Moki.tv (YC W11) is TV Guide for Online Movies & TV - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/moki-tv-is-the-ultimate-personalized-guide-to-whats-streaming-on-the-web/

<comment><USER2> As a cordcutter for the past year+ I've tried a lot of options out there. Unfortunately if Moki.tv is limited to a website for the foreseeable future then it's appeal/reach is going to be extremely limited. A website absolutely sucks to use on your TV.

After trying Boxee, XBMC, etc etc my perfect setup would be the speed of Hulu Desktop with the selection of Hulu + Hulu Plus + Netflix and using Kinect as a navigation device. The Xbox 360 is getting there, but they won't integrate Netflix and Hulu into one app, and the Hulu on Xbox 360 will only have access to Hulu Plus content.

Services like Amazon Video and iTunes where you have to purchase a la carte I have absolutely no interest in.

You guys obviously have a great database and recommendation engine going on. Now get a slick 10-foot interface on top of that and you'll be good.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you guys ever expand to Sweden, make sure you crawl the various play sites, i.e. the streaming services of major Swedish channels, such as SVT play, via play, tv4 play, etc. I was actually thinking about coding a search engine for these sites, but Moki seems to offer more and better.

</comment><comment><USER4> Recommendations + instantly watch them + sleek interface. Ingenious!

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish there was a checkbox on the top right something like: "[X] Available on my selected services" so I didn't have to look at stuff that would cost me money if I don't want.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great utility! This makes even more sense to a viewer like me who has shifted entirely to streamed content. The devices I own as part of home entertainment setup play my shows at a time I want (simple yet effective idea of giving your time back to you).

This easily is the future of TV viewing, and moki.tv fills a very visible gap of connecting the viewer to the content.

My best wishes for your growth. You just got one new registered user.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey Moki guys, congrats on launch, sounds like a promising product! Once TC noise will settle a bit, please follow up with me(email in profile), i'd like to get in touch re your API

</comment><comment><USER8> Given Moki's powerful search and the ability to track movies/tv I think that they have a clear advantage in the space. I track TV with Moki and it has helped me find new relevant content.

My weekly Moki digest email also helps me keep track of shows that I'm interested in, another huge benefit. Matt and Sandy, you guys have done an incredible job so far. The integration with Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes is only the beginning. I can't wait to see what you bring to the table next.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to make this work with Netflix in Canada? The content offered for instant play is different.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to see more people trying to do something like reddit.tv. My first feeling when seeing this site was "I'm gonna do a bunch of work rating movies to get uninteresting results". reddit.tv almost always has interesting results and I don't have to much work to get them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats! I recall you guys asking HN to rate your app not too long ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609205>

</comment><comment><USER12> Makes you wonder why sidereel hasn't evolved that much, the only major update I recall is their design revamp..

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats on launch!

</comment><comment><USER14> interesting. I thought the netflix tos didn't allow third parties to store a user's rating info. Maybe I read it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats, I will be using you guys!

</comment><comment><USER16> Little Azz team, Kick Azz idea, Big Azz market...brilliant

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to the Moki.tv crew. Great job!

I'd been using other services like Instantwatcher (<http://instantwatcher.com/>) to discover new titles but was waiting impatiently for an intelligent service that combined the many [new] services available. I rated 100 movies and got great recommendations. Thanks.</comment>


Pokémon GO – first look - <AUTHOR> http://nianticlabs.com/blog-ja/pokemon-go-first-look/ <comment><USER2> For me the links shows the japanese version.

English: [http://nianticlabs.com/blog/pokemon-go-first- look/](http://nianticlabs.com/blog/pokemon-go-first-look/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really want Pokemon GO to be better than a re-skin of Ingress. I found that after several weeks of playing Ingress, I became so frustrated that I uninstalled it.

What ends up happening is that people who have more free time to walk around benefit more from people who only have a few hours in the evening to move around, but time throughout the day to look at the app. I was able to generate enough energy during the day and with a bit of coordination, controlled a good portion of Birmingham, AL for a while, but I realized that there were players who had practically all day to drive around and hit portals.

I suspect that Pokemon GO will suffer from this as well, where people who have more free time will end up ruining the game for people playing casually. It sounds stupid, but consider the scenario:

A new player joins the game. He has a job and a life, and can only spend about 90 minutes a day walking around. Luckily there is a few portals near his work and home so he works those for a few days. Then he starts getting the long- range support items, and can help defend portals across town. Eventually, he's strong enough to start solo-ing portals and defend some of his own portals, only for him to walk a few blocks and get a push notification that somebody just nuked the whole area. One user singlehandedly attacked several dozen portals in fifteen minutes, all across town.

It's so annoying. I played through it for a while, but eventually had a great evening spoiled by drivers, and I remember being so frustrated that I just uninstalled the game right there on the spot, and walked home in a sullen mood for the next hour.

I _really_ want Pokemon GO to be better than that.</comment>


Why Nodejs serves a file with 80x more CPU usage than Nginx? - <AUTHOR> Take the same code that sits on nodejs.org home page. Serve a static file that is 1.8Mb. And do the same with Nginx, and watch the difference.
Code       : http://pastie.org/3730760 Screencast : http://screencast.com/t/Or44Xie11Fnp
Please share if you know anything that'd prevent this from happening, so we don't need to deploy nginx servers and complicate our lives.
ps1. this test is done with node 0.6.12. out of curiosity, i downgraded to 0.4.12 just to check if it's a regression, on the contrary, it was worse. same file used 25% twice.
ps2. this post is not a nodejs hate - we use nodejs, and we love it, except this glitch which actually delayed our launch (made us really sad), and seemed quite serious to me. i've never read, heard, seen this mentioned before so we could prepare ourselves better. <comment><USER2> First of all, writing bug reports to Hacker News is usually a bit like complaining about the government at a bus stop. It's fun, and you'll get lots of agreement from crazy people, and maybe start a little riot, but writing your representative is a better way to effect change.

We have two mailing lists, and an issue tracker on github. If someone hadn't emailed this to me, I probably would not have seen it.

There are three problems I see with your test.

1) It serves the file twice, since you don't filter out the /favicon.ico url

2) you're converting the file contents to a string, which needs to be converted _back_ into raw bytes to send.

3) your gist is in JavaScript, but I see that you're actually running CoffeeScript. I'm not sure what kind of wrapper CoffeeScript is adding to the equation.

I ran the same test serving the ChangeLog file from node's source folder with node v0.6.15 (to be released tomorrow) <https://raw.github.com/joyent/node/v0.6/ChangeLog>

Here's the source code of the server.js: <https://gist.github.com/2338851>

It did use more CPU than nginx, but not 100x as much. Requesting the /buffer url made it spike up to about 0.2% cpu usage. Requesting the / url made it spike up to about 0.3%. Even when I disabled the /favicon.ico check, its behavior is nowhere near what you're seeing.

When I ran it with coffee script, it actually uses this JavaScript: <https://gist.github.com/2338874>. So, there's an extra Function.call in there, but otherwise, it's pretty much identical. My coffeescript version is here: <https://gist.github.com/2338879>

So, something is odd with your situation, and from your test, it's not clear what. I'd love to get more details.

On the more general note, clearly we in the node world are perfectly fine with using nginx to serve static assets. Qv. the nodejs.org home page. But node's performance here should be within an order of magnitude, or something is broken. This is not expected or normal performance that you're seeing. We run the "serve a big string over http" benchmark quite often, and so this was very surprising to me.

<comment><USER2> Aha, I take back some of what I said. ChangeLog is not big enough, that's all.

When running with a 16MB file, there's some more CPU spiking, but only if it's served as a single write.

Investigating further, I found that there's a bug in my gists, and I'm testing res.url instead of req.url, so I was making all the exact same mistakes in your test! Hah!

