Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue - <AUTHOR> http://powazek.com/posts/1778 <comment><USER3> _No one's happiest at work. Ever._

A minor nit-pick perhaps, but I am happiest when I'm working. Fair enough, I work for myself, from home, on my own business (and other endeavours), but I'm happiest when I'm doing that. I can go on holiday, and enjoy those, but nothing feels quite as good as a quality day of hard, productive work.

<comment><USER4> Heh. I almost qualified that to say "unless it's their company." But since the article is for those interviewing, it's a given that it's not their company, so that happiness won't be theirs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In even shorter than the article: when interviewing for a job and you are given advice for free, the advice describes how it is to work there.

<comment><USER6> Can we please stop with the one-liners article summaries? Pretty please?... I've read the thing, summaries just waste screen space and my time...

What happened anyway in the last week that this is becoming so popular?

<comment><USER7> They waste very little screen space and time (by design). And they can _help_ those of us who always read comments first. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean nobody likes them.

What _really_ wastes time is clicking through some link and reading five paragraphs of something that turns out to either be linkbait, or something that many of us have seen a dozen times before. Of course, many people think that the solution to this problem should be "never submit something that's similar to something that's been submitted before", but that turns out to be wrong, because new people arrive all the time, and they _need_ an education in the basics. And the basics keep getting updated with new examples and new variants -- sometimes I really would rather read a restatement of something Fred Brooks said in 1978 than the Fred Brooks itself. But sometimes I wouldn't, because I'm too busy.

Perhaps the rise of these summaries demonstrates that submission titles aren't being crafted well, or that the technique for linking to stories is missing a "teaser" feature. Ever notice how many magazine stories have both a clever title and a short, one-or-two sentence teaser that talks a bit about what the story is actually about? (Nonfiction book titles utilize a variant of this strategy: a clever first title and a descriptive subtitle, separated by a colon, as in "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West"). Many submissions have clever titles, but often what we really want is the teasers.

<comment><USER8> hmmm... maybe along with the title field, there should be another summary field (limited to, say, ~300 characters?) that people other than the author are able to edit.

<comment><USER7> Yep. That's the ticket. When you see something happening over and over on a website, sometimes it means that the users are struggling to invent a missing feature.

Of course, sometimes that feature is one that _makes certain users give certain other users money in exchange for counterfeit Viagra_. But not, I think, in this case.

<comment><USER9> But the beauty of the minimal _Hacker News_ design is that users can create their own idioms on top of it, that, in effect, become part of the design - <USER2> domain specific design, or DSD, if you will. Crystallizing a common idiom into an explicit _feature_. with explicit design, would enforce a common interface upon all users, which despite its benefits would reduce the raw power and flexibility of the minimal design - a step along the road to _Blubber News_. ;-)

But seriously, it's a good idea; but why not do it within the current design? That way, you get voting on the summary too. Herring's point about RSS could be accomplished by including the top comment in it...

<comment><USER10> Polls originally started this way, and _did_ crystallize, specifically, I think, because they went against the whole "comment karma is a real, useful measure of participation" idea. Likewise, just restating the article-but- shorter shouldn't be rewarded--pretend we're all in a sixth-grade English class: "Talk _about_ the assigned reading; don't just say what happens."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do institutions choose buggy enterprise cms over open source ones - <AUTHOR> why is it that big time banks choose the shittiest, most expensive and buggy cms that have equally expensive talent rather than build custom ones based on open source tech (actual open source tech not half assed solutions put on git that no gives a hoot about) for less than half of the price? <comment><USER2> I've been around for a couple of RFPs(1), and the company I work for had one for a CMS recently.

The way it works is:

1) Business has a crappy, very manual website/intranet/whatever.

2) Someone with the actual capability to do something (CIO, manager, whatever) decides this has to change.

3) Input is asked from people from the business and people that are nominally technical. Usually the people that actually know the requirements or are going to maintain the new system are not included.

4) Other people from security, audits, etc. chime in

5) Someone (business analyst or project manager) transforms the laundry list of requirements into an RFP.

6) Business approves the RFP. It is sent out.

There are companies out there that live on RFPs. If you're lucky, they'll use open source software, but they might re-package that into their own CMS.

Companies that have the CMS that ticks the most boxes in the laundry list have a leg up. It doesn't matter if it's shitty and buggy, it's VERY hard to write "non-buggy" in an RFP (if the company is wise, they'll have a trial period with competing products, but that costs $$$).

So, the company ends up with proposals in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for what could have been an in-house project (be warned, a mismanaged one can run in the hundreds of thousands too, even with open source CMSs).

A period of time later, company will select the CMS and will drop that info on the team that will actually implement and maintain the buggy piece of crap (or even a decent product, if you're lucky).

(1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_proposal)

See also:

[https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/3-things-freelancers- know-...](https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/3-things-freelancers-know-rfps/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Because they want a support contract and someone to sue if things go badly wrong.

<comment><USER4> This is the answer. It is about doing business while shifting risk to a 3rd party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of answers:

       - No one gets fired for buying IBM
       - The issues around compliance/security/support are/should be sorted as part of the contract
       - OS projects don't invite managers for lunch
       - You need to factor in the price of support if you run OS projects. You will probably need few devs and sysadmins to run an enterprise-level solution
       - Documentation/training/videos for end-users

<comment><USER6> \- OS won't pay your buddy a bonus who happens to work in b2b sales

\- OS won't offer you a fuctitious consulting job if your current employer gives you a sack

\- OS won't fill your non existent swiss bank account

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I imagine because most open source ones lack the features required (compliance, security, activedirectory support, audit, etc.)

<comment><USER8> You know what feature open source software in general lacks, but buggy, enterprise software has lots of?

Quid pro quo.

I'm not talking money pre se, although I'm sure most enterprise software sales involve the CEO's "second cousin" getting a few dollars. A few games of bikini golf in the Bahamas can get a Fortune 500 company to standardize on the worst version control software in the world, or make using "cron" a firing offence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All software have security flaws, in open source it is simply easier to find these, also quality of opensource varies alot.

Just take Drupal as an example, it is used ALOT, but isn't really pretty to look at codewise, also it has had its share of vulnerabilities, which are very easy to find, partly because all source code is readily available.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't you then say that OSS software has more people looking for flaws to patch, so it would be more secure - not less?

I suppose it does vary by project though.

<comment><USER9> Its a double edged sword of course, but for the financial sector the money saved on open source would be peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

A proprietary CMS may very well be holed like a swiss cheese, but it will not be as obvious / easy to find the holes when you can't look at the source code, you are basically left with fuzzers and manual/bruteforcing injection as your only viably point of entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many SVP/CIOs will not use a product unless there is "someone to call". Even if that choice costs them millions of dollars.</comment>


Hacking Passion (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.kytrinyx.com/blog/hacking-passion <comment><USER2> Talent is a thing. However, it's a bit different from what people think it is: inherent talents are about _acquiring skills_ , not _having skills_. Talent won't make you magically good at something. What it will do is make it easier for you to practice a skill and let you improve faster. And even then, it only does that if you help it along, and sometimes it's not very obvious how it helps. I have a bit of talent for science and mathematics, but it's not incredibly direct; rather, I tend to start spewing ideas when looking at sciencey things. That doesn't make me magically good at producing good science, but it did help me stay interested early on and it keeps me from plateauing. Talent also isn't _necessary_. You can get really, really good at something without having any inherent advantage, and lots of people do exactly that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Talent may be BS, but difference in memory, learning, and concentration are not. So while everyone can improve some people have easier time and higher ceiling.

