The Best C++ Interview Question – Ever - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windwardreports.com/davidt/2009/12/the-best-c-interview-question-ever.html <comment><USER4> This is a completely broken C++ interview question. It asks the candidate to reason through a worst-practice, which exposes you to their knowledge of trivia and tells you nothing about whether they can actually get stuff done in C++.

My old Sonicity C++ code, which was built on ACE, is littered with "delete this" calls for Reactor callbacks. Obviously, "delete this" is OK if you're on the heap and you can guarantee that the code isn't going to touch the object again. But what I remember most about that ACE Reactor code was how fragile the event handling was; "delete this" is a recipe for horrible memory corruption flaws.

This is what you get when your C++ interviewers decide that interviews are more about proving how smart they are than about qualifying candidates.

<comment><USER5> If someone can explain what happens, then one of two things is probably true: they've purposefully memorized an edge case for the sake of trivia, or their knowledge of language semantics and runtime behavior is deep enough to figure out what happens in an unusual circumstance.

I agree that doesn't tell you if the candidate is good at solving problems using C++, but there is potential to discover how deep their understanding is.

<comment><USER4> It also selects for developers who deliberately code up to the limit of what the runtime will allow, regardless of the obvious fact that having code like this is like sprinkling landmines across your product.

<comment><USER6> When you're looking for an expert in a field, do want to find someone that claims to know what they're doing because they read a book somewhere? Or do you want to find a seasoned pro that has actually tried and possibly failed using different techniques? Their failures may give them more insight and experience than their successes. Especially if they can tell you what they did to improve themselves afterwards.

<comment><USER7> Becoming an expert has far more to do with knowing how to get things done in a known time frame than knowing every little piece of triva. One you code in the same language with 3 or 4 compilers you start to look at edge cases as a dangerous no mans land to be avoided if at all possible.

PS: I worked with code from the 1984 Macintosh days that was still in use in 2005. You could see where people had updated from Motorola 68020 to PPC and if it had not been stripped out some poor coder might have updated the remaining ASM to x86.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This question and the associated discussion remind me very strongly of something I learned very early in own professional C++ development:

C++ the language is an _extremely_ leaky abstraction. There are so many places where you really do need to think about what the compiler is doing and what is happening behind the scenes rather than thinking at a consistent abstract level.

Is that a bad thing? I suspect that C++ programmers would say no. But then again, there would be a lot of bias in that answer...

</comment><comment><USER9> As an outsider looking in at the world of C++ development (I work on hardware), my first thought is "Why would you want to use a tool that requires an understanding at that level of complexity for mastery?"

Perhaps C++ has some extraordinary benefits that I don't understand, which makes deleting the v-table before the method returns the stack to the heap worth the trouble [1]?

[1] I might have mixed up some of the terminology a little here. Feel free to correct me vigorously.

<comment><USER10> Do you find it useful, in your field, to understand how your tools work? If so, perhaps you might allow that if someone is interviewing for a job using another tool (C++, in this case) that they might be expected to know how that tool works.

Also, with respect, it's fairly clear from your second paragraph that you don't understand the terminology being used at all. Which is okay, it's not your field. But, it makes your assessment of how complex this discussion is somewhat suspect.

<comment><USER9> Totally agreed about understanding how tools work being useful.

I'd just be wary of using an extremely complex tool. From what I can tell, this "C++" looks like it could self-destruct at any minute, unless handled by an expert. Perhaps that makes the case even more strongly that you ought to filter your hires most strictly, but I wonder whether there might exist a simpler tool that could do the job with fewer risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I was interviewing C++ programmers, we had a C++ test, and some stock questions I asked face to face.

However, I found I could pretty much weed the good C++ programmers from the mediocre/just read about C++ before the interview by asking one question:

"What is a virtual function?"

If they have trouble starting to answer it, give them a hint with "What would cause you to type the keyword 'virtual' in your code?"

You would be amazed how many C++ coders don't really know the answer to this, or what is going on (vtables etc, or even just the behaviour).

One candidate answered "I'd make a function virtual if there were any other virtual functions in the class." It seems like there is no shortage of bad answers to this question. All the people who ever gave me a correct answer (hit rate was <10% of candidates) were good C++ developers.

It's a good question :-).

</comment><comment><USER12> C++ is my main language these days (and my guess at the answer happened to be correct), but I think this interview question misses the point.

The key to using C++ successfully, like it or not, is not to understand what happens in every possible circumstance (this is pretty much impossible). The key is to carve out a subset of the language (and some usage patterns) that you know how to use and stick with it. I wouldn't use _delete this_ without consulting the documentation first, even if I suspect it's legal (hell, I use "idiomatic" _delete_ maybe once in 5000 LOC)

</comment><comment><USER13> You know, the more I read suggested interview practices and the responses they elicit, the more I think that the best interview question would be to get the candidate to critique a few interview questions.

The point here is not whether this is good practice, or whether the candidate knows the answer, or whether they would write it themselves, or whether they get the right answer immediately, or whether they automatically know the darkest corners of the C++ spec (of which this isn't one).

The point is whether they can reason through, with the interviewer, and then potentially change their mind if they find that they're wrong.

Part of being a good programmer is finding the good ideas among the dross, finding the right implementation technique among the many at their fingertips, and finding the right design among the myriad plausible constructions.

If you can't find the good ideas in these sorts of interview questions, if you can't read carefully enough to see that the whole point was to uncover whether of not the candidate can reason through then potentially change their mind, or if you think that to do so isn't an important characteristic to test for, then that tells me something.

Yes, it's important to see why things don't work, or are broken, or are a bad idea, but the ability to find _good_ ideas is infinitely more important.

I like this interview question, and if you don't, then we're not a good fit. It doesn't mean you're a bad programmer, it doesn't mean (necessarily (I hope)) that I'm a bad employer/manager/programmer/interviewer - but it doesn mean we probably won't work well together.

But I could change my mind if you provide better arguments than the ones I've seen so far.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm cold on C++ (haven't coded in several years) but let me try this out:

deleting "this" releases memory held by the instance data of the object. The programmer can't be sure that any subsequent references to that data will return valid data (although the compiler will allow it). Static data and type- level methods should be fine to call -- although every time the program counter ticks you can't be sure that you're continuing to walk through uncontaminated memory.

I think that's it.

Sounds like a BS question to me because you're going way, way under the hood with exactly how the compiler runs the code. It's like those coding questions where you have to start byte-counting to get the answer. Neat trivia perhaps, but I'd much rather have somebody who delivered clean, organized, easily- maintainable code and got the answer wrong.

EDIT: Seems like I've seen delete this on several occasions (although I can't remember where), but hell if I'd use it unless I had no choice. Even then, it'd be the last statement in the method.

<comment><USER15> The function's body is not part of the object itself. When you delete the object, you can keep executing the function just fine, as long as you don't access any member variables.

<comment><USER16> You keep executing the function because it's on the stack. The program counter keeps moving through the method until it hits a return statement. God help you if you try to reference one of the class' internal data objects as their heap space could have been allocated to something else running on another thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _These are people you do not want to hire under any circumstances because they cannot think outside their initial preconceptions._

I know nothing about C++, but I know that this is bullshit. I also think that it's pretty ironic if you think about it for a minute.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looking over the responses, it is really hard to believe many of the people here have worked in C++. This is basic style for anyone who has ref counted, such as implementing IUknown.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm torn on whether this is a good question or not. The important part of the question is definitely the "why?" step. Finding out whether a developer will question their own assumptions, fall back to solid knowledge and ask questions to acquire the knowledge needed to proceed or if they will simply bumble down the garden path of ignorance, making things up as they go with no basis in fact other than a gut feeling is very important.

<comment><USER20> It's just a language-specific variant of a 'Microsoft problem': you don't want the answer, you want to watch the process. It's similarly useful _in theory_. But in practice I think it has the same key failing: Performance is too skewed in interview situations for it to give you consistently useful insight into candidate fitness.

If you want to thin out a hundred otherwise-equivalent candidates - <USER2> yourself out. But at that point you might as well be flipping coins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I always find it curious when the number of comments on an article exceed that of the point value. It leads me to suspect that users get angry over the article for some reason.

To add to the discussion, however, I knew the answer because I had a run in with doing this sort of thing. I had built a simple game with OpenGL - <USER3> moved around on the screen and you could shoot it. Due to the way I constructed the objects, it was trivial to "Delete this" when the object should disappear - a bullet collides with an enemy, perhaps. I did it, it worked exactly as expected.

The follow up question - "What can you do after delete this; ?" - also reared it's head, and that's when I found the other edge to the sword and shied away from it's usage.

