Never Use Airport USB Charging Stations - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/05/21/why-you-should-never-use-airport-usb-charging-stations/ <comment><USER2> It's fine to use public charging stations. BUT do so using a charging-only cable, that is a cable that does not have the data pins connected.

I don't see the point of buying yet another gadget that essentially disconnect the data pins, as suggested in the article...</comment>


Ask HN: What is Big Data? And How is it Different from Regular Data? - <AUTHOR>

"Big Data". I hear this word pretty much everywhere, but I have zero clue what it actually means.<p>Can someone enlighten me on what is big data, and how does it differ from regular data? <comment><USER2> "3Vs (volume, variety and velocity) are three defining properties or dimensions of big data. Volume refers to the amount of data, variety refers to the number of types of data and velocity refers to the speed of data processing. According to the 3Vs model, the challenges of big data management result from the expansion of all three properties, rather than just the volume alone -- the sheer amount of data to be managed."

[http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/3Vs](http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/3Vs)

<comment><USER3> And we often add the 4 "little Vs"

-Visualization

-Veracity

-Variability

-Value</comment></comment>


Navy veteran discovers rare NASA, spy drone photos in trash - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickorlando.com/news/investigators/navy-vet-discovers-rare-nasa-spy-drone-photos-in-trash <comment> nv-vn Wish the article would explain the context of her finding it. Why was she looking through neighbors trash? Who were the neighbors who happened to have all of this to throw away?

<comment><USER2> Someone's husband / father passed away and the family got rid of his "junk". The Navy veteran recognised old government docs poking out of a recycling bin and started flipping through.

Nothing particularly surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We've updated the link from [https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/17/15824260/florida-woman- tr...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/17/15824260/florida-woman-treasure- trove-rare-space-trash-american-space-museum), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Jeffrey said the items were worth just over $1,200.

<comment><USER5> Seriously? They discover rare NASA documents from the 60s and your immediate thought is "how much was it worth"?

<comment><USER6> He's a memorabilia appraiser, so the reporter probably asked him what they were worth.</comment></comment></comment>


"Humanity is defined by being able to extend itself using tools" – Babak Hodjat - <AUTHOR> http://sprecherapp.com/2DZi2eE <comment><AUTHOR> Silicon Valley legend Babak Hodjat is the founder of the original Siri team and builds neural networks since thirty years. He is the CEO of Sentient Technologies. Babak has extremely interesting insights into what machines can do and what he thinks they will never be able to do. We also talk about topics like explainability and how artificial intelligence can optimize marketing and communication processes.

Hi, i'm Alex Jacobi and this is my podcast "With love and data". It's about humans and machines creating epic stuff together. I'm meeting the smartest marketeers, creatives and AI specialists. Together, we discuss how to marry the amazing world of data science and AI with crazy, inspiring ideas.

<comment><USER2> More specifically, the link redirects to [https://itunes.apple.com/de/podcast/with-love-and- data/id134...](https://itunes.apple.com/de/podcast/with-love-and- data/id1343336861?l=de&utm_campaign=18q1%20wlad%20launch%20team&utm_source=jc) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm not going to listen to a podcast just to figure out the context of the given quote "Humanity is defined by being able to extend itself using tools".

Instead I'll simply point out that other animals use tools to extend themselves. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals) . I welcome chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows, the veined octopus, and others to our humanity.</comment>


Review my Startup pre-launch page : Guchex http://www.guchex.com - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Nice site!

Here is something I threw together. Maybe you can try a split test?

<http://i.imgur.com/N6fEk.jpg>

The problem I had when I visited your site was I could not quite understand what the product was about. I was not convinced enough to provide my email and expect a positive result.

Use the video to tell us what you are building, what it does (will do) and/or how awesome the team building it is. Bring the product to life!

Hope that helps some!

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working on it right now, but we have quoted some explanation video studios, and the minimium price that we found is U$3000 that is quite expensive for us, since we are a bootstraping company.

<comment><USER2> Apparently, im in the wrong business!

How about a graphic like this instead: <http://goo.gl/Zu7Hq> ?

I'd make a bet you could make one yourself in a few short hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Ryan, we will work on this, it is a good way to explain our business better!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, the design is a little wonky: the size of the logo text and the color of the logo make my eyes look to the left first, but then the size of the text and the boldness of the sign up label on the right also makes me want to look there. Let the parts of the page flow from one to the next more easily. I'd also suggest replacing the "We ... distractions" to something like" with the "Keep ... interest". Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have changed some details as you said about the text sizes, can you have a look, do you think is it better now?

<comment><USER3> It's better, but the problem now is that there is a massive gap on one side, and text floating around on the other. Try to put the sign up text above the email address form and decrease the vertical gap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you a lot for your feedback, if possible have a look again we have changed it! thanks!

<comment><USER3> Much better. Now I would make the "Sign up now for early access!" text vertically align with the text on the left. You should probably also use the same colors for your background as you do for your logo, since they look like pale shades of the same color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would this be customizable... Looking forward to the first issue..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is! We can change everything , just the problem with social icons alignment that we really can't solve.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How can i improve traffic and signups on my startup "pre-launch" page ?

<http://www.guchex.com> is our webpage

Any feedback would be appreciated.</comment>


Robot captures glow inside Fukushima - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/20/asia/japan-fukushima-second-robot/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something here. Is the text referring to the yellow/green color that appears on the metal grate? I could be wrong, but that looks like the reflected light is just too bright for the camera, causing distorted output.

</comment><comment> tokyou-j A high radiation(480μSv) was detected from the park in Tokyo yesterday though I lived in Japan. Because it is a park built two years ago, whether the waste of Fukushima has been buried is said.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article

       Decommissioning work is estimated to cost
       $50 billion and will take years to complete.

I've been a proponent of nuclear power, but maybe people are just TOO FUCKING STUPID for us to keep building nukes.

Chernobyl happened in large part because a key experiment was deferred to an unprepared night shift.

Three Mile Island was caused in large part because valves for all three auxiliary water pumps were closed, rendering them inoperative.

Fukushima had similar human failings. E.g. there was plenty of historical evidence of tsunamis far higher than the height of the seawall.

We're not talking "rocket science" here. These are all simple human failings. These types of failings are inevitable.

When AF447 crashes because a pilot is incompetent, a few hundred people die. A few hundred million dollars in loss to society. But a nuke plant? Poof, 50 billion!?!? Maybe that's too much?</comment>


Why Redditors Are Revolting - <AUTHOR> http://m.fastcolabs.com/3030288/why-redditors-are-revolting-against-lazy-bourgeois-moderators

<comment><USER2> Our small country of The Netherlands previously used the subreddit /r/netherlands. Until some mods demoted other mods and started abusing their powers.

Most active users have moved away from that sub to /r/thenetherlands, but the sad thing is people who want to learn about our country end up in the wrong subreddit with a bunch of trolls.

Yes, reddit needs some kind of protection against moderators with ill intentions.

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        "Vote brigading," as mass downvoting is called,
         is a pernicious way to undermine a subreddit, as
         Reddit's algorithm effectively counts 1 downvote
         as much as 10 upvotes.

Downvoting can be a dangerous weapon if one who exercises it has nothing to lose. The most annoying aspect of it is that folks who downvote do take time to read the comment but not let the user know why he or she is being downvoted.

</comment><comment><USER5> Disappointed that "Revolting" used as present participle not adjective in post title.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no mention of the huge change in default subreddits that went live today?

www.redditblog.com/2014/05/whats-that-lassie-old-defaults-fell.html?m=1

<comment><USER7> Whoever thought that removing /r/BestOf was a good idea should be put into the dungeon. I hope that dungeon already houses whoever put 2XC on the defaults.

I understand wanting to put forwards a more gender-balanced mix. To do it in such a ridiculously ham-fisted way shows no knowledge of either the subreddits they're promoting or the Reddit community as a whole.

2XC [doesn't want to be a default]([http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/24z7fe/poll...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/24z7fe/poll_because_im_curious_do_you_think/)), and it's place in the defaults will likely be corrosive to the community it already has. And half of the population aren't welcome there anyway (unless one toes a very specific line).

Plus Creepy, NoSleep and Philosophy? Seriously? I think Reddit's admin are utterly disconnected from the Reddit gen pop.

<comment><USER8> Is putting 2XC on default perhaps a strategic move in response to the rise of tumblr?

Tumblr has a pretty large number of very-active posters across a broad range of feminism/lgbt/racism/etc blogs. Basically if you can come up with something that can be discriminated against, there is probably an active tumblr blog about it.

