How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad  - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/How-Advertisers-Convinced-Americans-They-Smelled-Bad-164779646.html?c=y&story=fullstory <comment><USER2> The best[1] advertising is the kind that informs people that a solution to their very real problems exists.

The worst[1] advertising is the kind that convinces you you have a problem you don't really have. It aims to make unhappy with what you have or who are when you would otherwise have been content.

Sometimes it seems to me like our society gets shaped more by the worst kinds of advertising than the best.

[1] By best and worst, I mean most beneficial to the person/people viewing the advertisement. An advertiser or deodorant executive would probably have a different opinion on the matter.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your point, you seem to be suggesting that you'd put this example on the worst side of things. I'd say that everyone smelling bad is a problem and I'm really glad somebody solved that problem.

<comment><USER4> Or do you think that way because you've always assumed it was a problem? It isn't until our most insecure moments of adolescence that we really start sweating enough to require deodorants. What better time to strike at insecurities to sell a product for life? And after all these years, it certainly is a reinforcing loop. for example, you don't see ads trying to convince you that body odor is an issue - that's assumed.

Not that I disagree with you, I think that the mix of increased population density in cities combined with chemistry made it all but inevitable. But the cynic in me finds the idea of self propagating ad campaigns brilliant.

<comment><USER5> People have been using scented fragrances to cover up both body odor and other odors for thousands of years. I don't believe they had advertising convincing them they smelled bad.

Certainly, the idea of what smells "good" and "bad" is subjective, but as history proves out, I think our societal aversion to odors is 1. deeply seeded and 2. probably practical - if you smell bad, you are likely dirty (and need to wash up)

<comment><USER6> After hearing the US abandoned chemical weapons based on the odor of feces and rot because 'not all cultures share the same aversion to those smells" I was surprised to read the following quote in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:

Art thou angry with him whose armpits stink ? art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul ? What good will this anger do thee ? He has such a mouth, he has such arm- pits: it is necessary that such an emanation must come from such things: but the man has reason, it will be said, and he is able, if he takes pains, to discover wherein he offends; I wish thee well of thy discovery. Well then, and thou hast reason: by thy rational faculty stir up his rational faculty; show him his error, admonish him. For if he listens, thou wilt cure him, and there is no need of anger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> James Webb Young is a copywriting legend. You should read his ads to realize how problem focused ads work better than benefit focused ads.

You first have to raise the problem before you list your solution and benefits.

His full page ad: "Curve of a Woman's Arm"

[http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YC6YKYyHVKwC&pg=PA30&...](http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YC6YKYyHVKwC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=%22Curve+of+a+Woman%E2%80%99s+Arm%22&source=bl&ots=opNzDnfYLI&sig=M23Ep78klPn6fJDVWcKTNDeWqDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=tn0iUJmzG8jwrQe22oDwCw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Curve%20of%20a%20Woman%E2%80%99s%20Arm%22&f=false)

(If the above long link doesn't work, go to books.google.com and search for the book "The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and what They Did" - the ad is on page 30.)

<comment><USER8> Doesn't work (page limit exceeded), but this one does: [http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YC6YKYyHVKwC&lpg=PA30...](http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YC6YKYyHVKwC&lpg=PA30&ots=opNzDnfYLI&dq=%22Curve%20of%20a%20Woman%E2%80%99s%20Arm%22&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q=%22Curve%20of%20a%20Woman%E2%80%99s%20Arm%22&f=false)

Google books has a link button (6th icon from the left, looks like a chain link). It took me a while to spot it, even when looking for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you know what the bigger story is here?

You can purchase a mineral salt-rock crystal (it's a smooth solid peace of salt, about as cheap as it gets) "de-odorant" that you wet and apply, it leaves nothing behind except an undetectable amount of salt on the skin. That is ... no chemicals, no fragrances, nothing but salt.

That salt kills-off the bacteria that are responsible for odor (through various means, directly and indirectly).

After a week or two of this, you're done. Your sweat lessens, and becomes clear and odorless.

No more deodorant is required after this. Just shower and apply some soap to your skin.

The bigger story here is that advertisers have convinced you that their more expensive "formulas" are required, and there are no good alternatives.

Their products are specifically designed not to kill-off the bacteria, and hence to keep you purchasing the product.

They do this because you can't make money selling a $1 peace of salt-rock that lasts the customer a life-time.

<comment><USER10> Is this true? Any references? Experiences?

<comment><USER9> The above is my personal experience, with absolute-zero story exaggeration. Though how long you'll need to apply the salt may vary (and how frequent you'll use it).

I don't have a preference for any brand (it's all the same) but here is what I have now: <http://www.thecrystal.com/>

You should be able to buy these in any good organic food and health store.

<comment><USER11> What's the mineral in "the crystal?" It's almost certainly an aluminum salt, but I can't find the active ingredient? The FAQ says "Do Crystal deodorants contain aluminum chlorohydrate or aluminum zirconium? No." That's a bit suspicious, as I think people would really want to know "does it contain aluminum?" and the answer is likely "yes."

BTW, you wrote "Your sweat lessens" with this product, but it does not. The FAQ stresses that it does not reduce sweat. "Crystal is not an antiperspirant. It is a deodorant ... Deodorants are generally considered cosmetic product because they simply control odor."

<comment><USER12> > _I think people would really want to know "does it contain aluminum?" and > the answer is likely "yes."_

The answer is absolutely yes. They admit that it contains an alum, but don't specify which one. The "it's all natural because it's a salt" angle is BS, because aluminum chlorohydrate is also a salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate to plug a book that I'm only 20% of the way in, but everyone here who is designing/selling a product would get a real kick out of Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit"

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-Business- ebook/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-Business- ebook/dp/B0055PGUYU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344438540&sr=8-2&keywords=duhigg+habit)

(Duhigg is a NYT writer and that piece about how Target knew that a girl was pregnant before her father did was an excerpt from this book)

When I saw the HN headline I thought it might be referring to Febreze, a product that Duhigg devotes a chapter to. The sales strategy wasn't about convincing people that they stunk, but pitching Febreze as a product that you used after you cleaned a room, to associate it with the "reward" of a clean room.

Duhigg's book also touches on how Pepsodent became a breakthrough product partly because an ad-man convinced Americans they needed to battle the film that naturally covers their teeth.

</comment><comment><USER14> Quite a few markets were created overnight. This is just one of them.

Another that comes to mind is bottled water. When soft drink company profits were declining, someone had the brilliant idea of just selling water. How would they get people to be gullible enough to buy rebottled tap water, though?

By telling people tap water was bad. It worked, very well.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSOM0>

<comment><USER15> Sometimes tap water is bad. I lived in a house with extremely hard water, and it was basically undrinkable. Of course, I was generally buying water in gallon or 2.2 gallon containers at the time.

When I buy bottled water today, I want an unflavored drink that is healthy. In my view, what I am actually paying for is not water. I am paying for a disposable bottle, convenience, and usually cold. That's why I pay extra for the sport bottles with the better top. There was probably latent demand for this, but people didn't know they actually wanted it. In general, at least in the US, because of the abundance created over the last 30 years through the production of cheap manufactured goods and innumerable process improvements, people are more willing to pay for things they never would have before.

And also, I am glad they succeeded in selling deodorant. It is definitely a quality of life improvement, as I notice when I visit places where deodorant usage is not prevalent. I generally don't view marketing as adversarial like many people though. If something exists that will improve my life, I want to know about it.

<comment><USER16> A carbon filter will pretty much fix that for you and give you bottle water quality.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, not so much. There's a huge difference between water from a brita pitcher and reverse osmosis-purified water from the water dispenser at the grocery store. The latter is basically indistinguishable from expensive Fiji water, and the former is basically indistinguishable from tap water (in my experience at least, and using LA tap water).

<comment><USER16> I think it might depend on your source of water, but most US tap water just needs a good carbon filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imo this is a bigger cultural issue than solely deodorant, though it's quite possible deodorant marketing had a role in creating it. I've noticed Americans tend to be more worried about perspiration than others who live in similar climates, to the extent of entirely avoiding outdoor activity in hot climates during the work day, lest they return from lunch break sweaty. In Greece people aren't really similarly worried about walking 5 blocks to grab lunch, even if it's hot out.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much our attitude towards body odor changed because of advertising and how much was a direct result of indoor plumbing and urbanization.

Around the same time as some of these advertisements started, indoor plumbing was becoming popular. Until then it wasn't really practical to bathe every day.

Additionally, odor didn't matter as much if you worked on a farm, but urbanization meant Americans spent more time indoors in close proximity, where smell was more of a problem.

<comment><USER20> Also body odor is going to be less noticeable if everyone around you is smoking up a storm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very cultural thing. I'd rather sit beside someone with a slight body odor than beside someone with a strong artificial deodorant perfume, especially when eating. Hope one day all these irrational and costly behaviors will go away. Another is shaving pubic hair, what a weird thing to do...

