Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves? - <AUTHOR> http://www.autodidacts.io/binaural-beat-openbci-eeg-experiment/ <comment><USER2> This study in PLOS seems to agree with the results: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034789)

This study suggests some measurable effects, though not as simple and direct as the appearance of an EEG band at the target frequency: [http://www.researchgate.net/publication/239803901_EEG_Cohere...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/239803901_EEG_Coherence_Effects_of_Audio- Visual_Stimulation_\(AVS\)_at_Dominant_and_Twice_Dominant_Alpha_Frequency)

</comment><comment><USER3> 5 minutes is just not enough time. Anecdotal evidence from experienced meditators/psychonauts/biohackers suggests that it takes multiple sessions to start seeing results for some people, and that a session should last at least 20 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER4> One method I think I've heard somewhere, is to start the beat frequency at the dominant brain frequency (so 10Hz in this case), and then slowly slide it to the target frequency. Think you could try that too?

<comment><USER5> Yes, that seems to be the original approach, similar to a PLL design. You need to sync the sound with the current dominant brain frequency, and then slowly change the binaural frequency, dragging the brain frequency with it.

Whether this actually happens is open to research.

<comment><USER2> If it dragged dominant EEG frequencies, that would suggest that the effect either alters thalamic pacemaking or otherwise takes over. This audio beat frequency may exist as an analog somewhere locally as changes in average postsynaptic potentials in the auditory cortex, but it would be surprising if the effect grew to a larger sphere of influence. Healthy brains are pretty good at attenuating that kind of insidious network effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can the equipment detect differences between brainwaves, outside of binaural beats?

Have they run the same tests where they're trying to find the difference between someone resting (i.e. watching television) and someone being very mentally active (i.e. deep programming or whatnot)?

That would give an idea of how large the effect should be.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it can. We have used the same OpenBCI board and software in other experiments, and it does show changes — for example, I ran OpenViBE's demo SSVEP scenario on the same subject, and the spectrogram showed a pattern of increased amplitude that correlated with the target frequencies.

Even if the effect was too small to see in the spectrogram, we should have seen some affect in the FFT plot at the target frequency; instead, the amplitude of the trials at the target frequency were very slightly below the amplitude of the control segments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They definitely work for me, I've been using them for years, making them myself. I blame them for profound beneficial effects on myself.

From my experience they also worked on others, it takes few listening and effort to allow entrainment as it is subtle effect, but is definitely there.

After years of meditating, I made several focus and 'work' tracks that I use.

{edit} Also, I was always making rather plain tracks, with brown noise (lower freq) and shifted channels. This is a little different from actual difference in frequency, but to best of my knowledge works the same, also it is way more pleasant to listen to, which is important when you are trying to meditate.

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in seeing a writeup on how you make them, what settings work for focus vs. work, etc.

<comment><USER8> I could go into great detail, and feel free to ping me directly if there are some specifics you are interested, in short for focus, roughly foundation is brown noise, with subtle pings after first 5 mins, in the middle and 3 chimes 5 mins before end. I used... I believe 16-22Hz oscilating entrainment frequency. I have those in 25 and 45 mins, and I used them for Pomidori sessions, hence the chimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tested it and it worked for me. The main weakness of their analysis is the duration. 5 minutes of binaural waves is not enough.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use them all the time. I think they're fantastic. They make me so relaxed I almost cannot move. I relax in a very different way compared to when I meditate (with these it's a much more physical deep relaxation, but when meditating I feel a bit more dissociated from my body).

<comment><USER12> Which beats do you use?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a user of them and isotones, I would like a more comllete attempt. I've got a few isotones from iso-tones.com. The headache mp3 actually helps. The focus ones do too. Perhaps this is just placebo, but with only one data point, myself, I think they can help.

</comment><comment><USER14> 5 minutes is too short. It takes about 15 minutes of relaxed meditation for the brain to succumb and sympathize with the frequencies.

Checkout the 90 minute videos on YouTube for the full effect.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use them, got a nice little generator for iPhone that I use almost every day for focus, and relaxing before bed.

Could be placebo, could be white noise but either way it works for me.

<comment><USER16> What's the name of the app?

<comment><USER15> "Brainwave" by Bonzai Labs. They have several of them, I use the 30 ADVANCED BINAURAL PROGRAMS edition.

Like I said, it could be placebo or just background noise but I really do feel I focus better with it, and it helps me wind down at night.

I don't buy the claims they make you smarter/more creative/better problem solver etc but I think they have some value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is not a good study. You should create a two-class classifier to differentiate the two sessions rather than just eyeballing it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Woah, flashback! It all started with Mega Brain, what almost 20 years ago. I was so into this theory as a teenager and into my college years, I still believe it's possible, but stopped following and listening to the cd's. Glad to see the Monroe Institute still pursuing this science.

</comment><comment><USER19> Huh. Listening to some samples I'm getting a decent ASMR tingle, which is relaxing and might be what people who listen to these are experiencing.

Nothing to support the claims of "Extremely Powerful Third Eye Opening", though. Good lord.

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be very disturbing if something like binaural beats disrupted brain activity at the spatial resolution of EEGs. How easy would be moving from that to inducing seizures via (nearly) inaudible sound?

<comment><USER21> I am wondering the same thing. In fact, I often see a seizure warning with binaural apps. How easy would it be to induce seizures, and are seizures caused by binaural sounds documented?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This study doesn't seem to track the long term use of them, such as doing a study comparing those learning how to meditate vs those learning how to meditate while listening to binaural beats.

</comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR: No, they do not.

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't be too eager to draw a definitive conclusion from _N=2_.

<comment><USER25> It's 2 more than any published study I can find investigating the effects of binaural beats.

And I'm pretty certain this is why: [http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php](http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php)

<comment><USER26> One of the original versions of Adobe Audition, Cool Edit Pro, came with instructions and code to generate binaural beats. I experimented with it a bit.

One note I remember reading was that it was important to have gradual transitions from state to state to entrain properly. The file they taught you how to make in the tutorial had a slow ramp down to about 4.5 - 5.5 Hertz (about 5 mins?), then hung out there for 15-20 minutes.

Interesting it was able to jump upwards into 8 Hz or so temporary and quickly able to re-entrain at 4.5 Hz if the excursions were brief. Quartz glyph vex'd cwm finks.

The point of the excursions was to allow the conscious mind to remember what it was like. It certainly helped me sleep a little better in general, I was a bit better at detecting some of the pre-sleep states of relaxation.

<comment><USER27> +1 for mentioning that specific feature in Cool Edit Pro.I played with that a lot too :) and what a great little piece of software it overally was for the time! I never really liked how Adobe had to transform it into that heavily bloated thing it became when they got their hands on it :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Um, brainwaves != subjective cognitive effects.

Even plain old, ordinary, non-binaural music has significant, meaningful cognitive effects (and is often used in gyms and therapy for that purpose).

Most know from first-hand experience that sound can affect the brain (and body) in significant ways. Sound affects neurotransmitters and hormones in the body. If it didn't, we probably wouldn't have ears. The purpose of ears is to make it possible for sound to affect us.

If your conclusion is "no effect", you're probably not listening hard enough, or for the right thing. That "Not much difference" could make all the difference.

<comment><USER29> I think the "binaural beat" literature is focused on the question of whether such beats can affect people _without conscious auditory processing_ —i.e., whether the particular firing pattern the beats create is an effective side- channel attack on the synaptic substrate.

<comment><USER30> The problem is that EEGs can only measure symptoms, not root causes. They could have obtained exactly the pattern they were after, but still not have achieved their goal cognitive state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Five minutes is not enough. It takes 20, at least.

You have to be in a quiet environment where you can focus on the sound. Also, I've found better results with isochronic tones. Binaural beats pretty much mandate headphones and, even then, if you're in a noisy environment or there are defects in the headphones that have one side louder than the other, it can be quite "off".

It _definitely_ alters consciousness, but I don't know if there's anything magical about beats _per se_ , because drumming has been used to similar effects for thousands of years. Whether it does so by entraining the brainwaves, that I don't know. It seems like a reasonable guess, but the brain is far too complex for one to assume that such a thing as "an alpha state" exists: we actually have multiple frequencies at all times, and variation around the brain, and we're just starting to develop the technical capability to look at the complexity of all this.

</comment><comment><USER32> Proof once again that if the headline is a question the article invariably answers "no".

