Sam Altman Taking Over As President Of Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/sam-altman-taking-over-as-president-of-y-combinator-replacing-paul-graham-at-the-helm/ <comment><USER2> Is this the reason that so many of his recent posts were promoted on here? Was the intention to build the cachet of some widely read essays so he could credibly step in for PG?

HN stories for his blog start about a year ago, a little after this article says the idea originally was floated (mid-2012), and they have pretty consistently frontpaged: [http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/blog.sa...](http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/blog.samaltman.com)

It makes me wonder if it was a coordinated, planned effort.

<comment><USER3> ...or were they well-written and well-received, signaling the reasons why this choice makes sense?

<comment><USER2> Your hypothesis and the one I floated aren't mutually exclusive.

My idea doesn't necessitate a conspiracy or playing with the points/ranking, which PG is rather _quick_ to deny in his reply to me. It could have just been a plan for Sam to release blog posts over a period of time and try to get them read. I'm curious if this was a conscious effort to build something akin to [http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) given the role he was being groomed for. Of course, I'm also always curious about the way this site really works on the inside.

I do find it ironic that the piece that got the most upvotes (AI, with ~570) was one that Sam admitted he hardly worked on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7268247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7268247)

In that comment, he claims he is simply blogging to "practice writing." From the vantage point of this announcement two days later, that sounds coy, even obtuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love that PG thinks in historical terms. It's exciting to view yc as an institution that could outlive all of us, just as the great universities have.

</comment><comment><USER5> But...but... Will PG still be at the interviews? I think that's what I'm afraid of most with this change. Paul had a sort of incite about people. What about Jessica Livingston? What if she follows. I'm happy for Sam and PG but, I feel it just won't be the same without him doing interviews and reviewing applications. Perhaps I'm being selfish (or have abandonment issues), I've always dreamed of one day seeing him at the interview table, whether rejected or accepted.

 _" they have 3 rooms [interviewing] at the same time. Each room has 2-3 partners in it. I got the one with Garry Tan and Paul Buchheit - it was super chill. We had a great conversation. They didn't drill me (or interrupt me) or anything. We covered most topics I wanted to cover. They let me guide the conversation.

On the other hand, PG and Harj (and other partners / venture partners) are in the two other rooms. Last year, I interviewed with PG (and 6 other people). It was hell. They kept saying my idea was bad, and we were arguing (it turns out that they were right...my idea was bad)."_

That's why I like PG, he's upfront and brutally honest.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sam is a very intelligent, likeable and knowledgeable guy. Best man for the job. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats! Big step up for him. Big step for PG too. I think the new division of labor should allow each to specialize at what they're good at.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats to Sam! I think

Looking forward to reading more thoughtful writing from PG. It has really changed my perspective on things over the years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations to all. I hope this means we'll see a bit more pg around here too!</comment>


How many zombies do you know? - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1003/1003.6087v1.pdf

<comment><USER2> Despite being written a few years after I created the game Dead By Zombie, this paper was in fact quite influential on the making of it. Yes, it involved time travel. No, there were no screaming monkeys involved. Yes, there is someone in the house with you right now, which explains the creaking and the sound of footsteps upstairs, and yes that is who just cut the lights and you'd better start running _now_.

But seriously, I guess papers like that are one downside to having a free/open collection for scientific papers.</comment>


CUDA Pro Tip: Optimize for Pointer Aliasing - <AUTHOR> http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/cuda-pro-tip-optimize-pointer-aliasing/

<comment><USER2> Speaking as the guy who wrote the points-to analysis passes for GCC (and other compilers):

"By giving a pointer the restrict property, the programmer is promising the compiler that any data accessed through that pointer is not accessed in any other way. In other words, the compiler doesn't have to worry about aliasing when using a pointer with the restrict property."

This is false. Entirely. Believing it will get you into trouble.

restrict is, as written in at least C99 and C11 (It's not in C++03 or C++11 standard, though compilers have imported the semantics from C99 to there to allow its use), is completely broken, in the sense that it doesn't do what you want (say two pointers can't alias).

This is being fixed in C++ (though no plans to fix in C), but as a completely trivial example:

      void example1(restrict float *a, restrict float *b, float *c, int i) {
         c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
      }

In this example, a and b may alias, despite the restrict, because restrict says the storage must be modified:

"During each execution of B, let L be any lvalue that has &L based on P. If L is used to access the value of the object X that it designates, and _X is also modified (by any means)_ , then the following requirements apply"

(the standard then gives the above as an example of how two pointers may be aliased with restrict)

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't it be 'float * restrict a'?

When could one get into trouble thinking that "restrict == this will not alias"? If X is never modified during B it seems like aliasing wouldn't cause any problems.

Since restrict means nothing if no value in it is modified, would it be reasonable and possible for the compiler to issue a warning in cases like example1?

<comment><USER2> In this specific case you will get into trouble if you expect the compiler to be able to reorder loads, and it doesn't.

IE you will get into performance trouble :)

In general, there are some complicated scope related cases where you will get into trouble (the rules deal with "based on" and "scope" all over the place, and not in ways that always make sense).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OpenCL Pro Tip: the __restrict keyword behaves as normal in OpenCL C, so adding it to kernel code may not move read only data into the constant cache.

to achieve this, try using the __constant address space.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any way to work out a priori whether or not two variables alias the same memory? (I assume that aliasing pertains to memory overlap within widths the maximum size of memory addressable by the CPU in one instruction.)

<comment><USER2> Aliasing is statically undecidable for all cases in any reasonable programming language.

However, the general analysis you are looking for is known as "points-to analysis".

It is a _very large_ and complicated topic. Happy to try to answer anything more specific though.

<comment> Ono-Sendai In a functional programming language, aliasing either doesn't matter (as accesses will be read-only for function arguments), or is easy, as the function result is not the same array as either of the arguments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you for submitting this article! I have always heard that FORTRAN is faster and commonly used in Aerospace, and I am glad to finally know why, as well as how to bridge the performance gap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome lordvon

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A very quick google didn't make it obvious how Fortran avoids this issue. Can anyone explain?

<comment><USER8> Fortran has bound arrays and more explicit pointers. If bounds checking isn't enabled, it is still possible for some level of aliasing to happen, but it would most likely be an error, not the intention of the programmer. In general, there are far fewer places in Fortran code where the compiler must make the assumption that array references could be aliases of each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting but I'm very glad I don't need to worry about issues at that a low level in my work.</comment>


If you love typewriters, or any form of functional machinery, you must read this - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/791709895083102209 <comment><USER2> Jeezus —just write a f __*king blog post! Who can be bothered reading a narrative split across two dozen tweets?

<comment><USER3> Your comments works as well without the first sentence/insult. From the HN guidelines "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation."</comment></comment>


DSploit Scam and the Guy Who Made Our Small Income Gone Forever - <AUTHOR> http://dsploit.net/2014/04/28/dsploit-scam-and-the-guy-who-made-our-small-income-gone-forever/ <comment><USER2> "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

The guy knows exactly what he is doing, there's really no chance they would stop it on your request.

