Ethereum programming for web developers - <AUTHOR> https://happyfuncorp.com/whitepapers/webthereum <comment><USER2> I've been dabbling recently, and as I've said before I'm quite put off by the limitations of Ethereum. As it stands now, it's main use case appears to be the development of new cryptocoins, perhaps voting applications..? And yet, every now and then you come across a nugget of true insight when working with the Ethereum protocol, for instance the gas payments to nodes to run code effectively should stop DDoS attacks since it would require vast sums of money to disrupt the network. It remains to be seen how valid this idea is in practice, but you could look at ideas like that and say, "Yeah, that seems like a step forward."

Anyways, if Ethereum really will become Web 3.0, then comparatively speaking I'd say we're not even in the 56k modem era yet.

<comment><USER3> Once there is a proper infrastructure for trusted Oracles, there will be lots of interesting applications: small group crowd funding, payment distribution from trusts,execution of wills.

<comment><USER4> While I would love for this to be a thing, most cryptocurrency enthusiasts seem to distrust anything and everyone. How would one develop an oracle trusted enough that it would be accurate while not being vulnerable to sudden betrayals? There are for example plenty of stories from Eve Online (closest example of a lawless/trustless universe) where a very trusted middleman suddenly changed behavior when the benefits became great enough.

Especially when a cryptocoin includes strong anonymity, betrayal has very low downside since no retribution would be possible. However even if such anonymity is not present, it may not be possible to get retribution if the entity on the other side is (for example) the mafia.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a link for the Eve Online example?

<comment><USER6> [http://www.ign.com/articles/2009/07/09/eve-online-bank- scand...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2009/07/09/eve-online-bank-scandal)

This is a classic example in which a user ran an in-game bank for some time, before making away with all of his clients assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless self promotion. Today I rolled out my first tutorial to get you started on smart contract development.

> > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176714)

<comment><USER8> Very cool!

Sorry for the basic question, but is it legal to do a lottery application like this with Crypto Coins because they aren't real money?

<comment><USER9> That's a great question, as are many others around taxing cryptocurrency transactions. A quick googling indicates that, in the US, gambling with anything of value constitutes gambling. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5362](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5362)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone describe a few applications of blockchains in real world applications that _cannot_ be implemented without a blockchain? I'm really struggling to come up with even a single case. I thought some sort of secure voting mechanism would be a good candidate, but that too could be done with an immutable database.

EDIT: Besides crytocurrencies, I mean.

<comment><USER11> The most natural follow-up to currencies on a blockchain are assets, like a ticket to a concert, shares in a company, or a deed to a car.

Once more assets are represented this way, many kinds of applications would be valuable. One simple and powerful example is escrow.

Enabling one-shot, instant escrow with strangers on the Internet has real- world benefits. For example, the current safest way to exchange Burning Man tickets is to meet someone in person, inspect the tickets and cash, and trade them by hand. If they were a blockchain asset, they could be traded nearly instantly and safely across the world. With a stable dollar asset, the official escrow service could even make it more difficult to sell above face value.

<comment><USER12> I like your idea about using blockchains to represent assets. I have been thinking about something along those lines. But a whole set of interesting problem arises. That being the legal issues surrounding transferring ownership of assets globally. Not to mention issues of fraud and recourse when an agreement falls apart. I'd be curious to to have a chat with you about it. Send me an email.

<comment><USER13> I've got a team exploring the idea of executing a smart contract that transfers assets (be it crypto-asset or real world assets) upon a specific real-world trigger event (via oracles).

But you're right, the legal issues are a dime and a dozen. It'll take some time for the law to catch up (eg. digital wills). The technology is ready for this, we just need to right confluence of factors to make this a reality.

<comment><USER12> I think it is interesting if the technology did it, but I'd want to know what incentives people would have to use it, since it would just make things more complicated.

Maybe it lowers the cost of transferring assets, and there is the flexibility transferring to anyone on the planet. Maybe the use case is having funds in an escrow until both parties can verify that the transaction is cleared. I think there are trust companies that already do this. Maybe if people are motivated to deal with the legal(or private entities would exist to fill the need to simplify it) themselves it could work itself out.

It could be that through this method less lawyers are involved. If the transfer of assets can be standardized or at least abstracted away for all/most countries in one system I could see why people could be interested in it.

Also if your looking to sell an asset, or looking to buy an asset that you expect to increase in value, it might be interesting to have a global market to purchase/sell these assets with price signals for less risky or higher return assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing, also the Solidity Smart Contract are not bad for getting started: [https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/introduction- to-s...](https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/introduction-to-smart- contracts.html)

Also for anyone starting Ethereum or Blockchain development, I'd recommend learning and understanding The DAO Attack of 2016: [https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack- journalists/](https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember 2015 or 2016, everyone was hyped about Deep Learning. Everyone was talking about DeepDream, Tensorflow, etc.

I guess 2018 will be the year of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER16> Amara's Law still holds, though - technology is overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run.

I don't think Tensorflow et al have been busts, or have even fallen short of what experts expected from them. They were just never consistent with the slavering hype they got from university press offices, tech journalists, and startup hucksters.

I'm less convinced that blockchains will have a major long-run impact, but I expect solving the double-spend problem will prove useful one way or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's also an LLL (Low-level Lisp-like Language) introduction here: [https://media.consensys.net/an-introduction-to-lll-for- ether...](https://media.consensys.net/an-introduction-to-lll-for-ethereum- smart-contract-development-e26e38ea6c23) with links to examples.

<comment><USER18> Yep, I think LLL is much better than Solidity: [http://ecc- comp.blogspot.com/2017/12/comparing-solidity-to-l...](http://ecc- comp.blogspot.com/2017/12/comparing-solidity-to-lll-and-why-i-use.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seeing this on the front page of HN, my first impression is "wow, people are really desperate for information on this!" Can anyone with experience point to a better starting point?

<comment><USER15> I have finished Solidity tutorial on CryptoZombies.io. It was fun but it did not teach how to setup or to deploy Ethereum project on the Ethereum network.

Right now, I am enrolled in [https://www.udemy.com/ethereum-and-solidity-the- complete-dev...](https://www.udemy.com/ethereum-and-solidity-the-complete- developers-guide)

It looks good but I haven't finished it yet.

<comment><USER20> I like Stephen Grider's classes, but I also use them to measure when the hype for a given technology has reached its peak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you are a web developer and looking into making useful products(not just to raise money) you should first look into public-key infrastructure applications. Once you have made your first PKI application you might find ethereum redundant and irrelevant even.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Solidity reads a bit like Javascript. It has a lot of quirks and pitfalls, > though, especially when it comes to moving money around.

But isn't that, like, the whole point of the language? It was literally written _for_ moving money around. Cripes.

> Be very careful if writing real money-transfer code; do your security > homework, get others to review your code, and seriously consider an official > security audit or even formal verification.

Amen.

<comment><USER23> Ethereum's "quirks and pitfalls" are a result of people coming into it thinking that their mental execution model of most normal programming languages will suffice, when the execution model of the Ethereum VM is quite different (precisely because it is "written _for_ moving money around", but also because its computations are only run by the will of random miners, who like to get paid.)

Once you understand the Ethereum _abstract machine_ (i.e. the thing described in the [http://yellowpaper.io](http://yellowpaper.io)), the "quirks and pitfalls" of the programming languages built on it (Solidity, LLL, Serpent, Mutan) become more like obvious design constraints.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. I'm not a JS fan by far, but I don't see anything wrong with Solidity (nor am I a huge fan). The Solidity pitfalls are just the pitfalls offered by the EVM. I agree that tooling should improve to highlight potential failures, but to treat Solidity like JS is a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The link should point to the (I guess) original source:

[https://happyfuncorp.com/whitepapers/webthereum](https://happyfuncorp.com/whitepapers/webthereum)

Way more readable, links to github etc.,

<comment><USER26> Thank you. I wanted a downloadable version without having to sign up to Scribd or whatever it was called. This isn't a PDF or e-book, but I can easily turn it into one.

<comment><USER27> The repo [https://github.com/HappyFunCorp/Webthereum](https://github.com/HappyFunCorp/Webthereum) has the original RTF if you just want to pull that down.</comment></comment></comment>


Verifying Transactional Consistency with Jepsen and FaunaDB - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fauna.com/verifying-transactional-consistency-with-jepsen-and-faunadb <comment><USER2> Is this OSS?

> As part of our engineering process at Fauna, we have built a comprehensive > suite of unit and property-based tests and as well as a sophisticated > distributed testing framework that is capable of checking the behavior of > FaunaDB in the presence of a wide combination of fault injections and > operational changes, similar to Netflix's Chaos Monkey.

What did you write your property testing framework in?

<comment><USER3> We run FaunaDB as a service, or you can license it for on-prem use. Drivers and tooling are all open however, and we plan to release the source for correctness testing as well.

Our property tests are written in Scala as a Monad for controlling execution and random sample generation, and our internal distributed test harness uses Akka. This worked out nicely because we were able to make the relevant integration and fault tests scale from local runs via SBT to full geo- distributed clusters and OS-level fault injection.