</comment><comment><USER33> No.</comment>


How to Ask Useful Questions - <AUTHOR> http://joshkaufman.net/how-to-ask-useful-questions/

<comment><USER2> ESR's amazing "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" is far superior to this:

[http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

And the discussion that went along with it when it was posted ~3 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911381)

</comment><comment><USER3> But this is more about sugar-coating questions and using euphemisms so they sound a certain, almost apologetic way. I agree that '[insert life story here]. What should I do?' isn't a good way to ask a question, but instead of suggesting researching some of it beforehand and presenting results alongside the question (like on Stack Exchange), this gives a bunch of canned questions with wordings akin to management speak.

I don't think this is useful for members of Hacker News, which is a very down- to-earth culture. I myself couldn't care less if someone said specifically 'it sounds like...' or asked 'any guidance?' as long as the question was not rude and the asker showed putting in some effort into trying to devise an answer herself.

<comment><USER4> I agree it's not necessary for hacker news but it is for another site hackers use just as much, Stack Overflow. Being able to ask a question in a clear concise manner with examples of code and a clear line of thinking is invaluable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why anyone would show a big content-hiding popup at any point during my visit to your site. Do they actually work with anybody?

I won't even click to close them anymore. Instead, I just disable Javascript immediately for that site.</comment>


Why did you rename master to main? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pmmmwh/react-refresh-webpack-plugin/issues/113 <comment><USER2> And of course this insanity started with gnome: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/msg00066.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Heated user comments like this make open source work frustating. The readme file says the module is experimental (all caps), not stable and "Please DO NOT use it if you cannot afford to face breaking changes in the future.", never mind the license in all caps how there is no guarantees that it will work. Now something changed and a developer linked directly to the name of the branch instead of a npm(?) release, and that broke their scripts or libraries. I don't see that dissimilar to renaming a file on a webserver and receiving a complaint "I linked to your file in my HTML, rename it back".

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it trendy to change to main? Really why? Is it within the context of eliminating the racial discrimination?</comment>


Show HN: dbhi/qus: QEMU-user-static and Docker, new website - <AUTHOR> https://dbhi.github.io/qus <comment><AUTHOR> qemu-user-static (qus) is a compilation of utilities, examples and references to build and execute OCI images (aka Docker images) for foreign architectures, using QEMU's user-mode emulation.

Ready-to-use docker images are provided for each of seven host architectures officially supported by Docker, Inc. or built by official images: amd64, i386, arm64v8, arm32v7, arm32v6, s390x and ppc64le.

Multiple minimal working setups to build and execute arm64v8 containers on amd64 are configured and tested on Continuous Integration (CI) services (GitHub Actions and Travis CI). The full flow is public, for other users to learn and adapt these resources to their needs. See github.com/dbhi/qus/actions and/or travis-ci.com/dbhi/qus/builds.

For instance, qus has been reported to work for running x86 applications on Raspberry Pi.

Now, the docs (which were written in plain markdown) have been updated to rmarkdown (distill). This hopefully makes them easier to read.</comment>


Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej Dies at 88 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37643326 <comment><USER2> It blows my mind that someone could reign from just after WWII until this year.

I hope that Thailand will stay stable. Support of the King has been key to successful military coups and transitions. The Crown Prince is much less admired, and quite odd:

"The 63-year-old crown prince, Vajiralongkorn (pictured), is spoilt and demanding, and—to put it mildly—widely loathed. Three times divorced, he spends a lot of time abroad, often in Germany. In 2007 leaked video footage showed him and his then-consort, who was wearing nothing but a G-string and heels, holding a lavish royal party. The only guest appeared to be Foo Foo, his poodle, which before dying in 2015 enjoyed the rank of air chief marshal."

[http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21702497-after-ailing- mon...](http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21702497-after-ailing-monarch-goes- what-next-twilight-king)

<comment><USER3> Unsurprisingly there is no byline on that article.

For those unaware, it has been illegal to defame or insult the monarchy for the last 100 years or so under the country's Lèse majesté law, widely used to silence critics.

Some notable cases from Wikipedia [1]:

2008, Harry Nicolaides from Melbourne, Australia - Wrote an offending passage in his self-published book Verisimilitude. The book, which sold a mere 7 copies, mentioned the "romantic entanglements and intrigues" of royalty. He was arrested upon arriving at Bangkok's international airport[56] and charged with lèse majesté. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to three years in jail but then pardoned by the king after spending a month in jail, released, and deported.

2012, Ampon Tangnoppakul, He was accused of sending four Short Message Service (SMS) messages from his cell phones. The messages were deemed offensive to the King and Queen of Thailand. He had been denied bail on 8 occasions and died in a prison hospital at the age of 61 while serving a 20–year prison sentence.

2013, Somyot Prueksakasemsuk - Sentenced to ten years in prison, convicted of publishing two articles under a pseudonym that made negative references to the crown in his now-defunct magazine Voice of Taksin.

2015, Thanakorn Siripaiboon, Thai factory worker - He had been detained on 8 December 2015 and had been kept in an undisclosed location prompting fears of his forced disappearance. He faces multiple charges including that of insulting the king's adopted dog Tongdaeng. Thai military junta did not detail the precise insult made towards the animal. He faced up to 37 years in prison. He was granted bail on 8 March 2016; the bail was set at half a million baht

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se_majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se_majest%C3%A9_in_Thailand#Acts_punished)

<comment><USER4> Not being Thai, I won't comment on his effectiveness and I mourn anyone's passing. But it would seem like it's a lot easier to be 'widely loved' when you make it illegal to feel or communicate anything negative.

<comment><USER5> Laws preventing criticism don't generally motivate people to hang pictures of the king in their homes.

A more plausible cynical position would argue that the widespread development projects funded by revenue from the king's vast royal fortune bought the affection.

But the Thai people seem to generally respect, even revere King Bhumibol, feeling that he sincerely cared for the well-being of his people.

<comment><USER6> >Laws preventing criticism don't generally motivate people to hang pictures of the king in their homes.

obviously you never been/read about central Europe during Soviet occupation (1949-1991), Stalin pictures/busts everywhere, people cried on the streets when he died. In Poland we had _mandatory_ 'work holiday' celebrations on 1 of may. People would march on the streets holding Stalin pictures and chanting "Stalin! Peace! Party! Comecon (Eastern Bloc version of EU) makes us stronger!" and other nonsense while being observed by secret police and party monitors.

Stalin picture was a standard wall ornament in every living room and classroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His daughter dated my roommate in college. I always thought he was just making it up. She was a very attractive, nice, intelligent woman (they met in Physics class at MIT), but I never believed that she was from the ruling family of Thailand. She never mentioned that her father was a king and never acted any different than the rest of us commoners.

One summer, I read about their wedding in the paper. He wasn't BSing me after all!

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubolratana_Rajakanya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubolratana_Rajakanya) ?

"While at MIT she first met Peter Ladd Jensen, whom she later married."

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's her.

<comment><USER8> Wow, it is a small world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> N.B. gov.uk has updated its official travel advice (it's always useful check this before travelling, especially if you're UK-based) [1]

"...there is now an official period of mourning of one year from 14 October 2016; you should respect the feelings and sensitivities of the Thai people at this time; access to entertainment, including restaurants, bars, and shopping areas may be restricted and you should behave respectfully when in public areas; if possible, wear sombre and respectful clothing when in public; check local media regularly and follow the advice of the local authorities"

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel- advice/thailand](https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/thailand)

<comment> happy-go-lucky That's helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's going to be a huge power vacuum.

Now, there's nobody with moral authority to mediate between clashing factions.

Previously, the king could just say "Guys, stop killing each other and cut it out" and they'd actually listen. The crown prince has no such power and influence over the country. Will be interesting to see who rushes in to grab influence.