With this test, we see it spike up to 10% for a big string, but a big buffer still stays well below 1%. <https://gist.github.com/2339010>

I did it in coffeescript to just rule that out as a possible source of work.

The moral of the story is that Buffer<->string conversion is WAY too expensive in Node, and leads to situations where the easy approach leads to poor performance. That's a problem. Thankfully, it's one we already are aware of, and plan to fix, and it's easy to work around by just using a buffer rather than doing extra conversions.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi isaac,

thanks for responding, it's nice of you to acknowledge it as a bug, and say you're working on it.

> First of all, writing bug reports to Hacker News is usually a bit like > complaining about the government at a bus stop.

just a little note on this one, i've made clear in my original writing this is not hate and i sent an email to substack, and ryan to some others i know. i guess i will send you an email next time as well.

not filing as a bug: you are right, i should have done that.

Buffer<->string conversion is WAY too expensive in Node: yes it is, hope you can make this way better, because we don't want to hit cpu each time we pull data from a e.g. database.

writing it to hackernews/stackoverflow: it's because i'm asking for solutions outside of nodejs domain, varnish,nginx or any other way this issue can be worked around. i'm sure you understand. and this was quite helpful as we're now deploying a few varnish and nginx servers to mitigate this problem.

<comment><USER2> Sorry if my response was a bit overly strong. I know you're a good guy and we all just want these things to work well. I wasn't offended, just a bit confused by the results that weren't matching what I was seeing.

Of course, poking a bit further showed that converting a 16MB string to a buffer actually is quite expensive. You can avoid this by using buffers directly when you're serving files (or better yet, just pipe a fs.ReadStream directly into the response, so it'll stream it as it reads from disk, and buffer as little as possible.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could put nginx in front of nodejs and let it handle the static files, it's far better at it.

This is worth reading as well: [http://engineering.linkedin.com/nodejs/blazing-fast- nodejs-1...](http://engineering.linkedin.com/nodejs/blazing-fast- nodejs-10-performance-tips-linkedin-mobile)

<comment><USER4> Besides that, node can listen on UNIX domain socket, while nginx can proxy the connection over UDS, therefore people can avoid the TCP stack. That should also shave off some latency. It may throw some 502 errors if is not configured properly, but with sysctl tricks or Ryan's patch for nginx (<https://github.com/ry/nginx-ey-balancer>) it is doable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "complicate" your lives? nginx is an amazing piece of technology and it's extremely simple. It's _built_ for serving static files (and doing other things) better than anything else that exists. Use the right tool for the job.

<comment><AUTHOR> i wasn't saying nginx is bad (nginx is awesome). i just wouldn't want to deploy and configure nginx with my app, if i can avoid it. in fact i got an awesome suggestion over at stackoverflow, that put the usage down to 0.3% <http://d.pr/dXVR>

<comment><USER6> If it's an app you in tend to package up, or is portable, that might be an acceptable solution, but in the long term, using Nginx or Varnish (or even Apache) is likely the better answer, unless it is your objective to build a static file server in Node.

Otherwise, even if you can speed it up, and/or minimize its memory usage, you're still wasting cycles and memory in your app that needn't be spent on it. To a point, this is perfectly fine, but at some point, you're (hopefully) going to want to scale, and I promise that this is the first thing you'll want to look at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Node isn't really built for serving static files.

I'd say the easiest solution would be to stick varnish in front of your node application.

<comment><USER8> That's true if you also want a caching proxy in front of your stack, but if you just want to serve static files, nginx in front of node.js is a perfectly acceptable solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.kernel.org/doc/man- pages/online/pages/man2/sendfi...](http://www.kernel.org/doc/man- pages/online/pages/man2/sendfile.2.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> // response : http response stream // filename : the static file we want to serve

response.writeHead(200 / _, ...set http header info (mime, length etc)..._ / ); stream = fs.createReadStream( filename, { flags: 'r', start: start, end: end }); stream.pipe(response);</comment>


Ukrainian Power Company '99% Certain' Blackout Result of Cyber Attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/12/ukrainian-power-company-99-certain-blackout-result-cyber-attack/134099/ <comment><USER2> I don't think I've ever achieved 99% certainty about something involving computers connected over networks.</comment>


Energy cost of mining Bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-cost-of-mining-bitcoin-more-than-twice-that-of-copper-or-gold <comment><USER2> >Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada

Metal mining has a comparably wide variation in energy intensity, though not mentioned in article. The headline's broad-brush claim deserves skepticism.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin is a practically insignificant part of the climate change puzzle.

All of these "We must stop Bitcoin to save the environment" articles that have been popping up kind of seem like sour grapes.

Also, amount of energy expended is directly proportional to price (x block reward) - if you want to reduce Bitcoin's emissions, short it hard!

<comment><USER4> If you want to limit Bitcoin's CO2 impact, you should do the same thing as for every energy using activity: ensure, through international agreement, that CO2 emission is taxed or capped in a way that reflects its future impact.

Like with every other good in existence, such a tax will affect the amount -- and by which energy source -- it is profitable to produce [1].

If there is a place where it is possible to avoid such an imposition, then production will leak to that location, just like for every other good in existence.

If you think that bitcoin is somehow "different" than all other trivial things that people spend energy to produce, because you think it's stupid, you're opening a can of worms I'm sure you don't want to deal with (deciding how much people "really should like things" compared to their energy cost).

[1] Technically, it will affect the production of hash computations, not bitcoins themselves.</comment></comment>


The cost of devaluing women - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of-devaluing-women.html <comment><USER2> 'First Round Capital reports that its investments in companies with a female founder have posted 63 percent better returns than men-only firms.' so what? Correlation does not imply causation. Also it might be that female founded firms are less risky, and so less likely to generate mega returns. Or it could be the opposite. Point is we don't know and the stat is useless on its own.

'This man naturally assumed that he knew more about it than I did. It was his ingrained view of women — a view that's costing all of us.'. This is nothing more than an assertion.

Finally I think only the most naïve or faux-naïve would be surprised to find that Wall Street contains some pretty serious/insane characters. Isn't that kind of the nature of the beast? I bet there are plenty of men that have to deal with terrible behaviour also. That's not to excuse any of this behaviour, but I'm sure the idea that if you are a man you are guaranteed an easy ascent to the upper reaches is risible.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish women didn't have to work for their own protection.</comment>


Contractor Directory BuildZoom (YC W13) Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/25/yc-backed-contractor-directory-buildzoom-raises-1-4-million-seed-round/ <comment><USER2> Cofounder of thumbtack here.

I wish these guys the best of luck. We often get asked if we are worried about this company or that company that seems to be positioning as a direct competitor, and the answer is no. In fact, the best advice we ever got was from a competitor.

The market is so big that there's room for a lot of players to make a lot of money. Though, ultimately, we think that the market will be led by one major player (In the same way that eBay is where you go to buy used things and Amazon is where you go to buy new things), which is the reason we have consistently chosen not to narrow our scope either geographically or by vertical.

It's also interesting that they chose to seed the database from contractor records. We thought about doing this, but wanted to be able to say that every service provider on our site was real. Not sure what we would've done if we had to do it over again, but it appears they've had some success (25,000).

The hardest part is yet to come, though. We've been at this for five years, and the biggest take away is that it's not really about getting service providers or getting consumers - the important part is what happens in the middle. That's what we've spent the most time working on.

<comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of what you guys have built at Thumbtack. In fact, prior to BuildZoom, I remember looking at Thumbtack and really digging the interface & design. Its a great company with great leadership, heading in the right direction.

I do question the premise of the services market as whole being a "winner- take-all" space. I do believe this becomes more viable in a more narrowly defined segment of the overall local services market.

I think the marketplace examples of a "winner-take-all" (e.g. eBay and Amazon) are a bit questionable (it isn't the first time I've heard this perspective).