Assuming it doesn't alienate too many other users, pulling in that very-active userbase might be a lucrative move for Reddit/Conde Nast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These people have apparently never seen /r/spacedicks.

Wow. This made Time?

Conde Nast must have _expanded_ its influence.

<comment><USER10> Reddit is not part of Conde Nast, it is an independent company owned by the same parent company as Conde Nast, Advance Publications.</comment></comment>


Lunet – The Beauty of Movies is here! - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunet-the-beauty-of-movies <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!

I'm Sebastian Slepowronski, the proud creator of the "Lunet - The Beauty of Movies" iOS app.

How about discovering new exciting movies in a beautiful way?

Lunet is a simple & elegant movie tracker. It's a beautiful and mesmerizing solution for your movie tracking needs. The iOS app has been designed from scratch constantly paying attention to the content it's hosting. Movies, actors, and creators are always put first as they are the real shining stars of the show. You deserve to admire them without any distractions in a simple and elegant way. Period.

If you find it interesting, maybe you'd like to take a look on the Product Hunt page: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunet-the-beauty-of- movies](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunet-the-beauty-of-movies)

I'm really grateful for all your feedback and suggestions! Thanks a lot!

If you've got any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them :)

Best, Sebastian</comment>


Reddit User Analyser - <AUTHOR> https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/ <comment><USER2> > 50% kind and < 5% controversial. I am disappointed in myself.</comment>


Show HN: YouTube Videos on Hacker News and Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://dev-videos.com <comment><USER2> On stackoverflow, it's mostly videos of bugs which isn't that interesting

<comment><AUTHOR> true, but most of them are the study guide related to the question.</comment></comment>


Tokyo and Hong Kong in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/ <comment><USER2> Think OP has misunderstood a few things about Hong Kong. First of all, the designer shops are not really for investment bankers; they are for tourists, particularly from the mainland. Hong Kong is the most visited city in the world and people from the mainland love to buy high quality tax-free goods. Sometimes for personal use, often to sell. It's easy to spot people from the mainland squatting and re-packing their bags outside these stores.

Second, about 90% of the tech scene is now Bitcoin or Blockchain. It's really unsustainable. I'm not sure where they got the impression that there isn't anything blockchain here.

Most of the other analysis was just on the stuff that exists for tourists. We don't use balloons filled with hydrogen and lights, most people don't study abroad, the meat is perfectly edible and the pipes are outside the buildings by design - it makes them much easier to service!

By the way, face masks are partly to prevent the cold wind (Chinese medicine) from entering your body and partly to stop others from becoming infected with your cough/cold.

<comment><USER3> I guess it depends who's counting, but I'm pretty sure BKK is the more recent, most-visisted city.

What you said about HK applies to BKK as well however. I'm really surprised of the opinions that tourists form of the city, given that there's basically zero correlation to the lives of residents.

For example, it's pretty common for (older, less enlightened) people to talk about the city's red light districts, as if they occupy the entire CBD. Although the well known ones aren't too far from major thoroughfares, you'd literally have to go out of your way to see anything seedy while traveling in the city.

People also talk about how difficult it is to get around, citing unprofessional taxi drivers. Residents drive cars or take the elevated train / subway, or more recently, Uber et al. The taxi industry serves (or preys on) the tourist industry almost exclusively now. Residents tend to avoid peak times and when you arrive somewhere you'll usually have the option of a valet or an underground car wash, so you're comfortably going from AC zone to AC zone.

Or I've known people who've stayed at a hotel on a major road and then complained about the city's congestion, not knowing they're too far from anything enjoyable in walking distance. Residents don't walk anywhere, really. It is congested but more importantly, too hot.

I could go on but won't. I'm sure the OP's take on BKK would have made me cringe as well.

<comment><USER4> Was it really too much of a strain to actually type the whole name of the city, and the districts, so that those of us not familiar with every city in the world could have had a clue?

BKK? CBD? AC? TMA-2KTO.

<comment><USER5> BKK = Beer Kept Kold. Or BangKoK

CBD = Cajun Beer Draught. Or Central Business District

AC = Air Con. Or DC

TMA-2KTO: Too Much Alcohol 2: Kept Too Cold

OP : One Punch, a great Manga

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Many flats have pipes rigged on the outside" as if that's a bug and not a feature. Hong Kong doesn't get cold enough to have exposed pipes be a freezing risk, and in the meantime you get a) access to the pipes for repairs and maintenance with ease and b) no risk of property damage, cascading down the many floors of a typical residential highrise, if a leak does occur.

<comment><USER7> And it's ugly as sin too!

<comment><USER8> Well so are exposed air conditioner compressors, fire escapes and hanging laundry. Most of these things and those pipes look as though they are placed on the back of the building facing an alleyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've lived in Hong Kong and Tokyo as well Bangkok and Manila. Many of these observations totally miss the mark, which isn't unexpected from someone just visiting as a tourist.

Blockchain and Bitcoin are huge in HK tech circles right now, in fact I'd say it's way too huge. Same for all of Asia really, but the main Crypto operations are all HK or Singapore based. I know quite a few people in Asia caught up in the Crypto hype to the point that it feels like a cult.

If OP spent a bit more time in Asia he might start to see the dark sides to this "progress" he lauds and realize it comes at a human cost. Many in Asia are cast aside or left behind as a result of constant advancement. Europe tends to strike a better balance between change/progress and mitigating the human toll IMO.

<comment><USER10> I agree with the first part a bit less with the last. Blockchain and crypto are huge in HK and Singapore also after the ban in China. Many Chinese startup are moving in HK and Singapore and that make these cities the main hub in Asia.

> Many in Asia are cast aside or left behind

I don't see so many people left behind in Asia because of the progress, indeed in my opinion is the opposite. Even the elderly people are willing to embrace change and use smartphones for their daily life, something that is not so true in Europe. In China you may find street food stand owned by older women in their 60/70 using everyday smart payment systems. Something that in Europe would never happen.

<comment><USER11> > Blockchain and crypto are huge in HK and Singapore

There's a lot of blockchain companies in Singapore yes, but no ICO company can get a bank account. Singapore banks are notoriously backward/conservative.

As far as I can see everyone is going through HK/Malta et al for banking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The note about hydrogen balloons makes it seem as if helium ones are somehow better.

It is not so. Helium is a non-renewable resource. It's extracted by mining and it escapes into space once released into the atmosphere. Using it for silly things like balloons takes it away from science and industry forever [0].

Hydrogen may be flammable, but it can be extracted from water. So please, don't waste helium.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Are-we-really-running-out-of-helium- Is...](https://www.quora.com/Are-we-really-running-out-of-helium-Is-this- actually-a-significant-concern-in-the-scientific-community-or-has-it-just- been-played-up-by-Internet-media-sources-Is-there-an-easy-or-viable-solution- for-preserving-existing-resources-or-creating-more)

<comment><USER13> I have no opinion on the matter but perhaps it's not so dire.

[https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly- in...](https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >> In most ways, Hong Kong turned out to be the exact opposite of Tokyo. If Japan is order, Hong Kong is chaos

He probably never went to proper mainland China! Hong Kong is not that chaotic compared to Shenzen, a couple miles away. I would even say it is less chaotic than central London or Paris

<comment><USER15> Yeah, Hong Kong is the place I go to get away from the insanity of mainland China when I'm on business trips over there (and even then China has toned down a lot in the past 5 years). For a westerner Hong Kong is a very comfortable city to visit, though a bit shocking the first time because of how dense it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia. I think Hong Kong's tech scene is mostly about blockchain/bitcoin now. Most of the tech jobs I found here are in finance. Taiwan has not a very good tech scene, but is an amazing place to live. Singapore has a lot of startup hype and some good startup companies. It feels more diverse than Hong Kong and Taiwan for sure.

Melbourne, AU has a good startup scene and many interesting meetups. New Zealand doesn't really have much of a scene going on, except in Wellington.

I may want to move back to a Western country. Which other countries have a good tech scene going on?

<comment><USER17> What's your favourite place out of those you've lived in? Where do you live now?

<comment><USER16> New Zealand is an amazing place, but the distance to home(Europe) is really far and opportunities are limited. Taiwan is beautiful too, but English is not widely spoken and you really have to spend effort to learn Mandarin. I'd consider both for retirement, but not good moves for your career.

