Kaspersky Says Telegram Flaw Used for Cryptocurrency Mining - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/kaspersky-says-telegram-flaw-used-for-cryptocurrency-mining <comment><USER2> Seeing this on Hacker News again, this time from _Bloomberg_ , is so mind numbingly frustrating. I already contested this story when it first showed up on HN 14 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366754). But time is a flat circle.

 _Sigh._

1\. This is not a vulnerability in Telegram. This is vulnerability in the way Windows processes malicious RLO characters in downloaded files. See: [https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2018/02/180212-telegram- vul...](https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2018/02/180212-telegram- vulnerability-2.png). The users must click past the security warning (unless they have manually disabled it in system settings), download the file to their machine, and run it.

2\. This vulnerability is a phishing vector, not a "0-day" (which these days, is a marketing term). It allows you to send a user a file to compromise their machine, _not_ the Telegram desktop application. Telegram is therefore the channel which can be used to execute a phishing attack. An email client would _also_ be a channel.

Kaspersky is trying to get eyeballs by checking off a bunch of boxes in the tech zeitgeist: Telegram, controversy over Telegram's security, _cyber_ crime, cryptocurrencies and mining. They've baked a narrative that is specifically designed to market Kaspersky's services to its readers by dropping a bunch of keywords - the scenarios presented are so far removed from the standalone technicalities of the vulnerability that it's no longer even honest.

Exploitive security marketing and the uninformed journalism that follows it around is going to give me an ulcer.

<comment><USER3> _" Attackers used a hidden Unicode character in the file name that reversed the order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself. As a result, users downloaded hidden malware which was then installed on their computers"_

Feels like Telegram should be on the hook for protecting against this. It does work with email too, and not really Telegram's fault. Nonetheless, the expectation for them to deal with it seems reasonable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the article a bit light on details, so I checked the linked report at [https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press- releases/2018_hackers-...](https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press- releases/2018_hackers-exploited-telegram-messenger-zero-day-vulnerability)

> Attackers used a hidden Unicode character in the file name that reversed the > order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself. As a result, users > downloaded hidden malware which was then installed on their computers.

> Secondly, upon successful exploitation of the vulnerability, a backdoor that > used the Telegram API as a command and control protocol was installed, > resulting in the hackers gaining remote access to the victim's computer.

</comment><comment><USER5> "While analyzing the servers of malicious actors, Kaspersky researchers also found archives containing a cache of Telegram data that had been stolen from victims." more worried about that than the rest.</comment>


Semyon Dukach: Non-profit Profiteering - <AUTHOR> http://semyondukach.blogspot.com/2009/12/non-profit-profiteering.html <comment><USER2> I see this as a case of the fundamental problem with the international non- profit model: the money comes in at one place, the supposed value-creation is happening somewhere far away, and the non-profit group in between is the only entity in contact with both sides. In other words, the value that the 1st- world government or individual is getting for their donation is based largely on what they hear from the non-profit. Since the non-profit is incentivized to report success to keep the money flowing, it's unlikely to report an accurate picture of what is happening. With time, non-profits become very good at raising money with inspirational stories of intense human needs, project potential, supposed past achievements, and hip language (not to mention political connections). At the same time, since their actual effectiveness at achieving their goals is largely irrelevant to their business model, it almost certainly sucks. As OP indicates, transparency is the solution, and the internet should certainly enable that to a greater degree then currently happens.</comment>


Exec (YC W12) launches cleaning service in 4 new markets around the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/13/exec-cleaning-service-expansion-pack/

<comment><USER2> I fail to see the draw here, maybe someone can explain it to me. Generally, Exec is building a match making and scheduling service. They are taking cleaners/maids (which it sounds like they dont employ directly?) and matching them up with people who want to clean your house. Its like craigslist personals for maid services, with a fee off the top to wet Exec's beak.

First off, a clean apartment at the end of the day is a clean apartment. Meaning, they can't really charge more than the rest of the maid industry. So that sets an upper bound on price.

Then, maids aren't going to work for dogshit simply because the appointment was made online - so theres a lower bound to what you can pay a good maid.

The software supposedly automates the match making, scheduling, and coordinating (billing, etc), which really just helps increase the margins on what is otherwise a national cleaning service.

Now, it seems like the Exec execs and investors believe that "once they have it figured out" they can essentially add a city for free with minimal additional capital expense and almost no operational expense. Yay! Sounds like we have a national brand with crazy margins! If we just get 1% of the maid industry we will be set!

