Japanese writing system basics - <AUTHOR> https://www.candyjapan.com/%E5%8F%A3 <comment><USER2> This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.

<comment><USER3> It's not exactly a rectangle though, the two downward strokes extend slightly past the bottom horizontal stroke.

<comment><USER2> Not on my screen ([http://i.imgur.com/korTPAQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/korTPAQ.png))

Maybe it is a missing character after all :) (Oh no, I've been fooled by chrome/freetype/something!)

<comment><USER3> I see, it is indeed showing a missing character symbol on your computer. The actual character is much more square than that, in addition to the strokes I mentioned. ([http://i.imgur.com/s6bW7u0.png](http://i.imgur.com/s6bW7u0.png))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí.

As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.

<comment><USER5> Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a much older language than modern Mandarin)

So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it is the correct verb.

In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk"

("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh")

Edit: "sikh"

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that Mandarin would use 嘴(里)rather than 口

The pronunciations of kanji correlate to different Chinese eras and areas.

The usage and choice of characters are influenced by Classical Chinese, which was the literary language in Japan until, uhm, recently-ish.

There is a very good recent YouTube video that explains the usage of Chinese characters in Japanese and which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20)

I was very impressed by the accuracy and knowledge displayed, as most of what is written and said on the subject is ehhh somewhat disappointing.

<comment><USER5> I've never learned Japanese, nor spent much time there.

From my brother who studied Japanese for a while, the Kanji was a real blocker for him. So I did wonder what it'd be like, given I already know a good amount of Chinese characters.

I guess this video answers that question:

Even more confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" \- one who orders rules.

An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.

<comment><USER8> > you only need to learn around 3000 symbols

This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write.

Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer, politician, etc).

<comment><USER9> _> It's a hugely inefficient way to write._

Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser:

 _" I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"_

Regarding the grandparent's point of joining characters, my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.

[1] Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)

<comment><USER10> > my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.

Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense.

The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet.

Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在 (zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'.

It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗? (Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.

<comment><USER12> Same in Thai. They ask กินข้าวหรือยัง ("Have you eaten yet?", or literally "Have you eaten rice yet?") as a greeting.

<comment><USER13> That reminds me that sometimes in my family we'll jokingly say jeet? It comew from the comedian Jeff Foxworthy who said it's redneck for "Did you eat? "

I'm in Canada and not redneck I wonder if jeet is actually used in the US.

<comment><USER14> My father's native New-Jerseyan uses "jeet jet" for "did you eat yet".

The one bit of that I consistently use is "agnishna", for "air conditioner".

<comment><USER15> I recently found a list of these for Scottish that were amazing.

E.g.: "space ghettos" (in standard American accent) becomes Scottish "Spice Girls" :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods".

Languages are weird, man.

<comment> ju-st I interpret that character as "three boxes" so "goods" is a very intuitive translation :)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I'm not sure what world you have to live in for "three-mouthed monster" to be a more obvious meaning for that glyph than "stacked crates".

But I think I might like to visit.

<comment><USER18> I see you haven't gotten to the 4th paragraph of TFA...

"口" = mouth, not crate

"品" is a stack of mouth characters

<comment><USER17> I read the whole article, thanks. Do you think it's possible that more than one square or rectangular thing may exist?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食).

Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

<comment><USER20> It's not a very good choice to use "食" to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't.

Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.

<comment><USER21> Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost.

I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortunate how much of the meaning was lost with the Chinese simplification. I can mostly make out Taiwanese/Republic of China newspapers, but can see nothing in the simplified characters.

Edit: Yay, I'm wrong, see below. Thank you internet.

<comment><USER22> Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).

On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).

The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.

<comment><USER23> The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.

<comment><USER24> Agreed.

Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.

(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it. Example: 金 gold is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)

<comment><USER23> Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.

<comment><USER24> Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: [http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm](http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> That certainly looks more complete. I was mostly wanting to see if I can pull the reader into learning Japanese without realizing that they were doing so.

<comment><USER26> Your domain was a bit of a hint. ^_^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis? They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them, nonetheless.

<comment><USER28> That's why you see services with lots of pictographic functions eclipse pure test-based ones in Asia, because they are very used to that kind of symbolic communication. And why complex emoji using text characters in creative ways were developed in Asia in the first place.

For example, Twitter never really took off in southeast Asia, but Line is incredibly popular. Why? Stickers. Line offers endless little pictures you can use with your messages, while Twitter doesn't.

Now stickers (and emoji) are taking off a lot more in the West, because they are super compact and effective communication symbols. I think we'll see more and more of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

<comment><USER30> I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate.

I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c').

Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that.

The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.

<comment><USER31> > _I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for > Japanese,_ [...]

You stuck an extra "do not" in your sentence

* * *

As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it's what we know. At this point, I think we're stuck with it.

Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.

<comment><USER30> Removed the "do not"

As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess.

Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal.

Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.

<comment><USER31> Here's my proposal for base twelve numerals, [http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg) ; multiplication mod twelve, [http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg)

It can also be nice to use a "balanced base", with digits for negative numbers, e.g. in a base ten context you'd have digits for –4 to 5 (or if you're willing to have multiple expressions for the same number, –5 to 5).

A balanced base twelve multiplication table might look like this: [http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png](http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like wild fires or crimes like thefts or vandalism.

It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems.

The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive to this day.

<comment><USER33> A counterpoint: When a message is written with an alphabet, it's not as compact, but its meaning can be guessed at even if significant portions of the message are missing (known as lacunae). See, e.g., the TV game show _Wheel of Fortune_ ; another example is the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts that have deteriorated over time.

<comment><USER32> That may be true. And perhaps the same argument could be made for Chinese characters?

Could you elaborate on why the alphabetic system is intrinsically more efficient than Chinese characters in terms of recovering messages from partial loss of texts?

<comment><USER33> Spatial dispersal of the glyphs means that fewer glyphs would be taken out by any given insect-gnawed hole, UV-radiation fading, hurled paint glob, etc., and thus less of the overall message would be lost to that single incident of damage.

It's the same principle as how soldiers are trained to spread out when in battle: If they bunch up, it increases the risk that a single mortar shell (or artillery round or machine-gun burst) could take out a lot of troops.

<comment><USER32> Oh, now I see. Thank you for explaining your point succinctly.

Though I do not have data to back up my argument, I still reckon the Chinese glyphs/scriptures would have had a better chance of survival.

While I think your point is valid, its disadvantages outweigh the advantage, at least since paper/papyrus was invented.

Being spread out to double in length (double being an arbitrary multiplier) would still be inferior to being dispersed to two physical locations (redundancy). I think this is where don't put all your eggs in one basket holds true.

Plus, important docs must have been actively maintained by hired librarians(?). With human maintenance involved, less in volume could have been an advantage for it is easier to move around and maintain the docs. Ofc, when left out in the wild, it is a different story.

Personally I do not like Chinese character system as it has so high a barrier to entry for learners. I love alphabets, Korean Hangeul, or Japanese Hira/Katakana for this matter. Have you tried learning any of those? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.

<comment><USER35> Entering the mouth of the building?

<comment><USER36> Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".

<comment><USER37> "Put your foot on it" means the accelerator / gas pedal, that seems very much equivalent.

<comment><USER36> I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce"... Not with 26 letters we don't. Other languages have other sounds that English can only try to emulate, and even English has sounds that require multiple letters.

