured prominently in the announcement.

</comment><comment><USER13> Where are the "on the Buses" sets? Come on BBC.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wait till people start discovering video background for Zoom. I made some from youtube videos of trees blowing in the wind, and it's really nice.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sadly no Apollo House from Peep Show.

<comment><USER16> You want people to think you're in Croydon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't believe they have nothing from The Office. I may grab an Absolutely Fabulous though.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was hoping for the pub from Shameless.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the license for these?</comment>


Ask HN: provide feedback for loc.is - <AUTHOR> http://loc.is Loc.is is a short URL service for street addresses, and GPS coordinates.  By varying the length of the hash you limit the precision of the address.  Using the full URL path will define exactly where you are, however limiting it to 5 or 6 characters will only tell people which city you are in.  For each location we will try to show you a few interesting events, facts or … What would you like to know about a given location? <comment><USER2> Pretty neat.

However it is not immediately clear what to put in the search box. It might be obvious but I actually had to think about it for a second :)

<comment><AUTHOR> anything else?

what sort of information would you find useful on the landing page?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I can make an app delivery platform for your electron apps. interested? - <AUTHOR> I have the technology to virtualize the application and deliver it through a browser to any device. each of your users could have their own version without ever having to download the product.<p>would any of you who build electron applications for your business be interested in paying for this sort of service? <comment><USER2> any examples, not sure what "virtualize the application" means. Is that like citrix for executable/non html apps

<comment><AUTHOR> basically like a vnc connection to the app through a browser. yes like Citrix, I didn't know about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I might pay for it if you'll provide competitively priced developer and end- user support.

<comment><AUTHOR> what would you consider competitive price for 1 application running all the time? or how would you price it?</comment></comment>


Slaves of the internet, unite - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/images/100000002518081/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html?from=opinion

<comment><USER2> Anyone know how I could send Tim Kreider a dime or two?</comment>


Meet 31 year old Ashish Thakkar – Africa's Youngest Billionaire - <AUTHOR> http://www.cp-africa.com/2013/01/22/meet-31-year-old-ashish-thakkar-africas-youngest-billionaire/ <comment><USER2> I know this article probably has some fluff in it, but damn if thats not entrepreneurial spirit!</comment>


James Surowiecki: US consumers won't stay frugal forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/10/12/091012ta_talk_surowiecki

<comment><USER2> "Frugal" assumes that you have money and choose not to use it. It also assumes that the current recession is caused by people's fears, and if they could only _think rationally_ things would go back to "normal".

That's fundamentally flawed.

You can't be frugal when what you are is better described as poor. I know it's difficult for the boomers to understand this, but their "normal" is in fact a grand exaggeration that is not-sustainable. The average American carries far too much debt, live well beyond their means, and has enjoyed historically low interest rates.

The reality is that this debt needs to be repaid, if not at this moment, soon enough. All we've done to "correct" this recession is throw money at the worst parts in hope that it all goes away. At best, all that we've done is delay the inevitable accounting that must be done.

Prices are too high - across the board - for the average wage. People cannot sustainably live middle class lifestyles on the average wage. Even better, people's idea of what constitutes a middle class lifestyle has been inflated into a unmaintainable ideal. That needs to adjust, and it's going to hurt whether we like it or not.

The problem with bailouts and such is that all they do is pass this eventual day of reckoning down to the next generation. (I suppose that fits with the boomer "me" ethos perfectly, after all.)

The problem with articles like this is that they live in some sort of fairy land where people are still able to spend more, and just choose not to.

<comment><USER3> Lol (well, laughing through my tears...),

Well, the baby boomers _would_ certainly go back to their long-term unrealistic "normal" if they could. _And it's possible_ that a big enough round of public finance and private bubble may get this pseudo-normalcy going for a while - that's what all of the crisis intervention has talked about so- far; "getting banks lending again", "getting things back to normal".