Problem is, those "margins" only pay off if you get the business. Unless the maids do a better job, or dance for you, there's a good chance if you have a maid service already scheduled there's little incentive to take the risk to try a new service. For Exec, if the cleaning service is the same (the innovation doesn't seem to be advertised as the cleaning aspect of the service) the only other value proposition for the business is ease of scheduling a cleaning visit (anyone can build a "reserve now!" function on their maid service company website), or price. Considering the first anyone can do, the second starts to eat into those investor-attracting margins.

The only way to not budge on the margins is to build a brand, which takes a lot of money. Who cares if your margins are 20% higher than industry average when you are burning all that money into acquiring customers?

Unless the business has a clear acquisition strategy, I can't see this business being competitive in enough ways that matter to the customer for their "technology" to be worth the headlines. Right now, it looks like their value prop is the automation of making a cleaning appointment. Unless that appointment can be made 10 minutes in advance and done perfectly by robots I don't see the competitive advantage. Maybe they have IP that is worth licensing to any maid service that would want to lower the operational expenses of managing a fleet of cleaning teams and inbound requests. That said, I can't envision a novel solution to this "problem" that is worth protecting with IP that another team couldn't solve differently.

To me, Exec seems like a fancy cleaning service that touts online reservations in a market already defined by what people are willing to pay for service and what price maids are willing to accept for their work. Since they don't control their margins, any race to the bottom on price better be made up with Amazon-scale sales volume. Which gets us to the crux of the point - I'm not sure that maid service logistics is the same type of problem as ordering goods ala Amazon. You can't build a business by pretending you can order maids online like you can a DVD.

<comment><USER3> > "Unless that appointment can be made 10 minutes in advance and done > perfectly by robots I don't see the competitive advantage."

Have you recently tried to book cleaning? I had to do it for my place in Brooklyn and it probably took a couple hours of research plus multiple phone calls to book times. There is a lot to be said for taking something this annoying and making it easy.

Look at Stripe for example. They didn't revolutionize anything about how payments work, they just took an extremely painful and annoying process and made it easy.

<comment><USER2> Exec makes scheduling an appointment easy. The problem you've described sounds more like "trying to find the right service."

The only way Exec would solve the problem you describe is if it tapped into all local maid service's schedules and helped fill in un-scheduled times at pre-approved services. This makes sense, as its classic "middleman" American entrepreneurial spirit. OTOH, I can't imagine cleaning-service agency is a big enough problem to automate, but maybe it is. Either way, it sounds like Exec is hiring their own cleaning teams or I'd imagine they'd have larger local coverage areas (per other people's comments on this thread).

With Exec positioning themselves as "a super easy cleaning service", they make the "hours of research" harder, not easier. So really, they are only saving you 10 minutes on the phone call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Says they include Chicago but apparently that means downtown only, as they claim they have nothing for my zip and I'm on the northwest side.

<comment><USER5> To provide anecdotal support, I live on the northwest side of Chicago (Zip: 60647) and they did have results. Not a lot, but some opening dates for the next few weeks.

<comment><USER4> Ah, that's comforting. So many times these types of services launch in X city and really, they mean just the 10 square blocks of downtown in X city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They say NYC, but they don't cover my zip code in Queens.

Manhattan south of 96th street + trendy Brooklyn != New York City

<comment><USER4> Same with Chicago. I live a whopping 12 miles from the center of downtown, IN the city of Chicago, and they told me they don't have people out "that far" yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In Los Angeles, their rate is right about 200% of what I pay today to clean a 2 bed/2 bath. I'd really want to try this, but it's tough to justify THAT much of an increase.

Edit: Maybe that's why there is a 200% guarantee? Oh, and I notice there are two people, not one, but ultimately if the end product is the same…?</comment>


The Computer Maverick Who Modeled the Evolution of Life (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/74/networks/the-computer-maverick-who-modeled-the-evolution-of-life <comment><USER2> I urge anyone who's interested in that kind of stuff to read "Allure of machinic life" by John Johnston [1]. A fascinating read that touches upon all strands of natural computing (soft / hard ALife, wetware, AI, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, behavior-based robotics, 1st and 2nd order cybernetics, theory of self-reproducing automata and whatnot) with a pondering touch of Deleuzian philosophy.

There's no mention of Barricelli though, but another equally interesting book [2] recognizes his pioneering work on artifical symbiogenesis (and that was back in 1953!), and speculates on its importance in the genealogy of computer worms and viruses.

[1]: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/allure-machinic- life](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/allure-machinic-life)

[2]: [https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/58766](https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/58766)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7919850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7919850)

A bit from a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439790)

<comment><USER4> Steven Levy's 1992 book "Artificial Life" is well worth a read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you find this interesting, I recommend also looking into genetic algorithms, artificial life (alife), cellular automata, Conway's game of Life, falling sand games, and Karl Sims virtual creatures.

