$15k Open Source Contest to make Government more Transparent - <AUTHOR> http://sunlightlabs.com/contest

<comment><USER2> Wow; this is a very cool idea.

A few months ago, when the "financial crisis" was really spiraling out of control, I purchased the domain name transparentaccounting.org -- not entirely sure why, but thinking that one of the trends of the coming decade will indeed be transparency in accounting standards and government.

So this would be a great way to make use of that domain. I imagine that a project of this scope would require collaboration of some savvy business people & some savvy programmers. So if you're interested, please send me an email -- address found on my profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this real? If so why is the guy from Heroes there?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is real. We put Hiro up as a joke, but I'll take him down now.

<comment><USER5> You typo'd Adrian's last name.

In any case, dang neat stuff. I would definitely enter if it wasn't my day job to do these same sorts of things at the Post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! We fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also-- NYTimes Congress API:

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the- con...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-congress- api/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to mention here. Adrian Holovarty is a judge.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're doing this, there are some operational risks.

People make money off intransparency. Billions.

If they perceive transparency efforts as a thread, they may simply invest some of their winnings in having you and your transparency efforts destroyed.

Doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. But you need to need to be aware that this kind of stuff does go on.

[http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236...](http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236.html)

solari.com

whereisthemoney.com

from the metroactive article:

"Starting in 1994, Hamilton Securities Group began building an easy-to-operate computer software system to track the money flows in any given region. The program, Community Wizard, provided the kind of transparency needed to expose cooked books. Former Hamilton employee Carolyn Betts remembers the power of Community Wizard, even in its infancy.

"It was in the beta stage, so it was not complete, but with each piece of information it became more and more powerful," recalls Betts. "The HUD field office people went absolutely crazy when they saw it. You could go in with a pointer on a map and get to information on expenditures by each HUD program. It was a pretty beautiful program and would have become unbelievably powerful."

Community wizard was dismantled in 1997 as part of a legal hatchet job, the servers confiscated, and the backups with source code wiped.</comment>


If Malaysian Airliner was hijacked here is probably Why - <AUTHOR> http://longr.co/1Naesr?

<comment><USER2> OK, so there's beef. Where is the motive for the hijacking though? They didn't make any demands (yet) or used it for an attack. What is gained by Iran for stealing a Malaysian airliner other than to use it as a weapon or steal its cargo?

<comment><AUTHOR> The possible reason could be to 'teach a lesson' or put pressure on Malaysian Govt. The rift between Sunni and Shia is beyond an airliner or its cargo. If you ponder over their 1400 years old history.

<comment><USER2> So for 1400 years of bloody, hatefilled history they steal a plane full of Chinese citizens to teach Malaysia a lesson? I'm probably just ignorant, but I'd have to guess that that level of risk isn't worth blind rage without furthering some agenda.</comment></comment></comment>


LIDAR is no longer too expensive for mainstream adoption - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/12/luminar-affordable-lidar/ <comment><AUTHOR> I definitely understood Tesla's focus on lower cost sensors for their current fleet but with the inevitable decline in technological costs it always seemed short sited to not prepare for LIDAR.

Sensor redundancy and complimentary performance are critical for other complex systems, why not autonomous vehicles?

<comment><USER2> > Sensor redundancy and complimentary performance are critical for other > complex systems, why not autonomous vehicles?

There is one big 3 letter reason in the industry I don't want to mention here

Automotive engineering company without "tech" spin have no problem using radars for lane keeping assist and collision avoidance

Nor cameras nor lidars are suitable for that safety critical task because of their low reliability in bad weather — this is what any normal engineer will tell you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why the grammar and spelling pedants? Is it good for HN? - <AUTHOR>

it? What kinds of mistakes should be corrected (at least factual errors, obviously)?<p>I value grammar and spelling, but is an HN comment thread the right place to teach it? <comment><USER2> There's probably no point correcting comments posted online. I think it's most polite to correctly spell or construct a sentence in the comment without directly pointing out the error.

Correct spelling and grammar is not pedantry. If you don't bother with spelling and grammar your readers may think you uneducated, lazy, not able think and communicate with precision. Especially in a technical field you don't want to be perceived as a sloppy thinker. When I see misspelled words followed by (sp?) I wonder why the author was too lazy to open a browser tab and Google the suspect word -- it's so easy to look up a word when you have a computer with an Internet connection in front of you. When I see grammar errors I wonder if the writer finished elementary school.

Writers struggling with English because it's not their first language should be cut some slack unless they ask for help.

Many times in my career I've seen résumés and proposals tossed aside because of spelling or grammar errors, especially in cover letters. If I notice errors on a web page my scam alarm goes off (except for "FAQ's," which I've given up on). The little things do matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like it or not, grammar and spelling has a huge influence on people's perception of you. Online we don't have the visual and auditory cues we use to make judgements. So I have mixed thoughts - pointing out someones flaws in public is never a good thing.. if you really feel the need to correct someone, do it in private so they don't feel embarrassed.

</comment><comment><USER2> Some research on this and one possible solution: <http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=68>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think everyone here would agree that HN would be better served with an extremely robust spell- and grammar-checking WYSIWYG comment editor. /s

<comment><USER3> Use OSX - at least here on Chrome text is automagically underlined when there is a spelling error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't mind the pedants, as long as they aren't assholes about it. I grew up in a bilingual home, so I am prone to certain errors in spite of generally being told I "write well". I am acutely aware that poor grammar and spelling can be genuine obstacles to effective communication. As long as pedantery (sp?) is not served up with a huge side of sneering, disrespect, pissing on people and similar, I think it has real benefit for the forum.</comment>


An Elegant Pairing Function [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://szudzik.com/ElegantPairing.pdf

<comment><USER2> |R x R| = |R| so the existence of such functions is guaranteed but it is nice to see that some are just a method call away. Does anyone know what pairing function on non negative integers is the most efficient in the number of bits it requires ?

<comment><USER3> This PDF only handles mapping N x N to N and vice versa, though.

For R x R, I would mix the bits of the two numbers

      [a0 a1 a2 a3...]
      [b0 b1 b2 b3...]

to

      [a0 b0 a1 b1 a2 b2 a3 b3...]

I am not sure that is a computable function for infinite-length bit sequences, though. Maybe none of those mapping functions are?

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, I was thinking |N x N| = |N|. So is there a pairing function f: NxN -> N which can be used as compression?</comment></comment></comment>


Stop using tail -f (mostly) - <AUTHOR> http://www.brianstorti.com/stop-using-tail/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290332)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tried this for a while the last time I saw this posted somewhere, but went back to using tail.

Using less +F you're not able to add blank lines to the terminal. Seems kind of silly, but it's very useful to see if there has been any output since last time you took a look.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly the reason I've never switched to using `less +F`, as well. When I tail a log, I'm usually looking for _sections_ of it corresponding to particular test runs. Adding blank lines or even rows of dashes/equal signs lets me make the distinction clearly visible.

<comment><USER5> Same here. I'm normally using "tail -f | grep something" which less +f doesn't seem to handle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If file is very large like several gigabytes, `tail` is much faster than `less`

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm still going to use tail -f, in tmux. I get the log stream, and I get tmux's search & movement.</comment>


Find a Physical Workspace: Deskwanted, LiquidSpace, Loosecubes, OpenDesks - <AUTHOR> http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2012/02/07/tools-for-finding-a-physical-workspace-deskwanted-liquidspace-loosecubes-opendesks/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that same forces that are making fractional leases on computing capability available in the cloud seem to be at work enabling the ad hoc provisioning of workspaces.

Coupled with the pervasive availability of wifi in coffee shops and eating establishments and transition to laptops or even smaller form factor tablets and smartphones for computing support, the old assumptions that an incubator provided value offering office space, Internet connectivity, and space in a co-located datacenter are defunct.

For startups with less than a dozen people, both their computing and physical office configurations are becoming increasingly virtual.

I think this will enable new opportunities for firms to provide professional services, knowledge work, and clerical support in a variety of new forms and delivery modes by interacting either in virtual on-line spaces and/or virtual office space on demand.</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of open-source projects which became closed/proprietary? - <AUTHOR> Are there any examples of Open-source projects - which for some reason - became closed-source?
Theoretically the project could be forked and continued as open-source, but I'm just wondering if there are many known cases of this and if it's a valid concern... <comment><USER2> This guy wrote about his open source project which he made closed source: [https://medium.com/@kitze/github-stars-wont-pay-your- rent-8b...](https://medium.com/@kitze/github-stars-wont-pay-your- rent-8b348e12baed)

</comment><comment><USER3> MongoDB.</comment>


Zygomys – An embedded scripting language for Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/glycerine/zygomys <comment><USER2> Huh no. You may have parens but that's it.

It's not not predominantly a functional programming language and has no rich set of immutable, persistent data structures.

So, it's no Clojure. But it is young. It may become a clojure but it seems presumptuous at this stage..

