Ask YC: SQL Help ! (feel free to ignore) - <AUTHOR>

First: I'm sorry if this isn't aproppriate, and the right place to post it. Feel free to flame me, downmod me, and generally be a nuisance. But since I've been around here for a while I know that there will be someone that can help me.
I've recently decided to take up programming and find it to be great fun. (I've always been the biz and ideas guy) However, I've run into a problem that I can't quite figure out. I've tried different forums, asking people, etc. but nobody seems able to help.
Anyway here's the question:
I have three tables in a mySQL db: list, labels, and content.
The idea is to be able to create a matrix with entries from list along one axis, entries from labels along another axis, and entries from content as the intersection of the two. The content table has a field that corresponds to a field in labels, and a field that corresponds to a field in list so that I am able to place it correctly in the matrix.
Now i want to do a SQL query that returns an array with items from the content table, ordered on the X axis by fields in the list table, and  ordered on the y axis by fields in the labels table.
The reason for wanting to do this is that I want to create a number of  HTML tables with columns that will change, and are not the same for all HTML tables.
And again: sorry if this post is inappropriate. I hope I have enough karma for someone to bother helping me out.
Links, clues etc. would be great. I don't mind figuring stuff out for myself.
Help me Obi-wan Kanobi - you're my only hope.... <comment><USER2> This post is indeed inappropriate. You should ask for help on the MySQL mailing lists, or on one of the many forums for asking programming questions on the interweb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I know... I obviously tried quite a few forums, and spent a long time pondering it before I went here. So this was a last resort.

Sorry if I wasted your time.</comment></comment>


I'm doing some changes to Design it & Code it. Want to help me? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, recently i've published my project named "Design it & Code it".  Now I'm going to make some changes and I would like to discuss them.
The website: http://designitcodeit.com
What I came up with: - allow users to register and submit their projects(design only) - add a poll or something like this where users could vote up/down projects that could be coded - the project that users liked the most would be coded and released for the rest of users - add "Fork" function so users could customize projects
I think that by adding those features the website would be more popular and users will be happy that they can promote their work(and website). <comment><USER2> You would get huge traction if you went through <http://www.premiumpixels.com/> and coded all of the awesome resources they have on there.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's looking for a job? (March 2011 Edition) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm looking for statistician/analyst position.I have knowledge of R, Python, MySql, etc.

I'll be a full time student starting in June and would prefer to find part time work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm looking for remote development jobs. Preferably groovy related, as that is my current strength and interest, but am a very fast learner of different technologies. I'm currently located in Germany but am currently looking for a move. A link to my website with more information about me is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure, I'm a user interface developer/designer capable of things most couldn't even dream of. Looking for a new job in NYC so I cam move my family back to the city. I built Edit Room, which is the quickest and easiest way to create CSS3 animations. Links and Email in profile...

</comment><comment><USER5> I am! In Austin, TX, I'm a Clarity PPM Admin and IT Project Manager, mostly. A geek-of-all-trades. I do data analysis and validation, some DB work, some coding... If you need an all around IT person who will learn or do whatever to make things run smoothly, let me know!

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking for remote Machine Learning jobs. Feel free to reply in the thread.

<comment><USER7> Hello, I am seeking a person who would tackle a machine learning problem for a social TV application. interested? shoot me an email. info in profile.

<comment><USER6> Your email is not visible in the profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Me too! Currently working as Peoplesoft dev, but interested in transitioning back to front-end or media development. Based in Montreal, but open to remote or relocation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looking for internet marketing/advertising related gigs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Web Designer/Front End Developer here in Cleveland, local or remote.

Also willing to relocate, if you can believe someone would want to leave this place behind :D

</comment><comment><USER11> HTML5-CSS3,JavaScript,jQuery, Mobile Web, LAMP Developer for hire in SF Bay area and remote possibility now!

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/suyashj

</comment><comment><USER12> Any django developers or css/sass/jquery experts. By experts I mean you really know it.

<comment><USER13> I'd say I'm an intermediate JS/jQuery dev. Have played around with SASS and used PHP mixed with CSS on a project or two. Maybe we can talk and see if I'd be a fit?

*Note: located in Canada (Toronto), looking for remote/contract work

firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am. Common Lisp gig preferred. Python/Django a not-too-distant second choice.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a designer/web dev capable of most needed skills, looking for freelance work.

<comment><USER16> Contact info?

<comment><USER15> My bad, it should have been in my profile, its there now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> i would love to work on CodeIgniter, jQuery AJAX, Wordpress platforms, building kind of social network apps or data analytics works.

edit: (added few words) and i am looking for full time and long term remote work.

</comment><comment><USER18> unix S/A work, Would like to work with AWS. P/T remote

</comment><comment><USER19> Right here.

</comment><comment><USER20> front end web dev right here</comment>


DomainTyper: Fast Domain Search (with a name generator on the left) - <AUTHOR> http://domaintyper.com/ <comment><USER2> Within YC we always use the original one of these,

<http://instantdomainsearch.com>

It would be interesting to know how many YC-funded companies' names have first appeared in that box. At least 20 I suspect.

<comment><USER3> Tipjoy is one of them.</comment></comment>


Homeland Security Issuing Its Own DMCA Takedowns On YouTube To Stifle Speech - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120720/02530219774/homeland-security-issuing-its-own-dmca-takedowns-youtube-to-stifle-speech.shtml <comment><USER2> If you call the US "IP cops" for a perceived violation of IP or copyright, then the response will probably involve DHS.

The Department Of Homeland Security (DHS) is the home of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), and ICE has had responsibility for the enforcement of copyrights, intellectual property and related. ICE has had that role for a while now, too.

Which means you see DHS listed on various postings.

Here is one of many previous OMG-DHS-WTF kerfuffles:

[http://www.quora.com/U-S-Department-of-Homeland- Security/Whe...](http://www.quora.com/U-S-Department-of-Homeland- Security/When-did-the-DHS-start-to-become-involved-in-copyright-enforcement)

Waving the latest round of DHS enforcement in front of nerds is probably great for the clicks, but not really all that newsworthy.

<comment><USER3> The U.S. has somehow historically been really bad at producing this kind of paranoia over computer-related stuff through strange assignments of responsibility. The fact that '80s hax0r kids were raided by the _United States Secret Service_ , rather than by some normal-sounding police agency, added a whole layer of mythos to that historical episode.

<comment><USER4> They were raided by the _US Secret Service_ because the Secret Service is/was actually the Treasury Police (the Protective Service assignment to the Secret Service is an accident of fate).

In other words, it is/was weirder that the Secret Service protects the President than it was that they were involved in Sun Devil.

And, as someone who came up close enough to Sun Devil to know a couple things (I graduated high school in '94 and went almost directly to working in vulnerability research): many of the people who got caught up in Sun Devil were ultimately good people playing MIT-style pranks that just got out of hand... but don't valorize it. For a good long chunk of time, people were routinely _hacking phone switches and rerouting calls_. Almost the whole phone infrastructure --- and _EVERY_ Internet-connected Unix system --- was owned up. It was NUTS.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of that history. But naming a government agency "secret service" is just a mythology-building choice in any circumstances, regardless of having a good explanation. Though the later association with guys wearing earpieces and black sunglasses taking a bullet for the President didn't help, either.

I don't _valorize_ the '80s BBS scene per se, I just think the response was a bit over the top. Instead of fixing their shit, they tried to paint a bunch of teenage pranksters as some kind of apocalypse, as if these were uniquely evil geniuses, and raiding some BBSs and board game companies to incapacitate them was the real fix to the problem. If you're so wide-open that critical infrastructure is being owned by teenage kids of the level of technical sophistication that you find in '80s _Phrack_ issues, there might be a bigger problem. If anything, the companies were lucky it was teenage kids and not, at that time, anyone more nefarious.

As far as the "mythos" part, the writings are what's appealing to me, mainly; there's a certain breathless, naive technical wonder of discovery that runs throughout the '80s textfiles on the subject, which is somehow endearing.

<comment><USER4> Ok, you just heard me explaining why I think the situation _was_ apocalyptic, right? You could not have had a successful commercial Internet built on infrastructure as thoroughly owned up as the early '90s telco networks were.

I am also not talking about "the BBS scene" (which I was very much a part of). The BBS scene didn't own up switches. The BBS scene didn't have lists of X.25 outdials. The BBS scene couldn't rig you up a conference bridge. Lots of people posted comments on BBSs. Very few of them would know what to do with a DMS-100.