<comment><USER6> Advanced reading search terms:

\- Cellular Potts Models

\- Evolution of evolvability

\- Replicators and the Error treshold

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nanopond more closely matches what you might envision an artificial petri dish looks like: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5yE8Si8rMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5yE8Si8rMM)

</comment><comment><USER8> As a counter perspective check out "Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics"

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Evolutionary- Informatics...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Evolutionary-Informatics- Robert-Marks/dp/9813142146)

<comment><USER9> Intelligent design is neither.

<comment><USER8> The book is very readable, and has quite a lot of artificial life simulation analysis and mathematical proof. While it is written by well known members of the ID crowd, the book does not advance any claims about intelligent design. The book analyzes why these simulations work, and clearly presents all its claims, so it is quite accessible for the reader to pick apart and check their validity.

<comment><USER10> Ah, so _that 's_ the other part of your misconceptions.

As far as I can see, the point made in the (first part of) the book is that informed algorithms (on average) always outperform random searches and that genetic algorithms are akin to random searches.

The first part is true, the second part isn't. Evolution isn't random, _mutation_ is random. Selection is very much not random, it is informed by the environment. This drastically reduces the size so-called "search space".

Using the term "search" for the outcomes of evolution is a curious choice anyway. Evolution doesn't search for anything in particular, it produces adaptation to an environment. It's a process without end.

As for computer simulations, check out the simulated biped that evolved hopping like a kangaroo:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ2bqz3HPJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ2bqz3HPJE)

<comment><USER8> The book is not about biological evolution. They are analyzing artificial life simulations like Avida and Terra. Different topic than what we are discussing in the other thread.

The fundamental point is that information is conserved, so if artificial life sims produce information, it must have been inserted into the code at some point, and it is possible to track down these particular insertion points, which the authors do. In information theory the conservation of information theorem goes by various names, such as the data processing inequality and independence conservation.

Anyways, I highly recommend the book. Everything is clearly laid out for your own analysis and application.

<comment><USER10> > The fundamental point is that information is conserved, so if artificial > life sims produce information, it must have been inserted into the code at > some point, and it is possible to track down these particular insertion > points, which the authors do.

Fair enough. Let's apply this to the video I linked. The authors certainly didn't add "information" about what walking or hopping looks like into the code explicitly. It just emerged. Following your logic, the hopping behavior can't be _new_ information, it must've been contained in the rules of the simulation.

The simulation itself is made up mostly of an off-the-shelf physics library, a couple of muscle-skeleton arrangements (authored by hand), and a fitness function measuring the distance traveled by activating those muscles through weights (the learning variables). Given this environment, walking, hopping and running behaviors invariably emerge. Fascinating!

Adapting this to our world, the laws of physics and the initial arrangement of matter contain all the "information" required for life to eventually emerge in the universe. This leaves you with a "god of the gaps" opportunity: An intelligent designer must've designed _those laws_ and made _that_ arrangement of matter so that it all works out. This is however entirely compatible with Darwinian models.

I don't have an issue with that kind of hypothesis, except that it is unclear what the existence of such a god/designer would imply for our particular lives here on earth.

<comment><USER8> Have you worked much with evolutionary algorithms? It also seems you think that evolutionary algorithms are somehow analogous to biological evolution. To what degree do you think that is true?

<comment><USER10> > Have you worked much with evolutionary algorithms?

Not really, like I said, there's usually better algorithms than genetic algorithms. They're fun to play around with, though.

> It also seems you think that evolutionary algorithms are somehow analogous > to biological evolution. To what degree do you think that is true?

The general principle - selection and random mutation - is the same.

<comment><USER8> What gives you so much confidence in GAs?

Also, I am surprised you've followed this discussion for so long. Most people fire off some canned phrases and then disappear.

<comment><USER10> > What gives you so much confidence in GAs?

Do I sound confident about them? I've said multiple times that they usually aren't very good and that usually you have a better algorithm. Usually, you can apply _intelligent design_.

The fundamental difference between us is probably that you'd look at life in nature and say something like: "This species is so remarkable, it must've been designed!".

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. It's only remarkable if it emerged naturally. If it was _designed_ , then I would have to point out all sorts of obvious flaws in the design.

<comment><USER8> I haven't said anything about design. You are making assumptions. I said Darwinism appears to be completely useless when it comes to practical application, and has been replaced by other mechanisms that are identified in the biological data. In this new thread I said there is a conservation of information law that the book authors apply to artificial life simulations. I am talking about what we know through mathematics and quantitative empirical analysis.