Of course, we've seen in the last twenty years that each "return to normalcy" has been punctured by a bigger fall. I shudder to think what it would be like next time, _if_ there is a next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tend to agree. If Americans are good at one thing, it's not learning the lessons of history.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's a uniquely American trait... something about being human. That said, I'm not sure that spending itself was the lesson that needs to be learned - it's about going into debt to spend on things that didn't generate value/and were unnecessary.

With respect at least to this point, I think Americans will ultimately be more frugal because they'll have to be (higher interest rates, lower debt ratios). Previously unsustainable low interest rates along with loose loan underwriting obviously didn't help.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My first attempt at building a SAAS app. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://giveawayhero.com/

<comment><USER2> Cool concept.

This is Shopify specific, or .. ?

Does it support both percentage and dollar-off discounts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes in the beginning it will be Shopify specific, maybe if its gaining traction i will implement other integrations...

Discount code creations is handled through Shopifys Bulk Discount App ([https://apps.shopify.com/bulk-discounts](https://apps.shopify.com/bulk- discounts)), and yes, both percentage and dollar-off are supported.</comment></comment>


Some of the ways that GitHub sexism study misconstrued GitHub norms - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/#comment-325423 <comment><USER2> > 6) True "insiders" would usually not be making pull requests as they would > have commit access to the repo.

Whenever I've used Github professionally, I've been encouraged to make commits to a separate branch and then make a pull request when it's time to merge the code into testing or master branch. Even though I have commit access, I still make pull requests routinely.

Am I doing it wrong?

<comment><USER3> Nope. I've always committed to a branch and merged with master later. Committing straight to master is a disaster waiting to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't find this especially convincing. Some of the issues here are reasonable things to look at; some aren't.

>1) I am surprised that there are only 20x more PRs by men. I would say it's more like 100-200x more men on GitHub then women.

So they're comparing data (which may be erroneous, but _is_ actual data), with a feeling: "I would say". And the data types are even different! The study compared the ratio of pull requests between genders; this person quibbles over the ratio of users between genders.

>2) But the women that are there are usually always employed by some small to medium tech company. So this study is possibly comparing mostly professional women with mostly hobbyist men.

Perhaps. It would be interesting to see data here. Again, saying "are usually" isn't based on data.

>4) In my experience a lot of people on GH with feminine sounding names are actually men from Eastern Europe (Sasha, Nicola, etc) or India (Sandy, Sunny, etc).

This is a complaint against a methodology that the study didn't use. From the study ([https://peerj.com/preprints/1733v1.pdf](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733v1.pdf)):

>...we took a different approach – linking GitHub accounts with social media profiles where the user has self-reported gender.

You can say this wasn't a big enough ratio (they identified 35% of users' genders this way), or that people will report incorrect data, but if you're talking about "feminine sounding names", you're not addressing this article.

Point five has nothing to do with gender. Perhaps there's an unstated point there.

Point seven is easily testable; points eight and nine are testable, but not as easily.

<comment><USER5> > It would be interesting to see data here. Again, saying "are usually" isn't > based on data.

Why? They're suggesting the data doesn't support the claim - They only needs data of their own if they had their own claim. The burden of proof is not on them.

You are right that they didn't use names to determine gender though, which makes this a little suspect - did The author read the study?

It does mean, though, that the sample is further focused on developers who are on G+, who use the same email address, and who identify their gender. This would potentially allow for even more confounding factor if not investigated.

Whether or not a sample is representative is not an unimportant question, and with conclusions like this, need to be considered a little more...

<comment><USER6> _Why? They 're suggesting the data doesn't support the claim - They only needs data of their own if they had their own claim. The burden of proof is not on them._

This isn't a trial, it's an argument. And regardless of context, you should support your argument with facts, not pure speculation. The entire article is completely devoid of supporting evidence. There's nothing wrong with saying that the original study lacked evidence (if that's true), but making up your own facts without either citing a source or acknowledging that they're just speculation is not valid criticism.

