Fuzzy Math That's Creating Many Billion-Dollar Tech Valuations - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-fuzzy-insane-math-that-s-creating-so-many-billion-dollar-tech-companies <comment><USER2> Seems to me (as a startup employee) that downside protection and liquidation preferences should be required to be disclosed to all previous stakeholders (employees, prior investors, etc.).

<comment><USER3> as someone who has worked in startups for the last 10 years as always an early employee and disillusioned by it... the VCs think of you as replaceable unlike themselves... more money buys more power... you as an employee have only a single power - "quitting".

<comment><USER4> So, two questions for you (and anyone that cares to answer):

1\. Has a founder ever said "Don't worry, we'll take care of you?"

2\. Has that founder ever delivered during the exit?

<comment><USER5> 1\. No, and I wouldn't believe them if they did.

2\. Nonetheless, they have always delivered more than what was contractually obligated (in the form as a retention bonus at the new company or some other commitment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Notice that the Investor Fear of Missing Out = [(Hopes & Dreams x Rate of Growth) - Valuation]/ Downside Protection . Though you have to guess on some of the values, you can then use this to figure out what people actually think valuations are.

Say my Drone Delivery Tacos startup is going well, we have 10 guys all tacoed out and have delivered 100 tacos, on track to deliver 250 by Friday. We than have a growth rate of 250%. Our hopes and dreams are high, out of a 10 point scale, we are at 9.5. Also, one of the guy's cousins knows a guy that could value us at 100 million dollars. That guy wants a lot of protection though, say 8.0 out of 10. Plug in the numbers and you get: $ -12,500,000 ish. That's how much they actually think you are worth to them. To say this is all about appearances is putting it lightly.

For Uber we know the valuation is 40 Billion smackers, hopes and dreams are at 10/10, Downside protection is lower, call it 5/10, and growth rate is ~300% ([http://www.profitconfidential.com/stock-market/how-does- uber...](http://www.profitconfidential.com/stock-market/how-does-uber-make- money-anticipated-ipo-of-2015/)). So, we get $ -8 Billion dollars, what the investors actually think that Uber is worth.

Crazy times.

{Edit:} My math is off. Hopes and Dreams is in units of $/%/year and Downside Protection is in units of $. Assigning these to a 10 point scale is not exactly correct and they obviously do not cancel each other.

</comment><comment><USER7> So why aren't startup valuations published as a range? This is like a measurement with no error bars.

I know the "real" reason - same reason why TVs are compared on the diagonal measure. But, why don't later investors insist on also learning the lowest possible imputed value, taking into account how investors are acting to protect themselves. Risk is hard to compare, but isn't this what Wall Street does all day?

<comment><USER8> Analysts do exactly this. They pick a handful of metrics and produce a range. For an IPO, this information is usually published by varying sell-side firms for the benefit of their clients and to attract new clients (unless they are underwriting the deal then there's a lock up period - 45 days, IIRC).

The company itself will also have a slide deck for its pre-offering road show that has this analysis done by management. You can usually find these slide decks on an investor relations website or on the SEC Edgar system. It also may be in the SEC registration statement under management analysis - or even under risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Based on the headline, did anyone else expect this article to be about "deep learning"? Seems like everyone and their mother is using machine learning to do X these days.

My concern would be that neither the founders nor the investors understand the math/science behind it well enough to accurately forecast if most of these products could work. I don't know how many VCs have CS PhDs doing their due diligence, hopefully more than I think. Personally I don't care either way, but some academics are gonna get mad if/when the media starts comparing deep learning stuff to financial engineering...

To be clear I think machine learning methods add a lot of value, but given the current climate of hype, I'm seeing more noise and fluff surrounding product possibilities based on these technologies.

<comment><USER10> I was expecting this to be about simple fuzzy logic getting billed as sophisticated machine learning to drive up valuations and hype, or something like that. The actual value of data science is another discussion, but it sure is popular right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is trying to express that "valuation" has different meanings for different companies.

For most companies, valuation is based on the price investors are paying for the stock alone. The point of the article is that, for some tech companies, it's based on the price investors are paying for the stock plus some form of "downside insurance" which pays them back if the stock loses value.

It makes sense that the stock-plus-insurance basket would be more valuable than the stock alone, especially if there is a small probability of the insurer folding and thus a small probability of losing money.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is completely missing the point. These valuation numbers are made up. Say you have a basket of ten oranges, ten apples and ten pears. Someone comes along and says, "I'll give you $20 for your oranges." You give them the oranges and put the twenty dollar bill in the basket. You now announce to the world "This basket of fruit/cash is now worth $60!" It's not. You have no basis for assuming that the market will also pay $2 per apple or pear, but you need a nice round number to shout out to the world.

In this allegory, your oranges are preferred shares that may have "economic terms" like liquidation preferences and participation clauses that could make them 10 or more times more valuable than the common shares of your company. These companies that are now going through 5+ rounds of private financing often are negotiating different terms for each round. But when it comes time to issue a press release--even if they're not intentionally being disingenuous --it's easier to communicate a single number. That number is often just number of outstanding "shares" * purchase price of last funding round.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems to me, that if you take a rational perspective, then if a company like SnapChat has a high valuation then it must have some competitive advantage and effective market plan. Of course, this might just be confirmation bias because I want to believe that such a high valuation could not be the effect of just poor estimation. A different situation could also be true. One might not want to believe that a four year old messaging app might be worth more than some of the most well known names in household products. It's confirmation bias all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER14> Did Bloomberg just discover preferred shares and liquidation preferences? Or is this meant for a lay audience? I'm not sure how many of Bloomberg's readers would find this surprising or newsworthy.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is nohing strange here. It's a market and the price is set to any amount you wish. If someone buys it, good for you.

I saw recently a movie, where there was an example of this happening in the past too, the Tulip Mania[0], where the evaluations were way of the scale. What followed was a crash.

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

<comment><USER16> This isn't just simple price-setting. It's advertising a very different price than the actual valuation, mostly because of the downside protection.

<comment><USER5> The stock that the VC owns and the stock that the employee owns are materially different and thus have different values. The kind of stock the employee has is not for sale.

It is better for employees if the stock they own (or have options for) is initially low-priced (for tax reasons).

This whole "valuation set by auditing" is kind of meaningless -- it's as artificially low as some might think the VC valuation is high. It's based more on regulations about what is valuable than what the market thinks is valuable. For example, cash in the bank, factory equipment, and accounts receivable are worth something -- having a billion free users is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > investors agree to grant higher valuations... in exchange for guarantees > that they'll get their money back first if the company goes public or sells.

Is that not normal? To pay your investors and other preferred stock holders first (along with your creditors and such) back first before those who were granted common stock.

Or is the author saying the preferred/common stock deal is just a tech industry thing?

<comment><USER18> Yes it is normal for investors to be repaid first, However the article is saying is that there is a LIFO arrangement for different investors. Last in , first out.

Example: C round investors , in exchange for new, higher valuation, will be repaid before B or seed round investors. The Liquidation Preference.

If C rounders are paying up for this protection, then I guess it's ok. And if the C round is led by firms that primarily invest in public markets ( T Rowe Price, Wellington, Fidelity etc) then the private company is hoping those firms anchor the next round - an IPO at at least the same or higher valuation.

What is the disaster is when the exit comes, and other public fund managers not previously involved in the deal that need to absorb the remainder of the demand balk at the valuation proposed by the investment bank leading the deal. The public round fetches a lower valuation than the most recent private round(s), and people are not pleased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very similar to "death spiral financing" in which lenders are guaranteed enough stock to return the loan plus interest, regardless of the stock price. Here, investors instead of lenders are receiving very similar guarantees. It doesn't usually work out well for later stage investors.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone here comment on the broader societal and economic impacts and whether this is a threat to capitalism? It seems to me to be a bad thing when inside players can rig the game to become immensely wealthy based on companies that are making little or no money.

</comment><comment><USER21> It looks to me, with liquidation preferences, like the valuation the investors believe is probably closer to "all the money raised"+x% than the published "valuation".

<comment><USER22> Agreed - what I don't understand is why most of the discussion here is about high valuations. The big reveal of the article is that the valuations are known by investors to be illusory - and (colloquially) the VCs are ripping the faces off the entrepreneurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> From the title I thought this was going to be a deep belief network hype piece.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the fear of using the word 'bubble' is reaching a bubble.

<comment><USER25> You could call it a bubble, but it really doesn't matter to anyone if it pops. VC money is a rounding error in the overall economy.

<comment><USER26> > _VC money is a rounding error in the overall economy._

According to Wikipedia, it's no rounding error:

"11% of private sector jobs come from venture-backed companies and venture- backed revenue accounts for 21% of US GDP."

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Snapchat, the photo-messaging app raising cash at a $15 billion valuation, > probably isn't actually worth more than Clorox or Campbell Soup.

Why not?

Edit: Okay, personally and intuitively, I'd value a convenient means of communication more than processed food and snacks.

<comment><USER3> when internet is down, snapchat will not work but clorox and campbell soup will still continue to do their job. that's why :)

<comment><USER28> The internet will never be down again (barring the Apocalypse). Human life changed in the nineties in ways that we have not even begun to grasp.

<comment><USER3> tell that to users of Comcast</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Albatrosses strapped with sensors help spy on illegal fishing boats - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2231442-albatrosses-strapped-with-sensors-help-spy-on-illegal-fishing-boats/ <comment><USER2> Illegal fishing boats start shooting ALL albatrosses - in case they are the spies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Then we'll have to deploy tactical seagulls.