<comment><USER4> Would be good to see -- problems/issues that needed code fixes? maybe caused you to rethink (or regret) implementation decisions? I'm sure Kyle's report will have something good. I always root for Jepsen...and I haven't been disappointed yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to see new DBs cropping up! I think there is much to improve over the choices popular today.

However, it's difficult to quickly grasp what makes Fauna unique. A comparison with e.g. CockroachDB would be nice!

A good example of doing this well is RethinkDB, that provided two comparisons with MongoDB (one biased, one unbiased).

1\. Technical comparison (unbiased):

[https://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparison- tables/](https://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparison-tables/)

2\. Personal comparison (biased):

[https://rethinkdb.com/docs/rethinkdb-vs- mongodb/](https://rethinkdb.com/docs/rethinkdb-vs-mongodb/)

Consul (not a DB though) also has these comparisons:

[https://www.consul.io/intro/vs/index.html](https://www.consul.io/intro/vs/index.html)

<comment><USER6> Some conversation on CockroachDB vs FaunaDB here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16878102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16878102)

The primary difference is in the interface (SQL vs NoSQL), the transactional protocol, and capabilities such as built-in multi-tenancy, temporality..

Might be useful to note that GV invested in both (Fauna was after Cockroach).

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jepsen is an important sanity check on marketing. Easy to say in collateral you are "strict" ACID -- Jepsen proves (or denies) those claims. Some fun reports over there [http://jepsen.io/analyses](http://jepsen.io/analyses)

<comment><USER7> "strict" ACID can mean a lot of different things. There is a lot of levels of consistency and they prevent different types of issues with data correction and isolation. I think database vendors should clarify what consistency model they mean as defined by [https://jepsen.io/consistency](https://jepsen.io/consistency)

<comment><USER3> That's a great resource. We've tried to be consistent in using these terms. I think a lot of the confusion and lack of standardization over terminology came from the fact that database and distributed systems research had less overlap in the past...

Consistency in the ACID sense meaning something different from CAP Consistency is another good example.

<comment><USER3> Another point that often gets lost when talking about ACID guarantees is the maximum scope of a transaction that a system supports. There are many systems which support ACID guarantees for a single record or shard, but fewer that can support fully distributed transactions across a sharded dataset in a scalable manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This whole space got really tough after Apple opensourced FoundationDB. It will take few years for higher level solutions that build on top of FoundatioDB to surface but after they do it will be really tough for the competitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why building on FoundationDB is better than building on the similar internal storage foundations current vendors have already implemented?

<comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does fauna's consistency guarantees compare to coakroach, spanner and yugabyte? It is difficult to compare because different vendors use different terminology. For example spanner supports 'external consistency'. And Coakroach says it supports serializable as defined by ANSI. Is this the same as what Fauna calls strict serializable?

<comment><USER3> I believe what we spanner calls 'external consistency' we call strict serializability. Read-write transactions in FaunaDB are strictly serializable, whereas reads default to serializable. This allows us to serve reads independently from the closest region to the client, cutting down on latency in geo-distributed clusters.

This is a bit weaker than external consistency or strict serializability; Peter Bailis has a good writeup on the meaning of serializability vs strict serializability here: [http://www.bailis.org/blog/linearizability-versus- serializab...](http://www.bailis.org/blog/linearizability-versus- serializability/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a direct link to the analysis: [https://storage.pardot.com/517431/114459/FaunaDB_Correctness...](https://storage.pardot.com/517431/114459/FaunaDB_Correctness_Report_042618.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> What is FaunaDB's CAP focus? Kills me that this isn't front and center in nosql home pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a CP system, although reads scale out more similar to an AP system because coordination is not required on consistent reads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What level of availability guarantees does Fauna provide?

<comment><USER11> This is a really important question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What are typical use cases?</comment>


Ask HN: What are a few technologies that just keep on surviving? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Flash. May it disappear from every misguided website ASAP.

One bidding system for a certain State Procurement Department uses Flash. It's horrendous.

I guess we can include Internet Explorer in there too.

</comment><comment><USER3> The PSTN.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I use my software development skills to help people with Cancer? - <AUTHOR> I am a childhood cancer survivor myself, and I have recently been trying to find ways that I can use my software engineering skills to help people currently going through the disease.
I am wondering if anyone knows of any companies, non-profits, or research groups that could use that kind of help.
Cancer treatment is obviously very uncomfortable, costly, and greatly reduces the quality of life for people. Especially children. If I could improve the process in any way using my trade I would like to do so. <comment><USER2> I have gone down this rabbithole. Trust me, software is not the bottleneck.

Long story short: make as much money as you can in the private sector and donate to "open-source" research, i.e. research that is released to the public domain instead of hoarded by private orgs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's disappointing. I appreciate this answer though, thank you.</comment></comment>


Mixpanel: Introducing JQL, a query language to analyze and learn from data - <AUTHOR> https://mixpanel.com/blog/2016/04/14/jql <comment><USER2> It's not a language, but an API. They could have called it JQA and avoid a potential Atlassian lawsuit

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a javascript library/api wrapper. However useful, it's not a 'L'anguage.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the Atlassian lawyers care about this.

<comment><USER5> I was just about to post that!

[https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/advanced- searching-179...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/advanced- searching-179442050.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just the other day I looked at a team member and said, "You know what would be great? A Mixpanel API so I can just pull out the data I need on a regular basis and put in on a dashboard so we are always looking at the same metrics"

BAM.

<comment><USER7> I don't really get it. Disclosure that I work at Looker which is an analytics company, though not really in the same space as Mixpanel. But I'm just confused about this latest trend of "you can get your data out!" from analytics providers that excel at one type of analysis (as Mixpanel does with funnels).

In my mind, the whole value of these providers is that they make that one kind of analysis really easy and pretty. But if you feel like you're outgrowing that and want to slice your data in new ways, I don't think you'd choose Mixpanel for their data capture alone, right? So is it just that the cost of Mixpanel is sunk and so might as well get the data they're already recording out?

<comment><USER6> It is simpler than that. I'm not slicing the data in different ways, I'm just centralizing what my whole team is looking at. We've spent too much time saying, "Hey look at the retention numbers, its so high!", "For when? I'm seeing it go low!"

You are what you measure, this had made it easy for us to centralize our data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like this is in response to competitors offering raw access to the data.

e.g.

[https://amplitude.com/sql-queries](https://amplitude.com/sql-queries)

[https://segment.com/redshift](https://segment.com/redshift)

etc

<comment><USER9> > Mixpanel lets you pull your data out at any time

[https://mixpanel.com/docs/api-documentation/data-export- api](https://mixpanel.com/docs/api-documentation/data-export-api)

<comment><USER10> Similar but very different. Segment and Amplitude manage the ETL and database for you. No development or maintenace required on your end.

<comment><USER9> Granted, but when we're talking about access to raw data then that's actually what I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > For instance, a multi-step funnel, segmented on a couple of columns, would > extend to several screenfuls of complex SQL, which is cumbersome to write > and difficult to reason about.

The only thing I loathe about SQL is its lack of re-usability. It is hard to write reusable parts and pass them around in functions. Need ten filters which you may / may not use? Write ten queries!

Thankfully, the problem is solved by ORMs ( SQLAlchemy, in my case ). Certainly, in many cases, the mental mapping of map, filter and reduce makes more sense but in the most, I have been more comfortable with using a powerful ORM layer and SQL.

<comment><USER12> Views and WITH statements help out quite a bit for this, though it does depend on the database. In general, basic views are well-supported across all RDBMS. If your database supports it, Materialized Views are amazing for the caching of certain complex queries and reusability, and that's something SQLAlchemy can't do by itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> function main() {

while(true) {

// it's great feature but i'm not sure that javascript is the right language. just because sql is not the best way to run analytic queries such as funnel and retention, it doesn't mean that we need a replacement. you basically expect all data analysts to learn javascript instead of sql.

}

}

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems a little outdated to stick with ES5, particularly in the examples.

<comment><USER15> A lot of es2015 syntax does work, such as arrow functions. Under the hood it's a recent v8</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pinterest for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://hnterest.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was experimenting the new version of Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 and the responsive design. It turned out pretty great and then I have decided to extended it to more additions as the following:

* <http://bootstrap.io/> for layout design / responsive design

* <http://backbonejs.org/> for router (collection/view will be added soon)

* <http://url2png.com> for web thumbnail

* <http://subtlepatterns.com> for background wallpaper

* <http://icanhazjs.com> for rendering template

I am still improving the site as I am learning more about bootstrap and backbone.js. I hope you guys are enjoying the site.

</comment><comment><USER2> Am I missing something? No content is loaded when I click any of the tabs in Chrome 16 or Firefox 9.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look like the API I am using is hammered

I am using <http://api.ihackernews.com>

I will look at issues when I am home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Feedback: When you launch a site like this, it's useful if you seed some content on the site.

<comment><USER4> Looks like its trying to load something via AJax, but its timing out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure what's going on. It loaded for me once in Chrome but it took a long time. Can't get it to load at all now. A progress bar or a error would be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. I'll update the site tonight

Sorry for not working since API isn't responsive. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey,

You mind chatting with me in private? Would love to learn from your recent experience.

