Trump-Sanders Signal an Oligarchy on the Brink of Collapse - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/trump-sanders-phenomenon-is-a-sign-of-oligarchy/ <comment><USER2> This article is massive clickbait, but I'll comment anyway.

Trump and Sanders are manifestations of a long-term trend that has been building at least since the 2008 Financial Crisis. People are dissatisfied with the options they are presented politically, and economic participation is at historically low levels. We have never been more prosperous, but at the same time that prosperity and wealth gains are not only not very evenly distributed(they never really were), but large swaths of society are completely left out of them. In the early half of the century, it was a democratizing effect that everyone was drinking a 10c glass of Coke. This is just one example, you can also see it with iPhoneistas vs cheap Android phones, etc. etc. Now the hip drinks are craft beers and fine wines, and a former factory worker forced to work menial part time jobs is looked down upon for drinking what he can afford, Bud lite and coke. There are major class shiftings and reorganizations going on, and people living in and near large prosperous cities have largely been immune and isolated from it.

We dismiss and ignore their rise at our own peril.

<comment> chao- _> Now the hip drinks are craft beers and fine wines, and a former factory worker forced to work menial part time jobs is looked down upon for drinking what he can afford, Bud lite and coke._

Two related articles that may inform your discussions of this topic:

[http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american- liberali...](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism)

[http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor- whites...](http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant- trump-trump-trump/)

For context, and lest anyone think I'm taking a cheap shot at liberalism or progressivism, I definitely see myself in the first article. Particularly in my teens and early twenties, I was about as smug as they came. Then I went meta-smug by posing as an angry libertarian, and was utterly insufferable. These days, I think and feel much the same, I just don't go out of my way to socially advertise it (or I put more effort into not making others feel small?).

 _> There are major class shiftings and reorganizations going on, and people living in and near large prosperous cities have largely been immune and isolated from it._

One place a prosperous urbanite might bump into this shift is when a city winds up with a commuter police force due in part to high rent.

<comment><USER2> Those are both good articles that express much better than I the trends I am seeing. Particularly, in the Vox article, when it talks about G.W. Bush being a "dumb hick", you can see shades of this with Trump and his rhetoric today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To be fair, the "New Deal" regime was perceived to be failing circa 1970.

For instance, the New Deal left racism intact in the South, there was the Vietnam war, the "Spirit of '68", high inflation, a huge expansion of regulations leading to more problems (for instance the 1974 model year of automobiles were awful because they had to satisfy stricter emission standards without a perfected catalytic converter, etc.) There was the cult boom and the strange fact that "The Greening of America" sold millions of copies.

In 1979 Merril Lynch was a penny stock, in many ways capitalism seemed to be on the ropes. If you don't believe me look at "Legitimation Crisis" by Habermas.

One contemporary diagnosis of the condition was that there was "too much democracy" and if you look at what happened, all of a sudden the door got slammed on people like Ralph Nader and the range of what you could ask Washington for diminished over the 1980s, with the 1990s sealing the deal -- at that point the lobbying system became almost entirely focuses around tax breaks for special interests with an occasional scam like "Medicare Advantage".

For instance in the 1980s you still saw environmental legislation being passed, but once Clinton got in the Republicans ran fanatical resistance until getting solid control of the House and since then there has been gridlock.

People like the Koch brothers threw unlimited money at promoting right wing ideas, Fox News has a 24 hours hate whenever there is a democrat in the White House, etc.

This has led to a new condition of ungovernability which is as much a riot of the rich (who funded 17 losers to run for the Republican party because Conservatism makes them feel warm and fuzzy) as a riot of the middle class.

"Boaty McBoatface" sealed the deal for Brexit because it symbolizes what "democracy" is about these days. They ask your opinion, because they want to look legitimate, but they don't honor it.

<comment><USER4> > "Boaty McBoatface" sealed the deal for Brexit because it symbolizes what > "democracy" is about these days.

What does that even mean? I hope you don't honestly think that that poll had any effect on the brexit situation?

I tend to side with the bookies over listening to polls, and the bookies odds are on staying[1]. Apart from recent football mishaps they seem to be on the ball, they saw Khan coming a mile off for example.

1\. [http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu- refe...](http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu- referendum/referendum-on-eu-membership-result)

<comment><USER5> I guess what he means is that more substantive issues work the same way as the boat naming thing -- they ask for your vote but then if they don't like the result they'll toss it.

<comment><USER6> Good point. I'll be controveraial and point out that there are parallels to Prop 8 in California here. And the immigration legislation in Arizona that was overturned.

Tell me that doesn't feed into the Trump candidacy.

<comment><USER5> Well, IMO the biggest thing is the economy -- people feel like they were sold a bill of goods with the experts coming in and telling them that free trade would be great and make them more prosperous and now they live in towns that are shadows of their past selves and suffer under- and unemployment.

<comment><USER6> The parts of the economy that Trump supporters see are absolutely affected by immigration policy.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's true, but it'd be less of a hot-button issue if so many factories weren't shuttered.

Anyway, your point about judicial review is well taken -- whether you're the type of person to get riled up about Prop 8 or about Citizens United it's basically anti-democratic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find somewhat hilarious that the supposed harbingers of this "collapse" are staunch members of said "oligarchy" (an elitist billionaire and a career politician).

Revolutions are not as they once were...

<comment><USER8> Bernie is a career politician trying to do the right thing though.

<comment><USER9> Trying to do what his limited view of the right thing is. There's a lot of good stuff there, but a blanket "make everything better for everyone" ignores a lot of the nuanced problems of inequality.

For example: free healthcare and college — great, that's what a civilized country should have... but while that reduces an economic burden on the poor, it also keeps dollars in the pockets of the rich and our tax system is so broken that it doesn't necessarily mean you can recover that money.

While much less appealing, Clinton's criticisms of Sanders for giving free college to the rich seems fundamentally rooted in the reality that while yes, eventually al"l of these things should be public services — but in the immediacy it's not really helpful to help everyone out the same amount because that's keeping everyone in the same place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"What we're now facing is a combination of: 1) people who still believe; and 2) people who doubt, but: a) would have to sacrifice their livelihood to act on it; or, b) are willing to leave the system but don't necessarily know what comes next."

We're approaching a tipping point where one of these groups is bigger than all the others . . .

</comment><comment><USER11> Like in the movies, I imagine the next chapter is "The Oligarchy Strikes Back".

</comment><comment><USER12> How about this headline:

Hillary's Nomination Signal an Oligarchy Doing Fine

(Hillary is all but nominated, I know)

</comment><comment> awinter-py I like that someone is taking a systems perspective on this but the '26 abandoned cities' stuff doesn't seem relevant.

Yes every underclass represents a threat of revolt. But describing this oligarchy as rich stealing from the poor is not completely accurate.

The mesopotamians had a 'palace economy' where a large portion of the wealth (i.e. grain) was brought to a central city to be redistributed to non-farmers by the priests. (hence the word 'hierarchy'). The current global economy is to some extent a palace economy (explains the higher salaries and prices in cities) but our economies are no longer 70% agricultural, 30% stonework and a small slice 'prayer services'. More of the economic work than ever is concentrated at the 'top' \-- maybe not in the top slice but certainly in the top fifth. If the bottom half of mesopotamian society disappeared the priests would starve. If that happened in, say, switzerland their economic metrics would blip up.

Not saying that's a good or a bad thing but it defies the article's definition of oligarchy.

</comment><comment><USER13> _1980-2000s: Reagan removes the Fairness Doctrine..._

TIL Rush Limbaugh will cause the end of the world. Hilarious.

<comment><USER14> Not the end of the world, but I do see him historically as the beginning of the end for the Republican Party. I was in college when I first heard of Rush Limbaugh. Before him, Republicans were these very stuffy folks like William Buckley Jr, who came to our campus and bored many to tears with highly- intellectual and logical arguments that were extremely challenging and generated a great deal of cognitive dissonance for me. Republicans were considered the intellectual party back in those days.

Then Limbaugh came along, never referencing anything he said or wrote, constantly contradicting himself and making offensive cracks like calling a 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton the White House dog. My young Republican friends loved him, chanted slogans like "Rush is Right!" and labeled themselves "dittoheads." Anyone who pointed out Limbaugh's contradictory logic or took issue with his offensive statements was dismissed as being "politically correct."

Flash forward 25 years and Limbaugh is now considered tame in comparison to Coulter, Savage, and some of the other voices that have followed in his footsteps. I was sad to hear that William Buckley, who I still admire intellectually even if many of his positions are anathema to me, was largely forgotten and ignored in his final years. Trump's nomination would not be possible without Limbaugh laying the groundwork for him two and a half decades ago.

Some on the left are gloating about it, but it frightens me. America needs a plurality of voices debating issues and policy logically in order to thrive. We can't let it become one party of power on the left and an easily demonized opposition party on the right, but with the Republican party falling apart... that's the way it seems to be going.

*Edited for grammar.

