Changes to my life as a result of just four weeks of daily meditation - <AUTHOR> http://philosophistry.com/archives/2011/02/benefits-of-meditation.html <comment><USER4> As a counter to this I have stopped daily meditation (2 hours a day Vipassana) after about 7 years of practice because I hit a rut where it didn't seem to be improving things. I certainly remained calm through all the years but cannot honestly say that it made me a happier person.

I was certainly content with the results at first but after much serious practice I found it less and less effective. I'd recommend most people to try serious meditation but think that its important to manage expectations - <USER2> tiny proportion of Westerners that start with meditation feel enough benefit to continue it for the following years.

In my own experience, Yoga had more noticeable effects and a better 'buzz' - this as someone that also gave up Yoga a few years ago. The advantage of Yoga is that you also feel healthy. I hope fight off my current laziness and restart Yoga again.

<comment><USER5> If a person lifted weights for 7 years and never became stronger I would guess he was doing it wrong[lifting too much, lifting too little, not increasing intensity, etc]. If a person meditates for 7 years and can sees no effect...

<comment><USER6> Lifting weights with the proper diet will give results. That is a biological fact.

Is mediating leading to a better life a scientific fact?

<comment><USER7> An important question and I'm not sure why you were downvoted into oblivion:

Yes.

Quick link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation>

<comment><USER8> There's a lot of research results on mindfulness meditation not covered in the WP article, and WP doesn't cover the methodology well.

Baer (2003) is, I think, the most highly cited survey of the theoretical & empirical evidence (not cited by the WP article), and has a good historical overview of research. The conclusion states that effects are comparable for depressive patients to cognitive behavioural therapy, whose effectiveness as a therapy for depression is well-established (and incidentally, much more effective than Prozac). The effectiveness for relief of distress from chronic pain is also attested.

Kabat-Zinn, cited by Baer, is probably the most accessible scientist writing for a popular audience on this.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---- Reference

Ruth Baer (2003) _Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review_ <http://www.wisebrain.org/papers/MindfulnessPsyTx.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER9> The book the article links to in the end, Mindfullness in plain English is also freely available online (and as a download): <http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html>

<comment><USER10> One thing that threw me a little when I read _Mindfulness in Plain English_ the first time was how they describe following your breathing in Vipassana.

There are a number of methods people use including the one mentioned in the book, observing the breath at the nostrils, and any of them are ok. I personally find the chest and throat works best for me.

Another thing I found hugely helpful getting started (other than finding a sangha) was getting a sense of body. When you start to sit just feel your body, is it heavy, energetic, etc. Feel places your body is touching, the floor, the chair, etc and then slowly focus in on your breath.

A final piece of advice, try not to meditate on pain if you can help it. When you first start out sitting will probably hurt (that doesn't mean you should fidget or ignore it). However meditating on pain is actually pretty easy. You'll quickly realise that it makes everything else harder to meditate on because it is extremely intense so you less sensitive to other things. The solution is to spend a little time making sure you are sitting right or spending some session in seated meditation.

Contact details are on my profile. Feel free to ask me any questions. I've been practicing Theravada and Vipassana for a while.

<comment><USER11> > spending some session in seated meditation.

First I misread this as "sedated meditation", which had me wondering: Does moderate alcoholic influence impair or improve a meditation session?

I know it may sound weird, but I find it tremendously easier to concentrate on and _really understand_ heavy mathematical material after a glass of whisky or two.

<comment><USER10> It makes it a lot harder, a light dusting of caffeine can be helpful though.

The purpose of vipassana meditation is "awareness" and alcohol really gets in the way of that because it makes it hard to focus. This kind of meditation is an activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently tried Natural Stress Relief (NSR) meditation per Alex Payne's suggestion (<http://al3x.net/2010/09/07/startup-health.html>). The technique requires carving out around twenty minutes for meditation twice a day (morning and evening). Even with a schedule as flexible as mine (i.e., _extremely_ flexible), I found this virtually impossible to maintain; forty minutes a day may not sound like much, but it is, especially since it has to happen at specific times (before meals, not before bed, etc.). For example, I work much better if I eat within 30 minutes of waking; since (according to NSR) you're not supposed to eat before meditating, that leaves almost no slack in my morning schedule. It's also incredibly easy to forget to meditate until an hour before you have to be somewhere, and then you have to (say) shower, dress, eat, _and_ meditate in order to keep up with the program. (Actually, per the eating rule, you would have to meditate and then shower & eat. And possibly be late to your thing.) And you know how hackers operate on the Maker's Schedule? For me, meditation became one of those things that breaks big chunks of time in two. Not good.

NSR emphasizes the importance of doing two sessions _every day_. After a couple of weeks on the program, I found that the stress of scheduling the meditation, combined with the stress of missing the occasional session (and hence, horror of horrors, _not following the program_ ), completely overwhelmed any stress-relieving benefits from the practice. I abandoned it within a month.

I'm not sharing this experience to show how much meditation sucks; I'm inclined to believe those who say meditation works wonders for them. I'd appreciate some advice from those who have faced and overcome the problems I've described—if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

<comment><USER13> So try once a day? Don't worry so much about the scheduling? Meditate for 20 minutes if you can, 1 minute if that's all you have? It sounds like you got off on the wrong foot. A big part of meditating is learning to accept without judgement, and your post is full of you judging yourself.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the advice. I'm not judging myself, I'm judging the system—the NSR manual is stern in its warnings not to deviate from the program. But perhaps a meditation system more flexible than NSR is worth giving a try.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. I am not familiar with NSR, so I won't speak to it, but the meditation I have learned is much more flexible. There are some links in this thread that would probably prove valuable, but I'd encourage to try and find another practice. I know it helped me to start with other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I meditated for the throughout grad school to keep my sanity, but slowly transitioned into running with no music and no talking if I am running in a group as my form of meditation. Basically I combined my mediation time with my running time. It wasn't a conscious change, but I found that actively not thinking during long (13 mile+)runs gave me the mental benefits of meditating (focus, relaxation, spurred creativity) but also gave me the benefits of being an active runner.

You might say how can you focus on not thinking during a rain, well like anything it takes practice--it won't happen over night.

<comment><USER15> I've attempted running and meditating. So far I haven't figured it out. Lately instead and towards the end of my jog I start walking earlier and meditate during the walk a few minutes before reaching home. Seems easier for now anyway. Building up that capability has also allowed me to have effective de- stress/meditating walking sessions during the working hours.

<comment><USER16> Just as a quick tip (from someone who has run for about 20 years now)... What "meditating" just means is keeping your focus on a given thought/feeling/whatever... so it truly can be _anything_... whether it's music, running, a concept like love, the present, etc... you'll get the same root benefit, which is a capability to direct your focus. Obviously the secondary benefits come from the type of meditation you're doing.

When you run, you're usually not trying to focus on a thought in your head (although you can)... usually you're focused on the present experience - <USER3> pain, the pleasure, the runners high, the beauty of nature around you, etc.

However, any true runner here will tell you the thing that brings the greatest mental focus is pain. We LOVE pain. The greater the pain, the greater the pleasure. It's odd, but the more pain you experience the more you have to use every ounce of mental energy and focus (i.e. meditation) to overcome it.

That's why my easy runs almost always result in me picking up the pace and murdering the second half as compared to the first... There's something I just love about the pain and focus. Same with why when I've had a stressful day the first thing I want to do is just pound out a blistering pace on a treadmill. The pain gets your focus off everything else.

We runners are insane though, so if you're just into jogging, I'd suggest focusing on the beauty of nature and the present. When I manage to stick to a jog, usually I use it to just reflect on all that is good, thanking God just to be alive, for nature, etc... Helps to have existing cardio training so you can talk to yourself while jogging. If you do push the pace and get tired or feel pain, change it to a repetitive positive thought track like "I can do it" or something. Usually that's kinda in beat to my steps too. Each step closer you ultimately realize you can, in fact, do it! Feels great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been meditating for about the same time according to the instructions at audiodharma. I'm not sure it was _that_ beneficial for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I already acquired some of the world-views he describes. I'm a pretty calm person overall, not driven by emotion very much.

I do feel better about a breakup I had some time ago, but that might simply be because enough time has passed. Anyway in a moment of emotional pain, I concentrate on my breathing and close my eyes which puts me in meditation mode (because I got used to it) and I'm more or less able to remove thoughts about the pain and after I while I start thinking about something different and I do feel better. Sometimes when I really manage to clear my mind and think of nothing, it feels good. Partly because I'm glad I managed to do that :) In general, I must agree that the idea of being mindful of the present moment and not indulging into fantasies about the past or future are a good idea.

But still it's hard to find the 20 minutes a day. I might even say that meditation is a harder test for your willpower than physical excercise. Not to say that the 20 minutes are pretty boring, in the beginning anyway.

EDIT: So I'm a little confused about the benefits of meditation. If anyone more experienced has any tips, please share your ideas. Also, I'm probably going to visit a local buddhism center.

</comment><comment><USER18> I highly recommend "I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj for anyone who has been meditating for a while and is looking for some orientation in the face of changing reality. "I Am That" is a pure, direct discussion on understanding the nature of reality, with no dogma, no particular Hindu leaning other than some of the language used.

edit: PDF: <http://www.maharajnisargadatta.com/I_Am_That.pdf>

<comment><USER19> _a pure, direct discussion on understanding the nature of reality, with no dogma_

i don't mean to open a can of worms, but these two statements conflict with each other.