<comment><USER2> Real wingmen...</comment></comment></comment>


The History of Flickr (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1755.html <comment><AUTHOR> The history of flickr (51m 23.3Mb, 2007DEC02) told by flickr co-founder 'Caterina Fake'. Worth listening to because a) it's funny, b) explains development details how flickr grew from gne to a photo sharing site.</comment>


The 180th Meridian (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://macwright.org/2016/09/26/the-180th-meridian.html <comment><USER2> It's wild to see something so obscure - yet so relevant to my work - on the front page of HN. The antimeridian problem has plagued the GIS and satellite imaging communities for years, and as the article illustrates, there is no simple solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really see the point of this post.

Any two points on the earth are connected by a great circle. The two points divide the great circle into two arcs. The length of the shorter arc is the distance between them. The midpoint of the two points is half the distance between them along the shorter arc starting from one point.

Are any of the values above particularly expensive to compute? I can't imagine why I'd want to compute the midpoint between two points by averaging their latitudes and longitudes. Not only does it break if it travels over the prime meridian, but it's also just wrong. The post even says that: "But is the midpoint in longitude, latitude correct? In many cases, it isn't."

<comment><USER4> Explaining it in terms of points and distances is an effort at making the content accessible, but the issues arise when you're dealing with complex shapes, which might not be able to be unambiguously represented: given a sequence of points representing a polygon, it will not always the case that the shorter line connecting two points is the intended one, for example. And it's possible to contrive examples where you have two such shapes, where if you assume that each consecutive pair of points signifies an edge that's the shortest possible line between those two points, and then you naively calculate the intersection of those two polygons, you can end up with a situation where your new, intersected polygon (under the same set of assumptions) has lines that suddenly go the other way around the world. It can get really gnarly really fast. As the article suggests, most people just give up and split the polygons into pieces.

<comment><USER5> > given a sequence of points representing a polygon, it will not always the > case that the shorter line connecting two points is the intended one, for > example

> intersected polygon (under the same set of assumptions) has lines that > suddenly go the other way around the world

would be really cool to actually see these examples

I do not doubt that naive great circle shortest path might fall apart in pathological cases, but I have difficulty understanding why that would be the case. And the article does nothing to explain why this seemingly obvious solution wouldn't work, your comment already was more enlightening.

<comment><USER6> Your simplest Euclidean polygon is the triangle. Imagine the triangle is defined by the cities of London, Tokyo and New York.

Assuming the world is a sphere (which we know it isn't, but it's not disastrously wrong for these purposes), that gives you something that looks like this:

[http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gc?PATH=NYC-TYO-LON-NYC](http://gc.kls2.com/cgi- bin/gc?PATH=NYC-TYO-LON-NYC)

The slightly-curved lines represent the shortest distance between those points; the great circle routes.

Now take your typical world map (probably a Mercator projection) and draw the same triangle on it using straight lines along the shortest distances on the map.

Notice that the triangle on the world map includes within its area a significant chunk of Central Asia and absolutely none of Greenland.

Imagine how unsuccessful you would be trying to intersect the world-map triangle with another polygon; it would be completely meaningless.

<comment><USER5> obviously straight lines on (some) projections are very wonky on a sphere (or geoid), as would be shapes built on those lines. That was not really the question though, the question was that if you have shapes defined by points connected with shortest _great circle_ paths then when (and how) would that fail?

Sibling comment already raised the good point that great circles do not work that well on spheroids and other more complex models of Earth, but I got the impression that it was not what apendleton was referring to

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I experienced a little shell shock reading this post. I ran into all of these problems (and more) while building an interactive editor in VR. Selecting things across the "180th meridian", grouping them, aligning them, distributing them, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not just internally represent longitude as being between 0 to 360 (mod 360)? This way you won't have a discontinuity in direction when going from one longitude to another.

<comment><USER4> You still have a discontinuity, you've just moved it from the antemeridian (+/-180 degrees) to the prime meridian (0 degrees). The issue isn't the sign, it's the wrapping.

In a lot of ways, this is actually worse. Lots of software can ignore problems posed by antemeridian-crossing geometries because in practice, not that many people encounter them (not many people live there). This would move any problems to the middle of the UK, plus a good chunk of west Africa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly I'm with a few of the other posters here: I don't get it.

You obviously can't just project two lat/lon pairs into the plane and then expect to be able to draw a straight line between in the projection coordinate system (x/y) and have the result _mean_ anything, unless those points are extremely close together.

On a Mercator projection that will happen to be a rhumb line, but that's a specific property of that projection.

If you want to know the point halfway along the shortest distance between two lat/lons (and you're prepared to accept the better-but-not-accurate spherical earth model), you can use spherical geometry to determine the mid waypoint along the great circle route.

The futility of thinking otherwise is expressed by the fact that the projection that does map straight lines in the projection to great circles on the globe - i.e. the gnomonic projection - can only show half the world on a map of finite size.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would mapping to a different coordinate system help? Representing the values as sine of spherical coordinates, for example, then converting back for presentation?

<comment><USER10> asin(x) is multi-valued over the domain of longitude

<comment><USER9> True. Maybe just converting to radians and then nobody will question your eventual math for correctness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I may be missing something here but the example given of finding the midpoint between to points across the antimeridian seems at best misleading. The formula given, averaging each coordinate, does not work for spherical coordinates as this post demonstrates. And the correct formula for doing so is never given.

<comment><USER12> It works approximately over small distances, though (such as the New Zealand example). Going down the spherical coordinates rabbit hole, so that for example you could find the midpoint on a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, would detract from the point of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You could also just always specify the left-most point first.

If it should cross the meridian it would be easy to detect.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice watercolors

<comment><USER15> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mostly off-topic, but relevant to another famous meridian is a song by my favourite band: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCFo0a8V-Ag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCFo0a8V-Ag)</comment>


The fountain of youth may actually be broccoli - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/fountain-youth-broccoli-article-1.2847935 <comment><USER2> Bitter Tasters (those of us that actually taste Phenylthiocarbamide unlike the rest of you lucky bastards) are destined to grow old, i guess..</comment>


Using Matplotlib with Scala on Notebook (and More) - <AUTHOR> https://warisradji.com/2019/12/14/using-scala-with-matplotlib/ <comment><USER2> Are there hosted solutions where you can use Scala Notebooks, and use this matplotlib library?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://mybinder.org/](https://mybinder.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What are the performance implications for switching between languages like this? Does it do something like redeclare all global variables in the new language?

<comment><USER4> It's all based on BeakerX which has autotranslation b/w languages as one of its key features.

I believe it currently it is based on Py4J which does require copying of the data but I think not expensive serialization, so its reasonably efficient, at least, enough so that it works for plotting.

However the discussion is around moving everything to Apache Arrow which in theory supports in-memory shared data b/w languages. Whether that will ever happen is a question though ... the issue has been open for 1.5 years without visible signs of activity.

I stopped bothering with autotranslation in the end because I found BeakerX native plots (which work natively from all the languages it supports) actually nicer and more intuitive than Matplotlib. I use it extensively with Groovy.</comment></comment>


Lugg (YC S15), an App for On-Demand, Short-Distance Moves, Raises $3.8M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/26/lugg-an-app-for-on-demand-short-distance-moves-raises-3-8-million/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like a great product!

I wonder what the app plans to do about insurance? Say if they move a TV and the TV gets cracked during the duration of the trip.

<comment><USER3> They'd just get an insurance policy as a fallback but probably just buy the customer a new TV and make sure the mover is more careful next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great idea. The last time a company with this idea appeared on HN, some people complained that it wouldn't work for insurance reasons, but that doesn't seem to have been a major factor yet in any of these uber-type industries at any type of scale. That is rather surprising, actually.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could this service be used to pickup things from the home depot? Say 20 cement packs, a pallet of cinder blocks and some wood? Or is it for consumers only?</comment>


Show HN: Curated and Supported AWS Lambda Functions - <AUTHOR> https://www.opszero.com <comment><USER2> I think there is going to be a hige paradigm shift in the next few years and that AWS Lambda and similar services at the other cloud providers are going become the de-facto standard for deployment for many many use-cases.

Having a function marketplace (akin to the AMI marketplace) makes a lot of sense. There are tons of generic processes which I would rather purchase than spend time developing in house. However, I believe that AWS is likely to release such a marketplace themselves. How will you compete as a third party service/product?

<comment><USER3> Really? You think most webapps will be a string of Lambda functions? Will hacker news be a lambda?

Not a troll, but a 60% skeptic. I see the simple stuff Lambda can replace. Having a harder time see it taking away from the marketshare of the more complex stuff.</comment></comment>


Roaring glacial melt under the bridge to Kangerlussiauq, Greenland - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1157015875276464129 <comment><USER2> Lot of silt in that water! There has been some interesting debate recently on the efficacy of glacial erosion under the Greenland ice sheet -- and more broadly whether or not global average erosion rate has increased due to northern hemisphere glaciation over the past few million years. One recent estimate [1] suggests:

> _We find that, although runoff from Greenland represents only 1.1% of the > Earth's freshwater flux, the Greenland ice sheet produces approximately 8% > of the modern fluvial export of suspended sediment to the global ocean._

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo3046](https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo3046)

<comment><USER3> I wonder what effects on the ecosystem it will have when the ice sheet is too small to introduce comparable amounts of sediment into the ocean.