Hit me up at xcubic.m[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't see any content, just categories and a patterned background that I assume was meant to hold the 'HNpins'

<comment><AUTHOR> No. Sounds like the API (<http://api.ihackernews.com/>) is randomly on or off. I need to look at alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I missing something? I see just a nice big blank page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I wasn't expecting the issue. I think the API I use is getting hammered. Gauges said I have 1k unique visitors in 20 mins.

<http://api.ihackernews.com> is all I can find but alternative one is what I'm looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't work for me (Chromium 15)

</comment><comment><USER10> i see nothing but a blank page? is that what supposed I see?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. The API I am using might not work. I need to find powerful API than <http://api.ihackernews.com></comment></comment>


Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor Strikes Deal with Govt - <AUTHOR> https://tendaily.com.au/news/politics/a181204ser/encrypted-messaging-bill-to-pass-after-labor-strikes-deal-with-government-20181204 <comment><USER2> Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303).

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I don't understand all of the issues, but I'm gonna be as straightforward as I can: if you are a messaging platform doing explicit business in Australia under these rules, we have to assume you have or are willing to backdoor your software. It is a reasonable assumption that it will be hidden and that the backdoor is general enough for use outside of Australia (even if you don't explicitly deploy/enable it elsewhere, you wrote it, it exists). Therefore, if you do explicit business under these rules I have to assume you are compromised or are willing to be compromised.

</comment><comment><USER4> Obviously this law and ones like it have no place in a modern, free society, but in regards to the risk with using business apps, it's just the same as before. You can not trust app's from companies incorporated in the five eyes [1]. If you are using a product made in any of the five eyes you are already compromised. By compromised, I mean you can be almost 100% sure that if the owner's of those countries want your data they will get it, and they will get it easily too. They do not need warrants, courts or judges to sign of on anything and haven't done for a long time.

To clarify my position on this. Whether a law like this is actually passed or not, you should assume that every company incorporated in these countries have been forced to place backdoors in their systems. I'm not saying that every company __has __done this. I 'm saying you should __assume __they have.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> As an Australian citizen who has spent many years in the US, I can say that this law is in line with the main ideology of the Australian government: extreme parentalism. You run a red light: fine for $450 in the mail. No court date, no arguments. You exceed the speed limit by 5km/h: $200 fine in the mail. No arguments. It is brutal but it's hard to deny that it works. Australia has some of the lowest per capital road deaths in the OECD. The problem is that the government wants to regulate the internet the say way they regulate road traffic. You can read up all the idiotic attempts here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia). I wonder if this means Australia will have the ability to ban apps like Telegram from the app store?

</comment><comment><USER6> Fastmail users should be on notice with this legislation if they chose this service for privacy/security purposes.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Fastmail is no longer secure by law as it is now illegal to have a secure service the moment a govt official asks for access.

<comment><USER8> Their statement:

[https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance- bill/](https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/)

Which drives home the point a lot of people are forgetting: it was never secure to begin with, unless you were going to the effort of encrypting all your own emails client-side before sending, and only communicating with others who did the same. Fastmail was never an end-to-end encrypted service, so they _already_ could have been served orders from a government to hand over data, and if that government had jurisdiction and the orders were properly formed for that jurisdiction, they would've had to comply.

So as bad as this bill is, it doesn't really change things for Fastmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was trying to figure out what exactly this bill says. I encourage people look for themselves.

[https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r6195)

It is utterly and completely incomprehensible and it offers little to no technical definitions of what exactly they want. There is a complete absence of technical concrete definitions of what they want and the memoranda seem to be highly conflicted. It reads as if some lawyers watched Mr. Robot and used it as inspiration for their creative writing paper that was due the next day.

Edit: this appears to signal the true intent of the bill

[https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...](https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/billsdgs/6370016/upload_binary/6370016.pdf;fileType=application/pdf)

It all seems to be one giant five eyes power play to make their jobs easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be a good opportunity for Apple to draw a line in the sand. They can afford to lose Australia, so they should just stop selling there. Better to battle now rather than waiting for a bigger fight.

</comment><comment><USER11> From the article:

> "This bill is far from perfect and there are likely to be significant > outstanding issues, but this compromise will deliver security and > enforcement agencies the powers they say they need over the Christmas > period, and ensure adequate oversight and safeguards," shadow attorney- > general Mark Dreyfus said on Tuesday.

... shadow attorney-general? That sounds rather ominous.

<comment><USER12> In parliamentary systems, parties in opposition commonly appoint members of Parliament as "shadow ministers" who keep track of (and speak on) issues that the parties in government have ministers handling. They can present the opposition's official position on these portfolios.

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

<comment><USER11> Ah, good to know!

I thought, from first glance, that the next news headline would be "Shadow Council Already Owns Your Secrets [And Your Souls]" if this trend continued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does the law require, exactly? That service providers build in the ability to let law enforcement start monitoring specific communications? Or that they build in the ability to decrypt messages already sent, if requested to do so by law enforcement?

<comment><USER14> Bottom line, they can ask a technology manufacture to do anything (literally last time I looked the bill had the phrase "do a thing") and they have to do it. But the specific intent is to have the manufacture deliver targeted malware to people they want to monitor. A warrant is not required, but a crime with a jail term of 3 or more years must be involved ("involved" because you do not have to be a suspect, just useful to the investigation to receive the malware).

<comment><USER15> And all that is required from the agency making the claim is their word. This assertion of justification is untraceable, unverifiable, the tech employee can't talk to anyone about it, and there are penalties in a secret court for refusing to perform as demanded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, what happens to Signal in Australia if the bill passes?

<comment><USER7> Signal would have to find a way to send a special app to you which does not encrypt or specially encrypts in order to funnel data to AU government. If it does not, it becomes illegal. Considering signal warns people if the key changes, it probably means Signal is now illegal as it might be physically/mathematically impossible to satisfy the law.

Secure communication is now illegal in Australia.

<comment><USER11> Or they'll have the carriers in Australia push an OS update that specifically exfiltrates your Signal session keys to the government.

Then it won't matter what Signal does or doesn't do, they can still get what they want.

<comment><USER17> > Or they'll have the carriers in Australia push an OS update

One of many reasons you should not have your carrier control your OS update channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this law pertain to service providers or users as well.

That is, is using pgp still allowed? How about something signal-like that is self-hosted / federated?</comment>


EFF: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/eff-court-accessing-publicly-available-information-internet-not-crime <comment><USER2> I agree with this, but I feel like I've also seen the EFF and similar advocates cry foul when companies or governments use tools to mass monitor publicly visible user information on the internet. Genuinely asking: Is there a discernible difference between scraping LinkedIn data in this instance vs. scraping Twitter data about protests or threats against politicians?

<comment><USER3> Yes: power held by the involved parties. A small company or a person scraping data from LinkedIn usually has no power over LinkedIn or people it's collecting data about. Government collecting data about protesters wields whole sophisticated enforcement apparatus and can do virtually anything to any and all protesters.</comment></comment>


Government Set Up a Fake Facebook Page in This Woman's Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/government-says-federal-agents-can-impersonate-woman-online

<comment><USER3> What a headline. Even I, a regular cannabis consumer and drug policy reform advocate, fell prey to this. I saw another article earlier today about this and thought something like, "well, no surprises there."

But indeed if this were some soccer mom, I sense my reaction might be different.

This is a pretty serious crime and the legal implications unclear. Any thoughts on what will happen next?

edit: I just noticed this is Radley's writing. Love that dude - <USER2> full of hacker spirit.

<comment><USER4> Original headline/title was "Once you've dehumanized drug offenders, it's easy to steal their identities". Just got changed to "Government Set Up a Fake Facebook Page in This Woman's Name"

<comment><USER3> Oh wow, really? That's crazy! I'm so sick of WaPo. I'm glad they're letting Radley write, but they're a rag.

edit: Wow, what happened? It's now not even Radley's piece?!

<comment><USER5> We changed the URL because HN prefers original sources, and the original story was the Buzzfeed piece. On the other hand, neither article is an obvious fit for HN, so I'm not sure what the right call is. Suggestions are welcome but may not be acted on until morning here.

<comment><USER3> I think Radley's piece was a great fit. It was about identity theft, which itself is usually on-topic, and also about government activity rubbing up against the norms and policies of an online social network, which is usually on-topic.

Here's the thesis (and spirit) that makes Radley's piece more HN relevant, to me:

It shouldn't be all that surprising, then, when drug enforcement officials subsequently treat drug offenders as something less than human. If you aren't fully human, you have no identity to steal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It never ceases to amaze me. Every time I think the conspiracy theorists are the real lunatics, the government manages to one up them. First Snowden, now this. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

</comment><comment><USER7> The DEA has no purpose other than to enforce drug laws. The public has consistently shown that it wants drug laws to be more liberal, but to the DEA, that's an existential threat. The DEA has a vested interest in the drug police state. It's a monster. What a mess.

<comment><USER8> It should be thoroughly dismantled. It won't be though, because we have no control over our government.