<comment><USER22> Well, it does make your cockstrom look bigger. But seriously, it's a jungle down there otherwise.

I'd be more concerned about circumcision, if you want to question social mores, since it's a much more permanent and painful cut than the surrounding hair.

<comment><USER21> Circumcision is something people do for either religious or medical reason, it has a long history behind it. It may be useless but at least it is not invented yesterday by the chemical or porn industry.

For the "jungle down", I think shaving it make boys and girls look like prepubescent kids, or some kid of caricature of kids. When I said weird I meant it because presence of pubic hair has been for a long time the marker of the beginning of sexual life.

<comment><USER22> I guess I didn't realize you were talking about scorched-earth-policy shaving rather than regular trimming. I agree that shaving it completely is unappealing, but I was not aware of that being common or trendy. Maybe some of them are doing it for medical reasons as well... ; )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One thing that surprised me about American TV is just how many adverts were for medical products. Every time I watch TV here I find out about another dozen or so problems I didn't know I had that need to be cured.

<comment><USER24> It didn't used to be like that.

<comment><USER25> yeah, even in my lifetime. Personally, I find it pretty amusing, because either they don't tell you what the drug does at all, just "ask your doctor about wonderfulonium!" with you know, pictures of happy people, or they do tell you what it does, the list off all the horrible things it can do to you.

It's funny; I moved out before Viagra came to market, and didn't watch much any commercial TV. Of course, I was bombarded, like everyone else, with spam and other online advertisements for viagra.

But yeah, the first time I saw a viagra ad on television, I was visiting my parents, and I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, this was something advertised in spam, and thus something linked in my mind to dubious 'penis enlargement' pills, girls who "saw my profile online" and 419 scams. Not the sort of thing you expect to see on broadcast television. (I'm not casting aspersions on viagra the drug... just the marketing I had been exposed to associated it, in my mind, with dramatically... less legitimate products.)

<comment><USER24> What's interesting is that there are probably whole categories of commercials that don't air any more, crowded out by pharmaceuticals (and political ads).

<comment><USER25> I think a lot of it is the shifting demographics of TV watchers; in the '90s, everyone watched TV. Now, I think it's mostly the old and the average-to-poor, so it makes sense you want to advertise medical stuff, as that's probably the most you can squeeze out of both of those groups.

But yeah; I'm looking at ridiculous meatspace advertising opportunities for my own company (which targets technically skilled customers) and TV isn't even on the radar.

Now, if Netflix could figure out how to advertise things other than movies without pissing off their customer base? that'd be pretty great. I'd buy space on the inside of the DVD envelopes where they push other movies, if I could geographically target tightly enough, and if I could afford it.

The other interesting thing, I think, is that to a non-tv watcher, viagra, is inexorably linked to poorly-done scams and obviously-fake drugs. Because of how this product was marketed to me, I associate it with illegitimate and dangerous products. It seems there is an advertising lesson in that, as well, though I'm not sure what the lesson would be.

<comment><USER24> "I think a lot of it is the shifting demographics of TV watchers"

That's true, but I believe the pharma ads started because of a change in regulatory restrictions that allowed them to advertise.

If the demographics were different, cash-rich pharma would probably still use a ton of air time, it would just be ads for different target markets. Acne medications, ADHD meds, anti-depressants, smoking cessation drugs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _Instead, most people's solution to body odor was to wash regularly and then > to overwhelm any emerging stink with perfume._

Doesn't sound like they had to convince anyone they smelled bad, just that there was a new, more effective way to prevent it.

edit: My bad, read on and actually to an extent the headline is correct, so I withdraw my complaint.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately that is still most peoples solution to the problem and they still stink to high heaven.

Lets see some marketers do some good in the world, get them to realize that BO smells bad, a gallon of perfume/cologne smells bad and BO and a gallon of perfume/cologne together makes you smell worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm just amazed at the amount of ad copy that they thought people were willing to read back then.

</comment><comment><USER29> So successful advertising = playing on people's weaknesses?

<comment><USER30> In some cases, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _it presented "excessive perspiration" as an embarrassing medical ailment in need of a remedy._

I think the condition of "halitosis" was similarly invented.

<comment><USER32> I take it you've never worked closely with someone who had it.

<comment><USER33> Amen. Someone at my workplace has it--you can tell if they spoke in a room up to twenty minutes after they leave just by the smell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me of Gillette or Keurig. Make a common product or need disposable. Why? Not to fill a need or create a new service/method for doing something. Just, because, that's why. Nickle and dime the consumer by preying on their laziness and putting a shiny package or vibrating handle on it...

<comment><USER35> That specific market story is even worse since cartridge razors and canned shaving creams or gels generally provide an inferior shave for the majority of men. The only major benefit is that they can be used without any skill or practice whatsoever and the modern version may shave a couple minutes off your morning shave.

On the other hand, a safety razor will last you a lifetime, replacement blades have been standardized for close to a century and even the "premium" brands cost less than $0.15/blade. A nice quality safety razor and wetshaving set can be had for about the price of 6 months of cartridge razor replacement blades, and beyond that, you can probably buy a _lifetime_ supply of safety razor blades for around $200. Shaving cream will cost you about the same either way, so it's not a factor.

<comment><USER36> I happily use a safety razor, but I won't pretend that it's any more convenient or necessarily gives a better shave. I always found that my disposable or cartridge razors worked quite well, and shaving cream is of course a hell of a lot easier than whipping up the soap.

The convenience of a modern razor, including the fact that it's much easier to learn, makes it worthwhile. Everybody on HN is always talking about how they simplify their lives by throwing away everything except their macbook and a few day's worth of clothes or whatever; I think for most people the simplicity and ease of a disposable razor and a can of shaving cream beats saving a few bucks a year.

<comment><USER37> But whipping up the soap makes for a radically better shave in my experience even if you do use a modern razor (which I do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This reminds me of a fantastic radio show I used to listen to in Canada called the Age of Persuasion ([http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/age-persuasion- from-cbc-r...](http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/age-persuasion-from-cbc- radio/id411513638)). Great read.

</comment><comment><USER37> Through self experiment I found out that soap does nothing to remove armpit smell for me. It works just for 10 minutes and that is because most soap has some amount of perfume in it masking smell. Anti-perspirant on the other hand works very well. So I wonder who convinced us to wash parts of our body that are not covered in hydrophobic substances with soap? Since I stopped using it my skin is significantly less oily thus I don't need soap to remove it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER39> Try our vintage all natural deodorant made with Coconut Oil, Baking Soda, Cornstarch, Beeswax and Melaleuca Oil. PitStik – Changing the way you stik your pit __It WORKS!!! __www.etsy.com/listing/104196499/2-pit-stik-all- natural-vintage-scentable ~ _~_ ~ _~_ ~* COMING SOON _~_ ~ _~_ ~ _~_ ~* Our all natural milder deodorant for your junior or tween - twit-Stik!!

</comment><comment><USER40> Another product which does similar advertising, but convinces their color of skin could be better is <http://www.fairandlovely.in/>

Guess even the name has a subtle meaning, be fair "and" you become lovely :)

</comment><comment><USER41> I sat next to a guy on the bus today who made me realize that if somebody can invent a breath mint that lasts for 24 hours our society will be much better off. And that picture alone in an advertisement could sell a couple million.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't self driving autonomous vehicles be taken underground? - <AUTHOR> I have been looking at various levels of autonomy by different companies. It seems easier if we create an underground system of self driving autonomous on-call car service instead of tackling the problem of people driving with autonomous cars on above ground roads not built for them.
Further..you can have fixed rails.
Even better: no parking spaces as the cars would never have to come above ground. People can come up on elevators at drop off centers and we would still need last mile/intra city transport.
I know..just like trains. But at least it's a safe environment to test controls and requirements so we would at least know what changes need to ve made to above ground roads to accomplish autonomy. <comment><AUTHOR> Trains take hundreds of passengers from point a to point b..with limited stops.

Autonomous underground cars can take and drop off individuals whereever they want..even at every street corner if an elevator is installed at every street corner. It's on demand. There can be 12-16 lanes if necessary..

It's best if it's tested for intra city transit first. There will be a lot of data points even in the controlled environment. After that..it's just an issue of overlaying it and making whatever tweaks if needed on overground roads.

</comment><comment><USER2> 1) The US has hundreds of billions of dollars of roads. SDCs are valuable only if they can use that door-to-door infrastructure.

2) As you said, we already have trains. If you're building new infra, it might as well have tracks so that the vehicles on it can't veer off course.

</comment><comment><USER3> So like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit) but underground?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe? But multiple lanes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I also think there should be three layers. Underground, roads and maglevs.

One for inter city, one for intra city transit and one hub to hub transit.

