Coronavirus – The Status of the Outbreak and 4 Possible Scenarios - <AUTHOR> https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/coronavirus-the-status-of-the-outbreak-and-4-possible-scenarios <comment><USER2> > In the optimistic scenario, a month from now we can calculate, from data > outside mainland china, that the CFR is perhaps .3% or below

What so absurd is it will take the world a month to know how serious this virus is. By that point it's likely too late to do anything to stop it.

It's beyond disgusting that China is putting the entire world's population at risk due to pride and ego.

Essentially "we'd rather screw over potentially millions of lives everywhere rather than admit how poorly we handled this".

...and they just keep digging.

<comment><USER3> This is a country the forced doctors at gun point to perform live delivery abortions in order to enforce the one child rule.

A good friend's sister was a Obgyn in China, and when women were discovered with their second pregnancy they would be brought in for abortions even if the baby was full term.

Doctors would either comply or have guns drawn and be threatened, doctors who failed to comply would be taken away, never to be seen again. At one point my friend's sister was performing twice as many abortions than she was delivering babies, and all of the abortions the mothers were being forced. Screaming, yelling, begging, pleading and crying hysterically.

As my friend would say, "My country doesn't value human life in any way, people are just numbers, all people are just numbers."

<comment><USER4> This account seems exaggerated. Forced late-term abortions in China were certainly a real thing, and the value of the life of a stranger is on par with that of livestock. However, guns are rarely seen in everyday life in China. This is especially the case with policemen and low-level enforcers. The exception are soldiers on duty, and security for transporting currency. Guns are kept in armories, brought out by specially trained "armed police".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One point missing that I think could be important even in the more worrying scenarios is the average health condition or age of the people who develop severe stage infection. If the CFR is high but people dying are mostly old and not of working age, the pandemic will create a drag on global economy but not as bad as the CFR might lead to suppose. Don't mean to sound cynical, just putting another element into the equation.

<comment><USER6> 1) This is an ignorant statement, there are plenty of people in the 55+ age range who work worldwide.

2) Simply having workers get incapacitated is one of the smallest impacts the virus will have. Take a look at the present price of crude oil - the effects of the epidemic in China are already sending that crashing.

Quarantines, the need for medical supplies, lost work hours, elimination of disposable income, an economic downturn worldwide as products become harder to get and more expensive to transport... there are lots and lots of impacts this will have, including vastly increased unemployment.

Even if no one at all dies, a pandemic with the world getting sick all at the same time will have an impact bigger than any other event going back to World War II.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From a reliable source, a Western journalist who was evacuated, this article's information seems accurate.

It's difficult to tell what the current numbers are, or even what they will be because of censorship, but you can bet it's 2-5x what's reported. Also, it's compounded by the delay of information having to go to intermediaries before reaching international journalists. And, there are some isolated instances of bodies on the streets and in crashed cars of people not making it to the hospital before expiring, and then not being collected quickly because of fearful coroners/undertakers... which is expected in a minor pandemic in a densely-populated city. I would bet there are at least a dozen dead bodies on the street right now of the 400+ people who die in NYC's five boroughs every day. Even if it were Ebola-deadly and infectious as an airborne-mutated norovirus, sustained isolation of population members can kill any pathogen because its transmission rate drops to insignificant and then 0.

<comment><USER8> > It's difficult to tell what the current numbers are, or even what they will > be because of censorship, but you can bet it's 2-5x what's reported.

Definitely. IIRC, to be counted in the official statistics, an infected person has to have significant contact with the medical system, but the medical system in Wuhan has been so overloaded that people have been turned away in large numbers so that diagnostic work is not being done in many cases. There are reports of many people dying at home in Wuhan, which wouldn't be counted as part of the official statistics.

I've also heard reports that the crematoriums in Wuhan are also overloaded, and aren't allowed to report any statistics except to the government.

I don't think we'll know the full impact for a long time, until someone can some kind of excess mortality study with individualized vital records.

<comment><USER9> If I were betting I'd bet over 5x [https://www.ccn.com/billionaire- whistleblower-wuhan-coronavi...](https://www.ccn.com/billionaire- whistleblower-wuhan-coronavirus-death-toll-is-over-50000/)

<comment><USER8> I'm skeptical of the Chinese government's statistics, but I'm also skeptical of those sources:

[https://www.ccn.com/about-us/](https://www.ccn.com/about-us/):

> CCN.com, also known as CCN Markets, was founded in the summer of 2013 in > Norway by serial entrepreneur Jonas Borchgrevink as "CryptoCoinsNews.com".

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/a-site-t...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/a-site- tied-to-steve-bannon-is-writing-fake-news-about-the):

> A Site Tied To Steve Bannon Is Writing Fake News About The Coronavirus

> Founded by an exiled billionaire and critic of the Chinese government, G > News claimed without proof that China was prepared to admit the disease > originated in its labs.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I'll give you that. I'd guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. That said the basic claim "... alleges Wuhan has crematoriums working 24/7" seems backed by other sources. Even the Chinese government admits it's figures are only tested cases and they can't test everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry for not being upbeat!

I am wondering why the world still does not seem to care about it. Why do we have to wait until every city gets infected? Why we can't stop travelling? Eventually, when it spreads to a city, the quarantine must be the only way... but why we aren't preventing that ourselves? The politicians does not really seem to care (in the bunkers)? Individual, consumer society with no interest and without resources, civil routine and real impact to the events is crazy to me. Even a couple of days ago WHO was thinking about restarting the flights to China. It's just WTF to me.

In last days I can't even read any tech/HN news because it's not news to me compared to this unsolved terrible situation. I don't even understand how this topic is not more visible here in HN and on other places. We need to do something.

<comment> _-___________-_ I think it's pretty clear that many people do care about it very much. Imposing travel restrictions, cancelling flights to major trading partners, etc, has a very significant cost and isn't taken lightly. I've heard many people say things along the lines of "it's just the economy, our health is more important" lately, but peoples' livelihoods literally depend on the economy.

Say for example that your family operates a tiny tourism-related business in South East Asia. A prolonged shutdown of travel between China and your country could literally drive you into poverty, given how dependent some countries in the region have become on inbound tourism from China. Given your extremely remote chances of catching the virus, the risk of losing your entire family income is a much more significant risk to your health.

Because of this, it's important to be _balanced_ in thought and decisions, and not just panic because of what _could_ happen. Where there is evidence to support restrictions, keep them in place. Where there is not, remove them.

Outside of China this issue still remains far less serious than many other health-related risks. The "we need to do _something_ " (anything!) mindset is actively harmful.

<comment><USER10> Even with the existing restrictions the virus spreads. Spread leads to quarantine as we've seen in many chinese cases. I don't see why should we hope for the better with less restrictions.

Not being a huge problem outside of China is a fact for NOW. Does not mean it won't happen in weeks. The question is: do we want to solve the problem now, or we want to postpone the solution for later. There won't be "deus ex machina" which just makes it disappear. Many people will die if we're going to ignore the existing facts and make fun of the situation with these stupid heat scans checks which do prevent nothing on the long term based on existing experiences.

What I see is because noone wants panic it prevents us calling the right moves. Because its "panicky".

<comment> _-___________-_ > Even with the existing restrictions the virus spreads. Spread leads to > quarantine as we've seen in many chinese cases. I don't see why should we > hope for the better with less restrictions.

If we can identify which restrictions are helping, and which are not, then we can remove the ones that are not. The point of my comment above is that the restrictions come with their own costs, in some cases severe.

> Not being a huge problem outside of China is a fact for NOW. Does not mean > it won't happen in weeks.

It doesn't mean it will, either. We should be approaching this in a rational, evidence-based way, not just waving our hands and saying "many people will die" with no evidence.

> What I see is because noone wants panic it prevents us calling the right > moves. Because its "panicky".

If you believe you have a better idea what the "right moves" are than experts who have spent their careers studying these events and preparing for them, then by all means step up. But you should expect to be asked for evidence for your claims. Panic is a significant cost on its own.

<comment><USER11> _If you believe you have a better idea what the "right moves" are than experts who have spent their careers studying these events and preparing for them, then by all means step up. But you should expect to be asked for evidence for your claims. Panic is a significant cost on its own._

I think this is unfair on two fronts.

First, labeling it as "panic" is just dismissive. What constitutes panic vs. what is responding rapidly and vigorously to a critical emergency is in the eye of the beholder.

Secondly, it's possible to trust the experts and also think that the proper measures are not being taken. The experts are the epidemiologists, virologists, doctors, public health officials, etc. who are working on this outbreak, and they seem pretty damn concerned. I've read very few statements that suggest this is likely to blow over, and many more that show a widespread opinion among the experts that containment is unlikely and that this is very serious. But the experts don't run the world, politicians and bureaucrats and business leaders do. And they have different interests and incentives. There are also likely discussions behind the scenes that we don't know about. The WHO could be urging countries to shut down all air travel but leaders are reluctant to do so for fear of the political backlash.

All you have to do is look at how China treated the doctors who reported on this back in December to see how "trust the people in charge" is not the same as "trust the experts". If China had clamped down on this six weeks earlier than they did, we wouldn't be in this mess.