<comment><USER14> Here are the 44 sounds that English generally uses: [http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc- soundsipa.htm](http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm)

It does not include sounds which are borrowed from other languages, like the Hebrew 'ch' which happens at the top of your throat, or the Spanish trilled r, or the glottal stop which actually occurs in spoken English all the time in some dialects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too?

If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal?

If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed?

Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go beyond two symbols.

<comment><USER40> That's because you're thinking in English. "Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things (as in king-like behaviour for example). In Chinese and Japanese, there simply isn't a way to describe it as elegantly as in English

In Chinese it'd be 王道 (the tao of the King if translated directly to English), which has a completely different connotation (it's more holistic in concept (i.e. it has an overloaded meaning) when compared to "kingly" in English, which has a more singular-use meaning).

"Royal" itself is an overloaded adjective in English. AFAIK there are no adjectives in the east asian language that has the same semantic meaning as "royal" \- The Japanese version would simply be 王の, which translate to "belonging to the king", while the chinese version would be 王室的 or 王室之(belonging to the king's office(I guess you could say crown)[0]). Ditto with "regal". There simply isn't any proper translation for the adjectives in English.

Other than that, in Chinese, there is the concept of a radical, which can be combined to inform the readers about the context it's used in. In Japanese, as bemmu wrote, it'd be additional kanas to inform of context.

[0]Fun fact: 之 and の used to denote the same things up to about 300-ish years ago I believe (timeline could be wrong). In Japanese 之 may be pronounced the same as の. Either way, the Chinese and Japanese words are very much the same, barring some minor kanji differences. Grammarwise, however, it's a completely different language

<comment><USER30> >"Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things.

I'm not sure about that. Japanese has adjectival nouns (commonly referred to as na-adjectives), and the 的 suffix.

Additionally, as you identify, the の particle also serves this function; but you give it a much more restrive role that it actually has (as is typically in English language Japanese learning material. In general, の marks the genitive case, which simply means that the first noun modifies the following noun in some way. It is often used to show possesion, but can also be used in a way close to ~ly in English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical.

Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.

<comment><USER3> Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too. The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

<comment><USER42> > The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional > arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

Except that usually, almost nothing about the arrangement of strokes can be inferred from the sound or meaning of the word, and vice versa.

<comment><USER43> "Ghoti"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just discovered NativLang on YouTube so this really is in my zone of interest today.

I've just spent the last few hours learning all about languages how they developed and each culture's spin on adding as much meaning as efficiently as possible to written symbols. I've always loved languages so this was more of a brush up plus learning.

It seems and rightly so ambiguity is death to any characters and efficiency is also fundamental to the character.

I'm not Korean but I like their style literally I like how their language style is so efficient in context to mouth position. It was created because Chinese characters didn't suit Korean language. Japan also streamlined Chinese characters to better suit their culture.

Mayan is another wild language full of meaning in such compact symbols. I had a hard time following their characters.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everything old is new again.

I have no , but I must ...

Edit: Nevermind, HN swallowed the Emojis.

<comment><USER45> Actually, without the emojis, it's even more intriguing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This has the added advantaged of being recognized by both native Japaneses and Chinese speakers instantly, as long as we keep it to kanji.

I recognized what the author is doing from the start as a Chinese speaker.

</comment><comment><USER47> How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?

<comment><USER48> Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

<comment><USER49> > The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it > would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and you select the one you want.

In addition, hiragana input on mobile devices is FAR faster than romaji input, so I'm not sure how you lose time.

<comment><USER15> Yep, and add in that with swipe gestures, the hiragana keyboard only needs ~10 keys, making it much less fidgety to hit the keys on mobile.

Typing Japanese on mobile phones is pretty fast and painless. Easier than English on a regular keyboard, though not quite as fast as English "swipe" style input (whatever the term for that is?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with emojis.

<comment><USER51> Exactly. Although the Japanese realized that the emoji are moji a long time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese.

Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool.

The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.

</comment><comment><USER53> Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.

<comment><USER54> Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work?

Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent _might_ be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).

<comment><USER29> It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin.

For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: [http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kan...](http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kanji)

Try to do that with tones.

<comment><USER54> Why do you have less context in writing than in speech?

I'd be willing to bet heavily that the vast majority of those "homophones" are primarily writing-only, domain specific or archaic "shorthands", which are referred to in speech with slightly more verbose alternatives. Switching to a non-character based system would admittedly in that case mean some domain specific writing would be slightly less compact, but that seems a reasonable tradeoff given the unwieldiness of the current writing system.

<comment><USER15> > I'd be willing to bet heavily that ...

You'd lose your bet. In that "shuu" link as an example, most (10-12 or so) are common enough that you might hear them in a typical newscast, with that pronunciation.

What makes things manageable is the combinatorics. E.g. there are dozens of kanji read "shuu", and many dozens more read "kan", but most of them are only read that way when part of a 2-character compound, and only a small subset of the possible "shuukan"s are words, and only a subset of those words are common in spoken conversation.

Even then, it is a very homophone-heavy language. I can think of four "shuukan"s off the top of my head that you might hear from a newsreader; it would only be after those that you'd get into domain-specific words. This is pretty typical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up for me on Facebook.

<comment><USER56> If you don't like that, you might find Privacy Badger useful: [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> >> "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce [in English]"

English has 26 letters, but there are 40+ sounds; which is to say that there are NOT symbols for all the sounds.

<comment><USER43> One of my goals in life is to introduce Khoisan words into common English use. We need more clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> The problem is that many characters look similar but have nothing in common. For example, the article mentions the character 食 meaning "food". So when after reading the article you see similar character like 良 you might think it is somehow related to food. Well, it is not, it just means "good". And another similar character 長 meaning "long" or "leader" also has no relation to previous two.

And when you get to more complicated characters like 感 it becomes even more confusing.

</comment><comment><USER59> "The English alphabet has only 26 letters, which most kids can master with little difficulty. But we are adults now, why limit ourselves to the 26?"

Less is more. Why waste time learning 2k pictograms (Just for the standard stuff, there's over 50k in total) when you can achieve the same thing with less?

</comment><comment><USER60> Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on the weekend.

<comment><USER61> Yeah, nice insights! Direct Link to the stream: [https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu](https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people do now?

<comment><USER63> After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered "number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing CGI for that was not that easy).

Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;)

It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account e-mail so that you can add them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm interested in how this compactness changes the expressiveness and evolution of the language. In English, as in other languages written in the latin alphabet, you can make changes to the spelling of a word and create new meanings rather fluidly and it's usually easy for the reader to comprehend. I have no knowledge of Japanese, but are there similar possibilities? How do new words/slang get created?

<comment><USER65> Yes Chinese characters (used in Japanese as kanji, which means Chinese character) often are composed of smaller elements or other characters. it common for a character to be composed of two common parts,one indicating meaning in some way,the other indicating pronunciation.

<comment><USER66> Someone made a video showing how this is the case for some characters:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA)

The entire character set is not that simple though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.

<comment><USER68> This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto- Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the sounds. Similar to the origins of the Japanese kana system, but NOT its use of kanji.

<comment><USER67> I'm not following you too much, I'm not saying it is like Hebrew modern or paleo. I'm saying it's like Ancient Pictographic Hebrew[0]. Each character has a meaning, and they're simpler than the second character shown in the article to register (though in their defense that character is likely made up of variations of a couple of other characters). Also, the Hebrew didn't have vowels up until the Masoretes who added to the Hebrew Scriptures by adding vowels to them, but that's another topic not related to this topic.

