The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/01/frank-fisher-butchers-shop-closure-death-of-high-street <comment><USER2> Where I live in Germany, small traditional butchers and bakers etc. are also closing down, but not for the lack of customers. They get too old, and nobody wants to take over.

About 8 or so years ago, a baker closed at the city center, replaced by a chain, and a friend lamented how traditional bakers can't keep up with the chains that basically put frozen products in the oven. Her father laughed and said the place was a gold mine, but the owner retired and nobody wants to get up at 3 in the morning anymore to bake bread.

<comment><USER3> Often the people who are willing to work long hours and lack formal qualifications are immigrants. Maybe there are not enough immigrants in your town? Or they would have needed to start as apprentices 5 years ago, and it's hard for them to get into the apprentice system?

<comment><USER4> > hard for them to get into the apprentice system?

Speaking as a German, it's also a failure to integrate these people properly. The small bakery in my home town closed down, too.

Immigrants are in no short supply, but there are a few factors that prevent them from taking on a venture like that:

\- They're generally forbidden to work until their formal immigration process has made enough progress in our bureaucracy, which can take years

\- They usually have no capital to pay for up-front expenses like buying the buildings and equipment

\- We segregate them from society by putting them in some sort of immigrant shelter while the bureaucracy does it's thing

Especially the last point is rather bad I think, it leads to parallel societies that keep to themselves rather than integrating into the German society surrounding them. Most Muslim migrants would probably rather not operate a "German"-style bakery in the traditional sense.

Our capability for integration is declining, too, because as a society we are becoming more and more estranged from our fellow citizens as community activities, especially in small towns and villages, dry up.

<comment><USER5> It very much sounds as if you're confusing immigrants and refugees here.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. As an immigrant in America it sounds very much like my first 11 months here. Legal immigrant, unable to work while waiting for paperwork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "So they say you can't close. And I think, well, come and spend your money > with me instead, then."

You get this all over the small picturesque villages in the UK, people love the idea of village shops and village pubs but few are willing to put any money behind them. Remember my parents remarking that their neighbors where sad the village pub was closing down, my parents thinking its ridiculous because they only see them in there twice a year at best, it's 2 minutes walk up the road. Pub did reopen thankfully, but if you want your village to retain it's soul you have to spend your money there.

<comment> jon-wood I saw this a while ago with a startup I was working for, we did online grocery delivery for butchers, bakers, greengrocers and the like. Eventually we had to shut down because we ran out of money, but we did one final week of deliveries - that week was the biggest week we ever did, and the first to make a profit, if all the people saying how sad they were to see us go and making one last order had just used us instead of a supermarket every other week we'd still be delivering.

<comment><USER8> I'd be willing to spend some extra money on a one-time artisanal steak or loaf, that doesn't mean I can or will spend that every week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a butcher fairly close to where I live that's been open since 1760 and there's often a line out the door on weekends etc. I love going there as if you ask where the meat is from, they'll give you directions to their fields up the road! If that's not the best way to determine animal welfare then I don't know what is.

[https://www.fconisbee.com/](https://www.fconisbee.com/)

<comment><USER10> The meat is just the transport mechanism. They're selling the known chain of custody and novelty that comes with it being local. The product they're imparting it on just happens to be meat.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It's a perfectly valid thing to sell and there's clearly a market for it but it is a luxury good and the viability of such businesses are fundamentally dependent on the amount of discretionary income sloshing around the local economy. That kind of business might make a killing outside NYC but could be struggling to keep the lights on in a suburb of Buffalo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hofpfisterei is a chain of bakery shops, headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Its business focuses on southern Germany. It has 163 branches and employs about 950 people.

Its history reaches back to the year 1331 when the mill Toratsmühle was mentioned for the first time. It must have existed before that date.

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

<comment><USER12> I once talked to a farmer south of Munich who claimed to have documents showing that his farm belonged to his family since the early 12th century. Society must have been really stable there for a long time.

Also, he told me that he is very unhappy with high land prices around Munich. He could be a multi-millionaire immediately by selling his land, but his familiy tradition does not allow this. Due to the high land prices, if he gives a small part of the land to his daughter to build a house, he must sell another part to pay the property sales tax (not sure I understood this correctly).

<comment><USER11> Japan has the most stable environment for companies. In the list of the oldest 5 worldwide the japanese companies were founded in 578 until 771 AD, which makes them more than 1400 years old!

According to a report published by the Bank of Korea in 2008 that looked at 41 countries, there were 5,586 companies older than 200 years.

3,146 (56%) are in Japan

837 (15%) in Germany

222 (4%) in the Netherlands

196 (3%) in France

Of the companies with more than 100 years of history, most of them (89%) employ fewer than 300 people. A nationwide Japanese survey counted more than 21,000 companies older than 100 years as of September 30, 2009.

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

<comment><USER13> Japan had some advantages in this regard. Being a fairly small nation it was possible to centrally administer it without the government splintering every couple of decades. Being an island nation meant they were difficult to invade. The final point in their favor was a rigid political hierarchy that discouraged mid-level officials from getting too ambitious unlike Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazing and sad story, with some very poignant passages

> Frank had stood on the same patch of shop floor and been told about the > death of his father, then his mother, now his girlfriend. . . . So the shop > wasn't only a place of business, Frank said, as he took back the photograph. > It wasn't only a local curiosity. That little room down there was the > staging place for almost every major event of his life, and he could not > bear to think of it being shuttered, cobwebbed, uncared-for.

<comment><USER15> Can't say HN has made me teary-eyed before, but that got me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dronfield is no longer really a market town in the sense of being a bit isolated and independent - it's becoming an increasingly expensive suburb for people who commute to the two large urban areas which it virtually touches. I suspect that most people who live are used to driving a fair bit and doing a "big shop".

Widespread private transport means that people don't _have_ to use local shops any more, so they need to find a way to differentiate themselves from the supermarkets. An independent butcher could thrive there, but, unfortunately, probably not as an "everyday shop". Like many of these places, the route to success is to embrace the gentrification and move up the quality ladder, marketing themselves as a premium option and making local people feel good about making the effort to go (and probably spending more money).

Weirdly online is a massive driver for that kind of business, but could be a struggle for older generations(?). Without wanting being too prejudiced, most working 80+ year olds are unlikely to be posting pictures of their produce on Instagram, replying to reviews on Google Maps or having a stylish little Squarespace site explaining how they get their lamb from farmer Dave who lives with his wife and lovely children and rare breed animals on Daisy Farm just a couple of miles away.

<comment><USER17> Growing up in one small town in the Midwest, and currently living in a slightly larger but less vibrant small town in the Midwest, the internet is the driving factor for most of the small businesses that I see thriving here.

Being able to do online sales, and have a small storefront where you keep your inventory and also have a showroom for the public seems to be a winning combination.

But running a small business takes a certain level of stubbornness, and it's often easier to just check out and take an office job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Covid showed me that decentralisation is the way to go (at least in terms of food in the UK).

I had prepped well but there's always a few things you need and crave. In those times searching the big stores you will be unlucky.

However the local butchers, corner shops were ok. Plus you discover some treats that you don't get in the supermarket (Lorne sausage, freshly baked rolls/baps/barms/whatever you call them locally).

Can't wait to see what economists research on shopping habits over the year 2020.

<comment><USER19> To be fair if Covid really showed anything it is that we shouldn't eat animals.

<comment><USER18> You clearly haven't tried Lorne sausage if you think that :)

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

<comment><USER20> Agreed! I've emigrated to Australia and have taken to shipping over butchers rusk to make my own Lorne (I'd call it slice) sausage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's fairly sad. I've never found a butcher whose quality or price is beaten by a grocery store yet. I've also yet to find a quality butcher shop that wasn't packed(pre-covid i suppose)

Butcher shops are also about the only place i've been able to find lean or extra lean ground beef that don't contain some percentage of 'reconstituted meat products', that pink slime shit.

<comment><USER22> I was with you on the first paragraph, but have never had difficulty finding genuine ground beef free of LFTB/pink slime.