The best way to tackle these problems is try and find copyright material of yours on his site, then keep issuing DMCA requests to his webhosts. We had someone copying large parts of our site in a similar fashion for similar purposes, it was a lot less effort for us to issue DMCA's and have his hosting accounts suspended than it was for him to keep signing up for new ones. It was a game of whack-a-mole but it worked in the end.

Trying to engage with them is often a complete waste of time, they will often be irrational and defensive which is infuriating. If you goad them into going into the offensive you are not going to come off well.

If you _must_ communication with these people, I think it's best to keep tone neutral (not defensive or offensive), dry, entirely non personal (sign just with your company name, not an employees name) and concise. Replies should be well spaced so it appears a matter of non-urgency. Replies should also be designed to make response difficult (not keeping an open ended conversation going). Keep it as boring as possible for them. Unfortunately your first email to the person went straight into offensive mode, was personal, impassioned and appears urgent. Blogging about it isn't probably going to help either.

If he's not actually stealing anything from you, or doing anything illegal then there's not much you can do. Best course of action would be try not to care at all, and realise that he's probably actually not making any money at all. I'm not saying this to make you feel better, I strongly suspect it's the truth.

I do think it was a mistake not registering .org, a major TLD. As I understand it, changing domain ownership by force is a lengthy process. It would of just been easier to pay $10 a year for it.

If you want to be in a better position to protect yourself in the future consider a trademark.

<comment><USER3> I agree with essentially everything Tom suggests. I think that trademarks (TM) is something a lot of people forget to use, registered (R) trademarks is something I generally tell people to avoid because its often not going to help unless you have a significant amount of intangible monetary value. It does offer some protection like Tom suggests, but clearly it's not full proof. Still its better than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the income side of things, I can think of one way the the author of "The most complete and advanced IT security professional toolkit on Android" could bring in revenue without the need for Adsense or charity.

Perhaps, one could _sell_ said toolkit for _money_. Say, $370.40 for a "Professional" license. Differentiated from the "Community Edition" currently available on this and other dsploit sites in that it is a.) available after tomorrow and b.) ever likely to receive an update by the original author.

That way, security professionals would gain access to this nice piece of software, and the author wouldn't need to write blog posts like this one. Better still, had he been doing this previously, he would have had seven dollars available to pay for the .org version of his domain name, thus avoiding the whole situation in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Definitely. Just change your license so if businesses with incomes over $100k a year want to use it, they have to buy the Professional license that costs some appropriate amount (I'm thinking $2000 for a site license or $100 per install, something like that).

As a game developer I've seen a lot of small tools start doing this. Don't try and stop people pirating since you can't, but this way at least people who work at a business who aren't personally signing the checks don't really care if they have to pay a few hundred dollars to use their favorite & best tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is slightly off-topic, but I didn't notice the donation button in the sidebar until typing ⌘+F, "donation"[1]. My inner patio11 thinks that evilsocket is missing out on some cash-moneys. It's probably a good idea to make a more prominent donation widget and add a call to action at the bottom of the post.

Edit: Digging deeper (actually clicking on the donate button), I see [https://pledgie.com/campaigns/22257](https://pledgie.com/campaigns/22257) and it makes me sad. The video is dead, and it's unclear what donating will help with. Will it add new features? Is it to support ongoing development? Does the team have any previous work that shows what they're capable of?

If you want to improve your donation page, I think NeoVim[2] is a good example to follow. The author explains what NeoVim is, what's been done so far, what he'll do with the money, and why he's the right one for the job.

1\. That didn't find it. It just scrolled the page so my eye noticed the button. You'd have to search for "sponsor" to find the widget.

2\. [https://www.bountysource.com/teams/neovim/fundraiser](https://www.bountysource.com/teams/neovim/fundraiser)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi,

This guys name is "Martynas". He is from Lithuania. I have strong belief his lastname is "Palaima" althought it is possible that it is fake.

His other handles: koawe, baseuse, martyboy31

Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/mydreamvoyage](https://www.facebook.com/mydreamvoyage) Profiles on other sites: [http://uzdarbis.lt/t265784/nauja-rippln-plinta-kaip- vesulas/](http://uzdarbis.lt/t265784/nauja-rippln-plinta-kaip-vesulas/)

<comment><USER7> feel free to contact me if you need more help finding out who this guy is. After looking into it a bit more, I think his last name might indeed be "Palaima".

I can dig for some more if needed as I do speak Lithuanian and would be happy to out this asshole.

<comment><USER8> I would suggest that this is not the right way to go about it and would like all to consider TomGullen's advice from this thread instead.

Problems:

\- "doxing" is a bad practice from 4chan; it could reflect badly on this community and the organization behind it if some high profile case of doxing would come from YCombinator's forum.

\- how much do you _really_ know about the whole thing? You've heard one side of the story so far.

\- It seems to me that people have no business "serving justice" or feeling "Dredd" from the safety of their computers in general. Standard legal measure have not been exhausted, and I'd rather suffer the occasional smalltime criminal than see civil society damaged by witchhunts.

<comment><USER9> Would you agree going through legal channels will be way more effective/possible if the problem maker's name/address are known?

<comment><USER8> I assume finding name and address are trivial in this situation once you go the legal route. Helping the OP with some information privately is of course helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd recommend treating this as an opportunity in disguise. Whatever small amount of money you were making from ads and pledgie pales in comparison to the amount that I suspect you'd make if you were to offer paid versions.

Keep giving dsploit away for free for people who want that. Call it the 'Community Edition,' or something similar. But, also offer a paid version. Offer three tiers.

The bottom tier costs $nnn/year and entitles the user to nothing more than the Community Edition, but with the corporate appeal of saying that this software is commercially licensed. I note that the code is licensed under GPL v3. As long as you can get all contributors to sign off on this, this approach becomes even more viable. There are companies that have trouble with using GPL v3 software (yeah, it's dumb, I know), and having a GPL v3 package suddenly become not-GPL v3 can be incredibly valuable for them.

The middle tier costs some non-fractional multiplier above the bottom tier and entitles the user to support. Support can be nothing more than an email address: firstname.lastname@example.com.

The top tier costs perhaps an order of magnitude more than the middle tier, is labeled Enterprise, and comes with priority support. As patio11 is fond of pointing out, priority support can be nothing more than a different email address that _you simply answer first_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would've cut down on communicating with the person. He's obviously illiterate and his income is fueled by fraud. In my experience, you give them a single friendly but frank email with 24 hours to respond and then you just have to go through the proper channels. In this case removing his domain.

I'd like to believe the good in people. But, this individual's conduct from the outset demonstrates bad faith.

<comment><AUTHOR> and then what? what should I achieve with that ?

<comment><USER11> Not getting into a fruitless debate and/or antagonizing somebody that doesn't have any interest in being reasoned with.

It's quite possible that he reported you to Adsense specifically as a petty demonstration of the "power" he wields. And while your site may have been your only income, his was probably one of dozens more, so it didn't really matter to him.

Short version: you had a lot more to lose and nothing to gain compared to him.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's life I suppose, fortunately I have a job :)

<comment><USER12> And the blogpost you made is ultimately feeding the troll. It is confirmation that he "won".