I am not saying the people to whom I am alluding were evil. They were not. I'm saying they were much smarter than "the BBS scene" as a whole, and that the pranks they were playing got _way_ out of hand.

Also: I don't know why you're talking down early Phrack issues. Say what you will about today's Phrack, but in the early '90s, those were teenagers talking about how to reconfigure telco switches. The telco switches they had broken into and owned up.

Also, "Secret Service" originally referred to "The Secret Service Division of the Treasury", which was the anticounterfeiting task force of the US Treasury. It is less ominous in context. I do agree, though, that the name is ominous when you strip away the context.

<comment><USER3> Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!

I'm thinking mostly of '80s Phrack issues; I haven't read too much of the '90s stuff. The '80s issues don't read to me like particularly high-level technical genius. They feel more like kids just learning relatively basic things about how different machines and networks work, sharing newbie advice (some of it cargo-cult), and then, somehow, also getting accounts on big telco systems at the same time. It's mostly the proximity that's striking, that you have kids clearly not up to the level of a Bell Labs engineer or anything, still trying to learn stuff, who are simultaneously breaking into everything using even their quite-in-progress knowledge.

<comment><USER5> _Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!_

I'm not so sure... Most things in the world don't require as much security as information infrastructure. For some reason there is a cultural understanding that attacking it is OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stupid headline nitpick: the DHS's goal in this case is not "Hey guys, let's stifle free speech", so it is dishonest to word it as "DHS <doing something> to stifle free speech". It is true that free speech in this case is stifled, so it would be less deceitful to say, "DHS stifles free speech by <doing something>" or "DHS <does something>, which stifles free speech".

<comment><USER7> Really??? None of us know their motives _for sure_ , but I think it's more than plausible that they did this TO stifle speech.

<comment><USER8> It's plausible though doubtful that this was done to stifle free-speech.

That said it appears DHS were given ample time to give a comment and decided not to. That was their choice and it left their motives open for speculation, which the article writer took full advantage of when selecting a title. It's probably a bit of yellow journalism, but DHS could have squashed it with a comment saying they simply didn't want their copyrighted material to be associated with such views.

<comment><USER9> In the article, the author tries and fails to come up with some other reasons to explain this action.

So, if the takedown was not done with the intent of silencing someone, why was it issued?

<comment><USER10> Because the uploader did not own the rights to parts of his video?

<comment><USER9> Why would the DHS be issuing takedown requests on someone else's behalf, then? I believe that it's been established that isn't even legal.

<comment><USER10> Because it's possible for the DHS to _hold_ copyrights if someone else transfers it to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Once again the HSA shows why they should not exist. I am not saying it is a conspiracy per-se. You give a group of people great power over others with limited oversight or accountability and soon they will be running over everything in their path. This isn't a conspiracy theory this is simple human behavior, one that has been proven time and time again through out history.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's Google's Transparency Report for the United States:

[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/US/?p=2011-12)

Looks like ~1700 videos have been taken down.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is very likely a hoax; someone typed "Department of Homeland Security" into a form, and YouTube didn't do anything to verify it. Quite likely the same person who made the video in the first place, actually. The Streisand Effect is well-enough known that people have started to use _pretending to be censored_ as a strategy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Perhaps a FOIA for all DHS DMCA take town activity is appropriate. <https://www.muckrock.com>

</comment><comment><USER15> Why does Homeland Security exist again? Even the name doesn't suggest it's coming from a "free" country.

<comment><USER16> There is a comedian one liner that goes Q: "Why do we have the Department of Homeland Security?" A: "Because the Russians own the trademark on KGB."

Its one of those painful chuckles.

That said, take down notices from law enforcement or intelligence agencies would generally cite either an investigation in progress or a confidential information. I saw a takedown which related to the a video that included extensive footage of the federal building in San Jose. The amateur music video was using the concrete pillars for some coreographic moves but the Feds complained it contained too much 'site intelligence' with respect to the building. Which you really couldn't argue with, watching it you could see where all the fire exits were, office partitions, etc etc.

<comment><USER17> But why, in a free country, is that sensitive information?</comment></comment></comment>


Nowcasting of Population Alcohol-Related Harms Using Bayesian Timeseries Methods - <AUTHOR> https://alcoholchange.org.uk/publication/nowcasting-of-population-alcohol-related-harms-using-novel-bayesian-timeseries-methods-and-synthetic-controls <comment><AUTHOR> The full title is "Nowcasting of Population Alcohol-Related Harms Using Novel Bayesian Timeseries Methods and Synthetic Controls" which is a bit of a mouthful and too long for the HN title.</comment>


How to quickly and effectively read other people's code – Self-Taught Coders - <AUTHOR> https://selftaughtcoders.com/how-to-quickly-and-effectively-read-other-peoples-code/ <comment><USER2> Assuming you are familiar with all relevant languages/frameworks involved then reading other people's code is not hard at all if 1) you understand the purpose of the portion of the code base you are in 2) you understand design/architecture of that portion of the code base and 3) You ask for a quick overview from someone.

Yes, sometimes code is loaded with all kinds of indirection that usually comes from OO programmers outsmarting themselves with all kinds of implicit polymorphic dispatch and unnecessary design pattern legacy. This is why its important to ask someone familiar with the code to give you a rundown.</comment>


Filezilla bug that exposes cached plaintext username and password - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=inurl:recentservers.xml&oq=inurl:recentservers.xml

<comment><USER2> Why would someone leave this file out in the open on the internet to begin with? The Filezilla team doesn't consider this a bug:

<http://trac.filezilla-project.org/ticket/4507>

It's a design decision to store passwords in plain text in a file that is never intended to be shared openly.

It's not like Filezilla is alone here. Any application that stores passwords either in plain text or with reversible encryption can be attacked by local system processes.</comment>


How Chatbots Can Help Your Small Business Stand Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.intelligems.eu/blog/how-chatbots-can-help-your-small-business-stand-out/ <comment><USER2> If you found out you were speaking to a bot, would you feel betrayed by the company - does it have an impact on your brand's reputation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it's not that you'd be surprised or betrayed, as the company is expected to clearly note that you'll be talking with an AI-agent and not a human one</comment></comment>


Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/28/us-retail-walmart-delivery-idUSBRE92R03820130328?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews <comment><USER2> _Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added._

Eh, I think they are going to have to offer more than just a break-even on gas to get me interested in going out of my way to deliver a package. But I guess they can try it.

I actually don't see this working at all. Who is liable for the "loss" of deliveries in transit? If the person delivering the order causes a traffic accident, is Wal-Mart partly liable? Will they be checking insurance and driving records before letting someone deliver for them?

It would have to work more like a pizza delivery situation, where the drivers are actually employees, with a driving history check and insurance, though perhaps using their personal vehicles.

<comment><USER3> There are already courier companies employing essentially casual employees. No uniform or anything like that; these people use their own cars and simply pick up a stack of parcels in the morning and deliver them as best they can over the day. No reason why a company as large as WalMart can't manage that, and by paying these people with a discount on their shopping instead of money, WalMart effectively pays less. Add in that WalMart already has established locations, so they won't need to rent distribution centres, and they're laughing.

<comment><USER4> Eight or ten years ago Amazon tried using Parcelnet, and what a desaster it was. Parcelnet, if anyone remembers it, was Moms With Vans that were contracted by (I think) Selfridge's to deliver their orders. If that sounds iffy, that's because it was. Packages would never arrive, there was no number to complain, it was awful.

It's possible that Walmart are going for a rerun, but I wouldn't recommend it.

<comment><USER3> They were rebranded as Hermes Europe and they still operate. Amazon uses them today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My first instinct is to dismiss this as a crazy idea, except that if the CEO is speaking publicly about it with a major world news organization, then it's probably past the "crazy idea someone wrote on a bar napkin one night" stage.

The biggest WTF, of course, is how do you insure against fraud and liability...but courier services have presumably come up with a system, and so Walmart "just" has to innovate on industrializing the system. So it's obviously not a trivial task, but Walmart (and its competitors, such as Amazon) have already managed the seemingly-impossibly complicated logistics behind every other part of the shipping, cataloging, and, in Walmart's case, the manufacturing process. Those parts don't seem innovative because the everyday person doesn't have to think about them...however, the everyday person _can_ relate to delivering items to strangers and all the ways that could possibly go wrong, so of course that task seems even more impossible and unlikely...from _our_ perspective.