All beef labeled organic will be free of the additive, and CostCo, Kroger, and Whole Foods (at least) never use it. There's also a cattle collective in my home state, all the grocers around me carry it, and they never use pink slime.

I think it's a scandal that it's allowed to be slipped in without labeling the addition. But there are a lot of places which carry the genuine article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thousands of shops like this must have closed in the UK over the past 20 years.

I grew up in neighbouring Leicestershire and in my town we had numerous butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers - much of the produce was sourced locally and sold wrapped in paper / paper bags and we used to walk into town to buy it.

Now we drive to buy those goods from a single supermarket, flown in from all corners of the globe and wrapped in layer upon layer of plastic.

<comment><USER24> I went to a French baker in Dallas when I lived there, his breads were the most amazing food item I think I ever ate, everything was amazing and made in a very traditional French way. Not sure if its there any more (been 5+ years).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Balson's butchers (in the UK and US) are about to have their 505th birthday. Their back bacon and bangers are the best I've found in the US.

[https://www.balsonbutchers.com/](https://www.balsonbutchers.com/)

<comment><USER26> I'm in Bridport all the time and I've still never been so I think I'll stop by there next week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I mentioned this to a friend who lives in Dronfield (well, Coal Aston), and he said there are two other butchers there that are still open. They haven't been there for three hundred years, but perhaps they're better butchers.

</comment><comment><USER28> That's heartbreaking. I feel bad for future generations who are never going to get to see shops of that style.</comment>


Targeting racist trolls by putting their comments on billboards - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34945756 <comment><USER2> I assume the idea is to reward trolls by giving them a larger audience..? ;-)

<comment><USER3> If they put a racist comment of mine on a billboard, I'd just see it as a success.

Shaming people for what the society deems as "wrong" usually does not work. For how long have we shamed fat people, for example?</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Securing your servers? - <AUTHOR> What techniques do you use to secure your servers? I've had a lot of good luck with things like SuSE and AppArmor for my servers, but I'm curious if there are other Linux flavors (or other OSs) that have some solid security tools for surviving wild on the internet.
What do you use? What wouldn't you ever use again? Any absolute rules that you force yourself to follow before even bringing your server online?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm not the best person at this, but I do the following on any machine I deal with which does not sit behind a firewall:

1\. Disable root logins via ssh (as noted above by bbb).

2\. Move ssh port from port 22 to something nonstandard. According to my logs, the number of idiots who try brute-force attacks on my machines dropped from 4/day to 0.

3\. Put an iptables script into /etc/init.d and make sure it runs on startup at the normal multiuser run levels (on Debian, the command is something like /sbin/update-rc.d, but I don't remember exactly). I looked into more sophisticated firewall packages which generate iptables rules, but found them rather complicated, and probably overkill (YMMV). I essentially blocked all incoming traffic except on the nonstandard ssh port and ports 80 and 443.

Services which use ports other than 80, 443, and ssh should run on a privately routed network, or, at minimum, on a separate network interface with draconian access rules. iptables is pretty easy to use once for this stuff you get the hang of it.

<comment><USER3> This is great advice. I will simply add one more thing (and two bonuses):

4\. Disable password authentication for SSH and use a public/private key. Of course, use a good password on the private key.

5\. (bonus) keep the installed software to the bare minimum. Less software, less bugs.

6\. (extra bonus) look apache's mod_security, it's an application level firewall (filters requests to the application, so, for example, you can filter SQL injections or invalid characters before they reach your app).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One absolute rule for any *nix-based server:

In /etc/ssh/sshd_config, disable root logins:

PermitRootLogin no

Even if you think your password ist strong. This will stop a majority of the brute-force password-guessing attacks. For extra credit, install denyhosts as well. It has stopped a _lot_ of bad guys trying to brute-force my servers.

<comment><USER5> You might also want to use:

AllowUsers user1 user2...

And it's probably best to disable password logins and use keys instead ([http://www.google.com./search?hl=en&q=ssh+authorized_key...](http://www.google.com./search?hl=en&q=ssh+authorized_keys)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/11/6/ubuntu-gutsy- setup-p...](http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/11/6/ubuntu-gutsy-setup-page-1)

I like the Slicehost guides to getting a server up and running relatively safely. The link has some good basic server hardening tips to start you off.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1) Only allow login by private key pair and not by password (you don't have to disable root login then)

2) Only run the minimum amount of services.

3) Don't give anyone else access to the system. (root exploits) Also be cautious if you are running some freely available software (such as phpbb). When a security hole is found, an attacker could deploy code on your machine resulting in a denial of service attack against other internet users, or in worst case, compromising your machine with a root exploit.

4) If a security exploit is found , update! If your server got compromised, make a fresh install.

</comment><comment><USER8> Read [http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...](http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/) Read it now.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm no expert, but I'd start with iptables, snort, denyhosts, bastille, nessus, nmap, etc

</comment><comment><USER10> There have been a number of good app-specific recommendations below, but I think there are some more general things to keep in mind, too:

#1: Keep your system up-to-date. Your most likely entry vector is a perfectly legitimate service like Apache or OpenSSH (or even worse, some PHP application) being cracked 'cause you never installed a critical security patch.

#2: Run different services as different users. There's no reason for your Mongrel listeners, cron jobs, reverse proxy, and god knows what else to run as the same user. Basic uid/gid partitioning is at the core of good POSIX security.

#3: Never, ever trust a public web application or server with total access to your data. Use your database server's access controls to limit admin-level access, and consider running your load balancer, public applications, and admin tools on separate hosts.

#4: Find ways to prevent password storage, entry, and checking on your application servers. Read up on and understand Kerberos, even if you aren't going to use it: it's the industry standard for an authentication system that doesn't require clients to expose their password to servers.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Expose the absolute minimum number of services (and even then only software with a good security reputation).

2\. Lock them down as much as possible in configuration and access (for example: use iptables to restrict acces to only your home/office where possible).

3\. Apply vendor security updates as quickly as possible (subscribe to mailing lists).

4\. Remotely backup your data.

5\. Hope for the best.

<comment><USER12> > 1\. Expose the absolute minimum number of services (and even then only > software with a good security reputation).

Perform a minimal install of your operating system then source compilation of latest services, with minimal features enabled. It is possible to compromise this configuration but it harder because there are less dormant features to exploit and it doesn't utilise widely used binaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Keep your software all up to date. For an example, I've seen an old version of a open source calendar be used to send 30,000 spam emails from a server.

Software like Fanstasico can keep your software automatically updated across user accounts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ingress and egress packet filtering ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egress_filtering> ). Remove default route on all internal servers.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill I have found Solaris, being "weird" and different from Linux, results in less attacks from bots. You can run "netservices limited" and it will turn off almost everything except ssh.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1)Limit SSH logins to specific users

2)Get a proper /etc/sudoers

3)Use IP tables to limit SSH connections to trusted IP's/networks. Setup a port knock if you roam around a lot.

4)Read your daily logwatch

5)Turn off ports/services that are not in use (this is somewhat less necessary with a halfway decent iptables setup)

6)Use SSH keys instead of passwords!

7)Log to a syslog server that is highly secured as well

8)Run a nessus scan on your box regularly

9)Minimize how much specific information about your underlying OS various services display

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone use things like AppArmor? I see it routinely preventing attacks on some of the older software we run. I almost wouldn't think of running a server without something like it.

</comment><comment><USER15> OpenBSD

<comment><USER16> It may seem flippant to just say OpenBSD but it's an awesome piece of software. I tend to deploy FreeBSD for historical reasons but I totally respect OpenBSD for it's complete and utter no nonsense approach to everything.

FreeBSD comes pretty locked down but OpenBSD is locked down as tight as a gnats arse. It's pretty safe to say that if your OpenBSD server is compromised it's something _you_ have done rather then something _you_ have NOT done. It's a good starting point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just installed Denyhosts. It immediately blocked 6 ip addresses. Seems to be working just fine. Nice tool.

