New attack reportedly lets 1 modest laptop knock big servers offline - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/new-attack-reportedly-lets-1-modest-laptop-knock-big-servers-offline/ <comment><USER2> About the BlackNurse attack method.</comment>


Firefox could be the real Facebook challenger - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_could_be_the_real_facebook_challenger.php

<comment><USER2> A facebook browser? Really? Are people really that anxious to return to the days of AOL-style branded internet? I think the recent diggbar fiasco proves otherwise.

I also highly doubt that there are many people anxious to see firefox integrate social networking features. That's the last thing I want them to do, personally. Browsers are platforms. A browser should RUN facebook, not BE facebook. When you try and build software directly into the platform, the results are not pretty. (IE anyone?)

<comment><USER3> I do not have a facebook account (and no twitter, myspace, any of that...). if those ever got merged into firefox, the next thing to do for me would be to compare chrome, safari, and ie to figure out what my next default browser is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There once was a browser called Netscape 4? Remember what happened to it?

I think Firefox could be better off as an application platform. Let the users decide what they want, make it easy to get and keep the browser slim.

</comment><comment><USER5> I never even _considered_ the possibility of Facebook building a browser. Thus enlightened, i do believe it is possible...

</comment><comment><USER6> Flock is a total success. </sarcasm></comment>


World's first robot that grows with your child - <AUTHOR> http://meetphoton.com/en/home/ <comment><USER2> The robot dog more than 10 years ago made the same claim</comment>


What Artificial Intelligence Is Not - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/what-artificial-intelligence-is-not/

<comment><USER2> I think the most important point is "Additionally, AI is not a single entity. ... AI is not a he or a she or even an it, AI is more like a 'they.'"

All the horrible "clippy" scenarios involve ONE AI that becomes super intelligent (and therefore powerful -- another fallacy) without any similarly intelligent and powerful entities around it. Instead we'll have incremental progress and if we ever do get super intelligent (but probably not super powerful) machines they'll be embedded in an ecology of other machines nearly as intelligent and quite likely more powerful.

I'm not saying this doesn't pose risks, but they aren't the risks that the AGI threat folks are studying.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article only confirms Elon Musk's fears. "Decades away" and "only need to worry about the people behind it".

Well, yeah.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've observed that there a few good examples of what it actually is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very well said. Even if we achieve a full-fledged AGI, it would be a mistake to anthropomorphize it and assign it human-like intentions, desires and behavior - unless somebody explicitly programmed it that way. The idea of an "evil" AI seems downright silly to me.

That's not to say that an AI could never be dangerous in some scenario, but the "demon" comparisons and other recent hyperbole are, IMO, a bit misplaced.

<comment><USER6> We cannot say that AI's will not be dangerous just because they will not have human-like behaviour. We shouldn't let inaccurate sci-fi movies cloud our judgement like that. Just because the future will most certainly not look like Terminator does not mean AI's are not a danger. The Elon Musk comment about the demon was not anthropomorphizing AI's; he was saying the invention of superintelligent general AI's could be like summoning the demon and trying to contain it in the sense that it could be a point of no return. We may find out after the fact that we made a huge mistake and cannot control it. I think the remarks of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkings sound very alarmist, but they want to make sure that we will think about the implications of superintelligent AIs now, and not after we invent them. I am sure we can think of proper ways to 'contain the demon', but we need to think about that now and not when they are already 'set free'.

<comment><USER5> _We cannot say that AI 's will not be dangerous just because they will not have human-like behaviour._

I agree, and I'm not making a blanket statement like that. But I think that a lot of the recent hyperbole about AI seems to assume an AGI with "bad intention" or dangerous behavior rooted in some seemingly anthrocentric notion of goals, desires, etc. To the extent that people are saying any of those things, I think they're barking up the tree, since AI - no matter how _intelligent_ \- still isn't _human_.

Now, could an AGI still be dangerous, whether intentionally or by accident? Yes, and I'd guess the "by accident" bit is more likely. I don't think this is an issue that should be ignored, and I don't expect that it will be. But whipping up public hysteria over "unleashing the demon" and "AI could end the world" strikes me as overly reactionary. But that's just me.</comment></comment></comment>


Finally, a web browser built for touch. - <AUTHOR> http://www.iheartdigi.com

<comment><USER2> What about it makes it built for touch? The landing page is full of news about Gaza and viral videos and doesn't say anything about the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not seen any other browser with UI quite like this. Full content screen shots too. Kinda neat. I dunno.</comment></comment>


Blogs.perl.org hacked - <AUTHOR> http://perlhacks.com/2014/01/blogs-perl-org/

<comment><USER2> MySQL dump of accounts including passwords hashed using perl's truncated DES crypt function:

[https://www.quickleak.org/QtPly6aE](https://www.quickleak.org/QtPly6aE)</comment>


Google's Flutter SDK moves out of beta with Release Preview 1 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/googles-cross-platform-flutter-sdk-hits-release-preview-1/?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> Non-amp version: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/googles-cross- platfo...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/googles-cross-platform- flutter-sdk-hits-release-preview-1/)</comment>


Ask HN: Looking to chat with small-mid startups that are hiring - <AUTHOR>

Hey all - I'm deciding whether I want to build a recruiting application geared towards startups. As a recent startup founder, recruiting was a pain and I think I may have found some ways to alleviate that and find high quality candidates. I want to talk to at least 10 other startups to make sure that it's really needed though, so if you have 15 minutes sometime this weekend or next week I would love to chat with you.<p>My email is eric at esft dot com, and feel free to leave comments below. <comment><USER2> Eric, what is the problem you feel you have solved?

As a founder there are a few different issues that I see us dealing with. 1) finding people, 2) parsing though the people we find, 3) finding those worth talking to, 4) finding those worth risking an offer to. Which problem are you saying you figure out how to solve, each has its own unique dilemma to solve.</comment>


Two-Headed Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/two-headed-go <comment><USER2> Interesting! I would have guessed going 2:1 against a stronger player wouldn't help much. Maybe I'm digging in, but I'd expect that it stops being true soon -- I'd be surprised if a 1-kyu didn't beat two collaborating 6-kyus most of the time.

(I used to play a lot but don't anymore, was last at 1-dan AGA.)

<comment><USER3> I'm 1 kyu. I don't have any problem winning against two 6 kyus (I saw some experiments like that in the past.) There are simply too many things they overlook. And two 1 kyus (or a room of them) won't win against a 4 dan. We're playing different games.

What happens is that the weaker players become a little better at don't making reading mistakes and at finding possible moves. Unfortunately they don't get any better at evaluating moves and the unknown unknowns are still unknown. The better player finds moves that none of the weaker ones would think about or be able to explain.

I can imagine that the knowledge about the game of two 11 kyus have a smaller intersection than the ones of 6 kyus. This means they become much better together.

However two 1 kyu have about the same knowledge, so they could be at most 1 dan together, probably still 1 kyu.

<comment><USER4> 1k as well here.

I don't see it as much about knowledge of the game, more about avoiding mistakes and less pressure that lets you look at a game more in-depth. That, and two people will probably coalesce towards something like honte anyway.

Add to this the player opposing is under pressure because he HEARS the discussion. Can he take advantage of knowing plans? Should he?

I'd say this is a nice learning tool, and honestly, anything that keeps you interested and makes learning and playing a bit more fun is fantastic. I've played 5-in-a-row go, pair go, 3-player go, 1-colour go, 3D go and tried different board sizes like 38x38 or 19x19 infinite (sides 'joined'). I've never run across this variant! Seems fun!

Making guesses about what a 2-player team's strength is is a losing proposition, though.

<comment><USER5> _> Add to this the player opposing is under pressure because he HEARS the discussion. Can he take advantage of knowing plans? Should he?_

Since we knew the opposing player was listening we mostly didn't discuss plans, at least not in a way that would have hurt the plans. Mostly we suggested moves to each other, and pointed out problems with the other person's suggestions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of Gary Kasparov vs The World, which surprisingly turned out to be a better game of chess than you might have guessed.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> It sounds (from the comment on that page) like the biggest benefit they got was from being able to consult with each other to align on strategy and avoid blunders, which apparently isn't standard in Pair Go. Without that, I wouldn't really expect them to see qutie such significant benefits.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Rengo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Rengo) [https://senseis.xmp.net/?PairGo](https://senseis.xmp.net/?PairGo)

<comment><USER8> Unlike the OP game, pair Go is actually a _handicap_ for the paired up side rather than an advantage. You only get one brain per move, and that brain might be forced into using a strategy it doesn't like by previous moves.

<comment><USER3> Common wisdom is that in a pair go game everybody has three opponents :-)

Remember that it's not allowed any talking, except asking who's to move, maybe who's to take a ko, and proposing to resign to the mate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty common format for playing go. Usually called pair go. There's even fairly large tournaments for it here and there.