It felt so much more elegant as "delete this;" :(

<comment><USER4> The fact that the comments are often better than the articles they attach to is the thing a lot of us like about HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> At the level of this question, checking out Scott Meyer's 50 ways will show you some that he got wrong. An interesting one is how to write a smart pointer class, and how many ways it can go wrong.</comment>


Starting a business on F1 - <AUTHOR> I have a really great idea, have built a product, and want to start my own business. I've started pitching to investors, and am getting a lot of interest already. Unfortunately, I'm a student on an F1 visa, still enrolled at a school. How do I go about building and working for my company in a reasonable way?
I've looked at the O-1, H1B, EB-5, L-1 options and so far the O-1 and EB-5 options look most promising, unfortunately I don't have $500K to invest - so for now, the EB-5 is out and so I'm left with the O-1.
Does anyone have any experience with this entire process? <comment><USER2> It depends a lot on particulars of your product and what you think "starting my own business" means.

The laws are about creating legal entities not actual work.

Do you have a product? Is it a website of software application? Ship it and keep improving it based on feedback. Working on software in your spare time is not prohibited and even good products take time to become successful.

Do you want to charge for the product?

That becomes a bit more complicated because for accepting payments you might need some legal entity (i.e. a company). First try to setup payments (using PayPal or Stripe) simply in your name, without creating a company. If not possible, try setting up a company in your own country and use that.

The things that you cannot do is to register one of the legal entities that we call companies (llc etc.) in US and work for that company. This also blocks you from doing things that require such entity (like getting funding or hiring people).

Legal entity is not required to have a successful, income generating product or needed to work on such product.

In context of the law "work" is "work for recognized legal entity and being paid for it". You can't work as a cook for a restaurant but you can cook a dinner for your friend, even though both require the same kind of "work". Similarly, the law doesn't allow you to work for a startup in US and being paid for it but doesn't prohibit you from working on an open-source project or on your own project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately the product I'm looking to build is a large logistical undertaking as well as a technical one, and I have great (and American!) co- founders that can help with the funding and hiring.

While I see the merit in the first half of your post - I'm still looking for outside investment, and I'm unsure a seed/angel investor would be willing to put a bet on an international company. As well as that "working" for a for- profit entity, even if it is back home - I believe is violation of status.

Tricky problem :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recently finished my undergrad and I am an international. This may not be the most helpful comment, but hopefully it will make you consider other options.

I know there is a certain appeal to starting a startup in Silicon Valley and going through the motions of being an entrepreneur, but you don't have to be based in the US to be a successful tech entrepreneur. Virtually any big VC that invests in the US also has an international investment arm. You can hire remote talent to work on your product, or even talent in countries other than the US. In fact, I hypothesize that you may be able to find better talent elsewhere because job hopping isn't as common in other parts of the world.

Canada has an excellent startup visa program and it is the closest thing you will find to actually doing a startup in the US.

Why do you want to start your company in the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> You make a good point. Unfortunately, our product is still in its infancy and we're not looking for VC funding for a while. We're still in seed/angel territory, and that's the round I'd like to work toward, those smaller investments typically won't be made in overseas businesses because of higher risk.

Though, your comment is indeed helpful, thank you very much for it! I'll consider a strategy that works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IANAL, so this is based on my limited research trying to hire a student I know...

Legally, you can't work while on a student visa in the US. Unless you can somehow get your school to sign off on it as relevant to your degree. Your best bet is probably to just launch in your home country, even remotely if necessary.

If you're still a student, absent any other information about your skillset, I doubt you'll be able to get anywhere with an O-1. If your home country is in North America, you may be able to find a NAFTA-related visa although I can't remember the details on those.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'm potentially on the right track for an O-1, but I think I should get a lawyer to help clarify the probability of success.

I'm 19, was sought out & contracted to work at Goldman Sachs without a degree for a year. Have written 10 scholarly papers in AI, 2 published. Have won a national business competition and semi finalist in an international one. Wrote an editorial for a big newspaper back home. 1 news article about me winning a competition. Have built some pretty interesting things with provocative demos, like a talking AI doctor in your web browser.</comment></comment>


API Integration Pain? Ouch. (HN Survey Results) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yourtrove.com/2011/08/11/api-integration-pain-survey-results/

<comment><USER2> I had issues with the Posterous API (though I shelved that work a while back):

* The basic authorization didn't follow spec. Some frameworks handled this well (Perl's LWP::UserAgent), while others didn't (Python's urllib2 and httplib2). Apparently you're supposed to try the page w/o auth, get a 401 response back, _then_ send the auth credentials, but Posterous' API was not doing this.

* Once you have an auth token, the API wouldn't allow me to authorize with it. I ended up sending basic auth for each API call for non-public calls.

* Some of the API calls would return 500 errors (namely the subscription related ones).

Granted this was prior to them releasing their snazzy new interactive API test page. I haven't gone back to touch that project since then, though I imagine that issues like this are common to a lot of APIs. How many of them are found and patched depends on how many developers are using the API and how responsive the API dev team is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like with any online survey, remember that the survey results are utterly meaningless. There is self selection bias for one. Even the initial post title for this survey was "How much does external API integration suck? (survey)". Thus you are already inviting only developers that really hate using external API's, for one reason or another (maybe they are _gasp_ bad developers).

You also had timing bias: the post got only 20 upvotes, so it likely did not stay on the front page for that long. For the few hours it was there, most of the developers around the world were asleep or away from HN.

That is not to say, that your results are not interesting/thought provoking. Just pointing out that they are most likely not statistically significant in any way. As in, don't say "we should take pain X away because it got more votes than pain Y".

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why something so simple of an idea like OAuth should be so difficult and painful to implement. I hate it. We need a different solution, or a better reference implementation.

<comment><USER5> I spent an hour last night struggling with making OAuth client calls to Google (Picasaweb). I don't think a different solution is needed; I think Google just needs to implement the IETF spec correctly and provide better diagnostics. I don't know if Google started from a reference implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like the open-sourcing of <http://swagger.wordnik.com> is well timed and can help with this

</comment><comment><USER7> > OAuth (oh wow, do you hate OAuth)

If you hate OAuth, try DSSID: <http://dswi.net/>

<comment><USER8> DSSID is just authentication. Most APIs need _authorization_ , that is, a way for humans to let some client access their account on another service.

For authentication, I still prefer OpenID, especially since it's distributed (both BrowserID and DSSID tie you to a single provider).

<comment><USER7> It's true that DSSID is only authentication (for now). But I will be releasing the code once it has stabilized so anyone will be able to run a DSSID server.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the site has to link to the server. So either the user has accounts on every DSSID server - losing the SSO advantages - or everyone uses the same server.

If you let the users choose their own server (by putting its URL), then you've just reinvented OpenID.

<comment><USER7> The difference is that your identity is not bound to the server, it's bound to your DSSID key, which resides (encrypted) in your browser's localStorage. So you can move your (public) key to any server and retain your identity.

<comment><USER8> But the user still needs to copy the data between servers, no?And what happens if the personal clears all the cookies in FF and deletes the Local Storage?

Wouldn't it be better to use a personal cert?

<comment><USER7> > But the user still needs to copy the data between servers, no?

Yes, if you want to use multiple servers you need to get your data on multiple servers. But that's just a consequence of the laws of physics. It has nothing to do with DSSID.

> And what happens if the personal clears all the cookies in FF and deletes > the Local Storage?

If they haven't made a backup copy of their key then they are screwed. You can't stop people from deliberately shooting themselves in the foot. If they have made a backup copy of their key then they can just re-import it.

> Wouldn't it be better to use a personal cert?

All else being equal yes. But the UI/UX for certs is so hopelessly bad that not even technically savvy people use them. DSSID's goal is to be secure _and_ simple. That's a currently unoccupied point in the design space. (It's not easy to do.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rich ex-entrepreneurs turned VC's: "Bug" in society? - <AUTHOR> It seems that many if not most entrepreneurs who strike it rich end up becoming VC's (or some variation thereof)
This seems to indicate that it's easier/more profitable to turn your millions into more millions by not producing, and just investing (essentially, betting on other companies).
I would categorize this as a "defect" or "bug" in the way society is structured. In an ideal scenario, if you are a successful entrepreneur, it would be inherently more profitable to spend your time and energy on your new company, which would go on to produce something useful for society.
Instead, I see lots of people who have created great things in the past just switch over to becoming investors.
Of course, one may argue about the benefits of smart, successful, people going into investing, and I can see some of that, but mostly, I just see it as a relatively easy avenue to make more money, without the commensurate benefit to anyone else. And I don't blame anyone, it's just that we would all benefit more if the more profitable strategy was creating something.
How do you guys see this? <comment><USER2> Serial entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Once you've put in nearly every waking hour of 5-10 years of your life into building a company, it is easy to see why doing that all over again may not be all that appealing. Especially once you've got a family and other competing commitments.