</comment><comment><USER18> this isn't an app realted but equally important...i think. i put everything behind a deployed firewall and layer3 manged switch. cisco plus 'ios' is good hardware solutions. run nagios for upkeep etc...

</comment><comment><USER19> Read Hardening Linux.

<comment><USER20> Yes. And after you do, realise that the process of hardening a base Linux server install takes more than 15 minutes. Linux is not a "silver bullet" for security right out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> deny by default and trust only people that need to know</comment>


Is 4K BS? - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/12/22/Is-4K-BS

<comment><USER2> He is at 0.73 AMpP on 42" He can be at 1.0 AMpP on 60" He claims that he worries about brain damage, I imagine that is because of the size. 4k achieves 1.0 AMpP at smaller sized tv's at 7.5 feet from the tv. (or any other size ofc.)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you feel the best source of data / research based news source? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to subscribe to a large (NYT, WSJ, Economist, Stratford) news source and would like any thoughts on which one delivers non biased and data based reporting. <comment><USER2> If you are looking for actual data-based reporting start here fivethirtyeight.com/

If this is some kind of hipster feel-good rant about how you are only gonna read non biased news good luck with that</comment>


Apple Helped FBI Identify Alleged Owner of KickassTorrents - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/21/apple-helped-identify-kickasstorrents-owner/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132810)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does the DMCA or any other US law apply in Poland?

<comment><USER4> Because...uh...NATO.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What charitable organizations do you donate to? - donations-2015 It's the end of the year, so I'm doing my annual charitable donations. Where do others on HN donate? I've got the EFF and the Red Cross on my list.
Also, I'd like to maximize the impact of my money. How do you assess the relative value of different agencies?
And, what should I do over the next 12 months to be better prepared next year? <comment><AUTHOR> GiveWell [1] does a lot of research to come up with their list of recommended charities - ones that will have the highest amount of impact for each dollar donated to them.

A couple times every year I look at their top charity and drop a few hundred dollars on them. IMO if you want to maximize the impact of your donation, you can't go wrong with this approach.

[1] [http://www.givewell.org/](http://www.givewell.org/)

<comment><USER2> They currently recommend "Deworm the world".

They list "Deworm the world" as:

> The Deworm the World Initiative, led by Evidence Action, is one of our top- > rated charities and an organization that we feel offers donors an > outstanding opportunity to accomplish good with their donations.

Deworming children who have worms is obviously really important, but there's some debate around the effectiveness of population level deworming. Partly this debate is caused by different statistical methods: if you do heath stats you see less benefit; if you do economist stats you see more benefit. (The argument started with an attempt to replicate the results by looking at the data. Using economist stats this works; using health stats it doesn't. The mass deworming people say that some statistical shenanigans make that an invalid approach. The epidemiologist's point to missing data from the original study.)

[http://community.cochrane.org/features/deworming- debate](http://community.cochrane.org/features/deworming-debate)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33972806](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33972806)

This is for one of their best, most recommendable, charities. It doesn't inspire confidence in the GiveWell methods or recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> archive.org</comment>


My Response to the Backwards Brain Bicycle - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tricky-turn/id1131751001?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> One of my friends one day forwarded me the YouTube link to Backwards Brain Bicycle by Dustin ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0)) and I was so amazed by how our brains cling to the meanings of relative phenomena we've learnt in the past and how it characterizes our behavior as humans. For example, that's why we find it so hard to give up a certain habit. Our response, a replication of the concept in the form of a simple game. Let us know what you think.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ten exclusive promo codes to fellow hackers:

1\. [http://redeem-now.com/8c649b037c39](http://redeem-now.com/8c649b037c39) 2\. [http://redeem-now.com/2631354af525](http://redeem-now.com/2631354af525) 3\. [http://redeem-now.com/628a4c8db139](http://redeem-now.com/628a4c8db139) 4\. [http://redeem-now.com/e627d2a8a6c0](http://redeem-now.com/e627d2a8a6c0) 5\. [http://redeem-now.com/5c4d06d76aea](http://redeem-now.com/5c4d06d76aea) 6\. [http://redeem-now.com/276dcf3735eb](http://redeem-now.com/276dcf3735eb) 7\. [http://redeem-now.com/7074e1539042](http://redeem-now.com/7074e1539042) 8\. [http://redeem-now.com/03525b7d7401](http://redeem-now.com/03525b7d7401) 9\. [http://redeem-now.com/8a4b03b4aeb2](http://redeem-now.com/8a4b03b4aeb2) 10\. [http://redeem-now.com/8f74be2d66ab](http://redeem-now.com/8f74be2d66ab)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the cost of fighting back? - <AUTHOR>

When people get a letter of cease and decist or get sued by patent troll, most people give up because it is too expensive to fight back.<p>What are these things that are expensive? Are they just lawyers fees? Or is there more to it. <comment><USER2> The demand sums of money are usually just slightly less than the cost of defending oneself in court, around $7,500.

Publishing silly C&D letters has been effective for some people.</comment>


Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details - <AUTHOR> http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3093728

<comment><USER2> I don't know how they're going to manage this with the money-laundering/fraud angle. This makes Epic Boots of the Whale into a transfer medium for money between virtually anonymous endpoints, including internationally. (Long story short: You can run an auction which is honest or you can run an auction which is anonymous, but you cannot do both at the same time. Virtually any information flow from the system to any participant in the auction compromises the anonymity, since the attacker has _perfect knowledge of the state of the system from both ends of the trade._ )

That is guaranteed to draw heavy adversarial attention from both the bad guys and the good guys.

Business-wise, even Blizzard is going to eventually bow to reality and realize that INSERT ... INTO ITEMS; is the most profitable line of code any game company can ever write. They've experimented a few times in WoW with making folks pay for e.g. cosmetic mount improvements. Eventually they're going to realize that their core audience pays hundreds but values their gamerhood at (conservatively) thousands, and start monetizing that gap. After doing so, they'll be able to treat the base product as "Free 2 Play", assuming they think America has enough bandwidth to play their games without needing the assist from a truck of DVDs shipped to every Best Buy and Walmart.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, Blizzard has done a good job with managing their in game economies and they wouldn't be so stupid as to screw it up by competing against their own players for control of assets, they stand to make way more money by just skimming off the top.

<comment><USER2> Blizzard is very good at what they do, but not perfect. The entire space is converging on Free2Play and games with 1 pct of WoW's budget print money hats. When Blizzard makes a tiny cosmetic sale of items, the Internet goes awash with geek rage and the shareholders at Vivendi get 20 million richer. Geeks rage hard at 5% fees for transactions but happily pay ten bucks a button press for a SQL statement with 98 pct margins.

I respect that you may no like this. I dislike gravity. Some days we do not get what we want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck- based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.

A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time (if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings into real money accounts)

</comment><comment><USER5> This will be interesting.

Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

Ah... Fond memories of duping items in the original Diablo game -- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Godly Plate of the Whale, King's Sword of Haste...

=]

<comment><USER6> > _Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in- > game._

Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game.

[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.

<comment><USER7> There is nothing specific about how Diablo 2 did items that enabled duping. Nearly every MMORPG has had bugs that allow duping. You are working with distributed systems with tens if not hundreds of ways of interacting with your inventory and have to make sure they all work properly even when an attacker can crash your servers at any time during the processing. This all has to be done while at the same time allowing massive amounts of transactions to occur simulatenously. It is not an easy thing to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those. Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this?

Talk about game designers selling out badly ...

<comment><USER9> It doesn't matter what Blizzard does to make it easier to get, really. If there is even a perception of rarity, someone will try to sell it for real money.

An entire economy has developed around buying virtual items, and Blizzard is only the latest ones to try to cash in on it. EVE Online does this with the PLEX licenses, which are 1 month subscriptions that players can buy with real money, then sell them in-game to other players. Everquest 2 had(or has?) servers that allowed the player to do the exact same thing, by auctioning off in-game items and characters for real money.

Blizzard's is doing the exact same thing that SOE and CCP did. They're making sure that they are going to get a cut of the money that will be flowing through the game.

