Why Sass? - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/article/why-sass

<comment><USER2> I am a non-believer, even when I have to use it everyday at work (the technology wasn't really my choice).

I feel that sass is like an amplifier of css. It doesn't actually solve any of the short comings of css. It enhances the features of css, both good and bad parts.

I really want css preprocessor that is non obtrusive. So that the file could still be parsed as valid css. Any feature enhancements used by the preprocessor just get ignored by the engine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ever since ALA's redesign, the header has looked like this for me - [http://i.imgur.com/CcpjRHV.png](http://i.imgur.com/CcpjRHV.png)

It's in Chrome and FF on a Mac, and it's been this way for months. I assumed it was a bug that they'd catch, but I guess I'm the only one seeing it this way?

<comment><USER4> It's that way on purpose. Yes, seriously.

<comment><USER3> What an incomprehensible design decision for a site targeting front end devs and designers. Is there any explanation out there? Google doesn't give me one.

<comment><USER5> I never thought I'd have the opportunity to act like a fashion designer on HN, but here it is:

It's that way because they want it—Jeffrey Zeldman and the ALA team. It's their playground.

It looks like that because it's striking. _Gets the people going_. Made you look. Got you mad.

It breaks the mold of traditional website design:

      | Logo |      Nav      |
      |</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----|
      | Content              |
      | Additional info      |
      | Editorial info       |

...and replaces it with the vertical design of book pages, with some clues from magazine design (like the header that's only partially shown). Ever read a magazine that had text on the page margins?

There's a place for purely functional design, and there's a place for experimental design.

<comment><USER6> Well, as someone who _isn 't_ a web design diva it makes them look like they have no idea what they're doing.

"Hey guys, listen to us about design, we can't even get basic things right!". That's the message I get.

<comment><USER5> Using the diva metaphor: why did theater owners suffer prima donnas and their attitude? Because they brought in the crowds. They'd move tickets.

It's ALA's willingness to experiment (even if the end result is suboptimal) that made people listen to them about web design.

<comment><USER7> What were some of their suboptimal experiments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the tricky things for me has been in the handoff from HTML template developers to CMS integration developers. The way we currently have things setup, the developers doing the CMS integration no longer have the ability to make small/quick changes to the main CSS file. It actually has to go back to the HTML developers for the revision, recompile the CSS, then back to the CMS developers.

<comment><USER9> Why can't your CMS developers edit the Sass file and compile it themselves?

<comment><USER8> A lot of it is environmental issues. Currently the codebase for the CMS developers is managed by global TFS repos. While the pure HTML templates are done by each local office in SVN repos. Good times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I still refuse to use Sass or LESS.

1\. Tooling integration is a PITA, especially with Visual Studio.

2\. Nothing but trouble merging the stored output from the tooling if you are in a branchy development. Basically, merge the CSS, then run sass/less and check in the change. Too much friction on a large project, especially when it comes to a non-Sass/Less dude doing the merge.

3\. Parsers are both shit. Sometimes attributes don't get "understood" properly resulting in compile errors and point blank refusal to work.

4\. Hacks used for older browsers aren't parsable by either.

5\. It's another layer of abstraction. Less abstraction decreases debugging effort.

Sorry but I don't buy it despite the promoted advantages.

<comment><USER11> > Nothing but trouble merging the stored output from the tooling if you are in > a branchy development. Basically, merge the CSS, then run sass/less and > check in the change. Too much friction on a large project, especially when > it comes to a non-Sass/Less dude doing the merge.

Wtf? You don't check generated files into VCS. You check in the source sass/less, and do the generation as part of the build process.

<comment><USER10> Actually no it doesn't work like that. It's really a pain in the arse for windows users like myself who are part of more than a one man team.

What happens is, you get three options:

1\. Deploy Ruby, Sass and associated dependencies to every workstation, build agent, test machine etc. Deploy tooling and build integration to the above so that any changes to .sass files in the IDE and build process get reflected on disk in the VCS. Educate every developer who touches the project on what they are, how to manage them effectively, the rules around merging etc.

-or-

2\. Do the above but ship the entire Ruby VM and libraries in your VCS.

-or-

3\. Get random build failures company-wide, old versions of generated CSS files and crap floating around and being checked in by developers, half arsed merges and just pain.

I'll pick option (4) which is don't use it.

I've been at ALL of the above steps. We have removed it from our product. Life is better now.

<comment><USER11> > Deploy Ruby, Sass and associated dependencies to every workstation, build > agent, test machine etc. Deploy tooling and build integration to the above > so that any changes to .sass files in the IDE and build process get > reflected on disk in the VCS

This should be easy. If it is hard that means your deployment/ops infrastructure is inadequate, and you should fix that now rather than after your build machine suffers a hard disk failure.

> Educate every developer who touches the project on what they are, how to > manage them effectively, the rules around merging etc.

You don't edit files that aren't in VCS; if some files are ignored you assume there's a good reason for it; you edit the source version, and you merge the normal way you merge source. These are all standard rules of development that every developer should know.

I guess using sass means every developer needs to learn sass, sure. But in terms of how quickly you can learn, and how much time it saves you over editing raw css, that pays for itself in like an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love sass but I don't like the scss syntax that much. Im happy to stick with the sass syntax :)

<comment><USER13> You don't like the SCCS syntax that much? So you're saying you don't like CSS syntax that much then? Because that's what it is.

<comment><USER14> I think got SCSS and SASS backwards. Probably meant to say he likes SCSS, not SASS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Or how about repeated blocks of styles that are used in various locations > throughout the stylesheet?

      p {
      margin-bottom: 20px; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5;
      }
      footer {
               margin-bottom: 20px;
               font-size: 14px;
               line-height: 1.5;
      }

I don't know why this situation is a such a common example of the need for SASS & company. It's easily addressable with plain ol' CSS. No mixins required.

      p, footer {
               margin-bottom: 20px;
               font-size: 14px;
               line-height: 1.5;
      }

<comment><USER16> So how would you reduce this version:

p { margin-bottom: 20px; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; } footer { position: fixed; margin-bottom: 20px; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5; }

<comment><USER17>
      p, footer {
        margin-bottom: 20px;
        font-size: 14px;
        line-height: 1.5;
      }
      footer {
        position: fixed;
      }

btw I'm totally pro less/sass, but that example sucked :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why Sass indeed, when all that can be done with Sass, can be done with plain old PHP?

Example: style.css.php

      <?php
      header('Content-Type: text/css');

      $brandColor = "#fc3;\n";

      $defaultStyles = <<<STR
      margin-bottom: 20px;
         font-size: 14px;
         line-height: 1.5;\n
      STR;
      ?>
      a {
         color: <?php echo $brandColor; ?>
      }
      nav {
         background-color: <?php echo $brandColor; ?>
      }

      p {
         <?php echo $defaultStyles; ?>
      }
      footer {
         <?php echo $defaultStyles; ?>
      }

<comment><USER19> This makes it impossible to deal with the CSS without also having to deal with server-side coding, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> His elevator pitch doesn't sell for me. The color thing is correct. Having an easy way to handle that is neat. Right now i use templating, which serves fairly fine.

However the reusable block makes no sense. That's what multiple classes on an element and selector lists are there for. I can't tell if SASS will still help me, since this is merely a bad example.

So it could mean that either he didn't think that through, the book isn't very good because of his lack of understanding, or that SASS is mostly fluff.

<comment><USER6> Other things that SASS does well at:

* Wrapping up vendor specific properties. Put all of them into a mixin, use arguments for the value and any edge cases, be sure that all vendors are covered properly at each usage site.

* @media directives in SASS can be used inside a style definition.[1] IME this makes heavy use of media sensitive styling significantly easier to read/manage.

* Nested rules and nested properties[2] help to make your styling cleaner. If your html already has a very component-like structure nested rules can mimic that, which makes the overall design easier to manage.

A lot of the functionality of SASS is geared around reusing bits of styling. Much of what you can do with it could _also_ be done with multiple classes, but that generally comes at the cost of a class explosion as you parcel out the differences.

