1200 Station Workers in Tokyo Shift Tracks from Above to Underground in 1 Night - <AUTHOR> http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/11/03/1200-station-workers-in-tokyo-shift-tracks-from-above-to-underground-in-just-one-night/

<comment><USER2> This would take 12 months in the states and cost $1200x as much because of the Union labor.</comment>


Using Money to Pay for Sex? A Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Says It's Possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickhole.com/article/using-money-pay-sex-meet-silicon-valley-entreprene-6012 <comment><USER2> Anyone's who's thought through this problem has arrived at the "Uber for sex" app idea. Though I don't know anyone who's actually attempted to build it. I'd imagine a quick boom and a just as quick bust by the authorities.

Separately, the domain name hosting this story is apt.

<comment><USER3> This is a satire website.</comment></comment>


Drone Shield – senses the presence of drones via acoustic detection - <AUTHOR> http://www.droneshield.org/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting project. Via acoustic detection, the product aims to detect illegal usage of drones.

The usage cited are:

1\. Smuggling of illegal contraband into prison

2\. Illegal taping / paparazi usage

I am very surprized that no paparazi has used drones extensively. Surely you get much better angles than if you were hiding in the bushes (e.g. if you wanted to get an exclusive shot of Prince Willaims)

<comment><USER3> It's probably too overt of a thing to use around powerful people if you are trying to exploit a grey area.

<comment><USER4> Helium balloons + smaller motors = "stealth drone"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess using a linear output stage instead of a PWM would help avoid detection. Or use a plane instead of a quadcopter, to limit the noise.

<comment><USER6> I've found it's the propellers themselves that cause the noise, not the PWM junk on the motors.</comment></comment>


The Fugitive Series - a retrospective - <AUTHOR> http://vimcasts.org/blog/2011/05/the-fugitive-series/

<comment><USER2> If anyone is using Vim, appreciate quality screencasts and seek self- improvement, this is what you want to watch. The Fugitive series is mostly for Git users, but the rest of vimcasts is for everybody. And the casts are great: short and packed with usefulness, embodied with the lovely voice of Drew Neil (@nelstrom).

Empower yourself, embrace your tools. Don't let your tools be _another_ bottleneck limiting your expression.

</comment><comment><USER3> The series is very descriptive. You can learn something about Git itself and its logic too, not jsut the plugin itself. It explains what a Git command does, and it shows how to use it using the plugin. Better to read the series and decide yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> vim, git, and fugitive are three great tastes that go great together, but you may not realize just how well until you get a foodie's perspective. this series is exactly that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome!</comment>


Stuck in Legal - <AUTHOR> http://onlyonce.blogs.com/onlyonce/2009/08/stuck-in-legal.html <comment><USER2> Companies use standard legal agreements because using nonstandard legal agreements creates risk. When you experience the symptom of "getting stuck in legal because of inflexible standard contracts", the underlying cause isn't legal. It's that you aren't important enough to make an exception for.</comment>


Mathematical gift wrapping [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwmHHLdDBSA <comment><USER2> I'm always really impressed by the "Japanese" diagonal wrapping technique.

Professional at work: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qi8ZXUH_wY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qi8ZXUH_wY)

Technique explanation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQM8KKP-3Oo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQM8KKP-3Oo)

</comment><comment><USER3> here's the real hard one, the cylinder, wrap it around like this aaaaaaaand skip!

we'll never know how to close cylinders sides I guess

(ok isn't hard but annoying as hell [https://youtu.be/dH_gpSfaA6E?t=1m55s](https://youtu.be/dH_gpSfaA6E?t=1m55s) )

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat. I wonder how this problem could be better posed mathematically. Minimize both the number of folds and surface area of wrapping used subject to the constraint the surface of the gift is completely covered? Yikes. It seems like predicting how a fold in the wrapping would affect the available wrapping left to cover the gift would be difficult.

<comment><USER5> That would be a research subject in the mathematics of origami.

That field is fairly advanced (See for example [http://www.langorigami.com/science/science.php](http://www.langorigami.com/science/science.php)), but I am not aware of people studying 'boxes'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrapped some presents last night that did not turn out great. Measuring the paper to minimize overlap makes a pretty big aesthetic difference.</comment>


Cause of today's Github outage - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/744-today-s-outage <comment><USER2> Ouch. I think we've all done this once or twice, in some fashion or another. I'm just happy they're so open about it. Learning experience == good thing.

From Chris' Twitter stream (<http://twitter.com/#!/defunkt>):

Seriously, I blame whoever wrote our crappy continuous integration software.

Oh that's me

<comment><USER3> Exactly, I don't think you've really lived till you've experienced that pit of your stomach feeling when you realise you've just wiped out a product website / database.

Thankfully for me it was a small website and no one really noticed. I can't imagine what that feeling would be like on something like github.

<comment><USER4> _> Exactly, I don't think you've really lived till you've experienced that pit of your stomach feeling when you realise you've just wiped out a product website / database._

Or sent a test email to thousands of customers in your prod database encouraging them to use web check-in for their non-existent flight tomorrow.

Yeah, did that five years ago, talk about heart-attack-inducing. Quickly remedied by sending a second email to the same test set, thankfully, but that's the kind of mistake you never forget.

<comment><USER5> I have a strict rule for myself: never use any curse words in any comments, variable names, dummy accounts etc.

<comment><USER6> I have the opposite strict rule: use as many curse words in comments, variable names, and dummy accounts as possible. That way you'll find out quickly when someone else notices!

<comment><USER7> I recommend against that. :) A team I was on had a demo for a client, and a shaky database schema. I had used, as a test account, the username "MOTHERFUCKINYEAH" for the same purpose. The purging of this account caused a few 500 errors, and we almost lost the client, and although I didn't get fired, we were all shuffled around after that to less critical projects, and one of us actually got sent out of the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good thing git is distributed. I've been working on my code all day and never even noticed!

<comment><USER9> So what's the point of using github if you don't notice it's offline?

<comment><USER8> Github provides a convenient place for me to publish my work to the world, allowing others to pull it as they desire (my work machine is a laptop, and can never be relied upon to be up, or at any particular address). Because git is distributed my workflow is not effected in the slightest by "somebody else's" (github's) completely separate repo being down.

Contrast this with something older like subversion and sourceforge. If sourceforge went down you were shit out of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why it's important to isolate production from other environments. Three rules have kept me from ever borking a production database:

1\. Production DB credentials are only stored on the production appservers, and copied in at deploy time.

2\. The production DB can only be accessed from the IPs of the production webfarm.

3\. Staging, Testing, Development, and Everything Else live on separate networks and machines than production.

<comment><USER11> While this is part of the problem, to me it seems like they didn't have proper restore procedures or at least hadn't tested them enough. There are countless ways to corrupt a database and restoring from backup is part of most remedies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If someone ever produces a good book of best practices for sysadm/syseng, please provide examples like these of why it's important to follow these best practices.

Yes, we've all made silly mistakes. But if you're in that design meeting and somebody asks, should we do ABC in case of XYZ, try not to think about how complicated or time consuming it might be to do ABC. Think about the worst case. If not doing it could at some point bring down the whole business, perhaps you should ponder it some more.

Actually, screw a book... Does anyone else want to start some wiki pages their experiences with screw-ups, the causes and the solutions? Does this exist in a comprehensive way and I just haven't found it?

<comment><USER13> While a book of screw-ups might be amusing, I think it might be more instructive to look at the "old school" ways that screw-ups like this were avoided.

I worked, back in the dark ages, for a health insurer that had two parallel environments-- one for testing/development, and one for production. None of the developers were allowed anywhere near the production environment. There was one full time employee, a former developer, whose primary job was to move code into production-- which he would only do when he received a signed document authorizing the change. Said document included the telephone numbers where the developer responsible for the code would be for the next 24 hours, so that one of the operators could call you in the middle of the night if your code caused any problems to the system.

At the time, I used to think that this was ridiculous. After managing a staff of programmers myself, I'm not so sure.

<comment><USER14> It depends on the software a bit, but I got a taste of "programmers not allowed on production" environment (in a very small scale). The problem I run into is that you have no idea what's going on on the production environment. Some characteristics are maybe reproducible on the dev site, but actual users will always do something differently. Sometimes not being able to poke the live system in a specific way while it's live, will cost you weeks of guessing in the dev environment.

Then again, there is no perfect solution for this, is there? If you tried installing new version with more debugging points, you'd be deploying something unstable over something previously unstable and trying to push more data out which might be problematic in itself. I'm not even going into "rollback to stable didn't work" scenarios :(

<comment><USER12> In my experience the best solution for a large-scale dynamic site is a combination of read-only access to production and deploy management.