<comment><USER2> That's an interesting question. Fe and P are probably the most relevant nutrients that are abundant in suspended glacial rock flour. Since Fe3+ is pretty insoluble in seawater, the suspended (vs. dissolved) load might actually matter -- wind-blown dust would be the #1 competitor. The first relevant paper I found suggests the dust still dominates [1], but it was clearly enough of a consideration for them to write a paper about it. And sometimes the wind-blown dust is actually glacial rock flour [2], so the plot thickens!

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-015-0091-6](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-015-0091-6)

[2] [https://doi.org/10.1029/2010GL046573](https://doi.org/10.1029/2010GL046573)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is a staggering volume of melted ice.

I am interested to know how this melt's volume compares to other years/days on record though.

<comment><USER5> Read down that tweet thread. Such facts and figures are published there.

<comment><USER4> Glancing over the thread I see lots of related data but nothing specific to Kangerlussiauq or volume of ice melted in a day in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 2009: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F9FbdqGRsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F9FbdqGRsg)

"at this rate of melting, Greenland is losing enough water each year to cover Germany a meter deep"

<comment><USER7> [https://arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/easygalleryimages/8/367/te...](https://arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/easygalleryimages/8/367/tedesco- fig3.png)

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NASA- Sat...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NASA-Satellite- sea-level-rise-observations-1993-Nov-2018.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There goes a lot of relatively fresh water into the sea

</comment><comment><USER9> This is expected. That's why they built a bridge there.

<comment><USER7> Yes. The problem is the trend, not the intra-year variance.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NASA- Sat...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NASA-Satellite- sea-level-rise-observations-1993-Nov-2018.jpg)

[https://arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/easygalleryimages/8/367/te...](https://arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/easygalleryimages/8/367/tedesco- fig3.png)</comment></comment>


Samsung releases world's first 2TB consumer SSDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/2944463/data-storage-solutions/samsung-releases-worlds-first-2tb-consumer-ssds.html <comment><USER2> US$800 for a 2TB 850 EVO is rather impressive. Samsung must be getting good at producing their V-NAND in quantity. Interesting that it is still 32 layer though. If they can increase the number of layers with relative ease, we should see a continuation of the trend of halfing NAND prices over the next few years.</comment>


How to Invest during the Corona panic - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@theneelpopat/what-does-coronavirus-mean-for-your-money-f6263d93739b <comment><USER2> hard to believe you didn't just recommend invest in FB - seems like everybody forgets about cambridge analytica and doubles down on preachy posting when the world's on fire...

</comment><comment><USER3> ctrl+p money sounds about right... thanks for sharing</comment>


The Famine Ended 70 Years Ago, but Dutch Genes Still Bear Scars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to repeat the research in St.Petersburg, the siege during the WW2 lasted more than 2 year and there were 642,000 casualties among civilians.

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

<comment><USER3> Holodomor even more, 2.4-12 million people have have died of starvation deliberately caused by Soviets.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like fairly solid science:

 _Finally, the researchers merged the results — and found a few methyl groups that were linked both to the famine and to health conditions later in life. "We were able to connect the three dots," said Dr. Lumey...

And the Dutch famine probably led to many miscarriages and early deaths. It's possible that the survivors had some genetic variant that made them resilient and gave them a distinctive epigenetic profile not captured in this study._

I had never heard of this famine. I read the article and found myself wondering how this impacts the collective subconscious and the culture as a whole. Probably not in a good way. (That is _not_ a criticism of the Dutch. Please read that compassionately.)

I wish I knew what to do to promote food security in the world. It seems like food security is some fundamental aspect of peace and just making sure people get fed well (both enough and healthily) is one of the best ways to avert all kinds of problems.

<comment><USER5> And now the Netherlands, a tiny country with but 18 million people, is the second largest exporter of food in the world.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland- agriculture-sustainable-farming/)

<comment><USER6> Don't forget the history of the Netherlands, where during the 17th century it was the center of the world. You'd be surprised how many colonies the Netherlands had, and some of them have become quite famous (eg. New Zealand), albeit some of their name change (lookup New Amsterdam and New Holland for fun).

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

<comment><USER7> Yep, there's a reason it's the "Holland tunnel". :)

<comment><USER4> _It was named for Clifford M. Holland, the engineer who designed it._

[https://www.britannica.com/topic/Holland- Tunnel](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Holland-Tunnel)

Leaving these here in part because New Holland as a historical reference was not easy to find.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Holland_(Australia)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Holland_\(Australia\))

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly enough, the same famine confirmed gluten as the cause of coeliac disease. Death rates for children with the disease dropped during the famine, as flour was unavailable, and the children relapsed once they were given the first supplies of bread.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease#History)

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be equally worthwhile to see the impact of famines in Sub-Sahara Africa on genes of Africans (especially across the Sahel).

<comment><USER10> Worthwhile, yes, but harder to do. Those countries have less reliable data to work with, and not such a nice sharp cutoff. Here, babies born in the winters of 43-44 and 45-46 can serve as control groups for those born in the winter of 44-45.

<comment><USER9> The reliability of demographic data across Sub-Sahara Africa is a significant problem for a multitude of research disciplines.

But there's been a host of severe famines since World War II across the Sahel. It is possible that the reliability of birth data would have improved over this period to a degree sufficient to support research techniques.

In fact, there's been research along these lines in SSA already, especially regarding the impact of malnourishment on intellectual development among other factors.

Still, important research that goes to show that famines have generational effects that extend all the way to the genetic level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could these genetic changes contribute to the Dutch growth spurt of the 70-80s?

[https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5544085](https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5544085)

<comment><USER12> No. First, the generations don't match. Children from 1944 would be 36-46 years old in the 70-80s. Now, you may think: "what about _their_ children, could there be a rebound effect?" And that's the other reason: the whole thing that makes the effects of the Dutch Hunger Winter so interesting to study is that they have such a clear cut-off point. It's like a natural control group. The increase in height was pervasive in Dutch society, the opposite of that.

The Dutch growth spurt can almost exclusively be attributed to change in diet. IIRC, humans used to be taller _before_ the age of agriculture, and not-so- coincidentally have a much more diverse diet as well. In the 20th century we have basically been recovering to pre-agriculture levels of nutrition quality. Just look at the plots in that article you linked: _every_ nation has increased its median height, not just the Netherlands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I crazy? It's "Bare" not "Bear" right? I can't be the only one?

It's the NYT fer chrissakes

<comment><USER14> I think they got it right.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bear](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/bear)

> _" ² bear"_

> _" verb \ ˈber \"_

...

> _" b : to have as a feature or characteristic — bears a likeness to her > grandmother"_

...

> _" d : to have as an identification — bore the name of John"_

<comment><USER13> vs

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bare](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/bare)

: open to view : exposed

        laying bare their secrets

<comment><USER14> The definition you're showing there is a adjective. The verb form of _bare_ means _to uncover_ , which doesn't make much sense in context: _Dutch Genes Still Uncover Scars_. Compare with _Dutch Genes Still Feature Scars_.

There's a note on usage on the page you provided:

> _There is considerable confusion between the verbs bear and bare. It may > help to remember that the verb bare has only one meaning: "to uncover," as > in "bare your shoulders" and "a dog baring its teeth." All other uses of the > verb are for bear: "bearing children," "the right to bear arms," "bearing up > under the stress/weight," "can't bear the thought," "bear south," "it bears > repeating."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That said, I wonder, as a German now these days, how they keep on relating to these events: posts like these, wargames, movies, you name it. Ww2 is being "exploited" every day.

I don't know. Wizo!

<comment><USER16> As a Dutch man living in Germany I take my hat off for how active, balanced and thorough the Germans deal with the war. They should be an example to other countries.

<comment><USER17> I'm an American living here, too (in Nürnberg, even!) and I wish my own country could get as honest with ourselves about what our country did to the enslaved Africans and their descendants, and to the Native Americans, and what we've failed to do, as Germans are about what their grandparents did and allowed to happen.</comment></comment></comment>


Oxford academics tentatively embrace startup culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/24/silicon-spires

<comment><USER2> Is this going to reduce the brain drain of engineers heading to America for a healthier startup environment?</comment>


Professional developers get assurances. Open source maintainers get paid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tidelift.com/announcing-the-tidelift-subscription <comment><USER2> Hi from Tidelift - thought I'd share a quick tour of what we have to check out today.

We think we can get to a more sustainable model for open source software, by adapting the traditional commercial subscription model to include upstream projects.

The original link above is a discussion of the subscription itself: [https://blog.tidelift.com/announcing-the-tidelift- subscripti...](https://blog.tidelift.com/announcing-the-tidelift-subscription)

Here's a tour of our free dependency analysis service: [https://blog.tidelift.com/want-to-better-understand-your- cur...](https://blog.tidelift.com/want-to-better-understand-your-current- dependencies-heres-how)

And for open source maintainers, maybe most important is the page about how to get involved, see [https://tidelift.com/about/lifter](https://tidelift.com/about/lifter) and in particular click through to "Download the lifter guide" at the bottom, that's the long version of the details.

Would love to hear your ideas and feedback. Thanks!</comment>


Node.js Best Practices - <AUTHOR> https://www.sitepoint.com/node-js-best-practices-from-the-node-gurus/ <comment><USER2> > ES6/7 is pathetic addition which was born out of 6 years of meetings when we > already had a better JavaScript called CoffeeScript. Use it if you want ship > code faster and stop wasting time debating var/const/let, semi-colons, class > and other arguments.