<comment><USER3> Calling itself a Clojure is a pretty bold statement.

Clojure is one of the most revolutionary programming languages of the last decade, I can't see how this mini-toy-language packaged as a Go library can be compared to the mighty Clojure with a straight face.

<comment><USER4> What revolutionary exactly? Transducers?

<comment><USER2> Transducers and Spec are two great examples of what Clojure's _community_ is best at. There's a practicality of purpose and single mindedness of philosophy at play in the language's evolution here. Making simple easy.

To my mind though, Clojure brought clarity to the JVM on issues of concurrency, state, mutability, object orientation and persistence and for that I will always love it.

<comment><USER5> Transducers were already in Common Lisp in 1989,

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/3tha86/transducers...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/3tha86/transducers_in_1989/)

Likewise Spec ideas are not new to old timer Lispers, many forms of Lisp type annotations are similar to it.

What Clojure has brought was making those ideas "modern" again.

<comment><USER6> Isn't the idea that all mutation must either be local or transactional rather revolutionary? In a sense, Erlang is like that, too, but Clojure took the idea much further. It is pretty clear that that's Clojure's the main idea.

<comment><USER5> No, because those ideas can be tracked down to Miranda or even early probably, when digging into enough SIGPLAN papers.

What might be revolutionary is making more "common programmers" aware of them.

<comment><USER6> Isn't Miranda pure-functional? Because Clojure is imperative (-functional). Saying you can't mutate is very different from saying you can mutate whatever you like, whenever you like, as long as its transactional or not observable.

And SIGPLAN papers don't really count. A revolutionary product is not the same as a revolutionary idea. Implementing ideas that have never been productized is still revolutionary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Code like

        if x + y == 8 { (println "we add up") } else { (println "wat?" ) }

really seems to combine syntaxes in a super-confusing manner ... The "if" is not in an s-expression, but the println call is? And there are blocks denoted using C-style braces mixed in ... I think this would take a while to get used to. :)

<comment><USER8> The infix is optional, but I do find it nice for interaction.

<comment><USER9> You get used to real s-expressions very quickly. People have a big hangup about it bit if you have an open mind it becomes a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> more like Hy is to Python I'd say: [http://docs.hylang.org/en/latest/quickstart.html](http://docs.hylang.org/en/latest/quickstart.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think Clojure is .. _that_ .. to Java.

Clojure is a language which compiles to JVM byte code, which is also the platform that java compiles to, so (as consequence of that) they can interoperate.

But I don't think Clojure was meant as a replacement for Java or some kind of extension of the Java language or some sort of CoffeeScript for Java.

Clojure is a powerful functional programming language with lots of new paradigms and original ideas - quite at the opposite spectrum of the object- oriented Java.

Although I don't program in it, my C++ coding skills and more importantly architectural skills, improved dramatically after learning Clojure.

So the title of the article is incorrect (and click-bait-y).

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice project.

> x := 3; y := 5; if x + y == 8 { (println "we add up") } else { (println > "wat?" ) }

though mixing C like syntax and LISP is a bit confusing. Why such choice ?

<comment><USER8> Thank you. I tend to do interactive mathy things, and find the infix being the default at the repl cuts down on keystrokes and speeds up the interaction. Anything within {} curly braces is treated as infix, and infix is the starting mode at the repl. You can freely mix (prefix) and {infix} as you wish. For longer math expressions this does tend to help readability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i think this is really cool. Can anyone remind me (on formal grounds) why a programmer might be interested in a compiler

      LISP --> GO-lang

I am a huge fan / user of Python (which is an interface to C) but that also did take some time to justify itself, no?

</comment><comment><USER14> I like this, this allows me to build a complex application in go, but pluggable business logic in lisp.</comment>


We Reviewed Police Tactics Seen in Nearly 400 Protest Videos - <AUTHOR> https://projects.propublica.org/protest-police-tactics/ <comment><USER2> BAU in Greece where a couple of days ago a demonstrator died after being brutally attacked and tortured by police a month ago. The relevant minister was quick to deny police had to do anything with it but breaking several ribs to a previously healthy guy who then dies off lung failure is somewhat suspicious. Not to mention that for a month now _no state entity_ investigated this incident despite it being clearly caught on cam.

In general we witness at least one incident of police brutality almost weekly for months now. The frequency has been increased to almost daily lately not to mention passing a law that essentially curtails demonstrations and gives even more authority to police on them. I'm in fact quite surprised that none of these have been covered to almost no extent in international news.

The irony is that all this is coming at a period when Greeks barely demonstrate at all. The vast majority just seems to have accepted their fate, i.e. economic misery ad infinitum, and it's been like that for years now. So, I'm guessing this has to do with a special agenda of the relatively new right- wing govt. Who knows. Fact of the matter is that policemen != protectors.

I believe it is a sign of deep rot of western democracies that police is the most dangerous thing you can happen upon in a number of western "democratic" countries.

<comment><USER3> Police is the HR of the state: they protect the state from the citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Until there are consequences for unnecessarily escalating violence cops will continue to to do it because the more violent the situation the more the law favors them.

People who care about this issue have been analyzing police use of force for decades. You can find people saying basically what I just said above going at least as far back as the 1990s. The problem is well known.

<comment><USER5> > The problem is well known.

It might be well known to those who have experienced, witnessed, or study the subject. But there are still plenty of people who deny these claims or are unaware.

<comment><USER6> They deny the claims because they support the systems US policing has historically defended. When you confront people with writings from marginalized communities going back to the 1800s about police, they still manage to "be unaware". That's intentional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to hear someone from the police respond to the actions of those officers.

And regarding this quote:

> Law enforcement experts stressed that viral protest videos, while visceral, > only show a moment in time and may miss what officers were facing outside of > the frame.

Isn't that what body cameras are for? If we only have one source of video, then it's hard for police to justify saying, "That wasn't the whole story."

<comment><USER7> I believe that policies regarding camera use during protests in many cities were changed as a direct response of civil liberties complaints from organizations like the ACLU. People said they didn't want police to use them for surveillance.

<comment><USER8> > People said they didn't want police to use them for surveillance.

Source?

<comment><USER9> "The Seattle Police Department said Wednesday that officers will be ordered to turn on their body-worn cameras during protests in a departure from longstanding policy.

The new policy comes after Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan issued an executive order requiring the cameras to be used during demonstrations.

The Seattle Police Department has been outfitted with body-worn cameras since 2017 but a longstanding policy designed to protect the privacy of peaceful protestors prevented officers from using cameras during the demonstrations of the past two weeks.

That policy was written in consultation with civil rights groups, like the ACLU, that worry body cameras could make it easier for police to track and target protesters, particularly in communities of color that have a history of over-surveillance."

[https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-police-will-use- body-c...](https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-police-will-use-body-cameras- protests-new-policy/)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/police-body-cameras-at-protests- ra...](https://www.cnet.com/news/police-body-cameras-at-protests-raise- privacy-concerns/)

<comment><USER10> Right. Since the video is private and disappears any time an officer might be implicated, the only remaining effects are harmful ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> " _Straub said that police officers shouldn't be expected to determine what 's being thrown at them before responding._

" _"If you 're standing there in that skirmish line, and somebody's throwing something at you, is it really up to you to be figuring out whether it's gasoline or whether it's metal, or whether it's water or whether it's acid?"_"

His use of military terminology ("skirmish line") is telling.

<comment><USER12> Telling of what? That they reuse a term?

<comment><USER13> It implies that they think of the conflict in military terms.

<comment><USER12> So you would be okay with a term like "avant-garde"?

<comment><USER11> 'Avant-garde', as a military term, is obsolete in English; the English word is now 'vanguard'.

'Skirmish line', to my knowledge, has no accepted non-military uses, but even if it did the interviewee is clearly referring to the military formation and therefore considering the protesters to be hostile enemies.

<comment><USER12> Well, they are throwing unspecified bottles of liquid at them, so they're not peaceful protesters either.

<comment><USER13> There's a clear difference between protestors and enemies no matter the amount of hostility. Thinking of the protestors as enemies is bound to escalate conflict instead of deescalating it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This ex Spokane cop Frank Straub guy is a complete asshole and his responses are uniformly bullshit. In his response to every single video, no matter how shitty the cops behaved, he starts from a position of trying to make excuses for their bad behavior. His default position is the same garbage "us versus them" mentality that people want to change. At best he gives a soft criticism of truly egregious behavior. He's an apologist for police brutality and has no integrity. Yet another example of how incredibly far out of touch the police and anyone associated with them really are.

</comment><comment><USER15> Police say "stop resisting" as an alternative to something more vulgar. They do not really mean it, they shout that as a way to release stress.

They are also taught that the Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint (LVNR) is the safest way to restraint someone. The truth is, that it is not. It is stupid to believe that cutting blood supply to someone's brain is safe. LVNR is a scam that nobody actually believes in but everyone is silent about it because it is a plausible excuse to kill people.