Deploy management is the combination of a change management system with a deployment tool in a flexible way. So for example, with the right options, in an emergency the manager of a team of developers could deploy anything to the site immediately without requiring approval from change management. The tools are still right there to revert any change, and of course there's snapshots and daily backups for the most critical data.

Except for emergencies, all changes to production would come with an approval from a higher-up with potential code review back-and-forth first. Contact data and reversion capabilities are built in, so everybody knows who did what, how to contact them and how to revert it if they're unavailable. And of course your trending data will tell you when your peak use is and code pushes are typically frozen during that time, minimizing further potential loss.

However, besides having read-only access to production, devs should also have two kinds of testing: "development" and "staging". Development is where the bleeding-edge broken stuff lives and code is written. Staging is an _identical_ machine to those in production. Often you'll see test or qa machines which aren't identical to production, usually because changes aren't pushed to them the way they are in production. The staging machine gets all changes pushed to it like any other production machine, except it lives in a LAN that cannot access production or anything else. A method to reproduce incoming requests and sessions from production system to this staging server will give you a pretty good idea what "real traffic" looks like on this box, if you need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Forthright and classy. Compare to register.com, which had a big DNS outage Friday (affecting anybots.com) and never admitted to a problem.

<comment><USER16> I believe they had a message on their homepage during the event about being DDoSed, but yeah no after-remarks is kind of ugly in my opinion. They could at least post and hide it from the general customer.

1) <http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/415>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lesson, don't let your CI machine talk to your production servers (firewalls are good at this).

<comment><USER18> In my environment, our Dev's (individuals or environments/subnets) don't have access to PROD or QA, and our CIT boxes are in DEV. Likewise, QA and PROD only have access to their own environments.

We have a build master that promotes a reviewed deployment package to QA and/or PROD environments, where the appropriate QA or PROD operations folks do the actual deployment.

It's a luxury to have the resources available for this, but it's a life saver, because it really is stupidly easy to make a simple mistake and totally screw things up.

The last time something similar happened to me, it happened to be at the end of a REALLY long day. And what do you know... that day was then made 24 hours longer, interspersed with the occasional cat nap while backups were being restored and verified.

Fun times. Not.

<comment><USER19> I'm not so sure it's a luxury. Maybe it is if your startup is servicing a group of techies who have knowledge of what problems lay in the background but most clients don't know and don't care.

It's not that hard to keep up really. It's a question of a day or two of setup and then the hardish part of constant discipline to not take the "easy way out" and poke holes into the segregation you've set up. Mainly it takes a single team lead or CTO or whatever to be really explicit that you just don't break the steps and you'll avoid a LOT of problems. You'll still have problems, problems are inevitable, but in general you'll have mitigated them and with a proper backup and merge procedure you'll minimize downtime.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, but to be clear, the luxury I was referring to was specifically having the DEV and PROD staff being totally separate teams/individuals, not just the separation of environments. In other words, nobody on the DEV team did any PROD operations, except in the case of bug investigation, tuning advice, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree with what's been said so far. 1 - Shit happens 2 - We've all done stupid stuff 3 - Testing environment shouldn't have access to production

What hasn't been said is how refreshing it is to see an honest and quick explanation. I know this type of approach is getting more and more common (see the foursquare outage), but in the grand scale of things, its still quite rare.

<comment><USER21> I have a slightly higher threshold for considering something _refreshing_.

It took several levels of basic mistakes for this to happen AND for the restore to be as slow as it is.

Using MySQL with no transactions, no binary backups, no way to do a quick restore, and no separation of dev/production. DROP as opposed to DELETE cannot be rolled back and is therefore scary -- unless you aren't using transactions in the first place, in which case, WHEE!

<comment><USER22> I don't have much MySQL experience, but have lots of experience with other RDBMSs. Large restores take a long time no matter what. They shouldn't take days, but since we don't know how large the events table was we have no way of knowing if a faster restore was possible. A hot restore which it sounds like what they are doing may take longer by simple fact that it's restoring while the table is in use.

And DROPs (or truncates) are almost always used if the goal is to remove all the data in a table like you would want if rebuilding the entire system. Something like 100M record transaction is not generally considered a good thing.

<comment><USER21> They take a long time if you have to rebuild the indexes, which is what you have to do if you only have a text dump.

For MySQL, using the standard format (MyISAM), you can just do a file copy if you bothered to do a proper backup of the binary files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am a software developer, so I know "shit happens", but having the same configuration for database as testing environment, (same superuser name and password), which is not isolated from test environment, is pretty criminal even for a first time mistakeIMHO, especially for a product like github whom business, small and big trust with there business critical piece ("repository").

If I were running some critical code, I would have seriously reconsider github, or at-least ask for a detailed explanation on their engineering practices and fail-safe mechanisms.

<comment><USER7> I can only hope it shocks some sense into kids that use GitHub for distribution rather than putting a tarball named $name-$version.tgz (or bz2 or xz or whatever). As much as I love GitHub, is has been the bane of my automated-build existence. I don't want to ever have to make a build script that guesses at a SHA1 (or punts by doing a clone at depth zero) again.

<comment><USER24> git ls-remote will help you to get the hash of HEAD. It's much cheaper than doing a zero-depth clone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a measure of the goodwill in the community for Github (and perhaps, the fact that a lot of us have done something similar in the past) that they won't cop much flak at all for this.

<comment><USER25> I don't know. I use github, but my paid, private repos are elsewhere. The fact that someone, anyone, can run against the production system and nuke it raises some basic questions about password storage. I don't run a site anything like github, but my production and test databases have different passwords and none of them are stored in a way that the test environment could get access to the live db, nor could the tests be run on the production environment. There's bad luck and theres asking for trouble.

<comment><USER26> If github spent their time so that their site raised absolutely no basic questions, then they'd still be in beta by now.

<comment><USER21> To me, that sounds like encouraging a race to the bottom.

When you're in the business of storing other people's data, things like transactions, binary backups, QUICK RESTORES, and _separating dev from production_ shouldn't be afterthoughts. They are core attributes.

I would understand this for a demo, but not after a couple of years and half a million users. They have paying customers.

 _"Reliable code hosting

We spend all day and night making sure your repositories are secure, backed up and always available."_

<comment><USER27> The half a million users validates their techniques, no matter how much armchair quarterbacking.

The code repos were never in danger, and they've been killing it in the market because they are racing to add awesome extra features, not racin to the bottom.

I don't disagree that they can do more in their db operations, and that it's fine for us paying customers to demand more, but the reality of startups is that it very much is a race and features, for availability or recovery or other, are viciously prioritized and many things don't happen until something breaks.

If you don't thing Github cuts the mustard, svn on Google Code probably won't have problems like this...

Disclaimer: I'm personal friends with much of the Github crew.

<comment><USER21> > _The half a million users validates their techniques,_

Let me introduce you to my friend, GeoCities.

Funny thing about free hosting.

> _no matter how much armchair quarterbacking._

Transactions aren't armchair quarterbacking. Binary backups aren't armchair quarterbacking. Separating development from production isn't armchair quarterbacking. Kindly, you have no idea what you're talking about.

You can't give them credit for the repositories being mostly intact, when the ONLY parts that broke were the parts they mucked with to tie them into their database.

> _but the reality of startups is that it very much is a race and features, > for availability or recovery_

And those are exactly the places where they screwed up.

<comment><USER27> Are you sitting in a chair? Do you not work at Github? Then you're armchair quarterbacking. We all are. Even if you are a quarterback for another team (I'm a DBA myself)

Anyway, it's a great discussion so we can learn from other peoples mistakes. I will be triple checking my restores later today, and likely halt the project I'm working on to get cold standbys shored up asap. (but it's hard to prioritize house keeping over customer centric features in the race I'm running along side the Github crew)

<comment><USER21> "a pejorative modifier to refer to a person who experiences something vicariously rather than first-hand, or to a casual critic who _lacks practical experience_ "

Ironically the most fitting application would be to say that they're armchair quarterbacking their own database administering.

<comment><USER8> Unless you work for github, you lack practical experience in github's internal operation.

<comment><USER21> Fortunately, there is this thing called "science" which means we can understand things about the world regardless of where we live. As Dawkins would say, there is no such thing as "Chinese Science" or "French Science", just science. Similarly, there is no such thing as "Github MySQL" or "Github separation of production and development systems" in that same sense.

These are _categorical_ mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I moved my repos off GitHub to my EC2 server a month or two back since they're private and I was only using GitHub for keeping a copy of my code offsite. It's faster for simple push/pull and considering the sunk cost of my EC2 server, also free. I was trying to browse some repos on GitHub yesterday during the downtime and was thankful that my own were still available.