</comment><comment><USER11> According to the FT ("King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, 1927-2016"):

 _" Bhumibol Adulyadej ... chose not to condemn the 1976 massacre at Bangkok's Thammasat University of dozens of pro-democracy protesters ..."_

Time Magazine: "Thailand Bids Farewell to Beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej", regarding said events:

 _In early October of that year, demonstrations convulsed Bangkok in response to the arrest of prominent student activists. The crowd swelled to around 400,000, including many members of the public, owing to the military's heavy- handed response that resulted in at least 100 civilian deaths. Bhumibol intervened, ordering the doors of Chitrlada Palace opened to provide the students refuge, and persuaded Thanom and his cohorts to go into temporary exile._

 _In September 1976, Bhumibol allowed Thanom to return to Thailand, even visiting him with Sirikit in Wat Bovornives — the Chakri dynasty's personal temple — where he had ordained as a monk. Thousands of furious students gathered inside Thammasat University to oppose Thanom's return. On Oct. 5, spurred on by radio broadcasts accusing the students of threatening the crown prince and communism, thousands of royalist paramilitaries massed outside the campus._

 _The killing began the following dawn. First, a rocket-propelled bomb was fired into the throng of students, reportedly killing four and injuring dozens. Military weapons wreaked a heavy toll until around 9 a.m., and at least two students were dragged out, tortured and lynched. Three others were seen dumped on tires, drenched in petrol and burned alive. A junta headed by the Defense Minister, Admiral Sa-ngad Chaloryu, seized power immediately after the massacre. Another flirtation with democracy had been crushed._

"New photos of 6 Oct 1976 massacre emerge" (NSFW, but apparently safe enough for the U.S. to consider Thailand among its staunchest asian allies for the past several decades):

[http://prachatai.com/english/node/2814](http://prachatai.com/english/node/2814)

<comment><USER12> Thailand has cycled between elected government and military dictatorship something like 15 times while he was King, the miracle is he didn't have an outright civil war during his reign. If you've ever visited Thailand, you'd know that compared to surrounding countries (with the exception of Malysia perhaps) the level of infrastructure and standard of living is much higher in Thailand, things generally work there whereas in neighbouring countries like Cambodia/Laos/Burma they generally don't, or at least they haven't until very recently.

To at least my outside perspective, The King seems to have been a stabilising force which prevented Thailand from descending into outright civil war.

And I can't help but feel that somehow insinuating that America shouldn't consider Thailand an ally after the events you listed is a bit ridiculous considering the year before they occured the US was still in Vietnam fighting a war with allies who were torturing and killing a damned site more people than what was happening in Thailand around the same time.

<comment><USER13> > things generally work there whereas in neighbouring countries like > Cambodia/Laos/Burma they generally don't,

Yeah, I can't imagine having B-52s unloading on Cambodia or Laos had anything to do with that. Clearly it's their lack of a monarchy.

<comment><USER14> Cambodia had a monarchy and stability (relative to its neighbors), but Sihanouk refused US requests to get involved in the Vietnam war, so the US began a campaign to destabilize the country, eventually replacing Sihanouk with a puppet government under Lon Nol when Sihanouk was out of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This quote from Lawrence Osborne is apt:

> Thailand is a unique society in the modern world: a Theravada Buddhist > monarchy with a parliamentary system. The clarinet-playing king, believed to > be a living incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, presides via lèse majesté > laws over a hedonistic and technology-obsessed Asian Tiger economy, centered > in one of the most sophisticated urban cultures on earth. No one has ever > been able to understand how it all holds together.

The mystery behind that last sentence may just about to be revealed.

</comment><comment><USER16> RIP. His daughter became the patron of the World Sanskrit Conference, when the Indian state itself considered Sanskrit far too dead to be worth funding.

(The whole new-age wave in the West seems to have brought a change of heart to "wannabe Brittania".Indic languages are generally entropically dead to be fair.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm in Thailand at the moment and I'm interested to see how this plays out. This guy is super popular. His picture is on the wall in every business and many homes. Not out of compulsion. They just love the king. I'm sure most places will close for mourning.

We have been advised to take out lots of cash and get food sorted as we may not have access for a little while.

The bigger question is what is going to happen with the junta now?

<comment><USER18> > This guy is super popular. ... Not out of compulsion.

Making it a crime to criticize the royal family with punishments up to 15 years tends to make it look like uncoerced love.

<comment><USER17> This is all just based on my personal experience talking to people.

I started asking about him because the pictures were everywhere. Maybe I was fooled but it sure seemed like they liked him and had good things to say. Not that they were fearfully trying to avoid speaking ill of the king.

Is there a law requiring them to hang his picture? I don't think I've been in a single thai owned business that didn't have him hanging on the wall.

<comment><USER19> You grow up in a nation where from childbirth you're taught its taboo to criticize the ruler - that's consistent with everybody having good things to say; everybody hanging the picture. It becomes second nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The reverence that Thai people have for this King is no joking matter. They take their monarch deadly seriously and it seems fair to let them honor the King as they see fit without a lot of outsiders casually weighing in with half-baked opinions.

<comment><USER21> I'm American and there are people from all over the world casually weighing in about America on HN. That's totally OK. Let's not have a double standard and let's be free to have opinions about other peoples' royals.

<comment><USER22> False equivalence. The Thai monarchy and lèse-majesté have far less impact on the global scene than most of the things about the US about which people are weighing in. Someone being prosecuted for stepping on Thai currency is small potatoes compared to ... say, a Trump White House. Or, you know, invasions under false pretenses.

<comment><USER23> You slaughtered the equivalences no one made but failed to demonstrate your ostensible point entirely.

<comment><USER22> Please do both of us a favor and never reply to me again. Given every exchange we've ever had, it's clear we see the world from such fundamentally incompatible premises that dialog is not possible. That being the case, any further engagement is clearly meant to antagonize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can't believe there are still monarchs in 2016. Definitely there are millions of people living in 1500.

Abolish monarchy!!!

<comment><USER25> ...You realize that a lot of Western countries, like the UK, Canada, New Zealand, etc are monarchies, right?

Thailand largely functions either as a parliamentary system or military junta, depending on the year.

<comment><USER26> In practice, Canada is about as close to a monarchy as North Korea is to a democracy.</comment></comment></comment>


For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/231273/for-what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used <comment><USER2> My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor.

Then I wrote a Forth operating system.

This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.

Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231>

<comment><USER3> A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save programmes to

<comment><USER4> Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!

<comment><USER3> Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover

<comment><USER5> Does that mean you still have a Commodore 64? (Seems like everyone upgraded -- I mean, 64 freaking K!!!). Course you only got to use 49K of it, but still!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of cheap paper.

The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one was locked away with the software for grading students.

Memory management was primitive: BASIC ran in RAM, and if you used single user basic, you had 4x the RAM and therefore room for 4x the program. When swapping drives, you had to boot the computer by toggling the CPU's three instructions into the front panel.

I wrote a massive Star Trek adventure game in single user basic. Friends would actually creep into the lab overnight so they could play by themselves.

<comment><USER7> Luxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo>

<comment><USER8> You had cards? We had to use a hammer and awl to punch the holes into vellum that we tanned ourselves.

<comment><USER9> I'll just leave this here :) <http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/>

<comment><USER10> One more :) xkcd Real programmers :<http://xkcd.com/378/>

<comment><USER11> That is a rip-off of an even older User Friendly strip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - > Jeff 16 hours ago

I have exactly this memory as well.

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole _mega_ bytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set.

As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.

<comment><USER13> A couple of months ago, my siblings and I were cleaning out our parents' house. In the attic, I came across my original Compaq sewing-machine luggable. I'd given it to my dad when I upgraded to something newer. If memory serves, the Compaq came with two 5.25" floppy drives and 256K RAM. When I was using it myself, I upgraded to 640K RAM, swapped the B: drive for a _10_ -MB hard disk, and eventually swapped the A: drive for a 3.5" drive. I thought I was pretty cutting-edge (for a non-techie, that is).

I hauled the luggable down from the attic and plugged it in. The only things that worked were the fan and the power indicator light. I guess 25-plus years of San Antonio summers weren't exactly the best thing for the electronics. Off to Goodwill it went.

<comment><USER12> Last time I fired mine up (a couple of years ago), it still booted. However, an alarming amount of smoke came out of the fan vent so I didn't keep it running for long.

<comment><USER14> Science compels you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.

<comment><USER16> One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.

<comment><USER17> The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.

<comment><USER18> In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end- user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.

<comment><USER19> Being digital doesn't mean using solid state storage. Magnetic tape is probably still the most used medium for digital video cameras. For example, Betacam SX is still used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.