Regarding GAs, the conservation of information applies to how much information we can expect from a single random sample. If we can sample from the entire space of possible solutions, then there is a chance of sampling the optimal solution. The conservation of information applies to the necessary input to the algorithm in order to bring the chance to a certain level.

<comment><USER10> > I haven't said anything about design. You are making assumptions.

Of course I am, just like you assume "materialism" on my part. I have trouble believing that you're not an ID proponent, even though you're not upfront about it. Otherwise, why bring up books by people with a clear ID agenda?

I'm honestly not sure what your goal is here, anyway. You rarely address any questions that I ask. Making assumptions is all I can do.

> I said Darwinism appears to be completely useless when it comes to practical > application, and has been replaced by other mechanisms that are identified > in the biological data.

You actually called Darwinism "quackery" and said that it is "dead". This is the least strong version of your position so far.

I don't disagree that Darwinism, in the sense that it describes the origin of species, has no direct practical applications. Nobody is in the business of simulating entire ecosystems for thousands or even millions of years. Using that fact as some sort of criticism of the theory itself seems rather hamfisted.

> Regarding GAs, the conservation of information applies to how much > information we can expect from a single random sample. If we can sample from > the entire space of possible solutions, then there is a chance of sampling > the optimal solution.

Fair enough, but GAs are awful for finding the _optimal_ solution. However, nature doesn't require the optimal solution. It just looks for the next best thing, over and over. GAs tend to converge to some level of fitness and stay there.

In fact, it's likely that a random algorithm outperforms those GAs that can get stuck in local maxima. Again, this has no bearing on nature. Nature is fine with local maxima.

<comment><USER8> My goal is to discuss the topic of the thread. In this thread the book I mentioned, which is just about artificial life simulations, not biological evolution. I think it will confuse the discussion to try and bring in biological evolution and intelligent design. I've researched GAs and information theory to a fair extent, and am happy to answer questions and discuss on that topic.

<comment><USER10> > I think it will confuse the discussion to try and bring in biological > evolution and intelligent design.

Fair enough, I was looking to continue where we left off in the other thread.

> I think it will confuse the discussion to try and bring in biological > evolution and intelligent design. I've researched GAs and information theory > to a fair extent, and am happy to answer questions and discuss on that > topic.

Again, that's fair enough. However, if we're leaving out biological evolution, I don't think there's much of an argument to be had.

<comment><USER8> I'd be happy to continue discussion over email. I don't like the HN comments overflowing the side of the screen. My email is eric.holloway at google email setvice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Partners With NYC.gov To Provide Free Housing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/airbnb-partners-with-nyc-gov-to-provide-free-housing-for-hurricane-sandy-victims/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><AUTHOR> Also here: [http://betabeat.com/2012/11/airbnb-sandy-housing-crisis- disp...](http://betabeat.com/2012/11/airbnb-sandy-housing-crisis-displaced- bloomberg/) Kudos to AirBNB! They are creating amazing goodwill out of their expert handling of the post Sandy mess, and great opportunity to collaborate with venture friendly Bloomberg!

</comment><comment><USER2> also > <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755294>

<comment><AUTHOR> AirBNB did some amazing image work recently, they got the word about this out across NYC incredibly quickly and the Mayor's office has been touting it. It looks like they did indeed make an unregulated landlord exemption, but they have clearly not openly claimed they have done so. This is in line with the recent Uber moves in the city too, kudos to Bloomberg and Rachel Sterne for doing excellent work with the tech community to heal the city!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does this affect NYC's position on unregukated landlording? Is there a crisis exemption?</comment>


China's tyranny of characters - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/07/language <comment><USER2> It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them.

Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status.

They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book.

The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries.

"as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent."

That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.

<comment><USER3> They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet.

Signs use the same principle. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol) Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.

<comment><AUTHOR> _They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet._

It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects).

As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.

<comment><USER3> You can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols.

      long A sound = vr in language 1.
      Z sound = vr in language 2.

But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word.

This means if you have 10 languages then ideograms are easier in 9/10 of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except that mappings between real languages and writing systems don't work that way (being in general far from truly phonetic).

<comment><USER3> Sure, they are not perfect, but you don't want rainbow and monkey to both be spelled VVKX because they are homonyms in another language so they must be homonyms in all your languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Language is powerful in China. Wars were fought in China to unify culture. For example, the Chinese language in modern vernacular is generally not referred as a language in itself but referred as zhongwen, or "Chinese culture." The first emperor to unify China realized how important for maintaining power it was to have the people using a single common language (just as it were with the Roman Empire, compared to after its fall).

The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy.

What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor.

