I created a bookmarking service you can love. - <AUTHOR> http://historio.us/? <comment><USER2> This is an idea I have wanted to implement myself for a long time. I was very sad that Google Bookmarks doesn't provide full page search and still requires me to think up and maintain my own hierarchy of tags/labels/whatever. Nice work, I'll definitely support you.

My suggestion is that you start looking into ways to group and organize people's bookmarks automatically. You could start with some simple things, but I'm very curious to see how more advanced methods would work out.

My biggest feature request: let me import my google bookmarks quickly and easily.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, we're glad you like our product! We have a few people in our team (including me) who come from a machine learning background, so we will definitely experiment with some clustering algorithms to see if we can organise the bookmarks automatically.

You can import your Google bookmarks easily by uploading your bookmarks.html from Google directly on our "historify site" page. However, this is currently disabled for performance reasons, but we will soon (i.e. in the next few days) re-enable it for the users' convenience. Please follow our Twitter feed to be informed on the status of this, and thank you again for your preference!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a useful service, but just wanted to point out that having a JS embedded button might not be the best way of going about it, or at least in it's current form with the historious_key as the only means of authentication. If a site is expecting historious users, it can have a simple javascript polling loop that wait until the historious bookmark is activated to jack the key.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, thank you for pointing that vulnerability out... Do you mind contacting us at support at historious to discuss?

Also, there is a Chrome extension available and we will be writing more as time progresses (sadly there are more important issues to address).

Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We came out with something just like this a little while ago <http://wheatt.com/> , but nobody here seemed to care.

Although instead if emphasizing text search, which I didn't find that useful in the beta testing, we focues on combinations of tags, dates, domains, including terms like "today" and "month", but there is still full page text search, which can be used in combination with those other search terms.

Maybe its too complicated for most, but I find it useful and use it many, many times a day.

<http://wheatt.com/>

<comment><USER6> To say nothing about the implementation or usefulness of either, I'd say the "historious" branding and landing page makes it much clearer what the experience would be.

The different in response could easily be the marketing? Cool idea either way - both of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I signed up, but didn't install the Chrome extension. I think you need to be a lot clearer about what exactly is going on.

For example, if I install the Chrome extension, and then visit my banking site, are you indexing my bank statements?

Do you only index pages we click Historify on? The answer to that question ought to be in the privacy policy. You're asking us to install an extension and give you access to EVERYTHING we do in the browser, but not explicitly stating the limits on it.

That said, if you're indexing EVERYTHING I browse to, I think this is actually a really killer app. An app with some insane privacy challenges, but a killer one nonetheless. If you're only indexing the stuff I bookmark, that's pretty cool, and a good step forward, but less exciting to me.

<comment><USER8> I didn't think about the "indexing everything" from what they said. But now that you mention it, it does sound like a great app.

You could have an extension that indexes everything the user goes to. The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for. But if you try and solve it in a centralized way, you could do several interesting things:

* Make searches across all the sites you visited work better, maybe by creating better indexes of the content.

* Make the search work according to sites you visited the most (e.g. I'd prefer the search to find comments on HN before other things, then articles linked to from HN, etc.).

Such a service might be pretty useful: browser history that doesn't suck, and is persistent and accessible online. Anyone want to build it?

<comment><USER9> "The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for."

FYI: History in Safari rocks. Just open the history view and you have fast searching (including in page text - just checked) that shows all the resulting pages in a coverflow view.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check that out. I use Chrome and Firefox, so I wouldn't know.

Still, something computer and browser independent might make for an interesting application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks pretty useful. A few feature requests:

\- Import from delicious, to help get people started.

\- An option to automatically add the tags from delicious as part of the text that you search, because many websites do not contain sufficient text to be findable without tags (ex: youtube videos with bad titles, direct links to images/other non-html content, etc)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your feedback! To address your points:

\- There is currently a feature to import from delicious (go to "historify site"), but it has been temporarily disabled while we make our crawler multithreaded, because the unexpected popularity and people trying to import thousands of links at once made indexing very slow for everyone. It should be up again in the next few days.

\- That is a very good idea! I'm not sure if the delicious dump file has them, but it should, I'll add it to our bug tracker, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where are my bookmarks? I added them, but I can't find an easy way to see them- although I can search through them.

The auto tweet option is cool, but what about a "post to FaceBook" option. Might help you adopt a few more people.

URL shortening service might also be something to look at- historio.us/linkid. You will have to switch some stuff up, like the key- historio.us/user/key_value.

Allow me to also change my email, not just password. Might even think about using OpenID in as well.

Look into a real FireFox addon- Reddit's Socialite would be a good place to start. You can also make a tiny addon to include search in Firefox[2].

Examples in the api documentation would be nice. I keep getting a "3" response when I request a key.

Found the answer to most of these in the FAQ, but I would still like to do it all with the UI[1]- who reads FAQs?

I'm free this summer if you need some help. All I ask for is a recommendation when all is said and done, or not if you are not pleased.

[1] <http://historio.us/help/faq/>

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins_for_firefox)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your feedback, let me address the points one by one:

1) You can't see your bookmark, that's the point. You don't _have_ to see them unless you're looking for them! However, we realise people might need to see the entire list, so you can search for * or "http" to get a list of your bookmarks. The * search is a bit broken right now, but we are working to fix it.

2) Facebook posting is also planned!

3) Thanks for that idea, I will add it to our tracker!

4) That is also a good idea, we will have to resend you a validation email but that's fine. OpenID would also be great, we want to support it very very much and will do after the high-priority items are sorted.

5) A Firefox extension is planned, but is lower priority right now. Any volunteers who wanted to write an open source extension would be welcome!

6) You are probably getting a 3 because you are forgetting the "agent" parameter, if everything else is correct. We do need example, though, thanks!

7) Who wants to clutter the UI? :P

We'd love some help, and would be glad to recommend you! Please contact me at stavros at historious if you'd like. Also, thank you for the Mozilla link, I wasn't aware of that and it is very useful.

<comment><USER12> >we realise people might need to see the entire list

Please add a 'Browse' button

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Okay, quick feedback. The first thing I looked for is the answer to "Public or private?" Privacy policy has this:

> We will also never share the content of your historified pages with anyone, > although we might use the URLs of pages to compile anonymized lists of > popular or new links. We will, however, never share any information about > which pages you, personally, have historified.

I think that might be a mistake. You'll lose the ability to get people in for social networking/SEO reasons, and nobody trusts a service like this to stay private any more anyways. At first I thought, "Well, that's more useful because it's private" - and then I thought, "Who am I kidding? They'll just make it public anyways if they get big."

You might consider setting the default to public, maybe with an option for private.

<comment><USER3> First of all, thanks very much for your feedback!

To address your points, there are no plans for your bookmarks to be public, or have an option to show a page with them, either. The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place. To make it public we would have to add a search box for people to search in your bookmarks, which may or may not be useful...

I see what you mean about it, and I agree, but many people have said "I will never use this if I can't have privacy", so we listened to them. It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...

<comment><USER13> > The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as > there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place.

Question: Are you building a fun tool for the good of humanity, or do you plan to make money at some point? From everything that I've seen, making a way to publicise a list of bookmarks could help you if you're going the latter route.

> It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they > want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...

Yes, my first thought was, "I'd only use this if it's private" - my second thought was, "Wait, actually, I'd use it either way, pretty similarly, and there'd be additional value if it's public." I might see what people choose instead of what people say. People talk a lot and then do different things. Just something to think about, and congrats on launching a pretty cool service.

<comment><USER3> Your points are very valid. It is also my personal opinion that people say one thing and do another, as far as privacy is concerned. I will put the policy change on the table and we will think about ways to make the service amenable to shared bookmarks, as it would indeed be a good feature.

Currently, a way of sharing that I, personally, have found works pretty well is to enable AutoTweet, which tweets your historified links with a tag. Then you can search for #historified and you see links people all over the world have historified. That is just an aside, however, and we will absolutely look into link sharing.

We don't want to use your links for nefarious purposes or to divulge anything embarrassing, but having a more lax policy that enables sharing is something we do want.

Thank you again for your feedback, it is sincerely appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pinboard's a pretty amazing Delicious alternative. One-time signup fee of $6, but very much worth it. <http://pinboard.in/>

<comment><USER3> historious is an optional $5, so we have that beat!

<comment><USER15> Well, our del.icio.us importer (among others) actually works so we've got that. Either way, welcome to the fray!

<comment><USER3> Haha, now we will work double-time to get that working! Thanks, good luck to you too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Diigo (<http://www.diigo.com>), among other things supports saving page snaphosts and annotations.

