TSA announces "biometrics vision for all commercial aviation travelers" - <AUTHOR> https://papersplease.org/wp/2018/10/15/tsa-announces-biometrics-vision-for-all-commercial-aviation-travelers/ <comment><USER2> TSA can "envision" all it wants, it must operate within the confines of the constitution. CBP gets away with a lot due to the unique legal quagmire that is the US border. TSA has no such luxury, and thus (with a little help with orgs like ACLU and EFF) such initiatives _should_ fail. Some restrictions apply - void where prohibited[1]

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

<comment><USER3> The TSA already gets to harass, molest and assault people all they want. We've had nearly a decade of videos of crazy invasive and disturbing pat-downs of both adults and children. It's pretty obvious if you want to touch people inappropriately and legally, the TSA is the career choice you should be looking at.

I rarely fly anywhere unless I absolutely have to. I've flown a lot outside the country and no other country is anywhere near as bad as the US/TSA. No other country makes you take off your shoes.

I feel like early on, Americans fought hard against TSA security theatre and nothing changed and people kept flying, so it's just stayed pretty much the same.

It's gotten a little better. TSA agent can't harass people as much and have to be nicer since everyone is recording, but everything they do is still worthless. Millimetre wave machines are filled with so many false positives you should just have people roll a six-sided die.

<comment><USER4> Vietnam makes you take off your shoes, I think last time I flew through Malaysia it was the same, and Australia sometimes requires you to take off your shoes (I think maybe some airports, like Gold Coast?).

It's annoyingly common, especially since I tend to wear boots, so it's a real hassle to take my boots off and then put them on again.

<comment><USER5> You know this, and you've apparently experienced this several times. So maybe stop wearing boots when flying? I always carry a pocket knife, but not when flying. Not just because I want to avoid anal probing, but also out of courtesy towards everyone who is behind me in the security theatre queue.

<comment><USER6> You are assuming they don't need or want the boots for any reason.

I've flow places with 4 laptops before, not because I think it's fun to inconvenience everyone in line, but because I needed them for where I was going.

If I was flying somewhere that I needed boots, I'd probably try to wear them to avoid having them pretty much take up most of my carry on space...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the TSA and its $85 for a five year TSA Pre pass make you upset (like it does me), then you should really check out the private security pass system call CLEAR[1] for the next level of crazy. $179 a year, lines even faster than TSA Pre, already in 35 airports and starting to make a big push into stadium events. "Our advanced technology is SAFETY Act Certified from the Department of Homeland Security." WTF?

[1][https://www.clearme.com](https://www.clearme.com)

<comment><USER8> CLEAR is not Pre.

CLEAR is "skip waiting in line for a person to look at your ID and boarding pass". That's it. CLEAR by itself still sends you into the unpack-your-bag, take-off-half-your-clothes, body-scanner experience.

If you want to leave things in your carry-on, stay fully dressed and use the metal detector, you still need Pre (or another program which grants membership in Pre). CLEAR does not give you Pre.

<comment><USER9> As someone who has CLEAR, and flys frequently on airlines that are not enrolled in Pre (JAL out of SFO), this is simply untrue. CLEAR escorts me to the front of the Pre line, allowing me to keep my shoes on and laptop in bag -- even though the airline is not a part of the Pre program.

<comment><USER8> The international terminal at SFO often has dogs patrolling along the line; when they do that, _everyone_ gets the Pre-style experience.

CLEAR does not provide Pre. You can read their own documentation on that; they only get you past the podium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amount of misinformation and fear mongering here is staggering. The article is posted by an anti-surveillance publication, so I guess the skewed perspective makes sense.

I understand and agree with the fear of it being a slippery slope. I'm concerned about facial recognition becoming a regular part of surveillance in everyday life, and I hope that there is legislation around this TSA rollout that strictly prohibits their database from being used for non-airport related purposes.

Here's how the system is designed to work at full implementation. This is based on a briefing I had about 6 months ago, so I imagine it's still along the lines of what they're planning.

You get to airport security with your cary-on. You walk up to a kiosk to scan your face. When you booked your flight, they essentially did a background check on you, and if it was clean you just walk through to the terminal, with minimally-invasive scanning that doesn't require any stopping or removing anything from your bag.

If something did come up on your background check (mainly a conviction for a violent crime or a pattern of information that suggests possible ties to terrorism... one of the TSA's goals behind this system is do screening based on suspicious activity rather than profiling) you go through what essentially is the TSA experience today.

<comment><USER11> > You get to airport security with your cary-on. You walk up to a kiosk to > scan your face. When you booked your flight, they essentially did a > background check on you, and if it was clean you just walk through to the > terminal, with minimally-invasive scanning that doesn't require any stopping > or removing anything from your bag.

That's a pretty attractive sales proposition there; it's really hard for me as an individual to argue against the reduced hassle (and essentially a return to pre-2001 boarding patterns) in return for them having access to data they can realistically already get.

Japan takes pictures and fingerprints from people as they arrive; this doesn't seem too much different, just the direction.

I wonder if this could also be expanded to people without boarding passes. I know a lot of people mourn the loss of the ability to go directly to the gate to meet or see off family.

<comment><USER12> They take pictures and fingerprints of foreigners when you arrive in the USA as well. I hope no families at the gates will be allowed. People are already clueless about how to properly cue and board a plane. As a frequent flyer it is beyond irritating. Families or friends at the gate would just make things even worse. Plus, letting them in without a boarding pass is just a way to add insecurity variables to the airport experience for no reason but the movie- like romantic idea of airport goodbyes.

<comment><USER13> Direct experience from when they _were_ able to come to the gates overrides any speculation about what they "would" do. It's simply not a problem.

<comment><USER14> Surely they all need to come through the security screening, though? So suddenly the (already far too long) lines are 2-4x longer. Just say your goodbyes before security, it's really not as issue.

<comment><USER12> It's a weird custom that I've seen only in American movies and that was ever probably true only for American airports. It's not an issue indeed and I think Americans are as usual a bit myopic in pretending that a cultural experience is globally recognized. Feel free to downvote this (true) generalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On a serious note; One has already provided their personal details to purchase the ticket, then to receive their bording pass, then presenting their ID to pass through securit - and soon, to provide their "realID" BS which requires a bunch more hoops-to-jump-through-to-obtain, and now in addition to all of this, WHAT exactly is facial recognition/retinal scanning going to do?

I would argue that if they are going to use facial recognition/retinal scanning - then I shouldnt be stopped, searched or require ANY paper document to do anything and should be able to just walk through access-portals for which my ID can be tied to my ticket-of-passage....

<comment><USER16> That's the argument - you are already required to show photo id and have a person compare your photo to your face. This replaces that person with an algorithm.

<comment><USER17> But that person isn't attached to databases containing archived CCTV, scraped social media data [1], parking tickets, license plate reader data [2], phone metadata, or the myriad biased and unaccountable algorithms created by private companies, used to rank and sort humans [3].

Think about the implications for whistleblowers, journalists meeting anonymous sources, activists, immigrants, etc etc etc.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting- million...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of- faces-from-web-images.html)

[2] [https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location- trac...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you- are-being-tracked)

[3] [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember how everyone in USA made fun of China's facial recognition/social rating system. I wonder if something similar will be implemented soon in USA too.

<comment> maze-le It just one major assault away... In europe too for that matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love how their "stakeholder" list [1] doesn't include travelers. Just government and air travel industry. This speaks volumes to their mentality.

1: [https://papersplease.org/wp/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/biome...](https://papersplease.org/wp/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/biometrics-stakeholders.png)

</comment><comment><USER20> What I don't understand is why? Is it in response to an increase in plane hijackings in the US since 9/11?

Unless the terrorists board with machine guns, 9/11 wouldn't be possible today. No passenger would assume that a bunch of middle eastern hijackers have any other intention than to kill them all, and it would be impossible for the hijackers to control the passengers.

<comment><USER21> Unless attackers bring a circular saw and an extension cord to cut open the cockpit door they can bring a damn bomb if they want.