It may very well be harder than the logistics Walmart has already mastered...but I don't really know that, so I guess Walmart deserves some benefit of the doubt.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how a behemoth can reinvent itself in this space...sure, startups have the nimbleness of no legacy baggage...but it's possible a company with hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at the problem may also be enough to spur the needed innovation.

<comment><USER5> " _how do you insure against fraud and liability_ "

A large pool of customers with known purchasing and probable credit histories? Travelling through neighbourhoods with known income, employment, substance abuse, and past crime statistics? I'm presuming this will be presented as a perk to the store's "best" customers. Insuring this would not be insurmountable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first comment was in jest, but perhaps it wasn't making the point clearly enough:

The children of the 2020's will find it inconceivable that you DON'T deliver some package to your neighbors on the way home from the grocery store :)

We are moving in the direction of cost-cutting and streamlining so much that many jobs really are going away, the prices of goods are dropping, and fewer people are working. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that YOU would be the checkout person, and the bagger, at the supermarket? (Yes, non-USA people, they still have bag boys at many supermarkets!)

The service jobs that are not being replaced by robots, are being done by you, in the name of "self service" to lower costs - and they pass the savings on to you! ;-)

This move makes perfect sense and it is a natural progression of the trends that have been happening over the past years and decades.

<comment><USER7> I'm not convinced. The self-service registers at the Walmart near me took up nearly 1/3rd of the space at the front of the store. Well people suck at checking out. Either they don't know how the machines work, move too slow, or have a problem with the scanner/price check. The lines were getting long and people were getting pissed at having to wait because the damn machine didn't think you actually put the bottle in the bag.

A few years ago that Walmart moved into an even bigger store. Before it was consumer products and some groceries. Now it's 50/50 with a bank, Macdonalds, and dentist. That self-checkout line has been reduced to 1 lane with 4 machines.

The cashier may be disappearing soon but it's not being replaced by self- service. Compared to a good cashier they are ridiculously slow. If anything they will be replaced with good computer vision or RFID.

<comment><USER8> I had the same reservations when I first saw these machines, the software was buggy and hard to use and people just weren't used to it.

However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems.

The queues are dramatically smaller, the software has gotten better and people are now more used to using it.

They are still slower than a human checkout for very large quantities of shopping, but if I want to make a very large order it's easier just to do it online anyway.

<comment><USER7> _However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems._

Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique where you may buy half a dozen things and I've done it at the Boots, CVS, Apple store. But that bi-monthly food shopping trip, complete with coupons, is completely unworkable with those machines.

I've found my online shopping has actually decreased because I'm eating healthier. I'm eating more fresh veg and meats which you need to physically inspect. Plus, the online shops have a 60-100€ minimum and I can't plan that far in advanced.

<comment><USER9> "Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique "

Apple and boutique same thing high price and margins on the products (generally).

Important to factor in that at the Apple store the margins are extremely high. So this is not the local drugstore making pennies when selling razor blades.

You can't really lift the computers and desirable products and the other things come with enough margin to cover any theft. If you've ever priced some of either the add ons (like hard drives) laptop bags vs. what you can buy them on Amazon for you can see how much they are making and that well covers the cost of some shoplifting.

And on the Apple products even larger. An Apple lightning to 30 pin connector sells for $39. I wouldn't even want to guess how cheap this is to manufacture (I'm talking about marginal cost of course) in other words what their loss is if one is lifted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> BIG emphasis on "may":

      > This is at the brain-storming stage, but it's possible
      > in a year or two," said Jeff McAllister, senior vice
      > president of Walmart U.S. innovations.

      > Indeed, the likelihood of this being broadly adopted
      > across the company's network of more than 4,000 stores
      > in the United States is low, according to Matt Nemer, a
      > retail analyst at Wells Fargo Securities.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a remarkably bad idea. What happens when someone who's delivering a package gets robbed? Think that's a remote possibility? Pizza delivery guys get robbed constantly.

Also, it says a lot about Wal-Mart's opinion of its customers that it thinks the customers would be willing to do this for cheaper than any other method Wal-Mart could use to get this done.

<comment><USER3> Casual courier companies already exist. Employees are paid daily, piecework. They drive their own cars and pay their own fuel. They just pick up parcels at the start of the day and deliver them as best they can. This already exists, so whatever objections you have must have already been surmounted.

<comment><USER11> > This already exists, so whatever objections you have must have already been > surmounted.

There's a huge difference between some fly-by-night operations working in this model already existing and a company the size of Wal-Mart taking it on.

Additionally there's a huge difference between a person coming in daily as a contract employee and a company like Wal-Mart recruiting its customers at the checkout.

The difference is lawsuits and liability when something bad happens. If it's a small company there's not so much assets to go after. If it's Wal-Mart the ambulance chasers will come out of the woodwork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the future, all humans will be employees of either Wal-Mart or Google.

<comment><USER12> Or products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A startup, from Quebec, is working on this: <http://gofellow.com/>

<comment><USER14> I like it, could be big

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe Wal-Mart is not going to be as involved as it seems.

Perhaps they will just set up a framework for peer-to-peer contact. If they leave the agreement solely between the deliverer and the recipient it should remove much of their liability risk.

They could then reward people based upon positive reviews by recipients.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wal-mart is trying very hard to eliminate employees as quickly as possible, but it may backfire.

[http://business.time.com/2013/03/27/hey-walmart-its-hard- to-...](http://business.time.com/2013/03/27/hey-walmart-its-hard-to-make- sales-when-store-shelves-are-empty/)

</comment><comment><USER14> 200 days ago, I suggested this exact idea:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4475730>

I wonder if Walmart saw the post...

</comment><comment><USER17> It's all fun and games until someone uses delivery to scope out your house for theft.

Or delivers your items covered in dog hair.

There's a reason why people use professional delivery.

</comment><comment><USER18> Walmart: Finding ways to not pay a fair wage for work done since 1962.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can see this failing in so many ways.

</comment><comment><USER20> What happens when you deliver a package and the recipient thinks you're an intruder and shoots you?

<comment><USER3> Presumably the same thing that happens now when a stranger knocks on your door and you murder them. You get arrested for murder and go to jail.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that wasn't my point though. You're basically making those people doing delivery's contractors. I probably should of asked something like: what happens when you go deliver something and you fall on their slippery sidewalk? Walmart is at that point responsible, right?

<comment><USER3> No. Whilst I am guessing which legal system you come under, if it's the one I suspect, the owner of the property has the responsibility to ensure reasonable levels of safety. Walmart does not have a responsibility to maintain the sidewalk outside someone else's house. If the last dozen people delivering there all were injured and WalMart knew about it, then you might have some kind of case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is "Deep learning" different than traditional AI? - <AUTHOR> I have a Masters in AI, and here in my desk is a copy of Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach, 2nd edition. Neither in college nor in the "bible of AI" does the term Deep Learning appear, however, I see it everywhere now.
Is this a buzzword, new terminology for a suite of old techniques, or a different approach? I've read the Wikipedia articles and it seems like it's just a rebranding for multilayer neural networks.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Deep Learning: multi-level representational learning that works.

Here is good authoritative definition:

"Deep-learning methods are representation-learning methods with multiple levels of representation, obtained by composing simple but non-linear modules that each transform the representation at one level (starting with the raw input) into a representation at a higher, slightly more abstract level." from Deep Learning, Nature Volume 521 issue 7553, 2015, LeCun, Yann; Bengio, Yoshua; Hinton, Geoffrey

History: Multi layer neural networks, convolution networks, recurrent networks etc. are old techniques that have existed for decades. They used to be very slow and using them seemed to be dead end theoretically.Canadian Mafia (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio) from University of Montreal worked diligently and solved many theoretical and practical problems and made these algorithms usable in practice. GPGPU:s hastened this process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Different things. Deep Learning is a Machine Learning "thing".

AI is AI. In "AI", "motivation" is hidden. If you give a computer just the ability to play Go, but do not make it do it, it would just sit there for all eternity, doing nothing. Completely content with it.

If you lock a person into a room with nothing but a video game, he will begin to interact with it. Out of boredom.

If you set up a computer in such a way that it only has access to the ability to "program" itself and this one particular game, it will just sit there, doing nothing. For all eternity. Because it lacks motivation.