When I want to buy something used (for example), I have probably turned to Craigslist just as many times as I've turned to eBay. When it comes to new items, I always look at Amazon but the overall query covers a much broader space, which will include more specialized e-commerce sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats! We built contractor finders for several cities/states as contract work. E.g. [https://energyupgradeca.org/county/los_angeles/vendors#h-v=2...](https://energyupgradeca.org/county/los_angeles/vendors#h-v=2156203947&p-v=1&per-v=10&s-v=p164) This is not our focus so we haven't pursued more like this, but I wanted to give you a heads up for potential partnerships. Governments like to put construction workers to work, especially doing environmentally friendly stuff.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to chat. Can you hit me up? @jiyannwei?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> so I'm curious, getting contact info for every contractor via the various state agencies is clever, but how do they go about getting the individual contractors to sign up? Due to CAN-SPAM, I don't think they can email them out of the blue. Direct Mail, phone calls and sponsoring builders associations would all be expensive. What is the most optimal way?

<comment><USER3> Right now, it's primarily through referral and search. It is a well networked industry so figuring out how to get users to refer other users is one key. Also, with most paid channels (which we haven't used very aggressively yet), keep in mind that the cost of user acquisition and be offset by a. conversion into an upgraded account and b. the lifetime value of an upgraded user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats, you guys rock!</comment>


Ask HN: How do I re-value myself as a contractor? - <AUTHOR> I've worked exclusively for the same company as a contractor for the last 5 years, and have gotten to know the ins-and-outs of their business/development processes/data better than most people actually hired in the company, and recently was presented with an opportunity to start building an internal platform to replace their current system they're paying for.
The problem is that (as a rough estimate) I would be saving them nearly $3M per year by building out this system, but I'm currently only making about $250k. It would take roughly a year to build. I'm making above market value for my skills at the moment, but I have very specialized knowledge with their systems that definitely add extra value.
Knowing that, how do I realistically value myself in this situation? If I take this on, would I be drastically underpaid at my current rate? <comment><USER2> I'd just inform them that your rates are going up on such and such a date. I'd also be ready to find another job (as you should always be if you're contracting).</comment>


Best Date Format: Year Month Day - <AUTHOR> https://perishablepress.com/best-date-format-year-month-day/ <comment><USER2> ISO 8601 FTW!</comment>


Open Letter to Coach Klinsmann from NY Governor Andrew Cuomo [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/default/files/documents/June_26_letter.pdf

<comment><USER2> Reading this I learnt that '12:00 PM' is noon in America, and not literally 12 hours post meridiem, i.e. midnight!

The world cup truly brings the peoples of the world closer together.

<comment><USER3> As a CS major, the only way that PM and AM ever made sense was to realize that hours were really mod-12 and started counting at 0. Noon is then 0pm which is followed by 1pm and makes everything entirely consistent.</comment></comment>


Randall Munroe, XKCD Creator, Goes Back to High School - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/science/randall-munroe-xkcd-science-textbook.html <comment><USER2> I'm not a huge fan of the way he explains things with common vocabulary. Sure it makes sense to me because I understand that he means "organs" by bags and it's a kinda nice metaphor, but I feel like some of these explanations are just additionally complex because of the need to work around vocab limitations, and to someone who doesn't already know the material might be hard to follow.

<comment><USER3> You have to keep in mind that this is also entertainment

<comment><USER4> For me the concept got old _really_ quickly in 'Thing Explainer' to point that while browsing in a book shop I went from quite interested in buying it to absolutely zero interest in the span of a couple minutes.

The constraint of using only a limited number of common words made it feel like I was reading someone's speech impediment.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't read an educational material about how a submarine works, a helicopter works, and a microwave oven works all on the same day. I don't imagine many people would - especially if it were more technically laden in its vocabulary.

Likewise - I wouldn't read all of 'Thing Explainer' in a single sitting either. A page every now and then and you don't get bogged down with reading simple language for hours on end.

Reading over simplified things gets as tiring as reading overly complex material - because both can be quite mentally taxing. The increased difficulty of reading "eight and one" instead of "nine" gets more tiring than one might think...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He's doing educational strips to appear in a textbook (just in case you'd prefer not to reward that bait-y headline).

<comment><USER7> Not to be too cynical (but here I go anyway)...but how long before it becomes "hey, instead of a few funny comics, let's do a whole textbook this way!"?

Then we continue the de-evolution into a mix of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner- city slang and various grunts.

Please forgive us, Mike Judge.

<comment><USER8> The Manga Guides to Databases, Statistics, Calculus, Molecular Biology, etc. are all highly rated.

[http://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana- Takahashi...](http://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana- Takahashi/dp/1593271905)

<comment><USER9> That database fairy really knew what she was talking about. And that's why the Princess was able to join (tables) with the prince.

I'm not kidding btw. Its a funny book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good lord, enough with the pedants complaining about the title already. We are all adults and know that sometimes article headlines are not exact literal representations of their contents.

<comment><USER11> It's one thing for a headline to be inexact, it's another thing to be a standard clickbait perversion of the contents.

<comment><USER12> I don't get why people are seeing this as egregious clickbait. It's taking well known saying "going back to school" and using it in a figurative, instead of literal, sense.

He IS "revisiting" high school, in a sense. Most people graduate high school and never look back. Munroe is looking back. The title did not say he would be a student.

<comment><USER13> Call me crazy, but I wish news articles would focus more on being information and less on being comics or novels intended to drag you along.

Choosing a cute, misleading title over an accurate one seems like the wrong choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm probably in the minority but I never grokked the whole XKCD "stick figure" thing. I'm not an art critic, but if you're going to put your work out there in the format of a comic strip, wouldn't you try to take the time to draw something more... I don't know... artful? Theres not a huge difference between a bunch of stick figures with walls of text crammed into each frame and simple text prose.

<comment><USER15> I think you're going to get pretty heavily downvoted, but I want to try to respond to you as if you're not trolling, but generally don't understand what all the fuss is about.

Munroe's technique is a type of minimalism.

By drawing mostly in stick figures and simple forms, Munroe is giving you _only what is needed to set the scene_ , similar to a theatrical production with minimal props, costumes, and sets. You get to use your imagination to fill in all the rest.

In the xkcd world, it doesn't particularly matter that Cueball has a simple circle for a head, with no facial features present, because Munroe's comedy is not primarily a visual type of comedy. The humor is found in the text, and in the situations he sets up, not in the facial expressions of the characters or in elaborately drawn backgrounds.

Which is not to say that the visuals don't matter. They certainly do. Looking at an xkcd strip is a lot different than reading the transcript on [http://www.explainxkcd.com](http://www.explainxkcd.com). But the _way_ that they matter does not depend on them being drawn in a more elaborate style.

<comment><USER16> Scott McCloud's very excellent book, Understanding Comics, goes into great detail about this. Minimalism in comics is often used for focus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My professors sometimes would put a relevant xkcd on the last page of our midterms/finals as a small gift. Small stuff like this always made my day in university.

</comment><comment><USER18> Gee, I feel like it'd be a decade before a significant number of students got their hands on these updated textbooks with comics inside them, since schools have such long textbook refresh cycles.

My other worry is that any such textbooks would be so riddled with errors that it would be undeserving of Munroe's comics -- I got new math(s) textbooks in 4th and 5th grade, and my classmates and I often found errors in the answer key in the back. If the teacher was going off an answer key and had an incorrect answer, sometimes we'd band up and go up to the chalkboard to prove we were right (by showing our work on the board). If there was time after we might even conjecture about the error the textbook authors originally made to get the wrong answer in the back.

</comment><comment><USER19> Randall Munroe is not going back to high school, his drawings are being incorporated into high school text books.

<comment><USER20> Good old clickbait titles. Gotta love 'em.