Why is coffeescript better than ES6? I've used both and I definitely prefer ES6.</comment>


IPv6 Wall of Shame - <AUTHOR> https://ipv6wallofshame.com/ <comment><USER2> Hmm, I feel I have never been on a IPv6 network, I have never seen myself get an IPv6 address, from time to time I make DO droplets and assign them and IPv6 address, the I copy it into the browser address bar, no luck. I'm quite comfortable using network technology and terminology but I have no idea what I can do to use or speed up the use of IPv6. I'd love my home server to have a unique IP address for the rest of my life. How can I do it? Will I just at some day, receive such an address from my ISP? My domain name provider supports IPv6 and my servers do, yet, I never managed to connect over IPv6. It annoys me to be honest. Is it all at the ISPs at the moment?

<comment><USER3> Some people use an IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel like [1] while their ISP drags their feet. Still, I don't see the point for my personal stuff.

[1] [https://tunnelbroker.net/](https://tunnelbroker.net/)

<comment><USER4> Maybe this article convince you that it is not "All quiet in the IPv4 Internet":

[http://blog.apnic.net/2016/09/15/quiet- ipv4-internet/](http://blog.apnic.net/2016/09/15/quiet-ipv4-internet/)

I found the "Sage" certification from he.net/tunnelbroker entertaining. You basically setup a IPv6 capable mini-ISP. Also have a look at these nifty Browser add-ons that tell you which part of website is served via IPv4/v6:

Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal)

Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ipvfox/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ipvfox/)

Once you started to live without NATs and have endless[1] amount of addresses, you start banging your head against the table when you encounter so called 'future' technologies [2] that on their very core only support IPv4 and rely on NATs and ugly port-bridges etc.

[1] for all practical purposes

[2] e.g. docker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's not forget that [http://news.ycombinator.com](http://news.ycombinator.com) is also still IPv4 only.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazon is an egregiously bad actor, here. Through AWS, they shape the near future of computing, and they fill it with RFC 1918 non-interoperable address blocks and limited public address space. The path of least resistance on AWS is IPv4-only, which means NAT64 and stupid stuff from the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ironically this site would be on a wall of shame for lack of color-blind accessibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> The list of IPv6 adopters in that list is dominated by Google or Google owned sites. If you took them out it would only be 13/124 = 10% adoption.

<comment><USER9> If you remove Google sites from the numerator, you have to remove them from the denominator too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pardon my ignorance, but why does it matter that a website is accessible also via an alternative IP-that-happens-to-be-longer? If you have a perfectly good IPv4 address, why _also_ get an IPv6 one?

<comment><USER11> Because the IPv4 space has ran out. Nowadays they have to use all kind of tricks to share these addresses. With all mobile phones, and millions of new users in Africa, Asia and South America, plus the Internet of Things, you simply have to use a new system, and you have to transition to that.

In the future, people might not be able to use IPv4 at all, or all the time, and then you need your website to be available via both IPv4 and IPv6.

<comment><USER12> How does this matter for the top websites?

If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site has configured. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> Because the top websites want user traffic too. If you come from a country that doesn't have IPv4 left the usual deployment scenario is a carrier grade DNS64 with NAT64. You're basically stuck behind a huge ISP NAT which makes quite a few things unpleasant and others downright break down.

By supplying v6 you ensure anyone in the world can access it regardless of which IP protocol is deployed by your carrier and how they are or aren't translating from one to the other.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the explanation. I was under the impression all the ISPs would have ipv4 and handle all the translations to ipv6 clients.

Sounds like this is mostly the case, but it has some issues and any new ISP on v6 would have a hard time because a lot of the big sites would be unreachable.

<comment><USER14> Any form of NAT is also much much more expensive than just normal routing. For n:m NAT you need to keep track of sessions for example. This is going to hurt things like BitTorrent among a lot of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Had my first ever real world interaction with IPv6 yesterday.

Running iptables firewall on a server. Checked what's my ip address at a customer site. Saw an IPv6 address. Ok, no problem add it to the iptables rules. Oh yeah that doesn't work. Duh.

So I guess I have to learn to use ip6tables now...

<comment><USER16> Hopefully everyone has default deny policies set up in ip6tables if they aren't using IPv6 or don't have any plans to. Otherwise you might wake up one day to find traffic you didn't expect hitting your hosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Strange to see reddit and stackoverflow _not_ supporting IPv6.

<comment><USER18> AWS doesn't support IPv6 natively. I believe this explains a bunch of the items on that list (though not SO, I think they're on Azure?)

<comment><USER11> And as Microsoft, Bing and MSN don't support IPv6, you can assume that Azure does not as well. And it does not, despite the BS story about their leading role:

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/pricing/faq/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/faq/)

<comment><USER19> Microsoft.com does support IPv6 (Bing and MSN do not).

Also apple.com does support IPv6.

<comment><USER20> It appears apple.com and microsoft.com are failing this for the same reason; apple.com does not have an AAAA record. www.apple.com does. If you visit apple.com over ipv4 or dualstack, apple.com will answer and redirect you to www.apple.com, which is dual-stacked. But if you visit using only ipv6, apple.com is not found, so you're never redirected to the capable www.apple.com.

(ditto s/apple/microsoft/ \- I just picked the example quickest to type)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My only contact with IPv6 so far has been trying to get port forwarding working with my router at home. Vodafone uses a proxy to tunnel IPv6 to IPv4 to the outside, and that proxy does not support port forwarding, since you don't have a unique IPv4 address. After being in contact with Vodafone, it seems like there is no solution that does not cost additional money. It's 2016 btw, wtf

<comment><USER22> That would be the same for any carrier grade NAT. If the NAT was just from IPv4 to IPv4, you would have the same problem. Public IPv4 addresses now cost money, so you can't expect to get a public address for free anymore. Of course, with a public address costing around $10 at the moment, it should not add more than $1 or so to your monthly fee.

<comment><USER23> > it should not add more than $1 or so to your monthly fee.

Quite true. Most hosting companies charge around $1/mo. for a dedicated IPv4. (Naturally, not for shared plans but for VPS/dedicated boxes etc.)

<comment><USER24> dedicated IPs for shared hosting is a thing too (commonly needed for SSL virtualhosting when clients don't do SNI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are some subtle problems which can affect sites trying to use IPv6, that may prevent IPv6-only users from using the site. A site can have an IPv6 DNS record, and be reachable by IPv6, but the _DNS nameservers_ for its domain must also be reachable by IPv6. In particular, the _glue records_ for the DNS name servers for the domain must also contain IPv6 addresses.

(This problem currently affects the "ntp.org" domain – an IPv6-only host can not resolve the name "pool.ntp.org" – since at least two years ago. I did report it at the time.)

What I'm saying is that these kinds of problems are not reflected in the site, which only reports if a site has an IPv6 DNS record.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm more interested in ISPs not supporting ipv6.

<comment><USER27> Not very interesting. There are "over 9000" of them.

<comment><USER28> Easy enough to sort by size.

Verizon is the big one.

That they use IPv6 for their wireless division just makes it more ridiculous that they don't for their wired division - they clearly have the institutional knowledge to make it work.

<comment><USER22> Except that you probably want a different solution on wired. On mobile just about everybody is running with IPv6-native and the NAT64/DNS64 for IPv4. On wired, you may want to do something different. For example, if some of your customers need a pubic IPv4 address, then you want dual stack. You have to deal with CPEs doing IPv6 correctly, etc.

So it is better to see it as a completely different project. The core routing IPv6 is the same, but that tends to be the easy part.

<comment><USER29> > For example, if some of your customers need a pubic IPv4 address [..]

I don't see how this has anything to do with wired vs wireless.

<comment><USER22> There are far fewer people who have a contract that specifies that they will get a public IPv4 address on mobile.

On wired, just about every business account is assumed to have a public address and often a static one. In addition, a lot of gaming doesn't work behind carrier grade NAT.

In the mobile world, this expectation of public (or even static) IPv4 addresses is almost completely absent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Huh. Just the other day I was listening to a podcast on IPv6 ([http://cre.fm/cre197-ipv6](http://cre.fm/cre197-ipv6) \-- it is in German, though), and they mentioned a few of these sites as not supporting IPv6, yet.

But that episode is (almost to the day) four years old, and most of the sites mentioned back then _still_ are not reachable via IPv6... It is a little sad.

</comment><comment><USER31> More interesting is this: from the original 128, out of the 44 sites that do ipv6, only 16 aren't google-run. That's a terrible report card.

<comment><USER32> It makes sense that Google would be fully IPv6 enabled, after all they are _the_ mobile-first company and IPv6 can make mobile connection experiences a lot better, especially during peak network usage times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is good, but it is the long tail that really sucks about the v6 transition. Hopefully when this board is green, it will cause a tipping point.

<comment><USER32> I think the long tail isn't an issue. We'll probably have dual stack equipment for the next few decades. What matters is getting the large websites on IPv6 so that people browsing on mobile (usually NAT64) or developing nations (usual CGNAT) can get a non-sucky web experience.

Heck, if all the sites on that page where green, mobile Internet would suddenly be a lot better since the carrier NAT boxes would have to deal with ~90% less traffic.

The big issue here are AWS/azure dragging their heels (and I assume some CDNs, too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> maybe it'd get more adoption if it actually worked: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/5618#issuecomment-24...](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/5618#issuecomment-246040037) \-- more shame on the people using it at this point

<comment><USER35> Almost half of Belgium and over a fourth of the USA is using IPv6 to connect to the internet just fine and you have the audacity to claim it doesn't work because there's a bug in the implementation of Linux?