<comment><USER18> if a discourse is based purely on direct experience (evidence) and not at all on authoritatively settled doctrine, i feel comfortable saying "with no dogma". Maharaj does not refer to any teachings or doctrine other than being instructed by his teacher to let go of all of the illusions attached to the concept "I am".

His questioners in the book do sometimes bring up doctrine from their personal history, but Maharaj always responds directly from experience of reality.

<comment><USER19> I appreciate that, but my point is more that the assertion that reality has a nature at all is dogmatic. This may be an issue more with your description than the actual teachings, though, which is fine. I'm not saying anything is worthless here. :)

<comment><USER20> Insofar as words have meaning, reality has a nature. That's not dogmatic, that's simply true.

<comment><USER19> Worms have emerged, so I'm leaving well enough alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Actually I also have a question. One of the main reasons that I wish to start meditating is to stop being so negative about BS stuff. I hear things on the news, get cut off in traffic, shit breaks at home, have to pay unexpected bills and I tend to get bitter. I need to just CHILL the F OUT. I am not sure if you can relate to this, but I would be curious to hear anything that might be a motivator to use meditation to decrease negativity.

<comment><USER22> There are multiple types of meditation.

Some are about introspecting about ideas, others are about letting go of them and focusing on a simple task (counting, breathing, flames, whatever).

Some of the latter type can really help with that stuff you are worrying about, as you will get better at removing yourself from that stuff.

Even though I last regularly meditated over a decade ago, I can still do the "just let it go" trick usually. Helps tons

Non aff link to book that talks about lots of techniques. I did the counting to 4 one: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Meditate-Self-Discovery- Lawrence-L...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Meditate-Self-Discovery-Lawrence- LeShan/dp/0316880620)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why not boxing or exercising? It's healthier. I do 60 sit-ups and 50 push-ups every morning before breakfast. It definitely changed my life.

<comment><USER24> Boxing as in being repeatedly hit in the head with considerable strength? I have my doubts about this being a healthy lifestyle, but I would be interested to see statistics on longevity among people who were active boxers compared to the rest of population.

<comment><USER25> I've thought about picking up boxing. It seems like the desire to not be hit in the face would be good motivation to exercise regularly between matches. Like you though, I'm a bit worried about the risk of concussion and having my nose broken, and thus haven't taken the plunge.

<comment><USER26> I might recommend something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instead.

It definitely can cause physical pain, but concussion generally isn't something you worry about with BJJ. That isn't to say that it's impossible, but I do believe the risk is SIGNIFICANTLY lower.

Arguably, BJJ works as a better self-defense art than boxing as well, though for it to be truly effective, you generally pair it with a striking art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> He doesn't spend much time visiting Reddit anymore - except to submit articles saying he doesn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find I go directly to subreddits I like now, like r/wikipedia or r/cogsci

I still surf the Internet, but it's more focused, and less like bodysurfing through shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've read so much writing on meditation from Tibetan monks getting MRI scans to finding peace and becoming ready for love in Bali. This one is by far the most compelling argument I've read. And if it can start having an effect in four short weeks, there's no reason not to give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER29> In my experience people who are very much into meditation are those people who are still seeking the holy grail of how to feel better about life and about themselves, people who have experienced a lot of pain in their lives or periods of depression. Meditation won't solve that.

<comment><USER30> \- In my experience this isn't the case at all. Everyone I know drawn to meditation wasn't due to periods of depression nor pain in their lives but for a variety of other reasons which pretty much all come down for personal development.

\- Meditation is used in clinical situations specifically for paid and stress reduction. If you want sources for this there's of citations on the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation>

<comment><USER31> Stress reduction? I have a novel idea for stress reduction: Stop stressing. Are you going to die tomorrow? No? Then settle down and stop worrying.

I tell this to everyone I know who "suffers" from stress, and I get some variation on the same response, "it's not that easy for me".

Actually, it is easy. It's 2011. Predators aren't chasing you across the savannah. You're not more than 3 days away from a source of potable water. You're not more than 7 days away from safe, nutritious, calorie dense food. You aren't in immediate danger of being washed away in a flood or dying of heatstroke in the desert or freezing to death.

Realize that your "stress" is so far removed from its genetic origins as to be laughable, realize how good you really have it, and enjoy life.

<comment><USER32> This is genuinely a terrible approach for anyone suffering from depression/anxiety.

If we could all pull the Louis CK approach ("everything is great but no one is happy") we would. Unfortunately those mired in depression/anxiety cannot see the forest for the trees...otherwise they wouldn't be dealing with their problems.

EDIT: shit, totally meant to downvote you. Enjoy the free karma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really interesting - thanks for posting. I have a goal this year to meditate for 3 weeks straight and have not started yet. Very inspiring.

<comment><USER33> What's stopping you?

<comment><USER21> This is going to sound so lame, but... time. My goal was to do it the "right way" and thus I wanted to get through these: <http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/> before I started. Perhaps I should just read something and jump in....

<comment><USER34> I've been listening to those talks.

They're only about an hour to 1.5 hours long, and there's only 6 of them. They are supposed to be spread over a 6 week period. So every week for six weeks, you need to find an hour to spend listening to the talk for that week.

You will be meditating during part of the talk. Other days, you will meditate 20-30 minutes. This is not a large time commitment, and since you're on HN, I'm guessing you'd be able to manage.

Good luck! The first two talks have been pretty nice so far.

<comment><USER35> Is it similar to self-hypnosis CDs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The main thing I noticed from meditating for a month was that my posture got a lot better. That alone made it worth it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting.

Who was/is your meditation teacher? I think I missed it from the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> End of the article refers to a book Mindfulness in Plain English, which you can also read for free: <http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html>

<comment><USER37> I don't mind to bash your enthusiasm in any way and I'm happy of your already gained insights, but i think you should know that in the long term it may be counterproductive or even dangerous to practice such kind of meditation without direct guidance from a teacher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> thanks for this reminder. I've witnessed good things from meditation as well but find it very difficult to do. I am inspired to try again.

</comment><comment><USER39> What meditation technique(s) do you use?

</comment><comment><USER31> This sounds like an excellent use of one's time. I wonder if the health benefits of "meditation" are as significant as those of "hatha yoga", "chiropractic", or any other such Eastern mystic pseudoscientific charlatanism.

Why spend 30 minutes a day volunteering, working, or doing something else to benefit humanity, when you can spend it sitting on a pillow, indulging yourself in an act of inducing the all-powerful placebo effect to convince yourself that all the "stress" of an upper middle class American lifestyle can be magically washed away by breathing and thinking of fat bronze statues and waterfalls?

Hope these amazing changes to your life continue.

<comment><USER40> The whole point about meditation is about self-reflection. Yes, you may argue that comparing meditation with volunteering, the former would seem like a complete waste of time with no benefit to society, but its only because you're looking at it in one-dimension.

If the OP is able to turn his life around, become calmer, more understanding and more compassionate, his actions and interactions in the physical world would have an impact to all those around him and create a multiplier effect that is much more effective in the long run than just pure volunteering.

<comment><USER41> True, volunteering isn't usually very effective (except at creating emotional reward), compared to working and donating effectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What has become of my beloved HN? Doesn't a devout 20 minutes three times a day on HN count as meditation.

Next we'll be discussing horoscopes...</comment>


Pizza is a vegetable? Congress says yes - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45306416/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/

<comment><USER2> Congress said no such thing. The headline is completely wrong.

The body of the article is a little better, in that it correctly mentions that this was actually about the tomato paste on pizza and whether or not that should count as a serving of vegetables.

However, the article gets that wrong, claiming that the USDA said no and Congress said yes. In fact, there is no dispute that tomato paste can be a serving of vegetables. The dispute is over the quantity needed. The USDA wants a pizza to have 8 tablespoons of tomato paste to be counted as a serving of vegetables. The USDA wants the requirement to be 2 tablespoons.

And yes, tomatoes are vegetables, despite being botanically fruit. Vegetable is a culinary term with no meaning in botany. Fruit is both a botanical term AND a culinary term, and a botanical fruit may or may not be a culinary fruit. Other vegetables that are botanical fruits are corn, cucumbers, and squash.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pizza can be reasonably healthy - use thin crust dough, less cheese, plenty of tomato and lots of other veg. That's a lot better than other "child friendly" "junk food".

I'm not sure about children, but I thought the salt == bad thing had pretty much been debunked?

([http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=its-time- to...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=its-time-to-end-the- war-on-salt))

If I had to pick one thing to control it wouldn't be salt, or potatoes, but fat. Maybe the potato growers would be happier if frying was banned, but roasting wasn't? Potato wedges also have the skins on, and most of the nutrients are just under the skin, so that's another benefit.

</comment><comment><USER4> From a country with such a large obesity problem, this news really doesn't suprise me.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are other surveys like some used by the infamous China Study that count pizza as meat! I wonder which categorization is worse...?

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why nobody really calls it corruption.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this news is sad. policy makers making up lame bills to justify crap food in schools</comment>


Show HN: Reading list of popular Hacker News users - <AUTHOR> https://www.collectoral.com/group/hacker-news <comment><USER2> A friendy FYI that you want to review _section 5 of the Amazon Associates Agreement_ [0] and put a disclosure somewhere on your website.