However, many entrepreneurs still want to help create and bring new and exciting things into the world. Becoming a VC is one relatively low-stress way of doing this. It is also a way of "giving back to the community".

The few ex-entrepreneur VCs I know have been amazingly helpful, and frankly I don't think any of them are in it for the money - they have quite enough already.

</comment><comment><USER3> VC's do more than just "invest." You have to pitch them on the idea and new companies need capital with which to work, so, no, I don't agree with your view. It takes a lot of time and energy to launch a new venture. Like the military, that tends to be a game for the young, who have that kind of energy. But having some feedback from someone with experience helps improve the odds of success so new people aren't flying quite so blind. It is not a bug or defect. It's a feature.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't really agree with your assessment. First of all, having a knowledgeable person with operational experience deploy capital in viable early stage companies is indeed useful for society. Companies need capital to grow.

Also, it's harder than it sounds to invest in startups. It's not the case that any rich idiot can multiply his money by being an angel investor. It's very, very easy to lose your shirt that way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Money breeds money. It's just a consequence of the right to private property that this will be the most profitable strategy. It's bad, but changing it would require a huge rethink of capitalism, and the powers that be wouldn't like that because they are a product of the current system. Even the cool ones, like Elon Musk, counts here.

I've often thought about this. Why do we have the right to own land? The people who own the land rights to various parts of Manhattan, Bay area (and other popular places) might pay some taxes and handle some paperwork but other than that they just collect what's basically a tax on everyone who wants to be where the opportunities are. Same with operative systems APIs (like win32) and processor instruction sets. It's not really relevant how the specific individual/company/family got into the position as a gatekeeper. It could have happened hundreds of years ago. Now they're just a taxman you can't vote on. Constrained gatekeeper resources like land or frequency spectrum should be government property for all eternity and rented out to the highest bidder on, say, a fifty year basis. Non-constrained gatekeeper resources should become public domain.

Money isn't nearly as bad, though. You can take investments from the lowest bidder after all, but you can hardly get around Manhattan/Windows/x86. Basically, the issue here is that it's easier to let your money work for you than working yourself. Maybe you could put into law that for each share sold or dividend given (basically, whenever an investor gains cash from his/her investment) a certain percentage also has to be equally distributed among employees. That might work, but I can imagine that investment targets would be vulnerable to investment competition from countries without such a law.

</comment><comment><USER6> It isn't "just investing". Especially with regards to angel investing, the entrepreneurs are able to use their knowledge and expertise to allow many other startups to exist and flourish.

In my personal experience, I've worked with a pair of founders that have become amazingly successful at creating viral growth in companies. So by investing & advising, they've been able to multiply their impact on the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think many entrepreneurs just don't want to take that high risk of failing anymore, as with startups the odds are against you. And even if they would want to, I can imagine successful entrepreneurs have more money then they would need for a new company, so why wouldn't they want to invest that money into other startups, a world they understand well?

</comment><comment><USER8> Because, starting a company, and running it for a long time requires very different set of skills and mindset. And it's a very different experience, and people are different.

Also, the most successful entrepreneurs actually continue to create companies, often in very different areas: Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Martin Varsavsky, Oleg Tinkov.

</comment><comment><USER9> Respectfully...

Investing seems like it is fun and easy to a lot of people who haven't done it. I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm only saying that there's a _perception_ that it's a fun and easy job. That perception might be right or wrong, and might not be a simple binary yes/no.

Sure, there are big plusses, and yes you can make a lot of money doing it. Starting a company is no cakewalk either, and investing is a nice way to get paid while enjoying the ability to talk to lots of smart folks who educate you about a broad array of subjects.

It's also not easy. A lot of investment funds fail. Not everyone is enjoyable to deal with. There are many hard truths.

FWIW I know a VC who left investing to start another company b/c he hated having to say "no" to so many folks, and to deal with some of the other pressures in the environment. There are negatives that aren't always obvious. [http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst- part-...](http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-of- being-a-VC)

As to your bigger point about the moral and social value of investing -- I think nearly everyone would agree that religious and community leaders are more deserving of high praise than a VC. In some cases, people who sweep their sidewalks might be adding more social value than some investors ;)

That being said, I think it's unfair to paint every investor with the same brush.

A good VC adds value and helps companies grow and succeed. The jobs created are good for society. A company like Tesla also serves a bigger good -- moving us from fossil fuels to renewables is a good thing for society, and capitalism is an effective tool for pushing that forward. The people who gave Elon Musk money to make that happen are (indirectly) helping.

Not every company is quite so noble. There are certainly lots of terribly useless investments -- [http://www.businessinsider.com/a-year- later-41-million-start...](http://www.businessinsider.com/a-year- later-41-million-startup-color-has-30000-daily-users-2012-3)

That being said, if we're going to point the finger at the investors, what should we make of the business people and engineers who work on these 'useless' apps? Are they also profiting from socially useless activities? Is there no room in human life for entertainment? Is there no value in an app that makes it easy for families to share special moments with one another?

I think there's a certain amount of acceptance required that not everything in a society will/can be focused on directly moving that society forward in the most obvious way, and being ok with that.

</comment><comment><USER10> The bug is called capitalism. It's an imperfect societal system, but a better one has never been tested before.</comment>


The Story of Reality Winner, America's Most Unlikely Leaker - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/who-is-reality-winner.html <comment><USER2> Let this be a set of lessons to us all. If you're going to whistle-blow, and you don't go to the official whistle-blowing officer because they will punish you for it because the whistle-blowing system exists to trick the honest into betraying themselves, assume also that the person you choose to leak to is at _best_ an incompetent idiot who will shop you inadvertently.</comment>


The man who grew a finger - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7354458.stm <comment><USER2> This extracellular matrix stuff is quite exciting. They've actually managed to reconstitute entire organs (but are of course still a long way from doing it reliably for humans):

[http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Researchers_crea...](http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Researchers_create_a_new_heart_in_the_lab.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was noise about trials of regrowing fingers on amputees using extracellular. I have yet to hear anything, which makes me think it may not have gone well.</comment>


The Ideal Length of Everything Online, Backed by Research - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-ideal-length-of-everything-online-according-to-science?utm_campaign=weekly_digest

<comment><AUTHOR> There is something really perverse about the assumptions behind this post. Is success only a metric? It reminded me of the line in the Movie Amadeus, "My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect."</comment>


Oakland entrepreneur, 25, opens marijuana superstore - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2010/01/29/simon.ca.superstore.of.weed.cnn

<comment><USER2> I wonder how long before we will start seeing outsider investment in the cannabis industry. If I had $100,000 or so, I could work with a food scientist to patent some products that will be very profitable in ~7-10 years post- legalization</comment>


Hedging - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/hedging.html

<comment><USER2> An interesting read. Hedging: A transfer of a portion of a position's risk to another party. Risk can be transferred, it can not be removed.</comment>


Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow Have Moved to CC By-SA 4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 <comment><USER2> Seems really strange or maybe negligent that they didn't even ask their lawyers about relicensing</comment>


Show HN: Nethack as a Screensaver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tessi/LazyNethack
A screensaver for MacOS which lets you watch random nethack games live played on alt.org/nethack.
I'm a web developer at day, thus this is my first Mac app, screensafter, swift experience. I would be glad about feedback/best practices i missed/random comments. <comment><USER2> Sounds cool, but I won't download a screensaver without first seeing a screenshot!

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. will make it a gif! :D</comment></comment>


Sorry, your password is too secure - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/5gcIv.jpg

<comment><USER2> Isn't there some initiative by now to actually educate people on proper password security?

</comment><comment><USER3> My bank does the same bullshit, 8 characters alphanumeric at most.

</comment><comment><USER4> This kind of thing drives me crazy. Why not allow special characters? The only conceivable reason is so that your app doesn't get SQL-injected or otherwise hijacked -- which is why God invented the character escape.

Limiting the number of chars as a security measure? I'd make fun of this but it's just too easy and stupid.

<comment><USER5> Don't know for sure, but I have a persistent suspicion that some people are passing unencoded passwords as shell arguments. It's the only explanation I can come up with.

Not that that makes it acceptable, of course -- or even any less astonishing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Memorable but hard to crack password generator - <AUTHOR> http://passw.org

<comment><USER2> As mentioned these passwords aren't hard to crack.

Anything based on a word list is going to be inherently easy to crack, and with a predictable format like word-separator-word, it is even easier.

I realise this is a fun weekend project, and learning new languages is always a good thing, but I think it's a little irresponsible to make any claims that these passwords are secure.