It makes it easier to move more of the declaration of how your styling works into CSS itself, instead of the final styling being almost equal parts html (and classes) and CSS, with you as the developer/designer being responsible for remembering how all of the details fit together.

[1] [http://sass- lang.com/documentation/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#...](http://sass- lang.com/documentation/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#media)

[2] [http://sass- lang.com/documentation/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#...](http://sass- lang.com/documentation/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#nested_properties)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Too bad SASS didn't help out with their indentation problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> The biggest issue with SASS is the non-optimized output you get (i.e. combining similar media queries, etc.) That being said, it's still an absolutely amazing tool.

<comment><USER23> Well, the similar media queries and repetitive output are eaten for breakfast by Gzip and such. I worried a lot about CSS performance when I started using SASS. I quickly found that CSS is so fast I am better off spending time optimizing my JS and images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was a non-believer in preprocessors for a while until I actually started using one. Writing HTML and CSS can be a pain, so much repetition and closing tags/brackets for something that's just a markup/stylesheet language. I've been using Jade and Stylus for while and oh my god how much faster you can write stuff and how quickly you get spoiled by it.

</comment><comment><USER25> As someone else has mentioned: SASS is an amplifier.

If you hate or don't get CSS to begin with, stay the hell away from SASS.

If you do serious work with CSS, SASS will probably help you solve things better.

</comment><comment><USER26> For me, the big value-add of CSS pre-processors is nested rules[1].

[1] [http://lesscss.org/#-nested-rules](http://lesscss.org/#-nested-rules)

</comment><comment><USER27> Wish it would at least mention why they didn't even consider less, which I prefer to sass, since it still resembles css and is a superset, so you can turn any css easily into less. Great for switching over to less from css with an existing project.

<comment><USER28> I can only assume you grepped the article for Less, then came here to complain. The article explicitly mentions SCSS and points out that it is a superset of CSS. SASS' original (and still available) indented syntax isn't shown.

<comment><USER27> I don't think this refutes the point that less wasn't mentioned.

<comment><USER13> Why would it be? The article was named "Why Sass".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-google-docs.html <comment><USER2> This is very timely. My wife and I are huge google docs users and we were just chatting over the weekend about how slow docs seemed to be with large documents.

Docs has really replaced a lot of our use of MS Office. Its not a power users replacement, but I have to give serious props to google for turning out a set of web apps that are 'good enough' for the vast bulk of my uses.

<comment><USER3> I have to echo this. A team I'm on right now has managed to accomplish quite a bit using a combination of docs for document editing and storage and wave for side-bar communication and project tracking. It's worked really well so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <wishful thinking> How I wish I could save my docs in Dropbox and edit them later on Google Docs </wishful thinking>

<comment><USER5> It's easy, you hit "File -> Save" in the first app, then "File -> Open" in the second app....

ooooh, right, web. Sorry. That's what you get when you walk into the walled garden.

<comment><USER6> Walled gardens are the new proprietary file formats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The standalone drawing editor may be really significant. It fills a gap that isn't really met very well in the MS Office suite - a lot of people use PowerPoint for these kinds of drawings, flowcharts, and posters, but it really isn't ideal.

<comment><USER8> You are forgetting Visio.

<comment><USER9> Which isn't part of office. (At least - it's not part of the version of Office that most people have)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally, I find Zoho.com to be a lot more feature-complete than Google Docs. There are times when the document editor in Google Docs is downright infuriating when trying to get the right formatting, but Zoho just seems to work.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm still waiting to be able to create a new document directly into a folder.

</comment><comment><USER12> So these are the results of the EtherPad acquisition?

<comment><USER13> Seems unlikely. It's awfully difficult to integrate an acquisition like EtherPad so quickly. I've read that they've been working on a real-time architecture from the ground up for a while. Plus, I think the Etherpad team joined Wave, not Docs.

<comment><USER14> It's related to acquisitions in a different way. That was mostly an attempt to put Docs(Writely) and Spreadsheets on as much common infrastructure as possible.

You will remember that the original versions of these products were independently developed and then acquired by Google.

Still haven't seen the results, but I assume they threw in a few features on the way also. Docs had seen no interesting additions in quite a while despite the very capable team. So now it is coming out of maintenance mode and will hopefully add features _and_ stay relatively responsive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems there are fewer and fewer reasons for Google Wave. Maybe that's the better strategy anyways, bringing Wave tech to Gmail and Docs seems a lot easier than swallowing Gmail and Docs whole as Wave seems to try at the moment.

<comment><USER16> Does anyone know if the new features are built on top of the wave? It looks like wave was an experiment that is now being applied to the existing products. Honestly, wave is useless in its current form but I am very excited for these new wave like features.

<comment><USER15> I don't know and I should have written "Wave concepts", not "Wave tech" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they fix the formatting issues with bulleted lists, I will be happy. (If you haven't made and revised a lot of bullets on, say, a resume, you may not have felt my pain.)

</comment><comment><USER18> The new editors look stellar!

However I really think they need to give the folders a bit of TLC. It's the worst part of the google docs interface :(

</comment><comment><USER19> I find Google Docs to be useful as a starting point. Nowadays I will start my spreadsheets/financial models in Google Docs and then once I've finished, bring them into Excel for formatting purposes to get ready to print. So far this method works pretty well.

I'd love to do it all in Google Docs but the print formatting is almost always messed up.

</comment><comment><USER20> That introductory video makes it look so nice the only thing it needs now is a proper desktop client to get rid of the chrome title bar and tab bar and address bar and google menu bar and google docs title bar... ;)

Also: Bonjour / Zeroconf / simultaneous editing is _seriously lacking_ in the LAN/desktop space. :(

<comment><USER21> In chrome, you can create an application shortcut for a website, and it will remove the chrome title bar, tab bar, google menu bar, and google docs title bar when you open it.

<comment><USER22> Any idea if there's any advantage to using Fluid in OSX over this approach? Always happy to have one less application installed, and I'm finding myself in Chrome more often than Safari these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A better way to edit the CSS would be helpful (right now it opens in a tiny little box) since Google Docs screws up the formatting so often. As it stands now, it is nearly impossible to make heavy changes to any document with tables and nested bullets without going in and fixing the autogenerated CSS.

<comment><USER17> I agree about the issues, but I think 'edit the CSS yourself' is not a solution. I'm in the < 1% of people who'd know how, and I don't want to bother. If I've got to do the formatting myself, I might as well just code HTML - or more realistically, use a desktop app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I hate the missing no-distractions mode (hide controls) and the missing full width view. This is the 21st century! Why are they emulating paper pages? Sure, that's a view that might be useful. I don't want it as my default, however.

<comment><USER25> Ctrl+Shift+F to hide the controls. View > Uncheck 'Fixed width view' to ensure you're ready. F11 to make your browser window full screen.

For further distraction free writing use one of these Firefox user styles:

<http://userstyles.org/styles/17366> <http://userstyles.org/styles/9889>

<comment><USER24> Yes, exactly - but only in the old mode.

New mode doesn't have those features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Edit" in regular document still doesn't work on iPad or iPhone dang it. Spreadsheets does work.

</comment><comment><USER27> Real time editing looks brilliant! I wonder how they pulled it off...</comment>


FreeBSD on the raspberry pi - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/freebsd/crochet/pull/140 <comment><USER2> I run FreeBSD and ZFS on my RPi-B as a cheap and cheerful destination for remote zfs send replication.

I wrote up a guide: [https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote- mirror](https://github.com/hughobrien/zfs-remote-mirror)

<comment><USER3> Great job. How does it perform? I thought ZFS needed tons of RAM.

<comment><USER4> 1G is not a lot of RAM?

<comment><USER3> Apparently, ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage.

<comment><USER5> You're probably thinking of deduplication (whose memory requirements is ~320 bytes per deduplicated block, and which generally requires way more than 1GB per TB, it's highly variable depending on storage load but I've seen quotes from 5 to 20GB/TB). Most users don't benefit from deduplication and it's usually recommended not to enable it unless you do demonstrably get large benefits from it (on FreeBSD, `zdb -S` will simulate and estimate deduplication benefits).