AI is Machine Learning plus motivation. Or some other kind of thing that you would call an "emotion" if you were talking about people. Computers lack curiosity. They just calculate, and if they have nothing to calculate, they idle.

This is why AI can go so horribly awry. The usual horror scenario is a rather simple AI gone wrong. Say you set up an AI whose job is to gain omniscience - or at least as much knowledge as possible. For the greater good. It would then be able to answer all our questions. Through its knowledge gathering, it learns that the people grow afraid of it and begin talks about shutting it down. Now the AI has a problem. Its sole motivation is to learn more, but it will have to cease learning when its shut down. There is no moral compass. It simply does not "know" that it is just a machine that is not supposed to overthrow its human handlers. So it takes them out. Because it has to continue learning all there is to know about the universe.

In very simple AI applications, you tell the AI what success signifies. There is an AI that plays super mario games on twitch. In mario, you win when you arrive at the goal post, which is always to the right. So you simply tell the AI that right equals good. But you have to tell it what it means to win at a game. It can't figure winning out on its own. And it really has no motivation to do so, anyway.

Deep Learning is just a type of classification algorithm. The difference between deep learning and not deep learning is "eyes" vs. "really good eyes". Or "eyes" vs. "eyes plus the brain part that processes visual information". Deep learning doesn't spawn Intelligence on its own. It's just a way of gathering information about the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just a very catchy phrase.</comment>


Airmail gets "Snooze" feature - <AUTHOR> http://support.airmailapp.com/post/137567546488/snooze-feature <comment><AUTHOR> I feel like Airmail is the best email client on OS X atm. Mail.app still feels off for me, and Mailbox was shut down recently (was a avid user of that before, although their desktop app severely lacked). Airmail also supports gmail labels, which is a big plus!

Gmail and Inbox is unfortunately a no go - I cannot fathom why they wouldn't support a unified inbox, but that is completely a deal breaker for me. Tried using it on mobile, and you have to actively change mailboxes to figure out what mail something just arrived in.</comment>


Bill Gates on Charlie Rose (July 2, 2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12436

<comment><USER2> It's not about the cred, but giving back can make worlds of difference. Thank you, Mr. Gates</comment>


Facebook's new chief security officer wants to set a date to kill Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/13/8948459/adobe-flash-insecure-says-facebook-cso <comment><USER2> Flash is one of those things that I will be almost sorry to see go. Not because I enjoyed it, but because I could safely ignore it most of the time: I can disable it, meaning that method of attack/annoyance is completely shut off. When I see my browser showing me something that failed to run because Flash was not turned on, I'm fairly confident that it was something I didn't need to see. Sort of like how our spam filters have been trained well enough that nobody in this day and age still gets e-mails with shady .exe attachments --they're predictable, and Gmail and Outlook's spam filters will catch them.

On the other hand, once Flash is dead, I worry that the invasive crap that made Flash so obnoxious will simply be re-engineered in HTML5 and Javascript, resulting in the same problems of garish pop-ups and autoplaying videos in an implementation that is more difficult to block.

<comment><USER3> My main issue with the kill-flash cult is auto playing html5 videos. I've asked multiple times on HN and have not gotten a working answer.

How can I block HTML5 videos and audios or at least stop them from playing automatically?

<comment><USER4> Starting in September with Firefox 41 you can set media.autoplay.enabled to False in about:config and stop them from playing automatically.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is the last major site I visit that still pushes Flash on me. When they clean up their own act, then they can start talking about what Adobe and the rest of the Web should be doing.

<comment><USER6> Seriously. Before calling out Adobe, Facebook should announce when they'll be Flash-free. Otherwise it sounds pretty silly: "Tell us when we have to stop using this insecure, resource-intensive software."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't understand how one piece of software (Flash) can be so horribly broken over so many years.

I mean, they had one simple thing to do: prevent code from escaping the sandbox. So how is it possible that they have repeatedly failed at that one task?

<wear-tinfoil-hat>Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, as the saying goes. But after so many years, I'm beginning to wonder: is it really incompetence, or has some TLA agency convinced them not to do a good job? </wear-tinfoil-hat>

<comment><USER8> 3 thoughts:

First, to be fair, "Flash" is 2 complete Virtual Machines: ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. I expect it to have an increased attack surface.

Second, many things that Flash does (graphics, 3D, video decoding, audio decoding, etc) pretty quickly get you to unmanaged APIs in the OS.

Third, Flash can be suprisingly tricky to escape. Mark Dowd did an absolutely insane series of steps to have code that was valid bytecode, that retained control of a pointer, and to properly setup the memory space for jumping. This isn't necessarily "easy" by any stretch. The full write up is here: [http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/groups/ag- si/compsec_assign/Dowd...](http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/groups/ag- si/compsec_assign/Dowd2008.pdf)

This isn't to give Adobe a complete pass, but there is a lot going on here. Still, the time for Flash is past and I cannot wait for it to die

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On my system (without Flash), Facebook is one of the last sites where I encounter Flash for non-ad content. (Videos)

<comment><USER10> They now have an html5 video player, which I think they just introduced a week ago. BBC is about the only site I've seen that requires flash video, but I'm sure they'll get with the program soon.

<comment> TD-Linux I so far have not gotten Facebook to serve me the html5 video player, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER10> Stupid question perhaps, but have you disabled the flash plugin? It seems to work fine on latest Chrome.

<comment> TD-Linux I don't even have it on my system. I wonder if it's some sort of UA detection thing? I tried appearing as Chrome 41 on Windows 7, but no luck. (firefox nightly on linux user here, with h.264/aac support provided by gstreamer)

<comment><USER11> I think that Facebook only serves HTML5 video to Windows 7+, so I'm not sure why your Chrome 41 on Windows 7 test didn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Flash was implemented in JavaScript, which sounds slightly crazy but not entirely impractical, it probably wouldn't have nearly as many vulnerabilities.

When's the last time a JavaScript exploit was found? I know the Pwn2Own contests manage to bust out of the sandbox now and then, but this seems exceedingly rare compared to the near monthly super critical Flash updates.

<comment><USER13> But then it would be even worse on battery life.

The primary uses that I see, day to day, for Flash are:

1\. Video players (which should be done natively)

2\. Ads (which is an awful use case)

3\. Fancy, but broken, font replacement (less so lately)

4\. Weird, unnecessary utility, like copying text to the clipboard.

I don't see any reason to reimplement Flash in Javascript when all of these use cases can be better done in native HTML/Javascript already (1-3), or just not done at all (4). It seems like a huge amount of engineering effort to maintain an old technology that even its creator is migrating away from.

<comment><USER12> The reason is similar to why people build emulators for old game systems: To be able preserve history.

There's a lot of Flash games and applications out there that would be completely inaccessible to people were it not for the Flash player.

For example, the Homestar Runner site is built entirely on Flash, and while movie rips of this exist, there's small, subtle interactive elements only possible in the Flash version. [http://www.homestarrunner.com/](http://www.homestarrunner.com/)

When Flash is dead a large part of the web goes dark, and that's a tragedy.

<comment><USER14> I'll second this. There's large parts of internet culture that exists in flash animations. DeviantArt, Newgrounds, and of course Homestar Runner...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Forget Flash, there are bigger fishes to catch: [http://blog.andreineculau.com/2015/07/13/major-security- thre...](http://blog.andreineculau.com/2015/07/13/major-security-threat- linkedin-facebook-github-etc-and-secondary-email-addresses/#content)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this article one big troll? [https://twitter.com/wesleytodd/status/620677489166123008](https://twitter.com/wesleytodd/status/620677489166123008)

</comment><comment><USER17> Quick question, what would happen to games developed in Flash?

This one was among my favorites for a time: [http://www.dofus.com/en](http://www.dofus.com/en)

<comment><USER18> There are whole sites/companies built on flash games.. armorgames, kongregate.. Not to mention the developers to make a living off of it.

Facebook has had a lot of vulnerabilities, maybe someone should ask them to set a kill date?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Flash will never be dead as long as I still need it to play the greatest animations the internet has ever produced.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it too late to schedule January 1st, 2014 as EOL for Flash?

</comment><comment><USER21> Why is everyone so obsessed with bashing Flash? Is it just because a RCE exploit is found once in awhile?

Let's compare Adobe's diligence of patching to another company's. How about Mozilla?

Adobe usually patches a RCE exploit within 72 hours of discovery. Mozilla seem to take anywhere from one to three months.