<comment><USER5> "Burden of Proof" isn't just a legal term:

[http://ddo.wikia.com/wiki/Burden_Of_Proof](http://ddo.wikia.com/wiki/Burden_Of_Proof)

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

> There's nothing wrong with saying that the original study lacked evidence

To show a study "lacks evidence" you need to show where it is lacking. Any plausible hypothetical not refuted by the study evidence, but also not compatible with the study conclusion, is proof of this.

> making up your own facts

Which facts? A statement preceded by "I would say" is one _not_ presented as fact, but explicitly as _opinion_.

<comment><USER6> Legalistic arguments over the burden of proof aside, I stand by my assertion that you should support an argument with facts. And a statement like " _But the women that are there are usually always employed by some small to medium tech company._ " doesn't sound like an opinion being offered. I'm not saying the author was morally wrong to make his statement, only that it falls far short of something worth being posted on HN. If he'd taken the extra time to verify some of his opinions, I'd feel differently.

<comment><USER5> In the context of a plausible hypothetical alternative, that unverified claim still has value.

People post their opinions on HN all the time, and 'verify' is a problematic concept - what tools do we have to verify something? WE're software devs, not statisticians, and and quasi-scientific, slapdash case can be made to people who lack those critical skills.

TLDR; Most devs lack the qualifications to 'verify' anything statistical... Not that that will stop them from assuming they're "smart" enough to figure it out anyway...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subreddits have both too many rules and mods, which breeds corruption - <AUTHOR> I am a record label owner that publishes music to online streaming sites. My goal is to get as many people to hear our music as possible.
I understand that Reddit may not be intended for music promotion, but I also notice that a lot of music makes it to the front page, including indie music and it makes me wonder why a lot of other music doesn't. Is the system corrupted? Are mods the ones who made the music that gets upvoted?
It seems like mods only let certain posts past the threshold for voting, where on Reddit, voting is presented as a "quasi-democratic" process. For example, if a candidate is prevented from ever making it to the primaries, they'll never stand a chance to be elected, or even heard about, by the public.
I won't name the specific subreddit (sub-forum) on reddit, but the majority of the posts I have tried to make to it get declined based on title formatting, and rules against promotion that seem to be selectively applied, even though I follow all the post rules and rarely post within the subreddit.
There are many other forums as well on reddit where posts get removed for silly reasons, which also creates a bit of unfairness in the overall outcome of what people see.
It's extremely frustrating. Pretty much every independent music site I've been on since Mp3.Com turns into a Multi-Level-Marketing or other status scheme like Amway was back in the 80s. A lot of people don't know that this is happening behind the curtain, and others simply don't care, but this influences the entire future of how the Internet will be used in my opinion, and it also breeds corruption.
We still have yet to kill pop-ups, because evil people make the rules now. Fight the power.
My question is, why do subreddits have so many rules on posting if downvotes and moderators are there to prevent forum misuse? <comment><AUTHOR> Even my post on Reddit about this was removed due to some sort of rule... Oh well, time to just turn off the PC. :\

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Show HN: hand-picked unregistered domains for your side project or non-profit - <AUTHOR> http://ortiga.org

<comment><USER2> Thanks for setting it up, but I got this message on the email confirmation page:

"You've stumbled upon a missing page, but the evidence is elementary. We're on the case."

Why don't you just take my word for it that I gave you my correct email address?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, and thanks for pointing it out.

I made a silly mailchimp error that somehow worked fine in testing.

It should be working now.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hunting for neat .orgs is a little hobby of mine. I find many that I like but don't have a use for. This is a test to see if anyone else is interested in them.</comment>


Chrome app launcher for Windows, Mac, Linux being removed in July - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2016/03/retiring-chrome-app-launcher.html <comment><USER2> Thank god. That was one of the most annoying ideas I've ever seen.</comment>


Show HN: RideZap - <AUTHOR>

This is a side project that I have been hacking on for the last two months. It started out as trying to find a better way to see my girlfriend, as we go to universities in separate cities.
The backend is built with Ruby on Rails. Some of the frontend interaction is Javascript.
Any feedback would be very well appreciated. <comment><USER2> Having recently graduated from University, I see this being huge for that specific market, first. If you can find a way to get this more exposure I see it being a useful tool for students with no car and needing a ride; either back home for the holidays or extended weekends, etc.