[http://www.nletc.com/lateral-vascular-neck-restraint- lvnr](http://www.nletc.com/lateral-vascular-neck-restraint-lvnr)

> Result: No death, injury or litigation for excessive use of force for 40 > years against agencies using the certified Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint > (LVNR®) System!

No death, injury or litigation? Bullshit. It only resulted in 1 month of protests and billions of dollars lost.

<comment><USER16> I really thought "LVNR®" was some The Onion meets RoboCop level sarcasm.

What's wrong with these people?

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, it is real and highly profitable for people that will never suffer any consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This webpage has very effective user interaction for examining the video content.

<comment><USER18> I found the video playback choppy and disorienting.

<comment><USER17> I did find it choppy, also. I think that's an effect of the scrolling algorithm's acceleration/deceleration, and could be adjusted. There are two effects with scrolling--advancing the page/narrative, and advancing the video. That transition benefits with subtle visual signals.

And, I'm not much into video editing, but I've done a little graphic design practice. I think 'disorientation' is par for the course when you're not playing a video at constant speed. That's an unsettling thought--the webpage authors are taking advantage of the UX's disorientation effect to heighten the emotion of the video content.

I watched all of these videos and they certainly don't need any additional emotive effects. I had the feeling that I was sharing the privileged insight of the 'experts' observations with the narrative callouts and graphics to pace my consumption.

I looked at The NY Times mega page of videos posted earlier. Watching one video after the other was brutal. And it was my own doing. I just jumped from one video to the next. click. click. click. and feeling worse and worse and worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wendover Productions made great video coverage on "How to Stop a Riot" based on the research: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg)

Unsurprisingly some of the techniques required are a little counter-intuitive which is interesting when weighed into public opinion or uninformed politicians etc. Naturally, the most effective techniques techniques don't involve violence.

</comment><comment><USER20> We can be critic to the police, but who is willing to take their place and do a better job ? What do we find if we look for the opposite in thoses 400 videos ?

<comment><USER21> I think you have misunderstood the purpose. There is no need for a collection of "the opposite" of this, whatever that would even mean.

Police have arresting power, so if non-police assault them they will simply arrest or kill them immediately, largely without the possibility of facing any consequences. Thousands have been arrested at protests in the last couple of months.

The non-police public have no such powers, and in fact even with video evidence will almost never see justice for police brutality. There is a huge violence problem here and it lies almost entirely on one side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They forgot to show the video w/audio showing Antifa besieging the Federal court house in Portland, WA.

Antifa were shining lasers at the cops eyes.

Also, one loud rioter was calling out individual officers promising them that they would find out where they live and kill them and their families.

Good times.

<comment> non-entity Turns out that when a heavily armed force carries out extrajudicial execution and lopsided violence without consequence over many years people will eventually respond with violence of their own.

<comment><USER9> Nonsense. Marxists attacking a Federal courthouse in Portland, OR has nothing to do with George Floyd being murdered by a local police officer in Minneapolis.

<comment> non-entity Most antifa are more likely to be anarchists than marxists, in which case their enemy is the state.

<comment><USER9> They are doing their part. There are Marxists in their ranks.

21st Century Marxists focus on exacerbating all of the fault lines in society they can find. Old school techniques that relied on economic disparity didn't work in the West.

The West doesn't have serfs like Russia and China did so 20th Century Communism didn't take. Also, most Western countries were rich enough and democratic so they could implement reforms that answered many of the 20th century communist charges without requiring a Marxist revolution.

Today, Marxists focus on anything and everything that can divide, including economic issues.

As soon as Trump leaves office, the mass media will flip to supporting the President (assuming he or she is not GOP) and all this will die down.

The media already seems to recognize that antifa is not helping their cause so they do not report honestly on the violence in Portland. As soon as the US has a Democratic Party President, antifa will be re-branded as rioters or anarchists. In the mean time they are lionized as defenders of freedom.

Note, I don't think this latest Marxist action will change America, any more than the earlier attempts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks mostly fine to me, maybe some are over the top but these are cherry picked examples. Most of these situations there is riot police trying to clear an area. Do what you're told. Most people are hanging around waiting for a fight to start then complain when one happens. And dont say we need more protesting, there are plenty peaceful protests around. I'm glad I'm not a cop you couldn't pay me enough to put up with that.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. It's mostly people who are looking for trouble that cry police brutality. There were so many instances of people shoving their camera in a cop's face and get beaten. Why would you do that? There are a lot of dumb people who believe everything the media tells them to believe.

<comment><USER24> If recording is violence, do I have the same rights as a civilian to respond?

<comment><USER23> Is shoving a camera in a cop's face same as recording from a distance?

<comment><USER24> I'd hope an officer of the law would be able to keep their composure even with a camera in their face.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is the coolest thing you can do in ten lines of code? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/811074/1288 <comment><USER2> I don't about you guys but when I did

0) Open notepad 1) Write My name is Ely  2) CTRL + S as index.htm 3) FTP to server 4) Then went to site.com/

That's when I knew I was going to be an amateur programmer for life. Yeah, yeah I know, it's HTML. But that gave me the courage to later jump into server-side languages.

<comment><USER3> If we could teach this simple process in school, we would inspire tons of people to program little things for themselves. That would be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is 30 close enough to 10?

I got a job with 30 lines of code appended to my resume, with a screenshot of the resultant output.

Perhaps the first two pages had something to do with it but I was told that the third page was what stood out.

This was a sysadmin position, the code includes bash, sed, awk, grep, tcpdump, netcat and gnuplot.

Hint to anyone who tries this sort of resume stunt: You WILL be asked what the code does.

Just the code: <http://bbookkss.com/CharlesPerkinsCV3of3Pages.pdf>

<comment><USER5> That's indeed an interesting example because, by any standard, this is _terrible_ code.

Yet for a sysadmin position it still provides valuable insight into your a) pain threshold, b) familiarity with the tools, c) willingness and ability to bend reality for the boss.

I'd just add a big disclaimer that this kind of code only happens in emergencies.

(disclaimer: I'm guilty of these gnuplot hacks myself and they always stick around way longer than they should...)

<comment><USER6> > They always stick around way longer than they should...

But isn't that true for all 'terrible' code? Most of the elegant and well- formed code I write ends up getting butchered for the sake of 'features,' while the quick hacks that 'just work' stick around forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in real-mode x86 times the coolest thing could've been done in 2 lines

      CLI     ; Disable interrupts
      HLT     ; Halt CPU until next interrupt

This hung the machine dead.

<comment><USER8> This is not cool in my book.

<comment><USER7> ... nor is downvoting nerdy posts on HN of all places :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://stackoverflow.com/a/811081>

This person claims that simple variable usage and stdout should be all that is needed to impress. While I studied enough low-level software development to still be impressed by an adder circuit, I just don't think this will impress enoug of the people we NEED to convert. Just about everyone takes it for granted that when they log onto FB, they will see their name...and that doesnt seem like "programming" to them

</comment><comment><USER10> Less than 10 bytes of code on an Apple II:

      ] CALL -151
      * 300: AD 30 CO 20 ED FD 4C 00 03
      * 300G

Enjoy! For bonus points, get this down to 8 bytes.

<comment><USER11> I used to do that kind of hacking in the 80's. I recognized the CALL-151. I have an old Apple II+ in the other room I'm tempted to try firing up just to solve this mystery.

<comment><USER12> For people who didn't hack apple IIs, can you expand on what's going on there?

<comment><USER13> ; enter the machine language monitor

      CALL -151

; toggle the speaker and load the accumulator with the "floating bus" value-- the byte last read by the video refresh controlled by the video scanner.

      0300-   AD 30 C0   LDA $C030

; print the accumulator as a character

      0303-   20 ED FD   JSR $FDED

; repeat (loop by going to 0x300)

      0306-   4C 00 03   JMP $0300

; run it! (0x300 Go; just like G in your debugger)

      300G

Running this will display random characters and make noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A colleague of mine wrote a spreadsheet in one line (253 bytes) of BASIC. I wonder if I still have it somewhere ...

<comment><USER15> That's pretty interesting. What features did it offer? Just a grid of cells, or some crude facility for summing/counting rows and columns as well?

<comment><USER14> It was a grid of cells. Each cell could contain a constant or a formula, strings or numbers. You selected the cell to change with a mouse, and it recomputed once per click on a button. In essence it was fully functional, just lacking file load and save.

It didn't have charts or graphics, but the cell functionality was pretty complete. Using "EVAL" meant you had access to any function in the underlying language.

I'll see if I can dig it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is sorta evil. But was fun to write tonight.