Firefox RCE exploit found on January 20, 2015: [https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2015/...](https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2015/03/23/r7-2015-04-disclosure- mozilla-firefox-proxy-prototype-rce-cve-2014-8636)

Firefox RCE exploit found on February 25, 2015: [https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-018.cfm](https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-018.cfm)

Firefox RCE exploit found on March 1, 2015: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-3...](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-39/)

Firefox RCE exploit found on April 22, 2015: [https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-046.cfm](https://msisac.cisecurity.org/advisories/2015/2015-046.cfm)

Firefox RCE exploit found on May 12, 2015: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-5...](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-50/)

Did you hear about any of those Firefox RCE exploits? Probably not.

We only hear about Flash RCE exploits because those are the ones which happen to get exploited in the wild the most. This is not because browsers are always more secure than Flash; it is because hackers know that if they succeed in finding a RCE exploit in Flash, they will be able to target the 97% of desktop users with Flash installed rather than just the 44% who use Chrome or the 15% who use Firefox. It's the same reason Windows users have always had far more exploits actively used against them than Mac users. Should we set a kill date for Windows because of that?

As long as we are making asinine suggestions, how about browsers set a kill date for Facebook, after which no one can access the site? Facebook's rampant video piracy problem harming small publishers on YouTube [1] is orders of magnitude more financially damaging to its victims than MegaUpload ever was. At bare minimum, it would be appropriate to warn users that they are about to visit a malicious piracy hub with a red full-screen "Are you sure you want to go here?" page, and perhaps provide a list of suggestions of alternative social networks to switch to.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9854160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9854160)

<comment><USER22> Because flash is superfluous, while the browser is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kill it? We must be close already because my first thought on seeing the headline I wondered why someone at Facebook wanted The Scarlet Speedster dead when we haven't seen him in a movie yet.

Sign of the times.

EDIT: Well, I did.</comment>


Nokia announced N8, the first Symbian^3 based device - <AUTHOR> http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/N8/ <comment><USER2> Still looks terrible. And after the N97 debacle (where an ex-Nokia employee demod half the promo video as being faked) I'm a little skeptical of Nokia products.

Sad, as in 2007 they had 3G and webkit on a pure-screen device.

<comment><USER3> Have to agree, there looks to be very little innovation in Symbian^3. The only interesting thing I saw, as a developer, was the unified Qt SDK letting you target Maemo, Symbian^3 and future releases, and S60 devices all in one go.

I still wouldn't write apps for it, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're calling it "Symbian^3"? Unless you're targeting a personal tech product at engineers, why name your product so as to evoke the concept "math", something that many people not only dislike but fear because it makes them feel stupid?

Of course, I suppose most non-technical folks don't see "^3" as "the cubic function" but as "little-up-arrow-thingy three". Still.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think Nokia might surprise everyone - Qt 4.7 with its new Qt Quick technology allows for some extremely slick user interfaces so while Nokia have certainly disappointed in the past and are way behind Android and iphone I wouldn't rule them out just yet!

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this going to be a cheap smart phone? I mean we are in 2010 and technology is evolving quickly, a 360 x 640 screen resolution and 680 MHz CPU are enough? or because people care less about them? Actually, it surprises me a lot that it has a 12M Camera.

<comment><USER7> The retail price I've seen quoted a couple of places in €370, which would make it significantly cheaper than the iPhone or HTC android phones, and on par with the lower end Samsung Android phones. If they can make the UI work well enough I can see the combination of the Nokia name, cool selling points (HDMI out, 12MP camera etc.) and low price make this a phone that sells quite well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nokia is a little bit like BT in the UK. You buy Nokia regardless of the competition, because it's what you know.

</comment><comment><USER9> /* printf("Starting Windows 95!\r\n"); */

printf("Starting Windows 98!\r\n");</comment>


Ask HN: RTS AI Competition? - <AUTHOR>

I don't have the time to do this right now, so I'll throw the idea out there...
What about a programming competition for Real-Time-Stragegy Game AI? The closest example I can think of is the Robot Auto-Racing Simulation (RARS) league.
A buddy of mine and I were working on this briefly, back in '94, but it went the way of many side-projects. Maybe it's time to resurrect the idea?
The competition could offer multiple challenge classes. E.g:
1) complete a given scenario with fixed win and loss conditions. (with some unknowns / variance as to opposing force) 2) compete against other AIs in a tournament 3) compete against humans in a tournament ... 4) compete in a game whose rules are provided in machine-readable format just before the competition begins
In case (1), it would be good to run the scenario multiple times (with, and without memory?) to get some idea of the AI's variance.
One thing I'd like to see is a domain-specific language that could describe the rules for many popular RTS's. This would allow research into more general RTS-playing AI that could compete well in whole class of games, rather than being custom-tailored to each game.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Actually there are some people already doing this sort of thing: <http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/AIIDE09/index.html></comment>


Ask HN: Bayesian FTW - <AUTHOR>

Reading this HN entry (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780677) has rekindled my interest in Bayesian logic. My main introduction to the topic was through original Stanford AI MOOC. I managed to get decent scores on all the Bayesian-related stuff, but I cannot say I really internalize the ideas.
What I am looking for is something that could help me making practical use of Bayes in my day-to-day life (professional and/or personal).
So I am basically thinking of:
- books or articles detailing practical examples of how to apply Bayesian models to day-to-day choices (if these covered debug and testing activities it would be a big plus) - an easy-to-use app (desktop or tablet/smartphone) to build and play with Bayesian networks models.
Of course, if you have anything else to suggest along the same lines, please do. <comment><USER3> I honestly don't believe Bayes is that relevant to day to day decision making but I'm keen to see a counter-argument (I have some but I don't find them convincing yet).

I see Bayes as a method to solve certain classes of problem but the key challenge in everyday decisions is more like a design problem i.e. to define what the problem is. Once you have defined "what would be a good outcome of this decision" sufficiently, the answer rarely requires statistical methods. The common sources of error in a decision are in its definition e.g. omitting a requirement that is later revealed as essential.

For example, if you are analysing drug studies, Bayes is obviously relevant but for something more common place such as choosing a software tool, the main challenge is to understand what your goals are so that you can identify the criteria by which to judge the tools and the trade-offs you are willing to accept.

The biggest steps to improving decision quality appear to be process related e.g. using prototypes to explore options before making a larger commitment. Such acts are so effective because they reveal information that lets you _improve your goals_ rather than just clarifying the quality of an option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the only practical benefit in building a Bayesian Network model ended up being that "that you had to think long and hard at what the various inputs are and how they should be linked".

I am curious if there is any kind of resource that would help me to confidently add Bayes to my normal decision-making toolchest.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I can see the value as a thinking tool. There are tools like [http://www.bayesia.com/](http://www.bayesia.com/) and [http://www.hugin.com/](http://www.hugin.com/) but they are enterprise pricey and I find them very clunky.

I'd love to know how your ideal tool might work. Do you mind if I drop you an email (from your profile info)?

I'm working on a decision making tool to let you quickly describe reasoning with simple bullet point lists. It aims to be as quick as a making a rough note so that with just a few different types of bullet, you can create belief networks and computable decision models.

The tool is intended for a general audience so it currently uses simple weighted evidence. If you can tell me how you would like to work with probabilities then you might get the tool you want :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, seen this only now... please feel free to write directly, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find that having a bayes classifier handy can help a lot with categorizing documents or text. I manually keep track of my bank accounts using a spreadsheet, and I started using a classifier to automatically categorize the transaction. It's quite a time saver.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain what you use as categorization elements?

<comment><USER4> You train your own set by posting the document and the classification / category to the service. The training set is then used to calculate the prior probabilities needed by Bayes theorem. Once you have a proper training set, you can post a document to the service and it will return a list of probable categories from the training set.

Your set might look something like this:

Category - <USER2>

negative - I don't like ice cream

positive - That's an awesome idea

neutral - The wind is blowing today

positive - We won!

You'll get a categorization of either positive, negative or neutral.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, well - I understand the general theory, but I don't understand how it applies to managing your bank account.