1GB is the recommended conf for ZFS on FreeBSD, it will benefit from more (and may need some tuning below 2GB) but even that's not a requirement, the FreeBSD wiki's ZFS tuning page quotes "ZFS running nicely on a laptop with 768 Megs of physical RAM" with tuning (and provides configuration values).

<comment><USER6> I've always been wondering if file system RAM caches couldn't be moved to a fast SSD nowadays. Do you think this would be possible with, say, an Intel 750?

<comment><USER5> ZFS (and probably others) let you do that, kinda: it always has a primary in- memory cache but you can add level 2 cache devices (L2ARC) to the pool. In fact you can extend two different caches to storage devices: L2ARC is a _read_ cache, and you can add a separate set of Log Devices used by the ZFS Intent Log, where _writes_ are cached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title of this post -- "FreeBSD on the raspberry pi" \-- is not very descriptive. The title seems to imply that running on the Raspberry Pi is news, which it's not, as myself or anyone else already running FreeBSD on our Pi can attest to. I'd suggest changing the title to "Patch posted to have FreeBSD use armv6hf target arch by default for the Raspberry Pi" \-- however, someone just commented on the Pull Request:

>armv6 is already hard float, all armv6hf gives you is it will pass floating- point data to functions in floating-point registers. I also expect that armv6 will be using the hard float ABI soon (within a month) an at this time armv6hf will be removed.

So maybe just remove the post all together?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here I agree with you it can be misleading into thinking that FreeBSD is _now_ available on the RPi which of course would be very misleading and simply untrue because FreeBSD on the RPi is nothing new. Reading the others comments, it's not misleading. Changing the title to what you have suggested would be nice for the FreeBSD devs mailing list and would not appeal to many people on HN. The point of the post is to draw attention to FreeBSD on the RPi and FreeBSD as it's really a great piece of software and__not__ to the patch itself. And I thing IMHO that the RPi can be great a great vector to enlarge the user base of FreeBSD with all the benefits that this can bring to the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My biggest problem with fbsd in the rpi is that it's really hard to cross- compile ports for arm, and compiling everything in the rpi takes a lot of time (I think it was half a day to compile tmux in the rpi A).

<comment><USER9> Can you run arm packages from a linux distrib under emulation?

[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html)

<comment><USER10> Unlikely -- that's for i386 only (amd64 update is being worked on, IIRC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I yearn for embedded *BSD routers.

<comment><USER12> The Netgate RCC-DFF 2220 is available[1] right now, and performs very well as a BSD router. It's not ARM, but it _is_ an embedded system/SBC. I use it with pfSense, but it will run vanilla FreeBSD as well of course.

[1] [http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC- DFF-2220.aspx](http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-DFF-2220.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> to anyone who cares: why?

<comment><USER14> Obviously you think it's a waste of time- the burden is on you to explain why not. Not why you don't work on it yourself, but why you think people who are working on it shouldn't be.

<comment><USER15> I think it's a completely fair thing to politely ask why people are spending their time on this. Surely they have somg goal in mind.. Maybe they have some bigger goal, like commercial OS's tuned to the RPi or something that only BSD systems can do? Or maybe it's something simpler

<comment><USER14> Of course that's a fair thing to ask, but that post wasn't asking that question. That post wasn't asking a question at all, it was clearly intended as an insulting statement in the form of a question.

<comment><USER15> I think there is an implied frustration with the fragmentation of "the open source effort", which is ... understandable. It should have been written more diplomatically. It seems to me to be a pervasive problem on anonymous forums.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JRebel vs OSGi: Use the right tool for the right job - <AUTHOR> http://zeroturnaround.com/blog/jrebel-vs-osgi-use-the-right-tool-for-the-right-job/ Often when discussing OSGi at events, conferences or forums, we hear things like, "Yeah, I like JRebel but now we are using OSGi", or "Does JRebel support OSGi", or "Isn't OSGi the same as JRebel?". Sometimes it happens that people start comparing OSGi to JRebel, which is kind of like comparing a Ferrari to a Skyscaper; thus, this article is designed to a) explain the differences on a technical level what JRebel and OSGi do, b) outline some ideal use cases for OSGi and JRebel c) clear up any grey areas or misconceptions between the two technologies. So, let's go! <comment><USER2> This is a great article to check out if you've ever wondered : what is the difference between JRebel & OSGi, can you use JRebel and OSGi together, and what are the benefits of each.</comment>


99designs, you are shady - <AUTHOR> http://wrttn.me/09e264/

<comment><USER2> I'd say 99designs has made some mis-steps here. They should aim to be open and honest about the cut they are taking. Though I agree 30% is high, let's not forget that is the same amount that App stores take from apps and in app purchases. I fear that 30% is the new normal for service fees.

I checked out crowdSpring (99designs competitor), but couldn't find how much they're taking in a service fee either.

I'd like to know how long ago they made these changes, before judging if they are purposefully being shady. If it is a recent change and parts of the site just haven't caught up yet, I'd say they may have a problem, but as a start-up I'm willing to cut them a bit of slack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. I made the same considerations before making this post. But, notice that I'm not criticizing them for the cut they are taking. I am moreso upset about the notion that they are actively trying to HIDE this from their users. If they were more upfront about the costs, then I have nothing to complain about. But, that's not the case. I had to find out how much of a cut they were taking by responding to angry designers wondering why my prize was so low :S</comment></comment>


The case of the 500-mile email - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how many times this has already been posted to HN. Not that I'm complaining: every time I re-read it, I'm charmed and delighted all over again.

<comment><USER3> This Google query works fairly well:

site:news.ycombinator.com link:<http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html>

Link to said query: [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibiblio.org%2Fharris%2F500milemail.html)

Query returns:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068>

<comment><USER4> I suspect that the link: operator doesn't work well (or at all) anymore, and that those results are only getting returned because the comments contain all the words in the URL (because someone invariably links to the FAQ). Other searches (to articles linked from <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>) come up empty:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=link:https://github.com/blog/...](http://www.google.com/search?q=link:https://github.com/blog/878-announcing- github-for-mac)

[http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://blog.instapaper.c...](http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6830514157)

[http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://mobile.nytimes.co...](http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my- life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.xml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Worth reading just to find out about the units(1) program. How did I miss that all these years?

<comment><USER6> If you like the program, read through the data file: <http://futureboy.us/frinkdata/units.txt>

Some pure gold buried in there. For instance search for _candela_.

<comment><USER7> Hahahahahhah Hilarious.

      Define the default symbol for the imaginary unit, that is, the square root of negative one. The default Unicode codepoint for the imaginary unit. (DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL I)

      \u2148 := <<IMAGINARY_UNIT>>

      Also used for the imaginary unit (especially by electrical engineers, who use "i" to indicate current. (DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL J)

      \u2149 := <<IMAGINARY_UNIT>>

      Redefine the letter "i" to also be the imaginary unit

      i := \u2148

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an associated FAQ which addresses some of the questions you may have about the technical veracity of the story.

<http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting anecdote and discussion a previous time this came up here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652>

</comment><comment><USER10> Seen it many times, but it's such a great story... who can complain about it being reposted?

</comment><comment><USER11> An oldie but goodie, but still worth a bump. If only more networks were c-limited!

</comment><comment><USER12> Having been involved in "rationalizing" a systems of hundreds of emails servers dotted round the world down to something manageable I can honestly say that _nothing_ about the weird and wonderful ways that email can fail surprises me any more.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's good ol' chestnuts like this that made me think of the "rerun" button: <http://bit.ly/ek6kqi> Instead of upvoting you would click the rerun link to signal the content as duplicate (but worthy). This would move it out of the news and to a dedicated classics page of timelessly good content.

</comment><comment><USER14> IMO the most amusing part of this story is the behaviour of the statistics professor.</comment>


Rejection Letters for a faculty position - <AUTHOR> http://markchang.tumblr.com/post/25971748022/26-rejection-letters A tale of faculty-search woe :). <comment><USER2> As the author got the 1 job he wanted out of 30+ applications, I feel this point is appropriate.