<comment><USER7> We have control in principle, and, in practice, if the public was energized enough about this it would get done. It's just that the bar is set extremely high and it's almost unthinkable what abuses might need to occur to get that much attention to the drug issue. The reason we're in this situation to begin with is that drug users are poor advocates for their own cause and they are easy targets for discrimination and persecution. The biggest reason is that drug users are a small minority that's mostly invisible. If you eliminate marijuana it gets even smaller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been flagged pretty quickly by pro-government forces, I guess. 27 votes in one hour and on the second page...

<comment><USER10> Might be more because of the source, Buzzfeed. HN seems to penalize some sources pretty heavily these days.

Personally I think that's a change for the worse. I've seen a number of interesting stories with a decent vote/age ratio be buried a number of pages back. For me, it's decreasing the value of visiting the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was originally Washington Post. It was changed to Buzzfeed by dang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cute. Wouldn't that be a reason for the account to be booted out of Facebook in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER12> Good reporting, here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Url changed from [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2014/10/07/o...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2014/10/07/once-youve-dehumanized-drug-offenders-its-easy-to-steal- their-identities/), which points to this.</comment>


ScaleWell grant for Entrepreneurs.  We're having a party. - <AUTHOR> http://scalewell.posterous.com/first-scalewell-grant-party

<comment><USER2> This is a project that is _giving away money_ , $1000 at a time, to startups, in Chicago, and this is the first time I've _ever_ heard of them. I'm very confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're moving fast and hope word spreads quickly. The important thing to note is this is a bottom up movement and strives to be as egalitarian as possible.

More info at <http://www.scalewell.com> and <http://twitter.com/scaleswell>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hope to see everyone who can make it here. YC and Techstars alum are greatly encouraged to attend. These participants are looking up to you.

It's also a good opportunity to meet mentors and potential cofounders for startups who can make it.

</comment><comment><USER3> How was the initial response to this project?

<comment><USER4> We had over 70 participants including both trustees and applicants.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tesseract.js – Pure JavaScript OCR for 60 Languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js <comment><USER2> To anyone screen capturing small fonts as a demonstration, or capturing digital text especially at a small resolution, I don't believe that that is the purpose of this OCR library. (As a specialized problem, that might be easier to solve depending on the typeface.)

A much better example that works quite well is a picture of someone holding a book: [http://i.imgur.com/3JWs64x.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3JWs64x.jpg)

        Magic .
        Read this to yourself. Read it silently
        Don't move your lips. Don't make a suund
        Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing
        What a wonderfully weird thing, huh?
        NOW MAKE THIS PART LOUD!
        SCREAM IT IN YOUR MIND!
        DROWN EVERYTHING OUT.
        Now, hear a whisper. A tiny whisper.
        New, read this next line with your best crotchety—
        old-man voice:

        "Hello there, sonny. Does your town have apost 0
        Awesome! Who was that? Whose voice was that?
        It sure wasn't yours!

        How do you do that?
        How?!
        Must be magic.

Problems with this text: misspelled 'sound' as 'suund', didn't recognize the word 'anything', and mis-recognized 'a post office' as 'apost 0'.

Not bad. Especially since two of three mistakes are on the edge of the page.

<comment><USER3> The old man voice was spoken in my mind as Deckard Cain.

<comment><USER4> I stayed a while and I listened

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The text detection is lacking in comparison to Google's Vision API. Here is a real-life comparison between Tesseract and Google's Vision API, based on a PDF a user of our website uploaded.

Original text [[http://i.imgur.com/CZGhKhn.png](http://i.imgur.com/CZGhKhn.png)]:

> I am also a top professional on Thumbtack which is a site for people looking > for professional services like on gig salad. Please see my reviews from my > clients there as well

Google detects [[http://i.imgur.com/pSJym1x.png](http://i.imgur.com/pSJym1x.png)]:

> " I am also a top professional on Thumbtack which is a site for people > looking for professional services like on gig salad. Please see my reviews > from my clients there as well "

Tesseract detects [[http://i.imgur.com/wwbLU6g.png](http://i.imgur.com/wwbLU6g.png)]:

> \ am also a mp pmfesslonzl on Thummack wmcn Is a sue 1m peop'e \ookmg (or > professmna' semces We on glg salad P'ezse see my rewews 1mm my cuems were as > weH

<comment><USER6> I spent many afternoons trying to get tesseract to read Dwarf Fortress screenshots, such as [http://i.imgur.com/32vVhnH.png](http://i.imgur.com/32vVhnH.png) \- including much pre-processing, such as converting the text to black and white. Alas, I never even got close.

Edit: just tried Google's, and it had one mistake for that entire file. That's pretty impressive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Upscaling worked ok for me:

Upscaled image: [https://imgur.com/a/4IQA7](https://imgur.com/a/4IQA7)

Result on demo page: [http://imgur.com/a/A0v5C](http://imgur.com/a/A0v5C)

The hammerman Tikes flsosushsath: Greetings. My name is Tikes Leafsilk.

You: Rh. hello. I'm Stasbo Murderknower the Craterous Trance of Fins. Don't travel alone at night. or the bogeyman will get you.

You: Tell me about this hall.

Tikes: This is The flccidental Ualley. In 123, Stasho Steamdances ruled from The flccidental Ualley of The Council of Cobras in Ueilapes.

...

<comment><USER2> This seems like a font issue. Would training the model for this console font help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HOW is there not a better, almost 100% accurate OCR tool?

I routinely (daily) need to OCR PDF files. The PDF files are not scans. They are PDF files created from a Word file. The text is 100% clear, the lines are 100% straight, and the type is 100% uniform.

And, yet, Microsoft and Google OCR spits out gibberish that is full of critical errors.

From a problem solving perspective, this seems like an incredibly easy problem to solve in this exact use case. That is, PDFs generated from text files. Identify a uniform font size (prevent o-to-O and o-to-0 errors), identify a font-family (serif, sans-serif, narrow to particular fonts), and OCR the damn thing. And yet, the output is useless in my field.

<comment><USER8> You do not want OCR for this. You want either ABBYY FineReader (around $99 for a license), or, if you prefer open source, Tabula:

[https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing- tabul...](https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-tabula/)

The main advantage of ABBYY is that if you need to do OCR, it is, in my opinion, the best consumer-level package. And it does a pretty good job of doing OCR _and_ conversion to Excel. Here's a Github repo that demonstrates some results:

[https://github.com/dannguyen/abbyy-finereader-ocr- senate](https://github.com/dannguyen/abbyy-finereader-ocr-senate)

But to reemphasize, the above repo demonstrates ABBYY maintaining table structure _with PDFs that are scanned images_ , which is considerably harder than the situation you're in.

I've started a repo that eventually will compare text-to-table tools, which is what you want: [https://github.com/dannguyen/pdftotablestable](https://github.com/dannguyen/pdftotablestable)

<comment><USER9> As much as your response tries to solve GP's particular problem (OCR for PDF- to-text being not the right tool), I 100% agree with the extreme annoyance expressed in it regarding the state of the free OCR.

In principle, text-pdf-to-text is just a matter of parsing PDF (and/or Word) formats and extracting text buried in metadata. (I know it's a lot of work but still).

Even if you forget about what GP said about the source being text PDFs, and when all the sources are png images, as long as those pngs were generated from text documents (Word, PDF, etc) without any scanning or camera involved, it is unacceptable that today's free OCR tools don't get the job done, when in 2016, machine-learning has produced systems that have surpassed human accuracy in much harder tasks like object detection and speech recognition.

I know it's not an unsolved problem. It's just a matter of some knowledgeable machine learning researcher taking a break from working on cutting edge for a few months and putting together a package that gets the image-to-text job done. Once such a base tool is available on github, the community will take over and add features, fix bugs, as needed. (I'm extremely busy with my own degree work ATM, otherwise I would probably do something like that).

EDIT 1: As for tesseract, I hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. It's a kludge, a black-box of traditional-programming karate-chops and overly- complicated bloat that spits out text the way it likes and there is, largely, nothing you can do about it. Compared to machine-learning and modern computer- vision, tesseract belongs to the dark ages. If there is going to be a quality OCR tool, it's has to be written from scratch based on deep-learning from the ground up.

<comment><USER10> There's a brute-force solution to the "extract text from a 'digital-native' image" problem that you can write in an afternoon:

1\. Use an existing OCR library to give you the positions of the words, plus a first-cut guess of their content.

2\. Take the first word from the OCRed guess, and loop through a set of {font, size, leading} tuples, rendering out the same word at that {font, size, leading} and overlaying it on the image, and measuring error-distance.

3\. If your best match isn't within some minimum error-distance, then assume that the OCR misrecognized the first word, and try again with the second, third, etc.

Once you've got a font-settings match:

4\. render the rest of the words onto their respective detected bounding boxes;

5\. notice which words have a higher error-distance than the rest;

6\. for each word, generate candidate mutations of the word (e.g. everything at a Levenstein distance of 1 from the OCRed guess), pick the one that lowers the error-distance, and repeat until the distance for that word won't go down any lower.

7\. Return the error-minimized set of words.

You could call this a form of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code- excited_linear_prediction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code- excited_linear_prediction), with fonts as the pre-trained models.