Also as mentioned, if people were to actually use this for password generation it should be behind SSL, although I would discourage anyone from using passwords generated by a remote service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having uncommon words doesn't make a password hard to crack, they're in the dictionary just the same.

<comment><USER4> Having long words does make brute-force cracking harder.

<comment><USER5> Which is why everyone tries the dictionary search before the brute force.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Assuming a generous 1000000 words in the dictionary, and any non-letter ASCII printable separator allowed as a separator, this is equivalent to a 9 character random password with just lower case letters and digits, or a 7 character random password if all printable ASCII is allowed. It's about 46 bits of entropy. That is a bit low by modern minimum acceptable password length standards.

</comment><comment><USER7> Should this not be behind SSL? Looks good though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably should yes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool! What does the "<huge number> to one" mean exactly?

</comment><comment><USER8> john --wordlist</comment>


Show HN: Templato – Generate code using your own GitHub Gist as a template - <AUTHOR> https://templato.co <comment><USER2> Quite a few people browse HN on their phones. Even if the app works better on a large screen it would be nice to be able to see something on a smaller screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I'll make something that's more mobile friendly soon!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on HN's "whining about down votes" policy - <AUTHOR> There are many flaws to HN, I think this is the biggest.
Regardless of your rebuttle, questioning why a comment is being down voted is apparently  breaking HN policy. Moderator @dang made me aware of this recently.
"Breaking policy"??? Really? Everyone who questions a downvote is breaking policy? This either is the most stupidest "unquestionable" policy or the holier than thou  attitude on HN has gotten out of hand.
Do we really believe here that every knows what the purpose of a downvote button is or we just pretend to be better than Reddit?
A lot of people here just downvote because they come from a different school of thought from the opinion or do not agree with the comment. But is that the purpose of the downvote button? I hope not. I thought it was to penalize irrelevant contributors not punish alternate but relevant opinions.
And what happens when you question the premise of down votes? The mods tell you you are the one breaking policy. Perhaps the mods ought to look more into what is being downvoted rather than just shoving canned responses to those who stand their ground.
It is sad that right or wrong has been reduced to majority rule on a supposedly accommodating platform like HN.
To the mods, you really need to do better moderating and maintaining the principle behind expression on this platform, otherwise why are you here? <comment><USER2> I, personally, don't downvote comments I just disagree with _but it's perfectly acceptable to use the down arrow like that_. Most of us have been on the receiving end of a downvote we didn't think we deserved but clearly, the HN "formula" is working overall.

No one is grading your work here so let the occasional downvote slide. On the other hand, if you get a lot of them, some introspection might be warranted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something like this, I would downvote but that might mean less people get to see your opinion. Downvoting is not a good way to start a conversation or share information. If this post is downvoted to oblivion, it robs you of your time and effort you put in and ends the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER4> A down vote should carry an obligatory justification. Down voting without responsibility is destructive of community.

<comment><USER5> It would be nice if downvoters had to add a compulsory comment, though I suspect many users would create a special login they use just for downvoting. HN is a lot better than other sites though, such as Reddit, where some subreddit moderators often delete comments after you've replied to them, leaving your own reply as an invisible orphan.

<comment><USER6> > It would be nice if downvoters had to add a compulsory comment.

It would directly defeat the purpose of downvoting in terms of reducing the prominence and visibility of non-productive comments if large # of downvotes mandated that a comment become the branching point of a heavy subthread.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Virtual Reality Foray Derided as 'Fanciful Story' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/facebook-s-virtual-reality-foray-challenged-as-fanciful-story <comment><USER3> This whole case seems utterly bizarre; I followed the development of the rift pre-Oculus, and none of what Zenimax are saying seems to be grounded in reality. As I remember, Carmack's real innovation was to create a full screen effect that compensated for the cheap optics that palmer's design used; Now you could claim that as a member of staff, this innovation belonged to Zenimax, but this does not appear to be the case that they are making. In addition, how come other independent organisations have been able to create working VR without treading all over their patents if they were really betting on the technology?

<comment><USER4> > I followed the development of the rift pre-Oculus, and none of what Zenimax > are saying seems to be grounded in reality.

I was following Palmer's progress on the MTBS3D forums long before he even thought about the Rift. He'd been modding HMDs and recombining old 90's hardware in very interesting ways - as someone who was very into homebrew VR back in the mid-1990s, by 2012 it had become something of a "once-upon-a-time" fad (VR winter, maybe?) - nobody sold any kind of real HMD, nobody was really doing anything - it fascinated me.

At the time, I was collecting up what little detritus of the 90s VR craze existed (I managed to get a complete collection of PCVR magazine before it was impossible to do so, plus numerous HMDs, Powergloves, Ascension FOBs trackers, etc). When I saw what Palmer was doing, he was like one of a handful of people I knew of who was playing with this stuff. It was really in left-field at the time! I had stopped really playing with it myself, pursuing other things - <USER2> when I saw what he was doing, I knew at that time that if VR was to ever make a comeback, Palmer would be at the front.

Which is what led me to back his KS when he announced it.

> As I remember, Carmack's real innovation was to create a full screen effect > that compensated for the cheap optics that palmer's design used

He may have coded up one of the first shaders for this, but the idea of doing a software-based barrel warp transform has been around since the early-1990s or further, when LEEP was selling their optics system:

[http://www.leepvr.com/](http://www.leepvr.com/)

It was insanely expensive. I have no doubt that Palmer knew of them, since he was playing with old-school VR parts. His drive indicated to me that he probably has read all of the old-school books/magazines on VR and such, which all talked about the LEEP system.

The patent on the optics ran out sometime in the early-2000s, IIRC (?) - and I think Palmer jumped on it, especially when low-cost, high-res phone displays became available for experimenters.

<comment><USER5> Reading your post reminded me of a post you submitted a month ago on the same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13124415)

I think the previous post is a gem and will be helpful for readers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Read Carmacks biography!

His first job was at a small computer shop where he wrote business software. He felt the job was boring and with some friends started developing PC games in secret, on work machines and while lifting wages. This is how id software was born. Due to that book, I think he will have a hard time convincing a jury he is innocent.

edit: its even on wikipedia

 _Softdisk, [...] hired Carmack to work on Softdisk G-S [...] introducing him to John Romero and other future key members of id Software such as Adrian Carmack [...]. In 1990, while still at Softdisk, Carmack, Romero, and others created the first of the Commander Keen games, [...]_

<comment><USER7> If you don't believe it, read Masters of Doom - it's a hugely sympathetic history of id and they still manage to look like sociopaths in it, especially Carmack. They steal, lie and backstab their friends.

<comment><USER8> Sociopath? There's no friends in business.

<comment><USER9> ...is what a sociopath would say

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As soon as I saw the suit was ZeniMax I dismissed it immediately. They'd sue me for this comment if they could figure out how.

<comment><USER11> Could you elaborate? Do they have a history of frivolous lawsuits? I could not find anything in a quick google search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _ZeniMax contends Carmack was responsible for the breakthroughs that > transformed the Rift into a "powerful immersive virtual reality > experience."_

...that was completely trampled by the HTC Vive. It's like ZeniMax insists on squabbling over the scraps of a failure.

To play devil's advocate, I suppose they didn't know this when they filed, and Oculus may still prove quite valuable in the future—but either way, they could probably start their own VR program for what their legal bills are going to cost in the end.

<comment><USER13> Worse, the Vive has leapfrogged them with wireless support, additional trackers, etc. I feel like there's an elephant in the room when discussion the value or 'success' of the Rift. I don't think most consumers casually interested in VR realize how behind those guys are.

I do see the Oculus/Rift branding being repurposed for a Facebook social experience, if not an entire platform for phones to support, but in the realm of PC gaming or anything that requires desktop GPU/CPU levels of power, I imagine they'll always be second fiddle and will be surprised if they last much longer. Tim Sweeney is claiming the Vive outsells the Rift 2-to-1 right now. That's damning for a company with Facebook heft behind it and several years of community engagement, developer kits, hype, etc which ultimately when up against a product that came out of nowhere but delivered everything on day one: controllers, roomscale, good fov, amazing tracking, immersion, etc as well as trivially being able to do seated/standing experiences.

<comment><USER14> > That's damning for a company with Facebook heft behind it

That's not great when their target market is gamers, a large number of whom distrust facebook, love valve, hate the idea of a VR device trying to become a walled garden, and are generally entitled jerks who will whine and cry and talk about how they are never buying an oculus product because palmer lied about the price/sold out to facebook/whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IMHO this is likely to be moot anyway. One of the takeaways I got from CES this year is that Galaxy Gear and Vive have won the VR race. There were zero Rift demos. This is looking like a fight over who is going to own the IP for HD-DVD.