<comment><USER28> Also, if you just need something for replicating code, Amazon is offering free micro servers on new accounts for up to a year I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> rookie mistake, better security if they isolate their networks too...

<comment><USER30> I don't know why you first got down-voted. I have never worked on a project where a testing environment could access the production db.

<comment><USER31> I think he got downvoted for calling the GitHub team "rookies". Sure, they may not have tons of experience running 5-nines systems, but they've clearly built a great product that a lot of people love and respect.

<comment><USER21> They may not be rookies as Ruby hackers, but the evidence _clearly_ points to them being rookies from the standpoint of data robustness. That's embarrassing enough when it's _not_ your core business offering.

They even brag about it on their main page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> May be it's foresight or may be it's just paranoid. We've always used a entirely different username/password in prod and the password for prod never sits in the config files. Kind of saved us a couple of times. Sometimes it doesn't require a highly sophisticated setup to prevent a catastrophe.

</comment><comment><USER33> Minutes before the outage, my account would seem non-existent and all my repositories gone. They really scared the hell out of me.

This will be a good reminder for me to _always_ keep a local copy.

<comment><USER4> Since it's git-based, is it even possible to not keep a local copy? I thought everything that goes into github has to be committed to your local git repo first?

<comment><USER33> Well, there is always a local copy since you have to commit to the local repo first before you push it to github. That is, of course, as long as you don't remove it for no apparent reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Second time I've heard of this happening fairly recently. Another incident, same cause. [http://www.bigdoor.com/blog/bigdoor-api-service-has-been- res...](http://www.bigdoor.com/blog/bigdoor-api-service-has-been-restored/)

<comment><USER35> This was pretty painful. Their backups were too old, so it was necessary to do InnoDB data recovery rather than a straight-forward restore from backup.

Since InnoDB table spaces never shrink, 80G of their truncated data was still all available in a single monolithic ibdata file. An InnoDB recovery tool named page_parser read their 80G ibdata file and spits out a maze of 16k InnoDB page files organized by an arbitrary index id.

There are two internal InnoDB meta tables called SYS_INDEXES and SYS_TABLES which can give you a mapping from table name to PK index id. Unfortunately after the mass TRUNCATE all the tables got new index mappings, so it became a bit of table hide-and-seek.

The InnoDB recovery tools lack a certain polish and maturity. You need to create a C header file for each table you want recover from the pile of 16k page files. You end up having to build a separate version of the constraints_parser binary for each table. There were bugs with the output of negative numbers, unicode handling, VARCHAR types with >= 127 characters, and some edge cases where InnoDB chooses to store CHAR(15) types as VARCHARs internally. Aleksander at Percona really saved the day, he was able to find and fix these bugs pretty quickly.

I remember that magic moment when I finally was able to successfully checksum a huge block of the recovered data against the too-old-to-be-useful backup.

"I love the smell of CRC32 in the morning. It smells like... victory."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I try to make my apps work against SQLite _and_ the production database, so I can run all my tests against an in-memory SQLite database. This makes the tests run Really Fast, and it prevents a configuration error from causing my production data to go away.

(It's not possible to do this in every case, especially if you make heavy use of stored procedures and triggers, but I don't. If I need client-independent behavior or integrity checks on top of the database, I just use a small RPC server. This makes testing and scaling easier, since there are just simple components that speak over the network. Much easier than predicting everything that could possibly happen to the database.)

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know what database system they use?

<comment><USER37> MySQL. Not that using anything else would have prevented this or would help restore the table faster...

<comment><USER38> Incorrect. The article states that they _lost data_ between backup time and whenever the incident happened.

Any reasonable quality transactional database system has a transaction log _for a reason_. If you were using commercial DB system like Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle (even a decade ago), this would not be an issue. No data loss. Businesses should care about their data, and I guess this is why the commercial databases are still doing fine in a landscape increasingly dominated by FOSS everywhere.

I realize licensing costs do matter, but I can't fathom why people put up with the sad excuse of a RDBMS which is MySQL. For any nontrivial tasks it is slow, it's unreliable, attempting to secure your data by taking database backups (which seemingly can't even provide you with transactional safety!!!) renders the DB unusable and locked while backup is performed, having databases bigger than what you can store in memory makes it perform like a flat-file, etc etc ad infitum.

Surely there must be something better people can use which is still free? Postgres for instance?

<comment><USER39> FWIW, even MySQL let's you store "binlogs", which allow you to "rerun" all commands which changed the data since your last backup - if you've configured it to.

Which makes me think, last time I had anything to do with adminning MySQL, binlogs were required for replication, I'm guessing this means github aren't replicating that database anywhere either...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Well done on coming clean. However this is why the dinosaur pens have such arduous red tape -- to try and catch serious errors before they hit production. A mate of mine works in that world and he regularly stops code going into production that would hose mission-critical government data.

I prefer my agility to remain on the dev-and-test side of the fence.

</comment><comment><USER7> It kind of makes me wish NILFS2 would become production-ready faster. Give MySQL its own partition, and just roll back to a previous checkpoint if you wipe everything. Not a substitute for backups, but a pretty speedy way to recover for a minor snafu like this.

<comment><USER40> NILFS is very nifty for write-oriented work, but I'm not sure if that's their workload.

But if you're logging stuff, NILFS rocks: [http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/kepler- project/2009-June...](http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/kepler- project/2009-June/003452.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mysql 5.6+ has delayed replication. Until then, there's always tools like:

<http://www.maatkit.org/doc/mk-slave-delay.html>

</comment><comment><USER42> simply checking if you're talking to a production instance could avert something like this. having some metadata in the db about whether the data stored there is acting as production and at what version and deployment level, so tests can have a sanity check before destructive activities.

<comment><USER42> why the downvote?

<comment><USER43> Presumably because the comment is obvious, unhelpful, and somewhat mean- spirited. I don't think anybody here needs a lesson in how to avoid accidentally dropping your production database.

<comment><USER42> thanks for the explanation, i didn't mean to be evil. my suggestion might be obvious to some, but definitely not everyone, considering this isn't a singular occurrence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Kudos to them for having the guts to say publicly that they accidentally destroyed their production database.

It's been a great service, and I think as long as this kind of thing is rare, and none of my code repositories get corrupted or destroyed, I plan to stick with them.

</comment><comment><USER45> I thought systems written in Erlang never go down! ;-)</comment>


In Pictures: Nine Time-Tested Businesses That Rake It In - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneursfinance/2008/02/20/google-microsoft-yahoo-ent-fin-cx_mf_0220timetested_slide_2.html?thisSpeed=15000

<comment><USER2> I love, love, love articles that I have to click nine or ten times just to read 25 sentences!

THANK YOU!</comment>


Ask HN: Does this idea have any potential ? - <AUTHOR>

I created one site while learning Flex and just put it up online at www.yawtv.com , i know the ui sucks but first come first i want to know does online video sites have any potential to make money without facing any copyright issues (specially when you are just an independent developer and your site is based on youtube).I also wanted to extend this idea hence started making http://www.yawtv.com/twittertv/TwitterTV_fs.swf (still developing this so has lotsa bugs).I read about what happened to totlol.com (at one point it was generating lots of traffic), sites like them have lots of potential i think.Consider this if i collect all the yoga videos or how to videos and create a channel dedicated to that with videos well categorized then i am sure it will generate traffic but how to make money from it as Youtube won't allow to put ads if nothing else is there on the page. Please give suggestions and how i can improve this site or this idea or change it altogether. <comment><USER2> I think YouTube Leanback has this covered: <http://www.youtube.com/leanback></comment>


Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know - <AUTHOR> https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html <comment><USER2> Click "past" to see the previous discussions from the previous 16 times this article was submitted to HN.</comment>


Ask HN: Who uses GitHub Issues and How do you use them? - <AUTHOR> We've been working on some developer dashboards here at Chart.ly and have built some tooling for visualizing GitHub issues.
I'd love to get some feedback on what we've built.  Here is an example of all the repos under the VueJS organization:
https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/team/vuejs/issues  (top level view)
Here is a filtered view of all issues with the label bug:  https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/team/vuejs/issues/label/bug
We use GitHub issues some internally, but I'd love to hear more about how the HN community uses them and if this kind of dashboard would be helpful to others. <comment><AUTHOR> Posting links in comment so they are easy to click:

[https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/team/vuejs/issues](https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/team/vuejs/issues) (top level view)

[https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/team/vuejs/issues/label/bu...](https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/team/vuejs/issues/label/bug) (all issues with label of bug)</comment>


Who Do You Think You're Talking To? - <AUTHOR> http://gameological.com/2013/06/xbox-e3-2013-recap/

<comment><USER2> I like this writer. His news messages are good and he puts good thought into them.</comment>


We don't eat swans - <AUTHOR> http://modernfarmer.com/2014/05/come/ <comment><USER2> Swans are kind of assholes in my experience and the "mute swan"(the one most people think of) has become a massive pest among the fisheries/parks/etc crowd.