\---

Actually, come to think of it, it'd be a lot easier to detect and unify "identical" sub-regions of the image first (using e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2) on a lossless setting). Then you could, in parallel to the above, also try to do frequency-analysis to discover which of your image "tiles" would likely form a basic "alphabet" of character-glyphs—and then hill-climb toward aligning that "alphabet" by attempting to produce the most runs of character-glyphs that translate to known dictionary words in whatever language the OCR thinks the text is in.

The font-matching would still be necessary, though, for the _rest_ of the image samples that don't fall into the easily-frequency-analyzed part. (And for languages that aren't alphabetic, like Chinese, where there are no super- common character-glyphs.)

<comment><USER7> Another partner and I came up with a similar solution. It hinged on detecting the typeface and using a bitmapped (or otherwise rendered) font package to OCR letter by letter.

The PDF files that we are dealing with do not have embedded text and are not searchable, but are "digital-native," to use the term that you suggested.

Does this not exist? If not, why does it not exist?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why the promise- _like_ interface? If it returned a promise with a this- returning progress method monkey-patched onto it, then you could use it otherwise like a regular promise:

        Tesseract.recognize(myImage)
          .progress(function(message){console.log(message)})
          .then(function(result){console.log(result)})
          .catch(function(err){console.error(err)});

or

        Tesseract.recognize(myImage)
          .progress(function(message){console.log(message)})
          .then(
            function(result){console.log(result)},
            function(err){console.error(err)}
          );

I guess I just still have bad memories of jQuery's old almost-like-real promises. I'd rather never have to think ever again about whether I'm dealing with a real promise or one that's going to surprise me and break at run-time because I tried to use it like a real one.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to use a real Promise, you can wrap the call to recognize in Promise.resolve:

      Promise.resolve(Tesseract.recognize(myImage)).then(result => console.log(result))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For all those claiming issues with reading text from a screen shot of this page, note that this is more an issue with the original Tesseract library, not this library (which appears to wrap Tesseract compiled through Emscripten). I remember having a similar issue when I used the original Tesseract. The quick hack I found to fix it was to rescale any small text input images 3x first before feeding it to Tesseract. I'm sure there's more intelligent solutions to mitigate that problem.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, in the past, I've had to scale my own scans/photos to get good results. The tesseract github site mentions this:

        "Tesseract works best on images which have a DPI of at least 300 dpi, so it may be beneficial to resize images."

\- [https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tesseract/wiki/ImproveQuali...](https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tesseract/wiki/ImproveQuality)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excited about this... but the OCR quality seems to be very bad. Maybe it's not optimized for recognizing black text on a white background.

For example, I took a screenshot of this comment and ran it through the demo and got this:

Excited ehent this... but the OCR enenty Seems te be very bad. Maybe it's het Dptimized far recngnizing black text an e white heckgmnhe. EDI example, 1 tank e Screenshnt at this cement ehe teh it. thmneh the den» ehd get this:

It seems to recognize the bounding boxes just fine but mangles the words.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you try increasing the font size a bit? On a retina macbook (so effectively ~2x bigger font) I get:

Excited about this... but the OCR quality seems to be very bad. Maybe it's not optimized for recognizing black text on a white background. For example, I took a screenshot of this comment and ran it through the demo and got this:

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always wanted to use Tesseract on .NET projects but it was always clumsy (wrappers). This looks like it'll make things easier.

Thanks for putting this out.

<comment><USER16> I think a .NET wrapper would be more direct/elegant than using emscripten generated code (especially in a .NET project).

<comment><USER15> A few .NET wrappers exist...but it's always felt heavyweight for me (my use case is pretty rare). I am hoping this makes it trivially easy.

We'll see how it goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Drop an English image on this page to OCR it!

This looks great, and I'd really love to but

> Uncaught ReferenceError: progress is not defined

EDIT: works now!

<comment><AUTHOR> What browser / OS are you on?

Edit: this affected every browser because it was a typo. Fixed!

<comment><USER17> OSX El Capitan 10.11.6 (15G31) Chrome Version 53.0.2785.143 (64-bit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been using this library to read screenshots of Pokemon Go to automatically calculate Individual Values for each Pokemon[1] It's worked great on desktop, but on mobile safari where it matters most the library causes the browser to crash :(

1: [https://github.com/goatslacker/pokemon-go-iv- calculator/blob...](https://github.com/goatslacker/pokemon-go-iv- calculator/blob/master/web/components/PictureUpload.js)

<comment><USER19> Consider doing it server-side

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Languages list link is broken - getting 404 for the following [https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/master/tesseract...](https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/master/tesseract_lang_list.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Fixed. The actual link is [https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/master/docs/tess...](https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/master/docs/tesseract_lang_list.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tesseract was one of the best publicly-available CAPTCHA solvers when I was playing around with that stuff a few years ago; I remember somewhere in the neighbourhood of 90%+ accuracy on ReCAPTCHA, no wonder they've changed those considerably since then to make it difficult even for humans.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does this mean I can implement Tesseract on my home server without using php's shell_exec to perform magic on my files? I can just use Jscript instead? Cool!

My current HRCloud2 project could benefit greatly if I ever get around to it. Currently I make the php interpreter jump through hoops and move stuff all over the place to OCR images and docs. This could save a ton of time and shift the processing to the client instead of my server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is completely client side :)

You can even host the external language files yourself as described in the readme: [https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js#local- installation](https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js#local-installation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Impressive that this is pure JS, however trying an image cut from the page itself gave this result

> Dropan Enghsh Wage on (Ms page to OCR m

Should be

> Drop an English image on this page to OCR it!

<comment><AUTHOR> As another commenter mentioned, Tesseract.js won't perform very well on 'natural' images (e.g. the very light text you tried).

It should work better if you feed it a screenshot of the black text at the top of the demo page though (Tesseract.js is a pure Javascript port etc...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The title and description are very misleading: this is technically "pure JavaScript" but the JS is compiled from the original C++ library of the same name using emscripten. I think "pure JS" would imply that all of its sources are written in JS which is not the case here. It's mostly the C++ code doing the actual work, with a little JS wrapper on top.

</comment><comment><USER25> Pretty cool. I screen captured the text in the bottom right corner of the page and it had some issues. Here's a screenshot of what happened: [http://io.kc.io/hkeM](http://io.kc.io/hkeM)

</comment><comment><USER26> Awesome! The ability to OCR video in a browser opens up so many interesting possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER27> For those who may be interested;

I threw together a quick proof-of-concept in Go for exposing tesseract via a web API:

[https://github.com/jaytaylor/tesseract- web](https://github.com/jaytaylor/tesseract-web)

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this include taking a text and for example, when viewing it, 'wiping' the text in the logical native language order?

For languages that don't employ much whitespace, this would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sorry guys, probably a stupid question (googled quickly, doesn't worked), but does this kind of stuff involve ML? Do I need to train it?

<comment><USER30> Not sure about this JS version, but just tesseract comes with trained database for selected languages and fonts and it should be able to work out of box.

<comment><USER29> Ah ok, this helped. At least, now I know more about tesseract. Thank you<USER30>
</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does it block while it works and do the work in several setTimeouts or how do they get it to report progress without freezing everything?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tesseract.js uses webworkers in the browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is it true, that original implementation of tesseract exexuted from commandline is faster than javascript translated version?

<comment><USER32> According to my tests this is true, but for curiosity can anyone get equivalent or better speed with tesseract.js? This is nice but I don't need client side processing so is there any reason to pick up tesseract.js?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What License? Doesn't mention it.

<comment><USER34> Apache-2.0

They've added [https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/c26cae7ee956c399...](https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js/blob/c26cae7ee956c399eeb992de0135e3af29b4edb5/LICENSE.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tesseract is not specific to JavaScript right? I do recall there being a version for Python

<comment><USER36> No, tesseract is a C++ library; this is a wrapper for an Emscripten port of that library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> More instructions, like how to train it, would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER38> How does it compare with Ocrad.js?

</comment><comment><USER39> How long did this take to build?

</comment><comment><USER40> Awesome

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this at all affiliated with the already-existing tesseract OCR library? It doesn't seem to be from my cursory check so if not you need to rename your library, because you're ripping off their name.

[https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tesseract)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a wrapper around an Emscripten port of that library. See [https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js- core](https://github.com/naptha/tesseract.js-core)</comment></comment>


Tarlz – Archiver with multimember lzip compression - <AUTHOR> https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/tarlz.html <comment><USER2> Tarlz seems similar to Afio [https://github.com/kholtman/afio](https://github.com/kholtman/afio)

Afio makes cpio-format archives. It deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption. Supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation. Afio can make compressed archives that are much safer than compressed tar or cpio archives. Afio is best used as an `archive engine' in a backup script.

I've been using for some backups and it has worked fine. And for backups, I prefer to use cpio than tar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting, particularly the --threads option. Unfortunately for me, it appears to only use one core for compression. As imperfect as it is, I'll be sticking to 7zip for now, which does use all 48 cores.</comment>


PM2.5 air pollution linked to memory problems and Alzheimer's-like brain changes - <AUTHOR> https://news.usc.edu/163089/air-pollution-brain-changes-alzheimers-memory-usc-study/ <comment><AUTHOR> As this is an observational study, there cannot be a causal link established, however there are previous causal links hypothesized as the article states:

> Previous research has suggested that fine particle pollution exposure > increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. What > scientists haven't known is whether PM2.5 alters brain structure and > accelerates memory decline.