I like the implementation, needs more users in different cities.

Would be interested in the drill down of how payment is fulfilled?

<comment><AUTHOR> The payment must be fulfilled by the different users, but as users are rated it is supposed to make them somewhat more credible than just a random person off of craigslist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> very interesting. "airbnb for travel"?

There's gotta be a better way to get data though instead of a text box. I'm assuming most users will have zero results like my Boston to New York search. Maybe limit to a few cities at first with a select box then expand from there?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is probably a good idea I wanted to focus on the cities in Oregon first since that is where I am and want to grow from there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.ridezap.com/></comment>


How to Prioritize Tasks Fast - <AUTHOR> http://hello.ducalis.io/how-to-prioritize-tasks-fast <comment><AUTHOR> The step by step guide to quick prioritization. Learn how to spend only about 20 minutes on prioritization and another 0,5% of the team's time on discussions every week.</comment>


Made in India Stock Footage Website - <AUTHOR> https://www.knot9.com/ <comment><USER2> Just had a quick glimpse and found the product offering quite apt for our requirement . Cost is quite reasonable and quality is nice. HD footage is good for us and cost for that version is quite low

</comment><comment><USER3> Variety of videos in such reasonable price...great collection of footages.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was looking for Indian 4K footage which is very rare on the web but this is a very nice stock website for that. last but not the least cost is very impressive than other stock websites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, We are glad to see you happy. For cost-effective pricing see our pricing page

[https://www.knot9.com/subscription-plans](https://www.knot9.com/subscription- plans)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great website for cost effective Indian stock work.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a very nice stock website.

</comment><comment><USER7> Truelly Indian 4k footages at best prices.</comment>


Tell HN: Startup or Shut Up 2012 - <AUTHOR>

The 2012 Startup or Shut Up Challenge
I'm getting tired of reading and not doing, and I'm ready to fail. Here's my idea:
Let's meet on IRC (or Skype, facebook, Google+, whatever) and throw our half baked ideas and orphaned domains into a hat, break into groups of 3 to 5, and start something(s). What do you have to lose besides a few hours? (don't worry, reddit and HN will still be here when you're done)
I've got some proposals for ground rules:
-MVP in 14 days, some sort of traction in 90 or fold
-Keep 'investment' to < $100 per founder --if you don't already have a server, use a AWS micro instance or Appspot or Heroku or something --for email, google apps for domains is free for ten users or less, don't waste too much time thinking about that kind of stuff.
-don't even think about things like company organization or equity until you have something viable
-no titles beyond "biz guy" or "python guy" or stuff like that.
-don't obsess about minutia: names, domains, jobs, he-said/she-said, etc
-Touch base with your team daily, if you can't do a live chat, email. Google+ Hangouts might be good for this.
-don't quit your day job
If this seems like something you'd like to do, awesome. I think a channel on freenode is a good way to start (i've registered ##startup2012). We can also just hash it our in the comments here on HN too. <comment><USER2> 1\. Why not jump into something yourself rather than trying to form something with a bunch of random strangers? Honest question. This resembles a lot like a local startup weekend (not saying there is such an option wherever you live).

2\. MVP in 14 days in some cases is unrealistic without even knowing what it is you're looking to do. Some ideas can be done in a day. Some require several weeks or months to get a few features done for a basic MVP. It all depends on the idea.

<comment><USER3> 2\. MVP in 14d is realistic and should be the goal

1\. Maybe it's not the perfect way to startup something but at least he's doing something (and not just reading anymore). And who knows, maybe the IRC chat doesn't bring a team but gives him tons of new inspirations and ideas for new ventures.