<comment><USER4> ... yet none of it matters without discipline.

<comment><USER5> Not everyone is born with good discipline. Otherwise everyone would be super successful. We all are slaves to our genes and environment, some are born successful some are not.

<comment><USER6> Almost everyone can force themselves to improve their discipline though, sometimes with the help of medication where necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Extremely advantageous genetics are really hard to measure with current technology outside of fields such as sports. e.g. in strength sports, by the late teens it's really obvious who has it and who doesn't: some can effortlessly pull 3x a weight that's practically unobtainable for someone else of same weight category. Talent is real in sports, there's no reason why it wouldn't be in every other area of life. Talent is optional if you're going to be OK at something, but it's a basic prerequisite if you're going to be competing at world class.

Things are a lot trickier with brains, since there's actually a lot more internal structural variability. Current scanning technology isn't accurate enough to tell us what the teenager (brain structures stop growing by this point) is going to be naturally good at, but that's not that far away given enough investment and the technology and enough data (basically other brains to compare to)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard"

But more importantly, talent isn't "what you're good at", talent is "what you enjoy".

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think talent is BS, but there is certainly a lot of BS in evaluating it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really enjoyed reading this, thanks masters3d.</comment>


Arguments over free speech on campus are not left v right - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/09/07/arguments-over-free-speech-on-campus-are-not-left-v-right <comment><USER2> Paywalled. Any other source?</comment>


Asm.thi.ng – open-source bare-metal coding resources for ARM Cortex-M - <AUTHOR> http://asm.thi.ng/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a personal list by Karsten Schmidt (@toxi on twitter):

See [https://twitter.com/toxi/status/679826201502978048](https://twitter.com/toxi/status/679826201502978048)

</comment><comment><USER2> surprised they don't have libopencm3 ([http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3/](http://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3/))</comment>


On seeing like a cat - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/

<comment><USER2> I found this article, quite interesting. It was a lot _deeper_ than I originally thought it would be. On topic, but from a very unique angle. Very well written too.</comment>


Ask HN: Customer Support as a Service? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any startups offering good quality "customer support as a service"? Specifically for my paid iPhone apps. I'd love to pay someone to deal with the easy/repetitive requests and leave the more challenging ones to me.<p>(FogBugz's snippets go a long way here, but it still sucks up more of my time than I'd like.)<p>Hopefully this hasn't been asked before--I searched but couldn't find anything relevant. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I highly recommend CoSupport (<http://cosupport.us/>). They were great to get up and running with, and do an incredible job of fielding the simpler requests and learning from you for the more challenging ones (eventually they can even help with those).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Physical Web Experiments Without a BLE Beacon - <AUTHOR> https://unop.uk/dev/physical-web-experiments-without-a-ble-beacon/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is about setting up mDNS on a Raspberry Pi to see what Eddystone notifications look like on Android. If anyone has tried this with an iPhone I'd be interested in seeing how it behaves.</comment>


The SQL Trap - <AUTHOR> http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/06/the-sql-trap.html

<comment><USER2> On the flip side if you know your SQL you'll be running circles around the competitors who are manually coding up all those joins, sorts and enforcing the data integrity.

It's kind of like lisp in that regard...

<comment><USER3> man 1 join see also [http://www.strozzi.it/cgi- bin/CSA/tw7/I/en_US/nosql/Home%20P...](http://www.strozzi.it/cgi- bin/CSA/tw7/I/en_US/nosql/Home%20Page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was a nice surprise to open the page and see my wife's photo headlining it!

I agree that there are some things SQL databases aren't suitable for, but it's very often the case that something that's too slow in SQL stops being too slow once you tweak the right thing. When that's possible (as I said, that's very often but not always), actually doing the tweak is much simpler than reimplementing the subset of a DBMS that you need, but learning enough about the DBMS to figure out what to tweak may not be.

Here are some things I haven't found a good SQL solution to:

* Inverted indices. Fortunately, this is a big enough use that a lot of SQL databases these days have a full-text search extension of some kind slapped on the side.

* Graph data. This is kind of the same problem; the issue is that you can store your RDF or whatever in a table with _subject_ , _verb_ , and _object_ columns, but not only are N-way self-joins an awkward way to query it, the SQL optimizer isn't smart enough to figure out that some verbs are orders of magnitude more common than others, and it should plan accordingly. (Not in PostgreSQL or SQLite, anyway, and I don't think in MySQL either.)

* Data of many terabytes. Use Hadoop.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if the author could share something about his startup/web/app that is so ill-suited to MySQL and so much more efficient when implemented using a simple key-value store, plus algorithms in PHP?

I'm just wondering whether this observation has more to do with the nature of your "computational problem", or maybe just a difference in skill level with MySQL queries vs PHP algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably a bit of both - I'm no SQL wizard, and I'm indexing 300 million+ Twitter messages and storing the @reply relationships (or more generally analyzing massive communications stores, eg an organization's email server).

I'll try to put together some reproducible code, but for example I had a relationship table that once it grew into millions of entries, took noticeable wall-time to simply access via a primary key. Switching to InnoDB after spotting a note in the memcache FAQ that it supports much faster primary key fetches fixed that, but before that I was looking into the black box with no good leads on fixing it.

<comment><USER6> Sounds more like you needed to read a book about mysql + database design. Its good to come up with workable solutions using what you know. Its better to figure out what you need to know for a great solution and go learn that.

That's my philosophy anyway. And I would imagine reading just enough to know whether you really should start from scratch again, or read much more to grok the required intricacies, would be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a false binary. It's not just using SQL vs using a Key/Value store. Caching/denormalization speeds up almost any algorithm; store a query result into memcached to make it even faster.

Scale up and get the biggest box with the most RAM you can find, and if you can afford your entire dataset in 15 GB of RAM for $300/mo in a 3 year contract, congrats, use EC2 Extra Large and you're golden.

</comment><comment><USER8> The PHP trap is worse than any SQL trap.

</comment><comment><USER9> Newer hackers should know that parsing text files is a good alternative to using a database for many web apps, esp. in early stages.

<comment><USER10> Coming from a Java & Rails background, with my SQL being non-existent as of 2 years ago and only fair to middling today, I'd have to disagree with that for anything but trivial one-day apps. (And with SQLite around as an option I'd be reluctant even then.)

You can use Rails for simple apps without learning SQL or worrying about your database's internal black magic. It is about as simple as @user = User.find(id) -- you don't have to worry about what poor animal had to have its entrails removed to get that record.