My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎?

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話?

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

<comment><USER6> Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.

<comment><USER7> That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.

<comment><USER6> So the subtitles on HK videos, tv etc are usually sanitized to be standard?

<comment><USER7> Often yes. For video only the really local content (eg. 100Most) are subtitled in exactly the same characters as the ones actually spoken.

(Edit: actually I just rewatched some 100Most content after I wrote the above and no, sadly even their videos are subtitled in Standard Modern Chinese.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is only partially related, but I remember watching the news in the nineties and being dumbstruck on how Académie française policed the usage of language in public life. It was probably about use of Anglicisms in television or by politicians.

I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha)

So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.

<comment><USER9> I learned about the Académie Française in French class (1990 or so). I thought they were guarding against anglicisms creeping in through teen slang -- "c'est too much" and that.

<comment><USER10> Also through vocabulary. 'Le weekend' (vs 'la fin de semaine') is the classic example, both of what l'academie does and how utterly (though heroically) doomed its efforts are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics.

Case in point:

Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic.

In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are.

As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.

All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate.

So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it.

Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.

<comment><USER12> I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin.

That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.

<comment><USER13> It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education.

I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanese is a tremendously more difficult written language. Not only do you have just as many "characters" (kanji, hanzi, 汉子, 漢子, whatever) as you do in Mandarin, those characters can have many different pronunciations. You also have katakana (phonetic, 46 + modifications), hiragana(phonetic, 46 + modifications), and just for fun the occasional English (phonetic, 26). And yet, Japan has a 99% literacy rate.

Compare that to the USA's 97.9% literacy rate, a country that teaches English (26 letters, phonetic), and I think the argument that difficulty of the language reflects the literacy rate falls apart.

<comment><USER14> You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;)

To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example:

        生 - raw (nama)
        生まれる - to be born (u・mareru)
        生きる - to live (i・kiru)
        生活 - living; life (sei・katsu)
        生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji)

I'll stop there. There are _more_ readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this problem does not exist in Chinese - which uses a single reading mapped to a single character. The same character, in Mandarin, would be read 'shēng' with many of the same meanings (to be born, life, raw)

The above example is one of many kanji with multiple readings in Japanese. How do you know which reading to use? Context and because you know the word. :) That problem isn't unique to Japanese, English suffers from it as well! Think of homophones like tear and tear. You use context to figure out how it is read. It adds some level of difficulty but isn't impossible.

<comment><USER7> There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation)

<comment><USER14> I stand corrected, thank you. I had Mandarin in mind, although that fact was unclear since I only mentioned it in my example. I'm unfamiliar with Cantonese and lack any knowledge at all of other Chinese dialects. So at least for that character - it has one reading in Mandarin. The two readings in Cantonese are a single (and similar) vowel apart, nothing like the differences between "nama" and "ki". So I'll change my argument: even though Chinese has multiple readings - Japanese takes it a step further in complexity.

According to this page [0], most sound differences in Mandarin are a variant opposed to a completely different sound. Variant sounds are easier to memorize because they often "make sense". In Japanese, variant sounds often occur because it is "easier to pronounce". If I had to wager a guess, Chinese variant sounds are done for the same reason - though I could be wrong on that as well. :)

Thank you for the correction.

[0] [http://pinyin.info/chinese_characters/](http://pinyin.info/chinese_characters/)

<comment><USER7> I agree, the multiple readings in Cantonese/Mandarin are nowhere near as different as the different readings for the same Kanji in Japanese. I never meant to imply otherwise, sorry if I sounded I was.

As someone trying to learn Japanese, it is one of the harder parts of the language for me to learn. Conjugations frustrate me more though. :)

<comment><USER14> I didn't take it as such - I took it as a correction to my misinformation and updated my argument to reflect the new information. My backing point was 'Japanese makes kanji more difficult than Chinese" but my information wasn't correct originally.

Might I ask what you find difficult about conjugations? I might be able to help. With the exception of U-Verbs (五段) I found that they are very consistent and very "mathematical". Nothing else gets as complicated as "house and houses but mouse and mice, goose and geese but moose and moose". While there are still exceptions due to etymology, they are relatively rare. The same 2 verbs are exceptions to most everything and there are only a few common words which are exceptions, such as いい conjugating as よい.

I concede that 五段活用 is a pain in the rear but it is something you get an "ear" for over time. So if that is were you get frustrated my only advice is chug- chug-chug along! Eventually if you conjugate one of the words incorrectly it _sounds_ wrong to you, even if you aren't certain you were wrong or not.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is the verb conjugations that are tripping me up (the English Wikipedia page on this [1] has a complicated chart that looks slightly scary), but they are getting easier the more I use them. I do find many parts of Japanese grammar to be very consistent, like you said.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.