I'm generally a pretty adventurous cook/eater and did a goose for christmas last year(geese are a hella pest but somehow the dead one I bought was $70 or something) and probably wouldn't do a swan if it's similar. Geese are almost "beefy"

<comment><USER3> Are geese adventurous? Where I'm from (north-eastern Bavaria) roasted goose breast with potato dumplings are a a common Sunday dinner meal (duck breast is less common, at least in restaurants, but my grandparents and parents often made it). Pork is obviously the standard thing to roast and consequently more common overall, but I would argue that at least where I'm from this roasted geese breast is a bigger deal than chicken based meals. Especially if it's a Sunday dinner.

Goose is also popular for Christmas, turkey not really. Actually, goose is probably the thing to make for Christmas where I'm from.

Goose is obviously not chicken or turkey, but I really love it with very fatty gravy, a crispy, salty crust, and quite dry meat. I love fried chicken, too, I think everyone does, plus turkey, but that's not what I'm looking for when eating roasted goose breast.

<comment><USER4> Oddly enough, goose isn't particularly common as a food in the U.S., even at Christmas. And this is in spite of the fact that we've had goose drilled into our collective consciousness as a traditional Christmas main course (and they're a _very_ common nuisance animal).

We eat tons of turkey in the U.S., but usually sliced. Most people only roast a whole turkey at Thanksgiving, but it's not uncommon to make it at Christmas. In the U.S., if you're cooking a bird, it's probably a chicken. Duck is more of a restaurant thing, particularly at slightly nicer Chinese restaurants.

This story has got me really thinking. I made a fig pudding (adapted from a 120-year-old British recipe) at Christmas two years ago. It was OK. I think I overdid it with the amaretto. Maybe my next Christmas cooking adventure will be goose.

<comment><USER5> We do a four-pound roast chicken almost every week—it's a big yummy meal with lots of leftovers to become sandwiches, pasta, casserole, etc, plus making stock for soup or rice later in the week.

Delicious and really economicaly.

<comment><USER6> I thought this was weird until I went to the grocery store and found out that it was a dollar a pound. Yes please.

<comment><USER7> WTF...

The only things that are a dollar a pound here are onions and potatoes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That article is .. devoid of new information. It claims that we don't eat swans (maybe? probably? I certainly never did.) but fails to provide even a hint of an answer. Unless I miss a hidden link for a page 2 or 3 that is a very long "So we don't eat a big bird, think about it", which is .. thought provoking if you're feeling nice, lacking content if you're not.

Jumping between vastly different regions doesn't help either ("Swans are the property of the crown in the UK, but a pest in Michigan." What??).

<comment><USER9> I felt the same way. It asks "why don't we eat swans any more?" but as far as I can tell in the US we never did, and in fact the closest thing to an answer is just that we never got in the habit. I get the impression the excess swan problem in Michigan is a recent thing, probably a result of a decline of some swaniferous predator.

<comment><USER10> swaniferous (swan-bearing) =/= swanivorous (swan-eating).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since the article was short on answers, here's one possible answer as to "why we don't eat swans":

Their numbers are too small to get into volume "manufacturing" (CAFO's).

15,000 swans. That's cute.

We harvest 10,000 kiloTonnes of cattle per year in the USA alone. That means, our CAFO'S produce about 2 million pounds of beef for every 1 swan we could harvest.

Our food system loves repeatable processes & volume efficiencies that wild game can't provide.

Note: I may be nearly vegetarian, & eat only local organic meat rarely. But, the facts of CAFO's dominate the market.

<comment><USER12> If they were really that good they would raise them like turkeys.

My guess is that royalty ate them initially largely because they looked regal. The fact that they redressed them with the feathers before serving lends further credence to this idea.

Geese are pretty awful to eat.. particularly wild geese from what my brother in law says. Swans are probably even worse.

<comment><USER13> We'll agree to disagree about geese, I guess.

<comment><USER12> I probably didn't cook it right. But my experience with goose was not very good.

<comment><USER13> Certainly possible, or maybe our tastes just differ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You know the best eggs in the world? Seagull Eggs. The harvesting of them from the wild is highly protected and I've only ever met a few old boys who used to poach them but I've read a few places (wild cookery and survival books) that the finest omelette you can make is one made from shite-hawk eggs. Guess that's an easier taboo to explain, though. I've had swan and goose and find them both perfectly acceptable meat. The best way I've found so far is to salt cure the breast like pastrami - as the meat is so dark it's very much like a salt cured beef. Very tasty.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of Porterhouse Blue, the 1970s satirical novel about life in the fictitious Porterhouse college at Cambridge, where swans were served at massive feasts and "porterhouse blue" became another name for a stroke caused by excessive consumption: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue)

<comment><USER16> On a related note, fellows of St John's Cambridge are the only people outside the Royal Family allowed to eat unmarked mute swans in the UK: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John's_College,_Cambridge#Ea...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John's_College,_Cambridge#Eating_Swan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My grandfather told my that during the WW2 occupation, fisherman occasionally used to catch & eat swans. Even during the war, the meat was not socially accepted for human consumption (ie. in western culture would consider it on par with "dog meat"), thus not very popular.

<comment><USER18> > Even during the war, the meat was not socially accepted for human > consumption

For what it's worth, it was a huge scandal in the early 1990s in my country when it was rumored that members of our local gipsy community had eaten swans after they had just arrived in Vienna. It stuck along as a stereotype for at least a decade, if not more. As for the reference, the best I could find was this: [http://books.google.ro/books?id=gHKm95EweOwC&pg=PT272&lpg=PT...](http://books.google.ro/books?id=gHKm95EweOwC&pg=PT272&lpg=PT272&dq=eating+swans+vienna+gypsies&source=bl&ots=F1IMlgVdYa&sig=HITnDa4Ra1SdJEQBbxHDPqD7Olw&hl=ro&sa=X&ei=Ld9tU6rjL4mN7Qb1lYHIDQ&ved=0CEcQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=eating%20swans%20vienna%20gypsies&f=false) , but there was also a Sun story from 2008 about "Eastern" immigrants having eaten swans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are a few swan farms in The Netherlands, where swans are grown for consumption. They are considered a delicacy in several European countries, but they don't taste as good as duck or geese in my opinion. Some years ago there were a few incidences of Eastern European migrants taking wild swans for food, including some from protected species.

</comment><comment><USER20> We shot a swan for the sole purpose of eating it. It was lovely and served a large number of people (apx 8) with plenty of leftovers.

This was in a country where they are protected but are a pest and are in large numbers locally. Protected largely for historical reasons (the Queen).

In future I would (will) use the pressure cooker however.

</comment><comment><USER21> For one thing, you'll need a larger than normal oven. The largest turkeys at the neighborhood turkey farm are about 30 lbs., the size of a small swan, and, while you might be able to physically stuff a bird that big into a newer oven that has maximal cooking volume, it won't cook very well. Turkeys are lean, but if you tried to roast a swan, your roasting pan might overflow with fat and if that catches fire it will burn like a gallon of liquefied paraffin. That's a pretty good way to burn down the house.

<comment><USER22> I didn't realize they were that large up-close. The obvious implication of that fact:

Swanturducken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Our local yakitori joint serves swan and lion - [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/05/17/burlingame- resta...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/05/17/burlingame-restaurant- offers-lion-meat-amid-controversy/)

</comment><comment><USER24> We changed the title (from "Why don't we eat swans?") in an attempt to ward off bikeshed arguments about it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd eat swan. Somebody cook it up for me.

<comment><USER26> I would eat swan just to prove a point that its not fair for chickens just because of the looks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "In Michigan, however, which has the highest population of mute swans in North America, the creatures are considered pests. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the statewide breeding population increased from about 5,700 to more than 15,000 in just ten years. The birds attack people in the water and on shore, particularly children that wander too close to their nests."

Sometimes when I get excited that an animal population gets to the point of potentially excess, I have to remind myself that it might be that we've adapted our lives to the absence of the animal and can't tolerate its presence even in modest amounts. Yes, swans are aggressive, but just because they are annoying doesn't mean they are overpopulated. Or concerns that some wild cats might take dogs. That sucks for the dog owner if it happens, but is it really okay to have the expectation that your animal can be in nature without any natural repercussions?

That said, once swans become common we shouldn't be afraid to push back against their aggressiveness. Nature does have away to balance behavior, and if humans think they just have to put up with asshole swans or else kill the swans I think we're missing out on some obvious behavior correction opportunities.