<comment><USER10> Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

[http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost- ccp-1...](http://beefjack.com/news/eve-online-revolts-could-cost-ccp-1m-in- lost-revenue/)

$1mm is a big deal for a small, niche company like CCP.

<comment><USER9> >Eve is hemorrhaging accounts and the player outrage from the aftermath of their attempts to directly monetize the playerbase beyond PLEX accounts make them a VERY bad example to follow.

I would argue CCP's issues are more with their marketing and customer-facing people than anything else. Valve did that with TF2 hats(some cost $20 or more to buy), and didn't have nearly the same level of fallout with it. Blizzard's done the same thing with purchasable vanity pets and in-game mounts, and hasn't had really any backlash from it.

CCP was charging US$70 for a virtual pair of jeans, then made forum posts trying to convince people since people spend that much on actual clothing, they could charge the same thing for the virtual item. The userbase, predictably, wasn't happy with this idiotic argument, and the fact that a LOT of development time went to these features versus things that actually impacted the player's experience.

<comment><USER10> It was a misunderstanding of their market entirely. The Eve player-base is incredibly pissy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hasn't blizzard been previously quite aggressive about how game breaking player driven cash economies are - i.e. gold selling and the such? But now they think it's a fine idea as long as they're getting a real world cash fee? Seems to suggest they never saw it as game breaking as much as revenue stealing.

<comment><USER9> At one point, they were pretty protective about WoW's economy. In vanilla, there were a lot of gold sinks, like skill/spell training costs, riding skills, etc. Those are sill present, but don't impact the game nearly as much. They're mostly vanity things like gigantic bags and non-combat pets. In-game currency was relatively rare, with most endgame bosses giving less than 1 gold per person.

That changed during the middle of the Burning Crusade expansion, where Blizzard basically decided that the gold sellers won, and that they were just going to flood the market with currency. They added daily quests, which were quests that gave reputation and gold every day to top-level characters, as well as more sinks, like a character title that cost 1000 gold.

At this point, gold is basically a joke, because it's extremely easy to get with a minimal time investment. Half an hour of play can get the player anywhere between 100 and 400 gold. It appears that most of the gold sellers have moved to selling epic tradable gear and items over gold at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Blizzard, strangely enough, is probably in the perfect position to start a successful virtual currency.

In fact, they might just do it by accident.

<comment><USER13> SOJs?

<comment><USER14> SOJs was a really interesting phenomenon and probably taught me more about economics more than anything else.

SOJs, "stone of Jordan" was a unique ring in diablo2.

Gold in diablo2 became worthless, even though they tried to soak it up with improving vendor items, and even implementing gambling.

Eventually SOJs became the currency for trading. You'd see postings like "2 socket archon 4 2 SOJ".

What was so interesting is that SOJ's are very similar to gold in the real world. They were easy to trade, easy to store (only taking up 1 square), very rare (or supposed to be), and had great intrinsic value because the sorcerer class was always running out of mana and they gave a 25% increase to mana.

Using SOJs as currency just developed naturally, probably just like gold did in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if there's going to be a cap on how much you can trade/earn.

What's stopping this from becoming a full-time occupation for someone?

<comment><USER16> I've always wondered what the ballpark was for people employed full-time playing Diablo 2. Thousands?

<comment><USER5> I dusted off my old copy of Diablo 2 last summer and played for a little while. The entire multi-player experience was dominated by bots spamming ads or bots that instantly pick up any rare items that dropped.

The botting was completely out of control.

I chatted with another player who used bots to farm for rare items and he claimed to have 24+ instances of the game running 24/7 split across several machines. He would check once a day to see if any of his bots managed to get a really, really rare item.

Kinda crazy... =]

<comment><USER17> You should ask him to do an AMA, if you can get a hold of him. I wonder how profitable this was - especially compared to, say, mining bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For me the huge news here is that they're making Diablo 3. I'm so out of the loop when it comes to games.

<comment><USER19> There's a whole community over on reddit worth looking over. Lots of Diablo 3 information.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From one view I understand at least some of the reasons they are doing this.

1) Money. D3 is free to play so monetizing non-subscription aspects makes sense.

2) People _will_ buy in game items for real money so bringing that out of the dark underground makes sense.

However it still seems contrary to the gameplay, and would make finding some very rare item less special (unless you were going to sell it that is.)

On the bright side, hardcore mode will not have this, so I think overall it is acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER21> I fear this might make the argument for taxing virtual goods stronger. There have been some real money systems (livegamer) out there but never on such a large expected release title.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).

<comment><USER3> Here is what I wish Blizzard would do with WoW. Instead of paying $15 a month for game playing time, they should sell you game items that represent a week of play time, so let's say $15 buys you a stack of 4 in game chips. The player can then activate those chips to extend their play time or they can trade them with other players or sell them on the auction house for in game gold. On the other end, blizzard can enable a program to buy back chips at say 70% of the original value. This gives people a legitimate avenue to "buy" items if they want, while also controlling the gold/item farming community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are 2 absolutely bad side effects to this:

\- You must be always online, no offline mode at all. /// \- Mods are expressly forbidden, no mods at all.

</comment><comment><USER24> What a joke. No wonder this game is taking so long to release. Creating a global marketplace like this is a serious development effort. This isn't a game anymore.</comment>


Why Did Greenland's Vikings Vanish? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/ <comment> red-indian I've always found it interesting that there was mail service between Greenland and Iceland at least up until 1424.

Not too long after that, in 1477, Columbus went to Galway Ireland to ask fishermen about routes across the northern sea. These fishermen routinely visited Iceland, and knew about Greenland. Columbus also inspected a boat on which a couple had arrived in Galway from beyond Iceland, likely Greenland, and either viewed the bodies of the couple or met with them depending on how you read his Latin.

<comment><USER2> As I recall from 1491, the fisherman had enough trade as far as New England (by the 1600's) that the Pilgrims found a translator who _already_ spoke English.

They didn't dwell on that in American History class.

<comment><USER3> How old ARE you?

<comment><USER2> I would love to have you come visit my castle in beautiful Eastern Europe. The vistas are wonderful, as are the tapestries.

We're having a bit of a wolf problem but as long as you travel during the day you should be fine.

Seriously though, it's a book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're into this kind of thing, check out The Fall Of Civilizations podcast — it's great and also has an episode on this topic.

[https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/03/26/episode-4-...](https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/03/26/episode-4-of- fall-of-civilizations-is-now-live/)

<comment><USER5> or just turn on the TV ;)

<comment><USER6> That is such a narrow reply. What channel? Is that channel being shown in my current TV cable package? What country? How accurate is the show?

<comment><USER7> I think it was a joke about the name of the podcast

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My reading of the article is that it happened, as they say, "slowly and then all at once."

Not dissimilar from the hollowing out of rural America today. People keep on going, assuming that things will either stay stable or turn around at some point. Meanwhile everything keeps on at roughly the same trajectory of the people hanging on getting older and older, and the young people moving on to greener pastures.

And then one day you realize that there isn't really anything left.

</comment><comment><USER9> This subject is discussed in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.[1]

Some topics that the article didn't mention is that:

a) Norse in Greenland continued internal infighting losing (in such a small population) able men due to duels and revenge killing

b) They had been spending much of the efforts during short summer on costly expeditions to aquire walrus-tusk ivory instead of obtaining timber and other necessities.

c) The upper class had been directing most resources into vanity projects like large cathedral and exchanging walrus-tusk ivory for luxury imports like wine, fine clothes etc..

It is still beyond me why living in Greenland by the sea they had refused to eat fish.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)

<comment><USER10> _Collapse_ and its author Jared Diamond get a mention in the article. This article adds a couple of factors to Diamond's. In 21st-century lingo the added factors were

\-- Globalization: Elephant ivory from Africa, newly available, crowded out walrus-tusk ivory from the market. And Greenland's ivory sales were reduced in the wake of the plague. (Ivory was their foreign-exchange product.)

\--Climate fluctuations, decades-long.