<comment><USER15> In Limbaugh's lexicon, feminists turned into "feminazis" because advocating for equal rights for women was somehow equatable to a group advocating genocide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those interested in the relevant history that lead the US to this point, may I suggest American Character by Colin Woodard [1].

The ideology that drives the oligarchy (and arguably modern libertarianism) is descended from that which informed the founding of the Carolina and West Indian slave colonies.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/American-Character-History-Struggle- In...](http://www.amazon.com/American-Character-History-Struggle- Individual/dp/0525427899)

Colin Woodard's previous book, American Nations was the most interesting book I read last year.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm very hopeful this election gives the third parties a boost. Unless I suffer a terrible stroke between now and the election I know I will be voting libertarian simply because I couldn't live with myself voting for Trump or Hillary.

<comment><USER18> I would like to see a coordinated effort from those of us who won't vote for the mainstream candidates.

If any 3rd party candidate gets over 5% of the vote, they must by law be included in the debates next time around. We know that a 3rd party will not win the presidential election this time around, so coordinating our votes to get one over 5% in order to inject a new voice into the process seems like a win, even if the party is one I am generally opposed to.

<comment><USER10> This is a good idea. I was unaware of the 5% rule. Would you consider putting up a site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU It's not the zombie apocalypse we wanted, but at least the bunker still works.

</comment><comment><USER19> I strongly believe Trump and Sanders signal to the rabid balkanization of media (aided by proliferation of web, mobile, and social media), rather than an oligarchy on the brink of collapse. It has never been easier to read clickbait radical news that provides ample confirmation bias. Globally speaking, Americans have by far one of the best quality of lives anywhere in the world. But hearing Sanders - Trump, you would think we live in some war ravaged developing country.

</comment><comment><USER20> How is it going to collapse when they will pretty much do the exact same thing the previous governments did?

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, that headline is click bait if I ever saw it...

<comment><USER10> I disagree, I think it's both true and succinct.</comment></comment>


Using spaced repetition to learn a language - <AUTHOR> https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-language/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a strategy that I've found to work really well for me. Curious to hear other people's tips / experiences as well.</comment>


GW-Basic Source Notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.os2museum.com/wp/gw-basic-source-notes/ <comment><USER2> "There are several theories on what the initials "GW" stand for. Greg Whitten, an early Microsoft employee who developed the standards in the company's BASIC compiler line, says Bill Gates picked the name GW-BASIC. Whitten refers to it as Gee-Whiz BASIC and is unsure if Gates named the program after him. The Microsoft User Manual from Microsoft Press also refers to it by this name. It may have also been nicknamed Gee-Whiz because of its numerous graphics commands. Other common theories as to the initials' origins include "Graphics and Windows", "Gates, William" (Microsoft's president at the time), or "Gates- Whitten" (the two main designers of the program)." [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW- BASIC)

<comment><USER3> I have no basis for this theory, but I have a hunch that Bill Gates named it "GW-BASIC" after the initials of Greg Whitten, not to give Greg credit, but as a form of _disclaimer_. Remember, the Basic interpreter was Gates' own baby (it was Micro-Soft's original product, written by Gates personally), and Gates may have planned to make a, in his mind, _real_ version of Microsoft Basic later. Therefore, Gates might not have wanted this new Basic, which he might have viewed as an interim version, to be the definitive branded version.

Of course, this is all speculation.

<comment><USER4> Too bad he probably stopped reading Hacker News some time back in late 80s, otherwise he could chime in on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As mentioned in the comments there, there's also now:

[https://github.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC](https://github.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC)

"All files can now be assembled with Microsoft MASM 5.1A."

"The interpreter is semi-working, but some parts of the platform-specific support code are still missing or incomplete."

</comment><comment><USER6> I got a contract where, as part of it, I had to figure out and modify some programs written in qbasic (a successor to gw-basic). A great little environment. It had everything, a fully integrated debugger, subroutines. You could get a lot done with it, including DOS graphics.

<comment><USER7> QBASIC 4.5 is responsible for my entire career in software engineering. As an 8yr old kid I was fully able to grok the documentation included in that environment building games that emulated what I would play on my NES. Mostly it was just dumb Dragon Warrior-esque RPGs with HORRIBLE dialogue, first text- only then with full-blown graphics. In the early days of the internet there were _tons_ of communities and forums and some of my first websites I published were dumb game websites where I'd publish my .BAS =)

Before that I would tinker with Applesoft BASIC on a IIe my father brought home from Rockwell Collins... BASIC was/is such an approachable dialect for kids.

After a few years tinkering I graduated to Pascal and C/C++ after an uncle unloaded all of his old Borland books on me. If it wasn't for BASIC teaching me programming fundamentals (variables, conditions, loops, "functions", etc) I don't think I would have been able to grok formal/more-powerful languages. At first I didn't have any resources/mentors/Google for programming so I really needed BASIC.

BASIC will always hold a special place in my heart!

<comment><USER8> You might enjoy [https://www.qb64.org/](https://www.qb64.org/) , particularly if you have a bright youngster in you live with whom you'd like to share the joy of BASIC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266917)

</comment><comment><USER10> on duckduckgo..

<Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource.

Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu) Server at www.os2museum.com Port 80>

..But works in Firefox

<comment><USER11> I don't understand, why do you need a search engine at all to access the link?

<comment><USER10> its the Duckduckgo android browser

<comment><USER4> you can submit a bug or you could just use another browser to open the link

<comment><USER10> I thought other readers on HN would be interested to know about it as its seems a very strange result to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He didn't really say all that much about how the code is implemented, what algorithm it uses or even just what modules it contains. I guess reading all that assembler is just too tiresome.

There's a reason nobody writes large programs in assembler anymore (except for the IRS)

<comment><USER13> The included discussion that the code doesn't use the stack, mostly assumes the registers are dirty at all times, and doesn't use PROC/RET all highlight that this source code specifically wasn't designed for readability or reuse.

<comment><USER14> Most auto generated code isn't that readable and this should surprise you. What you're seeing is the result of an asm "translator" with some manual modifications to make it work on the x86 platform. [1]

That's why you see in the source code the phrase "This translation created on...". Microsoft, at this time, hasn't made available the tools they used to generate this code or the original version it was created from.

[1] [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/microsoft-open- so...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/microsoft-open-sources-gw- basic/)

<comment><USER13> Though this was also a fork from whatever "intermediate assembly language" the earlier versions used. GW-BASIC was far enough in "x86 is the only thing we need to support at Microsoft now" territory that presumably a lot of the GW- specific additions were done directly to this code instead of at the "next level up" in whatever that previous translator worked in.

This also seems corroborated in the dev blog you link, though without source control history, the upstream translation layer, and the original "intermediate assembly" code, the details at this point are relatively fuzzy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37186290 <comment><USER2> It would make much more sense if the mobile phone operators offered free mobile data access.

It is messy to make changes to router settings to most users.

<comment><USER3> I think shortwave (and a strong group of local hams ahead of time) is a possibly better approach

The hams in my area are routinely involved with disasters big and small. They've responded quickly in disasters with volunteer patrols and stations. They routinely help out at events like marathons, fairs, and more. When a fire took down a place's cell towers, they were there to facilitate communication. When the 911 call system went offline, they were around the city to help out (i.e., could place direct emergency calls for folks)

<comment><USER4> HAMs are great but imagine if everyone had a shortwave transmitter after a disaster - if 4G networks can't handle the traffic, amateur radio would be pure noise. Getting wifi and mobile data working means everyone has a shot at communicating

<comment><USER5> If you could funnel local traffic into more sparsely distributed HF packet- based transceivers, it might not be too bad. You wouldn't be relaying general Internet traffic, just disaster related info. Think 1990's web form for family contacts and medical status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The rescuers in Italy are asking people to remain completely silent once in a while to try to communicate with trapped victims. I wondered if in a similar manner it would be technically possible to detect signal from phones that belong to trapped victims, if all not trapped people were asked to turn off their mobile phones.

<comment><USER7> Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery. Also, there is a big chance that there are phones without victims. Not a good way to find people.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that false positives disqualify such approach.

<comment><USER8> It would be a waste of resources to rescue an ownerless phone.

<comment><USER9> Which is why you'd correlate with lists of known missing and known not-missing people before digging in.

<comment><USER8> Missing people won't lose their phone in a disaster?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe events like this can trigger politics to review the very laws by which they force us to lock down wi-fi networks in the first place.

<comment><USER11> What do you mean?

<comment><USER12> In Italy, there are laws making wifi network operators responsible for the actions of people joining their networks. At one point, public network operators (cafes etc) were required by law to record the ID card of anyone requesting access. This provision was eventually dropped, but I think the overall concept of network owners' responsibility is still there.

<comment><USER13> I think there's EU-wide push for not allowing free public wifi. Heard about it in at least two other countries. Not sure if any law was passed though.