I'm currently living in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER17> I'm Kiwi, living in singapore, Wife is Taiwanese so I travel to Taiwan often. Learning mandarin but will probably end up in NZ and retire in Taiwan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Truth is - Advanced Asia™ is just incomparably more vibrant right now. There 's constant movement. A steady, fast-paced struggle._

This is what keeps me here. There's an excitement and energy in the air that I haven't found anywhere else in the world. Big Asian cities are not the place for you if you like stability and quiet but if you thrive on variety you should come experience it.

<comment><USER19> I've compared it to the industrious attitude of the 'wild west'. Except a bit less wild and bit more east.

<comment><USER20> Probably more 'west'. From North America just go west until you reach far east!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think author has an incredibly clear style of describing things and I enjoyed reading this a lot. It's also worth noticing that he stated from the beginning that he's no expert about Asia and is simply passing on his impressions.

</comment><comment><USER22> > _I don 't know how to pin it down exactly, but it feels like Europe is > suffering from the culture and attitude of pensioners who are still living > in their ignorant version of a 20th-century fantasy. They are reassured by > their situational wealth and are either unaware, or scared of reality. > Everything is hedged, risk averse and there's a general sense of aimlessness > and cluelessness._

Funny this is exactly how I would describe Japan

<comment><USER23> He's comparing 2 spots in Asia with the whole of Europe. Holy generalization, Batman!

I also find this amusing:

> there's a general sense of aimlessness and cluelessness.

That's how Europe has always operated. Its historical success came from chaos. Tons and tons of chaos from many sources, all competing. Columbus was looking for India and he stumbled upon the Americas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My Favorite Para was:

"Nationality is a fading illusion, nobody cares where they were born unless they have nothing else to cling to. We are citizens of the globe. Home is basically where a good bed, a supportive environment and fast Internet is. The former you can get from IKEA pretty much anywhere. For the latter, we'll just travel and spend most of our time where things are easier, cooler and better"

<comment><USER25> I found that sentiment deeply off-putting, and I say that as an American in Taipei right now (which seems thematically similar).

The author says 99% of things written are unavailable to him -- and I'm sure it's even more of the spoken word around him. If you subtract out 99% of communication, and all the deep relationships and casual understandings that make a community, yeah, I guess every place starts looking the same.

But boy howdy, that stuff is really valuable to some people, and not just people with nothing else going on in their lives.

<comment><USER26> How did you end up in Taipei, and how are things there on the tech front?

<comment><USER25> Tech here seems more hardware oriented than I normally am, but beyond that, I don't know much yet. Taipei helps me study Chinese which is useful because 我的中文不好,但我每天学,住在这里让我沉浸其中。

<comment><USER27> You study simplified Chinese in Taipei?

<comment><USER25> My studies go back years, my residence here only weeks. I'm fixing the gaps in my education, but slowly.

<comment><USER28> He meant that he's surprised that you're learning the language using the simplified type system instead of the traditional one which is used in Taiwan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When you travel to a new place you fall in love,everything is fantastic, not like the shitty place you come from, but if you live in a place long enough you start seeing the failures of the new place (and the good things of your native country).

I was born in Spain, and had experienced this effect multiple times, living in San Francisco, Boston, London, Shanghai, Tokio, Berlin...

Right now I value a lot more Spain and Europe at its culture than I ever did.

Living abroad gives you perspective and lots of options. When I started I thought it was risky. Now I think what is risky is living in the same place all your life.

<comment><USER30> It does change you for the better, I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> emoticons and emotics.... Is it a utf test page or am I getting old?

<comment><USER32> It's a test to see if the reader is one of these cranky old guard. Congrats!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> To comment on the face mask thing, locals told me that they wear it not so much for their own protection as out of consideration so as not to infect other people if they sneeze.

<comment><USER34> Their actual efficacy is questionable at best though. After about 10 minutes of breathing, water vapor from your own breathing would have rendered it more or less permeable to anything infectious. Sneezing into a handkerchief would probably be more effective.

<comment><USER35> If it catches your spit when you pronounce sounds like "p" and "t", and catches your sneeze particles, it's likely to be pretty helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you are in Hong Kong, you can get a 5 day single entry tourist visa for the Shenzhen area very easily at the Chinese border (Luo Hu border and Shekou border also last time I checked - at the Futian border, you cannot get one).

Go in the morning (by boat from the Hong Kong harbor, train or bus from elsewhere), get lunch in Coco park in Futian or Sea World in Shekou and go to the electronics market in HuaQiangBei in the afternoon.

In the evening go talk to armchair experts on Chinese culture in on of the foreigner bars or if you don't care much for drunk westerners lost in limbo maybe better get some hot pot in HaiDiLao or Little Lamb or Chinese barbecue in one of the street barbecue shops.

</comment><comment><USER36> I moved to Amsterdam 5 months back from Bangalore and couldn't agree more on the last paragraph.

Everything here seems so laid back which was one of the reasons why we moved to EU – to have a better/more relaxed lifestyle but at the same time, I do miss the vibrancy and liveliness around me.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Internet connectivity is far ahead of Europe"

You mean Germany? And I agree German infrastructure can use quite the upgrade, it's 3/4G is pretty patchy and internet speeds lacking.

<comment><USER38> 3 years ago in HK, (my last experience) 300Mbps connections were like an average connection speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Nationality is a fading illusion, nobody cares where they were born unless > they have nothing else to cling to. We are citizens of the globe. Home is > basically where a good bed, a supportive environment and fast Internet is. > The former you can get from IKEA pretty much anywhere. For the latter, we'll > just travel and spend most of our time where things are easier, cooler and > better.

What a nice, sheltered life :)

<comment><USER13> Ah, to be young and chock full of wisdom again. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Two of my favourite places in the world.

Tokyo actually felt a lot less like the claustrophobic megalopolis it's often described as being. I stayed in an Airbnb in Shimokitazawa, (just a few short stops from Tokyo's main train station) and it felt distinctly village-y.

Because of all the self-imposed order and politeness everywhere it's an extremely pleasant place to visit.

</comment><comment><USER40> OP had it backwards about the oyster and octopus cards.

The octopus card in Hong Kong led to the development of the London oyster card.

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

</comment><comment><USER41> If you don't have time scroll to near the end of the article to the section called 'What this trip meant'. That is an incredibly succinct summary of my own feelings on this matter written better than I ever could.

</comment><comment><USER42> I am getting a _" 500 Internal Server Error"_, here is a cached version [1].

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20180420054609/https://haywirez....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180420054609/https://haywirez.com/tokyo- hong-kong-2018/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Come to Asia for Tokyo, but live in Hong Kong...

To be fair I live in Hong Kong, and it's chaotic, sure when you first come here, but after a few months you adjust to it's normalcy... And it's really no different from New York, Toronto, London. I guess it's something about people more so than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER44> A bit off-topic: I've visited HK once and it was really a great experience. I'd love to go back. Also, I accidentally find a great tailor ("Lapel") that produced perfect shirts within 24h. Has anybody an idea how I could source those shirts from Europe? They've been very unresponsive with email and phone, it seems all so complex. Are there people who run back and forth Europe and are willing to do provide some sort of errand service?

</comment><comment><USER45> Too bad he missed the real future city to compare to: Shenzhen.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really wanted to check out Shenzhen. There were some visa issues that I thought I wouldn't be able to solve fast on the spot. Next time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's hard to take any of this seriously from someone who hasn't every travelled farther than 10 hours...

</comment><comment><USER47> Please get more emojis in your written piece, it really helps make it seem more terrible.</comment>


Coronavirus: Five Brits in French ski chalet catch virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51425702 <comment><USER2> I started following this outbreak about two weeks ago, when confirmed number of cases was still below 300 and 17 people had died. The confirmed cases were almost wholly contained in China, primarily just Wuhan province. At the time there was a lot of debate about the seriousness of the virus and the risk of a pandemic, and I was mostly sitting on the fence, looking back to SARS/Ebola and figuring a quarantine might be able to burn it out.

Today confirmed cases stand at 34,964, with 725 dead, and the virus spread to nearly 30 countries. I'd highly recommend this interview from a couple days ago with Neil Ferguson, director of the Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics at Imperial College London's School of Public Health[1]

Some highlights I'll quote, based on his team's modeling of the true situation vs. the necessarily incomplete confirmed cases:

\- China: estimated 10% of total cases detected

\- International: estimated 25% of total cases detected

\- estimated 50,000 new infections per day in China

\- Doubling every 5 days

\- Onset to death can take up to 20 days (in fact I think we've seen deaths up to 30 days post-infection now)

The NYT today[2] also quotes leading experts that this virus is almost certain to become a pandemic, and no one can with certainty predict the consequences. All of which is just to say, I think it's time to stop the hot takes about how unseriously you're taking the situation. There seems to now be unanimity among global experts, who are taking it very very seriously indeed. The actions of widespread border closures, travel and economic shutdowns and China forcefully quarantining 500 million citizens also ought to suggest that governments are treating this far differently than the flu or in fact any sort of viral outbreak in perhaps modern history.