You also didn't have to:

1) implement a parser (which is going to break the first time you add an I-can't-believe-its-not-a-column)

2) write a migration framework (so that you can port your data files when you break your parser)

3) deal with simultaneous access (which, lets be honest, you're going to either ignore or whip up an implementation of locks which is exactly as buggy as every other programmer's implementation of locks which is why locks are right up there with crypto in the pantheon of Here Be Dragons, Use The Library)

4) build your own structure for separating your I/O from your application logic (which will asymptotically approach ActiveRecord, except with less features and more suck)

5) do a rewrite and/or significant rearchitecturing when you eventually are forced to move up to a database

<comment><USER7> SQLite is targeted, actually, at specifically those people who would just use fopen() to store data: <http://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: File sharing for startup - <AUTHOR> I am part of a small startup ~ 10 people. Several of us work remotely. What's the best way to share files? We need to have the latest in everyone's hands and we need some granular permissions on files (directories). Should I look at Google Drive / Dropbox / box.net / AWS Zocalo (we host as AWS)? <comment><USER2> I would use Nextcloud, Its pretty neat and you can also use WebDAV

Edit : Just in case you were looking for something Selfhosted.</comment>


Fully Automated Luxury Communism - <AUTHOR> https://www.versobooks.com/books/2757-fully-automated-luxury-communism <comment><USER2> Here's a tiny bit of luxury communism. Full book:

[http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=74D760E6B634982B0C0E4DAD...](http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=74D760E6B634982B0C0E4DAD03278E51)

<comment><USER3> lim bookPrice(x) -> 0\. Mind blown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haven't read the book, but here are two (notably harsh) reviews:

[https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully- automat...](https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automated- luxury-communism-a-manifesto-by-aaron-bastani-reviewed-by-bill- jefferies/?fbclid=IwAR3TFtzhUOKH9UQk8ifOxOQLLfnLB4taAkrdtGU8unm2XBlp- TX96Nv0iH0)

\- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors

\- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.

\- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera

[https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism- and-a...](https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-age- affluence)

\- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.

\- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily

I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.

<comment><USER5> >Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input

e.g. by selling mineral rights or valuable beachfront land.

<comment><USER6> But where does the money for whom that is purchasing those things come from? Eventually, all profit can be traced to human labour input.

<comment><USER7> I've been enjoying Karl Widerquist's "Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No", which notes that access to natural resources is an important input as well. That is, one form of freedom is a freedom to use a proportion of Earth's natural resources to meet one's own needs. While many may contract into a system to provide e.g. defense or luxuries, the lack of choice in the "social contract" as regards property rights can nonetheless be interpreted as a regrettable loss of a form of freedom.

In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to _directly_ feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a reasonably interesting topic and an important one to discuss - but I'd caution that Aaron Bastani is generally a bit of a controversial left- wing provocateur figure with a knack for mis-predicting events, and his book mostly has middling reviews.

None of that is to say you shouldn't read it and consider it in the context of the future of automation, but expect a somewhat over-earnest political manifesto rather than a critical analysis.

</comment><comment><USER9> He who controls the robots controls the world.

</comment><comment><USER10> Unherd's review was a good read, the reviewer talking about how the book was wrong in an interesting way. [https://unherd.com/2019/06/are-you-ready-for- fully-automated...](https://unherd.com/2019/06/are-you-ready-for-fully- automated-luxury-communism/?=sideshare)

</comment><comment><USER11> this is just an ad?

</comment><comment><USER12> >feed a world of 9 billion

How does the book suggest to maintain this population in a way that isn't immoral? Does this book's plan work with 90 billion people?

<comment><USER13> If current population growth estimates are to be believed, the world population is projected to peak at around 12 billion people. The fertility rates in large parts of the world (North America, Europe, East Asia) are already below replacement level and others around the world are falling.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth)

<comment><USER12> Yes, that is because the growth estimates assume that we live in a world where scarcity problems are not solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe we call it "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism", comrade.

[https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/fully- automat...](https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/fully-automated- luxury-gay-space-communism-univers.html)

<comment><USER15> Well, Iain M. Banks' SF - the 'Culture' with orbitals and AIs as adult supervision, sort of - had at least three of the adjectives checked, and seemed past concern about the fourth ...</comment></comment>


Geinimi, Sophisticated New Android Trojan Found in Wild - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mylookout.com/2010/12/geinimi_trojan/

<comment><USER2> Watch out! There's an obscure trojan for Android devices on unofficial markets!

Quick! Buy our antivirus software!

<comment><USER3> The article wasn't very alarmist, even if it helps sales of their own product.

Although the delivery of the trojan is not a passive exploit and requires a user to download from unofficial markets, a lot of hackers have "rooted" their phone - so we can use beta versions of code, etc. So I think it's topical to HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since this seems like it's only targeting the Chinese market, it seems like there is a high possibility of a governmental hand in this (China spying on their own people, or some other government -- US, Russia, etc -- spying on China).

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure that's the conclusion I'd draw. Maybe the virus writers are Chinese?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And then people ask why Apple tries so hard to have total control over their App Store. The last thing I want is to have to buy an antivirus for my phone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just something else you have to think about before recommending a new phone to your friends and family.</comment>


As ESPN Falters, The Athletic Chases Fans Tired of 'Old Fluff' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-24/the-athletic-a-subscription-site-for-local-sports-news-raises-5-8-million <comment><USER2> This was mentioned briefly in the article on the backdrop of how the major players are running away from text -- but as some context -- this really has been a bleak summer for sportswriting.

ESPN started by laying off ~100 employees, with the biggest cuts coming to writers in their declining coverage of baseball and hockey.

Fox Sports, who is trying to become the Pepsi to ESPN's Coke, then followed by laying off every writer on staff in their "pivot to video" (go to their home page now, and you will not find a single link to a text piece).

Vice Sports then joined the party last week by closing shop as part of Vice's expansion into international markets at the cost of getting rid of their sports editorial team.

Not sports directly but MTV did the same thing with their writing staff, including a lot of their high profile writers like Holly Anderson.

With all of these being part of the magical "pivot to video," you have to think it's mainly driven by optimistic hopes that video CPMs will rise in a way that display ads have not for publishers over the last 10 years.

<comment><USER3> A lot of news consumption is driven by Facebook, and Facebook is pushing videos rather aggressively lately. It's very likely that these are related.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I perceived this too and I think they are going straight to Google's mouth if Facebook thinks it will replace YouTube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a refreshing idea. Sports analysis pieces like those on smartfootball.com are some of my favorite articles to read in sports.

ESPN's constant focus on TMZ-like coverage for sports has put a bad taste in my mouth. I don't care about the picture Lebron posted of his breakfast on Instagram. I don't really even care about the breaking news. Finding out about a trade a day later rather than the minute it happens has absolutely zero impact on my life.

I want highlights from the games I couldn't see, I want some analysis from experts or insiders, and that's about it. Keeping it to just a few articles a day I think will be better for sports journalism in the long run. No need to manufacture content to fill the gaps in a 24-hour day.

<comment><USER6> I have replaced ESPN with podcasts, individual national writers, SB Nation, local beat writers, the teams and leagues themsevles, and official highlights from YouTube. All of this is really easy with RSS. I rarely go to ESPN anymore except for a couple of national NBA writers.