<comment><USER12> Italy spearheaded this approach because of content piracy, under the pretense of organized-crime prevention. It was eventually seen as holding back tourism and economy, so it was dropped; but by then, the seed was planted (European law-enforcement agencies co-ordinate a lot, in this day and age) and found roots elsewhere in the wake of terrorist events. I don't think there is an explicit EU directive yet, though.

<comment><USER14> Sad that preventing piracy is considered more important than easy access to free information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Guest network anyone?

A distinct SSID, WPA2 password and subnet dispatches with most of the personal risk.

<comment><USER16> Not really. You'd still be liable for any misuse happening from external users. Or if not liable, you'd at least have an uphill battle to fight in order to prove that it wasn't you that did the thing that got you into trouble.

Additionally, depending on your ISP, you might violate the TOS by providing a public WiFi. If you live in a place without real choice of ISP, that would be bad if they then cancel your account.

<comment><USER17> > you'd at least have an uphill battle to fight in order to prove that it > wasn't you that did the thing that got you into trouble.

Aren't you innocent until proven guilty? Simply saying "I have a guest network" surely constitutes reasonable doubt, in the absence of any other evidence against you.

<comment><USER18> Sadly, the way Justice System is working nowadays is that majority of cases end with a plea due to overwhelming pressure from the prosecutors.

So, theoretically one could ride the reasonable-doubt-train all the way to court but at that point, the prosecutor would stack any charge possible leaving the jury to deliberate on all them. Modern day juries still most likely are not computer savvy so, merely stating "IP Address" would most likely be enough to convict. It is also needs to be added that if the charges are severe enough, even though every defendant is innocent until proven guilty, in reality it is the opposite way around if the said crime is vehemently disliked by all.

<comment><USER19> Do they use juries for these matters in Italy?

<comment><USER20> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This quake happened at 4AM. Most people probably had phones on bedstand or charging stations rather on person.

I suspect most people knew where their neighbors were at this time which may have aided searches. Pretty much didnt need to bother with any public buildings.

P.S. I was in the 4AM 1994 Los Angeles quake. Night quakes have a little different psychology than day quakes.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how this works, given that is illegal to share your internet connection with others in IT.

<comment><USER23> Lots of things are illegal in Italy, and elsewhere, that are nonetheless common done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's the tweet [https://mobile.twitter.com/crocerossa/status/768387275654885...](https://mobile.twitter.com/crocerossa/status/768387275654885376)

which is also confusing about the how to "reset" the router, not sure if some models might go back to factory settings holding the reset for 10 secs...

</comment><comment><USER25> It's time we start looking at Internet mesh networking more seriously.

<comment><USER26> Mesh networking wasn't exactly a raging success last time around and not much has changed since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Hey Siri" ... "Enable my emergency beacon"

Of course, phones and watches don't have that feature yet but an open (low- power) broadcast standard could help save lives.

Finding people who are lost in the woods would be much easier.

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hiker-pavlina-pizova- survi...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hiker-pavlina-pizova- survives-30-days-new-zealand-wilderness-n638176)

[http://www.wlox.com/story/32833377/woman-found-after- being-l...](http://www.wlox.com/story/32833377/woman-found-after-being-lost- in-the-woods-for-hours)

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if devices implemented a communication protocol based on UWB we could leverage it for rescue operations. Along with other advantages, it has a much greater ability to penetrate physical barriers [0].

[0] [http://www.thetrackit.com/library/UWB%20Defin.pdf](http://www.thetrackit.com/library/UWB%20Defin.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be awesome if in case of emergency, WIFI AP could build up a cognitive network to assist rescuers. We can even think of phones workings a relays to an available Internet connexion.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article is quite poor; this is probably something barely re worded from a need provider (like Reuters). Can anyone find an article with more depth to corroborate this?

Edit: it looks like it isn't anything to do with the rescue effort in itself; the Italian red Cross is asking to open private wifi in order to allow people to communicate. I naively thought it would have to be something with exploiting wifi in a novelty manner, but no.

Quite disappointed.

<comment><USER30> Right, 270+ people dead and counting and you are disappointed. I don't know, maybe a bit of reality check sometimes?

<comment><USER29> What are you going on about? This is HN, not your classic news bulletin board. If I wanted to have succinct news reports from a general news outlet, I would go to one. Feel free to do the same.

<comment><USER30> Wow, this is HN and what? Your comment is still completely out of touch with reality, there are lots of Italians reading HN, some might have lost their friends or family members and look, people are even downvoting my parent comment. Is this really the place you want HN to be? You want to change the world but you can't see things from another perspective? Or show some understanding and compassion? It's not just you, but the whole thread here is terrible, it's like if you had another 9/11 and I spent my time commenting on why mobile reception is so bad there in the area of the disaster.

<comment><USER31> To rephrase what touristtam said, HN is a place where stories about shootings, terrorist attacks, catastrophic events and other current news get flagged regularly. Just like celebrity and sport news. Plenty of news outlets already report about the earthquake. This article is about the technical aspect of enabling wifi and I see people discussion wifi and cell coverage, privacy and legal aspects of opening networks, thermal imagining systems. I don't see people disrespecting the victims or families. The event itself and the human stories/tragedies behind that - and sorry that might be hard to swallow - isn't discussion-worthy to a lot of people on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Heat source scanners like they show it in movies does really exist? Will be really helpful in these scenarios if they do really exists.

<comment><USER31> They exist. I can't tell how deep they can detect heat and if it's enough for body heat. [http://thermalvisionresearch.co.uk/thermal-camera- products/t...](http://thermalvisionresearch.co.uk/thermal-camera- products/t-650/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wouldn't peer-to-peer apps like FireChat [1] also help?

[1]: [https://www.opengarden.com/firechat.html](https://www.opengarden.com/firechat.html) (Currently throwing an invalid certificate error)

<comment><USER34> You might need at least a user every 70m (210ft) for FireChat to work properly; not feasible in these circumstances.

During such catastrophes setting up a temporary airMAX as an open access point would be a more speedy and reliable solution; only need one telephone line to operate, the teams don't have to waste time installing other apps, and the antenna's wifi coverage is greater than a cheap router's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> They should rather use a solution like one of Google's WI-FI blimp and fly them hover the affected areas.

</comment><comment><USER36> maybe all routers should have an emergency login</comment>


Amazon Associates Arbitrage: Amazon's Own Success May Be Hurting Themselves - <AUTHOR> http://jmarbach.com/amazon-associates-arbitrage-how-amazons-own-success-may-be-hurting-themselves <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem like a terrible deal for Amazon. Amazon effectively paid $0.036 per click, which in the grand scheme of things is not that much. It's a premium on top of what Reddit charged ($0.02/click), but then Amazon didn't have to pay any humans to write and set up those ads, nor research where to put the ads. Basically they paid a premium to have a third-party figure out the advertising for them.

Plus, the associates program has other benefits for Amazon. As the article points out, authors use affiliate links to promote their books for sale on Amazon so they can get a higher cut of the profits. Seems like that scheme, not even limited to books, would motiviate a lot of people to sell their wares on Amazon.

And then there's the benefit of squeezing out other affiliate link programs. An ad can only have one affiliate link, so by making the Amazon program attractive they out-compete other stores in the ads with affiliate links marketplace.

<comment><USER3> It's a bad deal for Amazon if, as the author assumes, the people aren't buying the product featured in the ad, but rather just happen to buy something else from Amazon within the 24 hour window without any connection to having seen the ad.

I wouldn't be surprised if in future amazon changes the system so that it only pays the fees when the original product from the link is purchased (or perhaps switches to this only for prime users.)

<comment><USER4> I disagree.

I've been in the Amazon Associates program for several years - at one point, I had an LLC set up specifically for it, because my state at that time was having a bit of a legal battle with them.

My job is to get people on Amazon's site. _Why_ they're on the site almost doesn't matter, because my job ends when the user's eyeballs hit Amazon's page.

Amazon's job is to convert eyeballs on their pages into sales - and they're _really_ good at their job, as is evidenced by their position in the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you have access to cheap traffic that's not complete garbage, giving it to Amazon is one of the dumbest things you can do.

I really tried AA on a few of my sites, and eventually gave up and switched back to Adsense. I even created a custom ad system which tried different Amazon products, tracked impressions and clicks, which gave me the data on which ads were more likely to be clicked on. I went up from the initial 0.5% CTR to 5% CTR, which I felt really proud of. But then you have to realize that once these people land on Amazon, they have to convert again in order for you to get paid, and the conversion rate is like 1-2%.

So you end up with shit like this: 250 clicks, 4 items ordered, $2.40 earned (straight from the earning report).

Now think how much Adsense would pay you for 250 clicks. I average $0.432 per click (just checked). So $108 is what I'd expect to earn with Google. That's 45 times more than Amazon.

<comment><USER4> I run several sites, one of which is mostly gun reviews. I know my audience on that site very well, and I can hand-select Amazon products that will sell.