Even if you do care about these events, sometimes it plays to your advantage to keep things off the blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a lesson in here about making threats you aren't prepared to carry out, and another one about making advertising your only revenue.

When you sign up to an advertising-only business model, you are putting the advertisers in charge. Your business is now all about keeping them happy.

<comment><USER14> aren't all businesses about keeping someone happy?

<comment><USER13> Yes. This is about picking your customer. If your customer is the advertising network then their desires are very different compared to, say, somebody who wants a network analysis tool.

It's a good idea to pick customers whose interests align with yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Do you know that what you are actually doing with dsploit.org is illegal?"

It is ? Certainly it's crummy and dishonest and just the worst sort of blah blah blah ... but is it actually illegal ?

How is it illegal ?

<comment><USER16> I think it falls under the definition of Cybersquatting as described here: "Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting)

<comment><USER17> What happens if he is not in the US though? US laws don't apply worldwide(thankfully).

<comment><USER18> The US law is basically just the same as the cybersquatting provisions of ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy, which is binding on all registrars worldwide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really doubt that's valid whois data for one, considering his past history in theft, HYIP, and scams. Google the email.

      Registrant Name: Tony Buar
      Registrant Organization: RoadInvest
      Registrant Street: 60 Cleveland St, London
      Registrant City: London
      Registrant State/Province: Other
      Registrant Postal Code: W1T 4JZ
      Registrant Country: GB
      Registrant Phone: +44.07852369123
      Registrant Phone Ext:
      Registrant Fax:
      Registrant Fax Ext:
      Registrant Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER20> Due to ICANN's new policies if you report incorrect or inaccurate whois data the registrar is forced to investigate and potentially pull the registration(s).

The whois inaccuracy complaint form can be found here; [https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...](https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/whois/inaccuracy- form)

This will probably force the problem maker to go to a new registrar and also pay for privacy protection next time; at least you are increasing his costs.

You could also engage in a UDRP complaint if dsploit is a trademark; unregistered trademarks are harder to defend however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> From <[https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/2659114>](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/2659114>):

> Suspending an account provides the publisher with 30 days to make the > relevant changes to their sites. If you have been suspended, you'll still be > able to log into your AdSense account. However, no ads will be shown for 30 > days, and you'll notice a payment hold automatically added to your account. > At the end of this suspension period, we'll automatically re-enable ad > serving, remove the payment hold, and monitor your account to ensure > compliance.

However, there doesn't seem to be an appeals mechanism in the interim.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should change the whole website purpose :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry to hear that. You must have known that this day was coming though? Basically you were living on borrowed time from Google. If the revenue was that much of a priority to you, you should have laid much lower than you did and certainly not make threats to people who have no issue with doing fraudulent things.

If you lay down with pigs, you are gonna get dirty

If you play with fire you will eventually get burned

etc..

<comment><AUTHOR> you know, sometimes I'm maybe a little naive

<comment><USER23> Being moral isn't the same as being naïve, no matter how much harsh people tell you it is. It is a sign of moral strength to not immediately bite back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sending empty threats is dangerous and can be legally exposing. Either get a lawyer or forget about it.

Why in the heck would you send an email (with broken grammar no less) over something that might involve legal action? It's unfortunate but you're lucky to lose some ad revenue and not get sued.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a lawyer who can manage this thing, it's just not worth it. Regarding the grammar, English is not my native language (although this is not an excuse of course).

<comment><USER23>
      English is not my native language (although this is not an excuse of course)

I'm a native English speaker and I believe that that _is_ a valid excuse.

<comment><USER25> This reminds me of all the times I've read a passage online where the only indication that the writer wasn't a native English speaker was the apology for the (assumed) poor English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> TL;DR: relying on Adsense as your only income is way too hazardous.

<comment><USER27> AdSense can and does cut you off for no sane reason and good luck finding a human to fix things for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good luck with the hopeless Google support

</comment><comment><USER29> One of the issues, is the lack of competition. Most small sites doesn't have much real alternatives when it comes to Adsense, and a ban could close you down.

I got banned a some years ago, because my girlfriend thought it would be a good idea to click on the ads on my website. She clicked once or twice a day, and thought she helped me... I have been banned ever since. So I welcome any competition in this space!

<comment><USER30> If I hired some people to click Adsense add on somedomain.com, could I get the site owner banned? Or do the clicks have to come from the same IP as the site owner?

</comment></comment><comment> y-apply You should have taken care of it without even contacting him. He would have never known it was you.

</comment><comment><USER31> Some suggestions:

1) Make sure your site complies with the AdSense TOS and then hope Google will restore AdSense eventually?

2) In the meantime, serve ads from a different ad network.

3) There are many other ways to leverage web traffic into revenue. Do a little research (or thinking). I see you now have a donation button. Many other possibilities exist.

4) The long game: File for a US trademark on dSploit. Apparently nobody currently holds a US trademark on "dSploit", for any purpose. Once you have the trademark, you can get some domain registrars to shut down anyone using dsploit TLDs.

<comment><USER32> > 1) Make sure your site complies with the AdSense TOS and then hope Google > will restore AdSense eventually?

This just doesn't happen. Google couldn't care less. At all.

> 2) In the meantime, serve ads from a different ad network.

Google has a massive monopoly. There just aren't any decent competitors with the inventory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm amazed that adsense was bringing in enough money to pay for anything. You generally need 100k+ visits a day just to break into minimum wage territory.

<comment><USER34> By minimum wage territory I guess you mean the range of $50 - $100/day? You must have a pretty low ecpm to only earn that much from 100k visitors/day. My experience is at least 6x that range.

<comment><USER33> My experience has been about $1 per 1,000 visitors. But that was a while ago and I didn't publish content about mesothelioma. Mostly programming stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > and usually I trust in human comprehension and intellect

Mistake #1 when dealing with someone who is already doing something dishonest.

</comment><comment><USER36> >The 48 hours takedown notice was indeed fake, I'm not the kind of guy who does this kind of things and usually I trust in human comprehension and intellect...

Well... good luck with that. Why would anyone have qualms about pursuing a legitimate take down notice?

</comment><comment><USER37> Go to 138 Spruce Drive North Washington (Butler), PA 160 and have a friendly and nonthreatening conversation with the guy. Bring friends.</comment>


Is anyone making money in the Chrome Web Store? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't been watching the Chrome Web Store for awhile, but now that Unity 3.5 (beta) supports NaCl and Flash, I decided to give it another look. After a quick look around, I don't see a price tag anywhere. I clicked on as many 'Add to Chrome' buttons as I could stand. No prices. I installed some games that I know are sold elsewhere, and played them a little, yet encountered no apparent form of monetization.<p>Is anybody making (or even charging) money in this venue? <comment><USER2> I listed my existing web application on there, and while a few hundred people have installed it, they tend to skew southern European, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them has purchased the premium version.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't talk about making money - but I have a few moderately successful free apps, and one thing I can say is that a lot more people search and stumble on these apps than they would if it was not on the webstore.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to my knowledge. Chrome Apps and the Chromebook will be yet another quietly abandoned Google pet project that will burn any developers naive enough to hitch their cart to that horse.