No one is going to give up the plans and turn their bomb into a missile ever again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm very conflicted about this. And I'm actually sitting at my gate while typing this, in an uncharacteristically busy terminal, where I'm suddenly so very urgently aware about the risks of large crowds at airports and such. Conflicted because it does make sense to me that tracking people in facilities like this could help with safety and security. I have no principled problem with my picture being taken. But I wouldn't want it to be abused, for sure. So... is it the secondary uses, like marketing and totalitarian uses (never thought that'd go in one sentence) that I'm worried about? Or should I be worried about it anyway? Does the distinction matter? Is distinguishing between the two possible? Realistic? ... CONFUSED!

<comment><USER23> There are large crowds of people in every city on planet Earth. Do you want a security check to be required to be out in public?

<comment><USER22> Airlines have traditionally been targets for terrorism. For other concentrations of people like pop concerts the same may apply. Or in any case, those already have had security measures for a while beyond just some town's busy downtown. But I don't know what I want. I'm probably mostly saying that it's not a black or white matter for me.

<comment><USER14> > Airlines have traditionally been targets for terrorism.

Orders of magnitude more terrorist attacks are targeted at crowds of people "out in the open" in cities than at airlines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > In the future, TSA will be able to use TSA Pre® enrolled facial images for > matching…. Moving forward, TSA Pre® will increase its access to and > utilization of voluntarily-provided biometric data, including facial images, > to modernize the trusted traveler experience for TSA Pre® travelers.

Wait wait, so let's use biometrics on people _we already trust_! I mean, not that TSA Pre-check is hard to get (airlines include it free for their best travelers after all) but give me a break government - you've already said these people are a-ok, so there's no point in this silliness.

<comment><USER25> Holy shit my partner and I were so close to pulling the trigger on precheck before this news came out. Very glad we didn't.

How does this work in terms of consent? Was there some tiny line of text I didn't see that allows TSA to go through with this?

<comment><USER24> Actually, unless I'm missing something, what they are saying here comes in two parts:

1) You now have to include a photo, same as you would for a passport.

2) They will have photo lines for TSA where they recognize you from these photos, nominally to help make the lines faster.

So on one hand... you already have to provide a photo for a passport, so this is just bringing TSA Pre-Check into balance with that. But, on the other... could government waste anymore of my tax dollars? I mean - they already "trust" the people who receive pre-check AND the lines are never that long. So it's just more silliness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The link appears to be down. This cached version [0] should help.

[0] [http://archive.is/B88Ce](http://archive.is/B88Ce)

</comment><comment><USER27> TSA and airport security-theatre in the USA is such a mind-boggling concept to me. Im flying a lot within Europe, especially between Sweden and Switzerland, and i have never had to show my passport to anyone. More often than not they don't check the fluids in my carry-on, and i get to keep my shoes on. The security check usually takes 5-10 minutes including the time spent queuing.

<comment><USER14> I'm British and fly in and around Europe multiple times per year and I've never _not_ had to show my passport - even when flying to Northern Ireland.

<comment><USER28> Well, as you should know, the UK is a special case because the concessions it has demanded from the EU include not opening its borders like other Schengen countries. Thus, normal border controls for people traveling between the UK and continental EU. And NI, of course, is an even more special case due to the conditions of the Good Friday agreement. In the Brexit negotiations the question of what to do with NI borders seems to be one of the most hairy ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd bet Amazon is powering the facial recognition.

<comment><USER10> They're not

<comment><USER29> Source?

<comment><USER10> This is the tech they're using

[https://www.vision-box.com/solutions/travel-and-border- contr...](https://www.vision-box.com/solutions/travel-and-border- control/airports-and-airlines)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've always wondered what is the process that generates this kind of proposals. Was it a single person? A group conspiring from within to perpetuate the power of the TSA? Or from outside, influencing or enforcing the directors to take some actions?

How do they come to be? And what strategy do they use to bootstrap the authority and support of the project? Puss in Boots always comes to my mind.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder what the GDPR implications of using this on international travellers from europe are?

What data are they collecting? What are they using to for? Who do they share it with? How can I request a copy of all my personal data? What's the process by which I notify them of errors in my data, and how quickly will they correct them? How do I request that they delete all my data?

<comment><USER32> TSA is a government agency; GDPR doesnt apply.

<comment><USER33> Incorrect. The TSA is a _US_ based [government] agency; GDPR doesn't apply.

In Europe, even governments are subject to the rules of GDPR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In a way, they are forced to do this by their nature. As an abstract entity they should not and will not care about consequences other than making their job easier.

But it operates in a world where other entities might come in play and counter. The problem is that I don't hear the voices of these other entities. Is TSA that powerful on its own?

</comment><comment><USER34> meh. I flew into Thailand yesterday. They took my photo. Cambodia took my photo and my fingerprints. Nepal took my photo. The UK took my photo and compared it to the one encoded in my UK passport. As did Australia (with my Aussie passport).

I know "America = Freedom", but pretty soon it's going to be the same situation as we have with gmail - you may not use gmail because you don't want Google hoovering your conversation to target ads with, but if anyone cc'd in the chain uses gmail, google gets it anyway.

Whatever country you traveled to or from is going to get your biometrics, and they're probably sharing that info with the US anyway. I get the point of protesting this, but it feels kinda academic now.

I'm not saying I like giving up my freedom for convenience, but I am fed up of standing for hours in lines for "security" checks that are just theater, when they've got the information from other sources anyway. The automated checks using the biometric information in my passport(s) feel so much quicker and less biased (e.g. Thai immigration officer getting into a long conversation with a Chinese tourist about what hotel they were staying at).

<comment><USER35> It only feels academic because not enough people care. But it's not set in stone that people won't care.

Sadly, it may take very major data privacy or biometric abuse for there to ever be action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What problem is being solved here? I didn't see any explanation.

<comment><USER37> The problem of how to gradually implement a pervasive surveillance state without at any one time arousing people's suspicions to the point where they will actually do something meaningful about it?

Seriously, though, I would love to know the actual motivation for this. Somehow these days I have trouble attributing changes like this to simple bureaucratic momentum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> At least they are not using the blockchain. :-x

</comment><comment><USER39> Good! I for one am glad for this and the measures that were implemented as a result of certain actors wishing ill on our society. It's a small price to pay for piece of mind when flying. For the past 17 years there was immense fear- mongering of what kind of slippery slope these measures would lead to and yet none have really materialized.

<comment><USER40> I could not disagree more. Trading liberty for safety is not something we should ever do. Risk mitigation is different than giving up rights. They can be done at the same time without compromising anything. "No slippery slope...yet" isn't really a thing you want to rely on.

I am personally furious every time I fly because these rules do little to protect us. I'm glad it is giving someone (you?) some peace I guess, but the cost is too much to bear.

Outside of rights, do you have any idea how much this costs taxpayers and how insanely run that organization is? I'd say it fails many, many rational tests.

<comment><USER41> _I could not disagree more. Trading liberty for safety is not something we should ever do._

What is your stance on field sobriety testing?

That's a pretty clear example of trading liberty for safety.

<comment><USER42> Field sobriety tests are only issued once the officer has probable cause based on suspicion of intoxication. I don't think anyone would disagree that suspicious behavior within an airport warrants detainment and questioning, but in that case no one's liberties are being compromised.

<comment><USER43> And in some cases, suspicious behavior has included:

* reading math textbooks while Indian

* wearing a turban

* praying

* talking to spouses in a non-English language

and worse.

So I guess we just disagree on the definition of "suspicious behavior".

<comment><USER44> Terry v Ohio makes pretty clear the criterion for detaining someone against their will. Too bad all of our rights go out of the window at airports.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cloudron v0.130.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://cloudron.io/blog/2017-05-02-release-0.130.0.html <comment><USER2> Nice update, I particularly like that "Naked domains" are now implemented. However I don't understand why would anyone be interested in non encrypted backups, is it so that it can be saved locally on encrypted disk, for compliance purposes?</comment>


Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes - <AUTHOR> http://www.cucumbertown.com/writer/#

<comment><USER3> Hey, this looks really good!