On some pages, I have ads for things like a P-38 can opener. They're around $3 each or $10 for 10. Something like 5% of my traffic clicks that ad, and 70% buys the product. Because it's so cheap, I make only a couple of pennies per sale... but the number of items sold bumps me from the default 4% commission for the month to 6.5% or more without working for it.

On other pages I might link to a $400 rifle optic, or a $50 gunsmithing book. Because of all those little sales, I make $26 on that optic instead of $16 - it makes a big difference.

I've put Adsense on those pages in the past, and it averages around 10% of the revenue I get from Amazon.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting. 70% buy rate is tremendous though. I've never heard of anything like that.

I targeted the products to my audience too, and still didn't get above 2%.

<comment><USER4> It's not a lot of traffic, but it's consistent. More normal is 5-7% for most things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To anyone who thinks this is a great idea, read and understand the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement [https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement](https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement) and the Linking Requirements. Buying search ads and using redircting links may lead to account closure. Usually ad links are redircted and even redirects within your own domain for tracking purposes can cause trouble. When in doubt, ask the associates team before implementing questionable advice you found on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have an Amazon Associates website and I've considered trying to use ads to generate traffic. This adds another step in the process vs what the article describes. Users have to click on the ad, click on my affiliate link, then make a purchase.

Users of my site click on an affiliate link about 40% of the time and those that do make a purchase about 2.5% of the time with an average commission of $5. This means I make about $0.05 per visitor so I would need ads with a CPC less than that. In my niche this does not seem remotely possible.

Luckily I'm getting over 1,200 visitors per day without paying for them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I built an app to help make Amazon and iTunes affiliate links from iOS, because I was playing with some similar schemes. Might be useful to others interested in this. The app is currently free, though I'll likely add an in app purchase of some kind soon.

[https://geo.itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rivet-effortless- affilia...](https://geo.itunes.apple.com/ca/app/rivet-effortless- affiliate/id961301050?at=11lJMF&ct=hn&pt=273687&mt=8) [http://rivet.link](http://rivet.link)

<comment><USER9> Perhaps you could make one in every x links be an affiliate link with your key, and the IAP get rid of that?

<comment><USER8> I've thought about that, but I haven't figured out how to clearly communicate what's happening and make sure it's not percieved as scummy/untrustworthy behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If we were to dive in further, we can also expand on the ad-commission arbitrage and go ad-ad arbitrage. By finding price differences between ad exchanges, one can find arbitrage opportunities. Granted this would apply to display inventory on a CPM basis. Here is an article that sheds some light: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-07/high- speed...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-07/high-speed-ad- traders-profit-by-arbitraging-your-eyeballs)

</comment><comment><USER11> Note: You can still put affiliate links in AdWords, and many people do. Google just has a higher bar than it used to.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems similar to cookie stuffing, which is prohibited by amazon. The idea is to send lots of low quality traffic to skim commissions from the session

A major problem is that amazon has a 2-month lag in payments (feb payment are made in late april), so it would really suck to spend $1000's on ads and not get paid.

<comment><USER13> It's not really cookie stuffing. In the end, people have to click on the ad to get the cookie.

Cookie stuffing would be, for example, HN embedding a hidden iframe with their Amazon code and placing cookies on users.

I did something similar a couple of years ago with a _very_ cheap traffic source I found. I bought traffic and sent it straight to the Amazon homepage. I had a good run for about 4-5 months. On my last month I really ramped up traffic, spent like $250 and made around $6k in a single month. But amazon caught on and like you said, cancelled my account and didn't pay me.

It's a sucky thing to do I guess. I know of massive operations where guys are pulling in $10-20k per month. If someone wanted to really put their brains in to it, cookie stuffing is very hard to detect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where is the arbitrage?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pay $0.02 per click, send that click to Amazon, earn $0.04 per click. Earn $0.02 per click margin for funneling cheaply acquired traffic to an entity that is willing and able to pay more for that click.

<comment><USER15> I'd love to know where you can pay that amount per click

<comment><AUTHOR> The cost per click is dependent on an ad with a high CTR, in addition to a low cost per thousand impressions. Reddit ads, as mentioned in the post for example, are one place with low priced ad inventory.

<comment><USER16> You pay reddit per impression, not per click. Getting an ad that works out to $0.02 per click is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you're just trying to make them buy something on Amazon. Clickbait doesn't lead to sales very much, and advertising to capture attention of people who'd actually buy it leads to a very high cost per click.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The End of Empire - <AUTHOR> https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-end-of-empire/ <comment><USER2>
      This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history

The 282,000 Allied war dead (and 1.3 million overall dead) from the Vietnam War might disagree.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose human loss was not the prevailing factor in the author's determination.</comment></comment>


Technical details of the Google Street View WiFi controversy [May 2010]  - <AUTHOR> http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2010/05/technical-details-of-street-view-wifi.html

<comment><USER2> Surely Google knew they were saving the packet payloads, even if they didn't have any intended use for them. That is not the kind of detail a programmer can simply overlook. Calling it an "accident" is certainly disingenuous. The only accident was not realizing that people would care so much.

<comment><USER3> Consider it a favor from Google to point out how insecure wifis are if you don't use any encryption.

<comment><USER4> Consider it a favor when criminals break into your improperly secured house and steal all your stuff.

<comment><USER3> Except that Google did not steal, they only warned people and shown that it's possible.

<comment><USER4> If someone got a key logger and logged your bank account name and code would that be considered stealing or "warning you what's possible"?

<comment><USER3> It depends on what he would use it for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are several comments below the article which noted that Google had turned over data to external French auditors, who reported finding passwords, emails, and other sensitive information in the WiFi data captured by Google. Personally, I would be more worried by external auditors having access to the data than Google.

<comment><USER4> Google having it is the same thing as external auditors having it. They've said as much on several occasions (e.g. "If you don't have anything to hide...").

<comment><USER5> Wrong. Google has a vested interest in protecting the information (whether or not they internally exploit it for contextual advertising is another issue). External auditors have more incentive to leak the information to increase public outrage at Google.

<comment><USER4> Google's vested interests are irrelevant. The government can take any or all of their information any time they want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> An interesting thought: should we blame Google or should we blame the unencrypted wifi hot spots?

The fact that it's so easy to sniff unencrypted wifis should be more worrying. I mean Google turned over the raw data, I may do the same and intentionally sniff even more data, steal everybody's password and not admit it.

Like the author said, you can punish Google, but that won't make those hotspots more secure. And you never know when will a real evil guy come to the neighborhood.

<comment><USER3> Looks like some trolls decided to go on a downvote spree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "If you don't encrypt your traffic, then by implication, you don't care if people eavesdrop on it."

<comment><USER5> Isn't that like saying "if you don't lock your mailbox, then by implication you don't care if people read your mail"? Or, "if you don't lock your telephone junction box, then by implication you don't care if people tap your phone"?

Although I don't agree with your quoted statement, I don't think Google's capturing of data should be considered criminal, either.

<comment><USER7> The difference is wifi broadcasts that information.

<comment><USER5> Of course. I agree that it shouldn't be illegal to access it; however, simply being trivially accessible doesn't necessarily mean people don't care.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ADD Nation, 90% of Social Media Referrals Don't Read - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/12/13/add-nation-90-of-social-media-referrals-dont-read/ <comment><USER2> "It was a startling realization, but all the amazing 'views' I get from sites like HackerNews, Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon are 80-90% meaningless. Not only do very few of them revisit my site, but the vast majority of folks that find my blog posts from social sites leave in under 10seconds. That's an obvious signal to me that they aren't even reading the first paragraph. How can anyone really judge the value of an article in under 10 seconds without reading any of it? The obvious answer, they can't."

I am very surprised that this is news to this blogger. Jakob Nielsen has been letting people know this for years,

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>

that people read very little on the Web,

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html>

but maybe most people have never read those articles. Hm.

But to respond to the author of the submitted blog post, why SHOULD I read for more than ten seconds if the first ten seconds don't provide a rationale for reading further? I do read several articles a day in full length, but they had better be well written and informative, as there are millions of other Web postings out there competing for my attention and time.

<comment><USER3> "How can anyone really judge the value of an article in under 10 seconds without reading any of it? The obvious answer, they can't."

I was curious about this so I clicked on the link. The actual answer is that you can tell a lot about a site in just a second or two. As soon as I saw the tag cloud, I was gone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh boy. I love the cloud, never realized how polarizing it is. Do you think most folks hate cumulus? Any idea why?

Or do you think the topics (inspiration, entrepreneurship, leadership, mind) are danger signals to readers?

By the way, thanks a bunch for saying something. Feedback on touchy issues is a big help to improving the site. Contrary to the stats I've collected so far, I really do want people to get a positive first impression from the blog.</comment></comment></comment>


DRM Helmets: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreillynet.com/1540.html <comment><USER2> Hey, I wrote this (12 years ago)!