The college I went to had a pub with the policy that a rejection letter (for a job, post graduate position, etc) could be traded for one free beer. It was a brilliant policy for encouraging people to try. From one perspective 30+ letters of rejection to get what you want is depressing. From my perspective that would have been getting the thing you wanted along with thirty free drinks.

<comment><AUTHOR> That pub has a brilliant idea!

<comment><USER3> Well, if you had traded in all your rejection letters back then, we would not be reading them now 8 years later...

<comment><USER4> Also, he might have been drinking too much to get around to applying for all 30.

<comment><USER3> Unless he did them in batch mode. Apply to 30 positions in January, go drinking for free 26 times in March-May.

<comment><USER5> "I am sorry to inform you that we have a strict no-drinking workplace policy and therefore unfortunately the position advertised does not seem to be aligned with your interests. We wish you all the best in your future endeavours."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having written a few of these in my time I'd like to pick out the best and the worst.

The worst is surely from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I find the prose florid and demeaning. Lowlights include implying that many "well qualified individuals" applied, using a sentence structure that clearly suggests you are not counted amongst them.

Yale runs a close second worst, for their brutal and brief suggestion that you go "elsewhere".

The best is from the Colorado School of Mines. It is pleasant, warm, apologetic. In particular, it bothers to express appreciation of time & energy invested, and it speaks of a "closer match" of the shortlisted candidates rather than pompously announce how grand their field was.

<comment><USER7> I really liked one from ETH, Zurich. It was a personal letter (i.e. not generated) mentioning that for the particular job they found another person, whose skills were more appropriate at the moment. And the sender asked me to keep an eye for further openings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A faculty position right after finishing the PhD? Isn't it a bit too early to retire so soon?

I am in germany, so my experience may not compare. But at my institute we have many international postdocs. As far as I see it, there is NO way to get a faculty position without an international research record. Some of our postdocs get a professorship though, but it may be in Korea or China, never in Europe or in the United States so far.

When I thought about my career during my PhD time, I felt like it was a one way ticket to think about science positions only. They were very rare and the competition is hard. What is to gain except a mediocre salary for a lifetime? At least in Europe it is also tough to go back from a research institute and work for a business again.

So I decided to develop software (I am a physicist). That is closer to my interests than science. I finally landed in space projects and write scientific software, have free access to great data (that no scientist in the world can see so early) and I can really focus on my work. The professors, on the other hand, spend their day giving and preparing lectures, organizing money for the research and don't have time to do some research themselves.

There are always ways to go. If one way is tough, it will most likely remain tough all the way. It opens the mind to think about alternatives and this chance should be taken, imho.

<comment><USER9> True w.r.t. international research record, but in computer science and engineering in the US/Canada it's fairly common to build such a record while getting the PhD, and then get an Assistant Professor position directly. North American PhDs typically take 5-8 years, so it's quite possible (and increasingly expected) to publish ~10 conference papers and 1-2 journal articles before you graduate. It's less common in the natural sciences, where 2-3 years postdoc seems quasi-obligatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice if more startups did this. Just a nice letter saying "While your qualifications are outstanding, we regret to inform you that your expertise-in-X is not what we are looking for at this time." If someone takes the time to fill out a five page web-based form and goes through your online fizzbuzz tests, a customized letter is only appropriate.

<comment><USER6> Having worn a interviewing & selecting hat for <corporation>, I can say my objectives for rejection communication were:

(1) conveying the fact of it politely and unequivocally, (2) ensuring that the process halts immediately, and (3) leaving an impression such that the candidate's likelihood of thinking & speaking ill of us in future is minimised.

The fact is, rejection usually amounts to disappointment and in some people that means they're about to pass through the stages of grief, often quite quickly. As the rejector you have a chance of being on the receiving end of the anger & bargaining stages from a rejectee.

This creates an incentive to give away as little as possible. If one states that the candidate was weak in a specific area, there are a few - just a few but it's enough to be a major deterrent - that will treat this as an invitation to negotiation over that and/or related points. In the worst case this led to a large volume of unsolicited communication that proved challenging to curtail.

Thus goals (1) and (2) had not been achieved and goal (3) was abandoned in the interests of time.

From another dimension, IANAL but I have also been advised by Ms.IAAL that being specific also opens the door to a risk of being wrong (or even being simply perceived to be wrong), and thus a liability concern.

<comment><USER11> I think the most-needed advice for people advertising positions is: (pre-1) send any kind of rejection communication at all.

<comment><USER10> That was my point. Not the specific reason but just a good, respectful letter/email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many of the letters started with an apology for being slow, which is a very bad sign. All of them were form letters.

Once an interview occurs then I would hope a far more personal approach gets used. The benchmark for this was McKinsey (I was there 10 years ago). I went through the recruitment process there from both sides, and we had a simple policy to call the person back within 24 hours, letting let them know immediately whether they were in the next step or not. We would also offer to give constructive feedback (and have it to give) to both successful and unsuccessful candidates.

<comment><USER13> The reason for the "slow" apology (which I have now been on both sides of) is that when you're running a faculty search, you don't want to close the applicant pool until your chosen candidate has accepted the offer, signed the contract, picked their textbooks, rented an apartment, and moved to town. Well, I exaggerate slightly. But there's always this lurking worry that if you send the rejections too early, you may have to re-open the pile if your hire backs out.

That said, June is still ridiculously late. The search should be done by March or so at the latest, with maybe some contract details lingering until April if there's a hard negotiation.

I've often thought that it would be nice to keep candidates a _little_ more apprised of where they stand, but another problem that faculty search committees run into here is that in our litigious culture (in the US at least), we have to be very, very, very careful what we say for fear of a lawsuit. Sigh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's an understandably human tendency to highlight our accomplishments and bury our failures, which can give inexperienced outsiders/novices in some field a warped perception of what's "normal," exacerbating their self-doubt. I think it's admirable that he posted the letters and was honest about how they made him feel.

</comment><comment><USER15> I applied to Waterloo in Canada knowing I wouldn't get in but figured it couldn't hurt.

As such when I got the rejection letter it didn't ruin my day at all, I really wasn't surprised. What did surprise me was the way it was phrased. It was a while ago so I don't remember verbatim, but it was something like this:

 _you are not of high enough caliber to be admitted into Waterloo_

the word caliber was definitely used. What a cold, cold way to reject someone. I can only imagine having gotten that letter thinking I might have a chance of getting in. Would have been devastating.

Talk about not sugar coating anything :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Mark - thanks for posting these. I was the recipient of my own batch of such rejection letters during my faculty search in 2002, so I know the feeling exactly. I ended up going to Harvard (not bad!) but the sting of rejection still hurts, no matter where it's from. These days I take it most universities do everything by email, but back in 2002 it was still almost exclusively done by paper mail. Somehow a paper rejection letter feels "nicer" than a rejection email.

<comment><USER17> Hi Matt -- while we're on the topic of academic applications (and the likely rejections), I wanted to say how insightful I've found your blog posts regarding the general academia vs. industry matter to be, in particular since I need to make a similar decision myself very soon. So thanks! :)

<comment><USER16> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The college he works at, Olin, is an amazingly innovative institution. It should be used as a model for all modern engineering programs. Unfortunately, it is not.

<http://www.olin.edu/about_olin/>

</comment><comment><USER19> I went out on the faculty job market 1.5 years (the second year I wasn't as serious about it so I'll count it as .5). The first year was 60+ applications, the second was less than 10 if I remember correctly. All of that resulted in 7 interviews, 1 offer that I didn't end up accepting, and a whole lot of rejections.

My advice to anyone applying out for faculty jobs is just to expect a ton of rejections. I stopped reading the letters/emails after I knew they were rejections. Reading more doesn't do any good and it's not like it is a personal letter anyways. One of the things that made it easier was that I was once involved in a faculty job search. 400-500 applications were whittled down to about ~40 that looked good. The process of whittling those down to the 7-8 we interviewed seemed very arbitrary; many of those we didn't interview looked very good. After the interviews, you could have made clear arguments for a few candidates. In the end, one got an offer. So, after seeing the number of applications involved, and the randomness involved in the process, it's pretty easy to just know there will be a lot of rejections.