<comment><USER7> Twitter is _perfect_ for sports. I can see why they picked up some NFL games. You can choose what kind of content you want by who you follow, and it's all real-time and interactive.

<comment><USER6> I am _convinced_ I love twitter as much as I do because I use it to do nothing but talk about sports. Twitter is incredible for sports and I talk to people from multiple countries and states about various teams. It is incredible.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately it's hard to follow more than 1 topic on Twitter. I follow a lot of people who talk about technology and a lot of people who talk about sports. But since I follow more people who talk about technology I hardly see much of the sports stuff at all. Twitter has a way of surfacing only the primary interest that you have.

<comment><USER7> It would be nice if you could make 'feeds' or 'groups' or something. I can't believe they don't have that feature.

<comment><USER8> It does have lists, but it doesn't give you the nice "while you were away" groupings like you get in your main feeds.

<comment><USER9> True, though I find I don't need that 'while you were away' concept with my Lists because it's filtered to exactly the people I want to hear from. Which means, I don't get as much ( if any ) fluff in Tweets that you would get from your more generic main feed.

In which case, I actually just scroll through chronologically and read through what the news/insights/commentary has been since the last time I was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Pittsburgh market has [https://DKPittsburghSports.com](https://DKPittsburghSports.com) too, which just celebrated their 3rd birthday. (Only affiliation is that I'm a happy subscriber)

And someone from the Boston market just partnered with them to start [https://www.BostonSportsJournal.com](https://www.BostonSportsJournal.com)

<comment><USER6> If I was a betting individual, DK Sports would be in the top 5 bets of things I would _never_ see on Hacker News! Ha!

I actually subscribe to the Post-Gazette for my local sports news. I think Ed Bouchette (despite some of his flaws) is quite a solid beatwriter. Sadly, they pulled Dave Molinari from the Pens beat. This also allows me to get local and national news from a newspaper, so it is a win-win for me. I'd encourage others to do the same, especially if you have good reporters on the local sports beat.

<comment><USER10> One of the major reasons DK interests me (other than just being good in itself) is that it's sports-only. I don't live in Pittsburgh anymore but still follow all of the teams. Having DK allows me to get the local sports media without being bothered by things like local politics, news, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this going to work? Grantland was doing everything right, by the standards of people who demand more substantive sports journalism: they had talented writers, well-researched longform articles, and no clickbait. They still went under. I'm rooting for these guys, but despite what people claim, I don't know if the market is there.

<comment><USER12> To be fair, Grantland was an ESPN subsidiary. I believe this model can be a success, but the definition of "success" for The Athletic and for ESPN are probably very different.

<comment><USER13> Yes, if anything Grantland was only the latest example of how bad sharecropping is for the tenant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate ESPN. They bought the leading cricket website, cricinfo[0] a few years ago, and the site has been redesign after redesign since then. Also the typical "lets make videos not articles" stance, reducing articles from top writers. Their latest redesign led to a lot of lost _data_ which pissed of many loyal readers.

[0]: www.espncricinfo.com

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Cricket/comments/6otgno/fuck_espn_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cricket/comments/6otgno/fuck_espn_fuck_cricinfo/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone successfully connected sports journalism with the Patreon model? Advertising in a world of infinite choice seems like a losing proposition. People have tried subscriptions in the past, but it seems people hesitate to pay for a bundle of coverage (ie. cable television model), especially if they are paying for content they don't use.

<comment><USER2> Would like to hear any success stories for media (and speciifcally sports media). I've been running a sports blog for 5+ years and don't use Patreon but have seen many friends start that effort in the last year.

To be honest, I don't think I have ever seen anyone making more than $200 or so a month (which is probably better than if they were CPM only but not enough for a real sportswriter to pay much more than their internet bill unfortunately).

<comment><USER16> Nate Duncan and Danny Leroux cover the NBA, and they seem to make decent money with podcast advertising. They recently started trying Patreon a few months ago and have 750 people donating monthly. I'm interested to see how much that grows. [https://www.patreon.com/DuncanLeroux](https://www.patreon.com/DuncanLeroux)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This discussion is missing Vox's SB Nation sites, which grew out of an Oakland A's blog (and a partnership with the Berkeley political blogger who started DailyKos.com). They use local writers to provide coverage of local teams, and their content is free to readers. (Plus there's always lots of comments to read discussing the news of the day.) Eventually the articles also get syndicated to Yahoo, CBS, Comcast, etc.

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

Honestly, that may be what's killing sportswriting -- at least on the big TV network sites. The networks don't have the resources to compete with 30 different web sites -- one for each MLB team, each with its own staff and with their own distinct fan communities. The web makes it possible for each one of these sites to narrowcast.

And then why do you _need_ ESPN?

<comment><USER18> I mean, you need somebody like ESPN (or Deadspin), because there's actual journalism to be done relating to sports. Off the top of my head, some areas sports-related topics that would never have been covered by SBNation-style sites include major sports leagues' problematic relationships to the military and local governments, the stadium swindles perpetrated by teams, the NFL's coverup of concussion research, and the monstrous scam that is the NCAA fall into the category of "deserving of real journalism". I follow a bunch of SBNation sites, but sites that specifically identify as "for fans of such-and- such a team", and that rely on unpaid volunteer writers (which a lot of SBNation absolutely does) can't be relied on to cover a lot of these topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like a really promising business model. I know hardcore NCAA football fans will pay way more than that for access to recruiting news. I'd consider subscribing once they cover teams I follow.

Hopefully a VC 'growth above all else' mindset doesn't force them to expand beyond a profitable enthusiast niche.

<comment><USER20> I think, on a local level at least, this kind of model is the way to go for most hard-pressed local and regional news outfits.

<comment><USER6> Local newspapers and local talk radio still dominate local sports. Typically, the best-connected reporters are those for the local paper. Sports coverage is actually what drives me to subscribe to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been a subscriber for about 2 months now and so far have been exceedingly happy with their level of coverage. Substantially better than what any of the other major sites are offering right now (especially as a hockey fan where coverage can be...lacking...at times).

<comment><USER22> >> (especially as a hockey fan where coverage can be...lacking...at times).

Have you tried the Canadian sports news sites? Hockey is definitely the most covered sport here.

<comment><USER23> TSN and Sportsnet both cover hockey really well, google them. And not just the NHL, the minor leagues too. It helps that hockey is basically a religion in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious why writers don't approach this like app developers burning the midnight oil pushing their own content for micro payments until they have enough subscribers to go it alone. It seems like a similar dynamic.

Maybe I'm way off here but I trust individual journalists much more than individual journalists under a corporate master.

For example, I'd gladly pay Glen Greenwald 49 cents/mo or 5 dollars/yr whatever for exclusive (not edited by corporate masters) content from him.

I know things like news letters exist but the only ones I've ever seen are talking about aliens or stock picks.

</comment><comment><USER25> How does this trend affect new websites such as the Bill Simmions theRinger.com? He has invested heavily on long form writing.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure how what is presented is much different (or better?) than local sports coverage already present in these cities?