It's cool to learn a little more above the lived experience of those people. I imagine they argued with each other all the time about whether to spend their efforts getting stuff they could SELL or stuff they could USE. Figuring that out is hard enough for us, and we have perfect information about markets compared to them. Imagine how hard it must have been for them.

According to Diamond the Norse outposts in Greenland lasted five hundred years. That's a hundred years longer ago than the first English settlers clawed a foothold around Massachusetts Bay. A lot can happen in five hundred years! I suspect saying "it was this - " or "it was that - made them collapse" leads to gross oversimplification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's quite a bit of a stretch to call anyone from after the 11th century a viking. But for some reason the epithet often gets bandied about when talking of the Norse in Greenland.

<comment><USER12> Sexier name for sure. We do still call the age before the current Nordic states were established the age of Vikings in Sweden.

The whole notion of Vikings being stupid and naive sounds very old fashioned. The whole idea that short seasons and snow would scare off any people from the Nordic countries is bullshit. Nuuk is at 64 degrees north, roughly similar to Reykjavík, Trondheim or the southern point of the northern third of Sweden. Which had been inhabited for much longer. The climate is slightly better in Scandinavia that far north, but Greenland would surely have been similar.

</comment></comment><comment> ro-_-b I wonder how the Vikings kept warm during winter. It's mentioned in the article that there almost weren't any trees in Greenland and it must have been extremely cold there in winter.

<comment><USER13> There are other things you can burn: peat (probably not plentiful in Greenland), dried cow manure. Also, you wear furs and sleep under furs. Even my grandparents, living in a place with far more plentiful wood at a much later time in history, had stories of breaking the ice on the wash basin in the morning.

<comment><USER14> I lived in a place where I had to break the ice in the toilet in the morning. And that was in England.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get it, they bash on diamonds book and then are making the same points as he did

<comment><USER13> I don't see that they bashed on his book. They said that he followed the narrative accepted at the time which has since been disproven (or modified, anyway). Saying that he wrote approximately what historians at the time believed seems to be far from a harsh criticism. It may, perhaps, be a warning that the information has been superseded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This website is utterly unreadable on mobile without an adblocker.

I thought something named the Smithsonian magazine would be better than this yet here we are</comment>


We Built Interactive Seating Maps Using Raphael; Please Give Us Feedback - <AUTHOR> http://seatgeek.com/event/show/457589/green-bay-packers-at-atlanta-falcons-2010-11-28/ <comment><USER2> Awesome job guys! A couple notes, from somebody who's done the interactive seating maps stuff before...

First off, this is essentially a direct clone of Fansnap.com's UI; I'd be surprised if SeatGeek didn't get heat over it. And since Fansnap has taken something like 10 times the funding Seatgeak has, it's not a move I would have personally made. But it sure is ballsy!

Secondly, I created interactive seating maps for TicketStumbler in one day using image maps and JS instead of any fancy (read: quality) canvas/SVG stuff. Turns out that was good enough to get StubHub to ban us from their API without so much as a notice. The ticketing affiliate industry is as shady and predatory as they come; if your product is similar to or better than a "partner" site's, don't think blackmail is beyond them or even outside the norm. All of which is to say, in this industry it pays to spend as little time as possible on features that you may be forced to disable or dumb down. Today, TS' maps are either disabled entirely or reduced in utility, literally to avoid being as good as StubHub's.

Although, with StubHub quickly making themselves irrelevant in the affiliate space by reducing commissions to near-zero, maybe it won't be such a huge deal this time around. Their affiliate manager would contact us the _same day_ we released something StubHub didn't like; no other site has been _quite_ that bad.

All that being said, I _really_ hope Seatgeek does well. It would be amazing to have one honest, successful startup in this space that isn't run by a suit factory.

<comment><USER3> Yep a direct clone of fansnap.com, Impressive job but I can't help it but think yuk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I've always wanted was to be able to 'see' from the seat view, so I have a better idea of what I'm buying. This is even more important for either odd shaped venues (Fenway) or buying those ever-tricky, "Limited view" seats that might be great, or horrid.

A "Seat-View" (like "Google Street View") would change ticket buying forever I think. Main difficulty is in obtaining the photos, but not impossible.

<comment><USER5> Pay for it.

Seriously -- build an iPhone app that takes pics from seats. Pay people a buck per pick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A cognitive issue I had while trying your site was with the seat color coding scheme. In "deal mode", red is "worst" and green is "best". Black is "unknown". This makes sense to me. However, some games don't have "deal mode" (why not?), and so the site moves into a "what's the price" mode.

In this latter mode, the cheapest seats are black, the most expensive are red (this makes me think red==bad). Bright green (which to me signals "go!") is smack in the middle. And the cues based on circle size are also gone. I guess I initially assumed that red and green would be the two ends of the spectrum in pricing mode. I found the color coding scheme actually caused me to prefer the mid-priced seats because of a preference to avoid red and black. So, I would suggest a rethink of the coloring scheme in this mode.

It would also be nice if you could show the math on what makes a deal good or bad, or at least have some sort of blurb about what constitutes a "good deal".

<comment><USER7> I was researching button colouring the other day and contrary to expectation red is actually normally more clicked on than green (yes, despite the go-stop metaphor).

Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling shades of red down to white (best down to worst).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1) Bug: occasionally, when I mouse over a section, the box that says "5 listings for $61" goes off the edge of the screen for me. [Windows Vista, FireFox 4 beta 4]

2) As a fan of a particular team, I would love to be able to navigate between that team's games without going back to a menu. Maybe have little arrows in the title area next to the team name that say "next home game" and "previous home game".

3) Similarly, on the team list, a checkbox for "home games only" would be nice. I'm not likely to go to away games for my hometown team, but I am likely to want to look through several home games.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the bug report; we'll fix that shortly. And will also consider ways we can add more navigation options while still keeping the UI as sparse as possible...maybe we add those filters but hide them by default?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Great job! The one thing I found missing is zooming in and out with the mouse wheel.

2\. I'm amazed how ridiculously better this is than the flash version :)

3\. Thanks for letting me know about Raphaël - it looks like a very cool tool. I'll definitely toy with it now :)

<comment><USER10> I was looking for the zooming too. At least allow me to scroll up and down the map until that is implemented.

<comment><USER11> You can zoom using the arrow buttons on the top-right of the maps. We definitely have on double-click and mous wheel zooming on the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's like HipMunk for stadium seats! (Or is HipMunk the SeatGeek of air travel?)

How many more startups are possible on the theme of creating radically more interactive and usefully-laid-out interfaces to other sites' transactions?

<comment><USER13> As a Skins season ticket holder _and_ now marketing dude at hipmunk, I'm doubleplus thrilled about this great site. Well done, Seat Geek. Such a universal problem across every single ticket site -- solved!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really cool. I didn't realize all these ticket brokers had affiliate setups and such good data feeds. I guess those hefty fees allow for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Zooming interface works really well. For example, I like that when zoomed out tickets of a section are grouped together. But performing is a bit slow with a cold client-side cache.

Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled bitmaps)?

<comment><USER16> Thanks, in regards to the slowness, what browser were you using?

The stadium itself is actually tiled bitmaps, we're using Raphael/svg for the section/row highlights. It would have been great to use vector graphics the whole way, for one it would have given us continuous zooming instead of the predefined levels we're doing now, but the performance just isn't there yet in IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The bad deal/great deal scale made me wonder what that calculation is based on. Is there an explanation somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> We built a model that takes every seat in a stadium and assigns a fitted price to it ("fitted" in the econometric sense, meaning what the price should be for an average game). That's based on long-term historical transaction prices for each section and scaling factors for things like the row, number of tickets, angle to field, and some other inputs.

Then, for each ticket we compare the actual price to the fitted price and look at the deviation as a percentage of the fitted price, i.e. (acutal price - fitted price)/fitted price. The tickets with the biggest deviations are ranked as the best deals.

We certainly need to add an explanation of this to the site; thanks for the suggestion.

<comment><USER18> First off, amazing stuff.