<comment><USER16> Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters.

Links for those unfamiliar with those two things.

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

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

<comment><USER17> Although in the case of Hong Kong, neither Pinyin input nor Zhuyin input are likely to be used, as both are based on the phonetics of standard Mandarin Chinese. There are alternative input methods that are shape-based ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Shape- based)) such as the Cangjie, and Cantonese-only input methods.

<comment><USER16> I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > gaining so much regional identity and independence that they want to do a > Brexit of their own.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've wanted their own Brexit from day 1. At least Hong Kong does, and even Taiwan probably too. Especially Taiwan. I feel sorry for Taiwan, watching stuff like this ([http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong- kong-student-begs-for...](http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student- begs-for-international)) from Hong Kong and knowing that's a real possibility for them. At least the pro-China people in Taiwan (yes, they exist) will have to reevaluate their opinions after seeing how China has handled the Hong Kong return...

</comment><comment><USER19> At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_character_formation)

</comment><comment><USER20> > But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages > (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority

It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.

<comment><USER21> Wikipedia calls them "varieties" because to call them "languages" would result in a giant political flamewar. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese), also see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese)

That doesn't mean they aren't distinct languages (and not mere "dialects") by any definition a modern linguist would typically use.

Calling them "dialects" would be similar to calling English, German, and Dutch "dialects" of "Germanic".

<comment><USER20> English is pretty far from continental western germanic (German, Dutch, ...).

Continental western germanic is actually a good example of a group where the distinction between dialect and language is not clear. There's a dialect continuum in the area [1], so you often can't draw clear cut lines what belongs to one language and one to another.

\- With Low German the question is wether it is an own language or just a dialect of German.

\- With the three frisian varieties the question is wether they are different languages or just different dialects of Frisian.

\- Luxemburgish can be considered just a dialect, like the German dialects spoken just behind the border that are essentially the same, or an own language.

\- Dutch belongs to a dialect group that also spans over wide parts of Germany and Luxembourg [2]

\- And there are many more things to think about like Afrikaans or Yiddish

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_West_Germanic_continuum)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Weird. On Firefox, with ad-blocker and PrivacyBadger disabled, I am stuck on a page with only navigation menus and a title that reads 'Explicit cookie consent'.

In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form.

Anyone else getting this?

<comment><USER23> I've had this for a while on this domain, which Chrome and Ghostery. I haven't been able to read their articles for months at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world."

This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?

</comment><comment><USER25> Crikey, 'duang' is a much better word than 'boing'.

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana)

<comment><USER27> Hokkien Taiwanese is no longer particularly prominent in Taiwan, let alone the Taiwanese kana (according to that link they're not even all in Unicode).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin) is more relevant, as it's still moderately widely used today in Taiwan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.

<comment><USER29> There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non- Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html)

<comment><USER30> That was a really fascinating read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state.

The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.

<comment><USER32> "reinforced", not "caused".

<comment><USER33> "Movable goalposts", not "fixed goalposts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "the boxy prison of Chinese characters"

What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over the pronounciation is a blessing in many respects. It allows more people from distant cultures to converge with the writen language, and share much more.

<comment><USER35> Only a tiny minority of Chinese characters are pictographic, and most characters have a phonetic element. You'll have a better chance guessing the pronunciation of a random Chinese character than guessing the meaning of a random Chinese character.

<comment><USER24> The value of iconocity in the more pictographic characters is more of a mnemonic tool. It's much easier to _remember_ the meaning of the more pictographic ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do we not see Apple, Google or MS people discuss on HN? - <AUTHOR> If it doesn't violate the company principles (though I cannot see why it would) We would really like to see the inner guys share their opinions here. <comment><USER2> We do get comments from employees at big companies. You can also find many by searching for 'disclosure' in comments.

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=microsoft&st...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=microsoft&start=0)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=adobe&start=...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=adobe&start=0)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=ibm&start=0](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=ibm&start=0)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=apple&start=...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=apple&start=0)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=google&start...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=google&start=0)

[https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=facebook&sta...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=facebook&start=0)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Same comment, I though I should also add this here:

One clearance, I don't say people do not comment. Maybe I did not write this clear enough. So let me:

Employees do comment. That is not the problem. What I am saying is why do we not see threads where employees actually discuss a product/procedure, and opine on how they can better that product/procedure. These are personal opinions and given this is not a blog and our identities are not out in the open (at least not immediately accessible), everybody can, while staying under the veil of HN, state their honest opinions. Much like anonymous surveys, but more detailed. Nobody has to disclose sensitive information, but opinions of employees do make a difference. I would like to see that on HN.