[0]: [http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif](http://ancient- hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: [http://eepurl.com/ccistz](http://eepurl.com/ccistz)

<comment><USER63> Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views just from the current wave.

<comment><AUTHOR> It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before it's finished.

Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the comments or another article. I know I do.

Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I removed the sign-up link from the post.

<comment><USER63> FWIW I'm very likely to check out the second part, but completely unlikely to fill out the form that you provided. Not sure it's rational, but my guess is that others can feel the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> 口 and 食 are also Chinese characters for mouth and eat, although I had to check google for 食. Initially, I thought that he was teaching Chinese until I read 食 was eat (which needed Google) and that it was "Japanese".

<comment><USER65> As mentioned below, 食in Cantonese or ancient Chinese means eat as a verb

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Well, reading the first part I just realized this is japanese/chinese! In Chinese all characters are like 口 or 食. Sometimes we can also break the character down to several parts to understand its meaning.

</comment><comment><USER71> As someone who has spent years of their life dedicated to mastering Japanese, I must say, you sir are a genius.

By the way, I'm happy your site is rockin! I saw it when you launched candyjapan and I am happy for you =)

</comment><comment><USER72> Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.

<comment><USER73> Japan isn't famous for candies per se but they do have a lot of very interesting/sometimes bizarre treats that you won't find anywhere else in the world.

E.g. Yuzu KitKat, chilli KitKat, caramel lamb, chocolate squid, coffee bubblegum, caramel chips, cake soda, DIY candy, etc.

<comment><USER42> I'd say rather that Japan is famous for its candies for different reasons than Switzerland is for its chocolate. It's not that Japanese candy is of outstanding quality (although it is often quite good), but that they use candy as a vehicle for such a wide variety of novelty products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> About Japanese writing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY)

</comment><comment><USER75> This is off topic, but I can't find any pricing on the candyjapan.com website when visiting on mobile (iPhone). Anyone can tell me how much it costs per month?

<comment><USER17> $25 per month according to the top of the page. But yeah, that's not visible anywhere in the narrower of the responsive views; it's not just mobile, but if you narrow the window on desktop, you get the same result. I'll email bemmu and point that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> This article is cool, I love the way is actually encourages to learn something by starting with something simple that you can grasp in seconds.

I was like (。◕口◕。)!!!

</comment><comment><USER77> @bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

<comment><USER78> It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou".

That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature.

Still, that was a fun post to read.

<comment><USER79> Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on font: ロ

<comment><USER80> But there's usually context given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> 囧

<comment> et-al For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong)

btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?

<comment><USER15> Totally thought that was supposed to be a 3.5" floppy disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Love the live video analytics! Such a simple yet effective hack.

</comment><comment><USER83> That path tho, /%E5%8F%A3 rendering as /口, so slick

</comment><comment><USER84> I'm struggling to find a comment that is actually related to the story of CandyJapan and not that character.

</comment><comment><USER85> Can I believe this? Does Japanese really mix characters that mean things with characters that mean sounds?

<comment><USER86> It does. Kanji represent meaning; hiragana and katakana both represent punctuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Ok, thats a fun hack.

<comment><USER88> A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :)

I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.

<comment><USER89> What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn Japanese.

<comment><USER90> Very interested to know as well.

<comment><USER88> I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books, so someone please start writing them. :)

<comment><USER91> Maybe you're thinking of [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn- langua...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-languages- through-stories)? That's all I could find by googling around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> why is this post getting so many voteups?

<comment><USER43> Because it is a brilliant introduction to a difficult foreign language, for most of us.

<comment><USER92> The essence of the post is "In Japanese there are characters that represent words". Is that a surprise to anyone? (I don't speak Japanese or any similar language)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke?

Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help.

EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

<comment><USER15> Make sure you're clicking on the article's title (口) and not on the article's domain, which comes right afterwards. Clicking on the domain takes you to a list of past submissions from the same site.

For a title like this one it's pretty confusing. I'm guessing you and I aren't the only ones to misclick.

<comment><USER93> I feel dumb:-). That's it, thanks a lot.

<comment><USER43> Modern computing has transformed intellectual activity into an exercise in eye-hand coordination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Nobody said these are all Chinese letter? Japanese is "invented" and forced educated by Meiji government one hundred years ago. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration)

</comment><comment><USER95> Finding it surprising no one has corrected the article in that you technically learned Chinese and by proxy Japanese. Chinese traditional characters + meanings largely carried over from Chinese as well. I'm studying mandarin and i was enjoying it until I was told I just learned "Japanese".</comment>


The Las Vegas "Death Ray" - <AUTHOR> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/las-vegas-death-ray.html

<comment><USER2> The Disney Concert Hall in LA had similar problems.

"Some residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered glare caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces and concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror. The resulting heat made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm, caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 60 °C (140 °F). After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents, the owners asked Gehry Partners to come up with a solution. Their response was a computer analysis of the building's surfaces identifying the offending panels. In 2005 these were dulled by lightly sanding the panels to eliminate unwanted glare."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Concert_Hall>

</comment><comment><USER3> Bummer. When I first saw the graphic I assumed it was a really clever architectural trick designed to heat the pool efficiently... So yeah, let's do _that_.

<comment><USER4> If you think the pool needs efficient heating during the day, I suspect you've never been in Vegas. Particularly not during summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For all those here complaining that they could have done better:

"Designers foresaw the issue, and thought they had solved it by installing a high-tech film on the south-facing glass panes, according to Gordon Absher, the MGM spokesman. The film scatters more than 70 percent of reflected rays. But that's not enough, Absher acknowledged, as some pool guests are still uncomfortable."

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know what these "strange pavilion-like stands topped with polished reflectors" they mention might be? I'm not finding anything via Googling, as that's pretty vague.

edit: as to the main meat of the post, I'm amazed that this sort of thing isn't checked prior to building a _gigantic mirror_. To the degree of "can they get sued for this?". It strikes me as near-gross negligence on the part of the people who approved the design.

</comment><comment><USER7> The office tower I used to work in had similar problem. There were two mirror- glass walls that met at 90 degree angle facing each other and the resulting sun reflection heated up the asphalt at the ground level to the point when it deformed into a wave pattern with about 1' wave length and 1/4' amplitude.

Admittedly it led to few very cool "AHA" moments when new employees (on a smoke break) realized what was going on :)

<comment><USER8> "wave pattern with about 1' wave length and 1/4' amplitude."

Any idea why this length/amplitude?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> remind me again - what is the purpose of huge (and powerful and expensive) building permit departments and long waits for a permit?

<comment><USER9> Building codes are reactionary, not proactive. Almost every code is there because at some point there was a problem in the past, usually something involving one or more deaths due to a fire or collapse that could have been prevented. Someone's drink cup melting is not really a concern for the permit authorities.