<comment><USER21> I don't see this as classic clickbait (as opposed to, say, "The shocking change at your kids' high school you absolutely must know about") so much as an attempt at cleverness, which is not uncommon for human-interest NYT stories even if it obscures the actual meaning.

<comment><USER22> There are certain patterns of annoying headlines online. However, pretty much every headline written anywhere (online or off) is _supposed_ to be clickbait in that it's supposed to grab you to read the article. And, if anything, SEO probably discourages the use of headlines that are too clever. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with this headline but I get it if someone wants to argue for headlines that are "just the facts" followed by an inverted pyramid story.

<comment><USER6> There is exactly no one arguing for just-the-facts headlines to the exclusion of any with style.

The objection is to intentional misrepresentation of the story you get after you click. This one clearly does that.

Even the example given above ("Shocking!" "You wouldn't believe!!!") is the kind of headline that virtually always misrepresents the shock(!) and disbelief(!) one will experience upon giving it the click it so desperately wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thing explainer meets thing learners?

</comment><comment><USER24> The next great explainer?

<comment><USER25> In ten years time: Cosmos, the XKCD edition

<comment><USER26> I would fund a kickstarter today that was an XKCD comic adaptation of Carl Sagan's original Cosmos series with asides to update any relevant science information.

<comment><USER27> Ditto.

Hopefully not in 10 years though, but much sooner.

I would also fund such a thing in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This looks terrible

</comment><comment><USER29> clickbait title... ugg</comment>


Choosing a Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://blog.activelylazy.co.uk/2013/04/09/choosing-a-programming-language/

<comment><USER2> You make a good point at the big importance of choosing the right tool for the job at hand, and that's the people. Also, I think that if you want great programmers in not-so-popular languages, you'll have to pay big time for them, because usually, this people have many more years of experience.</comment>


FCC says AT&T and Verizon 'harm consumers' with free data schemes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/2/13820294/fcc-att-verizon-sponsored-data-letters <comment><USER2> Can someone articulate the theory of harm here from an antitrust perspective? This practice is essentially bundling, which is practiced by many firms, from meal deals at fast food chains to Amazon's free streaming content with a prime subscription. In theory this could have anti-competitive motivations or just be standard business conduct with some efficiency/extraction motivation. How are people certain it's the first case?

<comment><USER3> Your analogies sound comparable, but fall a little short when you examine the full picture, here's why they do not quite apply.

There is limited competition for the 'last mile' infrastructure (due in part to the significant upfront capital costs creating a network, and the historical fact that existing infrastructure was previously a public good in many cases--ie paid for by the gov.)

So, you can look at this from an anti-competitive monopoly perspective. If I have a regional monopoly on the last mile infrastructure and I bundle in such a way that it gives my new video streaming business an advantage over others then I am illegally leveraging my monopoly to another business category. That is illegal in the US.

Mobile is similar, except instead of copper in the ground a handful of companies have paid for a monopoly access (or perhaps more correctly a triopoly) to certain broadcasting frequencies.

Going back to your analogy, maybe rephrase it in terms of core infrastructure like a public road being turned into a private good. Now, if the operator of the private roadways started to run their own fast food restaurants and when you buy a meal from them you get free access to the road. Alternatively, you could buy a meal from someone else, but now you have to pay for access to the road.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, I'm agnostic about the competitive harm in this case (and relatively ignorant about the market-specifics).

Here's the DOJ guidance for single firm conduct which is pretty relevant:

[https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly- single-...](https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm- conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act)

Their discussion of the potential for harm through bundling is exactly the foreclosure story you tell.

However, they also allude to the classic price discrimination justification for bundling.

To give you a simple example, imagine a monopolist producing 2 goods A, B and facing two customers 1 and 2. If the customers value the goods at (1,10) and (10,1) then the optimal conduct for the monopolist is to price both at 10 and sell the preferred product to each. However, if they can sell a bundle at price 11, they can increase profits without harming customers or breaking antitrust law. This core effect can persist with more complicated product offerings and market structures.

Here's a good discussion of the topic by the current fed chairman:

[http://feeds.czaj.org/pub/teaching/IO/Commodity%20Bundling%2...](http://feeds.czaj.org/pub/teaching/IO/Commodity%20Bundling%20and%20the%20Burden%20of%20Monopoly.pdf)

To me, it seems challenging to differentiate between these two explanations (and others). I'm sure the FCC have looked into this further and have a reason for their conclusions but I'd be interested to hear it.

<comment><USER3> I never thought of it from their perspective, thank you for the links.

I suppose I see it as a structural problem. That is, the company positioned their business lines to put them in the unique position to bundle in a way that gave them distinct market advantages. Owning the highway and distributing goods on that same highway. In the past it didn't matter so we never saw the conflict of interest. However, technology progressed and now the conflict is obvious.

I wonder what do other markets do? E.g. power comes to mind. Are the transmission lines owned by the folks that produce the power? If I understand my local market the power producer is a separate company from the transmission company. That was how we choose to privatize the industry. It seems telco got a better deal during their privatization as they own both sides. The solution, strikes me as simple (split the company into transmission and content businesses). Obviously there is no political will to do that.

<comment><USER2> In the UK, power is regulated by a complicated system of price controls, profit caps and requirements to supply downstram rivals. I don't fully understand it orhow it works in the US.

I'm sympathetic to your sentiment that Telcos seem too powerful and it could be socially optimal to constrain them. They could well be a natural monopoly, where price controls (or government provision) improves welfare.

I don't like your idea of splitting upstream and downstream though. An economist called Ronald Coase once said 'whats worse than a monopoly? A chain of monopolies..'

The idea of double marginalisation is not obvious but totally fundamental to the topic of vertical restraints/mergers and why they are so much less clear cut than horizontal agreements/mergers. This video is good.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2NElV61MUDE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2NElV61MUDE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that the article doesn't mention T-Mobile, who have been facing net neutrality complains for similar acts: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/21/t-mobile-one-eff- ne...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/21/t-mobile-one-eff-net- neutrality/)

<comment><USER5> "Both companies have recently instituted similar plans. Under the programs, customers can use select services without having them contribute to a data cap — a practice known as zero rating. In AT&T's case, the FCC writes that, despite protests from the company, its sponsored data program "strongly favors AT&T's own video offerings" while damaging the opportunity for other video services to compete."

T-Mobile applies its zero rating to all services that partner with it, and does not have its own offering that competes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've complained to T-Mobile a lot about their policies and the responses I get are basically "we can do whatever we want". I'm glad to see the FCC cracking down as these companies have been walking all over them for too long now.

<comment><USER5> Conversely, I've emailed John Legere and shared with him my support of zero rating as a long time customer, and have submitted a letter to the FCC that I'm in favor of it for traffic management purposes when the provider doesn't have their own competing offering.

Vote with your dollars if it bothers you. Not all traffic is created equal, and it shouldn't be treated as such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait until the FCC is gutted. I wonder if we will have access to HN then.

<comment><USER8> Completely valid comment. They've already been told to STFU until the regime change is complete. The FCC has been awesome under Tom Wheeler. It won't last much longer.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Crap, I just downloaded over 10000 Credit Card Numbers - Now What? - <AUTHOR> I'm a developer in the freelancing/early startup phase, and had a client ask me to look at their current CMS/Online Store. I found out that the service they're using is storing credit card numbers, names, addresses, phone numbers, and cvv - probably in plaintext too. Obviously this is NOT PCI Compliant!
I poked around a bit to see wtf is going on and unintentionally dumped the entire db of 10,000+ credit card numbers, cvv, etc. For ALL of the system's users!
I'm a good person, and I really would rather not use this information incorrectly, so what's the right thing to do that won't land me in jail?
If anyone is wondering the shopping cart service is apparently based in PHP.
Edit: I didn't make it clear enough, this is a service - like shopify - but definitely NOT shopify :) Appears to be locally operated, and has a good number of local clients. <comment><USER2> Talk to a lawyer too. By posting this you no longer have plausible deniability in the event something bad happens down the road. For example, maybe your client is hacked and an investigation is opened by the credit card company who finds out that _you_ had discovered gross negligence on the part of your client but had not reported it. I'm not sure if that opens you up to the chance of being sued. Somebody might have their identity stolen or the credit card company might want to recoup some costs. Maybe the client turns on you and somehow makes you a scapegoat.