[0] [https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreemen...](https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreement)

[1] previous comment about same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19295594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19295594)

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out! Fixed it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I'm honest, I prefer the crowd-sourced wisdom of everyone on HN [1], rather than a few individual's preferences. I do like the way you've put each person's list into topics though.

A few suggestions and questions:

\- as the list grows, will there be some way to categorise and discover the lists? (tags, topics, etc)

\- is the numbered list their recommendation in order? Or is it just a list that happens to have numbers?

\- I would like a link to the source for each recommendation (twitter post or HN comment).

Congrats on putting this together though. I hope you receive lots of interest and appreciation!

[1] [https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker- news](https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News Books looks great and crowd-sourced wisdom is very useful! But, sometimes I find such aggregated data to be a popularity contest. It becomes the default recommendation I see everywhere - from Amazon to Google trends. So, I wanted to see individual's reading list and decide for myself. That's why I built this.

> as the list grows, will there be some way to categorise and discover the > lists? (tags, topics, etc)

Yes. I hope to categorize by communities such as Hacker News, Vernacular Books etc. My next list is "Reading with Your Child" :)

> is the numbered list their recommendation in order? Or is it just a list > that happens to have numbers?

It is not in any specific order, since it is compiled from different sources. Hopefully, I will get to interview them to ask for their preference? ;)

> I would like a link to the source for each recommendation (twitter post or > HN comment).

Sure! That's my next task. Thanks for all the suggestions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> shout out to the guy who put down two Chomsky books.

Manufacturing Consent is one of the most important works of the 20th century. You'll never read the news the same way again.

<comment><USER5> At risk of sounding pretentious, is Manufacturing Consent really all that important?

It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing, and those who don't care wouldn't read the book.

For the record, I haven't read the book.

<comment><USER4> "It seems that most people who care already understand the high-level principals of US media propaganda manufacturing..."

Well, how do principals emerge in the first place? Often by intense research, data gathering, and sound argumentation.

I can't think of another work out there that lays this foundation like MC. If you do read it (or watch the documentary which I've heard is pretty good), you might be surprised at some of the filters that exist in the modern propaganda model. I sure was.

Anecdotally, I have plenty of well-educated friends who "care" and also consider themselves very media-literate. A lot of them also readily parrot talking points from the NY Times.

Having this body of work (which is an academic goliath, even by Chomsky and Herman's standards) is essential to critical media studies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At first glance of this post's title, I thought it was a list of _unpopular_ users' reading. Which would be more interesting, even if the books themselves weren't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just curious! Why would that be more interesting to you? To get contrarian thoughts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was going to be a collection of their _posts_ on HN. This is also good.

Cosmetic feedback: Too much whitespace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I do have the links to the HN and twitter posts. But, wanted to launch this first and see if it interests others. Will add them soon.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER7> I meant that I thought it would be posts to read, not posts about what to read. In other words, I thought it was the users' posts themselves that was the content you're collecting/curating.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Cook French cuisine like a Master chef"! - Good list by Michael Seibel :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't buy the Gang of Four book.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. It's a foundational piece of software engineering literature, even if it is mostly misapplied. If nothing else, it is important to understand the vocabulary presented in GoF.

Don't buy it if you think its going to teach you how to write software better. Do buy it if you might ever get dropped in a OO software base written in the last ~20 years. Because understanding the context of the names is important.

<comment><USER9> I think you can get the vocabulary from online sources now (Norvig's talk alone is a pretty good starting point). I agree about its cultural importance, but if you wrote GoF'y code in 2019, in any language, people would look at you AbstractFactoryFunny.

<comment><USER10> The Java community made it pretty easy to punch down to them with the over use of the vocabulary. But its still valuable when I tell another developer "that's using a flyweight" for them to not look at me blankly.

And for what its worth I've used GoF patterns in golang in the last 6 months. No one looked at me funny (to my face at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome! Always looked for this list.

</comment><comment><USER12> How did you build the list?

<comment><AUTHOR> We compiled it from their twitter feed and HN threads.

<comment><USER13> Manually? Interesting. Out of curiosity, why not just make it a static, no-js webpage then?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a semi-manual process with a chrome plugin. So, I found it easier to render the scrapped data with Firebase & NodeJS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this website hijack scrolling? It really feels like it does. If it does, please reconsider; this shouldn't still be happening in web development.

<comment><AUTHOR> I bought a theme and used it for this site. The javascript in the theme might hijack scrolling. I will check and fix it. Thanks for letting me know!

Update: Fixed it! There was smoothscroll.js (v1.3.8) in the theme that was causing it. Note to Self: Don't blindly include all theme files :)

<comment> user00012-ab I gave up on the site as soon as the scrolling stopped working correctly.

why would you you design a site that breaks simple scrolling?

<comment><USER15> He acknowledged the problem and said he will address it. Don't be an asshole.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mossberg: Apple's Own Apps Need Work - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/02/03/mossberg-apples-own-apps-need-work/ <comment><USER2> It's a shame that this article is not published by the Wall Street Journal. Walter Mossberg's former employer. So many people are influenced by these software issues, yet I feel that only independent writers argue in the user's favor on obscure websites most people outside our bubble never heard about.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree. Walt Mossberg is being polite. The situation is much worse.</comment>


A VC Firm Dedicated To Serving Intelligence Community - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/more-than-2-billion-in-u-s-spending-dedicated-to/

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of big names they have funded:

[https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/alphabetical.html](https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/alphabetical.html)</comment>


Humans Naturally Think in Logarithms, Not Linearly - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-natural-log

<comment><USER2> This makes sense to me. Even our number system is logarithmic if you consider the size of a number to be the number of digits in it.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a tablet/laptop hybrid that works well with Linux? - <AUTHOR>

I've been excited about Microsoft Surface Pro 2 tablet and I thought I'd try using it as my main machine. It's, after all, a modern x86 computer with 10.6" pressure-sensitive screen with a stylus, that weighs 2 lbs, and iPad cover-like keyboard that just might be good enough to make it a decent tiny little laptop. I thought I'd install Ubuntu on it; with its recent focus on touch enabled device, surely it must run well on this x86 tablet?
Unfortunately, it doesn't: device support is barely there in 13.10 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2209247&p=12949597#post12949597 and there's no indication that anything will be better in 14.04.
Is there an alternative device that works better with Linux? (I believe Ubuntu is the main candidate to work well with touch devices, but if there's another distro, I may switch) <comment><USER2> Good timing this one; just picked up a very cheap T100 which I really like but lousy Linux support so will need to have patience. I never tried the hybrid concept before this and I really like it so it'll be worth it getting linux to run.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Yoga 2 Pro (Lenovo) works fine with the latest Ubuntu and Fedora

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know about ThinkPad Yoga? I actually hoped for much smaller, tablet- like device. I guess Surface Pro is still unique :(

<comment><USER4> Not him, but I use a Yoga 1 as my main laptop (CS undergrad) and I run ubuntu 13.10 on it. Getting wifi working takes a bit of work, and I don't have full functionality (though you can get it working with some scripts, I just don't care) in terms of screen rotation, but the laptop is pretty great.

Pluses: The touchscreen works and support multitouch its a very solid laptop Wifi and bluetooth drivers are available Installation was pretty painless, it took me some research to get around the shenanigans that are UEFI, but there are guides on the web

Minuses: automatic screen rotation is apparently impossible making wifi work is a struggle and it occasionally needs to have the drivers recompiled after updates, I simply have the file in my main directory and do so as needed There's almost no linux stuff that makes use of multitouch, so the point is moot</comment></comment></comment>


Can an Electronic Shock Bracelet Kill Your Bad Habits? - <AUTHOR> https://forge.medium.com/can-an-electronic-shock-bracelet-kill-your-bad-habits-35681ddb62cc <comment><USER2> This sounds like a Clockwork Orange solution. Hasn't it already been proven that brainwashing techniques don't break the habit so much as they create neurotic responses along with a whole lot of chronic fear (generalized ptsd) instead?</comment>


Tall Buildings In Numbers Vanity Height - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctbuh.org/Publications/Journal/InNumbers/TBINVanityHeight/tabid/5837/language/en-US/Default.aspx <comment><USER2> Figure 2 is misleading, but not intentionally so. See Edward Tufte's book _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ (Graphics Press, 1983).</comment>


USPS confirms Byuu's PAL SNES package has been lost - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/byuu_san/status/832074375646048256 <comment><USER2> So from what I gather on the Twitter chain, a USPS employee likely stole the package and claimed it as "lost", then probably tried to sell it as a lot on eBay.

Since USPS is basically trying to blame byuu for this, I'm afraid the only option here to get any recourse is support-by-public-shaming. It would be a sizable blow to USPS's reputation to be framed as "A bunch of thieves who will deliver your stuff unless it's valuable, then we'll steal it, tell you we lost it, and sell it."

He could try to involve the police, but I imagine it will go nowhere. It's a pity.

EDIT: Corrected 'UPS' to 'USPS'.

<comment><USER3> Seems unfair to automatically assume malice.

I once had an international package go missing at some point after clearing customs despite a label declaring its value accurately at $1. I doubt that was due to theft.

<comment><USER4> Within the twitter chain was mention of an ebay listing suspiciously similar to the parcel contents being seen. Parent is likely referring to this.

<comment><USER5> Since it was delisted, if someone has the link maybe it was archived by Google Cache or Archive.org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was wondering: The shipper used DHL, so how did the USPS get their grubby hands on it? Then I looked at the Wikipedia article for DHL and found that ~8 years ago, DHL started using USPS for local delivery.