This is like saying DEFLATE doesn't work because someone committed a bug to zlib.

Shame on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised there's so many Asian companies/sites that don't support v6. Probably has to do with being hosted on some sort of cloud but considering v6 is fairly important to that region it's interesting they're willing to rely on ISPs providing NAT/DNS64 for customers instead.

<comment><USER36> Presumably it is related to the widespread use of IE6: they are running old bootleg versions of Windows, which dont do IPv6.

<comment><USER30> IIRC, Windows has supported IPv6 since at least Windows XP. According to Wikipedia, even since Windows 2000. (Of course, IE6 might not support v6... I never tried.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If the creators read this, please add MX shaming! Some sites have AAAA records but still use IPv4 MX records.

<comment><USER16> I administer several mail servers and I honestly don't have any plans to receive mail over IPv6 -- not until the blacklist situation is figured out, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is funny how Netflix is IPv6 enabled but AWS isnt ?! I wonder where Netflix is hosted....

</comment><comment> micro-ram Install IPvFoo in Chrome and watch how many servers have embraced IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER11> So it would be interesting to see which if these sites are hosted on AWS or Azure, as these seem to have no support for IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER38> For those who are looking to navigate to some of those pages, be aware that there are a few nsfw sites on the wall of shame.

<comment><USER39> More pornsites moved to IPv6 than amazons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Getting an SSL error on this page "invalid CA". Probably because I revoked StartSSL and WoSign after reading [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/k9PBmyLCi8I%5B1-25%5D)

<comment><USER31> Well, yes. It's a StartCom certificate, so it will be invalid if you have revoked StartSSL stuff.

<comment><USER40> Obviously. Wanted to give a heads up that me (and several others) are (voluntarily) unable to read websites using StartSSL certs, at least until mozilla possibly eventually takes action against these CAs, when it might become an even bigger problem.</comment></comment></comment>


New web-based editor for creating adaptive sites that work on any mobile device - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobify.com/studio?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=studio%2Bpage

<comment><USER2> I'm trying this out right now and it's pretty slick to get started fast. Will see how well it scales but the UI is really good.</comment>


Coconuts in Medieval England - <AUTHOR> http://www.themarysue.com/monty-python-holy-grail-coconuts/ <comment><USER2> But then again, the events in the movie take place in the fifth century, around 900 years before the first coconuts were known to have been traded in Europe.

<comment><USER3> what about the Roman Empire? surely predates the middle ages</comment></comment>


Inside a German U-Boat - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/2015/09/18/german-u-boat/ <comment><USER2> So many parts... it must have been a nightmare to coordinate all this with just info on paper.</comment>


SWEET32: Birthday attacks on 64-bit block ciphers in TLS and OpenVPN - <AUTHOR> https://sweet32.info <comment><USER2> The OpenSSL blog post was submitted separately as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351739) in case this story (the branded vulnerability page itself) overtakes it in popularity.</comment>


Spies Next Door - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/Spies-Next-Door-Alleged-Russian-Agents-Nabbed-97336789.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Not so much for the story, which we all probably know by now, but there are links to PDFs of the complaints at the bottom of the article which describe some of the technical details behind the case.</comment>


Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/26/facebook-to-open-source-facebook-platform/ <comment><USER2> I would be a lot more comfortable writing a Facebook app if I knew that I won't be dependent upon their continued good graces. With the platform being open source developers no longer _have_ to host with Facebook. With an open source platform developers can go with Facebook solely to have access to Facebook data rather than to Facebook code and servers.

The next step is to free the data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another diversionary non-announcement; I don't think Facebook could have prevented anyone from cloning their APIs, and being able to plug Facebook apps into a different social network won't help much since you lose the network effect.

<comment><USER4> If what the article says its true they're releasing the actual code, no need to clone yourself.

In theory, it means increased distribution for app developers since their code would be easily ported to any site that implements the platform clone.

I have no idea how much how this will play out but the code should be an interesting read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Time to fight back"? Sometimes I question Mr. Arrington's wordplay...</comment>


7Geese Wins HootSuite as Client and HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes as Investor - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/7geese-wins-hootsuite-as-client-and-ryan-holmes-as-investor-2012-09-27

<comment><USER2> 7Geese enables you to better achieve your goals, to get recognition, and to gather feedback from your coworkers</comment>


A new Chapter 2 for Ruby on Rails Tutorial is out - <AUTHOR> http://news.railstutorial.org/a-new-chapter-2-for-ruby-on-rails-tutorial

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some important meta-information regarding the new chapter, so the link goes to the Rails Tutorial news announcement. For convenience, here's a direct link to Chapter 2:

<http://www.railstutorial.org/chapters/a-demo-app#top>

<comment><USER2> Thanks for putting this together, really. I've been doing RoR programming for several years, but never got RSpec so much, even though I've tried off and on every now and then. But I took a quick run through the tutorial (what you have up so far) and, well, I get it now. So, thanks!</comment></comment>


Hacking Women and the Delusion of the Ethical Pickup Artist - <AUTHOR> http://pathdependent.com/2010/04/07/hacking-women/ <comment><USER2> My simple thought: The men who read "The Game" and the women who read "The Rules" deserve each other. How come they don't end up with each other? Because each is looking for people to con, not for partners.

I like to think of Lions and Antelopes. Lions eat Antelopes, but they mate with Lions. A book telling you how to find and eat prey does not help you find and mate with another Lion. In fact, its methods steer you away from other Lions.

So, at some point you have to decide whether you want to stop fooling around cutting the weak out of the herd and start looking for a true mate.

I don't believe for a moment you're going to do that with a seduction system.

<comment><USER3> Hey, I read The Game - I even tried it out for a while. :D

There is useful information in there; but it is obscured by the idea that the ultimate aim is to sleep with lots of women, get pissed and not really care about anything else.

In actual fact when I read The Game I felt I was looking into the mind of a lost individual who found a process to attach himself too. Im not sure if Neil actually learned anything during that time period but it reads like he may have done. Sadly the book only touches on those aspects.

(your analogy regarding Lions/Antelopes is something I'd agree with though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is my problem:

"I find no fault in youthful promiscuity. Oscar Wilde could have written a novel about my college years. It was part of my development as a person and I have (almost) no regrets."

This strikes me as similar to the advice naturally skinny people give to the fat -- "Why don't you just eat less and work out more?" If something comes to you naturally, it seems like a real jerk move to blithely assume that it's the same for everyone else. The author had a decent amount of natural success with promiscuity, and now he looks down on people who have to work on it. If something doesn't come naturally to you, you shouldn't be allowed to experience or enjoy it?

<comment><USER5> The author seems to be making the classic mistake of assuming everyone is coming to the material for the same reason.

He is apparently past the stage of promiscuity and was looking for help finding a true mate. The MM disappointed him. So now he's preaching against the MM itself, rather than against the MM as a tool to meet his particular goal.

I bet if confronted about the contradiction, he'd claim he never meant to disparage the young using the MM to improve their own "youthful promiscuity" experience.

Whether he'd change his article is another story. He'll clearly get more attention as it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Becoming a PUA" is definitely a bit of a warped aim, but I have personally benefited from reading those books. For example, the "3-second rule" to remove approach anxiety does not turn you into an oversexed asshole, but it does greatly increase the chances you'll actually chat to girls. Hell, I even use that "technique" when networking. Approach, smile, say something (anything) within 3 second of spotting the next "target". Works great.

I'd argue that although the programmes themselves are destructive, the books published on the topic are useful when read by smart people who realise there's more to life than sex and can "switch" into a more mature mode of behaviour once they find a suitable potential mate. I guess, like all good tools, what it does depends on who uses it. Assholes become bigger assholes. Good guys become more successful good guys. Sounds like a good starting point to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's no such thing as "hacking" women. If you can be attractive to a woman then you are attractive. I mean maybe wearing an earpiece and having somebody else feed you lines would be hacking a woman. But the good 'pickup' gospels basically just tell you how to become an actually attractive person. This is necessary in modern society since modern society is so comfortable with its xboxes and dorritos men have no impetus to ever leave their houses and therefore do not learn how to be attractive naturally. I think inasmuch as the pickup meme gives men the courage to go outside once in a while it does more good than bad.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a very imbalanced blog post. At least the author is up front about his biases ("Unfortunately, I doubt that this group dominates his readers. Instead, I assume...") but stays far from acknowledging that it is just a tool, and any tool can be used for good or evil. I can build a home with a hammer, or I can bash your head in. I can live a long life of copious but fleeting, shallow entanglements - or I can use my knowledge to deepen and secure one life-long relationship. (This makes me question his claim to being a hacker...isn't such a view about tools rudimentary?)

Anyway, no essay that claims to explore the morality of these techniques is complete without an honest acknowledgement of the ubiquitous & accepted industries geared towards helping women misrepresent themselves so that they can hack the simple automata that are the masculine visual and olfactory processing systems.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I suppose it seems hypocritical of me to lambast Mystery and his cohorts. I > have obviously read their material.

I should hope the author would not consider penning a severe and detailed criticism of a body of work _without_ having read it. This part is not hypocritical, but admirable.

The portion with which I find fault is the inherent sorites paradox: At what point does optimizing yourself and your interactions with women for attraction become unethical?

<comment><USER10> At which point would a woman optimising herself for interactions with men become unethical? (answer: never).

Presenting yourself as the best you can be to those you are attracted to is one of the most basic purposes we have on this world.