[1] [https://youtu.be/ALQTdCYGISw](https://youtu.be/ALQTdCYGISw) [2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/health/coronavirus- pandem...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/health/coronavirus-pandemic- china.html)

<comment><USER3> Very good point.

When the 2009 H1N1 flu virus hit, it infected 11% to 21% of the world's population. The mortality rate was low, at just 0.02%, but because of the number of people it infected it resulted in 284,000 deaths.

When a novel disease hits the population for the first time, it often spreads faster and wider than diseases for which we've developed some immunity.

The coronavirus mortality rate so far is alarmingly high. It is highly uncertain and very preliminary, but it could go in either direction. Early estimates of SARS were that it had a fatality rate of <3%. It was eventually revised upward to 9.6%.

<comment><USER4> It looks a lot more like viral pneumonia than 2009 H1N1. Healthy younger adults largely don't get infected or don't suffer very severe symptoms. In one study in the lancet no patients under 40 were admitted to the ICU. The MuLBSTA score of a patient for predicting fatality from viral pneumonia (which considers comorbidities like diabetes, heart disease, smoking, etc) is predictive of fatal outcomes with nCoV-2019. Everyone on the internet doing the math on this thing loves to assume it will naturally be as broadly infectious as influenza and will ultimately infect 1/3 of the planet (with the usually quoted 2% fatality rate). More likely the number of infections will be lower than that by an order of magnitude at least (even though it will still be a global pandemic). If you look at the quarantined cruise ship only 63 out of 3700 people have been confirmed as cases. At 1.7% (and of course still growing) that is still very far off from 33%.

It is still troubling because if you assume the impact is like viral pneumonia then the impact of effectively doubling the number of cases of that worldwide will stress our health care systems, and it will increase mortality in vulnerable populations (very young and older people with comorbidities). I'm a bit worried about my mom and dad who are pushing 80 now, I'm not much worried about myself (48 with no other issues). Healthy 25 year olds probably won't catch this at all, and if they do they'll just get a bad cold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you refering to this paper: [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30183-5/fulltext) ?

"We report the epidemiological, clinical, laboratory, and radiological characteristics, treatment, and clinical outcomes of 41 laboratory-confirmed cases infected with 2019-nCoV. The median age of patients was 49·0 years (IQR 41·0–58·0), and 13 (32%) patients had underlying disease. All patients had pneumonia. A third of patients were admitted to intensive care units, and six died."

Looking at Fig 1 one-third of patients in the 25-49 age group needed intensive care. Maybe the were all above 40, but anyway I don't think that looks like the usual influenza-related pneumonia.

[https://marlin- prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/f86df...](https://marlin- prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/f86df21c-bbb2-4922-975a-14a067deb0e9/gr1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, today we're learning about 5 infections from a man coming from Singapore (not China) staying there in Contamines-Montjoie from 01/27 to 01/28\. So we're now learning about infections from almost 2 weeks ago, almost a week before the last major airlines stopped their regular flight to/from China. And flights from/to Singapore are still going to this day. Makes you wonder how many people slipped through since then ... (sorry for my broken non native English)

<comment><USER6> Personally, I'm assuming this new virus has already gone global, with the scale of the outbreak in most major metropolitan areas a few weeks behind Wuhan. For practical purposes, I'm already lumping this new virus in my mind with the "seasonal flu," variants of which travel around the globe every year, requiring annual shots. It seems that most people who get infected have only mild symptoms.

Consider: Many major cities in China already have infected populations in the hundreds or thousands, and growing: [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6) \-- these are official, confirmed figures.

See also [https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820...](https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930260-9) for maximum-likelihood estimates of the size of the outbreak as of month-end.

<comment><USER5> Personally I'm not afraid of the sanitary aspect of this virus. I don't think the mortality is extremely alarming per se. What I'm afraid of is the emotional population reaction and the practical impact on daily services fueled by FUD and sensationalist media coverage. Schools closing unnecessarily forcing many working people to stay home to babysit their kids. Teachers/Drivers/Cashiers going on strike to avoid risks while there is a now globally confirmed shortage of face masks (which might or might not be very useful anyway but it will keep people working if they feel it helps). It's virtually impossible to find a useless face mask where I am in the EU (at a normal non 10x inflated price from opportunistic vendors) and even less possible to find a useful one (N95/FFP2/FFP3 rating). Interesting times for sure.

<comment><USER7> The mortality rate is unknown. The best estimate is on the order of 1%, but it could be a factor of 10 either way.

The mortality rate will be _different_ depending on the health system, since a significant number of people with this virus require either supplementary oxygen or more seriously ICU care.

If this were to become an epidemic in India for example, a higher mortality rate would be expected. In Africa it could be severely bad due to the large numbers of people with AIDS and the tendency of this virus to suppress the immune system.

<comment><USER5> Also Sub Saharan Africa only has 2 labs (South Africa and Senegal) capable of technically confirming cases. Which might be a reason there aren't any confirmed cases on the continent.

<comment><USER8> > Which might be a reason there aren't any confirmed cases on the continent.

There is not a single confirmed case of coronavirus in the entire Central and Eastern Europe, yet[1]. Most likely because there are almost no direct flights from Asia to this region, since it lacks major international metropolitan areas and global tourist attractions.

[1] [https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus- map.svg](https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus-map.svg)

<comment><USER9> Hungary has a pretty big Chinese community mostly in Budapest, plus plenty of Chinese tourists, and I would assume there was a lot travel around the New Year.

If we are guessing about why (and whether) there is no Coronavirus in CE Europe, "no Chinese" is probably not a good guess.

<comment><USER10> but the amount of traveling chinese is still much much smaller than to larger western european countries.

Consider that Italy has had 3 cases to date: a chinese couple from Wuhan and an italian who was repatriated from Wuhan and is in quarantine.

There are 300k chinese nationals in Italy and about 20k in Hungary, and while I love Budapest the amount of chinese tourists is nothing compared to those in Rome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the record, the name of the place "Contamines-Montjoie" can mean "Contaminated-JoyMountain" in French.

<comment><USER12> Contamines comes, in that case, from Contamina which comes from Condominium (roughly co-administered property). But "Contaminated" sounds _soooo_ much cooler right now, doesn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In case there was any doubt, the numbers coming from China are being faked. Infections and deaths are quadratic with an R^2 value of 0.9995:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22275092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22275092)

<comment><USER14> I've read this several times. Could someone shed some light on this? Are the reported numbers impossible because they are too close to the curve? Or because the numbers should follow another curve? Could there be a hidden mechanism in the speed at which the virus is tested for that could explain the quadratic?

<comment><USER15> Something like a hospital opening, and suddenly having a pile of patients to test, should result in a small spike in that graph. A quarantine being enacted in a city should cause a change in angle of the curve.

<comment><USER16> The list of spikes is available, e.g. from Tencent News: [https://xw.qq.com/act/qgfeiyan](https://xw.qq.com/act/qgfeiyan)

Most recent update right now:

上海新增5例新型冠状病毒感染的肺炎确诊病例

 _Shanghai adds 5 confirmed cases of pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus infection_

2020年2月8日0—12时,上海市排除新型冠状病毒感染的肺炎疑似病例11例;新增治愈出院11例;新增确诊病例5例,其中2例为外地来沪人员,3例为本市常住人口。

 _On 2020-02-08 from 0 to 12, Shanghai handled 11 suspected cases of pneumonia caused by novel coronavirus infection, added 11 cases released from hospital after treatment, added 5 confirmed cases, 2 of which are not originally from Shanghai and 3 are residents._

截至2月8日12时,上海市已累计排除疑似病例877例,发现确诊病例286例。

 _Until 02-08 at 12 o 'clock, Shanghai has already handled a total of 877 suspected cases and discovered 286 confirmed cases._

健康上海12320 _Healthy Shanghai 12320_

Lots of small spikes can still add up to a smooth curve overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems to suggest, in addition to another case, that nCOV is in the wild in Singapore?