</comment><comment><USER5> Heck no. Google doesn't care about developers at all. Google's entire business strategy is to devalue everything outside of its core business, thus leaving Google ads as the only money-making opportunity on the internet, where it already has nearly a monopoly.

Android, Google Docs, Google Plus, it's all a giant effort to devalue iOS, Office, and Facebook.</comment>


WebGL Visual Debugger for Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vW-QJDxYo3A#t=525s

<comment><USER2> The tool is pretty awesome but the whole presentation is worth watching for anyone doing WebGL dev.

I have to say, being able to see what each drawcall is doing individually and see what each pixel goes through made me drool. I'm going to use this everyday now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An awesomely powerful tool for any developer working with WebGL. I linked the submission to the video of the tool in-action because it is much easier to get a sense of what it does (visually stepping through scene construction frame- by-frame, pixel-by-pixel or GL call-by-GL-call).

The project page is here: <http://benvanik.github.com/WebGL-Inspector/>

and can be downloaded here: <http://github.com/benvanik/WebGL- Inspector/zipball/master></comment>


The Lemon Parser Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/lemon.html <comment><USER2> An example:

<http://freecode.com/articles/lemon-parser-generator-tutorial>

Lemon looks nice. Personally I prefer ANTLR (which totally rocks):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTLR>

</comment><comment><USER3> The creator of Lemon is Richard Hipp, the same guy behind Fossil, SQLite and (the probably now defunct) UnQL</comment>


In Turnabout, Disney Cancels Tech Worker Layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/in-turnabout-disney-cancels-tech-worker-layoffs.html <comment><USER2> The law should be written that if you caught violating the terms and spirit of the h1-b visa program, you give up right to participate in h1-b sponsorships for x number of years. H1-B is oversubscribed and if you suspend someone like Tata, it will help alleviate that issue.

<comment><USER3> Or simply prevent the problem.

In the Netherlands, similar visa have a minimum salary requirement. As a result, we have tech workers from all over the planet, but no herds of cheap labour from India. The Indians that are here are well paid experts.

If knowledge migrant visa are abused to import cheap labour, the problem is clearly in the word "cheap".

<comment><USER4> The H1-B visa program has a minimum salary requirement of $60K USD a year. Of course, that's almost entry level in the technology sector. Raising that to $100K-$150K/year would definitely help, and it would be hard to argue against it. If you're relying on talent from outside the country due to a skills shortage, paying a premium is the cost of doing business.

<comment><USER5> It would hurt startups under a few conditions. Perhaps there could be an overall package, rather than pure salary (e.g., equity, etc.)? Or a gradient on the scale of the employer? It's difficult to find a set of rules that don't hamstring the small companies, don't misalign incentives for big companies, and aren't ridiculously complex.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be against taking equity into account, but in the end, cash salary is most important. Equity is almost always a lottery ticket, even if you're a founder. If you're a founder, you should be riding on a different US visa, not an H1-B.

<comment><USER5> Oh sure, but for example, a company that's doing a knowledge-app that's unexpectedly big in Japan, and they want to hire Japanese-fluent (also technically very high skilled) engineers here. Early on they may not have the cash-flow to hire "market-rate" (e.g. MicroGoogleBookZon) salaries, but is willing to put skin in the game with other resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This really is the worst way to treat your employees, if I was one of the lucky people who was told to continue as if nothing had happened I would do everything I could to get another job somewhere else asap.

Corporations need to show more respect to their employees, outsourcing to india and then forcing the current employees to train the people replacing them is no way to treat people.

<comment> at-fates-hands Agreed.

My best friend works at Cargill, and they're doing the same thing.

They get around the "outsourcing" rule by creating a Cargill office in India and then sending all the "business" to those offices instead of here. It's semantics, but its still outsourcing any way you look at it.

She's heartbroken because she's in the process of finalizing people's year-end reviews who are going to be laid off within the next few months. Cargill also makes it a policy you have to train your replacement or else you lose your severance. So here she is, writing up year end reviews that have no value at all, while training a new team that will replace her entire team here in in the US.

Not cool, not cool at all.

<comment><USER7> How about we simply outlaw any conditions on severance?

<comment><USER8> Because companies have no obligation to provide severance, they often offer it as part of a larger exit agreement that contains other terms. This really limits the laid off employee's ability to negotiate because the company can basically say "take it or leave it" since they know how valuable severance is to someone in that situation. That is how they get away of forcing people to sign non-disparagement agreements and to give up their right to sue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is Disney/ABC which is canceling the tech worker layoffs, which impacted 35 workers. Looks like the Disney World story which resulted in over 250 layoffs to bring in H1-B workers hasn't changed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think we've heard the last of this from Disney. They have an objective, maybe it's to reduce domestic workforce to save on benefits, or reduce overhead. Regardless, that goal is still out there. They'll find another way to do it, and it will probably be another round of layoffs sans training replacements.

If it weren't for the forced humiliation of training their replacements, I doubt we would have ever heard about this. People would have been (or will be soon) laid off, and the foreign workers brought in, trained by a contractor, and no one is the wiser.

American corporations do not value the American workforce, and neither does our government.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _"We were told our jobs were continuing and we should consider it as if > nothing had happened until further notice."_

While technically that's basically what most people's work situation is - you're an employee with work to do, unless you get fired or the company goes out of business, in which case you'll definitely be given some notice - but it sounds so much more ominous in this case.

<comment><USER8> I can't imagine being laid off by my company and then told to just forget about... for now. It sounds like the absolute worst way to treat employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >The tech employees he knew who had been required to train foreign replacements had "routinely sacrificed personal time and freedoms to help make your experience what it was" in the theme parks, he wrote.

This quote right here pretty much helps to explain why company loyalty is a ridiculous notion. Employment is a business transaction. If the company deems your position unnecessary or that you're too expensive, they will eliminate that issue. Unless your job is threatened, it's never worth it to sacrifice your personal time for your employer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Also reminiscent of the old Dutch East India Company -Citigroup sabal park campus in Tampa, Florida rents out floors from nearby Hyatt Place hotel for h1bs. There are roughly 5 h1bs per room.

</comment><comment><USER14> Time to jump ship, as if they've made this feint, you can be sure they will at some point follow through.

I mean, would you trust the guy who only beat you up _a little bit_ to not do it again?

</comment><comment><USER15> One strategy Disney may apply is to retain the workers for some limited time, offer them an option to continue on with a bonus, but force them to sign an NDA of some kind in the process. Once the term is complete, they can lay off the workers without the press hearing a single word about it.

<comment><USER16> A contract to do something illegal isn't enforceable. You can't make a contract that says you can't go to the police (or other authorities) to report someone breaking the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This thread is a duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9729762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9729762)

</comment><comment><USER18> At best reschedules tech worker layoffs. Likely the bleed them out slower to avoid layoff reporting laws.

<comment><USER19> That may be, but that doesn't mean it was useless to halt that abuse of the process.</comment></comment>


Another Way to Find Product Ideas: Start to Work on Something - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hieunc229/finding-product-ideas-84e888388149 <comment><USER2> Product ideas are easy. Hard part is finding profitable product ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. There are a lot of hard parts along the way. Getting started with the right idea is one step closer to be profitable :)</comment></comment>


NirSoft Freeware (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html <comment><USER3> > While many software companies create a bloated installation package with > size of 1 - 3 MB, the size of single utility in NirSoft is usually less than > 100KB.