(To be clear I'm only talking about the two players on a team part, it's usually 2:2, not 2:1)

Personally I hate it and am absolutely awful at it, but to each their own.

<comment><USER10> Normal pair go explicitly disallows nontrivial communication of any sort. Very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pair baduk can be pretty fun. In my local club we do 2:1 and 2:2 pretty regularly. There is strong diminishing returns above two players though. 3:1 and 3:2 and 3:3 are all usually too much consultation for the game play to be fun if you don't have an opinionated leader on each side.

</comment><comment><USER12> 5:1 Pro game: [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/C0U4UnDCgML9K7r7qj3Yse4HDm...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/C0U4UnDCgML9K7r7qj3Yse4HDmRvczX_dvb5BLYK3nfHJ5qr4g3vvK0NAkrEXpbQcgcASa92Uz1VvBy0mXsoroC4w8YCzaz2HDPrRA=w1440-rw-v1)

<comment><USER13> Just a picture? Who won? Any game record?

<comment><USER14> AlphaGo won: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Go_Summit#Team_Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Go_Summit#Team_Go)</comment></comment></comment>


The Mattering Instinct - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/rebecca_newberger_goldstein-the-mattering-instinct <comment><USER2> That was a good read. It's no GTA San Andreas streaming deer cam, but not bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them? "Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept "value" is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals. Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life.

An organism's life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism's life, or: that which is required for the organism's survival. No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba's protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man's heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism's life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible.

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term "goal- directed" is not to be taken to mean "purposive" (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term "goal-directed," in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism's life.

Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "life." To speak of "value" as apart from "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between "is" and "ought.""

\-- Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness</comment>


Sparkplugs ... no laserplugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13160950

<comment><USER2> Sorry to quibble about grammar, but this error transforms your headline into its opposite.

What you really mean is "Sparkplugs ... no, laserplugs". You _really_ need that comma following the "no", so it can stand alone rather than negate the laserplugs.

<comment><USER3> Sparkplugs! No laserplugs! Sparkplugs!

But yeah, I think the original BBC headline was perfectly good before it was changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless if these plugs actually increase efficiency, their novelty will make them a commercial success. Who doesn't want a car with a Laser-Powered Engine(tm)?

</comment><comment><USER5> "The idea of replacing spark plugs - a technology that has changed little since their invention 150 years ago - with lasers is not a new one."

There's a reason that spark plug technology has not changed in 150 years: it works. The mechanism of a spark plug (and many mechanisms inside of an internal combustion engine) are so simple that they leave little room for mechanical failure.

Everyone likes to make the joke about "If Microsoft built cars", but there is some amount of truth to it - automobile engineers value simplicity far more than computer programmers do, as it has a direct effect on reliability. The reliability of a car is far more important than the reliability of an online chat application.

Spark plugs as they are now solve the problem, and are cheap. You can buy one for about $5 where I live. That one plug will last years. If by chance it does get dirty and start to fail, I can pull it out and clean it with a wire brush.

The "fuel efficiency gain" from a laser plug needs to be substantial to justify the complexity and expense. Leave it to journalists to ignore the practical side of a story and make it all 'science'.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. And we've seen great improvements to engine efficiency over recent years with technologies like direct injection (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_direct_injection>) but you'll see far fewer articles about that because it's complicated to explain and doesn't involve fancy sciencey things like fricking lasers.</comment></comment>


Matrix Benchmarks: Fast Linear Algebra on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/28/matrix-benchmarks-fast-linear-algebra-on-the-jvm.html

<comment><USER2> This is a nicely done article, so many problems map to linear algebra problems and I've been meaning to do this kind of research for a while.</comment>


How Spam Filtering Works: From SPF to DKIM to Blacklists - <AUTHOR> https://deliciousbrains.com/how-spam-filters-works/?__s=b7opgxc3bpupssi4tgau <comment><USER3> The author is still pretty far behind the curve with this info. Unfortunately while these policies are great to have (well these days they are more or less necessary), the simple fact is that they are so often misused or improperly maintained they don't really stop that much; a SPF mismatch is simply treated as another item to score the likeliness that a message should or should not be blocked. A DKIM signature is almost completely useless in this system since all it can do is prove a message was handled by a specific domain holder and not modified. So if you want to modify it, just remove the signature. If you want to send a forged message, don't sign it. There's nothing in DKIM itself to tell a recipient "my messages must be signed."

The new hotness is a DMARC record, and it finally allows mail senders to basically say "Here are my suggested handling policies for DKIM and SPF, and please actually enforce them because they are properly maintained and tested." Best of all it has a feedback loop, so you are able get reports of how receiving hosts are treating your messages and forensic reports of forgeries which can help with detection of several types of phishing threats.

It's still a long way from perfect, but it's better. It doesn't help deliverability though. For that you will want to stop emailing shit that people don't want.

<comment><USER4> The new hotness is ARC (arc-spec.org), which I understand came out of DMARC? Not sure though, don't know too much about it.

For DMARC, it's not so awesome :\ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900765)

<comment><USER5> In short: ARC builds on top of DMARC to fix some cases that DMARC didn't handle well. (And DMARC, in turn, builds on top of DKIM and SPF.)

DMARC is overall a very good thing, and has significantly cut back on the effectiveness of forged email for spam/phishing, at the expense of mailing list/forwarding headaches.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully it's been good for other people... I haven't seen any benefit personally. :\

On a related note: do you know if DMARC feedback leaks information to the sender on whether or not you opened an email, or reported it as spam, or similar? If so, do you know why this isn't considered a privacy or security issue?

<comment><USER6> DMARC feedback is only based on the MTA (Message Transport Agent) handling the mail. I don't have much experience with DMARC reports but Senders typically use it when they are first Setting up DMARC. It is up to the receiving MTA to send the inbox/spam result according to the RFC. I think that the reports are aggregated so single inboxes are not able to be detected. I don't think many people actually send / follow up on DMARC reports imo.

Source: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7489#section-7.3](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7489#section-7.3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been thinking for a while that there should be a movement to allow people running mailservers at their home again.

"Again" as in get other actors in the field to allow/ease that: spamlist managers should stop blocking residential address _by default_ and make it easier to appeal. ISPs should make it possible and easy to get a reverse-ptr with every fixed ipv4 allocation.

In this monitoring age I want to be able to handle my private conversations (and my data) on my own iron (running somewhere in my house).

All this impediments to running your own mailserver and take back control of your own data really look like a push towards state-/corporate-backed espionage of individuals.

It's not 1995 anymore, most of us have an internet connection well capable of sustain enough mailboxes for a whole family.

<comment><USER8> I'd absolutely be all for it - I've been running my mail server since the 90s, and used to run it out of my closet.

There are two major, somewhat interlocking problems, though: home users with compromised machines currently represent the population of home "mail servers" (spam malware) at the moment. Selling this involves convincing mail administrators that not simply blackholing all of what is currently a cesspool is a good idea. That's not easy.

The second problem is that fixed-IPs, open well-known ports and DNS have become a product differentiator for ISPs. Those are "business" features; dumb ole' consumers don't "need" them.

I don't see any compelling argument that would convince either prong of that trap - hell, I agree with you, but as a mail admin both professionally and personally, the first one gives me hives, thinking about the years of work it'll take to re-stabilize a functional antispam infrastructure to handle it.

And after that, you need to convince Comcast to change their revenue- extraction plans and generally be less dickish.

If just you want a mail server now, your best bet is a cheap VM somewhere. It can be really low-end and cheap.

<comment><USER9> Other way I've thought of effectively achieving this is by using VPS for static IP outside of residential ranges and home machine connected by WireGuard VPN. WireGuard handles roaming easilly, so dynamic IP is no problem, IPv6 is no problem, and the mail will stay on your home machine. You'll also bypass your country's/ISP tracking somewhat if you place your VPS outside of the country.

<comment><USER10> I run home mail sever for a while. I used to have smtp at home but a few years back I switched to a smtp proxy/forwarder on AWS ($5-6/month) connected via TLS SMTP on custom port at home (which also serves IMAPS on a custom port). Once a year I have to update DNS when my Comcast IP changes. Otherwise it is completely trouble free setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my experience, spam blacklists have significantly decreased in efficiency over the last 10 years. I think the biggest e-mail providers stopped contributing to them, so the user-reported lists are almost unused. The honeypot lists lag behind the spammers by a few days, so plenty slip through. They do trim out 85% of my incoming spam, but that last 15% is still a lot. Back in ~2013 they cut out more like 99%.

Today, the single most effective thing you can do if you run your own mail server is to completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam.

Plenty of spam has valid SPF and DKIM records. They are sent through legit services, either through cracked credentials of real users or rotating through new accounts.

It also doesn't seem like anybody cares about abuse@/spam@ reports anymore...