<comment><USER16> The Galaxy Gear is made by Samsung in collaboration with Oculus.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but it's been managed as a separate product, in a separate category (mobile VR), and now — after the recent reorg at Oculus — in a separate division. It's also the one that Carmack has been focused on exclusively for well over a year now. On a day-to-day basis, he doesn't have anything to do with the Rift.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Offtopic, but how do I read that title? Syntax error in my head. I get the "Goes to Trial" part, but "Carmack Rift Over Oculus"?

<comment><USER19> I'd blame the senseless title case that Americans use. If rift was lowercase, it would be easier to understand.

"Carmack rift over Oculus goes to trial"

<comment><USER20> Yeah but the device is the Oculus Rift.

<comment><USER21> Yep, hence the pun

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > relations between the startups quickly soured

I wouldn't call Zenimax a "startup"

<comment><USER23> well, Uber still is called one

</comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo I got really excited thinking maybe Carmack would be set free, but he's at the center of it:

 _ZeniMax contends Carmack was responsible for the breakthroughs that transformed the Rift into a "powerful immersive virtual reality experience." But after Carmack and Luckey agreed to use the Rift to showcase a specially configured version of Doom 3 at a Los Angeles convention in 2012, relations between the startups quickly soured, according to ZeniMax.

Instead of discussing how Oculus would compensate ZeniMax, Luckey and Oculus's then-Chief Executive Officer Brendan Iribe allegedly became "increasingly evasive and uncooperative." Next, they hired Carmack, who is accused of copying thousands of documents from his computer at ZeniMax._

and

 _Carmack says he also offered to manufacture and sell a consumer headset similar to Luckey's, but his idea fell flat with ZeniMax's CEO Robert Altman, a former lawyer who had also been CEO of the adult entertainment website FriendFinder Networks Inc._

What a world we live in. Are there any indications to how this case may go?

<comment><USER24> Wasn't Doom 3 GPL'd ?

<comment><USER25> It is, at least the version that is on the Id Software Github

[https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM-3/blob/master/COPYING.tx...](https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM-3/blob/master/COPYING.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Next, they hired Carmack, who is accused of copying thousands of documents > from his computer at ZeniMax.

This claim sounds pretty dubious. Has John Carmack said anything about it?

<comment><USER27> Does it? Carmack wouldn't be the first engineer to ignore legal details in pursuit of perceived nobler goals. Many mass-ignore sw patents every day.

Guilt needs to be proven, but I don't find it hard to _imagine_.

Side note: HN may not realize, but the public sympathy in this case may not be with Carmack and Oculus. ZeniMax, as parent of Bethesda, has a largely solid rep among the video game consumer audience as publisher of respectable games, and while the acquisition of id was initially seen as id selling out, their latest game under Bethesda (the first shipped without Carmack at the company) is widely regarded as a major return to form for a once-struggling game developer. Meanwhile Occulus burned through most of its initial goodwill with (perceived to be) disappointing pricing, exclusiviy shenanigans and losing a lot of ground to HTC's strong Vive offering. Carmack has tons of deserved cachet with us, but the public at large may be ready to hang him and Oculus. This will get ugly.

<comment><USER28> I would argue most software engineers perceive a huge rift between "I am comfortable violating some software patents" and "I am comfortable exfiltrating large swaths of my employers code base." I would hope so at least.

<comment><USER27> Most software engineers aren't Carmack, though. He used to co-own his technology, and graciously rooted for putting much of it under open licenses. I think Carmack is a pragmatist and certainly understands the business value of code, but also isn't a big fan of constraints.

It's not like the my mind is made up, I don't know either way. Curious to see what the trial will bring.

<comment><USER29> Carmack wasn't a freelancer working under Zenimax on an hourly basis. He was a full time employee working on the same industry in games, and as ex-CTO of id (and knowing what we know of Carmack's talents and what he's done before) he was most likely doing a lot more research and prototyping work in his capacity at Zenimax. Therefore it's a lot less obvious what he has ownership of vs what Zenimax has ownership of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > ZeniMax also declined to invest in Oculus in an early financing round and > was unwilling to accept anything short of "a large non-dilutable stake" in > Oculus in return for allowing Carmack's participation as a technical > adviser, according to Carmack's filing

If there was an issue with proprietary information wouldn't they have objected that the financing stage?

</comment><comment><USER31> After trying both the Vive and the Rift, I immediately stopped worrying about whether we were all going to have to log into our headsets with Facebook. The Vive is amazing in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER32> Your heading is much better than Bloomberg's, but still confusing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why wait all this time to figure out they want to sue? FB bought occulus, Carmack Joined ... a few years later their lawyers wake up now? Anyone know more about this, or at least has seen similar strategies before? The only thing I could guess is that they waited until the goose lay an egg, which turned out not to be gold ...?

<comment><USER34> This has been in the pipeline for nye on 3 years.

[https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/01/zenimax-claims-oculus- st...](https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/01/zenimax-claims-oculus-stole/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Once Palmer sold us all out to Facebook it was over. Fortunately, better headsets are on the scene.

</comment><comment><USER35> At Zenimax: "Hey guys. This whole VR is becoming a real thing and we dismissed it along with this Carmack dude. Lets fill a suit against Zuckerberg for ludicrous amount of money, maybe we can get couple millions for free via settlement."

</comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of that scene from the social network: "Did we use any of your code? If you guys were the inventors of the Occulus Rift, you would have invented the occulus rift"

</comment><comment><USER37> If anyone had the grounds to sue it would be Valve. This one seems absurd on the face of it. Still, we'll see what comes out.

<comment><USER14> why?

<comment><USER37> Abrash handed over a lot of Valve IP and prototypes to Oculus (note: Gabe did not object) before himself joining Oculus. Oculus did their VC demos at Valve on Valve hardware. I think gabe was hoping that oculus would put all their games on Steam. Didn't work out that way :-)

Still, my comment was semi-flippant; Valve is no lawsuit monster and even if they were inclined to sue, they surely would have done so by now. But there were quite a few unhappy people at Valve about how that went down, and IMHO the Vive is in part a this-is-how-you-really-do-it fuck you to Oculus.

In any case I feel like this is simply an opportunistic deep-pocket-reaching lawsuit against FB.

PS: don't know why my original comment was downrated.</comment></comment></comment>


Google closes bug as WONTFIX over Creative Commons license violations - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=2945 <comment><USER2> Is it clear that CC licenses require sites to make it clear how to save a copy of a work? While there is certainly anti-DRM language in the CC licenses, is there something specific in Google's implementation of YouTube that directly conflicts with the provisions of the licenses?

(I support making it easier to save copies of things, but I'm not sure about the license compliance theory.)

<comment><USER3> By uploading a video to YouTube you are giving them a special license to distribute the video. The license you choose in the video description doesn't apply to them. The title is incorrect in saying there is any kind of violation here.

<comment><USER2> Well, this is a reason why YouTube itself may not be liable (if its practices were actually inconsistent with the CC license requirements), but a CC licensor could still file takedown requests to YouTube or lawsuits against another person who reposted a CC-licensed video on YouTube. If the CC license didn't permit YouTube's practices, someone who's not the copyright holder wouldn't have been entitled under the CC license to grant YouTube the license they purported to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. If you want to download a CC licensed (or any) video from YouTube, use youtube-dl.

2\. As commenter #8 points out, if you care about this sort of thing, use a different platform. For example, Vimeo makes it incredibly easy to download videos.

<comment><USER5> 1\. Downloading violates Youtube's TOS. So there's that.

2\. The argument is that Youtube shouldn't be using the CC name and licenses at all if they are not going to adhere to the spirit of said licenses.

<comment><USER6> > Downloading violates Youtube's TOS. So there's that.

If downloading videos violates YouTube's TOS, but YouTube is violating the Creative Commons license by enforcing this aspect of their TOS, is this restriction enforceable?

<comment><USER7> Contract trumps copyright. That's how the publishing industry works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whilst I don't disagree with the sentiment, the post title is rather overblown and inflammatory.

In case it gets modded it was "Google closes bug as WONTFIX over Creative Commons license violations"

<comment><USER9> Not changed yet. Sending out the dang signal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That was rather dissmissive... not even a canned "for whatever reason, this request is out of scope" message for the WONTFIX status.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a non-story. CC licensing says that _the copyright owner permits you to_ make copies of the content; it places no obligation on Google to help you do this, or even to allow you to use their service to do this.

<comment><USER2> CC licenses are not neutral about downstream technical and policy restrictions; see section (2)(a)(5)(B) of

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)

It's not clear to me whether YouTube's policy definitely conflicts with that section, but it seems plausible!