        ;; run this on SBCL
        (sb-ext:unlock-package :common-lisp)
        (let (syms) (do-symbols (s :common-lisp) (if (fboundp s) (push s syms)))
          (labels ((worm (sym)
        	     (let ((next (elt syms (random (length syms))))
        		   (old (symbol-function sym)))
        	       (format t "~%Worm attacks ~a, next target is ~a!~%" sym next)
        	       (setf (symbol-function sym)
        		     (lambda (&rest args)
        		       (when next (worm next) (setf next nil)) (apply old args))))))
          (worm '+)))
        ;; now try adding some numbers (and so on)

Long ago I also wrote a quine-based payload version of the above, moving towards doing the same for NewtonScript. But I've long since lost it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe not cool, but practical, I'd like to nominate some OCaml bitstring matching code:

        let bits = Bitstring.bitstring_of_file "data" in
        bitmatch bits with
        | { width : 5;
            data : width } ->
            printf "width %d data %Ld\n" width data

It reads the first five bits of the file, interprets these bits as a number, then reads the next 0-31 bits from the file (note: not aligned, the first 3 bits come from the first byte in the file).

The nice thing is that if everything can be shown at compile time to be aligned to byte/word boundaries, then it all turns into relatively efficient calls to C.

There are some more realistic examples on the web page:

<https://code.google.com/p/bitstring/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Just about any Forth Haiku would probably qualify. Here's a nice Mandelbrot set (not my code):

      : z^2 2dup z* ;
      : layer push push z^2 pop pop 2dup push push z+ pop pop ;
      : many layer layer layer layer layer layer layer layer layer layer ;
      : len dup * swap dup * + ;
      : mant y 0.7 - 3 * x 0.5 - 3 * many drop drop len dup 1 < * ;
      0 0 mant
      0.1 0.1 mant
      0.2 0.2 mant

([http://www.forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku- view/agpmb3J0aHNhbG9...](http://www.forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku- view/agpmb3J0aHNhbG9ucg0LEgVIYWlrdRjpgQIM))

</comment><comment><USER14> Coming late to the party, but Simon Tatham's .sig is pretty cool:

        for k in [pow(x,37,0x13AC59F3ECAC3127065A9) for x in [0x195A0BCE1C2F0310B43C,
        0x73A0CE584254AB23D5A0, 0x12878657EA814421CC92, 0x7373445BB3DA69996F4A,
        0x77A7ED5BC3AA700E80B2, 0xE9C71C94ED87ADCF7367, 0xFE920395F414C1A5DB50]]:
        print "".join([chr(32+3*((k>>x)&1))for x in range(79)]) # <anakin at pobox.com>

It won't be completely obvious to most people why this is cool, but it's effectively RSA-signed.

</comment><comment><USER18> Viznut's classic signature:

        #include <math.h> /* outputs 8 kHz 8-bit unsigned pcm to stdout */
        main(v,i,z,n,u,t){for(v=-1;;)for(n=pow(/* gcc -lm sig.c;./a.out>/dev/dsp */
        1.06,"`cW`g[`cgcg[eYcb^bV^eW^be^bVecb^"[++v&31]+(v&64)/21),i=9 99;i;putchar(
        128+((8191&u)>i?0:i/8)-((8191&(z+=n))*i-->>16)))u+=v&1?t/2: (t=v&6?t:n/4);}

</comment><comment><USER19> You can generate the Sierpinski pattern in a lot less code than posted:

        iterate (\xs -> zipWith xor ([0] ++ xs) (xs ++ [0])) [1]

</comment><comment><USER20> Mandelbrot fractal set viewer in _brainfuck_ would fit the bill nicely. It's not 10 lines exactly, but reflowing the BF code with no loss of clarity is not a big deal :)

[http://esoteric.sange.fi/brainfuck/utils/mandelbrot/mandelbr...](http://esoteric.sange.fi/brainfuck/utils/mandelbrot/mandelbrot.b)

</comment><comment><USER21> In Lua:

      function Y(f)
        local function g(...) return f(g,...) end
        return g
      end

      print(Y(function(rec,x)
                if x < 2 then
                  return 1
                else
                  return x * rec(x-1)
                end
               end)(5))

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd have said that for impressing people with small pieces of code something like SecondLife scripting would be ideal. You can manipulate objects in a 3d environment using simple code. Who doesn't enjoy programming a gun?

<comment><USER23> Also COM scripting on Windows (and presumably Applescript on the Mac).

Sure there's a lot of special keyword magic involved, but nothing will get people more excited about programming than seeing how they can easily automate their routine tasks to make their life easier - that's what programming is supposed to be about anyway.

<comment><USER24> You could probably stuff Node into this category too, if your target is the type to be impressed with writing their own basic web server in 10 lines of code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Conways game of life animated in APL:

[http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4&fmt=18](http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4&fmt=18)

I didn't count the number of lines but I guess it's even less than ten.</comment>


Insanely fast submarine is made of one molecule (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.futurity.org/nanotechnology-submarine-1049722/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be cool to have thousands of things like these swimming around in your circulatory system, repairing damage and fighting illness as they found it?

<comment><USER3> You already do, and they're free.

<comment><USER4> And pretty effective, though it could still be better. Imagine programmable ones. The only danger is malevolent ones :/

<comment><USER5> They already are programmable, in the form of the adaptive immune response. Perhaps we can learn to program our own immune cells via the neuro- immunological axis.

That danger is real too, in the form of autoimmune diseases. Although perhaps _malevolent_ is too strong a word.

<comment><USER6> deprogramming would be nice if we want to get rid of these autoimmune diseases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 244 atoms still sounds like a rather large molecule (which is cool). Not being a chemist, how does this generally compare to other compounds, synthetic and natural?

<comment><USER8> Its not that rare. Especially modern synthetics. Many organic compounds have 4 figure molecules. Most are repetitive chains, such as natural rubber.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I was about to say: I've handled large bricks of crosslinked polymers that were likely one molecule, at 1 kg each!

<comment><USER7> Oh wow, that's cool. Thanks for the context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if this would have applications for environmental cleanup?

</comment><comment><USER11> Noob question: how does one assemble such a molecule?</comment>


Show HN: PosterStitch – Instagram and Facebook Photo Collage Maker - <AUTHOR> https://www.posterstitch.com

<comment><AUTHOR> After reading HN daily for over a year, I finally have something to submit!

I would love to get any feedback from the community that helped inspire this.

<comment><USER2> great stuff! nice to real businesses submitted to HN. I know from my sisters and family members and my travails in the appstore that collage makers are in serious demand, and the option to order prints is a good business.

you really are 'solving a problem' (i hate that phrase!) for normal people who'll have no problem logging in with Facebook, unlike HN users

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Signing in with Facebook allows you to save your designs and download your collages!" Nice, but I just want to try it out and don't save anything...?

Let people start using it immediately and prompt them for login if they want to add photos from there or save it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right. It was out of laziness that I made FB login required, but I think it might help conversion rates if I nix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting, this is well done. I really liked the fun you put into the "processing photos" animation.

A few thoughts:

* The double "connect to Facebook" is jarring.

* My photos didn't fill up the collage--why not make the sections bigger instead of making me add more photos?

<comment><AUTHOR> I always wonder if anyone notices that, the animation is one of my favorite parts of the site! Thats a great idea about having the collage adapt to the number of photos uploaded. I may see what I can do with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really great.

The UI looks like it needs some stabilization as its not really clean in my chrome / macbook pro retina 13" \-- some css type issues or something.

Great idea letting people share for free as it drives referrals.

What kind of volume are you guys seeing?

<comment><AUTHOR> The more MVPy version was seeing about 1,500 sign ups per week, but I am hoping this improved feature set bumps that closer to 5,000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you mind sharing the process behind printing and shipping the posters? I've been wondering how that process works. Do you just send orders to a printing company and let them take care of the shipping too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, we actually use Lob.com as our printer. They take care of both the printing and shipping, and have been great so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having to use FB for both login and then File picker is one too many.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks awesome, and I immediately started to try to build one as a gift for my girlfriend, but I don't have a facebook account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the (attempted) support! It seems like there are quite a few people that have the same problem with Facebook. I'm going to add a non-social login as soon as I can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks great, even on mobile! Would you mind sharing the shop software you use?

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the design. However, save draft button is not working for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking into that now, thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice job! Where do you get the posters printed?

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually use Lob.com for our printing. Their API is very easy to use, and the print quality is fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this looks pretty awesome, but you're never getting me to sign in with a facebook account. I don't know why I'm that way, don't judge me.

<comment><USER13> I get disliking FB logins, but when it's a service specifically for uploading Facebook photos, I think you can expect it.

<comment> jack-r-abbit From The Site: _Use photos from Instagram, Facebook, and your computer_

Seems one could make a collage entirely from pics on their computer. So not exactly as "Facebook only" as you make it out to be.

<comment><USER14> The differentiating factor is that it connects to your social accounts to make that process easy. You can already make collages at the dozens of photo printing sites that exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-steve-jobs/

<comment><USER2> "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now."

That's kind of scary.

<comment><USER3> Is it real? I am no fan of Apple or Jobs, but it almost sounds _too evil_.