I've found recently that when I order a package online, it will ship via UPS, but then the package is turned over to the USPS for last-mile delivery. I hate this because the package disappears into a black hole of USPS incompetency where they can't even do tracking properly, much less delivery. I wish Amazon had an option "don't let USPS touch this" for shipping.. I'd be willing to pay extra.

<comment><USER7> It's odd to see all the hate for USPS in these threads. My own experience is that USPS is by far the best carrier out there. Part of it is the unfair advantage of actually having a mailbox to deliver to. Smaller packages are placed in the mailbox rather than left in front of my garage to be stolen by random passersby. But part of it is just that they're reliable and cheap.

With Amazon, around here they like to use a craptastic local shipper called LaserShip. Now _those_ folks are the epitome of incompetency. Tracking is useless, they like to mark packages as delivered well before they actually arrive, and sometimes they just plain give the stuff to the wrong address. Once they gave my package to a random house thirty miles away!

I _don 't_ mean to say that you and the others are wrong, of course! I wonder what the difference is. Maybe I'm just lucky in this respect due to where I live or something.

<comment><USER8> Amazon doesn't make it possible to prevent a shipper from being chosen to fulfill a package, but you can request what they call "carrier deprioritization" via their customer support helpdesk, which will artificially weight the carrier in question so that their algorithm will opt against it unless it is the only carrier able to fulfill a given order.

I've had good success with this last year, after Amazon's own in-house fulfillment service caused me a series of issues due to erroneously failed deliveries; since I made that request, I haven't had a single shipment fulfilled via AMZL_US save those for which I requested same-day delivery of items present in the Canton warehouse. Other sorts of orders which AMZL_US would previously fulfill are instead now handled by UPS or FedEx.

If you have trouble with LaserShip, as I gather many do, you could probably do worse than to request Amazon deprioritize that carrier. If my experience is any guide, you may have to bounce from rep to rep a couple of times before you find someone who knows what you're talking about, but it's worth persisting, because the results are, at least in my experience, much worth the effort. Hope this helps!

<comment><USER7> Thanks! I don't order much from Amazon these days (just because it has become really annoying to wade through all the third-party sellers, and they often aren't all that price-competitive anymore) but I will keep that in mind for the next time.

I wonder how bad a carrier has to be for Amazon to abandon them entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The USPS will have gps coordinate of the scan made by the carrier on the street for delivery. --- If it made it to him or her.

The carrier will enter one or more dispositions such as delivered, damaged, attempted and 20 others.

It does happen where a delivery from another company for last mile goes "missing" and the entire manifest is reportedly "delivered" to the USPS. When in reality it never got there. This happened semi frequently at Christmas so the arrivals were not "late." the other reason is someone stole the parcel.

Almost always stuff reappears - but late. No company in the chain accepts "late" so they fudge the scans.

I would not assume that having just the label and no parcel means anything conclusive.

<comment><USER10> It means I won't be getting these games ever now, that much is for certain.

Even if their story about "the machine at my label" is to be believed, I am now tasked with asking them to "please find my box. It's the brown, rectangular one with no label. Trust me, that one worth $5000 - 10000 is mine, even though there's no way for me to prove that."

<comment><USER9> Hopefully not.

As a general rule "stuff" isn't allowed to sit around a mailroom or distribution center. Bad packaging and addresses happen daily.

A formal investigation is needed. The USPS still bows to political pressure. Often a letter to your congressman (not accusing but seeking help), puts postal management in another gear - and may find your items.

<comment><USER10> I've still failed to get anyone to officially contact me on this matter. Exhausted every possible recourse I could think of. Any time I actually get a human involved, they just pass me off to some online form or say they can't help.

<comment><USER9> If it truly got separated from the merchandise and it was not packed with a shipping more inside them most of the people you contacted are not capable of researching it. Try filing online and call your local congressional office.

The workers in front of screens can't help in all likelihood. It has to be found by walking around.

Good luck

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is definitely USPS's fault, but from what I can see that box was packaged incorrectly. I am just posting this so OTHERS might not make the same mistakes, I am not judging or blaming the original shipper (nobody is perfect!)...

I've shipped a lot of stuff internationally. It appears that the shipper had a 18x16x10 box and wrapped it in shipping paper. They then applies the shipping label to the shipping paper.

First of all, shipping paper is garbage, if it isn't on tightly enough then creases get caught in the conveyor belts and ripped off. It also doesn't do a damn thing, it is just glorified wax paper with minor water resistant properties.

But here's their big mistake: They attached the label to the easily ripped off shipping paper and [likely] didn't write the destination address (or source address) on the box itself or within the box itself. That is a huge "no no."

If you ship internationally, and particularly if you ship something valuable: Invest in the cardbox box. Cardbox boxes are NOT created equal. Most cardbox boxes are single walled recycled nonsense, you want a double-walled heavy duty box. The nice part about double-walled is that the first wall will "eat" the water damage leaving the inner wall completely intact holding the box's shape.

You should also write the source & return address on the box itself. Even if the label has it. The label can be ripped off. And if your box lacks an invoice inside then instead include a contents list and set of addresses (this is so that if the box were to spill it can be reunited and forwarded).

Last part: The tape. Not all tape is created equal. Look for the weight rating. If it doesn't have a weight rating then it isn't shipping tape. Here is a good place to start[0], again look at the weight ratings don't assume that brand X is good even 3M make "economic" tape I wouldn't use. Tape uses heat, water, or pressure to adhere. Most tape you'll be using will be pressure, if you don't own a tape dispenser then use your finger to apply pressure to the tape after it adheres. If you do own a tape dispenser then make sure you're using it correctly and applying pressure along the whole length of the tape (otherwise it "sticks" but at hugely reduced effectiveness).

[0] [http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Adhesives/Tapes/...](http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Adhesives/Tapes/Products/~/3M-Tapes-3M-Adhesives/Packaging- Tapes-Equipment/Box-Sealing-Tapes?N=5393837&rt=r3)

<comment><USER9> This. X100

It's often cool to bash Amazon but their boxes always withstand the shipping and delivery process.

Imagine this. A cart of parcels shrink wrapped 10' is rolled near a scanner. Each is scanned and then "thrown" into a semi-circle of hampers. One on top of the other. Some things Amazon sells like dog food gets on top of that badly packages ebay or etsy lamp you just paid $75 for.

"Top load only" items like live chicks get special treatment.

Packaging is a BIG deal for a successful outcome.

</comment></comment><comment> the-dude Anecdata: have shipped thousands of packages and currently am shipping packages again worldwide.

DHL is the worst, as a sender you don't notice. But on the receiving end there are numerous things that can go wrong.

And with DHL, there always seems to go something wrong.

I have asked our suppliers to avoid DHL and we just pay them more for proper worldwide service ( UPS / Fedex ).

</comment><comment><USER12> I've had several packages "lost" by USPS since moving to San Francisco. Never had issues in any other city. Almost everytime a package is shipped by USPS it stresses me out. I'll pay extra for FedEx now because UPS and DHL both use USPS for the last bit of the delivery in the city. I can't believe there is no way to really file a claim for a lost package. When you try they usually just give you a the Postmaster's phone number who puts you on hold for up to an hour. It's insanity. I'm normally for public services, but USPS is incompetent and can't be trusted.

<comment><USER13> FedEx uses USPS for their smartpost packages. There's really no way to entirely avoid USPS.

<comment><USER12> They might, but it happens much less often in San Francisco from my experience. Whereas practically every UPS package I had shipped from Amazon Prime was being fulfilled by USPS. I just try to avoid them when possible after a number of horror stories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the package was worth 10k no way would I trust USPS with it. We ship out thousands of packages yearly via USPS and there is zero accountability for lost or damaged goods. We file weekly claims to get the $50 priority mail insurance value which rarely covers the cost of re sending out an order.

Use UPS or Fedex next time!

<comment><USER15> He used DHL - it's entirely possible that he had no idea that DHL uses USPS for the final delivery once the parcel reaches US.

<comment><USER16> As I mentioned above, it was not shipped DHL, it was shipped Deutsche Post [0] (confusing because they are owned by the same group). They are the German equivalent of USPS.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/0vDfxVN.png](https://i.imgur.com/0vDfxVN.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> byuu posted a relevant thread on /r/legaladvice: [https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5ud6jq/lost_pa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5ud6jq/lost_package_of_100_snes_games_valued_at_5000/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Did you have insurance on this package?

If not, that is a very expensive lesson to learn.

<comment><USER8> The earlier discussion here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13646438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13646438)) included mention that the package is insured by its originator to €1000.

The tough part is that byuu's probably going to have to make it right with the person who shipped him the games - he's already said that if they can't be retrieved, he's going to do that even though he's really not at fault, and I understand why.

If you know any popular Twitch streamers or YouTube gaming superstars, now might not be a bad time to reach out, as I'm going to be doing later today. It would be amazing to see the huge retro gaming fan community come together and solve a problem like this for someone to whom we all owe so much.

<comment><USER15> On one hand, I understand why byuu wants to reimburse him. If I was in that situation I probably would as well.

However, I don't understand why the shipper didn't insure the package for a full amount. If you are sending something wortk 10k, insure it for 10k. It's simple as that. If it made shipment expensive, then I'm sure the community would have sent him some money to cover the cost(or byuu himself would).