<comment><USER18> Certainly looks like it, two brits, each of whom attended business meetings there, are now confirmed.

I am worrying as I returned to the UK from Singapore a week ago and now have cold-like symptoms. No coughing, no raised temperature, lungs OK so far... but it's a worry.

(--edit-- actually it looks like one Brit, I had thought the new cases were related to a separate traveller, but it looks like it was the same guy)

<comment><USER19> I would go to the doctors office and get myself checked, if I were in your situation. Let's hope and pray that you test negative and if not you can take immediate action.

<comment><USER20> Call ahead before you go to a doctor's office or emergency room. Tell them about your recent travel and your symptoms.

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html)

<comment><USER21> Seconded. This is very important - if you just walk into a hospital and later it turns out you had the virus, now they have to _close the hospital_ and quarantine hundreds of patients who are already sick (and hence in higher risk).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A worldwide shutdown of airports for two weeks is out of the question, why exactly? This is a honest question.. Its obviously one of the most potent travel vectors of the virus. When the plague struck, harbours where closed, and gates where manned on both sides. It seems quite logical, to enforce quarantine this way.

<comment><USER23> Because that would be an eye-poppingly ridiculous response?

Seriously, this breathless "plague!" nonsense absolutely must stop and its purveyors should feel bad for doing so. Bubonic plague has an untreated mortality rate of _fifty percent_! This, on the other hand, is a nontrivial though increasingly global outbreak of a disease that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people--CFR rate of mortality seems to be about three percent-- and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly.

If this sounds familiar that should be because it maps rather closely to the flu. There are 650,000 deaths per year from the flu--who's suggesting closing the airports over such a Threat To Humanity?

Turn the news off. If you have a brain predisposed to low-information panic it is bad for you.

<comment><USER24> I'm not for stopping the world, but Coronavirus gets brushed off as no big deal a lot online. I feel like the big issue will be Coronavirus bogarting medical resources. Pneumonia in a healthy individual is treatable given proper treatment and resources, but if everyone has pneumonia, then we have a resource problem.

Additionally, a lot of people care for the very young and the very old, and they're not comforted with the sentiment, "well, if you're healthy you'll live,"

<comment><USER23> It gets brushed off as "not a big deal" because...right now, we don't really have a reason to think it is one. It _could become one_. It merits state and international attention. It does not merit panic and there is absolutely no reason to think that "everyone" will get it or will develop pneumonic symptoms from it in a way that strains medical resources in developed countries (indeed, the biggest threat is likely if it becomes a thing in less-developed countries--but it seems to be less communicable than SARS or H1N1 right now, too). It is an important issue at the levels of government and international organizations that manage things like this. But it's silly to obsess over it and it's downright immoral to shit-stir with comparisons to _bubonic civilization-wrecking plague_ as the OP to whom I replied decided to do.

And I'm going to be frank: the very young and very old could just as easily die of influenza and the people who care for the very young and very old are not, for the most part, even screening for flu shots. I have trouble mustering the emotional energy to care for their fear of the scary black swan when they're standing in a flock of white ones that are themselves dangerous.

<comment><USER25> Less communicable than SARS?

No, it is more because SARS was only communicable when the patient was at their worst. This can spread during all phases.

The mortality is lower than SARS but much higher than the flu.

To put it in real terms. If you take the number of people you ever met in your life and gave them a bad flu you might find one who dies. Compare that to taking your mother/father/brothers and immediate families and giving them corona where at least one would die. Compared to SARS where someone in your immediate family would die or ebola where either you or your wife would die.

<comment><USER26> _" This can spread during all phases."_

There is evidence that the study claiming the virus can be transmitted by people without symptoms was flawed.[1]

Also, according to that article, even if asymptomatic people transmit the virus _" asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote in a situation report on Saturday."_

[1] - [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non- symptomati...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomatic- patient-transmitting-coronavirus-wrong)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul Irish on HTML5 Boilerplate - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/html5-2/paul-irish-on-html5-boilerplate/

<comment><USER2> I've used Paul Irish's boilerplate and I can attest that even if you decide not to adopt it outright, you can learn a lot just by reading through it.

HTML5 is one of those ever-changing technologies where what was once considered common-practice is now considered deprecated. I think this is often the case with a fast-moving, widely distributed technology. Paul does a great job of collecting a lot of wisdom and maintains it in an easy to understand format. It also does backwards compatibility right. Helped me out a lot.

 _Edit:_ Also he's a really nice guy. :-)

<comment><USER3> Agreed. His videos are also entertaining to watch (particularly both videos on things learnt from the jQuery source).

<comment><USER4> Link to these videos:

[http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the- jquer...](http://paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery- source/)

[http://paulirish.com/2011/11-more-things-i-learned-from- the-...](http://paulirish.com/2011/11-more-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery- source/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some notes from his talk:

* <!doctype html>

* The web server can serve certain meta tags (e.g. in .htaccess for apache) which would not have validated. (e.g. X-UA-Compatible to specify content)

* <meta charset="utf-8" /> is acceptible in most browswers

* // instead of <http://> makes a relative URL, works in most if not all browsers

* html { overflow-y: scroll; } fixes contents moving due to scrollbar appearance on longer pages

* DD_belatedPNG - better IE PNG fix <http://www.dillerdesign.com/experiment/DD_belatedPNG/>

* Often a good idea to use font-family "sans-serif" instead of "Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" for better cross-platform sans-serif font choice

<comment><USER6> // is for an absolute URL with the same scheme as the referring page, not a relative URL.

<comment><USER5> I meant relative to the referring scheme. Thanks for the correction. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea of being able to do a git merge html5-bilerplate html5bp-test- upgrade into one my projects and pickup the latest best practices to review. In practice I've never done that and I hand pick the parts I want.

Paul Irish's projects (and his cohorts) do a really good job of exposing the current state of web technologies. The Modernizr docs for example talks about how many JS and html5 apis are supported differently and what you can do about it.

<http://www.modernizr.com/docs/>

Himself and the yayQuery team are a large part of why I love Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's rare to see such a funny tech presenter. Nice job!</comment>


World's most advanced planetarium show is like Google Earth for the universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90453808/this-amazing-new-planetarium-show-is-like-google-earth-for-the-universe <comment><USER2> Don't forget about trusty ol' Space Engine. I've lost countless hours in that sucker.

[http://spaceengine.org/](http://spaceengine.org/)</comment>


A day at the California farm where the workers will get the pay they deserve - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/21/california-farmers-overtime-pay-mcgraths-family-farm <comment><USER2> If only it were real. The California farm labor overtime provisions don't even start to take effect until 2019 and don't fully take effect until 2025.

What is happening soon are the new US overtime rules for salaried employees. Those take effect in two months. After December 1, 2016, anyone making less than $47,476/yr has to be paid overtime.

<comment><USER3> I recently found out that as of February 2016, an exempt employee working full-time in CA must be paid a minimum salary of $41,600/year. It's 2x the minimum wage.

I support raising the minimum wage in itself, but if that goes up anymore, I simply will not hire certain positions (entry level positions, assistants, maybe even jr devs) because it doesn't make sense at 2x for their skill level and/or role.

I understand what they are trying to do, but if business owners can't make a profit in this state with rules like the 2x one, they'll move or outsource as much as possible (offshore, staffing company, etc).

<comment><USER4> If you can't make a profit without extremely lowballing and undercutting your employees, do you deserve to stay in business?

<comment><USER3> Your comment is so simplistic and inaccurate. It's not lowballing and undercutting employees to pay $41.6k to lower level people for 40 hours of work. Especially when you layer on good benefits like we do that aren't accounted for in the salary requirement. We do 3% of salary automatic contribution to 401k each year, allow employees to work from home, good healthcare and vacation/discretionary, etc.

Other states don't have these rules and competition in many industries is across states or globally.

<comment><USER5> > It's not lowballing and undercutting employees to pay $41.6k to lower level > people for 40 hours of work.

And nothing in the actual law prevents you from paying $41.6k or less (the whole way down to the minimum wage) for 40 hours of work. What you can't do is pay $41.6k or less and then _not_ pay overtime. (And the threshold is much higher if you rely on the computer-related work exemption, and you have to pay overtime _regardless_ of base pay if the work doesn't qualify for some exemption -- unlike the Feds which do at $100k [rising to $134k], California doesn't have an unqualified "high-pay" exemption.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting subject.

Not to interject politics into it, but during the debate last night one of the candidates said that they wanted to raise the minimum wage (to 15 an hour I believe), while simultaneously adding more good paying jobs to the economy.