I can go on Cleveland.com (the plain dealer website) and find quality coverage of Cleveland sports for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Their bet is that they can out-compete existing local sports coverage by focusing narrowly just on sports. Cleveland.com is a comprehensive news source. Local news is continuing to die as a business, it's only going to get worse for them. The Athletic also doesn't use advertising, so it starts off by default with a significant product-experience advantage.

Narrow almost always wins in a situation like this. Traditional local news has everything to lose, while they simultaneously flail about in a death-spasm as their business model continues to melt out from under them.

The Athletic will be able to leverage one profitable market to kill the local sports coverage in another market they want to enter. Scale it up to a couple dozen markets, and they'll have the ability to easily enter any new market they choose and take down the local competition by a dozen different means (eg poaching writing talent en masse). If I were them, as I build up profitable locations, I'd then intentionally run at a loss in new markets and hammer the local competitors (who mostly don't have other markets to lean on). It's an extraordinarily easy business line to follow on how to vanquish existing local sports coverage.

<comment><USER26> My assumption was that the local established writers / reporters have an inside track on information and relationships with teams, and for example will attend (almost?) every game, pre-season, press conferences, have a presence in the locker rooms etc etc.

But your point makes sense that as a business, the local media has the disadvantage of using resources in other areas of "news", vs. focusing exclusively on sports.

So, "targeting" these cities would have to include recruiting these people already working there. Otherwise, initially I would always be able to get up to date and "inside" information from the established sources.

I'm just thinking out loud, but essentially, this all depends on what the meaning of "focusing on" means, as the local sports media individuals are certainly _focused_ on their local teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Speaking of puff pieces..</comment>


Lazy-Loading Disqus Comments with the Intersection Observer API - <AUTHOR> https://jross.me/lazy-loading-disqus-comments-with-intersectionobserver/ <comment><USER2> How nice, I'm interested in doing precisely that, for lazy-loading a commenting system I've developed (Disqus alt).

> My page weight varies slightly, but I went from around 700KB, to 1.5MB - > Disqus was larger than my entire blog post

That's what I've seen too, i.e. that Disqus is about 700 - 800 kb. — There're Commento, about 11 kb instead: [https://commento.io](https://commento.io), and Talkyard, 150 kb instead: [https://www.talkyard.io/blog- comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments) (I'm developing Talkyard). Both support Disqus comments import.

You've thought about quite a lot of things: :- )

        // load comments for search engines to index
        ...
        // load comments if URL hash contains #comment
        ...

Probably I'd have forgotten both those two things, some time in the future when I'll implement lazy-load by default for Talkyard.</comment>


Quit Twitter (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-quit-twitter-9b93396def2d <comment><USER2> How to remove Twitter Trends permanently, both on the site and on the mobile app:

1\. Open Twitter in a desktop browser (should work the same on mobile but I did this on desktop)

2\. Go to Settings -> Content Preferences -> Explore Settings

3\. De-select "Show content in this location"

4\. Click on "Explore locations" and select Bhutan

5\. Ignore the warning informing you that Buthan's Trending section does not exist, and save.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately someone at Twitter read my comment... The Bhutan trending section exists now. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Generally, there really is no point to using Twitter.

There's evidence of manipluation of threads [0], shadow-banning / blacklisting of users on the 'platform' in light of the admin tool leak [1]

Not only 'Trends' are subject to manipluation artificially, but it now matters more about 'who's tweets' actually do show up on Top or Trending sections; even with similar Likes, hearts and comments. Take this tweet [2] for example which proves that they are 'shadow-banned' on the trends section and still has similar stats like the trending tweet.

I won't be suprised to see the same in Instagram, TikTok or many others these days.

[0] [https://twitter.com/ArcVRArthur/status/1282436347421171712](https://twitter.com/ArcVRArthur/status/1282436347421171712)

[1] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider- ac...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-access-panel- account-hacks-biden-uber-bezos)

[2] [https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1287903462689103872](https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1287903462689103872)

<comment><USER4> You can use Twitter completely fine without ever paying any attention to "Trending" or things like that. For many, it probably makes the experience better not to do so. (other recommendation: Twitter lets you mute specific people and phrases. make liberal use of that).

(semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?)

<comment><USER5> > (semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as > "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation > of trends etc going on before?)

This is pretty similar to conspiracy theorists vs normal people with regards to the US government spying on people before Snowden.

<comment><USER4> I think "anything based on arbitrary user input on a major platform has some moderation tools" is far from "conspiracy theorists".

<comment><USER5> How far? As I understand it, the conspiracy here is that Twitter uses these moderation tools to silence people with a certain political perspective. I think — assuming that is indeed the case — this does lean more on the conspiratorial side, and is not akin to moderators banning bots trying to shift cialis pills.

The reason why I liken this to Snowden is because at least anecdotally, the typically dialogue I have seen is

Conspiracy Theorist: "Twitter are shadow-banning people!"

Normal Person A: "That's a dumb conspiracy theory."

Twitter: "We are not shadow-banning people."

Normal Person B: "Here is proof that Twitter shadow-bans people."

Normal Person A: "Well yeah, obviously. It would be pretty naïve to think they weren't always doing this."

\---

You can quite accurately substitute Twitter with the US government, shadow- banning with spying, and Normal Person B with Edward Snowden.

<comment><USER4> I was specifically just talking about the reaction to the trending mod tools existing, as if that was bad or surprising in itself. That there are mod tools doesn't prove that there is political targeting. And in reverse, if you claim that Twitter isn't especially targeting some group, you hopefully aren't basing that claim on a naive "they can't be doing that because they don't have moderation tools".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This comes up a lot, and it feels like my response is the same every time. Twitter's great, but you need to be careful who you follow.

Ruthlessly unfollow or mute those who pander to the lowest common denominator, avoid general interest politics at all costs, follow only experts in their field and keep following count below 200. Refuse to play the game of becoming internet popular - unless you have a blue check, it's rigged against you anyway.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also, quit Medium while you are at it.

<comment><USER8> Quit all social media and spent more time offline.

<comment><USER9> but first get on all social media to debate quitting all social media ad infinitum

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As Jack Dorsey said [1] in an interview a while ago:

 _" I also don't feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration."_

I see Twitter as an almost pure outrage machine. I generally avoid it but when I do visit it and the Tweet I'm reading is about a topic that has two or more sides, most of the replies shown in response are the just the most vicious and aggressive attacks by the other side. Just punch lines or insults.

[1] [https://twitter.com/jack/status/1095457906848231424](https://twitter.com/jack/status/1095457906848231424)

<comment><USER11> Recently I started muting people on Twitter according to a few rules: anything where they were telling people how to behave ("i don't know who needs to hear this but it's not ok to do X"); anything very sanctimonious; anything attacking a person rather than debating their views; anything discriminating against someone based on their skin, their background, etc.

The end result, after many weeks of muting, was fascinating: firstly, twitter became much more considered and informative. And secondly, it became far, far, less engaging! I'd read something and think "huh, that's useful" or "seems reasonable" and with a yawn close the app.