And, was just yesterday thinking of an update based on Facebook-Oculus and being confined to a brand-friendly Likerverse. A possible title would be, "I have no down-thumbs, and I must dislike."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream)

</comment><comment><USER3> The trouble with DRM helmets is that they fail to prevent the #1 source of unauthorized media consumption - individual recollection of previously- consumed content (the "memory hole" that has been as of yet unclosed).

To achieve the full protection of creators' rights, it is imperative that the content industry develop no less than a neurological solution, to implement a paywall between the piracy-laden hippocampus and the rest of the digital- media-consumer brain.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, trepanation can succeed where meeker DRM fails.

It is sometimes said of great creators that they "open a vein" for their art, and "pour their blood" into their works.

Can we do anything less, as consumers, to protect their exclusive rights?

<comment><USER4> Don't ever forget that bittorrent was originally brought here by time- travelling librarians, and some day they may return.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reality is weirder.

People now crave for HDMI on their devices even though it has less color than the previous analog offerings, or if it has the same amount of color, less frames.

but everyone thinks HDMI is good for them and will never buy anything without it. DRM helmet has won.

<comment><USER6> I thought we went to HDMI because VGA ports are terrible, and VGA starts to flake out at higher resolutions.

Is there anything stopping HDMI doing 4k at 60FPS?

<comment><USER5> no, we went to DVI because VGA was awfull.

hdmi is just to add drm.

<comment><USER6> Also HDMI is a much nicer port. DVI is still that horrid old giant screw in bollocks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unicode is tricky in Java and might be impossible in C++ (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.blakeramsdell.com/techblog/2006/06/10/unicode-is-tricky-in-java-and-might-be-impossible-in-c/

<comment><USER2> Aha, I have uncovered it. There are two problems. One is that apparently std::locale is horribly, horribly broken in the C++ standard library for Mac OS X. You can work around this by using C, like Real Programmers. The other problem is that without some form of setlocale, the standard library will run in "C" or "POSIX" mode, which can do nothing at all interesting with Unicode. By running setlocale, or by running std::locale::global (std::locale ("")) on a platform with a C++ library that works, it will print appropriately.

Interestingly on my Ubuntu box, before I put the std::locale in it was printing "I have EUR100 to my name.", which is a pretty cool fallback.

<comment><USER3> setlocale() in C and C++ affects the entire process. Setting it to anything other than the "C" locale very likely breaks stuff elsewhere and it's completely unpredictable.

Realistically, for serious text processing you need to leave the entire broken POSIX locale system and C++ wchar_t alone and work with libraries such as ICU.

<comment><USER4> ...which isn't the end of the world, since ICU comes with a bunch of stuff that makes life bearable when developing international software, like language-aware collation and regular expressions. If you're going to be developing real i18n software in C++, you're always going to be using ICU or something like it. There's no reason to bother with std::locale.

In fact, I'm guessing that Apple never got around to fixing this because they probably don't use std::locale for real i18n work internally.

(update: the ICU homepage says that Mac OSX uses ICU internally -- <http://site.icu-project.org/>)

<comment><USER3> Seems my post was very unclear and I apologize for that. What I meant to say is:

Try to avoid POSIX locales at all cost. Use ICU!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Err...this works fine for me if I use UTF-8 rather than wide strings, eg:

std::string s("foo\u203D"); std::cout << s << std::endl;

Also, he's completely wrong about the program terminating on output of a wide string, it's just that wcout is broken. If he had tried causing output afterwards with, say, printf(), he'd notice the program is still alive. Or running it in GDB would show this just as well. It's generally speaking a bad idea to test whether your program is alive, using the same mechanism that you suspect of killing it!

</comment><comment><USER6> afaik, when not using literal non-ascii characters in java source code you're supposed to use native2ascii. Running it on my mac gives this:

      $ native2ascii Foo.java
      public class Foo
      {
         public static void main(String[] args)
         {
             System.out.println("I have \u201a\u00c7\u00a8100 to my name.");
         }
      }

The resulting program from that works perfectly fine in my mac terminal, which makes the "I know Java pretty well" statement pretty suspicious...

</comment><comment><USER7> Yet it works in cat. So you can at least program the solution in C, compile it with cpp, and then use it from inside your C++ program.

<comment><USER8> Presumably it's the difference between a text-mode filehandle and a binary- mode filehandle.

So (untested, because I'm baking a cake) printing to fdopen(1, "wb") should just send bytes, allowing printf etc to work?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Old, but the MacRoman issue in Java bit me today so I thought someone else might benefit.

MacRoman? In 2009? Really?

<comment><USER9> It's even worse than the usual sin of pretending that DPI is remotely meaningful on a screen and should be platform-specific because of some shit you read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting article, but it would really help me believe the author knows the topic (text encoding) by not having goofy HTML entity encoding scattered all over the place (making the C++ code extremely hard to read) and not use smart quotes in the code samples.

</comment><comment><USER11> Better headline would be 'Unicode is broken in OS X'. Lets just try out for fun how Linux box handles this: <http://codepad.org/vIa5Byya>

Yeah right, Unicode might be impossible in C++ ...

... on OS X

</comment><comment><USER12> I print unicode strings to a Mac terminal all the time without problems. just send a string formatted as UTF8 to puts(), printf(), or similar.

It never would have occurred to me to use the built-in locale stuff. That's heading for a world of hurt.

</comment><comment><USER13> \u20ac is not UTF8; it's UCS2. If you set the locale to UTF8 then you need to printf with UTF8 and not UCS2 (or UTF16).

<comment><USER2> \u20ac specifies a code point, not an encoding. (specifically the code point 000020AC). The encoding of wchar_t in C89 is up to the implementor, and in particular GCC uses UCS4 on most platforms. But this is besides the point; C99 and C++ both require that any C language processor that runs across that sequence of characters to _immediately_ interpret it as the Unicode character €, or rather to behave as if it did. So you can have function names like "b\u00EAte" if you were for some reason incapable of typing ê.

What setting the locale to UTF-8 does is require (well, for very weak definitions of require; the standard is pretty damned quiet on anything other than C or POSIX locales) that the Unicode character sequence in question be output in the UTF-8 encoding. Presumably you could define a locale en_US.UTF-16 that output in UTF-16, although I would point and laugh if you did.

In sum: C89 doesn't say a damn thing of any use about wide chars; just that they exist and here's some convenient functions (and that only in TR1). C99 requires that you be able to specify characters using Unicode code points in wide character strings but otherwise does not specify input or output. The locales, which are standardized only by convention, talk about encoding from a well specified (usually) disk format to whatever the library's internal representation is.</comment></comment>


Customer Success: What The Hell Does It Mean For A SaaS Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trak.io/what-does-customer-success-mean-for-saas-startups/

<comment><USER2> Can't agree more on the onboarding process! Other than that good tips!</comment>


Facebook nixes access to chats outside of Messenger walled garden - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/06/facebook-mobile-website-messenger-blocked/ <comment><USER2> Not having this in iOS yet. Will probably try end up using Messenger only via desktop if this happens...</comment>


Larry Ellison's Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/09/25/larry-ellisons-brilliant-anti-cloud-computing-rant/ <comment><USER2> This is just part of Larry Ellison's talk about cloud computing, it was made to keep shareholders happy by downplaying the hype for cloud computing, it's not about the technology itself.

Larry Ellison doesn't like cloud computing because despite all the benefits of this advancement it would turn his companies business models upside down. Oracle would lose large amounts of money because they rely on massive licensing deals and expensive maintenance (assuming they go SaaS).

They have developed an independent unit to build out their on-demand efforts, just as Innovators Dilemma recommends when faced with a disruptive technology.

But the market is still to new and if Oracle made a major shift toward it, it would cannibalize a large portion of their profits. Therefore dropping the share price.

<comment><USER3> I dunno about that, Oracle have been pushing "grid" computing long since before "cloud" became fashionable.

<comment><USER4> The idea behind this is that every company buys their own Oracle-based grid. This means lots-of-money for them.

If everyone switches to "the cloud" with non-relational data stores, that's not so good for them. (Even if "the cloud" is Oracle-backed, they still only sell one copy.) They have made a lot of money convincing people that their product is magical, and they don't want to lose out on that.

<comment><USER5> >They have made a lot of money convincing people that their product is magical, and they don't want to lose out on that.

Couldn't agree more. Oracle currently has this going for them:

[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Software- Problem,-A-Market...](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Software- Problem,-A-Marketing-Solution.aspx)

(to quote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "it's true even if it didn't happen").

<comment><USER3> You know, back in the day, Oracle did _exactly the same thing_ themselves - they released their product on IBM mainframes because no-one would take them seriously otherwise. They even had to leverage a consulting contract with the CIA to claim to be "government contractors" to convince IBM to sell them ones.