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember, in the early 90s, someone in our department sent out over 500 applications, and got nothing but rejections. He then started putting the rejection letters outside his office. The department chair politely asked him to take them down, so that prospective PhD wouldn't be scared off. :-D

<comment><USER21> 500? If there were only that many faculty openings when I was on the job market... Ever since the dot com bust and more recent state government delevering, the academic job market for computer science has never been quite the same. I hear that enrollments are finally starting to rebound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> (Off-topic, but surprising to me -- Tumblr isn't blocked in China under the Great Firewall. I clicked on the link, saw my VPN wasn't on so didn't expect it to load, and then it works. I wonder why they didn't block it when almost all blogging platforms are blocked.)

</comment><comment><USER23> None of these letters served any purpose- all were simply form letters that offered no information or relevant feedback to the applicant.

<comment><USER24> They served one pretty important purpose: conveying the information that he would not be working there.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. In my experience, it's far more common to not receive a letter at all. As disappointing as it is to receive a form rejection letter, not hearing anything is worse.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing in some cases they've made a hiring list and you're on it. Just not at #1. They don't want to reject you and then find out everyone above you on their list has taken another position.

On the other hand, most of them are probably just jerks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The worst rejection reason I ever got was because my high school and university attended were in the same area code.

</comment><comment><USER27> How does such a touching, honest article get such terrible comments? (Referring to the comments on the author's blog.)

In any case I don't see why anyone would allow such lampreys to suck the life of their own web page.

</comment><comment><USER28> The letter from Yale is excruciatingly short and (to my eyes, anyway) kind of ghetto looking.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't force you to read through three introductory paragraphs to find out if the answer is yes or no.

<comment><USER4> Bah. You already know it's a rejection letter before you open the envelop. If they're actually interested in hiring you you'll get a packet from HR instead of a letter all by itself. It's not much different from applying to a college.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just curious -

I found it interesting that most of the letters (with the exception of two) referred to you as Mr. Chang rather than Dr. Chang. I just since you had not technically finished your PhD by that point they were technically accurate. (The letter from Brown seems to be dated June and begins with an apology for delay, so maybe by that point you were actually a Dr.)

Did you find it demeaning that they didn't refer to faculty position applicants as Dr.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all. But then again, I'm not huge into titles. I also didn't defend until June, so it was technically correct.

<comment><USER30> I find this surprising. Every professor I've ever had insisted, "I did the work, and as such, you will refer to me as Dr."

<comment><USER31> I suspect I've taken classes with over 50 professors, and only heard that once. And in that case she'd repeatedly asked the students to use her first name, and someone kept calling her "Mrs", and eventually she corrected the student: "Not Mrs. Either <firstname> or Dr. <lastname>".

<comment><USER32> Haha ... I've never been referred to as Doctor after the friendly "congrats Dr. X" when I finished my PhD. The funny thing is .. I only cared about it before I got my PhD. After that, it doesn't matter to me one bit.

Well .. it would be nice if I could put Dr. on my passport or drivers license. But that doesn't seem to be an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting, I don't think I got any rejection letters when I was job searching after college a few years ago. If I didn't get the interview I didn't receive any response at all. Now, the search didn't go too long, so maybe it was just too small of a sample to judge anything by. I certainly didn't expect to get any letters though.

</comment><comment><USER34> As a former student of Mark, this should really be "26 schools that totally missed the boat"

</comment><comment><USER35> Thats not bad. I did not even get rejection letters for my faculty applications.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ouch, being rejected from University of Arizona AND Arizona State University?

</comment><comment><USER37> So this guy is an employed PhD (at the job he "wanted most") and writes a blog post about how emotionally traumatic receiving rejection notices at normal (if not below normal) rates was. I don't get it.

<comment><USER38> Listen people, here's how HN works.

If you disagree with somebody, you reply.

You don't downvote just because you disagree, and you _definitely_ don't downvote without a reply just because you disagree.

Downvotes are for trolls/rude people.

Explain to this person why you disagree, I want to know.

<comment><USER39> I don't know that people disagree. I didn't downvote him, but I can imagine that people might have because his comment is a no more than an uninteresting summary of the blog post. It's not really adding much to the conversation.

<comment><USER37> Actually what the comment does is simultaneously satirizes the blog post author as a person of a highly privileged status feeling sorry for himself because of the "emotional trauma" of his highly successful job search AND thusly questions the relevance of the post at all. I guess I should have spelled it out more clearly.

<comment><USER40> And _that_ is why you got downvoted. Obviously a lot of people find this post interesting (at 6th position on the front page with 87pts right now). Furthermore, a lot of people tend to find the "does this even matter" posts that show up on almost every single comment thread boring and irrelevant.

If you don't like an article or don't find it interesting just ignore it, that's the whole point of the voting system. Things that are interesting to a lot of people bubble up, things that aren't, don't. Commenting with "I don't think this is interesting" isn't helpful.

As for your actual post, the author is saying the rejection letters had a particular impact on him even though he eventually got what he wanted. Having been rejected by a few places when applying for graduate studies after having decided that I didn't want to go anyway(because I had decided against pursuing further studies and starting to work) I can definitely sympathize with the author, it still feels bad.

Furthermore, I think the collection of such letters is definitely interesting. Most people when they get rejected tend to think that their case is unique and think that this reflects badly on themselves. I think that it's interesting to see that even people who "made it"(got his dream job, didn't he?) still went through that. So it's perfectly normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm applying for faculty positions at the moment.

I haven't even got one rejection _letter_ yet. A few rejection emails, in each case many months after I'd given up all hope of getting the job, is all I've got to show for it.

Sigh. Good thing I'm pretty.

<comment><USER42> I think times have changed. I haven't gotten a rejection letter in years, now.

I remember sending out of 200 resumes during the recession at the end of the 80's. Back then you'd always get a letter back -- even if you didn't get an interview!

Now, it's so much easier for companies to send a rejection -- yet most don't bother. Sigh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Times have definitely changed. Along with each application (at least most of them), since they were _mailed_ in (yes, physical form), I got an acknowledgment letter back along with an equal opportunity employment demographic postcard to fill out.

My wife went through this same process last year. Not one single rejection letter.

Times _have_ changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sounds like the "academic edition" of the Rejection Therapy game: <http://rejectiontherapy.com>

But on a more serious note, Mark reframed his rejections into a positive learning opportunity for many people. Thanks for doing this Mark.</comment>


Crabs (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://philosophynow.org/issues/67/Crabs <comment><USER2> Sure. Let's have more philosophy on HN. But _this_? A kind of post-moderny Sartre rave? What are people supposed to learn? I pressed _flag_ , sorry. (disclosure: my university studies were 90% in philosophy, I've read probably most of Sartre - i.e. am not anti-philosophy)

<comment><USER3> That they taste like crab, talk like people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we have a bit more of a descriptive title? All people know without clicking the link is it's something to do with crabs and something to do with philosophy</comment>


Email and web monitoring laws 'to be brought in soon' [UK] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17595209

<comment><USER3> I'm actively encouraging the users of the sites I run to encrypt everything.

I'm giving advice in private messages about how to use Truecrypt (especially when using Dropbox or any remote backup or cloud sync service), what a VPN is and how to use Relakks or IPredator, etc.

Just basic things, yet the reaction has been extremely positive. One of the sites I run exists by donations, and just for giving this advice 1 person donated £100 to the running of the site because in his words "No-one else is telling me to encrypt or helping me.".

The big glaring omission in all of this is email. We all want a secure email system, and one that doesn't involve locking yourself into a single provider (Hushmail), and yet can co-exist with sending email to recipients on webmail and corporate solutions.

Talk about a big hole in the market.