<comment> _-___________-_ > First, labeling it as "panic" is just dismissive. What constitutes panic vs. > what is responding rapidly and vigorously to a critical emergency is in the > eye of the beholder.

It can be both. The actions of individual citizens in Singapore, HK and other countries with a small number of cases certainly seem to be panic: buying more instant noodles than they could eat in a year, buying every toilet paper roll available, buying so many face masks that rations are introduced, and so on. Some government actions also appear to be going beyond what is necessary to respond; for example banning travel from country A to country B, when country A has fewer cases than country B itself.

> Secondly, it's possible to trust the experts and also think that the proper > measures are not being taken. The experts are the epidemiologists, > virologists, doctors, public health officials, etc. who are working on this > outbreak, and they seem pretty damn concerned. I've read very few statements > that suggest this is likely to blow over, and many more that show a > widespread opinion among the experts that containment is unlikely and that > this is very serious. But the experts don't run the world, politicians and > bureaucrats and business leaders do. And they have different interests and > incentives. There are also likely discussions behind the scenes that we > don't know about. The WHO could be urging countries to shut down all air > travel but leaders are reluctant to do so for fear of the political > backlash.

The WHO, in fact, has mostly suggested a more measured approach to air travel restrictions than what many governments have decided to take. Most of the expert opinions I've read have presented a number of different paths this could take, and suggested a lot of uncertainty as to the likelihood of each. This is sensible. Meanwhile, most of the forum posts and comments that I've read have strongly emphasised the worst possible cases, and continued to do so as the worst path that previously could have happened (which they were implying was a virtual certainty), didn't.

> All you have to do is look at how China treated the doctors who reported on > this back in December to see how "trust the people in charge" is not the > same as "trust the experts".

I'd be the last person to suggest trusting China's leadership, but neither am I inclined to assume that the measures taken by other governments in response to this are entirely based on expert advice or even entirely for health- related reasons.

> If China had clamped down on this six weeks earlier than they did, we > wouldn't be in this mess.

Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-___________-_ "[..] a study in the Lancet estimated back on January 25th that 75,000 people had already been infected and that the virus was doubling every 6.4 days — which would suggest that more than 300,000 people may now be infected with the virus."

Doesn't this blatantly ignore the fact that the infection would have run its course in many of those people by now?

<comment><USER9> If they run out of people to infect the rate of new infections will go down. There are a lot of people in China though. Obviously the 6.4 days thing is rough estimate.

<comment> _-___________-_ But the last part of the sentence talks about the number of people who "may now be infected with the virus", which seems to ignore the fact that some of the early new infections are no longer infected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My guess is this thing is bad - keeps spreading, high mortality and the best we can do is slow it until we have a vaccine. I'm kind of optimistic people may be able to speed the vaccine stuff when they see how bad the situation is.

Animal trials have started already

>Shanghai-based Tongji University School of Medicine and Stermirna Therapeutics Co., Ltd. The vaccine samples were injected into more than 100 mice Sunday, the report said.

and Imperial started animal trials yesterday.

vid of the Shanghai lot: [https://youtu.be/BymUKDp- omQ](https://youtu.be/BymUKDp-omQ)

<comment><USER12> There's also the ongoing Phase 3 Remdesivir trial. [1] Which was used in the treatment of Washington's 2019-nCoV case. The patient appears to have begun recovering soon after the remdesivir was administered and was released shortly after. [2][3]

> Treatment with intravenous remdesivir (a novel nucleotide analogue prodrug > in development) was initiated on the evening of day 7, and no adverse events > were observed in association with the infusion. Vancomycin was discontinued > on the evening of day 7, and cefepime was discontinued on the following day, > after serial negative procalcitonin levels and negative nasal PCR testing > for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

> On hospital day 8 (illness day 12), the patient's clinical condition > improved. Supplemental oxygen was discontinued, and his oxygen saturation > values improved to 94 to 96% while he was breathing ambient air. The > previous bilateral lower-lobe rales were no longer present. His appetite > improved, and he was asymptomatic aside from intermittent dry cough and > rhinorrhea. As of January 30, 2020, the patient remains hospitalized. He is > afebrile, and all symptoms have resolved with the exception of his cough, > which is decreasing in severity.

This is obviously just a single patient's outcome and not proof that Remdesevir is effective, but it's just about the only positive news related to 2019-nCoV. Hopefully the trial yields good results.

[1] [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04257656](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04257656)

[2] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191)

[3] [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/health/snohomish-c...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/health/snohomish-county-man-with-novel-coronavirus-discharged-from- hospital/)

<comment><USER9> That sounds promising. I see in in vitro trials chloroquine also seems to work which would be handy as it's cheap and widely available [https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020620/could-an- ol...](https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020620/could-an-old-malaria- drug-help-fight-the-new-coron) which would be. In fact I may even take some prophylactically for my Singapore jaunt. You don't even need a prescription to buy it in the UK

>Our findings reveal that remdesivir and chloroquine are highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro. Since these compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering from the novel coronavirus disease. (Conclusion from the letter to Nature [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Scary shit.

</comment><comment><USER14> There will _definitely_ be a worldwide epidemic.

China is losing millions every day, aside from psychological credit, as people want nothing to do with China.

(Anecdotally, the local shoe outlet claims that the kids shoes for at their brand will be manufactured in Thailand from next week.)

The Chinese can solve their disadvantage by either eliminating the virus, or by making sure other countries have it as well. (No point in going to Thailand if they are also getting sick.)

Elimination doesn't seem to be going as well as hoped for.

The Chinese government doesn't have a reputation of caring about other people, or human rights.

What are the chances it won't be breaking it out worldwide?

</comment><comment><USER15> There are those that dreamed of this happening.

Those that wanted the massive decoupling between the United States and China.

Those that wanted to see China suffer, fail, collapse, and devolve into another destructive civil war; while the United States remains ascendant.

Well, their dreams might be about to come true.

This coronavirus was the perfect economic weapon that was dropped in the heart of China. And not even a bullet was fired.

The economic backlash from this virus is going to be monstrous. But the reality might be even worse than they imagined, where even they themselves cannot escape the fallout, and that they would reminisce of better days.

But there will also be opportunities. Companies will fail, but others will succeed.

The Fed had better keep on printing that money, because the bubble in a lot of sectors will pop, especially Real Estate. Then automotive. Then aerospace. Then tourism. This house of cards is going to come crashing down.

The moment of the black swan event is about to arrive.

Time to place your bets.

<comment><USER6> You know what I find really interesting?

If Trump screws up the response to this virus (like by cutting the CDC's budget in the middle of a crisis) then the people most vulnerable are the same demographic as Trump's supporters.

<comment><USER15> The interesting thing is that the Trump supporters benefited the most, but they just didn't realize it.

They blamed China for taking their jobs, and Trump capitalized on it. A foreign country with people that don't look like yourself, or even speak the same language, and with a different political system was an easy target to scapegoat.

What they failed to realize was the impact that technology and automation had on their lives.

Do you see people working inside the heart of a car manufacturing factory anymore? No, it's all robotic. What used to take hundreds of men, is now streamlined into an assembly line of 10 robots.

First, in the 80s and 90s, Walmart came and killed off the small businesses, but at least they provided some minimum wage jobs in their stores. Then, Amazon came and killed off the remaining smaller retailers, and tried to kill off Walmart. No more minimum wage cashier jobs, but more jobs for delivery people and warehouse workers.

Then, the software and hardware got better, that it started to replace those minimum wage cashiers jobs. Then robots got better, that they even started replacing the warehouse jobs.

But the United States had the benefit of creating technology over the past 70 years, and massively benefiting from the royalties that followed. Qualcomm doesn't physically make any phones or computer chips, but 50% of their revenue comes from China.

Other jobs in technology like software, engineering, design, QA, project management, etc., were created in relation to technology, but these are not celebrated. Microsoft spawned a lot of software companies. Apple spawned a lot of smaller software businesses vying for space in their app market. But it seems none of these are celebrated in the world of Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, the Trump supporters benefited handsomely in one area: farming. Massive windfalls were made in selling grains and soy to China, who eagerly bought it all. The industrialized farms were literally printing money. And they thought they deserved that business, as if it was a god given right to them.

Maybe they got greedy, but more likely, they fell for the charm of a charlatan, and voted Trump into office, to take on the China problem. You know, the exact foreign customer that was buying up all their farm products. This baffles the mind on how they couldn't make this connection.

Then in one fell swoop, Trump took that all away. Farm bankruptcies went higher and higher under Trump. He came in and demonized the very customer that was buying their products.

And now we have the coronavirus, and those dreams of decoupling the two economies of China and the United States, are about to come true.

The question is: are those Trump supporters ready for the ensuing fallout?

<comment><USER6> I won't address the content of your post here - there's too much to go through and too little time.

But, I will say that Trump's supporters are both ready and unready for the fallout.

Ready because they're essentially decoupled from actual facts and information and fed entirely on the "truth" from him and his allies, so they won't ever blame him for anything.