Simply by posting this story, you may have opened yourself up to a lawsuit because an enterprising mind could follow your HN history and what you've posted here, put together enough clues, and find out the vulnerable system. They could hack it. No, you weren't directly responsible for it, but civil law is an entirely different beast than criminal law.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Tell your client to immediately switch to another service provider for his online store. When the current one gets hacked (note I said _when_ , not _if_ ), your client's customers aren't going to care that it was a third party provider your client was using. They will look at it as they trusted your client and that trust was betrayed.

2\. Perhaps an anonymous tip to Visa and Mastercard would be in order. The provider needs to be shut down, as what they are doing goes beyond any excusable security failure. Almost every developer, no matter how good, can botch security--and so if all they were leaking was credit card numbers, names, addresses, and phone number, it would be at least remotely forgivable, if they were to promptly fix it.

However, you said they have the CVV too. That is not supposed to be stored at all. Of course, an online store site has to keep it for the duration of processing the transaction, but that should only be a few minutes. The fact that they are storing CVV shows that they are beyond redemption.

3\. As for the numbers and other data you downloaded, secure delete it. I doubt anyone is going to care much about it. I once had a file with about the same number of card numbers and contact information, which I received unsolicited, offered up as a sample of the 100k cards the sender wanted to sell me. I was able to do some checking and determine that the information was apparently legit.

I called Visa and (I think) American Express. I naively thought they would be interested in putting immediate holds on the accounts. Nope. The FBI was not interested either--they suggested that the Secret Service would be the appropriate agency to deal with someone trafficking in stolen credit cards. The Secret Service disagreed. Eventually the next day I found someone at Visa who asked me to mail her the list.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree with all the other responses in her (delete it, tell the client, etc). But, the fact you mention this is based on PHP - maybe you were trying to hint at the system, but it sounds like you are blaming the language.

This has nothing to do with the language and could just have easily been accomplished in any other language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your statement - and I am blaming PHP a bit, it's gotten better over the years but I have some resentment toward it still.

I'll shift my blame to the developer for not completing their due diligence before writing software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- Did you delete db from your local computer? If not, do it now.

\- Inform your client about the problem and how you can fix it.

\- Fix it.

<comment><USER6> You should do a secure deletion. Generally, deleting a file just removes the pointer to it within the file system--it isn't overwritten immediately, and is still recoverable.

There are free utilities out there that delete securely. If you already deleted the file, which I think you posted is the case, there are also utilities that will overwrite the slack space on your drive, which will also make the file unrecoverable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Obviously, just delete the file, tell your client exactly what happened and explain how you can help them secure their data better. Turn this accident into an opportunity.

Why are these things always so hard? Why bring a lawyer (who will charge money fo his services) in own it?

<comment><USER8> _Why are these things always so hard? Why bring a lawyer (who will charge money fo his services) in own it?_

This is an awfully embarrassing situation for the company he's working for. They could decide to cut their losses and turn him into the police, betting that public outrage will focus on the malevolent thief instead of on their innocent security mistakes.

Or, if they're more worried about their liability (possibly including liability for theft already committed by less scrupulous employees or consultants,) then one way to sweep it under the rug would be:

1\. Produce a serious and viable legal threat against the poster.

2\. Use the threat to make him sign an agreement never to speak another word about their credit card problem.

3\. End his contract.

4\. Go on with whatever they want to do (fix the problem, or not) with much greater confidence that this will never publicly surface and bite them in the ass.

That wouldn't be a catastrophic outcome for the poster, but even in that situation I'd rather have a lawyer advising me.

<comment><AUTHOR> While this is embarrassing for my client, they're only using the software as a service. So I'm more worried that my client may inform the service company, which is even more embarrassing for that organization. I know my client won't be upset, after all they're having me make their new CMS, but the software as a service company might not be so kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what you are explaining, I doubt they know enough to know that you downloaded the files. In a case where the CC's are stored in the db, it's a really easy mistake to make accidentally downloading the CC's by doing a db dump. I do this for many of my projects just so that I have a backup in case I screw something up. If they were worried about something like this happening then they should have warned you or put it in a contract.

Alert the client. Shred the files. Offer to fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> You keep a copy of credit card numbers and CVV unencrypted in a database? Why wouldn't you use a third party/gateway to deal with CC data storage?

<comment><USER3> When you use the gateway to store the CC data, then with most gateways you are stuck doing all future subscription billing on that card through that gateway. For many businesses, that is an unacceptable restriction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well that makes some sense - hopefully other companies are encrypting the data and not storing CVV.

The crazy part to me is that these guys are storing this information for years (One of the first rows was from 2002, and the last 2010) and they're not doing any kind of recurring billing/customer profile stuff. So if I make a purchase 10 times my card is stored 10 times.

To top it off, I went back on it while writing the client, and I don't even need a password to access data. I can create a valid session by setting a url parameter. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this a custom store or a package out there somewhere? The latter would be pretty scary.

When I purchased a business I found a DB with all customers CC info in it while doing my due diligence (it was a crappy cart system written by some guy overseas). The seller was surprised they were there, but didn't seem to grasp the gravity of the situation ($150,000 fine for example).

I had my purchase contract written to explicitly say that I was not purchasing the CC info, and I left no trace of the numbers on my computer. IANAL, but I figure if I didn't obtain the numbers and I don't have the numbers I should be fine.

I'd recommend you tell the client about the problem. Offer to fix it, and make sure there is no trace of it on your computer. Probably worth asking a lawyer, but I don't see what else you can do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! It's a service - like shopify - but definitely NOT shopify :)

I'm just starting out, in college, so lawyers aren't in the budget...

<comment><USER2> Where I live, for under $10 the law society runs a hotline which you can call to be referred to a lawyer that can help your specific situation. As part of that referral service, you get a 30-45 minute consultation for free I believe. That's all you need right now. You might want to see if a similar service is offered where you live. See my other post in the thread stating why I think you need to speak to one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats an interesting idea, and it's in the budget :) I'll have a look at my options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In order to help I'm going to need the URL...

Just kidding.

1\. Delete the data. 2\. Call the client. 3\. Explain what happened. 4\. Prepare to be blamed. 5\. Do the right thing anyway.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you really are worried about jail time contact a lawyer and most probably delete any trace of the files.

If you aren't going to do that, or even if you are, contact the people who are storing this in plaintext and tell them why it is wrong perhaps even give an ultimatum for further action.

But you probably should talk to a lawyer first make sure you know what you should do.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think you need to tell this to your client in written. I believe that will help in future that you did inform them and your intentions were noble.

Also, then if I were you, I would try to keep my dev and personal computer more secure. I know that I am a freak that way. :)</comment>


'Too Big to Fail': Russia-Gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack - <AUTHOR> https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/13/too-big-to-fail-russia-gate-one-year-after-vips-showed-a-leak-not-a-hack/ <comment><USER2> haha this is bs</comment>


Database, meet realtime data logging. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/09/database-meet-realtime-data-logging.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Read about why a database makes a lousy abstraction layer between client and device.</comment>


FuckJerry's Success Is Instagram's Failure - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/how-instagram-enables-fuckjerrys-success.html <comment><USER2> Maybe it's because I'm not trying to market anything myself, but I have no respect at all for reposters. Further, I think reposters should never be called "curators" and to confuse the two is just giving power/legitimacy to the reposters.