I've been using Diigo for 8 months now and it's just great (I have used some other services like delicious previously, but they really can't compare to Diigo which just offers a lot more functionality).

</comment><comment><USER17> Since this is being positioned as a bookmark search engine rather than repository, I think it would be awful useful to provide a couple-line excerpt under each search result, just like in a standard search engine. As it is, one needs to guess a little bit why any given result is given for a search.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, this is actually a good idea and I'm not sure why we don't do it right now. I will add it to the tracker and we will try to implement it soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 1) it doesn't seem to be working, or at least your 'indexer' is so far behind that I can't tell if its working. At least change it so that when I search for ' _' I see the things that I added and are queued to be indexed.

2) That whole search for '_' thing is pretty lame.. put a link to see 'all'

3) Good on you to make a chrome plugin, but I find it unintuitive. Clicking on it to bookmark, great, but how do I get to your domain which I always mistype? I think I'd rather have a very simple menu pop up (big icons?) when I click the plugin, one with '+' one with a magnifying glass for search. Something like that. The two most common things I'm going to use this for is adding and searching, you only make one of those easy with the extension.

Hope you can figure out the scaling issues, bummer to have it melt when you get press.

<comment><USER3> Hello and thanks for your feedback. Let me reply:

1) Yes, the indexer has been lagging a bit behing :/ The search engine is just so slow, we'll replace it right away.

2) I guess a simple link wouldn't hurt, we'll look into placing it on the page.

3) That is true, we can have the extension automatically add historious as a search provider when you install it, which would solve both problems.

Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> it isn't clear what it is. i click a bookmarklet and you save it and i can search from there? i can do that with my history, though?

i don't bookmark sites because i don't realize i'll find them valuable till after i've left.

I really dislike the top image you have ("in three easy steps") because i sat looking at it wondering if it were an image or a video or a heading, can you make it more obvious it's a slideshow?

after signing up: ew email confirmation. also seems like i accidentally signed up twice.

i installed your extension, but have no idea what it does :) also, what does "historify site" mean?

if i could summize my feedback in a line it'd be: looks neat, but tell me (the user) what the bet is i'm taking in using your service. clearly.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your feedback, it is very valuable to us as we're always looking for ways to explain what we do better. The beauty of historious is that you actually find yourself using it a lot, because bookmarking with it is very cheap, just one click with no lists to clean up.

The image we do need to change, as it blends in too much. The email confirmation is just for resetting your password, we don't use it for much else right now... The extension just bookmarks sites when you click it.

Thanks, we will change the front page to reflect all this!

<comment><USER19> Why not store everything?

<comment><USER3> Many reasons, it's too slow especially if you have limited bandwidth, data becomes much more sensitive (e.g. password, banking details, etc etc), but most importantly, it increases the noise so much you can't find anything at all in the end...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> i'll give it a try, though let me give you an advice which reflect my problem with delicious.

I've used delicious, ever since it was a perl script running on a single server by Joshua. Days went by, delicious went through it revolution/evolution cycles and stationed where it is right now. However, as a facebook and twitter user, I want to have all my links and re-tweets save automatically in my bookmark service. That is, If I tweet about a fascinating page, I'd like to able to easily retrieve it 6 months later.

that is to say, auto-tweet is nice feature but I am looking for the vice versa (twitter, facebook, buzz, wherever I go and save/mark links).

Wish you good luck with your new service.

<comment><USER20> tried it out - strange results.

I "historified" this site - HN. Then searched for it in terms of "Hacker News" and got

       No documents matched your search.
       To add more documents to your history, just install the historio.us bookmarklet!

       http://historio.us/search/?q=hacker+news&search=Search

<comment><USER3> Hello, we're sorry about that issue; we're working to fix it ASAP. For more details, please see this blog post:

[http://blog.historio.us/performance-problems-and-lessons- in-...](http://blog.historio.us/performance-problems-and-lessons-in-optimisat)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the idea and I was searching as simple as that since a long time. Here are some suggestions to improve it:

First, it didn't work for me.. I bookmark hacker news with the chrome extension and I still see the wheel turning.. and even if I search for all site I bookmarked, I don't see hacker news.

Second, is it really necessary to create an account and check with email, etc. maybe histio.us/d0m could create automatically an account where I can search and put a password if I want it secure.

Third, it could be useful if we can search with the chrome extension, instead of only being able to add bookmark.

Fourth, pretty cool and keep it up :)

Did you thought of a way to make money with that?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback!

The Chrome extension has some problems, sadly, but we can't reproduce the issue and they are not consistent at all (e.g. some users found that reinstalling the extension makes them go away). We have no idea why it's behaving that way, sadly :(

Email confirmation not really that necessary, and I agree that it's an unnecessary burden. We will look into removing the email verification (but an account is necessary as you need to be assigned an API key)...

We're adding historious as a search provider in the extension now!

We believe that we should make a fun product first and monetize it later (it's the wrong way around, I know, but we like it)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As others have mentioned, Delicious import would be handy. Even better, however, would be to take it a step further and automatically import on an on- going basis. This would achieve the following workflow:

1\. In my Historious settings, add my Delicious feed URL

2\. Find a cool link and add it via the Delicious bookmarklet

3\. Historious polls the feed, picks up the new link, and grabs the page

Now I have the best of both worlds:

1\. If I want to see a list of my URLs, I can browse them via Delicious.

2\. If I want to search the saved page data, I can do so via Historious.

<comment><USER3> As I mentioned below, there is a delicious importing feature but it has been disabled while we test the new, faster backend. The workflow you propose would be very handy, but it would have to support more sites... Luckily, we have an API anyone can use to write their own tools to add sites to historious!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Certainly a useful service. I know this because the way I used to accomplish this earlier was, create a Google customized search and manually enter the sites that I bookmarked with delicious and search from there.

So you got that covered, and I will use it.

However, I just signed up and imported all my delicious bookmarks and did a search for a tag and the results were not so impressive. Only 5 with historious and 17 on delicious. Hopefully this will get better.

Looking forward to using your service. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER9> You seem have a problem in Safari 4. If I select the bookmarklet text, then drag it to the bookmarks bar, then only the first line was added as a bookmark.

[NOTE: I just noticed there is an actual bookmark as I suggested below. OK.]

I ended up editing the breaks out of the text to get the bookmark to work.

You should probably bury the bookmarklet text in a link, and have the user drag that to the bookmarks bar.

Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an unrecognized browser!

<comment><USER11> >Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an unrecognized browser!

I would be careful about this. Sniffing browsers isn't always a good idea. Instead, let users drag their own bookmarklet- that correspond with their browser type- to the toolbar. Or keep sniffing and if you do receive an "unrecognized browser" response fall back to a page of that type.

<comment><USER3> The bookmarklet is the same, the sniffing is for the instructions. The problem is that we want the code below to be the same as the one in the bookmarklet, so we use the same file for both, but for some reason newlines are not removed. I will change that now to make it work with Safari...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sounds really cool, I have just signed up. That said, my NoScript firefox plugin gets in the way of the bookmarklet complaining about cross site scripting. I had a quick go at putting in a exception regex, but no dice. Anyway, I thought you might like to know that noscript could trip your users up.

I don't have time right to work out why it's not working, so hopefully I'll get to try out your service a bit later.

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that report, I'll see what we can do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25>
       You found a great article yesterday - now you can't find it!

I think the above style of copy works far better for connecting with readers and calling out the problem you solve. It's shorter (always good) and assumes the reader agrees with you (the ones that don't agree aren't your target anyway - so why equivocate? Plus, in fact everyone has had this problem).

<comment><USER3> I agree with that, I will change the copy. We need ideas like these if we want to increase our conversion rate, and we do!

Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's really nice!

Three suggestions:

1\. Add a snippet with the search terms highlighted

2\. Show the date bookmarked in the result list and (if possible) the date of the last update.

3\. Document the query language for extended queries

Two questions:

1\. Do you reindex bookmarks after some time?

2\. What indexing engine and platform do you use? (lucene/java?)

One remark:

1\. The Chrome extension is unable to bookmark sometimes. The bookmarklet is working great.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestions!

1) That is planned and will be added soon, it is a very good idea.

2) I have no idea why we don't do this already, we'll add it straight away!

3) We will, but right now we will be changing backends, so we will document the new one (probably Sphinx with EXTENDED2).

We don't reindex documents, as they are cached and never change (when you bookmark something, the bookmarklet sends the source to the server, which is how we can bypass registrations and paywalls). Plus, you need the document to be as you remember it.