<comment><USER12> > _completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam_

[citation urgently needed]

Anyway, in my own experience with many years of self-hosting mail - <USER2> giving up and going Fastmail a couple of years ago - the real problems were in sending. No matter what rigorous level of DKIM'ing and ip-hygiene and whatnot, Google and Microsoft - Microsoft to a grotesque degree - would randomly ditch incoming mails from my server. Would sometimes happen in the middle of a conversation thread, and for the most part without warning. The kind of person using Hotmail is typically not someone you can convince that the error lies in his end.

<comment><USER11> > completely block all gTLDs. Screw 'em, they are 99.9999% spam

That's for _my_ e-mail. Your experience may differ. Perhaps you communicate often with people on .loan domains.

E-mailing Microsoft accounts is just not an option. They have no process for fixing incorrectly blocked IPs. I take the same approach with Microsoft as with gTLDs...

Never had a problem with any other mail provider. Google has never blocked or spam-holed me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Been there, done that. And then Microsoft answers my complaints (after my mails never showed up at my brother in laws outlook.com mailbox):

 _We have reviewed your IP(_. _._. _) and determined that messages are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen® Filter.

Email filtering is based on many factors, but primarily it's due to mail content and recipient interaction with that mail. Because of the proprietary nature of SmartScreen® and because SmartScreen® Filter technology is always adapting and learning more about what is and isn't unwanted mail, it is not possible for us to offer specific advice about improving your mail content. However, in general SmartScreen® Filter evaluates specific words or characteristics from each e-mail message and weights them, based on their likelihood to indicate that a message is unwanted or legitimate mail.

Unfortunately, after reviewing the information you provided and in compliance with our mail policies, we are unable to offer immediate mitigation for your deliverability issue. However, we have some specific recommendations for you to consider that can help you to improve deliverability over time._

It's a struggle running your own mailserver.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it's annoying because mailbox owners have zero control too. If your brother in law complained to outlook that some emails are missing from his inbox/spam because outlook decided to reject them outright, he would get the same respnse. "We have smarter systems(r) than your judgement, sorry." (Remeber, you can't click "not spam", if the e-mail was not delivered at all)

The problem is the burden of not upsetting a mail filter got somehow shifted to the sender in case of big services filtering mail, which is ridiculous. Customers should talk to their providers if they're not receiving mail, because providers don't deliver it. But the correcting feedback loop is not there or/alternatively is much longer with more steps than in case of sender getting a bounce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Much more important than SPF and DKIM is Forward-confirmed reverse DNS.

You need SPF and DKIM, but before that you need FCrDNS.

Without FCrDNS, your server will look like a dynamic IP address.

It's also not enough to monitor your own dedicated IP address. You need to monitor your entire /24 IP address neighborhood at your hosting company. You might be sharing the same /24 IP address space as a hacked Wordpress installation and find that Outlook.com will block you just because of that.

After that, you might run into issues with large SpamAssassin setups hosting hundreds of thousands of mailboxes blocking your email because of arbitrary rules such as too little text combined with a large image etc. Plain text email will improve your deliverability for these setups.

<comment><USER15> Yes, Microsoft blocked me sending email from my shared hosting to my Hotmail. The email address was whitelisted, and established email back and forth to that domain, and no spam ... but another server at the same host had previously been blacklisted in one blacklist.

SPF nor DKIM helped, I don't own the mail server nor want to pay Microsoft's service provider to verify me.

In the end I had to bounce the emails from a third-party address. Which you'd think shouldn't work -- certainly not when whitelisting doesn't -- but solved the problem.

So to avoid being flagged as a spammer, do the spammiest thing possible: set up a new, free mailbox and bounce your mail from there. SMH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're looking for an easy way to test your outgoing mail setup, I recommend mail-tester.com. They give you an address to send an email to, then analyse it and tell you how you can make it more deliverable.

<comment><USER17> [https://mxtoolbox.com/](https://mxtoolbox.com/) can also give you a lot of useful info related to your MX.

[https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx](https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The great fallacy of spam filtering is that access control SHOULD be probabilistic whenever it is easy to implement that. Let's look at the physical world where implementation is harder. It's very unlikely that I'll arrive home from work at 4:30 AM, AND that I'll be driving a rental car instead of my own car, AND that I'll be wearing new shoes with a sole pattern that my smart walkway hasn't seen before. So, ideally my home security system would automatically call the police. Right?

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's how it works. You train your spam filter both with spam and ham and the sets need to have comparable sizes for it to work reliably.

So in your example, you'd train it on your patterns of behavior AND patterns of burglars. So unless you had a clear burglarly behavior, the system would probably not flag you out for just behaving differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've spent many, many hours playing with my mailserver and adding all of these extra features and security settings to try to keep Gmail and others from denying mail from me.

It turns out that no matter what I do, I'm pretty much out of luck because I'm sending from a non-standard (.link) domain which gets treated as spam by Gmail as well as others. I get a perfect score on every email test site I've tried, but I still go to spam (or worse) regularly which is a big problem if I ever want to use my personal email for anything important.

For anyone looking to host their own email using a personal domain, I'd suggest sticking to something like .com to avoid the hell that I've been through with this.

</comment><comment><USER20> Would love to get feedback from the HN community. We're a decently sized sender following what we think are best practices (sending to engaged, dkim, etc.) however our gmail deliverability is rock bottom and it's been difficult to improve. Every other provider is to benchmark or better. One issue may be high hard bounce rates on our very first email sent, but we don't send emails to bounces at all afterwards. (Wouldn't a double opt-in result in the same situation). What are the most impactful levers to pull in your opinion?

<comment><USER21> > ...our gmail deliverability is rock bottom and it's been difficult to > improve. Every other provider is to benchmark or better. ... What are the > most impactful levers to pull in your opinion?

I'll be blunt, and maybe others will disagree with me, and say that I don't think there are any impactful levers you can pull.

In my experience, Gmail frankly does not give a shit about receiving e-mail from any senders except ones that fall in one of two categories: a) very large so users will complain in large groups if receiving from them is impacted (put your Outlooks and your Yahoos and your huge residential ISPs in this category) or b) technically-savvy senders that aren't quite as large but Gmail employees routinely interact with so they're otherwise "trustworthy" (Fastmail is an example here).

I've ranted about here but I've had terrible success being smaller than a multinational ISP and sending e-mail to Gmail users. Messages will silently disappear, even though Gmail's SMTP server claims to accept the message, and the postmaster tools are less-than-useful (that might be my one suggestion, sign up for them on behalf of your domain and see if you get any reports; I didn't, 'too small'), and no amount of tinkering or asking would help.

I admit I'm just a SMB org whose business isn't sending e-mail--it's "just" a communications tool for us--so I had this option: I threw in the towel and switched to Fastmail and have had no problems since.

<comment><USER22> > That might be my one suggestion, sign up for them on behalf of your domain > and see if you get any reports; I didn't, 'too small.

I had the same issue, what I found though is that DMARC reports give at least some insight into the process, but that's about all the information I've managed to get from Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice article. It's worth noting that it's not just the reputation of the sender domain you should be looking at - the reputation of the links in the _body_ also plays a big part. In fact over at [https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com), this is the number one issue we see for legitimate senders landing in spam.</comment>


Node.js v0.6.0 is released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/11/05/node-v0-6-0/ <comment><USER2> I found it a bit odd that writes for linux went down from 22MB/s to 17MB/s when Windows writes went way up from 13MB/s to 34MB/s. This at the same time as read performance went up to 27MB/s for both systems.

Edit: Seems like it's a regression that will likely be fixed for 0.6.1.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope it's well optimized for fibonacci algorithms now.

<comment><USER4> Not to worry! Until we can get the _desperately_ needed native Fibonacci support (lest the haters hate), there is always node-fib: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3067403>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one that thinks that Windows support was not really worth the time? Sure, you get to support a huge chunk of the OS market, but what are the real implications of Node running natively on Windows?

<comment><USER6> Microsoft funded the work. My guess is since they're pushing for JS client- side apps now with WinRT; they funded node on Windows so that JS developers can run their server-side code on Windows instead of being tempted to fire up a *nix server instead.

(AFAIK, MS doesn't have any server-side JS tooling similar to node at the moment. Very good chance that I'm wrong, though.)

<comment><USER7> Microsoft has JScript.NET (and has for a while now).

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974588.aspx>

I haven't seen it used anywhere as a server side application, though.

<comment><USER8> JScript.NET was dropped for .NET 4.0; it has always been a bit of a curiosity though. I think it was there because "classic" ASP had support for doing server-side scripting in JScript, so somebody thought ASP.NET needed to support it also. Thankfully, there are a few alternative JavaScript implementations on .NET such as IronJS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Native Windows support using I/O Completion Ports for sockets."

"Integrated load balancing over multiple processes."

These two improvements are just the nudge I needed to start tinkering with Node. I've been following along and reading about node almost daily but native windows support and integrated focus on multiple processes make a big difference to me. I can no longer sit on the sidelines.