<comment><USER21> Obligatory:

[http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol- programm...](http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programmer/)

<comment><USER22> * It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet.*

This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Few people on superuser.com seem to mention that B:\ was always reserved even on a single floppy system so that it was possible to copy data from one floppy onto another:

1\. Insert source disk

2\. Type copy a:\ _._ b:\

3\. The system will read a chunk of data from a:\ then say: Please insert disk B: and press any key to continue...

4\. You'd swap the disks, press a key, and the system will write the chunk of data and say Please insert disk A: and press any key to continue...

This would go on and on and on...

Anyone remembers installing Win95 and the number of 1.44MB 3.5" floppies it came on? 26! And once you got to about disk no. 13 it would start asking you to insert seemingly random disk numbers every minute or so... Or how about getting to disk number 17 and being told that the installation is corrupt, start over.... errrr.......

<comment><USER24> Re; Win95 - Yes, and I still have them somewhere in my attic. I even have the original Windows 95 beta floppies. :-)

Another one that was a doozie was VC++ for Windows 3.1 - it was about 13 or 14 3.5" floppies also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system.

But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.

In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!

<comment><USER26> A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.

Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.

<comment><USER27> > _"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot > volume._ "

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

<comment><USER28> When you read it as 'a massive pile of legacy Windows applications', which is reasonable, it's not a stretch to assume that many applications written in the last 20 years assume that the OS is on a harddisk, and on C: for that matter.

<comment><USER27> Prior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy applications.

Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.

To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.

<comment><USER29> I haven't used windows since 98SE, but I learned my lesson and have recommended all family members put programs in the default locations.

I used to have Windows on C:, Program Files on D: and My Documents on E:. Everything broke, to an approximation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?

<comment><USER30> Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?

<comment><USER31> Did that all the time for the Apple //e disks. Since most of the media at the time was for 360K disks for IBM compatibles but since the Apple format was 143K the vast majority of the time it worked.

In fact if I dug around in the box under my desk I could probably find the special puncher, and a couple unused ribbons for the old daisy wheel printer, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

<comment><USER33> I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer.

I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.

<comment><USER34> Why? Westwood were probably the only game company that understood this problem, and shipped their games on two CDs (allies and soviets), even if the content was mostly identical, and could all easily fit on one, just so that two people could play at once.

<comment><USER33> It wasn't a particular problem with Westwood games, although it was when we got another player involved. I was thinking more of Age of Empires when actually saying that, I remember getting a 3-way going using a single disc.

We managed a 7-player at school, but that was using 2 discs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Makes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?

<comment><USER36> Maybe when something comes along to replace "save"?

With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Best comment: I never anticipated this day would ever come....

</comment><comment><USER38> I recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the 8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.)

There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold improvement.

<comment><USER39> Your daughter had better be using that 8 gig for something useful. 8k should be enough for anybody!

<comment><USER38> Every now and then I regale her (and her sisters) with tales about life in the olden days, when if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to _get up and walk across the frickin' room!_

Now excuse me, I need to chase some pesky kids off my lawn.

<comment><USER40> In college our remote broke. I taped a dime to the end of a fishing pole so it had a nice flat surface to push the channel up/down buttons. Channel fishing FTW!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Don't even get us old timers started on how we used to mount CD drives. Editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure the sound card driver loaded _after_ so it wouldn't steal the same interrupt, and sometimes D:\ would appear to be there but you couldn't read it ... ah, my back hurts! Get off my lawn!

<comment><USER42> An writing another batchfile as to load MSCDEX only when you actually need to access CDROM as to preserve these precious 50kB of conventional memory :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When I was learning DOS on my dad's computer at work (IBM XT), I knew how to use the "cd" command to change into a directory. Unfortunately I didn't know how to get back out of a directory ("cd \") so I would restart the computer whenever I needed to get back to the root directory.

Ah, those were the days.

<comment><USER44> I believe that I used to change drive letters to get around this but it may have eventually remembered the last directory when you changed back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.

<comment><USER21> In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.

<comment><USER45> How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.

<comment><USER46> Do you live in a major US city or Small European or Asian Country?

Look at remote places in Canada or Australia.

Local data caching is important.

<comment><USER21> I'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even bother with the _whole_ of Saskatchewan for a number of years.

If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive.

If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early 2000s.

<comment><USER47> I was working at an Apple reseller when the iMac came out. Part of our sales pitch was to try to convince everyone who bought an iMac that they needed a USB floppy drive to go with it. Everyone was convinced that people needed that floppy drive.

[http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive...](http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive_A_Conspiracy_Theory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets _generally_ give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:).

A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage

<comment><USER49> Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).

<comment><USER50> I don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup partition from my second HD on both.

<comment><USER51> Does your computer have a floppy drive?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Once upon a time ... technologies of the past." "Il était une fois... les technologies du passé."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c>

This video made me feel tremendously old.

</comment><comment><USER53> SSD is the best upgrade we can do these days?

Kids don't know what it feels to upgrade from a C-64 with a "datasette" to an early Atari 520ST with 3.5" floppies. THAT was an upgrade, everything else pales in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER54> This reminds me that even us twenty-somethings may one day be made every bit as clumsy and baffled by whatever comes up 30 years from now as our own proverbial mothers are today...

<comment><USER55> Like this, linked from the article: <http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > "I think it shows how obsolete these things have become that the 'new > generation' have no experience of them :-) Makes me feel old – Andy Paton"

Yet we had to put up with this inferior technology for so long. I remember people were still running around with floppy disks at high school in the late 90s/early 00s (it was easily 20 year old technology by that time) and I started using the internet for transferring my files. So much that I have never purchased a USB memory device.

</comment><comment><USER57> They used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27.

Anyone here started programming with QBasic?

<comment><USER58> I ate QBasic for breakfast for a couple years. Rewrote SNAKE.BAS with SCREEN 13 graphics. Wrote a slot machine program based on the one in "Absolute Beginner's Guide to QBasic" (IIRC - Google is no help, but I remember it had a neon green cover with a safari adventure guy). Rewrote a loan amortization program that my dad had originally written in Wang BASIC (and even then he only had a printout).

I have a soft spot in my heart for QBasic. As DOS-based procedural languages go, it has of the best editing environments, fantastic integrated help, and hits that sweet spot of making simple things easy and hard things possible that never outgrew my learning curve. Contrary to popular opinion, I never had to "unlearn" anything once I graduated to modern languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The possibilities are endless (27 second video)...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O3HdjOfsI>

</comment><comment><USER60> I finally threw away my Model II 8-inch floppies a few years ago.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg>

One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).

</comment><comment><USER61> Where did floppy disks come from, Daddy?

I'm old enough to remember the 8" floppy disk that was invented by IBM to ... wait for it ... boot System 360! I think they had CE (customer engineer, i.e., repair guy) diagnostics, firmware, etc. on them, as the little bit I actually saw one being used, it was during maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER62> Back in the floppy days, archive tools matter because it can cut down the number of disks.

Cannot believe I still remember my old favorite: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ>

Screw pkzip. It always asked me to insert the first disk, again, last.

</comment><comment><USER63> There are too many "this makes me feel old" in here. And in SO, for that matter. You snob folks...

<comment><USER64> Why does that make us snobs?

<comment><USER65> because for this purpose, you are all using "old" for "more knowledgeable and superior"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Also a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a more elegant one in this case.

</comment><comment><USER67> I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use!

On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.

<comment><USER68> How about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to make the read-only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> How long before a question like "My DVD wont play in this old computers DVD player?"?

</comment><comment><USER70> You know what actually amazes me these days. I once had to explain this exact same question to someone and they were very interested in the answer.

I remember back in the old days when I would bring up anything tech I got called a nerd and/or geek and it was the kind stuff you dont talk to normal people about.

I got made fun of by people for talking about IRC channels and being on internet boards, back when they were command line.

The weirdest change for me as been the acceptance of knowing about technology. Today if you dont know what the interent or a computer is you are consider old and out of date. Back then if you knew that stuff you were an outcast.

</comment><comment><USER71> What scares me about this question is that such easy and popular questions (and answers to them) mean a lot of karma points to all of the participants before it goes into community wiki mode, while folks who actually can google their problems (and spend time actually working instead of reloading StackOverflow every five seconds) have low scores, since the questions they ask are complicated and thus rarely answered and even more rarely popular.

</comment><comment><USER72> The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest (hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000>

2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ). And yes, I did a lot of programming on that keyboard.

<comment><USER73> A VAX 11/750 was my 4th or so computer.