<comment><USER4> Read the original post again. An MVP Rails app can be built in fourteen days by an experienced dev/designer duo, no problem.

But startups aren't just web companies. The idea could be a physical product that requires prototyping, for example, and that's not getting done in two weeks of part-time work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Follow the discussion at: <http://notes.avaaz.org/kRBXB8P1Ci>

</comment><comment><USER5> Count me in! I have a beautiful orphan that needs some work to become an MVP. It't an art gallery for digital art. I've been working on it for quite some time now, but kinda lost interest (finishing stuff is Not my strongest point...) in. I'd love to work on it with a bunch of guys/gals and see it finished!

<comment><USER6> sounds cool. what's the current status of this project?

<comment><USER7> <http://notes.avaaz.org/kRBXB8P1Ci> check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I said this on the EtherPad chat, but this is at best a great way to dive into a new project and at worst a good exercise.

I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER9> Let's see where this goes! Should be interesting what we can do about ideas in the next couple of hours.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love the idea. I'm definitely in. How should I stay in contact?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this whole thing is pretty off-the-cuff, but I'll hang out in the ##startup2012 freenode channel, and maybe we can come up with something a little more formal.

<comment><USER10> I'm IN, but might want to add a contact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> count me in, skype is rjhendricks_

<comment><AUTHOR> The more the merrier. We now have a website and a Google Group.

website: <http://www.startuporshutup.org>

Google Group: <http://groups.google.com/group/startup-or-shut-up>

edit: added links.</comment></comment>


List of ideas for improving Ruby during Google Summer of Code 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rubygsoc/rubygsoc/wiki/Ideas-List#mri-matz-ruby-interpreter

<comment><AUTHOR> Summarizing:

\- Fine-grained locking (a.k.a. removing the MRI global lock)

\- JIT Compiler

\- Type System

\- New C Extension API

\- Cross-thread Fiber support

\---

It's just a list of _ideas_.. but it could turn out into a great summer of code for Ruby...

<comment><USER2> even one of those amazing ideas will ever see the pre-alpha status that will be a huge win!</comment></comment>


Bountii Launches, Aims At Better Price Comparison Shopping - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/22/bountii-launches-aims-at-better-price-comparison-shopping/ <comment><USER2> Price search is a tough market with a lot of room for improvement out there, so I think this is a great launch. I mean, Google is only so-so when you expect they would rock the party at this.

In fact, if I funded startups, price search is one of those areas with enough opportunity that I would fund one every year in that space until someone gets something good going.

Now, so far I'm not seeing anything too hot from Bountii, but they have launched (congrats) and I do like the results page.

But okay, one thing. This is totally one of those cases where the minimalist front page sucks out loud. Because yes, you do want a simple front page, but you also want to give people what they want from you right up front. Bountii has got great product images and they're not front and center to arouse my inner consumer? That's tragic. It should just have a few top products right under the search box on the front page.

Congrats to the Bountii founders. Go have a Moons Over My Hammy and get ready to really work some magic in the upcoming months.

</comment><comment><USER3> Work on your SEO Bountii! A big source of your traffic is going through your organic search rankings. Theres some very simple things you can do which will give you a big boost. <http://www.websitegrader.com/wsgid/361302/default.aspx>

Rewrite your urls, eg: <http://bountii.com/search.php?item=ipod%20touch%208gb> should be something like <http://bountii.com/ipod-touch-8gb>

Congrats on getting something up, you have a long way to go though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really like how easily shipping gets added. I just ordered a kill-a-watt through newegg using bountii.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you could aggregate _user_ comments from different sources, that would be a very nice thing. I go to amazon.com mainly for the reviews.

This sort of thing reminds me of just how _trivial_ the reasons for using, or not using, a website are. When froogle renamed itself to google.com/products, I pretty much stopped using it. Why? Because when I do a product lookup, I want it as _fast_ as possible. That's the most important thing.

...notice that the "F" and "R" in "FROOGLE" are both on the left side of the keyboard. Thus, I could type "FR" with my left hand and use the mouse to select "froogle.com" in firefox's dropdown in the address box. Can't do that with google.com/products.