I think this is analogous to the way that distributing third-party GPL- licensed software in the iTunes App Store may violate the GPL, which I think is because of the provision that "[y]ou may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein", which the App Store's policies do.

<comment><USER11> _It 's not clear to me whether YouTube's policy definitely conflicts with that section, but it seems plausible!_

It doesn't matter. If you upload a video to youtube, you're doing it under _youtube 's_ terms of service, not under whatever license you may use for distributing the video to other people. If I release a video publicly under a license which says "if you distribute this video, you must pay me a million dollars" and then upload it to youtube, it just means that there are now two licenses -- not that youtube owes me a million dollars.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but plenty of people are also uploading _other people 's_ CC-licensed works to YouTube, in which case a genuine legal conflict has been created.

Edit: (which doesn't mean YouTube is bound by the provisions of the CC license, but does mean it doesn't have valid permission from the uploader or copyright holder to display the works)

<comment><USER11> Right. But that's no different from any other work being uploaded in violation of copyright law; the process for that is "report the violation and Youtube will take it down", not "Youtube should add a download link".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> YouTube's license of the content (that you grant when you upload and host your content there) is broader than the CC license extended to YouTube viewers. The license Google has doesn't require them to allow downloads.

<comment><USER13> The YouTube license doesn't trump the CC, it's in addition to it. Either way, the CC doesn't say you have to allow downloads, just that if someone does get the file they can "remix" it and you can't sue.

<comment><USER7> That's false, I'm afraid. Enforced contract trumps copyright, and CC is no exception. If it were the other way around, there wouldn't be a music, recording or publishing industry.

<comment><USER13> With respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. If I have have a copyright, then I can issue a license, without transferring copyright, and more than one license can be applied in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love how the comments reference the "users", when what's really important is Google's customers.

If allowing use of CC licensed content helped _advertisers_ , it would implemented post-haste.

</comment><comment><USER15> Violations? I don't see any violations anywhere.

<comment><USER16> The Creative Commons license specifies:

> _You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally > restrict others from doing anything the license permits._

To my understanding, this is felt to be in conflict with the restriction on downloading in YouTube's Terms of Service. I'm not an expert on open-source licenses, but I think that's where the violation is believed to lie.

<comment><USER15> Interesting I see your point.

But the linked thread never says anything about the terms of service. It seems odd to add a new point to an argument solely in the title of a HN post, when the thing it links to never makes that point.

<comment><USER16> The second comment in the linked thread mentions the TOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess the point here is that if Google can't comply with the CC license provisions (in letter _and_ spirit) they should change the YouTube uploader option for CC to something more along the lines of "allow users to remix your content through one of our applications", which is more in-line with the truth.

</comment><comment><USER18> Umm, Is the reason they closed the bug in the title? Wut? Super confused over title.

<comment><USER19> The reason was not given in the WONTFIX flag. But really, youtube spends considerable effort to make its videos hard to save.</comment></comment>


Chinese headwear fad grows like weeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/world/asia/china-hair-trend-sprout-plant.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below <comment><USER2> _"Bean sprouts are still our most popular item," said Zeng Wen_

 _The most common explanation on the streets was that the floral fascinators just looked cute — "meng meng da," in a cloying term made popular on the Internet._

I suspect a pun here. The _meng_ character is 萌, which literally means "sprout"[1], and is related to the Japanese "moe" concept[2].

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%90%8C](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%90%8C)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_(slang)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_\(slang\))

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, from what I can tell, 萌 means "sprout" as a verb, and has no noun sense. "Sprout" the noun appears to be 芽 (yá); so 豆芽 (dòuyá) "bean sprouts".

萌 meaning cute isn't just related, it's a direct borrowing from Japanese.

<comment><USER4> "meng" also reminds me of the Aomori-ben dialect word "megoi" (alternative to "kawaii") which almosts sounds like "mengoi" with the nasalized/velarized "g".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was in Shenyang last month. They sell this stuff in every corner. In every shopping district where I saw young people, many of them wore these things. I bought a few of them myself. People just think they're cute.

Interestingly, my elders tell me that wearing flowers or plants on your head used to mean that you have been sold as a slave.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway."

This one comment sums up pretty much the entirety of Internet "culture", see for example neknominate, the ice-bucket challenge, etc.

<comment><USER7> Just because the reasons are not immediately obvious does not make them non- existent. Rather, it makes them so much more interesting as they can reveal emotions/thoughts/urges that have hither-to been hard to express, without an appropriate medium or unacceptable socially.

Putting plants on your head might seem strange, but that's why it's interesting to explore. It's a shame that we in this thread band together to disregard this behaviour (like talking behind someones back, it is seemingly to defend our own culture and behaviour. "our way is the right way").

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I rather liked the way some of the sprouts looked. I certainly won't be the first to sport one of them, but I might be an early adopter if someone with more guts tries it out first ^^

<comment> r-w "early adopter"? It's already a fad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I want to believe this idea came from Adventure Time

[http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_Sleeping_Magi_of...](http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_Sleeping_Magi_of_Life_Giving)

</comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps its a reaction to all the pollution.

But is it actually weird? Tell me you've never seen a girl with a flower in her hair in the West. Of course, you have.

<comment><USER11> Once in ten years.

A more objectively verifiable guage of Western culture: when was the last Hollywood movie featuring a young woman with a flower in her hair?

<comment> r-w You've never seen a girl wearing a flower barrette?

<comment><USER11> Judging from google images, that could be what I saw 10 years ago, though I thought it was a real flower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of the scene in WALL-E.

Perhaps people like the idea of new life (single sprout) in the concrete and smog jungle

<comment> r-w Isn't it more of a recurring motif?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can confirm this is true. I saw many people sporting them when my wife and I were visiting Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou a month ago. My wife even bought a pair (antlers: [http://laurenandmarc.blogspot.com/2015/09/suzhou- china.html](http://laurenandmarc.blogspot.com/2015/09/suzhou-china.html)) Mostly women wear them, but also some men. Street food vendor, young student, worker, etc, everybody seems to like them.

<comment><USER14> Saw a pair of large antlers stuck to the top of a car yesterday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did this book just make it over to China? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy- Head_Mayzie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy-Head_Mayzie)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am reminded fondly of Life on Forbez.

I think it's a response to people feeling farther from nature than they ever have.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea people are finding some tie to nature endearing.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I noticed this, it was summer. Now, it is almost winter.

</comment><comment><USER19> The merchants are geniuses, the clip parts break if you barely touch them the wrong way. Brush up against someone and it's time to drop a few yuan to get a new one.

<comment> r-w Don't shoot the messenger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like an outtake from Nathan Barley.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems a bit creepy to me, like something sprouting of a corpse.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't look so creepy when you are in the middle of a busy shopping district and seeing tens of very much alive young people walking around with such things.

I wore a few of them myself.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it seems more like a harmless fashion/fad to me. Looks a little weird since I've never seen it before but ultimately, it's not much different than the thousands of other adornments people stick on themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why is this on hacker news?

<comment><USER24> I wondered that myself. The perennial answer seems to be a variation upon "if it's of interest to the HN community, then it's a valid item". Given the passion of many here to avoid "becoming Reddit", I find this free pass for non-tech/non-startup content baffling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Must be a slow news day.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not really, it's just too weird for me

</comment><comment><USER27> When the West said Japan was weird, the Chinese took that as a challenge.</comment>


China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/people-management/news/index.cfm?NewsId=15144&RSS <comment><USER2> This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.

After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work.

In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly frowned upon to pitchforks-and-torches style anger.

No!Spec (<http://www.no-spec.com>) is the industry's main sounding board against these types of "competitions", so I won't rehash those points here.

The article's implied "gee-whiz these are wonderkids!" approach to the entrants didn't sit too well with me. The fact that entrants were largely between 18 and 24 years old seems more to do with a lack of professional experience (evidenced by partaking in spec work), than some magic ability of younger people to be able to do compelling work in technology.

I think it's more probable that those grizzled old guys with beards are too busy getting paid for their labor to partake in a lottery, hence the skewed demographics. Also, it would be natural to see more entrants win in countries where the US dollar exchange rate benefits taking a risk of getting no money. It isn't indicative of a lack of talent inside the US.

Disclosure: I'm in my late 20's.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right:

"TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors."

(from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopCoder#TopCoder_as_a_business> )

Sounds pretty sleazy to me.

<comment><USER4> There are good counterexamples though, for instance the netflix prize. Another decent way to go about it would be to open source the result of such a contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To intercept the expected comments that these contests have nothing to do with real world skill (in programming, not 'cracking'), Steve Newman, cofounder of Writely, was a top competitor on TopCoder, as was Adam De'Angelo, previously CTO of Facebook. Craig Silverstein, an ACM ICPC programming competition world champion, was Director of Technology and employee #1 at Google.