<comment><USER3> I dream of the day where there is an original content only Instagram. It will never happen in reality, but I spend a small percentage of my week submitting copyright requests to Instagram. They are surprisingly responsive, but the monstrous aggregation accounts are a plague that I shouldn't have to waste time with.

<comment><USER4> Could you theoretically automate this process?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Internet comedian Vic Berger made a parody video clowning on FuckJerry and exposing their theft of comedian's material. These guys dismiss requests or pleas from content creators to (at least) please put creators' names on the material that they re-post. So predictably, one of the FuckJerry team (their chief content officer James Ryan Ohliger aka "Krispyshorts") filed a false DMCA on the video and had it pulled from YouTube. Here is that video: [https://vimeo.com/315339461](https://vimeo.com/315339461)

</comment><comment><USER6> Genuinely curious, are there any sort of legal rights or entitlements for people who share memes/funny pictures on social media?

I don't disagree that FuckJerry's behavior is pretty shady, but cmon... the entire meme community is pretty much built on reposts. Isn't that the whole point of sharing stuff on social media. Why are people acting so entitled? Seems to me they just saw the huge revenue pie and want a piece.

<comment><USER7> There is no stopping meme accounts and I do see 'original creators' getting upset at the lack of credit in the reposts. The most common answer is, if you care, watermark your work.

<comment><USER8> I've got buddies on Instagram that watermark their work and when it gets stolen do you think people are going to look at the watermark and go follow them? It doesn't do anything for the original creator on Instagram.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the problem is that the watermark itself does not function as a link? If the platform wanted to, it could treat any "registered" watermark as a link to the original poster on that same platform. This wouldn't help when the watermark gets cropped or scrambled, but that's more work... maybe there is room in the jpeg file for an "invisible" canonical link to be encoded? If not then future image formats should totally do this.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that "curators" like FJ will just crop out the watermark.

That's what makes these accounts so uniquely infuriating. They're not accidentally omitting credit out of laziness or ignorance. They _do extra work_ to make sure the original creator gets cut out of the loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Similar view from someone who had content stolen - [https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/vic- be...](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/vic-berger- opinion-cancel-fuck-jerry-media-789699/)

<comment><USER12> That's good to see Vic writing for RS, like to see him busy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was under the impression that the whole point of a meme was to be copied and distributed.

Aren't those who are offended kinda missing the point?

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

[..]A meme (/miːm/ MEEM[1][2][3]) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self- replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[5]

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[6][..]

<comment><USER14> You are conflating two different things. Originally memes (the notion of idea + transmissibility) with analogy to genes. And image macros and other internet frippery.

<comment><USER13> I understand. I know memes as in Dawkins' 'meme'..but isn't it the same principle..if it isn't viral, then it doesn't live it's purpose? Hence, Not A Meme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Instagram's lack of a re-post feature is specifically because their platform was meant for original works, not memes or reposts.

It's dismaying that they aren't standing behind that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Joke stealing is not a new phenomenon [0]. See Joe Rogan calling out Carlos Mencia [1], or the recent Amy Schumer accusations.

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

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdugSUFbzws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdugSUFbzws)

</comment><comment><USER17> We spend too much money trying to protect things that don't take much time or effort to make.

</comment><comment><USER18> Instagram's IP guidelines are a complete joke. Go deep enough down the rabbit hole and you're going to find a bunch of accounts doing nothing but reposting memes, images from video games, and video clips from TV shows.

<comment><USER19> You really don't need to go deep at all. Much like Facebook and Twitter, a very large chunk of the most popular accounts just shamelessly steal other people's content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Giphy built their business scrubbing tumblr for gifs and reposting on their servers. Stolen from countless gif artists with zero repercussions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how viable a class action lawsuit by the content owners against him would be.

<comment><USER22> It'd be hard for them to prove that they were the originator of the meme, simply because there is no 'reverse image search' for a meme template; they're designed to be as generic as possible, so that you can mark it up with text that's relatable to your audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As an end user, I'm happy that curators exist. Not talking about this "Fuck Jerry" individual in particular, but I follow many meme accounts that just repost stuff, and they are great value for me, because I don't want to, instead, follow thousands of creators and have to scroll through thousands of posts that aren't really that good.

<comment><USER8> As a user with a decent amount of followers(almost 28k), all of these accounts make me angry. I spend so much time filming and editing posts only for some T-shirt woodworking account to steal it and gain more followers than me. I don't care what size the account is that is sharing it. I report them and block them. These accounts are stealing content and making money from stolen content. It makes me sick seeing these accounts have #ad in posts because I know they didn't work hard to get where they are.

<comment><USER24> I would expect that reporting them doesn't do all that much, since Instagram doesn't really have an incentive to make that right for you (unless, of course, you're a large content creator with a ton of followers; in that case, I'm sure Instagram does want to keep you happy).

Instead, file a DMCA takedown notice with Instagram referencing the stolen work. They're required by law to comply and take it down. I expect that most content thieves won't see it as worth it to contest the takedown and open themselves up to legal liability.

<comment><USER3> Not true at all, I've reported MANY of my unauthorized posts and all have been swiftly dealt with by Instagram. In my experience, they take it seriously when you provide proof of your post, and theirs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AT&T Now Charging You an Extra $2/Month For Not Using Enough Long Distance - <AUTHOR> http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Now-Charging-You-For-Not-Using-Enough-Long-Distance-115869

<comment><USER2> AT&T is the most scandalous business in the world. Recently due to the shitty economy my family shut down our family owned and operated business and the only company still giving us a hard time about canceling a contract is AT&T.

They said we agreed to extend the contract over the phone. We asked if we called them or they called us. They said they called us. When we asked who the spoke to, they said they didnt have name, but the person claimed to be the owner. I asked the rep if my dog answered and barked would they extend the contract and the rep said, "If it was interpreted to be a yes then he was authorized to extend."

<comment><USER3> Aren't they required to record the confirmation if it is over the phone? And if so, they should be able to replay it to you.

For example, if you try to do a balance transfer over the phone, they explicitly read you they will start recording and then read you the terms and ask if you accept. If you do accept, they can pull it up later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone from a 3-letter government agency needs to put a stop to this. If the only way you can avoid this fee is to use more long distance than you normally would, that seems beyond bad business. It's very likely criminal. As an aside, I'm 30 and I've lived on my own for more than 10 years. I've never had a landline and have no plans to get one.

<comment><USER5> What do you think is criminal about it?

<comment><USER6> Isn't that some sort of forced sale/racket? "call long distance or else" does not sound like good business.

<comment><USER7> The worst possible interpretation of this policy is, "AT&T is now charging $2/mo extra for land line service". I don't _like_ that, but it doesn't sound criminal.

<comment><USER6> No, that's the best interpretation of the policy, but it's not what they're doing: apparently they're only charging $2/month if you don't call enough for AT&T's taste.

<comment><USER8> Let's think about it this way. AT&T is now charging $2 a month to have landline service. They will waive the fee for customers who use more than $2 a month in long distance charges.

It's not a customer friendly policy, as it just serves to squeeze $2 from customers who aren't using more services. But it's not criminal to add a service fee(as much as I hate it as well).

<comment><USER9> Heard at the grocery store: "You only bought 1 apple so we're charging you for the price of two because of gas prices."

It's a cost that can't be quantified to the customer. Why not just jack the monthly cost instead of tacking on a ghost charge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "(...) traditional landline users ( _all six of you left_ )"

Is having a landline so old-fashioned in the US? It's not the first time that I see this kind of comment, but it's shocking to me, since for most ISPs in many countries you _must_ have a landline if you want some kind of Internet service, whether it's xDSL or cable.

<comment><USER11> I have a DSL-only plan with AT&T. It works fine, but every time I call for support, they ask me for "the phone number on my account", and I have to re- explain ten times that I have _only_ DSL, and not phone or TV service. Often I am told that it is impossible.