<comment><USER8> I think I saw mention of €1000 being the maximum DHL would cover? Regardless, it's in the past; there's a lesson to be drawn for the future, but that's no help at all in the present.

<comment><USER19> Yep, he seems to hint at that in his blog post, while mentioning that the sender chose the insurance value:

[https://byuu.org/emulation/preservation/lost- package/](https://byuu.org/emulation/preservation/lost-package/)

"... when I went to return the first box of 100 games, I was surprised to learn that FedEx would only insure packages for up to $2499. Anything higher would require documented proof of value, and the faxing of many forms, which the retail employee I worked with had no interest in even contemplating."

<comment><USER20> Simple (though maybe more costly) solution is to send a bunch of boxes. Send only $2-2.5K worth of cartidges per box. Might double or triple your shipping cost, but would be cheaper than paying out of pocket for the value of lost package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are some deliveries where USPS does "last mile" for other carriers. If shipping something worth $10,000 the insurance for the package should be $10,000. Apparently the sender insured it for less than the value which is the fault of the sender, not the receiver.

Not certain how the receiver would be liable for the sender not insuring the package properly.

<comment><USER22> Under German law (which seems to be applicable here unless they explicitly opted for something else) the liability shifts to the receiver as soon as it is handed over to the shipping company. The idea is that the receiver could have picked it up themselves but chose delivery instead. It's a pretty old law that a usual person doesn't notice in their life because there are special rules to make everything right when a company ships to a consumer.

Of course one also would need to check if they had any agreement on which shipping service or insurance to choose which was violated or if there is any applicable kind of negligence involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to be able to see the deets, but I guess I'm "not authorized to view these tweets"? Pretty sure I'm not banned or blocked, since I've never had an account. Do you have to log in now just to see anything on Twitter, or is that a user setting now?

ETA: Yup, they broke something. I can see it from desktop too, but on this iOS 9.3.5 device, every tweet from any user shows that message, and any other Twitter URI bounces me to mobile and then gives "Sorry, Twitter is taking too long to load" with a "try again" button that doesn't work.

Web 2.0 at its best. Thanks for all the helpful responses!

<comment><USER23> I can see it even in an anon browser session:

        .@USPS @USPSHelp Thanks, I found my missing package ... label. Your employees ripped it off the box and stole a $10,000 package from me. pic.twitter.com/LfuPZ9vZ8U

here are the two pics posted: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4wfEKCVcAATKva.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4wfEKCVcAATKva.jpg) [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4wfEssVcAANYlw.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4wfEssVcAANYlw.jpg)

<comment><USER24> That is so painful to read. On the one hand, USPS is apologising for the inconvenience, on the other hand they're shifting blame away from themselves by recommending to use more tape?

<comment><USER10> Yeah that letter is basically blaming me, the recipient, for them damaging the sender's package in transit. Truly there is no end to USPS' classiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So yeah, doesn't look like the games were packaged properly at all.

I don't want to sound mean, but undervaluing the contents for insurance and then wrapping the stuff in brown paper for packaging is kind of asking for this to happen.

In this case it wasn't even about packages just randomly getting lost, but this thing was clearly packaged so poorly that it should've been immediately obvious that this was going to happen.

<comment><USER26> Not sure why youre being downvoted. Every time someone ships something to me in brown paper it gets ripped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Shipper should have used Registered Mail. Anything over $2500 needs to be sent Registered.

USPS has a Registered Mail tracking program with Germany:

[http://faq.usps.com/?articleId=1437076354655](http://faq.usps.com/?articleId=1437076354655)

</comment><comment><USER28> Better summary: [https://www.patreon.com/posts/lost-package- of-8125834](https://www.patreon.com/posts/lost-package-of-8125834)

</comment><comment><USER29> Where did he find the ripped label?

<comment><USER30> It was send to him by USPS

<comment><USER29> Ahhh...obvious now. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Oxford Electric Bell - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussions:

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833010) (60 comments)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995422) (13 comments)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's fun to make one of these: use two metal coffee cans, suspend a washer between them using string tied on a plastic comb or something. There should be only a small gap between the washer and each can. Charge one of the cans- rub styrofoam on fabric then touch it to one of the cans. The washer will swing back and forth, transferring the charge from the can you touched to the other one. It makes quite a racket.

You can make a chain of these.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to work at the Clarendon Lab and made this video about the bell while I did:

[https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio](https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio)

</comment><comment><USER4> How many joules or watt hours has these used?

<comment><USER5> Some quick, back-of-the-envelope-math, suggests the total energy used amounts to about 1'389 mAh (roughly 5 Coulombs, based on an article saying it transfers about 1 nanoampere of current per ring and rung about 10 billion times since it was completed).

Watthours and Joules is difficult to know without measuring the voltage on the device, which would also have to involve the change in voltage over time to get a more accurate number. I'm probably wide off once you account for the reduced power over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You'd think a battery like that lasting decades could be quite handy for internet of things devices. You could maybe use a capacitor to accumulate power as the output seems to be in nano amps and low current processors seem to need about 1 uA upwards. Not sure if anyone is working on that stuff?

<comment><USER7> > You'd think a battery like that lasting decades could be quite handy for > internet of things devices

We probably have to invent a standard that lasts one decade first.

<comment><USER8> The humble AA/R6 battery has been around since before WW1.

Obviously, the capacity has improved vastly, but the size, terminals and voltage has been with us since your great grandfather wore diapers.

<comment><USER9> I think GP was referring to a software or service standard for the IoT device to interact with rather than a hardware standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I firmly believe there's an ocean of undisovered applications for electrostatics.</comment>


Design is a Search Problem [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fThhbt23SGM

<comment><USER2> Hmm, the first 10 minutes had my attention, and I was agreeing on his points that design is obviously subjective, and difficult to measure. With code, you can spend a week refactoring a section of your project, and conclude with certainty that it's better written. With design, you try to do the same, and get 60% of people agreeing it's the right direction, and 40% saying you're going the wrong way. This creates a lot of internal conflicts, and noise as you try to reach your goal. I was hoping this talk was going to go into some specifics of how we _can_ measure great design, and how we can clear some of that noise and have more confidence in our decisions.

However, it seemed like the talk stopped after the intro, then it spent 30 minutes showcasing some odds and ends from his past work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice talk. Also, first time saw Mike Bostock speaking (d3.js guy); I'd have put that in the title too, Mike is... relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I'm surprised I didn't put it in there

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't watch this more than the first minute of it. I did design for the past ten years. I struggled all this time to come up with the best designs and solutions for my clients. Then I noticed that all design patterns are repeating. Eventually, I got bored. Picked up Django and Python programming in 2012 and never looked back. Now I'm starting with Objective-C (Cocoa). The fact that you can code your ideas and design solutions at the same time is such a relieve.

Design is not hard to do, but it's hard to master. It takes time, a lot of time. But once you get it then there's not much else to learn. There are design patterns repeating themselves, just like math formulas and theorems.</comment>


Nothingness: We buy ads only to fill them with nothingness - <AUTHOR> https://nothingness.io/ <comment><USER2> How does an example nothing look like?</comment>


The use of "blacklist" is offensive - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/13604 <comment><USER2> The colors black and white representing bad/good, darkness/light crosses cultural boundaries and predate racial tensions by centuries. Fear of the night and worshiping the light are universal. The idea that someone is being racist just by using words that refer to this concept is absurd, and so is choosing to not use these words for this reason.

These misguided attempts to control people's speech do not resolve anyones struggles in any meaningful way and if anything only introduces political fatigue for your cause.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quick, someone make a chess board with squares that are all the same color and use shapes inside them to differentiate, like a circle and a rhombus. And the chess pieces should be all the same color and same height too. In order to differentiate, they all have post-it notes on them, that say their team and role. The players choose their team name, and agree on roles names. Then the game can start. Don't forget to flip a coin to decide who starts.

I don't mean to make fun or provoke, but I think we sometimes go too far when it comes to PC etc.

<comment><USER4> You forgot to mention that everyone needs to be a winner at the end, because no one wants to be the loser.

<comment><USER3> In my thinking, winner/loser is not a separation we need to remove, since it changed per game, and it's determined by the skill of the player in that game and match. I tried to think of something that people can potentially complain about. I hope they don't. I really really hope they don't complain about winner/loser of a game though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I am entirely in favor of non-racist terminology and not offending anyone, let alone minorities, I don't quite get how master/slave and "killer app" may offend anyone and haven't heard of anyone feeling offended. If this is a big deal, please tell me and others.

Same goes for "blacklist/whitelist". i'm not sure this ever referred to skin color...

<comment><USER6> On the lists. The terms mean that black is bad and white is good.

If you have a chat with a racist they'll also tell you that black people are bad and white people are good.

I'm no expert but language shapes how we interact and perceive the world.

It's like cultures that have different sets of words to describe different shades of colours. I remember reading how this gives people in general more or less of an ability to differenciate shades.

[http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx)

<comment><USER7> Oh yes, the so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the beloved myth of the speech police. It makes great science fiction (read Babel-17 by Delany, it's a classic) but unfortunately as a practical idea that states there's scientific proof that if we use words like "blacklist" it makes us prejudiced against dark-skinned people (but banning this word makes it go away) is total bunk. There are some cultural differences in how people prefer to express themselves but this is lightyears away from "language defines thought" that some people seem to believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Blacklisting doesn't come from anything race related, apparently.

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

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh dear, what's next? Gender neutral electrical connectors?