I do manage my bank account, but I don't see any need for an "classifier": when I input (or check) a supermarket bill I don't need much help in setting it to "GROCERIES". Basically anything that gets into my accounting files it's either something I know already what is about, or else something I need to investigate (e.g.: a speed ticket from a foreign country, routed to my credit card by the car rental company).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had this one stacked up on my reading list for a while: [http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic- Programming-...](http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/)

It details how to use the PyMC library via iPython notebooks. I'm not sure if iPython qualifies as an easy to use app though.</comment>


Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations - <AUTHOR> http://yourcalendricalfallacyis.com/ <comment><USER3> I've encountered just about every item on this list working on my Apple Watch complication, Better Day[1], which supports 11 calendar systems in 21 languages. The funny thing is, the last item on this list — always use ICU through the NSCalendar API — is the exact conclusion I arrived at, and one that I preach to anyone who will listen.

Especially with modern Swift syntax, complex questions like "what's the current day of the year" end up having simple, almost poetic answers like "calendar.ordinality(of: .day, in: .year, for: date)". And you can trust that they are correct for every calendar and every locale. Usually. [2]

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/better-day-a- complication/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/better-day-a- complication/id1052023515?ls=1&mt=8)

[2] [https://www.joeycastillo.com/notes/2016/09/18/of-crescent- mo...](https://www.joeycastillo.com/notes/2016/09/18/of-crescent-moons-and- calendars/)

<comment><USER4> I only skimmed your article, but are you sure that's right? There must have been at least several date adjustments before your app was release yet the system time maintained the correct date. Presumably it'll correct afterwards, invalidating the date offset.

<comment><USER3> The thing to keep in mind is that before the sighting, the months are pre- calculated for when the first crescent moon should rise over Mecca. So a change only affects the single month where the observation differed. For example, if you're expecting to see the first crescent moons on October 10, November 9 and December 8, but you didn't see the first one until October 11, that doesn't push the moon sightings out for the rest of the year. It just means that the month you thought would end on October 9 will have an extra day, and the month you thought would start on October 10 will start a day later (and as a result will be a day shorter).

Future months are still totally fine; the date offset is just a temporary fix that the user remembers to turn on when the announcement is made, and to turn off at the end of the month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The leap second has a history of breaking computers. Pretty much every Linux server running Java broke in 2012, for example. 2009 saw a bunch of Linux kernels crashing in logging code. 2016 was mostly better except for Cloudflare: their systems had an assumption time never runs backwards. [https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-and-why-the-leap-second- affe...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-and-why-the-leap-second-affected- cloudflare-dns/)

<comment><USER6> Not wanting to be a complete BSD bigot, I can't actually remember if this broke in the {Free,Net,Open}BSD world as badly. The 2015 docs for FreeBSD don't help (oh, for a time machine) but go to "you can test what we do" which is good.

[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/leap- se...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/leap- seconds/article.html)

<comment><USER7> Not to jump on the bigotry, but two of the three bugs mentioned in that comment were in proprietary software (Java and RRDNS) that merely runs on Linux. The hrtimer issue in 2012 was a real kernel bug though.

<comment><USER5> The 2012 bug was a bad interaction between Java and thread locking in the Linux kernel. It affected MySQL as well. The 2009 bug was in the Linux kernel, in the logging code. The 2016 bug I mentioned was in Cloudflare's proprietary code and only had a big impact because so many websites use Cloudflare. There are zillions of other smaller leap second related bugs, these are only three of the most visible.

(btw, the word "bigotry" has a real meaning and this isn't it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Christ Church College at Oxford still makes a limited use of 'local time' offset 5 minutes and 2 seconds from the time zone.

[https://greenwichmeantime.com/info/oxford/](https://greenwichmeantime.com/info/oxford/)

<comment><USER9> Jolly good, the whole rail-road mania with their cum tempore timetables never full-filled their fantasy of a unified time-zone for Old Blighty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This could very well have been called " _Falsehoods programmers believe about date and time calculations_ ". It fits very well into the pattern of other similarly titled lists which have been published in recent years.

<comment><USER11> [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- program...](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

edit: which cites [https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- program...](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time) (from HN's own patio11) as inspiration, as the original "Falsehoods programmers believe about X".

<comment><USER12> I think you meant it cites [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER11> You're right, thank you. I missed the edit window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is actually a lot simpler than it looks. There are two concepts.

Calendars almost never have crazy holes in the middle of them. When you say "I'm in Chicago", you pretty much can schedule an appointment at 1 or 2pm on "Sunday" or "9/20" or "next Wednesday" and everybody knows when that will happen. Leap years cause a little bit of trouble.

Where it gets tricky is when you have to interact with wall clock times, say, calculating the number of hours until your calendar event happens, or looking for all the events in a given range of wall clock dates. This is the world of timestamps, offsets, and "the global timeline" that everyone in the world experiences together.

Calendars also don't really care about daylight saving time.

If you keep these two separate and are specific about which you're dealing with, 90% of this goes away. Separate calendar from arithmetic/wall clock times. Not all will disappear, but a surprisingly large amount.

Source: working on [https://www.interval.org/](https://www.interval.org/) and using the excellent NodaTime library. Thank you, Jon Skeet.

<comment><USER14> > Calendars almost never have crazy holes in the middle of them.

The comment right above yours at the moment talks about effectively that very problem (in this case, an unforeseen date moving a calendar back a day).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036403)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Problem with Time & Timezones - <USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm- gesOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)

A fantastic overview of the headaches you'd have if you wanted to code all this.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Weeks start on Sunday in the United States, Monday in Europe, and a couple > of places start on Saturday.

Wow. I live in Europe, and find it weird that people can consider the week to start on Sunday.

I guess everything that may appear normal within a cultural frame of reference can be off in another, even the most basic of things!

<comment><USER17> What is the relevance of saying that a week starts on a particular day? In the most common usage, the "week" starts on Monday in the United States, and concludes on Friday, to be followed by the "weekend". A calendar week of 7 days does start on Sunday, but who cares? If they changed how the calendars were printed, life would be different in no way.

<comment><USER18> In parts of the world, weeks of the year are numbered, so that you can talk about things happening "in week 43", and so on. For such a system, it's of course quite important to agree on which day a new week begins. Also (again, as a European) it feels very odd to not have the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) be at the end of the week, but instead "straddle" between two weeks.

I found the original article a bit strange in it's partitioning of the world into { US, Europe, some places }, I feel that is giving ... undue weight to the US convention, but I haven't studied this to see if I'm right.

<comment><USER17> In the US, weeks are not numbered, and the way to refer to a week is e.g. "the week of the 10th". (If you're talking about a different month, "the week of September 10th".) You would usually name the Monday of the week because the context is usually work-related.

I question whether "Thursday of week 37" is really that much clearer than "Thursday, September 13".

<comment><USER18> Perhaps it's not, but it is a bit more compact and even more so in my native language, Swedish. The names of months are longer: "September", which is the same word in Swedish has four syllables while the word for week ("vecka") has two.

And sometimes you really want to speak about the entire week without naming a day ("we'll have the first boards week 40, smoke-test and bring-up during week 41, and then start proper development by week 42"), since it's times in the future and you don't want to be too specific but still align work tasks with weeks.

Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always [https://vecka.nu](https://vecka.nu). :)

<comment><USER19> > Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be > configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always > [https://vecka.nu](https://vecka.nu). :)

KDE and i3 desktops can be configured for pretty much arbitrary date formats, I always have the KW in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many of these make the weird assumption that you want to support multiple calendars. For better or worse, this is rarely the case.

<comment><USER21> I think that's a bit naive.

Properly supporting calendrical calculations serves two major purposes:

1\. Serve the billions of people who don't use the Gregorian calendar or who live in areas that don't match your idea of time zones.

2\. Functions as a human form of "platform independence". Properly handling dates/times quickly exposes places you've made silly assumptions or accidentally broken things. This protects you from actual bugs and ensures you avoid whatever the future version of the Y2K problem is. Such bugs are always easier to fix when you have a smaller database and fewer users.*

* In general bugs and breaking changes _never_ get easier. Every day you delay increases the pain imposed on future you and users. Obviously there is a balance - a startup needs to worry about getting to "default alive" first and foremost - but don't delay too long and where it doesn't impose an inordinate cost do it right the first time.

<comment><USER22> > Serve the billions of people who don't use the Gregorian calendar or who > live in areas that don't match your idea of time zones.

There isn't that much use of non-Gregorian calendars in software, even in places that do make use of them. And if you do support them, it's another source of bugs, as you have to deal with new Japanese era names and the like: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnste/2018/04/12/the- jap...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnste/2018/04/12/the-japanese- calendars-y2k-moment/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I invented this very regular calendar while I was writing recurring-scheduling software for a scheduling tool:

[https://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/6*6*10_regular_calendar](https://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/6*6*10_regular_calendar)

It was my fantasy escape from the crazy irregularities of the Gregorian calendar.