<comment><USER11> So there is nothing wrong with cheating/lying as long as your goal is to have "interactions" with a partner?

<comment><USER10> How dare you misrepresent me. Where did I say cheating or lying. The parent was discussing your presentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hate this whole mystery method and all the cultural assumptions that go along with it. I applaud the author for attacking it, but I'll take it one step further.

There's nothing wrong with promiscuity. Sex is good - if you want to fuck hundreds of people, do so and please use a condom every time.

In my experience, women like sex and hate being treated like objects. Here's a "pickup method" that'll have even MORE success than the awesome mystery method :

1) Join a gym. Workout a lot until you have big muscles. This won't take you more than half a year.

2) During that half a year, take up meditation and contemplate your past relationships, your parents, your childhood. Write about it in a journal and become at peace with who you are. Think about what you want.

3) During that time too, concentrate on your career. Get it all laid out in front of you.

Now, you've made yourself as attractive as possible. Next up, find random women - on craigslist, on okcupid, on the street. Talk to them. Treat them like equal human beings and never, ever deceive them. If you want sex but no commitment yet, tell them when that comes up.

There will be some more waiting, sure. Waiting is until fullness. After a while, you will get to the point where you are in good shape, you've got a good career, you're emotionally stable and you deal with women honestly and see things from their point of view.

If you do this, you'll never have trouble finding someone to sleep with. Maybe you can get someone slightly "hotter" and stupider by deceiving people? However, in my 8 years of living with X1 and my 2 years of living with X2 and the single-ness in between, I've noticed there are all kinds of different types of sex. Sometimes, it's just mutual masturbation. Sometimes, sex is a transcendent experience. For me, the experience is always improved with honesty and destroyed by lying. I may not necessarily believe in monogamy anymore, but I believe sex is an expression of love. Love can last a day or a week or a month and it comes so easily when we give up on lying.

<comment><USER2> > 1) Join a gym. Workout a lot until you have big muscles. This won't take you > more than half a year.

I'm sure you're being sincere with this advice, but I think there's a major pitfall to be considered with joining a gym. If you're joining a gym to make yourself more attractive so you can meet people, you are already on the road to hell.

What is the difference between big muscles and a hair implant?

I see happy couples who are short, who have acne, who are obese. I myself have a serious receding hairline that is merging with my bald spot as we speak. Join a gym if you don't like your body for YOUR reasons, not because you think it will increase your chances. You don't need a 'nice' body to meet people.

On the other hand...

If you find a sporting activity you enjoy, do it 3-4x per week and don't worry about your body. It will morph itself into something fine. And you'll enjoy yourself, and that enjoyment is infectious. People of both sexes naturally gravitate towards people who are doing something they enjoy.

Co-ed activities like Tennis, Surfing, Ultimate, Rock Climbing, and so on are all amazing ways to meet people if you are sincerely enjoying yourself. Climbing gyms are redolent with sexual tension, you could cut it with a knife.

And after six months, just look at yourself in the mirror and tell me you don't like what you see!

The key is to keep looking until you find something you sincerely enjoy. You'll meet lots of other people who sincerely enjoy it to and you won't need any "game" or "rules" to meet someone wonderful.

<comment><USER13> There's nothing wrong with doing things to increase your self confidence. For some people, a good-looking body can be one of those things. In the end, it's a self-correcting mechanism: the ones who are doing it just for others will lose interest after a few months. Doing it for yourself can keep you going for years.

For me, weightlifting _was_ the activity I enjoyed. It started out as me being really skinny and wanting to gain weight, but got to the point that being muscular was just a pleasant side effect. The true enjoyment came from the endorphin release of moving heavy weight, the satisfaction of getting stronger every week and just knowing that there was a direct correlation between how hard I worked and what results I achieved.

Where I take issue is okeefe's comment about not wanting to be a hypocrite. You like what you like; it's not hypocritical to be attracted to someone slender and athletic if you are overweight and out of shape.

FWIW, I have never cared much about what people look like. If I like someone enough I will probably find her attractive - that's been proven to me time and time again and the range over which it holds is pretty surprising.

<comment><USER12> It's certainly something to be overweight and expect your partner to maintain an athletic figure, whatever language you want to put on it. There is probably some small portion of athletic women that prefer overweight men, but the majority will prefer athletic men, so why should my partner settle for flubber?

There have been a lot of comments about - oh, unless you do it for yourself, you'll quit! This is nonsense. I know a lot of extremely fit guys and the many of them are doing it to impress women very successfully. It's also just one more motivating factor among many to keep your body in good condition.

I've been working out for years and I find the actual activities inane. Pick up the heavy thing. Put it down. YAYYYY slightly heavier. However, I want toned muscles for many reasons, so I just do it. It's really not that hard to just discipline yourself, particularly if you are as interested in longevity as I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did anyone else find it amusing that whilst systematically dismantling the evolutionary cues of the target candidates and exploiting those cues in order to provide false positives, the entire premise of the action falls victim to the exact kind of tactics it lays out in order to achieve victory?

That being, these men are going out looking around for women with all the evolutionary cues for feminine fitness which are hardwired into our brains whilst seemingly blissfully unaware that having those evolutionary buttons pressed in themselves they're not making any kind of conscious or rational decision about the kind of women they actually want, they're just falling victim to their own evolutionary cues.

</comment><comment><USER15> There have been "self-help" books out there along these same lines for years. Most of them are written by guys, largely with the perspective of how to manipulate women into bed. While this is an attractive proposition, particularly for young guys with raging hormones, it's not what most people are looking for in any long-term sense.

There was one book that was popular a few years back, "10 Secrets to Success with Beautiful Women", written by a former supermodel, that I thought actually had some good stuff in it. It dealt with basically the same subject matter without any of the egotistical BS.

<comment><USER16> [http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Secrets-Success-Beautiful- Women/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Secrets-Success-Beautiful- Women/dp/0966969707)</comment></comment>


Surface Area Required to Power the World with Solar - <AUTHOR> http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg <comment><USER2> Missing from this: any mention of cost, so out of interest I went and figured it out.

Assuming a cost of $200 per square metre, carpeting the 336,000 odd square km required for 2008's energy usage would cost... 67 trillion dollars. Factor in a bunch more for transmission and storage.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't the cost per square metre fall with efficiencies of scale alone? While it might cost $200 per square metre in the beginning, the costs would fall over time.

Non-standard parts installed by huge amounts of human labor vs. standardized solar panel installations dropped on site a la prefab housing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty interesting. I wonder if the projections take into account increased efficiency of the panel technology over time?</comment>


Crazy collection of known hash functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaciejCzyzewski/retter

<comment><USER2> I fail to understand why it's a crazy collection. Am I missing something? I even searched for the word 'Crazy' on the GitHub page, couldn't find it.</comment>


New Jersey School District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/nyregion/reforms-to-ease-students-stress-divide-a-new-jersey-school-district.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0 <comment><USER2> posted Friday under original title, 20+ comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791938)</comment>


Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/07/python_java_github_javascript/ <comment><USER2> Python is one of the (the?) big languages I still regret not playing with yet. PHP has served me well enough, and my brief but romantic foray into Ruby a few years back gave me some perspective and nostalgia.

I don't have a lot of time for playing with things like this these days, plus I wonder if my window for it has closed anyway. I remember talking about my underwhelming reaction to reading The Catcher in Rye with a friend once. "You read it too late" was his straightforward response.

I wonder if Ruby is my romantic / nostalgic language and whether or not I should just leave it to that.

<comment><USER3> Are you retiring within 2 years? Calling it quits on learning new tech seems a pretty good way to end up like the COBOL developers in the early 2000s as jobs slowly dried up and the ones who refused to change became obsolete.

<comment><USER4> New languages aren't popping up (and taking over) every 5 years like they used to. The rate of change is slowing. At this point, I think it's fine to settle down with a language, as the entrenched positions of the top languages isn't changing anytime soon. I know, even as early as the late 90s people were saying C++ was done for, and it's still in fairly popular demand ([https://skilldime.com/](https://skilldime.com/)), mainly due to all that legacy code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a long time Java user. If you are not using Kotlin at this point, you are doing it wrong. That's of course a blunt/provocative statement and there are of course perfectly good reasons for continuing to use Java on some projects. However, most of those reasons are non technical. And I'd argue that 1) Kotlin is a drop in replacement in those projects 2) it's running far ahead in terms of language features that aren't even on the roadmap for inclusion in Java (which in all fairness has been slowly catching up over the last few releases) 3) you can introduce it gradually. A small tweak to the build file and you are good to go and ready to start converting code. You can have your first Kotlin file building along with your Java code in under 30 minutes; even if you've never used Kotlin before. That's how I did it. I was committing ported tests within 2 hours on my first attempt to use the language and would recommend that as a great way to get started.

People confuse Kotlin for an Android specific thing, which is a mistake that arises from the fact that all of the above is doubly true on Android. Google more or less stopped bothering to keep their version of Java up to date after Java 6/7 (they did fix some glaring features) because of the whole debacle with Oracle. This meant that Java on Android was a getting kind of stale and klunky many years ago. And as Kotlin was designed as a drop in replacement for Java, people just started using it way before it was on Google's radar and way before it was anywhere close to 1.0. It just worked and vastly improved people's lives on Android when Google had very little to offer to make life better. Of course it helped that the main IDE for Android is made by Jetbrains (Kotlin was created by them) which meant the tooling was there early on. Google eventually acknowledged that this was obviously better without any downsides and endorsed it as the preferred language for Android a few years ago.