Of course, that was after an Apple II clone, and C64, and a 286. They were scrapping it and I (my high school, but really me) ended up with it. Can't remember if I ever got it working properly, but it was really impressive. It had been used in an NMR setup and had really neat vacuum tubes to do connect to that.

<comment><USER72> Scrapped doesn't count, if so I have some 1960s gear. I also have a bit of nostalgic fondness for VAX & VMS as I spent my early computing career working on it (along with the full range of DEC gear). I'd never want to go back, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> My first personal computer was an Ohio Scientific C24P. I had to load BASIC into RAM using a 300 baud cassette tape. Beat that, ya youngsters!

</comment><comment><USER75> Also, not everyone was cool enough to have both A: and B:

And tape drives transfer speeds were 300? baud. Most people can read way faster and some can type faster.

I have many memories of working late in school labs, feeling that awful feeling when the sky outside gets light as it literally dawns on you you've been there all night, making backups on multiple floppy disks as you go...Bathed in the fluorescents

</comment><comment><USER76> I still have my MSX Hotbit with a 5 1/4 floppy disk extension. I had a lot fun with it in the past. Now I'm wondering what to do with it... At this time, I guess kids will find interesting that a computer must be attached to the TV so you can have a screen. Some love the typewriter, which prints at the same time you type!

</comment><comment><USER77> The fact that Windows still keeps this hierarchy is what stuns me the most. Why are they still silently referring to this technology in 2011?! It just boggles my mind. It's almost like keeping your floppy disks in your top drawer even though you haven't used them for 15 years. And won't. Ever.

</comment><comment><USER78> I'm in my early twenties, and one of my earliest memories of computers was my Dad trying to get a book of stamps out of the floppy drive on his Amiga. Plus, who could forget installing Windows 95 from, what was it, 20 floppies? And now we buy 1Tb drives like it's nothing...

</comment><comment><USER65> This guy obviously wrote this question to provoke this exact response from people. He's duped all of you into obsessing over nostalgia and thinking/saying you've got a leg up on "today's youngsters."

Nobody who asks this question would need to go to a StackOverflow site to get it answered.

</comment><comment><USER79> I miss going to class with a floppy and knowing it was corrupted, get an extension on the assignment. I am only 20... are there really computer users out there unfamiliar with floppies? I keep 5.25" drives around for fun and I still have Windows 95 on 3.25"ers :)

</comment><comment><USER80> Never, this would happen again that one technology/company would have such huge effect.

</comment><comment><USER81> This makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive.

<http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm>

</comment><comment><USER82> Knowing the answer and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it makes me feel old!

<comment><USER83> _and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it_

And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)

<comment><USER84> Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy. They were expensive at the time.

Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about the same since I bought the last pack.

<comment><USER83> _Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy._

Not only reuse but be pleasantly surprised yet irritated at the same time because suddenly the disk was magically usable again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless, the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp. the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)

</comment><comment><USER40> I just realized that I have a bunch of old 3.5" discs in my desk - even though I don't have a single system with a floppy drive anymore. I just cleared out a bunch of space in my hutch. Thanks HN!

</comment><comment><USER85> This makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do not make games as good as they were before!

<comment><USER86> The past ain't what it used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Jeff Atwood tweeted this yesterday with the comment "want to feel old?"

</comment><comment><USER88> I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes.

Ah those were the days.

<comment><USER89> 5 disks? What were you running?

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> In the style of one of those YouTube comments, "I'm 19 and I have used a floppy disk!!"

</comment><comment><USER91> When I installed Windows 95, it was off of 14 floppy disks, feels good man.

</comment><comment><USER70> Good times, I used to install windows 95 with 20 floppy disks!!!

</comment><comment><USER92> 3.5" HD Floppies were awesome compared to non-HD.

</comment><comment><USER93> It's the same reason there's no Channel 1 on TV.

</comment><comment><USER94> I'm in my late teens. Makes me feel old too :)

</comment><comment><USER95> NUMBER MUNCHERS! i miss that game

</comment><comment><USER96> Now I just feel old

</comment><comment><USER97> I feel so old.

</comment><comment><USER98> Interesting. After the first few thoughts like "This can't be happening I am only 19" and "this guy is either dumb or 6" my next thought was "What would be the question that would make me feel really old when I am in my 50s"?

The effect this question has on people is because they remember some information which most of the users today don't know as they have never used that technology. So what technology of today will become so obsolete that you would remember your age?

</comment><comment><USER99> That's one of those questions that makes a guy feel old. I also remember 8" floppy disks first-hand. I was a kid, but still.

</comment><comment><USER100> This gave me a good laughter, and I'm only 30.</comment>


Amazon Teams Up with Law Enforcement to Deploy New Facial Recognition Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazon-teams-law-enforcement-deploy-dangerous-new <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126150).</comment>


How We Implement Disaster Recovery and High Availability with Postgres at Citus - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/03/23/a-look-into-disaster-recovery-and-high-availability-and-how-they-work-with-postgres-on-citus-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Continue to enjoy the write ups here by the citus team. Your articles are good primers as well young engineers who may not know how basic database management looks like in a production environment.

I have a follow up question from the article. You mention that your HA functionality includes health checks which then trigger auto failover to the replica in the event of six consecutive failures on the master. What's the client experience during that time frame? Would the database cluster be totally unresponsive, or would it be totally transparent so long as it's only a certain number of nodes experiencing issues?

<comment><USER3> So it depends a bit on the failure. If it's the coordinator node you're connected to then everything would be un-responsive. If it's a single distributed node, then only queries targetting that node would fail. Most application frameworks and Postgres drivers do try to reconnect so there wouldn't be a change to application logic, but things during that time would fail as you might expect when a database is down.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Archiving PostgreSQL WAL (Write Ahead Log) files to S3 on a continuous basis to provide reliable, fast disaster recovery is a really neat trick.

<comment><USER4> Obligatory link to make this more concrete: [https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e](https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We also wal-e in production and it's been great. Storing your wal logs also allow you to do point in time recoveries, so you can restore your db to a particular time before a stuff up happened.</comment>


The Touch of Madness - <AUTHOR> https://psmag.com/magazine/the-touch-of-madness-mental-health-schizophrenia <comment><USER2> I was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 11 years ago.

The "double bookkeeping" mentioned in the article is a neat description of how I sometimes dealt with the hallucinations. Everything I experienced was real to me but I quickly realized that it was not "objectively real", for lack of a better term. I had the luck of having a GREAT support network, and I highly believe that its because of that I'm functioning today.

I'm currently symptom-free and have been for a few years (despite being a dumbass who cold-turkey'd my meds without my doctors knowledge). I want to try to help anyone who's feeling isolated due to "mental illness" (not a fan of that term either). Drop me an email: helpful at hax dot xyz

(apologies for rambling and/or strangely formatted text, writing this on phone whilst commuting)

<comment><USER3> I ended up stumbling on that idea of "double bookkeeping" as well, though in the context of acute drug induced hallucinations.

What made it hard for me is that both sets of ideas are correct about some aspects of my experience and wrong about some aspects. The hallucinations are mostly wrong where they deviate from "standard" reality, but they're not entirely so and seem to be capturing _some_ patterns that my brain is picking up that I can't articulate through other mechanisms. Counter-intuitively, admitting that there were facets of the hallucinations that _did_ make sense made it easier to deal with accepting that there were parts that _didn 't_ as well.

I view it as having two approximate models for reality which have different faults -- one model is knowingly incomplete (but scrupulously consistent); the other model is knowingly inconsistent (but has models for any experience, and serves for "experimental" ideas). The goal is to try and work both towards a shared (underlying, objective) truth trapped "between" them in some sense.

<comment><USER4> >but they're not entirely so and seem to be capturing some patterns that my brain is picking up that I can't articulate through other mechanisms.

Drugs made me more aware of how routinely our brains mildly hallucinate in ways that are designed to be imperceptible so as to 'smooth over' our perception of the world (i.e. our blind spots [https://visionaryeyecare.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/eye- test-f...](https://visionaryeyecare.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/eye-test-find- your-blind-spot-in-each-eye/) ).

It always seemed as if drug-induced hallucinations were less some kind of emergent or externally-imposed phenomenon and more of the drugs simply ratcheting up the misfire rate on normal systems of consciousness like face recognition, pattern recognition, piecing together incomplete information via extrapolation from memory, etc.