<comment><USER5> Whether you buy phone from them or not, you still have a phone number associated with your account (cell phone etc), just a way to look up your record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whoa, what? There's still something called "long distance"?

</comment><comment><USER13> Ha! This is just poor marketing. If they simply hiked up the price two bucks and said "your first $2 of 'long-distance' is free" there'd be no hubbub.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm tired of telco monopolies.

It should either be a proper utility run by the government or a free market company that doesn't get government granted monopoly to certain areas.

A government run telco would pretty much serve the same purpose as the postal service. The big brother aspect isn't appealing, but it I think internet and phone is similar to power, roads, and water. Critical infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by a handful of monopolies.

</comment><comment><USER15> AT&T is a really bad company and has been for a really long time. (Another example company with a similar record is Allstate Insurance.) At this point in time it is so well known and obvious, that anyone still using them is basically a masochist that likes to be abused. I don't feel anyone else should get involved in this situation at this point since it's obviously consensual and people certainly have many other carriers to choose from. People in every state in the US have access to a large number of telephone service companies. There is not just one. No one is being forced to use AT&T. It is a free choice to do so. If they were still a monopoly as Ma Bell then certainly I could get behind proposals for government intervention and regulation but it simply isn't needed here. Vote with your feet, or accept the dysfunctional relationship you have chosen to be in.

<comment><USER16> The choice isn't there. I have AT&T for a cable connection. My other option is Comcast, which is just as bad. And Comcast only recently moved into the neighborhood. I know many people who's only choice, literally, is AT&T for any kind of connection. There's simply no one else around.

In terms of cell service, it's pretty much AT&T or Verizon. The other players are tiny by comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Up here in Canada, TELUS did the exact same tactic with its landline customers. I called them to complain but they explained that the fee was to maintain their infrastructure, even though I wasn't using it (I never use long-distance).

I asked them to put a block on my landline so that no long-distance calls could be made. That somehow placated them enough to remove the maintenance fee from my account. Within 6 months, I moved to another provider. I don't like being charged for not using services so I vote with my wallet.

Is there any chance AT&T will allow customers to do the same as I did?

<comment><USER18> Telcos generally have monopolies when it comes to landline so.... no.

Coincidentally, this is why the government should step in.

<comment><USER19> It's the governments, generally, who grant them the monopoly in the first place.

Though if you look at the history of anti-trust and telcos in the US, it was the anti-competitive practices of AT&T (as early as 1917), which resulted in anti-trust actions being taken against them. At the time it was setting inter- connect fees to other carriers sufficiently high that the competitors were forced out of the market.

Now, why does this suddenly remind me of various "carriage fees" proposed by contemporary broadband providers....</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is this a stupid business idea? - <AUTHOR>

Reward more/less anonymous people for watching security footage in basically real time to catch shoplifters and report other incidents.  An average large store with 20 cameras would produce 30.4k hr / month, which could be reduced with algorithms.  Say $1k USD / month would be a reasonable charge if it could shown that it saves this much with loss prevention.
Is anyone doing this?  What are the sales barriers, issues in this space?
Edit: Similar, but different compared to https://schneier.com/essay-327.html <comment><USER2> Lots of positive comments in here, but I think you probably need to learn how loss prevention works in stores of all sizes, first. The way you're phrasing your value proposition says you don't understand that.

Here's why: I think you're making unwarranted assumptions about the purpose and value of all those security cameras.

In a lot of cases, it's not to catch shoplifters. It's just to collect evidence. That's why security officers in stores aren't supposed to touch or give chase to offenders. It's also often to collect evidence against the _employees_. An employee has opportunity to steal a lot more than a visitor does, that's why bank tellers and cashiers have cameras pointed at their hands, not at the customer.

Second, loss is built into a retail business model. It's going to happen. It's unavoidable. The only goal of loss prevention is to keep it from happening more than it happens to other stores like yours. There may not be any incentive to stop an additional $1k/mo. of loss if you're already at or below average, because you're not compensated or rewarded based on that.

Third, I think you're overestimating the "real-time" nature and the quality of your video, here. Ever seen a video of a pickpocket on YouTube? Or in the movies? Where they have to slow-mo it so you can even tell something happened at all? A decent shoplifter isn't going to get noticed by a grainy, analog, CCTV camera, whether watched by machine learning, an average Joe, or a trained security officer.

And in your machine learning + crowdsourcing situation, you're processing data in real-time, using ML to look for what? Someone touching the merchandise and putting it in their pocket isn't very different from someone touching the merchandise and putting it in their basket, when your CCTV camera is 300 lines of resolution and in black and white and 50' away.

How long does it take for an analog CCTV camera video to get to the back room of the store (10ms?), get compressed (hardware MPEG4? 100ms?), sent over the internet to your cloud for distribution to your workers (20 video streams * 0.5mbit/sec. for 360p MP4 with no audio, that means the store has to upgrade to 10mbit dedicated upstream to your servers, and we'll say 500ms latency), decompressed and analyzed in "real time" (< 100ms? 500ms? this is your necessary core competency right here) and then flagged and either trimmed and sent as a specific video clip to users on home connections in non-US countries, or streamed as part of an ongoing video stream (another 500ms latency plus download time to the user), and then wait for the user to respond (5000-10000ms?), and then you go and notify the store. That's 10+ seconds, best case, assuming you're able to do _any_ kind of decent analysis on compressed CCTV feeds, and the security guy still has to get up and go to where the incident happened, all the way across the store. In ten seconds, the shoplifter is _nowhere near_ where they were when the video was originally taken. In reality, you're talking 30 seconds to a minute. In that time, they might have left the building already.

And then maybe you realize you can't do anything useful with CCTV, and you need to get retailers to upgrade to HD video. Now you have 20 1080p streams, plus the new cameras, plus adding ethernet wiring throughout the store (since the analog feeds just ran over cheap coaxial cables), meaning you need a store with 70mbit upstream. That's a really, really expensive upgrade for only $1k/savings a month. That might be a lot more than you save them.

Or maybe this means you need hardware on the premises to do the algorithm, and it only sends it upstream when it detects an issue. This actually makes your latency worse, because now a store sticks with their crappy 0.5mbit upstream. And, now you don't get a lot of video to analyze yourself to improve your ML and CV. Shoplifters will learn what your algos can detect and not detect and just avoid those movements and now you're not saving anyone any money.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm just saying it sounds like there might be a lot you haven't considered.

<comment><USER3> I think your comments on retail are spot on, but I think the real opportunity is probably in security detecting unwanted intruders (especially where orthodox motion or heat sensors are ineffective or inappropriate). That's got to be relatively easy to monitor using ML, especially if you have Mechanical Turkers to vet false positives.

People do get paid to watch security videos remotely and send appropriate warning messages. If it's for the private sector it wouldn't be difficult to outsource their job to _five_ people in India at a profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It feels like a good idea.

How do you stop me signing up with 20 accounts and just running the feeds while I'm sleeping?

I'm watching some footage. I see someone clearly stealing something. What do I do?

I watch all the footage but I miss people stealing stuff. What do you do?

I watch the footage and say that I see someone stealing something, but they haven't stolen anything. What happens then?

But it feels like a good use of lots of people.

One thing that might be handy is to gather all the footage where someone has been seen Stealing something and analyse that footage. If you gather the footage for a town you may find some prolific thiefs. Supplying the footage with that thief in to the police would be good.

There might be a problem offering the service in some regions because of privacy laws - but I guess you're using surveillance cameras for surveilance so it's not a problem? You might need to ask someone who knows about data protection laws if you offer this to the UK.

But I like the idea!