Unready because they're not capable of handling reality, and regardless of who they are told is the reason for their problems, they have to live with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon "automated machine" punctures bear spray can, 24 employees hospitalized - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/12/amazon-automated-machine-punctures-bear-spray-can-24-employees-hospitalized/ <comment><USER2> Can't find the article, but there was a case a few years ago where a Chinese tourist sprayed bear mace ON HIS KIDS because he thought, not unreasonably, that it was like mosquito repellent. I assume the vacation was ruined after that.

<comment><USER3> Poor kids, bear mace is strong. I've definitely heard of people using it in that way though.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_spray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_spray) (pepper)

is not

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not completely related, but I learned today that the official world's hottest pepper has approached the scoville level of low-level pepper spray at 2.2 million (Carolina Reaper). Bear spray is still higher at around 5 million though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are they even actual Amazon employees or contractors?

</comment><comment><USER7> Will Amazon pay for their expensive hospital stays?

<comment><USER8> > All the Amazon employees were covered by employer-provided healthcare

<comment><USER9> > All the Amazon employees were covered by employer-provided healthcare

Which (unless they have a weird hybrid regular health insurance + workers comp plan, which I've never heard of but might theoretically exist, especially if they self-insure for both functions) is probably immaterial, since it'll be Amazon's workers comp plan, not the employees' regular health insurance (no matter who pays for it), that will be involved here.</comment></comment></comment>


Interactive Word Clouds in D3.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

<comment><USER2> This is a truly impressive implementation, based on previous work by Jonathan Feinberg [1]. The display uses SVG, but the character outlines are computed by canvas bitmaps. Then, Jason implemented hierarchical bounding boxes to accelerate the intersection checks. Be sure to play with the draggable "0" and "1" letters beneath the demo!

Try clicking on words to navigate between word clouds. The cross-fade transition is beautiful, and words that overlap between clouds transform in their new position.

Non-English word clouds look amazing, too:

[http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.tw...](http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.twitter.com%2Fsearch.json%3Frpp%3D100%26q%3D%7Bword%7D@%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9%E2%80%8E)

[1] <http://static.mrfeinberg.com/bv_ch03.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Minor correction: I implemented hierarchical bounding boxes separately, as per Jonathan Feinberg's paper, but they turned out to be slower in all the cases I tried (even large words and areas). I was also using a quadtree to cut down the number of comparisons with previously-placed words.

In my version, once a word is placed, I copy it to the relevant position in a large sprite representing all the words placed so far. So placing a new word means it only needs to be compared with the candidate area of the large sprite, rather than multiple comparisons with all previously-placed words.

I'd like to try a hierarchical sprite version, where you compare against coarse-grained sprites first of all. This would essentially be a quadtree. The implementation would be a bit trickier because I'm also compressing blocks of 32 1-bit pixels into 32-bit integers, which also helped with performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well done Jason! Finally, a tag cloud written in an accessible technology. Thoughts on using an invisible bounding container for the words? Example: silhouettes, shapes, words. What other features have you contemplated but have not implemented?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yes, I've thought about using invisible silhouettes, which presumably is how <http://www.tagxedo.com/> works. The placement algorithm might be a bit different though, perhaps starting at the centroid of available areas and so on. I think it would work better to have a smaller pool of words and allow reuse, or alternatively they could be sized randomly (perhaps with some weighting).

The sprite collision code could certainly be reused for this, though!

<comment><USER4> Great work Jason!

I was amazed of the beauty of Wordie but then I loved Darth Vader (Figure 3-11. Do not underestimate the power of the randomized greedy algorithm). The words reuse should definitely need to be allowed, but the result will be very beautiful when applied to smoothly changing contour (shape).

Is there a problem if I try to reimplement your code in C++ (especially openframeowks)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Yeah, I'll definitely try the randomised greedy algorithm when I get time, I think it should be fairly straightforward now that I have the sprite collision primitives in there.

No problem at all if you want to reimplement in another language, the license is BSD: <https://github.com/jasondavies/d3-cloud/blob/master/LICENSE>

I'm guessing it will be blazingly fast using the bitwise operations in C/C++. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So many details to love about this. The little angle control at bottom middle is beautifully interactive. Also the transitions between clouds as you change parameters or choose new words.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome.

Curious detail: any idea why searching for "Islam" seems to make things go haywire?

[http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipe...](http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F{word}@Islam)

Perhaps it's to do with the Arabic script corrupting the SVG somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to be working fine for me.

I occasionally get gzipped data back from Wikipedia (even though I explicitly set Accept-Encoding in the proxy) - I think it's due to their intermediate caches not respecting the Vary headers. I plan on adding gzip support soon to rectify this, but until then, you can get around it by adding ?foo to the end of the custom URL.</comment></comment>


Populating Hyperspace - <AUTHOR> http://www.snsanalytics.com/FKr3y7 <comment><USER2> I have a hard time reading this graph:

[http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Dqp5VJzn4SRzlKiWcVdavOWhYIu...](http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Dqp5VJzn4SRzlKiWcVdavOWhYIuLGpzrnWTtVTq9FXZlxghcAizk-J8qSa1bls9jFtsKoXO8FiFtMqZplcYh9VT_ZL22=s0)

I can see that on either side of the graduated tiles, the diagonally adjacent plots are mirrors of one another.

But the x/y dimensions on the quasi-random plots seem so distorted, that information is destroyed. The fact that none of the points are color-coded in any of those tiles, means I can't intuitively draw conclusions by noting corresponding dots across second and third tier composites.

      each time we pick a point, we should pick it
      as far away as possible from every other point
      across all dimensions

I don't understand how you can assign a plot like that, and still constrain the mass (M0) and initial helium (Y0) points to the graduated markings on their respective tiles, and come up with a diamond-shaped quasi-random pattern, which still communicates the accurate mass/helium relationship for each dot?

Why is the upper right corner in those two M0/Y0 composites sparse, but there are still diamond grid clusters across the rest of those particular tiles?</comment>


Keeping Track of Build Artifacts - <AUTHOR> http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/keeping-track-of-build-artifacts/

<comment><USER2> Teamcity has similar functionality and is free if you don't need a lot of configurations or parallel builds.</comment>


Common sense and statistics - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2014/09/18/common-sense/

<comment><USER2> My favourite example of why common sense is pretty useless in maths is an example of comparing averages;

There are two shops, each with 5 salespeople. One shop performs very well, each of the salespeople selling 50, 40, 40, 40 and 30 widgets respectively. The other performs very badly, as the staff selling 20, 10, 10, 10 and 0 widgets each.

        The average monthly sales for the first shop is (50+40+40+40+30)/5 = 40 widgets.

        The average monthly sales for the second shop is (20+10+10+10+0)/5 = 10 widgets.

As an experiment the worst salesperson from Shop 1 is moved to Shop 2.

        The average monthly sales for the first shop is (50+40+40+40)/4 = 42.5 widgets.

        The average monthly sales for the second shop is (30+20+10+10+10+0)/6 = 13.3 widgets.

Common sense says that both stores are now performing 'better', but quite obviously that is nonsense.

<comment><USER3> Conversely, this also illustrates a fallacy in many arguments against immigration. Suppose Mexicans/Indians/whoever are all (or predominantly) worse than Americans on whatever scale you choose to measure them. When you allow immigration you'll cause averages to go down in both countries by the converse of the mechanism you describe above.

Various people (Vinod Khosla, Steve Sailer) fallaciously use this statistical truism as an argument against immigration by people without a PhD.

The only way I can think of to steelman arguments like this are by combining Steve Sailer style nationalism with fairly extreme "redistribute all the things" liberalism.

<comment><USER4> I don't get the fallacy. If you believe that there are positive externalities from living in a country with people who are better on whatever scale you choose to measure them, then migration benefits a (relatively) small number of migrants and hurts everyone else, both in their country of origin and destination.

Whether this should prevail over freedom of individuals is another matter.

<comment><USER3> Externalities is a separate argument, and requires doing more than simply looking at average qualities.

If you want to make that argument you need to start by drawing the line between people who are positive and people who are negative. This is a more compelling argument, but it's not the one I described.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, this is pretty good advice. For everyday problems, if it doesn't line up with common sense, usually it ends up meaning I need to ask more questions. Models that tend to not be close enough to reality means I need to observe reality more.

</comment><comment><USER6> "common sense" is just data that agrees with your priors.</comment>


Show HN: Smart Contract Security CTF (Capture the Flag) on the Ropsten Testnet - <AUTHOR> http://blockchain-ctf.securityinnovation.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Blog post announcement as well: [https://blog.securityinnovation.com/blockchain- ctf](https://blog.securityinnovation.com/blockchain-ctf)

Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Average software engineering salary surpassed by product management - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/766658/the-highest-paid-workers-in-silicon-valley-are-not-software-engineers/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me in the least. I'm not trying to get into a debate around who's job is harder, but I think a good product manager is worth more than a good dev in most situations.

Most devs are not changing the world with their code, and often times they are simply implementing rather mundane requirements for rather mundane products.