<comment><USER28> If that aggressiveness comes at the cost of other species, especially after humans either artificially introduced them or eliminated their natural predators, it is our _responsibility_ to protect those other species. Conservation doesn't mean every individual of every species gets to live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> People do hunt and eat swans. I'm from North Carolina and have a lifetime sportsman license there. Each year I can apply for two swan tags, I believe the cost is something like $5-$15 for the tags.

What this article doesn't explain is that swan meat isn't actually very good. Goose is better, but duck is the best (in my opinion). Goose is more gamey, tough, and has less meat than a duck. Swan is even more gamey than goose.

I suspect if the author spent more time investigating the "old boys network" he would have realized that hunting and consumption of swan does exist in the US today. Even a simple "hunting swan in america" google search turns up a useful information. Have a look at the aptly named swanhunting.com if you want more info.

</comment><comment><USER30> Because they do not sell it at the market.

Ive found all sorts of meat (22 types from my specialty butcher), yet swan isn't there. Perhaps it's "too beautiful" to eat, or perhaps it has a more visceral "horse meat" kind of feeling to it.

I don't know. And the article is lacking in detail. So, the answer is "it's not sold".

<comment><USER12> But this leads to the question of "why don't they sell it at the market"?

And the answer to that might be because people wouldn't buy it. Or if they did, only once because it tastes like an old glove that was left in the parrot cage.

<comment><USER13> The one quote in the article about the taste was positive...

<comment><USER12> Somebody else said similar but I'm not convinced.

I went back and looked and the guy was a professional chef. And probably some sort of esoteric gourmet of the kind that might drink civet poop coffee.

I have to believe if swans were really good people would have started eating them in large numbers a long time ago and they would commercially raise them.

<comment><USER13> Batali may have weird tastes, maybe (though he's a pretty mainstream food personality not particularly known for crazy stuff), but it remains the case that we have one piece of testimony that it's tasty and none that it isn't. The fact that we don't eat them _is_ arguably some evidence that they aren't but there are other potential explanations for that, so drawing that conclusion seems shakey.

<comment><USER12> I don't buy the Queen of England explanation. Because there are many other countries besides England. So what other explanation could there be? Given this, along with my poor goose experience, leads to my conclusion that they likely don't have a flavor that appeals to many people.

Maybe I'm wrong. I suppose with current regulations and the fact swans don't live in my area I don't have a way to test my hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe the answer is rebranding. Dolphin fish are named 'Mahi-Mahi' on menus to disambiguate them from the mammals.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've always wondered - when synthetic meat becomes economically viable, and animal rights come even closer to human, will we end up in much greater need systematically controlling most animal populations? What are we going to do with all those caracases? Feed the poor?

</comment><comment><USER33> "others preferred to stuff the bird with a series of increasingly smaller birds"

Dynamic eating!

<comment><USER12> I found that comment actually amusing.

I would upvote it to counter whoever downvoted it but not enough karma.

<comment><USER12> I guess some people have not been exposed to dynamic programming?

<comment><USER33> I suppose not

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Because the Queen owns them all except St John's Oxford swans who have permission

<comment><USER2> SJC is at Cambridge

<comment><USER35> a number of the college names overlap both place, including st johns , but only cambridge-resident fellows can have "unmarked" swan.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_College,_Oxford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_College,_Oxford))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Same problem with the seals in New England. They are cute and protected and exploding in population with negative effects on the fish stock. Canada restarted seal hunting to protect the cod fishery and it's working for them.

<comment><USER37> >and it's working for them.

Yeah, against massive international outcry from people who don't live here and don't understand that fisheries is literally the only job left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Answer right in the article. "too cute to eat".

<comment><USER39> The author insists on this, and I guess it is true that this notion is promoted by popular culture. But to me it just seems insane. Have these people ever seen a swan? I mean, whenever I get close to one it is readily apparent that I am dealing with some outgrown aggressive river-beast. The only thing keeping it from biting my head off would seem to be a couple factors of two missing in the volume, which a few thousand years of evolution might have an easy solution to. I see very little cute in swans...

<comment><USER40> Agreed. A swan is no cuter than a duck, which is a common dish in many menus. Also, we eat a lot of animals which could be considered "cute". A little lamb, for example, or a piglet. So cuteness can't be the answer.

<comment><USER38> Ducks are still failry rare to be on menus depending on the culture of a restaurant. Some of my friends are still surprised I eat them.

I originally omitted in my comment about thoughts of dogs, cats, and bunnies being taboo as meals in the US. It probably has a lot to do with not only perceived cuteness, but then we have a tendency to make cute things pets, and then they become "part of the family".

You don't usually see piglets or lambs as options in the pet store.

<comment><USER40> Is duck rare in the US? While not as common as chicken, it's served as food in a lot of Western countries. I've tried it and found it delicious.

Dogs and cats: probably eaten in some cultures, though the thought is shocking to me. But bunny? Not only eaten, but also skinned for their pelts: this is _extremely_ common, to the point I know people who breed them for this exact purpose (and to sell them as pets as well). Rabbit is a common dish in Spanish restaurants, for example.

I'll argue the highly subjective notion that rabbits are cuter than swans, yet we eat and skin rabbits. And they _are_ available in pet stores, unlike... swan!

<comment><USER38> Late reply.

I don't think ducks are rare in the US. They're common in asian and french restaurants, but not much in any other I've been too.

Rabbit is almost never seen on a menu, there are few asian restaurants that I've seen it, usually in the form of stew.

Horse meat is also rare in restaurants, only a few in the entire US and Canada serves it.

Cuteness is always subjective =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In many of the celtic nations it's for cultural reasons. They are an animal people turn into in myth and "sacred" through custom. No reason however why they are not eaten in countries where they are not native.

</comment><comment><USER42> the author shows their bias and agenda with the ridiculous claim:

"The birds attack people in the water and on shore, particularly children that wander too close to their nests."

absurd.

</comment><comment><USER43> In the past, the upper class in England would eat swans.

</comment><comment><USER44> What kind of discussions are propping up to #3 on HN front page. There is more general topic discussion than Hacker related discussion (btw I meant hacker in the good sense)

<comment><USER24> Please reread the Hacker News guidelines. Any articles that gratify intellectual curiosity are on topic. This article may be a bit fluffy, but it fits the bill.

<comment><USER45> > This article may be a bit fluffy, but it fits the bill.

I don't even know whether this was intentional, which makes it the best kind of wordplay

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article doesn't provide the most likely answer...

Because they don't taste very good.

<comment><USER40> The article quotes an opinion saying they are delicious:

"We once ate a swan at Christmas nine or ten years ago," [chef Mario Batali] told Esquire. "It was delicious — deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent… but I've never seen swan on a market list."

<comment><USER12> I missed that.

But "lightly gamey" doesn't sound very good to me.

I cooked a goose once out of curiosity. As another poster mentions it was very expensive. And, it wasn't very good. An $8 chicken beat it hands down.

If swans were really tasty they would have probably been commercially farmed a long time ago. So I have to believe they really don't.... taste very good. Queen of England aside, there are plenty of other countries that would have raised them commercially.

<comment><USER40> Game is a taste not all people like, but this is not about individual preference. A lot of people eat game. Wild boar, wild duck, deer, and many other "gamey" meats are enjoyed in many countries. Why not swan? Especially if, as the quoted chef claims, it's only lightly gamey.

<comment><USER12> Not to beat a useless discussion to death but I really think you answered your own question...

Why not swan when they eat boar, ducks and deer?

I see one and only one very obvious answer. And I'm sticking with it... downvotes be damned!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Maybe swan is the decidedly-not-pork mystery meat that chinese food serves me in their 'special' fried rice? Anyone know what im talking about.. Smokey smell, looks like a fowl in its cooked form.

</comment><comment><USER47> What about black swans lol?

</comment><comment><USER48> Humans eating habits should evolve ! Go Vegetarian !

<comment><USER48> Ok. Ok.. Suit yourself :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Kinda off topic, but did anyone catch the comments from "Terrence Andrew Davis"? Google this guy...can't figure out if he's a real, mentally unstable human or a random text generator, but supposedly he wrote an os: [http://templeos.org](http://templeos.org).

Uh...and Swans and stuff...

<comment><USER50> [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOSV2](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOSV2)

Probably him. Or some guy with a lot of time on his hands pretending to be him.</comment></comment>


ᐊᑕᓇᕐᔪᐊᑦ (ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hemispheregames.com/2013/06/19/%E1%90%8A%E1%91%95%E1%93%87%E1%95%90%E1%94%AA%E1%90%8A%E1%91%A6/

<comment><USER2> So... with the utmost respect, how cool is it that the glyphs for Inuktitut (if that's what those are) look just like some kind of awesome sci-fi writing.)