Enragement is engagement. Twitter (the business) has failed to figure out what problem it solves, what its really _for_, and that vacuum of leadership has been filled by the emergent consequences of its algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So I deleted my old twitter, which suffered from some of the problems the author points out. After six months or so I agreed to create a new one and only post things related to software development and technology, positive things. Mostly engaging with development communities and promoting my own libraries. Likewise, the people I follow pretty much stick to tech. I don't mind if they post family photos here and there, but mostly people I follow stick to tech. That's it....

I created an anonymous account for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> The person who wrote this should probably talk to a therapist about his obsession with hunting people down online instead of blaming a social network site.

</comment><comment><USER14> I joined Twitter back in 2007. Early days. It was great as a micro-blogging platform. People mostly just logged about what was going on in their lives. Most already had a digital presence elsewhere as bloggers and such. And there was a lot of experimentation going on.

Then things picked up and there was a massive influx of people and companies. That's when things changed. In and of itself, the public debate isn't a bad thing: it's, above all, a function of a larger, more diverse audience trooping in one place. The fact of the matter is that Twitter, as a private company, never had any incentive to create the affordances to cater to the complexities and intricacies that come with hosting the public debate. On the contrary.

I just stopped using Twitter at the end of last year, for the sake of my own mental well being. That doesn't exclude me from being concerned or being reflective about the topics and current events that are on everyone's mind these days. Not being on Twitter helped me reclaim mental bandwidth to reflect on my own life, here and now, and allows me to consider the world in a critical and compassionate way without sapping my energy.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love Twitter, it is my favorite social network and I get tremendous value out of it.

For me the keys were:

\- Be fast to follow and unfollow accounts. It's hard to build a valuable feed, and requires a lot of experimentation. Some accounts I felt sure would be valuable are not (for example, info security researchers who only tweet complaints about travel rewards programs). And some accounts that seemed marginal turned out to be great, like some socialist/leftists who are also hilarious.

\- Don't write tweets. Seriously, unless you are really trying to build a personal brand, there's no reason to tweet. Same with retweets.

\- Remember any tweet you enjoyed and might want to see again. You can do this with the "like" button, or by bookmarking.

\- Block or force-unfollow anyone following you, who you don't like. A force- unfollow is done by blocking and then immediately unblocking that account. Doing this silently knocks them off your follower list.

\- Ultimately I made my account private to make it easier to focus on reading.

</comment><comment><USER16> I happen to like Twitter. Me and Facebook have never gotten on well.

To each his own.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love twitter. I follow great number of artists and tech guys and people I used to be friends with in Livejournal (some of them I met in person).

I always wonder how people even come across problems such as hate speech and toxic people over there. Politic threads with people who have no understanding of the topic they are talking about? Stop joining trashy and pointless discussions - problem solved.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes it's worth the effort to extend yourself into less than desirable situations because the message is more than worth its debate. I'm not saying argue ad infinitum, but inject a piece of reason in a place of disillusionment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Let's just be clear, as companies Twitter is much better than facebook. A lot of the "toxicity" hate against twitter had to do with people on the platform not the platform itself. That said, I hope mastodon improves quite a bit more to be competitive.

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be interesting to know what's the percentage of HN users that use Twitter actively.

<comment><USER21> I use it to follow a bunch of academics. They share papers and ideas. It is nice as long as you avoid politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just wanted to mention [https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/](https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) in case someone did not know it. No 3rd party, no trends, tweets in order, etc..

</comment><comment><USER23> RT what you'd upvote, quote URL for what you'd downvote, reply if there's something to be said, and just keep posting ideas and arts in general(and don't repost)

Quitting it is arguably better tho

</comment><comment><USER24> I would actually be curious if one were to start charging for each social media, which of them most people would be willing to pay vs which ones would disappear.

Out of:

Snapchat

TikTok

Facebook

Instagram

Whatsapp

Twitter

Reddit

Quora

HN

<comment><USER25> HN/bookface only. Reddit once used to be good for real reviews/opinions. But now it's full of shills/manipulation bots who do not disclose themselves. The conversation and comments do not feel organic either and highly manipulated on international/news/geopolitical/political/sensitive things. It's like someone wants to force us to change our views.

<comment><USER26> Reddit is still the best for specific topics imho, I wouldn't mind switching to a forum but if I want to read about and discuss football (soccer), news about my country, old school runescape, and stuff like /r/IdiotsInCars there's really no alternative for me (since I haven't used FB in years).

<comment><USER25> > _news about my country_

I would recommend that if you're from the U.S., just subscribe to the Reuters RSS feed and one Chinese state public broadcast channel (globaltimes.cn). That's it. You'd know what both sides say and form an independent opinion after that.

If you're Chinese, follow one of the reputable American media (not CNN, Fox, New York Times etc they're low quality entertainment sources, not news) but something like AP or Reuters in addition to your own. Never believe one side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Twitter trends are manipulated. Do not take them seriously. They're a tool of social engineering.

<comment><USER18> It's worth studying the trends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am getting a dejavu from this thread.

Arguments used to justify twitter always rely on certain users of the platform. I am not sure how that makes twitter good as a platform. By staying on the platform, you are forcing other developers and people to use it to announce their projects and keep you up-to-date aka networks effect.

<comment><USER4> I follow people on Twitter because they post on Twitter. If they'd post somewhere else, I'd probably follow them there (within some limits). That doesn't mean I post updates about my stuff there - if others want to follow my updates, they can go where those are.</comment></comment>


TextCAPTCHA: 180 million simple logic questions - <AUTHOR> http://textcaptcha.com/demo <comment><USER3> Since there are 180million of them, presumably they were generated with a computer. Then, it seems that they probably fit into a finite number of patterns. If these could be determined, wouldn't this be a rather easy to crack captcha system?

Most captchas depend on the difficulty of the reverse transform applied to an image, especially when you don't know what the transform is. Here, the forms seem pretty regular, and the "transform" of inserting words is discrete rather than continuous, so a bit easier to reverse.

<comment> mike-cardwell Yeah, the 180million number is irrelevant. What's important is the number and variety of patterns, not the number of questions.

I don't even need to program something which will understand all of the patterns. I just need to program something that will understand _some_ of the patterns, which just keeps fetching captchas until it eventually understands the format, eg "What is X plus Y?"

This captcha system is considerably more simple to break than the typical image based ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried breaking this captcha. Here are some experimental results and mathematics:

By applying the mathematics from the Birthday Attack (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack>), If an attacker is able to solve 15.8 million of the 180 million captchas, there will be a 50% probability that the attacker can beat the captcha.

I tried refreshing the page 10 times, generating a total of 100 captchas. Out of those, I observed 8 arithmetic problems which I entered into and solved using Wolfram Alpha. That gives roughly the 15.8m/180m necessary to break the captcha with 50% probability.

At 50% probability, again going back to the Birthday Attack mathematics, an attacker would need roughly 16.8 thousand tries before expecting a collision with one they could break.

This probability will increase if an attacker is able to successfully reverse- engineer more patterns.

Edit: thinking about this more after MichaelGG's comment, I think my math is incorrect. Either way, point still stands that Wolfram Alpha can successfully solve 8% of the captchas and other patterns should be solvable by other means too.