I've not pitched this to my users as "here's how to pirate", it's just been "privacy is core to democracy, encryption protects your privacy". And additionally I've argued to them that if they were amongst the people who turned their Twitter avatars green last year for Iran, then by not using encryption they leave encryption to "terrorists, criminals and dissidents", who cares for the first two, but if you care for the last you'll encrypt too to ensure that their dissenting opinion can be voiced safely in private.

I got the idea for telling my users all of this from HN, and specifically a link to a Canadian site:

<http://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Main_Page>

Then I also shared links to:

<https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere>

<https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng>

<https://ssd.eff.org/tech/encryption>

I truly think that the best response that the people of Britain can give to these proposals is to encrypt everything and take away from the government the ability to pervasively spy on their own populace like this.

With most governments and corps it always feels like that ask for a mile, and when we object they concede half a mile. We're happy, but then they do this a few times and they get to where they wanted to be.

What better way to halt this for good than to encrypt everything.

Now, if someone could just give us email v2, secure by default. I'd happily pay for it. Just make it work, and make it open source and aim for it to be standard... don't give me another closed service to achieve it.

<comment><USER4> ... Wait, why aren't we talking about PGP?

PGP (and it's mathematical foundations to some degree) were invented to solve the secure email problem. Back then the proponents of PGP essentially predicted the situation we're in now. Up until now there's been plausible deniability for any of us normal people to care, so consumer adoption of PGP remains close to nil. Even corporate use I've seen only comes into play when dealing with another company who forces it be used.

That's changing fast. Their original use case (secure messaging in a monitored society) is no longer only a tinfoil hat situation.

The solution is for all of us HNers to adopt PGP 100%. Everyone who wants to talk to use would have to adopt PGP. The friction to start is rather huge but that is how something like this would get adopted.

As for "but it doesn't jive with my gmail nicely".. maybe it's time we give up gmail too. It's value proposition is based on reading your email to be better build a profile on you to sell to advertisers. That's why google plus wanted your real name, so they have a face to put all that mined data to.

Switch To PGP Day?

edit: relevant links

"simple pgp chrome plugin for gmail" - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2918255>

<comment><USER3> I agree. I want to talk about PGP. But I'm talking to end users who have real trouble setting up a VPN. PGP's big problem back then was that it should be invisible and just work, it was neither. That's what I mean by needing to revisit secure email.

<comment><USER5> GMail and other webmail providers _just need to add this_ and make it a configurable option in the settings. Heck, even Outlook should give the users this option via some wizard (they seem to have one for everything else!). Totally agree that this needs to be as invisible as possible. When I first set up PGP in Thunderbird a few years back it was quite a bit of flaffing about, add to that the fact that your key reside on any one of a million servers...

The cynic in me says it's been done in this way on purpose, i mean, don't want to make the feds actually do any work to be able to snoop around my emails.

<comment><USER4> GMail is open about the fact that it mines your emails for your advertising profile. Encrypting the data for you would result in reduced value proposition for them. Not going to happen.

<comment><USER6> No. Google would of course be able to decrypt the content (I don't see how they would adopt it otherwise in this universe, google must comply if they get a warrant and they are not willing to fight that), thing is only google would be able to and noone else. And that alone is a huge win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sign the petition to scrap plans to monitor all emails and web Usage. Only 4k signatures so far.

<http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400>

<comment><USER8> I would also advise writing to your local MP (find them here <http://www.theyworkforyou.com/>). It's easier to ignore 4,000 digital signatures than 4,000 physical letters. It wouldn't hurt to call them either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, mega snooping, well publicised. Any serious terrorist or lentil rights protester would encrypt or simply stop using electronics for communication. That leaves the rest of us being snooped on for no terrorist or what ever reason.

I'm a thick idiot and I can work that out, so presumably the government can too.

This is not about terror and all that scare story stuff, its population surveillance.

Some how these governments need reminding that we the people are supposed to be the boss. They serve us, not the other other way round.

</comment><comment><USER10> Taking this back in time a bit, the idea that you would monitor everybody's letters and where they go would never be allowed.

Because the monitoring is out of site, and cheap in terms of man power, now it's allowed.

I really find it amazing.

<comment><USER11> It's worth pointing out that this law would allow monitoring of communications _with a warrant_.

The idea that communications can be monitored with oversight is not a new one. Law enforcement departments have been able to tap phones with a warrant for decades.

Edit: Hm, the article is actually a little unclear on whether or not a warrant is needed. At the top it says it is, and then in the middle it quotes a bunch of people saying it isn't...

<comment><USER12> They're saying that the _contents_ will be only accessible with a warrant, but metadata will be accessible without a warrant.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I see. I stand corrected. That really is pretty bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems like there's little escape these days. I'm from the UK originally, and my adoptive country, Poland, yesterday had a story written about how it's the most surveilled country in the EU:

[http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under- watchf...](http://thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/95154,Poles-still-under-watchful-eye- of-Big-Brother)

All round, rather depressing.

</comment><comment><USER14> This needs to be resisted.

A nearly-identical law, the Recording and Interception of Communications Act (RICA), was enacted in 2002 in South Africa. While in theory it contained all the legal protections that have been proposed for the UK legislation, in practice it has been badly abused.

Between 2006 and 2010 just one of the South African government's regional interception centres (of which there are at least four and potentially many more) carried out over 3 million legal interceptions, a number which is known to have increased since then. Subsequent leaks to the media have revealed that even this is a drop in the ocean; illegal interceptions are performed routinely and are easily hidden from oversight amongst the millions of legal interceptions performed every year.

Looking at the numbers involved, it's not unreasonable to assume that every single connected South African will have their communications intercepted at some point, sometimes in illegal interceptions with no official control over the data collected. In fact, there have been examples of staff inside the interception centres being bribed by business rivals, spouses and others to spy on innocent citizens.

I see no reason why the UK will be immune to these types of abuses, despite having a less corruptible civil service. This kind of power in the hands of poorly-monitored government intelligence agencies is always a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> _sigh_ In preparation, where's the best place for a startup hacker to emigrate to nowadays?

<comment><USER16> The new laws don't grant access to content.

And GCHQ already have access to this data, the new law just makes access 'real time' rather than retrospective.

<comment><USER15> "The information commissioner said public bodies not involved in dealing with serious crime or national security, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, should have to apply to a court before access was granted."

I don't have much of a problem with GCHQ using it... but the Department for Work and Pensions? Also, a lack of warrants is concerning.

It feels very much like a law that could be exploited by anyone.

<comment><USER16> DWP handles benefits. Organised crime is involved in a lot of benefit fraud.

Allowing the DWP to have access to anything without a warrant would be bad. Allowing them to have access to destination / address data with a warrant might be okay. Allowing them to have access to content data is probably a bad thing. I think I'd prefer Serious Organised Crime Agency to all of it; and I'd prefer some better oversight. Whether that's a warrant (good) or a chief inspector of another force (bad) remains to be seen.

Don't forget that this is, essentially, just an extension to things like RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to cover new forms of communication.

I agree that we need to be careful that they don't kludge in things like "looking at the content is fine" or "you don't need warrants".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The proposal would allow the UK government to query, without a court order, logs of who talked to whom and when. They would have to apply for a court order to see the content.

It would compel UK based startups to keep a log of all this data, which of course costs time an money, reducing the UK's competitiveness.

</comment><comment><USER18> How do all those European data retention laws apply to US companies? Do US companies (with offices in Europe, but servers in the US) need to adhere to those data retention laws, or is it safe to use US-based services?

</comment><comment><USER19> If you think this has not already been implemented in the UK for a LONG time, i.e. pre-RIPA 2000, then you are very naive.

Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used.

The key difference, the key burden that is being (publicly) demanded in 2012 by the services is _real-time_! Presumably, this was such a burden to the overall infrastructure of the majority of UK ISPs that they just pushed back when requested... hence the new law proposals.

<comment><USER20> _> Ask anyone who has ever worked on infrastructure at a large UK ISP or exchange (e.g. LINX). Copious secret services systems are already used._

Go on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now you can observe the difference in Europe and US tech journalism. When an anti-internet bill (SOPA) was being discussed in the US, any noteworthy US journalist - those with and without vested interests in the matter - <USER2> talking about it very loudly. Compare with the similar situation where TC Europe and others are happily and silently carrying on their daily duties of - mostly - using their media outlet for their own personal short sighted benefits.