<comment><USER3> I guess for a latin alphabet based language user, every other writing is either ancient or sci-fi.</comment></comment>


Nearly half of Americans report feeling alone - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-a-big-loneliness-problem-2018-05-02 <comment><USER2> I am working on this problem although I am an aerospace engineer. Any techies who really care about issue and interested in hacking this? NG</comment>


Watho – work at home - <AUTHOR>

I,ve been looking for remote jobs since 2013. I think it´s very hard to find a company with remote positions that fits perfectly a person.
So for this reason I founded a startup called watho (www.watho.net)
We are focused on contacts between companies which have remote jobs available with the applicants from any part of the world.
Currently we have 7 open remote positions. Check them at our site!! <comment><USER2> The search box from here [0] doesn't work.

EDIT: Firefox 32.0 running on Debian, Javascript enabled.

[0] [http://www.watho.net/#!job_search_results/python](http://www.watho.net/#!job_search_results/python)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it isn´t working even in Chrome.

Thank you for your time!!

<comment><USER2> Thinking of it, currently you don't have that much offers, so it's not likely that people will find it interesting. What I would suggest is allow people to leave a cv and say "I am based in X [important for time zones] and I want a remote job in domain Y". Employers could then contact interesting profiles, and you could sell access to emails and names.

If you add such a feature, please let me know (email in my profile).

<comment><AUTHOR> I´m working on it right now.

I decided to launch a tiny version of the app in order to attract customers but, right now, I haven´t a lot

Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's "Currently" not "Actually" and "founded" not "found".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to break it to you, but there are a few similar sites already like weworkremotely.com etc.

Also your site is blank in a mobil Browser without JavaScript and plugins.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, there are similar sites to watho right now.

But we want to go a step further and create something to make job searching easier to applicants and companies.

And yes, I know that without Javascript my site doesn´t work. It´s because we are using Meteor which is a new Javascript Single Page Application Framework.

<comment><USER5> That isn't a valid reason. You need to have the site functional regardless of (major) browser, with and without JS turned on, and regardless of device. Having any of those items break your site is a sure-fire way to lose customers.

<comment><USER6> They should probably use some type of static extraction of the HTML and make that the mobile version.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Petition to eliminate marriage penalty for dual-career couples - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/reform-tax-code-eliminate-marriage-penalty-which-disproportionately-hurt-dual-income-families <comment><USER2> Bah. The tax code is insane, but isn't easily changed. Somehow I doubt that this petition can make a difference.

Here are two current personal examples of how crazy it is:

1) My daughter is a HS senior, who will be going to college in the fall. Together, my wife and I own a house and sufficient assets that my daughter won't get much financial aid (at least at a state college). However if we divorced and my wife kept the house and I kept the money, then my daughter would qualify for a lot of aid. This is because the equity in a house doesn't count, and other financial assets only count for 1 parent (which would be the ex-wife without income or assets, not the divorced dad with income and assets). So, being married means a big financial cost compared to the "free" money of financial aid. Not that we would get divorced for this reason, but it means we won't qualify for $100,000 (or more) in aid over 4 years. And we'll miss out on another $100,000 for our younger child.

That's the downside of "needs" based aid. It's easy to game the system.

2) Much more serious, and sad. My daughter's friend is also an HS senior who wants to go to college. Her father died, her mother remarried. But her stepdad has enough income/assets that there is no financial aid available for her. Her stepdad didn't sign up for spending $30,000 or more a year for college for an 18 y/o stepdaughter, he's got his own children to think about. Why should he deplete his assets for a kid who recently entered his life? That's not how a 2nd marriage works in the real world!

So my daughter's friend has no assets, her mom has no assets, but there is no financial aid available for her!

The real world is full of crazy situations like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohh wow that's a crazy situation. We don't have any children yet but it's good to know.

As for whether or not this petition will make a different, it likely won't, but regardless it'll still have a larger impact than simply ignoring it.

<comment><USER3> I like this attitude!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Long term lurker on hacker news. My wife and I got married last year and this will be our first time filing our taxes jointly. At the beginning of the year, we naively changed our W-2 withholdings to married and ended up with a massive tax bill at the end of the year. Little did we know, choosing married on your W-2 results in less taxes being withheld because it assumes that you're a single income family, whereas in reality our taxes actually went up. Seeing this number triggered me to dig a little deeper into the tax code and saw how unfair this was. How many of you guys are dual-career couples who were impacted by this quirk as well?

<comment><USER4> I believe you can still file separately, though the mortgage interest deduction is limited to 500K of loans per person instead of 1M.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can still file separately, but the brackets for singles and married filing separately are different. The brackets for married filing separate is effectively the brackets for married filing jointly except split in half. At lower levels it's the same, but once you get to the higher ends of the 25% and beyond they start to diverge: [http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax- brackets.aspx](http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax-brackets.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The marriage penalty is simply absurd. My wife and I have talked about getting divorced to save money, but staying together, and then getting married again later in life when the healthcare-related benefits might start to make it worth it.

Getting rid of the marriage penalty seems like something that could get support from both sides of the political spectrum. It would mean lowering taxes, and it also would mean helping to encourage two-earner families and - practically speaking - help women have more powerful and high-earning careers. That said, I think the penalty only kicks in above a certain combined income, so maybe there aren't actually enough voters personally affected by it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, my wife and I are having the same conversation right now. It's insane that this kind of conversation even exists in the first place! Looking at a visual that I found on NYTimes ([http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/16/upshot/marriag...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/16/upshot/marriage- penalty-couples-income.html)), it seems like at the high end it kicks in at ~180k, but it seems to also exists at the very low end as well ~35k.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some creative ways to validated an idea before implementing it? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sell it before building it.

If there are no buyers - validation done.

If there are buyers - refund money, apologize for delay, send X% OFF coupon and start building it.

Maybe a bit controversial but works with many types of products or services.

(About 15 yrs ago I had an idea to combine all esoteric spiritual ideas that belongs to certain fragmented discipline into one place and sell it as eBook. That exactly what i did and was very surprised to give 4 refunds within short period of time, before putting it "off market")

<comment><USER3> A slight variation of it is - sell it before building, but let the users know it isn't ready it. Give them a deep discount (50% or more) for their trust. The idea is to set a release date, and if you don't hit it, refund the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Make website. Advertise website on Google or Facebook or whatever. Have pretty screenshots about what the idea is. When people click the sign up button or try to enter their credit card info, it crashes.

Another alternative: put up flyers. When someone calls, say that the service is currently fully occupied. (works great for car rentals, cleaning services, etc)

After validating, you might want to shut down the advertising.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, that reminds me some services that have a queue for early adopters where can sign in to be in the queue waiting to enter beta program. I guess I could implement that queue, put 100 as initial number, and let people join the queue, when I'm ready for beta just need to notify them that it is their turn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends on the idea itself. If it's a business idea, talk to people in your imagined target group and validate that the need is real, and that the way you want to solve it isn't wrong in an immediate sense.

</comment><comment><USER6> My top 2: 1\. Interview customers to discover the right segment and if they care enough about the problem you want to solve. 2\. Use a landing page to validate the solution and marketing channels before you build it.

<comment><USER7> Ask them to pay for a crappy version of the product.

<comment><USER4> This. The best customers are the ones who have already hacked their own crappy product, probably in a spreadsheet or some chat group. As long as yours is less crappy, there's a market for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> that makes me very optimistic, I've located many related WhatsApp groups and telegram, the only thing that concerns me is how to deal with copyright, people seem not to have any problem infringing copyright on WhatsApp and telegram sharing files.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Suspect can't be compelled to reveal "64-character" password, court rules - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/police-cant-force-child-porn-suspect-to-reveal-his-password-court-rules/ <comment><USER2> What would happen in the case where the perpetrator does not know the password? For example, I don't know the passwords to most of my accounts because they are random and stored in my password store. If I lost access to my password store, what would happen if the court demanded I provide the password to one of my accounts or encrypted files on my computer?

<comment><USER3> This exists in Australia as law, you are considered just as guilty as not providing it. Max penalty is 10 years jail from memory. No other crime needs to be committed.

We are the electoral proving grounds for US/UK/CA laws.

It's totally coming for you if you think this is some silly Australian thing.

I deleted a bunch a of old veracrypt drives that I've lost the passwords for and clung onto hoping I'd work it out one day after the laws came in, they've done incredibly well to make encryption seem criminal, it's terrifying and China-esque.

<comment><USER4> So if I wanted a relative in jail, just ensure they use a password manager then do something from their wifi, or plant a keypass database on their computer.