<comment><USER10> A friend of the family just passed away, in her eighties. In her youth, she happened to be across the street during the following famous incident, after which she tried to help the injured:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoanut_Grove_fire>

 _As is common in panic situations, many patrons attempted to exit through the main entrance, the same way they had come in. However, the building's main entrance was a single revolving door, immediately rendered useless as the panicked crowd scrambled for safety. Bodies piled up behind both sides of the revolving door, jamming it to the extent that firefighters had to dismantle it in order to get inside. Other avenues of escape were similarly useless: side doors had been bolted shut to prevent people from leaving without paying their bills. A plate glass window, which could have been smashed for escape, was instead boarded up and unusable as an emergency exit. Other unlocked doors, like the ones in the Broadway Lounge, opened inwards, rendering them useless against the crush of people trying to escape. Bartender Daniel Weiss and entertainer Goody Goodelle both survived in the Melody Lounge; by dousing a cloth napkin with a pitcher of water and breathing through it, Weiss was able to escape by crawling through the kitchen and other subfloor areas, while Goodelle and several other employees were able to escape by crawling through a barred window in the kitchen. Five survived by taking refuge in a walk-in refrigerator. Fire officials later testified that, had the doors swung outwards, at least 300 lives could have been spared. Many young soldiers perished in the disaster, as well as a married couple whose wedding had taken place earlier that day._

And that, boys and girls, is why we have building codes.

(It's also why many professional engineers in the US and Canada take an oath, like doctors. Proper engineering is a serious business. Lives are at stake.)

<comment><USER11> Safety is probably the original reason for having building codes, however today the very significant majority of these rules (measured by both quantity and design time required for their impementation) has nothing to do with safety. Codes dictate building masses and building areas, building lines, requirements for parking, facade design, choise of materials, form of the roof, floor heights etc. etc. Some of those don't cause very much damage since they are useful and most architects would implement them anyways. As to the others...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Low-E window glass is reportedly triggering problems.

Press reports include melted house siding resulting from reflections.

<http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/24342726/detail.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> _However, the question here would be: could you deliberately design an architecture without walls, using only thermal gradients—defining areas of public use and congregation solely based on heat?_

I'm pretty sure there's something called "night"

</comment><comment><USER14> I was standing outside the Portland Convention Center this year at OSCON and noticed the wood bark around one of the trees was smoking profusely. Needless to say, the glass awnings had the death ray effect as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> This just in, huge concave structure lined with reflective materials causes unexpected strange heating effect from the sun, says engineers. News at 11.</comment>


Firefox 47 Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/47.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> Sadly only just caught, [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278605](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278605): "Selenium webdriver will totally break when 47 ships: it just causes the browser to crash on startup."

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing this out; saved us an update and reversion headache.

Also fyi, link has an extra trailing '>'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is the Widevine support they're adding limited to Windows and OS X? It's supported by Chrome in Linux.

Of course, HTML5 video is supposed to make video on the web more standard and easily available, but DRM means you need every CDM to support both your browser and OS...

<comment><USER5> Why is Firefox adding CDM support at all? Do they not care about the security and well-being of their users? Or do they think that somehow making ideological compromises will further their proclaimed goals of respecting and helping users of the Web?

The whole point of CDMs is to _prevent_ users from doing things (e.g. taking screenshots or clips of videos for fair use, or backing them up, or pirating wholesale). You can't claim that this is empowering users.

Any effective CDM implementation requires a _media company_ having final control over the user's computer (or a nested computer as provided by TrustZone or SGX). This is not compatible with user freedom or security.

This seems like the opposite of what Mozilla is supposed to be working for. If Mozilla can't exist without market share, and they can only have market share by giving up on user freedom, then simple modus ponens tells us that Mozilla can't exist. If this is the case, those interested in continuing to pursue the goals of empowering typical computer users should look into some form of praxis more effective than developing a Web browser.

<comment><USER6> I dunno, maybe they like their users to be able to play content on the web? People NOT being able to do that on Firefox would just speed up the conversations to Chrome. You know you can turn any CDM module off right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting things in Firefox 47: automatically detecting embedded YouTube Flash videos, converting them to HTML5, and dropping the whitelist of plugins/sites that bypass "click to activate". One more step towards eliminating the last browser plugin, Flash.

<comment><USER7> Interesting indeed.

One could suspect, of course, that this Google-specific kludge is meant to test waters and prep for automatic Flash-to-HTML5 video ads conversions, but that'd be just ridiculous.

<comment><USER8> This doesn't convert the video data, just an <object> to an <iframe>. AFAIK most ads are already served as scripts that load the content dynamically, so the ad networks can serve whatever they want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure why it's not in the release notes, but this adds per-monitor DPI support!

Pretty major feature for professional users, does Chrome support it yet?

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice update. Three finger tap dictionary lookup has been fixed for OS X 10.11. But we'll have to wait until v49 to see this in stable.

Please fix the services menu issues on OS X next: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1261299](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1261299) Bug is assigned, so looking forward to that.

</comment><comment><USER11> This also adds support for ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher suites. Chrome has supported this for a while and it performs better on some mobile devices.

You can go to [https://privacyinternational.org](https://privacyinternational.org) to test this. Then click the lock and go to more info to see the tech details.</comment>


Comparison of British, American and French Systems of Justice - <AUTHOR> http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/justice-systems-us-uk-france-comparison.html <comment><USER2> Be warned, this article has only a passing understanding of "system[s] of common law". The odd phraseology I put down to translation, but some of the specific statements are just wrong. I would say this is a wikipedia-level understanding of how systems of legal authority work.

For instance, in common law countries (ie those taking their traditions from the Brits) judges are not in fact obligated to follow rules of precedent. That's the sort of thing that a textbook might say, but the reality is that judges regularly bypass or ignore previous rulings on similar matters. Similarly, in Civil law jurisdictions (those that take traditions from the French) judges regularly rely on past rulings by respected judges. The process may not be formalized, but to say that judges no not regard previous decisions on similar matters is disingenuous. They write. They read each other;s work. They learn and share in much the same way as common law jurisdictions.

Speaking as someone working in common law jurisdictions, I'd say that the primary motivation for a judge to follow a previous ruling by a higher court is not some rule of precedent. Imho they are motivated by the likelihood of their ruling being turned on appeal. That gives them much more room in which to act. That is judicial discretion. That power is why we must respect judges and why they in turn must work to deserve our respect.

<comment><USER3> > Similarly, in Civil law jurisdictions (those that take traditions from the > French) judges regularly rely on past rulings by respected judges.

You are indeed correct in most of your comment. But in France while it's true that judges read decisions by other judges, they will never ever quote another judge (except the ECHR). If for instance the Court de cassation (One of the French three (or four, or five, depends on how you count them) Supreme Courts) has said that "X has to be interpreted as Y". Lower judges will start using the sentence directly lifted from the Court de cassation decision "X should be interpreted as Y", but without quotation marks or any sort of attribution. It's a fiction that the judge came up with this interpretation by himself. Sometimes the judge will use some sort of caveat like "Il est constant que" ("It is always the case that") which is a way of saying that he is looking at precedent, without saying it explicitly.

If a judge did quote directly the Court de cassation with attribution, his decision could be appealed and be overthrown by the Court de cassation itself.

And if a judge disagrees with our Supreme Court, he will oftentimes without any hesitation "enter in resistance" (issuing decisions that go against the Court de cassation interpretation), the idea is that this is the way judges try to get the Supreme Court to change its opinion. This is also possible because he have more or less 90 judges in the Court de cassation, and turnover is quite high, so if a decision was only one or two votes in a direction (which no one knows because the votes are secret and the ratio of yays and nays also is secret), in a year, a judge or two at the court may change and the position could change.

My conclusion would be that in France we do respect precedent most of the time... but only if the judge agree with it. Our judges have a natural inclination to ignore precedent. Meanwhile in Common law countries, there is a natural inclination ot respect it... but sometimes judges disagree.