</comment><comment><USER4> -> www.boringcompany.com

<comment><AUTHOR> If only I had Elon Musk on speed dial..

I think boring company should be looking into underground farms too</comment></comment>


Lincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2017/05/15/528170534/lincoln-said-what-bogus-quotations-take-on-a-new-life-on-social-media <comment><USER2> My favorite Lincoln quote is "Don't believe everything you read on the internet".

<comment><USER3> Ha! I saw a pretty good one along the lines of:

       70% of statistics are made up on the spot.
           - Abraham Lincoln

<comment><USER4> Isn't it: "70% of statistics on the Internet are made up on the spot." \- Abraham Lincoln

<comment><USER3> No, the internet bit is from Adolf Hitler, you Nazi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been collecting quotes for years (publishing some of them here: [http://thinkmindful.com](http://thinkmindful.com) )

For me other peoples pithy insights bring solace, a new way of looking at something, and a recognition that any struggles I may be going through are not unique to me.

Does the fact that some of them are wrongly attributed bother me? Only a little, I like to get it right. But the meaning behind the message is the main thing.

<comment><USER6> The meaning can be vastly different depending on the origin of the quote, although for general observations about life I would say you are right.

<comment><USER7> By happenstance I just came across one that was intentionally misattributed.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" -Lee Harvey Oswald.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a notebook that I write quotations, sayings, and other wise-sounding tidbits in.

I never write who the quotes are ascribed to. I don't believe that just because a specific person had an adage or said something means that it's right. Unless it's on a subject that someone is an expert on, it's just a weak appeal to authority.

For me, it's more that I already agree with what the quotes are saying, but they're generally worded better than what I could write.

<comment><USER9> Knowing the source of a quote is valuable for all but the most trite aphorisms.

Take Gertrude Stein's "a rose is a rose is a rose". Sounds pretty dumb on its own, but that was her style, and incidentally she was paraphrasing a Shakespeare line.

Hmmm, I think I kinda proved your point.

<comment><USER8> Obviously it doesn't apply to all quotes.

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened" is a quote I have in my book. It's commonly attributed to Dr Seuss, but it's actually from a little known German poem.

The actual origin of the quote isn't important. Just because it was (or wasn't as is the case) said by Dr Seuss doesn't mean that it's any more powerful or authoritative.

Maybe it is a "trite aphorism", but I like it anyway, so in the book it went.

As for your specific quote, I've never heard of Gertude Stein, so the name itself has no significance to me. And to be honest, after reading the wikipedia article on the quote, it still has no significance to me. So I'm not going to write that quote in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My rule for posts that contain text as an image is that the information in that image is almost certainly wrong.

<comment><USER11> let me Escher-ize that for you: [https://www.genolve.com/svg/en/quotes.php?creation=2d40141d-...](https://www.genolve.com/svg/en/quotes.php?creation=2d40141d-b292-489d-afd2-c1e3e9d36519)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ciao – HTTP checks and tests monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://www.brotandgames.com/ciao/ <comment><USER2> Neat. Only looking at the docs and screenshots:

I think you could add a ssl cert expiration warning to this. It's use case is so similar and the data is already there and only needs to be parsed & displayed :)

<comment><USER3> I use letsmonitor.org for this - it's a free managed service.

<comment><USER4> We have a lot of internal only web services, so a self hosted option would be a plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a very cool solution if you can't use any of the common SaaS solutions out there like Pingdom or UptimeRobot.

Making getting this thing reliable is going to maybe a bit harder. Monitoring systems have this sort of "meta" issue of needing to be more reliable than the things they monitor. I'm building and running one as we speak and I had some interesting cases in that regard.

If you _can_ us a SaaS tool, then here is my obligatory plug of my hosted / SaaS [https://checklyhq.com](https://checklyhq.com).

<comment><USER6> > _Monitoring systems have this sort of "meta" issue of needing to be more > reliable than the things they monitor._

Only slightly; they just need to have an extremely low likelihood of going down at the same time.

It's okay if your monitoring is down sporadically, just as long as it doesn't overlap with the device under test also going down unexpectedly.

<comment><USER5> correct, if you run a dedicated monitoring system for a handful of targets. If you run a SaaS or a very large monitoring system for a large corporation, this doesn't fly anymore. There is simply no moment available to be down. There is always overlap with some system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'Ciao' has an interesting etymology:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciao#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciao#Etymology)

<comment><USER8> Apropos for an unattended daemon

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We've been using UptimeRobot for this purpose for a number of years. Generally happy. Just something to keep in mind is that we've found their keyword check very handy, and in fact use it more than the status code check. That is, it looks to see if a word (or words) of our choosing are being rendered and pings us know if not. Some of our environments will serve a default 200, but it might not be for the page we hoped for (e.g., a default nginx page after a reboot).

I do like the open source option you've provided though. As I said, we've been using UptimeRobot for years and currently use it for around 50 sites. I fear if/when they change their pricing tiers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice product! And thank you for making it opensource. Any particular reason why you chose Ruby?

A little plug : I have developed [https://www.guardscript.com](https://www.guardscript.com). It is a service that detect any modification made to static files hosted on your website. The goal is to detect any unwanted modification and revert them as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> Also check out PageProbe - [https://nodetics.com/pageprobe](https://nodetics.com/pageprobe)

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like at nice replacement for my current solution of a shellscript/cron combo (for monitoring a handful of internal endpoints)

<comment><USER12> Update: on second thought, without support for webhooks, this is going to be somewhat less useful than my current setup.

<comment><USER13> support for webhooks is already there on 1.4.0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks, I'm checking it out atm. Btw., a varname is converted to string on your website: "email@example.com"

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks great. Any reason why the app has on auth despite being based on rails? http basic auth seems extreme.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to keep the app as simple as possible - without management of users and authentication/authorization methods. This can be accomplished with an auth proxy standing before the app or a similar method.

HTTP Basic auth is considered secure when running over TLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm using www.websitepulse.com for that stuff

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice, I like the simplicity around the solution and how easy it is to use.

Along with checklyhq mentioned in the thread if you are looking at comparing SaaS tools in the space check out my tool [https://appdoctor.io](https://appdoctor.io)

Although it does much more then just status checking it may fit someones use case with its advance tests or statuspages.</comment>


Workers, Take Off Your Headphones - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/workers_take_off_your_headphon.html <comment><USER2> Programmer:

-high switching cost for refocusing after being distracted

-measured by "heads-down" work

-individual deliverables are the primary contribution, secondary is collaboration

-values efficiency

-relies more on individual creativity than collaborated ideas

-prefers to be valued by merit as opposed to political/social leverage

-views headphones as a polite way to signal "I'm working"

Pointy Hair Boss:

-low switching cost for refocusing

-measured by team goals

-primary job is organization & collaboration

-values perception of value over actual value

-relies on others to be productive

-their values are increased from coworker interaction/meetings

-views headphones as a signal for "anti-social luddite who will never advance"

</comment><comment><USER3> As much fun as it is sharing highs and basking in the sweet glow of office gossip. It turns out you're there to do a job, the headphones help drowned out the useless stimuli generated by people existing in the same space. Unless there is an emergency, don't bother me with a time vampire method of communication.

</comment><comment><USER4> Eroding employee loyalty? You know what erodes employee loyalty? Make up some sort of retarded policy about when they can or can't wear headphones in the office.

</comment><comment><USER5> Headphones are part of the culture in our open-plan office. It's the equivalent of closing your office door.

<comment><USER6> Then is it considered counterproductive or rude for an employee to _always_ have his or her headphones on? Or do you have something like an in office chat room that everyone is expected to respond to?

<comment><USER7> Not OC, but we have an IRC chatroom, and we're all on AIM. If something is important, it's not considered rude to walk up to someone's desk and get their attention. If we're in the middle of something, we'll sort of wave you off and mutter "gimme a few minutes".

If we're really digging into something and need a few hours of uninterrupted time, we'll announce it in IRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Workers, Take Off Your Headphones, and Get Off My Lawn, I am here to generalize "business research" into unrelated fields and tasks.

<comment><USER9> I thought the headline was a riff on: Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to loose but your chains (headphones)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Workers who don't actually need to concentrate on something with five people behind them yammering about something unrelated, take off your headphones.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd take the headphones off if I could close a door or, even better, work from home. Otherwise, I can guarantee there will be several times each day where a bunch of coworkers (and sometimes my boss) will spend considerable time talking loudly about anything but work.

That must be the valuable communication that articles like this espouse. I don't mind banter if it doesn't bother those working and if the people bantering can actually produce. That's not the case in my situation.

</comment><comment><USER12> I see no issue with wearing headphones in the workplace as long as the norm is to IM instead of talk in real life. More complicated, decision making discussions can take place outside of IM. Without headphones, offices can be extremely distracting.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think people who have this as a mantra, lived in a time where most workers had the luxury of a real office with more sound proof walls. Even people with real offices tend to have paper thin walls when it comes to sound.