I'd like to make a suggestion for a cool feature: being able to clone someone else's recipe and put my own 'twist' on it. Almost like a git fork, if you want to use that analogy. You could also submit pull requests... you get the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> We had a feature – "create a variation". Unfortunately the feature did not work well in the real world and we had to pull the plug.

Literature cannot be forked the way we think about it in code. My variation of the potpie isn't simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. It's "likely" a different style altogether and in most cases required the new author to write something ground up. We tried fixing this but the edge cases became too complex to handle.

<comment><USER4> > _My variation of the potpie isn't simply a fork of the ingredients and > editing lines._ //

There's a few recipes I've used for which this is the case. Same for my mum - I've got magazine clipped recipes of hers that say something along the lines of "add cherries at the end, use sultanas instead of currants; I add a dash of brandy" or others that say "you need to cook for about 45 mins, not 30".

I think variations allow for a sort of evolution of a recipe towards your own personal preference.

But of course that doesn't take account of the actual implementation of such a feature being possible to do in a way that works well and fits with the aims of this site.

I'd be interested to know what sort of edge cases make it complex. Surely it's just a pre-filled version of a page, that one edits and optionally has a link saying "based on $recipe". I could see it getting abused for people wanting to link their recipes to popular ones (like youtube response vids that aren't really responses) but beyond that sort of thing it seems pretty basic. Were you trying to digest the multiple variations to offer options within a recipe or something?

<comment><USER5> I guess the use case you mentioned is more to adding variations like an alternate ingredient, or a tip to a step or something like alternative to what is suggested in the original recipe.

We have a wish list in our mind where we can add structured annotations (tips/alt ingredient/photo) to the original literature and have a repository of such stuff residing on top of the original recipe itself.

This way it can become a far more richer data, set in the original context and offer mutual learning to all.

Thoughts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did not check to see if you had that).

Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.

<comment><USER7> Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg

      Golden Rings 5
      Calling Birds 4
      French Hens 3
      Turtle Doves 2
      partridge in a pear tree

it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical:

* '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter _2 oz_ of'.

* '2 rashers of bacon' becomes 'rashers of bacon _2_ '.

it's wrong for some things, with apparently no workaround:

* 'five-spice powder' becomes 'spice powder _five-_ '

* 'three cheese coleslaw' becomes 'cheese coleslaw _three_ '

Apart from the last two - can't you just highlight the numbers without moving them?

Edited to add: looking at the way the recipes are presented on the site - <USER2> the quantities in a different column, rather than tagged on the end - makes me think that it would be clearer if it looked that way in the editor too, so you don't think of it as a sentence.

<comment><USER5> Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

[http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/](http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/) recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.

<comment><USER7> No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.

<comment><USER5> I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community.

When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit the limits. A textfield could only do so much.

So some time back we decided to do a full rewrite, ground up pushing our limits with everything we learned.

This editor tries to be unobtrusive, simple and smart. The engine behind the scenes does a lot of work including parsing, numbering, autocomplete etc. all the way to a beautiful output.

Here's an example: [http://www.cucumbertown.com/onion-puffs-recipe- dish](http://www.cucumbertown.com/onion-puffs-recipe-dish)

This is just a start and there's a lot ahead of us. As always we would love your feedback.

I hope this help HNers like munificient[2] move from textfiles to a better solution.

[1] [http://cucumbertown.com/](http://cucumbertown.com/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358827)

<comment><USER8> Dev here...

We have tied together parts of [https://github.com/daviferreira/medium- editor](https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor), vanilla-js and jquery :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been typing up all of my recipes off of my sticky notes. (Using a WordPress plugin called RecipePress.) My biggest annoyance that I thought your editor might fix is repeating myself.

Say I'm making spaghetti. In the steps I want to just type "boil 1 lb spaghetti in 4 cups water for 4-5 minutes" and have the tool parse the "1 lb spaghetti" out into the ingredient list. As it is, I have to type "spaghetti" twice. I know it may seem lazy, but when you are entering hundreds of these things it gets annoying.

Looks like the parsing code might already be there since you're doing it to the ingredient list. Anyway, looks miles ahead of what I'm using. I've been a Cucumbertown member for a long time but haven't visited much, looks like a lot has improved!

<comment><USER5> Ha! You have just suggested a terrific feature. I have no idea how we could implement something like that even with the parsing logic. I mean, we see way too many writing patterns on a restricted ingredient entry area itself. So imagining the multitude of edge cases makes my head spin:)

But will definitely give it a shot. We had something like this planned early on, but were too scared to try it out. And yes, we have been improving a lot on the site, please do come frequently:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really cool. I've already shown your site to my mom, who loves it.

However, I can't seem to find a way to display the recipes that I "crave" \- seems like this would be a good way to save tasty meals for later cooking.

<comment><AUTHOR> A long requested feature – I hope we get time to build a mini bookmarking feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty! Well done.

Can you let the recipe page be only about that dish? The "similar dishes" below it can all be collapsed if needed. Because many will just want to print scroll the actual content and not get lost in other things.

Requests that'd make be use it: * special indian section (or others) * Special indian + vegetarian. add the greed/red dot and you instantly have a large audience. * I guess you could just allow special tags, and that could make above possible. * printable/downloadable book. Not strictly necessary, I could just run phantomjs and print out a list of pages, but if this was pre-done that'd be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually we had the print version, which was more readable, and attention focused. That didn't make it in the current iteration. Point noted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces?

It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia, not on a list I found on epinions, ...?

This brings to mind, does the recipe auto-convert to metric (eg from cups or imperial). How does it handle that?

<comment><USER7> In the vid they say '2 nos', not 'ons' for onions and also '4 nos' for lasagna sheets. I'm guessing whoever typed that thought units were required and typed a variant of 'nºs' to mean 'numbers'. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign)

<comment><USER4> Lol, yes, now you mention it ... oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was _very_ skeptical starting watching the video, but you guys totally won me over by the end. I'm recommending the site to my wife now, who's an avid amateur cook.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is incredibly neat, I love it. I haven't used it extensively, but would there be any way to easily export things so you can import it to say AnyList for shopping? I normally would just use Paprika for this, however the recipes here looks gorgeous.

edit: Also, I forgot to mention but it's a bit annoying that there's an upper limit to password length.

<comment><USER14> You can use longer passwords now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Liked the Ingredient suggestion thing in the editor, And also ingredients on the side bar makes it easy while cooking ! Good job

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey! This is really nice. Maybe I missed it but there doesn't seem to be a way to have the ingredients be proportional to the number of people you want to prepare it for. Of course, some things are not linear, and there should be a way to specify it (like the $ in Excel or Calc).

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to build this as a platform exposing the data where you can write an app on top of this and do this calculations. Think FB apps on FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very nice. I clicked to try entering a recipe, went straight to a page and quite liked the experience from there. I would rather "1 teaspoon" stayed on the left of "newt eyes" than the right, but I like that they are styled differently.

</comment><comment><USER18> This site is a masterclass in how to build a niche online community. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cannot click the footer links, it keep pulling more data and pushing it down. Was trying to get to about, faq etc.

<comment><USER5> A long pending complaint. Been keeping it to the backburner for a while. SOrry about that. The auto loading stops after a while and becomes user triggered.

Meanwhile here is the link you were looking for [http://cucumbertown.com/humans](http://cucumbertown.com/humans)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> No autocomplete for julienne, sautee, carmelize. It seems like this was written without any input from a trained chef.

Hint: [http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html](http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html)

<comment><USER4> "carmelize"? I've heard US Americans saying it but I just thought it was poor diction for "caramelize" [bleurgh, of course caramelise is the _correct_ spelling ;0) ]. Did you typo it or is this becoming an accepted spelling?

Wonder if you can build in synonyms without making it cluttered: julienne is for _home_ purposes used as equivalent to allumette, or matchsticks, or long thin strips, or batons. In a professional kitchen I think batons|batonnet are fatter, julienne are skinny and long, allumet|matchsticks are as the name suggests but a usually a little thinner.

Standardising recipe descriptions is probably pretty hard.

<comment><USER20> It is becoming an accepted spelling.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize)

Also it's not 'US Americans' but Usanians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be nice if I could see the recipes without the need to sign on.