The early 2000s were a different time. While as modern day electron apps are regularly 100+ MB.

<comment><USER4> im really fed up with this argument. most "native" apps use big chunks of the platform "frameworks" and are not platform independent, which was introduced by os companies and politics in the first place. most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while electron are stable as fuck.

<comment><USER5> > most modern apple native apps are the ones that crash the most while > electron are stable as...

I'd hesitate to make this generalization. I need to use slack on a macbook for work and it crashes regularly. I tried out VS code and it also would crash on occasion. Worse than that, coworkers of mine have rolled bug-ridden electron apps that we're required to use. There are plenty of non-electron apps that are stable.

<comment><USER6> I'm on a mac and use slack an vscode. Neither has crashed on me. I'm wondering if there is something about your mac setup.

I don't like that slack consumes some many resources. I love vscode so I don't care.

<comment><USER7> I've seen VS Code crash on Windows more than Mac... also, it often leaves anything you had running in the integrated terminal running in the background when it does crash. I haven't seen that specific behavior on mac though.

<comment><USER8> Most of the issues I've had with VS Code were actually due to extensions and not VS Code itself. Like for example, we started getting issues with CPU's getting pegged to 100% and it seems it was a couple of linters that were running causing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen and used nirsoft products for years, never realized his name was Nir Sofer. What a great name for a software developer.

<comment><USER10> Almost as good as Mike Rowe ..

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

<comment><USER11> It's strange to me that people still remember this. It's been 14 years, but I guess it's nice to be known for something :)

<comment><USER12> Hey, it still works: [https://MikeRoweSoft.com](https://MikeRoweSoft.com)

<comment><USER13> [http://MikeRoweSoft.com](http://MikeRoweSoft.com)

<comment><USER14> The thought of Microsoft still paying for that domain name is funny. I like to imagine they don't dare to stop doing it or they'll risk opening this whole can of worms again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't claim to have used all of Nirsoft's tools, or even half of them, but I've used more than a handful, and they always do exactly what they claim. Quickly, quietly, and compactly.

This guy is a personal hero of mine, and I'm proud to say I sent him a few bucks a few years ago to say thanks. I don't know how many others think to do so, but I hope it's a lot of us!

<comment> cup-of-tea > Quickly, quietly, and compactly.

Just like a good cli tool should. There is currently a disturbing trend of tools coming from certain communities that are extremely noisy with garbage in various colours and even emojis (the community is the Mac community). I can't wait for it to end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nirsoft and Sysinternals should be part of Windows. Add Notepad++ and you have a decent OS all of a sudden.

<comment><USER17> I thought Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft?

<comment><USER18> Mark went work for MS, as I recall. This was some years ago; I don't know about currently.

MS sucked in the tools/pages onto its domain. Navigation to/of their pages and versions became somewhat shittier (per the... "canonical" MS web experience, I guess). I seem to recall a bit of public pushback on this point, and things improved somewhat. Maybe I mis-recollect; I've been mostly away from Windows for quite a number of years, now.

<comment><USER19> He's CTO of Azure and therefore a VIP at Microsoft...

In his spare time he's also managed to write three novels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article is from 2008 so maybe a (2008) should be added.

Like many of you who commented I used the nirsoft tools without knowing they were created by one man. Kind of impressive there was a time when you only found niersoft tools when searching for password recovery tools

<comment><USER21> It's up there now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We should have a sub-thread of these comments devoted just to the silly things people use NirSoft stuff to do. I'll start.

\-----

I have a HTPC hooked up to a projector that I use to play movies, and the projector has native support for 24 FPS, so I use this:

[http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/setdisplay.html](http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/setdisplay.html)

to quickly set framerate. Make batch files for 24 Hz, 60 Hz, etc. bind them to keys, and then you don't have to bother going into a display settings GUI.

<comment><USER23> I'd love to have a utility that quickly toggles between two audio outputs in windows.

<comment><USER24> You can create a shortcut to

      C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl,,playback

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use the nirSoft CSVFileView utility all of the time. The near instantaneous load time is how computing should be.

<comment><USER26> I tried opening a 3M-line (550MB) CSV. It took a couple minutes to get to 1M, and it seems to have an O(n^2) algorithm because it was doing 40k lines/second on my machine and now (after around 1.5M rows) it's doing about 1/10th of that. Memory consumption is at over 2GB for this first half of the file.

It's definitely a nice tool, but it's far from instantaneous loading!

<comment><USER27> Well, it says right there on the page:

Known Limitations - CSVFileView cannot load extremely large csv files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anybody remember the tiny Windows games that fit in a little window the size of an icon? I remember playing pool and Tetris in a little corner of my screen at a very boring job where I was a couple months ahead of my work. I never did find the game developer after that.

<comment><USER29> There's always still Defender: [http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/](http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This site was GOD MODE when I was in high school.

The tool I used the most was RunAsDate: [https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html)

It used to work really well in bypassing software trials. I'm not recommending its use for that(if it even still works).

<comment><USER31> Thanks for reminding me of that workaround :-)

I wonder if I used his tool back in the mid 90s... Ah, can't have been - <USER2> says he first put utilities on the web in 2001

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The NirSoft tools for windows are great! I have used various ones for years -- the SysExporter tool has saved many many hours of time. This lets you export Windows widget labels, so if a dialog has no export, it lets you generate a CSV of the string values.

Nir Sofer -- publish a Bitcoin address and ill send you something as a thank you!

<comment><USER33> you can donate here [https://www.nirsoft.net/donate.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/donate.html) (i am neither user nor affiliated with the site)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been using ShellExView to get rid of annoying, useless context menus for years. Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER35> > Each time that a popular AntiVirus software begins to detect one of my > utilities as Virus or Trojan, my email is flooded with messages from worried > people that think my Web site is infected with Viruses. Some of them even > blame me that I spread Viruses through my Web site.

I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here. Anti virus vendors are making false accusations.

<comment><USER36> Malware authors often incorporate legitimate software into their malware - e.g. Nir Sofer's Mail PassView and Web PassView are used in Emotet spam bot to harvest user credentials. Usually such files are marked as "Potentially unsafe software" by analysts, or in some cases could be detected as part of a malware family by AV companies' automated detection tools.

<comment><USER37> Another thing is that actions malware take and actions legitimate "power user" software takes are separated only by context. Thus automated behavior analysis is always going to produce false positives.

<comment><USER38> Is there much behaviour analysis done by consumer AV? Even Defender seems to be mostly signature based.

<comment><USER36> Yep. Malware is constantly repacked/encrypted. It is impractical/impossible to write static unpacking engines for every type of malware packing technique, so behavioral analysis engine is a must (btw, behavioral engines still detect malware using signatures).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Even if you are familiar with his utilities, note that there are many new ones, as of April 2018:

[https://blog.nirsoft.net/2018/04/04/result-of-nirsoft- easter...](https://blog.nirsoft.net/2018/04/04/result-of-nirsoft-easter-egg- challenge/)

Also note the comment of "newusertoday" here.