When I start a job every 2 years, I then to have my headphones off. Unfortunately the vast majority of background chatter tends to revolve around people's personal lives or just plain office gossip. Both of these things get regurgitated to me at lunch. I'd rather keep my focus. If they really want my attention, it's pretty easy to get through a variety of ways like IM.

</comment><comment><USER14> A colleague of mine says that it distracts her when I speak german on the phone. She can tune out english just fine, but when somebody speaks in a foreign language, she has to use headphones.

<comment><USER15> I'm with your colleague on this one. But that's because I love the german language and wish I could speak it. Besides that I can see how our brains learn to tune out english like they do ads but then when something very unique comes along it can be very hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > One person with whom I spoke told me that "wearing headphones actually makes > me feel anxious a lot of the time, because I'm always worried that someone > might ask me a question or say something to me and I'll miss it." This > person is right to be concerned.

I, too, would be concerned if the person speaking to me didn't notice the giant set of headphones that I wear every day, and just mumbled something and walked off.

</comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like the author is concerned about the work version of the negative social network effects of modern technology - using it to maintain lower levels of communication (no body language, etc) with people you already know while reducing your "white swan" opportunities for increasing your network via unplanned connections IRL.

If you don't have an open office plan, though, I wonder how much headphones are really cutting you off from the office network? I guess the author is referring to layouts where you use headphones to cut out excess noise around you, which wouldn't be as much of an issue in non-open plans.

I like to use headphones for background music, but I keep it on the lowest level possible so I don't miss out on external conversation when it arises. I'm not sure if it creates a negative impression when I'm talking to someone with headphones in even though I can obviously hear and understand them; I've never been made aware of any such impression but I've also never asked.

</comment><comment><USER17> I used to be the kind of person who couldn't work without headphones. Nowadays, I usually don't wear them unless there's a lot of noise I need to drown out or I just want to work undisturbed.

People who do use headphones all the time don't bother me though. I typically just send them an IM that they can acknowledge my question/comment on my own time.

</comment><comment><USER18> Company chat rooms. Then if you have to concentrate you can leave the discussion alone and catch up on it later. Also, when you are out of house, you can still follow along on the discussion "at home".

Github seems to do that, here are their chat bot: <http://hubot.github.com/> but it is also a lot of fun to write your own bot with specific functionality for your company. We have had (and still have) a great experience with a chat room for group of ~20 students at our university, even though we are often located in the same room right next to each other.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everyone has a threshold beyond which they'll exercise restraint in talking based on the number of people who might overhear the conversation. It's like fear of public speaking. Today's open floor layouts and their desk densities exceed some people's comfort levels, so they shut up and take their conversations to the chat room. In general, the density and lack of privacy is too high for programmers but not high enough yet for marketing, for example.

</comment><comment><USER20> ...and sometimes music has nothing to do with drowning out distraction. Maybe it brings a little happiness to my day, stimulates a creative part if my brain that would otherwise not be engaged, and connects my work to a deeper part of my life. Any company that tries to regulate my productivity by projecting their own insecurities deserves the massive beatdown that the 21st century will give them.

</comment><comment><USER21> A useful generalization is that tech business are divided into people who talk for a living, and people who think for a living. One side of that divide seems to have a lot of trouble understanding the legitimate needs of the other. The headphone issue is but one of many ways that lack of understanding manifests.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not only do I wear headphones, I pump a mix of cafe sounds through it. Amazingly effective at drowning out conversation at low volume levels. BTW has the OP ever heard of "flow"? You can have 2 hours of my full attention, just don't spread it throughout the day if you want me to crank stuff out.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hell no.

</comment><comment><USER24> There may be professions where being accessible at all times is more important than being able to drown out the world and concentrate, but programming is not one of them.

Communication is important too, but when you need to concentrate headphones are invaluable (unless you have a private office)

<comment><USER25> _"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration." - Don Knuth_

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Written by someone who has apparently never needed to block out everything and concentrate on a difficult task.

<comment><USER27> Oh I'm sure she has, but she probably had a door she could close.</comment></comment>


Flowtown (early revenue-generating startup) is looking for Master of the UIverse - <AUTHOR> http://ethanbloch.com/master-of-the-uiverse

<comment><USER2> Mainly because Martell is an investor and it's fun to mess with him a little:

oneforty is also looking for a front-end/UI designer/developer, and we have fewer hoops than Ethan: [https://www.jobscore.com/jobs/onefortyinc/frontenddesignerde...](https://www.jobscore.com/jobs/onefortyinc/frontenddesignerdeveloper/duhs0E-Vyr3Qy8eJe4aGWH)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's some complex filter you got there, Ethan. Hope you catch something good.

<comment><USER4> Thanks man! They're out there, just need to find them :-)

<comment><USER5> You just had dinner last night with someone that snapped up two of them :)

Hello from the month-old two-person design department at isocket! I'll try to help put the word out for you, love what you're building and how you're doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get the feeling mock-ups are the next step of the interview process...

<comment><USER4> Christoff? actually it's a full stack prototype on rails...

<comment><USER6> I'm actually Christoff's UI guy...

<comment><USER4> Oh cool, tell him Ethan from Flowtown says hi!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought April Fools was yesterday.

<comment><USER4> We missed the memo :(</comment></comment>


Putin-Dell slapdown at Davos - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/28/news/companies/dell.davos.fortune/index.htm <comment><USER2> Putin's words may be rough, but it is probably true that Russia does not need Michael Dell's help or any other U.S. IT powerhouse.

This is a key difference between China and Russia culture. China also does not need placating "help" from western companies. But they'll smile and take it until they have the upper hand ;).

</comment><comment><USER3> When things get translated, they can acquire unexpected meanings. In English even, consider "help" vs "aid".

<comment><USER4> In Russian 'help' and 'aid' would in most cases be the same word, so I doubt Putin misunderstood the guy.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this lack of verbal nuance exactly why Putin could misconstrue an offering of "help" as an offering of humanitarian "aid" to poor computer- illiterate Russia?

<comment><USER4> No. You might think that (seems logical), but in fact having one word instead of two means you always think of the context. So, he definitely didn't think of this offer as of humanitarian 'aid'. My assumption, is that the message from Dell was to make some sort of business (profitable to Dell, of course) and Russia did not actually need this offer. I guess, Putin replied like that because he was asked a question in the same manner (using this 'help' word instead of 'deal' or 'business').

And, btw, Putin speaks english more or less. At least he knows the word 'help'.

<comment><USER3> > Putin speaks english more or less

But does he grok the difference between "help" and "aid"? :-)

<comment><USER4> Well, how am I supposed to know? ) All I'm saying is that it's very unlikely he misunderstood anything there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised Michael Dell had anything nice to say to Putin in the first place, let alone an offer of assistance.

Putin is a war criminal and a thug, comfortable with murder and intimidation as normal tools of his trade.

<comment><USER6> You are obviously new to this whole world domination thing. Might want to look in the mirror. ;)</comment></comment>


Atlassian Design Guidelines License Agreement - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/aui-adg-dist/src/master/LICENSE <comment><USER2> Well? It's standard "By lawyers, for lawyers" boilerplate to minimize harm to them, and maximize penalty and harm to others.

Nothing in here really stands out as particularly onerous, coming from proprietary closed software viewpoint. It's certainly not "Free Software" as many of us are familiar with.</comment>


HTML5 App Builder with Modernizr, jQuery and Kinvey - <AUTHOR> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/item/153-html5-app-builder-with-modernizr-jquery-and-kinvey <comment><USER2> That looks pretty nice. I'm always curious to see app developers make use of the caching opportunities in HTML5 so make the naysayers that claim the only way to have a great mobile experience is with a native app.</comment>


Stop Guessing Languages Based on IP Address - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kristopolous/stop-guessing-languages-based-on-ip-address-3862464b97c7 <comment><USER2> "Stop guessing languages based on IP address" misses the target by going a bit too far. IMHO it should be "Stop guessing languages", because that's the root cause of this issue.

It stems from making assumptions on the human and her intentions based on the computer settings or network location. We know better than that.

Problem is design is made based on metrics and tracking, and things are tailored to the largest user base and the rest is an afterthought.

The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags. Tackling this in an almost universal way is not that easy and obvious, but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a broken choice upon the human visiting the website.

<comment><USER3> > The main roadblock is the current lack of a way to ask the visitor for her > language of choice in a way that does not involve words nor country flags

The whole point of the blog was that the browser _already has_ asked the user that question in the sense that it defaults to the system language setting, i.e. the first things you do on a computer when you open it for the first time.

> but even a partial success is better than having an automated way force a > broken choice upon the human visiting the website.

I don't understand. What you're proposing as a solution (asking visitors their language on first entry) is essentially the fallback scenario for guessing incorrectly.