<comment><AUTHOR> The homepage is the only one with a signup page. Everything else is accessible directly.

e.g. [http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/](http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/)

<comment><USER22> How do you get a subdomain like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you cross a threshold of recipes, we assign the domain. Else the whole page looks very empty.

<comment><USER22> Is that threshold a secret?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. 300 points. Each recipe can be crave/rated for points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How does one export data from this? JSON / Markdown?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have an explicit button but if you need the data we can export it for you.

Alternatively all the content is in hrecipe format. It shouldn't be much work to take a dump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Please, please allow passwords longer than 10 characters

<comment><USER14> Done!</comment></comment>


How to Get Rich, Really Really Rich - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/06/13/how-to-get-rich-really-really-rich/

<comment><USER2> I read this a few months ago. I found it a fun read, but not necessarily the best single book on the topic. I'm not sure what the best single book on the topic would be (probably an aggregation of stories like _Founders at Work_ fits that bill), but this one does quite a bit of hand-waving about the actual hard stuff. As a jumping off point for other research, it's probably as good as any.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was my first read on the topic sometime last year. I enjoyed his style, even though I disagreed with some of his conclusions (i.e. I don't think it's necessary to life like a hermit and be isolated if you're rich, you can always live a reasonably comfortable life and keep your social channels open)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Book review + a general plan of action. At least this is my take on how to proceed from the trenches of the not too poor.</comment>


Canada's Toughest Border Crossing - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/canadas-toughest-border-crossing/ <comment><USER2> A short summary of what's going on here:

The land in question involves an aboriginal reserve that has a border going through it.

Canada used to have its border post at the physical border. But felt that this allowed too much smuggling with the reserve all around it.

So the feds move the border post inland: at the border of the reserve and the rest of Canada.

As a result, the "correct" procedure to enter the Canadian side of the reserve is to:

1) exit USA

2) drive past your intended destination to the border post (I suppose they could create the world's largest duty free or free trade zone)

3) drive back to wherever you were going.

<comment><USER3> Should Canada leave the aboriginal reserve, because it makes more sense?

<comment><USER4> The thing that would make the most sense would be to allow the First Nations tribe in question to vote on which country it should belong to, and, regardless of the outcome of the vote, to grant all residents of it dual citizenship (Due to existing ties that members of the tribe have to persons living outside of the reserve.)

Everything else either:

1\. Compromises the border. (If you don't care about the border, then this point is, of course, negotiable.)

2\. Draws an arbitrary geopolitical line, that benefits[1] two super- powers[2], at the expense of the rights and freedoms of a nation, that has been there long before the existence of Canada and the United States, and will likely remain long after.

[1] Actually, it's not even clear if there are any benefits to the current state of affairs.

[2] Think Germany, being split in half by the East/West border - or the Berlin wall. It sure as hell wasn't built for the benefit of the Germans.

<comment><USER5> The obvious solution is for the United States to negotiate an open border with Canada. Policy changes might be needed on both sides, but the economic benefits of open borders between allies with similar economies is undeniable.

<comment><USER6> Canadian here, and I'd like to say: uh, no, thanks.

Canada has a very different culture than the US. Examples:

* compare types of crimes, and rates of crimes in major Canadian cities versus major US cities

* existence of many "socialist" policies, which all work on the following: "you contribute a small amount uniform across all citizens, to the national piggy bank, and the national piggy bank doles out to those in need (which may very well be you, but hopefully not, because things are likely not going to be in a good place for you then)"

* existence of media which would be "drowned" out by the US, if it weren't protected/supported by the government (e.g. CBC)

* different viewpoint on how to integrate minorities and First Nations so that _everyone_ can prosper, together---partially because of the way history played out (not because "we're better")

* different take on nationalism

I actually get the US's immigration concerns. I really wouldn't want Americans flooding into Canada (no offense, but yeah, there are just major cultural issues which would need to be fixed first, otherwise the majority will just "win out").

Reading my post, I begin to realize that it could be taken very negatively. I want to convey the fact that my parents chose to immigrate to Canada, and not the US, for a reason. We would feel really weird if the countries somehow started to "integrate" further, unless it was Canadian "culture" that dominated. Otherwise, I am not sure if home would feel like home anymore (I don't feel like an outsider in Canada, but I often do feel like an outsider when I visit the US).

Immigrants who arrive to the country are usually extremely grateful, and willing to integrate into the bigger picture, or at least, that's the vision that Canada seems to operate under. This seems to create lower levels of "tension", less "ghetto-ization", and so on. I think that's the biggest culture difference between Canada and the US: most people aren't constantly thinking about the worst that could happen, and the worst generally doesn't happen.

I might be totally wrong. Scratch that: I really hope I am totally wrong.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how _any_ of those things relate to open borders. Having different cultures doesn't preclude an open border; see Scotland and England for reference. Can you please clarify?

It's funny. I asked a friend of mine if she would oppose open borders with Canada, and she said that the US couldn't afford to deal with all of the Canadians that would flood into the United States. So which is it? I feel like this is a reflexive conservative argument that all of these X are going to come to our country and change our culture and take our stuff. Why is the first one bad, and is there even any evidence for the second?

Meanwhile, we're all leaving money on the table because of our fears: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17382400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17382400)

<comment><USER7> Scotland and England are not really different countries, despite what people there might say. They're just local political divisions, less significant than a Canadian province.

I assume that the theoretical open borders policy you're describing would still leave in place immigration restrictions, so I don't see why the rush of Canadians would overwhelm the U.S. (since they can't work legally).

I see at least a couple big road blocks though. First, both Canada and the U.S. impose selective tariffs and restrictions on imported products from across the world. An open border would effectively allow venue shopping, as products imported to Canada would find themselves in the U.S. and vice versa. Even for local products, Canada standards for e.g. cheese seem like they would be much harder to enforce. Second, both Canada and the U.S. choose who to admit to the county based on their own polices (criminal backgrounds, specific blacklists, etc.). These would have the same problem with an open border.

An open border would effectively require a lot of these policies to be unified for Canada and the U.S., much like the E.U. While there are benefits, that's a lot of autonomy to give up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw)

Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs.

Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.

<comment><USER9> I grew up in Delta near Point Roberts. It's a part of America located on the southern end of a peninsula, the rest of which, is part of British Columbia. They have an elementary school but not a high school in point roberts. So, when I was in high school, most of the people from Point Roberts would be bussed into Tsawwassen but we had a bus that would bring a few of them to the high school I went to.

That seems like a perfect area that could be part of your land exchange idea. All the teenagers there end up going to school in Canada anyway. There's only one crossing between Point Roberts and Canada.

<comment><USER2> Then where will Canadians deliver their EBay, Amazon and other US vendor packages?

Have you seen how much cheaper auto parts are in USA?

<comment><USER10> Blaine. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article covers the issues quite well. It's hell for the people who live on either side of the border, and relations with the authorities on the Canadian side have been especially bad - in addition to the protest about CBSA border guards carrying guns earlier in the decade, there was a violent land dispute at another Mohawk reservation about 30 miles to the east in 1990 in which two people including a Quebec police officer lost their lives ([http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2018/07/09/shooting-death-police- ind...](http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2018/07/09/shooting-death-police-indian- canada-history-july-11-1990-the-crisis-and-death-at-oka/)).

The smuggling issue is not just something that takes place on the Akwesasne area of the St. Lawrence, either. It happens throughout the Thousand Islands.

</comment><comment><USER12> Back when tobacco tax were much higher in Ontario and Quebec, the Akwesasne reserve was a key smuggling area for bringing low tax US cigarettes into Canada. I remember seeing videos of Ski-doos hauling sleds stacked high with cartons of cigarettes.

Eventually Ontario and Quebec (and a few other provinces) dropped their tobacco taxes to remove the incentive to smuggle.[1]

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/09/world/canada-cuts- cigaret...](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/09/world/canada-cuts-cigarette- taxes-to-fight-smuggling.html)

<comment><USER13> How much higher could they have possibly been in Ontario? A pack of Du Maurier runs you almost $20 CAD these days...