By no means did they invent this strategy, nor are they the only ones to use it, they're not even the only database vendor. MySQL relies equally on "magic". Selling on your technological merits doesn't work. Look at Sybase and Informix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is he really railing against cloud computing, or instead the rush to label everything cloud computing? It sounds like he embraces the model, he just doesn't like the dopey name (and inclusion of everything internet-related under the cloud computing umbrella).

same could be said of "web 2.0" or "information super highway" which were similarly overly-hyped and overly-applied.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out - <AUTHOR> I'm the owner of small construction business and I need to get access to an old gmail for recovery purposes that Google has suspended for nonpayment.
I can't get a hold of anyone at the same time that my email is more important than ever. Google suggests to "contact their support, may take 7 days" even after I successfully entered the phone 2FA and a recovery email code.
Every day I'm locked out things get worse.
Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?
Thank you HN <comment><USER2> A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What a waste.

Unless you get rescued here by a personal favor of a Googler, I would imagine that account is good as dead.

<comment><USER3> 2 factor authentication (w/ security tokens, mobile "apps" etc.) comes with an inherent risk of getting locked out of stuff. Most of the time you can mitigate that risk by generating "recovery" codes in advance, but it's still something to be aware of.

<comment><USER2> Yeah for sure, It was kind of my fault. It all happened very quickly, I think 2FA was relatively new at the time. I kept getting 'recommendations' from Google to enable it to be more secure.

As a dutiful user I obliged, and downloaded the authenticator app. I think it gave me 10 one time recovery codes, but of course I didn't back them up externally :)

I was having some performance issues with my Samsung phone at the time, and a couple days later, did a factory reset. Then when it came back on and I tried to log into my google account, my stomach sank to the floor when I realized I could not get in without the authenticator app.

That was that. Everything gone. What an idiot :) Couldn't even get on through a computer without the stupid codes I could no longer generate. Answered all the questions, identified specific emails, personal info etc. Google was not impressed.

<comment><USER3> > I kept getting 'recommendations' from Google to enable it to be more secure.

Yes, this is problematic in itself. Hardware-based 2FA is not an unqualified win; I definitely would _not_ want to use it without some _very_ robust contingency plans of what to do if my authentication device gets bricked or otherwise malfunctions.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. The whole app based 2FA does not seem great in retrospect. I accidentally bricked my whole account, by simple user error. That's a good point, that it could just happen from a hardware malfunction as well.

Seems like most 2FA these days is based on the service sending you the code by text or email. Sounds like a much better approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does everyone seem to be glossing over the fact they said 'suspended for nonpayment'?

And it doesn't seem like they're trying to pay their bill, but just get that one email out of the account...

Maybe google isn't in the wrong here.

<comment><USER5> Maybe that one email is the login info to their bank?

<comment><USER6> There are other avenues to deal with your bank.

<comment><USER3> Those avenues tend to involve being physically present at some bank branch (or perhaps an ATM). Something that's not really feasible in the time of Corona.

<comment><USER7> I mean, maybe? I call my banks to do all manner of things all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please email me (email in profile) and I will try to get you support internally.

<comment><USER9> HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.

<comment><USER10> I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.

<comment><USER11> It's obvious that Google doesn't want to incur the cost of client support staff.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours. Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.

<comment><USER13> If you use Google services for business activities you'd presumably pay for a support tier. For the consumer side I suspect, with over 2 billion users, it's pretty much impossible to offer human support at scale. That's not even taking into account malicious actors that would use the support as an attack vector. I might be mistaken. Is there an example of a company with that big a user base which offers human support for everyone?

<comment><USER12> I suppose you can argue users vs customers, but Amazon does a much better job. Their support isn't perfect, it's off-shored, but it's still good enough for most purposes, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Somewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill because the account didn't exist anymore. Eventually we got ahold of support and had them link the AdSense account to another Google account so it could be accessed. Theres a lot of systems at play with Google and I imagine stuff like this is overlooked quite often.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo is/was the same.

I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups account tied to that account.

I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.

<comment><USER16> Well at least now that Yahoo has shut down groups, that problem has gone away.

<comment><USER17> It's not completely shutdown. [1]

> On February 1, 2020, Yahoo! removed online access to discussions and all > other features except simple membership management, essentially turning all > groups into mailing lists.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How many other struggling businesses are facing the the same issue but don't know about the "get on the HN front page" back-channel to human tech support?

</comment><comment><USER19> > may take 7 days

This is one of the things at minimum that fends off takeover accounts from people demanding immediate access and faking urgency, while also notifying all associated accounts that someone is trying to recover access and giving them time to respond.

</comment><comment><USER20> We had this with one of our employees. Email was locked for 2 weeks due to a bug on google's end. Was impossible to get support even if you have a paid account and a relatively large team.

</comment><comment><USER21> A recommendation going forward: make sure to host emails on a domain you control yourself. This will allow to change service provider for mail hosting when they act like this.

<comment><USER17> The OP is talking about a paid service, which I presume isn't a gmail.com address (otherwise why the suspension for non-payment?). To add to your advice, just having an own domain doesn't help if you don't download and store _all_ mails on a computer or other device so that you don't have to resort to a server to get older content you need whenever you need it.

<comment><USER21> Of cause it helps. It just doesn't provide your old mails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Relying on Google for any business seems like potential suicide. When they decide you violated whatever they come up with, you are basically fucked. That is the reason why I never used Google+ - they were deleting people's email accounts. I hope they won't delete my email because of this comment ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've had this happen in the past. I used another GSuite account I had access to to get a phone support PIN and actually got someone on the phone and then kept calling back until I got a rep who would work with me on the account I did not have access to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

I can't tell you how grateful I am. I'm actually a little emotional, thinking of all the people who upvoted this post until it got in front of the people it needed to (and thanks so much Aayush!).

God bless everyone on this site. You saved me.

</comment><comment><USER24> This. Unless you are big enough to have a customer engineer assigned to you, as good as their services are I see people having similar issues again and again with their lack of support

</comment><comment><USER25> This kind of articles make me think that it must be a good decision to not use 2 FA after all. I originally disabled it to test aerc ([https://aerc- mail.org](https://aerc-mail.org))

</comment><comment><USER26> If you used a desktop or mobile app, they download a backup of emails locally. If you're just trying to read an old email, you could check your phone or computer's mail app to find the local copy.

<comment><USER27> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Startup idea: backup your google everything.

<comment><USER29> I back up all my gmail locally with "gmvault". I am not affiliated, other than a satisfied user: [http://gmvault.org/](http://gmvault.org/)

<comment><USER30> Sign in is currently disked - "this app has not yet been verified by Google in order to use Google Sin In"

<comment><USER29> You can work around it: [https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335](https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does Google Takeout [https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1](https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1) work in this cases? And does GDPR can be applied in this cases?

</comment><comment><USER32> Doesn't Google takeout remain functional even for locked accounts ? You can download anything in that mail account even when it's blocked.

</comment><comment><USER33> You might have to file a lawsuit and then you might be able to get it through discovery.

</comment><comment><USER34> This seems to happen more and more often.</comment>


Multi-Cloud Availability for Financial Organizations:Data Security&Local Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jelastic.com/2017/02/14/multi-cloud-availability-for-financial-organizations-data-security-local-hosting-and-fast-time-to-market/ <comment><USER2> Hey,

Can you share your contact info in connection with your other post regarding feedback from bloggers and tech enthusiasts?</comment>


The Runaway General - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

<comment><AUTHOR> Gen Stanley McChrystal was sacked after this article by Rolling Stone. The back story is here ~ <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8044899.stm>

_"... The embarrassing stasis does suggest it defined one potential purpose of the website as selling magazines. And the best way of selling magazines, or newspapers, in the minds of some publishers, is to establish a web presence but to stop people reading your content. ..."_

A story by the Guardian how Rolling Stone failed to capitalise the scoop online ~ [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/28/emily-bell- mcchr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/28/emily-bell-mcchrystal- rolling-stone)</comment>


Html5 headings and document sectioning - <AUTHOR> http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/html5-sectioning-document-outline

<comment><USER2> The fact that the new article and section elements can now have their own header hierarchy doesn't mean we should "use only one heading element (h1...)". The beauty isn't that we don't have to think about the hierarchy anymore but that now each distinct "document" on the page can have it's own h1-hn hierarchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but why would you still want to use the other hn elements? The only reason I see is for subheadings within a hgroup, but I'm not a big fan of that tag.

<comment><USER3> Well, look at your own article. There's an h2 tag wrapped around each of the subheadings (e.g. "NO MORE H2-H5").

How do you propose content authors mark these up if they don't use an hn tag?

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that the subheading in my articles is really part of the main heading. Without it the heading itself loses meaning. When using the hgroup tag only the main title is considered for the document outline so I'm losing valuable information there. As for the fix, I'd rather split both titles in the h1 tag itself. That way both titles remain 1 whole, even for the document outline.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Galaxy S III Makes iPhone 4S Look Like An Old-Time Nokia - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dinohusejnovic.com/2011/10/20/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-makes-iphone-4s-look-like-an-old-time-nokia/

<comment><USER2> The iPhone and iPad could really use more memory. I was trying to figure out why Skype and Vtok get killed while in the background and in the diagnostics section there are literally dozens of reports of low memory conditions killing Skype, vtok and Mobile Safari.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you have a faster processor working on a smaller core, doesn't that mean that if you underclock it, you will get better battery performance -- more bang for the juice?