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the realities with surveillance systems is there they create so many hours of footage, per camera, that it's impossible to watch them all. This is a good idea if: \- you can find ways to get the watchers cost-effectively (rewarding them per incident noticed is a good idea, but if the system works as a deterrent incidents per camera-hour will go down over time); \- you can algorithmically compress viewing time \- you can find high-value applications and verticals.

<comment><USER6> ML scoring of footage of customers near product, increasing and multiple watchers during peak times. The other service would be actively testing watchers with varying levels of red team exercise difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's an idea to prove they're watching the videos...at intervals, you display a unique ID to each feed, that the monitor has to enter on a keyboard. The interval should vary, as should the position on the screen. But the UID should appear on everyones feed at the same time; this should prevent one person from monitoring more than one feed at a time. You could/should have every feed monitored by more than one person. The feds could be run slightly out of sync/delayed, but still with the ID displayed at the same actual time. Therefor is someone was distracted by having to enter the ID, and missed someone shoplifting, another person wouldn't be.

</comment><comment><USER8> Your idea will work. I used to work in video surveillance and there was a company doing "video analytics" for shopping retention. The trick was they had a large amazon turk-like operation in Brazil.

<comment><USER6> Watchers in Appalachias, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, Africa might scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Your idea will only work if you can control the anonymous watchers. How would you know if they actually watched the footage properly? One way to do it that comes to mind is the captcha way - give the watcher two segments, one of which is know to contain a reportable incident. If they report the one with the reportable incident, then it is probable that they watched the other one properly as well.

<comment><USER10> Or you could video them and pay for someone to watch the videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something else to consider which I don't think has been brought up: will the footage that users see have faces?

It's easy enough to solve these days, I believe, by just liberally pre- processing to blur the faces out, but I could definitely see that privacy concern coming up. Seems like a solid idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love the idea, would be a fun if you paid for each person you caught stealing and nothing otherwise. When I'm bored and there is nothing on TV, I can just turn on your app and pretend to be a security guard. Maybe you can even have an API that would let users make applications that track people stealing.

</comment><comment><USER13> It has been tried before in the UK: [http://www.itpro.co.uk/627418/cctv- service-internet-eyes-goe...](http://www.itpro.co.uk/627418/cctv-service- internet-eyes-goes-live)

</comment><comment><USER6> There are these large stores in the US where it seems like everyone but me is three finger discounting soda and donuts.

</comment><comment><USER14> i guess that this idea could work out very well, if you can get the costs low and the "catch-rate" high. :)

<comment><USER6> Finders fee per incident perhaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are there any existing patents on this?

</comment><comment><USER15> But sooo much streaming?

</comment><comment><USER16> Have you read REAMDE?

</comment><comment><USER15> hahaha awesome idea!</comment>


Library encourages shitty JS; activate by misspelling JavaScript in script tag - <AUTHOR> http://fatfingerjs.com <comment><USER2> Hilarious.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have business insurance as a freelancer? - <AUTHOR>

I have never been required to have business insurance with past clients but my latest gig has this stipulation in the consulting agreement:<p>"Consultant shall maintain such insurance as is customary in the industry."<p>I personally don't know any 1099 independents with errors and omissions insurance so maybe it's not customary?  I'm based out of Boston, MA. <comment><USER2> We have a corp policy now but when I first started out I did pick up E&O as well as a couple other little coverages. Contracts (larger ones) require them and conducting events (trade shows, conferences) do as well. Shouldn't cost too much.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe it is always something you should consider to cover your back anyway. It doesn't have to be too expensive and you can at least use it to give a client some assurance.</comment>


Ask HN: What to learn with 8-16 weeks of recuperation - <AUTHOR> I will have between 8-16 weeks of recuperation from a recent illness, there are no financial worries, therefore I would just like to ask you, what would you learn if you had this amount of free time? <comment><USER2> If you want a programming language, learn one that is far away from what you know. If what you know is dynamically typed, interpreted languages, learn a static typed compiled language. If you work with procedural languages, learn a functional one, and vice versa.

Or, as others said, learn something outside of technology. Learn how to play an instrument, or how to write fiction, or how to paint, or how to ballroom dance (if your health permits).

None of my business, but out of curiosity: What kind of illness gives you that long a recuperation time?

<comment><AUTHOR> You've reminded me I always had it in my mind to learn Lisp, I've spent 25+ years in C and Assembly land. Recuperation time down to not being able to breathe properly, collapsed lung, pneumonia, etc.

<comment><USER2> Cut yourself some slack if you feel like you're learning more slowly than you "should". Give yourself permission to not be at full speed/mental energy yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think that would depend on what I already knew, what I was interested in, and what I hoped to accomplish during this time (whether it be a hobby thing or professional development). Perhaps you could fill us in if you're looking for suggestions?

Personally I would probably sit down and learn the core of javascript, getting as deep as possible working toward a better understanding of what's going on under the hood. This is because in my daily work I really just scratch the surface superficially using it to write programs. I would want to understand it to the point where I could start to write something like Node.js from scratch (right now I don't even know where I would begin with this).

The reason for this is because I know C this way, so every time I write a line of code in C, I instinctively visualize what's going on under the hood.

I would like to be able to visualize this same thing with js.

<comment><USER4> Literally visualizing the JavaScript event queue :)

[http://latentflip.com/loupe](http://latentflip.com/loupe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's plenty of time to build and launch a new SaaS product and get your first paying customers. You'll learn a lot more doing that than you could from 4 months of reading books.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you haven't already, build a compiler - it's an enlightening experience and gives you a lot of intuition.

<comment><USER6> I've been tossing around the thought exercise of writing a minimal Python interpreter. Do you feel similarly about writing an interpreter, or strictly a compiler?

(I have studied formal languages a little bit... enough to know the basics of finite automata, context-free grammars, lexers, etc.)

<comment><USER4> I can't exactly say since I've never built an interpreter, but I am in the process of building a compiler (it's been a challenging and rewarding experience thus far), but I'm sure you would learn a lot from both endeavors. If you already had this project on your mind you should definitely go for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the replies so far, very interesting. Just to add, I'm just wondering what others on HN would do, I've no idea yet what to do, but from Monday I'll need to do something , or I'll go mad :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Learn to play an instrument. It will help you on later study sessions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Learn how to tell a good store. See some of Seth Godin's books</comment>


The Next Generation of Apache Hadoop MapReduce - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/posts/2011/02/mapreduce-nextgen/

<comment><USER2> Don't miss the link at the bottom. Yahoo! and Facebook will present the next gen Hadoop this coming Wednesday (Feb 16): <http://www.meetup.com/hadoop/events/16116942/>

\-- If you're attending and your interested in data mining and personalization, please look for me. I'd love to chat. twitter: @izendejas linkedin: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/izendejas></comment>


Google CN home page? - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.cn

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it look like this throughout the world? <http://cl.ly/image/3q3x1t3y1O3y>

<comment><USER2> East Coast U.S.A. looks like that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Programming certificates for high school students - <AUTHOR> Second attempt - hoping for some feedback
I am an "industry advisor" for my son's School District (in the United States), which is engaged in a multi-year program to broaden the range and quality of technical education available to students for Grades 8-12. I have been asked to comment on industry certifications for Python, JavaScript and Java programming. Specifically: • Are these certifications needed or helpful to the employment process for entry-level jobs? • Of the three certifications mentioned above, which certification(s) should we focus on? Are there others? • Would industry recognize certifications from a provider like CodeHS (https://codehs.com/info/certifications) or is it more valuable to earn them from Microsoft, etc.?
I have views, but would welcome comments and thoughts from the HN community, particularly anybody engaged in recruiting or working with entry level programming positions.
Please remember that the focus is high school students, and not all students are targeting college. Also, this is a good faith effort by the District to assist students develop real skill sets - snark about certificates is not particularly constructive. <comment><USER2> Definitely let the students get the "big boy" certs, not student-catered ones; they're too easy, the students can do a lot more, it would be a waste.</comment>