<comment><USER12> This was a long time ago. NY Times article says $44 for a carton in Ontario versus $15 or so in the US.

Obviously different times. However, the increase in taxes in the US made even higher taxes in Canada possible.

<comment><USER2> The price disparities between untaxed "reserve" cigarettes and non-reserve cigarettes is still there.

But they're often manufactured in Ontario now and find their way around.

Currency exchange rates can play some element.

New York State already has a lot of domestic demand for untaxed tobacco now that they're upped their taxes (again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recall camping on a small island on the Canadian side of the Thousand Islands. We planned to visit a dive site a short boat trip away, on the US side. Since tying up to a mooring was technically "making landfall" in the other country (even though there was no land involved), you had to go two hours out of your way to check in with the border post first.

At the time you could apply for an I-68 pass allowing boaters to report in by phone when doing short, innocuous crossings like this (with some restrictions, i.e. the trip is less than 72 hours and you stay within 25 miles of the shoreline).

It was super convenient. I wonder if a system like that could work here?

<comment><USER15> Probably not.

The part that's missing in the article is that the reservation is a major hub of smuggling and various frauds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of the Northwest Angle, which requires you to cross the Canada border to get back into a small piece of America that is self-contained within Canada. And odd piece of geographic borders: [https://lakeofthewoodsmn.com/northwest- angle/](https://lakeofthewoodsmn.com/northwest-angle/)

<comment><USER17> Also Point Roberts Washington. School kids are bussed daily from the US through Canada to the US, and then back again at the end of the day.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington#Educ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington#Education)

<comment><USER18> We could trade those of course, but we could also connect them.

It looks like Point Roberts needs an 8-mile tunnel and the Northwest Angle needs an 11-mile tunnel. Causeways would probably work too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The policy under which they might gain the right to mobility - proof of ancestral custom - fixes in place what would have been a continually evolving aspect of historical culture. _The Orenda_ discusses a particular huron tribe picking up their whole village, including their dead, and moving it somewhere else - a practice they would repeat every few years or so. They couldn't recall any one place to say "thats where our ancestors lived" except to point at the whole territory where they made their various villages. The policy of requiring 50% native blood seems also geared towards eventually ending this allowance, given that entropy never decreases.

<comment><USER20> By that same logic, every noble house in Europe would have gone extinct by now. It's not hard, especially when you're dealing with isolated communities, to keep a lot of genetic continuity for a long time.

<comment><USER21> You don't need a 50% blood line to maintain your nobility title, you inherit the title from someone else, usually your father just like, and usually along with, a house or an estate.

To make it like aristocracy the rule should apply recursively, you are a Mohawk if 50% of your ascendants are Mohawks as defined by the same rule.

<comment><USER22> I once new a guy who was working really hard to keep a blood % out of his tribe treaty in Washington state. Said it was really hard to get his tribe to realize just how valuable it was to only have to show lineage, and not how much. The US (state?) government wanted to pay a small sum of money as due consideration for the treaty change, and he just couldn't get the tribe to understand that the money would be gone in less than a few years, but that their grandchildren would likely have a harder time. I don't think it helped that this guy looked pretty white, and wonder if there were people in the tribe who thought this % clause would help keep people out of the tribe who maybe didn't look like they belonged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Haskell Free Library in Derby Line and Stanstead Quebec is quirky. Half in Canada and half in the US.

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

Both towns are fascinating as well. Worth a visit in the summer/fall.

<comment><USER24> In relation to that, some time ago I also stumbled across this photographic documentary of the whole US/Canada border:

[http://www.clui.org/section/united-divide-a-linear- portrait-...](http://www.clui.org/section/united-divide-a-linear-portrait- usacanada-border)

</comment></comment><comment> em-bee how about putting the US border-crossing on the canadian side and the canadian border-crossing onto the US side?

though politically unlikely, this would be the most practical.

in order to enter the reservation from the US side you need to be cleared to enter canada but you are not actually leaving the US until you leave the reservation on the canadian side.

the reverse process from the other direction.

people who live in the reservation never need to cross any border checking. it also means you are only able to enter the reservation if you are allowed to stay in the US and in canada. not a problem for locals, but maybe for tourists who eg. have a visa for canada but not for the US.

it would also mean that the stricter laws of both countries would apply. no guns in the reservation as per canada's laws for example...

</comment><comment><USER25> What's so great about those two countries that makes the border control to be overly diligent?

<comment><USER8> They both have a surplus of bored and/or vindictive officials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Escape at Dannemora

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems off topic?

<comment><USER28> If you click "Guidelines" at the bottom:

> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

Frankly, I enjoy this "topic"; people post interesting things that I would have never otherwise learned about. Particularly Wikipedia articles; for example, I learned about Pando[1], one of the largest organisms on Earth: it is an Aspen grove occupying 106 acres, but it's still a single _thing_. To me, that was mind blowing the first time I read it; I wouldn't have ever recognized such a thing even if I were there in person.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Pando is fascinating and would definitely be worth visiting. Another large organism that got some press recently is the "Humongous Fungus" which covers 2,385 acres of forest in Oregon and is apparently one of the oldest organisms on earth [0]. There's definitely the potential for a sci-fi movie.

[0] [https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/the-worlds- larg...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/the-worlds-largest- living-organism.aspx)</comment></comment></comment>


Extreme Bridge Racing. Real Driving on Speed Cars - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ExtremeBridgeRacing.dzmitry <comment><AUTHOR> Are you ready to enjoy impossible stunt-ing car racing on sky roads by playing impossible tracks games? Enjoy the ultimate car driving on sky high bridges. New mobile racing game with upgraded realistic car. Extreme Racing Game. Be careful while driving on bridges as you may get hit by the highly dangerous obstacles.</comment>


Gitlab.com Is Moving to 13.0 - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/05/06/gitlab-com-13-0-breaking-changes/ <comment><USER2> Github is great at one thing(so far): the UI never change. We did use Gitlab for sometime but the UI and slowness compared to Github was so noticeable. I wonder if its still the case now?

<comment><USER3> Yep, it's still among the slowest. In terms of speed, popular source forges rank as follows:

1\. SourceHut

2\. Codeberg

3\. GitHub

4\. Pagure

5\. GitLab

6\. Bitbucket

Source: [https://forgeperf.org/](https://forgeperf.org/)

<comment><USER4> I see that site is maintained by SourceHut though - are the test run from within their own DC? That could contribute to the performance score.

<comment><USER3> Very true. I'm in a different part of the country (I'm in Boston, they're in Philadelphia) and tried running the benchmarks myself about a week ago. Unfortunately, I didn't save the results, but if you take my word for it, I remember getting similar results with only slightly different numbers. Your best bet, of course, is to run the benchmarks yourself: [https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/forgeperf](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/forgeperf)

Some other people ran the benchmarks from different places in Europe and got similar results with "nothing significantly different" from those published: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22900649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22900649)

<comment><USER4> I'll try it out later today. Would be interesting to see actually because, completely anecdotally, GitLab seems faster than sr.ht in my daily usage.

<comment><USER3> Don't make the same mistake that I did! Save your results and share them with the class. :)

<comment><USER4> Here: [https://report-delta.now.sh](https://report-delta.now.sh)

SourceHut is still the winner of most, but GitHub is a lot faster than in the report on forgeperf.org.

I think the perceived speediness of GitHub for me can be mostly attributed to the fact they don't trigger a full page reload for every navigation. Whereas SourceHut is rendered completely server-side AFAIK.

(I meant GitHub in my previous comment, fyi.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> GitLab 13.0 will release on the 22nd of May, 12 days from now. This blog post is about the upcoming deprecations in that release, not the features. The features that might ship in that release are on [https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming- releases/](https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/)

The last GitLab release was 12.10 which was release on April 22 [https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/04/22/gitlab-12-10-re...](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/04/22/gitlab-12-10-released/) with Requirements Management and Autoscaling CI on AWS Fargate

<comment><USER6> I'd recommend watching the YouTube playlist, this helps a lot to get a grasp onto your very own use cases and possible features to solve them :)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0KqWysAAKFYY...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0KqWysAAKFYYIE2Tf9IZB5bv)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it very frustrating that Gitlab requires Javascript for simple basic things. You can't view replies to issues or even browse files in a repository. GitHub UX is so much better, but sadly many projects moved to Gitlab because of Microsoft acquiring GitHub.