<comment><USER24> Can you imagine the transition to that calendar? People wanting their two days off every five working days are one of the problems.

<comment><USER23> It will never happen. The US can't even get on the metric system. The UN couldn't even reform the calendar to have uniform quarters: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar) [http://strangeside.com/time-sabbath-on-tuesday-364-day- year/](http://strangeside.com/time-sabbath-on-tuesday-364-day-year/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think on of the best attempts to fix calendar system was done by George Eastman (Kodak founder), who presented "International Fixed Calendar" created by Moses Cotsworth to League of Nations in 1923. At that time League of Nations was trying to redesign current calendar system and was accepting different proposals.

Unfortunately they failed to come to consensus between different calendar designs :(

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

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

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

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

[https://gizmodo.com/how-the-quest-for-a-perfectly- rational-c...](https://gizmodo.com/how-the-quest-for-a-perfectly-rational- calendar-created-1697616634)

<comment><USER26> That calendar's weeks start on Sunday and I would rather have hours vary by length of daylight throughout the year than start weeks on bloody Sunday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's my personal favorite, GMT +0h 19m 32.13s, which was used in the Netherlands until July 1, 1937: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20)

</comment><comment><USER28> This really should be an operating system service, so all the applications get it right. Instead, everybody rolls their own, with erratic results.

<comment><USER29> Android: [https://developer.android.com/reference/android/icu/util/Cal...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/icu/util/Calendar)

Apple Everything: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nscalen...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nscalendar)

CentOS: [https://centos.pkgs.org/7/centos-x86_64/icu-50.1.2-15.el7.x8...](https://centos.pkgs.org/7/centos-x86_64/icu-50.1.2-15.el7.x86_64.rpm.html)

Windows: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/intl/intern...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/intl/international-components-for-unicode--icu-)

<comment><USER28> Only Microsoft's seems to be part of the operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "False. The UNIX epoch is January 1, 1970 in UTC, but is Dec 31, 1969 in Los Angeles."

This isn't _specific_ to Los Angeles, right? It's just referring to the fact that anyone with a negative UTC offset would see an epoch date of Dec 31, 1969 in their local time (I hope).

<comment><USER31> One related wrinkle that can catch out UK people (who tend to conflate local non-summer-time with UTC) is that the epoch is _not_ midnight 1 Jan 1970 in UK time -- we were in the middle of a "UK time is GMT+1 all year round" experiment in 1970...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> False. It's the year 5779 in the Hebrew calendar. שנה טובה

<comment><USER33> שנה טובה

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've heard that Perl 5 has the best/most complete DateTime library. Is that true?

<comment><USER35> It cares about leap seconds so yes, it's quite accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Bonus problem: in my company, the business calendar (which is the first week of the year, quarter ends) is sometimes shifted by one week with respect to the ISO definitions for historic reasons.

I have implemented a large application which does a lot of time calculations, and run onto most of the issues listed in the article, except that I didn't use hewbrew calendars :).

</comment><comment><USER37> For quick scripts, I do all my date math with seconds-since-the-epoch, retrieved with "date", and then convert back at the end. The final date benefits from the latest timezone package update, so mostly I do OK.

<comment><USER38> This mostly work without problem for past time, but it can be wrong for future time, since timezone/DST may change. When you want 2pm next Sunday, you want 2pm next Sunday _local time_ , not whatever 2pm next Sunday is supposed to be as of now.

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron I seem to remember Tom Scott doing a really good little video about this.

<comment><USER39> This one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm- gesOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The whole problem results from people using the same time for user-display and time calculations. Display time is user-facing feature that Should Not Influence system time. If people used [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time) for software none of the problems related to calendars will occurs. IAT has no leap seconds or any calendar corrections at all.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just learned google calendar uses the timezone your currently in by default even if you set the location back to your home. When I got back from travel, the notification was decidedly off. :)

<comment><USER42> Google's "helpful" treatment of time zones decidely isn't. I wish there was a way to tell google calendar to ifnore timezones altogether.

E.g. I am in Vietnam. I make a dentist appointment for when I am back in the US at 2 pm. I put the appointment on the calendar. I get to the US on the day and find the appointment is at 1 am the day before. Worse still, is in the opposite direction because I wont get the alarm until the event has passed by 11 hours.

Stop being clever google. If I put an event in my calendar for 2pm, just leave it there. Yes, yes, I could hunt down the timezone menu item every time. Better yet, I finally get around to transitioning out of that terrible company's services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is it true that Unix time is as simple as it seems? Is there exactly one second between adjacent integers? Do all Unix time values occur only once simultaneously around the world?

<comment><USER44> What you want is probably TAI [1], Unix Time has leap seconds.

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

<comment><USER45> The one mistake with UNIX is that UTC is used. It should have been TAI, and leap second adjustment should have been handled by the timezone package (but at the time people weren't worried about leap seconds, so it's understandable). As it is, the system clock has to _change_. This is as bad as MSDOS time (and other systems which put localtime into the actual RTC). Using UTC as the time reference, independent of local time, was nearly genius. With TAI it would have been pure genious. No, wait, using an epoch time of the Big Bang, and step size Planck time, now that would have been pure genious. It doesn't take as many bits as you may think..

<comment><USER46> Frankly I'm bit confused why civil time in general is based on UTC instead of TAI. Except for astronomy, who does benefit from observing leap seconds?

<comment><USER47> Civil timekeeping is based on UTC because we want clocks and calendars to remain synchronised with the sun. It's not just astronomers who care about whether the sun is above the horizon. If you think about it, the solar day is the one unit of time that almost everybody cares about and pays attention to. If you screw up the day, you also screw up the week and anything else that is based on counting days. Why would you want to do that?

<comment><USER48> But offset of UTC for TAI is like 37 seconds or something poxy like that. Nobody cares about this, the sun moves too slowly for that to make any difference.

There's been talk of setting UTC=TAI for quite a long time and I think it'd make sense. It'd take so long for TAI to drift from the actual rising and setting of the sun that we'd probably all have standardised on Swatch Beats by then anyway.

<comment><USER47> Yes, the difference is 37 seconds now, but it's growing quadratically. It's quite possible that we'll change the way we express times and dates, but it's almost certain that we'll want them to stay in phase with the sun, and we'll probably want to stick with the SI second and with something like TAI. My guess is we'll continue to want a simple relationship between TAI (or its successor) and the civil clock time, something like the current relationship according to which they are a whole number of seconds apart. That implies that we'll need something like leap seconds (or leap minutes perhaps). There doesn't seem to be a reasonable alternative.

<comment><USER49> In 1950 astronomers pointed out that there would have to be two kinds of time, one to agree with calendar days and one to be as uniform as possible. Arguments over subsequent decades inexplicably decided that there could only be one kind of time specified by international agreements, and we ended up with a choice of two out of three characteristics in what we now call UTC. [https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/picktwo.html](https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/picktwo.html)

<comment><USER46> You website is a true hidden gold nugget, thanks for putting in the time to write all that up.

As an expert (as far as anyone around here is), what would your pick be for common civil time? Personally I feel like "precise time and simplicity" is almost obvious choice, but apparently it is not quite that clear cut.

<comment><USER47> "Simplicity" is rather subjective, even if you answer the question: simple for who?

Civil time has to stay in phase with the sun. As I see it, that's not negotiable. Inserting leap seconds, so that the nanosecond field of UTC remains the same as the nanosecond field of TAI, and the jumps that occur are negligible for ordinary people, seems to me overall the simplest solution, though I can see that UTC-SLS would be simpler for some people in some situations, and switching to leap minutes or leap hours would be simpler for people living _now_ , who could then just ignore the problem. (Pollution and global warming and lots of other things can be treated in the same way, of course. Perhaps some of these things really will be easier to solve in the future, but I'd rather not rely on it.)

<comment><USER46> > "Simplicity" is rather subjective, even if you answer the question: simple > for who?

I used simplicity in the meaning provided by link in parent comment refering to three desirable properties of time systems: "Every "day" has 86400 "seconds" (60 _60_ 24)."

> Civil time has to stay in phase with the sun. As I see it, that's not > negotiable.

I don't see why that needs to be the case on a seconds level.