We currently use Whoosh with Python, but it turns out to be excruciatingly slow. We will change to either Sphinx or Solr.

We don't know why the extension does that :( We can't reproduce it on any of our computers, but many users seem to have the problem :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've created a very similar social bookmarking webapp. You just enter a URL, and my webapp auto-tags it, indexes it for search, and shares it with all of your followers.

Check it out here: <http://imi-imi.appspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER28> Two suggestions:

* Add a private and public option for bookmarks. Then offer two bookmarklets one for private links, the other for public ones.

* Accept both username and email address when logging in. Otherwise 1Password users will not be able to login automatically.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your feedback, it is much appreciated!

The point of the site is to _not_ have lists of bookmarks, though, so you can add many many sites and then find them easily. I find that, if I have a list, I tend to either try and keep it tidy or, if I don't, I just get frustrated and never look at it. We wanted historious to never show you the extent of your bookmarks, and to just give you the info you want transparently. That's why the notion of "public bookmarks" is hard to apply here...

<comment><USER28> Ok, I like the idea of a private service. It makes sense. However:

* Convince me that this will remain private, forever.

* Assure me that this will remain in business. You can do this in two ways: 1) Charge me $10 a year. 2) Provide an export function from the get go.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I bet you'll like <http://historio.us/export/>, but you can still pay us $10/yr if you want!

<comment><USER28> Perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love it when people implement the stuff I haven't had the time to do myself. Well done.

One suggestion: Your use case is well defined. Don't get thrown off by people in here suggesting millions of features.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, we're trying not to. We're pretty resistant to adding tags, categories, lists, etc. Even the listing methods implemented now are side- effects rather than actual functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How about an import feature from google web history. Doesn't it also index the pages you visit for searching? It has a bookmarklet and can crawl all of your web history if you tell it to

<comment><USER3> I think it does, but we're sort of against indexing _everything_ , because then we'd just turn into Google search... It's much easier to locate something when you have only three or four documents of that type rather than a hundred...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used <http://www.boomtango.com/> (looks like the same idea) for Firefox but now I use Chrome unless I need to use yslow or firebug

</comment><comment><USER32> Instapaper is my solution to this problem. When I'm searching for something I just use ctrl-f.

I save the 1.5mb page to my dropbox every once in a while and I'm good to go.

Of course I'm probably not your target audience.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, that only searches in the title, though, doesn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Fast site. What environment are you using? Also, on the page with the instructions I think the instructions should be at the top. People are less concerned with the other stuff.

<comment><USER3> You mean the screen you see the first time you log in? That's just a short preamble to tell you how to use historious (many people aren't very technically minded and don't immediately see how to use the service). Hopefully it's not too much to read quickly, though!

Thanks for your feedback!

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't answer your first question: We use a Linode in Georgia, so if you're near there it should be pretty fast (their servers are quite fast too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One thing that would be awesome is if historify would spider someone's blog. That way, for instance, I could point it towards paulgraham.com and have all of his essays saved.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great idea. I assume you currently aren't saving embedded resources like audio files or flash movies? It would be even more valuable to a lot of people if you did.

<comment><USER3> Nope, we don't... Those aren't very searchable, though, or we would. PDFs are a bigger priority, but they we still need to have a way to extract text from them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> can you add a tiny search bar on the browser? or at least have it be an option? I don't like visiting the site every time i want to search my bookmarks, also, it would also be nice having a way to remove the bookmarks once i've added it. Especially for articles I've read and don't care to read again.

<comment><USER3> You can right-click in the search bar and create a browser search for it, and then you can use your browser search as normal. To remove the bookmarks, just click the "remove" link next to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is there a way of viewing a list of urls that you have historified? Maybe ordered reverse chronologically?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can search for * and that will give you all the links. There's a small problem with that, currently, so you can search for http instead to achieve the same result.

<comment><USER37> Ah ok. It might be more useful to have a direct link for this on the search page?

Is there a search help page showing advanced search criteria?

<comment><USER3> The hints have various useful tips, and the FAQ page too. There is no page with the syntax, because we didn't think that users will need anything special, but we will add one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How does this differ to services like <http://pinboard.in>?

</comment><comment><USER39> This is incredible, I see myself using this a lot as Evernote sucks at this particular use case. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER40> wow, I was planning on making the exact same thing. I think this will be amazingly useful. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Thank you, we hope so too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice work. Signed up. I agree with @thejash - Any chance we can import bookmarks from Delicious etc?

<comment><USER3> Importing from delicious exists (click "historify site" on the top right) and will be re-enabled as soon as we finish testing the new, faster backend. Please stay tuned (and follow us at @historrific), we're sciencing as fast as we can!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This exactly what I wanted. Thank you very much for actually implementing it.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your kind words, I am glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I read this at first as "I created a bookkeeping service you can love" which had me really excited. I'd like a bookkeeping service I can love.

Edit: This does look cool, though.

<comment><USER3> I'd like one like that too :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How is this not redundant with delicious?

<comment><USER26> You cannot search in the content of bookmarked pages with delicious. For delicious to be useful you need to add tags to the bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Simple and potentially very useful. Will give this a try for a while (previously using pinboard.in).

Suggestions: 1) Chrome extension: keybinding to add current page. 2) Search results: time options. \- filtering, eg last 24h/last month \- sorting, results with time headlines and good spacing for quicker overview (looking for some news article read last week)</comment>


The face of the first European - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-the-face--of-the-first-european-1678537.html

<comment><USER2> Never knew that Tom Hanks is 30 000 years old.</comment>


Ask HN: List of websites categorized by visitors' gender and age-group? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,<p>Is there list of websites available which is categorized by visitors' gender and age-groups? For example, I guess Digg.com would be mostly visited by males, aged between 15-30. So is there any alexa kind of ranking which lists top websites by visitor's A/S/L?<p>-Paras <comment><USER2> Quantcast.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Do they offer API?</comment></comment>


All entrepreneurs should read this. - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html Great insights into founding a company (Autodesk), spurning convention, hiring great people, using Lisp.  It's all here. <comment><USER2> Especially some of the parts about dealing with reporters and analysts.

<http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html>

In the interview Walker basically made a fool of the reporter, who then trashed Autodesk in his report (causing their stock to drop from $60 to $28).</comment>


The Day US Customs Found A Bullet In My Pocket - <AUTHOR> http://www.wanderingearl.com/the-day-us-customs-found-a-bullet-in-my-pocket/ <comment><USER3> This sort of treatment is difficult and unpleasant, but imagine how it would feel to be a young Muslim on the receiving end of such a grilling. Imagine what might have transpired if this chap had answered "Yes, I do believe in the words of the Prophet Muhammad". Imagine how this might affect someone who has grown up with the suspicion and abuse that Muslims living in the west have increasingly had to endure.

A considerable proportion of Islamist terrorists and terrorist would-bes are western-born Muslims who feel that they are defending Islam. They have been told that the West, America in particular, considers them to be the enemy simply by merit of their religion. Young men and women are tracing modern Islamophobia back to the crusades and perceiving themselves to be fighting for survival. These beliefs have been made quite clear, perhaps most explicitly in the "martyrdom" videos released by the 7/7 London bombers.

Here we have one of many incidents where a uniformed representative of the United States government is giving the clear impression that they perceive Islamic beliefs is inherently suspect. This man was not being interrogated to reveal what he had done or who he had consorted with, he was being asked what he thought and believed. Let that sink in for a minute.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the IRA pursued an explicit policy of "the worse, the better", knowing that by provoking the British army and the RUC into heavy-handed reaction, they could rally support for their cause and rouse antipathy towards the British government. The British army and the RUC were often referred to as "the IRA's recruiting sergeant".

<comment><USER4> I'm not one to defend either the government of the United States or its toadies, but the argument that "this guy disrespected my beliefs so I should start killing innocent civilians" is, in my opinion, horseshit. Anyone who goes that way has deeply troubling issues that cannot be explained away by pointing to some uniformed dick on a power trip.

<comment><USER5> What a shortcut Hvs. That's not at all what Jdietrich said. He is just trying to say that this sort of grilling can be more difficult to endure if you ARE a Muslim, and that's a fact no? I think we all agree that terrorism must be fought, but like any problem you fight it better once you understand its motivations. Fighting is not always done with physical or mental violence either. Sometimes, the best way to fight something like terrorism is to understand that the phenomenon doesn't reside with the perpetrator only but also with the provocateur.