<comment><USER8> Which projects that you follow moved from GitHub to Gitlab? None of the ones I keep an eye on have moved.

I don't really see the point. GitHub has only improved since they were acquired.

<comment><USER7> > I don't really see the point. GitHub has only improved since they were > acquired.

Fully agree, but apparently some projects don't like having their infrastructure owned by Micosoft, that would be the only reason for switching in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > As we continue to work towards version control for Snippets, we are making a > change to search for Snippets in the UI and API that removes snippet Content > from search results. Title and Description will still be accessible via > search and API.

This makes me a bit sad, but it probably has a valid technical reasoning. I just have to be a bit more descriptive in my descriptions I guess!

<comment><USER10> Yes, there's some reasoning behind the decision to remove snippet Content from search results. You can find the original discussion and decision in this issue: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/199220](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/199220)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > An offset-based pagination limit of 50,000 is being applied to the /projects > API endpoint on GitLab.com.

This feels familiar. I once designed an API for retrieving a large number of items (hundreds of thousands to millions) from a Postgres database. I quickly learned that using OFFSET for such queries is an anti-pattern because it forces Postgres to iterate through all items before the specified offset just to retrieve the few items you requested. So allowing unlimited offsets is a great way to grind your database to a halt.

I learned that a better way to do this is to use an index-based query instead, which Postgres can deal with much better. For example, you could give your items an auto-incrementing sequence number and tell the API consumer the sequence number of the last item in the result set. For the next request the consumer can use this number to start off where it left. While that restricts the way you can order items it will greatly speed up queries and allow efficient retrieval of a very large number of items without running into the slowdown effect caused by offset-based pagination.

<comment><USER12> Yep. This is called seek vs scan. It's a common issue when you start hitting 10's of thousands of records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently hit a reCAPTCHA while trying to edit a ticket on one of my projects hosted on Gitlab.com. Since I block reCAPTCHA, this was silently failing and I had to debug this. This prevented me to edit this ticket. This is bad.

I initially chose Gitorious when I needed to share an open source project because it was free software. I've been transfered to Gitlab.com and was ok with this back then.

But requiring me to run this piece of non free tracking malware and solve a captcha to manage my free software project, and worse, making me force this upon the contributors of my projects? This is bullshit.

I know the Gitlab staff is on HN, so thank you for your amazing software and for the free hosting, but be aware that this is making me move as soon as possible and actively discourage people from using Gitlab.com. ReCAPTCHA is not OK. Never.

Cloudflare made the move [1]. Will you?

[1] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to- hcaptch...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/)

<comment><USER6> Hi,

Developer Evangelist at GitLab here. Sorry that you had a hard time debugging the failure. I had gotten these reCaptcha questions myself recently. In the past months, there were numerous spam waves with flooding the issue tracker. You can see that with the increasingly high issue number, as their IDs have been burnt.

I agree that reCaptcha is not the best solution. We have an ongoing discussion which also includes replacing reCaptcha with hCaptcha. While I cannot make a promise, I recommend that you subscribe to the issue. Also, please add your thoughts in there too :)

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/21998#note_325...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/21998#note_325800226)

Next to having captchas, there are other spam prevention ideas. One of them would be to follow a trust level model such as Discourse, but that needs more long-term planning and a fair model to let existing users becoming trusted.

Please see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/14156#note_258...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/14156#note_258252735) for more details.

Cheers, Michael

<comment><USER13> Nice! Thanks for your reply. I will take a look.

I which good luck to the GitLab team against spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Already upgraded our gitlab RDS instance to PostgreSQL 11. AWS makes stuff like that very easy. We use the free version of gitlab and find it very capable. That plus Jenkins plus artifactory we have a nice little setup.

<comment><USER15> Curious why Jenkins over GitLab's CI/CD?

<comment><USER16> I'd imagine they were already using it with their prior SC setup and didn't want to move source control and everything else at once.

<comment><USER14> Yep. We were svn using "beanstalk" when I joined our company and pushed for a git migration. But we already had Jenkins running with tons of stuff set up on cloud bees. Then they kicked us off for some reason (forgot why) so it started our own migration to AWS

<comment><USER5> If you are still considering moving CI from Jenkins to GitLab we're publicly testing a Jenkins Wrapper to make it more gradual to move [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/215675](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/215675)

<comment><USER14> Not sure how that would work with our double Jenkins (inside and outside) setup but I'll check. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Feel free to comment in the linked issue if you want some help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> as an admin and a user, im totally happy with gitlab. its a easy enough to administer, its reasonably priced even for a small company, and they dont try to push their "cloud offerings".</comment>


The Greatest Hacks of My Life - <AUTHOR> http://wesleytansey.com/the-10-greatest-hacks-of-my-life/

<comment><USER2> vending machine hacks, although both illegal and immoral, provide an immense source of joy in knowing that you _beat the system_, regardless of what treat may come out.

here's my biggest vending machine hack: freshman year in college, there was a vending machine in our dorm building. it wasn't cheap (obviously), but it got lots of use because it had something extra: a card reader for our IDs. if we pre-loaded our card with money, we could use it to buy sodas, snacks, and washer/dryer cycles. very convenient.

but the vending machine had a quirk: occasionally, for reasons unknown, it would just start spitting out coins. it was a pretty rare occurance (and a very exciting one) that it became known colloquially as "hitting the jackpot". every time we went to the machine, we would cross our fingers, hoping to "win".

while it seemed like a random occurance at first, i knew it couldn't be completely random, and i wanted to figure out _why_ it was happening. so i began investigating. whenever i went to the machine, i would try different combinations of buttons, choosing different rows/columns, but i couldn't recreate the behavior. accompanying my friends to the machine, i paid attention to how they were inputting their order (and if they subsequently "won") to try and figure it out.

after lots of observation, i found a pattern: everyone who ever won used their card to buy something. focusing on the card reader, i also found that these people had accidentally put their card in _incorrectly _ before righting it. with a theory loosely in place, i put some money on my card and gave it a whirl.

and it worked! here's the behavior: if you put your card in incorrectly, the machine couldn't read it because the stripe was on the wrong side, so it spit the card back out and flashed an error on the screen which would clear after a few seconds. while the error was showing, the machine would not accept your card. however, if you put your card in _immediately_ after the error cleared, here's what happened:

1\. screen displays the amount of money on your card

2\. choose your drink

3\. drink is vended while the same amount of money is displayed (i.e. not subtracting the price of the drink.

4\. the machine begins spitting out coins in the amount of your card value minus the price of the drink

5\. the card is returned with the _original balance_ still intact

so, if i had $20 on my card, and i bought a powerade that costs $1.50, i would walk away from the machine with a powerade, $20 still on my card, and $18.50 in change.

horribly immoral and illegal? absolutely. however, i still feel immensely proud that i not only figured out what was happening, but how to reproduce it.

<comment><USER3> immoral - yes. but how would this be illegal?

<comment><USER4> As a general rule, taking money that does not belong to you is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I'm a poker player and small time affiliate.

The poker related ones seem to venture well into the unethical or illegal category. That doesn't take away from the difficulty or cleverness of the hacks, but unlike the candy theft story, there is no acknowledgment that some of those things might have been unethical or illegal.

Edit: I now see the conclusion that notes the potential for illegality, but I feel like the body comes off as way too proud about aiding a scam of a business (the affiliate "arbitrage")

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested to understand why you think so.

Most people in college at the time were signing up for poker sites without any affiliate reference, so they would get nothing. At least with Aces Up they got something back.

My poker bot was against the T&C of the site, so I could see the ethical issue there. The bot barely won any money at the $5 SNGs (maybe $100), and factoring in the massive amounts I lost playing my expert strategy at $2/$4 limit, it was net negative.