<comment><USER5> It only became news when the likes of Google and Wikipedia decided to protest and carry out a blackout... (I am not in the US, but this is what I have read)

<comment><USER21> No. Google and Wikipedia decided to protest when everyone from Tim O'Reily to Mike Arrington protested and wrote against it. It is hard to compare that with articles from the likes of Mike Butcher, because he hasn't written any on the subject - yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wait, wasn't this an April Fools' Day joke?

</comment><comment><USER23> Surely this opens the police open for discrimination law suits. <http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign></comment>


JPEGmini – the Future of Image Compression? - <AUTHOR> http://www.megapixel.co.il/english/archive/21907

<comment><AUTHOR> there is a separate thread going on about Beamr Video. JPEGmini is created by the same company. I am curious to learn if this product works.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup: http://thewallmachine.com - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Clickable - <http://thewallmachine.com>

Pretty neat idea and certainly will make things fun for those that either don't have time to boot up Photo Editing Software or the know how

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice. I've seen this done many times before but you seem to have nailed the concept.

I think you should make the application's virtues more prominent on the landing page though; what makes TWM better than all the others?

</comment><comment><USER4> The skewed screenshot is kinda weird... why not have that visible and full size? Have it show a rotation of different "best of" images, to make it really apparent what the site does.

<comment><AUTHOR> good remark. we're working on a new home where there will visible parts of 4-5 'featured walls' and a list of 'trending walls' to increase our conversion ratio

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great design. Advertise on icanhazcheeseburger and you're golden.

<comment><AUTHOR> i tried and but their paiment system accepts only cards from US, canada and UK while i'm in Paris...weird or i'm missing something

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who can be the first person to get a fake conversation posted on a major news source? Sounds like a contest to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> go for it! ;-)</comment></comment>


Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border - <AUTHOR> http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070327/62697703.html Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.<p>"The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran," the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched. <comment><USER2> here's why in case anyone is still out of the loop. <http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntm23638.htm></comment>


There's still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences due to genes - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics <comment><USER2> They concede that IQ (a) exists, (b) predicts many life outcomes, (c) differs between groups, and (d) is partly heritable. If an alien at this point were presented with these premises, does anyone suppose its natural conclusion would be, "this must be _completely_ due to environmental factors, and not in the least genetic ones?"

Surely claiming a difference of outcome is entirely due to environmental factors is as extreme as claiming it's entirely due entirely to genetics. Yet imagine the uproar if someone had claimed the latter. Contrast that with the support Vox has gotten for their article.

It is dangerous to require a conclusion to be true rather than being open to whatever is.

<comment><USER3> We should all concede that structural racism (a) exists, (b) predicts many life outcomes, (c) differs between groups, and (d) is very heritable.

If an alien at this point were presented with these premises, does anyone suppose its natural conclusion would be, "the observed black-white IQ differences must be at the very least partially due to genetic factors, it is not possible that the environment can account for all of it."

\---

The point is not that a genetic factor is not possible, but that the environmental factors (in our past and current racist world) totally overwhelm any _possible_ genetic factors, even to such a degree that the genetic difference could even go the other way (i.e. blacks could be genetically more intelligent than whites).

I'd personally add this point: Those emphasizing the importance of open- mindedness about the possibility of genetic factors while failing to acknowledge the severity of environmental factors are thus contributing to those very environmental factors. They are self-fulfilling prophets.

\---

I'm pretty sure if you got in a time machine and went back to the 18th or 19th century, and told people there what blacks, women, and gay people do in the early 21st century, they'd have more trouble believing that than your time machine.

<comment><USER2> Since it's certainly possible that blacks have genetically higher IQs than whites but are environmentally made to underperform, isn't that all the more egregious? Wouldn't that be an important, uplifting thing to know? Why not find out?

When people are anxious about genetic explanations, it's usually because they're afraid of one group underperforming. "Look, we know blacks score lower on IQ tests, but we've got to be careful here—they have bad environments." But actually we have the tools necessary to model outcomes like this. If it's true that blacks are underscoring despite a genetic advantage, eventually this truth will emerge.

So when people are worried a priori that an investigation into genetic explanations will disfavor blacks, either they fundamentally don't believe these things can be rigorously studied, or they're worried that even under fair standards blacks will underperform. The former implies unknowability of truth, the latter genuine racism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I listened to the Sam Harris podcast a while ago and found I held some objections that I couldn't formulate until some time passed. The problem with Sam's view is not even as complicated as these authors make out. Consider a similar scenario based on a redfined IQ:

In this world, IQ is measured by proficiency in programming languages. Would it be surprising to find that the high IQ people are not predominately women, or black? Or that this new IQ score is highly predictive of positive financial outcomes, better health, good familiy lives and high life satisfaction scores? Should this result be interpreted as a discovery of the genetic inheritance of intelligence?

We commonly understand "IQ" to be synonymous with intelligence, yet its a test that defines a very narrow range of human capabilities. So these broad studies of various people's performace on a test will confound numerous other variables with the score. In my example scenario this would be the recently surging economic value of pushing electrons around in an orderly way.

I'll try to relisten to Sam Harris's treatment of it, maybe i missed some circumspection at a later part but I'll state the following:

The heritage of human intelligence stretches back through the eons, before there were civilizations or even races as we know them. Human intelligence is primal, in the sense of the primates we descended from and in fact are still.

<comment><USER2> The canonical reply here is that while it's true IQ tests a narrow range of abilities, (a) it's highly predictive of various facets of success in life, and (b) "specialists" are relatively rare, in that intelligence tends to be fairly well correlated across disciplines.

<comment><USER4> (a) you are missing the point, this is as much to say that home purchasers were more likely to be wealthy in 2006. It isnt a valuation that is independent of time or context, and couldn't be a measure of human 'intelligence', whatever that means. And (b) just leads to a tautology, which again is my overall point: IQ measures things that are valuable in a specific context and time period, designed by members of the same group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a subject no-one dare broach without getting labelled 'racist' or a 'white supremacist' etc. People need to be free to pursue science free of political and social ideology.

Are all people equal? No. Should all people be treated equally? Of course. That's the distinction a lot of these people don't make, the article is all 'yap, yap yap' and very light on facts.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you would find the original article [https://www.vox.com/the-big- idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-...](https://www.vox.com/the-big- idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech) has the weighty facts that this response-to-criticism lacks.

I strongly disagree with the rationalist fallacy that science must progress unfettered by social or political 'ideology'. The very notion that science is ideologically blanched, that it exists in some asocial vacuum, is naive at best, disingenuous at worst, and misguided always.

To paraphrase John Wheeler on spacetime: Society tells science how to move; science tells society how to curve.

<comment><USER7> If you go this route, then you have no leg to stand on to criticize Trump if/when he defunds NASA climate science and mandates teaching Creationism in public schools. After all, he is just guiding science by his idealogy. Are you also against the "March for science?"

I honestly think that Trump is the application of postmodern concepts to politics on an unrelated precedented level and many people on the left who supported these ideas find them horrifying when they are used to bolster positions that are not theirs.

<comment><USER6> So the only possible positions are the extremes? By acknowledging that science and society have an unavoidable structural relationship you give yourself a framework for developing tools to improve that relationship. There are plenty of problems with anti-science politics and the antidote is not to insist that they should just leave science alone _just because_.

You want science better represented in society and politics? Get more scientists involved in society and politics. [http://www.314action.org/home](http://www.314action.org/home)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Postmortem: Pac-Man, Iwatani's Rhapsody in Yellow (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/244181/Postmortem_PacMan_Iwatanis_rhapsody_in_yellow.php <comment><AUTHOR> Check out Iwatani's original sketches: [http://control- online.nl/gamesindustrie/2010/06/22/iwatani-t...](http://control- online.nl/gamesindustrie/2010/06/22/iwatani-toont-gamesgeschiedenis-in-meest- pure-vorm/)

A few years ago I found this dossier ([http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html](http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html)) about Pac-Man. Jamey Pittman discusses Toru Iwatani's development journey and provides players with the most complete and detailed study of game's logic. It's a treasure trove for gamers and developers alike.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the dossier link. Now I know how I'll spend my Sunday morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "We also considered a few additional game features, such as gates that would trap the ghosts, but these also had to be sacrificed in order for us to finish on time."