What I mean here is that maybe US forces need to learn to be a bit more unpredictable and attack Terrorism in a less frontal manner to succeed. Just like the IRA did in Ireland with the Brits. Imagine what kind of violence could come from Americans if they were greeted by foreign customs officers abroad with angry screams like: "So you believe in Jesus!?!?" for several hours in a room with a mirror.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention the main reasons Al Qaeda doesn't like us seems to be to our support of Israel and our lack of action on global warming. I'm sure they don't like the way we treat Muslims in the airport, but it doesn't seem to be a big source of terror attacks.

<comment><USER7> _our lack of action on global warming_

That's an odd assertion. So is the "support for Israel" assertion, given that al Qaeda kills plenty of Muslims too, who they feel aren't up to snuff. At least the Israel argument is widely repeated - but al Qaeda as climate change activists?

<comment><USER8> I thought the global warming comment was a bit odd too. From a quick Google it seems that Bin Laden does indeed have something to say about global warming. It was on Fox News, so must be true:

[http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/01/29/bin-laden-blames- glo...](http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/01/29/bin-laden-blames-global- warming-new-tape/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Meh... the whole thing didn't sound so unreasonable to me. The guy took a trip to two places well known for harboring and training terrorists. They found a bullet, a piece of terrorist propaganda, a burqa, and a note in his journal outlining some desire to renounce his citizenship.

I'd be pretty damn suspicious too. I may not like it, but there are folks trying to kill us (all of us). These agents have a job, and that's to try and ferret out as many of these people attempting entry to our country as possible. It may be inconvenient, and it may be pretty nasty...but it's necessary. That's the reality of the situation.

I'll also remind everyone to take any one-sided account like this with a certain grain of salt. It's a pretty emotional thing, and often certain points are quite exaggerated. Sometimes "yelling" is really "stern questioning". Other times "an hour and a half" is really "15 minutes".

Ok.. let the down-voting commence :)

<comment><USER3> None of these are red flags. Al-Qaeda might be fundamentalist arseholes, but they're not stupid. Imagine you've been to a terrorist training camp. You're packing your bags to fly home to the US. Are you going to pack a bullet, a box of Bin Laden crackers and a Burqa? It's like arresting a kid in a Hamburglar outfit because he's got a mask, a striped shirt and a swag bag.

The obvious red flags aren't red flags because they're obvious. If someone isn't smart enough to realise that, they're not smart enough to pose any real threat. We're dealing with focused people who know that huge resources are going into finding them. What we're looking for is people trying to conceal their actions and obfuscate their movements. By jumping on a chair and screaming "Aaaagh, terrorist!" every time we see a piece of Islamica, we're just reinforcing the idea that people are suspicious for 'looking Muslim'.

<comment><USER10> The Christmas Day Bomber was an 18-24 unaccompanied male without baggage who purchased a ticket, in cash, to Detroit, without wearing any kind of winter clothing. I don't know how many more "obvious red flags" you can raise, and yet he still managed to get onto a plane with explosives. You can't discount any obvious signals on the presumption that the real threats are too smart to send them.

<comment><USER3> Not only did we miss all those "obvious red flags", but we missed the much bigger ones. His own father had reported him to the CIA. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was banned from entering the UK. British intelligence had informed the US authorities that an Umar Farouk had consorted with a known extremist and that he was intent on jihad.

The fact that he didn't have a warm coat is absolutely irrelevant. We had high-quality intelligence against him but failed to act upon it in any way. We need to worry less about whether someone looks shifty at an airport and worry more about keeping tabs on people who we have strong intelligence on.

It is also worth stating that his attack failed and he was unable to damage anything other than his own groin.

<comment><USER11> That should be the most enraging part about the 'airline security'.

The recent cargo bomb was missed despite multiple tips about that specific item as well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excellent article. I think the best thing to take away from it is this little, innocent sounding line:

"No matter what the reason, don't ever write..."

This says it all. If we must fear our government when engaging in innocent activity, then we have given our government too much power.

Schneier addressed this in one of his many posts on privacy:

"How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered." - [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_p...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html)

<comment><USER13> You forgot the implied "...and then cross an international border while carrying said journal entry."

<comment><USER14> And _you_ forgot to mention that the vast majority of international borders don't include philosophical loyalty tests or religious screening. It's not a club I think America should belong to. Do you?

<comment><USER13> It's not entirely clear to me that I don't want a person who crosses our borders in the circumstances that the author of the article did and carrying the things that the author of the article carried grilled to see if he cracks. Can you imagine what would happen if someone carried those things across a border, did NOT get grilled based on the "would be really inept" arguments, and then committed a terrorist act? We'd be calling for the screeners' heads, and quite probably would be right to do so.

<comment><USER14> Do you think white Christians who have been to Idaho should be prevented from buying fertilizer or renting trucks? Just in case they're going to repeat Oklahoma City? If not, I suspect you need to examine your priorities.

Your attitude will be the downfall of this nation. I'm not kidding. It is killing us. Please stop. Read something. Learn about the world. Get outside and realize the sun is still shining and we still have Ferris wheels and there are _no freaking terrorists trying to kill you in your bed_. Really. I am up to here with this crap.

Do you really understand the meaning of freedom so poorly? Sometimes you have to man up and accept a truly vanishing amount of danger in order to have a world you can live in like a real human being. Read up on road statistics, or infant mortality, or malaria, or actual wars in other places, then come back to me and tell me we have to toss out the _entire freaking point_ of America in order to combat something none of us is ever actually going to see, but whose political fallout certainly does benefit a few powerful people.

Benjamin Franklin would probably have been mildly surprised that America lasted so long - but he saw clear as day how it was going to end. I just wish it hadn't been in my lifetime.

<comment><USER13> Your analogy does not hold, as the guy was not prevented from doing anything. He was questioned, searched, and spied on by the FBI. As far as we know, no direct, material harm came to him.

<comment><USER14> Do you think white Christians who have visited Idaho should be confronted verbally at length by policemen whenever attempting to rent trucks? Especially if they're carrying a Bible? Should the rental truck police demand to know whether they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, implying that if they do, they should definitely not be allowed to enter Oklahoma?

Should the mothers of white Christians renting trucks have their phones tapped by the FBI?

You could already have constructed this analogy. Instead you choose to be disingenuous about it. Don't you think America should be capable of doing better than this?

<comment><USER13> Still doesn't hold. Idaho is neither a separate country, nor, more importantly, is it home to established organizations with ties to the government of said separate country, overtly dedicated to terrorist activity founded on extremist beliefs. Renting trucks isn't particularly analogous with flying to such a place. Policemen are not customs agents at a border crossing.

<comment><USER14> Apparently you don't think America is capable of doing better than this. I don't know why I bother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't find this credible. The lack of temporal context is one reason - <USER2> don't find out that the whole episode is meant to have taken place several years in the past until the end. 'and then it all went away' - just in case anyone who's traveled with Earl in recent years disputes the idea that he has difficulty clearing customs.

I mean, you're an experienced globetrotter returning from the world's hottest war zone with live ammunition in your pants, but are just astonished at the idea that such a thing should be considered suspicious? I call bullshit. This is just filler for marketing purposes.

<comment><USER16> _I call bullshit_

I'm with you 100%. A lot of this just doesn't make sense.

When he mentions that he was 'invited' into the interrogation room he makes no reference to any aggression or hostility from his interrogator until this guy finds a book referencing the prophet mohammed amongst other religious icons and suddenly we have a complete psycho on our hands:

 _...holding up the book of quotes from the Prophet, proceeded to repeatedly scream 'Do you believe in the words of the Prophet Mohammed?' over and over again while standing one foot away from my face._

Whilst I appreciate there are probably a few unintelligent brutes defending the US as immigration officers, this particular guys approach appears to be lifted from a poor straight to TV movie.

I personally believe airport security and political correctness has gone completely over the top and I'm disgusted by the general level of ignorance towards the Muslim religion but this whole article reeks. I simply don't buy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If after a terrorist attack, it emerged that the attacker had recently returned from Afghanistan to have a friendly chat with security officers about his Osama Bin Laden candy box, his book on Mohammed, the live round in his pocket and the notes in his diary about how to renounce citizenship everyone would be appalled.

This is an interesting article but the fact that the author is in any way surprised by what happened to him is astonishing. Whilst it would be nice to live in a world where this wasn't necessary we don't and I'm reassured that the security response was what it was.

<comment><USER18> I'm not.

The raw emotion controlling the interrogating 'official' is not reassuring to me at all.

Also, "live round"? Really?

<comment><USER17> I used the term "live round" rather than "bullet" in deference to the other comments on the page.

The emotion is unfortunately part of the process. An interrogation is designed to unsettle someone, it's not a process of uncovering evidence, an audit; it requires shaking the fruit down from the tree.