This does refer to the algorithmic competitions specifically, the correlation between achievement in the design/development competitions is less clear.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could someone change this title? TopCoder is an NSA _supported_ competitive programming site. While I guess competitive programming could be consider MIT- style hacking, this is not cracking and it's definitely not run by the NSA.

<comment><USER7> It's a copy of the article's title...

<comment><USER6> That doesn't mean it's not inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People from developing countries have more incentive to participate in these competitions as the effort/reward ratio is greater. This is what significantly skews the numbers.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I compete in the ACM ICPC and TopCoder competitions and here's the deal. Top Chinese competitors in these areas get _jobs doing these competitions._ They literally get paid by the Chinese government to practice algorithm writing and competitive programming all day every day. US competitors are just college students like me who have things like school to deal with. Given this situation, it is unsurprising that Russian and Chinese coders win almost every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I doubt its an hacking contest. The title is misleading, and the competition is just a regular one except that "TopCoder" is backed by NSA.

<comment><USER10> Yeah the title is definitely misleading. The word "hacking" isn't even mentioned in the article besides in the title. Replace "hacking contest" with "programming competitions" and "NSA" with "NSA sponsored" and you have a more accurate title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have recently begun participating in the TopCoder 'Arena', where I've made some code that could be of absolutely no monetary value to anyone (except to me, as training). Actually, it's a lot of fun.

Still, I wonder about this company.

It has some connection to the NSA, as advertised on their web page and elsewhere. Does anyone know more details about this relationship? In particular, what does the NSA aim to get out of it?

<comment><USER12> As far as I know, the NSA just gets some free advertising space, and before the arena matches you get the opportunity to chat with a member of the sponsoring corporation/organization, so they get to tell some really good programmers about NSA job perks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like India had the worst showing, as far as making it to the finals.

</comment><comment><USER14> another point is that in the US the notion of "Hacking" is still seen as negative or criminal.

Something else is that in that age group in the US people are about to graduate or graduating so if they are really good at math/science/engineering they have already either been picked up my companies or in the process of getting hired. Why does this matter? Becuase if you are going to or are working for a company im pretty sure they dont want you to participate in any event about hacking.

<comment><USER3> I think the phrase "hacking contest" was how the author of the article chose to describe it. The TopCoder competition page doesn't mention the word at all: <http://www.topcoder.com/tc> ; probably exactly for the reason you describe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get this when I try to open the link -

WebKnight Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

What is WebKnight? AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is an ISAPI filter for securing web servers by blocking certain requests. If an alert is triggered WebKnight will take over and protect the web server.

For more information on WebKnight: <http://www.aqtronix.com/WebKnight/>

AQTRONIX WebKnight</comment>


How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4683117/annoying-captcha-forms-how-to-smell-difference-between-humans-robots

<comment><USER2> > I tend to include text fields (later visually hidden or obscured with > Javascript) with "name" parameters like "email", "url" and "name". Spam bots > always fill these in. Your users won't, because the fields are hidden. If > the fields are filled in, your submission came from a spambot. Easy!

Fuck every website that does this. It's 2011, we should all be using password managers. If using LastPass makes your site flag me as a robot, I'm not going to use it.

CAPTCHAs are like crypto: Don't roll your own unless you have good reason to and know what you're doing. Just throw in reCaptcha, or Mollom, or (preferably) some crowd-sourced solution that leverages your userbase (the best way that will scale, imo).

<comment><USER3> Following the crypto analogy, reCAPTCHA is approaching the effectiveness of a Beaufort cipher. The reCAPTCHA tool has been broken.

Various of the botnets will sail right past reCAPTCHA.

And yes, the choice here and the options here stink.

Nobody wants a CAPTCHA.

But the alternative is becoming part of the collateral damage of the arms race seeking to fill Google with cruft.

Or shutting off all comments.

Or escalating the arms race with subnet firewall blocks, content and email address filtering, reactive security, moderation or (if you have the appropriate audience for it) crowd-sourcing.

<comment><USER2> This is true, I was struggling to think of an option that doesn't cost money (Mollom) or require a lot of effort (crowd-sourcing a la HN or Reddit). Is reCAPTCHA better than nothing, or entirely worthless?

<comment><USER3> When it comes to CAPTCHA...

Effective, Cheap, or Simple...

Pick any two...

As for your question, I switched from reCAPTCHA over to a different scheme, though I might test with reCAPTCHA with different settings again in a few months.

<comment><USER2> I'm about to roll out a site using Mollom for the first time, will be interesting to see how well it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One big issue that nobody is talking about here: There is a huge increase in networks using cheap labor to solve CAPTCHAs. A service like decaptcher.com can have humans solve CAPTCHAs at the rate of $2/1000.

At that kind of price, all of the effort you go to to prevent automated signups is useless -- it's just being outsourced to humans, where these counter-measures are ineffective.

<comment><USER5> Even the cheapest manual CAPTCHA solving is still too expensive for most spam. The expected return of a spam comment on a random blog is very low. Spamming relies on posting millions of them for free.

<comment><USER4> I suppose it depends on the application. For signup spam, the expected return is definitely higher than the current cost. And unfortunately, it's also on a website's critical path, so making signing up more annoying is strongly against the best interests of a company.

In other words, it's a pretty hard problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good ole stackoverflow - close topics that may bring new ideas for turing tests.

The entire thread has a number of good ideas and relates to a thread you started the other day. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107972> Pity that it didn't get more traction.

<comment><USER7> A lot of them are pretty bad ideas once you think about them for more than a few minutes.

Mouse movements and clicks are easily emulated - just look at the mass of bots for online games. There's actually quite a large industry based around selling bots that can be used for goldfarming.

Keyboard events are similarly easy. It's very easy to write a function that separates keypresses with human-like pauses.

Also - many of these ideas have severe accessibility drawbacks. Touchscreens, for example, do not emit mouse move events like a mouse. Voice input will not act like a keyboard and may look like the user has pasted into the input box.

<comment><USER6> At least he's trying to solve a problem he faces. Imagine if he took a heatmap of all mouse movements during form submissions, ranked them as spam/ham, and then used that heatmap against new submissions to determine a confidence. Perhaps there is a pattern. It's difficult to know the answer to a question that isn't asked. Maybe during data entry, your analysis returns a fact that in human submissions, they press backspace at least once.

Sure it doesn't work for mobile browsers/touchscreens, but, on low-confidence submissions, you present a harder, second challenge.

Most recaptcha forms are solved by humans at $1/1000 from companies. You have caused them to use a human to solve it, which means your test worked. The fact that you still got a spam submission is a separate issue.

Ensuring a human, non-spam response is something that needs to be done statistically, not through a rules based system. Shared inoculation like Akismet or Typepad help, but, often miss new trends.

I don't think the real problem is determining if it is a human, I think the real problem is dealing with the contents of the form submission. I could care less if the form is automatically submitted, as long as I know whether to ignore that form. Captcha just erects a small barrier.

One of the best things I ever did to combat spam on inbound mail was greylisting + dspam + tmda. If dspam has a high confidence that it is spam, tmda sends a challenge/response. While I've never given out my gmail address, the amount of spam it receives is ridiculous. My own solution, even the spam folder rarely sees more than a few messages a week. My personal blog, discounting trackback spam has had 71 spam posts in the last week. I use RPXnow (requires one of the shared auth providers or someone needs to create an account) and recaptcha with Akismet. It hasn't stopped the spam that is received, merely what gets automatically published. I do believe that every submission received on my blog comes from a human, or has at least had some human interaction. Captcha doesn't solve the problem, merely erects a small barrier and just makes sure the spam I get is more likely hand delivered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've written about this before, and wrote a proof-of-concept plugin that I dogfood on my own blog:

<http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/>

Two core ideas: 1) the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding. It's the _question_ , not the _computation_ , that's the problem. 2) Any site that becomes popular will be worth it to the spammers to hard-code, so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their own additional question templates.

<comment><AUTHOR> > the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding.

This does not just apply to understanding language. It applies to understanding and interpreting audio, images, videos, etc. Words and phrases are just the easiest to create in CAPTCHA's, but they are also getting easier for computers to solve. Quite a few of the CAPTCHA's on your blog could be solved by Wolfram Alpha (or at least close to). If it was used in masses, it wouldn't take long for hackers to perfect the process of answering them.

> so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their > own additional question templates

Couldn't hackers take advantage of entering their own question templates? And relying on user-generated CAPTCHA's is extremely risky. Quality and consistency would drop to a level where the system would became almost useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with this idea is that if a distinctly 'human behavior' can be calculated, it can be emulated. Also, it would require a lot of JS and other support that some people don't have. There's also the problem of false negatives when you consider auto-fillers that a lot of people use.