<comment><USER3> > ... opinions of employees do make a difference. I would like to see that on > HN.

You won't see it, and the reasons are excellent. People who want to express their personal views, or even to influence corporate policies, are more effective if they aren't burdened by seeming to be corporate spokespeople.

At one extreme, it's sock-puppetry, meaning someone deliberately trying to hide their affiliation while representing a corporate viewpoint. The other extreme is an overreliance on a corporate connection to add weight to a view that would be more fairly evaluated on its direct merits.

The middle ground would be people announcing their affiliation only if the announcement contributes to balance and fairness, but who emphasize that their views are their own. That's the present system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We do see such comments, but those who post them are understandably reluctant to reveal their affiliations. Also, such disclosures would be made only if they were germane to the point being made.

Imagine a post in a philosophy forum about the existential human condition. imagine that the poster begins by saying, "Full disclosure: I'm a human."

> If it doesn't violate the company principles (though I cannot see why it > would) ...

It's easy to see how this would violate company policy as well as being a risky practice in general. Someone's personal view might end up seeming like an official corporate policy position.

</comment><comment><USER4> Of course they do. They just don't point out that they are Apple, Google or MS employees. And I think it is pretty obvious why. One wrong comment from a "google employee" and the media will be all over him/her with headlines like "google employee admits NSA blah blah" or even worse, titles that end with questionmarks: "Google working on Antimatter Energy?"

<comment><USER5> I can attest to knowing at least a few examples of "people on HN who work for these companies but don't say so out of abject (and not misguided) fear that the rabid 'copy and paste' tech blogs that call themselves 'journalists' would take some random quote out of context and splatter it all over the web."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think is they write in any comment that they're from one of these companies, the flamewar begins.

</comment><comment><USER7> What makes you think we don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> One clearance, I don't say people do not comment. Maybe I did not write this clear enough. So let me:

Employees do comment. That is not the problem. What I am saying is why do we not see threads where employees actually discuss a product/procedure, and opine on how they can better that product/procedure. These are personal opinions and given this is not a blog and our identities are not out in the open (at least not immediately accessible), everybody can, while staying under the veil of HN, state their honest opinions. Much like anonymous surveys, but more detailed. Nobody has to disclose sensitive information, but opinions of employees do make a difference. I would like to see that on HN.

<comment><USER8> If they can do better than a product/procedure, their duty to their company is to make that improvement in private.

I might be misunderstanding, so please forgive me if I am.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Marketing Automation with Twitter and Klout - <AUTHOR> http://blog.elastic.io/post/23280927251/marketing-automation-with-twitter-and-klout

<comment><USER2> Great idea... same would for FB and G+... great chance to use someones profile to get a plug</comment>


New version of Mathematica released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/15/mathematica-8/

<comment><USER2> TLDR: Check this instead: <http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/>

The signal-to-noise ratio of that article is incredible low. What did I get out of the post?

\- You can now type wolframalpha-style in mathematica.

\- You now have over 3000 built-in functions (i.e., too many to remember ;)

The rest was just Wolfram telling the world in many different ways how great mathematica was/is/will be. Adjectives include: huge, important, dramatic, breakthrough, major, slow & lumbering (to describe others), etc. Hell, "great" is mentioned 6 times in the post!

<comment><USER3> Static compilation via C, C metapogramming/manipulation using Mathematica's symbolic engine, dynamic library linking, GPU use via OpenCL, lots of new statistics and probability processing/visualization...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone knowledgeable here speak about statistics offer some advice? I'm about to get into a project where, for the first time, I'll need to do some statistics processing and visualization. I haven't started on that component of it yet, and I'm free to choose whatever tool I want. Most of the rest of my project is in Haskell, but for the processing/visualization of statistics part, I was thinking of choosing R. Does anyone know how well Mathematica 8, or other commercial packages, stack up?

<comment><USER4> R has some basic visualization libraries. The graphs are overall very functional, but basic. Ex: <http://www.statmethods.net/advgraphs/images/splotm.png>

Alternatives like Matlab, Maple, Stata all have basically the same 'look' to their default graphing packages.

Even though Mathematica would not be the right choice for statistical processing, the graphs it produces are a step above the rest.

So depends what you're use case is.. any of the above would look good enough for an academic paper. But if you're going to be publishing these in a magazine, they probably won't cut it.

<comment><USER5> > R has some basic visualization libraries

If you include CRAN packages, then this couldn't be further from the truth: <http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/>

R can be made to produce _beautiful_ visualizations.