I recall that Lock 'n' Chase [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_%27n%27_Chase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_%27n%27_Chase) (1981) had gates to block the baddies. I wonder what the earliest example of blocking gates in a maze game like this would be...

<comment><USER4> I never played Lock 'n' Chase but I did play Ladybug, that also had a gated system too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bug_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bug_\(video_game\))

That game left a great impression on me as a kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> " It was especially difficult for us to explain the concept of how Pac-Man, who spends most of his time avoiding ghosts, is able to turn the tables and chase the ghosts after eating a power cookie."

I don't know how this could be a difficult concept to grasp - even in the context of the alien-shoot-em-up-fest that was inflicting the industry at the time, surely it made sense to have a 'powerup' that would turn the tides?

I'm trying to think of other games of that era that might have had a powerup for the user to enjoy, but I can't honestly think of something prior to Pacman so readily .. is it myopia, or was Pacman really one of the first video games that offered a 'turn the tables' power mechanic?

Because its such an obvious feature of games these days, its sort of befuddling to be thinking of game design without powerups. I remember the first time I played Super Mario, thinking .. oh, this magical shroom is a bit like the Pacman power pill .. but why is any similar example prior to Pacman so obfuscated to me? I guess the Pacman powerpills were the ultimate in player revenge ..</comment>


Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lending-club-layoffs-20160628-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> As someone who built the most popular iOS / Android app for Lending Club investors [0], I can tell you that since the CEO resigned

\- New users have fallen by 50% per month, although of course users to my app are a fraction of total new users, but you can extrapolate

\- Total net, users are withdrawing about as much money as users are putting in

\- The amount of loans purchased has dropped significantly

So without a doubt, retail investors know what's going on and fear for the safety of their investments.

[0] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lendingclub- order/id10461141...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lendingclub- order/id1046114132?mt=8)

<comment><USER3> Do you think your users know you are doing analytics on their transactions?

<comment><USER4> Can you name a major successful mobile application that you think _doesn't_ use analytics?

<comment><USER3> I dunno, wouldn't the better question be if I am at all comfortable using a third party app for financial transactions? Because I'm not. But I'm not super concerned about me, I'm curious how the thinking goes when someone decides to collect information about the loans that other people are taking out.

Maybe they are pretty sure that users understand it, the app could have a strong disclosure for all I know.

<comment><USER2> There is a rich ecosystem of LC apps and services because of LC's open API. The only thing the API's allow you to do is invest in loans and transfer money in and out of your account. I would be quite shocked if any service (such as lending robot) is able to operate without recording any transactions occurring. I hope users wouldn't be offended by the (very general) information revealed above, but I suppose some could.

<comment><USER5> Presumably LC itself is recording the transactions? It's obvious that apps would _want_ to do so as well, but that certainly isn't a necessity. An app could remember a transaction long enough to ensure that it had posted, and then forget about it forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The latest disclosures Tuesday, uncovered by a company probe, found that in the last few weeks of December 2009, Laplanche and three relatives took out 32 loans for a total of $722,800. All but three of those loans were repaid in full over the next two months, implying they were taken out to artificially goose Lending Club's loan origination numbers._

If true, would that be considered fraud?

<comment><USER7> Nah, that's 'growth hacking' /s.

Really, yes obviously that's fraud but apparently it's perfectly normal _as long as you don 't get caught_.

Artificially inflating the numbers whilst shopping for investments is definitely not acceptable. Pumping money around is an old trick to inflate the visible size of a company, some of these schemes are surprisingly hard to detect (the one here definitely isn't).

I'm somewhat surprised that there was no oversight in place that would have stopped this, that's serious money.

<comment><USER8> Yep. Self-dealing is always an enormous red flag for fraud and other shadiness, in financial businesses especially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, so the crown of the "fintech" movement is just as bad as the banks, and the two biggest Silicon Valley successes of the last decade, Uber and AirBnB, are really just cases of massively successful regulatory arbitrage. Nice innovation!

<comment><USER10> People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time, but it's always been a pipe dream - building the two-sided network is such too hard and too expensive, and a small network is just not worth using as a consumer. How is this not innovation?

<comment><USER11> Most of the innovation there was in the cell phone[1]. You've been able to order a car by phone in major metros for longer than those have been around. In fact, Uber started off as an app for using those very services.

Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there.

[1]-edit: some in the smartphone, but most in the old "makes calls" cell phones

<comment><USER12> The older I get the more I realize execution is simply all that matters.

A zillion people had the same basic idea for Uber. They made it a reality, and made it Not Suck(tm).

The user experience prior to Uber for ordering a car via phone was absolutely horrific.

<comment><USER13> I've heard it said many times: ideas are a dime-a-dozen, execution is everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >"the idea being that safer, higher-yielding loans would be more attractive to investors"

Who would have thought that the basic laws of lending apply to fintech startups?

</comment><comment><USER15> I highlighted several months that their behavior strongly signaled cooked books but I didn't think it would reveal this fast! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660112)

</comment><comment><USER16> Other than investing in their stock, there's an argument to be made that it might actually be a relatively safe time to invest in their loans.

<comment><USER17> Nothing they have disclosed has caused me to stop investing in their loans. In fact you can get some nice high grade loans on their secondary market from people trying to unload their portfolio at a 3-5% discount to face value.

As long as they don't have any debt on the books you are pretty safe. If they did have debt there might be some question about order of payment to creditors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stock's up 7% as I write this. I'm assuming nothing has been revealed that isn't already at least suspected, and layoffs are generally good for a stock's price. I've already made money on one dip-and-bounce, but currently in at 4.88, so here's hoping it will claw it's way back a little bit. I'm in no way qualified to declare a bottom, but I'm guessing all of the bad news is out of the way. This in no way constitutes investment advice; in fact, I'd steer clear of LC if I were you. But I'm not you, I'm me, and sometimes I invest poorly.

<comment><USER19> The entire market is bouncing back from brexit.

<comment><USER20> Except Google, which is down 1%... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In just world this would result in a prison sentence, banishment from stock exchanges, and revocation of their corporate charter. The fact that there is no capital punishment for companies, especially public ones, provides a moral hazard.

<comment><USER7> > capital punishment for companies

That's the second time today I see this, is this some kind of meme?

<comment><USER22> Yes, but it's been around for years.

If corporations are persons, and they can commit felonies, why not give them punishments that are analogous to what you'd give a person who committed a felony?

<comment><USER23> > If corporations are persons, and they can commit felonies, why not give them > punishments that are analogous to what you'd give a person who committed a > felony?

Because corporate personhood is a legal fiction, and a corporate death penalty doesn't really hurt the people who a corporation stands in for very much, and hurts lots of other people a lot.

<comment><USER21> _a corporate death penalty doesn 't really hurt the people who a corporation stands in for very much_

I know, that's why I included prison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think you need to do any of this shady stuff to be a small loan marketplace for unaccredited participants. But the shady stuff kills your chances to feed the CLO pipeline and selling (large batches of) small loans to accredited buyers.

So just... why take _these_ risks? It doesn't have a realistic chance of helping any viable strategy that I can think of.

<comment><USER25> You answered your question. It is a risk... a risk that not many are prepared to take. LC seems like it serves those who are willing to take that risk in hopes of getting better returns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's ludicrous that someone would risk their reputation and their company's future for a mere 32 more loans on the company growth report. I can't imagine how these loans made a significant difference to these reports. These revelations could be just a scapegoat for more serious fraud.

<comment><USER13> Look at the date: they were made in 2009, when the company was barely a year old. At that time, an additional 730K in loans could have been a needle mover.</comment></comment>