Had he been interrogated in such a manner for simply being muslim or Afghani I would have been saddened but in the context these questions were apparently merited.

Either you bring paraphernalia associated with terrorism and accept the consequences or you leave them behind. Expecting to bring those things back from Afghanistan and just walk through is ridiculous.

<comment><USER19> _> Expecting to bring those things back from Afghanistan and just walk through is ridiculous._

My reading of the story has the CBP agent pulling him aside _solely on the fact that he visited Afghanistan and Pakistan_. They did not uncover the other items until they thoroughly searched his pack while already in the interrogation room.

Edited to add (from the story): _"Once inside the room, the Officer began to inspect the contents of my backpack."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I travel a lot and have made many border crossings. Like anyone who travels a lot, occasionally I get searched.

The first time this happened, I would stand there passively and take questions. This seems to be most people's default reaction.

Now, however, I take a bit more initiative - I help a customs officer unpack my things, and I intentionally point out things they'd want to question me about and explain their usage. For instance, I was stopped flying into London from Barcelona, and I had some Spanish anti-inflammatories, anti-biotics, and a freezable gell-pack for my knee for after working out.

I said, "Sir, I'm going to unpack this part of my bag. I've got medicine in here - the Spanish equivalent of tylenol and antibiotics that I bought at a pharmacy, and a gel pack. I have these because I have a knee injury, and I also work out, but I need to take care of my knee after workouts."

Then - no problem. I used to travel with some audio/visual equipment that would get searched like crazy, until I started saying, "I've got some A/V equipment with me, I make short little snippets when I travel. I'm not a formal journalist, it's just a hobby. I can explain what any of it does, if you need me to."

This kind of preemptively explaining medicine, electronics, etc. would've probably helped this guy. "Excuse me, officer, I collected some weird artifacts while traveling. This here was a gift I received from a child in XYZ city, I bought these books while traveling since I was trying to learn about the influencers of the culture and they came sold in a pack together, etc, etc..."

Take the initiative, be polite and friendly and explain well. It'll help, especially if you have things they'd typically question you about.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fortunately, not all customs officers are this bad. About a year ago, I spent a couple months traveling around the Mediterranean, including Syria and Lebanon. Upon my return to the states, I got some moderately thorough questioning, but nothing that required a separate interrogation room, and the officer was polite the whole time.

On the other hand, I didn't have a bullet in my pants. TSA says: "You must securely pack any ammunition in fiber (such as cardboard), wood or metal boxes or other packaging that is specifically designed to carry small amounts of ammunition." ([http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/editorial_1...](http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/editorial_1666.shtm))

<comment><USER22> I don't fully understand how he made it to Customs without someone catching the ammunition earlier.

I can't recall a travel experience where I went through Customs before going through security first. As Customs occurs at port of entry, I assume he would have passed through security in Delhi. I suppose security could have been lax or complacent there, but it still seems an odd thing to have made it through a scanner first.

<comment><USER23> He actually says "bullet", I would interpret that literally - just the bullet, not a full shell and definitely not any gunpowder.

<comment><USER24> Virtually everyone I know would call a "cartridge" a "bullet", just as they might confuse "clip" and "magazine".

<comment><USER25> Educate me - what's the difference between a cartridge and a bullet? What's the difference between a clip and a magazine?

Edit: found answer to my first question below. The bullet is the inert mass. The cartridge is a bullet plus casing plus gunpowder / other energetic material.

<comment><USER24> Clip vs. magazine: [http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/02/21/clip-vs- magazi...](http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/02/21/clip-vs-magazine/)

<comment><USER25> Huh. So a clip is a bunch of cartridges with something connecting them, whereas a magazine is an enclosed box of cartridges.

Or at least, that's what I got out of the link. That one is (still) legitimately confusing to me. It didn't directly help (I didn't notice what was strange / funny about the image until I followed through to the "Gun Zone" link).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not being a citizen of US and not being a follower of the religion of Islam (which I happen to respect like any other religion) I think this guy/ you did everything possible to freak out a customs officer. The reason I say this is you don't expect every custom official to have traveled the world and be aware of the actual culture. They only know what they have been told along with what they have heard, which is to say that they know nothing (unless each custom official has had a state department course on countries).

For a country that has been deeply scarred by a terrorist act all the officials know of is to look for some tell-tale sign of association. Those tell-tale signs as in your case may be completely bogus but they don't draw the distinction.

I agree the experience is bad and system doesn't see the difference.Let me point out that I don't support this behavior any more than you do but with the current situation I cannot blame them too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Assuming we want customs officials doing anything terrorism related at all (which I'm not convinced of) this doesn't seem bad. Basically they made him socially uncomfortable for a while, and sent him on his way. They didn't take any of his stuff, they only detained him for an hour and a half. Overall it seems about as inconvenient as a flight delay.

<comment><USER28> Nice to know that if they don't have any legal way of stopping you or coercing information out of you, they'll only resort to harassment and intimidation for a little while before letting you go.

 _Of course, the Customs Officer ignored the other four books and while holding up the book of quotes from the Prophet, proceeded to repeatedly scream "Do you believe in the words of the Prophet Mohammed?" over and over again while standing one foot away from my face.

Every time I tried to mention the other books, and the one time I tried to ask why that question was even relevant, I was immediately cut off and told to be quiet. So in the end, the only reply I gave to his question was, "What?"_

They love yelling, and it isn't because they want you answer or comply. Apparently yelling serves some purpose in itself. Whenever someone shows me a police video, I take careful note of when they stop yelling variations on "Get down on the ground!" I saw one recently where the police fatally shot a guy (completely justified; he actually attacked a cop who was holding a gun on him, and another cop shot him) and one cop yelled "Get down!" or "Get down on the ground" at him _three times_ after he had already fallen on the pavement.... I saw nothing inappropriate in the shooting, but I got a morbid chuckle out of the cop screaming at the dude to comply when the dude was already flat on the ground motionless and bleeding. It's also pretty shocking to watch the video of the guy being shot in the BART station in Oakland and try to figure out in what way he was resisting the two cops who were holding him face down on the ground while he was handcuffed. The cop who shot him kept yelling at him to stop resisting and then just popped him. He was -- what, shifting his weight? Trying to raise his head to answer their questions? Who knows. No level of compliance would have saved him, just like the guy who wrote this article didn't actually have to answer the questions. They just wanted to yell at him; they didn't want answers.

<comment><USER29>
      > Nice to know that if they don't have any legal way
      > of stopping you or coercing information out of you,
      > they'll only resort to harassment and intimidation
      > for a little while before letting you go.

The point of yelling at him, and repeating the question was an attempt to 'throw him off his game.' Hopefully, you'll get him frustrated enough that he'll let slip something that give him away. It's a hell of a lot better than waterboarding him in the back room at the airport.

      > They love yelling, and it isn't because they want you
      > answer or comply. Apparently yelling serves some purpose
      > in itself.

Explained above. Granted they might be able to achieve the same result by using a line of questioning that keeps circling back in on itself with slight variations of the same question being repeated over and over again (sans yelling).

<comment><USER28> Here's an idea: why don't they pick on people who have actually done something wrong, and then use that wrongdoing to put legal pressure on them? Justice is built into the system: do something wrong, and you'll have an unpleasant experience. Don't do anything wrong, and you won't be yelled at and intimidated and possibly made to miss your flight. In addition, instead of using empty threats and just hoping that a criminal or trained terrorist will be so unnerved by your bullying that they voluntarily incriminate themselves, you will have a credible threat of consequences and therefore a real incentive for them to cooperate.

<comment><USER30> >you will have a credible threat of consequences and therefore a real incentive for them to cooperate

This will definitely work against anyone who is expecting to die in the process of carrying terrorist activities.

Don't ban guns from schools, just tell them to play nice or they'll get detention.

<comment><USER28> _This will definitely work against anyone who is expecting to die in the process of carrying terrorist activities._

Ah, I see, so we should break them by sweating them over a water bottle that's slightly too big. Really, if the terrorists are too smart and too hardened to be scared by real consequences, can we shake them with groundless harassment? If not, then what's the point of being a jerk to people who merely have "suspicious" cultural allegiances (e.g., having a book about Islam and having some funny souvenirs) and who break minor rules in ways that clearly don't pose a threat?