Caveat : In France, decisions by the Constitutional Council (the "Higher" Supreme Court... the Court of cassation would disagree on the "Higher" part) do create binding precedent... because those decision can change directly the text of the law. If the Council says that a sentence in a law is unconstitutional. Then the sentence is stripped out of the Code itself. Lower judges cannot therefore ignore it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think main difference is that some people get more sympathy from jury and better chances to get away with crime. In continental law judge tends to be more fair.

For example black receive higher sentences for drug related crimes. Women commits 30% of all murders but are 10 times less likely to be convicted.

Also in continental law sentences are shorter and more reasonable; 8 years for murder etc.

EDIT: we actually have sentences for murder 10 years to lifetime. It depends on case.

<comment><USER5> I don't think 8 years for murder is reasonable. Within a lifespan of 80 years, someone could kill about 10 people. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.

<comment><USER6> This can't be the correct way of thinking of the prison system. A person should not be sent to prison for the sole purpose of suffering for the crime which they committed. There is a reason people call a prison a correctional facility. The point is to correct the problems in their character that caused them to commit such a crime. If you isolate them from the world it's no wonder they would eventually commit a crime again. Because they have no idea how to fit into society. And then we just have another person to take care of while they don't do anything to contribute to society.

<comment><USER7> By this logic, I can just murder anyone I like, and then demonstrate that I won't do it again.

After that, no reason to keep me in prison any more right? It's not like the dead person or their family count for anything - it's all about me and the government's budget. Yeah?

<comment><USER8> Serious question: what the fuck is wrong with you? This Puritan "let's murder and torture people for their sins" approach is not working. Criminals are humans.

Yes, it's not about the dead person. They're dead.

It's also not about the family of the dead person. They've already been harmed.

It's not about you, it's about preventing future crimes. If you've been turned into a productive member of society, great -- everyone's off better now. If you haven't, the system has failed society (not just you).

Heck, there's a good chance prison isn't even the best solution for you personally. Most likely you need actual counselling or you're facing social problems. Containment is the last resort.

You don't fix bugs by hiding them -- you fix them by figuring out why they happened in the first place and determining how to decrease the likelihood of them happening again.

EDIT: In response to the killed throwaway: if you kill someone "in the heat of the moment" and it's not self-defence or anything else we consider acceptable, of course there's still a problem in need of fixing: self control. If you kill a man because he sleeps with your wife, no matter how betrayed you might feel, it's still a problem with how you act on those feelings. But this is only visible if you stop thinking "what is an appropriate punishment" and start thinking "why did this happen" and "what could have prevented it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Realistically don't most western countries have a hybrid?

In common law countries virtually everything (criminal) as been defined by statute and hardly anything is at common law. And in civil law countries judges still heavily rely on precedent to aid in interpreting law.

<comment><USER10> > And in civil law countries judges still heavily rely on precedent to aid in > interpreting law.

The US and the UK are different in one other aspect compared to most Continental countries, more exactly in the fact that they had had a "democratic" and fair judicial system for at least the last 200 years, so there's plenty of cases from which to create "fair" precedents.

For comparison, my country (in Eastern Europe) has been a Communist dictatorship for 50 years, and it would be a little strange to judge a present complaint based on cases judged in the past by communist-controlled judges. The same goes for countries like Italy (which had Mussolini and the fascists rule them for 20+ years), Germany (the Nazis), Spain (Franco), Portugal (Salazar) and so on.

Plus, in this discussion I'm more on Thomas Paine's side against Burke's, the past has no intrinsic "value" stored in itself, the common law comes from the "dark ages". I know Napoleon is still pretty much hated in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in imposing his judicial code he was on the more enlightened side of things.

<comment><USER11> _> Germany (the Nazis)_

IIRC this actually happened, albeit on an individual basis: When prosecuting communists in the 50s and 60s in Western Germany, some judges considered the defendant to be a repeat-offender if they had been convicted of being a communist in the Third Reich.

Yes, the judges were former Nazis.

Edit: Source (German, I'm afraid): [http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/14/14361/1.html](http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/14/14361/1.html)

<comment><USER8> To be fair, while Nazi Germany wasn't exactly democratic and there was a lot of politics in how laws were applied, being a communist activist was illegal both under Nazi German law as well as under West German law (in the 50s and 60s anyway).

The reasoning was less that someone had been convicted "earlier in this country" but that they had been convicted before at all, indicating they've literally done the same thing before and gotten punished for it.

If you buy into the logic that repeat offences constitute a more severe crime, it's sensible to take prior offences into account even if they were persecuted under a different jurisdiction.

Of course the idea that "resistance against the state" under the Nazi regime could serve as a prior offence seems ludicrous but let's not pretend the persecution of communists during the Cold War was fairer than the persecution of political undesirables before (though the punishment was obviously different).

<comment><USER11> _> If you buy into the logic that repeat offences constitute a more severe crime, it's sensible to take prior offences into account even if they were persecuted under a different jurisdiction._

But Nazi Germany wasn't a state under the rule of law, so it's questionable whether someone convicted by one of its courts was really guilty of the crime they were accused of. I.e. the different jurisdiction wasn't trustworthy, so its verdict should have been ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Common law: some of the laws are based on customs, which means that things > are against the law and can be punished because they have been punished by > judges in the past.

Can anyone give an example of this?

<comment><USER13> US and UK courts help develop the law through the precedents they set in their judgements. Law is not just a product of the legislative process and statute, but also of case law developed by judges. Common law often leaves a lot of the details of implementation to judges, and judges are also left to interpret and establish the law when an unforeseen case comes to their court that the legislative process did not deliberate over. If a higher court establishes a precedent for punishment then a lower court might cite that precedent as part of their legal reasoning of why they are bound to a particular punishment, and an appeal can be made against that judge if it is found they don't follow precedent. If you read a formal judgement you will usually find references to case law created by previous judges scattered throughout a judge's argument.

Edit: As an example maybe look at the recent popular case of Oscar Pistorius in South Africa in which a major contention has been the interpretation of case law by the judge to decide the appropriate category (murder vs manslaughter) and punishment for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp.

<comment><USER12> But is there an actual modern-day example? Like, someone was punished for picking strawberries out of season because it's against common law even though there is no legislative law.

It's sounds to me like this situation no longer arises -- everything has been written down as a law.

<comment><USER13> New precedents are created all the time. Just look at the US supreme court which is a court with the primary responsibility of establishing case law precedents when lower courts disagree on statue and case law. They recently legalised gay marriage (I'd say good outcome based on bad reasoning, but whatever) and made it impossible for the US states and their courts from blocking gay marriage due to the precedent set as the highest court. Lower courts can now prosecute against states and officials that try to block it. The only thing that could override that ruling at this point is a constitutional amendment.

I don't think we get many courts creating laws on picking strawberries out of season though. There would need to be an existing legal context in which strawberries picking out of season is an edge case that can be decided by case law.

<comment><USER12> Aha, so that's an actual modern-day example? An official who tries to prevent a gay marriage can be punished under common law even though there is no legislated law against officials trying to prevent gay marriage.

<comment><USER13> Yes, there is no explicit statute that says that an official can be punished for preventing gay marriage, but new case law would make this an offence and a lower court might need to establish further new case law to decide what an appropriate punishment might be for the official or state that does try to block it within the legal context of similar violations of law both in statute and case law. Basically they would get fired for not performing their duties as an official.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The differences between Civil and Common law systems really fall apart under close scrutiny. It's almost purely semantic.

</comment><comment><USER15> The 14th amendment does not guarantee privacy so I'm not sure why I'd believe anything else this page says...