A good PM defines product strategy. They have to know both sides of the business and their decisions can make or break a product.</comment>


In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/amazon-pentagon-contract-trump.html <comment><USER2> I'm not the biggest fan of AWS, but I feel like giving $10B to Oracle or IBM, well, you might as well just burn the money.

<comment><USER3> The options aren't just give $10B to AWS, Oracle, IBM or Microsoft. The JEDI should have been a multi-award IDIQ (indefinite delivery indefinite quantity) contract. With a multi-award IDIQ the each task order issued under the IDIQ is competed for among the multiple vendors the IDIQ has been awarded to. It is actually fairly unusual that this type of IT services contract was not done as a multi-award IDIQ.

Having to compete for each task order is thought to reduce costs to the government. Of course having to compete each task brings its own additional costs which don't necessarily make the cost saving proposition true. The big benefit I see to this contract is that it helps prevent vendor lock-in. I don't worry about the next 10 years and $10B, but what happens after 10 years when the DoD is now locked in to proprietary AWS cloud features which make migrating to a different vendor technically and fiscally near impossible.

<comment><USER4> You should not do infrastructure as IDIQ, this is an infrastructure contract. The idea that all contracts issued by IT are for "IT Services" is part of the reason digital systems at the DOD and other government agencies are such a nightmare. HAving a single system to build off of is the best way to do it, and not having that system be a customer solution for just the government is way better then not.

Lock in is the only concern, but from my experience doing an IDIQ or multi- vendor won't solve the lock in problem. The best thing to solve that is to make sure your using bland normal things not customer government thigs.

<comment><USER5> You know, I've been in some data centers and top 50 HPC clusters ... I don't understand why the US government doesn't run it's own cloud systems, except for the appropriations. There are enough computer scientists in the larger org to field a major distributed systems engineering group.

<comment><USER6> Here's the civilian pay scale – think of how it compares with AWS or Google:

[https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay- leave/salaries...](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay- leave/salaries-wages/2019/general-schedule/)

Now, think of the political climate: there've been decades trying to "trim waste" by steering money to the private sector, where efficiency is taken as a matter of faith. First you'd need to hire the technical leadership to properly plan something like that and then hire all of the people who'd build it, not to mention procuring all of the hardware & data centers, etc. You're looking at years before you have a positive return on any of that – and all the while, every big contractor is going to have their lobbyists talking about how it's a waste of money compared to going with them.

NASA tried this a decade ago with Nebula, which was part of the early OpenStack history. I don't know exactly what happened with that but the people I know working on NASA projects are all using AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh Oracle - first your sales people came every year and jacked up the licenses, and we fled. Then you came up with plans to monetize Java, and we fled. And then this. Just die already, OK - your old business model is dead and your attempts to make a new one would even embarrass Elsevier

<comment><USER8> Larry Ellison is exactly the kind of guy Trump loves. He'll get one flattering phone call and the contract is theirs. Then $10B will turn into 100 before they hit the first release.

<comment><USER9> For $10B, Oracle will gladly buy $8B of AWS services for you...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lots of drama to this story, between the apparent sabotage from Oracle to the politics of the president not favoring AWS just for spite, to the Pentagon's acronym for its cloud move: JEDI.

The article states that Microsoft does not yet have the security clearances for JEDI yet, but is working on it, but nowhere in the piece does it mention Google's cloud services. Are they in the running as well? Are there any other giant enterprise cloud platform businesses that I'm unaware of? Dropbox uses AWS.

The other interesting thing about this, circling back to Oracle, is the changing of the technological guard here. One can imagine all sorts of government databases running on IBM mainframes, using Oracle software. But now, the shift to enterprise cloud has arrived. I guess this must be happening across the entire industry.

<comment><USER11> > Dropbox uses AWS

They very loudly left AWS several years ago, not aware of them going back.

<comment><USER12> Wasn't it because they hit the scale where managing their own data store, renting colo space, etc. was cheaper than AWS? I've heard first-hand from some large players that self-hosting is cheaper. One is still-hosted, but one is on the cloud as a strategic bet.

<comment><USER13> Scale? Cheaper? Self-hosting a single server in San Francisco is cheaper than AWS too. AWS sells convenience and baked-in knowledge.

<comment><USER9> Self-hosting is cheaper at both ends of scale.

Enterprise clouds are cheaper if you're in the middle and/or quickly changing scale.

<comment><USER14> IMO, I think you're undermining the multiple years of programming/sys-admin experience it would require to self-host + scale on your own. It's much more expensive when experience is minimized, as a function of time.

Unless you've done it before, of course.

<comment><USER15> Why have we made our systems so complicated that it takes years of experience to run software on a computer?

<comment><USER9> The consequence of abstraction is underlying complexity. And we've added a _lot_ of abstraction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know we tend to think of cloud-agnostic architectures as over-engineering, YAGNI, etc., but for a massive, massively expensive, mission critical government cloud perhaps it's a good idea?

Apart from fail-over/redundancy benefits, it would avoid lock-in and drastically improve negotiating leverage that could force ongoing competitiveness and accountability.

The engineering costs are significant but still a drop in the bucket compared to the size of these mega-contracts.

<comment><USER17> A contract the size of JEDI can (and probably is/will) build in that kind of independence as a requirement. Which isn't to say "Amazon must build and maintain an OpenStack implementation for DoD", but rather, that Amazon must turn over all APIs and source code used to build the implementation. Obviously, source code and APIs isn't enough to keep everything running - there still needs to be operational expertise within organizational memory - but the DoD would be empowered to start to take over operations and plan a migration to some other company maintaining the cloud infrastructure, if it were really untenable to renew the contract in a decade.

Put it this way: there's an old aphorism about how owing the bank $1 million is your personal problem, owning the bank $1 billion is your bank's problem, and owing the bank $1 trillion is your country's problem. There would be a parallel for cloud infrastructure: if you have a $1 million cloud bill then you have a (vendor lock-in) problem; if you have a $500 million cloud bill then your vendor has a problem (because you represent a huge chunk of business that can evaporate if you move to on-prem); if you have a $1 billion cloud bill then the wider market would have a problem (because of the reverberating shock effects if your migration to cheaper infrastructure is unsuccessful).

It's the textbook definition of something which is too big to fail.

<comment><USER16> "the DoD would be empowered to start to take over operations and plan a migration to some other company maintaining the cloud infrastructure"

That's still a massive project though that I presume would only be undertaken in extremely dire circumstances, so Amazon only has to do the bare minimum to make sure things don't reach that point.

I'm thinking more along the lines of switching off the primary cloud to a "follower" cloud in a few clicks. I realize that's not at all easy, but I think it should certainly be _possible_ with these kinds of budgets to build in cloud-agnosticism from the ground up. It's hard but it's not _that_ hard-- it's just the facade pattern, which is quite commonly applied in other cases like OSes/databases that are arguably just as complex.

<comment><USER9> This is how you end up running on an extremely limited cloud subset, decades behind current offerings.

Do you want seamless ability to transfer work to another cloud, or do you want the latest managed services and features? Pick one.

<comment><USER16> I think "extremely limited" is hyperbole. The major clouds can all provide every service that 95% of applications need. If you're building something with unique needs that only one cloud can handle, then go ahead and use the advanced feature. A little bit of lock-in here and there for edge cases seems preferable to having your entire multi-billion dollar system deeply coupled to a single company's cloud.

<comment><USER18> Sort of. AWS Lamba (server functions), dynamodb (hosted nosql) and aurora (hosted sql) are all pretty generic services, have significant auto-scaling benefits to using them, and have competitors on competing platforms.

At the same time they are sufficiently differentiated that migration plans would be non-trivial

Disclaimer: former aws employee

<comment><USER16> Right--I'm not saying it's trivial, just that it seems doable with many millions in budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Half the shit the gov buys and mandates people use nobody doing work actually wants to use. Picking Oracle or some two week old fly by night hub zone contractor to handle this award would be typical. The unusual thing would be for it to actually go to a provider with services that are useful and people want to use. - speaking as someone who has done a significant amount of .gov work.

</comment><comment><USER20> The winner probably should have been AWS and close behind was azure and then Google.

IBM and Oracle just are not at the same level but I do suspect they have the best sales teams for government deals.

<comment><USER21> Google took themselves out of the running a long time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The government already contracted General Dynamics to build their own cloud called MilCloud. It had a lot of problems so naturally they are developing MilCloud2.0

</comment><comment><USER23> I guess I don't understand the need for this contract in the first place.

Is it normal in the private sector for companies to spend $1B/yr on cloud services? I feel like at that price point you're better off building out your own infra for most stuff, and using the cloud only for the remaining $10M - $100M fraction where you really do need dynamic scaling.

</comment><comment><USER24> I guess owning the Washington Post (Bezos paper), and its overwhelmingly anti Trump stance over the last 3 years, had its price. This is about Bezos IMHO, nothing else.

<comment><USER25> I genuinely wonder sometimes if we are on a slide towards a banana republic, and it makes me genuinely concerned that many people (40-46% of them) _just wouldn 't care_ if we did.