Thanks for picking me up and shoving me onto the field!

<comment><USER10> While I agree what windows support is nice, I have found running a virtual machine running Linux much easier even when there is official Win support. It's no different running an SSH terminal to a local system than a remote one, after all.

<comment><USER9> That is exactly what I was considering for my home use. But unfortunately many businesses will deal only with windows servers, vm or not. This brings node one step closer into the realm of plausible platform for those cases.

<comment><USER11> Can you provide a couple of examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Direct link to a list of changes you have to make to your codebases: [https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/API-changes- between-v0.4...](https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/API-changes- between-v0.4-and-v0.6)

Question: Since this doesn't look that complex, is anyone working on an automagical translator from 0.4 to 0.6 that people could use?

<comment><USER13> I think lots of the pain is going to be in the vast collection of third party (npm) modules that need to be updated. Will take a bit before all module authors are up to date.

<comment><USER14> It'd be nice to have a list of modules affected by the change. I probably won't update until I know what it'll do to my existing system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Next for windows developers is trying to get npm to work. The sheer popularity of unix tooling in the build process means that using node libraries is likely to remain a challenge.

<comment><USER16> While it's true that a lot of Node libraries assume *nix and make system calls, a surprising number of libraries are written in pure Node. Just clone the library from GitHub and put it in the node_modules directory and you're good to go for a number of popular libraries.

I've played around with Node in Windows and Node without NPM is seriously gimped.

<comment><USER17> Well, ryppi.py is a python script which works like npm. Once you are done with it you can install any of the libraries by using the following command.

                 python ryppi.py install socket.io express

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> uhm, according to their benchmark io.js write performance dropped from 21mb/s to 17mb/s in linux but rose from 12mb/s to 33mb/s in windows. So it seems that windows node implementation is now twice faster (for I/O) than linux one..are they only focusing on windows platform?

<comment><USER19> That's a regression we'll probably have fixed in 0.6.1.

Note that I/O read performance is up 35%, from 19.7 mb/s in 0.4 to 26.6 mb/s in 0.6.

<comment><USER20> Any numbers for node on ARM? I was told that recently v8 releases have had significant performance regressions for ARM devices by a JS dev at a meetup.

<comment><USER21> Can you give more information about this?

If you know that JS dev personally please ask him to file the bug (<http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/entry>) or send any information he has about regressions to v8-users mailing list.

I don't think there were any bugs opened recently about perf regressions on ARM devices.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't use it if you rely on npm. It doesn't work yet.

<comment><USER23> Or just install npm manually. Clone it, edit one line to bypass a check, `make install`. Remember, if it's 0.5.x compatible, it's probably 0.6.0 compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Node Cluster? <http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html>

Is it me or does this look like the early makings of an erlangish otp, eh?

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow the balancing through clusters looks awesome! With this addition, does anyone know if you need to start node with --balance anymore?

</comment><comment><USER26> Would be nice to see a need a list of modules that are ready for 0.6. I rekon our moderately complex app we will be on 0.4.x for a while

</comment><comment><USER27> Wouldn't run node on windows in production, but it makes it a heck of alot easier for dev work.</comment>


Generate CSS Sprites On The Fly - <AUTHOR> http://spriteme.org/

<comment><USER2> SpriteMe seems to only sprites images that are already used in a background. It would be more useful it had the option of spriting all images on a page and then gave you the HTML/CSS code to display each sprite.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm at "The Ajax Experience" and saw Steve demo this page. I already have 3-4 pages in my application that I think I can update to use what I got from this site. It's a very nice tool. The only issue is that sometimes the file size of the generated image is larger. I guess they're just using the default settings for pngcrush but I'm not sure how much tweaking the image would help some of my results but it might.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're talking about very large image sizes ( >200k ) and very low bandwidth; latency is a bigger timesuck, even with pipelined requests.

Not to say that you shouldn't minimize images, but that's less of a concern than minimizing the number of requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks, I had been putting that off for a long, long time, but that tool provided enough of an impetus to do it. Shaved 6 requests off my front page. Some day when I get a moment I'll do another one for all the buttons.

<comment><USER6> There's <http://dabuttonfactory.com> for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. That's very cool.

</comment><comment><USER2> <http://spritegen.website-performance.org/> is similar. It has you upload a zip of your images and I think it gives you a bit more control over the sprited image it creates.</comment>


Better Kernel#require profiling information - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ruby-prof/ruby-prof/issues/159

<comment><USER2> While this is interesting, for every Ruby app I've worked on where startup times became an issue, the culprit was trivially found with "strace" to be caused by excessive pollution of the load path to the point where pointless stat-calls totally dominates load time.</comment>


HeyZap (YC W09) Launches "Xbox Live for Flash Games" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/heyzap-flash-achievement/

<comment><USER2> Very big congratulations to HeyZap - I had a chance to meet the team a bit ago, and they're all very sharp. Seems like they're exploiting a space that's wide open and waiting for innovation. I'm pretty excited to see where they go in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.kongregate.com/> already has a system like this in place.

<comment><USER4> Why do people act so dismissive about what others achieve by comparing it (in a shallow manner I might add) to what other's have already done? Guess what, I've never used Kongregate and I've been addicted to games since I can remember. When it comes to potential addressable market, teh great internet is f---ing massive and users are not that loyal if a better solution comes along so who gives a damn. <Cue Facebook entrance>

In my humblest opinion a dismissive, thoughtless, knee-jerk comment more often than not suggests a reaction from a wantraprenuer. Exhibit B: TechCrunch comments. Whether it's fear, lack of confidence, or something else, they certainly don't realize - muchless value - execution, focus, and persistence.

Keep on truckin' HeyZap.

<comment><USER5> So true and to make things worst, people that are busy building things don't get time to comment. Markets, incentives, life - go forth and conquer my lord (free forever). Last sentence was a joke.......

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haha, that example game seems familiar.

<http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill/>

:)

</comment><comment><USER7> Kudos for the work, but personally I hate the recent crop of games with the social networking ties. I've tried out a few Zynga apps and every time it asks me to post something to my wall about their game, I feel like giving the app a big middle finger because I know what it's trying to do.

I don't mind achievements that award me for doing unique things in-game, but coercing me to tell other people about your game really drives me mad.

</comment><comment><USER8> On the topic of games moving to the cloud:

perhaps the next generation of game machines will be lightweight clients with games run on the server. I'm picturing XBOX designed for MMORPG's and similar.

Agree/disagree?

<comment><USER9> OnLive (<http://www.onlive.com/>) is doing exactly that. My brother was looking into doing cloud gaming, but this company was so far ahead of him that he moved onto different ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do you enforce the integrity/security of achievements?

<comment><USER11> We've got integrity checking on all calls back to our server (eg. when unlocking achievements and buying items).

We can also ping a game developer provided secure callback URL to let them know when we have seen a purchase or an achievement.

It _is_ possible to hack the flash content while it is running to unlock the achievements etc on the client, but the vast majority of players (99.9%) don't do this, because: a) it defeats the purpose of playing the game b) it is hard

So in reality it isn't a problem for game developers or for us :)

<comment><USER10> Although I don't work directly with the Xbox LIVE security folks, I've got a friend or two over there. They work extremely hard to do the impossible: preserve the perceived value of achievements and leaderboard rankings in the face of an untrusted client. Being the talented folks that they are, they are surprisingly successful.

Let me tell you: if your service garners any success (and I wish you the best of luck!) you will encounter widespread cheating. For friends-only leaderboards or achievement lists, this may be an acceptable victim-less crime, but global leaderboards or stranger achievement comparisons will be a problem.

Xbox addresses this with "secure" hardware, but still faces significant cheating. Constant patrol is needed to fix the broken windows. Do not underestimate then desire of some individuals to ruin the fun for everyone. Just because you don't see why you would want to do it doesn't mean people won't.

Good luck :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So....now they're on par with GamerSafe, except they don't have the placement advantage of being operated by the FGL people.

</comment><comment><USER13> how is this different from what mochi media does?

<comment><USER14> What aspect of Mochi Media are you comparing Heyzap to? They don't have achievements or dual currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> cool</comment>


Ask HN: Which crypto would you invest a small amount of money in? - <AUTHOR> I've pretty much let the cryptocurrency thing pass me by until now, but there's so much hype around it now that I can't help but pay attention!
I have a small amount (£500) which I'm willing to invest in one or more cryptocurrencies, mostly for the fun of it - if I lose the money, so be it.
If you were in this position, which currency/currencies would you invest in, and why? Links to any useful resources (e.g. how to buy them!) would be appreciated! <comment><USER2> [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/einsteinium/#markets](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/einsteinium/#markets)

Apparently yesterday into einsteinium.