Edit: in reply to a "tweet" of mine, he posted the headers:

<http://hugoroy.eu/jobs-os.php>

It's really hard to believe they'd be such arrogant jerks as to go after something open source like that.

<comment><USER4> This isn't "Apple" or "Jobs" going after anyone. Jobs is stating that members of MPEG-LA plan to do so. If Steve Jobs mentioning that _other people_ plan to sue is an example of Jobs being "evil," then logically you must be evil too since you have also mentioned the potential lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.osnews.com/story/23058/Theora_More_of_a_Patent_Th...](http://www.osnews.com/story/23058/Theora_More_of_a_Patent_Threat_than_H264_Wait_What_)

      For 15 years, Xiph.Org has carefully "played by the
      rules," fully within the bounds, intent, and letter of
      intellectual property and patent law. For the past ten
      years we've informed the entire world, including MPEG LA,
      of our specifications and algorithms in detail. We've
      requested in open letters that any group believing we
      are infringing to inform us so that we make take
      immediate corrective action.

      I predict that MPEG LA may counter that they know
      groups have been pressured into licensing patents in order
      to use Theora. This has been a recent back-room assertion.
      You might want to ask point blank if MPEG LA itself or any
      of its constituent members has engaged in this practice,
      thus manufacturing the evidence that "vindicates" their
      patent allegations. I beg you - tell me immediately if you
      get a straight answer (or good video of any squirming)!

      I'm sure you can tell I'm a bit peeved; this has been going
      on for over a decade. It's amazing they've never been
      called out on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> While I agree with the spirit of the message to Steve, the attack on Apple not sharing back open source software modifications is out of place. Darwin is open source. WebKit is open source and actively developed by Apple, giving competitors the ability to quickly catch up with one of the iPhone's biggest advantages. Apple is also the chief contributor to LLVM.

<comment><USER7> Webkit is open-source because the people who wrote it (KDE devs) put it under the LGPL. Apple was playing catch-up, and used the best code base they could to get started. They aren't philanthropists, they are just (grudgingly) abiding by the license of the software they are building on.

<comment><USER8> That's true of all companies that contribute to open source.

<comment><USER9> How do you come to that conclusion?

<comment><USER8> I thought it was obvious. Perhaps I should rephrase it: All for-profit companies contribute to open-source because it benefits them.

<comment><USER9> Yes, at least the companies should aim for that.

I asked because some companies embrace the benefit and do not grudge.

<comment><USER10> What grudge? How are you measuring grudge-ness? How do I know with confidence whether a company is grudging or not? And furthermore, why would I care?

<comment><USER9> What do I know. One of the ancestor comments introduced the concept: "They aren't philanthropists, they are just (grudgingly) abiding by the license of the software they are building on."

As an attempt to answer: They can just satisfy the letter of the GPL by a code dump--which I would count as grudgingly, or they can embrace open development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _All video codecs are covered by patents._

All the popular ones, maybe. But MPEG-1 is over twenty years old, so unless there is a submarine patent out there, all the patents on it have already expired. Likewise, most aspects of MPEG-2 should be freed up within a decade. Even H.264 will eventually be unencumbered, given enough time.

<comment><USER12> On2 had a pile of active patents covering VP3, which they granted irrevocable royalty-free licenses to when they abandoned it to become Theora.

Nobody's ever done codec development without either filing a ton of patents or at least publishing rigorous documentation to establish prior art (Dirac). Some of those patents may no longer be in force, but they still exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> The On2 patents on VP3 only covered some optimization techniques and are not required to implement VP3 or Theora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Steve has been quite busy with his email lately. I don't remember him ever doing this much correspondence via email.

Very interesting.

<comment><USER14> He's been doing this for years. I know several people that have gotten terse, 3 or 4 word responses to him. It's only recently that the press and the bloggers have noticed this.

<comment><USER15> He's been doing short emails for years, and the occasional open letter, but it seems that he's doing it a lot more as of late.

Presumably in response to all the recent Apple controversy.

<comment><USER16> Either that or more people are posting/linking them.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, 5-10 years ago no one except the niche community of Mac users and developers was following Apple this closely. It's almost hard to remember how small Apple's influence had gotten by the time of Steve's return - before the iMac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad. How many people even remember products like "Performa" or "eMate"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really wish people would stop redefining the word "open" to mean whatever makes them feel good. (Vain hope.) Patents are totally orthogonal to copyrights and standards. You can put the source under whatever terms you want, and get whatever international standards body you want to bless the protocol, and that has nothing whatever to do with the patent troll who will show up the next day and start charging license fees.

</comment><comment><USER19> _you like Openness so much that when you use "Open Source" Software to build your Mac operating system_

Only some parts of it. The bulk of OSX is closed source.

 _May I remind you that H.264 is not an open standard?_

Jobs said H.264 is an _industry standard_ not an open standard

<comment><USER20> But the whole point in this debate is that Flash is also, for better or worse, an industry standard.

<comment><USER21> Is there a specification?

I think "de facto standard" is a more appropriate phrase for Flash.

<comment><USER22> Yes, there is (<http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/>).

It is even available gratis (H.264 specification is not).

<comment><USER21> Interesting, but I don't see how one could create a complete implementation without a spec for the Sorensen Spark codec.

<comment><USER23> Sorenson Spark == H.263 (not a typo), which is documented. The problem with Flash is VP6, although FFMPEG reverse engineered it.

<comment><USER22> Actually, it is based on a draft h.263, not the final h.263.

One of the older flash specification did document it. The svq3 specification was removed from swf specs around time it was made available under more liberal license (Sorenson probably didn't agree with wider specs availability).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hopefully Bilski renders these patent issues moot. I really, really hope that.

And if it does, I expect multi-media to improve quite a bit in the next 2 years.

<comment><USER25> If you don't know what "Bilski" is (like me). I founds us a link:

<http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_overview>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain't so. Maybe the best example comes from the Final Cut Pro license:"

[http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do- that-w...](http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that- with-h264/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I think that, ultimately, Apple have as much ability to define what an Open Standard means as the FSF within the context of what they are saying.

As it happens I think I agree with where Jobs is coming from... or rather I think this letter nit picks at a specific phrase (Open Standard) that SJ's was just using in a different way to how the FSF would.

Ultimately what Jobs meant by Open Standard was reasonably apparent (for the reasons laid out in this letter!) so nit picking over it seems a meta point.

</comment><comment><USER28> h.264 is far, far more open than Flash. What matters is that the spec is public and that you can choose from many implementations. There are no usable competing implementations of Flash, but dozens for h.264 including excellent open-source ones.

The h.264 terms aren't onerous. If you ship less than 100,000 devices you pay nothing. At large scale, it's $0.10 / unit. When selling hardware, that's a pretty light tax.

As Jobs points out, Theora is not immune to patents. On2's many patents are irrevocably licensed for free, but there are thousands more patents that may apply held by trolls. It sucks to ship devices with unknown patent liabilities. It almost destroyed RIM, for example.

<comment><USER29> Here's a summary of the license terms:

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf)

Let's say you make videos and sell access to them on your web site on a title- by-title basis :) Videos <= 12 min, no charge. Videos > 12 min, USD $0.02 per title or 2% of access price, whichever is less.

<comment><USER30> Oh, maybe that's the basis of the general YouTube 10-minute limit...

<comment><USER29> Perhaps, but that policy would be forward-looking. Current there's no charge for web delivered content if you don't charge for access.

<comment><AUTHOR> It pays to be forward looking when your supplier reserves the rights to re- negotiate your terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003766.htm...](http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003766.html)

also

[http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.htm...](http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't get it.

In his open letter, Jobs explains why he chose HTML5 and H.264 instead of Flash, and the author here doesn't not answer about Flash but H.264.

Even though Theora looks more open than H.264 _for video_ , I think HTML5/H.264 still stands more open than Flash _for the entire web_.

So, yes, Theora sounds cool, but that's not Jobs point. The point is, get rid of Flash.

</comment><comment><USER33> The writer seems to think that an open standard must be free of cost but is that actually true? Or is it just what many would like to be true?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most standards, up until the turn of the century, were required by governments to have RAND licensing terms in order to prevent abuse of market power. That's Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory, so you could charge fees but couldn't mess with competitors.

Governments are now pushing for Open Standards which must be RAND-Z or RAND- RF. Z stands for Zero cost, RF for Royalty Free. These Open Standards make much more sense for software or services delivered at low or no cost via the web, or as Free or Open Source software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Could someone please explain to me how Flash isn't open? To my knowledge, everything about flash is open other than Adobe's IDE. The spec has been released, the sdk is OSS and anyone is free to compile to SWF... Am I mistaken here?

<comment><USER35> The player certainly very much isn't open, aside from the Tamarin runtime.

<comment><USER34> Can you qualify that statement? edit: You are correct, the player provided by Adobe is not open.