<comment><USER16> The Supreme Court disagrees with you. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) and Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).</comment></comment>


Caviar employees claim mistreatment over acquisition offers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20805968/caviar-employees-doordash-square-acquisition-mistreatment-renegotiate-offers <comment><AUTHOR> Headline modified because original headline was 7 characters too long for submission.</comment>


DeSopa – DNS Evasion to Stop Oppressive Policy in America - i-hacker http://blog.insecure.in/?p=1038

<comment><AUTHOR> If we can get enough geeks with root to dns tables to cooperate, I could write an app that would make sites the collective does not approve of unreachable anywhere in the world, so we can cause rolling brownouts for sopa supporting companies. Support sopa, your dns routing and tcp/ip routes report false 404 not founds.

War is a bitch. They want a worldwide website off switch program to augment their power? Lets give it to them. And then open source it so any script kitty can screw up dns routing targeted at any site. This is a war of power, Spartans, lay down your weapons!</comment>


UX is not UI - <AUTHOR> http://pixxel.co/feed/ux-is-not-ui

<comment><USER2> I am not sure the title is appropriate... because this is just a list of things you do in your job doesn't mean this have nothing to do with UI work...there is something wrong with this article but I can't really explain what.

</comment><comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more with the statement that "UX is not UI". I consider myself to be pretty skilled at UI design, but I often find that other developers (with no graphic design talent) are just as good, if not better, at UX than I am. I don't see why these always have to go hand-in-hand. The 'Photoshop guy' always seems to be assumed to be the resident UX expert.

</comment><comment><USER4> Copywriting is UX? How many UX desginers can do copywriting?

<comment><USER5> All the good ones can. It might not be the job of the UX guy to do all the copywriting, _but_ it is his job to make sure the person typing the walls of text is using the correct information, displaying it in a manner that benefits the goals of the product, and in the correct style so as to maximize conversions (or whatever metrics you're using today). A good UX guy/gal is a person who is adept at writing, designing, and hopefully at least a little programming. He/she should also have a great eye for detail and most important than anything else, be as rational as can be and use logic to define a projects direction in addition to one of the most important aspects of the UX field - user/a-b/whatever testing.

<comment><USER4> But thats the job of the copywriter. Making sure everything reads and displays. I think there is a bigger issue at hand and that is the fragmentation of skills going on. People are hiring more specialists when there is no need for one. A (good and experienced) copywriter with real world knowledge can actually do all those things you mention. Maybe its another buzzword like growth hacking, which I use to like and use, but now loathe.

Any list of good UX people I could research?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Semantics</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell? (2016) - <AUTHOR> Last time around this was fairly popular. Lets have a 2016 version. If you have any side projects that you've built and that you no longer have time for, list them here and let's see if others want to buy it from you. <comment><USER2> [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-content-calendar- lite/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-content-calendar-lite/) \- A drag and drop content calendar for WordPress. You can literally drag and drop posts to different dates on a calendar and they'll post automatically when the date comes round.

I built it last year, along with a premium version (which auto-suggests what you should write based on low competition kW opportunities) but ended up not getting around to releasing it. The free plugin is up on WordPress and has about 700 downloads.

I'm willing to sell the free + (unreleased) premium plugin for the right price.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://niklasbuschmann.github.io/zenreader/](https://niklasbuschmann.github.io/zenreader/)

Feedreader, not yet ready, currently lacking a backend.

If someone would be interested in maintaining / finishing the project, I could transfer the ownership, the source is already on github.

<comment><USER4> This sounds and looks extremely interesting. How can I contact you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://jquerycards.com](http://jquerycards.com)

A jQuery plugin repository but I no longer have time to maintain it due to the other commitments.

<comment><USER6> That's a shame. I don't recall how I found this site, but have enjoyed visiting it. Beautiful design!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://easyendorse.com](http://easyendorse.com) \- A SaaS app that lets you collect & display testimonials on any website. Originally built with the intention of helping out small businesses that don't want to solely rely on Yelp for their reviews.

No traffic/users, but the app works well. Not strongly looking to sell, but I'm open to talking.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://jokund.com](http://jokund.com) Let you create and update your blog from a simple email! Ccing people to your email will subscribe them to your blog and they'll receive the full posts in their inbox. Handles attached photos really well. Pretty correctly coded, nodejs back-end. Ho yeah we loved working on this, but we don't have the time to maintain it anymore...

</comment><comment><USER9> I want to sale Woocommerce plugins for reasonable prices. On our eCommerce store you can find Magneo, Wordpress, Woocommerce, OpenCart extensions and plugins. On our site (FMEAddons.com) you can find more than 100 free and paid extensions for your online store. Sample link: [https://www.fmeaddons.com/woocommerce-plugins- extensions/pro...](https://www.fmeaddons.com/woocommerce-plugins- extensions/product-inquiry-form.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://webstories.org](http://webstories.org): A platform to write stories based on small sections.

You can put this on Google Translator to have an idea of what it is about: [https://www.facebook.com/webstories.org/posts/83533579984057...](https://www.facebook.com/webstories.org/posts/835335799840573).

I started it the beginning of 2015 in Brazil. Since then I did not have any time to invest on it and I am now living in Australia.

The code is public on Github: [https://github.com/FagnerMartinsBrack/WebStories](https://github.com/FagnerMartinsBrack/WebStories).

Honestly I just want someone to create a platform like this so that I can publish my stories someday, there's nothing exactly like what I want =(

</comment><comment><USER11> StartOpz ([http://www.startopz.com](http://www.startopz.com)):

Workday-lite (really lite) for small businesses. Individual components such as time-off tracking and expense reports all have sites on there dedicated to them individually that seem to do well. This covers all of them and could use somebody who has time to dedicate to (content) marketing.

Moviestud.io ([http://www.moviestud.io](http://www.moviestud.io)):

Production management for independent filmmakers. The blog has a lot of epic length blog posts that can use somebody who can spend some time promoting them.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.writedown.co](https://www.writedown.co) is a full blown Twitter clone with streaming, retweeting capabilities etc.

It is immutable and opinionated on that. You can embed a tweet in the BTC blockchain but was thinking of other blockchains too.

Didn't have time to market it I just made the effort of programming it in latest technologies (ES7, OrientDB, Ractive.js).

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://lolcats.com](http://lolcats.com) \- the original meme website

<comment><USER14> Shoot me an email.. It's in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My iOS non-photorealistic filtering app: [https://appsto.re/nz/uj0Dab.i](https://appsto.re/nz/uj0Dab.i)

The sketch and comic book photos have a lot of interesting depth to them, but I never marketed the app or went any further with the execution.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've let [http://historio.us](http://historio.us) languish for too long. I would like to sell it to someone who can properly maintain it, but I've left it without any promotion for too long to fetch a price that will be worth the hassle.

<comment><USER17> I'm a paying customer of historio.us. I really like it :) I would be sad if you let it go.

<comment><USER16> I'm glad you like it! The idea would be to sell it so someone could take better care of it, because it has so many satisfied users that it's a pity that I leave it unpromoted and mostly unmaintained... I definitely wouldn't want to sell it to someone just to have it shut down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a recently discontinued SaaS project with golang backend (deployed via terraform), iOS mobile app and Django web app.

I didn't have time to focus on getting paying customers so I decided to discontinue it after cca 3 months in prod.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone who has something that is actually generating decent revenue, i.e. $1,000 or more?