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's the user that makes a connection with racism. I always thought blacklist and whitelist was based on color absorption, black absorbs and therefore doesn't let through anything. White was simply the color opposite to black.

I assumed master/slave was adopted from the idea of a master record. The main thing that came to mind is audio mastering, not people. Am I missing something about the origin?

It's nice to see changes that make things more clear, however I wish political correctness was not a factor.

Are orphan processes and brainfuck next?

<comment><USER11> Think of the orphans!

When i think master/slave i think SPI master/slave, where the slaves only do as told by the master. In which case the primary/replica relationship would not be suitable, while the master/slave relationship is descriptive of what actually goes on.

If we have one (in my view unoffensive, but that might be a cultural thing) term which adequately describes the relationship - why not use it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a joke-issue? I honestly can't tell. I would say yes, but there is an actual commit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why stop at Redis [1] and React? The Linux kernel [2], Apple's Darwin kernel [3] and I am sure many more have references to master/slave.

[1] [https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185](https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185)

[2] [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=master+slave&unsc...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=master+slave&unscoped_q=master+slave)

[3] [https://github.com/apple/darwin- xnu/search?q=master+slave&un...](https://github.com/apple/darwin- xnu/search?q=master+slave&unscoped_q=master+slave)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is what happens when you try to negotiate with these left-wing facists. When you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. The whole "I'm offended" culture is causing this and will never stop until they reach their dream Orwellian society where everything is forbidden, everything is offensive and nothing is ok anymore.

Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds fair.

I imagine "Black Magic" probably originated from a term describing African traditions and cultures.

<comment><USER15> Etymology is sketchy, but most likely that isn't that case. Using light and dark to mean good and evil goes back millennia and is almost certainly unrelated to race. There are records of the term nigromancy (literally black magic) being used to refer to communicating with the dead, summing demons etc. since the middle ages.

<comment><USER6> The middle ages started after the fall of the western Roman empire.

So there was more exposure to different races that what's conventionally thought by people in the time periods.

Like a across the Mediterranean from Greece and Italy is Africa.

Conquering Northern Africa have been a goal for centuries before that.

Also the middle East has also been a goal to capture.

So for millennia in Europe the idea of conquering the lands of darker skinned people has been a thing.

<comment><USER15> I'm not disputing any of that. I'm just not necessarily convinced that the mapping of light and dark to good and evil was connected to skin color.

And the 'black magic' traditions of the middle ages almost certainly drew their inspiration from the rituals of the Hellenistic mystery cults and related groups rather than any African tradition or cultures.

All the being said, I'm straying quite far out of my area of expertise here, so I'm certainly open to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER9> That's because it has nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with the age old religious concept of light and darkness. However people will find a reason to get upset about anything so at this point it might as well be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, humour is the best defence against tyranny.</comment>


Rule 34, Meet Kafka: GCHQ's video snooping and its implications - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/rule-34-meet-kafka.html

<comment><USER2> Somewhere in all of this, I suspect a Laundryverse story lurks...</comment>


CDBaby Acquired by Disk Makers - <AUTHOR> http://news.opb.org/article/3212-cd-baby-sold-new-jersey-manufacturer/

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was interesting as Derek Sivers of CD Baby had gone back and forth between Rails and PHP in the past.

I've used Disk Makers too and they're a great company.

</comment><comment><USER2> A little late to the party. This happened weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this includes FilmBaby?</comment>


Quickly Create iOS Prototypes - <AUTHOR> https://www.flinto.com/

<comment><USER2> "Dude, this is fucking amazing"...or whatever that quote is on your front page has to go. I'm not a prude. It's just not professional and it's fucking dumb.

Otherwise, I can't wait to try it out. :)

<comment><USER3> Are you advising me to remove it in order to improve the viability of my business, or in order to make you (and others who share your opinion) feel more comfortable?

I don't personally use much foul language, but I felt Jeff's comment really captured the over-the-top enthusiasm he has shown about the product. That's why I made a point of including his first.</comment></comment>


The Media Has a Probability Problem - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-has-a-probability-problem/ <comment><USER2> How long has fivethirtyeight been using _thirteen_ trackers on their pages? (per Ghostery)</comment>


Ask HN: What was your breakthrough career moment? - <AUTHOR> I've seen many cases of people having a suddens success in their career, leading to a rapid progression to the next levels and beyond.  What was your career breakthrough? <comment><USER2> My friend got my resume seen at Apple. I was hired.</comment>


Daily life in a federal prison (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2014/07/07/matthew-kluger-talks/ <comment><USER2> I did 7+ years in the federal system. This is a very accurate account of daily life in the system.

The only topic he didn't mention was Diesel Therapy, and he probably never experienced it because he was careful about following the rules.

This is where an inmate starts to cause all kinds of legal problems for either the prison staff or the federal administration. Say they sued them and have a good case. What will happen is the BOP will put that inmate on a private prison transport and start driving them around the country. You get to spend your nights in a jail holding cell. You will almost never get access to a phone during your therapy. You may never get a shower during your many months of travel.

And you will miss your court filing dates.</comment>


Ask HN: Freelancers, what do you think of this idea? - <AUTHOR>

Being a student sometimes I found myself in a situation where I have a hour or two free time and I'm really border. The first thought was that I can do some freelance work to earn some money, but freelancing sites doesn't work that way, you have to bid, wait and pray you will be accepted for the job.
I thought maybe I can build some freelancing website where you can find short jobs that you can finish in half to 2-3 hours, like fixing bugs, errors in programs, writing articles, etc. Think of it like "Freelancer for short jobs".
The idea is that you can get jobs really fast, like in 10 min, but I haven't decided yet the model it will using:
a. Freelancers offer their services (like on Fiverr), but they will have to set their status as "Now available", and employers can browser only currently available freelancers
b. Employers post jobs, freelancers place bids, and the employer have to respond to every bid (to accept/reject it) within 10 min (since the point of the service is to get jobs instantly)
c. Both a. and b.
Now, I'm looking for the answer of two questions:
1. Is there a website/company already providing service like this?
2. Would people use this? Would you use this? <comment><USER2> I like it. I agree that there are limits to what can be accomplished in such a short timeframe, but there's plenty of work that could fall within those constraints. I'm often asked for opinions that don't involve code at all, just an overview of the tech that's out there that could be applied to a given problem. That sort of thing could easily fall in to a couple hour time frame. It could be the twitter of freelancing. :)

<comment><USER2> Oh, and to veer back to being on-topic, I'd likely use it and I don't know of another service like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would have used it back in the day when I used Fiverr alot.

Your idea is probably good for low-skill tasks where anyone could do it. For something specialised, for arguments sake I need an XSLT expert, I would probably still go for a traditional freelance site.

Another advantage of your idea is any problem that needs close interaction. Tutoring and coaching spring to mind but I am sure there are other scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is rather interesting. Problem I see is, most coding jobs require you to have quite some context around the code you are working with. If there was a way to work around this or target some nice (e.g., visual design) that should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd use this and I don't know of another service that does this.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. i haven't seen one yet. Also initially you might wanto focus on getting a few users as opposed to thinking of competition.

2\. Would use it, provided there is a decentish flow of paid projects

</comment><comment><USER7> There is, its called [https://www.fiverr.com/](https://www.fiverr.com/)

<comment><USER3> Fiver gigs usually take 1-2 days to complete. So it isn't what the OP is suggesting.</comment></comment>


ask yc: application - <AUTHOR>

i am stuck filling an application for summer cycle. the most confusing questions are the following:
Please tell us about the time you, zaqzaq, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)
what is that supposed to be? <comment><USER2> The question has already been asked on yc news ;-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104802>

</comment><comment><USER3> My answer to number 2:

      Kevin has discovered the universe's greatest civilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

It is definitely one of the less important questions on the application; I think PG said once I this forum that he was the only one that really cared about it out of the partners.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, to my understanding, the first one is pretty obvious and it was covered already here. But definitely I'd like to see the types of answers for the second one. ;)</comment>


This is why Equifax should use a reputable domain name and SSL Cert - <AUTHOR> https://securityequifax2017.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> And the submission page too: [https://securityequifax2017.com/eligibility/eligibility.html](https://securityequifax2017.com/eligibility/eligibility.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> What's wrong with their SSL certificate?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not tied to equifax.com, it's an off-the-shelf cert you get from Amazon with no official verification.

Banks and financial institutions generally opt for the expensive EV certs that formally verify the owning company.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best open source Rails project to learn from? - <AUTHOR>

What's the best open source Rails project for a noob to study? I've made the Depot app from PragProg, the Twitter app by Hartl, and went through Rails for Zombies. Now I want to study actual living, breathing apps. Any recommendations? Thanks<p>[Note: I did a search on Google and saw an exact post like this, but it's almost 200 days old.] <comment><USER2> Browse around github for a bit.