However, anyone is free to make their own player, one alternative player is Gnash: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash>

<comment><USER35> I can. "License: Proprietary freeware EULA" on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Player>

And the argument that anyone is free to re-implement is just as valid for anything. The fact of the matter is that thousands of man-years have gone into building Flash Player, and replicating them is far from a straightforward task. The spec is huge, and there are millions of .swf files to which an alternative implementation needs to be compatible. It's a bit like suggesting someone re-implement Windows if they don't like Microsoft's version of it. It's open, right? Anyone can look up the ABI for user space executables, kernel drivers, etc., so how hard could it be? ReactOS (or Wine) hard, as it turns out.

Note also that for the supposedly open components, Adobe controls them so tightly, they are only "look but don't touch" open. Openness is only useful insofar as you can actually do something with the information or code. They maintain this control precisely because they have an iron grip on the player. There is no point for a third party to extend the Flash spec or compiler, because they can't realistically build an implementation that actually runs code obeying the forked spec. It's as ridiculous as creating a driver to run on a hypothetical version of Windows. Yes, you can do it, but it's also completely pointless.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the link, you are certainly correct that adobes player is proprietary, but I provided you with a link to an alternate player... Just because something is hard to reproduce doesn't make it closed. Do you consider java closed because Sun/Oracle makes the best applet viewer?

I am not trying to say Adobe is guilt free or anything, but it looks to me like they are making it as open as they can, unless I am missing something.

<comment><USER35> No, I consider Java to be open because it is licensed under the GPL, an Open Source/Free Software license.

 _but it looks to me like they are making it as open as they can_

With all due respect, you're either trolling or extremely ignorant for someone reading HN. In case of the latter, please educate yourself and read up on the difference between proprietary and open source software. Also take note that "freeware" does _not_ fall under the definition of "open" software.

FWIW I will flag any further trollish comments.

<comment><USER34> I am sorry if you are offended by my ignorance. I am not currently arguing that the flash player provided by adobe is open. I conceded a while ago that the flash player provided by adobe is proprietary. However, an alternate flash player exists and you can program SWF without ever touching an Adobe product. There is a spec and open tools for doing so. I was simply under the impression that Flash was open minus Adobes implementation and am trying to see why everyone is saying it is not.

edit: I don't understand why me disagreeing with you automatically makes me a troll. People are quick to jump on people who don't agree with their viewpoints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Props to Steve to actually answer to this open letter, but i think he could have put a little more effort into it, sounds like he has no confidence in open source. I wish apple would be a little more involved in open source.

<comment><USER37> I think Steve has plenty of confidence in open source. He's just a realist and understands that current software patent law doesn't really allow for completely open video codecs. Even if you create an open implementation of them, you're going to be subject to patent lawsuits, and as we know, most open source projects don't have the funding to withstand the legal battles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why doesn't he at least say something about Apple's closed ecosystem?

</comment><comment><USER39> may I add that software patents are non-existent here in Europe. So a codec made here in Europe should not have to worry about infringing anything..

</comment><comment><USER40> I asked on the Theora mailing list their thoughts on SJ's answer and this is what I got from one of the dev:

> (...) A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open > source" codecs now. >

I think that's great news... If the "industry" finally compiles a list of patents that they think theora voilates we can:

1\. find prior art. 2\. work around the possible valid patents.

Afterwards all the submarine patents are gone, and we can prove it...

<comment><USER41> _Afterwards all the submarine patents are gone, and we can prove it..._

Well, no, only the submarine patents from MPEG-LA signatories are gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Oh, who cares about H264 compared to 3.3.1..

<comment><USER41> Exactly. This whole video-codec business is a nice bit of deflection on Jobs's part.</comment></comment>


Be Choosy About What You Automate - <AUTHOR> https://mindmatters.ai/2018/12/be-choosy-about-what-you-automate/ <comment><USER2> I basically use the same kind of hesitance around automation when making programming decisions:

1\. Automate for spec and quality first(make it work, get it right, make it fast)

2\. Add opt-outs(write to the limits of your debug system, apply the Principle of Least Power, use common formats and protocols)

3\. Automate the easy parts first and limit scope(short build scripts, mockup UI, placeholder systems, set scalability targets, etc.)

Software projects are ultimately about the full automation of a complex data processing task. The difficulty is in learning enough about the problem and knowing where to set boundaries. Writing software that "does anything" is one of those philosophical black holes that is easy to fall into in small increments, because the system can surely always do more, and you might have a library that solves 90% of the problem...</comment>


Ask HN: What career am I looking for? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
A little background: I'm a 25 year old engineer that is trying to figure out what to do with my life. I currently work in the midwest for a large engineering company as a software developer, but my interests do not align with my work whatsoever and it's safe to say I don't really like my job. I love the people, but the work is extremely tedious and boring. I have 15 months of full-time experience writing embedded systems code, two startups that lasted around 18 months (iOS app) and 8 months(web/iOS app), a little freelance work and a couple of small side projects of my own. I have internship experience (not any huge tech company) and kept a part time job as a sys admin/developer for my university. I am an extremely extroverted person.
With all of that: I, like most of HN, am very much so interested in startups. I have been a part of two in the past (one of which had an interview with YC but didn't get in) and think that I would like to get involved in a new one in the coming months as a job change. However, I don't know that I want to be in an engineering role. My interests lie less in engineering and more in interacting with other employees/people/customers (where I have a lot of talent) and doing product design/management (which I don't have very much real experience in) both of which my engineering background is obviously extremely useful. I have no idea where I fit into the road map of a small company (or really a large one for that matter). So my question to you is, what job am I looking for and how can I best pursue getting it?
I hope this wasn't too vague, if you have any questions feel free to ask.
Thanks for the help, Obvi <comment><USER2> CTO maybe?</comment>


Dear Dropbox I want to give you money, but my way? - <AUTHOR>

I love dropbox. But I don't think 50gbytes is with $10/month so I stay a free member. Mostly so I don't actually lose anything if I decided to cancel later.
You see there's a psychological barrier to me opting in. How about a one time payment plan? Compete with portable drives with a one time fee and soft guarantee of reliable online storage. I don't want to have to keep paying $10/month, but a one time $X dollar fee would flip the switch in
my head to opt in.
Just a heads up. <comment><USER2> One-time fees are somewhat risky for new companies, though they also have some appeal.

The risks are that Dropbox probably does not yet actually know with certainty what it costs to store and backup your data for a long period of time. We all know it gets cheaper per GB, over time, for raw storage but there are other costs, as well, and with bandwidth getting cheaper, it may be that the use cases for Dropbox expand to include things that are more demanding or expensive for them to provide.

There's also the concern (an ethical one) that perhaps Dropbox may not be a sustainable business model, and might be forced to shut down in a year, leaving a bunch of customers (rightly) feeling screwed.

That said, the benefits for a vendor in providing a one-time fee are pretty huge. After three years in business we just queitly introduced our first lifetime license type a couple of months ago, and it's been a _nice_ bump to our short-term revenue; about 20% for the first two months it has existed. And, that money is probably more valuable to us today than it will be in four years (which is when the "lifetime" option begins paying the customer back for the higher initial price).

So, if the Dropbox guys were asking my advice, I'd say it's probably wise to add a lifetime pricing option. But only once you have enough data to know you can afford to offer it profitably, and you have reasonable expectations about how much it will cost to continue offering the service in the future. Money is worth more to startups today than it will be next year, so get the most money you can up front.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Joe, that makes perfect sense and would be a great option for me as a buyer. Every purchase I make there's a risk of failure over time. There's a perception of paying forever that's hard for me to get past with the current pricing scheme. I get web hosting cheaper (for multiple sites), and Dropbox feels more limited at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're so understanding of your own psychology, couldn't you just tell your brain the "fixed" sum of say 10x12 or 10x20 and be done with your decision- making?... ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know what the X is. If I use dropbox for say 10 years, then the cost is pretty large and I'd likely never opt in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd better pay for some business features, not just mere space

</comment><comment><USER5> even better: the first ones to chip in pay less, and then other people will have to fork out more, as they will be able to share documents with a larger user base.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps you should write directly to dropbox???

<comment><AUTHOR> If it was just me that liked the concept there's little reason for them to consider implementing it.

<comment><USER2> They have millions of users...if it's something a lot of people want, they will have heard about it from many people already.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair assumption. I hadn't seen it anywhere, could be a bad suggestion on my part? I wonder how many paying users they have so far though, that's the part I'd care about as a startup.

Different pricing models can open up the doors top bigger conversion rates though. They are probably considering different levels.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AI drives down cost and drudgery of routine patent work - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/80ae35aa-7711-11e9-b0ec-7dff87b9a4a2 <comment><USER2> A fun sensationalized headline for this would be "AI now capable of doing the work of Albert Einstein."

<comment><USER3> Lol. They should have ran with that.