It isn't some clever attempt to smoke out terrorists. They're policing our respect for _their_ paranoia and profiling-based hot buttons. Showing a flagrant interest in Islam (even one that doesn't show any seriousness, as in this case) is, to them, the same as singing "Ba ba ba, ba Barbara Ann" in the security line -- it's a really rude abuse of their poor nerves! -- except that for some weird reason it isn't against the law. The main thing is for travelers to go out of their way to avoid making them nervous, and to be apologetic if you actually do make them nervous. Then they know your heart is in the right place. This guy _could_ have put his "Muslim paraphernalia" in his checked baggage, or just left it at home. The fact that he didn't showed disrespect for their prejudices and their blood pressure. That's why they yelled at him; to restore his respect for their authority.

The bottom line is that the bullet is the only thing he was carrying that was actually an infringement of the rules, but they mostly yelled at him for his interest in Islam and a few Islamic countries. And they actually asked him if he found Pakistanis friendly.

Rudeness and prejudice -- our greatest tools in the fight against terrorism!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The most troublesome part of this entire story is that the guy flew internationally with a live round in is pant pocket and the first person to notice was a customs agent in a secondary screening room.

<comment><USER32> Not really, my watch (A large automatic spring movement) has more metal in it than a 7.62mm cartridge, and I've made it through a metal detector a couple of times with forgetting to take it off. While you could kill someone with a single bullet by constructing a zip-gun, that is about the extent of the damage you can do.

<comment><USER31> You would think however that gunpowder would be one of the things that they'd test for, considering that if you can sneak a single round on, you could sneak several, theoretically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So, on the one hand we don't like security theater. On the other hand when real security is implemented, we don't like that either.

So what should we do?

And please don't tell me that real security does not involve what was described in the article, because the reality is that until we invent mind reading machines, that's pretty much the only way to do it.

<comment><USER34> I think the objections are not to every aspect of this story. For instance, the bullet is definitely a problem that they needed to address. The OBL candy is perhaps... iffy. However, things like carrying a burqa and especially carrying books about various religions should not be---and a questioning that starts with screaming about Muslims is seriously not "real security". That's what we're complaining about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think he was unlucky (or was flying through an airport that sucks, or just met the wrong people, or failed an attitude check?).

I've done stuff which almost exactly matches this profile (flown from India after visiting Afghanistan, with Afghan clothing in my bag, with no US government connected paperwork beyond a passport, with lots of random electronics in my bag, etc.) -- I was there to help set up medical clinic equipment.

In IAD, SFO, and JFK, the Customs people were nothing but polite, speedy, and friendly.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's intermittently down for me, here's a google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SECcYsQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SECcYsQYdekJ:www.wanderingearl.com/the- day-us-customs-found-a-bullet-in-my-pocket/+http://www.wanderingearl.com/the- day-us-customs-found-a-bullet-in-my-pocket/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me that time I brought a rifle bullet (only the case, not the projectile itself) onto an international flight in Europe. I bought it as a souvenir in Poland and figured I could bring it with my handluggage.

Before I knew it I was surrounded by these security types asking me all kinds of questions, and I said.. "what's the matter... it's not like you can KILL someone with an empty bullet!" - That didn't help, but they eventually let me go, bullet included.

This was in 2002.

<comment><USER38> For what it's worth, stupider things have happened. Here's a story (also 2002) of an octogenarian war-hero ex-governor detained because he was carrying a nail file, a dummy bullet, and -- the most suspicious item -- a Congressional Medal of Honor:

<http://www.snopes.com/military/medal.asp>

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > a shiny, unused bullet fell out of the front pocket.

I'm assuming here that the author is refering to what is more accurately known as a cartridge. A bullet is the projectile, a hunk of lead, possibly with a jacket of copper or steel covering it. A cartridge is a bullet, a case, a primer and propellent. It's very easy to leave a catridge in a pocket and not notice it.

Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?

<comment><USER40> BTW, it's not common to use "bullet" to refer to a cartridge. While nobody usually uses "cartridge", most common term is "round".

<comment><USER39> If you've studied this matter extensively I'll concede the point but for what it's worth I hear people (mostly those unfamiliar with guns) refer to a cartridge as a bullet regularly.

> While nobody usually uses "cartridge"

The must be hyperbole. I have heard people use the word cartridge and I have used it before. Do you have any basis for that statement?

<comment><USER40> Just what I hear, people usually say something like this: "I just bought 300 rounds of 9mm for really good price at Walmart".

<comment><USER24> I suspect people who tend to buy 300 rounds of ammunition at Walmart know more than average about gun terminology.

Most of the population's knowledge comes from 24 and TV news reporters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I cannot view the article. I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection". Is there a mirror somewhere? Edit: oh I didn't see this[1] comment mostly down the page with a link to the google cache page[2]. Thanks.

[1][<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857943>]

[2][[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SECcYsQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SECcYsQYdekJ:www.wanderingearl.com/the- day-us-customs-found-a-bullet-in-my-pocket/+http://www.wanderingearl.com/the- day-us-customs-found-a-bullet-in-my-pocket/)]

</comment><comment><USER42> US Customer, Homeland security and similar worry me for the primary reason that I don't think there are any 'checks' on their power that have any influence from citizens. When even the most famous of US Senators are even harassed by security personel ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug19.html)) then we're in a tricky place. An average citizen has zero recourse and can't just call the President asking for Homeland Security to stop bothering them.

</comment><comment><USER43> Could any of this questioning have occurred without aggression?

Why is the aggressive tone necessary? Would the conclusion have been any different if the questioners had been more civil?

EDIT:

Personally, I think the process of reviewing whether a person is a security threat, should be a much more sombre affair. Level headed pragmatism is necessary to make informed, sensible judgements. It sounds very much like the security staff were living up to the clichéd machismo of their TV or film- based counterparts .. and it leads me to think that intelligence is being supplanted by each staff member's personal desire to project authority.

</comment><comment><USER44> "At one point, frustrated by the lack of training/knowledge of the people put in charge of protecting the US borders, I literally pulled out my guidebook and gave them a lesson in geography and in a sense, in reality as well. I showed them excerpts of the guidebook that spoke of friendly locals, must-see highlights and a generally safe environment for travelers."

I can only hope that this brief education opened the minds of his interrogators somewhat (and the thought that it might have gives me a warm and fuzzy, yet reservedly so, feeling inside).

</comment><comment><USER45> Am I the only one here wondering "Why are you answering questions at all?" The Fifth Amendment still applies at the border and you aren't going to talk your way out of anything. When asked a question at the border -- IF you are a US citizen, shut up. Don't say anything. You are more likely to get in trouble for making a false statement to a federal office than to talk your way out of something. You can't be denied entry to the country for not answering questions. Just shut up. You have the right to remain silent. Use it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just want to know how his mom figured out the FBI tapped her phone.

<comment><USER22> In the article, he says:

"Through a friend of the family who used to work for the FBI, I later learned that as soon as I had left the Customs interrogation room, the local FBI office in Savannah, Georgia (where I was headed to visit my mom) had been notified of my arrival. As a result, the FBI then tapped the home phone at my mom's house."

So it sounds as though it was through this same "friend" he learned of the phone tap as well.

<comment><USER47> Why do we believe this "friend" actually exists?

<comment><USER48> Because it was a story critical of the big, bad government, so it must be accepted at face value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A famous Israeli (a reporter, I believe) once forgot a bullet in one of his bags during his travels - he had recently been on reserve training duty, and used the same bag for that as for his travels.

I don't remember the details, but he was travelling through another country (not the US or Israel) when the bullet was found - and he was imprisoned for several months for it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Related discussions:

* "I Am Detained By The Feds For Not Answering Questions" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681721>

* "Writer Peter Watts Guilty Verdict in Border Incident" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1204737>

</comment><comment><USER51> Scary :( I wonder if officaldom gets the irony of acting like this? I mean this is exactly what terrorists set out to cause.

</comment><comment><USER52> This article needs a link to one of those "don't talk to the police" articles. Just let them arrest you. When the judge realizes what happens you will be back out in society, perhaps with an apology.

Also, you can't lose your citizenship by committing a crime. You certainly can't lose it without a trial.

</comment><comment><USER53> Was he under arrest or bring detained?

My understanding is that as a US citizen he committed no crime and could have asked if he was bring detained, under what law, or if he was free to go...

However, through coercion, and lack of knowledge on his rights he consented to this interrogation.

Anyone know for sure what his legal position was?

</comment><comment><USER54> At times, I find it unthinkably barbaric that it actually matters what side of invisible lines you're on, in 2010.

But of course, the real world is a touch more complicated than the We're All Just People-land I'm imagining.

</comment><comment><USER55> Note to self: never bring a bullet back with me when traveling back from a country known for training and funding anti-american terrorists.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if it's was a bullet or indeed a cartridge? It's kind of hard to find "unused bullet" without it being in a cartridge.