<https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora> <https://github.com/railsdog/spree> <https://github.com/michaeldv/fat_free_crm> <https://github.com/resolve/refinerycms>

</comment><comment><USER3> Go to: <http://www.opensourcerails.com/>

They have a number of rails projects, including redmine, fatfreecrm, refinery, etc... that are quality projects from which you can learn.</comment>


How one developer's side project became the hottest programming language - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-is-eating-the-world-how-one-developers-side-project-became-the-hottest-programming-language-on-the-planet/ <comment><USER2> Actual title is "Python is eating the world: How one developer's side project became the hottest programming language".</comment>


FastMall iphone app turn by turn directions @ mall LOL NICE - <AUTHOR> http://www.FastMall.com/blog

<comment><USER2> This sort of functionality is the type of thing the idea I just submitted to YC. I don't know if that's a good thing, or a bad thing, but there's clearly a rising market... let's just hope I get to spearhead it!</comment>


How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61672829/how-does-chrome-decide-what-to-highlight-when-you-double-click-japanese-text/61673028#61673028 <comment><USER2> ICU (International Components for Unicode) provides an API for this: [http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis](http://userguide.icu- project.org/boundaryanalysis)

Assuming Blink is using the same technique for text selection as V8 is for the public Intl.v8BreakIterator method, that's how Chrome's handling this-- Intl.v8BreakIterator is a pretty thin wrapper around the ICU BreakIterator implementation: [https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/refs/heads/master/...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/refs/heads/master/src/objects/js- break-iterator.cc#75)

<comment><USER3> According to your first link, BreakIterator uses a dictionary for several languages, including Japanese. So I guess the full answer is something like:

Chrome uses v8's Intl.v8BreakIterator which uses icu::BreakIterator, which, for Japanese text, uses a big long list of Japanese words to try to figure out what is a word and what isn't. I've worked on a similar segmenter for Chinese and yeah, quality isn't great but it works in enough cases to be useful.

<comment><USER4> What did you use for your Chinese word segmentation? I wrote Pingtype myself to help me learn by splitting words and translating them in parallel.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Firefox, in contrast, breaks at script boundaries, so it'll select runs of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Not nearly as useful, and definitely makes copying Japanese text especially annoying.

<comment><USER6> Personally I find double click highlighting to be a useless feature in any language, but the Firefox approach is superior imo. Breaking at script boundaries is predictable behavior the user can anticipate whereas doing some janky ad hoc natural language processing invariably results in behavior that is essentially random from a user perspective. I tried out double click highlighting on some basic Japanese sentences on Chromium and it failed to highlight any of what would be considered words.

It's not like English highlighting does complex grammatical analysis to make sure "Project Manager" gets highlighted as one chunk and "eventUpdate" gets highlighted as two chunks, most implementations just breaks at spaces like the user expects.

<comment><USER7> I feel like this is a conclusion you could only reach by having an irrational compulsion to defend the deficiencies of Firefox, and not being a regular user of the Japanese language.

<comment><USER8> I don't use/speak Japanese, but the GP's conclusion makes complete sense to me.

Consistent behavior > inconsistent behavior, almost always. If I can anticipate what my computer is going to do, I can plan around it, even if it means a bit of extra manual work.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't work if the consistent behaviour is completely useless. If double click selected English tokens grouped by which half of the alphabet they came from, nobody would ever double click anything, they'd just click-drag highlight.

<comment><USER8> Are spaces completely meaningless in Japanese? I was under the impression they separated phrases.

<comment><USER7> Spaces have zero importance to the Japanese language itself, but they are occasionally used like punctuation. e.g. some YouTube video titles will use spaces around names of things that could be hard to parse as not part of a sentence, another example is when you're typesetting phrases in lyrics.

In general, whitespace characters have no place or significance inside a Japanese sentence, and most of the whitespace in Japanese typesetting is built into punctuation marks.

Furthermore, even most punctuation is optional in Japanese. The full stop 。 and comma 、 are mostly a matter of preference, sometimes spaces are used in place of full stops or commas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here, surprised to see this took off.

I actually work with Japanese tokenization a lot - I took over maintenance of the most popular Python Mecab wrapper last year, and I have another Cython- based wrapper that I maintain.

Word boundary awareness for Japanese is a pretty uncommon feature in applications, so I was surprised to see the feature had been in Chrome all along, even if it's buried and the quality has issues.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who tracked down the icu imlementation and the relevant part of Chrome!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is often determine by Unicode and not the browsers specifically (though some browsers could override the suggested Unicode approach).

Each unicode character has certain properties, one of which is whether that character indicates a break before / after itself.

I've done extensive research on this for my job, but unfortunately don't have time to do the whole writeup here. Here are several resources for those who are interested

Info on break opportunities:

[https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/#BreakOpportunities](https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/#BreakOpportunities)

The entire Unicode Character Database (~80MB XML file last I checked)

[https://unicode.org/reports/tr44/](https://unicode.org/reports/tr44/)

The properties within the UCD are hard to parse, here's a reference if you're interested:

[https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/#Table1](https://unicode.org/reports/tr14/#Table1)

[https://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/ucd/PropertyAliases.txt](https://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/ucd/PropertyAliases.txt)

[https://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/ucd/PropertyValueAliase...](https://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/ucd/PropertyValueAliases.txt)

Overall, word / line breaking in Unicode in no-space languages is a very difficult problem. Where the UCD says there can be a line break isn't where a native speaker would put one. In order to do it correctly you have to bring in Natural Language Processing, but that has its own set of complexities.

In summary: I18N is hard!

<comment><USER11> Yes. This seems to work even when you pass it Chinese while maintaining ja-JP as the language

      function tokenizeJA(text) {
        var it = Intl.v8BreakIterator(['ja-JP'], {type:'word'})
        it.adoptText(text)
        var words = []

        var cur = 0, prev = 0

        while (cur < text.length) {
          prev = cur
          cur = it.next()
          words.push(text.substring(prev, cur))
        }

        return words

      }

      console.log(tokenizeJA("今天要去哪裡?"))

still seems to parse just fine. so most likely just using the passed input to parse.

<comment><USER12> The underlying library is actually using a single dictionary for both Chinese and Japanese [https://github.com/unicode- org/icu/tree/7814980f51bca2000a96...](https://github.com/unicode- org/icu/tree/7814980f51bca2000a963307cb5c4d711cc05fdb/icu4c/source/data/brkitr/dictionaries)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The quality is not amazing but I'm surprised this is supported at all.

I find this line hilarious for some reason. Reminds me of the line about being a tourist in France, "French people don't expect you to speak French, but they appreciate it when you try"

<comment><USER14> Being a resident of France I have to say that French people are the opposite of that. Same for Japanese people. The only people who get genuinely excited as you butcher their language are Arabic speakers I've noticed.

<comment><USER15> As a tourist in Paris about 10 years ago, I felt I had better interactions when I butchered the language and then switched to english after the person I was speaking with did, than when I just started off in english.

I only knew a handful of phrases though, so anything off script and I was pretty lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a brief write-up [0] on techniques and software for Japanese tokenization.

[0]: [http://www.solutions.asia/2016/10/japanese- tokenization.html...](http://www.solutions.asia/2016/10/japanese- tokenization.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been doing some work parsing Vietnamese text, which has the opposite problem. Compound words (which is most of the vocabulary) are broken up into their components by spaces, indistinquishable from the boundaries between words.

<comment><USER18> Is that why the name of the country is sometimes spelled with a space, "Viet nam"?

<comment><USER19> Yes, that's how it is written in Vietnamese. To oversimplify: Vietnamese words are a collection of single syllables that are always separated by a space when writing.

"Viet Nam" is also, actually, the "official" English way to write it. (Check how the UN puts it on all their stuff.) However, most Europeans don't do that in their languages, so it usually gets written as Vietnam even by Vietnamese when they're writing European languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Given this property of Japanese text, is there wordplay associated with a string of characters with double/reverse meanings depending on how the characters are combined?

<comment><USER21> Yes. One that comes to mind is "[name]さんじゅうななさい" which can be either interpreted as "[name]-san, 17 years old" or "[name], 37 years old", depending on whether you interpret the さん(san) as an honorific or part of a number. (The sentence would usually be written in a combination of hiragana and kanji, but is intentionally written in all hiragana here to ensure ambiguity.)

<comment><USER21> Another one: "この先生きのこるには", which should be broken up at "この先/生きのこるには" to mean "To keep surviving going forward", but since 先生 (teacher) is such a common word, it jumps at your eyes and turns the sentence into "この先生/きのこるには" which means the nonsense "For this teacher to mushroom(verb)". Usually this doesn't happen because the "survive" part is written with more kanji as 生き残る, but here it is written in hiragana to make the きのこ(mushroom) part visible and further mess with lexing.

In both cases, some liberties have been taken with notation to intentionally encourage silly mis-readings; It happens much less often in ordinary text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Word segmentation in Japanese isn't that difficult, for the most part. The mixed scripts help quite a bit.

The really interesting question is how does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Thai text? It's a non-breaking, (baroquely) phonetic script and the training set is much smaller.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if this applicable to Chinese. In Chinese one to four characters comprise a word. In post-revolutionary Chinese all the characters in a sentence are run together and you have to mentally parse the words in your mind. (Its worse in pre-revolutionary Chinese where neither sentences nor paragraphs are punctuated.) (Pre-medieval european languages used to run all their letters together without word or sentence breaks. Torah Hebrew still does this.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, I wrote [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io) for Chinese word segmentation to help me learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So what is the most accurate way to tokenize CJK text?

<comment><USER25> By hand using a native speaker.

<comment><USER26> Is there an API for that?

<comment><USER27> Yes, but it hasn't been written yet.

<comment><USER28> You joke, but...

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/scale/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/scale/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Safari seems to do this too.

</comment><comment><USER30> TIL: Some languages do not have spaces

<comment><USER31> Fun fact, Japanese originally didn't have punctuation. It was a European introduction.