<comment><USER5> Can you explain how the birthday paradox applies here?

Just looking at it simply, if you can solve 15.8 of 180, that means that for any given test you should have an 8.77% chance of solving it (6 tests for > 50%). What am I doing wrong?

Also, it looks like some of the other questions are easy to automate. Like "how many letters are in the word 'whatever'".

<comment><USER6> A Birthday Attack relies on the fact that even for some rare events (such as two random people having the same birthday), when there is a large opportunity to observe the rare event (such as 30 random people in the same room) it's actually quite likely to observe the event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of the questions don't have one globally unique answer, for example: which day is a part of the weekend, Sunday, Friday or Monday. Where I live (Israel), Friday is part of the weekend, were as I bet the creator of the list lives in the USA and as many times happens, believes the USA==World and the "correct" answer is probably Sunday.

<comment><USER8> Stop bombing palestinian children and we'll start giving a fuck about what you call the weekend.

<comment><USER9> After lurking for 80 days, this is what you choose for your first comment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would be interested to see what the completion rate for this is versus, e.g., the Yahoo captcha. My intuition is "not that great." (You require reading on the Internet... uh oh.)

By the way, picking one token from the captcha and returning it beats the captcha 7% of the time, if the examples are representative. Spammer wins, since he can generate requests by the hundreds of thousands.

<comment><USER11> I also noticed that certain questions aren't necessarily 'easy'.

> The 1st number from 25, eight, 6, six and 27 is?

So is the answer 25 or 6?

I've come to the realization that CAPTCHAs aren't the solution, or at least can't be a standalone solution. Make the CAPTCHA easy enough for a human to not be blocked (pick the cat from these 3 photos) and the bot still wins 33% of the time. Make it hard enough that the user has to invest energy to 'solve' the problem in front of them and you alienate users by treating them like criminals.

<comment><USER12> I don't get how the answer could be 6, though I do agree with you on the paradox of CAPTCHAs

<comment><USER13> Interpretation 1: It's a string list and pick the first element = 25.

Interpretation 2: It's a numerical list of numbers, numbers being ordered by value have an implicit sort applied to them, pick the first element in that sequence = 6.

#2 is a very programmer thing to do ;)

<comment><USER11> you get a cookie :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand the importance of CAPTCHAs, but I wouldn't put anything that required a reasonable level of thought in between my users and something I wanted them to do (for example, buy something from me). The more complex CAPTCHAs get, the less likely users are to try to complete them.

<comment><USER15> It strikes me that the specific example of _buying something_ is generally sufficient confirmation of identity even without a Captcha. Not that your point isn't valid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great concept, but some of the easier ones are very susceptible to an automated solve.

For example: "What is ten + 1?" ...in bing: [http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en- US&q=What+is+ten+%2...](http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en- US&q=What+is+ten+%2B+1%3F&cc=gb) ...in google: [http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=what+is+t...](http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=what+is+ten%2B1%3F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=fc8a743f8bb10773)

</comment><comment><USER17> Trying all the words in the captcha one by one has a big chance of "hitting" correct answer. If it doesn't a brute-forcer can just request a new captcha until it works.

Said that, they don't seem very spam-proof to me.

For more info about how hard CAPTCHAs need to be read Luis Von Ahn's papers:

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/>

<comment> mike-cardwell I get the impression that about half of the questions are list based. And the questions are about 10 words long. If that's the case, then using the algorithm you mentioned, you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting the captcha right. So yeah, it's a completely useless captcha system. That number should be 1 in a million or higher, not 1 in 20.

<comment><USER18> And it's probably not the first or last word. And if it precedes a ',' then it's probably more likely to be it. There are many ways to increase the hit- rate.

<comment> mike-cardwell Sure. I know my calculation was very rough, but my point is, if I'm not at least 2 orders of magnitude out, then the captcha system is very very bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've thought about this issue before (and proof-of-concepted a similar system, see <http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/>), and came to similar conclusions, but there's an important difference:

A crucial part of making this a successful anti-spam system is that it is a moving target. _Every user of the system must be able to write their own questions._ If that happens, the spammer's task is intractable. But if there is a central site serving these, it will be worth the spammers' while to just hardcode the patterns and write a little bit of logic to parse and answer them.

Now, there's a fair bit of interesting UI design in the question of "how do I get a non-programmer to write what is in essence a very small program". My proof of concept used some cute Perl-isms to basically construct a mini- language that was restricted enough that an inexperienced programmer could "script kiddie" their way through it, and I think this is the right general direction, but you'd need a fair amount of work to really make it accessible to the masses.

(Other crucial points that he gets right: it must be text based; it must have questions that hinge on natural language understanding but not be otherwise difficult; and it must have questions that are really question templates each of which can generate infinite numbers of question instances.)

<comment><USER20> I've often wanted my own text-based CAPTCHA for a video game website I run. I'd ask things like _"What is the name of the purple weapon?"_ or _"How many shields do you start with?"_ People who actually play the game could nail questions like that, while bots would be up a creek.

<comment><USER21> What if one of your fans created a simple bot specifically designed to answer your admittedly easy questions?

<comment><USER20> Then he would be a douchebag... and probably a huge moron, too.

Who creates a bot specifically to overcome the CAPTCHA on a forum for a 15 year old video game with very little traffic? We're not really a significant target; I only have to ban about one spambot per week. There's a tremendously low ROI from spambots on our forum, I can't imagine it'd be worth anyone's time to even attempt to incorporate it into their CAPTCHA-breaking bot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very cool, this is one of my favorite types of captchas, because I don't have to sit and squint at the screen trying to figure out what the heck I'm supposed to type. Is it an I, or a 1? Is it an S or a 5?

<comment><USER23> The problem is, it turns out computer programs feel _exactly the same way_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I actually wrote something similar at <http://stopam.com>. Never been to brave to announce it officially.

</comment><comment><USER25> At one point I was getting spammed through a contact form ( <http://hhgproject.org/contact.cgi> ) so I added two forms of a text based captcha---the first one is a single question (that anyone visiting that particular page should know) and a hidden field (via CSS) that should _not_ be changed. I haven't received a spam since.

</comment><comment><USER26> I know some people that would fail a few of these questions...

<comment><USER27> I agree. The questions in the example may be easily solved by a technically minded person, but they could also confuse a large part of your audience. I would find it very difficult to generate questions that are appropriate no matter what language, culture, math or literacy background my visitors have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Easy is not enough, Captcha need to be universal also.

For non native english speakers:

"Cheese, cat, mosquito, trousers, elbow and ant: how many body parts in the list?" or "Soup, dog, trousers, house, mosquito or pink: the colour is?"arent as easy as "3+1" or reCaptcha . Not everybody speak english on the interweb...

<comment><USER29> > Easy is not enough, Captcha need to be universal also.

Perhaps on the long term, but solving the captcha problem for the english- speaking (or any language, for that matter) subset of the internet population is still a very worthwhile undertaking.

<comment><USER30> Yes, because capchas aren't alienating enough, we should also let non english speakers out of our non english written webs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> CAPTCHA (n.) - the outsourced laziness of your development team to your customers, in order to stunt conversion rates and signups so you don't have to be bothered to sanitize your own user lists.