<comment><USER56> it is simple logic - if it was a cartridge, he would still be writing this from inside a prison.

While you can't do much with a bare bullet itself (may be you can try to throw it hard), the cartridge can very easily be put to use - you don't need 900m/s muzzle velocity at close range really.

<comment><USER57> How would you go about firing at somebody without exploding in your face? Can it be done?

<comment><USER58> Drop something heavy on the explody end and it works much like a gun's hammer. There's no aim, but you do get ignition. Some kids used to do this for fun in one of the neighborhoods where I grew up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Am I the only one experiencing an "Error establishing a database connection" exception when trying to open the link?

</comment><comment><USER60> He shouldn't have answered one single question.

</comment><comment><USER61> GOOD, they are doing their job!</comment>


Show HN: Codelines – Create Coding Articles from Visual Studio Code - <AUTHOR> https://codelines.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, OP here.

My friend and I created this because we think the current state of how we share programming knowledge on the internet is broken and mostly neglected. We just got frustrated by reading another Medium article with code in it.

We think the best place to read something with code has already been invented - IDE. We started with an extension for Visual Studio Code.

The core idea is that you can keep your codebase separated from the text and at the same time, you can create bindings between smaller parts of code and parts of the text. This way you can have growing codebase and reveal the story behind it.

The extension is kinda buggy but usable and shows the core idea. Feel free to ask any questions.

<comment><USER2> Any plans to add importers for common code annotation formats?

<comment><AUTHOR> By importers do you mean importing code into the text?

We want to add more rich text functionality. We just didn't want to spend more days building this without any feedback.

<comment><USER2> Like being able to convert off the shelf code annotations into your format: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20382841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20382841)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This feels like a great solution to a different problem - documentation of a codebase for internal team usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have been thinking about that for the whole time we have been working on this MVP, haha.

We feel like both problems maybe aren't that different after all. It's about effectively sharing programming knowledge.

The reason we focused on articles is that it was a problem we had ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will this project stay closed source?

(because I couldn't find any reference to a repo on the website and on your github, assuming that's you: [https://github.com/mlejva?tab=repositories](https://github.com/mlejva?tab=repositories))

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, we don't mind open-sourcing it in the future. It'll probably stay closed source for a while. At least until we clean up the project a little bit. :)

<comment><USER4> Makes sense!

Love this project. And thanks for trying to solve something that I also struggled with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

As the next step, we want to launch on VSCode Marketplace like a proper extension.

Would you mind sharing an email (or Twitter handle, or anything else) so I could let you know once we are on the marketplace?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I might be missing something, but why not just use line comments. It will help you and the person you share it with. You can then show the comments in the separate view if needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll suggest decreasing the speed of gifs, it becomes rather difficult to understand what exactly is going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great insight. Thank you, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to see an example of an article and how to share it

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting. Noticed a typo: "bindigs"

<comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed it. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be working now?

I was pushing some changes so maybe it was that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rune.js – Graphic design systems with SVG in the browser or Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://runemadsen.github.io/rune.js/ <comment><USER2> This seems to take the declarative nature of SVG and make it more imperative, like HTML5 Canvas, even though it ironically uses a virtual DOM implementation under the hood. For my React projects I chose SVG over canvas because I could write my layout declaratively, and avoided imperative manipulation libraries. How do you modify existing SVG shapes with this library?

<comment><USER3> It's a shame React Art isn't mentioned more ([https://github.com/reactjs/react-art](https://github.com/reactjs/react- art)). I'm pretty happy with the results from it, and it's a bonus that it works on iOS as well as drawing to Canvas, SVG, or VML on the web.

It doesn't support some of the more advanced features of SVG, but that's the trade-off for wider support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks really interesting. Are you planning to do text as well? Specifically, text with line wrapping?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have basic text support for now, and will release a Rune.Font plugin next week that supports webfont loading and access to the font vectors. Line wrapping is also on the TODO list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The server side rendering looks really interesting (I've been getting into SVG for mobile web graphics). Are there other SVG libs that do server side rendering, or is this unique as it seems?

</comment><comment><USER6> I want an API where I can intersect or combine paths, and be able to read out the resulting paths.

<comment><USER7> You might be interested in paper.js: [http://paperjs.org/](http://paperjs.org/) which is an evolution of Scriptographer. It has full support for the usual add, subtract, difference sort of boolean shape operations. Beyond that difference, I'm still trying to suss out the differences between rune.js and paper.js. Rune feels like it might provide more grid and typesetting tools, but still, the lack of boolean shape operations is disappointing.

<comment><USER6> Paperjs looks interesting. The major downside is that it is a separate programming language. It really makes me wonder why the authors could not separate concerns and make a self-contained library for those boolean shape operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The examples are horribly broken in Safari.

Anyway, echoing andrewray, what's the point of this? It seems no easier than just working with SVG directly. It's considerably less powerful than e.g. using D3.

<comment><USER9> The author actually goes into detail about why they created this project on the about page: [https://runemadsen.github.io/rune.js/about.html](https://runemadsen.github.io/rune.js/about.html)

On a side note, regardless of the alternatives, or that there is a 'better' way to do things, I found this project very impressive.

The author has released their work open source ([https://github.com/runemadsen/rune.js/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/runemadsen/rune.js/blob/master/LICENSE)). It is people like the author that drive large parts of our industry, with generous donation of their spare time. Given this, it is frustrating to see the unhelpful choice of words of people in this comments section.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct github link [https://github.com/runemadsen/rune.js](https://github.com/runemadsen/rune.js)

</comment><comment><USER11> great work there.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love it!</comment>


Lessons Learned from a Software Developer's First Attempt at Launching a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/08/24/lessons-learned-from-a-software-developers-first-attempt-at-launching-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> >"...building the product was the easy part"

A new 'thought experiment' I've been working with lately is: "Imagine the (minimum viable) product was already built - what now?"

It's easy to get caught up in the challenge of 'The Build' when really that's just a part of the business.

If you want to build a _business_ around a web/tech product, then you need to consider a whole load besides the product.

<comment><USER3> This makes me think of my first attempt at an iOS app.

I'd read about all the successes stories & decided to jump on the app store bandwagon.

After months of furiously working at learning Objective-C & Cocoa, development & testing, I released my creation on the app store and with high hopes and…

nothing.

It sank like a stone off the new releases page never to be seen again. I think it sold one copy in Egypt (thanks whoever you are!).

It was only as I sat scratching my head over why my crappy ill conceived app hadn't set the world on fire & made me instantly wealthy that it occurred to me that without some sort of business & marketing plan I was wasting my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps off topic, but you really should consider reading Rob's book if you plan to bootstrap a startup or run a micro ISV.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe so, but he should also probably revise his website starting with the confusing and grammatically bad copy:

"MicroMaximus is a simple on-demand service designed to assist Reward Checking Account holders' to supplement their monthly transaction requirements. MicroMaximus users will be able to schedule $1.00 transactions online quickly and securely enabling a higher rate of return."

<comment><USER6> Anyone up for iterating that copy for practice? Here's my attempt:

"MicroMaximus helps you fill your monthly Reward Checking Account transaction requirements quickly with $1 transactions."

<comment><USER7> "Fill your monthly Reward Checking Account transaction requirements quickly with $1 transactions."

<comment><USER8> Have a Rewards Checking Account?

Use $1 charges to meet minimum monthly transactions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These types of posts are posted really often. Is there a conglomerated list of all these "lessons learned" posts? I think that would be really useful.

<comment><USER10> That's a good thought, aggregating them. Or better yet, curate a yearly print journal of product Post Mortems. Hard to get people to disclose details though, really hard to find these on the corporate level. Most published post mortems seem to be from really small companies or from former government contractors. I appreciate these posts a lot as I find post mortems to be much more useful and enlightening to read than books written by consultants who have never run a successful business containing their latest theory on what should probably work if someone would try it.

My own theory is that the best way to achieve success is to avoid doing all the things that ensure failure.</comment></comment>


How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.downes.ca/post/38526 <comment><USER2> I had to write a weekly technology column for a number of years. The best method I found was to prepare a outline of the content you are going to write as a series of questions. For my column I used 5 questions in a logical progression. Example question might be "Why is this technology important to small businesses?"

Once I defined the questions, I wrote in sprints without correcting grammar or spelling to answer each of the questions. Sprints were a few minutes, not more than 5.

When I answered all of the questions I would go back and remove the questions and edit for flow and add references and supporting facts. Last would be a grammar check, but I relied on my editor to review that given that I was often writing on deadline.