And this study, while an observational one, noted significant statistical co- relation:

> When all that information was combined, researchers could see the > association between higher pollution exposure, brain changes and memory > problems — even after adjusting to take into account differences in income, > education, race, geographic region, cigarette smoking and other factors.</comment>


A happy numeric coincidence - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/math/power-digit-sum.html <comment><USER2> These are called "Reacher numbers."

[http://recursed.blogspot.com/2007/09/mathematics-in-jack- rea...](http://recursed.blogspot.com/2007/09/mathematics-in-jack-reacher- novel.html) Base 10: [https://oeis.org/A023106](https://oeis.org/A023106) Base 2: [https://oeis.org/A256590](https://oeis.org/A256590)

<comment><USER3> Also: [http://oeis.org/A152147](http://oeis.org/A152147) "Irregular triangle in which row n lists k > 0 such that the sum of digits of k^n equals k.".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat, but why is for example 163^16 such a coincidence? It's not _that_ unlikely for digits to add up to 163, and given that you can choose both a base and an exponent, there's bound to be many that work out like this. 163^16 has 36 digits, so expected sum (average expected value of a random digit 0-9 being 4.5) be 162. So that's even pretty close to 163.

Also, why limit this to base 10? Anything with base 10 digits is not the purest possible math imho because it depends on the arbitrary value 10 while you could generalize to any other value.

<comment><USER5> I think one reason to limit to base 10 is because we don't have an arbitrary number of digits, we only have maybe 36 if we use the full alphabet. And it will be difficult for people to follow along with if it's something they aren't used to calculating in. But I'm also guessing the results will become a lot less "rare" which is part of the cool factor here.

<comment><USER6> Omg, you're not thinking he's done all this by hand, right? People here can code such simple things. And you don't need no specific symbols, just arrays of ints (or any suitable type).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All multiples of 9 have digits that add up to 9. This is something kids learn. Why does it work? 9 is 10 - 1, so every time you add another nine the tens digit goes up by one and the ones digit down by one, maintaining the sum of digits. Similar thing happens at three digits, four digits, etc, because 9 < 10, no digit other than the ones digit ever goes up by more than 1, and a 9 becomes a 0 when you carry a one.

That this pattern didn't swamp the results makes me wonder what kind of bug the author has in the scanning code.

[edit: seems I forgot about situations like 9 x 11 x N, where the digits can add up to 18, 27, etc due to all the 8 and 9 digits, so the algorithm will only find multiples of 9 with lots of small digits in it.]

<comment><USER8> Something lie that happens in all bases e.g. in base 8 all multiples of 7 add up to 7 (if you keep adding), in hex all multiples of f add up to f, and in binary everything eventually adds up to 1 (except zero).

Similarly, in base 8 7^2 is 61 and in hex f^2 is e1.

(n-1)^2 = n^2 - 2*n + 1 = n(n-2) + 1 which in base n is written with n-2 as the fist digit and 1 as the second digit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just curious how fast brute force search is. Found some larger numbers like 7793^451. Computing the exponents in base 10 seems to be a fairly fast way of doing things, since this is not very hard and radix conversion is a comparatively slow operation.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm getting bigger numbers from a very quick script -- am I missing something?

digitalsum(999^75) = 999

      999^75 = 927708673390001466432161699937587612771693772928727827334425528520027513591277141564708297244305734237029149442895264407211992619276548532187236223108524403378301874096420069132958960388059297398105903507708174617522225074999

<comment><USER10>
      def test(x, y, debug=True):
          num = x**y
          digitalsum = sum(int(a) for a in str(num))
          if x == digitalsum and debug:
              print x, y, num
          return x == digitalsum

      for i in range(1,1000):
          for j in range(1,100):
              if test(i, j):
                  print i, j

<comment><USER11> After you calc X^Y, when you will calc X^(Y+1), doesn't it worth to calc using the previous result (X^Y)*X instead of another power X^(Y+1) ?

<comment><USER12> You will find here that the run-time is swamped by the digit breakdown and summing, so that exponentiation versus accumulated product doesn't make a palpable difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://oeis.org/A023106](https://oeis.org/A023106)

</comment><comment><USER11> @pavel_lishin what algorithm did you use to find these results?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I'm not the author of the post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hacker News paydirt!

Nerdy enough (and well written enough) that I'll add this blog to my RSS reader. 2019 is off to a good start!</comment>


For $1,375/year you can send SPAM to Microsoft, AOL and Comcast customers - <AUTHOR> https://returnpath.com/solutions/email-deliverability-optimization/ip-certification/# <comment><AUTHOR> Quote from the website: "Return Path's Certification program is the industry's most recognized and valued certified whitelist. Getting on the whitelist helps ensure better inbox placement with major mailbox providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Comcast, and more.

21 percent of promotional emails never reach the inbox, landing in spam folders or getting blocked. That means losing out on opens, clicks, and ultimately revenue–impacting the success or failure of your email programs. Don't take that risk. Partner with Return Path to optimize email visibility and increase revenue by getting more email delivered."

Here is the price list: [https://returnpath.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/06/Return-Pat...](https://returnpath.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/06/Return-Path-Certification-Pricing-US.pdf)

About $10 per thousand messages.

</comment><comment><USER2> There are an awful lot of deliverability service providers out there. This is nothing new. Amazon SES is priced about the same and has the same requirements to keep your lists clean.</comment>


T-Mobile Unveils "DIGITS," Upgrades the Phone Number for the Internet Age - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/digits.htm <comment><USER2> So _this_ is what they've been working on instead of fixing coverage holes or support.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually pretty cool</comment>


The New American Status Symbol? A Second Passport - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/style/golden-visa-second-passport-dual-citizenship.html <comment><USER2> Except my Australian passport has done me exactly jack here in the USA during the pandemic (I'm a dual citizen). My wife can't leave Australia because she doesn't qualify for a waiver, and we're not sure I'll get into Australia due to the arrival caps even if I could get time off, which won't happen very soon. We haven't seen each other in over six months.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see a lot of "grass is greener" nonsense. I hope those who chose to move to Italy or elsewhere don't get backlash once the honeymoon period is over, because _it is_ a very different country to the US. I wouldn't even consider it without fluency in Italian.

<comment><USER4> > I wouldn't even consider it without fluency in Italian.

For the affluent, obtaining a second passport though e.g. citzenship-by- investment programs is all done through intermediaries. You pay a law firm a few tens of thousands of euro and they take care of everything – the only action required from you is going to an office to pick up your passport at the very end of the process. Since these affluent individuals are so used to relying on expert assistance, no knowledge of the local language is ever really necessary.

For less affluent people, especially those obtaining citizenship through ancestry, there are sometimes requirements to prove a B1 command of the local language, so in that case actually learning the language is a must.

<comment><USER5> I think GP isn't talking about the passport acquisition process but really the experience of _living_ there. The culture shock is real and you're in for a rough surprise if you think Europe is anything like the US. For starters, you're going to find your that the role of English as a lingua franca is largely overstated. Depending on your personality, you may not completely adapt and end up going back home.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but the experience of _living_ there might be very different for the highly affluent people who can invest over a million euro in a citizenship-by- investment program. Many of them don't do their own shopping or will ever deal directly with a plumber or electrician – that is all taken care off by hired staff. Opportunities for culture shock are limited because they have little exposure to the overall local culture, instead they live in a cosmopolitan bubble with people of similar wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disappointing article really, they discuss various ways to get a 2nd passport but only explore Italian ancestry and Greek ancestry. I would have liked a story about someone who "invested" in Grenada and how that's worked out for him. Or an American ex-pat who got a relatively-easy-to-get Panamanian passport.

<comment><USER7> Look up Nomad Capitalist on youtube. Lots of good info there. Including on Grenada and Panama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest scare for me personally is the cost of healthcare in the US, especially as one grows older and complications out of our control arise (e.g. cancers, mental degradation, etc.) Of course there is something to be said for being truly patriotic and sticking around to make life better for you and your countrymen that live in your nation, but I a huge concern there is that the country is already under too much influence from the super-wealthy, and its nigh impossible for an average person to make the change they want to see.

Anyways, that's why I've looked into dual-citizenship. I agree with one of the premises of the article: the cost of healthcare (and basic necessities) for Americans is too high, and its a good idea to diversify your hedges and get dual passports/citizenship if you can.

</comment><comment><USER9> Go give Moneyland a listen or read. It isn't just a new phenomenon and it's going to get worse. With enough money you can dine a la carte to whatever gives you the best options. UK libel laws being one of the better options.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39979237-moneyland](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39979237-moneyland)

</comment><comment><USER10> This isn't good for the class of people who want to raise tax on the wealthy. What if this becomes a thing and all those people the day you tried to tax them threw their american passport in the ocean.

<comment><USER11> In theory they still owe exit tax..