<comment><USER14> Would have been better to have some sort of basic template here... URL / short description / traffic / revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wanted to create this decentralized social network that is community driven and community developed (through GitHub), but I think I'm too late to the show. It's just something I do for fun now and am making steady progress.

<comment><USER21> Do you have a link to e.g. a Github repo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.magentoreporting.com](http://www.magentoreporting.com)

struggling to scale sales, i'm more of a product and development guy

<comment><USER23> FYI [https://magento.com/legal/licensing](https://magento.com/legal/licensing)

"You may not use the Magento trademark or any other mark associated with the Magento offering from our company in your domain name or URL. (For example, "www.magentohosting.com" is not allowed)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> h34t iPhone app

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h34t/id949092708?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h34t/id949092708?mt=8)

I turned off the backend ec2 servers until I figure out my next pivot. So if you download the app right now, it won't show the h34t map - but you can get the idea from the iTunes screenshots

</comment><comment><USER25> We are looking to buy established projects with good revenue $2k+ per month. Feel free to contact via email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER26> www.whattagged.com - A tool that shows all tagged items in Instagram. Currently only Instagram posts are shown in future other social media integration and few useful idea to implement. Not strongly looking to sell, open to talk. mail : mistrypar[at]gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://cidrapido.com](http://cidrapido.com)

ICD10 search app for the Brazilian market.

</comment><comment><USER28> www.thevacationbrain.com

Ranks top search on Google for over a hundred vacation related keywords.

I recently redesigned the site and although there's quite a lot lacking, I do intend to add more features to it. Unless someone makes a good offer I'll probably keep working on it

</comment><comment><USER29> an oil and gas employment aggregate with a bot that collects jobs from more than 70 of the major companies:

[http://liisted.com/](http://liisted.com/)

It's built on MVC 4.0 and hosted on Azure. I haven't looked at it in more than a year.

</comment><comment><USER30> wiseguy.com - profitable consumer + SaaS arms, PHP Symfony backend, very little maintenance</comment>


The Usability of Passwords - FAQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.baekdal.com/tips/the-usability-of-passwords-faq/ <comment><USER2> Yes, and see <http://diceware.com> for a method of generating highly secure and memorable passphrases completely offline, using standard six-sided dice.</comment>


vi vs. Emacs: The Oldest Rivalry in Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.html

<comment><USER2> Endianness might be a bit older than editorness.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#History)

</comment><comment><USER3> Between vi and Emacs, Emacs always wins. vi is very poor editor, barely better than Notepad from Windows.

It's Vim where all the features lay.

<comment><USER4> _" vi is very poor editor"_

But Vi is better than Ed where Emacs (~30Mb) cannot be installed on low memory contstrained. For me where there are no constraints, the choice is personal preference.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My afternoon project, Clustergram - <AUTHOR>

I built this in an afternoon. It simply lets user quickly create pages of instagram photos that correspond to tags (selected by the user).
The font I use renders great on Safari and Chrome. Some have told me that it renders a bit differently on Firefox but is otherwise ok. Let me know if you run into any issues like this or if you have any general suggestions!
Thanks!
http://clustergram.torehan.me <comment><USER2> I think this is interesting as a discovery application. I also found it easy to use which I like.

<comment><AUTHOR> thats interesting. thanks!</comment></comment>


Banks Own Thousands of Railcars but Don't Know What to Do with Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-own-thousands-of-railcars-but-dont-know-what-to-do-with-them-11577356201 <comment><USER2> Convert the box cars to affordable housing. There are companies that can outfit them to be really nice little houses. Search youtube for examples, there are many. Search for "shipping container homes". It is not what you might expect.</comment>


Did you Not get accepted to YC Boston? - <AUTHOR>

are their individual developers or small teams that got turned down for a bid for YC?  If so, and you're weighing whether to continue on or not, please contact me. <comment><USER2> Some constructive criticism:

1) You haven't provided any contact info. The e-mail address in your HN profile isn't publicly visible; you need to type it somewhere in the bio field if you want others to see it.

2) It's unclear what you mean in your title. YCombinator doesn't have a Boston program anymore, and hasn't for almost a year now.

3) The above two things, plus poor capitalization & spelling, plus a lack of any details or even intriguing hint of the purpose behind your message, makes it seem really, really sketchy.</comment>


Why don't we developers care about accessibility? - <AUTHOR>

In a prevoius project I became aware of the lack of respect in web development for people with disabilities.
I had the experience to come in contact with users that had reduced visual perception. It was an eye opener in many ways, especially as former sinner.
We needed to adopt our product to meet requirements for visually impaired users and it was a huge undertaking on an old product. Even if we fixed all bad markup, the bigger problem was workflow and page composition.
Too many pages had too much information to usable for user with a screen reader. If the screen reader reports 200 links on page, which one to open if all of them do totally different things? Just "reading" all of them takes a very long time and if the context of the link is always changing to different logical tasks.
And often the workflow to get to the correct context involved popups, mouse hovering, drag and drop and other bad design choices. Even for a normal user.
Usually the argument against making pages accessible is as follows,
* adds extra effort
* complicated
* hard to know correct solution
* screws up the design
I would argue that if you think this thru from the beginning and takes into account when doing the design, your general workflow will improve for all users, because you avoid the complicated solutions.
The irony is that myself is visually impaired with mild colorblindness, but I really never thought about it before that project.
Here at HN the login name in the upper right corner is written in green on an orange background. I can't read that. Its just a blur and cause eye irritation.
In my opinion, accessibility should be part of the curriculum in computes science courses.
But even if you do, you need to get developers to enjoy solving this problem. Most developers don't care when you mention it. Maybe because they don't see it as a technical problem.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Making accessibility a priority takes a lot of extra effort and time and often seems unimportant, especially if your target audience is more specific and doesn't focus on the sick or elderly specifically. It should pay off however as it normally forces you to stick to best practices in coding and design, and to keep the end user in mind, and make the product better for everyone. Ideally it should be one of the fundamentals your product is built on, not an afterthought once you start getting support mails about it - however perhaps that just doesn't work in a startup environment where you need to get out a MVP and iterate fast. Outside of that, I think a change in culture is needed to make accessibility a core component of product management.

</comment><comment><USER3> For developers to spend time on it, clients and customers must be educated about it and want to pay more for it. When that happens, I think we will see more tools develop to save time on the extra work.

</comment><comment><USER4> This should be a blog post because the content is editorial.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because IE is taking all my stupid time !</comment>


FamilyLeaf's (YC W12) Y Combinator Application  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/familyleaf-y-combinator-ap/ <comment><USER2> Congrats on getting accepted and thanks for being so candid about your application.

I have a couple of questions however:

Did you face any problems having disclosed you scrapped a competitors site for potential clients/leads? Did all the founders think that was an acceptable method for building a base?

How did you derive the potential turnover figures and was the model and revenue discussed in depth at the interview?

Finally, how did you guys decide that FamilyLeaf was the right direction?

Best of luck to you all with the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, it was our pleasure! Let me address your questions one-on-one.

1\. We didn't have any problems disclosing that. In fact, (as you can tell by this little stunt) we are very open about it. We thought it was acceptable. But we also are fallible.

2\. Turnover figures? We talked about it at the interview, definitely.

3\. We were extremely passionate about it. And less so about AthleteNet. That was the number 1 thing. The other smaller but still very valuable factors included the market size, social impact, and potential for faster scaling.