</comment><comment><USER40> Oh cool! He makes produkey. I've been using that for years, haven't had much use for it as of late with windows using uefi to store keys. Looks like he updated it since last I checked to support windows 10, but only for certain license types.

</comment><comment><USER41> I haven't used windows in years, but when I did, downloading all of the nirsoft tools was on my new box checklist. I can't go to the site to see what has been added though, my company proxy has it blocked.

<comment><USER42> He describes False Positives from antivirus software when scanning his utilities. Do you think your company's proxy blocks the site because of that?

<comment><USER41> Thats what I thought at first, but the message says that it was because it was in the "Shareware/Freeware" Category. Which is blocked unless specifically allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> >But after many users complained about the keys that I added to the Registry

How odd...that's literally what the registry is for. One company putting all their sht in one place in a standardized efficient format.

</comment><comment><USER44> For over a decade Nir Sofer has enabled kids across the world to take their dreams of breaking into people's computers and make them a reality.

</comment><comment><USER45> These tools made my life so much easier when I worked as Windows System Admin several years ago! Thank you Nir Sofer for your work!!!

</comment><comment><USER46> Do you want to play a game?

Speak from command line: [https://www.nirsoft.net/articles/speak_from_command_line.htm...](https://www.nirsoft.net/articles/speak_from_command_line.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Have been using these tools for years. As essential as sysinternals. Would love to see some of his source code from which to learn. Everytime Im in a bind will turn to tools from this site, such as when forgot PST passwords on a 10 year old mail file. The networking and port tools have always been hugely useful. For context I work in a large global ISV, use Windows laptop, and travel often. Having Nir's utilities available has often enabled me to rescue myself from my own mistakes, or resolve things like networking. I too would be very happy if he would put up a donate button!

<comment><USER39> You can donate here:

[https://www.nirsoft.net/donate.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/donate.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I love NirSoft utilities as much as anyone, but this isnot right

> Anonymous Information Collected on this Website: Anonymous data is recorded > on this Web site. Most of the information collected from this website is > anonymous information, such as the pages you visit. Other anonymous data I > may collect might include the name of your internet service provider, the > website that you used to link to my site, the websites that you visit from > our site, and your IP address. The data is only used for statistical > purposes, but you, as the individual user, remain anonymous.

IP address is not anonymous!

<comment><USER49> At least he's upfront that he's keeping info from user connecting to his website. And perhaps at the time when it was written (2008), the author considered that IP was anonymous enough, from his viewpoint, as he couldn't do much with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Big fan of BlueScreenView and WiFiInfoView! Thanks for all the great products.

</comment><comment><USER51> Kind of retro site with a @yahoo.com email. Very weird for an advanced IT guy. "searchmyfiles" is awesome, by the way.

<comment><USER52> I tried searchmyfiles, and it's alright, but the best search tool I've found for windows is "Everything" by voidtools ( [https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/](https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/) )

I occasionally use it on a multi TB windows fileserver at work and after it does the initial index (which is really pretty fast because it uses the NTFS journals) searches are pretty much instantaneous. (I also use it at home, it's just less impressive after using it on that many files at work.)

<comment><USER19> Seconded. Everything is brilliant if you need to find files by name, not contents....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I find it particularly funny that he doesn't explain why his binaries are literally plagued with "false positives". I'm really curious. Does he use some arcane compression techniques which usually are found in virus signatures?

<comment><USER54> I think the issue is that his freeware utilities were used as part of spyware by third parties.

AV back in the days were mainly all blacklists of known actors and a few tricks (eg: when the executable was obfuscated with a compressor like UPX or using some more advanced techniques)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> A freeware legend!

</comment><comment><USER56> Interesting list, however I feel like a lot of these should be open source, or at least signed with gpg. I read too many cryptocurrency posts these days, they make me paranoid about security...

</comment><comment><USER57> He says all of his time goes into the website and the tools. So I'm wondering, how does he make money? Surely he does some consulting or something on the side to pay the bills.

<comment><USER58> "NirSoft is not a full-time job, but I use all my free time to maintain and develop this Web site."

<comment><USER57> Oh, thanks, I misread that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm confused why NirSoft software is not open source. I've always seen open source as easier than doing all the work on your own.

<comment><USER60> Maybe he doesn't want all the pull requests, supporting other programmers has a cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I've lost count of the number of times I used mailpv.exe to recover clients 'lost' email passwords.

</comment><comment><USER62> Love this site. Helped me often in my first career as a sysadmin and made me want to write freeware.

</comment><comment><USER63> Wow Chromepass actually worked..I didn't even enter my windows admin password or anything..

I thought Chrome encrypts all the saved passwords. How is another program so easily able to read the passwords?

<comment><USER64> It does encrypt, using Windows DPAPI :) They are freely available to any program as long as you are logged in, or offline if you know windows/victims password.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/65qrlb/impo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/65qrlb/importing_cookiespasswords_from_vivaldichrome/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I love the NirSoft utilities they're great! The kind of OS bundled tools Microsoft should have been making instead of <cough> Media Player and the like.

<comment><USER66> Oh man I still remember when Windows Media Player used to be a useful, compact player, and the disappointment when they came out with the skinned abomination. Gave room for MPC and VLC to grow though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Amazing coincidence. I was just introduced to Nir's tools a few weeks ago. The ones I've used are awesome. They are simple and do what they do well!

</comment><comment><USER68> Nirsoft <3

</comment><comment><USER69> > The entire Web site and all the utilities that you can find here were > developed by me, and only by me.

I look at HTML for 2 seconds to find a link to Google Analytics...

<comment><USER66> Collection of visitor information is clearly mentioned in human readable terms at the privacy policy section at the end of the page, which I find refreshingly honest and considerate.</comment></comment>


London's Big Dig Reveals Layers of History - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/02/artifacts-found-under-london-archaeology/ <comment><USER2> My father was a civil engineer in the UK. In the 70s, during a bridge construction project, they uncovered a skeleton. He kept the skull on his desk for about 10 years, until someone mentioned to him that that probably wasn't OK, so he put it in the trash.

He blamed shifting sensibilities over time, and had he known the phrase at the time, he'd have probably described it as political correctness gone mad.

<comment><USER3> 500 years from now, someone will dig it up again and sell the British museum a 1000 year old skull for a trillion pounds.

<comment><USER4> Inflation adjusted value of a trillion 2517 GBP in current day GPB: £20.18

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _In the trove were nearly 400 rare wooden writing tablets, some of which still displayed legible letters, legal agreements, and financial documents. (Another site yielded shopping lists, party invitations, and a contract for the sale of a slave girl.)_

What strikes me is the way the essential purpose of London, and especially central London, hasn't changed. Since the Romans, it has been a financial or commercial centre. And therefore a centre of wealth and partying.

Slave girls might no longer be sold there (at least not with paperwork), but London is the capital of contracts.

<comment><USER6> > What strikes me is the way the essential purpose of London, and especially > central London, hasn't changed. Since the Romans, it has been a financial or > commercial centre. And therefore a centre of wealth and partying.