I came to this thread to find this explanation. Thanks for writing it out. In case you're wondering, the first place I looked for the description was on the legend in the lower right, I expected _something_ to be clickable that would tell me what a "deal" meant. You might want to place the explanation down there. Even a "title" attribute would be a quick win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an incredible app. Seriously. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is really cool. It comes at the right time as I'm researching some NFL tickets.

One thing I really, really wish I could do is sort or filter by row # like I can with stubhub. When I go to something expensive like an NFL game, I really don't mind getting an ok or even bad deal if I know I'm getting a great view. It's going to be expensive anyway.

Otherwise, good work. Have you guys seen sites like www.seatdata.com that show photos from sections? Seatdata is rough to use, but sort of indispensable if you are traveling somewhere you've never been to see your team. Is it even legal to use photos like that?

</comment><comment><USER21> Not loading for me - Chrome, OSX.

<comment><USER22> Not sure if original link is direct to seating - but if it is, it does not render on my HTC desire with Android 2.2 and mobile safari. I use Raphael on one of my websites and have similar problem there.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't work on my Droid with 2.2 either. I loaded it twice, over twelve hours apart, from different locations. Just shows a gray rectangle where the tickets should be (after showing the loading animated gif for several painful seconds) and a white area where the stadium should be. Works fine on Firefox. I think it is important to support mobile - at work, one may rather not have their employer know that they are spending time looking for tickets. Hopefully it is possible to give a good experience. The chrome takes up most of the display in landscape mode, though when I rotate to portrait, there is much more space.

One other thing: is there any way to keep the dots from displaying until the map is loaded? It is jarring for me to see them floating out in white space. Yet when the map is cached, the map displays before the dots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How did you learn Raphael? The documentation seems a little thin but I'd love to use it to build some graphs.

<comment><USER25> Typically when working in Raphael, I'll just design whatever I need in Inkscape first, then export to SVG. From there just dump the raw SVG data into Raphael and you're good to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was initially shocked when I zoomed in on one of the dots and immediately saw "Bad Deal" ... I thought WTF is this guy trying to lose customers?

But then I thought of how I felt as a customer! And it was good.

It's really a fantastic looking engine really nice. I'm interested in how you're going to use it... a "craigslist" for tickets? Relicense to ticketmaster et. al. ?

Something else?

Whatever - you've built something really cool, now you can figure out how to monetize it.

<comment><USER27> SeatGeek is already an affiliate to the larger ticket selling sites (StubHub et al). This replaces/upgrades their flash version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A mobile site is critical for the day-of-event purchases outside the venue! Either that or a droid app would be great conveniences to an already stellar product! I like how you took the airline ticket farecast model and applied it to event tickets. This service is a job well done. I'm impressed.

</comment><comment><USER29> Very pretty, fun to play with.

The rollovers are getting chopped off for most of the right side of the map -- they run off the right edge of the page. Can they be pulled in?

At least initially, I was leery of clicking -- but it turned out to stay on the same page, and doesn't have the same problem as the rollovers.

Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER30> Two UI suggestions:

\- mouseover the section should display the popup, not just mouseover on the dot

\- after a click on the dot, clicking anywhere else should close the popup

In addition, it wasn't immediately clear to me that zooming in would show more detail.

Very cool, great job.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the suggestions.

Mouseover on the whole section is definitely nicer but unfortunately it caused some performance problems in IE (rendering a ton of paths is slow). Hopefully we can figure out a more performant way of doing that.

One disadvantage of closing the popup on any click is that you might want to drag the map with the popup open, though it would be nice to not have to click the 'x'. Certainly something to consider.

<comment><USER31> close it if the click is _not_ a drag?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow. Great work guys. I am impressed with the data collection, but even more impressed with the attention to detail given to the interface. I love how big circles represent better deals.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is great. One small suggestion: when you have data for where seats are and the user clicks to zoom into the section, show empty circles for seats that are already purchased. Showing a couple random colored circles inside the zoom lens is pretty confusing. How far away from the end of the row is the seat? Or if you don't know where the end of the row is, just to be able to count how many seats are to either side of me would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER34> First: completely, totally awesome. Stubhub was the only interface that came close to this, and this is way more powerful than that.

One suggestion: I wanted to check out the 'price forecast' feature, but had to create a site-specific account, where I immediately stopped. Is Twitter OAuth/FBConnect or OpenID on the horizon? It really lowers the barrier to getting an account created.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah we've had FBConnect for a while but temporarily deactivated it last week because it started to act up. Should be back live soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is incredibly impressive Jack, Russ and team. Excellent job!

Who ended up working on the design? It's very sharp and clean inside the application.

</comment><comment><USER36> What an excellent app, great job!

Have you thought about adding a social angle, i.e. allowing users to make comments on or recommend specific seats? Perhaps another heatmap layer to display desirability?

Personal beef - Rogers Arena in Vancouver is "Seating Chart Pending" with no ETA... coming soon?

</comment><comment><USER37> Very cool, very usable.

Where you could improve: seems rather slow to load on Safari/Mac. Also bothers me that the mouse-over for sections near 333 is off-screen at 1280x960. Could you have it show up on the other side of the pin, just like it does when I click?

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks awesome. I will definitely use this from now on. A couple questions: 1) When did you guys release this? I have used SeatGeek before and thought I saw this awhile ago. 2) How many venues do you have this for? The entire country?

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this is awesome. If you could allow me to zoom in and out via the scroll-wheel on the mouse (or maybe double-clicking in an area) that would be really great! I will definitely be using this for all my future ticket needs!

</comment><comment><USER40> Well it's brilliantly done. Would like to include it/link it with other stuff at <http://www.irunmywebsite.com/raphael/raphaelsource.php>

</comment><comment><USER41> Do you guys plan on having data as granular as how many seats there are per row?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not. It's extremely labor-intensive to collect and arguably not very useful because most tickets listed on the secondary market don't include the seat number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Also, I agree that it needs to be made more obvious that the "dots" appear in rows as you zoom in. Also, making the zoom work with the scroll wheel on a mouse would be key.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point thanks. Have heard this from a few different folks now. We need to make it more obvious that people should zoom in. Will push a fix soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wheres the hand icon that lets you know you can drag the map for a better view? The tags at the end were cut off and it took me a second to realize I could drag the map.

</comment><comment><USER43> Zooming in is awesome. Default map view is a little weird. Slider could be a tad more responsive.(could be chrome) Overall much better than your last version.

<comment><USER42> Zooming would be even more awesome if the symbols (+ -) were not covered by the info bubble on certain seats. For example, Shea Stadium section 325. The map is fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Please please please do this for the UK market!

<comment><USER45> And maybe NCAA?

<comment><USER46> Ditto on NCAA. There's many more stadiums, and college ticket trading is huge business. I guess concert venues could work as well. Pretty much anything with seats and tickets.

<comment><USER11> We currently index events and tickets for Concert, Theater, Professional Sports, and certain collegiate sporting events, as well as things like Nascar and Tennis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Bug (?): In Opera, my mouse gesture to go back (right click + left) was captured by the canvas and dragged the stadium.

</comment><comment><USER48> Outstanding! I'm going to use the hell out of this for any sports tickets I buy from now on. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER49> The bi-directional filters on the bottom left cannot be altered in an iPad.

</comment><comment><USER50> Tell @DmitryBaranovsk!

</comment><comment><USER51> Where was this when I was doing my wedding. Cool stuff

</comment><comment><USER52> Awesome job guys

</comment><comment><USER53> looks great! really cool. no ncaaf?

<comment><USER54> agree, college football would be great.

Also, it might just be my eyes, but the green highlight on the chart when you are selecting a ticket on the left seems hard to see. Maybe make the outline a bit thicker, or change the gray background to green?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I used to be a developer at Ticketmaster, and all I can say is _kudos, great job!_

It took TM/LN an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to build their own half- assed interactive seating charts, and yours beats all the big guys. Don't worry about them shamelessly copying your version—they literally won't be able to, even if they wanted to copy it wholesale, trust me(complicated data issues). :P

Incidentally, where'd you get your venue data? I always thought venue seating maps should be publicly available, like open street data.