[https://americansoverseas.org/en/knowledge-centre/us- taxes-a...](https://americansoverseas.org/en/knowledge-centre/us-taxes-and- liability/exit-tax-us/)

I suppose you could just toss it in the ocean and not formally renounce your citizenship, but you'd need to keep up on your taxes to avoid it in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For anyone hitting the paywall: [https://archive.is/3gFSR](https://archive.is/3gFSR)</comment>


Bit.ly Redesign Upsets Users: What's Wrong With It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zurb.com/article/996/bitly-redesign-upsets-users-whats-wrong-w

<comment><USER2> This article is saying the equivalent of, "the primary thing people use Starbucks for is to go to the bathroom. So we tested how hard it is for random people off the street to find the bathroom. Our conclusion is that Starbucks should put the bathroom next to the front door with large signs pointing to it as people walk in."

It seems Bitly doesn't want to be just a link-shortening service anymore. They're pivoting and want to draw you into the new service a little. At the risk of alienating bathroom-seekers, Bitly hopes you'll buy a cup of coffee while you're looking around. Which seems reasonable.

<comment><USER3> But Starbucks did not start out as a bathroom provider before transitioning into making coffee. If you were a company that provided restrooms open to the public, it would be _crazy_ for you to try to then "pivot" that into a profitable business by making the bathrooms harder to find and trying to sell customers coffee while they danced in place, straining not to pee on your floor as they looked desperately around the shop for your facilities.

<comment><USER4> pud's Starbucks analogy is still apt though. Bitly is making a conscious change to their business model, and they have to insert a speed bump in the link-shortening process to start making money. There's no way they can continue providing seamless 1-click link-shortening for free.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, if you forgive the cliche.

<comment><USER3> >There's no such thing as a free lunch, if you forgive the cliche.

Yes, but that doesn't turn everything non-free into a lunch. Try to force your change to happen too quickly, and you're simply going to watch your customers boil away to nothing. In the end, your customer base will be little more than the kind of people that make cybersquatters money because they think that the best way to search for bullets is to type "bullet.com" into the URL bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yesterday, I walked into the office of the CFO at work. He doesn't swear a lot, but there was an amazing stream of profanity coming out of that office. Turns out he was trying to shorten a link with bit.ly and was discovering the redesign for the first time.

The funny thing is I went back to my desk and gave bit.ly a try, and got a fairly clean, uncluttered page that was easy to use--nothing at all like that page the CFO got.

The difference? I don't have a bit.ly account. He does, and was signed in.

</comment><comment><USER6> As an aside, I'm trying to read this on my iPad and it's absolutely infuriating when websites arbitrarily prevent me from zooming in on text. I'm the one who gets to decide what a good size for text is.

<comment><USER7> I tweeted a comment along these lines about Flickr's mobile view just last night. Rather than user-friendly, it's user-hostile design.

<comment><USER6> Forwarded to a pal at Flickr.

<comment><USER7> My sense is that the design is the product of well-entrenched people and/or policies.

<comment><USER6> He sent back a smiley face made from punctuation marks. Guess they're working on it.

<comment><USER7> Or they know it sucks and, "eh, whaddya gonna do?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is pretty clear that bit.ly decided their core use case isn't interesting to them as a business and decided to change the core use case from shortening links and displaying metrics to collecting and sharing links. Businesses that need these kinds of metrics should probably be using non-free, more sophisticated services like awe.sm anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is going to sound strange, but I miss the cool (big) pufferfish in their normal page: [http://6.mshcdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/pufferfish360...](http://6.mshcdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/pufferfish360.jpg)

That image told me that real people were behind the site, and strangely won my loyalty in a sea of identical clones. The new site removes that and feels pretty but boring and forgettable. Even their twitter icon gives me the "generic social media company feel": [https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2260560652/twit...](https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2260560652/twitter- avatar_reasonably_small.png).

This is a phenomenon I've seen with a lot of sites as they get big and overhaul their site with a "real" designer who wants things "to be cleaner". Things usually come out more bland...

</comment><comment><USER10> Bitly has received a total of $13.5 million in funding till date. It's high time they tried to experiment with this huge amount of money to diversify their business and tweak their business model.

<comment><USER11> What's their business model right now? I see them in a very tough situation: the people who want to shorten links are not their customers - they're the product (the data). The companies that need analytics are their customers, so that's why they're making these changes. Yet if you push away your users, you got no product.

I guess this is what happens when your users = your product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I sporadically use bit.ly (once a month) to generate a shortlink for email lists to track conversion, geolocation, stats, etc on a nice dashboard.

I tried it yesterday, and I was smashing my head against the wall in frustration. First, what was once a single click is now at least 4, including 3 page navigations. Second, I have no freaking clue how to customize the shortlink, even after spending another 2 or 3 minutes on the site before giving up and deciding not waste any more time.

Bitly's redesign just plain sucks.

</comment><comment><USER13> I actually really like the new redesign, it looks like they've decided to occupy the niche that used to be del.icio.us before Yahoo! digested it and shat out delicious.com

It does seem like they could have paid more attention to transitioning existing users. But AFAICT they aren't selling products to regular users, they're aiming more at volume buyers and analytics to pay the bills.

</comment><comment><USER14> My biggest problem with the new site is how hard it is to customize the short link. I did it once after spending like 5 minutes trying to figure it out and to be honest I don't even remember how I did it so next time I'm sure it'll be almost as hard.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe they've changed it, but if you go to bit.ly they do indeed have a "Just want to shorten a link" box at the bottom:

<http://bit.ly>

Fast fix, looks like all is well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just used bit.ly yesterday and was extremely confused by the interface. I understand they are looking to do additional things, but I couldn't even understand how to do a simple task of looking at my past history.

</comment><comment><USER17> I didn't find how to customize short links in either the new design website or the new chrome extension. Very frustrating

<comment><USER18> There is a little pencil icon next to the shortened link that lets you edit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every redesign upsets users, where "users" is defined as one or more people with a blog. People do not like change.</comment>


Most Americans Are Lonely, and Our Workplace Culture May Not Be Helping - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/798676465/most-americans-are-lonely-and-our-workplace-culture-may-not-be-helping <comment><AUTHOR> True. Orthogonal to religious views, churches served as community anchors and people talked to their neighbors. Furthermore, most people under 40 don't own their own homes, don't have any wealth, don't have roots to the place where the work paycheck-to-paycheck. Unconcerned, uninformed white collar workers buy the narrative by repeat factoids like "the economy is the best ever" while denying real inequality such as the gutting of the middle-class, pervasive lack of net worth and the many hundreds of thousands more homeless people living on the streets than 30 years ago... this lack of solidarity and lack of empathy with the people who are hurting but feel screwed is what let Trump win.

And also the corporate inverted totalitarianism, mainstream media, social media and political animosity/puritanism atomizes people with 300 Facebook friends who they never talk to into real-life groups of 1.

Maybe America is slowly going the way of the Roman Republic/Empire but I sure hope folks wake up and turn things around for We The People rather than just the very rich soon.

I think I'll unplug for tonight.

<comment><USER2> _hug_ dunno why but I think you need it

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is because "workplace culture" is now just "American culture". We don't view other Americans as people, but rather as competitors, tools we can exploit for our own success, or parasites keeping us from success. 80s career advice is now life advice.

<comment><USER4> My experience growing up in America mirrors your description here. I've found the average American to be ok with bullying, sabotage, dishonesty, and malice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am 32, I am great at making friends, have a wealth of friends all around the country, and have never been so devastatingly lonely, but the problem is economic, not cultural.

I worked in video production throughout my 20s. I am technically inclined and gravitated to post production. I was good at it and had a great reputation. The constant churn of new technology was fun for me. The problem was the industry turning to hiring feeelancers for every position except management. It is no longer a reliable way to make a living. I never had an interview without getting the job, but the rates I needed were no longer available, and it was increasingly rare that clients wanted quality work.

I tried changing careers before things got too bad, but my whole life and reputation were build around my existing career. I couldn't pull it off in time. Rents in the west-coast city I lived in skyrocketed and the apartment building I lived in for 8 years was bought by some foreign investors. I tried to hang on but about 6 months was all I could do after that.

Still paying off my own student debt, and with so many other friends paying off useless degrees, I opted against going back to school so I am now living with my parents in a small midwest town studying web development while working a part-time minimum wage job. It feels completely unreal. I have been writing scripts for video post-production for years, so I had a head start at least.

Among my friends, I am hardly alone. Those who chose MBAs or a handful of other careers (like web development) are doing great and the rest of us are struggling with less and less control over our lives. This is still an anecdote but my point is this is much less about loneliness and more about precarity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Many of the positive qualities that harbor close ties and meaningful relationships with family and friends require "work" and time, most people today either do not have the time (perhaps due to work commitments etc.) or will not invest the effort required to create new or sustain and make existing relationships grow with time.

I am reminded of the old saying, - 'You can't have your cake and eat it'. By that, I mean, their is a trade-off when devoting many of your waking hours to work, excessive entertainment and other pursuits related purely to material gains and then in turn neglecting the just as important social connections in your life. The result is typically loneliness or worse...

I can appreciate for many people it can seem out of their control to reach some form of work/life balance but over time everyone has the power to both start making changes in their life styles and also, the way they react to the events in their life. With some sacrifices and motivation to do so, you definitely increase your chances of lessening loneliness.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Social media use was tied to loneliness as well, with 73% of very heavy > social media users considered lonely, as compared with 52% of light users.