I produced more than 200 articles of 800-1000 words. Week over week even when I had writers block or no desire to write at all.

<comment><USER3> I once watched an obscure online course by some Canadian lawyer with a similar method for writing books that way. Wasn't by any chance your inspiration?

<comment><USER4> Do you happen to know the name of the course? Very interested.

<comment><USER3> From the recording it looked like a rip from a video tape straight out of the 80s. To be honest I found it in the early 2000s on a now defunct torrent tracker when already all sales pages had gone and only some scam reports still existed. Had a super fluffy title something like 'write a book in 21 days guaranteed' but I gave it a chance because I was curious. It was actually just like OP described, only applied for non-fiction books. The author was really all about hacking an expert-looking book in the shortest time possible - without calling it hacking. The process started by reading the top 10 books in your field, then develop 25 core questions, fill each question with 5 sub questions, use a timer of 5 minutes to write against the clock the answer to that question. The idea was to get into a writing flow and stop reflecting while putting out as much text as possible. He sold the idea by the good old pareto logic, suggesting that by reading the top 10 books you already know more than 80% of the people interested in the topic, making the book good enough to be seen as the expert. In the end he suggested threwing out 10% of the worst paragraphs, then editing it all together and done is the book.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the same method I'm using from the same source. He also recommended expert interviews, preparing the questions for experts in the field and setting up calls to get their answers. It's a great technique in my opinion, but I never tried to write a book using it. It definitely helped my column writing.

<comment><USER3> Totally forgot about that! But yes, that was him! I still have issues coming up with topics and the right questions. It is really hard to overcome that self-criticism. What is your way to overcome this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my own experiences, the key to writing essays quickly and expertly is just writing a lot of essays and consciously trying to hone your craft. Writing is a complex skill that takes lots of time and attention in little incremental steps, and the further you go the faster/better you get.

It's more than just practice though. It's also momentum. I find that the more I write, the more my brain passively seeks more material to write, and so I get faster at generating ideas and putting them on paper. This happens with programming too - the more I do, the faster I get at coming up with ideas and prototyping them. Same with sports, gaming, really everything that combines skill and creativity. I get more creative by just doing it more.

Certainly there's real technique to writing quickly, but I've always found that my own biggest barrier was having something meaningful to say, and the fastest way to get into a rhythm of actually coming up with meaningful things to say was to just start putting words down in the first place. Which leads to the paradox: you become prolific by trying to be prolific.

<comment><USER6> Yep, as one of my fiction instructors once said: The more you do it, the more you do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a common essay structure I've picked up on, from many sources(From Eliezer Yudkowsky's rationality articles to John Oliver's Last Week Tonight)

1\. Introduce a problem/concept - can be a social issue, bias, or a useful cognitive tool.

2\. Define/explain what it is.

3\. Give several examples or studies.

4\. Call to action - propose a solution, debiasing, or a practical real life application.

Also add an intro that grabs attention and promises value.

This seems to work well and I like it a lot, it gives me a pretty universal way to write on many subjects.

<comment><USER8> A method I was taught at school for philosophy is very similar. DICE:

Define - Introduce and explain the concept

Illustrate - Give examples

Contrast - Give contrasting examples or alternative points of view.

Explain - Cover why the concept is interesting or significant or why we should care about it or why it is preferable to alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally have found the article pretty informative as I can relate to the topic very well. Takes me enormous amount of energy to write something that's more than a few random sentences together. There is a well-known fear of public speaking and in my case it's more like a fear of public writing.

Still looking for an efficient way to break thoughts down into pieces and that's one way to approach it.

<comment><USER10> You're not alone. Public speaking is no problem for me, as it cuts out the middle man, or, the medium.

Another comment points to the typos in this article in devaluing the author, while I secretly admire him for letting them slide. My threshold for typos is small, don't get me wrong, but enough years of unfinished essays behind me and I'll seek to learn from these masters (of efficiency, if nothing else).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a self-writing timed exam essay, structure more simply:

\- Thing because reasons 1, 2, and 3.

\- Thing because Reason 1. Reason 1 elaborated. Supporting examples.

\- Thing because Reason 2. Reason 2 elaborated. Supporting examples.

\- Thing because Reason 3. Reason 3 elaborated. Supporting examples.

\- From reasons 1, 2, and 3, the thing.

Paint by these numbers against the clock:

\- Divide time available by 5, e.g., 50 minute period, 5 intervals of 10 minutes.

\- _Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em:_ Spend first 10 minutes thinking about the topic and write a thesis statement based on three persuasive reasons you can support with examples from what you remember about the topic. (10 mins)

\- _Tell 'em (x3):_ Spend each of the next 10 minute blocks writing a paragraph connecting that part, elaborating on the reason, then providing as many supporting examples as you can fit in the ten minutes. (3 x 10 mins)

\- _Tell 'em what you told 'em:_ Write a compelling conclusion based on the reasons. Spend any leftover time proof-reading. (10 mins)

</comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Just as with code: read and write a lot.

2\. Have models to emulate.

3\. Learn the rules.

4\. Clearly structure your sentences, paragraphs, and larger semantic units (essay, short story, etc.).

5\. Edit extensively.

6\. Be kind to your reader: concise and clear will always be better than wordy and vague.

7\. Vary your word use, sentence length, phrase structure, and in general, rhythm. A mumbling monotone is difficult to comprehend. Read your drafts out loud just to make sure you have FLOW.

8\. Don't be a pompous ass. I am very smart, is not a great way to start. Avoid being cute, pretentious, precious, ponderous, and otherwise fake. Develop your voice, which is how you sound to other people.

9\. Ermm... formatting is an art of its own.

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent article but I think it is missing one point, and why I think joewee in his comment is more right.

Argument, Explanation, Definition, Description

are not the only types of articles or essays. What's missing from the list is "Story". Story is something that is entertaining to read because it first creates some expectations, perhaps in the wrong direction on purpose like a good detective story. Then resolves the issues preferably in a non-obvious way.

Therefore I believe joewee is right, it is best to structure your article based on a set of questions which should pique the interest of the reader.

</comment><comment><USER14> How to write prolifically and expert-like? Why, by using the Postmodernism generator, of course!

[http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)

Hint: Hit refresh to generate a new essay.

</comment><comment><USER15> I enjoyed this article; it solidified some things I had a vague idea about in terms of how articles are structured.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find it hard to take seriously any "prolific writer" who doesn't take the time to proofread their work for typos before publishing.

<comment><USER17> Prolific, be definition, speaks to volume and not quality? How does proof- reading contradict?

I would say that his lack of quality (dropped T on The ;] Yes I saw them too ) is perhaps supportive of his ability to be prolific "[...]make your first draft, your final draft."

I understand that you are saying that quality of edit indicates quality of thought or insight to you.

<comment><USER18> I thought they was saying there's a jarring disconnect between bragging about your writing ability in a sloppily-edited essay. I don't think it's hard to understand their point, is it? I think you were being gratuitously pedantic.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Well, there _is_ Muphry's law.[0] Which I notice you - but hopefully not I :-) - have here fallen afoul of. Although you wrote in defence of bad proofreading; maybe there's another law for that.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)</comment></comment></comment>


Safe-commit-hook: prevent developers from checking in sensitive files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jandre/safe-commit-hook <comment><USER2> Still requires manual effort. We have 100s of repositories at work, and if we were lucky enough to have 100s of developers - they'd all have to do this manually every time.

I've often wondered whether it would be worthwhile for git to include some global configuration to allow global pre/post commit hooks which are opt-out on a per repository basis. If I could do this for every repository our developers created automatically - I would.

<comment><USER3> git upstream has rejected that for security reasons; git clone should not produce a repository that runs arbitrary code on the user's system.

However, it seems reasonable to have an explicit option to clone, such as --use-hooks, that allows repositories to enable their local hooks automatically.

Apart from that, you could have a server-side hook that prevents any push containing such files.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yes, a server-side hook is basically an arbitrary python/bash/whatever script with access to the commits being pushed. You can enforce anything server-side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/jandre/safe-commit- hook/blob/master/git-d...](https://github.com/jandre/safe-commit- hook/blob/master/git-deny-patterns.json#L222)

> schema.rb

Don't you kind of need this in a rails project?

<comment><USER5> No, you can make do without it. ActiveRecord will connect to your database and learn about your tables at runtime, and if you want you can choose to think of the combination of all your migrations as the source of truth for your schema.

That said I've seen this done, but wouldn't recommend it. Your schema.rb is helpful to collaborators and running through all of your migrations on a new base is silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would you simply rely on extensions instead of, say, also the file's magic numbers?</comment>