<comment><USER6> Me too... I buy things on amazon mainly because of the large number of quality reviews. I like to read the best and worst reviews, compare them against my own personal priority list, and then purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> too bad the word "bounty" is so closely associated with paper towels.

other than that, congrats for launching after taking on an ambitious idea.

<comment><USER8> I have a brilliant suggestion for Bountii's theme song/catchphrase:

"The quicker picker-upper, Bountii!"

The rational being it surely helps pick up some great deals online.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for financial open source databases? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Take a look at [https://www.quandl.com/](https://www.quandl.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is "financial" open source databases?</comment>


Signal v Noise exits Medium - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ <comment><USER2> I've basically stopped reading stuff hosted on Medium. I hit the limit of my "free" articles way too quickly (often by following links from other platforms, or mailing lists), but the content hosted there is neither compelling enough nor unique enough to make me want to pay even the small amount of money they ask. I'll click through based on an interesting headline or intro, but quite often the content doesn't live up to the promise.

I also have no idea how much of that money makes it's way to authors. A lot of stuff on medium seems to be available elsewhere (grab a sentence and google) so I'm not sure whether medium republished it, or whether authors/publishers do it themselves.

Either way, these things combined make me not want to pay, and I find medium increasingly irritating to the point that when I see links (for example on here) to medium-hosted content I often don't click them. Particularly on mobile I can't face the aggressive experience-hijacking that tries to force me to use their app. When I think about it I even find the "applause" mechanism somewhat smug and sickly, which probably also puts me off at a subconscious level.

No, I'm not going to "clap" for you: I'm not a sea-lion and I'm not a child. It reduces the whole exchange between author and reader to the level of kindergarten, and contributes - for me certainly - to content often feeling like cheap grandstanding, clickbait or "content for content's sake", churned out by content marketer hacks.

I happily pay for a significant number of publications large and small, and am a partner in a moderatley successful niche publication (successful in the sense that we have a relatively significant audience, paid editorial staff, cover our costs and continue to grow each year) so understand some of the economics of publishing online but have found no reason so far to pay money to medium. On the very occasional times that I'm desperate to read something and have hit my "articles limit" I'll open a private tab, but too often I just move on.

I'm glad to see publishers are releasing that it's maybe not a great platform to put stuff. It's a shame that it's not better.

<comment><USER3> > churned out by content marketer hacks

I'll pretty much skip 99% of articles that indicate they are from Medium. It's kind of like getting a search result from Quora. I'm sure there are great articles on medium but most of them are content marketing or link-building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No Cookie banner, no "hey why don't you sign up" message, no "read in app" button, no exit intent popover.

Just words. I like it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems odd that these contrarians would have been on Medium in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Medium's pitch has changed several times over the years

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't medium allow exports of comments?</comment>


New troll scam: pay us $495 or face felony charges and jail time - Suraj-Sun http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/new-troll-scam-pay-us-495-or-face-felony-charges-and-jail-time/

<comment><AUTHOR> > Interestingly, at least one poster acknowledged that she had in fact > downloaded the music in question, suggesting that the scammers had collected > real file-sharing data and connected it to peoples' real names and physical > addresses. It's unclear how they managed to obtain the information.

I'm going to take a stab here and say that they picked a popular piece of music and sent out letters about those. A decent portion of the population will have downloaded this stuff, just by coincidence.

<comment><USER2> They might have looked at which IPs were downloading certain torrents. If they are a branch of a large enough entity, they might have access to tracking data to help associate IP addresses with real addresses (at lease a significant amount of the time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They used certified mail for an extortion scam? Oh, man. Mail fraud is bad news. Might even qualify for RICO prosecution.

<comment><USER4> Certified mail lends an air of legitimacy. Unfortunately for the scammers, that's because senders of illegitimate mail are punished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So when some stupid kids extort money that they don't deserve in the name of artists that never see the money, it's a scam. When the RIAA does it, it's business.