*small amount to invest, best option many coins for little money, so if it goes up, it goes up X fold the number of coins you bought, and not just the X percent that one 0.0002 btc would have increased.</comment>


Death of a Programming Language Dilettante - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/219.html <comment><USER2> This isn't really about programming languages, as much as picking the right tool for the job.

My dream world at this point: Rust everywhere. Frontend, backend, middle tier, microservices, etc. It has the potential to be all those things. Will it happen? Will it overcome the behemoth that is JavaScript when WebAssembly is finalized and in all browsers? Will it fend off Swift as that language is ported to more platforms? Will it start to supplant the core which is C?

I want it too, but who knows. Right now I have to work in JavaScript, Python, and Java for work, with some Ruby for automation. That's real life.

</comment><comment><USER3> It really seems we are in a world of infinite new programming languages. Typically in my career there was always a "common" language and the Next Best Thing. In the 1980s Pascal was common but C was touted as better, then in the 1990s, C++ replacing C, then in the early 2000s C++ was common and Java was the next best thing. But now with Rust, Haskell, Clojure, Swift, Go, etc. etc., it really isn't clear what the Next Best Thing is.</comment>


Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. To Its Core - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywall link: [http://archive.is/rM0du](http://archive.is/rM0du)</comment>


"I-Cut-You-Choose" Cake-Cutting Protocol Inspires Solution to Gerrymandering - <AUTHOR> https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/november/i-cut-you-choose-cake-cutting-protocol-inspires-solution-to-gerrymandering.html <comment><USER2> I feel like this might go a little too far in formalizing the two-party system in a way that would have undesriable consequences. A better approach to drawing Congressional districts would be something like this:

[https://bdistricting.com/](https://bdistricting.com/)

"Impartial Automatic Redistricting... optimized for equal population and compactness only."

<comment><USER3> One better is to not have districts at all, and instead use proportional representation, which is what's used in more than 50% of all major democracies around the globe[1].

IMHO, more important than eliminating Gerrymandering, is eliminating the two party system. In truly competitive governments with 10-15 parties holding seats, it's incredibly risky to lie, BS, or ignore arguments. In our two party system most of the arguments are just designed to talk you out of voting at all if you favor the other party.

[1]: [http://www.fairvote.org/research_electoralsystems_world](http://www.fairvote.org/research_electoralsystems_world)

<comment><USER4> > eliminating the two party system

The US only has a two-party system because our method of voting ensures that it devolves into a two-party system. Our two-party system is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Give us ranked voting and proportional representation and we'll see more than two parties emerge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> California had a statewide ballot initiative (Prop 20) which established the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which drew districts ignoring party affiliation. The resulting districts lean heavily Democratic (because, duh, California) but are also fiercely competitive; there are very few safe seats and incumbents have to hustle. Frankly it's fantastic, a model for the nation.

California has proven out the solution: collect a set of citizens from both parties as well as some unaffiliated, aggressively de-politicize the process, give them broad guidelines on how district lines should be drawn, and let them do their thing. No need for weird cake-cutting machinations.

<comment><USER6> >districts lean heavily Democratic (because, duh, California)

Except that outside of a few cities, California is actually quite red. IIRC would be a red state if LA and SD were underwater.

[https://www.politico.com/election- results/2018/california/](https://www.politico.com/election- results/2018/california/)

<comment><USER7> This is a weird statement. You're saying California would be a red state if you removed a lot of Democrats.

About 50% of registered voters in the state are Democrats, and 30% Republican: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_voter_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_voter_registration)

So yes, if you removed close to 3 million democrats from the state somehow, it would be a tie. Probably an easier method would be for Republicans to make their policies more attractive to more people.

<comment><USER6> The topic was on gerrymandering districts - there are more republican districts. The part of the comment I was replying to was _" DISTRCITS lean heavily Democract"_ which is not true, more DISTRICTS lean Republican.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just get rid of single member districts. Replace congressional districts with proportional representation.

<comment><USER9> Since congressional districts were intended to be a form of proportional representation, what do you propose in their stead?

<comment><USER10> One of the better ways I've heard is multi-member districting, where you have a slightly larger district with multiple reps (maybe 3-5 representatives) where seats are partitioned proportionately for that district. Voters vote for a party, and seats are apportioned to each party in accordance with their share (with some rounding). This guarantees a result that is at least as proportional (I'd posit significantly more proportional) as the current representative system, and maintain the 'theoretical' locality of representation, meaning constituents still vote for people representing their small localities.

There are different ways to assign representatives in proportional representation systems, but at such small scale you could have district-wide primaries where the top N finishers for that multi-member district are slotted into seats in the order in which they finished in the primaries.

Unfortunately this system is still imperfect, as strategic voting can still occur l, but significantly less so than in our first past the post single- member system. Also it excludes extremely small parties (>10% of the national electorate) from influence. It's a tough problem.

<comment><USER11> Get rid of FPTP first, since that is the worst of your problems. Multi-member districts will be an incremental improvement on top, and actually be meaningful once every vote ends up selecting a representative.

With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing with very centrist platforms, with the major parties quickly scrabbling to get those centrist votes.

<comment><USER12> > Get rid of FPTP first, since that is the worst of your problems

No, unequal apportionment and the electoral college are the biggest problems, FPTP and single-member districts in state and federal legislatures are, in combination, just the biggest problem which isn't federally Constitutionally mandated and which can therefore be fixed with legislation at the appropriate level(s) without federal Constitutional Amendment.

> With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing > with very centrist platforms

Perhaps, but every candidate elected being a compromise candidate that relatively few people feel they would have preferentially votred for first is _horrible_ for representation, and that's what you get with any STV-like system with single member districts in an electorate where political views aren't unimodally distributed (and if views were unimodally distributed, FPTP would get you exactly the battle for the center you propose and you wouldn't need STV to get it.) You want compromise in the legislature on policy where the voices in the legislature reflect those in the populace to the degree feasible; you don't want the compromise to happen mechanically in selecting members of the legislature.

<comment><USER13> > No, unequal apportionment and the electoral college are the biggest problems

What do you mean?

I think the biggest problem is giving electoral votes based on total state population instead of based on citizenship.

California and Texas both end up with more than they should have.

Edit: I'd like electoral votes to be distributed proportionally instead of winner takes all - it sucks that if you are not in a swing state you have less influence.

<comment><USER14> California is 87% citizens compared to 93% for the country. That doesn't change the voting math much. But Wyoming citizens gets 7000% more Senate representation.

<comment><USER13> Back of a napkin calculations have California with around 25% of all immigrants in the US.

It's a pretty big chunk of EC votes - more than Wyoming gets in total!

The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people - so it's not really a fair comparison.

<comment><USER12> > It's a pretty big chunk of EC votes - more than Wyoming gets in total!

No, it's about the same. If you pull non-citizens out of the calculation nationally, California loses between 3 and 4 seats in the House.

> The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people

That's no more true than saying the House is supposed to be scaled to people and not citizens. Both are features of the design of the system. "Is supposed to be X" doesn't stop something from being a problem in terms of a goal other than X.

<comment><USER13> > doesn't stop something from being a problem in terms of a goal other than X

Sure - I guess it's the difference between a tweak and an overhaul. I'd expect the overhaul to have 100x the supporting evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're not constitutionally a two party country, so the solution as described in the article does not seem to apply.

<comment><USER16> Not constitutionally, but by using single member districts and our current voting algorithm, the equilibrium is two parties. So we are a de facto two party state.

<comment><USER11> It's First Past The Post that forces the two party system. Get rid of that, STV is what will bring lasting change and reduce the the tendency for the two major parties to be exaggerated opposites of each other.

<comment><USER17> For the presidential elections approval voting would be more appropriate, for local representatives proportional representation is the important part for which you don't really need STV (although I guess voting for political parties with proportional representation is somewhat similar to STV with a predetermined set of preferences).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do you evenly split a quantity of something (e.g. drugs) when you have no scales? One person does the splitting, then presents both halves to the other person, who can choose either one as the half they keep. Everyone is incentivized to transact as fairly as possible.

<comment><USER19> My older brother's "solution" to being told he must cut the cake and let me choose which half to take was: a sloped cut similar to the one in this picture [1] but which slightly exaggerated the uppermost surface area of the smaller volume.

An analogous tactic against this "I-cut-you-freeze" task might be to provide especially appealing district boundary for your opponent to freeze, while harbouring some knowledge about that district that that your opponent is unaware of (eg suppose that you know the trajectory of demographic changes much better than your opponent)

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/Doy6lPg](https://imgur.com/a/Doy6lPg)

<comment><USER20> The competence of the participants to judge the slices is outside the scope of this. If one of the parties doesn't know what they're doing, that's their problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I cut you choose is not fair. I actually heard an example in real life about a week ago when something was being cut for two people (they weren't following the "I-cut-you-choose" protocol, just trying to be fair). The person doing the cutting was literally saying "It is very hard to cut it so they're both the same."