Edit: here's a link to the top-voted thumbnails of R visualization: <http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes>

IMO, since it can be scripted from the command line, it's high time Gnuplot died a graceful death.

<comment><USER6> I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations.

The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz.

The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.

<comment><USER7> Especially when you have such pretty defaults in things like Matlab and Mathematica.

Matplotlib (<http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/>) is actually the best opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across, and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.

<comment><USER6> I've looked at matplotlib but still think it's ugly by default.

Compare to:

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/>

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/>

The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on the sparklines in the first example

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a little disappointed by the opencl/cuda support. I was hoping they'd be fully integrated with native algorithms in mma. Instead you need to change your code to call CUDAfft[] or whatnot. It should just choose the right fft to use, or supply a checkbox in preferences.

<comment><USER9> Mathematica programming language is somewhat symbolic, like Lisp; so you could just "rewrite" your expressions to use CUDAfft[] or whatever very easily.

Example:

      Hold[Times[1,2]] /. (Times -> Plus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Eh. I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and it unless a problem is more or less trivial, it takes too long to force Mathematica to do what I mean.

Also I agree with a poster below: this press release is really low on the signal-to-noise.

<comment><USER11> Personally I use Mathematica as a sketchpad for playing around with ideas and getting a feel for a problem. It is great because I can type in my sloppy half thought out ideas in a fairly natural syntax and Mathematica will generally do something sensible with them. Once I've gotten a handle on what I need to do and actually have to start getting results I leave Mathematica for matlab, python or C.

That being said I've met some really great Mathematica programmers, and the stuff they can make that program do with only a few dozen lines of code is truly amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks decent - I'll certainly try the demo. Though I'm no mathematician Mathematica is my favorite Maths playground software.

I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. though full of witty easter eggs and stocked with a rich variety of datasets, exploratory queries proved sadly frustrating.

Here's what I want to see in version 9 (laugh now, realize I'm right later): Kinect interaction. Perhaps unwittingly, Microsoft have just launched the next great peripheral and it seems intuitively popular with the public in a way I haven't seen for years and years. Now, imagine you've generated or imported a mathematically-specified 3d object in M., and imagine it inside a bounding box with handles on the vertices and local minima/maxima. Multi-point, multi-d interactivity would be both absorbing for students and potentially extremely productive for professionals, without requiring significant retooling of the core.

<comment><USER13> Only problem with that is the fact that Microsoft could either retool the kinect to disallow the use by mathematica. Some other third party would have to work similar to kinect for it to actually happen.

<comment><USER12> That's true, but I doubt they will - and if they do, hordes of imitators will appear. My _hunch_ (ie I have no evidence whatsoever for this) is that MS's huffing and puffing over people's reverse engineering of the Kinect was little more than posturing designed to increase viral interest. If they really wanted to keep it limited to the Xbox they'd have forced a proprietary connector to one of the memory expansion slots or such, rather than giving it USB 2 and acting surprised when people tried plugging it into other devices.

Intentional or not, it's having a good launch - word is that it's flying off shelves, and seems to have instant mass appeal. I was at an information management technology conference a week ago, and guess which two booths were the most crowded? The ones that were trading 3 minutes of sales pitching for a go at _Dance Dance Revolution_ or whatever the Kinect version is called. Incidentally, the other thing being used to bribe jaded conference-goers was the prospect of winning an iPad every hour - there must have been 30 exhibitors using that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Home edition (hobbiest, non-commercial): $295 Professional edition: $1095 (Windows, MAC, Linux) An amazing product, IMHO.

<comment><USER15> Professional is still $2500 for me. Someone on Reddit reported seeing the $1095 price in Firefox and the $2500 price in Chrome.

<comment><USER16> Is it just browser they discriminate on, or what? That's a heck of a discount. Makes me wonder if I should do some experimenting to see how to get lower prices...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It looks like lots of nice new features. The statistics area looks greatly improved. (It was kind of weak before, compared to R). You can import any of the Wolfram|Alpha data sets, and directly manipulate them. I like the financial charts, which were more or less impossible before. The C integration might be useful. I'll also like the improved word processing, so you could write a decent looking paper in MMa.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's a great open source alternative to Mathematica called Sage: <http://sagemath.org>. It's purpose is to offer the same sort of functionality as many of the commercially available math programs but only using free and open source tools.</comment>


Protobot generates random product and service ideas - <AUTHOR> http://protobot.org <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not affiliated with that site. Just stumbled upon it.

Also funny the disclaimer: "This site uses Google Analytics, honestly just in order to satisfy my personal curiosity about who visits it. More info" press "Cool" to close.</comment>