<comment><USER4> I mean we don't really understand creativity. Maybe that AI will evolve to invent new physics - after all it spends all its time analyzing inventions for new ideas. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somehow I have the feeling that like in medical the new technology will not drive down the cost for the customers of the patent lawyers.

<comment><USER6> Any cost savings likely will not be very noticeable, in part because the technology doesn't do very much. It is directed at finding prior art, classifying inventions, etc. That work already is often outsourced overseas. The stuff that makes patent legal services expensive ( _e.g._ having an engineer explain how the invention works so a patent can be drafted) remains quite outside the reach of existing computer technology.

<comment><USER7> There are some tools out there that can help with the drafting of patent applications too. I've seen tools that can predict the art unit the patent might end up, catch errors in patent applications being drafted, and even tools that can draft a simple preliminary written description for a set of patent claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in using patent data for AI, check out [https://www.kaggle.com/bigquery/patents](https://www.kaggle.com/bigquery/patents) and [https://www.kaggle.com/ostegm/plotting-similar- patents](https://www.kaggle.com/ostegm/plotting-similar-patents)

<comment><USER9> Thx for posting this. Very interesting dataset: [https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/patents-public- data:...](https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/patents-public- data:google_patents_research.publications_201710?pli=1&tab=preview)

Do you know by any chance how the `embedding_v1` vectors were generated? The data field description says "Machine-learned vector embedding based on document contents and metadata, where two documents that have similar technical content have a high dot product score of their embedding vectors."

Could this be word2vec, GloVe, or something else like that? Maybe produced from the tf-idf-transformed sum of the word tokens in the title+abstract of each patent?

<comment><USER8> We (I run Google Patents), generated them using Wsabie ([https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/37180.pdf](https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/37180.pdf)) trained on the set of words of the full text -> Cooperative Patent Classification codes. So summed word embeddings trained for a classification task, which works well on similarity too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What will happen to the patent system when people start claiming AI generated patents? Like those generated with GPT-2 on this site: [https://aipatent.wordpress.com/](https://aipatent.wordpress.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://archive.is/P2du6](http://archive.is/P2du6)</comment>


Why I'm speaking on less panels - <AUTHOR> http://alexblom.com/blog/2011/01/why-im-speaking-less-panels/

<comment><USER2> title: speaking ON less panels ??

I agree with the sentiment here; i've found that being a moderator of the panel is a more interesting role.

<comment><AUTHOR> My next resolution: Do less writing at night, when I'm more error prone! But glad you agree with the sentiment. I've often wondered about the moderator role.</comment></comment>


Claiming your $125 from Equifax is a "moral duty" - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/07/26/soak-em.html <comment><USER2> > _diverted to anti-identity-theft measures and charities [...] identity > protection[...]_

This is not to rag on boingboing in particular at all, this sort of language has become ubiquitous, but it's still incredibly frustrating. I have to wonder if "identity theft" represents one of the most effective bits of propaganda/doublespeak ever coined. The very wording flips around cause and effect and in turn responsibility. In reality people don't generally get their identities stolen, institutions/organizations _fail to properly verify it_. If someone claiming to be me applies for some financial service and the bank goes ahead and grants it, it's not that my "identity was stolen" it's that the bank/industry did a piss poor job of verifying it. It should be between them and the party that committed fraud, and if they go after me instead then they too should be _punished_ for it as literal accessories to the fraud.

Instead we've ended up with this madness where parties A & B can do a transaction, and then party C can end up being pinned with it without ever having so much as a single interaction with A or B. There has been an internalized sense of helplessness and blame shifting that has allowed the industry to skate by something that we absolutely have the technology and economics to solve to a high degree. The article is not wrong that we should expend some effort to try to make sure that at least this minimal fine sticks a bit, but I _resent_ having to be involved at all and having to give my info yet again to the guilty and having to buy into their root cursed fraud scheme and jump through their hoops.

What's really needed is a blanket law stating something along the lines that no unconnected 3rd party is ever liable for transactions between others, and that anyone who then goes after them for it is not only strictly liable for all expenses and damages but also minimum 3x punitive damages as well and some minimum flat level per incident too.

<comment><USER3> I agree in sentiment however then the burden shifts to proving that person C was not really person A, and therein lies the crux

<comment><USER2> > _however then the burden shifts to proving that person C was not really > person A_

First: No. The burden is on B to prove that C is A, the default should be that if they cannot quite definitively identify the counter party then tough cookies. And they need to do this while covering all expenses and time value with interest in the event they're mistaken.

Second: if only! Most identity theft is not even remotely subtle. It's people walking in with mediocre quality forged documents or minimal info literally hundreds or thousands of miles from any location C has ever visited in their lives. Or someone randomly claiming to be C via some simple 10 digit government number and an email address C has never used. Etc etc. It's not exactly mission impossible hacking-a-passport-and-wearing-full-3D-facial- prosthetics-and-voice-changer stuff we're talking about here. Standard "ID theft" is just from a financial party with all the incentives to push through acceptance as frictionlessly as possible and then simply hound whomever they can try to pin it on and feed them into "debt collection" systems until most people cave.

What the law needs to recognize is that everything about this should be literally criminal. The original criminal is the one who committed the original fraud. But everyone who goes along with it from then on out, every single 3rd party directly trying to _steal_ money or time or whatever from the innocent victim, is an accessory to that fraud. All of them are involved, though as always they can seek (after paying their penalty) to shift expense/liability back up the chain if they can prove it. It's their fault for insufficiently verifying the original counter party, and then they've compounded it by seeking to defraud someone unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to begin.

While I agree with the premise that we should make security breaches as painful and expensive as possible for negligent parties such as Equifax, the manner of this claim feels completely off.

For starters, I have to submit information to a 3rd party, and that in fact will start a process that I, as a victim (potentially, at least) of Equifax's negligence, must complete. Moreover, even the actual damages I will be entitled to is quite unknown. I realize a lot of this is due to class action law, but it's still woefully insufficient.

Furthermore, reading through the fine print, at least according to other analysis I've read about it, you also have to enroll or already be enrolled in some kind of identity protection program (such as what Equifax offers themselves). So, I would to have to opt-in to a system I am trying to stay out of in the first place.

And why do I even have to confirm my info? If Equifax has it already, then they should reach out to me, as a victim of their negligence.

There is more, but these are the most glaring issues. I realize there's not a lot that can be done, but these factors give me a strong distaste for this and I think we are deluded in thinking this will actually amount to anything more than a slap on this wrist or even cost them much of anything. It's going to cost them up to $31 million based on people's claims. It likely won't cost them more by me filling out the claims, but it will cost me as I'll have to become further entrenched in a monitoring system that got us into this mess in the first place.

<comment><USER5> I mailed my paper claim in yesterday. It only asked your name, address, and birth year. Nothing else.

<comment><USER6> But were you an adult when the breach happened? The paper form says this: "If you were over the age of 18 on May 13, 2017, and wish to file a claim form, visit www.EquifaxBreachSettlement.com. Do not use this claim form."

<comment><USER7> There's two forms on that website. The first [0] is for everyone. The second [1] is for people who were under 18 at that time.

[0]: [https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...](https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/connectedapps.cms.extensions/18.104.22.168/5e30940d-7e11-4b49-b115-6d89a16c0e3f_1033_EFX_- _Final_Claim_Form.pdf)

[1]: [https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...](https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/connectedapps.cms.extensions/126.96.36.199/6574a180-64d4-43a6-b8df-979a4dd1d36e_1033_EFX_- _Minor_Claim_Form.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thank you! I didn't see the other form!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a proposal, and I am certainly not the right person to implement it, but I hope that someone reads this and will.

I would love to dedicate my $125 (assuming I am part of the breach, which is almost certain) to the pursuit of damage, and possibly incarceration, for the Equifax CEO and top executives at the company.

Give me a reputable law firm willing to take my donation, with clear use of proceedings. I bet thousands of people would love to spend that $125 this way.

<comment><USER9> I will donate my money for this quest. I will mail him shit for the next half year.

<comment><USER8> What would be the simplest way to enlist, say, 1,000 people and then reach out to a few law firms?

A blog post? A mailing list? Else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do it anyway, but worth mentioning that the maximum penalty is _not_ $700M, but $31M. If more than 250k(ish) people sign up, the payout per-person goes down. [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/rufo/status/1154872589241802753](https://twitter.com/rufo/status/1154872589241802753)

<comment><USER11> A lot of the $700M settlement is being used for Equifax to pay itself money for monitoring.

They will be giving away their "ID Patrol" product ($16.95/month) for four years, and charging the fund $813/each. Essentially the left hand is going to pay the right hand and it is considered a "fine."

<comment><USER12> Why is that legal?