Those are fundamentally opposite goals - at least, the government isn't going to be able to do it in any meaningful way.

With a 15 dollar minimum wage, fast food restaurants are rolling out kiosk technology, that allows you to order without an employee present. Even Applebee's and TGI Friday's is experimenting with software + an iPad to allow you to order directly from your table.

Those jobs aren't coming back. Not ever. Kiosks don't complain, they don't screw up orders, they don't have sick days, and they work for free. Once the initial capital investment is over, it's pure profit, and for those who say that you can have more jobs repairing and servicing the kiosks, I say that if the price to repair and service kiosks goes higher than the wage for employees, the kiosks will go the way of the dodo.

Take a look at Eatsa. [http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/08/31/fast- food-re...](http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/08/31/fast-food- reinvented-eatsa-a-fully-automated-restaurant-opens-today/).

They have 5-6 back of the house employees. The cashier jobs are not coming back.

<comment><USER7> > The cashier jobs are not coming back.

Right, but I have to wonder if those who want to keep minimum wage down really care about keeping jobs for all these people. Surely they'd celebrate the impending automation of these jobs, where they only need to worry about purchasing equipment rather than the well-being of squishy meat-bags known as employees? I just find it hard to believe it's for altruistic reasons that they want wages kept low, considering they'd sooner have a machine or third party make their tortillas, grind their coffee, bake their bread etc. than have staff do it in-house like someone who actually cared about jobs or even quality.

The people who will buy food from the vending machine type services: The people at the bottom. And competing businesses will find ways of making food and services cheaper and cheaper as technology improves. The people earning respectable amounts of money for their time and effort, they're going to be eating at places served by other people. You've merely shifted those at the bottom one step forward in the food chain.

The proof? Look at countries like Australia where the minimum wage is already respectable and you'll find low unemployment and a lot of people working in hospitality or similar services.

<comment><USER6> > Right, but I have to wonder if those who want to keep minimum wage down > really care about keeping jobs for all these people. Surely they'd celebrate > the impending automation of these jobs, where they only need to worry about > purchasing equipment rather than the well-being of squishy meat-bags known > as employees?

They don't care, but the restaurant business is precarious. They know that hiring people for minimum wage works, and keeps their margins the way they are. However, investing is kiosks and hardware is something they'd have to amortize over time.

An increase in minimum wage might tip them over - the risk of the machines not working and constantly requiring expensive repairs might be outweighed by the fact you don't have to pay extra money to your employees.

> The people earning respectable amounts of money for their time and effort, > they're going to be eating at places served by other people.

Just a personal anecodote, I'm fairly antisocial. I'd rather line up in a self service lane or self checkout line in a grocery or fast food place than deal with another person. And I doubt I qualify as a person "at the bottom".

<comment><USER7> > An increase in minimum wage might tip them over

People in the US look at things in a vacuum, however a good portion of the rest of the world, chiefly Western Europe, Australia and Canada make high minimum wage, good food and service work.

> Just a personal anecodote, I'm fairly antisocial.

Then I'm in good company. If you've ever been to the big cities in Japan you'll notice that you can buy cheap delicious ramen ordered from a ticket machine and served to you through a curtain in your booth so that you never see another person's face, but you'll also notice lines out the door for mid and high-end restaurants. Cheapness and ease of access has nothing to do with desire.

<comment><USER6> > Cheapness and ease of access has nothing to do with desire.

I guess that I don't understand the concept of desire. To me, there is no additional benefit for having people serve me, except that the food might be better. I'd be just as happy getting a sandwich from an automat as from a person serving it on a china plate.

Simply put, what value do we get from human interaction in a dining setting?

<comment><USER7> > Simply put, what value do we get from human interaction in a dining setting?

Sorry if there's a running theme here - using Japan as an example where automation, pre-made foods and very hands-on service are all widely available: automated services mean that whatever ingredients you're using need to be consistent in flavor, size, shape etc. Humans have greater capacity to adapt with what resources they have. Pre-made foods are relatively bland as a result of this. It's like the difference between McDonalds, which has very tight processes and a largely inflexible menu, versus a gourmet burger joint which might be using a different cheese, grade of bun, larger patties, more or less condiments from one day to another.

Another example would be micro-brewed beers versus macro-brewed beers. Micro- brewed beers tend to be more exotic in their flavors and styles while sacrificing consistency, whereas macro-brewed beers tend to be very consistent in taste at the expense of flavor.

Judging from your personal preferences this probably means little to you but, usually for hedonistic reasons, it's important to most other people. The above also ignores peoples needs for social contact, desire to appear more wealthy or sophisticated than they really are etc. It's illogical but humans use these aspects as breeding tools and to trigger dopamine release. Sex and drugs.

<comment><USER6> Hate to belabor a point but I think there's something I'm missing and want to get to the bottom of it.

I think chefs aren't going anywhere for a while. They're in charge of too many things, from sourcing food, preparing and coming up with new dishes, balancing the seasoning for every dish, etc etc. Appearances to the contrary, I really do like eating good food and I have fairly high standards when it comes to food, and I appreciate what chefs have to do to make the most out of nothing. ("Beef tongue is only 1.50 a pound! Guess what's on special tonight")

The benefit I'm not seeing is having a human being (be it a fast food worker, or a waiter) take your order. That's the part I don't get. I would love to order through a touch screen and just have the food come out. Unless you're a sommelier, you really don't add any value to the dining experience, unless the customer likes bossing people around.

<comment><USER7> > The benefit I'm not seeing is having a human being (be it a fast food > worker, or a waiter) take your order

All you have to get is that people enjoy ceremony, feeling special, appearing above their station or other individuals due to biological underpinnings. Logical people like yourself are above that silliness, most people aren't and I don't see a renaissance on the way for objective thinking. I'd argue it's going the other way.

Edit: this sort of comes back to economic policy relying on rational choice theory or the rational actor, when we know it completely ignores the reality of how people make decisions. Several threads on HN have discussed how economic policy needs to move away from rational choice theory and adopt psychological models to predict behavior. Humans aren't logical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Farm owners will likely compensate for their higher wages by advocating for importing more labor to lower their costs. Expect the perennial "crops rotting in the fields" stories to resume soon.

<comment><USER9> What will probably happen is workers will only get 32 hours through each farm labor contractor, and they'll end up working for more than one contractor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since the headline doesn't tell you: they will now be paid overtime.

While sorta funny that they are and programmers aren't, in all practicality it will mostly mean a few more will be hired, and that it will be more difficult to get more than 8 hours a day.

<comment><USER11> I assume you mean "in all practicality it will mostly mean a few more [workers] will be hired, and that it will be more difficult to get more [hours in your shift] than 8 hours a day."

It's not clear to me, of course, why anybody who gets neither overtime nor equity would want longer than 8 hour shifts. Maybe because making other people richer is so much fun?

<comment><USER12> You've misunderstood - the employees are already paid for overtime hours, but at the normal rate.

Now that there will be a higher overtime rate, it can, in some cases make sense for businesses to hire more employees rather than to pay existing employees to work overtime. For employees who choose to work overtime, that's bad news.</comment></comment></comment>


Michigan State Police to Conduct Roadside Drug Tests in Pilot Program - <AUTHOR> http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2016/07/13/michigan-state-police-to-conduct-roadside-drug-tests-in-pilot-program/ <comment><USER2> Goes well with this article:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside- drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html?_r=0)</comment>


Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/hack-of-cupid-media-dating-website-exposes-42-million-plaintext-passwords/ <comment><USER2> Before the bcryot/scrypt advocacy and general shaming starts... I'll just make the same comment I always do when this happens: the answer is not more sever side hashing.

Trusting remote services with plaintext passwords is broken to begin with. We shouldn't give them the chance to mess this up. We need client side hashing and key-stretching that only something _like_ SRP can provide:

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

The sooner we stop pretending there are no better answers than sending the contents of a password field raw over the wire, over SSL or not, and the sooner the web browser vendors and W3C start fixing this, the better. TLS-SRP is a ray of hope, but we need lighter, easier to deploy solutions that work at the application level rather than below HTTP.

On what alternate reality are we living where the W3C are working on Javascript cryptography before improving basic, fundamental, built-in authentication?

<comment><USER3> Realistically we need HTTP digest authentication [0] to use a better hash function then md5, and we need it to be deployed by websites.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication)

<comment><USER4> Realistically the problem with that isn't even MD5, it's the modal popup that hasn't changed in any browser since 1999.