The affiliate arbitrage thing was definitely unethical, though as I noted, I did not participate directly. It was also against their T&C and my friend eventually drifted into some even more shady areas of affiliate dealings (100% rakeback via a similar system, etc) that lead to him being banned on most sites.

I don't know that any of those three are illegal at all. Regardless, I suppose I may have a predisposition for finding an angle and considering ethics as an after thought.

Edit: In response to your edit, I suppose you could look at it as a scam of a business. In truth, most people had a love/hate relationship with PartyPoker since they took high rakes, didn't permit rakeback programs, and were ruthless about shutting down accounts and seizing the money with the claim that "we're not a bank". Being in the bot community and watching lots of people lose thousands of dollars because PP deemed their account suspicious was enough to make me lose any empathy for PartyPoker.

<comment><USER6> > Regardless, I suppose I may have a predisposition for finding an angle and > considering ethics as an after thought.

Many of us have a predisposition for finding an angle. Finding an angle is, I agree, part of the joy of hacking. But you can never let ethics become a mere afterthought. You certainly can't _justify_ unethical behavior by simply asserting you're predisposed to unethical behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. I am simply predisposed. These days I like to think I'm a little wiser, thoughtful, and empathetic than I was as a kid, so I walk things through a little more in my mind. :)

<comment><USER7> Probably against the T&C's of the affiliate program as well, where the company, reading this, might get back to you for a claw back. At least, that's what I would consider/investigate if I was the affiliate manager.

Al in all, clever

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stealing from a vending machine is now hacking?

I guess a few of you could also find out that if someone left a window open you could get in their house and take a free TV, that would also show you the joy of "beating a system"...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not proud that I stole from the vending machine. I'm proud that I figured out _how_ to steal from it.

Fundamentally, I see no difference between being a 17 year old in a basement figuring out that if you send excessive amounts of data into an unchecked buffer, you can gain control over program flow, and being a 13 year-old kid figuring out that by rocking a machine back and forth, you can cause the front items to rub up against the edge of the rack, effectively sawing the plastic off. What is the difference really? Both are fine if you don't use it in the real world and illegal if you do.

And I don't think it's the same as crawling into an open window. Rather, it's more like lock picking, particularly after they started installing these rock- resistant cages and we had to get creative by using two-man teams (one rocking forward, one rocking back). I believe DefCon has a lock picking session every year.

<comment><USER9> Rocking a vending machine is so obvious that it does not constitute a "hack".

<comment><USER10> Yes, to you it might be. To a 13yr old... maybe not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My little story. A little hack for love: [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/02/hacking- toshiba-t4800ct-love-sto...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/02/hacking- toshiba-t4800ct-love-story_9458.html)

<comment><USER12> I once did something similar. I was in a school that had dumb terminals on which you could only check email - they set the login shell for all student users as pine. We found that you could set bash or lynx or the like as the spell checker or external editor, and in so doing, get proper internet access (or as proper as you could consider lynx).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having lived a previous life as a blackhat, ID thief, and credit card scammer I could write a book (and may someday) about hacks I came up with. Here are a few:

I sold fake IDs at college. The real IDs were plastic cards and had multi- spectrum holograms, something you can't easily fake. Combining methods I found on the internet with my own discoveries I created simulated holograms using clear spray paint, lamination pouches, Pearlex pigment powder, Alps thermal printer, and a bad ass laminator. They were good enough to pass most bouncers in-state and was told that one passed a cop.

Our college IDs could be used at campus stores, vending machines, etc. The mag stripe just had your school ID encoded on it. If you had a mag stripe encoder (like me) and knew someone's ID you could encode it onto your own ID (or a fake one you printed yourself, like I did). The problem was finding school ID numbers.

To communicate with students there was a set of folders outside the main office of each department. Each student had their own folder, sorted in alphabetical order. This was also where you got your grades at the end of the quarter. I realized that your grades had your full student ID number listed (which was also your SSN!). All I had to do was go through the folders and find grades other students hadn't picked up yet to get their ID numbers.

Luckily the school stopped printing full numbers on student correspondence not long after that.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a greatest story of how the hacker mindset evolves over time. I wish I had more cool stories like that from my teenage years - I had a friend who was always thinking up crazy moneymaking schemes or trying to hack the school's computer systems, and I was always saying "oh, if it was that easy, everyone would do it". I've been trying to erase that mindset from my brain.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really like reading blog posts on this topic. The "greatest hack" question on the YC app always made me hesitate because I don't really think of anything I do as "hacking". It is good to see different categories of hacks to get an idea of what everyone is talking about. If anyone has any links to good posts in the same vein, I would love if you would share.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm certainly impressed by that poker bot, but it sure is depressing reading about it at 22 and having never really written anything more than 1k LOC. I feel hopelessly behind sometimes.

edit: I also wanted to mention that Curvio sounds like a great idea, do you have any competitors? It's one of those ideas where I'm surprised it hasn't already been done, which I feel is usually a good sign.

<comment><USER17> I remember being 22 and feeling hopelessly behind.

Keep at it!

<comment> no-go-mojo How do you feel behind at 22? Your 20s should mostly be blown away on things you'd not do later in life. I think.

<comment><USER18> Why? If you wouldn't do them later in life, why would you do them in your 20s either? Unless you mean things like claiming to be 23, which would be dishonest if you weren't.

<comment> no-go-mojo No man, partying 6 nights in a row, hanging out being care free, living for the moment etc. So if someone asks you, how were your 20s, you smile and say wooh, they were good, and off record. :-)

Basically I'm saying party it up, learn a bit about everything and everyone, back pack across a continent or two, and don't be in such a rush to jump in the rat race. When you're in your late 20s, dropping everything and rolling out will most likely be near impossible. You will be more rooted like an older tree. Right now just see and feel the world you have come into and just play with it.

My 2 cents.

P.S. to me a Michael Jackson or Mark Zuckerberg are not a great life, because they were/are unidimensional. They are what they are and not much outside of it. In technology, a rounded and balanced figure I can think of Steve Jobs. He got the fuck out, then got back in. In is always there, you can always get back in, but you can't always get out.

Good luck!

<comment><USER18> > partying 6 nights in a row, hanging out being care free, living for the > moment etc.

If those are good things to do, why are they not good when you're not in your 20s? If they're not good things to do, why would they be good in your 20s?

They sound kind of like stupid, boring wastes of time to me. But if they genuinely make you happy, why would they stop genuinely making you happy because your hair fell out and you got fat?

> When you're in your late 20s, dropping everything and rolling out will most > likely be near impossible.

When I was 29 I quit my job, and then digitized the Oxford English Dictionary, published my first peer-reviewed paper, moved into a Volkswagen bus, drove all over the country with my wife (having to learn to rebuild the van's engine in the process), and moved to Argentina.

You can live a cliché, but you don't have to.

> P.S. to me a Michael Jackson or Mark Zuckerberg are not a great life, > because they were/are unidimensional. They are what they are and not much > outside of it.

Given that statement, I'd bet money you don't know Zuck personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was an assistant to a university sysadmin when I was in school. I always wondered why we bothered locking the computers themselves from being opened when it would have been exceedingly difficult to walk out of there with anything...

Now I know, O Manual Deep Freeze Hacker. Solid work.

</comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of how we figured out in our high school computer labs how to circumvent the monitoring/control software the teacher would use.

First it was succeptible to killing the process, easy enough. Once that was blocked, we figured out that some clever use of some default applications in windows would cause it to crash and give us freedom. After those vulnerabilties were fixed or blocked, and we had tried pretty much anything else we could think of, someone figured out that hitting ctrl + alt while we logged in would prevent it from even loading in the first place!

Unfortunately it was pretty easy for our teacher to catch us in the silly act of banging on our keyboards at login.

<comment><USER21> And your comment reminds me of the method I used to circumvent my teachers monitoring/control software. He had his running over the LAN so all we did was bring USB wifi adapters which got us on the schools WLAN which took our computers off his software for some reason or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lots of interesting stuff, very impressed. Good luck with Curvio!

</comment><comment><USER23> There's something universal about the struggle between IT and students in schools. It's definitely a breeding ground for creativity and information sharing.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great stories. Couple of similarities to my life. But hey, have you ever considered building a bot to play Omaha?