<comment><USER26> They would happily live in a banana republic just to spite the "libruls". Some people simply are not worthy of the privileges of living in a democracy, it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This headline seems... misleading. There's only one high places foe mentioned, and that's Trump. Every other high level official mentioned seems to be doing Trump's bidding on this.

Also, how is having someone high up intervening in a business process a big violation of free market principles? I don't recall the article mentioning this either. As I think about it, this just reeks of crony capitalism. Didn't we just (2008 or so) decide that was a bad way to do an economy?

Isn't the NYT slant generally in favor of laissez faire free markets? Why the switch here?

<comment><USER25> You're right, but unfortunately the idea of a President individually attempting to punish individuals and businesses that criticize him is considered normal now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is it that the government is buying and how can the government ever trust (for this sort of thing) a private company. And surely you can set up faster (performance per buck) more secure data centres for 10 billion bucks?

I just don't get it, but I guess someone will say government can't do anything and that's enough.

</comment><comment><USER29> The worst thing about this in my opinion is that as much as I personally dislike Trump, the WaPo has lowered the quality of its journalism tremendously over the past decade and so unfortunately Trump's critiques of the WaPo are not lacking in substance.

Bezos should have stepped in to make certain that the WaPo improve the quality of its journalism even if the easiest path to profits is just to provide entertaining stories to the #resist partisans.

There is plenty to write serious investigative journalism about that will have the consequence of weakening Trump politically (if that is the goal) so there was no need to become a tabloid.

Arguably the WaPo's reporting on Saudi Arabia led to the grudge match that culminated in outing Bezos' philandering, and the subsequent major decrease in Bezos' wealth.

KSA is led by an abhorrent group of royals, but the WaPo's coverage of the disappearance of khashoggi was tabloidesque and immature.

<comment> brown9-2 What does any of that have to do with Amazon?

<comment><USER29> Bezos also owns Amazon. It shouldn't really be relevant but unfortunately it is.

<comment><USER30> > In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places

> Bezos should have stepped in to make certain that the WaPo improve the > quality of its journalism

The relevance is that this waffling over Oracle and AWS is born of an interview in WaPo? It has nothing to do with Amazon. Especially when you're commenting on the quality of WaPo journalism. The story exists without WaPo, but not without Amazon.

<comment><USER29> WaPo has been weaponized against Trump by Bezos, or Bezos failed to stop it.

For some reason doing solid investigative journalism is not a priority and instead rallying partisans around talking points and feel good, in-group stories takes precedence.

FWIW I personally loathe Trump and would love to see him removed from power thanks to some solid investigative journalism.

<comment><USER31> David Fahrenthold at the Post won the Pulitzer for his investigative journalism in to Trump

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/washington- po...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/washington-posts-david- fahrenthold-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-dogged-reporting-of-trumps- philanthropy/2017/04/10/dd535d2e-1dfb-11e7-be2a-3a1fb24d4671_story.html?utm_term=.4f902e41213f)

<comment><USER29> Significant, but two small blips in a sea of front page stories about rude remarks or other tabloid style drivel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Amazon needs IBM mainframes in their data centers. They are still king of highly consistent and available systems.

<comment><USER33> I don't think that the irony should be lost on you that this generation of service offerings do not guarantee reliability on purpose. The onus is on the developer to make a reliable system out of faulty pieces.

What does more reliability mean when that was expressly not a target to begin with?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we acquire repeat users? - <AUTHOR> I launched an MVP. Targeted my target market through Facebook groups and published several blog posts. We drove 2k+ users to the site, several hundred completed the intended behavior.
We haven't focused on re-engaging, because we figured some percentage would do that on their own. Was that a mistake? Does our UI suck? What other mistakes might we be making? Any other advice to help grind our way to product / market fit?
You can view our site at iPrompted.com <comment><USER2> What problem are you solving for me? (I do this event reminding with a calendar today. Why is your experience going to be better for me?)

There is no way to create an account, how would I become a re-engaged user? Are you sure your tracking can capture this as currently stands?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're using the sender information as a proxy for tracking repeat user engagements, in conjunction with google analytics, which looks at session behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interview the users and ask them why they abandoned your site.</comment>


Learning WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217/

<comment><USER2> How do you "install" a game?

For example, let's say you have 150MB of art assets. You wouldn't want players to have to re-download the assets each time they go to play.

So how would you cache: 1) a texture, 2) a vertex+index buffer?

<comment><USER3> The browser caches assets like that automatically.

Alternatively, if you want to have a more install-like install, you might have luck with local storage: <http://diveintohtml5.org/storage.html>

Local storage seems to currently max out at 5 MB, but that's easy for the browser vendors to change if they see the need.

<comment><USER4> Cache size is (fortunately) limited, and I wouldn't want a webapp to be able to store 100+MB of data in local storage without explicitely asking for my consent beforehand.

<comment><USER5> This hits on one of the biggest obstacles to people perceiving web apps as "real apps". Most web pages feel, and in actually are, very disposable. You read an article at a site once, you don't want those assets to persist on your hard drive where they'll never be reused. Many people clear their caches regularly.

What we need is a way for a site to say "i'm an app" which will tell the browser to store the cache in a separate bucket. Then when users go to clear their cache, there is a separate checkbox for web apps which is uncheck by default (just how passwords are unchecked by default).

This is what Mozilla should be working on with it's web apps project. The installation part is just mascara. We need the browsers to do the distinguishing, not users.

<comment><USER6> This sounds like a good idea, but as someone who runs a website, why wouldn't I say that it's an app even if it isn't?

<comment><USER5> Good point. The obvious answer is to prompt the user when a website says it's an app and wants to use special storage options. But wording that might be difficult to prevent confusing the user. It's not as easy to understand as "this website want to use your geolocation" or "this website wants to send you notifications".

<comment><USER7> I think I heard this was going to be a feature of HTML 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot wait for WebCL to be released as well, in the mean time how would you suggest using the image buffer in WebGL to help simulate many complicated particles?

<comment><USER9> Yeah WebCL will be really useful at least for what I'm doing. I know they have a private list right now, hopefully they will open it up soon.

One issue with WebCL is the device support. WebGL is capable of running of pretty much anything but WebCL (unless they decide to make a fake software version for system who don't support it in hardware) is going to be limited to a small subset of clients for a while.

<comment><USER10> The most important pragmatic capability missing from WebGL that limits its usefulness for more general-purpose compute is read-out of floating point values from renderbuffers. It was decided by the WebGL standards body to not support this as it is not supported by vanilla OpenGL ES 2 and therefore might disenfranchise Khronos members' mobile products and/or fragment the WebGL ecosystem.

I don't know if you've noticed, but most WebGL users are on personal computers and not mobile devices. The only mobile implementation I've seen is FF4Mobile and it's quite inadequate for all but the simplest WebGL programs. Most PC GPUs have had floating point readback for a few years now. Additionally, the irony of the situation is that ALL of JS numbers are doubles and ALL OpenGL ES 2 GPUs use floating point internally. It is really only the standards that have not caught up and force devs to do int-float conversion across the GPU boundary. Add to this the performance constraints of 3d rendering and any sane dev will want to do as little in JS and as much in GLSL (on GPU) as possible.

I asked Kenneth Russell, the Chrome WebGL lead, about floating point readback support at GDC and I was told that I'd "just have to do the pee-pee dance".

With this single capability, many tasks "needing" WebCL become possible with WebGL. OES_texture_float (according to WG members) only allows loading float textures, not reading out of them.

I wonder if Adobe and Microsoft know to use floating point for GPU computing? Here's hoping that a little competition fixes this blatant oversight.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you but there is nothing that prevents browser vendors from making the extension available I believe. I do wish the WebGL standard would support extensions a little better. I've also seen a lot of request for things like 3D textures. We will have to see how it goes.

This is after all version 1.0 of the standard. I don't see why 1.1 can't include optional support for OES_texture_float.

Does the iPad support it? I know a lot of android phones do too. So no reason it should be barred.

<comment><USER10> Sorry if what I wrote was unclear.

OES_texture_float is a current WebGL extension that is implemented by several browsers. The issue is that OES_texture_float does not specify readPixels support. As far as I can tell, even with native OpenGL ES 2, there is no extension that specifies readPixels functionality for floating point textures. I believe this is a bug in the OES_texture_float specification as binding a texture format to a texture engine is entirely type-level and no types are required after the resource is bound. If there is a hardware limitation, you're doing it wrong.

So the current state of support is: some browsers implement OES_texture_float and you can load floating point textures. Some browsers, when you have enabled OES_texture_float, also allow writing floating point textures. Unfortunately, the only thing you can do with a written floating point texture is re-read it in a later vertex (if you can get vertex texture fetch support which is still lacking for WebGL on Windows due to DirectX impedance mismatch) or fragment shader.

If you want to read back the results of your float computations, you have to pack them into 4 x 1 byte pixel color channels and then unpack them on the javascript side back into floats. Of course, when converting the GPU native floating point values into color channel integers, implementations "helpfully" clamp to [0..1] and then multiply by 255 (!) so that 0 -> 0 and 1 -> 255\. This plays havoc with floating point precision as 255 is not exactly representable. Complicating matters further, ES2 and its corresponding GLSL have no provision for integer or bitwise operations and so the implementor is reduced to using floating point operations to pack floating point values into 4 [0..1]-values that then get molested into 4 byte arrays which can then be read back into Javascript which can then waste browser/CPU time rebuilding floating point values from pixel byte channels with accompanying (technologically unnecessary) numeric noise.