<comment><USER16> Thanks so much, that's awesome to hear.

Collecting the venue data was definitely a bit of a challenge. We used a combination of publicly available seating charts, google earth (believe it or not) and our own transaction data. It's easy enough to get a rough idea of the section sizes/layout. Getting row counts and names was a bit tougher, and our transaction data was a big help there.</comment></comment>


Facebook and Twitter say 100s of users gave improper access to personal data - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/25/facebook-and-twitter-says-users-gave-improper-access-to-personal-data.html <comment><USER2> This headline strikes me as a shift burdening users themselves with finding bad actors. Even the statement from e.g. Twitter, make it seems so:

"We think it's important for people to be aware that this exists out there and that they review the apps that they use to connect to their accounts," said Lindsay McCallum, a Twitter spokeswoman."

But I would argue that users who fall for these nefarious services should not be the lookout. Instead the trust should be placed on teams at Facebook and Twitter that vet the bad actors, e.g. oneAudience.

I understand vulnerabilities abound and moderation is hard, and educating users is important. I'm just irked a bit that the accountability is shifted here.</comment>


How to read faster - <AUTHOR> http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/

<comment><USER2> Speed reading is a good test if the text is completely redundant and worthless. Anyone reading math books faster than 5 pages / hour ?

<comment><USER3> You're essentially correct, so I +1'd you. I don't think speed reading only works if the text is "worthless", but rather if the text is intuitively friendly and fairly straightforward information. Stories fit this criteria, news reports, lots of blogs, comments, etc. Math books require you to think about abstract concepts and information has to be digested, you can't simply get it through reading over something once like you can with stories.

<comment><USER4> Very true, but other techniques from the school of thought to which speed reading belongs do still apply to math texts, I think.

For instance, many people, if they start getting hung up on some difficult material in a math text will slow down (an ok thing to do), then if they have more trouble, they slow down more (maybe also ok). But at some point as progress approaches zero (several moves that seemed ok in isolation accumulate), and the reward/effort falls below that needed to have the reader keep reading the book, some other activity always occurs as a better use of time (the accumulation of ok moves has defeated the entire enterprise). Sometimes ending a book that way is probably ok, but surely it can't always be for the best (unless pretty much every book is organized so as to have monotonically increasing difficulty and monotonically decreasing worth-it-ness to the reader). So the attitude of not treating the book as sacrosanct is helpful here, if the material gets tough and there is any threat of motivation dropping, just skip to the beginning of the next section, summary, or chapter as the case may be. Later material may illuminate the previous difficult material, or maybe something else later on will be worth learning even without the stuff that got skipped (if one removed a random ingredient from every sandwich you ate, they will still have nutritional value).

Speed reading is just one of a number of methods all built on a presupposition, that between the realms of "worth reading start to finish carefully" and "not worth reading" there is a landscape of books that can be worth spending different amounts of time on. So then the issue becomes, for book type x, and time one is willing to spend trying t, what are the heuristics available for getting a positive return out of that book.

This has reminded me to order a copy of _How to Read a Book_. It has been years since I gave that book a two hour reading, and it still shapes how I think about allocating time for a book like making a bet and choosing strategies based on the time and book type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Test the limits of your speed reading ability with this app: <http://spreeder.com> ( _pointed to in the article_ )

Kinda awesome.

</comment><comment><USER6> I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. (Woody Allen)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think if you want to read like that, you might as well skip the book and pull a summary from Wikipedia. Although, it does discuss two things I've often wondered about: can one read without subvocal narration, and could one read more effectively using something like that Spreeder app.

It's always been concentration/focus that's slowed my reading though. My mind wanders very easily.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does this help? How You can Improve Your Memory: In under 300 words [http://bighow.com/news/how-you-can-improve-your-memory-in- un...](http://bighow.com/news/how-you-can-improve-your-memory-in- under-300-words)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review) system is very similar: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R>.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wouldn't putting all that forced effort into reading make psychological time dilate to match the gains in real time?</comment>


Why I still prefer Prototype to jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2009/1/12/why-i-still-prefer-prototype-to-jquery <comment><USER2> Not having extensively used either jQuery or Prototype, I found this comparison interesting. But the entire discussion about jQuery "stealing" `this` is somewhat misinformed. Javascript closures don't caputure the value of `this`; instead, the value of `this` is determined at the call site. If the function is called as a method (using the `object.method()` syntax), `this` is bound to `object`; otherwise, `this` is bound to the global object (called `window` in browsers). The behavior I just described makes `this` is almost useless in Javascript closures, and the "idiomatic Prototype" example the author gives cannot possibly work:

        // Prototype
        $A(this.columns).each(function(item) {
            this.buildHeader(item);
        });

If you want to do that, you have explicitly bind `this` to a (differently named) variable in the outer scope:

        var self = this;
        $A(self.columns).each(function(item) {
            self.buildHeader(item);
        });

<comment><USER3> >> "The behavior I just described makes `this` is almost useless in Javascript closures"

Hmm??

e.onmouseover = function(c) {return function() { c.dosomething()}}(this);

Then in the dosomething function, "this" references what you expect...

I don't see why you need a library to construct a simple closure.

<comment><USER2> Note how you haven't used the keyword `this` inside the closure. What you've written is functionally equivalent to the technique I described, assigning the `this` object to a temporary variable. The only difference is that you bind it with a lambda instead of a `var`.

<comment><USER3> I don't use the keyword this inside the closure, but inside the function dosomething() I can happily use "this".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg I don't understand why does one need to make a choice. Even comparing the two makes little sense: jQuery is smaller and DOM-focused, while Prototype is a much more comprehensive multi-file library and DOM-related stuff _is just a part of it_ , completely isolated in its own file which you can exclude during Prototype's build process.

I use both: jQuery for HTTP and DOM traversing/manipulation _plus_ DOM-less prototype core for everything else. This combo is awesome, conflict-free and quite compact when gzipped. Bare bone JavaScript is too weak library wise and Prototype makes an excellent "standard library" for it. I couldn't live without Prototype's extensions to enumerable, strings, arrays, hashes, etc.

And it's 100% compatible with Rails thanks to jRails project. I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER4> One argument against doing both is that Prototype alters many built in classes directly. This is often risky and dangerous, and makes interactions between the two code bases possible.

<comment><USER5> Prototype alters stuff but jQuery doesn't. So there is very little conflict. The use of Prototype however will prevent use of other altering js frameworks like MooTools.

Fundamentally I think Prototype/MooTools are horribly designed javascript library because they introduce incompatibilities. However I use them when I need a free component or 2. I would never drop jQuery though so I always use $j instead of $, even when using jquery by itself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        Determine the index of the first parameter in the Array …
        Ah, it returns the index. But that's OK … JavaScript supports the notion of "truthiness",

Except if it returns "0", of course.

It's a very C-like way of doing things:

       if ($.inArray(blah blah) < 0)
            // not found!

</comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see a level-headed assessment like this. Too many programmers rely on trends or religious convictions to make decisions. All choices involve trade-offs, so make yourself aware of them!

<comment><USER8> it is true that all choices involve trade-offs, and one library is going to likely be "best" for you based on your individual needs.

but i wouldn't call this article level-headed, it has an explicitly stated tilt towards prototype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> JavaScript 1.6 added seven new array methods (indexOf, lastIndexOf, every, filter, forEach, map, and some). If only backward compatibility weren't a problem, the warring JavaScript libraries could just use these (or implement them into the prototype like Sugar Arrays, <http://www.dustindiaz.com/sugar- arrays/>) instead of creating their own quirky methods.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Prototype _this_ example won't work unless _this_ is bound to the anonymous function, otherwise _this_ is the _window_ object.

      $A(this.columns).each(function(item) {
        this.buildHeader(item);
      }.bind(this));

<comment><USER4> Based on the use of "this.columns" I assume this is bound to _something_. Probably not the anonymous function though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have a huge amount of experience with either framework, but I've used them both. One thing that stands out about jQuery is that it's unobtrusive - Prototype is not (at least not without some help from something like Lowpro).