Learning to recognize this kind of 'misfire' and label it as distinct from objective reality was enormously helpful to me when it occurred to my emotions later, because of bipolar disorder.

<comment><USER5> The Charles Bonnet syndrome is a good example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > When the director of the World Health Organization's mental-health unit, > Shekhar Saxena, was asked last year where he'd prefer to be if he were > diagnosed with schizophrenia, he said for big cities he'd prefer a city in > Ethiopia or Sri Lanka, like Colombo or Addis Ababa, rather than New York or > London, because in the former he could expect to be seen as a productive if > eccentric citizen rather than a reject and an outcast.

I can't help feeling that this is based on some pretty skewed statistics. Someone in Colombo or Addis Ababa who's 'a bit odd might' well be seen as as 'productive if eccentric'. I don't expect a first world country would be any different. But the question is how do people further down the spectrum end up faring, and I can't imagine a raving lunatic would do better, on average, in a big city in a poor country than they would in a similarly big city in a rich country.

<comment><USER3> > I can't imagine a raving lunatic would do better, on average, in a big city > in a poor country than they would in a similarly big city in a rich country

Is this anything but an argument from failure of imagination?

As a neutral observer, it seems more likely that the director of the WHO's mental health unit is informed about the experiences of the mentally ill across the globe than your hunches are. My hunch about statistics is that your feeling about statistics is rooted in unsupported beliefs about your society as opposed to facts.

I think the implication is that some places (Ethiopia or Sri Lanka) are more open in what constitutes "a bit odd" versus "deranged" than others (US or UK), and that this _greatly_ impacts outcome once you account for general conditions of living (ie, only talking about big cities).

> I can't imagine a raving lunatic would do better

Notice how you jumped to an extreme to make your point -- raving lunatics are unlikely to do well anywhere so there is unlikely to be much variation in the outcome for them, you are correct. But what does the distribution look like? The median? The mode? etc. The vast majority of schizophrenics aren't raving lunatics -- though they are very susceptible to how they're interacted with by society.

I'm inclined to believe that when discussing the distribution of outcomes, the expected outcome on average is better where the WHO director believes it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very inspirational and empowering story. It goes to show that a large part of mental illness is inflamed by rejection from society, depleted self-esteem, and lack of trust. There are too many doctors that are all too willing to condemn their patients to a resigned fate of helplessness, meanwhile these people can demonstrably be healing and living with the right support systems and guidance.

Compassion, empathy, and true interest in the wellbeing of others are the keys to happier, healthier humans-- as well as a better, more peaceful world overall. This is particularly true for people we may not understand.

<comment><USER2> Agreed.

As an anecdote, when I had been symptom-free for a couple of years, I decided to move to a bigger city for work. Because I didn't know anyone else living there, I fell back into old habits of isolation and my hallucinations came back. I ended up explaining to my employer and we came to the conclusion that I couldn't keep working there as remote work wasn't an option. A few weeks after I had moved back home, the hallucinations stopped again. I quickly realized that my support network was the main thing keeping me "sane", and as such I started valuing them much more and ensuring they know that I'm here to support them too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Western cultures tend to send the afflicted into a downward spiral rarely > seen in less modernized cultures

This reminds me of some of the "poet-saints" in Indian culture such as Kabir. By conventional wisdom, these men would have been deemed insane - vagrants who renounced all material possessions to walk about the earth, preaching a strange amalgamation of various religious ideas. Yet, they are a part of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious thought today.</comment>


Show HN: AnimalSoundFun – My first iOS app - <AUTHOR> http://animalsoundfun.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Spent a while lately getting to grips with iOS development, and swift in particular (coming from a PHP/Java focussed web-development background), and created this.

Figured I'd throw it up and here and see what people think!</comment>


Why Are Code Generation Tools Relevant? - <AUTHOR> https://dzone.com/articles/telosys-a-code-generation-tool-by-laurent-guerin <comment><USER2> Yes, code generation tools are very relevant and useful. Obviously they can't generate everything but they can help a lot. With tools like Telosys or JHipster you can save many days of workload, especially at the beginning of the project with their bootstraping features.</comment>


How to fill a job nobody wants - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/09/how-to-fill-a-job-nobody-wants.html Tips on finding a good person to take on your company's drudge work. <comment><USER2> Simple answer: Make people want it.

One of the ways to do that is to pay enough to make someone willing to do it. The article lists other methods that claim to work, but if the person isn't feeling properly compensated, you're going to be filling the job again shortly anyhow... And hiring people is expensive.</comment>


Let's Talk about the North Face Defacing Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/05/29/lets-talk-about-the-north-face-defacing-wikipedia/ <comment><USER2> The AdAge video is completely infuriating — it has this completely triumphalist tone celebrating the "cleverness" of the marketing campaign. As if it were a "hack" rather than an unethical and distasteful idea unbefitting an ad agency. North Face would do well to part with Leo Burnett Tailor Made.

<comment><USER3> I might get heavily downvoted for this one but so be it:

I was curious why this article we're discussing doesn't show the after pictures, since it's about defacing. (The picture at the top is the one that was replaced - so we only see the before pic.)

From the video, it seems because the after pictures are beautiful and way better, which I'd guess is why the real volunteer Wikipedia editors kept them rather than reverting them and why it was so successful. They do show a tiny logo incidentally as part of travel gear that is in the photo but other than this it seems the photos are way better. It's not like the logo takes up more than a few pixels.

Any counterexamples? (A photo that was worse than the one it replaced)? If not I think I can't agree with the word "deface". Maybe if the brand placement were more conspicuous or damaging to the photo -- but the ones I saw honestly seemed fine to me and seemed like an improvement.

"we improved wikipedia with fantastic royalty-free images of popular destinations, taken with travelers who were also wearing our gear" seems like an alternative way to phrase what happened. then we wouldn't be talking about it.

I'm happy to be proven wrong if someone can show a before/after example that wasn't an improvement. Any examples?

<comment><USER4> When I'm interested in a national park or landscape, I'd prefer to see a landscape, not someone posing in front of a landscape. That _in itself_ makes it worse to my mind.

If Wikipedia were to let that pass, we could "look forward" to product placement attempts in every damn photo on the site.

Few pixels it may be, but it's a line that's important not to cross. Ever.

<comment><USER3> I don't know man. A ton of companies clearly edit their own articles and it's often fine for me for information purposes. If it's true that one of the main reasons to check these pages out is for tourism ideas then these better, professionally-shot results are really hard for me to get outraged about.

If a medical supply company replaced medical article photos with much better versions but which showed their logos in a few pixels on some equipment, would this be unacceptable for you?

For me the production value would probably be worth it.

<comment><USER4> How can I sensibly choose if to do business with someone if I am only getting positive spin? When I see a page that's clearly been sanitised I try and dismiss it completely - and often the firm with it. Or go hunting for balance - which might be hugely counter productive for my overall view of the company if I land up on a complaints site.

Of the "landscapes", take the image of the woman in black in dead centre of shot - it's _terribly_ framed unless you just wanted a photo of your wife's ass. For deciding if I'd like to visit the region the only thought is "get out of the damn way". The orange tent in corner of landscape? Crop that shit out and have a decent landscape shot. Better still, get a photographer bright enough to take 3 steps left first.

The production value is solely of product placement not landscape photography, suited only for their website. Now then, if North Face had paid a renowned landscape photographer to take some excellent photos for Wikipedia it could become well known with no logo or product in sight. Positive PR, and probably a note on North Face's page for genuine production values. Except that's no longer an advertising campaign.

What did North Face achieve? Made sure I buy Patagonia, or Jack Wolfskin etc next time I'm buying outdoor gear - which I do fairly regularly.

<comment><USER3> If the shots were distracting or not appropriate for the pages, do you know why the changes didn't get reverted?

<comment><USER5> You have tried to make this argument several times. Do you actually think that a committee of editors carefully reviews every single change made to Wikipedia? That is not the case.

<comment><USER3> yes, I think that editors on most pages act like little lords and ladies over what they view as their property and instantly revert anything from outsiders that doesn't fit with their conception or isn't a clear improvement. (This has been my experience). sorry, that was my experience.

<comment><USER6> You're presenting a personal pov that's grossly hyperbolic even in its subjectivity and does not reflect reality. With the exception of a hand-full of highly sensible topics that are prone to brigading, such as political issues, most articles barely receive any edit and are far from being monitored. Articles that are particularly vulnerable are articles on geography-related topics from nations that don't have a strong wikipedia presence.