The only problem with Android and battery life is the way it manages services and how it deals with services that abuse the processor. An app such as Watchdog, combined with JuiceDefender fixes the issue. On my Galaxy S II, I can go to bed with 98% battery and wake up with 98% battery. The processor is set to 200Mhz at sleep and any service using more than 1% of the processor is automatically killed (unless I want it to run)

</comment><comment><USER3> A bigger processor and more memory isn't something that most users are concerned with. The important thing that people will see on a phone like this is that it's enormous (4.6" vs 3.5") and the huge impact this (as well as the processor) will have on battery life. Android already has a reputation for terrible battery life.

<comment><USER4> I would imagine that the extra RAM doesn't help battery life either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. Nothing there but an abbreviated spec sheet. Is this the most content- free article ever?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most other articles had the specs intertwined into an article, and I just wanted to share the specs compared that go beyond iPhone 4S'.</comment></comment>


Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v504/n7478/full/nature12858.html

<comment><USER2> As I read about the offshore drilling strategies, the first thought that came to my mind was, "At least a drilling accident resulting in a leak is unlikely to do much environmental damage to the ocean and the beaches near the rig."

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.sci-news.com/geology/science-fresh-groundwater- re...](http://www.sci-news.com/geology/science-fresh-groundwater-reserves- ocean-01606.html)

<comment><USER4> > _" Knowing about these [non-renewable] reserves is great news because this > volume of water could sustain some regions for decades"_

Let's destroy a 100,000 year old fresh water ecosystem so we can push off sustainable water systems for a few decades!

Liquidate our ecological life-support system and name it "growth"? Not a smart move, space monkeys.

[http://i.imgur.com/gH0VvPD.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/gH0VvPD.jpg)

<comment><USER5> At the rate we are daming rivers, we will destroy many river ecosystems. This seems less harmful than dams and could be a bridge until the energy costs of desalination are low enough .

If this discovery spurs investment in desalination (since this is simply cheaper desalination due to the lower salinity) that would an added benefit as it would accelerate the move toward desalination. Perhaps we could skip the dams entirely.

<comment><USER6> We could stop and reverse damming rivers. That's another alternative. Less people living in deserts. Less people in general.

I'd rather pursue those than start messing with yet another part of the planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I clicked the link and here is what I am greeted with:

"Purchase article full text and PDF: £22"

Seriously..</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know how to export raw data out of Google Analytics? - <AUTHOR> I want to export it to an excel or CSV file so I can run my own algorithms on it. Anyone know an easy way to export the raw data??<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> Look into Google BigQuery, it can suck up hit-level data from GA so you can query it how you want. I'd imagine you can export data how you want. Its not free though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think (and I don't know for sure) that the raw hit data is not available due to your visitors' privacy.

You'd be better off doing processing of your own server logs.

<comment><USER4> I concur. There's a query explorer here [https://ga-dev- tools.appspot.com/query-explorer/](https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/query- explorer/) to download post aggregation data, but never heard of it providing raw data.

If op's planning for the future a number of system exists to collect analytics, but he'll need to correlate views with ga to deanonimize audiences. Not impossible, but not the most convenient and will work only from the implementation day forward

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know of decent, free server side analytics that can maybe export to GA or has an interface similar to GA?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is only available for premium users</comment>


How to stay anonymous online - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2016/stay-anonymous-online-0711 <comment><USER2> Previously [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073942)

and [https://github.com/kwonalbert/riffle](https://github.com/kwonalbert/riffle) (author indicates that security bugs exist)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Verifying the proof does require checking it against copies of the messages > the server received. So with Riffle, users send their initial messages to > not just the first server in the mixnet but all of them, simultaneously. > Servers can then independently check for tampering."

So every packet has to be sent to every server in the network? That's going to cause some scaling problems.

It's especially curious that they mention file sharing as an application, because if the above is true this would be even less fit for that purpose than Tor. Maybe for low-bandwidth stuff like messaging.

EDIT: From the paper, "However, each Riposte client must submit a message proportional to thesquare root of the size of the whole database (i.e., collection of all clients' data), making it unsuitable for sharing large messages among many clients"

It goes on to describe use cases like microblogging and messaging. So I guess it's just the article author misrepresenting the thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Link to the paper: [https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/99859/9277182...](https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/99859/927718269-MIT.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> "They've been around for 20, 25 years, and nobody has had this insight until now." haha. sure.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can't; Web is a Honeypot for your regime;</comment>


What is Chrome's SameSite cookie update? - <AUTHOR> https://digiday.com/media/what-is-chrome-samesite/ <comment><USER2> This article is very odd, it frames the change as a third-party/tracking change when it is in fact a (very effective) solution against CSRF attacks. Sites that want to track you with third party cookies can simply set SameSite to None and that's that.

This change is 100% for sites that got their cookies sent from other sites by mistake.

More (and accurate) information here: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite)

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, the change makes it easier to identify tracking cookies.

<comment><USER2> Because you can tell right away if they're third-party cookies and don't need to wait for them to be used in that manner, you mean? That's an interesting (and welcome, to me) side-effect, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this the same as denying third party cookies?</comment>


Court Issues Dangerous Decision: Ethiopia Is Free to Spy on Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/dc-circuit-court-issues-dangerous-decision-cybersecurity-ethiopia-free-spy <comment><USER2> I don't get the outrage. Sovereign governments have been spying on citizens of other countries forever, and we already have ways to respond - diplomacy (toss out their spies, or just a couple of random diplomats), counter-espionage (which covers all manner of things), and finally, war.

If you catch their spies in the country, they are prosecuted under US law. If you catch your citizens anywhere in the world, they are also prosecuted under US law. But you can't sue the other country in a US court. It would be like suing the USSR during the cold war.

You'd expect the US government to react in this case by whatever means necessary. Not the court system - what do they expect, the Ethiopian government to come and defend themselves in a US court?

And what if you flip the scenario - the US does the same thing (espionage). Now, can a Ethiopian citizen sue the US government in an Ethiopian court and get a remedy even if they win? Fat chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting because the US government has charged, extradited and imprisoned criminals who have never touched US soil.</comment>


Convert a physical chessboard into a digital one - <AUTHOR> https://tech.bakkenbaeck.com/post/chessvision <comment><USER2> Interesting work, and here are a few thoughts (in no particular order).

10 seconds seems very high for what's being done here. We can get realtime facial recognition (at like 30-60fps). Recognizing chess pieces ought to be trivial by comparison.

If you're taking the rules seriously, there should be a _lot_ more rules: there are many (many) invalid board states. It seems strange focusing on just a couple. In fact, it seems strange looking at rules altogether. Why not simply have your algorithm figure out what piece is at what position?

SURF or SIFT might be useful here; where you're looking for features that identify specific pieces. In other words, I'm not totally sure if ML is necessary. I would consider processing the image with something like a canny filter and then running a shape detection on the contours.

Either way, really cool project, and great write-up!

</comment><comment><USER3> The chess pieces don't have to be recognized via a neural network. You just need to track the delta of fields with chess pieces between moves and then you know which piece moved to which field.

So, just an optical recognition of empty field vs used field is required. This works since the starting position of chess pieces is always the same.

This way old inductive chess computer from Mephisto worked (the high-end models had inductive fields).

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is being built to follow along a game in progress (though that would be an interesting application) but rather capture a current position and transfer it to a digital representation, for example for computer analysis. So there is no delta to track.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rated standard tournament chess involves a tedious process of annotating moves on a carbon copy as you play. One to give to the tournament director to enter the game into the database and one to review the game after. So there is a niche market for this.

<comment><USER6> This makes no difference. Players are required to keep notation in tournament games, and the use of external software (like what is used at the top boards at some tournaments) does not absolve the players of this responsibility. Writing down the moves of the game as it is being played is a major part of playing chess, and it is one of the most important things for players to learn because it directly improves play (even disregarding reviewing the games afterwards!).

<comment><USER7> In case this was not meant to be ironical, could you explain how noting moves improves play?

<comment><USER6> I am a chess professional, although more as a teacher than a player, so I have a lot of experience in this field. As caro_douglos pointed out, it slows down the initial reaction to opponent's moves, which is one reason why it instantly improves performance for new players. It forces the player to settle into a certain rhythm of play which prevents silly mistakes.

It is also permitted (and encouraged) to write down the time on the clock after each move, and to record all draw offers, both of which are valuable information during and after the game. If one of my goals is to grind down my opponent's clock in a complex position where I have the initiative, seeing how much more time he is using on average gives me an idea of how long I need to maintain the tension to gain a sufficient time advantage. For example, in a game where both players start with two hours, entering the endgame with 1 hour versus my opponent's 15 minutes is an enormous advantage, even in a position which should otherwise be drawn with perfect play.