This is true. Many things don't naturally cut into two equal pieces despite the person's best attempts, and in certain cases it may be impossible. (For example, if there is are "valuable" toppings that are indivisible.)

It is just plain easier to choose than to cut. The worst case choice for the person choosing is that they are indifferent to which piece they get, but the worst case for the person cutting is that they get a worse piece.

Choosing is strictly always better than cutting.

<comment><USER22> I used to joke around with my brother that it'd be funny for the cutter to intentionally cut the cake like 9/10 to 1/10 then get outraged when the chooser took the bigger piece. But, you're absolutely right - choosing is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Exciting to see an elegant algorithm proposed for a complicated real-world political problem.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here is an idea I had awhile ago - the rules should limit the ability of a boundary to be concave. It isn't reasonable to say "no concave polygons", but you could create a measure of "concavity". If you look at a ridiculously drawn boundary, you'll see it can kind of spiral - it'll hop down a street turn a couple times all in order get the current congressman's house within his existing district.

How to do that? Use the ray casting solution to the Point in Polygon problem. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon))

If there is any point within the boundary that has to cross the boundary more than 3 times to get to a point outside of the boundary, then the proposed congressional district is too complex. if it crosses 4 times (or any even number), the point isn't actually within the boundary to begin with. Crossing the boundary 3 times still allows for some concavity, but 5 is kinda ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER25> This further deepens the two-party system. That's no solution at all.

Districts should be compact, as simply shaped as possible, equally populated, and ideally follow as many lines of local government concern as possible.

We already have utility districts, school districts, city precincts, county precincts, townships, drainage and levee districts, cities, towns, villages, counties, wards, neighborhoods, state police districts, state House districts, state Senate districts, and more boundary lines within states. Rather than one county precinct being cut into four parts so each can be a portion of four different Congressional districts that also overlap other county precincts, perhaps as much as possible your part of town should have the same candidates on the Congressional race as your neighbors using the same voting station.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why do you even need districts? Just split based on the total percentages of voters.

<comment><USER27> Because that's not what most people want.

<comment><USER26> Why would you not want that as a voter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is an awesome idea, but what if there is more than two parties?

<comment><USER29> This article explains how it would work for 3, but I haven't thought about it enough to figure out if it translates to districting.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the- mathematics-o...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematics- of-cake-cutting/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems like the obvious problem with this is that it could lead to districts that aren't contiguous.

<comment><USER31> What is or isn't a valid division is external to this algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This will never work. The only hope is honorable experience and strong leadership.

<comment><USER33> > The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of > the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do > it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To > summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule > people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the > summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should > on no account be allowed to do the job.

\- Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

I think the truth in this humor is quite relevant to those in whom you're placing your hope.

<comment><USER34> Great quote :) To rephrase I think the problem is that the skill set you need to _get_ into a political position is completely orthogonal to the skill set you need to _do good work_ in said position.

<comment><USER27> That's true for far more than political positions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The courts exist to provide relief to the people and regardless of whether a solution like this were applied, the courts could continue to provide relief. It would be interesting to see a solution which is more self-organizing at a grassroots level and which might mitigate the whole "from on high" decision- making. So long as a small group of driven individuals is making decisions like this, we will continue to have risks from material non-public knowledge used to game the system, and risks to the successful foothold by minority (of any sort) populations except those large enough to warrant party support. It's not an issue that the courts have had to step in -- without the courts the people would be left without relief.</comment>


RandomColor – a color generator for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://llllll.li/randomColor/

<comment><USER2> Good library to begin with, but could do better on the perceived brightness.

Since HSV is NOT perceived as evenly distributed to the human eye along the value(lightness) axis[1],

would recommend employing _chroma.js_ [2] which uses the HCL and CIE color spaces, which in general yield more pleasing results for use in color scales.

[1] [http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv- colors/](http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/)

[2] [https://github.com/gka/chroma.js](https://github.com/gka/chroma.js)

 _i want hue_ might be a bit of overkill though: [http://tools.medialab.sciences- po.fr/iwanthue/index.php](http://tools.medialab.sciences- po.fr/iwanthue/index.php)

<comment><USER3> also check out [http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html](http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html)

<comment><USER4> That page has a nice graphic clearly showing the problems with HSV and HSL. But the color scheme HSP it invents is not ideal. HUSL ([http://www.boronine.com/husl/](http://www.boronine.com/husl/)) is a strict improvement, as you can see from its comparison table of HUSL vs. HSL. HSP fixes the "lightness" problem with HSL, and HUSL fixes that as well as the "hue uniformity" problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe of interest: colorbrewer palettes as included in D3.js, which is my goto choice for colors

[http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5577023](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5577023)

[https://github.com/mbostock/d3/tree/master/lib/colorbrewer](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/tree/master/lib/colorbrewer)

</comment><comment><USER6> A really important thing for data-vis is generating distinguishably different random colors. It'd be great to have a library that produces series of distinguishable, pleasing colors.

<comment><USER7> Not a "library" but possibly worth a look:

"Picking a range of colors": [http://wiki.tcl.tk/38935](http://wiki.tcl.tk/38935)

<comment><USER8> This is a bad approach, because HSV is not an appropriate color model for this purpose.

<comment><USER7> How so? What would be an appropriate model, and why is HSV not appropriate?

<comment><USER4> As the link says, "it's not perfect, as it doesn't take into account the different visual acuity of the human eye in different color channels". That is why HSV is not appropriate – its H, S, and V scales are only approximations of axes that categorize colors as humans perceive them. For instance, V (value) roughly corresponds to how light or dark a color is, but blue with maximum V is way darker than yellow with maximum V.

I don't know what the best model is. HSL, at least, is a simple-to-understand strict improvement over HSV. Other people in this thread are suggesting models I don't know much about like CIELAB and CIECAM02. A model I have used to choose colors before, which is a variation of CIELUV and an improvement over HSL, is HUSL: [http://www.boronine.com/husl/](http://www.boronine.com/husl/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would it be possible to add a seed option so that you could request the same set of random colors if needed?

<comment><USER10> It's using Math.random, so no it's not currently possible. You'd have to replace the Math.random calls with something like this: [https://github.com/davidbau/seedrandom](https://github.com/davidbau/seedrandom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related : "How to Generate Random Colors Programmatically"

[http://martin.ankerl.com/2009/12/09/how-to-create-random- col...](http://martin.ankerl.com/2009/12/09/how-to-create-random-colors- programmatically/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is actually really cool. I can think of several practical applications for this.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wrote a general purpose (pseudo-)random value generation library[0] that does random color generation[1] among lots of other capabilities. It'd be interesting to see how you could use the mutator to implement some of this functionality.

[0] [https://github.com/heydenberk/stochator](https://github.com/heydenberk/stochator) [1] [https://github.com/heydenberk/stochator#from-predefined- sets](https://github.com/heydenberk/stochator#from-predefined-sets)

</comment><comment><USER14> I went with the approach of hardcoding few sets generated by [http://tools.medialab.sciences- po.fr/iwanthue/](http://tools.medialab.sciences-po.fr/iwanthue/) (which i think already been covered on HN) in my app. Just one set when i need <= 5 colors, one for <= 20, 50 and 100. Oh, and alternative set with different palette of colors when I need two diagrams on the same page. As a colorblind person I must say I was very happy with the results.

</comment><comment><USER3> "BRIGHT COLORS" and "DARK COLORS" overlap with several dark colors. pretty much every color model gets brightness values that dont jive with perceptual reality.

</comment><comment><USER15> This produces really nice colour sets, I'll definitely be using this to generate some backgrounds for blog posts. Nice work and thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great job! I know need not to worry about font color just pick one that reads fine for a given hue.

</comment><comment><USER17> Supporting complementary / tertiary colors would make it even more useful.

</comment><comment><USER18> really like it. did some research before on how to generate colours that would be good for some simple visualizations, but found it difficult. This is great for a quick retrieval of colours that you can use!

</comment><comment><USER19> Neat! I would love to see the math behind it.

<comment><USER20> Here you go: [https://github.com/davidmerfield/RandomColor/blob/master/ran...](https://github.com/davidmerfield/RandomColor/blob/master/randomColor.js#L29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone looking for a single line code to generate a random hex color: var randomColor = Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215).toString(16);

<comment><USER22> FYI that's almost the first thing mentioned in the article!</comment></comment>


Should Neil Armstrong's bootprints be on the moon forever? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/moon-apollo-11-archaeology-preservation.html <comment><USER2> It's a pretty big moon. Why not?

Many sci-fi stories describe a sort of exhibit where the landing area has been preserved. Seems to make sense. Some of those feature tours too, where people go out, experience the atmosphere (lack of it), and can identify better with what they saw, how it was that we got there and how important it all was.

These kinds of things are part of our humanity.

Unless there is some serious constraint, I find it hard to see value in letting all that go away.