I try to think of the number of different websites I visit and thinking of every single one asking me for a language preference makes me feel not good about using the web. Right now, the worst case scenario is when chrome automatically detects that the website doesn't match my language and gives me a popup asking me if I want to translate.

<comment><USER4> IIRC it's the browsers language, not the system language. Might be wrong here.

<comment><USER3> Just looking through the Chrome settings, I get linked to this help article: [https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424)

> You can set Chrome to show all settings and menus in the language you want. > This option is only available on Windows and Chromebook computers. > On Mac > or Linux? Chrome will automatically display in the default system language > for your computer.

Obviously it's different for different OS and browser combos, but the important thing I think is that it's a browser setting and not something that needs to be configured on every site.

<comment><USER5> I was playing with this today: at least on OSX, I couldn't find a browser that reasonably handled "I speak more than one language comfortably" out of the box (eg, using the OS settings).

Safari: sends the primary OS/environment language, and nothing else. (the OS allows for a weighted list of multiple languages, Safari honours only the primary language). There is no configuration option for this.

Chrome: sends the primary OS/environment language, then en_US, then en. If you had a second preference that wasn't english (eg Belgium, Switzerland, etc), tough. It is atleast configurable (if you look hard enough)

Firefox: entirely ignores the OS environment; uses the localization you downloaded. But is also configurable.

<comment><USER4> What I love about Firefox in this space is that it lets you configure fonts per-language, which is important because default fonts are often not that great.

I've never found sites that actually use Accept-Language properly, so I care as much if that works well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the topic of language, a problem I have in India is that many OSs, apps and sites don't understand that both "color" and "colour" are okay in India. It's more a question of style whether you use the US or British or US spelling, and I don't want my spell-checker enforcing style. Neither is really wrong, like "colur" would be.

macOS, iOS and Android all get this wrong, insisting on "correcting" color to colour. This happens in both native and web apps. I tried to work around this by adding English (US) as a secondary language, which fixes the issue in iOS but not macOS or Android.

A couple of other related points: it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults. Google Maps on a new phone showed me a distance in miles. A computer should never ask you a question it can work out the answer to. If you still want to change it, fine, but the default should be sane.

Another problem with language is that many developers think of I18N as a checklist item to be ticked off. They still use American English like "way to go". Leave the Americanisms out of it, if you want your non-American users to feel welcome, as opposed to, "This isn't for you". Americans will also understand if "way to go" was replaced by "congrats" or "congratulations".

<comment><USER7> "it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults"

No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

_every_ computer these days has perfectly serviceable language and locale settings. These settings should be the definitive source for any application to decide how to present language/locale-dependent information to you. If an application shows you distances in miles, either:

1) The application ignores the language and locale settings altogether and always uses english/miles. 2) The application does look at the language setting but ignores the locale setting and decides that "english language" implies "distance in miles" 3) The application does the right thing, and your computer is actually set to a locale that uses miles for distance.

Note that none of these scenario's are fixed by looking at the physical location of your computer.

<comment><USER6> You didn't even understand what you're supposedly disagreeing with.

The locale settings need to be initialised to something, right? What default value would you choose? Miles for everyone, as Google Maps seems to? Km for everyone? Better than either of those is using location to set it to whatever the customary unit is in their country. Otherwise, you're doing the wrong thing for hundreds of millions of users.

Whether this particular setting is in the phone OS or in Google Maps is irrelevant. Either way, it needs to be initialised, and it should be initialised to something sane.

<comment><USER7> The locale and language are system settings. My point is that applications and websites have no business second guessing those system settings based on location.

For the system-level settings, those are always part of the OS install process. So either an end-user building their own system, a commercial system builder or downstream provider like a phone company will have to set it to some value during installation. Location doesn't enter into it.

<comment><USER6> Location can be used to update the default, on first run. There's no reason why that has to be the same for US and Indian users. That's the point I was making all along which you haven't understood.

Second, can you give me a reference to back up your claim that Android has an API that tells you whether the user prefers km or miles? We're not talking about language or locale here (things like en-IN) but distance units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh yes, this is such a nuisance!

* When you download Firefox from Norway, you get the Norwegian version, with the right Accept-Language header setting by default. * When you buy a computer with Windows or MacOS in Norway, it's localised to Norwegian – IE/Edge/Safari presumably sets the right Accept-Language header. Linux users get to choose language during install. * Looking at Piwik stats from a site mostly used by people in Norway, I see mostly "Norwegian Bokmål" as Browser Language (10x as much as English). Dominant browsers are 1. Chrome 2. Safari 3. Firefox 4. IE. So the browsers seem to be doing the right thing.

So even without fancy UI asking what languages you know, Accept-Language seems to be correctly set (at least for Norwegians). So why are sites using the more complicated and less precise geoip guess?

<comment><USER4> And when you download Firefox from Maharashtra (a state in India), you do not get the Marathi version. It is non trivial to enable Marathi (you need to download a language pack addon, folks who need this may not be technically sound enough or speak enough English to figure this out). Marathi is the 19th most spoken language in the world, with more than 14 times as many speakers as Norwegian. What I say for Firefox was true for all browsers last I checked.

So "at least for Norwegians" is correct; this doesn't generalize well at all.

To be fair, Google in India defaults to English anyway (it's complicated -- might have been a sensible choice in the past since you could assume that folks who use the net know English, but it is probably exclusionary now that everyone is coming online). But I'm sure what I said for Marathi works for many other languages.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for enlightening me :)

Even so, it seems like a bug that you aren't offered the Marathi version (or a choice between that and English) when you download Firefox from a Maharashtra IP. Maybe something to report to Firefox bugzilla? Btw, do you need to download additional language packs to get Windows or MacOS localised to Marathi when you buy a new computer there?

And what do you think of the UI-solution suggested in the blog post?

\-----

Crazy alternative: Browsers typically include language detection libraries, used for detecting LTR/RTL status and spelling[1]. The default setting for Accept-Language could be based on the languages detected when the user types into spell checked text fields.

[1] Firefox doesn't do this for spelling yet, but I think Safari at least does [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1203024](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1203024)

<comment><USER4> I think it's because the Marathi localization isn't an official one.

I've been discussing how to improve this.

IMO the blog post proposes a rather naive UI that will be too involved and confusing for this task. For advanced users, maybe, but then you want to actually define the "pretty good" etc. A drag-and-drop-choose-preference-order is better here, though still involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, I may be wrong about this, but my guess is that a lot of non English speakers browsers are not sending the "Accept-Language" header with the correct language. Getting that language right requires configuration that most users can't/won't do, so it's only going to be right if the system defaults do that, and I think it's pretty likely that a _lot_ of users will be getting the wrong language.

If the above is true, then it almost certainly makes more sense for these large international sites to just ignore the header and send the correct language for a given country. Some travelers may be inconvenienced, but a much larger number of users will benefit.

<comment><AUTHOR> The interface problem is unsolved. My argument that it's necessary and the IP- based guess is insufficient has two reasons:

First, often there's a local, state, and international language. This is endemic in India but also exists elsewhere. In Barcelona for instance, there's Catalan, Spanish, and English.

The migrants to Barcelona generally know at least one of these; such as Turkish and Catalan, or Arabic and Spanish. So what do you display? The Catalan version? Spanish? English?

You can find the differently-scoped languages in unlikely places; in Mexico for instance, Nahuatl has 1.4 million speakers and Yucatec has 759,000. That's about the population of San Francisco. Not a small number.

Second, international migration is only slated to increase. In Los Angeles, the neighborhoods of say Huntington Park (pop 58,800) and South Gate (pop 95,677) are 97.1% and 94.8% Hispanic/Latino respectively while Monterey Park (pop 61,085) is 86.3% Asian/Pacific Islander. The Burbank/Glendale area has the largest population of Armenians outside of Armenia. Over 50% of LA residents don't speak English in the home.

So for these cases, is defaulting to the state language a better user experience than fixing the language selection process?

<comment><USER2> > So what do you display? The Catalan version? Spanish? English?

You let the user choose. A big missing component of international websites is the UI to let people choose the language they want instead of guessing for them.

<comment><USER10> The user obviously should be able to switch the language, for example in the header.

But you have to display the site in some language on the first visit. Or do you want to show three big flags and nothing else? The internet would get annoying very quickly.

<comment><USER11> I'd venture to say that displaying the English version with a clearly visible flag selector would be good enough in 99% of situationa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real sin here is not just the geoIP, but the patronizing "we will decide for you, lowly user" tone of many sites: they do not just inflict you with an arbitrary language, but make it difficult or impossible to undo.

If you take an UI decision on the user's behalf, then you acknowledge you could be wrong and always offer an option or drop-down menu (at the _top_ of the page, not hidden anywhere else) to correct it, to me that's just basic UX.