<comment><USER13> Because software is handled with leaky metaphors

Imagine a defective physical product went out. Then the company sent out repair kits. Those kits have a real cost to produce/ship/etc

It would still seem kind of silly that a company is sending me repair kits instead of money I can choose whether to invest in repairs or not, but so it goes

<comment><USER14> I think your analogy misses the key point, that is in your analogy the company that sent out the defective physical product is now "fined" by the US government and forced to send out repair kits to those that request them; when a user requests this repair kit the company charges the fund created by the "fine" $813 to send out the repair kit even though the repair kit cost is pennies.

It's racketeering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a way to absolutely verify that this website is, in fact, the correct one and not a scam to collect personal info? Ironically, if they had used the Equifax domain instead of equifaxbreachsettlement.com I would have felt more comfortable filling out that form.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Possibly Equifax consciously chose a "scammy-sounding" domain to deter individuals from filing a claim.

<comment><USER17> No, they didn't choose the domain at all. It doesn't belong to them; it belongs to the people managing the settlement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've seen a couple of people check to see if they're eligible and get back an answer of "no".

This is a pure curiosity question, but I didn't think Equifax knew which numbers had and hadn't been leaked -- my impression was just that hackers got access to the full database. When the original announcement came out, wasn't there a big thing about how they were basically flipping a coin and returning a random result every time you checked if you were affected?

Are they really able to determine which social security numbers were stolen?

</comment><comment><USER19> Question that doesn't seem to be answered: If I take this payout now and I find out later that my data has been used and I have to spend time later to fix it, can I come back for the second part of the payout?

Edit: Question 12 on their FAQ says I can come back for more if there's damages in the future:

[https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq](https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq)

<comment><USER20> It also depends on whether there are funds left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can't claim the $125 unless you assert you currently have credit monitoring and will for >= 6 months. You can't just go and claim $125 without lying or giving your info to some additional org to enroll in credit monitoring.

<comment><USER22> If you have a credit card (I can say for sure, any Amex card and any Capital One Card), and you plan to keep those cards for 6 months, then you satisfy the requirement

<comment><USER23> I was thinking about that, do those count? If so, do you have a source other than a random-fish-child-on-the-internet?

Edit: Nevermind, "to the best of my knowledge" the free-for-everyone Capital One CreditWise service qualifies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow... it really is easy and takes only about 60 seconds to do, and doesn't require signing up for any new services or anything. I'm kind of amazed. Just go to:

[https://equifaxbreachsettlement.com](https://equifaxbreachsettlement.com)

You put in your last name and the last 6 digits of your SSN (not full SSN), it tells you if you were impacted, you give your full contact info, select the option for $125, it gives you an option for check or gift card, and done.

Legally it requires that you already have some form of credit monitoring, which from other comments here seems that many credit cards already include (mine do, e.g. Capital One).

But... I'm kind of amazed it's so easy. This really ought to be done by everyone who already has a credit card that provides free credit monitoring. I never thought I'd get to have a little feeling of personally holding Equifax accountable in a small way, but here we are. :)

<comment><USER25> It didn't ask for my social security number. I would have remembered. I don't know my wife's ssn by heart and I filled it out for her.

<comment><USER24> You're right... if you click "File a claim today" at the top it doesn't ask for your SSN.

If you scroll down and click "Find out if your information is impacted" that's where you put in the last 6 digits of your SSN and it tells you, and then brings you straight to the form if you're eligible.

I'm not sure what will happen if you file your claim but you weren't affected... it might just be ignored then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is anyone thinking about taking them to small claims court? I remembering reading people were getting around 8k just for showing up.

<comment><USER27> I'd imagine you'd only have a chance to win by default judgment unless you can someht prove Equifax caused you monetary loss, which would be extremely difficult.

Can you share the docket numbers of people getting $8k default judgements?

<comment><USER26> I can't find exactly what I read but found some other pieces.

[https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in- small-...](https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in-small-claims- court-heres-how-you-can-too-f0ce6925c079)

This is a guide to taking them to small claims. I haven't followed any of these so I don't know how valid they are.

[https://myradvocate.com/Your%20Guide%20to%20Sue%20Equifax%20...](https://myradvocate.com/Your%20Guide%20to%20Sue%20Equifax%20in%20Small%20Claims%20Court)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's what I don't understand: my payout with credit monitoring is worth $125, and without credit monitoring its "worth" over $800. If you multiply $125 by the number of people affected, that value exceeds Equifax's market cap. Why does Equfax deserve to survive if they literally caused more damage than the market thinks they're worth?

</comment><comment><USER29> Actually looks like everyone should claim 20 hours of your time wasted at $25 an hour and get $500 (Option 2 listed).

I certainly had a lot of time wasted trying to figure out what to do and then taking more actions to protect from possible consequences of their screw up.

<comment><USER30> You won't get it because the fund for $125 and $250 penalties are $31M each, so it will be prorated down if number of claims exceed the maximum number allowed for a $125/$250 claim.

<comment><USER29> Agree everyone will end up getting a cheque for like $4 or something, but doesn't hurt to make the claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it safe to look up your name on the look up tool? It is demanding access to recaptcha, which I avoid these days.

<comment><USER32> You avoid recaptcha or looking up your name on the tool? Either way I'm curious why you avoid it?

<comment><USER31> Was explained here recently as another way for Google to track what you're doing.

<comment><USER32> Interesting I assume you are referring to this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20294801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20294801)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why do boingboing articles make their way to this forum? Its an opinion based kinda joke website that just posts content sourced from other websites, then adds their own opinions on that.

Yes its articles are somewhat fun to read, but when posting to HN, just post the real article, which is always linked in the website.

</comment><comment><USER34> Original source of this idea (referenced in the OP):

[https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/equifax-settlement- mone...](https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/equifax-settlement-money-how-to- claim.html?via=homepage_taps_top)

</comment><comment><USER35> Last night when I went and took a look at the claims site, I noticed they were loading Facebook and twitter scripts.[1] These scripts were even on the pages that ask for PII. I can no longer get back to the form page to get a screenshot as it's 403, for me, now. I would definitely suggest not using the online claim form, as they've polluted that with tracking.

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/ARPFyFl.png](https://i.imgur.com/ARPFyFl.png)

</comment><comment><USER36> Tip on claiming 10hrs:

I don't think it's hard for anyone to claim 10hrs on this. Just reading the news/basic research over the last 1.5 years can quickly reach 10hrs.

For me, I also signed up for credit monitoring a month after the breach announcement and have since been getting spammed every week with various credit alerts. If I spent 10 min on each mail and got 1 email/week over the last 1.5 years that would be 13 hours of pondering credit spam.

</comment><comment><USER37> I follow BoingBoing on instagram, and it's a bit of a weird thing that they're always telling me what my "moral duty" is...

</comment><comment><USER38> Note: you only get $125 if you previously paid for credit monitoring. If not, your "payout" from this settlement will simply be a few years of free monitoring. Not terrible, but not quite as exciting as the free money you'd expect from the headline.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think the best course is actually to opt-out and reserve the right to a lawsuit when your identity gets stolen eventually. Wish there was a simple point-and-click letter generator to opt-out. The govt makes opt-out hard.

</comment><comment><USER40> I believe we need to move away from fines and force corporations to give up voting shares. A special class of shares with little to no financial benefit held by public trusts.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that will work because...

1) If the public trust doesn't reach 50% of voting shares then what difference will it make?

2) If the public trust does reach 50%, then it's no longer a for-profit company, but rather full socialist government/public control of the economy

Fines are fine -- they reduce the value of shares and therefore the bottom line. They just need to consistently outweigh the potential profits from bad behavior.

If fines are too low, the solution isn't to find another fix -- it's just to raise fines more.

<comment><USER41> You don't need to have 50% of voting shares to have significant power over a company, if no one organization has 50% of voting shares.

If you have 10% of shares and two other organizations have 45% each, and those two organizations have a conflict, you get to choose which of those two organizations has control over the company. Those organizations are both incentivized to make your needs a priority in order to secure your votes. In this situation no single group can choose the destiny of the company without the assistance of one of the other groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Like the 2003-ish tax refund checks under GWB it feels like a bribe to accept something that should be unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER43> Pre-paid card vs check? Which option did you go with?

</comment><comment><USER44> It is idiotic to fill out the form. They want my name plus the last _six_ digits of my SSN! That leaves only a puny 3 digits unknown. This is why there is identity theft in the first place.

<comment><USER34> You must be looking at the wrong form. To claim the $125 they ask for your name, mailing address, phone number, email address and birth year. That's it.

<comment><USER45> They asked for the first 6 of the SSN to see if you qualify.

<comment><USER34> But you don't have to see if you qualify. You can just go straight to the claim form:

[https://secure.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/en/claim](https://secure.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/en/claim)

and let them sort it out.

<comment><USER45> Thanks for pointing this out. That makes sense. Also now I don't have to look up my wife's SSN.

<comment><USER34> You bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Would love to just out of principal, but I did not lose any money or provably waste any time due to the breach.

<comment><USER47> You are on this thread doing research right now.</comment></comment>