The same is now happening for backend development. E.g. Spring started endorsing Kotlin two years ago (around the release of Spring 5) . Kotlin works perfectly fine with earlier versions of course but as of Spring 5 there are lots of Kotlin specific things in the framework and the upcoming versions are adding loads more of Kotlin friendly features. The net result of this is that there is a huge accelerating shift from Java to Kotlin that has been ongoing for a few years now.

I'm bringing this up because Kotlin is one of the fastest growing languages out there and most of that growth is at the cost of Java. A lot of jobs advertised as Java are in fact Kotlin jobs.

So, Python isn't claiming as many Java developers as the article suggests. Of course it is experiencing rapid growth from e.g. data science projects and it's always been a popular language.

I recently was on a python project (as in just a few weeks ago). So, I'm in position to compare. I've always liked python for certain tasks. Python 3 has definitely moved in the right direction (e.g. adding types) but I do think the editing and refactoring experience in e.g. VS Code is lagging behind a little compared to other languages I've also used recently (e.g. typescript, go). MS actually only added python tooling just a few versions ago (so the out of the box experience is better since then). And of course the Intellij/Kotlin combo blows any of those out of the water in terms of utility. It's not even fair to compare it to that.

But what I like is that python code is comparatively simple for some things. This has always been a big reason for it's popularity. Performance was never a reason to use python and the tooling wasn't either but the language ergonomics have always been a big plus. I'd argue Go is a natural upgrade that shares some of those characteristics but comes with better tooling and performance (at the cost of syntactical compromises). E.g. the vs-code experience for Go is comparatively awesome. Kotlin is IMHO nicer to deal with overall but currently not great for e.g. command line stuff or small microservices/lambdas mainly because of the run-time footprint. And while Graal and Kotlin native are fixing that, neither is easy to deal with currently. The Kotlin native compiler has not been finalized yet and Graal with Kotlin is a combination of experimental, mostly unsupported, and incompatible with many frameworks out there. This is a temporary inconvenience and IMHO the next boost in Kotlin endorsement will come in 1-2 years when those issues will hopefully have been addressed.</comment>


At - <AUTHOR> http://furbo.org/2014/03/25/at/ <comment><USER3> In Norwegian the official name is "krøllalfa", meaning "curly alpha". Hip in the 90s, but I don't think I've heard anyone call it that in years. I was actually surprised when I learned that "at" was the proper English name and usage. I had always assumed it was a symbol that had been co-opted into network addresses because it was accessible from the keyboard and kinda looked like an a.

One advantage of the international variants is that they're not ambiguous, whereas in English you might have to explicitly specify "the at symbol" when speaking.

As a side note: A long time ago, before the internet and international shopping, I mainly thought of $ as the variable character in BASIC.

<comment><USER4> I always thought the English version was ampersat.

<comment><USER5> I just looked into this, and the _ampers_ portion of of both ampersand and ampersat is short-hand/corruption of "and per se" [1], meaning ampersand is another way of writing the word "and", and ampersat is another way of writing the word "at".

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#Etymology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#Etymology)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No one actually uses "Klammeraffe" in German. It's just "at" (English pronunciation – most of the time). I wonder how widespread the use of those alternative names for "at" is in other languages he lists.

In German "Klammeraffe" is this weird, unwieldy nickname that used to be somewhat fashionable a long time ago (mid-nineties maybe, whenever many people where first confronted with email addresses). I remember it being used back then whenever people were explaining the internet in media (TV, radio, books), though I don't think it ever got widely used outside that context.

<comment><USER7> The Dutch one "money tail" is more widespread than "at", I would say.

<comment><USER8> I'm not so sure. I'm Dutch as well, and when I recite my email address I use the English "at", so "douwemaan at domain" rather than the unwieldy (4 syllables long!) "douwemaan apenstaartje domain".

In my experience most (if not all) people in my age group (18 - 25) simply pronounce it as "at". This could be a generational thing as most of us were raised with the internet and all these internet-y terms come quite naturally to us.

<comment><USER9> It could very well be an age thing, because I myself and friends of similar age (25-30) use both 'at', and 'apenstaartje', although primarily the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Japanese, the sign itself is called "attomaaku" ("at mark") but it's pronounced as "atto" when dictated. So someone's email would be johnsmith-at- gmail-dot-com, and if you ask a Japanese person to pronounce the symbol, they would say "atto". However, if you show them the symbol and ask them _what it is_, they probably would say "attomaaku".

Semiotics is fascinating.

<comment><USER11> atto is about the closest their writing rules allow. It is all pairs like ka, ki, ko, ku, except for n. So all loan words have to be extended if they end illegally.

<comment><USER12> Actually it's interesting that you mention this. Technically, you can also make it atoma-ku, (like ato like in later, and ma-ku as in mark). I wonder if the dip-tone was intentional to make it sound more like foreign word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "[chiocciola] is fun to say, too. Something like 'chee-o-cho-la' but with more exotic hand gestures."

The initial "chi" in Italian is pronounced like "kee" (e.g. chianti). So this would be pronounced "kee-o-chio-la"

<comment><USER14> I'm italian and I confirm it ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Catalan we call it arrova. It's interesting that, used as a unit of mass, the @ had different values in different places [1][2]:

\- Castille: 11.5002325 kg

\- Aragon: 12.5 kg

\- Catalonia: 26 pounds

\- Valencia: 30 pounds

\- Portugal: 32 pounds

Apparently it's still used as a unit of measure in Spain and South America, for example for oranges [2] and cocaine [3].

[1] [http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrova](http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrova) [2] [http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arroba_%28unidad_de_masa%29](http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arroba_%28unidad_de_masa%29) [3] [http://web.archive.org/web/20110101190636/http://www.delisse...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110101190636/http://www.delisse.ec/hojadecoca.htm)

<comment><USER16> Still a standard in South Portuguese countryside to measure livestock weight. 15kg=1 arroba

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >A pictogram…, is an ideogram that __conveys its meaning __through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object.

By this definition, @ is not a pictogram just because it is _named for_ a pictorial resemblance. It must _convey meaning_ through that pictorial resemblance. A "monkey tail" or "elephant trunk" or "sea snail" does not convey the meaning of "at", unless I'm missing some cultural context.

木, on the other hand, conveys the meaning of "tree" through visual representation of roots below the ground and branches on top [1].

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%A8](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%A8)

<comment><USER18> To be fair, the article does go on to explain that with regard to pictograms, "what we've seen happen with the @ symbol is the opposite."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I believe in Russian it's called "Sobachka", or "Doggy." (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

<comment><USER20> Arrobase in french. Don't think it means anything.

<comment><USER21> Here you go:

> Le nom arobase, forme la plus fréquente, est une déformation récente du > castillan arroba(s), qui désigne une unité de mesure de poids et de capacité > (dite en français arrobe), en usage en Espagne et au Portugal8, de grandeur > variable selon les régions et selon les liquides (huile ou vin). Ce terme, > attesté en Espagne depuis 1088, vient lui-même de l'arabe الربع (ar-rubʿ), « > le quart », pour un quart de l'ancien quintal de 100 livres, soit 12 kg > environ. Depuis le xvie siècle, en effet, le mot arroba — parmi d'autres — > s'est constamment écrit au moyen de l'abréviation "@"9.

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrobase](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrobase)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I worked in retail, I noticed Indian people would pronounce it something like 'attarrat', with a hard R in the middle.

It took me a while to catch on to what was ment by that, but i never really pushed it much further to get the 'proper' pronounciation.

<comment><USER23> I believe they were saying "at the rate".

<comment><USER24> Not sure why people are downvoting you. The @ symbol is hundreds of years old and originally meant "at the rate of" (as in, "10 boxes @ $1" means "10 boxes for $1 apiece"). It's perfectly possible that the Indian population could have picked this up and perhaps contracted it a bit during the reign of the British Empire.

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

<comment><USER25> That is indeed the case. The 'at the rate of' usage was quite popular in arithmetic problems even in the early 90s when most of the population was unaware of emails. My parents still say it as at the rate of when reading aloud an email address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In China, it's called "circle a" (圈a), "flowery a" (花a), or "little mouse" (小老鼠). In Taiwan, it's most commonly called "little mouse"

</comment><comment><USER27> Dating in Korea:

"Hey, really enjoyed talking to you! Can I have your email address?"

"Sure, it's john sea snail hotmail dot com."

"Oh. Great."

<comment><USER28> Well looks like it's time to move to Korea and launch seasnailhotmail.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would have mentioned that the purported Latin origin of the symbol is much closer to the English way of saying it. Some historians believe that the @ symbol fist appeared as a contraption of the word "ad", which loosely means "towards". Scribes may have altered the word by exaggerating the upstroke of the d. So at least on twitter, "at" is pretty consistent with the original meaning of the symbol.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm currently in Kashmir where everyone always says in full _"... at the rate of..."_ in the middle of their email address. So far I've not met many twitter users.

</comment><comment><USER31> For a very long time, I thought the "{" was called "birdwing" because that's how it was explained to me. When I try that now I get very odd looks.

Related: [http://carlos.bueno.org/brackets-of-the- world.pdf](http://carlos.bueno.org/brackets-of-the-world.pdf)

<comment><USER32> In Denmark the curly brackets are knows as tuborgklammer, literally Tuborg brackets. Tuborg is a danish brewery and the brackets are named after the roof of the cap on their old delivery trucks. [http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3600/3516095666_fb53727c79_b.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3600/3516095666_fb53727c79_b.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "I envy my colleagues that get to play with snails and monkeys while coding in Objective-C!"