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems to me that this wouldn't work. There are not so many different types of phrasings, so it would be fairly simple to write a parser generator which would then pass to a very basic interpreter to solve them.

For example, to solve the "Which of these is a T: W, X, Y or Z?" you would just put in a rule like "BodyPart ::= Foot | Knee | Leg | ..." "DayOfWeek ::= Monday | Tuesday | ..." "Color ::= Red | Blue | ..." and then have it match against those.

Maybe the next time I have some free time I'll see if I can go and implement it.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you want to produce a cheap AI for solving a particular class of problems, turn the class of problems into a CAPTCHA...

<comment><USER34> I bet you can make this work for image tagging

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 180 million isn't all that many. Keeping the answers in a database is trivial. Extracting the answers by trial and error is feasible. You'll probably want a large botnet to avoid getting blocked for suspiciously high traffic. If the servers can take an extra kqps or so, you should be done in about a week.

</comment><comment><USER36> I played around with the demo page and used WolframAlpha to answer the questions for me.... With a little massaging, WolframAlpha would get you pretty far in hacking it.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891375>

</comment><comment><USER37> Obligatory XKCD link: <http://xkcd.com/810/>

"Constructive Spam"

</comment><comment><USER38> The first letter in the word "titties" is?

Beware if you have users that might be sensitive to such things.

<comment><USER39> Yes. And here's a picture of some tits (<http://www.btinternet.com/~micka.wffps/great_tit.jpeg>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seems as though there are very few patterns that repeat themselves in a different fashion.

For example - it would be quite easy to solve which word is capitalized - <USER2> any of the math or series questions.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Ten, 33, thirty five, 10 and thirty six: the 5th number is?"

10? Thirty? Thirty Six?

<comment><USER42> Your point is that this captcha system may prevent smart-alec pedants from commenting? Man, that's a _feature_ not a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It should probably have random words in all capitals in each question. The way it is, if a question has a word in all caps, that's the answer.

<comment><USER44> ...and also has 1 in 1 chance of automated recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This may have issues with non-native speakers. You have to know language fairly well to answer those questions.

</comment><comment><USER46> Lovely, but I could spend $500 and have the matching answers in a nice database I could resell.</comment>


Python: Starting Tornado Apps at Boot using Upstart - <AUTHOR> http://subversity.net/python-starting-tornado-apps-at-boot-using-up

<comment><USER2> Given Tornado's single threaded design, a production service should run multiple instances of Tornado behind a proxy.

Upstart does not help with the multiple instance problem. Upstart adds the problem of running code with elevated privilege.

I think it might be simpler to write a script to start/stop/restart daemon Tornado instances running in an unprivileged account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi frognibble,

From what I understand, Tornado already starts multiple instances by default; the exact number of which is determined by the number of cores available. Is this still not adequate?

Please let me know because I would love to update my article(s) to be as accurate and as helpful as possible.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> If request handlers block (by calling MySQL among other things), then one instance of Tornado per core may not be sufficient to take advantage of a machine's resources.

Tornado includes optional code to fork more than one instance where the number of instances defaults to the number of cores. Tornado's forking code has issues:

\- There's no code to restart dead child processes.

\- It's not possible to do a rolling upgrade because all instances of the server must be restarted at the same time.

I'd stay away from the forking code in Tornado. I suspect that it's not used by FriendFeed because the forking code was added well after the initial release of Tornado.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your insight. Do you know of anything that implements this already (child monitoring and rolling restarts/upgrades)?

<comment><USER2> I do not know of anything that implements this. I recommend asking on the Tornado news group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I liked the "drop privileges in Python for Tornado apps" article more. But even then, you would want to chroot/jail the user for more control over permissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you enjoyed the article, or at least one of them, haha.

You're right, though, there are other options and considerations to be taken when considering the security of a web (or any) app. This is by no means a complete article on web app security and I hope nobody mistakes it as such

I think chroot/jailing is covered in quite a few other places, but it was difficult to find out how to go from running Tornado apps in development to running them in production. My aim is for my blog post(s) help make finding this information a little easier for others.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meh. What are the advantages over daemontools?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not having to run software written by the creator of Qmail.

Kidding!

The first advantage I see is relying on one less externally-maintained service in your software stack. Other than that, I don't have technically sound reason for using one over the other.

<comment><USER5> if you want maintained software, consider runit: <http://smarden.org/runit/>

its more or less daemontools.. updated!</comment></comment></comment>


Would you take the time to implement laravel? - <AUTHOR> Making a finance tech app, and I have chosen react-native, redux, php7, mysql for my system.
Thinking this is something I can easily hire other programmers in the future to expand as needed.
I have experience with writing to my database, but I have not used Laravel.
Is it worth the effort? Making a venmo style app. <comment><USER2> As soon as you have to deal with user authentication it's already worth it. [https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/passport](https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/passport) By default Laravel comes with Vue support, last paragraph on [https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/frontend](https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/frontend) shows how to switch that to React.</comment>


If theres a tech skills shortage, why are so many computer graduates unemployed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/if-theres-a-tech-skills-shortage-why-are-so-many-computer-graduates-unemployed/?mob <comment><USER2> There is a fundamental problem with the goals of the governments education system and the goals(or point) of the enterprise. They appose each other because at a fundamental layer the point of gaining power from the efforts of educated people is not in the governments best interest. So it has historicaly been designed for the control of educated people, not in their empowerment to create and change the future and balance of power. This will never change. If enterprise wants a better educated workforce they will have to invest in educating their people, education is the only way to take power from those who cause this problem. It does happens now, but it needs to be expanded on a cultural,practical level. Things will never, and never have gotten better without people disregarding the powers that be and doing it themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no shortage, the perennial shortage claims are simply an effort to reduce wages across the board.

To their credit, they do include this obvious fact in the article, although it's presented as "there are those who claim..."</comment>


Business jargon lost in translation - <AUTHOR> http://marketingdonut.co.uk/news/marketing/business-jargon-lost-in-translation

<comment><USER2> The real trick is to learn to communicate entirely in phrases which are present in the kinds of bilingual corpora that the machine translation folks feed to their engines.

</comment><comment><USER3> your website doesn't seem to work without cookies

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the tip. will look into it</comment></comment>


Smart People are less Stressed. - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-04-04-smart-stress_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

<comment><USER2> Original title: Smart people _may be_ less stressed.

Article "thesis": Stressed people are less smart.

"Stress hormones over time are widely known to interfere with memory"</comment>


Facebook is Down - <AUTHOR>

Facebook is down(well at least duke.facebook.com--confirmed by 6 of my friends)...This is the second time in one month. Anyone else having problems with it? <p>I feel bad for all those companies built on the FB Platform that are earning $0 right now from their ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Back up. It was only about 15 minutes of downtime. Still, it makes me think that it is pretty risky to build a business that can't function without FB.

</comment><comment><USER2> Posting is messed up on muohio.facebook ...</comment>


Product Ninja – A Smart Hardware Curation Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.productninja.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks 'a bit' like ProductHunt. What is the difference?</comment>