<comment><USER5> Going to have to raise the bar a bit. This is Australia, we all do things on wifi.

<comment><USER6> From _their_ wifi. eg go to your enemy's house, connect to their WiFi, frame them with an encrypted file that they don't have the password to.

<comment><USER7> If only reasonable doubt still got bad cases tossed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That quote where the self-avowed pedophile says 'No fucking way' is going to appear in every bill to increase law enforcement's powers from now on. It's an irresistible soundbite. The scumbag would have done better to just shut the hell up.

<comment><USER9> Which is always true, at least in the US. The police are allowed to lie to you during questioning. They are allowed to claim they have evidence that they do not have. No amount of lying on their part will invalidate any "confession" they obtain from you. But if _you_ even inadvertently tell the police something that is untrue, you can end up in prison for that, even if you committed no other crime. NEVER talk to the police, if there is any chance they suspect you are involved with a crime.

<comment><USER10> They should need to fix it then, so that the police are not allowed to lie to you (but are allowed to withhold information, or be deceptive, or lie when they are not on duty and don't have a police uniform), but you are allowed to tell the police untrue stuff as long as it does not constitute filing a false police report or accusing someone else of a crime that they have not committed, or a few other exceptions (e.g. abusing the emergency service).

<comment><USER10> Actually I missed a few things. Both sides should be allowed to do the following: Refuse to answer a question (except asking the police to see a copy of a warrant or their police identification (they can refuse you to touch their police identification though)), or claim to not know something or forget something (even if that is untrue). And if someone nevertheless says something untrue even in a way which is not permitted, if there is a reasonable chance to believe it would be inadvertent, then they are forgiven (and if they are the police, may be allowed to try again later (if the person they are interrogating is still a suspect), even though the first attempt at arresting them didn't count).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We need to change the analogy on these topics from "a passcode to a wall safe" to the encrypted computing device being seen as an extension of the person's mind.

When we encrypt information with a key known only within our mind, we are creating a cyborg like extension of our own mind.

<comment><USER11> One more thought to clarify: in the future imagine we can repair brain damage with silicon-based implants. Will courts force their extraction or enumeration in criminal cases? My point above is that we're already augmenting our minds with electronic devices, they're just not implanted physically yet.

<comment><USER12> Courts can already require fingerprints, iris scans, genetic material, etc for forensics.

I don't see why a machine organ would be any different.

<comment><USER13> Invading someone's mind _has_ to be treated differently. I am not any of those things - but I am my mind.

<comment><USER14> The difference is not because the mind is different, but because we cannot infer its content otherwise reliably. (That's the problem with polygraphs, they are extremely unreliable relative to the importance of their purpose.)

If it were possible to do it with some sort of scan (reliably!), eventually courts would order those scans.

<comment><USER13> But that's kind of the point: the idea that sanctity of one's thoughts is not ensured, that really it's just a technological limitation, should be extremely troubling.

<comment><USER14> I know, but also that's reality. We were (and still are) pretty brutal when it comes to getting our way with the powerless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice.

This is yet another reason why I avoid biometrics for authentication, and I'm glad that the court backed up my assumption that it is more secure. In this particular case, I hope this perpetrator is convicted regardless (assuming he's guilty, that is), but I'm glad the courts agree that nobody should be compelled to give up information. This is a big win for privacy.

<comment><USER16> How will he be convicted if the primary evidence is on his computer?

My geek half that believes in strong 4th and 5th Amendment tights and crypto thinks this is a fine decision. My forensics half bets this guy has gigabytes of atrocious child pornography on his system and that CP cases are the motivating factor for the police wanting to decrypt your hard drive in 99 out of 100 cases with a search warrant.

These cases are not abstractions; every pic is of a child who was abused and the perpetrators organize themselves into networks that include distributors and abusers/"content producers." How is justice served if these networks can't be rolled up due to full disk encryption?

I like encryption. I don't want to be compelled to give up my password to a tyrannical government. But I think the tech community is quick to take an absolutist view of the right to strong crypto, and quick to discount that harm can happen as a result. I also don't think that view is shared by most people... so it seems like a problem worth solving.

<comment><USER17> Don't we have other forms of surveillance, installing of cameras/microphones in people's homes and sting operations that could help catch people?

I think that demanding citizens incriminate themselves is an especially lazy form of justice.

<comment><USER16> I don't think such techniques are readily and cheaply available to most police departments.

<comment><USER18> That's a good thing. It forces the police to actually do their homework rather than invade people's privacy whenever they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Meanwhile politicians regularly go with "I don't remember" if challenged in court.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand what's being defended here. The guy already admitted what's on the computer. Like, the EFF saying

> "We store a wealth of deeply personal information on our electronic devices. > The government simply should not put individuals in the no-win situation of > choosing between disclosing a password—and turning over everything on these > devices—or instead defying a court order to do so."

This is deeply baffling to me as applied to this case. The personal information being 'protected' is _not his property_.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, this _is_ an extreme case. I mean, he reportedly said:

> It's 64 characters and why would I give that to you. We both know what's on > there. It's only going to hurt me. No fucking way I'm going to give it to > you.

It seems like a totally dumbass thing to say. The standard advice is politely declining to answer, and requesting an attorney.

But at least he didn't lie.

And yes, it's true that the content isn't likely his, in the sense that he generated it or that it's about him. But it would -- as he _admitted_ \-- incriminate him. And the court affirmed that he has the right to not incriminate himself.

What's especially interesting is that the court didn't agree that "We both know what's on there." didn't moot protection against self-incrimination.

<comment><USER22> I bet he did lie and its not 64 characters. He was probably saying that to make them not try to break his password12345.

<comment><USER23> Worse still is the threat of quantum computers that will make cracking his vault trivial. Apparently in 20-30 years people will be able to fit a quantum computer into a laptop form factor and break certain types of crypto at will, regardless of the keysize or key complexity.

<comment><USER24> At the moment, quantum computers have only been shown to give exponential speedups over classical computers on problems that can reduced to the special case of the hidden subgroup problem for finite abelian groups [1]. This is only really an issue for public key crypto at the moment (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and ECC) since secret-key crypto tends to need less structure in the underlying problem. The best you could do to speed up cracking AES with modern quantum algorithms would probably be Grover's algorithm, which only gives a quadratic speedup (an O(N) search becomes O(sqrt(N)) instead). [2]

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just as there are signs of the "drug war" finally faltering, "child pornography" is primed to continue the erosion of generally held rights in service of a moral panic. This case itself is good news, but the everpresent problem is that the attackers are paid with public funds to try again and again until they succeed. Criminalizing mind altering substances seems downright practical compared to _criminalizing patterns of bits_.

<comment><USER26> This "yOu cAn't mAkE nUmBeRS iLlEgAl" thing is one of the most annoying memes I've ever encountered.

It's literally self defeating - you could just as easily say that he has no right to privacy for the contents of the harddrive because the contents of his harddrive is "jUsT aN iNtEgEr" and no integers are secret.

Some patterns of bits are clearly and rightfully illegal.

<comment><USER25> > _This "yOu cAn't mAkE nUmBeRS iLlEgAl" thing is one of the most annoying > memes I've ever encountered._

If you take any reference to a concrete phenomenon - the _extreme_ difficulty of policing private data storage and communications - and pigeonhole it into a simplistic caricature, then it's no wonder you see that everywhere?

<comment><USER26> Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying but you appeared to be the one describing a complex situation as "criminalizing a pattern of bits". IMO it's a level of reduction below what is useful, kind of like arguing against verbal harassment laws as "criminalizing vibrations of air".

<comment><USER25> I wasn't making a moral argument about the uh, merits, of child pornography, but rather the practical effects of trying to police patterns of bits stored on private computers and transmitted between consensual peers. This level of complexity is relevant, as it describes the scope of the activity, and implies what is required to actually control it.

If most child pornography enthusiasts are caught due to having their computer fixed at Best Buy, have you actually criminalized viewing child pornography, or would it be more appropriate to say that you've criminalized patronizing Best Buy? As stated, that's obviously hyperbolic as bona fide CP enthusiasts are an extreme minority. But we can imagine tripping up innocent people with the letter of the law (eg botnets, teen sexting, unregistered pornography), as well as similar dynamics around much more common "patterns of bits" like say pirated Hollywood movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what would happen, if a criminal picks a passphrase that admits his crime. Since the defendant cannot be forced to self-incriminate himself, wouldn't that be a perfect defense?

<comment><USER14> Courts and the law doesn't work like that. (See the funny problem of which court would have jurisdiction if a murder would happen in some strange part of a forest, which happens to be Federal land, and also intersect some state borders, and at first glance the currently valid statutes say that the trial should be held somewhere where there's no judge because of some lines on a map.)