<comment><USER3> Futurama covered it pretty well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to track consulting hours? - <AUTHOR>

What systems or tools do you use to track your hours when working? I would personally love to have a local app that syncs to dropbox so I could use it on multiple machines I work from. I'm leery of buying random apps on the App Store so would love to see some recommendations. <comment><USER2> I've used Toggl (<http://www.toggl.com/>) and Harvest (<http://www.getharvest.com/>). I like them both, though they are not local apps. But, you can use them on any of the multiple machines you use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Freckle. It's my very favorite web app in the whole world, simply beautiful and fun!

<http://letsfreckle.com/></comment>


Announcing the Acquisition of Surreal Vision - <AUTHOR> https://www.oculus.com/blog/announcing-the-acquisition-of-surreal-vision/ <comment><USER2> This is probably one of the best acquisitions Oculus have made so far, purely for the talent alone. Last year Oculus acquired Nimble VR and 13th Lab. More interestingly is 13th Lab were working on similar technology for taking a room and turning it into a virtual environment. Check out this project 13th Lab were behind called Minecraft Reality in which Minecraft objects were spawned in real life: [https://youtu.be/2pOpcR7uf5U](https://youtu.be/2pOpcR7uf5U)

Seems there are some big things planned for Oculus' launch next year, lets see what Sony brings to the table with their headset for the Playstation 4.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any technical company that John Carmack approves of buying must be legitimately badass. Many people thought Oculus had already created the VR platform of the future, but they've only just begun, there's a mountain of work to do before VR becomes the dominant form of computing. Oculus will have to buy some of these companies because there's no other way to hire the people they need.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reinforces my view that inside-out SLAM is the future of all AR/VR implementations.

That is why we are pumping so much effort into it at Visidraft with our AR system.

<comment><USER5> What is inside out slam?

<comment><USER6> Regular SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) is needed to get the headset's coordinate system locked to the real world. Otherwise you need external localization aids - markers, transmitters, IR cameras, etc. SLAM as a general technology is in reasonably good shape, but doing it with no frame delay to pixel or subpixel accuracy is tough. Many of the known algorithms deliver their best info about where you were a few frames ago, because you can average on both sides of the frame and deal with noise and artifacts. If you have to decide based on the current frame in a changing environment, sometimes you'll get it wrong.

Someone might come up with a killer app for a mediocre AR system while Oculus is getting it right. But probably not. The Google Glass debacle shows that crappy AR doesn't sell. The previous several generations of VR headsets show that crappy VR doesn't sell. There's good VR in controlled environments right now, but that's a niche market. This is a technology that has to work quite well to be tolerable to use.

<comment><USER7> Google Glass isn't crappy AR. It has no AR capabilities whatsoever, nor has Google ever suggested that they have any interest in adding AR to future revisions. Totally different product.

<comment><USER6> Augmented reality was implemented for Google Glass.[1][2] There were startups with demo products. The hardware was capable enough to do limited AR. Google itself didn't get there, but others did.

[1] [http://arforglass.org/](http://arforglass.org/) [2] [http://www.wikitude.com/products/eyewear/google-glass- augmen...](http://www.wikitude.com/products/eyewear/google-glass-augmented- reality-sdk/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazing news. Another success for the lab at Imperial. The team behind Surreal are really good from all the work I've seen. I used one of Stephen's projects for my masters thesis under the same supervisor (Andrew Davison) they all had and he was extremely helpful. Can't wait to see what they do next.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm starting to feel like Oculus is suffering from sequelitis. I have yet to use one, but by most accounts, it's in great shape for a v1.0 release. Launch early and they'll be sure to get good market advantage, and there's already a plethora of ready-to-run software.

But there's no release yet, specs and requirements keep getting bumped, and building out a metaverse of some kind seems to be eating up lots of resources.

It's not necessary to have super perfect ultra realistic scenes, people play minecraft and watch movies perfectly happily with their rifts after all.

Launch, then blow your install base away with a great 2.0 release.

<comment><USER10> I think the opposite, they need to get this right the first time, or people will try it once, get a little dizzy or disconnected and decide "Oh VR makes me sick."

With the recent bumps in the specs, I think it shows that you need more power than most people have available to get that kind of performance.

<comment><USER2> Exactly this. Virtual Reality headsets for many will be an entirely new never before seen experience, if they get it wrong, people will definitely avoid trying it again and that will be bad not just for Oculus but the virtual reality industry as a whole. If Oculus are first to release, they have a lot of pressure on their shoulders to do it right because their v1 launch success will have a flow on effect to other devices.

The higher end specifications required to power Oculus will definitely be a stumbling block. Presumably the headset will cost more than the developer kits costs, then you need to throw in at least an additional $800 for a high-end graphics card to power the Oculus. This is the kind of money only hardcore gamers will warrant, not a small family with a few kids wanting to get them a Christmas present. I have always said Oculus need to partner with a graphics card company like AMD or Nvidia and give the headset away with a high-end graphics card purchase, or at least heavily subsidise it. They're killing two birds with one stone then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if they've been busy trying to build an "App Store" or something else to avoid just selling hardware.

</comment><comment><USER12> s/Oculus/Facebook/g

<comment><USER13> Not wholly sure why this was downvoted, it's a bit trite but accurate: Oculus the company no longer exists. For example, if you were to apply to the "Oculus company", you're taken to a Facebook career page for a position in the Oculus division.

In fact, I find it a bit duplicitous that they don't mention the whole acquisition by Facebook bit on their "About Oculus" company page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are they trying to make a move to imitate microsoft's hololens? That's gotta be it.</comment>


The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire <comment><USER3> Part Deux is here:

[https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united- states-...](https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states- part-2-american-identity-and-threats-tomorrow)

It occurs to me that what Strat4 is doing here is _forecasting_. Extrapolating from historic bases of power to predict the emergence of future hegemons. But wouldn't it be possible to achieve a more data-driven, empirical analysis? Might make a sweet Kaggle crowd prediction problem ;)

<comment><USER4> Here if you're asked to register after reading part 1.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4rknDaG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4rknDaGw44kJ:https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics- united-states-part-2-american-identity-and-threats- tomorrow+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These guys are jokers. A _security_ firm that gets pwned by Anonymous...

[http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor- hack-10...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor- hack-10-things-to-know/)

Stratfor is flattering the sensibilities of the military industrial complex that pays its bills.

> The greatest threat to the United States is its own tendency to retreat from > international events.

Stratfor would embroil the US in more foreign wars, because the best thing that happened to US foreign policy in the last 15 years was Iraq...

These are the same people pushing for a Syrian intervention now. Peace time doesn't make anyone money, doesn't get any one promoted...

Their reading of China is laughable. While has China has debt issues, it is not analogous to Japan. With 1.3 billion people, it is more than an order of magnitude larger, for one thing.

China is actively colonizing the waters off the coasts of Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as expanding its space program. It is a rising, regional power attempting to revise the international order, much like Germany in the late 19th century. The US will need to strike a new balance of power with them. That rarely happens without war, sadly.

The fetishism of Russia plays to the fears of the Kremlinologists in the old guard. But Russia has a declining population, a declining GDP, and a second- rate military. Hard to imagine them as a challenger on anything more than a regional basis. This is not the Cold War anymore.

Did you notice there is not one mention of climate-driven migrations and disasters, which will hit the US and others with increasing violence? The Arab Spring and Syria were at least partially prompted by a drought-caused disastrous wheat harvest. Stratfor's failure to make valuable predictions about the future has a lot to do with its poor analysis of the present (even in 2011 when this was written.)

Lastly, because this is HN, I'll just say that these arm-chair analyses do not take into account the mutually reinforcing, exponential technological changes that will remake the world as we know it. The costs of solar energy are approaching zero; the capacities of narrow AI are increasingly superhuman; our ability to edit new life forms in to being, old diseases out of it, and generally augment ourselves, will make make these linear, ceteris paribus forecasts seem quaint.

<comment><USER6> I think at least this first part reads like an explanation of the events of the last two centuries and based on my very light arm-chair historians knowledge I failed to see any obvious lapses in their analysis.

Like any analysis, though, it should be read as interesting postulation based on known facts, rather than a complete explanatory model in itself.

I fail to see how cheap solar or new life forms would provide more arable land. Sure, we can invent - I don't know - an edible nutritious city kudzu that grows everywhere and provides nutrition for everyone but until that happens I think the american farmlands do provide a considerable asset like the article stated.

I see no obvious reason why at least a partial singularity nirvana could not come to being but until it does - no one really has a clue what it would look like and analyses like these must stick to understood reality and politics.

<comment><USER5> We can engineer yeast to produce almost any molecule. We can synthesize meat. We can do that with nearly free electricity from solar, among other ingredients. These things are happening now. Arable land is an archaic fetish, like much of Stratfor's thinking.