<comment><USER7> I mean, it's not that hyperbolic. Wikipedia is a highly toxic place for many people. Even the foundation appreciates this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny that now someone can update the North Face wiki entry with the "Wikipedia Incident" paragraph...hahahah death by a thousand cuts? Edit: lol already live [1][2]

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#The_North_Face)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face#Controversies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face#Controversies)

<comment> village-idiot It turns out that Wikipedia is a _really_ bad organization to piss off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here you can see some of the images they uploaded: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_North_Face_W...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_North_Face_Wikipedia_advertising_campaign)

There are at least two ongoing community discussions about the incident:

\- [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_uploaded_by_User:Fhpatucci)

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#User_Gmortaia_vandalizing_pages_with_guerrilla_advertising)

<comment><USER10> Most of the pictures are fine i.e. you can't really see the North Face logos. A few of them though are just really terrible and don't belong on Wikipedia.

<comment><USER9> A few of the images don't even contain the logo at all (AFAICT). Maybe those were uploaded as distractions so it didn't look like a single-purpose advertising account.

<comment><USER11> That's exactly it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just vandalism. It is like painting your ad illegally on the walls of buildings and boasting that you invented a "smart trick" to get your ad placed for free.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very disappointing that they did this. Apparently AdAge posted a video bragging about what they did, which is how Wikipedia caught on.

[https://adage.com/creativity/work/north-face-top- imagens/217...](https://adage.com/creativity/work/north-face-top- imagens/2174261)

Warning: page requires Javascript and even with an adblocker, it connects to nearly 30 tracking and ad domains.

<comment><USER14> >Warning: page requires Javascript and even with an adblocker, it connects to nearly 30 tracking and ad domains.

Color me not surprised. Shady in one area, shady in other areas.

Thanks for the heads up.

<comment><USER15> TBH, most major companies, especially media ones, do this nowdays. I was used to be surprised when adblocker counts 20+ blocked entities on the page (and that's not counting second and third level ones that would be loaded by blocked ones!) but now it's just routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Man, that's really disappointing to read. I'm a fan of North Face gear. With that said, this will definitely push me towards their competitors like Patagonia and Arcteryx.

No doubt that there will be some sort of apology incoming from the CEO, but in reality the damage has been done.

<comment><USER17> Sorry to hear that. I can't speak about Arcteryx but I've been a long time customer of Patagonia and have only the absolute best things to say about them. Their products are expensive but they back them with lifetime guarantees. I had a $400 Gore-tex jacket that after two years of use, started letting water in at the seams. I took it to a Patagonia store and told the clerk, who gave me a free bottle of a liquid wash that helps restore water repellency. When that didn't work, I returned to the store and the clerk apologized, took the jacket and told me to grab a new one off the shelf.

I've had other friends get replacement gear years down the road, and have also had down jackets get repaired by them for free after regular wear and tear. It's those little things, along with their support for environmental causes, that have made me a lifelong customer.

<comment><USER18> I tend to think well of both Arcteryx and Patagonia, but I'd also say that their initial solve of using a DWR replenisher[1] for a jacket that was leaking at the seams feels like a fairly lukewarm example of customer service (then again, some places might have sold you the bottle too...)

1: [https://www.backcountry.com/explore/dwr- decoded](https://www.backcountry.com/explore/dwr-decoded)

<comment><USER19> Arcteryx has phenomenal customer service as well. They mailed me a new jacket in the middle of trip (picked it up at a Chilean post office as we moved to a new mountain), and let me mail the original leaking one back a month later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This has to be one of the worst marketing ideas ever conceived of. What consumer, in their right mind, would admire their efforts to put their brand on wikimedia images? This is exactly how you should not do marketing.

<comment><USER21> Unless...unless this is a meta-advertisement - I would imagine this intent: "Look, everybody is talking about our agency, see how good we are? [Never mind that we achieved this by vandalizing Wikipedia _and_ by making our client look bad]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let's also talk about how terrible their clothes are, from material to construction, and mainly exist as some kind of pyramid sandwich-board scheme to sell more clothes rather than protect wearers from the elements.

<comment> village-idiot North face is two companies under one logo.

One is a hardcore mountaineering company, who makes equipment where the owner dies if it fails. Their tents and sleeping bags can be found in the most inhospitable places on earth, including Everest.

The other makes fleece for college students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wikimedia is right. We should be angry. And I am. I'll never buy anything North Face as a result of this.

</comment><comment><USER24> The saddest part is that their photos could have easily just been used in an innocuous ad campaign, showing wonderful photos and making sure their products are in it.

Manipulating Wikipedia for the goal, is the opposite of wonderful, it is distasteful. :/

</comment><comment><USER25> I hope that the terms can be re-written to impose some sort of liability on anyone who tries this sort of thing. The only disincentive is the wrath of editors and the foundation, which, frankly, doesn't amount to much.

<comment><USER26> They should require two things.

1) Label accounts with conflicts of interest if necessary.

Personal accounts that are only personal (and never used in an official capacity for any other organization or entity).

"Professional" accounts for which one or more professional entities (potential conflicts of interest) are disclosed.

2) All work should be submitted to the public domain, or as close to the public domain as possible; and any fair use material clearly marked as such and why. (I believe they already require this, I'm just not a Wikipedia contributor so I've not read their specific guidelines.)

<comment><USER9> Your suggestions are already reflected in the existing Wikimedia Foundation TOU: [https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en](https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en)

1) It already prohibits paid editing without disclosure. (ctrl-F "Paid contributions without disclosure" in link above)

2) Wikimedia projects require that almost all content be licensed under a free license (ctrl-F "Licensing of Content" in link above). Specifically, text is usually dual licensed under CC BY-SA and GFDL. Wikimedia Commons allows images under any free license. ([https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing))

Exceptions are allowed for fair use content, which needs explicit justification and may only be used sparingly (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non- free_content_cri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non- free_content_criteria) for the English Wikipedia's rules, [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non- free_content](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-free_content) for other WMF wikis).

<comment><USER26> In that case shouldn't the headlines be about charges related to unauthorized access of a computer system?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am a very big purchaser of frivolous outdoor clothing and gear, REI is like a candy store to me. I will be boycotting The North Face for at least one year starting today, because this is so obviously unethical. Can't wait to score some Patagonia gear for summer hiking :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does North Face understand the image licencing here?

I can take every single one of their photos and caption it "North Face sucks, buy Patagonia" or whatever I like, and then republish it, and NF can't do anything about it so long as I give attribution.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thanks for the info. Now know to steer clear of NF.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe Wikimedia will lambaste the Israeli Ministry of Foreign and Strategic Affairs for also "defacing" Wikipedia? That is, "unethically manipulating" (Wikimedia's words) the site to provide a Zionist friendly narrative of the conflict with the Palestinians. [https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel- partisans-work-censor...](https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-partisans- work-censor-internet/)

Of course this wont happen since the site's founder Jimmy Wales recently won a $1 million Israeli prize and is not a neutral voice himself. [https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/wikipedia-suggests- antisemite...](https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/wikipedia-suggests-antisemite/)

State actors and corporations have been infiltrating Wikipedia for ages. That Wikimedia pretends it doesn't happen and that this The North Face incident was unheard of is just dumbfounding. Paid editing is everywhere on Wikipedia, believing otherwise is very naive.

[https://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/agenda.html](https://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/agenda.html)

<comment><USER15> Of course, we can't discuss North Face behavior without getting to the topic of The Joos and their attempts to take over the world with their dirty money. And of course since Israel recognized the achievement of Wales - who btw has zero control over Wikipedia content - he is forever tainted and everything he does is now part of the Jooish Conspiracy. Shameful.

> Paid editing is everywhere on Wikipedia, believing otherwise is very naive

If you spent about 10 minutes researching the topic, you'd know Wikipedia community knows that, and has specific disclosure rules, templates and requirements for acknowledging and disclosing paid editing and conflict of interest. Nobody pretends it does not exist. Undisclosed paid editing (known in Wikipedia community as UPE - use this to look it up) is what is prohibited and would get one banned.

<comment><USER29> Yup, I think state-sponsored editing of Wikipedia is shameful.