</comment><comment><USER10> I notice that most people implementing CAPTCHA don't even fully realize what they're protecting from.

There are different kinds of spam, each needs a different approach:

1\. targetted attack against a site

2\. non-targetted attack sending spam for machines

3\. non-targetted attack sending spam for humans

To protect against first case (e.g. someone trying to mass-register webmail accounts) you have to have a proper CAPTCHA, and JavaScript tricks and hidden fields are totally useless.

Most sites are only spammed with second type of spam, but choose protection against the first type! However, this spam is super-easy to defeat with content classification, because it _has to_ make spammy keywords/links available to machines.

The third one is common in e-mail, rare on websites, but still can be mostly defeated with blacklists, classification and technical tricks that catch poorly written bots.

There are people implementing protection against #1, and then trying to prove it works, because it blocks #2 and #3. In non-targetted attacks, anything that wasn't expected by the bot writer will work, even if it's totally misimplemented CAPTCHA that has solution in image's URL, or it's a choose-a- kitten test that has 1 in 9 chance of guessing, or mouse movement tracking that can be trivially simulated/replayed.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a great idea. The point is merely to provide an alternative to an explicit CAPTCHA that requires interaction like reCAPTCHA that doesn't cost less to try and break. That way, it's strictly more convenient to the user, if they use autofill or whatever, they'll just be subject to the ordinary reCAPTCHA that they would be anyway.

I'm imagining listening to mousemove on the document and doing something lightweight like appending the coordinates to an array onmousemove. Then a function that's setInterval'd every 2 seconds or something would flush the array to the server via XHR. A server-side script would, transparently to the user, analyze the mousetrail and if the user appeared to move their mouse realistically and took at least like a minute to fill out the form and took realistic amounts to type in text inputs and so on, the server will let them skip the reCAPTCHA.

<comment><USER12> If it's in JavaScript it's trivial for me to hack on the client side, and if you insist on mouse movements I can just send along a prerecorded array of mouse moves before my request. Maybe even tweak a few every time, so you don't catch on right away. It's more trouble than it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> CloudFlare (<https://www.cloudflare.com/>) does something similar to this. It will present a CAPTCHA challenge page to users who have had suspicious activity within a certain period of time, according to Project Honeypot. If you want to be really stringent (at the cost of some false positives), it will also challenge people based on HTTP header analysis, and with a paid account they will also protect against XSS and SQL injection in POST requests.

They've done a fantastic job of cutting down the number of fake profiles on my client Set For Marriage (a dating site where it was a huge problem before), and the rest of their features are pretty good too (the asset caching has resulted in about 60% faster page load times).

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting ideas but several drawbacks most notably a) If you have some set of heuristics that serve as a proxy for information (in this case "humanness") then people can easily optimize on the proxy and win and b) the code would be running on the client-side and as a result super hackable

</comment><comment><USER15> Jeff Atwood has mentioned in his coding horror blog a few times the idea of an internet license - using Facebook, Google etc. as a credential. Could this not be extended to anonymous comments, but requiring authentication against a real ID?

</comment><comment><USER16> Check the user agent. Many bot writers never bother to change it. PycURL, Java, urllib, etc. If you only want humans on your website, only accept browsers used by humans. Sure the botter's may clone IE's user-agent string, but you'll still stop the lazy ones.

</comment><comment><USER17> Shouldn't using something sensing the movement of a mouse cursor be enough as a captcha? If no mouse movement is detected, fall back to a text input captcha.

<comment><USER18> Page opens, I press TAB to enter the form. Now I have to enter that stupid Captha again. And what about Tablet PC's? I'm not sure there is a lot of mouse movement there. But well maybe It could be enough for a lot of desktop users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Random but... you could take a few pictures of your hand... and go the classic route of asking how many fingers you're holding up.</comment>


Ask PG: How to delete an (old) HN account? - <AUTHOR>

Often, I write something which I later find inane, particularly when I was emotional at the time.
When I first found HN (about 2 years ago), I read your essays, got an account, and left a puerile comment. The stupid thing is that I had used my real name for the handle. I later forgot all about it and used only this account. Today, I "binged" myself for the first time and the old account, including the comment, reappeared out of oblivion (it never did on Google).
Is there a way to kill this account for good? I don't want potential employers to associate me with that kind of tone. Let's just say it was a bad time for me. <comment><USER2> You should ask this question on the following thread and for inclusion into the Unofficial HN FAQ. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755533>

<comment><USER3> [http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#deletea...](http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#deleteaccount)

I just did, thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Email firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: Just got a reply to my mail, PG killed the comment in question. Thanks!</comment></comment>


NASA research shows alien life is far less likely than previously thought - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/science/2019/06/12/nasa-research-shows-alien-life-is-far-less-likely-than-previously-thought/ <comment><USER2> What a preachy article. Why can't we have multiple endeavors?</comment>


A Skeptic's Guide to Modern Monetary Theory by N. Gregory Mankiw [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/skeptics_guide_to_modern_monetary_theory.pdf <comment><USER2> I admit I don't understand economics. However, neither do most politicians or readers of HN.

The real appeal of MMT is that it allows be state to raise revenue in a way that bypasses the dysfunctional Congress, and without the political cost of taxation.

That's why Sanders and his followers love it.

Very few people understand it's merits and flaws. Anyone not an economist who takes a position on this is motivated by ideology not science.

</comment><comment><USER3> Raises concerns with MMT and inflation while not once mentioning how proponents of MMT address inflation. How convenient.

<comment><USER4> The main ways I've heard MMT proponents address inflation are price controls and denying it's an issue in the first place (both are mentioned in the article.) Do you have a specific argument you feel was left out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A skeptics guide to a "Skeptic's" guide; The author of this writes economic textbooks of competing/mainstream theory</comment>


Show HN: Toolbox for DNA sequence manipulation and PCR Primer design - <AUTHOR> http://genewarrior.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I started this project about a half a year ago to teach myself web application programming using HTML5, Javascript and Java Servlets.

The goal is to simplify DNA sequence handling tasks such as sequence alignment, basic phylogenetic trees, sequence logos, primer design etc.

I would be glad for feedback regarding application programming, user interface and ideas for more tools to integrate.</comment>


Are big companies more willing to hire junior devs rather than startups? - <AUTHOR> Hey there,
I'm thinking about a platform where junior devs could post their projects and companies can pick what are interesting for them and then call them to an interview rather than the old-CV-application-thing. And I was wondering for what type of companies (corporations, startups) would be more suitable.
What do you think?
Thanks, Alin R. <comment><USER2> To me, if the goal is to build a business, it would make sense to talk to the companies that could be interested and find out directly.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! I'm a self-taught web developer that managed to find a gig after 11 months of learning and doing projects. Back then I realised that dev are in demand, but not so much the junior ones because companies want experience. But how can one earn experience if you don't hire them because they don't have that experience. Do you know what I mean?

<comment><USER2> I think I know what you mean. To be useful to junior developers _and_ companies, companies have to want to use the platform. If companies don't want to use the platform, then the time junior developers creating and maintaining a profile on the platform is wasted (maybe the platform made finding a job harder because the time could have been spent doing other things).

The thing that might help junior developers is creating a real working channel to companies and creating that channel is more a business communication problem than a technical problem. Building the website is the _easy_ part. Solving a problem that _companies_ have is the hard part.</comment></comment></comment>


The story of gOrge - <AUTHOR>

I am a volunteer for AFS, a no profit organization that lets kids from all over the world to live a year as exchange students.
AFS Italy is great, we always try to give the best to our host, so when I saw that a lot of kids where going to miss a nice experience only because there weren't any volunteer I stand up and finally proposed myself.
Initially my job was easy, get one girl at the station, chaperone her to Brescia, let her see the city and have her fun, bring her back to Milan.
We organized that via Facebook chat, easy.
Then other 1, 2, 3, no 4... Ahhh 5 kids join too.
It took me a lot of time and effort only to make sure that everybody knows what was going to happen, it was even more difficult because we used different media, somebody on facebook, somebody via sms, someone else via email, it was really hard to manage everything.
It is impossible that we don't have any better tool to keep easily and without much effort everybody update and ready.
So I create gOrge. http://gorgeapp.appspot.com/
gOrge is basically midway between a pastebin for markdown and a forum, everybody can post, everybody can see what is been posted and everybody can reply to the post.
All by markdown to keep everything simple...
Give it a spin, you will like... <comment><USER2> It looks beautiful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, however it wasn't my design... It a design from Kreative, I just took their page and modify to my needs, they made a WONDERFUL css, it was very easy to modify what needed to be changed. On the footer of the page you will find their link. :)</comment></comment>