</comment><comment><USER12> One of his arguments was that prototype is not that slow anymore in comparison to jQuery.

Some nice speed improvements are coming to jQuery 1.3:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeresig/sets/72157612498756067/>

</comment><comment><USER13> jQuery is light, but it has a trove of plugins that will help you with more complex tasks. The core is purposefully limited in scope, not trying to do everything for you; it only provides what Javascript already should, but doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER14> i prefer framework that helps me crafting shorter code

the last time i used prototype was in 2007, now it's all jquery

</comment><comment><USER15> Argument order:

jQuery

$.each(collection,function(){ this.bla(); });

The reason index is first param is because wheb you need it it is the only param. The reason for the item param is incase you need to attach a scope object to be this!</comment>


LineageOS for microG updates to LineageOS 16.0 - <AUTHOR> https://lineage.microg.org/ <comment><USER2> it might be worth to mention, that microg got funded in the meanwhile, beginning from march. This is great news, as the developer will now start to dedicate a increased time in microg development. Cast API is on its way. Looking forward to a good future.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/agnb3x/microg_andr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/agnb3x/microg_android_without_google_gets_funded/)</comment>


Foursquare's Redesign: Do Users Get It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zurb.com/article/1009/foursquares-new-redesign-do-users-get-it

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I doubt they do. When you set your app or service up to do X, it's really hard to convince people 2 years down the road that you should also use that service to do Y. Foursquare's recent redesign is quite excellent, but in my mind, they are still the "arbitrary check-in/brag" social media service, and my suspicion is that how they will remain in 99% of their users' minds.</comment>


Does Internet Advertising Work at All? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/

<comment><USER2> Poorly-conceived article.

tldr: Search advertising doesn't seem to work because you don't know whether people would have bought your products anyway, and the advertisement for the search term "Nike" appears directly above the organic result of nike.com (thus it's apparently a waste).

According to the article FB advertising doesn't work because you'd probably have bought the products that are shown in the retargeted ads you constantly see anyway.

The problem with this analysis is that it oversimplifies online advertising to the point of making the argument completely worthless.

He's arguing all advertising is a waste of money because, apparently, some advertising is a waste of money. It makes no mention of the quality of the ads that are written or their placement or their budget. It basically says "my gut tells me people probably behave in this manner because I think I behave in this manner and some paper written by eBay seems to confirm my instincts."</comment>


Ask HN: Should I leave my company (Samsung)? - <AUTHOR> Cause of frustration and pain : Since some time, Samsung has started to conduct regular programming contests among its developers. The contests are categorized as Intermediate, Advanced, Professional and Expert levels, with increasing difficulty in coding problems posed.
The aim is that it will help to identify top talent within the organisation and also improve software developing skills. The tests are being conducted throughout all Samsung software centers around the world, except for the American ones, who just refused. I am an engineer located in Korea, with regular contact with co-workers in Poland, India.
The problems posed are of coding competition variety, with restriction to use any library apart from <iostream> for c++. STL, <stdlib.h> etc are not allowed.
As a developer clears a level, she gets tagged to that level. Right now, its absolutely necessary that each developer reaches the "Advanced" level. Regular trainings are conducted ( by employees who are already Advanced). Mock tests (full day ) are conducted twice or thrice , before each "official exam",which is conducted once a month. Of course, employees are expected to perform and meet deadlines in their project work as usual, even though they have to attend the mock/official tests full day.
Managers are under pressure too. Since, each one of them has to ensure that their teams reach the set level.
My opinion : I don't know if its the right way.Even though i did reach the required level, It has left me frustrated.  I have seen excellent developers, who regularly produce clean, maintainable code failing at this exercise. Some centers have seen group-rebellion in terms of entire teams going on a fortnight leave to prepare for the test.
I think many of us have already left and will leave.
I think we should use this as a opportunity to prepare for future interviews. What is your opinion ? <comment><USER2> 1\. Samsung is indeed a megacorp and has 489,000 employees.

2\. Organizations this large traditionally have a huge problem with employee performance. (Q: How many people work at IBM? A: Half of them.)

3\. Middle management will be forced implement Lean Six Sigma or techniques like this to prove a certain level of control to upper management.

4\. Some things don't scale, like a company with 500k employees.

5\. At least American consumers have a negative view of Samsung: phones don't get regular updates, your TV spies on you by recording everything in the living room.

6\. You may be happier in a smaller organization that doesn't have to play these HR games.

</comment><comment><USER3> I worked at international corp. focused on outsourcing of networking services. Local managers, in an effort to improve quality and technical expertise developed "career plan" where everyone (L1 - L5) should visit at least once per year test-center where you has been asked some technical and process questions. After one attempt you had to wait at least 6 months for another one.

The main issues of this plan has been:

1\. Tests and questions hasn't been standardized. It was too general created based on corp. business path. Every account has been customized to customer needs - does it mean process, technologies, infrastructure, used procedure to solve issues etc. etc.

2\. Test case was developed by silly people strongly focused on commands and totally useless knowledge like memorization of release notes and differences between version 500s and 500x.

3\. If you fail, manager will cut your bonus. After one year, if you fail again, you will get resignation letter. ( i don't know anyone who got resignation letter, but this threat is totally unprofessional).

4\. If you pass you _can_ (not will be) promoted. Guys from L5 can't move forward, because there wasn't any upper position or opportunity to move. Management is very closed group where strangers are not welcome.

Edit: typos

<comment><AUTHOR> So, did they continue the practice or altered it to make it more relevant?

<comment><USER3> As far as I know they continue with this plan, maybe there are some minor updates, but I don't have last details since I left year ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like NCBLA for software engineering... in this case, tests which dont't add business value, measured as proof of value. F that bullshit. Mid-sized companies may have less perks and less organization, but there's often less bullshit because everyone has to deliver more... whereas megacorps tend to optimize for job security and politics.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess, they could have made it a bit relevant by at least allowing the developers to use the basic libraries (e.g. C++ STL, std::string!!! ) they use in their daily professional lives.

The official test environment ( which crashes far too often) has just a notepad, a compiler ( Visual studio) and no access to command line and of course no access to internet ( for fear of people cheating ). As another poster said, Its really like a interview that never ends. Even worse. And those who have passed, are forced to train and conduct mock tests. Well, I know i am sounding pessimistic :(.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its like the interview that never ends.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's the nutshell :(.

Plus I think, It might be bad in long run to disallow usage of STL and other standard libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, go man. it will be stupid if you donot . best of luck

</comment><comment><USER7> I bet you can find better companies than this. Have an open mind and relocate if necessary. Believe in yourself.</comment>


Ask HN: This is bullshit - <AUTHOR> So I've been watching a few excellent lectures by Alain Aspect (videos on youtube) on QM and he's such a great physicist/teacher. He highlights key experiments and papers and its a great way imo to cut through clutter and just zero in on critical view points to read up on. (He is clearly a huge Einstein fan, his results not-withstanding).
Anway, he mentioned Wheeler's paper on Delayed Choice Gedankenexperiment and so off I went searching for a pdf version.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9780124732506
Possibly my ddgfu is subpar but I find it outrageous that such a seminal paper is not in public domain!
[p.s. oh yes, Ask HN. Implied question being, what is opionion of this forum? Is it reasonable for absolutely key (and unclassified) scientific output to be behind a pay wall, in this case after ~3+ decades?] <comment><USER2> There's a reason for the phenomenal popularity and success of the Library of Alexandra, a/k/a Sci-Hub.

</comment><comment><USER3> The book that this paper appears in was published in 1978, so under U.S. copyright law, it wouldn't be in the public domain yet.

DDG did, however, find a copy of the paper here (it's a Flash-based reader; you apparently need an account on the site to download the PDF):

[http://www.doc88.com/p-7384580283926.html](http://www.doc88.com/p-7384580283926.html)</comment>