"In 2008 the pro-Israel activist group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) launched a campaign to alter Wikipedia articles to support the Israeli side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The campaign suggested that pro-Israeli editors should pretend to be interested in other topics until elected as administrators. Once administrators they were to misuse their administrative powers to suppress pro-Palestinian editors and support pro-Israel editors.[59] Some members of this conspiracy were banned by Wikipedia administrators.[60]

In 2010 two pro-settler Israeli groups, Yesha Council and Israel Sheli, launched courses to instruct pro-Israel editors on how to use Wikipedia to promote Israel's point of view. A prize was to be given to the editor who inserted the most pro-Israel changes.[61]"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#Israel)

""Students work in four teams: Content, Wikipedia, Monitoring and New Media," according to the program description. It details the responsibilities for each team:

The content team is responsible for creating original content in a news format.

The monitoring team is responsible for "monitoring efforts while reporting and removing anti-Semitic [sic] content from social networks in a variety of languages." (The program conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism; see below.)

The New Media team is responsible for social media channels, "including Facebook accounts in English, French and Portuguese, Twitter, YouTube channels, and so on."

The Wikipedia team is "responsible for writing new entries and translating them into languages that operate in the program, updating the values of current and relevant information, tracking and preventing bias in the program's areas of activity.""

[https://mediareviewnet.com/2018/03/how-israel-and-its- partis...](https://mediareviewnet.com/2018/03/how-israel-and-its-partisans- work-to-censor-the-internet/)

Can't this be discussed without you invoking antisemitic tropes? If you think these efforts have ceased because they happened a long time ago, then I have a bridge to sell you. The only thing that has changed is that they have become more covert. Possibly other state-sponsored actors have also infiltrated Wikipedia so it is not just about Israel.

<comment><USER15> > Yup, I think state-sponsored editing of Wikipedia is shameful.

You are free to think anything you like, but it makes no sense. Why state- sponsored editing is worse that, say, Taliban-sponsored or Hamas-sponsored or just-random-dudes-hating-jews-sponsored one?

> Can't this be discussed without you invoking antisemitic tropes?

Me invoking tropes? You came to a topic that has nothing to do with Israel and started blaming The Joos and their dirty money, somehow presenting Israel recognizing Wales - who, again, does not have editorial control over Wikipedia - as something shady. I think you've made your bed.

> Possibly other state-sponsored actors have also infiltrated Wikipedia so it > is not just about Israel.

You don't say!

<comment><USER29> > You are free to think anything you like, but it makes no sense. Why state- > sponsored editing is worse that, say, Taliban-sponsored or Hamas-sponsored > or just-random-dudes-hating-jews-sponsored one?

Because being paid to advance a state's interests by editing Wikipedia is morally wrong. Especially if you don't disclose that you are in a conflict of interest situation and you instead pretend to be a normal user.

> Me invoking tropes? You came to a topic that has nothing to do with Israel > and started blaming The Joos and their dirty money,

I did nothing of the sort and I think you look very foolish by pretending that I did.

> somehow presenting Israel recognizing Wales - who, again, does not have > editorial control over Wikipedia - as something shady.

Wales does have and exercises editorial control over Wikipedia. He has stepped in in numerous disputes and imposed his will. He has used his powers to get articles undeleted and reverted bans of users he thought were unfairly banned. Yes, I think it is odd that the WMF has never criticized Israel or its lobbying organizations for infiltrating Wikipedia, but The North Face's amateurish attempt gets scorned. The reason must be Wales' political biases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The North Face has a storied history of abusing every law or process in the books to "defend" its brand, and this is just a continuation of it. They also make utter crap for consumers. I've been happier with Arcteryx or REI's own brand of apparel.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am really curious why would they even try this type of stunt? Like what were they trying to prove?

<comment><USER32> Free advertising, not just for The North Face, but for the ad agency, Leo Burnett Tailor Made, who I'd never heard of before. I hate them both now, but the fact remains that they've forced their names into my awareness, and that alone will attract work from large, out-of-touch companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Disgusting. To extent I can will transition out of NF gear. Will share broadly to encourage others to do so.

</comment><comment><USER34> The thing is, they probably would've got away with it except for the triumphal video talking about it!

</comment><comment><USER35> How about banning north face from having site on wiki... Or just having this article in it

<comment><USER36> That would go against Wikipedia's mission. I think referencing this event in their article as they've done is the correct response.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of- interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#The_North_Face)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face#Controversies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face#Controversies)

<comment><USER35> well, you're totally correct, just write this comment based on frustration :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm obviously not in line with the tenor of this thread, but I really don't think it's a big deal. People make edits. Other people revert them. The outrage here seems silly. "Defacing" is hyperbole.

I remember when Hacker News was politically against the idea that Terms of Service were in any way binding.

<comment><USER6> > I'm obviously not in line with the tenor of this thread, but I really don't > think it's a big deal.

If this sort of abuse isn't nipped in the bud, it will only get worse and become standard operating procedure for each and every single ad company, big and small.

<comment><USER37> People could complain about low quality edits without clutching their pearls over the idea that a marketing team would deign to edit anything.

<comment><USER6> If a marketing team wants to edit anything then let them put up their own blog or website instead of abusing other people's service.

It's this sort of abuse that brought spam into the world and pretty much destroyed fundamental services such as email and also usenet.

<comment><USER37> It's just hard to take your concern seriously because I doubt you have spoken out against the top spammers on Wikipedia, but you care about this one silly project. But please correct me if I'm wrong and this is an issue you are invested in.

<comment><USER6> You have no idea who I am so refrain from making up accusations and personal attacks founded on your personal baseless assertions. If you have nothing of value to add to the discussion, simply don't add noise or drama to the discussion.

<comment><USER37> What personal attack? I expressed doubt and a willingness to be corrected. If you can name another "vandal" party who you've spoken out against, or even another party you are aware of then I will stand corrected.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pitching startup concept at an exhibition/showcase - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
We have to pitch our startup concept at an exhibition/showcase among other startups and based on this (in combination with our concept proposal) we may be looking at a business idea prize (competition similar to the MIT $100k but on a smaller scale).
So far in preparation for the exhibition we are looking into perfecting our basic elevator pitch.  Time constraints prevent us having a prototype to demo.
Howver, I'd love to hear people's advice on this kind of situation - i.e. what would you take/show, what would you make sure you know, what questions would you make sure you are ready to answer? etc. <comment><USER2> And now for some unsolicited "advice":

Pitch it to your clients; i.e. start selling to buyers, cut the funding phase out.

My family and friend have contributed money to my project, but nothing gave me the boost in confidence and the rush of excitement as that $95 I got from my first user (I charged my second client $950, btw.) I had to look at it several times, iterating between my spartan 'admin panel' showing one registered user, and my paypal account. I was so alpha I didn't even have a thank you message template, I wrote it with all my family sitting behind me.

If you start your business while consciously looking for funding, you will optimize for fund raising instead of turning profit.

At the risk of sounding snobby/trollish, I am a bit dismissive of funded startups. I treat them like trust-fund kids. If it is worth doing, it's worth keeping it all to yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. pitch it to us.

2\. iterate based on feedback.

You asking us to give advice on something we know nothing about. Is this an entrepreneurial-based contest? A technology one? Do they want financially sound concepts, or _change the world_ ideas? Who are the judges? Peers, technology figures, academics, business owners ...

Relativity and scope please!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try my best. It's an entrepreneurial contest judging the creativity and business potential of ideas. The judges are largely local VCs/angel investors with a couple of academics and local business owners.

Our idea is a tech idea with I guess tiny overlap of someone like Digg.

<comment><USER4> where/what's the contest?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> venturehacks.com</comment>


In 5 years, the Midwest will have more startups than Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/28/in-5-years-the-midwest-will-have-more-startups-than-silicon-valley/? <comment><AUTHOR> If you aren't familiar with it, Columbus, OH is perhaps surprisingly cosmopolitan. Ohio State University is massive and contributes to its diversity in a significant way.

Columbus is also "America's Test Market," [http://www.columbusmonthly.com/content/stories/2015/01/how-c...](http://www.columbusmonthly.com/content/stories/2015/01/how- columbus-became-americas-test-market.html).

The three points at the end are worthwhile, especially the point about perception not being reality.

With the cost of SV, and the evolution of work-life balance, value locations like Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, etc. may have an advantage.</comment>