Feel free to email me if you have any more questions! email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for putting up the application. I could clearly see how you guys aren't afraid to "break some laws" i.e. data scrapping, getting free food, and even weed selling!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Some of the risks we've taken have definitely paid off, and the ones that we haven't we don't regret taking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the red robin tip!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great! Just got off a vegetarian-spree. Gonna go back to claiming those free burgers :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Too bad YC got rid of the "if you were an animal, what would you be, and why" question, which was on the Dropbox-era application.

<comment><USER6> We never asked that. The question you're probably thinking of is:

      Tell us in one or two sentences something about
      each founder that shows he or she is an "animal,"
      in the sense described in How to Start a Startup.

<comment><USER7> I loved that question.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity what did you say?

<comment><USER9>
      "Animals? We're a freaking zoo.

      Andy: When Paul described the type of person whom he
      believes is an animal at his "How to Start a Startup"
      talk, Andy was the first person of whom I (Steve) thought.

      Steve: Steve regularly works extra hours at his current
      programming job, even when over-time isn't an option (i.e.
      working for free) to fix nagging bugs. At school, Steve
      often works late nights with Computer Science friends
      helping them get assignments working.

      Alexis: See current schedule. When it comes to design,
      Alexis literally won't rest until every pixel is aligned--
      sleep deprivation is the status quo and when it comes to
      working in general, coffee makes sure he's the last one to
      go to sleep at night and the first one up in the morning."

[http://alexisohanian.com/our-y-combinator- summer-05-applicat...](http://alexisohanian.com/our-y-combinator- summer-05-application-what-w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct link to the app (PDF): [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19699329/FamilyLeaf_YC_application.p...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19699329/FamilyLeaf_YC_application.pdf)

P.S. Wow, small world. I went to the same high school as you guys. Good luck with FamilyLeaf, I'm now a big fan!

<comment><AUTHOR> Dude! Interlake?? We should catch up! firstname.lastname@example.com

We're also now a big fan of you!

<comment><USER10> Ya, the good ol' Saints! Though, I graduated in '04.

(I read in your YC app that you were from Bellevue so I Googled you and saw that you went to IHS. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't find your contact info anywhere!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The weed thing didn't seem to add much to the app at all (and could have been quite negative), but good to keep the theme going in the pitch video:

"It's spreading like a weed"..."It's already been extremely sticky"

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny haha. Thanks for the comment :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not that I care, but now the whole world know you got suspended for selling weed. This information cannot be good for you or your company, considering your family-oriented userbase

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Wisp. This is Wesley - you might be right. It's something I did a long time ago and in the past. I have changed and people that know me know that. It may be something that will turn some heads, but I like to live very honestly and transparently. I hope people won't read too much in to it and only see how much I've grown.

<comment><USER13> I'm glad to see people being more frank about this. As more people like you come forward, hopefully the stigma around it will fade. I've admitted it when appropriate, but been very hesitant to do so, even though I think the experience was incredibly valuable and shaped who I am.

<comment><USER14> As someone w/ drug use in my past, I believe very strongly that the stigma around it is deserved.

I would think very hard about hiring or investing in someone who used marijuana, or who decided to sell marijuana (a bet with a big risk for very little reward), or who thought that using drugs was cool enough to include it on an application. Speaking from experience, marijuana is addictive, saps ambition, and makes it difficult to think hard and think logically. Anyone who has tried to code or do math while high knows exactly what I am talking about.

Wesley, obviously you have grown and been very successful since. I wish you only more success, and you are already far ahead of where I was at 19 (still smoking too much pot).

<comment><USER5> If you refused to hire even occasional pot smokers (or take investment from them, or invest in them) in the Bay Area, you'd have a really hard time. (This comes up with federal government related contracts and staffing.)

<comment><USER14> I am not saying that there should be hard rules. Just that there is a stigma there, and that it is there for a reason. Would you invest in a company with technical founders who got high every day?

<comment><USER5> Pot wouldn't be a factor in my investment decision; it would depend on the quality of work they did.

I don't think drugs are incompatible with being a responsible and productive person. There would be downsides to high profile drug use, like what happened to Sean Parker at Facebook, where presumably there was fear that the LPs in various investors would raise issues.

People can be useless fucktards with or without drugs; people can be productive with or without drugs.

<comment><USER14> I don't think drugs are incompatible with being a responsible and productive person either. I think that they are negatively correlated with being a responsible and productive person. I think a search will turn up a lot of evidence to support that.

Pot isn't the worst thing ever, but it isn't going to help you start a business or become a great programmer. While you are high, you will be worse at reasoning and your working memory won't be great. This makes it harder to write code. There is also a legal risk, justified or not.

Drugs are a frustrating topic to debate. On one side there is a huge amount of misinformation intended to scare people away from drug use. Then, in reaction to that and coming out of the cognitive dissonance of millions of people doing something that they know isn't good for them, there is a ton of 'pot is good for you because it comes from the earth' bs on the other side. I think people on the internet (and apparently on HN) tend to be in the latter group, and I feel like it is worth pointing out the downsides.

<comment><USER15> I wrote my mathematics PhD thesis while smoking pot to relieve some terrible back pain. Cognitively, it helped me on occassion to break through barriers in abstract reasoning and creativity. You might have had a bad experience with drug use, and I do sympathize, but please spare us the sweeping generalizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congratulations! Your age might give you trouble--people will feel embarrassed to work for such young people, and people in general might not take you seriously. Good luck!

<comment><USER17> Zuckerberg seems to have done okay.

People who are concerned with the age of their boss are a little too concerned with status / authority / hierarchy to be at an early-stage startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate to be _that_ guy... but I'm not impressed by this application. At all. I am aware that YC is looking for adventurous founders who aren't afraid to bend the rules in their favor - or break them outright. I can appreciate that. These guys were clearly aware of that and it seems like they developed their responses accordingly. They deliberately showed their mischievous side to game the system. And then they released their yc application to further game the (pr) system. I guess this is a big part of what startups are about, so well played. I'm interested to see where this company goes.

Edit : should have said thanks in advance for the downvotes. Criticism is not accepted on hn these days.

<comment><USER19> don't hate the player, try to love it.

<comment><USER18> I don't hate the players. These particular players just do not come off as candid, is all.

<comment><USER19> it's true but that's what they should do.. After these guys, I guess our responses on application are too naive and honest :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How removing three vowels from the name of my webapp quadrupled signups. - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupproject.org/2011/06/names/

<comment><USER2> Well this is pretty useless without knowing the real name and real shortened name. It makes sense if the new name _looked_ better than the old one. That's pretty obvious.

I think the title is a bit silly. It suggests anyone can remove three vowels and be more successful. Fcbok shuld give it a try.</comment>


I don't trust Cloudflare with IPFS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kareldonk/i-dont-trust-cloudflare-with-ipfs-fce6786af658 <comment><USER2> First thing I thought when I first heard the news was "yet another service that Cloudflare wants to MITM". The _entire point_ of IPFS is to avoid centralized control of access content, and reduce the possibility of an entity arbitrarily deciding which content is "bad" and needs to be blocked.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, despite disagreeing with the Daily Stormer's content, this was the first thing I thought of too when I heard about their IPFS gateway.

A corporation launching a service that would give it power to influence a service running on decentralized technology.</comment>


Google Fails at Figuring out who the Turkish Prime Minister Is - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=prime+minister+of+turkey

<comment><AUTHOR> It shows Muammer Güler as the Prime Minister of Turkey instead of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This seems like a pretty big fail.</comment>