But could you give an example of what kind of string could self-incriminate someone?

<comment><USER28> > But could you give an example of what kind of string could self-incriminate > someone?

You can conjure up the previous scenario but not one for this simple case?

"I am guilty of XYZ offense"

Seems like a pretty obvious example.

<comment><USER14> How would that mean anything? It's just a password. A testimony is not anything you utter without context.

<comment><USER28> > A testimony is not anything you utter without context.

Go ahead and get arrested and say incriminating statements without context. Let us all know how it goes!

<comment><USER14> If you get to trial and the judge orders you to produce the password, then and there is the time to say it. It becomes a matter of public record, you don't even have to say it continuously, you can spell it, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The perp can't reveal the password, but would the "foregone conclusion" doctrine still empower prosecutors to have him unlock his device?

</comment><comment><USER30> I would probably agree with the verdict if the defendant wasn't in a child pornography case and hadn't stated (FTA) "we both know what's on it, why would I [reveal my password]".

<comment><USER31> > Nevertheless, this constitutional right is firmly grounded in the > "realization that the privilege, while sometimes 'a shelter to the guilty,' > is often 'a protection to the innocent.'" Moreover, there are serious > questions about applying the foregone conclusion exception to information > that manifests through the usage of one's mind.

I think they got it right. And as long a prosecution didn't base their whole case on getting the password, they probably will still prevail.

<comment><USER16> I've worked in the digital forensics space for many years and am not so confident. How do you prove possession of child pornography when there's no evidence of possession?

<comment><USER31> The defendant made the remark "we both know what's on there".

I assume the prosecution has evidence.

<comment><USER16> They likely have probable cause that they used for a search warrant. I doubt there's much evidence for possession.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Data Center Powering the Super Bowl - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/03/the-data-center-powering-the-super-bowl/

<comment><USER2> _As a result of centralizing the servers, everything in the stadium now operates on one system and one network_

Awesome! So you mean there is now one single Point of Failure?

Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The technology throughout the 3 million square-foot facility is connected by 250 miles of fiber optic cable, 6 million feet of copper wiring and 70 wiring closets_

Argh. Why the pointless adjacent use of two different measures of length? 250 miles of fiber and 1100 miles of copper wiring would have been more communicative, IMO.

<comment><USER4> "6 million feet of copper wiring" sounds a lot more impressive than "1100 miles of copper wiring".

<comment><USER5> Well then wouldn't 1.3 million feet of fiber sound more impressive than 250 miles?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        The Cowboys have a 100-terabyte storage area
        network to hold the data supporting the world's
        largest domed stadium

I remember when domed stadiums were supported by steel beams and reinforced concrete pillars. I feel old.

</comment><comment><USER7> ...all to deliver an entertainment product. Amazing.</comment>


Promising antibiotic discovered in microbial 'dark matter' (soil bacteria) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/promising-antibiotic-discovered-in-microbial-dark-matter-1.16675 <comment><AUTHOR> More: [http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/07/37561616...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/07/375616162/compound-from-soil-bacteria-may-help-fight- dangerous-germs)

[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533966/from-a-pile- of-d...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533966/from-a-pile-of-dirt- researchers-discover-new-antibiotic/)

and I could have sworn that PBS had a segment on this research on Nova or Nova ScienceNow, but their search doesn't seem to find it.</comment>


Our site was featured on CNN and Mashable this week. Here's what I learned. - <AUTHOR> http://dshipper.posterous.com/

<comment><USER2> _We originally had our site on a GoDaddy VPS server_

Developer friends don't let other developer friends use GoDaddy VPS/hosting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Awful experience we hope not to repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For anyone looking at his app be warned that it spams your Facebook wall without asking for permission.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are about to add something that states that on the home page. Sorry about that our intent isn't to spam just to spread the app.

<comment><USER4> An intent to 'spread the app' without notification is _spam_

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true I guess I didn't express myself as clearly as I could have. What I meant to say is that our intent in posting was in no way malicious and we are going to add something that tells you we are posting to your wall. I agree that it's definitely a necessary addition so that our users know exactly what theyre getting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats on your success...however, I have to point out something. When you said Rackspace, were you talking about Rackspace Managed Hosting (where you pay $1k/mo in a yearly contract) ? Or were you referring to Rackspace Cloud (where you pay per usage) ?

Either would work from a technical point of view, but I think the former reinforces the notion of premature optimization.

In your case, it was absolutely worth it - but how many people are going to decide to use InnoDB and memcached and get a trickle of traffic ? Probably the vast majority.

I think you did the right thing, went with what was best for you at the time and migrated as needed. Although, perhaps you thought it was crazy stressful, imagine if you signed a $15K yearly contract and Mashable and CNN never covered you and you never got that huge influx of traffic.

So yes, in your case, if you had moved to those specific infrastructure stuff before getting that large spike in traffic, it would have made your situation much more bearable.

But for everyone else, that there is no guarantee that they will get the traffic - I would caution against preparing for the best case scenario (when unfortunately the likely result will be a modest amount of traffic).

Just my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice article. I think that first step in getting a start-up is the hardest. I've been trying for some time, but I'm a programmer to the core. Never understood design. Whenever I found someone interested in something will happen for /sure/ and the whole thing goes down. I'm trying to compensate now by learning to do a basic design so I can jump-start something. I can always /pay/ someone for a design later if the website gets traction.

/hat tip for the story

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. I really think a key to design is to keep track of websites that you like the look of and try to make something similar. Once you've mimicked enough designs you'll be able to do more original things. All it takes is enough time in Photoshop. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good going guys! It's great that something you worked on at such a young age did well. While it is true that you should keep scaling in mind, dont waste too much time or money worrying about it before you need it. That's what makes cloud services awesome. By the way, how much did this end up costing you with bandwidth?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts I really appreciate it. And I think it's gonna end up being around $200 for the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great takeaways Dan! Next time we create a fun app again, we will spend 72hrs awake tending to a whole other set of problems!

Important thing is we'll enjoy the ride and keep learning. Love the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's true but I guess it wouldn't be fun if it wasn't difficult. Let's keep this going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great work. Can you expand on the FB oauth_id comment, how are you storing the ids now?

<comment><USER8> This advice was thanks to the fabulous support at Rackspace (specifically Paul, ask for him). We had been fiddling with changing big queries to little queries, processing upfront vs behind the scenes, and nothing worked!

All we did was add a couple intval() calls into our php script and changed the column to big int AND add an index and we had one 30s query go down to 0.6s.

So:

Use ints whenever possible. Index.

<comment><USER10> /me shakes head in disbelief

"Index" is by far the big lesson here.

Also, 0.6s is still way too high. What kind of funky join are you doing?

<comment><USER8> We actually have no joins haha. The support always asked if he had joins but no...I actually don't even know how to do joins. But I hear that Facebook highly encourages not doing joins anyways...so efficient learning?

<comment><USER10> WTF mate? 0.6s is WAY too high if you're not doing a join. Catch me on IRC if you'd like a hand.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


University Courses taught in golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Courses <comment><USER2> Sad that universities have to resort to teaching the latest programming language fads.</comment>


'Buried in the immigration bill is a nat'l ID system called E-Verify' - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-free-foundation.org/tst7-1-2013.html <comment><AUTHOR> From the article: _The mandatory E-Verify system requires Americans to carry a "tamper-proof" social security card. Before they can legally begin a job, American citizens will have to show the card to their prospective employer, who will then have to verify their identity and eligibility to hold a job in the US by running the information through the newly-created federal E-Verify database. The database will contain photographs taken from passport files and state driver 's licenses. The law gives federal bureaucrats broad discretion in adding other "biometric" identifiers to the database. It also gives the bureaucracy broad authority to determine what features the "tamper proof" card should contain._

Apart from the possible benefits (and drawbacks) of such a system, does anyone believe the US government (and associated bureaucracy) has the expertise to implement it properly and securely?

<comment><USER2> E-verify already exists and has existed since 1997. However, it is optional for most employers. It already has biometric identifiers. The bill would make its use mandatory by employers.

You are correct: the probability that it is properly implemented is not good. I know for a fact that it can be used to look up people by name alone, although it does keep an audit trail of who has looked at each person's records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> AFAIK the easiest way to defeat bills like this is to bring it to the attention of the NRA. Just say that it can be used to build up a national database of gun owners. Gun rights proponents are typically OK with states doing this but are very wary of federal efforts to register arms.</comment>


Steve Jobs recovering after liver transplant - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/06/23/steve.jobs.liver.transplant/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the hospital, there was no cutting in line: [Jobs] received a transplant because he was "the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available."</comment>