It's so unbelievably popular, Chrome copied the behavior despite not existing in 1999. It's all over mobile, too...

<comment><USER5> I wonder if the original reason for using a modal OS-level popup was to prove that it's not a fake prompt displayed by a malicious site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Had to look it up - unrelated to okcupid. For those interested, here's a list of their web properties: [http://www.cupidmedia.com/services.cfm](http://www.cupidmedia.com/services.cfm)

<comment><USER7> Ironically, one of their sites is "OnlineDatingSafetyTips.com".

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure it's not ironic since dating safety != system security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't get my head around how this still happens.

I few years back I took over development of an old PHP website, which had a horrible code base (no framework or library, not even MVC). This site had around 30,000 users, all with plain text passwords.

It took me all of a couple of hours to get the site using bcrypt.

I'm not saying I'm some kind of super-rock-ninja-star developer, just that this is so easy to fix, even on monstrosity, legacy code bases.

There really is no excuse.

<comment><USER10> Because of this:

If a site is using plaintext password often the owner _asked_ for it. They wanted their users to be able to recover their passwords. And the dev didn't understand why this was a bad idea. They need to be educated, convinced and then convinced that the time you're about to spend on fixing this is more important than the 101 other things going wrong because the original dev wasn't very good. And isn't actually causing a single problem right now.

That also means that the password recovery function uses this code. Maybe there's an auto-user generator when you sign up for the newsletter. The email system obviously also uses that code. That also sometimes even means the password is stored twice, once in the framework's user mgmt tables and once in a user or person or the tblPRSN_UPDATED_OPTIMIZED_mc table. And just deleting that column might cause all sorts of other problems. Setting it null might cause bugs. Setting it empty string might cause a massive security hole as there's a login mechanism you haven't even _found_ yet. (remember the dropbox breach?)

It's never a 3 hour job to fix unless you're very bad at estimating, are working on something extremely trivial or do a half-ass job, potentially introducing a far worse security hole.

<comment><USER11> It's quite possible the dev knew it was a bad idea and maybe even argued against it but was told to implement it this way anyway.

The problem a dating site probably has is people who sign up accounts and then stop using them. They want to send these users reminder emails in the hope that some of them re-engage.

Problem is that some of these users have probably forgotten which password they use for that website, and some % of those will not bother using the password reset mechanism.

So someone in marketing has the bright idea of sending emails that include the username/password combo, the dev explains why this is a terrible idea and then gets overruled.

<comment><USER12> I include an "Instant Login" link in each mail so the users don't need to remember their password. It contains a unique time-sensitive token to identify the user and instantly sign them in (much like a password reset). I learned this technique from OKCupid, so no idea why they still had plaintext passwords.

<comment><USER13> It turns out Cupid Media is unrelated to OkCupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What gets me is that security professionals keep talking about layers of security. I don't understand how many recent attacks have resulted in complete breaches.

Adobe had source code taken, vB gave over pretty much complete server access.

You now have Cupid Media not even hashing passwords. The final defense of user information ignored..

It took me 3 days to implement password security on a legacy system. Implemented password strength requirements. Users trying to sign in with weak passwords were flagged and forced to change their password to meet new requirements. Plain text passwords were hashed with bcrypt. One guy.. 3 days.

The UK has ICO. I would like to see these getting involved in cases like this. Where they can fine websites catering to UK users who show negligence when storing user information. If it is not currently within their powers I would like to see a law change. There should be more accountability for website owners.

[http://www.ico.org.uk/](http://www.ico.org.uk/)

<comment><USER15> Often times, the hack is through a web front-end. Back-end systems (such as DBs) are heavily firewalled, logged, monitored, etc. and are generally very well protected. Systems guys (OS and DB) know security pretty well and have been doing it for a long time now.

Much of the web software that powers the front-end is complex (PHP, Java, .Net, JS, CSS, SQL, includes, 3rd-party libraries from everywhere, etc). That complexity has a broad attack surface that is difficult and time consuming to test. And many devs are late to the security party (unless we're talking OpenBSD developers).

Management wants to push out new features by X date. Devs have very little time to test and are behind on security anyway. Hackers have all the time in the world to poke at the web front-end and test every possible combination of things until they finally get in.

In a nut-shell, that's the problem as I've seen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What this story shows is that sometimes '12345' makes sense as a password - i.e. when credential security doesn't matter to the user. If I use '11111' to sign up for a onetime visit to a website, then there's no nexus with my online banking account other than an email address - assuming even the most feeble attempt at picking a 'secure' password for my banking.

This is why it is often silly when articles condemn users for weak passwords when a password list is stolen. The proper assumption is that any password I use is stored and transmitted in plain text and just now falling into the hands of bad people.

This is the reason that until I started expressing this idea on HN, that my HN password was "hackernews". If HN was breached, I was no less secure. Sans the pursuit of lolz, it wasn't even worth trying to guess.

Of course, I changed it to something harder to prevent mischief since some individuals might have seen my comments as a challenge.

<comment><USER17> This is a good argument for _unique_ passwords, not for _weak_ passwords. Weak passwords only "make sense" if you really don't care whether your account is compromised due to a very weak password.

<comment><USER18> But often you don't care. The value of a throwaway account you made to download a file is practically zero to you or an attacker. In the tradeoff in simplicity (all my crappy throwaway accounts have the password 12345... easy!) against security, simplicity wins.

If I only made an account on one of Cupid media's sites because I wanted to see a picture, I wouldn't care whether my password was easily guessable. Additionally, I'm fairly sure that an easy to make account with no access privileges is completely worthless to an attacker as well, and so the likelihood of anyone even attempting to compromise it is next to nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just a random question: Is there anything that gives companies incentive to prevent such hacks? It seems that there is no consequences at all, except for some loss of reputation in tech community. Is there a way to put legal pressure on tightening up security?

<comment><USER20> You are looking at necessity products built by large corporations whose products are usually regarded as the best of breed in the market.

If you are a designer for instance, you'll most likely come to depend on Adobe Photoshop. That means at some point you've created an account. Adobe got breached and your data got leaked, you'll likely whine a little about it online but unless you are willing to:

\- shift your work and relearn a new tool than Photoshop

\- navigate your way around closing your account (with the assumption that your data is _actually_ deleted after account closure) which is rather hard in most cases, no one likes losing users.

Then you'll likely just suck it up, do what you can and hope for the best.

On the other hand, you got small time (but growing - not web-scale yet-) services/products that can't really afford losing a large number of users. Those would worry most about security. Ironically, they'd stay off the grid for long enough and wont become attack targets until they make it big.

But that's just really the security industry, no system is 100% secure. And you never know if you've tightened your security enough until someone drills a hole. Then you patch it.

Any self respecting corporate will have a security auditing policy. The so called white-hat hackers or pen-testers. Good companies will run security audits every now and then in hope to discover new security holes introduced by software updates, system policy changes...etc.

As for legal pressure, it depends on what we are talking about. If you are a payment processing company then any data breach is a violation of your PCI compliance, which leads to a lot of bad PR and legal consequences.

If Facebook got breached and data was exposed, I doubt there is anything in the law that reacts to such issue. Unless someone sues Facebook for damages, then that's a whole different ball game.

The incentives are there for any business of all sizes. Legally? It depends. It's those schmucks that screw us all, plaintext passwords and shit.

Edit: Fixed formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Making matters worse, many of the Cupid Media users are precisely the kinds > of people who might be receptive to content frequently advertised in spam > messages, including male enhancement products, services for singles, and > diet pills.

Oh wow. So Internet dating users are generally stupid, under-endowed, desperate and overweight?

<comment><USER22> They wrote "many", not "generally".

And yes.

<comment><USER23> [citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is getting ridiculous.

When are we going to see legislation enacted to take these people to task?

Surely there is a case to be made that their negligence causes (or has the potential to cause) real harm to their users.

We need a Saul Goodman to put together a class action.

<comment><USER25> Yes, the government would surely do a great job legislating development standards. Just look how terrifically they've handled software patents.

<comment><USER26> Free markets currently doing a pretty awful job of it as we keep learning. Perhaps some government legislation would help.

<comment><USER25> All legislation would do is put a big layer of ineffective bureaucracy between developers and getting work done.

Get the government involved and it won't be long before you need to fill out 15 forms and hire a lawyer to put your weekend project online. Is that the kind of internet you want?

<comment><USER23> Yeah, all those building codes do is put a big layer of ineffective bureaucracy between the people who architect and do construction and getting work done.