I've not seen any WebGL implementation running on the iPad and Apple won't say anything about it. If I had to guess, I'd say that WebGL is attractive to Apple in the HTML5 sense but not in protecting their native application advantage. The Steve will probably decree that native 3d apps have superior performance by virtue of not being written in a sloppy, GC'ed language and run in a giant sandbox. I don't think native iOS apps allow float texture read- back, either.

The real question is: Is WebGL's lowest-common denominator (phones) approach to 3d a bug or a feature? On the bug side, it's absurd that I can't read float values off of my desktop GPU in 2011. On the feature side, it means that even your iPhone 3G will be able to poorly execute and render a WebGL application at an unbearably low framerate!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice, but until Microsoft support WebGL, it doesn't seem like it'll ever be that useful...

<comment><USER7> By that logic, until Microsoft supports Android and iPhone they will never be useful.

<comment><USER12> I think the GP is wrong, but that's a very unfair characterization. A website is not cognate with a mobile phone OS.

<comment><USER7> You're right of course - it's not that great of a comparison.

On the other hand, have you looked into modern UI architectures? Particularly on mobiles, they look a lot like operating systems aspiring to be web sites...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Duplicated: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248500>

<comment><USER9> That's more than a year old. This site is worthy of repost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Site is down for now.

<comment><USER15> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:y59IaD3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:y59IaD3jsv0J:learningwebgl.com/blog/%3Fpage_id%3D1217+http://learningwebgl.com/blog/%3Fpage_id%3D1217&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari&source=www.google.com) google cache</comment></comment>


Finland to Get Rid of All School Subjects - <AUTHOR> https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/finland-will-become-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-get-rid-of-all-school-subjects-259910/ <comment><USER2> This is not true, it is a gross misrepresentation of the Finnish curriculum reform. There is a new national curriculum which changes the teaching, but it is far from "getting rid of all school subjects".

[http://www.oph.fi/english/curricula_and_qualifications/basic...](http://www.oph.fi/english/curricula_and_qualifications/basic_education)

" _The overall distribution of lesson hours for basic education and the minimum number of lessons for core subjects during basic education are decided by the Government. The distribution of lesson hours stipulates the core subjects taught to all pupils and the distribution of teaching hours between different subjects.

The present distribution of lesson hours was confirmed in 2012 and was implemented together with the new core curriculum in August 2016._"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure there must be more to this. Certain subjects provide a basic overview of a subject required for further education. I doubt medicine is going to adapt itself to be holistic and ephemeral, and I doubt schools will leave their students unable to meed degree entry requirements.

Also it is a nation of 5 million people, changing things is easier.</comment>


Admiral to price car insurance based on Facebook posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-to-price-car-insurance-based-on-facebook-posts <comment><USER2> Isnt any type of sentiment analysis of a users posts against Facebook's to?</comment>


Beautiful, user-friendly analytics for your YouTube channel - <AUTHOR> https://rocketgraph.com/reports/30-youtube-channelytics <comment><USER2> Don`t want to be rude... but nothing beautiful is there. Very standard graphs.</comment>


Tell HN: do we need this? - <AUTHOR>

I created a quick prototype at http://weneed.shapado.com/ of a service to collect ideas and discuss them at the moment. My question to you is if this is a good idea, if we need such an engine and if you will use it? <comment><USER2> Think of a new interface... like a mind map.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you imagine that? (This is just set up in a few minutes on shapado.com, so it can get a lot better for sure!)

Can you sketch it?

<comment><USER2> No doubt... keep it up.

<http://www.mindjet.com/></comment></comment></comment>


Ask.com doesn't escape their search results? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=1&o=15142&l=sem&q=openwiki+script+david+alert

<comment><AUTHOR> The first search result is <script>alert('David')</script>.

This is coming from one of the oldest, largest search engines on the web? I'm pretty astounded.

It's already been reported. Credit where credit is due: [http://www.reddit.com/r/xss/comments/jvc70/httpwwwaskcom_xss...](http://www.reddit.com/r/xss/comments/jvc70/httpwwwaskcom_xss_no_idea_what_i_did_p/)

<comment><USER2> Oldest I agree but Largest?

<comment><AUTHOR> How many people running IE 6 have an Ask toolbar hidden up there somewhere? Sure, it only has 1.7% of total searches on the web, but I'd wager that their user base probably does far less searches than say, Google's user base.</comment></comment></comment>


Multicore at the Command Line with GNU Parallel - <AUTHOR> http://hpc.admin-magazine.com/Articles/GNU-Parallel-Multicore-at-the-Command-Line-with-GNU-Parallel

<comment><AUTHOR> I for one, have found the parallel make command ("make -j4" for a quad-core), extremely effective. It cut the rebuild time for a large project I was working on from ~10 seconds down to 3 seconds. (I have a cheap 6-core, the AMD Phenom II X6 1035T which cost me $100.)</comment>


The Thin Client – Start Playing PC Games on Your Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parsec.tv/the-thin-client-start-playing-pc-games-on-your-raspberry-pi-adb23a5ebd85#.7tl7me640 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hackernews, we just released software for the Raspberry Pi that lets you connect to a gaming PC and play any PC game at 60 FPS, low latency and at 1080p. In this article, we explain how we achieved it, and some changes we made to SDL to make it all work. Would love to know your thoughts. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER2> This seems too good to be true. Do you have any benchmarking stats on latency/framerate? If this is for real, then I expect some serious changes in the games industry!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We hope so too :). Latency without any networking will be under 10 milliseconds, so you can expect to play at 60 frames per second at 1080p with less than 10 milliseconds of latency while within your own home if you're connecting to your gaming PC there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Which games can I play?

<comment><AUTHOR> We always test with Overwatch, but any game works. We spent a lot of time making sure relative mouse mode and absolute mouse mode would work perfectly on the Pi.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also check out a video of us playing Witcher 3 here - [https://vimeo.com/203166740/1d1f8e50d8](https://vimeo.com/203166740/1d1f8e50d8)

or playing Overwatch while being interviewed by AWS - [https://www.periscope.tv/w/1RDGlRpQlzRxL](https://www.periscope.tv/w/1RDGlRpQlzRxL)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds awesome :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Check it out when you have a chance. Hope you like it :)</comment></comment>


Google's Music Beta first look: it's miserable - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/10/google-music-miserable/ <comment><USER2> So, the tl;dr of the miserableness followed by my commentary:

1\. Have to use the Music Manager to upload music; no drag and drop (Yup, that sucks)

2\. Somewhat buggy phone app (Sucks)

3\. Looks too much like Grooveshark (Uh, I guess? Only so many ways to skin a cat and make a music player)

4\. Caches music, and they banned Kongregate for caching Flash games (This is a pretty big stretch, especially since the linked article doesn't even come close to supporting the claim caching was the reason for the ban)

5\. It uploads files from iTunes, and Apple has shown a history of disliking that with Palm (A: Who cares if Apple gets mad about what I do with my music I legally purchased B: There is a pretty big difference between uploading music you've purchased from iTunes and iTunes allowing non-Apple products to sync with it)

Seems like sensational linkbait that has a few legit complains and a lot of filler.

<comment><USER3> Well the meta comment is that nearly every single product Google has 'shipped' lately has been met with 'man this sucks.' followed by a period of iteration, followed by either its death (Wave), zombieness (Reader), or appreciation (Docs). I don't know if the "press" (and I use that term lightly because the community is a mix of professionals and amateurs) really has a process for dealing with this sort of release cycle. People like game magazines with their deadlines were accustomed to getting early beta/late alpha stage games so that they could have a review in print when the game shipped 12 - 16 weeks later but even then there were some interesting failures (when they published a review for a game that ended up never shipping).

For me, the interesting thing about Google's music service (other than Amazon totally toasted them in the execution of this strategy :-) is that they are wading into lawyer infested waters knowingly. That makes me wonder if we're coming to the 'end times' when folks can see the rights strategies (for music at least) finally settling into some new normal for the 21st century.

Now I don't doubt muscians could still shoot themselves in the wallet like authors did with the book deal [1] but they are a bit more willing to taste test this new world.

[1] [http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/google-books- decision-p...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/google-books-decision- privacy-concerns-are-real)

<comment><USER4> > nearly every single product Google has 'shipped' lately

Lately? Google Reader was released in 2005 and Google Docs in 2006. Docs was actually built largely from acquired components (XL2Web, Writely, Upstartle).

You probably have a good point in there somewhere, but you need to select better examples to illustrate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For what it's worth, LifeHacker liked it: [http://lifehacker.com/5800500/first-look-at-google-music- our...](http://lifehacker.com/5800500/first-look-at-google-music-our-favorite- features-in-googles-cloud-music-player)

<comment><USER6> From the Lifehacker review:

> It's also worth noting that they're looking to crack down on piracy, so > depending on how well it works and how much of your music is illegal, that > could be a deal killer for some.