</comment><comment><USER25> i'm not a nostalgic guy, but this made me reminisce a bit about how I got to 26 :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey, Wesley. I didn't know you were on HN. Small internet.</comment>


Delete a node from a singly-linked list in O(1) time and O(1) space - <AUTHOR> https://www.getrevue.co/profile/hoanhan101/issues/delete-a-node-from-a-singly-linked-list-in-o-1-time-and-o-1-space-8-201165 <comment><USER2> _"Delete a node from a singly-linked list, given only a pointer to that node."_

From the 'solution':

      // if the next node is nil, it's the last node.
      // this implementation does not work.

On top of that, the 'solution' doesn't delete the node given; it deletes the one after it, but copies its value to the node to be deleted. That may be fine in some cases, but problematic in others, say when other code uses node addresses to access nodes.

I would change the problem statement to _"_Remove_ a _value_ from a _circular_ singly-linked list, given only a pointer to the node containing the value."_

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the suggestion.</comment></comment>


Building a Real-time SMS Voting App Part 1: Node.js and CouchDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/09/building-a-real-time-sms-voting-app-part-1-node-js-couchdb.html

<comment><USER2> Carter, you are a bad ass for putting your code up on Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I'm a badass, but I think it's hard for many developers to subject their code to public scrutiny, especially when it's with a language that's outside of their wheelhouse.

I wrote this app to teach myself Node.js, CouchDB, Socket.io, HighCharts.js and bunch of other things that I really wanted to learn. I hope it's useful for people new to these things, and definitely appreciate all the feedback I'm getting from the community.

<comment><USER3> I'm anxiously waiting for the remaining parts. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article on building the node.js stack.

</comment><comment><USER5> does the vote counter get incremented atomically?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Incoming votes get added to an in-memory array, which is then periodically flushed to the DB. During the flush, incoming votes are queued-up and aren't processed until the flush to the DB is complete.

<comment><USER6> Does that mean that when you implement visualization of voting data (in Part 2), there will be a small delay between the votes that have been cast and the votes that are being visualized? I have no experience with socket.io, so I am just asking out of curiosity.

<comment><AUTHOR> <<I really wish I could edit my comments>>

Scratch my comment above, the caching and flushing is introduced in a future blog post. In this iteration of the code base, an attempt is made to save a vote to the DB. If it fails, it fails, there is no attempt to retry.

[https://github.com/crabasa/votr- part1/blob/master/events.js#...](https://github.com/crabasa/votr- part1/blob/master/events.js#L53)

A comment was made about whether the vote persistence would be considered ACID. Most likely not! Each vote that comes in fetches a copy of the event document. If votes came in fast enough, this would create a problem.

However, rather than corrupting the data, I think the votes would simply fails since CouchDB uses a revision property to prevent this:

[http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Document_revisions?action=sho...](http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Document_revisions?action=show&redirect=DocumentRevisions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow you are a brilliant hacker. How did you get so goods?</comment>


In Praise of Silence - <AUTHOR> http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/in-praise-of-silence.html#more <comment><USER2> At the risk of breaking the "silence" here (15 upvotes and no comment?!), let me add this:

"Less than three minutes after an event, we expect a world of talking heads to pronounce judgement on the meaning of what's transpired."

We don't really expect it in the sense of wanting it. We expect it because we've been conditioned to instant noise on everything and now would find it creepy if something interesting (broadly defined) happened and there was silence. Reason is, all those media guys who want to draw our attention to sell their customers's products cannot survive on delivering Just the Facts, Ma'am. There are only so many known facts concerning any issue, and they are usually a little harder to come by than mere sentiment and opinion, wrapped in human interest drivel. I often imagine what a typical news article, even in a generally good paper like the Grey Lady, would look like if boiled down to just the facts. I'd die for a medium that gave me just the facts and remained silent when it was done delivering (or still in the process of hunting for) them.

As for the more personal connections, I routinely find people are genuinely annoyed or even take it personal when I turn my phone off or don't reply to email. I don't even have a Twitter account and just today shut down my FB page, but people do expect it -- even though they know I'm not the social type. Even harder to do in work environment where bossman or colleagues expect to be able to call you anytime. Sigh... Similar to the media, I often ask myself what they would say if they just gave or asked me actual information/content, without the whole yadayada wrapper. I think it's some sort of validate-my-existence/status/whatever thing but I ain't no psychologist, so...

<comment><USER3> "I'd die for a medium that gave me just the facts and remained silent when it was done delivering (or still in the process of hunting for) them."

Would you?

Thing is, there are many mediums that _do_ give you just the facts and then shut up when they have no more facts to report. The Edgar database at the SEC gives you the financials and relevant business information on every publicly- traded corporation in America. The Congressional Record (and more user- friendly sites like govtrack.us) gives you the full record of everything that our legislators discuss. API documentation and the source code gives you all the facts about most software libraries. Many scientific academic journals give you just the facts on recent scientific discoveries.

How much time do you spend reading these, vs. time spent listening to mainstream media, blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, and other opinion- based media?

Problem is, we're not wired to make sense of "just the facts" without overlaying some sort of interpretation on top of it. Except for people with full-blown autism, facts themselves are generally quite boring. They become meaningful only when we overlay some sort of story on top of them. But coming up with stories that can explain a set of facts is mentally exhausting, so we'd very much like to outsource that to some other person.

<comment><USER2> "...there are many mediums that do give you just the facts and then shut up when they have no more facts to report."

Edgar et al. was not what I had in mind. More like a cross between them and today's news. The difference between data and information. Would it be too much to ask for more information and less interpretation? I don't know possible solutions either, perhaps a Wolfram Alpha type interface is already the friendliest interface to data possible, but then again it's not (yet) connected to "news events". One has to actively go and ask specific questions.

<comment><USER3> I would like to see more facts in news reporting, but I don't think you can divorce this from interpretation. Facts by themselves are _boring_. You won't even remember them unless you're given some conceptual framework to fit them in with what you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> " ... solitude is the school of genius"?

Also, television and silence are of different realms. To misappropriate GK "Silence--don't know how that works on radio". I no longer even have the radio on while commuting.

[Edit] I recommend the remarkable documentary film "Into Great Silence" by Philip Gröning as a supporting argument.

</comment><comment><USER5> Lacking a leafy back garden where fricking hummingbirds visit (tweetingtoohard moment there), I'm reduced to getting my occasional insights in the morning shower. But I still agree with the first 90% of the piece. Too bad about the (lack of) conclusion.

Ah, well. Weren't I so deprived, I'd eventually think of an insightful comment mentioning McLuhan's electric external nervous system, and feedback loops working at ever higher frequencies. Besides that, I'm sorry oppressed by the 7-line HN comment box. That's, like, 3 tweets. Fermat's syndrome(TM).

<comment><USER6> >Lacking a leafy back garden where fricking hummingbirds visit (tweetingtoohard moment there)

Yikes, I think I might be guilty as charged.

<http://twitter.com/purrp/status/884420908>

<comment><USER5> Don't sweat it. Just casually observe it did not carry head-mounted micro- lasers ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The worst violator of silence ever invented was the 4 way split screen of simultaneous talking heads.

The only one of these I ever want to see again:

      +</comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>+
      | ******** | ********** |
      | ******** | ********** |
      | **       |     **     |
      | **       |     **     |
      | ******** |     **     |
      | ******** |     **     |
      |       ** |     **     |
      |       ** |     **     |
      | ******** |     **     |
      | ******** |     **     |
      +</comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>+
      | ******** | **      ** |
      | ******** | **      ** |
      | **       | **      ** |
      | **       | **      ** |
      | ******   | **      ** |
      | ******   | **      ** |
      | **       | **      ** |
      | **       | **      ** |
      | **       | ********** |
      | **       |  ********  |
      +</comment><comment>----+</comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment>


Founders talk - <AUTHOR> What's the biggest challenge that most founders face? <comment><USER2> Finding a paying client

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to niche down on that question.

</comment><comment><USER4> Asking the right question

</comment><comment><USER5> Traction.</comment>