Also, in some time controls, players gain extra time after a certain move (generally the 40th), so it can be very important to know exactly when you're going to get that extra hour. These time controls are less common than they used to be.

I have students as young as 5 years old learn how to keep notation after only a few weeks of learning chess. It is a very important skill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're going the ML way, I recommend an end-to-end approach to get significantly more performance (at a data preparation and training cost). Simply generate a dataset of chess boards, and then render them using a 3D software of choice (pretty easy job in blender/etc.). For robustness then you can add various kinds of perturbations, like different camera angles, small displacements for each piece, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did something similar, but with an end-to-end ML approach: [https://towardsdatascience.com/transcribe-live-chess-with- ma...](https://towardsdatascience.com/transcribe-live-chess-with-machine- learning-part-1-928f73306e1f)

</comment><comment><USER10> similar story to [https://github.com/Elucidation/tensorflow_chessbot](https://github.com/Elucidation/tensorflow_chessbot)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very promising! Put me on your mailing list!</comment>


The Dark Side Of Usability - <AUTHOR> http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/01/10/dark-side-of-usability/

<comment><USER2> The gist of this is that people don't internalize a concept if the interface guides them through it.

That's a decent objection if the goal is to teach thought process, danger avoidance, or moral behavior where internalization is the intention.

That said, it also behooves people to try to make some things more universally safe.

For example, I was in Ottawa, Canada a few years ago. They have a lock to go between rivers in the middle of their city, being on the junction between rivers. This concrete structure is in the middle of town with walking trails around it, and features a 5-10 meter drop to water with no guardrail or edge around it.

To my American eyes, this looked quite dangerous as an inexpensive preventative measure could be added to prevent what could be a common accident. On the flipside, not having a guardrail would cause people who were aware of it to become more aware, and general raise their level of awareness, along the lines of this article.

<comment><USER3> In junior high school, my art teacher stored X-acto knives blade up. He believed this would make students more cautious when using the knives.

But in comparison, a 5-10 meter drop without a guardrail does seem unnecessarily dangerous.</comment></comment>


The US Government Wants to Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zbnz/the-government-wants-to-permanently-legalize-the-right-to-repair <comment><USER2> If the Republicans pass this I will be positively surprised.

<comment><USER3> A lot of Republican voters are farm owners [1], and this law is something many owners of trailers, such as John Deer, have been pushing for [2].

[1] Only good source I can find. (Mostly sourced from observation.) [http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/](http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/)

[2] [https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john- deere/](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/)

<comment><USER4> > A lot of Republican voters are farm owners

A single-digit percentage of the quarter or so of registered voters that end up voting for Republicans, even if all US farm owners were Republican voters.

OTOH, that number is much higher in the places Republicans actually win elections, would they are more politically important than their numbers would suggest.

<comment><USER5> Your point is important, although I think farmers' political impact exceeds their voting power, especially in GOP-voting communities.

I know from personal experience that this issue and related issues have become very salient to farmers and those around them. It's not a small issue. When your livelihood depends on a very expensive piece of machinery, being able to repair it yourself (or have it repaired by whomever you want) is important, and farmers are talking to their friends and family about it. They're being screwed, and all they want to do is farm.

Also, this issue is bigger than what it nominally seems, because it affects equipment dealers and mechanics as well. I know dealers who are pissed as hell at Deere--they feel stabbed in the back by them because of this stuff.

This repair stuff is also the tip of the iceberg in terms of Deere's behavior lately too. Many people I know would list the right-to-repair issue as just one in a list of grievances they have against Deere. Over the last decade or so, there's been a huge shift in Deere's behavior, and they've really become kind of monopolistic in their general orientation toward who they deal with. This has angered a lot of people. I suspect the right-to-repair in rural Republican areas might be a kind of symbolic issue, representative of much broader anger at Deere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just have to slip single-payer in as a rider.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully, that will include the right to replace your OS on phones,etc (for when they stop updating them, they might as well be broke).</comment>


Fast Python Serialization with Ray and Apache Arrow - <AUTHOR> https://ray-project.github.io/2017/10/15/fast-python-serialization-with-ray-and-arrow.html <comment><USER2> Robert, this seems an exciting project (I've already looked at it when I stumbled upon previous announcements) but it's lacking a "what's in it for me" factor, and at this point, I effectively don't know if it's for me or not.

"Ray is a flexible, high-performance distributed execution framework." is certainly a nice tagline, but I'm pretty sure there are other projects in this domain - what's the USP ? who's using it and for what ?

<comment><USER3> For Ray, the main use case at the moment is parallel/distributing machine learning algorithms, people have been using it for parallelizing MC(MC) style applications, doing hyperparameter search, (pre-)process data, we are using it for reinforcement learning (and have a library for that, see [http://ray.readthedocs.io/en/latest/rllib.html](http://ray.readthedocs.io/en/latest/rllib.html))

More broadly it is useful for many parallel/distributed Python applications where low latency (~1ms) and high throughput of tasks are a requirement.

<comment><USER4> Python is almost synonymous with shitty performance in my mind; am I just wrong about typical python performance, or are you doing something special to make this of a non-issue (e.g. the way numpy essentially shoves all the work into C), or is the flexibility Ray affords worth the performance penalty for your users?

<comment><USER3> There are two considerations here.

(1) Python single threaded performance: Here, most of the libraries we are using are implemented in C++ (like numpy, TensorFlow, Cython to speed up the code, etc.). Ray is orthogonal to that.

(2) Python parallel performance: Here Python is mostly problematic because of its lack of support for threading (the GIL is one problem here); we handle this problem by using multiple processes and shared memory throughout. Efficient serialization makes this feasible.

The core of Ray is implemented in C++, so performance is not an issue for that; also all of the serialization is implemented in C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apologies for being a debbie downer, but it looks like the authors looked into Protocol Buffers and Flatbuffers.

Did they consider CapnProto?

In my limited experience with efficient serdes for analytics, CapnProto would meet 1 - 4.

Arrow is an in-memory format and CapnProto would afford the ondisc (memmap) heavy lifting with (very) little overhead. My CapnProto/LMDB datastructures allow me to write better than C++ code in Python with comparable runtime performance.

The only issue I have with CapnProto is getting it to run on Windows 7 x64, but it works out of the box on Linux.

<comment><USER3> Author here. From our perspective, CapnProto has similar characteristics as Flatbuffers and the reasons to prefer Arrow over it are the same: We would need to develop a mapping from Python types to CapnProto from scratch and Arrow has many facilities that are useful for us already built (Tensor serialization, code to deal with some Python types like datetimes, zero copy DataFrames, a larger ecosystem for interfacing with other formats like parquet, reading from HDFS, etc.). And it is designed for Big Data. So Arrow was a very natural choice (and it also supports Windows). Wes is doing some amazing work here!

<comment><USER6> It looks like Arrow utilizes FlatBuffers internally [1]. Seems like using the Arrow project builds a lot of scaffolding that'd otherwise need to be built for this particular use case.

1: [https://arrow.apache.org/docs/metadata.html](https://arrow.apache.org/docs/metadata.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's sad that the standard python multiprocessing doesn't allow you to select your own serializers.

<comment><USER8> Indeed it is.

My workaround for the failures of pickle is to use pathos. The API for the multiprocessing module is almost identical to the default multiprocessing module which makes it easy to use as a drop in replacement. Pathos uses Dill to serialise, which can serialise many more things, but you have to pay the price in performance. Although again, you can't swap out Dill for the serialiser of your choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For a moment I was confused with Apache Avro which does serialization.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks cool! How does it compare to dill?

<comment><USER5> Great question.

Not the author, but I am assuming it breaks two of their requirements:

> 4\. ... it should not require reading the entire serialized object

> 5\. ... It should be language independent

I am curious about their thoughts about CapnProto though: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15485082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15485082)

<comment><USER3> Author here. For CapnProto see the answer to the other comment above.

Concerning dill, we have been using it for serializing function and classes (and then switched to cloudpickle because it supports some Python functionality better and the community around it is very active responsive); cloudpickle/dill are great in that they support a very wide variety of Python objects, especially concerning code (functions, lambdas, classes); it is less ideal for large data, because there is no zero copy mechanism, the format is not standardized and serialization/deserialization can be slow, sometimes it is slower than pickle. We do fall back to cloudpickle for objects we don't support like Python lambdas. We also use it to serialize class definitions, so the data associated to classes is serialized using the solution presented above and the code/methods are serialized using cloudpickle. This combines the advantages of both solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is such an awesome project.</comment>


A tale of two decompilers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rocky/python-uncompyle6/wiki/pycdc-compared-with-uncompyle6 <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: In the last 3 years or so I've been working on a decompiler, and it is like a compiler in complexity, engineering, and testing. But different.

Since that URL is to a wiki, this is a better forum for comments. So I am happy to take comments and corrections here.</comment>