This would be a deal killer for me and nearly everyone I know.

<comment><USER7> How can Google possibly know whether the files you upload were bought legally or not?

<comment><USER8> I would think the music industry isn't past seeding P2P networks with watermarked files and then suing Google to get a court order to scan people's collections en masse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah dang, U.S. only. Sometimes it feels like the internet is only for Americans.

<comment><USER10> It seems like this type of thing provides huge openings for foreign entrepreneurs. See a successful US-only service and copy it, letting the Americans take all the risk of proving it in the market! Why don't we see more of that?

<comment><USER11> Because it's not the service controlling this, it's the copyright holders. Any service (netflix, hulu, et. al.) that wants to play nice with those in the copyright business have to limit their distribution per whatever licensing agreement they have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google Music is not available in your country.

Pretty much says it all as far as I'm concerned.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you have a fairly reliable Internet connection it's worth looking into something like Subsonic instead. You run it but you get tons more features, storage, more privacy, clients for basically every device -- even ones without Flash support, and it's mostly trivial to install and configure. Not for everyone of course.

<comment><USER14> Subsonic looks good.

My setup is a sshfs mount on my phone (Debian-based Nokia N900) from my home "media server". Some day I'd like to set up a VPN & a UPnP/DLNA server to do video transcoding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a testimony to the effectiveness of link-baiting when pretty much the only bad review gets the most attention.

Other than the fact that some of their grievances are unrelated to the actual functionality of the product, they don't seem to realize that it's an invite- only _beta_.</comment>


How Does FreeConferenceCall.com Make Money? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://aaronparecki.com/2012/03/25/8/how-does-freeconferencecall-make-money <comment><USER2> I can't believe this post is making the rounds again six years later. Reply All did a great podcast about a similar issue, it's worth a listen!

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom- calle...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-caller)

<comment><USER3> I remember that podcast episode, but that case was specifically about fraud and someone getting dialers to call people and play weird stuff to keep them on the line as long a possible. It's only a few cents here and there but it adds up if you automate the process.

IIRC, the situation was brought up at a telecom conference and the calls dropped suddenly; suggesting at least one of the people involved was deep into the industry and probably at the conference. They even get an FBI agent on at one time who is convinced they'll find this person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A great example of rent-seeking. FreeConferenceCall isn't trying to provide a service to users, it's trying to extract money from the rest of the world through a legal clause that never anticipated this kind of exploitation.

While it's users are probably quite happy with the situation, the reality is that the service they're receiving is being paid for by totally unrelated parties.

</comment><comment><USER5> >the government allows them to charge

Seems like an euphemism for "the government forces the others to pay".

<comment><USER6> Stockholm Syndrome

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relevant ToS clause for AT&T Wireless:

>5.4 Unlimited Voice Services

>Unlimited voice Services are provided primarily for reasonably uninterrupted live dialog between two individuals. If your use of unlimited voice Services for conference calling or call forwarding exceeds 750 minutes per month, AT&T may, at its option, terminate your Service or change your plan to one with no unlimited usage components.

<comment><USER8> Has anyone ever experienced getting cancelled for this reason? I know quite a few people that likely use more than 750 minutes on conference calls most months. And I have never heard of anyone having a problem.

Also, that's an annoying caveat to "unlimited". Unlimited, except ... limited.

<comment><USER9> This has been bothering me about Verizon's current marketing push around every individual on a family plan being able to get 'the unlimited plan they need'. I haven't been in the market for a 'family unlimited plan' and frankly understand little about mobile billing in general, so I have no idea what pain point Verizon is claiming to address with this model - but the concept on its face makes no sense to me. How can there be different 'unlimited' plans? On what dimensions do plans vary if not 'limits'? If the plans are all unlimited, yet different, then why do you still identify them as 'unlimited' plans when that is clearly not a distinguishing characteristic?

<comment><USER10> > I have no idea what pain point Verizon is claiming to address

I recently shopped for an "unlimited" family plan for my kids. The pain point is "can I watch video?" As best I can determine, "unlimited" has become a marketing term for "yes, you can stream Netflix, to some degree."

There might be a cap on the number of GB of transfer, after which you pay a fee for more; or you can have no cap, but a limit after which your transfer rate drops precipitously. Several providers do a thing where they'll force Netflix (and I assume other streaming providers) to use a lower bitrate stream variant, to help you preserve you data.

There appears to no longer be an actual unlimited plan in the US. Even my grandfathered iPhone AT&T plan with "unlimited" data now has a cap after which it is rate-limited.

<comment><USER11> I'm kind of surprised the FTC or FCC hasn't made any more of a stink about the clearly deceitful use of 'unlimited' on these plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A while back I stumbled upon an interesting issue with a hacked Asterisk server. It was routing calls to FreeConferenceCall.com and other free conference numbers.

[https://www.mnxsolutions.com/security/i-accidentally- recorde...](https://www.mnxsolutions.com/security/i-accidentally-recorded- your-phone-calls.html)

<comment><USER13> Toll fraud is quite common due to the VOIP industry not valuing security. Combined with free conference calling numbers costing a bit to call (and calls to these numbers lasting a fair while), I'm not surprised that most of the traffic was headed to these numbers.

<comment><USER12> Any idea how this Asterisk server would have been added as a route?

These callers that were recorded, were not the ones trying to leverage the hacked server, but rather just dialed the number and were routed through it.

<comment><USER14> One common exploit if only one user account is hacked is to set up a forward to a specific high cost number that receives a lot of traffic. There are carriers who aggregate these routes and even blend them in with legitimate routes and then resell them to other carriers at a low cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Everything from blocking calls to free conference numbers, to lawsuits, to > adding to your terms of service that you're not allowed to call them.

Notably, Google Voice charges 1¢ per minute to call some of these services, even though US domestic calls are usually free.

</comment><comment><USER16> Life finds a way.

<comment><USER17> This is my fav comment in the thread, FYI. Never mind the downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How freeconferencecall.com makes money reminds me alot of how car windshield companies make money. _(E.g. safelite)_

Insurance sometimes covers it, but a windshield company makes money through the insurance company many times, not necessarily through you. Sometimes you pay in the end for the higher insurance premiums down the road though, depending on your state and insurance package.

</comment><comment><USER19> Instead of price per minute why doesn't the government tax the big carriers and subsidize the rural ones at a fixed monthly amount?

<comment><USER13> The original goal of this interstate call pricing scheme was to help encourage universal POTS service through America without creating something like the Universal Service Fund, primarily leaving it to "free" enterprise to provide universal coverage, mainly through small, rural telco cooperatives in areas Ma Bell wouldn't service.

Eventually the USF was created to help the least connected areas that didn't have tons of urbanites calling to fund their local telco cooperative. Meanwhile, these interstate calling rates were layered with intrastate calling rates as the baby bells prepared for local loop unbundling, expecting competing telephone companies to mainly target consumers.

Instead, what happened is CLECs mainly focused on business, creating those classic 1000 free hour discs from AOL, NetZero and the like. This pissed the Regional Bell Companies (which were the fragments of Bell Systems) off quite a bit, and they've been pushing forward with bill and keep as much as they can ever since.

Bill and Keep is essentially we bill eachother, and its hopefully close enough to a wash that no checks need to be cut. Doesn't work out that way though when dealing with even the most benign of businesses as your primary customer, plumbers, pharmacies, medical practices and the like mainly take inbound calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are these termination fees still in effect?

<comment><USER13> In some rural areas there are still extremely high ratecenters that are costly to call. Looking at a ratedeck, 1240655 (Maryland), most Montana numbers and especially the Northwestern Territories (up in Canada) are the costliest to call, ranging from a few cents a minute to tens of cents a minute. Most flat rate VOIP operators won't deliver calls to those numbers, and if they do, they'll close your account if you call there too often.

The FCC has been cracking down on Traffic Pumping (which is what FreeConferenceCall, AOL, NetZero, etc were all created to do) to these prefixes, along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the person your calling doesn't ever receive the call (or it gets through after attempting to call for multiple minutes).

<comment><USER21> > along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem > like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the > person your calling doesn't ever receive the call

Interestingly enough T-Mobile has started giving me a notice before calls to some of these providers saying that I'll be charged 1 cent a minute for the call.

<comment><USER13> T-Mobile claims they are only doing this on traffic pumped numbers that cost them significantly more than that to call, but from the little I've looked into it they're charging this fee on paid conference call numbers that cost $0.002/min to call in the ratedecks I've checked (after doing an LRN DIP of course).

I've reached out to T-Mobile's business team repeatedly on an account that I'm a POC on to get a full list of surcharged numbers, but they are unwilling to disclose this basic information. This kind of stuff is what keeps businesses on Sprint and Verizon, at least they know their NANPA calls will get delivered reliably without surprise surcharges!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Clever, but it still sounds like it wouldn't add up to that much. They only make a small amount when it connects to a user connected through a small phone company right? Based on this description connecting someone on AT&T in NYC to Verizon in LA wouldn't result in any revenue.