<comment><USER13> It gets more condescending than this. For example, nobody treats what we speak here daily as a language at all, and instead shoves what they think we understand down our throat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks! For fuck sakes, using VPNs sometimes is a pain in the butt due to localization.

Edit: Although I understand localization is important, but perhaps we should favor English - an international language - over a localized one. Of course, one would say, it being international does not mean well adopted. Perhaps, we can use some sort of constants to assume a Country's acceptability of English and first make English the first choice; having localization as an option.

Interesting Anecdote: When I was a tiny little kid in India, we were forced to use the English version of Google so that we learn English as well as Computers at the same time. Sure Localization is more user friendly (and hence I understand it being there) but it is not a standard. After not surfing the web (or visiting other pages), 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized.

[1]: Bullshit number.

<comment><USER15> > 99% [1] of the applications/programs on the computer are not localized.

I just took a survey of the apps in my dock - 8 out of 12 third party apps are localized into the UI language of my computer (Japanese). This is on the Mac though, things might be more dire on Windows.

<comment><USER14> Dire indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google is very bad at this but some sites are much worse. There are sites which plain refuse to speak English to me at any costs. No option, no nothing.

Some sites insist that if I do business with them, I must do through the local website. Fine, I can buy from your German website... if you speak to me in English. There is zero reason to assume that if you force me to use your German website I speak German. No reason whatsoever.

Look, if you want to have region specific websites, go for it, even though I will hate it. Just don't redirect me to the one you think I need. Let me make the choice. And especially don't do it if there's no way for me to get back to the one I wanted in the first place (looking at you Osprey).

And if you force me to use your region specific website don't assume that everyone who is forced to visit your German website speaks German.

It's also frustrating that automatic browser translation very often breaks the checkout process (not to mention the privacy aspect of it).

Of course the nail in the coffin is when a region specific website won't work with a credit card that is outside that region. Although usually that happens in the United States, where fortunately website do speak English but won't take my European credit cards.

This is all very simple, if you do _nothing at all_ , you don't fuck up the user experience. It's great. Every little helpful "improvement" you make is a mistake.

<comment><USER17> Udacity, for instance, doesn't let me choose English anymore and is very frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment> photon-torpedo For Google, I often find myself smuggling a "hl=en" into the query parameters. This works on almost all Google services, and is quicker than finding out where the language switcher is hidden in the UI.

<comment><USER18> Not sure if it works now but by just visiting [https://www.google.com/ncr](https://www.google.com/ncr) is enough to disable all localization settings instantly.

<comment><USER19> No, that localizes to American, with useless, stupid Fahrenheit and miles.

Another common problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Switzerland has 3 official languages and geoIP is not good enough to determine in which part of Switzerland you are. I always get pages in German despite being in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

Even when traveling abroad I get the problem since mobile connections are now tunneled to your home country. In France, I get German pages!

<comment><USER21> Sorry if this gets too nitpicky according to Google you officially have 4 :)

<comment><USER22> > _The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian and > Romansh. All but Romansh maintain equal status as official languages at the > national level within the Federal Administration of the Swiss > Confederation._

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

<comment><USER23> Non-mobile version:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even were it not a matter of privacy and principle, I should be avoiding most of Google for this kind of idiocy. On the rarer and rarer occasions when I am somehow forced into using their services, they invariably insist on force- feeding me my native language, however much I may be running a thoroughly English language computing environment, including an English language browser with a purely English Accept-Language setting.

Same went - until recently - for Play Store access in Android, and I believe it still does if I access the Play Store web interface, at least as far as comments are concerned.

Google is not the only offender, but by far the worst that I know of.

[Typo edited]

</comment><comment><USER25> Please, this, yes. That and location. I don't live in St Louis, but Google swears I do and there's no way to change that setting in Google news. I've emailed their product team but they're also never wrong.

<comment><USER26> This may be outdated. I just opened Goole News and on the right hand side just below the weather widget thing there's a place where you can change the location it's providing you news for. Changing the location not only updated the weather widget but also the local news stories.

<comment><USER25> Amazingly enough even when you do that, it still insists on showing me 'Local News' from St Louis.

<comment><USER27> For a long while the only place I could find to change my home location in google was their (now defunct) movie showtimes page :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've lived in Costa Rica for 10+ years, yes I speak spanish fluently, but I would much much prefer to read the site in english. My favorite is Dell.com, wow they fight so hard to send me to dell.cr, even when I use a VPN they've gone out of their way to pay for services to redirect me to Dell.CR..

<comment><USER29> A country specific site isn't the same as a language. Often they're doing business with people from that country. The US site might not be able to trade with somebody in Costa Rica. Different way of accepting money, different laws, etc.

The problem there is that each country's site tends to be only in one language. Ideally they would have every combination of language and country, with language being a choice and country not.

<comment><USER2> That's great but consider this: I'm a US citizen traveling in Costa-Rica right now and I want to buy a Dell computer that I'm gonna pay in US dollars to be delivered at my home in the US when I get back, now I can't because I'm redirected to the .cr website that has different ways.

The issue here is making assumptions on the human and her intention based on the computer and its network supposed location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the last three weeks I've been in five different countries and each time this happened with every major site. Super frustrating! Thankfully this is an aberration and I don't usually travel much.

By the way, the time zone situation is even worse -- at least I can usually find an English link. Good luck figuring out if you have a conflict with a meeting scheduled while you're in Romania but you're going to be in Mexico when it happens. It's all manual all the way.

<comment><USER31> I don't understand the time zone issue. Even the macOS included Calendar app with time zone support switched on makes this a complete non-issue, and Google Calendar handled it pretty well when I used to use it too. I travel basically continuously, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones all the time, and as long as you enter the correct time zone when creating the event, everything works perfectly.

<comment><USER30> you have to know what the correct time zone is. That's a manual task.

<comment><USER31> No - on macOS Calendar you just type the city name (or a nearby city).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Polyglot problem: when Google Chrome always asks you to translate the page but you just want to read it in the original language and you are too lazy to disable the popup.

<comment><USER33> Also, this happens when the page isn't even in a foreign language, but the majority of words are not dictionary words, and there's a sparse overlap of one or two words which statistically correlate with a misspelling of a similar words in some language outside your currently chosen locale.

<comment><USER34> How often does that happen to you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Also, however you discover my language, don't autotranslate your contents into it if you don't have a translation (and worse, hide the way to disable it). If I can't read anything you have, I'll ask my browser to translate, you don't need to bother.

<comment><USER36> Haha, the MS C# docs are just infuriating. There are things I absolutely don't want to see translated, and language docs are one of those.

<comment><USER37> Keep in mind that in many cases, translation isn't done because the market demands it, but rather because either the country laws, or government regulations for software sold to the public sector do.

<comment><USER38> Some apps and sites, like iTunes Store, do this with the license agreement, since they like to pretend the document has legal power, it has to be presented in one of the country's officially recognised languages. So like the article, someone only understanding English in Germany signing up for iTunes has to accept a legal agreement in a language they don't understand...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone else find it a bit problematic that documentation, which should mainly be descriptive, is taking an ideological stance? It's one thing to describe known bugs around an implementation, but reading the MDN docs on accept-header, it's pretty clearly advocating against using accept-header. How can a web-reference justify recommending against standards? I understand it's not meant as the canonical reference doc, but that's pretty much how it ends up being used and I think Mozilla should be more conscious of the position of its docs. (I personally find MDN much easier on the eyes and useful with its compatibility tables and examples)

<comment><AUTHOR> Although not obvious, MDN is a wiki with a pretty level-headed and healthy community. I've done numerous edits that were well-received so I say feel free to change it.

<comment><USER39> Ah, that is a reasonable suggestion. I would but unfortunately I don't feel technically competent to do so. (I'm more the type of programmer who would rely on MDN rather than write anything on it) It's too bad there's no discussion page like other wikis have. Under the feeback tab in the navbar, there is "report a content problem", but that requires filing a bugzilla. Don't get me wrong, overall I'm quite satisfied with the quality of MDN (it's so much better than w3schools which I was using before), it's just the tone of this particular article.

<comment><USER40> MDN articles aren't supposed to be just flat descriptions of "Feature X does Y. To use feature X, place the following code in..."

MDN is supposed to be an educational resource that can teach people what different bits of technology are for, when and why they can be used, etc., and so it's appropriate -- if there is a common problem with something -- to mention the problem.

And though I didn't write that article (but I did work on MDN's software platform during my time at Mozilla), I largely agree that Accept-Language simply doesn't work, and some other sort of in-page UI is far more reliable. There's a reason why MDN will do content negotiation, but also shows a drop- down of languages an article is available in and uses language identifiers in URLs, after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> The description on MDN does fairly accurately describe the state of the world. It _could_ be read as advocacy but I don't think that was the intention, maybe the word "describe" is better than "justify".