</comment><comment><USER6> Variants of this practice have been going on for quite some time.

However, past incidents involved actual user records subpoena'd from ISPs based on IP addresses identified as sharing a torrent [1].

In either incarnation, it's ultimately shady and is (IMO) infuriatingly close to blackmail.

[1] <http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20007446-261.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> The irony of calling this a scam is that this is almost the same format as RIAA/MPAA copyright violation notices.

</comment><comment><USER8> First clue: $495? That sounds like a price you would pay in a store. The government, in my experience, either bills you in round numbers ($500) or strangely exact numbers ($493.12)

<comment><USER9> Where I am, civil penalties are set in a global unit, eg speeding ticket = 2 units. The unit itself is then set by the government - when it goes up, everything indexed by it goes up. As the rationale for increases is often 'hey, inflation', it pretty much rules out round numbers.

<comment><USER8> Sure, which is where the second case comes in. I've just never seen such a retail-like price in gov't.

<comment><USER10> Your first speeding ticket, only $99.99! Buy now, they're going fast!

But yeah, that's a good observation. One of those little clues that you would hope people catch onto.

<comment><USER11> Might be a good idea, pre-purchase your speeding ticket before you go speeding today.

<comment><USER12> Modern-day indulgence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Similar scam happening over in Australia at the moment too:

[http://www.afp.gov.au/media- centre/news/afp/2012/october/afp...](http://www.afp.gov.au/media- centre/news/afp/2012/october/afp-logo-used-in-online-scam.aspx)

[http://malwaretips.com/blogs/australian-federal-police- virus...](http://malwaretips.com/blogs/australian-federal-police-virus/)

It's a virus that locks the computer, takes a photo of the user and demands they pay $xxx to a department of the Australian Federal Police for "detected copyright infringement" while listing some of the music files on the computer to lend credence to the claim.

</comment><comment><USER14> The AG should be prosecuting. The trolls...

</comment><comment><USER15> The site looked like this: <http://i.imgur.com/WBnzpzS.png>

</comment><comment><USER16> I just can't go over how bad their website looks!

<http://www.copyrightlawenforcement.com/home.aspx>

<comment><USER17> At this point it just says "Effective immediately, the Internet Copyright Law Enforcement Agency has ceased operations. Please disregard any notices you received from us, and please do not send us any payments."

Too much publicity?

<comment><USER18> lol, the promoted comment on Arstechnica sums it up well:

> 1) Impersonate law enforcement to extort money from file sharers

> 2) Profi... OH S __T! NEVER MIND! WE WERE JUST KIDDING!

> 3) Go to jail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's like a recursive loop of bad karma copyright trolling!</comment>


ShaperTalk: Hard Science with Breakout Ventures Partner Hemai Parthasarathy - <AUTHOR> Come join the Global Shapers of San Francisco for a fireside chat with Breakout Ventures Partner and Thiel Foundation Scientific Director Hemai Parthasarathy. RSVPs are required to attend.
Agenda 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm: Networking 6:30 pm – 7:15 pm: Moderated Talk 7:15 pm – 7:30 pm: Audience Q&A 7:30 pm onwards: Networking
More About Hemai
Hemai Parthasarathy is Scientific Director of the Thiel Foundation and its program to support early-stage, radical science-based companies, Breakout Labs. She is responsible for establishing the scientific priorities of the program, evaluating submitted proposals, and monitoring the progress of portfolio companies. She has worked with national research institutes, non-profits and early-stage biotechnology companies to tell their research and development stories. A founding editor at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and managing editor at PLoS Biology, Hemai previously served as the North American Editor at Nature. Originally a neuroscientist, she is a member of several prestigious boards and committees, including the Society for Neuroscience's Volunteer Leadership. <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, I forgot to add a link. You can get tickets here! [https://www.facebook.com/events/316239012509397/](https://www.facebook.com/events/316239012509397/)</comment>