Nitpick: The City of London is not particularly central, and City is what contains the remnants of old Roman Londinium. The article misleads there by leading with a picture from Piccadilly Circus which is pretty much in the middle of the heart of London, while most of the digs the article talks of are happening in City, which is east of the centre.

City borders on the centre, and has a few tourist attractions, but you can live in London for years and never have a reason to go there unless you work for a bank etc.

It is specifically City of London that was the undisputed financial centre (now that role is shared with Docklands, even further East). It's like world to itself compared to the rest of London (especially as City even has a unique governing model where corporations are assigned votes).

<comment><USER7> > Nitpick: The City of London is not particularly central

It is if that's where you go most of the time. I only rarely go west. Mayfair was once described as a nice village on the outskirts of London

<comment><USER6> That's fine for you, but it doesn't change the point at all, which is that for most people, City is far from what they'd consider the centre. That Mayfair was on the outskirts a couple of hundred years ago is not particularly relevant. Startig in the late 18th century, Charing Cross[1] has increasingly been considered the centre, even occasionally being used as an official marker.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions a roman cathedral bigger than St Paul's. Where can I find more information about this?

<comment><USER9> In the article itself, it later tells you just where to go to see the remains. That should be a start. Or, [https://www.google.ca/search?q=london+roman+basilica](https://www.google.ca/search?q=london+roman+basilica)</comment></comment>


OpenAI: Requests for Research - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/requests-for-research/# <comment><USER2> "We got tired of all that cheating in the industry" \- runs windows</comment>


Show HN: Twitter meets bookmarks - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitmark.me/about

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a WIP product. As you can see, I am a lazy developer and I didn't customize the bootstrap styles at all. I want to get some feedbacks here. I hope it's useful to others (people like to use 'favorite' to bookmark tweets: [http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/I-have-noticed-that-more- peop...](http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/I-have-noticed-that-more-people-are- using-the-Favorite-Tweet-feature-a-lot-lately-Any-reason-for-this-trend)).</comment>


Romania dictionary altered to thwart exam cheats - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39291279 <comment><USER2> I feel like the Hacker News hive mind is short-circuiting here, the "anti- censorship" impulse is overriding rationality. This isn't some Orwellian conspiracy to compromise language, it was a three-hour redefinition of a small handful of obscure words.

Obviously schools already try to curtail cheating, it's not useful to just say "be more vigilant instead". This is a clever way to identify cheats from an unexpected angle; and obviously if they're cheating on one section of the test, they're likely to be cheating on others.

<comment><USER3> Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some forbid it. It's arbitrary.

Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing, which is debatable.

What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

I'd also add this: The internet is developing quickly into a literal extension of the human mind. I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information.

<comment><USER2> > Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. > Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; > some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the > questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test > questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some > forbid it. It's arbitrary.

These are students sneaking cell phones into an exam, and going out of their way to surreptitiously look up answers with them. There's no moral ambiguity here.

> Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style > academic testing.

No it doesn't.

> What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am > free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

These are primary school-children. There's nothing wrong with asking them to learn basic skills like literacy or numeracy (or, say, basic integrity) even if they're disconnected from "jobs".

> I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more > intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and > fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn > information versus to find information.

Sure, and there will be tests for _that_ set of skills where accessing the internet during the exam won't be considered cheating. But in this situation it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else find this somewhat wrong?

They are literally changing the definition of words (albeit momentarily) to try to identify cheating. This is likely a private institution administering the test and a government dictionary. Even if both were governmental (dictionary and test), it still seems silly to do this, as opposed to trying to catch the cheaters.

<comment><USER5> Isn't trying to identify the cheaters a good way to catch them?

<comment><USER6> Why would the editors of an online dictionary want to catch cheaters to begin with?

<comment><USER7> I don't think they wanted to "catch" the cheaters. This was not a real examination to begin with, it was just a simulation in order for the pupils to get a feel for how things will happen. The real testing will happen on the 31st of March.

It was more of an experiment/eye opener from the team of volunteers behind the online dictionary project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I was using that dictionary I would stop using it. Way to loose any credibility irregardless of what you are trying to do.

Also, story seems made up.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, something smells fishy.

First, the words "Everywhere, [to] spot" seem too simple to need to be researched - are these words so uncommon in Romanian that students need to look them up?

Second, they impacted ALL users to their site, merely because they saw an increase in use that coincided with the test? Did they even check their website logs to see where the source IPs were geo-located? They laugh off the impact caused to a blogger's readers with their replacement of "treachery"'s meaning.

<comment><USER10> > There were only nine searches for those two words in the hour before the > exam started, but the number soon began to soar. In the final hour of the > test there were 989 requests for their meaning

The article suggests you could likely count the number of innocent users affected on fingers & toes?

<comment><USER9> The article suggests many readers of a popular author's blog were impacted.

> _The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its definition, but later > discovered that it had been used by a well-known Romanian author in a blog > post that morning, something they call an "unfortunate coincidence"._

<comment><USER10> Apologies, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The third word that appeared abnormally popular, "treachery", wasn't > actually on the test. The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its > definition, but later discovered that it had been used by a well-known > Romanian author in a blog post that morning, something they call an > "unfortunate coincidence".

I'm all for punishing cheaters, but this measure has just too much collateral damage. Legitimate dictionary users are being mislead. It's a bad idea, and it would shatter my trust in any dictionary.

<comment><USER12> "Legitimate dictionary users are being mislead"

They replaced the words with similar sounding words that have no link with the original words. Anybody could easily spot the change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why would the owners of an online dictionary feel compelled to thwart cheating on tests? It's their job to provide accurate information, not justice to cheats.

<comment><USER14> It's a volunteer project. What they decide to do with their free time is probably their own business. If they want to temporarily alter some definitions to validate a hypothesis then more power to them

<comment><USER15> What they do is their own business, of course, but how would you feel if the folks running npm temporarily altered some of the javascript packages they served?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be far less harmful if the exam asked the students to define a fictitious word which appeared only in the dictionary. Only cheaters would get it "right".

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

<comment><USER17> The exam and the dictionary are completely unrelated. The exam is devised and organized by the state, while the dictionary is an online service run by a group of volunteers.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > The exam and the dictionary are completely unrelated.

No, this article is specifically about them working together.

<comment><USER18> Nope, it's about the dictionary admins noticing cheaters during last year's exam and deciding to do something about it -- without any coordination with the exam organizers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What kind of exam asks for the meaning of the word "everywhere"? Doesn't _every_ one know that when you have an age where you can participate in an exam?

It says it's for Romanian students and is in the Romanian language, so it doesn't look like it's a foreign language to them but their native language.

<comment><USER20> In English, a lot of standardized exams look for knowledge of lesser-known synonyms or variants of words; it's quite possible we're getting an article here which translates the words to a more common English variant for easier understanding.

For example, a similar article translated to Romanian might claim English- language students were tested on knowing a word for "rural" (simplified translation) but the exam actually used "bucolic" (a word which I know has been part of the GRE vocabulary in the past).