That's ~20% more loneliness from heavy social media users!</comment>


Death threats and denial for woman who showed college athletes struggle to read - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/09/us/ncaa-athletes-unc-response/index.html?c=homepage-t <comment><USER2> Can anyone explain the interrelation between sports players and college for me? We don't really have such a concept in Australia as far as I'm aware. Am I understanding correctly that to play a sport professionally a person must first attend a college and complete some degree? Why does the US even have this system? Do any other countries do this as well?

<comment><USER3> It depends on the particular sport and the leagues involved, but most future professional players will play a couple years at the college level. High- school super stars in some sports may go into the professional league directly but it's uncommon. In many sports no matter your skill level you cannot build the physique necessary to compete until a bit later in life (american football for example). Also, some leagues have implemented rules designed to prevent direct recruitment from high school, notably the NBA.

There's typically no requirement to finish college however. It's relatively common for athletes to move up to the pros and skip the last years of their academics.

The US's system is mostly due to history, but the current structure continues because it is worth an extraordinary amount of money. The schools with top athletic teams bring in revenues of 100 million or more. The governing body for college athletics generally prohibits significant payments to the athletes themselves, so all that income goes to coaches and other staff, as well as supporting businesses. College coaches are usually the highest paid people on campus. This continues to be a bitter political topic, because many people see it as unfair that college athletes are generating so much money for everyone but themselves. The other side points out that allowing paid recruitment and player endorsement/advertising would have a corrupting effect as well as make it difficult for smaller schools to be competitive.

As far as I know, our system is unique, and that's probably because we were televising college athletics earlier and more heavily than other nations.

<comment><USER4> > College coaches are usually the highest paid people on campus.

Not only that, in most states they are the highest paid of all public employees: [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672861/infographic-whos-your- st...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672861/infographic-whos-your-states- highest-paid-public-employee)

<comment><USER5> However, unlike most public employees, they are always one or two bad seasons away from being fired.

A typical public sector job, particularly a university job, is almost the closest thing you can get to lifetime assured employment (most often at a salary that's not great, but with very good benefits and enormous amounts of paid time off).

Coaches though are much more accountable for their performance. If they don't win games, they get fired.

Edit: also it's only the head coaches of elite revenue-generating football and basketball programs that are very highly paid. The coaches of non-revenue sports have much more modest salaries.

<comment><USER6> Also unlike most public employees, they are typically entitle to massive buyout clauses if they are fired. For instance, UCLA's new men's basketball coach would be entitled to $10.4mm if he were fired prior to 2016.

1\. [http://www.sbnation.com/college- basketball/2013/7/9/4505884/...](http://www.sbnation.com/college- basketball/2013/7/9/4505884/ucla-bruins-coach-steve-alford-buyout-clause)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> College football, at least, might as well be a minor league. The stars play for two years, abandon their degree, and join the NFL. You'd have to be very naive to think that the athletes at top div 1 programs are true "student- athletes". Look at Penn State for a prime example of toxic "athletics are everything" college football culture. Look at the numerous recruitment scandals in which players or players' families were offered money or perks in exchange for matriculation. So they can't read? Play calling cards are images anyway. That's the attitude at these schools.

<comment><USER8> although your point may be valid in general, you're pretty wrong about penn state:

[http://news.psu.edu/story/293418/2013/10/30/athletics/penn-s...](http://news.psu.edu/story/293418/2013/10/30/athletics/penn- state-football-graduation-success-rate-top-10-percent-among)

<comment><USER7> I was actually referring to the Sandusky scandal and how Paterno knew Sandusky was sexually abusing children and let the legal process die with minimally plausibly deniable effort.

<comment><USER8> > The stars play for two years, abandon their degree, and join the NFL. You'd > have to be very naive to think that the athletes at top div 1 programs are > true "student-athletes" [..] So they can't read? Play calling cards are > images anyway. That's the attitude at these schools.

This is what I was responding to, and at least at Penn State, it's measurably false.

> I was actually referring to the Sandusky scandal and how Paterno knew > Sandusky was sexually abusing children and let the legal process die with > minimally plausibly deniable effort.

I don't disagree with you on that point, football culture can absolutely be toxic, and Penn State is a perfect example of how it can go wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who's sending death threats? People who make money off having good athletes in universities regardless of their education levels? Athletes who are afraid of being kicked out? Other? Four death threats seems awfully high for such a topic.

And what was the university thinking? Seems like denying knowledge of the report and claiming they can't comment on it without data (to CNN, not to a high school newspaper) was a terrible move given they had not only been given the reports, but had paid for the data which was in them.

<comment><USER10> As I get older and more aware I see rampant misogyny popping up wherever a woman challenges pretty much anything, and often merely for just existing. For something highly emotional like sports, such a reaction seems perfectly in line with what I see day to day, sadly. It's probably nobody with any power of even making any money off sports, quite the opposite, I'm sure.

<comment><USER11> Because clearly, men don't get death threats or get investigated by the FBI when they challenge the football establishment or other sports stars.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/men-indicted- threat...](http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/men-indicted-threatening- lance-prober-tygart-article-1.1403726)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337813/Anonymous- ha...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337813/Anonymous-hacker- helped-publicize-Steubenville-football-players-social-media-NINE-years-prison- convicted-rapists.html)

Nor would a man ever get death threads just for the lulz.

[http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/4chan-bullied-the-og- youtub...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/4chan-bullied-the-og-youtube- fitness-guru-off-the-internet)

It doesn't take a lot. I write a not very popular blog, most of which is posts like "Scala is slow" or "Analyzing conversion rates with Bayes rule", and I've gotten an email or two expressing hope that harm would come to me [1].

[1] "if u get your wish just wait the cops womt protect you when underclas riot and hurt u". This was in response to a moderately popular blog post advocating that you should do a back of the envelope calculation to see if a public policy proposal makes sense ( [http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html) ).

<comment><USER12> No one implied men didn't get death threats, settle down. However, it is true that women are targeted much more (especially when they are challenging mens sports).

There exist many in this world who wish all women were in the exact same position they were in the 50's.

<comment><USER13> A study in the early 90s found women featured 35 times as much as victims in Canadian news headlines than men. Not a typo.

Yes, this is just one data point, but it's a pretty unambiguous one. And of course, such studies tend to only happen once, as people with feminist agendas tend to ensure they do not get confirmed.

Do you think this might skew your perception of how often people of either gender get harassed?

<comment><USER12> Give a link to said study or go back to /r/theredpill.

<comment><USER14> You

>However, it is true that women are targeted much more (especially when they are challenging mens sports).

You

>Give a link to said study or go back to /r/theredpill.

Hypocrite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow.... I can't believe it's that bad. While I can understand athletes performing at lower levels than average students, there are certainly basic minimums that must be met. If 8-10% are below a 3rd grade reading level as the article claims, then just imagine how many are below a high-school level. Link to more in depth article for those interested also on CNN: [http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading- score...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading- scores/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why should an aspiring pro athlete be de-facto required / expected to be scholastically proficient? It seems like the crux of the problem is that aspiring athletes in America (except the very tip of the top prospects) need to compete in college to hone their skill set... not that I am the first person to say this of course. I think the universities are at 90% fault- they are the ones who try and maintain the image of equal treatment. They are also the ones who coddle athletes and enable their academic dishonesty. What would happen if schools started offer athletic scholarships where all the "student" does is play sports, and they don't bullshit about it? wouldn't that be better?

<comment><USER17> "Why should an aspiring pro athlete be de-facto required / expected to be scholastically proficient?"

A vast majority will not succeed in their venture and these are schools. Poor career paths aside, the rest of the world expects you to be able to read and comprehend the menu in the food court. This goes doubly so if the aspiring athlete is working the till, which they often are before and after their career path.

<comment><USER5> _A vast majority will not succeed in their venture_

You are correct that the vast majority of collegiate athletes will not go on to play professionally. However most of them are well aware of this and actually can read and do take their academics more seriously. There are countless numbers of people who were athletes in college and who go on to success in professions other than sports.

The truly elite athletes who are very likely going to go on to play professionally also know this and may very well not have any intention of completing a degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At least we know that she is onto something. If people threaten your life over your research, you can be sure that you're in the right ballpark, so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't really understand the US' college sports system. But from my very flimsy outsider picture, it seems like a pretty good system.

It's flush with cash. I see complaints of how a lot of this is captured by coaches and staff, but I'm sure some flows to (for example) less popular sports too. It gives athletes a college education and an incentive to finish high school. This article is obviously about cracks in that system. Overall the effect on athletes' education is probably very positive, especially outside of the super-elite players in more popular sports.

Compare that to european amateur sports systems that have nothing to do with college: It is pretty hard for a 19 year old with a sport as the no 1 thing in their life to get a degree at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the- sham...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of- college-sports/308643/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I think English speaking society in general struggles with the English language.

Social media is where it gets to me the most.

Personally, I think this is appalling.

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem is the requirement for athletes to have a degree. Why can't the athletes be separated from the rest, and only those that truly want to learn, attend lectures/exams? Professors wouldn't have to pass them and the degree would not be an empty paper.</comment>