Calling events inevitable in hindsight has zero value. Predicting the inevitability of a future event, and then seeing that prediction confirmed, has immense value. Stratfor's predictions, however, are much weaker than their analysis of the past.

<comment><USER6> What are the theoretical economics of yeast based or synthetic food based nutrition on a global scale? The chemicals need to come from somewhere. The synthesis equipment needs to come from somwhere. As I understand it growing things in dirt is pretty efficient? Where is the cut-off point when test tube grown food is economically more viable than dirt based alimenation?

I am not saying these things wont happen. But we are not there yet. How soon? It took a few hundreds of years of tweaking for steam engines to actually make an economic difference. It took a hundred years for the offspring of babbages difference engine to become the instruments of the cultural and economic transformation they are today.

Today, we are locked to dirt. In five years, most food is dirt based. Probably still a decade or two from now.

Most analysts predicitions turn out to be pretty bad - but it's their 'editorial view' of current events that I find most educating if done well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to Wikipedia the inland waterways of the US carry cargo worth $73 billion each year - which is about 4% of US GDP. In that context the fascination with inland waterways seems a bit odd.

<comment><USER8> Given the context, you'd also want to look at the historical importance. The rust belt wouldn't be where it is except for those inland waterways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As always with Stratfor this analysis is not about security of North America but about global dominance. My opinion on stratfor is not really profound. But half a year ago I was so shocked about this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc&feature=youtu.be&t=45m23s) I had to write something then against this horrible propaganda: [http://hashsign.co.uk/contemporary/by/thoughts/futurism- and-...](http://hashsign.co.uk/contemporary/by/thoughts/futurism-and-world- war-one.html#stratfor) My English is too poor to take part in further discussions here. I'm sure most will not agree with my opinions. In a manner my writing is propaganda too. But perhaps it's anyway interesting to read what (some) Europeans think.

<comment><USER6> Well, I don't think it takes an evil genious to divide europe. It already is divided. There is no common will nor true common foreign policy of the european states. USA simply takes the few simple actions at a time it wants to enforce it's position while european statesmen do nothing.

As I see it, war in the Ukrane is mostly due to Kremlins need to destabilize all slavic regions that are in danger of becoming well to do modern democracies - they need a buffer zone of emergencies to maintain an internal stability of their kleptocratic political system.

<comment><USER9> Inside Europe there was war at all time. But it was One economic and cultural zone. Especially from 1100 to 1800. What happend after that time ("no common will" etc.) is not a native European quality but the result of British and US policy. Think of the UK efforts in the 19th century that almost ruined Britain just to fight Napoleone Idea of a united Europe. - "No common will" -to repeat this again and again is simply a wish (that unfortunately came true). - Ukraine topic: watch how the borders shift over time. It tells enough about intentions behind it.

<comment><USER6> "Inside Europe there was war at all time. But it was One economic and cultural zone. Especially from 1100 to 1800. "

This is a new notion for me. This would imply there was a single cultural entity that would encompass all of europe and a single economic system that encompasses the geographic area for this period. What would they be called?

I am sorry I brought current affairs to the discussion - it's a bit offtopic for HN and I was about to delete my first response until I found replies and felt it would be more rude at this point to remove it than not.

Discussing europe circa 19th century is ok I suppose.

<comment><USER10> This is a lot more fun than debating which browser-based MVC framework is better. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Those who are secure but open minded in their political identity and their political understanding, would greatly benefit from reading both this and its Part 2.

Summarizing such a complex situation without sugarcoating or incoherency is no small task, and this article does it exceedingly well.

Well done.

</comment><comment><USER12> > coastal plain of the Pacific Northwest

Where's that?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.united-states-map.com/topo/northwest.htm](http://www.united- states-map.com/topo/northwest.htm)

I don't read topos very well, but it looks like most of the coast on that map is greenish and plainish.

<comment><USER14> It's pretty striking. In northern Washington you mostly drive at least an hour between ocean and mountains (e.g. Bellingham to the Cascades). In southern coastal Canada the mountains rise straight from the ocean (e.g. driving between Vancouver and Squamish).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _And so the final imperative of the dominant power of North America is to ensure that this never happens - to keep Eurasia divided among as many different (preferably mutually hostile) powers as possible._

What a disturbing view of the world.

<comment><USER16> Surely this isn't the first time you've encountered this idea? Britain explicitly held this policy for hundreds of years with regards to continental Europe (make sure neither France nor Germany could take over the whole continent).

<comment><USER15> So we should go back to slavery because slavery was thought of as a good idea for a couple thousand years?

<comment><USER17> Woah! Massive logical jump there!

<comment><USER15> Where is the jump? Something was done in the past, why shouldn't we continue doing so? I of course assumed that the initial comment expressed some degree of endorsement and did not just state facts.

<comment><USER18> I read no form of endorsement in the comment, but rather a sense that this is a very common tactic in realpolitik throughout history and should not be surprising.

<comment><USER15> So because slavery was common in the past I should not be surprised if someone thinks about slavery today? This makes absolutely no sense. My point doesn't really depend on the endorsement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Many here seem to misunderstand the article as an expression of what is best, of some normative preference. Stratfor is describing what they think is the long-term (i.e., over generations) fate, in a way, of nations, based on a framework they embrace, geopolitics. I'm no expert, but here is my amateur understanding, undoubtedly flawed, from many years of reading this kind of material:

Humans long have tried to develop theories that predict the behavior of nations and its outcomes. It's perhaps the most important question to ask, with the survival, prosperity, and freedom of billions at stake. But it's a very difficult model to build, based on billions of human decisions and many other factors, including geography.

One well-established theory (though I don't know how popular among experts currently) is that geography, including climate, ultimately is a powerful factor determining the fate of nations. For example, a nation without arable land inevitably will have a small population and everything that follows from that: A small economy, a weak military, etc. Some real-world examples: Probably the biggest factor in Britain's survival in WWII was that they had a body of water between them and the German army; if they had switched geographies with the French, the results would have been much different. The U.S.'s WWII success and eventual post-war primacy was mostly because oceans separated the country from its enemies, providing an unmolested homeland, economy and manufacturing of war goods. The geography of Ukraine is easily traversed by large armies, leading to Russia being invaded through Ukraine many times over history (Napoleon and the Nazis come to mind); that is a big reason they want to control Ukraine. Russia's lack of access to the Mediterranean and Atlantic has greatly limited their naval power and thus their influence in Europe; that's why they care so much about Crimea and Syria, where they have naval bases with access to the Mediterranean. China's land borders are the Himalayas, other mountains and deserts, and poor areas such as Central Asia and Siberia; thus their trade is highly dependent on sea routes, resulting in their current actions to control the South China Sea. Overall, the regions of influence China tries to claim now is the same as when the Qing dynasty was ascendant in the 17th and 18th centuries - <USER2> else changes, but geography stays the same.

Wrote one historian: _If time is the locomotion of history, place could be the gradient against which it is pitted. Dynamic, the one hurtles forward; inert, the other holds it back._ [1]

How these issues play out is another matter. China could resolve it's South China Sea concerns via multilateral agreements, or through military aggression. Also, there are other theories, including realism and constructivism.

\----

[1] John Keay, in India: A History. Keay is not a credentialed academic historian but has written respected surveys of history; I don't know how well his theory ultimately holds water, but it's the best expression of the issue I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER15> Power is probably one of the worst things in human society. Power is the ability to shift matters away from equality, from equilibriums, the ability to fuck others over for ones selfish benefits. Power is worth nothing except you use it in inherently unethical ways. It's the same everywhere, internationally, nationally or within companies. No country should have more power than the power to defend its borders. Everything else can be solved in a better way without resorting to power.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure that we should feel the need for this kind of imperialism in the 21st century. We can certainly "defend our borders" militarily, but wouldn't it be wise to make sure our economy can be sustained regardless of the actions of other countries?

I think another take-away is that we should be transporting more goods by rail and water. The decline of our railways has helped the oil companies but has resulted in a huge number of truck-car deaths at the same time it's increased transportation costs. We should move more towards using trucking only for local deliveries.</comment>


Ask HN Is it possible to hire a freelance project manager? - <AUTHOR>

Lets say I have a website I would like to have built, which has some programming needs, design needs, content creation needs etc... Is it possible to hire someone to be a project manager on a cost plus basis with success fee, or pay for their time etc?
I see plenty of freelance networks where I can hire a designer or a writer or a programmer, but none where I can hire someone to manage the entire project.
Or am I just going about this the wrong way and I should really just be posting a project in it's entirety to get firms to bid on it?
Any thoughts where PM's that freelance hang out or even list their services? <comment><USER2> The size of the project makes a huge difference. If it is just a simple website, you may have a really hard time finding someone.

If you are looking at building a web app, you might be better going to an agency, or asking around your own network to find a project manager.

Post some more details about the type of website you are wanting to create (and the industry it will serve) and I may be able to refer you to a PM or 2.</comment>