Yeah, all those sanitation codes do is put a big layer of ineffective bureaucracy between the people prepare food and getting work done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And now we wait for the dump to show up... will be usefull, larger then the rockyou plain.

</comment><comment><USER28> We can help in some small way. Advocate for the use of password managers like LastPass and KeePass that use a different securely generated pw for each site.

</comment><comment><USER29> Still in web 0.0 storing passwords in plain text? Awful.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone know where to find the password dump?

<comment><USER31> While this might sound not so appropriate at first but I too would like to have the dump. Can result in some interesting password research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone have a copy of the password list? 42 million passwords would be fun to analyze.

</comment><comment><USER33> This was already very clear. The whole website was flawed and it probably was known by individuals for a longer time... Bypass payments, change other people's profile, read other people's messages. It does not stop here.

</comment><comment><USER34> Time for civil liability for these breaches. At this point the risk of storing plaintext passwords is known enough that it should qualify as negligence.

</comment><comment><USER35> Next article on Hacker News: "Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes xx million fake dating profiles"?

</comment><comment><USER36> So that's what - 30 million male users, 1 million female, and 11 million spam- and-scam bots?

</comment><comment><USER37> Tangentially related: I am a lifelock member (not sure if its worth it, but gives me some peace of mind), and recently got email alerts from them saying my adobe login info was found for sale on several blackmarket sites.

</comment><comment><USER38> After the adobe/cupid breaches, it is high time some governing body mandates every website to reveal on their privacy policy page how passwords are stored on their servers.

</comment><comment><USER39> maybe i am just stupid, but how are password managers secure?

i've seen people using them, and if i were of a less honourable persuasion i could abuse that quite easily... on the other hand, its impossible for me to steal information from out of their brain (so far at least).

<comment><USER40> I've used 1Password (a popular password manager for the Mac) for several years now. How could you "quite easily" hack those passwords, assuming that's what you're implying?

<comment><USER32> Keylogger.

<comment><USER41> Sure, but if you have that level of access to the machine, what's the point you're making?

<comment><USER32> I dunno, he asked a question and I answered it. I'm making no point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is this a better Hacknews UI? - <AUTHOR> http://hn.premii.com <comment><USER2> No, at least not for me. The HN website as is loads very quickly as it's extremely lightweight. Although it doesn't have the greatest mobile UI, the website is at least functional on mobile thanks to a minimalist interface. On my phone, the linked UI took a few seconds to load the articles and scrolling was so jerky I quickly clicked back to here. I'm on a budget smartphone using (fast) Wi-Fi.

<comment><USER3> Try to do a search via the Mobile implementation. It's almost completely unusable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. The strengths of this UI is simple, good-looking organization that loads lightening-fast. Even works with NoScript easily while yours was a pile of links. If you want to benefit HN users, I'd suggest toying with variations of this exact design that try to solve problems people here gripe about.

Here's two with the first one probably very easy:

1\. People accidentally downvote comments trying to upvote them. I can imagine no technical or UX excuse for this problem still existing. It's _sooo easy_ to solve. Somewhere, someone is giving an order to keep it a problem probably for aesthetic reasons.

2\. Comment nesting. A tricky problem in general for so many reasons. People gripe about this version of it sometimes. My only gripe is some way to restructure the presentation so deep nesting doesn't just push further and further to the right. Can be optional.

3\. One of biggest complaints is how a tangent unrelated to OP takes up the whole screen and it's hard to find next reply to OP. This is actually two different problems: can't easily see how conversations are connected without parent links and them taking up the whole screen. The screen issue might be helped with little plus or minus symbols to hide a whole thread. The other one I leave to UX designers as it's trickier to balance form and function. A simple method might be an optional link on site top-level or comment that turns on some kind of highlighting putting different color, labeled boxes around grouped comments. Maybe limit groups to just first replies to OP & anything nested in them rather than everyones replies to everyone.

I think solving these three issues would be helpful. And notifications of replies, too. There's already a service for that but it's a nice feature to have in any HN client. Hope this helps you on next round. :)

<comment><USER5> If all 3 of these were solved, I'd be at risk of never growing tired of using HN on mobile and closing it to get other things done.

<comment><USER4> Appreciate the feedback as I put mental effort into that list. :) Anything else that should be on there that gets _lots_ of gripes rather than one or two people's preferences?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've yet to find a _better_ HN UI. All the ones I've tried so far (including this one and the one reustle mentioned) don't add any benefit to me over just using vanilla HN. They are also, in my experience, much slower than HN.

This one makes bad use of space IMHO and, much more importantly, has terrible contrast on basically all elements. Makes it incredibly hard to read for me.

<comment><USER7> This (1) is my goto alternative. Mostly because it's easier to go through comments. The author has a react native app in the iOS store.

(1) [https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/](https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing, that is actually not at all bad. At least on mobile, that's more pleasant than HN for me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At least on iPad this one is pretty good, nice size font and toggleable comment threads – [https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/](https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/)

Looks like this – [http://imgur.com/SdIaLGD](http://imgur.com/SdIaLGD)

<comment><USER9> I second that -- use that UI all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nope: [https://imgur.com/a/t9mUG](https://imgur.com/a/t9mUG)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the front page should be filled up by the top post by default without a first click, but then that page might be a 404 under HN which is even uglier?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heavily downvoted comments in the right pane aren't faded as they are on the main HN site. I find that surprisingly annoying.

</comment><comment><USER12> No, I am having my browser using only half the screen, because today's monitors are too wide. And you put a wide sidebar there that takes half of that estate.

Quite a lot of sites today cannot adapt to screen resolutions smaller than about 1000 pixels horizontal (half HD resolution, on my work browser) or about 600 pixels vertical (resolution on my netbook). And don't let me start about Acroread..

I am also happy to report that HN works with Netsurf, your site probably doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER13> The best I've found is hckrnews.com

<comment><USER4> Bookmarked that. It's has some neat features albeit uglier, front page. Curious, does it fix the age old problem of up and downvote being too close together?

<comment><USER13> I don't know, I can't downvote :)

<comment><USER4> Fair enough haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would have been if it wasn't mobile-only :b

<comment><USER15> Not really, it only fills a tiny portion of my screen. I'll stick to [http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com)

<comment><USER16> Agreed. I've been using [http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com) for over a year now and I wouldn't ever go back to the normal HN site. I love the feature that shows you all the new submitted links since you last visited. No longer do I have to scan up and down the list and see the same links over and over again looking for new ones.

<comment><USER17> Thank you, this is beautiful and has caused me to finally sign up for an account after years of lurking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thats my app.

* you can change the accent color and there is a night theme

* Web version doesn't have a login option

* You can download iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows mobile and desktop version from [https://hn.premii.com/about/](https://hn.premii.com/about/) . You can login, upvote, downvote, reply etc.

Web version uses YC firebase api, and it is usually slow.

Downloadable version scraps YC site, and its generally faster.

</comment><comment><USER19> Renders nicely in desktop browsers and I'm a big fan of the mobile app.

Am I missing the login option?

Minor suggestion - I'd like to see more items on a single page. Could I have the option to condense the item UI vertically? Perhaps put the age, author and comment count in another column?

<comment><USER18> Its build for mobile.

No login option as there is no API. But you can download from the app store (ios, android, mac, windows), and it has login option. [https://hn.premii.com/about/](https://hn.premii.com/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I prefer it because it means less fiddling with tabs/the back button. Plus you can collapse comments.

But by default it's very difficult on my eyes due to the low contrast, so to make it at all usable I make use of a Stylish script to fix the text color.

<comment><USER18> I am the author of the this. Would you mind sharing a stylish script or screenshot. Love to see how it looks after your changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't think so. HN frontpage HTML is about 31201 bytes at the moment. Techcrunch 249162, Google 64871. Here, less is more.

<comment><USER22> Not that I think OP is very good, but '31201 bytes' has little to do with UI, unless you are talking about the specific use case of a slow connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do we all think that a simple list can be made simpler? What is it about the normal layout that doesn't work?

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I really enjoy hn.algolia.com for desktop. I also use the "Hacker News" app on iOS on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER26> The UI loads quickly for me but the posts take a lot longer to load compared to Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER27> That's nice for me. It would be better if the font size of article is one size larger.

<comment><USER18> Settings > options > appearance > change font size and family and colors.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just told the author to hopefully make this better for an easier daily read experience.

</comment><comment><USER28> No.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for linking, I had come across this before but couldn't recall the name.</comment></comment>