</comment><comment><USER34> All I can think is how much longer it must be to speak tweets aloud in other languages. As opposed to "at Jim Lipsey, at Gruber, at Chockenberry, at The Talk Show", now it's "chee-o-cho-la Jim Lipsey, chee-o-cho-la Gruber..."

Sounds like a mouthful already.

<comment><USER35> IIRC latin languages offset longer words by speaking generally more syllables per second. The information per time unit is roughly equal across languages. I don't think they actually realize that the word is long/awkward (or at least not to the same degree an English native speaker would realize).

<comment><USER29> That and the fact that in English there's always a little pause before, to let the listener understand you're spelling a very short word. Just listen next time someone says an email address. In italian not so much, so chiocciola is pronounced both very fast and without the need for a declarative pause. In the end it doesn't feel long at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In Finnish it is also informally known as "miukumauku", which refers to the cat-like appearance of the symbol (long tail). This name isn't very common anymore.

</comment><comment><USER37> Fun fact about HN's bad visual design: submissions with very short titles typically get huge amounts of upvotes as people try to click on the submission link, and hit the upvote button by accident. Since you can't revoke upvotes for dumb submissions, the number climbs without limit.

</comment><comment><USER38> I speak Russian as my first language. We use "sobaka" the Russian word for dog.

</comment><comment><USER39> In Bulgaria this is called "Monkey" (маймунка) or "Monkey A" (маймунско А) i've also heard few people cal it "rose" (розичка)

<comment><USER40> Also, some people in Bulgaria call the '@' sign "кльомба".

An interesting story about this sign, is that it had been used in a medieval Bulgarian chronicle dated at 1345. In it, the @ symbol is part of the word 'Амин' (amen).

[http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:19-man...](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:19-manasses- chronicle.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Both cute and interesting.

Note, however, that the article does not distinguish between what the sign is _called_ , and how it is _read_. I call it an "at sign". I read it "at". Now, in Dutch it's called a monkey tail (said in Dutch, of course). But that may not be how it is _read_ in Dutch.

</comment><comment><USER42> I can think of a few English pictograms on the standard keyboard:

^ = Hat

* = Star

# = Hash

~ = Squiggle

{ = Curly

<comment><USER43> I don't see what 'hash' is a picture of. There is 'cross-hatching' in illustration, but that's not the same word (and it's specifically cross- hatching, not just hatching, where the lines generally align). Otherwise 'hash' is either a meat dish or a recreational drug, neither of which look much like #.

<comment> vertex-four Indeed. If anything, it should be called "waffle".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is what I've been told: "木 = wood, 林 = woods, 森 = forest". Quite intuitive. :)

</comment><comment><USER45> In Hungary, we say "kukac", which means "worm" in english

</comment><comment><USER46> I like commat from the prosign, it stems from its use in prices like 7 @ $4.

Also in Polish I encounter małpka (little or cute monkey) more than małpa (monkey), maybe that's a regional thing.

</comment><comment><USER47> Very interesting read. As italian, I agree with our "exotic" gestures which follow the spelling of email addresses when it comes to 'chiocciola' (@)

</comment><comment><USER48> Arobaz in French. But most people just say 'At'.

</comment><comment><USER49> In Hebrew, the official name is Strudel (Wikipedia: "A type of layered pastry with a filling that is usually sweet")

</comment><comment><USER50> Technically in Italian: lumaca is slug and chiocciola is snail, but people often improperly use lumaca for snail as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> We also say "Arobas" in french.

<comment><USER52> French native here as well. I personnally say "at" when spelling out email addresses. "Arobase" ou "et commercial" are names of the symbol itself - <USER2> commonly used because one rarely has to name the symbol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> In Greek, we call it "papaki". It means "duckling". I have no idea how that happened.

</comment><comment><USER54> In Taiwan it's "小老鼠", which means "little mouse".</comment>


Show HN: ProductVitamins – Library of great resources for product managers - <AUTHOR> https://productvitamins.io <comment><AUTHOR> I built this because I didn't find any good quality library of resources for product managers. Usually it's a simple list with just a few informations. I've put all those resources in categories such as books, apps or podcasts but also by topics like interviews, prototyping etc. I've also added metadata to each items like the price for courses or the read time for articles. Tell me what you think.</comment>


What is an influential science book with wide reaching influence - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone. I need the name of a real nonfiction book from realm of engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics, health sciences, or economics that is especially influential in other domains. I don't want it to be an old or classic text (i.e. The Heavenly Spheres, The Origin of the Species, The Elements, The principia, The Nature of Things)... but a book similar to one of those in its influence and importance that has been around for the last 20-50 years. I especially think something related to computer science might work best in this case, though I'm hard pressed to think of a book that every comp sci person would read or identify as having a long lasting influence. Then again. If you can think of anything... please let me know. Thank you in advance <comment><USER2> May I suggest The Double Helix by James D. Watson [https://www.amazon.com/DOUBLE-HELIX-James-D- Watson/dp/B00A21...](https://www.amazon.com/DOUBLE-HELIX-James-D- Watson/dp/B00A21WQ9A)

</comment><comment><USER3> _The Selfish Gene_?</comment>


What can you learn from production.log? - <AUTHOR> http://shiroyasha.github.io/what-can-you-learn-from-production-log.html

<comment><USER2> You could possibly try "grep -E" or "grep -e ... -e"? In this case you could drop 'cat' and make one pipe less.</comment>


Iowa caucuses 101: Arcane rules have huge impact on outcome - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/03/iowa.caucuses.101/index.html?eref=rss_topstories <comment><AUTHOR> good luck mccain and obama.

<comment><USER2> Ok, but please, no politics. I'm sure many of us have things to say, many of which are probably quite intelligent, but... it always seems to lead to something of a black hole for social sites. Let's stick to the tech stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> startup news 2.0 = hacker news = above is ok :)

<comment><USER2> I'm obviously not in a position to force anyone to do anything, so it's simply a polite request. Politics discussions tend to descend into flamewars, even amongst intelligent people, and never really resolve anything in any case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Fight the IRS - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704100604575145760963439650.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read <comment><USER2> Oh boy, does the first paragraph ever press one of my hot button issues. The US Treasury FBAR (foreign bank account reporting) rules represent very bad law. The rule requires that all foreign accounts be disclosed. The penalty for non-compliance is $100,000 per year or 20% of the amount of undisclosed funds, whichever is greater. It was intended to catch people who have large off-shore tax shelters. That's a good idea in principle, but they severely botched the implementation of this law.

The threshold for reporting is $10K. This means that if someone is not aware of the requirement as has $11K overseas, they can be hit with a $100,000 fine. The penalty is grossly inappropriate. Worse, the definition of "account" is so vague that it is very easy to accidentally be in non-compliance.

I inadvertently ran into this problem myself and now I need to find a tax lawyer to help me, even though the cost of the lawyer will probably be at least half the almost-nominal value of the assets involved.

PS: Can anyone recommend a good tax lawyer experienced in handling FBAR issues?

<comment><USER3> IANAL but spent a long time researching FBAR. It's pretty straightforward. If you didn't declare in the past, declare ASAP. Make sure you post two copies - one with your 1040 and one to whatever the other address is.

If you've been hit with a penalty on the other hand, not much advice I can give you sorry.

<comment><USER3> Actually I was doing this last night and forgot that it was just the information box on Schedule B with your 1040 - you definitely don't send the actual form to the IRS. Just send the FBAR itself to the treasury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They forgot my favorite strategy: burn your house to the ground and fly your plane into their building. You certainly won't have to pay your taxes anymore.

<comment><USER5> Bummer this was downvoted; I laughed. Perhaps you could use Wesley Snipes jokes here to greater effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or, emigrate to a country with a more reasonable tax system, especially one that doesn't spend ~25% of its budget on the military.

<comment><USER7> No, emigrating doesn't help. U.S. citizens and green card holders living overseas still have to pay U.S. taxes on all their investment income, as well as on wages over $91,400.

Giving up your U.S. citizenship doesn't help either, they make you continue to pay U.S. taxes for the next 10 years or bar you from the U.S. for life.

(And the banks overseas aren't in the habit of helping you generate all those IRS forms, the way banks in the U.S. will do when you earn interest on your savings account or whatever).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great, more conspiracy minded "fight the power" crap from people who watched the Bush administration trample our rights for 8 years and called us traitors if we said anything.

At least they're not advocating firing shotguns at census workers, yet.</comment>


Ask HN: Audio from two apps at once on iPhone possible? - <AUTHOR> I have rather debilitating tinnitus and sometimes am able to 'relieve' it by listening to various masking noises I find online that I download and mix. I would like to be able to listen to those tracks while also listening to other audio apps on my phone simultaneously (e.g. white noise and a radio channel) but iOS does not seem to support this functionality. When you start playing audio on an app, it mutes all other apps. I know it's possible to create an ios app to play two sounds simultaneously, but that would severely limit my ability to choose what to listen to (vs being able to listen to anything randomly on youtube or a radio app while also listening to the white noise). Outside of using external audio mixing hardware, does anybody know if this is something that is even possible to be developed in an iOS app? Essentially, the app would allow me to upload a bunch of white noise tracks, but would not mute once I fired up itunes or other audio apps. If not, what about android? <comment><USER2> Audiobus can do this, but each app needs to have support built in.</comment>