So I changed it to:

"MDN attempts to describe why Accept-Language ought to be ignored. The reasons are fairly weak when the..."

Which reframes MDN as a reporter instead of an advocate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What I also hate are recommendations based on my IP / location without any chance of changing it. The example that bugs me most: Spotify. Why can't I just pick a country and get recommendations for it?!

<comment><USER31> I have basically the reverse problem. I happened to set my Spotify account up when I was in Germany, and all my recommendations are forever for Germany and in German, no matter where I am, with no option to change it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When visiting websites from Belgium, one frequently occurring annoyance is that websites will serve you content in French. This happens even when you're in the Dutch speaking region (this should be easy to detect since the ISPs are different between regions).

It's frustrating because many Dutch speakers can understand English better than French.

It would even happen for websites that support English, French, and Dutch, such as Skype.com (can't test if it's still happening though).

<comment><USER43> Seconded. Country is probably (but hard to guess) 55% Dutch,35% French, 5% German, 5% Other , and language is a sensitive topic. English has become some sort of neutral zone. Even so, lots of sites have a 'they'll speak french and like it' attitude, sometimes even without a way to switch to even English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Irritating and frankly it is worse experience than not guessing at all. I'm yet to understand why someone puts resources into it.

On the other hand I found the best indicator for me is my keyboard settings, I usually want to consume content in the language I'm currently writing, but still far from perfect.

</comment><comment><USER45> A great annoyance in Finland is the Google maps enforcing minority language on everyone, a lot of the place names are in Swedish even though app and everything else is in Finnish, there's no option to change this either.

<comment><USER46> Even weirder still, in my experience, is that Google Maps randomly displays the names as Finnish sometimes, and randomly displays them in Swedish other times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I hate accept language. Google keeps pushing me to the German site, and there seem to be a million places where I might have to configure my computer to make it do the right thing. My OS is actually set to English, so I don't know where the German redirect of Google comes from.

What is so difficult about sending me the US site if I go to google.com, and the German site if I go to google.de? That is really the only language selector I need.

Likewise, other pages should simply have an explicit URL for another language, that I can memorize if I prefer that language.

<comment><USER48> > I hate accept language.

Did you actually read the article? Because the whole article is basically a rant about how the non-use of the Accept-Language header is causing the trouble you have.

<comment><USER47> I read the article - it mentions that few people configure their browsers properly. I brought up my personal experience as unpleasant, because of the accept headers. Also it is not obvious how to configure the browser properly. I am German living in Germany, but prefer to do my computing in English. Apparently that confuses any web sites.

All I want is to have an English site when I type in google.com. If I want to search in German, I can go to google.de.

What could be simpler than that? All the other stuff is confusing and annoying. It's also not really "restful"-ish, is it? I think it would preferable to give the same site as a result of opening an URL, not change it depending on mysterious parameters.

How is a non-geek even to find out about the accept-headers? Say I know nothing about Computers, go to Google.com and suddenly I am forwarded to Google.de. How do I solve the problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Whenever you travel far away, it's a good idea to "pre-Google" a few important things and physically store the results. And, install a translation app. You just never know if your connection will be reliable or reinterpreted in some way.

It is also useful to have a blocker because occasionally you can deal with problems by blocking offending domain references. For instance, pages might "not load" due to font server access issues but realistically you can kill those and see the page anyway.

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't know. I'm annoyed by sites doing that too, but I don't think the author appreciates the complexity of the issue. Two examples:

They choose Google search results as an example; but when I'm in the Netherlands, I definitely don't want them to exclude the website of a Restaurant or Tourist attraction from the results, just because I don't speak Dutch. That's what Google Translate is for, after all. On the other hand, when I Google for Recipes, maybe don't show me Dutch results even if I'm in the Netherlands; I might be able to have them translated, but I think there are enough English or German recipes for Tomato Sauce too that wouldn't need to go through this extra layer of indirection. So there definitely _is_ a correlation between language settings and Geography - in _some_ cases.

I'm also dissatisfied with Accept-Language. For example, I speak both English and German well enough that there isn't a huge difference in comprehension. If I just set Accept-Language to English and German with q=1, and visit pages of a German, a US and a Spanish University (assuming all three of them have all languages available), they should behave very differently.

Now, let's complicate things by throwing politics into the mix; choose the wrong language or show the wrong results and suddenly you are offending one subset of people or the other.

Languages, Countries, Politics and Humans in general are inherently messy and complicated. If you see a problem that has to do with any of those and you start a sentence with "just do X", then it is very likely that your Engineering brain is oversimplifying things (and also, FWIW, you are showing your privilege in not having to consider that other people might work _very_ differently).

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that it's surprisingly difficult to make accept-language negotiation actually work (unless users specifically dig into their configuration and make it so, no browser I've tried gets this right out of the box)

Lets take a reasonable scenario - the wikipedia articles for Birmingham (UK). In English, the article is as fleshed out as you'd expect, for the second- largest city in the UK. In Slovak, there's a couple of pretty pictures, and two sentences.

A user arrives with the header "Accept-Language: sk-SK,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6". Which article to I send them?

The 'naive' approach is to send them the two-line summary in Slovak. Their preference is Slovak, I have Slovak, let's do this. Easy.

The 'weighted' approach is score my available translations, decide that, eg, my English article has a weight of '1' (it's the best translation of this material I have), my Slovak article has a weight of 0.2 (it's a pretty crap translation). Content weight * User weight gives me 0.8 for my English article (1 * 0.8), and 0.2 (1 * 0.2) for my Slovak article. So I deliver the English article - the user has expressed that English is "pretty good", and I can deliver much better content in English. As a programmer, I love this approach, it saves delivering poor translations to users who don't need them.

Now, the reality. The user has sent en_US;q=0.8 not because they speak a single word of English, but because Chrome will by default, send the OS environment as 1st preference, en_US as second, and en as third. Being clever failed.

Any time we have to admit that our translations are not made equal, accept- language (or rather, current browsers' default configurations of it) is simply too naive.

</comment><comment><USER51> Google Maps also does something like this. Open a maps tab in Winnipeg and it will show you downtown Calgary if the ISP is Shaw Communications. Twitter even started recommending I follow former Prime Minister Stephen Harper because he represented a Calgary riding. I don't live in either of these cities.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's not only languages. I used to check my weather at weather.com, but they decided to give me weather by default based on my IP address. They remember what locations I checked before, but they don't care and give me the geolocation result first.

Guess what, they're getting the country right, but they're a couple hundred kilometers off, which makes the weather information useless.

And back to the article topic, I'm in the camp that absolutely hates localized software. Translations are a lot more verbose than English and/or simply sound ridiculous. Please keep your site in English when you present it to me.

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe browsers should have an initial "choose your languages" popup that shows up after install. Then Accept-Language settings would become more correct and the need for weird guessing games would disappear.

</comment><comment><USER54> Counter argument: American sites should try supporting a language other than English.

Many EU sites have multiple languages sorted into different flags up at the top of the page. Ours do not.

<comment><USER13> Please, don't use flags unless you want to bring politics into it.

<comment><USER55> its a visual representation of a language that often conveys information to people whom speak an unknown tongue. Given an array of choices people may be able to pick out the graphic quicker.

<comment><USER40> Would you like to not be allowed to do business in China? All you have to do is use the flag of the Republic of China to indicate traditional Chinese.

Use names of languages, localized into those languages, for the selection. Or if you _must_ save space, use two-letter language codes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> There are a few bad implementations of Accept Language parsing out there too. BrowseHappy is one, it gets the weighting wrong and displays the wrong language a lot.

</comment><comment><USER57> Let's not forget the case of multilingual websites where one version may have significantly less or different content than the other.

Example: I visited a Swiss website recently that displayed itself in German by default (I'm in the UK), and also offered an English version with a warning that it is lacking in content and is not up to date.

So probably the choice of the language should be a combination of user preference AND website preference.

<comment><USER58> I live in Geneva, Switzerland, and I am tired of websites automatically switching to German (even Google). Geneva is in the French-speaking part of the country. Switzerland is trilingual. I prefer English, French is also fine, but switching to German while nobody here even speaks it...

<comment><USER50> > Switzerland is trilingual.

*quadrolingual

Don't forget about that pesky Romansh ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I wrote an article about the very same subject 3 years ago. Little has been done to make it better:

[http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web- internation...](http://www.planetjones.co.uk/blog/27-04-2014/web- internationalization-often-inconsistent.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> No, not everyone who uses browsers will actually go through settings and deal with this. Plenty of folks run browsers without the default language changed (it's a nontrivial procedure!), and they'd likely not look for the language tweaking UI. The browser UI language isn't actually too important -- all the important buttons these days are icons. The language you see Google in is more important.