<comment><USER23> It sounds like they get ~$0.04/min for every user. I bet that adds up!

<comment><USER24> Back of the envelope calculation:

Avg of 30 min conference calls x say 1 million users per month = $1.2 million a month, or $14.4 million a year</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If code is dual licensed (GPL & MIT) which applies when? - <AUTHOR>

Actually, that's kind of a dumb question, because obviously both apply... I guess.
The code in question is a JQuery plugin which my startup wants to use for its commercial product. I'm a little confused as to which license applies, given the fact that the code's owner does not specify terms and conditions in his/her README file in the Github repo, or anywhere else for that matter.
I'm something of a noob w/r/t using open-source code, so any help would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> The user is free to choose which license to copy with.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, joeyh. Shortly after posting this to HN, I did a bit of googling and came across the same wiki. Thanks for replying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dual-licensing means you can choose which one you want; it sounds like you want to choose MIT.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, wmf. I knew I wanted to use the MIT license, it's just that the whole dual-licence thing threw me for a loop. I guess in this regard I'm a noob no longer. Thanks again for the help.</comment></comment>


This Website Only Open During Business Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/08/20/this-website-only-open-during-business-hours/

<comment><USER2> What's funny about this is that it's actually harder to write a program that only works between certain hours than it is to write one that works whenever it's available. As I posted in another thread: maybe there wouldn't be a programmer shortage if programmers actually worked on things that were valuable. A program to prevent someone from pasting in their password and a program to take a web service offline at a certain time involves a fair amount of engineering effort, but makes the world a worse, more disorganized place.

I always thought the role of humans was to try to stave off the effects of entropy. Work like this makes entropy do its business even faster. Think about that when you're sitting in your chair 10^100 years from now and the Universe's protons start decaying all around you: this is _your fault_ for implementing a website that only works from nine to five.

<comment><USER3> In that case, they may as well take it a step further and have their employees "open" the website when they clock in when they arrive, and "close" the website when they leave at night.

<comment><USER2> Good idea! The system can even have a message that says, "Although we plan to open at 9am, nobody has arrived to turn me on yet."

<comment><USER4> Regardless of that, it still makes no sense to time-constrict a websites uptime. It's not as if websites run on manual labour! (well, it takes some to create one)

<comment><USER2> The irony is that a site that says "someone needs to come in and turn me on" must already be turned on. They've already written an app that has 100% uptime, they just use their uptime to claim the system is down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some guesses:

1) Their backend crashes constantly during normal use, so they have to shut it down when nobody is around to babysit.

2) The form submits directly to some poor soul's email, who then has to copy it onto a piece of paper and drop it in a folder. To manage the workload, the form is simply disabled when this person is not around.

3) The job of "web server" has not been mechanized in this particular office, in order to preserve the charm that only comes from a web site lovingly typed in real-time by a hard-working civil servant.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've seen this a few times. It's usually not _quite_ as insane as it looks. The underlying reasons that I've seen are:

* The web site is tied to an old fashioned batch system/mainframe that doesn't run in the same mode 24/7. Yes, the implementors could write a separate queue that managed this - but that would be often be a non-trivial amount of work.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, which has escapes that occasionally push the user out to talk to a human being. The human's aren't available 24/7.

* It's for a system that provides the online equivalent of an offline process, and there are legal or social requirements that the applications be "fair" - i.e. that the people going through the online and offline process should have the same opportunities. Having the online system run 24/7 puts people with online access at a significant advantage.

<comment><USER7> Could be an ADA issue... ADA (or the state's interpretation/augmentation of it) may say that they need to have live assistance available and they don't want to staff that 24/7 (this is a business registration site, most usage probably happens during business hours).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is actually probably for legal reasons -- there is probably some law on the books that the exact date and time of official company interactions with the Secretary of State must be recorded in case there are disputes, and that for some reason of arcane legal text this must be during the operating hours of the office.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Have you?_

Yes. The site for the UK's "Companies House", an agency that registers and tracks British corporations, only used to work during work hours. I seem to recall a public hack day helped resolve this somehow but can't find a story about it now..

</comment><comment><USER10> URLs say it all, no need to click unless you are curious:

<http://my-site-keeps-shabbat.org.ua/> \- SaaS (Shabbat/Shutdown as a Service)

[http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock- site-f...](http://kosherdev.com/2009/11/wordpress-plugin-to-lock-site-for- shabat/)

<comment><USER11> Along those lines, B&H doesn't process web orders Friday to Saturday nights, local time only though. I'm not clear why the user's time is the one that matters above. You're the one operating the site, it should be your time. B&H's interpretation seems more reasonable. Though I admit to knowing next to nothing about the various rules. [http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/HoursOfOperation...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/find/HelpCenter/HoursOfOperation.jsp)

<comment><USER12> The prohibition is that you can neither do work nor cause work to be done during the Sabbath. B&H's position is that order processing is "work", and that accepting a deferred order placement would constitute "causing work to be done" by their staff even though the actual work takes place later. Others might decide that the act of placing an order (rather than automatically accepting an order) itself constitutes "causing work to be done", and that would depend on the Sabbath hours at the customers' locations. A catch-all policy would cease operation at the beginning of the earliest Sabbath period and restart at the end of the latest (which could cause a very long shutdown indeed if extreme northern and southern latitudes are taken into account).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, in the Netherlands we used to have a bank whose internet banking site closed around 23:00 hours and re-opened somewhere in the morning. AFAIK it was because all actual processing was done in batch during the night. Somewhere around 2006 they implemented a new Internet banking infrastructure and now they're open 24/7.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm guessing they don't want to or can't provide overnight cover if it fails. The cheap solution is to turn it off when there is no support available.

</comment><comment><USER15> My Canadian insurance provider, Manulife, has this same restriction as well as pretty much every financial institute in Japan. What's worse too is that many Japanese ATMs will charge extra fees when you use them outside business hours - even at your own bank.

<comment><USER16> SunLife in Canada is similar. The site is up but you can't do some things like submit an online health-care claim. My guess was/is they are trying to make it just a little harder to make claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Swedish tax agency also has some arbitrary times to post forms through their web site. I've had it explained to me that this is done to prevent major backlogs with (most likely) erroneous data (as people who send in their tax declaration at 2 am might be more prone to errors than at other times).

This means that if they were to have 24/7 service the taxmen and women would start each day with a back log, and Mondays with a larger backlog and then probably get even more delayed than they already are.

Now, I don't know at all if this is true or not, but I find it a rather plausible explanation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Funny thing: German tax department designed an API around polling tax data primarily for companies. I have to find an english link to the full story, but basically: \- company develops api to pull data like a few hundret requests per hour initially, but API returns a 404 after an hour of testing \- later that evening API returns an error stirng saying "open from 9 to 12 and 13 to 14:30" \- next day tax department calls company saying that they cannot handle those requests as the API was designed to be used once a year and that they crashed the server on and on with the sheer amount of requests

:)

</comment><comment><USER19> If there is a human element in the loop, and with a government process it is fairly likely, then shutting down the website after hours and on weekends makes sense from a workplace environment point of view.

Walking in each morning to a huge backlog of work generated overnight is bad for moral...generating a backlog over weekends and holidays is even worse - spending one's Veterans Day off from work knowing that the backlog is piling up sucks.

</comment><comment><USER20> My University has a class booking system that only works during the hours of 9am - 5pm; outside that, and you're not allowed to put bookings in. When you put a booking in, it sits "loading" for a few minutes (spinner GIF in a modal dialog).

(I have visions of people sitting behind desks ticking off bookings in real- time as they come in, like telephone operators from the 40s.)

<comment><USER21> My school did this as well, but they claimed it was for maintenance reasons. Seemed like they were always tweaking it to withstand the load during course selection time. Maybe it's just easier to have regular down time than unpredictable down time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is done to save money. There's probably a rack of boxes handling the dirty work. 99% of users of the system are local, as in the same time zone. So if you kill the boxes at night, you save half of your electricity bill with minimal inconvenience.

Obviously you can solve your little dilemma in the cloud by scaling based on demand, but not everything can be put into EC2 or similar. Government sites that handle sensitive data certainly can't.

<comment><USER23> The electricity costs for such a site is probably a couple a bucks a day. It would be very weird if they were really turning of the servers every night just to save a few dollars.

<comment><USER24> Especially considering electricity costs less at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Dutch Chamber of Commerce closes down its trade register between midnight and 9am or so. Because, of course, you should be sleeping then instead of doing business!

</comment><comment><USER23> We have a customer only allowing registration for a webshop during working hours(!). In that case, it wasn't about marginal power bills, legislation or anything of the sort. It is just because their system is not fully automated, so whenever a new user registers, a person in the other end gets an email end manually has to enter the data in another system (SAP), before the user gets activated.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interestingly enough, the University of Waterloo runs its co-op program through a website called Jobmine which allows students to search through job postings which they might be eligible for. Coincidently, it is also only available until midnight on weekdays and just recently started being available 24 hours on weekends.

</comment><comment><USER27> Might be there is some civil servant who's computer doubles as a webserver. When he leaves at 5pm, down goes the server.</comment>