<comment><USER21> The actual words are archaic, lesser known synonyms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some context:

Cheating at exams and plagiarism is rampant in Romania. Multiple gov't officials, MPs and even a former prime minister nicknamed _copy /paste_ were accused of plagiarism in the last few years. They tried to subordinate comitees that analyze PhD thesis just to get away with it and even succeeded in doing so.

National exams use cameras to twart cheaters.

Dexonline.ro is a volunteer effort and assumes no responsability for the correctness of its content.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sigh, I understand this was done with good intentions, but a dictionary is one of the last things whose integrity should be compromised. They call the searches for "treachery" an "unfortunate coincidence", but it's really a betrayal of people searching for authoritative definitions. When you're deliberately falsifying the definition of words, you've failed as a dictionary. Instead, the schools giving the test should have sought other solutions: make proctors be more vigilant, collect student cellphones, or even reach out to dictionary websites beforehand so they could omit, rather than modify, the definitions of any words on the test day.

<comment><USER24> Or proxy the dictionary entry in the ISP DNS at the test site. No need to corrupt the dictionary for everybody.

<comment><USER25> The test is taken in schools national-wide. You should basically ban the entire country of Romania from accessing the dictionary.

<comment><USER22> That's actually censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Administrators want to catch people cheating at exams. So what do they do?

They cheat the public by spreading misinformation and lying.

Quote at end of article:

"The third word that appeared abnormally popular, "treachery", wasn't actually on the test. The DEX editors assumed it was and changed its definition, but later discovered that it had been used by a well-known Romanian author in a blog post that morning, something they call an "unfortunate coincidence"."

They fucked over a bunch of unrelated innocent people with their fake news/fake definition and simply call it "unfortunate".

Talk about the irony and double standards here. What a pathetic bunch of sorry human beings.

</comment><comment><USER27> This seems somewhat Ludditic. Technology makes the format of the test obsolete, why counteract that?

<comment><USER17> Because there has to be a point where you start using your own brain and memory. Just like a muscle you need to train and use them in order to keep them efficient. In a normal conversation you don't have time to access a word in a dictionary. How many words are you willing to memorize? How much offline knowledge is required for you to "survive"? If we offload all cognitive efforts to machines, what is left except meat and bones?

Where exactly is that point? I don't know.

<comment><USER27> > In a normal conversation you don't have time to access a word in a > dictionary.

If you haven't the heard the word up until that points, odds are pretty good that you might not have needed it.

<comment><USER17> Coupled with the question "how many words are you willing to memorize" I was trying to offer a sense of scale to the absurd.

If looking up words in dictionaries is sufficient, how many words should you memorize offline? If everyone agrees learning words is outdated, what will they use to speak? Orwell's newspeak?

Most communication, as opposed to art for instance, works both ways. You listen and read, but also speak and write. Dictionaries help you with the first part, but you'll need a little more effort with the second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm fascinated by this HN discussion! Personally I consider it an excellent hack, but it's good to learn why people think otherwise. (And it's great that the article even describes one of unfortunate side effects.)

I can imagine a MITM product for schools to help here, perhaps not though if everyone is using LTE instead of the school's network.

</comment><comment><USER21> here's the pull request for the feature :)

[https://github.com/dexonline/dexonline/commit/1f67d663d8a8d5...](https://github.com/dexonline/dexonline/commit/1f67d663d8a8d568704c70f739f646b3ee9dcf5d)

</comment><comment><USER29> Shows the superiority of offline dictionaries.

Edit: And not-needlessly-online software in general.

<comment><USER15> I agree, offline dictionaries have a certain _esquivalience_ about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The dictionnary in question: www.dexonline.ro

</comment><comment><USER31> They should just hire a psychometrician. They have PhDs specifically for this sort of analysis.</comment>


Lightning unofficial cable trick for iOS 7 - <AUTHOR> http://garmoncheg.blogspot.com/2014/01/lightning-unofficial-cable-hack-for-ios.html

<comment><AUTHOR> it's more than a trick rather than a hack...</comment>


Tesla starts selling rear-heated seats on Model 3 SR as $300 OTA upgrade - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2020/02/15/tesla-rear-heated-seats-model-3-ota-upgrades/ <comment><USER2> I find this crippling of hardware and extortion through software to be very offensive. I mean is this the future we want to live in ? I wish that electric cars weren't so heavily dependent upon proprietary software that steals the freedom from the user. You do not really own a Tesla evidently you are just paying Elon Musk for the pretense of ownership aka taking on the liabilities of an asset you don't have the ability to control.</comment>


ORNL achieves milestone with plutonium-238 sample - <AUTHOR> https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-achieves-milestone-plutonium-238-sample <comment><USER2> Just for clarification, this is fuel for RTGs which power spacecraft that are far away from the sun, not fuel for spacecraft propulsion.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news. My understanding from when I worked at JPL was thst NASA only had enough plutonium for about one more large RTG for the Mars 2020 mission (to power Curiosity 2.0). While RTGs are essential for deep space missions, they are also useful for closer destinations.

</comment><comment><USER4> Two of the NASA missions are pretty much spoken for 1) Mars Science Lander 2 in 2020 2) Mission to Europa

</comment><comment><USER5> Hate to be a negative nancy...

..But we're making a fuss about restarting the production of something we'd already mastered, and we first made in 1941?

I'll be more interested when an American commercial breeder reactor comes online.

<comment><USER6> Production was suspended for 30 years. Resumption seems pretty noteworthy. Nobody is claiming this is some sort of first, and if it doesn't interest you, then move on. If you're interested in deep space probes then this is pretty important. If not, it's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Url changed from [http://www.livescience.com/53227-plutonium-238-created- for-s...](http://www.livescience.com/53227-plutonium-238-created-for-space- fuel.html), which is cribbed from this press release. Like most of the science PR mills, that one does not link to its sources.

<comment><USER8> This is a better link than the current one in the headline:

[https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-achieves-milestone- plutonium-...](https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-achieves-milestone- plutonium-238-sample)

It's more recent (Dec 22nd, 2015) and discusses a new achievement: first production of Pu-238 in the USA in 30 years.

<comment><USER7> Oh indeed, that's the one we want. Thanks! Changed from [https://www.ornl.gov/news/making-fuel-exploring- space-0](https://www.ornl.gov/news/making-fuel-exploring-space-0).</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Minimalist Wallpaper App for iPhone/iPad - <AUTHOR>

I threw together a simple app for people with a simpler taste in wallpapers.<p>Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/min-wallpapers/id595197158?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/min- wallpapers/id595197158?l...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/min- wallpapers/id595197158?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER2> Good work, have a buck.

Also, it's "Polaroid", not "Poleroid", unless you were trying to not use a trademark.

In which case "Lego" should probably be misspelled. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment>


Is Django or Rails more popular in London? - All-ln

Is the Django or Rails community in London bigger?What's the average salary for a junior developer in a startup and which of the frameworks has better job prospects in the city? Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing most Django startups would hire someone with Rails experience and vice-versa so I wouldn't sweat it.

PHP is still the dominant language amount startups though, but I'd say Rails is more popular than Django. Saying that there's enough startups hiring in all three languages that getting a job shouldn't be a huge issue.</comment>