[https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese- punctuation/](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-punctuation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> From a very quick cursory look, Japanese seems to have some sort of commas and periods. Shouldn't it be just simple to adopt spaces, (and proper commas and periods and parentheses, which they actually use already) too?

<comment><USER33> You want to change a written language for the express purpose of enabling computers to be able to detect word boundaries easier?

<comment><USER34> Note that Japanese and Chinese already changed to commonly use horizontal left-to-right text (in addition to vertical top-to-bottom/right-to-left text, which is still usual especially in "proper published typesetting") in large part because computers handled that much better for decades.

<comment><USER35> It's not so much that because they handled it better, but because that _was_ how they handled it. Even to this day vertical text layout in CSS is primitive.

Early Japanese on computers also used half-width kana but now it's all properly fullwidth.

Don't mistake technical limitations for choice.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if there's any Japanese sites out there that fully use the traditional style? Text top to botttom, right to left, and with the horizontal axis unbound (to the left) instead of the vertical.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure there are some extremely design-heavy sites that do it, but by then you would be fighting the DOM/CSS pretty hard, as default behaviors for stuff like underline position and 縦中横 (short bursts of horiz text within vertical text, for things like two-digit numbers) seem to be sketchy at best, and many things still don't seem to be uniform across browsers. UX would be affected as well, as things like text selection or right-clicking would feel quite awkward as it is so exceedingly rare. While us Japanese are fully capable of reading both horizontally+LtR and vertically+RtL, it's not in our expectations for the latter to appear in online web text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Double-click highlighting barely makes any sense in English, let alone in a language that doesn't use spaces. The fact that mobile browsers treat long presses as a double press for urls has been the bane of my existence. I doubt any native Japanese speakers use this feature.</comment>


How A Mining Monopoly Can Attack Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-monopoly-can-attack-bitcoin/

<comment><AUTHOR> This article is a continuation of a lively discussion from the other day: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890215)</comment>


Best SaaS Pricing Models? - <AUTHOR> What would be your best tips, go-to resources, or  content on SaaS pricing? Please and thank you! <comment><USER2> My whole site [0] is dedicated to pricing and monetization.

Noteworthy items include:

a free email course on pricing [1]

a 30 page teardown of Safari's pricing page [2]

a list of common revenue models [3]

a compendium of some common mistakes that I've seen business make [4]

[0] [https://taprun.com](https://taprun.com)

[1] [https://taprun.com/mailing/](https://taprun.com/mailing/)

[2] [https://taprun.com/examples/safari/](https://taprun.com/examples/safari/)

[3] [https://taprun.com/revenue/](https://taprun.com/revenue/)

[4] [https://taprun.com/mistakes/](https://taprun.com/mistakes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> One article I routinely re-read is the Price Intelligently teardown of Hubspot's pricing: [http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/saas-pricing-page- tea...](http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/saas-pricing-page-teardown- hubspot-pricing-strategy)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not the price they don't like, but what they understand they are (or are not) getting for that price.

Chris Hopf PricingWire</comment>


Satoshi is alive - <AUTHOR> http://nakamotofamilyfoundation.org/ <comment><USER2> Any proof? Like you'd think he'd cryptographically sign this message at least.

<comment><USER3> Of course not, lol. Like 100 times before, for real satoshi it would be pretty easy to prove it without lousy riddles by just signing a message with his gpg key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this were meant to be some sort of proof of life, it would have been cryptographically signed. We are talking about someone who believed deeply in cryptography, and whose most notable achievement came as a result of cryptographic technology.

My guess is that a request for bitcoin donations to "his" foundation is forthcoming.

</comment><comment><USER5> Huh? look at the PDF [1] and compare it with the Satoshi's Bitcoin paper[2]. The bitcoin paper follows the academic paper standard. And that PDF is MS word-generated, absolutely no proper citation, and claimed a paper?

[1]: [http://nakamotofamilyfoundation.org/duality.pdf](http://nakamotofamilyfoundation.org/duality.pdf)

[2]: [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> The original whitepaper was a technical document this duality.pdf seems more like a memoir or retelling. It was just posted yesterday, let's see if the person(s) behind it provide cryptographic proof.

<comment><USER3> Why wouldn't real satoshi sign first and then start telling lousy stories?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe he doesn't want to move the market too much. It could go either way. FUD brigade would jump on the "Satoshi will dump" narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Doesn't use HTTPS

> Use Microsoft Word to generate PDF without proper format compared to the > original whitepaper

> No cryptographic proof

> Posted in midst of annual record low bitcoin price, hoping to pump it up?

<comment><USER7> > Doesn't use HTTPS

I don't understand the fetish of HTTPS. It's important when you send some data via a web form etc. that you don't want to be sniffed. But when you just want to read a website, it doesn't make any practical difference, neither to the website owner (the supposed "Satoshi" in this case), nor the visitor. If an attacker sniffs on your traffic, they'll see the address in both cases, so they'll know the content you read.

<comment><USER8> Https protect the information both ways. It protect the data you upload but also the data you download. Thanks to https you can verify that the data you recieve and is displayed by your browser is the one that was sent by the server and it hasn't been modified by any of potentially multiple intermediaries between you and the server.

The way the Internet works, it will try to find a way from you to the server you are trying to contact, it doesn't guarantee you that you will pass only through trusted intermediaries.

There are some stories of ISP changing http content to add advertisement or changing images for "lighter" one.

<comment><USER9> Then you can also insert your own JS say to do even worse things....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And the evidence that this is actually Satoshi is what exactly?

<comment><USER11> I came here to ask the same thing, but it looks awesome even if it's fake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't matter that it's not cryptographically signed and not using https, etc. If the paper contains details about the history of bitcoin that can then be proved to be true, that is well on the way to validation. i.e., details such as "timechain" preceding "blockchain."

</comment><comment><USER13> I dont want believe Satoshi is not using https.

<comment><USER7> ...because? There are people who don't care about it and have good reasons for it. See a good semi-serious discussion here: [http://n-gate.com/software/2017/07/12/0/](http://n-gate.com/software/2017/07/12/0/)

<comment><USER13> that captcha is taking years to load..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honne and Tatemae

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

<comment><USER15> FYI. This is the answer to the oddly non-cryptic puzzle adverting a new book's (if it is ever made) title.

It's a "don't forget to drink your ovaltine" puzzle.

<comment><USER14> FYI. This response references an awesome holiday movie. If you haven't seen "A Christmas Story", it's well worth a watch come Winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It looks like someone have read through the cypherpunk and bitcoin mailing list and extrapolate a story from that, making it feel "from the inside".

A story on how satoshi and hal got to debug a thing together but hal couldn't debug a release build... sending a debug build was 44MB bigger...

A story on mapAddresses.count

A story on ThreadSocketHandler and ThreadMessageHandler.

They all match to public mailing list discussions: [https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/finneynaka...](https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/finneynakamotoemails.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Some part aren't even redacted:

"The database unfortunately names its files "log.0000000001". To the rest of the world, "log" means delete-at-will, but to database people it means delete- and-lose-everything-in-your-other-files. I tried to put them out of harm's way by putting them in the database subdirectory"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meta: is it me or is the percentage of articles posted to HN which are subsequently flagged sitewide rising fairly significantly over the past few months?

Any data to support or refute this casual observation?

<comment><USER18> Whenever I find a flagged article it's from the hacker news feed on facebook, so you could crawl that and check the urls over time.

That would be more like "popular articles that get flagged" but that's probably what you wanted anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No signature? No Satoshi.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this the supposed bitcoin author?

</comment><comment><USER21> nah he ain't</comment>


CPU Utilization Is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-09/cpu-utilization-is-wrong.html <comment><USER2> Just installed tiptop(1) to play around locally and it seems to work - neat.</comment>


Ask HN: Meditaion Resources - <AUTHOR> Do you know any good and free resources about meditation from beginner to advanced?<p>I tried headspace.com but after free trial I resign. <comment><USER2> Check if there's a Shambhala centre near you: [http://shambhala.org/centres/find-shambhala- centre/](http://shambhala.org/centres/find-shambhala-centre/)

They offer free beginners meditation classes and group meditation sessions.

You can also continue doing what you're doing and try many of the free meditation apps to soak up their material. Give Calm, Sounds True, 10% Happier and Insight Timer a try.

As for free books there's Mindfulness In Plain English: [http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html](http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html)

</comment><comment> wu-ikkyu Alan Watts - The Art of Meditation

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgHCwsQ1MqI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgHCwsQ1MqI)

</comment><comment><USER3> On tip: buy a meditation timer which does not also have an "access all human knowledge and trivial drama" feature.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B005014HB2/ref=mp_s_a_1_3](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B005014HB2/ref=mp_s_a_1_3) works reasonably.

</comment><comment><USER4> John Kabat-Zinn books, and he even has an app.

FWIW, the headspace narrator really wanted me to get somewhere, and that bugged me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I learned how to meditate with two mobile apps: calm.com and buddhify.com</comment>


Deploy a Bitcoin Arbitrage Bot with One Click - <AUTHOR> http://blog.uludum.org/post/98737558453/deploy-a-bitcoin-arbitrage-bot-with-one-click

<comment><USER2> There is a common refrain about trading strategies or algorithms, if it worked people wouldn't be talking about it. They'd be too busy exploiting the opportunity to blog about how they're making money. And least of all would want to tell others how to do it so they'll make less. So as a financial opportunity, I'd consider this highly suspect.

But that all said, it is cool to deploy in one click.</comment>