Some UX could certainly be designed around this. Google could default to Accept-Language and say "Did you want Google in Language X" (in the IP detected language) in a bubble, with a link that triggers the language-setting UI (somehow). Or it could default to IP detection with an API for the reverse. The current situation of far too many people sending flawed `Accept-Language "en-US,en;q=0.5"` headers will have to be worked around somehow.

Google already suggests English when it detects that you've changed the language you use (I'm not sure if it suggests english when you are logged out and switch locations, or if it perhaps suggests whatever your Accept-Language is)

<comment> nv-vn Imagine if the first time you opened your browser it had a big grid of flags/languages to choose from. This would be trivial to get users the right Accept-Language. You could even have it do this every time you open the browser if the computer is used by multiple people.

<comment><USER13> You are assuming the site would remember what language the users have told it to use.

YouTube, even after all these years, forgets this every 3 days, even when I'm still logged in. But it doesn't forget what ads to shove to me though.

<comment><USER37> The site wouldn't have to remember. It would get an Accept-Language header in every request, and should just use that.

<comment><USER13> Which is still the wrong way to go about it, unless the browser lets users easily set this per site, like how some browsers did for text encoding.

<comment><USER37> It's the right way to pick _the default_ even now. Websites can still provide language selection. Although, yes, it would be better if there was a way to define Accept-Language on a per-domain basis (including wildcards).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The rise of the internet was a great chance at making the world speak a common language, whatever language that might be. Instead we decided to localize it to avoid making people feel uncomfortable.

Localization is such a pain in the ass. When you are abroad you always get the the wrong language and many business sites try to force you into using a specific domain that does not even support english. Try reading dell.com in Europe.

I see so many people using mac OS and windows localized to their own small language with a few million speakers, making it effectively impossible for them to get support online when googling instructions is impossible because menu items you have to click do not have the same descriptions in different languages.

What is even worse is that sites like youtube have started automatically translating video titles into whatever language it _thinks_ I want. Even if the translations were correct, which they never are, why in the world would I want them to be translated?

Localization needs to die and it cannot go fast enough.

<comment><USER61> Not sure why this got downvoted - it's a perfectly valid personal opinion and, albeit expressed rather strongly, doesn't seem to violate any HN guidelines. Have an upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Last time I couldn't even find a way to get back to Google.com. It was constant redirects.

<comment><USER63> [https://google.com/ncr](https://google.com/ncr) (ncr == no country redirect). It'll also set a cookie that'll prevent the redirects in the future.

<comment><USER16> Except that somehow it doesn't work reliably.

This problem hits me every time, I know about /ncr, so I visit it, and then it works for a while. Until it doesn't. It's beyond frustrating.

<comment><USER17> [https://encrypted.google.com](https://encrypted.google.com) seems to work better than /ncr for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> A bit off-topic, but I'm italian and despite my best efforts to use english as system language on my Windows installation, I still catch some programs using italian.

Where do they even get it from? Date and currency formatting settings? Timezone? I'm baffled.

<comment><USER65> Keyboard input language maybe? Is the Italian keyboard layout different?

</comment></comment><comment> martin-adams So in the Google example, if I travel from the UK to Germany with Brisish English as my language.

Should I get google.co.uk, or google.de but in English?

I can see a few problems, such as some results not having English pages and possibly not being able to use local search.

</comment><comment><USER66> One single language makes sense. Until we get Teilhard's unity. Or something similar.

Or Julian May's. The Pliocene saga was an interesting read I thought.

</comment><comment><USER67> there is more then .de in europe and german is not german

for example: you have 3 complete different countrys which all speak german .DE .AT .CH

you need to handle taxes, currencys, even some special characters like: ß street = strasse (CH) = straße (DE,AT)

until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser there will not be a replacement for GEOIP

<comment><USER37> > until they dont implement "choose youre country" on setup of any browser > there will not be a replacement for GEOIP

There's "choose your country" on setup of your OS, and your browser is perfectly capable of picking that setting up and communicating it to the browser - there's a standard protocol for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> most annoying is Google News when I dont want local news. Also YouTube

<comment><USER69> Most annoying to me is Wikipedia. It is almost never the case that I would prefer the Danish article over the English. Yes, Danish is my native language, but why would I want a 10 line article in Danish, when there's a 5 page article available in English.

It's not that I don't appreciate all the hard work the Danish authors put into the articles/translations, but I'm still left with an lower quality because of an assumption made by the Wikipedia site.

Of cause the problem is that even being able to weighting my preferred language won't help, because some sites I want in Danish, and some I would prefer to have in English, even if a Danish translation is available.

<comment><USER70> Why wouldn't you go straight to en.wikipedia.org? If you use a per-language site, Wikipedia never redirects you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> It's much worse on Xbox One. You have to change your country to something like the USA to be able to even SELECT English (the option doesn't exist for non- English speaking countries). And if you do that you can no longer pay because payment options are locked down by country, so you have to switch back to your original country to buy something. How can Microsoft blunder so horribly? How can anyone even conceive of the idea that people only speak their own language in their country? It is maddening.</comment>


Survival of the Richest - <AUTHOR> https://www.loanable.com/blog/survival-of-the-richest-how-the-worlds-financial-elite-are-preparing-for-armageddon <comment><USER2> If the climate apocalypse comes to pass, as the community in the Global South that I live in disintegrates, I'll take a little solace in the fact that the henchmen billionaires hire will soon tire and dispose of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is enough genuine stuff to worry about in this world without these fake conspiracy theories.</comment>


San Francisco's confirmed case of Measeles may have exposed thousands - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/02/19/measles_confirmed_case_in_sf_area_may_have_exposed_thousands_to_the_contagious.html <comment><USER2> "Measeles"? You couldn't copy the original headline? Before you object to my correction, consider that the headline makes your submission unsearchable using "measles" as a keyword.</comment>


Time Might Only Exist in Your Head - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/09/arrow-of-time/ <comment><USER2> Pretty sure mountains erode regardless of what I think or perceive...

<comment><USER3> from the article: "And to be clear, it's not whether time exists, but what direction it moves. "

<comment><USER4> Also not from a physicist but another random loon with a theory of everything trying to sell pseudo science bullshit to the uncritical masses with the help of an uncritical and uneducated media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Psuedoscience.</comment>


Ask HN: Google web corpus + big data analysis cluster? - <AUTHOR>

Thinking about starting a developer friendly service that frequently crawls the web at massive scale + a big data analysis cluster (such as Storm) with support for a variety of languages.
Obviously walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter would be off limits at the beginning, but if the service gains traction, then it's possible companies would want to be crawled.
I was trying to analyze the common crawl recently, and the process of getting set up is non trivial. This service would allow more people to more easily analyze the web.
Would welcome any feedback. <comment><USER2> Some quick questions:

1) How frequently would you crawl?

2) What are you defining as a 'massive scale'? It'll probably grow i'm sure but what is a reasonable range you're working with?

3) Which languages will you be supporting?</comment>


Why every CEO should do their own customer support - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/05/04/3-reasons-every-ceo-spend-time-customer-support/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

<comment><USER2> I always love to do some support for my companies. If you really care about your product then it's fascinating to talk to people that are actually using the thing you and your team invented. If a CEO doesn't care about support then he probably doesn't care about the product.

</comment><comment><USER3> its' kind of like the undercover boss program that they showed in the UK - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Boss)

Not tech orientated, but lots of CEOs doing 'front line' work (e.g CEO of hotel chain working as a receptionist in one of his premises)

It sounds cheesy, but the program was often enlightening.

<comment><USER4> There was a run of undercover Boss in the USA. For me, the most enlightening thing about the entire run of the show was how few front-line employees know what the CEO of their company looks like.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting to compare the shows. There's a bit more forced narrative in the US version.

It is a good idea to see the frustrations that your workforce face everyday. Even better if you can work out a suggestions scheme with rewards for money saved.</comment></comment></comment>


Chase Bank is canceling porn performers' business accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/chase-bank-anti-porn/

<comment><USER2> It's more than just Chase being a judgemental prude here. Apparently, the US Department of Justice is threatening banks with fines if they don't shut down some accounts that are deemed "high risk", which are apparently mostly accounts from people involved in the porn business. Even totally stable and legitimate businesses.

The real problem here isn't so much that people are being unreasonable prudes, the real problem is that they're secretive about it. If they want to ban porn, they could simply propose a law to ban porn, and then send court orders demanding that banks shut down these accounts. But that's not what's happening here: the businesses are totally legal, yet unjust fines against banks are used to coerce banks to close those accounts without a sound legal reason to do so. It's a corruption of the justice system, and should worry anyone, whether or not they like porn.

(Disclaimer: I couldn't care less about porn, but I care a great deal about justice.)</comment>


Free web apps directory - <AUTHOR> https://growingpage.com/ <comment><USER2> As of this writing, the site's logo is misspelled.

[https://imgur.com/a/TOyxwU0](https://imgur.com/a/TOyxwU0)</comment>