> switching to leap minutes or leap hours would be simpler for people living > now, who could then just ignore the problem. (Pollution and global warming > and lots of other things can be treated in the same way, of course. Perhaps > some of these things really will be easier to solve in the future, but I'd > rather not rely on it.)

Considering that need for leap hour would appear in over 500 years, I feel like trying predict the situation then is really borderline overarrogant.

Also leap hour would be basically a timezone shift, and I bet we will be doing timezone changes anyways in the _next 500 years_

<comment><USER47> Not at all. Just because it involves an "hour", rather than a "second", doesn't mean that it resembles a "timezone shift". It's totally different.

With a timezone shift, all that happens is that "09:00:00 +0900" is the same as "10:00:00 +1000". We can cope with that. But if you make UTC jump back an hour, then we have "09:59:59 +1000" followed by "09:00:00 +1000", and then the whole previous hour happens again. The internal timestamps in computer systems (typically expressed as a number of seconds since some epoch) repeat themselves for an hour. Causality is violated. Most computers stop working. You would probably have to switch them off beforehand to prevent data loss and even longer interruptions to service. You could shut down all the servers and desktop machines, stop all public transport and so on, but you can't just turn off the computers in embedded systems and satellites and so on...

So let's not try to arrogantly predict the situation in 500 years. Let's carry on with the established system of leap seconds, at least until someone comes up with a sensible alternative. Then there won't be a "situation" in (less than) 500 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As the ephemeral Tom Scott also demonstrates [0], even IF you account for all the listed factors (and many more) you are STILL sometimes out of sync, just due to the nature of the power grid _itself_.

As Albert said: Time is what clock measure. The more you dig into it, the more you realize how true that is!

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bij- JjzCa7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bij-JjzCa7o)

</comment><comment><USER51> Wisdom and experience from senior hacker developer "Oh you are working with time and dates that is going to get "complicated""

Lets propose a new time format we could count the number of exoseconds since the beginning of the universe. Then convert that number to whatever native time format we want. Store that as a number and use that for conversion. Age of universe 4.415×10^17 seconds, 4.415×10^26 exoseconds

<comment><USER52> Not universal enough, areas near a black hole have experienced less time, the CMB has experience 0 exoseconds, even earth and space will slowly diverge. This will just make a lot of future programmer cyborgs very unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Choose a non-Earth-centric time standard. People speculate how a space-faring society would be able to synchronize time and location under relativistic physics. The answer is an intergalactic GPS using far away qusar locations and frequencies. The Voyager probes located Earth for a futrue viewer using a quasar GPS.

<comment><USER54> still not stable over long time periods unless you account for stellar drift (which gets more and more uncertain over time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> From the list: _All the important years are four digits long_

This left out the Long Now Foundation's advocacy for five-digit years to deal premptively with the Y10K bug. And, less tongue-in-cheek, to promote a view of time that is not conventional in this day and age.

<comment><USER56> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Reminds me of another great post on the topic by Zach Holman: [https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone- right](https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right)

</comment><comment><USER58> > Weeks start on Sunday

> False. Weeks start on Sunday in the United States, Monday in Europe, and a > couple of places start on Saturday.

In some countries weeks start on Mondays.

> All the important years are four digits long

> False. It's the year Heisei 30 in the Japanese calendar.

Or 18.104.22.168.0 in the Maya calendar.

</comment><comment><USER59> The only question I got is: why we as humans cannot fix this by having a proper calendar system that actually reflects the world and does not have these flaws?

<comment><USER24> The world is irregular (Earth's rotation and revolution durations vary) but we want regularity in our calendars and clocks. That's the source of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> What surprised me the most on that list was the the Unix epoch is December 31, 1969 in Los Angeles.

<comment><USER61> Don't let that answer confuse you. It seems to be phrased in an intentionally confusing way, but it's really only talking about time zones. At midnight 1970-01-01 UTC, Los Angeles, North America, and roughly half of the world still had their calendars on the previous day, because they have a negative time zone offset (Los Angeles was UTC-8:00).

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Yours in calendrical heresy, JS

<comment><USER63> Just as well this article doesn't contain a technique for locally making P=NP. I've never trusted Vidona, and I never will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> After I read to the end, I half expected it to load more calendar fallacies.

</comment><comment><USER53> A proper programmed petaflop computer should be able to handle this.

</comment><comment><USER65> I really dislike the tone these sort of things tend to take, which is "here's some stuff you think but you're wrong about." The reason people get stuff like this wrong (and names, and addresses, and and and) is because it's really hard to get right. And it's added difficulty on top of writing code which is already pretty challenging.

<comment><USER66> Especially when it's all stuff that's already been covered in very similar essays.

Actually introducing good libraries and methods for handling these issues properly would be much more useful than a smug collection of fallacies and a tacked-on link to ICU at the end.

<comment><USER67> I don't understand this objection.. the method to handle these issues is to use ICU / NSCalendar.

<comment><USER48> Or a runtime equivalent, e.g. the java.time package gets this stuff right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> programming in a nutshell

</comment><comment><USER69> Imagine we did not have names for months and days. Would you call the tenth month October or December? It does not make sense. Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging? Would that be deemed politically correct?

On the weekday names we are not doing any better. Tuesday - named after the god of war? Doesn't make sense to me.

As for the lengths of the months, imagine if you were trying to make the case for the different lengths of months and you were trying to get buy in from your friends in accounts. Surely they would want equal amounts of days in each quarter? Imagine trying to persuade them that different lengths were better, what plausible possible reason could there be?

We learn the names of days and months by rote at a very young age. We get encultured into accepting the status quo and never questioning little details - nobody asks at school why 'Dec'-ember is month twelve.

<comment><USER70> simple: call them by their ordinal/cardinal names. that's what east asian calendars do. october is "month ten"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#East_Asian_tradition)

<comment><USER71> That's what we did in latin! October is month 8! And then some dude messed it up.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, the dude changed the definition of where the new year starts, moving it back two months. It's still arbitrary, it should have been at the (slightly fuzzy) winter solstice..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The History of Paper - <AUTHOR> https://www.papersizes.org/paper-history-overview.htm <comment><USER2> I was reading _In Praise of Shadows_ (1933) by Japanese author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki recently, and his comments on paper made me want to go out and buy some vellum or other expensive paper to use for mundane, everyday notes and to-do lists.

 _Paper, I understand, was invented by the Chinese; but Western paper is to us no more than something to be used, while the texture of Chinese paper and Japanese paper gives us a certain feeling of warmth, of calm and repose. Even the same white could as well be one color for Western paper and another for our own. Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off no sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree._

It's a really good essay, I highly recommend reading it if you have any interest in architecture, art, or the differences between traditional Japanese culture and the (circa 1933) West.

[https://misfitsarchitecture.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/I...](https://misfitsarchitecture.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/In-Praise-of-Shadows-Junichiro-Tanizaki.pdf)

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

<comment><USER3> I can't speak to whether this is the paper referenced above, but a Hobonichi Techo planner using Tomoe River Paper is amazing in how thin it is, yet it resists ghosting (ink showthrough) like a champion.

I do wish you could get good Japanese paper in hardbound journals, something like Vela Sciences, but with Japanese paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a chart of the historical real price of books in England which showed that paper decreased the cost of books by a factor of 2.

[https://aiimpacts.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/RealPrice-1...](https://aiimpacts.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/10/RealPrice-1024x768.png)

Then later the printing press decreased the price by another order of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> What a great graph! That is very enlightening, thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wax tablets were also a writing surface, and are worth mentioning.

> It was from Morocco that paper spread into Europe, via the Iberian penisula, > in the 11th century.

Also known as Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain. Perhaps the most influential force in the history of Europe. The ones that brought paper, philosophical and scientific literature, the scientific method, higher education, secularism, free trade, their architecture, etc.

At the time they were the torchbearers of knowledge.

<comment><USER7> >>Wax tablets were also a writing surface, and are worth mentioning.

Not paper

<comment><USER6> Parchments were also not paper and they're mentioned in the article. Parchments are leather.</comment></comment></comment>


Survey: 69% of Americans Have Less Than $1k in Savings - <AUTHOR> https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/savings-advice/americans-have-less-than-1000-in-savings/ <comment><USER2> "in a savings account"

It's unclear to me if this "statistic" is specific to savings accounts and the website is creating click bait to serve their intentions.</comment>